[Column] The limits of control

We will travel to distant planets setting up colonies as modern explorers, discover bizarre worlds and gaze at a sunset with three suns. My ambition when I started studying aerospace engineering was something like that. I was 18 and it was 1996.

After just a few lectures, my heart sank. The sheer scale of the universe was overwhelming… Okay, you can travel to the moon in three days, but imagine if you wanted to go to the next-closest star after our sun. It’d take you more than four years, if you could travel at the speed of light (which is impossible). And that’s
just the next-closest star.

In any case, most of the planets around the distant stars that astronomers have discovered in recent years are totally incapable of supporting life. They’re so hot that you’d melt spontaneously, spacesuit and all. Over the years, I’ve come to accept that we will continue to be able to study the most far-off worlds only from a distance, but travelling to them is simply unrealistic for human adventurers. It’s impossible now, will be so in a decade and will still be impossible in a century.

Controlling your environment could perhaps be seen as the running theme in an engineering degree programme. But to what extent are there limits on that control? For me, the theme of this Delft Outlook – Idealists – immediately calls to mind an intrepid engineer who really can devise a solution for everything.

I wouldn’t wish to discourage ambitious world reformers with noble plans, but I believe in putting things into perspective: most things in life are not under your control. Reforming the world is no easy job when your original plan is in tatters because – to cite just one example – a worldwide pandemic breaks out. Or your partner or child becomes ill and you have to become a carer.

But that kind of random event that diverts you from your original path can sometimes turn out surprisingly well. For example, you may be attempting to reform the world a little by conducting research into bacteria that can prevent infections and you suddenly realise that there’s absolutely no bacterial growth around a certain mould in your lab and that this could be a much more important discovery altogether. That’s what happened to the Scottish doctor Alexander Fleming, the man behind penicillin, in 1928.

There are countless other examples of brilliant inventions that first make you think that a world reformer with a determined plan must have been behind them, but where it was actually chance that really made it happen. Or as John Lennon once sang: ‘Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans’.

Tonie Mudde is an aerospace engineer and science editor at de Volkskrant newspaper.