Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Two Scientists, One Question: Does Alien Life Need a Soul?

Episode Date: May 30, 2026

An astrophysicist and founder of Reasons to Believe argues the universe looks increasingly designed for life — while a cosmologist challenges whether fine-tuning proves anything at all. If we're alone in the cosmos, the implications are staggering. If we're not, it could change science, religion, and humanity's future forever. Hugh Ross is an astrophysicist, founder of Reasons to Believe, and author focused on the intersection of science and faith. We cover: - Why the search for extraterrestrial life may be making Earth look more unique - Whether fine-tuning points to a Creator or a multiverse - What happens if AI becomes the dominant intelligence in the universe - Why scientists increasingly believe intelligent aliens exist despite lacking evidence - The cosmic time windows that make human existence possible Can hope survive in a universe that eventually dies? Timestamps: 00:00 Why Are We Here at All? 10:44 Is the Universe Designed to Kill Us? 20:25 The Evidence That Humans Are Different 29:42 Why Scientists Still Believe in Aliens 40:08 The 25 Conditions Life Needs to Exist 49:42 Does Fine-Tuning Prove a Creator? 55:37 Could an Alien Have a Soul? 1:03:26 What Happens After This Universe Ends? 1:05:59 Do Parallel Universes Solve Anything? 1:12:09 Will AI Replace Humanity First? 1:17:55 The Strongest Case Against Fine-Tuning 1:24:00 Would You Baptize an Alien? ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe #extraterrestrial #scienceandfaith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price? Moment. Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. This live stream is sponsored by the Reasons to Believe Scholar Community. Welcome and thank you for joining us for this special live stream. Today's conversation explores, if the universe is fine-tuned, why isn't there more life out there? Dr. Hugh Ross, astrophysicist, founder of Reasons to Believe, and author of numerous works on the intersection of science and faith, is joined by Dr. Brian Keating, cosmologist, Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego, and host of the Into the Impossible podcast.

This conversation will be moderated by George Heraxon II, senior research scholar at Reasons to Believe and senior adjunct professor in philosophy and ethics at Azusa Pacific University. This session is divided into three parts, understanding our guest's worldview, fine-tuning and life beyond Earth, and a Q&A portion. We're honored to have you with us for this important discussion. Welcome to this Reasons to Believe quarterly live stream broadcasts where we explore God's world and God's Word. And as you heard, I'm George Faraxon, a senior research scholar here. And I'm joined by two very fine people. I call them my intellectual Sherpas for today. And we have Dr. Hugh Ross, astrophysicist.

Welcome, Hugh. Thank you. You just came back from a trip from Canada, your homeland. With you, actually. Yeah, I was there. Yeah, we got to hang out with quite a number of professors and students. That was a lot of fun. So welcome.

And we are also joined here in person, which is wonderful, Dr. Brian Keating, who is the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics at the University. of California. And you host your own podcast. You're an author. And just something that's fun is you you didn't walk here. You didn't drive here. But you, I was able to fly here. You flew here. And a mighty, you know, four-seat propeller plane all the way from San Diego. And I made it on one tank of gas. I didn't even have to refuel along the way. Now, is this something you just picked up? Or I thought I heard you mentioned this is this part of

like part of your family heritage. Yeah. Yeah. My stepfather was a pilot who flew a F-4. Phantoms in Vietnam and he had all of his training, you know, magazines around and logbooks and everything. And I always want to be a pilot. And I said, oh, maybe I could be an astronaut. What do you have to do? And you have to be under, you know, 200 pounds or whatever. And at that time, even, I wasn't under 200 pounds, still not. And I figured, oh, maybe if I'm a professor and an astrophysicist plus a pilot, they'll take me in. And luckily, you know, myself's time. You know, maybe I'll get a ride aboard a SpaceX rocket someday. But that's the dream. And yeah, it's always been a, part of my identity, really. Once you become a pilot, you're always a pilot. You can't take it

away from you. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's good. We all have our avocations or hobbies. You look out into the heavens, both of you do. You get the flying in the heavens. Hugh, I know you like to hike as high as you can. I like climbing a mountain. Climbing mountain. So different ways we reach the heights here. I'm just a lowly drummer behind, you know, a drum set. So it's going to be a lot of fun talking about why the universe is the way it is, why isn't there more life out there, these types of questions. But for the first part, we want to talk a little bit about how we approach science, maybe also science and faith issues. Then we'll go into some of the prepared questions we have. And then we'll invite those of you who are listening and participating.

I know there's people in our scholar committee who will share questions that we will, I will go ahead and share with both of you and we'll get your comments on this. And feel free to dialogue with one another. It doesn't have to go through me. I'll kind of sift, go back into the background as needed. I'm not the astrophysicist here. But Brian, I wanted to talk to you first. How do you kind of approach science, faith questions? I think I have this right, but you describe yourself as an observant Jew, but agnostic. Am I stating that correct? Yeah, I think the term I often use is devout practicing agnostic, too, yeah. Holted the Sabbath.

Keep the Sabbath. And I really was inspired by my late great friend, Freeman Dyson. It was the first guest on the end of the Impossible podcast, Titanic Astrophysicist, not the inventor of the vacuum. He would have been much richer, heavy, but he invented the Dyson sphere and contributed quantum electrodynamics. And he and I dialoged a lot about faith, and he won the Templeton Prize once and was very humble about it and said he didn't deserve it, but at least he didn't deserve it less than some other people who had wanted. And I said, you know, it's interesting for him because you

are, you know, by all means, a very thoughtful person, but you don't practice, you don't do anything. So I said, how would that be any different than an intelligent alien that we're going to talk about today? If an alien was watching you on a Sunday morning and saw what you were doing and saw what Richard Dawkins, you know, I've also hosted, been privileged to host him. And I said, if you saw, if an alien saw those two men on a Sunday morning, they both not be going to the same church. So how do you free them and distinguish between what you claim is your agnosticism and true atheism? I said, you know, can you, can you be courageous and say that you're an atheist? He said, I can't, but I don't know how to demonstrate that. And that's when I came up with this

idea about 10 years ago that you could be an agnostic, but you can't be a non-practice agnostic or else you're an atheist. There's no functional way to distinguish it. So my practice is I observe the samba, I keep kosher. My kids, you know, all know, 10 times more about the Torah, the Bible, the Tanakh, than I'll ever know. But I've done my best in the time that I've had since I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church. I've had a lot of experience in different forms of religion. And for me, as a scientist, the most ecumenical way to do it as approach it as a scientist can

approach it with our frailties and with the courage that you guys exemplifying to ask the biggest questions and not be afraid of who you're asking or what you're asking about. Yeah, I was just mentioning I was reading an economics professor. by the name of Tyler Cowan, and he observed that in our culture today, that we live in a new time where he calls it a new culture of anger and resentment. Yeah, he was at my house when he said that. He was at your house. My wife would probably agree with Tyler.

Well, I mean, that's one thing. As I observed on your podcast, on your interactions, I think RTB wants to hold this up to create a culture where we're cheerful. We are full of goodwill. We want to pursue truth together. You're not the problem. Persons aren't the problem. We want to tackle things, pursue truth together, kind of in arms, locking arms together. And we want to do it, we always say around here with gentleness and respect, thinking

beyond, or as you talk about in your podcast, into the impossible. We want to address these issues and be courageous, but humble in that process. I call you guys kind of my intellectual Sherpas. We all need guides in life. and I'm the philosopher, you're the physicist, astrophysicist. Hugh, a little bit different than Brian. How do you approach the science-faith topic for those who may not know specifically? Some people criticize they want to keep science and faith a little bit separate,

different magisterium, or that, how do you approach it? Yeah, well, I'm like Brian. I didn't have a religious background, but I got into science starting at age seven very seriously. And over the years, as I was growing up, recognize, hey, the universe has a beginning. Seems like there has to be a cosmic beginner. I want to find that beginner. And after a two-year search, I realize,

I think the Bible accurately describes the origin and history of the universe. It seems to predict future scientific discoveries. So as a sophomore physics student, I dedicated my life to Jesus Christ. And, you know, 41 years ago launched Reasons to Believe. And it's based on what I call the Two Books doctrine. that God has given us two trustworthy books, the book of scripture, and the book of nature. Does your science inform your religious practice? Is there any integration between those two for you? Or is that somewhat, you try to keep them, you know, there's a barrier or something?

Yeah, I mean, I don't subscribe to the Stephen Jay Gould, you know, the nice Jewish boy who, like many Jewish boys, from Lawrence Krause to Carl Sagan, you know, saw their bar mitzvah as their graduation from religion. Right, saw this as a time when they can abandon it and then pursue true reason. And I never got to meet, you know, Carl Sagan. I met his widow and dialogue with her and Dr.ian. But I did talk many times with, you know, people from Sam Harris to Lawrence Krause and many others. And the thing I'm always left with is that they're left with a 13-year-old's understanding of the Bible and of the Torah in my case. And in that case, I say to them, well, would you trust, you know, Sam Harris, would you trust the word of a 13-year-old neuroscientist?

Absolutely not. Or Lawrence Krauss, could you falsify if a 13-year-old comes to you and says, I can falsify your thesis of a universe from nothing? Would you believe? No, he doesn't know anything yet. He doesn't. So, but you, Lawrence, you, Sam Harris, accept the word and falsification from a 13-year-old version of yourself. And so how do you do that? I approach scientific questions and I approach the Torah seriously.

I take it seriously. What I do, and I talk about this in my first book, is can we approach the Torah in the Old Testament? you approach that in the way that I approach a scientific text? In other words, can you demand of God, can you demand of the text themselves, the spiritual, scriptural sources, the same level of proof of rigor, of citations, and of perhaps falsification, that we demand of science. So you have to be open to this. Otherwise, I say, you know, if you don't believe that God can be questioned, and the word Israel, as you guys know, means fights with God. So Jews are not known for being humble, you know, and they're in their opinions, always, but we all have the same call, right?

But if you can't ask questions as to the scientific basis for your faith, then to me, it's just, you know, bagels and a yarmulka and, you know, some some fun times on a Saturday morning, but it's not, it's not real. It's more, it's more of a hobby, of an application, nothing wrong with it. But if you can't ask questions of God, who can you ask them? So I approach religious questions, not as a guy, but as a fact claim that can be interrogated by the tools of science. Do you see it the same way, Hugh? How would you add to that?

No, I love what you just said. I mean, that's how I was. Who's smiling over here. I think it's pretty the way to approach these issues. Yeah, yeah. We can pursue it as someone you have met before. I think Dennis Prager wrote the rational Bible, you know, those kinds of things. So, well, let's get into some of those topics here.

Is the universe ultimately hostile to life? That was one question that we were going to. addressed. And some people have famously quipped before, you'll know who they are. You know, the universe is out there to kill you. Or I think Neil DeGress Tyson had an episode on his Star Talk at one time. It's podcast entitled, How Will the Cosmos Kill You? And I was reflecting on this a little bit. And I thought about, you know, when I was in middle school, I took shop class, woodmaking, you know, crafting. And I remember the wood shop teacher telling me, everything in the shop is out to kill. you. You know, here are all these beautiful machines, a saw, a lathe, all designed, meant to do

particular things, but they were there to kill me if I wasn't careful. Is that a helpful analogy to the way the universe is? Because if we're too close to a black hole, that's not good, right? Talk about that. Well, let's start with our guests first. Brian, when you hear that question, is the universe ultimately hostile to life? Therefore, there's some implications to that. that we'll get into. How do you approach that? Well, I love when, you know, I've been on Neil's show many times, he's been on my show many times. I love when that question is put, or that statement is posed by him because he's effectively admitting to the essence and existence of a designer, right? He's saying, it's designed to kill

you. Well, I'm sorry, Neil, that means, you know, welcome to the club now, maybe, perhaps. It seems to stipulate that there must be some malevolent designer, not a benevolent, God, that we might, you know, consider here. But that it's designed, no, it's not designed. You can't have it both ways. You can't say it's design. you know, to ultimately destroy everything, and we're here by acts of random chance, right? And these are the dominant kind of things that I think we're going to get into from the cosmic scale that I study, you know, how is it possible to exist in a multiverse of an infinite number of possible universes? Does that explain our anthropic origins in existence here?

Or no? Or is there astrobiological reasons? Are there great filters out there that prevent us from, you know, either contacting or receiving evidence? But again, we have to treat things as scientist here because there's so much non-science, nonsense in the public sphere. And never more so. I mean, it's concomitant with what Tyler Cowan was saying, the hostility and resentment and anger, but it's also never been a more kind of anti-scientific age. I don't know if it's getting worse, if it's getting, if it can get better, but if scientists don't uphold some standard of rigor and also intellectual honesty, then when you say things like the universe is out to get you, that you're implying there is some force of design, which goes against previous statements that

my friend Neil has made. So I think that there's arguments to be made for these things, but again, my role as I see it today, is to be act as my hero in all things, science, and even in religion, Galileo, bequeath to us. He said, you know, a scientist's job is to measure what you can measure and make measurable what you cannot yet do. And that, he said in the book of nature is written in these symbols that we can comprehend, the symbols of math, of triangles, of mathematical formula, but it's also accessible to reason and, and, and, And from that perspective, postulating reasons why we don't see, essentially the answer to the Great Filter or the Fermi's paradox, to assume that there's a reason that we're not able to connect with other life forms or see them yet with conclusive evidence, which I think is a non-disputable fact right now. We have no explicit evidence for alien existence.

I mean, maybe that kills the live stream right now, but we're done here. But it's certainly fun to consider. How do you approach that question? Well, I find it interesting that both Jews and Christians for over 2,000 years have debated this issue. Are we alone in the universe, or did God perform miracles in some other planet and created life there? And people who have argued, no, we're the only ones cite passages where it says, God doesn't perform gratuitous miracles. And it seems like he's concerned in the way he does his miracles, and he only needs one planet.

Others have argued, look at all the texts that you see, especially in the Psalms. It seems like God really enjoys creating. You see that in the book of Job, the book of Proverbs. And he seems to be a compulsive creator. He's got to have done it in many places in the universe. I think what's special about the time we're in now is that astronomy is advanced to the point where it seems to be favoring the model that we're alone, as opposed to, hey, life is everywhere. Now with that, I would make an important caveat.

I think it's going to be relatively soon we're going to find the remains of life on virtually every solar system body. And people will look at that and say, hey, it looks like, you know, life is everywhere. But I've always argued that's inevitable because of how prolific life is here on Earth. We've been exporting life throughout our whole solar system, especially on the moon, to a lesser degree on Mars. It's simply inevitable we're going to find the remains of Earth fossils on these bodies. It's the interstellar problem that I think is a challenge. We're not exporting microbes to other planetary systems, but we are in our own system. But astronomy seems to be agreeing with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

It really does look like it's out to kill us. With the one exception, the planet that we're on, the planet that we're on, seems wonderfully designed to make our existence possible. And I would think all the hostility we see elsewhere basically drives home the point we're living on our very special planet, we're reading a very special star in a very special galaxy, in a very special galaxy cluster, on a very special part of the cosmic web. And so what does that tell us about the significance of human beings? Yeah, it might be that the universe isn't out to kill us.

it might be that we're out to kill us. I mean, there's certainly more risks, you know, that we take on a daily basis, you know, speaking of someone who just flew up here, right, in a small, you know, contraption that has the kind of appointments of a 1988 Honda Accord. People think, oh, the private jet travel is so nice, yeah, it must be. But yeah, certainly we have innumerable ways to kill ourselves and to fight with ourselves and to maybe even extinguish life on Earth as precious as it is. And I think sometimes there's a coping mechanism that secular people have, which is to say that there must be life elsewhere in the universe, such that if we destroy the one body that we know for sure as conscious life, as technological life,

that there's sort of a backup drive, you know, that we can boot up somewhere else, and the light of consciousness, as Elon Musk, who I talked to briefly once in my podcast says, won't be extinguished, right? That's his big goal. And I stipulate everything you said is probably true. We not only have microbes that we get from other bodies, but we export them to other, you know, Now we're exporting technology. So imagine a civilization far away if it existed, looking at us. It would seem mostly nothing for 4.2 billion years in the last 75 years. All these things sprouting off of it and going around it and going into the heliopause

and visiting other solar systems and light days away from Earth. And I agree with you. I've heard a lot of rumors and I can't speak about the autopsy. I mean, I can't speak about the aliens now that, but I have heard rumors from the most credible scientific sources that, yeah, it's imminent. We're going to announce, just as you said, life, whatever that means, it's not going to be dolphins with iPhones on, you know, planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, but it will be something, you know, that will be revolutionary. I mean, let's just concede that that discovery will change, you know, humanity forever.

It doesn't mean, doesn't have any implication for our degree of less specialness. I think you're right. I think we get in a parochial kind of bubble, literally and figuratively, that we think that, you know, we've searched and searched, and therefore we haven't found something, and that evidence of absence is absence of evidence, or maybe the reverse. And, you know, that's a classic logical fallacy, you know, to say that we've searched my friend Jill Tarter, who is the inspiration for the character Ellie Arrowway in the movie Contact, written by Andrewian and her late husband, Carl Sagan, you know, that, you know, she said, basically we've scooped up about the amount of exploration we've done as equivalent to this coffee

mug, which you guys Irished up for me. Thank you guys so much, compared to the Pacific Ocean. And it's just incredible to think we can make that. Now, if we can't say something based on that, you know, if I go down to the Pacific Ocean, I scoop up some water and it has no microbes in it, well, that would kind of upend a lot of what we know about a host of different scientific claims that have been made, and we've never had evidence for that. But so the lack of evidence so far doesn't imply a continual lack of evidence. And we have developed more and more powerful tools. But I'm all in agreement. I think that will change things. I also think we're isolated and special in so many ways that the secular person will attempt to deny. You know, for example, we often hear

we're 99.7% similar to chimpanzees. And, you know, my friend Dennis Brueger once said, I wish it was 100%. You know, because it's like, oh, that 0.3%, you know, whatever it is, that little bit. I mean, what is that? Is that a brain size? No, they're animal. that have a lot bigger brains than we have, is it some neural density and oh. So sometimes that lack of specialness is used as a way to say we're insignificant, we're unimportant, we're unimportant, we're meaningless. The concept Alvar Berkman wrote about, called the Cosmic Insignificance Therapy, meaning that you can comfort yourself, Hugh, that you're meaningless compared to the planet

Jupiter. And therefore, you know, nothing that you do matters, really. And in a hundred years and a thousand, no one will even know that you existed. I don't believe that. I don't believe that's a relevant question. I believe that gives permission to deny. I believe that gives people reasons to deny, not reasons to believe. And I think that ultimately that's not approaching things in a scientific fashion.

