 When she's not writing about science and space, you might find her riding in a horse race. This astronomical doctor, it seems, spends her time jumping or bushes and streams on her horse. Named Ben, she's got a horse. And for some reason, his name is Ben. I'm going to bring her on out. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Pamela Gay. I'm speaking at a TAM. And every year I've worked to try and write a new talk that is relevant to what is going on in the moment that we're all gathered here talking and figuring out how to change the world that we live in. And I have to admit, I've really struggled to write the talk this year because we live in a time where it seems that everywhere we look, there are incredible positives and incredible negatives. And sometimes it seems that there's nothing but extremes. We saw a school bus driver bullied by out-of-control teens. But then the internet saw this and became enraged and worked to get this woman a vacation. But they instead completely changed her life. And this was awesome. We saw a New York fifth grader forbidden from giving his award-winning essay on same-sex marriage, an essay that said, who are we to judge? We must learn to accept all differences. Well, he was judged by a closed-minded principle. But then, in response to massive internet outcry at this act of censorship, that principle felt his hand was forced. And he allowed this child to give his essay in front of a school assembly. The child went on to say, if we judge people like this, this is a form of prejudice. We must learn to accept all differences. In conclusion, I hope that everyone understands how important it is to respect everyone for who they are. Those are words a school principal tried to censor. What kind of world do we live in? We live in a society that in many ways is broken, but sometimes remarkable humans decide to make the world better. And they do this because they can. And they just do it and look to see who mind it only later. I'm lucky to get to work with many people who follow this attitude of just get out and make the change happen. Two weeks ago, Google highlighted a virtual star parties that my dear friend Fraser, Kane, and I, and many others participate in. And I'd like to share with you the video that Google created. OK. Fraser loves a rosette. So we always go to that when it's in view. I love science. I love communicating and exploring about space and astronomy. I want other people to enjoy this stuff as much as I do. My first instinct is always to set up the telescope and go, you look first. So when Google Plus came out, I thought, wouldn't it be cool if we could get a telescope streaming an image right into the hangout? And Mike's got just this monstrous telescope that he's built himself. I hadn't even done a hangout yet. I'm like, this actually sounds really intriguing, right? Telescopes, computers, let's figure this out. Let's try it. He emailed me and he said, I think I've got it working. And he invited me into a hangout. And there it was. You know, there was the moon. I was hanging out with the moon. That was when I knew we could do anything. You know, let's get more telescopes. Let's get different points of view. Everyone, this is Umair. Hi, Umair. He's based in Pakistan. And then we've got Peter, who is in Australia. We're getting people from Mexico and South America and South Africa and Malaysia. Hey, nice Pamela. Hey, friends. And now suddenly, there is a way with almost no effort. We're able to bring all these people together and put on a show. Too close. Everyone good to go? Good to go. I'm going to click on Start Broadcast. We're public in three, two, one. Hi, everybody. Once again, we're going to have our virtual star party working the telescopes tonight. We've got Stuart Forman. He's the one showing us the moon right now. We've got Gary Ginella. What's your view, Gary? The monkey head. It's in the upper part of Orion. That's really cool. If we were looking at this image in color, what we'd see is this is a beautiful light. Yeah, it's a beautiful light. Well, I think everyone's ready, but Mike. And no pressure, Mike. Oh, I think I see something. Can you move it a little down, Mike? There it is. Oh, man. Look at that. Don't ever change cameras, please. Just in being in contact with these people and just talking to people. Some that you don't know that you're getting to know, and even though they're three time zones and thousands of miles away. Somebody to share with. It's nice when I look at my pictures and know I did it. It's wonderful. But to share it with somebody. Being able to look out into space gives us context for how we live in our day-to-day experience. It shows us that we're part of this bigger universe. All right, so, Gary, you've got the reset for me. I do. I mean, for us. I mean, for us, for everyone to see, not just me. Don't hit us. It's for you first. It's for me, yeah. I work with some of the best people a person could ever work with. Every Sunday night, every Sunday night, I invite you to join us, as we share with you, the moon, the stars. Anything that's up and clear for the telescopes we bring you from all around the world. Now, when this video came out, Tim Farley wrote something that brought amazing clarity to my way of looking at what we were doing. He wrote, Fraser didn't ask permission from anyone to do this. He didn't conduct any focus group or conduct a study. He just saw an opportunity, and he took it. And that is powerful. Fraser is one of those remarkable