-
Dr. Lisa Prato
-
Dr. Jeff Hall
-
Dr. Lisa Prato Astronomer, Lowell Observatory
TRANSCRIPT:
One of the things that I like about astronomy is that it's very unifying, because if you're thinking about your science and you're thinking about binary stars and exoplanets, the sort of human conflict seems to kind of melt off, and I think that's very powerful. I also think that it's a very, very exciting way to educate people all over the world about science. I think it draws people in, and then you can explain certain sort of fundamental scientific things through that vehicle.
Of course, there are tremendous challenges. Where do we go, as far as what do we build next? Do we build giant supercomputing centers for theorists to run big models and simulations? Do we build a 30-meter telescope? Which there is a group working on that. Do we maintain lots and lots of 4-meter telescopes, where people can get lots and lots of time to look at the same object over and over and see how it's evolving or changing? So these questions are being addressed now by astronomers, by committees of our peers. We're constantly in a challenging federal budget environment; we're trying to prioritize.
So yeah, the economy does have an impact on us, but I think we really need to work hard at exciting people, at getting people interested in science beyond the sort of conflicts of everyday life to thinking about something else, and I think we can. It just takes a lot of work.
-
Dr. Jeff Hall Astronomer, Director, Lowell Observatory
TRANSCRIPT:
I would guess that ever since Olduvai Gorge, humanity has asked itself a couple of fundamental questions: "Where did we come from?" and "Are we alone?" Two million years later, those questions are still outstanding, even with the spectacular technology we have these days. What is the evolution and fate of the universe? Interesting new things keep turning up, just within the last decade. We've discovered that the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating, leading to what is called, for lack of a better term, dark energy, to explain these observations of supernovae that suggest the universe is expanding ever faster. Are we alone? Is there life elsewhere in the universe?
Our founder, Percival Lowell, was intensely concerned with this question. He spent the latter part of his life right here, thinking that he had discovered evidence of that. We may yet discover evidence of life on Mars. Clearly, water flowed there at some point. You see river channels. We have a spacecraft on its way there now that will explore that question in even greater detail than we've been able to do before. Farther out in the universe, we are finding these little worlds that may be analogs of Earths around analogs of the sun.
We are, in a way, looking for ourselves out there. It may not look exactly like us, but we're closer than ever to finding it. Carl Sagan used to like to point out that we are what he called "star stuff," that the atoms that form our bodies were synthesized in the cores of massive stars elsewhere in the universe. That's why I like to extend the analogy to what he referred to as "cosmic fugues." He was talking about life elsewhere in the universe when he wrote that in the second chapter of Cosmos, but I think you can take the analogy even farther and view the pursuit of astronomy as practically the universe attempting to comprehend itself. It's a very self-referential pursuit, and I think that makes it singularly satisfying pursuit to be part of.
-
How might electromagnetic propulsion work?
Answered by Science Channel
-
Why do we need rockets?
Answered by Jacob Silverman and Discovery Channel
-
How will we communicate with each other across space?
Answered by Science Channel
