Space Junk - Humanity Star! With Dr Ben Pope
Listen now
Description
Part 2 of my conversation with visiting NASA Sagan Fellow and exoplanet-studying astrophysicist Dr Ben Pope is a lot like a Jane Austen novel. We unpack our prejudice against the Humanity Star and Musk’s space Tesla, we spend a lot of time talking about money and the elite, and ultimately find common ground in our mutual embarrassment about Australia’s obsession with STEM. We hope you enjoy this wild ride through politics, philosophy, sociology and stolen biccies. Ben did his undergraduate degree in Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Sydney. He then completed a PhD at Balliol College, Oxford, where he most notably competed on the winning team in University Challenge, 2017. Ben currently lives in the USA where he researches exoplanets.
More Episodes
CONTENT WARNING: please be aware that this episode includes detailed discussions of wartime killing, and of targeted airstrikes in particular. In this episode I speak to Wing Commander Duncan Blake who spent 22 years as a legal officer in the Royal Australian Air Force, most recently in the...
Published 01/13/22
Published 01/13/22
This week I spoke to David Knoff, who recently spent 537 days in Antarctica as the leader at Davis Station. David and his team did not know when they left Australia in late 2019, that the COVID-19 pandemic would change the world and leave them isolated longer than they had ever expected and force...
Published 08/13/21