The Infinite Monkey Cage - Can Science Save Us?

Episode Date: July 28, 2014

Can Science Save Us?Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined on stage by Stephen Fry, Eric Idle, chemist and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University, Professor Tony Ryan, and University of London solar scientist, Dr Lucie Green, as they ask: "can science save us?" They'll be looking at some of the fantastic ideas at the very forefront of science and technology that are being looked at to help in tackling some of the biggest challenges facing our planet, from climate change, to feeding our ever expanding global population.

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 for the 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. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio. Enjoy it. Hello, I'm Robin Ince, and I have read more Deepak Chopra than the man sitting next to me. About two sentences and one more tweet. I'm Brian Cox and I'm the least likely person on this show

to say, quantum healing is healing the body mind from a quantum level. Our body's ultimately a field of information, intelligence and energy. And yet off air, that is all he goes on about. The thing about morphic resonance is I realise that I am not a new

scientist, but merely made from the memories of the atoms of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton. I will sue. Oh! I will sue. My dog knows when I'm coming home. It can smell my Timothee.

I will sue. I will sue. You can sue me. I need my career to have a lift. So, er... Today, we're asking, can science save us? And indeed, should science save us? Yes, it can and no.

Right, there we go. That's the whole show dealt with again very quickly. So, there was a monk who once said to Richard Feynman, and we don't quote monks enough on our predominantly rationalist science show, but there was a monk who once said to Richard Feynman that the keys to heaven also open the gates to hell, which is a terrible security system, by the way. You'd think a deity

would come up with something better than that, to be honest. In other words, might our ever-deepening knowledge of the workings of nature also lead to our downfall, or might it be the only route to our survival? Right, well, we know the answer to that, but for BBC

regulations, we're not allowed to say. So, hopefully our panel also know the answer to that, but for BBC regulations, we're not allowed to say. So, hopefully, our panel also know the answer, so let them introduce themselves. Hello, I'm Stephen Fry. I'm from Five Minutes in the Future. And I would save the world... Well, as I told you five minutes ago. I would save the world...

There are a lot of people like me who have slightly more adipose deposit than is necessary. And there are plenty of need... There's a huge need for more energy. So we just need a way of siphoning the fat out of people like me and burning it. And I think, you know, just the Midwest of America alone could fuel the rest of the world for at least a decade

while we worked on nuclear fusion. So that's my solution to saving the world. You can't be from five minutes in the future due to the hyperbolic geometry of space-time. No, the reason you can't be from any time in... Oh, hang on. It's hyperbolic. It's a minus sign in the metric.

Yeah, all right. OK, I'm from five minutes in the past, as I'm about to tell you. Hello, I'm Tony Ryan. I'm a pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Sheffield, and I'd like to save the world by convincing the people that the planet will do just fine without them. Just as a matter of interest, you're a pro-Vice-Chancellor. Is there such a thing as an amateur Vice-Chancellor?

Could I apply? Believe me, I have lots of colleagues who are amateur Vice-Chancellors. This is the best panto audience we've ever had. He always said something against humans. I'm turning on this. You can't be from Sheffield because of the hyperbolic nature of Spenner. Hello, I'm Lucy Green. I'm a solar scientist at UCL. I can't promise to save the world, even if from the sun, but in that case, I will know about it eight minutes before everybody else.

Now, that's correct. eight minutes before everybody else. Now, that's correct. I'm Eric Idle. I am a cellographer, and I would save the world by Tuesday. And this is our panel! Yay!

So, Stephen, for the purposes of argument, I'm going to assume that science is synonymous with knowledge. Mm-hm. It does come from the Latin skire, to know. Absolutely. I knew that. Did I? I don't know. I'm justified in doing so. But talk about knowledge, first of all. Is knowledge always a good thing?

Well, Alexander Pope says little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Drink deep or sit not from the Perenian spring. The Perenian spring. It goes on to say, yeah, exactly. The wonderful subject we are really in is epistemology. And don't take the piss out of it, because then it would just become etymology, which is the science of words, which is quite interesting.

I think we're in the age of entitlement, where people are proud of not knowing everything. That's true. But knowledge... No, you're absolutely right. I mean, it's the first thing, if you read philosophy at university, probably the first thing you study is whether or not it is possible to know something. And it sounds like a kind of game that you play because to all intents and purposes, we know things.

And to all intents and purposes, we know things at a very basic level. In science, people say, oh, you know, quantum means that nothing is certain, the uncertainty principle and the fuzziness of reality. But to be honest, you know, Ronnie O'Sullivan can become a millionaire on the basis of very basic Newtonian mechanics by potting a ball into a pocket, and he doesn't need to know quantum mechanics

to work out the angles to get the ball in. And I think to worry about knowledge is probably a very bad thing, don't you? Well, this is the... This is the point of the show. Well, I wonder, I think you did a degree in English, didn't you? I did, yes. Yes, me too, so I get into a lot of trouble from him.

And Brian does kind of say, you know, science is knowledge, and that knowledge is science, and he kind of mixes those two things up. Do you ever find it slightly annoying that there are some scientists who do just go, well, all knowledge is basic, as long as it's experiment and these kind of things, then it's scientific knowledge. The rest of the stuff is just conjecture and poetry.

