a very large tablet that you've chosen for a subject you're the creation of life on earth and you're doing it from a chemist point of view you have a wide interest in these broad softball questions that are involved in this and you've been interested in that for a very long time in your own but at the after that she said i don't need to many hamburgers hamburger you grow to have brooklyn grow in your stomach so i thought i grew in her stomach like a hamburger and it's a strange quick answer and i thought the stork brought us here so where th know one answer lives to another and eventually understand this how human babies are born but there's a bigger question which is how did life come here how on earth did it come here if it came on earth  and mechanical and the wild things that we associate with life that we know about a really here on earth so it has had to begin you really have to look to earth for a beginning and that's where problem starts you have to look to the earth in the beginning and then we have if you look at it through the human experience in a certain sense i don't know how long three thousand many years or however long humanity's been on earth there's been a perennial question and we've asked that question in a condition of supreme ignorance in terms of understanding physical process because we're coming to understand scientifically and so forth the realities of the world in such a new kind of way to modernise mystery throughout most of the human experience we've answered that question probably in terms of creation myths and other kinds of mythological the mud of the nile river was giving birth to frogs you know in that worms are coming out of dead meat very simply once i took with my wife and i to have a case in the galapagos this is phil's a black cloth and everything says black that stuff looks so barren and so hospitable but when you look carefully something darts just out of your consciousness when you look at this little black colored lizard just ducking out of your sight it's like just yeah exactly you could and the worms came out of meat that was decaying the problem came when you really study down to different levels how life is made you know it's not just like a difference between water and something solid like yes or no yeah absolutely and in the th century moon had discovered the microscope and says little things crawling around microorganisms tiny little specks of nothing crawling and the simplest explanation is that those alive stuff those are just little bits of whatever the essences of life and they're made of that so they call around you know there's something fundamentally different to what they're made of than what a rock is made of and that explains everything you know yeah yeah vital difference but as you be able to look at them closer and closer no somehow you have to the mechanism that creates order something this complexity out of nothing so the only other answer is to try and find another tack and his soon that nothing this can generate something this that out of random bits and pieces of religion is top down yeah those are to meet there in some difficulty yeah you also have to live in science with certain kinds of indeterminancy to things too which makes it a bit more difficult people are looking for absolute answers to things and have it as a simple and easy and that's part of our human heritage to have these right because it it just creates a way of living that is very uncomfortable for a lot of people that's a major problem if we look at science we look at the life processes it's a rock and we can understand well in a certain sense life processes it seems to me your book is on the origins of life itself which is a very large tablet deserves taking its way back to the beginnings of a certain sense to have a very clear understanding the science is given as we get to a certain point in the advancement of life evolution and life forms on earth this is a very clear understanding of what exactly it that took place so we can understand it more clearly but there is we it to the very beginning in the ultimate kinds of questions we run into trouble maybe an analogy being the same kind of process toward the big bang theory where we can understand it fairly well in closer as it works but when we get right back to the final nano nd we have problems as a question like that in terms of trying to get at the ultimate questions of life do we run particular problems when we get to the final question of how it all started for the lives of science has given us a clear understanding things that are closer in to what happened monday through friday you know the st six days and other things in fact the strange thing is that the most of the days of the week for about five of the seven days bacteria ruled the planet the humblest simplest forms of life left evidence i develop a scale like a department store and if you are ten times as big if you go into elevator and into none of it and push plus one when you're sixty feet tall and you walk around looking what it is to be sixty feet tall people are up to your ankles here you know an elephant visualize it this way you look over my book or anything you like and look at the period the smallest period there is and just stare at it and now imagine that period is expanded to the size of say washington square with a plaza around  chemicals random chemicals like on a beach like and sand like on the moon a meaningless chemical somehow formed a bacteria then you've got the origin of life problem l functions that you once you were once one cell you were fertilized egg a little bigger say five or ten times bigger than the bacteria but not that much bigger that everything that you see today was in that one cell latent but all the children would have gone the way because that is that unlikely for forty six characters in this language that are my wife's typewriter and you pick one it's one in forty six to be and not to be is about oh my forget that eighteen to twenty counting the spaces things in a row in forty six multiply twenty times and forget it yes run so when you have simple chemicals you consider the simplest part of any one of his cells the fundamental thing called arriva so to talk about random chance assembling it to get it that would be part spontaneous generation that bugs come out of bugs and worms come out of logs and life springs up everywhere all the time it's not such a big to do to make life out of nothingness and if you look at the floor you texting to see a monster rising and he sa was the a local corner of the galaxy then and you really don't know what was happening but for the major myth and science the assume that it was filled with his gases at least a generation ago when it was hot assumed was filled with all these methane ammonia and lightning and thunder in the ultraviolet light under these influences only gases from chemicals like the very chemicals that are present as building blocks of life today and because of being formed all the time they rained out of the atmosphere and the into the ocean was a brand new ocean then in the form the super rich and chemicals like a chicken soup today there was no chicken around was before bacteria before anything nothing but eat it up nothing could destroy it so just grew thicker it was called the in large numbers but it is serious trouble on home and the interesting thing as it gets into trouble is that the hearings have not said she would get into