Is There Life After Death? What Happens When We Die with Brian Cox

0:00Hello, a massive welcome to Happy Place with me, Fern Cotton. This is the show that tries to make sense of what it means to be human. Today, I'm chatting to Professor Brian Cox. I went to a film set. I was talking to the actor. He was a very famous actor. And it was a scene that he was playing when he saw some aliens for the first time. And he said to me, what would you think if you saw the aliens? They landed like outside here now. What do you think? And I said, I'd just be relieved. And he was like really confused. But you're scared. No, because the responsibility, I'd feel the weight. of being the only repository of meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns lifted off my shoulders.

0:41And then he looked so confused. I thought, I wonder if I've ruined the scene. So I learned some good lessons this week. One of them was to remember to have fun. Now, like you, I'm sure we adults get very bogged down with the serious, the nitty gritty and also just the mundane of life because we're busy. we got no time to do anything for ourselves it's just relentless but I took my kids to a theme park at the weekend and part of me was like oh god it's going to be so hectic it's going to be people everywhere the kids are going to be all hyped up it wasn't as if I was looking forward to it put it that way but I had the best day out I have had in so long I bloody loved it my kids wanted to go on this one roller coaster three times in a row and I was thinking I can't be bothered as soon as I got on it I was screaming like a kid I forgot about all my worries when this bloody roller coaster started going backwards I properly shit myself but it was just the most it do you know what it was it was a nostalgic sensation I'd forgotten about because I used to love going to theme parks as a kid myself and I literally haven't been to one since childhood and it was just that sort of like being out of control, letting go, screaming because you're allowed to.

1:57Honestly, I had the best time ever. So this is your reminder and my reminder to have a little fun where we can, because otherwise you could go like weeks can go by and you're like, God, I've just been so serious for like three weeks about having a laugh or doing something a bit silly or doing something for the sake of it. Everything's got to have a purpose and meaning. No, it hasn't. No, it hasn't. Just have some fun. And I'm saying that for me as much as I am you, you lovely lot. Now, let's talk about Brian. Brian is a physicist and he's one of the best communicators about science, cosmology and astronomy in the world.

2:35You might be one of the many people who listen to his incredibly popular podcast, The Infinite Monkey Cage. and he's recently launched a new one called A Question of Science and he's about to get significantly more busy because he's embarking on a huge world tour called Emergence in 2026. I wanted to speak to him for many reasons. Like all of you lot, I've got big questions and big things that I think about. Not all the time as Brian does, but I like to think big. I like to remind myself constantly that we are on a floating ball in infinite space just so I forget about the minutiae of day-to-day and the little worries that can really bog me down.

3:14And also I wanted to interview Brian because I had done so once before, but it was on radio for about eight minutes. And I thought, God, if I do near enough to an hour with Brian Cox, it's going to really push me. I mean, like IQ wise, it's going to really push me and my level of intelligence and understanding about things. I got a D in science. Do you know what? I would have actually got more than a D, but I was already filming Disney Club during my GCSE. So I actually missed physics. Shame, because that's what we'll be talking about today. So if I'd gone to physics, because I did do biology and chemistry, I definitely would have got a C.

3:54Come on, come on. Anyway, I'm not naturally scientifically minded. So I knew it would be a push. And hopefully I've done this chat justice. you know I'm I'm never aiming for the perfect episode but I do leave each week thinking I could have done better I could have done better and I only see that as a good thing right let's do it here's the show

4:35Professor Brian Cox, lovely to see you. Good to be here. Last time I interviewed you was actually on Radio 2 and I think I had all of about eight minutes to talk to you, which is an impossible task. About the universe. About the universe. Tell me what the universe means in eight minutes. But today we can take our sweet time, so it's really great to see you. You are next year embarking on a whole massive world tour for quite literally 12 months. You're off. Well, more than that, actually. Really? The last one in the end went on for about four years. Oh, my God. You're like Coldplay. Yeah, you just keep adding on to it.

5:08Actually, the Boston Globe said that my tour was the Taylor Swift eras of science. Yes. And I thought, I'll take that. Yeah, put that on your poster. The Taylor Swift. It is. I think it is on the poster. You're absolutely right. I love it. So, and yeah, so this one at the moment is about 18 months, I think. Wow. And here in the UK, the big shows are in October and November next year. So, you know, the O2 and the arenas in Manchester and Birmingham, Nottingham, all that. So amazing. And it's wonderful that it's basically cosmology, you know, it's astronomy and cosmology. But it's kind of like prog rock as well in the sense, you know, because we've got the biggest possible screens that you can fit in those places, which is at the moment.

5:55So we've got things like the James Webb Space Telescope, which wasn't active last time that I toured. And almost every day you see beautiful images, like ultra high resolution, magnificent images of sort of exploding stars and colliding galaxies, just beautiful stuff. And so putting those on those screens is really exciting to me because the screens are massive, as I said, as big as we can fit into those arenas. It's so beautiful. You know, I think a lot of the time we just think, oh, God, everything's so doom and gloom out there and everyone's feeling rubbish and a bit down. And then you filling venues of that size, like huge arenas.

6:39There are so many people out there that want to feel awe and wonder and have big questions to ask. And I think we forget that. Yeah, I think, I mean, almost everybody, I would say everybody that I meet is interested in the questions that are raised by astronomy and cosmology, but also biology, just science in general. It's how you phrase the questions. Yeah. Because there are questions, you know, are we alone in the universe is a question that people think about. Even are we alone in the solar system? Are there microbes on Mars? But also these bigger questions about how did the universe begin?

7:14Why is there a universe at all? How come there are things like us in the universe, which are just little patterns of atoms that can have a conversation? You know, there's an observation a few weeks ago from the James Webb Space Telescope of a galaxy from which the light had been traveling for 13.5 billion years to reach us. So the universe is 13.8 billion years old. So you're seeing this thing as it was just after the universe began. Wow. And so you can see that. So you say, well, how did the universe go from that, which is these early galaxies? And even before that, just a load of hydrogen and helium, nothing else.

7:54How did it go from that to us? Which is really part of what the show's about. One of my great heroes, Carl Sagan, said that a physicist is a hydrogen atom's way of learning about hydrogen atoms. And you go, that's quite a beautiful way of putting what a human being is. We started off as just a load of hydrogen a couple of minutes after the Big Bang. And now we're these things. And that story is quite majestic. So I think everybody's interested in that. Yeah. And I think we are desperately wanting to land on that because we get so bogged down with the minutiae of our everyday lives and our worries and our idiosyncrasies and the issues that we've got going on that actually when we pull focus and we go, oh, my God, we ask big questions like that.

