Dr. Brian Keating
speaker
1,291 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Sep 2025
Dr. Brian Keating’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Okay, it's not biological necessarily.
Okay. So one theory of the formation of life on Earth, you asked me about that earlier, the origin of life on Earth is a huge mystery. How did life get here? One proposition was made by Fred Hoyle and other people. It sounds dirty, but it's not. It's called panspermia. It just means that genetic material has been transferred from another astronomical object landed here on Earth.
So the converse reaction occurs as well. But the fact is we don't observe it even on Mars. So if I told you we've discovered a planet and there's another planet right next to it and it has almost the same conditions. It's in the so-called Goldilocks zone where the temperature is just right to have liquid water, which Mars can have on it at certain times of the year in certain places on Mars.
It had flowing water on it. We know for sure Mars had flowing water on it. We know for sure that material from the Earth got there when Earth had life on it. So the absence of life on Mars is a data point. It's not probative or provative. It's positive rather that life couldn't exist on Mars. We haven't searched all of Mars. But it at least shows that there's an impediment to it.
So people are fond of saying – As I told you earlier, there's about 10 to the 24th planets probably in our observable universe. Going back to the Big Bang, going out to the farthest reaches of the universe. But even if you just take the Milky Way galaxy, there's probably literally hundreds of billions of planets in our galaxy alone.
And when you look at that, people like to say, as Carl Sagan did, if there's no life, it's an awful waste of space, right? Why is there so much space and there's no life? It seems incomprehensible. But nature – I love when atheist scientists will say like you propose God exists and that's the God of the gaps to explain things that you don't understand.
But when science advances, we'll have an explanation. for why, you know, thunder occurs. It's not because of Thor, right? We get rid of gods as we learn more, and so the gaps shrink smaller and smaller. But they'll say the same argument about life in the universe. They'll say, well, there's got to be life because there's so much room there. But as I told you, I've been to Antarctica twice.
The only life forms I saw there, okay, were people. I saw a few penguins in the distance. And a couple of dead sea lions. There's no trees. There's no flora at all on the entire continent. It's incredibly barren. And yet, Andrew, it makes up 8% of the landmass of the earth. And you would think, well, it's just proportional to the amount of area, i.e. the number of stars.
There should be 8% of the life on Earth. There should be a billion people there or whatever, 600 million people. No, there's nothing there except for scientists that go there. So the odds of life are – you can't construct probability from possibility. That and many, many other arguments that I could give you, the improbability of life, how hard it is to create life.
And if you just sprinkled – imagine you had a koala cannon, OK? People at PETA are going to get mad. Why don't you just go to Mars and spray it with koala – it's obviously not going to like start life, right?
That's right. They would not like that. So yeah, so possibility is not probability. The number of hurdles to create a single cell is enormous. We have yet to reproduce, to make a functional cell in the laboratory. Not that that's a requirement to prove that life could exist elsewhere. I'm just saying it's very hard. Our history of life, we have an N of 1. It's very difficult to speculate on.
And if we're alone, if life is abundant, as Fermi asked many, many, many years ago, if life is abundant and the galaxy is old, where are they? Where are the aliens? There should have been plenty of time not only for them to evolve and be superior to us in many ways and travel the distances of our galaxy, not even of the cosmos, our galaxy. Where are they? Where are they?
They've known about us for 80 years because we've been broadcasting radio waves for the last 85 years.
Internet, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I was, I was blessed as my first guest on the, into the impossible podcast that Freeman Dyson, now you mentioned your dad, your dad mentioned him. One of the greatest intellects of the last 100 years, great physicist, and he had these ideas for these Dyson spheres which would be energy harvesting.
So the first ingredient that you need to construct the Huberman planet habitable zone is to have energy, is harvest as much energy as possible from a star. So he basically conjectured a megastructure, an alien megastructure that could be observable astronomers could detect these objects and some have claimed that we have, but those have always been refuted.
And it would be basically surrounding a star, capturing every photon worth of energy that came out of it, and then converting that to mechanical energy. And then, yes, and then once you have infinite energy, you can actually do fusion. You can make up whatever molecules you want. You could make up, you know, 3D printing at the quark level on up, basically. And so
So that was his conjecture of how super advanced aliens would behave. But again, we have no evidence for it, but it's fun. It's certainly fun to have the science fiction, you know, kind of, you know, a lot of interesting science, you know, originates from ideas and creativity that originates from science fiction. So yeah, it'd be a lot of fun.
Thanks, Andrew. You've been a big inspiration to me too. And you know, Use your language. Thank you for your interest in science. It's really done so much for the world and you give it all for free. And it's truly an inspiration.
And it's really fun to talk to somebody who's, you know, at the level that you're at and so many different things and still has that, you know, as scientists, we get inured, we get kind of used to things. Oh, there's a rainbow, there's a meteor, you know, whatever. But you still have that passion. You have that passion, that curiosity. And I think that's what makes a true scientist. And
Showing 1081–1100 of 1,291 · page 55 of 65
← Previous
Next →