Transcriber: Ian Brown Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
I'm going to start with a bold assertion.
Everyone on this planet is at least a little bit curious
and fascinated with space and astronomy.
Even if you pretend you’re not, I think that deep down you really are.
It’s one of those topics of guaranteed endless fascination,
particularly to kids: dinosaurs and space.
And for good reason.
It’s deeply mysterious, awe-inspiring,
humbling, terrifying, exciting, all at the same time.
It’s the great beyond which we can see, but we can’t touch.
It’s so remote, and yet it can be deeply personal,
especially when we look up at the night sky and we see the stars.
The magnitude of it all defies comprehension,
and yet it can change our perspectives on our very existence.
In a way, it defines who we are, our ultimate global identity.
We are a species of creatures
who have become aware that we are living on a rock
which is hurtling through space around a star.
And that star is a roiling plasma, effusing hydrogen,
which itself is hurtling through space
around the centre of an enormous galaxy called the Milky Way.
And that galaxy contains billions of other stars,
plus all of their planets, and huge clouds of gas and dust.
And all of this is held together by an invisible force of gravity,
most of which is being produced by mystery stuff that we can’t see
and don’t understand, so we just vaguely call it dark matter.
And the Milky Way isn’t even special.
There are trillions of other galaxies out there,
each with their billions of stars and planets,
and everything seems to be expanding away from everything else
due to the expansion of space itself.
And this expansion, it’s not even slowing down,
it’s actually accelerating
due to the existence of something even more mysterious
called dark energy.
And all of this, ultimately,
is the definition of who we are, and where we are.
Life, the universe, and everything.
Is your head spinning?
Don’t panic.
You can’t tell me that’s not fascinating.
This fascination with space and astronomy
has certainly shaped my own personal identity.
Ever since I was very young, I was fascinated by the beautiful photos
from the Hubble Space Telescope of galaxies, and planets, and nebulae.
And then when I went to high school, I realized that mathematics and physics
are just languages, and once you understand them,
you unlock many more layers of depth, and beauty, and understanding
about the mysteries of the universe.
I was thirsty for more knowledge.
But how could a girl from the relatively small town of Mandurah
in the state of WA, Western Australia,
end up studying the mysteries of the universe?
Well, it never actually occurred to me to think that I couldn’t.
I just assumed that I would have to move to the eastern states of Australia,
or somewhere overseas.
But first I trundled off to university to get a degree in physics in WA,
and there I was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
I met two astrophysicists who had just moved to the state.
Their names were Peter Quinn and Lister Staveley-Smith.
And that moment changed my life.
Peter and Lister told me that they were here to boost WA’s bid
to host a global mega-science project, the Square Kilometre Array,
the SKA telescope.
They told me that this would be the world’s biggest radio telescope,
and that it could revolutionize our understanding of the universe,
and help to make WA a world leader in astronomy.
And I thought, whoa, what is a radio telescope?
(Laughter)
Well, I soon found out because I then began my PhD in radio astronomy in WA.
This is a radio telescope.
It’s called Murriyang, or the Parkes Telescope.
And it's actually a movie star.
It featured in the Australian film “The Dish.”
about the role it played in picking up the TV signals from the first moonwalk.
But it’s not just TV signals from spacecraft that Murriyang can pick up.
Objects in space, astronomical objects,
can glow at all the different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum,
including optical light that we can see with our eyes,
and radio waves that we can see with a radio telescope.
Because radio waves are actually a type of light, not a type of sound.
This is a time lapse video of me taking my observations with Murriyang.
I'm sitting in the control center underneath the dish there,
and I’m searching for the very faint signals of hydrogen gas
in distant galaxies, in galaxies far, far away.
And I’m doing this to try and learn more
about the raw fuel from which stars are formed.
The more we learn about astrophysics, the more we realize we don't know.
When did the very first stars blink into existence after the Cosmic Dark Ages?
Where did galaxies get their massive magnetic fields
and supermassive black holes?
Was there ever other life out there?
What the heck is dark matter and dark energy?
And what else is out there that we don’t even know about?
To answer many of these questions, we would need to look back in time.
We’d need some sort of giant time machine.
And so we’re going to build one.
The SKA telescope will be the vessel that takes us
on our voyage of discovery through space, the final frontier.
The thing about space is that it’s big, very big.
So big, in fact, that it takes light millions or billions of years
to travel between galaxies.
And this is the reason why looking deeper into space,
actually means looking further back in time.
If we can build a telescope that is so powerful
that it can see 13 billion light years away,
then we might be able to see the very first stars
forming in the universe about 13 billion years ago,
and everything that happened after that.
This is what the SKA will look like.
It’s not just one radio dish, like Murriyang,
but thousands, which will mostly be built in southern Africa.
And millions of these kind of radio antennae,
which are another type of radio telescope,
which will be built mostly here in Western Australia.
This will be run by a consortium of more than 15 countries,
and the headquarters will be in the UK.
It's been three decades in the planning,
but construction of the SKA starts this very year.
And the best part is that we don’t even have to wait
for the SKA to be built to start our time travel.
We’ve already built smaller precursor telescopes to start us on our journey.
This one in South Africa is called MeerKAT, it’s very aptly named.
There are two in the Murchison Radio Observatory
in Western Australia: the Australian SKA Pathfinder,
and the Murchison Widefield Array,
which looks like metal spiders, but detects longer wavelength radio light.
Even though these precursor telescopes
are only about one to three percent the size
of what the SKA will eventually be,
they are already the world’s most powerful radio telescopes,
and we've already made amazing discoveries with them.
