January 31, 2019 9:00 pm

Friday, We Prepare for the End of the World

It’s the end of the world and we know it! On this new episode of StarTalk® Radio, Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with comic co-host Chuck Nice and Josh Clark, co-host of the Stuff You Should Know podcast and The End Of The World, with Josh Clark podcast. If you haven’t listened to Stuff You Should Know, it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world – they recently hit 1 billion downloads!

Josh is in the house to help answer Cosmic Queries on a topic in which he is very well-versed: the end of the world. How will the world end, you ask? Will a meteor come rocketing down and kill us all? Will artificial intelligence rise-up and take over? Will humanity destroy itself? Those are the serious questions we’re here to answer.

You’ll learn about some of the biggest existential risks to humanity. Find out why Josh thinks artificial intelligence is possibly the biggest threat. What would friendliness be in an artificial intelligence machine. Will AI become our evil overlords? Will the Earth survive without humanity? Could we have become intelligent enough already that we might accidently wipe ourselves out with our own intelligence?

You’ll learn how Neil and Josh would prefer to die, at least in a space-related way. We discuss how religious groups might act if we discover extraterrestrial life in the universe. Then, we scale down and ponder whether or not atoms “know” that they were born out of star stuff. And we measure the possibility of our universe being inside someone else’s Large Hadron Collider.

Lastly, we explore the impact of machines becoming self-aware and what it means to be transhumanist. All that, plus, we compare Deep Impact and Armageddon, and Neil can’t help but share some choice words about the latter.

Please join us tomorrow night for Cosmic Queries – The End of the World, with Josh Clark at 7pm ET right here on our website, as well as on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher, and TuneIn. If you’re an All-Access subscriber, you can watch or listen to this episode ad-free at 7pm, too.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
-Ian Mullen