SGU Episode 873

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SGU Episode 873
April 2nd 2022
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 872                      SGU 874
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
AJR: Andrea Jones-Rooy, political, social, and data scientist and professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the NYU Center for Data Science
Quote of the Week
I beg of you, do not jump to the conclusion that certain things you see are necessarily "supernatural" or the work of "spirits" just because you cannot explain them.
Harry Houdini, Hungarian-American escape artist, illusionist, stunt performer
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Live from NYC

Voice-over: 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. (applause) Today is March 25^th, 2022, and this is your host, Steven Novella. (applause) Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody! (applause)

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy. (applause)

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys. (applause)

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Hello New York! (applause)

S: And we have a special guest Andrea Jones-Rooy. Andrea, welcome to the SGU. (applause)

AJR: Hello. Thank you for having me.

S: You've been on the show before.

AJR: I've been on the live stream.

S: The live stream.

AJR: I've never done a, I've never done a SGU.

E: Not on SGU.

S: You're first time the guest rogue. A virgin. Yeah. (Cara laughs)

AJR: So, we'll see. I'll just just wink and I'll leave whenever [inaudible] (Cara laughs)

E: Not before science or fiction.

AJR: Yep.

S: Andrea you are a political scientist and a data specialist.

AJR: Yes.

S: That is accurate?

AJR: Political scientist and data scientist.

S: Data scientist.

AJR: Yeah. I don't just specialize. I science. (Cara laughs)

S: Okay.

J: It that two PhDs?

AJR: Yes.

S: Is that two separate PhDs?

AJR: It's one PhD and a rebranding, is what it is. (Cara laughs) Yeah. So I have a PhD in political science and then all the students in the entire world wanted to study data science and I said "yeah, I teach data science". And so now I'm a data scientist.

C: That's what you can do when you have a PhD, people don't seems to know.

AJR: Exactly, exactly, Cara you're ready you can, you can change it all around. So I did do quantitative political science. And so I was doing statistics and now I just said yeah, I can look at other numbers, they don't have to be about politics. That's where I am now, yeah. And I did the programming side of analysis in political science so it was sort of related.

B: What kind of program.

AJR: I started in R and now I'm in Python, what do you think about that?

B: I've heard of Python, I've never heard of R. Is that like a pirate language? Arrrr.

AJR: Yes, yeah. Well there's a hilarious statistics joke, I don't know, I'm sorry a programming joke, are you ready?

B: Please please yes.

AJR: So the joke is: what is a pirate's favorite programming language?

C: Arrrr.

AJR: Stata. (Cara and Evan laughs) And we like it because it makes someone say arrr and you're hilarious. (laughter) So we had fun in grad school. I have a, I have an actual statistics joke if you want to hear it. I'll stop. Is this why you want to go?

J: Go ahead.

AJR: Do you know the three statisticians who go hunting?

J: No.

AJR: No? You know this?

S: I think I've heard this.

AJR: Okay, so three statisticians go hunting. Don't say if you know what it is, right, they go hunting. One of the statisticians shoots at the duck and hits 10 feet in front of it. Another one statistician shoots at the duck and hits 10 feet behind it. And the third statistician says "you got it!". (laughter)

C: I like it.

AJR: And those were the two times we laughed in grad school. (laughter)

S: I had a doctor duck hunting joke.

AJR: Oh let's hear it.

S: So there was a family practitioner, neurologist and a surgeon go duck hunting.

AJR: Perfect.

S: Right? So they're waiting for the [inaudible] for the ducks to come. A flock of ducks flies by. The family doctor says "There, oh duck, wait do you think it's a duck? What about you? Do you think those are ducks?". By the time he was done getting consultations they had, they had flown by. Then another five minutes go by, another flock of ducks come by and now it's the neurologist's turn to shoot he aims his gun "It's a duck! Wait that could be a goose. Or it could be a, you know, a swallowed tail but before he would caught up, you know, figured out exactly what the species was, they were gone. Then a few minutes later another more ducks come by now it's the surgeon's turn. As soon as they come into view he raises his gun blam blam empties both barrels. Grabs the other guy's gun, there's birds falling all over the place. Then he turns to, actually, there's supposed to be a pathologist there as well (Cara laughs), turns to the pathologist and says: "Go make sure those were ducks".

C: Yeah, there you go.

E&B: Ooh.

AJR: Yeah, that's good. All right, I have one for being stranded on a desert island. And it's, what is it, it's a physicist, a chemist and an economist, okay? Does anyone know this one? You might know that, in the front you know this one, okay. So let me see if I get this right. So they're stranded on a desert island. Everyone is starving. It's a physicist, chemist and economist. And a political scientist my PhD's in political science so we added ourselves to the joke, right? It's the kind of entrepreneurial spirit we have. They're stuck on a desert island. All there is is one can of food and no can opener. So they say: "How we're gonna open this?". And the physicist says: "Well, we could set up some kind of lever and then have it catapult against the thing and then crack it open and blah blah blah.". The chemist says: "Well we could apply heat", I don't come from the natural sciences, so I don't know it might work, "We could apply some heat and crack it home and it would expand". And the economist says: "Assume there's a can opener.". And then the political scientist says: "Assume the economist is right.".

C: There you go.

AJR: But if you're a political scientist that's uproariously hilarious. (laughter)

Special Report: Political Science of War (4:36)

• James D. Fearon: "Rationalist Explanations for War"

S: So Andrea we were chatting before the show and you said that a paper came out recently which completely changed your entire field. So let's, let's hear about it. Well I first won a challenge recently, because maybe I misled you. It came out in 1995. (Cara laughs)

S: You didn't mention that.

AJR: I didn't mention that. In the scheme of knowledge is very recent.

C: When people cite papers now, that I'm editing a book, right now and I'm seeing like citations from the 90s and they'll say things about things and I'm like no, that doesn't fly, I need something a little more reasonable. A lot has changed since 1995.

S: It depends on your field.

C: True.

AJR: But this was a revolutionary field, or a revolutionary paper that spawned research that's going on to this day. And so the paper is "Rationalist Explanations for War by James D. Fearon, who's a political scientist at Stanford. You can look it up, I checked ahead of time, there's no paywall, you can look, free PDF. It's an amazing paper. And he said in 1995: "The main puzzle with war is that it's costly but it nonetheless recurs". So war is─

S: Recur or reoccur?

AJR: I think he says recur.

C: It does recur, it does not reoccur. Actually it probably reoccurs and also recurs, yeah. I think recur is more specific than reoccur.

AJR: Right. I think so. Right. And the idea is that wars are exposed inefficient. So exposed inefficient, meaning once we get to the end of a war, and there's a reason, this is on my mind and I'm sure you're all imagining what that reason is these days. After the war, you're gonna get to some settlement, wars end and some settlements sorted out. But we've all paid the cost. Big capital C of what that war was. So why can't rational actors figure out their problems and not incur that huge cost C and just get to that settlement without all the violence. Like literally without all the stuff going on in Russia and Ukraine. And a lot of researchers until 1995 said well the explanation is, I'm oversimplifying, but the explanation is egos, irrationality, crazy people. And that may be the explanation, right? But this person said, James Fearon said, what if we could mathematically figure out a rational reason to incur this capital cost C. If we could figure that out, then maybe we could do things to prevent or shorten wars. So I've been thinking about Fearon's paper and that spawned a whole revolution in the field where we started using math and assuming economists were right to understand and predict war. So it's a huge landmark paper. The three reasons that a rational actor would choose were, by rational I only mean, I think I'm giving a lecture, sorry everyone. By rational I only mean you're doing what's best for you, you don't have to get too wound up on the definition, right? Three reasons. One - incentives to misrepresent private information. So my private information if I'm Russia or I'm Ukraine is how far I'm willing to go to fight for this thing and how much power I actually have. Both sides have incentives to act like they are stronger than they are, and so you're going to escalate to a point of no return. There's some brinkmanship and shelling if you know that game theory as well. And so the idea is you escalate, escalate, escalate and incur something called audience costs where everyone else is watching, and you can't back down, and so you're better off going to war in incurring this C than saying "oh just kidding" and this was, you know, the Iraq invasion and George W Bush, like, that was very big, you know, a very strong example of this particular mechanism.

The second is commitment problems. I can't commit to not fighting you because there's no world government. And I can't commit that if we get to a settlement where we say well this is where Ukraine ends and this is where Russia. The paper wasn't about Russia and Ukraine but it'd be amazing if it were, right? We can't commit to not fighting tomorrow, so it never goes away.

And the third is one, that this this researcher said it might not be a real problem because there are creative solutions around it, is issue indivisibility. Which is it's just an issue you cannot come to an agreement on, so you think like Israel-Palestine or you practically can't divide it up, because it's on the same land. Oor you're disputing, you think of all the territorial disputes around the world like that could be it. Political scientists like to think well in practice, we could figure it out. You could have this territory on weekends and holidays, and you could have this territory and it's like, but in reality there's political reasons you couldn't get to those.

So those are the three big reasons for war. And one thing the political scientists like to do is watch every war and see which of those three things explains what's going on. It's a very grim pastime, and we're not very fun people to hang around, right?

B: Did they watch a news and eat popcorn?

AJR: Yeah exactly. We say incentives to misrepresent private information, yeah, that's it, we bet it's all very fun. The thing with Ukraine and Russia is that I don't think either three of those apply. Maybe issue indivisibility. But what's so jarring, one of the many things that's so jarring about Ukraine-Russia is that you, most of our models of war, since 1995 have assumed two sides that participate in this escalation. And it's so rare to see the cases where one side is like, I'm not escalating, I'm not going to fight, don't come fight, and then you see this huge escalation. Now there's fighting of course. But so I actually don't know and I've been wondering what James Fearon would say about these huge asymmetric wars.

J: I think you said it though, I mean this one is actually driven by ego.

AJR: I mean that's the thing and, so I'm like is Fearon wrong? This is my whole, you know, religion this past 30 years.

C: But did he even consult a psychologist when he wrote that paper? I mean that's the thing, like to, I get to say like maybe we can't say it's as simple as irrationality. But to say let's take irrationality out of the algorithm altogether seems short-sighted.

AJR: So he's not arguing that it's not irrationality.

C: Okay.

AJR: He's saying if if it's if we have two rational actors, why would it still be rational for them to go to war.

C: Right but in in many cases we don't have two rational actors. And I think that's also part of the problem with Ukraine-Russia.

AJR: Well one of the frustrating things with political science and the world is that we, all the leaders that we are concerned about, Xi Jinping, you know, North Korea, every country that we're nervous about we debate are they rational actors, are they not rational actors. Trump - is he rational, is he not. What is rational, doing things in his own, how do you define that? And so we kind of get lost in circles, and this was why this paper was cool, was because we were like given that the argument, well they're crazy, it doesn't help us better understand.

C: Right, because they still are going to act in the interest of whatever their crazy algorithm is. And so understanding that is important. But rational versus irrational is sort of a construct that you're never going to be able to come to an agreement on.

AJR: Exactly.

C Is there pathology, is there not pathology.

AJR: Right, though I will read all those papers from psychologists, who are like, I shouldn't do this but I'm gonna analyze this later from afar (Cara laughs).

C: Yeah, go for it yeah, yeah.

S: So it's my understanding is, I mean I think the indivisible thing does sound right here, and if, tell me if you agree with this analysis, that Putin thinks that there is no Ukraine. Ukraine thinks there is a Ukraine. And that's an unresolvable difference.

AJR: Right, right.

S: And and I think you know Putin, from everything I'm reading about, is staking his entire country and political future on this notion that he can just absorb Ukraine because it doesn't actually exist or whatever.

C: But it's not that he thinks it doesn't exist, he thinks that in his moral universe he gets to own it. [inaudible] But that's what all of the coverage that I've seen. It's like it, it's historical, it's based on how he came up and developed his leadership. And he misses mother Russia desperately and wants to be that leader again.

S: Yeah but these two things are not mutually exclusive.

C: True, true.

S: So everything you're saying is correct, but, but I'm also reading, you know, from people who like wrote the book on psychology, that, you know, he really, there's this mythology now. Whether he believes it or not is anyone's guess. But the mythology is that Ukraine does not have any existence apart from Russia. It is Russia, right?

C: But he sees that they have a president.

S: No but that's not legitimate, it's just, it's just not legitimate.

C: Yeah he sees it all as not legitimate, not that it doesn't actually exist.

AJR: And we see examples of that elsewhere around the world as well.

E: Oh yeah.

AJR: Countries claim to be autonomous. And many people think they are. And other countries say I don't think so. You know, you can have your president, that's very cute but you're not actually that country.

E: Taiwan.

C: Western Sahara, yeah.

S: I've read previously, and not a political scientist, don't know, but my late understanding was most wars are about resources. Is that still pretty much true or is?

AJR: It depends because resources as well is one of those things, where it's like, well how do you define resources, right? Usually we think natural resources and we're talking oil and this and that. And you can pin a lot of conflicts as I think through the ones that I'm aware of, it's like, yeah resources. But resources could also be human capital, it could be, I don't know what enough about the natural resources of Ukraine, I would imagine that there's more to it. The mythology around Putin is, it's not, if Putin was just trying to maximize natural resources, I don't know that Ukraine is where I would go, sorry.

J: Actually Ukraine is resource rich.

S: They're like the bread basket of Europe and you know without Ukraine Russia is a lot poorer. And so there would be a huge gain for Russia if they did absorb Ukraine.

AJR: That's true.

J: As an example Ukraine produces 75% of the of neon in the world. And you can't make CPUs without neon.

AJR: Look at us not supporting Ukraine or supporting Ukraine by running computers.

C: Couldn't you make a make a distinction though between geopolitical conflict or like war, straight up war geopolitical conflict, whether it be over ideology or over, you know, these these these three descriptions. And the very specific situations in which there's like an imperialist attitude, right? Because that's a different situation where one group wants to take ownership of one another's land. And that is the, that is what promoted war a lot historically. But I think you should, we have to look at those wars differently than we we look at conflicts between two nations where they have no intention of rewriting their boundaries. Or of sort of occupying or taking ownership. Like that's a different kind of a war.

AJR: Well I'm glad you brought that up for two reasons. One is that I think something, you're hitting on something that political science, to my knowledge, has not studied as much as they should. Which is, what are we fighting over in the first place.

C: Right. Like that does matter.

AJR: Right. We often assume in our models like, given a fight, how do we, what causes two countries that are in a dispute to go to war or not go to war. And most countries that are in disputes do not use violence against one another, right? The second thing that I love that you brought up about this is that measurement is one of my favorite fields or subfields, or techniques of all time which is, how do you even define and measure what a war is, right? Does it count as a war if you're like, I don't know, a whole bunch of people die and you're fighting over something. But is that 100 people, is it 50 people, is it, do they have to be civilians like it gets very grim.

S: It's 50.

AJR: It's 50?

C: Is a drone, is a coordinated drone strike a war.

S: Are economic sanctions an act of war?

AJR: Right, exactly. And, I think to to both of your point, I mean are we fighting over the land Ukraine, are we fighting over the physical resource or are we fighting over the idea. And I think the fact that it's a physical movement, I mean seeing, you know, in the New York Times you see these red arrows that just look so 100 years ago, right? Seeing the physical takeover of land feels like war in the sense. And maybe this is some American bias that I have, sending drones to fight an idea is super bad. But not a war in the same kind of sense that is causing us to freak out. I'm coming around Steve, I think that it's hard to think of any war where I would believe that there weren't resources under the hood, right?

C: But again, resources can be human capital, it can be land, it can be all of those things.

AJR: Right. The only other thing I'm going back to to fear on, because you know, he needs someone to defend his ideas. But, you know, these Stanford professors, no one's sticking up for them. (Cara laughs) Thank goodness I'm here, right? Is maybe Putin is playing a game of escalation not against Ukraine but the rest of the world.

C: Yeah.

AJR: Right? NATO, US, other powers, China, not the China, you know they're trying to get China on their side. But that might be what they're doing. They know Ukraine isn't going to fight back though they're fighting back more than they expected. But is Biden going to do something, that's the escalation that maybe he's playing.

J I question that because the one thing that I felt like all the analysts were sure was, that Putin did not want NATO to do what NATO did over the last month. NATO, the NATO nations really became arm and arm nations with each other. And it flew in the face of what he wanted. He was like trying to make it so he's suppressing NATO. And now NATO is an order of magnitude more powerful and resilient, you know?

C: But the worst possible thing that could have happened was that Ukraine went Euro and I think that's what really really, you know, exacerbated this.

J: What do you mean, they're wearing tight jeans?

C: Yes. All the things.

AJR: Even Eurovision and Santa Claus?

C: Funny thing is like, as silly as it sounds, that is part of it. Like their, their president wears blue jeans. Like he is very western in that way. And so all of these very kind of European and western influences from something that used to be the USSR. Like it's one thing if, if Ukraine was like this defunct, you know, old russian nation that sort of just was like languishing. But when they were, you know, talking about joining and when when sort of they started to get all this backing I think that scared Putin shitless. He does not want that, he does not want the world to go Euro. And that happened in his backyard.

J: Well Ukraine actually it was like doing better economically than Russia, right.

C: Of course, you don't want to be proven wrong when you're, you know, like it's really hard for some people to be wrong.

J: Yeah.

C: And sometimes instead of like going "okay, you're right", which is never going to happen with Putin, they're going to throw a temper tantrum.

S: Andrea how does, like just a gross miscalculation play into the rational actor thing? Because I think that's the one thing that everyone I've read on the Ukraine-Russia war says is that Putin totally miscalculated. Pretty much everything. His power. Ukraine's resistance. NATO's resilience. Pretty much across the board. And was he rational, given his assumptions and that the escalation was due to the fact that his assumptions were wrong?

AJR: Or yeah, or is he just─

C: Or is he a narcissist?

AJR: ─like he saw the math, was like I don't care, I'm gonna die soon anyway. And then so, we had a projector. There's a beautiful number line between for the two wars. So Russia-Ukraine and what their costs are, what they're willing to do. And there's all these different variables, and you hit on the main ones, which are like the things you could, you guess about, and you could get wrong. So the incentives to misrepresent, and this is where I think it happened less with Ukraine but maybe the other countries, is I want to make it look like I'm more willing to fight back. If anything Ukraine, Putin might have correctly thought that Ukraine wasn't willing. And then Ukraine surprised itself by being more willing. We don't actually know, there's a capital T true value for all of these variables. But we don't necessarily know what those are. Historically though these are the cases that we tend to observe because they're interesting. You think of US and Vietnam. We totally miscalculated how willing Vietnam was to fight. How able they were. So it's how willing are you to fight, it's what are your resources to fight. It's what's the match up of your resources versus our resources. And it's, that's where it kind of gets frustrating going back to the, the irrational, irrationality story because you can't know. And so the question is, given these variables, how do we either make it look like that Cost is going to be so big that Putin is incentivized to back down. Or how can we more transparently reveal how far everyone is willing to go to put an end to this. If we are. Right? And so so it's more about, how can we change the math as opposed to what he, because I don't know, what he thought. I don't know if his math was wrong or if it was right and he doesn't care, I don't know.

J: So I think, I think he well, he lives in a bubble, right?

AJR: That's the other thing.

J: That's the problem. He, I don't think he's actually hearing like hard reality.

C: And so how can you be a rational actor if...

J: If you're not getting real information. Another fair thing to say is, aren't we all surprised that Ukraine lasted this long? I thought it was going to be a two week thing.

C: Not just that they're lasting this long, that they're actually like they're taking things back now. Like they're, they're wearing Russia out.

J: Yeah. I wouldn't mess with Ukraine, I mean like, think about like, the like Russia's percep, you know, the world's perception of Russia I think is like it's massive, the army's huge, they have a ton, you know, like a ton of equipment and all this stuff. And then when we see it, it's like a clown show what they have going on in Ukraine. Like everybody miscalculated I think. Nobody said before this war Russia's gear is super old and their army is not [inaudible].

C: I think they kinda did, but they were like, but Ukraine has like not a lot to go back. I think it has always been kind of really.

J: I don't know, I didn't read any of that.

C: I think that's kind of the big kind of global joke is that Russia's a little like, you know, all their nuclear like, like they don't keep their nukes under lock and key and everything's like rusty and falling apart. I mean I think that's always kind of been everything's still cold war era.

AJR: I mean. I flew on Aeroflot in the early 2000s and I thought I was gonna to die, so...

C: Aeroflot?

AJR: Aeroflot.

C: I liked my Aeroflot.

AJR: Really?

C: Yeah, when I went to Kazakhstan. I thought it was kind of [inaudible]

AJR: Oh man all the stereotypes, like we took off and it's immediately bouncing. All the seats. The things don't latch shut at the top. And all the people, I'm not even exaggerating, all the people on the plane who were all like old Russian dudes, stood up and immediately started passing around vodka. Like as we're going.

C: That sounds horrible.

AJR: Is this a joke, am I being punked?

C: That is not how my flight went.

AJR: I had water in [inaudible] it was wild. So I'm assuming that's how they got to Ukraine, I don't know.

C: It's on Aeroflot.

AJR: But there is another line of research that's like okay, one thing we tend not to think about are the people on the ground, who are doing the fighting. We get so wound up with the leaders, that it's like well, who's doing the fighting, right, who are the the players on the ground. And in this case, what is Russia, what are the Russian soldiers fighting for.

C: Right.

AJR: Versus what are the Ukrainian people fighting for. And I would certainly imagine that they would fight a lot more if you're on the Ukrainian side.

E: You're yeah you're defending your it's a different strategies, absolutely.

AJR: You're playing two different games, right? You're doing what you're supposed to do.

C: But but but but again if we're working under legitimate, valid data and assumptions it's one thing. But if we're operating under the construct of the propaganda bubble that the Russian soldiers are fighting under it's different. So they they may be fighting for something that we fully don't understand because we haven't been living under that propaganda machine for as long as they have.

AJR: What I would love is a bit of survey research on the front lines for the Russian and Ukrainian soldiers and then we'll know..

J: Well they have.

AJR: Think you're right because we don't know, we don't know what they think.

J: They have prisoners of war, I mean they could be asking those soldiers that they've captured, you know, what to do, I'm sure they are, I'm sure we just aren't getting the intel.

C: Yeah.

AJR: I mean are we so in the, I don't want to be politically biased, are we on Ukraine's side, what do we think?

C: Pretty, yeah.

J: I mean, you know.

AJR: I mean Putin has some interesting ideas (Cara laughs) Please don't use that [inaudible] out of context.

[talking over each other]

E: I mean it's pretty clear to me.

C: The longer you're in media the more you realize you can't make statements like that, that somebody can pull completely out of context and then air somewhere.

AJR: I'm gonna have to slip Steve a lot of money [inaudible].

B: You're clearly not a rational actor.

AJR: I'm just trying to misrepresent.

News Items

S: All right. Let's move on to some news items. We have a few news items to get to.

Transgenic Plants and Space Travel (22:55)

• Transgenic Plants and Space Travel

S: We're going to start with one about transgenic plants in space. So this is a study looking at a transgenic lettuce. And the the idea was, you know, that, you know, space is a pretty unforgiving place, you know, there's there's no food there.

B: It's cold.

S: It's very cold. Or hot. It could be, it tends to be either it'll boil you or freeze you, one or the other. There's no air or water like it's pretty, pretty [inaudible] place.

E: Lots of radiation.

S: Lots of radiation.

E: Lots of radiation.

B: But it's pretty, it's pretty.

S: And yeah, NASA's planning on going to Mars sometime in the 2030s.

E: Good luck.

S: Three-year mission is what they're planning. 10 months to get to Mars. About a year on Mars carrying out the mission. 10 months to get back. And they, you know, they are researching all the things they have to research to figure out how to do that. They don't have all the answers yet, they're just assuming in the next 10 years or whatever we're going to figure out all the pieces to the puzzle. And the the research that's happening on the ISS, a lot of that is to figure out how are we going to get astronauts to Mars and back, right? So one of the things that is a huge challenge is microgravity. The fact that you know for 10 months there, 10 months back, they're gonna, the astronauts going to Mars will be under microgravity, essentially no gravity because they'll be coasting. And on Mars, Mars surface gravity is 38% Earth's surface gravity. So they'll be under reduced gravity for three years. Now aboard the ISS the data that we have from there is, lots of bad stuff happens, right, in microgravity. One thing in particular is bone loss. Astronauts lose 1-2% of their bone mass per month in microgravity.

AJR: Oh god it's that bad?

S: 1-2% per month.

C: Yikes.

S: So if you're there for a couple of months it's a nuisance, right? 30 months, you know, do the math, it's, that's a problem, right? We don't have, we haven't had you know somebody that long, but, what's the longest one on the ISS? It's getting up to a couple, a year or two.

J: Well over a year.

C: Is that bone loss, sorry, just to. just to clarify. Is that bone loss all things being equal, no other variables, or is that like the best we can do?

S: That's the best we can do.

C: So that's with supplements and exercise.

S: With exercise and everything else. That's with the program. Because they're not having astronauts not exercising to see what happens.

C: Right, they can't, yeah.

S: So that's that's with the best exercise program that we can have on the ISS they still lose 1-2%.

B: And that's crazy exercise, I mean, it's like what a?

E: They spend a lot of time.

C: I think two hours a day.

B: It's two hours a day? Who does two hours of exercise a day?

C: Look at that. Yeah I had, I had Nicole Stott do you guys know her? She's an astronaut and aquanaut on on Talk Nerdy.

J: An aquanaut?

AJR: I don't know that word but I like it.

C: Somebody who does like undersea research and spends a lot of time under sea.

J: That is cool.

C: To train, mostly to train to be an astronaut but I had her on my show, I just interviewed her last week so her episode will air on Monday. And we talked a lot about those experiences of like, you have to strap yourself into bed because otherwise you'll like float around and hit your head on shit. And yeah, she said about two hours a day, is what's generally just a baseline just to try and combat.

B: And you still and you 1-2%.

S: Still lose 1-2% of your bone mass. All right so one of the ways to mitigate that, again I always like to go back to fact, we asked a couple of NASA scientists: "What do you do about the whole gravity thing?". And their answer, and radiation and all that. Their answers were basically twofold one - get there fast, and two - we'll find out we'll medically mitigate it, right? That's─

AJR: Wow.

S: ─we, you can't shield against the radiation there's, forget artificial gravity, not happening this century.

C: Yeah they're locked eagles.

S: The engineering problems are too severe.

B: Right, even, even like a rotating habitat, it's not gonna happen, it's not gonna happen soon.

S: Maybe a space station, that doesn't have to go anywhere but not going to Mars, not going to happen. So every science fiction show lied to us.

AJR: Yeah I'm watching the Expanse, so this is crap, yeah.

S: Well Expanse is actually pretty good, they actually are in microgravity, they're using Velcro to the ground and everything, all their hair is up. They're very careful about that. But anyway, so how do you mitigate bone loss medically? With hormones, right? Parathyroid hormone which stimulates bone growth. This is a hormone that you have to inject, so you could just give, you know, give a daily injection of parathyroid hormone.

J: Right so every bone in your body will get thicker?

S: No. Yeah yeah. It's a hormone, so it just makes your bones store more calcium, right? So basically...

C: Do you have to also supplement calcium or do you have enough calcium?

S: Well you know, this assumes you, you're not dietarily limited.

C: Right, right.

S: Your diet is adequate.

C: Probably they would supplement it also.

S: And vitamin D and all that stuff.

J: Will that work on elderly?

S: Yeah, sure, yeah.

C: But not from osteoporosis.

S: But here's the thing, it could, it could work with osteoporosis. But, it's a daily injection.

C: It's daily.

S: So imagine taking to Mars three years worth of syringes and drugs for daily injections for every astronaut on the Mars mission. It's not feasible. It's not feasible. S that's not going to work.

B: Probably cost 10 million dollars just to launch the drugs off the ground.

C: Don't you think every astronaut's just going to have an IV, they're gonna have to, right?

S: Not necessarily.

C: There's a lot of medical mitigate in Mars? I don't know.

AJR: Everyone just have one syringe.

C: There a lot of, yeah, or a port. I don't know there's so much medical mitigation we talk about, so many different things that they might have to do.

S: But ports can go wrong man.

C: They can.

S: They can clog and get infected, you don't want to be on Mars with a clogged, infected clogged port.

C: But you also don't want to be every day on Mars.

S: Of course. But list-, but wait. (laughter)

[talking over each other]

S: So this is the transgenic plant story that we're going to talk about now.

J: Steve get to the point. (laughter). Just teeing it up.

AJR: Right.

S: So, you can make, you can make a form of parathyroid hormone that you can eat. Basically. You could modify, you attach a fractionated crystallized, whatever, protein to it which you get from an antibody. And that does a few things. For one it stabilizes it. Makes it so it's more bioavailable. So you could eat it and actually absorb it. And it makes it stay longer in your blood. So it prolongs the duration of the effect, right? So you could have that, now how are you gonna have, again, enough of this parathyroid hormone for everyone to have a three year supply? Well, you could grow it.

B: Aaa, see?

S: If you can insert the gene for this modified parathyroid hormone protein into a plant, let's say a lettuce plant.

B: Yeah but we can't insert genes willy-nilly what do you?

C: We can't? [sarcasm]

S: This is the research they did, they made a transgenic lettuce with this inserted protein. They actually haven't gone through all of the ones that they've created yet. They've only looked at the first like 10 out of 400 that they made. But it had enough of the parathyroid hormone modified in the lettuce, that if you had eight cups per day, which they admit is a big salad.

B: A lot of salad.

AJR: A lot of salad.

E: How much is that?

S: I would be okay that, I love salad. But every day?

C: Yeah juice it. Or blend it.

E: Smoothies.

J: Can't they just make it make more?

S: So, can't they make it make more? That's of course the goal, right? So obviously this is this is version 1.0 and we have 10 years or whatever to make better versions of it. So hopefully they'll be able to get the content up enough where it's only half that, let's say, you know, four cups becomes a lot more manageable. Whether it's juiced or eating eaten raw or whatever. So that's the goal, right? We'll deal with the bone loss by giving by growing parathyroid hormone. And they're growing food too, which I understand you need that too if you're going you're spending three years going back and forth for Mars.

J: This means though they absolutely are going to have to grow plants when they get there.

S: If, this is the plan if, this is the solution then yes, they're going to absolutely.

C: I think they have to do that anyway.

S: Yeah.

C: I think that's always been known that they have to. I would think they would choose something with a little more nutritional density.

AJR: I was wondering about lettuce.

C: Like it seems like a wasted vehicle.

[talking over each other]

C: Put it in a potato!

E: Easier to grow than other options?

C: Put in something that has more calories.

S: I don't know why they chose lettuce.

AJR: Coconut would be nice. (Jay laughs)

J: Takes two years for the palm tree to grow.

(laughter)

C: Pineapple yeah.

B: Can't you just take the 8 cups and distill the hormone down into something that is in the shot glass?

S: Theoretically. But again, we're trying to make it easy on─

B: Yeah I get it.

S: ─Mars, not give them all this complicated stuff to do.

AJR: Well it sounds like they have two hours a day to walk on a treadmill, they might as well eat lettuce at the same time (Cara laughs)

S: Yeah.

E: Oh, at the same time?

J: Maybe this is easy to grow, maybe that's more than anything.

S: Yeah I mean lettuce is easy to grow, you can grow it hydroponically.

B: It's a proof of concept, it's not necessarily gonna be lettuce.

S: You're right and they might put the same thing in multiple different things so they're not just eating lettuce every day, you know, tomatoes whatever. Cucumbers, you know, that'd be nice.

(laughter)

AJR: It's like all right you have to eat one food when you go to Mars, like pick carefully because that's the one.

B: Peanut butter.

S: Beans? Beans are good.

E: Potato.

AJR: Pick like, Reese's Puffs cereal.

B: Oh my god yes. I had it just last week it was awesome.

S: Yes, the Reese's Puffs plant, yes, that's what they'll do. (Jay laughs) So anyway, so more, to me, more interesting than this one application is the technology right, is the idea. So seeds, very tiny. And they don't weigh very much. So you could take a bunch of seeds to Mars because weight and size is everything when you're getting stuff to Mars. And then you basically have a pharmaceutical factory that you can just you know prop up just by growing stuff on Mars. So once they get to the point where they like all right we have simulated Mars soil, we can, we know what to do to make it, so that we can make it into soil you can grow stuff in. That's, it doesn't, it gives you food, it gives you oxygen, very important. And it could also give you pharmaceuticals. Like, your growth hormone or whatever, your your parathyroid hormone so you don't lose your bone mass. But think about all the other things that could create. This is just a technology that could be used to produce any protein, whatever, you could produce theoretically in this way. And so there you know there may be again a whole suite of transgenic or modified plants.

J: Can they make a Xanax salad that would be actually.

S: Xanax salad? Theoretically.

C: Theoretically.

AJR: Prozac coffee.

S: Bring in a bunch of seeds and you have them as, yeah, there might also be industrial uses not just pharmaceutical uses that you know you might be able to make stuff out of it. So growing these transgenic plants on Mars could be very very useful for a lot of things. Again plus you also get your food and it would be nice to also, you know, genetically modify them so that they can grow on Mars. Also you might want to optimize them so they can be grown hydroponically. And of course these all can have applications on Earth. For example, there are countries in on Earth where people don't have good nutrition, they don't have adequate medical care and they can't get these daily injections of parathyroid hormone, of course that's a separate problem that we should be fixing. But in the meantime mitigating that by saying well: "Here, you can just grow these plants" and that will be better than nothing. It could be a partial solution to that. So there could be a lot of runoff from this technology that has earthly applications. But I definitely think that genetically modified plants are going to be playing a huge role in any future space colonies that we have, settlements.

J: One thing that sticks in my head when I hear this is, how much space are they going to have to grow plants indoors? I mean, imagine if they had a space as big as this room. Which is huge on Mars, right? How much food can you grow in a room this size?

C: Vertical farming is how you have to do it. It's all hydroponics so it's like rows and rows and rows, you can grow acres worth of food in like no space.

E: And like how many people are going, it's not, I don't think hundreds of people probably could be a dozen, maybe.

AJR: The six of us and who else? (Cara laughs)

J: Can they use and is the Sun intensity there different enough.

S: The Sun intensity on Mars is 50% Earth. 50%.

C: They probably use grow light anyway.

S: But you can use grow lights.

C: Grow lights are more efficient anyway.

S: So they did they, you know, that's why people Jay have been experimenting with the, the self-contained, you know, places. To see like well how could can they grow their food.

E: The biodome.

S: The biodomes, yeah. So the ones that they've run so far have been able to grow 70 or 80% of the food that they need, so they haven't made them yet intensive enough that it was 100%. But it creates more than enough oxygen. Actually, you know, I read an interesting paper, if you grew enough food to feed everyone there, you would actually overproduce oxygen and that would be a hazard.

E: Well you have to vent it.

S: Unless you vent it. Yeah because it would blow up, you know.

B: Or turn it into fuel.

S: Yeah or turn into fuel. So that would have to be built in. So you have to overproduce oxygen then siphon off the excess for fuel, right? That's a great fuel.

J: They have that moxie machine that's converting the atmosphere into oxygen for fuel.

C: And when you grow in a closed system, a fully sealed closed system like they're doing with some of the shipping container systems, you have no loss of water.

S: Yeah water use.

C: Because it doesn't evaporate, it evaporates, condenses, it's always the same water being used.

E: All contained.

C: Yeah, it's 100%. So that's really really beneficial too.

AJR: I want to move into one of those now.

[commercial brake]

Homeopathy Trials and Publication Bias (37:13)

• Reporting bias makes homeopathy trials look like homeopathy works

Anti-Universe (52:34)

• Our universe may have a twin that runs backward in time

Psychedelic Treatments (1:04:49)

• AI maps psychedelic ‘trip’ experiences to regions of the brain – opening new route to psychiatric treatments

Plastic in our Blood (1:21:00)

• The Guardian: Microplastics found in human blood for first time

Science or Fiction (1:30:55)

Theme: Ancillary skills of U.S. presidents Item #1: President Nixon was an accomplished musician who could play the piano, clarinet, violin, accordian, and saxophone. Item #2: President Lincoln was a champion wrestler, being almost undefeated and holding a regional title for several years. In 1992 he was inducted into the Wrestling Hall of Fame. Item #3: Thomas Jefferson invented the swivel chair, inspired by the long hours spent in drafting the Declaration of Independence.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Lincoln into Wrestling h.o.f.
Science	Nixon accomplished musician
Science	Jefferson's swivel chair

Host	Result
Steve	clever

Rogue	Guess
Andrea	Lincoln into Wrestling h.o.f.
Bob	Lincoln into Wrestling h.o.f.
Jay	Nixon accomplished musician
Cara	Jefferson's swivel chair
Evan	Lincoln into Wrestling h.o.f.

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:41:35)

I beg of you, Sir Arthur, do not jump to the conclusion that certain things you see are necessarily "supernatural" or the work of "spirits" just because you cannot explain them.
– Harry Houdini (1874-1926), in a 1922 letter to Arthur Conan Doyle after Doyle visited Houdini at his apartment in New York City to partake in a slate-writing session.

Signoff

S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

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Today I Learned

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