Origins Institute Lecture Series with Brad Gibson

Have we been visited before? Are they out there watching… listening… studying us? And if they are out there, where might ‘there’ be? Our Milky Way Galaxy can be a nasty and inhospitable place for life to develop… but, all is not lost… there are some very unique and special places hidden amongst this hostile environment where the building blocks for life might just be right for extraterrestrial life to flourish.

In this lecture, Professor Brad Gibson will examine the evidence for and against the existence of extraterrestrial life, and walk you through the associated good, bad, and ugly corners of our Galaxy.

Professor Brad Gibson is the Head of Physics & Mathematics, and Director of the E.A. Milne Centre for Astrophysics, at the University of Hull. Brad completed his MSc and PhD at the University of British Columbia, building the world's first Liquid Mirror Telescope Observatory and designing software to map the distribution of the chemical elements throughout the Universe. Brad was responsible for using exploding stars to determine the expansion rate of the Universe, as part of the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project on the Extragalactic Distance Scale, for which the team was awarded the Gruber Prize in Cosmology. He was the first to identify the locations within the Milky Way most likely to harbour complex biological life, for which his work was named by National Geographic magazine as one of the top 10 news stories of the year.
Professor Gibson is a sought after speaker and has spoken at the Cheltenham Science Festival, the British Science Festival, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, opened for Brian Cox and Lucy Hawking at European AstroFest, and delivered a highly popular TED talk on the subject of the search for alien life.