The Infinite Monkey Cage - Starless World

Episode Date: November 27, 2024

Brian Cox and Robin Ince consider how different our understanding of the universe would be without the stars. They are joined by Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Roberto Trotta and comedian John Bishop who illuminate all that we have learnt from the stars and how different life would be without them.Every culture has looked up at the night sky, but why are we so drawn to the pin pricks of light in the sky above us all and how have they helped shape human civilisation? Roberto Trotta takes us back to the origins of astronomy, to women who he believes were the first astronomers, linking the orbital period of the moon with the length of the menstrual cycle. We continue the historical journey, through the astronomical greats, Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler who all in part owe their scientific discoveries to the stars. Our panel marvel at how we, an infinitesimally small part of the universe, are able to look up at the stars and comprehend what is beyond and how this star-gazing has profoundly shaped our sense of selves as well as underpinned science as we know it.Producer: Melanie Brown Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem Researcher: Olivia JaniBBC Studios Audio production

BBC Sounds music radio podcasts You're about to listen to the Infinite Monkey Cage. Episodes will be released on Wednesdays, wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, the full series is available right now. First on BBC Sound. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince. And this is the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Today we ask a big question. What if there existed a universe that was without Patrick Moore or indeed Brian Cox? What if there was a cosmos without the sky at night? Because there was no sky at night, just an inky blackness. The experience of standing alone on a clear night and looking at the stars of dreaming of worlds beyond our own, worlds beyond imagination, is not only a powerful emotional experience but also a powerful intellectual one. The attempt to understand the motion of those points of light in the dark was key to the development of modern science. And it is something we talked about a lot when we were on tour, that beauty that when you you go out on a clear night and

you look at those stars and you think about those photons where basically they've been created from hydrogen becoming helium, the photons then travel across distances far greater than we can currently imagine ever traveling ourselves and then the first thing that they actually collide with is us, something that is able to think of what has happened, think about the stars, contemplate the beauty. And I was talking to an astronomer about that and he said, the photons I always feel saddest for are the ones that have traveled all that distance

and just as they're about to meet my eye, I notice my lace is undone. I said, isn't that? Yay, I'm gonna be understood the, oh, I'm just in moss. Today we're asking the question, what do the stars teach us, and how would we have conceived of the universe beyond Earth if we could never have observed them? How different would our civilization have been? What would we never have known? And would Brian still be touring with the adult-orientated rock band Dare,

as opposed to making all that money from pointing at stuff. Well, we'll find out. To help us understand the dark sky, we're joined by a cosmologist, a space scientist and a bishop. And they are... I'm Roberto Trotta. I'm a cosmologist at International School for Advanced Study in Trieste, Italy, and at Imperial College London.

And the one thing in the night sky that would miss the most if he wasn't there is the mysterious glow of the Milky Way. Hello, I'm Dame Dr. Maggie Adair in Pocock. I'm a space scientist and science communicator. I have a book out, The Art of Stargazing. Just kidding, The Art of Stargazing, my essential guide to the night sky. And the thing I would really miss is the moon because I am an absolute lunatic And when I see the moon it makes my heart sing and so without it I would be bereft I'm John Bishop. I'm a comedian And I was once in Doctor Who thank you and I'm like you Maggie. I would miss the

Optimism I feel in my heart when I look at the moon and hope I see a young boy riding a bicycle with ET And this is our panel Roberto the book you've just written star-born is contemplating a starless as in not the lack of stars but our inability to Be able to observe the stars if that had happened. So what drew you to that idea of imagining that what if? Well I lived for 15 years in London and that got me thinking how much the stars have done for my own life.

I'm a cosmologist, my very profession wouldn't exist without seeing the stars. I started thinking, well, hang on a minute, could the same be true for humankind as a whole perhaps? What would have changed? What kind of world would we live in if we had been fated to live in a universe, just like London, where you don't see the stars, where everything is covered by clouds

at all times everywhere, and nobody has ever seen a star, nobody has ever seen the moon, nobody's ever even seen the disk of the sun. And I started to realize that all of those things have shaped every aspect of who we are today and our civilization would probably actually not exist if it were not for the stars. Maggie, can you paint a picture as we begin right at the beginnings of astronomy or even before astronomy, what were our distant ancestors thinking and seeing when they were looking at the stars?

If you go back far enough, I think every culture across the world has looked up and wondered and sort of, yeah, and celebrated the night sky. And to me, it was the ultimate box set. I always think of sort of cave people before they can even speak you know just like the wonder of it and then because I think because it is such a wonder and such a draw to the eye when you can see it on a clear night I think they

started making stories and so religion and I think also they wanted to understand the chaos that happens here on earth and to understand that they looked up at night sky and said, okay, well, you know, if I'm born at this point in time, and my star sign is this, and then this planet goes through, then I'm going to be more angry because it's Mars. And so they were trying to interpret the chaos on Earth by using the stars above them. Do you remember when you were a kid what those kind of thoughts of looking at the sky were? I've been fascinated by the sky. I was that kid who would lie on a field and look at clouds and try and make shapes and living on a council estate outside of Liverpool that wasn't really on a flight path.

So every now and again you'd see an aeroplane and that was like to me a suggestion that there's flight and there's life beyond where you're living. And then you'd all that into the night and looking at the night. You know, I'm in my 50s, so we're the generation after men had walked on the moon, but sort of also after the excitement had gone and nobody was getting infused about space like they do now.

I'm never lost for the wonderment of it, but I was reading Roberto's book, what's fascinated me, because the night sky that we're looking at is not the night sky that human beings have always looked at. Absolutely, because the night sky changes over time, over thousands of years, the constellations, over hundreds of thousands of years, the constellations even change shape.

And so what the primitive Homo sapiens 50,000 years ago would have looked at in the sky and marveled at is, if not fundamentally, somewhat different from what we marvel at today. But the fascination remains, not just the science and the puzzling about the orbits of the planets and the stars, but also other feelings, emotional feelings, like spirituality, for example.

All the big sky gods were the most powerful gods in whatever civilization because the sky was this unreachable place of potency and power and divine seat of power and influence on our lives. Astrology for example has dominated thought until the scientific revolution. I don't know if anyone's got it into one of those fancy taxis. You know you get in the cars where they've got like, they used them in the cars where they've got like, they used them in hen parties, where they've got like little twinkly lights

in the people carrier. Just sitting in a people carrier with twinkly lights, I think it's a good night out. So, yeah. Imagine being a fierce homo sapiens looking up and the whole sky is like a hen do. When do they realise? It would have been more astonishing if they'd been in a people carrier to be honest. When do they realise you're

not actually part of the hen party? I was, you know, every now and again they book a strippogram. That's what I've always loved, you've never forgotten your roots John, you've never forgotten your roots. Show business, show business. Palladium tonight, tomorrow, wherever put me, yellow bow. Roberto, when do we see the first evidence of people not just looking at the sky and making up stories and patterns, but actually beginning to measure it,

beginning to document what's happening there? Well, that depends on what you mean precisely by evidence. In historical times, certainly the Mesopotamians and Babylonians were great observers of the sky. And they had very sophisticated methods to look at the stars and the planets and record their movements with great attention. But to me, the most interesting part

is when we try to stretch our imagination to even further back into the past, to prehistoric times. And there, of course, evidence becomes more scant, because the evidence is buried at the bottom of caves, and there is very little to go by. But there are certain hints. And one among them stands out for me, and is a piece of bone. It's a bone of a leg of a baboon.

And it's carved with 29 notches. And the bone is broken off at one end, so we don't know whether the series continued or it ended there. But 29 is a special number, because it's almost exactly the time it takes, the number of days it takes for the moon to do a full period of the moon, 29.5 days.

29 is pretty close, it's as close as it gets. And also perhaps not coincidentally, it's the same length as the average woman cycle, which again is a big mystery. Why is it aligned with the period of the moon? We don't know. There is various ideas, but there is no firm evidence for it. But the point is that if this fibula of the baboon,

which is 17,000 years old, was actually used for counting something, and that something was the days or the nights that pass between a full moon and the next full moon, that makes of it one of the first lunar calendar. And because of this connection between womanly cycle and lunar cycle, which was inescapable, very, very powerful on dark nights in prehistory, I like to think that the people who actually carved these notches in this fibula, which has been heavily used, is polished by, because someone has been fondling it in the dark for a long time. Well, those people are actually women, I think.

