Video: The Colossus telescope and the search for exoplanets with advanced tech civilizations

This SETI Institute talk combines two amazing developments of our day – the discovery of exoplanets and the development of giant telescopes. Jeff Kuhn of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii gives an excellent presentation (suitable for a wide audience) about The Colossus Project: Designing an optical/IR instrument to detect life outside the solar system:

This talk describes an effort to detect life, and even conduct a planetary census, in our cosmic neighborhood. I’ll describe some results from the Colossus group, an interdisciplinary science and engineering team, working to show how telescopes much larger than the TMT or EELT could be built today by relaxing some of the astronomical requirements of current “world’s largest telescope” projects.