Invasion of the space people

Right well things happened. It's relentless this linear progression of time, isn't it?

So what have I been doing? The majority of my time for the past few weeks was taken up by alternately doing exams, preparing for the doing of said exams, watching large storms happening, or watching 22 tiny people in coloured shirts run around with a ball. Thankfully all the exams are finally over now so that leaves more time for frivolous pursuits, and also more watching of 'feet ball' as I believe it is called. Oh yeah and then I have occasionally been spluttering dumbfoundedly at the sheer quality if the recent Doctor Who output.

But more interesting to write about is my foray into the besuited world of the european space think tank, courtesy of flatmate, german, friend and European Space Policy Institute intern Andreas. The occasion was the opening of an art exhibition in the ESPI offices by a one Gerald Martineo, an Austrian-Romanian artist who makes paintings by pouring colourful plastics onto canvasses. His art is apparently quite science and technology focussed, and his latest series of work consists of colourless resin poured over huge canvasses, studded with used radiation sensors from various satellites and then themselves irradiated at Austria's only reactor to discolour them slightly. It was pretty good actually, though I was more immediately attracted to the coloured stuff. As I remarked at the time it is interesting that to look at one of his newer pieces you have to know a lot of background about it, without which none of the point of the work is evident. I've always thought that whether or not your art has an amazing message it should also look really cool on your wall, but this is just an opinion.

Anyway, although the art was fun, I really came because I've never been to a european space policy intitute before and I wondered what it would be like. I like to think I got a glimpse into a way of life/ career that is very different to my own. That week was the annual meeting of the UN Comittee on the Peaceful Use of Space so there were many UN types and hangers on wandering around. Unlike me free posh food and wine at a random exhibition opening are probably more the rule than the exception, so they all looked a lot less lost than me for the beginning of the event. However I got into the swing of things after some sandwiches and a couple of interesting speeches by a physicist and the artist himself about the meeting between art and science (in short our primary reward for doing either is the fact we are doing them) and an interesting but overlong speech by the ex-astronaut head of the COPUOS. Do you think that's an ugly acronym, or is it just me? It reminds me of coprolites for some reason (it might help to point out that in conversation it is pronounced 'cop-wuss').

I get the feeling that as I am not normally exposed to such speeches I actually found it far more engaging than some of the more experienced space-people. Frankly I was excited enough that there even exists a comittee on the peaceful use of space that says things like 'guys, let's use space for peaceful awesome things!', a fact which was naturally pretty obvious to everyone else. I'd kind of put my interest in space on the back burner, not having the benefit of a large planetary science department at Uni Wien, but being in a room with all these people who deal with space all day every day, even if primarily from a political/legal viewpoint, brought it all back. I very much enjoyed being able to wander up to people and get reasoned answers to things like 'Who's going to be taking people and stuff to space in 2030?' And true to form, I also got to add my two pennies on the importance of geology in space, or rather the importance of space infrastructure to the progression of geology. I believe geologists are the only scientists who would claim that it is absolutely undebatably better to land a man on the moon rather than send a robot. But even if that doesn't happen any time soon, geologists will have to rely on the political and technological developments in the space industry for a massive amount of their future research, from planetary geology to the use of aerial measurements of the earth, so I think it's time we got more interested in this sort of thing as a science.

Aaanyway so there you go, that's my pompous way of justifying why it was good to go to a place where they gave me free food and wine.

Bye for now!