>> the next on the tv, tree into with guest host ingrid wickelgren the scientific magazine. this week caleb scharf and his boat "the copernicus complex." any come of the director of astrobiology explores sentries of research about life on earth am i the current debates about how it began in the question of whether humanity truly is unique in the universe. this program is about an hour.

>> host: hello, or scharf. it is wonderful to have you here today. i found your book fascinating. it was a terrific read and i am thrilled to be here. you know, one of the great things about being here and talking to you is i get to ask you about the big questions. it questions that most people would not have to answer. that is the real fun of this book. so your book is called "the copernicus complex." so maybe you could tell us what that is. >> guest: absolutely. tanks, ingrid. so, "the copernicus complex" is really a phrase that is trying to capture one of the aspects of what i think is perhaps the biggest question we as a species can ask.

and sometimes we ask it nonscientific way. the book is really about the scientific question of whether or not we are alone in the universe. title "the copernicus complex" is the way we feel about ourselves and a complex that we carry around with us that on the one hand from copernicus we learned that we are not central, not special in any way and that idea has propagated through the centuries has really driven a lot at the core of modern science. i did become known as topic mediocrity because there's nothing special or interesting about it anyway. >> host: this is the complex we carry around. >> guest: yeah, the complexes that instinct tends to make us feel special. i think all of us as humans,

unless we are extremely downbeat and tend to break up in the morning and think the world revolves around us. rationally we know of course it doesn't. he seeded that idea. so we really have this little battle going on in science-based file that i'm the one hand, rationally we can see that we may not be special for central to the universe in any way. >> host: we as humans? not as individuals via >> guest: as individuals, and even life on earth inc. about it. we might say look, perhaps this has happened somewhere else. but at the same time, we like to think we are special. the complexes dealing with all of it. really part of it. that is part of the theme of the book except exploring it in a

more sophisticated analytical way. what does it really need to have this complex and how might it hinder or even help us through science? >> guest: yes, the premise of the book is we are special or not special in some happy medium in between. or we are both. we are both sorted unique and we are also cosmically ordinary. >> host: that is naturally the conclusion i get at the end of the book. there are a couple of things that motivate me. partly with the notion of telling the story about the incredible science that has happened in the last couple of decades that is moving towards a point where we might actually be able to answer and real numbers the question of whether or not anything else out there at all like face.

but at the same time, we are coming up with contradictory evidence. we have evidence that really stands out in the fergana kit worldview, which is mediocrity. there are billions of other planets in our galaxy. we didn't know that 20 years ago. on the face of it, that is a beautiful -- >> host: it started with copernicus is finding that we are not the center of the solar system. post co. u.k. and trace it back. copernicus was in exactly the first person to say that the earth might not be the center of everything. it is dated way back to the ancient greeks. aristotle's thought perhaps the earth was at the center of things, but other greek philosophers think a didn't like that itr didn't make sense. it wasn't logical how that could possibly be. so it took a long time for someone like copernicus reading

what scientists were doing in the middle east at the time and he too understood some of the history of ancient greek science. so it didn't come to him in a flash i see. he assembled information that was ardea there. so this idea on the one hand we have evidence now that really supports the copernican worldview. we are absolutely not central. in an expanding universe, there is no center to that expansion. it's kind of the ultimate extension of the principle. but there is billions of evidence that there will be billions of planets in our galaxy beyond the solar system. we've also learned that the chemistry of life, the building blocks of that chemistry is everywhere.

it is not something that just happens in special places. the carbon-based molecule throughout. >> host: said the potential buyer, the chemical potential everywhere or chemical atmosphere is not special or unique. >> guest: so there is a host of evidence that supports this notion of mediocrity. but there's also a host of evidence that kind of suggests it is not so simple. this is really a big piece of the book is discussing these two sides to the equation. the other side to the equation is yes, we found these planets around other stars, thousands at this point and we can extrapolate there are billions. even the type of star that we

orbit means that word is slightly unusual case, not the most frequently occurring type. >> host: now what makes it unusual or special? >> guest: fingerprint for the solar system in terms of the planets that followed the planet itself. they are relatively circular. they were able to compute in detail. they are relatively spread out. we also have a range of what are called planets like jupiter and other things. but we've learned is that the majority of planetary systems are configured somewhat differently. they all tend to be less circular and more elliptical or

