^B00:00:01 >> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^E00:00:04 ^B00:00:21 >> Jane McAuliffe: Well, as the last of our panelists is coming to the stage, I'll take this opportunity to introduce myself. I'm Jane McAuliffe, the Director of the John W. Kluge Center and it's my privilege to welcome you here this afternoon. This is the moment in our public programs where we ask you to silence your cellphones and other electronic devices. And we also remind you that this, as you can see from the cameras, is being filmed for eventual placement on the Kluge Center website as well as our YouTube and iTunes channels. Just a word or two about the Kluge Center itself and our Bloomberg Astrobiology Program. Kluge Center was created 15 years ago through a generous gift, a very generous gift from the philanthropist John W. Kluge. He and the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, had the idea of a residential research center for scholars here at the Library of Congress. And that is our primary mandate as the Kluge Center, is to welcome both senior and junior scholars for extended periods of residency anywhere from three or four months to a full year. So that they can pursue projects that draw upon the collections of this extraordinary institution and do it in a collaborative environment along with many other scholars who are equally engaged. So we are a primarily residential research program but we also, as you can see by being here today, we mount many public programs, lectures, seminars, symposia, conferences throughout the year. A lot of these programs are actually lectures by our scholars in residence. Others are with invited scholars from around this country and across the globe. The third thing that the Kluge Center does is to award the Kluge Prize which is a major award for lifetime achievement in the study of humanity. It's awarded every few years and we're in the final stages of the selection process for the next Kluge Prize winner which will be announced sometime this summer. The Prize has been a million dollars for the scholar this year in honor of our 15th anniversary celebration. Mary, you look so [laughter], you look suitably surprised. It'll be a million-and-a-half dollars. That's a nice way to celebrate our 15th anniversary. And another way in which we're going to celebrate that anniversary is with a blowout program here on June 11th that we're calling ScholarFest. So if you go to the Kluge website, you'll see a link to this and all of the former residents who are coming back to be part of a day of overwhelming intellectual activity and discourse. So please join us, if you can. Now, one of our premier programs at the Kluge Center is the collaboration with NASA and the Library of Congress that eventuated in the Blumberg Astrobiology Program. It takes its name from the Nobel Prize winner, Baruch or Barry Blumberg, who was the founder of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and also an inaugural member of the Library of Congress' Scholars Council. And it was Dr. Blumberg who envisioned the creation of a program in the Kluge Center that would concentrate on connecting scientific discoveries in the field of astrobiology with the best thinking in the humanities and the social sciences. I'm very glad that Mary Voytek from NASA can be with us today and that Carolyn Brown who was her collaborator in the founding of this program is also with us today. The program really exemplifies the profound, varied and significant subjects of research that are enabled by the Library of Congress collections. This year, we have devoted our collaboration between the Library of Congress and NASA to mounting three dialogues, what we're calling Blumberg Dialogues. And in doing so, we've been gathering scholars at the Library of Congress from across the humanistic disciplines. This second of the three Blumberg Dialogues brings together distinguished scholars in the fields of the history and philosophy of science, as well as planetary science. And they have just spent a day-and-a-half in conversation. I understand in quite intense conversation on issues such as the origins and evolution of life on Earth, the search for life beyond Earth, and the future of life both on this planet and beyond. We're certainly looking forward to hearing the results of these conversations and their insights this afternoon. The third of the three dialogues will take place on August 6th and will bring scholars from the field of literature and the arts. We are particularly grateful to Derek Malone-France and John Baross for directing these dialogues and I'm going to introduce each of them in turn and then turn this over to them. Derek Malone-France, who is standing here to my right, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at George Washington University. He is also Executive Director of the GW University Writing Program. This fall, he taught an undergraduate course entitled Human Existence and the Search for Life beyond Earth. It was a course that covered contemporary philosophical, religious, political, and social implications of this ongoing search for life in the universe. Derek is the author of two monographs, the first entitled ^IT Deep Empiricism, Kant, Whitehead and the Necessity of Philosophical Theism ^Normal and the second, ^IT Faith, Fallibility and the Virtue of Anxiety - An Essay in Religion and Political Liberalism ^Normal. Dr. John Baross is a Professor in Oceanography and in the Astrobiology Program at the University of Washington. John kind of raised his hand but you're going to be hearing from him too so just to identify him. He specializes [laughter] -- thank you, John -- in the ecology, physiology, and taxonomy of microorganisms from extreme ocean environments. More broadly, he's very interested in the origins of life and the possibility of life on other planetary bodies. In recognition of his work, he has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. He's also a member of the American Society for Microbiology, the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the International Society for the Study of the Origin and Evolution of Life. I'm so glad they could both be with us today and I now turn this over to Derek Malone-France. Thank you. ^M00:07:51 [ Applause ] ^M00:07:56 >> Derek Malone-France: Thank you very much and thank you to Jane McAuliffe and to all of the staff here at the Kluge Center and our partners over at NASA as well. It's been a joy to work on this project and a joy to work with John. John and I are mostly here to facilitate and we want to hear primarily from our featured scholars who I will identify simply by name and affiliation because we don't -- they're all very accomplished. We'd use all of our time if I listed their accomplishments. We are joined by Eric Schwitzgebel here. He's Professor of Philosophy at the University of California Riverside. Linnda Caporael, Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Paul Humphreys is Commonwealth Professor of Philosophy and Co-director of the Center for the Study of Data and Knowledge at the University of Virginia, and Sarah Stewart-Johnson is Assistant Professor of Planetary Science at Georgetown University where she runs the Johnson Biosignatures Lab. So a distinguished panel with a lot to say about our topic. And I will turn it over to Sarah who will begin with her comments. >> Sarah Stewart-Johnson: Oh well, thank you so much, Derek. I have to say, this has been such an extraordinary pleasure to spend the last couple of days talking with you and talking with all of the -- my fellow panelists. It's just been a really incredible experience. I came here thinking that I had a relatively broad perspective. ^M00:09:26 I studied this place. I say Mars primarily and it's millions of miles away and I'm a scientist who also likes to think about sort of [inaudible] occasions of science on society. ^M00:09:37 And so I thought I came in, you know, with this perspective and I've been -- it's just that concept has been completely exploded by the time I've been able to spend with these wonderful people here. ^M00:09:48 And I guess one of the main things that I've taken away is just this idea of how much our thinking is just a representation to this particular moment in time. ^M00:09:58 One of the things that we had the opportunity to do as part of our two days was go on a tour of this magnificent building. And I don't know how many of you noticed, but when you come in, there's a grand hallway and you go up these staircases and there are these little figurines and they were representations of sort of things going on at the time the building was built in 1897. ^M00:10:18 And one of them, this little charred-looking figure is that it's a little electrician and it's got like an old telephone piece next to its ear and sparks of electricity coming out of its head. ^M00:10:29 And you know, that building, the building was so much a representation of our times and I think about, you know, what Mars -- my focus of study was like at the time this building was being constructed in 1897. ^M00:10:42 And it was this pale dot of light in the distant sky and optics had taken us just as very far as we could take them. Telescopes that improved and improved for 300 years but we got up to the point where the atmospheric aberrations were making it just impossible for that technology to take us any further. ^M00:11:00 And at that point in time, we couldn't even conceive of the sorts of technologies that would come with the dawn of the Space Age, the idea that we could just take our telescope and put it above the atmosphere and have space base instrumentation. Or the idea that rocketry would come along and we could actually go to Mars and we could take a robot to Mars and we could have it explore robotically, you know, like we do now. ^M00:11:23 And it's just these leaps in imagination and I just think isn't that exactly where we are with extra-solar planets, these planets that are being detected around distant stars and looking at those now, you think they're just so impossibly far away, these aberrations of light in the distance. ^M00:11:41 Maybe we'll know a little something about their atmospheres but of course, that's not true. I mean, of course, there will be these developments, that technology that we cannot even begin to imagine that will take us forward with astrobiology in these incredible ways just in our lifetimes alone. ^M00:11:58 And so that's been one thing, just from this expansion of imagination but also this idea of just this moment in time. One of the great points that Jennifer Wiseman who, I don't know if she's here right now, but she's from NASA Goddard and she joined us for part of our session. She talked about this idea that, you know, we are as a society of just broadcasting all these messages out into space. ^M00:12:20 But how much longer will that go on? There's this transition to digitization and maybe that particular moment in sort of our own development was just again, it was such a blip, you know, that it will just keep on going. ^M00:12:32 And we also had this idea of maybe we'll go into a post-biological state, you know, like [inaudible] had this concept of taking us, you know, in biology, maybe it's just a stopping point on the way to something different. And there's the idea we talked in detail to about looking for fossil worlds as opposed to extant signatures of biology. ^M00:12:53 Because maybe given the vast distances and the time it takes life to travel, that it's really just looking for things that used to be. And given, of course, how long the geologic time that we're dealing with, it should be just this fossil worlds. And another idea that we talked about that I found just fascinating is the idea you can always look out for life but we also had these