SGU Episode 989

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SGU Episode 989
June 22nd 2024
"Freeman Dyson theorized that hypothetical alien megastructures would give off infrared radiation and searching for that byproduct would be a viable method for searching for extraterrestrial life." 3D Illustration Getty Images/NASA
SGU 988                      SGU 990
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
The downside of skepticism: it can easily turn into an arrogant position of a priori rejection of any new phenomenon or idea, a position that is as lacking in critical thinking as the one of the true believer, and that simply does not help either science or the public at large.
Massimo Pigliucci, Italian-American philosopher and biologist
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Show Notes
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Introduction, Juneteenth

Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, June 19^th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: I love these long summer nights.

S: Do you?

B: That's right.

E: Yes.

B: Oh, my gosh. We've got two more days.

E: I know. It'll be the longest.

S: Even under the heat dome?

E: Even under the heat dome, yes. I get it, that it's warm out there, very hot in some places, and fires in New Mexico, and some terrible things going on. However, it does not—maybe it should, but it doesn't diminish the fact that I like—

S: That you're living in air conditioning.

J: Look, Ev, there's always something bad going on somewhere. I mean, you've got to enjoy your own life, for crying out loud.

E: I get that. For some reason, I'm very in tune with how much light there is outside. I think about it daily. I really do.

C: Yeah, because you've got a brain and a super charismatic nucleus.

E: Well, just I don't know. I probably think about it. It should be background sort of thoughts, but for me, it's not.

S: Yeah, I like the light.

E: I do as well.

C: It's also—it's Juneteenth, everyone.

S: It is.

E: Juneteenth.

C: Happy Juneteenth.

E: Happy Juneteenth.

S: I don't know if we've had a show on Juneteenth before. If we did, I didn't notice.

E: I don't recall.

S: Yeah. So for those of you who may not know, Juneteenth celebrates the day when the last slaves were finally freed. So the Emancipation Proclamation was made effective in 1863, but did not instantaneously take effect all over the United States at that time. There were some locations that were still—even though the war was over, they were still under Confederate control, specifically the state of Texas. It wasn't until June 19th, 1865, two years later, that 2,000 Union troops showed up in Galveston Bay, Texas, and finally said, you have to free your slaves. So that was the last of the slaves were freed.

C: Yep. Emancipation Day is what they call it in parts of Texas.

J: So did those slaves that were not initially released, did they know that they should be released?

S: I don't know. I mean, they probably were not given up-to-date information.

E: Yeah, probably not.

C: Well, and I don't think, obviously, it's not a function of, I know, and now I can't, you know. Like, obviously, there was, like, deeply coercive practices going on, even after Juneteenth. It was not an easy time to be an easy place.

E: No, it was not the end of the suffering.

C: And we know, too, that Lincoln was really pushing for a lot of—what could we call them?

S: Reforms?

C: Yeah, reforms and resources, so that after emancipation, there wasn't mass chaos. And so that people who had been wholly, sadly, dependent these enslaved people didn't have anything to their name. And so they were really pushing for giving property to each individual, for ensuring that there was access. But then a lot of that was undermined when Lincoln died.

S: I mean, things were going okay for a while under Reconstruction, but then, basically, they basically completely undermined and ended, in a political deal, ended, effectively, Reconstruction. And then the South was able to, basically, have all but slavery. You know what I mean? They tried to do everything they could to return things to the way they were under slavery, even though it wasn't technically slavery.

C: Yeah. Johnson was not a good guy. Let's be honest. Lincoln was really pushing for, like, all of these reforms during Reconstruction. And Johnson undid a lot of that.

E: Only when Grant came along did, really, some of the Reconstruction things actually start to take effect and be enforced. And Grant would send the army into places where the army needed to be to help enforce-

S: We think we have a lot of political strife today, but imagine that. I mean, obviously, nothing worse than an actual civil war. But then having to deal – that was – talk about upheaval, social upheaval and political upheaval.

J: I mean, population-wise, how big was the North versus the South?

C: Are you asking about how many soldiers or how many people living in the United States?

S: Union population was 22 to 23 million people. Confederate, I think, about nine.

C: Oh, interesting. I'm seeing 18.5.

E: Now, are they including the four million people who were enslaved?

C: They are. Yeah. In the South, it was nine million, including four million enslaved people.

E: Including, yeah.

J: Wow.

S: So there was – 18.5 was free, and then 3.5 million were slave.

C: I see.

S: And then in the Confederacy, it was nine million total, 5.5 million free, 3.5 million slaves.

C: Gosh. The Civil War was dark. Did you guys watch Manhunt?

E: No.

J: Nope.

C: It's really good. It's on Apple TV. It's basically about John Wilkes Booth – it's not really about John Wilkes Booth, but that's sort of the background story. But it really digs deep into the politics of the time and Edwin Stanton and Lincoln's cabinet and all the upheaval around his assassination. It's really interesting.

GMO pineapple and petunias (4:58)

S: So I did receive my GMO pineapple and petunias.

J: So what kind of pineapple was it?

E: Right.

S: Remember it was the red flesh pineapple?

E: Yum.

S: It was good. Unfortunately, it was already pretty much right at the edge of being – it was ripe and I didn't have any time to store it, so I had to crack it open.

E: Yeah. We were going to get together, maybe put a candle in it, blow it out, and then cut it up. But no. There was no time.

S: Bob was able to try some. So it was very nice. It's a mellow pineapple with – definitely with hints of watermelon.

B: It was tasty as hell.

S: Yeah.

B: It was very, very good. And I had it at the lower end of its deliciousness.

E: At the tail end.

S: And then I got my glow-in-the-dark petunias.

C: Oh, wow. Are they as impressive as I'd hoped?

S: So they do glow in the dark, but you have to like really – it has to really be dark. You basically have to like put your hands over them so that you can cover them and then you can see them glowing in the dark. But they won't really ramp up until they're thriving. So I transplanted them to a larger pot. I've been watering them, trying to really make them thrive. I'm hoping that they're going to start producing those proteins once that's the case.

E: I hear if you rub the leaves, they'll –

C: Fiction.

E: Fiction.

S: But they're pretty petunias.

C: That's pretty cool.

S: But now that I know the timing of the pineapple delivery, I'll try to order one so we can maybe get it on a – for a live stream.

C: Oh, cool.

J: We could do it during the 1,000th episode.

S: We could.

C: Get them delivered to Chicago?

E: You want to risk that?

C: Try it.

S: You could order a sugar loaf and the pink one and see which one's better.

E: Well, look. Pineapple is my all-time favorite fruit. So I would eat it. I would eat it anywhere with anything. I don't think I've ever tasted something that had pineapple in it that I did not like.

C: I love pineapple, but it makes my throat itchy.

S: Yeah.

B: Itchy?

E: Is it that sting that –

C: Yeah. Does it have papain in it? What's the enzyme that does that?

S: It does have an enzyme that basically like digests. So it's eating you while you're eating it.

C: Yeah.

B: Awesome.

E: Wow. Well, it's a good way to go.

S: Yeah.

E: As far as I'm concerned.

News Items

Sun's Magnetic Field About to Flip (7:04)

• The sun's magnetic field is about to flip. Here's what to expect. 

S: All right. Let's dive into some news items. Jay, tell us about the sun's magnetic field.

J: Well, it's going to flip.

E: The sun's magnetic field will flip.

J: That's it.

E: Will that have any ramifications for us here?

J: I don't know. That's all I read.

E: Oh, gosh.

C: That's it. Good night.

E: That sounds terrible.

J: This is significant. It's a significant event. It's called the magnetic field reversal. This happens about every 11 years and it coincides with the solar cycle's peak activity. So the sun's activity increases, increases, increases, peaks out, the magnetic field flips, and then it takes a little while to settle down. So some people say that they switch suddenly, but that's not really the case. It takes time. It takes time for it to work itself out. I'll tell you more about what happens when the flip occurs and why Bob should be afraid.

B: Yeah.

J: Because the undead get heavily affected by this event.

E: No, no. Seriously. That was in a movie.

J: Yeah, it was.

E: A documentary from the 60s or something.

J: The sun's magnetic field is generated by the movement of what, guys?

B: The sun's magnetic field?

J: Yeah. Yep.

S: The plasma inside.

J: It's correct. Good job, Steve.

E: The movement of the plasma. What part of the sun, though? This is what level is creating it? How deep?

E: Right. Is it the core? Is it the surface?

C: Is it the outside-y? But isn't the sun hotter on its surface than it is deeper in?

S: Well, it's deceptive. The sun's not that hot on the surface.

E: 6,000 degrees.

S: The corona.

B: The corona.

S: The around the sun. That's where you get the millions of degrees.

E: That's where you start.

S: But it's very diffuse.

J: So the electrically-charged plasma is in the interior of the sun, and that shuffling around and movement of the plasma is known as the solar dynamo, which I think is pretty cool. So the sun is composed mainly of ionized gas, and there are separated electrons from their nuclei creating plasma that conducts electricity, it generates magnetic fields, and like I said, it moves around, it churns around inside the sun. There's a lot of activity going on there. So every 11 years, the sun's magnetic field undergoes this series of changes, right? It's a process. So at the beginning of the cycle, during a time called the solar minimum, the sun's magnetic field resembles something called a dipole, which is like, if you've ever seen a picture of the Earth's magnetic field, you could see these two round structures coming out off the sides, and then you have these two poles above the North Pole and above the South Pole. So that's why they call it a dipole. It has somewhat of a flower look to it. It's very pretty. So the sun looks similar to the Earth's. It has a very clear North and South Pole. So as the cycle here on the sun progresses towards a solar maximum, the magnetic field becomes more complicated, and there's a lot of sunspots and active regions appearing on the sun's surface. Sunspots are actually very important here to this process. Sunspots are, if you guys don't know, these are regions of intense magnetic activity on the sun's surface. These can be visible if you look at the sun with the right kind of equipment. You could see little dark spots on the sun, and it's a cool thing to keep in mind that when you see them, it's very likely that they could be three, four times the size of the Earth. You know, they're just huge. These appear dark because they are a little bit cooler than the surrounding areas. So these sunspots, like I said, they play a critical role in the magnetic field reversal because what happens is they emerge in pairs with opposite magnetic polarities, and these polarities migrate across the sun's surface. This contributes to the overall magnetic field changes that happen on the sun. So as the solar cycle reaches its peak, the magnetic field lines, they become tangled and the magnetic poles gradually weaken, right? So they're kind of diminishing and they're diminishing, and then they eventually just kind of shift places with each other. This process is driven by the movement of the magnetic fields from the sun's equator towards the poles where they cancel out the existing polar magnetic fields and establish new ones with the opposite polarity, to be specific. So this flip isn't instantaneous, but it occurs over a period of a year or two, depending on how everything shakes out because there's so many moving parts here. Now, after the flip, this is the part that Bob's got to be terrified of, all undead immediately drop. They just cannot function for weeks.

B: Oh man, I hate when that happens.

E: Sorry, Bob. I feel for you.

