Jay Richards had a really fun and interesting conversation with Sean McDowell about the new updated edition of his book with Guillermo Gonzalez, The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery. Of course, people always want to know what the authors think of the chances that there are intelligent life forms out there on another planet that will someday communicate with us. The Privileged Planet thesis doesn’t say yes or no on that but rather that if there are intelligent aliens, they will live somewhere remarkably similar to our own Earth, down to some very fine details…like having perfect solar eclipses. Dr. Richards says:
If we find complex life elsewhere in the universe it will be around a planet in a system very much like ours. And so Guillermo said, Look, if SETI [the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence] ever works and we get a radio signal from another stellar system, the first thing we should do is ask them to send us some pictures of their perfect eclipses and we’ll send some of ours. That’s the prediction.
The intelligent design of Earth or any habitable world is such that the possibility for science, to which perfect eclipses and other features are so important, is worked into the design. Richards says, not facetiously I think, that God or the designer created the universe in order to make scientific discovery possible…whether for us or for those hypothetical intelligent aliens. Watch the rest here. Tomorrow, Jay will be taking questions and challenges from the audience.