Ben Miller : "Technology has really won the argument”

Comedian, actor and lover of all things science, Ben Miller has documented the search for alien life in a new book with optimism for the future. Are we really alone in the universe?

- David Crookes

Although you’ve just written a book about alien life, you’ve got three young children. Has that made you reassess life in general?

I think a new baby makes you reassess a lot of things in your life, from home furnishings right on up to the existence of God. But the reason for writing the book – which was started three or four years ago – was to continue from where I left off with my first book, It’s Not Rocket Science.

I found that I was fascinated by biology and the extraordinary advances being made in that area, and I also kept stumbling across different areas where people were talking about alien life and I just thought it would be a great thing to bring all of those things together in one book and talk about the real science of aliens. So my route into The Aliens Are Coming! was sort of through that. It’s why this book starts where the last one leaves off, because I ended the first with a discussion of extraterrestrial life.

You say in your book that, as a boy in the 1970s, the hopes of finding life kept diminishing the more space was being explored. Was that disappointing for you?

It was a really depressing time. It was beautifully summed up by [late astronomer] Carl Sagan in his book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision Of The Human Future In Space, in 1994: “The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.” The 1970s was a golden age for robotic missions and that was an extraordinary period: we sent stuff to Venus and all the way out of the Solar System. Amazing. But then things just slid. We’re actually now entering a golden age for telescopes and I think it’s amazing what our telescopes can do now; just incredible.