The Aliens Are Coming! with Ben Miller and Jim Al-Khalili

well I hope we're going you're going to enjoy the next 90 minutes I think what we're going to do is I'll have it then and I would have a chat about about the book for about half that time and then we'll open it up to all of you to quiz him about it the book is out officially out today very excited although I have I did see it in foils at Waterloo station earlier this week and I assumed it been out early about penny that there has been a big black market for this book I have not support I'm not surprised been trying as a crackdown on that so I don't know if it's a lie but I'm assuming most of you haven't read the book yet which is why you're all here good has anybody has anybody read it I mean you've had a day and made was that a long train fighters okay right how many five go there we go that's pretty good very good that was a train journey from Penzance yeah I should have finished the book by then no it no excuse well I have read it because I will sent it quite early on by the publishers because I knew we were doing this event and I have to say it's tremendous fun I have to I guess own up that I'm I'm also editing a book on aliens which is going to be out later this week I can't help noticing you didn't ask me to contribute to yeah yeah I don't I was hoping you wouldn't ask me that I'm feeling very guilty there because you are now an expert on all things alien and and I have to say the book was a tremendous read and I kept I sort of fold fold over sort of corners of pages and things that the sort of questions to ask you yeah um but it but I think your first book it's not rocket science and and and we did this sort of event at the yellow food book festival a few years ago and we had a similar sort of chat and that was your first foray into popular science writing yes presumably that was a nice enough experience that you decided to do another one yeah it really did rekindle or my holy interest in sites because of course I am you know I did I did begin I did a degree in Natural Sciences my you know science was very much the thing that I was first interested in and I I did half a PhD we did merges essentially you know PhD most of the PhD did everything but right up my thesis in solid state physics writing the first book you know which was very much a kind of you know it's kind of my own private adult education course sort of reminding myself of all the bits of science that I really loved and was very exciting because I came across biology which and when I studied no offense to any biologists that made the present but your subject was extremely dull twenty years ago and is now I think the most one of the most interesting fields of study going and I felt after writing the first book I felt so excited about the biology that I'd come across and particularly the advances in you know the understanding of you know biochemistry essentially DNA and I sort of felt I really really got fascinated with the idea of the really what is you know what is this thing we're all doing what is life you know physically what is it how common is it what would other life be like and DNA seemed to be such a sort of an incredible window onto that world I thought I absolutely have to write a second book the first book sort of about what we know second but really about for me about what we all we don't know it yeah and you know those those those things that we know in science are wonderful and they're amazing touchstones but the stuff that I think really gets all of us going is this is those frontiers the things that we don't know and and for this book you really did have to go out and talk to people and quiz them and this is what was so brilliant your voyage of discovery I was in my zone totally with the first foot so I was like writing about the things that I really knew about and I didn't know any of this so it's a complete you know an innocent abroad in the world of biology thankfully because of the first book I was able to say look I have written a book on science just going on to lots of you know large rubber extremely having in scientists have got an awful lot of demands on their time but at least I could say like I have actually written a science book so I am I am for real and I do really want to talk to you about this about the science and I have to say it was incredible the people that I met you know the journey that I went on you know and this is a I love I'm also really really love the personality of scientists I don't just I'm a bit of a em you know if science is football I'm a football I'm a football fan really you know and this is a fanzine basically I love meeting professional scientists I love finding out about how they got interested in their subject what makes them tick but you're also unique people at you and Darrow Breen are in that unique position where you have got a science training you do know how to think like a scientist but you also know how to connect yes which sort of thing that a lot of scientists aren't able to do but also I think there's a huge you know there's a huge overlap I think in the Venn diagram of the human personality as a big overlap between maths and comedy and you know music and there's a we have an enormous amount in common I think scientists and comedians and I think that I believe that since that's not everyone's with me yeah you know and I think that for me what's really exciting is joining together two sides of my life is joining together the comedy that I love and trying to make science funny I mean that come with varying degrees of success no yeah it's certainly in this book I mean it it is incredibly amusing all means it's some and and okay it's a sort of subject that lends itself to people who think they've they've seen alien UFO abductions and all that this they are easy targets but you know the book is full of these