The Infinite Monkey Cage - Apocalypse

Episode Date: November 15, 2010

Physicist Brian Cox and comedian Robin Ince return for the third series of the witty, irreverent science show. In the first episode of the series, Brian and Robin are joined by comedian Andy Hamilton to discuss some of the wackier apocalyptic theories, as well as those more grounded in science fact. Did the Mayans know something that we didn't with their prediction of global annihilation in 2012, or should we be focusing our energies and scientific know-how on some of the more likely scenarios, from near earth asteroids, through to climate change and deadly pandemics, or even the more long term possibilities of our sun burning out....although we have got roughly another 5 billion years to ponder the challenge of that problem. Recorded in front of an audience at the Drill Hall in London.

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To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio4. Welcome back to the Infinite Monkey Cage. I'm Brian Cox. And I'm Robert Ince, and we're back for four more programmes, and this time for the whole series, we will have an audience. In fact, we have an audience before us who will make a small noise just to show that they are here. Since we were last on air, I've written a paper on extracting the Higgs boson couplings at LHC using a central jet veto and broken the sound barrier in an inverted dive

from 40,000 feet in a Hawker Hunter. And I've played to a very disappointingly small audience at the El Giva Theatre in Chesham and I had food poisoning for six hours and trained from Newton Abbot to Ilkley. Yes, your glamorous life, but have you had a contaminated fish stick? Have you been sick anywhere recently?

Yeah, whilst filming in the high Bolivian Andes. OK, there we are. But why do we care about illness? What a small thing the illness of the body is, because today we ask, is the apocalypse upon us and can science save us? Whether we like it or not, the end of the world is nigh. But when is nigh? As Carl Sagan almost said,

in five billion years, the sun will swell to a red giant, engulfing Mercury and Venus and eventually gobbling up the Earth. And look who's this coming down the street. It's my old friend Richard Feynman. He was ridiculous. This show is originally going to be called Can the Human Race Survive the End of the Solar System? And Will We Ever Get That Far?

But I know the answer to half of it, as usual, so I'm going to re called can the human race survive the end of the solar system and will we ever get that far but i know the answer to half of it as usual so i'm going to rephrase that yes the human race could survive into the indefinite future if it would only embrace science and reason rather than new age drivel and superstition but given that it probably won't then how far can it reasonably be expected to get ah you say you understand most things. Dark energy, no evidence, a load of old rubbish. So we have a panel of experts to help us out today and hopefully avoid the apocalypse. In the Hollywood movie version of the approaching apocalypse, he'll be played by Jeff Goldblum, who will insist on adding a monocle to make the character more believable. Science writer and broadcaster Adam Rutherford.

And in the British film version of Armageddon, she'll be played by Helena Bonham Carter in 18th Century Lace. It's solar scientist Dr Lucy Green. And in the British film version of Armageddon, she'll be played by Helena Bonham Carter in 18th Century Lace. It's solo scientist Dr Lucy Green. And in the French film version of The End Times, in a stunning bit of miscasting because he insisted on it, he'll be played by Catherine Deneuve. It's writer, performer and occasional polymath, Andy Hamilton.

Andy, firstly, whatever happened and did they ever exist, to the man with the End Is Nigh signs? Oh, yeah. I think I've got a vague memory of an End Is Nigh man who used to walk around the West End when I was younger. I don't know where he is. Well, he'd be dead, probably.

He's got Toll You on the back. I mean... Yeah, I don't know, because they're in cartoons. He had End Is Nigh signs, and I was at the cartoon museum the't know, because they're in cartoons. I think he had Endless Nice signs and I was at the cartoon museum the other day and also flashes in coats like that. I don't know, were they real? They were, good. Thank you very much.

What a nostalgic memory, where have they all gone? Adam, I want to come to you for a considered scientific opinion. Let's go straight to the heart of the matter. 2012, it's in the news, it's all over the web. What's go straight to the heart of the matter. 2012, it's in the news, it's all over the web. What's your opinion on 2012? You're referring to the Mayan prophecy that in 2012 the world will cease to exist. So it's derived from this calendar and the 144,000 day

cycles that the Mayan calendar was based on. 2012, 21st of December 2012 to be specific, is the end of the cycles. But there is no prediction in Mayan history, of which we know very little, that anything is going to happen at the end of it. It's like nothing happens on June the 23rd. But some conspiracy theorists believe that something tragic like the magnetic poles of the earth will reverse, which does happen and has happened many times in the history of the earth, it tends to happen over about 10,000 years. Would it matter if the poles reverse? No, it wouldn't matter at all. How would it affect me?

