Astrophysicist, writer and photographer Pedro Mota Machado speaks of science and poetry, artificial intelligence and human imperfection, Carl Sagan and old Azorean whalers. Nearly four decades after leaving São Miguel, he insists that the umbilical cord connecting him to the islands was never cut—and when asked which island is his, he gives an answer as expansive as his view of the cosmos: “I am from all the islands.”
There is something wonderfully Azorean in the beginning of Pedro Mota Machado’s journey toward the stars: it began beneath glass, among pineapples. As a boy in São Miguel, he helped his grandfather with simple tasks in pineapple greenhouses, places he remembers as possessing “a kind of magic.” His grandfather occasionally gave him a coin. The child saved those coins until he could buy his first book, about astronomy and the Solar System; decades later, it still occupies a place of honor in his library. At the same time, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was opening another window: Machado remembers running to the television to watch it and searching libraries for Sagan’s books. “My vocation for astronomy was born from pineapples,” he says. The sentence contains much of the man: rigorous science accompanied by humor, memory and the refusal to believe that wonder must disappear when knowledge begins.
Machado, now 58, left São Miguel at 17 to study theoretical physics in Lisbon and has lived on the mainland for nearly four decades, but returns home every year and repeatedly brings his scientific, literary and photographic work back to the archipelago through schools, the University of the Azores, public lectures and exhibitions. His attachment is not merely geographical. He says the umbilical cord was never severed; it simply stretched across the sea until it became like a string of the viola da terra playing saudade. He has walked with the romeiros of São Miguel, photographed and written about them, and co-authored A Irmandade dos Romeiros with Luís Mota Machado and Alexandre Coutinho. He has sat for hours listening to former whalers in Calheta do Nesquim and Lajes do Pico because, he says, human beings have two ears and one mouth and should use them in roughly that proportion. He is fascinated by Azorean history, ethnography, villages and the extraordinary manner in which islanders learned to create a civilization “in symbiosis in the middle of the ocean.”
That affection extends beyond São Miguel. When people ask which island he comes from, Machado replies: “I am from all the islands.” For him, the Azores derive their strength precisely from the tension between unity and difference: nine small territories possessing an ethnographic and cultural diversity that can exceed that of much larger regions, yet connected by what he calls a system of “communicating vessels.” The islands are not fragments accidentally placed beside one another; there is, he argues, a deeper thread connecting them. Even the famous Azorean mist becomes part of his creative imagination. Solitude, he observes, is not the same as loneliness, and being alone can be essential to artistic and intellectual creation. It is an amusing paradox for an astrophysicist formed beneath famously cloudy skies.
His career has carried that island-born curiosity extraordinarily far. In 2023 an asteroid in the Solar System’s asteroid belt was named for him, producing considerable media attention that Machado characteristically deflates with jokes about paying property tax on his celestial rock and complaints that the asteroid is apparently rather ugly. Yet he immediately redirects the honor toward his origins: whenever the asteroid is discussed, he makes certain the Azores are mentioned. More recently, his public visibility increased again with his appointment as National Commissioner for the total solar eclipse—an event described in the interview as an astronomical “Woodstock.” Behind the humor, however, is a scientist working at the frontiers of questions concerning planets, exoplanets, astrobiology and the nature of life itself.
But Machado resists the idea of the scientist as merely a highly accomplished technician. Science without the humanities, he argues, risks becoming intellectually impoverished. A scientist confronting something no human being has previously seen needs more than equations: philosophy, poetry and art become part of the intellectual “toolbox” through which the unknown can be understood. His conversations with Azorean poet Eduíno de Jesus offer a beautiful example. Reflecting together on the mystery of how nonliving matter becomes life, Eduíno once condensed the problem into four words: “Matter became moved.” Machado has since carried that poetic intuition into astrobiology conferences. For him, the phrase illustrates something fundamental: science and poetry need not inhabit opposing worlds. At the frontier of knowledge, where certainty ends, they may begin asking the same questions in different languages.
That humanistic concern also shapes his provocative reflections on artificial intelligence. Machado worries about copyright, employment, creativity and the extraordinary speed of technological change, but deliberately reverses the usual argument: he says he feels “sorry for AI.” Humanity created it, he suggests, and is behaving like an irresponsible parent by emphasizing optimization, quantity and profit without sufficiently embedding ethical, moral and humanistic principles. His metaphors range freely from Frankenstein and Rousseau to 2001: A Space Odyssey. He calls for international regulation, protection for creative workers and, more profoundly, a cultural conversation about what values should accompany these technologies. His central fear is not simply that machines will become too human, but that humans may build them according to the least human parts of ourselves.
For Machado, imperfection may be part of the answer. He points to music and physics to argue that absolute perfection is neither the essence of creativity nor even the condition of the universe. Without variations and inhomogeneities, he observes, galaxies, stars, planets and eventually life itself would not have emerged. The same principle, in his view, helps explain why human artistic creation retains something difficult to reproduce through mechanical optimization. We recognize hesitation, irregularity, vulnerability—the presence of another consciousness behind the sound. Humanity’s supposed defects may therefore be among its greatest creative resources. “We are imperfect,” Machado says. And rather than treating that condition exclusively as failure, he invites us to consider what the universe itself has made possible because perfection never existed.
This may explain why Pedro Mota Machado moves so naturally between telescopes and poetry, equations and romeiros, exoplanets and old whalers. His universe is not divided into science on one side and culture on the other. They belong to the same search. Carl Sagan stands in that universe beside Manuel Ferreira; theoretical physics can converse with Eduíno de Jesus; an asteroid can carry an Azorean name while a scientist sits quietly in a Pico village listening to people who once hunted whales. The scale changes, but the curiosity remains.
And perhaps the most revealing image is still that first one: a boy beneath the glass roof of a São Miguel pineapple greenhouse, saving his grandfather’s coins to buy a book about the Solar System. He could not yet know that one day a rock orbiting the Sun would bear his name.
But he was already looking upward; even beneath the Azorean mist.
Based on a superb interview published on this excellent project, Complexo N. If you read Portuguese, I invite you to read this astonishing (and I don’t use the word lightly) interview here on their Facebook Page.
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=122180813012677115&set=a.122105975396677115
