The Infinite Monkey Cage - Under our Night Sky

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

Under The Night SkyBrian Cox and Robin Ince discover the importance of the night sky to human history and how our relationship with the stars has changed over the centuries. They are joined by star-gazer Jon Culshaw, astronaut Tim Peake, astrophysicist Lisa Harvey-Smith and astronomy writer Stuart Clark as they chart the changing nature of our relationship with the sky above us. They discuss ancient cave paintings depicting Orion's belt, the astronomical revolution that came with our understanding of how planets orbit the Sun, and how astronauts like Tim who have "touched the sky" have seen the stars in a totally unique way. Has our ever expanding knowledge about the stars twinkling above us removed some of the magic, or have modern missions and the incredible images of space we now see brought us closer, quite literally, to the sky above us?Producer: Alexandra Feachem

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. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. And I'm Robin Ince and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage. And, well, I suppose we should just And I'm Robin Ince, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage. And, well, I suppose we should just start by saying science ruins everything. That's the new angle. We're taking to broaden our potential audience. It's a more kind of post-modernist approach that has

come from my immersive reading of continental philosophy, including Foucault for Fools and Derrida for Dunces. Derrida for Dunces? I mean, I suppose, is there any other kind of Derrida? Look, don't talk about philosophy, OK? Because we will be here all day if we do that. Well, we'll be here for 5,000 years, won't we, with no answers at all. There we go, good. This is... Because for the last few series, the chemists have been annoyed at being called an art,

Brian said, let's annoy the philosophers, just for a week, just to give a week off for the chemists. And so he has. So tonight, we to give a week off for the chemists. And so he has. So tonight we're going to be talking about the night sky. As anyone who's watched Brian on Stargazing Live will know, there is nowhere finer to see intense cloud cover.

Makes the sky so much more enigmatic. And just behind that over there is probably something sparkly. But we can't see it due to a grey, grey cumulus. Yeah, who'd have thought it? Manchester in January might be cloudy. Anyway, today we are exploring our relationship with the night sky. Is the majesty of the heavens obscured by our quest for understanding,

or does our ever-expanding knowledge of astronomy re-enchant the universe? We are joined by two astrophysicists, an astronaut and someone who perpetually travels through space and time due to their love of Doctor Who and they are... Hello I'm Tim Peake, I'm an astronaut and my favourite constellation is Orion because when I was a Cub Scout it was the first constellation that was taught to me and somebody showed me that from Orion's belt and Orion's sword and another star you can make an arrow that points north I thought that was the coolest thing ever. Hello I'm Lisa Harvey-Smith I'm an astrophysicist and a professor at the University of New South Wales also an author of some bookies. My favourite constellation is the

great bear the plough and that's because my dad taught me that when I was 12 years old. He showed me how to point north with that one too. And it means I don't get lost when I'm coming home from the pub. Hello, I'm Stuart Clarke. I'm an astrophysicist and the author of the book Beneath the Night. And my favourite constellation is Taurus because 19,000 years ago, a prehistoric artist drew the constellation in a bear shape on the caves walls of Lascaux in France. And so when I stand outside under the night sky and I look at the stars of Taurus and I imagine a bull there I'm actually going through the same imaginative process as that human 19,000 years ago which I find mind-blowing. Hello I am the doctor I travel through space and time my favorite constellation

is the constellation of Castorbus because that's my home Gallifrey and this is our panel Tim, did your relationship with the sky change? You said that you had a favourite constellation from when you were little, but did it change when you were on the space station or during that time? It changed almost the instant I got into orbit

because we launched from Kazakhstan at about five o'clock at night, eastwards, obviously. And by the time we got to orbit, eight and a half minutes later, we're over the Sea of Japan. And I floated up, looked outside the Sawyer's window over this night sky. And it was just incredible. I saw the stars like I'd never seen them before

with so little light pollution. It's just brilliant, brilliant night sky full of stars. And it just put things into a different perspective. And over the course of the next six months, put things into a different perspective and over the course of the next six months getting to the cupola window and going out every time and looking at different constellations at different parts of the hemisphere as well i just had a new appreciation not just of the stars but also of our planet and our you know our place in the universe is it more difficult to recognize the constellations because of the density of stars?

Much more difficult, yeah. I mean, I really struggled at first, and then you kind of get your eye in, and you, you know, once you also know where you are over the world, it helps. So I'd always check the orbit first, rather than just going straight to the hatch, so I'd have a clue as to orientate myself. So you navigate from you say oh well I'm over Europe so I know that this is the northern sky and I'm over Australia so it's the southern sky. Yeah yeah to help out but no it is absolutely incredible seeing it from the space station. And does it give you I mean because as you said with without the light pollution with seeing how packed the sky appears to be but then at the same time realizing the enormity of the gaps between those stars in reality and that must give you also just a sense of a changing sense of size as well

