The Wow! Signal Podcast Paul Carr

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
 
 

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: 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

Released: 28 November 2020
Duration: 70 minutes, 39 seconds
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.
For more information about this episode, include a rich set of links, please see the blog entry for Episode 48 at:
https://wowsignalpodcast.com
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 Daniel De Paulis
Producer: Paul Carr
Music: DJ Spooky, Nest, Erika Lloyd.
 
The Wow! Signal is published under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license.

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
Apollo 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
 

Released: 6 April 2020
Duration: 53 minutes, 55 seconds
 
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.
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.
For more information, please visit us at https://wowsignalpodcast.com
Links: The Extraterrestrial page at MIT Press
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
Natalie 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

Released: 31 March 2020
Duration: 54 minutes, 8 seconds
 
Co-hosts Paul Carr and Daniela DePaulis welcome Dr. Paola Castaño to talk about her research among the science teams working on the International Space Station.
For more information, please visit our blog at https://wowsignalpodcast.com
Guest Bio Paola Castaño is a sociologist of science. She recently completed a Newton International Fellow funded by The British Academy at Cardiff University and is working on a book about the meanings and valuations of scientific research on the International Space Station. On the basis of ethnographic work following the life course of experiments sent to the station, the book examines the fields of particle physics, plant biology and biomedical research. She has a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago, and has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, the Free University of Berlin, and Waseda University in Tokyo.
Links: The International Space Station goes under the microscope
Human Research Program Investigators’ Workshop 2020: Day 1
Cosmic-ray positron fraction measurement from 1 to 30 GeV with AMS-01
Scott Kelly’s genes and NASA’s twin study on him, explained
Keyworkers
 
Daniela De Paulis on the Unseen Podcast
Daniela De Paulis discusses Cogito in Episode 35.
Cogito in Space
Castaño's article on Cogito
 
The Wow! Signal podcast on Reddit
Our YouTube Channel
Credits: Co-hosts: Paul Carr and Daniela De Paulis
Producer: Paul Carr
Music: DJ Spooky, Blue Dot Sessions, Lee Maddeford, and Lloyd Rogers