Saturday October 12th 7:00 PM

The Privileged Planet
by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards

There is an opinion, quite common among scientists and intellectuals, which holds that our Earthly existence is not only rather ordinary, but in fact insignificant and purposeless, at least as usually expressed. The late astronomer Carl Sagan typifies this view in his aptly-named book Pale Blue Dot:

Because of the reflection of sunlight . . . the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world. But it's just an accident of geometry and optics. . . . Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

We think this melancholy assumption, despite its heroic pretense, is mistaken. In fact, we think the unprecedented scientific knowledge acquired in the last century, enabled by equally unprecedented technological achievements, should, when properly interpreted, contribute to a deeper appreciation of our place in the cosmos. In the forthcoming book, The Privileged Planet, we hope to substantiate that claim by means of a striking feature of the natural world. Simply stated, the feature is that the conditions that allow for intelligent life on Earth also make it strangely well suited for viewing and analyzing the universe.

Register for the online e-symposium
$25 before October 1st
$35 beginning October 1st