packed together with the herb is being quite spread out. if planet formation run amok and made up lots of planets around like little bugs around. and there are also types of planets that don't exist in our solar system. there are planets out there, which are very abundant. 60% of those we think are called super earth. they are somewhat larger than the earth, but not as large as a planet like jupiter. now he might have expected there could be such things, but we didn't know for sure and we didn't know most other systems continued the world whereas we don't. what does that all mean? that's a big question. we don't know the answer to that. >> host: shows that we are may

be in a special circumstance. >> guest: one piece of evidence that the trust something not quite as mediocre perhaps as we thought about the presence of life is the difficult path we don't understand that we can also look at the history of life and earth and use that as some sort of an example is a template. again, on the side perhaps there's something special going on, you look at the history of life on earth, you can see a number of things that have to kind of lineup in order for complex life, bunny rabbits or sheep or something, for that to access. a number of things seem to be necessary. a planetary environment,

behavior and certainly in the deep history of biology for new types of cells came to be complex cells, for example. >> host: a few things spell out a list, an ingredient list like check, check, check. you've got all these things then life can occur. this is something that's roughly establish or conjectured? >> guest: i would say not really. this is shooting in the dark. if we had a magic formula, you need this and you get one, then we can answer a lot more about life elsewhere. this is really to argue that making a series of statements are extremely dangerous although i'm talking about it now. >> host: you like to live dangerously?

a little bit. >> guest: sometimes. life is dangerous. planets are dangerous. the universe is a dangerous place. you have to go with the flow. part of the difficulty is that these are all things they take on meeting after the event. so part of the arguments i make in the book as we can be sitting on another planet with a different history. i can be leaping around in my purple scaled skin and having the same interview and saying yes, if we hadn't had six moves around our planet, we wouldn't be here today. so there's a danger in this interpretation of things after-the-fact. one of the arguments i make is this is intriguing that apparently our existence complex is contingent on a number of

fairly improbable things happening across the last 4 billion years. when you add it all up, it's extremely unlikely. that's only after the fact to make that. one of the arguments if you don't actually learn much at all. >> host: that you make via analogy of a baseball flying up into the stadium and you happen to be the one to catch it. i've been sort of seeming improbable, but then if you were to sort of wind the clock back, that could have landed in someone else's hands. it was going to land somewhere. >> host: in a crowded baseball stadium and he said the ball happens to land in your hands, any of us would say that's incredible and you start looking back at the events that led to that point. if i hadn't picked this seat in

the stadium, if i hadn't shown up at this time, if i hadn't come to the game today, this would've happened. if you look around you can use the 50,000 other people in the stadium, you begin to realize it was going to land in someone's hand. if i got into the crowd. someone is going to catch it. that person would've had the same conversation. >> host: and if we have planets -- >> host: the difference between a baseball stadium in our situation is that it's as if he were sitting in the baseball stadium, yet you catch the ball. and if you don't know, you have to wonder him ideally one who caught the ball? of course you probably heard he answered the question. if that were the case, would be incredibly unlikely. a similar situation exists with the interpretation of the history of life on earth and

trying to extrapolate that to say things about whether or not we are very, very unusual, there is no other life eventually or otherwise. so one of the themes in the book is taking that kind of argument, which has its flaws as they try to describe what the baseball analogy. but at the same time you can't totally dismiss it. it could be correct, but it could be wrong. and these other factors like the fact that our solar system is somewhat unusual. for example, is that rather than? we don't know. but you kind of wonder and raises of five. >> one of the very interesting aspects of this book is not necessarily obvious that you spent a lot of time talking

about microbes. in fact, you begin the buck but the dutch scientist von haven hook who discovered for the first time that there is little creatures that are in our saliva and no one had seen those before. you begin the book with this. so microbes play a very important role in this story. can you talk a little bit about the? >> guest: sure. as you say, i began the book with this moment when perhaps the first time ever, a human season into a drop of water and realizes there are organisms so small that you can't see them with your human eye. you can even see them with a magnifying glass. you have to have a powerful instrument to peer into this

costs a lot. really looking in to find a drop of water, you have to ask yourself, are we in that situation except we are inside the drop of water. i think one of the names that made me want to write the book was realizing that some of these clues, some of these ideas about the nature of life are not just coming from astronomers, planetary scientist, understanding planets in the abundance of other worlds, but it's coming from biology. it's coming from a far deeper understanding of what life really is. it is something that gets skipped over a great deal. what do we mean by life? a lot of philosophical arguments about what life is. mechanical arguments. it is something that replicates and purses on changes in so one of the one good but there's also

a simpler question, which is if you take life on earth, give me a laundry list of what does it consist of. in terms of number, biomass, genetic diversity that the single at the single cell of my quirkiness of bacteria. i felt it was appropriate to start with a first glance at the microcosm because it has something to say about our significant complex life. and our status in a planetary system. >> host: you could consider it threatening microbial cells make up more above.

