In this World Space Week podcast, Sam Leske, Hari Mogoșanu, and Michael Paolucci, founder and CEO of Slooh, explore the mission and evolution of Slooh—a platform that brings live celestial observation to students and enthusiasts around the world. Over the past 20 years, Slooh has constructed a global telescope network, enabling people of all ages to explore the night sky. The platform has expanded from space science to include Earth science, helping students access data from satellites to study geography, geology, and climate science, thereby fostering critical thinking and hands-on learning. Michael discusses the origins of Slooh, born from a desire to unite people under the shared wonder of the cosmos, and emphasizes the importance of students conducting their own explorations. Slooh’s curriculum and activities, available 24/7, transform the educational experience by allowing students to make their own observations, study real-time data, and engage in a community that spans continents. Through Slooh, Michael Paolucci has created not just a platform but a communal journey through space, inviting users to look beyond the divisions of daily life and rediscover our shared humanity under the stars.
Special thanks to Leah Shir for support with the podcast editing and to Rhian Sheehan for the music.
Transcript of the podcast was edited for clarity
Welcome to the World Space Week podcast, we are Hari Mogoșanu and Sam Leske and Michael Paolucci, founder and CEO of SLOOH.
[Michael Paolucci] For twenty years, SLOOH has built a global network of telescopes around the world and built a curriculum for K-12 and higher education, with a mission to connect students together in exploring the night sky. So it’s wonderful to be with World Space Week. I think our missions are fairly well aligned and love to talk to you today about all the things on your mind.
[Hari Mogoșanu] Slooh is amazing, we love it and have been using it for a few years now and we know that Slooh has kindly donated some accounts for World Space Week, so we were curious to bring this to the public and tell them what Slooh is about, how it started and what kind of work it does because it is a truly life-changing tool.
[Sam Leske] And it has an amazing story on, on how it started and, and we think that story’s so special. It would be it would be remiss if we if we didn’t cover it.
[Michael Paolucci] Well, wonderful. Thank you. Maybe I’ll start from the present day and work our way backward. So, you know, as it relates to World Space Week, which has a focus on on climate science, we are thrilled right now to also be announcing a new Earth science curriculum. So we are enabling students not only to explore space with online telescopes that we own and operate but now we are giving them access to satellites which are looking down on Earth and which enable geography, geology and environmental science inside schools. And I think this is just so important as it relates to climate science because, there’s just so much disinformation and politics has entered, the forum with respect to how to interpret what is happening to our planet. And it’s more important than ever that we teach students how to do their own primary investigations, how to see things for themselves, analyze, collect and then analyze the data and just come to their own conclusion about what’s happening. You can’t really trust third parties out in the media and then the political sphere to tell you what’s happening. And so developing these skills has always been, at the forefront of what we do.
We are not a simulation or an animation. It is always been about these instruments which are on top of mountains just like you all are right now. And they are in the Canary Islands at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, really one of the best observatories in the world, the largest observatory in Europe, the largest telescope in the world is up on that mountain. And we have made that that those incredible pristine skies available to students in the wider public.
In addition, we have telescopes in Santiago, Chile in partnership with the Catholic University and most recently we launched a new observatory in Australia. So over in your neck of the woods we are now offering 24 hour access to the night sky. And it’s amazing cause the students get to control the telescopes. They are actually logging into the system and making 5 minute and 10 minute reservations on the equipment.
And really, I think one of the foundational, sort of innovations of Slooh is figuring out how to scale this affordably so that everybody can do this thing and do it together. And so the way we’ve designed it, it’s a social mechanism. It’s actually one person in control, but everybody else gets access to the live feed, which is something that we, you know, patented and designed on our own. The live feed from a telescope comes in like a Polaroid, but also just that the data is open source within the community. And you might ask yourself, why doesn’t every telescope work this way? I mean, it seems like it should. And there’s a lot of reasons we can talk about later why it doesn’t. But within our ecosystem, the telescopes are open to the community, and so they’re all sharing the live feed.
And there’s this sense of of sort of togetherness and common exploration, which is curated to the point where we’ve kind of organized the night sky. Like our favorite book, the Burnham Celestial Handbook, we’ve taken the top 1000 things to see in space. We call them the Slooh 1000. We’ve curated a lot of content around those thousand objects. They’re the objects that are most interesting to see, the most studied, the most talked about, and legend and lore. And we present those in a way that the students still have to control the telescope, figure out how to get their own image of the thing, collect the data, study the data over time, and then complete these curriculum aligned learning activities, which are, you know, in the United States, they’re aligned with Next Generation Science standards. It goes beyond science to a complete STEAM curriculum. There are all kinds of art, literature, math, even computer science quests. So we’re really trying to touch on everything that can possibly be related to space so that teachers can involve it more on the curriculum. And so in doing this, we have built this wonderful community which goes all the way to New Zealand and back to Israel and up to Germany and, you know, down to South Africa and Chile. And everybody’s exploring together. And you have this wonderful sense that, you know, we are all Earthlings, you know, exploring space together.
I think part of our mission is that, you know, there’s not enough that connects us as human beings in our daily lives. Like we we wake up every day and, you know, we’re an American and, you know, we might be of a certain race or religious belief and and, you know, certain political point of view. And it, it seems like we’re just being pounded with reasons to that we are different and there’s not enough, just sort of mindshare around the concept of, Hey, I’m actually an Earthling also. And what can bring us together better than the context of, of space and, and looking out together from our our common Little Rock here and saying, Hey, I’m going to wake up today and just have like a little meditative moment of, zooming out and seeing what else is out there. And maybe my problems don’t seem as great. And maybe within that context, some of the world’s problems, you know, seem more manageable and or at least we can develop a common motivation to address them.
I always talk about, the sort of the hubris of mankind. And, we’re the biggest kid in the on the block here, You know, we, we sort of the master of our domain. But, once you kind of look out and you start thinking about what else is out there and this grand scale of things that honestly, we’ve only really understood in the last, 100 to 200 years to get a grasp on just what else is out there. It’s you know, it, I think it right sizes it. It’s actually kind of relieving to think like this. And in some ways then, it makes it all the more imperative that we protect our environment, be a good steward of of everything on this planet, of all the other species on this planet. And try to think of ourselves at this species level at some, at some point, again, to just sort of realize the grand scope of things.
And so that gets back to the original motivation for this. In 2001, I was living in New York City. I had, I had just come through a sort of a seven or eight-year process of building my first company. It was an Internet advertising network, really one of the first to put Internet. And honestly, we just wanted to make games and we were making games. And then it was like, wow, we got to figure out how to get these games paid for. And so the only way to do that then was was advertising. And so we sort of pioneered that internet advertising, almost reluctantly. And my company went public and I was all set up in New York and I was married, I had a daughter. And and then 911 happened and, we watched it on television. My best friend was working in Tower One, the World Trade Center.
His name was Blake Wallins.
He worked for Cantor Fitzgerald with his good friend Greg Richards, who they grew up going to camp together. And there they were on the 100th floor. And our world ended that day, at least it felt like it. I was 31 years old. And I just felt at that moment a little frustrated that I couldn’t do anything. I wasn’t going to go strap on a bazooka or, even in a sense there wasn’t an opportunity to go contribute and help down at Ground Zero. And so I took a step back and really just thought about what, what could I do to try to confront this worldview? And in a way, it’s like that all this negative energy just sort of washes over you, like all this dust and debris. And I don’t know, I kind of just in a way, like held my arms open to it and just let it, just let it come. Then we mourned my friend. And obviously as a nation, we were in mourning.
And the world was trying to figure out what this meant. And for me as an Internet entrepreneur, I came up with this concept of, hey, wouldn’t it be something if we could actually create like almost like a temple of light where people around the world could come together? And have this sort of enlightening moment of camaraderie and, and spirituality. I mean, I think everybody who looks up into space and is connected to the night sky feels some spiritual sense about it. It’s just so foundational with questions about God and what are we doing here and is there anybody else out there? And so that was the that was the pretence of just like, let’s just bring people together, like around the celestial campfire and goodwill will be created from it. And let’s see if we can get all of the kids of the world to like look up and feel this sense.
And, I feel 20 some odd years later, I mean, it’s been a tremendous struggle to build it and, and socialize it to the world, which we very much appreciate your support. And there’s so many good hearted people trying to help us bring bring everyone together. I’m, I’m really touched by the fact that we have students in Islamabad using this platform and loving it. And, getting connected to our students here in the United States, World Space Week is, is another opportunity to share this vision and this mission. And, we know we’re not alone in doing this. There’s so many people trying to promote a similar sense, but for us, it’s all about the hands on giving the kids the opportunity to see it for themselves and to connect with each other. And if we can achieve that, I feel like that’s, a life well spent and, we’re going to keep doing this for another 25 years, I’m sure.
