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Martin Rees

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143

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2022-07-23

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2022-07-23

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1. “The size and the mass, you can estimate. But detecting the actual light from one of these exoplanets hasn't really been done yet exactly one or two very bright big planets.”

   2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Get a picture. Well, actually, let me caveat that it takes 50 years to get a resolved image, but to actually detect the light. Because now, of course, these exoplanets are detected by their effects on the parent star. They either cause their parent star to dim slightly when they transit across in front of it. And so we see the dips or their gravitational pull makes the star wobble a bit. So most of the 5,000 plus planets that have been found around other stars, they've been found indirectly by their effect. In one of those two ways on the parent”

   2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Starting to be able to address these. I mean, I mentioned the fact that the origin of life is a question that we may be able to understand. And serious people are working on it. It's usually put in the sort of too difficult box. Everyone knew was important, but they didn't know how to tackle it or what exponents to do. But it's not like that now. And that's partly because of cleverer experiments. But I think most importantly because we are aware that we can look for life in other places. other places in our solar system and of course on the exoplanets around other stars and within 10 or 20 years I think two things could happen which would be really really important we might with the next big telescope be able to image some of the earth like planets around other stars”

   2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Which would not have happened anywhere else? Or was it something which involves the processes would have happened in any other planet where conditions were like they were on the young Earth? So we can't say that now. I think many of us would indeed bet that probably some kind of life exists elsewhere. But even if you accept that, then there are many contingencies going from simple life to present day life and some biologists like Stephen Jay Gould thought that if you rerun evolution, you'd end up with something quite different and maybe not of an intelligent species. So the contingencies in evolution may militate against the emergence of intelligence, even if life gets started in lots of places. So I think these are still completely open questions. And that's why it's such an exciting time now that we...”

   2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “We don't understand, although we know that in evolution of simple life to complex life, we don't understand what caused a transition between complex chemistry and the first replicating, metabolizing entity we call alive That's a mystery and serious physicist. And I came as a nerve thinking about it, but we don't know. So we therefore can't say, was it a rare fluke?”

   2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Well, I mean, I don't agree with that as far as life is concerned because remember that we don't understand how life began here on Earth”

   2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “If you speak very unhumble indeed, it may make a difference, but for most of us, I don't think it makes much difference. the human race as such is something which is very special or if on the other hand it's just one of many such Species elsewhere in the universe or indeed existing at different times in our universe.”

   2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Yes. No, I think the Ruggers and House of those points you make. Yes. But I think... Even the solar system is pretty vast by human standards. And so I don't think the perception of this utterly vast cosmos need have any deeper impact on us than just realizing that we are very small on the scale of the external world.”

   2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Well, that's not logically impossible, but I think many people would accept that it does go on and contain probably a million times as much stuff as what we can see within a horizon. The reason for that incidentally is that if we look as far as we can in one direction and in the opposite direction, then the conditions don't differ by more than one pass in 100,000. So that means that if we're part of some finite structure, the gradient across the part we can see is very small. And so that suggests that it probably does go on a lot further and the best estimates say it must go on at least 20 times further”

