These women are descendants of Polynesian navigators, trained in the old ways by their elders, and now they're passing it on to me.

I recently sailed on the Hokulea, named after the sacred star of Hawaii, throughout the South Pacific to make a film about the navigators.

They have been compared to astronauts these elder navigators who sail vast open oceans in double hulled canoes thousands of miles from a small island.

Now science may dismiss this methodology, but Polynesian navigators use it today because it provides them an accurate determination of the angle and direction of their vessel.

Her Government was involved in a number of initiatives aimed at sharing the benefits of outer space, including the Geoscience for Andean Communities Project and the provision of satellite images to assist navigators in staying clear of drifting ice.

And I am reminded that throughout the world there are cultures with vast sums of knowledge in them, as potent as the Micronesian navigators, that are going dismissed, that this is a testament to brilliant, brilliant technology and science and wisdom that is vanishing rapidly.