Guests

Mr. Bormanis is a writer and television producer, most recently for the ABC Studios series Legend of the Seeker.

In 2008, he was a writer and producer on the CBS / Warner Brothers television series Eleventh Hour, and in 2005, for the CBS / Paramount television series Threshold.  Prior to Threshold, he was a writer / producer for the Star Trek: Enterprise television series, and science consultant for Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and the Star Trek: The Next Generation feature film series.  He has written stories and teleplays for both Star Trek: Enterprise and Star Trek: Voyager, is the author of a book, Star Trek Science Logs, published by Pocket Books in February 1998, and a contributor to another book, New Worlds, New Civilizations, also published by Pocket Books.  He wrote the narration for Centered in the Universe, a planetarium show currently running at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.  Mr. Bormanis is also a consultant to The Planetary Society, the world’s largest non-profit space education organization, based in Pasadena, California.

In August, 1991, Mr. Bormanis was awarded a NASA Space Grant Fellowship to conduct research for the Space Policy Institute of the George Washington University in Washington, D.C.  He is co-author, with the Institute's director, Dr. John Logsdon, of "Emerging Policy Issues for Long-Term Human Space Exploration: Background Paper" and co-editor, also with John Logsdon, of Conference Proceedings: Emerging Policy Issues for Long-Term Human Space Exploration, both published in December, 1992, by the Space Policy Institute.  Mr. Bormanis has also written astronomy and space science articles for Ad Astra, The Colorado Plateau Journal, The Journal of Materials, The Planetary Report, Sky & Telescope, SkyWatch ’99, SkyWatch 2001, Space News, and Mercury magazine.

Mr. Bormanis received a B.S. in Physics from the University of Arizona in 1981, and an M.A. in Science, Technology, and Public Policy from the George Washington University in 1994.  He is also a classically-trained pianist and an avid photographer; his astronomical photographs have been published in the magazines Sky & Telescope, Astronomy, and Questar Observations.

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.

Dr. Adrian Brown is a planetary scientist working at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. His fields of research include Mars, astrobiology, and remote sensing spectroscopy - understanding the way light interacts with solid surfaces. He is interested in furthering our understanding of all aspects of the way electromagnetic waves interact with particulate surfaces (like snow or soils). His current research focuses on the analysis of data from the Mars instrument "CRISM" which is onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (Mister Oh), helping choose targets and analyzing data from the North and South Poles of Mars. He works with other researchers to study seasonal changes in the surface and atmosphere in the polar regions of Mars. The poles are the most dynamic regions on Mars and they may hold the history of past water on Mars. Brown also is the coordinator of the SETI Institute Seminar series - a weekly science talk from cutting edge researchers in the Northern California region - and is involved in the running of the Australian Space Prize, an annual prize for undergraduates who have completed an Honours thesis related to space in science or engineering.

Dr. Alexei Filippenko is a Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley whose research specialties include exploding stars, black holes, violent galaxies, and cosmology (the study of the universe as a whole).  The work of his group measuring the speed-up of the expansion of the universe (using exploding stars as milestones) was recognized as the “Science Breakthrough of the Year” in 1998 by Science magazine.  He has won a number of research prizes, including the Pierce Prize of the American Astronomical Society.  In addition to his research, Professor Filippenko is a very popular teacher, having been voted the “best professor at Berkeley” by a student poll several times.  His introductory courses have been recorded on video and audiotape by The Teaching Company.  The latest is entitled "Black Holes Explained."  He won the 2004 Carl Sagan Prize for excellence in science popularization in the Bay Area.

Ben is a co-founder of the Spaceward Foundation and a member of the Space Elevator community. An aerospace engineer by day, he dons the cape and mask of Space Elevator crusader by night, and engages in daring escapades such as running the $4,000,000 Space Elevator challenge, developing Carbon Nanotube technology, and attending ISEC board meetings.

... The Space Elevator is it. Mankind has outgrown its habitat, and most all modern-day ailments are simply symptoms of this fact. The only way to solve the underlying problem is to expand the habitat, and the Space Elevator is the only way to do that. Rockets can enable individual Space missions, but only a Space Elevator can enable a true expansions of civilization into space - a space-faring society that is currently only imaginable to science-fiction writers. Looking back from the year 2500, the construction of the Space Elevator will be considered the defining moment in history when the Space Age truely began, comparable in importance to the invention of the heat engine and the beginning of the Industrial Age.

As an engineer, there is no better occupation than this. As a person, there is no more significant a pursuit. The future is closer than it appears!

Ben serves on the board of directors of ISEC.

Dr. Cynthia Phillips is a planetary geologist at the SETI Institute. She has an undergraduate degree in Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Physics, from Harvard University, and a PhD in Planetary Science, with a minor in Geoscience, from the University of Arizona. Dr. Phillips specializes in processing images taken by robotic spacecraft of the planets and moons of our solar system, with a particular interest in the icy moons of the outer solar system such as Jupiter's moon Europa. Dr. Phillips also directs a number of educational programs at the SETI Institute, including the Research Experience for Undergraduates program that brings 15-20 college students from around the country to the Institute each summer for research internships. She is also a public speaker and the author of 15 books, including Space Exploration for Dummies, The Everything Einstein Book, and The Everything Astronomy book.

Dale Cruikshank is a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, where he specializes in determining the compositions and physical properties of small bodies in the outer Solar System. In this work he uses telescopes on Earth and in space. Cruikshank is especially interested in the ices and complex organic materials on the satellites of the giant planets, and icy bodies that lie beyond the orbit of Neptune. He got his Ph.D. at the University of Arizona in 1968, and has been with NASA for about 23 years. He is currently working on the Cassini mission at Saturn and the New Horizons mission that will fly by Pluto in July, 2015.