SGU Episode 886

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SGU Episode 886
July 2nd 2022
A polymetallic nodule
SGU 885                      SGU 887
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
Quotes of the Week
-- Healthy skepticism is the basis of all accurate observation. -- We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.
first: Arthur Conan Doyle, British writer second: Carl Sagan, American astronomer
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Show Notes
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Introduction, Snake Rescue, Mice, Cats & Dogs

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 29^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: And that's it. It's just the three of us.

B: What is happening now.

C: Weird.

S: Evan is on a scheduled break this week. Is doing something with his daughter I think. And Jay's traveling. So he's also. He was sick last week. Completely unrelated. He may or may not be here next week it depends on what his travel plans are. It's the summer. Summer's very disruptive. There's going to be a lot of swapping in over the next month or so. But first I want to tell you guys about a nature encounter I had recently. We like to tell about our nature encounters. And as Cara likes to say we live in the woods.

C: You do.

B: I guess.

S: There are woods near my house. Yeah. So anyway Sunday was like a beautiful day like. One of the first weekend days where we didn't have anything scheduled. So we're doing a lot of yard work. My wife says Autumn, it's our daughter, found a dead snake near the garden. Will you get rid of it for us. So I'm like hmm. I immediately knew what would happened. Because we have I have fencing around my garden and at one point I put up some like mesh fencing to keep little critters out. And then it didn't work out so I got rid of it but there was some left behind. I'm like I bet you that snake got caught in the mesh.

C: Oh no.

S: So I went. It was a rat snake which is was a black rat snake. Not that big probably a juvenile. It was absolutely completely entwined in the mesh. And it looked dead. And so I was getting ready to just cut it out and get rid of it and it starts to move. Like ooh this thing is not dead yet. Now my daughter is a budding herpetologist. She's the one who owns a Blue-tongued skink. Plus my wife is a softie. She's like oh she my wife is like deathly afraid of snakes but still she's like oh the poor thing. Free it.

C: Yeah. (laughs)

S: Free it? I mean it was so entangled in this mesh. This is like fine a very fine mesh of like plastic. It was also like grown into the ground and everything, you know I mean? It's been there for years. They talked me into like fine. The thing looks like it's still alive. I'll see what I could do. So I─

B: Yeah what's the strategy.

S: It took me like 20 minutes. I painstakingly cut that snake out of the mesh.

B: Do they bite? Do they bite?

S: So well it bit me. But I was wearing gloves.

C: Okay.

S: And they don't have fangs. They just have rows of tiny teeth. So it kind of like bit at my it snapped at my finger at one point which I didn't even feel it because I was wearing a glove. But it was like surgery. I had to get the scissor between the snake and the mesh. It was so tight in places it was constricting him, you know what I mean. I was digging into it and I wasn't sure like how healthy it was but then I had to have my daughter hold his head so he wouldn't keep snapping at me while I finished cutting it away.

B: Oh yeah that's a good strategy.

S: Yeah. So we did. We cut it away and as soon as it was totally free. After taking a picture. We released it and it slithered away really fast.

C: That's good.

S: So I think it was not moving mainly because it was probably painful for it to move. But we freed it quickly enough that it I don't think it was that harmed.

C: That's exciting.

B: Nice. Good job.

C: It's like a good deed for the weekend.

S: I know. It kind of felt good to freeing the creature. Plus it eats vermin. It eats mice and chipmunks which─

B: Oh god I wanna buy some.

S: ─we have a ton of in our property. And they of course are menace to my garden. So I'm like yeah black snake in the garden. Good. Eat all the mice. Get rid of them.

B: That's awesome.

S: Yeah they're just a menace.

B: Should have put them in my basement.

C: Oh no you have mice in your basement?

B: We did. It was bad. It was an infestation.

S: Yeah we did a couple of times. We've always been able to get rid of them but it's a constant thing. Like you have to constantly be on the lookout. And we've now we basically just have a service that just constantly keeps our house vermin free.

C: Interesting. We don't have basements here. And we didn't in Texas where I was growing up either. That's like not a concept I'm familiar with really.

B: That's sad.

C: Yeah. We have attics.

B: Nothing like a good basement.

S: Well they'll get into your house whether it's a basement or not. I mean again like if you if you live surrounded by wilderness mice will get into your stuff. That's just the way it is.

B: Basically nothing you could do.

S: There's nothing they're just constant fact of life. You just have to live with them or you got to be vigilant about keeping them out of your house. But part of it is covering all the entry points but they're very small and they're good at making entry points. So you can just minimize them but there's no way you could really keep them out.

B: Yeah they can know a way at most materials and they can get through so surprisingly small holes. So tiny you wouldn't believe that they could fit.

C: You should get a cat Bob.

B: Liz and I have a cat.

C: And she's not a good?

B: Oh yeah she's left a couple, not a lot, but she's left a couple of dead mice around which is kind of cool.

C: Interesting. I had a cat once. Here in California in my first apartment I lived in I had a cat and she was the sweetest thing ever and of course I didn't let my cat outside I live in an urban center and you shouldn't do that. But she really did like the outdoor. So she would hang out on my patio. Like on my balcony all the time. And one time I came home and she had gotten a bird. From my fourth floor balcony.

B: That's what they do.

C: And I was like wow okay we're gonna not do that anymore. It was amazing. I was like you are a hunter.

S: Oh yeah.

B: Yeah it's like a holocaust for the birds. The cats.

C: For sure. Especially the ones roaming the neighborhood. But I had no idea she was skilled enough to do it from like a six by six patio. Wow.

B: They're amazing. I have such love and respect for cats now. We never had cats growing up so there's always dogs. Always dogs. Always wanted a dog but now that I've gotten used to a cat the past four or five years. I got mad respect for their agility. Just astounds me all the time. It's so much. They're so much more three-dimensional than a dog.

C: Well they definitely more agile. I'll give you that. But they're also a lot easier. I loved having cats when I was in college because I could just leave for the weekend and they were fine. I could never do that to Killer. He would die.

B: That's huge. That's huge. That's huge. But so I will say of course coming home from whatever and having a dog run up to you and lick you all over to me that. I try to get my cat to do it and won't do it. Will not lick me.

S: The level of affection from a dog is like an order of magnitude than most cats.

B: Oh my god.

C: Oh yeah. But they're also an order of magnitude more needy.

S: Totally.

B: Absolutely. Yeah. Leaving for a day--no.

C: Oh leaving for three hours. My dog acts like I've been gone for a [inaudible].

B: Oh wow separation anxiety is a thing for sure.

S: All right so guys one other thing. Earlier this week I pre-recorded a talk that I'm giving for Skeptical 2022. This is virtual this year. It will be live July 16^th and 17^th but some of the bits are pre-recorded. Also Evan was on their skeptity this year with Bill Nye so Evan will be making an appearance as well. My talk was on when skeptics disagree. It was all the big issues over the last 30 years where there was significant disagreement within─

B: Oh wow.

S: ─the skeptical movement among skeptics.

B: Touchy.

S: And why I think caused them and how they what's the status of them were they resolved or not etc.

B: I wouldn't touch that with a 20-foot pole.

C: That's brave.

S: It was fun. So that'll be airing during the conference. Just like with NECSS which is also coming up. If you buy a ticket you'll be able to watch it whenever. You don't have to be watching it on the 16^th and 17^th. And then speaking of NECSS that's coming up as well. That is August 5^th and 6^th. Also a virtual conference. Also you'll have access to the whole conference for a long time once you purchase a ticket. So the full details are on necss.org just go there you'll see the updated list of all the speakers we're getting. That's gonna also be a lot of fun.

Special Segment: Cara's Upcoming Surgery (8:30)

C: And you know sorry to have to do this while we're missing Jay and Evan but I wanted to. I don't know. An announcement sounds odd. It's not really an announcement but I wanted to talk to you and to of course the listeners about some upcoming plans in my life. I had been grappling for a while with whether or not I wanted to be public about this because a nobody's f--ing business but I do think there are some real benefits to speaking out. So long story short I was recording an upcoming episode of Talk Nerdy a few weeks, maybe two weeks ago now with an incredible woman named Rachel Gross who wrote a book called Vagina Obscura and we were talking about women and women's health and reproduction. And I was like you know what I got to talk about my own thing that I've been dealing with and I just went there. So if you're a Talk Nerdy listener you're going to hear an in-depth very spontaneous conversation about this on my newest episode that comes out on July 4^th. And July 44^th of course is Independence Say here and it's also the day before I'm having a pretty major surgery. So anybody who has followed me on social media probably saw about six weeks to a month ago now when I had a more minor surgery. You saw a couple pictures that I posted and I got a lot of really wonderful love online. And that was--I didn't say what it was at the time but that was a very common surgery but I did do it under general anesthesia. It was my first time ever under general anesthesia so I was super scared. But I got through it. That was a common surgery called a LEEP which is a surgery that removes some cervical tissue to to study it for pathology. I also had something called an ECC which is an Endocervical Curettage so that's like a scraping of the endocervix. And then something called a D&C which is Dilation and Curetage of the uterus. That part's not usually included in the initialism. But D&C is actually a really interesting procedure that we're going to talk about a little later when we talk about abortion science. I was not having an abortion though. I was having a D&C for also pathology purposes. It's a scraping of the endometrial lining of your uterus to look and see if there's any abnormality. All of this came after an abnormal Pap. Women get paps regularly. Oftentimes when they come back abnormal the problem is squamous tissue which is a certain type of cell layer of the cervix. Mine came back abnormal in my glandular tissue which is more disconcerting because it happens farther up inside the cervix and it can and it enters into the uterus there's kind of no dividing line there. And it came back something called adenocarcinoma in situ which sounds really scary for good reason. That word carcinoma is scary. It's cancer. The operative words here are in situ or for some reason a lot of the doctors say in situ which I find interesting because researchers almost always say in situ. We use that term a lot in research too. Anyway that means in place. So what that really means is that the abnormal tissue the cancerous tissue is still in an outermost layer of cells. It has not yet invaded the basement membrane. So they often refer to AIS as cancer stage zero meaning it will progress. It's not a question of if but when. And yet it has not progressed yet which is a very good sing.

