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Teich's Tech Tidbit of the Week
September 16, 2002
9th Edition Authors: Seth Shostak
Teich's Tech Tidbit of the Week
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| Seth Shostak's wonderful short story, "In Touch at Last," is the only
piece of fiction in the 9th edition of Technology
and the Future. Not surprisingly, it centers on the discovery
of extraterrestrial intelligence, the search for which is Shostak's major
passion and the focus of his career. Shostak is a senior astronomer
with Project Phoenix at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California,
as well as a science writer, lecturer, and media personality. He
is also heavily engaged in public outreach activities at SETI. "In
Touch at Last" was originally published in the AAAS journal, Science,
in December 1999, as part of a millennium series of speculative essays
on what life might be like for a scientist in 2050.
Shostak, whose credentials include a B.A. in physics from Princeton
and a Ph.D. in astronomy from Caltech, did research in radio astronomy
at several observatories before coming to SETI. He has published
approximately 50 articles in professional journals and several times that
number of popular articles. He also produces his own films, many
of them about science and used by television. His official bio claims
he is the inventor of the electric banana, but I have been unable either
to verify this or to determine what the electric banana is (other than
a Swedish [?] rock
band, which I assume is not what he is talking about).
This is the sixth in a series of Tidbits of the Week devoted to the authors whose works appear in the just-published 9th edition of Technology and the Future. Last week's Tidbit profiled John Seely Brown. Future Tidbits will profile such other writers on technology as Amory and Hunter Lovins, Paul Duguid, Robert Pool, and President George W. Bush (!). |
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Order
Seth Shostak's book, Sharing the Universe, from Amazon.com.
(pb $14.95).
Shostak's biography on the SETI Institute site. "Searching for Aliens from Your Home Computer," Teich's Tech Tidbit of the Week, August 30, 1999. A feature on "SETI@home," a program that uses distributed computing to assist SETI in analyzing the vast amount of data it collects. Shostak's bio on the site of MWT Associates, an adventure travel agency for which he is a lecturer. Seth Shostak, "An Inhabited Universe?" an interesting article on the PBS.org site, Stephen Hawking's Universe. "Search for Intelligent Life in Space," a course on audio and video tape by Seth Shostak, offered by The Teaching Company. Q&A With an E.T. Searcher: Chat With SETI Astronomer Seth Shostak, transcript of a call-in show featuring Shostak on ABCNews.com (March 1, 2000). Transcript of "Ask Seth Shostak." Another call-in show, this one on the BBC (August 12, 2001). "ET & the Bioastronomy Conference," transcript of a program broadcast July 20, 2002 on The Science Show, Radio National, The Australian Broadcasting Company. Seth Shostak, "SETI Strives to Find Aliens," on TechTV (September 10, 2002). "Lighthouses in Space?" Short piece about SETI and Seth Shostak on the science radio program, Earth & Sky (February 10, 2002). A one-minute public radio tidbit. More interviews with Seth Shostak:
"Looking
for Life," feature on SETI and its efforts to find extraterrestrial
intelligence, including articles by Shostak, on MSNBC.
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