>> guest: we carry around 10 times were single celled microbes and around l. number, which is an extraordinary aim. obviously the field of microbiology has revolutionized by beginning to understand how these microbes are not just necessary for a function as large but they also play a role in who we are as individuals and cultural groups, you name it. what i wanted to show you written a book is to take an idea of the human microglia among which is a hot topic, an interesting topic and try to connect back through to an even broader context, which is the context of all of life on earth dominated by mike wrote and it is these microbes that long

before we came on a comment maybe one or 2 billion years ago, even before oxygen came along, essentially the same types of single celled organisms have been here in june and the planet for their own benefit. think with some conscience intent that we've been not doing that the environment. we don't know when life began. it became pretty early. it was formed 4.5 billion years ago. i think the evidence they were living organisms on the planet. we also are being engineered by the free-market medicine on the

cameras. chemically make up the continental to the oceans linked with life. >> host: one of the other interesting things you point out is microbes prey to your area, they form sort of a backup for our dna. >> guest: yes, this is something i hadn't fully appreciated until a few years ago. if you look at the life that spread over every rock crevice in the planet. there's a finite number of metal off of it life on earth used. how you extract energy. we breathe oxygen metabolism they make use of methane for the

ethernet frame under extreme organisms that you breathe iron and manganese. that is how they survived. there is a finite number of these metabolic tools of life on earth seems to have converged on. in the interesting things is that you not make information that describes the machinery by which you can make use of any of these processes seems to highly conserved. in other words, it is everywhere. organisms obviously past generation to generation. microbial seem to often carry around the genetic machinery that they themselves don't necessarily use. it looks really like a giant distributed computing -- the ultimate cloud computing system where if you take a picture on

your cell phone, it is immediately uploaded to a couple places. but if you suddenly flush down the toilet it doesn't matter because that wonderful picture of your cat doing something as artist or as someone else. in fact it's stored in multiple copies. it looks like micro real life, therefore life on earth does that already and it's been doing that for billions of years. the realization has been or you could come along and destroyed 99.9% of life on this planet tomorrow. let's hope it doesn't happen. but if you could do that. there's also a little bit of stuff left, the microbes. the odds are extremely high they will contain this key genetic code for metabolism. in other words, what life has learned over 4 billion years wouldn't be lost. so what is tending to think this

is one mechanist insert a by which life on earth has survived 4 billion years because once it's found these few solutions to survive holds on tight in a very robust way, information away. that has the hallmark of something that could be more general, the universal rule of how life got to exist for more than a thousand years on any given planet or in environment, that that i can ascend, which we didn't understand, if you kill off all the dinosaurs, baddest dinosaurs, baddest day. they're gone. actually, the microbes that live at the dinosaurs, whatever they figure out, all the genetic materials are still around. they passed microbes and microbial spread across different species. post code that is one way life

has managed to serve eyes for 4 billion years from asteroid impacts and ice ages and all these events that could've wiped out life. >> guest: that's right. one suggests life is far more tenacious than imagined a few years ago. we know there were certain organisms are extremely good at surviving difficult environments for us. great heat or pressure. but beyond that, life once it gets going on a planet can preserve much more complex information and it needs, much more complex information than it needs and i think that makes it very tempting to say about, this is such an obvious engineering system that if there is life anywhere else, it may employ the same kind of mechanism to stay

put and perhaps that gives us extra clue how to look for that night. >> host: if we are looking for extra life on other planets, which we are and have been for a long time, what exactly are we looking for? >> guest: is a great question. i think you could answer that question back in an 1860s at the dawn of the space age. we might find vegetation on mars, something like that. in fact coming people really did think that way. people were thinking along those lines. to some extent it is perfectly fair because they had not seen a place like mars up close enough to realize that was impossible. in fact, if you look back at when the first flyby of mars occurred in the early space age,

