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Backlight Season 25 · Episode 14

The dark site of the energy transition

22nd December 2025 26 mins Season 25 Episode 14

French journalist Guillaume Pitron warns of the shadow side of the energy transition and digitization. Rare metals are essential for the production of electric vehicles, fighter jets, wind turbines and solar panels, as well as for our smartphones, computers, tablets and other everyday devices. But most people actually know very little about the way they are extracted, or about the ecological and geopolitical cost of this. Pitron wrote the book The Rare Metals War: The Dark Side of Clean Energy and Digital Technologies.

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Are we alone in the universe? still
Season 25 · Episode 15

Are we alone in the universe?

Astronomer Casper Farret Jentink works deep in the forests above Geneva on one of the biggest questions humanity has ever asked itself: are we alone in the universe? We are born alone, we die alone, and in between we try to understand what it means to be there at all. In a workshop, half-observatory, half science fiction decor, astronomer Casper Farret Jentink builds instruments with Swiss precision that can accurately measure light from distant stars to five silicon atoms, in search of a second Earth.
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