The Sun

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Hello, I'm Robin Itz.

And I'm Brian Cox, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Two hosts, three guests in two hemispheres, and 220 audience members, all sat alone in their homes, but all gathered together by technology.

The future moves on apace.

We're getting closer and closer to this being the equivalent of Star Trek's holodeck.

In fact, next week we are hoping that our guests are going to be Isaac Newton, Mary Curie, Socrates, and Genghis Khan.

Genghis Khan.

Yeah, I think it's going to add just a little bit of an edge to the show.

Anyway, with only around five billion years before it swells into a red giant and consumes Mercury and Venus, we thought it was time to discuss the sun.

To discuss how the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium has nurtured life on Earth on sombrero sails, we are joined by a biologist, an astrophysicist and a lyricist, and they are.

Hi, I'm Lucy Green.

I'm a professor of physics at UCL.

And the fact that I think everyone should know about the sun is that even though light only takes eight minutes to get from the surface of the sun to us, that journey from the core to the surface takes 200,000 years.

Sunlight is as old as modern humans are.

Hi, I'm Steve Jones.

I'm a biologist, a geneticist, and I've been working on snails and the sun throughout my entire career.

And the thing I find most fascinating about the sun, I lived in Edinburgh for 10 years and I only saw it once.

I'm Tim Minchin.

I'm not a professor of nothing.

My favorite fact about the Sun is that the Sun contains 99.9% of all the mass in the solar system.

And when it has burnt all its fuel, the Sun will collapse into a white dwarf, which will be only about the size of the Earth, but will still have the mass of 333,000 Earths, and it will be doing no fusion, which means it will be extremely dense, like Donald Trump, whilst having no original material like me.

And this is our panel.

I would like to immediately congratulate Tim Minchin for the most scientifically accurate satire that we have had all series.

There was a lot of information there.

That was good.

I like it.

I like how that joke, like the sun, eats itself.

And also, like the sun isn't very funny.

But

is Donald Trump supported by electron degeneracy pressure?

See, Tim, you've walked into one of the traps of science jokes, is Brian will always then have supplementary questions, and you'll go, I haven't done the revision beyond that punchline, mate.

That's as far as I've got.

Lucy, we're talking about the sun.

So could you give us, to begin with,

maybe the one-minute biography of the sun, a description of our star?

Yeah, so, I mean, the sun is the object that I spend my time studying.

For me, it's just the most interesting and most important object in the whole solar system.

In fact the whole universe I would say.

But it is a fairly typical star in some senses.

So it's our local star.

Size-wise it's about 110 Earths lined up side by side.

Surface temperature around 6,000 Kelvin but in the atmosphere that temperature hikes up to a few million degrees.

It's a middle-aged star so halfway through its life at about four and a half billion years old.

But it is fairly typical in some senses.

So, what it's made of, its rotation rate, but it's not typical in other ways.

So, for example, in how active our sun is, and maybe that's something that we can talk about later on.

So, our sun is an active star, it has these explosions and eruptions in its atmosphere.

But what we've been seeing in other stars is that other stars can be much, much more active than our sun.

But for us, it has a nice activity level that means that we can sort of exist

in its neighborhood without too much trouble.

Tim, I wanted to ask you that there was an incredible piece of work once at the Tate Modern, which was this kind of projection of the sun coming up.

And what the artist had hoped was that it would give a sense that for more primitive humans, that sense of almost worship of the sun.

And when we know the remarkable importance it has, do you feel as someone who's often spoken out about different mystical things, should we be worshiping the sun more?

I think it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to worship if you want to.

I think we probably lack a bit of ritual in our lives.

So, if you're going to ritualistically dig on something, I think the societies who had sort of spiritualities attached to nature and honoring nature certainly did a lot better than we're doing at looking after nature.

So, yeah, I reckon you can worship the sun, although you've got to be careful.

Aussies worship the sun and they've got a lot of skin cancer.

Depends how you do it.

Do it in clothes.

Steve, I didn't want to let your intro go

without commenting on it because you made this link, an unusual link, between saying you had spent your life studying snails and the sun.

