Not everything about the dark ages was dark, but everyday people led much different lives than we do now. Join our panelists for a discussion on how to avoid inserting modern bias into your story, or how to best employ anachronism for dramatic effect.

The annual presentation of what the other Space Agencies are doing. This could include, but is not limited to, the European Space Agency, Russia, Japan, Canada, and China.

You want your orbit to be stable, right? What's up with geostationary orbit around Mars? Speaking of Mars, astronauts travelling to Mars and then back to Earth will suffer poor health without gravity. A spinning space ship could work. How fast would it need to spin? In my spinning space ship, when I drop a wrench, how far will I have to chase it? All of this is pretty easy to calculate once you know how.

Reading from his book and some works in progress. 

Did George Washington really chop down a cherry tree? Did he have wooden teeth? Was Napoleon really short? We'll examine common myths that have been passed along as historical fact and discuss how they became so well (and incorrectly) known.

What's the sci-fi ideas do you wish someone would write about? For example, Stephen Hawking once said, "Imaginary time is like another direction in space. It's the one bit of my work science fiction writers haven't used because they don't understand it." What crazy ideas do you have? Have you ever ended up writing about something because no one else would? How did that go? How important is the premise in a sci-fi story to you versus the action, or the plot, or the character interactions?

Despite blowing up prototypes, SpaceX is making amazing progress toward reusable interplanetary spacecraft with hundred ton payloads. While the details change every day, it's time to review where they are and think about what this means for the not very distant future and and the expansion of our "playground" for real.

We all have a rough idea of what constitutes disability in our human world, specifically in American culture. What would be a severe disability to an alien but not to us? Where losing a sense of smell might be somewhat limiting to humans, how would that affect a being in a civilization of dogs-creatures? What about an intelligent plant-creature with no roots? What if everyone but you had the ability to jack into an immersive virtual cyberpunk world? What alien or "future" disabilities have al...

We have to eat when we send people beyond Earth's surface. What has been done so far to prepare for that need?

Since the dawn of the Satellite age we've been putting man made things into space, particularly around Earth.How much junk is out there? How much of it is useful? How much isn't useful? What is it used for?

How and How Long will it take to get from here to there in space? G. David Nordley will provide some rules of thumb for constructing timelines that involve interplanetary and interstellar journeys. Along the way, he will point out where conventional wisdom is seriously oversimplified in a conservative way, and where one may need to make some hard choices between what is possible and what one might want for a plot.