Under our Night Sky

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Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

And I'm Robin Ince and this is the infinite monkey cage.

And well, I suppose we should just start by saying science ruins everything.

That's the new angle.

We're taking to broaden our potential audience.

It's a more kind of post-modernist approach that has come from my immersive reading of continental philosophy, including Foucault for Fools and Derrida for Dunces.

Derrida for Dunces.

I mean, I suppose, is there any other kind of Derrida?

Look, don't talk about philosophy, okay?

Because that is a, we will be here all day if we do that.

Well, we'll be here for 5,000 years, won't we, with no answers at all?

Philosophy.

Here we go, goods.

This is

because for the last

few series, the chemists have been annoyed at being called an art.

Brian said, let's annoy the philosophers just for a week, just to give a week off for the chemists.

And so he has.

So tonight we're going to be talking about the night sky.

As anyone who's watched Brian on Stargazing Live will know there is nowhere finer to see intense cloud cover.

Makes the sky so much more enigmatic and just behind that over there is probably something sparkly but we can't see it due to a grey-grey cumulus.

Yeah, who'd have thought it?

Manchester in January might be cloudy.

Anyway, today we are exploring our relationship with the night sky.

Is the majesty of the heavens obscured by our our quest for understanding?

Or does our ever-expanding knowledge of astronomy re-enchant the universe?

We are joined by two astrophysicists, an astronaut and someone who perpetually travels through space and time due to their love of Doctor Who.

And they are...

Hello, I'm Tim Peake.

I'm an astronaut and my favourite constellation is Orion because when I was a Cub Scout, it was the first constellation that was taught to me.

And somebody showed me that from Orion's belt and Orion's sword and another star, you can make an arrow that points points north.

I thought that was the coolest thing ever.

Hello, I'm Lisa Harvey Smith.

I'm an astrophysicist and a professor at the University of New South Wales, also an author of some bookies.

My favourite constellation is the great bear, the plough,

and that's because my dad taught me that when I was 12 years old, he showed me how to point north with that one, too.

And it means I don't get lost when I'm coming home from the pub.

Hello, I'm Stuart Clark.

I'm an astrophysicist and the author of the book Beneath the Night.

And my favourite constellation is Taurus

because

19,000 years ago, a prehistoric artist drew the constellation in a bear shape on the caves walls of Lasco in France.

And so when I stand outside under the night sky and I look at the stars of Taurus and I imagine a bull there, I'm actually going through the same imaginative process as that human 19,000 years ago, which I find mind-blowing.

Hello, I am the doctor.

I travel through space and time.

My favorite constellation is the constellation of Casturbanus,

because that's my home, Gallatri.

And this is our panel.

Tim,

did your relationship with the sky change?

You said that you had a favourite constellation from when you were little, but did it change when you were on the space station or during that time?

It changed almost the instant I got into orbit because

we launched from Kazakhstan at about five o'clock at night, eastwards, obviously, and by the time we got to orbit, eight and a half minutes later, we were over the Sea of Japan.

And I floated up, looked outside the Sawyer's window over this night sky, and it was just incredible.

I saw the stars like I'd never seen them before, with you know, so little light pollution.

It's just brilliant, brilliant night sky full of stars.

And it just put things into a different perspective.

And over the course of the next six months, getting to the cupola window and going out every time and looking at different constellations.

at different parts of the hemisphere as well, I just had a new appreciation, not just of the stars, but also of our planet and our, you know, our place in the universe.

Is it more difficult to recognise the constellations because of the density of stars?

Does it?

Much more difficult, yeah.

I mean, I really struggled at first,

and then you kind of get your eye in, and you, you know, once you also know where you are over the world, it helps.

So I would always check the orbit first rather than just going straight to the hatch, so I'd have a clue as to orientate myself.

Oh, so you navigate from, you say, oh, well, I'm over Europe, so I know that this is the northern sky, and I'm over Australia, so it's the southern sky.

Yeah, yeah, to help out.

But no, it's absolutely incredible seeing it from the space station.

And does it give you, I mean, because as you said, without the light pollution, with seeing how packed the sky appears to be, but then at the same time realizing the enormity of the gaps between those stars in reality, and that must give you also just a sense of a changing sense of size as well of the universe.

Yeah, without a doubt.

And also the blackness of space.

I mean, you see this in the daytime.

So, I mean,

it's so different seeing Earth by day and Earth by night.

And by the

daytime, the blackness of space is unbelievable.

It's very difficult to describe.

And on Earth, we don't really see the true colour black, I don't think, because there's always some sort of light reflected from it.

But in space, you know, it's the blackest black.

And then when you come into the night part of Earth's orbit, that's when we have these really lovely low levels of light pollution and we can see out.

But you're right, Robin, that you just get this extra sense of enormity by seeing all of the stars.

You see the strip of the Milky Way.

And even I was able to pick out Andromeda as well from the space station, which was fantastic to be able to see that from space.

And it does just give you this incredible perspective.

Lisa, Tim mentioned there that obviously orientating yourself with respect to the sky is easier when you look at the Earth first to know which way you're pointing.

You grew up here in the UK and then moved to Australia.

So you see a very different sky.

