Guest
Jay Richards is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in Heritage’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation. He is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the co-author of “The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery,” which was recently re-released in a 20th anniversary edition.
Links
- Privileged Planet (website)
- Jay Richards X account
Transcript
Eric Sammons:
What is our place in the universe? Was planet Earth created specifically for intelligent human life or are we a cosmic accident? Today we’ll discover why Earth is truly a privileged planet. Hello, I’m Eric Sammons, your host, editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine. Welcome to Crisis Point. Before we get started, I just want to encourage people to hit that like button, subscribe to the channel and let other people know about it. Also, we only do this two times a year. We’re doing it right now, which is our fundraiser, our twice a year fundraiser. Go to crisismagazine.com, you’ll get a pop-up that will ask you to donate. We really do appreciate any donations. All of our content is free, but obviously it’s not free to produce. So we do appreciate that. And we promise not to bug you until probably maybe May or June, and we’ll give you about six months before we bug you again.
But we are doing great on our fundraiser. We have a great matching grant, $75,000, and we’re getting closer and closer to matching that. So I appreciate everybody who has already donated. Okay. So today our guest is Jay Richards. He is a returning guest. We always love to have him. I feel like he has a plethora of different interests and all of them seem to align with mine, so it works out. He is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society. He’s a senior fellow to Discovery Institute and the co-author of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in The Cosmos is designed for Discovery. Oh, my microphone there. It just came out with the 20th anniversary edition. I had the old edition and Jay was nice enough to send me the 20th anniversary edition, and it’s an excellent book. We want to talk about the themes of that book today. So welcome to the program, Jay.
Jay Richards:
Eric, thanks so much. And yeah, I was looking forward to doing this because I know you’re an amateur astronomer yourself, so you’re interested in this stuff.
Eric Sammons:
Yes, exactly. I’ll try to control getting too geeked up, I guess, for those who aren’t as much. But yeah, no, I take that back. I’ll get geeked up.
Jay Richards:
That’s what this is for.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, right, exactly. What’s the point of podcasts if I can’t get geeked up about it? So I want to start with something I think you start with in the book, which is this year in 2024 in America, we were able to have a total solar eclipse. And I was very fortunate, it was over my house. I did not have to go anywhere. I barely was in it, so I didn’t have a long time. I only had about a little bit over a minute. But I was weighing, okay, would the extra three minutes or so make up for the fact that it’s going to be a disaster driving somewhere in the trap and everything? My mom literally… She was still alive at this point and she was only about 12 minutes away. She was going to come over and she was outside of it. That’s how close we were to the edge. She was going to come over and it was all backwards to her house. And literally, she got about a half mile and it was so backed up. She just turned around. And she’s like, “It’s not…”
And I felt bad because what I should have done was picked her up hours beforehand, brought her over and then… But that’s on me. But anyway, the point is the eclipse was awesome. I had read so much. I read your book, The Privileged Planet and other things about how great an eclipse is. But everybody said, “You have to experience it.” And-
Jay Richards:
That’s right.
Eric Sammons:
Everybody’s right. Because it’s so true. It’s so different when you experience it than when you read about it or see a video of it or pictures of anything like that. My wife, she’s a little bit more better at expressing herself than me, but she really was like, “There was something about the light that shows during Eclipse.” That she felt like it was almost like the transfiguration light. It’s this pure light that you just never experience and there’s just something about it. And I’m leading to a question probably at some point, but it was such a great experience. Now you went to Dallas, right? To experience-
Jay Richards:
Yeah. And so the very first chapter of our book is about eclipses, and the argument in the book is that the things that make a planet habitable in the universe, those ingredients you need to build a planet that can host life of really any sort, those are also the best places overall for doing science and making scientific discoveries so that observers find themselves as the best place for observing. And solar eclipses are figure prominently, I would say, in the book because we take it for granted that our moon and sun, their apparent size is the same in the sky, that these two completely different bodies, but they’re very round visually from where we are and these things align. We shouldn’t take that for granted. My co-author, Guillermo Gonzalez, years ago, right before we started this book, actually did a study of the other planets, the 65 major moons around the other planets, and found that really the only place in the solar system where you get these is right here on Earth.
But as you said, you can spend… And we do spend a lot of time on the mechanics of that, but the experience of a total solar eclipse, you just can’t replicate it or describe it. And I very often will hear people saying, “Oh, yeah. Well, we saw most of it.” And I say, “Look, if you saw 99% the differences between day and night, you just didn’t see it because it’s only when you get the disk of the moon covering the bright part of the sun called the photosphere that you can actually look at it with the naked eye.” And so what happens is that just as it passes into what’s called totality, suddenly you take the glasses off, you can look straight at the sun and the moon. And now all of a sudden you can see the solar corona, the outer part of the solar atmosphere, which is, it’s very ghostly and ethereal. You cannot see it when you’re seeing the bright part of the sun, but it looks very much like an eye in the sky.
You’ve got this black pupil circle in the middle, and then you’ve got what looks like a gray iris and then darkness. In Texas, we were in Waxahachie, Texas, south of Dallas. Specifically picked that place and Discovery Institute hosted an event because it’s right in the center of totality. So we had four and a half minutes. I can tell you, you get four minutes, your eyes adjust to things. And so you’re seeing the darkness, you’re seeing the outer atmosphere of the sun that you cannot normally see. We were able to pick out the three planets actually, and a couple of bright stars. But what’s weird about it, unlike during the night where everything’s dark, if you look in every direction around the horizon, 50 miles out, the sun is shining there. You can’t describe it. Absolutely everyone that experiences it directly, I’ve never heard someone say, “Well, that was cool.” It’s always like, “That’s one of the wildest things I’ve ever experienced in my life.” And it really is.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, there’s just something very surreal about it. My daughter actually lives in Dallas and so she was keeping me updated. There was worries that it was supposed to be cloudy potentially.
