SGU Episode 770

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SGU Episode 770
April 11th 2020
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 769                      SGU 771
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
KPH: Kevin Peter Hand
Quote of the Week
Who are stakeholders in that heritage? That pretty much means every single person on earth. Everyone has some attachment to the moon.
Alice Gorman, Australian space archaeologist
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction

Voiceover: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, April 8^th, 2020, 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: We are all still surviving.

B: Still surviving.

E: Yep. We are survivors.

B: Was it three weeks in the pandemic, and I haven't showered in six weeks.

C: Wait. Have you only been in sheltering at home for three weeks?

B: No.

S: That's been more than that.

B: For me, March 3rd I started.

C: Oh, wow. I started, it looks like, on March 14th.

E: That's around the time when I remember it all started getting shut down and people started practising all the things they're doing now.

S: In the East Coast, we're just peaking now.

C: Yeah.

B: It's funny.

S: And they're saying the next two weeks, really, really physical distancing. If you've only been sort of doing it, if you don't have to go even to the grocery store, don't go.

B: Yep. It's funny. Have you guys experienced this, where you think about your mental state just weeks ago or a month ago, thinking over what you were thinking back then? And I remember I was going to a wedding, and I'm like, well, crap, I guess I can't fly. I'm not going to fly there. That would be silly. Maybe I'll drive 12 hours and go there and hang out with 100 people. Oh, my God. How did I even entertain that thought at that time? You know? It's just so weird, the evolution, and so fast.

J: Yeah. You know, like, what was it when you think back, like, somebody told me that five weeks ago that Buttigieg dropped out of the race? Doesn't that seem like three months ago?

C: Oh, yeah.

E: At least.

S: Yeah.

E: At least.

C/B: Wow.

J: I can report to you guys that it's very difficult. I have both of my kids at home, no school, no daycare.

S: Cabin fever.

J: Yeah, it is. I mean I'm trying to get them out as much as possible, like out in the yard. We're doing tons of yard work which is good, because it's like a two-hour block of time, because we have the the sun isn't setting until so late that we could get the kids outside. Nothing is working. There is just nothing like having the kids have to go to school, you know?

C: And do they understand it? Like, do they get it at all?

J: My seven-year-old really has a good, firm grasp of what's going on. My four-year-old is just kind of internalizing it like it's scary. You know, it's a big unknown. She doesn't understand. Dylan gets what sickness is. He's my seven-year-old. He gets it, so he understands there's a really bad illness going around, and we have to isolate ourselves. But they they miss their family a lot. They miss they want to see their grandmothers their grandfather, my wife's husband, who's... I'm sorry.

S: Your wife's husband? Who's that, Jay?

B: And they want to see their uncle. Hello.

J: Yeah, they do. I mean, Olivia talks about the two of you guys a lot. But, I mean, overall, though, the stress is kind of mounting, and I'm curious to know, if a lot of people are experiencing this. I'm horrified when I read that people are alone, like completely alone. That scares me as well.

B: Right.

C: Yeah. I think it might. I mean, I guess it depends on the person and what their mental state is and the kinds of responsibilities they have. And everybody's situation is different. In my mind, I'd rather be alone than with kids, but maybe some people feel different than that, you know? I'll tell you that at the group home where I'm closing out my practicum, the girls are AWOLing constantly. It's like they get it, but they don't get it because they just... I don't know if it's an oppositional thing, or if it's deeper than that, or if it's trauma related. I mean, it's a lot of these things, but they keep leaving. And I can tell you that one specific situation, without obviously giving any detail, a girl, it was like the final straw. She AWOLed for the last time. She knew she wasn't supposed to. And they were like, you can't come back in after you've already been on notice. We've got to close your bed. Like, it's too dangerous. It's too risky.

B: Sure.

C: And she did. She left again. And when she came back, it was like, okay, well, now what do we do? And they called the social worker. Social worker said, not my responsibility. They called the county of origin. County of origin said, we won't take her unless you quarantine her for 14 days.

S: Yeah.

C: And we were like, how do we quarantine somebody who refuses to stay in the house? And it was amazing to see how many people throughout the system passed the buck and were like, not our problem. We don't want to deal with it.

B: Wow.

C: It was really unfortunate. And it makes me think of how many systems across the board are failing right now because they never built this in as a contingency. And there are probably foster kids in institutions or in foster families around the globe that are not just foster kids, but a lot of people who are in institutional care are falling through the cracks left and right right now. Amazing.

B: Yeah. And Jay, don't forget. I know someone who has a family. They're at home now. Husband, wife, two young kids. The husband got it, the two kids, and now the mom. All four of them have it in the same house. That just scares the hell out of me.

S: Yeah. If one person gets it in the house, the household's got it pretty much.

C: The household's got it. Yeah. How are they doing though? Are they okay?

B: Yeah. So far, they're fine.

C: That's good.

B: Yeah. But you know.

J: Yeah. It could be a lot worse. I know. It's a stressful situation. But the external factor is stressful. We know what's going on in the world. We know the governments are having a ton of problems with it, and there's a lot of death happening all around the world that's unexpected. But then on top of that, we're having our internal problems. Everybody's got something different that is stressing them out. Whether you're alone, whether you're in a loud house. Some people are struggling with money. Some people are freaking out about income. A lot of people are going stir crazy. I'm seeing a lot of attitudes change. You scan through social media and you see people. The first week, I'm not trying to make light of this in any way, but there was a kind of fun aspect to it. We're locked at home. We don't have to go to work.

S: You're spending a lot of time with your family. It's a change of pace. Yeah. Yeah.

J: And now-

S: It wasn't that stressful, but now it's the marathon. Now it's like-

C: Yeah.

S: When you're first going, I could do this. This is fine. Then you start to really hit the wall, like, oh, this is really getting tiring.

C: Yeah. Well, yeah. The psychological stuff is really setting in. It's like you said, Jay. It's different for different people. For me, I can tell you that I am having circadian rhythm problems at the wazoo. It is just, I have no benchmarks right now. I have to build in all of these artificial reasons to get up and then to go to bed at a decent hour and to eat at the right times and stuff because I have no external structure at all in my life.

B: Yeah. Oh, wow.

C: It does seem like a lot of people are struggling with that too. The days are blending together. What's day? What's night? When it's, oh, it's messing with my head. And I think everybody has that kind of different psychological pressure.

B: And congratulations, Care, for using circadian and wazoo in the same sentence. I've never heard that before.

C: Thank you.

B: And from my point of view, I mean, I try to make myself feel better by thinking that, I've been home for a while. I know I don't have it because I just it's been weeks and I've been, you know what to do. I know what to do to be extremely safe. I know exactly what to do. I don't have to look outside looking for zombies all day. I don't have to build barricades. I did build I did program one of my robots to be a guard sentry and, he says stuff. Bob's robot: Dalek unit re-initializing.

E: Is that the one with the wazoo?

Seek, locate, exterminate.

B: So that makes me feel safe. So, you know.

J: That was, that was epic, Bob.

S: So I do, I do want to point out that we're talking about very minor issues that we're having with this compared to.

B: Yes.

S: We can't really complain because there are people who like lost their job.

B: Exactly.

S: And have like they can't work from home. They're having serious issues with their, they have serious health problems that they have to deal with amidst all of this. And it's, we're complaining about very minor things.

B: And they've got dead like family members, you know.

S: Yeah.

B: So we're doing great.

C: So the thing is I agree with that, but, but I also, I do think it's important not to minimize psychological stressors.

S: I agree.

C: You know, there are people, you're right, like, yes, people are losing family members, but there are also people whose depression or anxiety or OCD is like through the roof right now. And even though they might not have any oh, just because my aunt didn't die doesn't mean that I'm not in a critical place. So I do think that it's important to always, yes, we should compare ourselves to other people for perspective, but no, we shouldn't always compare ourselves to other people so that we beat ourselves up about how why do I feel like crap if people are dying out?

S: You're right Cara, patients will say to me all the time, like, oh, I'm sure you have patients way sicker than me. It's like, that doesn't matter. You are you. Your problem is your problem. Every problem is important. I do just want to, I don't want people out there to think that, like, we don't have the perspective that...

C: Yeah, that we're like just whining.

S: On the range of things, we're at the minor end of the spectrum. It's still an issue we got to deal with, but I did want to make sure we were, we are putting into perspective. Don't worry about it.

C: And globally, this is going to be one of those things that, like, we're going to have all this weird hindsight about. Do you guys think about that? We're like, we're living through the news in like a major way right now. There are kids who are going to be like, Corona, like, it marked their childhoods and things like Dylan. You were just saying Dylan's old enough to kind of get it. So as he grows up, he's going to be like, oh, that time when we were stuck at home because the virus was out there.

S: Yeah.

J: Yeah.

C: It's amazing. Anyway.

E: Yeah, it's 9-11-ish.

B: Oh, it's for the... Well beyond that.

C: I think beyond.

B: This is in, this is huge. This is an entire chapter in the history books. This is immense.

C: It's 9/11-ish for the people who lived in New York City. But I think, yeah, it's really beyond for like, because it's just, it's affecting literally every person on the planet. It's incredible.

COVID-19 Update (10:22)

S: Let's run the numbers very, very quickly. So the worldwide, we're up to 1.5 million cases, 88,000 deaths. We did have, we've been talking about like, how do we estimate the actual death rate, mortality rate, and the fact that we won't really know until we have some hindsight. So I actually, we got the first study using a method that is a hindsight method where you just look at excess deaths. And so there was a study looking at excess deaths in New York City, and they found that there are an additional 200 deaths per day at home. Just these are just people dying at home above the baseline. Baseline is usually 20 to 25 people per day die at home. And now it's 200 plus so there's an extra 200 people dying at home per day. So that's probably mostly coronavirus COVID-19, although it's probably also people who are dying from other reasons, but their death was precipitated by the fact that they can't get access to healthcare, or they can't get out of the home, or they're not, whatever. Their routine that they need to stay alive has been disrupted. So there might be some indirect pandemic deaths there as well. That we won't know for a while. But what that means is if these numbers are representative in any way, we could be underestimating COVID-19 mortality indirect and direct by 40%. So that's another piece of data in all of this, which we knew was coming, right? We knew that the excess deaths, like unaccounted for deaths, was going to be another piece to this puzzle and was going to make it seem like if anything, add to the mortality rate. But still estimates are anywhere from a half a percent to 20%. It's probably somewhere in the single digits, but significant. And we won't really know until we have more hindsight on it, as you say.

