Date of presentation: 17 May 2021
Subject: Earth is a planet, too!
Description: The wildly controversial and provocative headline for this presentation was "Earth is a planet, too!" This presentation hoped to bring to light that while our exploration of the rest of the cosmos is magnificent and awe-inspiring, it has all been fairly recent.
Our exploration of our home planet, though, has been going on continually for tens of thousands of years. It is still the primary testbed for our various machines, even the ones we ultimately use in other places like Mars or the Moon. The various physical processes that we expect to take place elsewhere - the water cycle, for example - take place here as well, and we can observe them here for very little before ever spending billions of dollars to assemble a probe to go somewhere else.
We live on a very special planet, and it behooves us all to take good care of it.
Incidentally, I believe this is the first time I have ever delivered a presentation out of doors. It was a unique experience.
