There’s a rich and long tradition of public discourse here in the UK known as “conversations with cabbies”. Taxi drivers, especially London ones, are renowned for their ability to combine blunt opinion with a kind of cosmic rumination.
“Whenever I hop into a cab and they say ‘what do you do?’ and I say ‘I’m a space scientist,’ usually there’s a double take because ‘oh, you don’t look like a space scientist,’” Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock says, laughing and miming bafflement. “Then we have a conversation and there’s lots of questions: ‘I’ve always wondered about this,’ and ‘How about that?’ And it’s funny because that [interest in space] goes back through time, and every culture,” she adds. “It’s one of those fundamentals.”
Three decades into a career that has taken her from the Ministry of Defence to the Atacama Desert, and regularly beamed her on to TV screens, though not — yet — into space itself, Aderin-Pocock, 57, is quite used to smashing preconceptions. Over the past 21 years as a science communicator, she has given talks to “about 650,000 people”, including school kids, students, diplomats and world leaders. She will be adding thousands more this month when she delivers the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, a series of public talks inaugurated in 1825 by the English scientist Michael Faraday, at the charity’s historic Mayfair headquarters.
“My first thought, because it’s the 200th anniversary, was that I wanted to do the voices of space past, the voices of space present, the voices of space future,” she says. “Now we’re going to be talking about the search for life.”
We are meeting just around the corner from the RI at another revered institution: The Wolseley restaurant. The dining room is one of the grandest in London (over three years since founders Jeremy King and Chris Corbin were unceremoniously ousted from the company that owns it, the place still looks the part) and we are tucked into a hushed antechamber near the entrance, overlooking Piccadilly.
As we study the drinks menu — and together settle for non-alcoholic cocktails — Aderin-Pocock expands on her theme: “I truly believe there’s life out there because it would be conceited to think not,” she says. “It’s a numbers game — just within our galaxy there are 300bn stars. Let’s say each one has just one planet going round it, why would life just occur here? But the problem is, the distances between the stars are so vast, will we ever find each other?”
Earlier this year came the clearest evidence yet of extraterrestrial life when an exoplanet named K2-18b, some 120 light years away, was discovered to have high levels of specific molecules that on Earth are only produced by living organisms. The data was supplied by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — “an amazing beast”, Aderin-Pocock says — which launched in 2021 and for which she helped create an instrument known as a spectroscope. It’s these spectroscopes that are able to analyse light reflected by distant planets to understand the chemical signatures of elements within their atmosphere.
“Stars give out light because of fusion, reactions happening in their centre, but planets don’t actually give out light . . . ” she says, whisking me off into a brief history of time: the Big Bang, the gradual formation of stars and galaxies, the whole concept of light years. Later, there are moments, listening to my interview recording, when I wonder if playback is on double speed. Aderin-Pocock flits between bashful erudition and breathless awe; words, numbers and beautiful ideas tumble out. “With the JWST we are looking at light that is billions of years old. We are looking at objects that no longer exist, because it’s taken so long for the light to get to us . . . It’s like a time machine. We can analyse the early universe.”
Menu
The Wolseley
160 Piccadilly, London W1J 9EB
Chicken schnitzel £24.50
Lemon sole £39.25
Steamed broccoli £6.75
Mandarin sorbet x2 £15
Pink Mountain £9.75
Botanical Fizz £9.75
Mint tea £5.95
Cappuccino £6.25
Bottle Kingsdown water £5.95
Cover charge £5
Total inc service £146.62
While my head gently spins, we break off to order. Since the birth of her now 15-year-old daughter, Aderin-Pocock has suffered from a severe dairy allergy, so having noted this with our waiter, and studied the menu carefully, she opts for chicken schnitzel. I go for lemon sole, and we order a side of steamed broccoli to share. Our neighbours include an elderly couple absorbed in newspapers and — I’m guessing here — a twentysomething billionaire eating his breakfast. Staff carry themselves with an easy confidence that implies we will be well looked after.
With drinks in hand — mine a “Botanical Fizz”, hers a “Pink Mountain”, a mix of grapefruit juice and alcohol-free rosé — I ask about her early interest in space, which, she tells me, was nurtured by the 1970s British children’s TV show The Clangers and, later, novels by sci-fi writers such as Julian May (“fascinating stuff, and the women had proper roles”) and John Wyndham.
