Episode 50 - Arecibo Wow! with Professor Abel Mendez

Released: 11 September 2024
Interview Recorded: 22 August 2024
Duration: 67 minutes, 19 seconds

Download the .mp3 audio file

We welcome back Professor Abel Mendez from the University of Puerto Rico to tell us about recent research into data from the Arecibo radio telescope into cold hydrogen clouds and a proposed natural explanation for the Big Ear Wow! Signal that we covered in depth in Episode 19.

We recommend you download the draft paper so you can follow along.

Links:

Arecibo Wow! I: An Astrophysical Explanation for the Wow! Signal

Our episode (#19) with Big Ear scientist Bob Dixon

A previous appearance by Abel Mendez on this podcast.

Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico

The Arecibo Radio Telescope Collapse

The FAST Radio Telescope

Astrophysical MASERs (microwave lasers)

Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: Masers

Population Inversion (Wikipedia)

The Hydrogen 21 cm line

MASERs, Interstellar and Circumstellar, Theory.

Credits

Host, editor, producer: Paul Carr

Music: Quincas Moreira (Black Swan), George Hrab (Far), Jason Robinson

Episode 50 of the Wow! Signal Podcast© 2024 by Paul Carr is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Pub #7 available on YouTube

 Feel free to listen to Pub #7 with Nick Nielsen, Mike Bohler, Rock Howard, and Paul Carr

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

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 Drakę: 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.

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.

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.

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:

1000 Word Philosophy

The Arecibo Message

Douglas Vakoch on METI and Daniela on Cogito (Episode 35)

Douglas Vakoch on a METI Messaging Project (Episode 37)

The Live Moonbounce Video

Daniel Oberhaus on Extraterrestrial Languages (Episode 40)

Julia De Marines on Episode 42

Earth in Human Hands

The Jaws of Darkness

Lyrics to "Time Pops Bubbles"

Engage with us on Discord

Connect with us on Twitter

Discuss on reddit

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.