images close-up came back and it was enormously disappointing and hadn't realized he was going to be so desperate like and desolate. and so, what has happened is the emphasis now has shifted less than looking for trees and sheep wandering around. but looking for the chemical signatures of life come alive is a messy phenomenon. it remained just things around itself. street chemicals alters the chemical balance of its environment among other things. and so, one of the key approaches these days is to look for chemical things in this is what is happening on mars, for example. in recent years there has been discussion -- water is considered pointed towards environments that might harbor sort of biochemistry we are familiar with because liquid

water is particularly important to think because it's a remarkable solvent and it's a remarkable, biological solvent and deeply involved, integrated with the way our biochemistry works. biochemistry of all living things. so follow the water has been the mantra for places like nasa because that is a necessary but not sufficient condition of life. but would really like to look for are some strange chemical imbalance, actually readily explained a existence of life. for example, some people have claimed that they had seen atmospheric methane on mars. methane on mars should stick around for very long. if you see it in something put a

tear recently taken s'il vous plaît be a geophysical phenomenon. it could also be that may be there some methane producing bacteria somewhere beneath the surface of mars. we don't know yet. the evidence right now is suggesting perhaps there isn't so much methane after all. but it's that kind of thing that gets people like me very excited. some things out of equilibrium. something strange. it is at least a dynamic phenomenon, hovering on the border between order and disorder. >> host: we are looking for kind of chemical signs on that border. >> guest: exactly. that is really a big focus. you can't quite do a cad per planets the size of this signals that you can achieve with modern

telescopes while looking at the chemical balance in atmosphere are very weak. but the hope is in really a few years time it will be instruments that will have the sensitivity to sift through the atmosphere of a distinct possibly earthlike planet and look for signs of chemical disequilibrium with oxygen or methane. >> host: okay, we are going to take a quick break and we will be back. >> host: so when the book on the attack about the potential

of actually measuring the probability that life exists elsewhere. and i thought that was a fascinating idea. also thinking of looking forward in seeing seeing if we could find it. could you tell us a little bit about how we might actually measure? >> guest: it's a very ambitious concept. to put beyond where we are now, say let's suppose we can begin to detect what is the next step. i think the ultimate step is to establish how frequently life occurs in the universe. now how do we do that? well, it may be very, very difficult. i talk about this to some extent in the book. it means taking these chemical measurements of the competition of the planetary atmosphere, learning how to pin down the

chemical signature that really gives you life on the planet or other characteristics, for example, the colors you see on the surface of the planet may be closely related to whether or not there is something grosvenor. make the plant life. ..

we don't usually get them in that respect. we know there's life on earth. bringing together and formulate a fingerprint, a great system if you will. this is grade eight life bearing planet for example. so one of the interesting things about looking for life is the focus has naturally been on just finding out whether or not there's anything else out there. that's completely reasonable. what's the next step? what's the ultimate place you can go to with it? and the reason i discussed this in the book is that it's closely related to something even deeper, and that is the question of why and how exactly this universe suitable for life, clearly our universe is suitable for life in at least one place,

here, but how suitable is it over all? the universe from which life has traveled to for a billion years, usually just called the observable universe. it's finite. it contains a few hundred billions galaxies and each supposedly commit a couple hundred billion stuff but a very finite number, a fine number of places where life might occur. it seems universe can contain finite amounts of life. it might be one instance but chances are it's probably something between one and very much larger number. but why is it that number? if it's just us, why? one living planet for 20 solar system. why is it that number? one of the arguments i've tried to make in the book is

determining that could be extremely important not just for evaluating some statistical numerical way of true significance, putting a number to it, but also as perhaps a code of deeper physics. and this really looks back to ideas that have been discussed in the past. for example, there's the anthropic principle. so this really came up in the middle of the 20th century. since we started trying to understand the nature of the universe. it wasn't quite clear at that time whether the universe was finite in age or whether it has always been here. the idea called the steady-state universe, which is the same in time and space everywhere. it wasn't a big bang. we nothing possibly there was a big bang. there was a starting point for

the universe. but a lot of physicists began to see that, well, there are certain prophecies, absolute strength of gravity, for example, and absolute strength of electromagnetic forces. these fundamental properties, fundamental constants of nature that a few altered any of them a little bit, the universe could be very, very different. then we have to begin to ask, this almost sounds a bit like a baseball problem again. how likely is it for a university end up with all the right features that would lead to organisms like earth, and it can seem somewhat unlikely if this is the only universe. so this was intimately related with the beginnings of what we now call the idea of a multi-verse. the idea that there might be not just one universe like this, but an enormous number of other