Yeah, the rest of the stuff is life, because you don't know people you're married to or what they're thinking. I mean, that's one of the most extraordinary things about human beings, is that you're seeing their faces, but you have no idea what they're thinking. And that's some kind of knowledge, isn't it? I mean, at least we went into Freud to try and understand that. But there's much more knowledge than is in science, I believe. That's too hippie.

I did like that we don't really... You actually said, we don't know who we're married to, which created a very interesting image in the... I know you've lived on the West Coast for a while. Yes, well, I have... You know, John Cleese is in that position. APPLAUSE on the west coast for a while. Yes, well, I have, you know, John Cleese is in that position. Lucy, is there a problem with the idea... Again, the intriguing thing, going back to the Feynman idea, Monk's idea there of the keys to heaven and the gates to hell,

that part of the problem of being an inquisitive species is that a lot of what we gain from our inquisitiveness, then we have to find new ways of dealing what we've generated from our own curiosity. I think we can sometimes learn too much. So from my point of view, we're always trying to understand how the universe works and how the solar system works. But then we might find out things that cause us problems. So one of the things that we're interested in is looking for threats from space. And one of those threats from space is discovering objects like asteroids that might impact us on

the Earth. So on the one hand, we've learnt, but on the other hand, we've done nothing so far to protect ourselves from these impacts. So knowledge can be an interesting thing that we set ourselves up, but then we don't necessarily find solutions. And if I get probed one more time I shall be seriously seriously annoyed. By who? The people from space who come and probe me. Tony, Lucy

touched on a point there about knowledge so with regards to asteroids for example surely it's better to know if there's an asteroid coming towards us or to certainly know that that is a possibility and a possible threat to civilisation. So I go back to the first question. Is there any sense in which knowledge can be a bad thing

or is knowledge of the natural world always a good thing? Knowledge of the natural world is always a good thing, and it has to be. And notice I'm the first person to say something who hasn't got a laugh. No, but it's a really good point. But there's the main... We go to the other philosophical arm, which is ethics. So suppose we have enough knowledge about...

We call it the natural world, but we are part of that natural world. Suppose we have enough knowledge about ourselves for insurance companies to be able to tell from our genome, and to demand an inspection of our genome before they will insure us that we are going to be able to tell from our genome and to demand an inspection of our genome before they will ensure us that we are going to be susceptible to this disease, that disease, and the other disease by a certain age, and they will therefore make us pay premiums on the basis of knowledge, absolute knowledge from genetics. That's a very disturbing ethical

point, don't you think? Well, it is, but it's actually more of an economic point, isn't it? ethical point, don't you think? Well, it is, but it's actually more of an economic point, isn't it? Because the only reason to have insurance is against an unknown risk. So the insurance company plays the odds so that the house always wins, of course,

but your genome knows what the house doesn't know. So insurance will not and cannot work if you have that much knowledge because how can they make money out of it? How can the insurers make money without some people paying more and taking less back?

I mean, that's the whole premise of the economic system that gave us insurance and misuses knowledge. Well, I hope you're right. I hope you're right. I mean, the fact is there is a great deal of interest in insurance companies in knowing what the life expectancy of various people are for their life insurance. But it's only so you can collect more money from them than you will pay out. That's the only reason.

But if you don't insure them and someone is uninsured, there's a big disadvantage compared to other people who are insured. Which is why we ought to have a national health system that works. Hooray! We come back to that. I like it. For the purposes of this discussion, so the title, if I remind everyone, is Low Tower. Can science save us? So the question is, are we, for the purposes of this discussion,

aiming to separate science from economics, from morality, from politics or is it impossible to do that? So again the answer is for me it's impossible to do those things because the problems that we face as a population that's approaching 10 billion are

feeding people, keeping the economy going, keeping people living and the technical solutions to do all feeding people, keeping the economy going, keeping people living. And the technical solutions to do all of those things reasonably comfortably are there. However, we can't access them because there's an economic system that doesn't pay the full price of, for example, digging buried sunshine out from under the ground so so it's cheaper to burn gas today and despoil the atmosphere rather than collecting sunshine in real time and using that to drive our economy using buried sunshine rather than real-time sunshine is cheaper because you only pay for the ladies and gentlemen of the audience by which i mean me what do you mean by buried sunshine? Well, so all fossil fuels, the cold fossils... Oh, I see what you mean, yes, because the energy was originally from the sun.

Yeah, the energy was from millions of years ago. So, for me, it's buried sunshine. I can't believe I'm going to ask this question now because it's against my better judgment. But it does sound dangerously close to something I get accused of a lot, scientism, right, in a sense, because what you seem to be assuming there is it's absolutely self-evident from the facts

the way that we should go. So how we generate energy, it's absolutely self-evidently true. This is it. If only they would listen, they, whoever they are, to the scientists, then we'd be fine. Is that actually a summary of what you're saying? Yeah, because if the people... LAUGHTER If the... Yes, I am guilty as charged. Is that actually a summary of what you're saying? Yeah, because if the people... LAUGHTER Yes, I am guilty as charged.