   2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Say that because we can see how with our telescopes to a sort of horizon which is about Depending on how you measure it, it's maybe 15 billion light years away or something like that. But that rise of our observations is no more physical reality than the horizon around you if you're in the ocean and looking out at your horizon. There's no reason to think that the ocean ends just beyond your horizon. And likewise, there's no reason to think that the aftermath of our Big Bang ends just at the boundary of what we can see. Indeed, there are quite strong arguments that it probably goes on about 100 times further. And it may even go on so much further that all combinatorials are replicated. And there's another set of people like us sitting in a room like this.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Those sort of defined theories which make assumptions about the physics at the relevant time and this time incidentally is 10 to the power minus 36 seconds. Or earlier than that. This tiny sliver of time. And there are some theories famous by Judith Andre Linday, the Russian cosmologist now at Stanford, called Eternal Inflation, which did predict an eternal production of new big bangs, as it were. And that's based on specific assumptions about the physics, but those assumptions, of course, are just hypotheses which aren't vindicated. But there are other theories which only predict one Big Bang. So I think we should be open-minded and not dogmatic about these options until we do understand the relevant physics. But there are these different scenarios, a very different ideas about this. But I think all of them have the feature that physical reality is a lot more extensive than what we can see throughout telescope. I think even the most conservative astronomers”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “The inference if it predicted many big bangs, not one, even though we can't predict the other ones. So the example is that we can take seriously a prediction if it's the consequence of a theory that we believe on other grounds. We don't need to be able to detect another Big Bang in order to take it seriously.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “What happened at the very beginning was Big Bang, were there many Big Bangs rather than one, etc. And those are issues which We may be able to get some foothold on from some new theory. Even then, we won't be able to directly test the series. But I think it's a heresy to think you have to be able to test every prediction of a theory. Let me give you another example. We take seriously what Einstein's theory says about the inside of black holes, even though we can't observe them, because that theory has been vindicated in many other places in cosmology and black holes, gravitational waves, and all those things. Likewise, if we had a theory which explains some things about the early history of our Big Bang and the present universe, then we would take seriously”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “world than quantum theory is and remember our lives our brains evolved and haven't changed much since our ancestors roamed the African Savannah and looked at the everyday world And it's rather amazing that we've been able to make some sense of the quantum microworld. The cosmos, but there may be some things which are beyond us, and certainly, as you implied, they're things that we don't yet understand at all. And, of course, one concept we might have to jettison is the idea of three dimensions of space and time just ticking away. Lot of ideas. I mean, I think Stephen Hawking had an idea that talking about what happened before the big bang. It's like asking what happens if you go north from the North Pole. It somehow closes off. That's just one idea I don't like that idea, but that's a possible one. And so we just don't know.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “It's out of the reach of present science because science develops and as the front is advance, then new problems come into focus that couldn't even have been postulated before. I mean, if I think of my own career, when I was a student, the evidence for the Big Bang was pretty weak, whereas now it's extremely strong. But we are now thinking about the reason why the universe is the way it is and all that. So I would put all these things we've just mentioned in the category of speculative science and I don't see a bifurcation between that and philosophy. But of course, to answer your question, if we do want to understand the very early universe, then we've got to realize that it may involve even more counterintuitive concepts than quantum theory does, because it's a condition even further away from everyday”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Well, I think Sense is a combination. I think what we hope for is that there'll be a theory which applies to the early universe, but which also has consequences which we can test in our present day universe, like discovering minutes exist or things like that. And that's the thing which, as I mentioned, we may perhaps need a bit of AI to help us to calculate. But I think... The hope would be that we will have a theory which applies under the very, very extreme early stages of the universe, but which gains credibility and gains confidence because it also manages to account for otherwise unexplained features of the low-energy world, what people call a standard model of particle physics, where there are lots of undetermined numbers. So it may help with that.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “into that volume. But the times we're talking about when the key proposition of the universe were first imprinted were times when that entire universe was squeezed down to the size of a tennis ball or baseball if you prefer and had emerged from something microscopic. So it's a huge extrapolation and it's not surprising that since it's so far from our experimental range of detectability we are still groping for ideas.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Atoms and dark matter and radiation, and why does it have the properties which allow galaxies to form being fairly smooth but not completely smooth? And the answer to those questions are generally believed to lie in a much, much earlier stage of the universe when conditions were much more extreme and therefore far beyond the stage when we had the foothold in experiments, very theoretical. And so we don't have a convincing theory. We just have ideas until we have something like string theory or some other clues to the ultra-iverse. That's going to remain speculative. So there's a big gap. And to say how big the gap is, if we take the observable universe to a bit more than 10 billion light years, then when the universe was a nanosecond old, that would have been squeezed down to the size of our solar system or compressed.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “After a nanosecond, the particles moving around like those in the large hatro collider. If you wait for one second, they're rather like in the centers of the hottest stars and nuclear accidents produce hydrogen, helium, et cetera, which fit the data. So we can, with confidence, extrapolate back to a universe with a nanosecond old. Indeed, I think we can do as much confidence as anything a geologist tells you about the early history of the earth. And that's huge progress in the last 50 years. Any progress puts in sharper focus new mysteries. And of course, The new mistress in this context are why is the universe expand the way it is? Why does it contain this mixture of?”