 We were having a bit of a conversation before we started about what is an extreme environment. And I think already started to come up with some interesting definitions on that. What constitutes somewhere that's extreme enough that you might call it exploration when you're going there and not just research, and where does research and exploration connect in these environments? I'll say a little bit more about that, but we do have some terrific speakers, which is one of the reasons that Katie persuaded me to come along here. The other reason is that I love this topic and I love this place. I've spent a lot of time here and it always feels like coming home, so it's a pleasure to have the opportunity to do that again. So thanks to Katie for that. But we do have fabulous speakers who know a lot about different aspects of exploration and who can speak about the Arctic, Antarctic and about space. And these are three of the very significant, if you like, extreme environments that might immediately come to mind when you think about that. And one suggestion for what makes an extreme environment is it's a place where, how long could you survive as a human without any life support or intervention. And if that's in the sort of weeks or months or years, and it's probably not that extreme, and if that's in the minutes or seconds or milliseconds, then it's probably pretty extreme. So that's quite a nice definition. And another one is what's the nature of your relationship with it? Can you survive there, but you know that your survival is always contingent. You always have to know something about the place, have a real relationship with it, and at any moment it might be able to spit you out. And that's the kind of extreme that might apply to somewhere like High Mountains or the Arctic, but it doesn't really apply to places like Antarctica or space. There are places Antarctica, one of the reasons I was so captivated by Antarctica is it's one of the few places on Earth where you really have to take your own life support with you or you'll die. If you go into the interior of Antarctica, you don't have food or water or shelter or clothing, you have nothing, you just have ice, which is one of the reasons that I love it. So that's just a little comment about what we might mean by extreme environments. And I'm hoping that we can have a conversation about what constitutes exploration. If you're going there for professional reasons to do sensible research, taking exploration out of the picture, is there any romance left in these places? And should we be going there anyway? They're expensive, they're difficult, they're complicated, and this day aren't there easier ways of getting that kind of information? And where does our humanity sit in all of these questions? So that's some of the areas that I hope that we might cover tonight with our distinguished panel. And the way that the format is going to work is each of our panellists will say a few words, as I just have, about their feelings about this, their thoughts about it. And then we'll stop and we'll have a short break for you to fill up your glasses and hopefully for us to fill up ours. And then the rest of the time we'll be over to you. So it's going to be conversation, questions, and I'll say a bit more about that when we get to it. But I'm hoping that as you're listening, you'll be thinking of what you want to know and what you want to say so we can really get some good discussion going. So without further ado then, I'll introduce the first of our panellist, and that's Dr Michael Bravo. He's been quite heroic today. He ended up spending this morning in bed feeling terrible, but managed to drag himself out on his knees and elbows to be with us tonight. So thanks very much for that, Michael. Senior Lecturer in Geography, and is an associate of the Scott Perler Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. And over to you, Michael. Thank you very much. Is that good? Yes, perfect. I really did want to be here this evening, so I'm glad that they perk it up a bit in the afternoon. It's a fascinating topic. An exploration seems to me an interesting and kind of unlikely or difficult topic to feel heroic about today. But even last week, actually, friends of mine in Norway pitched to me and said, well, what do you think about sailing the northwest passage next year using the skis and a sail? Something in the pit of my stomach made me realise that this kind of zest for exploration and that's kind of a little bit of fear haven't entirely disappeared. I thought it would be worth saying something about kind of the history of exploration and its rather checkered career. So my view of exploration is it's rather like a phoenix which can rise from the ashes. And that is just when you think it's dead and buried, it seems to come back to life in one guise or another. And I think that's where we find ourselves today. So what is that? But on the one hand, there might be a kind of general... We might talk about the human passion, I think, still for basic curiosity and for discovering things that are new. So there's something about the human spirit and I think it speaks to a kind of desire that's both to discover the outer world beyond the horizon but also in some sense to look inwards and it's the relationship between the two, the inner and the beyond, the outer, which I think is truly fascinating and itself feels beyond reach. And it's true that it's not... I know we do tend to think of exploration as sometimes it's just about dead white men. But I suspect tonight we're going to try and persuade you otherwise that there's a lot more to it than that. And it's true that for a number of cultures around the world, it's not just European cultures, exploration and what I call the liminal, the edge of civilisation, whichever one we're thinking of, has been tremendously important. And a good example would be the Temple of Apollo in ancient Greece at Delphi. So according to the mythology, the Temple of Apollo was created by a kind of mythical group of people called hyperborians living at the very, very edge of the world in the north. So it's intriguing that in a sense that something is close to home, essential to how we understand where we are from, seems to somehow require the involvement of something at the very edge of our consciousness and knowledge. Well then, let me just say a little bit about how exploration seemed to have ended in two senses. One is the proponents of exploration. I've often found it useful to say exploration is nearly finished. All we need is to fund this particular project and then our knowledge of something, like the globe or some kinds of particles, will be complete. Of course that's a good way to pitch a project. But in another sense also, I think around the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century with polar exploration, there did seem to be a moment in which one could think that exploration was over when the poles had been conquered, when it seemed that there were no terrestrial unknowns to be located. Of course history shows us that that perception, if it seemed true at the time, certainly isn't because there are constantly new kinds of places in the depths of the oceans in space that haven't been studied and understood. But also crucially I guess one of the things that signal the end of the long 19th century, a period of empire and exploration in which European nations in particular were rushing to colonize the polar regions was the First World War. The First World War brought the end of that phase of empire and in wiping out really so much life something really changed. And I think certainly that period of empire reminds us tonight that exploration in geopolitics have a really long history. We could go back to Alexander the Great and many others. So they've always been intertwined. Is it a necessity that exploration requires a backing of the state or of a powerful trading company like the East India Company to advance into new spaces? Well, so geopolitics seems to be with us wherever we go and of course that's not to say that science necessarily needs to be captured or captive to it. I don't think I believe that. I think one of the most important things when I was starting my professional career as an engineer was to try and understand where the opportunities were and what kinds of patrons might be working for. But I don't want to say that whatever kinds of curiosity we exercise that that necessarily means that you work for the state. But there's no doubt if we look at extreme environments particularly after the Second World War again because of the Cold War so much science was carried out in that context. So it was also the period I suppose interestingly of big science. A lot of big science was post-war because the creation of new medicines like penicillin although it required a certain kind of genius and there's the story of Howard Flory in the laboratory. It's also a story of the industrialization of science. It's a creation of industrial scale laboratories. So if post-war we've moved into a world where so much science is teamwork and is on an industrial scale that begs the question too, doesn't it? Whether exploration in some sense doesn't sound right to say it can be done industrially. And yet it does kind of beg the question particularly because some of the science from which we get most benefit and understanding today has to be done by large institutions and it's great that I've got colleagues here who actually do that and can tell us much more about it. Two more points. One is exploration back with us today and is it being democratized? On the one hand through tourism and through the price of exploration coming down in many regions, you might say it is. So my colleagues who wanted to sail the Northwest Passage that one of the advantages of doing it next year is it's quite a cheap place to do an expedition like that. But also I think one has to say that participation in science and also extreme expeditions and travel now I think a lot of the barriers of race, of class, of gender that have certainly existed in the past are coming down and I'm sure there's much we've got further to go. Particularly the involvement of women in scientific research and in extreme regions would be one example. But then I guess you could also ask about human agency. How much do we need human beings for exploration? After all quite a lot of discussion at the moment isn't there about the use of UAVs or drones? For quite a long time a lot of scientific research in extreme environments has been a great advantage Commander Hadfield was telling us in his recent book the advantage of not having to send people to carry out research. It saves lives, it's cheaper, it's often in some situations done better. So perhaps the heroic exploration of the future is exploration without humans. And yet, there is that and yet and I think all the panel feel there is still the case for the central involvement of humans either because the notion of the unmanned of the UAV in a sense is an illusion because behind every instrument like that there are always teams of human beings designing, making, controlling them and so on and therefore there's an ethics behind those. But also I guess coming back to the first point I made that there's something about the spirit of humanity and the inner self and even if you're one of those people like me it's kind of skeptical. I'm