Starless World

Speaker 1 This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Speaker 1 Your night in just got legendary.

Speaker 1 Legends.com is the only free-to-play social casino and sports book where you can spin the reels, drop parlays, chase the spread, and hit up live blackjack without leaving your couch.

Speaker 1 Slots, sports, original games. Legends has it all.
Win real prizes and redeem instantly straight to your bank. Legends is a free-to-play social casino void prohibitive.
Must be 18 pairs.

Speaker 1 We visit Legends.com for full details. Get in the game now and score a 50% bonus on your first purchase only at legendswithaz.com.

Speaker 1 Want to stop engine problems before they start? Pick up a can of C-Foam motor treatment. SeaFoam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Speaker 1 Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy to use in any engine. Just pour it in your fuel tank.

Speaker 1 Make the proven choice with C-Foam.

Speaker 1 Available everywhere. Automotive products are sold.

Speaker 1 Seafoam!

Speaker 3 Suffs!

Speaker 4 The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

Speaker 5 We demand to be home. Winner, best store.

Speaker 4 We the man to be seen.

Speaker 5 Winner, best book. We the man to be qualified.

Speaker 6 It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Speaker 8 Suffs.

Speaker 7 Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Speaker 5 Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

Speaker 2 BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Speaker 10 You're about to listen to the Infinite Monkey Cage. Episodes will be released on Wednesdays, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 10 But if you're in the UK, the full series is available right now, first on BBC Sound.

Speaker 11 Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

Speaker 1 I'm Robin Ince.

Speaker 11 And this is The Infinite Monkey Cage.

Speaker 1 Today, we ask a big question: What if there existed a universe that was without Patrick Moore or indeed Brian Cox?

Speaker 1 What if there was a cosmos without the sky at night? Because there was no sky at night, just an inky blackness.

Speaker 10 The experience of standing alone on a clear night and looking at the stars, of dreaming of worlds beyond our own, worlds beyond imagination, is not only a powerful emotional experience, but also a powerful intellectual one.

Speaker 10 The attempt to understand the motion of those points of light in the dark was key to the development of modern science.

Speaker 1 And it is something we talked about a lot when we were on tour: that beauty that when you go out on a clear night and you look at those stars and you think about those photons, where basically they've been created from hydrogen becoming helium, the photons then travel across distances far greater than we can currently imagine ever traveling ourselves.

Speaker 1 And then the first thing that they actually collide with is us, something that is able to think of what has happened, think about the stars, contemplate the beauty.

Speaker 1 And I was talking to an astronomer about that, and he said, The photons I always feel saddest for are the ones that have traveled all that distance.

Speaker 1 And just as they're about to meet my eye, I notice my lace is undone. I thought, isn't that,

Speaker 1 yay, I'm going to be understood.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'm just in mus.

Speaker 10 Today, we're asking the question, what do the stars teach us?

Speaker 1 And how would we have conceived of the universe beyond Earth if we could never never have observed them how different would our civilization have been what would we never have known and would Brian still be touring with the adult orientated rock band dare as opposed to making all that money from pointing at stuff well we'll find out so

Speaker 11 to help us understand the dark sky we're joined by a cosmologist a space scientist and a bishop and they are i'm roberto trotta i'm a cosmologist at international school for advanced study in trieste italy and at imperial college london and the one thing thing in the night sky that I would miss the most if it wasn't there is the mysterious glow of the Milky Way.

Speaker 2 Hello, I'm Dane Dr. Maggie Adarin Pocock.
I'm a space scientist and science communicator. I have a book out, The Art of Stargazing, just getting it out there.

Speaker 2 The art of stargazing, my essential guide to the night sky. And the thing I would really miss is the moon, because I am an absolute lunatic.
And when I see the moon, it makes my heart sing.

Speaker 2 And so without it, I would be bereft.

Speaker 1 I'm John Bishop. I'm a comedian and I was once in Doctor Who thank you and

Speaker 1 I'm like you Maggie I would miss the optimism I feel in my heart when I look at the moon and hope I see a young boy riding a bicycle with ET

Speaker 1 and this is our panel

Speaker 1 Roberto the book you've just written Starborn is contemplating a starless as in not the lack of stars but our inability to be able to observe the stars, if that had happened.

Speaker 1 So what drew you to that idea of imagining that what if?

Speaker 11 Well, I lived for 15 years in London.

Speaker 11 And that got me thinking how much the stars have done for my own life. I'm a cosmologist.
My very profession wouldn't exist without seeing the stars. I started thinking, well, hang on a minute.

Speaker 11 Could the same be true for humankind as a whole, perhaps? What would have changed?

Speaker 11 What kind of world would we we live in if we had been fated to live in a universe just like London where you don't see the stars, where everything is covered by clouds at all times, everywhere, and nobody has ever seen a star, nobody has ever seen the moon, nobody's ever even seen the disk of the sun.

Speaker 11 And I started to realize that all of those things have shaped every aspect of who we are today, and our civilization would probably actually not exist if it were not for the stars.

Speaker 10 Maggie, can you paint a picture as as if we begin right at the beginnings of astronomy or even before astronomy?

Speaker 10 What were our distant ancestors thinking and seeing when they were looking at the stars?

Speaker 2 If you go back far enough, I think every culture across the world has looked up and wondered and sort of yeah and celebrated the night sky. And to me, it was the ultimate box set.

Speaker 2 I always think of sort of cave people

Speaker 2 before they can even speak, you know,

Speaker 2 just like the wonder of it. And then because I think because it is such a a wonder and such a draw to the eye when you can see it on a clear night, I think they started making stories.

Speaker 2 And so, religion, and I think also they wanted to understand the chaos that happens here on Earth.

Speaker 2 And to understand that, they looked up at the night sky and said, Okay, well, you know, if I'm born at this point in time and my star sign is this, and then this planet goes through, then I'm going to be more angry because it's Mars.

Speaker 2 And so, they were trying to interpret the chaos on Earth by using the stars above them.

Speaker 1 Do you remember when you were a kid what those kind of thoughts of looking at the sky were? I've been fascinated by the sky.

Speaker 1 I was that kid who would lie on a field and look at clouds and try and make shapes and living on a council estate outside of Liverpool that wasn't really on a flight path.

Speaker 1 So every now and again you'd see uh an aeroplane and that was like to me

Speaker 1 a suggestion that there's flight and there's life beyond where you're living.

Speaker 1 And then you transport that into the night

Speaker 1 and looking at the night. You know

Speaker 1 I'm in my fifties so we're the generation after men had walked on the moon, but sort of also after the excitement had gone, and nobody was getting infused about space like they do now.

Speaker 1 I'm never lost for the wonderments of it, but I was reading Roberto's book.

Speaker 1 What's fascinated me because the night sky that we're looking at is not the night sky that human beings have always looked at.

Speaker 11 Absolutely, because the night sky changes over time, over thousands of years, the constellations, over hundreds of thousands of years, the constellations even change shape.

Speaker 11 And so, what the primitive Homo sapiens 50,000 years ago would have looked at in the sky and marveled at is, if not fundamentally, somewhat different from what we marvel at today.

Speaker 11 But the fascination remains, not just the science and the puzzling about the orbits of the planets and the stars, but also other feelings, emotional feelings, like spirituality, for example.

Speaker 11 All the big sky gods were the most powerful gods in whatever civilization, because the sky was this unreachable place of potency and power and divine seat of power and influence on our lives?

Speaker 11 Astrology, for example, has dominated thought until all the scientific revolution.

Speaker 1 I don't know if anyone's got into one of those fancy taxis. You know, you get in the cars where they've got like

Speaker 1 they use them in hen parties, where they've got like little twinkly lights in the people carrier. Just sitting in a people carrier with twinkly lights, I think it's a good nighthouse.
So, yeah.

Speaker 1 Imagine being a

Speaker 1 face homo sapien looking up and the whole sky is like a hendu.

Speaker 1 When do they realise?

Speaker 10 It would have been more astonishing if they'd been in a people carrier, to be honest, wouldn't it?

Speaker 1 When do they realise you're not actually part of the hen party? I was. You know, every now and again, they book a stripogram.
It happens.

Speaker 1 That's what I've always loved you. You've never forgotten your roots, John.
You've never found your roots. It's your business, your business.

Speaker 1 Palladium tonight, tomorrow weather, put me a little yellow bow.

Speaker 10 Roberto, when do we see the first evidence of people not just looking at the sky and making up stories and patterns, but actually beginning to measure it, beginning to document what's happening there?

Speaker 11 Well, that depends on what you mean precisely by evidence.

Speaker 11 In historical times, certainly the Mesopotamians and Babylonians were great observers of the sky and they had very sophisticated methods to look at the stars and and the planets and record their movements with great attention.

Speaker 11 But to me the most interesting part is when we try to stretch our imagination to even further back into the past, to prehistoric times.

Speaker 11 And there, of course, evidence becomes more scant because the evidence is buried at the bottom of caves and there is very little to go by.

Speaker 11 But there are certain hints and one among them stands out for me and is a piece of bone. It's the bone of a leg of a baboon.
And it's carved with 29 notches. And the bone is broken off at one end.

Speaker 11 So we don't know whether the series continued or it ended there.

Speaker 11 But 29 is a special number because it's almost exactly the time it takes, the number of days it takes for the moon to do a full period of the moon, 29.5 days.

Speaker 11 29 is pretty close, it's as close as it gets. And also, perhaps not coincidentally, it's the same length as the average woman's cycle, which again is a big mystery.

Speaker 11 Why is it aligned with the period of the moon? We don't know. There is various ideas, but there is no firm evidence for it.

Speaker 11 But the point is that if this fibula of the baboon, which is 17,000 years old, was actually used for counting something, and that something was the days or the nights that passed between a full moon and the next full moon, that makes of it one of the first lunar calendar.

Speaker 11 And because of this connection between womanly cycle and lunar cycle, which was inescapable, very, very powerful on dark nights in prehistory, I like to think that the people who actually carved these notches in this fibula, which has been heavily used, is polished because somebody has been fondling it in the dark for a long time, well, those people are actually women, I think.

Speaker 11 And that would make of women not just the first astronomers, but perhaps even the very first mathematicians.

Speaker 2 It's funny, because the first female name to be written in history books was a woman called Ed Hedu Anna. And Ed Hedu Anna, she had a great title.

Speaker 2 She was the chief priestess for the moon goddess of the city of Babylon. I want that on a business card.