Yeah. Let's just be clear on something. I made sure I heard writing for our audience. You said, we're going to find life, but it's going to be remnants of life from Earth that it has hit other planets. I also thought I heard you say, we're going to find life. Did you, were you saying the same thing as Hugh? I would say slightly different. I was saying, so Hugh's talking about a theory that's related to a concept called panpspermia

that was popularized by Fred Hoyle, who coined the term Big Bang as a majority of as an insult against the theory that we now dedicate most of our research to. And that was the theory that life is delivered elsewhere to the earth. It doesn't solve the origin of life problem and solves the origin of life on Earth. So there's reverse panspermia. I brought you guys last time. I'm sure you still have it, a little bit. fragments of Mars and the moon and meteorites.

And so we got meteorites from Mars. And so therefore we have Earth meteorites on Mars, right? So it must be there. In fact, there must have been some when Mars was wet and moist, because that's when the Earth was being bombarded 4.2 billion years ago, when Earth and Mars were young, there was a lot more exchange of interplanetary material between the two planets.

It acted like UPS, you know, going between and back and forth between the planets, delivering life in microbes, whatever, to the... Now, I don't think we're going to find life on Mars. I don't think that's what you're saying, but I think you're saying, we'll find fossils on Mars. Or find fossils. Perhaps, perhaps, yes. But I think when my astronomer colleagues are telling me is that they've already seen signatures of molecules that seem to only be produced by life

and maybe might be produced by some form of technology. Like if you see Freon, the gas of powers are air-conded, that is a very difficult molecule entropically to create naturally via stochastic processes. But it's trivial for us to do it here on Earth. Technology, can produce certain molecules that show up in the transiting spectra of extrasolar planets. And I'm hearing rumors. I can't, I'm not going to like stake my career on it, but they're very credible people saying it's just a matter of time. There's been many announcements of both life from Mars and molecules that seem to suggest the existence of life, not only in other stars, but from our own star on the planet Venus. Not many of them, if any of them, have been really

confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt, though. Yeah, I mean, phosphine on Venus, but you're right, could not be able to confirm it. And by sulfides, they found in the spectra of planets. But now we know that can happen naturalistically without life. So, yeah, that's not settled. So we should hold these people to the same level of rigor that they're going to hold a believer into their claims about the existence of God, of Jesus in your case, right?

So I don't think anyone should get a free pass. I think we should interrogate these things. And see, is it exciting? You know, I'd like to know from your perspective, because I was told I could ask questions with my friend here. So the Torah and the Talmud, which is a commentary on the Torah, as you know, has no

problem what seems to suggest in certain passages. I think it's kind of the meaning the meanings in doubt from my professional cosmological but not rabbinical training, right? I'm not around my. But there seems to be no problem with that. Now, obviously Gerardana Bruno, you know, he had a different experience in 1600 of being burned alive

by the Catholic Church for suggesting that every point of light was a star which had a planet around it, which had life on it, which seemed to contradict the existence and the possibility of Jesus dying for our humans' redemption. So how do you, what are the claims? Just as a scientist, scientist and scientists, what are the New Testament and gospel claims that either permit, forbid, or allow us to falsify the claim of Jesus' existence? I'm sorry to say in those stark terms, but if it's scientific claim. Well, the ones that have been cited to falsify the idea that God created life elsewhere,

or particularly New Testament texts where you see Jesus, Christians believe to be the creator, refusing to do certain miracles. It seems like he only does miracles to fulfill this stated purpose. So theologians have looked at that and said, I think we can work out our Christian theology that God can achieve everything he wants to achieve with life on one planet.

But then there's been pushback where other Christian scholars have said, But look at the degree to which God enjoys creating. He's promised he's going to be creating way beyond in the new creation. That's like that would seem to imply that he wouldn't limit himself to creating life just here on planet Earth. There's got to be millions of planets in the universe where he has done that. So it's kind of a balanced debate. It depends on your theological perspective. Do you give more weight to the text that talk about God's enjoyment of creating?

And especially they cite the fact, Notice how these texts, especially in Psalm 104, talk about the diversity of God's creation. So we should expect that not only is there life elsewhere in the universe is going to be diverse from the life we see here on planet Earth. But then there are those who argue to say God doesn't waste his miracles. And I also think the Bible talks about our desire to make contact. And I mean, you saw that in the novel you just mentioned. I mean, that was a whole theme. It's something within us that wants that contact.

And from a Christian perspective, well, God's the one that we need to make contact with. He's the extraterrestrial we need to relate to. But I actually had Carl as a professor when I was at University of Toronto. And he basically was lecturing saying, we humans are without any hope. And we don't make contact with extraterrestrial aliens. And so he believed that they have published them the Encyclopedia Galaxia. Galatica and if we can somehow use our radio telescopes to read that Encyclopedia Galatica that will solve all of our problems.

What did it were so? Well, I was sitting in the second row and I just nudged my fellow grad student and said, don't we already have an Encyclopedia Galatica? Carl overheard me. He says, I know the book you're talking about. No one can live up to its moral standard. And it's like, well, isn't that the point of the book? That's exactly its message.

So that was an interesting dialogue that took place there. But I think what it concerns me as an astronomer, I read these surveys, not just of late people, but of astronomers. And I thought, well, we're in the 21st century now. Astronomy seems to revealing more and more evidence that our planet is unique, our star is unique, our galaxy, even our super galaxy cluster is unique. And it seems to be giving more evidence.

Yeah, once we get past Earth, the universe seems to be able to kill us. But the paradox is the number of late people that believe that there are intelligent aliens like us and other planets. In 2019, that was 33% of U.S. adults. It's now 64%. You know, it's virtually doubled. And while you say, well, surely the astronomers would have a different perspective. But in 2025, nature astronomy did a survey and was a survey of 521 research astrobiologists and 534 doctoral-level scientists in geology, biology, and physics.

And we discovered was that 87% of the astrobiologists said extraterrestrial light is all over the universe. 88% of those that weren't astrobiologists, it was virtually the same. percentage and then they took out the 60 out of the thousand and 55 who said you know what I don't have an opinion I don't want to give an opinion they took those 60 out it was 98% who believed in ET but then they followed up the survey well what about extraterrestrial intelligent life and other planets and I was surprised that only 10% of astrobiologists express any doubt about

the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life and other planets. And when they surveyed the non-astrobiologists, 48%, it seems quite likely that ETI exists. So it's like the percentages are high even amongst the people that are doing this astrobiological research where they're being daily confronted with the fact, you know, it seems like we still have a data-free discipline. So, and you're right, we haven't searched everywhere. But I think what I find compelling, we now know we have to live in a very specially looking super galaxy cluster. That's a cluster of clusters of galaxies. And everyone we've looked at in the observable universe, either is basketball shaped or football shaped, jammed with all these galaxy clusters, squeezed rather tightly together.

We live in the only one we've seen so far where it's different. It's kind of like a stick insect where you have these small galaxy clusters strung out along these filaments. It doesn't look anything at all like the others. Well, I mean, in terms of our research and in terms of our uniqueness, my understanding from my friends that do these vast simulations is that actually the simulations match quite accurately with what we observe in barren acoustic oscillations and the cosmic microwave background that I'm dedicated my life to, to studying research life at least. And so, you know, we can look, we can look at nearby galaxies within our local supergroup and we can see, we can see, you know, the Andromeda Galaxy is not

that dissimilar from ours. In fact, it's so, you know, it's so dominant over us in terms of, you know, having twice as many stars perhaps, that we're actually going to combine with it and to make one giant super galaxy, you know, again, keep paying your taxes out there because it's not going to happen for, you know, hundreds of billions of years. So just avoid long-term investments. Exactly. That's right. That's right. So, you know, from the perspective of, let me get back to your survey, because I think that is interesting. I find it's almost shocking that scientists talk about belief.

I think it's totally kosher. It's totally acceptable for you to say reasons to believe. But I got a lot of flack for a video I made once called. Astrophysicist says, I don't believe in gravity. I don't have to believe in gravity because I have evidence for gravity, right? Now, could gravity change? And in fact, yes, we know that the laws of gravity have changed. We know that the physics of gravity, not just how we describe it from Newton to Einstein, from Galileo, back to Aristotle, all those different changes in our understanding of how we write down mathematical laws.

