We’re living in a tremendously virtual age where many young
people think that all of the discoveries that they need to make will happen on
their laptops and smartphones.
For me, it’s more important than ever to reintroduce a
sense of physical exploration, to get out there into strange, hostile and
challenging environments.
There is probably 99
per cent of deep oceans and all of space to left explore, and it is only by
putting humans into new physical locations that we’ll be able to make genuine
and crucial scientific discoveries. Human presence in
science is almost the definition of science.
It’s a human
endeavour to gather knowledge, not just a machine endeavour to gather data.
The robots we send into these environments don’t know what
to look for, and above all they don’t know how to be surprised by something
like the strange glint of a rock.
By Author, journalist and filmmakerPiers Bizony