On November 16th, I was lucky enough to attend the TEDxCUNY conference at the Macaulay building. This conference was sponsored and run by Macaulay and the theme was pertaining to the idea of Access, since CUNY is one of, if not the most, accessible platform of higher education and learning. One of the speakers at the event was Charles Liu, an astrophysics professor at The College of Staten Island and an associate at the Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium. In his talk titled Accessing the Cosmos, Liu discussed our relation to our planet and everything beyond in fittingly, an extremely accessible and profound way.

Liu sat with a young girl named Kate for a short question-and-answer about our relationship with space. Before they started, he discussed the necessity of making mistakes in science, that it doesn’t diminish failure. He cracked a few jokes and remained charismatic, allowing for a topic as daunting as space to become more relatable to an average student like me. This was something I really appreciated– I felt a true sense of balance in this talk, like I felt relevant as a listener. As far as my knowledge on astrophysics, I definitely fall somewhere in the middle of Kate and Professor Liu, so the balance between a discussion with a child and an expert was not only refreshing but also informative in the simplest possible way. One thing I learned from this talk before Kate asked any questions was that there are masses of astronomer data that are just free to download, which I thought was really interesting. I’ve been trying to look at more visuals of space as a result and that has inspired me in my most recent artwork, which isn’t totally finished yet:

One of the questions Kate asked that really happened to peak my interest was so simple- “Why can we only live on Earth?” To this Liu responded that we simply choose just to live on Earth because of convenience, but that we could potentially live somewhere else if we could reproduce Earth’s conditions (since we’ve adapted to them). Liu elaborated, mentioning that he believed that we can and will populate somewhere else eventually, harking back to his original idea– that we are part of the universe and the universe is part of us.

I found Professor Liu’s talk to be extremely relevant on a much grander scale than the specific topic of astrophysics. He was extremely insightful and exciting to listen to, and I feel that he made his discussion more accessible by first connecting us to ourselves and then to the world around us. This talk among the other talks and events at TEDxCUNY 2014 just make me that much more excited for next year!