of the universe yeah without a doubt and also the blackness of space it's um i mean you see this in the daytime so i mean it's so different seeing earth by day and earth by night and by the you know daytime the blackness of space is unbelievable. It's very difficult to describe. And on Earth, we don't really see the true colour black, I don't think, because there's always some sort of light reflected from it. But in space, you know, it's the blackest black. And then when you come into the night part of Earth's orbit, that's when we have these really lovely low levels of light pollution and we can see out. Earth's orbit, that's when we have these really lovely low levels of light pollution and we can see out. But you're right, Robin, that you just get this extra sense of enormity by seeing all

of the stars. You see the strip of the Milky Way. And even I was able to pick out Andromeda as well from the space station, which was fantastic to be able to see that from space. And it does just give you this incredible perspective. Lisa, Tim mentioned there that obviously orientating yourself with respect to the sky is easier when you look at the earth first to know which way you're pointing. You grew up here in the UK and then moved to Australia so you see a very different sky. Yeah and you know I'm an Essex girl originally and you wouldn't know it from my voice maybe, but it's funny that I learned the night sky in Essex and the moon a certain way up, Orion a certain way up, and you imagine these constellations that the ancient Greeks have drawn from us and the Romans. And then you go to Australia and become completely disoriented. It's really, really strange.

It's a really strange feeling because, firstly, the moon is upside down. And actually, even as a professional astronomer, I wasn't ready for that. I kind of knew it logically, but I didn't expect the feeling I got of disorientation when I saw it. And the moon being upside down spent pretty much the first one or two years in Australia with my head sideways um craning my neck because I was just trying to feel familiar with the constellations and then when I saw Orion upside down because we're the other side of the celestial equator the equator in the sky it was just such a bizarre feeling so yeah I've had to get used to the night sky here. And I find the constellations aren't as clear because I haven't grown up with them.

John Coulshaw. I'm calling you John Coulshaw because, of course, in fact, in your introduction, people have so far merely thought that you are Tom Baker. In fact, that's almost what I want to ask you, which is you are someone who loves the night sky. I've seen some of your magnificent photography of the night sky. And which came first for you was it actually science fiction was it growing up watching things like Doctor Who and then slowly you went you know what I like this science fiction but let's find out about the science as well I think

it all blended together simultaneously um watching those uh those editions of the the sky at night the early ones that I remember first around around about 1974 75, there was Patrick Moore speaking very very quickly about the Pleiades, a wonderful binocular object take a look at it, interesting by the naked eye but put some binoculars onto it and you will see the richness of it, quite magnificent and he

was such an intriguing character and what he was talking about was so intriguing I was compelled to just borrow my dad's binoculars and take a look in the garden and it just went from there and astronomy in the back garden was it felt very close to the science fiction I was enjoying on the television and and reading about so yes a perfect blend I would say I've got one of your photographs actually on the on the wall a transit of Venus. Of Venus.

Yes, that's right. Yes, that was taken on June the 6th, 2012. And that was actually the final astronomical event witnessed by Sir Patrick Moore. We actually, we were all staying at Farthings at the time. And I remember we all sort of wrapped him up in duvets and so on and gave him a flask of coffee and we wheeled him down to Selsey Beach and it was really rather cloudy a lot of the time but there was just a moment when just the top sort of quarter of the sun was visible and there was the dot of Venus the transit transit of venus and um yes i uh it'd be wonderful to witness that with with sir patrick and rather poignant to know it was the final thing he would he would witness

there is something rather lovely obviously you know we've done a few shows in the past and there's such a difference when you do tom baker or patrick moore your whole face lights up as well like i the love of doing people that you love and then sometimes i can see you doing certain politicians and the face i can just see going i wish this person wasn't in charge of a country and it's just such a love that seeing that change uh yes battle girls is still there uh but my favorite constellation probably cassiope. I don't know what it is, but it sounds good when I say it. Some of them. Michael Gove, I suppose, another one.

You know, he's sort of amusingly sneaky. My favourite constellation is Cygnus. Very striking. Yeah. But I'd much rather... I always love the scientists, science presenters, because I'm interested in that subject myself. It's a chance to just absorb into that universe just a little more.

Don't you start. Don't do it. But I think we should. We've got plenty of time. The public wants it. But I think if we unite, if we unite like two time lords, we can bring peace to the universe. Oh, it's good, you know, it's good. Thank you for being so recognisable and such a joy to audiences.

It is, it's just, I feel much cleverer. In fact, shall I do the rest of the show like this? Anyway, thanks very much, Brian. You can go now. Why we haven't talked about this with the producer before, this could have saved a fortune. This would have saved us hundreds of thousands an episode uh stewart we haven't spoken to you yet which doctor who do you impersonate um the uh

um stewart i want i wanted to talk to you just about you mentioned in the opening there about about the lesko uh caves and and this is something that is fascinating as well which is we're talking about the way that we interact with the night sky, but a lot of what you've been looking at more recently is seeing, I suppose, firstly, our changing relationship with how we understand the night sky, but at the same time also this fantastic thing. I remember you writing once, you know, the sky that we have is the same sky that Shakespeare had.

