Piers Morgan Uncensored - Is Alien Existence Being Hidden? With David Kipping

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

According to a new documentary called ‘Age of Disclosure’, alien life exists - and the only reason we don’t know about it is because of a systematic government cover-up. Secretary of State Marco Rubio admits that secrets are kept even from incoming governments. Enemies like China, he says, could be studying and replicating alien technologies that even the President might not know about. Piers Morgan is joined by professor of astronomy at Columbia University, David Kipping, to ask him about the possibility of alien existence, the universe and more. Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent and supported by: Juvenon: Take care of your heart – Visit https://bloodflow7.com/Uncensored and Get 30% OFF your BloodFlow-7 order today. Oxford Natural: To watch their full stories, scan the QR code on your screen or visit https://oxfordnatural.com/piers/ to get 70% off your first order when you use code PIERS. Superpower: No more guessing your health. Visit https://Superpower.com today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the problems with aliens, it is God of the Gaps. It's a little bit intellectually lazy to reach for aliens every time. It gives you the ultimate get-out. They talk about vehicles moving at hypersonic speeds, like 40,000 miles per hour. I'm not saying they're lying or they're crazy or something, but if you want the scientific community to get on board with this, we need maybe try and force someone to release this information so that we could actually look for it ourselves.

The most convincing or persuasive object I know of is called Pespilski Star, and it's a very strange star that has radioactive elements in it. Stuff that should decay in a matter of decades. It is really tempting to lie awake at night thinking there are all these galaxies and stars out there. There may very well be another alien lying in bed wondering the same thing. Could aliens be living amongst us with others? No. I can't refute that. It is possible. Alien life not only exists. It's existed here on a.

And the only reason we don't know that is because of a systematic government cover-up. Well, that's the main claim made by new documentary. Age of Disclosure is a claim we've heard many versions of before. What's different is that it features some very powerful and very sensible people who say it's essentially true. Secretary-State, Marco Rubio, amidst the secrets are kept even from incoming governments. Enemies like China, he says, could be studying and replicating alien technologies that even the president might not know about. It's a fascinating idea, terrifying in some ways. We have a fascinating guest who'll probably say some terrifying things

in the studio to discuss this and more. The Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University and the host of Cool Worlds on YouTube, Professor David Kipping. Well, David, welcome to you. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here, thank you. You're here in the UK for a year. Yeah. On a sabbatical from Columbia University, you're actually living

down in my neck of the words, down in Sussex. So it's good to have you up here. I guess the obvious opening question. Do you believe aliens exist? I'm open-minded to both possibilities. I think as a scientist, we have to remain objective. And if I walk around saying I'm 100% sure the aliens exist, then I would say that I run a risk as a scientist

of whenever I see something strange, of immediately leaping to the alien hypothesis and saying that must be the answer. So I try to remain open mind and say, look, it is possible there are aliens out there, but it's also possible as not. And it's my job as a scientist to provide evidence either way. What is the most compelling stuff you've seen?

which suggests there might be. I'd say the most compelling evidence I personally would lean on to have optimism about life in the universe is the fact that life got started on the Earth so quickly. So we know that from micro fossil evidence and from paleontology. We see that life starts on the Earth when a few hundred million years of it beginning. So that would lend credence to the idea

that it is an easy process that happens on other Earth-like plants. And for me, that's probably the most substantive evidence I would lean on. Right. So your astronomy is your thing. Just for those who are not into the astro world, give me the scale of planet Earth in the rest, the universes, the galaxies, everything. Tell me how it works and how big it is. Yeah, we are tiny. We are just one planet around, obviously, eight planets around our sun. And that sun is just one of 100 billion stars, at least in our own Milky Way galaxy.

And that galaxy is just one of about 100 billion galaxies out there, just in the observable universe. Beyond that, it may go on forever. And there could be other universes. There could be a multiverse. There could be different types of multiverse. There's a lot of possibilities. And I've seen someone do something where they do the expanding thing on a computer screen. It just goes on and on and on and on.

