A Trip to the Future: A Q+A Science Special | Q+A

tonight a panel of some of our finest scientific minds will hear their take on nuclear subs and the risks of protesting during a pandemic and we'll take a trip to the future exploring a.i and outer space welcome to q a [Music] hello i'm stan great it's great to be with you joining me on the panel this evening artificial intelligence expert toby walsh nobel laureate and anu vice chancellor brian schmidt wildlife scientist and science communicator vanessa perotta quantum physicist and innovator michael beasik and international air quality expert lydia marowska who helped highlight the airborne spread of covert and a little later we'll be joined by astrophysicist kirsten back should be part of our discussion we're delighted to bring together such incredible minds for you tonight remember you can stream us live on iview and all the socials quanda as usual is the hashtag please join the debate and publish your comments on screen from facebook instagram and twitter let's get to our first question tonight it comes from jessica quist the recent protests by construction workers have frustrated many victorians it seems to have been an excuse for violence and disorder and the display of toxic masculinity in its purest form these protests are also potentially superspreader events is it fair that our healthcare workers will be expected to treat patients who've actively defied public health orders and is it fair that hospital beds may be potentially taken away from those requiring acute care how do we manage this violence and how do we manage the risk to the community brian smith i want to go to you first of all on this i know you've written a lot about what you see as a increasing political populism some of the fear and anxiety of this age and and what drives this when you look at these protests what does it tell you well it tells us that we do have a small part of the population of australia that are fed up and uh really aren't buying in i think to the australian project and so that is a problem uh so education i think is really really important being able to have a conversation with people but australia you know as the population has made a decision of how to deal with covid not everyone is happy about it but clearly violence that we have seen is not the right way and we have made a decision as a population and and our politicians have on behalf of us to say this is not okay and so i do think we need to clamp down on it uh we need to find a way to get of course to being able to open up as fast as we can but ultimately we want to do it in a way that's safe and doesn't end up killing or making i would say really bad health outcomes for thousands upon thousands of australians yeah and brian you're right they point out that the small number but of course the violence that we've seen um the impact that that has is greater perhaps than the numbers themselves and vanessa bryan said something interesting there he talked about education communication there are people here apparently amongst the protesters who are anti-vaxxers who in spite of the evidence in spite of the arguments simply don't believe it how do you communicate a message to people right now who don't want to believe what they're told well this is an incredibly tricky time for many people and whether you believe to to be vaccinated or not that's that's your choice the information is out there however the way in which we provide this information can be a little bit tricky and it's it's it's kind of time in australia that we hit that refresh button on how we communicate in science and how we see science and this might be one potential example definitely one example of that but maybe we need to think about assessing how we provide this information to different demographics and and and and provide that through people who they can relate to so maybe there's a minority of people that they might look up to and they'll see someone and if they have those people providing those key messages that might be one way but there are so many and we are living in a one in 100 year event this is very tricky but communication is key and the good thing is australia is providing information on why we should get vaccinated and there is a lot of information thankfully coming from overseas and we've got the luxury of seeing countries overseas testing people as well as vaccinating people and there's huge sample sizes that us in australia can look towards to see if these types of new science is working lydia when you look at a protest like that and we often hear um concern about what could be super spreader events we've seen other protests and they haven't turned out to be that but what did you take away from these protests and what potential risks there may be given that victoria is still going through this outbreak of the delta strain well it's a very difficult question and it depends whether there are infected people in the crowd or not if there are and if there are others who are not wearing masks and they are in the proximity to those infected people they have very high risk of being infected so yes potentially events like this can be super spreaders on the other hand we are talking about events in open air in open air dilution of the virus is much faster so therefore in general outdoors the risk is much lower than uh than indoors and an infected person during during a protest would potentially infect somebody next to that person but not the whole crowd it's not like an indoor space where one infected person can infect the whole crowd so that's that's the reason why we don't see this many outbreaks during the protest yeah just on that as well abc has been able to report there was a man at the protests who has tested a positive he's in hospital um at the moment as well just to go to that that that issue that you raised there about someone potentially being infected well there was one person there that we've been able to report who is infected um michael brian talked there about the australian project um and that people are not on board with the australian project but it does raise the question and i think you know you're originally from the united states as well what it raises questions about politics during this time and and questions of personal liberty and freedom i know in the united states whether you wore a mask or not became a political statement but when we talk about an australian project when we talk about a joint effort in dealing with a pandemic there are other factors as well beyond the health factor that drive the sort of protest we've seen aren't there i mean i broadly think so but i i do think it's worth saying that this is a really small part of the population broadly people are on board and the best way to know is to look at the vaccination rates in new south wales we're now at 84 percent first dose which indicates that 84 of adults are on board with this project we really end up talking about a small but very loud minority and you know to some of the earlier discussion um yes there is a need for scientific discussion for education for communication but at the end of the day we we end up with a with a virulent minority of people who are either by choice or by you know their wiring immune to fact and so we need to take a different approach and for them i mean my overall view of this is we are the victims of the greatest