C: There's a footnote of the article.

J: It would be cool, though, if somebody wrote a story about zombies that has to do with this 11-year cycle. After the flip happens, the sun's magnetic field gradually returns to a simpler dipole configuration, and this is as it's approaching the next solar minimum. So this takes some time for it to work out, and the new dipole has the opposite polarity compared to the previous cycle, and this is the completion of the flip. This process begins brand new with the new solar cycle. So what effect will this have on us? Should we be worried? Well, let me ask you a question. Were you worried 11 years ago?

B: That's the question.

J: Did anything happen 11 years ago?

B: No.

J: Nothing that I can remember. I don't remember.

C: Maybe not related to this.

J: 11 years ago, what was it? It was 2013.

E: Yeah. What was happening?

J: Nope. Nothing spectacular.

S: Didn't the world end in 2012?

J: It did. But it came back.

E: It did, but it started again.

C: It was very important.

E: It was seamless. If you blinked, you missed it, Steve.

J: So when the flip actually takes place, we have more solar phenomena happening, like solar flares and coronal mass ejections, and these events release a ton of energy and charged particles into space, which is going to do a couple of things. It could impact satellite communications. It could affect GPS systems. It could have an impact on power grids that are around the Earth. Now, the increased solar activity can also do some cool stuff, like auroras. We have auroras in the north, and what do we call the ones in the south, guys?

S: Aurora Australis.

B: Australis.

E: Borealis and Australis.

J: There you go. So it's Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis. Okay. And these are located in the polar regions, of course.

B: I think it's called Australis.

C: I think it's called Australis, too.

J: Just relax, man.

C: Whatever.

E: What did you call me?

S: Australopithecus.

J: It's Australopithecus.

E: Oh, yeah. Makes sense now.

J: All right. So these magnetic field flippages, these are not harmful to people.

B: Jay, they're called flippity-dippities. Come on.

J: These solar flippity-dippities are not harmful to humans. They're harmful to zombies. Not humans. The associated solar activity, however, can affect our technological infrastructure. So power companies and satellite operators, they are on the lookout for any problems. And also during this phase, scientists study the hell out of the sun. Now we have a spacecraft that's, or you know, like an orbiter that's going around the sun right now. Correct, guys?

B: Yes.

E: That is correct.

J: This will be its first chance to look at the sun, right? Because it hasn't been, it wasn't there 11 years ago. So it'd be interesting to see what that figures out. So anyway, yeah. So don't worry. It's going to happen. If you're living in the right place on Earth, you're going to see some really wonderful auroras. And we really don't have that much to really be that worried about it as long as it isn't like massive, massive.

S: Jay, but we, all right, I have one question though. What about vampires?

J: Well, the vampires are tricky here. So now, as you know, they cannot come out in the daylight, but there is a 15 minute period when the poles are flipping, right? That they can come out, they can come out, they can say, hi, I'm not here to eat you. I'm just an observer of humanity. There's nothing to really be worried about with them, Steve.

S: All right. Don't worry about vampires.

J: No, they have a bad rap. It's bullshit. They're cool.

S: All right.

Kids and Gun Safety (14:42)

• In Homes With Children, Even Loaded Guns Are Often Left Unsecured 

S: All right. Cara, tell us about gun safety with kids.

C: Yeah. So a new study was published. It was actually published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report by the CDC on June 13th, 2024. It's called Firearms Storage Behaviors, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, Eight States, 2021 to 2022. That is the least creative title I've ever heard. It's like, what do you need to know? Well, there was something called the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which actually is an ongoing telephone kind of dialing automated survey. And it's given across the country, but it has modules that can be added to it. And one of the modules that can be added is about gun safety. And that module is not given to every single state, states opt into it. So between 2021 and 2022, the firearm storage behavior investigation portion was completed across eight different states. Those states being, let's see here, California, Alaska, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, and Oklahoma. And they asked not many questions, but a few really important questions. Do you keep a firearm in or around the home? If you keep a firearm in and around the home, are you male or female? Do you have anyone in the home under the age of 17? How old are you? And what is your race and ethnicity? And then they looked at that data, and they did their statisticals, and they determined some findings that are relatively consistent with previous studies, but are still alarming nonetheless, because this is happening against the background of increased suicides involving firearms and increased fatalities among children involving firearms. So here are some big takeaways. So for example, in Ohio, people who had both a child, so somebody under the age of 17 in their home and kept a loaded gun in their home, of those people, about a quarter of them said that their gun was kept unlocked. That was the smallest percentage across the eight different states that were surveyed. In Alaska, more than 40% of people who both had a loaded firearm and a child in the home said that they kept it unlocked. And we know that this is problematic, because having an unlocked loaded gun in a home is significantly related to gun deaths, even if it's not the gun that is owned by the person who died, right? So any unlocked firearm in the home increases the risk of gun death. And knowing that in Alaska, for example, 40% of people who have guns and kids are not locking their guns. And even on the low end in Ohio, we're still talking about around 25%. I mentioned before that there has been an uptick in suicides among children. In 2022, that was the highest rate that has been measured in the past few decades. A lot of people attributed COVID-19, but also rising gun sales. And even though it's not a massive amount of children that are killed each year by accidental gunfire, it does occur at large numbers. It's just lower than the numbers of children who die by suicide. So in 2023, looking at children and adolescents, so anybody aged 0 to 17 years old in the United States who died accidentally by a firearm, we are looking at 1,262 fatal injuries. And among those, half were inflicted by another person. And among those, or among the total again, the majority of them, the firearm was often loaded and unlocked within reach, like on a nightstand. And so we know that firearms need to be locked. And we know that they should be unloaded. But what's kind of this New York Times article that covers this CDC report, talks to some researchers at their division, at the CDC's Division of Violence Prevention. And one of the things that they note is that America is somewhat exceptional in that most or many, I should say, homes that own firearms list the reason for owning a firearm, not as sport, but as protection. And so what you end up with is this kind of paradox, wherein we know it's safer to keep a gun unloaded. But many individuals who own guns expressly for "protection", are less willing to keep their guns unloaded, because they want their guns to be at the ready. One sort of safety mechanism that is very easy to develop there is keeping that gun locked. They also talk a little bit about how there are some like rapid lock mechanisms. One researcher basically says, "I don't think many people really truly understand the risk. People don't think that their firearms are ever going to be used in a suicide until they're in that place. But improving access to fast access locking devices could be really beneficial." She said, "you're not trying to change the idea around home defense. I think it's possible to do, but it's harder than just giving somebody a technological solution." So you know, we talk about this a lot on the show, sort of changing hearts and minds, influencing behavior. Sometimes the easiest solution is one that is like working on the low hanging fruit. And in this case, offering better technology to prevent harm may be a good first step, but definitely education about the fact that although ostensibly having a loaded, unlocked firearm might make somebody feel safer, like, oh, if there's a break in, I can reach my gun faster and defend myself, it's actually associated with more death to loved ones and, accidental deaths or suicide deaths within the home itself. And so it's really important to remember that that sort of cognitive bias is going on. It's tough, though. This is a really tough issue. It's one that the CDC historically, and Steve, maybe you've done more research on this than I have. But historically, the CDC wasn't able to investigate or to publish studies, right? Because there were some mandates by Congress that prevented violence prevention studies around firearms by government.

S: Yeah, there was a time...

C: Yeah, federal government.

S: Yeah, that when the Republicans in Congress were threatening to pull funding for the CDC if they funded studies on gun safety, right? Because they were essentially presenting gun safety research as politically lobbying for gun control laws like basically taking the the Democratic side. And so they said, the CDC shouldn't be doing politics. So they have to just get out of gun research and they threatened to pull the funding. So that didn't, it was like not official, official, but it definitely completely chilled. It effectively ended it. But then that was that has been reversed recently. So this is why this study can be can be done like a study just like that.

C: Exactly. Yeah. And we know that when we're looking at this division, this violence prevention division, we can't ignore guns because guns are up there on the list. When we think about public health, we can't not talk about violent crime. And there is a subsection of violent crime that involves firearms and not just violent crime, but also accidental death by shooting and intentional death by suicide. And so these kinds of studies are really important. Nothing that was published in this study earlier this week was groundbreaking. It really just reaffirmed things that we already know. But because we've been sort of lacking research in this area, it is important that these kinds of studies are being done. And I think one thing I want to note that wasn't really covered by the article or even really by the write up by the CDC, is that these were surveys. This is self-report data, which makes me think it's likely under-reported. Yeah, it's likely worse than this.

S: You would think people under-report like they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing.

C: Exactly.

S: It reminds me of that comedy routine by Jim Jeffries, a very funny comedian. His like most famous routine was a gun control routine that he did. And he says obviously as a comedic routine, but he made the point, there's an inherent dilemma, right? If you having the gun at the ready is inherently unsafe. And people can't have it both ways. You can say, well, I practice gun safety, which means your gun is locked up in a location separate from your ammunition, and the gun's unloaded. And so that's which is obviously maximally inconvenient for emergency like self-defense in the home.

B: What did he say? Excuse me, robber. Wait one moment while I get the gun out of this.

S: I'm coming for you like he's loading up his gun.

C: And I obviously I can't speak for a lot of places around the world. But I can probably say with some confidence that like our friends and listeners, at least in the UK and some other countries that have stricter gun control laws. This is probably like, like a confusing conversation we're having because in many places like that, you cannot own a gun for self-defense. That's not a valid reason to own a firearm. Firearms are owned for sporting. And so it's very common to keep them locked up, unloaded and separate from ammunition because there's no reason you would need to have one at the ready.

S: Emergently, right.

C: But like you said, it's inherently risky. And we've seen this with the simulations of arming teachers or having guns available in schools like there's the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. That rhetoric when this is modeled and it's actually studied scientifically, it does not pan out. Usually there are more fatalities, not fewer. That risk benefit analysis is psychologically loaded, right? It's a fear that there's going to be a home invasion when it's actually not that common that something like that happens. What is...

S: Right. It's fear of an uncommon thing while you're putting yourself at risk for something that's way more common.

C: For something much more common. Yeah, exactly.

S: So that's why I agree that the best public health approaches are ones where it's a default. It's the easy thing to do. So like having gun locks where like palm locks, where it'll read the palm of the owner. So somebody else pick up the gun, it won't work. And it's just mandating that so that kind of thing is likely to have more of an effect. But definitely you always want to do public education because there's no substitute for people just knowing like what the best behavior is. But ironically, a lot of Republican states in the United States have outlawed physicians talking to parents about gun safety with parents of newborn children or of new children. Like this is a typical conversation that a pediatrician might have. It's like, do you have a car seat? Are there any guns in the home? If there are, do you keep them locked up? You know, basically doing that basic education, they're like saying that's an invasion of their privacy. You can't do that.

C: Are you serious?

S: Oh, yeah, totally.

C: Oh, that's amazing. I didn't know because obviously I work in a state where that's not the case. And as a psychologist, if I'm doing a suicide risk assessment, I have to ask if there are guns in the home.

