SGU Episode 820

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SGU Episode 820
March 27th 2021
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SGU 819                      SGU 821
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
How weak our brains are, and how quickly they are terrified and led into error by a small incomprehensible fact. Instead of saying simply: ‘I do not understand because I do not know the cause,’ we immediately imagine terrible mysteries and supernatural powers.
Guy de Maupassant
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Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Jeopardy

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, March 24^th, 2021, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Hey, everyone. I'm sorry I missed last week. I missed all of you.

S: You did. And Jay is not available this week.

C: Everyone's just doing their taxes.

S: Doing their thing.

E: Well, if everyone else isn't doing them, I'm doing them for them. At least that's how it feels some days, but I'm glad I'm here tonight.

S: Yeah. But at least we're not Jeopardy, right?

E: Well, we might be in Jeopardy.

C: Yeah. Jeopardy seems like it's in Jeopardy.

S: Jeopardy's in Jeopardy. I know. How can you avoid that? That cliche? So you guys, I know you guys all heard that they had Dr. Oz on as a guest host for a week on Jeopardy.

E: Oh, yes.

S: And he's getting a little blowback. I don't know if they're trying out new hosts to see who's going to become the permanent replacement.

C: Yeah. They're rotating a lot of different people. So we've got Aaron Rodgers, Anderson Cooper.

B: Katie Couric.

C: Katie Couric. Maya Bialik.

E: Sanjay Gupta.

C: Sanjay Gupta. Kind of random. A random mix of people. I think Ken Jennings guest hosted as well. Of course, that makes sense.

E: Now what does he know?

C: Yeah. But yeah, Dr. Oz. They didn't really realize how much people were going to be pissed. And I'm seeing-

B: Yeah, a lot of blowback. It makes me happy.

C: A lot. I'm seeing some kind of like, not, I don't want to say funny, but some comments like, quote, this stands in opposition to everything Jeopardy stands for. Fans are calling to boycott the show. There's like people collecting signatures. There's no way now.

S: Well, there was a petition signed by almost 600 former contestants, former players. Calling for his removal, they said that Jeopardy is known for being incredibly rigorous, a well-deserved reputation, to then invite Dr. Oz to guest host as a slap in the face to all involved.

E: Right, right.

S: That's pretty strong.

C: It's true.

S: Pretty strong words.

B: I love it. It's true.

C: I mean, all of the clues on Jeopardy are facts. It's objective knowledge. And Oz, as we know, pushes pseudoscience on his show.

S: Yeah, he pushes crap. Totally.

E: And that's not just our opinion. They've been studying what Dr. Oz has been saying, and they've come out with reports about how inaccurate and how much crap he has been peddling. This is not just us. This is not just opinion.

B: And it's especially insidious with him because he throws the crap out there, the pseudoscience. But also, he weaves in some standard stuff that's true. So that mix is especially insidious and kind of difficult to parse if you're not really schooled in the ways of such charlatans.

C: Agree. Agree. Unlike a Dr. Phil, who is an unlicensed psychologist, Dr. Oz was like a very well-respected – what was he? A cardiothoracic surgeon?

S: Yeah, he was a cardiac surgeon.

C: Yeah. He was like really well-respected. And when he first started out in his position, a lot of what he was doing was kind of like, this is what the science shows us. And then it was like, oh, I can peddle this supplement and make a lot of money? Okay. And then slowly, it just evolved into snake oil.

E: Yeah. And Oprah did us no favors by elevating him to a level he never deserved, and he really took off from there.

S: I mean, it's disappointing that they would put Dr. Oz on the show, but the blowback is heartening. It's good to see that.

C: Yes.

E: Yeah, it is good to see.

C: Democracy in action.

E: Plus, that people are aware and people are paying attention to this. This isn't just some, oh, well, that happened. Let's move on. No, they stopped and they actually voiced their opinions and how they're impacted by this. Very good to see.

C: For sure. Yeah.

B: I'm hoping that their ratings really tank that week.

C: ust for those few days. Yeah. And then bounce back when they have somebody else who's more well-respected.

B: That'll send all the signal they really need. I think that... Because I don't think there's any real hope that they're going to like, okay, we're not going to air it. They're not going to do that. I see that as very, very low probability. But you get some feedback where you're not having lots of eyeballs on those ads. That will mean things to people with the purse strings.

S: But regardless, I hope they just... There's more to a show like that than just the numbers this week. It's got to also be about their long-term reputation.

B: And this is not good when there's already a concern. Unfortunately, yeah. There's not a lot of long-term thinking like that in the world these days. But yeah, that'd be nice if somebody was thinking about that.

C: But with a show like Jeopardy, I mean, Alex garnered a reputation over his career. And I think there's probably already fear from the EPs and the network. What are we going to do? What are we going to do now? Are people going to keep watching without him? And so to make a big misstep like this is like, ugh.

S: It's bad. Yeah. Think about it. Jeopardy is a big brand. It's been around for decades. Oh, yes. And right, they have to be asking themselves, is there life for Jeopardy after Alex Trebek? And that's going to all depend on how they manage the brand. They bring in somebody who will be thought by the fans as true to the brand, as true to the legacy of Alex Trebek, then sure, absolutely. But yeah, this is a big-time fumble. Big-time fumble.

C: Oof. Big-time.

S: So hopefully, they'll learn their lesson, and they'll recover. But the worry is, my worry is, whoever made this decision, that does not speak well of whoever the people are who are in the driver's seat at this point.

B: Right. Yeah.

S: Somebody who is at that level, making decisions for the show Jeopardy, thought this was a good idea.

C: And the thing is, you never know. You never know if it's the show, if it's the EPs, if the network was like, you have to do this.

S: Yeah. You're right.

C: And so this could be a network executive, and the show's like, no, I promise you, this is not going to end well. And they're like, do it anyway. But at least that's the response. Did I ever tell you guys? I think you know this, that I read a couple, I did clues on Jeopardy.

B: Oh, yes. I saw it. It was awesome.

E: Video clues. I did see them.

C: Yeah, I did a talk nerdy category for my podcast. And then I did a category for the National Geographic Almanac. It was so much fun.

B: Oh, my God.

C: I feel like I could I did the whole the statement, and then they would ask in the form of a question. I could do this. Why don't we get some love over here for Cara hosting?

S: You could be a game show host.

B: I'll sign that petition. Just point me in the right direction.

C: Yes.

E: You're here.

C: Mwahaha.

B: But I do suspect, I do suspect that if the real important decision that Jeopardy needs to make, and I don't know what their game plan is, are they going to have guest hosts forever? I don't think so. I think that they're just doing this until they find somebody. So the real decision is going to be, who are they going to pick to permanently replace him? That's what's going to make or break the show, I think.

C: Oh, absolutely.

B: And people will forget about Oz in three months.

C: Oh, they'll have to. I mean, it'll be like that embarrassing mistake that they don't draw attention to anymore. I'll tell you, though, I still get residual checks from those episodes. That's pretty cool. They're not huge, but every so often I'm like, oh, cool, they re-aired my episodes.

B: That's yeah, it makes me think of like Friends or Gilligan's Island, man, just having those checks. I don't know about Gilligan's Island, but I know for Friends, I know for a fact they're still getting checks. And it's like, damn.

E: They do, residuals. Yeah.

C: Larry David is so rich because of Seinfeld. Are you kidding me?

B: Oh, God.

C: So rich. Oh, Jerry Seinfeld is so rich because of Seinfeld.

E: Well, who owns the Star Trek residuals? I want to know that, who they are. They're doing pretty well.

News Items

Vaccine Hesitancy (7:42)

• GOP Men Are Most Likely To Say They’ll Refuse COVID-19 Vaccine

S: All right. So we're going to start the news items again with a COVID item. This one is about vaccine hesitancy. There's been a number of surveys have come out about this, Cara.

C: Yes, yes. So I focused on three different studies, but there are even more, and they're coming out all the time now. And I just want to, at the very top, kind of caveat this by saying, this is going to be a very America-centric segment. So before I dive into these very America-centric surveys, I thought I might do a little bit of a, where are we at worldwide in terms of vaccination? There's a lot of different ways to slice and dice the data. So if we were looking at vaccine doses administered per 100 people, so if we're looking at it like a per capita situation, Israel is by far out front. Israel has vaccinated something like half of their population.

B: What is their population?

S: 9 million.

B: 9 million. So, okay, that's great. 50% of 9 million, that's wonderful. That is great for them. But put it in context.

C: Right, in context. So that's why there's different ways to slice and dice the data, right? We've got Israel up top. We've got the UAE. We've got Chile, the United Kingdom, and then we've got the United States when we're talking about per capita. But then when we flip it on its ear and we say just actual numbers, how many physical people have been vaccinated or actually how many doses have been administered, the U.S. is way out in front, 128 million doses as of March 23rd in the U.S., 82 million in China, 50 million in India, down to 30 million in the U.K., and then Brazil, Turkey, Germany, Israel. And then here's a cool one. What about people who are fully vaccinated? So people who have already had whatever the vaccine schedule was, whether it was a single dose vaccine or a multi-dose vaccine, 53% of Israel is populated, or is vaccinated.

S: Fully vaccinated.

C: Yeah, fully vaccinated. Yeah. 16% of Chile, so they're number two, 14% of Bahrain, 13.6% of the U.S. already is fully vaccinated. And then we've got Serbia, Morocco, Turkey, Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, Italy, and so on and so forth.

E: These numbers tell me we still have a long way to go.

C: We do. We do. But one of the things that's important to remember here is that there are different reasons for lack of vaccination. There are obviously supply issues. So in many of these countries, the reason that people aren't vaccinated is because they don't have vaccine available, because they are not allowed to be vaccinated. But soon, as a lot of the writings around these surveys say about vaccine hesitancy, and that's specifically what we're going to talk about, soon that is going to flip. And there's going to be a point where, at least here in the U.S., we have enough available doses, we're no longer delivering them in waves, and now we have enough doses that people are refusing. And so how do we get those people to take the vaccine? Because we know it's important. I think here on SGU, we're preaching to the choir if we talk at all about why we should get vaccinated. Right? I mean, at this point, we know we need to be vaccinated. But the question is, does everybody know? And what are their concerns? So I've got a few things here to look at. We've got a survey, Steve, you sent me this one, coming out of Carnegie Mellon. And this one, it's actually, it's kind of smart, it's a partnership with Facebook. But to be clear, I read how they actually did the survey. When you would elect to do the survey, it would take you to a secondary site. So Facebook was not administering the survey, and Facebook did not have access to any of the data. So in case you were afraid, but it was a link on Facebook, hey, do you want to participate in this study? And this study looked at a whole lot of people, we're talking 18 million total responses since it first launched last year. This specific report that just came out was based on 1.9 million people, and it was all between January 10th and February 27th. And there's some kind of important takeaways here. One is that we are seeing that the willingness to get vaccinated is going up. So that's a good trend. Not a lot. It's a little. But it's a significant.

E: Does that also mean that the initial reaction was like, alarmingly low?

C: Well, basically, the vaccine-hesitant adults is not changing that much. It's kind of holding steady around 23%. Yeah, not a great number. Not horrible, glad it's 23% and not 43%, but not great, right? So we're looking at an increase, though, of five percentage points from 72% to 77% of people who either are vaccinated or say they are willing to get vaccinated. So in a way, what we're probably seeing is that more people have been vaccinated since before the study, and that maybe a few people have changed their minds. But for the most part, people saying, I don't want to get vaccinated is still around 23%. We are also seeing that a big reason that a lot of people are afraid or unwilling to get vaccinated is concerns about side effects. And that varies depending on age, gender, and a few other things. So we're seeing that concern about side effects is consistently higher among women, among Black Americans, and among individuals who have a health condition. So they're eligible to get vaccinated, but they're nervous because of their health condition. What we're also seeing through this survey is that health care professionals seem to have the strongest influence. So if your doctor talks to you about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, and your doctor calms your fears about the side effects, you're more likely to want to get it. I think it bears out, right? The problem is the same people who don't always have access are generally the people who don't have a primary care physician. They're the people who already don't have continuation of health care. You know, they go to a walk-in clinic, or they go to an ER. They don't have a doctor, per se. Also, they kind of sliced and diced different states in this survey, and they found some kind of interesting results that, for example, in Florida, where there's a high level of it's higher than the national average, teaching people about side effects might actually close the gap more in Florida versus in a place like Texas or Michigan. It could be the age and the pre-existing condition component of that, right? So people who are sick or people who have pre-existing conditions that put them earlier in the vaccine line are also more likely to say, I'm nervous about side effects. So if we teach them about the side effects and we calm fears about side effects, they may then be more likely to say, okay, well, I'll give it a shot. No pun intended. On top of that, there are some other concerns. I think a main one that I wanted to get to, and this was my original pitch, but it's just a part of the overall story, is that what group of all groups do you think are most likely to say that they would refuse the vaccine? Steve can't answer because he already knows. So this is going to be Evan and Bob. What group of Americans-

E: Are we breaking it down by education level?

C: We're breaking it down by lots of things. So I want to know from you guys, among all adults, 47% of this group say that they will not get vaccinated.

B: All right. I'm going to throw it out. I'm going to throw out millennials.

C: Millennials? Okay. We do know millennial vaccine hesitancy is higher. So that's actually a good guess, but it's not as high as 47%.

E: Well, I'll stick with education correlation. High school only educated people.

B: How about political affiliation?

C: 47% of people who said they voted for Trump. But we're talking here 47% of white men who said they voted for Trump.

B: Yes.

C: Yeah.

B: Now that you say that, I did remember reading that.

E: I'm sure that ties into their general distrust of government in a sense.

C: Yeah. And so what we're seeing is that, and I'll talk about a really interesting study in just a second that talks about what type of messaging works, but what we're seeing is that a lot of public health officials are saying part of the problem here is that Republican leaders aren't being as vocal about the necessity of vaccination. So they're not stepping up. They're not showing their vaccines on camera like many progressive leaders have done. And even though Trump and Melania got vaccinated in January, they didn't tell people.

B: Yeah, they didn't. Right. They didn't do it, which really was irresponsible, I say. But Trump did actually come out recently and verbally announced hey, get vaccinated. I mean, has anyone tracked any change since then? I haven't heard anything.

C: I'm interested to see. So that basically, this article that talks about this study came out, was published on the 17th of March. We're recording today on the 24th of March. And the article does mention at the end that, yeah, Trump in a recent interview on Fox News on Tuesday night said, quote, so this would have been last Tuesday, I think, quote, it's a great vaccine. It's a safe vaccine. And it's something that works. So it would be really interesting to see if this number shifts. It may take more than one time, though.

B: Right.

C: That's part of the problem.

B: You need at least a double shot of that, I would think.

C: Yeah, you need consistent messaging that kind of stays the course. But hopefully, we're going to see that change. We're also seeing that only 75% of the House of Representatives is vaccinated, and they had access early. In January, a dose was set aside for each House member, but only 75% of them chose to get vaccinated.

E: That's interesting. Has anyone asked the other 25% why?

C: Yeah. So Senator Ron Johnson said that he declined, okay, so this is actually in the Senate, not the House. But Senator Ron Johnson said that he declined the vaccine because he already had COVID. He said, I think having COVID probably provides me the best immunity possible, having actually had the disease. I don't feel pressure that I need to get a vaccine. I'd rather let other people who want to get the vaccine get it before I do, which is a really problematic statement, because A-

E: That doesn't make sense.

C: It goes against the CDC recommendations. Even if you've had COVID, we don't know how long you'll have immunity. Getting vaccinated is your best chance of not getting COVID again. And B, he had a vaccine set aside for him. Not getting it didn't mean that vaccine magically got into somebody else's hands. It's actually quite likely. I don't know. It could be likely that the vaccine got thrown out. I think that kind of thinking is not helpful.

E: That's a poor excuse, and it's bad optics, and it's bad public messaging. You're supposed to be helping the public right now. It's not about you. It's about the people you're working for, frankly.

C: I've had a lot of friends come up to me and say, hey, I'm eligible, but I feel like I don't know if it's right for me to get vaccinated. Should I wait? And my advice to everybody who is eligible is, if you're eligible, get the damn vaccine. The sooner you get it, the better. And remember, the cue is not there because some people are more deserving. It's not there because some people need it more. It's there to get us all vaccinated in an orderly manner. The goal is for all of us to get vaccinated. So the last thing that I think is really interesting, you guys, is there's just today the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania just released a really big poll. They published it in PLOS One. It was a sample of 2,345 participants during the 2019 measles outbreak. So this is not COVID specific, but it looked at vaccine hesitancy during an active measles outbreak. And what they did is they, this is a scientific experiment where they showed different videos to people, to these 2,345 participants. They were randomly assigned to six different groups. In one group, they watched a vaccine hesitancy inducing narrative, as they called it. So it was a real news clip of a woman whose first child had been vaccinated, but had a rash response. And you could physically see the child, and it was an actual rash response from the vaccine because it does happen. It's rare, but it happens. And so she was saying, because of this, I'm not going to get my second child vaccinated against the measles. Look at my kid. Look how miserable. I'm not getting my other kid vaccinated. So that was a hesitancy inducing narrative. And it wasn't a lie. It was just not contextualized. So it didn't talk anything about risk or rarity. So keep that in mind. The second video was Fauci talking about why getting a measles vaccine is important. There were a lot of statistics in it. It was very science heavy. The third was a science supporting, so they called that a science supporting video. The third was a science supporting video also. But this one was a parent whose children would be endangered if they were exposed to measles, because either they couldn't get the vaccine for health reasons, or they had had the measles, and they were talking about how horrible it was. Okay, so we had one vaccine hesitancy inducing narrative, two science supporting narratives, one of Fauci, one of parents. And then the other three groups were a combination. So the mom's narrative, and then Fauci, the mom's narrative, and then the other parents. And then there was a control. Of course, you have to have a good control. And this one was about the benefits of aspirin. And then they showed these six groups the vaccines, and they found some interesting stuff. So they thought the hesitancy inducing narrative was going to affect outcomes, and it didn't at all. And they were like, well, that's weird. But then they were like, you know what, it's kind of makes sense. A one off doesn't usually affect a lot of change. So they see this once, it doesn't really change their outcomes yet. And when they showed the Fauci narrative, people actually, their outcomes were changed, they were more likely to say, I'm going to get the vaccine. They were also more likely, they looked at three different things. It was yes, I'm going to get the vaccine. Yes, I'm going to tell others that they should get vaccinated. And yes, I'm willing to write a letter to a pro vaccine letter to a state representative. And so they found that when they watched the Fauci video, they were more likely to get vaccinated. They were more likely to write that letter. When they watched the science supporting video of the parents, I think that it was also a neutral outcome. But here's something that's really interesting. So when they showed the mom's video first, and then they showed the Fauci vaccine, the mom video reduced the effectiveness of the Fauci video. So we're seeing now that there's an effect wherein they're getting primed with the visual of the little kid with measles, then Fauci saying, science works, get vaccinated. This is a public health emergency. Here are the statistics. But the problem that some of these, that the scientists who did this study think is that a, Fauci's video was very absolutist in its language. It didn't talk about risk at all. It didn't talk about nuance. It was basically like, we need to do this. Everybody should do this. And they were like, but what about that woman whose kid got a rash? Look at that woman, that doesn't fly. And so the question here is, how do we really start to affect change? We know that we need consistent messaging, and we need more consistent messaging. Because sadly, if that mother's narrative was followed by two, three, four, five, six other narratives similarly, that's how we start to get real vaccine hesitancy. The rhetoric of the anti-vax movement is, look at my kid, look what happened. But we also know that with these very strong evidence-based videos, they work. We know that when people see somebody in a position of authority who knows their shit, and they're saying, this works, let me show you why it works, let me show you the evidence, let me show you the statistics, it actually does affect change. It comports with people, and they are more likely to get vaccinated. So but what else do we need on top of that? Consistent messaging, and probably some nuanced messaging. We probably need contextualization.

B: Nuance?

C: Yeah.

B: Does that work?

C: Sad, right? What is that? What is that nuance that we're talking about? Because the problem is, the MMR vaccine is overwhelmingly safe. It does overwhelmingly prevent measles, mumps, and rubella, which is an overwhelmingly detrimental health problem. But there are always exceptions to that. And if we're not honest about those exceptions, and we don't contextualize those exceptions as incredibly rare, but real, then all of a sudden, we so distrust. People say, you lied to me. You said this never happens.

S: Mm-hmm.

E: Yeah.

C: No, it happens. It just doesn't happen very often. And the truth of the matter is, the disease is worse.

S: Yeah, I always frame it in risk versus benefit. I've had a number of patients express vaccine hesitancy to me. It's always about the side effects, the unknown risks. And I always reassure them, I say, I got the vaccine, my whole family's getting the vaccine, my wife, my kids are going to get it. It's all risk versus benefit. Again, no one's promising zero risk. That's not how life works or medicine works. But yeah, we know that the risk of the disease is way more than even the worst possible risk from the vaccine. Now, millions of people have gotten this vaccine, so we know there's limits on what could be happening. But what's funny is, I've had patients express to me worries about the risks of the vaccine while I was in the process of injecting them with the deadliest toxin on the planet.

