Thursday, July 15, 2021

Burst 34 - The Mystery of the Nine Transients


Interview recorded: 11 July 2021

Released: 16 July 2021

Duration: 21 minutes, 33 seconds

Beatriz Villarroel discusses her latest VASCO paper in Nature Scientific Reports, "Exploring nine simultaneously occurring transients on April 12th 1950."

Links:

Villarroel+ , Exploring Nine simultaneously occurring transients on April 12th 1950.

Burst 19: Our Sky Now and Then (August 2016)

Episode 41: The Vanishing Sources with Beatriz Villarroel (November 2019)

The Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations project: I. USNO objects missing in modern sky surveys and follow-up observations of a "missing star

The Palomar Digital Sky Survey

Gran Telescopio Canarias

The United States Nuclear Testing Program

Credits

Host and Producer: Paul Carr

Music: Ahleuchatistas and Erika Lloyd


Thursday, February 4, 2021

Episode 49 - Existential Risk


Released: 4 February 2021

Duration: 58 minutes 44 seconds

Co-hosts Paul Carr and Daniela DePaulis are joined by author Thomas Moynihan. The subject is the idea of human extinction and how it evolved into our present day understand of Existential Risk.


Guest Bio:

Thomas Moynihan

I am a writer and researcher from the UK. In 2019, I completed a PhD at Oriel College on the history of human extinction. Currently, I am a visiting Research Associate in History at St. Benet's College, Oxford University, and I am working for Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute with a grant from the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative. 
 
I am interested in the history of existential risk and of existential hope: that is, how people first came to understand the perils and promises that face us as a species. I see this as the central philosophical drama of the modern world: how we came to appreciate our position—and precarity—as intelligent beings within an otherwise seemingly silent and sterile universe. 
 
My goal is to reveal how contemporary research into global risks can be seen as part of the wider story of our ‘coming of age’ as a civilisation and a species.

Links:

Thomas Moynihan - https://thomasmoynihan.xyz

X-Risk at MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/x-risk

Mary Shelley - The Last Man

Churchill - Shall We All Commit Suicide?

The Order of the Dolphin

Frank DrakÄ™: A Speculation on the Influence of Biological Immortality on SETI

Natural Selection of Stellar Civilizations by the Limits of Growth

The Jaws of Darkness

The Ethics of METI

Credits:

Co-hosts: Paul Carr and Daniela De Paulis

Producer: Paul Carr

Music: Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Solar Arkestra, DJ Spooky


The Wow! Signal is released under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license.

Sunday, December 13, 2020

Wow! Signal Pub #4 Video

 Here's the video for Wow! Signal Pub #4. Present were Ciro Villa, Rock Howard, Buck Field, Nick Nielsen, and Paul Carr. We covered a wide range of topics from 2001 A Space Odyssey to Luna Lee.

Hope to see you there on Pub #5, which will probably be in March 2021.



Monday, November 30, 2020

Wow! Signal Pub #4 coming up soon

 We're planning the next Wow! Signal Pub soon. It's a live-streamed ramblecast, with no set agenda, no show notes, no definitive start/stop time, and no solemnity. you can say what you want, but it goes on your permanent record. Participation is open to pretty much anyone, but you have to give me your e-mail address so I can send you the Zoom invite.

Right now, the date and time to pencil in is 12 December at 16:00 Eastern Standard Time (23:00 UTC). We'll update that as we get closer. Hope you can make it.

Friday, November 27, 2020

Episode 48 - Chelsea Haramia on the Ethics of METI


Released: 28 November 2020

Duration: 70 minutes, 39 seconds

download the .mp3 audio file.


Co-hosts Paul Carr and Daniela De Paulis engage philosopher Chelsea Haramia on the ethics of sending signals into space that might be received by intelligent beings in the cosmos. How do we think coherently about the risks?


Links:






Lyrics to "Time Pops Bubbles"


Guest Bio

Chelsea Haramia received her PhD in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she specialized in ethics. She is now an assistant professor in the philosophy department at Spring Hill College. She is also co-editor of the online journal 1000-Word Philosophy, which houses a growing set of original 1000-word essays on philosophical questions, figures, and arguments aimed at an audience of philosophers and non-philosophers alike. She has published in the areas of normative ethics, bioethics, animal ethics, aesthetics, feminist philosophy, and astrobiology ethics. Her current work involves ethical and metaethical analyses of space exploration and of the search for intelligent life in particular.  

Credits:

Co-hosts: Paul Carr and Daniela De Paulis

Producer: Paul Carr

Music: DJ Spooky, Nest, Erika Lloyd.

 

The Wow! Signal is published under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license.


Friday, November 6, 2020

Episode 47 - Arthur C. Clarke, Godfather of Satellites


Released: 7 November 2020

Duration: 57 minutes, 36 seconds

 

Co hosts Paul Carr and Daniela De Paulis welcome space historian David Skogerboe to talk about the pro-space activism of Arthur C. Clarke.

Guest Bio:

David Skogerboe is a space historian and science communicator. He recently earned his MSc in the History and Philosophy of Science from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where he focused his research on the intersection of space science, science fiction, and science communication. During his masters, he interned at the NASA History Division in Washington DC, where he spent countless hours perusing the most interesting historical reference collections on the planet. He is presently a freelance writer and editor while he awaits the emergence of his first child, and he hopes to soon begin a PhD and a fruitful career as a professional nerd.

Links:

The Godfather of Satellites: Arthur C. Clarke and the Battle for Narrative Space in the Popular Culture of Spaceflight, 1945-1995, David Skogerboe, full master's thesis

Arthur C. ClarkeApollo 12: Why Don't You Know Me? You Should., David Skogerboe, NASA News & Notes

Wireless World Feb. & Oct. 1945, Scans of Clarke's articles proposing the geostationary satellite

How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village, Arthur C. Clarke (1992), Clarke's overview of the impact of communication technology on society

The Making of a Moon: The Story of the Earth Satellite Program, Arthur C. Clarke (1957), Clarke's pre-history of satellite technology, first published before Sputnik

The Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C. Clarke (1979), Clarke's sci-fi that features the space elevator and "project clean-up"

Arthur C. Clarke's official website

An expansive bibliography of Clarke's work. An impressive reminder of just how hard he pushed to propel humans into space, and keep them there.

Credits:

Co-hosts: Paul Carr and Daniela De Paulis

Music: DJ Spooky and Lloyd Rogers

 


Check out this episode!

Monday, April 6, 2020

Episode 46 - Extraterrestrials


Released: 6 April 2020
Duration: 53 minutes, 55 seconds

Download the .mp3 audio file

Author and podcaster Wade Roush talks about his forthcoming book from MIT Press, Extraterrestrials. The book covers astrobiology, SETI, the Fermi paradox and more for a literate but non-specialist audience.

Guest Bio

WADE ROUSH, a Boston-based science and technology journalist, is a columnist at Scientific American and the producer and host of Soonish, an independent podcast about the future. He has served as Boston bureau reporter for Science, senior editor and San Francisco bureau chief at MIT Technology Review, chief correspondent and San Francisco editor for Xconomy, and acting director of MIT’s Knight Science Journalism program. He holds a PhD in the history and social study of science and technology from MIT.

Links:

1950 New Yorker Cartoon by Alan Dunn
The Extraterrestrials page at MIT Press
The Extraterrestrials page at Amazon
Six Strange Facts about Oumuamua
Sofia Sheikh and the Nine Axes
The Vanishing Sources
Where is Everybody?
Stephen Webb's Book on the Fermi Paradox
Nathalie Cabrol
Seth Shostak on the Zoo Hypothesis

The MIT Technology Review
The Hub and Spoke Podcast Network
The Soonish podcast

The podcast contact page
Wow! Signal Live

Credits

Host and Producer: Paul Carr
Music: Lloyd Rogers and Jason Robinson

The Wow! Signal is released under the Creative Commons Attribution License