E: And a second wave, maybe.

S: Yeah, that's the other thing. So China, so we always like, we can look at other countries so like, we're like two months behind China. They're now loosening their physical distancing, and they're worried about a second wave hitting. And some of the, there's some early signs that it might be coming back, but we'll see, that's going to be a really important testbed. The other little update, little update, some experts reviewed the data worldwide and said there may not be any reprieve over the summer due to the warm weather. The warm weather may not decrease the spread of this virus.

C: Yeah, I was wondering that because it seems to be affecting every continent, and they're in some the summer and winter are flipped, and it seems to not, it seems to be somewhat...

S: Doesn't care. Yeah. Okay, let's move on.

What's the Word? (13:09)

• Fomite

S: Cara, you could, you haven't done a What's the Word in a while, and you're going to do one that is sort of related to the pandemic.

C: It is. It was actually recommended by a listener. And I thought that it it just seemed like it was important right now. So you may have come across the word fomite when you've been reading about, I mean, when you've been reading anything and everything on the internet, because you can only find coronavirus information on the internet, you may have seen this word fomite. And maybe you were like, that's a word I've never seen before. Maybe not. Maybe you're an infectious disease expert, and you know all about it. But have you guys come across this word before? Not counting Steve, because he's a doctor.

S: Yeah, of course I have.

C: And of course...

J: No, I have. I've come across foment.

C: You've come across foment, but not fomite.

B: Yeah, I was going to say the same thing.

C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So fomite is a really interesting word etymologically, but it's also a really relevant word to what the world is dealing with right now. So it's spelled f-o-m-i-t-e, and it's a noun that refers to objects that could become contaminated with infectious particles, organisms, whatever, and aid in transmitting them to other people. So it's sort of like an object that's the go-between to spread infection. So things like doorknobs, toilet seats, potentially, in the hospital. We actually talked about this, I feel like maybe a year ago, Steve. Didn't we talk about some sort of study about the sleeves of lab coats and ties?

S: And ties, yeah. As fomites. Yeah, absolutely.

C: Yeah, that they can be fomites, that they can spread infection within a hospital. You'll also see sometimes that equipment in hospitals can serve as fomites if they're not cleaned effectively. But even within our homes, I think we're reading about fomites all the time because we're reading a lot about like, should I decontaminate my groceries? How do I make sure my house is clean? How do I prevent the spread of infection? But okay, fomites from an etymological perspective. This is really cool. So I came across an article in the Journal of Hospital Infection, and it's pretty funny. This guy is like railing about how we shouldn't be using the word fomite at all because it's a completely incorrect word etymologically. It actually should be fomes, f-o-m-e-s. And that's because the word fomite itself is a, there's a special, it's a back formation of fomes. This is a Latin word that actually came into existence pretty early. So there's different kind of iterations. It didn't become a medical term until the middle of the 1800s. But even in the 1600s, we started to use fomes used. And fomes was actually, came from the same roots as like fuel. And so the idea here was the word actually translated to kindling or wood or tinder, probably from an earlier form that meant to keep warm, like fauvir, which would be like the root of fever. And so the idea was that it was originally used to talk about things that spread like fire.

J: Oh, cool.

C: Super interesting, right? But then in back forming it, back forming is when you remove like prefixes or suffixes to turn a word that had them into a different form of the word. But in doing so, you actually screw up the kind of like etymology of the word. So this was, yeah, like it shouldn't have become fomite. It should have apparently become fomies, but we call it fomites and that's just how it stuck in English. Yeah.

E: Happy little accident. We kept it.

C: Happy little accident in like the 1800s. I think in the scientific usage, it was first used.

J: You're saying in the vernacular of the layman.

C: Of the layman. Yeah. You know, his vernacular. But yeah, that's a fomite. And clean your fomites, people. Now's the time to clean your fomites. Sterilize them fomites in your life.

J: Sterilize.

S: That's a different robot. All right. Thanks, Cara.

C: Yep.

S: All right. Well, let's get to the news items.

News Items

5G and COVID-19 (17:06)

• Neurologica: COVID-19 Is Not Due to 5G

S: Again, we're going to start with a couple of COVID-19 related news items. It seems like the news is all COVID-19 all the time now. It's hard sometimes. It's hard to find any news being reported that isn't related to it. But in any case, we did get a lot of requests for this particular news item. There's a lot of speculation going around that 5G networks are somehow responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic or at least making it worse.

E: I see.

C: How?

S: How, exactly.

E: That's a question, isn't it?

S: This seems to be stemming from one paper that is basing it on mainly on the fact that Wuhan, China was the place where China rolled out their 5G network first. And that's where the pandemic started.

E: That's the crux of their argument?

S: That's pretty much at the heart of it is that sort of massive coincidence about it's not like there's this, you can overlay a pattern of 5G and the pandemic. It's just like just Wuhan was where it started.

C: Even calling that a coincidence is thin. It's like two things happened in Wuhan.

S: It's barely a coincidence at that, right. But also, there's the other basis is studies showing that it's possible to affect the viral activity in an electromagnetic field. But this data is so speculative. It is a huge leap from the kind of petri dish stuff that this guy's pointing to, to the conclusion that there's a real world effect in people with COVID-19 and 5G. This gets filed under wild speculation. It's like barely even a hypothesis. It's just wild speculation. That's it. So there's really nothing. There's no science to it. There's nothing to it at all. It's not really plausible. It's just one guy's wild speculation. I did want to put this into the context of a lot of the generic 5G fear mongering that's going on. Again things like pandemics tend to stoke a lot of fear and pseudoscience because and snake oil.

E: Right. Irrational behavior. Yeah.

S: We've spoken to about a lot of the snake oil being offered, either just legitimate or premature treatments to pure magical stuff. You know, there's no tested, proven, plausible treatment for it at this point other than supportive care. So don't believe anything out there. But getting back to 5G. So as 5G networks are being rolled out in much of the world, this is stoking a lot of fears, just like 4G did and 3G, you know.

E: That's right.

S: Yeah. And none of those panned out. But this is let's focus on the science a little bit. So in terms of plausibility, I think the big argument that people who are saying that we should be concerned about this is that, well, 5G is a higher frequency electromagnetic wave than 4G or 3G. It's therefore carries more energy and that has a greater potential to cause biological harm. So let's put that into perspective a little bit. 5G is operating in the 28 to 39 gigahertz range, right? If you go higher still, you get to microwaves. And then if you go higher still, you get to infrared and then visible light. Visible light is between 430 and 770 terahertz.

E: Wow. Way beyond gigahertz.

S: So that's 12,000 times the light. Visible light is about 12,000 times higher frequency than 5G. When I wrote about this, I pointed out the fact that the computer screen you're using to read this article is giving you higher, is bathing you in higher frequency EM radiation than a 5G network. But frequency is only one issue, right? It's also power because if you were within a powerful enough focused radio frequency EM field that could cause biological harm, mainly through heating, right? Not through, so it's non-ionizing radiation, which means it doesn't break molecular bonds, but it can still cause heating, right? That's why we use microwave ovens to heat our food. And so the issue is, well, if you're heating the tissue a little bit, can that cause any biological harm? And there are studies which show that like holding a cell phone to your head does warm the surrounding tissue a little bit. But it really is negligible. I mean, at this power and frequency range it's only at most hundreds of watts, tens to maybe hundreds, depending on if you're near a tower or something. So very, very low power, very, very low frequency. Comparatively, like the 5G networks are operating under, again, at most hundreds of watts.

C: Wait, and that's not ever been anybody's real argument, right? Like, ooh, 5G is making things slightly warmer. Ooh.

S: No, it is.

C: Really? That's the argument?

S: That really is the biological argument. That's it.

C: I thought that it was some sort of magic. Like, but the waves are magically dangerous.

S: But we know that they're not because they're non-ionizing. No, it really does come down to the tissue. That's really it. And so, a lot of the scientists who are sounding the warning bell, which, I don't think there really is a consensus out there that there's any safety concern. There has been like a famous letter from a certain number of scientists, but they have a history of being, I think, being ideological and political and not being really in the mainstream scientifically. So I think that that's like a biased group. So in terms of like researchers and scientists who know what they're talking about, the frequency and power is well below safety limits. There's really no plausible reason to think that this is going to cause any harm. Again, your computer monitor is bathing you in more powerful and higher frequency radiation than the 5G networks that are being rolled out. So what about clinical studies? Like, if you look out there in the world, are people being harmed by this? And we've spoken about like the cell phone data multiple times. And the answer is, well, we don't have it. We don't have data with 5G because the 5G is just getting rolled out. But if you look at the 3G and 4G data, after many, many studies, there really isn't any consistent signal out there. There doesn't appear to be any correlation with increased risk of brain tumors or cancers or any specific disease.

B: Correlation, smorrelation.

S: Yeah. So if now, of course, that doesn't prove zero risk because you can't do that. But the data is such that we could say, well, if there is any remaining risk that we're missing, it's too small to worry about. You know, just in the background, there are way, way, way many more things in your life that are causing that are much more plausibly having biological effects. And they're probably having more of an effect on you than the 5G. So it's really, in my opinion, a non-issue. We of course should follow the data. We should do epidemiological ecological studies just to be reassuring. But I don't think there is any, I don't think this is something people need to worry about is the bottom line. And there is no plausible connection to the pandemic. And people should stop spreading that around the internet because that's total nonsense in my opinion.

J: Yeah, I mean, for me, when I first heard it, I was like, yeah, of course people are saying that. And then it really started to get around.

C: Can I, sorry to take like two extra seconds, but can I read you a neighborhood petition that my friend got on Nextdoor, which is an app that people like in the same neighborhood have access to that I just saw on her Instagram. It says, it's becoming widely known that 4G and 5G technologies cause many harms to human health. Cancer is only one problem and one that is easily solved. 4G and 5G cause 720 factorial different maladies in human beings and can kill everything that lives but some forms of microorganisms. Some pathogens and certain parasites are made more virulent by selected frequencies of RF. Insects and birds are already being killed by RF broadcasts. Broadcasts can be controlled to give selected individuals maladies. All this needs to be stopped. And then she said that 3,000 people have already signed the petition. And this is like in a relatively affluent neighborhood outside of Los Angeles.

