SGU Episode 365
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Introduction
You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Monday, July 2nd 2012, and this is your host, Steve Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.
B: Hey everybody.
S: Rebecca Watson.
R: Hello everyone.
S: Jay Novella.
J: Hey guys.
S: Evan Bernstein.
E: Good evening, folks.
S: And, we have a special guest rogue this week: Daniel Beauley. Daniel, welcome to The Skeptics' Guide.
D: That's very hospitable of you. Thanks a lot.
B: Our pleasure, Dan.
S: Dan, you were kind enough to bid on the guest rogue spot at TAM9 last year, and it only took us one year to hook up with you.
(chuckles)
S: To get you on the show. And we're getting it in just under the wire; this is the show that will come out during TAM while we're hopefully auctioning off the slot for next year. But thanks for joining us.
D: Yeah.
S: So, Dan, tell us a little bit about yourself.
D: Yeah, well, you've had many guest rogues and a couple of the auction winners; a lawyer[1] and author, or I guess, doctor, Ray[2]. And, I'm a working stiff, essentially. I'm one of those telecom guys that might install your phone or Internet service copper or fiber optic.
E: We'll have to talk after the show.
D: Oh yeah? (chuckles)
E: (unintelligible)
S: Yeah, can you hook us up or what?
(laughing)
D: Wrong state.
E: It's not what you know, it's who you know, right?
S: How is fiber optic doing, I mean, do people actually get fiber optic into their house yet?
D: Oh, well, without naming too many companies, I've -- I'm in an area where fiber optic Internet and telephone is available, and meh... there were, of course, some first adopters -- really enthusiastic, and then television on fiber came along and really seemed to push the saleability. And I haven't really kept tabs on all the areas with fiber optic. But, you know, it's popular. It's certainly bandwidth-intensive; you can really put some great speeds on the fiber optic without even taxing the medium.
S: Well, that's what we want.
D: (chuckles) Yeah, exactly. That's what you're --
S: We want bandwidth, baby!
D: Yup, yup.
B: Dan, do you know off-hand what kind of megabit per second you can get download with fiber optic -- I forget what that number is; do you know off the top of your head?
D: Well -- keep in mind that I twist a screwdriver for a living, by and large; you know, crawl under mobile homes and stuff, but as some of the specs that -- as from what I understand it, we use single-mode fiber, so it's a frequency-specific type of fiber; there's a couple of frequencies that travel long and other frequencies of light are attenuated greatly. And so, the frequencies we use can, properly spliced, provide about 2.3 gigabits per second.
S: Aaah!
D: Right?
J: Wow.
B: Oh my God. That's awesome.
D: To a single -- right. And that, of course, is split up somewhat to deliver the typical residential service. So our typical packages go up to about 30 meg on download and 15-30 meg on upload.
B: OK. I'm getting one kilobit a second. So that would be very nice. (unintelligible) I am not kidding!
D: Oh gosh.
J: Dan, one more question about fiber optic: Is it true that you have to limit the bend that you put in a fiber optic cable?
D: Well, yeah, you have to limit it; I mean, that's a relative assessment, but -- I'm a 15-year tech; we've been working with fiber optic for about six years, and even in that time, the bend radius has been going down and down. You could take your typical ballpoint pen and wrap the fiber around it and lose very little -- you'll have very little light loss. Now, fiber likes to be relaxed, so of course we have whatever, you know, 4-inch trays to put the bending fiber in, and that usually keeps it at a very nice radius, but you can really wrap it.
J: That's interesting. Yeah, I guess I'm pulling from very old information then that I have tucked away in my head, that I picked up somewhere, I guess in earlier days, there was a maximum bend that you could do without data loss and all that stuff, but I'm not surprised to hear today that you could just basically do what you need to do with it.
D: Yeah, and there may be some differences in the single- or multi-mode types of fiber, but I'm not aware of what.
This Day in Skepticism (4:38)
- July 14, 1960 - Jane Goodall arrives at the Gombe Stream Reserve in present-day Tanzania to begin her famous study of chimpanzees in the wild.
News Items
UFOs on National Geo (10:13)
National Geographic: Five Good Reasons to Believe in UFOs
S: All right, Jay, tell us about National Geographic's foray into UFOlogy.
B: Oh my God.
J: I was so disappointed – I've been so disappointed in National Geographic, like for some reason I thought National Geographic really had their stuff together, and it turns out that National Geographic, just like any other company, wants to make money, so therefore they're writing crap to attract more readers and just squeeze money out of these ridiculous posts that they have and news items. I don't know, I would like to do a deep study on what happened to this organization, but my opinion of them now is pretty poor. And here's a really good example of why they suck: "Five good reasons to believe in UFOs", right on their website. The author's tone was "oh, I'm coming from a very scientific place, because 90% of all UFO sightings" – we've all heard this one before – "those aren't actually UFO sightings, you know, those are weather balloons and planets and astronomical things that people mistake for – but the other 10%" – we actually heard, remember guys, Michio Kaku was on TV and he said the same thing.
B: Oh my God.
J: Such a major disappointment.
B: My jaw dropped.
S: And hang on – and for clarification, we're saying believe in UFOs, what we're talking about is believing that UFOs are something other than just simple mis-identifications that they're not just unidentified –
R: Or un-identifications.
S: – they are something like alien spacecraft. That's what they're talking about.
J: That's right. Yeah.
B: I call 'em ETC: Extraterrestrial Craft.
J: The subtext here definitely is alien spacecraft; visitors from other planets. So they start the article with what would constitute proof, and they mention a few different things here. Does the UFO have to land at the river entrance to the Pentagon near the Joint Chiefs of Staff's offices? Well, that's –
R: A little specific.
J: That's pretty specific, but that's – yeah, if a UFO landed near a government building that's heavily watched and videotaped and everything and then you know, if that information were to be analyzed by the government, I think that that would be pretty worthy as evidence, at least to the government, 'cause they know that they shot the video.
S: What they're saying is, "do we need smoking gun evidence?" And the answer is, "yes!"
J: Yes.
(agreement)
B: Sorry! Yes, we do.
J: Now the next two kinds of proof that they list are the kinds that they're implying – well, not implying, but very explicitly saying – these types of proof exist, and these should be good enough, so here are their examples: "Or is it proof enough when a ground radar station detects a UFO, sends a jet to intercept it, the jet pilot sees it, and locks on with his radar, only to have the UFO streak away at a phenomenal speed?", which is – that's happened many times and they think, according to the angle that this article is going in, that that's it, that the proof that you need. And here's another example: "is it proof when a jet pilot fires at a UFO and sticks to his story, even under the threat of court martial?" Yeah, well, that pilot does believe that he shot at a UFO/alien spacecraft; even though he or she may be mistaken doesn't mean that because that person is holding onto that belief and they really do believe it deep down, that it's real. The level of somebody's belief does not dictate reality.
R: Yeah, they've made a false assumption that you either have to – either you're lying or you're telling the truth and you actually saw something, as opposed to – yeah, maybe you're telling the truth that you saw something but you're wrong about what you saw.
B: Yeah, it's a false dichotomy.
S: Yeah, and the other fallacy there is the implication that all fighter pilot is so well-trained – is a trained observer, that they would know what they are looking at, but that's simply not true. The human visual system is the same for a pilot or anyone else, and there are many documented cases of experienced pilots, whether civilian or military, mis-interpreting all kinds of things; completely getting their references off and thinking that an object is large and far away when it's small and close-up; mis-identifying Mylar balloons, the planet Venus, you know, pilots “locking on” the planet Venus and engaging it; that's happened multiple times.
B: Yeah.
E: They missed, by the way.
B: Yeah, this article really plays the "trained observer" card hard, and it's really annoying. The bottom line is, if you're human, you can mis-identify. Period! It doesn't matter.
J: The thing that actually bothers me is you don't hear these fighter pilots saying, "well, I've been trained to know that even when I think I see something, it might not be it because of illusions that can happen and my brain playing tricks on me." I've never read a fighter saying along those lines.
S: Well, I have, but you don't typically read that in UFO articles – in pro-UFO articles. Unfortunately I don't have a reference off the top of my head, but you know, we've gotten emails from pilots who say "this happens all the time; this is no big deal." You learn about all the different ways you can mis-identify what's going on there and how easy it is and how easy it is to be tricked by the horizon and poor visual viewing conditions, all those things. This is implicit in pilot training. But that always gets weeded out of these articles, and they create this fiction that pilots are somehow magical observers who can't get tricked by all the illusions that the rest of us are susceptible to.
D: Your point is taken, I mean, if such a statement appears in a periodical or a rag, it probably is a very abbreviated version of what might appear in an official report. And of course, it sells more papers if it sounds like a real occurrence.
J: Yeah.
S: Absolutely.
E: Or a television show.
J: Yeah, you're right, Dan. That's the thing; you always have to watch out, you have to insert that now as a component of, you know, is there a money-making angle to that perspective. It can sometimes make you question the things that you're reading even a little bit further. So, to continue down now – I haven't even gotten to the list of five yet; we're just talking about the set-up here. So here's the first one: "The long, documented history of sightings." and the article goes on to give examples of sighting from over 100 years ago, as if these were proof of anything other than people made mistakes back then too, right? Like, OK, so what you're basically saying is, people made mistakes 100 years ago, just like they're making mistakes today.
R: Yeah, and of course, prior to 100 years ago, were there no aliens visiting? Oh no, you know what it was, is everyone was attributing them to angels instead of aliens. So does that mean that this is also solid proof for angels?
S: They also mention specifically the airships of the 1800s –
B: Yeah, nice.
E: We talked about that.[link needed]
S: – so people were attributing their sightings to – oh, somebody, some lone genius invented an airship – you know, an airplane, and their description of it were like antiquated notions, pre-Wright Brother notions of what an airship might look like from the fiction of their day, not flying saucers. They thought they saw stuff and they interpreted them according to the fiction of the day. That actually is evidence against an external phenomenon.
B: It shows you it's cultural.
S: It's cultural, right.
J: I would tend to believe people less the further back you go in history. I really do believe that we're more savvy today; we understand things a little bit more clearly, obviously because of scientific advancement and some of us actually, you know, have critical thinking skills, which when applied correctly, can help us vet out a lot of different things and understand things a lot better, but in this case, you know, people from the 1800s, seeing a phenomenon that they can't describe, and now UFO-ologists are going back and saying, "yeah, they saw UFOs; they didn't even know it was a UFO back then, but that was a UFO sighting."
R: I don't know, though, like, allow me to defend the people of centuries ago –
J: Yesteryear?
D: Because they can't defend themselves?
R: You know, they were just as good at critical thinking then as we are now, you know, and I think what you're seeing is the same thing that happens now: a few individual gullible credulous reports get trumped up by news sources or just by word of mouth, and that's what ends up surviving through the years are these stories, not the thousands of other people who scoff and say, “come on, there's no such thing as an airship” or whatever.
E: Sells newspapers.
R: I think you'll see that happening in – well, we won't see it, but in several centuries' time, people will be looking back at us like, "oh, what a bunch of rubes," you know?
S: Yeah, but we are a bunch of rubes.
R: Yeah, that's what I'm saying; we are.
S: Culture in general. I agree with you, Rebecca –
R: We're just as much rubes as they were back then.
S: I think the only difference is that we have more technological savvy now, according to what we are exposed to. But that just changes how we – how people interpret what they think they see. As I said, people seeing unknown things in the sky imagining what they might see interpret it according to the culture of the day, so it seems quaint to us, looking back hundreds of years. But I think – I suspect a couple hundred years from now, the notion of a "flying saucer" will probably seem just as quaint and silly, you know what I mean? A 20th-century phenomenon; "oh yeah, that's what" – if you saw a UFO –
D: Well, we'll be folding space by then, so you know –
S: Yeah, if you saw a UFO in the 20th century, you would see a "flying saucer". How quaint.
J: In the future, Steve, they're going to have flying vampires that they'll believe in.
(chuckling)
D: Sooner than you think. These heritage reports, just a couple of comments on that is – well, back then, people were used to seeing – well, a more limited variety of things in the sky, obviously, with our age of air travel, all kinds of things are up there, with remote-controlled toy planes and jets and all that. And another thing is: has the incidence increased, like, let's say linearly with population? I mean, do we have a handful of reports, or at least – you could claim that some of these incidences never survived; they were never written down or reported enough for us to have a record of them, so maybe there are more reports than we have accounted for, but – you know, the one example of was it, 1670s or so, something like that, noted in the article, well... are there reams of these, or do these reports increase a lot with the new air age?
R: Yeah, that's a good point.
S: They do; they increase with the increase in actual artifacts in space and in the sky, and they also increase dramatically with any cultural report, or any – so you have UFO flaps, where there's some triggering event and then suddenly you have a spike in reports, and then it calms down to the background level. But that background level is proportional to the amount of stuff that we are putting up in the sky, absolutely.
J: But I would also like to point out, and this is just a gut belief that I have, that there are more skeptics, more critical thinkers out there today per capita than there were 200 years ago.
D: Eh, just blowing on your own horn.
S: 200 years is the Age of Enlightenment, Jay; I wouldn't be so sure.
J: Eh, what do you know.
S: And it's also –
(laughing)
J: Let me continue on here: "Numerous modern sightings by credible, well-trained, professional observers." We covered this one.
B: Here we go.
E: Yeah, we talked about that.
J: I have some – couple of quick examples just to point out: "a pilot of an Air Force F-86 fighter jet who was scrambled to track a UFO and got within 1,000 yards of a saucer-shaped object that abruptly flew away from him in a burst of speed after he fired upon it." After he fired – I love how he fires upon it.
S: Wow.
J: "I don't know what it is, but I'm going to kill it!" Yeah. "1948: UFO encounter in which two airline pilots got to within 700 feet of a UFO" – now get this – "and saw two rows of windows with bright lights."
D: 700 feet? That's pretty darn close in the air.
B: Pareidolia.
J: Yeah, but Dan, what else has two rows of windows with bright lights that flies in the air?
D: Hmm.
E: In 1948?
B: A nice big 747?
D & J: Yeah.
J: Objects that we build.
