Adler Planetarium

Astounding Stories 20, August 1931, Section 9, Jazzing Up the Universe.

Centuries of celestial history wheeled across the plaster sky of the new Adler Planetarium at Chicago recently at the dedication of the Astronomical Institution, the first of its kind in the Western Hemisphere.

A modern Joshua, working the levers and switches of a complicated instrument, commanded a miniature sun to stand still in the heavens, and it did.

He bettered the feat of the biblical prophet by stopping the sun at any given point on its orbit across the skies, and then ran it backward, its attendant planets, planetoids, and stars scampering contrary to all rules of the universe.

Writing in the American Journal of Physics, the scientist and science fiction writer David Brin asked whether small groups of zealots should bypass all institutions, peer critique, risk appraisal, or public opinion to shout, yoo-hoo, into a potentially hazardous cosmos.

Another expert who has commented on this topic is Lucianne Warkowitz, who is the astrophysicist working at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

She's also rather worried about all of this, and has this to say.

There's a possibility that if we actively message with the intention of getting the attention of an intelligent civilization, that the civilization we contact would not necessarily have our best interests in mind.

grew up in Chicago and It was in the mid-60s that I sort of became aware of the world and of course that got me into rockets and space flight and all that and I was totally into that until I hit the age of 14 when I discovered astronomy books and I became a pretty avid follower of science.

I ended up working at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, working through college.

And there I encountered my first computer in an electron microscopy class where we had to take some observations and input them into a computer and plot the results.

And in those days, that meant I used punch cards.

Oh, I'll tell you about this, too.

When I was in Chicago a week ago tomorrow, I went to the Adler Planetarium to visit some of the artifacts from my friend Jim Lovell from Apollo 13.

Tom Hanks played him in the movie.

Invariably, if I post something, you can see it online at Mark Larson Radio on all the social media.

I didn't have enough professional development funding left for the year.

And since I work for a nonprofit, like at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, making another big conference trip to Austin right after Las Vegas and Portland just wasn't gonna happen for me, uh, budget-wise.

Fast-forward to maybe a day after RubyConf.

I get a message from Rachel with a link to the announcement that Rails World was looking for MCs, and that they were looking for local Ruby community organizers to MC.

Both publications returned the submissions, suggesting they consult a scientist or astronomer.

At the Adler Planetarium, a spokesman dismissed the images, stating they showed no evidence of flying saucers, and emphasized that his directive was to debunk such theories.

Finally, the sisters even showed their prints to Leslie Desmond, a former RAF flyer and British Air Ministry member, who was a co-author of Flying Saucers Have Landed.

Desmond told them that two Norwegian scientists who photographed the same eclipse from 15,000 feet had captured similar objects.

Zooniverse is the world's largest platform for people-powered research.

Co-founded by the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and the University of Oxford, with the University of Minnesota serving as an institutional partner, Zooniverse enables anyone, anywhere, to contribute directly to real scientific research.

The work, contributed by everyday people, accelerates discovery by combining human curiosity and pattern recognition with data from NASA missions and observatories.

A total of 31 NASA-sponsored citizen science projects have been hosted on Zooniverse over the past six years.

I don't like the Cubs, so go ahead.

[laughs] The Adler Planetarium.

Okay, there you go.

[laughs] I thought, I, it was at tip, it was the tip of my tongue.