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I feel a humble proprietary interest. Our home, we were told when we moved in, once housed the largest and most powerful telescope in England… now in the Science Museum. We named the house after it: Observatory House. Two hundred years later and the world’s biggest telescope, the Square Kilometre Array, is about to be constructed. Our little garden can’t compete with a million square metres of collecting area. Sometime ago I was invited onto Question Time. There had just been a breakthrough in space exploration, at the same time as a humanitarian crisis. I was asked if I approved of the billions spent on such an expensive project when so many people were starving. It’s a legitimate question… but I didn’t hesitate: that morning I’d gone into our adolescent son’s bedroom as the news broke, to see him punching the air in excitement. It’s a false dichotomy, between science and compassion. One of the characteristics of human endeavour is that we often have no idea where it will lead. When Columbus, knowing the Earth was spherical, set out to reach the East by going in the opposite direction, he was expecting to forge a new trade route not land on a continent he didn’t know existed. Fleming was experimenting with the ’flu virus when he accidentally discovered penicillin. It could be a genetic breakthrough that solves world hunger for ever. So it makes no sense to restrict future enquiry for the sake of present crisis: it could be the answer to it. Over the door of the famous Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge are the words of Psalm 111, The works of the Lord are great; sought out of all them that have pleasure therein. The best throw-away line in the Bible is said to come after God made the greater light to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night. Simply this: he made the stars also. The SKA will be so sensitive it will detect radio signals emitted by cosmic sources billions of light years away, those signals emitted in the first billion years of the Universe when the galaxies and stars started forming, more than thirteen billion years ago. So this futuristic invention will be reading the far distant past: able to study how planets, including ours, came into being; how life formed on them. But that’s not all. According to the SKA website: “another specialism is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence that looks for radio signals from intelligent civilisations elsewhere in the universe.” In other worse, the telescope won’t just be looking for dead, dumb stars but living, intelligent creatures. Some may find this exciting: some terrifying. Almost the most thrilling thing I can think of is connecting with other beings, - who I believe will also be created by a loving God. The most thrilling being that they find us first… being far more advanced and intelligent than we are.