SGU Episode 940

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SGU Episode 940
July 15th 2023
"Betelgeuse may be larger and later in life than other scientists have calculated. It could go supernova very soon."
SGU 939                      SGU 941
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
G: George Hrab
Guest
AJR: Andrea Jones-Rooy, political, social, and data scientist
Quote of the Week
Every time you perform a magic trick, you’re engaging in experimental psychology. If the audience asks, "How the hell did he do that?" then the experiment was successful.
Teller, American magician
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, wildlife encounters, incl. Steve’s bear sighting(s)

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 12^th, 2023, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Evan Bernstein...

E: Good evening, folks.

S: And we have two guests this week, George Hrabb.

G: Happy summer, people.

S: And Andrea Jones-Roy.

AJR: Hi, everyone. Great to be here.

S: Guys, welcome back to the show. Nice to have you. Jay and Cara are on different continents from us and each other. Cara's in Africa, Jay's in Greece right now.

AJR: The sun rarely sets on the SGU.

S: That's right.

E: Never.

S: We have listeners in all seven continents because somebody told us that they listened to us in Antarctica once.

E: Absolutely. More than once, yes.

S: Yeah.

AJR: Awesome.

S: And Under the Sea of Japan in the Submarine was one.

E: Yep. And the Persian Gulf. Someone was patrolling the Persian Gulf.

B: Yeah, but didn't they discover that other continent by New Zealand? I don't think anyone's on that one.

S: Zeelandia? We also need somebody to listen to us on the International Space Station.

AJR: Right.

E: Yeah, when will that happen? Yes.

G: I'll get on that.

E: And eventually, Moonbase Alpha. And then we'll...

S: And eventually, Moonbase Alpha.

E: Oh my gosh. Then we'll be a solar system-wide podcast.

S: So I sent you guys all this video and your reaction was as predicted. So one of the running stories that we got going on the show is our wildlife encounters. And Cara's always cute because she thinks that we live in the woods, you know? Because there's trees surrounding my house. But the thing that's funny is it's getting harder and harder to make fun of her for that because it's like the wilderness is encroaching so much. So this was on Sunday, a few days ago, middle of the afternoon, broad daylight, my dog starts barking. Jay's, I'm watching Jay's dog while he's in Greece. So I have both dogs in the house. They're both inside. They both start barking at the deck through the glass sliding glass door to the deck in a way that let me know this was nothing, this was something unusual. This was not their usual bark.

E: Yes, a dog's bark has a communication to it, absolutely. My dogs do the same thing.

S: But it could be, it could be a raccoon. It could be something else.

G: Mormons. Mormons.

S: Could be Mormons. And there's a bear on my deck. Black bear.

E: Black bear.

S: Black bear. So this is now the third time that there has been a black bear encounter on my property.

E: You need to put up a sign to keep them out.

AJR: Yeah, no bears allowed.

E: Exactly.

S: I'll do it.

AJR: I don't know. Do they speak Italian bears? I don't know.

S: Black bear? I don't know. So that's three times, I've been in my house for about 25 years. This is my third bear encounter in the last four years. So clearly an uptick. So there's one a few years ago. It was again during the day. It knocked over the birdseed and it scared itself and ran away, basically.

AJR: That's what birdseed is for.

S: It was at nighttime. Again, dog barking at the deck. Thought it was probably a raccoon. Flipped on the light. There's a black bear standing on the railing of my deck trying to get at the suet, the bird food. This time, broad daylight, it's on the deck, the dogs are going crazy. This bear was chill. He did not, he was not skittish at all. At some point, you guys saw on the video, he like bears his teeth at the dogs, puts his paw on the glass. And he wasn't going anywhere.

B: Lights up a cigarette.

S: Yeah. We could scare them away fairly easily. The other thing is it's July. We almost always have bear sightings either in the neighbourhood or somewhere in the spring when they're just coming out of hibernation and they're really jonesing for food. In the middle of the summer, you don't see them so much. Then they get active again when they're bulking up to go back into hibernation, like in the fall. But this is unusual. I've never had a bear sighting in July. So yeah, I was then I'm thinking, what are we supposed to do here?