laboratories here. We're doing experiments. We're tinkering around. We've got artificial intelligence and there's also the idea of creating life, the synthetic life. ^M00:13:24 And I'm so drawn to the idea of finding life on Mars because we have one data point for life. It's just life as we know it. Everything is related and it's all the same life as we know it. That the idea of coming up with a second data point. And even if it was ancestrally related, that would be like playing the tape of evolution again and figuring out how it ended up differently. ^M00:13:44 Or if it was something that we had never even imagined, gosh, it would be better than anything. A pharmaceutical company could come up with, you know, in terms of helping us understand biology which, to this point, has been a very descriptive science in some ways but understanding the sort of fundamental principles. ^M00:13:58 But maybe we get to N equals two in our own laboratories. You know, maybe there's a way of exploring that space that comes from, you know, creating life in our own way. But of course, that brings this enormous ball of ethical questions with it and that's another main point I took away is the importance of having your humanist and social scientist involved in this dialogue and in this debate to help us understand the ethical implications and how to even recognize life. We need some philosophers to weigh in on that. And so with that, I'll stop. I just wanted to say thank you again. It's been a really wonderful experience. ^M00:14:37 >> Derek Malone-France: Okay. All right, Paul? >> Paul Humphreys: All right, well thank you and thank you for actually coming. It's been a real pleasure listening to people over the last couple of days. ^M00:14:45 Let me tell you a little bit about my background because it's relevant to my little encapsulation I'm going to give you. When I was in high school, I did all the mathematics and physics I found. Biology seemed horribly messy to me. I mean, my [laughter] bedroom was messy enough. I didn't want to take that to school with me. But then in college, I did logic and physics and then at graduate school, I did some more logic and [inaudible] science. And I always liked things in nice, neat compartments. I've come to appreciate biology and listening to my colleagues these last couple of days. They know far more about this. So I've come to see the point of that, well it looks to me like disorganization. But how does one deal with it? And here's the sort of main point that I would always get across when one can think about this. One of the remarkable things about physics is that it can appeal to laws that are universal both, you know -- every part of the universe and are held to be true all the way back to the origin of the universe. Now, you can think about that. That's a really remarkable resource for astrophysicists to have access to. Now, one of the characteristic features of biology, at least as I have encountered it is there [inaudible] absence of laws. It doesn't seem to be sort of law-governed in the way that physics and chemistry are set. So what does that say about the research enterprise of astrobiology? Well, here's one way I like to think about it. Humans over the course of history have had to deal with a number of disruptive revolutions in the way that they conceived themselves, and the Copernican Revolution was one of them. We used to be in the [Inaudible] world, at the center of the universe and along comes Copernicus and pulls us aside from that. So that's a bit of a shock to our ego. But we dealt with it. You had the Darwinian Revolution but we've been through recently a revolution in which artificial intelligence has become a serious possibility. And if you, you know, who follow the progress of Deep Blue in beating the then world chess champion, or watch Watson on television and saw it, you know, outperform Ken Jennings in general knowledge. Those are remarkable achievements. And they make us rethink the issue of just how special we might be. Now, what happens if we discover something in another galaxy or another planet in our own solar system? The question is how do we recognize that if in fact, you know, we don't have access to universal laws of biology? Perhaps such things exist and there is a research center at the University of Illinois that is pursuing that question. But what happens if it doesn't? Well, we do have the example of artificial intelligence. I mean, for a long time, we thought we were the only developed intelligence that was out there. Now we have other examples to go on. But the thing is that we've constructed those ourselves and so we know the principles that went into them and how they operate. If we find life on exoplanets, it may be very different from the kind of life that we have down here. And one of the interesting things I learned was the enormously rapid pace of discovery on Earth of forms of life that previously were thought to not to exist. But the challenge is going to be to see if we can understand forms of life on other planets that are radically different from ours and we have to develop techniques to be able to get to that. But one possible consequence if it's not the best case scenario is that we're just going to be faced with the fact that there are definite limits to what we can know about astrobiology. There may be some forms of life which is so fundamentally different from the ones to which we have access, that they're simply not, we're not going to be in a position to discover. That's something that I haven't fully realized before this session and I'm glad that I was here to think about that. >> Derek Malone-French: Okay. >> Paul Humphreys: Okay. >> Eric Schwitzgebel: Okay. So thanks to everybody. It was a fascinating discussion with so many different perspectives. And thanks to you guys, for coming to listen to us too. I had kind of two main thoughts that I came away from our discussion with. One was it would be very exciting to discover life on another planet. And I was wondering why that's so exciting to us, why we're searching for life elsewhere. ^M00:20:01 But why should we care about life in particular? What's -- that word has a lot of power for us. But you might, I mean, life is complex. Complexity is exciting but there are various complex things in the galaxy that we don't seem to get quite as excited about, about life -- as we do about life. Like there's a, you know, there's storms on Jupiter that are very complex and self-sustaining over long periods of time but we don't think of them a lot as alive. They don't seem as exciting to us as discovering even a simple microbe would be. Life is often defined in terms of reproduction. But reproduction doesn't seem that wonderfully important, you know, I think about, you know, people make choices whether to reproduce or not themselves as individuals. We could create say, robots that don't have reproductive capacities but they have intelligence. We might think those would be very interesting. We might, if we discovered robotic sentients or robotic consciousness in some other planet that wasn't, -- that didn't reproduce, we might have to make a decision about do we call this alive or not? You might think that part of what's exciting about life is intelligence. But you might think microbes aren't very intelligent. It might be that part of what's exciting about life is its potential to evolve into something else. Is that what we're excited about when we are excited about discovering life? Or is it instead that we get a glimpse of our own possible past, right? So here on Earth, we don't know very much about the origins of life here. If we saw microbial life elsewhere, would that give us some insight into our own origins and how contingent they might have been or whether they were common or necessary? So I guess I wanted -- one of the things I wanted to do, one of the things I was thinking about here was just thinking about the framing of the question for the search of -- for life and why it is that we're so excited about life in particular. I don't find the answer to that to be obvious. And then the second thought that I was having was that it seems like we should have guidelines that would govern our interaction with microbial life in the solar system. If we were to discover microbial life on Mars, or on Europa, or elsewhere, there are currently extensive guidelines of planetary protection that will prevent or aim to prevent contamination of non-Earth planets from infection by Earthly organisms and vice versa. But it seems to me like there are a lot of potential ethical issues that arise independent of that. So if we were to discover say, microbes on Mars, we might want to sample that. Under what conditions ought we be allowed to sample them? How large a sample could we take? What kind of experimentation would be permissible to conduct on a sample? If we discovered microbial life on Mars, it was under threat from say local conditions, would we be justified in intervening to protect that life? Would we be morally required to intervene to protect that life or would it be better to stand back and watch it go extinct? As far as I'm aware, we haven't got really clear either national or international guidelines governing the way with in which we would interact with microbial life in the solar system if we discovered it. So I thought it would be interesting to think about how to construct such guidelines and whether maybe we should have some sort of institutional committee maybe? It could be modeled on the existing institutional review boards and animal care boards that you see in universities. If you want to do research with human participants or with animal subjects, you submit a proposal to your institutional review board who then evaluates whether that's an ethical experiment according to existing guidelines. So it seemed to me that it would at least be possible to have set up in advance some sort of committee or body that would have guidelines, that would govern our interaction with microbial life in the event that we do discover it. >> Derek Malone-France: Thank you. Linnda? >> Linnda Caporael: That was awesome [laughter]. ^E00:25:03 ^B00:25:10 I am, as one of the social scientists here, I don't know that there are that many of us compared to philosophers. I was overwhelmed by the diversity of both philosophical viewpoints and about the amazing scientific discoveries that have been made about the precursors to life and to the possibility of microbes elsewhere. And astrobiology reminds me in some ways of the discipline I'm most familiar with which is human evolutionary theory and some background on me. I've been trying to bring a science of human evolutionary theory into the social sciences and at the same time, developing a critique of human evolutionary theory as it has already been brought into the social sciences. And in that project, I've looked for what are the overlaps? And the overlaps are elusive phenomena. So my interests are in life in the distant past, the interest of evolutionists or life in the distant past and the origin of life. And astrobiologists are interested in life in the future, possibly not so distant, possibly very distant. And to have sciences like these, our sciences that happen some sense of elusive phenomena and then the question becomes how do you have elusive phenomena and have it as a scientific practice? And here, I think, it's a very -- both of these sciences and this is really what I got from our discussions, they have these scientific cores that are very important, the extreme files, the precursors of life, the biosignatures, the essential scientific research that is going on here. In the case of human evolution, we have fossils but in the same way, the fossils are items that we can do scientific analyses of but