SGU Episode 956

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SGU Episode 956
November 4th 2023
Concept art example of a Generation Ship. Artist unknown.
SGU 955                      SGU 957
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
CH: Christian Hubicki, professor of Robotics
Quote of the Week
The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It's not that there's something new in our way of thinking – it's that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.
Carl Sagan, American astronomer
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Live from DragonCon 2023

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 Sunday, September 3^rd, 2023, and this is your host, Steven Novella. (applause) Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody! (applause)

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys. (applause)

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Hi everyone! (applause)

Reflections on DragonCon Panels

S: And as you can tell, we are in front of a live audience. This is our private recording that we're doing at DragonCon, the second show that we're recording here. So we thought we would start this show with, because we've been on, we've been pretty busy actually as DragonCons go. We've been on a lot of panels collectively. So we're going to talk about some of the panels that we've been on. There's one in particular, I think that would be good for a longer discussion. Bob was on a panel about generation ships.

B: Well, I mean, I mean, clearly I was on the most interesting panel of all of us. So that's why we're going to.

S: So we're going to quickly talk about some of the other panels that we were on first.

Skepticism and Gaming (1:18)

S: So Evan, Jay and I were on a panel yesterday about gaming and skepticism, which is like two things you don't normally think go together. But it was a fun panel.

E: It was interesting in a sense that we didn't really talk about computer gaming so much.

S: We didn't get there.

E: We didn't quite get there. Most of the time it was occupied by us talking about, well, certainly our live action role playing experience.

B: The height of geekdom.

E: Also known as LARPing.

J: Yeah, LARPing is basically it, Steve.

S: I would disagree with you.

B: What's high? What's geekier?

S: OK, so more geeky than playing a LARP was going to a LARP and while you're there playing Magic the Gathering.

E: Yeah, that's wow.

S: Which we witnessed happen. I mean, LARPing actually requires a lot more physicality. It's really a sport and a lot more social interaction.

J: Yeah, very interpersonal.

S: A lot. It's role playing. It's like acting. You're not just playing, whatever. As you said on the panel, there is no shame. Everything is good. There's nobody at DragonCon has any standing to shame anyone else about what gets them interested or what they're a fan about. But I don't believe in the this is more geeky than that is. But for the record, LARPing wouldn't be on top of my list because of most nerdy things because it actually involves a lot of physicality and social interaction. I mean, what would your criteria be for what's nerdy?

B: I just say it because it's an in-joke. It's an in-joke. I did do it, but I evolved beyond that.

J: On the outside, what a lot of people think that don't know about is they think we're just like pretending to be elves going through the woods. No, it's like if done well. If done correctly. Luckily, the three of us, me, Evan and Steve, got to be involved in the LARP 25 years ago at this point that had really intense writing.

S: It was very good.

J: There was a lot of intrigue. It was hard. In order to succeed in that game, you had to work at it. It was like being on Survivor.

E: Yeah, in a way, you could relate it to that.

J: Because there are players who are evil. If you're playing a good guy, you're fighting, literally manoeuvring around other players who are trying to do bad things. That was incredible. It was an incredible experience.

E: All the while, you're constantly solving a small piece or a large piece of a very big puzzle, effectively. It is a game in the end. There are overlaps between critical thought and how you go about achieving the goals within the game. It takes a lot of skill.

S: Gaming is all problem-solving when you strip it down. It could involve a lot of different skill sets that are applicable in the real world. Logic, resource management, diplomacy, negotiation, cooperation. They're all there. In fact, games were developed to teach those skills. That's actually, oftentimes, the purpose of them.

