Professor Brian Cox

speaker

436 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 3 Aug

Professor Brian Cox’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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SmartLess · "Professor Brian Cox" · 3 Aug 2026 podcast

So I'll give you one idea that if you look at the history of life on Earth, then we know that life began around 3.8 to 4 billion years ago.

So it's pretty much as soon as the Earth had formed, then you see microbes on it, let's say 4 billion years ago.

But you see nothing more complex than a single cell back beyond about a billion years ago.

So three billion years of the four billion years of life on Earth were single cells, just slime, basically.

And so in the last sort of little quarter.

So it took four billion years to go from the origin of life to us on this planet, which is one third of the age of the entire universe.

So many people, and I would put myself in this camp, if you had said, guess how many civilizations are there in a galaxy like the Milky Way?

I'd say on average, less than one.

which is a guess.

But it's a guess based on what, the only observation that we have, we've got two observations, right?

One is we haven't seen anything.

So an astronomer's called that the great silence.

And we can talk about that.

It's kind of a surprise.

I'll talk about that in a sec.

So that's one observation.

And the other one is it took four billion years for us to evolve.

Right.

Now many stars don't live for four billion years.

So what we're saying is this little planet, Earth,

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