S: Yeah. But come on, Cara, that doesn't really say much.

C: Yeah, I know. That's true.

S: Let's face it. That's like the woo population right there.

C: Yeah, these are the people. You're right. And of course they cited, I'm assuming this is that study, the 4G, 5G are very harmful to human health and environment, a preliminary review by Cristiano V. et al. in BAOJ Cancer.

S: The confusion that they're making is they're confusing hazard and risk, right? They're looking at preclinical data which shows the potential for hazard, meaning stuff is happening. So that's been likened to a shark in a tank. Yes, theoretically that shark could kill you. But the risk is really low if you're not swimming in the tank with the shark. A loaded gun is a hazard. But if you have it locked away in a safe, it's not very much of a risk. And so yes, when you have, in a very small space, cells in a petri dish and saying, well, stuff is happening when we expose them 24 hours a day to intense 5G fields, then there's a potential biological effect there. That's a potential hazard. It's not even a hazard. It's a potential hazard. But what's the risk of people out there in the real world? Well then that's where the plausibility drops off extremely low. And so far, with 30 years of people using cell phone technology, there hasn't been really any consistent blip in any of these things. So I think the risk is extremely low. But if your research is preclinical and involves toxicology and hazard, et cetera, that's your world. And some people just can't get out of their own world scientifically. And they think that that's the be all and end all. And they can't put it into perspective. And so that's where I see a lot of the papers and petitions or whatever touting the potential harm of one thing or another. A lot of it is coming from these toxicology type researchers who aren't putting it into clinical context.

C: Yeah. It's like they're forgetting that we have things like skin and skulls and white blood cells and all the things that your body has developed over millions of years of evolution to prevent every toxin in the environment from invading your cells.

S: And we're living in a magnetic field and we're living in the sun. We're being bathed by EM radiation all over the place. We're a little bit more resilient than that. Biology is, again, a dynamic homeostatic system that can deal with toxins and energy and things like that. So yeah, on the whole organism level, the plausibility really plummets.

E: I'm being bombarded with cosmic waves right now.

S: That's a lot of nuance and parsing for the public to do. They hear, oh, these scientists who say shit's happening in the lab are worried. But yeah, but other scientists who actually are medically trained aren't so concerned. The data just is not holding up. Okay. Let's move on.

The TP Thing [rename?] (29:16)

• Washington Post: Flushing out the true cause of the global toilet paper shortage amid coronavirus pandemic

S: This is a funny little thing, but we've spoken about it so many times. And I think there are some interesting intellectual lessons here. There's been a lot of discussion about the true cause of the toilet paper shortage that we're having.

J: Yes. The true cause, Steve, because there is a hidden truth out there that people don't know. And what's cool about it is it's a window into human psychology. And it shows us some of the best and worst traits that humanity shares. And just so you all know, I will be referring to this as the toilet paper hubbub.

C: Okay.

J: All right?

E: Okay.

J: So here is what's actually going on in the reality with toilet paper, right? So we know that the fact that toilet paper is regarded so highly, it shows that humans or at least some of us, we put it on a similar level as food. It's on the list. It's one of the things we grab when something's going down and it's not just local, right? It's not just happening when I say local, I mean, United States, this is happening all around the world. I mean, not only am I reading that, but I'm having people email me laughing about us talking about toilet paper saying, I'm from here, I'm from there. And it's happening all over. So the demand for toilet paper, brace yourselves, is still up. We still have a huge demand. In America, consumers have spent $1.4 billion on toilet paper in the last month. And this is a roughly 100% increase compared to the same timeframe last year.

S: Yeah, it's double.

J: So when the end of March came, supplies were so limited that toilet paper sales then completely went into the toilet. Ha ha.

'B: Ha ha.

J: Yeah. So meaning that supplies got so purchased that we had this huge spike of toilet paper purchases and this massive abnormal drop in toilet paper because there was no toilet paper to buy.

C: Yeah.

J: So let's get down to the science here, what's going on? Why is toilet paper so difficult to find? So there's a few theories we can throw around. One is a percentage of people that are buying toilet paper is extraordinarily high and the amount that they're buying as well. And the second idea is because most of us are staying at home, we're actually using more toilet paper at home, right? We need more toilet paper because our butts happen to be in our houses 24 hours a day instead of 16 hours a day, whatever it is. So it seems to make the most sense that both of these ideas here are in play. So an important detail to consider here is that toilet paper is a typical item that people go to whenever there's any kind of crisis, right? Like I said before, it could be weather related, there could be a power outage. Toilet paper is always at the top of the emergency list for some reason. I don't know why people aren't buying things like duct tape because that's so unbelievably useful, but toilet paper happens to be on that list. Now what's unique about the pandemic is that it's not just happening in one region. So it's happening to everybody everywhere and this makes it impossible for suppliers and distributors to keep up with this persistent and literally worldwide demand. Now it's also a problem that the pandemic has no end in view right now. We don't really know what's going to happen. So we're already a month into the pandemic here in the United States. It's been going on in other places longer than that, but people are still acting, regardless of where they are, like things are kind of still in an emergency. Now especially when something is not available at the store or there's a little less of a glut of it, people will notice it as you walk by, oh look, there's not many of these things anymore and people start buying them because they feel like if other people think they need it, I need it too, right? Another factor to consider, Cara, you in particular, is that since so many of us are staying home, we're buying toilet paper intended for the home, right? So when we go to the supermarket, we buy toilet paper that is targeted towards people like us, regular people. Most of us are not buying toilet paper that you'll find at your office building or your school or wherever you go during the day.

C: You mean horrible one-ply scratchy butt toilet paper?

J: Yes. In fact, I'm glad you brought that up. The quality of home toilet paper is a lot better than that. It must be rejected sandpaper that they try to sell us. It's terrible, that stuff. So anyway, the fact is that different companies sell the different kinds of toilet paper.

S: Yeah, they're totally different supply streams.

J: Yeah, it's two different supply streams, of course, right? So businesses are buying this stuff in bulk. They're buying different kinds, different grades. The whole way of doing business when you are a business is different than a consumer. I'm not saying small offices, usually bigger buildings and stuff, they'll buy all this stuff in bulk. So the supply chain is simply not prepared to make this sudden shift. And it's actually a very difficult thing. Companies that manufacture toilet paper for the home have increased their hours in response to the pandemic. And the companies that make toilet paper for everywhere else that you go have been making deals with food distributors so their products can be sold in grocery stores coming directly to a consumer, right? Now, this isn't easy. Because like I said, these giant wheels of toilet paper that you'll find in the office building are not intended to be sold in supermarkets and they're not individually wrapped. They don't come with barcodes. All of those things that we never think about, you can't just start selling those giant wheels of toilet paper to consumers because they literally can't buy them. Individual barcodes have to be created. They have to get into that stream. So they're going to be putting stickers on these giant rolls of toilet paper so you could buy them in the supermarket. The fact is, we actually don't have a toilet paper shortage. What we have is an infrastructure retooling issue. That's the real problem here. The experts are saying that the phantom shortage is not going to go away soon. And it'll probably be another month before the industry catches up with this sudden change in demand. You ever get stuck on the toilet, guys, with no toilet paper, and then you're screaming for help? Help! You're stuck. What do you do? You don't want to stand up for obvious reasons.

B: You do is you make sure you have toilet paper before you start.

J: I never do that.

C: Yes. That's a good idea.

J: Right. I never do that. It's too much thinking.

E: Like getting in your car and drive on an empty tank of gas. You're not going to get very far. You're going to get stuck.

J: But people used to wipe themselves with newspapers. They used to wipe themselves with book paper. They would go and take a shower. They'd go bathe after they used the toilet.

B: Well, all right.

C: Yeah, like a bidet, like what a lot of people in the entire world still use.

J: Exactly. I know America refuses to let the bidet catch on.

C: I think there's like a new bidet uptick because of the pandemic.

S: There is.

E: I believe that.

B: I would expect it. But I've looked into it a little bit. They're very expensive generally. The good ones-

C: They don't have to be.

B: They don't have to be. Absolutely don't have to be. But they are.

C: You can replace your seat.

B: Yes. You can go low tech. And from what I hear, the higher end ones are wonderful. But the real professional, the real dedicated bidets, they are not cheap in this country from what I've heard.

C: Yeah. I had Japanese toilets in my last house, and they weren't cheap cheap, but that's because we wanted the whole toilet.

B: How much? Give me a number.

E: $2,200.

C: $1,500? $1,500.

B: Yeah. To me, it's one expensive apparatus.

C: For sure. But we're building a house, right? But you can get just the seat for like a few hundred.

B: Right.

C: And so you take your seat off. But the problem is you have to have a plug by your toilet, which a lot of people don't have. So you'd have to get an electrician to install one. It's still a cool upgrade because then you never have to use toilet paper. And the seat is heated. What?

J: If you get the high end one, sure. Look, there is no real shortage. There's a supply chain issue. Yes, you should be frustrated if you're the person in your household that is the one that has to go to the store. And when you see the aisle completely empty, yes, you should look at that and shake your head because it's ridiculous because way too many people have way too much toilet paper in their house.

E: And I figure they're going to use it eventually. It's non-perishable.

C: Yeah. Well, and the truth is they are. But because of them, now I'm running low.

E: That's the point.

C: What do I do?

E: The hoarder mentality gets the better of us all.

B: I got a delivery. Yeah. I mean, I looked for it for a few weeks, couldn't find it. We never were in jeopardy though. We always had plenty left. We had plenty left. I wasn't worried. And by the time I saw it in the store just very recently, last time I went, they had so much of it. And you can only take two big Mega Rolls, but it was fine. There was never a real shortage for me in my household. But it was funny. Yesterday, I got a delivery of toilet paper from, I think it was from Amazon that I forget making the purchase, but I purchased it a while ago and it's got like Chinese lettering on it and they're small. I put a real roll next to it and they are tiny. They're miniature. Like, wait, who makes toilet paper rolls that small?

J: Yeah. What are you supposed to do with it?

B: It's just weird.

E: 100 sheets.

B: It was just weird. But I'll use them just for the fun of it just to see what they're like.

