Ret. Librarian Patricia Konarski Tucson Pick: Transcript of Library of Congress Presentation Hosted by Carolyn Brown

8/12/2019 Ret. Librarian Patricia Konarski Tucson Pick: Transcript of Library of Congress Presentation Hosted by Carolyn Brown

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>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

>> Well good afternoon everyone.

I am Carolyn Brown.

I direct the Office of Scholarly Programs

in the John W. Kluge Center here at the Library.

And it's a great pleasure to welcome you this afternoon

for a very unique conversation between two

of the country's leading astrobiology research,

David Grinspoon and Steven Dick.

Both astrobiology chairs.

David was the first inaugural chair.

And Steven is the second one.

And a special welcome also to our moderator, Joel Achenbach.

Before we begin, if you would,

please turn off any electoral equipment that's going to beep on

or otherwise interfere with the proceedings.

And I also want to note something that I'm sure all

of you are well aware of which is tonight is the night

of the President's State of the Union speech.

But that does mean that the capital police will start closing off things

at about 6:00.

So we'll want to exit through the back side of the building.

Today's program is a collaboration, product of a collaboration


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between NASA and the Library of Congress to explore the humanistic

and societal implications of the field of astrobiology.

Science, as you know, can ask questions about what exists,

how it came into being, and what are the physical processes

that are likely to unfold in the future?

But science cannot ask how our knowledge

of these issues might impact our understanding of who we are,

the meaning of our lives, or what we should do about what we learn.

So, the two different sets of questions, the science questions

and the humanities questions, come together in this collaboration

between the Library of Congress and NASA.

The vision for this collaboration came from Dr. Baruch S. Blumberg,

who was a Nobel Prize winner in medicine.

But also for our purposes what was most special about Barry

as we affectionately called him, was that he was both a founding member

of the Library Scholar's Council, as well as the First Chair

of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

And Barry was the one who thought we really should bring these two

institutions together and the two fields together or approaches

to astrobiology together.

I'll say a few refers about the Kluge Center.

It was establish through a generous donation, endowment really,

by John W. Kluge to create a scholarly venue on Capitol Hill,


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where the finest, maturist [phonetic] scholars

and thinkers might have opportunities

for informal conversation with the nation's leaders and policy makers.

Whereas we like to say the world of ideas and the world

of action might have a way of coming together for informal conversation.

The Center also supports a rising generation of more junior fellows.

Some of whom are here.

And our hope is that one of these days,

many of our junior fellows will have become our senior fellows.

So, I probably won't be here when it happens,

but we look forward to that.

Today's event is being live tweeted with hashtag astrobiology.

And you can also later look for us on YouTube and I-tunes.

You can sign up for RSS feed in the back, or pick up some brochures.

Yes, we still use paper.

And I also would like to give thanks to our other partner for this event,

the Science Technology and Business Division,

who have been very supportive, both in our chairs and research,

and also in promoting this event.

We are especially delighted to have as our moderator,

Mr. Joel Achenbach, a staff writer for the Washington Post,

who is himself at the forefront, maybe not in astrobiology,

but as someone who started the news room's first online column,


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Back 50 years ago, they had no idea whether any planets existed

at all outside our solar system.

So that's one thing.

I think one of the precipitating events for Carl Sagan was

that 1961 conference called Interstellar Communication.

And you recall if you go back 50 years,

there was the famous Cocconi-Morrison paper in Nature

in 1959 saying that aliens might be signaling us.

In 1960 Frank Drake actually made the first search.

In 1961 was that conference.

And I remember I did interview Carl Sagan at one point for one

of the books that I wrote,

and he said that that conference was really a turning point for him

in terms of making, or beginning to make what was then called exobiology

or astrobiology now, a field,

because you could actually then begin to talk about it in public.

It was as if some deep, dark secret had been unveiled.

And you could now actually start to do real research on this.

So, certainly the exoplanets that we now know about,

some 3,000 exoplanets, some of them in their habitable zone.

But also from the point of view of biology,

the idea of life in extreme environments.

Fifty years ago we had no idea that life could thrive


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in these extreme environments

like in hydrothermal vents deep below the ocean

at very high temperatures and pressures.

So those are just two of the things.

And I'll let David elaborate more.

>> So to your very first question,

is there such a thing as astrobiology?

That's probably the easiest question we'll get all night.

So I'll begin with that.

The answer is yes.

There is astrobiology.

Now is astrobiology on the trail of some amazing discovery

about life in the universe?

Well first of all I'll have to say, astrobiology has already led

to a lot of amazing discoveries about life on Earth.

And a lot of at least interesting new ideas and impetus

about the solar system and the wider universe beyond.

But what do we know about how close we are

to that amazing breakthrough discovery

of extraterrestrial life compared to what Sagan knew 50 years ago?

Well as Steve mentioned,

the exoplanets is probably the single most important breakthrough.

At the time when Sagan made that prediction,


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and they had that first early meeting at Green Bank

with Frank Drake and Sagan and all the sort of sages

who really established [inaudible] and were pioneers of astrobiology.

At the time they went through all the different factors and estimated,

and it's interesting they were very optimistic about the chances

for life if you have a planet.

They said basically the consensus view

of that group was it's basically 100 percent if you have planets

that have the right conditions, which mostly means liquid water,

that you will 100 percent of the time get life.

And they were also reasonably optimistic about the number

of planets that there were out there around stars.

And that to me is really interesting,

because that's something, well both of those are facts

that we have no evidence about.

We really don't know anything about the chances for life on a planet,

because we have one example.

And at that time, they knew nothing

about how many planets there were out there.

But they were pretty close, because now it looks

like most stars have planets.

