After 28 years of fascination, I’ve now completely lost my mind and gone all in.
The Tusk is sponsoring a speculative ancient history — and hard science — gathering June 16 – 18, 2023, in Asheville, North Carolina. The Cosmic Summit 2023 will feature controversial authors, speculative internet personalities, and hard nosed Phd’s from the Comet Research Group.
As regular readers of this website may recognize, this is a delicate and epistemologically risky mix. But I am convinced the effort is justified.
Our subject here on the Cosmic Tusk — ignored, suppressed and derided evidence of cosmic impacts in human times — needs a physical and entertaining home beyond the internet. I believe the subject needs to combine the fruits of hard science and informed speculation to flourish in the global mind.
Today, these worlds live separately on the web. I want to bring them together in person with an interactive and informed audience.
As you can see from the new website, I am determined to do my very best to make absolutely clear that the invited speakers from the Comet Research Group and the speculators are intellectually delineated from each other:
*DISCLAIMER AND EXPLAINER: The Cosmic Summit is not a presentation of the Comet Research Group. That fact will be repeated many times at the Summit. The Summit will cover subjects which are not endorsed or supported by the CRG or the thinking of individual CRG members. George Howard through Cosmic Tusk Productions, LLC, is the sole owner and producer of the conference, which is a for-profit entertainment and science gathering of general interest. George is an environmental entrepreneur in Raleigh, North Carolina, who became interested in the Younger Dryas Impact in 1994 and posts on related subjects since 2010 at cosmictusk.com. He is a co-director of the 510(c)3 Comet Research Group and an occasional co-author with the CRG with over 1000 peer-reviewed journal citations.
I certainly expect that for the dwindling band of vocal critics of the Younger Dryas Impact this fact will be ignored. For them, CRG members and internet speculators are inseparable (and coordinating their presentations at coffee houses in Asheville).
Intellectual guilt by association is in vogue these days.
The truth is that I invited these wonderful people because I am fortunate to know each of them, and each did the Tusk a personal favor by graciously and bravely accepting my invitation to speak at an unproven event. I sought a mix of speakers that if I were in the audience I would enjoy hearing from, and this is them.
The Cosmic Summit 2023 is indeed a for-profit endeavor. So, please, call me a wildly successful grifter next summer. But recognize I’ve put my time in on this subject. I have been laboring for understanding at my own expense since Bill Clinton was first elected, I was living with roommates, and watched as a slack-jawed DC punk when fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted Jupiter in 1994.
Profit is critical to provide a properly incentivized, self-sustaining, virtuous cycle of improving presentations of controversial material that will get bigger and better over time, free of “committee.”