Aliens 101

Paul Giamatti’s CHINWAG with Stephen Asma

Treefort Media & Touchy Feely Films

History, Society & Culture, Science

4.9 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

👽🛸👾 Brace yourself for an intergalactic Chinwag as Professor Asma brings you into Office Hours to take on the ultimate extraterrestrial thought experiment: how would we deal with aliens? From UN protocols and risk management strategies to spotting laser pulses and heat signatures, they explore the practical, the philosophical, and the downright bizarre. Stephen looks at sci-fi classics like HG Wells’ War of the Worlds, and contemporary works like Zixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem. Do aliens think like us, or is their science beyond our logic? Could ancient Cambodians have glimpsed serpentine visitors from the stars? And is it possible to think of aliens as modern-day gods? This cosmic wag is out of this world—don’t miss it! Paul Giamatti is a Golden Globe award-winning actor and producer. Stephen Asma is a professor and author specializing in the philosophy of science, religion, and art. 👽🛸👾 ========= Make sure to follow us @chinwagpod 👉🏼 IG: https://www.instagram.com/chinwagpod/ Tik: https://www.tiktok.com/@chinwagpod Website: http://chinwagpod.fm YT Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@chinwagpod Send your stories, Qs, or thoughts to 📧 questions [at] chinwagpod [dot] fm ========= Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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1:01.1	Thank you. Okay, welcome everyone to another episode of office hours with yours truly, Professor Stephen
1:25.7	Asthma. with yours truly, Professor Stephen Asma.
1:35.3	As usual, we're doing sort of a deeper dive on the weird, the strange, the wonderful, the sort of an intense study of inexplicabilia, if you will.
1:41.3	And today I thought we talk about aliens in general, extraterrestrials, and specifically
1:48.0	think about how they've been conceived and thought about through cultures, either, you know,
1:55.7	as dangerous enemies or as sort of gods or helpers. And it turns out there's long traditions of this.
2:03.2	I mean, we've had about 150, maybe 200 years of science fiction, aliens. But there's actually
2:10.5	much earlier stories. There's even sort of an ancient Roman writer named Lucian who's sort of living in the 100, 200 to sort of an ancient Roman writer named Lucian, who's sort of living in the like 100 to sort of
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