Ever wonder what the love child of the British version of The Office and an overheard conversation about science between two reasonably informed guys would grow up to be? Ok, maybe not, but Stuff You Should Know will answer the question anyway.

Stuff You Should Know, Science Channel’s new show based on the popular podcast of the same name, is a peculiar amalgamation of The Office’s awkward, asinine mockumentary comedy and scientific discussion.

Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant play themselves in a fictionalized workspace and circumstances that provide them the opportunity to discuss novel scientific topics. In the first episode, they use an interaction with an Alien Hand Syndrome sufferer as a platform to discuss different brain ailments, and in the second, they job shadow two homicide cops to talk about the interaction between forensic science and the public.

Stuff You Should Know is far more sketch than science. It has the attention span of a teenaged boy. The show bounces from scene to scene without explanation or sense. Josh and Chuck are likable guys who try to explain complex issues as simply as possible and use humor. It comes across as an attempt to use humor to subversively present scientific information to a scientifically illiterate audience without pretense, and they pay careful attention to tone to avoid coming across as intimidating. It would be hard to be overwhelmed with scientific information in the show; the grand total comes up to about three minutes of science per episode.

I did not find the shows funny, and my husband said he thought the second episode was better than the first. I suspect a younger man with less scientific understanding would find the show far more entertaining.

I could overlook the lack of chuckles if its second episode did not have serious scientific issues. The first episode only imparts a couple of menial factoids. The second episode deals with The CSI Effect, a shift in expectations of juries who now demand more in-depth scientific evidence since forensic science entered the entertainment realm in shows like CSI and Bones. This is something that legal professionals say they have bumped up against and may be a legitimate change in juror expectation. Chuck and Josh bring up an egregious example of a jury exonerating a defendant of rape when they found DNA inadequate to convict and wanted further forensic evidence. They fail to mention the mountain of evidence stacking up against many of the forensic sciences and the mass exoneration based on faulty forensic evidence.

The issue of forensic misconduct, incompetence, unjustified positions, and overreach was so pervasive, the U.S. Congress directed the National Academy of Sciences to investigate. In 2009 they released a document called Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward. In it they called for reforms in analyzing blood, coroner’s offices, finger print analysis, hair analysis, arson investigation, and more. According to the Innocence Project, 116 people were convicted based on forensic evidence and were eventually exonerated using DNA evidence. This does not include all the other types of exonerations based on revealing faulty forensic techniques like discredited arson investigation and faulty finger print analysis (yes, it happens).

To talk about the CSI Effect without this information is like discussing pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory and presenting it as fact. It’s just enough information to sound smart but draw the wrong conclusions. The CSI Effect may be people confusing fact and fiction as is asserted in the show, or it could be jurors understanding finally that they should have standards for conviction and taking their role analyzing the evidentiary value of findings more seriously by employing healthy skepticism.

Josh and Chuck seem to just be regurgitating headlines without looking a bit deeper, which might be excusable if it were not a program bent on getting scientific information into the minds of the ignorant. The media as a whole does a good job at misconstruing the significance of scientific and social findings; science programs should do better.

There are a few blissful cameos from science and pop culture stars in the second episode. Science Channel promises even more cameos as the show continues. None of the cameos in the first and second episodes have anything to do with the science on the show, which is a shame considering who stops by.

Fans of the podcast should know there is far more science in the podcast than in the show, but the guys have the same friendly mood.

Stuff You Should Know is not to my taste, but I don’t want to write it off totally. I hope they get their science together. Their odd-ball style is on trend in entertainment and just might have a shot at capturing the attention of young men by accidentally imparting science with its silliness.

Stuff You Should Know airs Saturday at 10 PM Eastern and Pacific time on the Science Channel.

National Academy of Sciences Report
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/228091.pdf

DNA exonerations
http://www.innocenceproject.org/know/
http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/detaillist.aspx

Frank Drake, PhD, founder of SETI, is considered by many to be a pioneer of the scientific search for intelligent extraterrestrial life. In 1961, Drake developed an equation to estimate the number of alien societies that may be detectable, which is now called the Drake Equation (http://www.seti.org/drakeequation). He was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974 for his work in detecting off-world intelligence. He’s now in his eighties, but his silver hair hasn’t stopped him; Drake is still working to find extraterrestrials. An approachable and interesting man, Drake isn’t above a joke about his work or the people with whom he interacts. While at SETIcon II in Santa Clara, California, Drake took a few minutes to answer questions about his research, the future of SETI Institute, and aliens.

The SETI Institute is not itself a UFO hunting group, nor is it associated with any. According to Drake, people used to confuse it as one. However, the public perception of SETI has changed over time. When asked how much time he spends debunking UFO myths, he smiled and said, “Zero. It used to be more. Lately, I think we are finally succeeding in discrediting all that. People are very hesitant to discuss abductions and UFOs because I think they’ve sensed that there is a growing body of conclusive conclusions that there is no substance there.”

Drake reflected on the bad old days of SETI research and continued with a light-hearted chuckle, “I used to have to debunk it in every lecture I gave and now it hasn’t happened in 1/10 lectures. But it used to be a regular standard question, ‘What is your status on UFOs?’ or what’s worse—‘Let me tell you my UFO story or let me tell you about the time I was abducted.’”

“One of them saw a UFO man in Central Park. Nobody else noticed.” Drake went on to recount another abductee story he encountered. “I was called about a guy who had a UFO experience right in a suburb of Santa Cruz [California]. He had this big story that he believed in and sounded very credible. I actually went out and investigated it.”

“He had some horses that he tended to in a pasture on the edge of town. He would go there early, around seven o’clock to feed them and water. And this one morning he came to the pasture and he found the horses very upset. They were running around. At about this time a UFO descended over him and shined a bright light on his truck, a brilliant light on his truck. It caused the engine to die on the truck and caused some burn marks on the truck. The UFO had this spotlight; it was shining around at the horses and all around the field. Then it got up and left. He had a very hard time getting the truck to run again. This was the story, bright light and all. Well, this particular field has houses all around. It was about 7:30 in the morning, people were up and about and I went and asked in the houses. Nobody had seen a bright light; they had not heard a sound; nobody had seen any of this. How could this be? It was a brilliant spotlight they were shining on the houses.”

Drake laughed and shared another story of a woman who believed she had an ongoing relationship with aliens: “She was probably thirty years old and she said that ever since she was a teenager, about one night a week, aliens came into her bedroom and did experiments on her. I said, ‘Why haven’t you set up a video camera?’ She said, ‘I never thought to do that.’ There was a guy sitting next to her. I asked, ‘Are you married?’ She said, ‘Yeah, this is my husband.’ So I asked the husband, ‘Didn’t you notice something?’ His answer was, ‘I’m a very sound sleeper.’”

Surprisingly, given the volume of UFO myths Drake has had to debunk over time and the ridiculous stories he has endured, Drake does not seem to look down too much on the people who have alien experiences. Even though there was a great deal of laughter while telling the stories, and frustration about the people’s inability to think it through, there was also a compassionate tone for people who were obviously scared by their experiences.

“They always seem sincere and in most cases are not kooky. They seem to be very normal, average people and they have these memories which they seem to truly believe them; which in most cases are patently impossible on the face of it....Some of the abductees think they [extraterrestrials] are visiting almost nightly and have experiments done on them every night.”

Drake was not above the occasional verbal eye-roll. He seemed perturbed by what he describes as a common phenomenon, “A thing we do get a lot of is people who claim they are in telepathic contact with extraterrestrials and we don’t need to bother. They are already in contact. That is a fairly common one we get. But what they report is clearly nonsensical. We always ask, you know, tell us something we can go out and find to be true. That never happens.”

The former misconceptions about SETI cost the SETI program millions of dollars in the early 1990s. Until 1992, SETI was a NASA project. Senator Richard Bryan of Nevada called SETI “The Great Martian Chase.” He said, “As of today, millions have been spent and we have yet to bag a single little green fellow. Not a single Martian has said take me to your leader, and not a single flying saucer has applied for FAA approval.”

Drake recounted the consequence to SETI when Senator Bryan took notice. “Up until 1992, the government funded SETI, it was a NASA project, was like a flight project. It was totally accepted. We were getting about twelve million dollars a year from NASA. Which was enough to build a lot of good equipment and do very high quality searching with people, attendants, doing all the right things.

“And then in 1993, a senator from Nevada [Bryan], looking for some way to get publicity for his re-election campaign, this is really what happened, decided he would attack SETI on the basis that we were kooks chasing after little green men, and wasting the taxpayers’ money. He knew anything that has to do with extraterritorial life gets in the news.” Drake continued, “So he went up to congress and started attacking SETI. Actually this had happened several years before but we had at that time champions in that blockaded it and prevented it from happening. This time he snuck it through. He waited until there was no one in the senate chamber, except him and four or five buddies, which happens you know. They made a resolution to end the SETI project at NASA and it was approved by five or six people. And overnight the SETI project was defunded....So all the government funding stopped and SETI was no longer getting twelve million dollars a year.”

The move from government project to private project was not all bad for SETI.

“We had a good project going then and we wanted to continue it. We knew without government funds, we could actually keep it running for about 4 million dollars a year. It’s much cheaper without all the bureaucracy. Fortunately we had some people in Silicon Valley who were very interested in it and said, ‘Ok, we’ll take care of this.’ Packard, Moore, Hewlett, Allen; they each chipped in a million dollars a year and continued that for another five years, so the project kept going. No government funding, now totally private. That was great. It was very efficient. We weren’t burdened with review committees.”

Unfortunately, it was only a couple of years until major philanthropists dried up and SETI was in financial trouble. “Now all our major donors have disappeared. Instead of four or five million dollars a year that used to come very easily—we were spoiled; we didn’t really have to work for it—it has shrunk down to half a million dollars a year and that’s not enough to run a proud SETI program. It’s hardly just enough about to keep the lights on, and the electric powering, and one or two people to do maintenance but really no scientific staff to analyze the data.”

Even with the funding problems, SETI was able to move forward with a new radio telescope array. The first forty-two telescopes in the Allen Array in Northern California became functional in October 2007. It was, in large part, funded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen at a total cost of thirty million dollars. The telescope was an affordable way to increase SETI’s search abilities. Drake explained the circumstances, “The original agreement by which this was built was a joint partnership between the SETI Institute and the University of California Berkeley. The deal was, we [SETI Institute] would pay to build the telescope, and they would provide operating funds.”

Drake outlined the other costs the relationship with UC Berkeley had on SETI and its research. “We needed their [UC Berkeley] expertise in telescope building, [and] they would only do this [partner to build the Allen Telescope Array] if the instruments were useful for radio astronomy. Regular radio astronomy wants very high resolution, sharp images. SETI on the other hand wants minimum resolution because that means looking at more stars at once. So it was a basic conflict between what is optimum for SETI and what is optimum for radio astronomy. So what we got is a telescope that serves the radio astronomers but is not optimized for SETI. It does SETI but not with the capability that we could have done with less cost if we squeezed them together.” SETI was willing to make this sacrifice for the ongoing funding promised by UC Berkeley.

Unfortunately, government funding again hampered SETI capabilities. “About the time it was finished there was this big budget crunch at the State of California and it hit the university really hard. The end result was the funding to science parts at UC Berkeley was cut so much they said, ‘Sorry, we can’t pay the operating costs of the telescope; sorry, we can’t carry out our part of it,’ and they walked away. Here we have this telescope and no money to operate it. We spent thirty million dollars and we actually had to put it in hibernation; mothballed for about six months. We did a lot of private fundraising and we raised enough money to put it back in operation for about six months—which we did. This was just last year [2011],” outlined Drake.

The Air Force took notice of the array and now fund its operation to track space junk. “They use it in the daytime, and we use it at night. That’s not the way it should be,” Drake explained sorrowfully.

Even though funding has been a roller coaster, Drake has not given up setting his sights high, and he continues to develop ideas for the best way to find life on other planets. “This technique of connecting together small dishes [the method used to create the Allen Telescope Array] to make one can be done indefinitely because you can keep adding dishes. The cost of the total instrument just keeps going up in proportion, which is a good thing because when trying to do this with a big dish it doesn’t. So [with] this approach, in principle, you can just add dishes indefinitely. You can fill up all of Arizona or something! That would be good.”

SETI is capable of collecting data but does not have enough staff to sift through it all. “We have essentially no staff.” Drake continued, “The data that is collected is not being processed as thoroughly as it could be.”

The funding gaps are serious enough that SETI has started to reach out to the public to pick up the slack. Drake hopes volunteers can help SETI. “We have a new program, SETI Live. Our system is called the Allen Telescope Array and data from it is being sent to ordinary people, and they search through it for signs of signals.”

Home computers are even being set to good work with the SETI@Home project. “It’s a good program. It runs all the time on the world’s largest telescope for a decade now. It has hundreds of thousands of users who process the data on their home computers, and they produce candidate signals, hundreds of candidate signals....This mode of acquiring the data and farming it out for analysis, and then going back to take a second look at a candidate, so far no candidate has ever been seen a second time.”

However, Drake was explicitly clear about the best way to help SETI: “Send money. Send money.”