8:40How the hell did we end up in this civilised world with AI and all of these technological advances? I think we want to constantly pull focus, but we get dragged back to the minutiae again and again on a daily basis. Do you think because this is such a huge part of how you operate in the world, who you are, how you think, do you think having that greater perspective impacts your happiness levels and helps you maybe distract from the everyday stresses? I think it does for several reasons. And one is a bit more abstract, as you said, the perspective. I mean, it is a remarkable thing to be a human being.

9:16And we don't know how far you'd have to go out into the universe to find anything remotely as complicated or wonderful as us. It might be beyond our galaxy you'd have to go. so that but that's as you rightly say that's a it's a very wide perspective and it's kind of a luxurious thing to be able to think like that when you're busy every day and you've got real things to do but I also think that it's like it's almost meditative in a way so learning about nature which is what we're talking about and nature is not just leaves and plants it's stars and the universe beyond is kind of quite a diverting experience.

9:55And it's full of, it's quite a joyful, pleasurable thing to, you know, and ask very simple questions about, you know, for example, why is the grass green is a good question. So you can sit there and look at the grass and maybe you don't think about it too much. We say, why is it green? And it's green because it does photosynthesis. And so it takes energy from the sun. And you say, why does it do that? And why does it reflect the green light? So we see it as green. And in the end, actually, you will end up going on a journey that takes you back through the whole history of life on Earth. And so suddenly you start asking questions about, you know, how did the plants come to be on the land?

10:30And it was 500 million years ago or something like that. And so it's actually I think it's a it's a joyful, distracting experience as well as it's just like doing a crossword, really, or something else. That's what other people do. But it also has this profound quality that ultimately, by asking those little questions, you end up going on journeys in your mind that span billions of years and billions of light years. And so, yeah, I think that, I mean, obviously I would recommend it. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. And also, I think it forces you to be open minded because with science, things change constantly.

11:05And although we can maybe get, we can land on a theory or land on something that we know to be true, in 100 years, that can all change. So it's really important to remain open minded. It's a really important point there, because there was in 1955, actually, one of the great physicists, Richard Feynman, wrote an essay called The Value of Science. And so what is the value of this? So it's obvious that we wouldn't have an iPhone, you wouldn't have modern medicine, you wouldn't have all those things, right? That's obvious stuff. But actually, he said what you said, which is it's because you're trying to understand nature.

11:40And the amount of knowledge we have is changing all the time. And so the picture we have of how things work and the theories and our understanding changes all the time. You get used to the fact that you're often wrong. So as a scientist, you're almost always wrong, actually. If you're doing a PhD or something like that, you go, I think it works like this. And nature will say no. And you go, OK. So you learn to be delighted, actually, when your opinion turns out to be incorrect. And that is a skill that I think we can all agree that many people in public life and elsewhere have lost. Gone. But of course, if you're not comfortable with uncertainty and comfortable with being on the edge of the known, then you never learn.

12:26And Feynman, actually, in this beautiful essay, I strongly recommend it. You can download it from anywhere. It's Richard Feynman, The Value of Science. It's about four pages. And he says in there that even if you think about what democracy is, democracy is the admission fundamentally that you don't know how to run a country because you accept that you change the government every four or five years. And that's a positive thing. So the moment you see someone saying this is the way to do it, then you know that it's that you know that is not the right person for the job. They're not actually a Democrat because democracy requires you to think that you're flawed and your understanding improves and you get most things wrong.

13:07But sometimes you get something right. And that's how we make progress. Yeah. And that's what science is. So there would be no modern medicine without that process. You need to almost be egoless because I think, you know, ego is the thing that is, you know, if we look at all the biggest problems in the world right now, It's because of everything you just said, that people are so certain. This is how the world should run. This is who should be in power. This is who should control this part of the world. And that's why we're seeing so much conflict and divisiveness and these huge canyon between different people's sets of ideas.

13:38And actually, we need more uncertainty to create a level of peace, which is maybe sort of a bit of a general sweeping statement. But it seems like uncertainty is so undervalued. Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting that Feynman also, he works on the atom bomb. He works on the Manhattan Project. So it's not surprising that in the 50s, he was thinking about this stuff because he thought he delivered the power to destroy ourselves. He had delivered us the power to destroy ourselves. And the other, more famously, Robert Oppenheimer. You know, everybody knows Oppenheimer, especially because of the brilliant film recently.

14:17So Oppenheimer wrote about the same things in the 50s. And again, he was writing about this idea that you have to embrace doubt and not fear doubt, but embrace it. And also, actually, Oppenheimer, he gave the BBC Wreath lectures, you know, really famous lectures in the 50s. I think it was 53. And he spoke about this stuff. And he said, there's a wonderful thing I remember where he said that everyone, to be a person of integrity, a thoughtful person, you'll have an anchor. So you'll have beliefs and you'll have a framework and a moral framework and you'll believe things. And that's really important.

14:55To be a person of substance, you have to have a position. But the trick, the key is to realize other people have different anchors. And so we all have our different anchors. And the challenge on this planet is to make sure that we work together in the interests of the planet as a whole and the civilization. And that sounds like a bit hippie maybe and whatever. But actually, if you think about it, if you're the person who built the atom bomb and you saw two of them dropped on Japan, and so you know what the power of those weapons is, one of the things you might think about is how to not do that.

15:32Yeah. And they're worth reading, these people. Because I think in some ways we've forgotten it. Well, we massively have. I mean, I had this episode of the podcast quite a few years ago now, but it's one that I always come back to. We had this amazing, sadly, late ex-Buddhist monk. He'd sort of finished his molastic lifestyle and was living in Sweden. And he wrote a book called I May Be Wrong. And that was the mantra constantly was in any conversation or conflict to have that in the back of his mind, I may be wrong, which immediately sort of like takes the heat and the anger out of certain situations.

16:06And it's really interesting because in the lead up to this talk, I listened to a bunch of podcasts where you've been the guest just to see, because obviously your subject matters are widely spanning and you could go on any different path of conversation. So it's really interesting hearing you talk. But one common theme was that you use the word argue a lot, but in a way that we don't normally use it. I think, you know, if you were just to say, I was arguing with or I argue in an everyday setting. You imagine it's kind of heated and people are pissed off and they're butting heads. But actually, within the context of science, you use it in a much gentler way, perhaps in like the truest way that it should be spoken, that you're bringing another idea to the forefront of the conversation.

16:49Yeah, that's really, I didn't know that I used that word a lot. So thank you for that analysis. But yeah, it's right. In the context of science, you make an argument, I think in other disciplines as well, you talk about making an argument, not having an argument, but making one, which is laying out a position. And that's what science is. What is a theory, a scientific theory? It's basically a guess. So you guess. Einstein guessed about the nature of gravity in 1915. And it looks like he was pretty close. And that theory ended up suggesting there may be an origin to the universe. So it's quite a good guess there.

17:26but we still we still don't think it's complete and completely right so that's the process so you make a guess and then you'd make an argument and then in that sense and then you test it and so you do some experiments and you'd see and and really what you're doing is not looking for confirmation of your guess you're looking for the thing where it's frayed where it starts to not give the right answer because there's the place to go next to learn some more and you're right what you said earlier it was interesting about ego because i think if you really are if you're a scientist and you really are a good scientist what you're interested in is finding out how nature works you're not interested in being seen to be right yeah and that's the difference i think and of course i'm not naive enough and i'm not suggesting that scientists don't have egos because they do There's all sorts of politics.

18:20I mean, the Nobel Prizes were awarded today. Everyone wants a Nobel Prize and people feel really good about it. But ultimately, most scientists I've met are pure in the sense they just want to find out how things work. Yeah. And also curiosity is such a brilliant, again, underrated quality because you can never be bored. There's no chance of being bored if you're relentlessly curious about things. And that's probably something we all have as children. We're curious about the world around us and then it sort of gets beaten out of us a bit and we kind of stop wondering and stop thinking. And that's why I guess, again, your shows are so popular because people are naturally deeply curious.

18:57Yeah. Yeah. Actually, it reminds me of this. one of my heroes is carol sagan so he did a great series called cosmos when i was growing up but he wrote a book called the demon haunted world science is a candle in the dark and i strongly recommend it and beautiful book but right at the start he tells this story of getting in a taxi in new york and the taxi driver was like you're the astronomer off tv aren't you and he's like yeah and so he said what about aliens do you think the ufos have landed and so sagan said no I don't. He said, what about Atlantis? Do you think there used to be a city under the sea?

19:32And Sagan said no and whatever. And what about horoscopes and things? No. But Sagan, he was really wise, I think, because he said he didn't think he is a person who's just asking silly questions. He thought he is a curious person who's really interested. And really, he just hasn't been served well by society, by education, because there are answers to some of these questions. And the real universe is infinitely more wonderful than imagined civilizations beneath the waves and things. It's far more interesting than that. But he hadn't had access to the information. And I think that's a really important thing to remember that you said at the start, I think, there aren't silly questions.

20:17There are just people being curious. And if they don't know the answer, you know, how did the universe begin is a very good question. And actually, we don't know. we don't even know at the beginning right we know it was very hot and dense 13.8 billion years ago but we don't know what happened before that if there was a before and so I think that it's really important to as you said the curiosity is the important bit and then it comes down to it's part of the responsibility of a society to give people the tools to satisfy their curiosity and investigate their questions yeah I think people are nervous to ask questions because we hate feeling like we're a bit stupid you know we hate thinking is that such a basic question or i think the thing we hate the most is saying i don't know you know even if someone goes over have you read that book and you're like um yeah and you know you're lying like you don't want to admit that you don't have that knowledge and actually i think again science seems to be constantly humbling because although we know a hell of a lot we know there's like so much we don't know so much we don't know i'll get it slightly wrong was a great great scientist called john wheeler who's one of the most famous physicists of the 20th century and he said that we live on a we live on this little island of knowledge surrounded by an ocean of ignorance but as the size of our island of knowledge increases so do the shores of our ignorance which was brilliant it's a lovely way of putting it yeah And actually the live show that I'm doing now, it starts with a story about a scientist called Johannes Kepler.

21:53So Kepler was working in the early 1600s and he's famous for the laws of planetary motion. So in a way that I cannot conceive how he did it, just from watching the planets like Mars and Jupiter and Saturn, which was some other astronomers had cataloged where they are in the sky, you know, which we've known for thousands of years. It's astrology, right? You know, where the planets are against the stars. So he took that data and figured out that planets go in ellipses around the sun. And he figured out a relationship between how long their year is and how far away from the sun they are. It's remarkable just from this data.

22:31But he was really clever. And in 1609, there's a beautiful story that he wrote about where he was walking across the Charles Bridge in Prague in a snowstorm. and it was snowing and it was New Year's Eve as he tells it and he was going to his benefactor's house to a party so he's going over the New Year's Eve party to the guy that pays him and he realized he hadn't brought him a present and so you notice the snowflakes landed on his arm and he looked at them and he said why are they all six-sided right they're all different and really beautiful but they're all six-sided so what is it about that so he wrote this book going why and and he said well they come from water so maybe there's something in the water maybe it's what the water's made of that makes the snowflake which is right he didn't know it's 1600 yeah and maybe so something to do with that maybe he didn't know about molecules but he makes all this progress and he talks about beehives and pomegranate seeds and everything that's got these geometric shapes and he's on the right track yeah we now know it's the water molecule and we know about that but it's a 20th century discovery but right at the end after he's written this wonderful book which you can just but i recommend it it's called the six-cornered snowflake we need like a whole book list of this episode in the notes yeah the six-cornered snowflake right at the end he says he just says i can't i can't go any further with what i know and he says i leave it to you dear reader wow to the people of the future and he says in the the translation I have he says I'm knocking on the doors of chemistry but we didn't have chemistry we didn't know anything so but you see you see this brilliant mind asking all these questions and then almost being happy at the end going oh it's great it's something for the people of the future I think also like because I watched the trailer for your show and heard that story and I was again sort of bowled over by the simplicity of a question that you know that many of us probably haven't wondered why does a snowflake look like that and actually our appreciation for the natural world and the fact that we know we're not really looking after it probably does boil down to the fact that we've lost that sort of simple curiosity about why a snowflake has six sides we sort of don't give a shit we're like oh well how you know can we go to space and I know we'll get on to that but you know we've lost that sort of simplicity that curiosity about the real simple aspects of the natural world around us yeah and this is one of the greatest minds i would say the kepler i mean he was a genius but you're right he's asking this really childlike question which is a very deep question yeah and actually i someone wrote recently um it was a nobel prize winner i've forgotten it was but he was asked like if you were to go to kids to school and say everything's made of atoms things are made of atoms is there anything you can do as an experiment in a school to show that it's very difficult you know this is a 20th century discovery and you say that's probably the shapes of things like snowflakes because if you see something and capilla said you know i i cannot believe that this beautiful shape exists at random yeah there's some reason why this thing is like that and the reason is the water molecule and you have to know quantum mechanics and all sorts of things to know understand why the water molecule is the way that it is yeah but that idea that crystals a crystal structure like a snowflake is telling you something about a deeper picture yeah it's a really modern way of looking at it and it's right it's correct so it's probably snowflakes snowflakes are probably the example of something that's telling you there's something else going on.