C: What? Botulinum toxin?

B: Botox.

S: Botulinum toxin.

C: Yeah, for their migraines, yeah?

S: It's the most potent toxin that we know of, meaning per gram.

B: Yes, that is hilarious.

C: That is funny. Yeah.

Ocean Worlds (25:46)

• Researcher theorizes worlds with underground oceans support, conceal life

S: So Bob, tell us about ocean worlds and their prospect for life.

B: Yes. Yeah, this is fascinating. Researchers claim that the prevalence of subsurface oceans in our solar system mean that life in the universe is likely far more prevalent and long-lasting than we think. Yeah, so this was announced in a report presented at the 52nd Annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by Southwest Research Institute planetary scientist S. Alan Stern. Stern calls these bodies, planets, moons, even dwarf planets with significant water inside. He calls them interior water ocean worlds, or IWOWs, I-W-O-W-S, which is a decent acronym for once. I like it. I'll be saying IWOWs a lot. It stands for interior water ocean worlds. So if you think about it, the last couple of decades or so have revealed it's kind of like a slow stealth revolution in astronomy, right? We've discovered or predicted a plethora of interior water ocean worlds just in our solar system. In our solar system. Think Jupiter. We got Europa, one of the kings, right? Definitely. These are confirmed. The bodies I'm going to say now are confirmed, like pretty much next to no doubt. Jupiter's Ganymede could have layers of ice and water between its layers of crust. A lot of people are saying that Callisto is pretty much confirmed as well. Then you look at Saturn's moons, Enceladus, that along with Europa, these are the two, the king and queen of these water worlds. I mean, it's obvious. And Enceladus is especially fascinating. It's like a global ocean underneath. And don't forget about the awesome geysers that are spewing its interior hundreds of miles into space. Enceladus might be, for me, the number one pick for research. There's also Titan. Also confirmed. Titan's fascinating. It's not the biggest moon, as you might think. It's actually Ganymede. But Titan is, I think, second biggest. And it's fascinating because it's got methane lakes on the surface, but its interior is probably even more wet with a huge amount of water. They're saying that it's as salty as the Dead Sea on Earth. They seem pretty confident about that one as well. But then there's other bodies that are predicted to probably or likely having lots of water. Neptune's moon, Triton, looks like it has a sub-ocean. Even Pluto, dwarf planet Pluto could have a good water. They're talking about that now. And I hadn't heard of this one, dwarf planet Ceres. It's thought to be 25% water, some of which could be liquid. Don't know how much, if any, but it seems like it could. So lots of bodies that we've discovered the past generation or so that has a lot of water inside. But what really fascinated me are the benefits of IOWs. I'm going to discuss two of them below. They're kind of game-changing and really dramatic. Start with the first ones. Now, oceans on other worlds require, like the Earth, they require a narrow temperature range, right? If you're going to have liquid water on the surface, that's a narrow range, right, where water's liquid, between 0 and 100 Celsius, basically. So that means that for a given stellar class, the distance of an orbiting planet with liquid water on the surface, that's got to be a narrow range as well. And we call that what? We call that the Goldilocks zone. That's the zone where you can't have free-flowing water on the surface. Very narrow. There's not a huge range of distances where that would be the case. Now IOWs, though, they can exist over a much wider range of distances, right? In fact, for moons, that distance from the sun is now essentially as big as it can be, right? Think about it. If you have a gas giant farther away than even Pluto, it doesn't matter because it's not the sun's light that's warming that moon and making the water liquid inside. It's the tidal forces of the gas giant that's doing it. That's what's causing the heat. So this is called tidal heating or tidal flexing. It's essentially converting gravitational energy to thermal energy. And this is where the heat is ultimately coming from. You know, it's creating friction, making it warm enough for an IOW to exist, for that liquid water to exist. And then you can take this, you can go down that rabbit hole even a little bit deeper here. There's a process. I learned about it today. The process is called serpentinization, which essentially liberates minerals and sources of energy like molecular hydrogen and electrons. You know, by basically exposing the water to the rock, you're releasing these valuable resources. And those these sources of energy and minerals and electrons can be used by chemosynthetic organisms. Now, not photosynthetic organisms that dominate the earth because there's lots of there's lots of surface life. But if you're going to be getting energy from inside a planet, photons are irrelevant. There is no there's no photosynthesis going on. And this is happening, of course, in the earth, the deep oceans as well. There's chemosynthetic organisms that do not rely on the sun. They're rare and very niche, but they exist on the earth. The idea is that this is what the life would be based on, on these IWOWs. As my Spanish teacher used to say, anyhoo. So what would it mean? Oh, he was great.

C: That's not Spanish.

E: Yeah, what does anyhoo mean?

B: No, no. Mr. Hebert. Steve, say it. Mr. Hebert in high school, he would go off on these beautiful tangents. And then at the very end, he would say, anyhoo, and then continue. So-

E: That was his reset.

B: Yeah, it was. Steve and I would like laugh every time he said it.

S: He'd go, anyhoo.

B: Anyhoo. So anyhoo, what would it mean then if this Goldilocks zone expanded from this narrow slice to essentially most of the entire solar system in question? Of course, it means that we just greatly increased the number of planets that could harbor life. Now granted, it's a liquid life. It's life that's based in the water, in an ocean. And that puts some interesting potential constraints on the technology development, right? I mean, think about it. How much of our technology depends ultimately on the ability at some point to create fire? I mean, it'd be interesting to see how an intelligent civilization, what that would be like. But that's another discussion that I'd like to have, just not tonight. All right, so that's one implication. What do you think another implication is of an interior water ocean world? To explore that, what threatens life on Earth? A lot, right? I mean, just read Phil Plait's book. There's a lot of stuff that are existential threats. So a comet or meteor impact immediately leaps to mind, right? I mean, that could take us out tomorrow. There's also stellar flares. And if you want to get more dramatic, there could be a supernova going off nearby. Or how about this one, a gamma ray burst that hits the planet with a beam of gamma radiation a light year wide. We are toast. Depending on its distance, we are toast. Actually, if you're really, really close, I don't care where you live, you're toast. But how about this one? How about aliens detecting life on a planet and then sending their automated warships to plunder their resources in gold? Right? I mean, if you're on the surface, if you're on the surface, and you're alive, you are creating a signature that's detectable from light years away. If you're not, if you're under the surface, you're kind of hidden and a little bit safer. So that's just another, just a weird angle on this. But hey, it's true. So all of these threats and more, it's not much of a threat if you're up to dozens of kilometers or hundreds of kilometers below the surface ice. And you know, it's like the exoskeleton of Mr. Krabs, right? The squishy important parts are underneath and protected by the hard outer part, the ice. So therefore, what life that may exist on IWOWs could last far longer than life on an exposed planetary surface. So that's pretty much it. Those are the takeaways. You know, the subsurface oceans are now predicted to be very common throughout the universe. And it greatly increases not only the number of worlds that could harbor Earth-like life, but it makes that life much safer and therefore much more long-lived than us poor exposed humans scuttling around on the dangerous surface of our planet. Fascinating. So life, the potential for life has just like greatly increased throughout the entire universe. And I love reading about that. That's awesome.

E: So let's wait for the day when we finally do, hopefully, discover somewhere, likely in our solar system, a form of life.

B: Let's do it. Let's go to Enceladus or Europa right now. I think that should be the top priorities for NASA.

E: And then what that does to that number, Bob, that increases it even further than what we're talking about today.

B: Right. You get another data point. Assuming that we didn't see them and they didn't see us, if it's a different DNA, you're right. Then we have a second data point and that's what we need, a second data point. And that's why I think we need to get there and it should be a priority beyond almost anything else.

E: Yeah. And we're not talking about sending people there.

B: Right. Definitely.

E: We can do this with robotics.

B: Yep. Absolutely. And we need to... I mean, I think it needs to be more of a priority than going to Mars. Absolutely.

E: It answers bigger questions.

B: I think, right. I think going to the moon is it's kind of cool and important, but we got it. I think we should get to these planets because everything looks good for life. We've said it so many times. Everything looks good. Everything you need for life. You've got heat, you've got minerals you've got, I mean, those, and you've got liquid water. I mean, that's it. You've got those. Chances are you got some, at least some sort of bacterial life that could be swimming around right now. Or how about something? How about multicellular life? That could be there and it could be swimming around and we're not going to know until we get there. Let's get there. I'm done. Somebody stop me.

S: But Bob, another way, another way to get data points about life in the universe is looking for techno signatures. We could look for signs of technology and maybe-

B: Segway, are you segwaying right now?

S: I am segwaying.

Oumuamua Explained (35:45)

• Oumuamua Explained

S: Maybe alien artifacts have come to us, right now.

B: Ha!

S: I don't think that we've detected that, but, uh, the head of astronomy at Harvard university does.

B: What?

S: Avi Loeb.

B: Oh yes. Yes.

S: He wrote the book, Extraterrestrial, the first signs of intelligent life beyond earth. And in which he argues, he argues that Oumuamua, remember that's the first interstellar visitor.

E: The cigar-shaped?

S: Well it was, it turns out it was sort of, it's actually more flat. It actually looks more like the millennium Falcon. It's like a pancake.

B: Just the angle. Okay.

S: Yeah. It's just the angle.

B: This again?

S: I think, yeah, cause there's an update. There's an update.

B: Update me baby.

S: So professor Loeb thinks that, that Amumuamua displayed features that cannot be explained as a natural object and therefore aliens. But let's back up a little bit. So in 2017, astronomers spotted a very unusual object passing through the solar system. In fact, it was going to go very close to the sun and to earth. What made it unusual was its trajectory. It was on a parabolic pathway, which means it was going so fast that it would not be captured by the sun's gravity. It wasn't a, a solar system object. It was something that was passing through our solar system.

B: Just passing by.

S: Yep.

E: Excuse me. Pardon me.

S: Interstellar object. Now this was interesting for a number of reasons, one of which it was the first one that we've confirmed. We also had no idea how frequent they were going to be, but simulations told us that these would be very, very rare. And so what were the odds that one would be happening now and also coming that close to to the earth and the sun. But then a couple of years later we discovered a second one. So now we have, again, that second data point's always so critical.

B: Yeah. This ain't rare.

S: So clearly these are more common than we, than our previous models predicted. So that was one thing about it. But the real thing is that we couldn't quite characterize what kind of object it was. So one, as Evan alluded to, was its shape. It was very elongated. And then as we had, had more time to observe it, it's not quite cigar shaped. It's more like on its edge it is, but when, but we got to see that it's actually flattened like a pancake. So what would make either a comet or an asteroid that shape that we don't, we've never seen that before. It's very atypical.

