Yes, fan(s), tonight is the night we’ve all been waiting for.  Today sees the release of my latest project, EarthRise by the band Spiral Planet, of which I am a member.  I produced this album, and it took about 16 months to complete, as well as finish it.

Tonight, at Two Rivers Production Company in Coombe Hill, just outside Cheltenham, England, I shall be performing with the band at the album’s launch party during which we shall be playing about half the songs from the album plus a couple of newbies.

Nervous?  Not really.  I’m more nervous about the reception of the album than the gig itself.  Plus the fact that I am in too much physical pain to be nervous.  I’m playing keyboards in the band, the instrument that I have played in every band I’ve been in, apart from the very first one, Scarlett Llama, back in 1982.

Actually, as I wrote the above, I did feel a bit nervous about the gig.  I suppose there is always some apprehension before a big event in one’s life.  And this album is a big event, certainly for me – we have had media attention for I think the first time that I can recall – a 25-minute radio broadcast on Dean Radio on Sunday, and a piece on The Local Answer‘s website; hopefully someone from that particular magazine will be at the gig tonight.

I have to give a small talk on the history of the band as well, and I’m always pretty nervous before speaking in public, more so than playing music.  I don’t know why that is.  The talk will be just a few minutes, but even so I have been pondering it for days now, even thinking of writing a script!

Please find below a copy of the album cover.  If you click on it, it will take you to the Spiral Planet Facebook page, at which you – yes you – can request band leader Mark Millar to send you a copy of the album for a measly sum of £10, part of which (certainly before Christmas at least) will go towards a charity called PTSD Resolution, that helps those suffering from that condition after having been in a war zone.

Not sure whether the album is worth your hard-earned wonga?  Have a listen to each and every track for nowt on the Spiral Planet YouTube Page!  See you on the other side! x

Let me say right from the off that I am not a scientist.  I am the son of a scientist, but I am not a scientist myself.  I have no more than a very basic understanding of astrophysics; I know what it is, I know very broadly what it’s about, and I can spell it.  Like most of the world’s population, I know the names of the most commonly known parts of astronomy – Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, that sort of thing.  And, like most of the world’s population, my favourite constellation is Orion, because of the three stars in a row that comprise his belt.  So I am not coming at this from a scientific perspective.

Or a religious one.  I believe in a divine power, I don’t call it God, and I certainly don’t follow any of the individuals that came to Earth over the centuries claiming to be his son, his messenger, his hairdresser, whatever.  I’m sure they were all very nice people, but they all suffered from this delusion that they were somehow more closely connected with the being that runs the Universe than the rest of us and that they were the only means by which the rest of us mere mortals could form any kind of a connection or bond with this being.  I could pick holes in the Bible all day long,

Or a conspiracy theorist one.  I must admit to liking a good conspiracy theory, they are entertaining, but not necessarily believable.  So this blog is not going to tell you that alien species invaded Earth in 1947 and were captured by the U.S. Air Force.  Perhaps they did, I have no idea.  But this isn’t about that.

This is about mathematics.  Or at least, the power of mathematics.  Oops, I forgot to mention that I am no mathematician; indeed, I am about to confess something that I have not told anyone except my dear wife since 1982: I cheated to get into the top set in mathematics at school.  We used to have this thing called a log book back in the day.  It was a thin book containing loads of mathematical tables and it had an orange cover.  You were allowed to take them into the examination that would determine which set you would go into for maths.  We did a test paper and I wrote all the answers down inside my log book.  By chance, many of the questions came up in the examination proper.   I was in the top set for maths.  Just shows you what a joke ‘streaming’ is in education.  The feeding of children into sets that would not only determine the course of their lives but the amount of ridicule you would get if you were in the bottom set.  God, it felt good to be at the top.

But I digress.  There is, however, something relevant in the previous paragraph: the chance that the same questions that were on the test paper came up in the examination itself was, like, a gazillion to one.  But they did.  And I got into the top set for maths.

And that is the approach that I want to take here: what is the likelihood that alien life forms exist out there somewhere, hitherto undiscovered in the Universe?  I would suggest that the likelihood is so high that it must almost be a certainty.   And the only thing you need to do is look at the sheer power of numbers.  No need for any telescopes, red-shift light analysis, or any of that gubbins.  You just need to look at it numerically.

Let’s look at two of the billions, possibly trillions of galaxies out there.  Ourselves, the Milky Way, and our neighbour, Andromeda.  In about four billion years’ time, maybe a little longer, Andromeda is set to merge with the Milky Way in one great big galactic tango before settling into what I would like to call an übergalaxy of sorts.

In that new galaxy alone, and in the total of the two current galaxies that will go to form that übergalaxy, there will be/are something in the region of one trillion, two hundred and fifty billion stars.  I’ll run that by you again, this time numerically: 1,250,000,000,000 stars.  Ish.  And we are the only planet with life on it, apparently.  The chance of that would be the equivalent of one human winning $1,250,000,000,000 on the lottery.  Obviously not impossible, but very, very, very, very, very, very unlikely.

Now, people say to me, look, Stephen, we’ve heard all this shit before and the answer is simple: if there was alien life out there, they would have visited us by now, and we would all know about it; indeed, many on Earth would be at least half-alien, and there would be another pressure group to be politically correct about.

