WSU Honors College Students Invite Astronomer Michael L. Allen to “Speak with E.T.”
PULLMAN, Wash.—Michael L. Allen, director of the Washington State University planetarium, will present “Speaking with E.T.—We’re All Ears,” at 6:30 p.m. Monday, April 22, in the Honors Hall Lounge. The public is welcome to the event. Refreshments will be served.
Each year, Honors College students are polled by the Honors Student Advisory Council (HSAC) for the name of a favorite professor to present the HSAC Invited Lecture. This year, Allen was selected as the top choice.
Allen supports the thesis that our first contact with alien life will be with a technological alien species. He supports this claim based upon the supposition that technological activity is the most pervasive type of life-like activity that exists.
He will discuss efforts to send and receive messages from extraterrestrial intelligence (space aliens) and review such attempts in the speculative literature that portray hypothetical contact scenarios.
Allen, a senior instructor in the WSU Department of Physics and Astronomy, teaches HC 290 “Science as a Way of Knowing” for Honors. He is interested in teaching undergraduate students critical thinking (CT) skills and developed a series of CT-themed lab exercises. He received his Ph.D. and MSc in astronomy and was a lecturer at the University of Toronto, and his BSc in honours physics from McMaster University. He is assistant editor of the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.
Allen does academic and career advising for his department, is a member of the WSU Academic Advising Association (ACADA), and received in 2011 the Excellence in Advising Award from the (then) College of Sciences.
CONTACT: Linda Howell, HSAC Advisor, Honors College at WSU, 509-335-7801, linda.howell@wsu.edu
Beverly Makhani, Communications Director, Honors College at WSU, 509-335-6679, Makhani@wsu.edu