The Doctor Who Effect
How many times do we turn on the computer, open the newspaper, or hear on the radio a story about lazy young people, teenagers without direction, selfish technophiles? Well, here’s your daily antidote to all of that negativity, because teenagers are incredible and this one will definitely inspire you.
Ishita Thakur is a 17-year-old from Indore in Central India, and when humankind finally get to explore our universe in person, her feet may well be among the first to touch the ground on another planet.
“My story started out just like any other child who dreams to go out of this world, who wants to become an astronaut,” Ishita says, “but I kind of drifted away from that dream when I was in elementary and middle school. Then, in 2014 when I saw the space shuttle Endeavor in the California Science Centre, that is the moment I realised yes, that is something really amazing, I want to be a part of it.”
So did what else did Ishita want to do? Was it always space?
“Just about a year ago I got the idea to be an astronaut again. Before that I wanted to be an astrophysicist, but I realised actually I wanted to be an astronaut.“
It’s all very well to dream — every kid does, right? But Ishita is doing far more than that.
“There’s an app called Space Nation Navigator. It allows you to train like an astronaut while you’re at home. Usually to train as an astronaut you have to go to NASA or a real training centre to do that, and it costs a lot of money and time, and you don’t know at what point you are going to be eliminated. This app, that lets you train like an astronaut, is really a big step in the space exploration field because you can do most of the things at home: you can study about the space station, you can learn Russian, you can know the secret codes they use on the ISS. I have been using the app since it launched in October 2017.”
What are Ishita’s favourite things about the app?
“You get to play stimulation games to get your mind adjusted to what might happen and to give you a little insight about that. There’s a mission in which you actually go out and run for two kilometres, and it tracks you with the GPS, not like other health tracking apps that measure the number of steps based on how your phone moves. This is a great thing because nobody can actually cheat on those missions — you actually have to go out and do something. On the two kilometres, you have to collect the planets of the Solar System.
“It gives you bonus points and completion points, so that every time you complete a mission you will feel the need to complete more missions based on the points you get. You want to be great at this. You want to go to space and you want to be in the leaderboard, so you will keep playing it again and again until you are really tired!”
And the real-life payoff?
“The idea of the app is that the top hundred people will actually compete in a boot camp in an actual training in Iceland. Out of the top one hundred, the top twelve will have a real, televised training — a very serious one — and out of those twelve, one of them will go to space.
“All the Apollo astronauts trained in that area in Iceland, so it would be really great to tell people that you trained in the same spot as people who actually went to the moon!”
To what degree is the app game-like and to what degree is it real?
“On the app there are pretty deep things that you learn, like how astronauts live inside the space station, what training they go through, what are the things they use, the different kinds of systems on the ISS, the different kinds of experiments they do. At a certain level it always comes to the point that you actually have to go to a real training centre and do something.
“When I first heard about it I thought the app was too good to be true, but at the end, I downloaded it and it’s a pretty great app.”
So what made Ishita switch from the theoretical field of astrophysics to being a hands-on astronaut?
“I was always interested in space and stuff, but about a year ago, I started watching Doctor Who. In that TV show they actually travel all around the universe. They have a little different insight to all other sci-fi movies and it inspired me, made me want to go out of this planet and explore what’s out there. I also loved Interstellar and The Martian.
“Science fiction has a lot of impact on the people who want to be astronauts or astrophysicists or engineers.
“People perceive that arts and science are totally different things, and that if you do arts you can’t do science, if you do science you can’t do arts — so sci-fi movies are a way to connect people from different kinds of fields and really tell people how amazing different things are.”
And never underestimate the impact of a teacher.
“In tenth grade I had a teacher — she was a really great maths teacher and the way she expressed mathematics and applications in the real world, and the way she made our maths classroom fun, that’s kind of what inspired me to go into the science field.
“I was kind of on the verge of going for journalism, but in the end my maths teacher was so good that I’m really glad she did inspire me. So it’s because of her that I chose this field.”
Ishita has advice for teachers to encourage their students to think “big picture”.
“People my age tend to go into a field that they’re really comfortable in, so if you want to really inspire people my age — especially teenagers and even younger than that — you have to get to their level and speak from their perspective. If I was 10 and someone would have just blurted out all the things that an astronaut does, I wouldn’t have been interested. I would have wanted to see it from my level, the kinds of things they really do.
“It’s better if you get to know the different kinds of things you could do, and then actually come up on your own with what you want to do. Because if someone tells you do to something you obviously would not be comfortable with doing it in the way that you would be if you came up with the idea on your own. So it’s good to go out of your fields and see what you really want to do, and experience it on your own.
“People can easily be inspired from different kinds of people. It could be a celebrity, or a famous scientist, or someone from your home town or your country, or somebody else from the other side of the world. But if you come up with the idea on your own and decide all on your own that you want to do it, you would not be demotivated at any point if someone says that you can’t do it. There will be a thousand people telling you not to do this, so it’s really important that you know why you choose to do it.”
Speaking with Ishita, it’s very easy to forget that she’s just 17. She’s highly articulate, very well versed in her chosen field, and makes incredibly mature theoretical and practical connections — but when she finally gets to set foot on Mars, what’s the first thing she wants to do?
“If I’m not speaking from a scientific perspective, I would probably want to jump around!”
I think we all would, Ishita.
You can hear the full interview on VoicEd Radio Canada via SoundCloud here.