J: I sit on the panel talking about GMing my kids playing D&D. I was super excited to introduce them. I remember having many conversations with Steve. How do you think I should do this? What should the experience be like? Because I wanted to get Steve's input from a skeptical perspective because he had kids and he kind of went through it already. I'm picking good titbits from him. It was one hell of an experience. First off, role-playing, I don't know if any of you do it, probably most of you do, but you have to sit there and you have to pay attention and you have to buy into it. Kids are known to famously not sit there and calmly listen. It's like they're erratic. My kids have ADHD, so it's even worse. I'm like, while trying to make it work with them and I'm trying to come up with what the scenario is going to be, it's been difficult, but they are getting better at it and they're getting into it. I noticed that they role-play more in their playtime with each other and other kids. It kind of sparked that with them. One story I told was talking about teaching your kids lessons. If you're GMing your kids in a game like that, you have control. You have a lot of really interesting control over the environment that they're in and things that they experience. My example was my daughter, my son and my daughter were at this merchant and it was an old woman and she was showing them things and they were going to buy some stuff and the woman pulls out this diamond and she grabbed it and took it from her. I'm like, oh, all right. I'm going to give her a real-world reaction to stealing from someone just like that. I was literally able to teach her that stealing is bad through the game, but it wasn't just saying it. She was having an emotional experience. She was really excited that she got it because I let her take it out of this old lady's hand, but then I'm like, the way I played it.

S: Did the guards beat her up or anything?

J: Well, the old woman berated her and I went a little too far, I guess.

S: Your role playing was a little bit too good.

J: It was too good. The woman was very upset and then my wife and I had a discussion with her about why do you think the old woman got upset? It was really cool and it made me realize, wow, role playing is a pretty cool vehicle. I could teach them skepticism in role playing. I could teach them difficult social interactions, like the stranger danger thing. It's huge. Kids are like, you go to school, are they going to get shot? Is someone going to take them? It's happening. It's real. This is our world, man. I look at it like I'm going to start to really try to teach them more and more lessons through gaming. It's just a great mechanism.

S: Yeah, psychologists use gaming to teach skills. Quite a bit, yeah. It's pretty legit.

E: Even in something like board gaming, which is my other podcast, if you know Which Game First, a board game podcast, we review board games, play them, review them. We've played some board games that were specifically designed for psychology, for psychology classes, psychology experiments. We have another one. I ordered another one coming up soon. We'll be reviewing that soon. And there's a ton of areas of critical thinking, science that overlaps in board game, especially nowadays. There's been a renaissance of board gaming that's come along. They've become so much more than just monopoly sari in the game. A lot of us used to play as kids. There's so much more complex and so much more going on with them. And just the themes themselves. There are whole companies out there devoted to making science-themed board games. Terraforming Mars, maybe you've heard of. Cytosis is another one. A very popular game called Wingspan, all about birding, Steve. We haven't played it yet. We should play. These are award-winning games.

J: Yeah, I love that.

S: It's not a simulation. It's not supposed to be realistic. But there's a lot of elements in there. Like this became Airborne. And the biggest, you're playing the, you're playing Plague Inc. You're the virus, right, or whatever. You're trying to kill the world. That's your goal. And the biggest threat to you killing the world is vaccines. Is the humans developing vaccines and getting the vaccine program.

B: Pesky humans.

S: Pesky humans. Anyway.

B: Wait, Evan just said board games probably, what, 10 times? Every time he said it, I heard Borg games.

S: Borg games?

B: And I'm thinking, what would a Borg game actually be like? That could be interesting. I think we'll have to think about that.

J: Before we switch topics, Ev, I think it would be cool if you guys on Which Game First came up with a list of games in some categories, like for kids, that would be good ways to teach them.

S: Educational games.

J: Educational games that actually are good. You know what I mean?

E: Yeah. We will definitely do that.

J: That'd be cool.

E: Yeah. Absolutely.

Government Coverup of UAPs (9:06)

S: I was on a panel on UAPs, formerly called UFOs.

E: Are they real?

S: A lot of it is stuff that we talked about on the show. I think the thing that came out for me on the panel wasn't really new, but it had kind of shown a new light on it. One of my co-panelists worked for the government and kind of emphasized, again, stuff we know, but it's like, yeah, one of the difficulties we have in communicating a skeptical approach to conspiracy theories about the government hiding aliens in UFOs is that the government does hide stuff. I mean, and we know that we have an intelligence community and we have military secrets and industrial secrets, et cetera. There's a certain amount of secrecy, top secrecy, built into modern governments. And so we can't say that the government doesn't keep secrets, because they do. So that just creates a challenge. How do we express to people? It's like, yeah, they do keep secrets, but not that one. Well, how do we know they're not keeping that one? So it was a good conversation, because it kind of drilled down to a couple of things that really make the UFO conspiracy different than just military secrets or intelligence secrets. One is that it's allegedly been going on for decades, 40, 50 years. There's just no parallel in reality for that. The stuff that was happening 50 years ago, we all know about now. Those kind of secrets usually don't survive multiple generations. So really the time factor was really the critical bit. Another aspect to it is that these phenomena are supposed to be international. So conspiracy theorists sometimes forget that America is not the only country in the world. You know what I mean? The American government keep this secret from us. Yeah, but is Zimbabwe keeping the secret from us? Is every country in the world competent enough to completely manage this on an international level that it's never getting out?

J: It depends on how far down the rabbit hole you go. There are people that will say, there are people.

S: You have to continually expand the conspiracy. When you ask questions like, so the media has never penetrated this bubble? Well, the media is all in on it. Why hasn't Russia exploded? Well, there's actually a world government that all of the governments actually kowtow to. You have to keep going deeper and deeper and broader and broader to maintain the viability of the conspiracy. Because otherwise it will collapse in on itself.

B: In that situation, I feel like telling these people, have you met people before? Have you ever met people? Because I don't care. When you have tens and hundreds of thousands of people involved in such an amazing thing, somebody is going to take that smoking gun, amazing evidence, and then become famous. Look at everybody. The world is flat. And become famous and become lion eyes throughout the world as the person who broke the silence. But nobody does that over decades. No one's done it?

S: What we get is rumours. The whistleblowers are just giving us more rumours. The whistleblowers aren't giving us the Pentagon Papers. Again, think about it. How long did it take for Vietnam to blow up, right? The Pentagon Papers were dumped on the New York Times, you know? Why hasn't there been the equivalent of that for this 50-year, world-changing hoax, apparently, that's going on?

J: But the biggest thing, the absolute biggest thing, is you go 50 years ago versus today, is that, again, there's billions of phones and the internet, which means that any one person, one person, just takes one freaking person.

S: One photo.

J: One photo. It goes online.

S: That's legit.

J: Yeah. And the fact is, even with all of those cameras and all of those hands and all of those different places on the world, 24 hours a day, that we don't have one non-blurry photo that's legit.

B: Yeah, but of course, but you know, today, one photo would not be enough.

S: But the thing is, all right, so the other point I made when I was on the panel is, if you listen to David Grush, the narrative is that any time a UFO crashes anywhere in the world, the government's there before anybody else.

E: The men in black come by.

S: It's like, really, how is that happening? There's 8 billion people on this world, most of them with phones. Most of them with cameras and putting cameras on them and the connection to the internet on them. There's absolutely no way they would put the lid on every single event that happens before somebody gets something real to the internet.

E: Unless the men in black are already in cahoots with these aliens, which is, I've seen that, too.

S: You have to expand your conspiracy to lizard people levels in order to maintain the narrative, because it's not compatible with the real world.

E: Or it's not real.

S: Or it's not real.

E: Which side are you going with?

Generation Ships (14:04)

S: Okay, I did some other fun panels basically talking about skepticism. We don't have to get into that. But Bob did one that is on a topic that we never really did a deep dive on on this show. And it was a lot of great content, so I thought we should just have that conversation among the four of us. So give us a quick...

B: Yeah, so the topic was generation ships. And I had, talking to the panelists, I was like, we've got to really just define what a generation ship is, which is essentially the classic definition of a generation ship is a large, really large spaceship that has a breeding population of humans. It travels through deep space for such a long time that the descendants of the original people are the people that are going to be landing the ship or reaching the destination. And the original people will be gone.

E: Bob, is there a classic sci-fi that we can point to for that example?

S: Dr. Strangelove is a great one.

B: What?

S: Dr. Strangelove. So there are very few sci-fi examples of actually generation spaceships. There's a lot more of generation silos, you know what I mean? My favorite one, of course, is the planning that we hear about on Dr. Strangelove.

E: Right, the planning.

S: Remember, animals could be there. He's like, slaughtered.

