Brian Cox is both dismayed and optimistic about the future of our species. For dismay, look no further than Donald Trump’s hair. “I saw some rally where he was talking about his favourite hairspray and berating scientists who told him that by spraying out of the can you could have an impact on the atmosphere,” Cox recalls. “And he told the gathered throngs of supporters, ‘Come on folks if the windows are closed how can you possibly have any impact on anything outside of your own space, your own apartment?’ Such a deep fundamental... and of course the crowd cheered. And to watch this.” His voice trails off.
But Cox, as millions of science fans know from his television and radio shows, is an optimist. He speaks to WIRED about the importance of humility, our place in the universe and fighting back against anti-science rhetoric.
I think politicians often make the mistake of viewing society as a series of groups competing for finite resources. I think that’s the wrong way to think about it. A society needs to be viewed as a single organism. It seems to me self-evident that understanding more about nature makes your society better. The opposite is understanding less about the natural world and that can’t be right. History tells us that’s not correct.
I think the chances of detecting microbial life beyond Earth are high. If we went to Europa and went to Enceladus and went to Mars and had a good look, I wouldn’t be surprised if in one or more of those places you find microbes.
But whether that life becomes multicellular and ultimately intelligent is an entirely different question. These are profound questions that I think not only inform our understanding of the universe, but understanding of our place in it. It’s quite possible that civilisations are very rare, and that has political ramifications. Let’s imagine that we start to come to the view that there are very few places like Earth, with a civilisation on it. I think that’s a necessary step in our political evolution, because at some point we’ve got to find some direction, some way of running this world that is not fragmented. It’s self-evident, it’s bloody obvious that we have to do that.
You have to have a population that’s able to process the idea that we’re not alone in the universe. To many of us, that would be a profound realisation. The more of us that find that profound, the better the world will be. If most of the population of the Earth doesn’t think that’s important, then we are in a mess.
Science is about doing the best that you can in the knowledge that something better will possibly come along in quite short order. So I would say to Donald: “You haven’t learnt yet and there’s still time. You haven’t learnt humility and humility is the key to wisdom, the road to wisdom.” That’s what you learn when you are a professional scientist.
Understanding what science is, understanding what it’s not, is a very humble pursuit. It’s the process by which you understand nature. As a professional scientist you’re usually wrong and you try things out and you change your view immediately when some new evidence comes in that contradicts your view. It runs against many of the feelings that we have about our opinion or the value of our opinion. So I think it has to be educated out. Then the question arises: when does it get educated out? I think for most scientists it’s when you’re doing a PhD – you suddenly find that you’re not as clever as you thought you were.
It’s perhaps the case that we need to move the teaching of humility to earlier on in the school system. I think about this quite a lot because I can’t understand the polarisation of politics at one level, but also the polarisation of discourse, not only online but everywhere. We see it, certainly in English-speaking countries, we see a polarisation and then I find it very difficult to understand and I have to remember that I’ve had a particular path through life. Science is about training yourself to understand that you’re likely to be wrong.
Our universe, as far as we can tell, operates according to a very small set of laws of nature, and they underpin everything. That means that virtually all lines of enquiry lead to depth at some level. And I think it’s too complicated for anyone, let alone a politician, but actually anyone, to understand which bits of this enquiry into nature will lead to profound discoveries. You’ve got to push in all the directions of human curiosity in order to make great advances.
The historian Niall Ferguson wrote an article saying populism has a half-life and the reason it has a half-life is because it doesn’t work, and so you get found out. Let’s say people decide they’re not going to take antibiotics, that position has a very clear half-life because they all die of things. Intellectually, that kind of silliness is an absolute rejection of the way of thinking that has brought us to this point in the Earth’s history where infant mortality rates are the lowest they’ve ever been, the population at the highest it’s ever been, that globally people are being lifted out of poverty at a record rate – this is because of science. It’s because of a few other things as well, but it’s based on this way of looking at the world.
We also have to remember that it’s basically an English-speaking disease. So when we talk, as English speakers of anti-science movement, we really mean in the US and to a lesser extent the UK. We don’t mean in China, and we don’t mean in India, really, as far as I know. I think it will burn itself out because the pessimistic view would be that it will not decay quickly enough. You mention climate change. The problem is we’ve ended up with an anti-science movement which is quite vocal at the same time that we have to actually act on a short timescale. If we had 20 or 30 years to act, I would be confident that the thing would burn itself out.
Whether it’s going to burn itself out fast enough to not cause severe consequences in the next 50 years or so is another question. We stand at a crossroads where we are about to become a truly multi-planetary civilisation and it will happen within the next 100 years or so, unless we cause ourselves a drastic problem or face a drastic problem. We’re almost at the point where I become optimistic about the survival of the human race… if we can get through the next decade or two.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
