SGU Episode 742

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SGU Episode 742
September 28th 2019
"Charting the trajectory of 'Oumuamua through our solar system's celestial bodies."
SGU 741                      SGU 743
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
UFOs: The reliable cases are uninteresting and the interesting cases are unreliable.
Carl Sagan
Links
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Show Notes
SGU Forum

Intro

Voiceover:You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Your escape to reality. Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, September 25th, 2019, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella, Hey everybody, Cara Santa Maria, Howdy, Jay Novella, Hey guys, and Evan Bernstein. Good evening folks. So Evan, what happened with all the storming Area 51 hubbub?

US#08:That's right. It was this past weekend, wasn't it? Yeah.

S:Oh, and there were millions of people signed up to the Facebook page, interested in going, definitely going. And the emergency services were notified and two towns went on standby alert because they couldn't handle, they wouldn't be able to handle the traffic. How were they going to accommodate potentially hundreds of thousands of people coming into the desert and get the water and the food and the thing? And that didn't happen. What do you mean? Like nobody came?

E:It's not exactly that nobody came, but there are some varying reports that I've seen a range from 1000 to 2000 people at a couple different select locations in total actually showed up. And in this particular article by the Associated Press, it says about 75 people arrived at the actual gates of Area 51. 75, man. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Evan, I saw a video of a news reporter with a bunch of people running with jumpsuits on behind him. I thought that was at this event. Someone could have done that as a fake, but that might have been at the event. Well, maybe that was all 75 people. And there were a couple of different events. There were competing events, you know, Alien Fest versus this other town's get-together thing, and a few other ones sprouted up. So you had a sprinkling of people here, a sprinkling of people there. So it depends on which event you're talking about. In fact, in fact,

J:The fellow responsible for the whole Storm Area 51 craze, if you can call it that, he a week ago pulled out of the event that he was co-planning because I think he either saw the writing on the wall that it wasn't going to be what it was going to be and he was going to be in for it for a lot of money.

E:His money backers also kind of pulled out and instead he and a bunch of people went to a A place in Las Vegas to kind of just gather and have their own little UFO convention kind of party. So there wasn't really a coordinated event when it was all said and done. But that's why there's a rough estimate about how many people actually wound up going into the desert and showing up and they're saying anywhere between one and two thousand people made the trek and only 75 people at the actual gates. So it was a bust. Well, I mean, it was a good bust, though, because, you know, I think a lot of people had a lot of fun like saying, oh, maybe we'll go. And, you know, there's a lot of that going on. You know, who knows how these estimates were made anyway? You know, people were saying 100,000 people. But I do think, you know, the last month when people were getting serious saying, you know, this could be really disastrous. If I was young and adventurous and deciding I was going to go to this thing and I heard like there might not be enough food or toilets, I would say, hey, guess what?

J:I'm not going. Yeah, ultimately I think practicality won the day and won the minds of the vast majority of people who may have otherwise were thinking about going. It's a good thing because there were no real incidents, no one got injured per se, no one got shot by any military personnel, nobody tried to actually cross into the restricted areas. The best thing that came out of this was that moment at the DragonCon live show where one of our listeners got up and Naruto ran across the room as a display for everybody else, which I thought was so much fun.

E:Thank goodness, because Steve actually asked me to demonstrate a Naruto run, but fortunately I was wired up to the table with microphones and things, so that kept me tethered. I don't know who it was. The girl that did it, I said right before she leapt out of her seat and did it, I said, I'll give you some free stickers. And then she did it and there was a big hubbub.

J:And I don't know if she ever came up and did it. So if you are that person, I will be happy to give you free free stickers, even a T-shirt. And do we describe what a Naruto run is?

E:It's that anime style of running. You know how they always like, they have their arms behind them and their head out in front and then leaning forward. Yeah, basically fast, small steps, it seems.

J:That's right, because hey, if you Naruto run, you're going so fast that even an army with guns and bullets cannot stop you all. So guys, I have a five to 10 year update on a previous topic that we covered.

5-10 Years (05:04)

Dino-chicken update https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dino-chickens-are-coming_b_13468148

S:I predicted this five to ten years ago that you would have this. Yeah? So in 2009, so exactly ten years ago, we talked about the dino chicken. You guys remember the dino chicken? What? I do.

