8 June 2013 | NewScientist | 27Except that this leads us to one
last piece of the combination of
job-risk psychology with the data:
the difference that it makes to be
outside that door.
One measure of this is the
chance of getting back inside.
Before the recession, about 1 in
3 unemployed people found a job
every quarter, but this dropped
to about 1 in 4 after the recession
began. In early 2008, about
400,000 people had been
unemployed for more than
12 months in the UK. By early
2013, this was up to 900,000.
Another measure of life on the
outside is to say that the risk is
misery. For the young, especially,
it can leave a permanent scar on
job prospects and wages.
Unemployed people are also
more likely to be sick, stressed
and depressed, to divorce, commit
crime and die early – and research
suggests that unemployment
makes the difference. Suicide is
often said to be one factor in this
rising mortality rate; others are
heart disease and alcohol.
Estimates of the extra annual
risk of death vary. One study found
no effect, others put it at around
20 per cent, while one said around
60 per cent. If true, the latter is
huge, similar to the average extra
risk from smoking 12 cigarettes
a day. It's as if every 24 hours out
of work left you 27 hours older.
Look hard at many risks
about which people worry and
you often find less to fear in the
numbers than headlines suggest.
Is unemployment an exception?
The odds of becoming jobless
are both worse than they might
appear and subject to potentially
huge consequential multipliers.
To be sensitive to this seems
perfectly rational. nMichael Blastland devised BBC Radio
4’s programme dedicated to numbers,
More or Less. Statistician David
Spiegelhalter is the Winton Professor
for the Public Understanding of Risk
at the University of Cambridge. Their
new book is The Norm Chronicles
(Profile Books)Comment on these stories at newscientist.com/opinionIn 1995, you discovered the first exoplanet
orbiting a sunlike star. Did you foresee
just how far the field would have come
since then?
At first looking for exoplanets was seen as weird.
A lot of people were negative about it. Then the
field began to grow, and the establishment of the
Kepler mission in 2009 showed the field was fully
mature. In parallel, exoplanet meetings also grew.
Many other disciplines are also interested now; it
is much wider than just astronomy.But isn't NASA’s Kepler space telescope all
but shut down now?
Yes. They wanted to push the mission as long as
they could to increase exoplanet detections, and
they found many super-Earth and Neptune-size
planets. But unfortunately attempts to detect an
Earth-sized planet orbiting its star with an Earth-
like year seem to have failed.Does that mean the search is off until 2017,
when NASA launches its Transiting Exoplanet
Survey Satellite?
No. Ground-based photometric technology has
been pushed to a point that the bulk of detection
can now be done from the ground by targeting
smaller stars. That’s where the Next-Generation
Transit Survey (NGTS) comes in.What is the NGTS?
It is an array of 12 small telescopes being installed
this year at Paranal in Chile’s Atacama desert – an
ideal location because it is extremely dry and has
clear sky about 80 per cent of the time. The
reason we don’t need bigger telescopes is that
we want to focus on small, bright stars.Why limit your planet-hunting to these stars?
We don’t want to repeat Kepler's observations of
faint stars. Also, if you find a planet transiting in
front of a faint star, it’s very hard to get other
information about it because the signal is too
weak. Bright stars offer the possibility of learning
more about the planet, by making it possible to
do work such as atmospheric analysis.One minute with...
Didier Queloz
What kinds of planets will NGTS detect?
We plan to be able to detect almost anything that
takes up to two weeks to orbit its star. If we are
lucky, we may get a couple of objects very close
to the size of Earth.Beyond identifying them, is characterising
exoplanets the next big thing?
The field is definitely moving more towards the
astrophysics: climate, weather, atmosphere. I think
we will be amazed by the diversity of these worlds.Will exoplanets reveal life beyond Earth?
It is in the mind of everyone involved that what we
are doing should lead towards an understanding
of life in the universe. On the practicality of life
existing elsewhere, I have no idea. In theory,
finding a planet is a way to tackle that question.
Once we find such a planet, there is no way we will
be able to fly there in a reasonable time frame, but
we can probe the atmosphere from here. Will that
be enough to answer the question of whether life
exists there? That part is still highly debatable.
Interview by Jon WhiteNASA’s exoplanet hunt may be on hold but the search for other
worlds won’t stop, says the pioneering Swiss astronomer
Profile
Didier Queloz is professor of physics at the
University of Cambridge and the University of
Geneva in Switzerland. He is a key collaborator
on the Next-Generation Transit Survey130608_Op_Comment.indd 27 3/6/13 10:15:56