individuals who just decided that he was going to do what he thought he could do to make the world better. And he was going to see if it could work. And it did work. And he looked to see who cared and who minded later. Well, it turned out Google cared, and they cared enough to help us promote what we're doing to the world. Now, doing what he does isn't easy. It's a lot easier to do nothing. It's easier to lose hope that anything can be done. And there are people out there who would encourage despair. If, like me, you're a child of the 80s, you may remember a movie called Never Ending Story. It wasn't a great movie. But it was a movie of my childhood. And when I was a dorky little kid, I kind of obsessed because it had the same kid that was in Battlestar Galactica, therefore it was required to love it. And in this movie, there's a giant wolf who totally understands the concept of trolls who are out there working to create a great nothing that eats our world. And this troll, this wolf, when asked why he supports the great nothing, he says, it's like a despair destroying the world. People who have no hopes are easy to control. Think about that for a minute. When you take someone's hope away, you can control me. Looking around the internet, I see a lot of people sitting around trolling and a lot of people experiencing despair. There are YouTube videos of people complaining and blog posts of people expressing hurt. And in many cases, there are legitimate reasons for people to be upset. There are people dying because they've lost hurt immunity, something that we as a community fight against. There are lesbian teens in Texas being killed for falling in love, which isn't in our magistrate, but it's something that I at least find despairing. There are so many cases of abuse and hurt that it hurts to read the news. And there are lots of real reasons to be frustrated about the world that we live in. And it is easy to complain and it is easy to lose hope. It's dreaming that is hard. That same never ending story and it's childhood tale of morality addresses this. Through the voice of the child like Empress, the boy outside the story is asked, why don't you dream Bastion in this very crying little voice I can't do? But Bastion replies with something that I think is far too honest and far too relevant even in our adult world. When he says, but I can't, I have to keep my feet on the ground. Dreaming is hard. It requires risks. It requires you to own the fact that you are capable of something great. A few years ago, I came across a powerful quote that was attributed to anonymous. The quote reads, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? I challenge you to let your feet fly off the ground and I challenge you to dream big and let your light push away the darkness of despair in the world. I challenge you to change the world. Now, I recognize that's a pretty big challenge and how many inspirational posters have you seen encouraging you to be the change you want to see in the world. It all gets rather demotivating and let's face it, in reality it often seems that, so let's face it, in reality it often seems that no good deed goes unpunished. That's reality, but we can do great things and we'll get punished. But that's okay if we make the world better in the end. I'm an astronomer. For the past 10 years, I've been listening to folks, bitch and moan, about how people have stopped dreaming, how people have lost hope in NASA, about, oh, whoa, is space exploration, where's my jet pack? Tied in with these complaints is a blame game of the public saying, well, NASA's boring. And NASA's saying, we're not boring, we're just underfunded. Congress needs to give us more money. Well, and then Congress says a lot of things. You can look around the internet and heck, you can look at videos from past years of this conference and you can see the people complaining. But complaining doesn't build our jet plane future, we build our jet plane future. Last winter, I had the opportunity to attend the Next Generational Suborbital Research Conference, which is perhaps the hardest-to-pronounce conference I've ever attended. In attendance were NASA superstars and heroes of the past. Neil Armstrong, that Neil Armstrong, who was the first man into space, he was the keynote speaker. In attendance were the leaders and entrepreneurs behind Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, X-Corps and a myriad of other space exploration corporations. These are men and women who dreamed of rocket planes and they made their money on the internet and now they're investing in hiring the engineers that are capable of building and designing the rocket planes, building and designing the space suits and building and designing the rocket plane future. While not at that suborbital research conference, the greatest role model of our future, this future building ideal is Elon Musk. This South African-born engineer made his start with PayPal. Energy and aerospace are two of his passions and today he leads SpaceX and Tesla Motors. When I stood on this stage last year, I talked about how we were one week past seeing the last flight of the space shuttle. Well, today, as I stand before you again, I can tell you that we are well on our way to regaining US manned space exploration and with tomorrow's rockets, we will go farther than we have ever gone before. SpaceX is a truly awesome thing. Commercial space flight is opening a new barnstorming era of space exploration and this time the barnstorming