SETI & Shostak

The presentation by Shostak was very good. He speaks fast - words run together - he is quirky, sharp and surprising. No wonder Larry King seems to like him, and he has run two or three specials on Nova. He seems to put a lot of confidence in Artificial Intelligence, and apparently believes it will be the way we will make "contact" with other life. He indicated that would take place within the next 24 years, but apparently it will not be a give-and-take thing since the round-trip between comments will take enormous numbers of years. Part of his humor was reflected when he referred to the evolution of mankind being largely ". . . a genetic experiment being run by women".


During the question-and-answer period, I asked him what we needed to know about the "electric banana" and he obviously took great delight in explaining the story behind that. He also referred us to the http://www.seti.org/.


There were SETI things going on in downtown Hickory all day, and a lot of Klingon-ears were in evidence at the performance, as well as several "authentic" SETIs. The audience seemed to be a mixture of True Believers, college professors and students, members of the Catawba Valley Astronomy Club, and just curious people - probably about 80 in all. Afterwards there was a snack line, then a showing of the film "SETI" in the planetarium.





The Arts Center had several other presentations in progress, one of which was a photo exhibition of the high-speed work done by Harold Edgerton, an MIT professor who made photographs of playing cards being severed by bullets, with both severed parts of the card and the bullet still in the frame. Also droplets of water, and other amazing pictures of a world beyond normal comprehension. Great photos even today, but they were stunning when he made them back in the 1930s and 1940s. The exhibition had come from Wolfsberg in Austria to MIT in Boston, and on to the Art Center in Hickory where it had been for the past four months and Sunday night was the last night it was open here. It is permanently located in Wolfsberg, Austria. For more information, check out http://www.2fast4u.ipressl.at/