Brainbox professor Brian Cox does not believe in aliens, he has revealed.
The popular telly physicist argues it is unlikely they exist because the chances of sophisticated life evolving like humans have are simply too low.
Instead he believes ‘there’s probably nothing else’ and that we are the only civilisation in this galaxy, at least.
The 54-year-old boffin explained that, because it took so long for humans to evolve from a single cell in such extraordinary circumstances, he doesn’t think it has been repeated.
Speaking to Noble Rot magazine, he said: “You can confine the argument to the galaxy, to the Milky Way, because we’re never going to contact anything outside that and nothing’s ever contacting us from different galaxies.
“But in a galaxy, there are 400 billion stars and more planets than that... I think there are no civilisations out there.
“It took 3.8 billion years to go from the origin of life on the planet to a civilisation, and that’s a long time. It’s a third of the age of the universe.
“The universe has only been around for 13.8 billion years and, as sun-like stars typically last for four or five billion years, there’s a window of stability.
“So it takes four or five billion years to go from a single cell to civilisation, and stars really don’t remain stable on timescales much longer than that.
“The biologists I know think that it was such a freak occurrence that anything got multicellular. There’s probably nothing else.
“I’ve got one friend who likes to say that all there will be out there is slime at best.”
Cox said the possibility that we’re alone in this galaxy should not depress us.
He said: “What does it mean to live a finite, fragile life in an infinite eternal universe? Well, meaning is a property of life and intelligence.
“So I’d say that if we are the only civilisation in the Milky Way now, then Earth is the only island of meaning in a sea of 400 billion stars.
“So that is either frightening or, well, at the same time gives you a sense of our value.
“I would say the universe is meaningless without life.”
Asked in the past if believes alien life could exist Professor Cox has not denied it but rather thinks that the chances of a hi-tech civilisation emerging in our galaxy are very slim.
He has previously explained: “I tend to restrict myself to the galaxy, as I do think it’s possible that at the moment that there is just one civilisation in the Milky Way, and that’s us.”
