Brian Cox's stupid science makes it a practical introduction to our galactic neighbors

EAll is relative. I believe that a physicist even proposed a theory in this area. Relativity was the subject of The Planets (BBC Two), in the first part of which Brian Cox provided a potted biography of our relatively close neighbors. The universe, he said, has been around for 46 billion years, but the Earth represents only four billion of them. So we are, relatively speaking, galactic beginners.

I put it in my pipe and smoked it while Cox was explaining a thing or two about Mercury, Venus and Mars, which we consider one thing, but which was another. Mars, which Matt Damon found so devilishly inhospitable in the 2015 film The Martian, once flowed with cascading rivers.