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Feb. 17, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:08:39
Edition 241 - Nigel Henbest

Leading British astronomer Nigel Henbest on Gravitational Waves and training to travel intospace...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is the Return of the Unexplained.
Well, here we are, right in the middle of February, heading towards the end of it, and I can't believe how quickly this year is going.
Weather here in the UK, well, the usual mix of storms, spring weather sunshine, and a little bit of snow for good measure.
I can't remember a year when we've had so much variety of weather.
But look, my intros and the way that I do the show are sometimes the subject of comment in the emails that you send.
I'm not going to do any shout-outs on this edition, but I will on the next edition.
Just to say that I have a listener in Canada, I haven't got his email right here, but I think it's Henry or Harry, who wrote in to tell me how much he enjoys the show and then to tell me a list of things that he didn't like.
He doesn't like the shout-outs, doesn't like me mentioning people at the beginning of the show, so I want to get your thoughts on that.
Should we continue to do shout-outs here, or should we drop them altogether?
I kind of like it, and I know a lot of you do.
Tell me what you think about that.
He says that he thinks I interrupt the guests too much.
Well, we've been round this one before.
Sometimes people have to be interrupted to keep them on point.
And I do try and keep interruptions to a minimum.
And I know that listeners in North America are used to, I won't say a more deferential style of interviewing, but maybe a different style of interviewing where people are perhaps sometimes on shows like this challenged a bit less.
But I'm always mindful of it.
And I'll keep that one in check.
Also, he didn't like the fact that I sometimes try and get the background of the person that we're talking to, to get their backstory.
He thinks that I should get straight into the subject.
Well, the only thing I think about that, and your thoughts welcome on that too, is if you don't get a human perspective on the person you're talking with, I think in something that is a show, as opposed to just here's an interview or here's somebody talking, it doesn't really give you any context.
I like to get a handle on who I'm talking with.
And I think, I get the impression, but I don't think I've ever asked you before.
I think that's what you want too.
But, you know, all points taken on board.
That's why I ask for emails.
So thank you very much for that email.
And, you know, I always try and balance everything that I do here without trying to second guess myself.
If you'd like to get in touch with me, I will be doing shout-outs on the next edition.
Go to the website, theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv, designed, created, owned, maintained, and perfected by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
There you can send me an email, make a guest suggestion, tell me whatever you want.
Or if you'd like to follow the other link on the homepage there and send a donation to the show.
Your donations gratefully received.
And as I said on the last edition, it is a fact when you do something like this that most people do not donate.
But let me tell you, it is utterly vital because of the shoestring nature of what we're doing.
We're trying to be independent.
We're trying to be different.
But we do need some degree of funding along the way.
Although you could be surprised, I think, to know how little you can do this on.
But nevertheless, some funding is important.
If you have sent a donation recently, thank you very, very much indeed.
Right, the guest on this edition is Nigel Henbest.
You might have heard him on here with Heather Cooper, the astronomer before.
Nigel is a really interesting and highly qualified guy.
Knows all there is to know about space, I would say, having had many conversations with him over the years.
But also, he is a space expert who's putting his money where his mouth is.
He is training at the moment to go into space.
And as you might know, if you've read anything about astronaut training, that is pretty comprehensive, and it really sorts the men from the boys, as they say.
So we'll talk to him about that, too, and find out how he's getting on with it.
I know that he's been in the so-called Vomit Comet, which gives you zero gravity.
And I think he's done an awful lot more too.
And I think there's more to do.
So we'll find out from him what he's going to be doing.
Thank you very much for all of your support for this show, for the kind things that you say.
Always happy to make changes in it if you suggest them.
And as I say, the whole thing is a bit of a balance.
It's keeping a lot of balls in the air.
And I think we're managing to do that.
I will have some news about the show very soon.
And yes, I have said that before, but it is incredibly soon now.
So maybe the next edition, maybe the one after that.
And I'll tell you what the direction of travel is for all of this.
Stay right here.
Don't touch that dial.
If there was a dial to touch.
Actually, I heard a great radio broadcaster in the US recently say, don't touch that mouse.
So we could say, don't touch that cursor.
Right, let's not waste too much time.
Let's get to Nigel Henbest, significantly north of me, about 50, 60, 70 miles north of me.
And let's talk about space and his journey potentially into it.
Nigel, really nice to have you on again.
Thank you for having me, Howard.
Well, Nigel, you've been on here before, but normally with your partner in crime, Heather Cooper.
And we just thought it was only fair to give you, because she gets most of the airspace.
I thought we'd give you your own outing.
I think is the way that it goes.
Oh, well, knowing Heather as I do, I guess it has to be, really.
But we want to give you your own outing on this occasion.
Just to introduce you, I had this email from a man in Canada telling me that I do far too much of this, but I don't think I do.
I think it's important to put people in context so listeners know who they're speaking with.
Tell me about you.
Well, my name is Nigel Henbest, and I'm an astronomer and astrophysicist by background.
So I went to Cambridge and I studied exploding stars and quasars, which are exploding galaxies way, way across the universe.
And now I write books.
So I've done about 40 books.
As you say, many of them with Heather.
And most recently signed up with Virgin Galactic to be a future astronaut.
So in a couple of years' time, I should be heading off from the spaceport in New Mexico and going up there into the world.
Not just the Wild Blue yonder, but of course above the atmosphere it's the World Black yonder.
And it's going to be.
Now that is going to be the second part of our conversation.
I do want to talk quite in depth about that.
You came then from the background of an era of pioneering astronomy in this country.
We had people like Fred Hoyle and all of the great astronomers here.
It was real groundbreaking stuff in those days, wasn't it?
I'm not saying we're not doing that now, but it was a really exciting time to be here.
It was really.
The 1960s, and I do go back that far was, some people say it was the second big astronomical revolution after the time of Galileo 400 years ago when we first looked at the sky through a telescope.
In the 1960s, we're using new eyes to look out there.
So I worked in radio astronomy at Cambridge, and that was a group, I wasn't personally involved, but they were the group who discovered pulsars, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Tony Hewish.
You had this big radio telescope.
I mean, it looked nothing like John Will Bank.
It was just, it looks like a field full of wires and were there to keep the grass short.
But they picked up these radio waves going pulse, bit, bit, bit, bit from space.
It's a whole new kind of object called a pulsar.
It was a very rapidly spinning star.
I was studying these quasars at the edge of the universe, a whole galaxy of stars that's erupting in the center.
And at the time, we really didn't know what they were.
But now it turns out they've got huge black holes in the middle, a black hole as heavy as a billion suns.
And it's swallowing up gas and dust and stars.
A quasar can swallow up a whole star like the sun and just give a gentle burp.
And that sort of cosmic burp is what we were picking up with our radio telescopes.
And then other people were sending satellites into space.
Our satellites do a lot of things.
Obviously, they look down on the earth and give us pictures of what the weather's like.
They use for communication.
But our satellites were looking out into space and picking up things like X-rays and gamma rays.
It's very intense radiation coming from space.
And again, the first black holes were tracked down with these kinds of satellites.
So yes, we discovered all kinds of things.
And maybe one of the biggest discoveries was the glow of creation coming from the Big Bang.
The whole universe started in this big eruption, the Big Bang, about 14 billion years ago.
And again, in the 1960s, astronomers picked up that little glow coming from the background.
So yeah, it turned astronomy in its head from when I was a kid, astronomy was always all placid and planets go around the sun, stars go around in space.
And then it became an exploding, exciting, really amazingly vibrant place.
And that was the big revolution.
Am I right in saying, Nigel, that all of the discoveries, and the ones certainly that we're getting close to now, but everything that's followed on from that great era has been confirmatory, has confirmed the things that people postulated and suggested back then?
Some of them are, Howard, you're absolutely right.
The discovery we've just had very recently of these gravitational waves from space were actually predicted by Albert Einstein literally 100 years ago.
But these are small ripples.
If you think of space and time as being like a rubber sheet and when the planets move around the sun, it's because the sun makes a dent in this cosmic rubber sheet and it's obviously invisible.
We can't see it.
But if you have two black holes merging together, spinning around more and more rapidly until they actually swallow each other up, then you get ripples spreading out across space-time, like tossing a pebble into a pond.
You get the ripples coming out.
But it needs very sophisticated technology.
So we've just seen that.
So that was one example that was predicted and it's very exciting.
I want to talk about that because I've had questions from listeners about it.
And of course, I've been interested myself.
I was covering it on news.
But you know, I'm a generalist and I'm not a scientist by training.
I try and get my head around as much of it as I can.
And I have to say that I heard a lot of scientists talking last week about why this is so fundamentally important and why this changes our understanding of everything.
But I have to be truthful and put my hand up here and say I'm still not entirely sure why.
But there is hype.
I mean, I'm a bit of a traitor to the scientific community when I say this, but it is a very important discovery.
But as you've just said earlier, it's a bit of a confirmation of something that we were expecting to find.
And oddly enough, the big scientific discovery would be if we didn't find them, then all our theories are wrong.
But what we're doing, we're seeing what's happening out there in the universe in a different way.
Now, I've talked earlier on about the light we see with ordinary telescopes, radio waves, x-rays.
Those are all kinds of what we call electromagnetic radiation.
They're all the same kind of thing.
They're just like light, except they're more energetic or less energetic.
Gravitational waves are the first time we've ever picked up anything in the universe happening in a different way.
We find it in a different way.
And what it's doing is probing places we can't see.
So these black holes have just been detected.
You can't see them with ordinary telescopes because they're black and black in the blackness of space.
And so this is the only way of finding them out.
And this is a surprise.
I mean, maybe not a huge surprise on the cosmic scale, but for astronomers, we didn't expect to find two such heavy black holes.
Each is 30 times heavier than the sun.
So, so close together.
And that's already turning our theories of how black holes are made.
So this is just the tip of the iceberg.
And think about any field of discovery, any new kind of telescope.
This is just the beginning of what we're going to find out.
And I think what's really exciting is what hasn't been predicted so far and that we're going to find with these instruments.
I mean, certainly from what I remember at school and reading as a boy, the concept of the black hole was always fascinating.
But you saw it in your mind's eye as something that is so gargantuan that it has to stand way, way out there on its own.
And as you say, to get information that there could be two reacting together, that's pretty seismic stuff.
It is.
And just remember, these two black holes are not near to us.
They are a billion light years away from us.
So this merger between the black holes happened a billion years ago.
So what was happening on Earth a billion years ago?
Life hadn't even come out of the sea onto dry land at that time.
So that's how far away these things are.
But there are black holes nearer to us.
And there's one in the center of our own Milky Way, which is four million times heavier than the sun.
And that's only, I'm an astronomer, I say only 28,000 light years away.
So, you know, if that one gives a big burp, we'll hear about it through the gravitational waves as well.
Right.
And so the picture that this will give to us is a picture of a world that was before we existed, of course, well before we existed.
But how can we learn about ourselves?
This is what some scientists were saying.
How can we learn about ourselves from This?
Well, a lot of it comes back to how the universe started, how the Big Bang happened, because we expect there were gravitational waves created.
Obviously, the Big Bang was a big explosion of all time, so there must be ripples coming out from that one.
So, how did that form into galaxies like our Milky Way?
Astronomers actually don't know how that happened.
So, the more information we get, the more we understand how that sort of thin soup that exploded from the Big Bang turned into stars and then into planets like the Earth.
So, it's all part of a really big jigsaw knowing why we're here.
So, what would be the next phase, do you think, in research that has been triggered by that confirmation of gravitational waves?
The really exciting thing, and that it's more or less coincidental, but at the same time that the LIGO gravitational wave detectors, we call it, cumbersome phrase, there are two of them actually, both in America, one in Washington state and one in Louisiana, for picking up this particular gravitational wave.
We've just launched a satellite way out into space beyond the Earth.
It's going around the Sun, and it's called LISA Pathfinder.
And the idea is we'll have a big version of this thing, actually going around the Sun.
So you're not on the Earth, where it's not just the waves from space that are shaking you up, it's earthquakes and the waves crashing on the seashore, the leaves rustling in the forest.
Even if you've got your detector out in space, and this is going to be huge, it's going to be about a million kilometers big, and that's going to pick up more and more.
And this E-Lisa, if it works, I should say, the satellite's just been launched.
It's called the Pathfinder.
And so far, it's working fine.
They just want to test the technology because we're looking at measuring things to the fraction of a size of an atom over a million miles.
I mean, that boggles my mind, even as a scientist.
How can you measure separation between your two mirrors, which is basically what it is, which jiggle backwards and forwards when the waves go past, to an accuracy less than the size of an atom over a million miles?
So they're testing that now, which is a test work.
In maybe 10, 15 years' time, we're going to have this huge thing out of space.
And that's going to be creating pictures of the universe in gravitational waves, just like ordinary telescopes show pictures of light coming from out there.
So that is literally going to be a whole new dimension.
And the answer is briefly, I don't know what we're going to find, but I know we are going to find something new.
Just like my own field in radio astronomy, no one expected to discover pulsars or quasars or the remnants of the Big Bang, but all those just came up.
So that's the excitement.
Was I right?
A couple of months ago, maybe six weeks ago, there was a story that radio astronomers got quite excited because of a signal that had come from, well, how many times have we been here before?
But a signal that had been detected that may have been not random.
I don't know if you recall this or if I'm making any sense to you, but I do seem to recall yet another inner stream of stories like that recently, but I don't remember hearing how that concluded.
There have certainly been a number of stories around it.
You say they keep popping up.
And scientists, like everybody else, they hype their own discoveries.
It may be the fast radio bursts that we're talking about here.
It's like a pulsar.
And Pulsar goes beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
This is like a very loud beep.
And that was just it.
So what could be doing that?
And there was a suggestion when they first started looking at them that the different beeps that come from different parts of the sky were related in the times that they got to us, in which case it might look for some huge, that looked like some huge cosmic consciousness which was aiming them at them.
I mean, I've always been a bit sceptical about this particular one.
And now we've got more of these beeps coming in, they do seem more random.
So we don't quite know what's causing them.
But until somebody sends us a, you know, a definite signal, we can say, that's so mathematical.
I mean, suppose somebody sends us a stream of pulses that spelt out pi, you know, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
I mean, it's got to be an intelligence who's working that out and sending it to you.
But just odd bits don't excite me, I'm afraid.
And of course, if a message was sent to us, and we've discussed this before here on this show with other people, like, for example, the SETI Institute, you know, what guarantee is there that we are looking at the right frequencies, that there may be frequencies that we're not even aware of out there that a civilization unimaginably far away from us may be using?