B: Sounds like a good number though to have.

S: Yeah you want stage zero if you're going to be staged for sure. And the so the good news is it's fully treatable. The bad news is the treatment is a total hysterectomy and so that is at the age of 38 something that I'm going to undergo here next week. Which means I'll be off the show for several weeks while I'm in recovery. And I thought it was important to talk about this because I think people listening right now either have gone through it or are gonna have to go through it. When I come back on the show I can report back what my experience was like. If anybody has questions of course you can reach out to me via social media as I'm preparing. I've been talking to a lot of younger women who have gone through this procedure for usually other reasons things like endometriosis or uterine fibroids. But also one person I talked to went through it because they were brachypositive and they did it preventively. So for cancer purposes. So that's my spiel.

S: Yeah.

C: I'd also love to answer any questions that you guys might have. I know we've talked about this offline so you might not have any but for the purposes of the listeners.

S: I think we should be clear: you're going to be fine. This is you're going to be totally fine when all this is done. But even still this is major surgery.

C: Yeah. Oh yeah. A hysterectomy is─

S: The removal of an organ.

C: ─and not just one I mean I think the reason that a lot of--I grapple with this because hysterectomy is the single most common surgery performed on women. Or I should say it's the single most common gynecologic surgery performed in the US. And so because it's so common and because there's a huge stigma around women talking about reproduction and because there's also a lot of misinformation disinformation and just lack of information that people generally have about our fundamental anatomy and physiology. I know women. Women who have given birth who when I tell them what the surgery entails they're like wait what now? I'm like yeah. So total hysterectomy for me it refers to the removal of the uterus, fallopian tubes and cervix. Radical hysterectomy also includes the ovaries. I get to keep my ovaries. I'm very lucky in that regard so I don't have to undergo any hormone replacement. But that said I will be having all of that structure removed which means you're also losing a lot of the structure in your pelvic floor. And so there's a lot of healing. It's laparoscopic which really helps with the heal time.

B: Oh sure.

C: But now pretty much the only thing between a woman or I should say or a trans man. Anybody who had a uterus. Who undergoes this surgery or somebody's non-binary. The only thing between where those organs used to be and the outside world now is the upper layer of your vagina that's sewn closed to form what's called a vaginal cuff. So basically it's tissue and then guts. Like your intestines. There's no cervix in between them anymore. So that's all of that structure has to be kind of sewn in artificially.

B: Wow.

C: So you've got a lot of healing to do.

S: Yeah.

B: That makes sense now. It's even more dramatic than I thought.

C: Yeah. But the good news is it is very common. I am in very capable hands and this for all intents and purposes and when you look at the literature by and large to like a very high degree. 99 point something will completely remove the cancer and there's really kind of no risk after that. I will still have to do some paps and things like that. And so they're a little bit different paps when you don't have a cervix. They're different but you still have to do them. But yeah. This should be a--this is a curative procedure. Or really a preventative procedure.

S: Yeah that's the good part.

B: Yeah. Right. So did they discuss? Are there any non-surgical alternatives or is that really your only option?

C: Yes. So the standard of care according to all of the different medical gynecologic groups who have done all of this research over the years is total hysterectomy. And the reason for that is that skip lesions are really common. So even though my LEEP came back positive for AIS but my ECC and my D&C were both negative there's a good chance we we actually removed all of the all of the AIS but the risk for skip lesions is so high. And a skip lesion is just a lesion that's non-continuous. So it could be somewhere else and we missed it.

S: So it looks like you got it all but you didn't.

C: Yeah it looks like you got it all but you didn't and the risk for that is so high that the standard of care is total hysterectomy. So if I had wanted children which I don't there are fertility sparing options but really all that entails is waiting. And you can wait a few years to plan your family and to give birth but during that time you have to have biopsies every six months. And to me what do I wait for? The longer you wait the riskier surgery is. The younger you are when you have a surgery and the more healthy you are the better outcomes. I don't have plans for fertility and I don't want to go through any more painful biopsies. I had already done multiple biopsies prior to this and one little thing that you might not know if you're not somebody who's had a colposcopy-they don't give you any anesthesia for those.

