What do we gain when we look to the skies? How has cosmology shaped our politics? And why is awe a feeling that we can’t afford to lose? In episode ten of With Reason, acclaimed science writer Jo Marchant takes Niki Seth-Smith on a dazzling journey through the history of science, mythology and our relationship with the night sky. For fans of Brian Cox, Carlo Rovelli, Robert Macfarlane and Gaia Vince.

Hosts: Niki Seth-Smith and Samira Shackle

Producer: Alice Bloch

Music: Danosongs

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Transcript:

Niki Seth-Smith:

Hi there and welcome to With Reason from New Humanist magazine with me Niki Seth-Smith -

Samira Shackle:

- and me Samira Shackle.

NSS:

This is still the place where we explore questions of reason and unreason belief and disbelief, criticism and debate, all by talking to bright and exciting thinkers about their work and ideas that light up our ever turbulent times.

SS:

So far this series, we've spoken to writers and academics challenging dogma on things like borders and belonging, religion and activism, desire and consent. But today, we're looking to the skies to hear an interview that you recorded Niki with science writer Jo Marchant. I'll be back to chat at the end of the show. So Niki, could you tell me a bit about Jo?

NSS:

Jo Marchant fascinates me because she seems to be a real polymath. She's an award-winning science journalist whose books have explored everything from the mystery of a 2000 year-old computer to Tutankhamun's Mummy, and the science behind the mind-body connection. She also has a PhD in genetics and medical microbiology and has worked at New Scientist and Nature. Her new book, The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars explores our relationship with the night sky and the cosmos beyond from prehistory to today. This journey through space and time is rich in historical and scientific interest. But she's also making an argument: she wants us to reconnect with the night sky and wants us to realize what we're missing by no longer looking up for inspiration. So when I met Jo, I asked her what drew her to write about the cosmos. She talked about the effect of awe - so was it the night sky that inspired her?

Jo Marchant:

Yes, it was a few different things. Actually, one was definitely an experience of the night sky. There's one episode that I mentioned in the book, when I was in Mexico on a completely different assignment, when there’d been a big thunderstorm, I was camping in the mountains, and it had been a sort of a stressful day of risky travel … and then just being in this tent, not sure where I was or if I was going to get swept away, and waking up in the middle of the night, when the rain had stopped, coming out and looking up and seeing the stars, and being absolutely just transported by this incredible view. I think we see it so rarely - I live in London, so it's a city, and you know, I think we just forget how amazing this view of the stars is. It's not really part of our lives anymore. And then when you do see a properly dark sky, it's this mind blowing experience. And I was interested in, what have we lost? How has that been important through history?

And the other reason why I wanted to do the book now was this feature of light pollution. We're the first society, civilization, that can't look up and see our Milky Way, our own galaxy, see the stars. So I wanted to know, what are we losing? How has that been important through history?

NSS:

Before we go into that, our relationship through time with the sky, what actually is the cosmos? Because I think the definition has changed through time, hasn’t it?

JM:

Yeah. So the cosmos really is just everything really: reality. Everything that there is. The word originally is from this idea of order rather than chaos. Why is there something? Why is there order? What does it mean? What does it come from? So that's what I'm interested in sort of, fundamentally, you know, what is reality? And what does it mean? What's it made of? What's our relationship with it? But you know, here on Earth, our main window onto that wider reality, that wider universe, is the sky, you know: the sun, the moon, the planets, the stars, and it's those circling patterns through the sky, that would have been the first thing that gave people that sense that there is order, there are patterns. This isn't just a sort of chaotic existence, you can see those, those regular cycles in the sky. And that's always inspired and motivated people. So on one level, I'm looking at that view of the stars, how has it inspired people? What is it told us about this universe that we live in? But then on a deeper level: yeah, we've always looked to the sky and the stars to answer those deeper questions of what is reality. What is our existence? What does it all mean?

NSS:

And going back to the very beginning, as you do in your book, we sort of start our journey in the Lascaux caves in France. And those are caves that boast hundreds of Palaeolithic artworks. And your book explores these findings that suggest that those cave paintings - they're often of animals as well as people - might actually be depictions of star constellations. If that were actually confirmed to be the case, why would that discovery be important?