really skeptical about the idea of there being a kind of a human self and inner self that we all share I'm not so sure that's true and yet I am willing to go along with the fact that there is kind of a collective interest or a collective desire that is shared across peoples and cultures to understand the world we live in especially while we need to take care of it. Thanks very much Michael and I should just mention by the way that when I'm tapping away on my phone I'm not actually doing my email or texting this is me taking those. I think some really interesting questions that came out of that that I hope we might be able to come back to is it inevitable that exploration requires geopolitics? Does there always need to be a state or private sponsor? What about industrial scale exploration is that really exploration? Is it inherently human to explore? You talked about going back to Apollo I'm thinking the fertile crescent or none of us will be here if we hadn't explored our way out of Africa in the first place so to what extent is this a fundamental human characteristic? Is exploration being democratised by the process of in some ways partly associating exploration with research of barriers of race and class and gender coming down and then how much do we need humans for exploration and the heroic future of exploration I'm struggling with the notion of a heroic robot but maybe we'll talk a bit more about that later. So our next speaker is Professor Jane Francis and this is a subject that's especially close to my heart because probably the place that I love most on Earth is Antarctica and this is something that Jane knows very much about she's the director of the British Antarctic Survey and has also had a very illustrious career as a paleoclimatologist working in both the Arctic and the Antarctic. Thank you very much. I'm going to talk to you really about Antarctica which I do think is one of the places left on Earth where we really, really don't know everything about Antarctica and there is still a lot of exploring to do particularly for scientists and you'll often hear Antarctica being described as the coldest, windiest, highest, driest continent it really is a challenge to work there it's remote, it's cold, it's difficult, it's expensive to get there but it is absolutely exciting to work there it's exciting to work there as a scientist and we really can do new scientific discoveries there by really exploring what's in the continent and I think you could say well why do we, why do we especially in the UK why is there a British Antarctic Survey why do we need to go all the way to Antarctica to study science, what's there, why is it important? Well Antarctica is like a big refrigerator at the bottom of the Earth I mean there's a big block of ice on the bottom of the Earth that's up to four kilometres thick and it affects every one of us sitting here today even in the UK so that big block of ice it influences ocean currents so the cold water that comes off Antarctica flows all the way to the bottom of the ocean and it comes all the way across the equator into the northern hemisphere the climates of Antarctica affect our atmosphere even in the UK and also most importantly I think the ice that's trapped in Antarctica about 70% of the world's fresh water is out there at the moment the glaciers are melting and they are the cause or going to be the cause of major sea level rises around the whole globe and the change that's going on in our climate at the moment caused by more CO2 but that link is then causing changes in Antarctica which will affect us in the UK so it is important globally Antarctica has a role to play globally I'm a geologist by training and I've worked on a particularly fossil plant so I've been to Antarctica about 10 times now to study rocks and fossils and try and understand what Antarctica was like in the past so to go to Antarctica for me is to go to Antarctica it used to be when I was allowed to do science to go to Antarctica for about two months at a time to go out in a field camp we lived in tents not in a warm base lived in tents during the Antarctic summer and just focus there and I loved being remote because it was away from email, away from phones away from the rest of the world and I was trapped in my little world of rocks and fossils and it was fantastic and the only thing I thought about the rocks and the fossils and the work I had to do we thought about the weather because the weather is really really critical that you know what's coming up for survival and then perhaps the most important thing was what you're going to have for dinner because food became all important in this world that actually is limited to senses there's not much colour or smell or music or sound there it's quite blue and white and a bit of brown so food was all important but we would spend two months there and I particularly found rocks and fossils of plants, of leaves, of pollen of big trees that used to live in Antarctica millions of years ago when the Antarctic continent was situated over the south pole but the global climate was much warmer more carbon dioxide from volcanoes and dinosaurs and forests covered the south pole and by studying those my research groups of postdocs and postgres we were able to reconstruct what life was like in Antarctica millions of years ago 100 million years ago, 70 million years ago 50 million years ago which is not too long geologically speaking until the ice set in in Antarctica about 40 million years ago and then the glaciers started to cover the continent so we were reconstructing what was like in the past so it was discovery and exploration of a kind if you like but it was definitely looking at Antarctica today to explore what it was like in the past the big science I think that goes on in Antarctica now really some of the big questions are how Antarctica is changing today with climate change and how is that influencing the rest of the world I think the biggest projects that are happening in Antarctica are looking at the big glaciers there's some big glacial systems and ice is draining off the continent in big glaciers and then floating out as ice shelves on the margins of Antarctica and what's happening is that the oceans around the world are warming up and those warm seas are getting underneath those ice shelves at the edge of the continent and they're melting them from below and when the ice shelves are breaking up I'm sure you've seen on the news some movies in the last few years of ice shelves breaking up what happens is those shelves which are on the edge act as a kind of buttress and keep the glaciers back in Antarctica and when those shelves break off the glaciers move faster down to the coast so gradually the ice is moving from the centre of Antarctica to the edges and scientists British Antarctic Survey and all our colleagues all around the UK and in the rest of the world are going to really remote places in Antarctica to try and understand how Antarctic ice is responding to global warming and every time another bit of ice breaks off and melts the sea levels are going up bit by bit 0.3 of a millimetre now but the predictions are that in a few years time we could be melting one of the big ice sheets in Antarctica and releasing about 2 to 5 metres of sea level rise around the world and the prediction is about a metre per 100 years and keep adding on and adding on to that so we're studying really the glaciers it's a big challenge now to try and study some of the big glaciers in Antarctica but it's quite remote regions and a big question of course is what's underneath the ice that's a big question a really exciting scientific question but it's just about discovery what's underneath the ice when you take the ice off Antarctica what will we find new rock sequences, new fossils will we find things in the lakes below the ice that have lived there isolated for millions of years there's lots of really exciting science still to do in Antarctica and Antarctica is very special it's quite unique in that it's described often as a continent for science it's the only place on earth where there has been no war it's a place where nations work together for science there's a treaty that all the nations who work there have signed to agree to abide by the rules many of them are environmental rules that prevent pollution and contamination as much as possible of the Antarctic environment so there's no military activity there no wars, no nuclear activity and it really is preserved for science so it's quite unique in a way and when we go down there to work we have to go permits we have to be very careful about our waste, we have to be very careful about contaminating any of the environments in Antarctica so it is extreme, it is remote, it's expensive to get there, it's very adventurous it's really wildly exciting but what would happen if we didn't know that Antarctica existed and I think if you think back we haven't known about Antarctica very long, 100 years or so and yet it forms a really integral part of the earth system the climate system the global system and if we hadn't discovered Antarctica you absolutely can be sure that we wouldn't understand how the rest of our systems work that affect us here we wouldn't be able to run climate models that predict what our weather here is going to be in the next few years we wouldn't understand how ocean currents circulate, we wouldn't or why they go like that we wouldn't understand why some of the even the tectonic plates moved around if we didn't know Antarctica existed and yet there's still so much of Antarctica that we don't know about so I think it's absolutely a brilliant place to continuing exploring it's exciting and I hope we can carry on working there for science for many more years to come Thanks very much Dane I love the whistfulness with which you said when I was allowed to do science and I also recognise that message about you spend so much time thinking about your dinner whenever I was visiting a remote field camp you don't take money you take fresh bread and you take vegetables and then they love you and they'll welcome you in to Antarctica certainly where I was going and some lovely thoughts in there as well that message that two to five metres of sea level rise and that's not the whole of Antarctica that's just the portion that seems most vulnerable to melting right now you think about the Atlantic North Atlantic, South Atlantic, the Arctic Ocean you think about the Indian Ocean you think about the Southern Oceans you think about the whole of the Pacific which covers more than two thirds of the earth and you are every single square centimetre of that ocean rising by five metres and that's still only a small proportion of the amount of ice that is in Antarctica so I think it's a beautiful way that you described the connection between Antarctica and the rest and the fact that if we didn't know it was there it would still be influencing us so that's one argument about why we should do research in remote places because they do affect us it's kind of the heroic journey the hero goes to the farthest off place to find out something about home and that's one of the things that I find captivating about Antarctica too also the model of cooperation that you have there which is something in doing big science in remote and difficult places you can't do it on your own you have to collaborate and you often have to collaborate