All we hear is…
More science festival rambling. This time about ‘What If…’, a BBC Radio Scotland recording of a couple of speculative discussion panels. The panels, on finding a cure for aging, and on time travel, are going to be aired at 11.30am on the 6th and 13th of April (This and next Wednesday.) Should also be available to stream off the website for a week after they’re first broadcast.
Since these are both going to be put out as general daytime radio broadcasts, they were always going to be aimed at a very pop-sci level and wouldn’t go into much depth. From a technical point of view, it was mainly a starting point to go and read up more about the panelists’ work. Since I wasn’t really going to be learning anything new from the talks, I mainly went to see what the audience/panel interaction would be like and to look at the process for recording one of these shows.
I was quite surprised about how smoothly the whole recording ran. They basically just let the whole panel play out without any interruptions, and then did a few edit takes at the end to redo some questions and intro segments. I thought it would be a bit more stop-start, especially since there was a lot of volume variation as the panelists swayed about around the mics. I guess they must be able to compress/level out the audio to a fairly acceptable level in post-processing.
What If… we find a cure for aging?
The panelists were: Aubrey de Grey, who began the Methuselah Mouse competition, and believes that aging can basically be made non-lethal and humans could potentially live for thousands of years; Paul Shiels who was giving a more moderate view that human life could probably be extended by around 50-100 years during this century; and Arnold Brown who was there as comic relief and for the ‘old guy’ perspective.
First of all, I was surprised to learn that Aubrey de Grey isn’t a member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. There’s been a fair amount of debate about whether he is genuinely on to something, or whether he’s just a kook. Either way, he was pretty interesting to listen to and is at least making the field more publicly visible. He came up with the most interesting point during the panel too; in response to Paul Shiels saying that he could foresee some breakthroughs to let people commonly live to 150, he brought up the domino effect that is often seen in technology races. Basically this is the phenomena where after waiting a long time for the first breakthrough in a field, subsequent improvements happen incredibly quickly (e.g. the aviation industry moving from the first flight to its current state.) His point was that after the first treatments to allow humans to live 50 years longer are found, it may not be that long before lifespans can be increased by hundreds of years.
Part-way through, someone from the Church of Scotland (I think) started to lead the discussion over to whether we should be trying to increase life without fully understanding the social and moral issues. I think this sort of misses the point. As long as anyone is interested in studying the field and there are people who want to live for longer, then attempts are going to be made to extend life. For better or worse, the questions of whether it should be allowed are going to have to wait for when/if it actually happens
What If… time travel was possible?
This one was much less interesting. Most of it was taken up by trying to explain to the audience that ‘into the future’ time travel actually is possible, and that if general purpose ‘backwards and forwards’ time travel does turn out to be possible then we have to accept either predestination or the many-worlds hypothesis. It didn’t help that Michael Lockwood, one of the panelists got a lot of air time and really didn’t do a good job of getting his points across quickly. Unless they edit it out, there’s a sort of painfully humorous bit with him trying to explain wormholes quickly. I don’t think he’s really used to having to having to give layman explanations of his theories.
So the whole thing was pretty light and frothy, but was a fairly decent way to kill a Sunday afternoon. Might be worth a listen if you want to slack off at work or something.