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
But if it's typical, I mean, 4 billion years, you said it's not a long time. It is a third of the age of the universe. So here... You put it that way, it's a long time. One third of the age of the universe to go from the origin of life to a civilization. And so what was required here on Earth was that that unbroken chain of life
remained unbroken for a third of the age of the universe in a violent universe. We know there are impacts from space. Many stars are significantly more active than the sun. So the sun's kind of quite a boring little star that just ticks along. It's very nice to us. We're also on the edge of the galaxy, by the way. We're not close in. If you go into this region where that black hole is,
There are a lot of stars around. There are supernova explosions and all sorts of stuff going on. So it's violent in there. So maybe you can only get unbroken chains of life for billions of years on the outskirts of a galaxy. So there are fewer stars and planets out there. And maybe even then you need to be fortunate.
The moon is big, and so it stabilizes the spin. So the spin axis, Mars, I think, if I'm right, I think the spin axis is wobbled around by something like 60 degrees or something over its history. Imagine that. Imagine Earth was – the pole was wobbling around and everything was falling over. You wouldn't imagine that complex life like us would emerge on a planet like that.
Yeah, an evolutionary biologist would say the counter-argument. is that what life does, what evolution does, is produce organisms that are well-fit to their environment. They fit niches in the environment. But there's no drive to complexity. There's no law that says that the more complex you are, the more likely you are to survive and flourish.
And the example of life on Earth probably backs that up. Biologically. Yes, three billion years of single cells. What that means is that the single-celled organisms were just doing very well. Right. And so it's not obvious. It's not a given that just because you suddenly get more complicated, you're better than the single-celled things. Right.
Earth was almost that. Right. So you go back one billion years from now and Earth was that planet. So the interesting things that happened, photosynthesis, complex biochemistry. But as far as we can tell, nothing more complex than a single cell. So as most of the history of life on Earth. So that might suggest that that's the way that things are usually. And that this is an aberration.
And again, emphasize we don't know. Right. But we've got one example. The other observation, though, it goes back to your first question. It is true that we do look sort of systematically for signals or evidence of civilizations out there. There's the Breakthrough Listen Project and there's SETI, as it's called. So we do. And we haven't seen anything, I would say.
And I know that if you go onto the web and things on the internet, people say, we have, we've seen stuff, and I've seen stuff. But just the basic point, as far as I know, scientifically speaking, we haven't seen anything at all compelling. No. Basically nothing. Basically nothing. And so astronomers have a name for it. They call it the Great Silence. The great silence.
And it's a tremendous mystery, as I said earlier. But it does seem that the universe is quiet, as far as we can tell.
Yeah, there are different. So the counter arguments when we say we've seen nothing, therefore, as far as we can tell, there's nothing out there. You could say, well, what if the civilization that evolved is far ahead of us? What if the space probes are the size of an iPhone?
Well, it's kind of a reasonable thing to say, actually.
Because why would you not, if you can build a little thing, it's easier to send around the galaxy than a big thing.
So why would you not, as you said, these hyper, ultra intelligent quantum computers, why would they not be tiny? Right. So you could say that. You could say, well, maybe they are. Maybe they're all over the solar system, but they're the size of phones and we wouldn't have seen them.
Yeah. Okay. You would have to concede that. So we're just saying that the way that we've looked for energy signatures, for example, of civilizations, you tend to look for big things because that's all we can see. And we don't see any big things. We don't see any big structures. We don't see any evidence of spacecraft and all that kind of stuff.
But I could make an argument that, well, why would the spacecraft be big? Right. Because as you said, it's another thing you said, actually. It's interesting that we're on the verge now of creating things, artificially intelligent things, which are smarter than us. So I think everyone agrees that we're on the verge of doing that. Artificial general intelligence.
Some people might think it's further away than others. You probably had people on the show said it's five years away or two years away or 50 years away. But it's probably not 10,000 years away, right? So that which is the blink of an eye. Once you've done that, and once you've got those things...
I find it hard to believe that if we get that far as a civilization, we won't begin to send those things out to the planets and ultimately to the stars. So we'll begin that process if we survive long enough. Sure. And it shouldn't be too much longer. Might be 100 years, might be 10,000 years, but we should do it. So it becomes a powerful question. Why does it appear that nobody's done that before?
And my guess, in the absence of other evidence, would be biology. It's just that maybe the number of places where biology becomes complex enough to do that is on average one, maybe on average zero per galaxy. Maybe just civilizations are very, very, very rare in the universe. Maybe that's an answer. But that's a guess.
There's a lot of points in there. So you're right. What you're arguing, I suppose, is whether intelligence... is integral to the structure, the biological structure, or whether it is a separate thing. And I think, so again, I think the answer is it's not known. You could argue either way, but the counter argument would be The brain, these things, are just computers, ultimately.
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