Yeah, and you know, I'm an Essex girl originally and you wouldn't know it from my voice maybe, but it's funny that I learnt the night sky in Essex and you know the moon a certain way up, Orion a certain way up and you imagine these constellations that the ancient Greeks have drawn from us and the Romans.

then you go to Australia and become

completely disoriented.

It's really, really strange.

It's a really strange feeling because, firstly, the moon is upside down.

And actually, even as a professional astronomer, I wasn't ready for that.

I kind of knew it logically, but

I didn't expect the feeling I got of disorientation when I saw it.

And the moon being upside down, I spent pretty much the first one or two years in Australia, like with my head sideways, craning my neck, because I was just trying to feel familiar with the constellations.

And then when I saw Orion upside down, because we're the other side of the celestial equator the equator in the sky it was just such a bizarre feeling so yeah I've had to get used to the night sky here and I find the the constellations that aren't as clear because I haven't grown up with them John Coolshaw I'm calling you John Coolshaw because of course in fact in your introduction people have so far merely thought that you are uh Tom Baker and in fact that's almost what I want to ask you which is you are someone who who loves the the night sky I've seen some of your magnificent photography of the night sky and which came first for you was it actually science fiction was it growing up watching things like doctor who and then slowly went you know what i like this science fiction but let's find out about the science as well i think it all blended together simultaneously um watching those uh those editions of the the sky at night the early ones that i remember first around about 1974 75 there was patrick more speaking very very quickly about the pleiades a wonderful binocular object take a look at it interesting by the naked eye but put some binoculars onto it and you will see the richness of it quite magnificent And he was such an intriguing character, and what he was talking about was so intriguing, I was compelled to just borrow my dad's binoculars and take a look in the garden.

And it just went from there.

And

astronomy in the back garden was it felt very close to the science fiction I was enjoying on the television and reading about.

So, yes, a perfect blend, I would say.

I've got one of your photographs actually on the wall: a transit of Venus of Venus that you yes, that's right.

Yes, that was

a photograph that was taken on June the 6th 2012 and that was actually

the final astronomical event witnessed by Sir Patrick Moore we actually

we were all staying at Farthings at the time and I remember we all sort of wrapped him up in duvets and so on and gave him a flask of coffee and we wheeled him down to Selsey Beach and it was really rather cloudy a lot of the time but there was just a moment when just

the top sort of quarter of the sun was visible and there was the dot of Venus the transit of Venus and

yes I

wonderful to witness that with with Sir Patrick and rather poignant to know it was the final thing he would he would witness there is something rather lovely obviously you know we we've done a few shows in the past and there's such a difference when you do Tom Baker or Patrick Moore your whole face lights up as well like I you the the love of doing people that you love and then sometimes I can see you doing doing certain politicians.

And the face, I can just see going, I wish this person wasn't in charge of a country.

And it's just such a

seeing that change.

Yes, Bettlegirls is still there.

But

my favourite constellation, probably Cassiopeia.

I don't know what it is, but it sounds good when I say it.

Some of them, Michael Gove, I suppose, another one.

You know, he's sort of amusingly sneaky.

My favourite constellation is sickness.

very striking.

Yeah,

um,

but I'd much rather, I always, I always love the scientists, science presenters, um,

because I'm interested in that subject myself.

It's a chance to just absorb into that universe just a little more.

Don't, don't you start, don't, don't do it.

But I think

we've got plenty of time.

The public wants it.

But I think if we unite, if we unite like two Time Lords, we can bring peace to the universe.

Oh, it's good, you know, it's good.

Thank you for being so recognisable and such a joy to audiences.

It is, it's just, I feel much cleverer.

In fact, shall I do the rest of the show like this?

Anyway, thanks very much, Brian.

You can go now.

Why we haven't talked about this with the producer before?

This could have saved a fortune.

This would have saved us hundreds of thousands an episode.

Stuart, we haven't spoken to you yet.

Which Doctor Who do you impersonate?

Stuart, I wanted to talk to you just about.

You mentioned in the opening there about the Lesko caves, and this is something that is fascinating as well, which is we're talking about the way that we interact with the night sky, but a lot of what you've been looking at more recently is seeing,

I suppose, firstly, our changing relationship with how we understand the night sky, but at the same time, also, this fantastic thing, as I remember you writing once, you know, the sky that we have is the same sky that Shakespeare had.

So, when we're looking up there, as much that might be changing on planet Earth, we have this kind of shared thing that is running through the history of our civilization.

Yes, absolutely, Robin.

And that was the thing that really struck home with me.

I started just being a bit curious to try and understand myself a little more and understand why I was so in thrall with the night sky and have been for my whole life.

And

the project just grew and grew and grew until I was just finding all these common threads and the way these

other people have associated with the night sky, then civilizations and the cultural importance of the night sky.

And it just stretches back far, far beyond written written records can recount.

One of the very earliest pieces of writing from Sumeria is all about the night sky and so it became an absolute sort of obsession of mine for the last few years to try and chart

this association that humans have always had with the night sky, how it's changed.

And I've come to realize that it's one of the most common human experiences that we can have is to stand outside and look at the stars.

