Hello everybody I'm talking today with Dr. David Kipping, a scientist, an associate professor of astronomy and director of the Cool World's Lab at Columbia, recently tenured.

He's published already over a hundred peer-reviewed articles, research articles, and is an active

communicator regarding scientific matters on YouTube.

Cool Worlds, YouTube channel. What did we talk about? We talked about well the position of man and woman in the universe are we alone

We talked about the means by which the exoplanets that could harbor alien life have been discovered and assessed and what those planets look like.

We talked about the potential progression of civilizations at different technological levels and how that might be detected in the cosmological space.

We talked about Dyson spheres and the utilization of the energy that a

sun produces for moving the technological enterprise forward. We talked about

the Big Bang and some of the challenges that have been posed to the

axioms and theories of modern cosmology in the light of the development of the James

what telescope. And we talked about of the development of the James Watt Telescope.

And we talked about the pursuit of astrophysics

as a career, and so join us.

All right, well, let's start with the big question, I suppose.

I know that you study the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe,

and so I suppose the big question that goes along with that is,

are we alone in the universe? That's a question that so many scientists have very assertive answers to.

They feel very confident they know what the answer to and typically the

responses well of course there must be. There's sort of two ways of answering that

whether you're talking about simple life, microbial life or whether you're going

all the way to intelligent civilizations

comparable to our own or even far more sophisticated but on both fronts the most

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