A Brief Pause From The Ordinary..., Demographics time--please just humor me Options

[nasaman58]

I just joined this community last night, and I'm just curious about some of the people here. I'm only 19 years old, but I'm more interested in all things space than anyone I've ever met. Just out of curiosity, what are people's ages in this forum?

[elakdawalla]

This seems to be the place for introductions, so here goes

I'm 30 and I work for The Planetary Society, doing whatever our fearless leaders ask me to do...which means I'm lucky in how varied my everyday job is. I cover space missions as "press," writing news stories for the website; maintain a weblog; write backgrounder material; run our various public involvement contests (art contests, guess the crater diameter, name the rovers, etc.); go on various enjoyable boondoggles, er, I mean, research trips; and do other stuff, like working as the image processing person in Cosmos 1 mission operations. (Too bad I never got any images to work on )

I love my job. I'm doing exactly what I set out to do when I went to graduate school -- help connect the "interested public" with what's currently going on in space research. Everybody wins; the scientists I talk to are grateful when anyone expresses interest in actually understanding their research (rather than focusing on endless debates like "What is a planet?"), and a small but devoted sliver of the public appears to love digging deeper into the science behind the latest discoveries.

What's struck me about reading the replies to this topic is the youthful mean age of the people reading and posting to this forum. The mean age of Planetary Society members is much older than that, over 50. Some general trends match, though; both respondents to this topic and Planetary Society members come from a broad range of professional backgrounds, with relatively few directly involved in aerospace research or industry; and both groups are, sadly, mostly male!

Emily