There is a desire for other worlds, living beings that inhabit different places in the universe, the “aliens” that literature and cinema, between ET and Star Wars, to name just the two most popular, have imagined in countless ways. Poignant, just between us, Eugenio Finardi and his «Extraterrestrial», in which the author asks the alien to take him away with him. Dream or omen? A decade ago now, the then director of the Vatican Observatory, Father Funes, explained in the Osservatore Romano that, based on astrobiology studies, it is possible that we also have “extraterrestrial brothers” created by God.
Tomorrow evening, November 14th, at nine o’clock, ufology will be at the center of a meeting at the Ulrico Hoepli Civic Planetarium in the Palestro Gardens, on the occasion of “University Thursdays”, evenings designed especially for students who want to delve deeper into scientific topics: yes, the The theme of the evening is the search for extraterrestrial life.
It was November 16, 1974, fifty years ago, when the Arecibo radio telescope, then the largest in the world, “wrote” a radio message and sent it wandering into space, to search for a relationship with possible alien civilizations. Taking advantage of the anniversary, we will retrace human attempts at interstellar communication, continued over the years not only in science fiction novels, but also in a more concrete way, such as the “toast for extraterrestrials” of 1983.
The question at the center of the meeting is whether this search for the alien has a real chance of success. The evening will be curated by Davide Cenadelli, from the Astronomical Observatory of the Autonomous Region of Valle d’Aosta, a graduate in Physics and with a PhD from the University of Milan.
At the Aosta Valley Observatory he deals with the search for extrasolar planets and stellar photometry and spectroscopy, as well as the history and philosophy of science, in particular the historical-scientific development of stellar astrophysics in the 20th century and teaching and dissemination for schools and the public .