Lotusphere 2007 Closing Session

Last year I was unable to attend the closing of Lotusphere and missed part of the "Meet the Developers" session due to travel arrangements and had this lingering feeling that I had missed something. Well this year I had made to effort to avoid that oversight and was pretty happy with the choice. The "Meet the Developers" session had a lot of tidbits of information as to the technical future of upcoming planned (or unplanned) changes coming from Lotus. The Closing session had an appearance by the Astro-Physicist Neil DeGrasseTyson. The inside joke was we moved from Comic to Cosmic (a reference to last year's closing performance). In the read more section, I will go into some of the interesting pieces of information from the Closing session. To read more about the (See Meet the Developers) session please see that blog entry.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson was one of the astro-physicists that attended the meeting that captured the nations attention last year when Pluto was demoted to a "minor planet". His topic of discussion was a "Top 10" list of numbers to put certain ideas into perspective.

From the distance covered when placing the amount of hamburgers consumed end to end. To the dates of impending doom from a giant asteroid. The topics were a break from the central theme of "it revolves around you" to the more grounded reality that we are but a small part of incredibly larger universe (possibly multi-verses).

Some of the items mentioned to get to the matter of perspective:

• The number of hamburgers would make trip around the earth 300 times and the remaining would make a round trip to the moon 4 times
• There are more molecules of water in a cup of water than there are cups of water in all the oceans of the world
• There are more molecules of air in a breath of air than there are breathes of air in the atmosphere
• On your 31st birthday, you will have celebrated your billionth second
• Various orders of magnitude were displayed to hint at their size: number of people in a stadium, number of people on earth, the number of grains of sand in all the worlds beachs, the numbers of stars in the galaxy
• Brief coverage of past extinction events that at least one was determined to be from meteor impact which led to the final item
• On Friday the 13th in April of 2029, if the asteroid "Apophis" passes through the "keyhole" (a specific point in the earth's orbit) in 2036 it will be collide with the Earth

The one hidden item in all this smallness, apparent from the anecdotal topic of the psychiatrist that attended one of his previous sessions that accused his presentation of making people feeling much less important and insecure than before. Neil's counterpoint to the argument of smallness was that while we are, but a very small piece, we are all made of the same stuff. From no matter where one is in our universe, we are comprised of the same stuff. "We are all Stardust."