I know this is the BBC but it's not one of those, how have you been affected by the apocalypse? There will be a hotline. At the end of the programme. So how would it manifest itself? It won't at all. We know that the pole is moving anyway currently at a end of the programme. So how would it manifest itself? It won't at all. And so we know that the pole is moving anyway, currently at a rate of about 20 kilometres a year.

The poles do actually move continuously through the Earth cycle because there's a lot of iron in the centre of the Earth and that is moving. See, I'm very impressed by the speed in which you've actually gone from 2012 to real science. Because I was going to say, Andy, I get a sense with the 2012 thing that perhaps book sales are more important than rationalism or facts. Yeah. They are cutting the Olympic funding bit by bit. I think they're secretly thinking that's a waste of money.

Apocalypse 2012. Now, you have actually been to a Mayan temple, haven't you? Yeah. And something excellent happened there. Well, excellent in my mind, if you could draw the picture. Robin's referring to the time that i climbed up up the mayan temple at chechnya nitsa which is an easy thing to do it's a step for me did you manage to get down no i i developed a fear of height i did spooky ever since that was where i started being conscious about heights it's astonishingly steep. I know.

My wife led me down, sort of like some blind cripple. I came down on my bottom. I shuffled down. You know, like a little kid who can't walk down the stairs. Can we just... Sorry, let's not move on too quickly from that. Let's all think of sexy, sexy Brian Cox. And everyone, oh, look, there's Brian Cox. Oh, going down a temple on his bottom.

I don't know if this is some kind of atheist agenda. Whether actually... Good comment on the 2012 myth. But, I mean, the real question... So the Maya were actually interesting, weren't they? I mean, they were excellent astronomers. I'm going to ask Lucy if there is anything interesting, astronomically speaking, in 2012. Well, there could be.

See? And this is something that the media has really picked up on, is when the sun will be at its next peak of activity. So the sun has this cycle where the sunspot number rises and falls these dark spots on the surface, but also things like explosions and eruptions that happen in the sun's atmosphere follow this cycle too and so we're currently using our models to predict when the next peak of activity will happen and the first calculation showed us that

it will indeed be around 2012 so that really got jumped on and so the thing that i keep reading in the paper is that the sun will unleash the big one in 2012, and it will wipe us out. Just like the Mayan calendar and the end of days has been shifted forward 60 days, we refined our models of the sun, and now we think solar maximum will happen around 2013, 2014. The big one is going to be unleashed in 2013 instead and wipe us all out. Yes. What are the consequences? What do you mean so the sun has um different kinds of activity and the one that is most important

happens to be the one that i study actually and it's called a chronomass ejection and these are huge eruptions of magnetic field from the sun's atmosphere carries with it mass plasma which has about the same mass as mount everest so huge things they expand very rapidly and when they hit the earth the magnetic field of this structure from the sun interacts with the magnetic field of the earth and it causes a huge range of effects driving the northern lights is the most beautiful manifestation but it could also be that your satellite navigation becomes blind other satellites themselves are affected so actually I was looking back to see some of the effects that the sun has had on us over the years and i started to feel a bit sorry for canada because in 1989 i was just drawn to this in 1989 we had one of these coronal mass ejections that hit the earth

interacted with our magnetic field and induced huge currents in the earth system so they flow through the atmosphere making the northern lights and So they flow through the atmosphere, making the northern lights, and then they flow through the rocks, or they flow through our electricity networks, which is the path of least resistance for them. And in 1989, part of the Canadian national grid was wiped out. Six million people lost their electricity, and it cost them over £1 billion to get the system back up again.