If the people came down, if these weirdos from outer space came down and looked at us, they would think we were monumentally stupid because there's enough energy that arrives on the Earth in one hour to serve the economy for a whole year. And all we have to do is collect it. Eric, is this, is it self-evident? Is it true that if we just listen to the scientists,

logic would dictate this political path or economic path and that would be fine? Well, that's what the Egyptian scientists said, yes. I mean, the point is we're in evolution. We're an evolving species. And so there's no such thing as a certain finite moment where all scientists are completely correct. And there are very simple solutions.

We're just learning how to deal with the problems mainly that happened in the 20th century, when we really grew faster and faster. So now I think it's cause for optimism than pessimism. And I would agree with that completely. Optimism, not pessimism. And I think also you can't discount the fact that we have relied on buried sunlight to get to the point where we are today. So in a way we needed to do that, to get the technology developments,

to drive the science forward, to even be able to ask the question of how do we use sunlight in a real-time basis to solve our energy needs and our food production worries. in a real-time basis to solve our energy needs and our food production. But there's also an extraordinary manner in which history just helps itself out in some ways. I mean, the development of fossil fuel, the cracking of crude oil that Rockefeller and others used to make their gigantic fortunes

and to create the enormous spread of the automobile and to improve industry around the world in the way that petrol-driven and oil-driven industries developed, happened at exactly the time that whaling had reached its peak. And the entire 19th century, essentially the oils that ran and lit the lamps of Europe were from the spermaceti from sperm whales, and they were being hunted to absolute extinction.

They're enormous heads. They're that species of whale, as you know, with those gigantic heads, which is filled with this remarkable sort of whitey, strange liquid that nobody actually knows its purpose. It's very extraordinary. They think it may be something to do with depth and something to do with sonar, something to do with depth and something to do with sonar, something to do with something, but nobody

actually knows. And it produces this wax and this phenomenally viscous oil, this beautiful oil. So amazing that NASA was still using it in the 1980s because even under extreme cold conditions it retained its absolute viscosity. Amazing

stuff. But if it had not been for Rockefeller, who gave us all the problems of oil and petrol, that animal, that beautiful and extraordinary animal, would be utterly extinct. So it is a kind of peculiar thing that happens from time to time in history, isn't it? Well, I just want to, Lucy, think about that, to have something that can be used to then hunt it out to extinction. You know we are a creature that can be prescient that can be forward thinking that i think of something

like easter island is one of those famous examples where people just went let's keep putting up the stone heads and a couple of people went i'm not sure we should cut down all of the trees actually this seems to be and then you have a big island with a lot of stone heads not people going i'm hungry how are the heads not that delicious you know and it's like... What is the problem we have as human beings to not be able to make that extra leap of forward thinking, to go, do you know what? We have to think of alternatives. We have to think of other ways forward. I think we are limited in our vision.

So we look at the world around us, our immediate environment and what's important to us. And I can see, you know, in the longer term, problems with what tony's saying about setting up a world where we're relying on the sun for real-time energy because we do need to look further ahead than that and what tony's saying is we need to have more food production which means we need to develop new technologies to make farming more efficient use of pesticides more efficient use of of pesticides more efficient, use of fertilisers more efficient,

which means new technology that could involve, for example, global positioning information or perhaps earth observation and remote sensing. So from my perspective, we need to look further ahead to not only the opportunities of those technologies but also the risks as well. And from my point of view, the sun is the answer to our question but also the problem as well. Because if point of view the sun is the answer to our question but also the problem as well because if we set up a society where we're reliant on this technology this is actually the

very technology that the sun brings down through its activity so we have to look at the answer and then we have to say but what are the risks associated with setting up a society like this and I don't think that that is thought through enough. Can you expand on that a bit so the threats from the sun? So we have an active star and it's often easy to forget about that because it looks so placid in the daytime this yellow disc that's just there all the time but it isn't it is an active and violent star and it produces eruptions that are known as solar flares which blast x-rays and ultraviolet light into the solar system and charge particles and then it has these eruptions called coronal mass ejections which blast out magnetic fields into the solar system and all of those things affect us here on the earth and they they reveal

themselves by interfering with our technology so whether that's our satellites our global positioning information our electricity networks, the more we develop ourselves technologically, the more we find out that actually the sun has come full circle and it's gone from being revered and feared to, oh, it's just a placid thing in the sky, back to being revered and feared again. And the whole back to the future thing is absolutely right, because if we have to go back to relying on the sun, we have to learn to do what plants have done very cleverly and store the sun's energy for when it's not there.

So Gerald Ford, reputed to have said, solar power ain't going to happen overnight. In that tradition of very, very bright presidents. And it's absolutely right. You know, plants solve that trick of very, very bright presidents. And it's absolutely right. You know, the plants solved that trick of storing the sun's energy, and they stored it in a fuel that was chemical bonds. And the trick we absolutely need to learn is how can we store the sun's energy in chemical bonds as a fuel,

perhaps even by recycling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, so that when we burn the fuel to provide energy to do what we want when we want, all we're doing is returning the carbon dioxide back so it can be recycled again. And that's a very, very clever thing that plants learn to do. But I was interested, Brian, in the fact that the question is about science. And this is a matter of just curiosity

because what we've really been talking about is technology, all of which is just assuming that we can build systems in some way that will help the world, that are all based on science that is already understood. And I wondered when the last equation was written, when the last discovery was made, when the last theorem was posited in pure scientific terms, which offers technology something you might go, wow.