isn't going to be grannies flying over cornfields. It's going to be grannies and grandpas flying over the Earth's atmosphere and that is awesome. Society is in the process of radical changes we in many ways return to a less centralized way of doing things as individuals take the initiative instead of waiting for the government to do something. Great minds of all ages are innovating a new reality. Nicholas Negroponte saw a digital divide, a problem with the world where we were creating an intellectual divide of have and have not simply because of access to the internet. He never got the systems he dreamed of with the one laptop per child completely where he wanted to go but his ideas led to today's low cost netbooks and to low cost computers that are starting to reduce the chasm between the connected and the offline. Muhammad Jonas recognized the ability of micro financing to change the world and work to define micro lending systems that make very small loans to individuals often women to start new businesses. Today these same ideas are behind Kickstarter and Indiegogo and many other websites where individuals present programs and projects and turn to the community to seek funding. Through these projects people are building their dreams and the community is funding that construction. Through social media this is becoming a shared experience as we virally reshape tomorrow and make our world better, one idea and one donation at a time. I am one of those people who just wants to do something and I like working with other people who just want to do something. Through this community I've gotten to know and respect and often befriend other doers. The JREF is named after a man who fought to debunk charlatans and fakers. I don't need to tell you Randy's story, you can go watch it in red lights that comes out this weekend. Following his footsteps have been successive generations of magicians. Fighting new fights are people like Eugenie Scott who is fighting to keep real evolution science in the classroom while fighting to keep the creationism out. Faced with a vaccination crisis we've seen Elise Anders and others start raising money and bring us the hug me I'm vaccinated campaign. These are doers and in astronomy all through history, everyday people have risen to the challenge and become doers that innovate how we understand our universe. In 1781 composer and concert director, concert director William Herschel discovered Uranus. Through the 1870s sanitation worker, Andrew Ansel commons pioneered the field of astrophotography in a spare time. In the early 20th century we saw the engineer, the radio engineer Grotto Rieber take his commercial radio skills and build a nine meter radio dish in his backyard. A dish that he used to map the radio sky creating the first scientific catalog in this new wavelength. Over the past century advances in optics and technology have allowed amateur astronomers to build larger telescopes and connect more effectively to international databases that are stored online. This has allowed amateur astronomers to see more and do more and has led to a flourishing of research opportunities both for amateur observers and people working to help astronomers understand our universe by plugging in online. For a while several of us, myself, Fraser Kane, Phil Plate we've been working to try and figure out how to more effectively engage you in not just doing astronomy through click worker tasks but becoming our peers and our collaborators. Several years of conversation led to a new project called CosmoQuest that we launched in January. CosmoQuest seeks to build an online research center for the public that provides for people interested in astronomy all the opportunities that I as a researcher find in a research center. I'd like to introduce you to a project that we're demoing at our booth out in the lab. This project is called Moon Members. For all of human history our sky has been punctuated by the change in light of the moon. In 1609 Galileo's Telescope revealed the lunar surface is a curious mix of mountains and cracks, craters and black lava seas. For 400 years scientists have worked to understand this, our nearest neighbor. Using images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter you can become part of this journey of scientific exploration. Moon Mappers, a new citizen science project from CosmoQuest asks you to help scientists explore the lunar surface from tracing craters to identifying scientifically interesting features. We are modern photographers looking for hazards and looking for the safe havens for a ship to land and a scientist to explore. We invite you to become part of a global community as we together trace out the lunar features. Work alone using simply craters or pit your crater finding skills against those of the software in man versus machine. In each of these interfaces you'll be exploring images with never before realized levels of detail. You may witness the foot paths of the astronauts trailing darkly through your display or see craters scattered over strangely textured terrain. Over time your efforts will lead to a new understanding of Earth's nearest neighbor. Along your path to discovery, we invite you to attend virtual star parties to listen to lectures and round tables by leading scientists and to keep up to date with all that is new in astronomy and space science. Become part of a vibrant community of people striving to learn and do science. Join moon mappers on CosmoQuest. Be a part of exploring