what those mean at the moment are hard to say. In both cases, we try to work out what it is to be human. So that when we look at human evolution in the past, we have fossils. We have some ideas. We have a discussion about what of its life, its selfish genes. We're talking about what does it mean to be human. I think we've gotten past the selfish genes story in many ways. And we need now a new place to start exploring what does it mean to be human? And there's something about astrobiology that enables us to ask that question. How are we to be human in a world that possibly has other kinds of organisms and some of those organisms might be dangerous. They might be microbes. Some of those organisms might be like our worst scenarios or fantasies of conquest and domination. There are other possible scenarios but these are things that we work out. So human evolutionists have thought about the past in terms of stories, which were stories about the present or the opposite of present, but not much in between. We don't know how to work out the stories of astrobiology although science fiction writers have probably worked that out and that would be interesting too. So how we will construct ourselves in this very different kind of science, the science of the future, as opposed to the science of that past. Science that we can see is opening up other ways of being compared to what we have imagined the past to be, offer some interesting prospects and I'm delighted to hear that there's going to be an arts and literature dialogue that's going to be following this one. I wish I could be the fly on the wall for there. I also wanted to -- this is a somewhat separate thing but for a long time, I was very curious about the conversation about origins of life. I thought I understood origins of life. And there's more to it than that. But one of the things that I think could be brought from my own work which really has to do with recognizing human interdependence; we are profoundly interdependent as individuals. We're a very interdependent social species. We don't do justice to ourselves with simply a selfish gene story. It's that maybe interdependence is some place on that spectrum between life and non-life. ^M00:29:59 And it's probably not going to be -- Eric's suggestion from earlier, a sharp, somewhat interdependent, very interdependent spectrum to start thinking about origins of life. And in that context, start asking questions about what are the kinds of vocabularies can we bring into astrobiology. So we have vocabularies of dominance, of hierarchy. This will solve vocabularies of interdependence that we might bring. We talked about ethics. We could add to the ethics vocabulary. Vocabularies of compassion, vocabularies of respect. So there's a lot of possibilities here for reshaping, rethinking. What is the good life? You know, what kind of life do we want to export if we were going to export life from Earth? We certainly know we don't want to export but what do we want to export so that raises a number of different questions about human possibilities. And it's been a really great experience to be with all of you and to have your attention for this as well. >> Derek Malone-France: Thank you. We do have time for a Q and A and I'm going to invite my colleague, John, to add any thoughts he might have while those of you who might be interested in asking a question, queue up at this mike here that's on the stand or if they're -- so John, did you have anything you wanted to add there? >> John Baross: I would just assume here the audience if they can, I mean, you don't want to get me started talking [laughter]. As they know, you know. >> Derek Malone-France: Oh, that was like Michael, do you want to ask a question? >> Michael: Yes, thank you very much. So I'd like to ask, if there has been a serious effort to imagine what an alien species would be like, I know that science fiction has tried to do this many times all the way from Star Wars which imagines humanoids to Solaris which depicts the aliens in unknowable completely alien other. And I find neither of those depictions especially satisfying because the Star Wars aliens are just corny humans and the Solaris kind of aliens are just depicting [inaudible] theological beings in the sense that they're beyond our understanding. So I'm just curious if the panel knew of any serious effort to describe an alien mind. It's really completely different from humans such as could social insects ever become language using technological beings and how would they actually do that? How would that actually work in terms of the biochemistry, the linguistics and the information storage and so forth? Now, I've been looking at them in this kind of in-depth discussion of the totally other almost like what Dr. Johnson said, creating version 2.0 in a lab and studying it. And I've no account of these things so I'm curious if you know of any such effort to do that. >> Derek Malone-France: Want to jump in first? >> Eric Schwitzgebel: All right. Well certainly, science fiction authors have imagined a variety of -- I mean, you marked some nice endpoints there but of course, there are science fiction authors who have explored a variety of ways of being different from human. My own inclination is to think that there are some limits to what a being would have to be like if it's going to not surpass into the completely incomprehensible Stanislaw Lem Solaris-type being, right. If you imagine beings who are sufficiently complex that it requires developmental resources over an extended period of time to develop them and live in a hostile environment or a sufficiently challenging environment then they would presumably have to have something like sensory perception for threats, right? And then they would need some capacity for action to defend against threats. They would presumably also have to have some sort of capacity to monitor and self-regulate. So already, we're getting the beginnings of a kind of set of capacities that we regard as fundamental to human or animal psychology. So I guess for that reason, I'm not inclined to agree with Lem about how, about radically different aliens being scientifically likely. But it might -- but I think one thing that we've been discovering in biology recently is that our favorite level of organization, right, is not necessarily so radically different from higher and lower levels, right? So social insects that you raised, I don't see any reason why social insects couldn't instantiate any sort of complexity that we see in, you know, normally embodied human beings. And in fact, we've got within us all kinds of microorganism that are essential to our functioning. >> Paul Humphreys: Could -- >> Derek Malone-France: Paul? >> Paul Humphreys: Could I add something? Yeah, so one of the core realizations that drove artificial intelligence was the view that the material substance in which the intelligence was grounded was to a certain extent irrelevant. And in artificial life, you've got two kinds of programs that strong artificial intelligence which -- sorry, strong artificial life which essentially holds the same view that the material instantiation of the living organism is not especially crucial. Now, if that's true, then you've got enormous flexibility for forms life can take. And what forms they take presumably depend on the contingencies of the environment in which the life develops. So I hope that helps. >> Derek Malone-France: All right, Sarah, did you have anything to add? >> Sarah Stewart-Johnson: Well, I didn't think that, you know, not just necessarily intelligence. I mean, when you think about sort of microbial life, there are now all kinds of things that we can sort of imagine, you know, ^M00:36:25 simple life forms. Even just being sort of chemical disequilibrium, you know, we kind of have this idea that you need to harvest energy and you need to have some sort of separation from your environment. ^M00:36:34 And I think that there has been an effort to sort of imagine when we send out, you know, missions in the future doing life detection, to have this kind of whole range of things looking at very, very specific signatures. You know, you could look for DNA or RNA baselines based on a shared ancestry hypothesis. ^M00:36:50 But then you could also have other instruments on your payload that you know, go all the way to trying to find these things. They may not be quite as unambiguous but it could be very significant in terms of, you know, recognizing something that we don't, at the moment, have the ability to conceptualize. ^M00:37:05 And I think that that's one of the strengths of NASA is because when we do send missions, you know, they're multiple instruments and you know, you could send six or seven different types of things to try to look for these different possibilities. ^M00:37:17 >> Derek Malone-France: Okay. ^M00:37:19 >> Paul Humphreys: Yeah, let me just offer a very quick, brief response to that, if I may. I think that there are all sorts of possibilities for this kind of disciplined exploration that really just have not been undertaken yet. For example, as you say, discussing first principles. Some social insects, you have to answer basic questions like, how do they work their will on matter? You just think about embodied cognition. In our brains, we use metaphor, you know, we use some embodied cognition to make sense of language. So how would a great alien kind of body undertake that kind of cognition? So I just wanted to say the point that there is a kind of disciplined structured explanation and I just haven't seen anybody do yet. Thank you. >> Derek Malone-France: Thank you. ^M00:38:05 >> I'd just like to say that the fact that planets are commonplace in the universe. It'd be quite extraordinary to me to think there's no microbial life. ^M00:38:16 But the difference here is extraterrestrial intelligence. I think Enrico Fermi said, "Where are they?" Because he said, you know, it took four billion years or more for complex forms of life, not just intelligent life to develop on earth. ^M00:38:33 Now given that the Milky Way Galaxy is over 10 billion years old, he postulated through probability theory that there would have been in that time certain civilizations, maybe a billion years in advance of us. ^M00:38:40 Therefore, with the probability that they're colonizing our universe. "Where are they?" he said. Now I don't know what you think of that but I think that there's a vast gulf between the possibility of microbial life and of intelligent life and we may never discover intelligent life. ^M00:39:10 >> Sarah Stewart-Johnson: And we, also you know, we think of ourselves as so intelligent but of course, here we are on the continuum and you can just imagine the sort of forms of intelligence that you know, we would evolve into or other civilizations would evolve into. ^M00:39:23 And one of the things that we got into a little bit was you know, at what point would we try to sort of communicate with a microbe, you know, like maybe there aren't very vastly intelligent civilizations out there but like are we of that much interest, you know, and that sort of a thing. ^M00:39:40 >> Paul Humphreys: Yeah, I mean, that's my reaction entirely. I mean, we tend to think of ourselves as very special [laughter]. It's like me wondering why all those tourists in the United States don't arrive at my front door [laughter] because there's no particular reason for them to come. ^M00:39:57 >> Sarah Stewart-Johnson: But intelligence is special. Intelligence is special in [inaudible] aware. I mean, intelligence -- I'm not talking about human talk but any kind of intelligence. ^M00:40:03 So my point is that there's an evolutionary scale from an amoeba to a primate, there's a vast difference. ^M00:40:14 And so, if you're talking about communicating, we