And something like one in five sun-like stars maybe have planets

that are earth like in the crucial sense of being maybe the right size


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and the right temperature/climate range

to have liquid water and possibly life.

So they were, their estimates, their instincts were pretty good.

They weren't way off on those numbers.

One thing we have learned in 50 years.

You know we haven't got a signal.

And, you know, we've been looking with the radio telescopes.

And people can debate how significant that is,

and there are a lot of reasons to justify the thought

that that doesn't really tell us whether there are or aren't aliens

out there, because there are a lot of ways that we haven't looked

and a lot of places we haven't looked, and a lot of different kinds

of messages we haven't looked.

You know there's all these caveats.

But nonetheless, that is evidence.

That's evidence that our galaxy is not full of civilizations

that are broadcasting messages in a certain way

that we would have picked up in those 50 years.

So we've learned something from that?

>> Are you surprised, either one of you,

that we haven't picked up some signal to-date?

>> I'm not really surprised.

I mean as David said, we've only looked at, if you look at a picture


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of the galaxy, which is 100,000 light years across,

and you draw a circle of what we've actually looked at, you know,

it's within a few hundred light years.

It's a tiny fraction of the galaxy that we've looked at.

And you can say that there it's not obvious that, you know,

there are aliens beaming radio signals

at the frequencies that we're looking at.

But it's just a huge galaxy and as Sagan would say, one of billions

and billions of galaxies.

So there's a lot more that could be done.

And of course, we don't have the federal funding

for the last 20 years to do it.

It's been done with pretty much private funding, the study,

most of the study programs.

So there's a lot more that could be done.

So I'm not at all discouraged that we have not yet found the signals.

And also, you know, if I had to guess,

I would say that microbial life is probably more abundant

than intelligent life.

So the intelligent life may be rare, however you want to define rare.

If only one star in, you know, well there's 400 billion stars.

So what, if only one star in 100 billion had life,

you'd still have four in the galaxy, or however you want to parse that.


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So it's just a huge galaxy.

And my, my operating principle has always been,

I think this was Carl Sagan's operating principle too,

that whatever has happened here under the proper conditions,

will happen out there under the proper conditions.

And we now know that we do have planets with proper conditions,

which is something we didn't know 50 years ago.

>> Do you want to answer?

>> Well I'll just say I'm not surprised,

but I'm mildly disappointed.

Only in I think some day we will get evidence.

And I would love it be while I'm here.

>> Is the universe primed for life?

>> We know that life on Earth is built

around ordinary stuff that's lying around.

The most, many of the most common elements

in the universe are part of life as we know it.

Does the universe look to you

as though there's a cosmic comparative for life to spring up?

Or is it possible that it is a fluke event?

>> Well there are two points of view on that.

One is that it is a cosmic imperative.

The Nobel Prize winner Christian de Duve wrote a book called Vital Dust


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where he argued just that.

That's the one point of view, that wherever there's,

wherever the conditions are right, life will arise.

And because you're talking such large time scales

and so many possible sites,

that intelligence eventually will arise too.

The other, the other point of view is another Nobel Prize winner,

Jacques Monod, French who wrote a book called A Chance

and Necessity saying that our number just came up in a Monte Carlo game,

and we happen to be the place where this has happened.

And it's not at all likely that it happened anywhere else.

So those are the two, those are the two extremes on the spectrum

that we're trying to determine by scientific means.

And this is what astrobiology is doing.

Even though whether or not, or which of those extremes is the right one.

Or whether it's somewhere in between.

>> Yeah, I mean it's really a question of how you choose

to over-interpret the data.

And I choose to over-interpret it in the sense the universe seems

to be very life friendly.

But, you know, one has to admit

that obviously this is the reason why we're searching

because we don't know.


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I mean one bit of data that you can choose to over-interpret is the fact

that it seems as though life happened quickly on Earth.

That once, you know, the Earth was not this hell of being pummeled

by asteroid impacts and volcanism, and, you know,

without a stable surface and any kind

of stable environmental conditions.

But once things settled down just enough,

it seems as though life formed.

So it didn't take billions of years.

>> How long was that, 3.8 billion years ago?

>> Ish, yeah, I mean it's the early record

of the Earth is not that well-established.

And in fact, that's one of the reasons we have to go back

to the moon is to find old Earth rocks and answer that question.

But something like 3.8 billion years ago.

So it did not take billions of years.

And actually, it may be that it wasn't until 3.9 billion years

that the Earth had settled down to a reasonable environment.

>> Is it significant that you get the Cambrian explosion several

billion years after you get the origin of life?

And how does that factor into our astrobiological calculations?

That it seems to take so long until you get a trilobite.

>> Okay let me make sure everybody understands the timeline here.


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So the Earth is about four and a half billion years old.

As David says, 3.8 billion years ago, somewhere between 5

and 3.8 billion years ago,

we see very primitive unicellular life arise.

To me that's a significant data point.

Because it's very quick after what's called the late heavy

bombardment ceases.

That life arises.

To me it's some indication that it may come from outer space.

Maybe we receded from Mars or something like that.

We could all be Martians.

But the Cambrian explosion, as you say, happened something

like 600 million years ago.

So for billions and billions of years we had nothing

but single cell life on Earth.

So the lesson there is it takes a long time

to start to develop complexity.

And I think that's another important lesson.

But again, you have to keep

in mind time scales involved in the universe.

If you look at the 13.7 billion years of cosmic evolution,

life could have arisen out there in our galaxy of six

or seven billion years ago.


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So, even though it takes a couple billion years to get complex life,

we got it here, and we could have gotten it

in outer space a long time ago.

So they could be very advanced.

But the question is why we haven't heard from them.

>>You also have to consider statistics of small numbers.

I mean that's one example of a planetary history.

