Arrival and The Story Of Your Life

Arrival and the Ted Chiang short story The Story of Your Life join forces for this episode of the Cosmic Shed.



Just as the story in both film and book focus on Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a linguistics expert who has her worldview changed by experiencing the language and culture of an alien race, we're joined by Professor Dan Everett, a linguistics expert who has his worldview changed by experiencing the language and culture of an alien tribe. You can read Dan's book "Don't Sleep, There are Snakes" for the whole story.

We're also delighted to be joined by SETI astronomer Seth Shostak to discuss life in the universe and much more...including what makes him throw up all night long.

Joining Andrew, Steve and Ti in the shed is Antony Poveda of I'm a Scientist Get Me Out Of Here.

In the episode, Ti mentions the Q&A podcast which we highly recommend and Andrew mentions these episodes of the Reasonable Doubts podcast on Determinism and Free Will. Again, we highly recommend them and all other episodes of the Reasonable Doubts podcast but don't wish to waste any more of our lives worrying if we have free will or not.

Ti has an event coming up called Cancel The Trumpocalypse where you can join him in a pub in Bristol to watch 24 hours of monster movies to raise money for charity.

Antony mentions his event when you get to meet a real Artificial Intelligence and we all do our best to say how much we love both the film and the short story...which we erroneously call a "book" throughout.