“Crabs will inherit the Earth”

Supernova Dr Tana Joseph wears many starry hats. An astronomer who studies the double stars outside of our galaxy, Tana runs science communication company AstroComms, where she supports other STEM practitioners – when she’s not sneaking science into TV and gaming scripts. As a Black South African woman, the social justice advocate feels the gravitational pull when it comes to letting us know that science is for everyone. We are entering a new era of astronomy. To tie in with Season 01: THE BIG BANG, TOPIA asked Tana: How can we see space differently?

Dr Tana Joseph‘s 3-minute noodles

“Everyone always gets nervous when I talk about exploding stars, but our sun is not going to explode. It’s not going to change for about five billion years. The double stars I study are a special kind, in that one of them is either a black hole or neutron star, which is what you get when massive stars explode.

To understand how the universe works, there’s all these different kinds of light that you have to put together. Stars in extreme physical conditions emit the same kind of X-rays that look at your bones in the hospital. And that’s what I look into.

My double stars give off all kinds of light, from high energy X-rays to low energy radio waves, optical light (like we see with our eyes), and infrared. If you like old school sci-fi movies, Predator from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movies sees in infrared. There’s lots of different ways to use light, whether it’s on Earth or in space – from sci fi, to medicine, to space, to chemistry.

I believe that science is for everyone. That includes people who don’t have formal science training out in the world, but also people who are inside and are having a hard time because of the old school traditional ways. People who have been historically excluded – People of Colour, women, people from lower socio-economic backgrounds – all those barriers that go into becoming a scientist or engaging with science.

Language shapes your perception of reality. We say space is mostly ’empty’. There’s this parallel that we’re making with colonial attitudes, especially with words that we used to use to justify colonising places that had Indigenous people there. And we’re using that exact mindset and language to perpetuate that into space. We talk about colonising Mars, which comes up all the time.

We have to see ourselves as part of this ecosystem, and not conquerors of the solar system. There’s this exploitative and extractive mindset about wanting to mine asteroids. Look at what mines have done on our planet. We are taking all of this and trying to export it to the rest of the universe. And this is very dangerous. I think we are, unfortunately, a long way from getting the people right at the top to see it like that. 

We’re still saying things like ‘manned spacecraft.’ No, it’s ‘crewed spacecraft.’

So who’s getting to go to space? The three main people right now are rich white men: Musk, Bezos and Branson. If the three of them succeed, then that’s just going to perpetuate the problems that we have on Earth and make it some other planet’s problem

We are all taught the Greek names for constellations. In South Africa, where I’m from, everything is flipped upside down, and we can’t even see half the stuff that you can see. So why are we being told about Cassiopeia and Orion, when Southern Africa has their own rich star lore that makes sense and puts it into context to where you are using the stars as a calendar. And of course, the native peoples and first peoples of the Americas have their own cosmology and origin stories, as do the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and all other Indigenous people in all places in the world.

I try to do science communication in both English and Afrikaans. There are movements in South Africa, and in other places as well, where people are not only reigniting their interest and spreading awareness about the local star lores and the cultural ways of knowing that involve astronomy and the night sky, but doing it in their Indigenous languages.

Making science accessible to everyone is making it a normalised thing that you speak in Zulu, or Tonga, or whatever your Indigenous language is. Then it makes it more real and more personal to you. That’s again, the importance of language and of Indigenous ways of knowing as a way to connect us all. We all as a people, no matter where you are, have some concept of looking into the sky and wondering about what’s out there.

We all know what happened to the dinosaurs, we need to be more humble and more open to learning. We should approach space and the rest of the universe with supreme humility and with a decentred concept of where we are. We tend to think that human beings are the end point of evolution on this planet.

Crabs and cockroaches will inherit the earth and we need to be humble about that. There’s a joke going around, if humans were wiped out, or there was a mass extinction, at the end of the day there will always be crabs. Crabs are extremely hardy. We need to first understand our place on this Earth and treat the Earth better, before we start thinking about making long-term invasive inroads into the rest of our solar system, nevermind the rest of our galaxy.

Humility might not save us, we might still get smacked out of the sky by a comet or something, but we owe it to ourselves to go into this with more open minds and less rigid ways of thinking, if we’re going to really appreciate what’s out there. The wonders of the universe are slowly being revealed to us and a lot of it might go unnoticed if we’re looking in very narrow ways.

It comes back to the concept of light. If you only look in one kind of light, you miss so many other things. And if only certain kinds of people are allowed to go into space, or only certain languages are used, we’re going to miss out on so much.”