E: A time-travelling –
J: That we may have flown have that. Thank you. I will continue. "Consistencies in the description of purported alien ships." OK, so witnesses who have seen UFOs have shown remarkably consistent shapes and other characteristics of the objects that they've described and here's what they see: "flyings discs or saucers; cigar- or torpedo-shaped craft without wings or fins; spherical or balloon-shaped objects that were capable of hovering or flying at high speed and balls of light with no apparent physical form that were similarly maneuverable." That's a lot of different shapes!
D: Right. That's not as consistent.
B: Not very consistent.
E: Not consistent. But it is consistent with the drawings and covers of, you know, books and magazines and pulp fiction and other things of the time that you would see about space stories and –
S: So, those are the two hypotheses for any consistency of reports: that they're seeing the same thing as an external phenomenon or that it's a psychological and cultural phenomenon and that there's cultural contamination, which is the far better explanation, because you can track, again, the details of the reports to, as Evan was saying, the existence of these things in popular culture, in popular media, in the movies. You know, when UF – when flying saucers start making their appearance in the movies, that's when the reports start to converge on that concept, on that design.
J: Yeah, I mean when Close Encounters came out, that put so much UFO information into all of our heads that we – that was just running around in there, and you damn well know that that movie influenced a generation of people to see those objects in the sky.
D: We all wanted to by Roy Neary and Jillian and see these amazing things.
J: So one thing that was interesting – you know, I'll remind you that this report that we're talking about came from National Geographic – they actually said, "one caveat is that in recent years, reports of wedge-shaped UFOs, which bear a similarity to the latest terrestrial military aircraft, have begun to supplant some of the traditional shapes." So right there, they say it, and I question whether or not the author picked up on the fact that they undid the previous paragraph with that one sentence; that kind of explains it right there.
B: The author's his own worst enemy.
J: And it makes me sad to think that the author could even write that and not quite pick up on what it really means.
D: Well, writing for National Geographic can – yeah, obviously gave some lip service initially – a little bit of lip service to, oh, the skeptical viewpoint; you know, what constitutes good proof? Well, and later on, does this same thing.
J: Yeah, it's almost like – you know, like Steve on any TV show; it's 90% B.S. and then you have a little bit of a thing here for the critical thinking, just to make sure they're covering their bases. Whatever; you're not going good so far, pal. The next one: "possible physical evidence of encounters with alien spacecraft". "Possible physical evidence"?
E: "Possible".
J: Why even write that sentence, it's ridiculous!
E: Yeah, it's ridiculous.
D: Big bucket for unexplained evidence, yeah.
B: This is the meat of it, Jay; for me, this one trumps all these other four. You know, you would think, after generations of all this supposed evidence and proof that UFOs exist – the physical evidence, you would think, there would be something, something, even one thing, or even one completely kick-ass video that nobody can say, "yes, this has… been manipulated on a computer".
J: Bob, but come on, man, men in black. Men in black! It is out there, and they come and take it away; they take away the physical evidence, they cut ‐ they don't let people walk close to where the alien spacecraft were landing.
R: Wait, you mean the men in black? Is that what you were talking about?
J: Ser – seriously! I'm serious! I'm dead serious!
D: First you sequester all weapons and armaments, yes.
E: (inaudible) gray than black, but yeah.
J: Rebecca, you speak – you speak to people who believe in this stuff and a lot of them believe that the huge government cover-up where you are in the right place at the right time, and you will meet the men in black who are pushing you to the borders. Absolutely.
R: Yeah, I think a lot of people don't realize that the movie is based on a long-running urban legend about, yeah, government agents hiding evidence of UFOs.
J: So check this out: so now they say, "OK, so here's the physical – possible physical evidence: Areas where soil, grass, and other and vegetation had been claimed by witnesses to have been flattened, burned, broken off, or blown away by a UFO."
B: Ooh. How compelling.
J: The key thing in there is: "had been claimed by witnesses to have been", which – that's not physical evidence! "Things that had been claimed by witnesses to have been". That's not physical evidence – I don't see the physical evidence.
E: None of this is; none of it.
S: Jay, there are claims of evidence. There's claims of physical evidence.
E: But never the evidence itself.
J: Right. They didn't put the word "claims" in the title here. So then they said, "samples of plants taken from a purported UFO landing site in France in 1981", so now we're talking about a specific encounter here. "French researchers found that they leaves had undergone unusual chemical changes of the sort that could have been caused by powerful microwave radiation, which was even more difficult to explain, considering that they found no trace of radioactivity at the site."
B: Ding ding ding ding ding ding. That jumped out at me; that totally jumped out at me, because it – I totally called bullshit on that, because wait, you're linking microwaves and radioactivity?
J: Yeah.
B: That doesn't really work. Microwave radiation's non-ionizing; there's no emission of alpha, gamma or beta particles; it's non-radioactive radiation. When you shut – when you stop microwaves, there's no radiation there to detect. So, to me –
E: Right, otherwise, how could you open your microwave door to take out your goodies, you know, your popcorn?
D: You're not even talking ionization; you're talking nuclear effects for radiation.
