September 23, 2015 3:44 pm

Are You Ready for Part 2 of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “A Conversation with Edward Snowden?”

Last week, in Part 1 of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s interview with whistleblower Edward Snowden – via robotic telepresence from Moscow – much of the conversation focused on the U.S. Constitution and the 4^th Amendment.

This week, the two self-defined geeks dive into some serious math as Edward tells Neil how cryptography works, from asymmetric encryption to secret sharing schemes and n-dimensional matrices.

But before you decide that Part 2 gets too technical for you, think again: the Cold War maybe be over, but in a world where a drone strike could be targeted using metadata, understanding how that data is derived and weaponized is just as important today as understanding the potential impact of nuclear fallout was last century.

And besides… then you’d miss out on Edward asking Neil whether cosmic background radiation, pulsars or other astronomical objects could be used to generate perfectly random numbers that could be used to generate perfect seed keys to be used in encryption, and the fascinating conversation that ensues.

Geeky?

Perhaps.

Interesting?

Definitely.

Important?

You’ll have to decide that for yourself, but we think so.

You can listen to this week’s episode on SiriusXM Insight Channel 121 at 5:00 PM EDT Wednesday or wait until Friday. September 25 at 7:00pm EDT. Listen right here on our website, or on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher and TuneIn.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Jeffrey Simons