Hasta La Gadget!

There’s nothing quite like having a meal with geniuses. And Popular Mechanics gave me that opportunity today, at a lunch held in honor of its Breakthrough Awards 2009 winners.

In a panel during the lunch, PM‘s Editor-in-Chief Jim Meigs (far right) introduced three of the honorees, each of who gave us a précis of his or her winning project. 

William Borucki (far left) is the science principal investigator of NASA’s Kepler mission, whose aim is to find habitable planets.  As he explained it, there are a series of steps humanity needs to take in order to expand into the galaxy; first, we have to determine whether other “earths” are frequent or rare. If they are common, we need to determine more closely their habitability. Then, Borucki said, “our children decide what happens.”