One + January 2011 - (Page 48)

Another World at Our Feet Arizona’s Barringer Crater can help groups see Arizona, as well as the cosmos, in a whole new way. BY CHAD MILLER METEOR CRATER ENTERPRISES IT MAY BE SURPRISING HOW OFTEN HUMANS HAVE GONE TO ARIZONA TO TRY AND SEE THE HEAVENS BETTER. Percival Lowell, for example, moved from Boston to Flagstaff in 1890 and built the still-standing Lowell Observatory so that he might better study the Martian canals and the Martian civilizations that had built then abandoned them. “The Arizona sky shows up as less turbulent in telescopes,” said scientist and speaker William K. Hartmann. “Telescopes, as well as magnifying planets and stars, also magnify vibrations and shimmers in the air. Imagine the hot waves you sometimes see over a hot road. There is less of that in Arizona, which makes for what astronomers 48 call ‘good seeing.’” Of course, sometimes, as in Lowell’s case, the imagination gets in the way of that good seeing. Astronomers in his day could not ﬁnd the canals in their telescopes, and when the probes eventually made it to Mars, Lowell’s dream of ancient Martian civilization went the way of science ﬁction. Hartmann—aside from working alongside Caltech’s Bruce Murray and Cornell’s Carl Sagan on the Mariner 9 mission, participating in the Mars Global Surveyor program, postulating that the moon was created after a large body struck the Earth and co-founding the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson— has made a career of imagining Mars. He penned a science-ﬁction novel, Mars Underground, and has become the go-to talent in the ﬁeld of space art. He does not always look up to see what is in the sky, though. “Arizona’s landscape, with its deserts and lava ﬂows and the best-preserved impact crater on Earth, makes for a great starting point in imagining the alien world,” Hartmann said. The impact crater Hartmann speaks of is Barringer Crater, a 570-foot-deep, 4,000-foot-wide hole 20 miles west of Winslow, Arizona. It was not always believed to be an impact crater. It took some “good seeing” and not a little motivation for proﬁt to convince the scientiﬁc world that the hole was the result of an extraterrestrial event. one+ 01.11

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of One + January 2011

One + January 2011
Contents
Energy of Many
Impressions
The Future is Sharing
Agenda
Overheard
Thoughts+Leaders
Focus
Strategic View
Fans, Dry Ice and a $600 Extension Cord
Top Spots
Connections
Irrelevant
Job Resolution
The Laws of Attraction
How Bazaar
What’s Cooking in 2011
Another World at Our Feet
Middle East Central
More Than Amusement
The Future Looks Brilliant
How to Develop a Virtual Event
Disaster!
Tales of Adventure for the Newly Independent Planner
Idea Man
Your Community
Making a Diffrence
Until We Meet Again

One + January 2011