26:11How does that play into just like our human lives? Do you personally believe that life is a random string of events that happen? Or is there some sort of destiny, fate, preordained something about how we're living as humans? No, I think it's a random series of events. We are not snowflakes. Well, the snowflakes, the snowflakes, so they're all six-sided, But then you say, why are they all different then? Which Kepler also noticed. They're all different, but they're all kind of similar. They're all different because they have different formation histories. So it's the path they take through the clouds when they form that gives them their shape.

26:56That's true of human. Yeah. That's true of us. Yes, very much so. So we're shaped by the path we take through life. Oh, I like that. So in that sense, we are the same as snowflakes. frozen history in a way which is what a snowflake is um but in terms of the the thing about destiny so it has a name in science called teleology which is the idea that there's a final there's a the cause is in the future so you're evolving towards something yeah going to work and that's not the way that we think of the universe scientifically so evolution for example Why are we the way that we are? It's all about our evolutionary history.

27:36We're not evolving to become smarter or something like that. You evolve to fit your environment. So it's not that we're not some kind of ascent to some grander form. So that's not the way that we think in science. Well, because I guess also if you look at the human race, we are undoubtedly getting smarter, but in some ways getting so much more stupid. I'm not sure if we're getting smarter. I mean, when you look at even recently people like Kepler, if you read that book, you see a modern mind, a very, very clever person. So I don't think we've got smarter in the last few hundred years. In fact, in the past few thousand years, no one's got smarter.

28:22The really interesting question is what happened to civilization and society that allowed us in about 1600 to suddenly start basically doing science which has led to the modern world but if you think about it without being dismissive to everyone who lived before that we didn't really do we didn't make much progress right if you went to walking around with horses yeah if someone from ancient greece went back 2000 years to ancient Egypt, they wouldn't really notice a lot different. Yeah. But they'd be a bit different. They'd have pyramids rather than temples. But basically, the knowledge they had about the world hadn't changed.

29:05So it didn't change ever, basically, thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And then around 1500, 1600, suddenly we start accumulating knowledge. And in only 400 years from Kepler, thinking about these points of light, we visited them all. 400 years. We've been to every planet that Kepler saw and discovered some that he didn't know about. And now we have a spacecraft, the Voyager 1. It's 50 years since it was launched. It's on the edge of the solar system. It's on the way to the stars. And that happened in 400 years. So I find it really interesting that it's that. It's not people have got smarter.

29:47It's that our society got smarter. How important is space travel in terms of our longevity as a human race? Is it essential? Yeah, it is. Well, so, I mean, you could say, well, it's going to be essential eventually, but it's essential now, actually. so if you look at the way our civilization works a large amount of the things we take for granted are delivered from space so there's a number i think there was a report from the royal society which is the uk's big oldest scientific society about a year ago and i think the number is 16 percent of uk gdp requires space-based infrastructure it's a very big number and because if you think about it we use it for all our communications we use it for the timing of our computer networks financial transactions weather forecasting understanding climate and all that kind so the the list goes on and on and on also how they're making certain medicines kind of essential that they're in the future yeah so already we're talking about that there's experiments to manufacture drugs and medicines as you say on the space station it's some things are better manufactured in zero G and so on.

31:07But even now, it's so integrated with our society that if we lost that infrastructure, it would literally, the civilization would grind to a halt. So we're already completely entwined with it. And I think, so we make a mistake when we think of space as science fiction. It's really not. It's part of, I did a discussion with someone the other day. I was going to say argument, but it was a discussion. about and they said um you shouldn't think of the you we talk about the space economy which is growing and we're thinking about things like mining asteroids and putting power stations in space and so on and then the earth economy but they said no it's just the economy it's all the same we're expanding outwards yeah we're already near earth orbit is completely entwined with everything that we do so it's becoming very important actually to manage it as well and to regulate it to to make sure it's not the wild west up there because it's essential to all our lives yeah well exactly and i guess also like looking at how you know meddling with asteroids for instance putting power stations on certain other planets is going to impact everything is going to impact I mean, yeah, I mean, asteroids.

32:25So there's the resources. There's an argument which a lot of the people, the early sort of evangelists for space. There's a guy called Gerard O 'Neill, later a guy called Robert Zubrin, who influenced Elon Musk quite heavily. And they all had this view that we're putting too much pressure on the planet, obviously, which I think everyone agrees upon, but resource extraction and so on. But the thing is that there are resources, an infinite amount of resources up there above our heads. Yeah. If we can access them. And a lot of the early pioneers and thinkers felt that that would relieve the pressure on Earth.

33:08And it would in principle, if you can do it, you relieve the pressure on Earth because you're not fighting over resources on Earth. Yeah. You realize that you can just go to that asteroid, that asteroid, that asteroid, the moon, Mars and so on. And it often sounds like, as I said before, it sounds like science fiction and naive. And it maybe was in the 70s. You know, maybe it was rather sort of wishful thinking, but it sort of isn't now. Yeah, it's coming. And so I think there's there are great benefits to be had from moving into space. And it gets a bad name sometimes because, you know, we all know about the controversies around some of the people who go there and space tourism and all those things, which would be fun.

33:47I'd quite like to do it. But obviously it's a, you know, whatever. But actually the the real potential there is to allow us to expand as a civilization without damaging the planet. Yeah, that's the potential. It seems like it needs to rally alongside us actually just taking care of the planet as well. Because I think, yes, you know, absolutely. We can see how that could be the future of us and not annihilating the planet that we're living on. But equally, will that make people even more apathetic? Like, oh, we don't need to worry about Earth because we can just go up there and go to an asteroid and nix something off of that.

34:21And that's definitely not true. No. So the thing to say, and this always has to be said, you're right, at the same time, it's talking about the potential of space, is that this planet is the only one that we can live on in large numbers. in the way that we do. It's perfect for us because we evolved on it. So it is the best place in the universe by far to be a human. Yeah. And that's just a statement of fact. That's the way that it is. So, yes, we can build colonies on Mars and the moon first probably. And there'll be a few hundred people and maybe a few thousand people. But it'll be horrible. It's not a nice place.

35:02And it never will be a nice place. No. You might have some nice greenhouses and some big sort of buildings. But imagine living your life confined to a building. There are not going to be rivers on the surface of Mars anytime soon. No. If at all, you know, even if you can terraform the planet in hundreds of years time, it's just not nice. So we have to remember that as a human being, this is the best planet in the universe because we evolved on it. And there will not be a replacement. No, I mean, you started a global summit with all of the world leaders giving this quite punchy statement that like this is it.

35:40And you were saying, you know, even they were kind of perhaps assuming you would turn up and go like, have a great time chatting about leadership guys. And actually you delivered some extremely punchy facts that they needed to hear. What I said to them was that so we could ask the question, how many civilizations are there in a galaxy like the Milky Way? or specifically in the Milky Way galaxy? And the answer is we don't know. So it's a big galaxy, 400 billion stars. Most of them have planets. So there'll be trillions of planets. There's an estimate that there might be over 10 billion potentially Earth-like worlds in the Milky Way galaxy.

36:17So there's a lot of places where life could begin and evolve. But on this planet, it took 4 billion years roughly to go from the origin of life to us. And four billion years is a third of the age of the universe. And so many people I speak to make the argument that that might be unusual. It might be microbes on Mars and all over the place. But if that's what it usually takes, which is what it took here to get things like us, there's probably very few planets which have been stable enough to allow life to live on them for four billion years. So what I said at that climate summit to the world leaders was, let's imagine that we're the only civilization in the Milky Way galaxy.

37:01Just a working hypothesis. Might not be, but might be. So let's imagine that we are. And let's imagine that you, being the leaders, through deliberate action, which would be something like nuclear war, or inaction, like failing to address the climate crisis or whatever it is, you cause this civilization to be damaged or even removed from the earth if you do that then each of you may be personally responsible for destroying meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns potentially forever have a nice meeting was my message which is true you know the thing is I think we don't know if it's correct then but it's possible yeah so I think it's just just let's work on the basis does that terrify you that there's nobody else that terrifies me that thought it sort of does there's a very famous quote by Arthur C.

37:59Clarke you know the guy who wrote 2001 amongst many other things who said that either we are alone in the universe or we're not and both of those are terrifying yeah so I mean I agree with you I I am I wish I could talk about it um but I can't because I went to a film set um and I won't even say when it was because you'll know well anyway but it was a science fiction film and they were there and I signed an NDA and everything so I can't so but it was that I was talking to the actor he was a very famous actor about um and it was a scene that he was playing when he saw some aliens for the first time or saw his alien spaceship and it was before he did it and he said to me what would you kind of feel what would be your reaction if you saw it and I know that you've interviewed actors right you know what they do they watch you and they ask you questions and then they nick the Cillian Murphy as an aside Cillian Murphy I worked on a film called Sunshine years ago with Danny Boyle and Alex Garland wrote it Cillian was to play the physicist and we spent a lot of time together on that film and I took him to CERN right where I worked at the time and we had a great fun and went out for a few drinks and got to know each other.

39:09In the film, he does this thing where he's sending a message back to Earth and he knows they're going to the sun and he knows that his family won't receive it. He'll never see them again, really. And he does this thing like that with his like, and he's kind of nervous and does this thing. And I said to him, why did you do that? And he said, because you do it. He said, when I ask you difficult questions deliberately, then you if it's a personal thing and you're not really comfortable you do this thing i love it and so he does it so just basically yeah and he said we did a thing recently and he said he said yeah i just did an impression of brian right but so this this actor had said yeah what would you think if you saw the aliens they landed like outside here now what do you think and i said i'd just be relieved yeah and he was like really confused he was like but but yeah you're scared of it i No, because the responsibility, I'd feel the weight of being the only repository of meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns lifted off my shoulders.

40:11Yeah. And then he looked so confused. I thought, I wonder if I've ruined the scene. Because I remember he's like, I know what I'm going to do. Yeah, I'd be terrified. And then he's like, what was he going to do? Is he going to look relieved when he sees this thing, which wouldn't kind of work? So, yeah. I mean, that is the terrifying bit, I think, is the lack of meaning, isn't it? Because yes, there's the lack of life, but the lack of meaning, which is only cultivated via the human brain. That's what I, yeah, that's my position. You know, I think that, I mean, you could, you know, argue if you're religious, you would not say that.

40:45Right. But I think that as far as we can tell, meaning is a property of consciousness. It comes from consciousness. It comes from thinking. And thinking is something that we do and we're physical structures. so it's something that emerges from a very complex physical system the most complex thing we know of anywhere in the universe which is the human brain so my argument is that if there are no structures as complex as human brains on any of these other planets in the milky way galaxy then there's likely no meaning there so it means meaning i have a friend who is um who is the dean of guildford cathedral a wonderful man called victor stock who's great and we I had loads of conversations with him.

41:31And in the end, we figured out that the only thing we disagreed on was that he thinks meaning is eternal and universal. Right. Because he believes in God. Energy. Well, he believes in God. He ran a cathedral. Whereas I think it's local and temporary. Right. So I think it comes from us. It's a property of things like us. and I think that it's sort of weird to say that because it's a very it's a scientific way of looking at the world right it's just there's nothing that's what it is but it kind of puts us back at the center of the universe in some strange sense or elevates us I think it makes us very valuable because of the rarity of structures like us yeah so I mean science has spent we've spent the last 400 years demoting ourselves from the center of the universe physically and finding that we're physically insignificant.

42:24But I also think we've got more and more knowledge about what a remarkable and probably rare thing a human being is. I mean, you say when you open shows, often you'll say, what does it mean to live a finite life in an infinite universe? And I wonder what your personal reaction to that question is, because for me, it feels extremely motivating. Like, oh, my God. I mean, it is quick. It's ephemeral. I need to get a move on i need to experience life and live it to the max but i think equally it could make you feel quite nihilistic and go what's the fucking point in anything yeah so there are two two reactions to it but i think you know if you um if you're walking through some forest and you and um and you and you just um tread on on an orchid let's say a rare orchid is there it's just there and it's one thing you tread on it what's your reaction to that is it is it to say it doesn't matter it was going to be gone tomorrow anyway it's a little it's a rare thing they don't last very long or do you think that there's something of immense beauty that should have should be protected because of its ephemeral nature of its existence yes um i once visited frank drake actually so there's a thing called the drake equation that is very famous it was frank drake in the 50s and 60s was one of the founders of seti the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and so he had a thing which how can we try and work out how many civilizations there might be in the galaxy but i went to meet him quite late in his life he died a few years ago but it was wonderful at his house and he collects orchids and there was an orchid there that we'd arrived and it blooms for one day a year wow this thing and it was just happened to be on the on the day that we arrived and he said you know this may obviously makes it more beautiful no one could argue that this one that blooms on one day a year is less beautiful than the one that's just always there right it's obviously it's a beautiful thing so we all understand that but he said actually that maybe that's what civilizations are like so maybe the fact that we haven't seen anyone or heard anyone is just because they're like these little orchids that just flower and then disappear yeah yeah but that would make them more beautiful to me yeah without a doubt yeah and that is that's what we are yeah we're just things if we're kind of immortal that's the thing in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that Douglas Adams wrote where someone got made accidentally immortal yeah and life was so pointless that they went around the galaxy insulting everybody in alphabetical order so good not even per planet but in alphabetical order so good maybe that's the only thing that would be left if you're immortal yeah I mean what what are your thoughts on life after death because it again I'm going to quote you and I've got to try and I've got a whole list of quotes here but you say life is a conduit through which energy in the universe passes so say a human an animal a plant dies where is that energy going yeah I mean it's it's what is life I mean that's a very good question by the way um the answer is we don't really know that there are two very famous books on the reading list the reading list is immense.

45:36One is called What is Life by Erwin Schrodinger, which was a very famous book in the 40s that sort of predicted the existence of DNA, which was discovered later. A great friend of mine, actually, Paul Nurse, Sir Paul Nurse, who's got a Nobel Prize, who runs the Francis Crick Institute here and founded it in London. He wrote a book recently called What is Life, which is brilliant from Nobel Prize winning biologists. And he ultimately says that we don't really know, but you can pin some things down. So one, as you said, is it's something that happens it's it's that there's energy a flow by energy i mean what what do we do we burn food in oxygen and if we stop burning food in oxygen then we die so there's the there's an energy in the way a steam engine does things so there's that part of it and then there's information that it processes information as well so that's what we do we so there's an information component and an energy component.

46:31But the point is, it's just at a fundamental level, it's no different to something like a computing device in the sense that it obeys these basic physical laws, which there's got to be a source of energy and you've got to be able to do things and your structure remains and things like that. So that would imply that it's the same as if your iPhone will stop processing information if you take the battery out. Yeah. So it's dead. It's a dead iPhone then. Admittedly, you can bring it back to light, so it's probably not a good analogy because you can recharge it, which we can't do. Currently. But the idea is that we, and this was all the way back in Schrodinger's book, he said this in the 40s, life obeys the laws of physics.

47:25So it is part of the physical universe. And so therefore, there's no conceivable way that your conscious experience can persist when the thing, the machine stops working. And that might sound harsh, but I would flip it around as we did before and say, isn't it remarkable that there's this kind of thing? It's just obeying the laws of physics and the laws of physics are pretty simple. Yeah. You know, there are only four forces of nature that we know of. And it all started out as hydrogen and helium 13.8 billion years ago. And we managed to get into these patterns that can genuinely, I really mean it, bring meaning to the universe.

48:10Yeah. Do you find that that, again, personally enables you to look at your reactions to I'm talking about everyday stuff here? you know nothing particularly traumatic or extra stressful but like the everyday either mundanity or or maybe it could be the bombardment of like outside news where we're receiving daily or stuff you've got going on in the family home can you look at everything through the lens of science and go I'm reacting to this because of you know my history and the data and whatever can you can you apply it to your own life in that way well no obviously I just get pissed stop but but i think there is something to be said like you mentioned data so it's quite liberating if you say like let's say you don't like flying for example so some people don't like flying and you get nervous but you can actually go and look at the data and find out that it's safe compared to other modes of transport yeah so you could just say okay i'm not going to be scared of flying them yeah if you really if you really can trust the data so it does it is useful to look at facts are useful i agree it's useful i know it's difficult and i know that we all have different you know sort of things that worry us for different reasons and that's you know that's that's part of being human but you can kind of liberate yourself a bit from it i agree i think I don't deal with it so much now, but I had really bad OCD at one point.

49:44And you have to apply logic and fact to it because it's so illogical. It's so fantastical and over the top and enlarged at times that you need to have, whether it's like photo evidence, fact, data that you've done this thing before, nothing bad's going to happen. And treat yourself like a machine, like a computer. Yeah, because, I mean, you are basically. I mean, it's a good question. I did talk about the Crick Institute. There's a podcast. I'm not promoting that, but I'll promote it anyway. We're like a very friendly podcast. We'll promote other ones. There's a podcast called The Question of Science, and I love it, actually.

50:23And it's out at the moment. They're coming out once a week. And it's just at the Crick Institute, and it's just experts on the panel, and I chair it, and the audience asks questions. So it's like question time, but with people who know what they're talking about, basically is the difference. So we did one on, we did, for example, can we cure cancer? Because it's mainly a lot of the Crick Institute, it's cancer research. And it was a tremendously optimistic program, actually, because you realize how rapid the progress is in understanding this disease. And just look at the statistics, as you said earlier, the survival rates.