E: It lacks, it lacks a certain roundness, shall we say?

S: Yeah. Yeah. What would have caused it to, to form in that shape? Well, here's the other thing. So as it was passing close by the sun, it, we noticed that it was accelerating in its orbit. So this happens to comets, they accelerate because of outgassing, basically acts like a little jet, a little rocket that pushes it away from the sun. It always has to be away from the sun, right? And this got that same push. It wasn't much, but it was definitely there. Now the problem was that when we looked at the object, it didn't have the brightness, the albedo that we would expect it to have if it had enough ice on it to be outgassing to produce that acceleration. It would, right?

B: But it was edge on though.

S: No, no.

B: It's a very small profile.

S: Even taking that into account, we should have seen more ice to account for that. Yeah. To account for. We should have been able to see a tail, but even without the tail there should have at least had a certain amount of ice in order to produce that amount of acceleration. So there was a disconnect between the amount of acceleration that we were seeing and the albedo that we were observing. So still more curious. That's primarily what Avi Loeb argues is the reason say, okay, well that's because it's a spaceship with a solar sail and that's what was giving it that acceleration. It was probably a derelict spaceship that was trying to visit the earth and that's why it passed so close to us. But on some point it just it was something happened and now it's just sort of drifting through. That's his argument. Not very convincing, but it's mainly an argument from ignorance. We don't know what this thing is. It's behaving in a weird way. It's aliens. And we've talked about this before. Every time astronomers see something we don't understand, it's very tempting to say this is alien. Do you remember the star, Tabby's star?

B: Yeah. Dyson sphere.

S: It had all these really, yeah, these significant dip in the light that we were seeing. And yeah, so it's a Dyson swarm, but then-

E: Nope, just gas.

B: You're right.

S: No, it was just comet. It was a swarm of comets probably.

E: Comets, yeah.

S: Or asteroids or dust or debris. It wasn't heating up the way it would have if it were technology. Anyway, back to Oumuamua. So that was the mystery. That was Avi Loeb's answer. But other astronomers, namely two Arizona State University astrophysicists, Stephen Desch and Alan Jackson, they tried to come up with some alternate explanation. And one of the things they thought of to explain these funky properties, basically, again, this disconnect between the albedo and the amount of acceleration, they said, well, we were assuming that the ice was typical ice, typical comet ice in terms of what it was made of. What if it was made of a different kind of ice?

B: So what, denser or less dense?

E: Like a darker ice or a darker ice that doesn't give off the albedo?

S: So, well, different elements would give off different amount of acceleration for their albedo. And so they ran through a bunch of things until they looked at nitrogen and bingo, it totally fit. If you plug in that Oumuamua had nitrogen ice on its surface, that would completely match the observed data, the amount of brightness that we were seeing and the amount of acceleration. So mysteries solve it. At least that's a very plausible hypothesis. Unfortunately, Oumuamua has now gone so far away that we can't image it anymore. So we can't study him. We have to go with the data that we have. Now you might ask yourself, okay, well, is that how unusual would that be to have just the nitrogen ice on it? Say, well, judging by our own solar system, that would be very unusual. But it does match the features of certain objects in our solar system, namely Pluto. This is Pluto's second mention on the show this week. What if you had a collision with a plutoid, a Pluto-like planet, which is mostly nitrogen ice on the surface, and it broke apart, and then you had like a chunk of the surface-

E: Flaked off.

S: Flying gets flung out of the solar system. And then that ice sublimates over time. That would also explain the flat-as-a-pancake shape. So that process could explain the shape and could explain the behavior of Oumuamua and fit the data that we have. Again, this is unfortunately a hypothesis at this point, but it does fit the data.

E: But you don't have to invoke aliens.

S: But you don't have to invoke aliens, so Occam's Razor likes it. They also calculate that its journey, its interstellar journey, was probably about a half a billion years. That would explain the rate of sublimation and the shape and size of Oumuamua, and the fact that it still had to have some ice left in order to produce that acceleration.

B: Wait, why was it sublimating ice in interstellar space?

S: Cosmic rays.

B: Oh, there you go. Cosmic rays, huh? They can sublimate?

S: Yep. So not fast, but given half a billion years-

B: Billion years.

S: So it's another lesson in humility. It's another lesson about don't jump to conclusions based on what we don't know. Give it time. Let's just say we don't know. At the very most, you have a hypothesis. I do think you've got to wonder why somebody would write an entire book based on a hypothesis that's not even the most plausible hypothesis. So I think he was jumping the gun there. And now just as his book is coming out, these other astronomers are like, nope, it's nitrogen. Problem solved. So that's tough. So when I wrote about this, I had to include my favorite example of a prestigious scientist. Maybe you know-

B: Cold fusion?

S: Nope. Basing an announcement-

B: NRACE?

S: -nope. On a lack of knowledge. So Lord Kelvin.

B: But no, but he had to cover your ass statement though.

S: He did, but Lord Kelvin said the earth cannot be four billion years old, like the geologists and evolutionary biologists think. It can only be millions of years old based upon my thermodynamic equations about how fast the earth's crust will have cooled over time. But he did not know what he didn't know. He didn't know about radioactive decay, which would serve to heat the earth's crust to slow its cooling. And once you plug those numbers in, it perfectly fits with the four and a half billion year old timeframe of the earth. So the cautionary tale there was do not dismiss entire disciplines of legitimate science you don't understand based upon one equation that you do understand. Because there's unknown unknowns. You have to be humble. Say, maybe there's something we don't know here. Let's try to not, yeah, geologists, they're all full of it, I'm right. How about, let's see if we, maybe we're missing something.

E: Whatever happened to wanting to falsify your own theories? And that takes cooperation.

B: To be fair to Lord Kelvin, from what my memory is telling me of what happened, he threw out there when he said this, he said, unless there's an energy source we're not aware of, he kind of threw that out there. And again, when the young punk scientist who was going to show that he was wrong, he was very diplomatic. And he said, Lord Kelvin was right. He said that unless there's another source of energy, and we found that source of energy, radioactivity. So he was like a gentle, like a gentle push to Lord Kelvin. He wasn't very like in his smacking him in the face with science. He was nice about it. So I think that's an interesting kind of extension of that story it's just a fun-

S: Fair enough. Fair enough. But by all accounts, Kelvin was very arrogant about the announcements. He might have given himself a CYA, like, well, unless there's some other energy source we don't know about. Hey. But at least he did say that, but he still was very, he was willing to completely dismiss all of geology.

B: Right. I agree. But there's lots of power in a CYA. You got to you got to put-

S: I agree. I do it myself. I hardly endorse the CYA.

B: So do I. So do I.

E: And Steve, you remind-

B: Because it's so easy. It's so easy to make these blanket statements in science, and you can't, because it's all about probability. There's no 100% certainty. So you got to throw them out there whenever you can, because science changes. And you got to be, have a more full explanation to say, unless as far as we can tell unless this happens, because it happens a lot in science. So it's a good idea to do in general.

S: Totally. Yeah. Keep your hypotheses open to any other plausible possibility. Don't make statements that go beyond the actual evidence or logic. So those CYA statements are often, they're real scientific statements. Like this is the conclusion. These are all the assumptions that go into that conclusion. There's no other heat source that we don't know of. It also assumes whatever B, C, or D. Also don't forget about Occam's razor. And that's where I think Loeb is falling victim to. He fell victim to the alien of the gaps.

B: Oh, yes. Alien of the gaps. Did you just coin that? I never heard that one before.

S: It's aliens.

E: Therefore, aliens.

S: And he is getting bit right squarely in the ass by that. Now I'm waiting to see how he is going to respond.

B: Right.

E: That's the real test here.

B: Does he double down? That's key. That's really reveal his true signature.

S: But again, in fairness while this study was published about the nitrogen and everything, it's got to go through the meat grinder.

B: That's true. There could be a fatal flaw.

S: Expert review as well. We'll see how it all plays out. But at some point the rubber is going to meet the road and we're going to have to see, you know, where the where the experts come down. You know what I'm saying?

B: Yes.

E: Yep. Rubber meeting the road. Got it.

More Dead Sea Scrolls (48:49)

• Dead Sea scroll fragments and 'world's oldest basket' found in desert cave

S: Evan, I understand that they've discovered some more. Wait for it. Dead sea scrolls.

E: Absolutely correct. Oh, my gosh. This is exciting. Israeli archaeologists have very recently discovered more fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Now, to put that in context, the last time Dead Sea Scroll fragments were recovered. Anyone want to guess what year?

B: 1930s?

E: Not bad, but a little more current than that.

C: 1940s?

S: 1960s.

E: 1960s. 1961. It's been 60 years.

C: It's been 60 years since 1961? Jeez. Recalibrate.

E: And since the last Dead Sea Scroll fragments were recovered. But now we have some new ones. This is exciting archaeological news. All right. I should explain a little bit about what the Dead Sea Scrolls exactly are. They are ancient manuscripts that were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in 11 different caves near the Kerbet Qumran region of Israel, which is northwest shores of the Dead Sea. And while they're roughly 2,000 years old, these fragments, some of them dating actually to the 3rd century BCE, that's a full 2,300 years ago. Most of the scrolls were written in Hebrew with a smaller number in Aramaic or Greek. Most of them were written on parchments such as goatskin and sheepskin. But there are a few written on papyrus, thick paper at the time. And there are some etchings on pottery, which I didn't know about. And there's one written on a scroll of copper. That's very cool.

B: Wow.

S: Cool.

E: In fact, they've written books specifically about that copper scroll, the Dead Sea Scrolls. Very cool. Now, the vast majority of the scrolls survived as fragments, but a few were found intact. Over time, scholars have managed to reconstruct from these fragments approximately 950 different manuscripts of various lengths. It's a little library, basically, is what they found. So what do the scrolls say? Well, one of them says Edith Joes and has a puzzle maze on the back filled out in crayon. No, not quite. The manuscripts fall into three major categories, biblical, apocryphal, and sectarian. The biblical manuscripts compromise some 200 copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible, and they represent the earliest evidence for biblical texts in the world. These are the oldest biblical texts known. By a lot, Steve, right?

S: Mm-hmm. A thousand years, I think.

