The Infinite Monkey Cage - UFO special

Episode Date: February 12, 2020

UFO SPECIALBrian Cox and Robin Ince host a close encounter of the 1st kind with comedian Lucy Beaumont, astronomer Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Director of Jodrell Bank Professor Tim O’Brien, and science presenter Dallas Campbell to ask if UFOs and aliens have visited Earth? They explore why Lucy's home city of Hull appears to have had more than its fair share of alien visitations, as well as learning about the genuine scientific effort to look for intelligent life elsewhere in our universe. This episode is also available to watch, so you can see our truly out of this world panel in full technicolour glory. Just look for The Infinite Monkey Cage UFO TV Special on BBC iplayer.Producer: Alexandra Feachem

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. 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. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.

Welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage. In over 100 episodes, we have asked major questions such as what is death? Are humans uniquely unique? What is reality? From quantum cosmology to artificial intelligence really we've been building up to the one big question we finally reached the destination because today we ask did spacemen colonize the earth well we're not asking that because they didn't why not it's a very very good question and i have done an enormous amount of research into this subject. Such as? I have read, did spacemen colonize the earth? So I have to admit, I haven't read all of it, but I've read some very pertinent parts of it. Listen, it's certain, I would say, that there are aliens amongst us. However, by amongst us, I mean in the observable universe, which contains two trillion galaxies, each with an average of a hundred billion stars. And since the laws of nature are consistent with the spontaneous emergence of civilizations,

i.e. we exist, then I find it unlikely that we will be alone. However, the question is how close the nearest civilization to us. And I think the answer may be outside the Milky Way and therefore forever inaccessible. Now, the great thing about you answering that is I know that because this is also being filmed for TV, they will just cut it at you saying, it is certain that there are aliens amongst us. And then we get a headline in the Daily Express. Definition of a monster.

Anyway, that still doesn't answer the big question from, did spacemen colonise the Earth? Which is, was the cabbage developed by aliens because a cabbage signalling to the sun for artificial light cannot be considered a natural characteristic as was discovered by Russian scientists in 1960? See, there's so many questions you scientists never answer, and a lot of them are about alien intervention in market gardening. As Robin has demonstrated, human suggestibility leaves us all open to all manner of dubious interpretations of reality. And when I say us, I mean him, of course.

Anyway, surprisingly today, we are going to discuss unidentified flying objects, but we are asking a series of scientific questions. Do we have any idea about the number of alien civilizations in a typical galaxy like the Milky Way? Why do we want to believe unidentified objects in the sky, maybe alien spacecraft? And if there are alien civilizations within reach,

in principle, how might we send messages across the universe and interpret signals that we might receive? To help us sort out the alien realities from the extraterrestrial fictions, we have a physicist, an astronomer, a UFO expert, and at least one person who may believe they have experienced a close encounter of the third kind, and they are? My name's Tim O'Brien. I'm an astrophysicist at Jodrell Bank. And my favourite fictional extraterrestrial is The Thing from John Carpenter's The Thing. Thank you, thank you. My name is Maggie-Adarin Pocock.

I'm a space scientist and a science communicator. And my favourite fictional alien is Chucky from John Wyndham's book. Yay! My name is Lucy Beaumont. I am a writer and comedian. And my favourite fictional extraterrestrial is Deirdre Barlow. I'm Dallas Campbell. I'm a writer, a television presenter, and I'm going to go with Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged from Hitchhiker,

infinitely prolonged from Hitchhiker, a mortal being who decided to use his time wisely by insulting everyone in the universe in alphabetical order. And this is our panel. Lucy, you're actually the reason that we are doing this show because you and Brian had a chat the last time you were on the show and you talked about a particular interest you had in UFOs. Can you enlarge on that? Where does that come from? Well, the conversation went like this, didn't it, Brian?

I said to you, do you believe in aliens? And you said no. And I said, you're wrong. That was it. It wasn't really a chat it was a disagreement. And then I said in hull Brian and you laughed at that and that annoyed me actually.

And I explained to you that me and my mum saw an object that was sort of like, it was sort of like solid yet fluid sort of iridescent and it just sort of floated up past the window and disappeared and I said to Brian what could that have been? And you said, a balloon.