intelligence operation in history that misinformation is being weaponized against us uh it's not all that secret in in fact uh and this is uh fomenting violence in a really tiny part of our population our job is to help those who are interested in hearing the truth and mock endlessly the people who are unwilling to embrace the truth toby pandemics um in the past have seen just the sort of events we're seeing now aren't they they've thrown up just these types of protests yeah history is in some ways repeating itself um if you go back to the 100 years to the spanish flu there were riots and protests then people were upset about mandatory vaccines and and the and the lockdowns that happened then so um i do think actually there's a strange uh cycle of history that these happen once every 100 years or so it's just long enough for us to have forgotten the lessons we learned last time the the pains that we had to go through um the sacrifices we had to make that was something that our great grandfathers great grandmothers had to live through and now we've forgotten those lessons and we have to learn those painfully enough and toby given um what we're on the cusp of as well with changes rapid changes when it comes to things like artificial intelligence might this be the last of this type of pandemic that we lived through i'm hopeful that this actually might be the last pandemic because we now it used to take a decade to develop a vaccine this vaccine took a year and that's unprecedented but now we can develop vaccines i mean some of these are vaccines like the mrna vaccines you can develop in a couple of months and so if we can learn how to distribute the vaccines and that's not just to us but that's to the whole world and we haven't worked that problem out because this pandemic is not over by a long way because we haven't really begun to vaccinate the third world and we can't breathe safely until everyone everyone on the planet has had the facts has such a chance at least out of vaccination we're talking about boosters in some countries and other countries have not even had first shots yet our next question comes from vera mironenko the soviet leader brezhnev told the people that the chernobyl power station was safe enough to build in his own kitchen according to my relatives living nearby in ukraine what risks does this government impose on the people of australia from the nuclear-powered submarines lydia it's a big question isn't it what what risks but where do you begin with something like that yeah well where do you begin well in principle as a nuclear scientist understanding nuclear power i'm in principle not against uh application of nuclear power for energy generation however the question here it's not really about science it's about the instrument we are using the instrument at the submarines when uh students come to me and ask me uh shall i use this instrument i'm i'm asking what's the purpose what's your aim and here the question is what's the aim of using this specific instrument and this aim hasn't been clearly communicated we've heard that this is because this is a superior technology superior technology for what this uh submarines are quieter can go underwater for much longer but on the other hand they cannot come closer to the uh to the land because in some places because they are very big they can't enter many ports so therefore what is the australian national goal of using these submarines and this hasn't been communicated one of the things we have heard of here is is the increasing geopolitical threat and potential conflict in the indo-pacific and preparing us for that and i want to go to brian schmidt on that question in just a moment but you raised something else interesting in your answer there and that is the question of application beyond submarines we are the sixth nation now to get the to to be planning to get this sort of technology but the only one that would not have a nuclear weapons program or a nuclear energy program should that be that part of this discussion as well we're going to be talking about climate science some later in the program but the question of nuclear energy should that also be part of our conversation right now video oh sorry i thought you were asking asking bran well uh as i said i'm not opposed to nuclear energy however being very much aware of all the challenges related to nuclear energy to all the costs all the other problems so this is not the first technology to consider there are other technologies to consider but nevertheless this could be considered within the package of energy solutions for a country in australia however there are other sources which i would consider first there's plenty of sunshine there's plenty of wind so these are technologies to consider to consider first but as i said nuclear energy could be one element of the package michael you're nodding along part of the answer where you're nodding along to yes to nuclear energy or yes to solar well i mean uh i'm i'm a little bit ambivalent right i think nuclear should be part of the discussion but i want to take a step back to the to the undertone of the question right why was why was chernobyl such a disaster why has it scarred people in their memories for so long it was because the government lied so much i mean the famous the famous quote now from from the mini-series is uh every lie we we tell incurs a debt to the truth and sooner or later that debt is paid now this is the only panel that's been on this show in quite a long time where every single member of the panel for a living tells the truth right you are you are a quantum physicist i know i know i know six world might be relative or well i have multiple truths i have the easiest way out but but the the fundamental aspect here is that if we're going to embrace technologies like nuclear energy even if we're going to build semiconductor manufacturing on shore which has huge amounts of toxic chemicals involved in order to do that fundamentally we need to have trust in the policy makers to inform us accurately about what the risks are and not to conceal those risks so unless we fix that problem the trust deficit in government i think that nuclear is actually going to be politically very hard and brian um one of the the questions lydia raised there is what is the purpose well we know part of this is the changing geopolitical risks in our area as well how do you assess those risks right now and for that it's the unnamed threat neither joe biden or scott morrison or boris johnson would actually say it but china yeah well uh stan i think you're probably as much an expert as i am on china but uh clearly the people who work at anu see this time of geopolitical tensions not going away anytime soon they see it as being probably a generational thing and so the strategists are trying to figure out how to keep australia safe certainly i would say the majority of people that i've had a chance to talk to at my own institution who work a lot on this do think the nuclear submarines are tactically a good investment for australia but they come with lots of complications they're very expensive and of course nuclear energy has not been something that australia has been prepared to accept i personally think it's uh you know it has strengths and weaknesses uh and it should be considered as part of the energy mix uh going forward if it makes sense i'm not sure right