February 23, 2026
Location Zoom Webinar
Spacefiction is dependent on interstellar travel, and could not exist without it. But if you carefully apply the laws of physics to the problem of interstellar travel, time and speed both present catastrophic obstacles. With time comes the inconvenient phenomena of gamma ray bursts from the birth of black holes, while with speed comes the lethality of dilute gas in interstellar space. We are trapped in a bubble bounded by roughly the size of the Oort Cloud. This does not mean that we cannot know our extraterrestrial cousins but visiting is impossible.
David Blair is a gravitational wave physicist who spent more than 4 decades developing methods for the detection of gravitational waves. In 1984 he invented the sapphire clock. During the 1990s he built the Gingin gravitational wave research centre and developed techniques for preventing instability in the very high optical power instruments needed for detecting gravitational waves detectors. He led a team of 20 physicists who participated in the discovery of gravitational waves in 2015. He is a founding member of the OzGrav Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery.
Please submit your questions for discussion during the webinar to [email protected] with the subject ‘Thinking Beyond- Interstellar’
Questions can also be submitted during the webinar through the zoom Q&A.