Beach Health, Extraterrestrial Communication, Maggots. April 13, 2018, Part 1

Science Friday

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Life Sciences, Natural Sciences, Wnyc, Friday, Science

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🗓️ 13 April 2018

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Some private citizens, scientists, and entrepreneurs are sending some focused messages through the cosmos, which could theoretically be intercepted by any technologically advanced civilizations among the stars, essentially advertising the existence and location of Earth. Is it ethical to do that—or could it needlessly put humanity at risk? Beach nourishment, the process of dredging up sand from the seafloor to replenish eroding beaches and protect coastal ecosystems, has a history that goes back to the 1920s expansion and widening of the beach at Coney Island. But does it work as intended? And where does all that sand go once it’s placed? These days, people are thinking about how to put maggots to good use before we die. That means we have to get over the ick factor and actually study these creatures. What do they eat, when do they eat, how much do they eat, and at what rate?

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Ira of Plato. A bit later in the hour we'll be talking aliens and whether we should be trying to talk to them.
0:08.0	Hmm. Is there a risk there? But first, NASA's Kepler planet hunting space telescope is failing, but fear not.
0:15.6	A new planet finder called Tess is on the way. And here to talk about that and other selected short subjects in science is Ryan Mandelbaum,
0:23.3	Simon's writer at Gizmodo in our New York studios.
0:26.6	Welcome back on this Friday to 13th.
0:29.3	There you come in.
0:30.5	That's right.
0:31.2	I actually have a selection of, I think, maybe some Friday the 13th, spooky unlucky theme
0:35.8	stories.
0:36.4	Hit us with number one.
0:37.7	Sure.
0:38.2	So, yeah, Monday NASA is going to be launching the transiting exoplanet survey satellite or tests,
0:43.5	which should be surveying as many as or perhaps as little as 200,000 stars within the closest 300 light years around Earth.
0:50.5	And they're hoping to find some exoplanets, maybe some Earth 2.0 candidates.
0:55.2	And who's launching this? Is this one of those SpaceX? Yeah, it's going to be on a SpaceX Falcon 9.
1:00.2	Wow, so there's a lot literally writing on that.
1:02.9	Yeah, well, literally, yeah. Literally, yeah. So, so how is this different from Kepler?
1:09.0	Sure, so this, what's really important about tests is that it's looking at the closest stars around us.
1:14.1	And these are going to be potential, you know, they're going to survey it first, and then these
1:17.5	will be potential targets for the James Webb Space Telescope or some successor to the Hubble
1:22.4	to really understand what's going on to the, you know, around these planets and perhaps
1:26.2	having an Earth 2.0 somewhere. So, you know, some of the telescopes, they have a very narrow focus on, which part of the universe. This is going to be a wide-ranging search? It's a survey. It's a survey. It's a survey. Get as much as they can to, you know, understand what's there and then dig into what looks most promising. Okay, let's talk about other mysteries of the universe.
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