SGU Episode 331
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Introduction
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 November 16, 2011, and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella,
B: Hey, everybody.
S: Rebecca Watson,
R: Hello, everyone.
S: Jay Novella,
J: Yup-up.
S: and Evan Bernstein.
E: Olas Nuetes. To all of our listeners who speak the Galician language.
J: Or Galactican.
E: Yeah, that's what I thought it looked like, too, Jay, but, in looking at it a little closer, Galician is the language.
S: What is Galician?
E: It has its roots from a Latin-derived language based out of western Spain and Portugal, around the time of the 13th century. And there's currently 3.2 million native speakers in the world, of that language.
S: Um hmm.
E: So it's the Yiddish of Spain, let's call it that.
J?: (In a Yiddish accent) Vat is this, Galician? (laughter)
E: You know, you learn something new every day.
S: That's what you learned today?
E: That's what I learned today. I didn't learn anything else except that.
This Day in Skepticism (01:10)
S: Well, how about November 19th in history?
E: Yes. On November 19th, this day, in history, the Apollo 12 astronauts, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean, land at the Ocean of Storms on the moon, and become the third and fourth humans to walk on the moon.
S: Oceanus Procellarum. Awesome.
E: That is it.
S: Sounds cooler in Latin.
R: It does. I don't know, Ocean of Storms, that's pretty cool, too.
E: Ocean of Storms is pretty cool.
S: Isn't that the next book in the Game of Thrones series?
B: Oh my god, I was thinking the same thing. (laughter)
J: Isn't that, isn’t that also a region on the moon?
S: Yeah.
R: Good one, Jay. (laughter)
E: Love it.
S: It's where they landed.
E: Apollo 12 is the, one of the missions that really gets forgotten about. You know, you have, obviously, Apollo 11, which is the seminal moment.
S: Yeah. 12 is the one after that, right?
E: 12 is, yes. And the one after that is Apollo 13. Of course, you know, the botched mission, with the failure and everything and the very popular, excellent movie, it was based on. But 12 kind of gets lost in the mix.
S: It's the forgotten Apollo mission.
R: (sadly) Oh.
E: It is.
S: You know why, because it was successful! It was the second, so, you know, it wasn't the first, and nothing bad happened. They went to the moon, they completed their mission, they came back.
E: Well, actually something bad sort of did happen. They almost had to abort the mission.
S: Yeah, but almost doesn't count.
R: Horseshoes and hand grenades.
E: But 36-1/2, this is cool . .
B: And Tiddly-Winks.
E: Their end lift-off, 36 seconds into the mission, and lightning becomes discharged through the ship, down through the Saturn V rocket, right down to the Earth. It was, through the ionized plume. And the protective circuits on the fuel cells in the service module falsely detected overloads and took all the fuel cells off-line. They didn't know what to do. They almost had to abort the mission, until Bean remembered seeing this in a simulation about a year ago, that they were practicing for, and they switched something over to auxiliary power, and that corrected the problem. But they, it was really a guess. They weren't sure that that was gonna work. But turns out it did, and off to the moon they went.
S: Awesome.
E: On a less-than-memorable mission, right?
S: That's good work, boys.
E: And something else, one other little interesting factoid. They used Doppler radar in order to land, pretty much precisely on target, where they wanted to, and that was the first time that that had been used by NASA.
S: Yeah, I know Apollo 11 landed way off. So they were testing this new method for precise landing, and it worked well.
E: It did. So, the moon is cool.
News Items
The Moon's Magnetic Field (03:55)
S: The moon is cool, and that's why it's our next news item, too. Bob, you're gonna tell us about the moon's magnetic field.
B: Yeah, this is pretty interesting. A forty-year-old moon mystery may have been solved recently. It looks like that we may have two viable theories, not one. We've got two viable theories why some moon rocks that were brought back in the '70s and were examined are magnetized, even though there's no magnetic field around the moon now, and we don't know how there ever could have been, until recently, of course. So, it pretty much started in the '70s, that moon rocks that were brought back from the Apollo missions caused quite a surprise when they examined them and they discovered that they, that they were magnetized. And, this of course meant that there almost certainly had to be some sort of magnetosphere around the moon at some point in its past. I'm not sure why the article I read said "almost" certainly, I mean it seems a hundred percent certain to me. I mean if they're magnetized. . .
S: Well, it's possible that Magneto went back in time to the moon (laughter) and magnetized the rocks where he landed.