And then I was reading in 1994 two canadian telecommunication satellites were taken out by an event from the sun and one took six months to recover at a cost of 40 million pounds and these are just two of hundreds and hundreds of events that happen on the earth driven by the sun and see that's all very good looking at the big picture but i still want to know how's that going to affect andy well presumably if we had one now i mean we're much more reliant now i mean it would would it cook sort of all the computer networks and well it could take out infrastructure that we rely on so the electricity our weather forecasts if you believe the weather forecast they all rely on satellites so that data would be affected

satellite navigation in your cars, actually, this is the one that people keep talking about. Well, that woman would get less cocky then. That was all predicted by the Maya, was it? It's not exactly the end of days, though, is it? Getting lost with your satellite.

It could be if you drive into a river. Hang on, you're not actually saying that you've gone insane. I mean, you're saying that what one hopes, and I have to admit I am losing less confidence in humanity, is people who go I might stop listening to that thing. It seems to be leading me to a river. This is technology, it's the only thing I can

trust. Well, you can hope, but I tell you what, I reckon it's a 50-50. We're talking about the sun though, but we talk about these kind of things, but actually the sun itself ultimately isn't... The destiny, as we mentioned at the beginning, is in approximately five billion years' time, it's the end for the Earth anyway, isn't it?

The end pretty much for our solar system. Yeah, that's right. So the sun only has a finite lifetime because it's fusing hydrogen into helium in its core, and that's what is providing its power. So once that hydrogen is gone, the sun will go out. So, you know, the sun will die, just like all the other stars in the universe.

Andy, why do you think... I'm just feeling really sad. It's not just the sun, it's all the stars in the universe. Eventually. You're thinking about property pricing, aren's all the stars in the universe. Eventually. You're thinking about property pricing, aren't you? I am, yeah. Why do you think, Andy, people are so morbidly fascinated by the apocalypse? Well, I mean, every culture seems to have an apocalyptic myth, doesn't it?

And what's odd about them as well, I was thinking about this the other day, is that they all have this, I mean, a lot of it's obviously based in religion, but they all have this slightly kinky element in a way, which is that apocalypses are sort of like a form of punishment, really, almost like the universe is, you know, visiting correction on us and sort of doesn't really approve of us being here. Yeah, I mean, I do think, Adam, there does seem to be an anti-science element to this. correction on us and sort of doesn't really approve of us being here yeah i mean do you think adam that there's a there does seem to be an anti-science element to this well it's not

rational if that's what you're asking and the reason we can tell it's not rational is because every single apocalyptic theory in history up to date has not happened yet and at some point it's like ghost hunters at some point they surely should turn around and say, do you know what, I think we've got enough data. So I counted that there were more than 60 in 2006 alone. How about that? Well, you mean not to humans. I mean, there are mass extinctions all the time.

That's absolutely right. In fact, mass extinction is the planetary norm, and that's something that is not really well understood in popular culture. There have been extinctions throughout the history of life on Earth. And in fact, and I love this stat, 97% of species that have ever existed currently don't. Why do you love it? Well, it's just because it shows how tiny we are in the grand scheme of things.

Everything that has ever existed, which is all intricately linked together through Darwinian evolution, almost all of it doesn't exist anymore. I'm excited, though. You said, currently don't. Does that mean... Much like the pulp comeback I've been hearing about, are we going to have...

..a brachiosaurus? Good to have you back, yeah. I haven't got all the guys. This isn't the original Dictadocus, I apologise. LAUGHTER Good to have you back, yeah. I haven't got all the guys. This isn't the original Dippin' the Docus. I apologise. I think that's perfectly plausible in the long term. I'm just looking forward for the day they get dodo's back. I just want to know what they taste like.

Dodo pasty. They're going to be so angry if they come back, aren't they? Imagine, they're going to be cross. Dodo's. And still looking at themselves and going, I'm cross and ridiculous. The worst mixture of what that going to be cross, those days. And still looking at themselves and going, I'm cross and ridiculous. The worst picture of what that used to be. Well, in fact, because something that, for my generation anyway,

dinosaurs, they didn't actually know how they, until I think, probably, was it the early 1980s, they came up with, as far as I know still, the best current theory is that an asteroid hit the Earth. Is that right, that that would still be... In fact, it was only this year that that was confirmed as being the consensus view. But even so, we think about a great big apocalyptic event like a meteorite, which was probably 20 kilometres wide and leaves a 110-kilometre diameter crater in the Earth. We think of that as being an immediate and terrifying event, which it is. But in

