Ed: This is an essay I wrote for my friends at the World Science Festival, riffing on the central themes of this years' event. If you prefer, you can also read this piece on the World Science Festival site. And, if you're in New York between the first and fifth of June, you could do much worse than popping into the Festival and getting a load of panel discussions like The Dark Side of the Universe, or Science & Story: The Art of Communicating Science Across All Media.
Science communication is difficult.
It can be crippled by the complexity of its own subject matter. It can be steeped in…
WSF
cevans | August 10, 2010
Greetings from the People of Earth from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
I made the above video, Greetings from the People of Earth, to open the World Science Festival 2010 panel "The Search for Life in the Universe," which featured personal hero Jill Tarter, David Charbonneau, and Steven Squyres.
In 1977, taking advantage of a fortuitous alignment of planets, NASA dispatched two spacecraft named Voyager into space. These probes, now the farthest human-made objects from Earth, carry with them a unique recording, the Voyager Golden Record. Compiled by a team under Dr. Carl Sagan, the Golden…