As the final crescendo of the Telling Responsible Stories course at the Munich Center for Technology in Society, my team and I released a podcast episode on how researchers, policy makers, philosophers, and the media deal with scientific uncertainty.
To make the topic tangible (and gorgeous), we discussed the case of 'Oumuamua, the first interstellar object to have ever been spotted in the Solar System. When this hunk of rock swooped into our neighborhood, astronomers had only a few months to gather all the data they could ever get. At the same time, journalists needed to carefully pick and choose what and how they report on (especially when some of the astronomers claimed it might be an alien spacecraft!), policy makers had to be convinced to steer money and telescopes into researching it as soon as possible, and for what? For something we might never know for certain? Why do we invest time, money, and attention to something that will forever remain out of our grip?
I'm super proud of my team's work and I'm sure you'll enjoy it, too, so give us twenty minutes of your time and let us transport you into interstellar space: link here.
(If listening doesn't work, we've also included a transcript.)
My brilliant team were Alison Boston, Annika Eßmann, and Maximilian Braun, and our colleagues also produces some interesting (yet very different) projects. Give them a listen over here.