And that will make women not just the first astronomers, but perhaps even the very first mathematicians. It's funny, because the first female name to be written in history books was a woman called Ed Hedu Anna. And Ed Hedu Anna, she had a great title. She was the chief priestess for the moon goddess of the city of Babylon. I want that on a business card. It would just be so cool. And she's celebrated today because she wrote poetry about measuring arcs across the sky.

So she was the first female astronomer, but the first female name to be written in the history books. So I think, yeah, female astronomy goes back a long way. Is there a kind of the different bit, because when the night sky, when they do, you know, anthropomorphize it, whatever you want to call it, in terms of turning it into men and women, and I think the moon is very often the female, is it Celine?

Is that right? Yes. And so that, as we look at the myths, which can sometimes just be thrown aside, do we also see within that important and useful knowledge beyond the story? Yes and it's quite interesting when we talk about stargazing, we talk about constellations, we have the 88 official constellations as sort of attributed by the International Astronomical Union, but one of the things I like to restore is an archaeoastronomy, so looking back in time and

seeing how everybody interpreted the sky. And if you take a constellation like Orion, it's quite distinctive. You know, the three stars in the center, then you have Betelgeuse and the other stars around. Different cultures have interpreted that constellation in different ways. In sort of a Greco-Roman, it's the hunter. But other people saw it as is of the wanderer. And you can see how people might have used it So like the ultimate projector. Oh, yes. So here we have, you know the hunter going across the sky and you can see him there

Oh, yes And so I think that's why we do that projection and but I think it is a reflection of our own cultures But what I do like to see is look at it across the different cultures because it's something that everybody has done Every culture projects onto the sky, whatever they want to see. Also, before writing was invented, you had to pass on all these stories to the next generation. So whatever stories you had that you wanted to remember

and pass down the generations, and they couldn't be written. One example is the song lines of Australian Aboriginal peoples who use the stars in the sky, not very much as a navigation aid, but more as a way to remember the instructions that were needed to go from one place to another over land and travel across the vast expanses of Australia. And when the first settlers came in, they followed the very same routes.

And along those routes, villages and then cities were founded. And nowadays, the highway system in Australia follows largely the very same routes and along those routes villages and then cities were founded and nowadays the highway system in Australia follows largely the very same routes that were once written in the sky and sung along the dream song and the dream lines of the Australian Aboriginal people and to me that's a beautiful thing. I'm fascinated by the fact that we've all got our own normal circadian rhythms, you know human beings have, animals have, plants have. So when the night comes, that's when we all close down, the human beings have chose to stay awake when it's colder, when there's less chance of hunting,

when there's less reason to be there, apart from to look up at the sky. And then the sky's filled with all of these dots and one of them's gone. Oh look at that, that's a half man, half beast firing a bow and arrow. You spend the rest of your life going, no it's not. They go, no it is, look at that. No it is, no it's not. I'm always blown away by what somebody has decided. You know, like the, as you say in the Romans, see, they're not, they're just dots. You can put what you want there. Well, it raises the question actually, because when, when do we see people beginning to say,

what actually are those? Are they really just little holes in this big crystal, whatever it is that surrounds us, or are they something else? I think that comes with the scientific revolution, really, in the 16th century when Newton starts realizing, first of all, that the laws that command the fall of an apple in a garden in Cambridge here are the same that command the moon to go around the Earth in orbit and also keep comets on track.

And so now the notion is born that the very same laws that are active here on Earth can apply to the crystalline spheres up there. At that point, the question comes, are there other worlds? So perhaps we should step back because it's the observation of the planets, isn't it, initially, that leads us. So perhaps you could just give

us a brief history of that time when we start saying these things are not gods wandering around. The data is telling us they're moving in a regular way. But by the time that Kepler comes around, for example, so we're talking at the end of the 16th century, at that point in time maybe the idea that Mars was the god of war had passed his heyday, but the idea that the influence of what is above stretches to what is below, remained very, very strongly in their minds. So if they didn't see the planets as gods, they still see the influence of the sky in human affairs as being very, very present and very, very prominent.

