Wunderdog26 Mar 2024

Neil DeGrasse Tyson: "If noone in society is thinking that way, however realistic or unrealistic it is, then ... we're not going anywhere ever."

At 3 in the night at Starmus 2017 I finally managed to get ten minutes with astrophysicist, science communicator, director of the Hayden Planetarium. At it's purest, Wunderdog digs into one or two topics and goes deep, like Vinay's refugee cities, Casey's carbon capture, Ana's cosmic bullet holes, and Eugene's star-based life. This isn't that! This is, me grabbing hold of someone very smart and trying to squeeze fun answers out of them on as many topics as I could.

We talk about CRISPR, Breakthrough Starshot, Ray Kurzweil, Mars exploration and contamination, mind uploads, genetically engineered bacteria and Craig Venter, sci-fi, Bach's Mass in D minor, and how Beethoven's 7th symphony is "high cholesterol" and Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival".

I was reluctant to share it because it was so unfocused, but Neil has such a knack for delivering fun, concise answers on any topic. He did this easily, despite having been CONSTANTLY surrounded by media all weekend. He was the most popular man on a festival where ELEVEN of the guests had won Nobel prizes.

Wunderdog is produced by Nitro Studio Oslo, and music is by Trop1ce / Charky. In this particular episode my ticket was funded by Norway's Research Council, and the interview was originally done for Andreas Kjensli Knudsen, Pablo Castro & my excellent live-podcast "Applied Science Fiction" / "Anvendt Science Fiction".

The people who support this stuff are mentioned on this episode, they did so at www.patreon.com/runde

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Episoder(20)

Robert Revell: Composing for film, craft vs creativity

Robert Revell’s grandfather was a poet who fled Mao’s China - and Robert tells the story of how he went back to find his family’s house, still untouched after fifty years. Robert is a film and TV co...

19 Jul 202551min

Terry Phan & Tomo Goto: Planet nine - finally detected?

"Extreme trans-Neptunian Objects" - or chunks of rock that orbit the sun on average 250 times further away from the sun than Earth does - are moving in strange ways. They seem to be clustered somewhat...

14 Jun 202522min

Noland Arbaugh, world's first Neuralink human: a pinky in the brain

Noland is an affable Arizonian with an advanced piece of tech in his skull: A Neuralink. With it, Noland can see his own brainwaves and control his computer ... somewhat. Often his powers are not very...

29 Jul 202456min

Astrobiologist Maya D. Yanez: Could acetylene fermentation be an energy source for microbes on Titan?

NASA JPL intern Maya D. Yanez has recently defended her Ph.D. on acetylenotrophy. This is the ability to extract energy from acetylene, and only a few species of bacteria (that we know of here on Eart...

14 Jul 20242h 46min

Vinay Gupta: We must not let the climate refugee situation turn into a global Gaza

Blockchain is a mystery to me, so I don't usually talk about blockchain projects. But Vinay Gupta is awesome. He thinks about climate refugees ALL THE TIME, and many of his projects, from the current ...

6 Jul 20242h 41min

Kevin Fischer, founder and CEO of OpenSouls: Giving AI souls

Note my NEW FORMAT: 10 minutes of quick questions first, then a deeper talk about ideas, motivation and process after. "I don't think it really matters if our profound connection happens with a digi...

27 Mai 202453min

Norwegian episode: Ingvild Bræin og ai-trøbbel for barnebokkritikk.no

Ein kommentar på nettsida www.barnebokkritikk.no vart illustrert med bilete genererte av Microsoft Ai Copilot. Eit bortimot samla korps av norske illustratørar og teikneserieskaparar hoppa inn på Barn...

26 Mar 202452min