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Hello.
I'm Virginia McSwain, a Professor of Physics at Lehigh University.
I'm Carl Mitchell, a student of Physics at Lehigh University.
We heard that Bill O'Reilly recently posed some interesting questions about the origin of the tides, our solar system,
and the existence of life.
And, we'd like to provide a few answers today.
Gravity holds the moon in orbit around the Earth, it holds the Earth in orbit around the sun,
and basically every object in our universe is gravitationally attracted to every other object.
Likewise, the moon's gravity therefore pulls on the Earth,
and the moon's gravity pulls on the Earth's oceans causing them to rise and fall, giving us our tides.
Shortly after the Earth formed, billions of years ago, a large object about the size of Mars crashed into the earth.
The resulting debris that was ejected coalesced, forming our moon.
Now, Mr. O'Reilly said that Mars and Venus don't have moons.
He is correct that Venus doesn't have a moon, but Mars actually has two,
and there are actually over 100 moons in our solar system.
Our sun is actually one of more than a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
The Milky Way Galaxy is one of billions of galaxies in our universe.
All of these galaxies came from a single explosion that began our universe;
the Big ***.
Many people interpret the Big *** event as a creation event by God, and this theory is actively supported by the Catholic Church.
NASA's Kepler mission recently discovered about 1200 extra solar planets outside our solar system.
54 of these planets exist in their star's habitable zone.
It's a zone that's not too far away from the star that water freezes,
but not so close to the star that all of the water simply burns off the planet.
Could any of these planets have life?
We don't know yet.
The next step would be to analyze these planets' atmospheres
and determine whether organic molecules and other such indicators of life exist in those planets.
So, why is Earth the only location where we find life?
Well, perhaps it's not.
The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
Mr. O'Reilly's point of view seems to be that if we don't understand something we should simply give up.
Well, if Copernicus and Galileo had given up
then we might still live in a world where people believe that the sun orbited the earth.
If Alexander Fleming had given up
then we might still live in a world where fevers were cured with leeches instead of penicillin.
We don't have all of the answers to all of our questions,
and we may never have all of the answers,
but the only way to continue getting more answers is by continuing to ask the questions and not giving up.