Cosmic Questions

The Daily

The New York Times

News, Daily News

4.5 • 97.8K Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2022

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What is a black hole? Why do we remember the past but not the future? If time had a beginning, does it have an end? We don’t have the answers to some of the universe’s biggest questions. What we do know often feels bleak, such as the notion that in a billion years there will most likely be no life on Earth. Or the reality that someday the entire human race will probably be forgotten. nulltheless, people search for answers. These are some of the cosmic questions that haunt the human experience.

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Michael. A quick note about today's show.
0:05.2	As you all know, we're a new show, and so much of what we do is pursue the answers to
0:10.5	big and urgent questions. What will be the impact of a giant piece of legislation? Or what
0:16.6	are the implications of a verdict in a major trial?
0:20.1	Recently, two of our Times colleagues, audio producer Bianca Gavre and science writer Denys
0:26.4	Overby, embarked on an effort to explore some of the universe's biggest questions. But
0:33.4	this time, the point wasn't to deliver concrete answers. Instead, it was to sit with the
0:40.0	kinds of big, dreamy, existential questions that we don't have answers to.
0:46.6	Today, we share some of the conversations that Bianca and Denys have been having. It's
0:55.4	already August 19th.
1:02.4	Hello. Hi, Dennis. It's Bianca. Yeah, how are you?
1:09.1	I'm good. How are you? I'm fine. So I'm talking to you, officer, on my iPhone. I'm through
1:16.9	my ear buds. Is that okay? Is this? Yeah. It sounds great.
1:21.6	All right. Okay. What are we doing?
1:28.6	Why don't you just start by introducing yourself? Can you say your name and what you do at the
1:37.0	Times?
1:40.0	My name is Dennis Overby. And for some reason, I get away with calling myself the Cosmic
1:46.8	Affairs Correspondent of the New York Times. That's what it says on my business cards.
1:53.8	So the title is Cosmic Affairs Correspondent. Right. So my beat, I just cried as physics,
2:03.8	the universe, anything you have to do with Einstein and anything else that I decide
2:10.3	fits into that rubric. So I'm interested in how people relate to their
2:16.4	position or their role in a universe that we don't understand and probably never will.
	...

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