Space archaeology | Alice Gorman | TEDxSydney

Translator: Bob Prottas
Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo My story begins one day
about 10 years ago when I was working as an archaeologist
in Central Queensland on the kind of job
I do most of the time which is looking at
Aboriginal archaeological sites. So I was out in the field,
I was on a construction site so I had the steel capped
boots on, high vis vest, hard hat. All of that stuff. Got to the end of the day.
Hot, tired, sweaty. Went home. Didn’t bother to take off
the boots or the vest. I went straight to the fridge
and I got a cold beer and I went out onto
my front veranda. Now it’s in Queensland
and as you know there’s no
Daylight Savings there. So it’s pretty dark
already by this time. And when I look up into the sky, So I’m sitting back,
sipping my beer, and suddenly a thought
pops into my head. Amongst all those stars, some of those little bright dots
are probably actually satellites. And some of them
are probably quite old. They probably have some
kind of archaeological potential. So this was really the
light bulb moment for me. I decided from that point
that I was going to try and find out if one could do an
archaeology of space exploration. After much soul searching
I decided that I couldn’t actually pursue this idea
from the wilds of Queensland. So I resigned from my job. I packed up my entire house
and put it into storage. And I embarked on
that journey to find out. Like all space missions,
that journey actually started on the surface
of the earth for me. So I started visiting
rocket launch sites. I went to the US. I went to Woomera
in the deserts of South Australia. And I went to South America. I started looking in
space museums and archives from Canberra to Paris. And I also started turning
up at space conferences where the presence
of an archaeologist raised a few eyebrows,
to begin with. (Laughter) Then I was offered a
job at Flinders University in the department of archaeology. This gave me the
opportunity to actually carry out this research
as part of my normal job. So what I’d like to do
today is take you to some of my favorite
archaeological sites and to some of my
favorite artifacts in the rest of the solar system. I’d like you to imagine
that the Sydney Opera House is actually a massive space liner and we’re currently
sitting on the tarmac at Sidney spaceport about to take off. We’re going to be
the first space tourists, proper space tourists. And I’m going to take you to low Earth orbit,
then to the Moon. We’re going to pop over
to Venus for a brief stop. And finally go out to the
very edge of the solar system. So let’s start in Earth orbit,
low Earth orbit specifically. This is the area
about 200 kilometers to about 2,000 kilometers
above the surface of the Earth. And it is actually
crawling with space junk or orbital debris. And it is, as I’m sure
many people are aware, it’s a significant
environmental problem for our time. We’re dependent on
so many satellite services for navigation,
telecommunications, Earth observation. All of these things
we rely on, even your ATM. Every time you use an ATM, it’s working on satellite signals. But there’s so much junk up there,
it’s starting to get in the way. So something will have to be done,
there’s no doubt about that. What I want to do though
is ask the question before we start trying to
get rid of some this stuff, does any of it actually have
cultural significance for us? Does it have heritage
value and do we want to do something sensible about that instead of just destroy
it all without thinking? To give you some examples, I’m going to look at two of my
very favorite spacecraft. The first is Vanguard I. It was launched in 1958
by the United States and it’s currently the oldest
human object in Earth orbit. It’s a particularly
interesting satellite because it was part of the whole Cold War adversarial relationship
between the US and the USSR. But because the US
wanted to promote a particular view of space
as a peaceful and democratic place they did some
really interesting things. They approached a number of countries to set up satellite tracking
stations including Australia, and they also set up
groups of volunteers that they called
Moon watch groups to help visually track
the satellite and send data in. And again there were quite a few moon watch groups here in Australia. So this wasn’t
Cold War confrontation, this was actually
international cooperation involving ordinary citizens, what we’d now call
the “citizen scientist”. So I think this gives Vanguard I
a very particular social meaning. It’s very historic,
but it’s also something that means a lot of things
to all of these citizen scientists. And as the oldest
human object in orbit, I think we shouldn’t
blast it out of the sky into bits if we don’t actually have to. A bit closer to home
is the Australis Oscar V satellite. In the 1960s
a bunch of physics students at Melbourne University
and their friends and colleagues decided they wanted to build
and launch their own satellite. So they got together
and they designed it from scratch. They had no money.
They were amateurs in this game. So they had
to test new technologies. They had to beg,
borrow and steal components. They even had
to buy stuff just straight off the shelf at the hardware store. And they nearly
lauched Australia’s first satellite. They were beaten
to it by WRESAT I which was launched
in 1967 and made Australia the third nation in space. Anyway, they weren’t
the first Australian satellite, but they did manage
to secure a launch in 1970 from Vandenberg Air Force Base. They also used volunteers. There were people
in 27 countries across the world who volunteered to track
this little black and white box and send the data back
so its scientific experiments could be done. And it’s still in orbit. This tiny little box
is still happily floating around in orbit. It’s part of Australia’s history in space and again it might technically be junk but I think it’s a little
bit more than that. It’s a bit more interesting than that. So now to the real thing in the 1960s. This really was Cold War stuff. In 1969 the Apollo 11 mission
landed on the surface of the Moon and changed the way
we viewed the Moon forever. The Moon has always
been a huge part of human life. It governs the tides. It’s the light in the sky
that we see at night. So many myths and legends
are centered on the Moon. But now it’s a human landscape. Tranquility Base where those astronauts
first set foot on the Moon is an archeological site.
They’ve left artifacts there. They’ve left footprints. We could analyze those footprints and those artifacts to learn something about that very extraordinary kind of encounter with the landscape. Interestingly also,
the United States put a flag and recent images we’ve got from the
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have shown us that
the flag isn’t still standing up. But I think there’s enough
evidence from those images to perhaps prove the Moon
conspiracy people wrong. We really did land on the Moon. What’s interesting about
the flag is that it is normally considered to be
a symbol of colonization. And under the terms
of the outer space treaty, which was only set up
a couple of years before 1967, no nation can make
a territorial claim on space. Space is for all humankind. So this is interesting. They put a flag
on the surface of the Moon. And there was
some controversy around that. But what the
international community chose to do was to interpret this as an action taken on behalf of all humanity. But that is a matter of interpretation. There are people now:
China, India, US, all the other space players, they’re thinking
of going back to the Moon and there are resources
on the Moon that can be used. So these symbols
could change their meaning. Which I think
is a really interesting feature of how that
material object can be used in the social
and political world of space. So let’s leave the Moon now and go to a planet
that people often forget about. While all of the big
Moon stuff was going on, the Russians were
actually putting a lot of energy in the 1960s right through
to the 1980s on Venus. And they sent a series
of landing missions there, called Venera. And nobody really knew
what Venus was like at this stage. It was even thought
there could be life there. People speculated that
there were warm swampy oceans full of green telepathic frogs
or beautiful singing angels. When the Venera missions
returned the first images back to Earth, we learned that sadly
none of those things were true. Venus is really just
a big brown old desert. But these little spacecraft,
I think, are some of my favorite things. They look a little bit like
Daleks to my mind. But they’re also very appealing. They landed all by
themselves on Venus. In the picture you see there, it’s an image taken
looking down on its own feet. It’s very personal. It’s like you can feel
the spacecraft in the photo. And they sent us these
pictures of another landscape, a place we’ve
not yet visited in person. To me they feel like
we abandoned them out there. They’re little orphans all alone, waiting for somebody
to come and pick them up. And there are some missions
being planned to Venus, so maybe that will actually happen. And I’m pretty sure, even though
conditions are very harsh, they’re probably still surviving
quite well on the surface of the planet. So again Venus is now more than just a far away place.
It’s a human landscape and these Venera spacecraft
are our representatives on the surface of Venus, if you like. Many, many other places that
we could have a look at in between. But I’m going to take us right to
the very edge of the solar system. There’s only 4 spacecraft
to have gone this far. Pioneer X and XI have already
passed out of our knowledge. We no longer have
any contact with them. Voyager I and II
are in some kind of – they’re out at the edge, they might be passing through
to interstellar space any day. There’s things
in the news all the time. So they’re getting to the
edge of the Sun’s influence and starting to move out
into the galaxy beyond. They are the ultimate orphans. They’re so little and alone out there. And there’s only one place on Earth still listening to them
picking up their signals. That’s actually the Canberra
Deep Space tracking station. So Voyager sends
its little tiny weak signal back to us and we know it’s out there. It’s our senses extended to
the very edge of the solar system. And that alone
makes the two Voyagers – I’ve chosen Voyager II
here because it’s my personal favorite. Everyone pays more
attention to Voyager I because it’s likely to pass out, it’s on a shorter trajectory. Iit will get there sooner. So everyone forgets about Voyager II.
So I like Voyager II best. (Laughter) These two little spacecraft
also have on them the famous golden records. On these records
were recorded examples of all the languages on Earth. Maybe not all,
but quite a few languages on Earth. There was music.
There was sounds. All kinds of things. Also on these records are two
aboriginal songs that were recorded with an anthropologist
out in the central desert. And I think this is extraordinary. So Australia at the moment, we’ve got a new space policy. We don’t have a space agency.
We might never get one. But Aboriginal culture
is actually taking us out to the stars. So, when we think about all of these artifacts and places these are human material interactions with the solar system,
with the space environment. The particular things I’ve
decided to talk to you about today are ones that appeal
to me particularly because they show very different
stories about what happens in space. They’re about the public
getting involved in space. They’re about amateurs
successfully launching a satellite. They’re about planets
and parts of the solar system that we might not
be able to go ourselves but our robotic avatars
can go to those places and engage with them. They remind us
that space isn’t just empty and vast and black and dark and somewhere else out there. We’re actually part of it. We’re connected to Earth orbit, to the very edge of the solar system. So space is something
that we should be feeling connected with, not cut off from. And our cultural heritage,
these places and these artifacts demonstrate the kinds of attachments and meanings that we can
give to these space places. This is significant for us because there are a lot
of resources in space. There are currently plans to conduct
asteroid mining, lunar mining, orbits and spectrums
are under pressure from commercial enterprises. And there’s of course huge
military interest in space as well. The CIA thing, I forgot about that. (Laughter) We need to be having a say
in what happens in space. It’s our cultural heritage too. These are places that
are meaningful for us, not just for governments. In the end, space archeology is something that connects us to our past in space
and to our future in the stars. And that future is yours and mine to decide. Thank you. (Applause)