E: I knew it, I just knew it.
S: So that's, yeah, you gotta hold out for that, you know.
B: Okay, there's the .000001 percent. The problem, though, is, how did the moon actually make a magnetic field. That's what the big mystery has been for over forty years. The moon is too small to make them, and, at least in the way that the Earth does. So, the Earth's magnetic field is caused by the interplay of two things. You've got the convection of electric charges, which is really key, that's primary. But you've also got rotation, which is also pretty important. This is the essence of a geodynamo. This is exactly what stars do as well. This is how they, how stars create their magnetic fields. The large temperature differences of the liquid metallic alloys in the outer core of the Earth causes like this lava lamp type convection of these electrically conducting fluids. So they, so these fluids move up and down through convection. And this coupled with the rotation of the core is what really creates this magnetic field that extends all the way to the surface and far into space, and which, of course, totally saves our ass,
S: Right.
B: from solar wind, and so it's really nice to have a magnetosphere.
S: And Jupiter has a very strong magnetosphere, and that's because of the metallic hydrogen, right?
B: There you go, the moving charges, yup.
J: Do you guys think with all these fortunate things that made it so life could exist on the Earth
B: Don't go there.
J: Wait. Wait. Do you think, though, that if, say, the moon didn't have a property that protects life, that other life would have evolved?
B: Well, sure. Life that would have been able to evolve in the different environment that whatever the moon lacked, caused.
S: Yeah. Obviously, life adapted to the environment, and so the environment is perfect for whatever life exists, because, you know, life evolved and adapted to it. But, the question is, how far can you stretch that before you're outside the parameters that organic life can form and be stable, and it's hard to say, you know.
R: Like a very wise Ian Malcolm once said, "Life finds a way."
E: Jurassic Park.
R: Yes.
J: So it's possible if the terrain on the Earth and the environment on the Earth was like, totally badass, that some form of life could have evolved that could just withstand extreme temperatures
B: Jay.
S: Like the Horda?
B; Jay, look at. . . Dude, no. (laughter). Not that extreme. But Jay, look at extremophiles. There's bacteria that can survive boiling water. They can survive radiation in space. I mean, sure, it might be so nasty on Earth that all you'd ever really have is these extremophile bacteria, but so, sure.
S: Yeah, but Bob, they . . .
B: That's not a problem at all.
S: wouldn't be extremophiles, they'd be normophiles. (laughter) Because they would be normal and we would be the extremophiles.
J: Well, the cool part about thinking about this, Bob, isn't that it would be bacteria. It'd have to be a complex organism that can think, and all, you know. I'm just thinking of the wicked tough alien that can withstand pretty much anything.
S: Yeah, they would be sitting around wondering if, hey, if the Earth had a magnetic field, do you think life could have evolved and survived? In a constant magnetic field, though, my goodness. Alright, so Bob, so, what's the mechanism, let me get this back on track, what's the mechanism for the moon having a magnetic field?
B: Well, the point is that the moon can't have a magnetic field the way that the Earth does, or stars do. It's way too small. The temperature differences that would be, that are near the core just aren't great enough to support any type of convection that would be required. How did the moon, then, magnetize these rocks? So clearly there's gotta be another way for a geomagnetic field to be created. And this is exactly what these two new theories are dealing with, in the Journal of Nature, I think they're in there now. The first theory describes the moon after it was formed. I think we've talked about this before. In those early years, it was much closer to the Earth. I think it appeared 15 times bigger in the sky. It was much closer.
J: Wow, that's cool.
B: So that, yeah, imagine that night view. So the tidal forces were equally great. They were really titanic. The moon raised mountain-sized tides on the Earth. But that also means that the Earth probably had a pretty dramatic tidal impact on the moon as well.
S: You know what just occurred to me, Bob, when you say that? I don't know if we've talked about this before, but in a lot of science fiction shows, they show these massive moons in the sky, you know, of the planet, and it's beautiful. But there would have to be a titanic. . .
E: Impractical.
S: tidal force, as well.
B: Oh my god, yeah.
S: And they never really show that. You know, they have these planets that are like Earth, but they have these gigantic moons in the sky without accounting for the fact that there would have to be an equally gigantic tidal force.
E: Would multiple moons, how would multiple moons, could one on each side of the planet, sort of equal it out?