Speaker 1 I mean, it just be so cool.

Speaker 2 And she's celebrated today because she wrote poetry about measuring arcs across the sky. So she was the first female astronomer, but the first female name to be written in the history books.

Speaker 2 So I think, yeah, female astronomy goes back a long way.

Speaker 1 Is there a kind of the different because when the night sky, when they do, you know, anthropomorphize it, whatever you want to call it, in terms of turning it into men and women, and I think the moon is very often the female, is it?

Speaker 1 Celine, is that right, Buddha Celine? And so that, as we look at the myths, which can sometimes just be thrown aside, do we also see within that important and useful knowledge beyond the story?

Speaker 2 Yes, and it's quite interesting when we talk about sort of stargazing, when we talk about constellations.

Speaker 2 We have the 88 sort of official constellations as sort of attributed by the International Astronomical Union.

Speaker 2 But one of the things that I like to sort is archaeo astronomy, so looking back in time and seeing how everybody interpreted the sky.

Speaker 2 And if you take a constellation like Orion, it's quite distinctive, you know, the three stars in the centre, then you know, Betelgeuse and the other stars around.

Speaker 2 Different cultures have interpreted that constellation in different ways, in sort of a Greco-Roman as you know, the hunter, and yeah, but other people saw it as of the wanderer.

Speaker 2 And you can see how people might have used it, like the ultimate projector. Oh, yes, so here we have, you know, the hunter going across the sky, and you can see him there.
Oh, yes, there he is.

Speaker 2 And so I think that's why we do that projection.

Speaker 2 But I think it is a reflection of our own cultures. But what I do like to see is look at it across the different cultures because it's something that everybody has done.

Speaker 11 Every culture projects onto the sky whatever they want to see. Also, before writing was invented, you had to pass on all these stories to the next generation.

Speaker 11 So whatever stories you had that you wanted to remember and pass down the generations, and they couldn't be written.

Speaker 11 One example is the song lines of Australian Aboriginal peoples who use the stars in the sky not very much as a navigation aid, but more as a way to remember the instructions that were needed to go from one place to another over land and travel across the vast expanses of Australia.

Speaker 11 And when the first settler came in, they followed the very same routes. And along those routes, villages and then cities were founded.

Speaker 11 And nowadays, the highway system in Australia follows largely the very same routes that were once written in the sky and sung along the dream song and the dream lines of the Australian Aboriginal people.

Speaker 11 And to me, that's a beautiful thing.

Speaker 1 I am fascinated by the fact that we've all got our own normal circadian rhythms. You know, human beings have, animals have, plants have.
So when the night comes, that's when we all close down.

Speaker 1 And human beings have chose to stay awake when it's colder, when there's less chance of hunting, when there's less reason to be there, apart from to look up at the sky.

Speaker 1 And then the sky's filled with all of these dots, and one of them's gone, oh, look at that, that's a half-man, half-beast firing a bow and arrow.

Speaker 1 You spend the rest of your life going, no, it's not. No, it is, look, look at that, look, and then you can see it.

Speaker 1 No, it is, no, it's not.

Speaker 1 I'm always blown away by what somebody has decided. You know, like the, as you say, in the Romans, see.

Speaker 11 They're not.

Speaker 1 They're just dots. You can put what you want there.

Speaker 10 But

Speaker 10 it raises the question, actually, because when do we see people beginning to say, what actually are those? Are they really just little holes in this big crystal, whatever it is that surrounds us?

Speaker 10 Or are they something else?

Speaker 11 I think that comes with the scientific revolution, really, and the 16th century, when Newton starts realizing, first of all, that the laws that command the fall of an apple in a garden in Cambridgeshire are the same that command the moon to go around the Earth in orbit and also keep

Speaker 11 comets

Speaker 11 on track. And so now the notion is born that the very same laws that are active here on Earth can apply to the crystalline spheres up there.

Speaker 11 And at that point, the question comes, you know, are there other words?

Speaker 10 So perhaps we should step back because

Speaker 10 it's the observation of the planets, isn't it, initially

Speaker 10 that leads us. So perhaps you could just give us a brief history of that time when we start saying these things are not gods wandering around.

Speaker 10 The data is telling us they're moving in a regular way.

Speaker 11 Well, by the time that Kepler comes around, for example, so we're talking at the end of the 16th century, at that point in time, maybe the idea that Mars was the god of war had passed his heyday.

Speaker 11 But the idea that the influence of what is above stretches to what is below remained very, very strongly in their minds.

Speaker 11 So if they didn't see the planets as gods, they still see the influence of the sky in human affairs as being very, very present and very, very prominent.

Speaker 2 One of the things I get and speak to lots of school kids, one of the things I like to talk about is the fact that our knowledge of the universe has evolved greatly.

Speaker 2 And it always goes back to that, you know, we're humans and we're at the center of the universe and all the stars rotate around us.

Speaker 2 And it was those wandering stars that sort of triggered, hold it, something's going on here. And it was people like sort of Copernicus who sort of thought, no, no, no, no, hold it.

Speaker 2 We don't have the Earth-centered universe, we have the Sun-centered universe. And that explains why these stars are wandering, because they're not stars, they're planets like ours.