E:Let me see if I can remember. Is this like de-extinction? It's de-extinction, kind of. It's basically the idea that you're going to reverse engineer a dinosaur from a chicken, right?

S:Because birds are dinosaurs, so we're going to reverse engineer non-avian dinosaurs by undoing the genetic changes that occurred during the evolution of theropod dinosaurs, dinosaurs that are similar to the velociraptor, into the whole avus group.

C:But actually they're not really doing that, right?

S:They're not necessarily, the research does not involve like a direct attempt to reverse engineer a dinosaur from a chicken or from any bird. What they're trying to do is understand the evolutionary pathways that were taken from the theropod dinosaurs to birds. And this method is helping them, right? Because evolution doesn't just like wholesale swap out genes, right? It doesn't overwrite like a whole, it's not like code, right? We just take out this piece of code and put in a new piece of code. It tweaks what's there already, and sometimes that could be as simple as turning a gene off. So if that's all you're doing, is turning off a gene, then all you gotta do is turn it back on, right? So the information's there, it's just a matter of what's active and what's not active. But not exactly, right? Because not all of the changes are turning off genes. And also, once a gene is turned off, there is no selective pressures to keep it from mutating. So it then starts to drift fairly quickly away from its original state, you know? Duplication of genes could also achieve the same result, right? Yeah, duplication, recombination, you can get chromosomal changes. Yeah, there's lots of things that could happen that are not easily reversed. So there is an update, though. There was a study in 2015, so about four years ago, six years after I think we last reported on it. This was done by researchers at Yale, Dr. Bellar, B-H-U-L-L-A-R. He is looking at the evolution of the bird beak, right? So he identified genetic changes between reptiles and birds, and he essentially did genetic alteration in an attempt to force a chicken embryo to go down a more dinosaur developmental pathway. And he reports that it worked. Now, he only allowed these chicks to grow inside the egg long enough to identify the anatomy, right? He didn't hatch them. He didn't let them hatch? He did not let them hatch. Because it wasn't part of the experiment. Well, he said they probably would have been OK. The anatomy gross curiosity. I mean, yeah. Doesn't that count for something? But don't you think like an ethics board would need to be like, yeah, hi, let's all have like another conversation about this? It was probably easier to get approval. We're going to sacrifice them once we look at their anatomy. Yeah, because I'm pretty sure everybody on that ethics board saw Jurassic Park. Yeah, because you don't want to eat a dino-chicken sandwich. All right, but this is the change.

C:This is very fascinating.

S:So what he discovered, and again, this is how this research can inform our understanding of evolution. It turns out that the bird beak is really just a super overgrown premaxilla, right?

C:So the premaxilla is a pair of very small bones that sits in front of the face and houses the incisors, right?

S:So these two bones became massively elongated, forming the beak. Wait, we need more details. What is this premix, though? Is it only around some teeth, or one tooth, or why is it there? Yeah, incisors. Incisors. Why? Those are two teeth. So there's two bones. So these two bones in birds became massively elongated, forming the beak. But they still had a jaw full of teeth. They just had a beak in front of their jaw full of teeth. And then in some of the lineages, including the one that led to birds, the jaw, the teeth went away and the jaw went away.

B:The jaw sort of shrank. So then it became underdeveloped.

S:And then you were left with just the beak, right? But some of them, right up until the asteroid hit, right, there were clades that had the beak and the teeth, you know? Wow. Okay. But where's my premaxilla right now? In humans, the premaxilla bones are fused with the maxilla. They do actually still house the incisors, but they're just all fused as the maxilla bone. So it's a good example of how evolution works with the material at hand, right? They can't just invent a beak out of whole cloth. It has to form out of something that was already there. And it doesn't have a designated purpose, like, let's grow a beak so the bird can eat easier or be more effective. But once they had the beak, it was well adapted to a lot of different lifestyles, including getting insects. And apparently, again, whether it was just luck or chance or they just happened to be better adapted, you know, the birds survived the extinction and the toothed dinosaurs did not. This researcher is pretty confident that this research will continue, Dr. Bellar.

