The excursion for the Kavli-IAU symposium will be to Housesteads Roman Fort – Hadrian’s Wall on Thursday, April 18, 2024, 1 – 5 pm. In addition to the tour of the Fort and the exploration of the Visitor Centre, there will be the possibility to walk along the Wall to Milecastle 37 and Knag Burn Gateway.
The afternoon of Thursday, April 18, 2024, will be free and dedicated to the visit of the nearby Hadrian’s Wall. This very long stone wall of 73 miles, which ran the entire length of the Britannia island in the north, was built by the Romans in their despair to keep the Scots out after all endeavours to succumb them turned out to be futile. Hadrian’s Wall was the north-west frontier of the Roman empire for nearly 300 years after it was built in AD 122 on the orders of emperor Hadrian following his visit to Britain. One of the intriguing characteristics of enclosures and fortifications is their physical manifestations of analogies to invisible cross-cultural relationships between science and society. The Great Filter, for example, is one conceivable answer to the Fermi conundrum. It proposes that a specific barrier to development exists in the evolution of life, from the earliest stages of abiogenesis to the highest degrees of development on the Kardashev scale, making detectable extraterrestrial life extremely rare.