S: Yeah it's considered too brief a procedure.

C: Yeah they say it's so short that the shot itself would hurt too bad and then they have to follow it. But it's still multiple sites so I've probably had five colposcopies now in my life. Maybe more. And each time it's two biopsies and an ECC which is the curettage of the endocervix. So it's three brutally painful like almost pass out painful punches inside of you but yes it's fast. Doesn't mean it's not horrible. And that's partially why we did the LEEP and the and the ECC under general anesthesia this time. And we needed to do a D&C too. Which sometimes you don't do under general. But general definitely takes that kind of pain away. And so yeah this will be my second time under anesthesia. Boy oh boy propofol is weird.

B: Yeah because this is going to be more extensive. You're gnnna to be under longer, right? So you're a little worried about the reaction for such a lenghty time.

C: Yeah an hour and a half last time. This will be more like four to four and a half she said. But everyone reacts differently.

S: Yeah everyone reacts a little bit differently.

C: Some people don't have a reaction at all. And here's an interesting thing. Steve I'd be curious to hear your take on this. So the first surgery I did I didn't ha--I was under general but I didn't need pain meds because it's really not that pain. I mean it hurts but you take ibuprofen and use a heating pad and you're pretty much okay. This surgery they put you on dilaudid in the hospital which is a very strong opiate. So and then you go home with some like norco or something like that. Just for a few days and then you move on to NSAIDs. But I've spoken to a few people who told me that paradoxically my post-anesthesia yuckiness that I felt after the first surgery might actually be mitigated because I will be on pain meds this time. So I might not notice that horrible propofol hangover because I'm on heart like pain meds.

S: Yeah because you'll yeah because you'll be on narcotics at the same time.

C: Yeah because I'll be like effed up. So that's kind of my hope.

B: Good luck with that. Cara I've got a question. Considering how radical the surgery is. What I'm curious what's the impact on menopause?

C: None for--well I can't say completely but for the most part if the ovaries are in place none. If you remove your ovaries what that does is it forces menopause.

S: Yeah it's a surgically induced menopause.

C: Yeah. Which is why women, I keep saying women but anybody who goes through that procedure, which is why they often require hormone replacement therapy. Depending on their needs. But for me the hope is so the uterus and the fallopian tubes really don't have any endocrine bearing. Sometimes there are some things that can happen to the ovaries because the tissue near the ovaries has changed. But very often the ovaries continue to have a typical ovulation cycle. And before you ask I did ask my doctor I was like wait where does the egg go? And she was like it's just a cell Cara your body just absorbs it like it literally always does. And I was like right right. She was like very rarely does it actually make it down the fallopian tube and into the uterus and implant that's like, it's just a cell. Your body just gets rid of it. So I will still have a cycle. I just won't bleed because I won't have a uterus. I can no longer get pregnant but I will still go through menopause at whatever age my endocrine system indeuces menopause.

S: Well Cara we are absolutely gonna miss you over the next few weeks on the show.

C: I'll miss you guys too.

S: And I know you're going to keep us updated. You'll let us know what you want us to tell your audience while we're waiting for you to recover. But I'm sure everyone want to know that you're doing well.

C: Yeah yeah I'll definitely let you guys know as soon as I'm aware enough to send text messages.

B: That said if you feel like it and you're kind of really loopy on narcotics. (Cara laughs) You know come on the show for just a few minutes. It'd be kind of awesome.

C: It'd be hilarious. And also for the Talk Nerdy listeners a thank you and b I did pre-record a bunch of interviews so there won't be any interruptions in Talk Nerdy. I'm gonna record all of the ads and intros here over the next couple days and get them ready so that my assistant can manage posting during the weeks that I'm recovering. So no interruptions there but I will miss everybody on SGU but I'll be back soon enough.

B: Sure.

S: Yeah. It'll go fast.

Quickie with Bob: Gamma Ray Burst (21:34)

• Gamma Ray Burst

S: All right Bob you're gonna start us off with a Quickie.