S: That would make it worse. If they were on exact opposite sides of the world the tidal forces would actually reinforce each other.
E: Alright, well is there a configuration where if you had multiple moons, it could sort of balance each other out that things would remain stable enough for life to evolve?
B: I don't think it would balance out that way.
S: Yeah.
B: I think you'd end up having, you could end up having four tides a day, type of thing.
S: Yeah.
B: Yeah, or really big ones, or, yeah. It would not be nice.
E: All right.
B: So, Earth's tidal force caused the moon's mantle to actually rotate around a different axis than the molten core was rotating, and this causes turbulence within the molten iron and that gives rise to magnetic fields, which in turn, imprinted itself onto the rocks cooling on the surface of the moon, which are the ones we found. Now, the second theory describes a moon that's being pelted by waves and waves of asteroids, and this gargantuan energy that these asteroids impart on the moon cause the mantle to actually rotate against the rotation of the core, causing turbulence again, which gives rise to the magnetic field. And this turbulence could last for 10,000 years, which would be plenty of time for cooling rock to fossilize the magnetic orientation. So in fact, the period of time in the solar system when this was a common occurrence, it's called the Late Heavy Bombardment, is precisely when the moon's magnetic field seems to have existed. So you've got these two interesting theories, and they are very complementary because they both share this key point that convection is not absolutely required. Simple mechanical stirring is really all you need, it seems, if these theories pan out, to create a magnetic field around a celestial object.
S: Yeah, so essentially the ess…the key component is that the core is rotating at a different angle that the outer mantle, so they're sort of rubbing up against each other causing. . .
B: Yeah. Causing the turbulence, which causes the movement of the electrical charges, and the rotation too, which helps create the magnetic field and there you go.
Europa's Icy Surface (11:33)
S: Well, we've actually got one more astronomy news item this week, but we'll do this one quickly. This one is about Europa. It's one of the coolest moons in the solar system because it potentially has an ocean of liquid water underneath its icy outer shell. And it's one of, it's on the short list of worlds in our solar system that might have life. You know, liquid water . . .
B: It's number one on that list.
S: Yeah, it could be, could very well be number one. But one of the questions is how thick is the ice on the surface? And this is a hotly debated topic among the relevant astronomers. And it makes a difference because, you know, if it’s really thick, thick being greater than ten kilometers, let's say, it would be a lot harder for us to send a probe there and drill down through the ice to get to the liquidy center. But if it's thin, like at three kilometers, then it would be a lot more plausible to be able to do that.
B: Wasn't there another important point, though? They said something about the interaction of the surface with the liquid underneath would help give a boost to the potential of life and I didn't really understand why that interaction would be helpful but they did kind of key in on that.
J: Why don't we just nuke a hole in the surface and then send a probe after that?
S: Yeah, just blow it apart? Yeah.
B: Hello, aliens!
R: The Bruce Willis effect.
E: We come in peace.
S: So you're talking about a new study, also published in Nature, a lot of interesting articles in the recent Nature, where the astronomers were looking at the formation of the ice sheet on the surface, basically features on the surface of Europa and how to account for them. It's pretty technical; I confess I don't fully understand what they're talking about. But essentially they're looking at these zones called "chaos terrain," and how they form. They came up with a model of how they could form that implies a thin ice sheet on, at least at that section, over the chaos terrain of about three kilometers. So that would mean that, at least in those locations, there is a very thin, you know, again the three-kilometer ice sheet on the surface of Europa. What you're talking about, Bob, is that also, this would imply a convection of the warmer water from deeper down to the surface. And why that's significant to the question of life is because that would mix nutrients into the ocean and make it, you know, life more viable.
B: So there's nutrients on the surface?
S: No, no. Just in the water. Mixing in the ocean of Europa, under the ice ocean. Basically dragging up minerals from deeper in Europa up into the water. Up into the ocean. So that would be a resource for any Europans.
E: Europeans.
S: And one of the articles I read on BBC was saying that the U.S. and Europe are working on missions to Europa that they're planning, hopefully, either later in this decade or early in the 2020s. But I hadn't heard anything really specific about that.
B: You know, it's times like this that I wish Superman was real. You know, like, hey Supe, you know, just fly to Europa, come back with a sample. You know, you'll be back in a day. You'll save us a quadrillion dollars, come on.
J: Bob. Bob. (laughter) Really, like, that's all we would use Superman for, like . . .
B: No. That's not all. (Many people talking at once) . . . key activity.
J: But that's the thing that you would be like . . .
R: Bob, if Superman exists then we already know there's intelligent life in the universe.
(Bob laughs)
R: That is Superman. He's an alien.
B: Oh, you're getting silly now.
R: That's not silly.
J: Yeah, 'cause what you said isn't ridiculous or silly at all.
R: Yeah, I think you started it.
E: Marlon Brando . . .
B: Superman would be a boon to science.
S: Yeah, absolutely.
J: Yeah, do you think that he would be like science's bitch, just waiting around for them to say "Go here," "go there."
B: No, he wouldn't be our bitch, but, you know, a couple days a year he could devote to science.
S: More than that. I think that would be a high priority.
R: Oh, yeah, we'd find a way to knock him out and cut him open in days, probably.
E: (laughing) and figure what makes him tick. (laughter) "Hey, look at that."
S: You would just, yeah, use some kryptonite, that's all.
R: Yeah, the U.S. government would stockpile kryptonite. And build a kryptonite jail, and then experiment on him for the rest of his days.
S: Yeah. I'm really glad we didn't get off topic on this one. (laughter)
R: What were we talking about? Oh. Europa.
S: Yeah, Europa; it's cool.
False Confessions (16:05)
S: All right. Let's change topics completely. Rebecca, you're gonna tell us about false confessions, and why that they are, can be even more misleading than you might think.
R: Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, you can already guess that false confessions would be a terrible thing. There are a terrible thing, and they happen at a frequency that's probably higher than most people suspect. So they're bad enough when you have people who are making false confessions under duress or maybe they have a low I.Q., or for some other reason. But, a recent study shows that they can actually be even worse than just, it's not just the person falsely confessing to a crime. That false confession actually sort of reverberates throughout the criminal justice process and can end up influencing other people in the, other people who are investigating the crime. So, basically what this study did was look at 241 people who had been exonerated by the Innocence Project since 1992. And a quarter of those involved false confessions, and 75% involved eyewitness mistakes. And what the researchers found was that the cases that involved false confessions had a much larger instance of multiple errors turning up on the part of the people investigating the crime. What they found was that false confessions can influence, for instance, people who are in the lab, who are testing the DNA results; people who are polygraph examiners – that's of course a whole other topic for another day.
S: Yeah.
R: But fingerprint experts and other people, when these people are told that there is a false confession involved in the case, they are much more likely to make a mistake, according to this study.
J: So, why? Because it influences them to dislike the person on trial or to like the person on trial?
S: No, to clarify. When they're told there's a confession, they don't know it's false.
R: Yeah, I said "false." Sorry.
S: They don't know, yeah, they're like, "Oh, this guy confessed . .
R: And it's wrong.
S: He confessed, therefore he must be guilty, and then, then, just like Sherlock Holmes said, you know, once you have a theory, you then twist the facts in order to fit the theory, right? It's amazing how every little bit of evidence can be twisted in that. They also mention, this is confirmation bias that we always talk about, I mean, the researchers going over the kinds of things that they've discovered. Where, for example, eyewitnesses may not come forward because they think, "Oh, well, I must be wrong, because this guy confessed."
R: Yeah.
S: "So I'm not gonna give my testimony that would exonerate him." Eyewitnesses that contradict the confession are dismissed. But then eve, to give examples of, as Rebecca was saying, of DNA experts giving wrong testimony, such as, the one example they give
B: The DNA could disintegrate, and change, like what?
S: Yeah. I mean, basically making false excuses for why the evidence doesn't corroborate the confession.
J: Oh, wow.
R: And this is exactly why, in science we have double-blinded experiments, because, you know, the science isn't, science isn't this cut-and-dried thing that is automatically going to speak for itself. There are a million little ways that humans can influence the process. And this is a real-life way that, you know it's a real-life example of what kind of a serious impact this can have on people's lives.
S: Um hmm.
R: 'Cause, you know, this an actually put people away. You know, a false confession featured prominently in the famous West Memphis Three case, which I think we've talked about before on this show, where three teenagers in Arkansas were jailed due to Satanic murders of some children in their area,
S: Yeah
R: when in fact there was no real evidence to convict them. One of the kids had a very low I.Q., he was kept in custody for a long time, he eventually gave a confession, and that's recently been, they were very recently exonerated. There's a huge number of people out there being falsely imprisoned due to things like this. So, it's a really interesting study that shows why we need double blinding in circumstances like this.
