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Chance of doing a series that was both totally big-deal science, definitive science about what we know about the cosmos, but in an educating and in an informative and in an entertaining way, so that a global audience on discovery channel could be sort of interested in this. >> larry: ben, does the british government take this seriously? >> i'm not -- i'm not sure i'm qualified to answer that, but i don't think so. >> larry: john -- no, ben, you first. the tendency has been to kind of dismiss this until mr. hawking arrived as sort of cooky. he says if intelligence aliens exist and they were to ...

Received, called the wow signal. take a look. >> on august 16th, 1977, a radio telescope in ohio picked up a signal that became famous. the signal was a steady source of radio waves, just the kind an alien race might send, because it stands out from the radio static that fills the universe. a computer recorded the signal as six letters and numbers. astronomer jeremy erman saw the data and wrote one word in the margin. >> larry: this is a remarkable, remarkable entertaining feature that will air on discovery sunday. john smithson and ben buoy are the executive producers of "into the universe" w...

Questions. we gave him our pitch, showed him a tape and had to wait a while, but thankfully the answer was yes, i'd love to do it. that's how it got going. >> larry: john, are you surprised at the reaction it's gotten around the world? >> no, i'm not, because, you know, professor hawking is this distinguished academic as we've said, but also he wants to bring science to a new generation, to people around the world. and he's prepared to -- everything he says is scientifically sourced. he wants to entertain people and by entertaining them he wants to interest them in science. so, you know, every...

Saying i ining aliens are comine to hide under the bed. he's saying if you follow the argument logically we'd be wise to exercise caution when dealing with aliens. >> larry: what do we do with this, john, oath e than entertain and inform us? what's the next step? >> the next -- well, what we're trying to do with this -- what -- you know, what's just so amazing about this subject? it blew my mind. i'm not a scientist. what blew my mind is just the huge scale of the universe. i'll never look at the night sky the same way again. the three years we've been making the show, someone told me the othe...

Look like. that's what we're able to do here. larry >> larry: ben, how did this come about? how did you and stephen and john all get together and do this? >> well, discovery wanted to do a new and exciting show on cosmology. and so we sat around the table for a while and thought who best to do it. and there isn't a bigger name than stephen hawking. so it was a very simple, very, very short list of who we wanted to work with. and then we pitched it to him. and you may know that stephen takes quite a while to respond to questions. so we gave him our pitch, showed him the tape, and we had to wait...