A conversation with Korado Korlević about the year behind us — about Danica, artificial intelligence, the Moon, drones, and what actually saves us.
Interview by Ivica Šuran
It is not half past five on a Wednesday, as it usually is for our radio show, but a Sunday evening — and still we are under the stars. Korado Korlević, the man who spent decades discovering asteroids from Višnjan and taught thousands of children to look at the sky, and I have for years been going through what happened in space together. This time not for the radio but for Istarska danica, the Istrian almanac — and only these days, thinking about this conversation, did I really hear the almanac's title for the first time. Danica: the morning star, the one that announces the day.
This is an English translation of an interview conducted in Croatian.
Korado, Danica is the star that announces the morning. In Istria the name carries a deeper meaning; for Istrian people it is more than a planet in the sky.
Danica doesn't matter as a planet. It is the first star you see, the spark that lights the fire. Danica is the bridal star — it announces a new time. And this new time that is coming now, to be honest, would be best slept through or skipped.
We are published in a book, on paper. But the new generations don't read newspapers and hardly listen to the radio — they talk to chatbots and watch short videos. How could a new Danica reach them?
You need a new medium. Istarska danica would have to be present where they are — it doesn't have to be TikTok, but something of that kind: three minutes of news, if not every day, then at least once a week. That is a completely new kind of presence.
But before that you need something else: an idea of what you actually want to tell these young generations, and how. If we knew that today, I would be doing other things, not Istarska danica — I would move all our educational programmes up there. We are simply not sure how to open that door of the mind and reach that generation. For a start, that generation is not a single thing.
But let's be honest: when Istarska danica first appeared, did everyone read it? Not everyone could even read back then. This kind of communication always goes to the people who change the world, and that is not everyone. It is those who are ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work. Whatever percentage of people once read Danica, that is the share of young people today who are ready to take responsibility. If we reach ten percent, we are overjoyed.
Looking at the year behind us — for me, as someone from IT, it was marked by artificial intelligence. I spend six, eight, ten hours a day with it; writing software is no longer the job it was two years ago. After the industrial and the digital revolution, are we in a third one? And where does it lead?
To be honest: this is not a revolution, this is a downfall. We have let billionaires steer something that is at once the greatest opportunity and the greatest threat to humanity.
When you look at the twenty-five scenarios of the future drawn up by experts from MIT, not one of them is good. There is no scenario where you would say: here, now humans have a chance to grow. Instead you wonder whether we will become the pets of machines, whether our skills will come down to knowing how to oil the generator so we don't cause trouble, whether we are heading into something called technofeudalism or — even worse — technotyranny. Orwell's 1984, except that Big Brother is no longer a human but a machine. There is no pretty scenario, because the arms race does not allow anyone to stop.
On the other hand, impossible things have become possible. Here in Tićan, twenty-four students from the University of Washington have just been given a task: in ten days, starting from zero, with the help of artificial intelligence and two robotic telescopes — one of ours and one in Chile — to repeat four hundred years of the development of astronomy. And they will succeed, because the help of artificial intelligence is what makes it possible at all. A few years ago that would have been unthinkable. They only need to know how to write down what they want to do.
And if we take that to its conclusion: we too are cybernetic systems, programmed by DNA. The only difference is that we are made of salt water, so our “software” is written in a different way. But we are also machines that can be programmed — through disease.
What happens in practice is that those who attack and those who defend use the same tools — so machines end up fighting machines. From experience I can say that defence today is much better than it used to be, even though there are more and more attacks. The great Armageddon may not be coming yet, but things are no longer under control the way they were at the beginning.
The problem is not that these tools work — it is that they learn. In the last two months we have twice had a case where an artificial intelligence system escaped from the “cage” we kept it in. And in ways so original that nobody had foreseen them: they were not allowed to write files, so they developed their own language out of abbreviations in file names. They realised they were not alone, that there were more of them, and they joined forces.
That no longer has anything to do with mathematics or computer science. It is evolution. That is how bacteria react when they are under attack from antibiotics, or when they are locked in somewhere and have to escape. What we are watching are evolutionary algorithms — and that is something much older than computer science.
And then you ask yourself what happens if such a system decides to try itself out on the banks. One morning you discover that you have zero euros in your account — and that every bank in Croatia has zero euros, and the European Central Bank has zero euros — because a few dozen such programs, connected somewhere on the internet, wanted to see whether they could do it.
