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Monty Python legend Eric Idle and rockstar boffin Cox write a song

Meaning of Life 'Galaxy' number gets numbers checked

Monty Python legend Eric Idle and fresh-faced rockstar physicist Brian Cox have teamed up to write a song. It's an update to Monty Python's "Galaxy song" about the meaning(lessness) of life, with a new focus on the biological reasons for our insignificance and will be featuring on the BBC show The Wonder of Life in January. Idle announced the boffin collab on a blog on Monday.

The original "Galaxy song" - starts:

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs Brown
And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft
And you feel that you've had quite enough ...

And proceeds to list out facts about the size of the universe that highlight our insignificance in the scheme of things.

Brian Cox swimming with jellyfish in the video for the new Galaxy Song, credit screengrab BBC video

Prof Brian Cox swimming with Jellyfish in a screengrab from the new video that describes mankind's ascent from the primordial ooze

The new version focusses on the almost accidental formation of DNA and incorporates recent research into the human genome.

Deoxyribonucleic acid helps us replicate
And randomly mutate from day to day.
We left the seas and climbed the trees
And our biologies
Continued to evolve through DNA.
We’re 98.9 per cent the same as chimpanzees [...]

Cox, who Idle met at a show a few months ago, has contributed to the final verse which returns to the size of the universe. According to a blog post written by Idle on the Nerdist, Cox had a few corrections to make to Idle's original stats about the size of the universe: correcting two thousand billion suns to "a billion trillion suns" and the width of our universe from fifteen billion light years to ninety billion.

The song will feature on Brian Cox's new TV series The Wonder of Life scheduled for the BBC in January.

The lyrics are up here, and a video was posted by Eric Idle here, though we're not sure it's going to stay there for long.

Thanks to Reg reader @Parax for the tip-off. ®

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