Stop fretting about asteroids, climate change real problem, more dangerous: Nobel laureate – EQ Mag Pro
A fortnight after NASA went to town with its success in changing the orbit of a flyby asteroid, Mayor, 80, professor emeritus at department of astronomy, University of Geneva, says he is a “little sceptical”.
“Don’t worry about asteroids, focus on climate change, it is more immediate and catastrophic.” Sir Michel Mayor, the 2019 Nobel laureate for physics, the man who first discovered an extra-solar planet — a planet outside the solar system — in 1994, says there may be life on other planets but space tourism is a bad idea.
A fortnight after NASA went to town with its success in changing the orbit of a flyby asteroid, Mayor, 80, professor emeritus at department of astronomy, University of Geneva, says he is a “little sceptical”. “It was quite a small asteroid.’’ Mayor believes it’s not prudent to put a lot of money into this, considering that there is a mere 1 percent chance of a very bad collision every century. “The damage can be catastrophic but it’s often localised, chances are the asteroid will hit an ocean, desert or mountain…We have seen events much worse than this,’’ says Mayor, who was here to attend a series of functions at Chandigarh University.
The larger the asteroid, the more difficult it is to change its orbit, he adds. “It was 66 billion years ago that an asteroid wiped out 75 percent of life on the planet. There is nothing you can do to change the orbit of such a humongous asteroid. That is why I think instead of investing in trying to deflect asteroids, we should use this money to prevent and mitigate climate change.’’
Mayor should know, for he has spent a lifetime studying the space. While growing up in the lap of the Alps in Switzerland, he was fascinated with geography and science. “When I finished high school, I decided to do physics and mathematics.” It eventually led him to study the velocity of stars. “Those days it was a very boring, very new domain.’’ It was a chance encounter with another astronomer at Cambridge University that led him to develop an instrument to check the velocity more efficiently in 1971. “It was fantastic,’’ he recounts. Two decades down the line, he developed a spectrograph for the national French observatory. “It was much more precise, 20 times better than the first instrument.” Eventually, it led him and fellow scientist Didier Queloz to discover the first exoplanet called 51 Pegasi b in 1994.
But these days, Mayor is more worried about earth than the space. The rising temperature and extreme weather events caused by climate change bother him no end. “This is a real problem, the result of human activity, all the fossil fuel we burn. This will not end life but it will make many parts of our earth uninhabitable, it will be cataclysmic for the people living there…once the waters start rising, many parts of your neighbouring Bangladesh will disappear. There will be a mammoth problem of refugees. Many parts of West Africa too will become too hot for human survival.’’
Mayor rues that politicians and governments are yet to realise the gravity of the problem. “Pollution isn’t caused by just one country, it has to be a united effort by all.’’
Ask him about the possibility of life on other planets, and he says, “You have two hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. Most of them are surrounded by planetary systems, a small percentage could have conditions conducive to life. But it has to be proved. Lots of labs are working to detect life in the universe. We can do chemical analysis of planetary atmosphere to find bio-matter. At present there is no instrument to do it, but we are close to inventing it.’’
Mayor is not a fan of space tourism. “It’s very good to take up the challenge of sending people to Mars but it’s completely different to see it as a tourist spot because life on Mars is a nightmare. It has no oxygen, there is no point in investing large sums in such enterprises.’’
Giving the analogy of Mount Everest, he asks, “We send mountaineers to climb the peak, but do we tell people to settle there permanently?’’
Mayor is equally dismissive about the idea of mining the planets. “It’s too much effort, yet another crazy idea floating around.”
The Nobel astrophysicist, who says he got hooked on science due to the Alps, has just one advise for children with stars in their eyes: “Study maths, use it as a tool. It is very handy.’’
Source: PTI