S: But the take home for me on this was, again, this gets back to what we call the fundamental attribution error, right? We tend to assume that people do things for internal reasons, right? So we were happy with the explanation that this was just panic buying of toilet paper when in fact, if you think about it this way, buying residential toilet paper has doubled, but pretty much your use of residential toilet paper has doubled, right? When you think about it, instead of splitting your bathroom use between home and work or school, it's all at home now. That's about right. At least from my personal experience, I'm using about twice as much toilet paper at home because I'm home all the time. I'm not going at work, which I used to do.

E: Number of hours.

S: Yeah. So you spend about half your waking day at work, half at home, and now it's 100% at home. So the numbers fit mainly with that factor. I think the panic buying is really just almost like an epiphenomenon. It's not really what's driving this. I think there's still some controversy about how much of it is hoarding versus the issue of the shifting from commercial to residential. But the numbers really suggest to me that it's probably mostly the shift to residential toilet paper use, which is interesting.

C: Or at least maybe that's where the numbers are now. But there was, right, like a couple of weeks-

S: Oh, there definitely was. There definitely was.

C: Of like sheer panic buying.

S: Once the shortage starts, yeah. A lot of people are not panic buying though, right? They're just getting their one-

B: They have no choice.

S: -package of toilet paper. Even when they can, they're sort of self-rationing. You know what I mean?

C: Well, but like Bob said, most stores are rationing anyway because they have to. But I do think that when we were faced early on with this idea that, guys, you're probably not going to be able to leave your house for a while. People were like, got to stock up. Like in a really extreme kind of way.

B: Think about it this way. How many people have gone to the store and said one of two things, oh, wow, I'm home a lot. I'm crapping more. I'm going to buy. I'm running low. I'll buy more toilet paper. Or the other group of people that said, holy crap, everything's collapsing. I'm going to buy a shit ton of this toilet paper. That's the group of people. That's the majority of people out there, I think. They're not saying, oh, wow. It's running low again. I'm going to buy some more. That's not happening that much.

S: You're just assuming, Bob. But my point is, I think that's wrong.

B: Yep, common sense.

S: That's not.

C: My common sense is right.

S: That is a wrong assumption. That's a wrong assumption.

B: I just saw a picture of somebody walking away with like 20 rolls, man. She's not-

S: Confirmation bias.

B: Yeah, that's fine. I embrace my confirmation bias.

C: I say we sort this out when we have more hindsight, damn it.

J: Oh, hindsight.

B: Nice.

Mining Space (41:18)

• ZME Science: Trump gives signal for moon mining with new decree

S: All right, we're going to shift away from the toilet paper news. We're going to do two quick astronomy news items. Evan, you're going to tell us about mining space, specifically the moon, but it is more about space in general.

E: Yep, that's right. It is more about space in general. But the news item is that there's been a new executive order that's been passed down from the Trump administration. It's called Encouraging International Support on the Recovery and Use of Space Resources. He signed it on April 6th. It further cements the US policy on the collection and usage of non-terrestrial resources, primarily the moon. This declaration references actually the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which is a real thing. And it's the basis upon which this executive order has been declared. Part of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty allows for the use of resources originating and existing in space. Here's the particular phrase that I believe they are referencing. It's Article 1, Paragraph 2. Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all states, meaning countries, without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law, and there shall be free access to all the areas of celestial bodies.

C: LOL. How did they think that was going to work out?

E: Right. Well, the treaty specifically forbids any claims of ownership of anything in space. So that's clear. You cannot make a claim of ownership according to this treaty. But specifically, it does say exploration and use without discrimination. So that's the gist upon which this executive order is being based. Now real quick on executive orders, for those of you who don't live in the United States or even those who do are not familiar with it, the executive, which is the president, can issue binding orders, which, so long as they are deemed constitutional, becomes the official policy or position of the administration. And they remain in effect until revoked, either by the sitting executive or by a future executive. So that's how those generally work. Now this policy of our freedom to explore and use the materials in space is a view that has had precedents and long sway. We never signed the 1979 Moon Treaty, which stipulates that, that treaty stipulates that you can't use the moon for anything other than scientific use. But that one hasn't really been signed by any major spacefaring nation. So it's considered not really any kind of binding contract or treaty affecting anyone who can get to the moon or any country that can get there. And also to help bolster the position, in 2015, our Congress passed a law explicitly allowing American companies and citizens to use moon and asteroid resources. So basically helping promote the mining of the moon, asteroids, and other things. Now ultimately, this is a piece of a larger puzzle on the administration's plans for NASA and the American space program in general, both public and private. The larger puzzle is called Space Policy Directive 1, Reinvigorating America's Human Space Exploration Program. We've actually talked about it a little bit on the SGU almost a year ago, because it included in that program, the Artemis program. At the time we spoke about it almost a year ago, it was leaked information, but now it's pretty well known. Artemis aims to land two astronauts on the moon in 2024 and to establish a sustainable human presence on and around Earth's moon by 2028. And the lunar resources, especially water ice, thought to be plentiful in the permanently shadowed floors of the polar craters, are the key to this grand ambition of the Artemis project. But the US will also, and I said this in the executive order, seek to negotiate joint statements and bilateral and multilateral arrangements with foreign states, other countries, regarding safe and sustainable operations for the public and private recovery and use of space resources. So that is the space news in regards to what's happening with the moon and what our ambitions are to actually go there. This just kind of further cements what our plans have been for some time. We're going to go there and we're going to use those resources. I really do hope for the betterment of the entire planet Earth and all people.

S: Yeah. But my interpretation of it, this isn't like a statement that we're going to actually do anything. This is just basically the United States asserting its right to exploit space and to thumb our nose at any international treaties or agreements, limiting our ability to unilaterally exploit the resources of outer space.

E: Yep. It says the United States is going to act with or without the rest of the world. That's basically it.

S: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. The whole idea is interesting. So certainly we want to, I think, make it easy for private investors, private companies to progress the private space technology. And part of the incentive for doing that, now you're going to make profit, right? You're going to be able to mine asteroids or whatever, make billions, trillions of dollars, and then that will get us, that will bootstrap a commercial space industry. But at the same time, we do have to, I think, as internationally, I do think we have to address this issue of, well, who has the right to mine anything in the solar system? You know what I mean? Is it just first come, first serve? Whoever gets there and puts their stamp on it, they own it? Or should there be, should we all agree on some rules?

E: There should be rules. Yeah. There should be some agreement in this. And again if the stated purpose is for the benefit of all humanity, then yeah, there should be these kinds of considerations made. There are certainly-

C: But is that the stated purpose in the executive order or in the treaty? Yeah, it's not, right? The executive order is basically saying, we're not going to be diplomatic about this. Deal with it, rest of the world.

E: Right, right. But then sort of backing to the treaty, which says, okay, so the reason part of the reason why we're doing this, ultimately the big picture, it's for the greater good of people everywhere.

C: Yeah, but isn't the executive order basically saying, F your treaty?

S: Yeah, pretty much.

E: Well, I don't know if it's really saying that. They're saying it's based on one of the principles on the first article, in fact, of the treaty.

C: Of course, they're going to find a justification, but there's no need for an executive order. This is like a formalization of a middle finger on paper.

S: Basically.

C: Yeah, otherwise there would be no purpose to write the executive order. The treaty's already in place.

E: They have lawyers who work specifically analysing space treaties and other space related legal matters.

B: Cool lawyers.

E: They're called space lawyers.

C: That's pretty cool.

E: That is pretty cool. Now, before I go off this, I mean, you can't leave that thread hanging. If you're going to have space lawyers, you got to have space lawyer jokes, right? For example, how do you become a space lawyer? You have to pass the space bar.

C: Space bar. I like it.

E: Okay, so what's a space lawyer's favorite social media site? Myspace.

S: Okay, that's enough.

E: Now, wait, there's more.

S: All right, Bob.

E: There's a lot more. Email me.

S: This is my version of the executive order on the SGU. I get to say unilaterally that we're moving on to the next one.

E: Can I have one more? Okay.

C: Poor Evan.

Comet ATLAS (48:36)

• Astronomy: Comet ATLAS may soon be visible to the naked eye

S: All right, Bob, tell us about Comet Atlas.

B: Yeah, Comet Atlas. I was going to talk about this big comet news last week and it got pushed back, so I'm doing it now. So there's new news, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to do my talk as I would have done it last week, and then at the end, I'll just add the little extra. Okay? How does that sound? Okay, so there's a new comet in town, and there's no guarantee, but it could very well be the best comet you will ever see, even potentially in the daytime. So I've been waiting for a naked eye comet for years. I was just so disappointed with some of the comets that I had high hopes for, especially Halley's Comet. Oh, my God.

S: Worst viewing in 2,000 years.

B: Huge. Worst. Yes. It was. Not only was it farther away than usual, it was, of course, incredibly overcast. So let's not dwell on that, shall we? So here's what Astronomy Magazine said. Right now, odds are that Comet C2019Y4 Atlas will be wonderful. Just maybe it will be the most amazing thing you will ever see, a great comet for the history books. Wow. So this is Comet Atlas, also technically C2019Y4. This was discovered December 29th, 2019. You may remember 2019. That's the year that now seems more amazingly awesome than ever, considering the year that followed it.

E: Oh, the COVID times. I remember.

B: The discovery was made by Atlas Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System. That's where Atlas comes from. And it's actually one of the few automated surveys of the sky looking for potentially nasty Earth-crossing asteroids. And it just occurred to me, this is an example of a country seriously planning for a low probability but especially deadly natural event. How refreshing is that? So refreshing that that even happens. But as Steven, my Spanish teacher, Mr. Ayerberry would say after a tangent, Steve, what do you say? What would you say?

S: Anyhoo.