And to answer your first question, I impersonated John Pertwee when I was in primary school

and

we had a dressing up day and I found a really flowery, you know, frilly shirt and I felt a million dollars that day.

I've never felt as good since actually.

Well, I know that later on in the show we now have got it set up for a Pertwee off between you and John.

Because last time we did a cox-off between Brian and John, John actually won, which was kind of then really affected Brian's sense of identity for about three different weeks.

Stuart, can you give us a sense of what some of the different ancient civilisations thought the stars were?

Because when the Greeks looked at the sky, the Egyptians, the Sumerians,

I suppose the Mayans, the Aztecs, can you give a summary of the different ideas of what they were looking at?

For most of them, they didn't really know what the stars were.

So they tried to endow them with a kind of meaning.

And what did it mean to live under this vast starry dome?

And a lot of those early civilizations thought, the Sumerians, for example, they thought it was sort of like

sort of God's whiteboard.

And that sort of whatever was going on up there, whatever he wanted us to do, or the gods wanted us to do, um he would put those messages um in the night sky and so it was there to be read and interpreted and give us some clue as to how to behave and conduct ourselves and organize ourselves

later on and this one i love i think this is absolutely fascinating um sort of by the middle ages or so uh the the universe itself is imagined as a finite volume with the planet the earth obviously at the center as they thought then, and then the planets, and then this boundary, which was the firmament.

And the stars themselves are holes in that boundary.

And beyond that boundary is the true heaven, the seventh heaven, the godly realm.

So when we look up at the night sky, you know,

the ideas there were that we see the pure white light of heaven shining through these holes in the firmament.

So that's some of the ways that it changed.

And Newton obviously just started everything changing by suggesting that the stars themselves were suns like our own, but just seen at vast distance.

So now, suddenly, not only does science sort of start to apply mathematics to the night sky rather than superstition and sort of mystery, it also says that the surrounding universe is not fundamentally a different realm from the Earth.

It's the same, governed by the same laws, the same matter, and it sort of extends ultimately the natural world way out into the vastness of space.

Lisa, what have we learnt in terms of in Australia over, say, 2,000, 3,000 years ago about the changing relationship with the stars there amongst people?

Well, the Indigenous Australian peoples make up about 500

language groups across the country and have had the longest living human cultures in the history of humanity

between 40 and 60,000 years of continuous culture.

So, I think, for

although through colonization, many aspects of the oral traditions have been lost, many have not.

So, there is still a lot of indigenous knowledge about the sky and what has been learnt.

And it's really interesting and it gives us a real insight, I guess, into potentially the psychology of human beings or potentially how humans have traveled across the world and shared stories through history.

A good example is the constellation that we call Orion.

It's a hunter,

a bit of a

sex pest as well, chasing the Pleiades around the sky.

So I'm not really approving of the story, but it's an interesting story because it's actually the sort of same story in a number of traditions across Australia and different continents in fact and Europe.

So it gives us a real sense of that interesting history that we share in explaining the night sky.

But it's not just stories that Indigenous Australians had about the sky.

It was really used as a tool, as a map and a calendar for different cultures.

For example, there's a fascinating story about the emu in the sky, which is a constellation made up of the dark clouds

of dust that hide some of the Milky Way and the light from the stars behind it.

And it looks like an emu and in many Aboriginal cultures in Australia, you know, this emu in the sky and its orientation at different times of year tells people when to collect emu eggs.

So there's lots and lots of stories, thousands of stories like this, and those have endured for a very, very long time indeed.

What I love about astronomy is when you talk to astronomers, the night sky changes each time you look at it.

And what you have now given us, of course, is not merely a sex pest in the sky, but also what we mainly know in the UK as an aggressive puppet.

So this has really changed.

Something.

What's the sky look like tonight?

This kind of aggressive puppetry mixed with sex pestery.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's definitely a different vision to the one that I had on Tuesday.

Tim, I find it again, just think of when you're looking at those, because as Lisa was saying, there's a fascinating thing in cultures where you find out that the way we create the pattern of the stars so sometimes you have beautifully exuberant creatures that are made by joining up the dots and sometimes you just have a pan or something like that depending on the different cultures did you find yourself sometimes as as you stare out the window as you are piecing together the night sky working out you know different senses of of mythology that you can create up there i think well it wasn't so much working out the different senses but um one of the things that really struck me was the aurora as well when you're looking down on Earth.

And that was hugely, hugely different.

I've only ever seen a very, very weak aurora from Earth, but to be on top of it, both the Australis and Borealis is absolutely magnificent to see this beautiful display.

And I think

that and then the backdrop of the stars against it, it almost helped put the universe into three dimensions.

And I think when we look at it from Earth, we see these two-dimensional pictures and we make up the figures, the stories,

and you almost get a more three-dimensional effect when you're looking at it from space.

I guess also the fact we're orbiting so quickly as well, and we actually get to see the Milky Way rising and setting in a much more dynamic environment rather than having to spend hours watching it with perhaps a time-lapse photograph sequence.

You know, it's there before your very eyes rising over the horizon.

And so, I think that gives the whole universe this much more three-dimensional approach.

But we're probably going too quickly for me to be able to come up with anything too artistic and come up with any new constellations or new ways of describing them.

