 It just feels very odd. My facing... Okay. Yes! Oh my goodness. Hold on a second. What do you wish you had known about your career when you were my age? Okay, well... I wish a lot of things. It's this thing of like fail, fail, fail, fail, win. It's a constant obsession. People think there's a right way to go through this. Like there's one right pathway. There's no ready-made solution that you just pull out of your toolkit of solutions. If you could bend the laws of physics and take a time machine to any point in the geological past, where would you go? That's a big question, right? It's like, do you want to come with mum to work today? Nah, it's fine. T-Rex. T-Rex. I want to see T-Rex. There's no question about it. Yeah, so I'd say it's a very exciting field to be thinking about working in. Science is great like that, so keep it coming back. Yeah. So today I'll be interviewing Chrissie, who I see as my future self. Today we're conducting an interview of my future self. Today I'm going to be interviewing my future self, Naomi, the astrophysicist. He's getting into a time machine going 30-something years into the future, finds himself and asks whether the choice were the right ones. At a dinner party. And you got the big shots around the table. How do you explain what you do? I don't really go to dinner parties. Oh, that's a much dreaded question, isn't it? So I usually say I'm an astrophysicist and then people stop talking to me. So I would describe what I do as I get the fun job at Questacon. People often don't know that there is even a field of science communication. We're trusted with very complex, often highly sensitive challenges, where there are real-world implications and real-world outcomes that need to be delivered. It sounds easy, but it's not. Now, what did you want to do as a career? When you were my age, I told my dad that I was going to take a course in cosmology. And he was like, what are you going to do with that? That's not a useful thing to do. Environmental science is so diverse that you can do so many different things. And I was so passionate about everything that I didn't have a clear idea of my idea job. That's what you get told all the way through school. And you need to know the secret of how to get to the best outcome. And I don't think there is a best outcome. I didn't end up in the place that I thought I was going to end up, but I would not take back. I did not regret any of those things that I did in that university degree. I think it's my way of saying I just basically randomly drifted through life and I've wound up here. What did you think your job was going to be like compared to what it actually is? It depends on how long back I go. I thought my job would be doing a lot of mathematics and a lot of writing equations out. And instead it's doing a lot of programming and a lot of things on the computer. What do you wish you hadn't known about your career path when you were my age? You're always chasing a question that you want an answer to and it's very hard to sort of stop. No idea how things were going to turn out, but yeah, absolutely. I love my job. That, you know, it was going to be a lot of hard work and with that hard work was going to come sacrifice. Do you think yourself at age 20 would be surprised by where you've ended up? I think so, yeah. My younger me that wanted to be a dentist would be quite sick of what I ended up doing. But as my younger me that I was studying already environmental science, it wouldn't be that surprise, but I think, yeah, quite proud. So if you were to give me three pieces of advice, what would they be? Science is done by people and sometimes you think, hey, science has nothing got to do with people. It's all objective. It's pretty wrong. Be the voice of reason and lots of people seem to have lots of strong opinions, but it's not kind of clear what we should believe. To know that you can always change your mind. That was one of the things that I probably didn't know much about when I was powering through my university degree and jumping straight into a career is you can change your mind, you can take your time. It's also important. My daughter said that it was amazing that somebody was going to be interviewing me as their future self and then she pointed out that it may be that you turn out to be way cooler than me. Well, it's been a pleasure to come and talk to my future self. It's really nice hearing that there have been success stories where like there are things that have changed, things that have worked out for the better. It's fascinating how much there is out there that we don't know. How the research you do does have a practical, you know, beneficial impact and that you can be directly involved in creating and developing that impact throughout your career. What haven't I learned? So what happens if you become like a million times more successful than me? I'll make sure to tell everyone that it was you who inspired me. Following your footsteps, my future footsteps next year. Thank you. I'm sure your future self will be even better.