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Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, will be speaking at an event on Waiheke Island in mid September.
Consolmagno is a Jesuit brother and president of the Vatican Observatory Foundation.
He’ll discuss the interface between science and humanity, our place in the universe and what it means to us if life is found out there.
The one-day festival, called Is There Life Out There?, follows a similar event last year organised by the island-based Awana Rural Women group, which attracted around 12 per cent of the island’s residents.
Other speakers include, top US planetary scientist Dr Faith Vilas, and Gino Acevedo, the Weta Digital creative art director behind such films as Avatar and King Kong.
Also on the bill is Auckland University of Technology microbiologist Professor Steve Pointing, who worked with Nasa researching extreme lifeforms that survive in polar cold and desert heat.
The group’s president, Gendie Somerville-Ryan, chuckled when asked how these heavyweights had been pulled to such a remote spot.
“Well, it’s just never good luck is it?”
The group was fortunate to have among its members Dr Ann Sprague, a retired University of Arizona planetary scientist who had connections with Vilas and Consolmagno.
“So we did have an in there, but then it’s not just about having a contact – it’s that these people have to actually be willing to come, and they’re even paying,” Somerville-Ryan said.
“Partly I think it was the attraction of people being able to come to a small isolated community, where we are desperate for knowledge, basically.”
Source
- nzherald.co.nz
- Image: sciencemag.org
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