So when we're looking up there, as much that might be changing on planet Earth, we have this kind of shared thing that is running through the history of our civilization yes absolutely uh robin and that was the thing that that really um struck home with me um i started just being a bit curious to to try and understand myself a little more and understand why I was so in thrall with the night sky and have been for my whole life and the the the project just grew and grew and grew until I was just finding all these common threads and the way these you know other people have associated with the night sky then civilizations and the the cultural importance of the night sky and it just stretches back far far beyond written records can recount one of the very earliest pieces of writing from Sumeria is all about the night sky

and so it became an absolute sort of obsession of mine for the last few years to try and chart this association that that humans have always had with the night sky, how it's changed. And I've come to realise that it's one of the most common human experiences that we can have, is to stand outside and look at the stars. And to answer your first first question I impersonated John Pertwee when I was in primary school and and and we had a dress we had a dressing up day and I found a really flowery uh you know frilly shirt and I felt a million dollars that day I've never felt as good since well I know that later on in the show, we now have got it set up for a Pertwee-off between you and John. So that's...

Because last time we did a Cox-off between Brian and John, John actually won, which was kind of then really affected Brian's sense of identity for about three different weeks. Stuart, can you give us a sense of what some of the different ancient civilisations thought the stars were? When the Greeks looked at the sky, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, I suppose the Mayans, the Aztecs.

Can you give a summary of the different ideas of what they were looking at? For most of them, they didn't really know what the stars were. So they tried to endow them with a kind of meaning. stars were. So they tried to endow them with a kind of meaning. And what did it mean to live under this vast starry dome? And a lot of those early civilizations thought, the Sumerians, for example, they thought it was sort of like God's whiteboard and that sort of whatever was going on up there, whatever he wanted us to do or the gods wanted us to do, he would put those messages in the night sky. And so it was there to be read and interpreted and give us some clue as to how to behave and conduct ourselves and organise ourselves. Later on, and this one I love, I think this is absolutely fascinating,

sort of by the Middle Ages or so, the universe itself is imagined as a finite volume with the planet, the Earth obviously at the centre as they thought then, and then the planets, and then this boundary which was the firmament, and the stars themselves are holes in that boundary. And beyond that boundary is the true heaven, the seventh heaven, the godly realm. So when we look up at the night sky, you do that, the ideas there were that we see the pure white light of heaven shining through these holes in the firmament so that's some of the ways that it changed and Newton obviously just started everything changing by suggesting that the stars themselves were suns like our own but just seen at vast distance so now suddenly not

only does science sort of start to apply mathematics to the night sky rather than superstition and sort of mystery, it also says that the surrounding universe is not fundamentally a different realm from the Earth. It's the same, governed by the same laws, the same matter. And it sort of extends ultimately the natural world way out into the vastness of space. of extends ultimately the natural world way out into the vastness of space. Lisa, what have we learned in terms of in Australia over, say, 2,000, 3,000 years ago about the changing relationship with the stars there amongst people? Well, the indigenous Australian peoples make up about 500 language groups across the country and have had the longest living human cultures

in the history of humanity, between 40 and 60,000 years of continuous culture. So I think for, although through colonization, many aspects of the oral traditions have been lost, many have not. So there is still a lot of indigenous knowledge about the sky and what has been learnt. And it's really interesting and it gives us a real insight, I guess, into potentially the psychology of human beings or potentially how humans have traveled across the world and shared stories through history. A good example is the constellation that we call Orion. It's a hunter, a bit of a sex pest as well, chasing the Pleiades around the sky. So I'm not really

approving of the story, but it's an interesting story because it's actually the sort of same story in a number of traditions across Australia and different continents, in fact, and Europe. So it gives us a real sense of that interesting history that we share in explaining the night sky. But it's not just stories that Indigenous Australians had about the sky. It was really used as a tool, as a map and a calendar for different cultures. For example, there's a fascinating story about the emu in the sky, which is a constellation made up of the dark clouds of dust that hide some of the Milky Way and the light from the stars behind it.

And it looks like an emu. but hide some of the Milky Way and the light from the stars behind it. And it looks like an emu. And in many Aboriginal cultures in Australia, you know, this emu in the sky and its orientation at different times of year tells people when to collect emu eggs. So there's lots and lots of stories, thousands of stories like this. And those have endured for a very, very long time indeed. What I love about astronomy is when you talk to astronomers, the night sky changes each time you look at it.

And what you have now given us, of course, is not merely a sex pest in the sky, but also what we mainly know in the UK as an aggressive puppet. So this has really changed. What's the sky look like tonight? This kind of aggressive puppetry mixed with sex pestery. OK, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's definitely a different vision to the one that i had on tuesday um tim i i find it again just think of when you're looking at those because as least we're saying there's a fascinating thing in cultures where you find out that the way we create the pattern of the stars so sometimes

you have beautifully exuberant creatures that are made by joining up the dots and sometimes you just have a pan or something like that depending on the different cultures did you find yourself sometimes as you stare out the window as you are piecing together the night sky working out you know different senses of mythology that you can create up there I think it wasn't so much working out the different senses but one of the things that really struck me was the aurora as well. When you're looking down on Earth and that was hugely, hugely different. I've only ever seen a very, very weak aurora from Earth.

