SGU Episode 910

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SGU Episode 910
December 17th 2022
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SGU 909                      SGU 911
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
MH: Mark Ho
Quote of the Week
QUOTE
AUTHOR, _short_description_
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
[ https://sguforums.org/index.php?BOARD=1.0 Forum Discussion]

Introduction

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. Today is Saturday, September 24^th, 2022, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening folks!

S: So no, you are not listening to the episode that aired at the end of September. We are recording two episodes on this day. This episode is coming out in December when we're on our trip to Arizona for our live shows in Arizona. This is part two of a six-hour live streaming show that we did. We recorded two SGU episodes. This is the second one. So this is the episode for sometime in the middle of December. I forget exactly what day it will come out. So we're going to get right to some bits for you guys. We have an interview coming up very quickly with an AI expert. But Cara, you are going to start us off with What's the Word?

What's the Word? (1:06)

• Word_Topic_Concept

C: So I came across something really fun that I think you guys will enjoy. It is a website that was started by a man named Jesse Sheidlower. I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. He created the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. It went live during the pandemic because he was home a lot and he was bored. I think he used to work for like the Oxford English Dictionary. It's got 1800 entries. I think it's always growing. And it has information about where these terms, these science fiction terms were first coined. He has the passage from where they were used and a little bit of background about the author. So I thought it would be fun to go into the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction and talk about some common words that of course, you may or may not know were developed by science fiction writers, but are used all the time now in common science parlance. So the very first one, and it's probably the most famous example of this pretty much across all the coverage that I see online, everybody cites this one first, is the word robot.

E: Oh, no. R.U.R.

C: Did you guys know? Yeah. Right. So robot. So the word robot was first used, I think it was, well, gosh, it's been used by so many different writers. A lot of people will remember some of the more recent uses, but before anything, it was actually used in a play by a Czech writer, and I probably can't pronounce their name. Maybe it's Čapek.

B: Yeah.

C: Does anybody know if in Czech with the little thing over the C, is that a ch sound? I'm not sure. But this Czech author wrote a play called Rossum’s Universal Robots, that's the translated title, in which he used the word robot for the first time. And robot came from, I think, the Latin for forced labor. And that's where the word robot really came into play. And so then it's been iterated multiple times since then. But the idea really early on, this was back in 1920, and the idea since then has often come from this idea of forced labor, use of labor in factories, use of labor in armies, cheap labor. That's where robots come from. And today, they still kind of carry that vibe, I guess. But obviously, it's grown to mean so much more than that, just like a non-human technological thing that does something, that does work.

S: Before you go off the robot, though, the idea of a robot kind of goes back to the ancient Greeks. There was this idea that–

C: Not with the word robot.

S: Not with the word robot. Just well, but you think about mechanical things displacing the labor of humans, right? That's basically the basic idea of a robot.

C: Yeah. Conceptually, this is super old. But the first time the word robot was used was by this Czech playwright. And then, of course, a lot of people think of it from 1940 when Asimov wrote about the actual field of robotics. And he had a character who was a roboticist. And so that's where it really did explode. So first use in the 20s, but then in the 40s, it exploded into our lexicon, and it was used all the time after that. Okay. So how about another one? Did you guys know that the word genetic engineering came from science fiction?

B: Cool. Which, where?

E: Well, the–

C: Right. So this was–

E: Not the word thing. They took the two words and put them together.

C: I have all my references. This was from Jack Williamson's novel, Dragon's Island.

E: I don't know that.

C: So it was an occupation within the novel of a genetic engineer. Or no, genetic engineering started in that novel, and then it took several years before genetic engineer the occupation was named by somebody named Powell Anderson. And Asimov used it also in the 70s, but in 1951 was when Williamson used in Dragon's Island: "I was expecting to find that mutation lab filled with some sort of apparatus for genetic engineering."

B: Cara, I just finished a series of books and they kept saying throughout, geneering. Geneering.

C: Geneering. Oh, love it. And that was a modern sci-fi series?

B: Well, within 20 years.

C: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

B: It was 95 actually, so it's not recent, but-

C: Here's another one that you guys might think, maybe you know this, maybe you don't. Zero gravity or zero G.

S: I heard that one. Yeah.

C: This started in sci-fi and this one's really fascinating because it was all the way back in 1938. The author Binder, Jey Binder, Jack Binder, he was actually, he's a comic book artist and he created Daredevil. He used this in his essay, If Science Reached the Earth's Core, and he wasn't talking about zero gravity in space. He was talking about zero gravity in the core of the Earth.