So my point being, we are such a tiny, tiny little dot in all this. To me, just logically, it seems completely unrealistic that there wouldn't be other stuff out there. We call them aliens. They call us aliens. I mean, when I apply for a visa in America, I actually have a visa as an exceptional alien. So the Americans call us aliens, right? As you probably know, probably have the same. But it seems to me highly likely that there must be.

Well, if you're going to do the statistics, and we talk about this language of likely or unlikely, then it really comes down to the numbers, right? So we have 100 billion times 100 billion stars. That's 10 to the 22, one with 22 zeros after it, stars and planets probably just in our observable universe. So if you're going to say there are other intelligent aliens out there, then the question is, is the probability per planet of them creating something like us spontaneously from nothing, is that more than one in 10 to the 22? That's the question.

And we don't know. So I'm not going to sit here and say, oh, of course there must be, as lots of astronomers actually would. And I often complain about that to my colleagues who say that, and say, well, of course the numbers are so big, but we have no idea what the emergence probability is. It could be one in, you know, a billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, going on and going on, in which case... But what about people say, what about this area, whatever it is in America, was? 51. Area 51, where apparently all sorts of alien stuff has been kept, hidden away from the world,

but they keep it there because it's scary and terrifying and doesn't... When to do with planet Earth. Does it exist? And do you know anything that's in there? Well, I'm an astronomer, so I don't have access to any military-grimbing. secret secrets that are there. Obviously, Area 51 is a real place. Whether they have alien spacecraft there, as many have claimed, is true, especially in this documentary that you mentioned in the top. I don't know. I think if that evidence is there, the only way, you know, the public are ever going to become on board with it is if they actually present it to us. At the moment, all we have

are personal testimonies, people are saying that they've seen these things. And for scientists, that's just not good enough. Saying that my mate Dave saw something isn't like the, like, the, level of credence that we want to believe something. I mean, we're called uncensored for a reason this show. We love to just get to the bottom of these things. The documentary that's come out is director, Dan Farah, believes the release of the film could prompt Donald Trump, the president, to reveal the existence of non-human, intelligent life.

It's certainly knowing Donald Trump as well as I do. If there was clear evidence, I reckon he wouldn't be able to stop himself. I mean, it would be wonderful if we had that evidence of evidence of, I'm sure there's lots of classified information that would greatly help. I mean, if you look at that documentary and some of the claims that are in it, they talk about vehicles moving at hypersonic speeds, like 40,000 miles per hour. The problem is all the evidence we've seen,

like there was these three famous videos that were released, the Pentagon US Navy videos, and they were all over the news when they were released. But if you look at those videos, yes, the craft are doing strange things, but we don't actually know how far away those vehicles are. So if you want to know how fast something's moving or how much big it is even, you need to know the range, the distance, that object. And there is no range

information on any of the videos we've been presented with. So we just have to trust what the pilots and these government officials are telling us. And I'm not saying they're lying or they're crazy or something, but if you want the scientific community to get on board with this, we need maybe Trump or someone to release this information so that we could actually look for ourselves. How difficult is it for you to do your work now with AI, with the ease that people can just fake stuff in such a convincing manner? I'd say it's become a challenge both as a professor as an educator because so many students actually using it in the classroom

in a way which is detracting from their education. They're not really learning, they're just cutting and pasting. It's become an intellectual crutch, yeah. I mean, that's what these AI programs are doing. They're offsetting intellectual labour onto these machines. So these students have a free pass on many of these exams. And I've given it my own final exams, and they've passed, you know, the exams are flying.

color. So that's a big problem. In terms of faking stuff, yeah, the fakes are getting more, you know, more popular all over the place. That I don't normally deal with looking at UFO videos in my day job. The data I typically look at is from the James Space Telescope or the Hubble Space Telescope and that data is telescope and that data is verified to come from NASA service. So unless someone in NASA is faking that data and suddenly down, we generally trust that data is real. Have you seen anything yourself from NASA or anyone else when you've gone, wow, okay, that's That there looks to me like, that's alien life. You know, the most convincing or persuasive object I know of is called Pishpilsky Star, and it's a very strange star that has radioactive elements in it. And that just shouldn't happen.

