The Cosmic Shed

In this episode we boldly go where we've never gone before...our first ever live episode.

In this positively charged episode, Andrew is joined in the shed by Sidney Robb and Tristan Green of The Last Baguette theatre company to talk about their latest play What's the Matter?

Andrew reports back from the first ever Blue Dot Festival at Jodrell Bank.

We hear from Professor Danielle George on the eve of her Robot Orchestra taking to the stage, Professor Angela Taylor and Ben Shaw about the SKA and radio astronomy, Dr Beth Healey about her trip to Antarctica to learn about long duration space travel and plenty more.

Somehow Dr Rebecca Cunningham also manages to make ylang ylang smell like floods...

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As Andrew mentioned in the episode, we are delighted to announce The Cosmic Shed Live in At Bristol Planetarium. 

Dinosaur Park is a theatre show which Sam Neill (of Jurassic Park) says is “Brilliant! Hilarious, poignant, spot on, great”. We happen to agree.

Andrew and Ti met up with Frode Gjerløw and Simon Maeder of Superbolt theatre after their performance at the Wardrobe Theatre in Bristol to talk about the show and where, for them, science fiction and storytelling collide.

In this long-overdue episode, Andrew is joined in the shed by Steve and Maddy to talk about the 1997 film Contact, and the novel that came before it.

The book was written by Andrew's favourite astronomer and science communicator, Carl Sagan, who based its main character on Jill Tarter, radio astronomer and former director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Andrew was lucky enough to talk to Jill for this episode, and she tells us about searching space for signals and why its so important, her experiences as a woman in science, and time spent advising Jodie Foster for her role in the film.

Joining us for the first (and hopefully not last) time is Timon Singh of Bristol Bad Film Club, who enthuses about other first contact stories and gives us some background on the film. We also hear from geneticist, author, and broadcaster Adam Rutherford on why he loves Contact and the way it portrays scientists as real people.

In the rest of the episode, Ben pops in briefly to share a prime number-based poem, and we discuss some of the science surrounding the search for alien messages, including the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox.

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As Andrew mentions in the episode, the Cosmic Shed was recently damaged in a storm. 

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Show Notes

Bristol Bad Film Club organises charity screenings of "films that are so-bad-they’re-great, cult classics that are rarely shown, movies with notorious reputations and classics from our childhood that no-one else seems to have heard of."

This Nature article has more on the University of California Berkeley sexual harassment case that Jill mentions.

In this artificially intelligent episode, Andrew and Ben give two robotic thumbs up to Ex Machina, and try to wrap their all-too-human brains around consciousness and the technological singularity