And and that’ll be that’s my, that’s my big long statement about what this is all about.
[Sam Leske]: That’s awesome.
[Hari Mogoșanu] That’s awesome. Yeah. Well, Space Week is a world celebration of the benefits that space exploration brings us here on Earth. And you were saying that now Slooh has capabilities of looking down to Earth. And that couldn’t have been more timely because this year, the World Space Week’s themes, every year we choose a theme for the World Space Week. This year is Space and Climate Change.
[Sam Leske] And yeah, great to use assets at space that are looking down and collecting all of this data, tons and tons of it. And, and what a great initiative to have Slooh access that and get students to be able to look at that data, interrogate it, analyze it, understand how they can actually make use of it. It really gives them an, an amazing connection. It’s, and this is what I think is incredible about SLOOH is, you can connect with the universe and, and now with the the Earth science you’ll be able to connect back to the ground and see, see and observe and, and understand how things are changing here on Earth, which which is absolutely incredible.
[Michael Paolucci] Yeah, I think the spirit of SLOOH connects with the spirit of the World Space Week because in the world we all want to share this amazing treasure that we have, which is human life. And through science education and through understanding our place in the universe, only we can understand how lucky we are to be alive here on Earth.
[Hari Mogoșanu] And I think this is what World Space Week is essentially about. It is started long time ago after the Apollo missions when the astronauts returned to Earth, as a one week celebration of that week of the Apollo landing. And people in Houston came together and they really enjoyed it and they thought, wow, this was quite an amazing thing to do to hang around together. So the next year happened again and the next year happened again. And, after a while, the United Nations thought it would be a good idea to have this communion of people around the greatness of space and the world. And so this is how World Space Week basically was formed. And instead of having it in July when the original Apollo landings were happening, they said, OK, let’s have it from 4 to 10 of October, four of October marking the launch of the very first satellite Sputnik, and 10 of October marking the signing of the the Space Treaty. And it is a literally a world celebration because you see, if you go on the World Space Week website — and everybody can have a look at past events, it grew exponentially. So exactly like you were saying it, it grew and, and now it is a truly a celebration of the world. So I think SLOOH in that regard, it brings to us this capability, as you said, of looking together at the stars and, and learning about them in peace and instilling that curiosity. And I think one of my favourite things, because I’m a huge fan of SLOOH is that you can actually use SLOOH right here, for example, during daytime, you open the computer and you you choose something and you can see stuff on the other side of the earth where it’s nighttime.
[Sam Leske] It‘s just an incredible technology and incredible capability. And I mean, we went to a school in a place called Rotorua up here in New Zealand and we showed a couple of teachers, we flashed it up and we showed them this live picture of star cluster. And they’re like, oh, that’s a nice picture. We’re saying, no, this is live. This is, you’re seeing this as the telescope’s collecting it. And they were like, wow, really? Where’s that telescope? And so that’s the one in Canary Islands. It was like, wow. And to see that look on their face that that was incredible. And it’s the amazing thing with Slooh is how you’ve integrated it into the education curriculum. And one of one of the things I think would be worth talking about is how do you see education and astronomy and space science education sort of developing into the future?
[Michael Paolucci] Great. Well, there’s a lot I’d like to comment on there. You know, just this notion that the students are seeing [Slooh] live and it’s very much their own personal journey. And, I liken it to like seeing somebody else’s photo of the Eiffel Tower versus like going to Paris and taking your own photo of it. And, having this moment, hat captures your mind’s exploration and appreciation of something that becomes a keepsake and kind of triggers your memory of it. And that is so essential you can obviously go get these images anywhere, but it’s your image and your understanding all the factors that went into collecting that image is what makes the difference for people learning as opposed to just watching somebody else do it.
