Wilson da Silva, Editor of COSMOS
Credit: Louise Lister/COSMOS
Wilson da Silva is Editor of COSMOS magazine and tells Hugh Liney all about National Science Week and how science could mean more for business and government.
Hugh: Talking to Wilson da Silva who is the editor of COSMOS and for the wrap up of Science Week which was held recently around Australia, Wilson tell us a little bit about the importance and achievements of scientists that were celebrated in Science Week, also perhaps some of the purposes and functions of Science Week itself.
Wilson: As you say Science Week is pretty important, it is essential to our lives, we couldn’t go a day without science, whether its weather reports - which use satellite data telling us what the weather is going to be like here or in the next month - to using mobile phones or email. 21st century life is totally dependent upon science, but the sad thing is not many people understand how science works, where it comes from, we actually have a shortage of people choosing the sciences as a career. One of the things the federal government did 12 years ago was create National Science Week, a kind of festival to highlight the work of science and also career options for scientists. It's also to outline to everyone not only are there great jobs in science, but the future is made by scientists and that we really need to start appreciating science. This year was very very successful; there were more then 1,000 events around the country, something like 1,000,000 people attended those events, which were largely volunteer-run things like museums and schools. Some science journalists will put on events to highlight the activities of science and how important they are. If you are working in technology today or working in any large company and you are ignorant of science, you are missing opportunities, so its really worthwhile paying attention.
Hugh: That’s a good point to make, one of your more tangential projects and part of the COSMOS involvement was a program called HELLO FROM EARTH. Can you explain the HELLO FROM EARTH program?
Wilson: Sure, so the Science Minister Kim Carr approached us on that and asked if we had any ideas that might interest the media in Science Week, and we proposed to 'Twitter to the stars' - to actually create a website to collect messages of up to about 160 characters, kind of like a text message, and these would be moderated by us at COSMOS. At the end of Science Week, we could transmit them to the nearest Earth-like planet outside our Solar System. We personally can’t transmit it - we need a very large radio dish. Luckily NASA and the CSIRO provided it, the Tidbinbilla tracking station outside of Canberra, which is actually one of the largest dishes for this kind of stuff its maintaining contact with over 40 spacecraft at anyone time out at the edges of the Solar System and some of the them outside the Solar System. So they have very powerful equipment and they agreed to come on board, we collected the messages and - I have to tell you, it was extraordinarily popular. Within 13 days we 1.25 million page impressions, we had 250,000 people who came to the site and checked it out, and we had 26,000 messages collected for transmission. Interestingly 41,000 people registered but only 26,000 could really decide what it was they wanted to say. The media coverage was extraordinary; we had 9,000 blogs talk about it, we had 6,000 messages on social media like Twitter and Facebook, and we had 1,000 newspapers - that we know of - covered the story. And hundreds upon hundreds of radio interviews. If the job that the Science Minister asked us to do was to attract people to Science Week, I think we did it well! At the end of Science Week, August 28th, we actually went down to Canberra to the big radio dish DSS43 that is massive - the dish is the size of two football fields, and the tower in the middle which transmits the signal is the size of a 5-storey building.To watch that thing tip toward you as it points to a Gliese 581d is actually quite impressive. And we watched it transmit all 26,000 messages three times over a two hour period. The intensity of the of the broadcast was equivalent to 300 billion mobile phones transmitting at once.
Hugh: They are fantastic figures and a great story, the potential popularity of communication of scientific messages. You yourself have more detailed reason as to why astronomy and space exploration both made such a positive continuing effect on mankind over the centuries - tell us a bit about that theory.
Wilson: Absolutely, astronomy is something that is kind of fun. But in reality astronomy - if you were a Chinese emperor thousands of years ago your mandate depended upon you being able to predict when the right season for planting and harvesting - well, that kind of stuff was created by astronomers, they gave you this information. At the beginning of each dynasty a new calendar was created - because calendars drift over time and the seasons don’t quite match - and one of the first things a new emperor did to establish his reign was to create a new calendar. Astronomers give us things like time right down to a billionth of a billionth of a second, which we rely upon for computer transmissions - email would not be possible without it. When you send an email with an attachment, each message is broken down into little packets, and those packets are a few kilobytes each, and a message is broken into thousands or billions of packets and re-assembled at the other end. Now, if you don’t have exact timing on your computer down to a billionth of a second, the message is going to come together incorrectly. So that’s a simple example. But astronomy more importantly - in the 21st century and more recently - is giving us information about climate change. I mean we wouldn’t have discovered climate change if it wasn’t for the study of the atmosphere of Venus, for example. It was when scientists like James Hansen - who got his Phd studying the atmosphere of Venus - he wanted to understand why Venus is so hot. Venus, you know, is very much like Earth - like a twin sister, the same size a little bit closer to the Sun but largely the same. Yet it is horribly horribly hot, its 400 degrees centigrade on the surface. He wanted to figure out why that was, and he found there was a lot more carbon in the atmosphere than existed on Earth and thought, "Wow, it's a runaway greenhouse effect. I wonder what’s been happening with carbon on Earth?" He went back and realised that carbon had been increasing for the last 100 years - so we became aware of global warming through studying another planet. Nuclear winter - the possibility that nuclear exchange could create a blanket of dust that could lock out the Sun and freeze up the Earth - that was discovered by studying Mars and its atmosphere. So there is a lot of stuff like that. Even the hole in the ozone layer was discovered again looking at the chemistry of the surface of other planets. Trying to understand basic problems in science, challenging problems, which you might say, look it has no business application. Well, actually it could save lives, create a whole new industry. And if it wasn’t for the discovery of antibiotics, somebody just looking at mould and wondering what kind of mould is this and what does it do - well, that’s how we discovered antibiotics, which have saved billions of people. Basic, curiosity driven research is essential to encourage our scientists to take up the challenge and tackle those big questions.