S: Of course. It's just basic.

C: This is an important thing for me. Yeah, it's basic.

B: You're invading their privacy. How dare you?

C: Wow, that's amazing.

S: I mean, it's just silly in the context of a patient-physician interaction. I mean, you're going to worry about invasion of privacy? You mean, there's no way you can do a physician assessment. It's basically inherent to the relationship that you are being invited in as a professional to, like, maximally invade someone's privacy for their-

C: Exactly. That's why we have HIPAA laws. So you don't then pass that on to somebody else because they know you're privy to personal information.

S: In so many ways, physically, I mean, mentally, emotionally, in terms of their private life, every aspect of their life may have an impact on their health care, on their illness. You have to ask them some very probing questions. And to, like, carve out an exception for, do you have a gun in the home, is just absurd. It's ridiculous.

C: And clearly politically motivated. That's, like, the only explanation there. Yeah. It's complicated, right? Because I know that this is a hot topic in the US, which is maybe sometimes a little confusing to people outside of the US. But it's one that education, knowing more, never made the problem worse.

S: Yeah. Generally speaking, that's-

C: Yeah. Generally speaking, being informed on these topics is always going to potentially improve outcomes. But I do appreciate the conversation about low-hanging fruit, easy technological advances that could be quick to adopt and may even be able to be mandated in order to improve public safety.

S: Yeah. Those are always the most effective.

Gates Goes Nuclear (28:29)

• Bill Gates Backs Nuclear 

S: All right. I'm going to talk about nuclear power for a bit. I know this is one of my favorite topics, so I talk about this a lot. Whenever I write about it, whenever it comes up, people, somebody observes that I'm pro-nuclear. It's not really true. I'm not pro-nuclear. My position on energy is all of the above. I am for renewables. I am for solar, wind. I think there should, I think every building in the country should have solar panels on the roof and battery storage. I'm for geothermal, hydroelectric, pumped hydro storage, and nuclear. I think all of the low-carbon options, we need to pick the low-hanging fruit of each option. They have different strengths and weaknesses. They work together well. The difference is there is a political discussion, especially in the United States, but in many countries in the world that are very anti-nuclear, and I think not for rational reasons, mainly for historical reasons or for a misunderstanding, misconceptions about the risks and benefits of nuclear. But there's one person in the U.S. who is very pro-nuclear, and that person is Bill Gates. And this has a significant implication that I want to talk about. So Bill Gates, if you don't know, he's a billionaire who basically made his billions and now is trying to put some of his money to good work. I do admire some of the things that he's done. For example, he decided at one point that he was going to vaccinate the world and has been a strong proponent of vaccination and pushing back against anti-vax misinformation and funding vaccines in the poorest parts of the world. That's a solid humanitarian thing to do. You can't not take that away from him.

B: Yeah, but wait, don't all billionaires do? Oh, no, they don't.

S: About 10 or so years ago, Gates sat down with some experts and he wanted to find out, all right, if I want to put a couple of billion dollars into helping deal with climate change, where can that money be the most effective? What technology could I bootstrap can I would not thrive were it not for a deep pocketed billionaire ushering this into existence.

B: I got to say, Steve, I assume that the experts that he picked were good experts?

S: Well, the answer-

B: That's an important question.

S: Yeah, so the answer that they came up with was, well, probably the thing that's floundering right now, like solar power is doing fine. Wind power is doing fine.

J: What about desert power?

S: I saw part two and they kicked ass, yeah. But the nuclear industry is kind of floundering because we have an aging fleet of nuclear power plants. We haven't really been keeping up with the industry has not been building a lot of plants and it's our knowledge, the institutional knowledge, etc., has kind of been falling by the wayside. And we haven't really made the transition to next gen like advanced high technology nuclear reactors. So he said, okay, let's tell me if there's a space here for like the next generation nuclear reactor, and I want to make that happen, right? So this-

B: Awesome, man.

S: Yeah, so now it's actually happening, right?

B: Wow.

S: They're very close to breaking ground. The first reactor-

B: Holy crap.

S: In Wyoming. Who knows when it will actually come online? These things are always late and over budget, which is fine. And he's like, he says, I'm going to lose money on this. That's not the point. This is not to make money. The point is I have deep pockets. I'm going to keep funding this until it happens.

B: Steve, did he take any steps he would like address like the bureaucracy? I mean, unless you kind of deal with that, it makes it so much harder.

E: Senate's about to pass a bill allowing for- that will help with that, Bob. It'll clear some of the- a lot of the red tape.

B: It's such a no-brainer.

E: And President Biden is expected to sign it. So that-

B: Well, that's good.

S: Biden has been supportive of nuclear power. Absolutely. So he basically found a company, TerraPower, and they designed a new nuclear fission power plant.

B: What generation?

S: Yeah, it's a next generation plant with the goal of making it cheaper because that's like the big issue here. It's got to be fast, cheap, and safe, right?

E: The trifecta.

J: When you say fast, what do you mean by fast?

S: Well, I mean, not 20 years, maybe 10 years, you know what I mean? That's that kind of thing. So it's a smaller reactor. It's like 300 megawatts instead of a gigawatt. So it should be a lot easier, a lot quicker to build for that reason. But here's a couple of the big innovations that he came up with. So first, it's salt-cooled instead of water-cooled. That's huge for a couple of reasons. One is that water has to be under high pressure, and the high pressure is what causes a lot of the expense, a lot of the safety features. You have to constantly be managing the amount of pressure in the water, and it massively complicates the design and therefore the cost and all the safety features of the factory. The second thing that they did was to separate out the nuclear part of the plant from the energy production part of the plant. And that may seem like a simple thing, but what that does, it means that the energy production part of the plant, the turbine, right, the thing that turns the heat from the nuclear part of the nuclear reactor into electricity, that is a separate building than the nuclear plant. That means, theoretically, you don't need any of the safety features in half of the plant that you have in the nuclear part. Now he's still trying to get approval for that from the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, right? But assuming that they approve that, that also would significantly reduce the cost of the plant because, again, you only have to have the containment vessels and all that stuff only has to be on the nuclear part of the plant. So half of it will be a lot easier design. Again, you take away all the high pressure water stuff. So you end up with what the the spokesperson for the company a video where he's explaining all the technology said, our plant is very boring. Like the design of the plant is very boring, but that's by design. That's kind of the whole idea. It's very simple, because we've basically designed away the need for a lot of the safety features and a lot of the complexity. Right? You just essentially just having fission happening over here, you just need the rods, that go up and down that make it that regulate the reaction. And then you have the turbine over there and you don't need all this high pressure stuff and all this redundant safety and everything. Now the salt cooling has another awesome feature.

J: They can get energy from it?

B: You get radioactive salt for free.

J: It tastes good.

E: You get iodine with that.

S: Not even close. The awesome feature is this. So you know, you can, how does the salt store the energy, right? It heats up, it melts, it becomes molten. And right then you could, it flows over to the electricity side, it heats up, the water turns a turbine. There you go. But you know, it keeps that heat a lot longer than the water does, right? So you could...

B: Higher heat capacity, right?

S: You could heat up a lot of the salt as a battery to store power, which means that the nuclear plant can load follow. So in other words, when the grid is making a lot of wind and solar, don't need a lot of electricity from that nuclear power plant over there, it could be storing up its energy as molten salt. And then at nighttime when the wind or when the wind's not blowing, whatever, when renewables are winding down, it can put out, again, its base load is 300 megawatts, but it can peak at 500 megawatts if it has the stored energy in the salt. So that's what I mean. It could follow the demands of the grid. So it actually makes it easier to have renewables on the grid. One of the criticisms of nuclear is that it's inflexible.

B: Right. The sun sets and the wind stops blowing.

S: Because, yeah, like nuclear's base load, it's like producing the exact same amount of electricity and it's very slow to ramp up and ramp down. And therefore it's not really compatible with renewables. This completely solves that problem. It flips it by making it actually facilitate intermittent sources of power on the grid because it can ramp up and ramp down. It could store the energy when it's not needed and then it could actually exceed its peak power output when it is needed. It's like a peaker plant, as they call it.

C: The salt instead of water, it sounds like a duh, obviously. Was it technologically really challenging to pull off? Why have nuclear power plants up to this point all used water?

S: Well, actually, molten salt reactors were first used in the 1950s, so it's actually an old technology. And then the last one closed in the 1970s. And for some reason, there wasn't a lot of interest in it since then. But now interest for, I think, the reasons that I stated is being renewed. And this is also not going to be the first plant to come online that's using the molten salt design itself. So it's not unique to this plant and it's not a new, new technology. It's just a renewed technology, I guess. So here's another thing that's advantageous about this and the reason why he's building it in Wyoming is that he's going to build it. So this previously was a coal town, right? A town that had a coal mine and a coal power plant. That plant is going to be closed in the 2030s, so they're phasing it out. And the town is panicking that they're basically their main industry is going to go away. TerraPower comes in and says, hey, we're going to have a nuclear power plant, it'll replace that coal plant. And by the time that's shutting down, we'll be ramping up, we'll be going online. So here's the thing about building a nuclear power plant of this size is that you can build it on the site or near the site of a previous coal plant and all the connections to the grid are already there.

B: Oh, my God.

J: Oh, wow.

E: Infrastructure.

S: Basically, you're just swapping out a coal plant for a nuclear plant.

B: That's effing awesome.

C: And they don't have to be like upgraded or anything. It's like all at the right kind of capacity.

S: Yeah, it's all there. It's all at the capacity of a power plant, right? It's the same thing.

B: Yeah.

S: So another thing, it's much better than coal, because coal takes a long time to take ramp up and down. It's really terrible at following the demand of the grid. That's why you build the natural gas plants, because those are the peaker plants. Those are the ones that you can rapidly turn on and off. But we don't want natural gas, right? We don't want coal. Instead, we have this salt-cooled nuclear plant that is a lot safer, a lot simpler in design and can follow the ups and downs of renewable sources of energy on the grid. So it really sounds like a great... It looks good on paper, right? It really sounds great. It sounds like it's-

B: Yeah, what's the downside?

S: I don't know. I don't think- the downside is it's nuclear, and there's still a lot of resistance to it. Now the usual things that people mention, what about the nuclear waste? It's like, well, which more accurately called spent nuclear fuel, the nuclear "waste". We've had this conversation before. Just store it somewhere. It's just not as much of a problem as people really think it is. First of all-

C: Put it deep underground.

B: So this isn't... Is it called, what, a breeder reactor, the one that could actually take that waste and consume it?

S: There are reactor designs that have less spent nuclear fuel. They could burn more of the fuel that they have. And there's also... If you want to spend the money, you can reprocess spent nuclear fuel and make it fissile again, right? So it's really just a matter of money there.

J: Did you just make up that word?

S: Which one?

C: Fissile?

S: Fissile. That's it. That's the word.

C: Capable of fission?

E: I get it, Jay.

