Pure Geek Bliss
I've spent the past three days at a conference for users of
Mentor Graphics software, which does various geeky engineering tasks involving printed circuit boards and semiconductors and whatnot. Like most conferences, they had keynote speakers and whatnot, and it was the most engaging set I've ever seen.
Wednesday night, we got to meet the
MythBusters. If you don't know who they are, they reenact urban legends and other such stories on the Discovery Channel using their special-effects expertise. Not surprisingly, this involves a lot of work with Buster, their crash test dummy, who was also at the conference, making his first public appearance. It also involves a lot of mayhem and explosions -- when (as usual) a story setup doesn't have the sensational effects attributed to it, the MythBusters take it upon themselves to see what it actually takes to bring the myth about. The show is done here in the San Francisco Bay Area, so they'd been out filming for next season earlier in the day. They also brought a blooper reel (not as entertaining as you'd think). But mostly, they brought themselves, answering interview and audience questions. The most interesting thing I learned is that it's gotten a lot easier to procure weird supplies now that the show is a big hit. Formerly, they'd call around for weird things (skunks, industrial fans, rocket motors) and no one would give them the time of day. Now, when they run out of ballistics gel, they can call around for it and people will *give* it to them because they're fans of the show. But mostly it was interesting to hear them talk about the show and the legends, and at the end they gave away promotional photos which they were willing to autograph. Cool!
Thursday I hauled myself out of bed to go hear Mike Sander, head of the Exploration Systems and Technology Office at
JPL, talk about the history of unmanned space exploration. If there's anything geekier than empirically testing urban legends and blowing things up, it's unmanned space exploration. Hundreds of engineers listened raptly to Sander describing the analogy between the exploration of the American West and the exploration of space. First, apparently, scouts go out. Some of those make it back alive to report what they found. Then you start to see organized exploration, but that's still a dangerous exercise, and round trips are not guaranteed. The next step are a few permanent outposts -- this is the point at which life insurance becomes available for sale, though it's expensive. Finally, you have full routine commercial activity (amusingly punctuated by a photo of Las Vegas in the presentation).
Exploration of space, it turns out, has happened along the same lines. We're still doing a lot of initial scouting; we're just now sending our first probe to Pluto. On Mars, we're well into the organized expedition phase, and preparing to make the transition to not only human exploration down the road, but, more suggestively, plans are underway to create an exploration infrastructure there, such as a telecom satellite so that rovers and whatnot on the surface can relay to the satellite, which in turn will have the high-powered hardware necessary to link back to Earth. Cool!
Finally, Friday morning, even shorter on sleep but ready for one more round, I went to hear the keynote speech of
Burt Rutan, the designer of SpaceShipOne, the experimental spacecraft that won the
Ansari X Prize for non-government space flight. He was just amazing to listen to, full of something that rides the edge between crackpothood and genius, but at the same time a shrewd enough businessman to make it work. He's got definite ideas for the future, same as Sander from JPL, but whereas NASA is thinking about exploration, Rutan is trying to begin laying the groundwork for things normal (well, wealthy, but still fairly normal) schmos can experience someday like orbiting hotels. And he said that one of the important functions that he's trying to fill, with his defiantly private space program, is to inspire tomorrow's geniuses. The pioneers of the space program grew up during the explosion of flight and were inspired by it; who will inspire today's children to dream tomorrow's dreams? I'm a cynic, but one would have to be far more cynical than I am to be unmoved by such a dream.
I'm applying to business school, and of course that means, to a lot of people, that I've sold out on what's really important. But I can tell you, after listening to such stuff, that my inner geek is alive and well and still responds to the same thing it's always responded to -- the call to go out and scout and map the undiscovered country.
