Brian Cox
speaker
1,719 appearances
13 recordings
8 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 16 Jun
Brian Cox’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
That doesn't sound like a scientific concept in a way. Meaning, right? Right. I would argue that whatever it is, it self-evidently exists because the universe means something to us. I would argue that it's a property of complex biological systems. So whatever it is, it's something that emerges, in this case, from human brains... It self-evidently exists.
Everyone who's listening to this knows that the world means something to them. So I would argue that if this planet is the only planet in our galaxy where complex biological systems exist at our level, then it follows. It's the only place where meaning currently exists in a galaxy of 400 billion suns. And therefore...
I would argue just for that very basic point that we have a tremendous responsibility in some sense. Because, by the way, I gave a talk, a little video thing at one of the climate summit, the COP climate summit in Glasgow in the UK a few years ago. And they asked me to do a little video to the world leaders. And I think they thought I'd say, you know, welcome to Glasgow, have a nice meeting.
But I made this little argument as fast as I could. I said, it's possible, at least, that this is the only place where complex biology has emerged in our galaxy. If that's true, this is the only island of meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns. And you are responsible for it because you are the world leaders.
Therefore, if you destroy it through deliberate action or inaction, then each of you would be personally responsible for destroying meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns, potentially forever. Now go and discuss that, was my intro to Glasgow. Now, we can all argue, because people will be listening to this going... Nonsense. How can it be? We can all argue about whether that's true.
What I would say is, given that, as far as I'm aware, we don't have any good evidence to the contrary, which goes back to your previous question, it's a reasonable working assumption. So why don't we just operate on that basis? And then, you know, yeah, if someone lands tomorrow, as I said, I'd be very delighted because then what I just said would be false.
And we could relax a bit and go, it doesn't really matter if we destroy ourselves to some extent. But so I think it's worth taking seriously the idea that civilizations are very rare. Now, and by the way, I used to say, so probably last time I was on, actually, I used to say that in the far future, then the complex life will cease to exist.
So it probably doesn't matter on a global scale, but it matters locally because of this idea that meaning emerges from complex biological systems. So if you don't care about that, what do you care about? But actually, I read a book. Have you had David Deutsch on the show? David Deutsch is a really interesting physicist. I don't believe I have. He's one of the founders of quantum computing.
And so he's a big figure in quantum computing in particular. But he's a great thinker. And I was reading some stuff he wrote recently. And he pointed out that it's not necessarily true that life is temporary. Because you could imagine a situation as you go into the far future. Let's imagine that we continue for a million years or a billion years as a civilization. Imagine what we could do.
It is possible that life can get so advanced in the universe that it can start to manipulate the universe itself. Or at least stars. He said you could imagine, for example, just imagine. Wild speculation. But imagine life gets so advanced that it can start to change the destiny of a star. Maybe it could start to add material into the star or something, you know, whatever.
So we don't know how to do that or if it's possible, but imagine it could. Then the evolution of stars... life would matter in the sense that it could start to change the way that the universe behaves on a large scale in the future. And so it reminded me, actually, there's another great book by John Barrow and Frank Tipler called The Anthropic Cosmological Principle from the 1980s.
It's one of my favorite books, actually. And I remembered it. And in there, they speculate about this life in the far, far future. And if it became powerful enough to manipulate the whole universe or the observable universe, then suddenly you can't make predictions about the far future unless you consider the possible impact of life on the universe.
And whilst this is, I should say, it's wildly speculative, but it's actually logically it's quite an interesting point. So I kind of disagree with myself a few years ago where I would have said that life is extremely valuable because it brings meaning to the universe, but temporarily. And so it brings these brief like flickering candles of meaning and then they go out again.
But it's worth considering. It might not necessarily be true that if you really think. I mean, just to say, I mean, it must sound to many people listening just nonsense, right? Science fiction. But if you think our civilization has been around for 10,000 years at best, really, give or take. And in that time, we've sent stuff out of the solar system.
Although we're way away from being able to manipulate stars, we can manipulate planets. So we are changing the way this planet operates. Life has changed it. The oxygen in the atmosphere, before we appeared, the oxygen in the atmosphere is a product of life. So life already... We know change is planets.
And so I like that speculation that just possibly it's not just a temporary little phenomena that flickers in and out and then disappears again. It could have a real bearing on the future of the universe.
I'm really interested in these kind of arguments. You put it really well, actually. It's fascinating, right?
Well, exactly. And this is the point that David Deutsch made in the book I've just been reading and John Baron Frank Tifler made before that. Although it sounds insane, as you said, and that four billion years, there's a lot to say about that, by the way. Because for 3 billion plus years of that on this planet, it was just single cells.
And so it's only in the last, let's say, a billion years, but actually a bit less, that we've had multicellular organisms. So three quarters of it at the time were just single celled. That's even crazier. Which is one of the reasons that many people think civilizations might be rare. Because the only evidence we have is this planet.
And the evidence on this planet is that single-celled life is sort of the way that things are for most of the history. And then so it seems like an accident in a way that happened late on in the history of life on Earth that produced multicellular life. Now, is that typical? We don't know. Maybe it took a longer time here than it might do somewhere else.
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