E: Yeah. Which is remarkable. That's a hell of a gap. 2,300 years ago, and then what? The next ones you have were in the year 1,200 or so. So that's an amazing gap. The apocryphal manuscripts, these are works not included in the Jewish biblical canon. They had been previously known only in translation. And in some cases, not known at all. So you can see why those are extremely important. And then there's the sectarian manuscripts, which reflect a wide variety of literary genres, such as biblical commentary, legal writings, apocalyptic compositions, and so forth. Those sorts of things. But exactly who wrote them and placed them in the caves is still a debate of scholars. The prevailing theory seems to be that the scrolls formed the library of a Hebrew sect that lived in that region at the time. However, some of the items definitely were either borrowed, stolen, or otherwise brought in from other places, other sects of Judaism, and from other regions. So they weren't all homegrown as they were. But it's all part of – it's amazing. Figuring out the what, the who, the why, this is really fascinating in its own right. The archaeology of it, the caves, the dirt, and the pottery, and the rocks, geology, geography, and the treasure that they find. Like finding buried treasure. And this is the romantic part of it. And this is the part that I think a lot of people can maybe relate to even more so than just the scholarly aspects of it, which again, are fascinating in their own right. Speaking of adventures, the backstory of this most recent find of these fragments reads a little bit like an Indiana Jones adventure. Let me put it in the context like this. Picture in your head this. A team of archaeologists rappelling down the side of a precarious 80-meter cliff to the entrance with gorges on either side of the opening of the caverns, a cavern known as the Cave of Horror.

B: I love it.

E: I kid you not. That is the name. That's the namescape. The Cave of Horror. Indiana Jones and the Cave of Horror. Wouldn't that make so much more sense?

B: Kids making Halloween ideas.

E: Yeah, right?

C: Do people die there? Why is it called the Cave of Horror?

E: Yes.

S: There's lots of dead people there.

E: I see dead people in the cave. This was back in the year 132.

C: Oh, okay.

E: Yeah. Kids listening right now. That was before the internet.

C: Everybody was just sitting around staring at each other back then.

E: There was a year 132, right? There was no texting. But there were scrolls. Back then, the land was known as Judea, and more specifically, actually, the Roman province of Judea. So as you can imagine, Romans ruled with a heavy hand over the local population, which included the Jewish people of the region. Now, religious and political tensions, what else, led to an uprising of groups of Jewish people against the Romans in what was called the Third Jewish Revolt, and the two prior revolts having occurred in the years 66 and 115. So this was the third one. And when you have revolts and you have wars breaking out, basically, you typically have refugees. It's all part of the horrible nature of war. Some Jewish refugees in the year 132 took refuge in one of these caves. And they know this because situated directly above the cave entrance is evidence of a Roman siege encampment. And they also know this, Cara, as you were alluding to, because inside those caves, among the artifacts, beyond the artifacts, actually, lay the skeletal remains of 40 people, men, women, and children. And the remains were found there during excavations in the 1960s. So you found the artifacts first, and then they actually found those people after the fact as the digging continued. And did you know an evil curse has befallen all of those who have entered the cave? Many became sick, several died, and some went insane. No, that's the Hollywood version. Hollywood would take this story and add that kind of stuff to it to make it into a movie.

S: Yeah, Evan, almost everybody who excavated that cave in the 1940s and 50s, they're almost all dead now.

E: And they became sick, Steve. They did. They felt they had illnesses throughout their life and then died. What are the odds? So the Israel Antiquities Authority, that's the IAA, they're in charge of all of this. And they said the current batch of scroll fragments that it discovered, they were able to figure it out that it's Greek translations of the books Zechariah and Nahum from the Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets, and were radiocarbon dated to the 2nd century AD. So everything lines up, scientifically speaking. There are about 80 fragments uncovered in this most recent discovery. Oren Abelman, Dead Sea Scroll researcher with the IAA, said, We found a textual difference that has no parallel with any other manuscript, either in Hebrew or Greek. So he said this is the real significance of this find. He referred to slight variations in the Greek rendering of the Hebrew original as known and compared to other manuscripts at the time. And this translation of the Hebrew Bible to Greek made in Egypt in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. In other words, there were some different things that they learned about this. They were able to uncover things they had not known before, just from these 80 fragments that they recently discovered. And he said that when we think about the biblical text, we think about something very static, but it wasn't static. There are slight differences, and some of those differences are extremely important. Every little piece of information that we can add, we can understand a little bit better. Absolutely. Now, one fragment read, this gave me a chuckle, There are things you are to do. Speak the truth to one another. Render true and perfect justice in your gates. And I thought that sounded kind of like a fortune cookie maybe that I cracked open a couple of years ago in a sense. So that made me chuckle. But all kidding aside, finding more fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it's amazing. It's good science, good for history, and good for, frankly, all the romanticism I think that we feel when we talk about discovering lost treasures. Now, before I let you guys comment on a couple of these, there was a few bonus finds that made the news item just that much more juicier. In the Cave of Horror, archaeologists also discovered a six-millennia-old skeleton of a child.

S: That was probably buried.

E: Yes, it was buried. Right. The excavation, the investigation continues, and these discoveries of these 80 fragments and the skeleton of the child, I mean, this is the most current work started in 2017. So they've been working on these pieces for years, getting these out. So they're continuing to dig and dig and dig, and they're finding older and older things. Also, they discovered a basket, which they age 10,000 to 10,500 years old, which is right now the oldest basket intact discovered in history.

S: You know what was in the basket?

E: Lotion.

S: Nothing.

E: Oh.

B: No, you're wrong, Steve. It was sand.

S: It was sand. Yeah, it's just some sand.

E: Sand, yes. Yep.

S: Imagine, like, you open that, there could be scrolls in there. There could be all kinds of things.

E: Little Geraldo's rivers.

B: Geraldo, yep. Just going to say that.

E: Al Capone's vault kind of thing.

S: But more importantly, Evan, there are caves and locations there that have not been excavated yet, and there really is a push to try to find anything of value before they get plundered or destroyed.

E: Yeah, they're looters. That's, oh my gosh, that's such a threat.

B: Well, how much more is left? Because they started an effort in 2017 using drones and things. So look at every nook and cranny. They're still plugging away?

S: Yeah.

E: Yeah, they're digging down further. I mean, this continues. The work continues. And there are 11 caves in which they have found artifacts. But as Steve, you alluded to, there are other caves and other places to search. So this work continues. It will continue. And who knows what else we're going to find? Just an amazing story. Thank goodness that the climate and the location of this and the fact that people years ago did make an effort, some effort, to try to preserve some of this stuff. It's paying dividends now, 2,300 years later.

B: I mean, that made me think real quick. That made me think about the Marvel Universe and the Infinity Stones. What are the odds of the Infinity Stones all existing in the Milky Way? Isn't that kind of ridiculous? They were created at the birth of the universe. Oh, by the way, they're all in one galaxy out of the billions of galaxies. That just occurred to me. How silly is that?

S: And far too many of them are on Earth.

B: Yeah. Hello.

S: Earth is an unreasonably important planet in that universe.

E: Well, maybe they're setting up a much deeper story, backstory, as to why that was the case?

S: No, just no.

E: I'm trying to get charitable.

S: Well, and the DC Universe version of that, the Earth is the single most important planet in the multiverse.

B: Oh, wow. Even more important than-

E: The multiverse.

B: Wow. OK.

S: Yeah.

B: Talk about it.

S: But that's where the story is. So what are you going to do? OK. So no who's that noisy this week. Jay will resume next week and get us all caught up. So we're going to go right on to your questions and emails.

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups

Correction #1: Tasmanian tiger (1:01:01)

S: One quick correction. First, Cara.

C: Yes.

S: This one is directed at you. You did make an offhand comment. We're talking about the Thylacine, which the last specimens were in Tasmania. And it went extinct in the early part of the 20th century. But they did range around Australia prior to that.

C: And New Guinea. Yes.

S: Yeah, New Guinea. Before their range was limited to Tasmania. But you made a statement about what caused the Thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger, to go extinct on the mainland.

C: Yeah. So I guess I remember differently, which means that I was talking off the cuff. Yeah. So I was I think what happened was that I was trying to make two important points. One is that in Tasmania, the Thylacine was driven to extinction by mostly not completely, but mostly displacement from wild dogs that were brought there by European settlers and habitat loss and things of that nature. The Thylacine on the mainland was actually it went extinct, or at least we should say it was displaced from the mainland before Europeans ever got there. That's the part that I did not say. I think I said that in general, the Thylacine was driven to extinction by Europeans.

S: By Europeans.

C: Yeah. So it was long gone off the mainland. The point that I was trying to make, though, was that the Thylacine wasn't just the Tasmanian tiger, right? Like we talk about it because it's in the name. It's the Tasmanian tiger. And we think about it as being only in Tasmania because in the lifetime of our grandparents or our parents, it only was in Tasmania. But prior to European settlement, it actually did roam around Australia, which is pretty cool, but that's much longer ago.

S: I did a little bit of more research on that. The current understanding is that the Thylacine went extinct in Australia probably around 3,000 years ago, but definitely no earlier than 2,000 years ago. Before Europeans got there, definitely. But it's still controversial, like all of these extinction things. It's still controversial about what specifically did remove the Thylacine from the mainland of Australia. And the possibilities are the arrival of aborigines, the introduction of the dingo, and climate change. And from some recent DNA evidence, looking at specimens of Thylacines from that time period, suggests it was probably mostly climate change.

C: Oh, interesting.

S: But they cannot, and probably the establishment of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation is one thing they're thinking about. But they can't rule out pressure from the dingo as well. So usually, yeah, there's multiple pressures present. It's hard to say which is the one or the combination that was most important.

C: It's such an interesting example, though, of this idea of almost like convergent evolution. Thylacines are not dogs. They're marsupial carnivores, but they're dog-like. They look like dogs.

E: Our brain wants to say it's a dog.

C: Yeah, we want to say that's a dog. And they held the same ecological niche as dogs. And so, of course, with competition, unfortunately, the dogs won out. They somehow had a leg up, no pun intended, and they were able to win out, at least in Tasmania. But what you're saying is it could also be that they ended up having to go farther south because of climate change. And they just couldn't exist on the mainland anymore.

S: Right.

C: It's interesting.

S: I don't think that, again, that's a settled question. But that's where the current research is.