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “It could be, and the sum is maybe very, very hard to detect, but I think we can hope for some new theoretical ideas because one point which perhaps you'd like to discuss more is about the very early stage of the Big Bang and the situation now is that we have a outlined picture for how the universe has evolved from the time when it was expanding in just a nanosecond. Up to the present. And we could do that because after nanosecond, the physics of the material is in the same range that we can test in the lab.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “10 between the heaviest particles that could be created by the large hadron collider and the heaviest particles which on theoretical grounds could exist. Turning into black holes. So there's a huge amount of possible particles which could be out there as remnants of the Big Bang, but which we wouldn't be able to text so easily. So the fact that we've got new constraints, some of the dark matter could be doesn't diminish my belief that it's there in the former particles because we've only explored a small fraction of parameter space.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “then we get a nice consistent picture if we put in times as much mass in the form of these Mysterious dark particles. And, for instance, it works better if we think they're non-interacting particles than if you think they're a gas, which would have shock waves and things. So we know something about the properties of these. But we don't know what they are. And the disappointment compared to my guess 20 years ago is that particles answering this description have not yet been found. It was thought that the big accelerator, the Lance Handlock and IDA at CERN, which is the world's biggest, might have found a new class of particles, which would have been the obvious candidates. And it hasn't. And some people say, well, dark matter can't be there, etc. But what I would argue is that there's a huge amount of parameter space that hasn't been explored. There are other kinds of particles called axions, which behave slightly differently, which are good candidates. And there's a factor of 10 powers of...”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Well, I mean, we learnt that galaxies and other large-scale structures which are moving around, but prevented flying apart by gravity, would be flying apart if they only contain the stuff we see. everything in them was shining and to understand how galaxies formed and why they do remain confined the same size one has to infer that it is about five times as much stuff producing gravitational forces than the total amount of stuff in the gas and stars that we see and that stuff is called dark matter that stuff its leading name is not dark it's just transparent etc and the most likely interpretation is that it's a swarm of microscopic particles which have no electric charge and the very small cross sectors are hitting each other and hitting anything else so they swarm around and we can detect their collective effects and when we do computer simulations of how galaxies form and evolve and how they emerge from the big bang”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “The book is called If Science is to Save Us, it's coming out in September and it's on the big challenges of science, climate, dealing with biosafety and dealing with cyber safety. And also it's got chapters on the way science is organized, universities and academies, etc. The ethics of science and”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Well, indeed, because the reason they really have a benefit over us is that they can learn and think so much faster. That's how they can learn to play chess and go. That's how they can learn to diagnose lung cancer better than a radiologist because they can look at 100,000 scans in a few days. Whereas no human radiologist sees that many in a lifetime.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “which we do fantastic analyses of and that of course could not be done at all without just the number of crunching capacities computers computers computers com”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “yield phenomena and insights which we wouldn't have guessed beforehand. And the way we can feel we're making progress in trying to understand some of these phenomena why galaxies have the size and shape they do and all that is because we can do simulations tweaking different initial conditions and seeing which gives the best fit to what we actually observe. And so that's a way in which we've made progress in using computers and incidentally we also now need them to analyze data because one thinks of astronomy has been traditionally a rather data poor subjects but the European satellite called Gaia has just put on line the speeds and colors and properties of nearly 2 billion stars in the Milky Way.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Which is crucial, and certainly in the subjects I do in astronomy, the huge advances we've had come not from us being more intelligent than Aristotle was, but through us having far, far better data from powerful telescopes on the ground and in space. And also, incidentally, we benefited hugely in astronomy from computer simulations. Because if you are subatomic physicist, then of course you crash together the particles into the big accelerator like the one at CERN and see what happens. I can't crash together to galaxies or two stars and see what happens. But in the virtue world of a computer, one can do simulations like that. And the pile of computers is such that these simulations can”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “If I can digress and put in a plug for my next book. It has a chapter saying why Nobel Prizes do more harm than good. So, on a quite separate subject, I think Nobel Prize is doing a great deal of damage to the perception of the way science is done. Of course, if you ask who or what deserves the credit for any scientific discovery, it may be often someone who has an idea, a team of people who work a big experiment, etc. And of course it's the quality of the equipment.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “That's a new thing, which is very interesting. They can suppress the instabilities in these tokamaks better than any other way.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “And I remember the first time I met him, he said that he was like me. He wanted to understand the universe, but he thought the best thing to do was to try and develop AI. And then with the help of AI, he'd stand more chance of understanding the universe. And I think he's right about that. And of course, although we're familiar with the way his computers play Go and chess, he's already made contributions to science through understanding protein folding better than the best human chemists. And so already he's on the path to showing ways in which computers have the power to learn and do things by having a bit to analyze enormous samples in a short time to do better than humans. And so I think he would resonate with what I've just said, that it may be that in these other fundamental questions, the computers will play a crucial role.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Of the electron, the fact that there are three kinds of neutrinos, something like that, you would know that there was some truth in the theory. And so we may have a theory which we come to trust because it does predict things that we can observe and check, but we may never really understand the full workings of it to the extent that we do more or less understand how most phenomena can be explained in a fantastic way. Of course, in the case of quantum theory, many people would say understandably there's still some mystery if you don't quite understand why it works. But there could be deeper mysteries when we get to these unified theories where there's a big gap between what a computer can print out for us at the end and what we can actually grasp and think through in our heads.