B: I know! This was – this was the biggest fact-checking fail that I'd – that I saw in this article. You know, this is National Geographic, I mean, at least have somebody, a scientist, run through that because to me, that was a joke. It's like, really? Radioactivity?
E: Yeah. Have the folks at Prometheus look at this, yeah.
J: That's what I thought, Bob; I thought total non-science-based or scientifically minded author here is writing about something and didn't even realize that one sentence should have set off some serious alarms; it would've set off alarms in someone that had a baseline of scientific understanding. At least ask somebody who may know more about it than themselves.
E: Like Ridley Scott.
J: Or they don't care. And here's the last one: "physiological effects on UFO witnesses". This is the one that for some reason boiled my blood more than the rest of them. "Various symptoms reported by individuals who had encountered UFOs ranging from burns, temporary deafness, to persistent nausea and memory loss." So basically, people bring their wash of symptoms to someone that's investigating UFO sightings or a parapsychologist or whatever, and they say, "I don't feel well; I'm dizzy; I had burns; I'm scared; I don't sleep as well as I used to; I feel weird; I have a funny sunburn" or whatever, and they're saying, this is UFOs; these are alien spacecraft visiting the Earth. You know, it's the idea here that people would come – like, when you go to Steve as a neurologist and say "I'm dizzy", the first thing Steve says is "that tells me nothing". There's a million reasons why you would be dizzy. Just like all of these symptoms. You can't say that temporary deafness was caused by aliens. You just can't say that; there's no correlation, it's just –
S: Well, the other thing here, Jay, is that –
D: You can say that, but –
S: Yeah. A lot of these cases have a lot of the – have a lot of signs for a psychogenic illness. I mean, these people are either – they're self-inflicting these symptoms or they're psychosomatic and this happens to be the focus of their delusion. Again, this is a well-documented phenomenon; it manifests in many ways; these cases are very typical for that, and… in order to say that it's a specific external phenomenon, you need evidence of that, and that's what's lacking here, so it's just another example of people with weird, probably self-inflicted or psychosomatic symptoms that are latching on to some bizarre notion that is causing it.
E: Did it mention why this article is even happening? So they could – so National Geographic could promote their show "Chasing UFOs"?
D: Don't look up so this'll all go away.
E: Which is all part of this campaign – the show's been advertised all over the radio, on television… they're running polls of people; 36% of the people polled believe in UFOs; they run articles like this.
J: Yeah. It's really sad. It's sad to see it be so pervasive; it's... I mean, National Geographic; these are the people – their magazines were inspiring to me as a kid, I mean those were the ones –
S: Oh yeah, we know what you were inspired by, Jay.
(laughing)
J: Seriously, people in our age group, we'd pick up these magazines; you'd see places you never saw before; they have such a collection of phenomenal photography and there's a history in this magazine of incredible photojournalism. Very respected history and beginning to this magazine and now this is what you're doing? Really.
S: Yeah, it's disappointing. Bob, tell us about a new technology for seeing inside tissue.
Seeing Inside Tissue (32:32)
ScienceDaily: Seeing Inside Tissue for No-Cut Surgeries
GOP Opposes Critical Thinking (39:46)
Neurologica: Anti-Science as a Political Platform
Alternative Chocolate (47:39)
unfiltered perception: Xocai – the nasty tale of a Norwegian chocolate mafia
Who's That Noisy? (57:58)
- Answer to last week: Victor Zammit
S: Well, Evan, get us up to date about Who's That Noisy.
E: First thing we're going to do is tell you who gave the correct answer to the prior week's Who's That Noisy. Remember we talked about the beautiful music we were hearing, which was the interpretation of the gamma ray burst from a video put together by the folks at NASA called the Symphony of the Universe, and we did have a correct answer on that. Asaf Elan from Israel was the first one to guess correctly. So, congratulations, Asaf, well done. Now I will play for you last week's Who's That Noisy.
Some open-minded skeptics, as I am, and others, who are closed-minded skeptics, those who don't accept the afterlife
OK, so who we have there is none other than Victor Zammit.
S: Victor Zammit, yeah.
E: Victor Zammit is a lawyer from Australia who's been a thorn in the side of organizations like the James -- the JREF, James Randi, and he has, well let's just say he has a strong, strong belief in the afterlife, and there's nothing wrong with that. But, he goes a bit further. Not only does he trash skeptics on a regular basis for having their skeptical viewpoints of things, he has a $1,000,000 afterlife challenge. Are you familiar with the afterlife challenge?
S: Do you have to collect it in the afterlife?
R: The first ghost to show up and ask for it, he'll get it?
E: Wouldn't that be easy. (chuckles) He has a one -- he says $1,000,000 is offered to any closed-minded skeptic who can rebut the existing evidence for life after death. Yes. He goes on and, you know, he attacks the likes certainly of Randi and he has some choice words to say about Richard Dawkins and I think even Steve might be mentioned in here, in one of his tirades on his website, which is very difficult to navigate and, let's face it, ugly. Victor Zammit.
S: It's not quite Time Cube, but you know, it's getting close.
E: It's getting close, so.
S: His website design, yeah.
E: Next week we will reveal who guessed correctly that that was Victor Zammit.
S: And what do you got for this week?
E: Here we go. Brand new Who's That Noisy; let's get it done.
(scraping sound)
S: Interesting, interesting.
E: It's an interesting one; we'll see who comes up with the correct answer. info@theskepticsguide.org is our email address, as you must know by now.
Questions and Emails
Space Mining (1:00:27)
S: All right, thanks Evan. We're going to do one email this week; this one comes from Charlie from Frantorp, Sweden.
E: Charlie.
S: Now, he gives his last name, but honestly, I think he's pulling our leg here with these characters. I mean, these are not real letters, right? Charlie K., and he writes:
I listened with interest to your interview about future possible mining of asteroids. There was however a question left unanswered. Perhaps it it something you could talk a little about on the SGU? What is the legal status for space mining? Is it a free-for-all? Can anybody with a rocket and a shovel mine any celestial body? Take for example the hypothetical platimum-asteroid. If a US company landed on one side of the asteroid and began mining and a chinese company (or government) landed on the other side, what would be the legal situation? And let's not forget the american flag that was put on the moon in '69. Does that prohibit the swiss from going there to mine all that cheese that Jay talked about? best regards Charlie
S: Dan, you looked into this a little bit for us.
D: Yeah. Well, I found a couple of articles; in fact, this question is quite timely because there's been a lot of developments lately in the space exploration and private industry... So, there aren't a lot of legal precedents. There is a U.N. treaty; it's an older one, it's 1967. So the 1967 Outer Space Treaty through the U.N. -- and it, I believe, it's been signed -- there are several countries that are signatories -- the space-faring countries are signatories of that treaty, but they're probably signatories, in my opinion, because it doesn't mean much. It is, at best, ambiguous; it both allows basically for unfettered and undiscriminated harvesting of space resources while also saying that you really can't own anything out there -- perhaps you can own the ore if you do mine it, and that is about as far as you can go.
S: Well, there was -- I did find reference to a 1979 Moon Treaty, which forbids private ownership of extraterrestrial real estate. However, that's only been ratified by 13 countries, which is not much at all. So it doesn't really -- and none of them are major space-faring nations. So, none of the people who could actually get into space have agreed that they can't own space -- own extraterrestrial real estate. So, I think it's ambiguous. Probably not going to be an issue for a while, I think... if you can get to an asteroid and mine it, good luck; you have the right to it. It's not like people are going to by vying for the same asteroid, at least not any time soon.
Science or Fiction (1:03:09)
It's time for Science or Fiction.
S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one they think is the fake. We have another theme this week!
R: God dammit!
(others cheering)
S: This theme is "the oldest". So, three news items about discovering the oldest of something.
D: Phyllis Diller. Sorry.
S: All right, here we go.
R: Well, he's locked in, so...
S: Item number one: Archaeologists have discovered the oldest example of cave art, dating back 40,800 years before present. Item number two: The earliest evidence of copper smelting was recently discovered in Eastern Serbia and dates to 7,000 years before present. And item number three: Archaeologists have discovered the oldest evidence of archery, a yew bow dating back 7,400 years before present. Well, Dan, as our guest, you get the privilege of going first.
D: OK, these are straightforward. Item number one about oldest cave art, 40,800 years before present. That's old. Obviously, caves can – especially art on stone, can persist, and so I don't doubt that necessarily on the basis of medium. I really have no compelling reason to doubt that, but that is old, that is… So number two, the earliest evidence of copper smelting was recently discovered in Eastern Serbia and dates to 7,000 years before present. Well, OK, I'll leave that one for a second. And then number three, the archaeologists have discovered the oldest evidence of archery, a yew bow dating back 7,400 years before present. Now archery was Asian in origin, and that falls well within, far as I understand it, the populating of that area. I think I would have to go with the fiction being the earliest evidence of copper smelting. That's the only one that gives me a little bit of a false feeling. So, that's what I'll go, number two.
S: All righty. Rebecca?
R: Yeah, for me it's between the copper and the archery. The cave art, yeah I get that, maybe 40,000 – yeah, why not. They were doing cultural things back then and they could certainly last that long. Copper smelting or archery; archery really, really big right now, so maybe – and Steve, I know you kid likes archery, so maybe archery was on your mind and you decided to make something up about archery. Or maybe that's what you want me to think. You know, I don't care; I'm going to go with the archery one, just... yeah, just because. I think you made it up because I think you like archery.
S: OK. Bob?
B: (exhales) Well, the cave art; I could buy that; that's not striking me as being way out, and like Rebecca, I have a problem with the second two, the copper smelting and the archery.
S: (affected voice) The shmelting.
(laughing)
B: The shmelting. The archery I could see somebody stumbling upon that idea and running with it. Less so the copper smelting though, that just seems a little too far back for me to buy, so I'll... I just think the copper is just too far back; I'll have to go with that as fiction.
S: OK. Jay?
J: Dan, which one did you pick?
D: The copper smelting.
J: And how do you typically do at Science or Fiction?
(laughing)
D: I'll tell you later.
J: See, the guy's almost done with his first show with us and he's already busting my balls.
R: He learns quickly.
D: You got a target on you, brother.
J: (chuckles) All right, so... yeah, the cave painting; I would be shocked if that one is fiction. I remember reading something; I don't know – like, I actually have something in my head that I recently saw, which is the – you know, the red – what were they, I forget what they were using to make their early, early paintings, but they were doing it over their hands; you see all the human hands and all that stuff. The shmelting is... now, does this include a pancake, Steve?
(chuckling)
E: Blintz.
J: 7,000 years, huh? Yeah, I mean, why wouldn't they be able to be smelting 7,000 years ago? And the third one, also found evidence of archery dating back 7,400 years; smelting is a lot more advanced than archery. I'll take (affected voice) the von shmelting for 1,000, Alex.
S: All right. Evan.
E: Well, the cave art 40,800 years B.P. Mmm, I agree with everyone else; I think that of the three is the most plausible one. Copper shmelting or archery. Sorry Rebecca, I'm going to go with the copper smelting one as the fiction.
S: OK.
J: Oh!
D: Oh well.
J: That means you're wrong!
R: I'm not liking my chances here.
S: All right. Well, you all agree with number one, so we'll start there. Archaeologists have discovered the oldest example of cave art, dating back 40,800 years before present. You guys all think that one is science and that one is... science.
E: Oh, thank God.
B: 50-50 now.
S: It was actually 40,700 years. That is – and Jay, I think you did probably read the item. Do you know what the art consisted of?
R: Penises.
S: Close.
J: I just remember it being etchings –
D: It was bunny rabbits.
J: It was really shitty; it was –
S: They were red dots.
J: Oh yeah, yeah!
D: No, no, no!
E: Red dots?
D: Five?
B: Planets. Planets, obviously.
J: They were among other things.
S: It was a star system. It was a star map. Yeah, they were –
(laughing)
S: If you look at the picture –
E: This means something.
S: – it's lots of red dots in kind of a pattern; it's obviously not a natural thing, you know, this cave painting. But the key is, it was using the same red pigment and the same blowing technique that Jay – of the pictures of hands that Jay was referring to. You put your hand on the wall, you blow the paint around it, take your hand away and you got a picture of your hand. So they figured out how to do that 40,000 years ago. This does beat the previous oldest cave art by about 4,000 years, so it does push it back a bit. This was found in Spanish locations, so in Spain.
E: There are caves in France that had very old –
S: Yeah, there's a lot of famous caves in France as well, but this is … same basic –
D: So, this doesn't – this is not like, a startling push-back of the early –
S: Nah, it really isn't.
D: But – yeah.
S: It was 4,000 years.
D: Talk about a long time ago – make-up, or something like that.
S: Yeah, the clam shells with the pigment.
D: Yeah.
S: Yeah, this wasn't surprising, but I had to find three items all about oldest stuff, so. But the other two are the tricky ones. So let's – we'll take them in order. The earliest evidence of copper smelting was recently discovered in eastern Serbia and dates to 7,000 years before present. All of the men think this one is fiction; Rebecca, you think this one is science, and this one is... science!
R: Wooo! Suck it!
S: Good job, Rebecca.
J: Good job.
B: Nice job, Rebecca.
R: Suck it. Suck it. Psychology wins again.
S: You got lucky.
R: It was not luck. It was not luck, sir. It's induction.
B: It's not "Science or Psychology"; it's "Science or Fiction".
R: Psychology is a science, Bob.
S: Once again, you were right for the wrong reason; we're getting there, though. All right, so the oldest example of copper smelting dates back to 7,000 years ago. They found evidence of copper slag, which is what's left behind after you heat up the ore and remove the copper. Ore is an artifact; they also found cast copper objects, so copper was probably – the evidence is that was probably the earliest metal that was smelted. It has a very low oxidation potential, which makes it easy to separate from the ore, so it's easy to smelt, comparatively. Lead, tin, and iron are more difficult; iron, of those metals, is the most difficult. Interestingly, gold has such a low oxidation potential –
J: I love gold!
S: – that it occurs naturally in its metallic form. It's probably true that people were finding and working gold as a metal before the other metals because you don't have to smelt it; you find it as metallic gold. But once you get up to copper, lead, tin, and iron, those exist in ore form – they're bound to other minerals and you have to smelt them in order to get the purified metal out. Copper's pretty good as a tool, certainly better than stone tools for blunt work, but it doesn't hold an edge. Does not hold an edge, so it's not really good for making – well, you can, but it's not really – it's a poor material for like, an axe or a knife. So they eventually discovered how to add tin to copper, creating...
E: Bronze.
S: Interestingly, it was thought – it was previously thought before this find, that the Europeans learned how to smelt copper from the Middle East; that it actually originated in the Middle East and then spread from there. But now the oldest find is in Eastern Europe, so that kind of moves the locus of where it started. It could have been discovered independently, of course, in the Middle East and in Europe, and also, of course, the oldest of anything is always determined by the oldest example that we have of it, which is probably not the true origin of it. You know, just the first example that we've discovered. Which means, going on to number three, archaeologists have discovered the oldest evidence of archery, a yew bow dating back 7,400 years before present. Now I admit this one was a little tricky, because archaeologists did find a 7,000-year-old yew bow, and that was the article that I was basing this on. And they –
B: What the hell?
S: And it is the –
B: You got some 'splaining to do.
S: – oldest Neolithic bow discovered in Europe. It's just not, by a long shot, the oldest example of archery. That's what made that fiction.
J: Oh, OK.
S: In fact, it's not even the oldest bow.
E: What?
S: Yeah, the Holmegaard bow is a couple of thousand years older. That dates to 8-9,000 years before present, and those were – those are actually – The oldest bows that we've discovered are pretty well-designed and pretty functional; yew is actually a really good wood to make bows out of; it has a lot of good properties for a bow. The Holmegaard bow has a very efficient design; it's a good bow; you could use it today as a reasonably designed bow, and could be made out of a lot of different types of wood that were easily available. Yeah, this was just the oldest Neolithic bow found in Europe, but not the oldest bow, and also, there are other lines of evidence for archery; for example, a cave painting of an archer.
B: Oh, yeah.
S: So that's a painting of a guy holding – obviously holding a bow in front of him, pointing it at an animal.
D: Yeah, it's iconic.
J: Unless the artist was psychic and he predicted the creation of the bow.
B: It was a science fiction cave painting. Come on.
S: And, the oldest evidence, however, which I admit, is not smoking-gun evidence, but the oldest evidence that possibly pointing towards use of a bow, goes back 50,000 years –
B: Holy crap.
S: And that is stone arrowheads. Now, the reason why that's not smoking-gun evidence of a bow is that they could have used like an atlatl to throw the arrows and not –
J: Atlatl.
E: Now you're making up words.
D: Like that Jay, huh?
S: They could have used some other – but they look like they're the size of arrowheads. You know, they're not spearheads, they're arrowheads. But still – that's somewhat indirect evidence. But still other lines of evidence that go back far, like arrowheads buried in the pelvic bone that really probably needed the force of a bow to get buried in there dating back up to 18,000 years ago, evidence of gluing feathers to shafts around 20,000 years ago.
J: Yeah, but don't do that at home.
B: (laughing) Nice, Jay.
S: Right.
R: Well, the important thing to remember is that I won.
D: Yes.
S: The salient fact – the salient fact of this item is that Rebecca won.
R: (blows raspberry)
S: I will point out again, for the wrong reasons.
R: Yep.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:16:07)
S: All right, Jay, what do you got for a quote this week?
J: I have a very awesome quote here and I want you, Steve, to guess who this is. But I will say that this quote was sent in by Ole Hjolmersen. Ole's from Sweden, and he sent in this kick-ass quote and I'm testing my brother Steve with this quote.
The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death--however mutable man may be able to make them--our existence as a species can have a genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
S: Yeah, the two people that it makes me think of -- one is Carl Sagan, it's kind of the way he writes. But I think Isaac Asimov comes to mind as well.
J: You know, not bad guesses but you're not quite there. STANLEY KUBRICK!
S: Oh, Stanley Kubrick. Cool!
E: Whoa!
J: That actually was a quote taken from a Playboy interview; he did it in Playboy magazine.
E: So, let's compare 2001 to Prometheus.
(all laughing)
J: Not -- Don't even. Hey, Dan, thanks for joining us. It was a really good time, man.
R: Yeah, thanks, Dan. You did well.
B: Great job!
D: Real pleasure.
J: Dan, I gotta ask you: was it worth it?
D: Oh, yeah. Are you kidding? Ohh. Great.
(laughing)
D: Was it Michael? Yeah, and he said something about the thrill of watching the sausage being made. Yeah.
(laughing)
R: You know, you can tell no one, Dan. No one. How the sausage gets made. They'll vomit, OK?
S: A secret you'll have to take to your grave.
D: Nope; that's the thrill of secrets.
S: All right, well, thanks for joining us, Dan. And thank you all for joining me again this week.
R & J: Thank you, Steve.
E: Doctor.
B: You're welcome.
S: And until next week, which will be our TAM episode, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.
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