“The idea that we are alone in the Universe seems completely implausible and arrogant. Considering the number of planets and stars that we know exist, is extremely unlikely that we are the only life evolved. ” The Darwinian biologist Richard Dawkins, famous for his campaigns for atheism, yesterday proclaimed his faith in aliens, and even dared to propose a “preliminary taxonomy” to describe how they might be aliens out there that should exist.
In an impassioned lecture on the opening day of Starmus Festival, an international astronomical congress that will be held throughout the week in Tenerife, the Oxford professor admitted that this time are going to delve in full “in the realm of speculation” , but said he is committed to extraterrestrial life by the weight of the astronomical evidence.
If in recent decades has shown that in our galaxy there are 100,000 million planets, of whom 10.000 million were in areas considered habitable their stars, to Dawkins’s idea that life Earth is a rare exception in the cosmic universe seems virtually impossible. For the author of such important works as ‘The Selfish Gene’ or ‘The God Delusion’, what science is proving ever more solid evidence is that we are not the center of the Universe, a planetary paradise designed for us by a creator.
On the contrary, the findings indicate that the Earth Astronomy is one of the many worlds where life has started an evolutionary process, according to biologist before a packed audience of fans Cosmos study said. Among the audience another great guest star Stephen Hawking, who will give a lecture today.
also found “What plausible, and most likely, is that the universe has many forms of life,” says Dawkins . “The difficulty is to show it, because these life forms are on islands separated by vast distances.” Therefore, the British biologist believes that if one day we contact ET, will be using radio signals , but certainly much that “we shake hands” with an alien.
And from that point of view, Dawkins believes that definitely worthwhile initiatives such as the SETI project in the search for intelligent life that prompted the astronomer and popularizer Carl Sagan mythical to capture signals from other civilizations . “It is a gamble in which success is unlikely, but it could pay off,” he said.
How could those alien life forms? Do we have enough data to predict how it would be to risk the biology of other worlds? Dawkins admits that any proposal in this area must necessarily be an imaginative exercise . However, he believes that “we know enough about the basic principles of life” and to propose some “well-founded hypothesis.”
Firstly, Dawkins (as a good disciple of the author of ‘The Origin of species’) says bet “his shirt” to life on other worlds follows a Darwinian evolution based on natural selection. The biologist showed some classic examples of adaptive mutations that favor the survival of species on Earth, as tiny caterpillars huddle to look like a giant animal, insects camouflage themselves from predators by adopting the form of spine or fish dress up algae.
If aliens exist, Dawkins would no doubt that all of them “are business survive to reproduce” through all kinds of accommodations that offer them advantages over competitors in their environment.
The atheist biologist ultimately acknowledged that he is looking forward to the first evidence of life on Mars is situated, to give another blow to “human vanity ‘and’ anthropocentrism “believe us special beings of divine origin. In the same way that science and dismantled the idea that the Sun revolved around the Earth for the next big Dawkins Copernican revolution would check that life is by no means a monopoly of the Earth .
The Starmus Festival, now in its second edition, is designed for professional astronomers only, but above all to inspire passion for the Cosmos in the whole society. So among the guests not only scientists from the likes of Dawkins, Hawking and Nobel laureates John Mather and Harold Kroto, but cosmonauts Alexei Leonov as-the first man who made a spatially walk, one of the Apollo astronauts on the moon, Charlie Duke, and Queen guitarist Brian May, who is also a doctor in astrophysics. Before starting his legendary band with Freddie Mercury, May had started a doctoral research work at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, but left when his songs began to sweep across the world. However, it was precisely the founder and director of Starmus, Armenian astronomer Garik Israelian, who encouraged the legendary guitarist to finish his thesis and became the supervisor of his PhD. “This festival is a wonderful madness that will reflect on the place of mankind in the universe,” proclaimed May yesterday during the opening of this great astronomical party.
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