SPACE
Once imagined as the heavens – home to a pantheon of gods and titans – space still has a special hold over humanity ’ s awe , curiosity and imagination .
Today , it beckons with the promise of new frontiers to explore , perhaps new life forms to discover and the tantalising possibility of further explaining our origins .
Irrespective of whether space is decoded through myth or science , it has always been assigned a special power over human affairs .
On a daily basis we tap into that power by using space-based satellites to support planetary communications , navigation , tracking , surveying and many more activities .
Driving space science is a model that depicts the Universe chaotically emerging from a Big Bang . It posits gravity as responsible for sculpting the newly formed and scattered matter into a cosmos , with the aid of dark matter and energy .
However , in arriving at this cosmology , some leading astronomers and astrophysicists have discovered a special new flair for solving Earth-bound problems .
Professor Amara explains that the ICG is very much engaged in astronomy ’ s core business worldwide : collaborating in space technology development and in the world ’ s largest observational studies using telescopes based in space and , one day , on the far side of the Moon .
But there is clearly something more being achieved at the ICG , given that its graduates are routinely recruited by the world ’ s leading technology companies – Google , Twitter , Netflix and more : “ These particular graduates are not hired for their expertise with the weird geometry of Einstein ’ s general relativity equations ,” Professor Amara says .
“ Rather , they have a special – and exceptionally rare – set of skills related to the level of meaning , understanding and value that we can extract from large collections of digital data .”
A flair for complexity
Today ’ s problems are not simple . In a sense , all the simple problems have been solved .
Today , we deal with issues that arise at the level of systems – entire ecologies , immune systems or global supply chains . Systems have many interacting parts that affect how the whole evolves , both in space and in time . It takes a great deal of observation just to survey the parts in a system .
In recent years , humans have been undertaking this surveying on a nearunfathomable scale . For example , they have been describing the entire DNA sequence in the genome of millions of living organisms . The result is data accumulating in enormous databases .
8 ISSUE 04 / 2022