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Since childhood, renowned space scientist Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock has had a “crazy dream” about travelling into space herself.
And while The Sky at Night presenter may never fulfil that dream (although she still lives in hope), she says she wishes other children would identify their own dreams to help motivate them to succeed.
“The driving force in my life has been that desire to get into space,” she says. “Even if I never make it, just by having that desire and that drive, that crazy dream, sometimes if things don’t go right I’ve been able to overcome barriers and have a successful career.
“So I say to every child, you reach for the stars, no matter what your stars are. For me, I physically want to go out to the stars and see what’s happening. But for others, it could be anything – have a big, powerful dream and see where that takes you, because it means that when you fall over, you’ll pick yourself up and find another route to get to where you want to go.”
It’s a compelling message from someone who had a challenging childhood herself, attending 13 different schools after her parents split up when she was young, and struggling with dyslexia, But space was in her sights from an early age – although when she said she wanted to be an astronaut, she was told to try nursing instead.
But her dream helped her get a physics degree and a PhD, before forging a glittering career in space science, working on projects including the largest space telescope ever built, the James Webb Space Telescope, before becoming a pioneering figure in communicating science to the public, especially school children.
The mum-of-one knows exactly how to effortlessly chat to children about the wonders of space and time, and her impressive ability to bring the complexities of the universe down to earth at a child’s level is one of the reasons she was chosen to give the 200th anniversary Royal Institution Christmas Lectures this year.
The lectures, which will be on BBC4 between Christmas and the New Year, are designed to explain scientific subjects in an entertaining way to a general audience, including young people.
In the lectures, Aderin-Pocock says she’ll be “literally speaking about life, the universe and everything,” and admits: “With only three lectures, it gives me a challenge, but I love a challenge.”
She says a major theme of the lectures will be are we alone in the universe, and how can we answer that question? She talks enthusiastically about how people are looking for life within our solar system, and one of the most popular destinations to look is Mars.
“There’s definitely life out there, and I’m pretty convinced there’s intelligent life,” she declares, although she says we might not even recognise where life is, adding with a chuckle: “I like to point out to kids that maybe the red rocks we see on the Martian surface, they’re alive, but we just don’t realise it. If they see the rover coming they might go ‘shhhhh’ , and when the rover goes past they start partying again. So there might be life out there, but we might not recognise it.”
While the search for life elsewhere in the universe is the “Holy Grail”, if we do eventually find life it probably won’t look like the aliens portrayed in films or in our imagination.
“One thing I like to do is explore what aliens might look like, because we have a loose definition of life and what we think life might be,” says Aderin-Pocock.
“But what is life? I guess it can be bacterial mass, but that’s not the life we’re really looking for. We’re looking for intelligent life, that can communicate with us, life that we can share experiences with. It seems to be a fundamental human thing that we don’t want to be alone.”
She says she believes there’s other life somewhere in the universe “because it’s a numbers game”, and explains: “In the past, we thought we were the centre of everything. Now that we know we live in a galaxy containing 300 billion stars, we know there are 200 billion galaxies out there with all those stars with all those potential exoplanets, so why would life just occur here?
“Probability would be skewed if life just occurred here. There must be instances where life has occurred in other places.”
But she says the problem is the universe is vast, explaining that the distance between our local star, the Sun, and the next-door star is 4.28 light years.
“So if we look at the next-door neighbour star, that’s 40 trillion km away, and travelling as fast as you can through space, that’s 16km per second, it will take 76,000 years to get there.
“And on top of that, how do the aliens find us? There are 300 billion stars in our galaxy, and we are one of eight planets going round one of those stars. How will the aliens know we’re here? “
Over the past 21 years, in her quest to make space easier to understand for ordinary people, and especially children, Aderin-Pocock says she’s spoken to 650,000 people, the majority of them being schoolchildren.
She’s aware that children can’t grasp the concept of the vast numbers of planets and distances in space, so when she speaking to school kids she often tries to break the figures down for them.
“There’s 300 billion stars in our galaxy – what does that mean? It’s trying to make these vast numbers, which do seem overwhelming, accessible,” she says.
“I say okay kids, we’re going to count from one to one billion doing one number a second – how long is it going to take? Is it more than a minute? About an hour? How about a week? And I actually say a billion seconds is 32 years.
“It makes an alien concept a little more accessible. But what I always like to add is a billion seconds, so that’s 32 years – you’ll be older than your parents by the time we get there.”
She adds: “Sometimes I’ve had letters saying ‘Dear Maggie, you came to my school and I started counting to one billion and I got to 572 and I had to go for supper.’”
As well as helping children get their heads around the huge numbers associated with space, Aderin-Pocock also tries to help them feel they’re actually a tiny part of space themselves.
“One of the things I love to ask kids, and it’s the title of one of my books, is am I made of stardust?, because space seems vast and different and cold, but the matter in you, me and everything else was made in the heart of a star. We are literally stardust.
“I mention the fusion process which powers stars and creates the elements. The universe started mainly with hydrogen, with a bit of helium, but all the other elements have been forged through the heart of stars, so we truly are stardust.”
The 2025 Christmas Lectures from the Royal Institution, with Dame Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, will be broadcast on BBC Four and iPlayer on December 28, 29 and 30 at 7pm.
