Life must exist beyond Earth, a leading space scientist says, adding it is yet another example of human pride to suppose otherwise.
The British space scientist Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who will be giving the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures this year, said that while science had made giant leaps in the understanding of space, including the sheer size of the universe, there was still much to learn – not least whether humans were 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.”
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 said, noting the vast majority of the universe was made of dark energy and dark matter – mysterious substances people still did not 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, emphasising that scientific progress was not one eureka moment after the next, but a journey in which some theories fell by the wayside while others were taken further.
As Aderin-Pocock noted, the idea that the Earth was 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 that the astronomer Edwin Hubble subsequently showed the universe was expanding, while the eponymous Hubble space telescope later revealed there were 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.
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 people to share their memories of attending the Christmas Lectures and Ri Discourses.
Aderin-Pocock is also hoping to mine the institution’s archives for clips from previous years, including the lectures by the American astronomer Carl Sagan, to explore how 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), 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.”
Aderin-Pocock notes that 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 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