S: Fissile material. But here's the thing that a lot of people don't realize is that you think, oh, you have to store it for thousands of years. But as we've discussed before on the show, there is a linear inverse relationship between the intensity of radioactivity and the half-life. The longer the half-life, the lower the intensity, right, per mass. The higher the intensity, the shorter the half-life. So all of the really radioactive stuff will basically go away in hundreds of years. By 500 years, it's all gone. The really, really radioactive stuff, the highly radioactive material, they have a very short half-life, 20 years, 30 years, right? Then you have things that have half-life more on the order of magnitude, like 100 or 110 years or whatever. The stuff that has a half-life of 20,000 years, that's near background levels of radiation anyway, right? By definition, it has to be because it's only giving off a little bit of radiation. That's why its half-life is so freaking long. Yes, technically, we do need to store it in a safe location. It's more of a risk, actually, chemically. We don't want it to leak into the water supply.

C: Yeah, that's why we put it, I think I visited one, in a salt mine, like a natural salt mine, where it just closes in on itself, but it's deep underground.

S: But it's basically no worse than just any industrial toxic waste at that point. The fact that it's "radioactive" is, for the long, long half-life materials, the ones that we have to store it for 100,000 years, you really don't, because at that point, it's not very far off of background radiation, you know what I mean? The bad stuff will go away within a couple of hundred years.

C: The interesting thing is, although that is a legitimate concern, I think that most people who are afraid of nuclear power are not afraid of spent nuclear fuel underground. They're afraid of a meltdown. They're afraid of what happened in Fukushima. They're afraid of Chernobyl. And I'm curious, is the salt a mitigator because we're not using water?

S: This does not have the meltdown potential of those plants. So here's why. I'll give a little bit more detail to explain why that's the case. If the water stops flowing for even a minute, the plant, it overheats and melts down, right? That's why you have to have backup upon backup and all of the redundancies and all of the safety things. That's not true for the salt. The salt can just sit there and soak up the heat, right? So there just isn't the potential to melt down the way there is for a water-cooled plant. Also, nuclear power plants that are water-cooled need backup power because their pumps can't go off.

E: That's what happened in Fukushima.

S: That's what happened in Fukushima. The water took out the backup generators, which were in the basement rather than on the roof like they were told to put them.

B: Oh, gee.

E: Right. The tsunami itself knocked out.

S: It knocked out the backup power. The water pumps went down. They overheated and melted down. That cannot happen with a salt-cooled plant like this. They don't need backup power. They don't need all the pumps. They don't need all that fancy stuff.

C: And then wasn't there literally just like tons of radioactive water that actually was released?

S: Yes.

C: Wasn't that the problem?

S: Although, we talked about this not too long ago, I think, on the show as well. By the time it gets into the ocean and then gets diluted again, it's close to background radiation. Yeah. It's not going to do it.

C: But in the vicinity, having all of that water.

S: Right. In the plant itself. In that local area, yes.

C: Soaking into the ground and on the shoreline. I mean, water is hard to contain.

S: This is just a vastly superior nuclear plant design. And I really could not find any big trade-offs or downside to it. It's a lot safer. It should be cheaper to build. It's just we have to officially get through all the regulatory stuff. They have to approve these designs. But they have enough to break ground. So they are building the containment vessel. They're building the stuff that they can build until they get approval for not having to have all the redundant safety in the part of the plant that doesn't have the nuclear material, et cetera. Oh, here's the other thing.

B: There's more?

S: Yeah. One more thing. This is unrelated to anything I've said so far. But this is another feature of how we have let our nuclear... The US has let our nuclear industry wane over the years. We no longer produce uranium. You know where we get all uranium from? Russia.

B: Soviets? You mean Russians?

S: The Soviets don't exist anymore. But Russia, yes.

B: I corrected.

S: Exactly. So Gates is trying to secure domestic sources of uranium. So we'll see how that goes.

C: Russia still gives us uranium?

S: Yeah.

C: Even now?

S: Yeah. Remember, there was a big thing about them buying up all the Canadian sites and everything. Yeah, they've actually been buying it up. Yeah, it's a problem. Because again, part of the support for this is we don't want to be dependent on Russian oil or natural gas, right? Because obviously, for geopolitical reasons, they might invade a NATO country. So it's a problem if we are dependent on them for energy, or our allies are. So yeah, so having domestic sources of critical infrastructure is a priority.

B: That's a no-brainer.

S: Yeah. So there you go. My hope is that Bill Gates will see this through, won't go over budget. He'll say, fine, here you go. He'll make it happen. And he said, this is the first one. The first one's always going to be very expensive. But the hope is that it'll be a proof of concept. And then you could just replicate it over and over and over again, the same exact design, and just start replacing coal plants with nuclear plants. We have to do this. Keep in mind, we have to do this just to tread water. So right now, for the last 40-50 years, we've been at like 19-20% nuclear in the US. We're about 10% worldwide. But we've been right 19% right now. So we've been right around 20% of our electricity is met with nuclear. But by 2050, our energy demand is going to go up by at least 50%. It may be more than that.

B: At least 50%.

S: So we have to maintain that 20% and increase it by 50% just to keep the percentage the same. Right? That's a lot. And we have to replace all of those nuclear plants, which are just coming to the end of their lifespan, right? Which is 40 years. So we're basically already past the lifespan, the original stated lifespan of many of our nuclear power plants. And so we have to replace all of them. We have to maintain our 20%. And we have to make up that 50% increase in demand. Otherwise, we're going to be building coal plants. That's what happened to Germany. Germany said, we're going to let our nuclear plants expire. And we're going to do all wind and solar, which again, I'm 100% in favor of wind and solar. They ended up building cold fire plants because they closed down their nuclear power plants. It really is-

B: Nuts.

S: -nuclear versus coal. And this makes it explicit. They're going to replace coal with nuclear. And that is far better for the environment, for everything, than burning more fossil fuels, especially coal, which is the worst.

E: And the plant will run on Windows 95. No issues there.

S: They got an operating system for free, Evan. They got it for free.

B: Oh, man. It's nuts. Every country needs to do this. Every country needs to do that, what you just described, and they need to do it as fast as possible.

S: Or the equivalent. I think every country can have a different solution. If you can have all geothermal, go for it. Whatever your-

B: Well, not many countries can do that.

S: Not Bob. We're a little bit American-centric in our thinking. America's a huge country with a lot of people and a massive energy demand. Other countries have different geological, different demands, different setups. If you have a lot of desert, like Australia, you could put a lot of solar. It's all fricking desert. Just put solar there and whatever. They might be able to get away with that. They may not need it. If you can have a lot of hydroelectric in Scandinavia, that's fine. I don't care. I don't care what you do. Just do whatever is the low-hanging fruit in your local area, but don't take anything off the table because of 30-year-old, 40-year-old fear-mongering. It's just we can't afford that now. We have to do everything.

Nanodroplet Drug Delivery (49:54)

• Ultrasound beam triggers 'nanodroplets' to deliver drugs at exactly the right spot 

S: All right, Bob. You're going to tell us some more technological good news, this one about nanodroplet drug delivery.

B: Yes. Researchers have made significant advances recently in a method of delivering drugs precisely to the area of the body that needs it using drug nanodroplets and ultrasound. It's perfected this method could revolutionize drug delivery for many people who experience horrible drug side effects or low drug effectiveness. Study is published in Molecular Biosciences, a study led by Matthew G. Wilson, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Utah. Prescription drugs available today, they're obviously amazing, even compared to what our parents had available when they were younger. It is obviously amazing. But ultimately, though, there are issues like whether the drug's injected, whether the drugs are swallowed, inhaled, or even just put in meatballs, the drug eventually diffuses through most of our bodies, even if it's only needed in one specific place, right? How many times have you thought about that? My foot hurts and I take a drug. How does it know where to go? Well, it goes kind of everywhere. But sometimes drugs going to different places can even cause harm. And don't forget, there's also the specter of drug side effects, right? We all know about drug side effects. Often for a lot of people, they're just deal breakers, like, oh, here's this great drug that would help me, but I can't tolerate the side effects. What do I do? You're kind of screwed in a lot of ways. So getting drugs at high concentrations only where it's needed would literally help millions of people with poor quality of life because of these conventional drug delivery limitations. Now one attempt to address that used liposomes, which are tiny, like they're fat-like drug carriers that can release their drug cargo when you hit them in the body with heat or radiation. Unfortunately, it's surprisingly hard to precisely heat a specific part of your body at depth in a safe and controlled way. So that's kind of like not really working out. So research has shifted to using ultrasound to activate the drug release inside the body. So now we know ultrasound, right? Ultrasound is one of the three major classifications of sound. There's the infrasound, that's the really low, that's the lowest, 20 hertz or vibrations per second or less. We can hear 20 hertz kind of, but that's the lowest we can hear. You go below 20 hertz and can't hear it. Can you guys guess what in nature creates infrasound?

J: I would say the roots of plants.

S: Whales?

B: I don't think they make infrasound.

S: Elephants?

C: Yeah, I was thinking whales.

B: Elephants. Elephants do. That's a good one. Elephants do. Because they have such a long wavelength they can communicate surprisingly far. But volcanoes, earthquakes, storms, they make ultrasound. So it's kind of like relatively easily found throughout nature. And then after infrasound, there's the plain old boring audible sounds that we can hear, humans can hear, no problems. That's two hertz to 20 kilohertz. Now beyond that is ultrasound, which starts at the highest sounds that a human can hear. 20 kilohertz, 20,000 vibrations per second. That's the highest we could hear, but ultrasound goes beyond that. And it's used for medical imaging, chemistry, and industry. And also bats famously use ultrasounds, but it's not very common in nature like infrasound is. Okay, so ultrasound, very helpful, especially for medical imaging. Now the drug carriers that are kind of activated by the ultrasound, in this study at least, they call them nano-carriers or nano-droplets. So these are super tiny, as you might have guessed, about 500 nanometers or billionths of a meter. So inside this outer shell essentially are two things. You've got the desired drug, right, the drug that you want to dispense. But there's also a fluorine carbon compound inside, and this is critical. This compound is called a perofluorocarbon. You may have heard of that before. So the ultrasound directly interacts with this perofluorocarbon. And they think what happens is that it kind of like expands the perofluorocarbon in such a way that the outer shell of this nano-carrier expands with releasing the drug. Well, that's the idea anyway. As cool as this ultrasound nano-carrier technique is, it has a problem, or it had a problem. In tests, either the nano-carrier was stable or the drug was released efficiently, but never both at the same time. And that's pretty much a deal killer, right? You don't want a drug carrier that's unstable, potentially breaking apart spontaneously, releasing the drugs willy-nilly throughout the body. That would not be good. On the other hand, though, you don't want a really super stable carrier that you can't efficiently release the drug from using the ultrasound. You want a balance. You want it to be very stable that won't spontaneously break apart in your body, but you also want it to be very efficient at releasing the drug. So that's been very, very hard to find. And this is, or create, this is where these researchers and this study comes in. They decided to tackle this by only testing essentially the known types of perofluorocarbons in the nano-carrier that were stable, because some were unstable and they released the drugs efficiently. Some were very stable, but they didn't release them efficiently. So they decided to start with, yeah, let's start with these nano-carriers that are stable. That's good. Stable is good. So let's work at it from the angle of manipulating the ultrasound to make them release the drugs, okay? And so they did that. They had like three or four different types of perofluorocarbon, types that were all stable, and they tried different frequencies to see which frequency works best to make these nano-carriers release their drug, their drug cargo. They discovered one specific stable perofluorocarbon. It's called perofluorooctylbromide. That worked better than anything else when it was triggered by an ultrasound frequency that was also a lot lower than had been tested before. That was the real change here. They were always testing very high ultrasound frequencies, say a thousand kilohertz, which is what? A megahertz, right? For this test, they went down. They found that 300 kilohertz was very effective, and that was one of the big breakthroughs that they made. So now, what do they have now? They've created a nano-drug carrier that's not only stable and trustworthy and long-lasting in the human body, but this nano-carrier can also be triggered by ultrasound to release drugs efficiently. So bam, that's kind of one of their major goals. They kind of did that. So now we can just release this to the public, right? Well, of course not. This was just in vitro. There's a lot more sciencing to do here. The next step in their study was to inject these nano-carriers in a non-human primate, which they did. This was part of the study. They injected it into macaque monkeys, and these drug trials were definitely a success. They say in their paper, the minimal impact on measures of toxicity in a non-human primate over this time period are a key indicator of potential for clinical translation. Indeed, only blood glucose was found to show a statistically significant change. So this is actually kind of funny. They test the crap out of the blood. They tested all the markers that I've ever even heard of to find out, to make sure that this was okay to have these nano-carriers in the monkey's body filled with this innocuous drug. They found out that it was totally fine, but they only detected a temporary rise in blood glucose. Then they say later in the paper, this is funny, the monkey received sweet juice as a reward on the days of the nano-droplet administration. So even the researchers realized that, yeah, this is probably because of the juice. You give them an injection, or you give them juice, and then they say, okay, you can give me the injection now, and then their blood glucose goes up. Well, I guess it's probably the juice. So basically, this is tolerated extremely well by these macaque monkeys anyway. Okay, so what's next in this research? They say in their paper that the field would benefit from more detailed pharmacokinetic studies. Pharmacokinetics is a fun word. It means essentially studying how the body interacts with administered substances for the entirety of the exposure. So they say that needs to be done.

S: What about pharmacodynamics?

B: They made no mention of pharmacodynamics. Just the kinetics, Steve, just the kinetics.

S: Just to define what those terms mean. So pharmacokinetics is what the body does to the drug. Pharmacodynamics is what the drug does to the body.

B: Interesting. Oh, maybe they should have thrown in the pharmacodynamics in the study.

S: Both of them are studied in drug development.

B: Okay. So what kind of interesting applications could this technique have if it proves viable in humans? Steve and Cara, your feedback here could be interesting. They describe a couple of neuromodulation applications, which were interesting. They say in their paper, a short-lasting psychoactive drug such as propofol could be used to systematically modulate specific parts of the brain in a diagnostic capacity.

C: That sounds so scary to me.

S: Yeah, but you know, we do that now.

C: But not with propofol.

S: Not with propofol, but we do that by basically sticking a catheter into an artery, right? Into just one of the arteries that feed the brain. So you could put that part of the brain to sleep.

B: Right.

S: So this would be a less invasive way of doing that.

C: Well, and don't we also do some interesting stuff? It's almost like knockout, but with magnets.

B: Yeah. That's another way.

C: Like magnetic stimulation. You can sort of knock out brain regions temporarily.

S: We talked about that last week when you were here, I think.

C: Oh, really?

S: Using deep brain, non-invasive deep brain stimulation by using overlapping fields that can't...

C: To pinpoint.

S: Yeah, they have destructive interference. So they don't affect the overlying tissue, but where they intersect, you have a frequency that affects the tissue, the brain function.

B: So Steve, you mentioned using...

S: What I'm saying is diagnostically, that's a very useful thing to be able to turn off half the brain at a time or one part of the brain.

B: So this seems to be a way to do it even more granularly, because you could focus on a very specific portion of the brain and have the drug released just in that specific area instead of an entire section of the brain. So this sounds just a better way to do that. So that sounds pretty interesting. They also mentioned longer lasting drugs such as ketamine could then induce neuroplastic changes. What do you guys think of that one?

C: I don't understand what you're saying.

S: So neuroplasticity is just the changing of...

C: No, no, no. I'm saying ketamine already does that. What are you talking about? What's the difference?

S: Well, just using it more precisely?

B: Using this technique with longer lasting drugs such as ketamine, which could then induce neuroplastic changes. So using this technique to... It's just a more fine-grained use of ketamine to...

C: So you're just saying targeting brain regions with ketamine.

B: Yeah.

C: Okay. But to me, I don't really...

B: Yes.

C: Like ketamine is only going to bind where it binds. And I could see, yes, if you don't want it to bind to receptors in a certain region, you only want them in this region, that that would be useful. But that statement of like using long-acting drugs like ketamine to induce neuroplasticity, that's what drugs do.

S: Yeah. It's just a matter of more specificity. That's the whole point of this.

C: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

B: By localizing the drug delivery, you can use a much smaller amount of the drug, but a much higher dose in a very specific region. That's going to knock back the side effects by potentially a huge amount.

C: Yeah. Think about like using a chemotherapy, for example.

B: Well, exactly. And that's exactly what my next statement here is. They also describe in their paper using this in scenarios where localized release of drugs could be especially helpful for, for example, a targeted release of chemo for glioblastoma or immunosuppressants for transplanted organs. So they seem like no-brainers, right? For cancers, you can just, you can put a high dose of chemo in a very, very specific, spot, like as big as millimeters millimeters cubed, you could really focus in the chemo in one specific area.

C: That would be a game changer for cancer treatment. I mean, we can do that right now with radiation. We can really target radiation, but chemo wreaks havoc on your body because it's systemic.

B: And then, like I said, for organ transplants people go on to, on those immunosuppressants for the rest of their lives and localizing that delivery too can be, could have dramatic changes. All right. So they closed their paper saying, the identification of stable drug carriers and compatible ultrasound parameters for effective release provided here lower the barrier for a clinical translation of these approaches. So they're releasing a lot of their information for other universities and doctors to create these and test them out. And they really want to make it, make a difference in, in drug delivery. And as we've seen in this discussion, I think it could make a dramatic difference for a lot of people. So very interesting technology.

S: All right. Thanks, Bob.

Potential Dyson Spheres (1:03:23)

• 'Dyson spheres' were theorized as a way to detect alien life. Scientists say they've found potential evidence.  

S: Evan, have astronomers found Dyson spheres?

E: Oh, well, we're not sure yet, but there has been news recently. Yes. Dyson spheres, they are back in the news. One might say we're coming full circle on Dyson spheres.

B: Oh boy.

E: And that we have a very well-rounded discussion about them when we talk about them. They're definitely within the orbit on our show. I have more. I'll save them for another time.

C: Sprinkle them.

E: I'll save them for another time. A Dyson sphere. What is a Dyson sphere? Bob, I know you know the answer to this.

B: Yes. I love them.

E: So, well, I guess it's a theoretical exercise, right? Envisioning a super technologically advanced world that has developed the capability of placing a network of structures around a star in order to optimize the harnessing of the star's energy. And if it sounds like science fiction, that is because the idea has roots in science fiction. Absolutely. Yep. A Dyson sphere was first suggested in the 19th century by author Sir Cumference of Ipswich.

B: Sir Cumference?

E: I had to throw that in there to see who was paying attention.

B: Oh, my God.

E: Good, Bob. Thank you.

B: Nice.

E: No, no.

S: That's a lot of Bugs Bunny level humor there.

E: Oh, I'm glad I entertained you, Steve.

S: Remember Sir Osis of the liver?

B: Oh, my God.

E: Now we have Sir Cumference of Ipswich. And, no. But, yeah, science fiction's involved. 1937 science fiction novel Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. But it was the physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson who was the first to formalize the concept of what became known as the Dyson sphere in his 1960 science paper titled Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation. Dyson basically imagined a solar system sized power collection structure as a technology that would be inevitable for advanced civilization somewhere in the universe. And he proposed that searching for evidence of the existence of these kinds of structures could lead, obviously, to the discovery of intelligent life somewhere else, either in our galaxy or perhaps the universe. Now, I read an interview that he later regretted having his name associated with the concept. And I couldn't pinpoint exactly why, but I think perhaps because I don't think he liked the fact that they tagged the word sphere specifically to his name.

B: Well, yeah. He didn't really imagine a sphere, which would be unstable.

E: Right. The idea that this would be some sort of solid object. He said it was patently ridiculous. So really, Dyson swarm is perhaps–

S: Dyson swarm.

B: Yeah, exactly.

E: -is perhaps the preferred term for that. But in any case, Dyson sphere is what everybody knows it as. The title of his paper summed it up very nicely, I thought. A search for artificial stellar resources of infrared radiation. If there exists such a world where its inhabitants have achieved something like a Dyson swarm or Dyson sphere, then the amount of infrared radiation being generated by that machine could be detected by us inferior beings here on the earth with our limited technology, relatively speaking. The news this week – well, it's being widely reported this week, but even though it came out a couple of weeks ago and got touched on, but it's all over mainstream news this week for some reason, is that there was a paper – there were actually two recent papers released and yeah, we have some new Dyson sphere candidates that have been detected. The paper is titled Project Hephaestus, Dyson sphere candidates from Gaia DR3, 2MASS and WISE, which are – two of those three are still operational telescopes in space. One is not. From the abstract, in this study, we present a comprehensive search for partial Dyson spheres by analyzing optical and infrared observations from the three satellites, again, Gaia, 2MASS and WISE. We develop a pipeline that employs multiple filters to identify potential candidates and reject interlopers in a sample of 5 million objects, which incorporates a convolutional neural network to help identify confusion in WISE data, W-I-S-E data. That's from one of the three telescopes. Finally, the pipeline identifies seven candidates deserving of further analysis. All of these objects are M-dwarves, for which astrophysical phenomenon cannot easily account for the observed infrared excess emission. So, looking at optical and infrared data from those satellites, they developed a method for taking 5 million candidates and running them through these various steps. So, your 5 million, what, becomes 1 million, becomes 100,000, becomes – and you knock out all these things as you go through the various variables in these steps. And ultimately, they went from 5 million down to seven. Part of the discussion, it's a little technical, but basically what they said is that a specialized pipeline has been developed to identify potential Dyson sphere candidates focusing on detecting sources that display anomalous infrared excesses that can't be attributed to any known natural source of such radiation. First thing you do is you weed out the candidates with nebula features. Those create some of the false positives you usually get. They look for specific signal-to-noise ratios, and they knock out all the other candidates that don't fall within those parameters. They examine hydrogen alpha particles. Then they go to optical variability and astrometry, along with some other flags for false positives that can basically show up. They weed out the seven candidates. They said, "All seven sources are clear mid-infrared emitters with no clear contaminators or signatures that indicate an obvious mid-infrared origin." But, the authors were definitely careful to point out that, yes, obviously some natural causes could eventually disqualify those as being candidates here. They said, "The presence of warm debris disks surrounding our candidates remain a plausible explanation for the infrared excess of our sources." And I guess that would be the most common idea or basically suggestion is, no, this is not a Dyson sphere. Instead, it's dust and debris around these particular M-type red dwarf stars.

