presentation last night for DaVinci Institute

I gave a presentation last night for the DaVinci Institute right at one of my favorite brewpubs too (C.B. & Potts in Westminster)! The title of the presentation was "The Past, Present, and Future of Mars Exploration: Not Just For Government Agencies Anymore" although they advertised the talk on their website as "Your Next Truly Great Vacation Spot May Be On Mars". That was their idea, not mine! Anyway... the talk went really well. It was a good group of people. I wasn't really sure what to expect going in to the talk in terms of audience. There were a few who were fairly knowledgable about space matters, but 90% of them weren't so I think I actually did a pretty decent job in putting the PowerPoint file together and including appropriate material. They had some good questions there. There was one fellow there who had attended a few of the old Space Development Conferences that Gerard K. O'Neill's Space Studies Institute used to host... actually I just checked Google and that group still exists! I thought they were defunct... I wonder who is running them now? Anyway, this fellow that I was talking with last night wanted to take issue with my suggestion about terraforming Mars saying that it would be easier to terraform Venus by putting a big parasol between Venus and the Sun in order to bring temperatures down on Venus. It would have to be a pretty darn big parasol!!! Anyway, it was a fun evening.