The Colossus Project: Designing an optical/IR instrument to detect life outside the solar system

This talk describes an effort  to detect life, and even conduct a planetary census, in our cosmic neighborhood. I'll describe some results from the Colossus group, an interdisciplinary science and engineering team, working to show how telescopes  much larger than the TMT or EELT could be built today by relaxing some of the astronomical requirements of current "world's largest telescope" projects.

Speaker: Jeff Kuhn, Univ. of Hawaii