SGU Episode 1045

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SGU Episode 1045
July 19th 2025
"Voyager spacecraft: a symbol of humanity's quest to explore the cosmos."
SGU 1044                      SGU 1046
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
"Of all forms of deception self-deception is the most deadly, and of all deceived persons the self-deceived are the least likely to discover the fraud."
Aiden Wilson Tozer
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
SGU Forum

Intro

Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello, and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is May 16th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody. Cara Santa Maria.

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella. Hey guys. And Evan Bernstein.

E: Good afternoon, everyone.

S: Yeah, so I think I'll be using this particular episode in the middle of July while I'm traveling. So that's why we're recording a couple of months before it's actually going to air. So who knows what crazy stuff has happened in the next. That's two months as we record this previous two months. As you listen to this, there could be something going on like we're totally clueless about, right I?

B: Hope. We hope you're not in a bunker right now.

E: Yeah, this. Could be our This is our time capsule episode. It could be.

S: Yeah, and I was just interviewed by a Finnish magazine they wanted.

E: Like a place where they, you know. Prepare people for. Clothing and accessories. Is that kind of finishing?

S: They were wanted to talk to me about RFK Junior.

E: Oh, that.

S: All the ways in which he is absolutely destroying healthcare in the United.

E: So it was like a 5 hour. Interview. Yeah.

S: Now we had, you know, I had to do it quickly. I'm prepping was prepping for recording this, but I I hit everything I knew what I knew was like she, you know, don't even bother asking questions. Here's what you end up, you know, No, but she had the correct questions. But she had a couple of, you know, reporter E ones like he's softening his rhetoric. Do you think he's modern? Oh, no, no, stop. Not at all. No, this is all BS, but it is, you know, so I was reviewing everything just to like have like quotes stuff handy. It's just amazing. Hi, so it's so much worse than any of us thought it was going to be. Even those of us who thought it was going to be an apocalypse. It's like even worse.

Voice-over: Yep.

S: Just to give very quick review, you know, he's like replacing people at the CDC and the FDA with anti vaxxer cranks, right? He, the CDC is no longer going to be releasing its morbidity immortality date reports, right? So we won't be able, we won't be tracking like infections. You know, they are no longer going to be essentially promoting vaccines. It's all personal choice now.

C: They're also limiting access to vaccine. They're like rolling back a new vaccine, the new one that's finally been kind of approved that are rolling back access. They're saying, oh you can only take it if you're over 65. Like back to the original parameters.

S: So one of the big things, so this is something that I think it requires a little bit of explanation. So I'll just say it very quickly, he is recommending that for all new vaccines there are placebo-controlled trials. So that sounds superficially good, right? You're like, well, that's, that's good, right? We should be doing placebo-controlled trials. But here's the thing. So right now, first of all, like the big anti vaxxer talking point is that we don't do placebo-controlled trials for new vaccines. And that's wrong. That's a lie. We absolutely do placebo-controlled trials for new vaccines. But there are two types of vaccines for which we don't do placebo-controlled trials. One are vaccines where we're they're just updating the vaccine. So there's already an approved safe and effective vaccine and the pharmaceutical companies like we want to tweak the formula, right? So they're updating it. The second kind are ones where they're making a, a strain upgrade or update, right? So it's like the flu vaccine, we're not going to make targeted against the new strain. It's the same vaccine. They're just making it with a new strain.

C: It's the idea here, Steve, that it would actually be unethical to give a bunch of people a vaccine that doesn't work. A.

S: 100%.

C: Yeah, that's what I figured. We know the flu vaccine works. We can't give people a fake vaccine.

S: You can't give people a placebo Yeah. And then the the the broader to state the the ethical principle more broadly. You cannot withhold proven therapies from people in order to get them into a clinical trial, right. You can't say so yeah, we're going to randomize you to the arm that doesn't get standard of care, you know, or doesn't get the proven treatment. We're going to withhold effective treatment from you just to see how bad things get.

C: Yeah, we. Can only do that when we don't know if the treatment is proven yet.

S: Right. But if you have a proven vaccine and you're updating it, then what we do is we compare it to the existing vaccine. That's the baseline. We know it works. We know it's safe. We test the new one against the the baseline and to make sure that no new side effects crop up or that it's at least effective or hopefully more effective or whatever, right?

C: Yeah, because what happens if the ones who were to get the placebo, the hundreds of people who were to get the placebo, were exposed to the flu because it's flu season, got sick and died?

S: Yeah, exactly. So that means no IRB, no respectable legitimate IRB would approve prove that study, which means it will never get done. That's an Institutional Review Board. There are the people who review the the clinical trial make sure everything's on the up and up, including ethical. So they so either. So probably the studies just won't get done. So it's just a backdoor way of shutting down, you know, vaccines because all vaccines are updated, you know, at some point in time and some need to be updated to the latest strain, right. The flu vaccine, if it if you weren't updating it every year to the strain, it'd be useless practically. But so couching it as we're going to do placebo-controlled trials equals we're going to shut down any new vaccines, you know, any vaccines updates or strain updates by making an unethical recommendation.

B: Right, So isn't. So isn't the flu vaccine this season then the people getting really sick going to explode?

S: Yeah, of course.

C: Of course so.

B: All right, well then the.

S: Other thing is wonderful for the for the strain updates, even if they did get a, even if we did do the study, they did approve it, it would delay it by 6 months. The flu season's over.

B: Right, right. So.

S: So you can't track the strain? Yeah.

B: What do you think would happen? Like, oh, we had X people. The effectiveness of the strain of the flu vaccine last year was this, and now it's far, far worse. And we had, oh, you know, 30,000 more people died. Well.

S: They're not going to report them. They're not going to because the CDC is shutting down. They're reporting.

B: There you go. So.

S: But is there no other way to get information, Steve? Well, we'll see. Well.

C: That's the difference between this happening in 19, you know, 38, and this happening in 2025. The hope, right? The hope is that there will be enough people with independent capabilities, but it is hard to do things like that on a national level. I think some universities are going to try, some different states are going to. Yeah, they're going to try to take this number exactly. But, you know, or we're going to start seeing states going around these federal guidelines to protect their people and then we're going to see bigger differences between health outcomes amongst the states, which we already see that's just going to grow. I mean, talk about Steve, did you talk about the fluoride stuff like the fluoride? Supplement didn't even get that this is. More about the full time. Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's amazing.

S: I know it's terrible. And so The thing is so many things are happening at once again, it's interesting. This is too much. Two months later, you'll you'll you know more than I do about what's already happened. But they're the so they're attacking the reporting of data. They're repair attacking the like the rollout, the updating the study of vaccines. Then they're also attacking the universities who could potentially keep them honest about it. And they're also trying to prevent states from bypassing their terrible federal regulations, right? They are fighting on every front. So anything you say, well, this could happen, they're actually trying to prevent that from happening too.

C: And it's one thing to be incompetent. It's one thing to be, I guess I would say weaponized ignorant, like intentionally ignorant. It's another thing to say. Our weaponized ignorance and incompetence is going to be the rule of law and we are actually going to ensure death, like not just oopsie, some people died. We're going to make sure that we ensure that people. Die.

E: There's a body count with this a.

S: 100%, but it's also where it's, I wouldn't even say the rule of law, it's because they're they're substituting the rule of law with the rule of a person.

C: Oh, you're so right. Yeah, this.

S: Is the rule of Trump. That's what we are under. It's none of it is really.

C: Well, and you sort of left out the 5th Estate and that's what I mean. I know that this is not timely, but as of last night, when we're recording this or two nights ago, that's when what John Oliver's most recent episode was all about the media and how we're starting to see the media kowtowing to pressure.

S: Backing down to.

C: They're backing down, they're censoring themselves, they're not pushing back, and that's so frightening.

S: So what's left? Science Podcast.

C: Yeah, yeah, to do this thing.

B: So we're so we're like the geeky little met nephew of to that that saves the enterprise. Is that where we are? Third line? The last line of defense?

J: I think of us like that. Did that little boy that spoke like an adult in Star Trek the Original series that was drinking Tronya.

E: Oh, that. Always freaked me out.

J: Tronya, Tronya.

C: Sure, Carol, Just roll. You guys, you have no idea.

J: Chances of you knowing that are 0 exactly.

S: That the rest was like, yeah, absolutely. Ohh sure, that's. External sense.

E: Perfectly cromulent.

Quickie with Bob: Weird Exoplanet (09:19)

• NASA's TESS Delivers New Insights Into an Ultrahot World – Exoplanet Exploration: Planets Beyond our Solar System 

S: All right, Bob, start us off with a quickie.

B: Oh, boy. Thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. New details have been recently revealed about one of the hottest exoplanets ever discovered, Kilt 9B. Astronomer John Allers describes it well when he said the weirdness factor is high with kilt 9B. Why would he say that? Let's see. So kilt 9B, it's about 670 light years away in the constellation Cygnus. It's a gas giant and it's a behemoth. It's 1.8 times bigger than Jupiter with 2.9 times its mass, and it doesn't have a nice stately 12 year orbit around its star like our big gas giant Jupiter does. Kilt might be has a 36 hour year, 36 hours to go around and start. Around. Yeah, going fast. It's it's so close, it's stupid. 3.2 million miles or 5,000,000 kilometers away, which is far closer to Earth than Earth is and it's 110th Mercury's orbit 110th. The closest planet in our solar system is like far away from this, from this one. And it's orbit brings it almost directly above its poles, right, which is odd. You don't, you know, when you think of an orb, a planet orbiting a star, it's orbiting like, you know, in the Equatorial region, not over its poles. It happens, but it's not I don't think it's terribly common. OK, so as you might imagine, the planet is quite hot. It's it receives 44,000 times more energy than the Earth does from the Sun, 44,000 times. So that makes its dayside temperature 7800 degrees Fahrenheit, 4300 Celsius. That is hotter than the surfaces of some stars. So, yeah, this is a hot planet. Yeah. Imagine. Yeah. See that? See that star over there? This plan is hotter than that than the surface of that of that star. Now, of course, astronomers imagine that, you know, such an incredible heating is causing the planets atmosphere to stream away into space to a certain extent. I wonder how long that would last. All right, You can't do that forever. And the star is also weird. The star is twice our sun size. I believe they meant they said the radius. Twice the radius and 50. 6. Percent hotter and it also spins 38 times faster than our sun. So what do you guys think? What would such a spin do to a star?

J: Like that change its shape. Centrifuge.

B: Exactly, exactly, Jay. So it's like an oblate spheroid. It's flattened at the poles. Imagine you're squishing down the poles closer together in a sense. And it that widens, widens the Equatorial region, right? The Earth is an oblate spheroid, but it's not not as dramatic as this one, so. This this has a result. That I haven't heard about before. It's called gravity darkening. Never heard that term before. It's interesting. That means that the polar areas are hotter and the the equator is cooler and the So if you if you could take the temperature at the poles and at the equator, you'd find a difference but almost 1500° between the two 800°C difference. Which is, which is. Dramatic. I love how they describe the planet as having 4. Seasons. In it's 36 hour year so it's got right it's got 2 summers and two winters. You're going over the poles twice a year and it's and it's hotter then you're going over the the equator Equatorial area and it's a little bit cooler. So that's like it's got Four Seasons. Let's see. Nicole Cologne as a co-author of the paper said it's really intriguing to think about how the stars temperature gradient impacts the planet. The varying levels of energy received from a star likely produce an extremely dynamic atmosphere. Yeah, I think this would have an amazingly dynamic atmosphere, also tidally locked, as you might suspect. So we got some crazy and just imagine the interplay between the incredibly hot sun side and the, and the farther, you know, night side. And then of course, you got that strip between, you know, what's going on there. Is it, are there any temperatures that are even remotely pleasant? I I doubt it, but who knows what's going on? All right guys, So Google. Kelton 9B to find out more fascinating details. This has been your gravity darkening quickie with. Bob, back to you, Steve.

S: Thanks, Bob.

News Items

Voyager Thrusters Brought Back to Life (13:21)

• Voyager 1’s Long-Dead Thrusters Fire Again After 20 Years – Just in Time 

S: Jay, how the Voyagers doing? I heard they're still kicking out there.

J: Well, this is this is Voyager one. This is guys. I have to say this is one of the most impressive feats of spacecraft troubleshooting engineering. Definitely nowhere near though. The Apollo 13 air scrubber fix.

B: Oh geez, right.

J: That was largely credited to one man who recently died.

B: Oh, really?

J: NASA engineers successfully reactivated a set of thrusters on Voyager One that hadn't been working since 2004. And there was a really important reason why they they pulled this off so quickly. Voyager 1 launched back in 1977 and it's currently the most distant human made object in existence at over. Anybody know how? Far away.

Voice-over: Oh gosh, all the far.

B: Away. Damn all the far away.

J: About all the.

B: Fars. Yeah.

J: How many 15 billion miles?

B: Oh, it's 15 billion. Billion. How many? How many light hours is? That that's the.

C: Meaningless number to me. So like where is it physically?

J: It's it it left our our solar system over 10 years ago.

C: Yeah, it's amazing. Well, and so well. Left the heliopause.

B: Push back.

J: OK, Bob, Right. We could have a side conversation for an hour about where, where's the rim, blah, blah, blah.

B: It's. Nowhere near the heliopause.

C: Did it leave the heliopause?

B: Yeah, it, it passed the influence of the of the of the sun's influences. So it's basically in in a sense it's an interstellar space. But still there's, you know, I mean, you got the award cloud, which is still I think a light year away. So it's, you know, it's nowhere near that. But yeah, in a sense, yeah. It left the IT left the primary influence of of our of our sun.

C: How do we know where?

B: Heliosphere.

J: Because we're in communication with it. Yeah, right. We know. We know what direction it's in, and we know by how long, by how long it takes to transmit to us. We know how long, how far away it is. So in order to keep those transmissions from Voyager going, NASA has to maintain this very, very precise orientation. So it's high gain antenna stays pointed at the Earth, right? If that antenna doesn't point at the Earth, we're not going to get the signals. So to do that, Voyager relies on these small thrusters that control its its orientation, particularly the roll motion, which helps it stay aligned with a GuideStar that they're using to to, to help the overall alignment. This is tough, and I would imagine that the farther away it gets, the more difficult that's going to be. The problem is nothing on board. Voyager was built to last 47 years. So the the primary roll thrusters, which are used to control these very tiny little movements that we needed to make. They stopped working in 2004 after their internal heaters failed. And apparently the heaters need to to function in order for the gas that they're emitting to flow properly. NASA engineers assumed that the system was completely done and they switched it. They switched basically everything off and you know, they went, they moved over to the backup thrusters. So those backups have worked really well in in way past what NASA thought they would be able to do, but they gradually are now clogging due to propellant residue, which again, they didn't think it was going to last 47 years. I don't think residue was a problem when they were building it. So Voyager One's thrusters are powered by hydrazine and this is a mono propellant fuel and it's usually used in spacecraft attitude control systems, right? These little thrusters that you'll see in movies and stuff that move jockey things around, it's stored in a liquid form. It's in pressurized tanks. And my first question was like, is there enough of that stuff?

B: Yeah, right.

J: I, I think they need so little of it to make the adjustments that that's why it's lasted so long. But there's got to be a, a time when they know that that propellant is going to, it's going to no longer be there. So if the thrusters failed completely, Voyager would simply just lose its ability to stay oriented with the Earth. And that would effectively just and quickly end the mission because no more, no more talking, no more mission. And to make this problem even worse, NASA the only antenna that's powerful enough to send commands to the spacecraft. This is called Deep Space Station 43DSS-43. It's in Canberra, Australia.

E: I thought you were going to say Deep Space 9. I was gonna.

J: Yeah, if I read Deep Space 9 in my head the first time I I read like Deep Space Station 43. It's like no Deep Space 9, just call it Deep Space 9 and everyone can go home.

E: That's right. We're conditioned that way.

J: So the deep space Station 43 is scheduled to go offline from May 2025 through February of 26 because we're doing a major overhaul of it. And this means that the team had this very narrow window of time left when that dish is functioning to attempt to fix or, you know, with the article that I first read, it said, you know, is a risk being unable to send commands for nine months. No, what would happen is is without without the thrusters working properly, it could just have veer, it could veer off its angle to us and no longer be able to write itself, which means the mission would have died. So I think the few articles that I read and everything were under playing the severity of it like that, You know, it, it just would it would end the mission apparently. So they had to get the fix in. They had to come up with the fix. They had to send it and it's, it takes two days to send and receive, right? So it's 23 hours each way. So this was a nail biter because when that when that dish went out of service temporarily, there was just nothing that could be done in over nine months that could have been the end. So engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, they went into full on think outside the box mode. Of course, lots of people were proposing different things and they were, they were scrambling, you know, they, they, they had to really, this was, this was a, a, a real close call. One team member proposed this novel idea, which is what if the heater system isn't actually broken mechanically, but it was just disabled by a, a, a circuit being off or something like that. Like, you know, some other down line thing that could affect it and, and have the same exact effect, right. You know, the switch could be in the wrong position somehow. And if they could, if they could reset it or flip it back, essentially resetting the power pathway, they might be able to restore the heaters, which would then allow them to bring these primary roll thrusters back online, right? And that idea it is it's risk. It was very risky. And this was a big thing that NASA had to figure out is, is it worth the risk? Because first, you know, these send the commands to restart these dormant thrusters. Then they have to carefully realign the spacecraft again. Like I said, the point the star tracker as its guide. With with super high precision and if the roll thrusters came alive too soon, right as the heaters are heating up and if those thrusters like you know, we're able to function and you know, if this machine is 47 years old before the heaters could completely warm the thrusters, they the thrusters could very likely misfire or even explode. And if they exploded, goodbye. That was it. It was unrecoverable situation. So the timing on everything of all these different nuances in the system were wicked important to go specifically as they they you know, they expect it out. So they sent the command on March 20th, 2025. Since Voyager is so far away, like I said, it took 23 hours to send it out and then it was executed. Then it took 23 hours for it to send a message back. So they had to wait almost two days to find out if they bricked the Voyager or fixed it, right? And that's again, that the news could have easily just said Voyager 1 is toast. So when telemetry finally came back on, it showed the heater temperatures rising dramatically, which is a clear sign that the plan worked. And the thrusters came back online and they work.

E: Amazing.

J: So that one, that one, scientists at JPL basically came up with the idea that maybe it's not broken, which is so counterintuitive, right? Because if things been broken for, you know, 11-12 years, you know?

S: But they I like that. That's always a good plan. Let's assume this is doable, or let's assume it's fixable. What could we do? I often do that in medicine and I tell his like to my students like, all right, what could this be that's treatable? Just think about it from that perspective. Don't don't worry about how likely it is. Just is there anything this could be that is treatable? And then let's make sure it's not that or let's treat it empirically, right? Because like, what are you? What are you? If you assume it's untreatable, that doesn't lead you to anything useful, right? Even if it turns out to be the correct answer, you haven't lost anything, right? Because it's on. If it's untreatable, it's untreatable. It's the same kind of thing. Let's assume it's fixable.

J: Steve, he was a lone wolf. The good for him. Tom Barber, who is the mission lead at JPL, he said, and I'm quoting these thrusters were considered dead and it turned out one of our engineers had an insight that maybe it was fixable, right? That's all it took. Hey guys, maybe the thing, maybe this thing is true. Set to evil, you know? So he's your problem.

E: Hey, someone set the voyage of the evil.

J: My final statement, this sentence I'm about to to read to you that I finally crafted is meant to have massive subtext. Let's see if you guys can pick up on it.

E: OK ready.

J: This kind of success isn't just about keeping the 47 year old spacecraft running. It's a perfect example of how a highly trained scientist using creativity and a nuanced understanding could carefully engineer a seemingly, you know, one out of a million fix. Even when you're dealing with a one ton robot, you know, racing through space at 35,000 mph that's 15 billion miles away. Science kicks ass and can do things that we never thought possible. Subtext. RFK is a Jackass.

S: All right. Thanks, brother. All right, Cara. Yes, I suspect we're going to have some lively discussion.

C: I think so. And maybe some emails maybe.

Space Tourism (23:31)

• Space tourism’s growth blurs the line between scientific and symbolic achievement – a tourism scholar explains how 

S: Tell us about space tourism.

C: So I came across an article that was written by Betsy Pudliner. I looked them up on their university website at University of Wisconsin Stout, and they are a professor of Hospitality and Technology Innovation, kind of their little bio is. With more than 30 years of experience in the tourism industry, Doctor Poodliner has cultivated a deep understanding of the field shaped by travel, blah blah, blah blah. OK, so this is a researcher of tourism, which is fascinating, and they wrote an article in The Conversation. Space tourism growth blurs the line between scientific and symbolic achievement. A tourism scholar explains how. So if we all remember April 14th of this year, there was a very media friendly, media focused launch by Blue Origin. So Ayesha Boe, Amanda Nguyen, Gayle King, Katy Perry, Carrie Anne Flynn and Lauren Sanchez. What do these six human beings have in common, other than the fact that they flew on a Blue Origin?

E: They're, they're celebrity or you know.

