Ep. 331: Arthur C. Clarke's Technologies

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In our previous episode, we introduced Arthur C. Clarke, the amazing man and science fiction writer. Today we’ll be discussing his legacy and ideas on space exploration. You’ll be amazed to hear how many of the ideas we take for granted were invented or just accurately predicted by Arthur C. Clarke.

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This episode is sponsored by: Swinburne Astronomy Online, 8th Light, Cleancoders.com

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Fraser Cain [00:01:21] Astronomycast, episode 331, Arthur C. Clark’s ideas and technology. Welcome to Astronomycast, our weekly facts -based journey through the cosmos. We help you understand only what we know, but how we know what we know. My name is Fraser Cane. I’m the publisher of the universe today. And with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the director of CosmoQuest. Hey, Pamela, how you doing?

Pamela Gay [00:01:46] I’m doing well. How are you doing, Fraser?

Fraser Cain [00:01:48] Good. I know you’re a little tired.

Pamela Gay [00:01:50] I am. Today is the day that the Rosetta mission woke up from its many, many months of hibernation as it was out a little close to Jupiter and beyond where its solar panels could provide quite enough power for full functionality. And we did a live hangout with a bunch of school groups over in Europe this morning at 4 a .m. local. And we have now gotten the signal back from Rosetta. The mission did come back to life, did wake up from its hibernation. And now we’re here to record a show on a completely unrelated topic. And my brain is full of science.

Fraser Cain [00:02:31] Good. Well, I’m really glad that Rosetta woke up. That was a little nerve wracking because it had been offline for so long. So before we get on, I want to give you one little quick piece of business, which is that we have now uploaded all of our videos that we’ve been recording on YouTube for universe today. These are these short explainer videos that we’ve been doing and we put them all on iTunes. So if you haven’t watched them because you don’t like to consume your media through YouTube, I totally understand that. And now you can consume them on your podcasting software. So go to iTunes or you can just go to universetoday .com slash video or universetoday .com slash audio. And you can download those that way. So more space goodness.

Pamela Gay [00:03:15] And if you’re like me and you can’t do just one thing at a time while you’re watching Fraser’s videos, pop on over to CosmoQuest .org and another part of your screen and work on doing science while you’re learning science.

Speaker 4 [00:03:27] Perfect.

Pamela Gay [00:03:29] This episode of Astronomycast is brought to you by EighthLight Inc. EighthLight is an agile software development company. They craft beautiful applications that are durable and reliable. EighthLight provides disciplined software leadership on demand and shares its expertise to make your project better. For more information, visit them online at www .eighthlight .com. Just remember, that’s www .thedigit8thlight .com. Drop them a note. EighthLight, software is their craft.

Fraser Cain [00:04:06] So in our previous episode, we introduced Arthur C. Clarke, the amazing man and science fiction writer. Today, we’ll be discussing his legacy and ideas on space exploration. You’ll be amazed to hear how many of the ideas we take for granted were invented or just accurately predicted by Arthur C. Clarke. Alright, where do you want to start here?

Pamela Gay [00:04:27] I think the best place to start is to mention a series of essays that he did in the late 50s, early 60s that were collected into profiles of the future, which was published in 1962. And the reason I want to start there is because these essays in this book came before Star Trek. And we’re often saying, well, do we have this Star Trek technology? Do we have that Star Trek technology? And my husband and I, who’ve been rewatching all of Star Trek from the original show back to the prequel Enterprise, have been laughing really hard at how the tablet technology of today so much exceeds the tablet technology that you saw in Star Trek, where they have a different tablet for every different thing they’re talking about and they’re stacking tablets. Star Trek isn’t the only place where we can go to compare our past ideas of the future to our present reality. Profiles of the future was really one of the first major here’s what you can expect that was written. And it was remarkably accurate. And I think my favorite thing that it predicted was Arthur C. Clarke pointed out that with the technologies of the future, the communications technologies of the future, someone will be able to be in Bali or Tahiti and working remotely that a surgeon in Iceland will be able to perform surgery on a person in New Zealand. And these are the exact things that we’re experiencing today as I’ve signed on with you from Indonesia in the past. And my husband works remotely. And we are starting to see at least military applications for remote surgeries taking place.

Fraser Cain [00:06:19] Right. And I mean, the downside, of course, is you’re seeing military operations of remote drones. You’re seeing people controlling weapons of war from afar. But that’s exactly it. There’s this disaggregation of people. You don’t have to be in the same place to do your work. He actually covered that quite a bit in Childhood’s End as well, which I mentioned last week was one of my favorite books, that pretty soon everybody has some nice house wherever they want to live in the whole world. And then they commute instantaneously to wherever it is that they want to work or if they want to meet. And a lot of times they just hang out at home because, you know, it’s so easy to just telecommute.

Pamela Gay [00:07:00] And this is your reality and my reality, because I live in middle of nowhere, southern Illinois, where I can afford to have a horse and a fairly large house at the cost of a nasty attic apartment in Boston. And you live on an island off the coast of Canada, and neither of us are near particularly large metropolitan settings.

Fraser Cain [00:07:25] Yeah, absolutely. And I could work anywhere. So he definitely predicted that. Let’s keep moving. What else?

Pamela Gay [00:07:30] So the other one that he predicted was how geosynchronous orbits could be used for communication satellites. Here, the idea of sticking something in an orbit that was sufficiently high up, it would have a orbital period that was equal to the rotation period of the Earth, that idea, that’s just math. But it was Clark that came out and said, you know, if we put something in that orbit and we put it above the equator and we put communications hardware on it or weather hardware on it, we can build a global network where the people on the surface of the planet and the satellites are constantly in sync with one another. And we can use this to systematically beam information around the world.

Fraser Cain [00:08:21] And to say that we depend on this technology is just an absolute understatement. I mean, as you said, there are the weather satellites that are constantly gazing at the same spot on the Earth and watching the storm systems and watching the clouds and the precipitation and relaying these full photographs of whole hemispheres of the Earth back for weather prediction.

Pamela Gay [00:08:44] Direct TV.

Fraser Cain [00:08:46] Right, media, you know, we want to watch your TV. And so it’s funny, I had a friend who literally didn’t believe that we were launching satellites and there are things in space. And I said to her, well, you know, when you take a satellite dish and you point it in the sky, what do you think it’s being pointed at? Right, you were pointing your satellite dish directly at a satellite and you were receiving the signal. If you point the satellite dish a little off to the side, there’s no satellite there. And that’s how you get your signal for your television.

Pamela Gay [00:09:19] And what I love is as you drive north to south in America, I’ve moved from like Milwaukee to, well, actually moved from Texas to Milwaukee, Michigan to Texas with these north -south drives as you’re going through the remote parts of, well, flat farmland America, you see all the farmers have their satellite dishes that are all pointed at the space above the equator. And so the angle of the satellite dishes gets closer and closer to the horizon as you get more and more northward and points more and more upward as you go southward. And it always makes me wonder if there’s some post -technological world where future archeologists in a day that we don’t have satellites are digging through all of this wreckage, are they going to think that we like worshiped the zodiac with metal dishes or something?

Fraser Cain [00:10:14] Right, always pointing our metal dishes towards the zodiac, towards the sun. Yeah, but yeah, no, I mean here in Canada where I am, our satellite dishes are really low, pointed really low towards the horizon, right? You often have a problem with trees or buildings or houses because you can’t get your satellite dish to point at the satellite, which is just above the horizon.

Pamela Gay [00:10:36] And this is one of the things that we’ve talked about in past episodes is if you actually get too far north, you can no longer really use the geosynchronous satellite. So there’s some crazy, impossible to pronounce orbits that have the spacecraft basically dipping really close to the Earth and then going out and passing over the polar areas very, very slowly, basically parading the geosynchronous rates before dipping back down and zooming around.

Fraser Cain [00:11:08] One thing which you mentioned briefly about tablets and stuff is if you go back and watch 2001, like literally back in the movie that came out in the 1960s, they have an iPad in the show, in the movie. And in fact, I know it was used as an example that this concept of holding a little tablet and moving it around with your finger had already been predicted long before Apple came out with the iPad, that this was one of those inevitable technologies that we would want. Arthur C. Clarke helped predict it.

Pamela Gay [00:11:43] And then there’s the technologies we don’t have yet that we desperately want. And I know one that you and I have talked about a lot is the space elevator. And while Arthur C. Clarke didn’t come up with the idea of the space elevator, he put together all of the pieces of, well, let’s connect to the surface, up to geosynchronous, and this becomes a low -cost way of getting society up and down. And this was discussed in his The Fountains of Paradise book.

Speaker 5 [00:12:12] Yeah, totally.

Fraser Cain [00:12:15] And I know he did a bunch of sort of technical papers following onto that to show, I mean, this was not just, here’s a crazy idea that I’ve got in my story, but actually he helped sort of do some of the math and sort of present the idea more fully. So he was pretty serious.

Speaker 5 [00:12:31] And what’s his classic quote?

Fraser Cain [00:12:34] Like, people will build space elevators 50 years after if people stop laughing at them, I think is the way it goes.

Speaker 5 [00:12:40] You hear that one?

Pamela Gay [00:12:41] Yeah, that quote, I don’t know. The one that I keep finding on multiple sites that I really like is one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand. When that time comes, the whole world would have shrunk to the point, and the traditional role of the city as a meeting place for men would have ceased to make any sense. In fact, men will no longer commute. They will communicate. They won’t have to travel for business anymore. They’ll only travel for pleasure. And I think we’re finding that there’s still something very tangible and valuable about flying around the world to share a drink with somebody. But I read a report earlier today that, at least here in the United States, teenagers are driving less and less because they just hang out with their friends online, and it’s the texting mentality, and you don’t go to the shopping mall, you go to Amazon. And so our world is changing.

Fraser Cain [00:13:37] Cue the existential angst.

Pamela Gay [00:13:42] Well, there’s always been existential angst.

Fraser Cain [00:13:45] It’s these days without driving to malls and hanging out.

Speaker 5 [00:13:49] They’re just Snapchatting. My day, we went to malls.

Pamela Gay [00:13:53] Snapchatting is a new form of terrifying, but that’s…

Fraser Cain [00:13:59] I don’t know if Arthur C. Clarke predicted that one.

Speaker 5 [00:14:01] All right, let’s keep moving. So space elevator.

Fraser Cain [00:14:03] I mean, I cannot wait for the space elevator. It will absolutely happen.

Speaker 5 [00:14:07] Count on it. So he will be vindicated.

Pamela Gay [00:14:11] So how long do you think it’s going to be?

Fraser Cain [00:14:13] I think it’s going to be on the moon first. I think if we get serious about extracting resources from the moon, it’s a much easier process to put a space elevator on the moon.

Speaker 5 [00:14:24] To put one on Earth,

Fraser Cain [00:14:26] it’s like right at the limits of technological…

Pamela Gay [00:14:29] Carbon fiber tubes.

Fraser Cain [00:14:31] Yeah, I mean, even with carbon fiber nanotubes, it’s going to be a really tough project to make that happen. So if it is even possible, 100 years?

Speaker 5 [00:14:43] I would think, yeah, 100 years.

Pamela Gay [00:14:45] Have you read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars series?

Speaker 5 [00:14:48] I have, yeah.

Pamela Gay [00:14:50] The one where their space elevator collapses and does bad things to the surface of Mars has always been deep in my chest as a, oh, terrorists or accidents or humans do things wrong. We’re going to belt our planet with carbon fiber and destroy everything along that line.

Unidentified [00:15:12] Right.

Fraser Cain [00:15:12] And I think we did a whole episode on space elevators, but I think the gist is that if you have an outward tension on the space elevator, then wherever it gets snipped, the rest of it is going to try and take off into solar orbit. And whatever is remaining below the cut point is what’s going to wrap around the Earth. But you could theoretically wrap around the Earth multiple times. So yeah, there’s some danger there with the idea. So what else did Arthur C. Clarke predict?

Pamela Gay [00:15:43] So he also predicted the asteroid mining that planetary resources is getting ready to do. The idea of going out, exploring our solar system, and taking advantage of resources on the moon, on the asteroids. And the only disturbing part is when he was making his predictions, we still didn’t know that much about the composition of the asteroids. And disturbingly, the more we learn about the asteroids, the more we learn there aren’t that many of them that are worth grabbing and mining. So it’s something that is definitely going to happen, but whether or not it’s something that’s going to be a new way to get massive amounts of resources is much more questionable.

Fraser Cain [00:16:28] Yeah. And so this was in Rendezvous with Rama, right? And so they built this project Space Guard to defend against asteroid strikes in the book and then met, you know, in Rendezvous with Rama. But what’s great is that in the UK, there’s a sort of a space society called Space Guard, and they’re looking to sort of do the same kind of thing that was defined in the book. But, you know, a lot of that, that preparation, trying to prevent asteroid strikes is all, you know, NASA has gone full bore on putting surveys up, and now there’s new missions in the works that will take that even to the next level. So this is all moving ahead. Mining them? Yeah. So you don’t think that it’s worth mining asteroids?

Pamela Gay [00:17:18] No, I don’t think there’s a difference between it’s not worth mining asteroids and it’s not going to be as lucrative and long term a solution for getting resources as we thought. There’s new information from looking at the spectra of a variety of different asteroids, and comparing it to, of course, meteorites that we find on Earth and we’re able to relate back to different asteroids. And it’s looking like the number of them that have sufficient resources to make them worth all of the cost of going out, getting to them, digging into them, getting the resources out, is probably order of 10.

Fraser Cain [00:18:00] Right. I wonder though, I mean, you know, 10 % of them are metal. I wonder if there are, you know, platinum asteroids out there. Are there gold asteroids? Are there ones that are just chunks of valuable resources?

Pamela Gay [00:18:11] How differentiated are they? Yeah. And that’s what we’re still trying to figure out. So hopefully this is one of those times where our early science results, and this is early science results, aren’t entirely right. But it was a kind of sad day when that new set of statistical results came out.

Fraser Cain [00:18:33] Yeah, because you imagined your future as a crusty asteroid miner.

Pamela Gay [00:18:39] No, no, it wasn’t that. It was more a matter of if people go out and mine the asteroids, we’ll end up with hollow asteroids that are great future spacecraft.

Fraser Cain [00:18:48] Right. Your favorite spacecraft design.

Speaker 5 [00:18:52] Yes. Yeah.

Fraser Cain [00:18:52] No, I think being able to have these spacecraft out there mining, it’s just another great reason to build a spacefaring civilization. So if we can make it pay, then that would unlock the whole thing. Because now if there’s profit, then can you imagine if the oil companies and the mining companies wanted to get to space?

Pamela Gay [00:19:15] Well, the oil companies won’t because there’s not exactly dead dinosaurs in the asteroids.

Speaker 5 [00:19:19] Tell them that there is. Tell them that there is.

Fraser Cain [00:19:21] That there’s tons of dead dinosaurs in the asteroids. And they’ll head off and mine those asteroids and we’ll build a spacefaring civilization.

Pamela Gay [00:19:29] What would be cool is that we figured out how to get helium out of the asteroids, but that’s a different issue.

Speaker 5 [00:19:35] What else?

Pamela Gay [00:19:37] So those are basically the big areas where he made his impact was looking at how can we use technology to enhance communications and how will that change society. He also made other predictions like the idea of building space planes and being able to go from London to Australia in 25 minutes. And the issues that most people may not enjoy that due to the difficulties of high -G launch, fairly high -G landing and weightless nausea in between. So the space plane idea was one that he predicted and we’re seeing that getting built today. We’re not quite to the point of landing somewhere other than where you take off, but I’m waiting for Virgin Galactic to start doing its around -the -world journey capabilities.

Fraser Cain [00:20:31] Yeah, it was great. I participated in a hangout with the folks from Virgin Galactic because they were talking about their plans. And one of the things they said is you know that the spacecraft doesn’t need to return to the same place that it takes off, right? Like it can go from Mojave, go up and take you on a really fun flight in space

Speaker 5 [00:20:53] and then land somewhere else.

Pamela Gay [00:20:55] Yes.

Fraser Cain [00:20:56] And maybe it can take a longer flight. Like in addition to the space tourism side of it, you can imagine this future, that this is the way you move towards the future of these suborbital aircraft.

Pamela Gay [00:21:12] There’s no replacement for the Concorde and no one’s working on it right now in a big showy way, but Virgin Galactic is not working on a replacement for the Concorde. They’re working on something entirely new that unfortunately will make the current cost of baggage look lame.

Fraser Cain [00:21:34] Right, yeah, I know, but I mean I think it’s important to just recognize that Virgin Galactic is owned by Virgin Airlines.

Pamela Gay [00:21:41] Virgin, yeah.

Fraser Cain [00:21:42] The Virgin hold Empire, but yeah, but also Virgin Airlines is part of this and so they are an airline company and they get people around the world. So I think if the more they can figure out the technology by sending people into high altitude and give the children a good time, they’re going to learn a lot of lessons about if there’s a viable actual travel method here. Okay, so here’s one that maybe you may have missed, which is sort of all the work you did on nuclear rockets.

Pamela Gay [00:22:10] That’s when I have to admit I did miss.

Fraser Cain [00:22:13] Yeah, so he did, he thought about this idea, and this was like back in the 50s about how you would use a nuclear reactor, an atomic rocket, and then you would use that to propel high energy exhaust out the back of the rocket. And that kind of came true. So the NASA tested out using nuclear atomic rockets during the 1970s, the 1980s, and they never really went anywhere. There’s been a few recent rocket sort of attempts, but a lot of the reactors and stuff have all been shut down now. So that’s a real possibility. And then the other thing is, is it more like using these nuclear reactors, more of the RTGs, but as a power system for really ambitious spacecraft. Imagine hooking up a nuclear reactor to an ion engine and think about the kind of power you would get in long duration space flight.

Pamela Gay [00:23:21] And the thing he didn’t predict, and I don’t think anyone could have predicted, was the problems that we’re now having with plutonium fuel sources. It was in the past, America made our own. We’ve now used up all of our reserves. We’ve been buying reserves from Russia. They’re almost out. And now we need to turn back on our plutonium production for the correct refined version that we need for doing radiothermal generators. And until we do, no mission to Europa, no more missions to the outer solar system, because as Rosetta found, it’s just a little too cold and not enough solar flux when you get out there. So you really need to have nuclear. Well, half -lives are your friends. They release heat and keep your spacecraft going.

Fraser Cain [00:24:17] Now he came up with a few ideas as well that haven’t happened yet. But still seem perfectly viable and we’re just waiting for them to do. So now I’ve got a couple here. Do you have any of those, of the future ideas yet, the ones that haven’t come true yet?

Pamela Gay [00:24:35] I’m waiting with fear and trepidation for the space elevator myself.

Speaker 5 [00:24:40] Are you? Okay.

Fraser Cain [00:24:41] So he wrote in Songs of Distant Earth about cryogenic suspension. And so the idea of freezing people for long duration space flight in their hollowed out asteroid. And so, you know, and that idea has shown quite a bit. Like if you watch Avatar, right?

Pamela Gay [00:25:00] Right.

Fraser Cain [00:25:01] He’s frozen for the trip to Pandora.

Pamela Gay [00:25:04] And we’ve seen it in a number of different science fiction books. We’ve seen it in various episodes of Star Trek where they find ancient cryogenically frozen this, that or the other thing.

Speaker 5 [00:25:17] Khan!

Pamela Gay [00:25:18] But the issue that we keep running into over and over and over is essentially freezer burn. A lot of liquids that have high H2O content, high regular everyday water content. Well, water is one of the few things that expands when it freezes and that has this nasty tendency to rupture cell walls, cause cellular damage. And while scientists have been working really hard to figure out how do critters like frogs safely hibernate in frozen winters, we haven’t really succeeded at getting truly large mammals. I think the largest they’ve gotten, last I checked on the research, was German Shepherds, which are still fairly big. But we’re now starting to learn that just cryogenically freezing fertilized human eggs isn’t as safe as they thought. But there’s a lot more damage to the eggs than had previously been understood. So freezing things is proving difficult due to stupid thermal expansion at cooler temperatures for water.

Fraser Cain [00:26:26] Right, but even not necessarily trying to have it reversed. I mean you see people getting themselves frozen so that, you know, some disease and then in the future if maybe the solution to that disease gets figured out, they can be thawed back out and cured, brought back to life, I guess. Now it’s a long shot, but at the same time it’s, you know, you’re not going to be around to care about the time. So if it works, it works. And if it doesn’t work, you paid your money, you took your chances.

Pamela Gay [00:26:54] And the idea there is you basically flash freeze a human being as close to death as possible, essentially so fast after death that all of the organs could have been harvested for organ transplant. And since limited to no cellular decay has set in, maybe you can be thawed someday and resurrected. I think that’s the correct word in this case. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 [00:27:22] All right, I got another one. Have you got any more?

Fraser Cain [00:27:24] Okay, so in 2001, he wrote about people moving their brains to computers,

Speaker 5 [00:27:32] about backing up your brain.

Pamela Gay [00:27:33] Right. And this idea came back in the Battlestar Galactica series, Caprica, the prequel series, and the idea of how few terabytes of information can be used to basically quantify the human life. The question is, if you understand all the decisions that have been made in the past, can you predictively create an algorithm that replicates human thought by downloading all of that past memory?

Speaker 5 [00:28:08] Yeah, so we don’t know. I know

Pamela Gay [00:28:09] this is something you’re a fan of.

Speaker 5 [00:28:11] Well, hmm, how am I a fan of this?

Fraser Cain [00:28:15] I am a fan of us figuring it out. So I think it’s really important for us to understand the brain and get us to the point that we can start to communicate with the brain and computer, some kind of back and forth communication. And you’re going to see in the beginning, there’s going to be a need for this for people who’ve had brain injuries. And you can route around the brain injury with a computer and provide people with the capabilities that they lost because of the injury. But you can imagine the next step is let’s enhance.

Speaker 5 [00:28:50] Let’s give you more memory.

Fraser Cain [00:28:51] Let’s give you faster processing. And you can then imagine down the road the situation where you back yourself up or you transition yourself from meat to electronics.

Pamela Gay [00:29:03] One of the things that allows human relationships to function and that’s getting wrecked in some ways by the internet is the ability for memories to fade and things to heal with time. And if you have that digital memory, there’s a lot of scary consequences. But I am fully a fan of all the work that’s going into figuring out how to do mind -controlled prosthetics, mind -controlled communications systems for people who have various forms of locked -in disorder. The fact that we can now get people that we thought were in near vegetative states communicating via computers that simply read their brain waves is one of those things that brings up Clark’s law of any sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic. And we’re hitting on that magical, miraculous technology.

Fraser Cain [00:30:02] And this is how it starts. This is the thin edge of the wedge. You start here with helping people and then after a while it just turns into people just wanting to compete, make themselves better. There’s no stopping this. But we’ll see how it all turns out and what is possible and what is impossible. So there’s a couple more, just little ones, which was he thought it would be possible to predict

Speaker 5 [00:30:31] and prevent earthquakes.

Pamela Gay [00:30:34] Working on it?

Speaker 5 [00:30:35] Working on it, I don’t think.

Pamela Gay [00:30:37] Well, there’s some poor innocent Italian scientists who actually got themselves into legal problems for failing to predict earthquakes. But there are a lot of scientists who are trying to predict with more than a few minutes notice when the big one is coming, especially where we know that there’s giant fault lines under so many high population areas all along the Pacific Rim. Not there yet. The planet is a chaotic system.

Speaker 5 [00:31:08] Yeah.

Fraser Cain [00:31:08] So the idea with this would be to detonate nuclear bombs, of course, because that’s how you fix every geoengineering problem. And you spot weld the plates together.

Pamela Gay [00:31:23] No, thank you.

Speaker 3 [00:31:24] Yeah.

Fraser Cain [00:31:25] Well, and hopefully by doing that, you then end up with other plates, like other cracks opening up in other places, but not maybe going through your cities and stuff.

Pamela Gay [00:31:35] This just reminds me of Venus, where they have the pressure and temperature builds up, builds up, builds up. And then we believe that there’s sudden episodes of volcanism. And I don’t want to do that to our planet. No, thank you.

Speaker 5 [00:31:49] Right.

Fraser Cain [00:31:50] So anyway, and that was in a book called Richter 10. So I think that is the one. People want to know which one is probably not going to work out. I think this is the one. But then, of course, right, any time you say that something is impossible, then it becomes possible. And any time you say something is possible, then it just becomes inevitable.

Pamela Gay [00:32:07] Any time a senior scientist says something is impossible, it becomes inevitable. That’s another one of those things that Clark came up with.

Speaker 5 [00:32:15] Pamela?

Pamela Gay [00:32:16] Yes.

Speaker 5 [00:32:18] You’re a senior scientist.

Pamela Gay [00:32:18] I’m not a senior scientist yet.

Speaker 3 [00:32:22] Yes, you are. I’m

Pamela Gay [00:32:22] a mid -career scientist. I think everyone listening will agree. I’m a mid -career scientist.

Speaker 5 [00:32:28] Cool.

Fraser Cain [00:32:28] Well, I think we’re out of time. So thank you, Pamela. Thank you, Arthur C. Clark, for everything you gave us. You are the best.

Pamela Gay [00:32:37] One of the best.

Speaker 5 [00:32:38] We’ll see you next week.

Pamela Gay [00:32:39] See you later, Fraser.

Speaker 3 [00:32:53] You can find show notes and transcripts for every episode at astronomycast .com. You can email us at info at astronomycast .com,

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