When you’ve spent 157 days, eight hours and 42 minutes in space, you get a rather different perspective on life back beneath the clouds. “I cannot watch the news because it’s highlighting all of the negative things that are going on because that’s what sells, right?” she says. In the coming years, she looks forward to a time when some of the world’s most influential people are getting ready to become pioneers of space tourism. “I would tell the conservation movements and the environmental movements stand by because there’s a lot of energy that’s about to be put into your cause and you should be able to jump on that."
As the world struggles to act on climate change, it’s a dose of perspective we definitely need right now. “They’re not just going to be a bunch of random astronauts who are having this conversation anymore,” Magnus says. “That’s going to be very interesting.” She speaks to WIRED about fear, protest and the next big breakthroughs for science and technology.
It’s driven by fear. I run into people, for example, who question that we ever went to the moon or even that I went to space and I don’t get angry when I meet these people, I feel sad for them, because they are afraid of a world where that’s possible, right? And so these people are trapped in these little comfortable spheres that they can’t get out of and I think that’s what’s happening with some of this backlash is the world is changing so fast now, we’re all connected, right? And so you’re having to deal… as a generic person, you’re having to deal with a very noisy landscape. Where before we grew up in villages, right? You live in your village, you know everybody, you understand the culture of the village, it’s all very comfortable, you know your place, you know exactly how people are going to react because you all know each other. Anything that comes in new is looked at with suspicion because it’s different and that’s kind of what’s going on on a global scale.
If your level of security about you and your place in the world is dependent upon having a closed mind like that, and refuse to even believe that amazing things are possible, you’re limiting your potential as a human being. You’re trapping yourself in a very small box. You’re choosing to trap yourself in a very small box and I feel sad for those people. I don’t get angry with those people and quite frankly – media person – I think one of the things that hurts all this too is if you look around in the media, and the internet is not helping this because people self-select what they’re reading, there’s a lot of negativity.
I can go out and march for science, but that’s not helping me get some person next to me comfortable with science, which is really what the bubble is all about, right? And so my whole question about those marches is – and I don’t know the answer to this question by the way – how do you take that energy and that passion and that clear sense of purpose and translate that into actions on a more local continuous everyday basis to get people enmeshed with the subject matter and the purpose of that march? The protest is good because it shows that here’s a critical mass of people who care about this subject. Awesome! With anything like that, you’ve got to start locally, right? Let’s get organised. You people from Chicago, go start a programme in your school system and work with the students or you people from Kansas City, go start an after-school programme or go and talk to your local congressman and make sure they understand that science is important so that they’re going to vote on the right bill.
If you look globally, there are a couple of things that come to mind. One is water – it’s amazing how many people don’t have access to a steady, clean, reliable source of water. There are a lot of small entities out there trying to figure out how to do that, so I think a technology that helps give people access to water is really important. And then access to information. What you can get online now from an educational viewpoint is huge.
Say you’re in the middle of the Gobi desert and you have no ability to physically go anywhere else. You’re limited by the opportunities that you have, but now you’ve got the internet. I can now, as that individual, go online and I can educate myself in veritable physics and who knows what else. You could be the next Einstein out in the middle of the desert somewhere but never get the opportunity because the potential isn’t realised. But what if he or she is connected to the internet? It has to start with water, connectivity and energy.
We’re on the cusp of a very interesting sociological experiment. I'm sure you’ve heard us talk about how our perspective changed when we saw the planet, you have a different view of the planet. People who are going to do suborbital tourism, where you go up, you get five minutes of microgravity, you see the beautiful planet, you come back – that’s going to be enough for them to get the same perspective change.
The people who are paying to do this – and it’s not cheap – these are people with means, these people are famous people. They’re going to have this experience and they’re going to have this perspective change and they’re going to come back and they’re going to want to evangelise about this experience. I'm interested to see what happens when the conversations that we’re having today enter into popular culture. When the Apollo astronauts took a picture of the Earth from space, it created the environmental movement. Are we going to take our planet seriously when all of this becomes more of a popular culture conversation?
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
