[katieHaylor (OP)]

Here's some listener feedback about a news item in our 2017 Halloween show:

I am listening to the latest podcast (as normal) and have just heard the item on sending ashes into space, for a small fee I assume. I think that it might have been interesting to include some explanation of what ashes actually are, particularly given the Halloween nature of the broadcast. I understand that DNA is destroyed at about 800 C and that cremation uses temperatures around 1400 C. This of course might be wrong. Yet it does raise the question about what people might pay to be sent into space and how much of a person this actually represents. Might it be better to collect dust from the persons house and send this into space instead?

[alancalverd]

Funerals are for the living, so "better" lies in the eye of the beholder."Less meaningless" perhaps, but spacecraft are generally carefully sterilised to prevent terran species invading other ecologies, so cremains are at least ethical.

[EdwardDub]

So how can the information in the universe continue to expand enough to preserve the past if the expansion of the size of the universe is slowing down?

[pensador]

So how can the information in the universe continue to expand enough to preserve the past if the expansion of the size of the universe is slowing down?

The expansion off the universe is not slowing down, its accelerating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_expansion_of_the_universe

[syhprum]

Microwaves are electromagnetic radiation above 300 to 3000 MHz i.e. UHF microwave cookers which is what you are presumably discussing use radiation of approximately 2400 MHz in the uhf range and should be called cookers.