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Astronomycast, episode 350, Spaceship 1.

Welcome to Astronomycast, our weekly facts based journey through the cosmos.

We help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know.

My name is Fraser Kaden, I'm the publisher of Universe Today and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and the director of Cosmopolist.

Hey Pamela, how are you doing?

I'm doing well, how are you doing Fraser?

Good, so this is episode 350 and the last episode we're going to be doing for our summer hiatus.

So we'll be recording this episode today and then we'll be taking two months off and then the next episode you'll hear should be the live episode from DragonCon, which will happen over Labor Day weekend 2014 live in Atlanta.

If you're going to be going to DragonCon, we'd love to see you.

We will have booths, we will have stuff and things and t-shirts and lanyards and science.

High fives, hugs, handshakes, we'll sign things.

We'll go for coffee, be fun. So hang out with us.

And so the other thing which I think is kind of appropriate, I mentioned last week about the new job that I've taken on working for Hero X, and which is a division of spin off from the X Prize foundation, but the goal is to try and make crowd, essentially anybody be able to make an X Prize.

So you should come check it out at HeroX.com, but specifically just to sort of demonstrate how this is all going to work, I've created my own challenge and I'm calling it the self replicating robot challenge.

And so the way this works is I want to see a robot, make another robot, and those two robots make a third robot, which I don't think has been done.

So, and so the way this works is I want to raise $100,000, and then from everybody, and then we all would be like, yes, I want to see this in the world, I want to see robots capable.

Now obviously the space exploration angle of this is that we want to be able to send probes to Mars in the moon and have them build more copies of themselves,

and then we can start with the actual challenge and see if people can make this thing happen.

So it's robots building robots, so the world can be taken over by some of the robots that we can build.

So we can start with the robot, and then we can start with the robot, and then we can start with the robot, and then we can start with the robot.

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