anecdotes or you know weird and wacky experiments yeah about the nature of life and and the search for life elsewhere some someone some I knew about an other side that there were really new to me and is it Joe is just good fun to read but you've the book sort of spans there are a lot of areas that the aliens and so the title aliens are coming so the notion isn't just what do aliens look like or what up what's the probability but it goes back to what what is life and have life and how likely was life to have started on earth and therefore could it start elsewhere and and all the search you know you can do wait for signals to come what do you look for extrasolar path and there's a lot happening at the moment in science it's extraordinary I mean again you know going back to when I was you know an undergraduate we were pretty sure that planets you know there had to be other planets out there I mean you'd go out on a summer's evening and you'd look up at the sky and you look at all those stars and you think well be pretty amazing if if these if this was the only solar system there's no proof and there were plenty of people who and you could find plenty of physicists who would disagree with you Suns yeah sounds really hot now to say it but physicists who would say well this is a very special set of circumstances that we find here in the solar system is we just don't you know some would say well we think they're almost certainly our planets others would disagree and then you know in the in the early 90s with that discovery of the very first planet it was so weird I mean they found a Wikus planet you could possibly imagine you know cuz we were looking you know we're thinking is that is there anything like the earth out there and they found this thing that was the size of Jupiter going around a star in about four days and it's just completely bizarre absolutely bizarre solar system that we found and and from then on you know we kind of had the two outliers then we had the earth you know you know and we had this hot Jupiter and then and of course they both as more and more information came in it sort of began to smooth out into some sort of recognizable curve and we now know yeah there are lots of you know hot Jupiters but there are plenty of Twisted Sister mm extrasolar planets exoplanets orbiting so yes I've been discovered since yeah many of them found by this amazing Kepler space telescope that sort of starts out really telling that story which is how barren with the first they were the early exploration that we made of the solar system you know when we're sending our probes to Venus and to Mars and then beyond to some of the giant planets how barren everything looked and then how it looked like the earth seemed to be the only place where life could possibly Goldilocks flourish yeah you know this place that was just right so perfect where everything was just so right and how slowly that picture has that pictures changed until this is there's a positive you may not be aware it but that's a positive fever in the cosmological community at the moment about the we just at the brink of the stage where we are going to be able to we already can look at the spectra of planets orbiting nearby stars and soon we're going to have more and more telescopes that can give us even more information not only about are there terrestrial planets orbiting well other lung probably planets larger than yeah but to begin with are there large planets orbiting sun-like stars near us and what are their atmospheres like we'll be able to see clear is it yeah it is that you can figure out the the what their atmospheres are they have an atmosphere or not just from the spectroscopy feel like that comes and then and the lines and the you read off the borrower's about it's got bit of oxygens yeah it's got nitrogen yeah well there are no oxygen there yeah yeah no oxygen they're indulgent aliens yes it's just so there's that search looking for planets that might be habitable and there's also the you know the SETI the search that's waiting for signals to come from alien civilizations I know and a lot of people may be surprised to not to know this but you know there have been a sort of dedicated yeah they've been dedicated physicists dedicated since the 1950s looking and you don't like the name SETI I don't like it it just SETI to me sounds it sounds too much like Yeti and I think that's been a big I think honestly I think branding is really important in science and we went for this the the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and unfortunately those two of those words being the the idea of extraterrestrials has been completely hijacked by Steven Spielberg so we've already got one come you know which by the way is one of my wife's favorite films justifiably so enjoy that you missing the no now just an egg you know in no I'm just saying how such a good film it's hard to sort of see past it to other kinds of to other kinds of alien life and it's also it's that made up Yeti thing that I just think together those two resonances make it very hard to see past the fact that these are bonafide a peer-reviewed hard-working cosmologists who are able to who are who are making them incredibly who are doing incredibly important work and the task is enormous because if you can say well we're going to find we're going to try and find signs of intelligent life in the universe the question is you've got an enormous haystack there that you've got to look for a needle in what you don't even know what kind of needle you're looking for you don't even know what the signal is so at least the debate has begun through SETI the debate is done of what we should look for and how we might recognize it if we find it which we haven't yet I mean despite the one-third of Americans who claim to have been abducted I made that statistic up and it's unfair on Americans because I'm sure they lost the number of people who think they've seen aliens and UFOs and so on and yet we know the most dedicated searches for any sort of signal that looks like it might have been you know some alien some intelligence that says has created it has come up with fraud this one results which are very fond of which is this this Wow signal right which is a fascinating it's a fascinating little story this guy Jerry ehman operating the what was the Big Ear radio telescope in Ohio who found who basically they closed down the telescope to cut off the funding and he was sort of moonlighting really was working I think in a business school retraining basically and he was still getting the data sent through to him at night and they were searching theirs too most of the stuff when you point a radio telescope at the sky mostly most things give off a big splurge of radiation or all kinds of different wavelengths there are one or two objects that give off very specific frequencies things like pulsar but most stuff just splurges stuff out of course a really wide range of colors if you like of the spectrum and artificial signals on earth tend to be focused around a very narrow range of frequencies and he picked up put it this way if he pointed his telescope at an artificial signal this is what it would have looked like unfortunately they listened for another sort of 60 days or something that's exact same patch of sky never heard anything else and because this is science you know this isn't UFOs this is science that's counted as a null result a null result but nevertheless something something did happen that is not explained simply by yeah something straightforward like reflected artificial signal or you know something from earth and then got reflected back into the tusko and I think a lot of it mean he found a signal it doesn't mean he didn't it's just kind of I just find it interesting it's not quite quite true to say we never picked up anything we did we picked up tuning once we didn't pick it up again it hasn't gone away yeah yeah yeah I mean because you know a lot of people say oh well maybe you know scientists NASA or whoever or the Pentagon they know they've picked up signals or they picked up for aliens of landed but obviously the conspiracy theorists are saying you know there's they're keeping it quiet you know it's for our own good yeah and what Scheldt hands how many people believe aliens have visited earth I'm not expecting to see many because you're all I'll lock this one too I'm not going to pick you out and you know that objects it's already cool I mean I think it's a it's interesting because I mean I'm maybe it's a smaller fractions of audiences that come to the rasta - I like to think my audiences a slightly different caliber but I love the story in the book where you you you you you trace back the history of flying saucers yeah it goes back to this guy Kenneth Arnold Kenneth Arnold 1947 that's right yeah I mean this is a fascinating this is an absolutely fascinating story and I mean I think with I do deal with UFOs in the book I'm fine I love UFO stories by the way I'm really absolutely fantastic and I enjoy them in the same way that I enjoy good ghost story they're sort of in they're absolutely riveting I think and always you have they always essential ingredient in any good UFO story is a really reliable upstanding citizen yes never had a dream you never had a dream any of you know is totally steadies a bank manager or whatever yes and you see how's this he meets this alien or gives this signal and I love these stories so they begin I mean they begin much early you know we have we have Lovell believing he sees canals on the moon and I think you're probably since the beYOU know I think it's probably since the very beginnings of mankind we've imagined that there were reaches out there but really interesting the Flying Saucer phenomenon is fascinating because when you investigate the story and I I can promise you I've done it so you don't have to because it made my brain bleed it's really trying to find facts and narrow a story down and but I got there in the end going back to original sources and original interviews so the story is this this guy so I mentioned I'm an artificial intelligence and that was mine yeah I'm a proxy sent here man I need to reboot myself in a minute I'll then so this guy um Kenneth Arnold a pilot he had he had a sort of commercial business we flew professionally so he'd be flying all over servicing sort of various companies with this equipment and he flew um short story he was flying in near Mount Rainier Rana in Washington and he saw he believed he saw some sort of boomerang shaped ships and being a pilot he made very accurate observations of how fast they were going and their exact shape and he drew them for when he returned when he sort of returned to the airport he told the friends about this and he drew pictures of them and in came some colleagues from the same airport and they said there's a military base nearby you might see military planes but he felt that they weren't military planes and the story went out on the wire and was picked up by a Press Association who got it complete who misquoted him saying that he'd seen a saucer shape object so first of all he didn't see a saucer-shaped object he saw I mean it saw something that looked a bit like and you can look at you look it up there was a thing called the military if he was reading aviation magazines at the time which you assumed he would you can find aviation magazines with this thing called the it was called a flying wing it was a design for that's very similar to what he's describing and yet it went out on the on the wire that he'd seen flying saucer and immediately you have many reports of people seeing flying saucers exactly not as he had seen them and described them but as they were described in the newspaper article maybe and this is this is real question to sort of this is a fascinating thing about the and it goes right to the heart of why we need to do science in the first place but um this this needs answering you know I mean you you read his account you can be pretty sure that he saw what he believed he saw what he saw psychologists call it priming you know you obviously see you know you see an image of something then you might believe at some later point the useful yourself he was he was possibly primed by some aviation magazine they had seen to believe he'd seen a flying wing people are reading the newspaper were primed by the newspaper to believe the someone had seen a flights also and then they begin they begin seeing flying saucers and then you have all these other incidents that follow in 1947 there's a wave of sightings in the US all of people seeing flying saucers and documenting them and drawing them and and you can't I mean you can't something's going on I mean I don't think that this is that thing is alien suddenly changed the design of their spaceships I mean I think it's possible but you know we have to think well how could that happen you know what why do we see things that aren't there and of course it comes down to the fact that this is brilliant there's a brilliant Oliver Sacks quote that I found that I will now mangle but it was something like you know every every act of memory is an act of invention and every act of perception as an act of creation it's the idea that you're that we play something with becoming more and more conscious of in psychology we play an absolutely vital role in what we believe we see you know most of what you see in this room now is simply a projection what your brain is expecting to see your brain isn't constantly sampling everything in your vision it's basically looking at one or two objects and it's just filling in everything we left ten minutes oh yeah we're not hearing and it's this it's this we have a hard time admitting that don't yeah you know we have a hard time admitting that we are imaginative creatures there were creatures of imagination you know but what the same goes for anything in the supernatural ghosts and things like that you know you know ghosts are real Jim oh sorry yeah crop circles died of death very quickly they did cross a direct way well and unfortunately yeah unfortunately with crop circles there were it would there were a small number of perpetrators and they they actually just sit put their hand up and they said yeah boy saying yeah I mean this is all getting out of hand yeah with it we've been making the crop circles it's really not difficult I'll show you I'll do one there they did those auto tight and this is how we do it it's really not complicated we just squash them because at the moment there was a there were scientists from saying you know these fractal patterns could only be made by other intelligence and you know um yeah yeah you get it into the heart of the book and you really get stuck into the science and you're talking about yeah in an accessible way what's capable but but in terms of just the the sheer and likeness the improbable you know the chances of life having emerged on earth even yes once we know life has emerged at least once here on earth yeah but you know what needs to come together for life to emerge what is it that what's that magical if indeed there is any magical jump between chemistry and this is another reason why I think this subject is sort of ignited over the last few years is restart I have some really I mean for a long time again you know okay you know you for younger members of the audience oh sorry to keep harking back to you know 20 years ago I stood aside but really all we had all we were given then was this sort of shallow pond idea you know this idea that well probably there was a pond and probably a lot of it evaporated so it got quite concentrated a lot of molecules in there and sooner or later molecule was created that could reproduce itself and that's how life got started and it doesn't and it's vulnerable that is vulnerable to a very clear argument which was made by a fantastic astronomer called Fred Hoyle who who said well you know that is like assuming that a wind can blow through a junkyard and spontaneously assemble a 747 you know that's life is too complicated for it to happen by chance myself and there's been some I mean I'm I have to put my hand up here say I'm I'm a I'm not going to give you an unbiased view at this point because having done a survey of all the different theories that are out there of how life got started there's some fascinating stuff about how it got about and how clays might have been the kind of template if you like for life to be in the one that absolutely rang true to me and maybe it's because I'm a physicist at heart was one that really it's a an argument that began with a physicist called Mike Russell and Nick Lane a evolutionary biochemist here in the UK is has run with it as well and done done a lot of work on it it's basically it comes down to this basically it's all you need is all you need is rock water and carbon dioxide so you its life is basically a volcanic effect is essentially what it comes down to that we need a source of energy if you need to the problem with a pond is life essentially does something quite extraordinary and we can all we all recognize it when we see it in that um you know I'm not the book of the table book just sort of flops onto the floor it doesn't then then hop up and start wandering huh sit down in one of the chants up and flicking through itself while I'm talking I mean it's the kind of life uses energy in a unique way you know it takes we one thing you can generalize about all life forms as they consume some thought event form of energy and and give out heat and how could a pond do that where's the source of energy you know you've got to one of the ideas where it's a flash of lightning or a bolt of lightning supplies that initial spark that generates the first molecule but life isn't like that life appears to need a sustained source of energy and that's what you have in a volcanic vent and there's been some detailed work on it and I mean different you know different evolutionary biochemists have slightly different theories but the in a nutshell it's basically that if you have acidic seawater as you did in the early earth and you have alkaline water coming from a volcanic vent on the seafloor you get a barrier and where you have a charged difference and that charge difference can be used as a source of energy I mean it's like a battery or essentially that energy is on tap to drive the formation of molecules and to drive the formation of longer chain molecules so I should say and that's the kind of stuff that we're made of and I just I love this energy approach to life and that's what that's what I found a most fascinating thing a bit of biology that I came across in the book does that answer Hoyles issue you know the improbable structure of the very first replicating molecule that can make a copy of itself you have all the ingredients you know but I mean Milanoo rate did the famous success in the 50s where they got all those you know the some of the bolt of lightning they had you know they're sort of the electrodes like Frankenstein's monster yeah they had all the chemicals of the test tubes stir it up and they got those building blocks the amino acids but I guess it's putting them in the right arrangement that is what is so hard to do yeah exactly and I think the show I think the honest answer will be no it doesn't completely answer it until we can until somebody's you know until somebody has managed to make a self reproducing molecule by you know some kind of electrochemical through some kind of electrochemical cell no it hasn't been done but the advantage that it has over the small warm pond mmm yeah I mean you can do it in stages you don't have to do it all in one go you can you could have you can have a membrane this is the really important thing nobody really knows what came first you know does the it's the chicken and egg really do you need a dessert does the membrane come first do and self reproducing molecules come first just something else come first at some point you need all of them and those ingredients are all there in hydrothermal vents the idea is once you can create some kind of simple inorganic membrane a bubble basically to protect to protect one of the in these alkaline hydrothermal vents as proposed by Mike Russell you get bubbles of iron sulfide anion sulfide also happens to be a great catalyst for making long-chain molecules so the idea is you have a little protective you know a little you know the bubble basically that does the job of an early cell and you start to get those first reactions and that create long-chain molecules as always a lot of detail to fill in there but the difference between that and Fred Hoyle is you only if you're on a very simple level if you can create a we're small molecules can get in but large molecules can't get out you start to concentrate your reactants if you like start to concentrate the chemicals in there in a way that you don't in the pond and so you've got concentrated chemicals with a continuous source of energy because you get this little electrical you get this electric field across you know across the membrane because of the alkaline vent fluid inside the bubble and the acidic vent fluid outside the bubble and this little electric field you get it can be used as a way of storing energy or driving reactions so you start to get this is what I found exciting about it you start to get the ingredients you feel you would need to begin cellular life and that's what we're talking about isn't it we're talking about how do you make a bacterium yeah I mean I guess that's it ordinary really is to make something that can make copies of itself yeah once that started on you off Darwinian evolution just yeah so but yeah it's more more complicated it's just that that first initial that that first step so it happened on earth do you then believe that it therefore if those conditions must exist of all the hundreds of billions of stars just in our own galaxy and so many of them have planets there must be planets that are the right distance from their star to have some liquid water and so on have all degrees surely that process would have happened elsewhere as well that's what I believe yeah I mean and I you know that's what is another argument as well which is that life that that kind of life started really early on earth so the very early Earth is is getting I mean first of all conditions we now know conditions settled down on earth much quicker than we originally thought you know so that there was an oxidizing atmosphere you know things like carbon dioxide were already in the atmosphere very early on and there was liquid water on the Earth's surface and then so the earth is you know roughly 4.5 4.5 billion years old roundabout you know no one's exactly sure round about the 4 million 4 billion year old 4 billion years ago mark the earth is pounded by asteroids this is terrible bombardment I mean it's bombarded obviously since it forms and it's bombarded you know up up until 3 billion years ago but there's a really huge spike in bombardment and we can tell we know this because we can see we can date the craters on the moon basically it's a really a period they called the late heavy bombardment where and life we think had begun on earth before that so that's really really early that's really really early to get going so it's almost like you think single-celled life to my mind works pretty much straight out of the box you know it's like you've got an earth-like planet you've got water on it it's going to sun-like star you're going to get you're going to get single-celled life as you as you know you know the it's the other stages are pretty really tricky it's getting it's getting from that to complex life most of the life that's nearly all life that's ever existed on earth is of the single-celled variety I mean bacteria are they're really dead they're really kicking our ass they really are I mean they are everywhere back to her everywhere they're the most successful organism on the planet bar none and only in one tiny tiny fraction of organisms did anything did what we call complex multicellularity evolve where we have you know things like arguably a handful of times in various different kinds of algae and in Phung in fungi and in animals yeah and of those handful of cases it's only out it's only animals where we find intelligence so the odds against intelligent life seem very very high yeah I mean in terms of life laughing I guess what always puzzles me is that so far there's no evidence the country so far it seemed to have only started once on earth yes yeah you know because we can try all life on earth can be traced back to that first yeah replicator that that that you could maybe you could maybe argue twice because you could maybe argue that the the what they call the last Universal common ancestor imagine this this but you know little pocket of life living in this bubble arguably left the vent twice because there are really two different kinds of single-celled organisms on the planet and the bacteria and the Archaea and they are very very different from one another and there is a school of thought which says that basically they both have a common ancestor but each evolved a different kind of membrane in order to leave the vent right so but you're still down to you know it's still not great is this two suitcases I mean now that really it's one anyway because it's the same family tree of life and that's really what if life started this is a great question if life started way back then why is it not been started it's so early that it was so easy for it to have started even you know before that late heavy bombardment starts it again yeah and and you get anything new in the book you explore some possible other worlds that might be just right for life I and I do and then you speculate what life would be like I even wrote this down because it's very very good so what would life on a super-earth in the habitable zone of an orange dwarf star look like that's pretty specific you've narrowed it down that's where you're gonna find the array lian's yeah well this is the really really exciting thing that I came across is that Sam and I didn't know this and I don't know um you know people but basically and pretty much as you'd expect most planets are medium-sized they're like things between you know between the terrestrial planets are pretty small obviously the earth and Mercury Mars Venus are all very very small planets then you've got really big things like Jupiter and in our own solar system there's nothing really in between we've got Neptune but you know there's nothing there's nothing like medium-sized god fat you get the big the gas giants Jupiter Saturn and if there's life there in their moon it's gonna be in their moons yeah because their moons are more like the size of the terrestrial planets yeah so yeah we're kind of went yeah so that's a very good point to make out when people talk about life on you know life on Saturn they talk about the moons of Saturn or the moons of Jupiter the yeah I mean it turns out of course that if you look at also you know put all solar systems up on the wall or up on the wall all the Kepler all the 2000 you know on solar systems we've found if you put them all up there there's a lot of medium-sized stuff that we just don't happen to have in our our solar system our solar system is a little not that unusual but not that common has maybe like 1 in 100 one in a thousand Sun to have no medium-sized planets at all so we don't particularly know why that was we think maybe it was because Jupiter moved around a lot in the early solar system and kicked a few planets out and kicked the medium-sized stuff out but really we should have some medium sized planets and if you get a really big terrestrial sized planet they call that super earth and so you're talking about stuff that's like say one and a half times the radius of the earth up to something that's sort of half the size of Neptune if you like that middle that's that's really a sweet spot for planets as you kind of think it would be really the smaller ones would be rare and legal ones would be rare and lot stuff would turn out to be medium-sized it turns out that kind of planet if it's around a star that is dimmer slightly dimmer than the Sun could be the absolute perfect place for life and for a number of of really really great reasons mostly to do with time because as we know one form of life on this planet what you clearly need for evolution is a lot of time Kay the next the stars that are slightly dimmer than our own Sun last a lot longer you know our Sun lusts Matt last say five billion years sorry 10 billion years the K types might last twice twice as long as you've got twice as much time so maybe you got 10 million years instead of the five that we've had where the star is stable and life could form with these big planets once you get a big planet like that obviously the gravity is much stronger you don't get huge mountains and deserts you get much more like a kind of um you know tiny little islands basically and we know from life on Earth that tiny little islands and shallow seas are great places for life to evolve you know there's not a lot of life in the deep oceans and there's not a lot of life at the top of mountains you know is it most life appears to you know going back to you know the very first you know hard-bodied creatures on earth they appeared to have evolved in shallow season that's we'd have it loaded that on super-earths so that was what I couldn't believe it you know not only are there up might there be other Earth's out there there might be more super-earths than there are earths and they could be a better place to evolve life so it's kind of it's really I don't blew my mine - I thought that was amazing yeah do you mean do you think in your heart of hearts that you know in your lifetime we will discover we're not likely to I mean it's not so likely we're going to discover here a signal from some alien civilization it's more likely that we're going to find some microbial life somewhere do you think that is likely because even that would would be the one of the greatest discoveries the whole I feel I feel like yeah within within a within a decade I think we'll have a disputed signal we'll have some kind of data where we've analyzed one of the things you look at the atmosphere of a planet even you can't go there you use the but you know the barcode you can see what the gases are in the atmosphere and if you've got and if you've got oxidizing gases and you've got a reducing gas they're present you there's a chemical you know something's not right something's going on because those without some source of energy life to keep light on earth we can't you know there's you know you've got plants pumping out oxygen all the time oxygen couldn't exist in balance with all the other gases of their own atmosphere without life continuing recycling it and pumping it out you can see that there's a chemical imbalance you know that there must be something going on you know and that that thing could be life I think we'll get something that you know possibly yeah yeah you know possibly within the next decade I'd hope that people will have the first observations where it's in dispute and then I really I think there's I'd be amazed if there isn't microbial life on Mars I just think it's because we've been there before but yeah and in the motor we haven't thought we discovered there yeah it turned out twice now we thought we just got once with the with the lander yes Viking Lander thought thought we find Martian microbes yeah and the second time with the meteorites you know the Allan Hills meteorites which I've got a picture of in the book you know which has got these I mean a lot of biologists say the the fossils it are just too small to be life but you know too small to be the kind of life we find on oh that's right it's too small to have enough room for enough DNA to get dead but who says vacation who says that life Martian life is using DNA generally it's a kind of odd it's an odd yardstick there were applying we do and not just think that all life should be like life on Earth but we even anthropomorphize aliens yeah yeah I know they should have intelligence like arson then yes we be able to talk to them and yeah although there are good out that was the other thing is that if there is a complex multicellular life out there there are good arguments to suggest that it that the same things that evolved on earth like teeth and eyes and intelligence and civilization would evolve there because was the other really really interesting thing as we think it's two things going on here we sort of assume everything is like is like life on Earth but at the same time we want to think that we humans are incredibly special and there was another thing that I learned as well going was that things like civilization have been going for about 8 million years in in a certain kind of Brazilian ant try and realized that Intel that octopuses develop nuclear fusion and ripping off my book right now yeah you know that all the we can't really claim any kind of we're an accidental hero really and Homo sapiens we didn't really it just all happened these things all just happen to fall at the same time you know and also we were nasty lot you know we wiped out anything else that was a was a rival to us you know it's very interesting I was thinking about this only this morning I was reading a story book to my son am i I've got a four-year-old son and he's very focused on goodies and baddies you know are you a goodie in a battler are you a baddie and to a certainly sense what all our stories are about isn't it you know it is us kind of you're either with us or you're not with us and we're going to just we're going to destroy you because we're good and you're fat it's part of our whole makeup we are completely um with murderous we're at a murderous species this is the terrifying thing you look at human history no human history and these other incredible creatures you know like then this we know of one for certainly lived alongside us but many many more in in Africa very very similar to us that we just clearly either out competed or more likely and just destroyed you know when you see what we do to us what we do to ourselves and other cultures are even other human cultures on earth that we decide that we take against and we're good and they're evil and we're going to wipe them out you know project that on to sort of alien I wanted yet joy the earth or their enlightened they want to teach us stuff yeah we never taken to account this might just be indifferent and I really don't care no have they done any work into what other forms life might take if it's not sort of DNA carbon-based are there other forms it could take

Channel: The Royal Institution

Views: 284,358

Rating: 3.5445666 out of 5

Keywords: Ri, Royal Institution, science, ben miller, jim al-khalili, aliens, extra terrestrial, seti, ufo, et, search for, do aliens exist, have aliens ever, intelligent life

Id: _FfNrO6vGTs

Length: 46min 40sec (2800 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 20 2016