Fermi and Drake

08/12/17 • 32 min

Are we alone in the Universe? Or are there alien civilisations out there? And if there are, where are they, and why aren't they talking to us? We'll explore the Fermi paradox, the Drake equation, and, of course... the simple fact that we're all living in a computer simulation. Don't miss it. "Hope that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth" - The Galaxy Song, Monty Python

Previous Episode

Bonus: AI Shakespeare vs. AI Trump, call for Listener Questions

Bonus midweek edition, coming to you as close to LIVE as is humanly possible... Inspired by last week's episode, Seduced By A Robot, I downloaded a neural network and started to play around with it. See what happens when I feed it:

The works of Shakespeare
My Facebook conversation history
A biography of Stalin
and, of course, the twitter feed of President Trump

The neural network I used was the tensorflow char-rnn - an open-source framework by Chen Liang - and I got the idea from Janelle Shane, who you can find at www.lewisandquark.tumblr.com. Also: an appeal for listener questions! I want to do a listener questions episode, but to do that, I need... listener questions. Tweet us @physicspod, email us at [email protected]. Any question will be considered, no matter how outlandish, and the ones that work out will be featured on a future episode. Here are some ideas:

Something you wanted to know about physics
Something you wanted to know about seduction (which I achieve masterfully in 100% of cases)
Something that's been bothering you in your personal life or in the world at large
Hateful abuse phrased as a question

Send them in! And see you Saturday for a regular episode.

Next Episode

Get Ready for the Apocalypse

We're going to be presenting a very special series of episodes over the next few months. The end of the world. Is it going to end in fire, or ice? And is there anything we can do about it? Get ready for the apocalypse.