Professor Brian Cox offers a guided tour of space in BBC Earth series Solar System
Starman Brian Cox talks about travel to Mars, science and failed experiments and how his latest series is informed by mountains of new data
Professor Brian Cox believes “we have to go to Mars eventually” – although not as a refuge after ruining planet Earth.
“Mars is the only planet in the solar system we can go to. But this is extremely important – I interviewed Jeff Bezos once and he said this – our planet is the best planet in the universe for us, because we evolved on it and are entirely reliant on its ecosystem.
“Mars is not a second chance; we can’t take everything from this planet, essentially destroy it, then move, en masse, to another,” says Cox, a British TV presenter and professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester. “Compared to the earth, Mars isn’t very nice.”
A “huge” fan of science fiction films, including Alien and Interstellar, he adds: “It’s not that we should go to Mars because we made a mess of the Earth; but it’s the natural and only – in the conceivable future, I would say – next frontier.”
Cox is our guide through the five-part TV series Solar System, a mind-warping trip from Venus to beyond the frigid sweep of Pluto. But the solar system has been around for a while; so why this series, now?
“We’ve made series about the planets before, but we now have more than 40 spacecraft in the solar system – more than ever – so there’s this avalanche of new data coming in. You start to build up a different picture,” says Cox.
