Barry Ptolemy City on August 3, 2011. Ptolemy has been quoted as saying he assembled this panel to "start a grand discussion about the future." Barry Ptolemy Robert Barry Ptolemy (born 1969) is an American film director, producer and writer. Ptolemy directed "Transcendent Man" (2009) a documentary film about futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil. Ptolemy was born in Los Angeles, California. His father introduced him to computers at an early age, giving him a lifelong interest in technology. At the age of 12, Ptolemy worked with Steven Spielberg on the set of "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" (1982) as an animal wrangler. Inspired by
Egyptian astronomy in fixing the dates of religious festivals and determining the hours of night, and temple astrologers were especially adept at watching the stars and observing the conjunctions and risings of the Sun, Moon, and planets, as well as the lunar phases. In Ptolemaic Egypt, the Egyptian tradition merged with Greek astronomy and Babylonian astronomy, with the city of Alexandria in Lower Egypt becoming the centre of scientific activity across the Hellenistic world. Roman Egypt produced the greatest astronomer of the era, Ptolemy (90-168 CE). His works on astronomy, including the Almagest, became the most influential books in the history of