#1233 - Brian Cox

That's very cool. Three, two, one.

Yeah, a guy named it was his online Twitter or his Instagram handles, TGT Studios. And he makes these. I actually had one made for Elon. Elon Musk loved it too. So we made him one with, he made one with like this very beautiful red wood. Yeah. And those are one of those things made out of Jamie that some diodes or something? Nixi tubes. Nixi tubes. Yes. That's right. The old. Yes. Yeah, he has to get them from Russia.

He has them delivered over from Russia, so they might have listening devices implanted in them as well.

So Brian, good to see you, man. Great to be back. Yeah, great to have you back. So tell me about this tour that you're doing. It's a world tour. Try to keep this sucker like a fist from your face. There you go. How's that? That's perfect. Yeah, so world tour starts next week in the UK. And then we go everywhere from the south island of New Zealand, all the way to the Arctic Circle, to Svalbard, which is north, the furthest north that you can go on a commercial aircraft in the middle. We're in the States for a month in a mainly May.

And yeah, it's about cosmology and about the questions that cosmology raises. So if you're interested in the science of how did the universe begin, even questions of what may have been there, is the universe eternal? Is there such a thing as before the Big Bang? What is the future of the universe? How does complexity emerge spontaneously in a universe?

Then we take it for granted that there's a big bang and it's all hot and there's just this kind of hot glow of stuff. And out of that spontaneously in 13.8 billion years you get something like the Earth with a civilization and life on it. So how does that

Do we know anything about that? I mean, we do. I'm asking the question rhetorically. We know quite a lot about it. So it's really about showing the size and scale of the universe, but addressing those questions. I think everybody has about what does it mean to be human? This tiny little finite life that we lead in a possibly infinite universe. How do you make sense of that?

Well, it's incredibly exciting to me that there's a giant audience for this and that what Neil deGrasse Tyson had been doing and what a lot of public touring intellectuals are doing now, they're doing these giant theaters and these people are coming out to see these shows and we're realizing that there's, I hate to use the term market for this, but there's a demand for this and there's a lot of people who are incredibly fascinated by this and it's spreading information, it's spreading knowledge.

In the UK particularly, Wembley Arena, for example, you're talking about 10,000 people, 12,000 people in these shows, and you're right, they are coming. Although they're big shows, spectacular screens and all that, they're coming for to think, they're coming to hear about what we know about the universe and nature.

And I think, you know, I think I'm not surprised people are interested because these are questions that everybody asks. You know, I mean, just why am I here? You know, everybody's asking that question. But my point is that there is a framework. There's a framework of knowledge. There are things we know about the universe. So it is true that science scientists are not going to tell you why you're here. They're not going to tell you what the meaning of life is. But there is actually a there are things you need to know if you want to start to explore those questions for yourself.

But you need to know that there are two trillion galaxies in the observable universe. You need to know that the Milky Way galaxy has got 200 billion stars. Most of those stars now we know have planetary systems. We estimate there are something like 20 billion Earth-like planets or potentially Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone. So if you're asking questions about what is my place in the universe, you need to know those things. First of all, it's a framework within which you can think.

When you get to those numbers, when you're talking about trillions and billions and all those zeros, my brain just goes numb. There's this lack of comprehension that I'm well aware of. Those numbers get thrown about, I go, oh, 200 billion.

No, everybody does. I think everybody does. I think every scientist, no scientist can picture that number. I mean, he even the small number, 200 billion, the number of stars in one galaxy. And then when you say two trillion galaxies, I challenge anyone to be able to picture that, but it is the reality that we've observed.

We haven't counted all two trillion, by the way. We have a thing called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which maps the positions of galaxies. So you know how much of the sky you've surveyed, and you know how many galaxies you've counted, and then you can spread that across the wider universe. And you get this picture of a vast and possibly infinite universe. We know that the universe are very strongly suspected. The universe is much bigger than the piece we can see.

So we have good reason to think that's the case. Whether it's infinite or not is another question. And then that goes to your, you know, can you picture infinity? Well, no one can picture infinity. There's a weird thing as well about, you know, we say the universe began 13.8 billion years ago.

So that's a measurement. So because we can measure the speed that all the galaxies are flying away from us, essentially. And then you can run time backwards, if you like, to find out when they were all on top of each other. And so it's quite a simple measurement. And we've done that. So we say the universe began 13.8 billion years ago.

But actually, all we know really was the universe was very hot and very dense at that time. And we have some theories that the universe was in existence before that, and perhaps some sort of circumstantial evidence. And that means that actually the universe could have always been the eternal. And when I talk to people sometimes, they get a bit... Some people get upset about that. Some people would rather it had a beginning. And the idea that it might have been around forever.

is more frightening somehow than the fact that it began. It's interesting the way that people's minds work, what terrifies you the most, an eternal universe, or a finite universe. Yeah, they're both incomprehensible.

The eternal universe, if there was an eternal universe, is that negate the theory of the Big Bang? Or does it mean that there's a constant cycle of Big Bangs and then expansion and then recompression? Yeah, it could do. So some of those theories are back in vogue again. So yes, some of them say that there's a cycling universe.

So the Big Bang is an event when space gets very hot and very dense and filled with particles. And that may happen again. Some of the other theories, there's a theory called eternal inflation, which is a theory that, and it's actually the most popular theory, I think at the moment, but what happened, but why the Big Bang is the way that it is. It's got some very special features, the Big Bang, which we could talk about, but inflation is the idea that space time was around before the Big Bang, and it was expanding extremely fast.

And there was doubling in size in the most popular of these theories. Every 10 to the minus 37 seconds, which is 0.00, 0.00, 0.00, 0.00, with 37 knots, one of a second. So it's an unimaginably fast expansion. And then the idea is that draws to a close. So it quite naturally sort of dies away and the expansion slows down. And all the energy that was taken, that was causing that expansion sort of gets dumped into space and heats it up and makes particles. And that's what we call the Big Bang.

And those theories that slight extension to those say that slowing down just happens in little patches. So most of the universe, the overwhelming majority of the universe is still inflating at that insane speed.

And that just little patches stop and they're big bangs so you get multiple universes a multiverse called inflationary multiverse and we are in one of those bubbles and that's one of the more popular theories. That's another one I mean that right now I'm aware of what you're saying I can I can sort of visualize it in some sort of a graphic form but it's incomprehensible like my mind doesn't it doesn't have the capacity to expand.

the sense of distance and size to that that grasp is this because of just the way we evolved we evolved here on earth to deal with the spaces in front of us and now over the course of you know industrial civilization and education we're now grasping these concepts that are so

alien to the reality, the tangible reality that we exist in every day. I'm sure that's right. Even very simple things, you go back to the Greeks, so Aristotle and the great, very clever people. But they thought the earth was at the centre of the universe. Why? Because it feels like it's at the centre of the universe. It feels like we're not moving.

And that's quite a deep point, actually, in physics. It's like, why is it that we're flying around relative to the sun very fast at whatever speed is 18 miles a second or something like that? And the whole solar system is going around the Milky Way galaxy and so on. Why is it that we don't feel it? And the Greeks quite naturally said, well, because we're at the center of the universe. They also said everything falls towards the Earth. So therefore, the Earth must be at the center. It's natural. Right. And actually, it's quite a deep

thought to understand why it doesn't feel that we're moving. You have to go all the way to Einstein, really, for someone to take that very seriously. Well, you said, actually, you said, well, there's a great little explanation in Stephen Hawking's brief history of time about this, that the idea that you can't tell whether you're moving or not demolishes the notion of absolute space.

So if we think about space, most people I suppose, you'd think the way that Newton did, of a big box within which things happen. That's a natural picture of space in the universe, isn't it? The thing in which all the planets and galaxies are placed.

But in the brief history of time, Hawking says, well imagine bouncing a ball. So he bounces a ball on the table now, a tennis ball. So I drop it and I catch you again. So let's say I drop it and it takes a second to bounce up. So in that second, the earth has moved about 18 miles or so in space around the sun. So you could ask the question, did that ball return to the same place in space or not? And the answer is,

you can't answer it. It does from our perspective. But from the perspective of someone watching the earth go all the way around the sun, it went up by a cot it again. It had moved 18 miles. And then from some other perspective, it would have done something else. So the point is you can't say this is a point in space. It came back to the same place because that just depends on your perspective. It depends on whether you're watching the sun, the earth go around the sun or whatever it is. So Einstein said, that means there's no such thing as absolute space.

Which is kind of follows if you think about it. But that's a difficult, it's a cool, difficult thought process. Right. I mean, that's essentially what's happening when you're on a plane. I mean, if you're throwing a ball up in there and catching it on the planes, having it on a much smaller scale, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're flying at whatever, 600 miles an hour relative to the ground. But it doesn't seem like it when you're sitting there.

Yeah, and Einstein elevated that to a principle and said, if you're moving it, if you're not accelerated, you're just moving at a constant speed in a plane. Or now, I mean, that's essentially what we're doing now. We're moving around the sun at effectively constant speed. Then you can't tell. So there's no experiment you can do. We could look at the decay of a radioactive nucleus or some electricity and magnetism or bounce a ball, have a pendulum, whatever it is. And there's no experiment you can do to tell you whether you're moving or not.

Therefore, that concept has no meaning because you can't measure it. And that led Einstein to relativity. So that's the basis of general relativity, which is our best theory of the universe. Now, why is it that we think that the known universe is larger than we can observe? Well, one point is that it's

expanding and we always see the same radiation out there, so the glow of the Big Bang. But there are some deeper reasons. The one from the theory of inflation, the best way to explain the universe, the properties that we see,

is that it's very much bigger than the piece we can see. So for example, we measure space to be what's called flat. I don't even say what's called flat. It is flat. So if you imagine slices of space, let's imagine slices of them at different times. So you just slice the universe.

and say there's a big sheet like this. There's a sheet of space and there's another sheet and another sheet and it can have a geometry, right? It can be flat like a tabletop or it could be curved like a sphere or it could be curved in the opposite direction, sort of like a saddle or a bowl and we can measure that and when we measure it we see it's absolutely flat.

And that's a very unusual thing for it to be like. It requires, because what Einstein's theory says is that the shape of space, that the curvature of space is determined by the stuff that's in it. That's basically Einstein's theory of general relativity. Put stuff in space and it curves it and bends it and warps it and stretches it and so on. And what we find is that there's precisely the right amount of stuff in the universe to have a completely flat universe.

And the explanation, the most favoured explanation for that, is the universe is way bigger than the piece we can see. And so it's like looking at a piece of the earth. If you look at a little one mile square of the earth, then it's flat. You have to look at big distances, kind of a border, the radius of the earth, or bigger than one kilometer anyway, on one mile.

to see that actually you're on a curved surface. And that's one of the ideas about the universe and why it appears to be the way that it is because it's way, way bigger. So we're just looking at a little piece and that's why it looks flat and that's one of the ideas.

Now, when you say flat, my brain doesn't understand this, because from our perspective, when you look up at the Milky Way, you see all these stars all over the place. So if you're saying flat, how much height and what are you saying? So in terms of the way to measure it.

The best way to think about it is not to think of three dimensions of space, because then we can't picture it. But you can think of two, like this tabletop. And that's all right, we just forget the other one for now. And so you know what flat is on this table. I mean, you could define it. So you could say, for example, that if I draw a triangle on the top of the table, then all the angles add up to 180 degrees.

So that actually defines flat. If you did that on the surface of the earth with a big triangle, then the angles wouldn't add up to 180 degrees. Or you could draw a circle and say, what's pi? So pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. That's only true on a flat surface. It's different if the surface is curved.

So you can define flatness. But when you're saying flatness, what is the height and what is the width? Like if you're talking about it as if it's a table, there must be some sort of a, there's a dimension to it, correct? Oh yeah, there's a third dimension of space. But the same applies. It's just a generalization of geometry then. So you can pick, they're fine. We can picture it in two dimensions.

But you can, you can draw, you can quite literally, you could imagine sending light beams out. And we do this measurement, actually. We can look at the, the, the, the most distant light we can see, which is something called the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is

If you imagine looking out, if you look at the Andromeda galaxy, which we can see with the naked eye here in LA, you can see that. It's the most distant object you can see with the naked eye. And it's about two million light years away also, which means the light took two million years to get to us. So it's a long way away, but it's very big.

So as you look further out into the universe, the more and more distant galaxies, you're looking further back in time. Because you look at something that's a billion light years away, then the light took a billion years to get to us. So you see it as it was a billion years in the past. And we can actually look so far out that we can see almost back to 13.8 billion years ago, which is very close to the Big Bang. So we can look to light that began its journey before there were galaxies.

And that's the oldest light in the universe, which is, by the way, one of the one of the pieces of evidence from people. So I don't believe in the Big Bang. The answer is where you can see it. Sorry. It's just there. You can see it. We have pictures of it. That light, it turns out that there are structures or ripples in that light, which we can use as a ruler. So quite literally, as a ruler on the sky,

And then because that light's been traveling through the universe, we can see how that rule has been distorted as the light has traveled through space. And so we can infer whether space is flat or curved or how it's warped, if you like, just from that measurement. It's a beautiful measurement.

Is it possible that in the future we'll be able to see past 13.8 billion years? Not with light. Because the picture is that before, it actually was released 380,000 years after the Big Bang. It's a very precise number. You might say, how do you know that? Well, before that time, the universe was so hot that atoms couldn't form.

So you had a soup of electrically charged particles. It was just too hot for electrons to go into orbit around nuclei. So the universe was opaque to light, so you just couldn't. It's like almost like a big glowing star, if you like. And then when it was expanding, it cooled past the point where the atoms could form.

and at that point it becomes transparent really almost instantly in a cosmic timescale and so the light could then travel in straight lines through the universe and we can see that light so we see the light from that time but further back than that it's opaque so you can't see past that with light but you can potentially with gravitational waves which is this

measurement that got the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago, the LIGO experiment here in the United States. And that looks for ripples in the fabric of space and time. And in principle, if we had a big enough detector, you could see the ripples from the big bank. So you could take an image of the big bank in gravitational waves, which would be, but you need an enormous space-based detector that we're not going to build anytime soon.

No, obviously this is all through equipment and technology that's been invented over the last few hundred years and perfected. Is it possible that things could get better and you could get some ability to detect things even in a far more distant way? Yeah, I mean, gravitational waves are incredible. Einstein predicted them in 1915.

never thought they'd be detected, because you need to search your hyper, you need lasers, if you didn't have lasers, but I think LIGO, this experiment, which is half in, near Seattle in Washington state, and half in Louisiana. So they've got two detectors, and they're basically sort of a three-mile-long laser beams.

and that just sit and measure this of stretching and squashing of space as the ripples in the fabric of the universe go through. And what they've been observing collisions of black holes. So you can imagine how extreme like a colliding black holes is an incredibly extreme event. So it shakes the fabric of the universe and the ripples come across the universe. And these laser beams, which are just basically rulers, can detect it.

sort of ring almost like, you know, just vibrate as the ripples go through. In space and time, that Kip Thorne got the Nobel Prize last year for this is one of the greatest living physicists. So I want to say I'm describing it as a storm in time. So you've got this time to storm. It's a beautiful image. So that technology is incredible. Because the change in length is a kind of an exact number, but it's way, way, way less than the diameter of an atomic nucleus.

So the change in length of the beams, it's tiny measurement, but we can do it. So there's a collision of black holes, the idea that you can detect that. The first paper they published, they're two black holes and they were about 30 times the mass of the sun each. And they were all between each other and spiraling in towards each other.

and they accelerated at one point they were approaching each other at one third the speed of light and they accelerated to two thirds the speed of light in a tenth of a second and then hit each other and the explosion the energy release was I think I'm right it was something like 50 times the energy release that the power of all the stars in the observable universe glowing

And it was something like 50 times that amount of energy for a tiny fraction of a second. But it's an unimaginably violent event. And that's why our detectors can see the ripples that that makes in space and time. And we're detected. It's two or three of them now, and also two neutron stars colliding. We saw that as well with it. So it's an incredible machine, which is why it got the Nobel Prize.

Now there's a supermassive black hole at the center of every galaxy. But there's also other black holes that aren't necessarily in the center of galaxies. So these little ones, a few times the mass of the sun, and they're from collapsed stars. So they are stars at the end of their life, very bigger than the sun, more massive than the sun. But they run out of their fuel and they start to collapse because gravity squashes them.

And if they're sufficiently massive, then there's nothing that can stop the collapse. And so they collapse as far as we know to a point, essentially an infinitely dense point. We don't really know what happens. We don't know what happens right in the middle. But they collapse to such an extent that there's a region around it from which light can't escape. So nothing can escape. And that's a black hole.

And what happens to them? Do they travel? Are they moving through space? Yeah, they're still stars. So they're still there. They're surrounded this region where you fall in. It's called the event horizon. And if you go across that horizon, then you are going to the center. There's one way of thinking about it, which is quite cool, which is that

The time and space sort of flip is one way to think about it. So in the same way that we are going into the future now. So we're going to tomorrow. There's nothing we can do about it. We are going to tomorrow. In the same way, if you fall in across the event horizon of a black hole, you are going to the middle, the singularity, it's cold. So that's your future. Every line of your future points to the center of the black hole. So it's kind of the

ultimate of no escape for the ultimate prison. You're going to get squashed to an infinitely dense. So not every star becomes a black hole at the end of its life. No, because if something like the sun, we have a small star. It's quite small. Yeah. And when it collapses, there's a, there's a sort of a pressure force if you like, which is caused by the fact that electrons don't like to be very close to each other.

So it's called the Pali exclusion principle. But essentially what happens is that so as they get squashed close and close together, they move faster and faster to get out of each other's way, if you like. And that makes a force which holds them up. And so that creates what's called a white dwarf star. So you can have a blob of matter. They're about the size of the earth.

but they're about the mass of the sun. And so that's for smaller stars. They end up as these white dwarf things, which are very dense objects. There's another version which is called a neutron star, which is the same thing, but for neutrons. And they move faster and faster. So if it's massive enough that it overwhelms the electron thing, then the electrons sort of fall crush into protons and turn into neutrons. And the whole thing starts again. And so a neutron star can be

You know, one and a half times the mass of the sun, let's say, but it can be about what? 10 miles across. So, so that's an incredibly dense ball of matter held up by this, you know, the neutrons moving around. It's got fancy name. It's called neutron degeneracy pressure, but that's what it is. But if you go even bigger.

then even that can't hold it up. And as far as we know then, there's no known force that we know of that can hold the thing up if it's too massive. And so that's when it just almost winks out of existence. If you like, it collapses and collapses and collapses. And that's when you get a black hole. We try to put that in a perspective. The sun is a million times bigger than the Earth. And this neutron star is, we'll just say one and a half times the mass of the sun. Yeah, so the 10 miles wide. Yeah.

And there's loads of those around. They're called pulsars, so we see those all over the place. The first one that was discovered was called LGM1, because they're spin very fast. And it was called LGM1, because it's a very regular pulse, and they thought it was little green men. So they called it kind of jokingly little green men one.

So yeah, we've seen that there's one called the crab pulsar, which is in the crab nebula, which we saw the supernova explosion. So that's when one of these stars explodes at the end of its life and then collapses to form a neutron star. And we saw that in 1054 AD. Well, it wasn't there some speculation that our gas or our solar system at one point was had a was a binary star system and that one of those stars had become a dwarf.

I don't know. Someone had read something about that in relationship to the dense object they believe is outside the Kuiper belt. There's a bit of evidence that there's something out there. Because of the periodic extinctions and things on earth, you get periodic bombardments from out in the Kuiper belt. I think one of the theories is periodic extinctions.

Well, yeah, so for me, there have been mass extinctions on Earth when a lot of the life died. And we don't know what caused all those, but sometimes they're impacts from space. That seems clear. And so, yeah, there are theories that there's something orbiting out there which can disrupt all these objects out in the Kuiper belt that sends loads of comets and asteroids inwards to the inner solar system, and can cause havoc.

And so there's some people look at those theories. I mean, I don't know. It's one of those, it is a possibility that there's something out there. The speculation was that there's something out there, correct me if I'm wrong, something called a galactic shelf, like that it gets to a certain space and it indicates that there's something far larger out there.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know the exact about the stellar-sized en masse objects out there. I don't know that. I mean, there are some sort of suggestions. There's another planet out there, a big planet, for example. But you're right, there can be stuff always in way beyond the Kuiper Belt. And we're talking, you know, a light year away or something like that now.

It's interesting because it's incomprehensible the distance right in our minds how far that must be out past what we used to call Pluto. But for whatever reason that becomes more interesting because it's in our neighborhood. Whereas if they find some distance star system and that it might have a planet that's similar to earth that doesn't seem as compelling for whatever weird reason.

No, yeah, I mean, I think the planets around Alpha Centauri, Proxima Centauri, which is the closest stars, it seems like there are planets around those now. And I think that was interesting because we could conceive of going there. Right. And there was this idea, you're Stephen Hawking actually, and some others, before we died, had this idea called Breakthrough Star Shot, which is the idea to send a little probe out to the Alpha Centauri system.

