 Hello. Hello. Welcome, everybody. Thank you very much. Thank you so much to Dr. Ting for presenting his research. We're going to move on to the Science Fiction Future Plenary Talk. My name is Victoria Jaggard. I'm a science editor at National Geographic, where we are currently celebrating an entire year of space as part of a program that we're calling Starstruck. We're getting very excited across the organization for all things space-related. In fact, I believe a little later today you'll be getting a sneak peek at a documentary we're making about the Apollo program. I am joined today by some incredible people who've done some incredible work with science and science fiction. Would you like to go down the line and introduce yourselves real quick? Sure. My name is Yatasha Womack. I'm author of the book, Afrofuturism, the world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture. I'm also a sci-fi writer. I have the Rayleigh Universe series and an upcoming series called A Spaceship in Bronzeville, and I like to write films. I'm Daniel Suarez. I was a systems analyst for about 20 years, and then I had the bright idea to write a book about some concerns I had about tech and automation in society. And since then, I've been a sci-fi and high-tech thriller author. And generally, I write books that are not in the distant future, but are in the present or the very near future. And one of the obvious drawbacks of that is that I'm probably going to be around when those dates come by, and I'm going to have to answer for the decisions I've made. But I don't really do it to predict. I more or less prototype the future in my books, and I try to do very good research to ground my prototypes in reality. And I do this primarily because I think the pace of technological change is accelerating, and I think in many ways we're living in a sci-fi future already. So I try to bring my readers through some of the issues and challenges we're going to be facing. And my next book as a good example, Delta V, is about commercial space exploration, which I think is probably going to be one of the most significant things we've ever done, and I think it's going to give us the opportunity to not only preserve our ecosystem, but also civilization. Okay. My name is Mark Oakrand. I'm training on bilinguals, studying primarily American Indian languages that had at the time zero speakers. What I did after that is work on some other languages that also at the time had zero speakers, because mostly what I've done is develop the languages for Star Trek, mainly Klingon. So that's what I've done is tried to figure out how to communicate with these people who may or may not be out there. I'm also probably the only one on this panel who has actually communicated with outer space. I'll tell you later what I did. Teasers. All right. Well, I just wanted to say, of course, thank you all for having us here. I was lucky enough yesterday to get a sneak peek at some of the work that your students are doing, and I was just kind of blown away by the realities of projects that are in development right now. Mining water ice on Mars, communicating with lasers across vast distances, actually manufacturing things in space, and what really struck me about these talks is these are real people working on real projects that, when I was their age, were pure science fiction. You know, the shipyards of Utopia Planitia is maybe going to be a thing pretty soon for all I know, and I think that's just an incredible, incredible thing. I'd put out a personal plea for everyone in the room, but on that transporter system, please. I would love to have that happen. And so since we have this captive audience of really smart people, I wanted to hear from our panelists what are some of these space science fiction staples that you would like to see come to life within the next 50 to 100 years? We went this way before. Sure. Well, I think that what excites me most is just the opportunity to possibly time travel and teleport. I do write about that in some of my sci-fi novels. I use that as a device. And on one level, as a creative, it's a great way to push past limitations and not feel like you're rooted in a specific reality. As a creative, it was fun for me to write about the Rayla character kind of hopping all over and being in different time zones and not having to deal with assumptions around who she should be in the present. But I do think that that would be a really cool thing to do. And I just, I think it's exciting to look at a lot of the quantum physics research that's taking place that's really exploring those possibilities. All right. I think the thing that I'm most focused on, I'm curious how many people here have read a book called The High Frontier by Gerard K. O'Neill, 1976. I'll raise my hand too. That sort of tells me what sort of heavy lifting I'm going to have to do here. I think right now a lot of people have what Isaac Asimov would call a planetary chauvinism. That is, we are very focused on trying to occupy planetary surfaces. One of the interesting concepts that I saw in The High Frontier was this idea that we would lift off of the Earth the power generation that we need to power the Earth and then the process creates space colonies to generate an entire cis-lunar economy. Now originally O'Neill did this. It was right after the 1973 Arab oil crisis. In 1976 he wrote the book because there was an energy crunch. And then of course fossil fuels were discovered. They found new sources of it. And for 40 more years we started burning more fossil fuel. And ironically it was that extra energy that is creating the climate change we face now. And the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we have about 12 years to start to address that situation and we're going to face catastrophic climate effects. So I go back to O'Neill's work thinking if we could lift our most carbon intensive industry off the surface, power generation, and have orbiting solar satellite power stations and space colonies and really