Anthropologist Ben Finney, who has spent a lifetime re-enacting Polynesian voyages, says human expansion into the previously uninhabited Pacific 3000 years ago is the best model we have for the colonisation of other planets.

Based in Hawaii, he now advises American space administrators on how to identify contacts from other civilisations, and runs summer courses at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France.

Eighteen years after he sailed into the Bay of Islands from Rarotonga on the outrigger Hokule'a, he is back to advise the Auckland Museum on a new exhibition - to open in 2006 - on voyaging in the Pacific.

He believes that human beings evolved as "exploratory, migratory animals" and that the same impulse that carried the Polynesians from Asia to as far as Easter Island years before the Vikings reached Iceland will eventually take us into outer space...