A space man’s guide to life, the universe and everything

Are human beings the smartest guys in the room, or anywhere? Will Harvie talks to a smart guy who’s in a position to judge.

‘‘It’s possible that there’s only one civilisation in the Milky Way galaxy,’’ says Professor Brian Cox.

There are something like 400 billion stars in our galaxy and many are orbited by exoplanets. And the Milky Way is about 13 billion years old.

So you might think our galaxy has produced civilisations more than once and maybe thousands or millions of times. But there’s no evidence of this.

Others think the opposite might be true – that ‘‘Earth is the only place in the galaxy where intelligent life exists’’, Cox says.

‘‘We may be the first . . . and the last’’ planet to evolve civilisations.

If that’s the case, we must consider our world to be ‘‘inconceivably valuable’’.

It’s worth repeating. Earth is inconceivably valuable.

Cox, the English physics professor, author and TV presenter, made this point in his speech to the opening ceremony of the World Leaders Summit at the recent climate change talks in Glasgow, Scotland.

His conclusion to the politicians and diplomats was unstated but clear – don’t screw this up.

He got less than two minutes to make the point and I asked him to expand during a video interview this week.

Life on Earth is about 3.8 billion years old and that was pretty much single-cell life for about 3.2 billion of those years, he says. More complex life started evolving on Earth about 600 million years ago.

It’s entirely possible evidence of single-cell life will be found soon on Mars or the moons of

Jupiter or Saturn. And if we figure out space travel, perhaps we’ll find evidence of single-cell life in other solar systems too.

‘‘My suggestion, and many biologists that I speak to take this view, is that simple life may be very common, [but] complex life may be extremely rare – and intelligence even more rare,’’ he says.

Leaving aside whether intelligence would allow climate change or nuclear weapons, Cox

acknowledges that measuring the rarity of intelligence is currently impossible.

But New Zealanders can get

challenged like this in Cox’s world tour, Horizons: a 21stCentury Space Odyssey, which premieres in Auckland on February

26, then moves to Dunedin (March 1), Christchurch (March 3) and Wellington (March 7), Covid permitting.

‘‘Using state-of-the-art LED screen technology, arenas will be filled with images of far-away galaxies, alien worlds, supermassive black holes, and a time before the Big Bang,’’ according to the publicity materials.

Cox has toured this kind of thing in New Zealand before and the shows are grounded in his day job as a professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester. He’s also coauthored eight popular science books and presented numerous science TV shows and series, mostly on the BBC.

He’s also appeared on the shows QI, Doctor Who and Postman Pat. Before all that, he played keyboards in two British pop bands, Dare and D:Ream, which had a No. 1 UK hit with Things Can Only Get Better in 1994 as well as eight more top 40 hits.

In other words, Cox is a performer. He’s got a quick smile and an approachable manner. He takes dumb questions seriously (trust me) and can produce fourminute non-stop answers that are as intelligent as they are wideranging.

On the pandemic, Cow admits his lack of credentials but notes he chaired public panels on

Covid-19 for the Royal Society and the like.

One panel on mandates was split. Some experts thought they ‘‘don’t work’’, while others pointed to the smallpox mandate, which did work. Smallpox is eradicated.

The difference, perhaps, was that smallpox produced awful fluid-filled blisters all over the body. They later popped, leaving permanent scars and sometimes blindness. The virus killed about 30 per cent of the infected. It was ‘‘self-evidently a really nasty disease’’, Cox says.

Covid-19, on the other hand, produces variable experiences. Some are asymptomatic, some have a mild illness, some are hospitalised and a small percentage die. Even in the UK (9.6 million cases and 143,000 deaths), lots of people don’t personally know anyone who was seriously ill or died.

It has therefore been very difficult to convince everybody that it’s a disease serious enough to warrant vaccines, he says.

The answer is education. Cox got his third, booster shot in midNovember, one of more than 13 million Britons so far to have taken that step.

He’s encouraged that while public health measures (lockdowns, masks etc) have been necessary, it is science solving

It’s entirely possible evidence of single-cell life will be found soon on Mars or the moons of Jupiter or Saturn.

the problem by developing vaccines.

The research has been similar to the Apollo moonshot programme – ‘‘essentially unlimited money and unlimited effort’’. The rate of advance has put scientific knowledge 10 years ahead of where it would have been otherwise, he says.

Cox much prefers cosmology, which he helpfully defines as the study of the large-scale structures of the universe. The Big Bang, before the Big Bang and, especially for Cox, black holes. They’re a research interest and he’s currently co-authoring a popular book on them.

‘‘The study of black holes, very bizarrely, is leading us to think that at some level nature seems to be built out of information . . . and the conservation of information seems to underpin the way that our universe works. That’s coming from thinking about black holes, which are real things we can photograph.’’

I’m not sure if I understand that either, but Cox promises to make it real during his New Zealand shows because he’s got massive LED screens and super-cool graphics.

At the start of the show, he asks a question: ‘‘What does it mean to live a finite, fragile life in an infinite, eternal universe?’’

‘‘I want the audience to leave thinking about their own answer to that,’’ he says.

‘‘Nobody knows the answer. But I think that science is necessary if you’re going to make any progress.’’

Cox’s current BBC show, Universe, will likely air in New Zealand in the first half of 2022.