Hugh: That’s a good point. I wanted to come to the matter of business because many listeners are in business and government and you have noted that Kim Carr has been proud advocate of Science Week. What the state of government and business performance in the scientific world at this stage in Australia? And science policy for that matter, what your overview?
Wilson: Look over the last 15-20 years things have gone up and down in science policy. We do have a lot more government funding, which you would expect; Australia probably spends more then it needs to. We probably need more business R&D. Having said that, the incentives for business R&D which have gone up and down over the last 15-20 years, they were very good during the late 80’s early 90’s when there was a 150% tax deduction. That scheme was changed and had been modified by various governments and various ministers. I think we are back to a point where business is more comfortable about investing in R&D. We need our business people to not think of science as something as you put in the attic and ignore because you don’t understand science. Science and technology innovation is creating the market of tomorrow. If you think that you shouldn’t have to worry about science and technology, it's like saying oh this Internet stuff will just go away. I have a friend that I rib every now and again because I remember he said to me in 1992 "Look, email is just a fad". These things are not fads; whether it is social media - which is a great way to keep, in touch with your customers, it's a fantastic way of having direct contact - there are things you cannot ignore. And if you do, your not abreast where it's going to go in about 10 or 20 years. I will give you an example: there is something called the Technological Singularity. Every 18 months to 2 year, the processing power of the computer chip doubles and this has been happening since 1968 and it seems to, we are starting to get to the physical limits of atoms around 2011-2015. Engineers are finding some cool ways around it, and processing power keeps doubling. So it's forecast that somewhere between 2025 and 2030, the processing power of computers will surpass the processing power of the human brain. Now if that happens, I don’t think we will get a robot that is going to take over the world. We are going to see is large-scale problems that require massive amounts of processing power will suddenly become very cheap, because the thinking that you and I can do - very complex analysis - can suddenly be done by compute. And if it's possible that within a few years of that point - because they keep doubling every two years - that we will have something that is not only has the processing power of a human in 2030 but in 2032 will have double that power, and then quadruple, etc. Eventually we will likely see the rise of artificial intelligence of a kind that we can talk to and interact with. And then, some of the most difficult problems in science - whether its cancer or massive amounts of data compression or climate change - we will actually be able to assign to computers, which are way more powerful than the human mind. And perhaps we will find solutions we cannot possibly imagine. Now imagine what that would do to an economy? Scientists look at this and predict that we will see another Industrial Revolution. The last time something like this happened, manual labour was replaced by machine, and we saw the economy double seven times - it was an extraordinary spike in economic growth. Some people have predicted that we are going to see something like 30 times that if the Technological Singularity happens.
Hugh: It is lovely to hear you talk about technology advancement creatively rather then a threatening way that some writers present it. Which brings me to indeed your own population. COSMOS and you have an issue out now in early October - tell us what’s about in the recent issue.
Wilson: Yes, it is exciting - but, as you said, it can be used for good or for evil. One of the things that science has discovered is that although we don’t understand how memory works and how memories are formed in the brain, they have found that the can actually start manipulating them, deleting certain memories particularly for people with post-traumatic stress disorder. They might have been a soldier in Rwanda or in a bushfire - I interviewed a bushfire fighter and all of his mates died but he survived, the extraordinary pain and stress he feels, he often breaks out in a sweat. It’s a terrible thing that people have to endure. Scientists are involved in looking at how to minimise these effects and the pain of those memories, and in some cases, scientists have found ways of editing those memories or actually deleting them. Now, of course, people immediately think of science fiction and ideas of deleting memories and mass population and looking at regressing or enhancing memories that you want to keep.
Hugh: Well I am certainly advocating for our listeners to get a copy of COSMOS.
Wilson: I should have mentioned also one of the things that we deal with, we are talking about Memory Engineers, the cover story, but we also discuss the revolution that electric cars will bring. This is dramatic. What we have got used to in the last 100-110 years with the petrol engine is a whole system of, you know, where you buy your car, you get your petrol at a petrol station and people who sell you cars make the margin on the parts they sell you. That economy is going to be turned completely upside down by the revolution of the electric cars. We think that electric cars will be the same as they are now, like hybrids with petrol and electric engines that can still go to service stations. But once you go to 100% electric, the whole ball game changes.Yyou have companies like Better Place who say, Look, in the same way mobile phone services rent you or provide you with a handset and a service, and you pay and you get the phone free, potentially you can get your car free if you pay for a car service. Or maybe you have a car and you buy it without any batteries, and they will provide battery and lease it to you, for example if you are going on a long holiday and there is not enough power, you can do a battery exchange and get your battery changed within 10 minutes. It changes the economy of cars, because electric cars have very few parts - they don’t require much servicing, they don’t require expensive parts that need to be replaced all the time, they have very simple engines. So if you suddenly have a whole bunch of electric cars, people don’t go to petrol stations, they charge overnight at home. You can see that if you are selling a cars, you need to find a new business model. That is an example the coming revolution. It's kind of here already - the first large scale sales begin next year, China is well into this and has invested dramatically and there is a large company there that is rolling out electric cars. There are several companies in the U.S. doing it, Europe is getting onto the bandwagon, Israel is there and Australia - which is going to roll our cars in either Canberra or Melbourne. The future sometimes has a nasty way of catching up with you, and the future of electric cars that you think is only in science fiction films- well, it could be a lot closer than you think. It could actually change the world that we know today.
Hugh: For that fascinating glimpse, thank you Wilson da Silva.
