I have reached the age where a few friends still have younger children, and one of them recently remarked: “There are two times in your life when you know the names of all the dinosaurs: when you’re seven and when your children are seven.”
I could not help draw similar parallels in my mind with the names of planets and constellations. As a young child, I remember committing to memory the names, order and composition of the planets of our solar system. By the time I was eight, I was convinced I wanted to become an astronaut; the first Maltese to make the atmospheric crossing towards our moon.
In the way Christopher Columbus made his way across the Atlantic in 1492, so too will humans revisit the sea of tranquillity and very likely place humans on Mars some 600 years later. And, in the same way Columbus sought funds from Italy and Spain, the superpowers of the time, space agencies from today’s superpowers are scrambling to fund missions to Mars.
We’ve seen China, India and, lately, the UAE launch ships to test the Martian waters. The traditional government-funded models for space exploration, exploitation and habitation have given way to the more entrepreneurial models of Elon Musk’s Space-X and Blue Origin, owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, bringing down the cost of space travel by several orders of magnitude. It is clear that the vehicle revolution for the 21st century is rocketry.
Malta has already made its first steps towards space. Recognising the role of space and space-based economy, we joined the European Space Agency as observers and later, the University set up the Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy. And, the state-of-the art planetarium at Esplora (if you haven’t taken your children, do so, sooner rather than later) was built to bring space and its related benefits closer to home.
I believe space still captures the minds of our youngest children and it should be used to continually stimulate the creative part of our brains- Kristian Zarb Adami
More recently, the government brought together stakeholders to form a space taskforce, whose remit is to chart a course for Malta’s space economy. In the same way the aeroplane revolutionised international travel and trade in the middle of the last century, the spaceship will continue the evolution, as mankind looks to inhabit (and hopefully not destroy) our neighbouring moon and planets.
Though I’m clearly biased, I believe space still captures the minds of our youngest children and it should be used to continually stimulate the creative part of our brains. American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once wrote that “science is imagination in a straitjacket”; and it is this imagination and creativity we want space to tap to inspire our children’s minds.
The best way to achieve this is through a novel education system. The information revolution brought about by the internet means we no longer need to train students to seek information in encyclopaedias or libraries.
The challenge nowadays is to teach students to use critical thinking, discussion and creativity to sift through the mountains of Google results each search returns; skills that still elude artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to this day.
My relative success at acing exams in the education system I was brought up in can be narrowed down to simple pattern recognition and memory exercise. Having poured over piles of past papers, there were few exam questions I hadn’t seen, which meant doing well was simply a memory-recall exercise, rather than a fundamental understanding of the subject matter.
That all changed when I went to university abroad. Sure, the past papers helped a lot, but the questions I was suddenly confronted with involved many more unseen problems taken from the cutting-edge research at the time and I was even faced with some unsolved problems. What the examiners were looking for was insight, creativity and a novel way of attacking new problems – that was something that took me a long time to learn.
And this is what universities should be about. In my opinion, they are responsible for four fundamental pillars of society: the generation of new knowledge; the transfer of knowledge and students’ education; the guidance of public, social and economic policies; and the economic dissemination of knowledge through spin-offs and entrepreneurial outreach.
It is the role of university to play a broader role in society than politics, have a far longer vision, be a far-reaching policymaker and be immune to the vagaries of short-term tactics and socio-political meanderings. Its role in societies has stood the test of time, with scholars of both the humanities and the sciences ensuring a richer tapestry of the society we live in.
While traditionally universities did not take part in the space race, it is now their time to join and to shine in such a novel industry. Universities and schools should encourage the young minds of today to create new solutions for space travel, space habitation and the conservation of planetary and lunar systems, to ensure a successful continuation of the human species… long after we have burned our own planet to the ground.
Kristian Zarb Adami is an astrophysics professor at University of Malta and University of Oxford.