B: So who's saying that? Who's saying that?

E: Yeah, they admit that. They admit it. They admit it. But here's what they say about the M-type red dwarf stars. They say that it gets complicated because, here's what they said, "Some research suggests that debris disks around M-dwarfs form differently and present differently." So I guess they don't have great chunks of data concerning that. They said, "One type of debris disk called extreme debris disks or EDDs can explain some of the luminosity the team sees around the candidates, but these sources have never been observed in connection with M-dwarfs before." That's what they wrote. So, yeah, are they dealing with something that they haven't, right? Of these seven candidates, is the reason why they're getting the detections that they are, is because it's something that they haven't seen before in relationship to these red dwarf stars. So they have to figure that out. They said, "Additional analysis are definitely necessary to unveil the true nature of these sources." And guess what will likely be taking a look at these seven candidates in the near future?

B: Yeah. What's his name?

S: Webb.

E: The big one. James Webb. Space telescope. Let's get that thing working for real. Pointed out those seven things. Let's figure this thing out.

B: I'm looking forward to that happening because I've read, Evan, another paper from other scientists who took the paper you're describing and tried to come up with other explanations. So what they did is they actually looked at other radio surveys of the sky and pulled in that information and kind of like overlaid that over what your scientists were seeing. And in their opinion, that it's less likely to be Dyson spheres, but they say it's more likely that it's some sort of extra galactic phenomenon. And they say that the most likely explanation is a distant galaxy, kind of like I think behind these infrared sources obscured by dust. So what they're saying is that it seems more likely that these far more distant dust, from these other galaxies, for example, contaminates the infrared energy distribution that these other scientists were seeing. So maybe that is a reasonable explanation for all of these or maybe a few of them. Maybe there will be a couple here that truly are anomalous that we can't explain. And hey, oh man, I pray to Lord Sagan every night that we discover a Dyson swarm out there. That would be truly news that would, I mean, viral. It would be amazing, the discovery of the millennium, my God. To really pin that down and have like, yes, this is, you know, to really know with such a high level of confidence that that would be amazing. Is it going to happen? You know, not probably not in my lifetime. I think I hope that we find them at some point some evidence that points to that. That would be truly amazing.

E: It's a fascinating thought exercise, no doubt about it.

B: I mean, the energy pouring out of the sun is redonkulous. If you could tap into that without dismantling your entire solar system to do it. But still, even constructing a partial Dyson swarm would be able to soak up so much energy. It's ridiculous. I can't imagine an advanced society not considering that. I mean there's only so much energy in the earth. And we're not of course, we're not close to tapping our earth for that. But I'd like to think that civilizations are out there that are old enough and sophisticated enough to take use of the energy pouring out of their sun.

E: And if they are, is the Dyson swarm the best way to try to detect that civilization? I mean, if they really are that advanced, would there be, should there be other things we should be looking for?

B: There's other things. There's other mega-scale mega-engineering projects that we would expect really advanced societies to do that would be detectable from many, many megaparsecs, gigaparsecs away in our galaxy or others. Yeah, there are things that could be detectable that they might want to do. And Dyson swarms is just one of them. It's the most commonly known one. But there's other things that could be constructed that would be like, whoa, that's not natural. That could be the byproduct of a super-advanced civilization. That would be just an amazing discovery. It would make my year.

S: It might be our best chance of discovering intelligences out there in the universe. You know what I mean?

B: Yeah, techno-artifacts.

S: Techno-artifacts.

B: I think the only way we're going to ever detect something that far away.

S: And the thing is, Evan, we don't have to get the details right about what kind of megastructure it is. If there is any kind of structure that's soaking up a lot of the energy of their home star, it will give off infrared heat and we'll pick that up. You know what I mean? So it's not like we have to know exactly what they're doing. It's just like, oh, there's something big and artificial there.

B: You just got to rule out the dust because that's a big one.

E: It gets in the way.

B: It tends to get in the way. It does the same exact thing. It soaks up the electromagnetic radiation except infrared. And so, yeah, dust is a bitch.

Who's That Noisy? (1:15:01)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Buggy-eyed frog picked up then going into water

S: All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

J: All right, guys. Last week I played this noisy.

[whizzing, whooshing animal burbles?]

I don't know. It makes me laugh. All right.

E: To me it sounds like somebody has blown up a balloon and they're holding the end of it now to release the air. And at some point it gets doused in water and creating bubbles.

S: I mean, it does sound like something bubbling water.

J: Of course it does. Yeah. Absolutely. So a friend of the show, Adam Hepburn, wrote in. And this is the guy whose whole family plays the game and they all guess. So his four-year-old said a laser heating up and boiling water, which I thought was a great guess. His seven-year-old said a vet cleaning a cat's teeth and then the cat is spitting out the water at the end. That's a good one.

E: Wow.

J: Kristen, this is a 39-year-old, crickets underwater. And Adam, who's 40, said submerging an air compressor hose underwater. And then Ron, I think might be his dad, it's annoying. That was his guess. It's annoying. Yvonne, who's 77, two geese involved in a midair collision. All good guesses. The guesses were better with the younger folk than the older folk. But you guys were incorrect. Keep playing the game, though. You're going to get it. Ben McFadden wrote in and said, hey, Jay, here's my one-word guess, otters. Here's my one-word answer, incorrect. But I like your effort. The effort is what I care about here. Michael Rogers wrote in. He said, is it hot metal getting quenched in water? There is quite a bit of that happening on the internet right now. That is not correct. But I do think that that was a good guess. And then Taylor Peterson wrote in a guess that reminded me of my youth. He said, bottle rocket underwater.

B: Whoa.

J: Now, I remember when we were kids, guys.

B: Yeah.

J: My dad had not just bottle rockets. My dad had those big, big sky rockets. You know, the ones with like a two-foot wooden stake.

E: Mm-hmm.

B: Yeah.

J: And we used to go to the pool, and we'd light them, and then put them underwater. And the wicks were waterproof.

S: They were waxed, yeah.

J: And then it would take off out of your hand and go down really slowly. It would go in the water. And then you'd hear like, boom.

E: Sounds safe.

J: And it would do that underwater explosion. Lots of fun. If I had a pool today, I would hate if my kids did that, but we were doing it.

E: Exactly. Don't do what I did.

J: I have a winner this week, and I do believe that this is this person's first time winning. This person is called Lily Luo. And Lily said, hi, all. First time guessing. My boyfriend, Danton, who is a longtime listener, made me do this. So after this win, you should be a longtime listener yourself. So she said, I think the sound is from the video of a frog hissing and being put into a container of water. So guys, this is a buggy-eyed frog that was picked up, got angry at being picked up, was put in a tub of water, and that's the sound it made as it was dropping below the water level. Here, listen again. [plays Noisy]

C: Oh, it's so cute.

E: Oh, my guess was right, except replace balloon with frog.

J: Yeah, you were absolutely correct in your incorrect guess. That one is so adorable. I love it. All right, guys.

E: No frogs were hurt in the making of this noisy.

J: That's right. No animals were drowned. That animal can handle the water like nobody's business.

New Noisy (1:18:33)

J: I have a new noisy for you guys. This noisy was sent in by a listener named A.E. Coleman.

[Forest sounds in background, squeaking animal foreground]

J: If you think you know what this week's Noisy is, or if you have a cool sound that you heard that you think I need to consider, email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

Announcements (1:18:55)

J: Steve, what helps the SGU more than anything?

S: Patrons.

J: Who are patrons?

S: People who have joined our Patreon.

J: Steve, your enthusiasm makes me want to run out right now and join a Patreon for some other podcast. Guys, patrons are what makes this show absolutely possible. As you've noticed, again, this is happening like almost every year. We haven't been doing that many ads. It's just the way that... Right, Cara? Same with your podcast, right?

C: Oh, yeah. Ads are just down across the...

J: It's just what's happening right now. We are almost essentially 100% reliant on our patrons, and you guys are doing it. We're able to keep going because of you, and we always would appreciate more patrons to help us continue growing and doing the different things that we're doing. If you're interested in supporting this program, which I hope you are, because we are doing this for 20 years.

E: Yep, in our 20th year.

J: Completely dedicated. I have to say something. If it weren't for Steve, there would be no SGU. Steve makes this show happen. Steve is the editor of this program. Steve arranges everything. Steve is our editor-in-chief. Goes meticulously through everything that we do to make sure that it all matches the type of editorial policy that Steve chose literally from day one. But yeah, we'd appreciate it if you'd consider becoming a patron. You can go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and help us out. You could also join our mailing list. You can go onto the SGU's homepage, skepticsguide.org, and you could join our mailing list, and we send out a weekly email with everything that we've done the previous week with a whole lot of other information in there. You could also give us a rating on whatever podcast player you're using. We have tickets left for the Chicago Extravaganza and for the SGU's 1,000th episode five-hour celebration. These will be happening on August 17th and then August 18th. There's plenty of time to make arrangements. So please do go to the theskepticsguide.org and check out the links that we have on our homepage right there. There's buttons there that'll take you to where you got to go, and we really appreciate it. And Cara, I'm happy that Killer is okay.

B: Yeah.

C: Thank you.

J: Do you have a Killer fund? Is there a fund that people can help Killer?

C: Nope. Killer's good.

J: Okay.

C: We got him. No need.

J: Can we send him treats?

B: Guys, I have a quick noise.

C: Yes. Yes.

J: Go ahead, Bob.

B: I'm ready. Ready? Listen. [plays a noise]

E: That's the noise Bob makes when he's eating peanut butter and chocolate.

B: Jay.

E: Jay. Jay doesn't get it.

B: Yes, he does. That is a voicemail that Jay left for me today. Yes. I love it.

E: Jay. All right. I have a question for Jay. How come you never leave a voicemail for me like that?

J: Because you always pick up.

E: That's right. I do pick up my phone.

J: You know what? If I don't have any real message for somebody, then at least I want to give them a moment of laughter. You know what I mean?

S: All right. Thanks, Jay.

From TikTok: Free Energy Murders (1:21:55)

• [url_from_show_notes _article_title_] 

S: We're going to do one of our TikTok videos. As you know, we stream every Wednesday starting around somewhere between 12 and 1. And I usually record two or three TikTok videos. One of the ones I did today was a guy who is basically saying this has been going around the internet. He did not come up with this list. Isn't it a coincidence that all these people die that he goes through? Like this guy researching cold fusion fell out of a window. And this guy who was a physicist was poisoned, implying that these people are deliberately being bumped off right when they're at the point where they're making this huge free energy type of breakthrough.