universes. there is no evidence for this right now. it gets very beautifully with a number of ideas in physics and cosmology. the interesting thing about it is it deals with this nagging question of why is the theory of only one universe and there's only ever been one universe, why was it suitable for life to emerge to make that observation? and equally you can use the fact of our existence to perhaps understand something about the deeper physics of the simple level. some might say we are made of carbon-based molecules. where did carbon come from? carbon comes from the center of certain parts of stars. our star so you see elements to make things like carbon. but if you tweak the physics of the universe a little bit, you wouldn't do that. you wouldn't make carbon. or alicia might not make enough carbon to ensure that there would be a planet somewhere with

lots of carbon compounds, out of which life might emerge. so some people have argued, using the so-called anthropic principle, a bit of a bad choice because it needn't be humans. it could be any life. that the very existence of life is telling you something about the deeper physics of the universe. >> host: interesting. so we have sort of a closed system. you can figure out how the physics and chemistry of what's out there could give rise to the chemistry and biology that we see, and then vice versa. >> guest: this has been the idea. now, i think in the book i try to make the case for saying this is very interesting, it's lovely, intriguing idea, but it's rather limited because it doesn't tell you how much life there should be. you only need one instance of life to be able to make those sorts of arguments.

we couldn't be or if the stars were a certain way and, therefore, the fundamental physics work a certain way, great. but what is determining how much life there is a new birth. perhaps that is a clue to something beyond what we thought about. something deeper still, and so that is one of the other motivations for learning what the abundance or frequency of life is in the universe. in the book at the a little bit about how we might do that and i really lost over the details of what would be an extraordinary technological achievement to be able to do this. >> host: does this have to do with sort of a calculation of uncertainty? i got your discussion of that was five those in the book, because, yeah, i'm no mathematician but i thought you did a great job explaining that.

guesstimate yes. part of the book -- >> guest: . yes. part of the book is the way we deal with probability, the way in which we make inferences about the world around us based on unlimited information. >> host: that so we have, limited information. >> guest: absolutely. these days we rely in general very heavily on a set of, a mathematical theorem that comes from this mathematician back in the 1800s. is the realm is all about -- is theorem is all about weighing evidence with theory, and asking not so much is my theory correct, but how probable is it that my theory is correct, given some observation that i've made? and in the book i use a little allegorical tale to just give an

inkling of how this works. it's the tale of a big chicken, actually it's going to turn into a rooster. it had just one day and it sees the thing in the sky, which is the son, and watches the sun moved to the sky during the course of its first thing in the world. and the sunsets. it's an intelligent little chicken but thanks, well, that will come back again. because it's a really intelligent chicken, it formulates, as thomas days what, a 30. well, i think there's a 50/50 chance that it will reappear. that's my theory. i will wait and see what happens. of course the next morning the sun comes up again. which goes to the sky -- >> host: another piece of data. >> guest: another piece of data. now the chicken can update this theory a little bit with this new data that says i'm going to

change the odds of the coming back again. instead of being 50/50 i'm going to say 75-20, probability the sun will reappear. of course, it does. so after a while, after about i think it's a month or so the baby chicken is got to the point where it has a 99% confidence that the sun will reappear. every day it has modified its theory. it doesn't know for sure the sun will reappear but it's 99% sure. and it can start crowing in the morning and annoying all the neighbors and such but this is really that kind of approach to answering are asking scientific questions is central to thomas bayes' bedroom, and central to modern science. the interesting thing about is you can ask the kinds of questions -- theorem. for example, and i can discuss this in the book, we do have a piece of evidence in the

question of whether not life is common or rare in the universe. that is that we are here. that one data point. most scientists of safety, one data point is useless, and they're actually right. but the interesting thing is the intuition often come if i'm walking down the street and i bumped into someone, what do you do? often people say, well, we are here and it surely big universe. we now know there billions of planets everywhere. surely there has to be life somewhere else in the universe. it makes sense, right? well, not really. if you apply the way of looking at things that thomas bayes gave us, this idea of probability inference and updating your theory with data, it turns out that you might have this theory that life on earth started pretty quickly 4 billion years, a few billion years later along

comes organisms capable of making that occupation. doesn't that tell us something about how likely it is life is elsewhere? the disappointing yet rather freeing and it is that actually it tells you almost nothing about the likelihood of life elsewhere. in the book i use this to really emphasize the point that right now, is we could discover one single instance of life with an independent origin like that on earth, it would change everything. it wouldn't just be oh, yes, okay. it would actually change the numbers. like the baby chicken updating is probably the sun will come up again. but in this case it would narrow the option much more than with the chicken and the sun. it would give you a much

