Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas25 Tammi 2021

131 | Avi Loeb on Taking Aliens Seriously

The possible existence of technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations — not just alien microbes, but cultures as advanced (or much more) than our own — is one of the most provocative questions in modern science. So provocative that it's difficult to talk about the idea in a rational, dispassionate way; there are those who loudly insist that the probability of advanced alien cultures existing is essentially one, even without direct evidence, and others are so exhausted by overblown claims in popular media that they want to squelch any such talk. Astronomer Avi Loeb thinks we should be taking this possibility seriously, so much so that he suggested that the recent interstellar interloper `Oumuamua might be a spaceship built by aliens. That got him in a lot of trouble. We talk about the trouble, about `Oumuamua, and the attitude scientists should take toward provocative ideas.

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Abraham (Avi) Loeb received his Ph.D. in plasma physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is currently the Frank B. Baird Jr. professor of science at Harvard University. He served as the Chair of Harvard's Astronomy department from 2011-2020. He is Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Founding Director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative. He is chair of the Advisory Committee for the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative. His new book is Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

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170 | Priya Natarajan on Galaxies, Black Holes, and Cosmic Anomalies

There is so much we don't know about our universe. But our curiosity about the unknown shouldn't blind us to the incredible progress we have made in cosmology over the last century. We know the univer...

25 Loka 20211h 27min

169 | C. Thi Nguyen on Games, Art, Values, and Agency

Games are everywhere, but why exactly do we play them? It seems counterintuitive, to artificially invent goals and obstacles just so we can struggle to achieve them. (And in some games, like Twister, ...

18 Loka 20211h 24min

AMA | October 2021

Welcome to the October 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of que...

14 Loka 20212h 59min

168 | Anil Seth on Emergence, Information, and Consciousness

Those of us who think that that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known tend to also think that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that must be compatible with those law...

11 Loka 20211h 25min

167 | Chiara Marletto on Constructor Theory, Physics, and Possibility

Traditional physics works within the "Laplacian paradigm": you give me the state of the universe (or some closed system), some equations of motion, then I use those equations to evolve the system thro...

4 Loka 20211h 35min

166 | Betül Kaçar on Paleogenomics and Ancient Life

In the question to understand the biology of life, we are (so far) limited to what happened here on Earth. That includes the diversity of biological organisms today, but also its entire past history. ...

27 Syys 20211h 14min

165 | Kathryn Paige Harden on Genetics, Luck, and Fairness

It's pretty clear that our genes affect, though they don't completely determine, who we grow up to be; children's physical and mental characteristics are not completely unrelated to those of their par...

20 Syys 20211h 25min

AMA | September 2021

Welcome to the September 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of q...

16 Syys 20213h 38min