D:Ream keyboard player Brian Cox reckons that there are 2 trillion galaxies .....

[6EQUJ5]

..... and that in our own Milky Way galaxy the chances are that there is one other planet with intelligent, technological life.

It is thought that it will never be possible for us to accelerate anything to the speed of light. If we could it would still take 200,000 years to cross the Milky Way at that speed. So Cox reckons that we know nothing beyond it. He says that there are 2 trillion galaxies and the average number of intelligent, technological civilisations is likely to be 2 per galaxy. But they could each be so far apart from the nearest 'neighbour' that it is not likely that many, if any, could even detect the presence of any other. For all practical purposes we can consider the universe to be almost infinite. But it is expanding. At the edge it is expanding at the speed of light.

[Piglet_Phoenix]

I once had a curry with D:Ream, and afterwards they came back to our student digs for a smoke or two.

Brian Cox was well involved, but the best crack was with their dancers

It's a bit weird seeing him on BBC Earth all the time these days.

[cocopops61]

I enjoyed watching that program and wondered if you would be watching it as well 6EQUJ5,I enjoy listening to him because he is not over complicated when it comes to explaining stuff..... D'Ream was ****e though

[6EQUJ5]

I follow the output of the various well known biologists, evolutionists, astrophysicists etc mainly on YouTube :-

Richard Dawkins
Jill Tarter (SETI)
Seth Shostak (SETI)
Paul Davies (ASU)
Brian Greene (Columbia[New York] University)
Sir Martin Rees
Brian Cox (University Of Manchester / CERN, Large Hadron Collider)

If you are an avid Brian Cox fan this may interest you but at 2 hours and 34 minutes it is a bit of a marathon listen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wieRZoJSVtw#t=0m0s