Is There Life on Other Planets?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

i suspect steve gouldwodwl disagree with what you've just said, for example. But the deeper point is that if there is life on other planets, if they have a gravity, the planet is gravitationally like ours,. and t has water and air and land, you're going to and up with something like swimming creatures and flying creatures who can walk bipedle or quadruped. And i think wonderful life is a very naive book, actually. Yeh, that's enderful life. I would agree with conway morris on that. At least i would.

Do you sometimes dream you can fly like a bird? Gliding effortlessly above the treetops, soaring and swooping, playing and dodging through the third dimension. Computer games, virtual reality headsets, and some drugs can lift our imagination and fly us through fabled, magical spaces. But it’s not the real thing. No wonder some of the past’s greatest minds, including Leonardo da Vinci’s, have yearned for flying machines and struggled to design them.

Shermer and Dawkins discuss: nationalism • Russian revanchism • the recent rise of authoritarianism and autocracies: worrying trend or temporary stumble in the arc of the moral universe? • U.S. acceptance of the theory of evolution finally breaks the 50% barrier • woke attacks on E. O. Wilson: why? • why Dawkins dedicated his book to Elon • What good is half a wing? • What is flight good for? • Why do some animals lose their wings? • Why flying is easier if you are small • physics of flying • unpowered flight: parachuting and gliding • powered flight and how it works • weightlessness • aerial plankton • winged plants • the difference between evolved and designed flying machines.

Richard Dawkins is one of the world’s most eminent writers and thinkers, and a major contributor to the public understanding of the science of evolution. The award-winning author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion and a string of other bestselling science books, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Literature.