I'll show you an example from my own work.
I use all of the precursor telescopes, but mainly MeerKAT,
because I currently work at the University of Cape Town in South Africa,
in preparation for the SKA.
And with MeerKAT, we discovered not one, but two giant radio galaxies
that no one had ever seen before.
Here they are.
The big, huge red beams are jets of glowing plasma,
which glow at radio wavelengths,
and are being shot out of supermassive black holes
at the centers of the galaxies.
Their existence gives us clues about how galaxies have evolved
over the history of the universe.
We think that the SKA will be able to find thousands more of these,
and I cannot wait to see what else the SKA will find.
Certainly, giant telescopes of the future, like the SKA,
will help us to define our collective identity as the human race
by helping us to understand more about the universe in which we live.
But, I think they can do even more.
What if astronomy could actually help us to improve our global identity?
I think it can, by helping us to achieve
the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
There are 17 goals.
They were established by the UN in 2015, with the aim of achieving them by 2030.
Here they are.
You don’t need to read them all now,
but they essentially define
how we collectively want to shape our future identity.
And astronomy can help. Let me show you how.
One of the most valuable and fundamental ways that astronomy can help society
is by providing a gateway for evidence-based critical thinking.
This kind of thinking we’re not really encouraged,
particularly in Western culture,
we’re often conditioned by advertising, the media, social media,
political figures, et cetera, to simply believe what we hear
without examining the messages critically.
But there is hope.
Just like the Apollo missions to the moon,
the discoveries of the SKA will inspire a generation.
And this is a powerful hook to generate interest worldwide,
in education, and so to achieve Goal 4: Quality Education.
Astronomy is a particularly powerful platform
to enhance interest in science and STEM subjects,
and so to increase the scientific literacy of society.
This means a widespread understanding and appreciation of the scientific method.
Hypothesis, critical analysis, conclusion.
At the crux of this is a society
experienced in evidence-based critical thinking,
empowered by evidence-based critical thinking.
And this is crucial for achieving all the Sustainable Development Goals,
on the large scale by the implementation of evidence-based policies,
and also on the individual day-to-day scale.
Take, for example, Goal 3: Good Health and Well-Being.
We have all had to endure an absolute storm of misinformation,
disinformation, and fake news surrounding really important topics
such as vaccine safety.
If we have enhanced scientific literacy and critical thinking skills,
we can better navigate this storm and make informed, healthy choices.
Astronomy can also drive us to achieve Goal 13: Climate Action,
by showing us just how truly unique our planet Earth is.
Thousands of planets have now been found orbiting around other stars,
and these are called exoplanets.
Some of them are in the habitable zone, or what we call the Goldilocks Zone,
which simply means that they are found at a distance away from their star,
where liquid water theoretically could exist.
But no planet has ever actually been found with liquid water.
And even if such a planet were found,
it would take many, many, many human generations to travel there.
And I’m sorry billionaires, but terraforming and colonizing Mars,
it's not going to happen.
The truth is simply that there is no other planet out there
that could sustain human life.
When we look down at our planet from space,
we see how thin and fragile the atmosphere is,
and we realize that we have to look after it.
If we mess up our planet, there is no backup option.
This is it.
There simply is no Planet B.
There’s something else that we notice when we look down at the Earth from space:
there are no borders.
They don’t really exist.
From this perspective, who we are ceases to be a question of nationality,
and becomes one of global identity.
Then from the perspective of the Earth looking up,
we realize that we're all under one shared sky.
This is something that unites us,
and can drive us to achieve Goal 16: Peace and Justice,
and Goal 17: Partnerships for the Goals.
And astronomy can connect us, not only here and now with each other,
but also with our ancestors,
because they also saw the same night skies as us.
It's another way that astronomy is a sort of time machine.
The First Nations people of Australia were some of the world’s first astronomers.
They knew all about eclipses, and sunspots, and variable stars.
They noticed patterns not only in the bright parts of the sky, in the stars,
but also in the dark patches.
For example, the dust lanes going through the plane of the Milky Way
form the shape of an emu.
Then across the Indian Ocean,
the San and the Khoi people are the First People of the Karoo region,
where the SKA will be built in South Africa,
and they have their own traditional knowledge.
For example, they identified the same constellation
as Western culture calls Taurus, or the Bull,
but to them it was the eland, which is a type of African antelope.
Tonight, if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere,
you can go somewhere dark and look up
to see the same emu and the same eland in the sky for yourself.
This is a beautiful photo of the emu rising above the land in South Africa.
By respecting and connecting with cultural astronomy,
we can celebrate both our cultural differences,
and the fundamental things we have in common.
Perhaps this can help us with empathy and compassion,
and help us to achieve Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities.
So these are some of the ways that astronomy can be leveraged
to help achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
But this can only happen if there is engagement with astronomy.
It’s our great privilege as astronomers to study the mysteries of the universe
with giant telescopes like the SKA.
It’s also our responsibility to reach out to you
and tell you about our work and our discoveries.
And we need you to reach back and engage with us.
So be curious, look up.
Engage with the new discoveries
coming from giant telescopes of the future like the SKA.
And tell others.
Tell your parents, your grandparents, your kids, your friends.
Share the perspective and the fascination.
And together we can become a people who respect and protect
the incredibly unique rock we live on,
who are humble in the face of the universe,
who work together to understand its many mysteries,
and in the process understand more about each other and ourselves.
Does this sound a little far-fetched?
As far-fetched as building a giant transcontinental time machine
to examine the very fabric of spacetime?
Perhaps it’s just about perspective.
Thank you.
(Applause)