J: WALL-E.

E: Have most people here seen WALL-E? I hope so, that movie. So that ship.

B: I couldn't believe I forgot it, but the original Star Trek series for The World is Hollow and I've Touched the Sky deals with a generation ship.

E: For people under 50.

B: But there's not a lot of them, right? There's spaceships for sure, but there's not a lot of generation ships. Why? Because it's kind of boring because you're traveling for centuries or millennia and there's no contact with anything because that's basically what would happen. So there's not a lot of examples, which is not surprising when you think about it.

E: But the ship is basically a planet unto itself.

B: Yeah, in a sense. So I was in a weird position with this because we were talking about generation ships and as I really dug deep into it, I realized a generation ship is a stupid idea. It's actually silly and I can't even imagine anyone really seriously investing in it because the chances of something of this actually panning out. I mean, if you're traveling, even using a fusion engine, it's going to take you centuries to get to the nearest planets. And in centuries, technology breaks down. Radiation is a horrible problem that we don't have an answer for. Even recycling water. Right now, we cannot recycle water well enough to last for centuries. We don't know what the answer would be for that. Then you've got the psychological problem. This is torture in a sense. You're condemning generations to grow up in a ship that's got to be cramped. It's got to be not a fun place to be. You have to have kids with this woman or this guy. You've got to have kids because your genes are right. That's an option that wouldn't be very nice for a lot of people. You would have a boring job. Well, not maybe a boring job, but you have to have this job because we need these skills. And skills would be lost. It could be mutinies. There could be takeovers. The odds of something like that succeeding, I think, are vanishingly small. And there's other options. If the goal is to get from Earth to another planet that's going to take centuries, then you would need something that does away with the psychological impact on people. So you'd have to have a sleeper ship where people are either frozen or in suspended animation. A seed ship where it's just embryo, so there's no real people there. Or even better, a data ship where it's all data. DNA is digitized. And you've got self-replicating machines to create the infrastructure and create the world for the people that would then be downloaded into cloned bodies.

J: And all for the sake of what, though?

B: Well, the premise is that you need to get to another planet because the Earth is doomed. The solar system is doomed. Assuming you've got a really good reason.

S: Or you just want to expand to do another solar system.

J: If humanity lives long enough, someday they're going to have to leave Earth because the sun's going to consume Earth.

S: Oh, that's a long time.

J: But even still, I mean, who knows how...

S: We can't talk about that part. But you could speculate about running low on resources in our solar system. That's going to be a really, really long time.

B: In our solar system?

S: Yeah, I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. Or, yeah, because you think about Europa has three times the water as the Earth does. I would think it would be more cultural, right?

B: Like Expanse.

S: We saw the launching of a generation ship by a religious group who wanted... They were pilgrims. They wanted to go to a different place where they could found a new world on their religion. That's the kind of, I think, incentive that would exist.

B: Yeah, but still, that's a decent incentive. But still, it's a ridiculous endeavour for the reasons I've described.

S: It's a very low probability of success given extrapolations of current technology. Maybe in 500, 600 years where we have super reliable technology of all the pieces that would be necessary to put into place.

B: Right, I mean, we'll hollow out an asteroid, spin it for gravity, and then have it be a self-contained ecosystem with a water cycle, carbon cycle, nitrogen cycle, send it on its way, and it will just be a regular self-contained world, and they're going to be there for millennia, and that will be more reliable, say, than anything...

J: I like what you said, though, Bob, about, like, why go anywhere? Like, make an O'Neill cylinder of some sort instead of the solar system.

B: Imagine you build the perfect generation ship. It's got everything you would need. Everyone would be happy and healthy and not bored out of their minds, and everything is recyclable, everything's great, and then you put, like, 10,000 people on it. Why would they even go and spend a millennia going to another planet? Hang around the solar system. You know, go to this gas giant and get resources, hang out. Why go anywhere? Because you've got your world right there. It's been created for you. Why go somewhere else and subject generations to such solitude?

S: The dilemma you're setting up is you've got to make it good enough to function without being so good that people just prefer to stay there. But there's probably a space in between, don't you think? Where it's like, yeah, this is good, I could survive here, but if I could go to a planet, I would prefer that. If we could have a new planet to settle in.

B: Yeah, but would you still want to go if you said, well, you'll never see it, and neither will even your great-great-grandkids. But there's this generation...

S: Well, you'll have to sell the first generation on that. Everyone else is screwed.

B: Exactly. If we're going to do it, I think we should be content that we are not. There is no faster-than-light travel. We have to be content within our solar system, and maybe that will actually give us the motivation to take better care of the Earth and other planets in our solar system, which is always a good idea because we're not doing a good job right now.

J: I was going to comment on that.

B: I think when we really need or want to do that in the far future, we'll be advanced enough to send the information and not matter, but the information that can then be reconstituted through super advanced technology. I mean, if we're going to do it, that's probably how we're going to do it.

J: I imagine that people, if a generation ship existed, it's likely that they'd do the same thing that we're doing on our spaceship, which is our planet, right? We're screwing up our planet, and they will screw up their ship. You think, oh yeah, there's going to be laws, and they'll have directives and all that stuff. Hello, here we are. We have laws and directives, but people can't seem to get out of their own way. Why would it be any different in a group of 10,000 people.

S: Because you're going to put an AI in charge of the whole ship?

E: I'm out.

S: This is an interesting part of the conversation on Bob's panel.

B: They laughed at me when I said about AIs rearing these digital kids that have been created, and they were laughing at the idea of an AI raising a generation of humans. Well, I mean, come on.

S: They're controlling the society during the trip.

B: Right, yeah. That's probably how it'll be done.

S: One of the panelists made the point that there'd probably have to be a lot of deception involved. People need to be told what they would need to be told to make them buy into their role in that they're picking up the stick and passing it to the next generation. That's all they're going to do. Again, they have to do a certain job. They have to mate with a certain person to make it all work out. Somebody needs to have a long view, the 1,000-year view. That's got to be an AI running the ship.

B: Sure.

S: It is very dystopian.

E: Oh, absolutely.

S: There is no nice way to make this happen.

B: Right, and imagine if that information came out, the true nature of the world.

S: You shut down the AI, then it's chaos.

B: Yeah, then there's your chaos again.

S: There is a lot of science fiction where they're not going anywhere, but they have to create the same situation. So, like, Silo is a recent series where it's the same thing. Whereas, again, they have all the problems of a generation ship except for the ship part because it's a self-contained population of 10,000 people. The Earth is irradiated, so you can't go outside.

B: They do have water, though, which is a nice thing.

S: They have a source of water. Other than that, they have one generator keeping the whole place running.

B: They're growing food.

S: People have to have a job within the system. They're told who can have kids and who cannot have kids. Because, yeah, you have that small population. You can't count on random genetic assortment. You've got to make sure that people are compatible.

J: So it has to be super tight. That's the problem.

S: Yeah, and there's a secret government cabal behind the scenes who are secretly spying on everybody.

B: With a long view.

E: Oh, gosh. Is there a rebel faction who's trying to hunt it?

S: There's a rebel faction, yeah.

B: Of course.

S: That's a very common plot device because it kind of makes sense.

E: It stimulates reality.

S: Something like that would happen. I also always think of Fallout because every Fallout shelter is being run by Vault-Tec, and it's the same thing. They're going to be there for hundreds of years. This is a game. Yeah, it's a game. But it's the same thing. It's, again, science fiction. These modern video games are like movies in terms of their production, even more so than movies in terms of the production, the writing, and the storyline that goes into them. Of course, this was a very dystopian world where the company running each vault was secretly doing experiments on people in a different experiment in each vault. But it was still the same kind of thing where how do you have a self-contained community for multiple generations? Ember is another recent picture.

B: That was a fun movie.

S: Yeah, City of Embers. It's the same kind of thing. There, you took a test, then you got assigned a new job, and that was it. That's your job. You struggle shit for the rest of your life. No...

B: Ifs, ands, or buts.

S: That's what the test told us that you're going to do.

E: So is this the direction the panel took, or did you talk about just the technical limitations of something like that?

B: I threw the cold towel, wet towel on everything, but then we talked about, all right, assume we create a great generation ship. What would it be like psychologically, reproduction? What would that be like on such a journey on such a ship? So we went with that, but I tried to get a little real in the beginning, to let them know, no, this is a bad idea, but if we did do it, then this is what it would take.

S: This is what it would take. Like anything to do with space travel, it's a lot harder than science fiction makes us think.

E: Oh, yeah. Radiation?

S: Yeah, the radio, yeah, we were talking at breakfast about the radiation thing. There is really, I'm not aware, you guys tell me if you know, I'm not aware of any science fiction show that really, realistically deals with interstellar radiation, like gamma rays, cosmic rays, high energy. They really don't, they just kind of ignore it.

J: It's too complicated.

S: Yeah, it kind of, it's really, it's a tough problem.

E: It's a tough nut to crack, yeah.

S: Ships are never designed in a way that you would actually design them, if you actually had to deal with radiation. The part of the ship where people are would always be in the middle. You wouldn't have a bridge on top of the ship with a dome, it wouldn't exist. You would always have the maximal shielding between you and a hard space.

B: Sometimes there are some shows that have such advanced medical technology that they can actually repair. I mean, God, even in Next Gen, I'm rewatching Next Gen, and they were being irradiated by some outside source. It was not natural, but they were being irradiated, and the computer kept saying, you've got ten minutes to a fatal dose of radiation. And they brought it down to one minute away from a fatal dose of radiation. I'm like, a minute away and everyone's this calm? Give me your breaks. Which means that at the end of the show, the doctor had to go around and cure everybody.

S: You're retconning that, they didn't show it.

B: No, but no, it just makes sense.

S: I remember that, though, and that's not uncommon.

B: They were seconds, literally.

S: But they're treating it as, like, you're perfectly fine until you hit that fatal dose, then you die. As opposed to, it's a continuum. If you're 90% of the way to a fatal dose, you're 90% dead. But they weren't treating it that way.

B: No, they weren't treating it that way.

S: So you're just retconning.

B: I assume that the doctors would have to go around and give somebody an injection, at least, to get rid of all that damage. But their calmness was disturbing.

S: Again, if you're writing the science fiction, it's so easy to throw in little things about, oh, you gotta take your radiation pill today, or whatever. Just talk about something. But they just basically ignore it.

B: And even NASA, we interviewed somebody at NASA, and we were saying, what are you doing about the radiation? Because everyone's talking about going to Mars, and going to Mars is not a good idea because of this radiation. Astronauts are going to be irradiated. How much are they going to get irradiated? And she said, this is her solution. Right now, get there fast and deal with it medically.

E: Oh, my gosh.

B: That was it. They're not even at the point now where they can attenuate your radiation.

E: It's like fire walking. How do you walk over the fire without burning your feet? Just walk really fast. And then we'll treat the burns.

J: All the information that I've been reading about, because I'm a huge fan of space travel and everything. We're going to the Artemis missions, and then it's a stepping stone to going to Mars. And you start reading about, man, Mars is it. That's a tough environment. It's a planet not too far away from Earth, and it's really, really hard to put people there and make them be able to live there.

B: Yeah. The magnetosphere is diddly. It's spotty. It's not a real magnetosphere.

S: It's not global. It's weak, spotty.

B: The atmosphere is 1/1000, the density of...

S: 100, 1%.

Pre-special Report: A changing Earth (28:40)

J: It's made me appreciate the Earth. We are so unbelievably set up. We are all trust-fund human beings on this planet. We have a wonderful, awesome planet that it was almost by design.

E: Oh, here you go. You said it. The D-word.

B: We evolved here. That's why we're suited to it.

J: We evolved to live on this planet. But it is protecting us from radiation. The things that we need are plentiful.

S: We are adapted to the planet. It isn't adapted to us.

J: Exactly. But the point is, we have this wonderful thing. And I'll say it again. Holy Christ, can we please take care of this planet? It freaks me out. Every morning I wake up and I'm like, more negative news about what's going on with global warming and the fires in Canada. We live in Connecticut. And that's smoke, man. There are days where they are saying, don't go outside. That's our future.

B: That never happened where we live.

S: That was the first time in my life.

J: Yeah, but wow.

S: Hazardous air condition.

E: The air turned pink. You could see it.

S: I remember the first time it happened. I smelled smoke in my house. I'm like, holy shit.

E: It wasn't just smoke.

S: Where's that coming from?

E: Almost that chemical.

S: Yeah, like ashy. It was like ashy smell. I'm trying to locate it in my house. And then I go outside. It's like, no, it's worse out here. Maybe it's the next door neighbor. Then I realize it's everywhere.

J: And I'm like, why is all the light pink out here?

S: It changed the colour of the sky. The whole atmosphere changed.

J: And then you have a friend that lives in Texas. And he was telling me recently, he came for a visit. And he was just telling me about the temperature. I mean, it's unlivable. He's like, we can't go outside.

S: Can't go outside.

B: He's like, summers, I'm inside. He's inside. That's it. Even the pool. Even the pool, he said, is ridiculous. The pool doesn't help, because you're walking into what? 100 degree pool? It's not refreshing in the slightest. Why would you do that?

J: But this is right now. We are at the beginning of seeing the dominoes fall with the global warming threat. It's already really bad.

B: It's happening faster than I anticipated.

J: Yes, exactly. I didn't think we'd be here.

B: And I was pretty pessimistic.

E: South and Southwest took it on the chin this summer.

S: Yeah.

J: The penguin population, the ice shelf is disappearing. It was one of the worst.

S: They had a breeding season failure for the emperor penguins.

E: Oh, yeah. That's right.

J: We are going to see some horrible stuff. It's important to say, we are so far from hopeless. There's so much that we can do as a global community to work on this.

S: We're going to get into this, actually, in a later segment in today's show.

J: I'm warming it up.

S: All right, good.

E: We don't need more warming, Jay.

J: Who's talking about what? What's the news item?

S: It's not a news item. It's a discussion topic. But we'll get there. All right.

News Items

S:

B:

C:

J:

E:

(laughs) (laughter) (applause) [inaudible]

Augmented Reality Interactions (31:16)

• Smart Glasses, Dumb Etiquette? How AR Affects Social Power Balance

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Recent Mission to the Moon (54:43)

• India becomes fourth country to land on the moon, first on the south pole, with Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft

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Different Types of Mass (1:04:23)

• Mass has different definitions. The moon’s orbit confirms two are equivalent

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Star May Become a Magnetar (1:15:11)

• Bizarre star may one day become a magnetar

(click to create redirect page)

Special Report: Global Warming Policy (1:25:14)

Electric vehicles

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Science or Fiction (1:43:23)

Theme: Fan conventions Item #1: The largest fan convention in the world is the Comiket, held in Tokyo, Japan, and primarily dedicated to the sale of self-published manga, with a total of 750,000 attendees in 2019. Item #2: The first event considered to be a fan convention was held in 1862 in London, celebrating the works of Charles Dickens, including attendees dressing as their favorite Dickens character. Item #3: The longest running convention in the world is PhilCon, the Philadelphia Science Fiction Conference, held in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.**  ** per Wikipedia: "Philcon is claimed to be the world's first science fiction convention"; whether it is the longest running convention of any kind requires additional consideration.

Answer	Item
Fiction	First con, Dickens celebration
Science	Largest con, 750K attendees
Science	Longest con, Cherry Hill, NJ

Host	Result
Steve	sweep

Rogue	Guess
Christian	Largest con, 750K attendees
Bob	Largest con, 750K attendees
Jay	Largest con, 750K attendees
Evan	Largest con, 750K attendees
Audience	First con, Dickens celebration

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

S: ... In past years, I've had, at DragonCon, for Science or Fiction, I've had Dragons as a theme; I've had Atlanta as a theme; I've had Georgia as a theme^{[link needed]}. The theme for this show—

E: —The universe! S: No.

S: —is conventions (Rogues approve)... specifically fan conventions.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:55:50)

The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It's not that there's something new in our way of thinking – it's that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.  – Carl Sagan (1934-1996), American astronomer

Robotics in 30 years, Signoff (1:57:36)

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