After the mad success of this post (second best in my Steemit history!), I decided to try some more real-life stuff.  Here's the first of two about one of my favorite experiences in ten years of teaching.

California's CONTACT Conference

Contact is an interdisciplinary academic conference, founded in 1983 by Cabrillo College anthropologist Jim Funaro, not long after the Voyager probe was launched, and the first Star Trek movie wrote that event into their 24th century future history. Funaro, who had been using SF novels in his anthropology courses, invited some SF authors and NASA scientists to hang out with the academic anthropologists, and it was so much fun they built a nonprofit, with a board and everything, to keep the meeting going.   

The next one is coming up in April, by the way, if you want to go; it's quite inexpensive for an academic conference.

Why was it so much fun?   

Well, these are nerds who like to talk about their work, for one thing. Funaro’s other innovation was to run a three-day simulation in parallel with the readings of academic papers (PowerPoint was not yet such a requirement). One interdisciplinary team built a future human culture (satisfying the futurist types) and the other built a future alien species (satisfying everybody else). On the third day they ran a live-action roleplay (LARP) of the First Contact between the two cultures, a situation anthropologists are obsessed with. This eventually grew into a curriculum for high school science students called Cultures of the Imagination (COTI), written by Israel Zuckerman.    

The meeting grew throughout the 80s, bounced around a few cities in the western US, and eventually settled at NASA Ames in Mountain View, CA, not far from Silicon Valley. Writers, artists, futurists, and Hollywood peripherals got involved, but the model remained an anthropological one. The three days of the simulation went:  

1. develop a single big-brained social animal species like an Australopithecus or a dolphin 
2. write a history of that culture through the founding of an agricultural city-state 
3. write a history of that same culture through achieving space flight   

That’s a pretty strict analogue of human history, but that’s what they were really interested in, counterfactuals of human culture. They started front-loading the planetary science to an SF writer named Gerald Nordley to save time for the “good stuff.” They did experiment with a broader ecosystem concept with the Epona system, which then spun off into its own project, but that was apparently mocked by the anthropologists as “Critters of the Imagination” (or so it was rumored).  By the 25th anniversary in 2009, when I attended for the first time, they had settled into a pattern of mostly letting Israel’s high school students handle the simulation, while they schmoozed and presented and reminisced. You can see from their website that the talks had become the priority. Only the first five simulations are archived in any detail (but they're pretty cool; check them out). I saw an opportunity to mix things up a bit.   

 [image link]

This giant metal crab statue was built in celebration of Canada's centennial.  It is based on a Haida legend about the protector of the harbor.  It was the closest I could get to the conception of our first alien.

Contact 2009 (my first)  -- the Drums 

I don’t remember any students this year, so at 39 I was almost the youngest person there. With a team of only 2 people working on the aliens (and noone working on a future human civilization), I got to push my biological ideas a lot harder than would probably otherwise have happened.    

I was interested in mating systems, which are well understood in biology. There are a lot more options than the human kind-of-monogamous standard. We went with a polygamous species whose “males” competed not through violence, but almost purely through display behaviors. Their life history was such that intra-species violence didn’t work well. Like the Grendels in The Legacy of Heorot by Niven & Pournelle (both Contact veterans – neither of whom was there that year, dammit), the Drums never stopped growing, so that it was not hard for the older ones to maintain their supremacy over the younger ones. They grew more and more neurons every time they molted, so they were not just bigger, they were smarter. They also switched gender as they aged, so that the older ones were "male" and the younger "female."   

The Drums’ entire culture was based not on violence but on seduction. They learned to cooperate to broadcast their songs further and further out to sea, where the young females swam freely, before joining a colony and molting into males, which looked somewhat like big crabs. Their partially metallic shells were their primary instruments, though as their acoustic technology developed they invented other things. We laid out a whole path of Civilization-style technological milestones, most of which I don’t remember ten years later. I do remember that we went well beyond spaceflight to embedded cybernetics, and that since the Drums regularly molted their exoskeletons, they saw no ethical or moral issues with hardtech modules attached to their bodies. See, I really wanted to shake up the LARP as well. Luckily, my teammate thought these ideas were refreshing and hilarious, and ran with it.   

So. Modern day Earth, not a future spacefaring culture. The Drums are detected in the outer solar system, heading straight for earth, blaring Barry White through their comms. We actually simulated this through the hastily-assembled Earth team’s phones:  every time they called us, we would hit Play on a different Barry White seduction song. Past aliens had communicated only through samples and snippets of pop culture, so that didn’t throw anyone, but why Barry White specifically? 

Because bigger people have deeper voices, the Drums, who had been monitoring Earth broadcasts for years, just assumed that Barry White was the biggest, oldest, smartest person on the planet. They (we) were devastated to find out that he was dead. James Earl Jones, who the Earth team fictionally rounded up for our meeting, was a poor replacement because he was not a singer. But they were satisfied by meeting his family and paying their respects, and then, completely confident in their technical superiority and not at all afraid of any Earth weaponry, flew off to Tibet to meet some throat singers. They simply ignored any threats, and their tech was advanced enough that the humans couldn’t do much about them. They had no interest in anything Earth had to offer technologically, but culturally they dug our little planet. Since most of the other meetings had gone for a more serious feel – and about 8/10 had ended in violence, one way or another – this was apparently a refreshing change for the regulars.  

Tomorrow, part 2: Graxian Shapeshifters!

(with pictures, I promise)

Thanks for reading!

REFERENCES

Gerald Nordley has a bunch of planet-building resources on his website.

http://www.gdnordley.com/_files/downloads.html