B: You would float at the center of the Earth because you're being pulled from-

E: Every direction equally.

B: -from the gravity of the mass of the Earth, so yeah.

C: Then later in 1952, Arthur C. Clarke abbreviated the term and made zero G in his novel Islands in the Sky, and that's when it started to take place in space.

S: Although now it's been replaced by microgravity.

B: Yeah, right.

E: Because it's not the actual zero.

C: They were like, let's be scientific about it. Let me see [inaudible].

S: Yeah, it's technically a little bit more accurate.

C: Then of course, alien, the word alien, which kind of is still, we've gotten away with gotten away from the modern usage as it relates to the historical usage. That was a person from another country or from another place. So alien from a location other than one's own. But now we don't tend to use words like illegal aliens anymore. That's quite offensive. And we've kind of advanced our labels, but that's where the word really started. And ultimately that's how it kind of translated into this idea of beings from other planets. So it's long been used to talk about something being foreign or something being from somewhere else. But let me see. The first person to use it in the way of somebody from another planet was a Victorian historian and essayist named Thomas Carlyle. And then apparently in science fiction, we didn't really start seeing the use of alien regularly as a catchall for like ETs for extraterrestrials until 1929 when Jack Williamson's story, The Alien Intelligence, was published in a Science Wonder Stories collective. And then finally, I found some cool stuff with computer terms. So the word worm, you remember computer worms?

B: Yeah.

E: Sure.

C: So this was not developed by computer scientists. This actually came out in a story by Brunner, John Brunner in 1975. His novel was called Shockwave Writer. And so here is one of the, there are two citations in it, but the earliest in the book is: "Fluckner had resorted to one of the oldest tricks in the store and turned loose in the continental net, a self-perpetuating tapeworm, probably headed by a denunciation group borrowed from a major corporation, which would shunt itself from one nexus to another every time his credit code was punched into a keyboard. It could take days to kill a worm like that and sometimes weeks." So this is our first usage of a computer worm.

B: That's cool.

C: Very cool.

B: Don't hear that word very often anymore, but.

C: No, you don't. But it's pretty cool when these kinds of things are first dreamed up. And we hear about this with Star Trek all the time. It's a million examples we can pull from Star Trek. But it's so cool that this one individual, again, I want to give him like huge props here. He's called Jesse Sheidlower, and he was already a word nerd. And he said that because he was kind of home all the time and had the time to do it. He got this site up and running during the pandemic. And it's called the sfdictionary.com, the science fiction dictionary. So look it up. You can you can have fun on there.

J: Neat.

S: That sounds cool. All right. Thanks, Cara.

News Items

Electric Planes (9:06)

• These planes are battery operated. Will that fly?

S: Evan, you're going to start off the news items telling us about an electric plane.

E: Yeah. Electric airplane in the news this week. Out of Sweden, a company called Heart Aerospace. Their mission is right from their website. Their mission "is to create the world's greenest, most affordable and most accessible form of transport grounded in the outlook that electric air travel will become the new normal for regional flights and can be trans transformational in addressing the industry's key sustainability challenges." So on September 15^th, they had something called Hangar Day, in which all their employees, all the everybody in the company and then invited guests come out to their big, big, big hangar. And they made major announcements there. Their biggest announcement was that they have been working on an airplane, an electric all electric airplane called the ES-19. It was it's designed to be a 19 passenger airplane entirely powered, but with batteries. Now they got that to the point in which they made a scale model and that actually did fly. And that was as of this past summer. But their announcement today is that they're stepping it up. It's now the ES-30, a 30 passenger plane. And all of their company's efforts are now going to go into making this design. The other part of this announcement that is significant is that they've got orders for this thing and they have orders from some pretty big hitters in the industry, including Air Canada, Mesa or Mesa M-E-S-A, United Airlines here in the United States and Air New Zealand are among them who have either put in actual purchase orders or have basically said, yeah, we're very interested in getting these airplanes to the tune of hundreds of these things that they're that they're putting in order for now. Let's talk a little bit about the plane itself. It's not built yet, first of all. However, they did right there.

B: It's right there man.

S: But they have the specs.

E: Yeah, they have they have the specs for it. And they have the then they have the test fuselage all built out inside one of the hangers that's hooked up to all the computers and all the simulators and everything. And they say that everything in that simulation is working as it's supposed to.

S: What kind of battery does it have?

E: It's going to be battery source batteries, primary five tons of lithium ion batteries right now.

S: Yeah.

E: So that's a that obviously comes.

S: It's a lot.

E: It's a lot.

B: How many tons?

S: Five tons.

E: Five tons. Yeah, that's what it is.

J: It's kind of weird. The fuselage is kind of weird. It almost looks like a seaplane.

S: That's probably the battery.

E: Yeah, the batteries are loaded down there in its belly as as it were.

B: That's a lot of batteries.

J: I'd like to see what the landing gear down.

E: Yeah, yeah, that would that would be that would be neat to see.

S: I wonder how hot it gets.

E: Yeah. So hot and fire.

B: Use the heat to heat the cabin.

E: How does that exactly work? But they must have it figured out. The range - 200 kilometers right now if you're going to use the batteries. OK. However, it does also in the tail section right below where the tail is at the very end of the plane. There is a liquid fuel reserve, essentially. So you can double the the range with that. And you would have that built into these planes in case, because when you're in flight, you may have to get suddenly diverted to other airports or other or other routes. So it's there strictly as as a contingency for those kinds of emergencies.

S: But 100 kilometers just off the batteries.

E: 200 kilometers just off the batteries from takeoff to landing. If you go if you kick in that that hybrid system, though, yeah, 400.

S: 200 or 400.

E: It's 200 or 400.

S: That's probably a lot of small city to small city routes.

E: That's right. And this was a particular goal, a threshold that they had to reach, because before this, I believe there are 19 maybe had I think was like 140 or 150. And it wasn't quite enough.

S: Yeah.

E: From the perspective of the airlines-

S: Not enough routes.

E: -not for themselves. Right. They couldn't make the routes. But getting to that 200 kilometers ticks boxes and gets you from from real destinations to destinations that you need to get to.

B: How about in air recharging?

E: Yeah. Wouldn't that be?

B: But how long would that take? How long would it take to fully charge?

J: Forget it.

E: But the thing is, this this is filling a niche for a part of the airline industry, obviously, because you are dealing with short routes. So there is right. What do you have right now for refueling on short routes? Nothing because you don't need it. So so basically the same premise. You don't you wouldn't necessarily have to design this thing with a need to recharge mid flight. It's not like you're going across the ocean or something.

B: What's the recharge time after it lands?

E: Thirty minutes, I think, is what they say.

B: Thirty?

E: Yep. Turnaround time. Thirty minute fast charge, fast charge. And maybe there's some other quicker, longer charge. I don't know what that does to the battery life or the life of the airplane, but that's what they're saying. Thirty minute turnaround time right there on their maximum altitude, 20 000 feet, which is apparently where you need to be for these this level. It basically ticks all the boxes that the propeller planes right now on these routes are filling and it meets it price wise also. So that's these are all the points that they're that they made with this announcement is that it's here. We've got it. The specs are here. We're going to build this thing out. We'll get this thing tested and in the air within a couple of years. And we're going to enter these things into service by 2028.

S: 2028?

E: 2028 is the goal.

S: That's a long time. Between now and then I bet you the batteries are going to be better.

E: Well, that's the other thing is that they said we're just dealing with what the technology we've got now and we're counting on things to get better with the battery technology.

S: Yeah. Also, you could slap some organic solar cells on top of those wings. You can't put like silicon panels on there. They'd probably be more heavy than they were worth. But organic or thin and light and very easy. They're not that efficient. But if we get the efficiency up to those like above 20%, I bet you that could add, 40, 50 kilometers to the range.

E: It probably could. Someone's asking in the chat whether they're flying right now. Obviously, this model is not flying right now. They still have to build it. The models that are flying that are all electric seem to be the single or two passenger planes in the Cessna kind of model. So those are out there to be had. I've seen video I've seen videos on that. I read news. I news I was about it in the last couple of years. Those have been out and are being tested. Military is definitely looking into them as options. But what we're talking about here is commercial, the commercial airline industry. Now, I and I always thought it was going to be a problem with with takeoff and getting enough thrust, getting those fans in the engines to turn to turn fast enough to get the thrust.

S: Batteries have a lot of power.

E: But yeah, no, that is not a not an issue. It's just they say what it just however they said, if you're going to do it with fuel, with batteries or with hamsters on a wheel, it doesn't matter. You just have to be able to be generated enough power. Now, the power density of the batteries the fuel to run the airplanes, it's much denser energy energy with the fuel. But the batteries are catching up. And like you said, Steven, within five years, next generation batteries that are coming out, they can only be better.

