01 The World According to Clarkson by Jeremy Clarkson

Author:Jeremy Clarkson
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: ePenguin
Published: 2005-05-25T23:00:00+00:00

Sunday 14 July 2002

I Bring You News from the Edge of the Universe

For me, there is no greater pleasure than lying on my back in the middle of a deep, black desert, staring at the night sky. I simply love having my mind boggled by the enormity of the numbers: the fact we’re screaming around the sun at 90 miles a second, and the sun is careering around the universe at a million miles a day.

Then there’s the notion that one of those stars up there could have ceased to exist a thousand years ago. Yet we’re still seeing its light.

Best of all, though, is that we’re about 3,000 light years from the edge of our galaxy – that’s 17,600,000,000,000,000 miles. And yet, on a clear night near Tucson once, I saw it. I actually saw it, and that was, please believe me, utterly breathtaking.

I therefore quite understand why people are drawn to the science of astronomy. Certainly, I’m not surprised that after 40 years of fumbling around, quite literally, in the dark, Britain’s astronomers have just handed over £80 million and joined forces with the Europeans.

This means they now have access to the VLT (which stands for Very Large Telescope) at the ESO (which stands for European Southern Observatory) in Chile. They will also help build the OWL (which stands for OverWhelmingly Large telescope). And, boy, with all these snappy acronyms, can’t you just tell this is basically a GO. Which stands for German Operation.

But let’s be honest, since Galileo disproved the Old Testament, astronomers have simply been dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s. Only last month, a meteorite shaved half an inch of ozone from the Earth’s atmosphere, and did they see it coming? Did they hell as like.

Occasionally, they show us a photograph of some cosmic explosion. But bangs without the bang never seem to work somehow. Remember: in space, nobody can hear you scream.

What’s more, Ineed scale. I need something to be the size of a ‘double-decker bus’ or a ‘football pitch’ before I get the point. Tell me that they’re burning 20,000 square kilometres of rainforest every day and I won’t care. Tell me that they’re burning an area the size of Wales and I still won’t care, but I’ll understand what you’re on about.

I’m afraid then that a photograph of Alpha 48///bB1 blowing itself to smithereens may be pretty, but getting access to the camera cost £80 million, and that seems excessive.

So, what about the question of extraterrestrial life?

Hollywood has convinced us that the night sky is full of aliens watching Holby City. But the reality is less romantic. The Seti organisation, which searches for life in the universe, and which was immortalised by Jodie Foster’s film Contact, has spent £95 million and seventeen years listening to the night skies. And it has found absolutely nothing.

However, let’s say it does. Let’s say that one day some computer geek actually picks up Corillian FM and let’s say we get a message back to them along the lines of ‘Yoo hoo’.

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