For some reason it took billions of years to make the leap

from simple cells to more complex life here.

Does that mean that it's hard to do everywhere in the universe,

or was there some random factor on Earth.

Now of course if I make that argument,

that completely destroys my other argument

that the universe is life friendly because life happened quickly here

on Earth, because that's statistics of small numbers too.

So we can't play it both ways.

>> Does intelligence tend to be at the,

at some point along the evolutionary narrative, or is that a fluke?

And to what extent given an average planet

which has life would you expect after a few billion years

to have a complex organism that has as its key adaptation technology?

>> Nobody knows.

As you said, a small number of statistics.


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>> Is evolution directional in any way?

>> Not that we know of, no.

Most biologists would say no that it's not directional.

So, you know, some people think that the leap from, you know,

of course it was a great leap from non-life to primitive life.

But some people think the leap from primitive life to complex life,

and certainly intelligence, is a much greater leap.

So there's no guarantee if you get microbes

that you're going to get intelligence.

And that's why I think microbes will be much more prevalent

than intelligence.

But as I say, even if intelligence is rare, there are so many sites

out there that it may still exist.

And if we get to talking about implications,

I think the implications

of microbial life are pretty significant also.

Even if we don't find the intelligent life.

>> And I actually slightly disagree.

I think there is a certain kind of directionality to evolution.

I know biologists might not like this statement,

so I hope there are no biologists here.

But I mean, there's one.

You can. But obviously in a certain sense there's no determined,


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simple deterministic directionality.

In a macroscopic sense, going from the earliest life to now,

there's an overall increase in complexity.

That is there was a time before there were multi-cellular organisms.

And there was a time before there were organisms

with well-developed nervous systems and so forth.

So I think there is an overall macro-macro,

hyper macro evolutionary trend towards greater complexity.

And if you want you can.

And I think people have, some people have a very interesting ways,

maps us into the larger overall story of cosmic evolution

where the universe of course started out with just particles and soup of,

and high energy soup and no structure.

And then there were various kind of structure that evolved,

even on the atomics, on the atomic level.

And then galaxies and planets and so forth.

And some people put the origin of life in that kind of sequence.

And you could argue that the origin

of more complex life fits into that sequence.

And then that in fact gets back to your question, is intelligence sort

of a step and possible technology, a step in that direction.

And I would say that my view is that it probably is,

not necessarily every planet, but I don't see it as a phenomena


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that for any reason it has to be unique to Earth.

>> Go ahead.

>> Well I would just say I agree with that to that extent,

that there is this progression of complexity.

If you want to see that quantified, you should look at the work

of Eric Chaisson, who's done some great work on this

and several books,

how the complexity has increased during cosmic evolution

over the 13.7 billion years, including life.

But that doesn't mean that life itself has a goal.

I think that's what biologists would object to.

That life knows where it's going.

>> But in terms of doing the Drake equation in our heads, and I,

you know, probably most people here have heard of this Drake equation.

It's all the different factors that go into the probability

that you might hear from,

get a signal from intelligent civilization out there.

And that's just one of the factors is how many planets

that have life have intelligent life.

And so you both sound fairly optimistic

that intelligence is something that you'd find relatively often.

>> Well I mean, biology, evolution is a means of solving problems.

Solves it by, you know, it's trial and error.


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But then the good solutions get remembered and carried forward.

So it's, it's an excellent way given enough time

to find good solutions to survival challenges.

And nervous systems are really good

at helping organisms survive challenges,

environmental challenges.

So I think, you know, and that, what is a nervous system.

Well you know the ability to sense your environment

and to develop behavioral responses to that sensing.

I mean once you've done that, which seems pretty simple,

and I think one could make an argument that that level

of evolution ought to be universal.

Then you've got a nervous system.

Well, then if you got nervous systems,

there's going to be some selective pressures

from more complex nervous systems.

And maybe cognitive faculties.

So I see a way that just the processes of evolution,

given the right environmental pressures,

could lead to intelligence existing on planets without some sort

of miraculous, you know, special sauce having to be there.

>> If we made contact with another intelligent civilization out there,

would we be able to understand one another.


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And kind of a related question is

to what extent is intelligence that's sort

of transcendent universal trait in which, you know, people communicate

with mathematics and figure out the universe according to equations.

And to what extent is it specific to a planet and a biosphere.

In other words, that in the same way that our bodies are,

reflect the world from which we are made.

Does our intelligence also reflect specifically this Earth?

>> Yeah I'm glad you raised that because this is a point

that often doesn't get raised.

And that is what do we mean by intelligence?

And that's a very difficult question.

And not one that you see raised very often, especially by the astronomers

who are looking for it, because their operation definition is

if I get a signal, and they're saying something,

that's intelligence.

But when you think about, as I say,

intelligence could have arisen billions of years ago out there,

you have to think about cultural evolution.

We don't talk much about cultural evolution.

But if you take seriously this Drake equation which you're talking

about which, by the way, goes back to the 1961 conference

that I mentioned, the drake equation.


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That has several factors in like the lifetime

of the technological civilization that are,

that have to do with cultural evolution.

And if there's anything that we see on Earth that will be reflected

out there, I think it that if culture,

if intelligence exists, there will be culture.

And if culture exists, it will evolve.

And therefore, you will have, you will have, you know,

intelligences that perhaps we cannot dream of now,

perhaps cannot communicate with.

In terms of communication, there are three possibilities.

You can draw a Venn diagram where you have a civilization

or an intelligence that is totally separate in terms

of its mental structures and its perceptions of the physical world.

Or you can have two civilizations that overlap.

You know, they overlap partially with our mental structures.

Or you can have them totally separate.

And we have no idea how, which of those cases will actually,

actually takes place out there.

