SGU Episode 939

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SGU Episode 939
July 8th 2023
"A recent study offered the “oldest decisive evidence” that our ancient hominid ancestors ate one another. But the field has a long history of overstating such claims, other scientists note."
SGU 938                      SGU 940
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.
Publilius Syrus, Latin writer from Antioch
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Hottest day, Meaning of life

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, July 5^th, 2023, 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 everyone.

S: So, guys, we just had the hottest day in history ever recorded.

C: Where?

B: Congratulations, Earth.

E: Oh, oh, right. When you say we, you didn't mean like the five of us.

C: Where? Where was it?

S: The average temperature on the Earth was over 17° Celsius for the first time.

E: Whoa. Death Valley?

S: And I think today was the second hottest day on record.

B: Right.

J: And what's amazing, Steve, is that all the world's nations are reacting to this news and they feel like, wow, now's the time to really do something. And they're actually changing their laws to fix the problem, right? That's the next thing.

S: So we're going to be breaking all kinds of records this year and next year because of El Niño.

C: Oh, right.

B: That's true.

S: So there is the El Niño cycle the weather pattern, which has to do with bringing up heat from the deep ocean, you know? And so in the La Nina pattern, you run a little bit cooler than average. And in El Niño years, you run a little bit hotter than average. So we're just the last few years, we've been in a cooler than average phase. So you have the increasing temperature due to global warming. But on top of that is the up and down El Niño/La Niña cycle. So now we're going into the hot-hot phase, right? So now we're going to be, the next couple of years, this year and next year are going to, I mean, almost certainly be the hottest on record. So it's not a surprise that we had the hottest day.

C: Great.

B: Yeah, but don't forget, there's been lots of El Niños in the past and none of them were this hot. So it's not just like, oh, it's El Niño.

C: Yeah, it's hot-hot.

B: Like you said, it's hot on top of hot.

C: Yeah, it's hot-hot. Not hot, but hot-hot.

S: So it actually had more warming than we realized in the last few years, but it was partially masked by La Nina. But yeah it's the same story where you were doing some stuff, but there just isn't the immediacy. It's like if people, I really think, I think even people who accept global warming and accept the science, even to a degree us, right, there's a little bit of partial denial.

C: There has to be. It's the only way we're not like constantly in the existential dread.

S: Yeah, but we really wrapped our head around how terrible it's going to be in the next, half a century.

C: I don't know if it's possible to.

S: Yeah, because if you really, really did, we would be like, oh my goodness, we really have to [inaudible].

C: Get through the day.

E: What's the opposite of survivor's bias? It's dead persons bias? I mean, is that why?

S: Dead men tell no tales.

E: Well I mean, 50 to 60, we're not going to be here 50, 70 years from now.

C: Yeah, but it's going to be unbearable 10 years from now.

S: Yeah, it's going to be, we'll feel it. I mean, yeah, it's going to be unbearable, but you know─

C: It will be in some parts of the world.

S: Totally, look at Texas, we were just visiting with our friends from Texas. You can't go outside. You can't go outside.

B: He's like, yeah, I'd still go outside in the summer.

S: It's like so hot and humid that you literally cannot modulate your own body temperature.

C: It's sort of like that here. I mean, I walk to work every day, which is getting to be really hard to do. But like, it's really difficult because I'm working with my clients, a lot of them are struggling. And what do you talk about doing? It's like, okay, well, we got to do things that are active and what can we do that don't cost money? And it's like, okay, we got to go on our walks. And he's like, I can't go on a walk. I'll die. It's like, what are you? I can't just go walk. So it's like, and we can't go back to a mall walking because there aren't any malls anymore.

E: Oh, wait a minute.

C: You guys remember mall walking?

E: Wall walking was great.

C: Yeah, it was awesome. But now there's no malls.

S: We're just getting old enough to become mall walkers and there's no more malls.

B: Well, I mean.

E: Well, maybe this will help bring them back.

B: When you say no more malls, I mean, what are we talking about? I know one local mall.

S: They're not all gone.

C: They're not all gone, but I don't know any local malls.

B: But has it been a lot?

S: But have you been to a mall recently? I went to our local mall recently and it's kind of a ghost town.

C: Well, maybe that's better for mall walking.

B: Yeah, the one near us, Steve, is crazy. I remember going there last Christmas and like, wait, every other store is empty. What's going on? And the movie theatre closed, which was the worst of all.

E: Yeah, and the ones that are there are Starbucks and vape shops.

C: Yeah.

E: Everything's a vape shop now.

C: There's a lot of sneaker stores, too. You notice that?

E: Discount sneakers.

C: Yeah, it's weird.

J: But to get back to the world government's thing, I know this is not an easily answered question, but what the hell is it going to take?

S: It's going to take it being too late, I think.

C: Exactly.

B: Exactly. There's nothing that will get them off their asses.

E: We are a reactionary species.

S: Yeah. I mean, it's like, you know─

B: I wish we were reactionary.

S: If it weren't the case, nobody would smoke. Right? I mean, think about it. If you smoke, you are completely in denial about the realities of one day you could get that diagnosis of lung cancer. You are denying it. If you really wrapped your head around that, there's no way you would do it. There's no way. And, of course, everybody that I've ever interfaced with directly or indirectly who has lung cancer and who smokes, like, what was I doing to myself? What was I thinking? I want to go back in time and tell my younger self, stop.

E: But isn't that part, isn't that addiction part of the, that's the problem, though?

S: Yeah, but why would you ever start?

E: I mean, that's the sickness.

S: You're thinking it's not going to be me. Yes, I know, statistically, blah, blah, blah, but I'm not, it's not going to be me. It's the same thing. It's like, yeah, global warming is going to happen to other people. It's not going to happen to me. It's not going to really affect me or whatever. But if you really, really wrap your head around it and the science is there, it's not like we don't know.

C: Well, something that might interest you, Steve, because I think this goes back to the conversation we had from the listener who wrote in last week about existential dread, is that a theorist that I read a lot of his work, Irvin D. Yalom, he argues that fear of death is so existentially terrifying to so many people that we develop these psychological coping mechanisms. And one of them is exactly what you just mentioned. It's this, well, it's not really going to happen to me. I know I'm going to die, but not really. Another one is, so it's the belief in exceptionalism. And then the other one he calls the belief in a personal saviour. And so for some people, it's religion. For some people, it's their therapist. For some people, it's like some newfangled medical thing that's going to pop up. But believing that, like, no, but something is going to save me from this fate. And it's a very common denial mechanism that people have that, like, helps them get through the day.

E: Well, I guess so. Because what? Some of these people would just turn into a puddle of─

C: Anxiety.

E: ─of a person who couldn't even function and the basic stuff.

S: Yeah, but I, yes, I think that to some extent, you can't, I don't think, expect people to live every moment of their life with the full realization of their own mortality. Nobody expects that. But but accepting it enough that you could say, I want to live my life to my fullest, you know? Today is precious because I am going to f and die one day.

B: Memento mori.

C: Yeah, we call that mortality salience and people with high mortality salience usually have better psychological outcomes. But you're right. A lot of existential theorists we're going back to philosophy now, they actually make a distinction between what they call the normal mode of being, which is like, I'm shopping and I'm watching TV and I'm hanging with my friends and the ontological mode of being, which is like, holy shit, I'm going to die. And then there's this thing we call the boundary experience. And the boundary experience is a diagnosis. It's a car accident. It's losing a loved one. It's something in your life that forces you into the ontological mode. And it's like, you can learn a lot from it.

S: The older you get, the more time you spend in ontological.

C: Yeah, yeah.

S: For a lot of reasons.

C: But you can't do it all the time. It's arresting. It's impossible.