Because nuclear fusion, we've known about, you scientists have known about for decades, virtually a century, and so has almost everything else that we hold out as an ideal. Is there anything new that science has suggested in pure scientific terms that technology might catch up with? How much did you pay Stephen Fry to ask you to do an equation? There's always one guest who suddenly goes,

I wonder if there's an equation. Well, actually... I think the answer... This is an argument that's often had in terms of funding Blue Sky's research and funding new discovery. And the answer, which I think is right, is a very simple answer. If you look back in history, it was never obvious at the moment of discovery, or even shortly

after the discovery, that the discoveries themselves would be useful. The classic example you mentioned, nuclear power, a very famous quote from Rutherford, after he discovered the atomic nucleus in Manchester, who said, anyone who thinks that this could be used as a power source is talking moonshine. And that was in the, he said that, I think, about 1920, actually.

And by the late 1930s, early 1940s, the technology was there to make reactors in order, in that case, to make the fuel for bombs, of course, but then in the future, nuclear reactors. So you never know. So the great discoveries of our time, the Higgs boson, for example, that's just been discovered at CERN, will that be any use? Well, history

tells you that knowledge tends to be useful at some point. I can't think of many fundamental scientific discoveries that haven't led to technological development at some point. The very fact that Stevens could say decades is very amazing because that's

a tiny infinitesimal time in evolutionary time. And that's the point about us. We are our own predators. And because we prey on each other, we set up traps for ourselves that we have to find imaginative leaps out of in order to survive. So the whole of the 20th century was a disaster which we managed to survive. Well, we may be transient.

We are totally transient. Of course we're transient. Definitely. You teach thermodynamics, don't you? Of course we are. We are just heat pumps, indeed. But actually, Eric, I think that's one of the important issues we could discuss. The question, can science save us, raises the issue that it actually is all we're doing with our scientific knowledge,

trying to mitigate the problems we cause with our scientific knowledge. No, because each time we get involved... I mean, look at my children. They're all so highly technological. They know how to fix, turn off the television, they do internet. Their communication skills are so much more vast

than when I was knocking around as a kid in the 50s. It's amazing. That evolutional leap is so huge. I was tempted to say, when you said in the 50s, I thought you were going to say, when I lived in a cardboard box in the 50s. Oh, we couldn't afford cardboard. We couldn't afford iPhones. Couldn't afford iPhones. We had to shout to communicate.

We had to go to the foot of our stairs. Shout and yell up. It comes down to the wetware between our ears, doesn't it? And the most extraordinary thing is that a lot of people would say, neurologists would say, that our brain has been kind of what it is for only 50,000 years. And obviously it's been evolving for longer than that since the last mass extinction event

when there weren't any land animals bigger than a few ounces. Our brain slowly developed along the lines it did. And consider how much we worry about the internet and and twitter and various things and what it might do for our concentration and so on remember that this is the organ you can stand in a field alone and there'd be nothing but a few birds and a little bit of wind will turn a leaf half a mile from you and turn show its silvery underside and you'll jump and you'll see it your eye will focus in on it this is a brain that has been purpose-built to be a predator or indeed to be ready to run away if a predator approaches. And that's a wonderful thing. But all animals

can do that. We've seen cats responding. But then we just get on a train and an hour later we're standing on Oxford Street and we're surrounded by thousands of people in different colours jabbering and shouting. We're focusing out. We're talking on the phone. We're avoiding a bus or a cab as we leap from one side of the street to the other. It's absolutely astonishing the amount of processing that's gone on, none of which was prepared for by evolution. How could it know

that Oxford Street was going to exist? And yet, this amazing ability to do the things it can, to focus, to process completely and to inhibit not just what we actually do, but what we stop ourselves from doing. We don't fall over not because we're automatically

programmed as, you know, because our brain is constantly stopping us from falling over while we're talking to people. But the one thing we don't do very well is defer gratification. And that's the kind of deep problem. This century, certainly.

Well, I think, and that's perhaps what's driven all the technological advances that Eric talks about. We're not very good at thinking more than a couple of years ahead. Infinity in financial terms is 25 years away. That's why

nuclear fusion's been 25 years away for all my life. But we actually have the best fusion reactor we can imagine that's 93 million miles away and the energy takes eight minutes to get here so let's get on and work out how to use it but is that partly why you were talking about the speed for the ability for the mind to adapt but equally the because in the last two generations luc Lucy we've been quite we're quite lucky generations for a lot of people in the west we we haven't had to face uh you know kind of premature you know death and all of these things as much as other generations and therefore we expect to go well I expect to have goggle box available to me 24 hours a day I expect to have

fridges and microwaves each one of those is my individual right and therefore to imagine in any way and you know so I hear people kind of attack science and they often attack it using their computers and the internet and the extra 50 years of life they've got and all of these things. You're paranoid. They use the extra 50 years to attack science

in fact to attack me personally. Well this is what I'm saying is we need to be, I saw Logan's run right and had some very good ideas. Not everyone at 30, but we'll give them an exam at 30 and we'll see how well they do, and then some of them have to go to the light. Call it eugenics if you want, but it will have a level of show business.

Anyway... But I just, yeah, I wonder that that's one of our adaptations, just going, everything's fine, and, oh, you know, someone will sort it out. Well, I think this is one of the big problems, and this is one of the reasons why scientists are out there doing public engagement with science because we do feel a sense of well that in some areas people view new technology a bit like clean washing it always appears at the end of the bed teenagers always get washing appearing at the end of the bed but where does it come from somebody has to do it somebody has to clean it somebody

has to fold it and it's the same for the technology somebody has to design it somebody has to think through how do they how do you code the computer how do you build the computer what's the scientific understand what's the science that underpins it and so i think we are progressing society but at the same time we are at risk of building a society that doesn't have enough of an inquisitive nature to then push forward the idea. I agree with that, and I think that's why someone like James Dyson, who keeps on going on about how we need more engineering, which is taking science and making it useful, is absolutely right,

because that's what made us great in the 19th century, the Bunwales and people. They actually took knowledge and they made it useful, from which we could all profit. Now I think he's the guru of the age. I'm still smarting from your jazz hand eugenics idea. What? Why are you smarting?

Jazz hand eugenics is probably the most fun eugenics there's been. I think if Francis Galton had thrown in the jazz hands with his brain-cooling hat, which I'm sure you know about, Stephen, the brain-cooling hat of Francis Galton, many great ideas, but one of them, keep your brain cool with my magic hat, didn't sell as well.

James Dyson has similar ideas, not all of them. So all I'm saying is brain-cooling hats and jazz hands may well see your scientists and working. But more stuff... It's not mine, I'm the only one who's... There is a brain-cooling hat, did you know that? And it's really odd, because people think it's a comic hat, and it's used in comedy sketches,

and they think it's just a sign of imperialism, but it's the pith helmet. And the pith helmet is not there because it looks ridiculous, although it does, and that's helpful, but it's there because what you do is you wear a pith helmet, and then you pour water on it. And the condensation inside your head, it's like air conditioning. It's absolutely magical.

So there is a brain-cooling hat. Does it have lion tamer on it? But while we're on Python sketches in the future and the past, Eric, it occurred to me, I don't know if it occurred to you, but now is the time for a sketch. Your classic and brilliant for Yorkshiremen is their sons going, you know, I go to my first lecture two hours before I get up, I work in a wine bar for six hours, and then I get home and I have to study for 12 hours before I go to bed, and then I get up again three hours before.

And then when I get out, I owe the government £700,000. I can't get a foot on the... You tell that to the old people these days, they won't believe you. LAUGHTER The thing about that sketch is, as few sketches are, it's actually based on real people's experience and how they boast about how poorly they were. And it comes from Stephen Leacock, who was a Canadian in the 30s, and I found it in Dickens, the same joke, absolutely the same gag,

people boasting about how poor they were. So it's very much a human trait. But actually, it's something that we perhaps need to start doing again but not as a joke because the problem we face is that there's there's more of us and we use more stuff so so this life this engineering life that's given us all these technological advances means we consume more and you've got a new phone every couple of years. Why? There was nothing wrong with the old phone, just this new one's better. So we're locked in this cycle

of continuous consumption that we can't, we don't seem to be able to break out of. And actually, that's the biggest challenge to us, is breaking out of our deep addiction to consumption. Because actually...

But that's because of capitalist societies. I mean, Seattle is funded by the fact they're going to sell you something that in two years you'll need another one. Well, and so then the issue is, can we get people to spend more but consume less, i.e. use less stuff? So there's a home and personal care company that shall remain nameless that

has a sustainable living plan. And it's a great plan. They're working really, really hard to do no waste from their factory. So nothing goes to landfill from the factory. All their raw materials, agricultural raw materials, are sourced from sustainable sources, but it's driven by doubling the size of the company. Well, you're not going to be sustainable if everyone doubles their consumption, because in the last hundred years, we've used more of the Earth's resources

than all of history put together. And that's the deep problem. Well, Tony, you've written a great deal about solar capture and written a book about it. The idea of solar capture, would that also require, though, as well as that as an idea, a change in the lifestyle of the more privileged elements of society like us?

Well, it's difficult. So let's think about the way we eat, right? So we eat lots of meat because we're hardwired to do so. That wet thing between your ears. And so as people become more and more wealthy, they want to eat more protein, they want to eat more dairy, they want to eat more meat. And dairy really worked

because it was the first trade. So the first thing you would trade would be food, and the highest energy density food, i.e. the most calories that's easily to transport is butter. And it turns out that butter and coal

have the same calorific density. So if you make a cup of tea, I say it as an exam question to the physics students. A big kind of project tutorial thing. The energy content of a cup of tea. Come on, Brian.

How much of the embedded energy in a cup of tea is boiling the water? It's got pretty high heat capacity. I'd say very little. Very little. So if you're drinking black tea, it's 80% of the energy is boiling the water. But if you have tea with milk and sugar, then 80% of the energy is boiling the water. But if you have tea with milk and sugar,

then 44% of the energy is the milk and the sugar. Milk, because it's a really energy-intensive industry. It worked when there were a few hundred million of us. It doesn't work for 10 billion. And as more and more people want to live that way, there's going to be increasing demands not only for energy, but land, fertiliser, fresh water. So we are going to have to live differently.