So it's entirely possible that this incommensurability problem

as it's called, will, it's one possible answer

to the Fermi paradox.

>> The incommensurability problem?


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>> Yeah, we're incommensurable.

They're intelligences out there, but we can't communicate

with them because, because their mental structures

or their perceptions of the physical world are so different.

>> Are you suggesting there may be some here in this room in fact?

You know you raise great questions Joel, and I think a lot

of people who've been involved in thinking about SETI and sort

or the theory of messages and its question, you know,

is there any hope for understanding.

They placed a lot of hope in this idea that they'll be some universals

in mathematics and physics.

And I think, especially those of us who are working scientists

or have immersed themselves in science a lot, have this feeling,

almost this eerie feeling about the universe

that mathematics is something that genuinely exists independent of us.

That we're discovering it not inventing it.

And if that is the case, then one might imagine that other creatures

who have evolved in the same universe with the same laws

of physics who otherwise have literally nothing in common with us,

may have discovered some of these same physical realities,

mathematical realities and then one can come

up with a language based on that.

If that's wrong, then you know, then all bets are off.


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>> This will be one of the great philosophical implications

if we do find intelligent life.

Because you know, we can't get out of our own heads is the problem.

You know, is, you know,

it's an epistemological problem objective knowledge.

Is our perception of the physical world real, you know?

Are we seeing what's really there?

Well we all have the same kinds of brains,

so but if you found another kind of brain out there and you started

to match up and see how they perceive things compared

to how we perceive things, and a lot of other different questions,

then that would be a significant addition to our epistemology.

>> So astrobiology and SETI are both ways

in which we can actually do scientific experiments

that test some of our basic philosophical assumptions.

And that's one thing people don't always realize that, you know,

this question, you know, is there some platonic idea

of mathematics that's real independent of us.

And philosophers can debate about that, but could we ever answer it?

Well, if met the aliens, and we saw a page in their physics textbook

and it had algorithmic spiral that looked just like my physics test,

or my mathematics textbook that I used in calculus class in college,

then that would be pretty strong, you know,


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real answer to a philosophical question.

>> What's the first thing you'd ask?

You've got one question to ask the intelligent,

you know, aliens out there.

What do you say, what are you made of?

>> No. I would say, could you please share with us the secret

of building a sustainable technological civilization.

>> The very fact of finding them,

finding an old civilization might mean, might answer that question.

Barbara, that reminds me of the, you know, the old situation,

the scenario where somebody asks the computer is there, does God exists,

and the computer says it does now.

You know, you could ask an extraterrestrial does God exist.

>> So if we found a signature from an exoplanet,

a signature of what looks almost certainly like it's an atmosphere

of a planet that has life, I mean there's molecules, ozone,

or there's the scientists all agree, this planet has

to have vegetation on it, okay.

But that's all we can tell is that just by looking

at the spectral signature, that's a blue planet.

Is that a front page story for weeks on end?

Or is it a one-day story?

Secondly, let's say we find an actual organism on Mars.


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Someone goes up and they drill a hole on Mars,

and they find a fossil microbe from three and a half billion years ago.

And we know there was life on Mars three and a half billion years ago.

Is that a one day story, a three week story?

And I assume if we contact the alien civilization, that's,

I mean, stop the presses.

That's a show stopper, but.

>> Well we've done that experiment already, August 7 of 1996,

NASA headquarters announced the Mars Rock,

ALH84001 has nanofossils, right.

Was that a one day wonder?

No. That was much more than a one day wonder.

Partly because the evidence had to be parsed over the next many years.

But, you know, a NASA administrator went up to the White House.

Both the President and the Vice-President were involved.

Congressional hearings were held.

Vice-President Gore had a symposium, not so much on the science,

although the scientists were there.

But what asking what are the implications if this is true.

And this went on for a period of months.

Of course gradually, it did go away.

But it was much, you know, a lot of people think

if we find microbial life that it won't have much of an impact.


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But I think that shows that even when we thought we had nanofossils,

fossils in a Mars rock that were smaller

than the smallest bacteria on Earth.

And see what the reaction was to that.

So I think microbes will also have a big impact, you know,

and the media plays a huge role in this.

Scientists also play a huge role as they try to figure

out if this is really true or not.

>> Yeah, I mean, I agree with everything Steve said.

I think the exoplanet question is a really interesting scenario.

And the one that, you know, may arguably is more likely to happen

in the next few years as we have discovered all these planets

around other stars.

And as astronomers are getting very clever about new techniques

to observe them and try to figure out what their atmospheres are like,

and especially as begin to be able to deploy new instruments,

where their more specially tuned to answering

that question what those atmospheres are like.

We may discover an anomalous atmosphere

that seems to scream life at us.

And then it certainly would be a big headline.

But then what?

And it could be very frustrating because there may not be that,


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it may be very hard to follow up on that observation.

We can't go there and do more.

I mean I suspect the clever astronomers then would have a lot

of motivation to find new ways to observe.

And I think we'd also be able to make very good arguments

to our friends across the street that now it's time

to really fund these instruments

that would really let us chase that down.

But you know, after that initial headline, there may be not

that much more we learn for quite some time.

>> But I agree.

This is really an up and coming point of astrobiology.

Just last month there were Congressional hearings specifically

on the subject of bio signatures, you know, because these exoplanets

that we're now discovering by the thousands,

you can start to look at their atmospheres.

And that's all very interesting.

I pointed out that the best bio signature,

the most unambiguous bio signature, however,

would be signal from the intelligence.

Especially if they said something.

>> Can you tell if there's life there based on the atmosphere?

Can you know?


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I mean, can you nail it down?

>> There would be, there would be interpretation I would say.

