The halfway mark has been passed! Day four of the festival, and we’re now over the hump of our 6 days of science.
Life Down Below investigates the idea that many environments exist in our solar system, and most likely throughout our universe, which would be perfectly capable of supporting life in some form. We explore the strange and sublime life-forms which exist in the ‘deep biosphere’, the challenging subsurface environments of the earth, and consider how the presence of life in these extreme conditions may support the idea of life in other ‘difficult’ places. We pick out some likely targets in the solar system and consider the possibility that we really might not be alone after all.
The Charles Lyell award Lecture ‘What do dwarf elephants have to do with climate change?’ is the most fiercely participatory session I have seen yet! Around 20 people are coerced down from the safety of the stalls to assist in explaining the strange size-shifting of species in island environments. Thoroughly enjoyable, informative, and in parts completely hilarious.
Nowhere near as ‘doomy’ as you might imagine, The Real Doomsday 2012 was a collection of lectures looking at the myths, palaeo-evidence and planetary physics behind extinction. Richard Fortey presented a motley crew of unlikely biological survivors from the last few million years of evolution, from the small-island mammal species under threat by new predators to the stromatolites, which dominated the early biosphere but now appear in magnificent isolation in Shark Bay, Australia. Jocelyn Bell-Burnell brilliantly debunks the bizarre astronomical myths behind some of the doomsday 2012 predictions, and takes us on a tour to the real end of the world… in just a few billion years time!
The Turing Project was a surprisingly secretive little getup, where just four participants at a time were ushered in to a 1930s style briefing room to crack codes and determine whether the distress calls we were picking up from cleverly-rigged typewriter / headset getups were being generated by a real person or a machine. Let the word-association games begin!
A quick dash across town for An Audience with Bill Bryson, who it appeared had completely packed out the enormous Music Hall in the centre of Aberdeen. Material World presenter Quentin Cooper threw some across excellent questions about Bryson’s recent masterpiece ‘A Brief History of Nearly Everything’, asking how it felt to be taken in to the arms of the science community with such gusto, with Bill, as always, a picture of humour and humility.