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The John Batchelor Show

VISIONARY: 1/2: #Bestof2021: Searching for living exoplanets: #Exoplanets: James "Q" Lovelock and the search for astrobiology evidence. Oliver Morton, Economist.(Originally posted September 22, 2021)

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 22 August 2023

⏱️ 11 minutes

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VISIONARY: 1/2: #Bestof2021: Searching for living exoplanets: #Exoplanets: James "Q" Lovelock and the search for astrobiology evidence. Oliver Morton, Economist.(Originally posted September 22, 2021)

https://www.economist.com/schools-brief/2021/09/04/finding-living-planets


The idea that Earth is in some way alive, or can be treated as if it were, is common to many mythologies and sensibilities, and has been a theme in science for centuries. Its modern form, though, dates from the 1960s and the insights of James Lovelock, a British scientist then working at jpl, a laboratory in California that is responsible for most of America’s planetary science.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is CBS I In The World. I'm John Batchfer. I welcome Oliver Morton of the

0:09.1

Economist magazine to celebrate with me the life of James Lovelock 1919 to

0:15.0

2022. He's just left us a very famous man if you understand the guy

0:20.0

hypothesis of 60 years ago. It belongs to James Lovelock eventually and also the

0:26.6

eve of discovering what could be validation or not of his thinking that you

0:33.5

look to the atmospheres of planet exoplanets would be the example in order

0:38.8

to define disequilibrium and that will be part of the mystery needed to solve

0:45.9

is their life outside of planet Earth Oliver. It's a joy to welcome you this

0:51.4

piece is wonderful you knew James Lovelock. Yeah I read about him but was he

0:58.3

really cute Oliver was he really James Barnes cute? I don't know as to that it

1:05.4

is certainly true that when he was when he left medical research to become an

1:09.6

independent scientist in the 1960s he did a significant amount of work for

1:15.5

the security services and I'm sure that when my friend Jonathan Watts is

1:20.6

biography of him comes out it will look into this so he's only did some

1:25.2

did some peculiar thing as well because his and cue is in some ways I mean in the

1:30.7

books I don't think there really is a cue that's just cue branch I think the

1:33.9

the the character of cue really comes from the movies but there is something

1:38.4

there's a term that the English use about a certain sort of scientist that

1:44.2

referring to him as a boffin and it more or less always is a him in this case

1:49.7

and boffin has a slightly upper class aspect that doesn't really apply to Jim

1:55.8

but the idea of someone who fiddled with gadgets with great delight that applies to Jim

2:00.5

completely and one of his I think one of the things that made him intellectually so interesting

...

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