SGU Episode 382

This episode is in the middle of being transcribed by banjopine (talk) as of {{{date}}}. To help avoid duplication, please do not transcribe this episode while this message is displayed.

This episode needs: transcription, time stamps, formatting, links, 'Today I Learned' list, categories, segment redirects. Please help out by contributing!

How to Contribute

SGU Episode 382
10th November 2012
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 381                      SGU 383
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
P: Perry DeAngelis
Quote of the Week
[Space exploration] is in financial trouble. Yet by many standards, such missions are inexpensive. Mariner Jupiter/Saturn costs about the same as the American aircraft shot down in Vietnam in the week in which I am writing these words (Christmas 1972). The Viking mission itself costs about a fortnight of the Vietnam war. I find these comparisons particularly poignant: life versus death, hope versus fear. Space exploration and the highly mechanized destruction of people use similar technology and manufacturers, and similar human qualities of organization and daring. Can we not make the transition from automated aerospace killing to automated aerospace exploration of the solar system in which we live?
Carl Sagan
Links
Download Podcast
SGU Podcast archive
Forum Discussion

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 Wednesday, November 7, 2012 and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella,

B: Hey, everybody.

S: Rebecca Watson,

R: Hello, everyone.

S: Jay Novella,

J: Hey, guys.

S: And Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening ladies and gentlemen. How's everyone tonight?

B: Tired of the winter already.

R: Aww, you guys only just got your first snowfall.

S: It was bad.

R: I'm really jealous.

E: Really bad.

J: The timing was bad.

E: We have ice underneath everything.

J: It really sucked being at work and then having it hit like around noon. You know, you can't call in and say you're not going into work.

R: I thought you meant the timing in terms of coming on the heels of the hurricane, 'cause

S: Well, that too.

E: Well, yeah.

R: Yeah, I feel terrible for the people without electricity still.

E: That hurricane. Ooof!

S: Yeah, like right on the heels of CSICon.

B: Superstorm Sunday!

S: We had to drive seventeen hours to get home because our flights were cancelled.

E: We just beat it, too.

B: Eighteen hours.

E: Just beat it.

J: Oh, that's right. We didn't even talk about that on the show.

R: Eighteen hours with a pregnant woman.

E: Yes.

R: I did not envy her.

B: Who had to pee less that some of the guys.

(laughter)

S: There was a point, though, where Jay demanded that his wife pee in the woods.

J: That's right.

B: That's true, that's true.

R: You forced your pregnant wife to pee in the woods during a hurricane? Is that what you're telling me?

J: I have many skills, and one of them is driving late at night in and around the border of New York City, like if you're driving, you know, say, over by the airports or whatever. I have very good instincts on what exits to get off of to get gas. And I was arguing with everyone in the car about like "Look, we don't get off at this exit because I can't see an open gas station from the road!" So you don't go like, hunting around for a gas station.

S: So, yes, Rebecca, he made his pregnant wife pee in the woods during a hurricane.

(laughter)

R: To get back to the crux. Wow, I am so glad that I did not have to take that van with you guys!

E: Yeah.

J: It was good, up until like the last four hours. We were good. We had a lot of fun. We were on Twitter with a lot of people that were following the ride and we were throwing a bunch of trivia out and you know, just having a good time with them.

R: Good.

S: We made the best of it.

E: Yeah, trying to keep our spirits up, trying to deal with the hurricane. Yup.

This Day in Skepticism (2:24)

• November 10, 1793 A Goddess of Reason is proclaimed by the French Convention at the suggestion of Chaumette.

R: Hey! Guess what today is.

B: It's the, uh, the week after Halloween.

R: Today is November 10th, and on November 10, 1793, a goddess of reason was placed on a high altar at Notre Dame in Paris.

E: A real goddess! That's a first.

J: What does that mean? I don't even know what that

R: Okay. So. All of this was a part of the Cult of Reason's Festival of Reason.

E: Well, there you go, "cult," so.

R: Yeah. Well, no, it's "cult" in the French sense, which, in the French translation sense, which is just, just . . . it was a political sort of religion. It sprung up during the French Revolution and it was an atheistic sort of movement that started out as a replacement for Christianity. And the purpose of it, though, wasn't just to be atheist, but to literally worship liberty, reason and truth.

E: Oh, I like that.

R: Yeah. As ideals, I should mention, but specifically not as idols. They were very concerned with accidentally personifying liberty, reason and truth and then creating actual gods to worship. So the goddess

S: So they made a goddess of reason?

R: Yeah, well they, you know

E: Was it like, was it with tongue in cheek?

R: They had her represented as, she was a living woman, for it to not be idolatry. Yeah, I imagine that there was a bit of tongue in cheek involved, but literally they did want people to worship liberty, reason and truth. Like, as a congregation, like getting together on Sunday and worshipping

S: So they were humanists.

R: No. I'd say uni, one of the Unitarian, Universal Unitarians. Yeah. It think that's, that's probably closer.

E: Not deists, though.

S: No, actually, it was stopped by Robespierre, who was a deist.

R: Correct.

S: And he instituted the Cult of the Supreme Being, as the follow-up to the Cult of Reason.

R: Yes. And, of course, both of them were eventually banned by Napoleon.

E: Yup. Napoleon came along and took care of all that.

(laughter)

R: But not before everybody in the Cult of Reason was beheaded. The year after the festival, so

S: Yeah, this was the Reign of Terror, yeah. The Cult of Reason was followed by the Reign of Terror.

(laughter)

R: But, it did seem to have a helluva lot of sway. I mean, the festival sounds like it was huge. According to some unconfirmed reports there was some amount of depravity going on.

E: Well, it was France, you know.

R: Sexy depravity.

S: I've read some accounts that described the Goddess of Reason as being a famous actress of the time. But other reports call her a whore. I don't know if they're mutually exclusive.

R: No, I think the two things were interchangeable, actually. At one point.

E: Actually a compliment at the time.

S: The Whore of Reason.

(laughter)

E: You reason whore!

R: Nothing wrong with that.

E: Well, if you're gonna be a whore of something, it might as well be reason.

R: Yeah, the festival was pretty huge, though. So you had your goddess of reason sitting up on an altar, in Notre Dame. All of Notre Dame, that was the center of everything.

E: Wonder what the Hunchback thought.

R: They actually dismantled a Christian altar and replaced it with an altar to liberty. And they carved the words "To Philosophy" over the front door, to Notre Dame. Which is kind of funny. Yeah, so it was a big deal.

S: Those were crazy times, crazy times.

R: Yeah. Shame that everybody was beheaded.

J: I mean that's a pretty bad-ass party. Everyone ends up getting their head cut off at the end of it. I mean, that's one helluva celebration.

R: Yeah, I mean if you're gonna go out, go out in style.

News Items

Life in the Universe (6:27)

• How Common Is Life in the Universe

S: So, Bob, tell us why scientists are being more pessimistic about the prospect of life elsewhere in the universe.

B: Well. It kind of depends on how you look at it, but you know, guys, I'm getting, I don't know if you are, I'm getting tired of these news items. It seems like every week they say, "Oh, life in the universe is more prevalent that we thought," and then the next week they're saying "Oh, well, sorry. Now it's less common." It just seems like they keep bouncing back and forth. So I find it a little bit annoying, but still, it's still a pretty interesting theory that these guys came up with. So what these scientists are saying is that asteroid belts are not just potential harbingers of death that people often think they are. They may actually be a vital ingredient, not only for life to exist, but also to endure in the solar system. Now this theory was put together by astronomers Rebecca Martin, who is, get this, a NASA Sagan Fellow, from the University of Colorado in Boulder. I thought that was really cool, I didn't even know . . .

J: Who gives that title?

B: Oh, well, NASA. And her partner Mario Livio, who's a Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, astronomer. They developed these models of these accretion disks that are in orbit around stars and they saw, they kind of tested what would happen if they placed a Jupiter-sized planet, a Jovian planet, in various locations in this system. And then they took those observations and they built up their theory. And they looked at 90 stars that had specific infrared signatures. That could possibly mean that there's actually asteroid belts around those stars. And I think they're fairly confident that that's exactly what it means. And they also looked at about 520 solar systems that had confirmed Jovian planets in orbit around it. And what they found was that only four percent of the solar systems had asteroids, had asteroids belts past the so-called snow line. Now the snow line, it's kind of like this border of sorts between the inner and the outer solar system. If you're beyond it, then the volatiles that are there, like water, ice, will stay in tact, which is a good thing, because you want, if they're in tact then they could actually be transported elsewhere in the solar system, as you'll see. So, the key though is that the asteroids are crucial. You know, 'cause when you think of these asteroids, you're thinking well they just occasionally hit the Earth and cause mass extinctions, right? Maybe. But there's also a really good upside to these asteroids. They deliver these huge payloads of water, organic molecules, heavy metals – all things that are pretty essential to life . So these things didn't necessarily exist on Earth de novo. I mean they weren't there from the beginning necessarily. The other cool thing is that these impacts, they sound nasty and they can be, but they also, according to these scientists, they think that they can give us a really great boost to evolution by preventing species from remaining static with your environment. So they talked a lot about punctuated equilibrium, which kind of fits well into that. Oh, they also mentioned that asteroids may have created the moon, right? I mean, the planet-sized, or Mars-sized, I guess it would have to be a planet, but it could have come from the asteroid belt, hit the Earth, created a moon, and the moon offers a tremendous amount of stability to our seasons. Without the moon, it's doubtful that life could have gotten such a huge foothold that it did billions of years ago. So you've got the asteroids. But the relationship between these asteroids and Jupiter, or a Jovian-size planet, turns out to be really critical to give life a start in a solar system, according to their theory. So, if you think about it, if you have a Jovian and an asteroid belt, you've got three different scenarios that could potentially happen. The Jovian planet passes through the entire belt, it just goes right through and becomes, what we've discovered to be what's called hot Jupiters. There are Jupiter-size planets that are in very, very close orbit around their parent star. Even closer than Mercury.

E: Whoa.

B: Yeah. If that happens, what it would do is it would just disburse all the asteroids. Imagine this gargantuan planet plowing through even a sparsely populated asteroid field, the gravitational pull would just send them all careening everywhere. They would all go their own way. So, that's one scenario. The other scenario is that the Jovian kind of just doesn't interact at all with the asteroids. So imagine Jupiter, many millions of miles farther out, farther away from the sun, and so it has very, very negligible gravitational impact, or influence, on the asteroid field. That means that the asteroid field would get huge. It would stay incredibly dense. If you look at our asteroid field, it's only about one percent of its original mass. So about 99 percent of the mass that used to be there has just gotten, I guess through gravitational interaction with Jupiter,

E: Disbursed?

B: Yeah, it's been disbursed. And that's a good thing, because if you have a really dense, super-dense asteroid field, then it could potentially be pelting the Earth over and over and over

E: It's cool; it's like pollenization, in a way.

B: Right. Imagine getting, imagine a mass extinction every ten million years, or five million years, not very hospitable. So that clearly would be, not be good for life. So the third way to look at the interaction between a Jovian planet and asteroids is what we have here in our solar system. There's a relatively mild influence on the asteroids and it keeps them sparsely populated, so that there's only occasional impacts on Earth, but there's enough to give us plenty of water and the squishy molecules of life. So that pretty much their theory. Now, I think there's a few ways to look at this, and it's really fun to see all the different takes that the science news reporters have. Some of them are very pessimistic; some of them are very optimistic. Some are saying that this is really good, because now we know more specifically where to look for life. And if this is correct, then, yeah, that would, it would be true. We would know, all right, let's find solar systems where there's a Jovian just outside the snow line and right next to an asteroid field, and you might find complex life there. So that's one way to look at it, kind of optimistically. The pessimistic way to look at it, like Steve was saying at the beginning, is that, oh, crap, life is much less likely than we thought. Because the kind of relationship that Jupiter has with an asteroid belt is very rare. And if it's that rare, and if life critically depends on it, then life would be very rare, much more rare than we think it is. I'm taking another point of view, though. I just think there's not enough information to really be super optimistic or pessimistic about this. Right? I mean, how many, we know of life in one place in the entire universe. On Earth. Just one stupid little data point, and it's really hard; you can't extrapolate. You have no idea what it's gonna take to make life stable in other solar systems. There's just way too much that's not known. And there's so many factors that could affect stability. Who knows what else might be important. So, yeah, this is a really interesting theory, and if it's true, it's good in the sense that we might increase our odds of finding life, but it also would kind of stink because life might be much less common than we think it is.

E: We'd have to throw out a whole bunch of systems, basically. We wouldn't waste our time looking at certain systems that don't meet certain criteria.

B: Yeah, but only if we had extremely high competence in this theory, and I don't know how we're gonna get that much competence. There's too many unknowns. I think we should just keep on looking.

S: It seems that the notion that hot Jupiters migrate in from the outside and they kick out a lot of planets is increasingly well established. Surveys have found that only ten percent of systems that have hot Jupiters in them have other planets nearby.

B: That we can detect.

S: That we can detect.

B: And that's another limitation. Our detection equipment. Who knows what we're missing with our level of technology, and of course, it will get better.

S: But very few systems have hot Jupiters in them. So that doesn't get rid of that many systems out there. So, again, we should say, we need more data. Now, just from a logical point of view, it seems that if you look at the conditions necessary in order to have the conditions that we're familiar with on Earth, that resulted in life on Earth as we know it, and every time you look at something you go wow, you know, the stabilizing effect of the moon, and

B: The Goldilocks zone.

S: Yeah, we're in the right

B: the asteroid belt.

S: Yeah, there's so many different things. We've had just the right number of bombardments. Whatever. But, I think it's all just retrospective, or post hoc, reasoning. It's a bit of the lottery fallacy, you know, like what are the odds that all of these things would come together and they all seem to be necessary, but, again it's 'cause we're looking at one of the winners. But how do we know that life can't arise in all kinds of other different situations? Life arose and has adapted to the situation that exists here, but if other situations exist, life would adapt to those situations. So I think we may be artificially narrow in terms of our thinking about the range of conditions in which life can occur. But, you could also say, well, if we're interested in finding any kind of life, even if it's very different from what we recognize as life here, then sure, there may be a broad range of conditions. But is we're interested in planets that we could inhabit, then we do have to stick with the more of a narrower criteria.

B: Yeah, but, what do we care if we could inhabit it? I think all that matters is can we all, well, just detect it, first of all, just knowing it and then not knowing really much of anything else, would still be awesome. But I think the potential for communication, I think, is what would be awesome. I don't care if it's a Horta, silicon-based life, hydrogen, whatever, if we can somehow communicate with them, mathematics or whatever, or intercept their signals and interpret them, then I don't care what they're made of.

J: I always thought it would be really cool to capture a bunch of really large asteroids, I mean of course this is science fiction-y, what I'm about to say, but you amass enough matter where it equals the size of the Earth, you put one like every quarter turn on our orbit around the sun, hopefully not screwing up orbits and whatnot, which I don't know what effect it would have. But then

E: You'd have two planets in the same orbit?

J: Yeah, we'd have four planets that are on the same trajectory, or you put it in a different orbit. Okay. Whatever. You put it in a different orbit where the planet will have the relative same gravity, relatively the same seasons and temperature ranges and all that stuff. But yet you've created a planet in your own solar system that you could populate.

B: But I think it's, though, even if we harvested every asteroid in the asteroid belt, it wouldn't be enough mass.

S: Yeah, we'd be better off terraforming Venus or Mars.

B: Yeah, Venus and Mars are just waiting for that. I mean eventually we'll be able to do that.

E: Ooo, the Genesis Project, I like that.

UFOlogy Dying (17:07)

• UFO enthusiasts admit the truth may not be out there after all

S: Well, speaking of life elsewhere in the universe, Jay, some UFO enthusiasts have been speculating that the future of UFOlogy is in question.

J: Yup. We might be seeing a real decline in the number of people that are interested in actually studying UFOs and going to conferences. So, it's also reported that there are dozens of UFO-related groups that are closing due to a lack of interest. Dave Wood, who's the chairman of the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena, also known as ASSAP, announced that a meeting has been called to go over the future of UFO study and research.

S: Jay, did they call the meeting ASAP?

J: (Jay laughs) We have to have an ASAP ASSAP. So Dave Wood said,

It is certainly a possibility that in ten years' time it will be a dead subject. We look at these things on the balance of probabilities and this area of study has been ongoing for many decades. The lack of compelling evidence beyond the pure anecdotal suggests that on the balanced of probabilities that nothing is out there. I think that any UFO researcher would tell you that 98 percent of the sightings that happen are very easily explainable. One of the conclusions to draw from that is that perhaps there isn't anything there. The days of compelling eyewitness sightings seem to be over.

E: There's never been compelling eyewitness sightings. That's a flaw in that reasoning.

J: Well, I'll tell you, what I think he's specifically talking about is the two incidents that are the big bookend incidents for UFO research and exploration, and one of them was the Roswell incident from 1947, which talks about a UFO crashing in New Mexico in the United States and the subsequent government cover-up, and another incident called the Rendlesham incident, which happened in 1980 which had similar storylines like the Roswell situation, which was like a UFO landed and the government covered that up as well. So what he's saying is those two incidents are the two big things that all the people that study UFOs go back to. And there isn't anything new happening. So, interest is waning, and, for obvious reasons, he's saying that the internet actually coincides with the decline in interest of UFO study. And why do you think that is?

R: Well, because we're solving more mysteries. It's easier for people to find information about whether or not something's the moon or not.

E: It's also easier to spread disinformation and prove that it's disinformation.

S: Yeah, it's interesting. So there's a couple ways to look at this. UFOlogy has waxed and waned over the years and it could just be that we're in a lull, and in ten years it'll be back again. And it's just a cycle. Like interest in Bigfoot's gonna come and go over the years, or the Loch Ness monster, right? So it's too early to say that this is a real trend as opposed to just the normal ebb and flow of beliefs in stuff like this. One generation sort of gets disaffected with it but then the next generation will rediscover this, the same thing. The allure of believing in alien visitation is not gonna go away. The other way to look at it is that the internet really has changed the nature of things. And that's what some of them are speculating about, the notion that things don't remain mysterious long enough to get out there. The hoaxes are exposed very quickly on the internet. Misidentified Chinese lanterns are identified very quickly by somebody, so the internet is basically chewing up these reports too quickly for them to take root. And that's causing, it's starving the UFO community of cases, basically, to talk about. But, so, I don't know. We'll know in five or ten years if this is a real effect or just the normal cycle.

R: I kind of feel like we're gonna see that happening with everything, though. I mean, a lot of this stuff just relies on ignorance and lack of access to information and I think with the internet, and just in general. I mean we don't really get miracles anymore. And for the same reason we're not gonna really get any interesting alien visitations anymore. And the only thing, in my mind, the only thing that could possibly revive interest again would be Hollywood.

E: Oh, yeah. They're good for that.

R: We see people get more interested in ghosts, for instance, when Paranormal Activity comes out, and things like that. And the big wave of alien stuff came after Close Encounters I think, right?

S: Yeah. Absolutely.

E: Big time. Yeah, I don't thing the desire for people to want to believe in these things are gonna change much just by evidence or lack thereof. People are still gonna want, or have the need, to believe in these sorts of things.

J: Sure.

S: Will it turn into something else, or will some version of UFO belief come back? They did make one interesting point, which is something that we've pointed out previously, was that, now that everyone is carrying a camera and basically a video around with them in their smart phone, you would expect that if these things were really out there, we'd start to see some, an increasing number of genuine and compelling videos, but we're not. And the only conclusion that you could really draw from that that's reasonable, is 'cause maybe there's nothing out there.

R: Or it's because they're shy.

J: Yeah.

R: Camera-shy.

S: That's why I said that it's reasonable.

R: I consider that reasonable.

J: So the summit's happening at the University of Worcester on November 17, and if anybody listening to this show can go to that event and report to us on what they see and hear, I would love, absolutely love, to relate that to everybody else. I'd report it on this show. All right, check this out, guys. I found this very funny. David Clark, a Sheffield

E: Dave Clark Five.

J: A Sheffield Hallam University academic and the UFO advisor to the National Archives said: "The subject is dead in that no one is seeing anything evidential." And then, as Steve stated, he goes on to make all of these very skeptical claims, like the guy actually says things like "The classic cases like Roswell are only classic cases because they were not investigated properly." And "the reason why nothing is going on is because of the internet. If something happens now the internet is there to help people get to the bottom of it and find an explanation." I just found that very encouraging that somebody that is an enthusiast of UFOs and everything is using some hardcore critical thinking here. Oh, maybe not hardcore, but at least using some armchair critical thinking to come to these very intelligent conclusions about one of his biggest interests. Also, one last thing. The current president of that organization, Lionel Fanthorpe, claimed in the journal that that organization puts out that King Arthur was an alien who came to Earth to save humans from invading extraterrestrials.

S: Um hmm.

R: Yeah, no, that sounds legit.

E: True.

Chelation Therapy (24:14)

• The result of the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT): As underwhelming as expected

Psychic Medium Fail (32:17)

• Two professional mediums fail test to demonstrate their psychic powers under laboratory conditions

Who's That Noisy? (43:23)

• Answer to Last Week: Crow T Robot

Questions and Emails

Universe Rotating (46:59)

Simple question so a simple answer, (I hope.) Why does everything go round, rotate I mean and not just when your drunk! Planets, Stars, Galaxies, and maybe the whole Universe? Why, how did they get going. And, how come when I take off the front wheel of my bike and hold the axle on one side doesn't it fall down when it's spinning. Bending gravity? I know about precession but I'm still confused. Thanks Guys and remember take care out there. - Ian. Redmond, Zimbabwe

Science or Fiction (53:01)

Item number one. Curiosity's atmospheric analyzer has confirmed the presence of methane in the Martian atmosphere, keeping hope of Martian life alive. Item number two. A new computer model supports the grandmother hypothesis - that grandmothers provide a fertility advantage to their daughters, thereby driving the evolution of longevity. And item number three. Physicists have created a device with a refractive index of zero, meaning that the phase velocity of light within the device is effectively infinite.

In Memorium - Mike LaCelle (1:04:33)

• The Rogues remember Mike LaCelle - the 7th Rogue, who died on November 6th

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:15:10)

[Space exploration] is in financial trouble. Yet by many standards, such missions are inexpensive. Mariner Jupiter/Saturn costs about the same as the American aircraft shot down in Vietnam in the week in which I am writing these words (Christmas 1972). The Viking mission itself costs about a fortnight of the Vietnam war. I find these comparisons particularly poignant: life versus death, hope versus fear. Space exploration and the highly mechanized destruction of people use similar technology and manufacturers, and similar human qualities of organization and daring. Can we not make the transition from automated aerospace killing to automated aerospace exploration of the solar system in which we live?

J: Carl Sagan.

References