Books and Ideas Podcast

Got it already, Ginger! Great idea!!!

Hi Ginger, this was a fantastic podcast, really interesting and great quality. It occurred to me that you might like some of the retrospective done by Robyn Williams on the A(ustralian)BC Radio National's Science Show on the Apollo 11 moon landings. You can get to the transcripts from this search (http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/index/date2009.htm#July for July's stories) but I can make the mp3 available to you if you'd prefer.

It just occurred to me that when you spoke about Walter Kronkite (sp?) explaining all about the technology of the moon landing the ABC ran a live feed from the rocket for a stupidly long period of time waiting for updates (including the landing itself).

The stories also cover Australia's involvement as primary relay stations because of the time of day of the moon landing and the moon walk. I seem to remember that Neil Armstrong was meant to wait several hours (to better catch US primetime) but decided to go out early, which is why Australia got the primary feed. I might have misremembered some of that, but I thought it might interest you.... See More

Radio National does All in the Mind as well, which I know you know.

Thanks again for Books & Ideas and the Brain Science Podcast.

Fun topic. A little too much "space cowboy" for me though. Don't get me wrong, I love space more than anybody. I had a NASA flag above my door up until when I was 18. I wanted to be an astronaut more than anybody until I realised the only path is to spend half my life in the airforce acquiring hundreds of hours of military flight time. It became pretty unattractive after that. I switched to become a particle physicist instead.

Although harvesting resources in space might be "moral" (I think I barfed in my mouth a little when the word was brought up), it certainly is not economical. Les correctly pointed out that the earth is not a closed system but then contradicted himself by saying we have to go to outer space to gather our resources. There is no advantage in collecting sunlight from space for electricity. It would be the same silicon panels. Enough solar energy already falls on the surface of the earth in one hour to satisfy the consumption of the world's population for a year. There is no technology to transmit tera-watts of electrical current wirelessly over hundreds of kms. What should be possible but still isn't is being able to transmit a few kW generated from my solar panel to a house a few blocks away via a wired smart grid. The problem with smart & green solutions is not the technology but the political will and policies.

Helium-3 from the moon would be great, we just lost €20,000 worth of it last week from a leak in our experiment. Attempting to mine it from the moon though is like a chimpanzee collecting iron ore in case it figures out how to build itself a car.... See More

I'm glad there was a Q&A session because we got to hear Les correct view on the urgency (or lack of) for human space exploration. It's costly and if our goal is to discover living organisms on mars, the worst way of doing it is to bring a foreign being made up of mostly bacteria up there to try find it. Contaminating a well preserved scene and then making a scientific mistake to conclude that all life is the same as that from earth would be andro-centric-logically devastating. The rovers already out-performed their life-expectancy by a year and didn't make a single complaint about it.

The problem with talking about space in a "cowboy" kind of way is that the general public can not tell the difference between proper science (mars rover missions & the recent LCROSS mission) and flying multi-billion dollar space junk like the international space station. One should be very clear to distinguish the difference. The former made remarkable discovers on the existence of water on extra-terrestrial bodies. The latter wrote a proposal advertising the science it would generate, but after being delayed by a few decades and going several billion dollars over budget it has produced nothing. The one possibly good mission, the AMS spectrometer searching for anti-matter sources in outer space, was not launched because it was deemed too heavy & expensive. "Cowboy" projects sucks up all the money from NASA. For instance, an already build satellite system (DISCOVR) which would provide the best data to date on global climate change has been sitting in a warehouse for several years because the previous administration decided there was no budget left from the moon/mars initiative to launch it.

Luckily the current administration is a lot more intelligent and seems to be listening. Let's hope they have the political will.

-from a concerned scientist.

Excellent podcast: I'm on my second listen (mostly because I wasn't quite in the headspace for philosophy when I started listening to it, so kinda missed the first half).

Can I check the free will business? In essence Tom was agreeing that our sense of 'free will' like we're a soul (sort of thing) is, in fact, an illusion, but given our whole context defines not only who we are but what direction we're going when we make a 'decision' that it's still our choice and couldn't be anything else (if that makes sense).

I also wasn't quite sure about the problem with the immaterial 'soul' making decisions and prodding the flesh to carry them out because it wouldn't be influenced by anything to make any particular choices: wouldn't that contra-causal bit be our selves, with all our memories, beliefs, and intentions, and wouldn't all that baggage be enough to generate choices? I can't see why that can't all be done in the flesh, but I'm fuzzy on why it couldn't be done as a extra-natural thing (from the evidence that was discussed in the podcast alone, anyway).... See More

Anyway, excellent work and I'm really thankful you've started up on the Books and Ideas ones again. They're a bit broader in their appeal.

I think you should put it under Science in iTunes. Only a few are not related to science.

Thanks Ginger!

Thanks for the feedback. I guess I really should consider listing the show under science!

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