Not Your Average Science Conference

WLRN’s Dan Grech crossed an item off his bucket list and reported the opening story of this week’s episode of This American Life. Dan got back to his nerdy roots and covered the Hundred Year Starship Public Symposium, a conference in Orlando on building a spaceship to travel to the stars. He says it was an odd combination of a science conference and a science fiction symposium. But it has a seriously ambitious goal: to kick off a several-centuries long process to build a starship. And it came with a sweet incentive: NASA and DARPA (the advanced research arm of the Department of Defense) would award the person with the best plan for how to build that starship half a million bucks. Seriously. They’re taking ideas here until November 11.