Adventures in Science with Geoff Notkin, Dr. Andrew Maynard and Dr. Cady Coleman.

The LIUniverse with Dr. Charles Liu

Can your passions for science, science fiction, space, fossils and even opera lead you to a life of adventure and maybe a career in science?

To find out, Dr. Charles Liu and co-host Allen Liu welcome returning guest Geoff Notkin, The Meteorite Man, and the co-hosts of the “Mission: Interplanetary” podcast, physicist/futurist Dr. Andrew Maynard and chemist/astronaut Dr. Cady Coleman.

All three of our guests have had interesting journeys and adventures in their careers. They’re here to discuss how the circuitous paths scientists often take in our lives, in an episode that connects, as Cady so perfectly sums up, pieces of the universe falling to earth, science fiction, real space stations, future space stations, physics, astrophysics and shopping!

Chuck starts off the episode talking about… The thrill of the hunt. Geoff describes how he fell in love with exploration and adventure, and spent half his childhood hunting for fossils on the “Jurassic Coast” of Dorset, UK and the other half in the museum looking at meteorites.

Although she’s most famous as an astronaut who flew on two space shuttle missions and was a member of Expedition 27 to the ISS, Cady tells us about her 2 1/2-month long expedition to Antarctica looking for meteorites. You’ll hear how the sheer number of meteorites that have been found there has transformed the study of meteorites. She also shares how living in tents and moving around the Antarctic environment relate to training for space travel. Find out the geologic reason why we’re more likely to find meteorites in Antarctica than anywhere else, and the challenges posed to that search by runny noses, moraines, and apple cores.

Next, Charles and Andrew discuss his surprising path, from teenage opera singer (something his co-host Cady discovers for the first time along with the rest of us!) to physicist to futurist, with sojourns in risk analysis, the early days of nanotechnology, synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and of course, science communication.

Naturally, with this crew, we’d get around to talking about risk and asteroids. We start off with the Chelyabinsk meteor, which airburst over a heavily populated area in Siberia, Russia in 2013 where about a million people live. Andrew explains that calculating the probability of a large meteor hitting Earth isn’t very straightforward, while his co-host Cady talks about how we’re working to have better measurements and more understanding about asteroids and meteors.

And then we get to “show and tell.” Geoff shares his favorite find, an elephant’s head-shaped iron meteorite he dug up at one of the 15 Henbury meteor craters from a single event in Australia 4600 years ago. Andrew shows off his set of the original CDs for “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” radio series by Douglas Adams, after which Cady describes the poster for Expedition 42 to the ISS with its obvious connection. (If you don’t know why the number 42 is important… READ THE BOOKS! They’re sci-fi classics.) Cady shares the stuffed penguin she brought back from her trip to Antarctica that has actually been to the South Pole. (Believe it or not, there’s more than one gift shop in Antarctica!) And finally, Charles shares something that co-host Allen Liu actually got for him from Allen’s trip to Antarctica – to see what, though, you’re going to have to watch the episode.

If you’d like to know more about Geoff, check out his YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAcGREEGQbQV3x-CnOXcXTg. And you can find out more about Andrew and Cady and the Mission Interplanetary podcast here: https://missioninterplanetary.com/.

We hope you enjoy this episode of The LIUniverse, and, if you do, please support us on Patreon.

Credits for Images Used in this Episode:
– A glacial moraine in Antarctica – Warren B. Hamilton /USGS, Public Domain
– Meteor exploding over Chelyabinsk, Russia – Aleksandr Ivanov, CC-BY 3.0
– The largest of the Henbury Craters – Michael Bemmerl, CC-BY 3.0 de
– ISS Expedition 42 poster – NASA Space Flight Awareness, Public Domain