I found that interesting that you said it feels more three-dimensional.

Does that sense of being in the universe rather than looking at it get even more visceral when you're on a spacewalk, when you're not looking through a window, but you're actually literally surrounded?

Yeah,

you know, it's very, very hard to process that because it is incredibly a visceral experience being immersed in in the blackness of space.

And also, it's very surreal and very serene.

You know, I had 10 minutes with Tim Copra just hanging out with very little to do whilst we waited for the sun to set when we were waiting to get on and fix the solar panel at the very furthest edge of the space station.

And so we got to see this beautiful, you know, scene play out beneath us where we were going from sunlight into darkness and watching the stars rise over the horizon.

And yes, you do feel very much a part of it.

And

you kind of realize that you're stardust, with the universe, with the consciousness of the universe, looking back on the cradle of humanity.

And it's an incredible, very, very surreal experience.

Can the beauty of what you're witnessing be actually distracting to your work at times?

Hugely, hugely.

I mean, we didn't want to get back to work after that, but we only had 45 minutes of darkness to fix the circuit breaker.

So

you have to kind of focus and get back on.

What you've described Tim is such a perfect example of what Immanuel Kant talked about with the sublime and the concepts of awe and the sublime and he said that he found it in his critique of pure reason.

He said that he found it so fascinating that we have such depths of inner thought and that we can turn our minds to trying to contemplate the infinite depths of space and what as well.

And he thought that that was sort of the defining characteristic, really, of being a human, that we live such fleeting lives and yet we aspire through our consciousness to try and understand the depths of space.

Stuart, I just wanted to ask actually, because talking about that way, that we sometimes find ancient sites, burial sites, sometimes, you know, stone circles, etc.

And there is, there's changing interpretation all the time.

But I was interested also whether we sometimes, I was up at the stones of Calanish Calanish just before the first lockdown up in the the outer Hebrides and there's been a lot of different papers there about what those stones which are older than Stonehenge are saying about the sky and what they're explaining the cyclic notion etc and then there are other papers that come out and say actually we are suggesting a greater understanding than there might be and really with quite a few of these ancient artefacts it if you stand in the right place you can find your pattern the pattern that you want are we sometimes doing that are we sometimes suggesting a level of scientific knowledge which we're projecting on people and we don't really have the evidence for?

I think that's absolutely true, Robin.

And so, one of the things that I've tried to do

in the book and the work that I've been doing is just to take it to the very lowest level that you can be absolutely certain about.

And even when you do that, you can still say that the pyramids are clearly

built and aligned with the Cartesian points.

You can still say, obviously, that Stonehenge is aligned with the midsummer sunrise.

And those,

even

just those, are important enough to be marvels when you think about the age in which those objects were built and made.

And also fascinating as well that we have these alignments with the sky and the celestial objects in funerary places.

So there's always obviously something in us that wanted to link death with the night sky and

just the sky itself.

John, you were a similar generation as well.

We mentioned Doctor Who, but the other thing is, in terms of interpretation of ancient artefacts, we were brought up at the time of Eric von Danikin as well.

I don't know if you remember where all of these cave paintings and lines on the ground became landing strips for various different gods, apparently.

You know, these books made a fortune and are all still published because they're as wrong now as they've always been.

And it's just kind of...

Did you find yourself as a young kind of because I remember I used to believe all of that stuff.

It was rather sort of amusing and rather

I found it sort of rather random actually.

There was a copy of Chariots of the Gods on the bookshelf at home and I would read it and sort of just have a look at the diagrams and my attention would wander And then it sort of set me up to read in a greater depth Arthur C.

Clarke's Mysterious World and the Unexplained magazine sometime later, which looked at the Nazca lines and

stone circles and so on.

And ancient technology,

the Baghdad Battery, for example.

So I suppose it led to a fascination with that area.

also but

I think I found it rather quaint at the time when I first looked at it.

Arthur C.

Clarke's mysterious world.

What I remember about that was I re-watched them recently.

When I was 11 years old and it was on, I never heard the last bit Arthur C.

Clarke says after every report, which is, I don't really think there's enough evidence to believe this is true.

But I blanked that bit out.

I was just seeing Bigfoot walking out of the woods over the road.

You know, this was all real.

This wasn't a man in a gorilla costume.

This was happening.

I was a very foolish child, and now I'm a very foolish adult.

He always said that at the end, didn't he?

Every single one.

Every one of them.

He said, well, of course, it's nonsense.

He's every single

show.

Listening, not listening.

One particular favourite was: I believe it's more likely that sea monsters would exist in the sea rather than in somewhere like Loch Ness, which is smaller.

And then Borden Honeycomb would say, next week, UFOs.

Do you have a favorite in terms of

some of

those myths and those ideas?

And there must be certain things that you have to counter on a reasonably regular basis.

I have fallen foul of the Flat Earthers

because

I was taken completely by surprise for an interview that I was doing, and they just said at the end of the interview, they said,

What about the Flat Earth?

And

I said,

Does anyone really believe that anymore?

Boy, did I find out that they do.

So,

yeah.