To be honest, that's his answer to normally everything. He just loves balloons. As opposed to a spacecraft that had travelled across interstellar distances to Hull. Then floated up to your window and then disappeared back to Alpha Centauri. So you've changed your mind now, have you? No, I think the balloon is the more likely explanation. So when you have had close encounters of the third kind, why are they the third kind?

Well, actually, I think, because we had an argument about this, I think you had a close encounter of the first kind, which I think is observing extraterrestrial spacecraft. I think third kind is actually some form of connection or meeting with contact. So Brian, actually, who thinks he's so clever, said he thought he'd had a third kind. I said it was the first kind, and it looks like I won that argument. So, quite so clever.

Maybe if you'd read, did spacemen colonise the Earth? Lucy returned to Hull to investigate UFOs further, and this is what happened. My name is Lucy Beaumont, and I am a writer and comedian, but today I am very serious about something. I am very serious about aliens and UFO activity. In 1913, in this area where I was stood, bright lights were seen in the sky. There were like whites and red and crowds gathered.

There were policemen there and residents and it was there for nearly an hour. We've come to Hull to investigate UFOs and to prove that aliens do exist. Not proving to me, I know they exist. We're proving to you and to Brian Cox. I have seen things happen. Things have fallen from the sky next to me. My mum has definitely been tampered with. She's had things fall out of her ear, like alien chips.

People have been abducted that we know. Everyone always says the same thing. When anyone ever goes public about it, someone knocks on the door in a suit and says, be quiet. I'm here today to talk to Matt Covell, who is a historian, a UFO expert. Hello Mike. Hello. Matt spent his life researching the unknown and the unexplained. Can you give us a brief history then of UFO activity in the Hull and East Yorkshire area, Mike? Yeah, certainly. I mean, one of the earliest reports came in 1801 that said this strange orb had come towards the town.

It had flown over the Humber. It was blue in colour, but once it was hovering over the Humber, it split off into four pieces. The residents in the town witnessed this. They then saw it come back together and form one piece before it flew off now something like that's not not like a celestial object or anything like that no because they won't have watched et then will they are x files that have had none of that so we'll go further through the files one of the big ones that happened in hull was in 67 uh and this was well published

in the press this was a sighting that that took place in a place called Longhill Park and a number of schoolchildren had seen this one. So this was reported in the newspapers. And what you've got there are the contemporary press reports that were published at the time. And on the flip side, you've got the modern reports that ask out for people because obviously people want eyewitnesses to come forward and speak about what they'd seen in the skies over Hull.

Wow, because I knew about this because my mum told me because my mum, she was brought up on Long Hill Estate. I, in my head, believed that and that's when the aliens came down and sort of intermingled with people on the estate and have affected my mum in that way, believing that mum has some sort of alien creativity to her. Well, we are now on the trail, basically. We're going back to where my mum is from,

where the cigar-shaped aircraft landed. Who knows, we might actually see some... What do you think to that then, Brian? You can join Lucy's full and in-depth hunt for evidence of alien life in Hull in her own Monkey Cage spin-off podcast on BBC Sounds, including interviews with local historian Mike Cobble and, of course, her mum, Jill. Maggie, it's easy to be cynical about these ideas, UFO sightings and so on. But if we start at the beginning, it is almost certain, isn't it,

that there will be aliens somewhere in the universe out there yeah because it is almost purely a numbers game it's probability because if you look at our galaxy our galaxy contains 300 billion stars it used to be 200 billion but we found a few more so 300 billion stars and now what we are discovering is the planets going around these stars, these exoplanets. So we detect those in various ways. And the more we look, the more of these exoplanets we find. So today we've got around 4,000 of them, but we're detecting more of them all the time. So we put up more technology. And that's just our galaxy. We're finding all these exoplanets.

But then if you look in the whole universe, there are approximately 200 billion galaxies. So why would life just occur here? We're pretty convinced it's out there. And we are, I guess, getting closer to perhaps discovering it. Because by analysing these exoplanets, we are able to actually measure the atmospheres of exoplanets by using a technique called spectroscopy, where some of the starlight passes through the atmosphere of the exoplanet and we can do some chemical analysis. Now, this might not give us actually a firm confirmation there is life there but it gets us closer to finding where life is more probable so if we saw signatures for

example like oxygen or i suppose one of the key signatures would be something like cfcs i suppose because i think if there were aliens out there looking back at us and they've detected cscs they won't think it's a sign of intelligent life because CFCs were a really bad idea. But it will show, because CFCs can't be made naturally, and so it will show that there were signs of life here. And we're really on the edge of being able to analyse planetary atmospheres in that detail now,

that we could even... We could even see chemical pollutants if they were there. We're getting to that sort of level of precision yeah i think as we get more and more sophisticated and put more sophisticated technology out there we are approaching that and the thing is um you can see um you could see the sort of chemicals you find in earth's atmosphere out there it wouldn't necessarily confirm that there's life there but, it's a strong indication anyway. Given that, Tim, why then are most scientists, so let's use the word cynical or doubtful, that there are UFOs in the skies

or alien spaceships, let's say, in the skies? I mean, I think it's fair to say that most scientists are pretty positive about the chances of life elsewhere in the universe. I think most people really do think there is life life what we don't really know is whether there's um intelligent life because like for most of the history of life on earth uh it was very simple life it was bacterial life you know it was uh for billions of years in fact and it was a sort of series of chance events that really led to the development of even multicellular life and never mind what we do now

whether we count ourselves as intelligent um so i think um i think that's one thing to say is that we do think they're out there the question is why do we not think they're here or at least why do we not think the things we see in the sky are evidence of extraterrestrial visitations is i think just because that would be a really remarkable conclusion to draw from what is very sketchy evidence um so there's there's very little well there's no uh good evidence at all that we've been visited by extraterrestrials and it would seem weird to me uh for these people to have come all this way and not leave something very obvious behind saying that they were they had been it we did have evidence you see so what happened was i said how long does it go on for my mum's in the audience that's why

so she had something in it you had something in your ear didn't you for what six seven years and you couldn't get it out could you and i ended up taking to a really good ear doctor down harley street i paid for it and he said never in his 35 career has he not ever been able to remove impacted wax. Didn't he? And then this thing in her ear fell out, didn't it, on the carpet. It made like a metallic clanging sound. On the carpet? Yes.

It made a sound, didn't it? Well, you said it was, you told me it made a sound, didn't you? It made a sound, didn't it? Well, you said it was You told me it made a sound, didn't you? It made a sound And then the cat ate it That was evidence we could have analysed And actually tried to find something out about it Then the cat disappeared

But you can see why a cat That's being fed on earwax Might decide to move to another home But I am fascinated In that kind of thing that we make those because dallas you're someone who's always been interested in in ufos and and that idea that quite often the thing maggie was saying people will make the leap almost immediately they will go it seems highly unlikely i think carl sagan said if we are the only planet with life on what a waste of space right so it does seem probabilistically unlikely that this would be the only place there was life. But the moment

that's said, then people will then go, and thus, UFOs. The thing is, when we have strong emotions, we are liable to fool ourselves. And that's the thing. The one thing we do know about flying saucers is that that sense of wanting to believe we are fallible. Our minds are fallible. We see things that aren't there. We see things that aren't there. We believe things that aren't real. It's just the way that the human brain works. So I'm very much of the belief that UFOs are interesting, not because they're alien, but because there is a psychological, social factor. And that in itself is interesting. People who study anomalous behavior or incidents, the paranormal, That's an interesting thing to study because it's about us. So flying saucers, I think, come from within us rather from out there.

If we look at the history of UFOs, how far back in history do those stories go? Do they change? Yeah, they definitely change. So the modern kind of UFO flaps really began in 1947. So the very famous one was the Kenneth Arnold sighting, 1947. Kenneth Arnold was a private plane who was looking for another plane that had crashed in the mountains in Washington, Washington State, and saw what he described to be nine discs flying as if they were saucers skipping across the water. So he didn't describe them as saucers, but that word saucer suddenly entered the language, and the newspapers called them flying saucers. So they were never saucer-shaped, but they behaved like saucers.