And I've done a book recently on discovery and how discovery,

you know, you don't just point your telescope at any object

or phenomena, and okay, that's the discovery.

It's a detection.

Then there's weeks, months, or years

of interpretation before you finally reach understanding.

So I don't think it would be an immediate thing.

There'd be a lot of interpretation.

Just like there was with the Mars rock and everything

that happens in science really.

>> Let's turn the question around.

Could aliens looking at our star system, at our planetary system,

and say they had decent space telescopes, spectrometers,

and they looked at Mars and they said, ah, most of it's CO2,

little bit of this, little bit of that.

Looked at Venus, they say, most of it's CO2, little bit of this.

And then they looked at Earth and they went, wait a minute,

or however aliens say that.

Earth has a flagrantly weird atmosphere because of life.

It's not subtle.

The 20 percent oxygen and the large amount of methane


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that should not co-exist with that oxygen, and there are other things

about our atmosphere that are clearly bio signatures.

Now, if we saw a planet that was that far out,

what we call out of equilibrium, that is chemicals

that are mixed together that left to their own devices, would just react

and not be mixed together, so there must be something weird,

some process causing that out of equilibrium atmosphere.

And on Earth, that's life.

If we saw that elsewhere, we would certainly,

I think there would be people making a strong case for it being life.

Now, I would think those aliens looking at us and seeing Earth

and going yep, that one's alive, no doubt about it.

They would benefit from the fact that they've already looked

around the galaxy, and they've seen other examples.

And they know how to categorize.

The first one we saw we might not be sure,

but I think this exoplanet revolution is just beginning.

And if there are living worlds, there's probably not going

to be just one other one other than Earth.

And it's something that we will learn to recognize

and learn to characterize.

>> Yeah I still think, I agree somewhat with that.

But I still think there'd be a lot of interpretation.


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I mean when you look at the Mars rock, which is a great case, the,

you know, even when you had the Mars rock in your hand, they had three

or four or five different independent lines of evidence.

You know you had organic molecules.

Well that doesn't mean there's life.

But you had what's called a magnetotactic minerals there,

which means usually on Earth they're made

by biological, you know, microbes.

Or you had carbonate globules, you know,

which are also made by microbes.

You put them all together, the NASA scientists argued,

and while it's a strong case.

Well other people said, no, four or five lines

of weak evidence doesn't add up to a strong evidence.

>> What do you think on that?

Do you think the Mars rock had Martian nanofossils?

>> No. No.

I think the consensus, it took several years.

But the consensus now is certainly that the, those are not nanofossils.

After all, it would have been almost too great of a luck to have,

too much luck to have, we're looking for life on Mars

and here it lands on Earth and we find it.

I think the evidence, the consensus that it is not naonofossil.


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>> Why does it matter if there's life beyond Earth?

Do we, how would it affect us.

And I think this is what you specifically are working on.

And I know you think this.

How would it affect us if we knew?

Because right now we don't know.

It remains a speculative field.

If it was nailed down, how would we feel about that?

Would it be a good thing for us to know that life is out there?

>> Well the first thing you have

to say is it depends entirely on the scenario.

If you find fossils it's one thing.

If you find microbes it's another thing.

If you get a signal, that's one thing.

If you can decipher the signal, that's something else.

If you can get a message they were actually saying something,

you could imagine.

If it lands here on the front lawn

of the Capitol Building, that's something else.

So you really have to specify what it means by which

of those scenarios occurs.

But I think even if you have microbes, one of the first questions

from the scientific point of view is, you know,


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is there a universal biology.

Is it, you know, if it's like life on Earth, if it's DNA based,

you have to ask the question, well was that an independent genesis

if it came from Mars or we find it in Europa or whatever.

If it's not, if it's something else, then we can start to talk

about universal biological principles in the same way that,

you know, in the 17th century Newton came

up with a universal physical principle, so that's one thing.

That's the, from the science point of view.

But then there's all kinds of other philosophical aspects

that you talk about too.

>> I think that any of those scenarios of discovery,

and you just mentioned several different ones,

would be deeply meaningful and truly wonderful.

A joyful extraordinary event.

For a couple of reasons.

One, I mean the reason it matters is we're curious

about how we fit into this universe.

And the march of science

over at least 400 years has been towards giving us more and more

of a sense that there's a great commonality

between conditions and events on Earth.

And things elsewhere.


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But this isn't the center of the universe.

And there's a big universe.

And that this isn't the only planet, and all these things.

But it's still possible that this is the only planet with life,

which would reverse all that and mean, what do you know,

we aren't the point of it all in the center of the universe.

Isn't that weird?

I don't think that's the direction that things are going in.

But we don't know.

And it would be very profound to find out.

But also, I mean just emotionally, spiritually, if you will,

I don't think we want to be alone.

We want to, I favor, and I think most people do,

a universe that's teaming with life,

or at least has the potential for life.

And it also by the way absolves us of a certain responsibility.

You know maybe if, one way to think about this is

if we really might be the only biosphere,

and maybe the only intelligence in the universe.

Then, you know, it's going to be a real shame

if we mess things up here.

And now it would be a shame either way.

But there's a sort of cosmic comfort in knowing


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that as a Doris Lessing's father said to her, and she said this

in the dedication of one of her book, to my father who used

to sit outside on the farm in South Africa at night looking

up at the stars and saying, well, if we blow ourselves up,

there's plenty more out there.

>> Yeah this reminds me of the Congressional hearing last month.

One of the Congressmen, one of the Congressmen asked, you know,

whether, is it conceivable that we are alone in the universe?

I said, yes it is conceivable because you just conceived of it.

It's entirely possible that we're alone in the universe,

certainly with intelligence because,

the interesting thing is we really seem not to want to be alone.

