'The biggest threat to civilisation is human stupidity': Brian Cox warns lack of action on food supplies, climate change and asteroids could end life on Earth

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'The biggest threat to civilisation is human stupidity': Brian Cox warns lack of action on food supplies, climate change and asteroids could end life on Earth

Posted by sciencetech-blog on Monday, September 29, 2014 Label:

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Professor Brian Cox has warned 'human stupidity' is the biggest threat to civilisation

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.

And he believes there has been a lack of action from world leaders on tackling the threats.

'The biggest threat to civilisation is human stupidity,' he said. 'The problem with these points is that if you make them carelessly you end up sounding like Morrissey in his teenage years,' he told Radio Times magazine.

'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?

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'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.'

One of Professor Cox' main concerns is climate change. This graphic from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows projected climate change from 2081-2100

PROFESSOR BRIAN COX Q&A WITH MAILONLINE

When do you think we will find life on other planets?

We should be on the verge. If there is life on Mars we should find it in the next decade or so.

We're also at the stage now, with the new generation of telescopes, where we can look at the light coming through the atmospheres of planets out there and start to characterise it. We might detect life on other planets before we detect it in the solar system which is exciting.

Do you think we can create robots that are conscious?

I suspect we will do it at some point. I think we will make a machine that is conscious, unless there is some physics that we don't understand about consciousness.

If you think the brain is basically a computing device, but a very complicated one, then presumably it operates according to the known laws of physics and therefore you should be able to simulate them.

Do you think we should be working on artificial intelligence if it's a threat to humanity?

I mean, you are talking about the far future. And things you say about the far future often sound fantastical. But [the threat of artificial intelligence] is a legitimate question.

It's an ethical dilemma. I don't know. Conscious things are notoriously difficult to deal with – look at humans..many people would argue ignorance is more dangerous than knowledge, but of course you have to learn to be responsible with knowledge.

What research are you most excited about at the moment?

I'm very excited about the discovery of the Higgs particle. There are huge problems with the way that fits into our picture of the universe.

So the fact the Large Hadron Collider is coming back online again next year, and that we're going to start exploring the Higgs particle for the first time, is interesting.

Professor Cox points out that the Apollo astronauts thought we'd be on Mars by now, and that we'd have moon bases by the 1980s.

In an interview with MailOnline earlier this month, Professor Cox said the problem is in human behaviour. 'We just the way we don't accumulate knowledge at the rate that we could.

'We just don't. I mean, you can see it by the figures. We spend virtually about as much on it as everyone else, which is sod all.'

Professor 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.'

The physicist, 46, said that the possibility of 'catastrophic climate change', 'crop disease caused by a loss of biodiversity' (right) and 'asteroid impact' (left) could wipe out mankind

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