So it's very much, isn't it, like sticking a needle into a haystack and hoping for a result?
It absolutely is.
And my favorite analogy here is that you might have Polynesian islanders sending up smoke signals, hoping to communicate with other people beyond their own island.
And all the time, aeroplanes are flying past and radio waves are going through them.
And they don't actually realize that there are ways of communicating apart from smoke signals.
But this is where things like gravitational waves are exciting.
That maybe a sufficiently advanced civilization could use these gravitational waves to communicate.
I mean, they travel through space and time without getting blocked by anything.
Or the little particles called neutrinos, which are very, very lightweight.
They travel at almost the speed of light.
They can penetrate through anything.
I mean, as we sit here, we've got literally trillions of neutrinos going through our bodies every minute, but they don't hit our atoms, otherwise obviously we'd be obliterated.
So we can pick up neutrinos with sufficiently sensitive detectors.
But both the aliens are so advanced that they can communicate that way.
And let's put it in context, Howard.
If we go back 200 years ago, nobody knew about radio waves.
Nobody knew about X-rays.
So it's only in the last century or two we've come across ways of communicating across interstellar space.
So if we fast forward 500 years or 1,000 or a million years in the future, what are those civilizations so much more advanced than us going to be using?
And we probably don't even know what they'll be using.
But isn't it fascinating to think that now that we have confirmation of gravitational waves, that some civilization, perhaps more advanced than us, have learned, well, certainly more advanced than us, might have learned how to piggyback a message on gravitational waves?
Indeed, we can't quite imagine that, but in principle, yes, you've got the two black holes going around each other, making the gravitational waves.
Maybe you could alter the way that they move, and then the message would get spelled out in gravitational waves.
It's certainly possible, yeah.
We're fascinated by black holes because they are a mystery wrapped in an enigma or the other way around.
I'm not sure which.
How do you begin to go and explore them?
Well, I mean, the simple answer is we don't have spaceships that can go out through a black hole yet.
I mean, I was on, I shan't mention the presenter's name, but I was on a breakfast time television show live being interviewed about a satellite.
I mentioned these satellites that are going around the Earth, picking up these radiations like X-rays coming from space.
And the presenter said to me, well, Nigel, what happens if the satellite falls into the black hole?
And I thought, oh, you ninca pooper is not going to do that live on air.
These black holes are thousands of light years away from this satellite.
It's only picking up the radiation.
So to come back to your question, we can't get there yet, although, you know, in a thousand years' time, hopefully we can send spaceships down.
But at the moment, we can only see them indirectly.
So black hole is black and space is black.
So it's like looking for a black cat in a coal cellar.
If I can use an old-fashioned analogy, if anyone knows what a coal cellar is these days, a black cat in a coal cellar on a dark night, you can't see the black cat.
But just imagine there's a white cat in the coal cellar.
They get into a spat and you can hear the shrieking and the scratching and the yowling.
And you can see the white cat moving around.
So you can say, hang on, that white cat is interacting with something.
It's got to be a black cat.
So if we have a black hole which is orbiting around a star, an ordinary star, we can see the star and we can see the stars being swung around in space by something invisible.
And a lot of these black holes, because they're so voracious, are pulling gas from the companion star and swallowing it.
And that gives out like the yowling of the cat.
It's actually X-rays that we pick up.
So if you see with your X-ray telescope, there's something out there producing X-rays.
You take your big optical telescope, the ordinary telescope, and you find the star being whirled around.
Then you say, hey, there's something invisible, something powerful.
That is a black hole.
So that's the way we can track down black holes in our own galaxy.
So it's indirect argument, but it's as Sherlock Holmes said, once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth.
And that's, you know, so black holes, I can't put my hand on heart and say, can you 100% swear there is a black hole there?
But I find it very difficult to explain these things any other way.
And what about the Star Trekian science fiction notion that a black hole might be a portal or be used as a portal to something else that we as yet have no conception of?
Well, there've been plenty of movies about that.
I mean, Walt Disney black hole film, Interstellar, and so on.
There's all kinds of ideas.
Well, the answer is, we don't know, Howard.
We don't know what happens inside a black hole.
So you could explain that.
A black hole is a region of space so collapsed that even light can't escape.
So everything falls into it.
Nothing can get out, not even light.
So, because light can't get out of it, it looks black, and we can't tell what's happening.
I mean, if I, I won't ask you to fall in, but if I fell in, I tried to send you a signal like a discussion on the radio, the radio waves wouldn't be able to get out of the black hole.
So the answer is from our point in the universe, we don't know what happens inside a black hole.
But that's where the fun starts, because then we've got the theory, which is Einstein's theory of general relativity, which predicted black holes in the first place.
And I must have a little aside here.
Einstein's theory predicts black holes, but Einstein didn't believe in them.
What happened was that there was a soldier fighting in the First World War on the German side, on the Eastern Front, against the Russians.
And he actually did some sums in the trenches and he sent them back to Einstein.
His name was Karl Schwarzschild.
And he said to Einstein, look, there ought to be these things that collapse totally.
He didn't call them black holes, but he said collapse stars.
And Einstein said, no, there's got to be something wrong.
So that's when we talk about the edge of a black hole.
We call it Schwarzschild radius because it was Karl Schwarzschild.
But to come back to my story, so we've got the theory, and the theory says if you go into a black hole, you can't come out.
And if the black hole is not spinning around, then you go into the center and everything just gets destroyed.
But of course, in reality, everything in the universe is spinning around.
The Earth is spinning around, the Moon is turning around, the Sun is turning around, galaxies are turning around.
So these black holes are spinning.
And the mathematics of it say if you have a spinning black hole, there might be a region in the center where you will escape destruction.
And possibly that region will lead you through a bridge into another universe.
And that's what all these movies are based on.
Now, I hate to be disappointing.
When you do them sums more and more completely, it gets more pessimistic because it looks as if you're going to run into a whole lot of energy.
To put that briefly, the black hole is sucking up all the energy that's falling into it.
And that's going to be inside the black hole at some point.
And it looks as if you're going to run into all that energy.
So it's going to be about pump.
You hit all this energy before you get into the other universe.
So in other words, we may never get the answers to our questions because we're dealing with forces that are so literally fundamental that we cannot overcome them.
Well, that's right.
And as I say, if we fell, well, if I fell into the black hole, I just take upon myself to be the black hole explorer.
I might end up in another universe and I want to come back and say to you on air, I'd like to say, hey, Howard, I'm in a different universe, but there's no way I could get the signal back to you.
But there is a different kind of a hole in space, which is called a white hole.
And that isn't a one-way tunnel.
If we could actually create a white hole, it'd be like a tunnel.
Like the tunnel under the Thames, you can go back forward through it.
And that idea was developed.
There was an old movie called Contact many, many moons ago.
I don't know if you remember that.
Do you mean the Jodie Foster movie?
Jodie Foster movie.
Yes.
Based on a novel by Carl Sagan, the great popularizer and astronomer.
And he wrote a novel called Contact, and he wanted Jodie, well, not her character in the film, obviously, to be able to travel way across space to another galaxy through one of these tunnels.
And obviously, he wasn't a theoretical physicist, and he contacted a colleague called Kip Thorne.
I mean, Kip Thorne is like the Einstein of our time.
I mean, he's a brain size of a planet, and he can work these things out.
Well, Kip was driving up Interstate 5 from San Francisco to Los Angeles in California, mulling this over.
And he thought to himself, actually, yeah, I could do what Carl wants if we have some kind of anti-gravity.
Now, to be honest, in the real universe, everything is gravity.
Everything pulls together.
You don't get things pushing apart.
But suppose we can make some anti-gravity.
You could stick it into a black hole.
It's like shoring up a tunnel.
And then we could go back and forward.
So white holes are very theoretical, but the theory actually does stand up if we can get that anti-gravity stuff.
So anyway, if anyone listening wants to take out a patent on anti-gravity, there's a good use for it.
No, totally.
And here is a potential way I would have thought.
But again, my scientific knowledge is limited to what I learned in school.
I'm learning from everything that you've told me this morning, Nigel.
A potential way for us to travel further than we thought we could.
Absolutely.
So if we had a white hole and one end was on Earth and the other end was in the, say, the Andromeda Galaxy, which is 2 million light years away, you could literally step through from your office here on Earth into your office on a star in Andromeda just instantaneously.
Whereas even light would take 2 million years to get from one to the other and a spaceship would take countless billions of years to get from one to the other.
So the other thing, if you do some bit of complicated fiddling around with physics, remember that Einstein said you've got space-time.
So the whole of this rubber sheet I talked about earlier is not just space, but it's time as well.
So you can get distortions.
And you've got this famous twins paradox that if one twin stays on the earth and another twin goes out into space at very high speed and then comes back, the twin coming back to Earth will be younger than the one who stayed on the earth.
It's all to do with the way time changes when you travel.
So it's a bit of a complicated thought experiment.
But if you take the two ends of your white hole, you take one of them around in space and you drag it back to Earth again, you could create a time machine.
So white holes also give us the opportunity, if we bring the second hole back to Earth, you can step through back onto the Earth, but step onto the Earth actually at a different time.
So what's happened in our lives, really, more recently, is a lot of stuff that was just simply for H.G. Wells and people like that, the stuff of science fiction, is slowly becoming science fact.
And that is remarkable, isn't it?
It is.
I mean, I love a quote from Arthur C. Clarke, obviously a late great science and science fiction writer, who says that any form of extremely advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
And this comes back to the Polynesian Islands as they were.
I mean, when Captain Cook arrived, they were in his ships and could produce his pipe and smoke tobacco.
That was all magic to them.
Similarly, we are able to send spacecraft way across the solar system.
Those amazing pictures of Pluto that we got last year.
I never really thought we'd get pictures of Pluto during our lifetimes.
And then it turns out to be this really weird world that we saw.
And the new telescopes.
And another thing about the universe, we know the universe is getting bigger.
We know that since the 1920s when Edwin Hubble, who the Hubble Space Telescope is named after, found the galaxies are moving apart from each other.
But just about 10 or 15 years ago, astronomers discovered that the universe isn't just expanding, it's accelerating.
So those distant galaxies are going apart faster and faster and faster and faster and faster.
And there's a theory that says if we stayed looking into the far future, the galaxies not only move apart, but this force, we call it dark energy, which is pulling them apart from each other, would also then start shredding the stars from the edges of our Milky Way galaxy.
And then it would get closer to home.
It would pull the planets away from the sun.
Then we're on the Earth at the time, say, then it would start pulling the Earth apart, and it would actually rip apart the atoms in our very bodies.
And the end of the universe would be that the atoms were made of actually being ripped apart into tiny subatomic shreds.
They call it the Big Rip Theory.
So the seeds of our own destruction, if you follow the Big Rip Theory, are sown.
We can't do anything about it.
We can't do anything.
Well, no, we can't.
I think there are cosmic scale forces.
But again, coming back to what you're saying about technology, if we go back even a hundred years, who would have thought we could be going to the moon now or harnessing the whole energy of the Earth?
So, I mean, let's keep our fingers crossed that maybe there are ways in which humans can do something right by the universe.
And unlikely, I know how, but we don't know what the future is going to bring.
I'm not sure whether you ever met any of the Apollo astronauts.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Edgar Mitchell, who, of course, left us just a couple of weeks ago, very sadly.
Sorry, you were saying?
Oh, yes, indeed.
I know Buzz Aldrin and Charlie Duke, yeah.
So, yeah, I mean, there was amazing guys to do what they did.
Well, they did, and we'll talk about your own plans to explore space as well, personally, in the next half hour of this interview.
I just want to finish this point about those people.
Edgar Mitchell, different from other astronauts like Buzz Aldrin, I think, because he was very much one for trying to contact other civilizations and perhaps believing that other civilizations exist out there.
I think the others tended not to go there by and large.
But remarkable people.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that, you know, you knew them.
I spoke to Edgar Mitchell.
Do you think that we have people with that kind of right stuff anymore for the exploration of space?
I think we do.
Coming back to the Apollo astronauts, I think all of them, even the most phlegmatic, were moved by that experience.
And certainly Ed Mitchell, when he saw the Earth in the distance like a tiny blue marble, was moved to remark on that.
And Rusty Schweikart was one of the first people to actually found the environmental movement, again, another Apollo astronaut.
And he said that was because he saw the veil, the frail, vulnerable planet in the darkness of this huge, possibly hostile universe.
So yes, it certainly moved them.
And I think that everyone who goes into space gets a vision which is literally extraterrestrial.
And the real part is, if you're going to be out there and you're going to fly a space rocket as a pilot, if you're going to head to Mars, you've got to be the kind of person who can fly the most sophisticated kind of spaceship and deal with emergencies and so on.
But it's not just the right stuff, as Tom Wolfe so well put it for the Apollo astronauts.
It's anybody can go out into space.
And I think that everyone has got skills to bring.
So you need doctors to look after people.
You need to look after their health.
You need scientists to obviously investigate what's going on out there.
I actually think you need poets as well.
If you look at what the Apollo astronauts said, it moved them.
I mean, Buzz Aldrin's wonderful phrase, what happened when Apollo 11 landed, that Neil Armstrong got Outside, and he looked around him and he said, Desolation.
And then Buzz got out and he said, Magnificent desolation.
And that's a phrase that stuck.
And even though Buzz is a fairly down-to-earth person, and that moved him.
Now, imagine having a poet out there in space, or a playwright, or a composer, or an artist.
Well, indeed, I was going to say that in the great conflicts, I think even in World War II, and I think in the Falklands War too, there was a war artist sent out there to record impressions of these important and momentous things.
So, of course, following that logic, you would send somebody like that into space.
You would indeed.
I think it's an experience for the whole of mankind.
And you think that so many people are inspired by music and poetry and art, art of various kinds, including video arts.
Then, yes, I mean, I think that's a way to get everybody involved.
Especially when you're talking about something that is bigger than most of us will experience, and war is something that most of us will not experience, thank the Lord.
And the terrible things that happen, the huge forces at play, and the awful occurrences, the only way to encapsulate those is to write about them or paint a picture.
Same with space, I guess.
Absolutely.
And I think, I mean, I'm not a historian, but I think the reason I had the war artists in the First World War was that everyone could feel a part of it rather than the remote campaigns like Crimea, although that was beginning to evolve the public in terms of newspaper reports.
People would really become a part of it and understand what was going on.
And my deep heartfelt feeling, Howard, ever since I was a kid and why I got into astronomy and astronautics, is that we are part of the universe.
I go out and I look at the sky at night, and that's as much a part of my world as actually seeing the landscape around me during the day.
And I think that's something which some people are frightened.
I know people are frightened of it.
You can talk to people, they're mainly grown-ups actually, to be fair, and they talk about the night sky, and they say, oh, no, I'm really scared of that.
It's all so big, and it's all so far away.
And what is a light here?
And that's millions of miles.
And you say that planet is 500 million miles away.
And that just scares me.
That's exactly the wrong attitude.
We want to get people to feel a part of it.
And kids don't have that problem.
I've been talking recently to some of the local schools around here, and they absolutely love it.
So we've got to keep that enthusiasm, that feeling of us inclusive part of space for everybody by using every means.
And space is inspiring in an artistic way as well as a scientific way.
So that is something we've got to do.
A headline that I've been reading in the newspapers a couple of times over this last year or so, new Earth-like planet discovered.
Now, when I think back on what those stories were about, I can't recall it.
They all sort of go into a great soup.
I'm not entirely sure what we were talking about.
Where are we with the discovery of a new or maybe a couple of new Earth-like planets?
Well, the reason I laugh just then is, as you say, the discoveries are coming in.
And every time there's every few months, there's a press release coming out.
And everybody, again, I shouldn't say this about the scientific community.
I know, but everyone is overhyping their own discoveries.
Everybody wants to say, I'm the person who found a new Earth.
And then somebody else comes along and says, actually, your new Earth isn't really like the Earth.
I found one, which is even more like the Earth.
But let me backtrack a bit.
If we go back 20 years, a bit more than 20 years, we didn't know of any planets beyond our own solar system.
And then in 1995, a couple of researchers in France from the Geneva Observatory, but observing in France, found the first planet going around another star.
It's called 51 Pegasi B. Not very exciting, but that's a catalogue name for it.
And it turned out to be weird.
It is like nothing in our solar system.
It was bigger than the planet Jupiter, and Jupiter is the biggest planet that we've got.
It's all made of gas.
But Jupiter's way out from our sun.
This new one was discovered really close in, so close that it's totally parched by the heat of its sun.
It's closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun.
And astronomers have called these hot Jupiters.
So that one is nothing like the Earth.
And the Holy Grail has to be to find something like the Earth.
And like everything in life, it's easier to find the biggest and most blatant ones.
So if you've got something as big as Jupiter, you can easily find it.
If it's close to its star, it's easy to find it.
Whatever technique you're using, if it's close to the star, you can find it more easily.
But to find a small planet, the Earth comparatively far out is much more difficult.
So we found about 2,000 planets going around other stars.
So I think that's staggering from just our solar system 20 years ago to 2,000 planets going around other stars.
And between you and me, none of them is actually a twin of the Earth.
You've got ones which go around in a year, about 360 days.
So that's about the same distance.
But those ones tend to be bigger than the Earth.
And if they're bigger, they've got more gravity.
And in fact, they might not even be made of rock.
We've got planets like Uranus and Neptune, which are not as big as Jupiter in our solar system.
And they're mainly made of water.
So these could be watery worlds bigger than the Earth.
We've got some which are the size of the Earth.
Those have been discovered.
But the ones the size of the Earth will be much closer to their star.
So they're really hot, they're really overheated, and we couldn't live there because they're too hot.
So we've got planets the size of the Earth, but they're too hot.
We've got planets the right distance from the star, so they're the right temperature, but they're bigger than the Earth.
And they might be made of water or goodness knows what else.
So we are still on the hunt for the twin for planet Earth, the exact twin.
I'm talking of water, all of the discoveries, ice and all the rest of it that made us so excited about Mars, those wonderful pictures that keep coming in from Mars.
As of this point in February 2016, where are we with Mars?
We are in an ongoing situation, as you might say.
We are still exploring it.
There's now so much evidence for water on Mars.
Again, I giggle a bit every time there's a press release from NASA or the European Space Agency saying definite signs of water on Mars.
I mean, I think that case was closed years ago.
There definitely is water on Mars.
There's frozen water.
There are places where the water is liquid.
And of course, the importance of water is that water is essential for life.
And on Earth, water and life are intimately linked.
Now, our bodies are made of, what is it, 70 or 80% water?
Life started in watery ponds or the watery oceans.
And so, if Mars has water, did life start there?
And what's frustrating for people like Heather and myself, I mean, we rewrite about these planets, we wrote a whole book on Mars about 10 years ago, is that the space agencies are so far not searching specifically for life.
They're still on the trail of water.
We think, say, that trail, it's gone cold, it's gone hot.
I mean, we know the water is there.
And what we would love to see is a spacecraft go to Mars specifically to look for signs of life, of living organisms.
Because the chances are, however, that when Mars was young, we know it was warmer.
We know there were oceans.
We know there were flowing rivers, because you can see the riverbeds, the dried-up riverbeds there now.
So the chances were that life did start on early Mars, because on the early Earth, it started very soon after the Earth formed.
So it could have started on Mars.
Is that life still there?
Has it died out?
I mean, some people say we'll find fossils of microbes on Mars.
But if you think how resilient life is on the Earth, you can find life in Antarctica where it's as cold as it is on Mars.
And in the very deepest depths of the ocean where people didn't expect to find it.
Absolutely.
These hydrothermal vents or black smokers where it's really, really hot.
And also in the depths of the rock.
I mean, to me, one of the most astounding things is if you go down the really deep gold mines in South Africa, so they're literally miles deep into the earth, and you can find veins of water.
And you look in those veins of water and you find microbes there, which haven't seen the surface for literally millions of years.
So life does tend to hang on and survive there.
So if you go to Mars, Nigel, not necessarily you, although your astronaut training might take you there, who knows?
But if one goes to Mars robotically or with a human being, how do you search for life as distinct from searching for water?
Well, the ideal thing, I'll leap forward a little bit first here, Howard, is if we can actually bring Mars rocks back to the Earth and then put them in the lab, it should be quite easy to detect actually in a lab on the Earth.
With robots, it's a lot more difficult.
But there was one very tantalizing experiment launched way back in 1976 when NASA sent its first landers to Mars.
They're called Viking 1 and 2.
And they had a suite of experiments on board looking for signs of life.
And what they did was to take a sample of soil, which might have microbes in it, and they incubated it on board and they added nutrients to it, like food, heated it up, and looked for the gases that came off.
And one of those experiments seemed to show that something was producing more and more gas.
So I don't know if you make homemade wine or beer, but I do.
And I know what happens is if you take, obviously, whatever you're starting off with, apples or blackberries, and you put it in the yeast, you get more and more and more bubbles coming off.
And that's because yeast is living material and it multiplies and produces more and more gas.
And as opposed to a chemical reaction, like dropping a fat physias aspirin into water and it just fizzes and then it dies down again.
So this sort of reaction looked as if something was living on Mars, creating more and more and more gas.
But NASA had another experiment which seemed to show there wasn't any carbon in the soil.
We now know that second experiment was flawed, but as of 1976, they said, oops, no carbon, no life.
So there are tantalizing evidence that there is life there.
So we could use that kind of experiment to incubate life in the soil.
That's what we need to do, because if it's there, it's quite sparse.
So we need to get it to grow until we could either see it producing gas or maybe see it under a microscope or look for the life.
If you put it in water and it grows, it changes the composition of the materials in the water.
So that's the kind of thing that we would hope to do.
