Here’s an interesting fact. The average age of a NASA astronaut is 35 which means that, given we are 20 to 25 years away from sending an astronaut to Mars, our first Mars astronaut is currently perhaps ten years old.
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00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Lovely this
00:06afternoon to speak to Ian and Charlotte, who are the Average Scientist, and you are taking part
00:12in a number of events around the Luke Jerram Mars installation in Chichester Cathedral.
00:18Before we talk about that, Charlotte, just tell me what the Average Scientist does.
00:24What are you about?
00:26So we're an organisation that we bring science to the general public, and we bring it in a little
00:35bit of a more engaging way. We're science communicators. We're scientists, but we're
00:39also science communicators, and we basically bring science to the general public in,
00:47I think, a much more formidable way, isn't it? It's much more engaging.
00:51Ian, it's abandoning some of the convoluted, very erudite language, isn't it, and speaking
00:56more directly, perhaps?
00:58It is, yeah. We democratise the subject. That's what we attempt to do, and make it accessible.
01:03The stories of science, it's our story, a human story, and that story belongs to everybody. So
01:11we're very keen that everybody has the opportunity to understand and have an opinion on all aspects
01:19of science, and we aim to make those subjects more accessible to people.
01:23And in that context, well, it's absolutely right that you should be in Chichester for
01:26the Mars installation. Ian, tell me why Mars is significant, and you tell me,
01:32well, the context of the Mars astronaut, when will that be?
01:37Yeah, so we're about, well, the average age of a NASA astronaut is 35 years or something like
01:43that, so around 35 years old, and we're about 20 to 25 years away from attempting to send
01:51human beings to Mars. So that makes a Martian astronaut 10 years old today.
01:56It's hard to watch, isn't it?
01:58Oh, it's a huge thought, yeah. And when we communicate that to our audiences
02:04across the country, you can hear almost a stony silence all over our auditoriums,
02:11very, very profound information, isn't it? So if you have a 10-year-old son or daughter or,
02:18you know, grandchild...
02:19They might, they just might, yeah. So Charlotte,
02:22tell me what you're doing in Chichester then, and when.
02:25So we're bringing a part of our main flagship show, The Wonders of Our Universe, to Chichester,
02:31and we're going to be concentrating solely on Mars, and our show is to complement Luke Durham's
02:37Mars installation in the cathedral. So we're going to be bringing our audience through
02:43some subjects around Mars, so we'll be talking about Mars as a planet, of what we have achieved
02:53so far in scientific terms with Mars, the Mars rovers, what they're doing there,
02:59what information we've managed to gain from sending these rovers over there, but we're
03:05also going to be talking about, obviously, the Mars generation and the future exploration
03:12of the red planet.
03:13Yeah, it sounds fascinating. Brilliant. Well, lovely to speak to you both.
03:17Have a great time in Chichester. Thank you.
03:19Thank you for having us.
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