C: I don't think all of them are celebrities.

E: Well, they're civilians.

C: They're civilians. What else? Something really obvious. What?

S: They're women.

C: They're women, right? So what? What were the headlines that we saw?

S: That you know all female crew put men to space.

C: Historic moment for women in space. We know all female astronauts dominate the skies or, you know, whatever. And the question that, like I would pose to you that Betsy posed to the audience or to the reader that I think the, you know, obviously the heart of this conversation is were they astronauts or were they space tourists? And what does that even mean? So if we were to take a poll, what do you what do you all think? What do you vote? Astronaut or space tourist?

E: Well, in the past they used to reserve the term astronaut for having achieved a certain altitude. I think that tech in some technical sense you became an astronaut, but I'm not sure if they refined it since.

S: Then, but that's a completely separate, you know, indication, right? So you can, we can have, you can set 1 threshold for did they get high enough to be in quote, UN quote space? But let's say they were in space and that we put that issue aside. Yeah, what were they? Right? That's the question.

C: That is the question. And so it's. When you say in the past an astronaut has a certain but there are other definitions of an astronaut.

S: Yeah, it's a continuum, right. So clearly, if you're a pilot, right, if you are operating a spaceship, if you're controlling, you're an ass.

E: You're the crew if you're part of the yeah.

C: Right. What if, right? What if you're a payload specialist?

E: Yeah, we're all flying airplanes, but we're not the pilots.

S: So payload specialist. So yeah, so. But if you're working in space, hmm, like if you're like going on an Eva to do work in that is occurring in space that can only be done in 0G or whatever. Yeah, that's also, I think an astronaut. But there's a it's a continue. But what if what you're doing is not specific to space? Like let's say you, you know, you have nothing to do with flying the ship. You just, you go up to the space station and you fix the toilet and you come back down. You're a plumber. You're a plumber in space. Does that mean astronaut?

C: I might consider that a space. I might consider that an astronaut, but I will say it also has a lot more to do with not what you're doing once you're there, but everything you did to prepare to get there.

S: Well, that's another thing, yeah.

B: How much training did it take? How much? Like that angle and how I was going to say something like, if you're doing work that would lean me towards thinking that you're you're more, more of an astronaut than not. What if you're a journalist? Like prepping?

C: Interesting. Yeah. You know, they're just they're.

S: Just there to experience and document your experience.

C: Yeah, we're like, let's think about wartime, right? We're we're embedded journalists, soldiers.

E: Well, right. But there are civilian journalists also embedded with soldiers or they're not soldiers.

C: Yeah.

E: So there's different types.

C: There's different types and, and this that civilian versus expert or civilian versus professional distinction is an important one here, right? Because, and I notice that Betsy uses that throughout their writing. They say things like as commercial space travel becomes more accessible to civilians, more people are joining space flights not as scientists or mission specialists, but as invited guests or paying participants. That line between astronaut and space tourists is becoming increasingly blurred.

S: What if you have to train to like wear the spacesuit?

C: Just to wear the suit.

S: Yeah.

C: Yeah. That's interesting. So basically, they did say something, you know, kind of interesting in their writing. Were these passengers astronauts? Not in the traditional sense. They weren't selected through NASA's rigorous training protocols, nor were they conducting research or exploration in orbit. Instead, they belong and, you know, they claim to a new category, space tourists. These are participants in a crafted symbolic journey that reflects how commercial spaceflight is redefining what it means to go to space. And actually they point to, and I didn't know this origins of space tourism going all the way back to 1986 when the Mirror was launched, because the mirror was the first kind of thing they called the first orbital platform to host non professional astronauts. So in the 90's, the 2000s Mirror and then the ISS did welcome a handful of privately funded civilian guests. And the most famous one I guess was in 2001. There was a businessman from the US named Dennis Tito and he's often cited as the first space tourist all the way back in 2001.

E: They call him a national.

C: No, they called him a space tourist, right? And so now we're starting to see this market, right? We, we're seeing Virgin Galactic, we're seeing Blue Origin, we're seeing SpaceX having these kinds of conversations. And I pulled, I highlighted a quote directly from the article that I think was very, I don't know, like they said it way better than I could summarize. And it's pretty short. The blue The Blue Origin flight was not a scientific mission, but rather was framed as a symbolic event in tourism companies, marketers and media outlets often create these performances to maximize their visibility. SpaceX SpaceX has taken a similar approach with its inspiration for mission, turning a private orbital flight into a global media event, complete with a Netflix documentary and emotional storytelling. The Blue Origin flight sold a feeling of progress while blending the roles between astronaut and guest. For Blue Origin, the symbolic value is significant. By launching the first all female crew into suborbital space, the company was able to claim a historic milestone, one that aligned them with inclusion, but without the cost, complexity, or risk associated with a scientific mission. In doing so, they generated enormous media attention because you can imagine if this was a haphazard crew or just a crew. Not just but a crew of a bunch of different people in, you know, mixed gendered crew. It would not have gotten the media attention that it got. But this author points to the fact that although this seemed like this big victory, it was really symbolic about visibility, about inclusion, about celebration. It's not the first time women have been in space. There have been 61 women astronaut candidate candidates. Many of them have flown Sally Ride, Mae Jemison, Christina Koch. Is it Koch Koch and Jessica Meir? But they trained as astronauts, they've contributed to science engineering and, you know, long duration mission research. There have been historic achievements. And so the question is, when we see all the media attention around these women who flew up and came down and then had all of this press around them, is that something that we should celebrate? And should it like bolster like, oh, women in science, women in space, This is amazing. Or, and maybe I should say and, or does it actually minimize the accomplishments of the women who came before them and who will come after them who are doing astronaut work?

S: Yeah. So like many things that we talk about, this is primarily an issue of categorization, which is ultimately arbitrary and context dependent. So, you know, back in the day, everyone going into space was an astronaut. There was number question about their status because you, you know, you had to be trained. You were doing something like there was number no tourists, no dead weight, nothing except for pilots and mission specialists, basically people who were absolutely astronauts. Now the categories of people going into space is broadening and we could start to split them out into different, different subcategories. You're right. There's space travelers, people who go to space. Some of them are astronauts, meaning they're professional. Their profession is going into space in some way. We're working in space all the way to like tourists who do absolutely nothing. But in between, there's going to be a continue of people who are doing doing some job in space or doing something. Maybe I like, just like your job is to be a tourist and write about like if you take a picture now you're a space photographer. Does that also make humor an Astra quote, UN quote astronaut? There's no right or wrong answer here. So, you know, and we have to think, as you say, about the meaning of these categories and how that is communicated to the public and how that affects the space program and space tourism and how the public thinks about it and about what it means to us as a society, culturally, everything so.

C: And that's the framing that the author really takes. They talk a lot about the history of tourism and tourism theories, which I didn't even know there was a whole area of scholarship around this, but that tourism is really an evolution over time. So, and they even have a little like kind of graphic of like starting with exploration into development, consolidation, stagnation, then sometimes rejuvenation or decline where they show that like the earliest tourists very often were and are hand selected that are either inordinately wealthy or there it's it's seen as some sort of rite of passage. And we think about early exploration in the same way. There have always been tourists who are along for the ride because they could pay their way onto the ship, because they can pay their way along. And they may have contributed to history and science as well simply by virtue of being present when something miraculous was happening. But then over time it becomes more democratized. So they talk about the Grand Tour of Europe, which was a rite of passage from I just pulled the article like 1600 on that. Eventually it became a pretty accessible thing to do. But early on you you needed like kind of a lot of money. You needed a lot of prestige. How do you get that ticket? How do you get that spot? And then eventually modern travel sort of mimic that. And so the idea here is that, yeah, with space tourism right now, we're in the exploration stage. It's expensive, it's exclusive, it's invite only, It's available only to a few. The infrastructure is limited. Companies are experimenting with what it looks like. It's not mass tourism yet, but maybe it will be. And so how we talk about it right now, how the media shapes these narratives is going to have a big impact for the categories that we use in the future. And I think as much as it's, you know, a categorization problem, and as much as we often talk on the show about the idea of constructivism and we put a label on something and that label is arbitrary, that doesn't mean it doesn't instill deep meaning, right? It can be both arbitrary and deeply meaningful. And so that's something we we definitely have to think about because the narratives, the storytelling is actually all of it right now. It's it's less about the thing itself and more about how we spin the thing that's going to affect what we think about it in the future and what the future of space exploration actually looks like from both the tourist and, I guess, professional perspective. It's a fascinating question, though. Yeah. And it's one that's near and dear to my heart because I have friends. I know people who have been to space both as astronauts, you know, in the very traditional sense, and then as sort of what I would consider tourists, but but who might have used or had the label put on them as astronaut. And I've always grappled with the feeling that comes up for me when when that label is used. So, and I think we all kind of need to do that.

S: It's like, what's the difference? Where's the lie between an explorer and a tourist?

C: Right for.

S: Sure, if it's the first time you're going someplace or it's, you know, exotic to you at some point that make you a little bit of an explorer or maybe you're just an adventurer versus you're just a tourist because there are people already there. But was Columbus a tourist because there were already people in the in the Americas anyway?

J: Yeah. It's complicated.

S: It's complicated, yeah.

J: It's complicated.

S: That doesn't mean you can't. As you say, you could still make meaningful and useful definitions, even though you recognize that this is just imposing patterns on and.

C: I think the part that kind of bums me out too is that in taking on a label that maybe doesn't feel earned or genuine, it minimizes the label that actually doesn't need to feel minimized. Does that make sense? Like being a space tourist, being the first space tourist or an early space tour is actually really cool. And so owning that and celebrating it and being like, I'm helping pave the way for many people just like you to eventually do what I do. Like, what a great thing to celebrate. But in being like, I'm an astronaut, then there's all this, like, really, are you an astronaut? And now all of a sudden we go, no, you're just a space tourist. And I don't like that.

S: Yeah, but you could use a term like you're a space fairer.

C: Or you got to celebrate the terminology. Yeah.

S: Yeah, So it's not a tourist, definitely has a minimization feel to it. Oh yeah, absolutely. But astronaut is obviously the maximally, you know, sexy terminology. But you guys, I agree there should be something in the middle. It's a it's an accomplishment. You put your ass in that seat and you got shot into near orbit. Orbit, whatever. Yeah. And you know what I mean, that that's something that trivial. It's not.

C: No, it's a huge accomplishment. But there is something kind of yucky that happens when somebody who makes a massive accomplishment embellishes and uses terminology even beyond, you know, it's like, can't it be a massive accomplishment on its own? Because the second you go, no, but it's this thing, everybody goes, no, it's not. It's just that thing. Just the just is the problem, because it's still very cool in and of itself.

