SGU Episode 881

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SGU Episode 881
May 28th 2022
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 880                      SGU 882
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
NRG: Dr. Naomi Rowe-Gurney, NASA planetary scientist
Quote of the Week
With less critical thinking comes more vaccine hesitancy.
Nedra Rhone, columnist, AJC
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, WETA Doc, AQ6

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, May 25^th 2022, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening folks!

S: So.

J: Yes.

S: Some exciting news. You know Jay, Bob and I have been doing alpha quadrant six which is our science fiction review show. And right before the pandemic we recorded a documentary at WETA in New Zealand. The special effects company that did Lord of the Rings and other movies.

E: I've heard of that.

J: District 9.

S: District 9.

J: I Am Mother.

S: Yeah that's right and King Kong. The most recent King Kong.

E: Oh yes.

S: And they did that really awesome World War I museum where the the statues were giant size.

B: Oh my god. And crazy realistic. Like crazy realistic.

S: Hyper detailed, hyper realistic and like what were they five times normal size?

B: Something like that.

S: Which is a lot bigger than it sounds. Because you think about that means you're 30 feet tall. Like the scale, that was the scale. Amazing. Anyway we did a documentary basically all about their process. And we finally published that as an AQ6 episode what two weeks ago Jay?

J: Just about.

S: So check that out. So we all do a lot of side projects every now and then we bring them up. But this is, the Alpha Quadrant 6 we've been we've done on and off. The pandemic really kind of torpedoed our schedule with this because we couldn't physically get together.

B: Photon torpedoed.

S: Yeah we tried to do some online and they were all right but you know just wasn't the same thing. Like we couldn't get in the studio together and crank out a bunch of episodes. But now we can. So so we're back on schedule putting out a video and a podcast every week.

J: Every Tuesday.

S: Every Tuesday, yep. So yeah so we want you guys to check it out. We did recently The Batman we reviewed that movie.

J: And Strange New Worlds

S: Strange New Worlds. So we try to hit that if something just comes out we'll try to hit it right away so that we could recommend it or not recommend it. Like we'll watch the first episode and give you an idea. Then we'll do wrap-up reviews or we'll do themed reviews. Like the top 10 spaceships or whatever. How many episodes total have we put since the beginning every published chance? We're getting up there.

J: You know 80 episodes.

B: Wow.

J: Oh if you want to find us you can go to youtube.com/AlphaQuadrant6. That's Alpha Quadrant and the number 6. Or you can go to alphaquadrant6.com. We have you know Facebook page. We have a Patreon so you can find us pretty much anywhere. Just look for Alpha Quadrant and then number 6.

S: Yeah doing that show's a lot of fun.

J: I love it.

B: And what are we gonna do what are we gonna do next guys? How about Love, Death & Robots review?

S: I already watched the whole season.

B: Season 3 baby. I'm partially through, no spoilers.

J: Bob Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan literally drops the day after tomorrow.

B: Yeah, we could do that.

J: Now I don't know if that's gonna be, if they're gonna drop the whole thing or if they're gonna do it episode by episode. Probably episode by episode so we'll get to review the first episode at least.

S: Then we're gonna do futurism in science fiction movies. And we've got to do Doctor Strange.

J: Yeah.

B: Yes. Hello? We got to get to the damn theater and watch it.

S: So those are the next shows that we're gonna review.

B: Let's go right now.

COVID-19 Update (3:22)

J: Can I tell you guys something else that's going on in my life?

S: Yeah.

J: So you know you covid, right?

S: Yeah I'm familiar with that, yeah.

J: So long story short my daughter did not get covid over the wave during Christmas when everybody got covid except my daughter.

S: She dodged Omicron?

J: She did. She dodged the big wave of Omicron. Well she got it last week. A week and a half ago So I have not literally seen my six-year-old daughter since Friday of last week because she stayed with her grandmother who also got covid literally the same day from the same person. Keep it in mind, you know, keep in mind man, covid is still swinging out there. There's, in Connecticut the numbers have been skyrocketing. It's happening in other states in the country probably in other places around the world as well. But just be careful. Carry masks in your car. Make sure the people that you know and love are vaccinated. Get your boosters. Like keep it in your head. You don't have to think about it every day like we did two years ago but be smart and keep up with it.

S: Speaking of which and we're actually going to talk about the monkey pox a little bit later in the show when we get to the news items. But you guys all know Mark Crislip, right?

J: Yeah.

B: Yeah.

E: Oh yes.

S: Yeah. He's awesome. So he he was writing for Science-Based Medicine for years but in 2018 he retired from Science-Based Medicine and now he's back. And he wrote his first post─

B: Awesome.

S: ─yesterday.

E: Un-retired like Tom Brady.

S: Yeah, exactly. He actually last Thursday he published it. And it was basically all about covid. It's like where are we with things right now. He's an infectious disease specialist but you should read it. He's very very funny writer just a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor but also totally on point. He basically says yeah we're never going to be done with covid. Like covid is never gonna be over. It's now permanent part of the infectious disease background. And we're definitely in the learning how to live with that face but he says things so matter-of-factly like as a specialist. It's like we know how to deal with this. We totally 100% know how to deal with this. You have to mask and get vaccinated. Those are the two things that really work right. Everything else is kind of nibbling around the edges but masking works and getting back. And then the only way to get to herd immunity is with vaccination. That's it. We're never going to get there by natural infection. That's always been a fantasy. It doesn't you know, infectious disease─

C: What about a hybrid of the both.

S: ─don't work that way. The problem is─

C: No really. I mean what about the people who do vaccinate and then the people who refuse who ultimately catch covid?

S: The problem is with the, as he explains, the problem with the relying on natural infections. Is that this virus mutates so quickly that by the time it comes around again it just reinfects you. So like omicron's really good at reinfecting people who were infected previously with covid for example. So it just doesn't work. You would need everybody to get infected at once with the same strain. Which is never going to happen.

C:' So just that is what vaccination kinda is.

S: That is what vaccination. Vaccination you can literally give everybody the same immunity all at once. That's the only way that we're ever going to really deal with pandemics like this. It's just so frustrating that's like okay here's the answer and then a bunch of people refuse to do it. And there's not really much we can do about it or are willing to do it. I mean we could.

Ulvade, TX Shooting (6:24)

C: I mean this is kind of the story of our American lives right now. Is clear and present problems that we have a clear answer to that people just refuse to.

S: I know. I know. I mean we haven't brought up yet what happened in Texas. And it's just absolutely horrible another school shooting. Another elementary school shooting. This was basically Sandy Hook redux. This is just.

C: Yeah this was the worst mass shooting in quite some time. Like we do have mass shootings nearly every day but this was the worst in quite some time.

S: Basically since Sandy Hook. Yeah totally. I mean can you just imagine just the whole classroom of young children being mowed down like that just like. You can't even wrap your head around it.

E: It's beyond horrific.

S: Yeah it's just beyond horrific. Every time there is a big, like national headline grabbing mass shooting, it's interesting to see the zeitgeist in this. Like what how are people basically responding. Like after Parkland there was this sense of this time something's really gonna happen, you know?

B: Yeah, yeah.

S: And of course nothing happened. After Sandy Hook it was like well this is so shocking. This is gonna shock even─

B: Yeah, little kids.

S: ─the cynics. I mean yeah those are little kids but nothing happened. This time around the vibe that I'm getting is everyone's just saying nothing's gonna happen. Nothing's gonna. That's nothing's gonna change. We're gonna do absolutely nothing in response to this.

E: Pretty defeatist.

C: Well you've seen the onion article, right?

B: It's just practical at this point.

C: It's getting so much coverage. There's an onion article that they published in 2014 and the headline was "No Way to Prevent This", Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.

B: Awesome.

C: And they have now republished it 21 times and only changed, like the exact same article, they've just only changed the details of the shooting. 21 times since 2014. And that's the thing a certain segment of the population sees that and goes yeah WTF. And another segment of the population sees that and goes second amendment. So yeah. I mean there's a lot of memes we could be listing here and there's a lot of I guess political discussion that we could be having which we try to to be smart about how we approach it here on the SGU.

S: So we try to be, try to be evidence based and neutral when it comes to partisanship. We're doing a very very quick coverage here. And we probably should do a deep dive at some point soon. And we've talked about it before. But the bottom line is that sensible gun safety regulations work. They work. We have enough data to know that that is the case. But also the one of the best articles I saw which is again it's one of these ones that gets republished every time there's a mass shooting. So it's still relevant like every six months or so. And it compared the amount of research money that the NIH and the CDC are spending on different problems. And the number of people those problems kill, right? So you have these tiny little dots of diseases with huge budgets researching them. Then you have this massive bubble of of gun violence deaths and a teeny tiny budget to research it. So like if you look if you take a public health approach to this which is reasonable and rational but also one you know political party is against looking at this as a health care issue. A public health issue. It makes absolutely no sense. There's a complete disconnect between the magnitude of the problem and then the research priority that we're giving it. And that's by design again that's not just because no one thought of it. That is by political design. So those are the things we need to be talking about. We should be doing the science. We should be doing evidence-based rational. And the other thing is 80-90% of people want these regulations. They're not even unpopular. That's the most frustrating thing is that we lack the political will in the face of overwhelming public support. Something is broken there, right? That's what's so frustrating.

C: Well the lobbying system. Yeah. The gun lobby. That's what's broken. Is that the interests of politicians. They're placing them over the actual lives of children.

S: No absolutely. Yeah that's the that that's really, our democracy isn't working when the public can't exert their will through their elected representatives. That's, this is, it reminds of that every time one of these things happens it's like and of course nothing's going to happen because. But I the thing is. I just really hate the defeatist attitude. And that's why I'm─

B: Oh I embrace it.

S: ─I'm not happy with the overall response that I'm seeing in public of nothing's going to happen, there's nothing we could do. Because it's self-defeating, right? Even if it's true it doesn't matter.

C: It also really doesn't makes sense given the administration we're in. Like we can do something.

S: Well yeah. Well I think honestly I think the thing that we can do is vote. That's the real. I don't think we have the political people in place now to do anything because you need you need 60 votes in the senate basically. And we don't have that. And if if the public really wanted if we really wanted to do something about this it would require people voting on this issue and getting off their butts and voting. And the problem is people forget about it in three weeks and they go on to the next thing.

J: And that's also incredible that's a very slow process.

C: Yeah. Like I think we can be doing more right now. And part of that is speaking up. It's putting pressure on the people that we already voted into office by just plastering them with the message that they are failing their constituents. And by acting locally as well because yes we know that the second amendment is this big Goliath that David is facing but we can affect change at the local level. We can make sure, we can make sure that the states that we live in have the strictest laws possible. In so far as they don't encroach on on the constitution. I mean obviously─

E: [inaudible]

C: Yeah. I mean we can make sure that our neighborhoods are safe. That's what we have to do.

B: Yeah but I mean I keep going back to for me Sandy Hook was a real real watershed in many ways because that was the time I really really felt well of course something's going to happen. When we're talking 20 some odd five and six-year-olds slaughtered. I mean that I mean it was really egregious and from that angle. And it didn't happen. So then I'm thinking what will it realistically take for something to happen. And I don't have an answer to that because I can't imagine what it's going to take for something to happen. This isn't gonna do it. Sandy Hook didn't do it.

S: All right well we're not going to solve this problem today unfortunately but it is a conversation that we need to keep having. So guys let's go on with our news items.

News Items

S:

B:

C:

J:

E:

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

Monkeypox (13:29)

• Should We Fear the Monkeypox?

NASA Mars Plans (30:45)

• NASA shows off early plans to send astronauts to Mars for 30 days

Linear Bias (37:47)

• The Linear Bias

Who's That Noisy? (52:46)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Water lapping up against metal gutters of pool

New Noisy (56:37)

[Michael Jackson-esque squeals, screams, and scatting]

J: ... If you think you know what this week's Noisy is, or, my God, people, if you have heard a Noisy that you think is cool--you found it on the web, it could be something from your life, at work, at home--as long as it's interesting and doesn't sound like white noise--if it sounds like this, [imitates white noise], don't send that to me.

Interview with Dr. Naomi Rowe-Gurney (1:13:08)

• Dr. Naomi Rowe-Gurney, Planetary Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Howard University

Science or Fiction (1:35:49)

Theme: Which one is older? Item #1: The first cities predate evidence for iron use by about 5,000 years. Item #2: The first dinosaur walked the Earth 40 million years before the emergence of the first true trees. Item #3: The first firearm was invented about 900 years after the first steam engine.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Dinosaur → true tree
Science	Cities → iron use
Science	Steam engine → firearm

Host	Result
Steve	clever

Rogue	Guess
Jay	Dinosaur → true tree
Evan	Steam engine → firearm
Bob	Cities → iron use
Cara	Dinosaur → true tree

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

Jay's Response

J: ... "to blaaave"

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:57:57)

With less critical thinking comes more vaccine hesitancy.
– Nedra Rhone, columnist, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Signoff/Announcements

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

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

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