SETI means ‘Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence’. I’m giving a talk at the SETI Institute on Tuesday December 17th, from noon to 1 pm. You can watch it live, watch it later on their YouTube channel, or actually go there and see it. It’s free, and you can just walk in at 189 San Bernardo Avenue in Mountain View, California, but please register if you can.

Life’s Struggle to Survive

When pondering the number of extraterrestrial civilizations, it is worth noting that even after it got started, the success of life on Earth was not a foregone conclusion. We recount some thrilling episodes from the history of our planet, some well-documented but others merely theorized: our collision with the planet Theia, the oxygen catastrophe, the snowball Earth events, the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event, the asteroid that hit Chicxulub, and more, including the global warming episode we are causing now. All of these hold lessons for what may happen on other planets.

If you know interesting things about these or other ‘close calls’, please tell me! I’m still preparing my talk, and there’s room for more fun facts. I’ll make my slides available when they’re ready.

The SETI Institute looks like an interesting place, and my host, Adrian Brown, is an expert on the poles of Mars. I’ve been fascinated about the water there, and I’ll definitely ask him about this paper:

• Adrian J. Brown, Shane Byrne, Livio L. Tornabene and Ted Roush, Louth crater: Evolution of a layered water ice mound, Icarus 196 (2008), 433–445.

Louth Crater is a fascinating place. Here’s a photo:

By the way, I’ll be in Berkeley from December 14th to 21st, except for a day trip down to Mountain View for this talk. I’ll be at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute talking to Eliezer Yudkowsky, Paul Christiano and others at a Workshop on Probability, Logic and Reflection. This invitation arose from my blog post here:

• Probability theory and the undefinability of truth.

If you’re in Berkeley and you want to talk, drop me a line. I may be too busy, but I may not.