Lisa Randall: evaluation

Transcript context

…I wish you could know high-resolution details of where that asteroid came from, where in the Oort Cloud, why it happened, is it in fact because of dark matter? Just the full tracing back to the origin of the universe because humans seem to be somewhat special. It seems like so many fascinating events at all scales of physics had to happen for [inaudible 00:10:17]. I’m really, really glad you mentioned that because actually that was one of the main points of my book, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs. One of the reasons I wrote it was because I really think we are abusing the planet, we’re changing the planet way too quickly. Just like anything else, when you alter things, it’s good to think about the history of what it took to get here. As you point out, it took many operations on many different scales. We had to have the formation of structure, the formation of galaxies, the formation of the solar system, the formation of our planet, the formation of humans. There’s so many steps that go into this. Humans in some part were the result of the fact that this big object hit the earth, made the dinosaurs go extinct, and mammals developed. It is an incredible story and yes, something else might come of it, but it won’t be us if we mess with it too much. But it is on a grand scale, earth is a pretty resilient system. Can you just clarify, just fascinating, the shape of things. The shape of the Milky Way’s… Of the observable stuff is mostly flat. You said dark matter tends to be spherical, but a subset of that might be a flat disk.…

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