Speaker 2 So I think that was sort of the first burst. And also, I think it was Aristotle that came up with the Earth-centered universe.

Speaker 2 And so to go against Aristotle in those days was, you know, his ideas have been around for about 2,000 years and saying, nah, you're wrong, Aristotle, was quite a bold move.

Speaker 2 And so I think that's when that came along, people thought that the orbits were circular.

Speaker 2 But it turned out that people like Copernicus were looking, and when I said they knew they were actually not circular, they were elliptical.

Speaker 1 Because Aristotle came up, he said that women had, what, four fewer teeth than men. And that's a really simple experiment to do to find out whether that's true or not.

Speaker 1 But everyone just went, yeah, Aristotle said it. So

Speaker 1 that change in thinking seems to entirely change the possibilities of astronomy as well. It is about how can we test our hypotheses.

Speaker 11 That's very interesting because it's the idea of the scientific method that you have to go out and measure things and then check in with your hypothesis and see whether it's right or wrong.

Speaker 11 Well, that was born with astronomy, actually.

Speaker 11 And so, in a way, I like to think of astronomy as the midwife of sciences because it was the very first domain where that became possible, indeed necessary.

Speaker 11 And the theory that came from Newton later on, for example, wasn't sufficiently accurate to account for the observational error.

Speaker 11 And so, because people were so obsessed with planets, and Tycho Bryan was one of them, they had incredibly precise data, and the marginal of error became important.

Speaker 11 It was the very first science, if you like, where you had quantitative measurements of a phenomenon that was regular enough to be amenable to actually scientific analysis.

Speaker 11 And that's the beauty of astronomy. It gave our ancestors something complicated, a complicated puzzle to work out.
And that's how the scientific method was born.

Speaker 11 So, with no astronomy, we would have no science, no technology, we wouldn't be here.

Speaker 10 Well, it's always interesting me that you see in astronomy the descriptions that the Ptolemaic systems and all these epicycles and things like that people try to

Speaker 10 just predict the motions of the planets and so predict where they were going to be at different times of year, build accurate calendars.

Speaker 10 When do we see the idea, which is probably the revolutionary idea in science, that actually there's a simple model of this?

Speaker 10 So it becomes that if you put the sun at the center of everything, it is in some sense more elegant and beautiful. When do we see that idea beginning to take hold?

Speaker 11 Yeah, that was the idea of Copernicus. And he said, you know, the sun is such a beautiful lamp that illuminates the whole of the universe.

Speaker 11 What better place for that lamp than the very center of that universe? And that's how this conception of

Speaker 11 the heliocentric model, the sun at the center of the solar system, was born. And then others worked out the details, like Kepler, for example.

Speaker 11 He then took this idea and started to think, well, if that's true, what are the consequences?

Speaker 1 The thing that gets me is what you were saying. There's a gap between a belief and something that you can prove, the measurement.
That's the birth of science, isn't it?

Speaker 1 Where you stop saying, I think this, and you start saying, I can show you this.

Speaker 11 Yes, but when Galileo brought his newly invented telescope to Rome to show the Pope and the other high brass of the church, they did look through the telescope, but they didn't believe what they saw.

Speaker 2 Quite actually. Because of a few years ago with Sky and I, we went to the Vatican and we met the Vatican astronomers and and this was the sort of the Vatican's take on things.

Speaker 2 They said no they were aware that you know the Sun was the center of the universe, it's just the way Galileo told it that didn't go down.

Speaker 11 Well I think there were something like 41 charges against him and the only one that ever gets mentioned is because he believed that there were other planets in the universe, but there were other 40 as well.

Speaker 11 So there are plenty of reasons they ended against him.

Speaker 1 It was a bit of a stirrer I bet.

Speaker 10 It's easy today, isn't it, to go Aristotle? I mean it's at the earth at the centre. But his arguments were good, weren't they? It doesn't feel as if we're moving and everything falls towards it.

Speaker 1 Well, when I was a kid looking at the sky, I'm looking up, I believed I was the middle of everything. It felt like it's all his,

Speaker 1 his conclusions was absolutely valid and made a lot of sense.

Speaker 2 And based on evidence, because you could see the sunrise, you could see the sun set. It seemed as if we were the centre of everything.
The stars seemed to wheel around us.

Speaker 2 So it was evidence, but they needed to go deeper, really.

Speaker 1 For me, the big thing is what you're saying about early manner, even Neanderthals.

Speaker 1 Again, there's an argument in your book that you say that may well be part of the difference between Homo sapiens surviving and Neanderthals in the fact that Homo sapiens were potentially more aware of what was the night sky and so could move better'cause they knew geography better and so on.

Speaker 1 However, to me, it's the fact that these things are slow. So when you're marking, when you're checking your observations, you're not there the next day checking them, you're not the next hour.

Speaker 1 Some of these things take years

Speaker 1 for your observation to be affirmed, and what we can't assume is it was the same individual checking them. So, that awareness of the importance of the stars must have been passed down.

Speaker 1 Otherwise, things like Stonehenge wouldn't exist, which when you look at you just cannot explain without the precise science that we've got today.

Speaker 1 So, how much do we know in terms of the direct connection of things like Stonehenge and Pyramids to the night sky itself?

Speaker 2 I think it's an area where we do need to be careful. For instance, one of my favourite Stonehurst circles is called Nabdiplaya.
It sits on African soil.

