Aug 23, 2009
This week's podcast celebrates the start of the Ultimo Science
Festival - ten days and nights of science fun for families,
schools, and people of all ages. The festival is presented by the
Powerhouse Museum,
the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation, The University of
Technology Sydney and TAFE NSW. It runs mainly in the
Ultimo precinct near Central Station and Harris St - see the map on
Google maps here. Most events are free and held from Friday
August 21 through to Sunday August 30, 2009.
In this show, I chat to Festival Director Tilly
Boleyn about how the festival started, what to expect, and what
fun can be had. Some of the events we chatted about include
Why the
mind matters, The Dark Side of
Science, Mathematics and
Sex, The Science of
Cocktails, and The Science of
Coffee. I also chat to Jacqui Hayes
from Cosmos Magazine
about the Hello From Earth project. The
project collects text messages on its website to send to
Gliese 581d which is an exoplanet, or
extrasolar planet, which means it is in orbit around a star
other than the Sun. The Gliese 581 system is thought to be one of
the best candidates for life
outside our Solar System of the more than
350 systems with exoplanets so far discovered.
After message collection closes on Monday 24 August 2009 -
hurry!! - all the messages will be collected as a text file and
sent to NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, where it will be encoded into binary code. This
system of beeps and pauses will be sent back to the Canberra Deep Space Communication
Complex at Tidbinbilla, near Canberra. The signal will reach
the solar system of Gliese 581 around December 2029 having
travelled 20.3 light-years (192 trillion km). The soonest we could
hope to receive an answer is in 42 years time in 2051. For more on
the technical details, check out the Hello From Earth
homepage.