S: Or even just single blinding.
R: Yeah.
S: Whoever's making the judgment can't know what the outcome is supposed to be. Otherwise it's not independent. That's what they were saying, you know, one of the checks and balances, you know, for guarantying that you don't falsely convict the innocent is that there has to be corroborating evidence. Which is a good principle, but if that corroborating evidence is all contaminated by people knowing what the outcome is supposed to be ahead of time, then it's not independent. It's all, as you say, it all flows from the one false assumption. It's just amazing how easily we can do that to ourselves and in processes even outside of science, any investigative process, you know, without that blinding, we'll just lead ourselves astray. We see the exact same thing in medicine. Your, physicians make bad diagnoses an then stick with them and then start, I see this happen every day you know, how easy it is to dismiss inconvenient evidence that doesn't fit your diagnosis of what you think is going on. Rather than, always stepping back and saying "All right, could this be interpreted a different way? Could I be wrong? Could, what are the alternatives? What do we really know for sure?" You know what I mean? If you don't systematically do that, you just, you can convince yourself of anything. It's always, it's good to be reminded. It's one of the core, core skeptical principles. We can't forget.
Who's That Noisy? (22:14)
S: So Evan, it's time for Who's That Noisy.
E: It is, isn't it? So, let's play last week's Who's That Noisy and do a little review. Here we go.
Man's voice: "Flying saucers and we had other things and all."
S: Who was that and what was he saying?
E: That is former President Harry S Truman. Yes. He's commenting on flying saucers, UFOs, this is back in, a clip taken from 1952, in which the famous UFOs over Washington, D.C. video was captured. Kind of took the nation by surprise, if nothing else, and has become, I don't know, iconic in its own right.
S: Yeah. You see that commonly referenced still, in UFO proponents' "best of," best cases.
E: But, you know it's interesting because, starting with Harry Truman, he sort of, became, I don't know, like the first UFO president, in a sense.
S: Um hmm.
E: And in another sense, every president since has been asked, or every administration, I should say, has been hounded, by UFO enthusiasts asking them to tell the public what they know, about, you know, little green men and alien bodies, flying saucers and whatever else.
S: Yeah, though at the time, you know, it really was a new phenomenon, the whole UFO thing, and there were, there were legitimate security issues. Such as, enemy nations using UFO reports as a distraction or as a psychological campaign, maybe even to provide cover for legitimate intrusions into our airspace. So that they were thinking about it in those terms, you know, the government. Not necessarily, even if they didn't think there was flying saucers or alien spacecraft, they were still concerned about it as a potential threat to our security.
J: Yeah, so they had to take things like that as if, well, maybe people think they're seeing something, but it actually could be, you know, a Russian spy plane or something.
S: Yeah, right, right. All right, Evan, who guessed that correctly?
E: Well, our dear friend and devoted listener Trinnock, once again. So congratulations to Trinnock once again.
S: He's just, he's getting too good at these.
E: Yeah, is there something we can do about that?
J: Steve, Rebecca and I came up with a good idea. Let's have Trinnock do his own Who's That Noisy.
S: If he wants to, sure. And that way he can't guess.
R: Yeah.
E: Yeah, that's one way.
R: That's the only way we came up with to take him out of the game in a fair manner.
S: Okay.
E: Well, at least for one week.
R: Yeah, for one week.
S: Right. So we'll see if he accepts our challenge. Meanwhile, Evan, what have you got for this week?
E: Okay. Brand new, fresh, hot off the presses. This week's Who's That Noisy.
(a conversation among two or three men, traffic noises in the background) X: He's here every day. Y: Is that good or bad for your business, with him hangin' around? X: Don't think it makes any difference. Z: Kind of like my chiropractor.
S: All right.
E: All right.
S: Interesting.
E: Go ahead, post your answer on our forums, on our message boards, or send us an e-mail at info@theskepticsguide.org. And of course, good luck to everyone.
Questions and Emails
BMJ Poe (25:17)
S: Thank, Evan. All right, we're gonna move on to a listener email. This one is a correction from last week. Are you guys familiar with Poe's law?
R: Oh yeah.
S: Okay.
E: I am now.
S: Poe's law is as follows; this was formulated by Nathan Poe, only in August 2005. It's sort of taken for granted now, but it really was very recently; and who wrote: "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake it for the genuine article."
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