• Question: Is being a scientist good for a sustainable life? :)

    Asked by antonia123 to Mona, Michael, Joseph, Jen, Emma on 16 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Michael Taggart

      Michael Taggart answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      yeah, it keeps you young, keeps your mind active and your always discovering new things and passing knowledge on to others. So all in all that seems to fit ‘sustainable’ 🙂

    • Photo: Joseph Finlayson

      Joseph Finlayson answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      I thought you might be referring to whether being a scientist makes one ecologically sustainable.

      It really depends on what you’re doing. If you’re a botanist, you might actually have a positive carbon footprint (taking in less carbon that you give out). If you’re a high energy physicist or chemist, you might be very ecologically unsustainable. For example, the Large Hadron Collider (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM) can use up to 180 Megawatts at its peak – equivalent to 90,000 kettles!

    • Photo: Jen Gupta

      Jen Gupta answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      It depends on what you mean by sustainable!

      I initially thought you meant it in terms of job stability i.e. be able to get a job until you retire. Unfortunately the outlook isn’t great in astronomy. If you want to stay in research, after your PhD you will try to get a research job. These are called postdocs and are normally only for 2 or 3 years. This means that most astronomy researchers will have to do a few postdoc jobs before they get a permanent job and these postdocs can be anywhere in the world. The competition is also very fierce and the number of permanent jobs is quite small so only a small percentage of people who do an astronomy PhD will actually stay an astronomer for the rest of their life. Luckily an astronomy PhD will teach you skills that you can use in lots of other jobs so I know people who are now teachers, bankers, computer programmers and lots of other things.

    • Photo: Emma Bennett

      Emma Bennett answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      Having looked the other posts there seems to be a lot of different things that sustainable could mean but like Joseph I went for ecologically sustainable.
      Being a scientist is probably not good for a sustainable life as we do a lot of work that requires equipment to be sterile and so can’t be used again and has to be thrown away. We do try to use less packing and waste as little as possible but unfortunately it is often not a very good profession for the environment – which is ironic as a lot of science is aimed at saving the planet.

      To try and save wasting samples though I have taken home bags of cherrys and herbs when we’ve finished testing them. Never fear they didn’t go near any nasty chemicals but people in the lab were a bit scared of eating a cake I’d made with cherries from the lab freezer but it was ok we all survived!

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