Lord Martin Rees on Catastrophe, Cosmology, and the Future
Release Date: 01/01/2021
Climate 201: Climate Doomism (II)
Physical Attraction
In the last episode, we briefly introduced "climate change doomers" and some of their misleading claims. In this episode, I talk about despair, and why we cannot give in to it.
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Climate 201: Climate Doomism (I)
Physical Attraction
We're going there. In this episode, I discuss why civilization is not going to imminently collapse due to climate change, explain why doomism is a new form of denialism, and debunk some of its most misleading claims.
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UNLOCKED: Book Club: Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants
Physical Attraction
A new episode released from behind the Patreon paywall. This episode, we'll review and discuss some of the issues raised by Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants, a book that details the history of the advertising industry.
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Climate 201 NETS XI: Direct Air Capture, p2 and NETS conclusion
Physical Attraction
In this episode, we will continue our analysis of Direct Air Capture and conclude the series on negative emissions - crucial component of decarbonisation, or a techno-utopian distraction from the real problems we face? [Don't expect an actual answer]
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Climate 201 NETS X: Direct Air Capture, part 1
Physical Attraction
Direct Air Capture - machines that suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Could this be the solution to a scaleable negative emissions industry? We'll discuss the pros and cons of the technology in this episode.
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BONUS: Black Mirror IRL pilot - Be Right Back
Physical Attraction
Hi all! This is a slightly special bonus episode. Some years ago I had plans for another series "Black Mirror IRL", which was going to be a series of episodes looking into the technologies mentioned and featured in the Netflix Series Black Mirror. Is anyone working on these technologies in real life? What would their potential social implications be if they were developed? How scientifically feasible would it actually be to develop something like this? The plan would be to explore one technology alongside each episode of the show. However, time has passed and I've moved onto other...
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Climate 201: NETS VII: Ecosystem Restoration and Mangroves
Physical Attraction
What are "nature-based solutions" to climate change? Can we restore the ecosystems that we've destroyed? And how can restoring mangroves help us to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere?
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Climate 201, NETS IX: Ocean Iron Fertilization
Physical Attraction
"Give me a tanker full of iron, and I'll give you a new Ice Age." It might sound like something Hank Scorpio would say, but this episode will deal with the very real idea of stimulating plankton blooms to remove CO2 from the atmosphere - ocean iron fertilization.
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Climate 201: NETS VIII: Enhanced Weathering
Physical Attraction
How could grinding up rocks and sprinkling the dust over vast areas help to combat climate change? In this episode, we deal with "enhanced weathering" as a potential source of negative emissions.
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Climate201 NETS VI: Planting Trees and Afforestation
Physical Attraction
Mention carbon capture, and the refrain you'll often hear is "why invent a machine that captures CO2? We already have one - it's called a tree." But is large-scale afforestation as a negative emissions solution so simple? We dig into its potential in this episode of our series on negative emissions.
info_outlineSometimes in this game you get to do an interview where you genuinely can say: "the person I'm about to interview needs no introduction." This is one of those occasions. But if I were to do that, it would wreck the fun of getting to introduce the interview, and why would I deprive myself of that?
So, this episode, we are interviewing Lord Martin Rees. Martin Rees is one of the foremost cosmologists and astrophysicists of our time. He was made the Astronomer Royal in 1995, has been Master of Trinity College Cambridge, and President of the Royal Society. He has written more than 500 research papers across various areas of astrophysics and cosmology, including contributions to the origin of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the final proofs of the Big Bang theory, quasars, and gamma ray bursts.
In the latter part of his career, he has been an immensely influential populariser of science, writing books on Cosmology such as Just Six Numbers and Our Cosmic Habitat. And he has also devoted himself to considering grand problems of the future of humanity and the existential risks that we face: his book, Our Final Century, helped to kick off the field of existential risk studies, and he co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risks at the University of Cambridge in 2012.
It is no exaggeration to say that a great many of the ideas that we've discussed on this show - and my own personal inspiration to study physics in the first place - owes to the work of Lord Rees, both in discovering much of the science in the first place and then again in popularising and explaining the ideas so wonderfully.
I was extremely grateful that he was willing to be so generous with his time and respond to such a large range of my questions. Our interview touches on existential risks, the current pandemic, extraterrestrial life, cosmology in general, and the nature of fundamental physics.