B: Aah. Thank you Steve you sexy chief grey top. This is your Quickie with Bob. (laughter) So Cara gird your loins this time for gamma ray bursts in the news or GRPs as I like to call them. And Cara thank you for using that the word initialism earlier in your talk. I loved it. So we know Gamma Ray Burst, right? We've talked about them. Some collapsing stars form a black hole that can spit out gamma rays from their poles so intense that they are the most energetic and luminous events in the universe since the Big Bang. So these are something else. Imagine turning the entire Earth's mass into energy then multiply that times 100 and that's what we're talking about. That's the scale of energy output that we're talking about with Gamma Ray Bursts. So Gamma Ray Bursts are mysterious though. They're still mysterious. I wasn't aware of this. It's because sometimes they can be irregular. They blink in the middle of one of their amazing displays. And then they resume. So it's for years scientists have wondered what's going on there. Why is this thing kind of like taking a little break and then coming back? What's happening? So they ran a new simulation of gamma-ray bursts on a powerful supercomputer. I think it's called the Great Hyperlobic Omni-Cognate Neutron Wrangler but I could be wrong. Don't quote me on that one. So it created the highest resolution gamma-ray burst ever in the simulation. And it shows the entire GRB evolution for the first time. Soup to nuts. And in it researchers saw that the star that's collapsing that the gas hits the disk of gas that's already around the newly forming black hole. So the star is collapsing but the black hole is already forming and there's already a disk of magnetized gas around it. And this so this in falling gas basically hits this disc and sets it wobbling. So that when it bounces off it as a jet. This jet bounces off because the disc is wobbling the jet is also kind of wobbling as it bounces off of it. And if the jet is strong enough to emerge through this still collapsing star. The gamma-ray burst is then born there. Once it escapes it is born. And that interior jet wobble makes the gamma-ray burst wobble as well. Which explains why we lose the signal briefly when we detect them. So I will say though, gotta say that I'm a little sad that the beam the gamma-ray beam that I've thought about for years. That's like potentially a light year wide that could swallow the Earth if it was close and do crazy damage. That laser-like beam isn't really laser-like. It's more like a flopping piece of pasta. It's kind of like going all over the place. Which is not as you know it just kind of seems kind of silly to me. I like the idea this gamma ray laser beam but whatever. There's still lots of other fascinating amazing things about this online. Check it out. And on that note ungird your loins. This has been your Quickie with Bob, I hope it was good for you too.

S: Thank you Bob.

C: So good.

News Items

Mining the Sea (24:33)

• Mining the Sea

S: All right guys I wanna start the official news items with talking about mining metals from the sea.

B: Oh my god. I love this man. There's so much great stuff in there.

S: I know. I wanna start though with a question for you Cara because I already asked this Bob and I know he knows the answer. So the idea is that there are metallic elements just dissolved in seawater.

C: Okay.

S: We talked about the fact that there was I know like a couple years ago that there's a lot of uranium in the world's oceans. There's enough uranium to there's like 500 times the uranium in the oceans than on the land.

C: Wow.

S: That's a lot.

B: Yeah.

S: So here's the question we're gonna turn to lithium. Lithium is an important element because it's lithium-ion batteries. And even for quite some time it's quite possible that lithium might be the center of our battery technology. Especially for vehicles. There's more options for grid storage because then you don't have to worry so much about size or weight. But with vehicles weight is everything. And so right now lithium is it and it may be for the next 20-30-40 years, who knows. If we're going to try to turn over our entire automobile fleet into battery electric vehicles that's gonna require a lot of lithium. If we're also gonna you have home backup storage for solar panels and also grid storage. That's a lot of lithium there as well.

C: Is lithium a [Rare-earth element rare-earth metal]? I know it's a metal but is it a rare-earth metal or no?

S: Lithium is not a rare-earth.

C: It's not. Okay. All right.

S: The rare-earths are just like one of the it's a series of metals and they're not necessarily rare. That's like a misnomer. It's just like it's like saying the a platinum group metal. There's the rare-earth metals. Whatever.

B: Right.

C: Gotcha, gotcha.

S: It's like a periodic table designation really. In any case but lithium is lithium it's not, lithium is the third element.

C: Right yes the third element but it's also I guess it's often found as lithium, I'm looking it up now, lithium chloride and potassium chloride. And you can pull lithium as a metal out of it.

S: Yes.

C: Which is cool.

S: It's also the only element that's also a drug.

C: Right. Yeah. That's the same thing. It's not two different words. It's lithium salts.

S: Which is very interesting.

B: Wow.

S: Anyway so the world right now we're using a hundred and sixty thousand tons a year of lithium. Mainly in battery production. 360 000 tons per year. So here's my question for you Cara. How much lithium is in the world's oceans? And you can express that in number of years of lithium at current usage. (Cara laughs)

C: And this is like fully dissolved. Like we're not talking about how hard it would be to get it out. We're just talking about how much is probably there.

S: Just how much is there. Just how much is there.

C: Maybe five years worth? Is that a really low number?

S: Close.

C: Oh it's close?

S: 1.1 million years worth of lithium. (laughter)

C: That's amazing. The oceans are so much bigger than we ever give them credit for.

B: Right? Basically inexhaustible. Essentially inexhaustible.

S: It's basically inexhaustible. So yeah I mean think about we could use ten times our current annual usage for─

B: For 110 000 years.

S: ─we could do that for a thousand years and only use one percent of the lithium in the oceans. Which would be nothing. Basically around rounding off.

B: Wow man.

