2 Brian: By ‘popular press’, Sasha means the Daily Mail, whose headline ‘Are we all going to die next Wednesday?’ should, if accuracy was the only goal, have led a one-word article: No.
3 Brian: This experience will be familiar to anyone who has been in the audience at one of Robin’s stand-up gigs.
4 Brian: I don’t even have to say it, do I?
AN INTRODUCTION
Welcome to
The Infinite Monkey Cage
Hello, I am Robin Ince.
And I am Brian Cox.
ROBIN: Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, our interest in space, technology and strange undersea creatures with terrifying tentacles or the ability to eat their own brains came from a mixture of Look and Learn magazine, The Six Million Dollar Man and Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World.
BRIAN: We were kids in the Indian summer of the space race, a little too young to remember the Moon landings, but the excitement of exploration still enthused us all. (I myself still own a Space 1999 outfit.) It was a time of Cold War danger and anxiety, but also of immense optimism and confidence in the promise of science and technology.
R: Sadly, Brian could never become an astronaut because he is too tall and I could never be one because I am too chatty… and short-sighted… and not very patient when it comes to misbehaving machines. So there is no way Apollo 13 would have returned to Earth if I’d been in there gallumphing about and kicking whatever bit of kit that refused to operate as I wanted it to. I am one of those unfortunate humans who believes that objects misbehave with the specific intention of ruining my day. I am likely to be found dead from a heart attack after a blazing row with an inanimate object.
B: Whilst Robin’s inability to operate machinery led him to become a comedian, via a degree in one or other of the humanities at some university or other, I became a particle physicist after a short detour via the music industry. Although even then I was primarily interested in programming the Roland MC-300 Micro Composer and only transferred my interest to sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll when my midi cable became frayed.
R: In the early 1980s, television was our teacher. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos is one of the main reasons why The Infinite Monkey Cage exists. Opening with the music of Vangelis, the composer who would also score Blade Runner – a film Brian loves as he now knows why he has the same dream about unicorns every night – Sagan’s ‘spaceship of the imagination’ travelled through nebulae and star systems. Music fades, camera pans across a cliff face and zooms into Carl Sagan, and we twelve-year-olds sat up, wide-eyed and eager, and heard the words:
‘The Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.’
And thus we were snared. Within minutes, we would know that we were all starstuff, that the stuff of us was the stuff of the stars. The atoms that were currently gathered to form the shape and minds of us had been forged in the furnace of stellar nurseries.
B: Carl Sagan was a pivotal figure for us because he made vivid the link between our science and our humanity. We are a part of the Cosmos, Sagan told us, and our fate is deeply connected with it. Science is devalued when separated from culture, and our experience of living is diluted when we become separated from science, because science is a necessary but not sufficient part of our exploration of what it means to be human. It is not possible to have a meaningful discussion about our place in the Cosmos without knowing its size and scale, without knowing that we are made of it and will return to it, without acknowledging the deep mysteries that await us as we push our understanding ever further back to the beginning of the Universe, 13.8 billion years ago.
Science is often celebrated because it is useful, and research is funded because it provides us with objects of perceived value. The true value of science is that it allows us to acquire reliable knowledge and teaches us humility. Your opinion is irrelevant in the face of nature; imagine the improvement in modern-day political discourse if that single sentence were seared into the forearm of every politician as a cow is branded with the mark of its owner?
Having said that, aircraft, mobile phones, medicine, electric light, refrigerators, vaccines, computers and radios are useful things, and Robin would struggle without the synthetic fibres that strengthen his book-filled rucksack.
We are a part of the Cosmos, Sagan told us, and our fate is deeply connected with it.
Raymond Baxter, the first presenter of Tomorrow’s World, seen here in 1970 with an innovative doll that can walk, talk and sing.
R: Tomorrow’s World told us of what was to come, and though often mocked for its adventurous predictions involving round cars on wheeled stilts, much of what was featured on the programme was accurate, intriguing and inspiring. Returning to it now, we are reminded of the speed of change. The unwieldy home computer of 1967 contains far less data-processing capacity than one of the twenty-first century’s fancier and, predominantly, pointless, wristwatches.
‘Imagine a world where every word ever written, every picture ever painted and every film ever shot could be viewed instantly in your home via an information superhighway, a high-capacity digital communication network… it sounds pretty grand, but in fact this is already happening on something called the internet’
Kate Bellingham told us in 1994.
1994!
Imagine a world without something called the internet. Imagine how hard it would be to shop, watch or destabilise democracy and seed disinformation.
William Wollard, former presenter on Tomorrow’s World, seen strolling up the roof of St Pancras Station in London in 1970, made possible through the cunning invention of Herbert Stokes’ ‘Roof Shoes’.
B: As children, the divide between science, pseudoscience and plain nonsense was not as marked in our minds as it is now, but perhaps paradoxically the lines were more clearly drawn in public discourse. In his book The Demon-Haunted World, published in 1995, Carl Sagan wrote: ‘I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline,