“The human species needs to expand beyond Earth,” says Professor Brian Cox.

Professor Brian Cox says he is ready to boldly go where no British TV presenter has gone before.

“I haven’t raised the money yet, and I haven’t convinced anyone to give me a ticket” to space, he explains.

But if Elon Musk, owner of the American aerospace company SpaceX, came to me, I would say: “I say… Great, we’re going up!” he adds.

Space travel is something we could all do in the future, according to Professor Cox, the UK’s best-known particle physicist.

Speaking ahead of his new BBC Two series about the solar system, he said he wants the human race to go further.

He says progress made by some commercial space companies means there’s potential for us to become a multiplanetary and interstellar civilization.

One of the people who beat Professor Cox to space is billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman and the crew of SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn spacecraft.

Isaacman made history last month when he became the first private astronaut to walk in space. NASA said the mission represents a “giant leap forward” for the commercial space industry.

Professor Cox believes this joint approach – collaboration between government agencies, such as NASA, and private companies, such as SpaceX – is a good thing. He adds that it is essential that we have cheap and reliable access to space.

“I really see that our civilization needs to expand beyond our planet for many reasons,” he says.

The aerospace company Blue Origin — the brainchild of billionaire and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — already envisions a future in which people live and work in space, with industries seen as harmful to Earth moving out into the cosmos.

There are limited resources on Earth, and the planet is being damaged by “civilization’s thirst for more resources,” says Professor Cox, making it essential that we aspire to become a multi-planetary civilization.

Tapping into the universe’s resources, such as extracting minerals from asteroids, may sound like science fiction, but he says: “It’s extremely important that we do it, and as quickly as possible.”

Whether there is the political skill to achieve this as a civilization is another matter, he says, but he believes it is our duty to explore our galaxy, the Milky Way, which is filled with hundreds of billions of stars.

There is so much to explore in our solar system alone. In addition to the Sun, there are eight planets, five officially named dwarf planets, hundreds of moons, thousands of comets, and more than a million asteroids.

If we had to hazard a guess, Professor Cox says it is likely that we are the only advanced civilization in the Milky Way at the moment, and perhaps the only civilization that has ever existed in the galaxy.

“However, if that is true, then our expansion beyond this planet becomes an obligation. Because if we don’t, no one will. So, if we don’t go to the stars, no one will ever go to the stars in this galaxy.”

“So it becomes extremely important to start taking those first steps.”

Mars and the Moon are the only places where Professor Cox can imagine seeing anyone visit and begin to build a permanent presence in their lives.

Despite the stadium-sized asteroids hurtling across the solar system, it is believed that the greatest current danger to Earth is actually its human population.

“If there’s anything that could destroy us, it’s probably us,” he says. Although he says that, he says the possibility of an asteroid hitting Earth is taken more seriously now than it was when he started producing TV shows. For the first time in more than 15 years. .

“At some point, we’ll have to move one,” he says.

In his new series, Professor Cox explores events occurring in space through cutting-edge missions. In October, NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft will set off on a five-and-a-half-year journey to Jupiter, exploring whether the planet’s icy moon, Europa, could harbor the right conditions for life. Scientists believe that Europe has liquid water in the form of a large saltwater ocean under its icy crust.

But what would life look like in Europe if conditions were right?

“It will be a simple life,” says Professor Cox. “It will be single-celled life at best, or something that looks a bit like single-celled life… We don’t expect multicellular life there — partly because it took so long to evolve here on Earth.”

It has been more than 10 years since Sir David Attenborough appointed Professor Cox as his natural successor. Could he be ready to take up the mantle?

“I’m very glad he doesn’t need a successor at the moment. He’s preparing more programs than I do,” says Professor Cox.

When it comes to Sir David’s career, he says it’s not possible for someone who invented this model to succeed.

“You can’t really have a successor because he was the first to do it. It’s almost like saying, ‘Who will be Neil Armstrong’s successor as the first human to set foot on the moon?’

Solar system It starts on Monday 7 October at 21:00 GMT on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer.