𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Will America invade Greenland in 2026? Imagine reading that question a couple of years ago. You’d think it was a misprint, or the opening line for some gag or other. But with President Donald Trump’s hands on the levers of power, anything is possible. Trump operates with a blind disregard for the rules.

He is, without a shred of doubt, the most narcissistic, self-obsessed president in US history. His sheer egotistical bravado somehow allows him to get away with stuff which would have sunk any of his predecessors – sexual boasts about “grabbing p***y” cruel, spiteful comments about critics who’ve literally just died; crazy claims about personally ending wars which in reality continue unabated.

Some of Trump’s more recent off-the-cuff speeches and statements have been beyond bizarre – rambling, disjointed utterances which make little or no sense at all. Some in Washington are beginning to whisper “the Biden-word” – dementia.

So will he annex Greenland next year – and then Canada? He’s said he wants to. Sometimes a cliche says it best. So here it is. You couldn’t make it up.

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There was some pretty good Christmas TV this year, wasn’t there? But for me, it was the Amandaland seasonal special that justified the licence fee. Not just because of the inspired casting of Joanna Lumley and Jennifer Saunders (Ab-Fab, everyone) but, for me, the show’s eponymous lead, Amanda. Lucy Punch’s inspired character is quite simply the funniest thing on TV right now. She’s a beauty but also a klutz too… with absurd delusions of grandeur (unable to face admitting the fact she now lives in unfashionable South Harlsden, Amanda insists on calling it “So-ha”. Brilliant). Much more of this genius in 2026 please.

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It’s almost New Year. But I’m not going to look ahead over the next 12 months (I’ll be doing that in the December 31 edition of this newspaper, along with my fellow Express columnists). No, I’m casting a longer view than that – 50 years or so into the future. Allow me to explain.

In my lifetime, people who speculated that there must surely be intelligent life on other worlds – or any kind of life, come to that – were mostly dismissed as cranks, wishful thinkers, or even heretics. Such thinking was seen as un-Christian: God had seen fit to make himself flesh in human form here on Earth. It was tantamount to sacrilege to suggest He may have done something similar elsewhere in His universe.

But over the past decade or two, there’s been a quiet revolution in thinking. Respectable thinking, I mean. This week, one of Britain’s leading space scientists announced she is “absolutely convinced” that aliens are out there – and that they will be found (or will find us) within the next half-century.

Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock, of University College London’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, said that while any alien life could be very primitive, it’s perfectly possible we willshortly encounter a presence with technology “far superior” to our own.

It’s the maths. The maths tells us that the chances of us being alone in the universe are vanishingly small. The genius that was the late Professor Stephen Hawking wrote in his final book Brief Answers To The Big Questions: “It is a self-evident truth that if the universe was not fundamentally suitable for life, we wouldn’t be here asking why it is so finely adjusted for it (life).”

We now know that planets that orbit distant suns such as ours have water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide – the essential constituents for, and giveaway fingerprints of, life. And that’s just in our own little medium-sized galaxy. There are trillions of galaxies. The chemistry and physics that allowed simple life to form on Earth, and fairly swiftly evolve into humans, is replicated throughout the universe.

So why haven’t we been contacted by other life forms? Hawking again: “We’ve simply been overlooked.” By which he meant that intelligent life is so abundant that our modest version of it doesn’t count for much in a universe positively seething with life. Or, he suggested, those alien life forms are simply so far away, they can’t easily reach us, “otherwise they would have visited Earth by now. And I think we would have known. It would be like the film Independence Day.”

Indeed, Hawkings’s last thoughts on the matter were cautionary.“If we ever do receive messages from another advanced civilisation, we need to be wary about answering back until we have developed a bit further… it might be a bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus. I don’t think they thought they were better off for it.”