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 it's the fact that these tiny particles behave like waves as well as particles. And I won't go into, it's quite an abstract concept. It's a very powerful theory and it's almost certainly correct. And the question is, is how does that randomness at the very, very small scale of tiny particles
translate to random behavior such as an asteroid colliding with earth or even the evolution of consciousness because one of the really interesting things that comes about is if the universe is deterministic then free will is an illusion that doesn't sit well with me i don't believe that um that free will is an illusion i was it was inevitable that we'd be having this wonderful conversation now at the birth of the universe but but some scientists
believe that it's deterministic and with and for a reason known as something as quantum entanglement and quantum entanglement is something that we don't fully understand yet and i don't believe we've quite got the right interpretation of so you had mentioned at the beginning that that there is some evidence that perhaps or there's some reason to believe anyway that that intelligent life may have been around before elsewhere
Well, so a couple of answers to that. So first of all, there was another species, a cousin of ours. We shared a common ancestor, but it was a different branch of the tree of life called Neanderthals. Many people will have heard of them. And they lived in Europe up until about 40,000 years ago. And they had language. They had culture. They painted the first cave paintings.
So they buried their dead. So these were clearly another intelligent species on earth related to us, but not our direct ancestors or anything. So intelligent life, has evolved twice. They had brains that were about the same size as ours. Now, the second part of your question is what might happen to the earth in the future?
Well, eventually the sun, the sun's probably about halfway through its life. It's about four and a half, 4.6 billion years old. It's going to survive for another 4 billion years or so. And when it comes, when it burns up all its hydrogen fuel, it's going to go through periods of rapid expansion and rapid contraction.
And when it does that, if the Earth's still in the orbit around it, it's going to burn the Earth up. And any life that may have survived until then is going to be destroyed. It's going to go extinct. However, we suspect that life's going to go extinct before then.
And the reason is, over the course of Earth's history, and in some ways this is a bit ironic, given what lots of people are talking about now, is that the atmosphere of Earth has been declining in the amount of carbon dioxide in it and increasing in the amount of nitrogen in it since it formed.
And in about a billion years' time, carbon dioxide levels are going to have dropped to such a low level that photosynthesis, so the way that plants make a living, is going to cease. And when plants cease to be able to do photosynthesis and create oxygen, then animals like us that require oxygen to breathe are going to go extinct as well. So we know that life on Earth will die out.
We know it may hopefully it's going to be a long time away. We know, you know, that we know the direction that it's going. We're not going to be here forever. Intelligent life's not going to be here forever because the Earth's not going to be here forever. Now, of course, that's still a very long way away.
And who knows, in the coming years, in the coming decades, in the coming centuries, humanity may end up finding a way to get to other planets outside of our solar system and forming colonies there. We can't do that yet. But science has brought us on a hell of a journey and it may continue to take us on a journey further.
where as we learn more, we do realize that we are able to colonize the galaxy. But at the moment, it will take us a very long time to get to those planets.
Wonderful. Thank you very much for having me on, Mike. It's been entirely my pleasure.
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