I was most surprised in the interview to learn about the accelerated understanding of Exoplanets. As discussed, these are very hard to detect, because they produce no light or other emissions. Therefore, the tuning of telescopes and other sensors to detect a planet is extremely precise, and requires the exo-planet to pass in front of the star and reduce its brightness very slightly. I'd be interested in learning more about how we went about these adjustments - after looking for the first one, what did we learn about the process of detecting exoplanets that allowed us to predict where we might find others? Tarter shares about how exciting the accelerated pace of discovery is, and I would have been more interested to know why that acceleration was possible.

The talk by Spiegehalter really underlined the relationship between uncertainty and predictive futures. In regard to his articles on COVID statistics, I enjoyed his discussion on how he limited his own word count to try and make sure he was not relying on unnecessary jargon, and delivering clear and digestible insights to the public. I think this is very insightful for two reasons. First, these advanced predictive systems do deal with much unknown, and there is much politicization of the reliability of these predictions. I recall initial comments made by the Bush administration that refuted the reliability of climate change predictions because they weren't exactly right. The compressibility and 'straightforward' nature of these shorter articles generates the risk that they can be easily refuted. The second area is in relation to the fact COVID and other health issues are wildly unpredictable, and requires constant updates. A long term model doesn't encapsulate the moving data components. This raises questions about whether our current mechanisms for tracking health epidemics are adequate. https://drive.google.com/file/d/108MSJWvgct6221x2upJVCl7OYNzcs13K/view?usp=share_link

I found it very interesting to learn that when there are financial shocks to the price of carbon fuel products, such as that prompted by the war in Ukraine, there have actually been times where extracting Carbon from the atmosphere has been cheaper than extracting it from the ground. I would have asked whether there are processes that allow us to turn that captured atmospheric carbon back into fuel, allowing us to 'recycle' our carbon emissions as fuel.