> Rooms are smaller and driven by interests or topics, rather than the people involved And this is a good thing. I recently did a room with an optics engineer

> Rooms are smaller and driven by interests or topics, rather than the people involved And this is a good thing. I recently did a room with an optics engineer from NASA who made the optics for Cassini’s Composite IR Spectrometer. And now the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and the Vera Rubin Observatory. The conversation went into exacting depth, with all of us enjoying it a lot and learning along the way. It felt like a salon, not a club. Earlier I was doing a room with the discoverer of 2014 UN271, the largest comet discovered so far. The Chief Scientist of NASA joined in and we spent an hour discussing possible missions through this ancient comet’s plume. The discoverer of the object got to meet NASA’s Chief Scientist to talk about his baby, and NASA’s Chief Scientist got to nerd out with us on the largest comet ever found. We also talked about algorithms etc for better finds. These conversations exist. They often happen in private. Or in clubs like Small Steps & Giant Leaps. There weren’t more than 40 people in the “room” and if you’d had raised your hand, we’d have pulled you up to nerd out with us.