What if humanity isn’t just a flicker in the Universe—but a force that could one day shape the cosmos itself? Physicist Brian Cox explores the possibility that we’re standing at the edge of a new era: The dawn of a spacefaring civilization.
From reusable rockets and asteroid mining to the philosophy of our cosmic significance, Cox imagines how we might continue to explore the frontier of space. As we industrialize low Earth orbit and contemplate colonizing the Moon and Mars, who decides how space is governed?
BRIAN COX: I attended several meetings and conferences where, of course, many countries and international bodies that are trying to work on the management of space. I find that it's a challenge because of course, it's always a challenge when different countries and different commercial interests and so on are trying to flesh out agreements about how you manage a frontier. But ultimately, I find it exciting because what it means is we are now at the stage where as the great Carl Sagan said, "We are beginning to take our first steps out into the cosmic ocean." And I always remember, and he said, "The water seems inviting. So it's a tremendous opportunity."
- [Interviewer] What opportunities might space colonization offer?
- I think we're at the frontier of a very exciting time in our history as a civilization because we are now, I think, on the verge of becoming a space fairing civilization in the truest sense of the word, let's say multi-planetary civilization. So there's been a revolution in engineering in the last 10 years or so, the last decade, because now we have reusable rockets. So SpaceX, now Blue Origin, have reusable rockets, which means that access to earth orbit is cheap or at least cheaper than it's ever been before. So we are industrializing the space above our heads just a few hundred miles above our heads at an ever increasing rate. Of course, it's been very important to us for many years, decades in fact. So satellite navigation, communications, weather forecasting, earth observation, climate observation, and so on, the observation of earth from Earth orbit has been part of our lives, whether we think about it or not, for quite some time. But now because we have the technology to access it cheaply, I think we are seeing a revolution. And so it will not belong before there isn't just one crude space station in orbit, which is the International Space Station. There will be multiple space stations in orbit. There'll be scientific research at a much higher level in orbit, commercial scientific research, there'll of course be space tourism. There's an increasing demand on communications, for example. So the Starlink satellites, hundreds and hundreds of them up there. There'll be multiple competing constellations of satellites that allow us to make phone calls and access high speed internet for many points on the earth. And so that process is accelerating and it is going to accelerate further. So what does that mean? So there's a tremendous opportunity. It's incredibly exciting before we start thinking by the way, about going out to the asteroids and mining them and building cities on Mars and building cities on the moon and so on. But let's just talk about earth orbit first. It's tremendously exciting, huge opportunity. But of course, you start to move outwards to a new frontier, then the frontier can become crowded. You can have competition for the real estate. You need some way of managing conflicts between. By which I mean conflict, physical conflicts between the satellites. What happens if someone satellite comes close to another satellite? How do you manage that? Do you allocate particular orbits or do you say that we're gonna have some framework like air traffic control, where you have an avoidance system that everybody agrees on, whereas if two things come close, they avoid each other. That framework is not yet there. I attended several meetings and conferences where there are of course, many countries and international bodies that are trying to work on the management of space. I find that it's a challenge because of course, it's always a challenge when different countries and different commercial interests and so on are trying to flesh out agreements about how you manage a frontier. But ultimately, I find it exciting because what it means is we are now at the stage where as the great Carl Sagan said, "We are beginning to take our first steps out into the cosmic ocean." And I always remember, and he said, "The water seems inviting." So it's a tremendous opportunity. But what kind of opportunities are gonna open up? Well, we know for example, so already from our experience on the International Space Station, that sort of development of new drugs, for example, or development of new ways of building semiconductors, for example, silicon wafers and so on, that lots of experiments have been done that suggest that there might be an advantage to on orbit manufacturing. So it's in a microgravity environment of certain things, growing crystals and so on, which might be useful. And so as we begin to get more experience operating in microgravity, we begin to see that there are applications for particularly material science and biosciences. But beyond that, so when we start to move outwards beyond near earth orbit and build the infrastructure that we need close to the planet to begin to move further out into space, then opportunities begin to open up that I find tremendously exciting. So one very well known example would be mining asteroids. So one could argue, there are people that argue that one of the biggest problems we face and have faced historically on earth is competition for resources. So not only just the pure competition, which leads to conflict and war, if you think those resources are limited, which they are on earth, but also just the stress of course, that you put on the earth itself, on the environment as our civilization grows and requires access to more resources. It damages the planet, it creates conflict and so on. But if you have the infrastructure to begin to move outwards, for example, to the near earth asteroids, then what you find is that resources are no longer limited in any reasonable sense. There are vast amounts of resources out there in space that we will have access to within the next decade or so, or certainly few decades. So that begins to transform the way that we think about our civilization, the way that we think about expanding our civilization, increasing the capability of our civilization and so on. So I think there's a tremendous opportunity there, to grow our civilization crucially, without further damaging the planet that most of us will live on for the foreseeable future. And that's why, for me, I'm ultimately optimistic about those steps that we are making into space. I mean, I would not have imagined, I think if you went back 20 years that we would have so many rockets flying and coming back to the earth again and then flying again, perhaps within my lifetime, but certainly at this point in the 21st century. So I think it's exciting, but the challenges, as with all new technologies, and you could extend this debate by the way to artificial intelligence or quantum computing as well as space flight. The challenges come when we try to build the regulatory framework and you need a regulatory framework. One of the things I think we are very bad at on planet Earth is recognizing that we all live on planet earth. So we're all on the same spacecraft, let's say, making our way on our journey around the sun. And ultimately challenges about the management of space or the management of artificial intelligence or the management of the power of potentially quantum computers, I think ultimately are global challenges. And we are very bad historically facing global challenges together. So that would be my worry, and of course, just to say how you think about space. So it's literally, it's only a few hundred miles that way up there. Now there are satellites whizzing around other than the geostationary ones, like the intellectual space station would be a good idea. It's in a country's airspace for a matter of seconds, right? So you clearly you need to develop some way of managing that environment, which is a way which involves international collaboration because the environment, the objects that are up there doing all the jobs that we want them to do, don't stay in any one country's airspace for more than a few seconds or minutes. And so it's kind of obvious to me that we need a framework to manage that. When we contemplate the size and the scale of the universe and our place within it, which you're forced to do. When you think about the the distance scales and the sheer size and age of the universe, then I think it's very natural for us to tend to come to the conclusion that we don't matter at all. And it is true in some sense just physically what are we, we are little specks of just a collection of atoms on one mode of dust, obviously around one little star in 400 billion stars in one galaxy amongst 2 trillion galaxies in a small patch of a potentially infinite universe. So clearly it is true, we are physically insignificant. So I've tended in the past to focus arguments or think about arguments of our value in the context of what does it mean to live these finite fragile lives in this infinite universe? And I could make a strong argument and have many times that not withstanding our physical insignificance, we may be remarkably valuable because the number of civilizations on the average in a particular galaxy, any given galaxy might be less than one on the average. Many galaxies may not even have civilizations in them, if that is the case and that it's speculative. But if it's the case, then we would be remarkably valuable, not withstanding our physical insignificance, because we would be perhaps the only place in the Milky Way galaxy where collections of atoms have come together that can think and do science and have conversations like this in a very real sense, bring meaning to otherwise meaningless galaxy. So that has been my position for some time. I think it's a good working hypothesis by the way, as an aside, if you think that we... I think Carl Sagan said it many years ago. In some sense, if that's the case, we have a responsibility to the cosmos itself because we're a product of 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution, but we might be a very rare and special product, but we might only be here, we will only be here for a small amount of time. The the sun will only be here for a small amount of time in cosmic timescales and so on. So I've tended to make that argument. But one of the great joys about reading other people's views about essentially being a scientist is that you can come across a point of view and you think, I hadn't thought of that, I might change my mind given that wonderful piece of