Speaker 2 It is about 7,000 years old, so it's older than Stonehenge. And people will look at it and say, oh, yes, yes, they can see how it's aligned.

Speaker 2 But take into account that the stars have migrated with time because the galaxy is moving. Sometimes I think we are pattern seekers and we want to superimpose as early as possible onto these things.

Speaker 2 Now, Naplya, I think it's still under debate, but that's what we need. We need the debate to see if it truly is an astronomical phenomenon or maybe they were doing something else with it.

Speaker 2 But I think that's why the scientific method works, you know, carbon dating, things like that. We can actually try and work it out.

Speaker 1 And is that why Atlantis failed as a society? Because I read a book which said that due to the refraction as they looked at the stars, the

Speaker 1 is why

Speaker 1 they're underwater turning. I want a series on Netflix like that other bloke had.
Anyway, so back to Atlantis.

Speaker 10 We have 1600s, late 1500s, early to mid-1600s. We have this idea and a mathematical model of the Sun at the center and the planets obviously around it.
When do we start then to see

Speaker 10 an idea of the, for example, the distances? So the distance to the planets and the distance to the stars.

Speaker 11 So, the fact that the planets had to be in certain relative

Speaker 11 relative distance to each other is something that was known because you could compute essentially the periods of the planet, and from that you can compute the relative distances.

Speaker 11 But the distance from us to the Sun remains unknown until 1769, which is actually the spur of one of the greatest scientific expeditions, certainly to date, and that's the Tahiti expedition of James Cook.

Speaker 11 There's a wonderful story where James Cook, you know, the great navigator and captain, gets sent to the other side of the globe to go and measure the transit of Venus in front of the Sun, because if you measure the passage of that planet in front of the Sun, which happens every hundred years or more, then and you measure it from two different places on the surface of the Earth, then you can work out what is the distance Earth to Sun and therefore the size of the Solar System.

Speaker 11 A fantastic expedition,

Speaker 11 incredible ambition, traveling with a ship full of astronomers and instruments all the way from Britain to the Pacific Ocean, hit a target thirty kilometers wide, and then get there, set up a cutting-edge scientific observatory, taking all the measurements.

Speaker 11 And so that's when we actually find out that the distance Earth to the Sun is 150 million kilometers, and that was a great success.

Speaker 11 Then Newton comes around and says, well, actually, if those stars are as fiery as the Sun is, then by measuring the relative brightness of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, to the Sun, we can work out distance using Saturn as a stepping stone because it's very, very difficult to do so.

Speaker 11 And then Newton comes up with a number which says that Sirius is some a million times further away than the Sun.

Speaker 11 We don't know how far away is the Sun at that point in time, but a million times is a great deal further away. And at that point, it was clear the universe is a big place.

Speaker 10 Th these are the Large Hadron Collider or the Hubble Space Telescope of their time. It's a tremendous effort.
And and do we have any sense of why it was so important?

Speaker 10 It's one of the big expeditions of the time in just to measure the distance to the Sun.

Speaker 2 I suppose when you think of things like the Royal Greenwich Observatory, which was originally set up, that was mainly set up for navigation.

Speaker 2 And so the stars played an important role for that. And I think it's not really the Earth-Sun distance, but understanding the cosmos at latitude,

Speaker 2 working out how to navigate across the sea, working out where you are from

Speaker 2 having a clock on board and

Speaker 2 sort of measuring using sextants. And so all that was about sort of navigation, sort of touring the world,

Speaker 2 increasing the empire and the domination. So I think that was much, very much a part of astronomy as well.

Speaker 1 As we look in the history of astronomy, what other individual stars have

Speaker 1 we been able to

Speaker 1 understand them and therefore understand ourselves?

Speaker 2 So, if we continue from what was being said about the Sun, Earth, distance, one sort of it's a group of stars and they're called Ceifid variables. So, by the time we get to sort of the

Speaker 2 1900s,

Speaker 2 and we're getting sort of later, there was a woman called Henrietta Swanlevitt, and she came up with a Levitt's law, and it was looking at these special types of stars called Cifid variables.

Speaker 2 Now, a Cefid variable, you can see them in other galaxies, but they flash, and depending on the frequency of their flashing, will tell you how intrinsically bright that star is.

Speaker 2 Now, this is wonderful for astronomers, because it means that if you see a Ceifid variable and it's flashing, and you know how bright it is, you can work out how much light you're seeing and then scale it up to work out how far away the star is.

Speaker 2 It's something called the inverse square law, but you can work this out.

Speaker 2 And so they were looking at these seafood variables, and this is one of the things that Hubble was doing on Mount Wilson telescope in the 1920s, largest telescope on Earth.

Speaker 2 And he was looking at these sea-feed variables, and he realized that the universe was far, far bigger than we could anticipate.

Speaker 2 And some of these sort of clusters of these sort of small clusters, they thought, they were other galaxies. And then something very close to my heart is a spectroscopy.

Speaker 2 And so with the spectrograph, you take the light from the object, you split it into its component colours, and you can work out if that star is moving towards us, moving away from us.

Speaker 2 And from doing that, we call it red shift or blue shift.

Speaker 2 From doing that, Hubble was able to work out not only that the universe was much bigger than we at first anticipated, but the universe is also expanding.

