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Convocation remarks by Geoffrey Marcy
11:15 a.m., Aug. 29, 2006--Following are the remarks by Geoffrey Marcy, professor of astronomy at the University of California Berkeley, delivered during the University of Delaware's New Student Convocation on Monday, Aug. 28: President Roselle, Associate/Vice Chairman Fischer, distinguished administrators of the University of Delaware, and entering students: I am stunned and delighted to be receiving this honorary doctorate. It seems that just yesterday I was a freshman struggling to keep up with my classes. And then later as a scientist, I was struggling to discover something, anything, new in my research, hoping to make even a small contribution to science. With some hard work, we were able to detect the first planetary systems around other stars using powerful telescopes. I feel lucky to have helped find the first new worlds, especially this week when we astronomers have revoked planet status from poor Pluto. Looking back, I see that what I learned as a freshman in college formed the backbone of my entire career. For those of you who are entering freshman, you are extraordinarily lucky. Here at the University of Delaware, you are attending a leading university in the United States. Delaware has world-renowned faculty, superior students, excellent research, and a commitment to public service. Indeed, the University of Delaware has become a model for other universities across the country. Congratulations on getting here. But you freshman now face a challenge. Sure, you will take classes and learn many truths. But along the way you will do something else. You will learn to question critically the truthfulness of everything you hear. You will learn to doubt the assumptions tossed at you by others. And you will learn to demand verification of ideas found in books, newspapers, and the Internet. In fact, you should question the truthfulness of what your professors tell you, including what I am telling you right now. You will learn to listen carefully to politicians to see if they offer both points of view, or just give one vantage point. You will also be asked to justify your own opinions and to change them, if your reasoning is weak. It is easier to be wrong than right, and difficult to tell the difference. With healthy critical skepticism, you will emerge with truths that are stronger and perspectives that are fresher. Your university education should also encourage you to highlight the uncertainties all around us in our complex world. Don't sweep your uncertainties under the rug, hiding them from others and from yourself. Embrace uncertainty! The uncertainty in one's opinion is as important as the opinion! As a student, you may also question who you are as a person. You may wonder what makes you tick, and wonder what hidden biases you carry with you. With more insight about yourself, you will also understand other people more deeply, including their feelings, desires, and the source of their meaning in life. At Delaware, your professors will teach you to examine the microscopic details of any subject so that the big conclusions can be assessed carefully, and reformulated if necessary. Revealing the hidden realities behind the curtain is the hallmark of a great university education. But it is your job to pull the curtain aside. In life if you don't dig beneath the facade, you will often have the wool pulled over your eyes. So, here at the University of Delaware, everyone's job is to capture the big picture. No science embraces the big picture more than astronomy, the study of everything in the universe. Let me tell you a remarkable story about your universe. Our Milky Way Galaxy contains some 200 billion stars and our Sun is just one relatively average star. From our research, we now know that most of those 200 billion stars harbor planets, some planets being giant sized like Jupiter and Saturn and some undoubtedly Earth-sized with a rocky composition and hard surface that you can stand on. Some of those rocky planets are like Mars, dry and frigid. Some are like Venus with a runaway greenhouse effect making the planet too hot for life. There must be rocky planets that are probably bizarre with properties beyond our imagination. In our Milky Way Galaxy, there must be tens of billions of rocky planets, like Earth. And our Galaxy is not alone. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies out there, similar to our Milky Way Galaxy. So, imagine tens of billions of planets in our Galaxy, and then picture hundreds of billions of galaxies, all being similar to our Galaxy. The number of planetary systems in our universe is the number 1 followed by 21 zeroes, that is 10 to the 21 Earth-like planets. Most of the Earth-sized planets are composed of the same chemical elements of which our own Earth is composed, carbon, hydrogen, silicon, oxygen, iron, phosphorus, and indeed all the natural elements of the periodic table. Some planets have just the right temperature so that water is in liquid form, raining down into puddles, streams, lakes and oceans. That liquid water, on those uncountable earth-like planets, serves as the mixer for chemical reactions. What happens when you mix together the chemicals on a planet's surface? Research by molecular biologists suggests that the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and other elements combine to form complicated molecules-organic molecules, including amino acids that are the building blocks of proteins and of life, as we know it. On planets throughout the universe, some of these complex organic molecules eventually become capable of duplicating themselves, replicating themselves chemically. These duplicators perpetuate themselves, multiply, and compete for both the remaining molecules and the remaining energy. Competition has a fascinating consequence: the strongest molecules survive and multiply. The most successful of these organic molecules group themselves together into units to perform more complex molecular functions. Over millions of years they develop spherical shields around themselves for protection. Some shields serve as membranes, able to transfer molecules and electrical charges in an out. They are therefore able to transmit information, that is, they can communicate with neighboring entities, making the first neurons. Large networks of these we usually call brains. How often such neural networks form organically on other planets is unknown. We do know that in one species in the universe, these networks developed so prodigiously that they now ask about their own origin and about the origin and fate of the universe. They also wonder if other neural networks exist elsewhere in the universe. You should carry doubts about the story that I have just told you about the origin of life. Biologists do not understand the origins of life in detail. They do not know the precise chemical steps by which DNA came to into being, nor do they know the origin of cell walls. Biologists can't tell us yet whether intelligence represents the pinnacle of Darwinian evolution or some random twig on the evolutionary tree. But 10 to the 21 planets constitute many, many throws of the biological dice, giving many chances for intelligence to arise. Probably, at this very moment, there are a billion convocations occurring in our universe, with speeches being given, some boring, some hopefully not. Maybe some of you freshman will someday contribute, by doing research, to our understanding of how life originated, how brains work, and whether intelligence is a natural end product of evolution. Are there other forms of life that we've never conceived of, non-organic forms? Perhaps. But we can just barely speculate about extraterrestrial life based on life here on Earth. There is little chance of guessing accurately about types life we've never seen. Your job, as freshmen here at Delaware, is to expose your neural network to deep insights about itself, about others, and about the natural world. Perhaps it is the destiny of we Homo sapiens to send spacecraft to other planetary systems, both to explore them and to learn of our own roots here on Earth. Let's hope that we humans have the wisdom to survive long enough here on Earth, to get along peacefully with each other long enough, to carry out this adventure to the stars. So, to you freshmen, let me offer you a challenge. Question the world around you. Don't believe everything you believe. While examining the details, don't forget to look inward at who you are and look outward at where you would like humanity to go in the next hundred or thousand years. I hope your journey at the University of Delaware will be enjoyable and rich. While sometimes frightening, the journey will certainly give you many cosmic experiences. Again, I am deeply grateful for this honorary degree and I hope the discovery of other planets helps us learn about our origins and our place in our wonderful universe. Thank you very much. |
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