E:He said, essentially, this is happening in 15 to 20 years.

S:We're going to be able to create something that is significantly dinosaur-like. So it's not going to take half a century, it's going to take decades. So it's really sticking on the order of 20 years. But again, we've heard that before, right? 20 years is that number where it's like, it's so far in the future you can't really even say. But he thinks that if we could make chickens grow a jaw with teeth instead of a beak and grow a tail instead of a bony tail instead of feathers and hands instead of wings, Yeah, you pretty much got a velociraptor, you know? Yeah, but we're not really gonna, well, that's a whole other question about whether or not we're gonna allow this kind of research. I mean, he says he's doing it, you know? No, but I mean, like, beyond just, like, teeth jaws. You mean approving that? Yes, that's what I mean by allow. Yes, yes, yes. I mean, like the people who make those decisions. Yeah, the entire scientific community might be a little concerned. That's why they do these things out on islands out in the off of Costa Rica.

C:Steve, how big is a velociraptor? So like a turkey? Now follow me on this. Yeah.

S:If we made them big enough,

C:Mm-hmm. We could ride them as a zero-emissions vehicle.

E:No, they emit.

C:They're gonna have, you know, methane pouring out of them and stuff. We can do that already with, like, horses. No, but you could ride a velociraptor.

E:I mean, you could literally ride a velociraptor to work. Yeah. Yeah, what's the novelty in riding a horse, Cara?

J:That's been there, done that. Yeah. But riding the velociraptor. We domesticated it because it was domesticatable.

C:That's right.

J:You know, Cara, you lack a certain kind of vision. You could train velociraptors. Didn't you see that movie where they did that? Oh, yeah, that documentary with the CRISPR at?

E:Yeah, right. I remember that one.

J:And so he also was saying at this time, just a few years ago, that CRISPR is like making this research go a lot faster. It's a lot easier.

C:Oh, goody. With CRISPR, we need a segment called One to Two Years.

E:So this was 2015.

S:I didn't see anything published more recent than that, but so there may be more updates on our dino chicken in the future.

C:Tastes like a Lazeraptor.

S:Tastes like chicken, but a little gamey. All right. That's a good update. Let's go on to some news items.

News Item #1 - Fat Shaming (13:17)

• Fat Shaming Is Counterproductive 

S:Let's go on to some news items. Cara, you're going to tell us about fat shaming.

E:Yeah, and I noticed, Steve, that you actually wrote about this today.

S:So that's convenient. I actually came across it when PopSci did a quick write up on it. And I think that this really came on the heels of some recent

E:Hubbub.

S:Yeah, some recent hubbub, that's a good way to put it, about fat shaming. Some very kind of prominent people calling for not less but more fat shaming. And the argument, I'm going to give them credit.

C:I'm going to go with principle of charity here, although I'm not sure that that's completely appropriate. I think the argument there may be based on the fact that there have been multiple studies that show That by and large, people aren't aware of like where they fall on the BMI. Also, I think by and large, I know that I came across this historically, but it wasn't mentioned in this article. By and large, people aren't aware of how many calories they eat in a day. It's just not a good metric that we have. And so when kind of tasked with taking stock of our own bodies, Generally speaking, we may think that we are smaller than we are. We may think that we are consuming fewer calories than we actually are. So with the principle of charity, maybe I'm assuming that these pundits know about these studies, and they think that maybe it's the job of, I don't know, the people, the job of the government. I'm not really sure what the argument is here. To help people come to the realization of where their bodies are. But now we're going to talk about why that's like just so wrong. Yeah, I fully support the principle of charity, but I don't think that's what's going on. I don't think that's what's going on either. I think they're just straight up wrong. Yeah, I think they're just being jerks. Yeah, give the background and we'll say why they're wrong. This is basically what I was going for there was like if I were in debate club in high school and my professor was like, hey, you have to be on the side of pro fat shaming, that's pretty much the only thing I could come up with, you know what I mean?

S:But then we'll talk about why that's just by and large wrong. And it really comes down to a lot of things.

C:I mean, some of them hopefully will feel like review at this point.

S:BMI, not necessarily a great indicator of health. Thank you so much for joining us today.

