The following panels are requesting panelists to help discuss the topics at hand! If you are interested in sitting on one of these panels, e-mail panels@geekkon.net by July 17! Please say which panel you are interested and if there are any times you would not be available.

Caprica, Smallville, Fringe, Stargate Universe, Doctor Who, and more. We'll mourn Dollhouse, Heroes, and other victims of niche marketing. We’ll wonder why V lived while Flashforward died. And we'll get our hopes up for the new fall crop of SF&F coming to the small screen. (The Cape? Really?) Handouts included. Since it's impossible for anyone to keep up with all the shows, audience participation is mandatory.

Peter Watts’s Blindsight and John Scalzi’s The Lost Colony both feature alien races that have evolved intelligence but not consciousness. What is consciousness, exactly? Philosopher Daniel Dennett took a shot at it in Explaining Consciousness, but the concept is still maddeningly hard to grasp. We all understand that it’s not exactly the same as intelligence or self-awareness, but beyond believing that it requires a large, complex brain, we still don’t have a very good handle on it.

How will the world end? Global warming has the potential to heat us up until Earth turns into another Venus. Conversely, a big meteor strike, supervolcano eruption, or nuclear war could trigger a new ice age. Do we have to pick a favorite before 2012? And, if so, can I vote for drowning in chocolate?

Since we’ve passed the peak-oil point and started to slide down the far side of that particular cheap ride, what other sources of energy will we use to power our civilization? And, intriguingly, can we tap into some free ones? Wind, geothermal, solar, tidal, and fission all have their advocates. Maybe we can run our cars on compressed air. Maybe fusion is no longer the same “5 years off” that it’s been for the last half-century. Maybe Steorn’s ORBO gizmo and the successors to Pons and Fleischmann’s cold fusion are really on to something. Can we tap hot air emanating from DC? That well seems bottomless.

In 1982, Arthur C. Clarke published 2010: Odyssey 2, a sequel to his and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Peter Hyams made a movie of it in 1984. So here we are at last in 2010, only to find the space program stalled in LEO, with the shuttle program winding down and NASA marking time. Would things have been different if the premise of Clarke’s original short story, “The Sentinel” (1951), had caused more people to look outward instead of inward? What will it take now to bring to fruition the old maxim that “The meek shall inherit the Earth; the rest of us are going to the stars.”?

The Universe apparently comprises 5% what we think of as “normal” matter and energy, 20% dark matter, and 75% dark energy. This information was discovered by scientists, but lots of other people are in a position to make use of it, including scam artists, ghost hunters, ufologists, religions, “free energy” enthusiasts, SF writers, and the cast of The Big Bang Theory. What’s really happening with dark matter, TTBOOK as of 2010, other than just making us feel really ignorant?

From the very 1st SF novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, thru H. P. Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones and George A. Romero’s zombies, to the latest New Weird writings of China Miéville (who forthrightly admits “It’s all about the monsters!”), we fans have been suckers for monsters. Now Stephen T. Asma has written a whole book about it: On Monsters. We’ll bat his theses around a bit.

Avatar gave us the most lushly imagined alien world ever, but was it more fiction than science? Would it really be possible to combine human and na’vi DNA? Where is unobtainium on the periodic table, and is that name more than just an in-joke? What’s up with the floating mountains? Are those auto-twining neural tendrils USB-compliant? Is Pandora’s atmosphere poisonous or just really thin? Human wartech seems to have gotten bigger but not necessarily better; how likely is that? Will James Cameron ever acknowledge his debt to Poul Anderson?

The Whoniverse and you: A Doctor Who fan panel for the longest running TV scifi series. From the orginal series to the new series and the spin offs Torchwood, Sarah Jane, and K9. A panel that is bigger on the inside.

A discussion on far more than the basic “what is steampunk?” this discussion panel will go into the underpinnings of the steampunk movement, asking questions like “why is the Victorian era so appealing a literary medium?” and “what aspects of modern culture allow steampunk to flourish as it has?”

Top hats, bustles… clockwork and gears? What are the components that make the