B: Take a video and send it to your family.

S: I did.

AJR: Live stream it.

S: The previous two times they were gone too quickly. Well, we actually did get a little bit of a video. The first one, the second one was too fast. This one, he was there for like five, 10 minutes.

AJR: He was enormous, Steve. I was really surprised.

G: How big do you think he was? How heavy do you think he was, Steve?

S: I mean, that was actually the smallest of the three black bears that I've seen on our property. The last one was a lot bigger. I think he might be a yearling.

B: 80 pounds?

S: No, no. That bear is probably 200 pounds.

E: So the third one was just right.

B: Well, geez. I mean three times the weight of your dog. Yeah, I guess.

B: Oh, totally.

E: 300 pounds, sure.

G: I think it was Jocelyn's hands were holding the door shut.

S: Yeah.

G: Just frantically pulling the door shut, like, please don't.

AJR: So what did you do?

S: Well, I put the board there so that she didn't have to do that. Then I closed the garage door because we have garbage cans in the garage.

G: And bears like Teslas, we all know that.

S: And the door from the garage to where we were, like in the family room there, would not keep that bear out. You guys saw that video of a bear just blowing the door open on a house and walking in.

G: So how did it conclude? What happened?

S: All right. So it could not get the bear to go away. It was obviously looking for the bird seed. So we have like this half-size aluminium can on the deck for the bird seed. And we have a big heavy rock on top of it, which is enough to keep out all animals except bears. So the only one strong enough to get that stone off. He had knocked it over, but the lid didn't come off. It was just sort of like it was stuck on the top of it. So he was like nosing around that for a while. He eventually got it off, but then didn't see that. I think once he figured out that the dogs weren't going to be able to bother him through the glass, he just ignored them from that point forward. And so I went upstairs because there's the bathroom window that overlooks the deck. I could see him from there. Took some more pictures. And then I said, all right, the bear's going out.

G: I'm going to shake my fist like you won't believe.

S: I yelled at him like he didn't care. So then I had to find something. There was nothing at hand. I got a bottle of saline or something, something heavy. I threw it at him, hit him in the ass. Nothing. I threw something else at him. Second time. And then he just like moseyed away. Like you know what I mean? He was just like whatever. This is boring. And then he went through the backyard, started sniffing some of the─

B: I'm not leaving because you asked me to.

S: I just choose to go. And then he went to the neighbours. You have to call the neighbour like there's a black bear coming your way make sure that they were inside. And then eventually he left probably went back into the woods.

G: Is there someone to call? Is there some kind of contingency in your town or something? Like what do you do?

E: The Simpsons had the bear patrol.

S: Last time we called animal services or whatever and they said they just noted it. They didn't do anything. They didn't send anybody. They just recorded it as a black bear sighting in Hamden, Connecticut and that was it.

B: My big fear, Steve, if I were you, I'd be a little nervous, quite nervous. I mean, imagine that those two dogs were outside when he decided to show up.

AJR: Well, I was just thinking that.

B: The question is, would he have like done a U-turn or went around your property or would he have moseyed in the property? I mean, he, that's scary, man. Like, holy crap, he would take out a dog without much effort, I don't think, right?

E: A dog should be faster than a bear to get away.

S: Black bears generally are skittish because even if they can win in a fight, it's not worth the risk. If they get a bite or something, they could get infected and die. It's just not worth the risk for them, so they go for the low-hanging fruit. Unless they're desperate, unless they're protecting cubs or they're really desperate for food, then they start to get more and more.

B: Or they're not a big fan of the show, you know that too?

S: Yeah, there is that.

AJR: They're more into wellness culture, but yeah.

S: So I looked up the laws in Connecticut, by the way, what are the laws regarding black bears in Connecticut? First of all, there's been a massive uptick in sightings and encounters. This is not just a coincidence, I've had three encounters in the last couple of years. And Connecticut's the only state in the region that doesn't allow bear hunting. The surrounding states all have a hunting season for black bears.

