Conference on World Affairs

Overall Impression:

Andy Ihnatko

The only part of Andy's talk that I got was his mention of the Astronomy Picture of the Day as being a cool web site to check daily. "Every third word is linked." One time they linked the word 'the.'

Barbara Thompson

Barbara talked about how NASA has been able to provide us all with a humbling perspective of ourselves, life, and our planet. Nothing quite matches the view of the Blue Ball from space. [See www.powersoften.com for a very interesting perspective on this life of ours.] NASA also supports the entire space industry, providing technology for society. An example was a math algorithm being created for space telescopes that is now used to stabilize images in our video camcorders.

Seth Stoshak

Seth remains one of the most enjoyable "stream of consciousness" speakers I had heard. Instead of trying to make a coherent paragraph of what he talked about I will use a list.

• Tang and Velcro, most commonly associated with the space program, are not space program products. Tang, who knows, but Velcro came from those little burs/seeds that stick to your socks.
• One benefit is an increase of knowledge for you. [To kids that means more homework. To adults that is more cool things to know about.]
• NASA provides us all with sense of adventure. There is that unexplored frontier we can dream about.
• The space budget is only a small percentage of the Health, Education, and Welfare budget. Trimming it would not make much of a difference on starvation or education.
• Thing of space probes as little Pioneer Ants wandering around looking for new resources for us to exploit, er, use.
• NASA is the only government department that can provide us all with a true world view.
• From space we can view human effects vs. long term natural effects on our planet.
• NASA has an Institute for Advanced Concepts. They grant money for people to study wild ideas that have a small chance of succeeding. I believe his example was of a "space elevator." A big giant post that can be used lift payloads into space. Some guy thinks he can actually design and build one using "carbon nanotubes." Picture a 60,000 mile beanstalk.
• They should probably put more money into presentation of their findings. Some sort of infomercial so we can all understand what NASA does for us.

• From Barbara's talk she mentioned the problem of "well intentioned people, who don't understand an issue, splicing a costly rule on top of it."
• Science fiction motivates the scientists. There is a story about Babylon 5 having a vehicle that was used as the design basis for a low-gravity transport that NASA was building. [There is a design rule that says it takes five to six tries to get a quality product designed. It is kind of cool it you can do the first couple of prototypes in the fantasy realm.]
• Kids are consistently excited about two things, dinosaurs and space.