Human Universe

by Professor Brian Cox

  And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus-

  Littrow, we leave as we came and, God

  willing, as we shall return, with peace

  and hope for all mankind.

  Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.

  Gene Cernan, Taurus-Littrow Valley,

  14 December, 1972.

  DREAMERS: PART 1

  Apollo was about many things. It was about winning a race against the Soviets. It was about national pride. It was born out of fear as well as optimism. It was about laying the foundations of American dominance in the late twentieth century. It was about economic stimulus. It was about dreams. It succeeded on all fronts. Was it really about dreams? ‘Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the Moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.’ I think so. Kennedy was a politician, but I believe he meant it.

  So what of the dreamers now? Is the twenty-first century the era of pragmatism? The era in which we believe, because we have to, that the interests of shareholders are aligned with the interests of humanity? Innovation funds the shops on New Bond Street, but is that all? A common governmental lament is that new knowledge is not converted efficiently enough into economic growth. Is that what knowledge is for? Who pays for progress? Who should pay for progress?

  Human Universe is a piece of documentary television, and this book is based on the series. Television is about stories; examples that illustrate a point. Human Universe is also at heart optimistic, because I am optimistic. I think we as a civilisation could do better, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, but it would be ridiculous to suggest that we are not doing some things right. In the final episode, we found two stories that demonstrate that long-term thinking is not dead; one almost Apollo-like in state-funded grandeur, and the other more modest but equally important. The first was a project I’d visited once before, back in 2009, known as the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The aim is to make a star on Earth.

  Nuclear fusion is the power source of the stars. The Sun releases energy in its core by turning hydrogen into helium. Two protons approach each other at high speed, because the core is hot. The core became hot initially through the collapse of the gas cloud which formed the Sun. Protons are positively charged, and therefore repel each other through the action of the electromagnetic force, but if they get close enough, the more powerful nuclear forces take over. The weak nuclear force acts to turn the proton into a neutron, with the emission of a positron and an electron neutrino. The proton and neutron then bind together under the action of the strong nuclear force to form a deuterium nucleus, which is an isotope of hydrogen (because it contains a single proton) with a neutron attached. Very quickly, another proton fuses with the deuteron to form helium-3, and finally two helium-3 nuclei stick together to form helium-4, with the emission of the two ‘spare’ protons. The important result in this convoluted process is that four protons end up getting converted into a single helium-4 nucleus, made of two protons and two neutrons, and the helium-4 nucleus is less massive than four free protons. This missing mass is released as energy, in accord with Einstein’s equation E=mc2, and this is why the Sun shines. The energy released in fusion reactions is colossal by terrestrial standards. If all the protons in a cubic centimetre of the solar core were to fuse into deuterium, enough energy would be produced to power the average town for a year. Or to put it another way, one kilogram of fusion fuel produces as much energy as 10 million kilograms of fossil fuel, which is approximately a hundred thousand barrels of oil, with no CO2 emissions; the waste product is helium, which can be used to fill party balloons.

  Energy is the foundation of civilisation. Access to energy underpins everything, from public health to prosperity. Access to clean water is surely more fundamental, you might say, but this requires energy. Even in the most arid regions, desalination plants or deep wells can deliver water in abundance if sufficient energy is available. It isn’t, of course. Profligate energy use has a bad name today, but consider this. In every country in which the per capita energy use is greater than half the European average, adult life expectancy is greater than 70 years, literacy rates are greater than 90 per cent, infant mortality rates are low and more than one in five of the population is in higher education. The reason energy use has a bad name is not because it is bad in itself. It is good, it is the foundation of modern civilisation, and modern civilisation is a good thing. I don’t want to live on a subsistence farm, sleep in stifling heat, run the risk of dying of malaria and have no access to clean water or cutting-edge medical care. I am lucky. I live in a city, I buy all the food I want from nice shops, I have a fulfilling job in a university and I get to do research at places like CERN, which is interesting. I want everyone in the world to have choices, like I have, and that means I want everyone in the world to have access to energy, like I have. In 2011, 1.3 billion people lacked access to electricity. Yes. Energy use is good. The problem with energy is how we produce it.

