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Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It is Friday, April 17th.

I am Father Raymond Guiao of the Society of Jesus, president and Chief Mission officer of Saint Ignatius High School, which is proud to support today's forum.

It is my distinct and blessed honor to introduce today's speaker.

Jesuit brother Guy Consolmagno astronomer and director emeritus of the Vatican Observatory and president of the Vatican Observatory Foundation.

The forum today comes at an incredible moment in the history of science, curiosity, and humankind.

Last week, Artemis II returned from its journey around the moon, and perhaps with a little help from the blockbuster film Project Hail Mary.

It feels like interest, wonder and excitement in the cosmos is growing once again.

But where does the Pope go?

If he has questions about the stars, he would turn to the leadership of the Vatican Observatory, which is one of the oldest active astronomical observatories in the world, with its roots going back to 1582 and the Gregorian Reform of the calendar.

For the past decade, brother Guy, or the Pope's astronomer, as he is known, has been that leader with the team of scientists operating out of facilities in both Rome and the Arizona desert.

He joined the observatory in 1993, produced over 300 scientific publications, and is the author of several books, including Turn Left at Orion with Dan Davis.

Would you Baptize an Extraterrestrial?

With Father Paul Muller, also a Jesuit and a Jesuits Guide to the Stars.

Today we are going to hear more about Brother Guy's journey, the work of the Vatican Observatory, and what it means to truly unite faith and science.

Also joining us on stage and moderating the conversation today is Doctor Kirsten Ellenbogen, president and CEO of the Great Lakes Science Center.

Since 2013, Doctor Ellenbogen has led one of the top ten science centers in the nation, according to USA Today.

Before we begin, a quick reminder for our live stream and radio audience.

If you have a question during the Q&A portion of the forum, you can text it to the number (330)541-5794, and City Club staff will work to.

We'll try to work it into the program.

Now members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Brother Guy Consolmagno of the Society of Jesus and Doctor Kirsten Ellenbogen Well, we have to start because some of us in the room and perhaps some of our listeners don't really know what the Vatican Observatory is.

Why is it there?

Can you give us a quick history?

The current version of the Vatican Observatory was founded by the previous pope, Leo.

Leo the 13th back in 1891.

The same guy who came up with the encyclical on, you know, version of our Rome and getting the church into the modern world.

It was to show the world that the church supports science.

But in fact, as the father said, we can trace ourselves back to 1582 and the reform of the calendar, and even earlier than that, astronomy was one of the four topics that everybody had to learn at the universities, in the medieval universities, before you could go on to study theology or philosophy.

Well, so you've been on a journey, though, to get to the Vatican Observatory.

You grew up in Detroit.

How does a kid from Detroit take us on that journey to get to the Vatican Observatory?

So do we have two hours?

Yeah.

Well, it was not at all what you would expect.

I grew up, of course, as a Sputnik kid.

I was in kindergarten when Sputnik went up.

I was in my last year of the high when people landed on the moon.

Every kid in those days was going to be, you know, a space jockey of some sort.

But the Jesuits got me studying Latin and Greek.

So by the time I finished, I didn't know what I was going to do.

I went off to Boston with no clear idea.

My best friend, also from high school, was at MIT.

I'd visit him every weekend and discovered they had the world's biggest science fiction library.

So I transferred to MIT to study science fiction.

I had to choose a major.

I chose Earth and planetary science.

Planet science fiction.

Turns out that was geology.

I'm going to study geology rocks.

But they have meteorites.

Rocks that come from space.

I got so excited in that I got my, you know, sent off to do my doctorate from MIT.

I went off to Arizona for a doctorate five years as a postdoc back in Boston, Harvard and MIT.

Those of you in academia know five years means couldn't get a job.

So I quit science entirely and joined the Peace Corps, where they had me teaching astrophysics at the University of Nairobi.

And at that point, I could get a teaching job because I had this.

So I was teaching a little school in Pennsylvania called Lafayette College, fell in love with it.

Small college teaching.

This is what I was made for.

I'd been dating somebody in that fell by the wayside.

So now what am I going to do?

Well, I realized if I were a Jesuit, I could teach at a Jesuit university, a place like John Carroll.

So I joined the Jesuits, thinking that that's what I was going to do.

The Jesuits I joined as a brother.

I was, you know, pushing 40 at this point.

Jesuits have three vows, Poverty, Well, I was used to that.

I'd been a grad student.

Chastity.

I was used to that.

I'd been a grad student.

Obedience.

I was not used to.

Rather than letting me teach where I wanted to teach.

Under obedience, they ordered me.

I had to move to Rome, live in a palace.

Look at that terrible scenery.

Eat that horrible food.

And by the way, at the Vatican Observatory is one of the world's largest collection of meteorites.

So for ten years, I was curating the meteorites and then got into about 20 years curating the meteorites.

And then in 2015, Pope Francis made me the director.

Amazing.

I mean, really, that's an incredible journey.

It didn't end there because you're emeritus director of the observatory now, and you are leading now the observatories foundation, along with the telescopes and the meteorite collection and the other labs in Costa Gandolfo.

in the Popes summer home about 30 years ago, we realized light pollution made telescopes in Rome impossible.

Pope Benedict had a homily an Easter Saturday night about light and light and dark in our spirituality.

And he says, we human beings nowadays make our own artificial lights that blind us to God's lights.

And he says, isn't that a symbol of symbolism, of sinfulness?

It's not a symbol that is sinfulness.

Any light that goes up in the sky, rather than down where you're trying to walk, is a sin.

Fortunately, there are still dark places in America.

One of them is Arizona.

So we built a telescope in Arizona.

We do now a lot of outreach work in Arizona.

All of this is part of and supported by the Vatican Observatory Foundation.

And I'll simply mention that it was a native of Cleveland, Fred Lennon, who paid for our telescope in Arizona and named it for his wife, the Alice Lennon Telescope.

Amazing.

Amazing.

Yeah.

Well, I do have to take a little side note, because I suspect many of us out here are still feeling that moon joy.

the splashdown was less than a week ago.

And it's funny to have you here so quickly after that, because the Jesuits and the moon have a long relationship long history.

Long history.

Tell us.

Tell us a little more about that history.

Well, we all know Galileo looked at the moon to the telescope.

He was not the first guy to do that.

It was an Englishman named Thomas Harriot.

But Galileo, being a good Italian, knew how to paint and watercolor in 3D.

He recognized with an artist's eye that he was looking at a sphere, that these were mountains, that these were craters, that these who had ever seen a mountain from above looking down before Galileo had the wisp.

That's one of the things that makes Galileo such a great guy.

Incidentally, Galileo was a good Italian and a good Catholic, and we're very proud of that.

Everything you think you know about Galileo was probably wrong.

The truth doesn't make the church look any better, but that's a different story.

20 years after the infamous Galileo trial, a Jesuit named Jean-Baptiste with the telescope, made the first really accurate map of the moon, including naming craters for prominent scientists.

And even though this was, you know, the time when the church and the scientists were having a hard time making the Copernican system work, he names the most prominent crater on the moon, Copernicus.

And he has a crater named for Galileo and a crater named for Kepler, and a crater named for Aristarchus, who had that idea of the sun being at the center.

Back in the Greek times.

And then he adds himself and his student and another to a dozen, two dozen Jesuits.

So there are now, I think, 35 craters on the moon, named for Jesuits.

The naming is done by the International Astronomical Union that has a committee doing that.

And I am on that committee because people thought I remembered my Latin from high school.

Well, we're big fans of NASA in Cleveland.

We have the NASA Glenn Research Center here.

We have the visitor center at the science center.

I'm hoping your a NASA fan as well.

I mean, what are your hopes for NASA?

Well, NASA paid for my education.

The NASA grants to my professors paid for me to do my graduate studies.

They paid my salary for a good ten, 20 years.

And even now, when the Vatican is paying my salary, you don't do science alone.

Yeah.

You only do science as part of a community.

You have a conversation with people, and those other people are more often than not being paid by governments, NASA or the European Space Agency or the Japanese space agency, JAXA All of these people are part of the conversation.

And to have a healthy conversation, we need to have a reliable sense of who's going to be paying for this stuff.

We're very excited about, you know, what NASA has done.

There is a Jesuit brother, not me, but another fellow who works in the meteorite lab who was invited to be part of the team studying the samples that were brought back from asteroid Bennu.

He's also on the Lucy team, which is a spacecraft going off to look at the asteroids in orbit, along with Jupiter in the L2, L4, and L5 points.

We work really closely, and I don't write papers alone.

My coauthors are funded by NASA or by the European Space Agency.

We all work together.

And the great thing is, 20 years ago, for my sins, they made me the head of the planetary scientists, astronomers, the Division for Planetary Science of the American Astronomical Society.

Part of that was going to Washington, talking to people there about the space program and our hopes for it.

And the great thing I saw then, the great thing I've seen everywhere is people of every political stripe, every religion, every philosophy.

We all live under the same stars.

We all have that same curiosity, especially the people I met in my Peace Corps days in Africa.

I'd go up country with a little telescope.

But have you ever seen the craters of the moon on a little telescope?

Sure, sure.

You've seen the rings of Saturn through a little telescope.

Have you ever seen the rings of Saturn in a small telescope with your own eye and not gone Oh, wow.

Everybody does that.

Including folks where my fellow Peace Corps volunteers were up country because it feeds our souls.

Because it makes us realize that there's more to questions of life than what's for lunch.

We don't live by bread alone.

I'd read that someplace.

And that kind of astronomy is what fuels our government paying for an outfit like NASA to feed our curiosity and just make us realize why we're alive.

I'm really glad you're here today.

No, it's it's it's wonderful what you've referenced a little bit of history where there's a tension between science and religion.

And I want to take you back to some of that and, and just elaborate talk a little bit more.

There have been some very productive times.

There have been some very difficult times and some of it really, as you were telling us, moved the observatory ahead The tension really dates to the end of the 19th century.

It does not date from Galileo.

Galileo was just one astronomer of many astronomers.

And as I say, even though he was unfairly treated by the church, his two daughters were sisters, were nuns.

He was not, you know, some atheist trying to rebel against the system.

Copernicus comes up with his idea of the sun being at the center of the solar system in the 1540s.

Within ten years, the Catholic Church has the Council of Trent, where they spent 20 years looking for heresies everywhere.

Galileo was never mentioned.

He's not considered a heretic.

Then the whole history of why there is this myth of a war between faith and science really takes hold.

At the end of the 19th century.

And why?

It's a great question for historians, the best I've heard.

It was tied into the anti-immigrant movement at the end of the 19th century in America.

The books saying, we got to keep those Catholics out of the country because they're going to ruin the place.

All those people with vowels at the end of their names, like my great grandfather, maybe they did ruin the place.

I don't know.

And in Europe, the church was the one force that was independent of the nation states that were all forming so that the unification of Italy was, you know, the church was worried because a lot of their territory was confiscated.

Bismarck was anti-Catholic because you wanted to, you know, unify all the different parts of Germany.

It was tied up in the politics of the day.

It was also tied up in people who misunderstood the theory of evolution.

All I got was the Sunday supplement version, which was survival of the fittest.

Well, if I'm rich and you're poor, it must be that I'm more fit.

So why bother helping the poor?

If I'm fit and youre Well, if people like me are the ones who are rich, then let's make sure that the people who don't look like me get into the country.

Even worse Let's make sure that they're sterilized.

That idea of eugenics tied in with the 19th century myth that, you know, steam engines and electricity will solve all of our problems.

The only outfit that spoke out against that was the church.

So that the Sunday supplement scientists and I'm talking some big names.

Alexander Graham Bell writes in National Geographic a long article about how wonderfully eugenics is going to be.

This is what people were thinking in those days.

You know, it wasn't until the world's most technologically sophisticated death camps were made in Nazi Germany that people realized how sick that idea was.

But until then, the church, it turns out to be bad science.

But even if the science worked, which it doesn't, it's still bad.

And the church was there to remind you that just because you can do something, doesn't mean that you shouldn't spend a moment or two asking, is this really what we want to do?

Well, listening to Brother Guy, probably none of you are surprised to hear that he's been awarded the Carl Sagan Science Communication Award.

It's quite an honor.

So give us some advice.

Right.

You're really working to communicate about the importance of curiosity.

You're talking about innovation.

You're talking about wonder.

And you talk to people not just who are people in the faith, right?

The broader community.

What advice do you have to the public?

What advice do you have to scientists to really make sure we're thoughtful in how we're doing this?

The first is to not be afraid to do it.

At the end of the day, if you're getting money from somebody to do the science, they deserve to find out what you've been doing.

You know, if that money comes from the government, the taxpayers deserve to know.

But again, we're part of a team.

Some people are going to be better at explaining this than other people.

And don't belittle the guys in your community who were doing the public outreach.

Nowadays, I know there are scientists who like to poopoo Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Oh, he's too public.

He's too popular.

They're jealous.

I know Neil, he's actually was a high school friend of a friend of mine, and he's a great guy.

I remember being at the Natural History Museum in New York.

I was going in to work with our meteorites.

He's on the street talking to a bunch of tourists about astronomy because he's in love with the astronomy, and he's bringing in the next generation.

When I was a student, people would poopoo Carl Sagan.

But again, his enthusiasm is what generated the next generation of scientists.

When I was growing up, it was George Gamow one, two, three infinity.

And it turns out a lot of Gamow contemporaries.

Oh, he's a publicist.

He's a publicity hog Don't be afraid to do that.

The other thing to remember is, at the end of the day, if I was going to give a talk here on my science, you'd remember 1% of what I said.

But you would remember that I love this stuff, that it's fun.

That that's why I'm doing it.

And do remember that it's.

You shouldn't be afraid to say.

Why am I a scientist?

It's not to make money, boy, I'm on the wrong field.

If that was the case.

Not to get girls didn't work for me anyway.

I'm doing it because I experience joy.

The.

I was teaching at Fordham one year.

I had a semester where I was teaching.

I was doing Maxwell's equations, doing all the mathematical manipulations.

Came up with the second order differential equations.

You know.

Your eyes are glazing over.

But there was a kid in the front row who looks at the equation and just spurts out for everybody in the class to hear, oh my God, it's a wave!

Which was what Maxwell realized when he realized that, yeah, electricity and magnetism can make waves.

And that's why we've got radio and that's why we can transmit electricity.

And that's why we can understand the spectra of other stars.

All because of those equations, all because it's a wave and the equations are elegant.

They are as beautiful as the sunsets that they describe.

And to that presence of joy to me, is a sign of the presence of God.

This is the creator saying, hey, is it this cool stuff?

Did you see what I did?

Come, let's look at the next one.

I love that.

And I wish that the joy of expressing about science was as pervasive, as it should be.

But even today, there are still attacks on science.

Right?

And we've seen this come up again and again and again, particularly attacks on expertise.

Authority.

Right.

Downplaying the expertise of Stem research.

So have you as that kind of attack, does that happen against the observatory?

Have you had to manage that in your career?

It's interesting that nowadays the only outfits that are still willing to say there is truth, even if we don't have it perfectly, is science.

And the church.

We find ourselves on the same side.

Yeah.

And part of the misunderstanding I hate to blame the way we teach kids, because I don't know any better way of teaching them.

But, you know, if you're going to teach music, you start by playing scales.

You got to hit the right notes.

Those are the scales.

But that's not music.

That's the exercise to allow your fingers to know how to make the music.

We teach physics by seeing if you can get the answers to the odd number of problems in the back of the book.

That's not science, but those are the finger exercises you need.

We teach religion with a set of rules, with a set of axioms, not because that's religion, but that's where you start.

Religion is about loving God, and love isn't getting the right answers.

Because if you figure it out, your spouse and I got that one figured.

Now that's not love.

Love is always discovering new things, loving, discovering new things about God, discovering new things about the universe.

And you only discover new things if you're willing to admit you don't know them already.

So you don't get mad when science gets it wrong.

You get excited because it means science is growing.

You know, some people ask me, is there ever a case when when this bit of science will disagree with that bit of religion?

And that actually hasn't happened because they're not talking about the same stuff.

But what does happen is a bit of science disagrees with this other bit of science.

And that doesn't make me abandon science.

That makes me say, I'm a I'm going to get a paper out of this.

I'm, you know, I'm about to learn something new.

You get excited when you discove People who are afraid, you know, I know one thing, and I know this thing.

Very true.

And I'm afraid to go beyond it.

Have no faith in their faith.

They have no trust in their science.

And it's such a shame, because it's in the learning where all the fun takes place.

Well, let me take this one step further and ask the difficult question, because there are attacks specifically on the Pope right now from the president and vice president of the United States.

There have been harsh comments about the ability of the Pope to make comment on the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.

What how does the faith community and its scientists stay focused in a time like this?

Ultimately, in every bad era and you read enough history, you know, there was no shortage of bad eras We held the meeting of The Meteoritical Society the international society that studies meteorites.

We hosted that meeting in Rome and the week of September 11th, 2001, right in the middle of this.

And we had a speaker, you know, sort of at the at the banquet, David Sobel, who wrote about Galileo and Galileo's daughter.

And that was great.

Being in Rome gives you a sense of perspective.

Hearing about Galileo gives you a sense of perspective.

Studying the stars.

Just going outside at night and looking at the stars reminds you that the universe is bigger than whatever it is I'm scared of at this moment.

And that sense of perspective allows you to weather the bad times and to not go overboard in the good times either.

That, I think, is one of the joys of science.

That is sometimes not understood why we do this stuff.

Also, science shows you how the world's biggest problems can be broken into smaller bits, and I can address this one and I can address that one.

And if I can't do that yet, don't worry about it.

Maybe I'll get there.

I go back to my time in the Peace Corps.

People growing up.

This is now 40 years ago in a country that have a lot of issues, like Kenya could be overwhelmed by it.

But to recognize that, hey, you can do the science too.

You can be part of this big question of what's in the universe.

And here's how we go about breaking down the big questions into little questions that have answers, gives you that sense of hope that I'm not going to get perfection tomorrow.

Indeed, you know Pope Francis's encyclical on load out of.

See, it's not the encyclical on the environment.

It's the encyclical about how we deal in an imperfect world, knowing that there are technological fixes needed, but none of them are going to be the final answer.

We're never going to be able to relax and say, got that one solved because of, you know, what we call original sin, what we call the human propensity to screw things up.

To quote a wonderful author, Francis Bufford, you know, they say original sin is the one theological principle that you can prove by reading the daily paper.

And yet to not be despairing of the misunderstandings and miscommunications to say we've lived with them all of our lives.

We'll live through this one as well.

I appreciate that we've got just one more question before we move to your question, and let's take it back to your core expertise and something very important for Clevelanders, because on Saint Patrick's Day, we had a meteorite come down right here in the Cleveland area.

It was very exciting.

How many of us heard the boom?

We heard the boom.

So tell us a little bit about, you know, do you have thoughts on the origin of that meteorite?

Do you have advice for any of us who are still out hunting to get pieces from that?

Give us your expertise.

Well, first of all, what are meteorites?

I grew up right after World War II Baby boomer.

I grew up in a in a housing development.

As the houses were being built, as kids would play in the backyards would always be a scrap heap of.

Yeah, the bits of wood.

Oh, this house is going to have the oak paneling.

And they've got the purple tiles in their bathroom because they have about five designs to the houses.

The solar system has its own scrap heap.

It's called the asteroid belt.

And the rocks from there that hit the Earth are ways that we can see what's inside the planets.

Because these are the bits that somehow didn't get to be inside, but are no different from the pieces that did.

So we know the chemical composition from knowing the compositions of the meteorites we know from their physical state.

These are things that really nothing's happened to them for 4.5 billion years.

So we've got this instant window into the past, and that's why it's so exciting.

The meteorites that we gather and collect are incredibly important to us because of the science.

There's also a business side to it.

Pretty soon, we're going to be going into space on a regular enough basis.

And these meteorites tell us the materials that are available if we're going to build things.

If you've got an asteroid that's full of water, like asteroid Bennu, you could use the water to get oxygen and hydrogen to make rocket fuel or to breathe.

There's a third thing, of course, as far as I know, nobody got hit by that meteorite.

As my old advisor, John Lewis once put it, my MIT professor, no one has ever been killed by a meteorite and lived to tell the tale.

But as there is a billion people on Earth now and we've got cities everywhere, inevitably one of them is going to hit.

Somebody is going to feel the punch.

By knowing what's out there.

We're learning how to deflect the asteroids or how to mitigate against whatever impacts do happen.

So the science, the economics, the human safety, all of it are tied up into knowing what's out there.

But to me, the most exciting thing is to realize that that blue sky or here in Cleveland, that gray sky that's overhead.

I grew up in Detroit.

I know what the weather is like.

You need to spend more time there.

That that sky overhead.

That's not an impenetrable barrier.

But we are physically connected to the planets.

We can touch them.

They can touch us.

Well, we're about to begin the audience Q&A.

For those just tuning in on our live stream or in our radio audience.

I'm Doctor Kirsten Ellenbogen, president and CEO of Great Lakes Science Center and moderator for today's conversation.

Joining me on stage is Brother Guy Consolmagno You know, I could do that.

I could say it like five minutes ago.

Also known as the Pope's astronomer.

He's the director emeritus of the Vatican Observatory and the president of the Vatican Observatory Foundation.

We welcome questions from everyone City Club members, guests, students and those joining via our live stream or at cityclub.org or live radio broadcast at 89.7 WKSU Ideastream Public media.

If you'd like to text a question, please text it to (330)541-5794.

That's (330)541-5794.

And City Club staff will work it into the program.

May we have the first question, please?

Good afternoon.

We have a text question.

Do you read science fiction?

And if yes, what have you enjoyed recently?

If not, why not?

Oh, I definitely read science fiction.

It's what got me into the sciences in the first place.

I am a fan of space opera.

There is science fiction out there that will ask the deep and important questions, but I do that for a living as a Jesuit.

I'm looking for the things that remind me of the fun.

There was a husband wife team of Sharon Lee and Steve Miller who write really ridiculous space opera, and I just I love them there.

Steve sadly died a couple of years ago.

I know the science is kind of goofy, but that sense of looking at the universe and having a tour of all the different places that you could find in space.

To me, that sense of fun is carried through that sense of wonder.

This is absolutely beautiful.

I'm so glad you're here.

I was a student at Cornell when Professor Sagan was there, and I was also very active in the Cornell Catholic community.

And I remember going to mass on a early Saturday evening, and then Carl Sagan would, hold open conversation hours afterwards, because we had a faction of the community that were strict creationists and very opposed to his presence on campus, and some of us very eager to be in conversation with him.

So I just wanted to share that fond memory with you.

He was a remarkable human being.

And my question for you, I didn't know about your book.

Would you baptize an extra extraterrestrial?

What's the answer?

Well, clearly.

Clearly the answer is to buy my book.

I do have to mention, first of all, two other professors who you probably knew at Cornell, Joe Burns and Joe Veverka And both of them are great scientists and Catholics.

The real answer of I'll tell the story behind where the title came from.

The subtitle is, and all the other crazy questions that people ask us.

I think we had to take out the word crazy for the publisher.

There was a time when I was going to be speaking at the Birmingham Science Festival in Birmingham, England, and by accident it was the day that Pope Benedict was also in Birmingham.

They asked me to talk to some journalists to promote the science festival, but they all wanted to ask about the pope, you know.

What do you disagree with the most about the Pope?

And where did the Pope try to?

You know, like I'm kind of tell a journalist this, come on.

And they didn't want to hear the fact that, in fact, Benedict was a great supporter of ours.

And I got to explain meteorites from Mars to him.

And that's sort of thing.

They were not getting there.

So one of the reporters came out with that question, would you baptize an alien?

I didn't realize at the time it was supposed to be a trick question, because if I said yes, then who am I to think that I know more than the aliens?

I said no.

Then am I saying that religion is just for us yokels here on earth?

But in fact, what I did say was the theologically correct answer only if they ask.

And you know, if an alien asks to be baptized.

And what's wrong with you, Mr.

Journalist?

That you're not as smart as that alien?

It's very entertaining.

A very useful conversation.

My question is that the dinosaurs were, according to science, because of the meteoroid.

How does science and the disappearance of, dinosaurs and the meteorite come together?

Well, the the question of the death of the dinosaurs.

A different version of that is the dinosaurs were killed because they didn't have a space program.

It's interesting to remember, of course, that the dinosaurs were on the Earth for longer than human beings have been on the Earth.

And in fact, the dinosaurs here, you could explain.

The two most famous types of dinosaurs were farther apart in time than from the dinosaurs to now.

But the Stegosaurus is in the tyrannosaur.

They were around for a long time, and probably the birds outside or, you know, in some ways descended to them.

We don't know for sure that it was a meteorite impact that killed the dinosaurs.

It's the best theory we've got going right now.

And as a theory.

It's rich in that it then makes you ask, how does that happen?

How could that happen?

Why would mammals survive when dinosaurs didn't?

What was the mechanism?

Can you find an impact at the time when the dinosaurs suddenly went extinct at the boundary?

And the answer is yes.

And the answer is oh.

In the process of trying to figure out how those things work, you then begin to learn about the materials that meteorites bring in, like iridium, that you can see a richness in iridium in this, you know, formation in Italy.

You can see how dust in the atmosphere can change the climate on Earth.

And yes, climate change can occur slowly.

It can also occur very quickly.

And the fact that it never happened before, in fact, it did happen before.

Maybe we should be paying more attention about the rapid changes that we're making.

You just say that, you know, a species can't kill itself.

All of the the bacteria that depended on not having oxygen around produced enough oxygen that they're not here anymore.

All of this is to remind us that human beings exist, and life exists on the surface of the Earth over a very long period of time.

Change is inevitable, but change can also be something if it happens too quickly, can throw off our equilibrium.

A great lesson to us all.

The last question is, you know God was good.

Why did he allow the dinosaurs to die?

Well, why does anything die?

You'd think if God was good, he would be do something to to give us eternal life.

And oh, I've just invented Christian theology.

I had a question about.

I guess it's a little bit between theology, theology and research and their connection.

Something that's very dear to my heart is, I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to spend my time studying science and that.

But I also recognize that that's not an opportunity everyone has.

I'm able to spend my time studying and stuff like that because, you know, my parents are able to help put food on the table and stuff like that.

So what would you say to someone who thinks that maybe the science perspectives aren't that important?

Because there's there's more pressing matters.

There's the bread to eat.

At the end of the day.

I'm going to answer that in a really roundabout way.

Bear with me.

I hope I have the time to do this.

I'll try to do it in in under a minute.

The Genesis story of the seven Days of Creation was the best science of its day in Babylon.

When this was written.

The science was obsolete 100 years later.

There's a dozen different stories in Scripture about, you know, how the universe was made, and they all disagree with each other because our science has grown.

What remains constant is the theological principle behind that seven day story.

That it was done by one God, done deliberately.

Done as logically, as day follows.

Night.

Looking at a universe that is good in every step along the way is good.

All of these are things you have to believe if you want to do science.

What is the goal of the seven days of creation?

What is the message that the author of a theological message.

The best thing, the thing the creationist pointed for.

The most wonderful thing made by God.

When God created the universe, the climax of it all was the Sabbath day, the weekend.

The weekend is why we exist.

Why were more than just cats looking for our next meal or our next nap?

The weekend is when we have the time to look at the universe as scientists, or as artists, or as poets, or just people who like to go back and look at the sky.

This is why we were made.

Now your religion may be telling you to help the poor.

I hope it does.

But what is our goal in helping the poor?

It's not to make them rich.

Then they're part of the problem.

It's to make sure that everybody can have at least one day when they don't have to worry about what they're doing to feed themselves.

So that they can go to a science museum or an art museum, or produce the things that go into those museums, because only in that way are we fully human.

I have a question over here.

My name is Monica marshall.

I'm one of the astronomers at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Being an astronomer, I do appreciate your storytelling.

And maybe to go along with this conversation we've had so far.

And to go along with that question you just finished answering.

Do you feel that storytelling How do you how do you how do you start that conversation?

Do you need a tragedy to happen?

Do you need a miracle for you to start paying attention?

Or like, how does this how do I care?

And how do I trust what you're saying?

To care.

Every kid knows about stories.

It's sometimes when when they start to worry that, oh, that was too easy.

That they learn, they lose that sense of storytelling and the joy of storytelling.

And we have to be able to rekindle that.

Aristotle talked about five stages in every story.

There is, you know, the setting, there's the conflict.

There is the climax.

There.

Okay.

What happens after the climax?

And then you catch your breath at the end?

There's is technical terms for all of that.

That's also every scientific paper here is the universe.

Here's the problem I'm seeing and trying to understand the universe.

Here is the clever insight that I had.

Here's how it addresses the problem.

And finally, here's what I'm going to ask for money next year to keep doing this.

That storytelling arc is something built into the way we interact with the universe, and the question of what makes this a particularly interesting story is because this is the conversations, the stories that we have with each other.

But at the end of the day, we're really only going to be telling the stories that we're interested in.

I'll go back to the person who asked, what's the science fiction stories?

I love the science fiction stories that scratch an itch that I'm interested in might be different from the ones that other people read, and there was nothing wrong with that.

But I've got to go with the itches that I've got.

I've got to go with the things that make me curious.

And if we can, in kindle in each other, in the children that we all are.

You know, I'm still 12 years old inside in the old joke.

What was the golden age of science fiction?

12.

That was the golden age.

If we can never lose sight of that sense of curiosity, the sense of curiosity, that sense of awe, sometimes going to a museum is the way to rekindle that.

Give yourself the time to go to a museum.

Thanks for joining us today.

So in the next couple of decades, hopefully humanity will go to Mars.

We'll go to maybe Europa, IO and explore there, and maybe there's a chance that we find some life microorganisms or something more complex.

So, my question is, aside from the baptism question, what is the appropriate response and orientation of the religious community, the global community, mankind to life on other planets?

There was a fellow at the center for theology in the Natural Sciences at Berkeley, who did a survey about ten years ago on what would religions think if we find life elsewhere.

And he found out that every religion, including atheists, all said, if we find life elsewhere, that would prove we were right on the wrong.

And the fact and the fact that we haven't found life yet hasn't, you know, made me lose my faith in whatever it is I do or don't believe in.

So it's not a critical experiment in that sense.

There was a cartoon when I was a kid called Pogo, and the cartoon was a little talking animals, and one of the porcupine was the philosopher.

And at one point he's saying, there are some people who say that there are creatures in the universe more intelligent than us.

Others who say, in the entire universe, we're the most intelligent.

Either way, it's a sobering thought.

But we have to be prepared for anything.

I'm not going to tell God how to make the universe.

I'm willing to be surprised.

My thesis, my, my master's thesis at MIT was about the icy moons, and I end up with the idea.

Well, I'm not going to actually predict life in these oceans.

I'll leave that for Carl Sagan to do.

And the first guy in writing to not predict life in the oceans of Europa.

But we'll never really understand life until we see more than one example.

I'm hoping we spend a good long time before we send people to Mars, because I want us to be able to have a mars that doesn't have, you know, E coli and other, you know, germs from human beings infecting the place.

Because I want to know, did Mars get it?

Did Europa get it?

Did EO that wonderful moon which I pronounce io?

Other people pronounce io.

The one way you can't pronounce it like a guy in on a news report.

And volcanoes have been found on Jupiter's moon ten.

We have different ways of pronouncing these things.

We have different reactions.

But let's find out.

I'm really struck by the comment you made.

The the quote you get from Pope Benedict talking about how light pollution is sort of an expression of human sinfulness.

When I hear you talk about science and research, I'm hearing a sense of sort of awe of of who God is and God's creation.

When I hear about space exploration, I also hear this very like human desire to take things for ourselves and to conquer and kind of make it our own.

And that seems really inextricably linked with the those resources are the same resources you need to do science.

And so I'm wondering, how do you navigate that tension between seeing God and also humanity wanting to sort of take take this for ourselves?

Yeah, it's and the resources include the human resources.

One of the reasons I went to MIT and didn't stay at the college, I was because the college, I was something of a party school, and I was sick of, you know, the smell of stale beer in the freshman dorms.

When human beings get to the moon, you're going to have the stale, the smell of stale beer there, too.

And those same people are also going to be the people we need to do the work, because there's none of us perfect.

There's none of us who don't screw up.

One of the ways we learn to progress is to learn from our mistakes, to be tolerant of the mistakes of other people, to be tolerant of our own mistakes, and to be able to say that, you know, just because still, beer smells bad doesn't mean beer is evil.

Rather, the opposite.

You know, I've also been able to travel to pubs in England and discover when it's done right.

It's good stuff.

That sense of not demanding perfection of ourselves and of our fellow people is something that tolerance is something that we need to live in tension with.

Because frankly, tension is what drives us forward.

When there's no tension, we think we know it all, and we sit back and, you know, do nothing but nap.

You know, I've had a cat who loved to nap, but the cat was missing out on the joy of looking through a telescope.

So as, someone who attended Catholic grade school and high school and finished up at John Carroll, I only ran into a handful of people who either were or thought Catholics were cool.

How does it how does it feel in this environment, this day and age, especially in the last two weeks, where as a standard bearer of the coolness of Catholicism, how do you handle it and what do you think of that?

Well, I grew up being a nerd when it was not cool to be a nerd.

My roommate at MIT, the guy who introduced me to science fiction, also dragged me off to hear Stan Lee give a talk at Harvard.

Oh, and you know Stan Lee.

Now, people in this room know who Stan Lee is.

No one would have believed that.

A few months ago, there was the obituary of one of the guitarists from the Grateful Dead on the front page of the New York Times 50 years ago.

Who would have believed that part of this is recognizing that things that give me joy are things that are going to give everybody joy.

When I was at MIT, there was a project, Plato and a network of about two dozen computers.

That was the internet 50 years before the internet came along.

And I remember thinking, this is so much fun.

Gee, it would be great if everybody could have that.

But of course, that's impossible.

And here we are.

Maybe it also means that those of us who are nerds or Catholics can begin to appreciate the cool things that those other people have been doing that we were Pooh poohing all along that, oh, this cool stuff to be seen in poetry and oh, cooking can be really a joyful way of experiencing God's goodness.

And even if it's stuff that I don't have a taste for, maybe I'm tone deaf and I don't get music, I can at least appreciate the people who are not tone deaf.

Actually, I'm not tone deaf and I do appreciate music, but I've met people who can't.

If you can say that's an itch that I don't have, but I really appreciate other people being enthusiastic, being not afraid to be enthusiastic.

I'm a scientist and I'm a Jesuit.

I've got a collar and an MIT ring.

I'm both a fanatic and a nerd, but I'm a fanatic about my science.

I'm a nerd about my religion, and along with everything else, I really enjoy both of them.

I think we have time for one brief question, Brother Guy.

I'm a high school theology teacher, and I'm sure your vocation story is more than just.

I wanted to study science.

Is there something a particular story, that you can share that feeds your surety of the nature and existence of God?

Ultimately, and this is something that too often we forget to tell both our science students and our religion students.

God wants us to be happy.

Now, the things that we thought were going to make us happy, like an ice cream sundae.

Afterwards, they make you feel sick.

So be careful about just going for what the the obvious, but the long term satisfaction that long term.

This is where I belong.

Maybe it's.

This is who I belong with.

If you're looking for a spouse or this is where I belong, if you're looking for a vocation, keep looking until you find it.

Because it's there.

Don't give up.

Don't despair.

Don't keep looking.

Because ultimately, that long term satisfaction, that joy is the presence of God.

Well, the next time you are thinking about where you belong or looking up at Cassiopeia or stumbling around looking for a piece of meteorite, I really hope that the words of Brother Guy Consolmagno stay with you.

I want to thank you for joining us at the City Club today and say that forums like this one are made possible thanks to generous support of individuals like you.

You can learn more about how to become a guardian of free speech at cityclub.org.

The City Club would like to welcome students joining us from Benjamin O. Davis School and third Saint Ignatius High School.

The City Club would also like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by Borromeo and Saint Mary's seminaries.

Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Great Lakes Science Center.

Friends of Dave Nash and friends of Terry Szmagala Thank you all for being here.

Next Friday, April 24th at the City Club, we'll hear from Doctor Christine Alexander-Rager, MetroHealth's President and CEO, on the progress, challenges and future vision for the MetroHealth system.

Emily Campbell with the center for Community Solutions, will moderate.

You can learn more about this forum and others at cityclub.org.

Thank you once again to Brother Guy and to our members and friends of the City Club.

I'm Kirsten Ellenbogen and this forum is now adjourned.

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