Laura Danly

Laura Danly, PhD, was an astronomer for ten years at NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, where she was also the Project Scientist for Education. She came to Denver in 1998, where she held a joint appointment as the first Curator of Space Sciences at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (then the Denver Museum of Natural History) and as an assistant professor at the University of Denver. She left DMNS in 2003, but stayed at DU where this past year she’s been a Senior Fellow of the Honors Program. Flash! Laura has recently accepted the post of Curator of Education at Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles..

Laura is the author of the beautiful book Chaos to Cosmos: A Space Odyssey.

www.du.edu/~ldanly

After 13.7 billion years of cosmic evolution, complex (human) life on Earth is in the unique position of being able to determine the course of its own future evolution.  I will be providing an astrobiologist’s view of the one place in the universe we know harbors life, explore the possible futures for human life in the cosmos, and explore what contemporary science tells us about the possibilities for alien life beyond Earth.

Questions that occur to the Café management:

• How do you define life in a universe-wide context? Even on earth there are creatures that breathe iron and eat sulfur.
• Is carbon necessary?
• Could silicon replace it?
• Once a planet evolves intelligent life, how long can it be expected to last?
• What are the odds that 2 such intelligences could evolve at the same time, and if they did, would signals from one arrive before the other was gone?