I think everyone who attended Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock’s talk at WHS on Wednesday can agree that it was extremely informative and inspiring… so let’s delve a bit deeper into the key components and messages of the night.
In an interview by The Royal Society, Maggie describes how people often ask her: “You’re a black dyslexic kid from a broken home in London. How come you’re so interested in space?”
Maggie’s response to this was, “although dyslexia makes reading and writing quite hard, now I see it as my superpower because dyslexia makes me think of things differently”. I found this response powerful because the ability to turn something many will see as a weakness into something that gives you the opportunity to have a different view on life is most definitely a superpower. Not only this, but Maggie mentioned how she attended 13 different schools throughout her education. She discussed how early on she felt ‘disconnected with school’ but because of the different streams she found herself in, was able to work harder than ever to achieve her GCSEs and A-Levels and then go on to achieve a degree in Physics and a PhD in mechanical engineering.
Maggie described how growing up as a black child in London she felt she didn’t fit in and how “Space was that wonderful thing that transcended all of that because when you look at the planet Earth from space, there are no countries, there are no boundaries, we’re just one people”. This phrase encapsulates so beautifully how we need to view life from different perspectives to overcome our differences.
‘Crazy dreams’. Maggie constantly reiterated this concept throughout the night.
Just one ‘crazy dream’ of hers was to meet the Clangers (pink creatures that live on a planet in space). You might be thinking that this dream is just too crazy to ever become close to a reality, however, you would be wrong there. In an episode titled ‘The Visitor’, Maggie is the inspiration for the astronaut character who lands on the Clangers’ blue planet out in space. So this crazy dream of hers was fulfilled: “When I watched the episode tears were streaming down my face because this was my childhood dream, my crazy dream.”
After working for the ministry of defence looking at missile warning systems, she landed her ‘dream job’. Maggie went from making her own telescope of 15 centimetres in diameter when she was a child, to working on one of the largest telescopes in the world at 8.1 metres in diameter. She describes it once again as: “I couldn’t believe it, another crazy dream coming true.” Are there any crazy dreams Maggie has not yet achieved? Maggie’s biggest dream, as I’m sure is very similar to some of yours, is to go to space. Even though Maggie was the first female astronaut to land on the Clanger’s little blue planet, her dream of reaching outer space has not yet been fulfilled, Maggie continued to remind us that we are the future and anyone of us could be that first female on the moon.
The future…
Pocock also gave us the insight into what projects are being developed as we speak. There is talk of having a mission to the Moon and building a moon base there, so we can perhaps launch missions to Mars from the Moon, as the centre of gravity is lower there. Now scientists are also looking beyond our solar system. There are 300 billion stars in our galaxy and most of these stars have planets orbiting around them, called exoplanets. A star called Trappist-1 has 7 exoplanets in orbit around it. Most of these planets are about the size of earth and four of them sit in the ‘goldilocks zone’ or ‘habitable zone’ where there is liquid water and water vapour detected in the atmosphere of these planets. So potentially, life could be possible here.
Another project Pockock touched on was project ‘Breakthrough Starshot’ with Stephen Hawking. Hawking is working on this other crazy dream by creating a solar sail in space which uses energy from the sun, by utilising photons that will hit this solar sail and transfer their energy to the sail, accelerating it. However, with project starshot, they don’t want to use energy from the Sun, but the energy from the Earth. Then, we can accelerate the solar sail to a fifth of the speed of light. If we were to do this, it would take just 20 years to travel to the next door neighbour star.
Maggie’s final note was this: “So each and every one of us should have a crazy dream, we should think big, we should be bold and we should love every second, it has worked for me and I think it can work for you too”.
