[dial tone]
- Hello?
- Hi, is that nature?
- Uh, no, he's kind of busy at the moment.
Hey, get back over here. Daddy's feeling acrobatic again.
- Sorry, can you put nature on?
- Uh, who's calling, please?
- It's humanity.
- Oh, just- just a second, then.
Yeah, it's the monkeys.
[clears throat]
- Yeah, this is nature. How did you even get this number?
- It's the first ten digits of pi.
- Oh, fucking Comcast.
- Yeah, have you got a second to talk?
- Wh- I'm literally running everything at the moment, so...
- Frankly, we've got a few pressing questions, okay?
- Oh, Jesus.
[Beethoven's String Quartet No. 6 in B flat major]
Light is pretty fast. Like, this fast,
and thus the fastest anything can go according to Albert Einstein.
Why?
Actually, while we're on the subject, why is anything set up like that?
Why is gravity this strength?
Why do prime numbers go in that distribution?
Is Firefly ever coming back?
What decided molecules would bond in the way they do?
Hmm...
Ehhh...
Mmm.
Why are the laws of physics the way they are?
Do they have to be like that, or is it just one form they can take?
Is this the only type of universe that can be made, or just one variation of potentially billions?
This is called Tabby's Star.
It's nice, isn't it?
Stars are really far away, so if you want to look for planets around them,
what you have to do is wait for the planet to pass in front of it, and learn about it from the light it blocks.
Right?
Well, lots of objects keep passing in front of Tabby's Star that make no sense.
They aren't planets, anyway.
They might be fragments of comets; they might be something natural we don't understand,
but whatever it is, we haven't seen anything like this before.
Might-
Might be aliens...
If you're an alien civilisation and you're really clever, you probably need lots of energy.
Well, the smart thing to do is to build what's called a Dyson swarm,
which are a load of machines orbiting a star for sucking up all of its energy.
We might be witnessing that.
We might not.
Pretty weird, though, whatever it is.
Actually, while we're on the subject - where are all the aliens, exactly?
The universe has been around for ages.
Life started fine on Earth; why is it so quiet out there?
Well, maybe they're not using radio waves; we've only been using them for just over a century.
Maybe they've found another type of communication, or maybe they walk among us already.
[The X-Files theme plays]
In any case, Tabby's Star is kind of weird, we don't understand why it's behaving like that
and right now it's a fun mystery.
We don't really know what consciousness is, but we know what the ingredients are:
two humans who can, at least, tolerate each other for a few minutes, about 9 months, and food,
and for some reason that gives rise to self-awareness.
This doesn't know it's a thing. This doesn't know it's a thing.
Why does this know it's a thing, and want to keep being a thing?
Here's the deal, then - we kind of know what different parts of the brain do.
This does the planning and the boo-hoos.
This does movement. This does looking about.. and stuff.
This does memory and perception.
But there doesn't seem to be a consciousness section of the brain.
Where does it come from, exactly, and how does it work?
And is it a thing that has to be made of meat, or can it be reproduced on other stuff, like computers?
The point is: we don't know right now how meat feels like an eye, if you put it together in the right way,
but for some reason it does.
Whyyyy-
Why did life happen on Earth?
Can it happen again on other planets? We have no idea.
The origin of life is called abiogenesis,
and much like penis enlargement pills, we've never seen the real thing; we just talk about it a lot.
So, it is a freak accident, or a natural progression given the right environment?
If it's an accident, we might be the only ones, even though that seems a little unlikely.
If it happens a lot, again, where are all the aliens?
And, why do amino acids naturally assemble themselves into humans eventually,
and how and why do they do it?
We don't know, but here you are.
Millions of years of evolution got you to this point.
Are you making the most of it?
Personally, I spent the last week eating biscuits...
and looking at photos of Margot Robbie.
Over 90% of the universe is invisible.
Why? What does that even mean?
Some of the invisible stuff is called dark matter.
We know it's there, for one thing, because galaxies look kinda weird.
But dark matter doesn't give off any light, as you may have guessed in the name,
which is weird because that's not how matter usually behaves.
The other stuff is called dark energy.
We know it's there because the expansion of the universe is slowing down. Right?
Because that's how stuff works.
Oh, wait, no, it isn't at all. It's speeding up because- well-
because it just is, all right?
And that's because of dark energy and we have no idea what that means.
Dark matter and dark energy are, basically, just blank cheques right now
to explain away stuff we don't understand.
It might be they're not real at all, and we're just wrong about gravity.
It might not. But still, yeah-
Whyyyyy
- Yeah, good questions. We'll have to do this again sometime.
- Oh, right. It's like that, is it?
We're not gonna get any answers, then?
- You're doing fine, don't worry about it. See you around, huh?
- Yeah, just one more thing while we've got you on the phone.
- Yup.
- Uh, just out of interest... - Yeees?
- Can ageing be reversed?
- What, I- I've no idea.
- And, why does antimatter exist? - I dunno.
- And, why is there such a big difference between human intelligence
and the rest of the animal kingdom? - Wh- I really don't know.
- And, why is there something rather than nothing? And are we alone in the universe?
And, is space infinite? And why do we blush?
And, why do brain freezes happen? And-
- Yeah, sorry, just got another call waiting. 10 seconds.
- Hello? Asteroids department.
- Yeah, they're getting clever again. Remember the dinosaur thing?
We need another one of those.