A lack of success finding extraterrestrial signals has not stopped Drake from considering what might happen if we finally interact with aliens. If those aliens are more advanced than us, Drake hopes to tap into their knowledge, failures, and experience for our own advancement: “There’s technologies you could learn. How to provide clean energy or nuclear fusion. If they could teach us how to build a nuclear fusion reactor, that would be good. We have spent hundreds of millions of dollars each year trying to achieve those. If they tell us, you know, how to do it right, they’ve probably already figured out how to do it right, what doesn’t work, and what is dangerous and so forth. They could tell us other technologies that are useful. For instance, nuclear fusion but [also] does putting solar power stations in space make sense, which we have been talking about too. We would find out whether it makes sense to colonize space because they will have done it. They would have tried it and found out if it is too hazardous or too expensive. We would see how they affect their environment. To what extent have they allowed their planet to become concretized?”

Drake, with a whimsical lilt in his voice, half joked, “We may receive purchase orders of some nonterrestrial life. How do we respond to a bunch of purchase orders? ...Some people worry a reply might excite an attack on you—not likely. However, we might decide we shouldn’t say anything to them; go and hide somewhere.”

Drake was a bit more serious about what we might do if we came across a less advanced civilization. “It is not likely that we will come across a less advanced species because less advanced would not have developed radio yet so there would be no way to detect them. Almost anyone we find will be more advanced than us. In any case, to answer your question, you would not tell them anything until you knew something about them, until you knew what might make sense to tell them. So just the fact they exist isn’t good enough to send some useful message. You need to start off somehow, which may be difficult. ...We want to tell them about us and what is special about us, what we think is special about us.”

When asked about how we should present what is special about us and if it was important to be honest at first, Drake had a bit of a mixed message: “We have always felt we should be totally honest; we shouldn’t guild the lily. Although when you think about it sometimes, for instance, we all like to send pictures of humans because we think they’re interesting; we don’t send ugly humans.” Drake laughed and went on, “Well, we do send average humans but we have never sent a picture of a homeless person or a goth or other peculiar type.”

Drake says he is not covering up proof of alien life, contrary to what UFO hunters believe. He expressed some worry that someone would take any joke he said about it out of context. He threw caution to the wind, belly-laughed, and sarcastically said, “I have all kinds of frozen cadavers in my basement. People actually believe that!”

Notes

SETI
http://www.seti.org/

Frank Drake
http://www.seti.org/seti-institute/board-of-trustee/frank-drake

SETI Live
http://www.setilive.org/

SETI@home
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

Donate to SETI Endowment:
http://www.seti.org/seti-institute/support-seti

Jill Tarter (left) at SETIcon II.

Jill Tarter, PhD, may be best known as the inspiration for the main character in the movie Contact, but that should not be her legacy. Tarter is a pioneer in SETI research. She has lead teams of SETI researchers, helped develop the SETI Institute research, headed up the development of the Allen Telescope Array, and helped push the parameters of scientific research and engineering. She was elected a fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and is a TED Prize recipient. Tarter speaks gently, clearly, and with a slow cadence that assures that the listener hears her carefully chosen words; she also speaks frankly about issues that concern and inspire her.

Life as a professional alien hunter comes with landmines of alien abductees and alien mythology. A frustrated Tarter explained her feelings about probably the most famous of all UFOs: “Roswell is well sustained because the cash registers keep ringing in Roswell as long as that mythology is supported. Roswell was a crash, Roswell was a cover-up, Roswell had nothing to do with alien space craft. It did have everything to do with cold war politics and our trying to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union and wondering about their nuclear testing program. If you actually look at evidence that has been released under the Freedom of Information Act, you can quite clearly trace Project Mogul, a flying contraption of mylar and mylar precursor balloons that were big enough to hoist the equipment that was being used to monitor. The fact that this information is now public, but people simply say, ‘That is a cover up too,’ is frustrating but speaks to the profitability of keeping alive the pseudoscience of this whole event.”

Her frustration with the lack of skepticism is not limited to those who think aliens landed at Roswell. She is generally frustrated with what she perceives as our society’s willingness to let feel-good ideas gain hold without the support of evidence or even in the face of contradictory evidence, especially in our education system.

“Certainly in terms of the formal education program, we don’t emphasize [rational thought]. We tend to do the opposite. Children are naturally curious explorers; they’re natural scientists. Once they get into school, we educate that out of them. We don’t support their curiosity. We don’t reinforce tools of observation and deduction and correlation. We tell them stories. We tell them stories that make them comfortable. We, in life, most of our population, would like to believe what makes them feel good, rather than what is true.”

Tarter continued, “We shouldn’t be having state legislatures that try to by law define pi as 3 so it is easier for students to remember. That is actually something that came out of the Georgia State legislature as a proposal.”

Her concerns extend to the faith-based science curriculum proposed and used in many states in public science classrooms: “We run all kinds of risks if we allow faith-based science to replace the real thing and the risks we run are that things won’t work and we will not innovate the next advance and we will therefore be buying it from overseas from countries that have had a better track record of supporting critical thinking in their schools and in their populations. ...I think it is frighteningly dangerous.”

The mistakes in education by American schools are not limited to content. Tarter thinks they also lack an essential quality of math, science, and engineering: fun. “I think the things we really mess up on in our educational system, we talk about math and science and engineers and all those bright people and how they are going to do wonderful things, and we forget to tell the students it’s fun. Right? It’s amazing to come to work in the morning and be able to pose your own questions, as opposed to doing something your boss tells you you gotta do today whether you like it or not. A creative life as a scientist, or engineer or mathematician, is a very rewarding life. You have the potential to answer a question no one has ever figured out the answer to. If you find that to be fun, then that is what you ought to be doing.”

Tarter’s concerns aren’t just about the people trying to present antiscientific or pseudoscientific positions but also with people who back away from addressing them when they know better: “We have an overwhelming tendency to be polite to religious belief systems because in fact there are many people who are comforted by that, who feel supported by that, who are encouraged to be better human beings, more thoughtful, caring, and fair by religious structures, and that’s all wonderful. So we tend not to try to be impolite to people’s religious beliefs. When something is touted as science, when it is in fact not science, it does not matter if the basis is religious or anything else, it is not science and we ought to be willing to say so. We are seeing now, Richard Dawkins and his colleagues saying really startling and harsh things that most other people are unwilling to say but are nonetheless true.”

Richard Dawkins, a British zoologist, developer of Meme Theory, former Oxford Professor of Public Understanding of Science, and author of books like The God Delusion, is a staunch, verbal, and unabashed opponent to pseudoscientific positions, including creationism in schools and religious faith in general. Tarter’s comments seem to reference Dawkins’s willingness to directly attack religious belief. In his book The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins wrote, “To claim equal time for creation science in biology classes is about as sensible as to claim equal time for the flat-earth theory in astronomy classes. Or, as someone has pointed out, you might as well claim equal time in sex education classes for the stork theory. It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).”

Perplexed by the fact that science has to keep addressing things like Roswell and creationism, Tarter said, “It’s this funny thing as a scientist, I can’t understand; once you have shown something to be flawed and fallacious, why that does not end the argument. Why it is that it can come back in a different guise, and not be recognized for being the same thing in different clothing.”

“The why in this case [of creationism], part of the answer is it’s well financed and it is difficult to deal with a well-financed campaign. We see that it’s growing. It’s not just denying evolution, we now see people denying climate change with the same strategies and tools used by those folks who originally denied evolution. That is, there is a way to do things, if you want to swing public opinion. There’s a very well understood way to orchestrate, to market, to sell that. We see the climate deniers using the same principles and tactics as evolution deniers. It isn’t going to get any better unless we say, ‘No, think about this; there is evidentiary proof for this and not that.’ ...I’m really unhappy that our population, particularly in this country [USA] seems to be so unwilling to think critically, to apply basic logic and the old ‘show me’ requirements. They seem to be willing to accept the most outrageous claims, amazing claims, astonishing claims, without saying where’s the evidence? Where’s the data?”

Tarter emphasized, “Science isn’t a popularity contest. Science isn’t what you want to believe. It isn’t what anyone believes. Science is what currently is the best explanation for the data and evidence that we have at hand.”

The prospects of critical thought are not much better when discussing aliens with the general population. “Forty percent of our population already thinks they’re already here,” Tarter assures us.

Twenty years of research into Earth’s extremophiles, life-forms that live in extreme environments, has changed the view of who “they” might be. “I think what the last two decades in research in extremophiles here on Earth [has taught us] that microbes deserve a lot more respect than we have ever given them in the past. When we think about life, we have had this ridiculous bias to think of human life as being some pinnacle of evolution. That is just bogus in terms of the reality of natural evolution. And so we are finding now that we are looking and asking the right questions, life has evolved to occupy environments that are incredibly hostile to human life. That’s the extremophile—living in extreme conditions.”

Extraterrestrial research was plagued with biases and assumptions that Tarter explains are only now being challenged: “When I was a graduate student, we were very clear that life would only exist between the boiling and freezing points of water. It would have to have a neutral, not too acidic, not too basic environment; pressure but not enormous pressure, pressure about like what we have on Earth; sunlight, we were told, sunlight was the engine of all life, powered all life on Earth. It couldn’t be too saline, couldn’t be too salty. We’ve just blown away all of those limits; we’ve expanded all those limits and hugely increased our understanding of the habitable real estate on our own planet.”

“With these wonderful forms of life that have evolved to love being in the boiling battery acid of a volcanic field, or deep in the ocean where the crust is splitting apart and super-heated steam and all these minerals are rushing out. And there is this incredible community of life, not all of it microbial. Tubeworms are big and they have microbes that they make a living on. There is huge diversity of life in these places. We’re finally beginning to give up this ascent of man idea and to prize and understand the amazing tenacity of life.”

“There’s far more potential than we ever understood on this planet, and I would be surprised if there weren’t even greater potential on another planet. I don’t know what they’re going to look like, [but] I don’t expect them to look like us.”

One of the most asked questions in discussions about aliens is Why would aliens come to Earth? Stephen Hawking, the director of research at the Institute for Theoretical Cosmology
at Cambridge, mathematician, and author of books like The Grand Design, thinks we should avoid extra extraterrestrial interactions: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach....If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans."

However, Tarter disagrees: “There’s this question of whether or not an alien technology that can actually get here, which by definition is far more advanced technologically than we are, whether they’re going to enslave us, take our resources and trash the place and trash us. The other alternative is that an advanced technology that can get here, is old, and they couldn’t have gotten to be old unless they managed to limit their population, utilize their resources wisely. If you take an old technology seriously, I think unless they are able to evolve beyond the aggression, which is probably part of the development of their intelligence, that they won’t survive to be old. They will do themselves in just as we seem to be showing lots of potential for doing. There may not be another century of humans unless something fundamentally changes here. So there are scenarios. The mean bastards who want to do us harm or the advanced technologies that don’t have any reason to do us harm and just might be curious about us.”

No matter the intention of the off-world visitors, there would be no shortage of ways that the interaction would change us. Tarter enthusiastically explains the huge leaps in understanding in biology that discovering life somewhere other than Earth could provide: “It would be hugely advanced if there were another biology that you could study to compare with biology as we know it; it would be a great step forward in trying to dissect what’s necessary from what’s contingent. We’ve only got one example. We can’t figure out whether it had to be that way or happened to be that way. Having a second example of biology will be incredibly important for understanding what is fundamental about life.”

The search for aliens in recent years has not been easy. Tarter won a TED Prize and consequently made their software code open source in a project called SETI Quest. Unfortunately, the attempts to reach out to the public and get assistance in the open source community failed to gain traction.

“We actually, after decades of doing our science in a silo, in splendid isolation, decided a couple of years ago as part of the TED Prize that we would open up what we’ve been doing. We would publish our legacy code as open source. We spent a lot of time cleaning it up, putting it out there, and trying to talk about it, give it enough publicity. We were hoping people would find clever things within it that they could use for other purposes, or that they could take pieces of it that we hadn’t optimized in terms of efficiency and help make them better. In general it was such a big piece of code, and the barrier of entry—the kind of machine and installation you had to do—was too high and we didn’t attract a very large community....They needed a great deal of effort from my team, which is pretty small. We can support some but we couldn’t do all the support that was needed for an open source project. In the end, it didn’t make a lot of sense for us to enter the open source community because we couldn’t garden it, we couldn’t support it with our in-house efforts.”

Like so many pure science projects, funding has become an Olympic-sized hurdle for SETI. In fact, it has become such a hurdle that Tarter is retiring from research to dedicate all her time to finding and raiding willing wallets. “We have done amazingly well at times. Right now is not one of the amazingly well times. ...We are all about funding problems. That’s why I’m retiring from being the director of the Center of SETI Research and keeping my Oliver Chair hat so that I can concentrate on doing the fundraising. We have been on a fundraising roller coaster from the beginning.”

“It right now is pretty desperate in terms of finding funding from the public sector, but in fact I think we can succeed. There is a small cadre of very knowledgeable fundraising individuals who think, as I do, that SETI is too important to fail. We are going to take this opportunity to focus on establishing an endowment because in the end that’s probably the only rational fundraising vehicle for this kind of research that may be multi-generational. With federal or state funding it can go away in any particular year. With individual annual funding, that can be hugely affected by economy. Universities have shown us that the endowment structure is something that can be used to continue focused application toward specific projects. That’s what we need to do for SETI.”