But no, no, gravity has physically changed due to the presence of what's called the cosmological constant, which is changing the rate of expansion of our universe, not our galaxy, not our solar system, but our universe is expanding slightly faster every day due to this presence of this mysterious substance called dark energy that Einstein once published as claiming, you know, according to George Gamov, that it was the biggest blunder of my life. And I think it's too bad because he could have been famous. You know, if he didn't make that one blunder, you know, he would have been quite successful. But it turned out that saying it was his blunder was the blunder because in 1998 we came upon evidence that, no, the universe does have the sort of a dark energy, vacuum energy

that's causing the rate of expansion to not only, you know, be of certain value that's positive and not negative or zero, but actually increased day after day, year after year, decade, billions of years after billions of years. So over that time, we've kind of visualized a form of anti-gravity, right? So the laws of gravity have changed, right? That doesn't mean that we don't understand it. That's puzzling. It's a miracle or whatever.

Within the laws of the cosmological model that we have, which are best way to interrogate observations versus theory, this makes sense. And it was discovered and it was quasi-predicted, actually, in the 1980s as well. So this is, and it's an extremely well-tested thing, but I don't have to believe in it. Like, I need faith. Like in Hebrew, we have a different name for belief and for fact and for knowledge and for wisdom. We have, you know, as many words for these different intellectual concepts as the, you know, Eskimos of Canada, your ancestral homeland have for snow, right?

They allegedly have 12 different things. So too do we. So we have a word for belief, and it's like faith. Faith is Amuna, which is where we get the word Amen from in the English language as well, right? Amen comes from Amuna, which means true. I attest to it, MS means truth in Hebrew. So it's something you specify, right? I don't have to have belief that, you know, aerodynamics principle is going to get me here

today and the propeller is going to work the way that aerodynamics is going to. We have evidence, you know, millions of things and piece of evidence, right? So it's shocking to me. It's not shocking, and it's totally appropriate that you call this reasons to believe. It's 100% appropriate. But to have a scientist say, I believe in aliens, or I believe in intelligence, all right? That's a completely assinine thing for a scientist to say. shocked that they would even, I wouldn't answer that question to you, to be honest with you.

I would say, this is nonsense. Do we have evidence for them? Yes or no? No, we don't. Move on the next question. What does belief have to do with science? That's pathetic. What shocked me was that the statistics over the past 30 years is showing this belief that

we're not alone is going up when the scientific evidence is basically calling into question. I would expect the evidence for belief to go down, but instead it's going up. And I'm wondering, what does that say about the desire? not just of late people, but as scientists, to want this to exist in spite of the evidence. Yeah, I think it becomes sort of their surrogate God, right? So if you have a, if you have no biblical God in heaven, you'll create gods in the heavens of the heavens, right? So this is a classic thing, and it's sort of a neo-paganism, right?

Because now we're ascribing these different entities, you know, like right now, we'll say we're insignificant compared to the planet Jupiter, so really everything's meaningless, so let's live our life that way and kind of eat drink and be married. But there's the alternative. What if we find life, right? So my question about these surveys is we do have to distinguish between life, you know, some slime mold on proximate centurray B. Will that be the breakthrough of at least our generation in terms of, of course it would be? And I'd be extremely excited.

I want to learn about it, whether it's properties, what is the spectrum, what does it, you know, what does it tell us about other chemistry, about origin of life on Earth from this perspective? But it wouldn't be as revolutionary, obviously, as finding intelligent life. The problem is, you know, the slime mold in my fridge, you know, in my college dorm, wasn't very good at using an iPhone, right? So we wouldn't know about that life as having technology unless it does possess what we seem to possess. It doesn't mean it has to have opposable thumbs. I mean, that's often cited as a center of our unique advantage.

But there's not telling that an alien has to be anthropomorphized in the way that we think they should be. Nature's under no obligation to behave in the way that some science fiction author, as great as he or she is, you know, writes it to be. But we wouldn't know about it, right? And in fact, we wouldn't know about it for, you know, for a long time, right? So right now, if we ask, what was the, what's the farthest civilization that has technology, not just intelligence, so have intelligence prerequisite for technology, right? What's the farthest of the way that civilization could be? And it's about 35 light years away, right?

Because we've had television technology since the 1936 Olympics, broadcasting, here we are, come and eat. You know, if that's what you want to do, you know, come and get us, right? And there's nothing we can do about that, right? Those waves are long, those horses have left the cosmic barn. And they're on their way out to a bubble that's about 35 light years away. And then light could come back and they could say, hi, we got your message 35 light years later.

So about 70 light years away. How many stars are in that region? It's a very small amount of stars. I mean, it's thousands, but it's not. trillions like in our galaxy or in Adromeda. And then how many planets are there, how many habitable planet? We can actually interrogate each one.

We could go around each. There's not that many of them. Right? So we can look for each star, each planet, each of it. And we can ask, do we see signs of our type of technology? Now, if they're using neutrino beams and gravitational waves to communicate, that's what I often hear. They define the laws of physics, right?

So, I'm a physicist. I'm pretty good with the laws of physics, right? So do we have evidence? Do we have any scientific evidence that we could say we have intelligent, technological life, not life, life that is bio- that is somehow sentient, but also can use technology. Could be an AI system. I don't know. We'll talk about it. Well, I would put the limit out at least 200 light years because it takes a very special kind of star to have a planet orbiting it in which advanced life exists. And stars are bright so we can

easily measure their characteristics. And so we know it has to be a twin of the sun. And so we've out 200 late years and say, we're confident. There's no such twin that's out that close. The question I would push back with respect is to say, you know, how much is the variability in the exact twin? I have twins. I'm blessed out twins. And they couldn't be more different. Like, you know, and any parent of twins out there is probably shaking their head in agreement. Not only are each one of my kids different, but the twins are like somehow more different than from each other than they are from the other kids in my family. So to say there's no twin might be a little bit over-contraint. But it doesn't destroy the argument, just maybe expands it out to 400 light years.

But that's okay, right? Because there's still a limited number of stars in our bubble of 400 light years out of 30,000 light years or more, 30,000 parsecs. I mean, we may be just this insignificant piece. And where we are in the galaxy, that might be important for interactions with things like the black hole in our center or the dark matter cloud that envelops us. But I'm curious, when you say that the prerequisite for a solar twin, there are stars, you can see one tonight. It's called Capella. It's a beautiful orange yellow star, just like the sun, same classification, a little bit brighter. The existence of things, if we were having this conversation in 1991, before the first exorolar planets were discovered, we would say, well, no, it's impossible to have a

Jupiter-sized planet orbiting three, you know, basically a third of an astronomical, within the orbit of Mercury, around any star. And yet we found thousands of them. We found giant gas giants, literally giants within like a few million miles of their host stars. And that was thought to be impossible also. So the question of like habitability, which level of habitability do mandate and how do we know what the requirements are on life? Doesn't that not put a limit on God's create ability? Like if God wanted to make a planet Venus bloom,

I mean, it's not in the habitable zone. It's too hot for liquid water, right? Could God not do that? I mean, of course God could do that, right? So how do we reach the limits of the parameter space we're going to search? I want to encourage our listeners to, we're going to come up on the time where we're going to have some questions taken from you that we'll have you guys answer. But you go ahead and respond to what Brian was saying. Yeah, that's an interesting question.

And you see on the NASA website 40 billion habitable planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone. But all we're looking at is the liquid water habitable zone. That's right. and a very generous definition of the liquid water habitable zone. And, you know, 13 planetary habitable zones have been discovered so far. Three chemical habitable zones have been discovered, one just two weeks ago, four lunar habitable zones and five galactic habitable zones. And the truth is, for a planet to be truly habitable at a microbial level,

we're not talking the equivalent of us. as 25 independent have all the zones and the planet has to simultaneously reside in all 25. So this is really pushing the view that it's not only a rare earth, it's a rare moon, it's a rare star. And you can push that to a rare galaxy. So again, I'm making the point. The more we're learning about the universe, the more evidence seems to be accumulating that, you know, our existence here is rare. Again, we haven't done an exhaustive search. That's right.

But the search has gone out quite far. I mean, we are able to see super galaxy clusters throughout the entire observable universe, and there's over 10,000 of them, but we were living in the one that has the necessary characteristics for our existence. So it's like we don't have to search those other 9,999. That's an approximate number, by the way. Certainly. Certainly, we can agree that there is. I mean, well, maybe people wouldn't agree that there's intelligent life on Earth, right? But you're really bringing up a fine-tuning question, which is part of the topic of the live stream, right?

So how finely tuned is necessary, right? So people ask me, you know, all the time, well, like math and music, they kind of go together. You know, you must play an instrument. My older brothers, a very, very renowned jazz guitarist. What instrument do you play? I say I play Spotify. You know, I can't play anything. I'm horrible with music.

And when I play, it doesn't matter if the guitar is. is finely tuned or not, it's going to sound horrible. It could be the perfect, you know, perfect tuning and whatnot. But the question of, you know, how finely tuned does the universe need to be for life to exist? It's a very, very interesting, very well grounded in hard scientific data and an appropriate question, I think. And there's many different realms in which you can suggest fine tuning. But you did bring up different elements that seem to be critical for our existence.

