Off to NASA!

Yeah, it's totally true: my life rocks. :)

Tomorrow, I fly off to California for a two-day invitation-only workshop at the NASA Ames Research Center. The conference is entitled "The Future of Intelligence in the Cosmos," and it's being jointly organized by NASA Ames, the SETI Institute, and the University of California Santa Cruz.

The participants include:

Gregory Benford
Andre Bormanis
Ben Bova
Paul Davies
Frank Drake
Jack McDevitt
Marvin Minsky
Robert J. Sawyer
Seth Shostak
Jill Tarter
Pete Worden

Way, way cool!

I'm chairing the session on Cultural Evolution, the foundational talk for which will be given by Kathryn Denning, an anthropologist at York University here in Toronto; I've followed her work with interest for years, and it's ironic that we'll finally meet half-a-continent away!

The whole amazing agenda is here.

And tomorrow also begins my summer of being away from home: I go directly from the NASA Ames conference to Dawson City in the Yukon, to begin my three-month-long writing retreat at Berton House, which will be interrupted in August for two weeks in China.

My father, who is house-sitting for us, was over this afternoon, and we got him settled in. And I've just returned from Lick's, my favorite hamburger joint -- for the last time until October!

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site