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RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS

intellect and domain knowledge of a scientist with the While the technologies and the intended purpose of the
inquisitive mind of a five-year-old child? SKA are incredible, what other benefits or digital dis-
A five-year-old doesn’t suffer from the belief that func- ruptions could it provide to the world? What might be
tion is fixed. To them, everything is an exploration and some of the other possibilities in the ‘white space’
the world, in all its wonder, is new. By the age of seven, where we are not looking?
many have already had their minds wired to see things One example might be the ability to make sense of big
in a particular way and, as a consequence, adults have data. The technology advancements made during the
to work very hard at seeing ‘the spaces between’. development of the SKA may not only help us under-
stand the beginnings of the Universe, but will almost
Unintended breakthrough certainly help us in the relentless march towards the
Internet of Things; when so much data and information
If history shows us that science has spawned so many is being generated that we don’t actually know what to
unintended discoveries, what is around the next corner do with it.
of unintended scientific breakthroughs?
The data stream received by the SKA is so huge that it
Perhaps one of the most promising opportunities for can’t be stored forever. In fact, the aperture arrays in
‘accidental discovery’ is the Square Kilometr rArray the SKA could generate more than 100 times the global
(SKA), the world’s largest radio telescope currently un- Internet traffic! In this instance, what the scientists may
der construction in the deserts of Western Australia and do is take a splice out of the data stream and then com-
South Africa. pare it to a later splice to see what might have
changed.
The SKA project is an international effort to build the
world’s largest radio telescope and will be a means of But here’s the rub: it will be critical to ensure that now
re-imagining our understanding of space and time as we have a means of ‘looking’, we don’t miss the oppor-
we know it. In actuality, the SKA is not a single gargan- tunity to truly ‘see’.
tuan telescope dish, but a collection area of one square
kilometer of radio antennas (called aperture arrays) ar- In the absence of true data storage in the world of big
ranged in a cleverly randomized pattern; listening for data, instead, we will need to look to pattern recogni-
signals so faint that it would be able to detect an airport tion. It will not be about data analysis itself, but looking
radar on a planet tens of light years away. for the trends in the data and then extrapolating from
those steady state trends to predict a future.
The SKA will effectively be a window looking back in
time. It will enable scientists to capture enormous vol- To make sense of big data, we will have to channel our
umes of data about the origins of the Universe and how inner five-year-old. We will have to keep our mind open
we came to be. to the unexpected and the unseen. Blending deep tech-
nical data analysis capability with the curious mindset
Equally, they may be able to shed some light onto an of a 5-year-old will be what the captains in industry will
inky, unknown future. Whether it be witnessing the birth need in order to find the next big thing that we never
and death of stars and galaxies, questioning Einstein’s knew we were looking for. ◊
theory of relativity, or maybe even proving the existence
of dark matter, the SKA will seek to unfold the mysteries By Angus Leitch,
of the cosmos and will almost certainly redefine our Regional Director - Western Australia, Aurecon
knowledge of human genesis and maybe even our des-
tiny.

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