Lisa, have you found, you know, as someone, you know, in terms of being in Australia at the moment, which is either over there or actually down there,

you know, are there certain ideas as an astronomer you find you have to counter more often?

And has that changed maybe in the last 10 years?

Things like, you know, Flat Earth seems to have boomed recently.

Does it boom?

I don't know how it spreads or whatever.

But it's kind of, have you found that certain certain things sometimes?

You go, this week, this is the main idea that everyone seems I have to give some rational explanation for.

Next week, it changes.

Well, there is that meme about flat earth theory, you know, being spread all around the globe.

But I think it actually hasn't reached Australia.

I've got to say,

I can't claim that one, but as a new Australian,

I've got to say that Australians do not have these wacky conspiracy theories as a whole, which is fantastic.

And I don't get hassled by them,

which is really great.

I do constantly get asked about black holes and whether we're going to all get sucked into one, but that seems to be the only

real kind of worry that people have in this country.

So, yeah,

I don't meet conspiracy theories that often.

And if I do, well, it's

you know, if Eratosthenes could actually measure the size of the Earth and the fact that it was a sphere at least, you know, thousands of years ago.

It just beggars belief that people don't believe.

And Tim can actually orbit the Earth several hundreds or thousands of times, I'm not sure how many, but it just, there's just no telling people if they don't want to believe

something.

And

no level

of

persuasion can really

grab someone who's got a belief.

And that's the thing.

That's the difference between an open-minded person and somebody who will not change their mind and not learn.

And I think that's the trouble with politicians who don't listen to science because they actually teach the rest of the population that science is not worth listening to, and it's not good enough.

We need our leaders, and we need our society and culture to accept that changing your mind about something and listening to evidence is essential for

a healthy society.

Although, Stuart, having said that, it took us a long time to develop anything like a scientific approach, well, science in general, but a scientific approach to the sky.

I mean, I suppose we go back to Copernicus, but then in particular, Kepler.

Absolutely.

Kepler, you know, he's one of my absolute heroes because he takes

all this data that Tycho Brahe had on Mars and he calculates the orbit by hand.

And at the end of that time, in the sort of first decades of the 17th century, he publishes three lines of mathematics, Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

And those laws are as true today as they were then.

They hold for Mars, which he first analysed, and it took him 10 years to do that work.

And he called it his war with Mars.

And

it holds for all the other planets in the solar system, it holds for all the asteroids, it now holds for the thousands of other planets we find around other stars.

And all of that, that is a demonstrable truth about the universe.

And he's done it for this realm, which previously people had thought was unknowable to us, God's realm, and heaven, and just something completely alien.

And so, if you can do it for there you know in that place you can do it anywhere and it just lights the sort of blue touch paper for the for the scientific revolution so is that the great leap that that he made is it is it conceptual that it is possible to understand the motion of these points of light is is is that his genius or is it also applying mathematics to those points of light i mean it's almost everything isn't it that he it is it is brian and i think you've you've hit the nail completely on the head because

they're flip sides of the same coin.

We can understand

those

moving points of light in the sky if we use mathematics.

And it has a sort of

basis in classical antiquity and the perfect mathematical realm that Pythagoras believed

was the universe.

And so we should try to uncover

those laws and those rules.

And that would give us knowledge of the world in which we live.

And it's interesting Kepler started, didn't he, with a rather mystical view, these perfect platonic solids, and trying to build a model.

And he really did try to build that model as well.

And

he believed that he could put all these shapes together and that would define the orbits of the planets.

And in order to demonstrate

this concept, he got the Duke of Württemberg to give him enough money to build this model in silver.

And just as a little bit of a sweetener, he said to the Duke, he said, and what I'll do is I'll make it into a drinks dispenser.

Not kidding.

Not kidding.

So the idea was, the idea was that in these different pipes of these geometrical shapes, there would be a beverage that matched the astrological properties of the planet whose orbit it was supporting.

And because he started to think, well, I can't get a silversmith to build this,

because then that silversmith will know the secret of the universe before the Duke of Württemberg.

So he farmed it out to all these different silversmiths who built a little bit of it.

And then they all came to

the Duke's Schloss at

the appointed hour and tried to fit it together and it didn't fit because the mistake that Kepler had made was assuming that all the planets moved in circular orbits and his humiliation at being proved wrong is what made him determined to find the orbit of Mars which he did which sparked the scientific revolution which gives us the world we lives in today all because he couldn't get his drinks dispenser to do today

has Dan Brown turned this into a novel yet this has a dan bra I can see Tom Hanks getting drunk it's got a bit of antiques roadshow to it it's covering a huge amount of ground it's a wonderful thing to think of that there were those times when Kepler had his doubts and he wondered if his life's works would amount to anything or be remembered and now here we are in the 21st century and so many exoplanets bearing his name.

Isn't that a wonderful thing?

What joy would have that brought to Kepler had he known?

And he also stopped his mother.

I mean, that's an interesting thing.

We'll talk about his mother being a witch another time, actually, but that's too much of a tangent.

But it's an interesting story.

She wasn't a witch, by the way.

He proved she wasn't.

Lisa John mentioned the discovery of exoplanets by the Kepler Space Telescope, which is a tremendous leap, isn't it?

