Events

Past Event

Convergence: Asteroid Mining and the Privatization of Space

October 12, 2017
8:00 PM - 10:00 PM
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Caveat, 21 A Clinton St., New York, NY

Speakers: 

How will machine learning (really) affect labor? How will a new artificial womb influence women’s health and reproductive rights? What new science is on the horizon and how do we sort through the ethical, legal, and policy questions we need to ask today to help shape the future we want tomorrow?

Convergence is a live show and podcast that brings two people from vastly different fields into conversation about how emerging science and technology will affect culture, society, and politics in the near future. Hosted by Meehan Crist, writer in residence in biological sciences at Columbia University, each event will bring out themes and ideas missing when conversations stay siloed.

This show is 21+ and cost $15 per ticket. Register for the event on their website.

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a journalist whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, the London Review of Books, and other publications. She has worked as an opinion editor at Al Jazeera America and a general news and business reporter for Reuters. Atossa grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, and studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Columbia University, where she returned for a master’s program in investigative reporting at the Graduate School of Journalism. She is the author of The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen.

Dr. Denton Ebel is a geologist specializing in meteorites: pieces of planets and “left-overs” from the formation of the solar system, particularly the distant, resource-rich asteroid belt. His group analyzes data from the MESSENGER mission to Mercury, comet samples from the Stardust mission, and the geochemistry of samples from the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary. Dr. Ebel is the Chair of the Division of Physical Sciences at the American Museum of Natural History, as well as the curator of the museum’s meteorite collection.

Meehan Crist is writer in residence in biological sciences at Columbia University. Previously, she was editor at large at Nautilus and reviews editor at The Believer. Her writing explores the intersection of science, culture, and politics: from sensory deprivation tanks and the KUBARK manual to cephalopod consciousness and climate change. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, the New Republic, Tin House, Lapham’s Quarterly, London Review of Books, Scientific American, and Science. You can find her online at meehancrist.com or on Twitter @meehancrist.