JM:

Yeah, so I started with the cave paintings of the Palaeolithic because this is really the first insight we've got into the minds of our ancestors, when we first start to see this art and this creative expression. So you know that Europe is one place where we see wonderful paintings, the Lascaux cave, but there are others now being found from similar time periods in Indonesia, for example. So it's not just a European thing.

But Lascaux cave is one of the places where you just see these stunning paintings of horses, bulls, stags, they're sort of floating across the walls and the ceiling of the cave. And yeah, there is one particular one that's very interesting. It's the biggest Oryx bull in Lascaux cave, it's known as bull number 18, and it's got this pattern of dots above its shoulder, and it's a very characteristic pattern. There's four in a line and then two in a line just above it. And you see that same pattern of dots popping up in art, all through history and around the planet. You see it in Native American art. You see it in the art of shamans in Siberia, you even see it in the logo of the Japanese car maker Subaru. And in all of these other examples, that pattern of dots is representing a star cluster, the Pleiades. So that's raised the question of, well, could the people of Lascaux have been actually painting the stars with these dots? And what makes it even more interesting is that the Pleiades is just above the shoulder of the bull in our modern constellation Taurus. And here they are in Lascaux cave just above the bull. So what I wanted to look at in that first chapter was, could that be true? Is there any evidence for this really being a star map? Could they have been painting stars? Could that link with a bull have survived? Until now? If it did, why would they have wanted to do that? And it is very difficult to say, for sure, what those ancient artists were thinking, you know, they didn't write down what they intended. So you have to kind of put together a patchwork of other different kinds of evidence, we don't know for sure. But yes, they could have been painting the stars, we could have inherited that story today. And the important thing I think it really says about the cosmos, that we first started off with, is that it was a very holistic, interconnected system. You know, we now separate earth and sky, ourselves and nature. But for the people back then it was just one system of nature, where things in the sky and earth just changed together.

NSS:

And the history that you describe in the book, when we're learning about this history of our relationship to the cosmos, is a reminder of the extent to which scientific discovery is actually being driven by what we might now call like myths or superstition. Can you give us some examples of how what we would now deem to be superstition or myth that has actually driven essential or crucial scientific discovery?

JM:

Yeah, so one thing I'm really interested in the book ... so I'm trying to tell this history of how the stars have been important. And I'm particularly interested in how have we built that powerful intellectual understanding of science. How do we move from a sort of mythological or stories-based understanding of what was going on around us to this scientific view, and one quite nice example is from the ancient Babylonians. So they were among the first civilizations to arise, we've got the first written records from around the third millennium BC and so you now you can see for sure, what were they thinking about the sky and there's an absolute obsession with what was going on in the heavens, like they took this holistic cosmos with events on earth and and the skies being entwined, really to extremes – that everything that happened, the planet changing in direction, or there's a lunar eclipse, they saw that as an omen, a warning from the gods. So they had teams of priests really, who would be watching the sky every night, writing down very carefully everything they saw that was happening, correlating that with events on Earth, coming up with sort of codified omens, what means what and rituals that you could conduct to stop the bad thing from happening. And because they did that, night after night, literally, for centuries, they started to realize that these movements in the sky aren't as chaotic and erratic as they had thought, that there's repeating patterns and cycles. And that is what really drove them to come up with mathematical ways of describing those cycles, which became more and more sophisticated over time, until they got to the point where they could actually predict with considerable accuracy where any celestial body was going to be, what was going to happen on any particular date. And that was the beginnings of a mathematical model of the universe.

NSS:

And when you talk about reading omens in the sky and noticing patterns, is that what we would now call sort of early astronomy, and obviously, there's, there's early astronomy, and there's also religious and faith based inquiry as well. How do those relate?

JM:

Yeah, that's an interesting question. Because now, yeah, we separate astronomy. So there's a scientific sort of mathematically based way of understanding the universe where we're sort of making numerical observations. And then there's astrology, which is more about meaning and stories and beliefs, and it's not based on scientific evidence, but those terms wouldn't really have made sense in the past, really, before the scientific revolution, certainly not for the Babylonians. So for them, the cosmos was absolutely a combination of those two things.