fact, the extinction that it caused lasted up to 40,000 years. So even this apocalypse and the global, the geological time scale is still relatively slow. You know, four times longer than human history. They found dinosaurs that were 40,000 years after

the point where this meteorite landed. Now something I know our producer wanted to know is if the dinosaurs died out, why are there alligators? That's what she said, and I want to know as well. It's a perfectly reasonable question, and the answer is we don't know. Oh, dark energy, alligators, is there anything you people know? So there are lots of quirksks it's uneven because we know that almost all of the large marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs got wiped out but

sharks didn't they're the same size and probably had a similar level in the food chain all of the dinosaurs got wiped out but similar size reptiles like the crocodilians like alligators didn't get wiped out so there's all sorts of things that we can't work out about what happened 65 million years ago, and alligators is one of them. But Lucy, there's a tendency to think of asteroid impacts as either Hollywood or something that happened in the past, isn't there? But I suppose in the list of things that could cause a mass extinction

and remove humans from the Earth, asteroids would be, what, top? I think it would be. It's top, and I think it's my favourite way to go as well. Because you can choose how you want to die with an asteroid impact. I mean, it is going to happen. Every day we're hit by 100 tonnes of space debris. Mostly it's in the form of dust.

But we will be hit by something big in the future. There are big objects out there. And, you know, if you're really unlucky, it would land straight on your head and squash you if you're you know maybe next in line if you're near the site you might be burnt as this huge amount of energy is given up and cause its fires or if it lands in the ocean it might create a tsunami and you might drown or like you were saying the food chain could collapse as all this stuff comes up into the atmosphere and circulates around the globe by the wind system and blocks out the sunlight.

So there are so many different ways you can go. So you get to choose by just travelling to a different place. I'm going to go to Mallorca because that will be a famine event rather than a tsunami. Do you know what? I think if you can't travel when there's a volcano, I'd be very surprised if you can travel when there's an asteroid. when there's a volcano, I'd be very surprised if you could travel when there's an asteroid. How much notice would we get of an asteroid? I mean, I think

Brian's right. I think there's a gap in the market for asteroid tourism. Because if it's a month, you might as well pick your venue, mightn't you? Well, that's right. And people are looking. So NASA are looking. But you might be surprised to hear that the Brits are looking as well. And even at the National Space Center in Leicester, they have a near-Earth object center where they're looking for bits of space rock that could hit us.

I mean, in the movies, it's portrayed as something that's like a fiery ball that comes very slowly through the atmosphere and then takes out Paris. I think it's normally the place it's taken out at the moment. But in reality, these things are travelling extremely fast, and so this thing would slam through, and you'd kind of go, oh, what? And by that point, it would have caused chaos. So we probably will have no warning. So, yes, I said that we are looking for them, but the thing is, when we look in the night sky

at something that doesn't give off its own light, these things are dark, they're really hard to see. So you try and track them as they move against the star's background but if something is coming straight for you that's really hard to see which are the problem ones in general yes so from a help i mean in in deep impact bruce willis lands on an asteroid with a couple of mates troubled by his relationship with his daughter, I think.

Can't remember the plot that well. But they attach rockets to it, don't they? And is that right? Or they blow it up? Do they blow it up? That's Armageddon. Oh, is it? But the very worst thing you can do

is blow it up. Because if you blow it up, then you've got a shotgun effect coming towards your planet. So from a health and safety point of view, what you really do is attach, I mean, I'm not a scientist, so, but if you attach

rockets to the asteroid, can't you just steer all the asteroids to a safer part of the universe that wouldn't... Surely that's what we should be investing public money in. A burst of magnetism from the sun and then the sat-nav on the rockets goes away

and the whole thing is just... We are actually investing money in that. I mean, NASA have got a telescope on Hawaii, haven't they? They're trying to map... See, they're all in orbit. The ones that are really problematic are the ones that aren't, so comets that come in from the outer solar system and you don't see them, and by the time they get here, that's it. But the near-Earth asteroids are in orbit around the sun.

And so we track them. And I think we have... What's the plan? To get them all? All the near-Earth asteroids above a certain size by 2015 or 2016, I think it is. And then you can predict when they may come round. And one of the plans, which sounds even more ridiculous than Armageddon, is to just paint it black one side of it.

Because all you have to do is alter its orbit very slightly, and it misses the Earth very slightly. And so one thing you can do is cause one side of it to absorb more sunlight than the other. Paint it black? Yeah, on one side. And that will give it enough kick, because it absorbs a little bit more sunlight.

That's quite a tricky painting job, isn't it? That's a lot of trestle tables. It's easier than it sounds. I'll get more than one quote on that one, definitely. It's easier than it sounds. I'll give you that. You've got to land on it with a paintbrush, which is the tricky bit. It was Carl Sagan, wasn't it? You should do it in your voice.

He said if the dinosaurs had had a space programme, they'd still be around. Yeah. If the dinosaurs still had a space programme they'd still be around yeah if the dinosaur is still had a space program be crumbly but delicious sorry i'm mixing up my favorite car segment so something that i want to find out after uh we're going to come back to some of these ideas but before that one of the complaints that we've had uh about the show is a lack of mathematical content uh people saying it's biological it's cosm cosmological, where's the maths? And so, to stop people whining, and I apologise, by the way, for stopping you whining,

because I know you like it. I shouldn't have said, I know you like it, like that. That suggests an entirely different subplot in my life, and a woman who I've kept in a well. So, we have decided that, yes, we have biological, we have cosmological, but it's time for the mathematical, and so we have a new regular contributor. The world of stand-up mathematics does not always go hand in hand, but one man dares to combine the two.

Please welcome stand-up mathematician Matt Parker. We've just heard that apparently the world's going to end on the 21st of December 2012 because the Mayan calendar's coming to a close. But why is the end of a calendar causing people to predict the end of the world? I mean, the old computer date calendar came to a close in 2000, and that didn't... OK, bad example. But why the Mayans? What's so great about their calendar?

Sure, they're an ancient and mysterious civilization, but their calendar is actually rubbish. For a start, the photos are dreadful. They're all just pictures of low-resolution pyramids. But the actual... That's funnier than you're giving it credit, by the way. The actual calendar, they have 18 months each of 20 days. And as some of you I know have already worked out,

that's only 360 days. It's over five days short of a full solar year. And people are using this to predict the end of the world. It can't even predict the end of a year. I think we should use a better calendar. Like a true nerd, I think we should be using the Unix calendar. And more people know what that is than I expected. As you already know, I'm just repeating it, Unix time.

All computers keep track of the date and the time by simply counting the number of seconds since midnight at the beginning of 1970, the dawn of the nerd epoch. And at the moment, we keep it as 32-bit time, so 32 ones and zeros keeping track. And that's going to run out in the year 2038, just like the Mayan calendar. They had their 18 months of 20 days. They put those in groups of 20. They put those in groups of 20. And that went to a group of 13, which is what runs out in 2012.

But we've now fixed Unix time. It's now 64-bit. And that's not going to run out until the 4th of December in the year 292,277... Please, I've memorised this. 77,026,596. You can check that on Wikipedia. And for the record, it's a Sunday. And given that's long after the Earth would have been subsumed by the sun,

I think my prediction of the end of the world is much more reliable. Thank you very much, guys. Very quickly, we made a little list. In fact, I went on Twitter and I asked people their favourite apocalyptic vision from the movies and from television. And I wanted to find out from a panel of scientists, and you, Andy, as well, which ones are likely. Now, The Road was a terrifying film in which all life has ended apart from human life. So, Adam, what is the likelihood of that? That's extremely unlikely.

Life is incredibly tenacious, and we're not a very successful species, to be honest. We haven't been around that long. We haven't even clocked up a good 500,000 years. On the other hand, we're very adaptable. We're probably the most adaptable species that's ever existed. I think the solution to the apocalypse for us is to live off-world. If we're really going to screw this planet up,

let's set up shop somewhere else. Have you seen The Road, Andy? No. It's very good. It's about a man who's trying to get a pound back on his shopping trolley. And he goes on a big journey. It's not like The Road to Hong Kong. There's no Bob Hope in it.

