(How) Can you make a space telescope sustainable?

Can Artificial Intelligence be the key to creating sustainable, climate-friendly and socially responsible space missions?

 

SwissCognitive Guest Blogger: Dr. Daniel Angerhausen, Founder and Director, Explainables, Senior Scientist, ETH – “(How) Can you make a space telescope sustainable?”

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I am part of a team that is building a space mission that will search for life in space. At the same time we are having serious problems keeping the only planet we have so far found in the universe to have life – our own – habitable. In this context, this question is the one that keeps me awake at night. Spoiler: I have no answer to it … yet. I am optimistic though, that with the help of the Swiss Cognitive and other global networks of optimistic people we can take the next steps towards this goal. And on the way there learn a lot about making space exploration more environmentally friendly.

I am currently working as a project scientist for the LIFE (Large Interferometer For Exoplanets) space mission at ETH in Zürich. The primary goal of this future space telescope concept is to systematically scan our galactic neighbourhood for planets that could harbour life on their surface. By searching for warm and rocky planets within 100 light years from us and testing their atmospheres for so-called biosignatures such as the combination of oxygen and methane we will be able to answer one of humanity’s oldest questions: “Are we alone in the universe?”. Our generation is the first in history that has the technology to answer this question. But it is also our generation that is facing the biggest challenge in history to keep our planet habitable for the civilization we have developed.

It is a big misconception and has always been a point of public criticism that space exploration (and all “blue sky” research really) is a waste of taxpayers’ money. Just go to the comments section on every article about the latest scientific results. But we are not shoveling millions of dollar bills into rockets and just to burn them in orbit. A lot of the money is spent to educate young scientists, who then leave academia and contribute to society in various ways. Another large fraction goes into the development of new technologies in collaboration with the industry that then leads to practical applications, which we can only speculate about before. It can be shown that every franc spent for such research will come back three- to fivefold to a society, unfortunately not on time-scales of an election cycle. In that sense basic research is like a third pillar for a society.

Yet I wonder if in times of a looming climate catastrophe I am investing my time, skills and resources into the wrong thing – living in the ivory tower staring outside ignoring the problems right here. And sometimes I have this conversation with other researchers who feel similar. We comfort ourselves with the thought that some of the research on exoplanetary atmospheres helps us to understand the Earth’s atmosphere better, that the students we teach will one day develop the technology that saves us from this crisis or that the thought experiments we exercise about alien civilizations trigger reflection about our own behavior as a planetary society.

This question keeps me up at night: Can we justify the tons of CO2 to gain that knowledge about the abundance of life and our place in the universe? Is there really no way to make a mission like LIFE sustainable, climate friendly and socially responsible? I don’t have answers but I hope that some of you who read this have pieces to this puzzle. Do you think Artificial Intelligence could be a key? Do you have experience with making similar projects sustainable? If so: Please reach out to me if you have. Let’s have this conversation.

Der Beitrag (How) Can you make a space telescope sustainable? erschien zuerst auf SwissCognitive, World-Leading AI Network.

Source: SwissCognitive