E: Probably not enough of them to─

G: Let's go live in Connecticut, Boo-Boo. It's safe.

S: Half of the bear encounters are because of garbage, and 25% are because of bird feeders. That's my problem. But you are allowed to kill a bear if they attack you or your pets. If they're attacking people or pets, you're allowed to kill them. And farmers are allowed to kill them if they attack their crops or their livestock. Other than that, you're not allowed to feed them and you're not allowed to hunt them or to kill them. But I know that if bears do get too bold in their interactions, if they do attack anything, or if they come into your house, they'll put them down. Otherwise, they may move them, but they think they're not really doing that anymore because they don't have any place to send them.

AJR: Oh, I was going to say, yeah.

S: This is the big problem is that we've encroached so much on their habitat and there really isn't that much space to move them to. Where are we going to move them to? There's more suburbs, so they just don't do anything.

G: So Steve, what would be your go-to weapon in your house?

S: Well, I'm thinking about it. What would I do? There's a couple of things. I think what I might want to get at hand.

B: Noon checks?

S: I do have, no, I have a paintball gun. And that would hurt them, I think. It's not going to physically-

G: Well, scare them.

S: That'll, you shoot them in the ass with a paint pellet, they'll feel it.

B: Those ass shots hurt, man. Although the fur would probably attenuate a bit.

S: But still, I think that might be a little bit better. If I had to kill it, I do have a crossbow in my house.

AJR: Wow. Please get someone to film that if it-

G: No katana?

S: I have a katana, but I would probably prefer the ranged weapon to the katana. That's more of a desperation maneuver, breaking out a katana.

E: I use my bare knuckles.

AJR: So is it all habitat encroachment? Is that the whole story?

S: Yeah. Yeah, mostly. And so there's a dramatic increase in small critters, right? And that attracts the predators. The other thing that's on a dramatic increase in Connecticut, and I'm sure just regionally, is coyotes. And-

E: [inaudible] in my neighbourhood.

B: We saw a baby, mid-sized baby adolescent outside my mom's back window for the first time in my life living in Connecticut. I have never seen a coyote.

G: A coyote. Wow.

B: I've seen foxes.

S: Their populations that have exploded. So about a week ago, I saw a coyote like 20 feet maybe in front of my car, just walked across the street. There's a hundred percent of coyote. And by coincidence, this morning in the bath, I get six o'clock in the morning, I'm getting up and getting ready for my day, I'm on the bathroom, and I hear howling from outside. So I open up the window to listen to it, and there was like five or six creatures yipping and howling.

E: Oh, yeah.

S: It's a hundred percent they were coyotes.

E: No doubt.

S: Because first of all, it was coming from the woods, I know all the dogs in my neighbourhood, you know what I mean? There's no reason why there would be five or six dogs all together yipping and howling.

E: Oh, it has a certain pitch frequency to it.

B: There's no reason for them to start in a spontaneous a cappella group or anything?

AJR: Barbershop.

E: I hear them at night is when I hear them.

S: Yeah. This was six in the morning. I'm very familiar with the sound of coyotes howling because I play Red Dead Redemption 2. They have a pretty sophisticated sort of nature simulator in the game where they have lots of animals and they're very realistic, including the noises. So if you play that game, you totally know what coyotes sound like.

E: So it's a nature lesson.

S: It is. This is 100% coyotes. So there's a whole group of them just howling in the woods this morning at six o'clock.

AJR: So Cara has been right this whole time. You are just in the wilderness, or really, we've taken over wilderness.

S: I'm surrounded on two sides by woods and they're pretty deep, but if you keep going, you get to another road though. I mean, it's not that big. But yeah, there's a lot of wilderness. I looked it up too. Coyote populations are exploding everywhere basically. They're just really, really well adapted to human civilization. They do well in the cities, in the suburbs, in the rural areas.

E: Which means you got to watch your pets. Watch your dogs. Watch your cats.

AJR: So a news item that I actually considered for this week had to do with a wolf that was either spotted or hunted somewhere that it wasn't normally expected to be found. And it was a mix of like, oh, wow, this is kind of exciting because of population dynamics and they can survive here. But then it was also like, oh, maybe this is very concerning, depending on your point of view.