50:58Anyway, so we did cancer, aging, dementia, those things. But also we did one on AI, which was really interesting to me because the question is, you know, is there any difference between us and a computer, let's say? So could you imagine it? They call it AGI, artificial general intelligence that's like us rather than just a thing that does one thing at a time, which is what we have now. and there was some debate actually and and the the more neurosciencey people felt know that it's really very difficult that the human brain is much not that there's anything mystical going on but it's so complicated and it's all to do with our experience of the world it's connected to our bodies so you can't have a brain in a jar you know that thing that you could just imagine just having you're taking your brain out and putting it in a thing and just leave but yeah so it's like so i think the jury's still out on on whether we're just whether you could whether we now in our conversation whether we could be having this in a big computer right it's kind of the are we living in a simulation kind of question yeah and i think the jury seems to be still out amongst the experts on that or whether biology is really difficult to simulate.

52:17I mean, our brains are not that different to space in terms of the fact that there's so little we know still. There's so much more to be learned about how it works. Yeah, it's amazing. I'll probably get it wrong now, but someone was telling me at the Crick about some work they've done on mice and they're looking at how they smell, the olfactory system. and they have these sort of they just begin to see that there's little co-processors in the brain so so a smell will come in and this thing will kind of take that data which is just some it's the same data that comes from your eyes or your ears right they're all just neurons going in there so your brain sort of figures out what is it it's a smell thing it's not a sight thing and then what is it and then what would that do where is it so it sends some data to a spatial bit of the brain that is dealing with where it is and how far away it is and then another bit is it something you should not like or like a reflex sort of thing or is it something that you use to build your model of the world so is it telling you there's some a forest around the corner or something like that and it's so remarkable that just beginning to map out which bits of the brain do this and how they get the data and where they distribute it to and it was amazing to me because you're right we don't know we know a lot about it but we don't know as much as we would like to know about it it's like the universe as you said in that sense yeah and we're living amongst you know there's been bad poor mental health forever but it seems like and that's the sort of thing that I'm deeply interested in is people's mental health and how we can help ourselves better it and you know we're still yet to crack that one because we're in you know we're up Schitt's Creek with that one at the moment yeah yeah I think it all comes back to what we were talking about earlier that we've not figured out how to run a world definitely and we we've sort of figured out how to run societies but maybe we're not doing a very good job at the moment And I would guess it's something to do with the rate of change and, you know, I suppose social media and things are fed into that.

54:28And we're having to live in a different way and interact with people in a different way. And we've not adapted. No, no. But I think it's the number one challenge that we face for all the reasons we've spoken about how valuable this society is. But you know one of the possible explanations for why we don't see any other civilizations out there is because they don't get very far. So if you think about us at the moment, it's only in the last century, half a century, that we've had the power to destroy ourselves. Yeah. And we've managed to avoid it. It's remarkable, probably, that for 70 years or so, since the invention of the atomic bomb, we haven't used them again after we used the 200.

55:20But we might do. And maybe there's a theory that essentially says it's too difficult to manage a planet. so when you have so many billion living things people in this case on the planet you just can't get along it's too many yeah so I would hate that to be the case because I think that we're so valuable and so rare yeah but we don't really you know the progress we've made seems to be unraveling somewhat at the moment yeah I mean as we are running out of time really quickly there's so many different tangents again i could literally but in that but i think one burning question i have and this is more from talking to my kids so my son who is 12 is bang into science like it's his whole world he loves it he and i'm constantly trying to learn from him and go back to the drawing board with my like lack of scientific knowledge and my daughter who's 10 she's you know i spoke to her in the car yesterday about this chat today and what would you asked Professor Brian Cox and it was all around aliens obviously um but there seems to be a point in the education system where girls are whether it's discouraged or feel like they don't have so much of a place in the science world and we can see that reflected throughout history with the few scientific women that are you know historically held up and shown as an example of someone that's done I can think of like Marie Curie and then I'm sort of out of ideas how can we encourage women to get more into science or for young I think it starts at the school doesn't it how can we how can we really focus on that and ensure that we're creating space and room for young women to really find their place in this conversation I think as you said we have to and this applies to all fields actually you have to when when a child shows interest in something you've got to really make sure that you don't snuff out that curiosity that you encourage it and also you're right that there's what could it be that's preventing girls going into science that is quite complicated and and i the only bit i know is i was involved a few years ago now in a prize the queen elizabeth prize for engineering which looked at this because engineering there's there's an equal problem if not a larger problem and one of the things that was found is that there are unconscious biases from parents if you think of engineering your your view of what engineering is might be building a road with a with a hard hat on now that's actually quite high tech now and really interesting but you might think i don't want my daughter digging up roads you know with all these big blokes or something so you have preconceptions and so in engineering that is the case.

58:13And so then, and it wouldn't be that, it's very rare that parents would try and put their daughter off going into something, but your reaction might not quite be, might not be quite as encouraging as it should be because you might be on there. And so science maybe has that image that maybe, you know, like being a rocket engineer, for example, and we have a shortage of spacecraft builders in the UK. We're very good at it. It's one of our great industries that we're world leading in. And we don't have enough people going into the industry. So it could be that if your daughter, you say which rocket building, you might have this unconscious image of a load of geeky blokes in a room, you know, playing with computers or something.

58:58So we have to make sure that teachers and parents don't transfer any lack of understanding of the career to their daughters in this case but it applies to sons as well it's we try and let them do what they want to do and encourage them whichever way that they want to go yeah yeah and then but and then you're right and then you get into more complicated issues about career structures which many industries have that um and that's true in academia as well that and people try to do that so so yeah it's a very good question yeah but in terms of real youngsters i really believe that it's it's making sure that if you're like if your daughter says i'm interested in astronomy you go right yeah so you take them outside and you start to know what the stars are if you could you buy them some binoculars maybe and and which you can get you know and and you can start you encourage it it's i think it's all about encouragement yeah and not putting barriers in the way the one thing i would say also is that it's really important as parents that you can, let's say you haven't been to university, let's say university, you haven't been to university and your son or daughter says, I'd like to do that.

1:00:09Then you can go to the universities as a parent and you can find out what it's like because you might not know people who've been to university and that's one of the big blocks actually. And so the universities are really happy if you say, what would happen to my child if they came to where would they stay what the where would they live what because you might be anxious about that and you can transfer that to your child as well but all the universities and higher education colleges all this are really happy if you come and say I don't I don't understand this myself can you show me then you can provide encouragement and you can you can begin to remove the blocks yeah yeah I think there's just some brilliant young women out there who are ready to change the world and it's it's exciting they're right you know I mean you said about the scientists I mean, so one of the questions I get asked a lot is how do we know how far away the stars are?