Question_Email_Correction #2: _brief_description_ (1:04:48)

It’s the second message I’m sending you tonight, so sorry for the spamming, but I believe this article is quite juicy: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjc/s10052-021-08967-3 Basically the author is claiming to have debunked dark matter (!!) by factoring in general relativity to calculate the rotation curve of galaxies – something apparently no one has bothered doing before? (!!) Anyway, it seems to me very unlikely that a lone researcher can run some calculations and suddenly debunk I don’t know how many decades of dark matter theories. Maybe something interesting to talk about during the show. I promise I won’t send you any other messages for at least a couple of galactic years. Take care and thanks for your awesome work –Cheers, Max

S: OK, one other email. This one comes from Max. And Max writes, "It's the second message I'm sending you tonight. So sorry for the spamming, but I believe this article is quite juicy. Basically, the author is claiming to have debunked dark matter by factoring in general relativity to calculate the rotation curve of galaxies, something apparently no one has bothered doing before. Anyway, it seems to me very unlikely that a lone researcher can run some calculations and suddenly debunk I don't know how many decades of dark matter theories. Maybe something interesting to talk about on the show. Take care. Thanks for your awesome work." OK, well, thanks, Max. So I've had a chance to look at this. And this is not anything new in general, right? The idea that if so back up a little bit, how do what we first thought that something like dark matter might exist because looking at the rotation curves of galaxies, meaning if you look how fast stars are rotating around the core of the galaxy and you plot how fast they're moving as you get farther and farther and farther away based upon gravitational force, they should be going slower and slower as they get farther out from the core, even accounting for the fact that there are more and more stars contained within their orbit. But that's not what we observe with most galaxies what we observe is that the stars pretty much maintain their velocity and the stars on the outskirts of the galaxy should be flying away from the galaxy. There's not enough gravity in the galaxy to hold on to those stars.

B: Right.

S: So what does that mean? One one past general kind of possibility that there's got to be more gravity there than we can see. There's got to be some gravity that's not giving off light, some dark source of gravity, some dark matter. So that's where the whole idea of dark matter comes from. The other possibility is that-

B: That's where it started. And there's other there's other lines of evidence.

S: Yes, this is where it started. That's a very important point. The other possibility, general category of possibility, is that there's something wrong in our Newtonian gravity calculations. This is modified Newtonian dynamics that maybe our gravitational constant may work when you're talking about a solar system. But when you start to get really big, like the size of a galaxy, it's actually the formula is a little bit different. And if we modify those equations so that they change how they work based upon size, you know.

B: Large scale of the universe.

S: Large scale. Yeah. Galaxy scale rather than solar system scale. Then that would explain the light curves, the rotational curves of galaxies. So those are the two competing things. But over the last few decades, dark matter has clearly won out over modified Newtonian dynamics, although so-called MOND has not completely gone away. Every now and then somebody comes up with some other way to sort of rejigger the equations. It's not completely dead, but it's beginning a shrinking minority as evidence has come in. So there is evidence for dark matter that's not related to the rotation curves of galaxies, such as my favorite, the bullet cluster, where you have two galaxy clusters crashing into each other and the gas would exert pressure on each other. You know, the two gas clouds basically in those galaxy clusters and they would slow down. The stars would just move past each other. And so we could image the gas, we could image the stars, and we could also image the gravity. Because the gravity affects the bending of light, and so we could make a gravitational lens map of the bullet cluster. And what we see is that the gravity just keeps going, even though most of the mass is in the gas, and most of the mass sort of slows down as the two gas clouds crash into each other. But most of the gravity keeps going. And so there's got to be something else.

B: Some invisible source of gravity, what could it be? Dark matter?

S: Dark source of gravity, dark matter, that is passing through each other that's not being slowed down by pressure, that is carrying that gravity with it. So that was, I think, the final nail in the coffin for MOND for this.

B: It was. It was. And I'm surprised that there's more stuff coming out like this. But I will say, I mean, don't listen to me and Steve. How about listening to Adam Rees, who is a professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. So he's made some interesting quotes about Lee's study. He said that, he said, I think it's flawed, and that it's at odds with what's been seen with larger samples of supernovae. And he also mentioned that there's inconsistencies with some of his figures. For example, one figure plots galaxies as older than our universe. So clearly something went wrong there with that figure. And finally, he says that, finally, Rees also said that other studies have used much larger samples and generally just basically dug deeper into the issue. And their findings are in direct contrast to what Lee and Kang's team found. So, I mean, you've got to factor that in. It just does not look good for this, Lee's research, in my opinion, and the opinion of this professor.

S: The study I'm looking at, though, what study are you looking at? Because I'm looking at one by Ludwig. Gravitomagnetism. So this is where they're saying that if you look at not just Newtonian gravity, but if you look at general relativity, there's a little bit of frame dragging going on. There's a gravitomagnetic flux. And if you take that into consideration, that explains the rotational curves of the galaxies. This is by Ludwig. So this is in the European Physical Journal. So this is a different one, I think, than what you were talking about.

B: So are you referencing some other guy debunking dark matter that's not Lee and Kang?

S: Yes, yes, yes. G.O. Ludwig. That's the study.

B: All right. Then I guess forget everything I just said.

S: Yeah. But that's fine. But what you're saying is you're talking about yet another attempt at using MOND. This is gravitomagnetism. But again it's funny. I was talking to Brian Wecht the other night. And I said, hey, have you seen that study by the gravitomagnetism? He's like, it's crap. Forget about it.

B: Yeah.

S: The thing is, these attempts crop up every now and then. That's why you and I got confused. There's two different ones. Because they're just very popular. Everyone wants to tinker with the Newtonian gravitational equations and solve the dark matter thing. Wouldn't that be great? Nobel Prize in there. But the problem is there's too many different sources of evidence for dark matter. It's not just all in the gravitational curves. I will say one thing, though. There is one thing that has always bothered me about the galaxy rotational curve.

B: Why? What's that?

S: And invoking dark matter is the only way to explain it. It's that there just happens to be enough dark matter so that the velocity of the stars do not change with distance from the core. Hasn't that bothered you, Bob? Something about that that's not aesthetic. It seems like an awful coincidence. There must be another reason why there's just exactly that much dark matter so that those galaxy curves are flat.

B: Right. Yeah. Why are they flat? Why aren't they going a little faster or a little slower?

S: Now, I know it's not literally true when you look at a lot of galaxies and we conclude, well, that galaxy doesn't have any dark matter. Whatever. There's different amounts of dark matter.

B: Some are a lot, yeah.

S: Yeah, like the first galaxies that we looked at and the basic spiral galaxies seem to have flat rotation curves. I don't know. It's just something that didn't sit right with me to say that, oh, there's just enough matter there to make the curve flat. I understand if it didn't fit and they had to make it fit, but it's not just that it doesn't fit. It's that it's flat. You know what I mean?

B: Is there some reason that the galaxies are long-lived in those scenarios where there's just a certain amount, a certain distribution of dark matter to allow the flat rotational curve? I don't know. I've never seen anybody address that. So that's an interesting thing to look up.

S: Yeah. Again, maybe we'll get emailed by an expert who knows the answer to this question. I personally haven't ever seen and I've looked for it, like a satisfactory answer. And it's just one of the things I think we don't know.

B: Yeah. Bottom line, there's lots of separate lines of evidence pointing to something very much like what we're thinking about dark matter.

S: Yeah. So explain—

B: You can't debunk it with one simple observation of one simple aspect of the evidence for dark matter. You need a much more complex rebuttal than just one aspect of it.

S: Yes. Start there. Explain the bullet cluster. Then get back to me with your MOND.

B: Yeah. If you're going to hit rotational curves, fine. You also better hit bullet cluster or something like that. And those aren't the only two, Steve. There's more that are a little bit more subtle. You got to address a lot of it. You can't just knock out one piece of it because that's just not going to do it.

S: Okay.

Name That Logical Fallacy (1:14:32)

S: We're going to do a name that logical fallacy.

E: Okay.

S: This is based on a question from Miklos from Sydney, Australia. And Miklos writes, hi, Steve and the Rogues. I'm powering through the Skeptic's Guide book, and I have a question to ask about anomaly hunting and the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

C: I love that fallacy.

B: Yeah.

S: Yeah. It's great. When you wrap your head around it—

C: It's so visual.

B: And it's got Texas in it.

C: It does. That's true.

S: He continues, to me, both of these seem very similar in that both use a certain piece of evidence to kind of retroactively fit in with a person's worldview. It seems to me that anomaly hunting is just a specific form of the sharpshooter fallacy with the individual looking for coincidences or weird occurrences instead of just general tidbits to support their point of view. Am I correct about this? Or did I miss something? And are there more subtle differences between the two? Any explanation would be very much appreciated. Keep up the excellent work with the show. Thanks. Okay. So before I delve into this question, I want to do, for background, I know I've said this before, but it bears repeating because I think people really don't fully appreciate this or they forget it. When we talk about these logical fallacies, anomaly hunting, Texas sharpshooter fallacy, appeal to authority, all the common logical fallacies that we're talking about, they're mostly informal logical fallacies. Informal logical fallacies mean this is bits of logic that may or may not be true, right? They might be appropriate or legitimate or valid in some contexts, but they might be not valid in other contexts.

B: They're guidelines.

S: It's context-dependent. They're not absolute. As opposed to formal logical fallacies, a formal logical fallacy is always wrong by definition. The logic is absolutely wrong, independent of context, right?

C: Yeah, in its structure.

S: In its structure, yeah, it's structurally wrong. Like you've said, again, A equals B and B equals C. Therefore, A does not equal C. No, that's a formal logical fallacy. That's always wrong, yeah. But the informal ones are tough. They take a lot of interpretation. There's a lot of nuance. Now, related to that—and this is really why I'm reinforcing this—is that because this is true, because they're so squishy and context-dependent, you could be a lumper or a splitter, right? The lumper-splitter debate is something that we talk a lot about in science or really in any field where there's categorization. And that is, do you tend to lump together similar things into big categories, or do you like to split out every slight difference into its own thing, right?

C: And again, these are constructs. People came up with these things.

S: Yeah, and people are—there are lumpers and there are splitters. It's more of an aesthetic thing. So with logical fallacies, you could do the same thing. You could try to shoehorn in multiple logical fallacies into one big sort of logical fallacy, or you can split out every slight different kind of application of a logical fallacy and give it its own name. What I like to do is something that's kind of in the middle, that's balanced. I like to—I do my best to try to identify what is really—to strip it down. What's the core logical fallacy that's happening here? What's the bit of bad logic that people are using? And that's the archetype, you know? And then there's versions of that. There are different ways to make that same logical fallacy, but in different contexts that give you slightly different types or subtypes, right? All right. So what I think is that both anomaly hunting and the Texas sharpshooter fallacy are part of a bigger category of fallacies that are post hoc reasoning, and that's the similarity that Miklos is seeing. So you're—in other words, you are reasoning after the fact in order to retrofit a desired result. Now, the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is all about criteria, right? It is—you are choosing the criteria for success to match the result. Not the other way around.

B: Not fair.

C: Yeah, it's like bad science. It's like looking at all the data and then going, I hypothesized that blah, blah, blah.

B: Shooting and then drawing and then drawing the target.

S: Yeah, so it comes from the—yeah, the Texas sharpshooter fallacy comes from the analogy of shooting a gun at a barn door and then walking up to the hole and drawing the target around the hole and saying—

E: Works every time.