S: Well, that's part of the reason for the explosion in coyotes is because we killed a lot of the wolves. And they're just filling the space. I don't mind the coyotes because they pretty much keep to themselves. They eat a lot, mostly rodents. They did an analysis of coyote scat and it was like, yeah, 98% of their food is basically animals.

AJR: Can they come to New York City and that might be the rat-sar solution.

S: Well, they are already. I remember a few years ago we read there was a study that estimated there were 70,000 coyotes in Chicago.

AJR: Oh.

B: Yeah. I remember that science or fiction or something we talked about in the show. I was like, what?

E: Fiction.

S: So they're doing well. The other thing we talked about recently was that the mountain lions are moving east. In 10 years, we may have them to deal with too.

AJR: Wow.

E: Well, then they'll come up against the bears and maybe that will.

AJR: And meanwhile, we'll be all under water anyway. So it's the piranhas.

G: It'll be dolphins and sharks.

AJR: Yeah. Man.

S: I know. The other two I thought were just quirks. With this encounter, because the fact is that bear was not skittish. He was perfectly comfortable facing off against those dogs. He was not scared away by people. You know what I mean? That's not good.

B: This wasn't his first rodeo.

S: That's not good. He's acclimated to people's homes. That's when it gets scary.

AJR: I mean, him pawing at the door was chilling.

S: So now I'm like, all right, how do I have to change my behaviour now? Because we generally leave our garage door open because that's where we let the dog in and out. And that's where we also have our garbage. Maybe we can't do that anymore.

B: Do they need to capture him and tie him to the chair and hold his eyes open with the drops and the classical music in the background? We got to re-acclimate him to the nature?

S: I don't know. Yeah. Got to reprogram him. No, for those bears, they either move them or put him down when they get too comfortable with people.

G: You have to name them something so you can just refer to him. You need some kind of a name.

AJR: Barney.

E: The name is taken to the dinosaur.

AJR: Right. Barney is for dinosaurs.

S: All right. Well, we'll keep our listeners updated if you have any more interesting wildlife encounters. In Pennsylvania, Georgia, what kind of wildlife encounters do you have?

G: In Bethlehem, we have foxes that are actually really cool. There's a big cemetery that's here and there's a couple foxes that live there. They're just classy and cool. There's something about it. You see a fox in the distance, kind of looks over at you. You look over at the fox. You both acknowledge each other. You're just like, yeah, this is kind of cool. And they go back to their business. We have a lot of deer. I've hit, I think, since in my couple of decades living here, I think I've hit three deer.

B: Me too. I'm at three. Yeah.

G: You're at three.

AJR: Badly, like, damaged, killed, injured?

G: No. One was looking at me funny. And I was just like, look, man. I'm just trying to have a good time. I'm just in a restaurant. Just leave me alone. No. Yeah, a car. One was on a highway, ran out into me. The other one was also on like a little side road. And they just bolted out and hit the side of my car. And they're just massive. Just massive.

E: They could take a hit, too.

AJR: They could really kill people. Kill themselves.

G: Yeah, we got raccoons and stuff like that. But yeah, nothing. No bears, thankfully. Thankfully, no bears yet. But just give it time. Just give it time.

S: Yeah, we got all that. We had one sighting of a fisher cat. You guys ever encounter one of those?

G: A fisher cat?

B: I have heard of them. They're tough, man.

S: They're tough, yeah. You recognize it mainly by its call. If you ever watch a UK TV show and they're canned soundtrack for nighttime. It's different than in the United States. When it's nighttime on a TV show in the US, what do you have? You have crickets and frogs or whatever. In the UK, I noticed they have fisher cats screeching in the background.

G: Fischer cats and teacups.

S: Background noise. It's like a child screaming kind of noise.

E: Oh, great. Can one get any sleep in that country?

B: Wow.

AJR: Maybe they find crickets absurdly distracting, whereas I let them. They blend in.