Speaker 2 We thought we had everything stars, but no, in the 1920s, suddenly the universe sort of changed in virtually all dimensions.

Speaker 2 And I find that so exciting that you know, a few simple experiments can sort of change our understanding of the universe.

Speaker 10 Well, that goes straight to the heart of what we're talking about here: the cultural impact of astronomy.

Speaker 10 The idea that the universe had an origin is suggested partly theoretically, I suppose, from Einstein in the 1915s, 1920s.

Speaker 10 Georges Lemaitre, the great physicist and priest, is noticing that there may be an expanding universe. Then, as you said, Hubble does it.
So, then we start talking about creation.

Speaker 10 Then we start talking about an origin to everything from, as you said, Maggie, just analysing light from the stars. So,

Speaker 10 it begins to get very important culturally.

Speaker 2 Yes, it's almost like throwing back because when we talk about sort of the ancients looking up at night sky, and so many cultures came up with creation stories based in the stars, and here we are again, the universe was created,

Speaker 2 the universe began and expanded outwards. So how do we explain that?

Speaker 10 Is there a sense of culturally, of a real... not a shock, but of interest in that?

Speaker 11 When the moment happens in the early 20th 20th century, when we realize that the Milky Way is just one among billions of other galaxies, we are very peripheral, that changes completely the perspective.

Speaker 11 It's a huge cultural shift, as huge as it would be to find life elsewhere in the universe, which might happen in our lifetimes

Speaker 11 if we're lucky. And so that changes everything in a sense.
And those big questions about, you know, what is the origin of everything there is, they keep being pushed back and back and back in time.

Speaker 11 Now we understand. understand pretty well everything that happened from 10 to the minus 32 seconds after the Big Bang until today,

Speaker 11 that's pretty good. But what happens between 10 to the minus 35 and minus 32 seconds after the Big Bang? Well, that remains uncertain.
Certainly science has pushed the veil back almost all the way.

Speaker 11 But the questions remain, we still don't know what happened then or earlier, or before there was time.

Speaker 10 What would our civilization have been like? We can't know. But how do you imagine our civilization would be today if we did not have access to the night sky?

Speaker 11 Very different. So the book recounts the story of what the stars did for us, in my view, from prehistory to AI.
But also there are little mini chapters inside the book that are sort of fictional.

Speaker 11 They take place on a fictional planet that I've invented. I've called it Caligo, which is a Latin name for fog.
And I try to invent, you know, what might have happened or what would not have happened.

Speaker 11 So that's one way of imagining it. But for sure, I think we wouldn't have science.
We our spirituality would be completely different.

Speaker 11 The way we think about ourselves, the way we we think about the world will be completely different. And even, I think, Neanderthals might be here in our place, actually, if you were for the stars.

Speaker 2 It's funny because if you look at the planet Venus, that is shrouded in cloud.

Speaker 2 And so we're pretty convinced there aren't any Vesuvians, but if they were, they would have looked up and just see sort of a cloudy sky. But at the same time,

Speaker 2 when we talk about a cloudy sky, we're talking about it in the visible light. And as an astronomer and as an instrument maker, one thing I like to talk about is tripping the light fantastic.

Speaker 2 And so we look at visible light, and that sort of is part of our understanding of the universe. And going back to ancient times, of course, that was the only source of understanding the universe.

Speaker 2 But for instance, with the James Webb Space Telescope, I'm just one of the 10,000 scientists that worked on that. But we use infrared light.

Speaker 2 And so, although we might not have been able to see that there was anything out there, I don't know.

Speaker 2 I believe in serendipity as well.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, I've got this infrared sort of sensor. Oh, wait, what's that? Maybe we would have, actually, probably not in the infrared because we're swamped in the infrared.

Speaker 2 but maybe with something we would have picked up one of the other wavelets and realized there might have been something beyond I'm always a glass half full person

Speaker 10 but I think that we might have we might have found other ways of detecting what's out there well I suppose radio as well I mean we you may well have invented radio and then suddenly there's a sky aglow with radio waves but I suppose the question might be we could rephrase it if you had no access to the sky at all which I suppose so it's not visible light or radio or anything if you just did not know there was a universe beyond the planet.

Speaker 11 But there is a counterfactual of sorts, going back to the Neanderthals themselves.

Speaker 11 We know that they were a different kind of human who had been around for 800,000 years before we came around, and yet they never developed all this technology.

Speaker 11 They never got to radio or the space or the James Webb Space Telescope. They didn't even have the sewing needle, for example.
And they were as intelligent as we are, we believe now.

Speaker 11 They had the same cranial capacity, they had arts, they were masters of fire, they were social, they could probably speak or certainly produce sounds. Why didn't they invent all this stuff?

Speaker 2 Is it curiosity?

Speaker 11 Star-driven curiosity, yes, I think so.

Speaker 10 So, so the reason that the Neanderthals died out, you're claiming, is because they weren't astronomers.

Speaker 11 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 1 That's why.

Speaker 1 That's why astronomers,

Speaker 11 it's so important to keep funding astronomy in this day and age.

Speaker 1 I'll definitely second that.

Speaker 10 If you don't fund astronomy, we will go the same way as Denita.

Speaker 1 I like this.