1:00:57I got asked that in a school the other week. How do we know how far away the stars are? One of the most important measurements, it was a great astronomer called Henrietta Leavitt, who was the first to work out that there are some stars. They call sea feed variable stars, but it allows you to work out how bright they actually are by looking at them. And she noticed that in the early part of the 20th century. That's the foundation. That work was used to prove that the Andromeda galaxy, which is our nearest neighbouring galaxy, is far outside the Milky Way. But it was her work. So there are actually quite a lot of famous women in the history of astronomy, but also science.

1:01:39But as you said, it's usually Marie Curie. Yeah. But there's, I mean, now... I felt embarrassed that I couldn't think of any more earlier. I was like, I'm going to have to ask ChatGPT because I'd like, I need to know about more of them. The men you can list off, but the women, they're maybe harder to find. Maybe that's a slight block for young girls, too. They're not seeing it in history. But there are increasing numbers now of role models. But you're right. It's just, you know, the history of science. I said that it really did start modern science in like 1600. Yeah. So those names like Newton and Einstein and Galileo, they're men.

1:02:17But of course, we're talking about society in 1600. Yeah. Yeah. So there's part of that, I think, just historically, until you get to the 20th century, it was extremely difficult to be a woman. Yeah. And go into science. Yeah. And it's changing. But as you said, when you say I was going to say not fast enough, the reason I would say that is because what we need in all sort of areas of human endeavor are people who are good at it and want to push the boundaries. is you need talent. And if you're only drawing talent from a small pool, in this case, you should say men, right? You're missing half the potential to advance human knowledge.

1:03:02So there's a practical point to be made as well. You just want to find the best talent. Best people, yeah, exactly. To end things, where is your happy place? I think it is if you're allowed to does it have to be a physical place? Can it be a state of mind? I think it is trying to understand something that I don't understand and at some point figuring it out I really love that process Is the figuring out essential? Does that lead to frustration if there's not a conclusion of sorts? I think that if you're trying to understand something that is understood but someone understands it but it might be very difficult then that process of trying to trying to find your own way of internalizing that idea so that it becomes natural to you and you really understand it is is a really exhilarating thing to do and I always say to students actually so I teach at the University of Manchester I teach first years and I always say to them that these ideas I talk about relativity right relativity is a bit confusing quite a lot yeah but ultimately it doesn't matter how long it takes you to get a particular thing into into your mind right to understand it and it's different for everybody and it's different for each different idea some ideas someone will get in 10 seconds they go yeah I understand that.

1:04:35And sometimes it might take a month for someone else, but it doesn't matter. And there was, I interviewed recently a great Nobel Prize winning mathematician, Roger Penrose, Sir Roger Penrose, who got the Nobel Prize for, in the 60s, he proved that black holes would form. So this very famous paper in 1963, and he got the Nobel Prize in 2020. And someone asked him, a young person from the audience said to him, how do you win a Nobel Prize? And he said, he said, He said, I was really slow at school. And actually, I was so slow that they thought I wasn't very good at maths. And he's one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th and 21st century.

1:05:16But he's slow. So he understood that really that the thing, the thing that's really enjoyable is just taking your time and keeping going until you understand something. You know, then you don't need to do an exam or have anyone test you. You know when you understand something. yeah and the thing is not to be worried about the fact that it might take you ages well our culture is like tomorrow yesterday like it should have been done why am i why why are things not moving more quickly so it's amazing advice in life in general to not be in a rush for any conclusion or any moment you can't rush understanding you can't be in a rush to understand stuff no you just you don't you know it when when you understand it you know it yeah i think you know that goes for just learning about yourself doesn't it you know you think if you look back to my 30s i'm like oh my god i don't know who the hell i was or what i was doing and you can't rush that you it's with age and experience um basil who i work with said that i should have asked you where is your happy space instead of place happy space yeah well is there anywhere in space that you love if you look at the history of the universe in which point in that history would you like to hang out in now right here because i think that all the things that we talked about earlier about the challenges that we face it is true that there's no better time to be a human being than now you know if you it's it's obvious in some ways the way if you go back go back to our grand when our grandparents were born there were no antibiotics they didn't exist when our grandparents were yeah it's mad It's post Second World War, really, that we have access to antibiotics in any large amount.

1:07:01So really, if you think about it, certainly in a country like this that we're lucky to live here, there is no better place in history to live. Now it's up to us whether that continues to be the case. It might not. You know, we could we could have the Third World War and then it would not be the best place to live. But that's a choice that we have to make. But at the moment, I would rather live in a time where there were antibiotics. Me too. Me too. Well, look, I wish you all the luck with your tour. I want to bring the kids. They will just love it. From what I've seen from the trailer and what I've read about it, it just sounds like it's going to be an amazing show.

1:07:44And I am definitely going to be all eyes open, wanting to learn as much as I can. So have an amazing tour. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. bloody hell my brain hurts does your brain hurt my brain hurts thing about having a chat like that is you're actually left with more questions at the end it's just there's eight more like I walked away and then as soon as he left I was like oh I didn't ask that oh my god I asked that but what about that follow-up question it's never ending it's never ending that's why you need to go and watch his tour uh tickets for Brian's 2026 world tour emergence are available now I'm going I'm taking the kids 100 my son Rex is massively into science by the way there will be a list of all the books that Brian mentioned in the show notes if you didn't write them down do not worry and talking of books do you want to know what book we're reading next month in November in the Happy Place Book Club oh it's my wonderful mate Elizabeth Day's latest novel One of Us ah this book there's betrayal there are buried scandals in this one do you know what it's just so different from Elizabeth's other books.

1:08:49She is just, not that she needed to find her stride because she was already a very accomplished writer before she started writing books, but this is just like, she is charging ahead with this one guys. Come and read along with us and join in the chat on Instagram at happyplacebookclub over the next few weeks. And there's something quite exciting that I'm going to be revealing on that Instagram account by the way, at happyplacebookclub. Go over to it, follow it. Something really cool happening soon. That's all I can say. All right, a huge thanks again to Brian, to the producer Anush Gute at Happy Play Studios and to you, you gorgeous ball of stardust.

1:09:42Thank you.