The Multimedia Lectures

AVATAR
A Journey Into the Science Behind the Fiction and Our Future

As a Titanic-exploring forensic archaeologist, author of 20 books (including Time Gate which became “Jurassic Park”), co-author of the ”Europa Theory,“ and co-designer of the Valkyrie interstellar rocket, Dr. Charles Pellegrino has served as a scientific consultant to engineer/explorer/film-maker James Cameron for twelve years on Imax 3-D films (ranging from expeditions with Cameron to the Titanic and the mid-Atlantic hydrothermal vents), Titanic and his most recent instant classic Avatar.

During more than a decade of joint space-flight consulting, deep-ocean exploration, and filming with James Cameron, Pellegrino has come to regard the hyper-active film-maker as a modern day da Vinci who combines art with an ability to quickly educate himself to Ph.D levels in multiple areas of science and engineering. As it turns out, much of the technology that went into filming the science fiction movie Avatar was itself science fiction only a few years ago, until Cameron and his team invented it, and patented it (consider the 3-D-ready t.v. screens now coming into your living room).

During the filming of Avatar, Pellegrino was one of the advisors James Cameron assembled from several scientific and engineering disciplines — ranging from rocketry to paleontology and botany — as he directed Hollywood's most unusual brainstorming sessions — aimed at making his fictional world near Alpha Centauri A into a planet that, though fantastic, could live and breathe in the real universe, “To such extent,” Pellegrino observed, “that we begin to think of planet Pandora as a major character in her own right.” Avatar, like the rest of Cameron's films, is a story about the promise that lies within technological advance — and it's also a warning.

Dr. Pellegrino's multimedia lecture takes you into the scientific brainstorming sessions and challenges faced during the production of the film, as well as into the technology developed for making “Avatar.” Pellegrino then looks beyond working with the most unusual film-maker of our (or any other) time, toward the amazing future that he and Cameron hope awaits humanity on the frontiers of energy, bio-computational genetics, and the bridging of interstellar space — if we are wise, and if we pay attention, and if we know how to survive as a civilization.

THE LAST TRAIN FROM HIROSHIMA
The Survivors Look Back

“This book somehow combines intense forensic detail — some of it new to history — with unfathomable heartbreak. Pellegrino unflinchingly chronicles these most devastating of events, the only times nuclear weapons have been used against human beings, and begs us to hold hands and pray that it never happens again. A must read for anyone with a conscience.”

James Cameron

As the 21^st century opened with a new move toward an era of nuclear proliferation, Pellegrino began a study of forensic archaeology in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ever-mindful of the fact that the more powerful Nagasaki bomb represented the approximate destructive power of the new bombs.

In his most recent book The Last Train from Hiroshima (Henry Holt, January 2010), Pellegrino bridges the two cities via the thirty people who fled Hiroshima by train to Nagasaki and who survived the atomic bomb a second time. One of them, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, is the only person who experienced the full effects of the blast at Ground Zero both times. The second time, the blast effects were diverted around the stairwell of the building in which he had been standing, placing him and the small group of people with him in a shock cocooned room as the entire office building disappeared around them.

Drawing upon his relationship with atomic bomb survivors and combining their voices with the new science of forensic archaeology, Pellegrino explores details behind the strange physics of atomic death, including the fates of the people whose shadows were imprinted on walls, and the discovery that, for one small part of a second, each city became a microwave oven.

Beneath the surface, the meaning of the title is that if we are not very careful, we are on that train, right now. Pellegrino's lecture brings into clear focus the risk we all face in the age of Nuclear proliferation.

“Using a combination of firsthand accounts of Japanese A-bomb survivors, American aviators, and classified documents of government officials, Pellegrino reconstructs two horrifying days and their aftermath when the age of atomic warfare was introduced over Japan… The stories of the few Japanese survivors, including a group of 30 civilians fleeing from Hiroshima to Nagasaki where they arrived to endure the second bomb, are heart-stopping. Pellegrino dissects the complex political and military strategies that went into the atomic detonations and the untold suffering heaped on countless Japanese civilians, weaving all of the book's many elements into a wise, informed protest against any further use of these terrible weapons.“

Publisher's Weekly (a starred review)

STRANGE ENCOUNTERS
The Biology and Archaeology of the Titanic

Even after a century, many facts about what really happened to the Titanic and in what sequence remain a mystery, as potent and perplexing as ever. Recent robotic exploration and laboratory investigation, carefully cross-referenced with a new look at old testimony and correspondence, have allowed the mystery to be peeled back with the precision of an archaeological dig, to reveal such insights as a tragic mathematics by which only twelve square feet of damage to the hull were multiplied by the opening of portholes and a critical gangway door. (Surviving Second Officer Charles Lightoller testified that he did not believe opening a hull door in the bow section of a ship that was sinking by the bow was a bad idea because he believed the Titanic to be unsinkable; and so he sank her faster.)

The wildlife in and around the Titanic has turned out to be as fascinating as the ship itself. The fish and invertebrates inside are completely different from the ones seen outside. Perhaps strangest of all are the rusticles, stalactite-shaped formations covering the hull and interior. They have turned out to be not merely rust but a complex consortium of microbes with an interconnected circulatory system. It is not proper to call them, “them.” They are an “it.” They're all one organism. The 400-foot-long bow section of the Titanic is becoming one of the largest living things on Earth.

The lecture and discussion are supplemented with video from Pellegrino's dives to the Titanic, including a large and startlingly bright bioluminescent animal, sometimes called “Charlie's U.S.O.”p>

ABOUT DR. CHARLES PELLEGRINO

Dr. Pellegrino wears many hats. He has been known to work simultaneously in crustaceology, paleontology, and advanced rocket design. Even while descending in submersibles to the decks of the Titanic, he was typically studying — all at once — forensic archaeology, microbiology, history, and the zooplankton crisis. Along the way, he has occasionally produced award-winning paintings. He has authored twenty books, many of which have become featured documentaries and the scientific bases for Hollywood films. These include Time Gate (which introduced the “dinosaur cloning recipe” that became Jurassic Park), Her Name, Titanic (James Cameron's Titanic), Ghosts of the Titanic (James Cameron's Ghosts of the Abyss), Darwin's Universe (James Cameron's Aliens of the Deep), Unearthing Atlantis (History Channel's Exodus Decoded), Ghosts of Vesuvius (History Channel's “American Vesuvius”), Return to Sodom and Gomorrah (National Geographic's Lost Cities of the Bible), and most recently, The Last Train from Hiroshima (January 2010, Henry Holt, optioned by Lightstorm Entertainment).

An advocate for space exploration, while working at Brookhaven National Laboratory brainstorming sessions on the Valkyrie nuclear propulsion system and a single stage Mars lander during the 1980s, he joined Senator Spark Matsunaga's U.S.-Russian Space Cooperation Initiative — which lives on as the joint Keldysh-Mir expeditions and the International Space Station. Senator Matsunaga's hope was that by learning to survive together in the cold and the dark (in the deep ocean and in space), adversaries might discover their common humanity, and reduce the likelihood that nuclear weapons would ever be used again.

His writing has received widespread praise: “Agree or disagree as you will, hours spent [reading Pellegrino] are like a visit with a brilliant conversationalist in whose company you may be provoked but never bored” — The Los Angeles Times; “Charles Pellegrino has raised the Titanic — at least in my imagination” — Stephen King on Ghosts of the Titanic. “A stunning and magical alchemy of science, philosophy, Bible Study, and brilliantly detailed on-the-scene reporting… This is a book to be savored, reread, and passed along to future generations.” Publishers Weekly (starred review, Ghosts of Vesuvius).