The Wow! Signal Podcast

This is the last recording I will make for this podcast. It is time to finally move on. I began this podcast with Episode 1 near the end of 2012 when I was in my mid 50s. Although we have been on a very long hiatus since Episode 50, I had the intention that when I retired I would either bring the podcast out of hiatus or permanently end it. As I got closer to that time, I understood that I only wanted to restart the podcast if I could put a fair bit of time and energy into it and put out frequent, quality content. Like the previous episodes, the new ones would be commercial free, audio only, go as deep as we could on our core topics, and would sometimes refer to Douglas Adams.  Now that I am retired, and things are much more real, I have decided that I am not going to do this. I won't revisit all my thinking about this, but part of it is that similar content is now widely available on multiple platforms, often accompanied by skillfully produced video. David Kipping's Cool Worlds is a good example. So, while I am not necessarily exiting podcasting forever, I am going to meet the commitment that I made to myself not to fade the Wow! Signal without notice, but to unambiguously announce the end of the podcast while expressing my deep gratitude to everyone who participated and who made the content much, much better than I could have made it by myself. I'm proud of our 50 Episodes and 34 Bursts - shorter, more focused episodes - and even the pubs I hosted and enjoyed immensely.  The podcast rss feed and the wowsignalpodcast.com domain will remain up for some time to come, but if you want to listen to any past episodes, I suggest you go to wowsignalpodcast.com and download the .mp3 files that interest you to listen to them at your convenience. I will have many of the episodes available on YouTube as well. If there is an episode you would really like a transcript of, I can probably supply one - just get in touch and I'll see what I can do. I'm going to thank everyone I can think of, and I apologize in advance if I left anyone out. I'll start with the folks who actually helped me create the podcast, and often had the idea for an episode or burst: Daniela DePaulis, Nick Nielsen, James Garrison, and Mike Mongo. I'm sorry I've been out of touch and hope we can meet up someday. Now, my many great guests. I'll list their names now. Some of them appeared more than once. There were people I never had on that I regret missing, and if you think I should have emailed you with an appearance request, you may well be right. Our first guest was Antonio Paris, founder of Aerial Phenomena Investigations. This was followed by:   Geoffrey Landis (twice) Nikola Danaylov David Grinspoon (3 times)   Seth Shostak Bing Garthright Duncan Forgan (twice), Isaac Stott, Ben Wright McGee Fraser Cain Paul Shuch Geoff Marcy + Ana Heras Daniel Cartin Nicholas Joll Heath Rezabek, Robin Hanson Steven Dick, Betul Kacar Duncan Lunan , Alan Penny Abel Mendez (twice) Bob Dixon JL Galache + Duncan Lunan Tom Barbalet Andrew Siemion   Martin Elvis Bradley Schaefer Tabetha Boyajian Stella Kafka Bradley Schaefer Douglas Vakoch (twice) Nathaniel Comfort Ben Montet   Doug Vakoch Jon Lomborg Frank White Sofia Sheikh Daniel Oberhaus Beatriz Villarroel Julia Demarines Adam Dipert Stella Kafka Paolo Costaño Wade Roush David Skogerboe Chelsea Haramia Thomas Moynihan In addition, the following people were guests on Bursts:   Mike Mongo Nora Noffke Daniel Cartin Jeff Nosanov Josh Grindlay Jason Hessels Beatriz Villarroel (twice) Tabetha Boyajian (twice) David Blank   Also, thanks to our Patreon donors and our Wow! Signal Pub participants, and Erin Carr and Joyce Abma for voiceover help.  Finally, thanks to all the musicians who let me use their music: Ahleuchatistas, Mike Griffin, DJ Spooky, Jason Robinson, Erika Lloyd, Sleep Research Facility, House Band of the Universe, George Hrab,  Eben Brooks, and many others. Well, everything ends sooner or later, and this podcast is ending now. It ran for 12 years, we had a good run, and I am happy I did it.  I hope I'll run into you in real life, or on other platforms or in other projects. I have largely curtailed my social media presence in recent years, but you can still find me on Bluesky. Hey, we may even do another pub someday. See you there?  

We welcome back Professor Abel Mendez from the University of Puerto Rico to tell us about recent research into data from the Arecibo radio telescope focused on cold hydrogen clouds and a proposed natural explanation for the Big Ear Wow! Signal that we covered in depth in Episode 19. We recommend you download the draft paper so you can follow along. Links: Arecibo Wow! I: An Astrophysical Explanation for the Wow! Signal Our episode (#19) with Big Ear scientist Bob Dixon A previous appearance by Abel Mendez on this podcast. Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico The Arecibo Radio Telescope Collapse The FAST Radio Telescope Astrophysical MASERs (microwave lasers) Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: Masers Population Inversion (Wikipedia) The Hydrogen 21 cm line MASERs, Interstellar and Circumstellar, Theory. Credits Host, editor, producer: Paul Carr Music: Quincas Moreira (Black Swan), George Hrab (Far), Jason Robinson Episode 50 of the Wow! Signal Podcast by Paul Carr is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Interview recorded: 11 July 2021 Released: 16 July 2021 Duration: 21 minutes, 33 seconds Beatriz Villarroel discusses her latest VASCO paper in Nature Scientific Reports, "Exploring nine simultaneously occurring transients on April 12th 1950." Links: Villarroel+ , Exploring Nine simultaneously occurring transients on April 12th 1950. Burst 19: Our Sky Now and Then (August 2016) Episode 41: The Vanishing Sources with Beatriz Villarroel (November 2019) The Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations project: I. USNO objects missing in modern sky surveys and follow-up observations of a "missing star The Palomar Digital Sky Survey Gran Telescopio Canarias The United States Nuclear Testing Program Credits Host and Producer: Paul Carr Music: Ahleuchatistas and Erika Lloyd    

Released: 4 February 2021 Duration: 58 minutes 44 seconds Co-hosts Paul Carr and Daniela DePaulis are joined by author Thomas Moynihan. The subject is the idea of human extinction and how it evolved into our present day understand of Existential Risk. Guest Bio: I am a writer and researcher from the UK. In 2019, I completed a PhD at Oriel College on the history of human extinction. Currently, I am a visiting Research Associate in History at St Benet's College, Oxford University, and I am working for Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute with a grant from the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative.    I am interested in the history of existential risk and of existential hope: that is, how people first came to understand the perils and promises that face us as a species. I see this as the central philosophical drama of the modern world: how we came to appreciate our position—and precarity—as intelligent beings within an otherwise seemingly silent and sterile universe.    My goal is to reveal how contemporary research into global risks can be seen as part of the wider story of our 'coming of age' as a civilisation and a species. Links: Thomas Moynihan - https://thomasmoynihan.xyz X-Risk at MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/x-risk Mary Shelley - The Last Man Churchill - Shall We All Commit Suicide? The Order of the Dolphin Frank Drakę: A Speculation on the Influence of Biological Immortality on SETI Natural Selection of Stellar Civilizations by the Limits of Growth The Jaws of Darkness The Ethics of METI Credits: Co-hosts: Paul Carr and Daniela De Paulis Producer: Paul Carr Music: Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Solar Arkestra, DJ Spooky

Released: 28 November 2020 Duration: 70 minutes, 39 seconds Co-hosts Paul Carr and Daniela De Paulis engage philosopher Chelsea Haramia on the ethics of sending signals into space that might be received by intelligent beings in the cosmos. For more information about this episode, include a rich set of links, please see the blog entry for Episode 48 at: https://wowsignalpodcast.com Guest Bio Chelsea Haramia received her PhD in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she specialized in ethics. She is now an assistant professor in the philosophy department at Spring Hill College. She is also co-editor of the online journal 1000-Word Philosophy, which houses a growing set of original 1000-word essays on philosophical questions, figures, and arguments aimed at an audience of philosophers and non-philosophers alike. She has published in the areas of normative ethics, bioethics, animal ethics, aesthetics, feminist philosophy, and astrobiology ethics. Her current work involves ethical and metaethical analyses of space exploration and of the search for intelligent life in particular.   Credits: Co-hosts: Paul Carr and Daniel De Paulis Producer: Paul Carr Music: DJ Spooky, Nest, Erika Lloyd.   The Wow! Signal is published under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license.