One of the things I go out and speak to lots of school kids, one of the things I like to talk about is the fact that our One of the things I go out and speak to lots of school kids, one of the things I like to talk about is the fact that our knowledge of the universe has evolved greatly. And it always goes back to that, you know, we're humans, we're at the center of the universe and all the stars are rotating around us. And it was those wandering stars that sort of triggered, hold it, something's going on here.

And it was people like sort of Copernicus who sort of thought, no, no, no, hold it. We don't have this sort of the earth-centered universe, we have the sun-centered universe. We have the Sun-centered universe. And that explains why these stars are wandering, because they're not stars. They're planets like ours. So I think that was the first burst.

And also, I think it was Aristotle that came up with the Earth-centered universe. And so to go against Aristotle in those days was, his ideas have been around for about 2,000 years. It's like, nah, you're wrong, Aristotle. Was quite a bold move. And so I think when that came along, people thought that the orbits were circular,

but it turned out that people like Copernicus were looking and they knew they were actually not circular. They were elliptical. Because Aristotle came up, he said that women had what? Four fewer teeth than men. And that's a really simple experiment to do, to find out whether that's true or not. But everyone just went, yeah, Aristotle said it.

So that change in thinking seems to entirely change the possibilities of astronomy as well. It is about how can we test our hypotheses. That's very interesting because this idea of the scientific method that you have to go out and measure things and then check in with your hypothesis and see what it's right or wrong. Well, that was born with astronomy, actually. And so, in a way, I like to think

of astronomy as the midwife of sciences because it was the very first domain where that became possible, indeed necessary. And the theory that came from Newton later on, for example, wasn't sufficiently accurate to account for the observational error. And so because people were so obsessed with planets, and Tico Bray was one of them, they had incredibly precise data. And the margin of error became important. It was the very first science, if you like,

where you had quantitative measurements of a phenomenon that was regular enough to be amenable to actually scientific analysis. And that's the beauty of astronomy. It gave our ancestors something complicated, a complicated puzzle to work out. And that's how the scientific method was born. So with no astronomy, we would have no science,

no technology, we wouldn't be here. It's always interested me that you see in astronomy the descriptions, the Ptolemaic systems, and all these epicycles and things like that people try to just predict the motions of the planets and so predict where they were going to be at different times of year build accurate calendars when do we see the idea which is probably the revolutionary idea in science that actually there's a simple model of this. So it becomes, if you put the sun at the center of everything, it is in some sense more elegant

and beautiful. When do we see that idea beginning to take hold? Yeah, that was the idea of Copernicus. And he said, you know, the sun is such a beautiful lamp that illuminates all of the universe. What better place for that lamp than the very center of that universe? And that's how this conception of the heliocentric model, the sun at the center of the solar system was born. And then others worked out the details, like Kepler, for example, he then took this idea and started to think, well, if that's true, what are the consequences?

The thing that gets me is what you were saying. There's a gap between a belief and something that you can prove, the measurement. That's the birth of science, isn't it, where you stop saying, I think this, and you start saying, I can show you this. Yes, but when Galileo brought his newly invented telescope to Rome to show the Pope and the other high brass of the church, they did look through the telescope, but they didn't believe what they saw. Quite interesting, because a few years ago with Skylight we went to the Vatican and we met the Vatican astronomers and this was the Vatican's take on things. They said no, they

were aware that the sun was the centre of the universe, it's just the way Galileo told it that didn't go down well. I think there were something like 41 charges against him and the only one that ever gets mentioned is because he believed that there were other planets in the universe but there were other 40 as well so there are plenty of reasons they had against him. It was a bit of a stir I think. It's easy today isn't it to go Aristotle I mean it's at the earth at the centre but his arguments were good it doesn't feel as if we're moving and everything falls towards it. Well when I was a kid looking at this guy I'm looking up. I believed I was the middle of everything. It felt like it so his is

His conclusions was absolutely valid and made a lot of sense But and based on evidence because you could see the sunrise You can see the sunset it seemed as if we were the centre of everything. The stars seemed to wheel around us. So it was evidence but they needed to go deeper really. For me the big thing is what you're saying about early manor, even the Ander falls, again there's an argument in your book that you say that may well be part of the difference between homo sapiens surviving and the Ander falls in the fact that homo sapiens were potentially more aware of what was the night sky so could move better because he knew geography better and so however to me it's the fact that these things are slow so when you're marking when you're

checking your observations you're not there the next day checking them, you're not the next hour. Some of these things take years for your observation to be affirmed. And what we can't assume is it was the same individual checking them. So that awareness of the importance of the stars must have been passed down. Otherwise, things like stonehenge wouldn't exist. When you look at you just cannot explain without the precise science that we've got today. So how much do we know in terms of the the direct connection of things like Stonehenge and Pyramid to the night sky itself? I think it's an area where we do need to be careful. For instance, one of my favorite stone hearse circles is called Nabda Playa. It sits on African soil. It is about 7,000 years old, so it's older than Stonehenge.

And people will look at it and say, oh yes, yes, you can see how it's aligned. But you're taking into account that, you know, the stars have migrated with time because, you know, the galaxy is moving. Sometimes I think we are pattern seekers and we want to superimpose as early as possible onto these things. Now that's why I think it's still under debate but that's what we need. We need the debate to see if it truly is an astronomical phenomenon or maybe they were doing something else with it. But I think that's why the scientific method works, you know, carbon dating, things like that. We can actually try and work it out. And is that why Atlantis failed as a society? Because I read a book which said that due to the refraction as they look to the stars, so anyway, is why they're underwater turnips. I want a series

on Netflix like that other bloke had. Anyway, so back to Atlantis. We have 1600s, late 1500s, early to mid 1600s. We have this idea and a mathematical model of the sun at the center and the planets obviously around it. When do we start then to see an idea of the, for example, the distances, so the distance to the planets and the distance to the stars? So the fact that the planets had to be in certain relative distance to the planets and the distance to the stars. So the fact that the planets had to be in a certain relative distance to each other is something that was known,

because you could compute essentially the periods of the planet. And from that, you can compute the relative distances. But the distance of us to the sun remains unknown until 1769, which is actually the spur of one of the greatest scientific expeditions certainly to date. And that's the Tahiti expedition on James Cook.

There's a wonderful story where James Cook, the great navigator and captain, gets sent to the other side of the globe to go and measure the transit of Venus in front of the sun. Because if you measure the passage of that planet in front of the sun, which happens every 100 years or more, then you measure it from two different places on the surface of the Earth. And you can work out what is the distance Earth, Sun,

and therefore the size of the solar system. A fantastic expedition, incredible ambition, traveling with a ship full of astronomers and instruments, all the way from Britain to the Pacific Ocean, hit a target 30 kilometers wide, and then get there, set up a cutting edge scientific observatory, taking all the measurements and so that's when we actually find out that the distance Earth to Sun is 150 million kilometers and that was a great success.

Then Newton comes around and says, well actually if those stars are as fiery as the Sun is, then by measuring the relative brightness of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky to the Sun, we can work out distance using Saturn as a stepping stone because it's very, very difficult to do so. And then Newton comes up with a number which says that Sirius is a million times further away than the Sun. We don't know how far away is the Sun at that point in time, but a million times a great deal further away.

At that point, it was clear the universe is a big place. These are the Large Hadron Collider or the Hubble Space Telescope of their time. It's a tremendous effort Do we have any sense of why it was so important? It's one of the big expeditions of the time in just to measure the distance to the Sun I suppose when you think of things like the Royal Greenwich Observatory Which was originally set up that was maybe set up for navigation and so the stars played an important role for that I think it's not really the Earth Sun distance, but understanding the cosmos at latitude Working out how to navigate across the sea working out where you are for me

I was offered having a clock on board and so for a sort of measuring using sextants And so all that was about sort of navigation, as of touring the world, increasing the empire and the domination. So I think that was very much a part of astronomy as well. As we look in the history of astronomy, what other individual stars have we been able to understand them and therefore understand ourselves?

If we continue from what was being said about the sun-earth distance, it's a group of stars and they're called Cepheid variables. So by the time we get to sort of the 1900s and we're getting sort of later, there was a woman called Henrietta Swan Leavitt and she came up with Leavitt's law and it was looking at these special types of stars called seafed variables. Now a seafed variable you can see them in other galaxies but they flash and depending on the frequency of their flashing will tell you how intrinsically bright that star is. Now this is wonderful for astronomers because it means that if you see this

seafed variable and it's flashing and you know how bright it is you can work out how much light you're seeing and then scale it up to work out how far away the star is. It's something called the inverse square law but you can work this out and so they were looking at these seafood variables and this is one of things that Hubble was doing on Mount Wilson telescope in the 1920s, largest telescope on earth and he was looking at these seafood variables and he realized that the universe was far, far bigger than we could anticipate. And some of these sort of clusters of, these sort of small clusters they thought, they were other galaxies. And then something very close to my heart is a spectroscopy. And so with the spectrograph,

you take the light from the object, you split it into its component colors, and you can work out if that star is moving towards us moving away from us and From doing that you call it red shift or blue shift from doing that Hubble was able to work out Not only that the universe was much bigger than we first anticipated, but the universe is also expanding We thought we had everything suss but no in the 1920s suddenly the universe sort of changed in virtually all dimensions And I find that so exciting that you know a few simple experiments can sort of change our understanding of the universe. Well that goes straight to the heart of what we're talking about here the cultural impact of astronomy. The idea that the universe had an origin it's suggested

partly theoretically I suppose from Einstein in the 1915-1920s. George Lemaître the great physicist and priest Is is noticing that there may be an expanding universe then as you said hubble does it so then we start talking about creation That we then we start talking about an origin to everything from as you said maggie Just analyzing light from the stars so it becomes it begins to get very important culturally light from the stars, because it begins to get very important culturally. Yes, it's almost like throwing back because when we talk about the ancients looking up at the light sky, and so many cultures came up with creation stories based in the stars, and here we are again, the universe was created, the universe began and expanded outwards, so how do we explain that?

Is there a sense of a culturally, of a real shock, but of we explain that? Is there a sense of a culturally of a real? the shock but of Interest in that when the moment happens in the early 20th century when we realized that the Milky Way is just one among Billions of other galaxies were very peripheral that that changes completely the perspective is a huge cultural shift as huge as it would be to Find life elsewhere in the universe which might happen in our lifetimes if we're lucky. And so that changes everything in a sense. And those big questions about what

is the origin of everything there is, they keep being pushed back and back and back in time. Now we understand pretty well everything that happened from 10 to the minus 32 seconds after the Big Bang until today. That's pretty good. But what happens between 10 to the minus 32 seconds after the Big Bang until today? That's pretty good, but what happens between 10 to the minus 35 and minus 32 seconds after the Big Bang? Well, that remains uncertain.

Certainly science has pushed the veil back almost all the way, but the questions remain. We still don't know what happened then or earlier or before there was time. What would our civilization have been like? We can't know, but how do you imagine our civilization would be today if we did not have access to the night sky? Very different. So the book recounts the story of what the stars did for us, in my view, from prehistory to AI, but also there are little mini chapters inside the book that are sort of fictional,

they take place on a fictional planet that I've invented. I have called it Caligo, which is a Latin name for fog. And I try to invent what might have happened or what would not have happened. So that's one way of imagining it. But for sure, I think we wouldn't have science. Our spirituality would be completely different. The way we think about ourselves, the way we think about the world would be completely different. And even I think Neanderthals might be here in our place actually if you were for the stars. Gosh, it's funny because if you look at the planet Venus that is shrouded in cloud and

so we're pretty convinced there aren't any Vesuvians but if they were they would have looked up and just see sort of a cloudy sky but at the same time when we talk about cloudy sky we're talking about in the visible light. And as an astronomer and as an instrument maker, one thing I like to talk about is tripping the light fantastic. And so we look at visible light and that's what is part of our understanding of the universe. And going back to ancient times, of course, that was the only source of understanding the universe. But for instance, with the James Webb Space Telescope, I'm just one of the 10,000 scientists that worked on that,

but we use infrared light. And so although we might not have been able to see that there was anything out there, I don't know. I believe in serendipity as well, you know. Oh, yeah, I've got this infrared sort of sensor. Oh, wait, what's that? Maybe we would have actually probably not in the infrared because we're swamped in the infrared,

but maybe with something we would have picked up one of the other wavelengths and realised there might have been something beyond. I'm always a glass half full person. But I think that we might have found other ways of detecting what's out there. I suppose radio as well. You may well have invented radio. And then suddenly there's a sky aglow with radio waves.

But I suppose the question might be, we could rephrase it, if you had no access to the sky at all, which I suppose, it's not invisible light or radio, if you just did not know there was a universe beyond the planet. There is a counterfactual of sorts, going back to the Neanderthals themselves.

We know that they were a different kind of human who had been around for 800,000 years before we came around, and yet they never developed all these technologies, they never got to radio or the space, or the James Webb space telescope and then even have the sewing needle for example. And they were as intelligent as we are, we believe now, they had the same cranial capacity, they had arts, they were masters of fire, they were social, they could probably speak or produce sounds. Why didn't they invent all this stuff?

Is it curiosity? Star-driven curiosity, yes, I think so. So, the reason that the Neanderthals died out, you're claiming, is because they weren't astronomers. Yes, exactly. That's why astronomers, it's bold. That's why astronomers... It's so important to keep funding astronomy in this day and age. I'll definitely second that.

If we don't fund astronomy, we will go the same way. I like this. If you listen back to about 50 episodes of this show, you will find there will always be a point where a scientist who's waiting to get his funding grant accepted will say and that is unfortunately Why I think their lack of understanding of the human genome Led to the death of Neanderthals You never get any Neanderthals right and then go look we're getting a lot of stick on that show Well, nearly all of us are

I wondered what do you know you know, this discussion, is this beautiful? It's so Frankie Howard. We've got a nice bit of Neanderthal. All fur coat and no telescope. The, er, now, erm, but I, I wondered what you feel about, er, like, there's a beautiful phrase, cosmological vertigo, you know. We've been talking there, which is that moment where you think of the enormity of the universe and we yeah you mentioned there 300 billion stars And then I presume that even though it's gone up by a hundred billion We're still imagining there are more galaxies than there are stars in our galaxy Do you ever get that sense of cosmological vertigo or is it something positive that always comes from this? Well, we say cosmological vertigo just like it's just too much

It's just too much. I know I know like like like you've written a whole book on what would it be like without stars. If it was me I'd just do that. For the listeners John is underneath the tablecloth. And has been for the whole show. Look I've been on the show a number of times, and I'm friends with you both, and there are times where the conversation gets beyond what my head can cope with. And I'm literally hanging on. So I've got stuff in my head, and I think, just remember that bit and drop that in. Just remember Kepler, Galileo, they're all there, early 1600s, Bruno got killed just before them. Throw that in, everyone thinks you've read it.

You know what I mean? So I am a little bit cramming. I'll be honest with you, by Tuesday I would have forgot it all. But it's also, the wonderments of it, I think there's a spirituality when you look at the stars, the relationship between human beings and why we're here and all of that stuff that sometimes feels a little hippie dippy can get explained by science and be understood by science, but not lose its spirituality or its meaning. And I think that's a wonderful thing.

I'd agree with that. And I think some people do get overwhelmed because I go out to schools, I speak to people, I have 300 billion stars, you're like, stars, hey, 200 billion galaxies, woo. And people come up to me afterwards and say, woo, yeah, when you say that, it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. And I think there are two sorts of people, the people who make them feel uncomfortable and the people who don't make it feel uncomfortable. But to the people who feel uncomfortable, I like to say that it just means we are part of something fantastic. We are part of this amazing cosmos and sitting on

this planet we are looking out there trying to understand it. And so we are an infinitesimally small part of that amazing cosmos but we are still a part of it and understanding it. And of all the things that you wrote in your book, of all the things I actually stopped, put it down, I went downstairs to my wife and said, Liz, we need a cup of tea. And she said, why? And this might be a figure that loads of people have heard before, but I'd never heard it before.

And it said that if you're born in Western society now, you are likely to have 4,000 weeks of life. And I suddenly went, oh my God god how many of them have gone? How many have I got left and what am I going to do with the thousand or so I got left because you know when you say 25 Christmases 25 summers it doesn't mean the same but a thousand weeks and then you put that down to how many nights are you going to look at the sky how many times are you going to reference who you are and where you fit into all of this and sometimes when you're saying hundreds of millions and billions and billions of stars it's too much but so but you've got to remember

that you're just passing through so just take a moment you've only got four thousand weeks I genuinely find every time that I look at it, daytime looking at the clouds, night time looking at the stars, to do that before you go to bed, to, you know, as you said, to lie in the long grass and just stare up, there is, there are few better... Short grass is better. It depends. It's true, it's true. And that is why your tribe died out, dominantly.

I'm always hiding from someone. The night sky. You know, again, when you come down to all the new understandings of mental health and the relationship about being outside, being in woods, being in trees, being able to see the night sky, all of those things matter to us in a way that I don't think we fully understand and maybe previous human beings did understand it a little bit more because they were less closeted. And I think that connection you're talking about is absolutely important nowadays because

yes, you can go out in nature in the woodlands, whatever, but the night sky is our shared global components. It's literally the only one aspect of nature that's shared among all of us, although we're losing it now to light pollution and so on and and to me that's really really important because to recapture that sense not just the understanding of the billions that we were talking about but the emotional connection with the night sky Making you feel small and insignificant yet significant in that strange way when that photon hits your retina and You understand or feel something. I think that's fundamental in this day and age where we are facing a dramatic ecological crisis

and loss of biodiversity and all the dangers that our planet faces to understand how special we are, how unique our blue marble is in that vast blackness of space and that's fundamental to make good choices. How special is the time we have? When you start it out in life, if someone said, this is as far as you're going to get, you've got 4,000 weeks, you would use that time better.

I mean, there's a week in Benidorm, I'll never get back. Maybe with previous human beings, because their life expectancy was shorter and their closeness to death was always relevant that their relationship with the stars might have been more powerful because they were mapping things that the next cycle of some of those changes would have been outside of their lifespan and somebody still mopped it. Well we're, we're gonna wind up there,

but I think you're entirely right, John, that you always find time to that experience of wonder and curiosity and connection and delight. Thank you so much to our panel, Roberto Trotter, Maggie Adair and Pocock, and John Bishop. And we asked our audience a question and today the question was what scares you most on the darkest of nights? Why did you do that in a northern accent? No, that wasn't a northern accent.

That was merely the darkest of nights. But I didn't. What scares you most on the darkest of nights in a northern accent Zoe said my a level results, and I'm the teacher Knowing statistically I will eat a spider during my lifetime together with flies and other insects. And that's from an old woman. He's been very worried for some time. John, what have you got? I've got to read this one, although afterwards I think there'll probably be an inquiry

because it's got, getting caught pe peeping and that's signed by Tom This is Anatidophobia a fear a duck is watching me while I sleep Why a duck in particular no that's that's a we'll leave that to all in the mind I'm sure if it's the if the night is truly dark the dirt wouldn't be able to see you So you'd be fine. So what don't you got night vision like then? So not good if it's completely dark There's literally no photons there then unless the duck is emitting light Like yeah

Yeah, we didn't say anything about banning torches I think I've cured the anatolyphobia because because the duck can't see you so don't worry about it the strawberry that's more worrying because then the duck might start you know accidentally walking into you the ducks not evil but it's just it's just can't see anything. No, I think you've made this far worse. That should be the advert that the ducks not evil says Robinette. The strawberries I had for supper might still be alive.

Anyway, so next week, next week we go from neutron stars to the neonatal. From the music of the spheres to the development of the ears, from the mysteries of the skies to the development of the ears from the mysteries of the skies to the Twinkle in our eyes from the beauty of Uranus Next week we will be exploring embryology the science of how we came to be from today's big bang to big bang next week Thank you very much for listening we'll see you next time goodbye Without your trousers In the infinite monkey cage

Turned out nice again. Strong message here from BBC Radio 4. A brand new series with me, Armando Iannucci. And me, Helen Lewis. A show all about the use and abuse of political language, where we take back control of the airwaves. And tell you what we're hearing on the doorstep. Just what do these phrases actually mean?

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