So I think … we started off in the Palaeolithic where it's all about stories, beliefs, what people were experiencing in their environment around them, and they're experiencing these stars rising and setting in the sky and that's matching what's happening. The seasons that the Babylonians are coming up with, the mathematical models, but it's still absolutely this magical thinking, this belief. And the stories that they're telling. There's no separation between the two. And even then when you look at the ancient Greeks, astronomers like Copernicus or Ptolemy, or coming forwards to Kepler, or Galileo, these pioneers of scientific astronomy, they're still all keen astrologers, part of their motivation is they're trying to understand the human soul, they're casting horoscopes. So it wasn't really until Descartes, when there's that sort of separation between mind and matter, if you like, that the division between astronomy and astrology really made sense.

NSS:

And moving on a bit in history, you quote Thomas Paine, the 18th century political thinker and revolutionary, whose writings on faith certainly didn't earn him any favours, and particularly when he called Christianity, quote, “a parody on the worship of the sun in which they put a man who they call Christ in the place of the sun.” But he was on to something, wasn't he? And why was that such a revolutionary thing to have said at the time?

JM:

So he was pointing out really, that with early Christianity, a lot of the beliefs and rituals around Christianity were based on existing pagan rituals to do with the worship of the sun. So you can look at worship on a “Sunday”, for example, or praying facing east to the rising sun. So you've got this sort of change, where instead of people worshipping many gods and the cosmos and the celestial body, now you've got monotheism, with one transcendent God, but he [Paine] was saying, well, it isn't really any different. So they're just, they've just taken over these, these previous rituals, it's just dressed up in different language. And so I think he was partly right about that.

But also, I do think there was a difference, that when you had these monotheistic religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, it wasn't just a change from many gods to one, it was a change from worshiping what was within the cosmos. So we're seeing a living divine cosmos, if you like, to putting that God outside of the cosmos. Now you've got a supernatural God, and that the cosmos itself is a sort of passive creation of that supernatural God. And that did really change our relationship with the universe. And it also interestingly created that idea of kind of God's-eye view where you can step outside of the cosmos and look in on it and observe it. And that's, ironically, a viewpoint that's been really important to the development of science, that idea of a sort of third person, observer’s view from somewhere outside of the universe. It's not a viewpoint that actually exists, but we sort of imagine it for the purposes of science.

NSS:

And you mentioned particular religious figures who might have, sort of, maybe, origins as a sun gods, or maybe worshipped as sun gods. But you also make this broader point about how the order of the cosmos or the order of the planets have been used to justify a kind of order here on Earth.

JM:

Yeah, this is a theme that I think is really interesting. And you see it all the way through human history, that knowledge of the heavens and people associating themselves with the cosmos and with celestial bodies, has always been used to justify political power. So even as far back as the Palaeolithic, anthropologists think that astronomical knowledge would have defined the elites, the people that were in charge, the people who knew when the winter solstice was going to happen, for example. And then through ancient civilizations, you've got these rulers who are associating themselves with celestial bodies, Roman emperors might associate themselves with Jupiter, for example, or the sun, you've got the Chinese Emperor as the son of heaven, the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, he is son of the sun, so they're, they're using that authority to cement their status. And it works really well, because it's very hard to question someone's authority, if it's just drawn from ‘this is how the universe works’, you'd have to question the whole cosmos.

But I think it's interesting that still now, even though our beliefs and ideas about the universe have changed, after models of how the universe works, they are still important in our politics and our social structures. So one example that I look at in the book is with Isaac Newton, so when he came up with his universal law of motion (the idea that, you know, everything in the universe is sort of being bound by these the same physical laws or rules that revolutionized physics) he also helped to revolutionize politics, because the universe was there no longer this chaotic place where, you know, celestial bodies weren't divine beings that could move as they wanted to, you know, they, they were all bound by the same laws, you know, particles and planets. They all had to obey these physical laws of motion. And so people started to say, well, shouldn't that be true of people as well? Shouldn't everybody from communists to kings have to obey the same rules and those kinds of ideas were very influential during the Enlightenment, people who were talking about ideas to do with democracy and human rights.

And so when people are talking about the role of governments as a check on the power of the king, for example, they using metaphors and language to do with gravitation and planets orbiting the sun, and then you've got the American and French revolutions, both very much influenced by these ideas as well. So you mentioned Thomas Paine before, he was a key person calling for revolution in America. And he was using arguments from Newtonian physics, for example, he was saying that, you know, because normally the planet is smaller than the sun that it revolves. But America is larger than England. So it shouldn't be a planet orbiting the central sun of England, it should be its own thing. And these ideas were really influential.

