Font Resize
BERKELEY — About 100 self-proclaimed geeks were at the Lawrence Hall of Science on Wednesday night to learn how to survive on Mars and then design and build a replica of a base station where they could live.
UC Berkeley's public science center has joined other Bay Area museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or MOMA, and the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, in offering evening programs for adults. MOMA shows films and has curator talks some evenings while the academy has a Thursday night event for those over 21 to "mingle, dance, drink, listen and explore the exhibits."
At the Berkeley hall, there was a geek challenge going on Wednesday.
"I basically created an event that I wanted to go to," said Gretchen Walker, the hall's director of community and visitor programs. "I like to go to science museums but you are always crawling over 10-year-olds to get to the stuff and you feel guilty. So we thought, 'Let's get the 10-year-olds out of the way and have a nighttime event for adults.'"
First there was a brief talk from Matt Fillingim from the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley and Adrian Brown, who works at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, or SETI, in Mountain View and the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, about how to survive on the Red Planet.
The surface contains many craters and naturally occurring channels but there is no evidence of flowing
What's more, "Mars is about 100 times less dense than the surface of Earth, which isn't very conducive to humans," Fillingim said.
With a basic working knowledge of the planet, the mostly 25- to 35-year-old crowd prepared to build their base stations. Some seemed quite excited about the power tools and saws that were provided for building purposes.
Head base station builder Gio Giordano, who is a hall science educator by day, led the way, showing the group all the fixings for base station building. Set out on several long tables were metal and plastic tubing, plastic and aluminum sheeting wood blocks, tiles, plastic bowls, plastic plants and flowers — and miniature dolls.
Because the evening included cocktails, music, and hearty spread of appetizers, it was kind of like happy hour but with more astrophysicists and pocket protectors.
This was the second "geek out" event for Ann and Mike McFarland, of Oakland. They came to the Oct. 21 event, which featured a multimedia concert of live music with video images of gravitational waves and a talk by Michele Vallisneri, a theoretical physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Within 15 minutes of grabbing their supplies from the tables, the married couple had set up an elaborate Mars base complete with living quarters, a water collection area and a way to generate energy and grow food.
"We are Lawrence Hall of Science members because our kids come here all the time. We came last month (for a similar event) and had a blast," Ann McFarland said.
The event was held in tandem with a new exhibit called "Facing Mars," which opened last month, and the hall's new planetarium.
The timing of the event was good for Lori Burns, a UC Berkeley senior studying integrative biology. It was her 22nd birthday Wednesday and she chose to spend it with friends Kim Nguyen and Matt Werner building a Mars base station.
"I love science and this is great because we get to build stuff," Burns said. "It's like a night out in San Francisco but closer to home, It's something to do."
Within just a few minutes, the trio had set up a makeshift organic garden to generate oxygen, a fusion reactor, solar panels and plastic sheeting to protect from solar wind, Werner said.
The next "geek out" event will be 7 to 10 p.m. on Dec. 10. It's called "Why We Must Colonize Space," and will feature Seth Shostak, a SETI astronomer, who recently appeared on Comedy Central. He will discuss why space exploration and colonization are not only good ideas — but an essential ones, hall officials said. The cost is $10. For more information, go to www.lawrencehallofscience.org.
