WE'RE LIVING in a tremendously virtual age where many young people think that all of the discoveries that they need to make will happen on their laptops and smartphones. For me, it's more important than ever to reintroduce a sense of physical exploration, to get out there into strange, hostile and challenging environments. There is probably 99 per cent of deep oceans and all of space to left explore, and it is only by putting humans into new physical locations that we'll be able to make genuine and crucial scientific discoveries. Human presence in science is almost the definition of science. It's a human endeavour to gather knowledge, not just a machine endeavour to gather data. The robots we send into these environments don't know what to look for, and above all they don't know how to be surprised by something like the strange glint of a rock.
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