C:The Skeptic's Guide We'll get to the why in a second. BMI is a way of getting a little bit of information about a lot of people. But it's not a lot of information, right? It's height and weight, that's it.

E:But it's useful when you're looking at tens of thousands of people.

S:Absolutely. Just let me not say much about you, because there's so many other variables that may trump the BMI itself. Yeah. And I think that we can split those variables a few different ways. We can talk about biomarkers of health, metrics of health, and how there's a constellation of things that we can kind of add up and say maybe that this is the state of my health right now. But there's also all the different reasons that people might weigh X versus Y. And both of those conversations, I think, are important for the conversation that we're having right now.

C:So number one, the BMI is not a great metric at the individual level. It just doesn't tell us that much. But number two, It's not just a behavioral thing. And like time and time again, research shows us this. It's not just about how much we eat. There's not a one-to-one correlation there. We know that there are genetic factors. We know that there are environmental factors. And even beyond that, one of the really important things about this new study that came out is the psychology of the conversation. And I think that's what we're going to eventually dive into. That's why we're talking about fat shaming today. One of the biggest ones that people are writing about right now is this meta-analysis that came out a couple of years ago, where they looked at multiple studies, and they focused on something called weight stigma, right? So people who are coming in to obesity clinics or to speak with their doctors about weight management, and realizing that There was a very high correlation between biomarkers of poor health and weight stigma. So they were controlling for things like BMI. So you take two people that have the same BMI. One of them has been bullied about their weight and has internalized that, you know, they've had a psychological experience where they're saying, you know, during my life, People have made fun of me, they've made me feel bad. That person is more likely to have worse health, like negative health consequences. So we're talking both psychological health, depression, anxiety, things like that, but also physical health markers, high levels of cortisol, you know, other things that we can kind of correlate with stress. Like they're not as healthy physically or psychologically, even if they weigh the same. So that tells us something. It tells us, number one, that there are negative consequences to fat shaming. It tells us, number two, that fat shaming is the definition of the backfire effect. If you tell somebody to eat less and you give them crap about how they look or about how they Which, A, I don't even understand why anybody thinks that this should be an appropriate public health strategy, but moving beyond that, if you do that, it actually makes people, A, feel worse, and B, tend to engage in behaviors that may actually exacerbate the problem. Steve, one thing that I think that I really like that you did in your article is that you talked about really when it comes down to it, what is the constellation of factors that lead to obesity, especially maybe viewing it as a public health issue, because you do point out at the very beginning, Obesity is rapidly passing up tobacco use as the kind of causal factor. Maybe we could say correlative factor. I'm not sure how the studies are done, but I think they can probably use some statistics to show that this is causal behind negative health consequences. Yeah, preventable cause. Preventable. You're right. Yeah, preventable. So we know that this is a real concern. The problem I think a lot of times comes out in messaging, and it comes out in understanding what are the reasons that obesity takes hold within a population. We know it's getting worse, and we know it's getting worse globally. So what are these reasons? Is it just that people are eating more? No. It's correlated with all sorts of things like low SES. Like food insecurity, you know, sorry, socioeconomic status. So you actually see a kind of interesting curve when you look at poverty, you know, at the lowest of low levels of poverty when people can't get any food, obviously, we see problems maintaining calories. And so you'll see that people are malnourished. But especially in like wealthier countries like the U.S., this is more rare. What you tend to see with poverty is that people are eating high calorie, low nutritionally dense food because it's cheaper and it's easier to get a hold of. And so you actually see obesity at these places where you would think it almost doesn't really, it's counterintuitive, right? Like people don't have much money. How are they eating so much? Food is cheap. Calories are cheap, man. And it's the quality of the food. Why are calories cheap, Steve? Why would you say that? We are really good at mass producing food. It's amazing sometimes. For a dollar, I could get a thousand calories. It's amazing how many calories you could buy if you don't care about the quality of the calories, as Cara was saying. If you just want it, you can get a 2,000 calorie meal for five bucks at a fast food restaurant. You know what I mean?