“I went to buy a telescope, I think from Argos, but it was very cheap. We didn’t have much money (we were living in a council flat) and it had plastic lenses. It didn’t perform very well,” she says. Walking home from school in London, she would be mesmerised by the Moon above Hampstead Heath and, determined to understand it better, she signed up for telescope-making classes, which were, and still are, offered by Camden council. “Average age was about 50, all white, all male, and me. But we had something in common, making telescopes . . . You [start with] two chunks of glass and you put an abrasive powder in between them . . . and you just grind away . . . I used to watch Star Trek [while working on it].”
It was not an easy childhood. Aderin-Pocock’s parents, both Nigerian immigrants, went through an acrimonious split when she was four years old. “Very unusually for the 1970s, my father [at a certain point] won custody of all four of his daughters,” she says. “In his mind, he was bringing up four girls in what he saw as a hostile environment. When he came to the UK there were still signs saying ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No dogs’. So he felt that education was the key.” It was her father, who had ambitions to study medicine but instead found work with PizzaExpress, who encouraged her love of science. “He gave us the ability to think, and I can never thank him enough for that.”
Our main courses arrive, and she begins to tackle an enormous slab of schnitzel. My lemon sole “grenobloise” looks immaculate, with capers and tiny croutons pepping up a pale, creamy sauce. But the fish is somehow both lukewarm and overcooked.
A complicated home life, and undiagnosed dyslexia, were just two of the challenges that Aderin-Pocock faced growing up. She ended up attending 13 different schools — some of them inner-city comprehensives, others smart girls’ boarding schools — in 14 years. “I think my accent must have morphed to fit in, because I speak with I think they call it home county vowels,” she laughs. “It’s given me that variety of perspective. So I don’t feel I am better than anyone, but I don’t feel anyone is better than me. I can blend in anywhere.”
That sounds like the positive take, I say. How on earth did she cope with that level of disruption? “I think I’m definitely a glass-half-full sort of person.”
Perhaps her recollections have been smoothed by time and with telling. She goes on to say that once, during a period living with her mother in Hastings, she ran away from home. It’s something she hasn’t spoken about before, though it will feature in her upcoming memoir, and she suddenly seems reticent and slightly guarded. The episode proved a turning point. She went on to blag her way into the top set at a new, more supportive school, which helped her refocus her sights on university and beyond. “I reckoned I sacrificed someone else’s happiness, so I was going to grab this opportunity with both hands.”
Aware that Elon Musk et al have yet to muscle in on our lunch, I pivot to the race for space, but delay the inevitable by grilling her for her views on Blue Origin’s all-female space flight last April. “I think the optics weren’t that good,” she says, carefully sidestepping my invitation to ridicule the flared flight suits and cringeworthy onboard antics of the crew, which included Jeff Bezos’s then fiancée Lauren Sánchez and the pop singer Katy Perry.
“It seems a shame that [fashion] was what they were focused on,” she adds, “because we’re looking at returning to the Moon . . . with [the Nasa space programme] Artemis. So far, there have been 12 people actually land on the Moon and they’ve all been American, white and male . . . So it’s exciting times. They want to send a woman, they want to send someone from a different ethnicity, and to send a non-American. I keep saying ‘send me!’ but they’re not returning my calls!”
After her PhD in mechanical engineering (during which time she met her husband), Aderin-Pocock worked for the Ministry of Defence, developing missile warning systems for fighter jets and handheld devices for landmine detection, before working as part of an Imperial College team on the Gemini telescope in Chile. In 2023, Mattel unveiled a Barbie in her image to celebrate her role in promoting Stem careers for girls.
We have chosen to finish with mandarin sorbets, and the waiter sets down our coupe glasses with a flourish. “Wonderful, thank you,” Aderin-Pocock says. “Is this dairy-free?” There follows a confused conversation about whether the tuile on top is dairy-free or just gluten-free. Various waiters dart back and forth.
“We are investigating.”
“Fantastic. I’ll hang fire,” my good-humoured guest replies.
While we wait, she reassures me that she always carries an EpiPen, and says she has recently become an ambassador for the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, an allergy awareness charity named after teenager Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, who died from anaphylaxis in 2016. The muddle is finally resolved, another serving is delivered, and we launch back into space.
Aderin-Pocock is pragmatic about the private investment pouring into the industry through the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin. She is also cautiously excited about some of the extraction opportunities that have been floated.
“People talk about helium-3 [a rare isotope that is abundant on the Moon], which we could use for fusion on Earth, which could provide good, clean energy as we move away from carbon-based fossil fuels,” she says. But she warns that we are in urgent need of new legislation to protect against exploitation. “What I’d love is a global consortium [independent of governments and not commercial in its interest] which actually decides these things,” she says. “The UN, because it’s done by proxy and veto . . . I don’t think it truly works.”
This lacuna in space regulation was highlighted earlier this year, when news spread of an asteroid, a potential “city killer” named 2024 YR4, thought to have a small chance of hitting Earth on December 22 2032. Infrared images from the JWST have since helped to downgrade the risk significantly — and there are organisations, including the UN-backed International Asteroid Warning Network and the Space Mission Planning Advisory Group, poised to react to such a threat — but the initial concern raised difficult questions about which countries would be responsible for destroying an apocalyptic asteroid and/or bearing the brunt of collateral.
“Of course, everybody has a vested interest,” she says, stressing “the impact of making global decisions, and getting a global consensus that we all go in the right direction at the right time”.
As for tactical options, these range from giving the asteroid a gentle nudge to what Aderin-Pocock describes as “Bruce and a team of plucky drillers”.
Armageddon? “The earlier you pick it up, the better, because you can deflect it. If something’s a long way away you can make a small deflection. As the asteroid gets closer, you need a bigger deflection so it doesn’t hit Earth . . .” Our elderly neighbours are still holding their newspapers aloft but are now eavesdropping intently and flicking us surreptitious glances. “And then there’s the nuclear [option], but you need to be careful about the shrapnel and where it’s going.”
The mandarin sorbet is refreshing but slightly crunchy with ice crystals, and has a tannic edge that neither of us can put our finger on. We sip our tea and coffee and muse on the im/possibility of deep space exploration.
“I am fascinated by philosophical discussions, but also the stuff of mathematics,” Aderin-Pocock says. If, as Einstein stated, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, she explains, it would take many millions of light years to travel from one side of our galaxy to the other. But in 1994, a Mexican physicist named Miguel Alcubierre proposed a warp drive solution that would — theoretically, at least — be capable of contracting space in front of a moving object and expanding space behind it, allowing for Star Trek-style long-distance travel. “[With the] Alcubierre drive . . . you could get to Proxima Centauri, our next-door neighbour star,” she says.
“The mathematics stands,” she adds, “but I think you need inordinate amounts of energy to actually warp space and time in this way. And we haven’t got access to that at the moment.”
As a presenter of The Sky at Night, the BBC’s long-running space TV programme (“older than the space age”), Aderin-Pocock is regularly called on to explain the intricacies of astrophysics and flag celestial events, and I’m keen to know what those of us with our feet firmly on the ground can look out for over the coming weeks. “There’s a nice comet, 31/ATLAS [discovered in July], which is going through at the moment . . . Comets are lovely because they’ve got beautiful tails . . .” (A follow-up email contains a tip-off about the Quadrantid meteor shower, which peaks on January 4 and promises up to 120 meteors per hour.)
I tell her about a night in mid-August when I lay on dewy grass watching Perseid meteors — so-called shooting stars — flaring against a backdrop of timeless constellations and a steady convoy of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. It was a view that seemed to encapsulate the deep mysteries and wild possibilities of our age.
Aderin-Pocock says her great hope is that humanity’s relationship with planet Earth will be transformed as a consequence of commercial space travel. She mentions “Earthrise”, the first colour photograph of Earth from space, taken during the Apollo 8 mission, on Christmas Eve 1968. She details the poignant beauty of that image — Earth a blue-and-white-swirled miracle, suspended above the grey lunar dust — and how it galvanised environmental activism in the years that followed.
“When we see our planet from space it changes our perspective of it. We see it as smaller and vulnerable and in need of protection, whereas when we’re here we drop bombs and argue and squabble. It can be a unifying thing.”
As the clamour of the new space era grows ever louder, Aderin-Pocock’s is a rare voice. One that speaks of ambition, yes — but reason and humility, too. “We’re on the cusp of something really exciting,” she says. “It would be lovely to get it right.”
Laura Battle is senior editor, FT Weekend
The 2025 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures will be broadcast on BBC Four and iPlayer on December 28, 29 and 30 at 7pm
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