And even after independence in America, the founders of the United States were using similar ideas to talk about how should they set up their new government, they wanted a balance of forces, which came from the idea of the balance between centrifugal and centripetal force keeping planet stable in their orbits that Newton talked about. And also, they had to come up with a new metaphor (they couldn't be, you know, like before, America was seen as a planet orbiting the central sun of England) where they can just be a planet, drifting in space now that they're independent. So they came up with the idea of a constellation of equal stars. And so with the American flag, you see, the states are represented as stars.

NSS:

That's been fascinating Jo. I had no idea that was the origins of the American flag. We're gonna take a short break now. And when we come back, we'll look at our relationship to the cosmos today. You're listening to With Reason where I'm talking to Jo Marchant about her new book, The Human Cosmos. With Reason is brought to you by New Humanist magazine where I'm deputy editor. If you like what you're hearing, please press pause and click subscribe in the app that you're using or leave us a review. It costs nothing and helps us to make more episodes that are free for you to enjoy whenever you want. Time for a word from my editor, Samira Shackle about something else that might appeal.

SS:

Prospect is Britain's leading monthly magazine of ideas, politics and culture. Their weekly podcast, the Prospect Interview, offers in-depth interviews with the brightest minds to discuss all the things that matter. Recent guests have included Andrew Marr on the future of the Union. And actually, me, talking about life and death in modern day Karachi. You can find the Prospect interview at prospectmagazine.co.uk/podcasts or subscribe through your usual channels.

NSS:

So Jo, so far today we've looked at how, through history and around the world, our relationship to the night sky has been key to religions and power structures, and also driven scientific discovery. But what about now in the 21st century?

JM:

There's been a few quite fundamental shifts. So one, as you mentioned, is the development of our scientific understanding. So rather than looking to the heavens, and basing our understanding of what the universe is and our place within it on our first person experiences, what we can see, as scientists become more sophisticated, and we've developed more and more accurate measuring instruments, we've kind of shifted so that now our sort of state-of-the-art knowledge about the universe comes from these measuring instruments, from data, we've got these incredibly accurate telescopes that are probing the universe. And it's connecting us in in one way, we understand so much more about the physical universe than ever before, we can see so much further than our senses ever occurred. We understand, we have got ideas about the universe, starting in a Big Bang, we can start looking about where it might end, we know that most of the atoms in our bodies once came from stars. So I don't want to suggest that science completely separated us from the universe, it's many wonderful discoveries have connected us in lots of ways. But you do have this shift where that knowledge now is coming from these telescopes that no one actually looks through anymore. So that is just a change in where we get that knowledge and understanding. And that's great. But what worries me a little bit about that is that alongside that, what's happened is we've kind of downplayed the importance of our own experience and understanding. So we don't see, you know, our own connection with the stars, our own view of the sky is not really telling us anything sort of real or useful or important anymore.

And then going along with that, the development of top technology. So, you know, we used to look to the sky to tell us about the passing of time, about navigation. And where we were. Now we've got clocks, we've got GPS, we've got electric lights and heating and intensive agriculture and jet travel. So we, we don't have to live in tune with the sort of cycles of the solar system anymore. We can live in a way that’s separated from that. And that's given us a lot of freedom in how we live, a lot of convenience. But again, at the same time, it's separated us from that sort of direct connection with the universe around us. And there are several areas where scientists are actually saying that this separation may not be good for us. So I mentioned the, the biological clocks, for example, we now know that if you are not getting that right exposure to the changing patterns of light and dark, for example, that that's causing all kinds of health problems, that neuroscientists are looking at the effects of using satnav systems to navigate and showing that actually, that changes our brains. And with clocks, as we time everything more and more precisely, it's contributing to this phenomenon called psychological time famine, where people feel rushed all the time, right, they've never got enough time. So all of these things, I think, are telling us that the technology is great but if we allow it to separate us from our environment, that there are some downsides to that.

NSS:

And you mentioned biological clocks and circadian rhythms. And obviously, our kind of reliance on electricity and electronic screens sort of taking us away from the rhythms of the sun. But you also said that probably the moon is influential as well. What kind of science is there behind that now?

