With special guest:
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Dr Sara Webb
… in conversation with Bill Kable
The title of this program may look as though it will make us doom struck or at least a little gloomy but strangely it does not. This might have something to do with our guest who is so bright and cheery talking about these biggest of the biggest of issues.
Dr Sara Webb has written The Little Book of Cosmic Catastrophes (That Could End the World) for a general audience who will be able to get a better understanding of where we have come from and where our Earth and humanity itself will go.
Today we talk about what has happened in the distant past, in fact when time began. An amazing number of things had to go just right for the universe as we know it to exist. This goes back to the laws of physics as explored in the recent past by Albert Einstein. Who knew that if the forces between the atomic particles were different, the matter of which we are made simply would not have formed?
Looking at the present we find that there are all sorts of threats out there beyond our world. We risk the impact on our communications with solar flares from our Sun, we risk the collision with an asteroid as happened so frequently when Earth was forming and which wiped out dinosaurs. We even risk the effect should one of the millions of Black Holes in our galaxy The Milky Way get too close to our solar system.
Then Sara’s book moves on to what will happen for sure and certain in the distant future. The whole universe is expanding which is one of the indicators of what has been called Dark Energy. Not only that but the expansion is actually speeding up. What would happen if the universe expands to the speed of light which is the ultimate speed limit for matter?
Well we will not be around to find out because this could be trillions of years in the future but it is one of lots of big questions our guest Sara Webb deals with in such an engaging manner today.
Dr Sara Webb
Dr Sara Webb is an astrophysicist dedicated to sharing the wonders of astronomy and astrophysics with a wide audience. Her work includes chasing the fastest and rarest explosions in the universe and investigating how humans and AI will work together in the future. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.
Song selection by our guest: Space Oddity by Astronaut Chris Hadfield