But to be on top of it, both the Australis and Borealis is absolutely magnificent to see this beautiful display. to see this beautiful display. And I think that and then the backdrop of the stars against it, it almost helped put the universe into three dimensions. And I think, you know, when we look at it from Earth, we see these two-dimensional pictures and we make up the figures, the stories, and you almost get a more three-dimensional effect when you're looking at it from space. I guess also the fact we're orbiting so quickly as

well and we actually get to see the milky way rising and setting in a much more dynamic environment rather than having to spend hours watching it with perhaps a time-lapse photograph sequence you know you're it's there before your very eyes rising over the horizon and so i think that gives the whole universe this much more three-dimensional approach. But we're probably going too quickly for me to be able to come up with anything too artistic and come up with any new constellations

or new ways of describing them. I found that interesting that you said it feels more three-dimensional. Does that sense of being in the universe rather than looking at it get even more visceral when you're a spacewalk when you're not looking through a window but you're actually literally surrounded yeah you know that's it's very very hard to process that because um it is incredibly a visceral experience being immersed in the blackness of space and and also it's very surreal and very serene um Um, you know, I had

10 minutes with Tim Cobra just hanging out with very little to do whilst we waited for the sun to set when we were waiting to get on and fix the solar panel at the very furthest edge of the space station. And so we got to see this beautiful, you know, scene play out beneath us where we were going from sunlight into darkness and watching the stars rise over the horizon. And yes, you do feel very much a part of it. And you kind of realise that you're stardust, you know, we're the universe, we're the consciousness of the universe

looking back on the cradle of humanity. And it's an incredible, very, very surreal experience. Can the beauty of what you're witnessing be actually distracting to your work at times? Hugely, hugely. I mean, we didn't want to get back to work after that, but we only had 45 minutes of darkness to fix the circuit breaker. So you have to kind of focus and get back on. What you've described, Tim, is such a perfect example of what Immanuel Kant talked about with the sublime and the concepts of of awe and the sublime and he said that he found it in his critique of pure reason he said that he found it so fascinating that we have such depths of inner thought and that we can turn our minds

to trying to contemplate the infinite depths of space and what as well and he thought and that we can turn our minds to trying to contemplate the infinite depths of space and what as well and he thought that that was um sort of the defining characteristic really of being a human that we live such fleeting lives and yet we aspire through our consciousness to try and understand the depths of space um sure i just wanted to ask actually because talking about that way that we we sometimes find ancient sites burial sites sometimes you know stone circles etc and there is there's changing interpretation all the time but i i was interested also whether we sometimes i was up at the the stones of of calanice just before uh the first lockdown up in the the outer hebrides and there's

been a lot of different papers there about what those stones which are older than stonehenge are saying about the sky and what they're explaining the cyclic notion etc and then there are other papers that come out say actually we are suggesting a greater understanding than there might be and really with quite a few of these ancient artifacts if you stand in the right place you can find your pattern the pattern that you want are we sometimes doing that are we sometimes suggesting a level of scientific knowledge which we're projecting on people and we don't really have the evidence for i think that's absolutely true robin and so one of the things that that i've tried to do in in in in in the book and the work that i've been doing

is just to take it to the very lowest level that you can be absolutely certain about and and even when you do that you can still say that the pyramids are clearly you know built and aligned with the Cartesian points you can still say obviously that Stonehenge is aligned with you know the midsummer sunrise and those even just those are important enough to be marvels when you think about the age in which those objects were built and made and also fascinating as well that we have these alignments with the sky and the celestial objects in funerary places so there's always obviously something in us that wanted to link um death with the night sky and or just the sky itself john you were a similar generation as well when i mentioned dr who but the other thing

is in terms of interpretation of ancient artifacts we were brought up at the time of eric von danikin as well i don't know if you remember where all of these cave paintings and lines on the ground became landing strips for various different gods apparently you know these books made a fortune and are all still published because they're as wrong now as they've always been and it's just kind of but did you find yourself as a kind of because i remember i used to believe all of that stuff it was it was rather sort of amusing and rather um i i found it sort of rather random actually there was a copy of chariots of the gods on uh on the bookshelf at home and i would read it and sort of just have a look at the diagrams and my attention would wander. And then it sort of set me up to read in a greater depth

Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World and the Unexplained magazine sometime later, which looked at the Nazca lines and stone circles and ancient technology, the Baghdad Battery battery for example so i suppose it led to a fascination with that area also but um yes i found it i think i found it rather quaint at the time when i first looked at it i have to see clark's mysterious world what i remember about that was i re-watched them recently when i was 11 years old and it was on i never heard the last bit arthur c clke says after every report, which is

I don't really think there's enough evidence to believe this is true but I blanked that bit out I was just seeing Bigfoot walking out of the woods over the road, you know, this was all real this wasn't a man in a gorilla costume this was happening I was a very foolish child and now I'm a very foolish adult

He always said that at the end, didn't he? Every single one every one of them of He said, well, of course, it's nonsense. Every single show. Listening, not listening. One particular favourite was I believe it's more

likely that sea monsters would exist in the sea rather than in somewhere like Loch Ness, which is smaller. And then Gordon Honeycomb would say, next week, UFOs. Yeah! Do you have a favourite in terms of some of those myths and those ideas?