Speaker 1 If you listen back to about 50 episodes of this show, you will find there will always be a point where a scientist who's waiting to get his funding grant accepted will say, and that is unfortunately why I think their lack of understanding of the human genome led to the death of Neanderthals.

Speaker 1 Do you never get any Neanderthals right and then going, look, we're getting a lot of stick on that show?

Speaker 1 Well, nearly all of us are, haven't we? We've all got a nice bit of Neanderthals. I wondered, John, what do you, you know, this discussion, this beautiful.

Speaker 1 Frankie out. We've got a nice bit of Neanderthal.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 All fur coat and no telescope.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 2 but I wondered what you feel about,

Speaker 1 like, there's a beautiful phrase, cosmological vertigo. You know, we've been talking there, which is that moment where you think of the enormity of the universe.

Speaker 1 And we, you know, you mentioned there, 300 billion stars.

Speaker 1 And then I presume that even though it's gone up by 100 billion, we're still imagining there are more galaxies than there are stars in our galaxy.

Speaker 1 Do you ever get that sense of cosmological vertigo, or is it something positive that always comes from this? Where you say cosmological and vertigo, just like it's just too much, it's just too much.

Speaker 1 I know, I know, like, like, like, like, you've written a whole book on what would it be like without stars. If it was me, I'd just do that

Speaker 10 for the listeners. John is underneath the tablecloth

Speaker 1 and has been for the whole show.

Speaker 1 Look, I I've I've I've I've been on this show a number of times, I'm like I'm friends with you both, and there are times where the conversation gets beyond what my head can cope with.

Speaker 1 And I'm literally hanging on. So so I've got stuff in my head and I think, just remember that bit and drop that in.

Speaker 1 Just remember Kepler, Galileo, and all the early 1600s, Bruno got killed just before them. Throw that in, everyone thinks you've read it.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 So I am I am a little bit cramming, and I'll be honest with you, by Tuesday, I would have forgot it all.

Speaker 1 But it's also

Speaker 1 the wonderments of it.

Speaker 1 I think there's a spirituality when you look at the stars, the relationship between human beings and why we're there, and all of that stuff that sometimes feels a little hippy-dippy can get explained by science and be understood by science, but not lose its spirituality or its meaning.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I think that's a wonderful thing.

Speaker 2 I'd agree with that.

Speaker 2 And I think some people do get overwhelmed because I go out to schools, I speak to people,

Speaker 2 300 billion stars. You know, hey, there are 200 billion galaxies.

Speaker 2 And people come up to me afterwards and say,

Speaker 2 when you say that, it makes me feel a bit, you know, a bit uncomfortable.

Speaker 2 But I think there are two sorts of people: the people who make them feel uncomfortable, the people who don't make it feel uncomfortable.

Speaker 2 But to the people who feel uncomfortable, I like to say that it just means we are part of something fantastic. We are part of this amazing cosmos.

Speaker 2 And sitting on this planet, we are looking out there and trying to understand it.

Speaker 2 And so, we are an infinitesimally small part of that amazing cosmos, but we are still part of it and understanding it.

Speaker 1 And of all the things that you wrote in your book, of all the things, I actually stopped, put it down, and went downstairs to my wife and said, Listen, we need a cup of tea. And she said, Why?

Speaker 1 And this might be a figure that loads of people have heard before, but I'd never heard it before. And it said that if you're born in Western society now, you are likely to

Speaker 1 have 4,000 weeks of life.

Speaker 1 And I suddenly went, Oh my god, how many of them have gone?

Speaker 2 Yeah, the countdown.

Speaker 1 How many have I got left? And what am I going to do with the thousand or so have got left? Because you know, when you say 25 Christmases, 25 summers, it doesn't mean to say, but a thousand weeks.

Speaker 1 And then you put that down to how many nights are you going to look at the sky? How many times are you going to reference who you are and where you fit into all of this?

Speaker 1 And sometimes when you're saying hundreds hundreds of millions and billions and billions of stars, it's too much.

Speaker 1 But you've got to remember that you're just passing through. So just take a moment.
You've only got 4,000 weeks.

Speaker 1 I genuinely find every time that I look at it, daytime looking at the clouds, nighttime looking at the stars, to do that before you go to bed, to, you know, as you said, to lie in the long grass and just stare up, there is

Speaker 1 short grass is better.

Speaker 1 It depends.

Speaker 1 It's true.

Speaker 1 And that is why your tribe died out predominantly.

Speaker 1 I'm always hiding from someone.

Speaker 1 You know, again, when you come down to all the

Speaker 1 new understandings of mental health and the relationship about being outside, being in woods, being in trees, being able to see the night sky, all of those things matter to us in a way that I don't think we fully understand.

Speaker 1 And maybe previous human beings did understand it a little bit more because they were less closeted.

Speaker 11 And and I think that connection you're talking about is absolutely important nowadays because yes, you can go out in nature in the woodlands, whatever, but the night sky is our shared global commons.

Speaker 11 It's literally the only one aspect of nature that's shared among all of us, although we're using it now to light pollution and so on.

Speaker 11 And to me, that's really, really important because to recapture that sense, not just the understanding of the billions that we were talking about, but the emotional connection with the night sky, making you feel small and insignificant, yet significant in that strange way when that photon hits your retina and you understand or feel something.