B: Anyhoo. So why is this potentially world-class comet that awesome? Why could it potentially be that way? And it has to do with its changing magnitude. This is why we think it's so special. And magnitude is a special thing in astronomy. In this context, magnitude is a measure of the brightness of an object. It has no units. So you would say something like it's a magnitude 7 star, something like that. You would say it like that. But each increment though from one magnitude to the next, that change is an increase in the brightness by a factor of the fifth root of 100, which is about 2.5, a little bit more than 2.5 times. So a magnitude 7 star is about 2.5 times brighter than a magnitude 6 star. And there's numbers for everything, everything that you could see in the sky. The sun has an apparent magnitude of minus 27, so it kind of goes up to minus 27. That's super bright. That's the star. Nothing's really going to be much brighter than that unless you're close to a nuclear blast or something. So there's Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. That's minus like 1.46 magnitude. The full moon is a minus 13, so it's bright, very bright, of course, full moon. A minus 4, so a minus 4 you could see during the day with a naked eye when the sun is out. You will see something that's a minus 4. That's bright enough to see during the day, minus 4, minus 5. Other stars, Polaris is a 2, positive 2. So the limit for the naked eye is magnitude 6. If you're higher than a magnitude 6, you're just too dim. You need binoculars or telescopes or something. So these are all apparent magnitudes. That's how they appear from the perspective of Earth. There's also an absolute magnitude, which is really cool. That calculates what the apparent magnitude would be if the object were moved to 10 parsecs, which is 32.6 light years away. The comets themselves, we've all heard of this. They're cosmic snowballs, right? Frozen gases, rock and dust, and that's about it. The increasing heat of the sun during their approach causes an outgassing, right? So you're creating basically an atmosphere around the comet. That's called a coma, and that coma can actually be sometimes 15 Earth diameters or larger. Atlas, they are saying that the coma of Atlas, the atmosphere of Atlas could be many times bigger than Jupiter itself. Gargantuan.

E: That's huge.

B: Gargantuan. But of course, it's kind of a diffuse light, and when you calculate the magnitude of a comet, they take all that light that's in the coma, and they squish it down into like a star-sized object and tell you the magnitude, but it's a little bit more diffuse because it's spread out. Now, the comet's dust and ionized gas particles famously extend, what? Into the distinct tails, different types of tails, with the ion tail always pointing away from the sun. The dust tail kind of lags behind a little bit. Now, all of these outgassed particles reflect light, right? They reflect light, and they even glow on their own, and that brings the comet to visual life and greatly increasing the magnitude as it approaches, ever increasing for the most part. Okay, so that is why Atlas is so startling. Its magnitude is changing far beyond what is typical. In December, it was like close to a 20th magnitude. I think it was 19.6 magnitude, which is so faint, very, very faint. This is three astronomical units from the sun, about 400,000 times dimmer than naked eye visibility. I mean, there's no way you were ever going to see that, very, very dim. But by March 7th, it was already a magnitude plus eight. That's over 600 times brighter than was forecast. So this thing was skyrocketing up in brightness, and this is what got people so excited, including me.

E: Yeah, let's get to negative 27.

B: But remember, now comets are unpredictable and quixotic. Many in the past have looked incredibly promising, only to fizzle out. So you've got to keep that in mind. Some have looked great. Next thing you know, they just start dimming, disappear, break apart. I mean, so there's no firm predictions that you can make. Just kind of cross your fingers and hope for the best. But with these best case scenarios, it was hard not to get a little excited. And the other big thing I wanted to talk about with this comet is that the tail, the star of the show really is the tail. One article said it interestingly. They said, when you're a grandparent and you're talking about this comet in 30 years, you're going to be talking about that tail, not the coma so much, but the tail. And the tail for this one looks like it could be magnificent, changing from a brilliant emerald to maybe transitioning to a blue as the ionization ramps up. And the tail is going to be extra, extra bright because its orientation is such that it's reflecting even more light than you would normally get, increasing its magnitude by one or two times. So even that. And then there could be something called a disconnection event, where the tail appears to break away and then reform a short time later. So just magnificent sights that we could potentially see when it reaches perihelion, say end of May. I mean, and it gets to... And don't forget, like I said, some predictions have it to plus one to minus five magnitude, which means that it could potentially be daytime visible, which is, oh, such incredible icing on the cake. So that's my report as of last week. In the past week, well, to sum up developments, I would say, just forget 70% of the shit I just said.

C: Oh, no.

J: What? Why?

B: Do you know why? You know why? Because the damn comet has basically broken up.

E: Oh, what?

B: It's just like broken up.

J: Oh, Bob, I'm sorry, man.

B: And yet again, yet again, something awesome in the sky doesn't happen because I'm cursed.

C: It's because you chose to do this news item last week, isn't it?

B: Right. You know, are you happy now, universe, if that's your real name? Are you happy now?

J: Bob, Bob.

E: It's that 5G radiation broken up. It's clear.

J: Bob, I don't say this that often, but I recommend you start drinking heavily.

B: Jay, it's a pandemic. Everyone's drinking heavily, my friend. So as a matter of fact, I just saw on the conversation that the alcohol sales are way up because everyone's drinking to forget the pandemic. So since last week, the brightness stalled. And then after that, it started to decrease steadily and like, oh, no, that's not good. And then they looked at images and it showed what was this elongated pseudonucleus that kind of lined up with the tail. And that's exactly, yep, exactly what you would expect to see when the excrement hits the fan or as astronomers call it, a major disruption of the comet. Oh, yes. Of course. So then they did follow up observations in recent days and they just confirmed the belief that the comet has broken up. So this is not going to be even a naked eye at night comet. Forget about naked eye during the day. Maybe your binoculars or you'll probably see something with telescopes for sure. Almost certainly there'll be something there that might be kind of cool. But man the great naked eye comet of 2020 is now not going to happen. And crap.

S: It fizzled.

E: It fizzled out. The Bob effect.

B: I will say no more.

S: It was going to come really close. I mean, it is going to get the pieces of it coming really close to Earth.

B: Relatively. I mean, it was going to be just spectacular. I've never seen such exuberant such excitement.

S: If it held together, it would have been awesome.

B: Yeah, it would have. Like the guy, like astronomy.com said, this would be the exact quote. It would have been magnificent. It seemed like it was going to be magnificent. But this is what happens with comets.

S: How about, Bob, will we get a meteor shower at least out of it?

B: I guess I guess that's possible because, yeah, that's what meteor showers are composed of, right? The debris from comets. And this one, this comet is especially fascinating because this was, they think, the theory is that this comet is just a piece of some megacomet, a very old megacomet that broke apart very, very long ago. That comet must have been truly amazing. But some of the comets that we see, they think are along the same, have the same orbit as that megacomet did from so long ago. But they're not certain if that's the case. But it's just another interesting little tangent and side piece to this.

S: I thought that was going to be an exciting end to our news segment.

B: Oh my God, dude. Yeah, right? I was like this pandemic sucks, but look at this epic comet. But no.

E: Hey, Bob.

B: Yo.

E: What do you call a space lawyer who doesn't lie?

B: What?

E: Serious.

B: All right. Nice.

E: Thank you.

S: You had to throw that in there, huh?

E: Yeah. I got more.

Who's That Noisy? (59:25)

• Answer to last week’s Noisy: _brief_description_perhaps_with_link_

S: Jay, who's that noisy time?

J: Steve, last week I played a noisy. Now, what I decided to do was instead of play back the noisy, I'm going to try to simulate it with my mouth. So here it is. [plays Noisy] Thank you.

C: Quite the simulation. Yeah.

J: Be careful. If you have sensitive ears or you're listening with headphones, just turn the volume down a little bit when you hear the segment start, just in case I do forget. That would be a little bit smarter, I think. Because it's also very hard for me to judge what it's actually going to sound like in your headphones. So anyway, I'm sorry. Let's work together on this. No need to send me angry e-mails anymore.

E: I'll stop.

J: All right guys, what was that?

S: So I listened to it carefully and there seemed to be some kind of electrical discharge at the very end.

J: That's a good guess. Jim Kelly wrote it and said, hi, I think this week's noisy is the sound of a machine that takes its felled trees and trims off branches and bark and cuts them into lumber. I've seen that. They have a machine that they attach to a tree and it runs up the tree, like this machine that like circles the tree and it cuts all the limbs off and then it comes right back down and then they can cut the tree down much safer. That is not it, but that was a cool guess. Evan, your guess was interesting. Listen to this. This was sent in by a listener that, wait, what is this? He said, you evil, evil people. That was the subject of the email. Cillian Brown said, laying there prone, bright lights, the smell of mouthwash. That noisy is some people's soul getting their tooth drilled, cleaned, potholed. The giveaway is the sound of the water being vacuumed up at the end. So I got one more guess. This one I had to read. This was from Zan Von Ackerman. Hello, Jay. Not handsome, Bob. Okay, this one is the awesome, this one's awesome and exactly the quarantine distraction I needed. There's a sound that comes in near the end and is the last sound heard to me. It is a arcing transformer or other 60 hertz electrical short. All the rest of that sounds like gas escaping or fireworks. He goes on to describe the sound that he's hearing. This was very close, very close, but someone did nail it. This was Mark Schroyer and Mark said, the last bit of this week's noisy, that noisy sounds distinctively like electricity arcing through the air. So my first guess is that this week's noisy is the sound of a stick or a branch that has fallen across power lines, whistling as current flows through it until it fully ignites, creating an arc. Let's listen to this again now. [plays Noisy] Electricity. Hear that?

B: I believe it.

E: Yeah.

C: It's like the stick is screaming its last life.

J: It had a good death though, you know? So thank you, Christopher Beck, for sending that in. That was a very cool noisy. Electricity is always fascinating to me.

New Noisy (1:02:52)

J: I have a new noisy for this week. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Always Geologizing.

E: Yeah.

J: And here it is.

[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

So I will let you know that this week's noisy is one of those interpreted noisies. You know what I mean?

E: Yes.

J: They have taken data from something and they have transformed it into musical notes. Does that make sense to you? I remember I promised that I would do that if I pulled out one of those types. But anyway, you're going to love it if this is your first time hearing it, and if it isn't your first time hearing it, everybody is welcome to guess, okay?

S: All right. Thanks, Jay.

Announcements (1:03:52)

J: Steve, I got to tell you something.

S: Yeah. Go ahead.

J: Now, NECSS. NECSS is a conference that usually consists of people getting together in New York City, but we can't do that this year because there's a pandemic, right?

S: Yeah.

J: So what we decided to do was start a digital conference. This year, NECSS, N-E-C-S-S dot org. If you go there, you'll see that we are having an online streaming conference. This will happen on what date, Steve?

S: August 1st. See how you can just whip out answers like that, Evan?

E: That's right. August 1st. Just like that.

J: It's August 1st. Yeah. So it's going to be really simple. Right now, we have an early bird price of $25. That means that at some point in the future, the price will go up. But if you do decide to do it, all you need to do is grab a couple of your friends, buy entry into this, and sit there and watch us entertain you all day with awesome speakers and fun events that we're planning. We're in full swing right now. Planning is going very well. We have made a lot of great momentum, especially with the technology part of this. So we feel very confident about everything and really not worried at all. It's going to be just a lot of fun and it'll be really cool. We're going to be doing an opener on Friday night, and then the full conference will be on August 1st. And that will be probably a very long day of talks and entertainment. So you can come in and join us when you're available. We really hope that you do it. And anybody that buys tickets for this year will be getting a discount for meat space conference happening in 2021, which will be happening in Atlantic City, which I am so psyched about. Oh my God.

C: It's so fun.

J: Yeah.

C: Oh my God.

J: Yeah. And believe me, when I tell you, wait till I start putting up the marketing for that. The hotel is amazing. I can't wait. I can't wait. But you know what? The streaming NECSS is going to be a lot of fun. So join us this year, get a discount for next year, put a smile on Steve's face for crying out loud. I know how hard it is.

S: Mm-hmm.

J: Yep.

S: All right. Thank you, Jay.

Interview with Kevin Peter Hand (1:05:52)

• JPL Science: Kevin Peter Hand - Deputy Project Scientist, Europa

S: Joining us now is Dr. Kevin Peter Hand. Kevin, welcome to The Skeptic's Guide.

KPH: Thanks. Great to be here.

S: You are the director of the Ocean Worlds Lab at JPL, and you have a huge interest in the big question, is there life in the water under the surface of Europa? So tell us what you're doing there.

KPH: Yeah. One of the big revolutions in our understanding of habitable environments beyond Earth that has occurred over the course of the past few decades is that we now have good reason to predict that vast, potentially global liquid water oceans exist beneath the icy shells of many moons of the outer solar system. And among these alien oceans or ocean worlds, Europa, a moon of Jupiter, Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, and Titan, another moon of Saturn, kind of rise to the top as premier locales where we could search for and potentially find extant or living life that's there today just swimming along.

J: I'm sure that you guys think about it, but what kind of life would that be? And do you imagine it in your head?

KPH: Yeah. Well, I definitely imagine it in my head, and I go through a bunch of this in my book, Alien Oceans. But to be clear, when I talk about the search for life beyond Earth, I'm primarily talking about the search for the tiniest of microbe. And even just a tiny speck of life would revolutionize our understanding of biology and the origin of life and whether or not we live in a biological universe or one in which life on Earth is some sort of biological singularity.

S: If you had to guess, would you suspect that life elsewhere in this solar system is related to life on Earth or completely different origin?

KPH: Yeah. Well, so that's such an important question, and it's key to what makes these alien oceans like Europa's so scientifically important. And let me give you kind of a compare and contrast. Mars, we all love Mars. Mars is fantastic. We do some work on Mars, and on Mars, we are primarily searching for evidence of past life, life that's fossilized in the rock record. And that's great, but it could be problematic in terms of figuring out how the biochemistry works. So if we find some fossilized microbes in ancient rocks on Mars, those rocks will not preserve the DNA or whatever the molecule is that gave rise to that life. So that's challenging in terms of extinct life doesn't offer you much hope of connecting it to the tree of life here on Earth. Coupled with that, Mars, as you obviously know, is one of our closest planetary neighbours. And throughout the solar system, Earth has been sending rocks to Mars, and Mars has been sending rocks to Earth. And thus, there could be a decent chance that life on Earth seeded life on Mars or vice versa. But that is not the case, or it's much, much less likely in the far reaches of the outer solar system where these alien oceans exist. So you've got these liquid water environments where life could be alive today, and they are protected from seeding from the Earth and possibly Mars. And so that means that even if we found DNA-based life on Europa, I think it would, with a few caveats, point towards an independent origin of life within Europa that biochemically converged towards the DNA, RNA, protein paradigm that drives all life on Earth. And so there's some really interesting contingency versus convergence things to explore with respect to biochemical evolution, just within our own solar system.

E: I think that alone makes the universe a much more interesting place if there's life in our outer solar system, that it's arrived from a totally different way of coming about. That just makes the universe so much more interesting.

KPH: Right. It means that at the end of the day, really what we're talking about is, is the origin of life easy or hard? And if it's easy, life is everywhere.

B: And it seems easy, doesn't it, in some ways. I mean, there's a lot we can't say about what could be under there. But I think one thing we can definitively say is that it would have to be chemosynthetic. I mean, right? It's not going to be photosynthetic because you're not getting any sun. So that's one thing. And we have chemosynthetic organisms on the Earth. Also one thing that I keep saying about why is there life in Europa? And to me, it's like, all right, you've got a water environment. You've got heat, right? The tidal stresses from Jupiter. And you've got minerals or something like that. I mean, you put those components together. Am I missing anything? What else? I mean, that's what you need. If you have that, then there's a good chance you've got something.

KPH: That's right. So you've basically encapsulated the keystones for habitability, which are liquid water, access to the elements that are needed to build life, things like carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur. It's basically a smattering of 54 elements from the periodic table. And then aside from the liquid water and the elements, the building blocks, you need some form of energy. And as you mentioned, chemosynthesis is the best game in town when you're cut off from the sun. And that, of course, would be the case beneath the icy shells deep in the oceans of Europa and Enceladus.

B: Yeah, this seems like such a no-brainer to me. I would – if I had my way, I would focus – I would put so much more focus on this and to what you're doing. Because to me, that's the discovery to be made in the solar system. Pluto was wonderful. So many discoveries are fantastic. The odds are so good that there's some life already there on Europa and Enceladus that I think I would just pour as many resources as I could into it because it's just so compelling. And to me, such a – I would make that bet any day. It just seems so clear that it's – you know, I'd be shocked if there wasn't something there. Who knows? But –

S: Well, tell us something about the probability of life bootstrapping itself. Kevin, is there any reason to suspect that life is more or less likely on Europa versus Enceladus versus Titan or are they pretty much equally likely?

KPH: Yeah, it's a great question and there's a lot of debate in our community about this topic. And I for one rank – it's like picking a favorite child, right? But here's – let me just take Europa and Enceladus first and foremost. Both are fantastic and we certainly have an incredible amount of data from the Cassini spacecraft about Enceladus and the plumes at Enceladus allowed the Cassini spacecraft to dive right through and taste material that was erupting out of the subsurface ocean there. Meanwhile with the Galileo spacecraft at Europa, there were challenges with the high gain antenna and Europa's much larger and plumes were not detected at Europa at that time. But let me give you a couple of ways to think about it. First and foremost, Europa we have good reason to predict has an ocean today and its ocean has been there for much of the history of the solar system. So when it comes to this kind of fourth keystone for habitability in life, time, Europa and its ocean has been stable and available for life for quite some time. But Enceladus, there are still a lot of question marks about exactly how Enceladus came to be and how long its ocean has been there. Now that could be a moot point maybe the origin of life doesn't take that long, maybe it's not a big issue. But if I had to pick, I would want the ocean that's been around longer. Coupled with that, Europa is embedded in Jupiter's magnetic field and that magnetic field irradiates Europa's surface. Why is that significant to life? Well, it's deadly for us and it's a challenge for robotic vehicles. But there's a beautiful thing that happens chemically on Europa's surface that could benefit any life within the ocean below. And that is...

B: You already need life before you can really get into communication.

KPH: So this comes back to the chemosynthesis the energy for life. Hydrothermal vents, which we think could exist on Europa's seafloor, and at Enceladus the Cassini spacecraft gave us some good evidence about possible hydrothermalism on that world. Hydrothermal vents are great sources of electrons in the redox battery powering of life as we know it. In other words...

B: Like ATP.

KPH: ATP then folds in at sort of a higher level, but really the way life works is through the economy of electrons and extracting the negative change in Gibbs free energy of the environment. And I won't go into detail on that, except I know... Well, Gibbs... Actually, Gibbs is one of my favorite physicists. He was actually a professor at Yale and just highly underappreciated. And so Gibbs did a lot of great work on geochemistry and thermodynamics. But so what life ultimately does is harnesses that negative change in Gibbs free energy in the environment and also accelerates the production of entropy. But the way in which life does that is by grabbing an electron from one compound and giving it to another compound. And it's kind of analogous to a battery where you've got a negative terminal and a positive terminal. And seafloors, such as our seafloor and potentially Europa's seafloor and Enceladus' seafloor, are like the negative terminal. And life needs a positive terminal. It needs the oxidant to go along with the reductant. And that could be a limiting factor for life in these alien oceans. But at Europa, the radiation environment on the ice on the surface of Europa yields hydrogen peroxide, sulfate, and molecular oxygen in the ice. The electrons, the ions, and everything are coming in and splitting apart the water molecules, H2O, splitting that. Some recombines into H2O2, some recombines into O2. And we actually know that peroxide, oxygen, sulfate, and a bunch of other oxidants that could be useful for life are in the ice on Europa's surface. So then if that subducts into the ocean below, now you can complete that biochemical battery and the race is on for life in that ocean.

S: So just to circle back on one thing, because I was thinking about that, that isn't there any connection between the ice on the surface and the water below the ice? There are fissures we know that open up from time to time, and you're talking about subduction. If that's true, then couldn't life from a meteorite from Earth get subducted down into the water in Europa and seed life that way?

KPH: Potentially. There is a...

B: One zero chance.

KPH: Thank you. But it's a heck of a lot harder. And part of that also is that when you look at the ejecta that would make it out to Jupiter, it's generally small rocks. And there's a whole problem of something surviving for that long in a smaller rock. But now you're careening into the Jovian system and you're impacting Europa at tens, if not many tens of kilometers per second, and you're obliterating whatever was in that little ejecta onto the surface of Europa. So your impact velocity also serves as another kind of protective extinguishing factor.

B: Even a bugbear couldn't survive that.

KPH: Yeah, there's no atmosphere to slow it down. And that's an interesting contrast with Titan, where an incoming meteorite actually gets decelerated and could kind of do a softer landing on the surface of Titan.

S: So we didn't talk about Titan yet, and that doesn't usually come up as often when we talk about life on sub-ice oceans in the outer solar system. So what's the quick summary on Titan? What's the possibility of life there?