That's an interesting psychological and sociological study maybe.

So, you know, to some extent we have a sort of preconceived notion

that we would like to be able to communicate with extraterrestrials

out there, or at least find microbial life.

So, but it's conceivable that we are the only ones.

>> So I think we're going to go to questions in a minute or two here.

I have one more question I want to ask the panel here now.

But is, can we do questions in a second?

We pass the microphone around?

Okay. Is our destiny in space or it is here on Earth?

And what I mean by that is in a practical sense.


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Are we going to wind up being a space bearing species that,

you know, zooms around the solar system and maybe the galaxy?

Or is it likely that the entire narrative

of the human species will be contained upon this planet?

>> Well in the short run, it's both.

And in the long run it's in space.

Because, you know, we obviously can't solve our problems

by just finding another home and launching everybody into space.

I mean even if you somehow thought that was a good idea.

If you do the numbers of how rapidly people are being born

and how much mass you'd have to launch.

Mathematically we couldn't solve our problems that way.

But I think if we want to ensure a long-term, healthy tenure

of our species and our civilization here, we cannot turn away from it,

exploring space and the knowledge

that it gives us about how planets work.

You know, we're in a position now where it's no longer a luxury

to know how planets work.

We need to know how they work in order to do a decent job

with the fact that we're apparently a major force on this planet now.

So, a big part of how we do that is by studying other planets

and putting Earth in context, and by inventorying the asteroids out there

that may come and cause us to have a very bad day.


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Like the dinosaurs had 65 million years ago.

So, our future is both in the short run.

In the very long run, if we're going to survive as a species, and then,

you know, we're talking, you know, billions of years now.

Billions and billions.

Then the sun and the Earth are not going to last forever.

So, there's at least a scenario in which we're successful in getting

over some of our current crises and foreseeable ones.

And we want to outlive our sun and our planet.

And then we don't have a choice.

We will have to be space bearing.

>> Yeah I agree that I think, well our destinies both here on Earth

and space, there may be big problems.

We can't cover the problems for space travel.

We've been to the moon, but there are problems even going to Mars

because the cosmic radiation.

When you spend more than a week or two in outer space,

there are these high energy cosmic rays.

And so far we haven't found a way to get around that problem,

because you can do it with shielding.

But the shielding is so heavy that it's prohibitive.

Now over the long term, however many years you want to define that,

I think we'll come up with some solution.


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So I think, you know, whatever it is, 100 years, 500 years,

our destiny is to go into outer space.

At the same time, I think we, we can't obviously get a lot

of people off of the planet because of the cost,

with chemical rockets these days,

if we come up with anti-gravity or something like that.

That's a different, something else.

But I do think it's important, and this was the opinion too

of NASA Administrator Mike Griffin a couple of administrators ago,

who said that at least one of the primary motivations of space life,

human space life, should be to get a few people off the planet at least.

Because you remember what happened in Russia last year, that fireball.

It wasn't big enough to do a lot of damage, and the, you know,

the bigger ones are more rare, but they are out there.

And even if we find them and see them coming,

that doesn't mean we can avoid a catastrophe,

which would pose an existential threat to humans.

And if you have an existential threat to humans, you have to start

over from 3.8 billion years of evolution.

>> Let me stop you right there.

Is it worth spending many tens or hundreds of billions of dollars

in order so that, in a low probability circumstance,

a small smattering of human beings might survive on another world,


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while our world has gone, you know, has been blown

to smithereens by an impact.

In other words, is it that important to our species that we would want

to invest a lot of money in trying to make sure there's some, you know,

tiny colony of humans out there somewhere.

That, it's kind of a weird question, but you want to take a stab at it?

>> Yeah, from a practical point

of view I don't think you would spend hundreds

of billions at any particular year.

But NASA's budget now is 17 billion.

The human's space life part of it is about 5 billion.

So if.

>> Yeah but going to Mars, you know, you cannot put humans on Mars

for less than $100 billion.

>> Over a number of years, 10 or 20 years.

>> Right, Yeah.

Right. So is it worth spending that kind of money for a toehold

on another planet as a matter of sort of species defense.

>> Well that's not all you're doing.

You're also exploring Mars.

My own opinion is that we should go first to the moons of Mars,

which could be quite a bit less expensive because it's much easier

to land on the moons of Mars,


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which by the way were discovered two blocks from the White House.

So I think there's an American sort of proprietary

by the Naval Observatory interest in the moons and Mars.

It's much easier to land on the moons of Mars which are sort

of natural space stations, just a few thousand miles above the surface

of Mars where you could do exploration and use it

as a shooting off point for other things.

So it's not just getting humans off the planet,

you're exploring at the same time.

And exploration is important I would argue.

>> Questions.

Who has a question?

Jason has a microphone over here.

Right. Right there.

Right behind you.

>> So I had the pleasure of working with Sagan

on the original Cosmo series.

And one of the hits of the series,

as well as the space program was the Voyage of Golden Record.

And now as David knows,

we're working with John Lamberg [phonetic],

who is the design director of the Voyage Record to beam

up a digital message to the New Horizon spacecraft, which is going


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to encounter Pluto in July 14th of 2015.

There's apparently some debate about whether things

like the original Drake message to the stars was unsafe SETI, you know,

how do you practice safe SETI

by communicating with extraterrestrials.

And does it matter that the Beverly Hillbillies and all of the rest

of the TV series that have been made are in fact traveling at the speed

of light out to the outer solar system and way beyond anyway.

So the question is, how do you practice save SETI?

>> Yeah well, it's a good question.

I mean I don't think we have to worry too much

about the Voyager Record, or this message that we're trying to put

on New Horizon, which is going to bypass Pluto in 2015,

and hopefully have a message for any extraterrestrials that find it.

And in that case it would be a digital message

that would be sent up.

It's not a physical message on the spacecraft.

I don't think we have to worry too much in those instances,

because those, let's face it, are really messages to Earth.

The chances of one of those being found

by an extraterrestrial civilization, that's possible.

But it's pretty low.

Those are not wide, wide-beamed broadcasts.


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There is a debate though that you're eluding to obviously now

in the SETI community over what people are calling METI, which is,

SETI is Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

METI is Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

And it's interesting.

There's a, people argue the ethics both ways.

Some people say, well it's not really ethical to just be listening

and not sending, you know.

And what if everybody is just listening and not sending?

Then everybody will think there's no aliens out there.

And we're all here.

But there is an argument that is a little bit hard to refute,

that there's, you know,

we're talking about existential risks here.

Should we have humans on Mars in case of an asteroid?

Well what if, if we really send a broadband loud message, you know,

are we shouting in the jungle?

Where there may be lions out there in the dark.

We'd like to think that advanced, advanced, in quotes,

species will be benign because the reason they got to be advanced

and space bearing is because they saw the kinds of warlike problems

and other problems that we're having now.

And they sort of transcended that, and they've become these, you know,


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So should we be doing this?

>> Let's get another question.

Let's go [inaudible] over here.

[Inaudible].

>> Sure. One thing that you were speaking of is

that you're talking about exoplanets.

And most exoplanets I think are discovered either one

through luminosity of some other object passing in front of it,

also by the wobble, you know,

it's getting affected by another gravitation.

Large gravitation being a planet.

So, one of the things, so you say, okay we look at this,

we have this narrow band and that life can actually exist

and does have a certain molecules,

has certain temperatures and everything.

Well, one point, we weren't ourselves like that.

You know, I think it's generally,

general consensus we're a second generation stars.

We made up of, I think it's 73 elements.

And that can only come from explosions of other stars.

So at some point our planet itself, Earth,

was not hospitable to actual life.

It was only when other elements, which we think came from outside


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So these planets are changing dynamic planets.

We draw conclusions based on what we see right now.

>> Well I think we can because the planets that we're looking at.

Most of them are being found by [Inaudible] Spacecraft.

Those are on average between 1,000 and 1,600 light years away.

So at the most you're seeing them as they existed 1,600 years ago.

So which is just in geological time is a very small amount of time.

So they would not have changed much in 1,600 years we don't think.

So, you know, I think you can begin

to see the statistics based on what we actually see.

>> Yeah but it is true that part of what we're trying

to understand is not just how planets are currently,

but the life cycles, the life history of planets.

And that's partly what we gain by exploring the solar system

and understand not just how Mars is today

and how Venus is today, but the past of Mars.

And the past of Earth.

And the past of Venus.

And extrapolating to the future of Earth.

So we do see planets as these time histories of conditions.

And, but we know a lot about how stars evolve, which is the main,

the main unknown there really.

Stars do get brighter as they evolve as the burn hydrogen into helium.


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But we understand that pretty well.

Fortunately there are a lot of stars out there,

and we have pretty good understanding by looking at a lot

of them how of their life story.

So we can infer the life stories of planets.

So there is a little bit of uncertainty there.

But I think that that's not really the main source of uncertainty

in our ability to determine inhabitability of planets.

>> Let's go right here.

>> Thank you gentlemen.

Interesting to meet people privileged

to have actually met Carl Sagan.

Although that life has a sample size of one as far as we know,

among the life on Earth, single cell multi-cellular animals intelligence

and reason.

There's only one species and only one civilization derived from Greece

that has a specific form

of philosophic reason which has led us here.

So, can we not conclude, is that some evidence that life is not only,

maybe rare, maybe simple cell, but even if you get complex animal life.

Even if you get intelligence in a certain sense,

pre-Greek intelligence, that really we are very unique.

And it's very improbable that reason


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to come a long and say, hey we're going to develop our technology.

Step aside.

We might, you know, if the fire ants started really acting up,

we might get out our, you know, Monsanto spray.

>> Let's go over here to this side of the room.

>> Yeah.

>> Hi. I just, actually this is ridiculous.

I just sent a Tweet and it was re-Tweeted

by David [Inaudible] I know is a friend of both of you.

My question is about if we're going to Mars, and I really hope we are,

in our entire civilization as we've gotten more technologically

advanced, our communication has accelerated the entire time.

If we start living on Mars, we're talking two-way return time

of something like 8 to 50 minutes depending on where Mars is.

And if we go to Europa and so forth even longer.

How do you foresee our civilization as a human species changing

as we lose the ability to social network in the way that we have been

over the past few decades?

>> That's a cool question.

I like it.

I mean one might say that we have some experience with not being able

to social network, and you know, actually having

to send letters and you know.


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It's quite, it's obvious that we're quite capable

of having a civilization without being able to, you know,

Tweet questions at each other instantaneously.

But I think it is a neat question

because it certainly would change us.

And we should take for, I mean, we've come to take for granted

that communication gets faster and faster and more instantaneous.

And yes if we became a multi-planet civilization,

especially including the outer solar system.

We would not be able to, there's no physics we know

that would allow us to do that.

So we would have to be more patient.

>> Does the biologist want to ask a question over here?

The lady in the front row.

>> Well I have a comment and then I guess a question.

And one is that I know Steve that you love the idea

of the definitive nature of a signal.

But in fact, as you well know, it's also an interpretation,

and it's prone to false positives as well as more importantly,

and one of the reasons I prefer to think about looking for microbes

in atmospheres, false negatives.

Because of just as David mentioned, the amount of history

that humans have been on this Earth is very small.


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It's just a blip.

And the amount of time that we were able to even make enough noise

that anyone else could hear us is even smaller.