But long before that, you know, we read in the Bible, Ezekiel chapter 10, there is talk of, you know, UFOs and the famous, I think the Mayan sarcophagus, King Kapal, I believe, looks like a sort of an astronaut lying on his back. And, you know, people who watch ancient aliens look at that. Do you know the thing I mean? I think Eric von Däniken talked about that. So throughout time, we have looked up in the sky and we've seen things. And because we are pattern seeking animals, we want to make sense of the world. We join the dots. And whatever is our concern at the time,

we see angels, we see devils, we see portents, we see hallucinations. And suddenly in 1947, we see this new technology. Of course, it was the time of the Cold War. It was the beginning of the space age. We had the beginnings of nuclear science, nuclear bombs. So there was this sort of techno fear. And in a way, I think the flying saucer became the folklore myth of that particular time. And we see it

through our technology, how the narrative of the flying saucer has changed. Nowadays, well, in the 1960s, we went into, it sort of crossed into the kind of new ageness. Flying saucers, once we realized they probably didn't come from planets because Mars and Venus weren't habitable maybe they came from other star systems from Alpha Centauri or from Zeta Reticulum when we realized well that's probably too far away then maybe they came from other dimensions so they've changed depending on how we've changed so I'm very of the belief that they are part of folklore and myth rather than anything else Maggie if we go if we go back to the origins of radio astronomy, some of the great pioneers, great physicists, great astronomers, Frank Drake, for example,

felt that there would be civilizations out there and once we had radio telescopes, we would hear them. And indeed, he wrote down the equation that bears his name, the Drake equation, to try and estimate scientifically how many civilizations there may be in a typical galaxy. Yes. And so, yeah, he came up with this equation. It wasn't an equation that he was hoping to put numbers in and get an answer. It was like a guesstimate.

And at the time he came up with the equation, so in the 60s, he didn't have... Lots of information wasn't known. But as we've progressed through time, more information is known. So we can get more accurate figures on the guesstimate. But it's quite a fascinating equation because it looks at the rate of star formation, for instance, in a galaxy. So the Drake equation sums up the probability of finding intelligent communicative civilizations within our own galaxy. So the first

part is how many stars are out there, the rate of star formation and then so how many planets will form around those stars now with our detection of exoplanets we're getting a better understanding of that okay so how many of those exoplanets will have an environment which could possibly sustain life because you could have an environment that can sustain life but you don't necessarily get life and so then after that okay um it has all these things and yet um it has an environment that can sustain life and yet uh we have life as well but what type of life is it very simple life and as you were saying brian um a life on our planet for billions of years was just very very simple life and it took something quite phenomenal to kick start sort of a multicellular beast and then ending up

with us so it looks at that so so you might have simple life but you have sort of intelligent walking around life talking to people and then on top of that so the romans wouldn't be uh considered as intelligent communicative life because they could communicate amongst themselves but they couldn't communicate with as you say radio telescopes looking out there and so but one of my favorite terms of the drake equation is how long does a civilisation last? Because I love the idea of aliens, you know, finally coming down to Earth and the spaceship door opens, you know,

and they step outside and there are dinosaurs. So if our civilisations don't overlap, then we will never meet the aliens. Perhaps they've come a long time ago or they'll come in the future. So all these different factors go together to actually try and work a guesstimate of how many intelligent civilisations are out there in our galaxy. I think, Tim, it's one of the most beautiful descriptions of civilized. So the Greeks and the Romans are not civilized

because they don't have radio telescopes. What did they ever do for us perhaps you could expand on that because you're a radio astronomer and and so this is it's not the the a large part of what radio astronomers do but it has been a relatively mainstream pursuit hasn't it to listen for signals it has yeah i mean we've now used radio telescopes to listen out for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations since about 1960. So in fact, as soon as the big telescopes like the one at Jodrell Bank were built, it was realized that if there was a civilization out there somewhere with a similar bit of technology, we would be able to pick up signals sent from one to the other. In fact, the people that wrote the first paper on this, two physicists called Cacone and Morrison wrote a paper in 1959.

And they cited the Geodreel Bank telescope and they wrote to Bernard Lovell at Geodreel Bank and said, here we go. Here's all the maths. We can prove you can detect these things if they're transmitting. Can you please use your telescope and search the nearby stars? And he was resistant to doing it because he felt that the job was so huge there were so many stars out there there were so many different ways in which they might send signals that we could spend our lives looking for these signals and still not actually hit upon the right method or the right time maybe they're not they've not evolved to the point where they they do send out these signals and so he wanted to carry on with his quasars and so on.

