Customer Reviews

Charlie Rose with Ed Weiler, Michael Lemonick & Neil Tyson; Ted Waitt; James Kaplan (May 27, 1998)

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A certain sense of excitement is felt around Charlie Rose's table in this segment. The sighting of a planetary system in the process of formation around a distant sun encourages the discussants in their unanimous belief that some form of life will be discovered outside of earth. They are speaking first and above all about bacterial life which can sustain itself in much tougher environments than complex organisms can. Tyson makes the point that to survive bacteria or other low- level organisms need not have 'intelligence'. Still the hope of the group seems to be that with the vast array of stars and the newly confirmed sense of the frequency of planetary system it is indeed likely that 'intelligent life' is operating in our Galaxy. Only as Weiler points out is most likely to far away for us to ever reach it , or for it to reach us.
Nonetheless the three talk a bit about NASA's pushing forward with the efforts at discovering Life. They talk about programs being in place which will improve the human capacity to observe and monitor other worlds.
Charlie Rose again does his job well here. He asks the big questions.
Of course he might have mentioned the "Where are they?" question of Enrico Fermi and the fact that for some decades now we have been sending out radio signals which an Intelligent Civilization could understand comes from another 'technical civilization'.
In any case the whole discussion is conducted in a good spirit. Perhaps William James " What has concluded, that we should conclude about it" spirit rules.
How happy people are when they have a world of possibilities open before them.
At the end of the program however when Rose is told about the effort to stop Frank Drake from sending out signals searching for other life- another possibility is raised. The weirdos out there may not be 'nice guys'
Rose of course sees that rightly as ridiculous.
But we don't know , do we?
And this is the real point. Until it happens it hasn't happened.
Maybe they are there , and maybe they are not.
And some of us may find out some day.