Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and presenter of the BBC’s long-running Sky at Night programme Chris Lintott reveals his rules for a perfect world
Once a month we’ll turn all the lights off for half an hour. I grew up looking at the sky. Although you can see a lot from the middle of the city, there is something stunning about seeing a properly dark night sky. It’s an experience people think that they have to get on a bucket list, like maybe once in their life they’ll go to New Zealand and see the sky from there. But there’s no reason we can’t share that experience together. Half an hour, once a month at an agreed time, we’ll just turn all the lights off and everyone can go out and look at the sky. It makes everyday problems feel a lot smaller.
Everyone launching a satellite will have to bring it down safely. If you go out and look at the sky after sunset, you’ll notice that there are lots of moving lights across the sky. Those are artificial satellites. More of them have been launched in the last few years than in the rest of the space age. We’re in danger of our night sky becoming polluted, which ruins the view but more importantly, if that space becomes too crowded, these satellites start colliding with each other, and then we won’t be able to put new ones up. We rely on satellites for everything from navigation and communication to keeping an eye on the Earth. So there are two parts to my suggestion: one is that if you want to launch something into space, you have to have a plan to bring it down when you’re finished.
And the second is that if you want to put something in space, I will have to personally approve it so that we launch things that will be useful to everyone.
Half of all science funding will be awarded by lottery. We need to let our scientists be risk takers. We often stumble across the big discoveries; we are often surprised by what we look at. Yet probably 30–40 per cent of the time spent by almost every scientist is in applying for money to do so. We ask for money to fund our students and build our telescopes and so on. It’s never wasted effort but, given that most applications fail, it’s a lot of wasted time. So half of the money I’m going to give out by lottery to random scientists. I think it would save people a lot of time, and we’d see much more creative science. Personally, the biggest scientific risk I’ve taken is I’ve started to work in SETI looking for aliens. That’s very fun, but obviously we haven’t found any and we may never find any. So tha
