Tim Coulson
speaker
53 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Tim Coulson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And so a planet needs to remain suitable for life and enabling life to thrive for long enough for it to become complicated. And we don't know how many planets fall into that category. We just haven't studied enough other planets yet. So in terms of why we're here, do we have a purpose? Well, biologically, the purpose is to replicate, so to produce offspring. But that's a very boring purpose.
I don't believe we've been put here. We haven't found any evidence that we've been put here with a specific mission in mind. But I think we can give ourselves a mission. And one of the things that I, so I nearly died when I was a teenager. I got malaria. And shortly after that, I decided I wanted to try and understand what science could tell us about about why we exist.
So started diving into that. So I gave my life purpose to try and understand what it was about why we existed. And I've loved every minute of it. I think it's been absolutely fantastic. And so I think we can give ourselves. So I think we're here by, by luck. I think a lot of things have happened. We have won the cosmic lottery.
I don't think we're here for a higher purpose, but we can give ourselves a purpose and we can make our lives meaningful. And I think nearly all of us do that.
a good question and it boils down again to the size of the universe and the universe has a maximum speed limit and that's the speed of light and even in terms of light years so that's a distance that light travels in a single year the universe is absolutely vast it's um you know it it takes uh the sun is is our closest star obviously it takes eight minutes and 20 seconds
for light from the Sun to reach Earth. But if you're looking out to our nearest star system, even if you're travelling at the speed of light, it's going to take you about four and a half years to get there. Now, anything that weighs anything, so anything with mass, can't get anywhere near the speed of light. So, you know, it can only get to a fraction of the speed of light.
even if an intelligent uh species on another planet had heard us and set off it's going to take them you know decades if not hundreds or thousands of years to get here so it takes like 26 000 years to get to the center of our galaxy and that's moving at the the universe's speed limit so unless we can come up with ways of traveling around the universe perhaps you know through
Thinking about kind of Star Trek and kind of in science fiction here through worms hole it her wormholes in space it's going to be very difficult for organ it for Intelligent aliens and other planets to get here and we've only been sending out signals to them for 120 years which is when Marconi sent his first radio signal out so if they're listening to that and they were say there were 60 light years away They would have heard that
If they sent a signal back to us, we would only be receiving it about now. And they would have to be within 60 light years, so 60 to get to them and 60 to get a message back. And there's only about 3,000 stars within 60 light years of Earth, which is a tiny number compared to the stars in the universe.
So it's possible there's intelligent aliens making their way to us now, but they're probably not going to arrive for a while.
So I think one of the things that I was really amazed at, I didn't know, is our moon is getting further away. So with each orbit, it goes around the Earth. it gets a little bit further away.
And so when it formed, and this is another fascinating fact, when the moon formed, when the young Earth, when it was about nearly about four and a half billion years ago, it collided with another planet that's been called Theta. And that melted the surface of our young planet, it threw a huge amount of debris up into space and that accreted to form the moon.
So it came together under gravity to form the moon. But the collision also formed the first atmosphere. And without that atmosphere, life probably would never have got going. So we probably owe our... Well, we do owe our existence to a collision that formed the moon. But also, over the course of time that life's been here, there have been all sorts of great extinctions when
when A, the dinosaurs died, and then at the end of the Permian, nearly 300 million years ago, there was a mass extinction that killed over 85% of organisms in the sea and over 70% on land. And if these violent events hadn't happened and these great extinctions hadn't happened, we wouldn't be here and mammals wouldn't have been here. So I think that's one of the amazing things. But what's truly...
And what's truly staggering is that science has been able to piece so much together. You know, the science is driven by imagination and curiosity. And we're all scientists at heart. Science is about finding what works and what doesn't work through trial and error, through experiments. We can all be scientists.
You're right that there are a number of things that, if they didn't happen, we wouldn't be here. As an example, 66 million years ago, an asteroid collided with the Earth. It caused a mass extinction, and it caused the death of all dinosaurs, except birds. So birds are the few dinosaurs that survived the extinction, and they have radiated to and spread to become the birds we know and love today.
If that hadn't happened, mammals wouldn't have got the upper hand, and mammals, we are mammals, mammals wouldn't have evolved to create us. Now, despite all of these events, these kind of events that look like luck, there are some physicists and some scientists, and they say this with very good reason, that if we were to start our universe exactly the way that it formed
13.8 billion years ago when we were to do the experiment where we run the experiment forward we would find that we were here we were sat here today having this conversation that exactly the same things would happen and so they argue that what what they say is the the universe is deterministic and with a big enough computer we would be able to predict the behavior of every single tiny particle
in the universe and how they formed atoms and how they formed planets and how they formed us. And that if we ran the clock again, we would be here. There are other scientists that say, actually, no, I don't believe that. I think we've won the cosmic lottery. There've been a large number of events that had to happen for us to be here and they were chance events and they were truly chance events.
And then the question comes, The question that they then ask is what is luck and where does chance come from? And what's really interesting at the moment, the only true source of randomness, so where luck could come from in the universe, is the behavior of tiny particles. And that's known as quantum behavior or quantum mechanics.
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