S: I've never been arrested in my life, Cara. All right.

E: Star Trek.

S: The boys get that. Yeah. Anyway.

C: Dang it. It worked even without knowing that it was a ref once. It was funny anyway.

S: It's my speciality.

B: Cara, what do you recommend to people who have a problem with this? What's the right thing for them to do?

C: Well, I think that, OK, so we talked a little bit about it last week that you can do. If it's severe enough to be an OCD kind of issue or severe anxiety issue, there is exposure and response prevention treatment, which is this very safe way that you sit with a therapist and evoke these images and these thoughts, and then you work on preventing the compulsion that's linked to it. But if it's not an OCD thing, this is actually what I do. I recommend existential therapy. It's a type of therapy.

J: How do you get that?

C: You work with somebody who's trained in existentialism, like me. There are people who subscribe to that training model, and they tend to be the ones who are more interested in talking about things like, we say the big four, death, isolation, meaning, and freedom and responsibility. So those tend to be the themes that we go into a lot in therapy.

S: And that's pretty clear, I think, in the evidence is that confronting your fears and not hiding from them is important.

C: 100%. Yeah. Increase your mortality salience. Yeah. But do it with somebody who studies this stuff.

B: Well, that's true of any phobia, right?

C: Totally. Yeah. And in a way, you can kind of think of it that way, that it's a death phobia. It's just that existentialists think that actually a lot of things are death phobia. We sort of believe that the fear of death underlies a lot of other anxieties.

S: Yeah.

E: I would think so. Yeah. That's kind of numero uno.

C: Exactly. Yeah. When you start digging deeper, it gets down to that.

S: Yeah. Just to bring it back around, for me, though, the ultimate goal is just turning it into something practical. Live your life, enjoy your life, be comfortable.

C: Find meaning and purpose from the fact that your life will end.

S: The atheist conundrum of people who are believers who have religion often ask, how do you get through your day? How do you live your life knowing that there's no meaning? First of all, it's very freeing knowing that there's no meaning.

C: And we make our meaning, exactly.

S: When you know that you make your own meaning, you make your own freaking meaning.

C: Exactly.

S: That empowers you to find the meaning in life. It's all subjective anyway. There's no objective meaning.

C: But they believe there is. They believe God is there. That's the other funny thing.

E: I don't want to be shackled to a dogma.

C: Have you guys ever had somebody who's a really firm believer ask you, you don't believe in god, why don't you just kill yourself? And you're like?

B: Why don't you?

C: I don't understand that reasoning at all.

S: Yeah, it doesn't even make sense.

C: I don't believe in god.

E: Well, they tell me I'm going to hell and I'll just say, I'll see you there.

C: Right, right. But really, the weird thing of like, if you don't have anything, if there's nothing after this life, why do you even keep going? And it's like, because this is all I have, my friend.

S: Yeah, right.

C: That's why I keep going.

S: The other question I get a lot is, why don't you just go around raping, killing, and stealing all the time?

C: Exactly. I'm like, would you do that if you didn't have god?

S: Because I'm not a psychopath. Yeah. But yeah, that's the thing. The implication is that you would do those things if you didn't believe in divine punishment. So you're a horrible person.

C: Yeah, it tells you so much more about the question asker.

B: Exactly.

E: It's brutal. Wow.

S: All right. Let's move on.

Quickie with Bob (11:55)

• [url_from_show_notes _article_title_] 
   (Note: this article is not from the SGU show notes page)

S: Bob, you're going to give us a quickie.

B: Yes. Thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. The planet that should be dead but isn't. Kind of fits our discussion so far today. The Hawaii Institute for Astronomy made a fascinating discovery recently, a planet called 8UMib, U-M-I-B, or HALIA. Planet HALIA is orbiting a red giant star, Baekdu, at half the Earth-Sun distance. But, and there's a big but here. The star was already burning helium. So that means that it had already swelled into a red giant star once before and now it's shrunk down to its current size. But the thing is, that means the star would have already ballooned its super hot outer atmosphere to one and a half times the distance to HALIA.