Because now we know that those points of light are not just on their own, that most of them have solar systems.

It's a massive leap, I guess, in our understanding of our place in the universe.

And

when I was a kid, when I started looking at the night sky, 1991, I think, was the first exoplanet that was discovered around a pulsar.

So a rapidly spinning neutron star that

had very, very regular pulses of radiation that were measured by astronomers.

And these pulses, as the star span around were

seen to change ever so slightly on a regular basis and this was inferred that there was this unseen planet around the the star

and then lots of other ways of discovering extrasolar planets were found so by the late 90s the 2000s there were you know several dozen exoplanets now there are thousands known

so we can measure them in a number of ways but really that it starts to prove to us that

again, building on those historical leaps from the theory of, you know, the Earth is the center of everything, the geocentric theory to the heliocentric theory, the Sun must be the center of everything.

That fact, that understanding that we're less and less important in terms of being the center of the universe,

again, it's another leap in that direction to say that the Earth and the eight planets around the Sun are not the only solar system system in the universe.

There are probably

a hundred billion or a trillion planets in our observable universe.

And that understanding really gives us hope, I think, that one day we could potentially find

other planets with colonies of bacteria or with a tremendous variety of life that is evolved from

various types of chemicals bubbling away in volcanic springs.

Like, we think that's how life may have began on Earth.

So,

it's another amazing avenue for us to really understand our place in the universe, I think.

And that search for life is one that's accelerating now because we can look for it in so many different ways.

Yeah, Tim, there's an interesting tension, isn't there?

I always find in astronomy, when I'm talking about astronomy, between seeing the Earth as this one planet amongst, what is it what's the number 20 billion i think potentially earth-like planets in the milky way galaxy alone so just one planet amongst billions and at the same time

uh understanding the perspective that astronomy gives us making us think about the earth as a rather special place and i wondered whether that tension is vivid and weighs on your mind when you are in space.

It's often talked about, isn't it?

The overview effects.

And it really changes every astronaut's relationship with our planet.

It does.

I think you're faced with this dichotomy and I remember talking to Rusty Schweikart about this and he obviously did his deep space EVA and had that wonderful perspective of being so far from the moon and so far from the earth at the same time of being outside of the capsule and going through these thought processes of feeling incredibly insignificant

and those feelings of

humanity and what are we and where are we in the universe.

But then coming back to this thought process of we are the consciousness of the universe, and until we find another advanced civilization, until we find intelligence that can have a conscious thought, then that makes us incredibly special,

incredibly relevant, even though we can still appreciate how tiny and insignificant we are with 20 billion other Earth-like planets in the Milky Way and

trillions of other or hundreds of billions of other other galaxies in the observable universe but we are the consciousness of the universe we are stardust that's arranged ourselves into a pattern of complex life that can actually think about our origins and calculate where we've come from over 13.7 billion years and I think that's what that dichotomy makes it it very very special did it change just when Lisa was talking about that sense of that there you know somewhere out there it is life you know that maybe the nearest life might be very very basic somewhere there and that bit where you actually are able to have this above the earth view and then you look out towards the stars did it change any sense of

your ideas of the possibility of life beyond earth

Yes, yeah, without a doubt.

And as Brian was mentioning there, the overview effect, I think every astronaut has it to some degree.

And I think it increases whether you're in space for a longer period of time or when you talk to the Apollo astronauts.

Obviously, the further you go from Earth, it's going to be incredible to speak or to hear the stories of those first astronauts who go to Mars and and see what their perspective is.

But no, it does change, Robin, when you look out

and it just gives you this appreciation of

how vast the universe is and the fact that there has to be other life out there.

And I I personally I think the universe is teeming with life.

You know, and biogenesis happened fairly readily here on Earth and probably has done on many other planets in the Milky Way alone.

But

we also have the problems with time and space and the vastness of the universe and will we ever find out if there is intelligent life out there or not.

It's a wonderful thing to think in our lifetimes that

we will witness that and hopefully that can be something we will be able to confirm in our lifetimes.

Something I'd love to see.

And I hope it's as spectacular as Arthur C.

Clarke believes it may well be.

Lisa,

I just want to ask you you very briefly, it's a little off topic, but I know you're very heavily involved in future telescopes, and particularly

the big radio telescope arrays that are now being considered, particularly the

SKA.

The SKA in Australia.

Do you just comment on how that's going to help us, what it's going to be able to do?

I think I saw that it would detect an aircraft landing radar within 50 light years.

That's right, yeah.

Which is quite a thing.

It's remarkable, isn't it?

And, you know, there's different ways to look for life, whether it's looking at the composition of an atmosphere of a distant star as it crosses the sun, and you can just measure which pieces of light are nibbled out by the different chemicals.

But another way is to look for things like us.

So we are right now using radio waves to broadcast our voices and pictures across the world and

communicate.

And that's the way that humans communicate generally is with radio waves.

So we're building gigantic telescopes that will measure radio waves from the universe, from naturally occurring things like galaxies and stars, and also if they exist from intelligent, potentially technological civilizations across our galaxy.

Now, if they're anything like us, and you've seen the film Contact perhaps

from the last decade, you know, you can see the kind of the motion of Earth's information throughout the universe as it travels at the speed of light, and that eventually betrays our existence to extraterrestrial neighbours.

Now, if that's real, then we will also be able to see or hear the signals from those extraterrestrial neighbours.

And yeah, if there's an airport radar, which is the sort of brightest thing that we emit as a civilization, or even just simply radar, radio transmissions, communications, TV,

maybe ET will be watching home and away.

Who knows?

Lisa, can I just ask one thing?

Because I'm fascinated in the way your relationship with the sky changes when you go from using a traditional telescope, so there you are

to using a radio telescope.

That must create a very different kind of feeling about what you're observing and the potential of what you're able to observe.

It does.

I love being an invisible astronomer.

It's great fun.

You know, there's X-ray astronomers, people who look at X-rays in space, infrared, ultraviolet, there's radio.

There's so many different invisible colors out there that human beings haven't evolved to see because mostly our atmosphere actually absorbs a lot of those things, not radio, but we'd have to have gigantic eyes if we wanted to see radio.

But, you know,

it's really interesting to be able to see and study things that light simply cannot.

allow us to see.

So we can see very, very distant galaxies, for example,

and we can really start to study the dark and dusty regions of our galaxy and what I have studied for a large number of years now is is the invisible kind of birth of stars inside dark and dusty regions of the Milky Way.

And it does kind of when you look at the night sky then enable you to imagine a greater potential.

So we're not just seeing the stars, we're not just seeing the gas and the dust, but we can imagine nebulae that you can't even see with your eyes and pulsars and things emitting radio waves, the hot gas screaming as it circles into a black hole in a distant galaxy.

Those things become very bright and very obvious when you use a radio telescope.

I love, John, I don't know if you've heard this before, but I can't remember watching a documentary about astronomy in Chile, but also about politics and all manner of things.

And this, when one of the astronomers said, astronomy is archaeology because you're always looking back in time.

And I thought, and that changed the night.

Again, that that was another way of suddenly going, that's another way of looking at the sky where you're actually going everywhere.

And in the desert, they're saying, you know, they dig down and they go into the past, and they look up and they go into the past.

And that to me is a tremendously kind of beautiful vision.

It is.

It's wonderful, isn't it?

The different

stars that give you different feelings of the light reaching you.

Some of it began its journey in Tudor times, other times when woolly mammoths were roaming the earth, and so on.

That's another wonderful way to connect to it there.

But we've come towards the end of the introduction in the show.

We have actually, I've just realised that.

We literally, we need to get to the first question about the theme, otherwise, it's going to bear no relationship to the Radio Times listings.

Exactly.

So, for the last couple of minutes or so, I want to get to the theme.

We've laid the.

For the last couple of minutes or so, I'd like to do the show.

But the question, let me ask Stuart.

The question that I alluded to at the beginning was that

all that's a long time ago now was

whether this,

we talked about Kepler and then we mentioned Newton.

We understand what's happening, we understand the laws that govern the motion of these points of light.

As Lisa had described, we've seen the exoplanets around them, we know a lot now.

The thesis of the show, the central question is: does that remove

the mystery, obviously, but does it remove the magic and does it remove the wonder?

I'll give you a spoiler before before I fully answer.

The spoiler is, no, it does not remove the magic.

The full answer is that it's such an interesting question because

the German philosopher, Max Weber,

he refused to sort of call the Enlightenment the Enlightenment, and he called it the disenchantment.

And he said it was a fundamental psychological shock

to the human mind that we now have this sort of hierarchy of elite scientists telling us that everything we thought we knew about the way that the planets influenced our personalities and all of that, you know, that's all gone, and only they know what's really going on.

However, in the work originally of Immanuel Kant to try to work out how we get our heads around this sort of subject and how mathematics allows us to have some intuitive understanding of these vast realms of space and and what the celestial objects are.

We then move into the 19th century where science popularization is truly born, I think.

And here we have people who are prepared, like yourselves, to

transmit the conclusions in ways that are meaningful to the audience.

No longer do people have to dig through the mathematics themselves.

No longer do they have to feel excluded.

Science and the knowledge that it brings can be used

as like an not an entertainment as such, but a wonderful new deepening of what we feel when we see and look out into the universe.

And that, I think, has moved us into this position today of having this true enchantment about the night sky, that we can know

what the celestial objects are and how they work, and we can have the mystery of the, you know, the, you know, what's inside a black hole and things like that that science is gradually working on.

But we can also still

feel the sublime beauty of looking at the night sky as well.

You know, we've never had it this good

to have the knowledge and still nothing can take away the aesthetic value of it all.

I think that's an interesting thing about saying, you know, not an entertainment as such, but of course there's nothing wrong as well with it also being an entertainment.

That, you know, to not shy away of just enjoying the show as well.

You know, it's quite a show, isn't it?

Looking up at the night sky, that's before we even then go into the examination.

Absolutely, Robin.

You're totally right.

And we are entertained by our knowledge of astronomy and the night sky every time we

pop on an episode of Star Trek or Star Wars or something like that, because the imagery that they're presenting comes from the images from the Hubble Space Telescope and things like that.

