Show Notes
This version has the corrected audio Tony Baker is a comedian, actor, creator, and lifelong astronomy fan who came into this conversation ready with the National Geographic space book that first got him hooked as a kid. Expect to learn how Tony thinks about space, comedy, God, science, acting, stand-up, observation, crows, astrology, astronomy, alien life, and the absurd luck of existing at all. We talk about why comedians are professional observers, why space makes us feel small in a good w...
More from Dr. Starkid
Could something alive on Earth survive in the ocean beneath an alien moon’s ice? Researchers tested that question by recreating some of the conditions thought to exist on Enceladus, a small moon of Saturn. The archaea they introduced survived and multiplied under some of those simulated conditions. I wanted to understand how you even design that experiment when the ocean you’re studying is buried beneath ice. We talk through Cassini’s encounters with Enceladus’s plumes, how tidal heating keep...
Relevant studies mentioned: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/fullarticle/2774113 - melanoma https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/fullarticle/2790089 (free version: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8943625/) - Keratinocyte carcinoma (aka Non-melanoma skin cancer) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10896812/ — The evolution of human skin coloration https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43630-026-00940-x — Blindspot: how sun exposure guidelines have ignor...
Elias 2-24b is already several times Jupiter’s mass, yet its star system is estimated to be less than a million years old. This episode follows the discovery and asks how a gas giant can grow so massive, so quickly. We cover how astronomers use infrared and radio observations to study young planets, how they estimate ages, and why growing from tiny grains into a giant planet is a bit more complicated than it sounds. We also look at how an early forming giant planet can influence the fut...
You might be a Martian. In this installment of the Dr. Starkid astrobiology series, I’m making the case that life on Earth may have actually started on Mars first. This idea does not yet have scientific consensus, but there is a convincing evidence-based argument for what might be the simplest explanation for why life showed up on Earth so early. Expect to learn about panspermia, LUCA, the origin of life, why Mars may have been chemically ready for life before Earth, how early Earth may hav...
Momentum is a basic concept in physics: mass in motion, moving in a particular direction. But it also provides an interesting way to think about how a human life takes shape. In this episode, Dr. Dakotah Tyler starts with the physics of momentum, inertia, conservation laws, and the strange rotations of planets like Uranus and Venus. From there, the conversation moves into biology, energy efficiency, the high metabolic cost of the human brain, learning, automaticity, and why repeated behaviors...