David Kipping

It's pretty rare that everyone in the room wants to do exactly the same thing.

So it's not unreasonable.

There'll be some loud civilization, there'll be some quiet ones, there'll be some blowing themselves up in nukes, there'll be some who are pacifists.

I mean, infinite diversity and infinite combinations.

Well, I think I'm a little bit controversial because I'm one of the few colleagues of mine.

Well, I'm not a colleague of myself, but one of the few astronomers I know who concede that we might be alone.

I'm open to that idea.

I'm not saying it's true.

Well, we don't have any evidence that we're not alone.

So it is a possibility.

It really kind of pisses me off, to be honest, when an astronomer is interviewed in a situation like this.

And they're asked, do you think there are aliens out there?

And so, yeah, of course, how can there not be?

How can there not, the universe is so big, blah, blah, billions of stars, of course, ergo, there must be aliens.

But we have no idea what the probability of life starting is.

I mean, even to make a moderate-sized protein,

A protein is just a chain of amino acids, and there's about 20 that go into making a protein.

And a moderate-sized protein has 150 proteins in a row connected together.

So the chance of amino acids randomly coming together to make even a moderate-sized protein is 20 to the power of 150.

So that's 10 to the power of 195, right?