BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts

Hello you lovely curious minded listeners. Today we have a special programme exploring

life beyond earth. Earlier this year we braved some very unforgiving summer weather in the

north west of England to visit the glorious Jodrol Bank in Cheshire, home of the great

level radio telescope. It also plays host to the Blue Dot Science and Music Festival, which

was in full swing at the time of our recording in July. We grasped the opportunity to whisk

away three of its stars and ushered them out of the mud and into our makeshift recording

studio, inside the first light pavilion. It's a stunning, grass-topped dome of a building

with its gallery fitted out with screens and installations made of remnants of the level

radio telescopes famous dish. I sat down with three extrema files and experts in understanding

the remote harsh environments on this planet and on others. Karen Olsen Francis is a microbiologist

who focuses on the tiny living things that manage to occupy earth's most hostile environments,

her research is helping shape space missions that are looking for evidence of life elsewhere

in our solar system. Libby Jackson is head of space exploration at the UK Space Agency

and the expert in how humans can be equipped for the extremes of interplanetary travel.

And Tim O'Brien is Associate Director of the Jodrol Bank Center for Astrophysics and

has spent his career exploring parts of the universe that no human can travel to by

listening thanks to the array of radio telescopes on this very site. We're going to spend the

next half hour exploring the search for extraterrestrial life. So, do stay with us.

We're at a festival that's named in honour of Carl Sagan, the Blue Dot Festival.

And he once said the universe is a pretty big place if it's just as seems like an awful

waste of space. Can I just ask you to kind of pick up on that? Do you think there's life

...