S:It's really amazing. It blows my mind how cheap meat is. That's scary. Relatively speaking, yeah. Yeah, like you watch a TV commercial and it's like, the massive bloody blur burger, only $2.99. And you're like, what? That's what I'm saying. It shouldn't be that inexpensive. You can get an 800,000 calorie burger, 1,200 calories worth of supersized fries. You're only up to five, six bucks.

E:If you get a sugary drink, tack on another 400 calories for 99 cents.

C:I mean, it's amazing. You've exceeded your calorie budget.

E:You're still in the single digits.

C:And let's remember that this isn't just about making smarter choices. That's something that I think we need to push past, this idea that people have a choice.

S:Or at least that the choice is one that is equivalently easy to make across the board, because ultimately, there are places all around this country and all around the world that you know, we might consider quote unquote, food deserts. I remember doing, I've mentioned this before on the show, I did a story about a community in El Monte, who at the time many years ago, when I was doing that story for our local PBS outlet, did not have a grocery store.

C:In the whole city. So when people wanted to buy things like produce, they bought them from the liquor store. What kind of quality of produce do you think that they were able to get their hands on? What kind of food is usually stocking the shelves? What liquor store sells produce? Exactly. The ones in cities that don't have grocery stores. But what else is on the shelves in a liquor store? Yeah, exactly. Lemons and limes, right? And And again, I think that this is really this big struggle and people are having political conversations about this right now for good reason between, you know, quote unquote, personal responsibility and the responsibility of the community and society. But it's also it's not just about poverty. We're talking about obesity. There's a complicated web of cultural changes over the last 20, 30, 40 years. That affect all of us. It's like more sedentary and we walk less in terms of getting around. We have less opportunity maybe to exercise than we did previously. Yeah, more white collar. There's a lot of stealth calories out there. It's so easy to accidentally overeat. You know what I mean?

S:It takes more work to not overeat than it used to. And the bottom line is that obesity has been increasing over the last 30, 40 years everywhere, so it's not just a sudden failure of willpower, right? Yeah, and we also know that there have been multiple studies looking at the actual construct of willpower, and there's like no correlation between willpower and obesity. Yeah, there's no, you know, with, with independent measures of willpower and obesity. So yeah, absolutely. It doesn't correlate with that. It correlates with all these other cultural, social factors. And also we know that if people try to just try to lose weight with sheer willpower, everyone fails, right? It just doesn't work. Yeah.

C:So I think that the people who are defending, I've read articles where people are like pushing back against the whole fat shaming idea, saying, what about holding people to personal responsibility, blah, blah, blah. But it's like, it's not about that.

S:Because they're looking at it as if these people live in a vacuum. Yeah, it's not that they're not taking responsibility for themselves. We have to identify the cultural factors that are contributing to this increase in obesity and try to reverse them, reverse those cultural factors. And it's complicated. We don't know what the answer is, is the bottom line, because whatever we're doing is not working because the epidemic is getting worse. But there was a very specific ad campaign that triggered a lot of this discussion. Cancer UK put out an ad where they showed a pack of cigarettes and then the brand name was replaced with the word obesity and saying basically being obese is more of a risk factor for certain cancers than smoking. And then they were criticized for fat shaming and then people were defending them saying, oh, so you're criticizing them for giving scientific information? It's like, nope, that's not what the criticism is. Yeah, it's a straw man. This is a public service announcement. Their goal is to reduce obesity contributing to cancer. And we, but the scientific evidence shows first, giving people information about the risks of, you know, the health risks of their behavior does not work. We are not wired that way. Screw information. It just doesn't work. So if that was their strategy, the science already says that's a failed strategy. Do your research before you invest in a public announcement campaign. It assumes that people don't already know, which is like, yeah, dude, I know that these cigarettes are bad for me. I'm smoking them anyway. They're already motivated. You don't need to motivate them. You don't need to point out that they're over it. All you're doing is making them feel bad. Yes, right. And I encounter this as a physician. It's my job to give patients information. They say, what can I do to fix whatever, my low back? And I say, well, you could do a number of things. On the list is losing weight.

C:And once or twice I've had patients actually accuse me of fat shaming them just for pointing out that, you know, losing weight will help you lower back pain.