among different countries as well and since we're going to have to collaborate for many other reasons if we're going to solve the big problems that we're facing as a human race then that's another potential reason and then the last thing about we only discovered Antarctica recently I love this that Antarctica is the only only continent on earth where we know the name of the first person to be born there you can't say that about any other continent that's how recently we met it and yet it still has that significance so those are all lovely points and I hope we can come back to them again soon so thanks Jane our final speaker is Kevin Fong and he's a consultant he's anesthetist at UCL hospitals he's an expert in the physiology of extreme environments and space medicine he's probably too polite to mention it but he's also written a very good book about this it's called Extreme Extreme is about these topics so rush out and buy it and tell it to your friends as soon as you finish and Kevin over to you thank you so I come with this from a slightly different perspective I am a doctor of medicine I work up the road at University College Hospital I specialize in anaesthesia and intensive care medicine so it's a different kind of extremes extremes of survivability in the face of critical illness and injury I've recently spent my time working for one of the air ambulance services at Kent Surrey Sussex flying around and trying to push that limit survivability of injury with the edge of all that science, technology and engineering have to offer you for me that is a sort of exploration and I guess what I wanted to talk about was whether we should continue to explore whether we're at an epoch whether at the end of an era whether this is a time where if we continue to explore whether humans have a central role in that and I say that because I'm a huge proponent of human space exploration I think that's what delivered me to science when I was growing up that's the first memories I have is watching the tail end of the Apollo project in 1975 is something the first thing I remember at the Apollo Soyuz test project and I have this sense that's what drove me to science as a career later on and I had and I sort of went over from one discipline to another in this sort of voyage of self exploration if you like I studied astrophysics first of all at UCL for no other real reason other than I thought I wanted to be an astronaut and the university handbook is alphabetically arranged you can go to the first relevant course and I didn't at that time think I was going to study medicine because my six-form teachers had sort of said again they will have you at medical school and that wasn't unfair of them I was much more interested in the red-haired girl I sat next to but as I got to university I became more interested in looking in and less interested in looking out I guess for a little while and certainly in my second year of physics I remember sitting in my flat and I lived with some medical students looking across at them after a particularly heavy night out thinking medicine can only be so hard to study surely so then I decided to study medicine so I went and studied medicine and I was very lucky at the end of that medical degree having thought I was going to put esoteric stuff aside and space exploration aside I got to work with NASA and their medical operations group in my final year and suddenly it sort of lit the torch for me again I think and I suddenly was back into exploration so I got to the end of all my studies with this sort of double identity so I would work as a junior doctor and I would stand specialising in intensive care on a unit at night looking at my patients trying to do these things and then I would very sometimes very literally go home get on a plane and go across the Atlantic and sit in a room and talk about how we needed $600 billion to go to Mars when last night I couldn't afford an extra dialysis machine for one of my patients and so I had that sort of guilt about well can you really justify this by reaching esoteric exploration feet when actually you've got such urgent needs and I spent a long time the whole of my junior training would be wrestling with that and running that double life and trying to reconcile the two and in the end that was most the process of writing a book about it was trying to resolve that conflict for me but let me tell you about what I think has happened over the last century I do think that we have arrived at a unique time and a time that is unlike any other time that's gone before it because the last 100 years have been so fast and when I was thinking about why we explore and how we explore we've talked a lot about Antarctica today and some of the great naval explorations and the polar regions and we've talked a little bit hinted about how recent all of that is but it is horribly recent we have only just celebrated the centenary of the first human footprints at the south pole in 1912 2012 that's 100 years that's 10 decades that's within the life expectancy of a child born in this country today with only slightly better knowledge luck in 1897 there's a map that's got a map of the world and at the bottom of the map it's got this lovely strip on the coastline that says the supposed continent of Antarctica this is just over 100 years ago and at the same time the text of surgery that we had said you shouldn't operate on a human heart you can't operate on it, it's an inviolat hole only a maverick would do so so this is 10 decades ago and now we sit here and we talk about you can go down, we were talking just before about how you can go down for basically a long weekend to Antarctica and there will be people in the audience who have had heart procedures and certainly people in the audience if not who know people who have had heart operations and it's a deal but it's not massive big oh can't be done deal the last 10 decades have seen us advance in exploration in a way that I don't think we've ever seen in any period in human history to be honest with you and I say that because if Ferdinand Magellan when he sailed around the world or at least his crew sailed around the world between 1518 and 1521 looked at Scott's ship the Teronova in 1912 they would have said that is a ship of discovery if you show Ferdinand Magellan Armstrong and Aldrin's ship of discovery the Apollo the Saturn V with the Apollo capsule on top of it he would have said what the hell is that and he wouldn't really have understood it as a ship of discovery and at 50 years or just about separate Teronova and Saturn V we talk about the heroic feats of exploration so Scott and his team heroically plodding to South Pole and failing to plod back that heroic period although we'd say it ended with World War I and the understanding of the idiocy of that sort of colonial heroism actually the conquest of Everest still looks like that doesn't it it's still men putting one foot bravely in front of another foot until they get to where they want to go without dying that's 53 that's one of the last terrestrial poles we achieve and then look at 61 with Gagarin and 69 with Armstrong and Aldrin look at how different those feats of exploration are separated by a decade and by the way in 68 Barnard also does the first human heart transplant having gone from the start of that century from a position where all the textbooks said don't do that don't touch that, don't do it to the point at which you're taking a heart after someone has recently died putting it in the body of someone who is about to die and getting at least one survivor out of that is how far we came in a short period of time and we moved on so over the 20th century we went from an exploration where we didn't really understand the body particularly well we didn't understand didn't understand the secret with which we transmitted our likeness and our traits from generation to generation we didn't understand DNA that molecular theory of inheritance we didn't understand the south pole we hadn't been there we hadn't gone across our own planet let alone into the endless skies and yet in the 10 decades that followed we did all of that and more and we went into space and by the 1960s we were planning missions that would go to Mars now we got to about the 1960s and we were hugely optimistic and if you look at the mission architectures at time and I spent a lot of time when I was at NASA looking at them there are architectures which bravely say we've been to the moon and we did that inside of Kennedy's decades so therefore Mars is going to be twice as far as way so it's 20 years so there are viable mission architectures written for the mid 1980s to Mars we were so optimistic we were so sure of ourselves the pace of advance was so fast and Mars was 20 years away and it always is and it always has been and every mission architecture we write is 20 years into the future and now we sit now where the people who talk about human space exploration this the final frontier the hawkish people talk about it as this waste of money that has literally seen us going around in circles for the last 50 years and something of limited value which has no place in the 21st century and you have to ask yourself whether or not that might be true certainly Mars is still 20 years in the future and it's going to cost us a lot of money and we do an awful lot with automated platforms now do we continue and that's very difficult to know yes there are lots of things to do here yes I think that there are lots of priorities that we need to try and address in the end I think when I finished writing the book I wasn't sure that that's not true I was sure that it was a false dichotomy that I think that the things that we say of exploration in terms of being a waste of money if you stop exploring physical exploration and I thought that you would then suddenly have the best health service and no world poverty and no famine then I'd be out there marching against it I just don't think that's true I just don't think that's how it works but more than that I think that science and exploration is what we've always done and I think the final thing I would say is this in my conclusion and my thoughts about exploration is this my very good friend Richard Barnett who is much cleverer than I am and much well first in the history of exploration told me off when I was sort of being quite romantic about exploration when he said listen exploration isn't something that all cultures have always done there are cultures who've never explored and besides what history tells about exploration is some of the cultures who were explored did pretty badly out of that deal you know the conquest doors going in to some of the South American indigenous tribes for example and so he told me off of being romantic about it and he was right to do so so you have to think about it exploration like technology and science is neutral and it is what you do it and how you do it what you do with it and how you do it that defines what it is but this idea that in science and by extension I think our technology and the technology upon which our economy is the base that you can predict what's going to happen that you know what you need to do to get to the future I think is wrong manifestly wrong I think when you look at the past you know that all we've done is fight the battles of the time that we were in and somehow that got us on to the next bit and the next bit and the next bit and so I think my conclusion of my thoughts about exploration ultimately were that it is true and it is obviously true that to continue to explore as a species you must survive that's absolutely true but I think and increasingly I think that the reverse is also true that as a species to survive you must explore and I think you can hold that argument up in many many ways that's what I'd say Thanks very much Karen that's a great quote to explore you must survive but as a species to survive you must explore maybe at the end we can go back to that and see if we still think there's some merit in it I think I picked out there's a lot of richness in that as with the other talks too and I just picked out a few things to perhaps reflect on this argument is this an end of an era how we've been accelerating and exploring and now human exploration is something of the past we don't really need to do that any more particularly and we're getting increasingly technological about that and yet the flip side of that is I was inspired by the tail end of Apollo as well and I mentioned earlier that if you see a satellite going overhead it's quite cool but if you see a satellite and realise it's a space station and there are people in it that changes everything about the way you feel about it and how much will that continue to be true can you justify big budget exploration when you can't afford a dialysis machine but is there just one pot of money and if you don't spend it on this will you actually spend it on that what about research and technology as exploration in itself heart surgery understanding the body searching for the Higgs boson are they actually exploration in extreme environments it's hard to imagine what's more extreme than open heart surgery or indeed the Large Hadron Collider and we didn't go to Mars and it's still 20 years away I might challenge that I'd say China say they're going to go to Mars and I wouldn't bet against it and I say India just sent a probe to Mars themselves and China said they're going to go to the moon first and there's a prestige associated with that and we also need to be careful not to be too to Anglo Saxon about this when we're saying is exploration dead and where might exploration come from exploration like technology and science is neutral I might challenge that a little bit as well because if it's true that exploration necessarily takes some kind of sponsorship that it's a state or geopolitics involved or is there some key rich player or is there some company that it's always going to have some edge associated with it that isn't just necessarily pure or is it and especially you can't predict what will happen in anything and that's one of the things that makes exploration so very exciting so I've just picked out those thoughts so many others there and you'll have your own too so now we have an opportunity to stop recharge our glasses and in about a few minutes five or six minutes we'll come and sit back down again and that's your chance to help us with questions so thanks very much here we are ready to hear your questions and your thoughts so for this part of the evening now there will be some moving microphones and please let the microphone come to you so that everybody can hear what you're saying and because this evening is also being recorded please say who you are and do try to keep your comments as brief as you can so that we can make this as much of a conversation as possible and with that here we go who wants to start have we stunned you all? is the role of testosterone in exploration and research changing? the question is the role of testosterone changing? the only explorers were men driven by the need to come so how important is testosterone in exploration and research and is it becoming less important or is it changing in some way excellent question, thank you very much I'll start there are about I think the number of females working at Bass is about 27% which is pretty good actually in the British Antarctic Survey women didn't start going to Antarctica until about 1991 actually which is a bit late because it was the 70s in other polar organisations overseas but in fact now I think that kind of number is fairly normal for a science organisation generally and the women go to Antarctica just like any other any other man and do the same thing so they get grants they come up with the projects and I don't think there's any difference the only difference there is actually is that until I got to Bass a year ago I always insisted on women's clothes and women had to wear men's underwear and if there's one thing I've changed in the British Antarctic Survey is that the person who orders the clothes now buys women's thermal underwear because someone had to wear that I'm very happy to hear that other comments? just to take it from a slightly different vantage point I suppose testosterone is also about the physiology of adolescents and what changes boys' behaviour so one of the really important things to think about in relationship to exploration is reading and we were saying in the interval as long as young people are reading things like Lady Bird books or many other forms of writing about exploration an exploration will stay alive I'm a historian essentially and the history of travel writing of scientific travel is probably one of the strongest genres of writing in history in the 18th century more people read travel writing than novels and the audience was as much women as men perhaps what's changed today now is that women are more involved in all aspects of travel as well as writing Kevin I was just thinking that one of the big arguments that was used for women not to go to Antarctica was that they wouldn't be able to survive there as effective as men and my understanding is it's the exact opposite yes yes I think actually again your question comes really back to that whole theme of how fast things are progressing the reason the history looks like determined testosterone driven white men with beards marching everywhere is because that's where we have been politically and socially until recently I was talking to someone the other day about Star Trek it's first episode transmit just half a century ago now and you look at it now and you think why wouldn't you have a multicultural crew and why wouldn't one of the senior officers be a black woman on that but actually in the 1960s when it's transmitting for the first time they're like what the hell is this what warship would have or what spaceship would have that as its crew they were trying really hard to break this mould of this is not how we explore and that is that expression even then their tokenism about both race and gender and sex are still pretty non-progressive when you look at it now so I think that what you're talking about is the fact that in some ways how politics and socially we have moved quickly some of the technology I think I'd like to comment as well that the first women who went to the South Pole for the first men who went to the South Pole there was this bitter battle there was this race is it going to be the Norwegians is it going to be the British we all know what happened and then it was considerably later what 50 years later or more that the first women went to the South Pole and they were actually taken there on an airplane as sort of a stunt and there were six of them so the question was which would be the first woman of those six to set foot on the South Pole and do you know what they did does anyone know what they did they held hands and they walked up together so there were six simultaneous first women to stand on the South Pole and I mentioned that partly because you said how is testosterone changing this but I suspect that testosterone has actually played less of a role in exploration per se than we might think and I have two reasons to say this and one of them is that when I went to the South Pole for the second time I met the guy who was the king of the South Pole he'd spent five successive winters there no one's ever done that before or since five winters in a row at the South Pole and he worked outside it was incredibly macho and his clothes were all kind of ripped and shredded and he kind of marched around the place of the king of the South Pole so I knew I was going to have to talk to him but I was really dreading it this is going to be Mr Macho testosterone and when I finally talked to him he was the exact opposite he said if anyone comes here talking about conquering the South Pole within a month or two of being in the winter they're crying for the mummy and he said this place is not a place to conquer he described it as patient and he described it as intimate that's his experience of being there at the South Pole and the other thing I'd say is I spoke to a lot of different women who have been down there early on sort of the first women in different you know with the British organization with the Italian, the French the US, the Russian and especially the message that I got was that this was not a battle between men who wanted to keep the South Pole or keep the Antarctica free of women and women who wanted to go there what people told me again and again and again was the battle was between men and women on the one side and bigots as they described them on the other because many of the men wanted women there as much as the women wanted to go and I think it's very testosterone charged but maybe the testosterone was actually as much of a hindrance as a help when it came to the exploration next question hello thanks for hosting this event it's really fascinating and I speak from somebody who's outside of the science and technology kind of sector and you tell these sort of fantastic stories and I just wonder is science and exploration seen is sort of seen as a bit kind of fringe and a bit sort of it's not high profile is that something you'd want to change would it help if you had more attention in the media and if your stories were more widely known because people would enjoy hearing them for one so science in extreme places is the definition and space exploration as well which is sort of seen as being out of fashion for a number of years so would it help the cause of science in extreme places if we had more visibility and attention look that's the way the political world works that if something has greater visibility and the public generally like it then it tends to stick around look at top gear so yes but you know health comes so there's a few things there one is this trope that we went to the moon and everyone was excited and then we got progressively less interested and now no one really cares anymore and that's not true although we swallow it whenever it's read out because it's a bit of a lazy joke and they go well that must be true because I've heard it said so many times but if you look at the source data for that there's some interesting stuff about how popular that was so they did proper formal polls of the American population up to the landing on the moon and then approval for project Apollo never hit 50% until a few weeks around the landing on the moon and then it fell off very quickly after that so basically this idea that everyone wanted to go to the moon and everyone thought it was a good idea at the time as a lie at least from the polls that were done at the time then this idea that actually the public lost interest or when you look at the number of technical PhDs that are gained by students in the United States in science, technology, engineering and mathematics in the post-apollo period they just massively upswing and they track exactly the Apollo budget so as the space budget goes up so it does a number of people taking those degrees and then as that budget falls off then there's a lag and then the number of those degrees falls off so basically the government blinked first and it blinked first because it's very expensive then when you look through shuttle periods when you look at American approval for shuttle it clines during the years it gets higher after the tragedies but it sits at around the mid 60% approvals so basically I think there's a massive appetite for this it's not good for governments because these programs are expensive and it's easier to say no one's bothered and everyone's quite bored of it but actually the truth is and I think your brain kind of rejects that if you look around you if you do straw polls, random polls of the public about 55-60% of people think human space exploration is great and about 45% of people think it's dreadful and we shouldn't be doing it it's a waste of money and people don't sway very much I guess it also depends where you are and who you ask having just come back from Norway I was reading an interview with Mr Mr Ulvan, one of their triple skiing gold medalists and I think currently president of the World Ski Federation and in the interview he was in the USA explaining the passion for skiing cross country skiing because the Americans seem quite puzzled and he said well it's a little bit like football in the USA except we have higher ratings so in some places this is carries everybody I wanted to build upon the first question about testosterone driven heroic exploration with a question for Professor Francis I think that the idea that especially polar exploration has always been driven by testosterone is really a myth there were women applying to go on Scott and Shackleton's first expeditions and I wonder now that those structural aspects of women's exclusion are gone from polar exploration what do you find that there is an increasing number of women who are interested in field work in these extreme environments or whether BASS has to look into any sort of active recruitment policies to encourage more women I don't think we do actually at the moment we are preparing a proposal for Athena Swan I don't know if you know about that that's the Royal Society scheme for women in science and so to make a bronze medal you have to put together lots of data and I think that what it shows at BASS is that we are like any other academic institution like a university we have the same profile there and I think we have as many applications from women as we do for men from different things and interestingly we have the same percentage of women say if you go to any university department you will find that women are attracted more to biology and less to physics and maths and it's exactly the same in BASS so I don't think there's really much difference at all I think I was just trying to think if there is any specific thing I mean there are some of course going to Antarctica is really difficult you have to go for a long time to leave your families behind but then if you work for National Oceanography centre you have to go on a ship you go away if you work for any other scientific organisation where you have to go away to do field work if you're a mother you know you tend to go away less although of course it affects fathers as well and so you do need very good parental support to do that kind of thing but in terms of applications I don't think we have there's no disability there's certainly no sense of that all the equality and diversity rules and there's no sense that women are disadvantaged or men are chosen above women One extra comment I'd make about that is that certainly when I was there tracking it I'd find that there was still quite a strong cultural element in the different countries in that the proportion of women in the Italian and French organisations was minuscule and they expected it to be so they actually built a new station on the plateau and built five times or six times as many men's ladies as the women's and when I said why were they doing that obviously there's always going to be fewer women here many fewer women here and that was sort of built into the system and then the other point about that is that by contrast the American programme has about 50-50 but that's not because they have a higher proportion of women researchers it's that they have the biggest logistics programme so they have a vast number of people on a very big basis as carpenters, as locksmiths as mechanics or those things and very many of those are women and very many of those did not have those skills when they went to Antarctica so they were chosen for their attitude and then taught her to be a locksmith or a mechanic or whatever when they got there and so that's why you have a bigger balance there Oh there's a gentleman over here who had a question I'd like to ask about when people are in distress up a mountain with blinding headaches or in the jungle being bitten by lots of midges or extreme temperatures in the Arctic having a terrible diarrhea how much does this affect their ability to think clearly and do the research? Not Great question Thank you Kevin Actually I tell you one of the hardest places I've worked is central Australia I was a postdoc in Australia and I had to work in central Australia I like deserts, not humidity I couldn't even begin to work in humid places but in the heat of central Australia in a heat wave I could feel my brain frying and I knew that I couldn't think and that if I sort of didn't concentrate I would wander off and probably die In Antarctica the cold is quite refreshing actually and I think it helps it helps you concentrate unless you get really really cold and then of course you're near hypothermic real fuzzy When you get extremely hot or extremely cold then if you become preoccupied by cold fingers I've worked in Antarctica where it's so cold that even where you wear three pairs of gloves if you've got to sort of write with your fingers you still get cold fingers and you spend all your time like this so you're not writing and things like that and then you concentrate a lot on the cold and then it goes to your work so there is a limit to which you can work in the extreme conditions but you still do because that's why you're there and that's what you want to do Actually the same guy who said to me that if you come down here and want to conquer the South Pole after two months you'd be crying for your mummy he also said that he'd get very frustrated with the way the disconnect that at the South Pole you can actually pick up a telephone and you can phone the kind of administrative offices back in the US in Denver in this case and have conversations with them about whether you've done a certain piece of work or if you've done a certain amount of support and he said that to put it politely this isn't quite how he put it but he said they don't really understand what it's like down here and he told me that once he said he was having this conversation with his person on the other end of the phone and he said can you feel your fingers because I haven't felt them in days and put the phone down manner with his colleagues how about that So as I said before to be able to continue to explore you must in the first place survive and in these extreme environments you are pretty close to the edge of it in some of these cases at the extremes of hot and cold some of the first symptoms of hypothermia and hypothermia are behavioural disorder this is why you have some of these situations in which you hear these terrible cases of people who are found in ski resorts wearing no clothing and having frozen to death and it's partly because the onset of hypothermia is accompanied by bizarre behavioural responses so yes it does it affects everything about you as far as I can tell from everything I've learnt about human factors over the years your brain doesn't work as well as you think it does even under normal conditions and it works even less well when you're exposed to the extremes and then finally to say that at some of the most physical extremes so if you take altitude where your body is short of oxygen because there's a lack of partial pressure of oxygen to drive it into your bloodstream you are wildly deranged and the guys you climb Everest who I have huge respect for amongst some of my colleagues at university college that's everything that you can do to stick one foot in front of another on the way up the ridge to that thing and there's this wonderful quote I can't remember precisely by the first guy to climb it without oxygen actually scientists said that it wasn't possible they did the maths they worked out that you probably couldn't climb it without oxygen and it's Hubble who says something like I think he writes a note at the top of Everest saying I'm nothing but a free floating lung floating amongst the clouds and this is the expression of a dying brain a brain that's dying of starvation of oxygen really it's nothing else it's quite clearly someone who's having a massive trip and similarly the free divers who say how they feel very at one with the ocean when they're down there that's because they very nearly are one with the ocean and so yes of course physical extremes unprotected do impair your ability to perform because it nearly kills you Dan Michael's going I think there's another side to it and so of course it begs the question you're asking what's an extreme environment when you really are so close to the edge and your body may behave very differently something I find really interesting about people I know in time I've spent in the Arctic which isn't terribly cold it's usually winter minus 35 maybe in with a bit of a wind chill minus 70 or something and often what's often uncomfortable is the darkness combined with those things and what strikes me is the people who are really experienced in these environments have the opposite reaction they find comfort they feel more comfortable in these environments than they do here they'll often say and I understand that because one of the one of the ways you get cold actually in any environment is by being anxious and your body's tense you might tell me what goes on physiologically but I think exploration people who work in extreme environments often come to talk about feeling at home in them I do think that's really interesting for this evening, for one particular reason if we've heard that in the 20th century our cultures have often been concerned with mastery of nature and that kind of modernist view of the world where we with enough muscle and technology but we know it's kind of the Anthropocene the story of the Anthropocene today is we know we need a different story so in that sense it really interests me about how people come to feel comfortable in very different environments it's got to have something to do with a mixture of knowledge but also learning how to feel connected to environments that we thought were very different and hospitable and realising in some sense that with care there are places for us to call home I think there are some people who were in Antarctica who I spoke to about spending the winter there said that they almost felt as if the darkness is like a blanket that they were drawing up around them and they felt almost physical pain when the sun came back because then normal stuff comes back and everybody else is going to be coming and the special thing is over and I think that's maybe a similar kind of feeling Jane? Yeah, following on from that I think working in those extreme environments one aspect is the remoteness and the isolation more than the temperature and in fact right now our base is in deep and dark Antarctica where it's really cold and very dark now we have a group of about 15 people in the base with the doctor who is experimenting on if you like there we have a big project that is funded by European Space Agency and they are doing tests on them to see about how they survive isolation and remoteness in readiness for missions to Mars so Antarctica is compared to the isolation that people experience in life and they are sitting in chambers doing simulation space docking and they are doing tests looking at the kind of words they use to explain their moods so that somebody can do psychological tests to see how they cope with remoteness Fantastic, thanks There is a question here John Witton Would you like to comment on the relevance of historical data both physical and human to today's science and the prosecution of today's science So how much is historical data explorers of the past who are doing science in extreme environments how much should we actually use that in today's science and today's way of doing science Well I think I think it's massively relevant that we would never have been predicted at the time and this is what we always come back to whenever you look back at any part of science of history You look back at Captain Cook sailing around going further south and saying in the mid 1800s saying no one will go further south than me There is this great quote No man shall sail further south than I and then he backs himself up and says effectively the paraphrasing at the end of it says anyway even if they do it would be completely pointless the land to the south would have no use to anybody and of course he's wrong in both counts of course people do go south men and women and the value in that is immeasurable when Scott and Amundson and their teams went to the south pole at the start of the 20th century no one really understood what the value would be in the future and yet sitting here 100 years ago having this discussion you would be saying to me what is the point of the south pole it's made us snow and rock as far as we can tell and you can't farm there and you can't launch much in the attack from there what's the point and yet by the end of the same century it would be clear that the paleo atmospheres that you were getting from bubbles of ice cores would be informing us about the future of our planet and literally having knowledge that may help us save the planet so yes I think historical data if that's your question do you contribute to our future explorations but the important thing is to say that they contribute in ways that were never anticipated at the time Jane do you want to comment I totally agree I think that there are some things those early observations I'll talk about it from a geological point of view were really absolutely critical of the process of building and building and building on that information and in fact I think there are quite a lot of sciences now some of the historical data to try and build long term records or historical records not geological long term records but historical records for hundreds of years because there are quite interesting I mean the early explorers wherever they were in the oceans, fishing whatever they did some of the early data are now being used to compile historical records so for example I know I saw recently a fantastic record of the fish stocks in certain oceans in the north scientists had gone back through all the fishing log books on certain ships and worked out how much mackerel had been caught in the past and that kind of thing so they are becoming really relevant now for long term records there's another long term record that I'd love to draw attention to and this is a tribute to the British Antarctic Survey that there were three men who were working down and I think probably the same remote base is a hally you were talking about the same remote base in Antarctica the younger they were measuring the weather they were measuring the temperature and they were measuring the ozone and it was quite difficult for them to do this because they were asked why are you doing that and they said well we don't know what it is and we'd like to know there's no point in measuring the ozone that's a ridiculous thing to do why you're doing that but they still kept sending their balloons up anyway and their records showed them that there was a hole in the sky there was zero ozone right overhead and they didn't publish it because because NASA had a satellite that was measuring ozone and hadn't found any problems at all so it was ridiculous for them to be out exploring in this place and continuing to measure it and there's no need there's a satellite up there but they kept measuring and they kept finding the hole so they felt very worried about this and they published it anyway and it turned out you know this story but the reason that NASA's satellite was not showing a hole was that it had been pre-programmed and it threw out results that were clearly spurious stupid machine it thinks there's no ozone there it's obviously broken so we'll fix it again so the merit then in having people who were there in this remote place in the location putting up balloons for no reason because it was there because they wondered about it actually bought us to the place where we understood that there was a hole in the ozone there and globally we needed to do something about it or globally we would be in trouble I think Gabriel's last story raises a really interesting point about, we've talked a bit about big funding in the Arctic and NASA getting us in the Antarctic and NASA getting us into space does this big funding in extremes mean that there's no room for science outside of a certain paradigm maybe within extremes and extremes kind of control us in different ways not just our bodies but in the way we can think in its dreams because we can't get the funding for certain ideas in its dreams well we've got a big field of examples to choose from it's a great question but my experience working in Arctic environments especially field stations you know it's incredible how much science is done on a shoestring budget very few great change in fact the more I've worked and occasionally you come into policy discussions where I've worked with the directors of major polar research institutes around the world looking at how international cooperation can be more effectively used I'm amazed that the opportunities for joined up science that don't necessarily cost very much at all so I think one example would be the may know that the air currents of the earth dump a lot of contaminants over the Arctic so it's important to monitor about 10 or roughly a dozen different sites around the Arctic we realized that in northern Canada I think two of the three sites weren't being monitored even though it would only cost about $75,000 a station to do that for this kind of big research problem so you know on the one hand some kinds of problems don't necessarily cost large amounts of money and on the other hand the ingenuity particularly of field based scientists who I have a soft spot for people who go out there constantly bringing friends up to help if they're making a research station they'll get a fire friend up to do the electricity they'll save up from other sources probably put a lot of their own personal funds into spending time doing field research so in the context of extreme environments I think that I think the stories of individuals remain really salient still are opportunities Jen what do you think so is a space of blue sky research given the constraints of fund this well I think you can in some areas do individual research but I think these days a lot of the big science questions require big grants and going to really extremes and I think you can do science on a shoestring but actually I mean a lot of scientific research has been done on this to really answer the big questions and have really big impact you have to have the big projects and to do it properly you have to have proper funding and that requires the funding agencies and everybody to decide how they're going to split their money up and it's been shown that you can do lots of small things but you have very small incremental changes but if you really want a big change of big answers you need to back a winner and really put your money into do something really properly I think it's also probably true to say that the funding agencies don't just fund what seem to be sort of very specific questions with very specific answers they're also prepared to fund things that are more blue sky and more experimental and then also the sorts of people that are prepared to get off the backside and go out of their comfortable beds and go to these places tend to be very passionate and tend to work every hour God sends and when you've got 24 hours of daylight you can have people who don't get very much sleep when they're in Antarctica and so we'll find every opportunity while I'm here I'll do this and this and this so I think there's always that opportunity for creativity there as well I would just say that I do think that the threat that you recognise in that question is real I think that the skew towards the things that grab attention that prevents us from funding the important but the mundane is real and it's a problem of our current state of politics it is the way it happens in medicine we fund the hell out of HIV and cancer it's a very high profile it's there dementia for years who cares it's not a pressure group there and it was five times less funded than cancer and we took a long time to wake up to that so yes of course I think you should go after extreme science but not at the exclusion of the non extreme science extreme environments are a tool the way to use extremes of the physical world is to use it to simplify your systems at least that's what we use in physics but if you look at a system of boundary conditions sometimes it strips out a lot of the complexity of the system and allows you to real properties of the system that otherwise would remain hidden and I think that you can do that both physically and biologically but yes you're right there is a risk and there is also the general points about long term measurements as well that have never been more important and not very sexy and often those long term measurements of funding agencies or governments will say oh we don't need to do that anymore and yet we really do but I think that's changing now I think people have really begun to realise that long term data is really important and so I think there's more funding going that way now you were talking earlier about inspiration and I was thinking I was nine years old in 1969 when I was watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon on a dodgy black and white TV on a cross channel car ferry as our family made its epic expedition from Glasgow to the south of France and if I couldn't be Neil Armstrong I at least wanted to be Scott Tracy from Thunderbird One and all that kind of good stuff and now 40-odd years later I work in aerospace and I'm an engineer and I write software for aircraft one of the things that is a bit of a crisis in that world you talked about the rise and stem degrees in the states that track NASA funding it's reckoned that in five years time 25% of all American aerospace engineers will have retired 25% of the entire brain stock of American aerospace off to play golf and there's nothing to take his place and I think you can't underestimate inspiration and I think we ought to get ourselves to Mars and there'll be a whole bunch of wonderful things will come as a result of that they've got nothing to do with going to Mars Absolutely, I think we all agree No no, but I think that's true I think if you went around the room for people of a certain age everyone has their iconic memory and I remember being on these panels I worked for the British National Space Centre which later became the UK Space Agency and I was trying to argue for us to re-involve ourselves in human space exploration in this country and I'd sit opposite people who would route me you know, fiercely saying no no no no no you get them in the coffee break and you know what though the reason I'm in science is because and then they have a story like that which I thought wow and this was all of them and so yes I think that it's underestimated it's not the only reason but it isn't important Hi So we are space physiology students these four of us and we came up with an interesting debate in a class so we were debating exploration and what it means but the argument or discussion came up on is the International Space Station exploration isn't Antarctica exploration since these are established bases for many years are they still considered exploration so I was wondering the panel's views on that Great question has it become to establishment to be true exploration So you need to the problem is right is that I think that the world changes so fast you see technology obsolescence so quickly in cycles so you're black and white fuzzy I remember that I remember turning on Doctor Who and if you didn't get there in time you had to listen to the bloody titles before the picture came on the screen but for about a minute with our TV you understand I had it and you see I remember going around to the kids house with the video recorder and you know he had a video and we could watch videos and we could record programs and then you see the video recorder come and go you see the CD come and go you see the MP3 player come and go etc etc etc and I say all of that because you see space station you think is it exploration but you know you talk to piercellers he says you have to understand what we did to make the space station and then low earth orbit into a building site you know we had bits of machinery up there we were delivering gear up there in a space truck we were hiking it out of the truck and we were bolting it together and once that was done once that exploration was done and that is a feat of exploration because if you can't exist and establish there you can't explore in the future then you use it as a laboratory for the human body so the exploration becomes looking in rather than looking out so I still think they're exploring up there that's the way they might have wanted to when it was first intended but they're still exploring we're still exploring in Antarctica I think it actually depends on your definition of exploration if you think exploration means being a macho man and going out on your skis and going to the south pole single handed I don't consider that to be exploration anymore I think that's personal adventure or extreme sports and exploration for me is actually going out and discovering new things and I think Antarctica is absolutely well actually it's not just Antarctica there's loads of places on the earth where you can go to and discover new things and you can call it science if you like but it is about going out and discovering new things on understanding how this earth works and for me that's exploration and there is a huge amount of exploration still to do in Antarctica because there's lots of places we haven't been to we can't get to places even we can go to the Arctic the exploration actually in the Arctic is what's underneath the sea ice the sea ice is melting but we don't know what's underneath the sea ice we don't know how those ecosystems live under the sea ice and what's going to happen when the sea ice melts you can go to a desert and there's lots of things we don't know and I think the idea of remote places and extreme places are the places where we haven't been and there is still an awful lot we can discover about them and for me that's what exploration means beautifully yeah, Jane put it beautifully and I know amongst some scientists there's this sense that they only get exhilaration doing their science if they're away from other scientists it's like some travellers or tourists have to be away from other British tourists in order to feel they're experiencing other culture and I don't think that's true in fact and I don't think that those are the conditions for doing interesting science that are very extreme I think it's just as important that people discover exploration here I want my kids to go to schools where they think London is a place to be curious about just as much as I want them to be able to go to the Arctic and have that wow experience so exploration first of all it's meaning changes over the course of history and the kinds of research problems that's attached to change it's bringing it all back to me beautifully when I was here writing my books and these things, it's almost Pavlovian I can feel myself ready to kind of fold things up there's a question here I know that the true scientists comfort zone is exploring researching, generating data and results but how much time does a scientist invest in actually convincing political and financial leaders of the true meaning of their results and the threats and issues that come nowadays great question, thank you masses of time even more these days we have to justify the science through a lot of assessment exercises and a big word I think is impact what is the impact of your research but I actually think that's a fair question because we do spend public money most scientists spend public money and they go out and they do projects and then how have you justified spending this money and but an awful lot of time is spent and an awful lot of money actually is spent trying to assess where the impact that science has had so this government likes to see economic growth, economic impact but also science impact I think there is still an understanding that you can do science and you can have a pure scientific discovery and it's not an impact necessarily on economics it's an impact on the science that we do which is just as important as any sort of financial aspect Michael well throughout history having patrons as for men and women of learning always been essential and often of course a source of great pride at the heart of the endeavour patrons were never far away one of the most interesting discussions I had with colleagues was at Cambridge a year or two ago was about to what extent patrons persist in the 20th or 21st century maybe I'll leave that with you to think about but I'd only say certainly in the world of the geography of faith in the polar regions there's no shortage of place names to document the significance of patrons that's entirely true of course I think this is going to be our last question now before we wrap out so yes Graham McMillan what concerns me is that quite often or most often explosion in extreme environments leads to the development of technologies that then enables man to exploit that environment and to destroy it and even the Antarctic Treaty system is a temporary system it will fall do you ever feel any guilt great question and in fact can I take it there's one of the hand that went up here and I felt bad at saying this is the last question and then we can answer it so this is here yes and this is possibly kind of related so I think it was Dr Walker who made an analogy also the science exploration is analogous and I wonder if there's kind of an analogy between the colonialist ideas of exploration and that the western concept of science is the dominant and the real way of understanding the world and whether actually the panel thinks that science and extreme environments might be or is an area where traditional or local knowledge is actually influential on science as science can be on understanding those environments so two great questions there so I guess does science open up areas vulnerable areas to exploitation and destruction and therefore should we feel guilty about that and also to what extent is a kind of western imposition of art the way we understand the landscape more or less important than what the people who are already living there how the people already living there understand it which doesn't actually apply to Antarctica space but does apply to the Arctic so Michael you first maybe it doesn't apply to those look historically there is no doubt about it science and colonial enterprises have worked hand in hand not at all times in all places but consistently throughout modern history the textbooks of the history of science show the complicated ways in which that's happened the really important point I think you're also getting us to think about though is the place of local knowledge well what do local people have to have had to say about this and it's true that science is a shared enterprise has often not usually depended on certain kinds of collaboration and there's so many examples the Ice Age, Louis Agassi he got his knowledge from people who lived in the Alps and told him that the glaciers move the floors who thought the northwest passage they asked the Inuit draw the maps please show us which way to go so this has happened throughout history I think the thing that I take great encouragement from is that there's certainly developed much more serious currents of collaborative research in the last several decades I think they've taken place informally in the past and now funding bodies are beginning to recognise sometimes that you can achieve more if you work with the local people but in the sense of the question how to decolonise science or how do you know if science is decolonise is a really good one it's subtle Jane do you think doing research in the Arctic and Antarctic also opens into more exploitation than potential destruction no I don't actually I think the reason why we know that there are very special places is because we do science there if we hadn't done science there we wouldn't know these special places that require protecting and in fact a lot of the things we do especially in the Antarctic Survey say around Antarctica there are a lot of scientists who do work that actually collects data to understand different environments to show that they should be preserved so an example is for example that there are groups of scientists around the world that work on the populations of fish and krill and squid and things in the southern ocean and there is a particular part of the Antarctic Treaty the Convention for Marine and Living Resources and it's because of the science that they do that they understand that these are vulnerable areas and then they have been protected and if we hadn't done that science I think there would be fish to death so hooray for the scientists I'm thinking that our exploration of space hasn't left near space environments in a particularly good or tidy state so again let me explain that statement I made that I think science, technology and exploration are neutral in that just because it's science it doesn't mean it's good just because it's technology it doesn't mean it's good just because it's exploration it doesn't mean it's good and you can find very many examples in the history of that being true and so it's what we choose to do with it that said the worry that by doing something by exploring something and developing a technology that we remain lead to later catastrophe isn't useful because I don't think there is any crystal ball that can tell us whether or not it is the thing that will kill us or will save us and I would take the first laboratory observation of nuclear fission in 1939 by Otto Frisch and Lisa Meitner they weaponized that in the mid 1940s at which point we would all say here well what the hell you know that's not good is it but then depending on who you talk to about our ability to wean ourselves off fossil fuels you look at a nuclear bridge to that and that may be the technology that saves us all so there is no crystal ball that tells you what's going to help and what's not going to help you and so so that's that and then in terms of local knowledge and science versus the rest of the world sciences and I do worry about this every now and again we get into the sort of I don't know what science positivism like science is the only philosophy that should run at everything and of course I think I feel that science is a way of describing the world and its state and as you get better at it you get to a closer approximation of the truth that you never actually get to the truth and so in that regard I think it's a description rather than an explanation and so in that regard you need to accept other people's thoughts and try and fold them into your line but it isn't this thing that is this all-knowing thing I think it tells you what you can know and there's a lot that you can never know so that's what I'd say about it OK well thank you very much but we're now going to start to wrap up the evening thanks for some fantastic questions here I've got a couple more questions to put to our panellists in the closing remarks and what I'd really like to know from each of you is at the beginning Kevin said that he felt like the age of exploration was dead or dying or changing or slowing but that's not necessarily the case but he's seen some signs that that might be the case so my two questions to each of you now are do you think the age of exploration is a human exploration is going to tail off into nothing and also if you got the chance to go to Mars would you go Michael I think it's incredibly important to have places where you would like never to go Mars might be one of mine but I've got one or two others as well so but the second question maybe the key one about whether exploration will peter out no it's not petering out it's changing and I think in the world we live in today exploration science more generally is negotiated it has to be negotiated because we don't have free licenses to go to be autonomous in the way that autonomy used to be a kind of either political or ideological dream so I think provided we begin to strip out some of the assumptions about what makes our our lives our existence in this world autonomous this kind of desire for a certain kind of modernist self control well that doesn't mean the end of exploration that means exploration on different terms Dane if we consider exploration is about learning something new rather than the classic going somewhere because it's there kind of thing which is my definition of adventurism and extreme sport so let's go learning something new I think there is plenty of things to learn new about the earth or everything particularly in extreme environments because not so many people have been there so I think actually there's masses more to learn and would I go to Mars? yes but via Antarctica so I don't know I genuinely think we'll look back at this time you could look back at this time so if you regard space as the final human frontier so if you say that we could continue to be fractal in our exploration of the world and explore it in greater depth and detail then yes we'll always continue to explore if you look at space as a final physical frontier I would really hope that it's not I would really hope that exploration will always be something that is physically physically involve humans I can see us looking back at this epoch as the point at which we decided that actually you know human space exploration we look at human space exploration as a feat in the way that we look at the pyramids which is these magnificent feats that you think why the hell would they have bothered to do that and I can see that being the case so I don't know actually I know what I hope but whether that is true I don't know so I guess it depends I think actually that exploration is what all of us do in all of our lives all of the time I really hope that's the case in everything you do whether you're going up mountains or you're just navigating your own life I hope so because otherwise my CV looks really quite dodgy so I would say in some sense human exploration will always be human and there will always be exploration would I go to Mars do you know what I've thought about that an awful lot so I would have got on a ticket to go into Lothal bit in a heartbeat I would go to the moon in about two heartbeats Mars I would sit down and think about really my heart and I would probably look at my two children and think probably north thanks very much Kevin so I'm going to answer my own questions because that's only fair but before that I'd like to try a little bit I'm not going to attempt to summarise what's been a fascinating discussion but I will pick out a few parts of it that I thought were particularly interesting at least to me and I think we've talked about aspects of exploration about things that we need to know and that we don't know that we need to know until we do it so that's one category of exploration and one reason that there's an exploration imperative if we don't do that then we don't survive as a species and so I'd say that's one kind and we talked about whether exploring Antarctica shows how vulnerable it is and how much it needs to be protected but I would also say that in a way exploring Antarctica and some of the pioneering research that Jane did showed us that Antarctica doesn't need to be protected in the past Antarctica's been hot it's been covered in ffarns and dinosaurs, it didn't care it doesn't mind whether it's covered in ice or not but if the ice melts we're the ones it's coming for so one of the things that we learned from exploration is how vulnerable we are and what we need to do to protect ourselves so that's one part of the story there's this notion that you can't predict what's going to happen and that's actually true of almost everything in our lives we just don't realise it so much and we were talking earlier before we started this about the financial crash about how confident economists always are in their predictions but how they never look back and say we got it wrong then and then and then and then also got it wrong then as well didn't we and yet there's some extra standard that if you're exploring you're held to it says what are we going to get from it and how can we believe you and in a sense I really like what Kevin just said in the way that we live if we're living right I think it's interesting there are some quite real ways in which going to these places give you new eyes and for example some of the astronomy that takes place in Antarctica is literally looking through different wavelengths looking via different media to see different things in the universe that you wouldn't have been able to see otherwise and T.S. Eliot said this to change the way that you see wherever you are and so there's a sense in which if you're explorers you're also capable of seeing and seeing and seeing the world with fresh eyes in a way that's essentially I think is very human and is also essential to the human enterprise I love this comment about you can't underestimate inspiration because we all know that in our hearts we all know that and we've all been inspired in some way the reason that all of this is in the room tonight is because there's something about exploration that has caught our imagination and our hearts and our souls we're not here for a technical discourse so you can't underestimate inspiration in the ways that we've described in all of this I just wanted to say do I think exploration is dead or dying or likely to die or human exploration is likely to die and you make a very compelling argument Kevin but I'd go back to that point about whenever we predict what's going to happen we'll be wrong when they said it was the end of physics along came Einstein and so on and so on and so I would expect that this might change but we're seeing China that's wanting to go to the moon so it's ready to start a manned exploration programme to the moon and on to Mars India is the first country that has ever sent a spacecraft to Mars and got it there successfully the first time and did it attend the price that NASA managed it and it's answer to how can you do that when there are people starving in the streets this is our way to lift people out of poverty this is our way to show ourselves as a technological nation so all of that makes me think that exploration is going on and still going on even in the big normal way that we talk about it as well as in our own hearts but there's two personal reasons that I'd like to bring in now for how I know that exploration is going on and we'll continue to go on and one of them is that my husband is actually an astronaut and actually an astronomer he's actually at UCL too and what he's doing now with his life and his research is getting school kids to come in and look at stuff about astronomy it's actually starting tomorrow at UCL it's called Your Universe so school children are coming in to UCL and graduate students are showing them telescopes and microscopes and cloud chambers and talking about string theory and these can be 8 or 9 or 10 year olds and they flock in there and it's open wide and they ask the questions and they're deeply curious and you can feel the passion and the energy in the room when they're doing that that's one reason I don't think exploration human exploration can read out and the other reason is I got a lovely photo sent to me by Texas Morning this is my 5 year old goddaughter she's only a little, she's got a bit of attitude I have to say and young Ruby Evans today is history day at school so she gets to dress up as anyone she wants to how many historical figures can she know about and she was asked what historical figure of all the ones that we've been telling you about you've heard about, do you want to dress up as today and the picture they sent me was Amelia Earhart Amelia Earhart and that ladies and gentlemen is my final proof that human exploration is not dead, will not be dead will never die and thank you very much to our panel and for all of you for coming tonight thanks very much