B: Does it sound kind of like this? [plays a scream]

S: I should insert this noise at this point in the show, so probably I'll do that. [plays fisher cat sound] Again, if you play Red Dead Redemption, it's every time it's nighttime and they're screeching in the background like that's a fisher cat.

AJR: You get a zoology degree at the end of that game.

S: You could.

G: Did you hear the story that the USPGA, the people that were broadcasting golf, were broadcasting bird sounds over footage, but it wasn't the local birds? People noticed and complained where they were saying, you're using the wrong birds. These birds wouldn't be in Florida. Basically, there's the wrong soundtrack during this big golf tournament. They had to get the right birds into it.

B: That's awesome.

G: You can't get away with anything.

E: Of course, yeah, people would notice that if you're in a heartbeat.

AJR: I read today about an app. It was like, are you sick of social media? I said, yes. Well, download this other app where basically it's kind of like a Shazam for nature where you put it in your yard and it tells you what kind of birds are doing the bird calls or if it's a squirrel or if it's a whatever.

E: Identify it, yeah.

AJR: I was like, I think I need that.

E: That's pretty neat.

AJR: It would just be rats. Can I talk about rats some more? It would just be rats.

Dumbest Thing of the Week (18:54)

• [url_from_show_notes _article_title_] 

• Meteors and Alien Craft

S: All right, Evan, you're going to do a dumbest thing of the week.

E: Yep, dumbest thing of the week. Hey, look, we have two special guests with us this week.

G: Are we it?

AJR: Are we the dumbest thing?

G: Oh, man. Andrea, let's get out of here. Unbelievable. So, so unclass.

E: Sit down. Sit down. Get back. Steve, I don't think they've heard the official song for this segment, the dumbest thing of the week.

S: Oh, boy.

E: And George being the musician, I think he can wholly appreciate this. So here I go. It's the dumbest thing of the week. It's the dumbest thing of I speak. In a world full of fools, this story rules. The dumbest thing of the week. Thank you.

AJR: Very nice.

E: Oh, thank you.

AJR: I'm going to wake up in the middle of the night with that in my head and not remember where I got it.

E: I'll remind you. Don't worry.

AJR: Okay. All right.

E: Avi Loeb, astrophysicist.

B: Oh, not again.

E: Here we go. That's all I had to say. Two words in and take it away, Bob. Astrophysicist and professor of science at Harvard University. He must be tenured because I don't know how someone like Professor Loeb keeps a position at Harvard.

S: Academic freedom.

E: Yeah. Well, he and the late John E. Mack, they met the same criteria, whatever it is, but I don't want to digress too far.

G: He was also on Steve's porch yesterday. It was really weird.

E: But the bear made more sense. Avi Loeb. Yeah. He of the belief that back in 2017, when the space object named ʻOumuamua was detected in our solar system, that this was possibly an alien space probe with a propulsion system disguising itself as a comet. In fact, he wrote a book about this called Extraterrestrial, the First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, arguing that ʻOumuamua had been nothing less than humanity's first contact with an artifact of extraterrestrial intelligence. There you go. Now, it wasn't simply a object that was outgassing hydrogen as the comet warmed up by the sunlight and propelled it along sort of at an unusual sort of distance and speed. But other than that, yeah, that's what he believes. Now, Professor Loeb just recently claimed that tiny sphericals, or spherules, am I pronouncing that right? Spherules.

S: Spherules or spheres.