But it does slightly presuppose that life on Mars is like life on Earth.
If it's microbes, but its chemistry works in a different way.
If it's not made of DNA and proteins, for example, of course, we don't know what to expect.
And that's why it'd be so great to get some samples back to Earth.
And what do you make of those people?
And there are many of them who say, and some of these people are not wacko conspiracy theory style people, but there are people with a certain degree of intellect about them who look at the pictures that we've been getting back from Mars and say that there is a certain hint, as you look at this other world, certain hint in the rock structures that you see there, of shape and form and possible logical structure.
In other words, there are signs there if you look for them, but maybe it's just our logical human brains making them.
There are signs there that something has been there before.
I would say honestly, Howard, it's our illogical human brains looking at them.
Our minds are very good at picking up patterns.
I mean, think of the number of pictures that you see on Facebook or your friends take of clouds in the sky, and you can see a horse or you can see a dog or you can see a human face or you can see the shape of Africa.
Humans are very good at picking up patterns.
It's part of our survival strategy.
I mean, if you're living out in the savannah and you just saw an ear and a tail, you need to be able to connect those and say, oh, there's a lion on its way.
Let's get out of here.
So there's a good reason why we've evolved to see patterns where patterns don't exist.
But those are natural features, all things.
But like the old canals of Mars, if you go back to Victorian times, people said there are straight dark lines crossing Mars.
They must be canals.
And in fact, those are just random dark dots we know now.
And the eye was connecting them into lines.
But the one I like best was going back to the 1970s again, the first pictures we had from orbit around Mars showed the face on Mars.
Do you remember that one?
I remember it well.
And of course, a guest on this show over the years has been a man called Richard C. Hoagland, who was known as the face on Mars man.
I wonder if he's listening now.
But anyway, I'll give my perspective, so to speak, on the face on Mars.
So this is this big rock structure.
It's a couple of kilometers long, which looks like a sculptured face looking out into the universe.
And of course, as you say, people like Richard Hoagland said that this is evidence of construction by intelligent Martians.
Now, the Mars Reconnaissance Observer went to Mars with a much more detailed camera in the 1990s.
And we talked to the guy who operated the camera on it, Dr. Mike Malin, and NASA says, we must take a look at this face on Mars just to silence the so-called conspiracy theorists.
Let's use that term for a moment.
And he said, no, my camera is there to do science.
Anyway, eventually he got the command from NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. So he had to look at this big, the face on Mars.
And the detailed views, and again, you've probably seen those, is there's actually an eroded mesa.
So it's like a plateau and it's eroded away and there are hollows and bits sticking out.
And in a low resolution picture, like Viking did, and the certain angles of the sun, it can look a bit like a face.
But that's because we're looking for faces.
Ever since we were kids, I mean, little babies can see faces.
They recognize a face, or even like smiley faces and emojis.
So kids can work out that those are faces.
So we're seeing those.
But of course, various people, and I don't know if Richard Hoagland was one, actually said, well, okay, that's what we're seeing now.
But what happened was that the Martians knew we were sending a better camera to look at it.
So they actually jet-ignited the whole thing and turned it into rubble.
Well, I mean, what possible counter-argument can you put to that?
Absolutely.
But Mars, an exciting place.
And you think from what you said that the hunt for life there, and it's possible there is some kind of life, but it needs to look for life in a different way and perhaps needs to probe beneath the surface more than we've done now.
Yes, the thing about Mars is it doesn't have an ozone layer.
And so it's like one huge ozone hole over the whole of Mars.
And that means that the sun's deadly ultraviolet rays hit the surface.
So right on the surface, we don't expect to have life.
But maybe even a few centimeters down, it could be protected enough.
So the best place to look would be looking underneath boulders or even better, to dig down into the planet.
Now, unfortunately, NASA is about to send a probe called InSight to Mars, which is going to dig into the soil.
That's just been postponed for a couple of years because of technical problems.
But looking for signs of life, there's one very intriguing clue that life produces gases.
I mean, let's try to be a bit polite, but all living organisms produce gases from parts of their body.
So what you need to do is follow the methane trail.
Methane exactly is the gas that we're talking about.
I mean, cows do that and humans do that too.
And microbes do it.
And very interesting, over the past few years, both spacecraft going around Mars and even telescopes on the Earth looking at Mars' atmosphere have found regions where you have methane in the atmosphere.
Now methane isn't stable.
It'll react with the other gases in the atmosphere and go away.
So it hasn't been there since forever.
It's being created by something.
And really, there are two possibilities.
It's either something geological, so it might be maybe water underground reacting with certain kinds of rocks and producing methane, or it's microbes under the ground.
And very excitingly, the European Space Agency, along with the Russians, is sending an orbiter to Mars in a couple of years' time, which is going to go around and specifically look for the methane.
And if we can see, I mean, what would excite me very much, if we find the methane is where there's water on the surface, then to my mind, that sort of speaks to the fact that looks like marshy kind of microbes producing methane.
If it comes instead from places like volcanoes and rifts, geological rifts in the ground, then maybe that's just down to the geology.
But for me, that's going to be the most exciting Mars expedition of the next few years.
So enormous ongoing excitement with Mars.
I want to get now in the final part of our conversation, of course, to talk about you and your own exploration of space.
You've signed up with Virgin Galactic.
Why?
Oh, it's just in me, Howard, ever since I was a kid.
I've talked about the 1960s, and I remember the space race and obviously Apollo astronauts landing on the moon.
I followed all that.
I'd have cuttings and posters all around my bedroom when I was a kid.
And then I followed all that through to the space shuttle and the space stations.
I got to know quite a few of the later astronauts, as you can imagine.
I've been to the mock-up of the space station in Huntsville, Alabama.
Very sadly, I was involved in making two television documentaries about the two space shuttles that were destroyed.
Challenger, that was destroyed in an explosion by its rocket in 1986 when it was taking off, and Columbia, which burnt up on re-entry in 2003.
So space is in my blood.
And the idea, ever since I was a kid, of going into space, I mean, I would give anything to go into space.
But in the days of the right stuff, you had to be a test pilot, you had to be physically fit, you had to have 20-20 eyesight.
I really was none of those, so I really didn't see my way to going on board in that sense.
And then nowadays, you've got scientists going up to the space station, but I'm beginning to push the age boundary for that one, to be honest.
And then the chance came along in 2004.
In that year, before Richard Branson even got involved in it, Bert Rutan, who's built amazing kinds of lightweight aircraft, the Voyager aircraft that traveled all the way around the world without ever actually touching down.
And he built this, what he calls Spaceship One.
And it was the first private spaceship to go into space.
When I say into space, it was just a hop.
It just went up and came down again.
And they basically refurbed it, refueled it, and within two weeks went up into space again.
And they won what was called the X Prize, the Ansari X Prize, for the first private company to launch into space twice within the space of two weeks.
And Richard heard about that.
His right-hand man was on the spot, and Richard saw the commercial potential for it.
In fact, I mean, he wanted to go up into space as well.
So he saw the possibility there of developing the Spaceship One into what we now call Spaceship Two.
So we've got a pilot and a co-pilot in the front and then a passpace for six passengers in the back.
And in 2009, so it was about five years on from there, I mentioned the TV documentaries and Heather and I and a colleague called Stuart Carter set up a TV production company in the 90s called Pioneer Productions, which makes programs about space and about the human body and about extreme machines, one of our big series, about all kinds of things.
In 2009, Stuart said to me, look, we've got our shareholding in the company.
No, I'm going to leave mine to my children.
What are you going to do?
And I said, well, I don't have children.
And he said, well, the Virgin Galactic is out there.
And I said, ah, I could sell my shares and buy a ticket to space.
For me, it was a no-brainer, Howard.
I mean, shares are a piece of paper.
Going into space is going to space a lifetime's dream.
So it literally was, I can remember sitting there and click that light bulb moment.
oh, yes, I get out of the TV business, sell my shares and go to space.
It's about $100,000, isn't it?
More than that.
I wish it were.
When I signed up in US dollars, it was £200,000.
So it's about £130 British.
It's now gone up, by the way, to £250,000 American dollars.
But I got it at the cut process.
Does this £200,000 guarantee that you will get into space?
It does, because, well, put it this way, if they pull out of the space business for any reason, it's fully refundable 10%.
So I would lose $20,000.
But yeah, I'm afraid to take that risk.
I'll get 90% of it back, whatever happens.
And Virgin Galactic is underwritten by Virgin Atlantic.
So as long as Virgin Atlantic Airway stays in business, it's a guarantee my money will get back.
Talk to me about the training, because I know that we've had little conversations about this, but you've done the Vomit Comet.
What else have you done?
Yeah, okay.
Briefly, the Vomit Comet is where you go in an airplane that goes in a big loop up and then it falls down, almost falls down out of the sky.
So you float around weightless for about 30 seconds.
And 30 seconds doesn't seem long, but the plane does that 15 times.
So overall, you get seven and a half minutes of weightlessness.
But what I've done more recently is the centrifuge, which is G-Force experience.
So I'm sure you know what the centrifuge is.
They put you in a cabin.
They call it the gondola at the end of a long arm, about 25 feet long.
And they spin you round and round faster and faster.
I've seen it.
Faster and faster.
That's right.
But when you sit inside, you don't know you're spinning around.
Otherwise, to be honest, you just feel a bit sick.
But you can't see outside.
And it's actually a flight simulator.
So in front of you, you've got dummy controls and you've got a view looking out as if you're looking out, first of all, obviously onto the ground and the atmosphere.
And then into space as you go upwards, it looks as if you're traveling upwards.
And that matches with the g-forces that you're feeling on your body.
And on the way up, well, the way the system works with the Virgin Galactic is we're in our spaceship as passengers and we're carried up to 50,000 feet by a carrier plane or mothership, as Richard.
He's actually named it Eve after his own mother.
So our mothership is called Eve, after Eve Branson.
And at 50,000 feet, the carrier plane drops the rocket, we light the engine, and then we zoom up into space.
And what we have to do is a sharp bend because we're traveling horizontally to begin with when we're dropped.
And then we have to turn and turn vertically upwards.
And when you do that, the G-force is down your body, from your head towards your feet.
So that's the first thing we have to experience in the centrifuge.
And we have three and a half G's of that force.
And what the instructor said is that it's like extra gravity, and it pulls the blood from your head so you can black out.
The first thing that's going to happen is you're going to grey out, your vision loses its color, and then you get more and more tunnel vision.
So you have to do special exercises.
We're not in a pressure suit.
I should add that.
If you're a fighter pilot pulling eight or nine Gs in a plane, you have a pressure suit which constricts your legs so the blood can't pool in your legs.
We have to do exercises to stop the blood.
I've been very delicate about this, but I have to ask you just to give me an indication of your age, because I would be, if it was me, I'm not 25 anymore, I would be a little concerned that my poor body wouldn't be able to handle it.
Well, let me just answer that question in a roundabout way, actually, how, because the instructor said to us, the worst thing you can be is to be tall, because then obviously it's further between your head and your heart.
So blood's more likely to flow back.
And it's worse to be young because your veins and your blood vessels are more supple and it's easier for them to expand and for the blood then to pool in your legs because the blood vessels down there are more supple.
They can just give and let the blood go down there.
So he said, it's actually better to be old.
So yes, I'm in my 60s now.
So I'm short and old.
I'm the ideal astronaut for the G-Forces.
Okay, so, you know, health-wise, you're absolutely fine and you're the right candidate.
Are you not scared?
Because there have been safety concerns about this.
Are you not scared by the process of being taken up there by one ship and then transferring to another and all the rest of that?
It all seems to me, although what do I know, to be fraught with risk?
Well, I think there are certainly going to be times as I get near the flight when, yes, I will get scared.
I'm sure that will happen.
I'm sure that's actually a normal thing to happen.
As you and our listeners are very well aware, that just over a year ago, we had an awful accident with the Persian Galactic Spaceship when it broke up in the desert in California and the co-pilot was killed.
And the pilot, amazingly, because a craft disintegrated around him, he was able to push his button, eject from this, it was an ejector seat, get free from his seat, and then parachuted down from 50,000 feet without oxygen.
I mean, he blacked out, hit the desert, broke his shoulder.
A week later, he was out of hospital.
Totally very, very lucky man.
Amazing that he's alive and managed to survive that.
And sad that there has been in this program, you know, one fatality.
But what happened on that occasion, there's no secret about this, that the official reports show that the co-pilot actually pulled a lever at the wrong time.
It was human error.
And the spacecraft and the rocket engine, which a lot of people pointed the finger of blame to at the time, are both absolutely fine.
And the results from the investigation actually show that the spacecraft, ironically, is actually stronger than was predicted.
I mean, it was actually tested literally to the point of destruction, which was never, of course, intended.
And being tested at the point of destruction showed it was actually stronger, more reliable than anyone had thought.
So obviously, those control systems are being redesigned so that same error can't happen.
Things are being automated so that people can't make errors.
And you don't sound, Nigel, like a man who's afraid of all of this.
I mean, look, if I was doing it, and, you know, I wish I could afford to do it, and it might be something that, you know, perhaps in another life I might do one of these days.
But my view of it would be that if there is risk involved in it, then if you're going to go, that's a great way to go.
Yes, I mean, there are a lot of elements to that.
I mean, first of all, anything in life is risky.
I mean, for goodness sake of the moment, there's this TV series called The Jump, where people are doing this sort of fugitive jump on skis, and four of them or more have got seriously injured.
I mean, I think somebody's going to get killed in that and they're not careful.
Extreme sports people who jump off cliffs wearing just a parachute.
I mean, I would ride down bicycle, sorry, ride down mountains on bicycles.
I mean, all those are extremely risky.
And I certainly wouldn't do any of those.
So, yeah, people take risks.
But even, you know, statistics of driving up and down the country's motorways are a bit scary if you look at them in detail.
So we're all going to die sometime.
And there are always risks around us.
So this is where that I'm choosing.
And clearly, Inverting Galactic is minimising the risks.
I mean, there's a good practical reason for that.
Richard Branson has said this, that if a government loses astronauts and they just have a big inquiry into it and official reports and then they go back to normal again, if a commercial airline loses passengers, it's going to kill the business.
So he's got a very good reason for being careful about safety.
That is absolutely, and that's no more or less than I would have expected from Richard Branson.
That's very, very logical.
There is a solid business reason for being as safe as you can be.
Well, not only that, Howard, but in fact, the very first passenger flight, which we hope will be about a year from now, is going to be Richard himself going up with his son, Sam Branson, who's actually filming it for television.
Originally, in fact, his daughter was as well.