I’m also just want to comment on the, the preciousness of human life and this sense that, we’re we’re trying to get people excited about [Slooh]. And, it’s not a simulation. It’s real, but it’s obviously still through a computer. And, what’s really missing in our world is people going out in the dark to do this thing for themselves. Yeah. And, I think somehow society has gotten afraid of the dark in the last like couple of 100 years. I mean, electricity is just …I think we should blame Thomas Edison. But there’s just so much light everywhere. And obviously light pollution is this artificial bubble of sort of man made, blinders that keep us from seeing what’s out there. And you go to these incredible sites, like we love darkskies.org, the International Dark Sky Association and all of the efforts to protect places where people can go and be with each other outside. But I’ve done this a lot with people and it’s like, you got to coach everybody to turn off your phone. We don’t, our eyes are going to get used to the dark and we’re not going to get eaten by a wolf in like the next 3 minutes. So let’s, let’s enjoy this moment of peace. I’m a I’m a big sailor and I love offshore sailing. And the best thing about offshore sailing is just those night shifts when you go up in the middle of the night and there’s no Moon. And it’s kind of clear in terms of not too much wind. And the Milky Way is right there over your head and it’s reflecting off the ocean and it’s under you, it’s above you. And I mean, if you turn off every single light on board, which we do, and you get used to it, you are, you are just gliding through the universe and there’s that and you truly are. I mean, that’s exactly what’s happening. That’s exactly what it looks and feels like. And it’s just so great for the soul. And it just really brings out, it makes you feel more alive and connected to what we’re all doing here.
So I wish for all of us that we get to a point where, we can figure out how to dim these cities and people in these urban environments can really appreciate it. But then to answer your question, Sam, I think for us, the big step that we’ve just taken toward Earth science is going to help immensely because the reality is it’s been an uphill battle to get space science on the curriculum more. And the reality is it has been impractical for schools to teach the subject in a hands on way in the past. I mean, it’s just not practical to have a telescope. You know, you try to get the kids to come back at night. Oh boy, it turned out to be cloudy. I mean, nobody really wants to come back to school at night, not even the parents. So it just doesn’t scale. And so, here we’ve come with this, 24 hour-Network and you can do [astronomy] at all times. And these schools now have digital infrastructure.
So a big part of what we’re doing is integrating with our partners like Power School and making it seamless for the educator who’s already in and a learning management system too, click, click, click in terms of assignment and rostering and all this stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with the fun of astronomy and and Earth science, but is still necessary. And on top of that, now what is really helping is this incredible growth in the space economy. And so a few $100 billion according to Space Capital has been invested in the last 10 years in the new space economy. And you see it every day with rocket launches and things like the James Webb telescope just calling more attention to all the capabilities. And there are now like 10 times more satellites in space than there were 5 or 10 years ago. So it’s really accelerated. And all of that helps convince the school administrators that I know you didn’t do this in the past. Now you can do it, and now you should do it.
It’s an imperative because you’re preparing these students for these jobs just like we teach chemistry and biology because we’re laying the groundwork for them to find a career. This is the same thing going on in space and the fact that Earth science is now part of the curriculum for us. I mean, that is taught and Earth and space science are taught together. So we now have a complete solution that fits better into the school system. We have a great sort of argument for why they should be doing more space science. And I’m really excited that soon we’re going to announce a partnership with certain players in the aerospace industry to develop a certification program for workforce development. So it’s developing career pathways. I like to call it space IT or satellite IT, you know, But the idea is what is a satellite? It’s a computer in space.
And the best thing that’s coming in the space industry is that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work in it anymore. I mean, there are going to be tons of technical jobs to administer, maintain, monitor, understand the use cases of all of this technology in space. And it’s not just for the Einstein and the class, It’s for everybody to find their place in it. And I just think that is another factor that’s going to lead to more raising the consciousness among our society because everybody’s going to have a role in it instead of just a just an elite few. Well.
[Hari Mogoșanu] I want to comment two things to what you said.
One is that when, when you’re an urban kid, like you said, and you look at your computer screen and you open SLOOH and you see these amazing objects–and not just a kid, I think anybody who uses SLOOH would experience the same wonder. And you see these objects and you take a picture of them and then the picture comes in colour. And it’s this extraordinary process when you work with SLOOH that you have your own discovery. And you have these things called quests, where people go on a quest and they learn more and they learn science and there are questions and answers and the teachers can supervise the students and so on. So then you, you almost like creating a demand of, of curiosity and of wonder. And people would be like, OK, these things are actually really close. All we have to do is turn the switch off and see the sky and, and perhaps they will be motivated to see the night sky as beautiful as really is.
So that’s, that’s on one side and on on the other side you’ve got the all the people who are actually, they do live in a dark sky reserve. Like we live in a dark sky reserve here in Wairarapa in New Zealand and we have this night sky and it’s pretty amazing, but you want to learn more about it. And so there are so many resources as the world has too much staff. And the one complaint that we have from, from the teachers is they don’t know where to look first and where to start. But SLOOH makes things so easy. And you just go there, you just open it and take it. And it takes you through a process because it’s very important for anything you learn from from primary school to university, it’s important to have a process to take you through this teaching structure, and to learn. So, so that’s very, very amazing about Slooh. So that’s one thing.
But the other thing I wanted to comment is I, and I think I think all of us will agree with this. I find it really strange that kids are actually curious about dinosaurs and space, yet we teach these things traditionally only at university level.
[Sam Leske] Yeah, we’ve struggled, certainly in New Zealand, we we’ve struggled to keep space in the curriculum. And every opportunity that the curriculum changes, someone wants to take it out. Yet we’ve got this aerospace industry that’s growing at a phenomenal rate. You know, for a country that’s basically relies on farming, we’re finally doing something a little bit different, launching rockets and building satellites and and this sort of thing. And you can’t help but notice this because you know when a rocket gets launched from New Zealand, that makes the news everywhere. So the kids are seeing this. They’re seeing this enormous number of satellites whizzing over the night sky after the sunsets. They’re seeing these lights, they’re seeing these Starling trains.
They’re seeing the satellite pictures. They know it’s there and they’re curious about it. And they’re going, how can I get a cool job like that? And, and Slooh offers their opportunity that they can see and, and get a really good understanding of what they’ve vocational part. And it’s really exciting actually what you were talking about before, because that’s going to really, really help the students see that these you can do this stuff, you can get into this, into this work. And these are the kind of steps you need to do.
[Michael Paolucci] Brilliant. Yeah, I, I think those are great points. And it’s it’s a mystery to us too, in a sense, or at least it started as a mystery. You know, when we first built this mechanism, I thought, wow, everybody’s going to come running and do it. And then we realized, wow, there’s really not that many people who know enough about this to appreciate it. And so that’s when we started to build it into a learning platform and actually take them through step by step how to train their minds eye to see these things and, and be dazzled by them. And, I like to compare space to a vast wilderness. And SLOOH is like a National Park. You know, it’s got a gate and it’s got some trails and some guides and we’re kind of helping you find your way and eventually you can go off in the backcountry and do your own thing. But we’re trying to make it feel very approachable. But then there is this thing within the school systems as we develop the learning platform. And we certainly have plenty of support from parties like the National Science Foundation that want to see these things happen. And then you run into this sort of buzz saw of or this, you know, sort of buzzkill of wow, they don’t yet appreciate it inside the school system. And how can that be? Because it’s like the most dazzling thing for kids. And as best I can guess, at least as an American, you tend to see everything through the lens of money.
And where there is no commercial opportunity, there is no attention to it. And this exists in the in the media world with respect to just, people being interested in the subject. It’s hard to get. And we live in this attention economy. And the attention is mostly driven by who is going to make some money on getting your attention. And the same has been true even in the school system. I mean, they’re trying to teach you things that are going to lead to you having a job. And I think space and astronomy was a little, it’s like a little hippie dippie, you know, it’s, it’s like, you know, the Grateful Dad and, and tie dye and you know, and if you go to these astronomy conferences, you kind of get a sense of these are people who don’t have any use of money. They really don’t care for it. They’ve found the things that they love to do in life are really not very expensive. It’s like going out into the night sky.
So I do think the commercialization of space, and I hate to say it ’cause I, I sort of watched this happen with the Internet and the 90s and I was a party to it when, it started as this academic network and then along comes a lot of players to commercialize it and it really tainted the information. I mean, let’s face it, you know, even Google puts out or, or ends up fostering a lot of information pollution because of the the way the economic machinery works. It’s very hard to go find something on the Internet these days that doesn’t first have you surfing through 19 different links of somebody trying to sell you something, whether that’s obvious or not. And I think part of my own personal mission in building Slooh was to try to go back to like that original, sort of idealistic notion of a network of information and create an environment that’s pure. And you can just log in and, and within these walls, there’s no advertising, there’s nothing commercial about it.