can talk to a microbe and [inaudible]. ^M00:40:21 It seems to me that this [inaudible] is finding, you know, sending out a message as we've been doing for years, of finding intelligent life [inaudible] is getting slimmer and slimmer. ^M00:40:33 >> Oh, [inaudible]. But you're right. >> Derek Malone-France: Go ahead. ^M00:40:36 >> Have widespread UFO reports any bearing on your subject? >> Derek Malone-France: I'm sorry but I didn't understand the word, widespread what? >> Have UFO reports any bearing on your subject? >> Derek Malone-France: We did not take up that subject. There certainly are a lot of groups that are interested in that subject and there are resources online and events that you can go to. We were really focused more on the specific themes of the NASA roadmap and thinking about the ways in which the most likely possibilities for scientific discovery would impact our thinking. Yeah, Jason? >> Jason: Yeah I wanted to follow up on Sarah's great point about the importance of having humanists involved with this conversation. And I was wondering if you could actually be more specific. What do you think some of those contributions are that make their involvement so valuable? Thanks. >> Sarah Stewart-Johnson: Well now, that's a terrific question and it consumed much of our time here actually especially this afternoon ^M00:41:41 thinking about the different ways that it would be terrific to get together and come up with, you know, like sort of a research, you know, to some documents, helping just to help define some of those questions, you know. ^M00:41:54 Like do we need an IRB for figuring out these things with microbes? Do we need an environmental ethics? Our environmental ethics here on Earth is entirely predicated in some sense on there being biology as part of the environment and so what does look like without life, ^M00:42:09 if there are places out in the world? What other sorts of things do we need to come into this idea of what is life? How do we recognize it, what the boundaries are? ^M00:42:18 There's a whole suite of philosophical, and ethical, and interesting questions that I think can be addressed by humanists and social scientists. ^M00:42:26 And I think Derek and John are going to lead the charge on sort of a future activity that will come out of this dialogue, where we do sort of help imagine the different research questions that could be there for future study. ^M00:42:38 And reaching out to colleagues to sort of help, you know, generate some really interesting thinking in these areas. But maybe you'd like to sort of talk more about that? ^M00:42:47 >> Derek Malone-French: Well, I mean, one thing I could say. I don't want to speak too much as the moderator but maybe this is a good moment for me to sort of characterize the breadth of perspectives that our guests, our participants in the dialogue brought. So, of course, we had a historian. We had philosophers. We had Lynda, who really works in a lot of ways in the interstices between disciplines, the social sciences and the sciences. I'm also a scholar of religion, as well as philosophy and I think we found that, you know, there were both serious ethical considerations that should be brought to bear, not so much in terms of particular ethical views immediately being imposed as the rubric under which the activity should take place but the production of the kinds of conversations, of why the conversation. Not just conversations among experts but conversations that impact public understanding and the public's ability to give feedback on that understanding to the experts, both scientists and non-scientists who are working in this space. But besides the ethical questions, there are a lot of interesting things too like the question about intelligence raises a lot of issues. Linnda, in one of our later conversations today, talked about different kinds of ways of thinking in categorizing the sort of phenomenon entities that we would run into, right? And so, the scale of human life, right, as distinct from the level of intelligence or civilization or other characterizations of human life, what if we found other entities that were at that scale regardless of how we would characterize them in terms of intelligence, right? Or Eric's point about complexity as potentially a distinct variable from intelligence. So they are beyond the ethical which I think seems kind of the obvious, right? There are these other ways in which people are coming at it from the point of view of contemporary history, or contemporary philosophy, or anthropology, or psychology, can help scientists to break out of some of the categorical distinctions that might be preventing them from seeing other possibilities, right. Even therefore helping in the search, right, helping to be able to locate different kinds of interesting objects of study than would be, which is not to say that this is anything unusual about scientists. Philosophers also have our own little categories that need to be burst sometimes and I think that was part of the power of this conversation for those of us who came to it from the humanities is that we were also being profoundly informed by the kinds of things that Sarah, and John, and others were telling us. Jennifer Wiseman, who was mentioned, who were telling us about the advance of discovery, you know, on the scientific level. So I think this is a case after biology represents a field in which disciplinary boundaries are less important. Expertise is important but it's an issue of negotiating multiple expertises in order to provide a perspective that's richer and fuller. Yeah, Tim? >> Tim: The question is one example of a strong interdisciplinary need, I read in the paper about different estimates about when -- well, desires to do a mandate for reaching Mars. And I'm a real promoter of robotic exploration. I'm not so much so sure I want to support a manned one but surely after talking about a manned mission, we're talking about round trip. At least usually, we're thinking of that. And if we're talking about round trip then I think there needs to be real attention as Eric was describing about protocols for that consideration. After all, there could be the possibility of dormant microbes, et cetera on Mars that seem to me this is a serious policy question and I'd like any comments on that. ^M00:46:43 >> Sarah Stewart-Johnson: Well, planetary protection is a very, very important thing to NASA. You know, there's a whole office of planetary protection where folks think about these things and there are specific protocols, you know, about forward contamination. ^M00:46:54 You know, we want to make sure that the spacecraft we sent to Mars are not seeding life there and we want to make sure that the stuff we bring back eventually when we do the sample return is safe. ^M00:47:05 I mean, one thing is pathogenicity typically evolves [inaudible] with a host, you know. So there are these ideas that maybe you wouldn't necessarily have pathogeneric microbes. ^M00:47:13 But you know, John was telling us about this wonderful discovery recently about these retroviruses. You know and there are these what -- you want to describe it here? I haven't read that paper but about the Archaea and the -- ^M00:47:24 >> John Baross: About the -- I'm not quite sure. ^M00:47:32 There's been a series of papers that have come out just in the last couple of months that have changed our perception about who we are and where we came from. And for example, I'll just -- there's been two papers. One that came out that is an organism isolated from a hot -- deep sea hot spring in the Arctic and it has genes in it that were thought only to be found in the kind of complex cells that are in your body. And includes really interesting genes, so you know, our cells have cytoskeleton genes, for example. But there's also in the idea on the first cells that led to complexity was a single cell that could actually engulf another cell which became our energy organelle, for example, the mitochondria. And one of the -- some of the genes that were found in this organism, again, just published a few weeks ago, are genes for that ability to engulf essentially becoming like an amoeba that an actually engulf a cell in it. So here we now have the third paper to come out in the past year that indicates that we don't have these three domains of life, bacteria and these Archaea that are included members of the most extreme organisms on Earth. And the separate lineage that led to us, the Eukaryotes. That now seems that the Eukaryotes are embedded into the Archaea that we are a part of this extreme [inaudible] group that probably has its lineage in some of these extreme environments and the data is becoming overwhelming that that's correct. Another paper that came out three weeks ago, again, looking at a series of almost 40 genes in most organisms that share those genes indicate that the -- probably the first organism on the planet was an Archaea which includes the group that makes methane. ^M00:50:00 And that completely fits everything we have been thinking about based on the Paleo record about what kinds of early organisms would have appeared on Earth. The main energy source early on would be hydrogen. That's what the methane producers like. They have a metabolism in which, and I'm carrying on a little bit here, that most of the early stages of it take place not by the enzymes that we have, protein enzymes but by the actual metal core of the enzyme itself which brings us back to minerals as being the early form of catalytic systems. And so, we are converging now onto what the earliest organisms look like, where we came from and how we are related to these early organisms. But I think from an astrobiology perspective, it really broadens our horizon on what to look for. We now have a better idea of what the conditions are for prebiotic reactions leading to life and what early life looked like. So now, we're really invigorated to go out and we have a better idea of what to look for. Anyway, I didn't mean to take that much time but I told you, never to wind me up [laughter]. >> Eric Schwitzgebel: Could I just briefly address the planetary protection thing that he mentioned? So I could totally be wrong about this. But my impression is that most of the work on the ethics of -- or the practice of planetary protection has focused on contamination and cross-contamination rather than the wider range of issues that seem to arise. In terms of possible interventions, possible damage that could be done that are somewhat separable from just the question of whether earthly organisms colonize in another planet or whether organisms from another planet come back to Earth. Like there are a wide range of issues there that I hope that we have more focus on. ^M00:52:09 >> Sarah Stewart-Johnson: Sure, [inaudible]. What I mean, I didn't -- any meaning there, if you'd like to talk about the planetary protection because it is a very robust effort that is going there. ^M00:52:17 >> That is true but it doesn't actually address the issues that Eric has raised. ^M00:52:19 >> Sarah Stewart-Johnson: Yeah. ^M00:52:20 >> And I think that is a vast area that we can have discussions and there are really -- as we get closer to potentially finding life or sending humans to places to look for it, I think it becomes, it really focuses the necessity to discuss that. So but -- ^M00:52:36 Anyway, so I have a couple of questions or comments. Number one, Eric, I really appreciate you pointing out that it's not clear why people are so excited about it. I don't think it's just simply to be able to find ourselves. I think just the possibility and life in general, even defining it is something that could take weeks to discuss and we, and actually at NASA, we've been discussing it for decades and still don't have a good