The discovery of countless exoplanets and new ideas in propulsion physics have resurrected international interest in the ancient concept of humanity traveling far beyond Earth. Such voyages will take place over many generations, requiring careful attention to both biological and cultural change over time. In this talk I will outline the foundations of a biocultural science of long-term space settlement.
Gravity in 1+1 dimension is classically trivial but, as shown by A. Polyakov in 1981, it is a non-trivial quantum theory, in fact a conformal field theory (the Liouville theory), and also a string theory. In the last decades many important results and connexions with various areas of mathematics and theoretical physics have been established, but some important issues remain to be understood. In this colloquium I shall focus on some recent developments and new questions on the relation between discrete and continuous 2 dimensional gravity, probabilities and stochastic processes, random fractal geometries and SLE curves.