Jay Richards:
And it was.
Eric Sammons:
And she said just literally, it was almost like God just said, “Okay, I’ll take away the clouds for a minute so you can have it.” It was amazing.
Jay Richards:
And in fact, I should probably tell this story, I’ve never told it publicly, but here it goes. We picked Waxahachie because of where it was, we thought it’s high probability of being sunny. And as you said, it was socked in in the Dallas area. I mean, it wasn’t just cloudy, it was murky. And we had to drive from our hotel in Dallas that morning for the Eclipse. And Guillermo and I, my co-author, we were supposed to do running commentary for this crowd of 750 people that came talking about what they were going to see. Well, at 9:00 that morning, there was nobody seeing anything. I was seriously panicked. I was in a depressive funk. I couldn’t get out of the car and my wife’s like, “Okay. Well, I’m just going to go pray a rosary around the area.” And so she did that. And so I must confess, I was so afraid that all these people had come all this way.
I promised God that I would do something, a very long fast. I don’t want to over-describe it. But I’m Moses or something. I’m just bargaining with God this way, anything. But it was a big promise. And so as you said, it was cloudy and all I really prayed for was that people would be able to see the totality. But even right as the eclipse started, right at the edge, the sky parted. It was so clear that we ended up with sunburn when it was all over. And then the next day in Dallas, my daughter’s University of Dallas in Dallas, it’s so murky at noon that the streetlights were on. So that was like, that’s the backstory, that’s what’s happening. And then the skies parted. Honestly, it was amazing.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, it is. Now the thing is, yes, we’re super geeked up about this. It’s very exciting. People who have experienced it know what we’re talking about. And people haven’t, there’s not another one in America for a long time, but it goes… My daughter, literally the one in Dallas, is literally thinking about going to Iceland for the… I think it’s in 2026 or something like that.
Jay Richards:
Yeah. That would be a cool place to see it.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. And that’s why I thought too. But it’s more than that. You mentioned that it’s a, quote-unquote, coincidence that the moon is visually the same size as the sun in the sky. And so we can have this opportunity where it’s literally just right there, perfect. Because if it was bigger, then it would cover up. We wouldn’t see things as the corona, all that stuff. If it’s smaller, then it’s just a partial eclipse, which is nothing. But it’s exactly right. But now what’s amazing is in scientists have actually used that to make scientific discoveries because of that. And I know the most famous one is I think 1919, is it?
Jay Richards:
Yeah, that’s right.
Eric Sammons:
From proving Einstein. So why don’t you explain a little bit how an eclipse scientist actually use it to prove scientific theories?
Jay Richards:
Yeah, absolutely. And so just to back up a bit, and so our book is about this remarkable… I think it’s a conspiracy rather than a coincidence. But the remarkable things that if you look at the things you need for a habitable planet, it turns out those provide the amazing opportunities for doing science. So in this case, one of the main things you need on a planet in order for it to be able to host life is it needs first of all to be around the star with an energy source, but to be the right distance from your host star. So the Goldilocks zone, not too hot, not too cold, too close. Your Venus, right? Is eight or 900 degrees Fahrenheit, slightly too far away, your barren Mars. So that tells you, you got to be just the right distance for a planet to be able to have liquid water on its surface to host life.
Well, now that’s not surprising that that’s where we are, obviously. If we weren’t there, I wouldn’t be here talking about it.
Eric Sammons:
That’s right.
Jay Richards:
But think about that. So when you get to Goldilocks zone for the right distance for life, that’s going to set the size of your sun in the sky. Another thing that you need for complex life on a planet like ours is it turns out you need a large well-placed moon like we have. If the moon were not there, the tides wouldn’t do what they need to do. The Earth would wobble on its axis erratically, it would just be really catastrophic for surface life. But so when you get a moon in the right spot and the right size, that’s going to set its size in the sky. And when you get those two things, you get totally eclipses so that these two things needed for observers on the planet, right? Also set up conditions for this cool thing, eclipses. And then as you said, eclipses aren’t just cool, they are like natural experiments set up for astronomers to be able to test things.
The most famous example of this is the eclipse expeditions in 1919. So Einstein had proposed his general theory of relativity, which is basically a theory of gravity, but in some ways it’s a theory of everything, how space, time, gravity work in the physical universe at large scales. And so one of his predictions is that if he were right… So rather than thinking of gravity as an attractive force, but rather thinking of massive bodies as bending and curving this thing that Einstein called spacetime, if he was right, then you should be able to detect the movement of starlight passing near a massive body like the sun. And so to be able to detect this, you’d really need a very specific point of light, and it would need to be passing right near the edge of the sun. And so the experiment would be, okay, you map where the stars should be when the sun’s not in that part of the sky at a different time. And then during the eclipse, you map the same stars.
And if the starlight near the edges has been curved, it would look like the star moved to a different spot. That’s the basic idea. And so he actually made that prediction. Eddington tested it, confirmed it, and then astronomers have continued confirming it since then. But this is huge because it was a breakthrough, this discovery for cosmology, which really made cosmology, in many cases, a science, which some scientists doubted. And can you really talk about the universe as a whole? That’s just one example. There’s several other examples, including helping us unlock what stars are like, what stars are made of. And so you get this thing that’s a really cool… It’s like a tag, right? It’s a clue that, okay, look really closely at what produces eclipses, the way it connects to both science and to life. And you’re going to discover this remarkable correlation between life and discovery that we talk about in the book.
Eric Sammons:
Isn’t it also true that the existence of Jupiter in our solar system basically allows us to have life here? I can’t remember now if I learned it from your book or from another book, but you might have mentioned it there. But the idea that the existence of Jupiter, which is this large gas planet, and somehow it though protects us and basically keeps… Without it life probably wouldn’t exist on Earth. So can you explain that a little bit why that is?
Jay Richards:
Absolutely. Yeah. And so I mean, most folks know that the Earth’s the only planet that we know in the solar system that has any kind of life on it. We like to try to find it somewhere else, haven’t been able to do this. But you’ve got Mercury, Venus, and Earth. So moving from the sun. And then from Earth, you’ve got Mars and you’ve got the asteroid belt. Then you have these two gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn. Now of course, astrologers have been telling us for thousands of years, I guess, that somehow these planets play a role in our existence. I don’t really think their theory of how that works is correct, but it looks like they do play a crucial role because they are like sentinels. So of course our solar system, after Saturn, you get Uranus and Neptune and maybe Pluto if you count it. And then what you’ve got is all these comets. Okay. Well, these comets are also part of the solar system and they are in this very elliptical orbit around the sun.
So they visit our part of the solar system, our neighborhood, every so often, and then they go way out like this. Now those are cool to see in the sky, but you don’t want large comets bombarding you, ideally. They have this unfortunate tendency to sterilize life on a planet. So imagine what would happen if we took these two gas giants, these big gravitational wells out of the solar system. A lot more of those comets would visit our neighborhood and we would encounter it. As it is, they take a lot of hits for us. You could think of these gas giants that are like the sentinels that protect the inner part of the solar system from too many comets.
Eric Sammons:
One of the things I realized from this book is that the vast number of things that need to be true in order for not just life, but intelligent life to exist on a planet. And so we talked about the moon, we talked about distance from the sun. Some of them are the habitable zone. It’s like, well, of course, I mean, where else would we live? We can’t live anywhere else. That doesn’t prove anything on one level by itself-
Jay Richards:
Yeah, by itself. Yeah.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. But then there’s so many of these things. There’s different cosmological constants, different variables. What are some of them that make it where if they were just slightly different, we couldn’t live here?
Jay Richards:
Well, so Guillermo and I, in the book, we distinguish what we call the universal or global factors, the things that are true everywhere in the universe. So for instance, the value of the gravitational force constant, it’s the same everywhere. The four fundamental constants are… They call it the gravitational, the electromagnetic, the strong and weak nuclear forces. You think of these as forces that are relevant at different size scales. Simple way to think of it. Those have to be very precisely set to have a universe that has planets, that has elements, that has galaxies. You change the gravitational force, for instance. The universe could expand forever and no atoms would be able to form or it re-collapse right after the initial expansion. So those are the universal things and there’s a bunch of examples of that.
And then they’re the local things you need. So even in a universe fine-tuned for complex life at the universal scale, as I said, so you need the right kind of stable star with the right kind of energy. You need a rocky planet like the Earth. So gas giants don’t work. You need that planet, as we said, to be the right distance from its host star. You need things like the large well-placed moon. You need these planetary neighbors. The planet itself needs to be composed really basically Earth size because it needs to be large enough to be able to hold an atmosphere, but not so large that it holds in things like a bunch of hydrogen. You need a liquid iron core like we have that’s working the way it is to create this magnetic field around the planet, which protects it. You need the right kind of atmosphere in that planet. And then you need to be in the right kind of galaxy that has heavy elements, which astronomers call metals.
So everybody that learned the periodic table in the seventh grade, so remember it’s hydrogen and helium and a bunch of others. And so what astronomers usually do, they go, “Hydrogen, helium, metals.” Right? That simplifies it, everything else. Well, you need those things to build bodies, to build rocky planets. And so there’s going to be an ideal place within the right kind of galaxy, not too close to the dangerous center, but not too far from the center because if you’re in the outer edge, it’s mostly just hydrogen and helium. So there’s a sweet spot at galactic habitable zone midway between the center and the edge of a galaxy, and probably between the spiral arms, which is of course where we are. That is just a thumbnail sketch of some of the ingredients you need to build a single habitable planet. So when people say, “Well, universe is so big. There are maybe 300 billion stars in the Milky Way, maybe there’s a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. This shouldn’t be that hard.”
Well, that’s true. But if you need lots of variables and each of them has a small probability, you can very quickly swamp all of the probabilistic resources, certainly of our galaxy. And so we think already that it’s unlikely there would be more than one habitable planet in the galaxy just based on the statistical calculations that we treat it as an open question. Now, that’s all the stuff you need for habitability by itself though, as you said. So well, maybe we just are the lucky recipients of a cosmic lottery. It was possible that could happen somewhere. It’s the one place it happened. The observers are looking around thinking, “Gosh, things look well suited for us.” But our argument is that, okay, yeah, by itself, that’s not a great design argument. But now what if I were to tell you that that also sets up the best conditions overall for doing science. In other words, the most habitable places are also the places that are most science conducive.
And what’s the best explanation for that? Materialism doesn’t have an explanation for it. Theism certainly does. If the universe is designed for discovery, this is exactly what we would expect. And in fact, that’s what we argue for.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, and that’s a great point. And I think that’s why I really think the value of this book is that there’s not theological arguments in it, but it really does support a lot of theological arguments. I know I’ve done a lot of reading of books in this genre that a lot of them are, as you know, are not written by theists, definitely not Catholics and not theists. Although some are. And one of the things that you see is the recurring theme, I kept noticing it over and over in all these different books, is the prominence of the Copernican principle. And this is this idea, Copernicus is famously the person from the 16th century, the scientist, Catholic, by the way, of course, who basically said that the Earth is not the center of the solar system, that the sun is.
But then what’s happened is that from this, there’s this narrative, there’s the narrative you hear, which is we always thought we were the center of the universe and we’re all that matters. And then all of a sudden Copernicus overturned that, and now we realize we’re like nothing. We’re not so special. We’re completely like everybody else. And that has anthropological and theological implications. Usually the argument is therefore we’re not special. So if we’re not special, then nobody designed us, nobody created us. We just happen to show up here. And so explain a little bit from how this works… And oh, real quick also, I’ve noticed in some Catholic circles, in Protestant circles, there is a reaction to that of they actually start to say that the Earth is the center of the solar system because-
Jay Richards:
That’s right. Yeah.
Eric Sammons:
They recognize the problems of the Copernican gospel and then they react to it. So what is a better way forward for Catholics to navigate this?
Jay Richards:
Yes. Okay. So the first thing is, I mean, we all know there was this pre-Copernican cosmology. Anybody that’s read Dante’s Divine Comedy, he presupposes it. But what’s important to realize about it is it’s not like you’re going to find in the biblical text, a description that corresponds to that in which you’ve got the idea is you’ve got the Earth in the center. But Aristotle put the Earth in the center, not because that was the best place, his physics said that, well, that’s where the heavy stuff falls. So the heavy mutable decaying stuff, it falls toward what’s really the bottom of the universe. And then the moon and above, that’s all made of this fifth element, this quintessence, it’s immutable and perfect and unchanging. And so in fact, prior to Copernicus, the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology, actually the Earth, at best, it was an intermediate place where death and decay took place. In fact, people talked about it as the place of detritus and decay. So the very meaning of the center prior to Copernicus wasn’t that that was the best place to be. And so that’s itself actually a 19th century invention.
And so yes, what Copernicus did is he proposed mathematically. He said, “Actually, if you treat the Earth as one of the other planets and then put the moon at the stable center, it actually helped. You can explain the planet’s movements across the sky much better.” It still took really a hundred years for this to gain wide acceptance and more than that, to actually really prove it. But nothing in Copernicus’s theory or proposal tells us anything about our metaphysical significance. As I said, if anything like Galileo, decades later when he was arguing for the Copernican view, he actually said, “No, this elevates us because now we reflect the light of the sun.” He reinterpreted the center and the sun more nonplatonic lines. So you don’t have to have a fight with Copernicus to disagree with the metaphysical claim that somehow science shows us that we’re insignificant. But if you assume that, right? As a narrative, somebody like Bill Nye, The Science Guy, will always say this, “Oh, we’re in this ordinary planet around an ordinary star, ordinary neighborhood in the galaxy, in the universe that didn’t have us in mind or something.”
Well, ordinary compared to what? I mean, the thing we’re most interested in the universe, what do we spend hundreds of millions of dollars sending probes to Mars for? It’s to find evidence for life. So clearly, if you say, “Okay, well, if what we’re interested in is a Earth or a life in a planet, a planet on which life can exist, gosh, we’re really special. In fact, Earth is very, very unusual.” I mean, we’ve discovered now about 5,000 extrasolar planets. We have yet to find an Earth twin or even a Mars twin. And so depending on what you’re counting, the Earth is profoundly exceptional and also probably rare in its properties. And so the Copernican principle, what it is, it inspired scientists of the 20th century to ignore these things, to assume that whatever happened here must happen countless times elsewhere. And it was really just in having to face the evidence over and over that, gosh, turns out you need a lot more things to go right in order to get life.
But that has been the trend throughout the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries that we’re just discovering that actually you need more than we could imagine just to get a single planet with life on it.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. And I think they start with the presupposition that there is no God when they come to this because it’s like, okay, if there is no God, then we have to explain somehow how we ended up with intelligent life. And so they do that. Now, what are some reasons? So I think what happens is this idea of we’re just an accident, but then the fact is, is from your arguments on The Privileged Planet is this idea that we might be the only life in the universe. Now, this is a big debate about the existence of intelligent life or any life outside of Earth. And of course now we’re talking a lot about these congressional hearings with seeing UFOs on Earth and things like that. And I feel like that’s mostly a distraction. But the idea though, how would you go about your argument for whether or not there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe?
Jay Richards:
We just treat that as an open question, honestly. There’s nothing about our argument that requires Earth to be unique. Now, our argument does strongly suggest that compared to all the planetary environments, the ratio of those planets that can host life is going to be very, very small. So Earth-like planets are going to be extremely rare. And so you can compare them in all sorts of ways with all these other places that you find. Now speaking as a Catholic and so a theist, God could do this either way. I mean, he is lots of ways he could have done this. And so for me, it’s an open question. Did God want life to just exist on one planet or did he want it to exist in other places? There’s nothing really in the biblical text that speaks to that, but I’ve never thought it was that big a deal theologically because it’s like, okay, well, let’s just wait and see.
It’s usually the atheists that are telling us, “Oh, if we find a microbe somewhere, somehow that’s going to overturn all of Western Christianity.” I mean, really? I don’t think so. Ironically, in fact, if you’re a materialist, that’s much harder. Look, if I believe as I do that the universe is not just that God set things up, but that he’s intimately involved, that the universe is intrinsically purposeful and teleological because of God, not in itself. But because of that, I think, gosh, if anything, it’s easier to imagine life existing somewhere else. If you’re a materialist, you’re just dealing with raw probabilities and you’ve especially got the origin of life problem to face, which I don’t think really has a solution in a materialistic context. So I mean, at least for me and for my co-author, Guillermo, we’re both Christians. I’m Catholic, he’s evangelical.
We just feel like that’s an open question and that’s just perfectly fine and good that we want to look at that and try… Because we’re either going to discover that it’s just harder and harder than we imagined to get a single Earth-like planet, which is amazing. Or we’ll discover that actually maybe there’s some other places like ours. This is a prediction of our argument is that if we discover other planets that have complex life native to it, it will be very, very much like Earth. In fact, it will look like Earth, it’ll have water and continents. It’ll be around the same kind of star. It’ll have a moon. And Guillermo said, “If we ever get a radio signal, for instance, from another civilization, the first thing we should do is send them our pictures of totally eclipses and ask them to send us pictures of theirs.”
Eric Sammons:
It is interesting because the argument for decades, it seemed like the Carl Sagan era was, well, there’s probably trillions of planets, which is probably true in the whole universe, trillions of planets. And so the first thought is, well, the numbers just work in favor of life, that there’s got to be on at least some of them. But then you guys go through a lot of the chances of the difficulty in having life.
Jay Richards:
That’s right.
Eric Sammons:
And what you find is the very large number of trillions is overwhelmed by the very small number, very small fraction of what would allow for life to exist on a planet. And so they cancel each other out in one sense. Of course, we can’t say for sure it makes it impossible.
Jay Richards:
That’s right.
Eric Sammons:
We’re just simply saying, with our current technology, it’s unlikely without being… If let’s say there’s intelligent life somewhere else, without some massively lucky guess, it’s unlikely in our current technology that we’d actually find it because it should be so rare.
Jay Richards:
That’s right. And now because one of these things that’s in philosophy of science, they talk about, okay, what is a scientific hypothesis? Well, it should be able to be tested against the evidence in some way. This is one of these claims like there is life elsewhere in the universe. That’s actually almost impossible to falsify, but it would be easy to verify, right? If a ship shows up over in Washington D.C. up here, right? It’s like, okay, that settles it. And so it’s clearly an empirical question. It’s just that based upon our techniques at the moment, we’re detecting extrasolar planets of a certain size around stars, and of course we can receive radio signals from space. And so at the moment, those are our only two ways of verifying that or maybe sending a probe to Europa Moon around Jupiter and seeing if there’s life there. But that’s really the limit of things.
And so we just said, “Okay, we’re going to be agnostic about that question and make the risky prediction. But if we’re right, we’re not going to find planets that are much, much larger than ours around red giants with 12 moons. It’s just so many ways that that would mess up the hospitality conditions for life that we just think that’s not how it’s going to go.”
Eric Sammons:
So the Star Wars universe with all their crazy planets isn’t really happening?
Jay Richards:
Yeah. No, it’s not. And yeah, even to get a planet that’s mostly desert but could still host life, it’s… Guess what? I mean, Mars is the most Earth-like planet we know of in the universe and we’ve seen that.
Eric Sammons:
It’s funny. I literally just watched Star Wars last week. A couple of my kids had never seen it before. So we’re like, “Okay, you’re old enough to see it.” And it’s funny because when they were in Tatooine, and Luke is looking at the two suns, I was like, “Yeah, that’s not actually happening. It’s highly unlikely that it’s possible that you could have life on a planet like that.” So thanks for ruining Star Wars for me.
Jay Richards:
It does run it. I mean, because it’s hard enough to get a stable orbit around a single star. Now imagine you’ve got these stars perturbing each other constantly. It’s just a mess.
Eric Sammons:
One thing I thought while you’re talking, just an aside, I was wondering is, it seems like a lot of the money we’re spending at NASA is for projects that seem to be geared towards finding life somewhere in the solar system because we can’t obviously go outside of the solar system really. So we’re just going to try to look into the solar system. Do you think that’s a waste of money? I mean, do you think we should be looking at something else or do you think that’s worthwhile?
Jay Richards:
We want to send a probe to Europa, which is an icy moon, but it’s under this very strong gravitational pressures of Jupiter, and we think there is a liquid water sea basically under this ice. And so it’s like, okay, well, that’s one thing you need. You’ve got liquid water. Now it doesn’t really have much energy from the sun, but it may be getting energy maybe from something that’s happening at its core. It’s an open question. But there’s really only a couple of places that are at all plausible. Everybody recognizes now that Mars is pretty much off the table. And so the idea is that, well, let’s go at least to the place in the solar system where there’s liquid water. If we don’t find anything there, I think everybody’s going to realize, okay, this isn’t worthwhile, but we do have that one place. And then there’ll be Titan, which has an atmosphere, but it’s a totally different thing and methane. I’m not optimistic about it.
So, I mean, that’s why we spend a good bit of time in the book talking about Europa just because it’s the best candidate. We give several arguments why we think it’s still not going to be hospitable to life. But I don’t think it’s a waste of time because it does bear on this really fundamental question. And I mean, NASA started out. It’s like any government bureaucracy. Right when it’s implemented with a mission, it can do some amazing things. And so we got to the moon in ’69, and then it became this sclerotic bureaucracy, unfortunately. But we seem to be able to successfully build satellites, so I’m fine with that. It’s going to be crazy if we keep looking in places where there’s no prospects though.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, I feel like the Europa Clipper, I mean, it’ll probably find out a lot of things. And one thing it does do, if it finds no life, it eliminates certain things. It tells us, okay, this is not a possibility for life in a planet or a moon like this. Okay, I just have to ask because I’m going to talk about something else in here in a second, but I wanted to ask, you mentioned about going to the moon. Do you think we’re going to get back to the moon before 2030 like they’re planning?