E: Spherules, spheres. Yeah, I'll just call them spheres. He and his team, they collected them from the floor of the Pacific Ocean, and they are mysterious alloys. They may be evidence of an interstellar object and even possibly more proof of the existence of an extraterrestrial civilization. Yep. Yeah. I learned about this, and I wound up going to one of Cara's favorite go-to sites for science called The Conversation. And here's what they say. Loeb is linking his finding with the passage of a fireball back in January of 2014 as meteor was observed by sensors of the U.S. Department of Defense that tracks all objects entering the Earth's atmosphere. It was recorded as traveling faster than most meteors and eventually broke up over the South Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea. All right. So, and ever since his provocative, well, I'll say provocative thoughts on the ʻOumuamua, Professor Loeb and his team of researchers, they've been pursuing leads to find more interstellar debris floating around our solar system. And as part of that pursuit, they've been looking through data at the Center for Near Earth Object Studies, CNEOS, going through their database looking for objects with unusual orbital characteristics. And a candidate was this particular meteor from January of 2014 due to the objects higher than normal velocity, right? Suggesting perhaps that this object originated from outside our solar system. Interstellar, as they say. So, they traveled to the coordinates where the meteor would have hit the ocean. They dredged the ocean floor with a powerful magnet sled, which picked up dozens of spherical objects, little tiny spheres, molten droplets about half a millimetre in diameter. And he wrote a blog post about it. "We have discovered spherules from the path of the first recognized interstellar meteor", which they're designating IM1. Fine. Here's what they say. They used X-ray fluorescence analysers to get its composition. They found a composition of mostly iron with some magnesium and titanium, but no nickel. This composition is anomalous compared to human-made alloys, known asteroids, and familiar astrophysical sources. Our preliminary analysis implies that the composition of mostly iron with a tenth of that in magnesium and some titanium does not resemble known human-made alloys or familiar asteroids. The fundamental question is obvious. Was this the first recognized interstellar object from 2014 manufactured by a technological civilization? Here we go again.

B: Wow, just leaping to that leap.

E: Oh my gosh, this guy has a penchant for doing this, clearly.

S: That's now his thing. So the thing is, other than that last giant leap into speculation.

AJR: I was sort of with it, yeah.

S: Yeah, the science is fine. So they basically said, we're going to try to see if we can identify from historical NASA records of incoming meteors anything that had characteristics that might mean that it's interstellar. So that was the first one, the 2014 meteor, because it was traveling too fast to have been an object from within the solar system because its velocity is so high that it's like escape velocity for the sun. So sure, that's a pretty good argument that that meteor was probably an interstellar object. Then they went and they looked at the calculated path of the meteor and they dredged up the floor with their magnet to see if they could find anything. And they said they did three other control areas. Again, I don't know where exactly they were. And they had fewer of those spherules. Not none, just fewer. But fine, okay. So even if I buy that at all, good job. You identified a probable interstellar meteor. You found what may be some remnants of it. Because as the meteor is burning up, the spherules are a sign that something was basically liquefied and then rained back down to Earth because when it's in free fall, it becomes a sphere and then it solidifies and there you go. And that's like a standard kind of evidence for comet impacts and meteor impacts and stuff like that. So fine, that's all good evidence.

G: Ergo, Superman is real.

S: Keep in mind, these little spheres are mostly iron.

AJR: Which we are familiar with, as I recall.

S: Okay, so fine, it's not the same ratio as meteors that we find in our solar system. Good, you've already said it's extra stellar. It's an extra stellar object. But what are you telling me, that the aliens made their spaceship out of iron?

AJR: That's how advanced they are.

S: That's what they're talking about. And there's plenty of other interstellar sources of iron that would also fit all of those characters that he's talking about that isn't man-made and isn't a meteor from our solar system. One of the coolest is that when large stars, the largest stars will fuse elements down to iron at their core and then they'll go supernova. And they could basically, the iron core explodes and sends these little fragments of iron throughout the universe. It could be one of those fragments. It would be interstellar, it would be mostly iron with just trace elements otherwise. So that's a possibility. That's cool. So the astronomy here is interesting and cool, but he spoils it by making this unfounded leap to it's aliens. And in interviews, I don't know how many interviews you saw with him, Evan, but he doesn't come right out and say it. He's like, well, we're investigating that.

AJR: But just listing it as a possibility invokes it as a possibility.

E: Of course.

S: And not only that, but the interviewer, the only thing they wanted to talk about was aliens. That was it. That was the whole interview. So you're telling me this could be aliens?

B: He got his hits. He got his clicks.

S: Completely irresponsible.

E: Yep. So a couple other things, Steve, to add to that: scepticism. Peter Brown, meteorite specialist at University of Western Ontario says, basically, it's really hard to know whether he actually picked up. First of all, this debris actually came from that particular comment. He said it essentially would be impossible to say that these particular spheres come from this particular event. So that hasn't even really been proven. This thing has not been tested for age. I mean, how old are these things? Did he rule out all the terrestrial pollutants? And here's something else he said that was interesting. He said that particularly at higher speeds, the US government sensors tend to overestimate the speeds at which they measure these things coming into our atmosphere. So we're not even, I suppose, really 100% sure that this was ever something that did come in at a higher than usual rate. So all those things still need to be investigated. And Brown said, I don't see any evidence that would necessarily bring you into such an extreme hypothesis that this would have anything to do with either alien technology or even necessarily something that's interstellar.

AJR: I mean, it sounds as useful as saying, well, it was aliens that caused the submersible to implode, too. You're like, I guess? I don't know. Like, it could have been aliens who did anything. Like, it just doesn't seem any more reasonable to include here than any other claim of anything that's ever happened.

S: At best, it's an argument from ignorance. But, Evan, you're right. Like, there's four links in this chain, right? And let's focus on the first three. I mean, those are kind of semi-plausible that this was interstellar, that it was not a standard meteorite, you know what I mean? All these things that the things that he found are actually from something are from a meteor and from an interstellar meteor. But that last step is like, wait a minute, let's focus on the first three, the ones that are actually plausible.

B: Yeah, these are Michio Kaku level sound bites just to get attention. It's annoying as hell.

E: Yeah. And in a way, trying to, I think, do perhaps some reputation rebuilding from his prior incidents, which certainly there's been a lot of ridicule of him since he came out back in 2017.

B: Oh, yeah.

G: What is that about? First off, I think this is more likely Iron Age time travellers, but I don't want to get into that. But what is it about these on some level qualified experts who then just veer off? Is it this sort of idea of being blinded by the clicks, being blinded by book deals, by television appearances?

S: I think that's a layer. That's part of it. I think it's also the other part is that he's not a sceptic.

B: Critical thinker. They're not great critical thinkers.

S: You could be a scientist without being a great critical thinker. Absolutely.

G: That's so weird, man.

S: Yeah, so they commit some basic logical errors, like argument from ignorance, for example, and they don't realize it. And then his project that he's working now is like the Galileo project. Like, really, are you that tone deaf that you are going to label your project with the Galileo fallacy?

E: The Einstein collective, right?

B: Oh, my god, that's why he needed Galileo?

S: Yeah.

E: Yeah, he's the pioneer.

S: He's taking the defensive thing of we shouldn't be stigmatizing exploratory science, and you shouldn't. Just because we're looking for something new doesn't mean you should be ridiculing it. No, we're ridiculing you because of your horrible logic, because you're not being a critical thinker.

G: It's the true Scotsman project.

E: It's crankish.

B: Yeah, right?

E: It definitely is.

S: Yeah, exactly.

AJR: Okay. Oh, just remind me what he's a professor of?

S: He's an astrophysicist.

E: Astrophysicist.

AJR: He is. Okay. I was like maybe he's like─

E: An accomplished one.

S: No, he's a legit astronomer.

AJR: Wow.

S: It's just that he decided that he's going to make this his thing.

B: He went to the dark side.

S: Then you write a book, and you get the press, and you get the interviews, and otherwise, nobody would care about his career at all. And so that you can't underestimate the impact of that.

AJR: Well, that's what brings me back to the freedom of speech note that someone said, which is like, yeah, I guess he can say these things, but freedom of speech shouldn't protect scientists pretending to do science, right? Like, we have freedom of speech around things that are maybe social issues, and they're debated, and we argue about that, but I rarely see it we retract scientific articles if there are errors, right? Is it because he's not publishing these things in scientific outlets that they can't get him on that?

S: No, he is, but no, it's not freedom of speech. It's academic freedom.

AJR: Academic freedom.