We don’t let anybody try to sell anything, even if it’s astronomy stuff. I mean, it’s just not done, as you guys know, within the community. You just don’t see it happen. And it’s all because of just trying to get us back to, you know, these little pockets of places anyway that can be trusted. But then, as you say too, there is just so much stuff out there, like there’s a lot of noise, well meaning people with a lot of different things that are, astronomy or space or whatever. And they’re free. But in my opinion, they don’t necessarily get people learning, moving through the steps of learning. And I think that’s so essential. They have to do it themselves. So, you know, we’re just on this quest, to keep promoting this as a standard, make it free where necessary. I mean, we need money to pay for it. But if there are situations where people can’t pay for it, we are giving it away through our grant@Slooh.org.
And we encourage people to go to that and apply if you, if you’re in a title one school in the United States or the equivalents around the world. But either way, we’ve gotten the price down to only a few dollars per student per year. So I really feel like it fits within the school budget for them to be able to afford it for every student. And that’s really what the mission has been, just to make sure it can be ubiquitous.
[Hari Mogoșanu] You talked about this throwing information at students and people just going in basically fishing anything they can find. And as we said before, this is a really great feature of SLOOH, the fact that it’s peer reviewed, it’s got an army of specialists behind it and it’s got a structure. And and I was wondering if you can tell us just a little bit about who are those people who put the SLOOH resources together?
[Michael Paolucci] Yes, thank you. It’s very much a team effort. We have one of my partners in this business is based in the UK, Paul Cox. He’s he’s a very public figure for us. He does a a ton of outreach with our star parties, which are the ways that we’ve give have given free programming for the last 15 years. We really pioneered the idea of a live telescope feed and video turned into video out on YouTube. And then we’re talking heads, Paul, and experts from NASA and others communicating about the wonder. And that really is then the way to draw people into this platform. And then once they sort of hear about it, then they come in and they want to do these Quest learning activities. And those have been developed by our director of curriculum, Doctor John Boisvert, who is an astronomer, as well as Kelly Rizk, who is a director of learning design and experience. So she has a background, 20 years in the field working for companies like SAVAS and Pearson Developing Curriculum. And so it’s really all at that level about trying to understand the 5th grade mind and the 8th grade mind and making sure that everything is designed with the right amount of scaffolding to lead them through the experience. We have a very small engineering team. It you, you wouldn’t believe how small it is, I won’t tell you, but we have two guys who who really have been involved for a long time building layer upon layer of, of systems that, connect these instruments. And then we developed our own quest authoring tools so we can build the curriculum and integrate with the data feeds from the telescope. It’s really so important that it’s structured data.
I mean, you can’t do the assignment unless you actually get the information from our telescope. You can’t just go get an image off Google or ask AI to do your homework for you. Like you actually have to do the exploration. And we had to build all that ourselves because it’s not easy to just plug in a third party, assessment mechanism, for example, into a proprietary system like that. So those are some of the people, Todd Reisel and and Ed Kalin are our technical team. And that’s really the core group that have like just Slooh built layers on this with a bunch of contractors helping.
And then also the community. I mean, it’s really fundamental to this platform. First, the amateur astronomy community that sort of suffered with us through, let’s call it like a 10 year beta of, you know, getting this equipment to work and then this incredible community of educators. In fact, one of my favorite is Cameron McEwing from New Zealand. Cameron has probably introduced us. I mean, I love Cameron. Cameron, not only does he put out some of the very best content on Slooh himself, which inspires a lot of the learning activities we develop. Because when somebody shows you, like, the blinking eye of the Gorgon, you know, and then you look it up in Burnham Celestial Handbook and read about the legend, it’s like just the stories already built and then you make a quest for it. And so, yeah, if you’re thinking about Slooh as a National Park, I mean, Cameron is one of our Trail Blazers. And he just knocks down, you know, some exploration paths. And then we, you know, put up some signs and say, hey, kids, follow Cameron, you know, into the Bush here, and you’re going to have an incredible, you know, journey of the mind.
So it’s people like that who’ve just given us tons of feedback and been involved in making sure the curriculum addresses their needs and understanding the students reaction to it all. And then really it’s all about sharing their work. I mean, we want to get Slooh’s homepage. You know, this is our secret aspiration. You’ll see it starting to emerge where we are now announcing the Gravity Awards, which you know, we’ve been doing this last year, but we didn’t have a name for it, where we’re trying to showcase student work and tell the story of the night sky through the eyes of the students. And now we have the Gravity Awards, which of course, as you know, Gravity points is the currency on Slooh. You earn gravity points and badges for learning and for sharing what you’ve learned with other people. And now we have the Gravity Awards where every couple of weeks we’re going to celebrate the best student work and feature it in these videos.
But we are working to make Sloohs public sort of exposed homepage, the view of the night sky through the eyes of students. And that is just all their content showing everybody what’s going on in the night sky and then involving the parents and everybody in their school community. And this, this contents all meant to be available for free and be part of this Gravity Awards competition. Because of course, if you’re a student and you publish something cool and then you get a bunch of people in your community to like it, you get more Gravity points. And then we’re going to have this plays into our whole industry certification and workforce development program. And so it’s just exciting if we can get to this point where everybody’s just seeing the night sky through the eyes of students and it’s widely available.
[Sam Leske] That sounds really amazing.
So we’ve just about run out of time.
[Hari Mogoșanu] But we have a question that we actually are asking every time we we have a talk about World Space Week, because this is very important. World Space Week is about what’s going to happen in the future and everything that comes from Space Research. And the question is, what is the future of humankind?
[Michael Paolucci] Well, well, you know, it’s funny, I’m just coming off reading the three body problem trilogy, which is an incredible series of books if you like sci-fi. It’s also, I think on Netflix as a as a mini series. And he certainly does a pretty thorough job of showing you an idea of humankind, you know, a few million years into the future. I’m also a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos. I got the privilege of sailing to the Galapagos couple of years ago and reading that book. And it is also projected far into the future. And humans have devolved into Penguins. And, part of his whole message is that, you know, our big brains, we are overthinking everything and our big brains might, lead to, you know, evolutionary calamity. If we path wrong, we’re so smart, but we’re using our big brain to dominate everything and and somebody’s destroying a lot of things. So I’m an optimist. I mean, I certainly believe human beings are going to evolve off this planet. And I believe in the power of technology, for sure. My father was an aerospace engineer and sort of instilled in me this idea that as flight came of age during his time, that the world will progress with technology. I don’t think we’re going to destroy each other. I do think when evil things happen like 911, there are more good people who push back and the world moves forward. And I’m thrilled to be a part of that. I’m excited to have my children be tuned into it. My oldest daughter actually works at SLOOH and she is thrilled to be a part of this, driving our education partnerships out of New York and getting the students in New York City schools involved where she taught for a time. So let’s let us, Sam, Hari and all the people involved in World Space Week come together and evolve together in peace and maybe not always peaceful, but with an aspiration for peace. And I think we will be OK in the long run.
[Hari Mogoşanu] That’s fantastic.
So I just want to end by reading a passage from the book Burnham’s Celestial book, because I I was rereading this tonight and it just so made me think of Slooh and this is this is where where it is, this is how it goes.
“We are beginning a journey. It will be a journey both strange and wonderful. In our tour of the universe, we shall travel the vast empty pathways of limitless space and explore the uncharted wilderness and creation. Here in the dark unknown, in men’s city of the heavens, we shall meet with glorious beyond description and witness scenes of inexpressible splendor in the great black gulfs of space. And in the realm of this inhumourable stars we shall find mysteries and wonders and dreamed of. And when we return to Earth, we shall try to remember something of what we have learned about the incredible universe which is our home.”
[Michael Paolucci] Beautiful.
[Hari Mogoşanu] Thank you so much, Michael, for this wonderful, wonderful evening slash night slash day across the across the universe, across the world. And we wish you a very happy World Space Week.
[Michael Paolucci] And you too.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai and edited for clarity
THE WORLD SPACE WEEK ASSOCIATION PODCAST SERIES
A series of conversations with visionary thinkers and doers, sharing their unique insights and aspirations for the future of humanity beyond Earth — made possible with the support of the World Space Week Association.
World Space Week Association Podcasting Team
Host and producer: Haritina Mogoșanu, Co-host: Samuel Leske, Milky-Way.Kiwi
Special thanks to
– Milky-Way.Kiwi and New Zealand Astrobiology Network for the recording equipment and time.
– Rhian Sheehan for his song “An afternoon on the Moon”
The podcasts have been produced for the global World Space Week network.
Think big, start small!
Our podcast series engages the public with cutting-edge advancements in space exploration by connecting with global thought leaders who are shaping the future of their space environment. Every space endeavor begins as a dream, and no matter who or where you are, pursuing that dream can make it a reality. In these episodes, we dive into goal setting and uncover sources of inspiration, tapping into the collective wisdom of pioneers to chart the course toward a future as a spacefaring civilisation.