Professor Brian Cox

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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

remained safe and stable enough to support an unbroken chain of life for one third of the age of the universe, which is what it took to produce us.

And when you put it like that, even though there are hundreds of billions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy,

But I often say that people say, well, surely there must be loads of civilizations.

But a very big number multiplied by a very small number, which is the chances that things survive, is not necessarily a big number.

A really big number multiplied by a really small number can actually be a really small number.

So that's the first thing.

The other thing I would say is that

The other bit of evidence that I'm really persuaded by is something called the Fermi Paradox.

Which is that, imagine, so we've seen that today as we're speaking, SpaceX have just done their thing on the stock market and all those things.

So, you know, we're building rockets.

We have two spacecraft that are in interstellar space that we're still in touch with, the Voyager spacecraft, after 50 years in space.

We are, yeah.

So they're in interstellar space.

So in about, most people would say modern science has been around for about 400 years, right, give or take, from Galileo and people like that.

So in 400 years, we've gone from basically inventing modern science to building interstellar spacecraft.

So imagine what we would look like in the Milky Way galaxy if you let us have another thousand years.

Or actually, let us have another million years at this rate of progress.

We haven't been around our species for that long, but give us another million years.

Imagine what we would look like.

Surely, we would have gone out to the stars and anyone else in the Milky Way galaxy would see us.

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