Why We are Alone in the Galaxy: Marc Defant (Full Transcript)

Marc Defant is a tenured professor of geochemistry at the University of South Florida and studies volcanoes and the origin of the continental crust.

Here is the full text of Marc’s talk titled “Why We are Alone in the Galaxy” at TEDxUSF.

Transcript:

I wrote a book about the history of life, and I started noticing when I did my research that there were the statistically improbable events seemingly that had to occur in order for us to get intelligent life here on our planet.

And SETI has been now searching for the extraterrestrial intelligence, they’ve been searching for life for 54 years and they, of course, haven’t found any intelligent life.

And so I got to thinking maybe they weren’t finding it because it’s extremely difficult to occur, evolutionary or whatever.

So tonight what I’d like to do is, I’d like to give you 3 examples of these statistically improbable events but please keep in mind that there are literally hundreds of these events which need to occur in order to get intelligent life on this planet, in my opinion.

Well, I need to go back to the Big Bang and talk a little bit about the Big Bang Theory, and I hope to god that when I said the Big Bang Theory, the first thing that came to your mind wasn’t the television show, because we’re all in trouble if that’s the case, and it could be a long talk, too.