So it weaves its way into our culture and society, even today.

I thought, John, maybe we're in January.

You'll listen to this in January, unless you're on the podcast and it's 2028, in which case this will be complete nonsense.

But for January 2021, what should people be looking for?

They can go out into their gardens and look up at the sky.

There's some wonderful conjunctions of the morning planet Venus with some delicious crescent moons.

In the early part of the month, of course, the quadrantid meteor shower.

One thing that I particularly love in january in those cold cold mornings and evenings is the phenomena known as the belt of venus which is particularly clear that part of the year wherever the sun rises or sets look in the opposite direction and you'll see just above the horizon that sort of a slate blue hue

with the a pink shimmer just above it which of course is the shadow of the earth cast into the atmosphere as the sun rises or sets in the opposite direction and And that's particularly wonderful in the cold months of weeks of January, I find.

And Lisa, in the southern hemisphere, for our southern hemispheric listeners, is that the right

everyone upside down.

Yeah, we will, you know, in January is a great month for the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds.

So although, you know, it's the middle of summer,

it's actually, if you can get, you know, 2 a.m., if you can get a bit of darkness,

great time to see the Magellanic Clouds, these two dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way.

So they're literally our galactic companions.

And with radio telescopes, by the way, you can see streams of gas linking the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds as they orbit silently.

They're wonderful things to see.

You can also see a couple of globular clusters really well in summer.

Omega Centaurium 47 Tucane,

really beautiful, fuzzy objects made up of 100,000 or a million stars each.

Absolutely fantastic.

And you'll be able to see Mars in the north as well.

A beautiful orange winking star.

You're so lucky with the southern sky.

I remember seeing Omega-Sen for the first time in a telescope from the south, and it's just a remarkable.

You can see it's a ball of stars.

You can see it.

Which I think is now thought to be the core of a galaxy, isn't it, that collided with the Milky Way?

That's right.

Yeah, there's a lot of galactic collisions going on, and it's probably been stripped off of its galactic shape and become the kind of lumpy

elliptical.

And it's incredible.

All the stars are about 13 billion years old, so it's an incredible kind of relic.

Very, very old and very ancient.

John, can I just ask you, before we do, we've got the audience answers to our question.

We were told that you are currently working on a project where you are doing various different Time Lords,

reading various different bits of science.

And our producer said that you had done you had started working on our favourite, probably I would say, mutually favourite piece of science writing, which is Pale Blue Dot.

Oh, yes, Pale Blue Dot.

It does sound rather remarkable, as John Pertwee, as if it was a third Doctor rousing speech.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of your tiny world.

To me, it underscores your responsibility to deal more kindly with one another

and

to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot,

the only home you've ever known, Brigadier.

Wonderful.

Thank you, John.

Thank you for doing that.

Thank you.

Now, we asked the audience a question today, and we asked them, what would you most like to see in the night sky and why?

I love this one from Tin Dog Podcast.

This is great.

I'd like to see an IFO.

And I agree with this.

Tim will agree with this.

I want to see an identifiable flying object.

You must get asked about that.

Did you see anything

in space?

Did you see any sign of UFOs?

Is that one of the questions you get asked a lot?

All the time.

All the time, yeah.

But of course, in space,

it's very, very hard to see even other satellites because, you know,

the speeds that we're moving, so you're less likely to see anything unusual, I think, in space than you are than being down.

On a farm in

the Midwest.

Yeah, very likely.

Eleanor Turner says, a constellation of Brian's face as proof of his eternal existence.

Though, of course, Brian's unaging face without even being a constellation is proof of his his eternal existence.

What is this?

Brian Eggles, yeah.

A giant rotating glitter ball and an announcement that Brian has signed up for Strictly.

Yeah.

Oh, that would be fun.

Would you take once see a restaurant at the end of the universe?

Here's one for John.

The return of Hallie's Comets.

I'm sure Patrick would have loved to see that, wouldn't he?

I always remember Patrick.

Yes, I remember that episode in 1987 or 1986 when it came back, and Patrick was absolutely incandescent with fascination.

It has been seen, and what a splendid sight it promises to be.

It's back in.

Yes, and

Nick Southern says they would like to see Hallie's Comet because they will be 97

at that point.

Nick will be 97.

So it is a while in the future, isn't it?

So we'll have to work hard.

We will.

Well, thank you.

I think that's probably enough of the audience's answers there.

So we will

just say thank you very much to Tim Peak, to Lisa Harvey-Smith, to Stuart Clark, and to John Forshaw.

Now, next week, we'll be looking at one of the most remarkable scientific detective stories of recent years, the quest to understand our distant cousins, the Neanderthals.

The study of human DNA reveals that many people have Neanderthal genes.

Apart from Brian, if you watched his Who Do You You Think You Are?

Where not merely there's no Neanderthal genes, there's nothing.

There is no, in fact, as far as we can see, there's no even link to humanity.

It appears that he comes from some kind of panspermic syrup, which has turned up near Olden.

So

we'll be looking at that and Neanderthals next week.

Thank you very much for listening.

Bye-bye.

In the infinite monkey cage, without your trousers, in the infinite monkey cage.

Till now, nice again.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

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.