stronger likelihood of there being an enormous abundance of life in the universe if you run the math properly, if you write out the formula, that probably stick formula. >> host: so what have our attempt spent so far together this much-needed data? there was a project to scan the skies for certain radio frequencies send out the wow signal, and various other ways. how might we go about getting this information? >> guest: i think there are several approaches, and i will get to the one you're talking about. it was a purchase we talked about already, the chemical signature approach, sifting in the dirt of mars to look for some signs there had been life. that's not a practical approach, and in principle the beauty of that approach is you can begin

to eliminate certain environments. very thorough in looking at mars and we don't find anything. that's important. that will tell us something. there's another way to do this, which you allude to with the wow signal. the wow signal was perhaps some people would consider the best example ever of a possibly artificial signal arriving at the earth from somewhere else out there. the rest of the universe to it happened in the late 1970s and it was part of a project that was explicitly listening for extraterrestrial intelligence, so this project not as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and on for a number of decades now. originally it was listening to radio signals and the idea is that you scan the skies as much as you can with as many

different radio frequencies as you can add as much of the time you can, looking for signals that don't appear to be natural. in other words, they're not signals coming from stars or galaxies or anything, but there's some structure to them. the kind of thing that we might send out into the universe, either intentionally or unintentionally. these days, that's still an effort that's ongoing, although it's been very difficult for them to raise money. it's kind of the ultimate longshot. a few succeed, you -- >> host: use a wow. >> guest: exactly. as the years go by and you don't succeed people say why are you doing this? i personally support the effort because it's one of those things that you don't know. we simply don't know, and if nobody is listening you will never find out. that may be extreme difficult to detect something, but again if

you don't try, you have absolutely no idea. if you tried at least there's a chance, even if there's a slim chance. these days there's attention being paid to other forms of study. for example, optical study. people have realized that radio waves through space may not be the best way to either send signals across to other civilizations, or to pick up a random signals coming from civilization. radio waves tend to get distorted by the material that's actually out there between the stars in our galaxy. where indivisible part of the spectrum, the optical spectrum, the principle is you can send signals that a much more coherent, much greater distances to get something like a big laser beam or some big device to focus light. so there's increased interest in

looking for perhaps an artificial signal that way. there are some innocent ideas that are bubbling up now that have to do with looking for some of the consequences of a technological civilization. one of the consequences -- >> host: here we are not going for bacteria. this is the real deal. >> guest: we are upping the ante. and one idea is that, assuming, and there are many assumptions, we are extrapolating an enormous amount from our own nature, our own experience that civilization of intelligent organism built machines. they come up with ways to extract energy from the equivalent of gasoline or maybe nuclear power or maybe it's solar power, and they use that energy. maybe it's electrical. maybe it's chemical, whatever. a consequence of energy use is

that you warm at the environment. for example, if you turn on your computer, it gets warm, right? what's that? that's just access. that's just leakage from all the things that are happening in the silicon chip inside your computer. it turns out that if you run the numbers in a big enough civilization, perhaps a bit bigger than we are at the moment on a planet, will generate a significant infrared heat signature. unintentionally. even if it's very efficient in its energy use. energy is never destroyed the it is just? >> guest: into other forms and it's hard to get rid of this waste energy. so some people have been talking about could you build a telescope specifically designed to look for this infrared blip of a planet, i really can't be explained by any known natural phenomenon. yo balkans and other things that

might generate heat signature, but the argument is there maybe very specific heat signature of civilization, of technological life. this is really a long reach, okay? the interesting thing about it is that if we take this question really seriously, it's actually the kind of thing we should be doing. we should be thinking about. to come back to your earlier question about how we going to evaluate our true significant universe, well, it's going to be a technological achievement rather than a philosophical one i think. >> host: when you conclude the book was sort of a subtle distinction between the uniqueness and significance, could you explain this sort of, the line you're walking a at the

