Transcript
A (0:06)
This podcast is part of the democracy group. Welcome to Outrage Overload, a science podcast about outrage and lowering the temperature.
B (0:26)
The situation here in Santa Monica, California is very fluid.
A (0:29)
You can see police here now firing tear gas into the crowd.
B (0:33)
More than 106 days of rioting in a Negro section of Los Angeles left behind scenes reminiscent of war torn cities. Jim Just a few moments ago, something believed to be a plane crashed into the south tower of the World trade Center.
A (0:51)
It's 1950 Los Alamos, New Mexico. Some of the most brilliant minds on the planet are are walking to lunch. They're joking about a New Yorker cartoon. They're complaining about the cafeteria food. In the middle of this mundane midday chatter, Enrico Fermi, the man who built the first nuclear reactor, just stops. He looks up from his sandwich and asks a question that still haunts every telescope. We point at the sky. Where is everybody? Think about that. In a galaxy with hundreds of billions of stars, we should be seeing a cosmic neighborhood bustling with life. But instead, did we see a void? And if we really are the only ones standing in that silence, maybe it's time we started acting like it. And that's what we're going to talk about on this episode of the Outrage Overload podcast. I'm your host, David Beckmeier, and today we're joined by a man who spends his days looking for life in the cosmos.
B (1:51)
I'm Caleb Scharff and I'm the senior scientist for Astrobiology at NASA's Ames Research center in California. And before that, I was the director of astrobiology at Columbia University for many years. And I'm also a popular science author.
A (2:06)
Dr. Caleb Sharp is here to help us zoom out from the outrage machine and look at the overview effect of our fragile, lonely island in the stars. Caleb Scharf, thank you so much for making time for our little program.
B (2:28)
Oh, my pleasure. Thank you.
A (2:31)
So you're the senior scientist for astrobiology, and I know we could sort of look it up on Google it, but can you just tell us a little bit of what is astrobiology?
B (2:40)
It's a good question. So astrobiology is really about the search for life in the universe, and that means also a search for how life comes to be. The origins of life. It's a quest to understand the nature of life on Earth. Then, of course, quest to expand that to the possibility of life elsewhere, whether it's in our solar system or much further afield in the cosmos.
