Jill Tarter reports on last month's SETIcon...

The weekend of August 13^th -15^th, was a big adventure for us at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, CA – we held our first ‘con’ event.  It was a little like throwing a party and wondering whether anyone would come, or maybe worrying whether thousands would show up dressed as space aliens!   Neither happened.  SETIcon-2010 was a wonderful mixture of science fiction and science fact – where the ‘science’ was a broad smorgasbord of topics relating to life elsewhere in the universe (including SETI) and in extreme environments here on Earth (all of which are studied by investigators at the SETI Institute), a debunking of pseudo-science staples, the joys of amateur astronomy, and behind-the-scenes creativity to depict the science of the future on small and large screens.  For those of the ~1000 attendees so-inclined, there was even music, dancing, and banqueting.  This year we celebrated the 50^th anniversary of the first SETI radio search and the 80^th birthday of Frank Drake (the original searcher), as well as the 25^th anniversary of the SETI Institute itself.  In future years we won’t have these milestones to commemorate, but everybody had such a good time, we’ll do it again anyway.

Mickey Hart showed us his music video ‘Rhythms of the Universe’ and the 18 Hz sub-woofers from Meyer Sound Labs resonated deep within us, as did the voiceover line ‘it’s us’.  This is a work in progress to be taken into 3-D and performed live on future big platforms, but Friday night’s audience reveled in an intimate conversation with Mickey himself.  Having been warmed up, many attendees then enjoyed a Rock Party hosted by the Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait – who knew he could do that!  If our summer interns had known, they would have recruited him for their setiGurls music video that they debuted to surprise us just before SETIcon.  The weekend was filled with panels and one-on-one Q&A opportunities with the local and visiting ‘talent’.  It was a special treat for all of us to hear Tim Russ (aka Tuvok from Star Trek: Voyager) talk about his passion for the night sky as an amateur astronomer, and to listen to Seth Shostak and Robert Sawyer trade one-liners, and to marvel at Rusty Schweickert and his job of trying to protect the planet from a trashing by near-Earth objects .  Trashed or not, one thing for sure – the audience loved planets!  Whether it was planets in our own solar system, planets that got demoted (Pluto), planets that never got formed (incoming asteroids), or planets orbiting other stars now being sought by the Kepler spacecraft and telescopes at Lick and Keck Observatories, it didn’t matter, the audience wanted more and was caught up in the quest to find the first Earth analog.  Stay tuned on that last point. For me, Saturday afternoon was a special treat as we held a special setiQuest Summit.  Three dozen leaders of successful open source and crowd source projects gathered to give their advice on how best to garden our setiQuest community in fulfillment of my TED wish.  They looked over our ambitious goals and offered their advice on prioritization, pitfalls to avoid, and a set of alternative plans for moving forward.  Best of all they identified themselves as part of that community and opted for future meetings with actions to be completed beforehand.  Houston, we have lift-off!  The world at large knows Scott Hubbard as the former NASA Ames Center Director, but Saturday night they got to discover his talents as a jazz musician, part of the warm-up act for the banquet honoring Frank Drake. Sunday continued the pace of presentations and participation, if anything the crowds were larger!  Biology and microbes of the extreme variety got to shine in the spotlight, as did the extreme real estate that might just turn out to be habitable in our own solar system. Educators, entertainers, and public speakers who struggle to overturn misperceptions and fears based on media hype, superstition, naive science, willfully bad science, and just plain greed, discussed ways to be more effective.   Their sad consensus is that it is getting harder every day, even as Hollywood and the National Science Foundation are forging a link to improve the scientific accuracy of the content of popular entertainment offerings. There were a number of lessons-learned from this first outing, to be applied to the next event.  The one that sticks in my mind is that we could have made our lively Saturday afternoon live-auction an even bigger success if we had kept a few of the items for offer after the wine and food of the evening banquet!  Yup, we’re newbies – I’m sure many of you could have told me that!

SETIcon will never replace TED.  Its topics are more constrained and its parallel sessions afford the audience a chance to get more up close and personal with the presenters and panelists, while forcing a choice of whom to cozy up with; as opposed to TED’s eclectic and heady offerings for everyone.  But like TED, SETIcon lets people expand their minds and contemplate how to participate and thereby become more than they were – always an idea worth spreading.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 30th, 2010 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Jill Tarter's Wish Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.