  The world produces more than 80 per cent of its energy by burning fossil fuels. This is expected to fall to 76 per cent by 2035 as nuclear and renewables grow in importance. Burning things is humanity’s oldest technology. The energy sector is responsible for two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions. The most recent scientific modelling suggests that global average temperatures will rise by around 2–2.5°C above the average of the years 1986 to 2005 by 2100. The rise could be less – as low as 1 to 1.5°C, or it could be 4°C or more. Some of the uncertainty depends on our actions, and so there are assumptions about future behaviour built into the predictions. But over 90 per cent of computer models agree that global temperatures will have increased by 2100 as a result of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning.

  Nuclear fusion, then, is a good idea. If it can be made to work in an economically viable way, it will provide limitless, clean energy for everyone. It is not the only way of achieving this goal. One can make a case for solar power, and indeed an increased contribution from other renewables and nuclear fission. But it is a possible way to solve the world’s energy problems for good, in principle, and is therefore worth exploring.

  The challenge is technical rather than fundamental, in the sense that we know fusion works because the Sun does it. Fusion is difficult to achieve on Earth primarily because of the colossally high temperatures and pressures required. There are two approaches being followed, and each is Apollo-like. In Europe, a worldwide collaboration involving Russia, USA, the European Union, Japan, China, Korea and India is in the process of constructing ITER. This machine is in effect a magnetic bottle, which can store a plasma at temperatures in excess of 150 million °C – ten times that of the solar core. ITER will use deuterium and tritium, which is another isotope of hydrogen comprising one proton and two neutrons, to make helium-4. This bypasses the slow initial weak interaction in the Sun that makes deuterium out of hydrogen, making ITER a lot more efficient than our star. Deuterium is extracted from seawater, and tritium is made inside the reactor itself by irradiating a lithium blanket with the spare neutrons produced during the fusion reaction. An 800MW fusion power station of this type would consume around 300 grams of tritium fuel per day. ITER is not particularly telegenic at the moment because it is under construction and will not be commissioned until 2019. This is why we chose to focus on the US National Ignition Facility, which is already up and running.

  NIF is pure science fiction; in fact, it was used as a set for Star Trek: Into Darkness. It is the world’s largest laser system by an order of magnitude. The laser delivers 500,000 gigawatts of power onto a target smaller than a peppercorn in a series of increasingly powerful hammer blows, tuned to arrive with a precision of better than a tenth of a billionth of a second. That is 1000 times the peak energy-generating capacity of the United States. This, as you can imagine, crea
tes a bit of a bang. The peppercorn-sized target contains deuterium-tritium fuel, just like ITER. The laser pulses raise the temperature of the pellet’s gold container, and the X-ray radiation produced drives a rapid collapse of the fuel, initiating fusion. The devil is in the detail; the precise timing and duration of the laser pulses, and the shape of the gold container, all contribute to the chances of success and the efficiency of the process. Despite the tremendous engineering difficulty, in September 2013 more energy was released from a deuterium-tritium fuel pellet than the pellet absorbed, although this was only 1 per cent of the total energy input to the lasers. Nevertheless, this demonstrates that so-called inertial fusion works in principle. The inertial fusion power station of tomorrow would use far more efficient laser systems – NIFs are now more than a decade out of date – and the fuel pellet technology being developed by NIF. The technology has been demonstrated to work, at least on a vast, government-funded research scale, and this is how difficult things like space exploration have to begin. Commercial companies will rarely take such enormous risks, and this means that we, the taxpayers, must pay for the creation of this type of knowledge. As with Apollo, we will be repaid, but the investment horizon is beyond that of the average accountant.