If aliens had visited, Tarter thinks things would be financially very different for SETI. She thinks the myths about SETI covering up alien visits are silly for that exact reason: “I wish I were, funding would be a lot more secure if we could actually trot out aliens and say, ‘see, they’re really here,’ but no.”

For Tarter, funding has not been the only hurdle to success. When she was a student, she was the only woman in her freshman engineering class at Cornell, a class of three hundred students. The problems were not just a lack of support of other women, but systemic sexism that limited her advantages. For example, women were expected to comply with a curfew that men were not expected to comply with, limiting her ability to participate in study groups. “All I can say is, it was really bad when I started,” sighed Tarter.

Even still, when asked if it is a degrading question to ask her about being a woman in science she proudly answered, “In fact, it can be. Women are facing a backlash from, ‘well you’re in your position because you are a woman.’”

Tarter was not advocating a completely gender blind approach because the disparity between men and women still exists in the science, math, and engineering fields: “The numbers are getting better, but they’re not good enough, and they won’t get good enough unless we actively work at that.”

The mountains women had to and still have to overcome are not always conscious. Tarter says, “When I got my degree, I thought, ‘well, this was hard and I made it so when I get out there I’m gonna show the world that I’m smart, I’m bright, I can do this. There’s no reason to stereotype and say women can’t do this.’ I so poorly understood the internal biases that we have about selecting and working with colleagues that reflect ourselves. All the other ‘ourselves’ out there were male.”

The biases were so pervasive that Tarter realized she herself had bought into them and realized how much change was necessary. “I had a unique experience that a little time after I got my PhD, I was invited to participate in a meeting in Washington, DC, and I walked into a room full of eighty women. Bright, smart engineers and scientists and mathematicians. I have never walked into a room of only women. I was used to being the only woman in a room full of men. It was an enormous eye-opening experience for me. It made me understand how much I bought into being one of the boys, how much I tended to denigrate the work of the few other women that I saw. It was all bad cultural bias, that had to go, and wasn’t going to go unless we worked on it. So I changed my tune and didn’t decide, good women role models were enough. They’re good to have. In fact, you aren’t going to make a lot of progress without having those because young women have to be able to see, ‘oh I could do that’ but you have to do a lot more. You have to really encourage.”

“I don’t think we encourage math, science, and engineering for either boys or girls. They [schools] are being more mindful of the women. Whether we are doing it right or not, I don’t know. If you find that to be fun, then that is what you ought to be doing. We ought to let people of both sexes know that it’s fun and say, you can do this too. If you want to do this, you can.”

Life isn’t all about alien life for Tarter, “I like to create things. I toyed with architecture for a while.”

Her brush with cinema has left the movie bug in her, “I had this really interesting experience when I met Jodie Foster and the movie team for Contact and worked behind the scenes there. There is an incredible amount of technology that goes into making a movie. I was fascinated. I thought, ‘gee, if I wasn’t doing my job, this might be a really interesting job.’ I’ll just throw this out there, Zemeckis [Robert Zemeckis, producer of Contact] changed the ending of the book to facilitate a sequel, and set it up. There hasn’t been a Contact 2. I think that would be a really good project. Anyone who’s into screenplays out there, and likes this kind of thing, where do we take that nineteen hours of static that’s recorded on that headset. Something happened right? What was it really? Where does it go from there? Particularly if we could get Jodie Foster to revive the role.”

Even though Tarter has interests broader than science, she isn’t willing to give up on larger goals for scientific advancement. She wants the choir of people who see the value of science to take active roles in the future of science literacy. “First of all, I’m delighted there is a choir. Secondly, it isn’t big enough. Thirdly, they ought to be seeking out opportunities to their kids that make a difference. Finding and helping teachers who want to make a difference for kids, who want to encourage that. Get into the classroom. Get involved in the formal education system. Volunteer in ways that you can interact with young people because it’s really critically important....We should strive to have a scientifically literate population.”

Notes

Dr. Tarter’s TED Prize Talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_tarter_s_call_to_join_the_seti_search.html

SETI Quest:
http://setiquest.org/

http://www.seti.org/

Donate to SETI Endowment:
http://www.seti.org/seti-institute/support-seti

Contact
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118884/

Robert Zemeckis
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000709/

Ariel Waldman (left) at SETIcon II.

Ariel Waldman thinks space exploration should not be limited to professional scientists and advocates for public participation in off world projects. Waldman is the founder of Spacehack.org, a website that acts as a repository for citizen space science projects and Science Hack Day, a twenty-four-hour event that brings scientists and nonscientists together to see what can be rapidly prototyped in such a short time. She, like many others like her, are illuminating the scientific community to the value of the public and is elbowing in to create a place for an average person in science’s endeavors into space. She is not alone in her efforts. SETI, NASA, Yale, Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and others are developing citizen scientist projects to harness the skills and power of the general public to advance science.

Spacehack.org is a repository of citizen science projects that the average person can participate in, most of which actually value the participants enough to credit them with recognition for their efforts. Waldman sees Spacehack and similar projects as pick-axes to tradition and has a clear vision of what Spacehack should do: “Ideally, breaking down this concept that science is something you need to have a degree to get involved in. I’m very frustrated a lot of times because I do attend a decent number of science conferences, often I will ask a panelist or speaker, ‘I don’t have a science background but I think what you are doing is really awesome, what can I do?’ Often, often their answer is, ‘You can always go back to school.’ ARG!”

Waldman continued, “So much of the focus is around kids and getting kids interested in science, which is totally noble and I’m not critiquing it at all. It’s what a lot of people should be focusing on. But I think people who have grown up and chosen a different career are considered lost to science. Oh, you chose the lesser career, oh you chose the more feminine career as a fashion designer or something. By communicating not only you from any industry can get involved in space exploration, but also maybe even that space exploration could use help from your specific perspective and discipline and create equally remarkable things out of that, that is really what space hack and other projects can add. [It] is really tearing down that invisible wall that science has put up and really, really promoting that it can be de-institutionalized.”

The citizen science movement is still in its infancy and Waldman knows it is still strongly reliant on traditional scientists to lead the way but hopes it won’t always be that way. “It’s difficult because even now I think citizen science is at its early stages. Most of the citizen science projects today are created by people who work in science who are good enough people who want to open it up to more people. I think in the future you’ll be seeing more projects ideally that come from people from all different disciplines where it will be more self-directed, so it won’t be a scientist saying, this is a really interesting project, you should work on it but citizens saying, this is a really interesting problem, why is no one focusing on it, I’m gonna start focusing on it.”

Citizen scientist efforts do have potential advantages over that of traditional science. Bureaucratic and political climates and profit motives can hamper research into important fields of research. Waldman believes the ability to tackle unpopular topics will make citizen science valuable to society in the future.

“Definitely there is interesting stuff with unpopular science. I have seen interesting hacks and citizen science come out of or around the science of sex. It is a fascinating topic that often doesn’t get funding because it’s risky or bureaucratic reasons. So the idea of doing more science around sex in general through having more people be able and being empowered to study it, is really great. That’s just an example of unpopular science. Really though, I think all science could use it.”

It’s apparent to Waldman that citizen scientists will have to prove their value to traditional science and like all things in science, it will take awhile for them to gain acceptance. She thinks the scientific community will finally see its worth, but it is going to take some convincing. “Maybe not within the next year but within ten years, I would say yes. Now it is still very hit and miss. For as many scientists who I talk that totally get it and are completely open, I also talk to a number of scientists that think it’s cute or a toy. These are actually things they have said to me and it’s very frustrating. Even when you say, ‘Well, but, these people have made a scientific discovery,’ they will be like, ‘Yeah, but it’s not really that interesting science.’ ‘But it was cited on all these papers.’ ‘But yeah those papers were already....’ They do anything to talk it out and kind of tell you why it is not important. I think that will change. There are already stories to tell.”

There is reason to be optimistic about the future of citizen science. Waldman shared the story of how a citizen science project Galaxy Zoo lead to the discovery of the phenomenon now called Hanny’s Voorwerp. Galaxyzoo.org is a citizen science project that uses average people to classify galaxies using Hubble Telescope pictures. A simplified system allows users to easily sort galaxies. More advanced users can also look through less simplified data to make more in depth discoveries. In a survey of Galaxy Zoo users, Galaxy Zoo found the most common interaction with science their users had was science documentaries.

“Someone discovered a very weird thing in Galaxy Zoo data. It was this weird blob,” Waldman continued, “This woman was like, ‘What is this weird thing.’ Scientists were like, ‘Don’t pay any attention to that, don’t worry about that.’ She was like, ‘No, I think this is a really interesting blob.’ She looked into it and more and more people looked into it and it’s actually, I’m probably going to get this slightly wrong, essentially it’s a piece of gas that is heated up by, I want to say, pulsar in a nearby galaxy. It’s a phenomenon that has never been seen before. It was a phenomenon documented before. Not only did she go and do this and find this interesting thing, and now it’s called Hanny’s Voorwerp. Voorwerp is the Dutch word for “thingy,” and it’s not anything technical at all. This woman Hanny found it.”

Not to be stopped at just discovering, Hanny pushed on. “Not only as a result she found this thing, she along with some of the Galaxy Zoo scientists got time on Hubble and got Hubble to reimage this image to better study it.”

Waldman thinks the fact that Hanny, a school teacher from the Netherlands, made such a contribution to science is hard to ignore. “The fact that someone, from anywhere in the world, found something weird and was determined to say, ‘No, this is really fascinating” and then ended up being able to control Hubble, I think is so exciting and so cool. I think there will be more stories like that, that emerge over the next ten years. I think haters are gonna hate; people are going to want to say bad things, but I think in ten years’ time there are going to be enough stories like that where someone is going to sound a bit more ridiculous to be saying that it isn’t really making any contributions.”

Hanny was not the only citizen scientist to make a significant discovery on Galaxy Zoo. Citizen scientists reviewing data on the website didn’t just classify a galaxy; they discovered a new one, now called Peas Galaxy or Green Peas Galaxy.

Citizen scientists bring a different perspective to scientific endeavors than do traditionally trained scientists. Waldman explains, “I don’t want to pick sides. Obviously being formally trained has a lot of benefits to it. There are a lot of cosmological things I wish I could explain to people better but I don’t have the years of PhD to do that. I do think it’s a benefit, not only because you do bring in perspectives from whatever life experience or whatever schooling, or not even schooling, that you’ve gone through.”

The benefits also extend to citizen scientists, Waldman tells us: “Since I don’t have schooling in science, I get to pick and choose what I find interesting about science. If I was doing a degree program, I would have to go through all the boring stuff in addition to all the exciting stuff. I am not one to say that all of science is fascinating. There is a lot of stuff that bores the hell out of me. I have the benefit of picking and choosing what I find interesting and being able to focus on those areas. I think that’s something you don’t have the luxury of doing if you are a traditionally trained scientist. Again, I’m not criticizing that, I’m just saying there are benefits to being not traditionally trained and being able to have more freedom of what you do and what you find exciting and when you can stop.”

Waldman knows from experience how much the science bug can infect an average person. Waldman herself was not always a science cheerleader. “I just didn’t think of science or space exploration much at all. It’s not that I didn’t like it, I just never really thought about it. It just wasn’t on my radar. And so I don’t have any thoughts of looking at the night sky and being wistful. I just don’t have those stories. All I have is watching a documentary, like any other documentary that I watched, about the Apollo mission. I think the thing that made me excited about it was seeing how NASA actually screwed up a lot before they got to where they are. Seeing them say, “We are going to space and we are totally going to do this.” Then rocket explosion, rocket explosion, rocket explosion, rocket explosion. Guys saying, ‘Let’s try this thing’ and nope, that exploded too. ...The average age of NASA [scientists] during the Apollo Era was twenty six. It was people around my age who were kind of messing around with stuff and didn’t seem to know what they were doing. So thought, ‘That’s awesome. I want to work at NASA.’”

Waldman didn’t stop at a desire to work for NASA; she reached out. “I randomly sent a missive to NASA saying I was a fan and letting them know I was around if they ever needed a volunteer or something. Serendipitously they created a job description that day for someone who had a background like mine, which was experience in advertising and design and start-up. They specifically wanted someone who didn’t work at NASA already so I was very, very lucky. I applied and got the job and it changed my life.”

After she left NASA, she couldn’t leave space exploration behind. “I was only at NASA for a short time but then when I left, it seemed impossible for me to say, I worked in space exploration once for a little while and it was just a job I had. That seemed impossible”

She was inspired to connect to the public with space citizen science projects and started Spacehack.org. “Spacehack is a directory of ways to participate in space exploration. It’s really a bunch of different projects where people can contribute to scientific discovery and space exploration even if they don’t have a science background. This varies from anything from discovering galaxies to building rovers that go to the moon or mars. It’s a wide variety of topics you can get involved in but it is all around the idea that you don’t have to have a PhD in science to do it.”

Spacehack projects are cultivated with nonscientists in mind. Waldman hopes folks of all different disciplines and abilities will participate. “Things like discovering galaxies, you don’t really have to have a specific skill set or background to be able to classify galaxies and potentially go on to discover galaxies. Whereas there are other projects like the University Rover Challenge, which is trying to build the next Mars rover with universities. That is something where yeah, it would be helpful to have more of an understanding in engineering to participate but there’s also projects that have been interesting that incorporate all different types of people.”

