Bijan Nemati on Another Big Space Telescope, and The Privileged Planet

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

On this ID the Future, astrophysicist Bijan Nemati delves further into why intelligent design matters to him and into the exciting work he’s doing for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman space telescope, slated for deployment in three or four years. That telescope and his contribution to it, as it so happens, tie directly into the popular science documentary he participated in, The Privileged Planet. Nemati describes how the instrument his company is building for the telescope is designed to aid in the search for earth-like planets beyond our solar system and why the list of criteria for planetary habitability is longer than many people suppose.

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0:00.0	I. Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Eric Anderson and today we're listening to the second half of my conversation with Dr. Bijon-Nimati, President and Chief Scientist at Tell us One Scientific and former scientist in origins researcher at Lockheed and the Jet Propulsion
0:26.4	Laboratory. He worked on the space interferometer mission and has expertise in astrophysics
0:31.6	and the early origins of the universe.
0:34.0	We now rejoin the conversation with Dr. Namati sharing how he became involved with one of the most
0:38.6	well-known intelligent design documentaries, The Privileged Planet. Now let's go back to what's this, mid to late 90s, you're in California, you're working, well,
0:47.8	JPL, you're at JPL now, right?
0:49.8	Yeah, in the mid 90s I was, no, at that point I think I was still and you still at Lockheed.
0:56.6	Lockheed.
0:57.6	Well, I guess in 97 was the first time I set foot at JPL.
1:01.1	Okay.
1:02.1	And as a Lockheed person and then. foot at that point
1:05.0	that point I was working for Lockheed so I was trying to help Lockheed
1:10.0	get the contract to build the interferometer for JPL.
1:14.8	Right.
1:15.1	And we succeeded.
1:16.1	We got that.
1:17.1	It's just around the same time that you get involved with,
1:19.6	I'm trying to remember when you got involved
1:21.7	with Privilege Plan, it was later so yeah 2003 yeah yeah so yeah I right so so 97 you know first time I'm getting involved, you know, with the origins program by 99, I'm kind of enmeshed in in a test bed, technology test bed demonstrator for the space interformatory Mission at Jet Propulsion Lab as a Lockheed person and enjoying myself.
1:49.0	But by 2001, I had decided, you know, I think I'm just going to become a JPL person. And so I
1:57.2	thanked my friends at Lockheed who had made this possible but but left and joined JPL. and I enjoyed you know 16 very happy years at JPL until I decided to move to Alabama and was a professor here for five years until I just started this company this year.
2:15.8	Yeah, okay, so because I remember, if I'm remembering right, you were at JPL when the Privilege Planps came out, right?
	...

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