Science Conferences: Ideas from the Cutting Edge

Art: Conception of Future Lunar Visitors

Hopefully this will be a post-heavy couple of weeks. For one thing, I'd like to do a bit of catch up on topics I started examining here the blog, but did not fully explore (like writing retreats.) But more importantly I'd like to blog about the planetary science conference I am currently attending. I'm a day behind already, given travel schedules and whatnot, so it is time to get my fingers moving on the keyboard.

This meeting is one of the most important yearly conferences for the subject of planetary science and is attended by over a thousand people, including scientists, press, educators, writers, students, exhibitors, and much more. Since I fall into a number of these categories, such as scientist, educator, and writer, this conference is a great place to be. My main goal (after actually showing up for the science talk that has my name on it) is to plumb the meeting for ideas for science fiction writing. I've never approached this conference quite this way before, and I'm looking forward to the inevitable challenges. Particularly the challenge of thinking both as a scientist and as a fiction writer at the same time - which will hopefully make for an interesting post or two.

By the way, if you follow Twitter, you can check out Emily Lakdawalla's (Planetary Society) tweets of the conference here.

Pax

Image Credit: NASA
http://ipy.nasa.gov/multimedia/m000000/m000000/m000024/index.html