answer. I think all of your comments about that possibility and the fact that even though we're seeing this tremendous diversity of our [inaudible] of one. It's -- we are still limited in what we can imagine is possible for something that we could consider life. And I think that it's a big enough challenge for us to potentially go somewhere and cover our bases well enough to be able to absolutely -- in fact, I don't think we could ever absolutely definitively say we haven't found life. I think we can say we've haven't found something that looks like us or has these characteristics but to actually categorically say there is no life on Mars, I think, seems near impossible based on the various possibilities of what it could -- what form it could take. And I think by extension, intelligence seems even harder for me to figure out how to identify. So maybe somebody has been contacting us, who knows? I think defining what that would look like, if we can't get exactly what it would be made out of, right, what it might be, its physical shape, something where we can't even describe our own intelligence seems almost mind blowing to me to even consider and feel any security in looking for much less recognizing. So I don't know what you think about that but it's -- we'll be employed for a long time, John [laughter]. >> John Baross: I've been accused of being an alien so [laughter] we can start right here. >> Derek Malone-France: We're actually at a good time now to stop, thank these panelists and change out to the second panel. So I'd ask you all to just hold your seats but give a round of applause to these panelists. ^M00:54:41 [ Applause ] ^M00:54:44 All right, thank you for sticking around and I will introduce our final three panelists. Kelly Smith is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Biological Sciences as well as the Lemon Fellow at the Rutland Institute for Ethics at Clemson University and also on the faculty of the University of South Carolina School of Medicine in Greenville. Mi Gyung Yang Kim, Mimi, is Professor of History at North Carolina State University. And Brian Henning is Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Gonzaga University. And I'll -- let's start? Yeah, go ahead. >> Mi Gyung Kim: So since I'm a historian and these two philosophers have many things to talk about, I said I would go first. And I'm going to confess that this invitation was actually a complete surprise because I'm that teacher in history of science who tells my students that I hope that space exploration by humans don't come. And my reasons are more based on historical facts which is that when the Europeans kind of crossed the Pacific, it nearly killed off the entire population of the natives. So they unleashed the biological warfare without intentions and without being able to imagine what they were doing, right. So because I teach those consequences of the European explorations, I often tell my students that, "Oh, gosh. I hope that we don't do this in the space because if we ever did that, it'll be beyond traumatic." But when the invitation came, I was intrigued by the intellectual challenge that a field like astrobiology would pose and also my obligation to teach my students a bit more up-to-date information about what the field is and where we are going as humanity and things like that. So I was very, I'm very glad that I came here because I got to talk to very sophisticated and intelligent people who filled me in with a lot of information, thoughts, and the challenges, and things like that. So I guess I wanted to just say a couple of things mostly but one is the potential that astrobiology poses as a kind of model of post disciplinary sciences. A lot of the problems that we experience with the climate and so on these days actually were shaped by our kind of professional training that trapped us into very, very narrow fields which do not allow us to be conscious like our medical doctors, right? When you go to see a specialist, you get frustrated that well, he knows one thing about this but he's not able to see what my body feels like as a whole. And that's the way that science has been pursued as disciplines and that kind of preventing us from doing something about the things we could have done like climate changes and what to do about that and things like that. So we are in dire need of this integrating and correlating these different kinds of scientific endeavors so that we can survive and prosper and we can talk about, actually talk about the future. And because astrobiology is a relatively new field, I think it has this tremendous potential to actually kind of set up a model of how do we do a post disciplinary science in a manner that is beneficial to humanity? And in that process, bringing in the humanities and social scientists to talk about the broader implications of science at a relatively early stage, I think is a really, really promising turn. But the challenge does remain that astrobiology is still a field that is in need of finding or defining what the object of inquiry is. Because as the conversations immediately came up in our, amongst ourselves and I think in here as well, when we begin to talk about life in the universe, we begin to ask the what is life. In other words, we could enter a kind of third scientific revolution that changes fundamentally what humans are, what we think humans are especially in the religious sense. So I find that very, very challenging and also I find it as a special kind of opportunity at the same time. That maybe we can do something right this time so that we can do the sciences that the humanity needs. And I find it very encouraging that the leaders of this field are cognizant of the need to conceive and implement a sense of planetary stewardship. I don't know whether that part of the concept is perfect. We had discussions about that concept but still, the awareness that we need to do this, that obligation, that sense of obligation, I think is very, very encouraging. So what I want to do for the remaining time, just like what I like to do is not go on and abstract why but as historians often do, talk about an example from Francis Bacon who imagined this utopian island at the beginning of the construction of the British Empire. ^M00:59:56 The reason why I'm posing this -- I'm sort of delivering this example actually has to do with my kind of -- I don't know, hope, I guess, that if we actually end up doing space explorations -- if we begin to conceive of some kind of empire as we have seen in the Star Wars. Could we actually develop a utopian imagination as the early statesmen were doing in the Early Modern Period after the explorations began. What if we go into space without this utopian imagination? What are we going to end up with? It's sort of what I'm thinking about so I wanted to lay out just briefly about what Bacon's dream was. Francis Bacon, of course, was a guy who rose up from a penniless state to become the highest person in the English government which was a kind of unique time for English history for that kind of opportunity to exist. He was a very political person. But what he did on the side, what he was completely devoted to was his notion of philanthropy so he actually coins the term philanthropy as a project that would benefit humanity, not just by charity; by giving away things that you don't need any more but by completely reformulating the knowledge system. He thought that too much effort was going into speculating upon what divine knowledge should be instead of conceiving the kinds of human knowledge that would be necessary for the humans to prosper on Earth. So his utopian imagination that was published as ^IT New Atlantis ^Normal in 1626, I believe, after he died. Actually, he didn't have the guts, I think, to publish it when he was alive. It's fascinating because it gives us a few elements to think about. Number one, what the strangest land on this island, actually very difficult, impossible actually to find the island, when they land on the island, they have to stay in what's called a stranger's house. And this is kind of quarantine process and what Bacon is afraid of is not just physical contamination on medical reasons but also moral contamination because this was a community that was built on Christian values. Although the island does not have an institutional church, it runs on the Christian values. So they are afraid of the moral contamination so they isolate a strangers but treating them very nicely so that they will be kind of acclimatized medically, physically and also morally to a certain degree. That they will be at least open-minded to what the island was about. And then the island itself is a gigantic sort of laboratory. The entire nation functions as a laboratory because the Christian duty is to serve your brother, to love your brother and serve your brother so what you do as a Christian is not just go to church, pray and so on but you have to work for your brother, brethren, right. So everybody becomes a researcher who contributes to the common good so this is a notion of commonwealth. I could, of course, go on, and on, and on, about this but Bacon's point, I think, really was that if Britain was going to be an empire, this was at a time when Britain was beginning to expand, he wanted it to be a moral empire. That was very different from what they thought the Spanish Empire was this evil empire. So there was this whole sense of developing superior form of knowledge and packaging it as a good product so that it would benefit the humanity and exporting that. But at the same time, it was not going to be a territorial empire. They had no plans of conquering any of the foreign lands. But they did send out periodically these ships that were called merchants of light, beautifully phrased. So their job is to go out and collect the information and bring them back to the center of the island so that they could develop this superior form of knowledge. So it's a very isolationist kind of empire whose mission was to propagate the Christian values on earth. So the reason why I bring up this, as I said, is for us to think about whether we go -- when we go into the space, whether we can actually have the kind of spatial empire, and have a kind of utopian dreams at the same time, or are we just going to go into this [inaudible] mode sort of thing. So and the philosophers can take up that issue, I think [laughter]. >> Derek Malone-France: Thank you. >> Brian Henning: Excellent, thank you all for being here and to Professor Malone-France and Baross for inviting me and the Kluge Center who's been so generous in arranging all of this. It's been really stimulating for me coming from philosophy and environmental studies to speak with scientists who are on the cutting edge of exploring the universe and Dr. Johnson and finding life in the universe is such an exciting and scary prospect at the same time. And so I'm really excited and provoked to think through some of the issues that are involved with this. My own scholarship and teaching is focused oftentimes on ethics, environmental ethics, and thinking through the nature of moral obligation, in particular, trying to wonder what does something have to be like in order to be deserving of moral consideration. And we ask this question here on our own planet and we haven't done a particularly good job of answering that question in a way that's been salubrious for ourselves or the wider biotic community. And I think so this opportunity now before we've really arrived somewhere where there's other forms of life is the perfect time to think through this and to do so with people from the humanities that bring other perspectives in addition to scientific and technical acumen. I'm reminded of a conservationist, Aldo Leopold, more than half a century ago