So if you consider those things, maybe just talk a little bit

about the strategy for something like SETI and the investment

and even doing that given the potential

for false negatives and false positives.

>> Well I mean, that's the points you've raised are very good ones.

And they're among the arsenal that is, that is wielded by those

who want to explain why, even though we don't have a signal,

we may in fact not be alone.

And it's a good argument.

And I think that, you know, the counter argument is

that SETI doesn't take a huge amount of resources.

And in fact, right now it's not being funded

by the government at all.

It's being done with private money.

And we could debate whether that's as it should be.

But I think that, the argument is pretty good for a low investment

of resources, the potential return is huge.

And so it's kind of like the lottery.

You can't win if you don't play.

So you may not want to put your whole salary into lottery tickets,


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but you know, if you buy a ticket once in a while, then you know,

something wonderful might happen.

And one could look at SETI in the same light.

That it's maybe not something we should put a huge amount

of societal resources in, but it is probably something

that we ought to be doing.

>> Let's go over here to the gentleman.

>> We said we'd take one question from social media,

so we do have a question, actually came in via Facebook.

And just for the two scholars to comment on biocentrism

and how astrobiology may impact that.

So biocentrism and astrobiology was the question.

>> Well of course that's one of the big implications.

Now I'm not sure exactly how this person is defining biocentrism,

whether they're talking about the so-called anthropic principle or,

you know, that the, which is sort of elegantly misnamed.

This idea that the laws of nature are just right for humans.

It's not for humans.

Biocentrism is actually a better term because the laws

of nature are just right for life, for biology, in the universe.

On the other hand, if this person meant are we the center

of the universe, then this is one of the great questions

that astrobiology could answer.


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you know, more stable structures are going to last,

unless stable structures aren't going to last.

And you'll get sort of a kind

of even non-Darwinian just pre-biological selection,

where certain order reinforces itself in the universe.

And if that happens, then it gets to the point

where you can have self-reproductions,

have some kind of heredity.

Then you've got biology.

So any universe that allows a certain amount of order,

no matter what the laws of physics are,

I would argue will allow biology.

And then that wider sense, a biocentrism may be a valid thing.

>> So you're saying that even if the physical constants were different,

that so long as order was possible,

you would see some kind of building complexity.

>> That's what I believe, yeah.

>> Question over here.

>> Yeah, thank you Joel.

I'd like to ask our astrobiologists to speculate

about your possible astrobiologist successors.

Maybe one or three or thirty generations from now.

The science fiction author I really like, his name is Jack McDevitt,


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he has a number of novels set in the universe.

It's about 8,000 years in the future.

Humanities as done a whole lot of SETI, and also begun

to send out starships and such.

And they haven't found anything.

And McDevitt's a smart guy.

He doesn't say this is the future but it could be the future.

SETI's about 50 years old.

So obviously it's very early days yet.

But what if it's another 50 years,

another 500 years, another 5,000 years.

And we just haven't found anything.

At some point we're going to start, I know the difference

between evidence of absence and absence of evidence.

But at some point, what might that be like if we look for generation

and generation and generation to come, and we don't find them?

>> Well it depends.

Them, you're inferring, implying intelligence there.

I mean there could be lots of microbes around,

which I said would be plenty exciting.

And we, I do think that we do have

to think beyond our own solar system.

You know, probably Europa is one of the best possibilities there.


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But if it turns out that there's nothing even

on your [Inaudible] these places that have water that we know of

and are even spouting water spouts, we still would have

to look beyond the solar system I think before anybody would give up.

And that's going to take, that's going to take a long time

to look at all those exoplanets.

>> Quick question.

If we found a planet out there that was like the Earth was, you know,

800 million years ago, where you have bacteria, but you don't

yet have complex life, is it within our rights to maybe colonize it.

Or do you say no, let that planet go through its evolution,

and let it go through its Cambrian explosion

and develop the way it normally would.

>> That's a [inaudible] ethical question.

I think if we find one, we really ought to leave it alone.

It's really valuable, both scientifically,

we don't want to mess with it.

We want to learn what we can.

But also, there's an interesting kind of ethical imperative I think

to let another biosphere be its own biosphere.

If we get to the point where, you know, where the astrobiologists

of 5,000 years in the future, and by the way when I think

of astrobiologists 5,000 years in the future, my main feeling


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about them is I'm jealous because for one thing,

if there are astrobiologists 5,000 years in the future,

it means we've made it through a kind of bottleneck

that we're wrestling with now

and achieve the different kind of [inaudible].

But mostly because at that point we will have characterized lots

of exoplanets, and we'll know the answers to some of these questions.

But I would say if it turns out that planets like that are commonplace,

and it's like, oh yeah another one with, you know,

a single cell slime type being, you know, carbon, you know, 4 based DNA,

then I think the equation changes a little bit.

But as long as that's a special, unique finding,

then I think we really want to be hands off.

>> Just quickly to say, to put that another way,

the question is what is our moral obligation to life beyond Earth?

And that's a very important question that you hear both sides of,

and to some extent, NASA wrestles with that

through the Planetary Protection Program.

We certainly want to protect our own planet from bad contamination.

But you want to protect other planets form contamination also.

Partly from selfish motivations because we want to study them.

But also because you don't want to destroy the object

of what you're looking for.


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>> I think we're going to wrap this up.

And I've really enjoyed.

I just want to say I admire these two gentlemen so much

and have benefitted from reading their works

and hearing them talk over the years.

So, and thank you all for coming and participating in this.

Thank you.

>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.

Visit us at loc.gov.

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Ret. Librarian Patricia Konarski Tucson Pick: Transcript of Library of Congress Presentation Hosted by Carolyn Brown