None of which precludes the existence of life elsewhere in the universe, at the mold level, at the dolphin level, swimming in some ocean somewhere, right? But intelligent life, basic life, and then technological life. Those are the three levels that I think we care about. And they go up in order of magnitude of how impactful they'd be, at least for me, right? First discovering mold, you know, from some creature, some protozoa on some exosolar planet would be incredibly astounding. Just to be alive during that time is amazing. And then the dolphin, you know, swimming in some liquid nitrogen ocean, so I don't know, making all these things up.

As I said, I have no special expertise in this field. You know, when I did biology in high school, you know, I dissected the frog. The frog kind of like screamed in pain. It was horrible. I'm just kidding. I know you're watching out there. There was a dead. There was dead.

Yeah. But, you know, the question is how finely tuned? So my friend Fred Adams, so I posted on the podcast. To my knowledge, secular, I'm not convinced about that, but he could be. You know, it's done a lot of work on just the habitability. of planets around stars and the stability of stars. Other friends of mine, Sergio Kleinerman, has worked on stability of space time itself.

So to have all these different levels, I guess the question is, where do you start? In Judaism, we have our own version of apologetics, right? It's different from the Christian apologetics because our goal is different, right? We each in apologetics, I like to joke, you know, we do at some level paint the target around the arrow, and that's fine.

There's nothing wrong with that. If you're honest about what you're doing, it's fine. Judaism have these things too. For example, there's a rabbi scientist named Gerald Schroeder. He's an Israel, to best of my knowledge. I've read many books, God and the Big Bang, Genesis in the Big Bang. I had dinner with him years ago. Oh, he did, okay, yeah.

He's a great guy. I respect him. But he has different arguments for the biblical reality of a seven-day creation period. And he goes through and makes arguments for it based on relativistic time dilation, which is a real thing. and the different events that he considers characterizing along the creation period. So what does Vallehi-Or mean? What does let there be light mean? What does the Tohu-Vabohu?

What does the chaos and disorder? What does that mean? All the different things. And he's a rabbi and he understands Hebrew better than I do. And he ascribes them different signposts on the creation of the universe from the physical perspective, from the laws of physics. When did electromagnetism come about? The electrow weak force, core confinement, bariogenesis, or car.

all these different things with CMB form that I study, et cetera, et cetera. And he gets, eventually he gets 15 billion years. Oh, that's great. You know, it's kind of kind of matches with what we believe now is practicing cosmologists, 13.826 billion years with a 10 million year uncertainty on the end. It's astounding precision that my colleagues and I've been able to work on with hard evidence and data, I don't have to believe it anymore. I can actually prove it, right?

But then you dig a little bit deeper. What is he doing? What is Gerald Schroeder? What is he doing? Well, he's picking out some arbitrary point. In his case, he picks that cork confinement. He says the core confinement corresponds to this genesis event. And from that, I agree that you will get 15 billion years.

However, if you take one picosecond earlier or later, because of the dependence on the fine structure constant and other forces and the QCD charge, I'll call the G value for QCD, you will get something that's 100 billion years or you'll get something that's one day. So it really depends on where you paint that bullseye around which arrow you're choosing. And so that finely tuning also occurs in the apologetic space. And sometimes I don't feel like we're 100% honest about that. Where do you choose to find tuning to be?

Well, very good point. Yeah, because I've taught to Gerald and it's like I can get a few points in Genesis 1 to fit my time dilation, but I can't get them all. That's right. He's changed his model multiple times. He still can't get a good fit. By the way, I'm sorry. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but this is so important. He's changed his model mode.

Have you changed the Torah? I'm sorry, have you changed the New Testament? Have you ever changed the Gospels? God forbid, right? You never do that, right? They're an affable learner. So the problem with apologetics from my perspective, and with all due love and respect for those that do it. I think it's important. I think it's interesting. It's a perfect philosophically, perfectly acceptable form of philosophical abduction, right? There's no an efficacy of a God that you believe in, right? You can't say the Torah must change to meet this. Now it's 15 billion years. Okay, tomorrow will be 13. Science changes. To defend Gerald, I don't think he's trying to apologize, argue for the truthfulness of the Tanakh. He's more interested in the Kabbalah.

And so I think that's the big difference between... Those are very different sources. Very different sources. Yeah, so apologetics. What are you apologizing for? But yeah. I think, hey, if you actually treat the... of the argument. Oh, yeah, the time dilation. We astronomers have been measuring the spectra of distant

galaxies with high precision now for 50 years. More, yeah. Okay. If the universe is really just 10,000 years old, we're going to see a difference. That's right. And we don't, even though we can measure the spectra. That's right. In nine places the decimal, which tells us it really is, you know, at least a billion And I understand that. There's a naturally occurring nuclear fission reactor in Gabon, Africa, called the Okalo Nuclear Reactor. There's actually a startup company that's called Okalo now trying to do is portable small nuclear reactors that we're going to need for our data centers to power there. There are AI overlords that are going to replace God for every one of the listeners out there. I'm sure. I'm joking. But this is this huge craze, right? So Okalo is a naturally sustained breeder reactor that had neutron moderation with no human beings around for the next billion years. It corresponds to redshift of point three.

And the exact laws of physics that held for the nuclear force there that depend very strongly on the nuclear structure, fine structure constants. So they haven't changed in over a billion years. So we can say very strongly, very carefully about the properties, the age of the universe, and without recourse to saying like, well, relativistic time dilation is actually observer dependent, frame dependent. And you have to acknowledge that, well, what frame has got in? Like, where is there this cosmic rest frame?

And then does that not violate Lorenzen variant? I'd love to talk to him. I'd love to meet with him. But my thing is you have to be self-consistent. You can't say that you're going to, like, science can change because we get more and more precision. Like Newton was subsumed by Einstein, but we don't need Einstein to get the Artemis mission around the moon. Yes, people out there, we did go around the moon recently. We will land there again. But we don't need Einstein at all to do any of this. Even to get to the nearest start, we don't need Einstein for any of that. We need Newton. Can we go beyond post-Newtonian physics? Is that a goal? You've talked to a lot about string theory recently. I've been watching proton decay, all these different things.

What level of fine-tuning would kind of be required to falsify the existence of alien? In other words, you can't prove something in science. I can't prove the earth is round, but I can prove it's not flat, right? That's a very clear thing to do. We can do that. It's a very high precision, it's extremely high precision. And we can't even, as Isaac Asimov, another one of my heroes one said, if you believe the earth is flat, you're wrong. If you believe the earth is a perfect sphere, you're also wrong, but you're less wrong. And I think that's our goal in science to be continually improving and less wrong. But to say that the Torah could change or the Gospels can change, it can seem to kind of like you've got to pick a team, Gerald. I would say

with respect. Yeah, you do. But I think your point is, hey, if we're talking about the Torah, the Tanak, the Bible, you expect that to be consistent with a fine-tuned universe. I mean, fine-tuning. So that's kind of the argument I've been doing for decades as saying, the more we study the universe, the stronger the fine-tuning argument becomes for a personal entity that designed it for a benefit. And it's like, you know, this list of habitable parameters. It's like every six months goes by, we had another one to the list. We're discovering more and more. If there really was no fine-tuning, we'd expect it to golly the way around, that the more we learn about the universe, the weaker the fine-tuning argument would become for God. what I've noticed in my lifetime, it's exponentially increase.

It's gone from just a little bit of evidence for fine-tuning. Right. And the classic evasion of that on the secular scientist's perspective is the multiverse, right? Yeah. So to evade that, you say, well, of course, yeah. In any given universe, just like, you know, guys, I saw this incredible thing on the way, I can't believe it. I saw a license plate, 9QR-X-743. Can you believe the odds of seeing that?

What the heck is this guy? Of course, that's like almost zero chance. any given, but if you say, what are the odds you saw a license plate? It's very high, right? So in the multiverse argument, you evade all this. You don't need God. It came from nothing, right? Yeah, but you have to apply to infinity. I remember back in the 1980s. Let's hold it there. So we're going to give you some questions. No, no, no, that's a good question. Yeah, we could. Yeah, I could have went and got lunch. And you guys would have still just like that. I'll take a kosher pastrovi sandwich.

And yeah, feel free to jump in. Both of you can comment on this. We'll try to keep our answers a little bit shorter just so we can get through some of questions. As a philosopher, when you're mentioning certain words, I believe, prove, you know, epistem. I might, you know, my belles and whistles are going on. I know. You're trying to get hungry. I held out. So this is from Steve. He says, astronomically, the solar system and planet is passing away over time based upon our best scientific understanding. So isn't it the real question? The real question is the sentient life with a spirit exist elsewhere, is his question. Yeah, I think he's raising a good point is that the time window for our possible existence is coming to enclose. And people say, yeah, in four billion years, the sun will incinerate us.

