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Doug Caldwell is a SETI Astronomer and the the Instrument Scientist for the Kepler Mission based at NASA Ames. Dr. Caldwell will give the status of the Kepler instrument and operation, a summary of exoplanet results of the Kepler Mission to date.

Kepler was launched in 2009 and is currently in an Earth trailing orbit. It detects exoplanets by looking for small but regular decreases in the brightness of stars.

Cosmological observations show that the universe is very uniform on the maximally large scale accessible to our telescopes, and the same laws of physics operate in all of its parts that we can see now.  The best theoretical explanation of the uniformity of our world was provided by inflationary theory, which was proposed 30 years ago.

While the prevalence of stellar multiplicity has been known for many decades, it is now becoming increasingly clear that planetary systems are also frequent around Main Sequence stars. This raises the natural question of the connection between stellar multiplicity and planet formation, a topic that was mostly ignored until the last few years. Does the presence of a stellar companion alter, prevent or promote the formation of planets? In which way?

A limiting factor for the survival of life in a changing environment is the intracellular production of reactive oxygen species. These can damage the building blocks of life (DNA, proteins, lipids) through oxidation. All organisms, including microbial extremophiles, have developed mechanisms to quench the reactivity of oxygen species or avoid their production. Not surprisingly, these same molecules are drivers for evolution.

At the present time, Mars is a dry and cold planet. Surface ice is unstable for more than one season outside the polar regions, and the atmosphere is so cold or so dry that the presence of liquid water, never detected, is unlikely anywhere on the surface.

It is often said that mathematics is a universal language that we could use to make contact with another intelligence. But is that really the case? Or is this just a disguised version of anthropocentrism?

Although they are relatively frequent as free-floating objects, brown dwarfs are scarcely found as companions to solar-type stars. The paucity of brown dwarfs in close-orbits first noticed by radial velocity surveys has led to the concept of the "brown dwarf desert".

One of major advances of string theory in recent years was an understanding that vacuum solutions with potentially viable four-dimensional cosmology come in a plethora of an incredibly large and rich 'landscape' of string theory vacua. The number of possible vacua and, in turn, types of Universes, may exceed 10 to the power 1000.

Common wisdom holds that, in order for a terrestrial planet to have life, it's helpful to have a Jupiter-like planet in the system to shield against inbound comets. How well does Jupiter do that really? Common wisdom held until recently that it would be an impossible for an icy object like Ceres to exist within the inner Solar System. From where did the ice come? Common wisdom held until recently that the Centaur asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects were dynamically distinct. Are they?