The Infinite Monkey's Guide To… The Future

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Suffs!

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

We demand to be winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

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

Suffs.

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

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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I'm Brian Cox.

I'm Robin Ince and welcome to another episode of the Infinite Monkeys Guide 2.

Now today it says in the script we're going back into the past, which we can't do.

Well, I suppose we're saying it as in we're revisiting the past, not physically using a time machine, but by listening to archived material.

Okay, right.

Is that acceptable to you?

I'll accept that.

Okay, today we're going back into the past to see what we used to say about the future.

Because, of course, Brian has proved himself something of a Nostradamus.

Nope.

You have, you've refused to.

So, Nostradamus made literally no correct predictions.

None.

That's a relief then.

Because otherwise, I was thinking the laws of physics, we have to get rid of all those episodes.

So I've not proved myself to be a Nostradamus.

Oh.

Because otherwise I'd have just talked nonsense and become famous.

What did he predict?

It's always the end of the week.

Wednesday.

He predicted Wednesday.

Did he?

He said, today is Monday.

I see Wednesday coming soon.

And then people said that what he actually meant by that was the assassination of John F.

Kennedy.

But I think they might have read a lot between the lines there.

Yeah.

And did he have that accent?

Yes.

Oh, it's January.

But I see April.

It's April.

Only two months later, over two months later, it's April.

Lost Cadamus has done it again.

Which I think also shows that he predicted the 30 Years' War.

When we were growing up, it was a boom time for imagining the future because it doesn't feel like that as much now.

Again, going back to all those books that we enjoyed, movies, 1997, Manhattan Island would be a maximum security prison.

It always was, wasn't it?

Everybody was living in a dystopian wasteland.

We were living in that time where we were being told that, well, by 2024,

we would definitely be living on the moon.

We would probably have...

By 1999.

Yeah, 1999.

Well, with flares.

Yeah.

The flares were a very important part.

And that is one bit that you have predicted correctly, I think, is your love of Brian nylon flares in 2024 very much reflects what the Terran Space Authority books were saying you would be wearing.

But throughout our mini-series, we've repeatedly asked what next for the human race and for the universe more generally.

I could tell you what oblivion, ultimately.

Yeah, can you stop doing that?

It's a spoiler alert situation.

People don't want to know how the universe is going to end.

They want to be surprised.

Back in 2020, when the COVID pandemic led to global lockdowns that made many of us feel like the world had ended, Eric Idle read a book by the physicist Brian Greene and discovered that far in the future, in over 100 billion years' time, space will have expanded so much that we won't be able to see any of the distant galaxies that we now know exist.

So here are Eric Idle and Brian Green.

What I found the most fascinating is that towards the end of the universe, if we were in it, we couldn't see the rest of the universe because it would have expanded beyond our sight.

And that is fascinating.

So, we're actually in a very fortunate part of the universe to exist in because we can actually see something.

You're absolutely right.

So, right.

I mean, they're all completely right.

So, in 1998, there was a shocking realization that not only is space expanding, which we've known since Hubble back in 1929, but it's expanding ever more quickly.

It's accelerating, it's speeding up, and that means, just as Eric is saying, that in the future, it isn't even that far in the future by the time scales that we're talking about, roughly 100 billion or a trillion years into the future, the distant galaxies will be rushing away at a speed that's faster than the speed of light.

So distant galaxies riding the swelling space can move away from us at a speed that's greater than the speed of light.

And that means the light that they emit will fight a losing battle as it tries to traverse the ever-widening gap between us.

So, yeah, exactly as Eric says, we will not be able to see the rest of the universe.

It will be as off those distant galaxies fell off a cliff at the edge of space.

And it'll be kind of

a lonely time.

The galaxies that are nearby will still be able to see them, but that's it.

We will be a little island oasis floating in a sea of apparently eternal darkness.

And that's

maybe that takes away the good news that I said before.

Can follow up on that.

Would we be able to intuit that there was a universe beyond that?

It's a very good question, and it's a hard one.

Not everybody agrees on this.

I think it would be very difficult for future astronomers to intuit that there was, in the past, distant galaxies that now have disappeared.

So I think it's quite likely that our descendants, if they're still around, they will come to the conclusion that the universe is static, eternal, and unchanging because the very diagnostic tool that we use to figure out that it is expanding, the motion of the distant galaxies, that data will be gone.