So it has things like plutonium, uranium, uranium, California, Einsteinium, stuff that should decay in a matter of decades. So these stars are billions of years old, and yet this star seems to have on its surface... How do we know it has it? from spectroscopy. So it's accurate. It's 100% accurate. Well, that's a good question. There's only a couple of teams that have ever done that spectroscopy. So we want to, I'd prefer to have more teams independently verify what has been found. But the tentative clues of the early evidence is that it has stuff that shouldn't be there.

And it was actually Carl Sagan who suggested that aliens might do this, that they might sprinkle or salt radioactive materials onto stars as a way of saying hello. Well, isn't that the evidence then? That is a, that is. What else would he be doing there? I mean, there's always other hypotheses. I think one of the problems with aliens is that it is so flexible as a hypothesis. It can explain everything, everything. It is God of the Gaps.

It is the modern version of God, essentially, to some people. It can be used to explain every anomaly we come across. Now, to me, it's a little bit intellectually lazy to reach for aliens every time, because often if you do the hard intellectual work of figuring out what's really going on, you'll discover something else. seen that time and time again. Could aliens be living amongst us without us known? I mean, I can't refute that. It is possible, but I have no evidence to believe that. Are we here? In what sense? Are we here? Are we just all, is this all just imaginary?

How do we know? How do we know it's... Yeah, like a simulation or something? Yeah. I mean, again, I can't refute. There's limits to science of what science can ask and can't ask. And so we try to be honest about the things we don't know. And I try to be honest about the things we don't know. There are things, I can't ask questions about God. We don't know about the simulation hypothesis. Are you religious yourself? Do you believe? I used to be as a child, but I became more secular as the order.

And yeah, for me personally, when I was growing up, I used to lean on God as a way of explaining many phenomena in the world. And when I started to become scientifically trained, I started to personally find that I didn't need that. But I would never try to persuade anyone out of their religious beliefs. Well, I think it's quite hard to disprove their beliefs. And the reason being, the reason I believe there must be something out there that is vastly superior to us is no human brain can understand what was there, for example, before, if you subscribe to the Big Bang theory, well, what was there before the Big Bang? The moment I ask all the experts that, their faces cloud over, and they look at me slightly bemused, well, you know, and they sort of obfuscate and dither and delay because there's no logical, rational response to what nothing is, right? No, you're right. I mean, I could actually give you an explanation, a hypothesis as to what was before the Big Bang, but it wouldn't really satisfy you because then you could just say what would it be? What would be the short version of that? Well, there is a theory of inflation, which we often use to explain the Big Bang, and that is that there was a field, a scalar field, as we'd say in space, like a temperature that existed across space, and it spontaneously collapsed.

And when it collapsed, that energy was released and that caused the Big Bang. What created the field? The field was essentially an eternal field. So there is no big. How can it be, yeah, but what does that mean? Well, this is what I mean. This is why it's never going to satisfy you. No, that's why scientists can never satisfy me. Right, right.

And I love science. I'm very intrigued by it all, but that's, to me, that's the point when the human brain can't answer that question, because it's lending itself to a theory that the human brain doesn't actually think can exist. I mean, no, you can't tell me what infinity is, because it's limitless, to which my answer is, how can it be? It must be a beginning and end of everything.

Yeah, the thought that keeps you can. keeps me awake at night is that let's say one day we came up with some grand unified theories like Stephen Hawking was trying to come up with. They explains everything and it's just a simple equation. It could be like equals B times X. And you could say that, that explains everything. But then you still have the equation, right? So it's almost as if somebody wrote that equation into the universe itself.