S:It's like, okay, I know, I understand where they're coming from because there's legitimate fat discrimination in medicine. You know, patients who are overweight. The Skeptic's And what happens is, like, everything gets blamed on their weight, you know, no matter what it is. It's like a knee-jerk. It's like, oh, that's because you're overweight. But the thing is, some things do legitimately correlate with it. Like if you have type 2 diabetes, like, yeah, you need to lose weight to get that under control. That's just a fact. But we need to find ways to communicate that, because again, my interest is in helping the patient.

C:I'm giving them information as a means to an end. The end is that they are more healthy.

S:But if giving them information actually makes them less healthy, then that is not a good strategy, right? Don't confuse the mechanism with the end. And I think that is what the critics of the fat-shaming pushback were doing. They were confusing them. The mechanism with the goal, if your goal is to improve public health, this is not the way to do it. We have the signs to tell us this will backfire. This will not only not work, it'll backfire. And you're referring again to the campaign where they put that on the cigarette pack. Yes. And here's the thing. We're seeing a significant reduction. Well, the whole vaping thing is another conversation, but we're seeing a significant reduction in health effects from smoking because significantly fewer people smoke. You want to know why? Because it's not like acceptable to smoke anymore culturally. It's harder. It's harder to do, but at the individual level, that's had the strongest downstream effect.

C:So it's really also I think a lot of times getting confused between a physician talking to their specific patient about things that, okay, what hasn't been working for you? What has been working? Why is it so hard to keep the weight off? Have we tried this kind of approach as opposed to a public health campaign, which ultimately I think is going to be more effective if instead of just talking to the individuals and saying, you eat less. Exercise more! What it should be doing is saying, okay, globally, what can we do as a society to make it so that it's not so damn hard for everybody to try and keep the weight off? Like, maybe we have breaks at work, and maybe we have, you know, a regulation about how food is packaged and sold. And, you know, whatever the case may be, there's obviously a laundry list of things That exists out whether it's a soda tax, whether it's a whatever, and they all have their pluses and minuses. But these kinds of things are the slow systemic changes that have probably occurred as a function in many ways of like modern capitalism, that we need to start seeing how what have been the negative downstream effects and how can we mitigate those things? Now I tell you, it's the the calorie listings has really changed my behavior. I think I don't know about you. I'm not going to the movie theater. Like, let's see. Popcorn. Two thousand calories. Like, are you kidding? There's no way I'm going to go. I'm going to go near that. Of course not. Yeah, that's more than my daily intake. Oh, my God. And even like restaurants like, oh, not going to have that. I would have had that if you didn't list the damn calories. Thank you very much. That's the point, right? Yeah. Well, and it doesn't compute for them. That's the thing.

B:Not everybody thinks in terms of caloric intake. It's just it's not a meaningful metric for everybody. And it's this like complicated layer on top of daily living where it's like, oh, my gosh, that's I have to think about that, too. I just want to eat. I just need to get food in my in my belly, you know, like I can't And that's the thing that we forget, I think.

C:It's the fundamental function of what empathy really is, is when you walk down the street and somebody's frowning or somebody's smiling, the first reaction that we always have is, what a jerk or what a nice person, instead of like, what is going on in that person's life right now? Thank you so much for joining us today. Frantically, because they have to get to their third job. Are they, you know, not eating enough because their kids, they wanted to feed their kids first? And these things sound extreme. Like, like, oh, oh, that's like the sob story. No, that's like the everyday story for like a lot of people in this country. And we have to remember that. All right, thanks, Cara. So Jay, are we ever going to have warp drive?

News Item #2 - Warp Drive (32:53)

• Scientists Are Starting to Take Warp Drives Seriously, Especially One Specific Concept : ScienceAlert 

C:So Jay, are we ever going to have warp drive? I mean, do you really want to ask me that question? You had a warp core breach once. It was a big drink at Horks Bar at the Las Vegas Hilton. That is actually true, Evan. That was a great drink. That was like a giant orb with the very tippy top cut off at the Star Trek bar. How many calories was it? Oh my God. Yeah, exactly. There was no calorie label on that drink. Okay, so Steve, you're asking me this profound question, and I'm going to give you a profound answer with a disclaimer.