That tool will no longer be available to us.

So, you know, you might say, well, look, we just need to, you know, write a letter to our distant descendants.

Tell them, hey, when you look out, you're not going to see any galaxies, but don't be fooled.

There used to be a universe full of galaxies.

They all just rushed away.

But I think those distant future astronomers are likely to not pay much attention to mythology handed down from an earlier age, billions or trillions of years earlier.

I think they're going to believe their own observations and come to this erroneous conclusion, the very conclusion that Einstein thought, that the universe is fixed and unchanging, even though we know that that's not correct.

The end of the world is nigh.

Though the question always remains is just how soon is nigh.

In our childhood, there was always this notion that there were various men going around wearing sandwich boards that said the end of the world is nigh.

Did you ever see one of those in Oldham?

No, no.

The end of the world is nigh.

It's already happened, haven't you seen what's going on down the supermarket?

Is the length of nigh a few years, a few centuries, a few billion years?

Nigh seems to be pretty vague.

Well, here's physicist Lucy Green telling Andy Hamilton and evolutionary geneticist Adam Rutherford why she thinks we'll be wiped out by an asteroid.

And that led to a long discussion actually about the best way to go.

When it eventually happens, we'll all go together when we go, maybe.

I suppose in the list of things that could could cause a mass extinction and remove humans from the Earth, asteroids would be what top?

I think it would be.

It's top, and I think it's my favorite way to go as well.

Because you can choose how you want to die with an asteroid impact.

I mean, it is going to happen.

Every day, we're hit by a hundred tons of space debris.

Mostly, it's in the form of dust.

But we will be hit by something big in the future.

There are big objects out there.

And, you know, if you're really unlucky, it would land straight on your head and squash you.

If you're, you know, maybe next in line, if you're near the site, you might be burnt as this huge amount of energy is given up and causes fires.

Or if it lands in the ocean, it might create a tsunami and you might drown.

Or, like you were saying, the food chain could collapse as all this stuff comes up into the atmosphere and circulates around the globe by the wind system and blocks out the sunlight.

So, there are so many different ways you can go.

So, you get to choose by just traveling to a different place.

I'm going to go to Majorca because that will be a famine event rather than a tsunami.

Do you know what?

I think if you can't travel when there's a volcano, I'd be very surprised if you could travel when there's an asteroid.

But

how much notice would we get of an asteroid?

Would we I mean I think Brian's right, I think there's a gap in the market for asteroid tourism.

Because if it's a month, you might as well pick your venue, mightn't you?

Well that's right, I mean and people are looking, so NASA are looking, but you might be surprised to hear that the Brits are looking as well.

And even at the National Space Centre in Leicester they have um a a near-earth objects center where they're looking for bits of space rock that could hit us.

I mean, in the movies, it's portrayed as something that's like a fiery ball that comes very slowly through the atmosphere and then takes out Paris.

I think it's normally the place it's taken out at the moment.

But in reality, these things are traveling extremely fast, and so this thing would slam through, and you kind of go, oh, what?

And by that point, it will have caused chaos.

So we probably will have no warning.

So, yes, I said that we are looking for them.

But the thing is, when we look in the night sky at something that doesn't give off its own light, these things are dark, they're really hard to see.

So, you try and track them as they move against the star's background.

But if something is coming straight for you, that's really hard to see.

Which are the problem ones in general.

Yes.

So, from a help, I mean, in Deep Impact, Bruce Willis

lands on an asteroid with a couple of mates,

troubled by his relationship with his daughter, I think.

I can't remember the plot that well.

But they attach rockets to it, don't they?

And is that right?

They blow it up.

Do they blow it up?

That's all good.

Oh, is it?

Yeah.

But the very worst thing you can do is blow it up.

Because if you blow it up, then you've got a shotgun effect coming towards your planet.

So, from a health and safety point of view,

if you regulate it.

I mean, I'm not a scientist, so.

But if you attach rockets to the asteroid, can't you just steer all the asteroids to a safer part of the universe that wouldn't...

Surely that's what we should be investing public money in.

We're not going to see a burst of magnetism from the sun, and then the sat-nav on the rockets goes away, and the whole thing is just.

Now, I love Lucreen, because as a solar scientist, she has such joy.

