Pipe Dream Zoom-chatted with Mika McKinnon, a geophysicist focusing on disaster research and a science writer and adviser for the entertainment industry. McKinnon’s writing has been featured in io9, WIRED, Vox Media and Vice Media. She is also an avid contributor of plausible mathematical equations seen in science fiction shows like the “The Stargate Universe” and “Star Trek: Discovery.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Pipe Dream: What can you tell me about your talk and how it relates to this year’s theme, “UNEARTHED?”

Mika McKinnon: So, I am giving a talk about telling stories with rocks and how rocks are a bit of our day-to-day companions. It seems a little bit funny, but when you ask people about their favorite rocks — even people you wouldn’t think have one do — and every single one of those rocks has a story to tell. Sometimes we know how to read it and sometimes we don’t. This particular rock that I’m going to be talking about is going to be a story of climate change, which is both extremely terrifying and extremely reassuring. It’s something I’m spending a lot of time with right now. I’m out on the West Coast, where we have been under a thick blanket of smoke for most of the week, and it feels very apocalyptic. It’s a nice reminder that, you know, things can change and still be okay.

PD: What’s the coolest research you’ve done as a “master of disaster?”

MM: My current research is actually taking [landslide hazard pattern-mapping] into space, so looking at landslides in asteroids, comets, moons and other small little bodies with very weak gravity and little to no atmosphere. And the reason we’re doing that is because we’re sending more and more robots to go explore asteroids. Next month, I was going to go on a zero-gravity flight with a vacuum chamber with a sandbox, and the sandbox would be in the vacuum chamber and the vacuum chamber [would be] on the plane, and then we’d do little parabolic flights to get microgravity to give me some sandbox landslide in no atmosphere and low gravity, and now that’s been delayed indefinitely.

PD: Was there any inspiration in going from geophysics into sci-fi?

MM: Geophysics came before sci-fi. A lot of how I paid rent through [graduate] school was working [in] the entertainment industry, and I loved it. Apparently people liked working with me, so they passed my name around. The funniest [time was when] I rented my physics textbooks to a movie that starred George Clooney, and I tried so hard to be like, “Look, you don’t have to pay me, just get him to autograph my physics textbook.” They wouldn’t let me do it, but I think I’m probably the only person on the planet that has made back the cost of a physics book.

PD: How did you get into science communications?

MM: Freelancing is a really interesting sort of concept because you need to be incredibly comfortable with rejection. I actually set rejection goals because, if I am not getting “no’s,” it means I’m only doing what is obviously safe and easy, and I’m not learning anything … [or] developing any new skills. You’ll never get something you don’t ask for, so I [give] myself rejection goals in both number and in type. So, I want to hit, let’s say 100 rejections a year. I actually want to get a lot more than that, but let’s just say 100 and I want to have one noteworthy rejection in a year. My current, absolute top favorite rejection is that I made it to the top 15 percent of Canadian astronaut candidates before being cut, which means that I passed the paper screen, the basic ethics screen and the background screen and I got cut when they said, “Well, we don’t need a geophysicist,” which is pretty freaking good to me! Like, I am really proud of that. That’s an amazing rejection to get.

PD: Is there anything else you want to touch on?

MM: So, the world is big and scary and overwhelming and there’s so many things that are going on all of the time and none of us know what we’re doing or where we’re going to go next. But, no matter where you are, there’s always a rock nearby. There’s always a chunk of the Earth that can tell you a piece of history that has been days to billions of years in the making depending on the rock, and I find that really reassuring. I find that really grounding and I know that’s a terrible phrase to use in this context, but whatever. I find it gives me some stability when there’s so much chaos and uncertainty to just be able to go, “You know what? I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I’ve got this rock and it can tell me a story of what’s happened before and I will still be around with what happens next.” That’s pretty much where I go with TedX. It’s all about where do we go from here, where is our context, where is our place and how do we connect with the world around us even when everything is overwhelming.