But in just a couple of million years, the sun's going to be sufficiently bright that in order to keep the temperature for photosynthetic light going, we're going to have to drop the carbon dioxide level down to a level where photosynthesis can't happen. So, at least on an astronomical time scale, our time in the universe, is relatively brief. So there's a window. There's a window. And I think that should cause us to think, why does that window exist?

What is our ultimate destiny? And hey, we can't depend on the universe keeping us going. It's definitely, the time for that window to close is going to happen. And so for me, this drives questions. Again, then, in that context, what is my purpose? What is the purpose of the universe? I think that's an important thing

is that people have argued the fine-tuning argument is just statistics but if you can link the fine-tuning with purpose especially you can link it with multiple independent purposes then it gives it weight I mean we are

maybe as a scientist you go so far you were talking about the evidence in that but as a human being as a philosopher or just beyond that you can ask these other questions that come into about existence.

We have this window. What does that mean? Maybe the scientist can't answer that specifically, but as human explorers, if you will, you can go beyond that. Any further comment from you, Ryan? Well, I think it's undoubtedly, it just seems to be unreasonable that we should be here at this moment to ask this question, you know, why here, why now?

What is the purpose of that? I think it's also a reasonable question to ask, you know, also if this is true, you know, why did God reveal himself to a band of nomadic, you know, kind of Bronze Age? Peasants, mostly as former slaves, that he freed, according to the Torah narrative, which informs the basis for the Old Testament, the New Testament built upon that in the Gospels. And so why did he, when there were probably about maybe 80 billion, 90 billion people that live, or, you know, homo sapiens, whatever that means, it could be half of that, it could be 10 times,

I don't even care. But there are billions of people that live before that and after that. So that, you know, I would ask with, again, with humility and respect, you know, how does the New Testament kind of grapple with that? Like, why are we conscious now? Is it, is the, why did this creation process? It makes the problem more finely tuned for Jesus's miracles and his revelation and his ascension, right? Because you have to believe in all those, right? So does that not sharpen the fine-tuning argument that some could say, well, why now, why here, why us for Jesus' existence in an even narrower,

33-year period 2,000 years ago and is eventual return. As we believe, it will come from the Versa, the Messiah, a Shiak will come. How do you reconcile with that? The fine-tuning of Jesus' time on Earth? I think that heightens the fine-tuning argument. These are these very narrow time windows. How do you explain the fact that we happen to be here in the history of the universe in 0.001% of its history?

Is there some significance to that? I think what drives at home, it's not just one narrow time window. I could name 15 narrow time windows that must be here for us to exist. And here they're all simultaneously lining up at the same epoch in the universe. If there is no God, how do I explain the fact that these extremely narrow time windows all simultaneously line up on this planet at this time in the history of the universe? So I would argue even the time is fine-tuned. Certainly could be.

Yeah. Let's go over to another question for Dr. Keating here. How does Dr. Keating view the concept of soulish or spiritual life being made in God's image and tie into the concept of sentient life elsewhere? So this would kind of agree. So I love this kind of concept, right? Because the listener or a viewer is making a scientific fact claim that could or could not be true. Right.

So if you were to observe a creature and contact with a creature that has a soul or a spirit, or even is seemingly spiritual in the level of, let's make a Turing test for spirituality, right? Not just for humanity, but let's have a spiritual Turing test. It's called the Ross test, right? So the Ross test says, you know, can you interact with this entity and determine whether or not it has a soul or a spirit? And if so, is that spirit, if it's not in a corporeal humanistic form in the image of God and the image of us, we are therefore in the image of God. Does that have any ramifications? Well, I think that scientist has to say we don't know.

It has to be humble and says, we don't know. There's not proof of it, but gives us an opportunity to falsify it, right? If we do find, as Carl Sagan would have loved to find, right, some intelligent, not only dolphins swimming through the liquid nitrogen pools, But, you know, someone is using a cosmic, you know, iPhone somewhere out there, right? We're in touch with that person. And we can pass the Ross test. And we say this person, that is something, right? You could also have a hyper-intelligent AI that has no effective soul or spirit

because it's encoded based on the training data that it has only, which includes the corpus of all of human knowledge, right? So maybe you couldn't pass the imitation game of that, but you could detect that, oh, it does not have a soul. Well, then that would be a falsifiable test. I think that's a wonderful conjecture. But I think right now we have to be honest and humble and so we don't know. But I think, Hugh, isn't it amazing?

We live in this time when telescopes and microscopes can tell us information that would be magical. Not a thousand years ago, 20 years ago. When I was in graduate school, 30 plus years ago, we didn't know if the age of the universe was 10 billion years or 20 billion years. So that means there were objects that we knew that were 15 billion years old. So if you believe 10 billion years for the universe, that meant you believe that there were objects in the universe. older than a universe, you remember this. I remember that, yeah. So that means like, hey, Hugh, I met, I met your mother.

She's half your age. What the heck is going on? Like, it's no wonder why people didn't take us seriously. Now we know that to the same precision I can say to you. You were born exactly at this day in this half of an hour. That's the level of precision we have. It's astounding. It's almost, you know, it's almost magical.

And magic is just another way for miracle, right? Yeah. And you're raising the point about the spirit. I mean, from a Jewish or Christian perspective, the spirit is non-physical. How can scientists then come up with a physical refutation of that which is an even physical? So it's in a different category. Here's one for you, Hugh. Sebastian says, Dr. Ross, would you push back on the claim that gravity has changed?

The person says, I believe it would contradict the promise in Jeremiah. Yeah, I would argue that gravity hasn't changed, but I think what Brian is bringing up is, well, dark energy has an effect on the dynamics of the universe. I wouldn't say it's changed gravity, it's supplemented gravity. And I'd be curious, you know, how you think about that, Brian. I mean, I don't think, you know, Newton's or Einstein's law, gravity has changed at all, but now we've got another factor that's actually more dominant than gravity in determining the dynamics of the universe. Yeah. So in Einstein's concept of relativity, space is not empty. It is dynamical. It has properties such that the vacuum isn't what we think of that insulates our Yeti coolers, right? It's not something that's the absence of completeness within it. It's actually an active, quantum mechanically viable and dynamic process that's been proven that we know that vacuum energy exists. We measure, it's called the Casimir force or even people out there, some say that are questionable in their motives, but they, they've created what they claim is a battery that extracts free energy from the vacuum. And that we'll all plug it in, we'll have limitless free energy. And some people even take it

further that that inventor of that thing better have 24 hour a day security guards, you know, to prevent him from big oil taking them out or big solar or whatever. But in reality, the vacuum is dynamic. It has energy. It has properties that allow input and output. And one of the things that that is incumbent upon Einstein, you know, Einstein's theory of relativity, which we have abundant evidence for. In fact, I got here in my plane, it has a GPS. And the GPS relies on satellites that themselves have to be calibrated to picose second level precision. Otherwise, the speed of light is actually, you know, quite fast. So every nanosecond light travels one foot.

So if you're off by, you know, 100,000 nanoseconds, I wouldn't have been here today. Sorry, you'd have another guest. You'd be covering for me, George. Get your rapid bachelor, PhD in physics. So, yeah, so the laws don't change. The laws are immutable and are knowable, perhaps only to Mother Nature or God or whatever. But our discovery of the laws then allows us and endows us with the ability to make predictions and seek evidence that could falsify.

But so far, we have abundant evidence for things like gravitational lensing, which the spacetime has to be dynamical, for the expansion of the universe, for the barren acoustic oscillations that tell us that dark energy might not be a cosmological constants. The biggest discovery in this field, since dark energy was validated, which was the biggest discovery since Einstein predicted it. So these are all huge things and they stand in stark contrast and contradistinction to things that are purely speculative for which we have zero evidence, like string theory, which attempts to find a possible plausible mechanism by which gravity can become

dynamical, but so far has zero evidentiary backing behind it. Yeah, and I think Sebastian is making the point, hey, notice that the Tenak talks about the immutability of the laws of physics. Is there any threat to that by current measurements by physicists? I would argue no. Yeah. And as I said, the nuclear reactor proves that the combination of the foremost fundamental constants in particle physics have not evolved at all over the quarter of all of the planet's history. Right.

And distant quasars, as you said before, we pushed that back to just a few hundred million years after the Big Back. Right. And you see oftentimes in the songs and of the places, Proverbs, that the immutability of the physical is also tied to immutability of God's moral law, that it will uphold. Well, that's the comparison. He says, I'm immutable. Here's evident as the laws are immutable. I'm immutable.

And that's actually the basis for doing science. If the laws are immutable, we can trust what we measure. Okay, let's keep going. Now for a Christian holding to the New Testament, there's this idea of that there's going to be a new heavens and a new earth. Some see that as a, you know, sort of a rebuilt carburetor. It's renewed in some ways. Others, this is, this universe is shut down and there's a whole new earth and new heavens that has some resemblance. That also gives the possibility of other kinds of life.

Someone's asking this question. What, let's hear your comments on that. Yes, well, this is not unique to Christianity. It's also part of Judaism that there's going to be this new creation. I've often made the case that what distinguishes, say, Judy, is in Christianity from the other major religions of the world, it's a two creation model. God creates this universe for the purpose of eradicating evil and suffering. And when that happens, there's no longer going to be a need for entropy, electromagnetism, gravity. He's going to take us

into a new creation where there'll be different laws. And what we see in both the Old Testament, the New Testament, God's going to be creating. And he's going to be creating something. It doesn't really tell us, what he's going to create. But he does say that his followers, as human followers, will be managing what he creates. But it's going to be under different laws of physics, different dimensions. Who knows what kind of life forms God's going to create there? Is it going to be just one life form? Is it going to be trillions of distinct life forms? I kind of go back to Saul Model 4. God seems to like creating diverse life. And with different laws of physics, I think he's going to have a fun time really creating incredible light forms. And we're all going to be surprised by what he creates.

And I think the real challenge for us is we're going to have to manage whatever he creates. It's hard enough trying to manage my two teenage boys, right? Trying to manage what God creates a new creation. And maybe that's why we're going to continue need a lot of wisdom from the creator. There's another question. Comment? No, I think. Yeah, he was a perspective is valuable. Okay.

Let's go to another one here. Some in quantum physics are using the theory to question the cause and effect mechanism and say they are potentially other independent universes with parallel timelines. Does this hold any weight? I think it was directed towards you. Brian, you comment on this a little bit. Yeah, so there are as many different interpretations of, of quantum mechanics as there are physicists.

It's a unique branch of physics that we don't have typically an interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics or of how a superconductor works, right? Well, I believe in the Fresno interpretation of the superconductor. I believe in the many superconductors theory. But in quantum mechanics, because it's so bizarre, alien and quite frankly dysfunctional, so much so that one of my professors quoted one of his professors, I think it was Wolfgang Powell. who, upon teaching quantum mechanics in the 40s or something, said something, they came into the classroom and said,

Professor Palli, I don't understand quantum mechanics. I have to be honest with you. And by the end of this quarter, you too will not understand quantum mechanics. So it then cries out for interpretation, which is actually oddly and eerily similar to religion, right? We don't have, you know, people say, well, like, you know, here's the, here's the Torah. Okay, great, but where's the commentary to it? It's like, here's the Constitution, you should be able to. determine everything that's legal and illegal in America. No, you need the, you need all the case law.

There's thousands and thousands of pages long, right? So you need, you need supplemental regard material. For religion, it is the Talmud, you know, in the case of, and then the commentaries on the talmud, and the super commentaries on the commentary, right? Like the superclusters of galaxy. And Christianity is the same way, right? So the thought that, you know, religion and science are, you know, kind of divergent actually breaks down at the level of quantum mechanics. because you do need an interpretation of it. Now, the dominant one, the one that actually works for day-to-day physicists to get things done, is known as the Copenhagen interpretation,

which makes predictions about all sorts of things that you can verify, not only down to very high significant figures, but it's actually the most precisely known scientific fact. The spectrum that he was talking about for different distant galaxies also holds on Earth, and we can calculate the different perturbations that occur to it due to external forces and even internal forces that were unknown to the current. creators like Schrodinger and Heisenberg and even Pauley in the beginning. But now we know them to 13 significant figures.

It's just an astounding level. Again, we live in the best timeline, whatever timeline that we're on. Now, in different models of both cosmology and what's called string theory, there then becomes manifest within them what's called a multiverse, different types of multiverses, parallel universes, as the viewer is suggesting. And so how do we grapple with them? There are ways that they're used to sort of make possible the strange features of the Copenhagen, the Orthodox interpretation, the Catholic interpretation, is that the wave function collapses.

But that's very distasteful. Like Schrodinger's cat is this famous a thought experiment where the cat is living and dead, and so you have to superpose that they're both living and dead at the same time, which my cat finds very troubling. My cat is named Schrodinger, actually. And you have to view it. But that's very weird. and then you open the box and you see if it's alive or dead,

and that's when the wave function collapses. But that type of behavior is very different. Like saying F equals MA for a baseball thrown through the air, and then all of a sudden it equals the F cubed M to the 15th. It's very strange. It's called non-unitary evolution. People don't like it. So they said, actually, instead of the wave function collapsing,

every possible outcome takes place. The cat is living in one universe and is dead in another universe. And that's the many world's interpretation. As parallel is the multiverse in cosmology, where there's 10 to the 500th or maybe infinite number of universes within the multiverse. And then in string theory, it's known as the landscape problem. So there's many different string vacuum that could be possible, leading to different configurations or curled up spacetime dimensions,

none of which we have evidence for either the multiverse or the many worlds ever ready in quantum mechanics, interpretation. And worst of all, string theory, which we may never be able to get evidence for, and it may only be non-falsifiable. And that's very troubling. So, yes, it's often used as kind of an escape go, you know, escape catch to jettison yourself from when you're in uncomfortable conversations about the meaning of quantum mechanics. Yeah. Well, people often look at quantum mechanics and say it refutes causality.

I think that's a mistake. It hides causality. And because it hides causality, we have all these different interpretive models. And there's a real limit to how much we can push. And so I agree with you. We've got dozens of different quantum mechanical models. We always will because of causality based on the Heisenberg uncertainty is hidden. So it's more of an epistemological problem, how we know, not an ontological.

Right. That's where we need the philosophers, right? Finally. No physicists has ever said those words. Now we need the philotone. I'm just kidding. I know. Well, some people are asking questions about, well, we're talking about, well, we're talking about

this window of time and that. But there seems to be now also a universe eschatology, talking about how the universe is going to end. You pointed to this. We have some viewers wanting what's your relative views of that, and does that impact how we think about ourselves, our uniqueness in that. We talked about the New Testament idea.

Well, there's that famous Woody Allen movie. We're a 10-year-old boy. refuses to do his homework because it says the heat death of the universe is coming. And the mother says, I don't care about the heat death of the universe. You're going to do your homework. Brooklyn is not expanding. The famous line. Right, right. So, yeah, I mean, the universe is heading towards an end,

and it's going to be a long ways off. But there's different ideas, as you know, about how it will end. That's right. And different ideas about, are we going to reach the big rip? and when is that going to take place? Even the heat death gets some dialogue and discussion. But the idea that we human beings can live in this universe forever and be able to expand our thriving in the universe,

we know that that model is incorrect. Yeah, I think it's finding a more kind of imminent parallel. You know, to quote Woody Allen again, another famous Jewish atheist, you know, he was asked, well, what do you want people to think about you in 150 years? And he said, I want them to think that I look pretty good for a 200-year-old. So, again, keep taking your vitamins, keep paying your taxes, because we don't know if we will reach the end times, right? But I think now the eschatological paradigm is now being kind of manifest over the threat, the opportunity, the benefits and the detriments of AI. I think AI, you know, to quote Yuval Noah Harari, another Jewish atheist.

You see why I call me something about. Teaching at Hebrew University or something. Yeah, yeah. which means it's not like a clinical seminar. I've noticed about some of these Jewish scholars is they're basically pointing out, maybe AI is going to bring about the end of all of us that passes. That's what I'm saying. So say more, say more. There's a couple of papers that have been published in the astrophysical literature saying

that in terms of our technological future, it's going to come to a crashing halt in less than 200 years, basically making the point, AI is the first technology we're developing, where it's expanding faster than we can control it. Exactly. And given the nature of humanity, within 200 years or less, we're basically AI is going to bring an end to maybe not us, but it's going to bring an end to our ability to control technology. That's right.

And that could be the end of us. I think that would be sort of what I call an AI event horizon, right? There may be a boundary beyond which we know control scientific discovery, factual, ontological, you know, kind of fact gathering, so to speak, epistemologically. So how is it more relevant? Well, it's upon us now. I mean, some say it's already been achieved. I don't actually believe that we've achieved AGI yet. I do believe it will have this transformative power at least as big as the internet, but probably some exponential power of that, both in terms of benefit and in terms of curse. So it has this exact parallel. I talk with John C. Lennox on my podcast

about his criticisms of Yuval Noah Harare's Homo Deus, which is we have become gods. That's the oldest story. I mean, literally the Tower of Battle, right? I mean, it's literally we are going up to make war, you know, to make a name for ourselves, right? What could be better than that? We're technological. We don't need God. We are gods, right?

And some say in the astrophysical literature that it makes no sense to send, you know, the slime mold, the dolphin with the iPhone. It makes no sense to send that around. You could just send information. You could just send the AI via its source code and, and some blockchain on the cosmic worldwide web or internet web cosmic web web cosmic wide web so so how would that then impact us right so we might discover life quote unquote it might not pass the ross test for a artificial spiritual intelligence but it may be the more

convenient parsimonious explanation of why we don't see biological life right we're not we're not maybe and maybe it's not transmitting on a frequency we can dial in with fine-tuning maybe Maybe it's transmitting in some other effect and what wave band neutrinos, gravitational waves, or etc. So I'm just saying the eschatological is on us now. It's not the end times. It's not the revelations, book acts and revelations. It's right now. And the question is, do we manage it?

