2013

The Earth is getting warmer. Come review the evidence that Earth’s climate has been changing, and understand the likely connection to the greenhouse gases generated by mankind’s industrial activities.

Dr. Robert A. Rohde, Berkeley Earth, Lead Scientist. He led the development of the Berkeley Earth temperature analysis, which has used more than a billion instrumental temperature observations to reconstruct the historical climate of the Earth.

Deep Space Industries is a new company dedicated to exploring, characterizing, retrieving, and processing Near-Earth asteroids for fuel, building materials, and planetary defense.

Dr. Jim Luebke, Deep Space Industries

The expansion rate of the Universe is speeding up with time, rather than slowing down due to gravity as expected. The origin of the repulsive "dark energy" may be the biggest unsolved mystery in all of physics.

Our speaker, Dr. Alex Filippenko, is one of the world's most highly cited astronomers. He was the only person to serve on both teams that simultaneously discovered the Nobel-worthy accelerating expansion of the universe. Alex has been voted UC Berkeley's "Best Professor" a record nine times.

NASA's Kepler spacecraft, designed to find Earth-like planets orbiting stars in our Milky Way, has been in operation since 2009. What exciting results have been found to date?

Dr. Natalie Batalha, NASA-Ames Research Center. Project scientist for NASA's Kepler Mission. She led the analysis that yielded the discovery in 2011 of Kepler-10b—the mission's first confirmation of a rocky planet outside our solar system.

The stars that speckle the sky have long fascinated humanity, but only in the past century have astronomers figured out how stars are born, live, and die and which stars might have planets with intelligent life.

Dr. Ken Croswell, Astronomer and author of eight books on astronomy. He has also written for National Geographic, New Scientist, PNAS, Sky and Telescope, and other publications. For many years he has been the astronomy consultant for Highlights for Children.

The first human mission to Mars will be humanity’s greatest undertaking in space exploration in the 21st century. As with all expeditions, its success will depend on planning and first steps towards the journey are already under way.

Dr. Pascal Lee is a planetary scientist at the Mars Institute and at the SETI Institute. He also directs the Haughton-Mars Project at NASA Ames Research Center.

The close flyby of the 30m asteroid 2012DA14 on Feb 15 and the Chebalkul Meteor which exploded over Russia the same day, has increased awareness of the smaller objects in our solar system and their potential impact with Earth.

Dr. Franck Marchis is a senior planetary astronomer at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute. He has dedicated his work to the study of our solar system, specifically the search for asteroids with moons, using mainly ground-based telescopes equipped with adaptive optics (AO).

What is the possibility of life in the universe and how can do we search for radio and optical signals from other civilizations. This program is part of the Bay Area Science Festival-in conjunction with Wonderfest

Dr. Dan Werthimer, SETI Institute. He specializes in signal processing for radio astronomy. He has been doing SETI since 1979, and he runs the SERENDIP and CASPER projects.