S: So and yeah I think probably in a thousand years we'll be on to something more advanced than lithium-ion technology. But so essentially we'll never use it all. But you of course you immediately hit upon the point of how do we get it out of there? How energy-intensive is it and how─

C: Right and how energy-intensive is that?

S: ─money-intensive is it. How much does it cost. Because yeah I mean no one's gonna do it if the lithium you get isn't worth it in terms of the market value. So it all it'll happen when the market value of lithium will support that enterprise. And of course that means it needs to be cheap enough and expense is actually not a bad marker for how energy intensive a process is. The more energy intensive process is the more expensive it is. So those two things do tend to go hand in hand. But we do have the technology we need to essentially filter elements, metallic elements out of sea water. There are about 40 commercially usable elements dissolved in seawater at significant concentrations. Lithium just being one of the higher ones. But there's also tons of copper. There's some gold. There's cobalt, nickel. There's lots of useful things in there. Manganese.

B: But some gold Steve some if you classify 20 million tons of gold some then you're correct. But like you said the problem is though it's so diffused it's like it's parts per trillion. (Cara laughs) So it's gonna take some serious tech.

S: Gold has one of the lowest. It's a lot in absolute amount but the concentration is very low. Whereas lithium is at the higher end in terms of the amount, the concentration. So because the height the concentration is fairly high it could actually be feasible to mine significant amounts of lithium from the ocean in a way that's economically feasible. So it probably won't be happening on a massive scale anytime soon just because of the economics of it. But the it's good to know that if our land-based lithium supplies start to run low that we have essentially an inexhaustible supply in the world's ocean. So we won't run out of it. We straight up will not run out of lithium. It's there. It's just a matter of how much does it cost to get at it. And of course it's a good bet that if we do need to to mine lithium from this from seawater itself that the technology will progress. It'll become cheaper over time. There'll be economy of scale and who knows. It might even be cheaper than mining it from the ground is today.

C: Do we already have like mechanisms, proof of concept, all that good stuff?

S: Basically these filters that just you could they just absorb different minerals from the water and collect it like in these. It's almost like fly paper kind of thing like hanging down into the water. Like a whole platform of them and then you just collect it and then haul away the minerals.

B: That's amazing. Imagine some future technology where it makes it easy to collect. Any of the metals that you want. That would be something.

S: Yeah so it's currently under investigation. It's essentially technology to absorb specific elements. So as I said there's an estimated 4 billion tons of uranium in seawater. 500 times the known land-based reserves. 180 billion tons of lithium. 40 usable elements. So this is an area of active research. The technology to economically on to scale. Absorb a lot of these from the ocean. And as long as we're not like dramatically affecting the concentration in the ocean we probably don't have to worry about it affecting the ecosystem.

B: Yeah good question. Good angle.

S: Yeah there is I mean that's like I said that it'll be a thousand years at 10 times current usage before we knock it the lithium down by one percent. Probably not going to cause any problems. But iron is actually a very important mineral in the ocean. And there has been a reduction in the concentration of iron in seawater and that's comparing mussels abilities to to adhere to things. Like they're sticky stuff.

C: Does that have anything to do with climate change?

S: Totally.

C: Why the iron is--yeah.

S: So we can't assume that altering the chemistry of the oceans will have no effect on life. On the ecosystem. It's something that we need to investigate. but again these there's so much of it there that it would be a long time before we would like significantly alter the concentration.

B: Yeah I mean there's like there's 20 million tons of gold. I'll take a million tons. That's a tiny bit and I'll be good. Totally good.

S: Yeah.

C: Right. And so the question is right like okay it may only reduce the concentration by one percent like we're talking about but does a one percent reduction in concentration affect the probably not the osmolarity of the ocean but it might affect the pH? I mean I don't know.

S: Just have to investigate it.

C: But that the cool stuff is we can model all of that.

S: It's not hard.

C: Like that's the cool thing. We can totally do that science.

S: And the stuff that we really need probably is not like necessary for the ocean life. Like I don't think anyone's gonna be miss the uranium that's in the ocean.

B: Yeah right.

C: It's probably it's more about the knock-on effects.

S: All right but there's another way to mine the ocean for minerals. And this is something I just learned about recently. Polymetallic nodules. Have you guys ever heard of them?

B: Oh yeah. Yeah.

S: Polymetallic nodules.

C: No.

B: These are weird.

S: So these are basically like concretions of metal that are strewn across the ocean floor especially in the deep ocean. They're called polymetallic because they have multiple metals in them. Their greatest concentrations are found between 4 000 and 6 000 meters depth.

B: Oh boy. That's deep.

S: That's deep. So the deep ocean. They vary in size from pebbles to large rocks but the average size is somewhere about a potato. So just imagine these these potato sized nuggets of valuable metals. Like solid metal but multiple metals too. They contain a lot of iron. They contain a lot of nickel which nickel by the way is also very important for battery technology and also running in short supply. And they contain cobalt which is huge. Because cobalt is probably the most rare or resource limited element that we need for our current lithium-ion battery technology.