accelerate that entire space-borne economy that would allow not just the saving of the planet but also the continued expansion of our economy, jobs. It's also, I think, a task that would unify humanity and especially the young generation to get up into space to remove those borders and basically have a very bright future. So that's what I'm focused on in terms of sci-fi. Great. Well I come from a very different sort of perspective from everything else and stuff because I'm not a science fiction writer in the sense that I dealt with scripts that somebody else wrote. Right? And I had to do that. But I thought about all this stuff and a while back someone asked me of all the things invented for Star Trek or created for Star Trek of the technological things. What would I like to have be the most real one? And I think everyone expected me to say universal translator. No. I don't know if universal translator is a good idea. It's a handy tool but it's not the be-all and great thing that people think about because if everyone is only hearing in the same language all the time and not having to deal with translation on your own, you're not getting the perspectives that other languages bring and other cultures bring. Everything would be exactly the same and I think that would stifle creativity to not have to deal with the way other people are thinking. Therefore the transporter is cool because it gets the timing. Outer space things take so much time and we don't have as an individual so much time so if there's a way to deal with that whether it's the transporter or something else that's what I would like to see happen. 100% agree. Awesome. So as people who are involved in the creation of science fiction do you feel that science fiction and actual science are kind of feeding each other over the years? Are you seeing this sort of interplay of I saw this in science fiction and so I'm going to work as a scientist to make it a reality as much as I see this in reality and I want to make it my science fiction. Shall we keep up the pattern? We can. Take it up. You know I think unless you wanted to jump in it sounds like you wanted to jump in. Okay. Well actually I think that for me just there's an obvious relationship. I think a lot of the science that we work towards is sometimes inspired by what we see in science fiction and then there's an expectation that what we see in there's this idea that the science fiction at some point should be supported by things that we can do in the world of science. The problem with that is that it doesn't always trigger the imagination and that a lot of the things that we come up with are kind of based on things that we see and then sometimes it can be based on things that we think we can already do. So I think one of the exciting possibilities around sci-fi is really continuing to help push this notion of what we can create especially as it comes to I think creating possible utopian societies. I know that there's an excitement about dystopia right now in a lot of sci-fi where we feel like it's the end of the world but I like to remind people that just in our earth experience there have been a lot of so-called dystopias and apocalyptic moments that we've moved past. So you can make an argument that we're living in a post-apocalyptic moment now for some spaces and for some cultures and for some people and those elements of those prior apocalyptic moments are usually drawn from for science fiction as if they never took place. And so I always like to say let's look at human relations and how we can improve human relations through a lot of our science fiction and our stories. Well I think you're exactly right when you talk about pushing the envelope I think that's what sci-fi does. I think it's easier for us in a way because we don't have a budget to worry about. And the other thing is as a sci-fi writer I can explore just beyond the edge just beyond the frontier and I can almost prove by my email trail that there is definitely a feedback loop because what will happen is I will write a book and then over the ensuing years somebody will get in touch with me and literally directly inform what I do next. Some people here at the lab are interested in things I wrote about and then I come back and visit them in this constant civilization. And again when I meet with scientists and other people they're very rooted in reality in facts and they have to be far more cautious. Whenever I'm doing research for a book I run into this all the time I sort of pester physicists about things like gravity mirror I try to find a gray area in physics into which I can couch whatever narrative device that I want and they're constantly trying to say well no I don't think that's possible and I'll say that's what I need and I don't think scientists have that luxury clearly but it's definitely it goes both ways. Yeah I was going to say the go to both ways part is what I'm thinking about with the kind of work that I've done prior to Klingon I'm not taking any great credit for this it's just luck that that happened most of the time when you hear outer space strange aliens speaking in science fiction movies they're speaking either absolute gobbledygook or perfectly good American English right? unless they're mean then they speak British English yeah British English if they're the villains and that changed around the time of Klingon not because Klingon has terrific relative clauses or something like that that's not why but I think for whatever reason I think the internet actually had a lot to do with that so people could talk to each other in easier ways than they could before but watching these things prior to this actually in any new science fiction movie or fantasy movie game of thrones anything like that the languages are all real these days if you see something where people are just going ghibli bobb that's very unusual all of a sudden not all of a sudden over the past 30 years or so but prior to all of this watching it I got the sense not being a scientist a rocket scientist