KPH: Right. Europa and Enceladus are great places to put forth the hypothesis of water and carbon-based life out there in oceans beyond Earth. Titan also has a liquid water ocean beneath its icy crust. But as you appreciate, Titan also has, on its surface, liquid methane and ethane lakes and seas. So part of what I love about Titan is that this is a great place to search for weird life. In other words, life completely unlike life as we know it. If there were to be life within the lakes of Titan, it would probably use methane or ethane as the solvent of life. We obviously use liquid water. Water is a polar solvent. In chemistry, like dissolves like, and so the polar solvent of water serves us very well. Liquid methane is non-polar, and so if that's going to be your solvent, now you're dissolving non-polar compounds. It's hard for us to even put forth a really strong hypothesis for how that life would work. But who knows? Mother Nature doesn't care what we think. She could just be cranking away with some bizarre life forms crawling along the shorelines of Titan's lakes and seas.

J: Isn't it true that if there is the potential for life there, that it's probably Cthulhu?

B: That would be so cool. I think we'd be hearing, seeing something about that by now.

KPH: Well, I sure hope so because we do actually have an amazing mission going to Titan. It was just approved. Boy, the years are passing quickly on me these days. I forget if it was last summer or the summer before, but this is the Dragonfly mission, and I'm a co-investigator on that mission. It's run out of the Applied Physics Lab down in Maryland. This is a mission that is a rotorcraft, so think of like a very large and more capable version of those drones that you see, and it's going to come into Titan's atmosphere in the mid-2030s, release a parachute, then kind of unfold a bit and fire up those rotors and essentially helicopter around the surface of Titan and landing, grabbing samples, and looking for signs of life and studying the geology and geophysics of Titan. It's going to be a fantastic mission.

S: What other missions are coming up? Tell us about Europa.

KPH: At Europa, we've got the Europa Clipper mission, which will hopefully get to the launch pad in the next few years, and depending on the launch vehicle, the rocket that it rides on, it'll get out to Jupiter and Europa in the late 2020s. That mission will orbit Jupiter, and it'll fly by Europa. It doesn't have a lander. It does remote sensing, and so it'll fly by Europa and give us an incredible close-up at a global and regional scale of Europa's surface. I'm a co-investigator on that mission, and it's a wonderful mission. I'm also helping to lead an effort to try and get a lander to the surface of Europa. We were originally hoping to launch just a few years after the Clipper mission, but right now we're kind of in a limbo. We're still studying it, but we're in a holding pattern. That's exactly right.

S: So no definite plans to land on Europa?

KPH: No definite plans to land on Europa.

S: But even landing on Europa isn't going to give us the definitive answer on the big question. At some point, we're going to have to drill down into the water, right?

B: Well, not unless it spews out through like a geyser. The lander on Europa is going to land near one of those, isn't it? So it could potentially find some biology ejected.

KPH: That's right. And so both Enceladus and Europa have very young icy crusts. At Enceladus, we obviously see the jets erupting out, and those plumes of material are repaving the surface of Enceladus. At Europa, we can actually see oceanic salts on the surface of Europa. And so we know that oceanic material is coming up to the surface and being emplaced on the surface somehow. So if we're seeing salts, might there be organics and biosignatures within that material also? And so we think that if we land in a salty patch, in a fresh region of oceanic material on Europa's surface, we might also find signs of life. Then we've got to land on the surface before we melt through the ice anyway, because we need to figure out more about the surface composition, the surface physical properties, and the exact thickness of the ice in order to then design a probe that could melt or drill through the ice and eventually get all the way to the ocean.

S: Are any other countries planning missions to Europa or Enceladus, and is there like an international cooperation going on at that point?

KPH: Well, not an international cooperation. We tried to do that back in the mid to late 2000s, but NASA and the European Space Agency ended up going their separate ways, though there's still a lot of close partnerships on these missions. And so the European Space Agency, ESA, has a mission that will go out to Jupiter, it'll fly by Europa twice, and then it'll go into orbit around Ganymede. And Ganymede's another one of these worlds that's covered in ice, but beneath its icy shell we think it too has a liquid water ocean. And it could have life also. The only challenge with Ganymede is that its ice shell is very thick, and so to the extent that we use these ice shells as windows into the ocean below for Ganymede, that's a harder story to tease out.

S: And what's the earliest where we could theoretically be getting that kind of data back from Europa?

KPH: Well this stuff is not for the faint of heart. A few years ago we were on track to possibly land on the surface of Europa in the early 2030s, but as I mentioned, we're in a holding pattern now. The basic math is that as soon as we get out of that holding pattern, it's roughly 14 years until landing. And so if we got out of that holding pattern in a few years, we could land on the surface of Europa in the mid-2030s. If it takes longer, it would be the mid- to late-2030s. And if we're stuck in that holding pattern for a really long time, we're looking at the 2040s, 2050s, 2060s.

S: Oh, boy.

B: I'm going to be dead, you know? I'm just going to be dead when this happens. If we had superheroes, this is what I would want them to do. Forget the crime, forget the arch-villains, take this lander and fly it to Europa and just put it there. And then come back, and it'll be there. You can do it fast. You could fly to there in no time, right?

KPH: Well, now, to be clear, a superhero would arguably be a good biosignature in and of itself, right? So of alien life.

B: I have a different study working on him, but get the lander to Europa first.

S: Well, Kevin, this has been really a fascinating interview. We really appreciate you giving us your time.

KPH: Hey, thanks so much. And I love the work you all do and keep helping the world think critically about the universe. Thanks.

Science or Fiction (1:26:54)

Answer	Item
Fiction	Childhood amnesia
Science	Fake crime memory
Science	True/false memory

Host	Result
Steve

Rogue	Guess
Jay
Bob
Evan
Cara

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

Theme: Memory
Item #1: In a 2015 study researchers were able to generate rich false memories of subjects having committed a crime in 70% of cases with just suggestive interviews.
Item #2: A recent study finds that subjects were no better than chance at identifying false memories from true memories in others.
Item #3: Infantile or childhood amnesia, the inability of adults to remember events prior to about 3 years of age, has been linked to the relative underdevelopment of language.

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. But before we get to this week's Science or Fiction, a couple of corrections from last week. So this was the fiction item, so it didn't matter. But I said that the mulga snake, it had the most potent venom.

B: Yeah.

E: You did.

S: And several people pointed out that it's actually the Inland Taipan, which I actually mentioned last week, as other sources said it's the Inland Taipan. I've been trying to resolve the conflict, and I have been unable to so far, meaning that different references give different numbers for the LD50 of how potent each venom is. And there are references which say the Inland Taipan has the lowest LD50. There are those that say the Eastern Brown Snake, which is a close relative of the King Brown Snake, which is the name for the mulga snake that I mentioned. So I haven't been able to confirm what the actual answer is. Yes, there are lots of sources that say the Inland Taipan has the most potent venom. But if you look at, for example, the snakedatabase.org, it gives the Eastern Brown Snake as having the lowest LD50. So anyway, I haven't been able to find a consensus. Maybe there's a snake venom expert out there who could tell me what's going on. Maybe some of these references are older than others, or they're using different methods. I don't know. None of this matters in terms of which was right or wrong, because that was all the fiction anyway.

C: Because the science was the toothy snail, the harpoon tooth.

S: Harpoon tooth shooting snail that Jay didn't believe. One other quick one. This wasn't related to science or fiction, but we were talking about the methanol.

C: Oh, yeah. We got a lot of emails on that. Yeah.

S: Yeah. So it's an interesting little thing. Yeah. So it's a common misconception that...

C: No. But I knew that, too. I just didn't remember it correctly.

S: I know that you hate that when you know something, so you don't quite remember it. But because there's so many little nuanced details. And just for the record, when you make moonshine, right, your home distilling alcohol, yes, you can create... The distillation process will create methanol and other lower boiling point contaminants like acetone, aldehydes, etc. But these are in small amounts, too small to cause blindness or any significant toxicity. They will, however, make the moonshine taste bad and will worsen your hangover. And so moonshiners who know what they're doing will discard the first few ounces which contain all of these lower boiling point non-desirable compounds like methanol. However, it is true that you can get methanol toxicity from moonshine, but not because of the distillation process, but because some unscrupulous moonshiners deliberately add it into their product. Because methanol is cheap, it gives you the same effect as ethanol, as regular alcohol, in the short term. So like when you're getting drunk, it feels the same. But in the long term, of course, the hangover is much worse and it can cause you to go blind if you can take enough of it. So yeah, you can get blindness from methanol in moonshine, but it's not because of the distillation process. It's because it's deliberately added just as a cheap substitute for alcohol.

C: Didn't we also get emails that said, and I remember learning this, but now I'm like, is that a wives' tale too? That government officials or anti-bootleggers were actually putting methanol into supply chains that they found to prevent people from drinking. Because like you said, it does taste really bad. And so people wouldn't want to drink it. And maybe they didn't have the foresight to realize how actually toxic it was.

S: Yeah, I mean, I did find references that during Prohibition, the government did "poison the alcohol".

C: But I don't think they were intending to blind a bunch of citizens. I think they were trying to make people go, yeah, you want to drink bootlegged alcohol. Well, it's going to be disgusting. Or it's going to make you sick, basically.

E: Make it a turn off, right?

C: Yeah, exactly.

S: But there was an official poisoning program, apparently, during Prohibition.

C: Isn't that horrible?

E: Yikes.

S: Okay, let's move on with this week's Science or Fiction. There is a theme this week. The theme is not snakes or venom, Cara. The theme is something that, as skeptics, we should know all about, memory, memory, okay?

E: Sure. Mm-hmm.

S: All right. Here are three items about human memory. Item number one, in a 2015 study, researchers were able to generate rich false memories of subjects having committed a crime in 70% of cases with just suggestive interviews. Item number two, a recent study finds that subjects were no better than chance at identifying false memories from true memories in others. And item number three, infantile or childhood amnesia, the inability of adults to remember events prior to about three years of age, has been linked to the relative underdevelopment of language. Jay, go first.

Jay's Response

J: All right. The first one, about it says 2015, researchers were able to generate false memories in subjects having committed a crime in 70% of cases. I mean, I think 70% sounds very high. I'm absolutely not doubting the fact that they were able to implant or prime memories, but 70% sounds very high to me. The second one says, this is one about the study that finds that subjects were no better than chance at identifying false memories from true memories in others. I would think that one is true. I mean, why would that not be true? And the last one here about infantile or childhood amnesia, the inability of adults to remember events prior to about three years of age, it has been linked to the relative underdevelopment of language. Yeah. I mean, I remember us talking about how I thought it was more around four years old where you don't, you won't have memories, but I guess language would strongly help you remember things just because of the way your brain is processing. But at the same time, I bet you that there are two very different parts of the brain. That's interesting. Damn. I want to hear the details about that one. So that first one about being able to implant memories and they were saying 70% of the time they were able to do, I think that might be too high. That's the fake.