So I think that at least a brief explanation of what you meant by it, I know what you meant by it.

You've spent your life studying snails and the sun.

What's the connection?

Well, the connection is I'm what's called a thermal ecologist, thermal geneticist.

And one tends to forget how overwhelmingly powerful the sun actually is.

I mean, the analogy I always use in my book, I mentioned my book, I managed to mention my book, Here Comes the Sun.

If you were to take a 300 kilometre square in the Sahara and cover it completely with solar panels, the solar energy that would land on those solar panels would power the entire world forever at no cost, the entire human world forever at no cost.

So that although the sun's a long way away and we only take a minute fraction of its output, from our point of view, there's an awful lot of it.

But from a snail's point of view, there's even more, because a snail is what shouldn't be called a cold-blooded animal, but it doesn't keep itself warm in the way that we do.

So it's constantly standing on the edge of a thermal cliff.

It has to move in and out of the sun to stay at the right body temperature.

If it gets too hot, it dies.

If it gets too cold, it starves.

Okay?

So it's a very pinnikety relationship with the sun.

And the thing which got me involved in that a long time ago,

50 years ago, really, the early days in the prehistory of genetics, even in the prehistory of physics, of course, because it was before Brian Cox was invented,

was

that I wasn't invented.

You were discussing.

Steve, we're trying to keep this quiet about the fact he was invented.

He still thinks he's a real boy.

Okay?

It's very important that we don't change that.

I thought physicists

didn't get involved in sex.

Certainly two of the physicists I know.

Now, I'm sorry, Steve.

I'm very disappointed with you as a scientist.

Only two physicists as reference points.

That is anecdotal evidence there, I'm afraid.

I'm a geneticist, and I start my introductory lectures in genetics by standing up there and saying, I'm a geneticist, and my job is to make sex boring.

And

after 24 lectures, they know exactly what I mean.

Back to the snails.

We haven't finished the snail thing.

I'll finish the snails because there is a point to them.

People tend to forget that genetics is a new science.

It didn't really get going until about the year 2000.

And when I started studying it, there was nothing you could look at in nature which was variable.

And the snails vary in their patterns, in their colour, whether they're light or dark or yellow or pink or stripy or not stripey.

And that, of course, and a physicist would probably understand this if I do it slowly, dark objects heat up more in the sun.

okay?

And so the question was, does the sun alter the genetic evolution of these snails?

And the short answer is yes, and it's taken me 40 years to get to that yes.

I just want to slightly argue the statement, there is a point to snails.

Not that I think snails are any more pointless than anything.

I just don't think there's a point to anything.

So it's, I mean, it's a general.

Well, that's true.

That's true.

You tend to forget, you know, snails saved the human race,

or at least marine snails did, because there was a moment in ancient, very ancient history, when the human population size went down to several hundred.

And there was a huge drought in Africa.

And we moved from the Rift Valley to the coasts of Africa, the southern coasts of Africa, and lived off oysters for about a thousand years.

And if you go down there now, and I've been down there and seen them, there are huge piles of oyster shells.

And oysters are, of course, mollusks, snails.

So in fact, we owe our very existence to snails.

So, they're not pointless.

So, there we are, Tim.

You see, we are covering a lot of ground here today, and so little bit about the sun.

The teleological nature of the snail was not expected within 10 minutes.

Steve,

I wanted to go way back to the origin of life on Earth and its interaction with the Sun.

Because, of course, the most common theory now is life began in the very deep ocean, so well away from the Sun.

So,

when do we see life beginning to interact with the Sun

if we take it as

most likely that life began in the deep oceans?

Well, I think almost certainly, almost immediately.

I mean, the problem about the origin of life is it's not a question about biology.

It's a question about physics.

How do you get this incredibly improbable

reaction going?

And there are various theories.

They seem to change...

more quickly than life does.

The big theory was, which I always like because of its name, it was called the black smoker theory.

And that was the origin of life, because a black smoker, as you know, is an ocean vent which pumps out lots and lots of heat and

black matter and has tons and tons of bacteria hanging around it.

Then it moved around to a white smoker theory, which isn't quite as hot.

But once it got away from the bottom of the sea, these vents, once it got into the ocean, it had to get into the sun because life needs energy to stay there.

Life is an improbable chemical reaction, which needs to be constantly fed with external energy.

There's a physicist you may have heard of called Schrödinger who wrote a book called What is Life?

And it's an incredibly clever idea he had.

The point about life, the only point about life, is that it's got an inside and an outside.

And what life does is to pump in external energy to maintain its own extremely unlikely existence.

And without that energy, you wouldn't have life.

And so from the very beginning of life, once we got away from the hot ocean floor, we had to go to the sea surface and get lie in the sun, and we've been lying in the sun ever since.

Lucy, we're talking about the origin of life, events that happened three and a half, four billion years ago, even.

The sun was a very different star then, wasn't it?

You mentioned that it's very stable,

but in the early days, it's significantly different.

Yeah, so our sun is middle-aged now, and it's in what we call the main sequence.

So,

it is very stable.

It's not changing rapidly,

it's not getting bigger.

It's not getting smaller.

But in its early phase, it was an active star.

So and when stars are young, they're quite active and they have strong winds blowing away from them.

But now our star has settled down.

And also, you know, when Steve's talking and talking about sunlight, I'm thinking about the wavelengths of sunlight.

You know, what is sunlight?

We know, of course, that it's visible light that comes through our atmosphere, but there's a whole range of other wavelengths of light that the sun emits.

And the sun is an amazing emitter and it sends out everything from long wavelength radio all the way through the visible infrared

and then up into very short wavelength energetic parts of the spectrum.

So what's fascinating to me is that you know how humans have evolved given the light that not necessarily is the light that reaches the top of the Earth's atmosphere, but the light that comes through the atmosphere.

Because our atmosphere protects us from the most dangerous forms of sunlight, X-rays and much of the ultraviolet light.

But it's the visible light that makes it through.

And so it's fascinating to me that

we've developed in a way that we can utilise that light.

So plants and photosynthesis and the eye.

The eye, I mean,

I'm not a biologist, as you know, but I'm fascinated by the fact that the eye detects visible light.

And as an astronomer, I think about the fact that when you want to see something, when we look into the universe, we build our telescopes, you know, we want to see detail.

And the size you build your telescope depends on the wavelength of light that you're using.

So our eye is picking up visible light of, I don't know, around 700 billionths of a metre in wavelength.

So we can get away with quite a small eye to see a lot of detail.

If our atmosphere let through lots of radio

wavelengths and our eye was picking up radio wavelengths which are much longer you'd need an enormous eye of around something like 3,000 meters across to get the same kind of spatial resolution that we get with visible light.

So there's just something so clever about the way we've evolved, given the star we have on our doorstep and given the light that that star gives to us that we receive on the surface of the Earth.

Let me break in there.

You can't use a word for like clever for the way we evolve because

that suggests some kind of planning.

And

evolution and natural selection is just a series of successful mistakes.

It's an error piled upon error.

And of course, if you look at the eye, as you will know,

any camera designer who designed a camera,

in which the light goes

through the back of the film before it gets to this light-sensitive stuff, which is what the eye does, would lose his job immediately.

So the beauty of the eye to me, and to biologists in general, is what a mess it is.

And that's what frightens me about physics.

It isn't a mess.

I like things to be a mess, and the eye is a classic example of it.

Well, that is, I mean, one of the things, as you know, you've dealt with this an enormous number of times, Steve, where sometimes a creationist or intelligent design proponent will say, but how did the eye evolve?

And as you said just there, it's a very messy process, isn't it, in terms of development of light-sensitive cells and beyond?

Yes, certainly.

You know, it's almost impossible to imagine the eye evolving.

But the crucial point is almost.

You know, every one of us is an almost impossible thing.

Some of us on this panel, I have to say, appear to be more impossible than others.

Name, names.

But that's what evolution does.

It doesn't plan ahead.

It's not clever.

It just fiddles along from one generation to the next, and it comes up with beautiful objects like snails and horrible objects like human beings as a result.