like you guys that everything I'm watching is real I know it's science fiction I know that they haven't quite created this yet but it's based on solid science it's not just made up out of nothing except for when they talk and then it was based on absolute nothing so the hard science the attention given to the hard science and everything else that attitude has gone over to the other things to the artistic stuff and to the language stuff so that that's based on hard linguistic science as well so it's the same interconnection but in the opposite direction and I think a lot of folks would probably agree that with science fiction in particular it's often a great tool for being able to explore not just real world science but real world social issues and either problems that we'd like to solve or things that we think may be problems down the line as technology and science develop do you feel then as creators involved in the space of sort of responsibility with the work that you do in terms of how it's going to influence what happens in the world at large I feel a responsibility and mostly because I know that a lot of people have been encouraged not to use their imagination the imagination is is often hijacked when people talk about focusing on realities, focusing on what it is you think you can do in building from that perspective since the imagination can really be a tool of resilience to help people push beyond their circumstances so that they can even envision a future and in envisioning a future that then inspires them to feel like they have agency in that future and that they can take steps to create the kind of world that they think values humanity Yeah I would agree with all of that it is funny I was going to say that I don't know that idea but if you look at the Overton window what is acceptable or what is considered real I think that's one of the great things you can do with sci-fi or fiction in general is expand people's perspectives put them in the role of a character or characters and let them see the world through other people's eyes and so I think in that sense it definitely changes the scope of the discussion Yeah I agree with all of that that's coming from when I created Klingon in particular the task was to come up with an alien language meaning a language that's not like any language on earth with the understanding that the people who are going to speak that language were earth people in actors but in order to do that in order to come up with something that's not like an earth language I had to know what an earth language was and based on the kinds of things I studied and so on I said okay that's the way it is what is not that so I think it's the same thing in terms of thinking about the future thinking about things that are to come it's based on what is because you can't decide what's going to be unless you have a good starting point so all the hard science and looking at those social situations we have now determine where the ideas are coming from and where they're going in terms of exploration in particular what do you see as being some of the both hopeful futures and the challenges that we may be addressing in science fiction today well I think the fun part that people like exploring is just the cyber punk aesthetic and this whole idea of well machines, well robotics take over and even if we're integrated with them how we will balance humanity and be able to maintain our sense of humanity based on this hybridity so I think that's one piece that people like to explore but I also think there's really the metaphor of the cyborg too and this idea of bridging who you are with maybe what's being cast upon you and using that as a metaphor for life and how people create hybrid existences in unique circumstances well one of the things that interest me so much in the next book that I did was I've read a lot of sci-fi growing up on a hard sci-fi and a lot of it lives you know 500, 300 1,000 years out and there's been some more recent entries that are you know present day what interested me in doing this next book was building a bridge if you will to the present where we are right now to that sci-fi future that everybody imagines because I've spent a great deal of my teen years thinking about just that and it always seems to be another 20, 30 years away and at what point is it really going to start happening and that's why I sit down to do this next book to try to figure that out so I went around the world basically talking to experts trying to understand what people were working on that might be the catalyst that really starts it not sort of but actually does so that was one of the things that got me very hopeful in that entire process I realized that and I firmly believe there's no technical impediment to this it's always that lift cost you know that payload cost per kilogram getting up that's really that is the big barrier that we get over and of course reusable rockets will help with that and what interested me was again getting masses from on top of the Earth's gravity well asteroid resources mass drivers on the moon whatever it's going to take so I don't know that is the type of thing that I'm really focused on as a hopeful very possible event I don't know about hopeful but I would like again coming from where I'm coming from deals with communication if there's folks out there how are we going to communicate with them and how are we going to prepare to communicate with them the people at SETI for example are thinking about things like this I don't know the answer to that you guys know that was it Voyager what that record the gold record I was on a panel once with the guy who decided what goes on there and it was very interesting is that the way to do it I don't know it's a start but just thinking about how are we going to deal with them I think the way that people are doing now with electromagnetic radiation and things like that is probably a good start but if we really encounter somebody out there what are you going to do the most obvious