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If you get a drill and drill down 5km beneath the ground, it's teeming with life - millions of tiny living fossils. They resemble the earliest life forms and suggest that life started under the Ground. The bible talks of Eden as a sunny parkland with white fluffy clouds, but it probably ascended from the region that we now associate with Hell.

Paul Davies

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Paul Davies
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: April 22
Cosmologist
Physicist
University Teacher
Writer
London
England
Paul Charles William Davies
Form
Ground
Suggest
Resemble
Life
Spring
Talks
Earliest
Started
Regions
Associate
Millions
Beneath
Eden
Ascended
Hell
Clouds
Fossils
Teeming
Probably
Tiny
Sunny
Fluffy
White
Forms
Associates
Drill
Living
Bible
Region
Drills

More quotes by Paul Davies

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The way life manages information involves a logical structure that differs fundamentally from mere complex chemistry. Therefore chemistry alone will not explain life's origin, any more than a study of silicon, copper and plastic will explain how a computer can execute a program.
Paul Davies
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Scientists have no agreed theory of the origin of life - plenty of scenarios, conjectures and just-so stories, but nothing with solid experimental support.
Paul Davies
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The laws of physics ... seem to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design... The universe must have a purpose.
Paul Davies
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The secret of our success on planet Earth is space. Lots of it. Our solar system is a tiny island of activity in an ocean of emptiness.
Paul Davies
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A permanent base on Mars would have a number of advantages beyond being a bonanza for planetary science and geology. If, as some evidence suggests, exotic micro-organisms have arisen independently of terrestrial life, studying them could revolutionise biology, medicine and biotechnology.
Paul Davies
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There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. . . It seems as though somebody has fine tuned nature's numbers to make the Universe. . . The impression of design is overwhelming.
Paul Davies
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The universe contains vastly more order than Earth-life could ever demand. All those distant galaxies, irrelevant for our existence, seem as equally well ordered as our own.
Paul Davies
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Matter is regarded as being constituted by a region of space in which the field is extremely intense . . . . . . There is no place in this new kind of Physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.
Paul Davies
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We will never fully explain the world by appealing to something outside it that must simply be accepted on faith, be it an unexplained God or an unexplained set of mathematical laws.
Paul Davies
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Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here.
Paul Davies
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Should we find a second form of life right here on our doorstep, we could be confident that life is a truly cosmic phenomenon. If so, there may well be sentient beings somewhere in the galaxy wondering, as do we, if they are not alone in the universe.
Paul Davies
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No planet is more earth-like than Earth itself, so if life really does pop up readily in earth-like conditions, then surely it should have arisen many times right here on our home planet? And how do we know it didn't? The truth is, nobody has looked.
Paul Davies
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No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating.
Paul Davies
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No attempt to explain the world, either scientifically or theologically, can be considered successful until it accounts for the paradoxical conjunction of the temporal and the atemporal, of being and becoming. And no subject conforms this paradoical conjuction more starkly than the origin of the universe.
Paul Davies
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The Goldilocks Enigma is the idea that everything in the universe is just right for life, like the porridge in the fairy tale.
Paul Davies
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When I was a student almost nobody thought there was any life beyond Earth. Today it's fashionable to say that there is life all over the place, that the universe is teeming with it, but the scientific facts on the ground haven't really changed.
Paul Davies
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General relativity is the cornerstone of cosmology and astrophysics. It has also provided the conceptual basis for string theory and other attempts to unify all the forces of nature in terms of geometrical structures.
Paul Davies
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Perhaps the best motivation for going to Mars is political. It is obvious that no single nation currently has either the will or the resources to do it alone, but a consortium of nations and space agencies could achieve it within 20 years.
Paul Davies
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To a physicist life looks nothing short of a miracle. It's just amazing what living things can do.
Paul Davies
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Man-made computers are limited in their performance by finite processing speed and memory. So, too, the cosmic computer is limited in power by its age and the finite speed of light.
Paul Davies