now i agree with lydia not sure that it does but with respect to nuclear subs they have a lot of advantages there are a few disadvantages and i think we have to let the experts in there kind of plot a way forward based on what they see as the geopolitical risks uh that's not just five years that's 30 or 40 years and we talk a lot about china now but it's not just china uh it's the whole region there's there's three billion people in this part of the world and it's going to get complicated over the next 50 years let's let's start with this our next question on a similar subject to this comes from justin brown this question is for professor birchick quantum technologies were one of the areas of collaboration outlined in the orcas pact what do we as a country stand to gain from this hold that thought michael um but a bit of tension is always is always a good thing toby you think that this may be a 20th century technology that's going to be obsolete by the time that we actually um are finally building them yes i mean a big manned submarine very expensive piece of kit but we don't know what the price is going to be is it going to be 90 billion is going to be more we don't know but it's going to be very expensive um and we're only going to have a few number of them um if you look at the way the military is going today it's increasingly to small unpersoned autonomous devices that are cheap um that will be much quieter we'll be able to go to shallower waters um so i i do wonder if that's just these devices are a relic of 20th century diplomacy um and they aren't actually ever going to be useful in a military sense at least uh for fighting 20 21st century awards and michael the the submarines get all the attention but there's a lot else we're talking about here cyber capacity as well changes to navigation capacity for submarines there's a lot more to it than just the submarines isn't it yeah i mean to use a crude analogy the submarines were the tip of the spear in a strategic relationship that now aligns three members of the five eyes the intelligent sharing nations and indeed to the to the question one of the areas that was mentioned is this area of quantum technology that uses quantum physics in order to achieve new things right one of the things that we can achieve is the construction of new kinds of sensors that allow us to navigate without gps this is something that we do in my company because this is what submarines are not using they're not using gps so they can't of course because they're they're deep under water but this is a problem that's that's you know recognized by every western government right now the idea of gps denial is a major strategic risk so what we do with my company cue control is we build new kinds of navigation systems that leverage quantum physics to give you stability over very long times what does that mean it means you can run underwater with no gps for very very long periods and still navigate accuracy accurately so if you're going through underwater canyons or whatnot this is extremely important right but this carries over to autonomous vehicle networks on the surface it carries over to space-based technologies acute control we have one of these moon to mars projects so there are all these opportunities that flow from that initial application and i think the the august agreement with submarines as the starting point was a wonderful nucleation of a technology sharing agreement that has been brewing for many decades already between australia and the u.s in quantum physics yeah we're going to get to that question too a bit later on about quantum physics and what other areas it can be applied to our next question though comes from jane louise lynch as a casual relief teacher in melbourne i've worked across many schools and have seen that ventilation can be inadequate in many classrooms some schools do not even have windows that can be opened also physical distancing is not possible with current class sizes why have ventilation and class sizes not been given adequate consideration as a game changer when it comes to air porn transmission in schools and lydia just further to that the whole recognition of the impact of airborne transmission was something we were late to overall wasn't it well very much so and this is not just airborne transmission we are talking about a lack of understanding of indoor air quality full stop this is something which we've never really thought never really worried about not just during the pandemic before the pandemic coming let's say to uh to the office coughing and sneezing and knowing that others will be infected nobody worried about this so there's no record no awareness recognition of indoor air quality full stop and then part of this is not no consideration to airborne transmission of kovit and lack of taking on board of the need for ventilation so this is not something which just started now it's a problem now this is a very very deep problem of our our society so the who the world health organization has released new figures as well and new guidelines on air quality and a correlation isn't there between potentially the impact of covert and places with poorer air quality in places with poor air quality people are sicker people are more vulnerable to other diseases so that's very much the reason why they would be also vulnerable more to covet that's that's right yesterday a new air quality guidelines were released in bonn and i was uh i'm proud being a co-chair of the guideline development group and i'll just stay with you lydia on this and and one of the one of the things that jane louise was raising there is why have we not given adequate consideration to this where are we right right now given how slow we were to react and as we start to open up where are we on discussion around ventilation particularly when it comes to schools this this conversation is only just beginning so yesterday announcements in victoria of the investment in schools in ventilation and the whole package of measures taken it's an extremely positive step this is the first step really like this in the country but in other states this discussion hasn't started yet and this discussion hasn't really extended to other areas of the society it's not only schools there these are offices they are restaurants they are basically everywhere where we spend together so we are just at the very very beginning of this discussion lydia thank you we're going to have to say goodbye to you here at this part of the program lydia marowska will leave us right now thank you so much for giving us your time tonight thank you for having me on the program and let's go to our next question that comes from natasha joyce after proposing yet more cuts to courses and staffing la trobe university has this week announced that for anyone to be on campus from december they need to be fully vaccinated could ensuring that universities provide covert safe environments be a potential selling point for an industry that has been abandoned by federal government thank you my name's natasha joyce i'm from bendigo in victoria have a lovely day thank you natasha what a lovely message and and brian i'll go to you on that where are you at at the moment on getting students back and having the right protocols and protections yeah well of course we're on lockdown here in canberra and i don't see that changing for the rest of the semester