S: —it's a bullseye. Yeah, you get a bullseye every time when you do that. Astrologers or pseudoscientists love doing that. Once they see the data, they go, that's evidence for my theory after they see the data. Did you—you got to decide ahead of time what the evidence is based upon some kind of first principles.

E: It's about making predictions, folks.

C: Yeah, postdictions. I love it.

S: Or there's harking. You guys heard of harking? That's hypothesizing after results are known.

B: Hark, hark.

E: Oh, I like that.

C: Yeah, you can't do that.

S: You got to make your hypothesis first, decide ahead of time what will test the criteria for testing your hypothesis and then look at data. Once you look at data, of course, you're going to figure out that, oh, yeah, this, of course, supports what I want to believe. So that's Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Anomaly hunting is a little different. With this, it's more about open-ended criteria, not necessarily post hoc criteria. The open-ended criteria is you're just looking for anything that subjectively seems unusual to you. And then you say, look, that's unusual. That's an anomaly. Therefore, it's evidence of my—evidence for my specific theory. There's evidence of a conspiracy. There's this thing going on. I can't explain. That means that this very specific conspiracy happened. No, you're just looking for things that are unusual. And then you're—but the thing is, anomaly hunting is always combined with other logical fallacies, right?

B: Really?

S: So you do—yeah, yeah. Because, again, you're trying to get to a conclusion. You're trying to get to the conclusion that this is evidence for my pet theory.

C: Right. So if it was like, that's a coincidence that X, Y, and Z happened the same day, must be God. Like, it's like this weird leap to the explanation.

S: So anomaly hunting is often paired with the argument from ignorance. This is an anomaly. We don't know how to explain the anomaly. Therefore, aliens, right?

C: Therefore, aliens. Yeah, right, exactly. Aliens or God.

B: Yeah. What it's not taking into account, though, is that anomalies happen. If anomalies did not happen, that would be truly remarkable. And you can't be impressed by the mere existence of anomalies.

E: So it's a misunderstanding of how statistics work as well.

C: Well, and it's kind of an intuition. It's a mental—it's that lack of neuropsychological humility, right? We developed these abilities, these schemas, to notice things that seem aberrant. We're good at pattern-seeking. And so when something seems wrong, usually we feel that it's a bigger deal than it actually is. We feel that that wrongness has meaning.

S: Yeah, it sings to us. The other frequently paired logical fallacy with anomaly hunting is the equation of unexplained with unexplainable.

E: Oh, yes.

S: Just because we can't currently explain that anomaly doesn't mean that it's forever unexplainable, and therefore we must invoke God, aliens, conspiracy, ghosts, whatever it is that you're doing. So yeah, the thing is, logical fallacies often are invoked in chains of arguments, again, leading down the path to what your desired belief or conclusion. And then that's why it could become tricky sometimes to disentangle them, and there's a lot of overlap. It's like, yeah, you might be committing multiple logical fallacies at the same time, you know? They don't always exist as these pristine, isolated logical fallacies. It's somebody's making an argument, and they might be meandering through a minefield of logical fallacies.

C: Well, and especially if somebody's not having that neuropsychological humility, and they're not being kind of like intellectually honest, then it's really common that an argument's riddled with logical fallacies.

S: Yes. Yeah, totally.

C: It's like they're going to do or say whatever they can to try and prove their point, but they're not actually using critical thinking to do so. I mean, obviously, logical fallacies happen a lot by accident. They happen a lot just because that's how we think, and we have confirmation bias, and we have all these other biases, and so they pop up. But yeah, when somebody's being disingenuous in the way that they're arguing, there's always logical fallacies present.

S: The other thing about anomaly hunting, and this gets to the statistics thing, that people confuse something which is typical of something with being predictive. This is something I talk to my medical students and residents about all the time because it's a very important change that you have to make in the way you think about things when you engage in any kind of investigative endeavor like medicine, right? You can't think about how typical A is of B. You need to know how predictive A is of B. So let me give you an example.

B: Please do.

S: Fever, right? Fever is very typical of COVID. But how predictive? If you just have a fever, does that predict, oh, you have a fever. You must have COVID. No, there's 1,000 other things that can give you a fever too. There's also fever of unknown origin where we don't know it.

C: You see that in psychology a lot too, like let's say hallucination. It's typical of schizophrenia, but it's not predictive of schizophrenia. There are a lot of reasons that people hear things or see things.

S: Yeah, so anomalies may be consistent with a subterfuge, some kind of conspiracy. But is it predictive? No, because anomalies are ubiquitous. There was always anomalies, especially if you use, and here's another logical fallacy, open-ended criteria, right? You don't have strict criteria for what counts as an anomaly. It's just, it seems weird to me, right? That's it. That's usually it.

E: It doesn't feel right.

S: Yeah. And if you don't see that that's anomalous, you're naive. That's then the ad hominem that gets thrown in there as well. So anyway, that's a complicated answer to the question. But I think that you have to learn how to, again, strip these down to what's the core bit of the logic that's being used. And then you see how many different ways people use them and how they get linked up and combined together. And there are definitely subtypes of subtypes. You know, like there's post hoc fallacies that include, or an ad hoc fallacies and whatever. And it's all under motivated reasoning, right? You know, at the end of the day, it's like these nestled logical fallacies. But again, it's good to be familiar with the many manifestations that they have, mainly so that you could police them in your own thinking, right? I also always want to emphasize that. This is about policing your own thinking, not playing gotcha with other people.

E: Yeah, it's not a weapon to use against other people.

S: Because people will use open-ended criteria in order to call anything a logical fallacy as a gotcha to dismiss other people's arguments without really engaging with them. And that's called the fallacy fallacy. Let's move on to science or fiction.

B: Oh boy.

Science or Fiction ()

Answer	Item
Fiction
Science

Host	Result
'

Rogue	Guess

Voiceover: It's time for Science or Fiction.

Item #1: A new analysis supports the conclusion that the largest flightless birds to ever exist, the Australian Dromornithids, were most closely related to chickens.
Item #2: An evaluation of college students during the pandemic found that while mood generally decreased during the lockdown, introverts experienced an increase in mood
Item #3: A new study finds evidence that the supercontinent cycle started about 4 billion years ago, and has gone through six full cycles.

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. And then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Just have three news items. But I think they're very interesting. You guys ready? All right, here we go. Number one, a new analysis supports the conclusion that the largest flightless birds to ever exist, the Australian dromornithids, were most closely related to chickens. Item number two, an evaluation of college students during the pandemic found that while mood generally decreased during the lockdown, introverts experienced an increase in mood. And number three, a new study finds evidence that the supercontinent cycle started about four billion years ago and has gone through six full cycles. Evan, you weren't here last week, so you go first this week.

Evan's Response

E: The largest flightless birds to ever exist, Australian dromornithids, dromornithids, dromornithids.

S: Maybe, yeah, dromornithids, yeah.

E: Dromornithids, amazing.

S: Probably dromornithids would be my guess.

E: All right, so how could these have been closely related, most closely related to chickens?

S: And I'll just clarify, I mean, obviously the chicken group not specifically chickens, but to...

B: Chicken-ish.

E: Chicken-ish.

S: The group to which chickens belong.

E: Which is called, is there a name for that?

S: There is, I'll tell you, it's galliformes.

E: I think I've heard that before.

C: Pico de gallo, right?

S: Which do not come from gallifrey, by the way.

B: You read my mind, Steve.

C: But you've heard of pico de gallo.

S: Yeah, gallo, gallo, yeah.

C: That means peck of the rooster.

E: I've always, something that has stuck in my beak all these years is chickens can't fly, but I don't know, is that, how do you, who determined that and defined flight in the context of chickens? So I'm going to assume that even though I don't have an understanding for it, that is generally correct. The chickens are flightless themselves. Therefore, these largest flightless birds from Australia are also flightless. And in that context, perhaps if they're related in that way, then perhaps in other ways, they are also closely related. I don't know. I somehow have a feeling if I'm going to be wrong about this one, that's the reason why I'm going to be tripped up is because of my lack of understanding of current chickens. The next one about the college students during the pandemic found that while mood generally decreased during the lockdown, the introverts experienced an increase in mood. Why would one have to do with the other necessarily in this context? If you're introverted and you're being your introverted self, which means the pandemic didn't really have much of an effect on your state of interpretation of yourself, I don't really know how to qualify or quantify that. But in any case, why would how the rest of the world who's not introverts and how they were impacted somehow impact the introverts and what they were experiencing? I would think that that would be more neutral, if anything, an increase in mood. Why? Because they're happy that other people are now doing less things? I don't think those two things are tied. I'm thinking this one's going to be the fiction. And then the last one about the supercontinent cycle four billion years ago, and it's gone through six full cycles. Well, I know there have been cycles. I think the trick here could be is that at certain points, the Earth was frozen, pretty solidly frozen. I don't know how that had an impact on supercontinent cycles. Even though there was this frozen exterior, were there still continental drift and things happening below the surface? So I think that would be the one way I would be tripped up on that one. But I'm not feeling it as much as I am the introverts one. I just think there's a disconnect there, and I don't see why they would have experienced an increase in their mood as a result of what was happening to the non-introverts around them. So I think that one's fiction.

S: OK, Cara?

Cara's Response

C: I don't know. I think introverts might have had some protective factors during the pandemic. Even though introversion, extroversion is sort of a continuum, and even though it doesn't just have to do with socializing, it has to do with stimulus. Introverts tend to want less stimulation in order to maintain focus, whereas extroverts tend to want noise and a lot of communication and more stimulation. There's just something about this that, yes, I bet everybody was depressed overall. I bet everybody got really down. I have a feeling that extroverts got hit much harder, and that introverts may have been a little bit more protected from depression. You know what I mean? And maybe even were a little bit like, hey, I don't know. Now nobody has any expectations of me. I can just hang out at home. So I don't know. This one's tricky, because it could also have a time scale thing. Like at the beginning, they were OK. But by the end, maybe everybody was in the toilet. I don't know. We're still not even to the end. The flightless bird one I have no problem with, that they're like chickens. And then the supercontinent cycle started 4 billion years ago and has gone through six full cycles. Oh, gosh. I don't know anything about. So are you saying like Pangea happened six times?

S: Yes.

C: What? Seriously? I had no idea. Why did I only think it only happened once?

B: Well, I can't say nothing.

C: Yeah, you can't say anything. That's so weird. Six full cycles, but 4 billion years is a really long time. Like we're usually just thinking about when there was life on Earth, I think, and not like, of course, microcellular life. But I'm talking like complex life, because when we think about plate tectonics and stuff, we're usually looking at, yeah, some geological evidence. But we're also looking at fossil evidence. So maybe I'm just thinking of the last cycle. Oh, gosh. Oh, gosh. They all seem true. Oh, what do I do when they're all true? Which one is least true?

E: You roll a d3?

C: Yeah, which one is fiction?

B: Come on, you've been playing this long enough.

C: I'm going to say that you said the mood, Evan.

E: Yes, introverts, I think, is fiction.

C: OK, I'll go with Evan. I'll say it's the mood. But I bet you they did.

E: There's an increase in mood. That just seems strange.

C: No, I think they probably did feel better. I just don't think it probably lasted overall. Steve, can I ask if you're talking about overall? I can't ask that, can I?

S: I didn't give Evan that information, so no.

C: OK, all right. I'll go with Evan.

S: All right, and Bob.

Bob's Response

B: All right, so let's go with the first one, the flightless birds. In my understanding, I mean, pterobirds, they're my jam. They're my favorite birds of all time. 10 feet tall birds that will rip your arms out of the sockets. They are awesome. They were in South America. They migrated to North America for, I think, a few million years. They are awesome. So now there's something even bigger in Australia. I mean, well, OK, everything's big in Australia. Never heard of them. I can't imagine that they're just finding these things now. Being closely related to chickens, sure. What the hell? How could I disagree with that? But yeah, the only thing that's freaky there is that this is it took them this long to find them. But I can believe it. Let's go to three, then, the supercontinent. Yeah, I mean, Pangea. There's also Gondwanaland and maybe one or two others that I'm aware of. Six cycles, six full cycles seems like a lot to me. And also, Evan, to answer your question. Yeah, I mean, lots of snow and ice on the planet. No problem. Tectonic plates were still moving because that ice is not going to affect, you know, the mantle. I mean, that's what the crust is floating on the mantle. That's what's moving the stuff around. So the ice had nothing to do with that. So yeah, it was still happening. But the second one, yeah, this is the one that I'm skeptical about. I mean, because superficially, it seems so obvious, right? Like, yes, it's a pandemic and everyone's in quarantine. So if you're an extrovert, you're going to hate being locked up. But if you're an introvert, you're going to love it because then you could just be, you know, your isolated introverted self more easily because you don't have to go out and do stuff. But the thing is, though, who are you locked up with? What if the introvert is locked up with the extrovert? Then the introvert is going to be kind of not happy. So that kind of throws a wrench of things. So I'm going to say that's fiction.

C: Well, I hope that's the answer, too. I hope that's why.

E: I liked your answer the best of the three of us.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: So we'll start with number one. A new analysis supports the conclusion that the largest flightless birds to ever exist, the Australian dromornithids, were most closely related to chickens. You guys all think that is science. And that one is...

B: Say it, say it.

S: Science. That is science.

B: How big? How big are we talking? 11, 12, 13 feet?

S: Three meters. So yeah, 10 feet.

B: 10? Well, not much bigger than the other pterobirds.

S: Yeah, but they were huge. The study was a look at their brains, because of their brain cases, because we have some skulls. Their brains were kind of flattened out in order to accommodate the muscles they needed for their giant beaks. And all of these guys were, I think, vegetarians, I think. But because of the neural anatomy that they can infer from the skull, that reinforces the possibility, that reinforces the notion that they are more closely related to galliformes than to other birds. They were thought to be ratites, but evidence has been moving in the direction that they actually are not ratites. They are actually related to basal galliformes. So again, at the sort of the base of the branch that now includes fowls chickens, turkeys, pheasants, all those birds.

C: So fowl.

B: Yeah, look at the image I copied into Skype.

E: Oh boy.

C: Oh, but he looks so dopey.

B: That one looks less dopey, the second one.

C: He looks like friend bird. Like you would ride him.

B: Rip your head off, man.

S: And for the record, Evan, chickens are not considered flightless. They can fly. They're just really bad at it. They're considered poor flyers, not flightless.

C: Yeah, but he said he was, I love that you said a vegetarian too, and not an herbivore. You said he was a vegetarian. Like he's like, no, thanks. I'm off meat this week.

B: Wow.

S: They would be fed on a diet of soft leaves and fruit.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: OK, let's move on to number two. An evaluation of college students during the pandemic found that while mood generally decreased during the lockdown, introverts experienced an increase in mood. You guys all think this is the fiction. And this one is science.

B: Oh, my gosh.

C: No.

S: What's funny is I have one of my two daughters is very introverted. And she loved the shutdown. I mean, she was so happy because the thing that you're missing is that it takes the pressure off completely to be surrounded by people. And that for some people, that was very comfortable. You know, that again, it sort of removed all that socialization pressure. That somebody who is uncomfortable in crowds or uncomfortable in a big classroom or uncomfortable being forced to have to be with a lot of people all day long.

C: And there must be some amount of protective it's like they themselves don't have as much social interaction by choice.

S: Yeah.

C: So when they're forced to not have social interaction, it's less painful.

S: So they used the OCEAN, the big five. And they surveyed the college students. And and then they correlated their personality profile with how their mood was affected throughout the shutdown and throughout the pandemic. Extroverts had had a problem. People were high in agreeableness and high in conscientiousness. But it was flipped for people who had neuroticism. And of course, if you were the opposite of extroversion is introversion. So if you had low extroversion then you also had a positive relationship in terms of your mood with the with the shutdown.

C: Nothing on openness. People with low openness weren't happier.

S: I think that was that was just neutral.

C: Oh, interesting. I would have predicted if I were setting hypotheses for that. The people who are not open to new experiences would be like loving just being at home doing nothing new.

E: Or you could have used the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacies, Kara, and come up with those ideas after you saw the data.

S: So they concluded these data support the conclusion that personality traits are related to mental health and can play a role in a person's ability to cope with major stressful events. Different traits may also be more adaptive to different types of stressors. All right.

Steve Explains Item #3

S: All this means that a new study finds evidence that the supercontinent cycle started about four billion years ago and has gone through six full cycles is the fiction.

B: Was it four cycles?

S: This is still a cut. Well, we don't really know. There's a few that we absolutely know about. The question has been, so we know that there is a 600 million year supercontinent cycle, where the plate tectonics, the continents come apart and then crash into each other again, then break apart and crash into each other again. So every 600 million years that goes through a full cycle. We know this has been going on for about two billion years. So we know for certain there's been at least three cycles. The question has been what happened prior to two billion years ago. We really just don't know. And this is where the new study comes into play. And this is cool because this is in Australia again, and there is a certain location that has a type of mineral that orients itself to the magnetic field of the earth. So get this. They can look at this. This is like a fossilization of where, relative to where that continent was, where that, yeah, relative to the poles over billions of years, because of the different layers will solidify with different orientations to the magnetic field. Isn't that ridiculously awesome?

B: Yeah, you just have to date the solidification though, right?

E: But the poles change.

C: Also, doesn't magnetic north change?

E: Yeah.

S: Yes, but we know that data though, right? So you could calculate that data as well.

E: They have that pegged? Okay.

S: So what this data show is that the supercontinent cycle probably does not go beyond two billion years. So between two billion and four and a half billion years ago, there was no supercontinent cycle.

E: Why?

S: Well, we don't know. We really have to, we're still trying to figure out. So first of all, we don't know what started the whole thing, right? We don't know what started the, like why there's continents and oceans, right? Why are there continental plates and oceanic plates? Why there is and why there is a supercontinent cycle at all? Why this whole thing happens? We don't know what the early earth was like. We don't know what kicked off this whole thing. And we're not sure how far back it goes.

B: Could it be like meteorite impacts, asteroid impacts?

S: Yeah, I don't know. But we don't, but we don't know. But this evidence shows probably the supercontinent cycle specifically is not, does not go beyond two billion years.

B: Wow.

S: But we don't know what the earth was like before that. You know, we don't know what the tectonic situation was prior to two billion years. There was something else going on. But it also suggests that they said that probably while there was no supercontinent, there probably were two main landmasses. But they didn't come together as a supercontinent, right? But we need more data points to really know.

C: And these rocks, these rocks that oriented, they're only two billion years old?

S: No, no, they go back further. But the point is, they don't translate into the supercontinent prior to that. They suggest that if anything, there was two landmasses prior to the oldest supercontinent cycle. Still a bit of a mystery though what actually the earth was like prior to two billion years ago. All right, Evan, give us a quote.

Skeptical Quote of the Week ()

How weak our brains are, and how quickly they are terrified and led into error by a small incomprehensible fact. Instead of saying simply: ‘I do not understand because I do not know the cause,’ we immediately imagine terrible mysteries and supernatural powers.
– Guy De Maupassant (1850-1893), _short_description_

E: This week's quote comes to us from a listener suggested by Paul from Thompsonville, Michigan. Thank you very much, Paul, for this. "How weak our brains are and how quickly they are terrified and led into error by a small incomprehensible fact. Instead of saying simply, I do not understand because I do not know the cause, we immediately imagine terrible mysteries and supernatural powers." Paul tells us that he found this in a ghost story by Guy de Maupassant.

C: Oh, Guy de Maupassant.

E: Ah, so you're familiar.

C: I love Guy de Maupassant. He wrote The Necklace.

E: Oh, I didn't know that.

C: He's like one of my favorite authors. Yeah.

E: Oh, wow.

C: Yeah.

E: This ghost story is called The Horla, and it was published in 1885. It's about a man being tortured by an invisible being and trying to reconcile what he believes with what is happening to him. Very cool. 1885. I like that.

S: Yeah, that is neat. Especially it goes back so far.

E: Yeah, yeah. And it was put together that could have been written last week. So very, very cool.

C: He's such a brilliant writer. Highly recommend if nobody's read his work.

S: What's your favorite story of his?

C: I mean, The Necklace is the one that sticks out to me. It's probably his most famous story. And it's this, I mean, it's got a twist. So I kind of don't know. No spoilers.

S: I didn't identify it by the ending.

C: 1884. It's like, really? At this point? But yeah, it's one of those stories that like, I don't know, it's all about perception and perspective. And it's got this massive twist, like a surprise ending. And it's, it's a brilliant.

B: It doesn't have to do with time travel, does it?

C: And it's about class. And it's about priorities. And I don't know. Can I tell you what the twist is? Do people want to know this?

S: It's actually, you can get it online, the whole thing. It's a short story.

C: Oh, totally. Yeah, this is old. This is very, very old. From like, 1880s.

E: We should all read it and talk about it someday. Have a little conversation about it.

C: Yeah.

S: Yeah, just search for The Necklace. It comes right up. It's the first link.

E: And now I'm going to read this ghost story called The Horla as well. So thank you, Paul.

C: Very cool.

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

B: Sure, man.

C: Thanks, Steve.

E: Thanks, Steve.

Signoff/Announcements ()

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

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

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