SETIcon

You know you've made it when your institution has its first "con." Such as it is with the S.E.T.I Institute in Mountain View, CA. SETIcon, as it is called, will be taking place in Santa Clara, CA on August 13-15 with a great line-up of speakers. I'm just hoping they will have a way to make a video record of the speakers available to those of us who are unable to attend. Just a few of the speakers on the agenda include former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, Jill Tarter the SETI Institute's director and inspiration for Jodie Foster's character in the film Contact, Isaac Asimov's daughter Robyn Asimov, and SETI Radio host Seth Shostak.

Though I knew of its existence in its early stages I didn't became acutely aware of S.E.T.I. and its work until I read Carl Sagan's first and only novel Contact. Once the movie premiered I was stunned at its profoundness and how it put our thinking on the possibility of extraterrestrial life in a context I had not considered: that of the vast distances involved in our stellar neighborhood and our isolated position relative to the rest of the stellar population in the Milky Way.

Now with the Internet community such as it is I am a devout follower of S.E.T.I.'s work and am able to stay up to date on the various projects and work taking place there. It will be fun to post about S.E.T.I. events and their work whenever something interesting comes along.

Let's hope one of those "events" will be the one that tells us we have a galactic "neighbor."

Chinese Media Wants To Believe

Recently a well publicized (well, on the Internet anyway) UFO sighting in China's Zhejiang provincial capital Hangzhou caused quite an international media stir (except here that is). The photographic and subsequent video record of the actual sighting aren't very convincing. I've seen to many video clips of old post cold war ICBM & lost derelict spy satellite boosters succumbing to Newtonian law and finally finding its way back to the insane world that launched them in secrecy no longer able to cling to their anonymity. The Hangzhou airport sighting actually looks pretty mundane in light of past clips of old spacecraft hardware giving up the ghost and de-orbiting to a fiery end.

I was just somewhat amused this event caused this much excitement with the weighty logical explanations on hand for what they obviously observed. Though I'm sure there's a little Fox Mulder in all of us when it comes to the possibilities of extraterrestial life. I reside quite comfortably in my skeptic's easy chair when it comes extraterrestrial visitations due to the distances involved and the resources needed to make the trip. As to the possibility of the existence of life as we define it outside the confines of our solar system I am definitely in that camp. This puts me in the S.E.T.I. school of thinking as opposed to the Roswell mindset and the expectations associated with that community.