CONTACT 2012

October 18, 2011

Contact | Astronomers have given us a new bucketful of worlds to consider for habitable planets and inhabitable star systems. We will be exploring this new galaxy of possibilities in CONTACT 2012.

We still hope to bring some elements of the CONTACT program to one of the San Francisco Bay area conventions later this year. If we do, one of the things we will definitely include is a Cultures of the Imagination (COTI) simulation. In 2010, we celebrated the inauguration of our second quarter century of CONTACT with a resurrection of our original focus on COTI. The event was such a resounding success that for the next CONTACT conference, we will once again return to the thrilling days of yesteryear with COTI Classic. This should please many longtimers, who have been clamoring for a return for years, and delight some newcomers, who have not had the opportunity to participate in the event that precipitated the initial success of our conferences. Human and alien teams will be recruited from our presenters and audience, by preliminary announcement and on-the-floor enlistment. Contact between the teams will climax the conference on Sunday.

COTI is an experiment in creation — participants design an integrated world, alien life form and culture, and simulate contact with a future human society. It was designed by CONTACT originators, Jim Funaro and Joel Hagen as a thought experiment for professional scientists, writers and artists. One team constructs a solar system, a world and its ecology, an alien life form and its culture, basing each step on the previous one and utilizing the principles of science as a guide to imagination. The other team designs a future human colony, planetary or space faring, “creating and evolving” its culture as an exercise in cultural structure, dynamics and adaptation. Through a structured system of progressive revelation, the teams then simulate — and experience — contact between the two cultures in real time, exploring the problems and possibilities involved in inter-cultural encounters. Contact between the teams will climax the conference on Sunday.

CONTACT remains committed to its original interdisciplinary, creative and scientific approach to what lies ahead for humanity and will present our particular brand of exciting and responsible speculation that has from the beginning made our conference and organization unique and fun. As usual, we will offer symposia on a wide range of topics, with speakers shaking out new ideas to sunshine at CONTACT. We’re planning to present our traditional blatantly diverse agenda at the next feasible opportunity. Don’t miss it!