Have we been visited by aliens before?  Possibly, but I’m sceptical.  I do not possess sufficient relevant scientific or historical knowledge to say categorically either way, but I do know that, whether it has happened or not, it is statistically very possible that it could happen at some time in the future, or is happening now.

Let’s say there are 1,250,000,000,000 stars in the galaxy, and, oh, 0.0000001% of them have planets spinning around them that may either be hospitable to life or already have life on them.  Do you know how many potentially life-bearing planets that would be in our new übergalaxy?  1,250!  That’s one thousand, two hundred and fifty, from just 0.0000001% of the galaxy.  Even if you were generous, and said perhaps only one per cent of the stars in the galaxy have life, or the possibility of life, that’s 12,500,000,000 just from one per cent of what are currently these two neighbouring galaxies: Andromeda and the Milky Way.

Now, you might be thinking: come on, you can look all this stuff up on Wikipedia.  Why is it of any interest to us?  The simple answer is, it should be.  It ought to be of interest to us.  We are this pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan called Earth, orbiting our sun.  Who’s to say there are no aliens out there looking at us and going, I wonder if there’s life on it?  I write this stuff now because I’m thinking about it now.  Neil deGrasse Tyson once said, imagine taking a cup full of water from the ocean, looking at it, and saying, there are no whales in the ocean.  In the case of the Universe, and even the two galaxies under discussion in this blog, there must be plenty of whales in this ocean. x

Being an avid reader of the news, I couldn’t help but notice that some of the stories – at least three, in fact – relate to pop stars giving their opinions on things, or talking about their music, in the week that their respective albums are being released.  

I’ve read stories just this afternoon on Christina Aguilera, Muse and Olly Murs.  Murs had this to say about the show that discovered him, The X Factor:

“I’d hate to see a show like The X Factor not be on TV any more, because it’s still one of the best.”

Source: BBC News Music News LIVE

Yes, from his perspective, I would have to agree with that, especially since that show gave him the opportunity to release the album, just last Friday coincidentally enough, which he is now shamelessly whoring.  

Muse, on the other hand, were actually talking about the album Simulation Theory which, coincidentally enough, was released just last Friday and which they are now shamelessly whoring. 

With this album there was quite an effort to sort of look beyond, to look both to the past and future simultaneously.

Matt Bellamy; Source: BBC News Music News LIVE

I won’t write about the Christina Aguilera incident because that’s just embarrassing; both for her and for the rest of us. 

And of course, I fully understand the irony that, even if one person only ever reads this post, it has promoted both of those artists’ albums still further.

Furthermore, I also understand that the entire motivation behind the music industry is to promote their artists’ wares, how else are you going to sell the albums in the shedloads required to make everybody filthy rich?

The entertainment industry as a whole has this whole promotion thing down to a fine art.  If a major new TV series is coming on the telly, you’ll get news stories featuring those actors, or simply about the show – of course, why not?  

It’s because people are fundamentally lazy, and the internet has done little to change that – indeed, it’s made it significantly worse.  Nobody goes looking for music or other entertainment any more; they’ve got to have it dropped in their laps.  I’ve got absolutely no problem with people promoting their latest record, book, movie, whatever; it’s just the cynical way that each artist is dealt with and told to do, to perform said promotion. 

Movie promotion works slightly differently.  I’ve seen it documented that actors and directors (typically) will sit in a hotel room all day while journalists from all periodicals, TV, radio and the blogosphere will file in and out and be given, I don’t know, fifteen minutes with the person in question. 

It’s no wonder that, by the end of the day, actors will get fed up with being asked the same questions in the same way and the journalists think that they are the first to do it.  

When the likes of you or I go to a job interview, it is the questioner who holds all the cards, who is in charge, basically.  But for TV and entertainment interviews, the questioner often sits timidly while the actor rants and rages at them, acting like the world revolves around them, which in a lot of cases, it does.  It’s funny how the dynamics of life works.

As I said, I’m not averse to it, I recognise that, if you have a book, movie, album, TV show out, you’ve got to let people know it’s there, or else they will not go looking for it.  I am having to do this myself, because I have an album out – EarthRise by Spiral Planet, out on Friday November 30 – which I produced.  So, because I am not in the public eye, I expect I shall have to come up with all sorts of crass ways to promote the album and to try and persuade people to part with even more of their hard-earned pay to buy it, despite the fact that those people will already have bought the new Muse, Olly Murs, Mark Knopfler, Take That, or Beatles albums already.  I don’t know, I expect I’ll have to write one of my smug little blogs, or put unfunny little messages on Facebook, that sort of thing.  

The album, EarthRise by Spiral Planet, out on November 30, is a double album that I produced that isn’t very likely to sell in the gazillions that Muse will, but if it sells one copy as a result of this blog, or perhaps through Facebook, then that will be job done.  I don’t have expensive press agents at my disposal, when you’re at the top you get everything done for you, but here at the bottom, you’ve got to do it all yourself.  You get away with it if you’re Take That, but for us, it looks like crass, arrogant, egotistical self-promotion.  Have a listen to the album and see what you think.  x