Not necessarily live worse, but all over the world live differently. It was a badly posed question, actually. The energy is E equals MC squared. The energy's in the mass. Look, you've got to be careful with physics students. Chemistry. Well, how we could do a brilliant... I've just thought, because we've been thinking of having a chain of T shots,

T equals MC squared, right? Where we... It would be great. No, I see it it this could be fine that's why that's why this show has two mcs is it yes that'd be m squared c squared but i think is it interesting here though it seems to be implying that's scary it seems to be implying that no, it seems to be implying that, no, science is not going to save us, because the problems that face us are behavioural, they're political, they're the way that we organise ourselves,

the way we choose to consume, rather than our technical prowess or the knowledge that we have. No, I think science absolutely is the way to save us. I mean, all the other things you mentioned are just rubbish, mainly. And I also... LAUGHTER I actually live very happily without dairy or meat, neither of which are very efficient ways of getting fuel for you to live,

both inessential, in my opinion. So I do think that we need to stop feeding cattle all that grass so they give us a tiny payback of protein. It's ridiculous. So I do think science is the way forward because we can have some agreement on science, whereas we can't on politics and religions. They all just divide us.

But science has some empirical... There's an actual yes or no. There is a question that can be asked about it. But that's the case if we can get the funding in place. So I think we have these high aspirations that science can save us, and I really think it can. But on the day-to-day business of doing scientific research, we're on the one hand driven by curiosity and what we want to do,

but on the other hand we're driven by what the government gives us and what the funding is. And there are very few areas of funding where you're just let free. We're going to fund you because you're brilliant. So the Royal Society does that, for example. In other areas, you have to have some discussion about meeting the aims of the funders versus meeting the desires of the individual.

And then there's the aims of the university you work for, the aims of the other scientific organisations you work for which shows you have to have these conversations between everybody between you between me between the general public about how are we going to solve today's problems what are the grand challenges of today and how are we going to get together to solve them but are we not here um steven confusing the word science with the word reason. What Eric argued for there was really, I think, rational thoughts rather than science in itself. I mean, I think there's no confusion at all.

I think people misuse... Yeah, reason to me is just another word really for superstition. I mean, you can be... Reason, is it? Yeah. I mean, essentially Pascal used reason Reason, is it? Yeah. I mean, essentially, Pascal used reason to have a theory of light, but it's empiricism

that is real science. It's when you test it. His theory was reasonable. It stood up. So was the miasma theory. The idea that you were ill because there was a bad smell was the most reasonable, rational theory in the world. It was impossible to doubt because

everywhere there was cholera, everywhere there was typhus, there was a bad smell. Therefore, reasonably, it must be the bad smell that caused the disease. It took an extraordinary empirical doctor, John Snow, to lock a pump in Soho and show that it was a waterborne thing,

a thing that no one could see. Pasteur hadn't yet postulated the idea of germs. They hadn't been demonstrated. Reason fell down. It was a kind of... The same thing happened to Paul Semmelweis, the Hungarian scientist, who noticed the extraordinary number of deaths in Parturition,

all these women dying in a medical hospital, and he tried all kinds of experiments, which is what science is, to see what it could be. And one of them just happened to be asking the medical students who'd also been working on cadavers in the next-door laboratory who were delivering these babies

to wash their hands. And amazingly, from 80% death rate, it went down to 5% death rate. I think I've now fallen into a semantic bucket. No, it's not semantic at all. It's really important. I used the wrong word in my question. To you of all people.

I've sent you off. Surely you see that. You see that point. And it's a traditional philosophical distinction is between rationalists and empiricists. Whether you believe something because you test it, vindicate it and repeat it, which is what I think science does, and what epidemiology does, what double-blind randomised testing and trialling does,

or whether because it's reasonable it works well on paper. Now, I know there are examples like Einstein, where he used reason and reason alone, and was apparently almost uninterested when Eddington proved the tenets of the theory of relativity by showing the bending of light and so on. But ultimately, I think we should most be proud in Britain of our empirical scientists, the ones who have demonstrated things to be true. Faraday, Davy, Newton, people like that.

It seems to me the question, the title of the show is badly posed, that I've just realised from this discussion. But can science save us? I think what we seem to have decided... Well, I'll put it to you, that this is what we've decided, that knowledge is a vital component. So if science is to be considered synonymous with the acquisition of knowledge about nature,

it's clearly a good thing. But on its own, that isn't enough. We need persuasion, we need rational thought. I'll step back from reason. No, I won't. I didn't mean that. But that's... I'll go round the planet. Steve, is that a reasonable summary? We're first and foremost human beings,

and we're ruled by our senses, by our feelings, much more than we are by any other part of us. And if you listened or read the biographies or autobiographies of any great scientist, whether it's Richard Feynman or some of the other great ones, even Dirac, even ones who were almost semi-human, they were so machine-like. They said, I had an instinct, I had a feeling, I thought, I felt, I wanted. They're the first to admit that no matter how much,

in the end they have to do the sums and persuade their peers that it all adds up. A lot of it is desire and there's need and there's feeling because that's what drives all of us. Tony? Well, if we were all rational, we wouldn't be in this mess, would we? If we were prescient and rational, we wouldn't be here. So I agree completely that the issue is

that we are not rational beings on the whole and don't act in rational ways. Otherwise, there wouldn't be diet-induced type 2 diabetes so prevalent because that's absolutely something bad that you do to yourself whilst almost knowing that it's happening. Because we have to satisfy an urge now that causes a problem later. And that seems to be deep in the way we're made. So it's not too positive an ending, Lucy. I wonder, Lucy, we're talking a lot about the human-created problems for humans to then survive.

I wonder, the fewer things that we haven't covered, though, what are, if you get rid of kind of sentient, inquisitive, sometimes malevolent beings and maybe just return to either a lifeless planet, what are the other things that, for any planet in the universe, what are the kind of day-to-day jeopardies of being in this dangerous universe? Hmm. Good question.

Well, I think the sun, as we've said already, is our friend and our foe and absolutely has to be monitored. But then asteroids, we touched on those earlier on. It's inevitable that we will have collisions from large rocky or metallic objects in the solar system. And they can be small and have a small impact or they can be massive and they can wipe out whole species. So we have asteroids and impacts from space which are inevitable,

and I think we have to be monitoring those, but at the moment we don't know really what to do to stop ourselves being impacted. Although, interestingly, we have had the first successful discovery of an Earth-impacting object. So this happened in 2008 2008 and there was a survey scanning the skies and they were looking for asteroids and they detected one and they realized that it was going to be one that impacted with the earth and amazingly within 20 hours they had

done the follow-up observations they'd refined the orbit and they realized it is going to strike the earth and it's going to come in over africa and it did so we had the first scientific success of predicting something was going to hit us and it actually happening so i think the sun we can understand i think asteroids we can understand but there's one thing that we probably can't do anything about and that's exploding stars nearby to the earth exploding stars or colliding stars that form huge bursts of dangerous radiation. So these are supernovae explosions or colliding black holes and neutron stars. And if that happens, we would get a blast of dangerous radiation

that would probably wipe out part of the upper atmosphere, change the chemistry, allowing much more deadly ultraviolet light from our sun and then start to act on our DNA and cause changes and eventually erode away the life that we have. And that sounds like science fiction, doesn't it? But Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, is not far off being too close, if I can put it that way. It's on the edge, isn't it? It could go any time.

It actually might even have gone already. Not exciting even for some people. That's true the edge, isn't it? It could go any time. Actually, it might even have gone already. That's true. It's about, what, 450 years? Or is that the other one? One's 450 light years away, one's 900, on both sides of Sirius. That goes on the other one. So you're right, they could have gone 800 years ago,

and it's still coming in. We haven't noticed it yet. But that's not... It's on the edge of the danger zone, that star, isn't it? And will go within the next few, what, tens of thousands of years? It will. You're right. It has to be close, and it has to be a real collimated beam of energy that comes our way as well. So I don't know, the stats would say

that perhaps we'd be at risk once every 500 million years. So it's not really something that I would put the money on to protect ourselves from. But to be fair, I mean, NASA is launching a satellite, a rocket, I think next year, which is going to be between us and the sun, looking away from the sun. It's the first time they've ever done this. So we can't see things coming from the sun direction

because they're too close to the sun, we can't observe them. But now we're going to put something in orbit which has it back to the sun and we can see everything else that's coming in. And that, I think, goes up next year. So the first stage is to notice it. The second stage is to do something about it. Yeah, we're blinded by the sun, aren't we?

So when we look in that direction, they come out of the sun and we don't see them coming. Are you an optimist or a pessimist eric when you so obviously i'm married i'm an optimist in the morning actually i think i am a pessimist at night given what we've discussed a huge advantage in knowledge, you say we're beginning to look to track asteroids, we recognise they're a threat, but on the flip side, as we've discussed, it seems that the capacity of our civilisation

to make what we might call rational decisions about our future is perhaps as limited as it ever was. But we have one thing in common, which is we want to survive. So that really unites us. So, you know, we have the capacity with these huge rockets and nuclear things to actually divert them, to deflect. You don't

think we can do that? No, no, no. I'm quite sure that that's technically feasible. I just think that the likelihood of it happening is so small that we might be better off spending the money on something else. Bruce Willis can't live forever. so small that we might be better off spending the money on something else. Bruce Willis can't live forever.

There's most likely more chance of that happening. I think in a lot of cases with science, to get the funding, you need that worst-case scenario to happen. So, for example, with the Boxing Day tsunami, the day before, scientists couldn't get any funding to set up their series of buoys so that you could see something coming, you see the tsunami coming but the day after of course

they have the money it's in place and i think the thing that has changed the way funding is going towards asteroids and that threat was chelyabinsk so this this meteor came in over russia no one saw it coming it was what a 15 meter 20re object and it exploded in the skies over Russia, caused damage to, you know, thousands of properties and hundreds of people were injured, and we didn't see it coming. Incredible. So now there's funding there that's looking towards

setting up a programme to say, well, what should we do? What would be the best case? What would be the best engineering case that we could make to protect ourselves if we saw something coming that was actually bigger than the Chelyabinsk object. So if we saw something coming that was maybe 100 or 150 metres across. What was the size of the Yellowstone National Park, essentially? That was pretty huge, wasn't it?