B: Really?

S: There's a lot of research going on trying to replace cobalt but something I'm a little bit more available. The problem is there's there's not a lot of cobalt mines around the world. One of the biggest one I think is in the DRC. And China completely bought all the rights to it so we are basically dependent on China for our batteries at this point in time. This was just stupid.

B: That's just not good.

S: I know it was dumb. Totally short sighted.

B: Dropped the ball on that. That just like.

S: Totally dropped the ball.

B: Like 101.

S: So but we shouldn't drop the ball on polymetallic nodules─

B: Probably will.

S: ─because they contain a lot of cobalt. Nickel and cobalt. They're basically batteries in a rock, you know what it mean? It's like everything we need for lithium-ion battery. Other than the lithium which we can get from the water.

B: International waters too.

S: There's one caution about them but so yeah so the deep ocean─

B: They explode when you touch them?

S: ─nope they're mainly sitting on the surface of sedimentary layers at the bottom of the deep ocean. That's actually an interesting research question that scientists are looking at. Why aren't so how long do they take to form first let's talk about that. They take millions of years to form. Two to three million years. Several million years. They basically slowly there's some there's some kind of something in the middle that starts it. Could be a bit of fossilized shark tooth or shell or even like a bit of an older nodule or something. And then you get layers and layers─

B: Nucleation point?

S: ─of yeah it's like a nucleation point of different metals absorbing around the outside.

B: Like a pearl.

S: Yeah. Kinda. Like a pearl of metals. And it could take millions of years to form so the question is why haven't they been buried deep in sediments over those same millions of years. They should be really deep under the ground under the sea floor and they think it's because that critters are knocking the sand off of the top of them and keeping them from being buried by the normal churning of the sediment. Laying down of the sedimentary layers.

B: Why do they do that?

S: I think they said: "It is assumed that deposit-feeding benthic organisms clean the recently settled particles atop the nodules and eject them on the sides or even below the nodules thus preventing their burial."

B: Thanks guys.

S: Yeah thank you. So mine is there's a few different ways to mine them and they're they these are things that have been done as like tests to see if it would work. So one is just like essentially just vacuuming them up from the floor. Another one you have imagine two boats with a line of buckets that are dragging along the sea floor just scooping up all the nodules. And so there's other technologies on it.

B: There's a lot of buckets man.

S: Yeah has a crawler that sort of crawls along the floor sucks up the nodules crushes them and then they get sucked into a tube to a platform and then put onto a ship which then hauls them away. Other than the fact that it's in the deep ocean it's like they're just sitting there.

B: Any estimates Steve on like these how much are we talking here?

S: Massive quantities.

B: Damn man.

S: One estimate of this is just the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. The CCZ which is just one location between Hawaii and Mexico where there is a dense deposit of these nodules. And they do need again in order for this to be economic for the mining to be economically feasible they need to focus on parts of the of the ocean floor where there's a high concentration of these. So there's a few zones of high concentration. The CCZ is one of them. That's between Hawaii and Mexico. So the estimates are that just that one zone contains enough nickel and cobalt and polymetallic nodules to create enough batteries for 4.8 billion battery electric vehicles.

B: What the hell.

C: Wow.

S: That's twice as many cars as currently exist. So that would be enough to make our entire fleet battery electric vehicles twice over. Just from just from the nodules.

B: That's nuts man.

S: Yeah. There's a lot.

B: So you gotta be the first country to do that though because this is international waters, right? I mean anybody can grab that.

C: Oh right what are the legal and like political implications of this.

S: That's a complicated area but there are treaties and laws that govern the international seas and the ocean floor. And so I didn't have a chance yet to go into the into a deep dive on just that specific thing. Like what is the laws governing it but it does seem like anyone can go do it. There are private companies that now that are dedicated to mining polymetallic nodules.

B: Oh nice.

S: Company out of Australia for example. So that's what they're doing. They are mining polymetallic nodules. Absolutely. So it's possible. Now there's one caveat to the polymetallic nodules. Environmentalists, right? Always sticking their nose in things.

C: (laughs) Oh-oh.

S: They're like excuse me but these nodules are not lifeless. There is a little ecosystem that forms on them of microscopic creatures and some very tiny creatures that eat the microscopic creatures and so if we do a massive mining operation of the deep ocean floor it, they warn, this may be disruptive to not only that ecosystem but whatever that ecosystem interacts with. So it might be part of a the bigger ocean ecosystem.

C: Well not just that. If we're doing a major mining operation on the ocean floor we're probably disrupting a lot of larger ecosystems on the floor too. With our tools.

S: Yes. Yeah. And the other concern is that we're stirring up a lot of the sediment and we're gonna disrupt the water by just filling it with all this sediment.