our universe. Together we are CosmoQuest. Our goal is to create a community of people bent on together, helping scientists do science. A community of people who can explain why what they do matters and what questions it is that they are helping to answer. We want to create a community and here is where I invite all of you to be part of what we're doing. The universe truly is yours to discover. Now don't get me wrong, as much as I try and be a doer, I've had plenty of my own rants on the internet experiences. But at the end of the day, I try really hard to remind myself not to feed the trolls. In fact, I try so hard, I ended up buying plastic bracelets where on my wrist as a stupid reminder, we also have those out at the booth. But sometimes you can't avoid the trolls and they seem to be demanding food. When I started this talk, I highlighted some instances of places where something had gone wrong in the world. And people on the internet responded to this wrongness with an outcry to make it right. And they made the world better. And in my perfect world, that's how things work. Things generally go well and when they don't, people demand change and they make things go right. But unfortunately, the internet is filled with trolls who sometimes instead work to make the world go wrong. Back in June, Anita Sarkeesian tried to raise just $6,000 to do a web series, a video series on women portrayed in video games to talk about things like the fact that there's always some knight rescuing the princess instead of some warrior woman rescuing the captured king. The internet responded in an amazing way. They helped her raise more than 26 times the amount of money that she was looking for to help her talk about women in video games. But then the trolls responded. And here I'm going to read an excerpt from the news statesman, which in turn quotes Anita. Even if you don't like the idea or don't believe that women are poorly represented in games, then isn't it fine for other people to give money to something they believe in? Except some kind of bastard klaxon went off somewhere in the dank moist depths of the internet. An angry massage is bat signal, if you will. In Sarkeesian's own words, the intimidation and harassment effort has included a torrent of misogyny and hate speech on my YouTube video, repeated vandalizing of the Wikipedia page about me, organized efforts to flag my YouTube videos as terrorism, as well as many threatening messages sent through Twitter, Facebook, Kickstarter, email, and my own website. These messages and comments have included everything from the typical sandwich and kitchen jokes to threats of violence, death, sexual assault, and rape. Anita tried to do good, but because of this, folks labeled her a terrorist. This is not okay, but you can make a difference. You can be the one to not feed the trolls by arguing with them, but to instead simply hit the report button, the spam button, the block button, work to get them off the internet by banning them and send them the message that what they're doing is wrong and will not be tolerated. Imagine a world in which all the time, all the energy, and all the bandwidth that currently goes into cyberbullying and trolling, instead goes into building good things, goes into doing science, goes into education. I have built a place to do astronomy. Others have built places to do art, to participate in wildlife studies, to work on storytelling, to evaluate consumer goods, to debunk false medical claims, find what you are passionate about, and build that thing. This talk is one that I've struggled to write. To finish this talk, I have to step out of my comfort zone and give an honest acknowledgement that trolling isn't just something that happens in nebulous, random places on the internet, and it isn't just people being verbal in their closed-mindedness. Sometimes things are more physical and more scary. As an astronomer, I have randomly, at professional conferences, had my tits and ass grabbed and slapped. This is part of being a woman in science. Often it's just been drunk creeps in the bar afterwards, but occasionally it's been men in power. With the drunk asses, I can get rid of them in the way you get rid of any drunk ass in a bar. But with men in power, I find myself later sitting around commiserating with the other women as we compare what has been touched and grabbed by whom. And as I say this, I know it is unbelievable. And how can we report the unbelievable and expect to be believed? This isn't to say that women shouldn't go into astronomy. It is to say that at the afters hours event, sometimes you have to stand with your butt to the wall and your arms crossed across your chest. You have the power to stop discrimination, most of the time, but not always. It pisses me off to know that as strong as I am, I know that I can't necessarily name names and expect to have a career tomorrow. But some of you are people with power who can change things. It is often hard for women and minorities to rise to positions of power to break through that glass ceiling. And in some ways, it is a self-efficacy issue. We're the constant downpouring of belittling comments like comments we've seen too much in the recent weeks in our community. The belittling comments and the jokes, they play a destructive role in self-confidence. At my university, I've heard faculty joke that there's a policy not to hire women into tenure-track positions. They do this in front of the junior faculty, all men. And I've heard people