›Becoming Multiplanetary Species Online Panel - ⌚ 11:00 PST

The panel of experts will discuss what are the challenges humanity will be facing while becoming multi-planetary, and how we should solve it. How our culture, society, faith, and psychology would change?

One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event. The alternative is to become a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planetary species.

Going to space is risky, the off-planet environment is naturally hostile to humans. Moreover, NASA identified that the second biggest risk facing people living in space, after radiation, is crew behavioral health. Working and living in tiny space habitats, there is no runaway, no retreat, it is not possible to go outdoors and enjoy the waterfall /flow of water. During the long-duration missions, astronauts/space tourists struggle with seeing the same people, performing routine tasks, and the space habitat becomes a place of likely rising conflicts. Not everyone can tolerate the isolation and loneliness encountered on long space flights.

Meet our panel:

Ariel Ekblaw, the Founding Director of MIT Media Lab's Space Exploration Initiative
Frank White, Space Philosopher, Author of The Overview Effect — Space Exploration and Human Evolution book in which he coined the term overview effect.
The event will be moderated by Anastasia Prosina, Founder & CEO, Stellar Amenities

Space experts and enthusiasts alike are invited to attend this event and enjoy interactive conversation with like minds, plus a close-up look at exciting projects of MIT Media Lab's Space Exploration Initiative as well as Frank White's reflections on the Overview effect. Prepare the most exciting questions to be answered!

Schedule (Friday, May 1st):

11:00 AM-11:13 AM PST -- Ariel and Frank will talk about their projects
11:13 AM- 12:00 PM PST -- panel discussion concluding with Q&A session.

Location:

The event will be organized online. We'll send you a link to attend the event online. Instructions and a link to join (over Airmeet) will be sent to you after registration.

Sponsors are welcome!

We recommend registering in advance, before April 29

About speakers:

Ariel Ekblaw is the founder and lead of the MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative, a team of over 50 graduate students, faculty, and staff actively prototyping our Sci-Fi space future across 40+ in house research projects. For the Initiative, Ariel coordinates space research and launch opportunities across the spectrum of science, engineering, art, and design, and builds collaborations on this work with MIT and Space Industry partners. Ariel’s work has been featured in AIAA, IEEE, WIRED, Ars Technica, MIT Technology Review, Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, PRI’s ScienceFriday, CNN, the BBC, and more.

Frank White has authored or co-authored numerous books on topics ranging from space exploration to climate change to artificial intelligence. His best-known work, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution, is considered by many to be a seminal work in the field of space exploration. A film called "Overview," based largely on his work, has had nearly 8 million plays on Vimeo.

White considers himself to be a "space philosopher," and has long advocated developing a new philosophy of space exploration. His book on this topic, The Cosma Hypothesis: Implications of the Overview Effect, has just been published. In it, he asks the fundamental question, "What is the purpose of human space exploration? Why has the evolutionary process brought humanity to the brink of becoming a spacefaring species?"

Anastasia Prosina is an award-winning aspirational futurist and practitioner in Space Architecture, the nascent field of helping people thrive in small spaces in space. She is the Founder & CEO of Stellar Amenities, a company with the mission of complementing space habitats with lightweight, deployable & reconfigurable elements to support wellbeing in space.

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