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Professor Brian Cox has warned ‘human stupidity’ is the biggest threat to civilisation.
The physicist, 46, said that the possibility of ‘catastrophic climate change’, ‘crop disease caused by a loss of biodiversity’ and ‘asteroid impact’ could wipe out mankind.
“The problem with these points is that if you make them carelessly you end up sounding like Morrissey in his teenage years.
“They’re so obvious that they become cliched positions to take, but actually they’re not cliched positions.
“The more we consider our position in the wider universe, the more pressing these questions become.”
He added: “When you think about these things, you end up with your head in your hands. Imagine an alien from another galaxy came and had a look at us.
“If there’s just this one planet on which there’s any meaning, how would you arrange your affairs? Would you really sit there and divide it up into lots of autonomous regions and spend a lot of money making sure they don’t invade each other?
“Or would you be more concerned with protecting civilisation as a whole, such as making sure we’re not going to get wiped out by a big space rock.”
He warned: “It won’t turn out well for us if we sit here on Earth and don’t bother with space. As a world, I would like to see us go to Mars – for the same reason we went to the Moon.
“It’s an inspirational thing to do but also the return on investment is enormous. The Apollo astronauts thought we’d be on Mars by now, and that we’d have Moon bases by the 80s. America would be in a far better position now had they done it.”
Prof Cox has filmed a new five-part series, Human Universe, for BBC2.
He spent three hours in a spacesuit for the show and admitted: “You’d think it would be brilliant being an astronaut but I knackered my ribs and they took five months to recover.”
He said of his career on the small-screen: “Television’s really important but I don’t see myself as a TV presenter.
“I want to carry on encouraging governments to do the correct thing, which is to invest in education and research, and if something comes up that’s a great piece of telly and excites me, then I’ll do it.”
Agencies/Canadajournal