science fiction example of that lately is a rival that movie which is based on a great short story that's kind of made up I don't think it's going to work like that but the thinking behind it is right on I think we need to start thinking about it I would like to hope that people start thinking about what are we going to do how are we going to recognize what is communication and what's not and things like that that's a tricky one for sure and there's also a lot of conversation about how the world in general is going to even react if we ever make contact how do we handle that are we going to freak out basically or are we actually going to be excited in that hopeful kind of way that Star Trek imagines we make first contact with an alien species and it unites the planet right that's because they speak English they're fine just different wrinkles on the forehead I do wonder though just about how viewing yourself as a person in the universe transforms you and just really playing with that idea around your sense of responsibility around just how we engage with people on earth and thinking of ourselves as being not just human beings but intergalactic in many ways looking at our bodies are very existence is really bridging spaces and times and being part of this larger continuum I think that could be really empowering for people actually that's the part that I would love about that idea that we are not alone that there's all of these other communities other beings the part that would upset me is I think science would become a lot harder because if we run into another civilization that's a million years more advanced you know it's kind of like I get the feeling like we would want to find answers to things and perhaps they would have some sort of curative relationship with us but there's always that idea of initial discovery which I think is so exciting which to some degree would be denied to us if you're dealing with a civilization that's a million years more advanced like oh fusion that's really cute we did that a way back and then how would we know if we actually interacted with one I mean if they're depending on the perspective or the energy level that they're functioning from you could be interacting and not know you're interacting on 12 dimensions right we're making an assumption sometimes around what that how they're going to show up that's a very good point I remember seeing a documentary talking about the colors of things and of course it's our impression of what they are but the spectrums that we absorb with our eyes when you see them in other spectrums things look of course radically different and then you start thinking about a multi-dimensional universe and they're going to rival kind of touching that the temporal dimension and you're right an alien species could be so completely alien not just in the way they think but literally the way they engage with the physical reality so I got in trouble about that with colors in Klingon because I decided all right Klingons physiologically are different somehow so it wasn't canon what you did right it's if I said it it's canon super right right so I made the color words not work the same way that they do in English a lot of a lot of human languages that's perfect and there's been all kinds of praise and criticism for that so that means I must have done it right exactly because I mean there are organisms on earth already that don't see in the same spectra that we do so we have to think about how they're interacting with the world and that's already such a challenge I think for us and how we interact with animal species on the planet how how is that going to affect how we interact with an alien species or how they would interact with us from a linguistic perspective one of the things that's interesting about doing all this kind of stuff is translation the people dealing with translating into Klingon and they do there's all kinds of stuff that's been translated into Klingon they have to think about it because Klingon has a limited vocabulary it keeps growing but it's limited have to think about what is it that you're trying to say and how are you going to say it in the other language and stuff which makes you focus on the message as opposed to the vehicle as opposed to the particular constraints of one language or the other so it opens you up to thinking in a different way that you haven't thought about before which builds on what you were just saying sorry I can't help but think that hesitate to say it but CGI I think helped in one way in the movies and that is I think prior to that the budgetary requirements were such that again the aliens would typically just have different wrinkles on their foreheads and speak with English accents but brine shrimp for instance this is a species on the earth is just so much more alien than typical Star Trek aliens were in the past and one of the good things about that idea of CGI then again informing sci-fi writers is you really start to think in radically different ways Vernevinge I'm trying to remember the book was it a fire upon the deep I think where he had a race that was sort of a hive mind of furry creatures that could increase their intelligence as they gathered together and then separated one would have a commanding personality and it's just so different in every way physically mentally and I don't even believe they saw the physical world with with eyes so it's all sorts of interesting questions about morphology and I think it's cool to remember too that the term alien itself you know a lot of the initial creation of the word alien wasn't necessarily to revert to people who were not or beings that weren't on earth it was really used to refer to people who were say just on earth and saying that they didn't have the same ways I think one of the early citizens of one of the Jamestown colonies was a person of African descent of the term alien was used to describe him in court documents to take away his property so it couldn't be passed on so I think just that metaphor of the alien or even how we use it today around illegal lands or undocumented workers I think it refers to a certain mentality with respect to difference and so it's really cool to think about how we can integrate these ideas and look at ourselves as one and ours are fundamental perception one where we're saying okay this entity is very different from us instead of really I guess building a foundation to see how we're similar and just how those processes how they process just transforms their experience so it's the other you know you identify them outside of your experience and you don't have to deal with that person but this would be bringing them in right and then looking at how that could you know collectively you know if you're just looking at earth and people from different spaces how you can create shared features and realities and when you think about other entities that are more intergalactic who would be coming from different perspectives how you would create shared entities and be equally influenced and inspired it does seem to be one of the sometimes less realistic aspects of science fiction that a lot of the off earth alien cultures we've invented tend to be very monochrome in what they do like you know what a Klingon is almost immediately it's all of Klingon basically it's all of the Vulcans it's all of the people from any given planet when we have all of these diverse societies and cultures and ways of thinking here on this one planet it just seems a little bit unlikely that that's going to be the case which is why it's odd to me that it's this idea that seems to have persisted in science fiction specifically and it makes me especially hopeful for opportunities for all kinds of people to get involved in both science fiction and literal space exploration so that we can make sure that we're ready for this diversity of thought when we do encounter the unknown and the unexpected I think that really becomes the exciting part as well to really look at how you can really integrate these concepts and build and move forward because a lot of our a lot of the science fiction that we've created and sometimes in the canon is based on assumptions that we're working with and even being able to challenge ourselves with this whole idea of projecting something into the future is a transformative experience I mean I would say some of the stories that I've written and I wonder if this is the same for you it really helped challenge your own sense of limitation around identity around how you function in a society the best ones yeah they transport you to a different place from where you are and again it gives you a perspective you would never have otherwise yeah I would agree with that definitely one other thing that I would say is that democratizing space I think will have a huge benefit to us for this and everybody in this room is familiar with the overview effect that idea of getting up into space and suddenly all of those borders go away you see how isolated and alone earth is and how we're all in this together I think that is going to be one of the single most helpful things we do and again getting a large number of diverse people up in space to experience that look around the universe and realize we've got to do this together I think that is going to be one of the most important events so how do we do it I would hope we don't have to wait for that to fill that way so in terms of again space exploration since we're all here thinking about Apollo and the amazing things that were done 50 years ago what are some of the things that you've seen in scientific developments in the recent past that has either informed what you're doing now or that you think could be informative for some really cutting edge science fiction yeah that's not really in your world it's good now go ahead I don't know given given what I do I don't know in terms of once again I'm going to go in the opposite direction with the Klingon stuff because when I started doing all this stuff people would meet people say what do you do and I made a Klingon oh how strange that is to make up a language and it's not I mean linguists and people interested in language have been doing that for thousands and thousands of years but I've said in some other context what I did is unusual because I ended up in 70 millimeter but the idea of making up a language is not a new thing so where was I going to go with this but the difference was when most people make up languages for their purposes they want to explore something about themselves very personally or look at new ways to deal with society or something like that but they're in charge what I did I was not in charge I was given a script I was given in the case of the Vulcans and the Klingons they exist already so I had to come up with something that fit in with what's already there so in the case of Klingon in particular vocabulary that I developed was what was needed in films and the TV shows so it's all this for lack of a better word outer space vocabulary and someone pointed out in Klingon you can talk about a bridge like a bridge on a ship but you can't talk about a bridge like a bridge over a river because it didn't come up in the scripts that's all and there was a project we had a while back where someone wanted to create a CD or a DVD, language learning thing for Klingon that was based on a template used for earth languages so in all the vocabulary and specifically European languages all the vocabulary was based on those sorts of things and I said well this is silly because if I'm going to get a disc to teach me French so I can go to France you know all the terminology related to France is going to be in there but if I'm going to get a DVD to teach me Klingon and I'm going to go to the Klingon plan and I don't want the words that are associated with France that doesn't make any sense anyway and the Klingon speakers thought this was just wonderful because they said now we can talk about everyday things so now there is a word for bridge so that taking it out of science fiction bring it into the real world this has nothing to do with your question take it out of science fiction he's an artist okay has expanded it as opposed to the other way around as opposed to taking it out of the real world and going into fiction it was taking out of fiction and bringing it into the little world and I think that's what's really exciting is thinking about these social structures one of the ideas I play with in the Rayleigh Universe series is looking at if you're creating this new society what laws are you working with if it's the the planet I call it planet hope which was created in the Rayleigh series the backdrop is that you had people who additionally came there who were space tourists looking to create a utopia as scientists who came and then at some point you had this lottery and then past that you had earth trying to get rid of people they just didn't want on earth anymore and some of the class dynamics were built around that notion but my question would be what sort of laws would people start working with if you had people from all over the world what would become important what would we preserve culturally and then what would become new what would be valuable from the earth experience that would continue to be relevant on these new planets and at least in this storyline this planet, planet hope it was a colony but it goes independent because at some point they want control over their own resources they have their own futures that they want to build and it's interesting to think about looking at the earth as being a past experience and I'm just really curious almost from an anthropological or standpoint what would we preserve what storylines, what mythologies would become significant based on who went well you were right about that if we encounter an alien species at that point earth's past would be completely past we would change completely as we dealt with absorbed or became you know we would change but initially I thought you were talking about the world building process and consistency of laws being you know space law that's going to be a burgeoning thing but doing it with an alien species that's going to be a whole other level of lawsuits but you know which dimension are you suing me oh by the way if I answered the question about what technology opposed to Apollo I'm interested in most and I'm going to try to take the temperature of this on the rest of the day and the rest of the crowd is rotational gravity or spin gravity and I'm always amazed that this seems to be something that is perennially pushed down the priority list but if we're going to spend some time in space we really need it and it mathematically works and it just seems like that's something we should absolutely be doing putting up a test bed where we can even if you did want to go and colonize Mars which I personally don't think is a great idea but if you were to do it you'd have to you'd want to test varying levels of gravity to find out what the minimum dose of gravity is for people to be healthy before you got there and so in that sense putting up a space station where you can spin it at various rates for certain time periods would be invaluable I would think and yet here we are we're 50 years after Apollo and we haven't done that yet it does seem like we'd have more space stations that we could visit we were promised a lot more space stations alright well I've had my opportunities so now I'd like to open it up to the room for any questions for our panelists yes over here the thing thank you for not throwing it so I'm curious if any of you see a role in science fiction for basically making progress in diversity and inclusion and we want you to give your answer in Klingon oh wow I have a translator well I do a lot of work engaging steam now diversity and inclusion and I don't always label it diversity and inclusion per se I'm just working in communities that I'm a part of and talking to people about futures and encouraging them to write stories about those futures or showing them stories that have been written around those futures I think the most exciting thing that gets people really wanting to jump into science is this idea that they can play a role in the future so there was an organization that I had an opportunity to speak with and there were just kids in their community and they were coming up they were studying Afrofuturism and quick side bars Afrofuturism is a way of looking at the future alternate realities but you're pulling from black cultures it intersects the imagination liberation technology black culture and then mysticism so that takes it a bit away from heart science sometimes because it integrates those things and it does look at the future the past the present as flip sizes of one and it values the divine feminine looking at intuition as being equally balanced to say logic so all of that just having that discussion and having people really explore ideas and looking at their relationship with space claiming the fact that people of African descent and all people around the world have had a relationship with the future have helped to transform those futures those discussions inspire people and help them feel empowered and then leads particular teens to want to to feel like they can make a difference in their neighborhoods and they can come up they can utilize technologies to really be able to do so so it was kind of fun this one group there are these teenagers and they came up with ideas where they had a drone that could deliver prescription medications and this was you know they came up with it they didn't actually invent it but they were you know or they had a a mask and they said oh if you put on this mask and they create a little film with it then it would protect you from police violence and you know it was all sorts of resolutions that they were coming up with they had holograms that you could see through glasses that would help you define community services in the area and so these are all experiments of mind right but they're