CHAPTER EIGHT
Questioner: How serious do you think the problem is with the creationists that are in the States?
CS: Well, different people will have a different answer. Some fundamentalist Christians believe that it is without any doubt that the world will end shortly, that the signs, especially the formation in 1948 of the state of Israel, are clear; that is, there are many fundamentalist Christians, at least in the United States-I don't know about elsewhere in the world-who deeply believe that this is true. And there will be a tribulation and a rapture, and there's an entire mythology about the events that will happen. We are even told by the Reverend Mr. Falwell that believing Christians, when the trumpet is sounded, will be taken bodily to heaven. And if they are driving a car or flying an airplane at that moment, then the car and airplane containing its nonbelieving passengers are in some difficulty. The conclusion of which would seem to be that there has to be a test of faith before issuing a license.
Questioner: You seem to think that in the event of a nuclear war, all human beings may become extinct. I put the question on the grounds of two things that you didn't bring up at all in your talk: One, nuclear power stations will be damaged in a nuclear war, and that will leak radiation that will be dangerous for thousands of years, and two, we don't know the effects of ultraviolet light that may come through to Earth after a nuclear war.
CS: Right. So the questioner says, is it clear that other forms of life would survive bearing in mind the enhanced ultraviolet flux from the destruction of the ozone layer and the radioactive fallout, especially if nuclear power plants are targeted. I chose grasses and cockroaches because of their high radiation resistance. And if you check it out, you find that they are several orders of magnitude more resistant than humans are. A typical dose of radiation to kill a human being is a few hundred rads. There are organisms that are not killed until a few million rads. Also, the sulfur-eating marine worms that I mentioned, they were not selected randomly either. They live entirely at the ocean bottom where no ultraviolet light can get and where they are quite well insulated against radioactivity in the environment. So for those reasons I still say that many forms of life would survive, and its clear from past mass extinctions like the Cretaceous-Tertiary event that many forms of life have survived in the past what were probably more serious events than a nuclear war, although it's quite true that the radioactivity was not a component of such events in the past.
Questioner: As a scientist, would you deny the possibility of water having been changed into wine in the Bible?
CS: Deny the possibility? Certainly not. I would not deny any such possibility. But I would, of course, not spend a moment on it unless there was some evidence for it.
CHAPTER NINE
CS: There was one question that was sent to me in a letter to my hotel, which was signed, "God Almighty." Probably just to attract my attention. It said that the writer's definition of a miracle would be if I would answer the letter. So to show that miracles can happen, I thought I would answer the question. The question was a straightforward and important one, often asked: "If the universe is expanding, what's it expanding into? Something that isn't the universe?"
Well, the way to think of this is to remember that we are trapped in three dimensions, which constrains our perspective (although there's not much we can do about being trapped in three dimensions). But let us imagine that we were two-dimensional beings. Absolutely flat. So we know about left/ right and we know about forward/back, but we've never heard of up/down. It is an absolutely incoherent idea. Just nonsense syllables. And now imagine that we live on the surface of a sphere, a balloon, let's say. But of course we don't know about that curvature through that third dimension, because that third dimension is inaccessible to us, and we cannot even picture it. And now let's imagine that the sphere is expanding, the balloon is being blown up. And there is a set of spots on the balloon, each of which represents, let us say, a galaxy. And you can see that from the standpoint of every galaxy all the other galaxies are running away. Now, where is the center of the expansion?
On the surface of the balloon, the only part of it that the flat creatures can have access to, where is the center of the expansion? Well, it isn't on that surface. It's at the center of the balloon in that inaccessible third dimension. And, in the same way, into what is the balloon expanding? It is expanding in that perpendicular direction, that up/down direction, that inaccessible direction, and so you cannot, on the surface of the balloon, point to the place into which it is expanding, because that place is in that other dimension.
Now up everything one dimension and you have some sense of what people are talking about when they say that the universe is expanding. I hope that that was helpful, but considering the auspices of the writer, you should have known it anyway.
Questioner: A program from the Reagan administration was over the television last week. Mr. Paul Warnke stated that Star Wars [the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI] would fail.
CS: Well, maybe I should just say a few words about Star Wars. Star Wars is the idea that it's dreadful to be threatened with mass annihilation, especially at the hands of some people you've never met, and wouldn't it be much better to have an impermeable shield that protects you against nuclear weapons, to simply shoot down the Soviet warheads when they're on their way here? And as an idea it's an okay idea. The question is, can it be done? And let me not quote the legion of technical experts who believe that it is nonsense. Let me instead quote its most fervent advocates in the American administration, in the Department of Defense. They say that after some decades and the expenditure of something like one tr-Well, they don't actually say the expense, but it's an expenditure of something like one trillion dollars, that the United States might be able to shoot down between 50 and 80 percent of the Soviet warheads.
Let us imagine that the Soviet Union does nothing in the next few decades to improve its offensive capability; it leaves everything (a very unlikely possibility) at its present offensive force- that's ten thousand weapons. Ten thousand nuclear warheads. Let us give the benefit of the doubt to the exponents of Star Wars and imagine that instead of 50 to 80 percent they can shoot down 90 percent of the warheads. That leaves 10 percent that they cannot shoot down.
Ten percent of ten thousand warheads is (an arithmetical exercise accessible to everyone) one thousand warheads. One thousand warheads is enough to utterly demolish the United States. So what are we talking about?
The advocates say it can't protect the United States. And there are many other things that could be said about it, but I think that is a key point. Its advocates think it won't work. And it will cost a trillion dollars. Should we go ahead?