Anyone seen my alien doppleganger? He must be somewhere...

Life outside of our solar system has become so commonly considered that the whole concept seems to be tarred with the broad brush of “sci-fi.” Nobody can talk about extra-terrestrial life without conjuring up a myriad of ideas from comics, movies, novels, Dr Who and so on.

It has got to a point where merely suggesting that life might exist anywhere other than Earth can provoke sniggers from whoever you happened to be with at the time. Then Stephen Hawking announced that he believed in aliens. That ought to shut the sceptics up. Now, I’m not one of these over-credulous people whose belief in aliens has become more like a superstition – you won’t find me saying, “Yeah, I was abducted by aliens once.” Because I haven’t been, and I doubt I ever will be. I doubt that they have even been to this planet. It seems a bit unlikely to me that a civilisation sufficiently advanced to be able to get here would see much point in actually turning up. Anyway, intergalactic travel just seems exceptionally difficult, so I don’t think that it will ever be considered a viable or even a useful occupation. Well, not until the “home planet” (I sound like a Dr Who buff – shoot me!) has gone totally pear-shaped. I really doubt that aliens would travel the many light-years to our planets for the sake of poking us in strange places, messing up a few of our crops and dissecting some cows, then leaving everything on Earth and, presumably, going home. That’s another thing, these aliens seem to go to pretty extreme lengths not to be found, and yet they leave witnesses and evidence all over the place. It doesn’t seem all that likely to me. For these reasons, among others, I don’t think that we have had, or are about to have, any alien encounters.

But look up. Consider the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, where they found, in a piece of sky chosen because it contains nothing, and that could be covered up by a grain of sand on the end of your finger, and held at arm’s length, 10,000 galaxies. So how many galaxies must there be out there, in total? Now tell me, how could there not be life out there? The universe is so ridiculously, incomprehensively vast that it must be almost a statistical certainty that there is something else sharing that enormous emptiness with us here on Earth. We might never find them, but they’ve got to be there, surely. There is a theory regarding monkeys and typewriters - basically, leave the two together for long enough, and eventually, by sheer chance, you'll get the whole works of Shakespeare typed out backwards. Likewise, the universe is so huge, so bordering on the infinity that makes everything a certainty, that there must be some angle you can look at some galaxy from and see a perfect map of Outer Mongolia. So there must, somewhere else, be other forms of life. Even if we do find them, though, we might not realise that they're there.

At the moment, we are looking for planets like ours – planets that could have liquid water, in other words, because we assume that liquid water must be one of the prerequisites for life. The thing is, it is only a prerequisite for life according to our current understanding of biology. And that could be ever so wrong. After all, once we thought that all swans would have to be white. Then we found some black ones. What if we found something that, instead of basing itself around water, based itself around alcohol of some kind, actually using that as a solvent? (We could start a research facility in Russia and call it the Charlie Sheen Institute.) Then they could live on much colder planets, or they could base themselves on liquid tellurium, in which case they could live on planets where temperatures reach over 1000K. We have absolutely no idea. For now, then, our aliens are going to live in our imaginations. There, they can take any form at all. In fact, the only thing that could create creatures as mad as our imagination can is reality.

ET must be out there. The odds of us finding him (and of “him” having gender) are phenomenally slim, but it seems virtually impossible for there not to be another form of life in the universe. We might not understand it if we find it, and it will almost certainly turn out to be something beyond our wildest imagination, like a fish that lives on liquid nitrogen, or something, but it’s far more likely that there are other planets harbouring life there than that the rest of the universe is totally dead.

Cancellara

Cancellara is surely a candidate for the best cyclist in the world at the moment. The Swiss machine has, in the past few years, been the undisputed king of the time trial. I direct anyone who refutes this to the tour's TTT a couple of years ago. Every time we were shown the Saxobank squad, they were being led out by the guy in yellow. You could probably say that he rode that race as if it were an individual event. In the face of Astana's might, Garmin Slipstream's lineup of specialist time-trialists, and of course, the phenomenal Columbia HTC, Cancellara held his ground. In style to honour his (nick)namesake, he fought against impossible odds and came out still in that iconic maillot jaune. Nutcase.

Then, in the Spring, he showed that he'd learnt to ride the classics. The climbs of Flanders fell before his power (1450W climbing in the saddle), and he skimmed over the cobbles of Roubaix at over 50km/h. He won both in a week. Nutcase.

It seems, though, that the cynics have done the same to him as they did to the other cyclist to dominate this century, Armstrong. They will not accept that hard work and dedication are enough to win. With Armstrong, they pointed the finger at drugs, forgetting that he is the most tested athlete this side of planet Zogg. And every test comes back negative. So what new weapon can they yield to discredit Sparticus? An engine... Right... are they serious? They point to videos of him pushing something on his gear changer as he attacks, saying it must be a button that operates an electric motor. But let me ask, what do you do when you speed up on a bike? Do you just make your legs go like the washer on its final spin, or do you change gear? And do you change gear by telepathy, or by pushing something on your gear changer?

When will we be able to look at a great sportsman and allow him or her to be just that - great? When will we stop looking at them with jealousy, and trying to come up with some scheme to discredit them?

Cancellara laughed at the accusations. Haven't his prosecutors noticed that he attacked 50km from the line at Robaix, and never slowed down? That's not a battery. And haven't they noticed that he is the best bike handler in the TTs, never lifting from that super-aero tuck that he also does better than anyone else? There is one engine on that bike. It's not hidden under the saddle; it's the bloke on the saddle, the one with thighs like artillery shells.