If they are around 100 metres, they're the ones that are deemed to be the risk, that could take out massive sways of urban areas, throw up a lot of material into the atmosphere, block out the sun. Though, to some extent, I mean, Eric, any of you, really, I mean, the Earth's... The sun's going to swell into a red giant in 4.6 billion years, engulfing our own planet Mercury and Venus. There's probably going to be a galaxy clash in 3 billion years

that may well wipe us out as well. What is the point? I want to be around to see that happen. That's the point. I want to see the sun get to that phase and I want to be studying it. Or I want somebody to be studying it. The worst possible scenario is that medical science advances so much that we live long enough to see the heat death of the universe. Wouldn't that be annoying?

We got immortality and the price of immortality was that we would see it all ending. I'm still waiting for Eric to tell us what the point is. The point of life, you mean? What are you saying? Yeah, the meaning of it. LAUGHTER APPLAUSE We have...

We've asked, as usual, our audience a big question as well. They're hive mind. We have asked them, if science can't save us, how do you think the human race will come to an end? And here are some of the answers. When all our physicists come from boy bands. This is a good one. This one's for you, Eric. How will the human race come to an end in a big musical number? Yes, surely.

Way to go. Like this one. Bees? A 404 error message. LAUGHTER APPLAUSE Can I just hear it for a species? Because, you know, I love bees. Bees are great. But did you know that 75% of the world's fruit is pollinated by bats?

Let's hear it for bats, everybody. Yeah. OK, I have one for you. All the vanilla plants used to make ice cream are pollinated by human hands. Can I just say, this is the greatest segue from one show into another. Never before have you gone straight from Radio 4 into primetime QI recordings. BBC budget cuts have been very useful.

So figs are pollinated by wasps. My favourite one, which is... When they gave bees a small amount of cocaine, what they found is when they came back and did the waggle dance, they exaggerated about how much pollen there was. There's loads over there! There's a huge apple! There was nothing, there was just a tree truck I don't know what's gone wrong with me

Anything about the sun that's... I'm thinking bees navigate by the Earth's magnetic field I think that's pretty stunning So they get lost during geomagnetic storms Do they? And birds And whales And you laughed about monks

Mandel was a monk,. Mendel was a monk. Father of genetics was a monk. And Lemaitre was a priest. Yeah, yeah. We're really genuinely actually fading out. Everyone's got a little bit quieter. What I loved was everyone got a little bit, Mendel was a monk.

Which also sounded like the beginning of one of those mid-90s songs he did for that prog rock album. Mendel was a monk! He had many peas. Anyway, so the... Come on, join in. We're all recessive now. Anyway, so...

This actually nearly is a prog rock album now, isn't it, for this show? Rick Wakeman, get out from under that table. So the... Thank you very much to our panel. Thank you to our panel, who have been the wonderful Stephen Fry, Eric Idle, Tony Ryan and Lucy Green. And we have an extra thank you for Eric Idle,

because Eric Idle has actually recorded a... We now have a theme tune, Eric Idle with the assistance of Jeff Lynn. And it's a beautiful... We're going to play out the theme tune. And there's just one question, Eric, I wondered, because you've got some amazing musicians playing on it. We've got our own keyboard player. What was it... What was it that he lacked that meant he didn't make the session?

Well, we've got a little keyboard player... Actually, on this very track which you're talking about, Jeff Lynn plays all the instruments, including the drums, so we didn't really need Brian. There was no... You know. Well, he wasn't around. It was in California. We did it. The fly amount was very expensive, and BBC Radio,

as you know, doesn't pay very much. We started to fashion a Contiki raft to send him over, but it just took too long. So we are going to end with... It's a fantastic song, and I warn you, it's incredibly catchy as well. So play out with the song, and you can also hear

and see the full version on the BBC Radio 4 website. So here is the new theme tune. I find quantum mechanics confusing today Now science is all the rage The Hadron Collider is banging away Pleasure, Emma. Thanks for listening. Goodbye. It's hard to explain why I'm losing my head In the infinite monkey cage So today I heard Mrs. Schrodinger say I'm going to put out the cat Mrs. Schrodinger said, whoo, it might be quite dead

I'm uncertain if you should do that Unless you've got that Robbie Nims and Professor Cox. I'd leave that poor pussy alone in its box. That cat may be as dead as a rat. You can wage in the infinite monkey cage. Scientists say all the world's just a stage. That physics is passing through There may be an infinite number of me's

And an infinite number of you God help us Over in CERN They are trying to learn What can the dark matter be Who gives a fig If a pig can do trig In the infinite monkey cage Thank you. be made out of string that's what the particle physicists say if infinite monkeys

dive every day they may accidentally write Hamlet the play but they probably just shall need to throw it away in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite monkey

cage in the infinite monkey cage Without your trousers In the infinite monkey cage Turned out nice again. That was the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. Did you spot the 15 minutes that was cut out for radio? Hmm, anyway, there's a competition in itself.

What, you think it's to be more than 15 minutes? Shut up, it's your fault, you downloaded it. Anyway, there's other scientific programmes also that you can listen to yeah there's that one with uh jimmy alka-seltzer scientific scientific his dad discovered the atomic nucleus that's inside science all in the mind with claudia hammond richard hammond's sister richard hammond's sister thank you very much brian and uh also frontiers a selection of science documentaries on many many different subjects these are some of the science programmes that you can listen to. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet,

we are travelling 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. As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors, like high blood pressure developed during pregnancy, which can put us two times

more at risk of heart disease or stroke. Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca.