Life must extend beyond earth, leading space scientist says
Life must exist beyond Earth, a leading space scientist has said, adding it is yet another example of our own pride to suppose otherwise.
The British space scientist Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who will be delivering the Royal Institution Christmas lecture this year, said that while science has made giant leaps in our understanding of space, including the sheer size of the universe, there is still much to learn – not least whether we are alone.
'My answer to that, based on the numbers, is no, we can't be,' said Aderin-Pocock. 'It's that human conceit again that we are so caught up in ourselves that we might think we're alone.'
And it is not the only outstanding question.
'The fact we only know what approximately 6% of the universe is made of at this stage is a bit embarrassing,' she says, noting the vast majority of the universe is made of dark energy and dark matter – mysterious substances we still don't understand.
It is this contrast of startling revelations and unanswered conundrums that Aderin-Pocock is due to unpick in the 2025 Royal Institution Christmas lectures – a prestigious series of public talks initiated by the chemist and physicist Michael Faraday in 1825.
'It's that sense of wonder and exploration, and the sense that there's so much more to discover,' she said, stressing scientific progress is not one eureka moment after the next, but a journey in which some theories fall by the wayside while others are taken further.
As Aderin-Pocock notes, the idea that the Earth is at the centre of the universe – championed by the philosopher Aristotle – lasted for centuries before being overturned, while it was the work of Henrietta Swan Leavitt in the 19th century that gave astronomers the means to understand the scale of the universe.
'And then suddenly we realised that we were so much more insignificant than we ever thought,' said Aderin-Pocock, adding the astronomer Edward Hubble subsequently showed the universe is expanding, while the eponymous Hubble space telescope later revealed there are about 200bn galaxies out there.
This is a big year for the Royal Institution, marking the bicentenary of three of Faraday's triumphs: the Christmas Lectures, the discovery of benzene and the Friday Evening Discourses – now given once a month as the Ri Discourses and not always on a Friday.
As a result, the organisation is launching a year-long celebration called Discover200 that will feature a candlelit discourse and recreations of past lectures, a new demonstration show and the release of all past filmed series of Christmas Lectures on YouTube. In addition, the Royal Institution is asking the public to share their memories of attending the Christmas Lectures and Ri Discourses.
The past will also feature in the Christmas Lectures, with Aderin-Pocock hoping to mine the institution's archives for clips from previous years, including the lectures by the American astronomer Carl Sagan, to explore how our understanding of space has changed.
Key among the missions challenging current theories is the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which was launched on Christmas Day 2021. With its huge 18-segment mirror the telescope acts like a time machine, capturing light from distant galaxies that – because light travels at a finite speed – was produced when the universe was still young.
'One of the things that it's discovering is that galaxies seem to be bigger than we anticipated in the early universe,' said Aderin-Pocock. The discovery has thrown up a host of questions, including whether the laws of physics are constant and whether dark matter really exists.
For Aderin-Pocock, the JWST is personal: she worked on one of its instruments known as the Near-Infrared Spectrograph.
But the mission is facing budget cuts of up to 20% – and that is before the US Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), which is overseen by the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, has finished scrutinising Nasa.
For Aderin-Pocock the role of Musk – who is CEO of the space technology company Space X – in assessing the agency is a conflict of interest.
'It's an odd stance to take to have Musk looking at this because you need someone independent, you need someone with distance from this. And to me, ideally, someone from a different arena, so that they aren't caught up in all the baggage that we carry around when we work in an industry, but bring a new light to it,' she said. 'And so the fact that Elon Musk is involved in this, seems like a bad idea to me.'
And while Aderin-Pocock is excited that the commercialisation of space –something she labels the 'battle of the Billionaires' – could hasten her dream of space travel, she said legislation is crucial.
'Sometimes it feels a bit like the wild west where people are doing what they want out there, and without the proper constraints I think we could make a mess again,' she said. 'And again, if there is an opportunity to utilise space for the benefit of humanity, let it be for all of humanity.'
Yet, like Musk, she is keen for crewed missions to other planets.
' I won't say it's our destiny because that sounds a bit weird, but I think it is our future,' she said. 'We live on our planet and, I don't want to sound scary, but planets can be vulnerable.'
As Aderin-Pocock notes, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, and while humans are now keeping an eye on space rocks coming close to Earth, they are not the only potential hazard that could decimate humanity.
'So I think it makes sense to look out there to where we might have other colonies, on the moon, on Mars and then beyond as well,' she said.
The Christmas Lectures from the Royal Institution supported by CGI will be broadcast on the BBC and iPlayer in late December
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Herald Scotland
a day ago
- The Herald Scotland
2,500-year-old royal tomb from Midas dynasty discovered in Turkey
The tomb was discovered at the archeological site of Gordion, the capital of the Phrygian kingdom, which controlled much of Asia Minor during the first millennium BCE, Gordion Excavation Director C. Brian Rose said in a news release. Gordion is located in northwest Turkey, about 60 miles southwest of Turkey's capital Ankara. At one time, Gordion was ruled by King Midas, famously known for his "golden touch." Archeologists believe that the newly-discovered tomb may have belonged to a member of the Midas dynasty. Iron Age archaeological find: British 'bling' from 2,000 years ago included horse harnesses Archeologists used magnetic prospection technology to find the tomb, a news release states. This geophysical method uses variations in Earth's magnetic field to identify objects below the surface, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. To archeologists' surprise, the tomb indicated a cremated burial. Up until this latest excavation, researchers believed the first cremation to occur in Gordion was more than 100 years later. Vessels inside the tomb also featured textiles adhered to their exterior, which indicate that textiles were an important industry in Gordion, Rose said in a news release. 3,000-year-old Mayan city unearthed: Why it's named 'The Grandparents' The tomb was located near and appeared like the Midas Mound tomb, which is believed to have housed the body of King Midas' father. The Gordion site has proved fruitful for archeologists for 75 years, since Penn Museum began leading excavations there in 1950. Previous excavations included the oldest wooden building in the world, dating back to 740 BCE. Others include the earliest colored stone mosaics found in Gordion, the best-preserved citadel gate of the first millennium and a gilded ivory sphinx of the 6th century BCE, according to a news release. Greta Cross is a national trending reporter at USA TODAY. Story idea? Email her at gcross@
ITV News
4 days ago
- ITV News
'In 40 seconds, everything was gone': The Swiss village destroyed by climate change
Sometimes climate change is hard to visualise, but not the disaster that struck the Swiss alpine village of Blatten on May 28. In the middle of the afternoon a glacier that had stood above the village for centuries broke free from the mountainside and crashed down onto Blatten. The Swiss authorities had seen in coming and evacuated the inhabitants 10 days earlier – only one person is missing, which is both miraculous and a tribute to Swiss engineering. But the 300 people who lived there lost everything. Daniel Ritler had lived all his life in Blatten. The restaurant and delicatessen he ran with his wife Karin now lie under millions of tons of rock and mud, themselves invisible under millions of gallons of water. 'The whole thing happened within 40 seconds. In 40 seconds, everything was gone. Houses that were built in 15 and 16 centuries were buried, all buried', he told me. The sheep Daniel kept in the pristine alpine pastures above the village also survived, but whether they or the Ritlers will even be able to return is uncertain, perhaps even unlikely. First the geology of the Lotschental valley must stabilise, and that itself could take many years. This disaster was not caused solely by climate change – erosion and minor earthquakes in these mountains also played their part – but there's little doubt that without the significant warming the Alps have seen in the last few decades it wouldn't have happened. On current trends, glaciologists confidently predict that by the end of his century, 2100, there will be no more glaciers in Switzerland. This doesn't just mean a lot of melt-water: the ice in a glacier binds together huge quantities of mud and scree and rock, so when the ice melts much more than water comes down a mountainside. Professor Stuart Lane, a British glaciologist who lives in these mountains, and teaches at the University of Lausanne, says that as good as Swiss engineering may be, you cannot engineer away a problem as big as the one that hit Blatten. Indeed, difficult decisions may have to be taken about moving whole towns or villages out of the way of collapsing valley walls. 'The only way you can get a glacier back is by increasing snow in winter and reducing ice melt in summer', he said. 'So only with a reversion to the climate of 50-60 years ago will you see glaciers come back again'. And you don't have to be a top scientist to know how unlikely that is.
Metro
4 days ago
- Metro
This is where the UK plans to hide nuclear power waste for thousands of years
Here's a puzzle for you. Imagine you have enough 'stuff' to fill St Paul's Cathedral to the brim five times over. This stuff is toxic to life on Earth. And it's going to stay toxic for centuries. Where are you going to put it? It's a question that has vexed experts ever since the world was yanked into the atomic age by US physicist J Robert Oppenheimer around 80 years ago. At first, it was military nuclear tests, and then it was civil nuclear power: all of it produces radioactive waste, and that needs to go… somewhere. Amid the British government's enthusiastic backing of nuclear power and investment in the new Sizewell C power plant on the Suffolk coast, figuring out the destination for this lethal product is as important as ever. 'Things that were ruled out along the way were the classic, why can't we fire it up into space?' said Neil Hyatt, Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK's Nuclear Waste Services (NWS). 'Well, look at the track record of space launches and how many are unsuccessful, and imagine that's not a satellite coming back down to Earth but spent nuclear fuel…' Some suggested it could simply be placed far from civilisation – but this required ensuring people would know to stay a safe distance for thousands of years, as languages evolve and symbols change meaning. Ideas included new religions, hostile architecture and glowing cats, resulting in one of the greatest Wikipedia pages of all time. In the early days, the UK got rid of our potentially cancer-causing waste by chucking it in the sea near the Channel Islands. But as political pressure grew and the London Convention banned marine dumping of radioactive products, scientists had to get more creative. Gradually, international thought was united around one deceptively simple idea: put the waste very, very deep under the ground. Sadly, it's not the glowing green sludge that you've seen Homer Simpson spill from metal barrels at Springfield Power Plant. High-level waste, which results from the reprocessing of spent fuel, is radioactive liquid which is converted into a solid block of glass. Intermediate-level waste consists of the leftovers from old and operating nuclear facilities, including fuel cladding, rubble, and – yes – some sludge. It's usually immobilised in cement and packed into stainless steel containers. In 1982, a specialist body called Nirex was set up with a remit to find a place to build an underground store in the UK, but every initiative crumbled in the face of protests. Some didn't even get as far as drilling to investigate the local rock. Seventeen years later, in 1999, a report from the House of Lords said any efforts to create a facility for 'deep geological disposal' would need to involve communities from the start. Selecting a site is complicated – like everything else in this story – by the extreme timescales involved. The waste will stay toxic for so long, scientists must take into account how the ground itself is going to shift over the next 100,000 years. Yes, that's 100 millennia from now. For context, it's been about 100,000 years since Homo Sapiens first left Africa. 'We're looking for rocks that have been stable for millions of years or hundreds of millions of years,' said Professor Hyatt. 'The reason for that is the radioactive waste hazard decays quite quickly over the first sort of 300 years, and then you're left with this tail that decays a bit more slowly. 'After the order of 100,000 years or so, the radioactivity has decayed to a level approximately equal to the original uranium ore.' There are currently three sites in contention to house the UK's geological disposal facility (GDF): Mid-Copeland and South Copeland in Cumbria, and Theddlethorpe in Lincolnshire. All are free to withdraw from the process whenever they like. That approach is influenced by Onkalo in Finland, a similar project which is decades ahead of the British effort. Pasi Tuohimaa, a spokesperson for site operators Posiva, said: 'None of the projects in the world fail because of not knowing the technology. Instead, they fail because of the political situation or bad communications.' But aside from investment in community projects, the main incentive for the selected sites to stick with the proposal is the sheer scale of it. The storage vaults for the UK's 750,000m3 of waste will be constructed in tunnels covering an area of around 36km2 at a depth of between 200 and 1,000 metres. If all goes to plan, the process of depositing will begin in the 2050s and end about 175 years later. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Like a medieval cathedral, generations of people will work on the project, knowing they will never live to see the moment it is backfilled and the contents are (fingers crossed) never seen again. It's almost certainly the biggest infrastructure project in the UK that most people have never heard of. As Professor Hyatt says, it's a 'long, long, long, long mission life.' More Trending The Finnish nuclear waste at Onkalo will be stored in rock that has barely moved in close to a billion years, which – according to Mr Tuohimaa – demonstrates how safe it is. 'The nuclear industry is the only industry in the world that knows where its waste is after the next ice age,' he said. 'When there's no London left, and there's two kilometres of ice on top of northern Europe, there's no Stockholm, there's no Copenhagen, everything is demolished – but we know where our waste is.' This story was first published on September 1 2024. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: The teenage Orkney killer who got away with murder for 14 years MORE: Rich people 'will have robot butlers by 2030′ – but there's a major flaw MORE: What is New World Screwworm and can it spread to humans?