“The Google Lunar X Prize, which is trying to build and launch a moon rover, actually have it land on the moon and have it do a bunch of interesting things once it gets there. Those are private teams from around the world who are doing that, and they not only need help from people who may have engineering backgrounds but they also need help from lawyers, they need help from writers, they need help from people who know how to make a wordpress site, designers, everything. So there’s a lot of projects like that, where you can say yes, I worked with a team to help get a rover to the moon and you don’t necessarily need to be an engineer to do that.”

Many worry that privatization may close off avenues to open science projects in space, but Waldman disagrees. She sees the money behind the projects as an asset to changing some frustrating regulations and paving the way for easier collaboration.

“One way is seeing that you’ve got a bunch of millionaires and billionaires running around, playing in space exploration. While that’s cool, that’s totally no more accessible than NASA was and it actually maybe promotes that you have to be super, super rich to get involved in space exploration. However, I would argue these people have a lot of money and a lot of power and they really care about making things more open for them to collaborate for their own personal gain. I think they are the ones who can put pressure on the U.S. government and on regulations that currently really hinder a lot of collaboration already. They are motivated to put pressure on those and get them to loosen up and get them to update all of the laws and regulations to allow for private space exploration which inherently will also apply to citizens. So I think it can be inaccessible for now but you’ve got more people with a lot of power and a lot of money interested in space exploration. I think whether or not they know it now, I think they are going to be paving the way so that ten, twenty years from now citizens actually will have less of a hard time because they really blazed the trail for a lot of things that are currently difficult for those citizens do.”

Waldman is specifically addressing the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR). Universities like MIT and groups like SpaceFoundation.org have suggested revisions to ITAR to improve space exploration and increase international collaboration.

Waldman simplifies ITAR: “It essentially equates doing anything in space similar to if you were building a bomb. All of those regulations that apply to building huge bombs also apply to space exploration. ITAR treats it as this is very secretive information; you cannot trade information. If you even show someone a screw on the floor that has something to do with a satellite, and they are from a different country, definitely the FBI will be right there, knocking on your door.”

Space is one of the few areas of science that is so hindered by Cold War Era legislation, making international collaboration extraordinarily difficult. Waldman, “If another country has a payload, and they want to fly it on our rocket, we can’t tell them any of details about that rocket. If I were to dumb this down a little bit: let’s say there’s a socket on a rocket and a satellite is trying to build a plug to fit into that. They can’t build the plug because the U.S. can’t tell them what the socket looks like. It actually acts against having international standards for space exploration and it also discourages countries from collaborating with us because they don’t have these issues collaborating with other countries.

“The sad thing is this has already affected the U.S. There are projects the European space agency has pulled out of. There are other projects countries now are motivated to—even though they don’t have all the innovation the U.S. does—they are motivated to work with other countries without the U.S. because even though they might be behind us in technology, they can probably get it done faster, and can probably actually guarantee that it is going to launch or do whatever they want. Whereas with the U.S. we have weird ways of doing budgets and regulations that other countries don’t have. We are really widening the gap for other countries to potentially have the opportunity to outpace us. They’re not currently, but we are giving them a head start on it.

“By having these private space ventures, and commercial space ventures, with a lot of money and they want to do international collaboration and they don’t want to deal with all these regulations, because in all their interviews they think they are horrible, that it’s not a good thing; they are the ones sending people to Washington and going to be able to actually make change. In that case, by getting those regulations to be updated more and less cold war era, and making it so all different types of people can collaborate.

“It’s just that these regulations are outdated. That’s why even if people don’t realize it now, these private and commercial space ventures that have a lot of money and power are actually going to make it easier for people in the long run.”

Average folks do not have to wait around for the ultra-mega-rich space-playboys to get around to changing Cold War legislative remnants in order to get involved in space science. Spacehack is always on the lookout for new projects the average citizen scientist can participate in. Waldman uses her own experience as a nonscientist to gauge which projects end up on Spacehack: “I don’t have anything written in stone but I always keep myself in mind. I am not a scientist or a developer. There are projects on Spacehack where it would help if you were a web developer but I just try to keep it reasonable. I absolutely don’t allow any projects that are about money donations for contributing to science, even if the money goes to a really good place because you aren’t actually doing anything. I try to look for projects where you can actively be contributing to something, your time isn’t being wasted, and it’s reasonable to ask anyone from someone who has no skills to a university student who might not have that opportunity otherwise. It is about the accessibility to get into something. Somethings might be harder than others, but if it’s not very accessible to get into in the first place then I’m not going to include it.”

Right now, Waldman is on the lookout for two projects. “There are two that I am frustrated that there are citizen science projects for or at least not one that is up to my standards of what I would like to see. One of them is that we have a problem with orbital debris. There is all this junk in our orbit and there are people around the world who are trying to solve the problem. There are many different ways to solve the problem and I don’t think there is any one way. It’s just a matter of finding interesting and successful ways. ...There’s everything from lasers, to launching satellites that clean up stuff, to new ways of doing flight paths. ...That is probably on my number one on my list. The second would be asteroid detection. ”

A successful citizen scientist isn’t just about inspiration. SETI learned from their SETI Quest program that setting the bar for entry too high can tether the project. The balance of demands on a citizen scientist is extremely important.

“There is a project to detect projects and it is for amateur astronomers. When I say ‘amateur astronomers’ like practically professional grade astronomers who have very expensive equipment who just happen to not be employed by an institution. There was some project I was looking at, at first I was really excited. She realized, “...no this is really extremely in depth, this is expensive equipment, this is not something an everyday person can do. It was saying to contribute, you need like this really expensive telescope or you need to get observing time at an observatory near you.”

The way a citizen scientist interacts with the project is essential to the success of a project. There are years’ worth of pictures and documents to review that are currently open to the public but are not accessible. Waldman thinks it isn’t enough to make information open; people need a way to interact with it.

“I do interaction design stuff so I’m probably extremely biased, but it’s extremely important. Without accessible interfaces to things—and by interface I mean anything from an actual computer interface to having a way to contribute to a Mars Rover program or something in the physical world. Without that, it doesn’t really matter what’s open. It really doesn’t.

“There is so much open stuff out there, and until someone makes it accessible, it might as well not exist. It’s really thinking about how to make things accessible, not just from opening it up and then telling people hey, on Facebook and on Twitter, oh all this stuff is open and come check it out. That’s not it. It’s really thinking through how does someone access this information? How does someone make sense of it? How do they connect with another human being over this? Thinking through those systems is very important.

“And also then thinking through how you make those systems meaningful. On Galaxy Zoo, if you are classifying galaxies, they have a whole system for not only getting that data to scientists but also then feeding that data back to the algorithms that are trying to classify galaxies, which are therefore going to get smarter. So it’s not just about improving things so that you can make scientific data better but also how machine learning and things work so that you are on a progressive trajectory.

“It’s language; it’s interface; it’s understanding how people interact; it’s understanding also that there are multiple different ways where people interact with you. You shouldn’t ever assume that just because everyone you know interacts with data a certain way, and have never seen a case where it hasn’t, doesn’t mean you should only design for that interaction. In Galaxy Zoo, you could go on to discover a galaxy and that requires you that you dig in through all this data they allow you access to but you can also spend five minutes, classifying a few galaxies, leave and never come again, and it’s still a very meaningful thing that does contribute to science. Defining those different entering points and different interactions of those is important.”

Waldman sees scientific diplomacy and outreach as essential to who she is now. “I felt that I was lucky to have such an experience and it shouldn’t be such a luck thing. I think people should be able to contribute to space exploration, and they can. They just don’t know and there is not enough communication around it. For the rest of my life probably, whether I like it or not, I’m somehow going to be involved in space exploration. I don’t always make money off of it—more often than not I don’t make any money doing any of it. It’s something that’s part of my identity now.”

Notes

Ariel Waldman
Spacehack.org

Hanny’s Voorwerp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanny%27s_Voorwerp

Galaxy Zoo
http://www.galaxyzoo.org/

Pea Galaxy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_galaxy

University Rover Challenge

The Google Lunar X Prize

ITAR
http://www.pmddtc.state.gov/regulations_laws/itar_consolidated.html

MIT ITAR Suggestions:
http://web.mit.edu/mgr/www/Portfolio/Balancing%20the%20Needs%20for%20Space%20Research%20and%20National%20Security%20in%20the%20ITAR.pdf

SpaceFoundation.org ITAR Suggestions:
http://www.spacefoundation.org/docs/SpaceFoundation_ITAR.pdf

SETIcon II in Santa Clara in June offered a diverse range of tracks, panels, and conversations with packed audiences filled with science fans and scientists. No matter the topic of the panel or initial audience question, four themes kept popping up: the public, frustration, what we do not know, and value. It became clear that the themes were no more separate than branches of a tree are from its roots, and that the scientific community is lost in a forest of these issues. It is evident in America’s current financial, political, and societal climate that this conversation could have occurred at any summit of scientists and their fans.

The individual songs of hindrance became a harmony of frustration with the general public’s fear of science or inability or unwillingness to understand science’s methods. Some blamed relaxed educational standards, while others struck at the internet for making it harder to tell the difference between truth and hooey. While it was never explicitly said, it seemed the panelists felt the public has become so disassociated from science, they do not understand what science is anymore.

“It’s this funny thing as a scientist, I can’t understand; once you have shown something to be flawed and fallacious, why that does not end the argument. Why it is that it can come back in a different a guise, and not be recognized for being the same thing in different clothing,” lamented SETI scientist Jill Tarter in an interview for Skeptical Inquirer.

As a consequence, many scientists think that American public policy no longer values scientific conclusions. Creationist hypotheses are shoved into public school textbooks, curricula, and standards. Anthropogenic global climate changes are poo-pooed as non-existent or the changed temperatures disregarded as a natural fluctuation in global temperatures. Under the banner of fairness, and in an unintentional display of ignorance, some factions of the general public demand that scientists address or teach controversies that do not exist in science. To seem equitable and just, the media often covers “both sides” of stories without explanation of the difference between the two; even if it creates a skewed perception of scientific consensus or lack thereof.

The continued devaluing of and misconceptions about science has big budgetary consequences in these hard financial times. Science programs (like those at universities), NASA and SETI are taking huge cuts; a fact that did not go unlamented at SETIcon and is a common complaint in scientific circles.

All scientific programs require public support, no matter their origin. Private groups like SETI Institute rely on philanthropic support as well as strategic partnerships, which rely on public funds. NASA, DARPA, public universities, and other governmental agencies rely on support from the general constituency to put pressure on legislators during budget time and to elect legislators who value science. Even private universities rely on funds from the public and their former students to fund research.

In SETI’s case, the lack of public support has had devastating consequences, especially in the case of their partnership with the University of California Berkeley to build a radio telescope array. Frank Drake, founder of SETI explained the scope of the problem, “The deal was, we [SETI Institute] would pay to build the telescope and they would provide operating funds. We paid $30 million dollars to build it. It’s built, it is there, and it works. About the time it was finished there was this big budget crunch at the State of California and it hit the university really hard. The end result was the funding to science parts at UC Berkeley was cut so much they said sorry, we can’t pay the operating costs of the telescope; sorry we can’t carry out our part of it, and they walked away. Here we have this telescope and no money to operate it. We spent $30 million dollars and we actually had to put it in hibernation; mothballed for about six months.”

The public is not withholding from taking sides or ponying up the cash to support a position in the struggle between science and pseudo-science. Creationist groups, UFO groups, homeopathic remedies, holistic healers, and other anti-scientific products and positions are raking in the cash while scientific programs atrophy and wither away. While science museums struggle to keep their doors open, creationist museums welcome throngs of believers. The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which presents a literal biblical view of the origins of the universe, cost about twenty-seven million dollars to build, about the same amount as SETI’s radio telescope array, and has not spent a day out of business. In fact, they have purchased property and raised another five million dollars to create a life sized Noah’s Arc in Williamstown, Kentucky. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine says Americans spend $34 million a year on alternative remedies. Even in these hard times, there is money to be had.

As previous administrations have demonstrated when they stunted stem cell research for religious reasons, it is not just financial support that scientists need. Dealing with the public perception of a body of research is a harsh reality. Even personal philanthropists have to deal with public pressures about their funding choices. A wave of unfavorable feelings from a powerful group can disrupt research. Panelists at SETIcon seemed to be trying to articulate the position that inspiration of the public and buy in by the average person is essential to success for scientists.

Jill Tarter observed, “The why in this case, part of the answer, is it’s [pseudo-science] well financed and it is difficult to deal with a well-financed campaign. We see that it’s growing. It’s not just denying evolution, we now see people denying climate change with the same strategies and tools by those folks who originally denied evolution. That is, there is a way to do things, if you want to swing public opinion. There’s a very well understood way to orchestrate, to market, to sell that. We see the climate deniers using the same principles, and tactics as evolution deniers.”

The SETIcon panelists unintentionally stumbled across something; the universal dependence of scientists on the public coupled with the public disassociation from science creates funding problems, financial devaluing of scientific research, and policies that ignore or actively dismiss scientific conclusions.