He might not have won the classics this year, but that doesn't mean he wasn't clearly the strongest rider in the peloton. Did you see what happened when he started to chase through the chasm that had opened between the leader and his group. The chasm damn near closed. And in the Amstel Gold race, when Frank Shleck decided to do his usual trick of falling off, and this time took Spartacus with him, did anyone notice the speed, skill and assurance that Cancellara showed in - well, normally I'd say "fighting" his way back to the peloton, but I think that "hurtling effortlessly" is more accurate. He made the cars look like they were stationary and had all the accuracy of Valentino Rossi in clipping apexes and finding gaps.

In short, the guy can ride a bike.

Fresh paint and cut grass

It is widely known that the Queen must think that the whole world smells of manicured lawns and spruced-up fences. She must think that cars are made of soft leather, sound proofing and that chauffeurs come supplied, and she must assume that the highways agency does a superb job of keeping the roads in perfect condition.

But she's not the only one.

There was a bike race in the area around my home on Sunday, and two hundred of the world's best cyclists descended on the city and it's surrounding country lanes. Now, I spend a lot of time on these roads: I guess that I have done about 4000 miles on the very lanes that the crème de la crème of world cycling were haring along. I can, therefore, vouch for the fact that these roads are not in the best state possible. In places, they are awful, and bordering on dangerous. There are some very nasty potholes on some very tricky descents, and if you don't know about them, you can be in serious bother. I went flying down one hill a few weeks back only to discover that the Dutch authorities had decided to pour gravel on it. I'm not sure how this was meant to help anything. My point is that the roads are not brilliantly cared for. But in the build-up to the big race, I went for a ride to discover that the roads are all in perfect condition - glass smooth, clean and, thankfully, gravel-less. The road fixers had obviously been at work in readiness for the pros.

Now, I could moan about the total lack of equality displayed by this sudden flurry of activity, but actually, I think it's good. The Dutch are famously keen on bikes, so they pull out all the stops to make sure that their beloved bike races go ahead - last year they granted a plane an exemption from the volcano induced no-fly-zone so that it could broadcast images of the race to the world.

The reason I won't complain about this is simple: I get to use the better roads, too. It benefits everyone who uses those roads, and the fact of the matter is that the pros are a lot better at cycling than me, that's why they're pros and I'm not, and it justifies the work being done for their benefit and not mine. What I actually think is that we should have more bike races and in more different places. For example, I spend a lot of time in North Yorkshire. The roads there are fantastic for cycling; the hills are astonishingly challenging, so there are loads of opportunities for strong/brave/foolish breakaway riders to make their bid for freedom. The only disadvantage is that some of these roads are abysmally maintained. The harsh winters smash them to pieces, and nothing is ever done to repair them. But, as I've just seen, the pros coming to town justifies the roads being re-metaled.

It also provides a fantastic spectacle, which must encourage more people to get out on their bikes and have a go. Considering Britain’s growing waistline, an increase in what is possibly the most endurance-heavy of the endurance sports (London Marathon: 2hrs 5mins, Amstel Gold Race: 6hrs 30mins) has to be a good thing. On top of that, we are constantly being told to use non-polluting modes of transport. Now, forget electric cars, which aren’t viable at the moment. Bikes are mass produced, cheap, require zero fuel and produce no emissions – not even at power plants. They use a bare minimum of materials, too, so that aspect of their production is eco-friendly, too.

So, why don’t we have top bike races in the UK?

Well, there is an obvious element of tradition. We never really have had many big bike races in England’s pastures green. Furthermore, many of the roads are not good enough for a proper peloton to roll through without instigating total chaos. There’s the Tour of Britain, but none of the one-day classics that are so popular on the continent. And that’s because they’re so expensive. I cannot pretend to know exact figures, but I know that the reason we do not get closed road bike races in this country it cost. Only the police are allowed to close roads, which makes perfect sense. But they charge a ridiculous amount of money to do it. They claim that their officers need special training before being able to close roads for bike races, which is fair enough, I suppose. But they also seem to believe that they need this training before every race they preside over. This means that organisers cannot afford to put their races on closed roads, which means that we cannot develop cycling like it is possible to do on the continent.

Which, to return to my original theme, means that we shall not have good country lanes, extending a vicious circle poor roads leading to no bike racing leading to poor roads.

You might think it’s very ego-centric of me to assume that cycling is the only thing that gets us a better road network, but I will simply point out the evidence of the beautiful Amstel course. And I will also say that, even if it is not the only reason the road network is improved, it is a reason. To refuse to use cycling to get a better network merely because it’s not the only method of doing so would be like refusing to jog to get fitter, just because it’s not the only way to do it. Unless you choose one of these other ways, you won’t get anywhere, and I don’t see anyone doing anything else. Also, I would point out that the country lanes are vitally important to many people, but that these people are not of direct importance to the economy, so it makes no financial sense for the Government to care for them. Cycling can give these quietly crucial lanes an economic raison d'être that they don’t currently have. Both advertising and tourism would pave the roads with, if not gold, at least some semi-precious mineral.

That benefits everyone, and it’s not just for that reason that we should encourage cycle racing. As I said before, it benefits our health, our financial comfort and the environment