S: Don't. Don't embellish, but don't minimize.

C: Yeah.

S: But I mean, it might mean that we're always, you know, tinkering with the term terminology to try to capture the right. Connotation.

C: The right.

S: New ones. All right, let's move on. So more bad news about the climate?

Global Temperature and Ice Sheet Melting (38:20)

• Warming of +1.5 °C is too high for polar ice sheets 

C: Oh God, there's always.

S: Going to be bad news about the climate.

C: Yep.

S: One of the big issues with climate change with the, you know, warming average global temperatures is melting ice. That has a problem for numerous reasons, but one of the big reasons, depending on where the ice is coming from, is that melting ice can raise sea levels. Do you guys know like Jay, what do you think is the 2 main reasons that sea levels rise due to a warming climate?

J: I think the obvious 1 is like are you saying why does it rise?

S: Yeah, why does sea levels rise?

J: Melting Arctic ice releases of poisonous gas. That last one was a joke. I mean what else can cause it other than our water in the ocean?

C: What?

J: Wait, wait, does the ocean take up more space when it's?

C: Expanding because of the heat, so.

S: Thermal Expansion, and actually until very recently, Thermal Expansion was the number one reason for sea level rise due to.

C: But now we're losing land ice.

S: Yeah. So it's.

C: It's not the sea ice, it's the land. Exactly.

S: So it's the ice sheets that are on land. So basically the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Western Antarctic Ice sheet, and the Eastern Antarctic Ice sheet are the three main ice sheets. There's also mountain ice and glaciers, You know, anything. Any ice that's on land that then ultimately ends up in the water can raise sea levels.

C: Yeah, because ice that's already floating in the water doesn't change it.

S: We're actually just getting to the point where ice melting ice is having a bigger impact on sea level rise than thermal expansion. But the question is how much sea level rise are we going to get at any particular level of warming? That's obviously affects the recommendations for where, like how much do we need, really need to limit warming to? But that's a complicated question because it's it's a not only, it's not only a matter of the peak temperature, it's also how long we stay there. If you get the temperature get back down fairly quickly, it doesn't have as much of an impact, right? So the Paris Accord and the recommendations of the IPCC have stated that we want to keep warming below 1.5°C above pre industrial levels, right? And because based upon the signs at the time, the you know, the irreversible or catastrophic ice sheet melting is likely to occur somewhere between 11.5 and two point O degrees Celsius warming above pre industrial levels. So if you stay below 1.5, we're probably OK. But of course, you know this data, that conclusion is based upon modeling from multiple independent lines of evidence and data is changing and so those numbers can change. By the way, do you guys know where we are right now? How much warming have we had above pre industrial levels? No, in terms of degrees Celsius.

B: Oh, the degree.

S: So 1.5 right is the Paris Climate Agreement and the IPCC recommendation.

B: It's just under. 2.5. Just under 2.

C: 1.9.

S: No, no, you guys, we're 1.2.

C: We're not past 1.2. It's so hard because we're always dealing with projections. Yeah.

S: So no, this is what you're confusing is that we have temporarily crossed the 1.5 C, but the average like for the year has not not crossed 1.5. We have like a heat wave or like, oh, we're actually, you know, one point for this week or this month we're at 1.5, but not for the year. We're at 1.2. So we're above 1, but we're not quite at 1.5. We're getting pretty close now, but we're getting pretty close to 1.5. And what we're going to, we're going to exceed 1.5. There's at this point, there's no way we're going to keep it below 1.5. The really the question is where's it going to peak and for how long? And so we want to, we want to keep it as low as the peak temperature, as low as possible. And we want to get it have it, you know, turn, bend that curve back down as quickly as possible. And it's all about how much CO2 we put into the atmosphere, right? That's basically what it comes down to. I mean, methane and other greenhouse gases play a role as well. Their effects are are bigger, but shorter term. But in terms of like over the next 100 years, 200 years, CO2 is the main, is the main forcer or driver, right? All right. So the new study looks at multiple lines of evidence, including historical data like in the past, when it's been warmer, how much melting has it been or how what were the what were the sea levels like when the temperature was 1.5 C, you know, warmer than it is then then above pre industrial levels, for example. And they concluded that in order to avoid significant sea ice melt, we need to keep global warming below one point O degrees Celsius. So we're already. Past. We're already past that point and maybe even lower, they say. But you know, at least but one point, you know, 1.0 is a is, is probably closer to the number that we really need to be shooting for. Again, it doesn't mean it's too late that don't, don't do anything because again, it's all about time as well. So do we still need to bend that curve back down as quickly as possible? So, you know, we're at 1.2. If we can start to reverse these trends quickly, we could avoid the worst of it. And again, when we talk about these glacier melts and sea level rise, we're talking about over the next 200 years, right? A lot of these projections are to like 2300. Yeah, 22123 hundred.

B: So Star Trek time.

S: Yeah. But we have to think about what the sea level is going to be in 100 or 200 years because of something called hysteresis. You guys know? It's my word of the week. You guys know what hysteresis is?

B: I have heard of that word, yes.

S: So hysteresis is when there is a delay between a physical cause and a physical effect. So in this case, we're talking about the delay from the temperature rise to the sea level rise resulting from ice melt, which could be decades or even 100 years or 200 years. So we're.

B: About inevitability, right?

S: Yeah, we're, yeah. So we're trying to, we're trying to prevent the worst of the climate, of the the effects of climate change, even though they won't, I mean, they they'll stick it still be very bad at 2100, you know, by the end of this century. But they may not peak until 2200 or 2300. But by then, like it's too late, you know, like they're, that's again, hysteresis works both ways, right? Then anything we do to mitigate or to try to reverse that trend will take a long time to kick in. It actually takes longer. It takes longer on the way down than the way up because the hysteresis is asymmetrical, meaning that it takes 10s of years, right, for the ice to melt, or hundreds, 10s or hundreds of years. But it takes hundreds or thousands of years for the ice to build back up again, right? So it's like an order of magnitude off. So like, yeah.

E: Must be artificially somehow with technology and accelerate. That, yeah.

C: But there's also the, it's not just hysteresis, is it? Because hysteresis is the delay, but we're also dealing with the negative, like runaway feedback. Well, that's a different issue. You're right.

S: That's a complete, that's the tipping point effect. Do you do other effects kick in that then make us jump to some other new new stability equilibrium? Yeah, new equilibrium. That's like, oh, we're going now our equilibrium now is 2 point O above pre industrial levels. And that's where we are, right? You might, you might, yeah, if you hit 1.5, you're going to hit 2.5, right. If you hit 2.5, you're going to hit 3.5. If you hit 3.5, you're going to hit 4.5. Yeah. So it's exactly, it's the tipping point like a domino effect. So and that's all that's, that's there's a lot of unknowns there because again, it's, we don't know exactly where those tipping points are. So it's all about the precautionary principle, like a actually rational reasonable outcome of the precautionary principle where we're saying, well, we're trying to avoid these possible tipping points because if it turns out that we pass them, there's nothing we could do about it at that point. You know, we're kind of committed. That's the idea. Like there's now you're committed to this much warming, you're committed to this much ice melt and we're committed to meters of sea level rise. So if all of these, the ice sheets, the land bound ice sheets melted, they all melted, how much sea level rise would would occur?

E: All of it.

S: Yeah.

E: Oh boy.

J: This is a wild feet. This is a wild guess, but 5 feet?

C: Yeah, many feet.

E: Oh no, it's meters. 20 feet. It's meters, so.

S: 65 meters.

C: Jesus.

S: That's yeah, that's what I meant, Feet. Basically 60. 5 meters if it all melts.

C: So basically we would only have mountains sticking.

S: So that's a lot. I mean, there be more. There be more than yeah, there more.

C: Yeah, but that wouldn't exactly.

S: Be water world but it would be pretty.

C: Bad there be no coastal areas left. Would be only the most inland of the largest land on Yeah.

S: Yes, you also think about it all right. How many people live within 1m of the current sea level?

E: Oh gosh.

C: I know I do.

E: 40% of the world's. Population.

S: I thought that was, there's 230 million people. That's only 1M, right?

E: Oh.

C: Yeah, maybe I'd talk.

S: About 1m that's within one minute. Not with 65 meter as Karis. It's like everybody along Eddie Big Coast. But yeah, but that's that could and that we could get we could reach a meter by the end of the century. That's 230 million people at current population levels displaced essentially.

E: Infrastructure. The whole.

C: Thing, Yeah, my elevation in LA is 305 feet. That's it.

S: Yeah.

E: Yeah, I'm at 371 feet at my house.

C: Yeah, we're screwed.

S: So, but of course it's not just like that's where the water level is. Obviously the higher the water level is, the more surges you're going to get. You know, there's obviously there's, there's also tidal effects and there's more storm, all the other things kick in as well. And so.

C: New York is 33 feet.

S: Yeah. New York gone.

C: Very. 88 million people just gone.

S: Gone. Yeah.

C: Wow. This is. Oh my God.

S: So, so, yeah, so basically they said 1.5 no longer is a safe level. Really one point O is kind of a safe level. We're already past it, which makes it all the more urgent that we turn the ship around, that we really start to, you know, reduce the amount of CO2 we're putting in the atmosphere and, you know, get down to very low levels, even reversing it, right? If we could, you know, to be taking out more than we're putting in for a while. Unfortunately, under the current administration, everything is going in the wrong direction. And even this, even the things they're saying they're going to do, like Trump said, again, we're two months behind reality here. But Trump said I wanted quadruple nuclear in the United States. Like that sounds good, but then he's gutting the Inflation Reduction Act, which was providing a lot of funding for new nuclear. So like what's actually happening is going to slow down the adoption of new nuclear. And of course, he's deliberately going after anything renewable, you know, which which all, and also any, anything against the EV market. So it's, it's bad times, you know, and of course he's gutting the Environmental Protection Agency and, and NOAA like, so we won't even have the data or, you know, to and we'll have the scientists, we'll have the infrastructure to study these problems. Any federal grants studying climate change gone defunded completely, just totally defunded. So that's what we're dealing with now. In the meantime, it's, you know, the effects of climate change are more urgent than we thought. But, you know, I think, you know, part of me has to believe, though, that the, the current crop of people doing this know that, yeah, the worst of it won't hit until they're dead. So they don't care.

B: Oh yeah, sure, that's a huge. Part Yeah, just completely selling out the future.

S: Yeah, in many ways, in every way you can think of, they're totally selling out the future. All right, Evan, tell us about how quickly robots could learn to do physical tasks.

