Monthly Virtual Lecture Series: Mars is an Airbnb, Earth is an Outpost

Novels like Neal Stephenson’s new “Termination Shock” attempt to nudge the real world with futuristic cures for global warming. In Isolation, Morgan’s planned Arctic-set TV series, a team of climate-fixers discovers that Earthlings aren’t the only ones trying to make our planet more habitable. Which raises the question: will our extraterrestrial explorations impact the future of other planets? In a wide-ranging talk on this semester’s theme of sustainability, screenwriter and Adjunct Instructor Morgan Gendel will examine the issue as it’s currently surfacing in science fiction and fact, with references to his own work as creator of a sustainable Mars habitat and writer of a well-known TV episode in which it’s memory, not resources, that begs for sustenance.

Screenwriter, producer and futurist Morgan Gendel is best known as writer of the heartbreaking, fan-favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “THE INNER LIGHT,” for which he was awarded the Hugo Award for Science Fiction Writing. In addition to writing other episodes of Star Trek: TNG and Deep Space 9, he has written or produced 250 episodes of TV for series including the CW Network hit The 100, on which he served as Co-Executive Producer; Law & Order, which earned him an Emmy nomination; The Dresden Files, which he developed for the SyFy network; and many more.