Welcome back to Behind Greatness. This week, we sit down with Steven at his home in Virginia. Steven was most recently the Chief Historian for NASA before his retirement. As an astronomer and an astrobiologist he has been a prolific thought leader, writer and theorist on cosmology, “cosmotheology” and on the implications of living in a “post biological universe”. We start with learning about the meanings of each and their significance to how we view ourselves in the universe. We discuss his ideas on the supernatural being the natural and his view on how we must stay open to what we think God is. Fascinating. We discuss ETs (a subject that he has been steeped in since his graduate student days) and his view on UFOs and technologically advanced alien civilizations and also his involvement in The Galileo Project with his friend and a former podcast guest and fellow astronomer, Avi Loeb. We also delve a little into the question of whether knowledge is objective, the problem of “stove-piping” in the scientific world and his advice that he gives to his grandchildren about passion. Did we say that he has a planet named after him?

 

Honourable mentions go out to Avi Loeb (ep105), Br Guy Consolmagno (ep133) and Fr. Nathan Castle (ep140).

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Steve,

• Website: http://stevenjdick.com/index.html
• Galileo Project: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home
• Cosmotheology: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/61006523.pdf
• Post Biological Universe: https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/hist_culture_cosmos_detail.html
• Book: Space, Time, and Aliens: Collected Works on Cosmos and Culture - https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030416133
• Book: Astrobiology, Discovery, and Societal Impact www.cambridge.org/9781108426763
• Book: Classifying the Cosmos. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-10380-4