end we need to leaders what to think about all of this? >> guest: yeah. so i think i'm pretty honest in the book about saying, look, this is my personal take. i've tried to pull together all these different threads, trying to express where do i get to, what do i think beyond certain -- and part of what helps me get to the conclusion is that i often talk about how life is a phenomena on this edge between altering chaos. a thing that seems to emerge where there's a bit of stability but not too much stability, where there's a bit of energy but not too much energy, whether there's certain chemical, not too many chemicals, not too few chemicals. kind of an emergent phenomenon which is the hot topic these days. it is in the idea that a set of simple or interacting things can somehow give rise to great complexity. like watching a flock of birds

flying around to each individual bird may just seem to be flying in a random path, but when you see a swooping flock of birds in the sky, it takes on a whole different structure. and i think that is a key piece of trying to pull these threads together. show the conclusion that i give the reader in the book is about i think the way to reconcile these pieces of evidence that don't quite fit together is to say that we may be unique, but not exceptional. in other words, life on earth, including us, maybe unlike that anywhere else in the universe. but there may also be many places that are equally unique. the pathway through life on earth for the last 4 billion years is full of twists and turns. so the idea that you would end up with anything like us, all

the creatures around us today, again somewhere in the universe seems very, very unlikely, very low probability. but the probability you end up with something is pretty good. >> host: something that might be equivalent if not identical. >> guest: but this is the tricky bit. what is equivalent? and here we may not have enough information, tended to think there is a planet occupied out there by an telogen creatures and yet they use tools, they use coconut shells. they have been around for a long time. they are clueless by verse. evolution has paid off. but that may not be alien enough. >> host: so as an editor in "scientific american" mind, i have to ask. you live your life as a cosmologist. you're constantly thinking.

so i wonder about that. you know, because people who suffer mental illness, sort of anxious to go there almost looking inward. they're always thinking about themselves. i wonder if there's a sort of a mental health value in having a broader view, right? because we talk about our significance as being very important to us, but sometimes we pay ourselves too much attention. and that almost seemed that it's more than just as out there. thinking about the solar system, the universe may actually give some perspective. and i wondered what you thought about that? >> guest: i like to say i'm a shining example of rational authority, but i'm not sure. but i think, for me personally,

absolutely. absolutely. this sense of perspective is profoundly important to me. today, maybe not so much, but on the occasions when i pause and think about it, and i think this is true for many scientists as well, that sense of wonder and a sense of curiosity, the sense of insignificance all at up to this package that is kind of comforting. in a strange way. you would think you would be screaming in a darkened room, but i think not. i think it actually makes you feel bad i'm in this extraordinarily wonderful situation with so much around me, and yet i'm utterly insignificant. but now i'm sitting here thinking about it, and there's something special about that, that ability, that extraordinary juxtaposition. my insignificance, yet here i am incapable of acknowledging it.

>> host: it if you're insignificant, then maybe the problem with your toilet is also fairly insignificant in the scheme of things, bright? >> guest: and my boss is insignificant and so on and so on. yet. i mean i've easily it's hard to lead your life day to day when john to pay the bills house make you can't always be thinking about the universe. >> guest: right. but to me it's a very soothing idea that all of this is merely a blip on a far grander scheme. >> host: well thank you very much. you have written and that's a big if a book or i was impressed by it, both answering these questions and the writing itself. >> guest: thank you very much. it's been a pleasure. >> host: likewise.

>> that was "after words," booktv's signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed bby a journalist, public policymakers and others familiar with their maternal. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9 p.m. on sunday, and 12 a.m. on monday. you can also watch "after words" online. go to booktv.org and click on "after words" in the boca tv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page. >> here's some of the latest news about the publishing industry.

to activate a breaking news about the publishing world. like us on facebook and facebook.com/booktv, or followers on twitter at booktv. you can also visit our website at booktv.org and click on news about books. >> monday night on the communicate is, federal trade commission or on net neutrality. privacy and data security. >> data is the tool and it can be used well and it can be used poorly. there are many benefits that can come from big data, consumer benefits that will be great insight in certain areas, many areas but some that are top of mind for me are in health care, other kinds of research reaching

underserved population and providing new insights i think in some of our more difficult to solve problems that we face. but are the risks from big data as well? i think that's true. i think that you can take pieces of briefly kind of separate pieces of information and assemble them into a profile that may give sensitive insights into the consumer. the question for me is you have all these benefits, you have some risks. what do you do then? spent monday night at eight eastern on "the communicators" on c-span2. >> and now booktv presents coverage of the ninth annual oakland book festival in brooklyn, new york. for the next few hours you can watch as authors discuss politics, nelson mandela, voting rights and public education. but first a panel on city planning.