joke that the reason I'm in a research science or research center and not on the physics faculty is because I have boobs. All jokes, no harm, just people laughing among friends. Nothing actionable, nothing illegal. So far, it's been the type of thing that I laugh. But the thing is, it hurts because I know the women who work with me, strong, confident women like Noisy Astronomer Nicole Gallucci and Georgia Bracey, they're going to be hearing this and it's going to affect their self-esteem as they look to build their own careers. I know it hurts my self-esteem. And I know that there's nothing I can do to change the reality I am in. I could move to another university, I could change which reality I am in. But I can't change the reality I'm in except to wait it out and wait for these people to retire, to leave. And I stay because I choose to be a female role model of what a woman in science looks like, what a woman who can do computer science looks like at a university that has no women in physics and no women in computer science on the faculty. You have no idea how much that means to me, I've really struggled with this talk. I try to say, brains, body, both. It is possible even in computational astrophysics. Here in the skeptics community, like every segment of society, we have our share of individuals who when they have the right combination of alcohol and proximity will grab tits and asks. I've had both body parts, randomly and unexpectedly grabbed by members of this community but not at this conference. I wanna make that clear, not at this conference. It's just like astronomy. It's a combination of inebriated guys going too far, guys that I can handle and men in power being asses. And I know that there's been a lot of internet buzz over the last two years about these issues. This is a community filled with strong, powerful women. I personally draw a lot of inspiration from ACOVACs and misinformation. These are just two of the many skeptics and many of the skeptical and scientific podcasts have female hosts. When these people see something go wrong, they ask for ways to protect the people being hurt, the vaccine clinics that we see. And they do things like what Shirley Amy did to raise money to bring women here. Women who together can support one another and who can get to know each other so that when we return home, we have a network of women to just turn to, to support us even from a distance. It's powerful to get these women here because these are women who will learn to react to problems with a sharp and needed call to action that is designed to fix the problems. I know this is an uncomfortable topic and I know that this talk is going to provoke some of you who don't like airing of dirty laundry. And I expect my inbox will hate me later. But I see a problem and I can't change it alone. Changing our society with all the ills, with the women being battered on the bus by out of control teams, the children being silenced, the false medical claims that are causing real doctors to get hate letters for trying to decry stupid things that don't actually heal. All of this harassment, all of this trolling, it requires you to do something. In my own life, I've actually had two guys, one of whom is here at this meeting who've intervened with me when they've seen another guy being a dick and going to do something inappropriate. And you can be that person who physically intervenes and you can be that person who maybe you aren't the person to start the organization. But when you see something that pisses you off, doing something, well, doing something can be donating to get more women here to help with what Surly's building, a network of women, to get more minorities here and making a point to admit we've got problems, we're humans and saying stopping harassment starts with me. We can make TAM a place that is focused on inspiring skeptical and scientific activism and put all that bullshit behind us. We want to make this place a place that is focused on seeing how we can make this world better. We can try and rise above these problems that plague so many conferences in every field. We can be the better example. The skeptics community is filled with strong people who are advocates of education, of building a more equitable society and of protecting the uneducated from the charlatans and the quacks. There are times and places to fight. James Randy's work has often exemplified the best ways to use evidence to fight the leaders of Wu. The Dover case was an example of the right place to fight, taking on the leaders of the intelligent design movement in the courts. We do need to fight to build a better world. Say that creating a more educated future is something you'll fight for and find something to do to help educate the people around you. Use social media to advocate for those who are doing good. When you see a problem that pisses you off, find out who is already fighting to fix that problem and support them. Highlight the issues and then support the solution. And when something pisses you off and you don't see someone already fighting to make the solution real, do like Elise Anders did and start your own grassroots movement to fix the problem. That exhaustingly used statement, be the change you want to see in the world. Well, damn it, be the change by doing something. And if you don't know what else to do, support science. I have a booth out there where you can get involved. Closing, I just want to remind you. We can understand our universe with science.