But since then, sure, there's loads of us get involved in this now across the world. It's something that has sometimes had a bad reputation, perhaps because of its association with maybe these sort of mystical sort of UFO flying saucer things. It might seem to be unscientific. But in fact, the people that are involved are very scientific about it. It's an unusual science problem because we have no way of predicting whether we're going to be successful or not in picking up a signal. We've no idea whether these extraterrestrials even exist, let alone that they're sending us messages. But it's such an important thing. It would be such an important discovery that we be such an important discovery that we're we think it is important to do and we want to find ways of doing it better

isn't one of the biggest problems with uh this as well is tenacity because we hear lots of reports of people even carl sagan of course talked a great deal about the fascination with extraterrestrial life but when he went to seti apparently within half an hour it's like everyone goes into the room and goes i'll tune in and they go there we are i don't know how you didn't notice that five minutes and i found the aliens and then after half an hour people go but what are we looking for so that seems to me one of the major parts which is the only things we've ever detected so far are ourselves that's the problem so we're basically looking for these technological signatures to give away the and of course we of course, we produce all this stuff ourselves.

So that's the biggest challenge. I think you're right that there's basically been these sporadic projects. There was the 1960 Project Osmer, a few other things, Meta. There was a Project Phoenix that we were involved with at the end of the 1990s. But the biggest one so far, and it's only just begun really, is a thing called Breakthrough Listen that's involved many radio telescopes around the world, and not just radio telescopes, systems that are looking for visible light flashes as well, perhaps laser signals being sent from other civilizations. And the reason that's got some hope of changing things is because it's been funded with a significant amount of money

from a billionaire who's put in $100 million to say, here you go, buy the equipment, pay the people, have a serious go at this. But it's still the case that the parameter space we're searching is absolutely huge. There's a recent estimate in terms of all the unknowns. What do we look for? How do we find it? And so on. It's a bit like saying there's something out there in the world's oceans that we're looking for.

And all we do is we get a sort of reasonable sized bathtub and sort of scoop up a bit of the ocean and have a look around in the bath. And we don't find a whale or whatever it is we're looking for. And so we go, we go it's useless we've not found anything and it's literally at that level we've literally only not even scratched the surface really of this job it could be something that we could be doing for thousands of years before we get a detection it could be that we get detection next week can you give us a sense for the uh just the the just the distances out into the universe that we might expect to detect signals?

So how many stars are there that we might expect to hear from? So back at the end of the project we did at the end of the 1990s, we searched 1,000 of the nearest stars. So these are stars within maybe 100 light years or so of the Earth. Breakthrough Listen is now searching a million of the nearest stars. So it's a thousand times bigger in that sense. But we're also looking at stars in the middle of our Milky Way. So we're looking at stars that are 25,000 light years away.

So of course one of the problems with SETI is that you're never going to have a scintillating conversation because the signal that you detect has been travelling for 25,000 years. And if you want to send a reply, it takes 25,000 years to get back. So that's an interesting point. But we're also going to look at 100 of the nearest other galaxies. And of course the question of how far away can you detect something, it all depends on how strong the signal is. And we don't know how strong the signal is that's being sent, if indeed one is being sent.

Our TV and radio transmissions, so the Infinite Monkey Cage, we think if there was a Robin Hinton or Brian Cox on a planet within about 30 light years, on a planet within about 30 light years uh and they were broadcasting the infinite monkey cage via the mechanism of radio how a big new radio telescope the square kilometer array would be able to detect it but only out to about 30 light years and we'll sue lucy i'm fascinated because that idea of the idea that we could communicate how much does it change you do you think the belief that there is something out there that you believe there has been an event which has been some sense of the being extraterrestrial creatures how does that change the way you view the universe well can i just say you're doing it all wrong for a start because i don't believe that you won't pick them

up on radio frequency it's a different level it's on a spiritual level you see you you can't pick them up and too i just think you're looking too far out of the there's very weird things happening in this country that are really in life in in hull in the old market they're selling pizzas in a cone. Sounds extraterrestrial to me. I'd say if you want to, like, maybe start with, like, Hartlepool. And then work your way round the country. There is this whole field of science called astrobiology and trying to work out what type of life can live out there. Looking closer to home does make a lot of sense.

