Andrew Lound Lecturer, Writer, Broadcaster and Astronomer REACHING TO THE COSMOS Opening with a starry night sky, Andrew tells of how humankind has always been fascinated by the heavens and has wondered what is up there. This search began well, with the likes of Thales who looked at nature in a scientific way. However, Pythagoras, the scourge of many a schoolchild, was the father figure of a school of philosophy that leaned heavily on mysticism, religion and secret knowledge, holding back open scientific thought from the gen-eral populous. Democritus was the total opposite; a believer in science and natural processes, he also supported a political structure that gave people a say in the way their lives were run. However it was the Pythagoreans that prevailed, as political leaders liked the idea of controlling their populations, with mysticism and religion being ideal tools. Although there were occasional bouts of realism, the religious zeal held back scientific enquiry for 1500 years until Nicholas Copernicus' book 'On The Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs' suggested for the first time since Hipparchus that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. The movements of the planets could be calculated more accurately and certain anomalies in the orbits of the planets could be explained by this shift. Johannes Kepler built on this work showing that the planets orbits are elliptical not circular - a stunning achievement given his own religious beliefs but he accepted the scientific proof above all. With Galileo's work, observing the heavens with a telescope and discovering moons orbiting the planet Jupiter, the ancient doctrines of Aristotle and Ptolemy - doctrines that had to be ad-hered to by religious/political states - were eroded as scientific proof opened the universe to all humankind. As the centuries rolled by new discoveries were made, new concepts about space and time obeying the laws discovered by Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and space probes have photographed old worlds in a new light. We have reached a point where the orbiting Hubble space telescope has images of objects 13.7 billion light years away and, as a new wave of solar system exploration begins, humankind is on the brink of new discoveries as revolutionary as Copernicus's. Yet as the 21st century starts a dark cloud appears, religious extremism, mysticism and a belief in fake science - sometimes supported by national and local government agencies fearful of not being politically correct - is becoming widespread, with science being attacked from the pulpit. A New Pythagorean age is looming where political and scientific freedoms would be eroded and humankind would once again be thrown into a new dark age. We are at a crossroads, as the future could be magnificent with humankind in spacecraft able to reach to the cosmos!