S: Okay. Bob?

Bob's Response

B: Yeah. A lot of these jive with studies that I've read over the years, nothing new, but over the the past 10 or 20 years, some of these make sense. So I'm going to start with three, the childhood amnesia having to do with the underdevelopment of language. That makes sense to me. It just makes sense that consolidation to long-term memory would be hampered by a very immature language skills. It just kind of makes sense. Not 100% sense, but I can kind of see that one. The second one, this one makes even more sense, the one about identifying false memories from true memories. That just makes way too much sense to me. I mean, I've read years ago about studies showing that even memories, even a professional would have problems teasing the difference between a false memory and a true memory. The person doesn't know the difference. The therapist didn't really, couldn't really tell the difference. So the first one, that's one I have trouble with here. So creating false memories about having committed a crime in the majority of the cases. Now I know that they've been able to create false memories. I mean, Steve, you do it on the stage in the extravaganza. Creating a false memory is not that difficult. But to convince so many people that they actually committed a crime, I would think you would have something in your head that would be especially skeptical of of a memory just appears that is like, oh yeah, I committed a crime. And just from suggestive interviews, I mean, I think it would take a little bit more work to actually create that. So I'll say that's fiction.

S: Okay. Evan?

Evan's Response

E: I'll agree with Jay and Bob, basically. And I do think it comes down to the fact that it's having committed a crime. There's something about that that's that's not some, oh, I remember the color of the car driving by. No, this is a crime that supposedly you had done. That's not just some light thing that a person processes in their brain. I think it's much more serious, therefore greater attention to that kind of detail. So that rich false memory of that and with just suggestive interviews seems kind of flimsy the other two seem practical. So I'll agree with the guys.

S: And Cara?

Cara's Response

C: I think these are all science. I don't know. I don't know how to pick. I think that easily people can be persuaded to have false memories. We see it all the time with unscrupulous or kind of we're learning more and more what the ethics of police interrogation need to be because so many people admit to stuff they didn't do. The childhood amnesia one seems like science, too, because, I mean, I don't think it's completely about language, but you wrote it in such a way that it says it's been linked to the relative underdevelopment of language. I mean, I think a lot of it actually has to do with memory and coding in babies. Like I don't think they have their memory systems, like I don't think are as developed and also maybe just globally they're not as pruned to be able to do make these have to be long-term memories. So I just think their brains probably aren't as developed as they need to be to make these memories. But also, yeah, I think language is a huge helper in making memories. No better than chance is very specific that saying the subjects did not do better than a coin flip. So maybe they did worse than chance or maybe they did way better than chance. So maybe I'll go with that one and say that's the fiction. It was the identifying false memories from true memories and others.

Steve Explains Item #3

S: Okay. So you all agree on number three. So we'll start there. Infantile or childhood amnesia, the inability of adults to remember events prior to about three years of age, has been linked to the relative underdevelopment of language. You guys all think that is science. And this one is the fiction.

B: Oh.

J: Holy bastard.

E: Holy moly.

C: It hasn't been linked at all?

S: Really it hasn't. You know, I've read a lot about this in prep. That one, the fiction, took me the most time to prep because you had to read around it quite a bit. And language wasn't even mentioned as a hypothesis. The debate is between do the memories form in the first place and are they later purged or are they never formed? And it's linked to the hippocampus. So you were kind of right there, Cara, when you were talking about the immature brain. So there's a few factors. Here's the range of hypotheses. Again, none of them involve language, which is why I thought I was safe to make that the fiction. One is that just the hippocampus is underdeveloped. It's not able to really consolidate memories into long-term memory. And so children up until the age of three to four are living in about a two-week window of memory.

C: They're like little goldfish.

S: Yeah. They're maybe a little bit longer and then after age three to four it increases. But even up to seven, it's still relatively shorter than adults, but it's much longer. That's why we have a paucity of memories four to seven. We have memories from four to seven, just not as many like memories per period of time as adult, as our adult part of our life. But like from up until age three, three and a half, most people have zero memories. They can't recall anything.

B: Yeah. But there was, there's some consolidation going on to long-term memory.

S: Well, that's the question. That's the question.

B: Yeah. I would think it's...

S: Is it just an immature version of consolidation that doesn't last that long, or is there something else going on? So the other hypothesis is that the brain is developing so quickly at that age that it just loses track of the memories. It's like the hippocampus is basically tells the brain where memories are, and if the hippocampus is growing and developing so quickly, it basically is changing so fast, it loses track of those memories until it sort of settles down, and it's growing at a slower rate so that it could... It's like trying to refile and update its filing system, and it can't do it up until age three and a half, four years old. The evidence to support that notion is that if you take mice who have the same exact phenomenon as humans, if you teach a young mouse to run a maze, and two weeks later it forgets. If you give them drugs to slow down the development of their brain, their memory lasts longer. So there's indirect evidence that it's linked to the rate of development, but there's also evidence that these memories are formed, but when the brain... This is kind of related to what I'm saying, that the memories are essentially purged as part of the later development of the brain. So that's really... It's like, are the memories there, but just we lost the address, or the memories themselves are basically what they purged to make way for new stuff. But of course, what happens to kids in the first three, four years of their life affects their personality and other things, you know what I mean? So there is some long-term memory going on, but as you know, there are different types of memory.

C: Yeah.

S: Yeah. So it's just sort of the autobiographical, episodic memory, being able to remember a day in your life, right? That's the kind of memory that gets lost prior to the age three, three and a half or so.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: Number two, a recent study finds that subjects were no better than chance at identifying false memories from true memories in others. That is science, of course. That actually was a follow-up study to the first one in 2015. They actually were using videos that were made during the 2015 study. And yeah, it was a coin flip. People will know better. Now, you ask, well, how could you tell if the people believe it? So sincerity is only one angle to it. So people thought they could tell the difference, though. People thought they could. And the reasons that they cited, well, they falsely believed, right, that true memories would be more rich in details and more coherent. And that wasn't true, that these false memories were just as rich in details and like recalling sensations and what it smelled like and all this kind of things. So there was an equal richness to the false memories and the true memories. And that's what tripped people up.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: And this means, of course, that in 2015 study, researchers were able to generate rich false memories of subjects having committed a crime in 70% of cases with just suggestive interviews.

B: A crime.

S: Yes, a crime. I found that very surprising as well.

C: I've been watching a lot of confession tapes lately.

'S: Yeah, right. This is what it is. So they basically deliberately did everything wrong you're That's what you're not supposed to do when interviewing a witness. And they showed 70% of the time, they were able to convince people that they had committed a crime earlier, like when they were a teenager, like an actual crime, like assault with a weapon.

C: Wow. Like an intense crime.

S: Yeah.

J: But how does that work, Steve?

S: So this was so it was 70% after three interviews.

C: Yeah. And that's about like when you think about police interrogations where they keep them sometimes for like 20 hours. And all of these documentaries about it always say the same thing. People wonder, or people always say, I would never do that. I would never confess to a crime that I didn't commit. So it's hard for juries to ever believe that.

E: After 17 hours, you might.

C: Exactly. And that's the thing. You read this headline and it's like, there's no way, but you can do it. 70%.

S: Yeah, 70%. They said 70% of participants were classified as having false memories of committing a crime after three interviews.

C: Amazing. And all they did was interview them.

S: Yeah.

C: Wow.

S: Out of nothing. They created it out of nothing, just by the interview technique itself. ell, that was the whole recovered memory / false memory syndrome. That's what it was.

C: Yep.

S: Completely irresponsible therapists.

C: Terrible.

S: All right. Evan, give us a quote.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:44:05)

Who are stakeholders in that heritage? That pretty much means every single person on earth. Everyone has some attachment to the moon.
– Alice Gorman, Australian space archaeologist

E: "Who are stakeholders in that heritage? That pretty much means every single person on earth. Everyone has some attachment to the moon." And that was spoken, written by Alice Gorman. She's a doctor, a pioneer in the field of space archeology.

S: Space archaeology.

E: Space archaeology. That is a thing.

C: Oh, no. He's going to come up with a whole bunch of space archaeologist jokes.

E: No. No, no. Save those for next week. Very cool. That's the research of, obviously, human-made items found in space and their interpretation as clues to the adventures humanity has experienced in space. It's really a fascinating idea or notion. And it's considered pioneering work. And Alice is the head of that. She runs a blog. She's an archaeologist, obviously by trade, but has turned her interest into space as well to that archaeology passion. So good for her. And she's reminding us here that the moon, again, doesn't belong to anyone. It doesn't belong to any country. Nobody can claim to it. It belongs to humanity and the universe, frankly. And we all need to appreciate that and enjoy it equally for all that it is to us. So many gone culturally and historically, and it's a very important part of everyone's life. I know it is to me. I love my moon. I would hate to live on a planet that doesn't at least have one moon. I feel very fortunate about that.

S: Yeah. Imagine if we had no moon.

J: Well, we wouldn't really know, would we?

E: Boring.

C: Yeah, you're right. We might not know we didn't have a moon. Yeah.

S: But I can imagine cool things that we don't have. Imagine if we had a planet like Saturn close enough in orbit to us that we could see it with the naked eye as like a moon-sized object. Wouldn't that be cool?

C: Oh, yeah. That would be freaking awesome. Yeah, you're right. It's got to have the rings.

B: See it during the day.

S: That could totally be the case. Totally.

C: Yeah, we've got to see those rings.

B: Minus six magnitude, see something cool during the day.

E: That our moon is positioned in the place that we can have these total solar eclipses.

B: Yeah. That's cool.

E: Very special. Good to remember.

S: All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

B: Sure, man.

C: Thanks Steve.

E: Thank you, Steve.

S: We'll be getting together in two days for our live streaming event.

E: Yeah.

C: Yes.

S: This is the day before the show comes out, but there'll be one every Friday. But when you're hearing this next Friday, we'll be doing another streaming event. So check our website for details.

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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