Jay Richards:
I think that on Musk’s current trajectory, we will. I’m optimistic. Now we’ll have to decide to do it. And then he wants quickly to get to Mars. At the moment, I have no reason to think that watching what’s happening with SpaceX that we can’t do that. In fact, I’m reasonably optimistic that maybe in the 2030s we’ll get somebody to Mars. Musk seems to think we’re, I don’t know, going to terraform Mars or something. It doesn’t have the right atmosphere. It doesn’t have a protective electromagnetic field around it. And in fact, it doesn’t even make sense to really send humans there. We should just send robots and stuff like that. The moon is a different thing, though. It’s nearby. It is much smaller, so it’s much easier to get off the surface of the moon than to get off the surface of the Earth.
And so setting up a subsurface base on the moon in order to use it as a jumping off point, I think that in some ways it makes more sense than Mars. But Mars has this special lure because it’s the closest planet to the Earth. We’ll learn a lot by sending someone there and hopefully getting them back safely.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, I think actually your book shows this too, that I think people greatly… I think Elon does too. I think they greatly underestimate the inhospitability or whatever the word is, how inhospitable Mars and other places in space are. I mean, even the moon is very inhospitable too, but that tells us how special the Earth is. Because I’ve read things that say basically being in space for a year or something like that is incredibly traumatic to the human body and-
Jay Richards:
Absolutely. Yeah. You’ve got solar rays, you’ve got cosmic rays, and that small amounts might be fine. But if you’re on the surface of the moon or the surface of Mars, you don’t have this magnetic shield that we have on the Earth, and so you’re going to have to armor plate yourself or something. This is just not conducive to human life to do this long term. It’s this idea that we’re going to just have a city on the surface of Mars. I mean, it’s going to be buried in a lot of heavy stuff. I mean, the only thing that really makes sense is you’d have something under the surface.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. And I thought somebody made a good point one time I read where they said, “Consider the most inhospitable places on Earth like, for example, Antarctica or up on top of Mount Everest. Are we building cities there?”
Jay Richards:
No.
Eric Sammons:
“No, because we know how difficult it would be to live there, so why do we think we’d build one up on Mars? It just is crazy.”
Jay Richards:
And those are much, much better.
Eric Sammons:
Oh, yeah, way better.
Jay Richards:
In fact, much better than any scenario on Mars’s surface.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if we set up a base on the moon simply because you can rotate people pretty easily because it’s only a few days, once you get the hang of it, a few days between the two. Whereas Mars, I think it’s minimum six to nine months to get there. And that’s only certain times of a two or three year cycle. If you miss the flight, you’re stuck there for another two or four years.
Jay Richards:
I know. I mean, it really is. It’s just exponentially more difficult than the moon is.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, yeah. But I think never underestimate Elon Musk, I guess. Right?
Jay Richards:
Absolutely. That’s a good rule.
Eric Sammons:
Don’t bet against him. One thing that this whole topic brings up is the theory of evolution. Because the underlying assumption when you read a lot of the different scientists like the Carl Sagan types, is that Darwinian evolution is 100% true. It’s proven. There’s no debate about it. And so the only way life happens is through this and plants is a process of evolution. What is your guys’ take about how evolution affects both the existence of the universe, of life and of intelligent life?
Jay Richards:
And so the first thing is that we want to distinguish lots of different definitions of the word evolution. And so on the super uncontroversial side, just the idea that the universe has a history so that things change over time, that’s non-controversial. Way over on the other side, I’ll say The Blind Watchmaker thesis, which is the idea that everything in the universe and life itself is entirely the result of a blind and purposeless process. That’s the deep, deep committed, The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, right? So those are the two extremes. And then you’ve got in the middle. So what I would say is, okay, look, natural selection and random variation explain some things in biology, antibiotic resistance, for instance, maybe variations in the thickness of beaks on the Galapagos finches, things like that. It’s good at tweaking populations around the edges. There is no evidence that natural selection and random genetic mutations can produce the innovations that we actually see in biology.
So I think that Darwin’s mechanism is true, but it’s also really a bit player when it comes to life, and that there’s a lot more teleology and other stuff happening than we could possibly have imagined. Now, what about star formation? So I think it’s much more plausible to say that given a giant cloud of hydrogen and just the fundamental forces, and so you’re going to have gravitational attraction, that you could get a star. I don’t think that there’s a type of innovation that’s involved there in the same way that there is when it comes to life. And so in the book, we presuppose that these physical processes are sufficient to account for these things, but we don’t have… In my view, I mean, look, God could have just created Ex Nihilo, this solar system six minutes ago, right? If he had wanted to. He’s not going to do that because it would be deceptive.
And so the way God has interacted across cosmic time with the universe, I’m going to sit loosely on the exact details except to say that it’s absolutely clear that there’s purpose and teleology in these things. And let’s be perfectly happy to look at any kind of proposed mechanisms that people propose. But just as the Copernican principle has been distorted and manipulated to tell the atheist story, so the Darwinian mechanism, which is interesting and explains a few things, gets way overused and is oversold to try to basically erase purpose and teleology from the biological world. And it just doesn’t do it.
Eric Sammons:
I know, it’s interesting because it seems like the atheists, especially starting in around the 19th century or so, they’re just desperately finding, okay, what can we find that will explain what we already believe? Okay, we’ll use Copernicus. Then we’ll use Darwin and you’ll fit it in, we’ll stuff it into ours. That’s not really scientific, of course, to do that.