When we're looking for life out there, we found and discovered life on Earth where we didn't think life could possibly exist. Now, it was based on the same sort of DNA and things like that. So it's life as we know it, but it was existing in sort of the deep trenches away from sunlight. And that suddenly opened our eyes to sort of, there might be moons with life on. In the past, we'd say, oh, it has to be a planet, it has to be in sort of this sort of distance from its local star and so it has the right sort of levels of radiation but we found a life where we just didn't think it was possible so sometimes looking closer to home give us a better understanding of what might be out there or what might be here i am interested in in what your view is if we are

thinking of extraterrestrials of what your sense of them might be of what your vision of them would be in terms of what they might want to communicate well you know you the idea of the the chip in the ear or whatever it might be that what would their intention be well i mean i don't think we need to worry about them being hostile to us because i think you know if we show them that what we've sort of evolved to is like the greg's vegan sausage roll do you think they'll understand you know do you mean they'll they'll understand but you know i don't picture them because i've because i you know i'm when i found out that the first ever recorded sighting of ufos was in hull in 1801 that made sense to me that that that obviously there's been sightings in the skies before then, but that's when they came down and that's when they intermingled.

I got that. And I think you can see... Because I think they were around a lot, very prevalent. That's why you had Beethoven, you know, like Da Vinci, all these great things. And then I think now they've definitely left, and that's why... That's true. That's why you've got ed sharon yeah the whole um the whole ancient astronaut theory is this idea that we got all

of our knowledge as you say from the gods like it was the the aliens that built the pyramids because we can't i can't understand how we build the pyramids therefore it must be aliens it's definitely it's another trope that we see in UFO law. Perhaps, Tim, there are two sides to the serious scientific work, I suppose. There's one which is, I think, uncontroversial, which is listen. But there's also attempt to transmit. We've done that, the famous Arecibo message, which Frank Drake, who we've already spoken about,

had a big hand in in the 1960s wasn't it so how do we decide whether or not it is wise to make ourselves known to the universe should aliens be there I mean I think Stephen Hawking wrote about this and said that we should not yeah Stephen Hawking was very anti the idea of sending messages, deliberate strong signals. I mean, I think I'm not so pessimistic. I mean, I don't think that that would lead to, you know, Independence Day or something. These things arriving to destroy the Earth. I think more for me, the challenge is what do we see?

Who gets to decide for a start-off? Is it just people like me that work at a radio telescope who gets to decide whether we speak for the planet Earth by sending out a message? Or how do we agree what to say? We can't agree on anything, so how are we going to agree as a planet what to say to potential extraterrestrials? But what I would say, this is a really current question,

because like Maggie was saying earlier about we're detecting all these planets orbiting other stars, we know of hundreds of potentially habitable planets. We're almost certainly within the next decade or so going to find a planet that may well even show potential evidence for life by analysing the atmosphere spectroscopically. And the pressure to send messages to that planet will be you know it'll be immense and people will just do it so you know people like me and colleagues who think about the best way of doing this and how to involve the united nations and so on probably you know won't get you know we'll just get ignored and it'll just get sent anyway so there's So there's no framework at the moment?

There's no international agreement or framework within which you operate? There are groups of astronomers that form committees that decide on what to do if we detect something and that decide on what to do if we, whether we should reply or not. But, you know, we don't, you know, have a way of stopping people replying if they choose to reply or to send messages. We're just people who think about it and think about those issues. So I think it's quite an important topic.

Should we send a message? What do we say if we do? I mean, Seth Shostak, who works at the SETI Institute, had this sort of quite interesting idea. Given the distances between these civilizations and that you don't really have a conversation, you're not going to say, oh, hello, is there anybody out there? And wait 5,000 years for a reply and then say, oh, my name's Maggie. What's your name?

And wait again. So what he said was what you do is you're going to send loads of information in one go if you're serious about sending messages. So he suggested we should just broadcast the whole contents of the internet. And that will tell the aliens all they need to know about us. Good idea. Well, I was just going to say, have you ever thought about just transmitting the archers?

