Sometimes You have to Shut Up, Sit Down, and Listen to Someone Smarter than You tell it Like it Really is

Imagine we're the only civilisation in this galaxy of 100 billion star systems. What a tremendous responsibility that confers. Imagine what that knowledge should do to our political processes; the way that we think about ourselves and the way that we get on together; imagine how ridiculous it is to divide our little world up into countries, and have a little war every now and again and point nuclear missiles at each other, if, in fact, there is nowhere else in the Milky Way Galaxy where organisms think, where they can look at the stars and have these conversations. What a ridiculous way to behave.

Cosmology necessitates a perspective that is incredibly humbling, and this is perhaps a good thing, and quite elating. You could say what we are, according to the evidence and the data at the moment, is almost indescribably special. Our insignificance, on a cosmic scale, actually makes us special, because we're the only place in the galaxy where civilisation has occurred. So these ideas are worth pursuing.

People have looked for meaning in the universe since we began to look at the stars, The universe means something to me, it would be ridiculous to say it doesn't: we have families, our loved ones etc: the fact that meaning might be emergent, it might spring from the laws of nature: it's certainly transient unless we build these self-replicating artificial intelligence machines.

We're not going to last forever as a civilisation, probably, so to me that doesn't in any way water down the significance of it. Cosmology can be a powerful aid to philosophical thought, in a sense, because we have to accept there's meaning in the universe, because it means something to us. I don't see why it has to be eternal; meaning doesn't imply purpose, I don't think there's any purpose to the universe, there's no point to our existence, but the fact that we exist at all is worth celebrating, you don't need to add anything else. You're almost devaluing what we have. Our civilisation is remarkable. We emerged as single celled organisms, probably before that we emerged as some chemical reactions in hydrothermal vents in the deep primordial oceans, and over 3.8 billion years we've come to the point where we can sit and think about the stars and have conversations like this. Is that not enough? Can't we just leave it there? Why does there have to be a point?

Brian Cox in conversation with Joe Rogan (with a little editing by me) 10/02/2015