And I think in their view, Yuri Milner as well, the entrepreneur wanted to do that. And I think it's something like 100 years travel time or something with our current technology. And they pointed out that we don't do that now. We don't think 100 years in the future. But if you go back when people were building cathedrals, people used to routinely start projects that would take 100 years to bear

fruit and so we could imagine going there and that then becomes fascinating I think because then you've got a solar system another solar system that you could go and visit conceivably conceivably

Yeah, I mean, what kind of speed are we talking and how long would it take to get there? Well, yeah, I mean, so it is, I think that the idea was about 100 years to get there. So it's going, you know, for like years or so in 100 years or whatever that is. So you would have to essentially do what they did in like the Ridley Scott Alien film and put people into some sort of a... Oh, yeah. It wouldn't be a crew. It wouldn't be possible for a crew.

Well, it is. But you'd have to freeze them. Yeah, that's always that, you know, when you talk to engineers, you had Elon on, didn't you? Yes. Engineers always say, you know, physicists go, well, it's possible in principle. So over to you, you know, you do it now. There are no laws of physics that tell us we can't do it. So we just do it. Right. But, you know, it's a weird relationship between the physicists and the engineers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, in principle, you're right. If you can send a little robot spaceship there, you can send a crude spaceship.

I'm of the opinion as time goes on and augmented and virtual reality gets better and better that

So it doesn't really totally make sense unless we're talking about colonizing someplace to send biological life to another planet. If we can send some probe that doesn't have to worry about the biology being affected by radiation or by the speed of travel or even by food, we can send something out there and almost be there by virtue of goggles, virtual reality goggles or something else. Yeah.

In science, at the moment space science, we have this debate a lot actually because of course space probes like Curiosity that's on Mars at the moment, that's really cheap compared to sending people to Mars. And so quite often the scientists who want to find out about the world will say well we should spend it on robots, we shouldn't spend it on people.

I think crude space exploration is in some ways. It's clearly true at the moment that humans can do more than robots, so we can explore the place better. But I think it has to be. It's about something else. It's not only about

living and working off the planet, which I think is quite a persuasive argument, actually. We've already industrialized near Earth orbit, so it's already a multi-billion dollar industry, you know, communication satellites and whether satellites, GPS, whatever. Yeah, we're already up there. And so learning to live and work in space is, I think, a natural extension of our

have our civilization, plus the fact that if you talk to Elon or Jeff Bezos, they point out that the amount of resources available just slightly above our heads is vast. And so I remember I talked to Jeff Bezos actually once and he thinks really simply and he said, for example, in the asteroid belt, there's enough metal, I think, to build a skyscraper.

What is it? It's something like 800 stories tall and cover the earth in it, right? If you want. Now, we don't want to do that. But his point was that the energy from the sun is all up there, the resources are up there. So you could almost imagine trying to zone the earth's residential at some point in the future to protect the planet and do your heavy industry off the planet, for example. And it sounds like science fiction, except that

now, SpaceX and Blue Origin, those people have got reusable rockets. So suddenly the economics become sensible. So I think expansion is good and I think we will expand and I think we will expand outwards because there's not much room left on this planet to expand. So I think that's a whole different idea. It's not about gathering scientific information.

It's about a frontier and all the benefits that come from operating as a civilisation on the frontier, which we've lost on the earth because there is no frontier left. And so I like that idea that Mars, when you talk about Mars, especially with Elon,

He's right, but that's the only place you can go. So there is no other planet we can go to, other than Mars. You can't go to Jupiter or Saturn. You can't go to Mercury or Venus. So if we want to go somewhere and expand our civilization, it has to be Mars and everything's there that you need. But that's a different thing to say, you want to find out stuff. You're right. If we just want to find out stuff, then you send robots.

But as far as expanding actual civilization and bringing it to another place, one of the things that freaks me out is people get depressed about living in Seattle. I mean, you're going to live on Mars? I wouldn't agree with it. It's the horrendous thing. It's like the Western frontier when people cross the States. Yeah. Incredibly dangerous thing to do. When people cross the States, they still got to Wyoming and beautiful places and Colorado. Yeah.

But it was hard. I wouldn't have wanted to do it. But once you got there, there's a river, and there's trout in the river, and the meadows are green. I agree with you, right? I'm not going to go to that, so there are vineyards and hotels and things. However...

It is true that there are people who like the challenge and what is true about Mars it's interesting actually because we know something about the history of Mars now quite a lot about history of Mars and it's certainly clear that there was water almost certainly oceans and rivers so and that water is almost certainly still there so.

I would say certainly still there. Well, they have found large quantities of ice now, right? Yeah, so there's certainly ice. There may even be pockets of liquid water below the surface somewhere. So a couple that with all the minerals and the resources that we know are there, and you have everything you need. So that's the thing about Mars. It's quite nice relative to everywhere else other than the Earth. You can't go to Venus. You just melt it. What is it?

400 and something degrees and 90 atmospheric pressure. So Mars is quite nice. But I wouldn't go there, I agree with you. Because it's not the gravity of Mars in relationship with Earth. What is it about a third? I think a third. Something like that.

So it would still have a significant, like, weakening effect. Like if you went to Mars and then somehow or another in the future, they were able to get back to Earth. Yeah. Your body would have a real problem with that, right? It would. But there is still ground. There's a bit more than a third. I can't quite remember. But it's something like that.

But yeah, so there's still gravity. So there's gravity. There's some protection from that you'd probably want to live in the caves, actually, or something like that. Because there's no magnetic field there. So it's quite a high radiation environment, but not too bad.

It's further from the sun than we are. There are places on Mars that there's a very deep crater called Helas, which is a big impact basin. And at the bottom, it's so deep. You could fit Everest in it. So you put Mount Everest in there. The summit of Everest wouldn't reach the rim of the crater. So it's something like, I don't know what it is, seven miles deep or something, six miles deep.

So you could go there and at the bottom, the atmosphere, it pressures so high that you could just about have liquid water occasionally on the floor of that crater. So it's quite warm sometimes. It can be 20 degrees. Really? Yeah, they're Celsius. Wow. So better than the case order right now. Exactly. So I was experiencing a serious call for it. That's right. Yeah. So it can be warm in the Minnesota. And so there are places where it's not horrendous on Mars.

So the Martian is kind of realistic in that sense. Sort of. Bits of it. Do you watch those movies and shake your head? I like him. I like science fiction. So I grew up with Star Wars. That was when I was nine years old or something. It's funny watching it now. Yeah, I'm not having this. I did an argument with Neil's degree, I was not an argument, but debate with him about lightsabers once.

Because I claim that they're physically, in principle, they're possible. And he was trying to say that they aren't. But they are. Would they have to loop back around? Because the light's not continuing to, like, the fact that it goes to a certain distance and pauses.

We'd have to have a mirror or something, I guess. Something would have to be the end of it, right? That's true. So it wouldn't be a different kind of light. So the only part I was making is that photons, particles of light, can bounce off each other. So we see that in really high energy experiments in particle accelerators, we can collide photons together. So my point was a bit of a pedantic physicist one. But it is true that a light can bounce off. It can hit light, but very, very high energy.

But when they press that button, it goes to a certain distance. Yes, I wasn't. That's engineering. Right. I agree with you. I agree with you. The distance. There's no mass to it, right? So as you're swinging it around, you wouldn't have the leverage of a long thing. So why not make it really long? Because it wouldn't be difficult to swing around. Like you could stab someone with a lightsaber a mile away.

Right? That's just a laser, isn't it? Yes. Like, why make it so short? It's ridiculous. You have to swing, you have to be close to hitting a person with it. It's a silly design. You are picking holes correctly in the engineering part of my... The only point I was making is the physics is that... Which I think is quite interesting. Is it light? Can bounce off light? Yes. That's the point. So, but it would have to be something that causes it to stop at the very end. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Which would be right, it would have a mirror, but it wouldn't look cool if there was a kind of thing with them. What drives me crazy about Star Wars is not the lightsabers, it's the lasers when they're shooting the guns. I'm like, why can't I see that when I can't see bullets?

This is supposed to be way faster than a bullet. Why is it easy to see this? Because it's like, you can duck. You can get out of the way of those things. They really slide around. They're so slow. How are we so angry? I feel like this is so dumb. I could go warp speed in this millennium falcon and travel the speed of light. But for whatever reason, these lasers are so slow that you could duck out of the way of them. That's so dumb. And it's not only Star Wars. It's everything. Every single film does that. Yeah.

Yeah, why? It's like films like, also, I worked on one of these films years ago at Sunshine. Oh, it was a great movie. Very, very underappreciated movie. Yeah, I think so. I think it's a brilliant film. But in that, so they asked me, and Danny said, I want to do it right, so I'll do the spacecraft without any sound, so when it's traveling through space, they'll be silent. And it looks shit.

You know, when you watch it, it's the same when you try and film astronauts and they're in zero G and they always move slowly. It's like, why? You're right. You'd be able to move very fast, but it looks silly. So there's kind of a, I suppose it's what audiences have got used to over the years. And so in the end, you have a, when this next one goes first, apart from 2001, which didn't do it, the silent in 2001.

Well, Kubrick was a stickler for science, and he would do complex mathematics in his spare time. What a fascinating guy that must have been. Yeah. I read that someone just found an interview, didn't they, the other day, where he explained the ending of 2001? I didn't say that. I saw it yesterday, actually.

And it was kind of a really simple version of it. You just said, well, the super intelligent beings take him in and put him in a zoo, basically, and watch him grow old, and then send him back to the earth as a super being. Well, that's the worst explanation at the end of 2001 I've ever heard. But it was Kubrick's. That's what Kubrick said. So he falls into the monolith.

Yeah, they just put him in this room, which is kind of a bad version of a French chateau or something. Watch him grow old and then send him back to the earth as a super-being. Wow. Okay. That was Kubrick's version. Yeah, cool. Strange. It's a weird genre, right? Because sometimes people get things right. Like, didn't H.G. Wells predict a significant amount of scientific inventions in the future?

Well, there was, I mean, it depends which one, doesn't it? There was a moon one, wasn't there? He did a gen to the moon. I mean, his time machine is not... Right, that wouldn't be able to do that. It really worked out yet.

I think it's, I always like science fiction. I like Arthur C. Clarke a lot, you know, because I think it is, you're right, it's a form that you can let your imagination wander and address things without restriction, I think. Did you like the Alien series? I loved it. I saw Alien when I was...

When i was at school is nine seventy nine and we had a school film club in the seventies they weren't like they are now you know so the first films they put on the three films i was eleven and it was alien apocalypse now in life of brian which i so that was my introduction to.

