Keith Cooper | The Stars Are Like A Mirror

Matt D’Elia Is Confused

Matt D'Elia

Society & Culture

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2020

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Everyone loves to think about aliens, and Matt is no exception. But when it comes to actually KNOWING anything about them— well, no one actually knows shit. So to discuss the possibility of their existence and our search for extraterrestrial life, Matt wanted to talk to an actual expert on the matter— not the guy from ‘Ancient Aliens’ or some other wingnut like him. Enter: science journalist Keith Cooper, editor of ‘Astronomy Now’ and writer of the new book ‘The Contact Paradox: Challenging Our Assumptions In The Search For Extraterrestrial Life’. Listen as Matt and Keith discuss the vastness of space, why it’s so hard to wrap our minds around that vastness, why humans are so fascinated by the cosmos in the first place, the present state of mankind’s search for extraterrestrial life (‘SETI’), what the future of that search might look like, how we should plan on encountering an alien life form if that should ever come to pass, why people insist they’ve encountered aliens when they definitely have not encountered aliens— and ultimately why, when we look at the stars, we are really just looking at ourselves. Also, Matt tells the story of his very first anxiety attack, which was triggered by staring up at the night sky and wondering what the fuck else is out there... if anything.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and this week's episode is
0:05.0	this is Matt dellia and this week's episode is about aliens.
0:12.0	Everybody wants to know about aliens,
0:16.3	but we don't know if they're out there.
0:18.0	And I wanted to have someone come on the show
0:22.0	who is an expert in looking for them. And a few weeks ago I saw a talk at the Royal Institute about SETI, which is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence,
0:39.5	and the man giving the talk was named Keith Cooper and Keith recently wrote a book called The Contact Paradox,
0:47.6	challenging our assumptions in a search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And the talk is super interesting.
0:55.0	It's sort of, I think the title of it is The Fermi Paradox, which is a very interesting thing that Keith and I get into among many other things including
1:07.3	just what I find most fascinating about this beyond just even just are there aliens out there, what's out there in the vastness of space, but how does
1:19.7	one look for a thing when you have no idea how to look for it and the space in which it could be is
1:29.9	endless and so it's a very wide-ranging conversation that Keith and I had.
1:39.0	Thank you Keith for coming on the show.
1:42.0	By his book, it's extremely interesting and has a lot of
1:46.8	the things it expands on a lot of the things we do get to talk about in the
1:51.5	episode much of which I was and still am deeply confused about but it's
1:58.8	sort of a confusion filled with wonder, less anxiety than wonder really.
2:06.0	And I think it's something we can all relate to.
2:09.0	I hope you guys like this conversation,
2:11.0	as much as I liked having it here is my conversation with Keith Cooper.
2:17.0	Okay. My name is Keith Cooper. I'm a science journalist based in the UK and I've been
2:38.4	doing this about 15 years. I edit a magazine called Astronomy now which is kind
	...

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