C: And that's probably incredibly fragile. I mean that would be such a massive blow to the ocean that just that doesn't happen.

S: Right now that's being studied.

B: It needs to.

S: What is the effect. What's the effect of these ecosystems. What's the effect of mining them. What's the, how can we do it and be the least disruptive possible. We certainly don't want to cause one environmental problem while we're trying to solve another. But it does seem like we should be able to mine them in a responsible way. Like everything. It's like fracking. It's like anything. It's like yeah you could do it the right way or you could do it the cheap way. And the question is are the regulations in place to make sure that we do it the right way.

C: In place and being enforced.

S: Exactly. And since we're about to embark on this massive mining operation of the ocean it seems this is the time to make sure that we know what the right way is and that we enforce it. So that we don't cause major disruption of the world's oceans ecosystems. So it's always complicated. It's never easy. But this is a this seems like an interesting opportunity if we leverage it correctly. Both of these things. The polymetallic nodules and just mining metals directly out of sea water. Maybe it'll take us a while before again this becomes technologically and economically feasible but we have a while. This is like we're kind of preparing this technology for when we really need it in 20 years or 30 years. We have it's not like we're going to run out of lithium tomorrow. And it's also not as if there aren't other land-based resources to be developed. There's plenty that to discover and to develop. So it's not like we're already at a desperate point where we this is our only option left. But it also should be pointed out that mining metals on land is also disruptive to the ecosystem. It's not like that's benign.

B: True.

C: No it's terrible.

S: Depending on where it is. And rare-earths in particular. Where they are being mined, like mostly China, are being done in an environmentally terrible way it's just─

B: Shocker.

S: ─not being done well. So even though this might be not be pristine in terms of its environmental impacts. It would probably better than what's happening now.

C: Or we'll just do the exact same damage in a different place. And that's a real consideration.

S: That's the thing if we don't do it right we don't make sure it gets done properly.

C: And it sounds like we have to figure out because like we can't ignore the psychology. We can't ignore the human. If it's cheaper to do it one way but that way is terrible for the environment we have to make it more expensive. As in the fees that you will face the ramifications that you will face are significantly more expensive than doing it the right way.

S: Right. Yeah. That's one way to do it. Absolutely. The principle here too which we bring up quite a bit is externalized costs. If a company can externalize a cost to the world, to society, to other people, to taxpayers or to the government or to whoever they will. They'll and one of the ways that you externalize a cost is by not paying for your own cleanup. Or not undoing the damage that you're doing to the environment in the process of doing your business. You just let somebody else handle it. One of the legitimate roles of government is to make sure that companies don't do that. They don't dump their costs on other people unfairly. Just cover your costs. Clean up your own mess. That's like just a basic principle. And it's totally fair. And of course we don't want to do it in such a way that it inhibits business. I want to mine these things out of the ocean because we want the batteries so that we can use renewable energy sources. Like this is something that is there's a an environmental good here if we do it correctly.

C: Yeah. Right. And that's really the question is like at what cost and how do we minimize that cost to its lowest impact possible.

S: That's like always there's a way to do it smartly. And you don't always spontaneously do it that way but we can.

[commercial brake]

Science of Pregnancy and Abortion (46:04)

• After Roe v. Wade: US researchers warn of what’s to come

More Galaxies (1:11:35)

• There are more galaxies in the Universe than even Carl Sagan ever imagined

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (1:21:44)

Email #1: Can Dogs Talk? ()

Before I started listening to the show, I heard about this woman who has taught her dog to speak in sentences. It played into my environmentalist and vegetarian biases, and I was totally taken in. Reviewing it again though, I think it is possible that this is a combination of facilitated communication (she takes big liberties in her interpretation of the sentences), the Clever Hans effect, and cherry picking (she probably only shares the really compelling examples, when there may be many more failures). Would love it if you could comment on the current status of communication with animals, and whether you think the Clever Hans effect is at play here. Thanks for all you do, and this is just one example of how my thinking has started to improve thanks to your work.

Sincerely,
Bart T. Cubrich

Science or Fiction (1:31:39)

Theme: Snakes Item #1: Brazil has the most number of identified snake species of any nation, currently totaling 412. Item #2: There were an estimated 1.2 million snake bite deaths in India between 2000 and 2020. Item #3: Cobras have extreme accuracy when spitting venom, able to hit there targets consistently at up to 30 feet.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Cobras' 30-foot range
Science	Brazil is most snaked
Science	1.2m snake bite deaths

Host	Result
Steve	win

Rogue	Guess
Bob	1.2m snake bite deaths
Cara	Cobras' 30-foot range

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

Skeptical Quotes of the Week (1:41:01)

Healthy skepticism is the basis of all accurate observation.
– Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), British writer

We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.
– Carl Sagan (1934-1996), American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator

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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