  It therefore appears that there is no technical reason why such power stations could not be constructed. There is much research to be done, but the barriers are likely to be budgetary rather than fundamental; the United States spends more on pet grooming than it does on fusion research. There is a serious point behind that cheap shot. I think one of the primary barriers to progress is education. I am a believer in the innate rationality of human beings; given the right education, the right information and the right tuition in how to think about problems, I believe that people will make rational choices. I believe that if I said to someone: ‘Here’s the deal. You can have limitless clean energy for your lifetime, for your children and grandchildren’s lifetimes and beyond, in exchange for grooming your own cat’, then most people would reach for a comb. I have to believe that, otherwise this book is a futile gesture.

  DREAMERS: PART 2

  The second of our stories couldn’t be more different. It involves no high technology and very little cash, but it may have a tremendous impact. Securing the future isn’t all about money; it’s also about action.

  The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is modest and beautiful from the outside. In common with all publicly funded construction projects in Norway, the simple door on an Arctic hillside is a work of art, created by Dyveke Sanne. In the summer, it reflects the eternal Sun. In winter, fibreoptic cables shine in the perpetual night. The doorway leads into a converted coal mine, deep in the permafrost. There are three caverns, each maintained at a temperature of -18°C by a cooling system. The temperature was chosen very precisely; it is the temperature at which seeds metabolise slowly, but do not die. At -18°C, the most hardy seeds remain viable for over 20,000 years. Only one of the caverns is in use; the other two are for the future. Inside, there are over 800,000 populations of seeds from almost every country in the world. All the seeds are agricultural crop varieties – the raw material for and the foundation of global food production. Seeds from America and Europe nestle next to those from Asia and Africa. Syrian seeds, rescued from the recent troubles in Aleppo, the home of a local seed bank, sit beside those from North Korea, South Korea, China, Canada, Nigeria, Kenya, and so on around the world. The vault contains virtually the whole history of human agriculture, stretching back to its origins in the Fertile Crescent all those years ago. Each seed population reflects some choices that were made, some environmental challenge or perhaps simply the taste of a farmer or his village. There are varieties manipulated by multinationals, or carefully cultivated and cherished by isolated tribes. The boxes are food for the imagination, time capsules, the stuff of dreams. They are also of fundamental importance.

  Why protect agricultural seeds? The answer is that biodiversity is a very good thing. Life on Earth forms a tangled web, a great genetic database distributed across hundreds of thousands of extant species of animals, plants, insects and countless single-celled organisms. The more species there are, the more data there is in the database, and the more chance the whole biosphere has of responding to challenges, be they from disease, natural or human-induced climate change, loss of natural habitat or whatever. This is obvious. If there are genes somewhere in the great database of life that allow wheat to grow with less water, and the climate becomes more arid, then those genes will be valuable to us. If we lose particular genes, then we lose them for good. Today, fewer than 150 species of crop are used in modern agriculture, and 12 of these deliver the majority of the world’s non-meat food supply. There is diversity in the form of different varieties, of course; there are estimated to be more than 100,000 varieties of rice. But the overwhelming majority of crop species used throughout human history are no longer cultivated. They are stored, however, in seed vaults, ready for use if needed. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a back-up; our insurance policy, ensuring that even if countries lose their seed vaults through natural disasters, war or simple neglect, then irreplaceable parts of the great genetic database of life will not be lost with them.

  The Norwegian government owns the seed vault, but the depositors own the seeds. A charitable trust, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, meets most of the operating costs through an endowment fund. Cary Fowler was the executive director of the Trust during the establishment of the seed vault. He was a pleasure to speak to when we filmed in Svalbard – a dreamer, yes, but a dreamer who gets things done.

  ‘Those of us in my field, we live in a world of wounds,’ said Fowler. ‘We see the injuries, we see the loss of diversity, the extinction, and at a certain point, enough is enough, and you try to figure out what can we do that’s not just stop-gap? That really is long term and that puts an end to the problem of crop diversity. Because we know that we are going to need this crop diversity in the future, it’s the biological foundation of agriculture. We’ll need it as long as we have agriculture.’ Which is as long as civilisation exists, I added. Fowler nodded. ‘After that, we won’t be bothered, will we!’

  The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is built, effectively, for eternity, or at least for tens of thousands of years. It is supported by practically all the governments of the world, and is a genuine investment in our future based on sound science and an understanding of the potential challenges and risks that we may face as a single, global civilisation. It’s not big, flashy or expensive, but it’s important and, perhaps as importantly, somebody actually did it. I find that inspiring.

  So where does all this leave us? All I can do is give you my view. I want to be honest. We didn’t set out to make a love letter to the human race when we started filming Human Universe. We set out to make a cosmology series, documenting our ascent into insignificance. Things changed gradually as we chatted, debated, experienced, photographed and argued our way around the world, and we realised that, for all our irrational, unscientific, superstitious, tribal, nationalistic, myopic ignorance, we are the most meaningful thing the universe has to offer as far as we know, and when all is said and done, that’s a significant thing to be. It is surely true that there is no absolute meaning or value to our existence when set against the limitless stars. We are allowed to exist by the laws of nature and in that sense we have no more value than the stars themselves. And yet there is self-evidently meaning in the universe because my own existence, the existence of those I love, and the existence of the entire human race means something to me. I think this because I have had the remarkable luxury of spending my time in education. I teach, I am taught, I research and I learn. I have been fortunate. I believe powerfully that we who have the power should strive to extend the gift of education to everyone. Education is the most important investment a developed society can make, and the most effective way of nurturing a developing one. The young will one day be the decision makers, the taxpayers, the voters, the explorers, the scientists, t
he artists and the musicians. They will protect and enhance our way of life, and make our lives worth living. They will learn about our fragility, our outrageously fortunate existence and our indescribable significance as an isolated island of meaning in a sea of infinite stars, and they will make better decisions than my generation because of that knowledge. They will ensure that our universe remains a human one.

  THE END

  What a piece of work is a Man. So certain, so vulnerable, so ingenious, so small, so bold, so loving, so violent, so full of promise, so unaware of his fragile significance. Someone asked me what they thought was a deep question: What are we made of? Up quarks, down quarks and electrons, I answered. That’s what a Man is. Humanity is more than that. Our civilisation is the most complex emergent phenomenon in the known universe. It is the sum of our literature, our music, our technology, our art, our philosophy, our history, our science, our knowledge. I have a recording of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony conducted by Bruno Walter made on the eve of the Anschluss. It is suffused with threat. Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic knew what was coming. Hope fades with the last vanishing note, which Mahler marked ‘ersterbend’ – ‘dying’ – in the manuscript. It is Mahler’s farewell to life, presaging Old Europe’s farewell to peace. None of this depth is present in the physical score itself; those black ink dots on white paper can be digitised using a scanner and stored in a few kilobytes on a mobile phone. The fathomless power of the recording emerges from a finite collection of bits because the performance contains the sum total of the fears, dreams, concerns and anxieties of a hundred lives, played out against a backdrop of a million more. The personal history of each of the musicians, the conductor and the composer, and indeed the history of civilisation, hangs upon the supporting framework of the notes, resulting in a work of infinite complexity and power, because each human being is possessed of infinite faculties, emergent from a finite number of quarks and electrons. Our existence is a ridiculous affront to common sense, beyond any reasonable expectation of the possible based on the simplicity of the laws of nature, and our civilisation is the combination of seven billion individual affronts. This is what my smiling seems to say: Man certainly does delight me. Our existence is necessarily temporary and our spatial reach finite, and this makes us all the more precious. Mahler’s great farewell to life can also be read as a call to value life with all your heart, to use it wisely and to enjoy it while you can.