The Rare Earth Hypothesis in the 21st Century -- How alone are we? By Professor Peter Ward
Note: Although the speaker *really* wanted to join us in-person, he will be speaking to us via Zoom from the Seattle area.
Our speaker will be Professor Peter Ward from the University of Washington. Professor Ward is a paleontologist and astrobiologist and a prolific, award-winning popular author, with at least 18 fascinating titles to his credit, including the book Rare Earth, which he published with co-author and friend-of-the-club Professor Don Brownlee in 2000. He has appeared on the PBS series Evolution and NOVA scienceNOW and Animal Planet's Animal Armageddon. Aside from his astrobiological interests, Professor Ward has done extensive scientific field work in France and Spain, studying the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, and in the South Pacific, studying the living cephalopods Nautilus and Sepia. Please see his description of his presentation below.
The book Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee was a 20th Century product. Since publication, in 2000, thousands of extrasolar planets have been discovered, and equivalent amounts of new information has come from the other aspects that we called "Rare Earth Factors" - such as new information about the formation of life on Earth, habitability, Habitable Zones, kinds of stars and galaxies, the Great Filter Hypothesis, and others. In this short talk I will quickly recount why we wrote the book, and the greatest hits that have had to be revised (and speaking of greatest hits, the movie "65" is not on that list!). So sit back, become skeptical, and let's try to convince ourselves that it is quite improbable that we are the sole intelligence in the Cosmos - but at the same time confront the probability that we will never discover whether that is true or not.
About Peter Ward
Peter Ward is Professor of Earth and Space Sciences, and of Biology, at the University of Washington, where he has been on the faculty since 1985 (or since the Pleistocene Epoch, essentially). Ward and Brownlee are writing a sequel to Rare Earth. Ward is also trying to figure out how not to break his back with his 11" Celestron telescope which is a beast to move.