We don't know if she still is going to or not.
And his mother, Eve, after whom the mothership was named, if they had originally launched five years ago, as was the plan, Eve would have been going up in her 90s.
But she's now decided in the mid-90s that she's too old for it, which is very sad because she's a great adventurer.
She actually flew gliders.
And during the Second World War, I believe she tried to get into the RAF glider corps by dressing as a young man.
Okay, when are you slated to go?
Well, the schedule is slightly uncertain, obviously, after the accident last year.
But what is happening this very month, they're rolling out the second spaceship, which replaces the first one.
They're already building it because the idea has always been to have two motherships and five spaceships so they can be refurbished and refueled and so on in turn.
So the second one is going to be rolled out this month.
And then it'll obviously do its test flight.
But as far as flying within the atmosphere is concerned, the first one did a lot of those basic aerodynamic tests.
So maybe, certainly later this year, the second spaceship should go into space.
And then once all the testing has been done with the test pilots, then hopefully the first passenger flight with Richard and Sam will be about this time next year.
Maybe.
Then, okay, for me, I'm number 245.
It's first come, first serve.
So I'm 245.
It's like going to delicate testing.
My ticket says 245 on it.
But there's six on a flight.
So I should be flight 41 or something, something like that.
So if they can keep up one flight a week, which is the idea, that would be about a year after.
So two or three years from now, realistically, two or three years from now.
So you're going to do it this side of 2020.
Yes, indeed.
And the other thing, if I'm number 245, so far there have been about 550 people being into space, astronauts from America, cosmonauts from Russia, astronauts from obviously Europe and Japan and all the other nations on the Earth going up there.
About 550 people have been up there.
So if things work out as planned, I will be among the first 1,000 people to go into space.
And if you think about, I believe, I'm not an expert, I think about 3,000 people have been to the top of Mount Everest.
About 3,000 people have been to the South Pole.
So I will be in a smaller elite.
That puts you in a very, very select band.
Indeed.
And 1,000 people, and one of the thousand people have been in space out of 7 billion people on planet Earth or out of 100 billion people who've ever lived on planet Earth.
So, yeah, I mean, not that I want to get the kudos for it.
For me, it's being able to do it during my lifetime.
And yeah, that's what it's about.
You've done the vomit comet.
You've done the centrifuge.
What have you got to do next?
Well, at the moment, those are the two main things that we needed to do.
And to go on the centrifuge, you have to do a full-scale medical, a full one-hour medical exam, which in fact gives you a certificate, which will enable you to get a private pilot's license.
So medically, I've passed the test.
In fact, I can get a private pilot's license, and that's all I need to do.
What will happen nearer the time is three days before the actual flight, we will go out there and meet the astronauts that I'm going up with and my pilot and co-pilot.
We'll do a bit of team bonding.
We'll do a lot more.
We'll do the waitlist and some G-Force experience actually in the planes that they actually have at the spaceport.
I must tell you about the spaceport actually, Howard, in the middle of the desert in New Mexico.
The nearest town is a little place called Truth or Consequences.
And the reason for that is it was called something else, but in the 1950s, there was an American radio show called Truth or Consequences, and they offered to broadcast the first show and several subsequent shows from any town that changed their name to Truth or Consequences.
So that's what it is.
And it's near Alamogorda, where the first atom bomb was tested.
So it's that sort of bleak desert.
And they've built a spaceport with a three-mile-long runway and a purpose-built departure building, a terminal building with integral hangars designed by Norman Foster.
And that's all built between Virgin Galactic and the government of New Mexico.
They've actually built this spaceport.
I've been out there a couple of years ago.
It's a really futuristic place.
So that's where we'll be based for the flights.
And I say, we spend three days doing more tests from there, getting to bond with everybody.
And then, of course, building up to the big experience at the end of that time.
And I can really detect the excitement in your voice, Nigel.
And please keep me posted about all of this.
We'll talk about it again.
We've only got a couple of minutes, but it's only fair if I let you plug one of your flow of recent books with Heather.
And the title intrigued me.
I've got a copy of it.
I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but The Secret Life of Space.
Tell me in a couple of minutes what it's about.
Well, it's about those stories behind the scenes.
So, for example, you've asked me about black holes.
We go into those background stories about what black holes are.
And in fact, we think about Albert Einstein and so on, but they were first predicted by an English clergyman back in the year 1783 up in Yorkshire.
And he came up with the idea of the black hole.
He didn't call it that.
One of my favourite chapters is about Stonehenge.
Okay, Stonehenge, we go there in June, we stand in the middle of Stonehenge, and you watch the sun rising over the heelstone, and the Druids do their thing, and they baptise our babies and so on.
But actually, if you look at the archaeological evidence, which has just been unearthed in the last couple of years, Stonehenge was actually built to celebrate midwinter.
So you go there in December, you stand at the heelstone, that big stone outside the circle, and you look through the arches of Stonehenge and you see the sun setting on midwinter's day, which makes a lot of sense because that's when people wanted the sun not to carry on declining, but to come back and light up another year.
We've got the whole story about dark matter and dark energy.
Dark matter, strange gravitational force, was actually first discovered in the 1930s by a Swiss astronomer, a total madman called Fritz Zlicki working in America.
But because he was Swiss and he hated the Americans, he called his American colleagues spherical bastards.
I think Heather's mentioned that before.
So the book is about, This is the backstory for the whole of astronomy.
So we've got the backstory of the Space River Rosetta, where we mentioned the comet, but obviously the space approach to Mars, life in the universe, the inside story of life in the universe, plus why stars shine.
And of course, life on Mars is there and the planets around the other stars.
So it's the backstory, as you say, it's not the stories that hit the headlines, but you see those headlines and you think, well, hang on, how do they get to this stage?
And we've unearthed the story of these mavericks.
We've got quite a few female astronomers because, again, they are underrepresented.
In fact, when Heather and I write, I'm the one who writes about female astronomers.
I'm more of a feminist than she is, actually.
But the person who said the whole of the universe, or most of the universe, is made of hydrogen gas, which is a bit odd because on Earth, hydrogen is quite rare.
But it is over 90% made of hydrogen.
She's an astronomer from Buckinghamshire, where I live.
And she pretty back in the 1920s that most of the universe was made of hydrogen.
And her supervisor didn't believe her.
And of course, later on, he actually stole her idea and published it himself.
So these are part of the untold story.
Oh, that is the way of life, I think.
Nigel, a real pleasure to talk with you.
We have a lot more to talk about.
And I'm really pleased that you and I had a chance to do a show together.
Give my regards, my love to Heather, and I wish you both all the very best.
And I wish you well with the preparation for going into space.
We'll be talking again, I know.
Thank you.
Thanks very much, Howard.
Nigel Henbest, always good to have him on.
And of course, we wish him well in all of his space ventures, including the travel into space.
If you want to know more about him and his work, I'll put a link to his website and his work on my website, theunexplained.tv.
My website, maintained and owned by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot.
Thank you to him for his hard work.
And thank you very much indeed to you for the guest suggestions, for keeping me one way and another on the straight and narrow as we go through 2016.
I'm very, very grateful to you and all of the tips that you give me and the steers that you give me and the guest suggestions and all the rest of it.
I don't think I could do any of this if I didn't get your feedback.
So until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
More great guests still to come, as they say on TV news shows.
Please stay safe.
Please stay calm and please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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