Jay Richards:
No, it’s not. It’s turning science into a applied materialism, and that’s the mistake. Natural science ought to be about a rigorous, the systematic search for the best explanations of how things work in the physical universe, no holds barred. We don’t decide ahead of time that, okay, this hypothesis can’t be true. And especially in the 20th century, look, if you’re a committed materialist, you had to say what Sagan did as late as 1980s that cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Well, in 1980, they’d already for decades, the general agreement of the scientific community said the universe hasn’t always existed. It has an age. It has a beginning in the finite past. And so I think if anything, 2024 is a really great time to be a theist because we know from the empirical evidence that the universe hasn’t always existed.
Eric Sammons:
It’s funny, I read Cosmos by Carl Sagan about maybe a year or two ago, and I felt like, okay, I have to read this because it’s the book that everybody uses. And it’s such a whopper that first line that you’re just like, “How do I even…” I mean, I still read it, but it’s like when the first line is such whopper, I mean, just so factually just… I mean, it’s just a statement of a blind faith is what it is. Then it’s like, okay, now I know I’m getting into it at the very least.
Jay Richards:
No, absolutely. And of course he knows perfectly well that sounds liturgical. That sounds like the glory pottery. He’s attributing to the created things, the things that should be reserved for the creator. But he also knew, he knew Big Bang cosmology. He knew the universe had an age. And so what I think that shows you is the metaphysical pressure you’re under if you’re a materialist, you need an ultimate cause of explanation. It can’t be outside the universe, and so you just attribute it to the universe. Now these days you attribute it to other undetectable universes and things like that, but that shows you that his commitment to materialism was so absolute. He didn’t notice that he was articulating a doctoral statement that was contrary to evidence that he in fact believed.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, I mean, it’s funny now they’re creating multiverses and everything like that. I mean, it really is just reaching and grasping for straws often. Now, one of the things in the book, I think you have a whole chapter on objections to your guys’ points. And I feel like the first objection that comes into my mind when I read a book like this is that, okay, but you’re limiting your definition of life so it fits in our existing universe. Couldn’t there be life that thrives in a methane environment like Titan or even crazier like just on Mars or something, some type of life that we don’t know about that is very unlike us, it could even be intelligent, but it just does that? It doesn’t seem like you’re taking, “Okay, well, this is the universe we live in. The planet we live now, it’s only us.” Couldn’t there be something a lot crazier out there, lifeforms?
Jay Richards:
Yeah. In fact, we think that’s the crucial issue. We’re not worried about it though because the thing I didn’t say is we’re doing actually what NASA does. So notice NASA is looking for liquid water. It’s not because they are nearsighted or are narrow-minded and think, “Okay, well, carbon life like us needs liquid water. It needs a matrix for the chemical reactions. Carbon chemistry is most reactive over the same narrow range of temperatures over which water is liquid. So there’s this hand in glove fit.” But as you said, well, maybe it’s something based on a completely different chemistry. And so what you guys are doing is you’re just assuming the only life you can have in the universe is Earth-like life. Well, we’re not just assuming it. What we’re doing is we’re assuming the truth is the periodic table of the elements.
And so chemistry is basically a complete science at certain level. All the elements are filled in, naturally occurring elements in that periodic table. And we know the chemical properties of those other elements. And so it’s not like we really haven’t thought about it. The argument is basically in this universe, if you want organisms that have chemical basis that can code information and store it, that can build complex three-dimensional molecules, can build three-dimensional bodies. There are just certain things you need to be able to do that. And there isn’t a substitute for carbon chemistry and there isn’t a substitute for water. And so the premise of our argument is that, look, the same rules of chemistry and the same chemical elements, they exist everywhere we can see. It’s not a different set of chemicals someplace else. And so what that means is you can actually constrain your understanding of what any kind of life is going to need just based upon our very robust knowledge of chemistry.
And so that’s why we’re perfectly confident doing that but it’s important to point out that that’s a premise based upon our knowledge of chemistry. At the same time, it’s also a way to falsify our argument. So if we find native life on a completely different planet, around a totally different kind of star, totally different chemistry, that’s going to just blow our argument to smithereens. And so it actually shows the arguments falsifiable, but that’s the one I actually worry about in some ways the least because I’m just fairly confident that it’s hard enough to get a planet where you can have carbon chemistry and liquid water. The other stuff just seems like… It’s silicon or something… I mean, it’s a distant second, and then there really aren’t any other contenders.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. So basically what you’re saying is there are certain laws of chemistry we understand, there are certain laws of physics we know, and that’s just the way things are in our universe, whether we like it or not, and want to pretend it’s not. And so in those boundaries, there’s only certain ways that life could actually form.
Jay Richards:
That’s right. That’s exactly it. And so this is why NASA is perfectly rational looking for liquid water either on the surface or under the surface of Mars, but is not spending any time sending probes to the sun, for instance, looking for exotic lifeforms.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, that makes no sense. Now, you’re involved with the Discovery Institute. I know it does a lot of things, what we’re talking about today. Can you tell us a little bit more about the Discovery Institute and what it’s doing?
Jay Richards:
Absolutely. So Discovery is founded in 1990, co-founded by Bruce Chapman and George Gilder. In 1996, the Center for Science and Culture was formed. And it was really set up to create a research program, both of full-time fellows at Discovery, but also scholars, scientists, philosophers elsewhere to pursue these very questions. So lots of books. Anybody that follows the intelligent design literature will notice in many cases that it ties back in some way to Discovery. So the books by biochemist, Michael Behe, who’s a Catholic, teaches at Lehigh University. Of course, the books by Steve Meyer, who’s the director of the Center for Science and Culture. And so that’s just one of several projects that happens at Discovery. There’s also transportation and a technology project and homeless project. But that Center for Science and Culture is… You can think of it as the institutional home of the intelligent design movement. And in fact, Eric, since we’re talking about it, I should mention, there’s a brand new book by a Canadian Oratorian, a priest called the Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. It just came out. It is really, really good book.
Eric Sammons:
Oh, I literally just bought that.
Jay Richards:
Oh, wow. That’s great. That’s a really a good book.
Eric Sammons:
I haven’t gotten it yet, but I just bought it at Amazon, I think, just the other day.
Jay Richards:
Cool.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, so I’m looking forward to reading that. Because I’m at an Oratorian parish and so I saw it was an Oratorian priest who’s… And I was like, “Oh, I got to get this one. This is going to be great.” Okay, so I think we’re going to wrap it up here. Now, one of the things I want to do is encourage people, again, The Privileged Planet, this is a… And a 20th anniversary edition, you’ve added some new stuff and improved the argument in there.
Jay Richards:
Yeah, we did. We added new information, of course, updated the data. We also actually rewrote it, so it’s actually an easier book to read. I mean, you learn a lot of things about how to write in 20 years. It turned out like, “Oh, I can’t believe I was writing this writing 20 years, hence.” And so it is a big book, but as you see, it’s got hundreds of illustrations, 20 pages of color plates and things like that. And so it was a huge undertaking the first time. It was actually a lot of work to do the new edition. But we had, believe it or not, planned, when we first started working on this book and got the contract from Regnery, we thought, “Oh, wait, there’ll be a 20th year anniversary edition in 2024. We should update it.” And that is exactly what we did. So this is what we managed to do, what we had planned to do over 20 years ago.
Eric Sammons:
I mean, that’s pretty forward-thinking. You even nailed it on a year when Eclipse happened in America.
Jay Richards:
That’s what we said, “Wait, 2024, there’ll be a totally eclipse across the American continent. We got to do it then.” So that was the-
Eric Sammons:
That’s great.
Jay Richards:
Yeah.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. So update, and now there’s a website to dedicate to the book, privilegeplanet.com, correct?
Jay Richards:
Yes, that’s right. And we’re eventually, I’m hoping, going to have a large language model up and running so that people can actually ask questions, and it’s trained on the book and other adjacent stuff.
Eric Sammons:
Ooh, that’s awesome. That sounds exciting. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes so people can… And I assume there’s a place on that site that you can buy the book, right?
Jay Richards:
Yes, that’s right.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. Okay. Awesome. Well, thanks, Jay. This is great. I mean, you’re doing so many different diverse things. I know you’re at Heritage Foundation, all that. Where can people find out the different work that you’re involved in?
Jay Richards:
Yeah, I mean, probably the easiest thing is on X, formerly known as Twitter, which is my handle is @DrJayRichards. So that’s my real time opinions. All my public policy work here at Heritage is just heritage.org and stuff related to The Privileged Planet is at discovery.org.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, awesome. Yeah. Oh, there was something. Oh, yeah. So I was just going to say, I want to thank you. I know you guys at Heritage, especially you, have been doing a lot of stuff fighting against the gender madness that’s going on right now. And so I really appreciate that because it’s so needed to have people who are dedicated to fighting just the insanity that’s going on right now.
Jay Richards:
Absolutely. And we’re winning it, Eric. And in fact, 2025 is going to be an amazing year on that front.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, I like to think that too because I’m convinced that the whole transgender nonsense was finally they took a step too far.
Jay Richards:
Absolutely. We know this. In fact, we know that something like three to 5% of the swing vote swung on this issue. And I knew that was what was going to have to happen for this ever to be bipartisan. And so yeah, we’ll see. If it’s not, I still think we’re going to have a successful year in 2025.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. I mean, Trump had ads that were explicitly on this issue. I remember when I went to a big conservative convention in Detroit, Turning Point, and Trump was there, and all the major people with vans. Everybody was there. I remember the thing that got the most consistent loud cheers was when somebody said something against the transgender movement. That always got the biggest cheers because it was just… And I hear you just talk to people. It’d just be some mom with some kids and she’s not really well versed in all this stuff, but she’s just like, “No, I just don’t want that. I don’t want them coming after my kids.”
Jay Richards:
That’s right. And it was a serious mistake on the other side to just hitch their wagon to that star. But it violates people’s natural reason and conscience. Even unbelievers. If you have children, you have a natural inclination to protect your child and this comes at… This ideology wants to destroy the family and destroy what makes the family, which is our capacity for reproduction.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. I mean, they were able hide the damage of abortion, of gay marriage and they thought you can make that… That’s other people. It doesn’t really affect me. But then the transgender is literally right in your family and it’s like, okay, I got to put my foot down here.
Jay Richards:
Absolutely. Yeah. They activated a lot of very accomplished and angry moms, and I don’t think they account for that.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, you don’t want to mess with them. Exactly. Oh, man. When the mama bear starts this-
Jay Richards:
Exactly. It’s like you guys have no idea what you have activated.
Eric Sammons:
That is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. That’s the fifth powerful force.
Jay Richards:
Exactly. That’s the fifth fundamental constant. Yeah.
Eric Sammons:
Exactly. The mama bear. Okay. Well, thanks, Jay. I really appreciate you being on there. Like I said, I’ll put the links to Privileged Planet, to your X account so people can follow what you’re doing.
Jay Richards:
Great. Thanks, Eric. Good to be with you.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. Until next time, everybody. God love you.