to India for the spice trade, sometime in the
mid-1400s they passed the equator. This wasn’t
important just because they were exploring new
land,buttheirsystemofnavigationjustbroke
down. They could no longer see Polaris because
they had crossed the equator. Soon after they
discovered another constellation in the southern
hemisphere – the Southern Cross – that performs a
similar function.
Ilovethisstoryofusingthestarstonavigate
yourwayacrosstheoceans,tomakesureyoudon’t
getlostinthisvastexpanseandgettowhereyou
needtobe,butthenalsoworkingouthowtoadapt
that system when you start going to different parts
of the world, like in the Southern Hemisphere,
which Europeans hadn’t explored before.That sort of navigation is a forgotten art now,
isn’t it?
We kind of take it for granted now, yes. I’m always
getting lost and the first thing I do when I can’t
quite work out where I am is reach into my pocket
andgetoutGoogleMapsonmysmartphone.You
don’t have to think about navigating anymore, and
that’s just over a quarter of a mile!“We’ve constructed constellations out
of these combinations of stars and told
stories and legends about them”
When you try and imagine what these early
navigators were doing, like crossing the entire
expanse of the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, where
they had not seen land for weeks upon weeks. Yet
they had that confidence that they knew roughly
where they were and where they were trying to get
to in order to survive the voyage. It boggles
mymindjusthowincredibleitiswhenyouthink
about it.Now you have looked intensely into the
deep history of the Earth, how do you see its
future unfolding?
The whole of the book,Origins,isthisfusion
betweenhistoryandscience.Itshowshowthe
humanstoryandtheoriginsofourcivilisations
have been crafted and inf luenced by fundamental
features of our planet. But then you can use this
understanding and knowledge to look into the
future, such as how the world is likely to
change and how that will affect you and I
and our everyday world.
Wetouchedonasimilarkindoftopicalready
to do with climate change and how coal and oil
was this wonderful resource to get us through theindustrial revolution. This has led to the privileged,
relaxed and comfortable lifestyle we have today.
But it has unleashed this genie in a bottle. It has
had these unintended consequences of putting
too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and
changing our climate. These are the problems we
have to solve in the near future.
So by understanding the processes that I talk
about in Origins, and how they affect human
history, it will also tell us about our own future as a
species and what we’ll have to do for ourselves if we
were to live on Mars or elsewhere.What are your thoughts on the mining
of asteroids?
So there’s a whole chapter in Origins about the
importance of metals in human history. Clearly
we’ve gone through the Bronze Age, the Iron Age
and today we’re very much in the Steel Age, the
Aluminium Age, if not even the Silicon Age – where
we use these non-metals for computers, solar panels
and so on. The problem with all those exotic metals
is they are quite rare and hard to get at on Earth.
There’s a limited supply and they’re hard to recycle
from the electronics we use.
Therefore there is a huge demand and potentially
a lot of money to be made by going to the asteroids
and mining those as well as mining these resources
on Earth. If you pick the right asteroid, this one
lump of rock just a couple of kilometres across
could be worth trillions upon trillion of pounds on
the global market for different metal.Below:
Mining
asteroids
could be have
a potentially
huge effect
on the global
marketLewis Dartnell