JM:

Yeah, I think the possible influence of the moon is really fascinating, because there's been lots of ancient beliefs and myths about the moon, especially relating to reproduction and fertility. And also there's this traditional link with the moon and madness. And this has been dismissed, I would say, by mainstream biology until fairly recently, there's been so many kind of pseudo-scientific claims and non-evidence based ideas about it, that it's kind of gained this veneer of wackiness, but actually scientists, particularly looking at marine species, for example, things like corals, fish, are finding that just as there are genetically encoded solar clocks (genes whose activity is varying every 24 hours with the sun), hundreds of genes are also varying in their activity with the moon. And obviously, that's really important for a lot of species that are living in the sea, you know, there's tidal species with the tides driven by the moon, but also species that spawn into the water. So they use the moon to be able to time that spawning so that they maximize the chances of fertilization.

But actually, when you look on land as well, there are lots of species that have now been shown to use the moon in the timing of their reproduction, either in conception, or in birth. And then in people, trials on this have been controversial with mixed results. But quite a few researchers are now saying, well, that's probably because actually, we're no longer exposed to the natural changing patterns of moonlight. So it's not really surprising that you wouldn't see them. But when they're conducting studies specifically to sort of isolate this effect, and and try and look for it, there was one recent study showing that actually moonlight can entrain women's menstrual cycles. And there have been studies on sleep, suggesting that the phase of the moon influences quality of sleep, even when you've got people isolated in sleep labs. And so overall, people are saying: Well, actually, we know that there are these genetically encoded lunar clocks in really different species, vertebrates and invertebrates. And actually, it's a kind of an artificial distinction to say, well, there's the sun, which has an effect on the moon, which it doesn't from nature's point of view, it's just changing patterns of light. And these changes of light happen on a daily basis, but also with the moon and with the phases of the moon. So it would be that combined pattern of light that's influencing biology, we just don't tend to notice it now, because we're separated from the moon.

NSS:

I also wondered what you made of this resurgence of interest in astrology. And it's often from people who don't, they're not asserting that there is any kind of truth-based objective reality out there. A lot of the time, people are sort of looking at astrology as a therapeutic tool. It seems to be a trend, particularly among young women. So I wonder what you made of that as a trend. And if that's an attempt to sort of reassert our relationship to the cosmos in some way.

JM:

Yeah, you're right. There is a really interesting trend there, particularly among younger people. And you're seeing a lot of astrology sort of online with different websites and apps. So it's quite different to the tabloid horoscopes that an older generation might be more familiar with. And what's interesting about that is, the fact that there's no evidence to support any of these astrological theories almost seems to be a selling point, that people are attracted to astrology not despite that, but almost because of it. It's kind of a reaction against a sort of overly reductionist physical view of the cosmos, where there isn't an important role for, for consciousness, for our experience for meaning and for belief. And I think people are reacting against that. Not necessarily dismissing a scientific-based view completely but wanting something else. And that's the attraction of astrology, where it's this more holistic view of the universe that we're part of, when meaning has a role to play that matters. I think we need to find a way to look at subjective experience and consciousness within a sort of scientific sort of worldview, if you like, rather than dismissing it, and then if we can accept that meaning and experience are important, then astrology won't necessarily have such a strong hold over people.

NSS:

And there's many ways to reconnect with the sky. There's also been a trend of people buying telescopes and doing amateur stargazing. And I have to admit, I'm one of those people. My partner bought a small telescope not so long ago, and I've tried to use these stargazing apps. But I think, like you, I live in London, and you know, we're lucky to sort of get a few pinpricks of stars on a clear night. So I just wanted to get your thoughts on kind of that amateur stargazing and maybe even some tips that you might have about how, not only for us that live in cities, but people can sort of practically on their weekends, in their free time, just reengage with the night sky and the cosmos.

JM:

Yeah, I think there has been a real resurgence of interest, especially during the lockdown. I've spoken to astronomers and amateur astronomy organizations who said they've had a huge boost in interest. And yeah, just before coming on to tips, I just wanted to say a little bit about some of the research around what looking to the stars does to us. And this is something that psychologists call the emotion of awe, which they define as being the way that we feel when we're confronted by something vast, that dwarfs us, it’s beyond our capacity to comprehend it. And researchers have found that all it really important, it makes people more creative, more curious, happier, less stressed, they become more generous afterwards, they make more ethical decisions, they care less about money, more about the planet. So it seems that if we're looking at something vast, it sort of shifts our attention away from ourselves and our own selfish daily concerns. And we feel more connected with something that's bigger. And that's supported by other studies showing that people sign their name smaller after feeling awe, they estimate their physical size as smaller. Neuroscience studies show that activity in the brain associated with our sense of self is reduced. So it's shifting people away from being obsessed with themselves. We see ourselves as part of something bigger, and that changes people's perspective. And the priorities and the decisions that they make. So looking to the stars, I think it's something that's really fundamental to what it means to be human. You know, we need the rational, scientific, detail-focused way of looking at the world, that's incredibly important. But the science itself is showing that actually, this bigger picture view, where we just look to the stars, is really, really important, as well. And yeah, I think that's one reason why it's so catastrophic, really, that we're losing our view of the heavens of the starry sky. 80% of people in Europe in the US can no longer see the Milky Way galaxy at all. So we've just lost that completely. I think a lot of people have forgotten what there even was, you know, we don't feel the loss of it, we just don't even notice the sky at all. And all the researchers have warned of what they call awe deprivation, the fact that we're all focused on small screens all the time, looking at our phones, not confronted by these vast horizons of nature, they've warned that as a society, that’s making us more selfish and more materialistic and that we need to try and reconnect with, with awe.

So in terms of how we can do that. I think dark sky reserves and parks are really important. But yeah, like, living in London, that's kind of not a daily solution. I think what you can see through telescopes is amazing. For a long time, I thought there wasn't any point but actually, over the lockdown, we've had sort of neighbourly get-togethers in the street when it's been allowed. And you can see, you know, the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter. I really enjoy following the phases of the moon, actually, it sort of connects you to that monthly cycle, the moon sort of becomes almost like a familiar friend in the sky, you're noticing those changes. So I think there are so many things that we can enjoy, you know, even in a fairly light polluted sky.

NSS:

And now we're gonna look at the New Humanist archive piece that we sent to you to have a look at. And that's about another thing that we might look at the skies for, which is aliens. In that piece, so that was published in 2013, and it's called They Didn't Come From Outer Space. And in that, James Gray reviews an exhibition called Alien Revolution that was on at the Royal Observatory, about the changing perception of alien life and our search for the little green men, as he somewhat jokingly calls them. And James Gray is quite pessimistic in that piece about our sort of future prospects of finding alien life. And I just wondered what you made of that. And are we slightly more hopeful now than we were then?

JM:

Yeah, I noticed that in the piece, and it made me think quite a lot has happened since 2013! Yeah, what I thought was interesting that I completely agree with, he was picking out, was how there's been cultural changes through history in how people have viewed alien life and the possibility of finding it really has ebbed and flowed. So even as far back as Ancient Greece, there were philosophers, the atomists, who thought that everything was made up of little tiny particles or atoms, who concluded that there must therefore be infinite worlds. And then of course, on some of those worlds, you were gonna have alien life. But then you've got the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, which sort of really squashed that: it was much more about Earth being at the centre of the universe, and for centuries, this was strengthened by the Christian Church as well, this idea of a sort of corrupt, decaying Earth down below. And then the heavens was something completely different. It was this sort of perfect divine sphere of, you know, where the gods lived.

But yeah, as, as James points out, once you've got Copernicus, who's putting the sun at the centre of the solar system, then you've got the Earth is just another planet, and the stars are other suns. And it sort of opens up this idea again, of other solar systems out there, and other aliens, perhaps living on those planets. And he talks about in the Enlightenment, for example, people were very interested in the idea of, of aliens. And yeah, after Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, yeah, this idea of not just sort of different kinds of humans living on other planets, but other types of species that would be sort of evolved in their own right. And then more recently, in the 20th century, there was kind of a dip in confidence about whether we were going to find alien life. So I have a whole chapter in my book, looking at this, and the sort of first scientific results that were coming in, it was looking like the moon and Mars were quite barren. And then when the Viking lander went there in the 1970s, again, there was mixed results. But the conclusion was, no, there's no life. And this was sort of seen as, okay, there isn't any life anywhere. And then even on Earth, as well, with the discovery of DNA, people thought, well, this, you know, the molecular kind of dance of life is so complicated, how could that possibly have arisen more than once?