E: I saw it in a movie once.

S: So here's the thing. Every one of his examples is bullshit when you look at the details. It doesn't hold up to the narrative that he's pushing here. So let me give you an example. He starts off talking about a Russian physicist, Dmitry, who was researching a plasma battery. It's like, OK, yeah, that guy was researching a plasma battery. And yes, he did go missing. He vanished at one point. Who knows what happened or why? I don't think it has anything to do with the fact that he was researching a plasma battery. For one thing, other people are researching plasma batteries. It's not like the thing is when technology is ready, when it's possible, like the laws of physics are there.

B: It'll happen.

S: Yeah. You can't keep it from happening by killing one person, right?

C: Right.

S: It makes absolutely no sense. You know, we often talk about like the history of technology where like when everything was in place, like a dozen people invented it within a short period of time. And then multiple people try to take credit for it because the technology was ripe. You know, we had the material. We had whatever, the science we knew.

B: Conceptual breakthroughs, whatever.

S: Yeah. It was all there.

E: We just talked about that with the airplane, right?

S: Yeah. So yeah, the airplane, the light bulb, all these things. The plasma battery, first of all, the reason why we don't have plasma batteries right now is because it's really hard to manage plasma. It just wasn't a practical, like pragmatic option for widespread use. It may have very specific uses somewhere. But the other thing is it's a battery. It's not a source of energy. So the idea that people who make their money providing sources of energy would kill off somebody who's making an incrementally better battery design.

B: To store their energy.

S: Yeah. The narrative does not hold up even to the slightest bit of scrutiny. It's like we actually already have kind of better batteries with lithium-ion batteries. And they're getting better all the time, et cetera. You know, again, confusing energy source with just energy storage. Another guy, he was a physicist who was poisoned with arsenic by his girlfriend. And then she later committed suicide. Basically when the police were tightening the noose around her and she knew the thing was up. Then she took her own life. But so yeah, it's an unusual, tragic thing that happened. Who was this guy? He wasn't, as far as I could tell, he was just a physicist. He wasn't working on anything to do with energy. How did he get added to the list? And then another guy was basically a strong proponent of free energy and cold fusion. Like there aren't a ton of these guys around. And he also died by suicide. He died by suicide shortly after one of his big main experiment failed to work. Basically, he proved that the laws of physics actually work and that his whole free energy claims are impossible. And then he jumped off of a building. And again, of course, you could make all of these sound sinister, although he like left a note and it really – he had attempted suicide previously. So it wasn't like – didn't come out of nowhere. But the premise of this video is that how could all of these things be happening? It's such a coincidence. But of course, it's not a coincidence if you have the world of physicists and energy researchers and anyone who's worked on anything to do with energy and you cherry pick those who died under unusual circumstances.

C: Yeah. I mean what's your end?

S: Yeah. What's the denominator here?

C: What's the rule? Thousands. Hundreds of thousands.

S: Right. Right. I mean, of course – so this is the – you know, it's its own genre of conspiracy theory where you just sort of gather together cherry picked cases that have some superficial similarity and say, isn't that a coincidence? It's like, no, you're cherry picking from a massive amount of data. It's not a coincidence at all. And if you look at each individual case, it doesn't add up to anything. But what's interesting, another interesting aspect of this, like you read the comments on TikTok that this narrative that anyone who develops any energy technology that's too disrupted will be instantly killed is so pervasive on TikTok. And I wonder if – I know it's a social media phenomenon, et cetera, but I also have read articles about the fact that the younger generation like doesn't trust authority and government as much, you know what I mean? And I wonder if this is all part of the same phenomenon. They just think that the elites and the powers that be are evil and can't be trusted and are going to make it so we can't have nice things and are going to destroy anything good that happens in the world, right? That's just their worldview. I don't know if that's how pervasive that is or if this is part of that or if it's just conspiracy nut jobs on TikTok. I don't know. But it's so damn common. Like it's just take it for granted. Oh, yeah, they're hiding cancer too, you know what I mean? Just like take it for granted like it's nothing, like this is happening.

E: It happens all the time.

S: Anyway, let's go on with science or fiction.

[top]                        

Science or Fiction (1:27:54)

Item #1: A recent analysis confirms that the current red spot of Jupiter is the same spot first observed by Cassini in 1665, making it at least 360 years old. Item #2: By analyzing tool-making researchers find that humans began cumulative culture around 600,000 years ago. Item #3: For the first time astronomers witness the activation of a massive galactic black hole into an active galactic nucleus.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Cassini saw same Red Spot
Science	Cumulative culture 0.6Mya
Science	Black hole into nucleus

Host	Result
Steve	win

Rogue	Guess
Cara	Cassini saw same Red Spot
Jay	Cumulative culture 0.6Mya
Evan	Cassini saw same Red Spot
Bob	Cassini saw same Red Spot

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

S: Each week I come up with three science news items, four facts, two real and one fictitious. And then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. I have three regular news items today. You ready? All right. Here we go. Item number one, a recent analysis confirms that the current red spot of Jupiter is the same spot first observed by Cassini in 1665, making it at least 360 years old. Item number two, by analyzing tool making, researchers find that humans began cumulative culture around 600,000 years ago. And item number three, for the first time, astronomers witness the activation of a massive galactic black hole into an active galactic nucleus. Cara, go first.

Cara's Response

C: Hmm. Okay. So apparently Cassini saw a spot. We're assuming that that part, well, I guess I'm assuming that that part is science, in 1665. And now this recent analysis is saying that the current, the big red spot we all know about is the same spot. So it's 360 years old. Okay. By analyzing tool making. Okay. Blah, blah, blah. Humans began cumulative culture. What does that mean? Accumulative.

S: Accumulative culture means that knowledge gained by one generation is passed down to subsequent generations.

C: Ah.

S: That technical knowledge is now accumulating. Like not everyone is starting from scratch by themselves.

C: Right. Well, I assume that as long as we've had technical knowledge like that, that that happens. So maybe that's not true. But as soon as we learn something, I think that we have had brains sophisticated enough to observe and apply. So is it 600,000 years ago? Wait. Humans weren't around 600,000 years ago.

S: There were early humans around 600,000 years ago.

C: Hominids? Really? I thought humans were like 250,000 years old.

S: Well, it depends on what you count. I mean, there were paleo humans or whatever.

C: Okay. So like something, hominin, hominid, something in that kind of. Okay. The first time astronomers witnessed the activation of a massive galactic black hole. The activation. It's like, what does this even mean? The activation of a massive galactic black hole into an active galactic nucleus. I don't know what that means.

S: So you know that there are supermassive black holes at the center of many galaxies.

C: Yes.

S: Right. And they could be active or inactive. They're active if they're eating a lot of stuff and they shine very bright.

C: Okay. And they're inactive if they're not.

S: If they're not doing that.

C: And what's a nucleus? I don't know what a galactic nucleus is.

S: That's the same thing.

C: That's the inactive. Oh, okay.

S: The active galactic nucleus is a massive black hole that's eating stuff.

C: Oh, okay. So they see the black hole turn on.

S: They saw one transition from being inactive to being very active.

C: Got it. Okay. Sure. Big sure to all of these. I don't like the fact that humans began human culture before there were humans, but I don't think that is the fiction that you're trying to like gotcha us on. I'm assuming you mean proto-humans.

S: Yeah, proto-humans, whatever, early humans. Part of the homo line.

C: Yeah, right. And so I think the thing, all of these seem so big and the one that seems the silliest to me, because I don't really maybe understand the scale of the bigness of the other ones, is that isn't the red spot, okay, you can't answer this, but like I'm talking out loud now, isn't the red spot just a big ass storm? Like a 360-year-old storm in the exact same place? I don't buy that. I know it's been there like most of our lifetimes and probably before us, but I don't know. That's a long storm to not change at all. And so if it's a storm, unless I'm really wrong about what it is, but if it's a storm on Jupiter, I don't think it's that old of a storm. I don't think that's how weather works, but I could be wrong. I'm putting my penny, not my nickel, down on that.

S: Okay, Jay.

Jay's Response

J: All right, so this first one here about the red spot in Jupiter, I mean, I just don't see any reason why it wouldn't be the same storm. 360-year-old. Yeah, I mean, I know it changes size and everything. I don't know. I just don't know why we would think it's a different one. I'm going to say that one is science. They've analyzed tool making and researchers find that cumulative culture around 600,000 years ago. That's interesting. Damn. Yeah, I read about this type of stuff all the time and the numbers always completely leave my mind. How many years ago? I'm just terrible. When something is more than 20 years ago, I just can't perceive. I don't know. I just don't know. All right, let me see. The last one here. For the first time, astronomers witnessed the activation of massive galactic black holes into an active galactic nucleus. I mean, I think that's science too. Okay, yeah. Scientists have seen the beginning of a black hole. No reason to think that isn't science. I mean, for some reason, the tool making one is itching me the wrong way. I don't know. Yeah, I'm going to say that one's a fiction, Steve.

S: Okay, Evan?

Evan's Response

E: The Jupiter one, first observed by Cassini in 1665. This one's puzzling because to know if it was the same storm as then, you would have had to have kept, I suppose, annual records on this thing. Is that how you know for sure? If there's any gap in that timeline, I think between 1665 and now, which there likely is, then I don't know how you could really know that that would be the storm. I don't know how that's possible. That's what's puzzling me. I'm also puzzled by the cumulative culture, 600,000 years. That's a long time. It's all tribes, no cities, nothing like that going on 600,000 years ago, just small bands of humanoids surviving together as best they can. But, geez, that one seems far-fetched. And then the last one about the gigantic black hole, well, they witnessed the activation of it. Sure. There's been other firsts for observations of black hole-related things that have come in recent months and years. So of the three, that one is cool and does not scare me. Cara, I'll go with you. I'll say it's the Jupiter and the storm. I don't think it's 360 years old.

S: And Bob.

Bob's Response

B: Well, hmm.

C: Tell us what's true, Bob.

E: Yeah, Bob, tell us.

B: I totally buy the on switch for the AGN, active galactic nucleus. Sure. A bunch of stars got close enough, create the accretion disk, x-rays flying everywhere, maybe even some polar jets, which would be nice. So, yeah, I could totally buy that. The one and two, though, these are rough. 600,000 years ago, what the hell is that? Homo heidelbergensis? Is that the species? How the hell would you prove cumulative culture? I don't know. How do you know it was just like not rediscovered if they're finding fossil evidence? How do they know it was actually taught? But, I mean, it could be an interesting discovery if they did find some evidence that really pointed to that. The Jupiter one's rough, too, because, I mean, my whole life. And to answer your question, Cara, yes, that's exactly how weather works when there's no land. When there's no land to absorb the energy of a storm, it just keeps going.

C: But for 360 years?