Why science has been isolated from the rest of society is not entirely clear. Even though scientific accomplishments have resulted in huge leaps in quality of life for many Americans, many do not associate one with the other. For example, even though Americans carry a cell phone and use computers, they may not make the connection to their electronics and quantum mechanics or know their microwave was developed at NASA or that research into vampire bats helped develop stroke medicine.

The wealth of advancements could make it challenging for an average person to keep up with how science affects them. It could be a lack of effort to make sure the effects of research on society are clear to the average American. It could be an active resistance to these ideas by highly organized, well-funded groups. It could be a perception, well-earned or not, that scientists are unfriendly snobs. It could be that civilians do not see or speak with scientists often enough because they a busy toiling in university workrooms and not on television. It is probably a combination of all of those things.

Creationists and anti-science religious groups learned a lesson long ago that the scientific community still has not figured out; it is the responsibility of the person who wants to influence the public’s perspectives to do the outreach. It must be done in a way that is interesting to the public, relevant to their lives, and captures their interest. There has to be a support structure for members of the public who want to be a prophet for ideas. It does not matter how many times science has proven itself in the past. Each person, every single one, requires convincing. Human beings do not have inborn ancestral knowledge, so each person needs to have the acorn of science planted in their brain. It may not be fair, but it is no less a reality than is evolution.

Every Sunday in church, creationist views are reinforced, the community provides emotional support for the idea, and teaches a new way to share the idea with other people. Anyone, no matter how poor, no matter how uneducated, no matter their profession, has a place at the table. The average person is encouraged to attend. Churches are masterful meme-spreading machines and they are exceptional at infecting average folks with their ideas. There is no scientific equivalent once someone leaves school—and sometimes not even when they are in school.

One of the most exclusionary aspects of modern science is the total lack of access for an average person. Much of science is reaching out to fields that require huge, expensive equipment that necessarily excludes most people from participation on a casual level or require a level of understanding that limits the people who are even capable of participating. The only opportunity for an average busy American to learn about research is when it is published in mainstream media outlets, which often get the details wrong. However, even if a person wanted to double check the results, when they are published, they are published in journals, locked away from average eyes without costly subscriptions.

The scientific community, skeptics, and science enthusiasts often get frustrated and stamp their feet at the ignorance of the public when the public assumes the media’s accounts are true and do not critically examine the whole story. Their frustrations resemble that of a human in an ape-ruled world yelling in dismay at a beachfront Statue of Liberty.

The public is instructed to read the actual results or reference the actual study. While it should be apparent that the media gets scientific stories wrong all the time, it is hardly the fault of the public for not knowing what they have no ability to learn because access to the information is expensive and many could not understand the information even if they could access it.

At the same time the scientific community is asking for support from the public or demanding they rely more on scientific research to make decisions, the public has less and less ability to understand or verify or even view what they are being asked to support. As a consequence, the busy general public is less inspired to support because of the huge rift between science and the average person.

At SETIcon, there was an echo of pleas from scientists of all disciplines and their enthusiasts to integrate the public into science. The SETI scientists wore bright yellow badges that said “Let’s Talk” to encourage people to ask questions of them. SETI staff described numerous citizen scientist projects, UC Berkeley representatives discussed how computers could be used to process data, and numerous websites to find galaxies or otherwise get involved with space exploration were explained. By engaging them in their research, many groups hope not only to make progress in research but to get enough buy in to ask for their money, or for their efforts to advocate for them to decision maker on their behalf. However, this is mostly just singing gospel to the converted.

One of the mistakes the scientific community has made has been seeking the support of the general public by organized and concerted efforts exclusively aimed at children, and to write off the adults in the general public. No one is saying that efforts to educate children are misplaced; however, the exclusivity is the problem. Children do not have money. Children do not vote. Generally, children do not raise children. It is rare for a child to start a campaign to influence perspectives and opinion away from science. It is extremely important to reach out to adults and advertise ideas to them.

Ariel Waldman, founder of www.spacehack.org, a website that gets average people involved in space exploration explains, “So much of the focus is around kids, and getting kids interested in science which is totally noble and I’m not critiquing it at all. It’s what a lot of people should be focusing on, but I think people who have grown up and chosen a different career are considered lost to science.”

No matter how uncomfortable, it must become an expectation of professional scientists to interact with the public in a way the public can comprehend. It is not another person’s responsibility to understandably explain a scientist’s positions to the public. It is downright irrational to presume that an average person will seek out an idea. The harsh reality is that scientific ideas, like all ideas, have to enter the public forum. Without champions, any idea will enter the waste bin—even if it is true. Scientists need to be expected to spend time presenting ideas to the people who ultimately decide the fate of their research.

“If I don my pure-scientist hat, I would say just send robots [into space]; I'll stay down here and get the data. But nobody's ever given a parade for a robot. Nobody's ever named a high school after a robot. So when I don my public-educator hat, I have to recognize the elements of exploration that excite people. It's not only the discoveries and the beautiful photos that come down from the heavens; it's the vicarious participation in discovery itself,” says Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and science communicator.

It is not demeaning to present ideas to people with less education. Until the general science education level comes up in the US, it may even require some background science education to present higher level ideas. This is no different than the expectations put on mechanics to articulate a problem in a way a non-gear-head can understand or doctors to explain medical procedures to patients. Scientists and their enthusiasts should be expected to present ideas with the same patience and articulation as any other profession that requires public understanding and assistance continue to stay in business.

Scientists also have to drop the two magisteria argument; the argument that science and religion answer different questions. They do not. Both science and religion state they are attempting to find the truth. Since the time of Galileo, it has been obvious that science invades the magisteria of religion and vice versa. If the science community does not have the courage to say that scientific methods of understanding are superior, the public will continue to devalue the conclusions of science.

There must also be a shift in the written communication between the two sides. Science writers have been used to dumb down research for too long. Writers need to not only convince the public of the value of science but write about the public in a way that interests or illuminates the scientifically-minded. If anything is clear, scientists need as much help to understand the public as the public needs to understand the scientific community.

Both the scientific community and the public as a whole need intermediaries who understand scientific advancements and why those advancements are important to the public, and who can also articulate both sides in a way that shows the advantages of both to each side. John Q. Public and the Ivory Tower will have to assign ambassadors between them. This will probably come in the form of articulate, accurate science writers who can reach out to the average reader, and public advocates who viciously defend science curricula and push for public policy based on scientific results.

Science and the public are like two sides of a zipper. Until they are used in tandem, neither side benefits. American culture sorely lacks ambassadors to pull the two together and forward. Worse though, both sides are only now starting to realize that they need the other to hold their pants up.

Creation Museum
http://creationmuseum.org/

SETIcon II had more than 800 attendees who ranged in age from tot to senior. Though it was primarily men of a fair complexion, there was a strong showing by women and some ethnic diversity as well. There was also a strong international showing as well. The convention attendees were scientists, engineers, science fiction writers, futurists, and average people interested in SETI. However, the group was unusually well educated in space exploration, a fact that became evident by the caliber of questions lobbed at the panelists.

SETIcon II was not a place for scientific lightweights. If brain power could be applied to the power grid, the conference might have been able to light up Los Angeles. A comprehensive level of understanding and knowledge of science in general, and space research specifically, was expected of everyone in attendance.

People without a strong grasp on the history of space exploration, NASA, and SETI may have found themselves as lost as a donkey in a calculus class. References were made to Voyager, DARPA, and ATA with the expectation that everyone had done their homework on international space exploration history. Terms like “exoplanet,” “extremophile,” and “EUs” were thrown around without explanation. It may have been frustrating for those on the back-end of the space science learning curve, but it was an opportunity to have in-depth, well-informed conversations and panels without having to resort to explanations that a sixth grader could comprehend.

Each panel allowed time for questions by the audience. Generally, the questions asked were well informed and interesting. It’s no surprise though. The audience was not filled with just space enthusiasts and SETI members. Scientists from NASA, the 100 Year Starship Project, other space agencies, universities, and research groups were in attendance and taking the opportunity to ask questions. There were surprisingly frank conversations about failures in research and public outreach.

Like all conferences, there were a few nuts as well. Well-meaning and seemingly well-adjusted people offered their evidence for visiting aliens and UFO’s in conversation between sessions. Discussions of medieval carvings that depict alien invasion and personal experience were quietly whispered to friendly ears. There was even a question about a planetary unconsciousness that left the panel squirming to find a polite way to answer. The nuts were sprinkles on the sundae that was SETIcon II.

The Conference

SETIcon II’s kickoff party on Friday evening was part update, part concert, and part art show. John Gertz, chairman of the SETI Institute Board of Trustees, updated the group about the happenings at SETI. He made a call to the participants to get involved by volunteering, raising money, participating in their open source programs, or starting Friends of SETI chapters in their towns. He was followed by SETI staff David Morrison, Edna DeVore, and Gerry Harp, each giving a brief message of welcome, an explanation of their positions, and how the group could help SETI.

To give the audience a brief explanation of the range of science done at SETI, a gaggle of staff scientists lined up to give lightning talks. Each of the talks lasted one minute or less and was on the topic of study of the scientist presenting. The presentations ranged from the study of ice on Europa (one of Jupiter’s moons) to the examination of extremophiles (organisms that live outside conditions expected to be life supporting) on Earth that are redefining the parameters of life and habitability.

Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons (NASA’s mission to Pluto) hyped the beauty of the private space flights. After an explanation of the different models of spacecraft currently being considered for private space travel Stern said, “I believe commercial space travel is where Star Trek begins.”

Former astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison gave a short talk and explained DARPA’s 100 Year Starship Project, a project to try to make human interstellar travel a reality in the next century. She explained a serious and obvious problem with our current technology: we just cannot go fast enough. Using our country as an analogy, if the Voyager probe launched from Santa Clara, California, in 1977, and New York City represents Alpha Centauri (one of our closest stars), it would have traveled one mile on its path by that scale. That distance makes interstellar travel using our current technology a real hassle.

The project seeks not only to overcome the technological challenges to traveling that far, but also how to sustain life on the planet and address any social or interpersonal issues that may arise. Dr. Jemison expressed hopes and understood the necessity that the problems are solved to make interstellar travel a reality be applied to Earth’s problems today.

Her presentation was followed by a sneak peek of “Shuttle 3D & The New Pioneers,” a documentary about the end of NASA’s shuttle program and the new world of privatized spaceflight with David Knight.

The kickoff was wrapped up with live music by the Kepler Mission Band and conversation that went late into the night.

The Panels

Saturday and Sunday were broken up into five tracks, with one hour-long session each. Each of the tracks had its own topic and panel. Three of the tracks had three to five panelists from a variety of different scientific disciplines. Many of the panels also had non-scientists, including linguists, web developers, and actors. Every panel had audience-driven question and answer time.

The others were the Media and the Fireside Chat tracks. The Media track ran video, sometimes with the filmmaker, and question and answer sessions. Each of the Fireside Chat sessions had two thirty minute interviews of one person of interest.

Note: The five tracks with five one-hour sessions per day meant there were nearly fifty different panel, media, and fireside offerings. Only one session will be covered per track. There is a link for each of the panelists mentioned at the end of the article. When choosing tracks, scientific panels always won out over science fiction or artist panels, so it is skewed that direction.

The Next Big Science Revolution

Moderator: Pierre Schwob
Panelists: Neil Jacobstein, Alex Filippenko, Ariel Waldman

The panelists were asked to predict the next big science revolution. It was no surprise that each had a take specific to their field. Jacobstein posited that artificial intelligence (AI) would be the next big revolution and that all science will come out of the larger processing power AI provides because the human brain has limited raw processing power. “AI provides a fulcrum [for] all areas of science,” said Jacobstein. Waldman thought it would be the rise of citizen scientists and the decrease in cost of space travel. Waldman asked, “What will you do when space exploration is as cheap as the web?” Filippenko thought it would be advances in our understanding of dark energy and dark matter.

The panel was asked by an audience member how to inspire the public to support scientific endeavors. Jacobstein emphatically insisted that scientific illiteracy has been tolerated for too long and should, “be eradicated like small pox.” Waldman said science needs to communicate with, and reach out to other industries and non-scientists. Fillippenko suggested that a literal “buy-in” would be helpful to get people interested.

Other audience member questions covered: the percentage of dark matter in the universe; how the Higgs Boson Particle will change physics; dark energy and whether or not it can be harnessed; what could be a Sputnik-like event in our future; what assumptions will be broken down in the future; the next generation of science standards; and the possible consequences of finding a signal from ET.

Doomsday 2012

Moderator: Edna DeVore
Panelists: Seth Shostak, Andrew Fraknoi, Leonard Mlodinow, Dave Morrison

The panelists were asked what role they thought the internet played into the spread of the 2012 Doomsday myth. Mlodinow explained that belief in the irrational is hardly a new phenomenon. He cited religion and cults as examples. He explained that 2012 believers are just early adopters. Morrison’s idea was that the internet lacks referees on the truth and that young people do not know how to tell fact from crap.

All Aboard the 100 Year Starship

Moderator: Adrian Brown
Panelists: Mae Jemison, Richard Rhodes, Dana Backman, Bill Nye

Mae Jemison gave a brief explanation of the 100 Year Starship Project before the panel started to address the problems that would need to be overcome before interstellar travel would or could become a reality. Rhodes saw a number of hurdles to overcome, including propulsion technology, politics, and what would happen if we came across AI before organic life. Jemison pulled Richard Obousy out of the audience to discuss the problems with using chemical propulsion for interstellar travel. Nye thought the considerations of the human need for gravity and temperature control would be essential. Another concern he brought up was how best to assure people get along on such a long trip in such a small space. Backman encouraged the audience to consider how many people were absolutely necessary to start a new population and cited the entire indigenous American population started with about seventy people.