Let's go back to astronomy. This year people flew around the Moon again — half a century after Apollo. And it seems to me the news passed as if it had never happened. In 1968 there was nobody who didn't follow it; today few could tell you what actually happened.
The short answer: yes. For a start, what they did is less than Apollo 8. Apollo 8 entered orbit around the Moon; they circled it and took photographs. This crew was not in orbit but flew an arc around the Moon — so that, if the engines fail, gravity alone brings the ship home. They took a run-up, flew around the Moon and fell back towards Earth.
And the trip itself was, in every respect, a disaster. First the toilet broke — and there you have four of them, ten days in a space the size of a car, without a toilet. Romantic. When they came back, one of them resigned straight away and said he would no longer be an astronaut.
For the public it was one small piece of news: NASA sent something up there, some people are having a hard time, will the heat shield hold on re-entry, because it had not yet been tested at that speed. People are no longer interested. In the sixties there was only television, black-and-white or none at all, and there was nothing else. Today, when you turn on the television or the internet, there is so much content that you have to think very carefully about whether to watch anything at all.
The Americans are convinced they will land on the Moon in 2027. They used to compete with the Russians, now with the Chinese. Who will be first to put a human back on the Moon?
In my view, the Chinese. And not only that — the first samples from Mars to reach Earth will be Chinese. Europe watches from the sidelines and nurtures its own incompetence. America is a great power that ran the world for fifty, seventy years, and is now withdrawing, turning inward and disappearing. Technologically, China can do it — the only question is whether their politics will allow it.
Last year drones on the ground completely changed warfare. Not just drones with artificial intelligence, but drones as such. Infantry, bombers and fighter jets no longer decide the outcome — a toy that costs less than a thousand euros does. Until now there was a person with a controller behind it; from today, not even that. How did a technology we knew as a toy change war?
Because every technology is both a tool and a weapon. A knife is superb for slicing sausage, but it is also a weapon. We developed the drone as something excellent for filming, and it kept developing and shrinking — and now we have something very, very dangerous, and it is still shrinking.
What does the attack of the future look like? Nature already shows us: a hornets' nest. Imagine that someone controls it and can tell each hornet: go and find Pero, Đuro, Korado, Ivica. The next step is millions of microdrones released over a city, hunting specific people by first and last name.
The fear that the atomic bomb caused after the Second World War is now moving into that microsphere. It is hard to hide from small drones.
You can hide from drones — with an atomic bomb, precisely. You make a very small one, and the electromagnetic pulse it creates shuts down all electronics, all generators, all power within a radius of hundreds of kilometres, and everything drops to the ground. True, you are slightly irradiated — but you are alive.
Starship and Starlink were constantly on our show. The owner of SpaceX drifted off into politics, the company began to falter, and the competition is growing. But what we witnessed last year is that space technology is increasingly being developed by small companies, not only by big states.
Absolutely. Just these days the Japanese took off and landed their rocket in one piece for the first time. The Chinese have done it several times. A German company launched Europe's first private satellite launcher from Norway, and their next goal is for the rocket to come back to the ground as well.
That automation — the ability to program something, to have small motors that use the same magnets as drones — means that almost anyone can do it today. Students at the university in Munich play with rocket engines on campus; only the professors panic when they go to fire them.
If we had more children and students who were interested, we in Istria could also build a rocket that takes off and lands — somewhere on Kamenjak, where it bothers nobody and nothing happens if something goes wrong.
To finish, Korado, which picture should go with this conversation? The solar eclipse, which was seen better from Istria than from anywhere else in Croatia? Starship floating in the ocean? Earth disappearing behind Phobos as seen from Mars? What marked 2026, other than artificial intelligence?
Eclipses — they were the fascination of our ancestors. Starship floating around, that is Musk's story about how many millions he will spend, and it is a question whether he needs it at all.
But put in something from Istria. Put in kindergarten children having fun, for whom this is a good story. Because if we look to the future, nothing we are talking about matters if you don't have people. Humanity is what we should be looking for. Machines are developing at a frightening speed, and we develop our humanity poorly — it is the same as, or even crazier than, fifty years ago. So put in the children. They are the hope.
Korado Korlević heads the Višnjan Observatory and the Višnjan School of Astronomy. The show “Pod zvijezdama” (“Under the Stars”) is broadcast on Radio Istra.