Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock speaks on space travel future and aliens: "I'm not sure about alien abduction"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Dame Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock has been blown off course by cancelled trains. She has finally arrived at the Royal Institution in London to rehearse her Christmas Lectures on the furthest reaches of the known cosmos, but the journey was challenging. She laughs at the irony: “I was stranded. I was like, ‘Beam me up, Scotty’, but no one was listening.”

The Sky at Night presenter – whose dream of becoming a space scientist took root after watching an episode of Clangers – has slept for just three hours, but she’s fizzing with the energy that both fuels her insomnia and has made her a household name. “I have dyslexia and ADHD, my head is a-buzz with ideas. Sometimes it’s overwhelming,” she explains.

She’ll be pouring a slice of those thoughts into her three-lecture series, entitled Is There Life beyond Earth? and showing on BBC Four, covering Nasa’s plan to return humans to the Moon, potential signs of life on exoplanets, whether future human settlements could survive in space and how the James Webb Space Telescope – on which she worked in the design stages – is rewriting the story of the Big Bang.

Dame Maggie’s story is compelling – her parents separated when she was four, she was diagnosed with dyslexia at eight and attended 13 different schools. But she made her name in science because, she says, “I was lucky to have a powerful dream.” She also wants to hammer home the message that space is for everyone.

“Growing up, I thought space and astronomy were done by white guys in togas. You hear about the Greeks and Romans, you don’t really hear about everybody else. But every culture has looked up at the night sky. It’s the heritage of all of us,” she says.

However, our ancestors could never have imagined this current era of billionaire-fuelled galactic adventure, led by the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson. While Dame Maggie is optimistic that “more of us will get out there” despite the eye-popping cost of a ticket ($28 million for a maiden flight on Blue Origin’s New Shepherd rocket in 2021, for example), she has concerns.

“Space is too important to leave to the vagaries of billionaires,” she says. “There might be life out there. How will we interact with that? The nightmare is that we exploit rather than embrace space. We need to get legislation in place before we spread our wings because, as humans, we have a tendency to make a mess of things.”

Is she confident that we will find other lifeforms some day? “I’m pretty convinced there’s life out there. I’m not sure about alien abduction, because space is vast!

Even if aliens are there, I think they might find it quite challenging to find us.”

As a space educator who’s spoken to some 650,000 people through her talks – “I’m knackered, but it’s a joy” – what’s the one thing she would change about our perception of space? “People say, ‘You spent all this money on space. What’s it for?’ They don’t ask that about art or poetry. I worked on the James Webb telescope, but most of my time is spent on observation satellites that look at our planet and tell us about climate change or help when a disaster hits. They benefit our planet, but people don’t really see that.”

She’d also like us to prise ourselves away from our phones and marvel at the sky, just like our ancestors did. “Stuck at the station this morning, people were on their phones. It’s a beautiful day, the sky was blue. I looked up and felt the sun on my skin. Every so often, look up, because it makes your heart sing.”

Despite all her achievements – from developing hand-held instruments to detect landmines to becoming the first black woman to win a gold medal in the Physics News Awards – Dame Maggie has one ambition that she is yet to achieve, to actually get to space. “So far, 12 people have walked on the Moon. They’ve all been white, they’ve all been American and they’ve all been male. Now Nasa has said they need to send a woman, they need to send someone who isn’t American and they need to send someone who isn’t white.

“I keep saying, ‘Me! Me!’, so we’ll have to see.” Train timetable permitting, expect to see her there.

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The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Is There Life Beyond Earth? air Sunday 28th to Tuesday 30th December at 7pm on BBC Four and iPlayer.

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