Episode 096 - Lee Billings and Dr. Bjoern Benneke

Probably Science

Andy Wood, Matt Kirshen

Jessecase, Comedy, News, Mattkirshen, Standup, Andywood, Science & Medicine, Science, Brookswheelan

4.8 • 707 Ratings

🗓️ 26 December 2013

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week Matt, Jesse and Andy are joined by Caltech Planetary Science Postdoctoral Scholar Bjoern Benneke and author Lee Billings to talk about the many topics covered in Lee's new book, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars, including: Hunting for exoplanets! Dating sites for farmers! The Drake equation! Earth's recent trend toward radio silence! Oxygen: The first great pollution crisis! Harold Urey's pessimistic time capsule predictions! Energy-hungry alien civilizations creating Dyson spheres! Competition in the exoplanet field! The philosophical reasons for searching for extraterrestrial life!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Probably Science
0:01.9	Welcome to Probably Science.
0:10.4	Welcome to Probably Science. I am Andy Wood, and I'm joined by Matt Kirshan.
0:14.7	Hello.
0:15.3	And Jesse Case.
0:16.2	Hi.
0:17.0	And this is our second week in a row of doing some actual real science on this show.
0:21.5	We've got real books, real scientists and authors.
0:24.8	Multiple people.
0:25.5	Real books that have been written on paper.
0:28.6	Normally we're just reading placemats and...
0:31.9	Yeah, yeah, educational placemats, which, as I've told you, I've been getting into collecting.
0:36.0	This is Jesse's new obsession.
0:37.9	Educational Mexican restaurant placemats.
0:40.1	They're very generic.
0:41.2	You can, but all sorts of different places buy them.
0:44.5	It's not even unique to Mexican restaurants.
0:46.5	All kinds of restaurants will have informational placemats.
0:49.3	Any foreign restaurant, yeah, informational placemats.
0:52.0	But the Mexican placemats, they choose to focus on
0:55.3	different things, different parts of the history, sometimes you learn a word, sometimes it's geography.
0:59.9	So I'm going to get, I think, 12, 15 of them, get them framed.
	...

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