S: So they cross that threshold, then that's it. Then just get incrementally better from there. Have you ever been on one of those like a prop plane for a short flight?

E: Absolutely.

S: Yeah, they suck.

E: Yeah, they're uncomfortable.

B: They're scary man.

S: The worst is they're loud and they vibrate but these are supposed to be a lot quieter.

E: A lot quieter, practically silent.

S: Probably a much more enjoyable experience certainly than-

E: Certainly from the noise perspective.

S: -what's currently filling those those routes.

E: So yeah, commercial battery powered flight. Here we go. A couple years.

S: And then there's already solid state solid lithium ion batteries. They haven't quite gone into mass production. I think Japan is working, has one that they're actually commercially being used. But when that hits, those have about twice the energy density as the regular.

E: That's a nice game changer.

S: So either it's half the weight or twice the range or some combination of those two things.

B: That's a near term upgrade?

S: I mean, that's something that we could see in widespread commercial use by the end of the century, by the end of the decade. Definitely. I mean, there's already some versions of them in use. But that could be a little jump to twice the energy density.

B: But why eight years from now?

S: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, the production, it's always that commercialization, ramping up the industrialization of it. Doing it on a small scale is just different. So it could be quicker. We'll see. It could be a few years. But that way for this kind of thing, that's really what it's waiting for is the batteries just across that threshold. It's usable. But yeah, it's good to hear that-

E: It's on the way.

S: -we're there. All right.

Zettawatt Laser (18:10)

• First light at the most powerful laser in the US

S: So this is going to be a quickie. This will be a good one to just fill in before. We have an AI interview coming up in about 15 minutes with an AI expert. And so I just want to talk about the upcoming strongest laser for the United States. So this is not the strongest laser in the world, but it puts it up there with the strongest lasers that exist.

E: And the strength of lasers?

B: This is zettawatt?

S: Zettawatt.

E: Zettawatt, yeah. Oh, OK.

S: But Bob, it's the zettawatt equivalent.

E: What does that mean?

B: Well, it's a super short pulse. We're talking femto-attoseconds.

S: That's not what makes it an equivalent.

E: Multiple lasers ganging up to make the zettawatt?

S: Nope.

B: It's pulling in laser power from an alternate dimension, alternate universe?

S: So it's the Zeus. Have you heard about that?

B: Yeah.

S: So the laser part of it itself gets up to 300 petawatts.

B: OK, yeah. Respectable.

S: What they do is they feed supercharged electrons into it, and that gets the effective power up to what a zettawatt laser would produce.

B: No shit.

S: But the laser part of it itself is in a zettawatt laser. It's a 300 petawatt laser.

B: Wow. I didn't see that yet.

S: So that's why they had to use the term zettawatt equivalent in terms of the power that it produces. So it's basically like having a zeta watt laser.

B: It's like those projectors that have lumens in it. It's not really lumens. It's a lumix or some equivalent.

S: Yeah. Lumen equivalent.

B: It's crap. But damn, man. OK. That's interesting and upsetting at the same time.

S: But at the end of the day, it's effectively a super powerful laser. I mean, zettawatt is...

B: It's 10²¹, I think.

S: Yeah. It's incredibly powerful.

B: That's a whole lot of watts.

S: But you're right. It's very, very brief in terms of, because obviously, they don't have the energy to have that thing going for any length of time. They're going to get it up in stages. In stages. Yeah. In series. So they're first going to shoot it up at only one, not even petawatt. What's before petawatt?

B: Peta... Exa? Exawatt?

S: No, no, no.

J: Gigawatt?

S: No.

B: Wait. Tera? Wait.

S: Tera. One terawatt. It's going to start at like one terawatt. Then they're going to go up by orders of magnitude until they get up to the maximum strength of the 300 petawatts. And then they're going to get it up to the max to the equivalent of the one zettawatt. All right. So what's this really powerful laser for? What's it going to do? Primarily it's for research. This is primarily going to be for research. With this, you could create super hot plasmas, for example. How hot, you might ask? So hot that we can actually do experiments-

B: Big bang?

S: -on the physics they said black holes. The physics near black holes where you have this super, super hot plasma. They always make general statements about like, this will help us research the quantum nature of the universe without getting into a lot of details because they're not designing experiments yet or at least not in the reporting that I'm seeing. But that's just theoretically you're going to, you could use this laser to create super high energy physics, which will get you into the-

B: But what about a Clark gluon plasma? Does it get to that level?

S: It might be able to, I don't know. But well, they didn't comment on that specifically. I think that's the kind of thing that they're talking about. So it just gives us access to new physics in terms of experiments because the energy is so incredibly intense. They also said they could use it for like X-raying very small things. Because, but this of course would be the extremely brief pulse, but at high energy, it allows you to penetrate things that you otherwise wouldn't be able to see the interior of. So like metals and stones and things like that. So it could also be used in research that way. Again, I think it's not exactly a portable or-

B: Record player?

S: Yeah, it's not a portable laser. So I think everyone, when you hear about the most powerful laser that we have or ever or whatever, your mind pretty quickly goes to, could this be a doomsday weapon?

E: Yeah, right. Are we going to blow up Alderaan with this?

S: What are the military applications of this thing?

B: Or hand-held laser pistol.

S: But this wouldn't be useful for that sort of thing. It's not portable enough, not sustainable enough. Bob, a little bit later in this episode, you're going to be talking about laser sails, light sails basically. And I tried to find any mention of using this kind of laser for that application and-

B: Oh, thank you for doing that.

S: -nobody brought it up. But I don't know if that's just because it's not the first thing you think of or that it's just not really useful for this. Probably because it's too short again.

B: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

S: You need sustained lasers. You also-

E: And I've though multiple lasers too.

B: The resources.

S: But also, you probably don't want it to be that hot. You don't want to burn up your solar sail.

E: Yeah, you don't want to destroy what you're trying to ship around.

S: Yeah, there's got to be a sweet spot in terms of how energy intense you want that laser to be.

E: Depending on the material you're making your sail out of. But foreshadowing, I like it.

S: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we'll be talking about that more. What kind of lasers would we want? What we need for light sails? Because I think the laser-driven light sails, as we're going to talk about, are going to be important to the future of space travel.

B: Maybe, probably.

S: But there are other countries out there that have more powerful lasers already. This won't even at maximum power be the most powerful laser in the world.

E: And are they using those lasers for the same purposes?

S: Yeah, basically. It's basically a research tool.

B: Yeah, I was actually doing a search recently for the most powerful, and I came across Zeus here. But they said United States. I'm like, oh, wait, no, I'm talking the world. And it didn't. I had to look away.

E: Ooh, classified.

B: I wonder if they're equivalent. I wonder if the real number one right now, I wonder if it's equivalent, equivalent, or I would think probably.

S: Yeah, yeah, right. I think so. I think so.

B: I mean, that seems like an interesting and cheap way to really upscale your super powerful laser.

S: Yeah, it's a good example of of the fact that humans are clever. That even when we run into theoretical limitations, and we've seen this all the time, this is the theoretical limit for whatever. There's the diffraction limit. We'll never be able to image something smaller than this. And then we find metamaterials that get around.

B: Trixie.

S: Yeah, that get around the diffraction. Oh, we're just going to cheat. And we're really good at figuring out how to cheat the system. Actually, this is like the most powerful laser that we could make with the equipment that we have. Then they figure out a way to cheat. What if we feed super high energy electrons into it? And then you get the equivalent of a more powerful laser than should be able to exist with the materials that we have.

B: It's fascinating idea. I can't wait to read more about that.

S: So this is just very, very early reporting. This is sort of a quickie news item because the reporting is very early. Clearly it hasn't been turned on yet. And it's going to take years to get it up to full power. And then so probably in a few years, we'll be reading about the research that's being done with this laser. But the zettawatt equivalent is a good threshold that I thought it was worth mentioning.

B: Yeah, zetta is huge. I mean, 10²¹. That's an immensely large number.

S: All right, I hear Ian talking to our AI expert right now.

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Interview with Mark Ho ()

• _Interviewee_Topic_Event_

Who's That Noisy? ()

Answer to previous Noisy:

_brief_description_of_answer_ _perhaps_with_a_link_

New Noisy ()

[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

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Dumbest Thing of the Week ()

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Name That Logical Fallacy ()

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Science or Fiction (h:mm:ss)

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

Skeptical Quote of the Week ()

You don’t need to predict the future. Just choose a future — a good future, a useful future — and make the kind of prediction that will alter human emotions and reactions in such a way that the future you predicted will be brought about. Better to make a good future than predict a bad one.  – Isaac Asimov, (description of author)

Signoff/Announcements ()

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

• Fact/Description, possibly with an article reference
• Fact/Description
• Fact/Description

References

Vocabulary