we have five weeks left so we're surely trying to get our head around 2022. of course it's quite a uh interesting viru environment where i don't think anyone really knows for sure but we're going through systematically looking at for example air quality in our classrooms and our buildings trying to assess this because there really hasn't been a lot of regulation there and there's a trade-off normally if you vent uh air into buildings uh they become less energy efficient for example so there's filters and things that are new technology we're going to have to look at with respect to vaccination we need to make sure that the environment we provide on our campus is safe it's not really you know it's not it has to be safe to a a standard what does that think what does that mean though brian if i could just come in there um does that mean that you're going to i mean are your staff going to be is going to be mandatory for them to be vaccinated are you going to have to have critical levels of vaccination before you can open up to having certain numbers of students back where are you at in really benchmarking this yeah i mean it looks to me that we will be over 95 vaccinated both within our staff and within our students and we're going to be embedded in canberra which is well on its way of also achieving over 95 so at that point uh the modeling i have seen but we need to keep on working on this as we understand what's going on indicates that requiring vaccination is not as important as probably other interventions we can do but we're not going to be able to just have a wide open campus it looks like for the foreseeable future we're going to have to have interventions with respect to air quality mass probably limits within rooms and we're in the process of trying to understand exactly through the modeling through our understanding of how this disease is progressing otherwise how we're going to run the campus next year and that that sounds that sounds very open-ended brian um so so is this going to be more online teaching into next year that changes the experience for for the student are you looking at being the middle of next year towards the end of next year it just seems to be a very open-ended process well my my hope is stan that we will have our campus open to staff and to students next year at the beginning of term but we have to be honest that we don't completely understand how this disease is evolving and there are going to be some restrictions so my belief is we will be able to have you know classes largely on campus there might be restrictions to class size there may be requirement for vaccination in certain situations where the health says we need to have it but we cannot put people at risk and it's evolving situation we can see we're learning as we go and so absolutely my intent is to have the the campus open but i don't think it will be absolutely like it was in 2019 i'm afraid i want to bring kirsten banks who's just joined us now and kirsten that changes the nature of the experience as i said for both the student for people working in the university as well um what should we be looking at as we open up the levels of exposure the levels of risk questions of ventilation where do you sit on this look i think the thing we need to keep in the forefront of our minds is to keep people safe and keeping safe is keeping on top of things like exposure sites making sure that people are vaccinated so that transmission is let down to a minimum and look i've been doing my phd from home for half of the time i've been doing my phd i am really keen to get back into the university luckily i'm in a field where i'm very privileged to be able to do that from home as long as i have my laptop and a stable internet connection i can do my research from home but for many other researchers that's been a very difficult time throughout these times where you cannot go to the universities they're shut down they're completely locked from people going and doing what they need to do to advance our knowledge and science vanessa's agreeing with that furiously yeah i mean i work on wales as one of my primary species and so it's limited how you can get out to the ocean we have to think about how we do things people work in the laboratory they have to change their whole way in which they may make you know assessments on certain bacterial cultures that kind of thing it changes a lot of things and i feel really privileged to and very fortunate i feel sorry for this next generation coming through in the phd world right now it's tricky because you don't have that face to face but also you can't go to international conferences and the good thing is we've been able to adapt and i think we need to look at the positives and adapting in this climate we see parents teaching their children at home and i'm sure a lot of teachers parents rather are appreciative of their teachers right now we're living in different times but we're big we're adapting to it and this is a good thing we need to look at the positives yes there are challenges and i really do feel for those students going through these challenges but out of this we're able to talk to each other in remotely right now people are watching us and devices in different parts of the world but safe and this is the main thing forward so there's there's some positives that come out of a bad situation we haven't addressed the other part of the question which is how the universities have been abandoned the there was a recent study that said to may last this year 40 000 jobs one-fifth of the workforce have have gone because universities would deny job keeper job seeker that is something that we really have to worry about universities are going to be driving the innovation that gets us out of the out of this pandemic that they've been developing the vaccines um what does that say about this country that we have there there was a baby there was a billion dollars in research um uh program support was that not enough it's not enough because you know all the overseas students weren't able to come 40 000 jobs disappeared to put that in context uh the coal industry which we do seem to support the politicians seem to support employees 39 000 people so that's more than the coal industry has disappeared that's that's a a generational loss it does raise the question too michael this has been raised before whether there was much reliance on money from overseas to which would ultimately go through to funding this was as part of the model was there too much reliance on overseas students and overseas funding yeah i have to say so i'm an academic too right at the university of sydney and i absolutely despise this question right universities not not you stan of course i'm happy to be despised universities like any other organization respond to incentives right and they follow the pathways that are open to them the government regulates universities in australia it's not like the u.s system where there are these private institutions that can within some bounds do have quite a lot of latitude it's not the same here you can't just raise fees uh on your own you can't just change student numbers on your own because of that universities were forced into a circumstance where all the research funding was getting tighter and tighter all these things called research infrastructure block grants that come on top of grants they were all