And get them hooked on it. That's all. And then do the same as the Radio 4 thing, which is suddenly change the time you broadcast the archers. And when then the aliens are a rate at the change of a three-minute difference, they're, ah, we've got a complaint from another planet finally. We changed the time the archers was on. They're furious.

Perfect. Maggie, we began talking about UFOs, so physical contact. We've talked about the potential for looking for signals and sending signals and so on, habitable planets. But what are the barriers? So let us say that there was a habitable world within 50 light years, let's say. I mean, I know you're involved in designing spacecraft. What are the barriers to traveling across those distances physically yes well so i suppose first and fundamentally the speed of light so we can send radio waves at

the speed of light and if it's uh 50 light years away it will take 50 years to get the message there and so that's a challenge in itself and that is sort of just a radio waves um traveling through the vacuum of space if you want to send probes there people there potentially i'd love to go well maybe not today but i'd love to go but so you're actually sending sort of physical mass there and then it gets a lot more challenging um so um we can't travel faster than the speed of light so how if we did detect a signal out there let's say let's say 20 light years away how would we go about sending people so we can actually interact on a more timely basis? So there are various projects, but even with 20 light years, it would take a long time.

So I think one of the most exciting projects at the moment is Breakthrough Starshot. And this was actually being championed by Stephen Hawking before he died. And the idea is to have a solar sail sail which is a space technology we already have and so a solar sail is a sheet of metallized plastic that sits in space of a very very large area and then what you can do is you can use photons from the sun but in this case because we want to sort of direct it would actually use a huge bank of lasers so we'd probably have to turn off the power for London for a night and would fire up these lasers. The laser lights, the photons would zoom up into space, hit this solar sail, transfer their momentum to the solar sail,

and then we could accelerate this solar sail to a fifth of the speed of light. Now, that's warp factor a quarter, so not that fast, but still a fifth of the speed of light. But even doing that, a fifth of the speed of light, it still takes a fifth times 20, so that is still 100 years to get to the laser. And also, this probe

that's been designed, we can't send anything larger than one gram. So I ain't getting out there anytime soon. So we can actually send things out there. So if you've discovered an exoplanet, we must have a closer look. We can send something out there. But of course, we accelerate it to a fifth of the speed of light, but we have no means of slowing it down. So it's, grab as many pictures as you can as you sail past at a fifth of the speed of light but we have no means of slowing it down so it's grab as many pictures as you can as you sail past at a fifth of the speed of light and then transmit that back to earth so um yes it's definitely limiting and and and transmit back with something the mass of a couple of grams it's very difficult to design does that make you feel that, and this is with due respect to Lucy, it would be, it is certainly beyond us now to send a large spacecraft between the stars. Do you think

that it's likely beyond any civilisation? Can you imagine as a physicist or an engineer that you would, we would possibly be able to do that, given 1,000 years, 10,000 years, 100,000 years, and so on? I don't think there's anything that technically would stop us doing that, if we really wanted to. I think the question is whether we really want to. And that might be another reason why these extraterrestrials haven't been here. Maybe they're just not interested in travelling between the stars for thousands of years,

which is what it might well take. This is an important point, isn't it? It's known as the Fermi paradox. The point is that, as you mentioned, 200 billion, 300 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, most of them with solar systems probably. There have been 10 billion years or more in which a civilisation could have arisen in this galaxy. So it does seem

difficult to believe that no civilization in the Milky Way galaxy ever got to the point where it could travel interstellar distances. And therefore it becomes difficult, as the great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi said, it becomes quite difficult to explain why they have not been here, why we do not see them i think it's an interesting point and the things our biggest problem is we only have one example of life and that's life on this planet um i was talking about sort of those moons um if you live uh by a star which is quite active you might live below the ground in which case perhaps you don't have the means so it doesn't mean that intelligent life isn't out there but you might live below the ground, in which case perhaps you don't have the means.

So it doesn't mean that intelligent life isn't out there, but you might not have the means of transmitting because you live below the surface. So there are ways of explaining why we haven't, but it's trying to work out the probability, and it's a conundrum really. And it's a conundrum, really. So although I'm aware that we haven't detected anything yet, I think we still have the potential. Before this show started, I was chatting with a few about the fact there was a wonderful House of Lords debate in 1979 about UFOs, the kind of thing I don't think would happen now.