Robot Learn Physical Tasks 60 Times Faster (50:41)

• NVIDIA Powers Humanoid Robot Industry With Cloud-to-Robot Computing Platforms for Physical AI 

E: Yeah, there's been some news this week on that front. I'm going to call this piece How to train your Robot from Dragon, as in slowing down dragon, see How to train your Dragon and I smashed those two together and.

C: Fort Man I.

S: Got it.

E: You got it phrase thank you let's role play a little bit guys all right I want each of you to be a take the role of a robot designer you've just. Designed.

S: Are we a robot that designs, or are we somebody who designs robots?

E: You are a human that has designed a robot. You designed a human sized robot with human like features. You know, arms, legs, hands, head. It looks human and you designed it to take the place of humans doing manual labor. OK, now. You have to. Yeah, you have to teach this robot to do a task, any manual task. You decide. You know, sweeping the floor, picking up a box and moving it. Basic kind of things that humans do. Give me a limiting factor in the teaching of the robot to do this task. What do you think? Some things limit our capabilities to teach the robot to do this task.

S: Not its ability to do the task.

E: Correct. Just about how you know how, how are you going to how are you going to train this robot?

B: I I would train it in virtually I wouldn't.

E: Expand on that, Bob.

B: There's they're doing a lot of that now where the training is happening in, in a computer with, you know, with you could have it training, you know, using like a say a physics engine, lots of people, you have lots of people doing it. And then from from there you could then translate that to to a real world. So I think you could do it a lot faster virtually than just starting training it and you know, you know, meet space.

E: That's a great point. Any other thoughts?

S: Guys, yeah, I think that's, I agree with Bob. I was going to say that as well because I know they're doing that, training it virtually and then you have to train it on the actual task.

E: You have to train on the actual task, right Steve? And, and when it comes to humans doing these tasks, we work on a very what human time scale, right? And therefore, a lot of the times when these robots are being trained, the human time scale becomes a limitation for that robot. Learning is slow because human tasks are, you know, have nuance and contacts and physical complexity. And the current AI systems, they're doing OK right now, but they're still catching up to those kinds of demands. And one major challenge for robot makers is the lack of large scale real and synthetic and synthetic data to train these robots. Human demonstrations are not scalable. They're limited by what, like number of hours in a day, for example. But robots also need to be tested in the physical world. So you have to compromise. But it's timely it there's a cost associated with that and there are certainly risks, safety risks also that come along with that.

S: Evan, can you train one robot or a limited number of robots to do the task and then have those robots train the other robots 24?

E: Probably. You probably could if you can get to that point right, But.

B: You wouldn't have to have them I wouldn't think. They'd have to specifically train other robots. They would just transfer the the learning data over and like bam like I know Kung Fu.

S: Yeah. So you train one robot, and then you just copy the programming to every other robot.

E: You right is what is eventually what you what you would do, but you still have to get that one robot up, up, up up to speed and running right. And in order to do that, you have to come up with a with better methods in order to train it not on human time scales, but things that are work better with rope, with robot learning and the way robots learn. And NVIDIA has came, has come up with a way to make the learning time for robots as much as 60 times more efficient than they were for robots prior to this technology that just came out. NVIDIA has announced Isaac Groot N 1.5, which is the 1st update to Nvidia's open, generalized, fully customizable foundation model for human reasoning and skills. So this is an upgrade to Groot N1. In under Groot N1, if a robot had to take, for example, 90 days to learn a task, whatever that task is, that robot can now do it in 36 hours, can learn the task in 36 hours. You go from right, It took three months for the robot to be able to to process all this stuff and get it to the point where you need to function correctly. Now it can learn the same thing in 36 hours. That's quite a job.

S: However, when you ask it a question all it says is I am Groot.

E: I love that they used. Groot. I love that they they used and didn't call it some, you know, L2Z65 whatever, like astronomers take note of that please, when you when you're naming things. Thank you. Yeah, Groot N 1.5, it bet it can better adapt to new environments and workspace configurations as well as recognize objects through user instructions. And this upgrade significantly improves the model success rate for common material handling and manufacturing tasks like sorting or putting away objects. And this is open sourced, it's out there, you grab it and they have grabbed it that since the announcement came out, I think it was Monday of this week, which is we're recording this in late May on the first day, I think 6000 downloads of Groot and .15 took took place. It learns quickly in large part due to a technique they refer to as dreaming. I don't know if you guys have we talked about the dreaming way of learning for robots.

B: Dreaming.

E: Dreaming, that's the term. Here we go. Android streaming of robotic sheep moment we finally reached it. Oh, that's a Blade Runner reference, by the way. Cara No.

C: Thanks.

E: Just, you know.

C: Not just for me, just for all of you in the auditor. Well, yes, and forever. I am the proxy for a particular type of listener.

E: So dreaming in this context, dreaming means using synthetic data generation, creating large scale, high quality simulation data in virtual environments rather than collecting real world world physical data, right. So instead of using actual time, real world physical means to teach something, you do it like Bob you suggested in a in a virtual, in a virtual environment. But essentially it's dreaming for these robots, but they retain what they learn. What a wonderful advantage.

S: Why not robots?

E: People, could you imagine? People. Could you could do that?

S: You could you could practice in your mind.

E: But to the point where you can accomplish a specific task.

S: Well, I mean, there are limits because it won't really help your muscle memory as much, but just because of the way we are neurologically, but you know, you can't, you absolutely like if you can train a sequence or think about things like that, you could do things in your head. I can think people would a Fantasia probably have a harder time doing that, but.

B: What about lucid dreaming Steve? I think that would also go a part at least part of the way towards a muscle memory as well.

S: I don't know. I don't know about the how that works neurologically.

E: While they are dreaming, they are practicing their tasks millions of times over, in parallel, across simulated environments millions of times. That's that's why this is reduced so so drastically. The simulation data acts as a stand in for actual sensor data, which enables the model to generalize skills before even being deployed in the real world. So this reduces the need for expensive real world robot trials. It enables rapid iteration and scaling across many different tasks, and it allows the robots to safely explore edge cases, you know, falling, colliding, failing, without all the real world risks that are involved with such things. So this is much more efficient and safer and certainly more cost effective ultimately as well.

S: So when do the robots take over the world again?

E: Oh yeah. So it was going to be, it's been about a year or two, but now it's 60 times that. So next week all.

S: Right. That's good. Bob.

Most Powerful Solar Storm (58:45)

• 14,000 years ago, the most powerful solar storm ever recorded hit Earth. 'This event establishes a new worst-case scenario' 

S: Tell us about the most powerful solar storm ever, well, ever recorded or known or whatever. What's going on?

B: Yeah, fascinating story here. Scientists have found evidence of the of the worst solar storm to hit the Earth ever found using a new climate chemistry model. With that, they were able to decipher the clues leftover 14,000 years ago, farther back in time than any other previous model could accurately perform. This is from Science Direct. The the title of the study is new model reveals that the latest the late glacial radiocarbon spike of 2350 BC was caused by the record strong extreme solar storm. To appreciate this news item as usual little homework we got to go over here. You need some familiarity with carbon 14 and the link that it has with solar storms. Carbon 14. We've talked about it on the show a few times. It's a radioactive isotope of carbon. It's it's weak. It's really nothing that you need to be worried to worry about radioactively like beta radiation. What happens though, it's in it's formation, cosmic rays hit the atmospheric nitrogen and that and that turns it into carbon 14. Carbon 14 then come combines with oxygen and creating radioactive carbon dioxide. And then from there, the radioactive carbon dioxide gets taken up by by plants using photosynthesis and animals consume the plants. So there we've got carbon 14 in our bodies that's replenished every time we eat. So now this is the basis for radiocarbon dating because carbon 14 decreases after death, right? So you're not eating it anymore. And then the half life kind of becomes noticeable because it'll it'll decrease. And so if there's if there's less. 14, then it's older and and that maxes out for what, like 60,000 years essentially at that point there's so little carbon 14 left that you can't even detect it. So then we have to use other methods for for dating. All right, yeah, yeah. The now the link to solar storms though, is that the storms create spikes of carbon 14 in the environment, like in like trees, for example. This is pulse of carbon 14 that's created with all, with all the particles and that are part of the the, you know, the the solar storm itself and extreme storm like what we're talking about here leaves distinctive spikes in, for example, in this example, tree rings. We could, we could detect it and it's, it's so it's like a it's like a fingerprint, but it's, you know, it's more complicated in that, of course, as usual. So there are some pasts, famous storms, solar storms that we are all aware of, but we've heard all of these and not, yeah, but, but even before, well, let's let's start with last year. They actually named last year solar storm the, the Gannon storm of 2024. It actually saw a mass migration of satellites. Well, because they, thousands of them began firing their thrusters to make up for the altitude loss, right? Because all those particles within within the atmosphere just essentially makes it denser. There's more drag, they lose their orbit and they got to get back up to their, to their maximal, you know, their working orbit. So a mass migration of satellites. Interesting words there. Then there was a Halloween storm of 2003 now that was similar in state in strength to the Gannon storm. For that one, similar to Gannon, just like satellite trajectories were just it's changing on predictably because of this denser atmosphere caused by all these charged particles from the sun. And then my favorite, the 1859 Carrington event 10 * 10 times stronger than what we experienced last year and the Halloween storm order of magnitude stronger took down Telegraph wires all over the world. Luckily, technologically, we're basically the infancy of of such things that could be impacted and so it wasn't this unmitigated disaster that it would be today. Now, the strongest, though, I wasn't aware of this, the strongest of all the storms we had detected until previously was 775 AD Solar storm doesn't really have a name. This was back when Charles the Great reigned in medieval Europe. There's few written records of this, but historians have found hints of this happening from ancient Chinese and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. So there it there are hints of it. So that's the biggest one that we have ever detected evidence for. And but The thing is though, we are, we live in the Holocene, right? This is like essentially the modern day till 12,000 years ago is considered the Holocene. It's interglacial, right? We're in it. We're in a period of time between glaciers. It's characterized by relative warmth and stable weather, right? So that that's kind of what the Holocene is all about. But we've never been able to detect anything outside of the Holocene because the weather was was different like the Pleistocene, right? It's very problematic. It was less warm, it was more glacial. And all of our models are meant really for the Holocene atmosphere. And so they don't really work reliably in atmospheres different enough to be to have their own designation like Pleistocene. Technically, scientists would describe it as a, that we have a lack of carbon transport models that hurt that happened during those glacial conditions character, you know, that happened in the Pleistocene and we, so we found tree rings from 14,000 years ago that were very notable. It was this, there seemed to have been potentially a huge spike of carbon 14, but none of our models could really handle it. They couldn't really decipher it. I mean, potentially it could have been a huge solar storm or, but maybe it was something geomagnetic or it was maybe it was due to climate change. So they couldn't really say with any any scientific certainty what these spikes were in those the spikes of carbon 14 in those tree rings from 14,000 years ago. And so this is where the new, the new model comes in. This is a new chemistry climate model called so-called 14 CEX model. So this is where this model comes in. I mean, I won't go into too many details about it, but obviously this model is optimized for interpreting carbon 14 spikes during glacial periods during the type of atmosphere that we believe was around when, you know, 14,000 years ago during this time. And what I liked is that they took, they took this new model and they tested it against the 775AD solar storm, which was, you know, clearly within the Holocene with, with modern atmos, you know, atmosphere and that solar event 775 AD, the biggest one we've ever studied. Obviously it's, it's very, very, very well studied. They use this model against that and, and the results were were actually very favorable. I the sense I get is that with this model could be used in the Holocene and the Pleistocene. So it does. So it's kind of they like, it seems like they expanded its capabilities to also incorporate the Pleistocene as well as the Holocene because because otherwise they wouldn't have tested it against the the 775AD solar storm. OK, So what the conclusion is obvious. It's it's the largest solar storm they believe. Odds are really good that this is the largest solar storm that's ever been detected. The the most? Carbon 14 ever injected into the into the environment that quickly, lead study author Kencia Golobenko said. This event establishes a new worst case scenario. Understand understanding its scale is critical for evaluating the risks posed by future solar storms for modern infrastructure like satellites, power grids, and communication systems. So yeah, this is this is important information for us to to take and prepare for. So my big question at this point was all right that's interesting but what would this what would happen if this storm hit today and it was hard to get some real solid predictions but the obvious answer is that it would be a global crisis that would be a disaster There would be long term blackouts. It would overload Transformers it lasting weeks or months or I think it could easily last potentially for years because a lot of a lot of these things are not easy to replace very expensive infrastructure damage. Like I was saying, Transformers, substations, high voltage transmission lines would be would be damaged or destroyed. We would experience a huge problems with our satellites and a loss I think of a good chunk of our of some of our very important satellite satellites, you know, because the high energy particles in the radiation can permanently damage or disable them. Imagine, you know, have, you know, a GPS communications whether whether monitoring, whether monitoring being being disabled or destroyed for significant periods of times like wow, not fun. There will be a disruption of air travel, which, you know, it sounds kind of trivial with all this other stuff going on, but I mean, imagine having a lot of the flights that were happening to be rerouted or grounded. So essentially global travel chaos is what would result. And then and then don't even get me started on the financial markets, global financial markets massively unstable who it would be. Can you imagine it? I just can't imagine a better, you know, worse day for the financial markets when, when that really hit. If it, I'm not even going to say if because this happened 14,000 years ago and it's, it's, it's going to happen again. Just a matter, just a matter of when at this point. And then finally here, supply chain collapse. And that's all about, you know, global logistics, you know, shipping and transportation systems. We could have amazing shortages for critical supplies, medicines, food. I mean, all right, have I painted the picture? There is a bright side. The bright side is the Aurora's would be off the hook. You, we would see, we would see Aurora's potentially in Equatorial regions. And if so, if you see, if you see Aurora's and you're at the equator, you know some shit is going down. And I, can you even imagine being in a polar region when this was happening? How bright, how amazingly bright that is? I would love to see that simulated. So yes, clearly this would be a global crisis. And I'm really hoping that this is, this is a wake up call, yet another wake up of the many wake up calls we need. I hope this is a wake up call, but I'm not confident at all because we are not very good for long term possibilities or, or scenarios like this where, you know, it could happen tomorrow, it could happen in 100 years. But if you look at, at the statistics, Steve, I never forgot that talk we did years, years ago about the, the probability of getting hit with a care, you know, a care, even a Carrington level event, which is weaker than than any of these, you know, and the odds were not encouraging at all. I mean, it was, I forget the exact numbers, but you know, within what, 20 or 30 years?

S: It's just like like on average it should happen like within 20 years. Remember, actually as pessimistic as you are, we have been hardening the grid for the last 10/15/20 years. The bottom line is what I found is that we, yeah, we do not know what would happen. We just don't straight up don't know. And now we may know even less because we have like these new upgrades, but The thing is like this one from 14,000 years ago, something that strong. Yeah, that is, that is hard, really hard to protect against. Yeah, something that powerful.

B: It is. I mean, I mean, I think we should be making lots of Transformers just like, and I know they're really expensive. Make a bunch of them. Store them.

S: Like we have a strategic reserve, a strategic reserve, we have a strategic reserve of oil. We need a strategic reserve of Transformers, right, exactly.

B: It's that's. Not yeah, you got to harden these facilities. And yes, you're right. They they they have made progress. They absolutely have made progress. But but I'm not confident that it's anywhere near enough.

S: Yeah, well enough. Again, is relative. That's enough for how bad of.

B: A yeah, I mean, I think preparing for a Carrington level is reasonable. You don't have, you don't necessarily don't, you know, because I because as we know, that last 5% protection could, could make it 1000 times more expensive. But but a Carrington level is reasonable. I mean, it only happened in like 8 what, in the last 1800s, not that long ago and like.

S: Well, like with floods, they talk about flooding, talk about a 50 year event, 100 year event, a 500 year event, 1000 year event. Same thing with these coronal mass ejections. We have to talk about 100 year event, a 500 year event, 1000 year event and we should be protecting at least for the every hundred year event, if not the every thousand or 10,000.

B: And hopefully models like this will help us detect even more more of these is ancient solar storms. And we can get a better sense on that, you know, on, on when we might expect the next one.

J: And this is like a, it's not just like an inconvenience like you were saying about like we could be out of power for so long that, you know, it becomes Lord of the Flies, you know what I mean?

B: Oh my God, yeah.

S: Millions of people, 10s of millions of people could die, you know, as a result. It could, yeah. It could take years for us to really get civilization back on track if it's bad enough.

B: Oh yeah, this would be.

S: Bob, interestingly you used the term off the hook to describe.

C: I know I was. I was like, Steve, How excited.

S: The how cool the the Aurora borealis would be. Well, we're going to get to that in a minute. First, we're going to talk.

Emails (1:11:36)

S: We have two emails. That's actually the second e-mail. The first e-mail comes from Levente Vizi, or Vizi from Orono Main, and he writes a paper in Nature Energy written by written by Siobhan Powell, suggests that we should be charging during the day to reduce strain on the grid. The idea seems very counterintuitive when thinking about lowering the peaks and grid demand, but makes sense for maximizing renewable energy usage. The other things I was wondering, which the paper doesn't mention, is how much excess energy production we would need on a day that has low solar and wind output. On such days the demand on the grid would be very strenuous. An interesting idea though. So he is talking about using car batteries for grid storage, but also the demand on the grid of recharging all of our EVs. The study he's referring referencing comes from September 2022. So it's a couple years old, but it's still relevant. And what they found was if you use a rapid, a model of rapid electric vehicle adoption, right? So towards the more more rapid end of the spectrum by 2035, that's 10 years away, basically everybody recharging their cars overnight would actually increase the demand on the group, the peak energy need of the grid by 25% and during a stress test could during a stressful situation could be up to 50%. They may not be there for a good idea to have everybody recharging their vehicle overnight and that it's better just to let you're off, better off just saying, all right, just recharge whenever you want because some people will be recharging during the day in terms of lowering peak demand on energy production. Does that make sense? But actually when you look, you know, you read this paper and there are other related papers because there was also like a paper published also in 2022 that said that with even conservative adoptions of EVs by say 2050, there could be between 32 and 62 terawatt hours of grid storage in EVs and personal EVs. And that even with modest adoption by 20-30, there could be enough Ev's for that to provide short term grid storage. Now, short term grid storage means 2 to 4 hours, which doesn't sound like a lot, but that's enough to shift peak solar production to peak demand as opposed to like days or months, right? Or seasonally shifting, like seasonally shifting it. We need closed loop hydro or something like that. But batteries would be used basically for short term storage. But that's again that's enough to balance the the production and demand during the day right throughout on the level of a day. But then what all this means is that the expanding EV market is both an opportunity and a challenge. It's an opportunity because it could provide a lot of grid storage, but it's a challenge because it's also going to increase our energy demand and it's going to end again, especially if we're all charging our batteries roughly at the same time. Now I think the same solution exists to both of these issues and that is having all of the EVs networked, you know which they are, especially if you have if you have a Tesla, Tesla, you know, can't communicate to your car, but also like run off of software that is basically you just set it and forget it right? You like we tell our Tesla have the car ready to drive at 8 O clock in the morning and then it's always plugged in when it's parked in our garage and then the car decides when to charge it, right. We're not deciding when to charge it. And, and it's been, it's based on a couple of things. It's based mainly on like when the lowest demand is, which is also when the electricity is the cheapest. But it could easily be all right, like these computers just going to decide like when do we need to take energy from the batteries? It's like for peak shaving, when do we need to store energy into the battery? And how do we balance that demand across a vast network of millions of Ev's to basically stabilize the grid, stabilize production to demand and minimize peak demand, right? So I think this is kind of an issue that's going to solve itself because, right, again, all we have to do is just keep doing what we're doing. You plug it in when you get home and you let your computer decide how to how to recharge it. And it's just a matter of incorporating that into the grid. Right now there's a like a legislation in Connecticut that if you allow the state utilities, right, if you allow the utilities to use your home battery backup for for grid storage, you get like a massive rebate on your bet on your battery, like 7 thousand $10,000, you know, like something significant. So that's good, right? That's it. Yeah. Let us use your battery for grid storage and we'll give you a huge rebate on the on the cost of installing battery backup in your home. So it could be the same thing, like you get a tax rebate or something. You get some kind of benefit for plugging your car in and allowing it to be used as part of grid storage and stabilizing the grid. I think we have to do that. Like this is going to have to be how things evolve, right? But at the end of the day, you know, there's a lot of storage, there's a lot of energy storage in an EV battery. And there's no reason why we should have millions of batteries just sitting there and not be using it for grid stability. But I do think I'm confident that this is an issue that we'll take care of because this is all software at this point, right? But let's get to off the hook. This e-mail comes from Annie from Ontario and Annie writes. I keep hearing Steve and his brothers use off the hook to mean a superlative. On the most recent episode, Steve said that the animation was off the hook on a show that he mentioned right at the end. I have always used the phrase off the hook to mean being let off without punishment, probably derived from a fishing metaphor. As in, somebody did something bad and was let off the hook. I hadn't noticed the rogues doing this until the last couple of years. I've been meaning to write in about this for some time but keep forgetting and I'm usually out and about when I'm listening. I happened to be at my computer when I heard this time. Is this more of a New England thing or is it more widespread in my life? I have never heard anyone use off the hook to mean anything, to mean great or excellent. Any idea when this started to become more commonly used? It drives me crazy every time Steve or one of the others says says it. I've never noticed Cara or Evan say it. I don't know if you guys.

C: Do I think it's only Bob?

B: This. I don't know why I gravitated towards that expression. You.

S: Say, I absolutely have said it, Yeah.

C: Oh, I I feel like you guys are mixing up off the hook with off the chain.

S: So we're not mixing up anything.

E: I think it became more commonly used around May of two.

C: 1000 is this true? Some people do say, like, you know, that that's off the hook. Like that party was off the hook.

E: Yeah, exactly in years.

C: But I I definitely hear off the chain. We're not pioneers.

S: So this is this is the history of this. So the term off the hook goes back to the mid 1800s and it was a phishing metaphor and it did initially mean like to be let not just it let off of your responsibility, right not.

C: But to be fair, it didn't just initially mean that, it still means that. Oh, it still means that. Yeah, I'm still saying yeah, people. I don't mean initially as if it doesn't. Mean that one of. Its.

S: Meaning that was its first meaning, like the term off the hook. However, some reference in some references say that it may also have been used to refer to, like leaving your phone off the hook, right?

C: I'm seeing that in etymology. Yeah, I just looked up the etymology. That's the second. The second phones used to have hooks. Yeah, you would leave it off the hook to prevent yourself getting phone calls.

S: Yeah, or you could say my phone is ringing off the hook. Have you ever heard?

E: That, that I've heard.

C: Yes, that's the one.

S: Which means like, it's out of control, right?

E: It's ringing like so. Physically moving. It's ringing so. Much that's what we've. Approved. No, no, no, no.

S: It means you're getting called so frequently that it's ringing off the hook. That's what that means. Yeah, but in the in the 1980s and 1990s. It took on a different meaning in black urban American hip hop culture.

C: Yeah, AAV.

S: Exactly. And this is this usage was to mean impressive or superlative, right? Like this party was off the hook and that then got mainstreamed by the two thoroughly 2000s. So we're just picking this up from the mainstreaming of this, you know, black urban culture playing of using it to mean awesome. But that's 20 years ago, 30 years ago. We didn't it's not new. We didn't make it up. It's not New England. It's just this is a mainstreaming of they they're saying mainly hip hop culture.

C: But also off the chain, by the way, they sort of cross.

S: Yes, but off the chain, which is like your dog is off the chain. They're wild. It's loose. It's crazy.

C: But it means this. But they're both like, superlatives. Yeah. They mean like. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

S: So I don't know it, and that's one of the speculation is that it kind of merged off the hook and off the chain, but it's but there's no evidence of that. And it could have just been that somebody just started using it to mean this is awesome. It kind of sounds like like when you say like this is off the hook, it kind of sounds that way, you know? It sounds like this is amazing, you know?

C: It is a funny, like it is a bit jarring though, and I can see what she means because it's like one of the only types of those sort of phrases that you guys use like this very eighties, 90s.

S: Well, we put we have.

C: Urban we have.

S: Proximity to New York, and that's probably the path that it took to our vernacular.

B: Yeah, and I like it. Get used to it.

U: Yeah, yeah.

B: People, I like it too.

S: I like saying.

B: It just something, yeah, something rewarding about it. It's totally rad.

C: That's all. It's so weird because why would I have never noticed? You say it, Steve, but I always noted, I think maybe Bob.

S: You might use it more, but I definitely use it.

C: I use it.

S: I even know what they're talking about. I know the episode they're referring to.

C: I definitely. Jay, what about you?

J: This whole thing absolutely came from, I think rap music influence, listening to MTV and things like that. I mean, we didn't make it up. It was absolutely something that we picked up from the culture and it was not a mild infusion. It was everywhere. Everybody was saying that in the 80s. Really.

C: I guess I'm saying that you say it often now because I don't. I didn't think so. Yeah. I don't think I've ever heard you say it. So it's mostly Bob and also Steve, Okay. And never. I've been. Have you used?

E: It Nope, I do not use it.

C: I don't either.

J: Bob and I are just cooler. And if I was going to say something was off the hook.

E: That's clear.

J: The sentence would start with that shit was off the hook. It would never be like that was off the hook. It'd be like that shit was off the hook. You know what I mean?

C: Yeah, and I would definitely always use it the way that our dear writer, you know, like, OK, guys, you're off the. Hook. I use it that way too. I also use it that way as.

B: Well, I just, yeah, I just haven't.

S: What about off the hizzy? That's a very dev off the.

B: Hook.

S: I never heard it.

B: Never. Stop there. First heard that today.

E: Wow, right now.

S: No, that definitely that that's that's even too cool for me. No, this should.

B: Be I say it's for shizzle. Is that?

E: OK, can I say that's like saying just like saying for shizzle it is.

S: That's off the hizzy.

E: Yeah, I say that all the time.

S: We have one friend who non ironically uses the term shizzle. But anyway, that's.

E: True.

S: Maybe not anymore, it's been a while, but we'll see. Oh.

B: Boy.

S: All right, guys, let's go on with Scientific.

B: Letters off the hook.

Science or Fiction (1:23:35)

Theme: Not A Pig Item #1: Scotoplanes, also known as the sea pig, is a round pink sea cucumber that uses elongated feet as legs to walk on the soft ocean bottom in the deep abyssal plain. Item #2: Not to be confused with the hognose snake, the large anaconda pig snake is a roundish and mostly pink South American snake that is trapped for its abundant and apparently tasty meat. Item #3: The river pig is a finless fresh water porpoise that is round and pink in color, with intelligence considered comparable to that of a gorilla.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Not to be confused with the hognose snake, the large anaconda pig snake is a roundish and mostly pink South American snake that is trapped for its abundant and apparently tasty meat.
Science	Scotoplanes, also known as the sea pig, is a round pink sea cucumber that uses elongated feet as legs to walk on the soft ocean bottom in the deep abyssal plain.
Science	The river pig is a finless fresh water porpoise that is round and pink in color, with intelligence considered comparable to that of a gorilla.

Host	Result
Steve	win

Rogue	Guess
Cara	Scotoplanes, also known as the sea pig, is a round pink sea cucumber that uses elongated feet as legs to walk on the soft ocean bottom in the deep abyssal plain.
Bob	Scotoplanes, also known as the sea pig, is a round pink sea cucumber that uses elongated feet as legs to walk on the soft ocean bottom in the deep abyssal plain.
Jay	Not to be confused with the hognose snake, the large anaconda pig snake is a roundish and mostly pink South American snake that is trapped for its abundant and apparently tasty meat.
Evan	Scotoplanes, also known as the sea pig, is a round pink sea cucumber that uses elongated feet as legs to walk on the soft ocean bottom in the deep abyssal plain.
Steve	Not to be confused with the hognose snake, the large anaconda pig snake is a roundish and mostly pink South American snake that is trapped for its abundant and apparently tasty meat.
Devin	Scotoplanes, also known as the sea pig, is a round pink sea cucumber that uses elongated feet as legs to walk on the soft ocean bottom in the deep abyssal plain.

C: It's time for science or fiction.

S: Each week I come up with three Science News items or facts, 2 real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is loosely based on not a con. The theme is not a pig.

E: I have never been to that conference.

S: Not a pig.

C: So wait, these are things that are not. These are.

S: Things that are not pigs.

E: OK. I like it. That narrows it down.

S: It'll make slightly more sense when I start to give you them. OK, item number one, I think this is pronounced scoto planus PLA NES plainus. Scoto plainus, also also known as the sea pig, is a round pink sea cucumber that uses elongated feet as legs to walk on the soft ocean bottom in the deep abyssal plane. Abyssal my nizzle.

E: #2 in my shizzle. In the deep shizzle. Plane.

S: The Deep All right number 2. Not to be confused with the Hognose snake, the large Anaconda pig snake is a roundish and mostly pink South American snake that is trapped for its abundant and apparently tasty meat. And eye #3 The river pig is a finless freshwater porpoise that is round and pink in color with intelligence considered comparable to that of a gorilla. Right, so these are three animals referred to as pigs, at least in their common names, that are not pigs. All right, Cara, go first.

C: OK, so we've got a sea pig which is a little sea cucumber. We've got a pig snake which but a large Anaconda pig snake. And then we've got a river pig which is porpoise. OK, so river, I've never heard of a freshwater porpoise being called a river pig, but I do know that there are pink dolphins in the Amazon River or in the Amazon region. And so these pink dolphins could be called river pigs. Why not? They're pink and they are freshwater. So that seems reasonable and intelligence comparable to a gorilla. Sure. I mean, you know, cetaceans are really, really smart. We know this sea pig, I feel like when I think about like a plesia or sea cucumber or like all the little kind of, oh, what are the ones I'm thinking of that are really colorful and but all of these little animals that you might see when you go like tide pooling and stuff, there are so many of them and they're so vibrant and they have such really interesting and unique looks to them that I could see that one being reasonable. The one that bothers me is the large Anaconda pig snake, a pink Anaconda. I think I would have seen this before. And also anacondas are big. They're charismatic. They're they're just these large creatures. I feel like I would have heard of this. So that one's bothering me. I'm just going to say that's the fiction.

S: OK, Bob.

B: Yeah, I mean, nothing really jumped out at me that much except for the this Anaconda fusing the idea of a anything pig like with an Anaconda just was rubbing me the wrong way otherwise. But I'm. I'm just rolling the dice here. Oh, I should get my science of fiction coin out. Oh, damn. Don't have my damn coin. It's upstairs. We can just. I'm going to go with the Anaconda and Cara, say that's fiction.

S: OK, Jay.

J: The Scoto planes. It just sounds like a name you made-up, Steve. The deep, abysmal plane. That's pretty cool. All right? Yeah. I mean, this is all spitballing. Let me see that the the hognose snake, it's an Anaconda pig snake, but it's not a pig. The large anacondas pig snake, that sounds fake too. The last one, the river pig, is a a finless freshwater purpose, right? I'm sorry, I'm reading that off the Internet. Porque, I'm just kidding. That's considered comparable to that. A gorilla, a pig, a pig. A pink water porpoise gorilla. That's crazy. The river pig. How come we haven't heard of any of these guys? Let me see. Here is a coin. OK, I'm going to. I'm going to say, I'm going to say the second one is the fake, the pig, the hognose snake. No, the I'm sorry, that's the other name for it. The Anaconda pig is not real.

S: OK. And Devin?

E: Jay, did the coin tell you to say?

J: No, I just, I just, you did a series of moves with it that led me to the truth.