who was contemplating our ethical evolution. He talked about the idea that over time, humans have gradually expanded this sphere of things that are considered within the scope of our moral consideration. We started off just with those individuals in our own tribe and then we extended to those in our city state and eventually many people now think ethics, morality covers all human beings. But Leopold argued that we need to also begin to develop the next stage of our ethical evolution and begin to recognize that we're part of this broader biotic community. And that broader community also deserves respect and consideration in our moral deliberations. So I was thinking about Leopold in the context of astrobiology and realizing that this insight about expanding ethical consideration now extends not just to the biotic community here but potentially a cosmological biotic community that we might be a part of in this broader solar galactic and maybe intergalactic community. And so as I began to be provoked to think about what a cosmocentric ethic might look like, what would it might look like if we started to conceive of moral obligation within that broadest context, for a long time, as Leopold notes, humans have really only thought about how we relate to non-human things in just economic terms. Is it financially viable? Would it make money is about the only limitation that we've used to decide what we should or shouldn't do with non-human things up until recently. But perhaps we're invited to start to think about whether we can move ourselves beyond sort of the conquerors and colonizers to how do we envision a way in which we could think of ourselves as a member? He says, think of ourselves as a plain member and citizen of the biotic community. What would that look like to take our place, a benign presence within both our planets and within maybe the broader cosmos? Finally, one other person came to my mind, the cultural historian and Catholic priest, Thomas Berry, came to mind. He talks about the Great Work with a capital G and a capital W. The Great Work, he thought, was actually trying to think of what that life would be like that moved us from destructive conqueror to benign presence. And he had a very planetary perspective but really, we could put it into that broader cosmic perspective and think about what not just astrobiology would look like but what an astroethics might begin to look like. So as I go back to think of environmental ethics in my own field, I'll start to write and think about that. but it's the most exciting part is simply that change of perspective that astrobiology brings and helps us to realize that life although is special and prevalent here might not be exceptional, what does that mean and how does that change how we view ourselves within the broader universe? And so hopefully, taking this invitation to think through the ethical implications of that now, rather than what we've done in the past which is to wait until we commit some terrible atrocities and then realize we better think through the ethical implications as we've just heard in our history on this is not great. So maybe this time, we could get it right and think through these things, start things with these things now while -- or before we've arrived and found life. So hopefully we can do a better job than we have in the past. >> Kelly Smith: Okay, well thanks everybody for showing up and I appreciate the Kluge Center and NASA's support. This has been a really interesting conference. I tell my students when I give a talk in class that it's okay to be wrong but they should try very hard not to be boring. ^M01:10:02 So that's my goal. I'm going to try to be a little bit more controversial. I'm going to hang a target on myself at least with respect to my colleagues, maybe you guys won't be shooting at me. I don't know. We'll see. I'm going to defend sort of space imperialism. If I were to title for a four-minute talk, I would entitle this as nod to Kubrick and Star Wars, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Empire." And so, I believe in a way that I'm not going to really defend in detail that it's a good thing for human beings to spread out beyond Earth. And I think that in order to do this, we need to exploit the resources that we find in space. And I also believe that non-intelligent extraterrestrial organisms are less morally valuable than humans. I won't say it had zero value but they're less morally valued. Now, in professional ethics circles, that's the kind of thing that people very rarely put that boldly and it actually makes me a little uncomfortable to say that because I can immediately envision all sorts of misunderstandings on your part. But nevertheless, I think it's true. Now, here's a positive argument for this kind of stuff. Human interests would be served by doing this. If you want, I can give you an argument for that. But it should be fairly apparent. Human beings clearly have moral value. In fact, we have very high moral value. We may debate the value of other things but human beings clearly have moral value. And therefore, there's no principle to reason why humans should not benefit ourselves by exploiting what we find in space. And I want to spend a little bit of time talking about a case that we spent some time talking about in our own deliberations. It's sort of a classic case. What do we do with Mars? Should we find that there's microbial life there on the one hand but on the other hand, there's something interesting that we want to do with Mars, terraform it or mine it or something like that. There are people, Chris McKay and Carl Sagan amongst them who've argued that if we find microbial life on Mars, we should essentially quarantine Mars and leave Mars for the Martians. And I argued that's actually an unethical position to stake out and here's a very simple argument along those lines. Not exploiting Mars under those circumstances would constitute a real cost to real human beings with real moral values. Exploiting Mars, depending on how we do it, would impose some cost to microbes which arguably have moral value at all, and if they do, it is certainly less than the moral value that human beings have. And therefore, it would be immoral to refrain at least indefinitely from developing Mars, okay. That doesn't necessarily mean that I'm in favor of paving over Mars at the drop of a hat. But on the other hand, if someone's going to say that we should leave it alone for three billion years, I'm going to have a dispute with that person. Some of the objections that we've talked about a bit in this group, I think, are fairly common objections to this. And so I just want to quickly roll them out and give you my position on them. One is to talk about the history of humanity and how we've done horrible things in the [inaudible] empire in the past that I certainly don't deny that. And I have no interest in repeating that. So if we're talking about intelligent aliens or even sentient aliens, I think we can have an interesting conversation about that. If we're talking about microbial life, I don't think there's anything interesting to be gained from the analogy to our imperial history. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think so. People, I think, oftentimes think that I'm endorsing an anything goes kind of argument here. And that's essentially a slippery slope argument and as any philosopher will point out, if you're going to make a slippery slope argument, it's really important that you established the slipperiness of the slope. And I'm not convinced that there aren't things we could do to control the exploitation of say solar resources such that we wouldn't have horrible misuses. And lastly, there's been a lot of discussion about how we got to make sure that what we do beyond the Earth doesn't perpetuate problematic social structures that we have on Earth. So runaway corporatism or imperfect political systems -- and this -- in my view, is that this is a very common sort of argument to be made about a lot of new technologies. But in general, I don't think it's fair to blame, in this case, a discipline, for a problem it did not create and it's not well positioned to solved, right? So these are legitimate problems but they're not problems that really have anything in particular to do with astrobiology, at least any more so than any new technology or any new discipline does. I think I did that in four minutes so there you go. >> Derek Malone-France: We have actually enough time if there are any questions for one another from this group. I don't know. We may have talked ourselves out with each other [laughter] on the topic as maybe people start to move towards the mike for the Q and A. >> Kelly Smith: We've heard a lot from each other so it probably would be good [laughter] to hear from others. >> Derek Malone-France: All right. >> So what do you think about the last talk and should we -- you think it's -- Mars should be exploited or if we actually have the ability to send humans to Mar, should we protect it if there's life there like we have something like Yellowstone, the national park? >> I would like to address that. >> Yeah. >> It's just this confidence of yours seem to be kind of -- I don't think we really have a reason to have that, you know. Human intelligence and moral sense that looking at the history of what we have done is just -- I just don't see the reason that we could just go to a planet and confidently colonize them. First of all, because we probably, as it was discussed in the last panel, we probably wouldn't recognize many forms of intelligence because given our very limited senses. So we don't really know what we would do. I mean, kind of when I was listening, it just reminded me of Gary Larson cartoon where there's guys welcoming the aliens who are coming over UFO and shaking something that looks like a hand and the text underneath was that, "and Jack just doomed the future of the Earth by shaking the leader's head." So I just -- yeah, I kind of think that -- thinking that we have this moral plateau and our intelligence is superior. I don't see why you think so and I don't see it happening here. So I'm just very curious of yeah, it's like -- I think if your idea would be followed, that could lead to very serious consequences because we don't really know what we are doing and we don't really know who we are. So like with this attitude, we kind of can totally mess it up also for ourselves because we could enter a situation that would be potentially dangerous for us. >> Kelly Smith: Okay, well so your question is, sort of two thrust. One is a precautionary question like how can you be so confident? Well, I didn't say that we should go to Mars tomorrow and start mining it, right? So if we find evidence of microbial life on Mars, I'd be perfectly happy to talk about something like, you know, a 100-year moratorium so we could study it and then even when we do start using the planet, I think there need to be regulations in place. So it's not as if I think that -- and that can all be debated like we'd have to really sit down and talk about what these life forms are like and what would really damage their ecosystems, et cetera, et cetera. That's one issue. The other issue has to do with why do I think intelligent life is more valuable. There's no quick answer to that question. But I will say this. That is a very old and venerable tradition in ethical theory, right. So it's not like it's a crazy new thing that I just dreamed up. And I think it's true that most people including most professional ethicists would find that true. Now that doesn't mean it is true, right? Maybe we're all deluded but that's the best evidence I can offer you in 30 seconds. >> Yeah, well it's -- judging intelligence by our own intelligence is kind of tricky and suspect. Yeah, I would like to see something more intelligent to actually have their consent [laughter]. >> Kelly Smith: That's, I mean, that's the problem that you're always going to have. I mean, all we have to work with is what we have to work with, right? So if the worry is going to be so strong that the argument is going to be well, if we could be wrong, we shouldn't take action then we're not going to do anything in space, right? We shouldn't even be orbiting satellites because maybe there's life in the [inaudible] orbit and we're killing it. I mean, I can't prove that that's not the case. I can give you reasons not to think it's -- >> [Inaudible] the other end. I wasn't talking about that. I mean, I was just talking about confidently going there with the intention of exploiting it would be something else. >> Kelly Smith: I think there's plenty of historical reason to be cautious about our own understanding and to recognize how much we don't know. It doesn't mean that we have to be so cautious as to then say, well, the universe is off limits either. So I take your point very well. I think an appropriate level of humility in face of our own depth of ignorance while respecting the fact that we're also not completely blind is you know, so it's just that we have -- if we learned from our history, we know that we've been very confident of knowing that what we're doing is right. We're going to go and fix the situation. This is one of the reasons why I was disagreeing with the stewardship language very slightly was simply that some of the stewardship language implies that we're in charge of. If we're stewards of the planet, we're in charge of it, right? And I think that sort of -- if that's what we mean by stewardship, well that usually leads to more damage, not to more that our history on that is not good. ^M01:20:04 So maybe what we should do instead of think of stewardship of ourselves, not of stewardship of the planet, that we need to be better stewards of our own impact on our own community and our role within the world and within the cosmos. And that a very large dose of humility in the face of our own ignorance which is receding, but not as fast as our technology and our ability to affect. Our technology is so powerful that it outstrips and combined with our own confidence, outstrips. We oftentimes cause damage and only realize it after the fact. So how can we be more humble but still not stifle scientific advance? It's got to be that more careful balance. I don't disagree with a lot of what you were saying actually. >> No. >> Kelly Smith: I just wouldn't put it as boldly as you [laughter]. I'm trying to be interesting. >> I'm trying to distance ourselves [laughter]. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Kelly Smith: Yeah. >> That was a very [inaudible] historical [inaudible]. >> Kelly Smith: Yes. >> Of confidence. >> Derek Malone-France: Thank you. >> I would be interested in hearing a description of what you think would be acceptable exploitation? It's not really clear to me exactly what this would look like? And any other ethical implications, what's the boundary there? >> Kelly Smith: Is that directed to me or -- >> I was trying to leave that open for everyone. >> Kelly Smith: Okay, why don't we let somebody else speak up first and then I'll -- >> Brian Henning: I wouldn't defend that term. You used exploitation. I was just -- it's too loaded for me so I think if it's actual exploitation, it would potentially be definitionally problematic. So I would think there would be forms of interaction which wouldn't be exploitation which could be morally defensible, morally permissible. We destroy organisms on this planet and we claim, we can claim that we have moral justification for doing so. I think we could do similar arguments in the case of other forms of life potentially. Exploitation potentially would be -- we may get into exactly what we mean by that but it would be problematic potentially in principle. >> Derek Malone-France: Right. Mimi, you want to say anything? >> Mi Gyung Kim: Me? Oh, I don't have actually a lot of confidence in our ability to predict what's going to happen when we encounter alien organisms. But the reason why I brought up Francis Bacon was because what he does is essentially to dream up this entirely new scheme of knowledge that will help us to get there. So that's, I think, what I'm hoping that astrobiology as a field would do, to dream up, to conjure up, to map how we do this, right, before we get there to talk about what we do with what we find sort of thing. So it's the path of pursuing that knowledge, that would kind of grow our confidence is, I guess, what I'm looking at this point. >> Brian Henning: Just one thing to add before turning it over to [inaudible]. I think part of the problem is that we approach the question from the standpoint of exploitation and resources. There might be that we're encouraged to reduce it down into the simplest resource questions in order to justify our expenditure of resources which makes me sad that we couldn't justify the exploration for the pursuit of pure scientific knowledge and curiosity. Why we need to sort of say, "Oh no, don't worry. We'll make money on this deal. It'll be good." So I think it's unfortunate that we tend to, we encourage ourselves to think of it in terms of the practical usefulness which leads to morally problematic uses. >> Kelly Smith: And on that note, I will make an argument for practical utility. So I don't know enough about Mars to really know the extent to which these kinds of things are true. But let's talk about something like mining an asteroid. So when we get the technology to bring an asteroid into near-Earth orbit and mine it, it's going to have resources that are -- if you want to put it economically, they're worth trillions of dollars and they would solve lots of problems for lots of human beings on Earth who are now living in a closed economy. And unless there's something particularly unique about the asteroid or some danger that would be posed to human beings or there's life on the asteroid, I don't see any compelling reason that we would not do that, bring the asteroid into near-Earth orbit and mine it until it's no longer there. >> Is that the sort of example that would have ethical issues -- other people? >> Kelly Smith: Well, there are environmental ethicists. I imagine Brian is one of them who would say that you are destroying not only resources but a unique object of our solar system that you will never be able to recover. Is that, I don't want to put words in your mouth. >> Brian Henning: Yeah, I'm not sure. I haven't thought through the asteroid example in particular. I think it's -- I think it's more complicated than the life question. I think the microbial life is a more interesting complicated question. An asteroid object that's flying around our galaxy, our solar system that we could rope is a little bit less complicated. I would want to extend the analogy of when it's appropriate to dramatically change a natural landscape and why. What are the -- you know, I think they're not zero ethical implications but I also think they're not as significant as when I want to destroy living organisms or a sentient organism. So again, I don't think that we're totally disagreeing. The problem, I'm more worried that we're not using this as an opportunity to rethink more dramatically whether or not we're pursuing forms of happiness and the good life that are not particularly enriching for a good number of people. So we're sort of encouraging -- trying to perpetuate a form of life which is -- which we could do better than what we -- so the exploitation model even for those who are fortunate enough to be winning at that model aren't as ritually happy as we might otherwise be. So why not use this as an opportunity rather than to perpetuate that model of happiness to rethink it? So it's not about for me about locking up natural places and just keeping hands off. It's more of re-envisioning what humans could become within a broader, you know, human earthly context and cosmic context. >> John Baross: Okay, at the basic level, we are -- we really want to search for life. And in our solar system, it's not just Mars. It's some of the icy moons and particularly [inaudible] an icy moon of Saturn. And on Mars, we are searching for the kind of environment and environmental conditions that might actually perpetuate life in the past or in the present. If we find evidence that there may be life there, we're going to examine it. There's no question about it. We're not going to destroy that environment. We're not going to try to alter it. But I think the science payload from finding a second form of life whether it be on Mars or one of the icy moons almost outweighs everything. What we can learn from that, and I don't think we can -- there's just no way we can stop that from happening but we have planetary protection issues. We have other issues. We're not going to destroy that environment. We're not going to contaminate it with Earth-type life so as to compromise that study. But I tell you, as a microbiologist that will be the most exciting thing in my life for evidence of a second form of life even in our solar system. And I would do everything possible to find out as much information as I could about that microbial community period. >> Derek Malone-France: John would be very excited about that, trust me [laughter]. >> John Baross: So that's it. >> Thank you. >> Oh, if we do eventually go out there, I think it would behoove us to take very seriously Buddha's precepts of respect and compassion for all sentient life, not just intelligent life as opposed to the Western Faustian urge to dominate and conquer nature which is really [inaudible] political imperialistic modus. And if we're, and just as an addendum to that, speaking of ethics, there's no logical positive correlation between intelligence and moral behavior. So Stephen Hawking says we should not be sending out messages because it might be picked up by the wrong sorts of people or persons. >> Kelly Smith: Yeah, let me just comment real quick. I don't think -- I certainly don't mean to imply that life is not morally valuable. Why I wouldn't actually argue on other grounds. I'm not going to get into right now that all life is inherently more valuable than all non-life, right? But I think that a lot of times, when you get into conversations about ethics like this, people have a tendency to talk about something very vague and say, "We should value sentient life," which I agree. But that doesn't solve zero sum questions, right. If you're trying to decide whether you strip mine Mars or leave it to the microbes, telling me that the microbes have value does not really help me solve that problem because what I want to know is how much value do they have and how do I weigh the computing interests? And in order to do that, you have to have some sort of relative scale and I would argue that intelligent creatures are at the top of that scale which doesn't, by the way, just mean humans. One of the neat things about astrobiology is that it allows me to say I'm not an anthropocentrist necessarily. If there are intelligent aliens out there, they count too, right. >> Brian Henning: Just to quickly add to that. ^M01:29:58 It's -- the zero sum games in ethics are frequently treated at the surface level of where we're given the idea that you choose between this or that which is usually a false dichotomy or a false dilemma. Moving from a hierarchical description of degrees of value to the claim that because something's higher in that value hierarchy therefore it automatically always outweighs things that are lower regardless of what it's for, I think is actually needing more scrutinizing. That just because I'm higher, doesn't mean that therefore my interest in building another strip mall automatically outweighs the value of things, maybe that stand of trees. >> Kelly Smithy: I would certainly agree with that. >> Brian Henning: So we need to then say not only how much value is there but also what are my interests that I'm trying to achieve. So the zero sum can be creating dilemmas that are -- you know, railroad track switching is problematic. >> Kelly Smith: Right. >> Brian Henning: But other than that, I think those hierarchies can be useful and necessary in making decisions. We don't want to pretend as though there are no degrees of value. >> What do you think about the international community's protection of Antarctica and protecting it for science and against exploitation? >> Kelly Smith: I have no problem with protecting Antarctica. I think if I were in charge, I would also protect Antarctica. Now, things get more interesting if you tell me A, we've pretty much learned everything that we know there is to learn about Antarctica. Let's suppose we impose a 200-year moratorium and people go up there and study it to death. Now there's always a possibility that we've missed something, right? And then B, there is, you know, a new form of energy that's buried underneath the shelf in Antarctica and mining it would solve a lot of energy problems. At that point, I think we should have a robust conversation about whether or not we should go mine Antarctica. And although I'm willing to have conversations about how we could minimize the damage and whether or not that's even worthwhile, if someone were to tell me at that point that we should keep the moratorium on development of Antarctica, I think that would begin to be an unethical position to hold. That's actually unethical because it's harming people. >> Mi Gyung Kim: Well, I don't really understand how ethics gets into the scheme because political economy is a very complex system. The fact that something is valuable to us in the current political economy does not mean that it'll always be valuable. So for example, when the Spanish Empire, you know, went crazy for gold and the kinds of things they did to the natives just to get the gold, it was just so horrible. But they thought if they had more gold, they would be the richest and most powerful nation. But what it ends up being is that they didn't actually have an economy they could view with that quantity of gold. So the political economists are squeezing their brain to figure out how do we actually conceive and develop an economy that is based on the quantity of gold? And they failed. And this is partly why the Spanish Empire declines because the transition from the credit-based economy of the Mediterranean to the gold-based economy was a radical transition. They were not used to it. They had to invent a completely new political economy. So that was not an automatic process. So the fact that something, some metal in the meteorite might have a value in our current political economy does not mean that it'll have that inherent value, right? So I think that we need more historicized and more sort of accurate understanding of what economy is. Economy is really in essence human relations. Its labor relations. Its product relations. It's not money relations, right? So our sort of notion that this mercantilist economy is the only system that is valid, true and therefore anything that contributes to that is going to be beneficial to humanity, I think is a bit problematic, although I'm not an economist. >> Kelly Smith: Right, I would say two things. So the question about whether or not there's a hidden cost there that we don't appreciate is a legitimate question, right? So if I assume that it's valuable, I'm assuming that experts have thought about this carefully and we really believe it's valuable. It's not something that's going to be an [inaudible]. It's not a fad or something like that, right? And the second thing I would say is again, we can have a debate about what the best economic system to set up is but given that we live in a capitalist economic system, I would point out that money has some moral value indirectly. It's not that money itself has moral value. But if we can make the economy say of the United States function more smoothly and we have more assets, that means in the United States, that more people would get healthcare. I think that's a moral good. And so although the money itself is not important, it allows us to do things that are important. Now, maybe we'd be better off to set up a Marxist society where these kinds of issues -- I don't know but like -- but it seems to me that's a question that has nothing to do with astrobiology. That's a question about political theory and economic theory and to raise it in a context of astrobiology, unless there's some particular connection, is a little bit of a red herring. >> John Baross: I just want to make one comment. I think these organisms are very anthropocentric and it's really about a discussion of our survival [inaudible]. And I would actually like a broader discussion that brings human existence into our whole, not only our whole existing ecosystem but throughout Earth history's ecosystem. We are part of a continuum. We continue to be that. And to actually put a base of philosophy on our primal importance is something I can't buy. >> Kelly Smith: But John, I didn't say that nothing else was important. >> John Baross: No, but that didn't -- but it's a really very anthropocentric argument. >> Kelly Smith: I didn't really get into it but I'll say this -- >> John Baross: Even resource, exploiting resources, exploiting the Antarctic is you know, why do we maintain those environments? Why are they important? >> Kelly Smith: We maintain those environments for a number of reasons like there are all kinds of [inaudible]. >> John Baross: [Inaudible] maybe? >> Kelly Smith: Yes! >> John Baross: Okay. >> Kelly Smith: But think of what you just did, John. You just appealed to human interests which I'm fine with. Right, so you can appeal to human interest in terms of scientific discoveries. You can appeal to it in terms of esthetics. So there are people who appreciate the fact that there's an unspoiled Antarctic wilderness and that's a moral value, right? So it goes in the hopper but it has to be weighed against other kinds of things. And I don't like the anthropocentric label. And one of the reasons I would say that is -- one question I've been asked many times by my students when I talk about this kind of thing is "Well, what if it turns out that there's some hyper intelligence out there somewhere in the galaxy that has a different order of intelligence from human beings? Would it follow from that, that it has higher level moral value?" And if I'm really convinced that that's true, I'm willing to bite that bullet and say, "Yes, it does." Now, for someone who admits that, I think it's hard to argue I have an anthropocentric system if I'm willing to have humanity as a whole, step aside for another civilization. I'm maybe rationocentric but I'm not anthropocentric. >> John Baross: The environmentalists have been -- environmental ethicists have been sort of debating about this for 40 years now. And part of the debate is over whether or not -- not just anthropocentrism in the sense that whether we invariably perceive the world from our own vantage point, we invariably do, but the bigger question of value is whether or not we are the sole value creators. Whether value is entirely relative or whether or not and this is why I think life is so interesting in astrobiology, why we're especially curious about life is there's -- and I think you can defend it intellectually that there's also a visceral reaction to the idea that life has value. That life out there would have some value, not just value to me because I'm curious about it, but also maybe it might be intrinsically valuable. And this is part of the fun debate is whether or not the idea of intrinsic value makes sense or not. From the economist's standpoint, no. All right, all value is created. It's all subjective. It's I value this, therefore it has value and the environmentalists want to say, well yes we're value creators but we're also value discoverers. We also come to a world, a universe full of value and so yes, I can give it value but I also find it already having value prior to arrival and I think given the age and size of the universe that that's a more respectful, appropriate default position. That the default should be in the universe 13-and-a-half billion years old and a planet four-and-a-half billion years old and we're a couple of hundred thousand or so years old that it's more appropriate to think of a universe that's full of value and potentially life. And that we're a particularly interesting form. >> Kelly Smith: Sure, I agree. >> John Baross: But we're not, we're not unique perhaps in that. And so, if that were the case now, just to look back to the resource usage question, I think, is a real one because if we have value and other things have value, we try and maintain our own life. It seems like we need to figure out a way to have a form of life which isn't going to require infinite resource use and extraction. But if we set up a way of life for ourselves that's going to already require us to bring resources from the outside -- so until we can figure out a way to stabilize our population, stabilize our consumption, we're going to invariably run into this problem of very limited resource usage. So we'll have no choice if we keep growing but to continue to do that. So at some point, I would hope rather than just say, "Well, now that we can explore other planets, we'll just -- we don't need to modify our habits." I'd rather figure out a way of stabilizing our own form of life that could be -- ^M01:40:00 So therefore we could explore and engage without having to colonize and appropriate everything in our path personally. But I partly think that because I think I could lead to in fact, richer forms of life all by themselves. But that's part of a debate for me is not just assuming that obviously it's growth or -- obviously, we going to grow. Capitalism requires it. Infinite growth is obviously the case. I'm like, well why? I'm not sure that that's the case. It's not. Why would it be good to try and pursue infinite growth? Why should it obviously -- >> Kelly Smith: I agree with most of what you say. The only thing I'll add to that is I think that the point of sustainability is that we live in a closed environment, right? We live in a closed economy. We only have so many resources. I'm not at all convinced that there's any reason to think that moving resources from an asteroid to Earth, that's what you're doing. You're not destroying them. You're just moving them from one place to another and making a different use of them. I'm not at all convinced that that's a moral evil. And it would fundamentally change the reasons for thinking that sustainability is important. That doesn't mean that we should therefore not worry about sustainability at all [laughter]. But it does mean that sustainability becomes less important if we have access to resources that will carry us through for -- I'm asking calculations that they are enough resources to carry the human civilization through for 20,000 years at current expenditure rates. It's just an asteroid belt. If that's true, then sustainability may be important but it's not nearly as important as it is right now when we have source of extra resources. >> Derek Malone-France: All right, thank you all. Thank you for an interesting conversation. Thank you for the good questions and for being here. Thank you again for the Kluge Center hosting this. ^M01:41:49 [ Applause ] ^M01:41:52 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E01:41:58