based on technologies that we have today and just the fact that they in the imaginative sense could conceive of these ideas lent itself to them wanting to build and say oh you know I can go into science or seeing how science relates to just social structures and how it can be a part of your daily life so for that it was empowering I do a lot with dance using dance in the body as a way to sort of bridge space and time using teaching dances like West African and Samba but also giving students an opportunity to do sort of freestyle dance whether say embodying the idea of a supernova or thinking of a star and you know what movements would be integrated with that and what I found to be really interesting was automatically they saw how they were a bridge through time how they connected the people of the past with people moving into the future and it lent to lent it to it itself to people wanting to say oh wow you know what if I you know could go to space or what if I interacted with people who are on other planets and I mean so fundamentally they start to see themselves as a person in the universe and a person who is a part of a larger spectrum of time and not just in the here and now and I think that long view vision just helps facilitate agency and creativity I could go on about that perspective but thank you for the question should I answer as well I would say that diversity is going to be enormously important because of the mission critical nature of teams working together in space I'm racking my brain for the title of Joey's book but Whiplash thank you one of the great chapters to me in Whiplash was his discussion of why you need diversity even if you're just a let's say selfishly enlightened person it's in your own interest to get a diverse team so that you avoid blindness of certain areas so that you can see things that you would not otherwise see and it seems to me in space that would be especially important that you get all opinions all perspectives because it's life or death out there and it can make all the difference would be the reason for diversity if no other and there's plenty of others and not to be trite but in theory that's what Star Trek is all about is inclusion and diversity in fact that's the way I got involved in Star Trek in the first place is because there was a short little scene with Mr. Spock and a female Vulcan named Savik and the scene was filmed with the actor speaking English but in editing and post-production they decided no it would make more sense that they were speaking Vulcan to each other so I made up despite what I said earlier I made up gobbledygook that matched the lips and they put in subtitles and that was how I got involved but anyway the reason they wanted to make that the change is important the reason they wanted to make the change is to show that these particular characters had something in common with each other above and beyond pointy ears and that was shown by the language and also to show that they were different from the other people who are on the ship but part of it as well and they wanted to do that very subtly and they did it by means of having them speak their own language as opposed to a lot of verbiage that was actually in there but cut out any other questions from the room and wave vociferously because I'm kind of blinded by the lights here someone over here hello I'm not throwing it all the way over there pass it down yes that's right a beach ball hi thanks my question is about science fiction that was written about a future but now has come and passed for instance like Jules Verne shooting a cannon at the moon to land on it or in 2015 we had Back to the Future Day which was written in 1985 how do you explain the difference between what we think about is going to be the future versus what actually becomes a reality and how do you incorporate that into your your writing well I think sometimes it really just points to it makes a big statement about where we are at the time I think for me I try to work around those issues by pushing it 200 years into the future and I don't have to be held to it for too long I'm an idiot but the other fun part I think about not projecting it that far is that you can also work with issues and try to make predictions around that of course if you aren't correct that's okay because it makes a really fascinating statement with what was important at the time so it almost becomes like this artifact of sorts around a perspective of the future or what we call retro futures I actually don't even think of it as prediction I think of it as prototyping you know like I said earlier what I'm trying to do is explore possible futures and they might be futures that we don't want to inhabit and think of it as dodging icebergs or whatever well somebody has to go and spot those icebergs I've had the experience where I've written stories that I thought had utopian elements and people would get back in touch with me saying well this is very much a dystopia I think well that's a difference of opinion but again if I get a future wrong it actually isn't going to upset me too much because you know if we avert a potential future that I don't think is worth living in then I'd be very happy to be wrong that we don't actually go there I do think it's a challenge though to come up with utopian worlds easier to create a dystopia right it creates a bigger arc for the character if it's a dystopia they get to be a hero but I do think that's a fun thing to think about wow what if everything is kind of okay and we're dealing with human issues you know it's interesting you bring that up because you hear this all the time utopia dystopia I think we are always living right in the middle because there's wonderful things that are happening and it's terrible things that are happening and I think the future is going to be like that it's going to be a little bit of both if we're lucky alright well unfortunately we are out of time so thank you so much to all of our panelists for being here today thank you all of you