But since then, we've realized that actually, life is so resilient, it thrives in so many different places on Earth that we hadn't imagined. Then in the 1990s, you've got the discovery of the first exo-planets: that's, you know, another world in another solar system. And also, we've now discovered thousands of exo-planets, every possible different kind of planet you can imagine. I think there's an estimate that there's billions of Earth-sized habitable planets in our galaxy alone. So those more recent studies I think is what has changed since James wrote his piece, that it's not just a possibility. Now, it's like, we don't have direct evidence for alien life. But I think that if we try and break that down into smaller questions like: Could living things survive in space? Do we see the ingredients we need another planet? Are there other habitable earth like planets out there? All of those smaller questions, we're just seeing the answers coming back like: yes, yes, yes. I think it's just seeming more likely now than ever, that we're part of this sort of cosmic web of life, rather than being that only spark of existence in the universe.

NSS:

Jo Marchant, author of The Human Cosmos, thank you so much for joining us. That was fascinating.

JM:

Thank you for having me.

NSS:

So now I’m back with Samira who's been listening along to my chat with Jo. What I found great about Jo's work, and this is true both of The Human Cosmos book and her previous book Cure, is she's really good at looking at these more broad concepts that include myth and superstition and the mystical, but untangling that from the history of science and scientific discovery. I wondered what you took away from that conversation.

SS:

Yeah, I was really struck by that too. I loved hearing her talk about mythos, cultural memory, and the sort of formation of early myths around the world and how that might relate to commonalities in the way people saw the stars and, and that kind of intersection between the mathematical and the scientific, and also the way in which those categories didn't really exist, then. That I found quite thought-provoking to just think about, you know, like today we obviously think of the superstitious and the scientific as being so obviously and clearly differentiated. But just the idea of those categories sort of developing over time as human knowledge. And the way we talk about human knowledge developed, I found really illuminating.

NSS:

There's also a section in the book when she's talking about the Lascaux caves. And she mentions that there was actually quite a lot of resistance to accepting that those cave paintings of animals and figures might actually be of star constellations. And that's a common theme throughout the book that there's resistance to maybe ideas that are conceived of as being a bit wishy washy.

SS:

That was one thing I really enjoyed about listening to Jo speak was the way in which she, she seems quite rigorous about looking at these, as you say, maybe wishy washy ideas or things that don't seem to be rooted at all in the kind of evidential and looking at where there is evidence and where there isn't. I thought that too later in your conversation, when you were talking about the moon. And the idea of the moon being sort of related to fertility and different physical cycles, and sleep and menstrual cycles, and all those different things. I found it so fascinating to hear her talk about the obviously very early stages and not definitive yet, but there's studies that are being done on that in other species, and even in humans about sleep cycles, and so on. So I thought she did that really well, kind of walking the line between not giving too much credence to perhaps superstitious ideas, and really, actually thinking very seriously about where there is evidence.

NSS:

I was reminded in this layering of myth, and story and science, actually, on the stargazing app that I very recently downloaded, you have different modes. So you can see, you know, these sort of brilliant and amazing kind of, you know, the animals and figures of astrology, and then in a different mode, you actually see the constellation formations with their scientific names. But it's quite a lot to get your head around. It was nice to read the book and kind of have a little bit of context for what I'm very tentatively exploring sometimes in my garden when the weather is warm enough.

SS:

Yeah, I was also thinking about the trend for astrology, which you asked her about is obviously something I've noticed as well, you see these kind of things that go viral, like adverts for flatmates that say, no Capricorns need apply, or whatever. So it was really fascinating to think about that in terms of this really long standing relationship to the skies above us. And they're looking for meaning.

NSS:

Yeah, it's interesting that there are those two trends of amateur astronomy and also astrology going on at the moment. So yeah, I mean, maybe we can all learn a little bit from the book and put this in context of wider history.

Next week, Samira will be talking to the author and poet Michael Rosen, about mortality, care, humanism, and more, as he tells us about his new book, Many Different Kinds of Love: A Story of Life, Death, and the NHS.

SS:

Remember, you can find transcripts and reading lists for all episodes of With Reason on the New Humanist website. And if you go to newhumanist.org.uk/subscribe and enter the offer code With Reason, you can get a year's subscription to the magazine for just £13.50. That means you'll get a beautiful quarterly magazine and access to our whole digital archive.

NSS:

This podcast was presented by me, Niki Seth Smith, with Samira Shackle. The executive producer was Alice Bloch and the sound engineer was Dave Crackles. See you back here soon, goodbye.

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