Can we steward it? Is it out of control? And is it sort of already escape the case? Whether it's AI or some other time window is going to come to a close, I think the basic conclusion is, our hope cannot exist in the universe. our hope has got to be elsewhere besides the universe if we have any hope at all. But what I find interesting, we humans seem to be programmed to search for hope. And if we're all programmed for that, there has to be some actual rational hope out there.

That's right. And it can't be the universe. It's got to be beyond the universe. I agree. The psalm says, and you'll know the psalm itself, but it says the song, man's days are but, you know, a passing wind, a passing shadow, a night watchman's shadow. I mean, it's incredible to think out how brief it is, and yet how amazing it is, that we are the only creatures that have this ability to interrogate the universe. But what do you agree, that's a significant challenge to non-theism?

That the existence of us as this only species that we know are. Or we're this hopeful species, and yet our hope can't last in this universe. It really seems like our hope has got to be elsewhere. I guess it depends on what's the end of hope. You know, probably Obama's 17th autobiography will be called the End of Hope or something. But my question is, is hope coming to an end from within or without? Is it the laws of physics, the laws of biology, the laws of our, you know, the micro-world, or is it the laws, which are much harder, the laws of how we treat each other.

I think there's a much higher risk of existential demise from our fellow humans before we think about asteroid collisions or the big rib. I mean, or even AGI. I mean, we might live in the final days, God forbid. it. But because of what we're doing with nuclear weapons and biological weapons, superintelligence, uncontrolled, super intelligence. It reminds me of the debate I had with Victor Stinger, where he was making the claim, the universe is all there is. Well, the universe is all there is, we have no hope. Interestingly, he said, I agree. We have no more hope than a piece of rock or a piece of dust.

That's it. Yeah, that's the insignificance therapy, right? Right. And at least in the Christian view, hope is a virtue. It's also a gift. Right. a transcendent gift and despair is somewhat looked down upon as a type of sin. Literally despair means that there is no hope in God. And Christians are supposed to not give in to that. It's true for Joseph. National anthem of Israel is called out of Tikva. The hope.

Well, we're quickly running out of time here. Let me see if I take one more question. And then we'll wrap things up. Just for you, Brian, real quick, so trying to make it short. It's like, you know, explain the universe, but in two sentences. What is your strongest argument against fine-tuning as evidence for a creator or intelligent designer? Yeah, so not to be too clintonian about it, but it depends on the meaning of fine-tuning, right? Okay.

So a lot of studies suggest things can be relatively coarsely tuned. It's not like tuning a radio or violin or guitar, that you'll have a kind of on-off switch, which will tell you in a binary Boolean fashion that you're not tuned or not, or are tuned. For example, the force of gravity can vary, you know, by some large fraction. We often hear that the cosmological constant has to be fine-tuned, you know, to 120 orders of magnitude. It's a complete category error. It's actually not. The cosmological constant, which I said is Einstein's greatest blunder, but then came to be his greatest blunder because he called it his greatest blunder.

It is actually an observable piece of evidence in our cosmological model. it's basically completely insignificant. It hasn't played a role in the history of the entire universe, including up to Jesus, to us, whatever you want to believe. It's come up, it has no bearing on it whatsoever, and we could vary it by a factor of, you know, probably 10 or more times. Nothing would happen, make it much smaller.

Nothing would happen by a factor of 10. So is that finely tuned? I mean, if I take a, again, if I take a radio station on my frequency that I have to communicate with the air traffic control tower here in Pomona, and I tune it off by just a tiny bit. I cannot communicate. I will be fine by the FAA. That's extremely finely tuning

with huge consequences to my life and my finances and my ability to fly, my safety. God forbid, something could happen, right? That's exquisite. We have five digits on the radio dial and a plane like mine, a private airplane. And if you're off by one of the last digit, you will not be able to communicate with anybody

and you will also possibly risk your life and other people's lungs and you'll be fined and sued. That's fine tuning, with a consequence immediate for me, right? But if I can tune that by a factor of 10, either direction, it doesn't matter. I would say it's not fine-tuned. So I don't view the fine-tuning

with the degree of kind of weight that Hugh does in terms of believing. And again, I don't like that word belief. But I like reasons to believe. I like to read. And that's the way my particular branch of, as I said, devout practicing agnostic Jewish, agnosticism, rather, is meant.

So I would you comment on that? I know there's a number of people would want to hear you comment on what Brian is saying right there. Yeah, I think what's compelling for me is that the more we search for fine-tuning, the more we find. It seems to have predictive value. People have made that comment about the anthropic principle. As we find evidence for the anthropic principle, it leads to other things we didn't expect to find. And it's like the trail never ends. The evidence for fine-tuning always increases.

increases, it never decreases, and the increase seems to be exponential just within the few decades in which we've been alive. One sense, I think it's a privilege to be alive in the 21st century, because 200 years ago, we didn't have these kinds of tools. Today we do, and look what we found, and what is it revealing about our place in the universe, or time and place? And the fact that we seem to be at a very special location in the universe where we can see all this stuff, that we were close to the black hole in our galaxy, we wouldn't be able to make these observations. Or we were in the halo of our galaxy, wouldn't be able to do it.

And we seemed to be at this fine-tuned place. So, I mean, everywhere you look for fine-tuning, you seem to find it. And so I think that's a compelling argument. I'll just give one counter example if I could, just to that again. There's nothing wrong. About a minute.

Okay, yeah. So I posted something recently on X, which is if you look at a circle, inside of a square, and scrap a circle inside of a square, how much area is in the kind of corners? How much area does a circle occupy out of a given square, cube, et cetera, et cetera. And when you go into higher and higher dimensions,

as you're fun talking about, and the string theory kind of concept that you just said, actually all of the inhabitable region, you'll get within like a billionth of a percent of the perimeter of a sphere, of a hygrisphere. If you have enough dimensions, right? So if you were living in such a universe, say, like, I live in the outer skin,

like one out of the, them thick, one plank layer thick of this vast cosmic universe. What are the odds of that? But there's none that it's more a statement about dimensionality than it is about the tuning that led to that. We just have to be careful and what we count towards evidence that's exculpatory versus provative. And I think it's legitimate. I think there's absolutely consistent with your worldview. And I just, I'm more and more curious to learn how do these different pieces of evidence from different fields, the conciliants that we get from different fields in astronomy, tell us about, Yeah, I'm all for viewing ourselves as important as having the only mandate that we know in the universe to interrogate it, as I said, as conscious entities.

And how we use that is at our peril if we use it incorrectly. Well, fine tuning can be just a statistic. Like, you know, the odds of getting a particular hand in poker. It's the same for every hand. But when you bring in purpose, especially you bring in multiple purposes, you know, that's something that we've been doing work on and say, when you look at the universe, it seems to be fine-tuned to fulfill at least 11 known distinct purposes. I think this gives meaning to the fine-tuning we're seeing. If we only saw fulfilling one purpose, you could say, well, maybe that's a statistical accident.

But the fact that it's fulfilling multiple radically distinct purposes, I think gives it philosophical importance. Someone give me a book from the scholar community. So I'll ask this Hugh for fun. Would you baptize an extraterrestrial? What I baptize an extraterrestrial? Depends on whether that extraterrestrial is capable of sin and has repented of their sin. Would you make them observe the Sabbath? We're forbidden to force people to do.

We just ask them, do you want to be baptized? Well, Ryan, thank you very, very much. You've been very gracious. Obviously, you have a depth of knowledge there. We have similar subjects that we're interested in, and we want to keep dialogues like this going on. I love your podcast. So where would you want to point people to discover more about you, your podcasts, some of your written work? I think the main thing is, yeah, the YouTube channel.

I have conversations with 25 Nobel laureates to date and scholars and thinkers like John Lennox. Next week I'll have Stephen Meyer on back again. So, yeah, it's kind of the intellectual salon I wish existed. You know, when I was in college and sleeping through lectures, and I've been able to create it with these, you know, geniuses from around the multiverse of minds that I get connected to. You really can get an education just listening to it. Yeah, it's free, and you can take a class in your pajamas.

Which I don't allow my students at UCSD. What's the address for that? It's Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube. And, you know, very well. And the podcast audio is into The Impossible. We have Star, Stars, and God, is one podcast that you're on, Hugh. So what about a book you would recommend for people? Well, an easy to read book I've written this called Why the Universe is the way it is, relatively short, introduces the fine tuning argument, but especially focuses when we're talking about the multiple purposes for the fine tuning.

And I find people really enjoy just like, oh, I have no idea that these purposes are relevant and actually all fit into the fine tuning, why the universe is the way it is. And you answer questions on Facebook and other places. I answer hundreds of questions literally every day. Literally every day. Well, we want to thank you for joining us on this live stream. Please, it helps us. Hopefully it helps you. Be sure to subscribe to this RTB YouTube channel and see future live streams that are coming.

Brian, you know, people ask me when I get on a plane, they say, have a safe trip. And I say that's up to the pilot. But this is truly up to you. but have a safe travel. So thank you for visiting us in person. It makes a huge difference. We appreciate you and your friend who came. Hugh, always great to have you at the time and the interaction.

I look forward really to taking this further, hopefully someday. It's been a fun conversation. Thank you for joining us.