The Infinite Monkey's Guide To… Talking to Aliens

The Infinite Monkey Cage

BBC

Comedy, Science

4.7 • 9.4K Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2024

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Brian Cox and Robin Ince are on a mission to discover whether extra-terrestrials exist. But if there really is other life out there, what would it look like?

Comedian Conan O’Brien is hoping for lizard-like creatures with superhuman strength, while Greg Proops imagines little green girls, like the ones in the Star Trek series he grew up with. Or possibly Ewoks. Either way, nobody can agree on the best way to communicate with them if we do ever make contact. Should we send them complicated equations so they realise how intelligent we are, and is playing Bach to aliens too much like showing off?

New episodes will be released on Wednesdays. If you’re in the UK, listen to the full series on BBC Sounds: bbc.in/3K3JzyF

Producer: Marijke Peters Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem

Episodes featured: Series 1: Extraterrestrial Life Series 25: Exploring Our Solar System Series 12: San Francisco Special Series 9: To Infinity and Beyond

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
0:04.6	My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.
0:08.4	As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable
0:14.3	experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC
0:20.4	makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,
0:24.6	poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.
0:29.7	If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.
0:36.0	BBC Sounds.
0:38.0	BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts.
0:41.0	Hello I'm Brian Cox.
0:42.0	I'm Robin Ince and this is the infinite podcasts. or could be 34. Frankly it doesn't really matter.
0:53.2	Well it does you know.
0:54.2	Well it doesn't because their regular listeners will know
0:56.6	that whenever we've done shows about cosmology you'll have moments where people go
0:59.6	well of course we believe there's 200 billion or possibly 400 billion so if you're
1:03.8	allowed to be out by 200 billion I think being out by like five or six well
1:07.4	it's not much is it and also actually because this is a podcast then it
1:11.2	might not be listened to in sequence it might be
1:12.8	listened to in 10 years time or it might never be listened to at all and then
1:16.4	philosophically we don't even know if it exists just use an n n because it stands for
1:20.1	an integer this is the infamous guy too where we look back over the past
1:24.0	N series where N is an integer. Now of course when we're talking about making
	...

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