Because when she started being a scientist, she was eventually put off because she was kind of told that you're not meant to be excited.

So she would see these incredible images of the workings of the sun.

You know, those kind of things are obviously not accessible to us.

They're accessible to solar scientists, then eventually accessible, you know, to the media and the internet.

And when she would get excited, these old scientists would go, well, don't get so excited.

And I think that's perhaps a change.

Do you think in science now?

I think people are accepting you don't get so excitable that you screw up your equations, but you are allowed to experience joy and delight at our ability to see the marvelous and the strange and the remarkable.

Yeah, you have to remember why you became a scientist in the first place.

It's excitement.

Excitement and awe at the beauty of nature.

And if you forget that, then you won't be as good a scientist.

The wonders of solar science is all well and good, and all the different ideas involving the possibility of sort of a burst of magnetism.

It's all well and good.

Well,

it's neither well nor good when we think of the burst of magnetism that might ultimately destroy our civilization.

It's part and parcel of a star.

It's not a story.

But I'm trying to be upbeat, like the one show we're doing.

I'm just saying

you're underselling the sun.

Yeah.

It's not all well and good.

It's the sun.

Talking about so many different ideas about how we might be able to preserve life for longer.

It was unusual, I suppose, when we started talking about how a particular way of going for a we may change our possibilities.

I have to admit, I wasn't expecting that link, but there we are.

So that's, again, is a lot of what science is about.

It has to be said, we haven't done a brilliant job of protecting this planet.

And obviously, we can't talk about the future without, at some point, mentioning climate change.

Back in 2016 or 2016, whichever you prefer, the director of the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, Tony Ryan, told us about some of the more eccentric things we've done that seem to have sped up the process of climate change and how we might be able to slow that down.

Here he is with Dara O'Brien talking about cool urinals.

The things we do that are profligate with energy are amazing.

I remember sitting down once and calculating how many power stations were running just to make ice cubes to put in the men's urinals in American bars.

Right?

I mean, it's just crazy.

You know about that, Dara.

I do.

So,

for many years, how many have been selling ice to urinals?

And people said, You're mad, you owe me a dime.

And I said, I certainly will, my friend.

He's got to find his calculation out, though.

If you've done that calculation, have you actually done the calculation?

How did you?

Yeah, well, let's follow that a bit.

How did you estimate the number of urinals in the United States?

Okay, so

how many people are there per bar?

Right, so a thousand people per bar.

Right,

then you take it.

Then you take the population of the country,

that gives you the number of bars.

Then you have the number of kilograms of ice.

You know the

enthalpy of fusion of water, you know how far you have to cool it, you can work out how much energy is needed.

You need to know the average temperature of urine as well, I suppose.

Well, it's no, it's pretty much thirty-seven degrees.

Yeah, idiot.

He in front of a fright has never even checked the temperature of his urine.

That would be biology, that, wouldn't it?

I want to know where they put the urine.

Oh, no, it's in the urinal to stop the smell.

I did not know that.

It's not that common a thing.

It's not like we glide around having our urine cooled for a fan.

I, in the car, have a urine cooling unit.

So when I climb it onto the plane, I can have my urine cooled for a flight.

I apologise for choosing that example, but it's just one of many examples.

How many power stations was it ultimately, John?

I'd have to sit down and do the calculation.

Look, you can't go through the whole the ice, the urinals, these thousand people pubs.

Just give me a minute or two.

None of us have even actually heard of this ice.

I mean, we don't really much know this ice neuron, it seems to be some kind of Narnia urinoid.

People.

I'm not sure you are.

Dora, you're elevated to scientists.

He's becoming comedy guest now.

As a species, we're pretty proud of ourselves.

A creature that shapes the world around us rather than evolved to fit into the shape of the world.

But maybe this creature that builds canals, writes symphonies, flies to the moon, and built alt and towers,

the pyramids, the hanging gardens of Babylon and other amusement parks.

I love the idea that the hanging gardens of Babylon just started off as an amusement park.

And they went, you won't believe it.

We've been upgraded.

We've been made one of the seven wonders of the world.

That should do well, shouldn't it?

And they've rebuilt it at Alton Towers.

Maybe this creature is a little too confident in its ability to reshape the world without any ramifications.

It's time to hand the reins over to another species.

Maybe bonobos.

No, they're busy, the bonobos.

