Fashioning the Future With: Emily Lakdawalla

Love space exploration and science communication? Then count your lucky stars because we have celestial scicommer extraordinaire Emily Lakdawalla on the blog today! Emily is the Senior Editor and Planetary Evangelist for the out-of-this world organization The Planetary Society.

The Planetary Society, a nonprofit led by CEO Bill Nye, is all about outreach, research, and advocacy in regard to the exploration of the solar system — and Emily heads up all of this fantastic foundation's communications from blog writing to serving as editor of the Planetary Report magazine to contributing to the Planetary Radio podcast, and much more.

If you think her amazing job totally rocks, get a load of this: Emily's undergraduate degree from Amherst is in geology and her master's from Brown is in planetary geology. That's just stone-cold science awesome. We could go on and on about Emily's accomplishments and accolades to infinity and beyond: For example, she's a former teacher who continues her commitment to education through her scicomm excellence. She's a contributor to Sky & Telescope, and Emily is the author of The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job, with another Curiosity book forthcoming! Roving radishes, that's rad!

We were thrilled to ask Emily about her work in scicomm, what she thinks about Martian planetary protection, who inspires her, and more. Meet Emily Lakdawalla, Planetary Evangelist!

When did you know you were a scientist?  

I have always been interested in science since I was a little kid. I loved science museums. I was basically raised on PBS shows like Nova, The Day the Universe Changed, and Nature. I remember in particular an Earth science show — I don't remember what the title of it was — but it was about geology. It was about the plate tectonic theory, which was new at the time when I saw it in the 1980s. So, all of those shows really inspired me to an interest in science. So, I studied science throughout high school and college and just wound up as a planetary scientist, but I could have been in any number of things.

Do you have a personal philosophy as a science communicator and STEM advocate?

I think probably my main philosophy is that anybody can understand the reasons why we're investigating scientific questions, and can even understand a lot of the science, but there's a major language problem in that scientists, like any other specialist, have developed their own vocabulary for talking about their work. And that becomes an obstacle to public understanding, which is why I view the work that I do is primarily a translation and interpretation work, so that I talked to the scientist, I speak their language, and then I translate what they say — and place it into context for a broader public to help them understand the same thing.

What is your favorite extraplanetary object?

Well, I don't have favorites. They're all my favorite. But some things that I keep on coming back to our, are the ice giants and our solar system: Uranus and Neptune. They haven't had dedicated missions yet, and I really want to see missions there. Uranus, in particular, has fabulous moons, but we haven't really seen them very, very clearly. We only had a brief Voyager flyby. And, so, I would love to see a mission go to Uranus and explore its moons and as well as the atmosphere.

I also am a huge fan of Venus, and I'm desperate to see a mission that will get beneath the clouds and actually take optical images — like regular camera images — of what's underneath the clouds because we've only had a couple such pictures ever. They were taken by Soviet landers and that was done in the 70s and 80s — and we haven't been back.

Is there one space fact that particularly blows your mind?

Yes, this is one of the ones that I like to use to try to blow other people's minds: If you look up at night, for all the stars that you can see — and even the ones that you can't see, the ones that are too faint to see — there is about one planet for every star. And this is a brand-new thing to know…we only began discovering exoplanets pretty recently. And now we know that they're very common. Not every star has a planet, but some stars have many planets. And, and so it just seems like there's so many opportunities for there to be life if there's as many planets as there are stars. It just makes the universe all the more interesting. There's all the more potential there for interesting and different worlds.

What can we look forward to in your upcoming book: Curiosity and Its Science Mission: A Mars Rover Goes to Work?

In my upcoming book, Curiosity and Its Science Mission: A Mars Rover Goes to Work, I will tell you all about the science that the Curiosity rover has achieved in its long journey across Mars, and about the landscapes that we think existed in Gale Crater in Mars' ancient past and what that has to do with Earth's ancient past, what it might tell us about how conditions were when life arose here and maybe on the Red Planet as well.

Would you ever consider traveling to Mars as a colonist?

I have two answers to that question. The first one is I'm very comfortable sitting here in my cozy home office. I have no interest in experiencing the discomfort of space. That's why we have robots. We can send these robots to places that would be desperately unsafe for humans and let them be our eyes and our ears and other senses as we explore other worlds. They can go places that that will never be able to go.

The other response that I want is I want it to be mentioned that I don't like the word 'colonist' because of the connotations it has for the disruption of native ecosystems and life and societies. Even though there is not intelligent life on Mars or any other world that we may send humans to live, I think we need to tread very carefully and try to have as little impact on those worlds as possible so that we can study them and understand how they came to be without them being polluted and contaminated by humans.

We also have to be very conscious of the kinds of societies that we're establishing and who gets to go and who gets to choose how interplanetary society grows. And if we do that, with the mindset that you know, "Be fruitful and multiply. Everything belongs to us. It's for us to exploit," that's not a future I want to see.

I want to see things done differently. So, I like to speak about humans living in space humans, traveling to Mars, rather than the more fraught words like 'colonies,' 'colonialism,' and even 'settlements.'

What do you think will happen in regard to Martian planetary protection when humans set foot on Mars?

We're going to bring all kinds of bugs with us, and life is resilient. So, it'll be a slow process, but sooner or later, once there's an established human presence — especially with travel back and forth — I think there will come to be Mars extant life that are invasive species — 'Mars endemic life' you might even say because it won't look exactly like the Earth life it came from. It'll have to adapt. take a little while, but I'm sure Earth life will establish itself on Mars once we have regular human habitation there.  

Who (modern day or historical) inspires you?

The people who inspire me most right now are the young women of color who are coming up in planetary science and astronomy and astrophysics, who are really determined to build a place that's safe for them and for women who come after them. Right now, planetary science, physics, astronomy, they're especially dominated by white men, and it's a very hostile environment. There's been some progress in terms of white women, but very little, and I see women dedicating themselves to make changes. I'm dedicating myself to help and support anybody I see come along, but it's going to take some trailblazers who are willing to put up with some stuff that nobody should have to put up with. And they really inspire me. I want to do everything I can for them to help them change the face of planetary science.

Editor's note: Emily suggests learning about these scientists to find out more about awesome women of color in planetary science: Bianca Vasquez, Jedidah Isler, and Divya Persaud.

What advice do you have for young people who want to go into science communication?

Well, this may be just bias, but I think it was very useful to get a master's degree in a scientific field because it gave me hands-on experience with research in a research setting, but a PhD wasn't necessary for what I do. So, don't feel like you have to go on to the PhD.

And then, I guess, my other advice is to just follow your joy, but don't require your job to give you joy. You're not going to go straight into a job that is what exactly you want to do. I've been very lucky. I've been at a place for 18 years where I've been able to slowly build my job into something that pretty well fits me. And you won't get that at the outset unless you're extraordinarily lucky. So, accept a job being a technical writer for a private company or a press release writer for a university. It may not be exactly what you envision, but every place you work will give you experience and connections that are valuable for whatever you want to do in the future. And then make sure you have a path to joy outside your work. Your work is not your life. 

If you were a superhero, what would your go to wearable tech device be?

I would like some glasses or goggles that would let me see across the electromagnetic spectrum — see it and use my whole brain to interpret what I see coming whether it be from ultraviolet or infrared, near or far infrared. See in thermal infrared, see in gamma rays — that would all be so very cool.  

To learn more, find Emily Lakdawalla on The Planetary Society's website and blog as well as on Sky & Telescope. Be sure to follow Emily on Twitter, too!