Speaker 11 I think that's fundamental in this day and age where we are facing a dramatic ecological crisis and loss of biodiversity and all the dangers that our planet faces to understand how special we are, how unique our blue marble is in that vast blackness of space.

Speaker 11 And that's fundamental to making choices.

Speaker 1 How special is the time we have? You know, when you started out

Speaker 1 in life, if someone said, This is as far as you're going to get, you've got 4,000 weeks, you would use that time better. I mean,

Speaker 1 there's a week in Bennydorm, I'll never get back.

Speaker 1 Maybe with previous human beings, because their life expectancy was shorter and their

Speaker 1 closeness to death was always relevant, that their relationship with the stars might have been more powerful because they were mapping things that the next cycle of some of those changes would have been outside of their lifespan.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And somebody still mopped it. Mopped it.
Well, we're going to wind up there, but I think you're entirely right, John.

Speaker 1 That you know, always find time to that experience of wonder and curiosity and connection and delight. Thank you so much to our panel, Roberto Trotter, Maggie Ader and Pocock, and John Bishop.

Speaker 1 And we asked our audience a question, and today the question was, what scares you most on the darkest of nights?

Speaker 10 Why do you do that in a northern accent?

Speaker 1 No, that wasn't a northern accent. That was merely the darkest of nights.

Speaker 10 But I didn't. What scares you most on the darkest of nights?

Speaker 1 Why did you do that in a northern accent? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry.

Speaker 10 Zoe said, my A-level results, and I'm the teacher.

Speaker 1 Knowing statistically, I will eat a spider during my lifetime together with flies and other insects.

Speaker 1 And that's from an old woman

Speaker 1 who's been very worried for some time.

Speaker 1 John, what have you got? I've got to read this one, although afterwards, I think there'll probably be an inquiry because it's got Getting Caught Peeping, and that's signed by Tom.

Speaker 1 This is anatidophobia, A fear a duck is watching me while I sleep. Don't question it, Brian.
Don't question it.

Speaker 2 Just accept it.

Speaker 10 Why a duck in particular?

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 we'll leave that to all in the mind. I'm sure Claudia handled it.

Speaker 10 If the night is truly dark, the duck wouldn't be able to see you.

Speaker 10 So you'd be fine.

Speaker 1 So what is duck? What's duck night vision like then?

Speaker 10 Well, if it's completely dark, there's literally no photons there, then unless the duck is emitting light.

Speaker 2 Duck with a torch.

Speaker 1 Like a bat. Like a bat.
Like sonar.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 1 We didn't say anything about banning torches.

Speaker 10 I think I've cured the anatomia.

Speaker 10 Because the duck can't see you.

Speaker 1 So don't worry about it. The strawberry.
That's more worrying because then the duck might start accidentally walking into you.

Speaker 1 You accidentally get the duck's not evil, but it just can't see anything.

Speaker 1 No, I think you've made this far worse.

Speaker 10 That should be the advert that the duck's not evil, says Robiness.

Speaker 10 The strawberries I had for supper might still be alive.

Speaker 1 Anyway, so next week, next week, we go from neutron stars to the neonatal.

Speaker 10 From the music of the spheres to the development of the ears, from the mysteries of the skies to the twinkle in our eyes, from the beauty of Uranus.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That'll do.

Speaker 10 Because next week, we will be exploring embryology, the science of how we came to be.

Speaker 1 From today's Big Bang to Big Bang next week. And

Speaker 1 thank you very much for listening. We'll see you next time.
Goodbye.

Speaker 1 In the infinite monkey cage.

Speaker 11 Till now, nice again.

Speaker 2 Strong message here from BBC Radio 4.

Speaker 1 A brand new series with me, Armando Yunucci, and me, Helen Lewis.

Speaker 10 A show all about the use and abuse of political language, where we take back control of the airwaves and tell you what we're hearing on the doorstep. Just what do these phrases actually mean?

Speaker 2 Can you be part of the Metropolitan Elite if you live in the countryside?

Speaker 10 And what does turbo charge mean? And why do politicians need to say it every five minutes? Exploring the verbal tricks of the trade and the effect it has on the rest of us.

Speaker 2 Strong message here from BBC Radio 4.

Speaker 10 Listen now on on BBC Signs.

Speaker 1 Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

Speaker 1 cows.

Speaker 12 Uh, you're actually on an Organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious organic food gets its start.

Speaker 1 But there's so much nature.

Speaker 12 Exactly. Organic Valley's small family farms protect the land and the plants and animals that call it home.

Speaker 1 Extraordinary.

Speaker 12 Sure is. Organic Valley, protecting where your food comes from.
Learn more about their delicious dairy at OV.coop.

Speaker 4 Sucks, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

Speaker 5 We demand to be home. Winner, best store.

Speaker 4 We the man to be seen.

Speaker 5 Winner, best book. We the man to be quality.

Speaker 6 It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Speaker 8 Suffs.

Speaker 7 Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Speaker 5 Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

Speaker 3 Suffs!

Speaker 4 The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

Speaker 5 We demand to be home. Winner, best score.

Speaker 4 We demand to be seen.

Speaker 5 Winner, best book.

Speaker 6 It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Speaker 8 Suffs.

Speaker 7 Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Speaker 5 Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.