Professor Ross Taylor to Deliver First David Cooper Memorial Lecture

The Mars Society Australia is delighted to announce Professor Ross Taylor will deliver the first David Cooper Memorial Lecture on 14th September.  His lecture will be titled 'Are We Alone?'.  This event will be held at the Woden Southern Cross Club at 7pm, and will open the 12th Australian Mars Exploration Conference (AMEC2012) to be held over the weekend of 14th-16th September.  Entry will be $5. Download a lecture flyer.

The David Cooper Memorial Lecture series has been established in memory of David Cooper, co-founder and President of the Mars Society Australia, who sadly passed away in July of this year.

Presentation Summary - Is There Anyone Out There?

Now that thousands of planets outside our solar system have been discovered, it is often supposed that there must be other inhabited worlds out there whose inhabitants are much more advanced than we are. This  question has been around for at least 2500 years. Are we now closer to an answer?

How and why are planets different from stars? How are planets made?

What do other planets look like? How do they compare with the solar system?

In our solar system we have two very different Earth-mass planets, Earth and Venus so making Earth-like planets seems difficult

Searchers seeking extra-terrestrial Intelligence understand the ‘tyranny of distance’ well enough but seem less aware of the ‘tyranny of time’. The window of time on the ETI planet has to correspond exactly with ours. Biological evolution as well as planetary development has to coincide. A trivial few hundred years either way would ruin the chances of communicating.

This lecture will explore some of these ideas.

Speaker Profile

Ross Taylor grew up on a farm near Ashburton, New Zealand and took degrees in chemistry and geology at  Canterbury University College of the University of New Zealand before completing a Ph. D. in geochemistry at Indiana University with Brian Mason. He was a tenured staff member at the Universities of Oxford and Cape Town before moving to the Research School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University

He has worked on the composition and evolution of the Moon, the continental crust, tektites and impact glasses, island arc rocks and many other topics involving trace element geochemistry. Ross Taylor was involved in the study of lunar samples from the first sample return in 1969, when he was a member of the Preliminary Examination Team at NASA JSC, Houston, Texas and carried out the first analysis of the first lunar sample returned to Earth .  He was chosen for this task because he was the co-author on the definitive text of Spectrochemical Analysis, the technique chosen to carry out the first analysis

Subsequently as a NASA Principal Investigator for 20 years, he worked on models for lunar composition, evolution and origin.

 He has published 240 papers in scientific journals and nine books, includingSolar System Evolution: A New Perspective, Destiny or Chance, The Continental Crust  (with Scott McLennan), Planetary Science: A Lunar Perspective, Lunar Science: A Post-Apollo View  andPlanetary Crusts  (with Scott McLennan).

Destiny or Chance Revisited that discusses planets outside our solar system will be published in September by Cambridge University Press.

 He has been awarded the Goldschmidt Medal of the Geochemical Society, the Leonard Medal of the Meteoritical Society, the Shoemaker Award of the NASA Lunar Science Institute, the Bucher Medal and the Bowen Award of the American Geophysical Union and the Gilbert Award of the Geological Society of America.

Asteroid 5670 is named Rosstaylor.

He is a Foreign Member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, holds Honorary Fellowships of the Royal Society of New Zealand, the Geological Society (London) and  the Geological Society of India. He is a former President of the Meteoritical Society. He is a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC)

  .

Read a full interview with Professor Taylor here.