There must be certain things that you have to counter on a reasonably regular basis. I have fallen foul of the flat earthers because I was I was taken completely by surprise for an interview that I was doing. And they just said at the end of the interview, they said, what about what about the flat earth? And I said, does does anyone really believe that anymore? Boy, did I find out that they do. Lisa, have you found, as someone in terms of being in Australia at the moment, which is either over there or actually down there,

are there certain ideas, as an astronomer, you find you have to counter more often? And has that changed maybe in the last 10 years? Things like, you know, Flat Earth seems to have boomed recently. Does it boom? I don't know how it spreads or whatever. But it's kind of, have you found that certain things, sometimes you go, this week, this is the main idea that everyone seems I have to give some rational explanation for.

Next week, it changes. Well, there is that, you you know meme about flat earth theory you know being spread all around the globe um but i think it actually hasn't reached australia i've got to say as i can't claim that one but as a new australian um i've got to say that australians do not have these wacky conspiracy theories as a whole, which is fantastic. And I don't get hassled by them, which is really great. I do constantly get asked about black holes and whether we're going to all get sucked into one. But that seems to be the only real kind of worry that people have in this country. So, yeah, I don't meet conspiracy theories that often.

And if I do, well, it's, you know, if Eratosthenes could actually measure the size of the Earth and the fact that it was a sphere at least, you know, thousands of years ago, it just beggars belief that people don't believe. And Tim can actually orbit the Earth several hundreds or thousands of years ago. It just beggars belief that people don't believe. And Tim can actually orbit the earth several hundreds of or thousands of times. I'm not sure how many, but it just, there's just no telling people if they don't want to believe something. And no level of persuasion can really grab someone who's got a belief. And that's, that's the thing. That's the difference between an open-minded person and somebody who will not change their mind and not

learn. And I think that's the trouble with politicians who don't listen to science because they actually teach the rest of the population that science is not worth listening to. And it's not good enough. We need our leaders and we need our society and culture to accept that changing your mind about something and listening to evidence is essential for a healthy society. Although, Stuart, having said that, it took us a long time to develop anything like a scientific approach, well, science in general, but a scientific approach to the sky. I mean, I suppose we go back to

Copernicus, but then in particular, Kepler. Absolutely. Kepler, you know, he's one of my absolute heroes because he takes, you know, all this data that tycho brahe had on on mars and he calculates the orbit by hand and at the end of of that time in the sort of first decades of the 17th century he publishes three lines of mathematics kepler's laws of planetary motion and those laws are as true today as they were then they they they hold for Mars which he first um analyzed and it took him 10 years to do that work and he called it his war with Mars and it he it holds for all the other planets in the solar system it holds for all the asteroids it now holds for the thousands of other planets we find around other stars and all of that that is a

demonstrable truth about the universe and he's done it for this realm which previously people had thought was unknowable to us god's realm and heaven and just something completely alien. And so if you can do it for there, you know, in that place, you can do it anywhere. And it just lights the sort of blue touch paper for the scientific revolution. So is that the great leap that he made? Is it conceptual that it is possible to understand the motion of these points of light is is that is genius or is it also applying mathematics to those points of light i mean it's almost everything isn't it that he did it is brian and i think you've you've hit the nail completely on the head because they're two they're flip sides of the same coin we can understand those you know moving points of light in the sky if we use

mathematics and it has a sort of sort of basis in classical antiquity and the perfect mathematical realm that Pythagoras believed you know was was the universe and so we should try to uncover those laws and those rules. And that would give us knowledge of the world in which we live. And it's interesting, Kepler started, didn't he, with a rather mystical view, these perfect platonic solids and trying to build a model. And he really did try to build that model as well. And he believed, you know know that he could put all these shapes together and that would define the orbits of the planets and in order to demonstrate um this

uh this concept he got the duke of wertenberg to give him enough money to build this model in in silver and just as a little bit of a sweetener he said to the duke he said and what i'll do is i'll make it into a drinks dispenser not kidding not kidding so the so the idea was the idea was that in in these different pipes of these geometrical shapes there would be a beverage that matched the astrological properties of the planet whose orbit it was supporting and because he started to to think well i can't get a silversmith to build this because that because then that silversmith will know the secret of the universe before the duke of wertenberg so he farmed it out to all these different silversmiths who built a little bit of it and then they all came to the to the

to the duke's schloss at the the appointed hour and tried to fit it together and it didn't fit because the mistake that kepler had made was assuming that all the planets moved in circular orbits. And his humiliation at being proved wrong is what made him determined to find the orbit of Mars, which he did, which sparked the scientific revolution, which gives us the world we live in today, all because he couldn't get his drinks dispenser to go to bed. Has Dan Brown turned this into a novel yet?

This has a Dan Brown... I can see Tom Hanks getting drunk. It's got a bit of antiques roadshow to it. It's covering a huge amount of ground. It's a wonderful thing to think of that there were those times when Kepler had his doubts and he wondered if his life's works would amount to anything or be remembered. And now here we are in the 21st century and so many exoplanets bearing his name. Isn't that a wonderful thing?

What joy would have that brought to Kepler had he known? And he also stopped his mother. I mean, that's an interesting thing. We'll talk about his mother being a witch another time, actually, but that's too much of a tangent. But it's an interesting story. She wasn't a witch, by the way. He proved she wasn't.

Lisa, John mentioned the discovery of exoplanets by the Kepler Space Telescope, which is a tremendous leap, isn't it? Because now we know that those points of light are not just on their own, that most of them have solar systems. It's a massive leap, I guess, in our understanding of our place in the universe. And, you know, when I was a kid, when I started looking at the night sky, 1991, I think, was the first exoplanet that was discovered around a pulsar so it's a

rapidly spinning neutron star that um had very very regular pulses of radiation that were measured by astronomers and and these pulses as the the star span around were were um seen to change ever so slightly um on a regular basis and this was inferred that there was this unseen planet around the star. And then lots of other ways of discovering extrasolar planets were found. So by the late 90s, the 2000s, there were several dozen exoplanets. Now there are thousands known. So we can measure them in a number of ways. But really, it starts to prove to us that, again, building on those historical leaps from the theory of the Earth is the center of everything, the geocentric theory to the heliocentric theory, the sun must be the center

of everything. That fact, that understanding that we're less and less important in terms of being the center of the universe. Again, it's another leap in that direction to say that the earth and the eight planets around the sun are not the only solar system in the universe. There are probably a hundred billion or a trillion planets in our observable universe. And that understanding really gives us hope, I think, that one day we could potentially find other planets with colonies of bacteria or with, you know, tremendous variety of life that has evolved from you know various um types of chemicals bubbling away in volcanic springs like we think that's how how life may have began on earth so it's um it's another amazing avenue for us to really understand our place in the universe i think and that search

for life is is one that's accelerating now because we can look for it in in so many different ways yeah tim there's an interesting tension isn't there i always find in astronomy when i'm talking about astronomy between seeing the earth as this one planet amongst what is it what's the number 20 billion i think potentially earth-like planets in the milky way galaxy alone so just one planet amongst billions. And at the same time, understanding the perspective that astronomy gives us, making us think about the Earth as a rather special place. And I wondered whether that tension is vivid and weighs on your mind when you are in space. It's often talked about, the overview effects, and it really changes every astronaut's relationship with our planet.

It does. I think you're faced with this dichotomy. And I remember talking to Rusty Schweickart about this, and he obviously did his deep space EVA and had that wonderful perspective of being so far from the moon and so far from the Earth at the same time of being outside of the capsule. from the moon and so far from the earth at the same time of being outside of the capsule and and going through these thought processes of of feeling incredibly insignificant um and those feelings of uh you know humanity and and what are we and and where are we in the universe but then coming back to this thought process of we are the consciousness of the universe and until we find another advanced civilization until we find uh intelligence that can have a conscious thought then that makes us incredibly special um incredibly relevant even though we can we can still appreciate how tiny and insignificant we are with 20 billion other earth-like planets in the milky way and and and

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

it change any sense of your ideas of the possibility of life beyond earth yes yeah without a doubt and as brian was mentioning there the overview effect i think every astronaut has it to some degree and i think it increases whether you're in space for a longer period of time or when you talk to the apollo astronauts obviously the further you go from earth it's going to be incredible to speak um or to hear the stories of those first astronauts who go to mars and and see what their perspective is but no it does change robin when you look out um and and it just gives you this appreciation of uh you know of how vast the universe is and the fact that there has to be other life out there. And personally, I think the universe is teeming with life.

And biogenesis happens fairly readily here on Earth and probably has done on many other planets in the Milky Way alone. But we also have the problems with time and space and the vastness of the universe. And will we ever find out if there is intelligent life out there or not? It's a wonderful thing to think in our lifetimes that we will witness that. And hopefully that can be something we will be able to confirm in our lifetimes,

something I'd love to see. And I hope it's as spectacular as Arthur C. Clarke believes it may well be. Lisa, I just want to ask you very briefly it's a little off topic but I know you're very heavily involved in future telescopes and particularly the big radio telescope arrays that are now being considered particularly the SKA in Australia do you just comment on how that's going to help us, what it's going to be able to do? I think I saw that it would detect an aircraft landing radar within 50 light years. That's right. Yeah.

Which is quite a thing. It's remarkable, isn't it? And, you know, there's different ways to look for life, whether it's looking at the composition of an atmosphere of a distant star as it, you know, crosses the sun and you can just measure which pieces of light are nibbled out by the different chemicals. But another way is to look for things like us. So we are right now using radio waves to broadcast our voices and pictures across the world and communicate,

and that's the way that humans communicate generally is with radio waves. So we're building gigantic telescopes that will measure radio waves from the universe, from naturally occurring things like galaxies and stars. And also, if they exist from intelligent, potentially technological civilizations across our galaxy. Now, if they're anything like us, and you've seen the film Contact, perhaps, from the last decade, you know, you can see the kind of the motion of Earth's information throughout the universe, as it travels at the speed of light, and that eventually betrays

our existence to extraterrestrial neighbors. Now, if that's real, then we will also be able to see or hear the signals from those extraterrestrial neighbours. And yeah, if there's a airport radar, which is the sort of brightest thing that we emit as a civilisation, or even just simply radar, radio transmissions, communications, TV, maybe et will be watching home and away who knows lisa can i just ask one thing because i'm fascinated in the way your relationship with the sky changes when you go from using a traditional telescope so there you are ready to using a radio telescope that must create a very different kind of feeling about what you're observing and the potential of what you're able to observe it does i love i love being an invisible astronomer it's great fun

um you know there's x-ray astronomers people who look at x-rays in space um infrared ultraviolet there's radio there's so many different invisible colors out there that human beings haven't evolved to see because mostly our atmosphere actually absorbs a lot of those things not radio but um we'd have to have gigantic eyes if we wanted to see radio but um you know it's it's it's really interesting to be able to see and study things that that light simply cannot allow us to see so we we can see very, very distant galaxies, for example. And we can really start to study the dark and dusty regions of our galaxy. And what I have studied for a large number of years now is the invisible kind of birth of stars inside dark and dusty regions of the Milky

Way. And it does kind of, when you look at the night sky, then enable you to imagine a greater potential. So we're not just seeing the stars, we're not just seeing the gas and the dust, but we can imagine nebulae that you can't even see with your eyes and pulsars and things emitting radio waves, the hot gas screaming as it circles into a black hole in a distant galaxy those things become very bright and very obvious when you use a radio telescope i love john i don't know if you've heard this before that i can't remember which watching a documentary about astronomy in chile but also about politics and all manner of things and and this when one of the astronomers said astronomy is archaeology because you're always looking back in time and i thought that changed the night again that was another way of suddenly going

that's another way of looking at the sky where you're actually going everywhere and in the desert they're saying you know they dig down and they go into the past and they look up and they go into the past and that to me is a tremendously kind of beautiful vision it is it's wonderful isn't it the different uh the different styles that give you different feelings of the light reaching you some of it began its journey in tudor times other times when woolly mammoths were roaming the earth and so on that's another wonderful way to uh connect to it there but we've come towards the end of the uh introduction in the in the show i've just realized that we literally we need to get to the first question about the theme, otherwise it's going to bear no relationship to the Radio Times listings. Exactly. So for the last couple of minutes or so, I want to get to the theme.

We've laid the background. For the last couple of minutes or so, I'd like to do the show. But the question, let me ask Stuart, the question that I alluded to at the beginning was, The question that I alluded to at the beginning was that all that long time ago now was whether this, we talked about Kepler and then we mentioned Newton. We understand what's happening. We understand the laws that govern the motion of these points of light. As Lisa had described, we've seen the exoplanets around that we know a lot now. The thesis of the show, the central question is, does that remove? It removes the mystery, obviously, but does it remove the magic and does it remove the magic um the full answer is that it's it's such an interesting question

because um the the german philosopher max weber um he refused to sort of call the enlightenment the enlightenment and he called it the disenchantment and he said it was a fundamental psychological shock you know to the human uh mind that we now have this sort of hierarchy of elite scientists telling us that everything we thought we knew about the way that the planets influenced our personalities and all of that you know that's all gone and only they know what's really going on however in the work originally of Immanuel Kant to try to work out how we get our heads around this sort of subject and how mathematics allows us to have some intuitive understanding of these vast realms of space and what the celestial objects are, we then move into the 19th century

where science popularization is truly born I think and here we have people who are prepared like yourselves to transmit the conclusions in ways that are meaningful to the audience no longer do people have to dig through the mathematics themselves no longer do they have to feel excluded you do science and the knowledge that it brings can be used as as as like an not an entertainment as such but a wonderful new deepening of what we feel when we see and look out into the universe and that i think has moved us into this position today of having this true enchantment about the night sky, that we can know what the celestial objects are and how they work. And we can have the mystery of the, you know, the, you know, what's inside a black hole and things like that, that science is gradually working on.

But we can also still feel the sublime beauty of looking at the night sky as well you know we've never had it this good um to have the knowledge and still nothing can take away the aesthetic value of it all i think that's an interesting thing about saying you know not an entertainment as such but of course there's nothing wrong as well with it also being an entertainment that you know to not shy away of just enjoying the show as well you know it's quite a show isn't it looking up at the night sky that's before we even then go into the examination absolutely robin you're totally right and we are we are entertained by our knowledge of astronomy in the night sky every time we you know pop on an episode of star Trek or Star Wars or something like that because the

imagery that they're presenting comes from the images from the Hubble Space Telescope and things like that so it it weaves its way into our culture and society even today I thought John maybe we're in January you're listening to this in January unless you're on the podcast and it's 2028, in which case this will be complete nonsense. But for January 2021, what should people be looking for if they can go into their gardens and look up at the sky? There's some wonderful conjunctions of the morning planet Venus with some delicious crescent moons. In the early part of the month, course the quadranted meteor shower one thing that i particularly love in january in those cold cold mornings and evenings is the phenomena known as the belt of venus which is particularly clear that part of the year wherever the sun rises or sets

look in the opposite direction and you'll see just above the horizon that sort of a slate blue hue with a pink shimmer just above it, which, of course, is the shadow of the Earth cast into the atmosphere as the sun rises or sets in the opposite direction. And that's particularly wonderful in the cold weeks of January, I find. And Lisa, in the Southern Hemisphere, for our Southern Hemispheric listeners, is that the right? I think so. Our listeners in the Southern Hemisphere, how's that? Everyone upside down. Yeah, we will, you know, and January is a great month for the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds. So although, you know, it's the middle of summer, it's actually, if you can get, you know, 2am, if you can get a bit of darkness,

And it's actually if you can get, you know, 2 a.m., if you can get a bit of darkness, great time to see the Magellanic clouds. These two dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. So they're literally our galactic companions. And with radio telescopes, by the way, you can see streams of gas linking the Milky Way and the Magellanic clouds as they orbit silently. They're wonderful things to see. You can also see a couple of globular clusters really well in summer. Omega Centauri and 47 Tucane, really beautiful fuzzy objects made up of 100,000 or a million stars each.

Absolutely fantastic. And you'll be able to see Mars in the north as well. Beautiful orange winking star you're so lucky with the southern sky i remember seeing omegas n for the first time in a telescope from the south and it's just a remarkable you can see it's a ball of stars you can i think it's now thought to be the the core of a galaxy isn't it that collided with the milky way it's some that's right yeah there's a lot of galactic collisions going on and it's yeah it's probably been stripped off of its galactic shape and become the kind of the lumpy elliptical and it's incredible all the stars are about 13 billion

years old so it's an incredible kind of relic very very old and very ancient. John can I just ask you before we do we've got the uh audience answers to our question we were told that you are currently working on a project where you are doing various different uh time lords uh reading various different bits of science and uh and our producer said that you had done you had started working on our favourite, probably, I would say, mutually favourite piece of science writing, which is Pale Blue Dot. Oh, yes, Pale Blue Dot. It does sound rather remarkable as John Pertwee,

as if it was a third Doctor rousing speech. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of your tiny world. To me, it underscores your responsibility to deal more kindly with one another

and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home you've ever known brigadier wonderful thank you john thank you for doing that thank you uh now we asked the audience a question today and uh we asked them what would you most like to see in the night sky and why i love i love this one from tin dog podcast this is great i'd like to see an ifo and i agree with this tim will agree with this i want to see an identifiable flying object you must get asked about that did you see anything in in space did you see any sign of ufos is that one of the

questions you get asked a lot all the time all the time yeah but of course in space you it's very very hard to see even other satellites because you know with the speeds that we're moving so you're less likely to see anything unusual i think in space than you are than being down on a farm in the midwest the Midwest. Very likely. Eleanor Turner says, a constellation of Brian's face as proof of his eternal existence. Of course, Brian's unaging face without even being a constellation is proof of his eternal existence.

There's another one here. What is this? Brian Eggles, yeah. A giant rotating glitter ball and an announcement that Brian has signed up for Strictly. Yeah. Oh, that would be fun. Would you take one to see a restaurant at the end of the universe?

Here's one for John. The return of Halley's Comets. I'm sure Patrick would have loved to see that, wouldn't he? I always remember Patrick. Yes, I remember that episode in 1987 or 1986 when it came back and Patrick was absolutely incandescent with fascination. It has been seen and what a splendid sight it promises to be.

It's back in... Yes, and Nick Southern says they would like to see Hallie's comic because they will be 97 at that point. Nick will be 97. So it is a while in the future, isn't it? So we'll have to work hard. We will. Well, thank you.

I think that's probably enough of the audience's answers there. So we will just say thank you very much to Tim Peake, to Lisa Harvey-Smith, to Stuart Clarke, and to John Coulshaw Now next week we'll be looking at one of the most remarkable scientific detective stories of recent years, the quest to understand our distant cousins the Neanderthals. The study of

human DNA reveals that many people have Neanderthal genes, apart from Brian, if you watched his Who Do You Think You Are, where not merely is there no Neanderthal gene, there's nothing. There is no... In fact, as far as we can see, there's no even link to humanity. It appears that he comes from some kind of panspermic syrup, which has turned up near Oldham. So we'll be looking at that and Neanderthals next week.

Thank you very much for listening. Bye-bye. Bye. Turned out nice again. you