E: So it's divine coin.

J: It's the divine coin, Steve.

E: I'm surprised you didn't go with Whistle Pig because.

S: I know you.

E: Guys know the big. The pink is throughout all these answers. Everything's pink.

S: Yeah, they're browned and pink. That's why they're all called Pig.

E: Is that why? Yeah, I was thinking, OK, what should I do guys? Should I go against everyone and say the River pig one with the comparable with the intelligence comparable to a gorilla? That one that didn't surprise anyone. Carrie, you you seem to think that was perfectly fine.

B: Well, cetacean.

C: Not saying anything.

E: But I'm allowed to ask probing questions or get comments.

C: Sure, ask any questions you.

E: Have you get no answers or feedback? That 1 is really the one I want to call the fiction. But everybody else went with the Anaconda pig. So there's this pig pressure of me to go with the Anaconda pig is the one being the fiction. But I don't know that you have great reason to assume that. Therefore I will boldly go where no pig has gone before and say the river pig. That one is going to be the fiction.

S: OK, so you all agree with the first one, so we'll start there. Let's go to Plainis or Plainis, also known as the sea pig, is a round pink sea cucumber that uses elongated feet as legs to walk on the soft ocean bottom in the deep, abyssal, not abysmal plain.

E: Same thing.

S: You guys all think this one is science and this one is science. This one is science. Has anyone seen this credit before? I know I've known of it before. Pretty cool it.

J: Is weird though, it totally looks like AI made it. I am now I'm. Not.

C: Well, now, yeah.

S: Yeah, it's got like a bunch of legs on the bottom. It's got these 4 tentacles on top. The legs are operated by like filling it, you know, with fluid. They're just feet that are elongated into legs in the they often have crabs like these little king crabs as but they're they're not parasites. They just sort of hitch a ride for safety. These things, you know, eat a lot of stuff. They're basically, you know, they eat all the crap on the bottom of the floor. Right.

J: Oh, I see. So they're they're sea dogs.

S: They'll even eat whale corpses. They tend to exist in collections of like 300 to 300 individuals. So yeah, they're really, they are very cool looking.

C: Oh, I was thinking nudie bronc. That's the word I was looking for that I couldn't find.

S: OK, well, what's that referring to?

C: Well, a little nudie bronc. They're like they're sea slugs and they come in all different colors and slivers and they're really.

E: Created slugs.

S: They're also very deep, so if you do bring them to the surface, they do tend to shrivel and die.

C: That's sad.

S: All right, let's go to #3 The River Pig is a finless freshwater porpoise that is rounded pink in color, with intelligence considered comparable to that of a gorilla. So how do we compare the intelligence of different animals? That's the question. One way to.

J: Look in the mirror.

S: Mirror test the mirror test, right? So do gorillas pass the mirror test? Yes do. Does this you know finless freshwater porpoise exist? And if it does, does it pass the merit test I.

B: Don't remember hearing about porpoises passing that test.

S: Well.

B: I think so, yeah. But specifically.

C: My guess would be that they 100% do. They're super smart.

S: One is science. But the gorilla does not pass the mirror test, and neither does this pass.

B: Are you? Serious. Really. Hell.

C: But do they pass a version of it that was made for them?

S: So from what I'm reading, because I checked it out, so first of all, they're saying like every reference as I read, it's like they're considered to be as intelligent as gorillas. Like, OK, but then my first question was, do gorillas pass the mirror test? And the answer apparently is no, chimpanzees do, but apparently gorillas don't. But.

C: Which makes no sense because gorillas can like, yeah, communicate with sign language, but they can't see a red dot on their face and know it's them. Yeah, I'm like, maybe. But again, we know that the the mirror test is actually quite biased because it's, like, geared towards animals that have a lot of specific skills. It doesn't. It's not the only.

S: Measure of intelligence or.

C: Measures self or or even just self concept or self, you know, recognition.

S: In any case, they said, according to studies, they're as intelligent as a gorilla. OK, whatever. But yeah, they're cool looking. They have. No, they're finless. They have no dorsal fin, Right. So they have a smooth head. They do have a dorsal Ridge, but they have no dorsal fin. They are freshwater. They don't. They're not in South America, though. They're in the Yangtze River in China. And they are critically endangered. You know, less than 2000 individuals, but yeah, they're and they're not pink at every age usually start out Gray or toward, you know, dark Gray. And then they they lighten up as they get older and some of them get just like pink color. The pig you could find picture that look like, yeah, they look like swimming pigs, you know, in terms of like their their skin color. But yeah, so they exist. Which means that not to be confused with the hognose snake, the large Anaconda pig snake is a roundish and mostly pink South American snake that is trapped for its abundant red and apparently tasty meat is the fiction now the hognose snake is real. That looks like a rattlesnake with a hognose like a turned up nose. The large Anaconda pig snake I just completely made-up of.

Voice-over: Yours you did.

S: But I imagine if they did exist they would be quite tasty. Have any of you guys eaten snake? Never.

C: Yeah, I've had. Snake. Nope.

S: Does it taste like chicken? No.

C: No.

S: What does it taste like?

C: I. Don't think so. I think a lot of things that people say taste like chicken don't taste like chicken, like frogs don't taste like chicken. I think it tastes more like frog than like chicken.

S: Is what is it? What does it taste like? Is it greasy? Is it gamey? What would you say?

C: It's muscular. So to me it was like, OK, oh thanks. But gamey is such a vague, like gamey is just anything that's like it's. Got Yeah, it's got a weird taste. I guess, but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But definitely gamey. There's a lot of like, like if you're in Florida, if you're out here, even in California, there's a sausage place sort of near me that specializes in like, quote, exotic sausages. So you can get like rattlesnake sausage. Yeah, I've had that.

S: I've, I've had like not that hard to find rattle snakes or bites or chunks or whatever before. It tastes like alligator to me. It was similar to that, yeah.

C: Yeah, totally. Like there, it's a little bit. I guess greasy is not quite the right word, but definitely more gamey than like.

S: No. Also depends on how you prepare it, I'm sure. Like if you know what you're doing, you can make anything taste good. Yeah.

C: Oh hell yeah.

S: Yeah, I had haggis.

C: It was. Great cultural norm.

S: It's like, yeah, yeah. It's against all expectations.

B: Yeah, that was surprising, I think. There was a lot of non haggis like not. Have right there 15th century.

S: Yeah, it's a big. Difference, I know, but that's my point. If you cook it properly or not, you know, properly, if you cook it in a way that's accessible, accessible to an American like me, yeah, it could taste good.

C: And that's, that's really the point, right? Because there are things we eat here that other people are like. Hot dogs.

S: Hot dogs are our one thing that the rest of the world thinks is disgusting, that we love or belong to sin.

C: Baloney. Oh God, baloney's like hot dog. Baloney's like the kid version.

S: I like the hot dog like I liked baloney when I was a kid. I would not eat baloney today, but I still love hot.

Voice-over: You have a degree in baloney.

S: Nice boiled hot dog, I love it.

C: Oh boil. Oh, I could only eat an all beat hot dog, that is. Grilling is even better, but even boiling I like.

S: I like boiled.

C: I can't do it. That baloney like boiled hot. Boil them so. Porky. It's just so overtly porky I can't do.

S: It, but if they're grilled, you're good.

B: Also mean.

C: Totally. And if they're all like. I prefer the old.

B: Chili on it, I agree. Ketchup or whatever. Mustard. I like my plain plain.

C: Oh, you know what? I can see if you might like this. I don't know. This is AI. Don't know if this is a Texas thing or just my weirdness growing up and in Texas thing, but I put baked beans. Oh no.

B: I've seen that I like. That probably. Chili. That's like a chili. Dog. Yeah, I like that idea.

C: It's like a chili dog, but they're baked beans.

S: Oh yeah. I don't like mustard or ketchup. I don't like condiments.

C: Me neither, I don't like mustard or ketchup so otherwise I would eat them plain or with cheese, but with baked beans it gives. Like a guest.

B: I gotta try that pork and beans.

C: Pork and beans. Yeah, exactly. Beef and beans all.

S: Right, Good job guys. Didn't go for my Anaconda pig Snake, huh?

E: I did I.

S: Haven't did yet.

E: It was delicious.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:36:39)

"Of all forms of deception self-deception is the most deadly, and of all deceived persons the self-deceived are the least likely to discover the fraud."  – Aiden Wilson Tozer, (description of author)

S: All right, Evan, give us a quote.

E: Of all forms of deception, self deception is the most deadly, and of all deceived persons, the self deceived are the least likely to discover the fraud. So that was said or written by a gentleman named Aidan Wilson Tozer. TOZER who? And I like the quote. Do you like the quote?

S: Sure. We've we've had that in many versions. You know there, yeah, different ways of saying that.

E: Now, here's the thing about Tozer, though. He's an American. He was an American Christian pastor from the early 20th century, very much a pro Christian person, an evangelical and, and, and did all these things. So in regards to that, however, he has some quotes for him and some things that he's written about that have these tinges of skepticism to them. It's like it's like he almost got there but didn't really fully apply it to everything in his in his life.

S: That is very common. That is very common. I'm hearing that all the time, even today from people across the political spectrum, pseudo scientists, science deniers. They, they talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk, right. They say it. They say they enunciate perfectly cromulent skeptical principles, but clearly they're not applying it to themselves.

E: Exactly. Not self applying, right? Right. They can't look in the mirror.

S: Or to their sacred cow, whatever that. Is, yeah.

E: And in this case took for Tozer. That's the exact correct. Term.

S: Yeah, just religious belief is the ultimate sacred tozer.

E: But if you were to read some of it, some of his, you know, writings and passages, you would say, oh, wow, these are good little skeptical Nuggets which they are on on their in their of their own. They're just not applied correctly when it comes to, you know, certain beliefs and things.

S: The the best manifestation of that was the flat earthers, like the if you watch the movie be behind a curve where like 1 flat earther is describing the conspiracy thinking and science denial of another flat earther. Cuz that was they were fighting like they were disagreeing with and then they go, is it possible I'm doing that? Then they then they had that Theodoric of York moment.

E: Nah, Nah. Like oh. You're so close. Oh, you almost had it. Let me take my hand. I'll. Help you, I'll pull you.

S: They walked right up to the abyss, but just couldn't jump in. You know they just could not do it. Oh well.

E: Oh well. Or the Abyssal. Plane or the abyssal?

S: The abysmal plane.

E: Yeah.

B: Yeah, that's off the hook, man.

S: That's.

E: Fine, here we go. Here we go.

S: Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

E: Sure, man. Yes, Steve. Thanks Steve. Have a good July.

C: Thank you.

S: And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe.