Twenty Thousand Hertz's Latest Episode: NASA Interviews, Wormholes & The Future of Space Communication

 Is there anybody out there? That one of the essential questions humans ask about life in our universe. We want to know if life exists in the vastness of space and the easiest way to compile data on the existence of intelligent life is not through our primary, "go-to" sense, which is sight, but through sound.

This week's episode on Twenty Thousand Hertz called "Space Audity," the TED podcast explores how we send and receive sounds from outer space, the way in which astronauts experience noise, and the technologies the future may bring when it takes 40 minutes to tell Houston there's a problem on Mars, or eight years just to say "hey" from the nearest star.

For more than 100 episodes, the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast has taken us on a sonic journey around our world, from audio forensics in criminal cases to misophonia, which is the hatred of some sounds.

Now we put on our space suits and take a walk into the vast reaches of our galaxy, as host Dallas Taylor acts as out pilot and guide to radio waves in the vacuum of space.

Potential solutions to sonic communications in space range from wormholes to quantum entanglement and even texting, as host Dallas Taylor explains through interviews with Peggy Whitson, NASA Astronaut and the first female commander of the International Space Station, plus Astrophysicist Paul Sutter and NASA Audio Engineer Alexandria Perryman. 

 

Artwork by Jon McCormack

 

 Listeners will learn about the complex and live-streamed communication processes that happen when one orbits the Earth at 17,500 miles an hour, the ability of radio waves to travel within a vacuum from 22,000 miles away (in a matter of milliseconds), and the possibilities for reaching people when signals need to move faster than the speed of light.

Read about the episode at Mashable, and listen to "Space Audity" HERE.

 

With millions of downloads, Twenty Thousand Hertz has excelled at weaving a narrative behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. Since winning back-to-back Webby Awards and joining the TED family of podcasts earlier this year, the podcast uncovered the origins of Netflix's "ta-dum" sound for the first time ever, Dallas earned over a million views for his TED Talk on silence, and recent episodes have delivered invaluable insight on the sounds of the future and our collective Sonic Utopia, audio deepfakes, dinosaurs and more.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound, the go-to sound designers for brands like Disney, Google, HBO, National Geographic, Netflix, Nike and many others.

 

Check out the episode. You may discover that aliens from galaxies far, far away have been trying to communicate with us for years through methods such as K-Pop lyrics, Kanye's rants and Roman Mars' basso profundo voice.

 

 

 

Thanks To Greg Jakubik.

 

 

 

By

Frank Racioppi