Are There Library Patrons on Other Worlds: The Search for Life Among the Stars

Recent discoveries have given scientists new optimism about finding life elsewhere in the cosmos. We now have evidence for over a thousand planets around other stars, and this year we have discovered Earth-size planets out there for the first time. Radio astronomers report signals that indicate the presence of the chemical building blocks of life in vast clouds of cosmic raw material scattered among the stars.

More and more, we are beginning to realize that the events that led to the development of Los Gatos Library patrons on Earth could also happen elsewhere. At the SETI Institute in Mountain View (and at other scientific institutions around the world), experiments are under way to find evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth.

In this non-technical illustrated talk, Andrew Fraknoi will explain these new developments in everyday language, and discuss what we are doing to find our counterparts among the stars. He will conclude with some thoughts about what might happen on Earth when intelligent life out there is actually discovered.

Speaker: Andrew Fraknoi is the Chair of the Astronomy Department at Foothill College in Los Altos, and was the 2007 California Professor of the Year. He also works as Senior Educator at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, where he served as the Executive Director for 14 years. He is lead author of Voyages Through the Universe, one of the leading astronomy textbooks in the country, and has written a children's book on astronomy for Disney. Fraknoi appears regularly on local and national radio explaining scientific developments. Bay Area radio listeners may know him best from his regular appearances on KGO radio and on KQED's Forum program with Michael Krasny. In 1992, the International Astronomical Union named asteroid 4859 Asteroid Fraknoi in recognition of his contributions to the public understanding of astronomy.