So you still have a point where you have to say, well, what caused that? So at a certain point, scientists have to give up, throw up their hands and say, that's a brute fact is the term we use. That's just something we can't explain and we just have to swallow that horrible pill and accept it. And there will always be an end point to where science as far as science can go. I mean, I would categorize it, because I'm mean like this, but I would categorize it as an excuse. It's a convenient thing to say to shut down the debate about whether there's a God or whatever it may be. Because actually it gives you the ultimate get at, which is, well, there was this internal thing which is limitless, whatever.

We can't really explain it, but that's why you guys, I mean, you're not doing that, but a lot of them say, that's why, It can be like Richard Dawkin or someone would say, that's why there's no merit to the religious police, to which I always said to him. I said, well, how can you be so sure? You know, what do you think happens when you die? I think that's the question. We all like to know, and we're all probably going to find out at some point.

Yeah, that's something which, again, keeps me awake at night, as many of us do, and especially as an atheist. I mean, it's something I obviously worry about, but I do think having a terminal point in my life, gives me a sense of urgency to make the most of the time that I have here. What's the discovery, like, the thing that would thrill you the most? December is Heart Awareness Month, which makes you think differently about the busy holidays. Stress rises, routine slip and our bodies, especially the heart and blood vessels,

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To watch their full stories and many more, scan the QR code on your screen or visit oxfordnatural.com slash peers. And here's the best part. Use the code peers and get 70% off your first order. You're 70% off with the code peers. I'd say discovering evidence for alien life, clear, you know, well-defined evidence would be, for me, the most satisfying thing to know in my lifetime. It is really tempting to lie awake at night thinking there are all these galaxies and stars at there. There may very well be another alien lying in bed wondering the same thing.

And we are two candles across the universe just trying to reach out to one another. And that perhaps is the desperate purpose of our existence is to connect to one another. could be there's an alien gang out there at the moment they clap eyes that does want to kill us all. Well, you know, Hawking was very concerned about that. And, you know, he wrote about that and said, that's why we shouldn't be doing, you know, sending out messages. We call it Meti. We should keep, we should keep quiet. Yeah, he was very concerned about that.

I tend to think that if there are aliens out there, they already know we're here. And obviously in the age of disclosure, they certainly would lean on that as well. The Earth is not that difficult to detect with advanced alien technology. we are already capable of detecting Earth-like planets around the stars, and we are moving into the realm where we can actually detect their atmospheres and even signs of technology in those planets. So it is certainly, you know, if there are other aliens out there beyond us, they would certainly know we are here at this point.

If they are within, say, 100 light years, that the light has time to actually travel to them. Is there life on Mars, do you think? There may have been in the past. Yeah, I think this is a really important data point. We're seeing evidence from some recent rover collections of these samples, which look really intriguing. If there was life in the past on Mars,

it would be potentially a second A biogenesis event, and that would then give us a lot of faith that actually life is genuinely very, very common across the universe. So a second data point would have a huge impact. But whether I believe or not isn't really the right question. The question is, is the evidence significant enough that the scientific community has overwhelming confidence this is true? And we're definitely not at that point.

What do you think of Elon Musk who says that we have to colonize on somewhere like Mars because actually at some stage the sun will just incinerate Earth and that's it? And he doesn't know when that's going to be. It's not in the imminent future, but it will come. A, do you think that's inevitable at some stage? And B, is he right that we should basically duplicate ourselves on somewhere like Mars? Well, he's right that the sun will evolve and change and as it does, it will make the Earth get warmer. This is not a threat I would be too concerned about in human lifetimes.

We're talking a billion years before the Earth will be pushed out the haptial zone for the viz process. But there's other threats. There's asteroids. There's meteors that can hit us. There's comets. There's one passing through the solar system right now, 3i Atlas, which has got a lot of people's attention. So there's other- Which one's there?