Wow, those are three great choices. But I feel like Ridley Scott's original Alien is probably one of the greatest horror science fiction movies of all time, and one of my all time favorite movies. But I really like the newer ones as well. I like Prometheus, and I really like Covenant, the last one.

Yeah, Prometheus, I don't know. Yeah, it's not the best one. I love the outcome. Like what they're trying to do with it, the whole idea about the engineers coming back in time. That's why I was disappointed with it, because I thought the opening is brilliant. And I thought this is just going to be brilliant. And then I thought it just lost its way and it was in disappointment because it could have been so brilliant. Yes, I agree with you. Yeah, the beginning was fantastic.

But I think Covenant was more exciting. It's also preposterous. If you went to another planet, the last thing you'd be doing is just breathing in the air. We'd have to be really careful not to contaminate, but not to be contaminated.

The other thing in science fiction films is gravity, because you always, even in Alien, you always just say the spaceship's got gravity. There's only 2001, where everybody floats around, because all has a spinning thing. The spaceship has gravity, and then when you land, the gravity is exactly like Earth.

Perfect. But it's ridiculous. What are the odds that you would find a planet that is exact? Even if a planet was one and a half times the size of Earth, it would have far more gravity. And that's really common for a planet to be just a little bit bigger. And then we would be like, fuck. Everywhere we'd be walking, we'd be getting crushed. I agree with you.

Yeah. Well, I suppose that's not the point. It's about ideas, isn't it? Yes. And this whole idea where you're just supposed to let the story play out. Well, I mean, Sunshine, the premise is silly.

It's the premise is the sun is dying and we're going to go and fix it. So both of those things, it fails on its first line in terms of realism. But the idea is that it's not about that. It's about the

It's about the Sun as a God in some ways. So it's about our response to the power of nature. And it's about deifying this thing and worshipping it and how ultimately you go. I'm out of your memory of the film, the Pimbaku, who's the first captain that went to the captain, the first mission to go and restart the Sun, which is the mad bit. But then became a religious fundamentalist, essentially, and then decided it's a fascinating idea that he decides to bring meaning to his life.

He will become the last man, the last human. And so he wants to be the last. He wants the sun to die. And he wants it to take humanity with it. And he decided to make that happen. So he stays there waiting for the second ship.

I like those ideas that, you know, what's your reaction to the power of nature? And as it happens in one of the things that in my shows, I'm not being a commercial person, I've just thought of it. One of the great things about cosmology is that it is terrifying in the truest sense of the word. I mean, we talked a bit about the size and scale of the universe and black holes colliding and those things. You know, it is very frightening

but also I think the act of trying to understand our place in nature and the size and scale of the universe and our tiny presence within it is valuable. So that you can be terrified but also inspired and interested. And it's part of if you want to find

If you want to ask questions about what it means to be human and means to be alive, then I think you find the answers in confronting that reality, which is that we live in a terrifyingly vast universe of powers in the universe that we cannot comprehend, as you said. But that's what you've got to face, because that's reality. So you can't hide your head in the sand and just duck it. And it can send some people crazy.

I'm sure, and it is really interesting that we need that suspension of disbelief in order to sort of make a film on space. You almost have to like, oh, well, this isn't really how it would be, but this is how you have to make it in order to fit it into a two-hour movie. Yeah. And then the film, as we sunshine, becomes about, then you can have the film about something else. Yes. Because it's not really about that. Well, did you like Event Horizon?

Yeah, I did actually. I thought that's fine. It was only ridiculous, but fun. I always wanted to ask about their concept of propulsion, that almost like space would be flat, you would fold space over, and you would intersect those two points, and you would be able to travel vast distances instantaneously. I'm doing a terrible job of explaining it, I'm sure.

Is that a concept that people have actually considered? Yeah, in general relativity. So Einstein should say what it is. Einstein's theory of general relativity is our best theory of space and time. And so it really is, as we've talked about before, you imagine space and time as a sheet. Just imagine it as a thing, literally a sheet, a surface.

And all the theory says is that if you put matter and or energy into that, then it curves it and distorts it and it can stretch it and make it shrink. And so it's the response of space and time to matter and energy. So if you, if you, the simplest version will be the sun. So you put the big spherical ball of stuff in there.

And it warps space and time, such that the nice straight lines, something just traveling, mind its own business, through that warp space, turns into an orbit. And that's why you can actually kind of see things that are behind the sun. So light bends around the sun, because it's just traveling through the curved space. The earth goes around the sun, because it's just rolling, minding its own business through the curved space.

So an example would be, you might say, well, how does a curved space? How does that give rise to something that looks like a force, which is gravity? So the best analogy I know of is to think of walking around on the surface of the earth. To be stand on the equator of the earth, and with your friend, and you say, we're going to walk due north. So we're going to set off, let's say we're a thousand miles apart on the equator, and we're going to walk due north.

And what's going to happen? So you walk in straight lines. You don't change direction. You don't do any accelerating. But the straight lines are the lines of longitude on the surface of the Earth. So as you go further and further north, you get closer and closer together. And if you carry on to the pole, you bump into each other. But nothing's happened. There's no forces acting. It's just that you're moving on a curved surface. And so you get closer. And that's basically Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Now, why did I start talking about the horizon, the idea of a fall down? Oh, yeah. So all you have to do to those folded kind of geometries is you have to try and specify where you would put the matter and what kind of stuff you'd put there to make the geometry fold in that way.

And you can do it, so you can write down that geometry. It's called a warp drive geometry. I think it's in textbooks. So you can do that to have a warp drive. The question becomes, what sort of stuff would you have to actually put into the real universe to make it warp in that way?

And it always, it usually turns out that it's the kind of stuff that doesn't exist, right? But it has properties. It's a matter of matter, a sort of energy that has properties that do not exist in nature as far as we can tell. But you can still write the geometry down in Einstein's theory. So if you had a significant force or mass or whatever it is, if you had that stuff that doesn't exist, it is a concept that

Yeah, so the geometry exists. So you can do it, and you can do the calculations, and you can see the warp drive. You can construct wormholes that connect distant regions of the universe, which you could use as time machines. You can do all that in the theory. But in nature, you'd have to have the right stuff to do it. But that stuff is not real. That seems to be as far as we know.

Now, what would have to happen? You would have to have enough power or mass to be able to fold those two things together. It tends to be weird stuff like stuff that has a negative pressure or something like that. Stuff that has physical properties that are just bizarre.

and that no matter our energy that we know of in the universe has, to make the geometry happen. But it's conceivable in theory that this could exist, even though it doesn't. It's a debate, ultimately. So wormholes is a good example. So that would be, quite literally, it was talked about the surface of the earth.

So you fly to Australia from LA and you have to go quite a long way around this edge of the earth. Oh, you could tunnel straight through and get there quicker. So that's a little graphic up there.

There it is. There's a wormhole. So you could go all the way around the edge, or you could take the shortcut. So the question is, so you can do that in Einstein's theory. You can write down that geometry, and there it is. So the first question is, can you make it? And as we said, we don't think that stuff exists. There's a second set of theoretical bits of theoretical work, which if you had a wormhole, then what would happen if you tried to travel through it?

And what seems to happen is that they become unstable the moment anything tries to go through. So you get kind of a feedback of stuff going through and through and through and through. And so it collapses. And there's a great book by Kip Thorne, actually. We just mentioned him. He got the Nobel Prize.

last year for the gravitational waves. And he wrote a brilliant book. I think it's in the 80s called Black Holes and Time Warps, where he talks about the answer is we don't fully know, but most physicists think that even if they existed, they will be unstable. And as soon as you even try to transmit information through them, send a bit of light through, then there will be this sort of feedback and they'd collapse.

And ultimately, the reason we don't really know absolutely is because you need what's called a quantum theory of gravity. And we don't have one. So we don't have the theoretical tools to be absolutely sure that these things would be unstable or don't exist in nature. But we strongly suspect that they don't. If they did, you could build a time machine.

So there's Stephen Hawking wrote a paper called the chronology protection conjecture and conjecture is the important word. So the conjecture basically was that the laws of nature will be such that you can't have stable wormholes and you can't build time machines. And if you send something through it, it would destabilize it. And if it didn't destabilize it, how would your physical body

deal with the stress of that.

And it's just like the moon's, you know, the tidal effects on the earth, which is quite small, but they still raise tides on the oceans. So that can be, if you think about something like a black hole, that can be a massive difference in gravitational pull from your head to your feet. And so it can stretch you out. And so, but you can with wormholes, you can, you can write the geometry down in Einstein's theory, six that you could go through.

So you don't have to be destroyed of anything weird happened to you. Would you have to have something protecting you? Some force? Some sort of a... Yeah, you just literally, you fall through. I mean, if they were, if they would exist, you'd just go through, you'd sit in a little spaceship, but you wouldn't... There's nothing inherently in them that says that you would be ripped apart or anything like that.

But what are your thoughts on alien life, on life outside of this planet?

Is there something you think about? Yeah, I think there must be. Even in the solar system, I would not be surprised if we find microbes on Mars, or on some of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, where there's liquid water. Like Europa. Yeah. And the reason is, if you think about the reason I think that, and it's a guess, is because if you look at the history of life on Earth, then so Earth formed, and it was just, there was no life, it was a ball of rock.

And almost as soon as it cooled down, we see evidence of life. So certainly 3.8 billion years ago, possibly even further back than that, we see evidence of life on Earth. So somewhere along the line, geochemistry, active geochemistry, became biochemistry on Earth.

And we have some idea that if you get gradients of temperature and acid and alkaline and the conditions that are naturally present on the surface of oceans, then complex carbon chemistry spontaneously happens. So we know that life, almost certainly, we know that life began on Earth. I mean, the other option is it came from space or something like that, but it probably didn't. It probably began on Earth.

So that means that at least here that happened, and that we know that the conditions that led to the origin of life on Earth were present on Mars 3.8, 4 billion years ago, and we know that they're present on Europa today. So I don't see that there's anything special. Life is just chemistry.

And the idea that geochemistry becomes biochemistry is not fanciful because it happened here. So I think that given the same conditions, it would be surprising to me if the same thing didn't happen in that life begins. So I that's one of the to test that is one of the great.

frontiers of science now. It's one of the great challenges, which is why another reason we're interested in Mars, because we know those conditions were there. We know there were what's called hydrothermal vent systems on the floors of oceans on Mars, 3.8 or 4 billion years ago. So it would be good to know what I've said is right. And the way we find out is to find life or evidence of past life.

Are you aware of the speculation that was going around? How recent was it that occupy thing, the octopus eggs? There was a group of scientists that were speculating that it's panspermia, the idea of panspermia, that it's possible that octopi had come from somewhere else, some frozen eggs had actually come from somewhere else and landed on Earth. And these were like legitimate scientists that were contemplated, not morons. I don't think I've seen this.

