Science and the Theology of Extraterrestrials | Prof. Karin Öberg

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 13 October 2022

⏱️ 52 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given at Baylor University on September 13, 2022. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website: www.thomisticinstitute.org About the speaker: Karin Öberg is Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University. Her specialty is astrochemistry and her research aims to uncover how chemical processes affect the outcome of planet formation, especially the chemical habitability of nascent planets. Dr. Öberg obtained her B.Sc. in chemistry at Caltech in 2005, and her Ph.D. in astronomy, with a thesis focused on laboratory astrochemistry, from Leiden University in 2009. She did postdoctoral work at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as a NASA Hubble fellow, focusing on millimeter observations of planet-forming disks around young stars. In 2013 she joined the Harvard astronomy faculty as an assistant professor. She was promoted and named the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor in Astronomy in 2016, and promoted to full professor with tenure in 2017. Dr. Öberg’s research in astrochemistry has been recognized with a Sloan fellowship, a Packard fellowship, the Newton Lacy Pierce Award from the American Astronomical Society, and a Simons fellowship. Her recent TED talk explaining some of her research can be found here: https://www.ted.com/talks/karin_oberg_the_galactic_recipe_for_a_living_planet

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:03.2	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:11.0	So this talk will be moving from things that are really close to what I would call scientific fruits.
0:17.5	That is scientific theories or explanations that seem fairly stable and they're
0:24.6	probably not going to change too much. Into scientific speculation. So this is where it becomes sort of
0:31.6	approach exo-questional so before closely. And then furthermore into more of theological speculation. So we are in a very good
0:43.4	places that we will have some theological truths that we can anchor these speculations in. But
0:49.0	then also our faith allows us, gives our permission to speculate about the existence of extraterrestrial
0:57.0	life and I will take full advantage with that and I'm happy to also pay questions afterwards
1:03.0	that pushes me even further if that is in the site.
1:06.0	But we will start with the science.
1:10.0	So one of the great discoveries, one of the great astronomical discoveries in the past
1:16.6	two decades is that planets are very common.
1:21.2	So we used to only know the planets in our own solar system, which used to be nine, and
1:27.2	then we pluto, another eight.
1:30.8	But around the same time as Pluto was devoted,
1:34.5	we also started to discover planets from other stars.
1:38.3	And today we know that basically all stars
1:41.6	have planetary systems around them.
1:43.9	They're just incredibly common. So in our galaxy, the Milky Way,
1:48.0	there are around 300 billion stars. That means that we have hundreds and hundreds of billions of planets as well within our galaxy alone.
2:00.0	So these these planets come in many different flavors, just as we have many
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