They're not dolphins.

No.

All that time, that evolutionary time, they went out of the ocean onto the land and they get their big brains and everything.

And they could have built a a civilization and instead they just went back into the sea.

Is that literally?

What do you think they did?

They were out on the land and they went, do you know what?

Yeah.

I cannot be bothered.

Chuck a ball into that wave and I'm off.

It's true, but I think it's a dereliction of duty, to be honest.

Because you can't build a civilization if you're aquatic.

You can't do electricity.

But when the dolphins do come up with aquatic electricity, then we're talking.

No one will be more surprised than me.

Anyway, we asked Chris Addison and Baroness Kathy Ashton what species should maybe have another go at it.

There are a number of good temping agencies we could call to see if people could come in and take over from us.

I don't know if that's a good idea.

But other species, are there other species?

Yeah,

could we get some dolphins in for a while?

They're sort of famously quite clever and rather benign apart from

one or two little awkward things that they get up to.

But other than that, you know, they're sort of famously bright and perhaps might have some possible solutions for us.

Of course, we would have to flood the entire place so they can get around.

Maybe they could take their capital as Venice and then we could move from there.

But yeah, I don't know that it's necessarily time for us to throw the towel in yet.

I just think that maybe we've.

It's like when you're driving a car, sometimes you realise you're just going in the wrong direction, and there are two options.

You can either keep going out of pure cussedness and the desire not to be felt like not to feel that you are wrong, or you can go, do you know what?

We took a wrong turning back there.

Maybe we need to go back.

I think we're probably at that stage.

And just as soon as we can get the glove box open and read the map, we'll be fine.

I'm a bit worried that he's he's still got the glove compartment on the map.

It's called GPS now, isn't it?

You're going to see some of the cassettes he's got in there as well.

I passed a junction.

You know, at the junction on Slip Roads, sometimes you just see an unspooled cassette.

In the old days, you'd just see somebody had obviously gone off for God's sake and thrown it out of the car.

I saw one about two weeks ago.

Who was that?

What car could they possibly have been driving?

At that point, you might as well just throw the car on the side here.

Now, someone who would definitely have an opinion on electrified dolphins because he has one of the most vibrant human imaginations I know is Ross Noble, whose mind reigns supreme, even if it does frequently surprise and confuse some of us scientific guests.

Rains chicken suits.

Yeah, yeah, there are these moments where you just see the scientists going, I didn't know we were going to go into a world quite so strange.

So, what does the future hold for Ross Noble?

Evolutionary anthropologist Chris Stringer and paleontologist Danielle Shreve told him what to do if he wants to be remembered in the future.

But probably not for eternity because we know eternity is...

You can't be remembered for eternity.

No.

Because, well, certainly in a universe that's expanding in the way that ours is, you reach a time when information can't be processed.

It's essentially the heat death.

Ross is probably someone who would like to be found eventually in thousands of years' time.

What is the best way he can increase the chance of being fossilised?

Of being scientifically important.

I'd like to say that it would a painless disposal in the permafrost, but actually, if you want to get good DNA out of Ross in several thousand years,

he's all the shores over first.

Sorry, how good is this one?

He needs to have his bones stripped of flesh first.

Oh,

yeah.

So, yes, it's true that

we're finding sites now where, for example, Neanderthals have essentially butchered and cannibalised their own, and the DNA out of that is superior.

Yeah, that's true.

Yes, it seems that cannibalism seems to help

DNA.

That's a nightmare because my wife's a vegetarian, so that's

where she's in.

Yeah, but it's the Jurassic part.

They just need a bit of DNA, and they can woof, off you go.

In the next episode, we look at tiny things.

Thank you for listening.

Bye.

Bye.

Now, all the episodes we took clips from are available on BBC Sounds and you can find all the details of those in the programme description for this show.

In the infinite monkey cage.

Till now nice again.

To know what it means to be Roman, you need to look beyond the sweating gladiators.

There are fresh stories to be told from scattered clues and new discoveries.

I'm Mary Beard and I'll be uncovering these stories for Being Roman, a new series for BBC Radio 4.

There's a young bride avenging the murder of her parents and an emperor flirting outrageously with his nervous teacher.

Listen to Being Roman wherever you get your podcasts.

Sucks!

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

We the man to be home!

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

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

Suffs!

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

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.