I found it a little bit of a downer. Lucy, my question for you. Planet of the Apes. Somehow humanity seems to pretty much not exactly destroy itself but we have a change in evolution and eventually the other primates take over and are in charge from orangutans chimpanzees etc well i i do like to think that we are going to be taken over by some other species on the earth sometimes i think we're the smartest we get men into space we do amazing things but then other times i think that we're really not that

smart and we're going to end up blowing ourselves up and the animals will be left when we won't be the most indestructible are the insects aren't they and we're after the nuclear testing that they did in the 50s the life forms they found that hadn't flourished but had done all right were were beetles and stuff like that? There are more species of beetles than there are of any other type of animal on Earth. There are more bacteria than anything else that's ever existed. So if the apocalypse comes and we can look at it impartially, it's going to be beetles and bugs.

Planet of the beetles doesn't sound like it. Ron, have you got a favourite vision of the apocalypse? Obviously, you've worked on a reasonably apocalyptic movie as well. I thought you were going to talk about the Large Hadron Collider, then. No, we'll get round to you and your plans for the world. All these tiny little black holes sucking us away like leeches. Is that what happens? Have I confused my science there?

When I say my science, a loose collection of ideas from Look and Learn, 1978. Yes. Yeah, I did work on Sunshine, which was an almost apocalyptic movie. Apocalyptic at the box office, it turned out. But a Danny Boyle's film, which I liked,

but that was, The Sun was, Lucy, you can verify the scientific accuracy of this, The Sun was going wrong and we sent a mission to fix it.

Going wrong? It was broken. It was never specified how. Did they try switching it off and switching it on? I liked the imagery in that film. Well, we've got from the audience how they think the world will end. We have, with credits followed by outtakes, which I think is...

Oh, you'll love this one, Cox. Large Hadron Collider becomes sentient Skynet style. So you haven't thought of that, have you? It's one thing, the mini black holes, but, oh, well. Bruce Willis turns out to have been a ghost all along. Bruce Willis turns out to have been a ghost all along. And I should say, can we add spoiler alert before I say that? Because this is entirely true.

On Twitter yesterday, someone unfollowed me because I'd given away the fact Godot doesn't turn up in Waiting For Godot. That's entirely true. I was going to see this in January. Now you've ruined it, considering you were so unfollowed. So there we are. You were right on that one, because you didn't say what Bruce Willis movie it refers to. Oh, yeah, Sixth Sense.

The LH... Oh, you can read that one. Not again. The LHC will cause a black hole which will suck us all into an evil parallel universe where we have to start anew. So that wasn't an apocalypse. No. That was just transport. A lot of hope.

Yeah, we just moved into a parallel universe, so that's not too bad. So there we are. Thank you very much. We still haven't got round to the big crunch, which I'm told may well be a help, not a hindrance, but you can look that up on the internet. Find out for yourselves, for heaven's sake. So, before the approaching apocalypse, we've just got time to thank our guests, Andy Hamilton, Adam a hindrance, but you can look that up on the internet. Find out for yourselves, for heaven's sake. So, before the approaching apocalypse,

we've just got time to thank our guests, Andy Hamilton, Adam Rutherford, Lucy Green and Matt Parker. And just before the end of the show, we'd like to apologise again for the lack of editorial balance in only using science and reason to inform our debate. But I would personally like to assure you all that I'll be broadcasting a shamanistic Yuletide special in which I will be curing the lame using a magic memory drink

I've made out of roots, herbs and things lying around in my winter solstice-aligned shed. Weed killery, but delicious. But don't worry, because as long as we choose the right type of apocalypse, we all go together when we go., we all go together when we go. And we will go together when we go. For what in the world is that in snow? Universal bereavement, an inspiring achievement.

Yes, we all will go together. If you've enjoyed this programme, you might like to try other Radio 4 podcasts, including Start the Week, lively discussions chaired by Andrew Marr, and a weekly highlight from Radio 4's evening arts programme, Front Row. To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio4. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th.

Terms and conditions apply. In our new podcast, nature answers rural stories from a changing planet. We are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts.