Radiolab - REBROADCAST: Space

Celebrate the 35th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 2 (it rocketed off Earth on 8/20/77 carrying a copy of the Golden Record), and tip your hat to the Mars rover Curiosity as it kicks off its third week on the red planet, with a rebroadcast of one our favorite episodes: Space.

Duration: 1h 1m
Broadcast on: 20 Aug 2012
Audio Format: other

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you're listening to radio from New York Public Radio Public Radio W-N-Y-C-N-P-R Some people go to therapy. Some to church. Others come here to the northwest corner of a parking lot on Fire Island, where most nights you'll find a handful of people looking up. I come down here quite often. It's a great place to stargaze. You got the sound of the ocean in the background with the crashing waves. Stats of the relaxation of it, you know. The night I visited this guy, Ron, was about one of twenty enthusiasts. Huddled over astral maps, staring through telescopes of all sizes. This is quite a telescope. Some so big, you needed a ladder. Wow, that's a big cluster of stars. Yes, it certainly is. Do you get attached to certain stars? Oh, yeah. You did begin. You know, the first one Jay ever found and stuff like that. Do you remember your first? Well, yeah, I'll be real. I was one of my, I really like. Ron's going to show it to you, I think. I didn't catch your name, actually. John. John. What it is that, to the naked eye, Alberio just looks like a really faint, single star. But when you look at it through a telescope, there's a look in there. Yeah, yeah. Oh my God, they're so bright. They're like little such lights. Through the telescope, Alberio looked like a headlight, bright and flat and close, very immediate. So nothing compared to what happened next. The woman walks up, points her finger at the star. Wait, okay, so is that the one up here? And touches it. That one right there. Touch is the star. That's really cool. That was one of the coolest things. Describe what you just did, please. I turned on my green laser and I pointed at the star. It was one of the coolest things I have ever, ever, ever seen. When was Linda, she had a pen that was a laser. And when she turned it on, a focused, bright green beam of light sprung from her hand to the star. Like a long green finger, she literally touched the star. And for a moment, I forgot the ground underneath my feet and that that star, Alberio, was 50 million light years away. It seemed right there. I mean, what do you see when you look up besides, you know, nebulas and stars and star clusters? But what do you sort of look for, exactly? Well, you can really see sort of like where you are in the universe, or at least in our own galaxy. And it makes like a very interesting perspective for yourself, you know, and like, what life is like here and that what life must be like in other worlds and whether or not there's other planets out there with people or different life forms that we came to comprehend. This is RadioLab on the chat album, Ron.

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