Can you give us the quick review of the snail's eye?

I've just got to ask you.

Because you're one of the leading experts on snails, and it seems remiss of me not to use that.

Snail's eyes, actually, are a classic of evolution.

You can see every step in the evolution of the eye if you look at different species of different kinds of sea snail more than anything else.

The squid eye is uncannily like our eyes.

In fact it works better than our eyes.

So we can see that.

But the joy of snails is

there is so much joy of snails that I even eat them now and again.

But as I said before,

they live on a thermal cliff and they live on the ground surface most of the time.

And the dangerous place for a creature to be on a sunny day is on the surface of the ground because there's a layer of superheated air on the ground surface and they have to climb to get out of it.

But the interesting thing is if you go to the Mediterranean, you go to Perth, around the coast of Australia, you'll see millions of these little white snails climbing up on the vegetation in the summer.

And they're doing that to escape the heat of the ground.

They're a pest in Australia, actually, it's called Theba.

It's a European snail.

But it's fascinating because that was picked up by the early Christians because they thought that snails were resurrected, because

they climb up a stick in the beginning of summer around the Mediterranean, then they appear to be dead, then it rains in the autumn, and they come alive again.

And if you go to Lambeth Palace in London, there's a thing called the Resurrection Window, and it's a very beautiful, well, it should be medieval, but it was blown up in the war.

It's a copy of it.

But the resurrection window has a picture of Jesus being resurrected and going off to heaven.

And there are two snails there.

And nobody ever understood why the snails were there.

But the snails are there because they're resurrected every autumn as it rains.

And they can come down to the ground surface because the sun isn't there.

And just to finish the story, that's why we stand up.

Because when primates came down from the trees onto the ground surface, if they weren't on all fours, first of all, they'd have much more skin facing the sun.

They'd heat up more.

And also they'd be in the superheated lair.

So slowly they evolved to stand upright.

That meant we could be walk, which is a series of successful falls, one fall after another, which we stop, which turned us into fantastic hunters, which made us what we are.

So that's what the sun did.

It made us indeed everything that we are.

I have to throw this to Tim.

Tim, because Jesus Resurrection Snails.

Discuss.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, it's really exciting.

I want to see.

People are new religious.

I think you did write a song, didn't you, called Jesus Resurrection Snails?

Honestly, it it feels like it might have been a band name I had once.

But I like the idea of worshiping snails.

That sounds much smarter to me than worshiping some other dude.

Snails are pretty cool.

Snails and whales, which, by the way, is my favourite Julia Donaldson book.

Snail and the Whale.

It's absolutely beautiful and very profound.

Unfortunately, there's not a book called The Joy of Snails, which would have been a very interesting sequel to a 1970s popular top-shelf fur manual.

Well, Alex Comfort, strangely,

I once corresponded with Alex Comfort, who wrote The Joy of Sex.

And in fact, I've got what was his job at University College London now.

And I wrote to him because I was working as a PhD student on the biochemistry of snail shell pigments.

And he'd written stuff on the biochemistry of snail shell pigments.

So we corresponded back and forth.

But this was before he wrote The Joy of Sex, so I didn't realize the incredible honour which I'd got.

I've still got the postcards he sent me about snail shells.

Maybe it'll be worth something someday.

Tim, it feels like it's time for a song

if today's show by the way tim does not lead to your first ever prog album i am going to be very disappointed

there's a big narrative coming on in this one look lucy we we you alluded to the the the stability of the sun we had this climate that's been stable enough for four billion years to have an or so for to have an unbroken chain of life stretching all the way back so if we look out beyond our solar system, so the 200, 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, can you just give us an overview of

the different types of stars, but in particular

with reference to stars that you think may be stable enough to support ecosystems on the planets around them?

Yeah, I mean that's a really good question.

And what I love is that in recent years we've had some fantastic new results coming through with missions like the Kepler mission, whose main aim was to study planets transiting in front of stars.

So when it comes to, so we're talking about the light coming from our sun.

And one of the interesting things is, in addition to the fact that you've got all these different wavelengths coming and some of it makes it its way through our atmosphere and some of it doesn't, is that actually the amount of light given off by the sun varies very, very slightly over time over something that we call the solar cycle, which is an activity cycle that lasts about 11 years.

And our sun is active and the activity follows this 11 year cycle but when we looked at other Sun-like stars we saw that they were way more active, producing explosions that were thousands of times more energetic than the explosions we see in the atmosphere of our Sun.

And so therefore we could conclude that the amount of high energy ionizing dangerous radiation would likewise be much more significant in the atmosphere of these other stars.

So I think there is something in our Sun that even even though it's kind of a typical star, we may be catching it in a phase in its life where it's just not too variable and not too active, and that could be important for us.

You know, Tim, I want to ask you a serious question, actually, which is that

I find when we talk about life on Earth, and particularly that unbroken chain that's led ultimately to civilization and humanity, the more we learn, the more precarious it seems.

And I think you can make a strong argument, I'll ask Steve afterwards, but you can make a strong argument there may be one planet on average per galaxy where we have an intelligent civilization so what do you feel that way the more you learn about science that or it's more a general question should we learn more about science as a civilization in order to value ourselves more because that seems to me the way that we're led i was just thinking about that what what are the odds that we're the only intelligent life in the universe right so when i was young i didn't know much about anything

as opposed to now when I know so much.

When I was young, and I just went, well, I didn't even know,

I didn't even know there was anything really past the solar system.

I didn't really know what stars were or whatever.

And I thought there's the Earth and humans.

I had a sort of, you know, Earth-centric view of the universe.

And then as I learnt more, and I really got my head around a billion trillion stars or whatever the number was back when I first sort of conceived of it, I thought, well, there must be infinite life because that's the nature of infinity.

Even the slightest chance of a thing must repeat infinitely.

And then when I, you know, now we talk about a billion trillion stars, and that's a big number, like 10 to the 24 or whatever, right?

You start thinking, well, what are the odds?

Out of out of a billion yellow dwarfs, how many are are as consistent as ours?

And that might that number might be two or six.

So, but let's call it one.

Let's say one in a billion yellow dwarfs are as stable as ours, right?

And then let's say for every stable yellow dwarf, life spontaneously erupted one in a billion times, right?

So that's a billion, billion.

And suddenly, when you look at the odds of all these events and then surviving, not going snowball, surviving wars, surviving that bottleneck

of sapiens in Africa because of mollusks, I mean, when you multiply a tiny chance things by tiny chance things, 10 to the 24 suddenly doesn't seem enough.

I have just recently started thinking, hold on, I'm not sure it is mathematically impossible that we are the most intelligent life forms ever to exist.

And if that's the case, we should stop yelling at each other on Twitter proto.

You were, I mean, Tim, that's an interesting thing where you're talking about knowledge there.

I remember the first time talking to Lucy when talking about the work that she did.

And when Lucy, when you were talking to me about the first time of actually observing the activity of the Sun I think a solar telescope where you are suddenly seeing something which is whatever you have imagined through equations or or or through academic books that sensation of seeing something which you've been unable to imagine before

I mean, that's remarkable, isn't it?

Yeah, it is.

I mean it's it is one of those life-changing moments.

And the thing that I think is that the sun is so familiar to all of us.

You know, it's there every day consistently.

It rises in the morning, it sets in the evening.

And so we know it, but yet we don't know it because it's so dazzlingly bright we can't look at it.

And so I had this sort of transformative moment when I was, it was actually in Crimea and I was visiting an observatory there and this lady who ran the solar telescope said, oh, I'll come to my telescope and we'll have a look at the sun through a specialist filter.

And I mean, I just couldn't believe it.

This, you know, bright, dazzling thing in the sky that has been there all the time suddenly was revealed as this structured, dynamic, beautiful object, like the beauty in it.

I never expected.

And when you see the structures, and that's why I'm so thrilled now that we have, you know, public access to all the data that we're collecting.

So everybody can see that.

Everybody can see that the atmosphere of the sun is this amazingly structured gas with these beautiful loops and you know sinuous structures and and that when they erupt you know it's it's it's all the superlatives.

It's the most energetic, most powerful, biggest, fastest, all these things.

But the beauty in it is something that I think

that we should recognise and applaud too.

So much how I felt when I first went jogging with Brian.

The fastest, the most energetic.

All these years he'd been there, but I didn't realise how beautiful and energetic he was.

But then

we had a boxing match, didn't we?

Then we actually

went boxing together, yeah.

And then he saw my beauty.

Yes.

The sheer power, the ballet.

It's even harder to see.

You have to look for a long time.

And then that evening, we don't know.

Then the seagulls turned up.

Maya coronal mass ejection.

I've worked out two edit points from what you've said today, Tim, so far for the Radio 4 version.

But

Steve, I suppose.

So, Steve, the counter-argument, I suppose.

So we've talked about this potential, the rarity of our system, the system of planet and star.

But I suppose the counter-argument is that life is ingenious once it starts.

And as you've said,

it responds.

to challenges.

That's what evolution essentially is.

So I wondered what your view of the balance between

these arguments, you know, the idea that we're in some kind of Goldilocks position, that maybe

on average, one per galaxy or even one per several galaxies as Tim said or that evolution is so

well life is so robust in meeting the challenges through evolution that maybe we're not so rare

the origin of life is a very very improbable event and it's often pointed out that almost almost by magic we're in we're in the in the Goldilocks zone you know but of course we would say that because we evolved to live on this planet it is conceivable I suppose, on distant planets that life

has evolved in a totally different way.

Maybe it's a gas, okay.

Remember life used to be a gas long ago?

Maybe it's a gas, maybe it's a crystal, but it's copying itself and it's maybe changing to adapt to circumstances.

But we wouldn't recognize it as life.

And no doubt that gas or crystal is probably thinking to itself in its smug way, as we do.

Oh, isn't it marvelous?

We live in just the kind of place where life can evolve.

So my own perception, I'm very far from an expert on it, I would imagine that life of the kind that

our kind of life, what we would recognise as life, I would say we're probably a one-off, but the probably definitely comes into that sentence.

Lucy, do you think we're...

What's your perception?

So I've definitely I just ebb and flow over this.

So you know, before

I knew much at all about astrophysics, I think, oh yeah, it's it's totally a numbers game.

And I'd come at it from these large numbers and think, oh, yeah, there's billions of stars.

And what we know now is that there are even more planets in the universe than there are stars in the universe because of all these exoplanet studies.

And so that made me think, oh, it's a numbers game.

You know, I know nothing about biology.

I haven't studied that since I was about 14 years old.

So I think, of course, of course, there will be other life out there.

But now, I think the nuances of stars and their activity, and the nuances of the planets that we're finding with the varying atmospheres, varying compositions, varying distances from their star.

To be honest, I don't know anymore.

I feel God that I completely.

And I think when you stack those numbers and numbers and numbers just to talk about life having long enough to evolve to multicellular complexity

and then

And then you hit the emergence of consciousness.

As I say,

a billion trillion doesn't suddenly seem necessarily enough star systems.

Yeah.

You know, because I don't know, the emergence of consciousness seems to me freakier than the emergence of life.

Well, I mean, how do you compare them?

It's like the Beatles and Oasis.

You can compare them.

It's not that hard to compare.

Yeah, that's not a problem.

The other perspective I look from is the kind of, you know, humans being, putting themselves up on a pedestal or knocking us off the pedestal.

And that kind of ebbs and flows with this as well.

So I'm kind of drawn to the the numbers that lead to us not being the only intelligent life that emerged because I'm sort of wanting us not not to be special in some way because that you know that affects our own psychology yeah

it would be such a pity if this is as special as it is

that's not something that's meant to be true if the greatest intelligence in the universe sat in its ug boots looking at Twitter.

It's so depressing.

Don't tell me that's not true.

I mean, I wanted to move this on because I know we're getting a little bit, you know, close, close to the end of the show, but one of the reasons that we decided to do the sun in this particular series was we were thinking during the lockdown, certainly in the UK, one of the fortunate things was that it had been very good weather.

That I think that when you are actually, you're in an enclosed space, to have that sense of light, to have that sense of sunshine, I think has had some benefit when people have been facing a lot of anxiety and difficulty.

So we wanted to kind of talk about, and I wanted to talk to you first of all, Tim, about this, which is that sense of sunlight when you get a cloudless day.

Sorry, that's, I think actually a live again from one of your songs, but when you do get a cloudless day, when you get the sunshine, that does seem to enhance humanity.

It doesn't merely seem to be some kind of hippie idea

that, oh yeah, the sun's ready.

That it really does change you psychologically.

And I wondered about for you personally, creatively, whether you find that does have an effect on you.

I don't know.

It depends what you're aiming for because a sunshiny day might make you write a sunshiny song, and that's not necessarily what you want.

But I do,

I'm absolutely sure, or at least it seems obvious to me, that

the physics, the biology of us that requires sunlight, exactly what Steve was talking about, that

really

our relationship with the Sun is the true origin of life and is consistent through all

living things.

I mean, I wrote a whole musical that uses the rising and the setting of the sun, and

you know, based on Groundhog Day, that talks about a day as a life, and that the sun is the beginning of, you know, the rising of the sun has always been birth.

That's why East is called East, because it's where East from Egg, isn't it?

Oostra, whatever.

You know, like the Sun coming up has always been birth, and the Sun going down has always been death.

I mean, we have a profound metaphorical, physical, intuitive relationship with the sun.

And it is definitely, when I lived in the UK for eight years, it is cold, you know, you talk about sort of geopsychology or whatever, the culture of the UK is affected without doubt in my mind by this

depression that settles over you all when you're just a month after Christmas and you're thinking oh god are we still is the sun still going down at four o'clock you know and that affects your culture in good ways.

It makes you more creative and maybe write more books and study more snails or whatever.

But also in bad ways, in which you do definitely have a sort of society-wide depression which sits on you for a month or two.

But then the spring comes and you have this joy, which I haven't seen in Australia because

we don't have the,

it is not withheld from us, so we don't have the ejaculation, you know.

If that's all radio for yeah, I mean, it's interesting that George Harrison, when he wrote Here Comes the Sun, that was after the winter of 68, 69, which was the coldest and grisliest winter of the century, up to then.

And he says, you know, the sun came out and he went, he picked up a guitar and wrote, Here Comes the Sun.

My God, I wish I could do that.

But there's an interesting, you know, what you're saying is correct.

The sun does, of course, cheer you up.

And as I mentioned at the beginning, I spent 10 years living in Edinburgh.

And if you think a London winter is grim,

try a Scottish winter.

But it cheers you up for reasons we understand now.

Because if you go out on a beautiful sunny day, let's say in Edinburgh, which is an extraordinarily beautiful city, and the sun's out, you think to yourself, oh God, this is such a delightful place, I'll stay here.

But then

the next summer days, of course, three months later.

But we now know that what the sun actually does, if you go into the sun,

it actually generates mood hormones in your skin.

Serotonin is one of them.

And it changes your mood physically through these hormones.

And there's a very bizarre paper

to do with sunbeds, which I was reading the other week,

where people lie on sunbeds.

And sunbeds are really big in the USA, much more so than they are in Britain.

And probably don't, I'm sure you don't need them in Australia.

And some people, women more than men, really become dependent on these sunbeds.

Addicted.

Yeah, they become addicted.

And

the people who did this work were concerned about the health effects because they're powerful, penetrating ultraviolet light in these American sunbeds.

So they did an experiment where they said to, let's say, 100 sunbed users, okay, we'll pay for you to go on our sunbeds for a week.

And we want you to describe your feelings about our sunbeds, whether they're working or not, whether they're doing anything for you.

And the cunning trick was to doctor half the sunbeds so they only made bright, visible light and no ultraviolet.

So people lay on the sunbeds, and within two minutes,

the people on the experimental sunbeds said, Hang on a minute, there's something wrong with this sunbed.

It's not doing anything for me.

And you can go further and you can use drugs that block these mood hormones and opioid drugs that block the hormones.

And if you put them on a proper sunbed with their hormones, with the drugs that block these joy hormones, they don't enjoy the sunbed.

So the sun, literally as well as metaphorically, makes your day.

I'm going to make my moody teenager who won't go outside watch this.

She'll make me buy her a bloody Sunday.

But it's a remarkable fact that British teenagers now

go outside for one hour a day less than they did just 10 years ago.

And lots of British teenagers are deficient in vitamin D as a result.

And that, of course, is the mobile phone culture.

You don't need to go out anymore.

And people, you know, people in the medical business are very concerned about it.

But I don't know what we do.

Move to Australia, I would say.

Well, we say, I just wanted to say that the last line of your book, which I think is very beautiful, and so I wrote it down and it sums up what we've been talking about.

You say, given the role of the sun's rays in health, in happiness, in memory, in food, in water, in the shape of the world around us, and in our very existence, its behavior in the next few decades should become a topic of almost as much interest to men and women as it has long been to snails.

A wonderful way to end.

Right, so we also asked the audience a question.

And today's question was: In the film Sunshine, scientific advisor Brian Cox, the dying sun is restarted by a nuclear bomb.

Have you got any better ideas?

So these are the answers that we had.

My favourite, to tee you up, Robin.

Rolly Horwood said, get Brian Blessed to shout at it.

For heaven's sake, keep shining, you bastard.

Keep bloody shining.

Sounds people, I really pulled back from my mic at that point.

It's a weird thing because I haven't been touring and because I've generally been in my attic room, I have not done any

impersonations of Brian Blessed for a long time.

And I forgot how happy it makes me feel.

Anyone who is, I promise you, Tim, if you are looking for a way sometimes to think, I'm feeling a bit bleak, you'd go, oh, don't be so bloody miserable, it really,

really picks you up on the bus.

I'll just ring you and get you to do it.

You ring anytime you want day or night I'm ready my the rest of my family might be surprised and my neighbours but hey that's the cost of it sometimes this is nice coprolite 9000 now there's a name says have an enormous dung beetle kick it about the sky a bit

the

I love that

throw in a throw in a strawberry

hit it the Tyler says hit it with focus light from a nearby star using a giant magnifying glass from orbit so that we can also use that enormous eye that's eventually going to evolve.

That Lucy was going to be a little bit more expensive.

Lucy, Lucy, would that work?

Well, I mean,

you need temperature, but you need density too to make these interactions probable.

So maybe blast it.

And also, you need fuel.

Oh, so it depends why the sun stopped shining.

If there's not enough hydrogen, shove some hydrogen in, heat it up, compress it.

That's basically what a star does.

I've never heard the restarting of a star described in such a beautiful, one-is-fun Delia Smith way at the same time as well.

Just slap a bit of hydrogen in, off you go.

There we go.

Take the sun straight out of the oven, you're done.

Lovely job.

My favourite was James Arnold put 50p in the meeting.

Next week, next week, we actually still have no idea what a show will be about.

So what we thought is using Brian Cox's knowledge of probability and inputting the information that we've already done shows on, the end of the universe, black hole, space archaeology and exploration and the sun, what does your android brain predict, Brian?

Physics.

Right.

Well,

snails.

I want to do chimpanzees, so we'll find out which equation is correct next week.

Oh, we could do 2001 then.

To compromise.

Yes, a little bit, both.

Physics and chimps.

Well, I'll tell you what, I'll ask Jane Goodall, and I'll see which one she wants.

I did mention we got Jane Goodall on next week, did I not?

Oh, okay, anyway.

So I think she'll probably go with the chimpanzees.

Anyway, thanks very much, everyone, for listening.

And as we've said, next week, Jane Goodall.

Bye-bye.

cage without your trousers in the infinite monkey cage

till now nice again

hi i'm catherine bellhorse and i'm sarah keywords we're comedians separately and a couple together and we're the host of you'll do the podcast that gives you a little insight into perfectly imperfect love yeah forget nights in with this one and hashtag couples goals.

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