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Very complicated geometry may be too hard for a human being to work through, but could be worked through by an AI with the advantage of the huge processing power, which enables them to learn world championship chess within a few hours just by watching games. So there's every reason to expect that these machines could help us to solve these problems. And of course, if that's the way we came to understand where the string theory was right, it should be in a sense frustrating because you wouldn't get the sort of aha insight, which is the greatest satisfaction from doing science. But on the other hand, if a machine churns away a ten-dimensional geometry, figuring out all the possible origamies wound up in extra dimensions, if it comes out at the end, spews out the correct map.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “I would simply say that just as There's no particular reason why the human brain should have evolved to be well matched to understanding the deepest aspect of reality. And I suspect that there may be aspects that we are not even aware of and couldn't really fully comprehend. But as an intermediate step towards that, one thing which I think is very interesting possibility is the extent to which AI can help us. I mean, I think if we take the example of so-called theories of everything, one of which is string theory, string theory involves very complicated geometry and structures in ten dimensions. And it's certainly, in my view, on the cards that The physics Of ten dimensions.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Right. So if you're interested in birds and how they fly, then things like imprinting. Baby on the mother and all that and things like that are what you need to understand. You couldn't even in principle. Solve this vertical equation how an albatross wanders for thousands of miles to the southern ocean and comes back and then coughs up food for its young. That's something we can understand in a sense and predict the behavior. But it's not because we can solve it on the atomic scale.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “in which you get the best explanation. So it may be in chemistry, things like valence, in biology, the concept in cell biology, and in ecology there are concepts like imprinting, etc. And in psychology, there are other concepts. In a sense, the sciences are like a tall building where you have Basic physics are most fundamental, then the rest of physics, then chemistry, then cell biology, etc., all the way up to the, I guess, economist in the penthouse and all that. And we have that. And that's true in a sense, but it's not true that it's like a building in that it's... Made unstable by an unstable base because if you're a chemist, biologist or economist, you're facing challenging problems, but they're not made any worse by uncertainty about subnuclear physics.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Special life force in living things, but nonetheless, no one thinks that we can understand a living thing by solving Schrodinger's equation. To take an example which isn't as complicated, lots of people study the flow of fluids like water. Why waves break, why flows glow turbulent and things like that. This is a serious branch of applied mathematics and engineering. And in doing this, you have concept of viscosity, turbulence, and things like that. You can understand quite a lot about how water behaves and how waves break in terms of those concepts. But the fact that any breaking wave is a solution of Schroding's equation for tens of 30 particles. Even if you could solve that, which you clearly can't, would not give you any insight. So the important thing is that every science has its own reducible concepts.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Well, I think perhaps we can come back to it later, that Only limited prospects of ever being able to understand with unaided human brains the most fundamental theories linking together all the forces of nature. I think that may be a limitation of the human brains. But I also think that we can perhaps aided by computer simulations understand a bit more of the complexity of nature, but even understanding a simple organism from the atom up is very, very difficult. And I think extreme reductionists have a very misleading perception. They tend to think that in a sense we are all solutions of Freuding's equation, etc. But that isn't the way we'll ever understand anything. It may be true that our reductions in the sense if we believe that that's the case, we don't believe in it.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “I think the phrase theory of everything is very misleading because it's used to describe a theory which unifies the three laws of microphysics, electricity, magnetism and weak interaction with gravity. So it's an important step forward for particle physicists. But the lack of such a theory doesn't hold up any other scientists. Anyone doing biology or most of physics is not held up at all through not understanding subnuclear physics. They're held up because they're dealing with things that are very complicated. That's especially true of anything biological. So, what's holding up biologists is not a lack of a so-called theory of everything. It's the inability to understand things which are very complicated.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “I think it would be foolish to give any firm estimate because we just don't know. And that's just an example of how we are depending on greater observations and also incidentally in the case of life, we've got to take account of the fact that, as I always say to my scientific colleagues, biology is a much harder subject than physics. Most of the universe that we know about could be understood by physics. But we've got to remember that even the smallest living organism, an insect, is far more complicated with layer on complexity than the most complicated star or galaxy.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “That we don't know at all, we know that these planets are there. We know that they have masses and orbits rather like the planets of our solar system. But we don't know at all if there's any life on any of them. I mean, it's entirely logically possible that life is unique to this Earth, doesn't exist anywhere. On the other hand, it could be that the origin of life is something which happens routinely given conditions like the young earth, in which case there could be literally billions of places in our galaxy where some sort of biosphere has evolved and settling where the truth lies between those two extremes is a challenge for the coming decades.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Light but plantary systems and that raises the question could there be life out there and so that is an exciting problem for the 21st century.”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Well, of course, we're still groping for any detailed understanding of the remote parts of the universe, but of course what we've learned in the last few decades is really two things. First, we've understood that the universe had an origin, about 13.8 billion years ago in a so-called Big Bang, a hot 10 states whose very beginnings are still shrouded in mystery. And also we've learned more about the extreme things in it, black holes, neutron stars, explosions of various kinds, and one of the most potentially exciting discoveries in the last 20 years, mainly in the last 10, has been the realization that most of the stars in the sky are orbited by retinues of planets, just as the sun is orbited by the Earth and the other familiar planets. And this, of course, makes the night sky farmer interesting. What you see up there are just points of”

    2022-07-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #305 – Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source