This investment puts us in an elite category of clubs and is in recognition of our great potential.". Trinity Mirror, Britain's biggest newspaper publisher, made the humiliating admission yesterday that officially audited circulation figures for its Birmingham titles - The Evening Mail, The Post and The Sunday Mercury - have been exaggerated for much of the past decade. Perhaps there are aliens, in orbits around distant suns, who already know the answers. But for us, these mysteries present a challenge for the new millennium - perhaps an unending quest. Sir Martin Rees is the Astronomer Royal. His new book, 'Just Six Numbers' (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £12.99), has just been published.
Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB empire has bought a 9.9% stake in Manchester City. Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB empire has bought a 9.9% stake in Manchester City. The First Division leaders can expect to make around £12million from the deal, which also includes BSkyB paying £2million for global rights to become the club's exclusive media partners. BSkyB will have a representative on City's board, and further money will be raised from a new rights issue to existing shareholders. In the deal, director John Wardle will become deputy chairman. Wardle and JD sports company partner David Mackin will convert £4.8million of loans they have in the club into shares. BSkyB also have a 9.9% stake in Leeds United. City chairman David Bernstein said: "We have broken historic ground today and I'm sure it will delight our fans. "We have massive support and BSkyB have recognised that. We see them as they were in the remote past - when all their stars were still young, and there were no planets, and presumably no life. But what happened before galaxies formed? During the first few minutes of cosmic history, everything was squeezed hotter than the centre of the Sun, into a dense gas that was almost structureless - so simple that it can be described by just a few numbers: the "mix" of particles it contains, the way it is expanding, and the strengths of the basic forces. How did 12 billion years of cosmic evolution lead from such a simple "recipe" to our immensely complex cosmos? How - here on Earth and perhaps on other worlds - did atoms assemble themselves into creatures able to ponder their origins? The answers will take us beyond the science we are familiar with - requiring new insights into the nature of space and time, and into the links between the cosmos and the microworld. These are really entire galaxies, each thousands of light years across, which appear so small and faint because they are so far away that their light set out 10 billion years ago. Were we ever to contact them, perhaps the only common culture would stem from a shared interest in how our cosmic habitat emerged from an initial genesis event - the Big Bang. We can in fact look back into the past, and see plain evidence of this evolution. Amazing long-exposure pictures taken with the Hubble Space Telescope show that the sky is densely covered with faint smudges of light, a billion times fainter than any star that can be seen with the unaided eye.
Our own Sun has burnt less than half its fuel, and will continue to shine for longer than it has taken for us to evolve from simple beginnings on the young Earth. Even if life is now unique to the Earth, there is time for it to spread from here through the entire galaxy, and even beyond. However different they and their "world" were from ours, aliens would be made of the same kinds of atoms and governed by the same forces as us; they would gaze out on the same vista of stars and galaxies. Some may find it depressing to feel alone in a vast, inanimate cosmos But I would personally react in quite the opposite way. It would in some ways be disappointing if searches for extraterrestrial signals were doomed to fail, but if our Earth were the sole abode of life in our galaxy we could view it in a less humble cosmic perspective than it would merit if our universe already teemed with advanced life forms. One thing we've learnt from astronomy is that the expanse of future time - even if not infinite - is far longer than even the 12 billion years that have elapsed since the genesis event that set our universe expanding. A manifestly artificial signal - even if it were as boring as a set of prime numbers or the digits of pi (the mathematical constant) - would convey the momentous message that "intelligence" (though not necessarily "consciousness") wasn't unique to the Earth and had evolved elsewhere, and that concepts of logic and physics weren't peculiar to the "hardware" in human skulls. The odds may, of course, be stacked so heavily against intelligent life that there is none anywhere in our part of the universe. That's why it would be so crucial to detect life, even in simple and vestigial forms, elsewhere in our solar system - on the arid surface of Mars, or in oceans under the ice of Jupiter's frozen moons, Callisto and Europa. Only in the last four years of this millennium have we known for sure that "worlds" exist in orbit around other stars.
