Paul Davies Discusses A One-Way Manned Mission To Mars

Paul Davies to Discuss 'One-Way Mission to Mars' at Dallas Convention

Professor Paul Davies will give a plenary address to the opening session of the 14^th Annual International Mars Society Convention, which will be held on August 4th-7th at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Dallas, Texas.

A prominent spokesman for the concept of a one-way mission to Mars, Prof. Davies is a world renowned physicist, writer and broadcaster. Originally from London, Davies is currently the Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and Co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative at Arizona State University.

Previously Prof. Davies held academic appointments at the Universities of Cambridge, London and Newcastle upon Tyne in the United Kingdom, before moving to Australia in 1990, initially as Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Adelaide.  Later he helped found the Australian Center for Astrobiology in Sydney.

Davies’s research interests are in the fields of cosmology, quantum field theory and astrobiology.  In 2005 he took up the chair of the SETI Post-Detection Science and Technology Task group of the International Academy of Astronautics.  Davies’s inquiries have included theoretical physics, cosmology and astrobiology; his research has been mainly in the area of quantum field theory in curved space-time, with which he has offered explanations for how black holes can radiate energy and what causes the ripples in the cosmic afterglow of the Big Bang.

Davies’s notable contributions include the Fulling-Davies-Unruh effect which theorizes that an observer accelerating through empty space will observe black-body radiation where an inertial observer would observe none, and the Bunch-Davies vacuum state, often used as the basis for explaining the fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation left over from the big bang. A paper co-authored with Stephen Fulling and William Unruh was the first to suggest that black holes evaporating via the Hawking effect lose mass as a result of a flux of negative energy streaming into the hole from the surrounding space. Davies has had a longstanding association with the problem of time’s arrow, and was also a forerunner of the theory that life on Earth may have come from Mars cocooned in rocks ejected by asteroid and comet impacts.

Paul Davies is the author of many bestselling books including:

• 1974 The Physics of Time Asymmetry,
• 1978 The Runaway Universe
• 1979 Stardoom
• 1980 Other Worlds,
• 1981 The Edge of Infinity,
• 1982 The Accidental Universe
• 1982 Quantum Fields in Curved Space (with N.D. Birrell),
• 1983 God and the New Physics
• 1984 Superforce,
• 1986 The Ghost in the Atom,
• 1987 The Cosmic Blueprint,
• 1988 Superstrings: A Theory of Everything
• 1991 The Matter Myth,
• 1992 The Mind of God,
• 1994 The Last Three Minutes
• 1995 Are We Alone?
• 1995 About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution,
• 1998 The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
• 2002 How to Build a Time Machine
• 2007 The Goldilocks Enigma,
• 2008 Quantum Aspects of Life (Eds. Derek Abbott, Paul C. W. Davies, and Arun K. Pati, with foreword by Sir Roger Penrose),
• 2010 The Eerie Silence,
• 2010 Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics.

In addition to giving a plenary talk at the Mars Society convention’s opening session of August 4^th, Prof. Davies will also participate in a special panel discussion on the topic of a possible one-way mission to Mars.