E: It would have absorbed that planet.

B: So at one time, yeah, it should have been like engulfed. So what was HALIA doing there existing, basically? How was it still there? This is what our sun is going to do in about six billion years. It's going to swell into a giant and probably, probably, not definitely, but probably burn the Earth to a crisp. So how did HALIA escape that fate? We're not sure exactly what happened. But one thing we are sure about, HALIA did not just sweat it out and endure the heat. That's just not in the cards, not going to happen, not one of the available options. So what are the more reasonable options? Well, my first thought, and I'm sure many of your first thoughts as well, was this is maybe a hot Jupiter scenario where you've got a high mass, short period planet around Jupiter mass, approximately. That is very, very close to the planet to the star, the parent star. And it is thought one of the theories is that such a hot Jupiter was created at the outskirts of the solar system and then kind of migrated in really close. Maybe that's what HALIA did, but apparently not. The researchers believe that this is not a viable option considering, they say, how fast the changes would have been happening to the parent star. That's not really an option. Okay, what are the other options? And these are interesting. Another theory is that Baekdu was in fact a binary star in its past. And the merger of those two stars prevented one of them, one or the other from expanding enough to sear poor HALIA to a crisp. So maybe the fact that it was binary and they merged prevented this swelling of the outer atmosphere enough to destroy the planet. Okay. Another option is that the planet is maybe actually like a baby planet, a planet that was born from the gas of a former binary system that created a second generation planet that never had to face being engulfed because it had already happened the swelling already happened before it was created. So that's interesting as well. So those are interesting options. Hopefully we'll find in the future what exactly is going on. Binary stars, as you probably know, are incredibly common. You look at, most stars you look at up in the night sky are binary or trinary, more so than singletons. Binary stars are incredibly common in the universe. And we just don't know a lot yet about all the different ways that planets and binary stars evolve together. And hopefully systems like HALIA and Bekdu will one day show us new ways planets are born and die and perhaps how they even escape fiery deaths. And this was your Quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

S: Thanks, Bob.

News Items

S:

B:

C:

J:

E:

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

Activity Good for Quality of Life (15:19)

• Older adults who remain more active have a better quality of life, study finds 

Hominid Cannibals (25:19)

• Cannibalism, or 'Clickbait' for Paleoanthropology?  

Aspartame and Cancer (33:53)

• Aspartame and Cancer 

FAA Approves Flying Car (46:52)

• A flying car prototype just got an airworthiness certificate from the FAA 

_evan_refers_to_episode_from_the_future_

Neutrino Image of Milky Way (1:04:12)

• IceCube detects high-energy neutrinos from within the Milky Way 

Who's That Noisy? (1:13:01)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Cincinnati Zoo's Little penguin "Cookie" being tickled

New Noisy (1:15:51)

[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

... what that noisy is

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups

Followup #2: Canada's forest management (1:28:19)

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Science or Fiction (1:32:58)

Item #1: A recent review of data finds that maternal mortality rate more than doubled in the US between 1999 and 2019 in every racial and ethnic group. Item #2: Astronomers observing distant quasars find that time in the early universe flowed 5 times slower than it does today. Item #3: A study involving bacterial cells with a minimized genome, in which every gene is deemed essential, revealed a dramatically reduced rate of evolutionary adaptation to stressed environments.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Cells w/ minimized genome
Science	US maternal mortality rate
Science	Universe flowed 5x slower

Host	Result
Steve	win

Rogue	Guess
Jay	US maternal mortality rate
Evan	Cells w/ minimized genome
Cara	US maternal mortality rate
Bob	Cells w/ minimized genome

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

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:50:35)

It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.  – Publilius Syrus (85–43 BC), Latin writer from Antioch

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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Today I Learned

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