S: Yeah. So the same thing with John Mack, which with Evan mentioned, who was a Harvard psychiatrist who came to believe that his patients were actually abducted by aliens. He literally fell for his own patients' delusions. Rule number one for psychiatry is you don't believe your own patients' delusions. And his argumentation was horrible, his methods became terrible, he just became involved in just verifying his beliefs rather than trying to disprove them.

E: Isn't that what this smacks of as well?

S: Yes. Yeah, exactly.

AJR: But doesn't academic freedom prevent you from, like, your department could be able to step in and say, well, it's not actually science that you're doing anymore. But I guess if you have tenure, you can't even do that.

S: I mean, there's a very high threshold for doing something because somebody's on the fringe. Unless you're sleeping with your students, you're pretty much okay.

AJR: I mean, we've had people in political science get in trouble for falsifying data. And that is grounds for maybe for these were younger scholars who ended up getting their job offers rescinded. So they weren't tenured and they didn't there wasn't that. But people do get fired for falsifying results.

E: Oh, for fraud, yeah.

AJR: Or like you said, sleeping with students. But I guess the fringe.

E: This isn't a case of fraud, though. I don't think he's doctoring any of his data. He's just drawing these conclusions based on─

AJR: That aren't fair, critical.

E: ─[inaudible] arguments.

AJR: Yeah, I see.

S: And that's not unreasonable, having a wide berth academic freedom. You're going to have to allow some some cranks in there in order to make sure that people who have legit but out there ideas have the freedom to pursue that. But yeah, but in the modern media environment that we're in the downside is just magnified significantly. The only thing the media wanted to talk about was this. So you're saying this could be aliens, right? That was it. The whole interview.

G: And then that's a badge of honour, too. If someone like that does get like, let's say, kicked out of a university, then they often flip it around and will be like, look─

S: What are they try to hide.

G: What are they trying to hide? I had these great ideas and they threw me out. So buy my book. You can't win.

AJR: I mean, you see it with with anti-vaxxer sorts of campaigns and other things, too, like there are serious health consequences. But you're right. They just form another rebellion university.

G: Right.

S: Yeah, exactly.

E: Dumbest thing of the week. Thank you Avi Loeb.

S: Let's talk about some actual science.

AJR: So hold on? So there aren't aliens? That's that's my headline. That's one of us is an alien.

S: No, the takeaway is aliens are flying in iron spaceships. That's the takeaway.

G: And they abducted Jay and Cara. So that's where.

E: Oh, no.

AJR: And sent a bear.

G: Sent a bear.

AJR: Yeah, it was an iron bear. Realistic.

News Items

S:

B:

C:

J:

E:

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

Leqembi for Alzheimer's (35:07)

• FDA Approves Leqembi for Alzheimer's 

Jeffrey Epstein Not Murdered (48:48)

• Investigation and Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Custody, Care, and Supervision of Jeffrey Epstein at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, New York 

When Will Betelgeuse Supernova? (1:02:51)

• Astronomer predicts that a red supergiant star nearby could go supernova very soon  

Can AI Solve Math Problems? (1:16:00)

• A.I. Is Coming for Mathematics, Too 

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Science or Fiction (1:36:49)

Item #1: A new paper estimating the number of planets in the Milky Way with liquid water increases the estimate by 100 fold from prior estimates, up to one planet per system on average. Item #2: A new bionic arm for an above-the-elbow amputation allows the user to control individually each finger of the hand using only connections with the remaining muscles. Item #3: In an example of convergent evolution, new DNA analysis finds that the pygmy right whale is actually a porpoise.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Pygmy right whale
Science	100x more planets w/ water
Science	New bionic arm

Host	Result
Steve	win

Rogue	Guess
Andrea	New bionic arm
George	New bionic arm
Bob	New bionic arm
Evan	Pygmy right whale

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

Steve Explains Item #1

G: ... H-2-whoa!

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:51:38)

Every time you perform a magic trick, you're engaging in experimental psychology. If the audience asks, "How the hell did he do that?" then the experiment was successful.  – Teller (1948-present), American musician

Signoff & Announcements (1:57:49)

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

• Fact/Description, possibly with an article reference
• Fact/Description
• Fact/Description

References