thought. And I found, it happened to me recently. I was reading a book, it's a very old book now by David Deutsch, who's is one of the greats, one of the founders of quantum computing. So he is a physicist and a thinker worth paying attention to. And he made a point, which I had heard before actually in a book called "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle," by John Barrow and Frank Tipler, which is a huge influence on me when I was an undergraduate physicist. So I couldn't believe I'd forgotten this point, but David Deutsch and Barrow and Tipler pointed out that it's not necessarily the case that life will always be a spec, right? Something that's very valuable and local in the universe, but doesn't make much difference on a cosmic scale. It's not necessarily the case because you can imagine. So let's take the earth as an example. So you might say, well, a planet is a very big thing and living things are very small, so they don't make much difference to a planet that's wrong. Because if you look at the earth, its atmosphere is the product of life. It's got oxygen in it and high concentration, it would not have that without photosynthesis. So, and obviously now our civilization has sculpted the surface of the earth. You see it, if you look at the earth from space, you don't just see oceans. You don't just see a kind of common or garden planet on the night side of the planet, you see our civilization. So we have now transformed the earth as a civilization, but life has been transforming it for billions of years. So you could say, well, okay, so what happens if we stay here? We become a spacefaring civilization, we don't destroy ourselves, or we aren't destroyed by some impact from space. Then could you conceive of technology that could start to affect the solar system? And the the answer must be yes, we could imagine building cities on Mars. We could imagine in physics, pure physics terms, terraforming Mars turning it into a habitable world. We could imagine going to the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, we could imagine going to the edge of the solar system. Could you imagine technology in a million years, let's say, that would allow us to begin to affect the lifetime of the sun. Could you imagine that in physics terms, according to laws of physics I suppose you could. You could imagine a tremendously powerful civilization that could start to, I don't know, throw material into some whatever it is. Maybe it was ridiculous thing to do, but you could at least imagine it. And then you go a million years, 2 million years, 3 million years, 10 million years, a billion years into the future, imagine that our civilization expands to the stars and becomes an interstellar civilization. Imagine our civilization populates the entire galaxy. There's nothing in the laws of physics that prevent that. And imagine we start to understand the quantum theory of gravity. We start to understand how space time works. I imagine if we start to glimpse some underlying structure in reality that gives us power that we've not yet dreamed of, who knows in a billion years. And so is it really true that in the far future of the universe then life will play no role? Or could it be that life could play a central role in the far future of the universe? And the reason that it reminded me of Barrow and Tipler's magnificent book, "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle," which I strongly recommend, is that in there they consider a cosmology, which is, it sounds like science fiction but you can conceive of it given the known laws of nature. It's a cosmology called the Omega point cosmology. So they consider a relapsing universe. Now are the moments our universe is accelerating in its expansion, or whether it continues to do that forever, we don't know. But at the moment, there it is. But I imagine in a relapsing universe, you can at least consider a situation where life in the far future is so powerful that it can begin to control the collapse of the universe and try to configure it presumably by moving matter and energy around in some inconceivable way. You can just about construct this thing such that the ability of life to process information increases faster than the rate of collapse of the universe. And so what that means, what does it mean? It means what's the appropriate measure of time for a intelligent being? It's really, I think fundamentally it should be considered, you should think of it as the time it takes to process one bit of information. And it turns out that you can at least write the equations down for a universe in which the ability to process information diverges to infinity before the universe collapses. So in that case, you almost say that life manipulates the universe such that it becomes immortal. In the far future. Now I emphasize this is complete, it is beyond speculative. So I'm not advocating for this position, that that's the way that nature is. But it's really interesting. It was really interesting to me to just think about it. The point I think, that key point, which is interesting, is that it's not necessarily the case that life remains insignificant on a cosmic scale. You shouldn't assume that, because if life persists sufficiently long and becomes sufficiently knowledgeable and powerful, then it may be able to influence larger structures, not just planets and not just solar systems, perhaps not just even galaxies. And it's a very beautiful idea.