Guests Media

John Billingsley, best known for his role as Dr. Phlox on Star Trek Enterprise and who currently stars as Mike Spencer on True Blood, will be joining us for our 2012 panel. John played Professor West in the 2012 movie directed by Roland Emmerich and starring John Cusack and Amanda Peet.

John will share behind the scenes information and discuss what it was like working on the movie. The 2012 panel will also include leading scientists who will discuss the facts and myths behind the 2012 Mayan prophecies.

John Gertz is President of Zorro Productions Inc. which was incorporated in 1986. Zorro Productions controls the worldwide trademarks and copyrights of the name, visual likeness and the character of Zorro. John has been guiding the brand for over twenty years through major films, television, stage productions, publishing projects and promotions in addition to hundreds of licensed products. The brand is represented worldwide by over thirty-five licensing agents for all media and ancillary products. The latest stage production, Zorro, the Musical has been sweeping through European theatres with rave reviews. John’s been an amateur astronomer and lay student of astrophysics for over 25 years. In addition to the SETI Institute, he also serves as President of the Board, Berkeley Jewish Community Center.

Mary Roach is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. Her new book Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void debuts in August 2010. Stiff has been translated into 17 languages, and
Spook was a New York Times Notable Book of 2005. Bonk was chosen as a 2008 best book by the San Francisco Chronicle, the St. Louis-Post Dispatch, and the Boston Globe. Mary has written for Outside, National Geographic, Wired, New Scientist, The New York Times Magazine, and NPR's "All Things Considered," among many others. She
is the guest editor of the 2011 edition of Best American Science and Nature Writing, a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and a winner of the American Engineering Societies' Engineering Journalism Award, in a category for which, let's be honest, she was the sole entrant. More info at www.maryroach.net

SETIcon is happy to announce a special event has been added to the TeamSETI members only event on Friday. Mickey Hart from the Grateful Dead will preview "Rhythms of the Universe" from 8:00 PM - 9:00 PM. This event is free to anyone that is a TeamSETI member and a SETIcon ticket holder. Seating is limited so you must RSVP to ensure admittance to this very special event.

Be sure to RSVP and purchase your TeamSETI memberhip and SETIcon tickets!

• $85 SETIcon Weekend pass & TEAMSETI membership

Modern technology allows us to capture or imagine them – electric, atomic, magnetic, galactic – and gives us a way to translate these vibrations into sounds which we can hear. Our radio telescopes have recorded the song of the pulsar, our mathematicians have modeled the domain of the Big Bang. The Black Hole in the center of the galaxy Perseus is singing a steady note -57 octaves below middle C.

The SETI Institute’s Dr. Jill Tarter helped Mickey gather together the first 23 of these magnificent, even dangerous, space creatures, and he introduced them, one a night, as the Grateful Dead toured country in the spring of 2009.

After the tour, Mickey continued to gather data from diverse astrophysical sources and detectors, from supernova to cosmic microwaves to the Crab Nebula.  Optical spectra of two well studied supernovae, SN 2005gj and SN 2006d, came from the Nearby Supernova Factory, while the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) provided cosmic-microwave background data. Jackson used the MATLAB computing language to convert the supernova optical spectra into sound snippets 3 s long, with the frequency mapped into time. The chosen supernovae had interesting spectra with a number of spectral lines. These produced a deep background rumble punctuated by louder sounds from the lines. For example, the carbon excitation line at 630 Å produces a louder section about 1.5 s into the clip. For the WMAP data, the temperature–temperature autocorrelation data at different multipole moments played the role of time, while for the pulsars, Jackson stretched the data to form a snippet about 1 s long, and stacked five of these snippets in a row.

Rhythms of the Universe represents a collaboration between scientist and artist, using their own sophisticated tools. Nobel laureate George Smoot, from the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and Keith Jackson, a computer scientist and musician also from LBNL, are providing some of the data for the project. The final result will be a SONIC musical “history of the universe", from the Big Bang onwards through galaxy and star formation, up until modern times. Hart took over and used a MIDI interface to alter the sounds in a variety of ways – adjusting their pitch, adding reverb and/or echo, and adjusting their envelope. The sounds were divided into short segments and also mapped to a synthesizer, with the keyboard controlling the pitch. Sometimes, the sounds were layered on top of acoustic instruments, again merging science and art. The end result will be recorded in 5.1 surround sound using equipment from Meyer Sound.

Although the project is yet to be completed, Hart will present a preview of this magnificent work at SETIcon.

Paul Duffield is a comic book artist and illustrator, currently working as the artist on Freakangels, a post apocalyptic sci-fi comic written by Warren Ellis and published by Avatar Press. He has worked on Manga Shakespeare's The Tempest, the Best New Manga 2 compilation, as a cover artist on Anna Mercury, Absolution and Crossed, and on various illustration projects and self published comics. In 2005 he was awarded a BA in Illustration and Animation from Kingston University, and also received first place in Tokyopop's first Rising Stars of Manga UK competition. In 2006, he received grand prize in the International Anime and Manga (IMAF) festival for "Rolighed", an animated short produced during his time at Kingston University. Paul has always had a keen interest in Physics and Astronomy, fuelled by a love for science fiction. In 2009 he became a member of TeamSETI, and then donated artwork to the institute, which is now being used in conjunction with SETIcon. He is looking forward to attending the convention and seeing his two passions, art and science, meet.

Robert J. Sawyer is one of only seven writers in history to win all three of the science fiction field’s top awards for best novel of the year: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He frequently writes about SETI, including in the Hugo Award finalists Rollback and Factoring Humanity. The ABC TV series FlashForward is based on his novel of the same name. He has published in Science (guest editorial), Nature (fiction), and Sky & Telescope, was a participant in the workshop “The Future of Intelligence in the Cosmos” sponsored jointly by the NASA Ames Research Center and the SETI Institute, and was Guest of Honor at the first-contact conference CONTACT 4 Japan. His website is sfwriter.com.

Robyn Asimov, daughter of famed author and scientist Isaac Asimov, has degrees in psychology and clinical practice.  She has spent many years working at New York area hospitals and at the Mt. Sinai Medical Center.  She now spends her time managing the estate of her father, and is a health care consultant.  She brings to SETIcon singular insight into the life of one of science and science-fiction’s most luminous figures.

Tim Russ, best known for his role as Tuvok on Star Trek Voyager, is an amateur astronomer. Tim started out engaging in hands on amateur astronomy almost 17 years ago, when he would go out to areas with dark skies on his own. With his small newtonian telescope, Tim studied star charts learning the constellations and where objects in those constellations were located. Eventually Tim became proficient enough to locate many popular objects just from memory, and he still goes out several times a year with one of his four telescopes to view the stars.

Tim is excited to share his love of astronomy and to discuss in further detail his experiences as an amateur astronomer.