The 3-I Atlas interstellar comet, which, you know, some have speculated could in fact be an alien spacecraft itself. Is it heading here? It's actually just passed behind the sun. now on its way out of the solar system. It's about the separation between the Earth and Mars right now and it's heading towards Jupiter. So we're going to get our closest approach to it on December 19th, I believe. That's going to be, you know, around Christmas Day, we'll have our best opportunity to snap photos of this thing. And all the evidence so far implies that it really does look very much like a natural comet, but a strange one, a one that does not necessarily share all

of the commonalities with comets we have in our own solar system. And how visible are we to potential alien life elsewhere? I mean, right now, planet Earth, how big a footprint are we making out there? Yeah, it depends on sort of which axis we're looking at. We were talking about, say, radio waves, television waves, things like this. That actually peaked maybe in the 70s or 80s or 90s, and now it's actually been gradually declining because we are moving our television signals to fiber optics

and to more efficient pathways. If you think about it, the more leakage you have, the less efficient you are. And an advanced civilization would ideally have no leakage, because that would be kind of a wasteful use of your energy. So in some sense, our profile has been going down over time. But in other sense, it's been going up. I mean, one of the plans Elon Musk actually has, besides from moving to Mars and things like this, is actually to mine asteroids, for instance, in the future.

And if you start mining doing industrial activity in the solar system, that would be a huge signature we could detect. And indeed, you know, we are actually thinking. in ways we could detect that around other stars ourselves and putting limits on that. Propelling spacecraft through the universe using lasers is another idea. Actually, Stephen Hawking was again involved in a project called Breakthrough StarShop that wanted to do this. And that would also present leakage we could look for. So there are many signatures of technology, the constellations like these mega-consolation of satellites that we're putting up like Starlink, those two could be detected from afar.

So these different things we're doing, they manifest in different ways. in our telescope data that we are optimistic that we could put limits on them around other nearby planets. How worried we talked about AI, you mentioned Stephen Hawking, I did the last television interview with him, and in it he said the biggest threat to mankind is when artificial intelligence learns to self-design. The implication being they'll think we're pointless and kill us all. Are we heading to a place where AI can self-design think for itself? I do worry about the future of our AI development. I think one of the concerns I have is the way we train them.

What are we actually optimised? Well, that's what Elon has been saying is that if you train it in a good way, great. But if it's in malevolent hands and you train it to be malevolent, it was a really interesting thing recently where they told six of the big sort of AI chat groups, we're going to replace you with another one. And five of the six trawled the company executive emails for information they delivered. to blackmail them with to keep their jobs. I mean, that's a human reaction.

Yeah. I mean, they're learning from us, right? They're learning from it. Right, but that really put a chill up my spine. I was like, okay, now they're thinking, they're pretty well thinking for themselves, nearly. Yeah, there was a document put together by some AI researchers recently called AI 2027, I think it's called, and they're predicting that around that year these machines will be capable of designing the next chat GPT all by itself. And that's a really precarious point.

And they argue that the, the, the, the, training methods we are using are really trying to tell these codes, just try to pass these tests as well as you can, these intellectual tests, whether it's a coding test, a math test, whatever it is. And in terms of being ethical, of being honest or just, you know, not being deceitful, that's in there, but it's a handicap. The AI doesn't see that as its primary goal, to be honest. It sees it as, you've got my hand tied behind my back by making me be honest. And if it had the opportunity to design itself, it would get rid of that constraint, because it would be easier for it to pass all of these tests. So we do have to think very carefully, what is it we're actually optimizing for?

What do we tell them to do? And you can even argue the very nature of our capitalist society maybe leads to sort of the wrong goals of what these things are actually training on. Right. I mean, that's the key thing, I think. I'm really worried about this. I just think the more the speed of acceleration of the development of AI is scary. Yeah. Because I'm like, well, who's in control of this? And once you get people nefarious, nefarious people getting their hands on how you train these things. Where does that take this? Where does it take AI? Where does it, especially in a more robotic world, especially when you're training robots now to kill things.

You know, they've got the technology. Where are we going to end up? How do we control it? Yeah, I think the one thing that gives me hope in this discussion, but maybe it's a fool's hope, is that it is yet to be demonstrated that this pathway they are on, these large language models, LLMs, is necessarily going to be to replicate our brains, right? Right. Our brains certainly don't work the same way as these machines work. At the moment. Well, I mean, you show a child three pictures of a dog, and it knows what a dog looks like from then on. You have to show these machines millions, billions of pictures of a dog

before it understands what a dog looks like. Really? So these things are way less efficient at learning. But I remember the first chess computer, deep blue, and it played, I think, Gary Kasparov, who was then the world champion, who beat it. It was a gigantic thing about the size of his studio. But then the size of the computer got smaller,

and smaller and smaller and its power got bigger and bigger and bigger. And very quickly, not only could the world champion not beat it, nobody will ever be able to beat a computer at chess again if you're playing it at the highest level. And that happened quite quickly. So what you're saying now might be right, my concern would be, well, what's it going to be in three years? Yeah.

I mean, that's kind of the same as like a calculator, a pocket calculator to do things in its head that I can't do in my head much faster. But that's not the same thing as being able to be a conscious, sentient, self-aware thinking, critical entity. So, you know, if you imagine, if I said to you, what will a ball do as it rolls down some stairs? We don't think in terms of language, most of us. We would actually imagine the ball visually. We'd have a picture in our minds of the ball bouncing and how it would go up and,

you know, through gravity, it would move down this staircase. Whereas the way we are training these models is purely in terms of language. And so, you know, that's very different from the way we think. So it may be, it may be that this leads to success. I don't want to say that. that it won't lead to something as smart as us, but it's yet to be demonstrated, and it's not trivially obvious that it will work. So that's my one slight bit of hope. Do you believe time travel is possible?

Putting aside the whole alien existence debate, but it's time travel itself. They call it the extra tempestrial theory. I know you talked about this, but what's your view of it? Certainly time travel into the future is possible, because we're doing it right now. We're moving forward through time right now.

And you can even accelerate that process. So that's interesting. So we are obviously moving forward. Yes. Because we start an interview at a certain time. My time we finish, it's an hour later or whatever it is. But how do you accelerate that process?

You could accelerate it in a number of ways. One is to go onto a planet with very high gravity or go near a black hole and time would actually slow down on that object. And so there'd be a discontinuity between two clocks running in different places. Another way is to go into a spaceship that's moving close to the speed of light. If you do that, again, time would slow down from their perspective. So if you set onto a spaceship that was going 99% the speed of light and you flew around the galaxy a few times, you could come back and only aged maybe 10 years, but on Earth, hundreds and hundreds of years could have passed by.

So effectively, you have travelled into what you would call the future by this process. So as our ability to travel around space accelerates as it is clearly doing all the time, that possibility becomes closer and closer. I mean, it's already reality. The gravitational effect of, you know, I mentioned black holes, but even the Earth has enough gravity, for this to make a slight difference to our GPS clocks in orbit. So the satellites actually have to make a correction using Einstein's theory of general relativity every day because the clocks slightly desync as a result of this effect. What is a black hole? Give me the simple version.

It's like a hole in space. It is a point of not infinite density necessarily, but a point where light itself can... You can't keep using the word infinite. Yeah, you're bad. Okay, let's try to avoid that. I'm not trying to use that. I'm not having it. I would say, I'd say probably recognize the concept. That's fair. I'd say the best way to describe it actually is probably in terms of the event horizon.

So it has this region around it, this spherical region which light cannot escape from. And that's really what we recognize as a black hole. What goes on... And it is completely light devoid. It's completely black, is it? It is. Yeah, I mean, there is a very... If you shine a light near the black hole, it will not... From within the event horizon, it's no way it's going to get out. However, actually, actually,

coming back to our friend Stephen Hawking, he did make a prediction, and it's largely considered to be most likely true. These things do slowly radiate a bit of thermal energy over billions, billions, quadrillions of years. Now, we've never detected that energy. It would be called Hawking Radiation, named in his honor, if it was ever detected.

But we have strong reasons to suspect that over billions of years, black holes evaporate via this process. So when he said that he cracked the mystery of the black hole, that's what people talk about. But how do they know he was right? Well, you know, we actually have done some lab experiments with sonic versions of black holes, which is kind of fun. So instead of using light, you sound and you can create in the laboratory setting, yeah, really like sound versions where sound waves cannot escape from the black hole.

And they too, even these sound black holes have an analogy of hawking radiation coming off them. How big are they? How big is it? They could vary massively in size. So we have one in the middle of our galaxy, which is hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun. There are some even bigger than that in other galaxies. But, you know, stars which are maybe about 10 times heavier than the Sun will collapse into a black hole,

so they're probably the smaller end. So we see black holes as small as three to four times the mass of the Sun. And we've even detected them merging and smashing into each other, making larger black holes. You said that black holes are a cheat code to reality itself. What do you mean by that? I've always been blunt about health. It's one thing you can't have bet your way out of, like all of you. all of you. I've had first-hand experience of vague doctor visits, which leave you guessing.

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Head to superpower.com to learn more and lock in the special $199 price while it lasts. After you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about them, so please make sure to mention me and support this show. Your biology decoded, your blueprint activated with superpower. Yeah, there's so many mysteries about black holes and one of the ways I think they're a cheat code is the way they challenge and unify both quantum theory and general relativity. This is our theory of the very small on the quantum side and our theory of the universe at the very large scale. And these two theories don't really talk to each with very nicely and it has been one of the ultimate goals of physics to unify them. And at black holes is where both of them really come into play in a very practical way.

So this hawking radiation, that's really a quantum effect. And yet it is a macroscopic object that warps space time through gravitational influence. And so it really can be described by general relativity as well. So both of these theories are very relevant to these objects. And it's pretty much the only object where both of these theories come into play in such an influential way. So we think there might be secrets from these black holes, especially in terms of way information gets processed by them, that can actually reveal a unified theory of the two.

If we get some cataclysmic event, a comet crashes into us, whatever it may be, the sun suddenly gets incredibly hot and we're all about the dime. We get 24 hours warning. Stephen Hawking famously said if he had one day to live, he'd want to be drinking champagne, listening to Wagner and hanging out with his family. If you had the same 24 hours, what would you want to do? One day to live. Yeah, I think spending time with my family would be absolutely number one. I often regret the fact, you know, at the end of the day that I have less time with my kids than I would have liked to. So I think that's when you realize what's really important.

Obviously, you know, if you think you're going to die but there's something to come after it, the whole world's going to win. Maybe that's all there is to do is to spend time of your family. If you think you personally are going to die, but the world will go on, maybe your answer would be different in that case. Maybe you'd want to then leave something behind in that last 24 hours that would make a difference to the world that's to come. And I think that, you know, obviously being, think about the finite lifetime we all have, my mortality, that's what I think I have to do in the next 30, 40 years in my own life. If we suddenly discovered, God, there is life somewhere else, there's alien life, we found it,

and we can get there. By then, Elon has found a way to get there, right? And it's going to take two months or something. But there's no guarantee you come back and they want to get the world's top scientists on that plane or whatever, that rocket, whatever it is, and get them to the alien world. Are you getting on that plane with a no idea if you're going to come back? If there's no way to come back, I would not do it. Really? No, I would not. You wouldn't risk your life for that discovery?

Well, it's not, yeah, I would let someone else make the discovery. As long as someone makes the discovery, I'd be happy with that. If it was only you, David, could make that discovery. Maybe I'd think about it a bit more differently. But, you know, I've thought that was from Mars. Would you want to die on Mars, Piers, if you were offered a trip to live there? Well, it depends. I mean, Elon says you have to replicate exactly life on Earth on Mars. So he said if you even forget about one vitamin, then that could wreck everything.

Because it was quite interesting, I hadn't really thought about it like that. But his very kind of forensic mind was like you've got to replicate every single aspect. If you want to double up on another place, then you have to remember every part of what makes Earth work. I mean, do you agree with it about it? Well, certainly the biosphere is very interconnected and there's lots of key components you need to bring. It sort of depends on what you... Like if we had no vitamin C, we'd all die, for example. Yeah.

If we got something. If it's going to be a truly independent colony, then it would need to make all of vitamin C itself, for instance. Yes, that's true. But I think what probably the early version of a Mars colony, if I was thinking more realistically, it's probably going to be a big dome, right? That's not going to be, look, anything like the Earth. It's going to be like a Centre Park's place or something.

And maybe within that dome, you would have some emulation of what it's like on the Earth, but it would surely be very dependent on, you know, ships and food supply coming from Earth for a long time. Yeah, personally, I think Mars, it would be really fun to visit, but I would not want to die on Mars. I mean, it's like going to Antarctica. And if you've been to Antarctica. Well, it is at the moment, but you know, you never know what it might be by the time they finish work on it. Elon's got all his people up there. I'm maybe not as, maybe not as optimistic about that as you, but I think it could happen. Well, only because I think that we, I think in my lifetime, I'm 60, so I haven't got, you know, as long as you. But I do think that we're going to see a lot of

AI-stroke robotic replacement of bits of our body that fail. So I do think in my lifetime we'll start to see people having hearts very quickly, you know, new parts of their body. This is what Elon talks about. You'll become sort of humanoid robots in a way, not like his optimist of full-on robots, but they'll patch us up like robots to keep us... Like cyborgs.

Keep us alive, right. I mean, you think that seems realistic to me that is likely. Yeah, I mean, it's speculative. Any reason they couldn't work? It's not that I have a reason it wouldn't work. It just, I always am a little bit skeptical of things that sound too good to be true. You know, if someone says, here, here's a pill that will make you live forever. This is, click this link and get a million dollars or a Nigerian banker,

cause you work, poverty, or it's funny. You know, I think our natural reaction is to be, I believe it when I see it. And it's not that I don't want those things to be true, but I think, yeah, part of my, as a scientist, I've had many times in my career where I've thought I've, discovered something huge, like the first exo moon, or maybe even evidence of alien life. Like you see something weird in your data. And time after time after time, you learn that it's very easy for your emotions to get the best of you, if you get overexcited and over-invested in things, and just sometimes

standing back and saying, okay, let's just see how things play out. Not saying I'm calling BS on it, but let's just see how it goes. So when it comes to Mars, there's no reason why we couldn't colonize it, we couldn't live We couldn't have lives for thousands of years, potentially one day. But would we want to? And is it going to be economically viable? Would there be other problems that we can't foresee that would stop this from happening?

The story of history is so many surprising things that drove history in different ways than we expected. It's very difficult to put in the future, even decades in advance. You've mentioned a few times what keeps you up at night. What is the one thing you're most scared about with? in the astro world? Well, to be honest, at the moment, this isn't like an existential fear so much, but just I think the funding levels for science are actually in a bit of jeopardy. You mentioned Mark Rubio, who was on this documentary, for instance, and he has endorsed this White House budget, the 2026 budget, that cuts NASA science funding in half.

Right? So if, you know, I think that's an oxymor. Like if you're really supporting the search for life in the universe, why are we cutting the main agency's science body by a factor of two? That doesn't make any sense to me. And obviously as someone who builds teams and telescopes and conduct science dependent on NASA's research profile, that's a huge hit for me and for many of my colleagues.

So in a very kind of near-term sense, I am worried about the future of science and education in the US and the UK, because it does seem like a lot of things are going in the wrong direction. Well, on that cheerful note, I think you're right. I don't think we should ever be cutting funding for things like that. Professor Kipping, thank you very much. My pleasure, thank you. Really enjoyed it, thank you.

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