An audience member asked if human beings should consider not embarking on such an endeavor because of their negative qualities. Rhodes brought up the example that when Australians went to New Guinea they brought law with them, greatly reducing the murder rate in New Guinea. (He seems to have missed the fact that the residents of New Guinea were not another species and were in fact human beings.) Jemison encouraged everyone to think past European values. Nye asked the audience to consider what it means to humans to not explore.

Other questions included inquiries into why DARPA was funding it, if art was considered important to the human way of life, and what would or should happen to humans born off world who want to rejoin Earth societies.

The Race to Find Alien Life

Moderator: Cynthia B. Phillips
Panelists: Robert Picardo, Richard Quinn, Scott Hubbard, David Summers

The panel offered their ideas about the method, manner, and place that would provide the best opportunity to find and detect alien life. Summers thought it would behoove us to first come up with a definition for life. After defining it, it would be a combination of methods, probably indirect methods like chemical analysis and remote sensing machines that would confirm extraterrestrial life. Hubbard, a self-described recovering bureaucrat, thinks that missions to Mars focused on following the water as well as a trip to Jupiter’s moon Europa may be promising locations. If those don’t work, the Kepler mission has provided over 2,000 planetary candidates, some of which are Earth sized and in an inhabitable zone. Quinn reminded the audience that the useful information we can gather is limited by our senses. Picardo wondered if we met our first aliens and they were not humanoid, or had a different size scale, or varied too much from what we already understand as life, if we would recognize them as life.

An audience member asked the panel if it is possible that life on Earth started on another planet in the solar system and was transplanted to earth. Hubbard explained that, “the planets have been trading bodily fluids for some time,” implying that comets and debris go from world to world and if life was on one of them, it could have “seeded” the Earth. Summers said it was a possibility that could not be ruled out, but after applying Occam’s razor, it was of lesser probability than life just evolving on Earth. Quinn hopes for separate biogenesis because it would be more interesting. Phillips thinks Europa is too far away for a single biogenesis to account for life—if indeed it even exists/existed.

Other questions asked: how to protect ourselves from aliens; non-organic or atypical alien life detection; which instruments would be used in a search for life on Europa; the prospects for liquid water on Mars; how to popularize the search for extra-terrestrial life; and problems with entertainment skewing expectations of science—specifically the high number of the public who believes that we have already found alien life.

Did the Big Bang Require a Divine Spark?

Moderator: Pierre Schwob
Panelists: Alex Filippenko, Seth Shostak, Richard Rhodes, Marc Okrand

Schwob asked the panel their thoughts on the question; did the Big Bang require a divine spark? Unfortunately, most of the panel avoided answering the question directly and started a half-hearted intellectual tap dance. Schwob, the moderator, opened the conversation with a declaration of his agnosticism but then asked the panel for their input. Shostak told jokes and self-deprecating comments before asking the audience, “If aliens also had religion, it might be evidence for a deity.” It was unclear if this was an attempt to force the audience to think about religion differently or a sincere question. Given the history of his podcast, Big Picture Science, it is likely that it was joke. Rhodes, once a seminary student, recounted his personal story of violence, how he turned to the church, but felt lost. Okrand, a linguist, discussed the parallels between the origin of language and religion. Filippenko said that he did not think religion is a scientific question and is thus outside the laws of physics. He believes that these questions fan flames between religion and science that “we have tried to douse.”

Schwob used his privilege as the moderator to ask a question about the multiverse hypothesis. After an explanation of multiverse hypothesis, Filippenko said, “I love the multiverse hypothesis but I have no proof.” Later he continued, “[We] can’t prove their existence but we can’t disprove their existence. They would have to interact to know they are there.” Shostak offered, “If this is the only universe, then is that a thumbs up for god?”

Other questions fielded by the panel included if the universal constants change, if the Klingon language required religion, if logic is axiomatic to the universe or made up by humans, if SETI finds an all-powerful alien race, would SETI be a religion, how we talk about concepts we can’t think about, how to hit on a Klingon (a good snarl), and if the reason we have something instead of nothing is because nothing is unstable.

Do Any Exoplanets Have Intelligent Occupants?

Moderator: Gerry Harp
Panelists: Jon M. Jenkins, Jill Tarter, Margaret “Maggie” Turnbull, Dan Werthimer

Werthimer enthusiastically shared his belief that life would be found in primitive form (bacteria or other microorganisms) on planets with water, but thought that radios or lasers may not be the way to find them. Turnbull reminded the panel and the audience that there is no good definition of life or intelligence yet and that that is a major hurdle to overcome. Jenkins thinks the Kepler mission’s results are promising but the next 50-100 years will be huge for identifying planets that may be habitable. Tarter thinks that we cannot understand biology until we find another example. She said, “We don’t know what is necessary and what is contingent.”

The panel was made up of SETI researchers and NASA scientists, so there were few surprise answers to any question, but the lively debate between the scientists about terms and presumptions was enlightening into how little is known or agreed upon in extraterrestrial research. It seemed whenever a scientist would assert something about the nature or qualities of life, they would be reminded that we only have one sample and it is impossible to draw conclusions about life as a whole from one sample. Turnbull was adamant that the categories of organic and inorganic could be oversimplifications, and that the process to biogenesis could be more nuanced than two stages. She thinks we have reason to believe that there was an intermediate step, or steps, between the two.

The audience’s questions were diverse and included: the likelihood that Earthlings are the first intelligent life in the universe; a question about if we should send out signals; non-planet places that could have life; if there is a planetary consciousness; and Dyson Spheres.

Fireside Chat with Mark Okrand and Debra Ann Fischer

Interviewers: Andrian Brown and Franck Marchis

Andrian Brown interviewed Mark Okrand on his body of work as a linguist, which includes inventing the Vulcan and Klingon languages for Star Trek. Okrand recounted how a serendipitous lunch with a friend in Hollywood landed him the job developing Vulcan for Star Trek. However, not all of his linguistic knowledge goes into made up languages. He also worked on reconstructing the Native American language of Mutsun, a dialect of the Ohlone people who inhabited the San Francisco area. He also worked on the first live closed-captioning for television.

Okrand dove into his influences, the way the Klingon written language was developed, and how spoken Klingon developed. He also explained why he left out what he intentionally left out of the Klingon dictionary. For example, he did not include geographical places in the Klingon home world so as not to hamper the writers of Star Trek.

Debra Ann Fischer answered questions by Franck Marchis about her research into exoplanets. She explained the limitations of current technology’s precision and the effects of having to share space with scientists in a different field. She conveyed to the audience how radically views of what is possible in the universe has changed in recent years. Kepler is finding more planet candidates, some of which are found in places where it was previously thought they could not exist, like binary star systems.

Fischer emphatically encouraged citizen scientists to get involved with planetary discovery. Using www.planethunters.org, a citizen scientist can review Kepler data in a user friendly format and help find planets and get credit for their discoveries.

Citizen Science – Can Science Harness the Power of 6 Billion People?

Moderator: Dane Glasgow
Panelists: Debra Ann Fischer, Jon Richards, Alex Hall, Dan Werthimer, Ariel Waldman

Glasgow let panelists explain their citizen science projects. Fischer told the audience about planethunters.org, a website that lets citizen scientists review Kepler data to find planets. Werthimer outlined SETI@home, a processor-sharing program installed on computers to run as a screen saver and analyze data. In it, participants get points for their use, and get credit for the discoveries made while using their computer. Richards explained SETIlive.org which, using a simple interface, allows citizen scientists to review data that might otherwise be ignored. Waldman shared information about spacehack.org, a website that acts as a repository for citizen space science projects.

In the discussion there was some conversation about some failures of citizen science, including SETIquest. SETIquest is an open-source project which required more maintenance than people at SETI anticipated and eventually became more of a hassle than it was useful.

The crowd was both excited to help in space research and apprehensive of its potential for failure. The panelists were asked about their biggest challenges, the actual value of crowd sourcing, about websites for particular space research, solutions for sharing problems, how to motivate people to participate, and how to inspire collaboration.

The Magnificence and Majesty of the Outer Solar System

Moderator: Rob French
Panelists: Cynthia B. Philips, Mark R. Showalter, Charles Lindsay

Philips and Showalter dug into NASA’s photo albums and presented some spectacular views of the outer planets. There was no shortage of good-natured ribbing between the two scientists about their chosen disciplines. Between the silliness of Philips’s mantra “geology is better,” and Showalter’s “nuh-uh, rings rock” was a collection of visuals that helped define scale, color, and topography of not only planets, but also their moons.

During the question and answer section, Showalter and Philips answered questions about why Neptune’s axis is sideways with respect to the other planets, how long the rings have been around some of the planets, their biggest surprises as scientists, and why there are spokes on the rings of Saturn.

What is the Future of the Allen Telescope Array?

Moderator: John Gertz
Panelists: Jack Welch, Jill Tarter, Gerry Harp

The Allen Telescope Array, located in Hat Creek, California, sports forty-two relatively small radio telescopes that, when working together, equal the sensitivity of a much larger telescope at less cost. The array has been victim of promises not kept and budget cuts, having spent several months in hibernation while new funding was secured.

Moderator Gertz seized the opportunity to mention a few ways that individuals could give money. Tarter explained that the antennas are currently shared with the Air Force. She hopes the array will expand into over 300 telescopes, as was previously planned. She would like to see an array in the southern hemisphere, maybe Australia, because it has a better view of the center of the galaxy. Harp had some technical changes he would like to make. Welsh developed a new receiver which greatly improves the telescopes’ receiving bandwidth and would like to see more antennas. Harp would like to improve the computers which are processing the information coming from the array.

The audience wanted to know how they could participate. Some suggested small, one-meter antennas in people’s backyards and others suggested other methods of fund raising.

The Buzz

In the halls and during breaks, there was much chatter about how to help SETI, and science in general. People buzzed with excitement, often telling other people about what they had heard and explaining how the listener’s special skills could be used. In the crowd were the panelists and scientists, encircled by enthusiastic and inquisitive attendees grasping the opportunity to ask questions. It is that connection that will serve SETI in the future, and what people will take away from SETIcon II.

References:

100 Year Starship Project
http://100yss.org/

Mae Jemison
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/jemison-mc.html

SETI Institute
http://www.seti.org/

Alan Stern
http://www.nasa.gov/about/highlights/stern_bio.html

New Horizons - NASA’s mission to Pluto
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html

“Shuttle 3D & The New Pioneers”
http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/1271537004/shuttle-3d-and-the-new-pioneers-an-amazing-film-pr/

David Knight
http://seticon.com/speaker/david-knight/

Pierre Schwob
http://www.seti.org/seti-institute/board-of-trustee/pierre-r-schwob

Neil Jacobstein
http://www.kurzweilai.net/singularity-university-appoints-neil-jacobstein-to-president

Alex Filippenko
http://astro.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/filippenko.html

Ariel Waldman
http://arielwaldman.com/

SETI videos
http://seticon.com/2012/seticon-session-available-on-dvd/

Adrian Brown
http://abrown.seti.org/

Richard Rhodes
http://www.richardrhodes.com/

Dana Backman
http://www.seti.org/users/dana-backman

Bill Nye
http://www.billnye.com/

Richard Obousy
http://www.richardobousyconsulting.com/

Robert Picardo
http://robertpicardo.com/

Richard Quinn
http://spacescience.arc.nasa.gov/staff/richard-quinn

Scott Hubbard
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2002/02images/hubbard/Hubbardpx.html

David Summers
http://spacescience.arc.nasa.gov/staff/david-summers

Cynthia B. Phillips
http://www.seti.org/users/cynthia-phillips

Europa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_%28moon%29

Kepler
http://kepler.nasa.gov/

multiverse hypothesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse

Higgs Boson Particle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson

Debra Ann Fisher
http://www.astro.yale.edu/people/debra-fischer

Jon Richards
http://www.seti.org/users/jon-richards

Alex Hall
http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/about/staff

Mark R. Showalter
http://www-star.stanford.edu/starlab_web_20030912/people/showalter.html

Charles Lindsay
http://www.charleslindsay.com/

Amid the towering ancient redwood trees and sequoias that dominate the landscape of Northern California is the small town of Willow Creek. Called the gateway to Bigfoot country, the starting point of The Bigfoot Scenic Byway, home of the Bigfoot Collection at the Willow Creek-China Flat Museum, and Bigfoot hotspot, Willow Creek is the home of the best evidence for the existence of Bigfoot ever collected. The existence of Bigfoot is still hotly debated, but Willow Creek is littered with clues to the existence of Bigfoot. Even the most skeptical needle peepers traveling on Northern California’s Highway 299 will be confronted by a most unexpected sight—Bigfoot, or at least inferential evidence of Bigfoot.

Willow Creek, a small mountain town in Humboldt County, has a population of about 1,700 people, and based on the services that seem geared toward human’s hairy cousin, nearly as many Bigfoots. Humboldt County is where the term “Big Foot” was coined, and is also where the most famous film of a Bigfoot was taken. Since logging slowed down, the town’s main industries are marijuana and Bigfoot. The approach to Willow Creek on Highway 299 is littered with Bigfoots and references to Bigfoot right along the highway.