getting cut and cut and cut and so what is the one lever that universities were left with it was undergraduate enrollments and so they followed the incentives they acted like good businesses just like the government always asks for and you know yes something catastrophic has happened uh to the market but i mean i wanted actually to come back to brian's point earlier and maybe i'll give you a little bit of a pointed response we yes we talked about safety and yes we as academics want a safe work environment we also want the institutions for which we work to speak up as leaders so even though vaccination as a mandate may not change things based on a 95 level and the amount of other non-pharmaceutical interventions that are available why not come out and say as a scientifically driven fact-based organization we believe that vaccines are essential except for those who have you know compromised circumstances and the like right let's be leaders instead of always running and being afraid of uh of the politicians brian just a quick response to that yeah absolutely every time i talk to my staff i say get vaccinated and uh the question is do i tell them because it's the right thing or do i mandate it and that's that's a really interesting hard question i'm going to try to get to the 99 level without mandating and if i need to mandate i will for health and safety reasons would you say mandate michael i say mandate because it sends a message not because i think people won't listen our next question comes from matilda ai has the potential to bring great benefits to society but the un high commissioner for human rights recently called for a moratorium of ai systems that threaten human rights it seems to be that one of the biggest risks is the affront to human dignity if machines are given life and death decisions for example as with autonomy in weapons what are your views on delegating life test decisions to machines and what can be done to address the development of lethal autonomous weapons and indeed we've already seen this haven't we we've seen increasing use of drones um in warfare and we talk now about the emergence of the the robot army that's going to change the very nature of warfare we do and it's a concern that i have it's a concern that thousands of my colleagues the majority of the people that i work with share that we're entering a a new revolution in warfare i mean the first revolution warfare was invention of gunpowder the second revolution was the invention nuclear weapons this is the third revolution that will allow us to scale warfare to um terrible inhumane things and so what what you're talking about as well is that if we're talking about robot soldiers these are indefatigable they're not going to be fed they can fight 24 7 and they're not going to make if they're not programmed this way not going to make human decisions they're not ethical or compassionate decisions they don't have our humanity they don't don't have our conscience they can't be punished they can't be held accountable it's not terminator it's not some you know intelligent humanoid robot with a red glint in its eye that hollywood would have you believe it's much simpler technologies it's it's things like as you say um drones that that have already been used in uh attack in libya and and it's actually called they use this phrase don't they are more humane warfare they they do and and it's not i'm not it's not clear to me that it will be more humane it will be a perhaps a faster way to kill people um and they will do whatever you programmed them to do um and previously if you wanted to do harm you had to persuade an army of people to do that but now you would just need one programmer how do you feel michael about the ethical decisions that we make and it's not just you know we're talking about warfare here but there are a whole lot of ethical questions around robots and and who whether robots do harm to human beings isn't it the first the first the first law that's right must not do harm but in fact we can't guarantee that no we can't guarantee that any technology that we build won't be used against us by artificial intelligence or by our adversaries in another country or our neighbors down the street um it is a very challenging issue and i think it will remain the subject of debate in perpetuity right how do not only how do we empower robots to make life-and-death decisions whether it's an autonomous drone that's going to have a strike on some target or it's the tesla on autopilot that decides if it's going to kill you or it's going to kill the uh the group of passenger of uh bystanders on the street um you know these these issues are going to be persistent but then it's going to be the question of how do we treat robots that's another ethical question and uh the the point that i want to make is that this is not in my view unique i think it is endemic to any advance in technology we always have to ask ethical questions and we should always be asking questions and not looking at this as us the one thing that breaks civilization we come back to the china question because china has made it very clear that they're seeking economic and military dominance by becoming a leader in ai they're not they're not announcing that they're going to build nuclear attack submarines they're announcing that they're building um underwater autonomous submarines and away from away from uh from warfare um you've said by 2050 if we're looking at a a robot world that you'll have a robot football team that will win the world cup i mean it's not just warfare but the way this changes everything in our lives yeah it's hard to think of a part of our life that won't be touched by technology that can do um smart things like this kirsten before we move on to our next question um this question of of ethics and robots we're talking about warfare we're talking about the more extreme dramatic examples of that but there are simpler things i remember one person once saying why were all robots white why why does siri have a female voice what values are we building into artificial intelligence do you think much about that or does that concern you well when it comes to technology i'm either really excited about it or really scared by it uh the the conversation that you were having before about having robots being able to fight 24 7. that is extremely concerning to me but on the other hand having a smart watch on my hand here being able to track my health data that is really fascinating to me and so i think there are some really innovative ways that we can use ai for good in ways that are fun as well and engaging with not just scientists but also the general public i'm told by 2050 as well that robots will read the news but it's already happening dan i should just add to that as well another really good example that we're doing here in australia is using we're teaching computers to look for animals in animal trafficking unfortunately wildlife trafficking is a global problem and that's some of the work i'm currently working on using innovative technologies to teach computers that that's an animal that's a lizard we need to work complementary with people there's the border force as well as sniffer dogs that this is something we need to do to protect our natural biodiversity and that's a great example our next question comes from peter strokel hello here's a question for brian schmidt do you think the expansion of the universe is accelerating because the rest of the universe is trying to get desperately away from planet earth and from mankind and all its irrational behaviors they may be running from the robots as well yes well sometimes i do ask that question myself so you know the the expansion of the universe the actual expansion uh not the acceleration the expansion uh happened uh because at the time of the big bang the universe started expanding we don't really know why the big bang occurred but 13.7 billion years ago give or take 100 million years something happened the universe was formed started expanding now what's really interesting is the uh the the discovery that i was part of in 1998 is that the universe is actually speeding up because to speed up something's got to be pushing on the universe and that that push which we ascribe to what we call dark energy or what einstein in 1917 called the cosmological constant energy that spread everywhere very finely in the universe kind of explains what we see but we don't know why it is there and so my hope but not yet realized and probably not realized in my my life unless we get lucky is understanding why the cosmological constant why energy is thinly spread throughout the spay out throughout space and maybe that's a way of linking gravity and the quantum world that we've been talking about here tonight and it might be the sort of the answer to the biggest questions of physics that we have is the theory of everything could emerge from that but we're not there yet we were talking about this before we came on and um and toby and i uh sort of asked the big question that's always asked this time kirsten i'll put it to you how can the universe expand when it's already infinite this is quite the loaded question and something that i struggle to understand myself so thank you for putting me on my toes you're still doing your phd so we're exactly i'm just a little baby researcher please be nice um but it's it's definitely a mind-boggling thing to think that the universe is infinite but also thinking it's expanding the way that we understand the world around us is that if something expands it must be expanding into something but that's not really the case with the universe as far as we know we know that there is this hubble bubble which is honestly should be a bubble gum flavor this hubble bubble of the observable universe that we can physically see beyond that there is more space that space is expanding away from us greater at greater than the speed of light so we can no longer see those parts of space and really it's it's just a lot to put up frankly it's a lot of space and just quickly to hurt our brains even more um michael it may not be one universe either multiple simultaneously you know people love to to talk about quantum physics this discipline where i work it's the small scale of things instead of the really big universe scale of things as as really difficult to understand as as mine that blew my this idea that it's expand the universe is expanding into nothing i'm a professional physicist and i still cannot get my head around that there's that famous al albert einstein quote the two things are infinite the universe and human stupidity i'm not sure about the universe our next question comes from tim davis the digital computer as we know it has had enormous success due to its design that enables virtually any computing algorithm to be implemented this is not true for quantum computers since their inception 40 years ago there have only been a few algorithms developed such as for factoring large numbers to crack online security or doing large combinatoric manipulations or acting like an old-fashioned analog computer to simulate quantum systems none of these processes are useful for most people you would never want to do this with smartphone so why the huge research effort and expense my question to the panel are scientists just playing on the success of digital computers to trick governments into funding their toy quantum computer projects or do they really think quantum computers have a use for the general public more than just destroying internet banking security mike i think tim might have said you're having a land of us when when the eniac the world's first digital electronic computer the one that that actually looks a lot like the computers that we carry around on our mobile phones when that was built and commissioned in 1947 there was only one application for it they spent millions of dollars in the 40s the application was calculating artillery shell trajectories and today we have facebook and we have uber and we have like all the things that have transformed our world including of course super computing and cloud in the cloud look there's a discovery process that goes on now the questioner was correctly pointing out that the number of applications that we understand right now as being potentially beneficial for quantum computers this new kind of information processing system is small his list was uh incorrectly truncated there are there are other optimization problems there called that we know map to real challenges that we care about in finance in material science chemistry in chemistry but also things like transport route optimization logistics optimization these are things that we think can come much sooner than these very very hard problems that the question are alluded to about about cryptography right but it's a it's a journey of discovery and if we just stop because it was uh you know one or two applications and not as many as 70 years of classical computing then then you know we would build nothing and people at home are probably going quantum computers what is the difference why are quantum computer if we're talking about the computers we know they operate on binary signals right if you're talking about quantum computers you're talking about multiple signals so the possibilities are greater and the speed potentially is greater for solving problems yeah i mean the best way to think about it in my view is it's just a computer that obeys different rules and because it obeys different rules the kinds of problems it can solve are different and you know this paradigm is actually not so crazy you know we we do talk a lot about general purpose digital computers that's the kind of computer we use in our laptop or in our mobile phones but there are a whole range of special purpose digital computers that we use right now they're called field programmable gate arrays you have five of them in your car we use something called a gpu a graphical processing unit which is a reasonably narrow in its capability uh processing system that's used for ai right now originally it was used just for graphics rendering found a new application so i think yes there is a culture a cultural imprint i guess that comes from the prevalence and the ubiquity of classical digital computers so much so that we've forgotten how many other specialized bits of technology exist and i think that quantum computers this new kind of computer that solves certain problems better they're going to enter our mix and they're just going to be another kind of computational tool that we have vanessa what opportunities do you see here and for cooperation as well across various different disciplines of science well i love that science is so collaborative and it's colorful in my opinion and to get a room full of different scientists from different disciplines is so exciting and that's what i love about science you know it really is i'm obviously biased but to be able to bring a group of experts from working on a project like with our whale drone research we collect whale snot using drones and some people may have heard of whale snap before but if you don't even care about whales or the ocean i hope that that sound of whale snot got your attention right now because it does tell us a lot doesn't it about the health of our oceans the health of our planet that's right and in the past to collect health information from wales we relied on killing whales and getting close to them and they're pretty big but my point is really using a whole skill set of different people from different disciplines i wasn't i'm still not a drone expert but thankfully i've been able to collaborate with with drone experts to create this design for accessing and collecting biological juicy information from a whale as it breeds i mean it is lung bacteria we're all used to being sampled right now but to do it with a drone and without the whale potentially knowing it's happening that's that's science right there and that's collaboration let's go to our next question it comes from ashley neal this question is for kirsten banks as an astrophysicist with aboriginal heritage uh what can the world's oldest culture bring to stem and more specifically what can it bring to astrophysics kirsten what's a fantastic question and i want to steer here to a challenge that we're facing a lot here in australia and that's with climate change which is related to astrophysics in some way too and more so within sustainability in this country and there is so much we can learn from indigenous culture and cultural practices that have been prevalent in this country for tens of thousands of years two examples i would like to give to you today is one on cultural burning we had the awful bushfires a couple years ago and seeing that hazardous hazard reduction burning has been proven to destroy or at least harm habitats and wildlife but by using cultural knowledge and cultural burning known as cool burning it preserves those habitats a lot better providing the same or very similar sort of protection as has a reduction but still preserving those habitats and the wildlife as well so we get kind of two for one there we're getting the safety but also preserving our wildlife another one i'd like to give to you this is a really cool example that i learned about recently is spinifex grass if you've been out in the outback you've very likely seen spinifex it's everywhere covers a third of australia and with indigenous practices they cultivate this grass to produce this natural glue and biodegradable glue and within this grass they've also found nanofibers which are thousands of times smaller than a human hair but five times stronger than steel and using this technology using this nano fibers from this plant that has been cultivated through indigenous knowledge has been able to improve and strengthen concrete meaning that we don't have to produce as much concrete because you need less of it because now it's stronger with those nanofibers then having less carbon emissions from producing that concrete in the first place also with ppe currently we have gloves even going off to the left side here condoms as well putting these spin effects and these nano fibers into these rubber materials strengthens them without breaking down their they don't break as often and also it doesn't mess with the the feel of it as well so that's one way that indigenous cultures can help us through to create these more um biodegradable and sustainable materials spinifex condoms we've got it all covered here i i wouldn't i wouldn't ask you your opinion on that brian but i i would ask you about where we are with incorporating just that knowledge that kirsten was talking about into our science into the teaching of science whether we are really serious about this or whether it's still lip service or something that we think we're duty bound to talk about and then move on to the re the real science and inverted commerce yeah well i think we're on a journey and when i think about when i about 10 years ago i was at the national museum of australia and they were starting to talk about storylines and how uh you know the indigenous australians navigated around and storyline of the seven sisters and i was like seven sisters like the the pleiades and the story was told to me and i'm like but that's the same story that is in europe and in north america and in thailand and then you start realizing that astronomy which goes back to the foundations of science but the literally something that every society is used as a part of their culture and you suddenly realize that we are bound by astronomy uh and the seven sisters pleiades visible every to every culture on the planet just because they're near the celestial equator is something that binds us it binds us from 60 000 years ago plus when we were clearly all one people and astronomy is not just you know technology and understanding cosmology it is part of the advance of civilization it's something the entire world has to do together it's a it's a global project and i think being able to understand and share in the oldest living cultures here in australia it's been one of the great gifts for me of being able to move from the united states here because i've suddenly got this appreciation of a shared history which goes back 60 000 years i've never had before so i think it's i think it's really very moving for me personally and we're learning together uh to appreciate uh humanity which is a shared history it's fascinating as well michael when you look at cosmology there you look at indigenous notions of time um circularity of time and and past and present and future co-existing and that's precisely isn't it the sort of when you look at the quantum world and shrink things to that level where you're seeing just this type of thing playing out yeah i think i think what it signals is uh a reminder that science is a human endeavor right that yes we may as professionals we seek the truth we seek to understand the way the universe is but we are not infallible right as history has shown over and over again we are part of a community and the work that we do benefits the broader community that is why we do it science is in the public interest and yes it delivers economic prosperity 26 of all economic activity in australia comes from scientific discoveries in the last 20 years according to the chief scientist so yes there are all these other benefits but i think uh the the discussion just a moment ago highlights how much this can be something that brings us together uh because it it's all about touching and shaping our lives and our understanding of the world it's a story here and we're glad to have you on the program being able to share it with us kirsten our next question comes from bill clappers hello the james webb space telescope is said to be the largest telescope ever placed in space a hundred times more powerful than the hubble telescope able to see way back in time billions of years orbiting the earth four times further out than the moon set to launch later this year after many delays is it going to go ahead uh how long after the launch will it take for the