CMA Presents "Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia"

Human civilization has evolved to the point at which we have begun consciously sending messages into the far future. How should we communicate who we are, what we know, to as-yet-unmet intelligent beings elsewhere in both time and space? Will they be able to decipher what we say? And what information will we leave to Earth's occupants a million years hence? How can we address an unknown destiny in which human culture itself may no longer exist?

Combining the logical rigor of a scientist with the lyrical beauty of a novelist, Gregory Benford explores these and other fascinating questions in a provocative analysis of humanity's attempts to make its culture immortal, to cross the immense gulf that such deep-time messages must span in order to be understood.

Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for achievements in the sciences. His research encompasses both theory and experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics. He worked on long-term marking of the major U.S. nuclear waste site, and helped design the message to fly on the 1998 Cassini mission to Saturn. Among his novels is the classic award-winning Timescape; his most recent work of fiction is Cosm.

This event is free to all JPL/Caltech community with identification.

For questions about this event, please send e-mail to [email protected] or call Michael Eastwood, (818) 354-9273.