B: Yes. But there's nothing really to stop it, really. I mean, if we had no land, if this was a water planet and we had hurricanes, it could likely last far longer than the – how long do hurricanes last? Weeks? They would last far longer because the land just sucks all the energy. You're removing it from its source of energy, which is the hot water. So, yeah, they absolutely – we know for a fact they last for at least, if not 360 years, at least what? A century or two. We know that. That's not the problem. The thing is this is iconic. This is like it's hundreds of years old. It was discovered back then, I guess. Perhaps they found evidence that what was originally discovered really did not last or it broke up or whatever. And what we call the red spot was actually formed afterwards. If this happened, that's probably what happened, which would be kind of surprising because, man, my whole life I've thought, oh, yeah, the red spot's been around for centuries. Even though that said, it's shrinking like a mother. It used to be as big as three Earths. Now, last I heard, it was as big as maybe one Earth. It's definitely taken a huge hit. So something's happening to make it get smaller. But it didn't exist back then. So that's possible, sure. So one or two are possible. Maybe I'll go with – for some reason, I'm thinking that this human cumulative culture thing, Steve would love if that were true. I'm getting a vibe that maybe that is true. It's dramatic. So because of that, I guess I'll just kind of flip a coin here. I'll go with Jupiter as well and say that that's fiction for some reason.

B: Even though you just defended all the reasons why it's probably fiction.

B: Yeah, but it's –

C: And then he went, the psychology of Steve's breaking out.

B: Yeah, I'm factoring in the psychology of Steve.

E: Oh, you're doing the Princess Bride thing. OK, I get it.

Steve Explains Item #3

S: All right. So you all agree on number three. So we'll start there. For the first time, astronomers witnessed the activation of a massive galactic black hole into an active galactic nucleus. You all think this is science and this one is science.

B: Cool.

S: So what's interesting is that we observed it happening in real time.

B: Yeah. That's epic. I want to see it before it happens.

S: We have seen variability in the output of these galactic black holes before, but this is – we've never seen this happen. This is a dramatic brightening that's lasted for four years so far. So we're not even sure exactly what's happening, but the easiest way to explain is that it had started feeding massively. It wasn't just like a blip. It wasn't one star. You know what I mean? It's basically becoming an active galactic nucleus. So it's very interesting for astronomers who are still viewing it with many different modalities and it will tell us a lot about black holes.

B: So is it a full-on quasar at this point?

S: They're calling it an active galactic nucleus at this point.

B: Yeah, but that's kind of what a quasar is.

S: Yeah.

B: So I guess it is. I guess it's kind of like a synonym, I guess.

S: Here's a question I tried to find an answer to and I found information, but I'm not sure I found a definitive answer. What do you think about this, Bob? You have an active galactic nucleus. It just started putting out X-rays, right? Would that kill any life in the galaxy? Is any civilizations in that galaxy now dead because it became active?

B: I think if you're near the core, you're in for a really rough time. But I think – I don't know what the demarcation would be, but I think at some distance from the core, you'd be good. But I don't know. That probably depends. Is it a scenario that if you're a powerful enough quasar, then it just sterilizes the galaxy with X-rays? I've never heard of that.

E: That doesn't sound good either.

B: No. But yeah, I suspect that it's distance.

S: Of course it's distance related. But would it include the whole galaxy or not, I guess is my question.

B: I suspect no. I don't know definitively.

S: The core would definitely be a very bad place to be.

B: Yeah, living in a quasar. Yeah, I've never specifically read anything about that.

S: The safest place to be is intergalactic. Remember, there are as many stars in between galaxies as in galaxies. And that may be where most life is because galaxies are dangerous places.

B: They're rough, man. We can get hit by various things that could just totally fry us. So yeah, you're right. If you've got your sun and your solar system is out there, that might be better as long as you've got your sun nearby, of course.

S: Oh, yeah, of course.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: All right, let's go back to number one. A recent analysis confirms that the current red spot of Jupiter is the same spot first observed by Cassini in 1665, making it at least 360 years old. Bob, Cara, and Evan, you think this one is the fiction. Jay, you think this one is science. Now, interestingly, just to give you a little bit of background on this, is that Cassini did observe a spot, what he called a permanent spot, in pretty much the same location as what we see now, right?

B: Right.

S: And it was observed between 1665 and 1713. But then nobody was really observing it for a while.

E: Yeah, that's right. So how do they know?

B: Jupiter, boring.

S: In 1831, modern astronomers looked, and where Cassini saw a spot, there was a spot.

B: Ooh, say it. Really?

S: Yeah. And so we know that it's been continuously observed since then.

B: Since then, right.

S: So the current spot is at least 190 years old. But the question was, is it the same one as Cassini saw 360 years ago?

B: Did he draw it or something?

S: He drew it, of course. So they went through all of his drawings, because he made lots of drawings of it. And they made measurements, et cetera, whatever. And they found that, because it's in the same spot, but it's not the same spot.

B: Damn. Whoa. That's awesome. That's so cool. So what was the thing that made them say, holy crap?

S: Yeah, they just don't match. They looked at the details of it, and they're definitely different spots. So it probably went away, and another storm occurred in the same place in that gap where it wasn't being observed. That's what they concluded.

B: Interesting. So the funny thing is that that original spot, that could have lasted for centuries as well. And he just caught it near the end. And guys, the same thing's happening to the red spot right now.

S: Yeah, it's going away.

B: It's going away. It looks like.

E: Oh, no.

B: So that's sad.

C: So maybe something about the feature. I mean, there are no features, really.

B: Oh, sure.

C: I'm curious. The wind patterns are not part of the planet. Yeah, what is it about that spot?

S: It's a hurricane that's lasting hundreds of years, basically. Because again, as Bob said, there's no land to disrupt it, to break it up. So it just keeps going.

C: Right. It's just interesting that in that same place, two big storms would happen.

S: Yeah, right.

C: Yeah, that's interesting.

B: And imagine if it was as simple as, oh, yeah, one is cyclonic and one is anti-cyclonic. It's going in a different direction.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: This means that by analyzing tool-making researchers find that humans began cumulative culture around 600,000 years ago is science. Very interesting study. So what these guys, you ask, how would they know? So what they did was they had different people, modern people. They told them, make a flint, whatever. They just gave them the rock and said, go ahead and make some stone tools.

B: Oh, I think I know where you're going.

S: And then they had them do it, and they counted how many steps were in the process they were using. Then they looked at tool-making over millions of years, like human, meaning hominid, tool-making over millions of years.

B: Wait, millions?

S: Yeah, two, three million years. 3.3 million years.

C: Yeah, hominids have been around a long time.

S: Tool-making has been around for over three million years. So they looked at the last 3.3 million years of stone tool-making, and they counted the number of steps involved. And basically, there were the same number of steps. There's a range, right? It was like there were four to seven steps from 3.3 million years ago up to 600,000 years ago. And then the number of steps took off. It became much more complicated. So going from five to 18 steps. So they conclude there was a little bit of a transition zone in there. But basically, by 600,000 years, there's clearly a change. So they're concluding that before that, people were using the same number of steps that naive people use, people who have never made stone tools before, who were just trying to figure it out on their own. So that kind of implies that they're not benefiting from prior experience or prior learning.

B: Interesting.

S: That's pretty much the same way that somebody would do it out of nothing. But after that, it got more and more and more complicated because they were learning cumulatively from previous generations. So obviously, they're making an inference. We can't know for sure. But it's a very interesting experiment, and I think they're on to something there. But their interpretation of that was that would be the initiation of like really cumulative, not just you pass something on, but then that gets passed on and built upon. Like you get this cumulative knowledge. It seems like that's been going on for about 600,000 years if you look at tool use.

B: How about the weaker interpretation being that they reached a critical mass of intelligence to like to really think about it? Like, oh, yeah, wait. I could do this better than my stupid grandfather.

S: Yeah. But it doesn't – that's obviously a possibility that it was just intelligence. But I don't know that that correlates with this specific species change. And again, there's been pretty much incremental changes that whole time, but this was a pretty significant alteration. So we don't know. You'd have to do more research and try to see – test different competing hypotheses. But I like what they did though. I think what they did is –

B: I knew you'd love it.

S: Tell us something about this. Now, cumulative culture is powerful.

B: Oh, my gosh.

S: It's powerful.

B: It's like evolution, right?

S: It is arguably the biggest human innovation ever, right? Being able to accumulate knowledge over time rather than just basically starting from scratch with each generation. All right. Well, good job, guys.

C: Thanks.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:46:47)

The downside of skepticism: it can easily turn into an arrogant position of a priori rejection of any new phenomenon or idea, a position that is as lacking in critical thinking as the one of the true believer, and that simply does not help either science or the public at large.  – Massimo Pigliucci (1964-present), Italian-American philosopher and biologist, from Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

S: Evan, give us a quote.

E: "The downside of skepticism. It can easily turn into an arrogant position of a priori rejection of any new phenomenon or idea. A position that is lacking in critical thinking as the one of the true believer. And that simply does not help either science or the public at large." Massimo Pagliucci.

B: Massimo.

E: From his book, Nonsense on Stilts, How to Tell Science from Bunk back in 2010.

S: Yeah, we interviewed him about that book^{[link needed]}.

C: Yeah, it sounds like he's almost like describing denialism.

S: Well, yeah. Or I think not necessarily denialism. I think it's more there are some people who call themselves skeptics who are really contrarians or they're cynics, right?

B: Cynics.

S: Yeah, they just reject everything pretty much as a knee jerk rather than saying, okay, let's think about this carefully. And also I talked about this not too long ago where people develop a skeptical narrative that they slip into very quickly. It's like, oh, this has got to be complete bullshit or complete bunk. And therefore I'm going to say just everything negative about it. Whereas often a lot of issues are in the gray zone or there's nuance or there's like, well, yeah, this is actually plausible. It just happens not to be true or whatever. Like he doesn't have to have all go one way. But they want to say not only is it not true, it's bullshit and it's complete nonsense and it's whatever. It's like, no, that's not true. We've had that kind of pushback from the beginning of our skeptical outreach career. I remember when we talked about SETI and someone was like, there's no life out there. You know, like that's like that's pseudoscience and like trying to build this case for how like there's no alien life. Like, no, there's alien life. They're just not here, you know?

C: Right. I mean, it's that big difference between walking into a claim and looking for face validity and prior plausibility and making and then starting from there as opposed to starting from like guilty until proven innocent or innocent until proven guilty. It's like, well, what am I looking at? Does this seem even plausible or reasonable? Let's start somewhere.

S: You got to go through the process. Even if it superficially seems like bunk, sometimes it's more complicated than that. Otherwise, you're just you're not really a skeptic. As he says, it's not really critical thinking. It's just knee jerk rejection.

C: You can't go in, I believe nothing until proven otherwise.

E: We will have a chance to see Massimo again when we go out to SciCon in this coming October.

S: Always good to see Massimo.

E: Las Vegas. Yep, yep. And I'm going to try to pull some more quotes from some more people who will be appearing at SciCon 2024 in future weeks. So stay tuned.

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

J: You're welcome, brother.

C: Thanks, Steve.

B: Sure man.

Signoff

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

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

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