data to come through and what are the big questions that it seeks to resolve thank you and yes it is going to go ahead was met go ahead i think in 2010 but it's going to go ahead this year in december 18. costing 10 times what it would have cost had it gone ahead all those years ago kirsten you were clapping as soon as that question was was asked what excites you about this everything excites me about this we have been waiting for so long for the james webb space telescope to launch like you said from 2010 it's been delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed it was supposed to launch late in october this year but then delayed again to december this year and fingers crossed please let that thing finally go into space because it's going to really broaden our horizons and help us understand more about our universe using its six meter wide mirror it's much bigger than hubble and we'll be able to see much further than hubble as well one of the things that i'm really excited to hopefully see come out of the james woods space telescope is seeing light from the very first stars of our universe the first stars to ever be born that's an exciting thing to look forward to that that answers your question i think michael before about how do we even begin to understand this this is really opening things look i i love this stuff yeah i'm not an astronomer i'm not an astrophysicist i barely understand uh the the general physics that that uh is being discussed here but there is just something so profound uh in looking at say a photograph of the hubble ultra deep field right this this image where you you look at the image and it looks like a collection of stars and apparently the story is the astronomer just wanted to look in some random place right and it yeah it looks like a a shot of the night sky until you look really closely you zoom in and zoom in and each one of those stars is actually an entire galaxy yeah right it's absolutely muddy and it raises the question we're talking about artificial intelligence but of course um even the pentagon now says that something may be out there that they can't explain toby what is it going to tell us about the potential of life as well elsewhere well i mean the big question and one of the biggest questions that science has yet not answered is are we alone and you know it's a very big universe um uh it would be terribly sad if there were no other voices to hear how do you feel about that venus well i just want to put out there's obviously a very strong presence for the the space that we're we're part of but we know more about space than we do know about the deepest part of our oceans now the oceans are important to all of us right here they're important to all of you at home whether you're watching this an ivy or wherever you're watching this the ocean generates the 50 more than 50 of the air we breathe it transports the goods that we have here from the clothes that i'm wearing to the device that you're watching me on right now we need to learn more about and and i i love science money but everything but we also need to have a focus on life on land and in the water and on earth and and the deep our final question tonight comes from leah jabali how do i become a wildlife scientist and what is your favorite animal what's your favorite animal oh i would have to say it's the whale and because this is i was hoping the kids would stay up late for this show right now sure they have thankfully i've got winston here and i just thought why not bring a prop it's a science show this is how i communicate science the whale is my favorite animal they're big in fact being next to a whale in the water you literally have to turn from one side to another they're so big they're as big as a bus and if you're in a car and you look at your family-sized car that's how big it's their babies are but to become a wildlife scientist and to do what i do you need to be passionate and i'm sure you do have passion i'm sure the people watching this show are passionate about what they do doing something that you love is really important and in australia to help foster that next generation for for the jobs that don't even exist yet is something that's important and to follow your passion and do something in terms of helping animals and saving whales by learning about them and learning about our environment is something that we can all contribute and you don't have to be a marine scientist or a wildlife scientist to do that we can all make changes at home every day don't pour chemicals down the drain and um you know make sure you throw your rubbish in a bin but be proactive the skills that you have at acquire at skill at school rather or those jobs that you might have at a supermarket these are all skills that you can take on board for the later future career of you becoming a wild scientist and ask questions talk to scientists we're not scary we're approachable and social media i can vouch for that you've been very approachable we have great programs too i don't know if you've got a favorite animal but you may have a future student there uh absolutely i'm you know i was trying to think what animal uh have i seen that i most want to be i grew up in alaska so i've seen a lot of whales but i like sea otters probably better than any other animal so another sea mammal uh and i'm not just playing to the crowd here kirsten a favorite animal and some advice from someone doing their phd to someone who wants to be a scientist well firstly my favorite animal would have to be the cockatoo they are so cheeky but very very smart as well but the thing that i would love to put forward to you is and to all the kids watching today is to follow your passions and if you don't know what you want to do yet try things that was the advice that i was given on my first day of high school is to try and take opportunities when they come and that's that's what's gotten me here today so keep following your dreams a final word from youtube in about 30 seconds or so well my favorite animal still is humans despite all our failings i'm still optimistic that we have hope indeed indeed we do and we have hope because of the fantastic people we've been able to share this hour with the incredible knowledge they've been able to share with us as well that's all we have time for on our program this evening thanks again to our incredible panel toby walsh brian schmidt vanessa perrotta michael bierseck and kirsten banks and thank you as well for all of your questions next week david spears is in the chair he'll be live in melbourne looking at the issue we did touch on a bit tonight but one that's going to continue for all of us the vexed issue of mandatory vaccination and you can join me on monday evening picking up our china conversation from earlier as well on our china tonight program until then have a fantastic night thanks for joining us [Music] you

Channel: abcqanda

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Keywords: Q&A, QandA, auspol, australian politics, politics, abc, abc news, Q+A, Science, quantum physics, quantum computers, astrophysics, air quality, artificial intelligence, wildlife science, submarines, protests, cosmology, Stan Grant, Brian Schmidt, Lidia Morawska, Vanessa Pirotta, Michael Biercuk, Toby Walsh, Kirsten Banks

Id: WzidBd-0_qg

Length: 60min 17sec (3617 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021