trouble we have to look at the real problems and maybe this isn't the case but keeping with the debated at the birth of the conference in july with the standard paradigm is pitted against this unorthodox crazy flaky like here and the idea is that you really think there's no way of getting to the chemicals in us from a random extra using what we  same chemicals we are it's made of minerals but he says there was another kind of mineral life which could exist much more simply because minerals have always been there and i mean earlier there was sun and there was water and there was  rocks that we can be sure of rocks of always been there in earth and water that those things could have generated a sort of very minor complexity in the minerals sea had very primitive mineral beings nothing as complicated as bacteria but stuff that could bridge the gap between simple chemicals and bacteria that life started with and he likes to photograph exotic mineral forms things that are sort of transitional much more complicated than salt or sugar but only much less complicate the bacteria he says that only this kind organic though it's not organic not going to that life doesn't have to be organic on life has a certain properties which can be organic burning it's a very strange concept but in simpler forms it can be in or get it and he postulates transitional yat that transitional sloppy form could grow but could also cause other rocks to form additional sloppy case now that it this process would have been preaching a certain sense we're going back to the process of going through the days you know the bacterial forms were there and  be done better by chemicals so they captured them you know they start to trap them from the atmosphere and the things that couldn't happen at random because our own chemicals behave very badly at random they did for us they organize the stalemate the complicated molecules just started with the idea since early earth doesn't have the right atmosphere it doesn't have the right ingredients with life to get elsewhere what if this is the wrong planet some other planet had the right ingredients but i life started there he said the earth is four billion years old but the universe is at least twelve billion years old so there was a room for a lot to happen before it was created and he just puts forward as i suppose it is what happened he says  say took four billion years elsewhere there was time for that because the universe is twelve billion years old let's say at the minimum estimate because a lot of time to mess around the new starter earth like planet elsewhere in a given four billion years that there is intelligent that we are better die with them they think that they could travel less with it doesn't work they die and spaceships so this side life must be exported how do you do it what's the simplest thing the most durable the most unpaired she will form a life bacteria so they ship out spaceships full of bacteria with robot messages find a worthwhile planet land dump your bacteria start life elsewhere and four billion years ago a space ship full of earth it would have had the conditions that would have been right for there to be the development of life in the way it was seen in terms of  today just and his fancy twenty years ago was the dust between the sun's you know it's not so popular but if you have seen pictures of clouds out of the galaxy just in between stars or dark patches some sort of inert matter that fills up areas between the star as it blocks out life times in fifteen years a survey has published papers on what that might be what is the stuff that makes up the clouds between the stars now for most of us for you lissa time for because of the different is a bacteria some have created out of chemicals here he says they came from outer space and that they kept coming and that bacteria loads and virus loads brought by comets are responsible for the only important steps of evolution of  testify with the idea that he testified would show that scientists can believe in a creator but it backfired because when he was put on the stand he began to spout all of the stuff about comets and silicon chips and everything there is no relation conflict between the scientific skepticism of the scientific community and the traditional religious systems and these questions are what do you feel i'm being were in a time of transition of this i mean what or how you feel is it inevitable the most religion then they come to creation church and the other starts that the american federation of biology teachers but also the all of the famous presbyterian congresses the jewish leagues almost every established famous religion in the united states was setting the laws of the universe and winding things up but not necessarily intervening getting back to where the very beginning questions sort of like in a certain sense you have to do the big bang we're going to quite there but science is making advances and in general we're making more and more advances even without the absolutist kind of attitude that we have we're living with these kind of synergistic understanding from different disciplines that give us a little more and more clear intelligent understanding of what it is exactly going on to reach these kind of understanding of the time in terms of technological capability also where we also reached the point where as a species were able through our technology to render ourselves as a species perhaps for the st time having cable in support of the human species it's a time of qualitative transformation it screamingly exciting time in which we we call ourselves homo sapiens we may be at a point of closing close on the human experience maybe coming into a new way of relating to cosmos or universe in a way that we have not had throughout the human experience or there will burst through a new way of being or some sort o n the presumption that we do not in a certain sense entropy which is all i guess is an options open to us in a certain sense other systems have were the time credible transformation in the the village you understand it's a matter of understanding all the time more and more and being able to live in a world of indecision in a certain sense the courage to live in a world of indecision without the absolutes that the historical systems that have under girded sense of human purpose and identity in the past have been comfortable but it makes a little uncomfortable ones about to leave exciting time to be alive which has been conscious at this particular time particularly taking a large theme such as you have for yourself when you have a lot of fun as i love it i'm getting lost it rings and i just i was i can get lost like most of my colleagues and settling some minor you try to break out of that you know what about everything we've done in this manner i did is that the interface between systems where the action really is and to be able to be taking a large scale paradigm paradigm systems of this ending a paradigm such as you have is a challenge because you're bringing a lot of different things together an incredibly exciting adventure and so forth and the book is highly recommended by me into a room by anyone again i want to report out the book's called origins of skeptics guide to the creation of life on earth and universe and earth again next week lou coming back here on conversations that's it for this particular this particular night bob once again thank you very much