The debate ends when the Earl of Clankety, what a name that is, he really existed, the Earl of Clankety, he ends by quoting Fred Hoyle, the great scientist Fred Hoyle, and he talked about the possible communications across the universe, and he said that there is an idea that there is something akin to a telephone directory across the star systems. What Fred Hoyle said is, my guess is there might be a million or more subscribers to the galactic directory. Our problem is to get our name into that directory. galactic directory. Our problem is to get our name into that directory. So Lucy, I'm kind of fascinated by the, what if rather than the aliens coming here and having any interest in us

whatsoever, what if it actually turns out that there are all these different forms of extraterrestrial life and they don't give one jot about our existence? What will that do to the ego of the human race? Well, they did. They were really interested. And then we got to the 80s. And I think it was Julian Clary that put them off. I mean, shell suits. How can you get more into it? That's very odd, isn't it?

That's not coming from this world, is it? I think, just to finish, Dallas, that we will ever meet the neighbours. I can imagine in my lifetime, I'm very young, obviously, that we could, as Maggie and Tim were saying, that we could get to a point maybe in a few years when the James Webb telescope is up there and we can detect chemical signatures from exoplanets,

we'll be able to say, OK, we're definitely not alone in the universe. And that's going to be a profound moment. Whether we'll be able to actually talk to them is probably a no as far as I can see. I can't see anything that's... Well, certainly no evidence that's going to convince me of that, unfortunately.

I feel like that about my neighbours. Well, we get... You know, maybe you're not meant to. No, you know, I do... You know, I've got a really strong relationship with my neighbours, but I am aware they get all the shoes from a garden centre. And they didn't know what nachos were.

I had to explain. I'm conscious of the fact that we're at the end of the program but we haven't really answered so Lucy posed a question at the start well a challenge to to us which is to to believe as you said Dallas I want to believe so could I just get a final poll around something with tim do you think that any of the documented sightings that there's any evidence at all that an alien civilization has attempted to contact or visited the earth i've not seen any good evidence that's the case and i'm not going to exclude the fact that there might have been some visitations it's just haven't seen any evidence of them well our next show comes live from Hartlepool we'll discover this is we asked the audience a question as well uh which is if you met an alien what would your

first question be when will you collect the secret agent you sent to earth in 1968 and we now know as brian cox uh have you ever been to a harvester before dallas we got one there uh yes i've got if i if you met a male and what was your first well very good question how was the food in area 51 which is a very good question i've actually eaten in area 51 this is my area 51 viewers guide uh I've actually eaten in Area 51. This is my Area 51 viewer's guide. Have you actually been in? No, I went to the Little Alien. That's as far as I got. That's outside. We've been there, which is sort of outside on the perimeter.

And it was very good. I think you slipped up there, don't you, Lucy? Because he said I've eaten inside Area 51. Yes, you did. They know too much. Are you here to take over? Would be the question. Please do. Anything Would be the question. Please do.

Anything would be an improvement. Does your species de-ream? And do you think things should only get better? Well, there we are. Thank you to our panel, Tim O'Brien, Maddy Derring-Pocock, Dallas Campbell and Lucy Beaumont. This is the end of the series.

And it's good that we end the series with this particular show because it's going to allow conspiracy theorists to believe that actually the show was removed by unknown powers as we got too close to the truth. Or, due to the fact that we've reached the contractual end of the series, as it makes clear by looking at the Radio Times. Yeah, but no-one trusts the Radio Times. I think many of us know it was actually set up by the CIA

as a way of controlling the minds of people in the home counties by making them all rate about wrong credits listings on occasional episodes of Start the Week. Anyway, for the second time ever, you can now watch an extended version of our UFO special on BBC iPlayer. And of course, listen to all the other episodes in the series on BBC Sounds. Now, I'm off to do a bit of physics. Yeah, and I'm off to Epping Forest to see if I can find Bigfoot. Well, last time I tried, it turned out just to be a very hairy caravaner. And frankly, he was all right. But he was very hairy.

It was his fault, not mine. But there we are. Anyway, goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. In the infinite monkey cage. Done that nice again. This is the first radio ad you can smell.

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