No, I didn't, but I mean, I think it's like, so Pennsylvania doesn't have to be unlikely. Right. I mean, for example, you might see in the other day we found an earth rock on the moon. Yes. Right. Well, you're back on earth now, because you're polarized or not. It's brought you back, didn't they? And it's four billion years old or something like that. One of the oldest rocks ever found. Yeah.

So we know that material gets transferred between planets. And so it's not inconceivable that microbes could survive that journey. We know that microbes can survive in space, for example. So that isn't mad. It's probably unlikely, but it's not mad. But with the octopus, I hadn't heard that. But the thing is that the octopus is still extremely similar biologically to us.

I mean, the difference is negligible. Yeah. So you still got the same energy system with a single ATP and DNA and all that stuff. It's all very, very similar. It was something about RNA and DNA. Did you find that article? I'm trying to find out. I'm looking at a different one from a different website. It's about the same thing it has to do with the Cambrian explosion. And there were 33 authors on a paper that got published in the progress and biophysics and molecular biology that talked about this possibility. There are other people that disagree with it though.

I mean, I suppose I haven't seen it. So I think it's unlikely because the octopus is extremely similar to us. So that suggests a common origin to me. That I suppose the cancer argument you could advance would be there's only one way to do life.

So you could say that actually given because the laws of physics and chemistry are the same everywhere. So maybe it's maybe DNA is the only way to do it. So that's the way it gets done, which is why they're so similar to us, although so alien as well.

Yeah, they're not, though. That's the thing. That's why I'm surprised about it, because they're not the alien. They're very similar. Well, they're in their abilities. I mean, they're ability to transform their outer texture and their color almost instantaneously. Oh, yeah. I mean, they have incredible camouflage abilities that really don't exist in the mammalian world.

Yeah, but I'll sell you the level. You look at an octopus cell in among under a microscope and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Right. So you're an octopus cell in a human cell. So the only way that that would make sense is if all life comes from basically the same kind of building blocks and just varies depending upon the conditions and where it takes place. I'm guessing, but yes, that must be the only way you could sustain that given that they're so similar to us because they really are.

Biochemically, is that, that's the only way it can be done given the, given the building block, the toolkits, the laws of nature and the elements and so on that we have in our universe. We have so many different life forms on our planet, but if we found anything that's remotely similar to what we have here on earth on another planet, it would be such an incredible discovery. Like when we sat, if we found a frog on the moon, I mean, the world would stop, right?

i'd be very surprised they've been of course but i mean if i found anything anywhere that is any in any way similar an insect on mars well this is

I mean, as I say, it'd be micro. I think we single-celled things. And remember, I mean, you mentioned the Cambrian explosion. So that is what we do know about Earth is that although life began, let's say 3.8 billion years ago, it wasn't until around 600 million years ago or so, or maybe most 700, that you see any complex multicellular organisms at all. So if there's something like 3 billion years, it was single-celled alone.

And that's one of the reasons why I would guess, if I had to guess, I would say that microbes would be common, because life began very quickly on Earth. And I would advise you to find it on Mars, but complex life, multicellular life, insects, plants, intelligence, I would guess, would be very rare, because it took so long on Earth to get there. You know, just slime. About three billion years of slime.

That was it. What happened? How did it go from slime to giraffes? It only did it very quickly once it got going. And it's one of the great unsolved mysteries in biology. One thing that is true is that we seem to be all complex creatures seem to be, we're called eukaryotes, right, which is cells with cell nucleus and all that kind of stuff.

and they look like they're the merger between two simpler life forms of bacteria and a thing called an archaea. So it looks like somewhere in two billion years ago, whatever it was in some ocean, the bacteria cell got inside the arcane and survived

as a symbiotic organism essentially. And then somehow, unbelievably, managed to reproduce and replicate in that configuration. And that does seem to be the origin of all complex multislava life on Earth. So it's called a fateful encounter hypothesis. And if that's true, then it's just a bit of luck.

and it happened once, right? And that's why we're here. Now, when you lined look, consider like how many billion Earth-like planets did you say exist just in our solar system alone? In the galaxy, 20 billion, something like that. So what in 10 stars? So the odds of complex life out of our incredibly fortunate situation, but the odds of that occurring on any of these billions of other planets that exist.

We don't know, but let's say the earth is, let's say it was on the fortunate side. So we're talking about, give or take four billion years, right, from the origin of life to now, and we have a civilization now, and we've had it. Our species has been around what a quarter of a million years or something. So it's just now, basically. So let's say four billion is on the fortunate side. Let's say that it was double that.

or triple that on the average. Suddenly, that's the age of the universe. That's the third of the age of the universe. So how many of those worlds have been stable for three or four billion years? That's quite a tall order, actually. It looks like our solar system might be quite unusual in that respect, because the planet's got to remain stable in a stable orbit. The stars got to remain stable. The large moon.

Helps us. Large moon stabilizers. Jupiter plays a big role. Takes the path of two worlds. Socks a man. There's a theory called the Grand Tech theory, which is very hard to explain the evolution of our solar system. When you do computer models of solar systems, you don't tend to get four rocky planets to close to the sun and four big gas giants further out.

And one of the current best theories, and I say this because it shows you how lucky we might be, is that Jupiter, they tend to form these big gas giants and migrate inwards towards the star. So in almost all the computer simulations, just because you've got this big gas giant orbiting all the dust around the star, they tend to drop inwards.

And it looks like Jupiter did that. So it looks like it formed and came in, and came in almost to where Mars orbits today, and then cleared out the region around Mars actually, which is maybe the reason Mars is so small compared to the other sort of Venus and Earth. But then Saturn was coming in as well.

And in the computer models, the interaction between Jupiter and Saturn stopped Jupiter coming in before it gets to the Earth. And they both get dragged out again. And so to where they are today. And so that seems to be one of the best theories for the evolution of our solar system. So what are the chances of that?

are so miniscule, like tiny. So that's the thing, I think, about these rocky planets. In order to get a civilization on them, I guess you need quite unusual solar systems. That would be a guess. And you need quite unusual stability on the planet for billions of years. And that's why I think we might be quite lucky.

And how does Bode's law work? Bode's law is a method of detecting if you look at the mass of a planet, you can accurately detect how much mass and the size of a neighboring planet? I think it wasn't just the physicians of the old base, I think, where it is.

Yeah, and it's one thing that is true about our solar system is that if you get the computer simulations, you can't put more planets in. So if you try and put more planets in, it becomes unstable very quickly. So the mass of like, if you measure Mars, you can accurately depict where the next planet close to it would be. It was, I mean, it was, that's what was done. Was it 17th century or something? I can't remember it along. Yeah, it was just one of those things where you notice a pattern.

They were just trying to figure out what the pattern was. Yeah, so it's just a pattern. There's nothing to that really. Other than to say that most simulations of the solar system, if you put other planets in, they tend to get thrown out by gravitational interactions. So there is a sense in which our solar system has got as much stuff in it as it could have.

So the planets are nicely spaced, and you're right, given the mass of them, that depends on how close another planet can be. And before the interaction goes wrong and it gets thrown out into the intergalactic space or something, because planets do that. We know that planets get thrown out of solar systems by gravitational interactions. So, again, it points to the fact that solar systems are not

are not stable over long periods of time. They're not like clockwork things. They're not like, you know, Newtonian clockwork and it just goes on forever. They're not like that, that they evolve and planets can shift orbits and change. And what we know,

If you look at the surface of the moon for example it covered in craters and that was caused they all seem to hit about the same time and it's about 3.8 billion years ago or so, and that's called the late heavy bombardment. So we know that if you look at cratering rates on Mars and on the moon it all seemed to happen in this, not all but,

Big peak around that time and that seems to be correlated with Neptune moving outwards in the solar system and into Kuiper Belt basically are towards the Kuiper Belt and calls in all sorts of havoc and everything comes into the inner solar system. So those things happen and it didn't happen when life was established on the earth.

So it's all extremely old stuff. The shifting ticks. But how long has the solar system been in this particularly stable situation that's in now? It's since about 3.8 billion years ago. So if it had been unstable at any point since then, then we likely wouldn't be here. Right. Do you think that it's possible, do you ever entertain the idea that it's possible that we are the only intelligent life in the known universe?

I tend to restrict myself to the galaxy, so I do think it's possible that at the moment there's one civilization in the Milky Way, and that says, and I think that's important actually, and it goes back to what I was saying at the start about the

astronomy and cosmology being part of the framework within which you have to think. If you're looking for meaning or you're looking for how we should behave even politically, that has a bearing to me. Imagine that we're the only place where there is intelligence in this galaxy.

And how should we behave? Should we actually not we stand in the fact that we're tiny and fragile things and insignificant physically? Should we consider ourselves extremely valuable in that respect? Because there's nowhere else where, you know, I would go as far as to say there would be nowhere else where meaning exists in the Milky Way. Because meaning it's one of those things that scientists don't talk about very much, although Richard Feynman, one of my great heroes, did

talk about it. There's a quote where he says, what is the meaning of it all? It's a great essay called the value of science. And so what is self evidently true is that meaning exists here, because it means something to us. So that's kind of an obvious statement. Your life means something to you and me. And so meaning exists.

But I think it is a local and temporary phenomenon. I think it emerges, meaning it emerges from configurations of atoms, which is what we are. We are simply that. We're nothing more than that. We're very, very rare configurations of atoms, I think.

And so that means that we are, if you go all the way down that line of logic, we are the only island meaning in the galaxy, meaning only to ourselves. Yeah.

It means something to us, because we're the only ones who can grasp the concept. And we are finite. We are a finite organism. We have this temporary existence while we're here. And to us, there is meaning. Yeah. And that's, I don't know any other way to define it. Right. So I'll define it like that. Yes. I don't think there's a globe. Yeah. Otherwise you have to believe there's some kind of global meaning and that's a God-type thing. And I don't think that's, I think it's more wonderful.

and more challenging to us because we have to take responsibility for it to say we should operate such that we are it in this galaxy. There's nothing else. I'm sure there are other civilizations out there in the universe because there are two trillion galaxies. I just can't believe this hasn't happened in other places. The question is how often does it happen and how widely spaced are the civilizations.

And I think they're very widely spaced, and I think there may be one or two per galaxy on the average. As you said it, you said it beautifully. What else can we think? And what else do you want? I mean, I think what it says is you have to take responsibility.

For all those things, the spiritual things that you think about and the emotional things you think about, you are responsible for that. You are that. Whatever that is, it exists in you and it will only exist for a short amount of time.

And so, you know, make the best of it. It would be my view. It's so unbelievably compelling, though, to consider the idea that somewhere out there, there's another civilization that may be even more advanced than us. And this thought of it is just so attractive. It's incredible. There should be. If civilizations are common,

Are we even slightly common? Then there should be civilizations ahead of us. Yes. Because there's been so much time. But wouldn't you want to see what that's like? Yeah. I mean, we've been so compelling. You imagine the timescales. We've been around as a civilization. Let's say 40,000 years. I don't know. Longer civilization has been around. Let's say that.

The galaxy is pretty much as old as the universe. It's 13 billion years worth of time. The idea that there are no civilisations arose 100 million years ago, 200 million years ago, 1 billion years ago. Imagine what they'd be like if they'd survived. We've had science for

Let's say since Newton or Copernicus, 500 years at most. We've gone beyond the solar system with Voyager. We've walked on the moon and we're about to go to Mars, I would think. So we're about to begin colonizing our own solar system.

So we've done that in 500 years. So imagine a million years in the future. So it's one of the arguments often used to say there aren't any civilizations out there in the galaxy. It's called the Fermi Paradox. Because if you imagine a civilization that's a million years ahead of us, they should have written their presence across the sky by now. They should use to see them. I mean, you'll see us. If we survive in a million years,

into the future. Actually, even a few thousand years into the future, we will be exploring the galaxy. We will have spacecraft that are going to the stars. We will be doing it. So our signature will become visible, I'm sure, if we last.

into the medium zone. Would we choose to not do that? Here's my thought on that is uncontacted tribes. Like do you know about the gentleman who was the missionary who visited North Sentinel Island, who was killed by the natives? North Sentinel Island, which is a really unusual place because they branched off from Africa 60,000 years ago and they've been living on this one small island the size of Manhattan. And as well as we know, there's only about 39 of them left, somewhere around there.

We can't, we're not supposed to contact them. Like people are not supposed to leave them alone and they're a rare tribe. When they find them in the Amazon, the uncontacted tribes, our initial instinct is back off, back off. Yeah, leave them alone. Leave them alone. Do you think that perhaps a universe, like if there is a civilization that's a million times more advanced than us, have been around here for, you know, millions of years of life as opposed to quarter million,

Why would they let us know? Like, would they look at us dropping bombs on each other and polluting the ocean and sucking all the fish out and putting clouds into the skies of dirt and particles? And why would they look at these crude monkeys? Look at that. They're so far beyond where they need to be before they could join the galactic civilization network or whatever. It is true. It's an argument that there is an argument as well that technology is so advanced.

would be difficult for us to detect. I mean, we tend to think of, you know, when you say written across the sky, I suppose it's true. I'm thinking of starships and things like Star Wars, right? Big energy things that you can see the signature of. But actually, maybe the civilization just becomes a nano civilization, you know, tiny little nano, but because that's more efficient. It's a better way to do things. So it's possible.

I suppose that there are space probes all over the place that are so small and is so efficient and you sell little energy that we just don't see. I suppose that is possible. My other thought is that where we are headed, it seems to me that there's some sort of a strange symbiosis that's taking place.

There's a strange connection that we have to electronics and ultimately to an artificial creation, artificial intelligence, whatever you want to call it, artificial light, something that's created by carbon-based beings, cellular beings that isn't cellular, but also acts like life.

that this may be the future of life, that we are so connected to the idea of flesh and blood and bone, but maybe this is just a temporary situation until we transition, or if not

us transition until it surpasses us. And this is the next stage of life. But this stage has no need for all the human and biological reward systems that are in place that made sure that we survive, whether it's ego or fear or emotions. No need for that. That it will just exist and maintain its equilibrium.

as this new form of life. And that this is the future of life in the universe. And that we'll get there, maybe it'll only be 100, 200 years from now. But that's what exists all throughout the cosmos. So there's no need to peacock. There's no need to show our sin on the sky and that it just exists in this form.

I agree. I wouldn't be surprised. Yes, that's the counter argument to this Fermi Paradox argument that I talked about. Well, exactly as you've just said, that basically you evolve to a point very rapidly where you just don't create a signature. Yes. And you don't really get involved, as you said. It just maintains.

Well, there's no motivation. Our motivations are so weird. We have these biological motivations to survive and there's motivations to conquer and to innovate and to spread our genes and to move into new territories. But if you didn't have biology, if you existed completely from

man-made materials or from materials found on earth and that this new form of life is created out of that. It wouldn't have those unless you programmed them.

And why would you do that? It is interesting, isn't it? Because we don't know what consciousness is. So it's often called the hard problem in science. We don't know. So it's a good question whether you can build, let's say you want to build a self-replicating machine, which is what you're talking about, something that can go and maybe go to the moon or Mars and replicate itself and then carry on, which is a living thing, I suppose. Does it have to have a sufficient level of intelligence

that it actually is conscious. And all these things that we talked about, this word meaning that we used earlier, that we all understand and can't define, is that a emergent property that has to emerge, if you've got something that's intelligent enough to replicate itself and live, and as you said, I don't know the answer, but it's worth considering that

This thing, this emotion, meaning, love and fear and all those things are just the things that happen when you are intelligent. I don't know the answer to that, but it could possibly be. And does consciousness have to have a local origin? Does it have to come from a thing? If you think about

cellular communication. If you send me, if you're in England and you send me a video from your phone and it reaches my phone, it's getting to me through space. It's going through the sky. It's like literally from a device not connected by any wires or anything. It's coming to me.

if there's a possibility to create some sort of global intelligence through electronics, that's non-local. If one piece of it falls off, it just repairs itself or figures itself out, but it's the same consciousness existing on a global scale through some sort of an electronic network, that instead of the idea that you and I have that Brian and Joe, you have your mind, I have my mind, and we exist

as intelligent being separate from each other, but instead of that, that all of it is connected, and that all of it is something that we can't even conceive of because our brains are too crude, like trying to explain to Australia-pithecus what a satellite is.

Yeah, I mean, yes, I mean, if you think about our brains, they are ultimately, what are they? They're just a distributed network of cells connected by neurons. And I mean, they're very complicated, but they are a colony of things that are autonomous in a sense, and they're communicating with each other. So yeah, I don't see why you can't scale that up.

in principle. The caveat is always that we don't know about this. It's just not understood. I think there's something weird happening. It's physical, though. I'm damn sure it's physical. I'm damn sure that there's nothing going on in my head other than what is allowed by the laws of nature as we understand them.

So eliminating, you mean, the idea of a soul being some sort of a divine thing that's inside the housing of the body. Yeah, I mean, I would say we can rule that out, actually. I've argued in the past. How do you rule it out? I've argued we can rule that out.

in the following manner. So it's my arm, right? So it's made of electrons and protons and neutrons. And if I have a soul in there, something that we don't understand, which is a different kind of energy or whatever it is that we don't have in physics at the moment, it interacts with matter because I'm moving my hand around. So whatever it is, it's something that interacts very strongly with matter.

But if you look at the history of particle physics, in particular, which is the study of matter, we spend decades making high precision measurements of how matter behaves and interacts. And we look, for example, for a fifth force of nature. So we know four forces, the gravity, the two nuclear forces, called the weak and strong nuclear forces, and electromagnetism. And that's what we know exist. And we look for another one with ultra high precision. And we don't see any evidence of it.

So I would claim that we know how matter interacts at these energies. It's a room temperature now. We know how matter interacts very precisely. And so if you want to suggest there's something else that interacts with matter strongly, then I would say that it's ruled out. I would go as far as say it is ruled out by experiments. Or at least this is extremely subtle.

And you would have to jump through a lot of hoops to come up with a theory of some stuff that we wouldn't have seen when we've observed how matter interacts, that is present in our bodies. And presumably, if you believe in the soul you want it to exist outside, when you die, you still want the thing to be there and you might believe in ghosts and things like that. I mean, look at a ghost. I mean, it's something that carries the imprint of you, presumably. It looks like you, right?

So that means that it interacts strongly with the matter that is you, because it carries a pattern. If it carries a pattern, it carries information. If it carries information, there has to be an energy source that allows that information to persist and the pattern to persist and so on. So again, you end up with a

a theory that is postulating something interacts with light, because if you think a ghost is the soul, then it's something that people see sometimes. So that means it interacts with light, but we know how light interacts.

and we ruled out anything but the most subtle further interaction that we haven't seen. So I would I claim, and I started off as a joke, this actually, I wrote it in an infinite monkey cage book, this radio show that I do, but it ended up, when I'd written it down, I thought actually that thing.

It makes sense. And I read something similar, actually. I think Sean Carroll, I don't know if you've had Sean on a couple of times. He said something the same. I think in the book that he wrote the big picture, I think he has a similar argument, actually. So it's occurred to him as well. It's roughly the same argument.

So this energy that's interacting with matter, even if you're not moving at all, if you're just thinking, it's interacting with the matter that encompasses your mind or your brain or your nerves or your neurons, it's something in there that's interacting with matter, whether you like it or not. So even just a simple thought process or a dream is still something that's interacting with matter.

Well, obviously, because if you will, isn't it in that sense, when you move, it's presumably moving. But even if you're not moving, the idea like you're saying your body's interacting with matter as you're moving your arm, but even if you're not moving, if you're just thinking and you're completely still, which is not totally possible because your heart's beating and you're breathing and all that stuff, but if somehow or another, you were able to isolate just the thoughts themselves are still interacting with matter because they're interacting with the brain itself.

So there's something in there. There's something that interacts with the physical structure of your body. And I would say there isn't. So that's the woo woo version is that the brain itself and the body, the physical, the spiritual self, you are merely an antenna that's tuning into the great consciousness of the universe. But why?

But then you have to answer what we know what we are made of. So we know how those particles behave and interact. So why do the particles not in any way interact with that stuff? Because we interact, if that's true, we don't only just interact with it, we interact extremely strongly with it. We're interacting with it now. Every movement I make is the interaction between that and the matter we have.

Yeah. Well, everything, if I move my fingers, everything that I'm doing is an interaction between that stuff and me. So it's a very strong interaction with matter, but we don't see it in all our precision measurements. Well, the answer for that answer is because it's not there. The answer is Jesus, and you can't measure God. That may be an answer, but the point is, as we talked about earlier, we'd have salute space. If you can't measure it, it's not there.

Right. But for whatever reason, for people, there is some incredible motivation to find a divine

something or another. There's something greater than this physical being. There's something, what do you think that is? What is that compulsion? We've already talked a bit about it. I think it goes to the the hearts of this question of what it means to be human. So I would say that being human, the answer, I don't have the answer to the meaning of it already, but the answer would be

We are small, finite beings, which are just clusters of atoms. As we said before, they're very rare, but we understand roughly how they came to be. And we have a limited amount of time, not actually, unfortunately, but because of the laws of nature. The laws of nature forbid us to be immortal. Immortality is ruled out by the laws of physics.

But also, actually, what it was interesting about if you look at the basic physics of the universe going from the Big Bang to where we are today, then the physics is driven by the fact that the universe began in an extremely ordered state. So it was a very highly ordered system.

And it is tending towards a more disordered system at the moment, and that's called the second law thermodynamics. And it's that basic common sense thing that things go to shit, basically it's the second law thermodynamics. And what we strongly suspect, and I would say no, is that.

In that process of going from order to disorder, complexity emerges naturally for a brief period of time. So it's a natural part of the evolution of the universe that you get a period in time when there's complexity in the universe. So stars and planets and galaxies and life

and civilizations, but they exist because the universe is decaying, not in spite of the fact the universe is decaying. So our existence in that sort of picture is necessarily finite and necessarily time limited.

And it is a remarkable thing that that complexity has got so far that there are things in the universe that can think and feel and explore it. And I think that is the answer. If you want an answer to the meaning of it all, it's that the you are part of the universe. Because of the way the laws of nature work, you are allowed to exist, but you're allowed to exist for a temporary and for a small amount of time in a possible infinite universe.

One of the biggest mind-blowing moments, I think, of my limited comprehension of what it means to be a living being was when I found out that carbon and all the stuff that makes us has to come out of a dying star.

Like that alone, that there's this very strange cycle of these enormous fireballs that forge the material that makes Brian Cox. Like what? That one alone, that there's some strange loop of biological life that comes from

stars, which is like the most elemental thing that we can observe. We see these things in the sky, it's this all-powerful ball of fire. And that that is where the building blocks for a person come from. And they will be from the carbon atoms in our body that you're right, they all got made in stars. Because there were just none of it at the Big Bang. There's only hydrogen and helium, tiny bit of lithium to be precise, but nothing else.

And so it was all made in stars. And it's probably from different stars. The atoms in your body, they're not all from one star that cooked it and then died. There'll be a mixture of stuff from many stars in your body now. And I agree with you. What more do you want? When I see people, I want more than that. There must be more to it.

What do you mean? We were the ingredients in our bodies were assembled in the hearts of long dead stars over billions of years and have assembled themselves spontaneously into temporary structures that can think and feel and explore and then those structures will decay away again at some point and in the very far future there will be no structures left.

So there we are, we exist in this little window when we can observe this magnificent universe. Why do you want any more? I think a lot of people aren't aware of all the information. And then I think on top of it, for some people, it's just

It's so overwhelming. This concept of 13.8 billion years of everything to get to this point that we're at right now, it's so overwhelming that they want to simplify it. They want to put it into some sort of a fable structure, something that's very common and similar and familiar. Yeah, I agree. But I think that's the

It's the journey that we go on. The real treasure, I think, is in that journey of trying to face the incomprehensible. It's in that realization that it's almost...

It's almost impossible to believe that we exist. That's a wonderful thing. That's what I think you miss out. I think if you decide to simplify it because you don't want to face the infinity.

that's out there in front of us. And you don't want to face those stories, as you said, that you look at your finger and its ingredients was cooked in multiple stars over billions of years. That's to me a joyous and powerful thing to think about. Yes. And I think you're missing out if you don't want to face that.

Well, I think the distribution of information has changed so radically over the last couple hundred years and particularly over the last twenty that you're seeing these trends now where more people are inclined to abandon a lot of the, even if you remain religious or remain, you keep a thought or a belief in a higher power,

People are more inclined to entertain these concepts of science and to take in the understanding of what has been observed and documented and written about Among scholars and academics and there's more there's more people accepting that have you look at the number of agnostic people now as opposed to 20 30 years ago It's it's rising. It's changing and I think there's also a

because of you, because of Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Sean Carroll, and all these other people that are public intellectuals that are discussing this kind of stuff. People like myself have a far greater understanding of this than I think people did 34 years ago. And that trend is continuing, I think, in a very good direction.

You know, what we should say is that science, we don't know all the answers, so we don't know where the laws of nature came from. We don't know why the universe began in the way that it did, if indeed at the beginning. So we don't know why the Big Bang was very, very highly ordered.

which is ultimately, as Sean Carroll actually mentioned him often points out, and he's right, that the whole difference, the only difference between the past and the future, the so-called arrow of time, is that in the past the universe was really ordered.

and it's getting more disordered. And that's that that necessary state of order at the start of the universe, which is really the reason that we exist. That's the reason because the universe began in a particular form. We don't know why that was. So we we we will probably find out at some point and it'll be something to do with the laws of nature. But so I'm always careful. I don't want to

Science can sometimes sound arrogant, right? It can sometimes sound like it's the discipline of saying to people where you're not right. And it's not the discipline of saying you're not right. It's saying this is what we found out. So I like to say that it provides a framework within which

If you want to philosophize, or you want to do theology, or you want to ask these deep questions about why we're here, you have to operate within that framework because it's just an observational framework. So everything we've said is stuff we've discovered. It's not stuff that someone made up.

We understand nuclear physics. We can build nuclear reactors, for example. So we understand the physics of stars. So we understand that the stars built the carbon and oxygen. And we know how they did it. And we can see it. Because as I said before, if you look far out into the universe, you're looking way back in time. And as you look back in time, you see less carbon and less oxygen. So we have a direct observation that in the earliest universe, there wasn't any.

because we can see it and now we see that there is some and we know how it was made. So I think it's important to be humble when you're talking about science. You're not saying this is the way that it is. I mean, your own sense, but it's not able to answer ultimate questions at the moment. It's not able to answer even whether the universe had a beginning or not. We don't even know that.

And I gave a talk to, I was asked to give a talk to some bishops in the UK about cosmology. And I said, yeah, that'll be great fun. And so when I gave him this talk, and at the end, I said, I've got some questions. So if the universe is eternal, and it might be, it might not have had a beginning, if it's eternal, what place is there for a creator?

That's a good question. They didn't have an answer, right? An eternal creator. But I think that it might be eternal, and we might discover that. So we don't know at the moment, but we might. So I think my point is that these other human

It's very natural to religions and natural things. You see it all across the world in all different cultures. But I think that in the 21st century, religion needs to operate within that framework if it's going to operate. There are still great mysteries and it is appropriate to think about what it means to be human and I'll give you my view of what it means.

But I don't think the problem comes when your theology or your philosophy forces you to deny some facts, some measurement. These things are measurements. We're not saying it's not my opinion, the universe is 13.8 billion years old. We measured it. It's like having an opinion between the distance from LA to New York. You can't have an opinion on that. We know what it is. And it's the same.

It's like, you know, these things, you know, people say the earth's flat or whatever, they're just like, it isn't, and we've measured it. So it's just stop it. You know, but that doesn't mean you can't be spiritual and you can't be really just, I would say, and it doesn't mean you can't believe in God or God's or it. That's not ruled out by science, but some stuff's ruled out.

Well, I love the way you communicate this because it takes into consideration human nature. And like, I love Dawkins. He's fantastic. I think he's very, very, very valuable. But he likes to call people idiots. And the problem with that is people go, fuck you, you're an idiot. It like is a natural inclination when you insult people to argue back

and to sort of dig their heels in. And you don't do that. And I think that's very important. And I think that a guy like Dawkins just gets frustrated from all these years of debates with people who are uneducated or saying ridiculous things. And he's a bit of a curmudgeon. And he seems to be softening as he's gotten older.

He's an evolutionary biologist, and that's the front line in some sense, isn't it? Yes. The thing about particle physics is that you don't get a lot of shit because people don't understand what you're talking about. Where's the evolutionary biologist? Right, so I understand his frustration. Oh, I do too. Having said that, I've softened a bit over the years, actually, because

Now, I think at this point, both in the US actually and in Britain and in some of the countries, we are at a point, you've sort of alluded to it, where everybody's angry. There's a lot of anger, and a lot of it's justified, by the way, whom you could talk about that, you know, income inequality and all those things. So it's justified anger. But it seems to me that there are people of goodwill.

who need to band together to diffuse the anger in our societies. Otherwise, we won't have countries like the United States. It's United States because it's united in everybody. You've got the American flag there. There's a sense of belonging and identity and togetherness in a country which you've got to preserve. I've stopped actually picking... I used to, for example, quite enjoy picking fights with Deepak Chopra on Twitter.

And it's just funny to laugh, you know, and you just do it. He says some crazy stuff and he's... But I've stopped doing it going well, but relative to some of the other people. He's someone he means.

Well, yes. I don't agree with virtually anything he says. However, he's a well-meaning person. And so I've started trying to seek common ground. Now, that's why I, for example, gave a talk to the bishops that asked me to come. I don't agree with them on their theological framework.

But they mean well, most of them. Yeah. So I think seeking consensus and diffusion anger, as you said, is it is incumbent on all of us, especially people like us who have a public voice. We need to diffuse some of this anger because otherwise it will consume everyone.

Yes, I've tried very hard to evolve in that respect and just get better at communicating ideas and get better at understanding how people receive those ideas. And I think that's, it's easy to get lazy and to insult and to... It's fun, it's fun. It's fun, yeah. Well, especially me, I mean, I'm a comedian. It's part of what I do is insult people. Yeah. I do.

I use it for humor. I want to entertain people. That's the whole idea behind it. But I think in terms of like discussing ideas, especially that are so personal to people, like religion, I've reexamined the way I interpret these ideas and the way I talk about these things. Yeah. That's it.

It's interesting, I did a BBC programmer ages ago, I was asked to do it on the single the wreath latches that the BBC have done since 1952, I think it was. And Robert Oppenheimer did them in 53.

And it's fascinating, you can get the transcripts online, they're free. And you can get one recording of the five, they taped over the other four, can you believe it? Wow! So you raised them, because they wanted to tape for something else. No! It's just unbelievable. But one of them exists of Oppenheimer, giving these lectures.

Oh my god, how do they do that? They taped over, can you buy more tapes? And Bertrand Russell did them, though. They taped over Bertrand Russell's? Because tape was so expensive.

But he talks crazy. But it's brilliant. It's called science and the common understanding. And they weren't very well received because they thought he was going to talk about the Manhattan Project. So they thought he was going to talk about the atom bomb, because he ran it basically. But he didn't. He talked about how thinking like a scientist

Which means thinking in the way that nature forces you to think can be valuable in other areas. And that's an insight in itself. The great thing, the unique thing about science is nature forces you to think like that. You can't have an opinion about gravity. You jump at the building, you can hit the ground. That's it. It doesn't matter what your opinion is.

And he said, so if you think about, for example, quantum mechanics, so sometimes you think of a particle like an electron, sometimes it has to, it's a point like object. It behaves like a little billiard ball thing, a pool ball that bounces around.

But sometimes it behaves like an extended thing, like a wavy thing. And nature forces you to hold both ideas in your head at the same time in order to get a complete picture of the object, a description of an electron. And it's a that's the valuable thing about quantum mechanics, you know, unless you're doing electronics or inventing lasers, you don't need to know this stuff. But if you want to learn how to think,

It's valuable to be forced to hold different ideas in your head at the same time. It's really teaching you not to be an absolutist. It's teaching you the example he uses is, because he was, I think he was, had problems with McCarthy and all those things, didn't he? So you think he's running the 50s. So he said, you can either be, you can be a communist, which.

in his definition would be that you think the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. So society is all that matters. It could be a libertarian on the far conservative end where you think that the individual is the only thing that matters. And that's it. But actually, of course, to have a functioning society, you need a mixture of the two and we can weight it one way or the other. But you need to hold both ideas in your head at the same time.

And that's, he said that, one of the most valuable things about science, because it forces you into modes of thought that are valuable. And that's what we're talking about here. We're talking about absolute positions are always just a blanket sort of subset of what's actually happening. You can't understand the world by being an extremist. Yeah. You've got to hold all these views in your head.

Well, I find that so often on this podcast because I talk with people I agree with and disagree with and I always try to put myself in the head of the person that I disagree with. I always try to figure out how they're coming to those conclusions or where they're coming from. And I think it's so important to not be married to ideas. I got a conversation with someone about this.

And they said, like, sometimes you change your opinions a lot. I go, yeah, I do. I do. I think I can flip flopping. I'm not a politician. Like, I'm not flip flopping. I'm thinking. Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Like, I will have one opinion on a thing, whether it's a controversial thing, like universal basic income. I'll change my mind 100% two weeks. Yeah.

And I'll go, now I think it's probably a good idea. And then I'll go back and forth. No, no, no, no. People need money. It's as cruel as it seems. They need motivation. And I don't know. I bounce around with these things. But I've tried really hard, as I've gotten older, to have less absolute opinions.

Yeah, Richard Feynman, another great physicist, a similar essay, a similar time to Oppenheimer, and he also worked on the Manhattan Project, and it's called The Value of Science, and I think that was 1955. And they both shared actually a surprise, I think, that they were still alive, because they thought that the power they'd given to the politicians, the atom bomb,

would destroy everything. They didn't think the political system would control it, and it did. So that's an emotionally remarkable thing. We're still here. But in that essay, he said that the most valuable thing about science is the realization that we don't know.

And he said, he said, in that statement, he calls science a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, by the way. And he said, in that statement is the open door, the open channel, he called it. So if we want to make progress, we have to understand that we don't know everything and we have to leave things to future generations. And we can be uncertain and we can change our minds. And he said that that's that it's a great last line. I can't remember exactly what he says, but he said it's something like is our duty as scientists.

to communicate the value of uncertainty and the value of freedom of thought to all future generations. That's the point. That's what freedom of thought means. Freedom of thought means the freedom to change your mind. In fact, that's what democracy is. If you think about it, democracy is a trial and error system. So it's the admission that we don't know how to do it. Therefore, we'll change. Every four years, we'll change the president. Every eight years, we'll change the president. Why?

because the president doesn't know how to do it. So someone better. There will be someone better that comes along and then someone worse and someone better. But it's a trial and error system. And he's right. And he's right that that is the open door. That's the road to progress. It's certainly better than humility.

Yeah. One of the things that I love so much about Bertrand Russell and about Feynman was how human they were. They were very human. I mean Feynman liked to play the bongos and chasing girls and Bertrand Russell was addicted to tobacco. He would talk about how he wouldn't fly unless he could smoke. Like he had to get us was back when they had smoking sections on airplanes and he had his pipe and he just refused to fly without tobacco and he couldn't imagine being without tobacco.

It's so strange for such a brilliant guy to be addicted to such a gross thing. You're right, because I think these are people that found existence joyous. They wanted to know. They just wanted to know stuff. They didn't want to know everything, because you can't know everything. I suppose that's what... If you think about what the job of a scientist is, it's to stand on the edge of the known.

because you're a research scientist. So if there's nothing to know, then you've got no job. So you have to be naturally comfortable with not knowing. And if there's one thing, I really do think, how do we begin to patch our countries back up again? One of the reasons, I think, in education is to teach people the value of uncertainty.

of not knowing. It is not weak to not know. It's actually natural not to know. And that's one of the problems with religion is to say that you know when you do not, or to say that you have absolute truth and absolute knowledge of something when it can't really exist. History tells us, doesn't it, that anyone who thinks they've got absolute knowledge is a cause is trouble.

Yeah. Um, did you see X Machina? Yeah. Did you enjoy it? Yes. Yes. I know. And Alex Galland, because he wrote Sunshine. Oh, right. That's right. And 28 days later. Yeah. And yeah. So another new movie, The Weird One, the Alien movie. He wrote that as well. Right. Um, I'll call it was an isolation. An isolation. Yes. Yeah. So a great Sandra. Yeah. Yeah. Um, did you, are you scared of artificial life, artificial intelligence?

And Elon must scare the shit out of me. Yeah, when he talked about it. Like he talks about it like we're in the opening scene of a science fiction movie where he's trying to warn people and then they don't listen to the genius and it goes south.

It sort of depends. I chaired a debate on this for the Royal Society in London a few weeks ago. So it's true now, at the moment, what people tend to be frightened of are general AIs, or AGI, they call it artificial general intelligence, which is what we talked about earlier, a human-like capability thing.

And we miles away from that. We don't know how to do it. We haven't got them. And we miles away. So at the moment, artificial intelligence is expert systems and very focused systems that do particular things. You can be scared of them in a limited economic sense, because they're going to displace people's jobs. And actually, interestingly, in this panel discussion we had, it's going to be like where you might call middle class jobs in the UK. So white college jobs.

It's not actually why people are interested in universal basic income to sort of replace money that's going to be lost because there will be no jobs for all these people, otherwise we have just a mass catastrophe. Yeah, they're very good. Someone said that these systems, that's especially intelligent systems at the moment, they're very good at doing things like lawyers work.

So they're very good at reading contracts and things like that. That's interesting because it's a revolution. It's not like the Industrial Revolution where it's manual labor that gets hit necessarily. This is kind of interesting because it hits that kind of intermediate level that usually escapes. So you're right. One of the answers is to tax. There was an example was a robot tax. So in a car factory, you say to the manufacturer, well, OK, you can have a robot. Well, you pay the robot the same as you pay a person.

And then that money goes into funding universal basic income or something like that. So I think there's got to be an economic change because these systems will be there. But all the experts I spoke to agreed that the idea of a terminator style general intelligence taken over the world is miles away.

And so whilst we might start thinking about the regulation, it's not going to happen soon is the general point, I think. So I would disagree with him on that. I think I think it's too far in the future at the moment. I might be one of those people that's going, it's going to be all right. And then, you know, my iPhone takes me out on the way to the airport.

It's not a choice at the moment, isn't it? Don't give your iPhone a laser. It doesn't matter if it goes crazy and tries to take over the world. I know that's a bit facetious because he would say they could take over power grids and all that kind of stuff.

Well, it's these concepts that are really hard to visualize, like sort of Kurt's Wiles idea of the exponential increase of technology leading us to a point in the near future where you're going to be able to download your consciousness into a computer. You talk to computer experts like this now way, we're miles away from that. Yeah, on neuroscientists.

One brain cell, probably, we can't. But Kurzweil's convinced that what's going to happen is that as technology increases, it increases in this wildly exponential way where we really can't visualize it. We can't even imagine how much advancement will take place over 50 years. But in those 50 years, something's going to happen that radically changes our idea of what's possible.

And I think Elon shares this idea as well, that it's going to sneak up on us so quickly that when it does go live, it'll be too late. Yeah. I mean, it's worth putting the framework in place, I think, the regulatory framework. Even as you said, for the more realistic problem, which is people's jobs are going to get displaced.

Yes. And there's a great, I was at a thing and someone said, I can't believe it was, but they said that the job of the innovation system is to create jobs faster than it destroys them. So you've always got to remember that as a government and as regulators, if you're going to allow technologies into the marketplace that destroy people's jobs, it is your responsibility to find a way of replacing those jobs or compensating those people, as you said.

With the ones you get break down so human being those that people need some meaning like they just giving them income I think is just gonna

It's just my speculation, but it can create mass to spare. Even if you provide them with food and shelter, people need things to do. So there's going to be some sort of a demand to find meaning for people, give them occupations, give them something, some task. It seems to be one of the critical parts of being a person. So we need things to do that we find meaning in.

You know, like you were talking about we're the only things that we know of that have meaning that find meaning and share meaning and believe in that.

We're going to need something like that. If universal basic income comes along, I don't think it's going to be enough to just feed people and house them. They're going to want something to do if a person is a, you're doing something for an occupation and this is your identity and then all of a sudden that occupation becomes irrelevant because a computer does it faster, cheaper, quicker. These people are going to have this incredible feeling of despair and just not being valuable. Yeah.

I mean, what one, the utopian sort of a version of this is that everybody gets to do what we're doing now, which is make a living sort of thinking and creating and all that kind of, you know, so that's the utopian ideal is you don't need to do the stuff, the job that you don't really want to do in the factory. Right. You can do the thing that humans are best at, but I agree, that's a very utopian

Does everybody want to do that? Does everybody have the mindset? Maybe because of education. If everybody had an interest like that, if everybody went on to make pottery and painting and doing all these different things, they've always really wanted to do. Their needs are met by the universal basic income money that they receive every month.

But, boy, there's a lot of people that don't think have those desires or needs and to sort of force them onto them at age 55 or whatever it's going to be. Yeah, seems to be very, very difficult. Yeah. Yeah. I agree.

It's a big challenge. But I think that in concept, at least, it's inevitable that we do have some sort of an artificial intelligence that resembles us, or that resembles something like Ex Machina, if people choose to create that. We can choose to create it in our own image. But that's very God-like, isn't it? God created us in his own image. Yeah. And again, yeah. You see?

I don't know. When I talk to people in the field, as you probably have, most of them say, don't know how to do it. It's really going to be miles away. So maybe I'm hiding my head in the sand a bit, but I don't think so. I think it's

I think we'll know when I don't think anyone's going to do it accidentally. Right. So I don't think it's just suddenly going to be upon us. I think we will see ourselves getting acquired in that capability. We'll see ourselves getting close. We'll see those systems begin to emerge and then we'll think about it. I think 200 years ago, if you wanted a photograph of something, you want a picture of something, you had to draw it.