Willow Creek is speckled with services that seem to infer the presence of Bigfoot. On Highway 299 there is a small motel exclusively for Bigfoots, the Bigfoot Motel. Just up the highway a couple of blocks, Ace Hardware has a mural facing the highway that depicts Bigfoot’s contribution to human society, starting before native American populations until present. Between the motel and the mural is a Patriot Gas station with a large Bigfoot statue, which seems to indicate a Bigfoot-friendly establishment. It is just a short jaunt from the gas station to Bigfoot Ave and the Bigfoot Golf Course. The visitors’ center has a carved Bigfoot right out front and hundreds of references to Bigfoot. The Early Bird restaurant has a Bigfoot Burger that is so ridiculously large it would be unreasonable for a single human being to eat one. The Del Loma RV Park has a huge Bigfoot with a fishing pole, beckoning them in to fish. The bewildering Bigfoot Rafting company is either a company that takes Bigfoot on rafting trips, or lets human beings ride a Bigfoot as a raft. There is even a Bigfoot podiatrist who makes house calls.

The most scientific-ish evidence confirming the existence of Bigfoot is kept in the small town museum. Nearly half of the small Willow Creek-China Flat Museum is dedicated to The Bigfoot Collection. The Bigfoot Collection is made up of local Bigfoot sightings, plaster casts, references to hunters, and mythology surrounding the creature. There are cryptozoological references to long extinct species, doctor’s notes, topographical maps, and artists renderings of Bigfoot.

Plaster casts of over twenty-five foot prints of various shapes, sizes, and clarity are kept in about a dozen display cases and are sure to make an impression. At about a foot long each, if they were laid out end to end, they would stretch almost all the way to the other side of a room. Disappointingly, almost all of the footprint casts are behind glass and about three feet above the ground, so to compare one’s own foot to any of the casts, one has to be willing to rip off their shoes and strike a ballerina pose. It makes understanding the scale challenging. There is even an extra bonus Bigfoot handprint, er, handblob cast.

The Bigfoot Collection is a bit follicle frenzied. There is a letter from Sterling Bunnell, MD, written on March 19, 1993, in which he explains that he cannot identify the hairs sent to him by a man named Darryl Owen. “I have examined the hair specimen you provided from Dalmatian Creek and by light microscopy under direct and transmitted illumination with human, chimpanzee, gorilla, orang [sic], and Pygathrix monkey hair. It is clearly related to the human-chimpanzee-ape group but is distinguishable from each of these.”

On the opposite side of the museum is a letter whose authorship is unclear in a plastic bag with black hairs. In it the author explains that he consulted a local taxidermist who said it was not bear hair and a zoologist who said it was bear hair. The author explained, “I personally don’t believe it is from a bear.”

Much of the museum is dedicated to the people who dedicated themselves to finding evidence of Bigfoot. Local hunters Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin, who filmed what is probably the most famous Bigfoot footage ever, are featured throughout the museum along with “Pioneer Bigfoot Investigator” Bob Titmus. There are pictures of them measuring, and then more pictures of them measuring, and a few more measuring pictures. There certainly is no shortage of evidence that Bigfoot investigators exist.

The crown jewel of the Bigfoot Collection is the diorama of Bigfoot in the wild. In it, a plastic Bigfoot is standing in a clearing, atop a ridge, surrounded by mountainous moss.

Willow Creek is a wooded Disneyland for skeptics. Fantasy abounds and there is a chance to come across giant hairy creatures—or at least across statues of them.

Bigfoot Hotel
http://www.bigfootmotel.com

Bigfoot Rafting
http://www.bigfootrafting.com/

Willow Creek – China Flat Museum
http://bigfootcountry.net/

More Willow Creek Bigfoot Pictures
http://bigfootbytheroadside.webs.com/

Bigfoot Podiatrist
http://www.bigfootpodiatry.net/podiatrist-eureka.html?sitemap

Bluff Creek Patterson Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28NjzVlUHuY

SkeptiCal, a one day conference billed as Northern California's science and skepticism conference, was host to more than 260 skeptics at the DoubleTree Hotel in Berkeley, California on April 21, 2012. The convention day was split between speakers giving talks to all the conference goers and two breakout sessions, each of which had three options. Lunch featured live entertainment and there was a live skeptic poetry reading between talks. Altogether, there were approximately fifteen speakers and entertainers.

Conference Speakers

Dr. Sarah Strand's talk, "The Neurobiology of Religious Experiences," offered an explanation of out-of-body experiences. Out-of-body experiences (OBE) were explained in most cases as having the following characteristics: peace and connection to the universe, sense of release from one's body, movement toward a bright light down a dark tunnel, and a vision of a deity or people from one's life. OBEs may occur when the part of the brain that connects the right and left parietal lobes—the angular gyrus—experiences an interruption in activity. The perception of the space of our bodies (where our bodies start and end) is controlled by the left parietal lobe. The right parietal lobe controls the perception of space outside our bodies (the space after our bodies end). When the connection between right and left parietal lobe is disrupted, we can no longer differentiate between our bodies and the surrounding space. As a consequence, a person can experience the sensation of floating. People who have OBEs do not universally interpret them as religious; such an experience could simply be the result of a physiological difference in the sensitivity of one part of their brains. When stimulated, people with high sensitivity in their right temporal lobe see or feel a presence in the room more often than those with low sensitivity. Religious believers and non-theists both experience a sensed presence, the feeling that there is someone or something in the room, during an OBE. Sensed presence may be the neurological exemplar of religious experience. To summarize, we need not look outside our own skulls to explain an out-of-body experience because the answer is between our ears.

(In a follow up e-mail, Dr. Strand graciously offered her e-mail address to Skeptical Inquirer readers who have further questions. Contact Dr. Strand at scstrand@gmail.com.)

"Homeopathy: How Does It Work?" QR code sticker

Jay Diamond, outspoken international skepticism activist and the founder of Reason4Reason and the 10:23 Campaign, gave an impassioned talk about how to advance skepticism publicly and facilitated acts of activism during his talk. The audience attempted to overdose on a homeopathic remedy for insomnia made primarily of coffee (and water, of course), each person taking approximately fifteen doses in a small cup. (There were no reported cases of death or persons falling asleep during the conference.) Diamond encouraged the audience to take a QR code sticker and put it on the shelves of stores that sell homeopathic remedies. He also led a twitter bombing of Pauley Perrette, who plays forensic scientist Abby Sciuto on NCIS, because she participated in an anti-bullying campaign with self-proclaimed psychic John Coffey.

Executive Director of Chabot Space and Science Center Alex Zwissler provided a light-hearted examination of the rational and irrational aspects of belief in his talk, "How Do We Know What to Believe." Zwissler combined important insights into the reason's behind people's choice to believe with disarming, witty slides—featuring such captions as "Stand back, there is science in this shit"—and stories of nuclear scientist climate change deniers. Zwissler even presented a belief equation: If A is true, then B and C must follow. In this equation, skeptics spend most of their time worrying about proving A but most people are more concerned about B and C. Before a lengthy and at times hilarious Q&A session, Zwissler left the audience with the question, "What beliefs would you be willing to change in order to get others to change their beliefs?" His talk in five words: Be smart and speak gently.

Television skeptic, world class soprano, and cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Indre Viskontas's talk "The Allure of Mystery: Why Debunking Falls Flat" outlined the value of story when trying to get people's attention and change their minds. Viskontas explained that people generally remember stories better than they remember facts. Specifically, if given a list of facts and a list of myths, after a short time people tend to misremember some of the myths as facts. An interesting aspect of her talk was a brief explanation on what skeptics often do wrong; in essence, Viskontas encouraged skeptics to employ storytelling when it is important to the speaker that the listeners remember the content or change their beliefs.

Dr. Alison Gopnik's eye-opening and adorable talk, "The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us about the Truth," offered some insight into our own minds by unveiling the minds of children and the value of immaturity to an intelligent species. Using a clever arrangement of Ping-Pong balls of two different colors, Gopnik's graduate students were able to ascertain that babies can do basic statistical reasoning by indicating when something unexpected happened. Children will override their experience for what they are told. Researchers gave children a strange toy that did several things and made various noises. When a child was asked to figure the toy out, the child would seek out its functions. If the child was told that one of the toy's functions was what that toy does, then the child would not seek out the toy's other functions. Succinctly: Hey teacher, leave them kids alone.

Mentalist and former James Randi Education Foundation Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge protocol tester Jonny Zavant showed off whimsical works of trickery and flimflammery with his assistant Caroline. The highlight of the performance was when we learned that "Roar is dinosaur for I love you."

Breakout Sessions

A note on breakout sessions: Since there were three going on at one time, it was not possible to attend them all. I attended two.

Morning Session

Not covered: "This Week in Science" Live Podcast by Dr. Kiki & Justin and "Extreme Weather: World Temperature Records" by Christopher C. Burt.

"Vaccinate Your Damn Kids" by Elyse Anders, the founder of the Women Thinking Free Foundation and Hug Me! I'm Vaccinated Campaign, encouraged people to vaccinate their kids. She addressed concerns of adult vaccination and arguments presented by anti-vaxxers, and participated in a lengthy question and answer session. In the back of the room, the City of Berkeley's Health Department offered free Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis/whooping cough) vaccines and Anders encouraged everyone whose vaccinations were out-of-date (or who thought they might be) to get vaccinated. Approximately 12% of conference goers did their part to keep up a strong herd immunity by getting vaccinated.

Afternoon Session

Not Covered: "This Year the World Will End—Or Will It?" by David Morrison and "Fear, Magic and Death: My Escape from Wooville" by Kernan Coleman.

In "Grassroots Skepticism" Brian Thompson, the Field Coordinator for the James Randi Educational Foundation, led a discussion about how to successfully start and maintain a group for skeptics. In it, he encouraged skeptics who want start a group to first see if other groups exist because it is easier to join or take over an existing dead group than to start a new one. Thompson advised a founder to consider the focus of the group: educational, social, activism, or all of the above. When an outsider wanders into a group, Thompson advised that skeptics go out of their way to be nice, like Mormons—whom he called "sneakily nice."

To Better Hear a Skeptic-Do You Have a Solution?

"Now in a class of twenty five, I have ten that are not vaccinated."
"I worry about my friends who think that using these remedies will treat them."
"How do we get people to stop believing in woo?"
"She is my hero."
"I get extra credit for being here."
"I wanted to meet like-minded people."
"My family does not know I am skeptical of religion."
"Now they are saying that vaccines have parts of aborted fetuses in them."

In the hallway between talks; in the seats while waiting for a speaker to get started; and during the question and answer section of a presentation, a careful observer could see what conventioneers were hoping to get out of SkeptiCal 2012: satisfying and practical solutions. For many, advice was needed to address pressing and frustrating concerns. Others' reasons were as personal as meeting a hero or getting a better grade. The specific issues that brought conventioneers to SkeptiCal were nearly as diverse and numerous as the convention-goers themselves; yet almost every question and conversation could be whittled down to "I have a problem. Do you have a solution?"

During Anders's talk, often exasperated and obviously extremely concerned people who feared the consequences of not finding a solution posed questions to her. A teacher from California's Central Valley—a generally poorer and more conservative area in California—explained the changes in her classroom to the group during the question and answer portion of Anders's talk.

"Ten years ago, I only had one child who was not vaccinated in my class. They were a Christian Scientist or something. Now in a class of twenty five, I have ten that are not vaccinated."

The teacher went on to explain that her friends and the parents of her students alike flood her inbox with e-mails that contain pseudo-scientific and fear-mongering information about vaccines. She reported that these concerns keep changing: first, parents were concerned that their children would develop autism due to mercury poisoning from thimerosal; then they were worried that their children were receiving too many medications at once; then the fear was of toxins; and now a rumor that vaccinations are made of parts of aborted fetuses is frightening a new population of poor religious conservatives into refusing to vaccinate their children.

Even after sitting down with parents and explaining vaccines, this teacher could not persuade them to vaccinate their children. Several disappointing attempts to set them straight failed and she did not know how to effectively convey the safety of vaccines to them.

Anders replied, "We can say the Lancet retracted the 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield that showed a connection between vaccines and autism. They don't care about that. When I went to get my child vaccinated, I had a moment of terror and thought-what if I'm wrong? And I know better."

Audience members chimed in with advice on how to send information to the worried parents, ideas on how to combat the parents' emotional concerns, along with words of support. Helpful websites—including http://www.hugmeimvaccinated.org—were also discussed.

Sheldon Helms, psychology professor at Ohlone College, Bay Area Skeptics Board Member, and SkeptiCal 2012 event planner, wanted to inspire his students to attend science and psychology talks they might not see elsewhere. (One of his many hats is adviser to Ohlone's psychology club.)

"The majority of my students who came to SkeptiCal were members of the Ohlone College Psychology Club," said Helms. "They were very excited about the fact that the conference had so many topics related to psychology and social science in general, and voted to use club funds to pay for their registration as a field trip. I offered my other students extra credit to encourage them to attend, and many did so. I would estimate that about thirty of my students attended, and at least seventeen of those were Psychology Club members."

In a follow up e-mail about the conference, Helms explained the impact the conference had on his students: "I have no doubt that my students benefited from being at SkeptiCal. … After returning to my classes, my students who attended were abuzz with excitement about the speakers they heard, the people they met, and the camaraderie they felt being there."

It probably comes as no surprise that after a desire to learn something new, fellowship and camaraderie may be the single most sought-after aspect of SkeptiCal 2012. Being a skeptic can be lonely and isolating; outside of online communities, it can be hard to find a supportive ear. Skepticism often puts the skeptic at odds with the harmful yet deeply-held personally-identifying beliefs (e.g., I am a healer because I do reiki) of otherwise decent people. Many skeptics feel an obligation to engage woo because of its potential harms. Even those who do not actively engage it may find their personal value of rational thought or admiration of science attacked, dismissed, or devalued, even by their families.

Numerous people who were interviewed refused to give their names out of fear that their loved ones would find out they are skeptical. Some had family members and friends who celebrated woo, while others who had become extremely skeptical of religion feared being disowned if their skepticism became public knowledge. Some expressed a frustration at finding a skeptical or skeptic-friendly romantic partner.

In his talk, Brian Thompson asked the crowd why they were in a group or why their skeptical groups started. The overwhelming answer was that people were lonely and wanted to find like-minded people. Thompson summarized their answers: loneliness.

A perceived failure to live up to a duty to protect, a feeling of inadequate persuasive arsenal to attack these ideas effectively (how do we convince people to stop believing in woo), fear, and isolation create a frustrated, marginalized, and often lonely population needing to connect with others of a like mind for emotional recharging and idea exchange.It is no surprise that so many conversations at the conference revolved around meeting other skeptics, having a friendly ear to bounce ideas off of, and trying to develop ideas with people supportive of and familiar with the scientific thought process.

Eddie Scott Horsfall performed skeptic-inspired songs during the lunch break for the crowd, but his reason for coming was not solely musical. "I want a sense of community, and to be around like-minded people."

Horsfall was seeking other people who shared the sentiment that "The universe we live in is explainable and understandable through science and that's awesome!"

Similarly, Helms wanted to show his students a community of people who value critical thought:

...the impetus for encouraging them to attend was to expose them to information about psychology, other sciences, and critical thinking in general. Equally important, however, was that they do this in an atmosphere where they would be surrounded by like-minded people who are also interested in those topics. We live in a world that openly discourages critical thinking and that, all too often, disparages those who seek an education. One of the best antidotes to that negativity is to gather together with others who think like you do, and whose behavior sends the message that it's not only okay to be interested in science, but actually cool.

We might take away from SkeptiCal 2012 that in order to persuade people to re-examine their beliefs, it is necessary to tell a story that illustrates the facts without confusing the audience with comparisons to untruths—in other words, stories that convey realities without explicitly outlining them. Once minds turn to skepticism and are convinced of their mistakes in method of thought or belief, their irrational needs do not evaporate. Open skepticism is often adversarial and heated; its products bounce off of closed minds more often than they seep into open ones. Skeptics may grow thicker skins, use more energy in thought, and seek truth before good feeling, but skepticism is not immunity to feeling the sting of failure, the pain of rejection, and or the burden of worry. Skeptics, just like everyone else, need support, camaraderie, and acceptance.

The answer may be to follow Brian Thompson's advice to be sneakily nice—most of the time.

Links

SkeptiCal 2012: http://www.skepticalcon.org/

Sarah Strand: http://sites.google.com/site/strandpsychology/about-me

Jay Diamond: https://twitter.com/#!/jaydiamond

Reason4Reason: http://reason4reason.org/

10:23 Campaign: http://www.1023.org.uk/

Pauley Perrette: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauley_Perrette

Chip Coffey: http://www.chipcoffey.com/

Alex Zwissler: https://twitter.com/#!/alexzwissler

Chabot Space and Science Center: http://www.chabotspace.org/index.htm

Indre Viskontas: http://www.indreviskontas.com/

Alison Gopnik: http://www.alisongopnik.com/

This Week in Science Live Podcast: http://www.twis.org/

Brian Thompson: http://www.amateurscientist.org/

Sheldon Helms: http://www.ohlone.edu/people/shelms/

On August 3, 2011, a live panel discussion about the predicted upcoming human-technology merger known as the Singularity and the content of the movie Transcendent Man, called Transcendent Man Live: a Conversation about the Future, was telecast to theaters all over the country. A mixed bag of content, Transcendent Man Live: a Conversation about the Future perfectly illuminated the problem with discussing science in America in general: it seems we cannot just have a conversation about science; we have to include nonsense from all sides in the name of fairness, to “teach the controversy.”

On the panel were Ray Kurzweil, inventor and futurist; Barry Ptolemy, director and producer; Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple; Michio Kaku, physicist and television host; Tan Le, technology entrepreneur; Dean Kamen, inventor; and Deepak Chopra, doctor and spiritual leader. It was hosted and moderated by Ellen Ratner and Alan Colmes, both of Fox News. There were several celebrity cameos including Al Gore and Suzanne Somers.

Some background: In 2009, Transcendent Man was released. In it, Ray Kurzweil tries to convince the audience that in the near future humans will merge with machines and we may even stop aging. It is this potential merger, which Kurzweil calls the Singularity, that the panel discussed in Transcendent Man Live: a Conversation about the Future.

The first few minutes of the telecast were a tribute to Ray Kurzweil and his accomplishments—a credibility reel to give the audience a reason to consider his point of view. Then Kurzweil explained his theory of the Singularity and the importance of exponential thinking to the audience. He explained that when people were on the savannah, they had to think laterally because of their surroundings. For example, a lion will not run at an exponential rate.

Kurzweil outlined his proof that lateral development (one innovation at a time) is not how information technology evolves and it is not the way to think of it in the future. It is because of this exponential growth of information technology that he believes nanotechnology, innovations in genetics, and robotics—including artificial intelligence—will be a billion times more powerful in twenty years than they are now. When this happens it will allow us to merge ourselves with our machines and allow machines to merge with us.

Essentially, the Singularity will occur when we know enough to repair our genetic flaws (including aging) and have machines small enough to enter our body to do the repairing as well as increase our intelligence.

The panel, an eclectic collection of people and professions, was a mixed bag. Some offered exquisite moments of mind-changing insight; others made insipid, excruciating, forehead-slapping remarks. It reminded me of the last time I had a bag of Jelly Belly’s Every Flavor Beans. When sampling from a bag of Every Flavor Beans, one is almost as likely to get a disgusting Vomit Bean as a delicious Juicy Pear Bean. Every time I get a bean that tastes good, it is a half-hearted victory because I know it has raised the probability that I will soon be sucking on an Earwax Bean.

When discussing why people should not fear becoming merged with machines, Kurzweil explained the human physical condition in a way that I had never heard before. It was both accurate and poetic. He said that humans are not their bodies because our bodies are renewed every seven years with new cells. Instead we are more like the shape of water as it goes over rocks in a river—not the water, not the rocks, but the shape. In the context of the discussion, it was a beautiful metaphor that rearranged my understanding of self.

As soon as Kurzweil earned some credibility in my mind, he then threw it in a dumpster with a ridiculous endorsement of notorious-to-the-skeptical-community Suzanne Somers and her plan for a healthy life. For those readers not in the know, Somers decided not to get cancer treatment in place of “natural” options. Now she is seen by some, including Kurzweil, as a mogul for staying healthy. Her plans include bioidentical hormones, whole foods (unless you want to buy her processed food instead), and various other dietary supplements and vitamins.

It is hard for me to take Kurzweil seriously on matters of the future of science and development when he throws his hat behind an advocate of faith-based healing (for which there is no evidence of success) such as Somers.

Listening to the panelists was like playing a terrible television game show. Every question was an opportunity to look behind another curtain. Just as in game shows, sometimes a point was made that was so valuable to the discussion that a member of the audience should have jumped up and down as if a prize had been revealed. Other times, panelists gave an attention- and credibility-sapping donkey of an answer.

In fact, from the beginning, it was obvious there was going to be a real problem with the discussion. Everyone on the panel and the hosts were there in person except Deepak Chopra, who was telecast onto a television in the room. Worse, the television was set in the exact middle of the panel on a pedestal, making Chopra look like a revered, disembodied floating head. It resembled a makeshift altar to Chopra, even if only in impression.

As far as I am concerned, when you put Deepak Chopra on a panel to discuss scientific revolutions, the discredit is done. No matter how credible the other persons on the panel may be, good manners dictate that they not treat a religious representative or resident dullard with the condescending or dismissive tone deserved.

Except for one exchange between Michio Kaku and Chopra about quantum physics in which Kaku lost his cool and put Chopra in his place, good manners won out over scientific inquiry and debate. Much to my disappointment, even though the panel members were often displaying physical signs of disgust, outwardly they treated Chopra as if he had an equally valid point of view.

Worse, Chopra demanded attention. He felt the need to address every single question even when other members of the panel had barely spoken and had more requisite knowledge to give an accurate answer. Had I not been carefully listening so I could write this review, I would have just checked out during his vocal expressions of intellectual vomit.

The moderators were extremely frustrating. It was obvious that neither has a background in science journalism. Ellen Ratner seemed ill prepared to cover the topic and the nature of her questions led me to believe she did not really understand what was going on. Alan Colmes had a bit of a better grasp, but he made jokes that could most generously be described as common. The most insightful remarks that came from the panel emerged when the discussion drifted slightly off the topic. Even still, there was a question about God that seemed misplaced and brought out the worst in almost everyone on the panel.

The problems aside, I really did gain valuable perspective about the Singularity, as well as some new orientations to consider about merging ourselves with machines. Frustration aside, Transcendent Man Live: a Conversation about the Future was worth watching for those few diamonds in the rough. If nothing else, it was an excellent way to exercise critical thinking.

I think I would have enjoyed it more at home with a group of friends, engaged in conversation about what was said instead of sitting silent in a theater. If or when Transcendent Man Live: a Conversation about the Future is released on DVD, I will do just that. I suggest the same for the readers of this review.

Further Reading:

Suzanne Somers Cancer Controversy: http://articles.cnn.com/2009-10-24/opinion/commentary.brawley.cancer.treatment_1_alternative-and-complementary-medicine-medical-peers-therapies?_s=PM:OPINION

The Past is Now

Nostalgia for the Light is a documentary about time and how it is experienced cosmically and personally, as shown through one small region of Chile. Mind-opening and perspective-changing, Nostalgia for the Light brings the recent and distant pasts so close together, it is almost as if the filmmaker could bend time so the beginning of the universe was flowing into now.

Nostalgia for the Light is a series of interviews of experts in different fields about the study of the past in the high-altitude, extremely arid Atacama Desert in Chile. The desert has no living things in it except human beings. The air is thin and extremely clear. For generations it has been a transit route. During the reign of Pinochet, it was used to house concentration camps in abandoned mining camps and to bury the bodies of political prisoners. It is these conditions that draw people who study the past to converge in this hostile place. It is narrated in part by the director and writer Patricio Guzmán.

Nostalgia for the Light starts by explaining why people study the cosmic history of the universe in the Atacama Desert. It is asserted that the lack of moisture makes for the world’s best view of the stars—and one might be persuaded by the sheer number of observatories.

Astronomer Gaspar Calas speaks throughout the film about the cosmic perspective of the past. His insights in the beginning of the movie are attention-grabbing and require some thought to fully appreciate, but in a way that made me even more receptive to what else he had to offer. He gently opened my skull and dropped ideas in my brain, leaving a gap open for the people who came after.

After Calas, we meet Lautaro Núñez, an archeologist who takes us around the desert showing us the transit paths of llama shepherds of the past. He explains the people’s history of the desert. It is during discussions about the recent era (19th century) that we get the first hints into the problem of those who willfully forget or dismiss Chile’s past.

Vicky Saaveda, Violeta Berrios, and a few other women go through the Atacama Desert by hand with small shovels looking for the bodies of their dead loved ones who were taken during Pinochet’s rule. They wander, digging, hoping to find mass graves or the graves of individual people. During their digs, they often find small fragments of human bone blowing across the desert.

It is these little fragments of bone that tie the entire cosmic story together. Nostalgia for the Light is a painful mace that gives new meaning to Sagan’s quote, “We’re made of star-stuff.”

The slow pace of the film allows for time to process the depth of what is being offered, but at times it does drag. I was a bit bored of watching the observatory dome opening and closing or rolling around the tracks. It is not a film-killer though; some time is necessary to make the connections because Patricio Guzmán does not beat the viewer over the head with the themes—for which I am eternally grateful.

Nostalgia for the Light did not just give me insight into Chile or the Atacama Desert; it gave me new ways to think about time, what it means to live in the past, and if it is even possible to do anything else. It is full of thought-inspiring insights, comments, and themes. The use of cold factual perspective and warm emotion creates a choir of bells ringing a beautiful, haunting, strangely wonderful, and disturbing song.

Before this film, I had never simultaneously felt the sensation of soaring on the wings of wonderment and sinking into a tar pit of sadness. My heart was torn and sewn back together over and over again during Nostalgia for the Light. I cannot suggest Nostalgia for the Light highly enough for anyone interested in the effects of the past, historical or cosmic.