S:This is edgy. I don't want to say fringy because I don't really think that's a good descriptor for it, but it definitely is something that is on the absolute edge of speculation and research being done to see if we could actually

J:achieve speeds faster than than light. Now, let me explain to you before people really freak out, because right now a lot of you should be freaking out hearing me say that. But it's nothing that's going to happen even remotely soon. This is like in the distant 20 years. No, like, you know, hundreds of years, I would I would think, or thousands of years. You know, what we're really at its core, what we're really asking here is, are there any laws of physics being broken in order to pull this off? So let's get into it. So scientists, you know, they're saying that this is legit. It's hard living in a universe where we can't travel fast. Tell me about it. It sucks. And it's really going to suck for future generations because, you know, your girlfriend might live at the edge of the solar system and, you know, you want to see her. This past August, a presentation made at this year's American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Propulsion and Energy Forum In Minneapolis, discussed of all things, like we said, the warp drive, the warp drive. I can't believe I'm actually talking about this. So Joseph Agnew, who is an undergraduate engineer and researcher at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, he's in the research center there.

E:He gave a presentation at the forum.

J:And one of his studies that he presented was entitled An Examination of Warp Theory and Technology to Determine the State of the Art and Feasibility. And he describes a warp propulsion system in that talk that he gave. Now, to a person who really understands physics, he said it's relatively simple. Not to people like me, but you have to have a degree in order to find the simplicity in it. So the idea, of course, is completely theoretical, but it could maybe, maybe, maybe possibly be valid in some crazy interpretation. So take a look at this. First of all, this the concept is called a Alcubierre drive, which is named after a Mexican physicist who created the idea back in the 90s. The basic concept is that if space time could be stretched like a wave where it has a buildup on one end and then a expansion on the other end and the ship was inside of that, like, you know, think of it maybe as a bubble or whatever, this might work. Now, the theory states that the spaceship rode it like a wave. It could travel faster than light. And that's actually called a Alcubierre metric. So the ship is inside the wave that's created. So the ship is not actually supposed to be moving faster than the speed of light. And there's the trick. That's the rub. That's the secret sauce that the physicists are talking about. The ship is standing still. Space time is being warped around the ship. That's the concept. Now you can kind of think of this. Let me go back to the surfer analogy. Imagine a surfer who's not moving, but the ocean is moving underneath them, right? So the surfer is staying in the same place, but everything else is moving. You don't really have to move all of space-time, you just have to bend it the same way that gravity does. Now think about that. I found that the idea that it's really like the idea of gravity. And because of LIGO, we now know that that gravity waves exist and that they're measurable. And that was a major milestone for people to believe that this type of research might not be a completely waste of time is since since space time is movable or bendable. Now, of course, you know, we're talking about one of the forces of nature here, gravity. But could humans do something to affect gravity? And we don't have to affect a lot. We don't have to affect space time in a large area. Like I said, it could be just around the ship in a relatively small area. So how would we do it? So the fun thing about this is that the researcher I said earlier, Joseph Agnew, he's a Star Trek fanatic, right? And he was heavily inspired by the technologies that he saw on the show. So let me let me read a quick quote here that Agnew said. He said, in the past five to ten years or so, there has been a lot of excellent progress along the lines of predicting the anticipated effects of the drive, determining how one might bring it into existence, reinforcing fundamental assumptions and concepts, and my personal favorite, ways to test the theory in the laboratory. Now that we know the effect is real, the next question in my mind is how do we study it, and can we generate it ourselves in the lab? What he's talking about here is being able to, even on a very, very small scale, have enough energy available in order to warp space-time. Now, there was an estimate done, I think 15 or 20 years ago, saying that if we were going to do anything like this, that it would take as much energy as the universe has inside of itself, right? Yeah. I think the last time we talked about it, that was the state of the art. I have good news, Steve. That estimate has now shrunk down to the size of Jupiter. I don't like talking in so non-specific terms, but I'm asking questions like, what are you talking about? What needs to be the size of the universe? You're saying the amount of energy that could be stored in the universe versus the amount of energy that could be stored in a mass the size of Jupiter.

S:And I think what they're actually saying is that you would need that much exotic material in order to do this.

J:Or would you need to convert the mass of Jupiter entirely into energy? That's what it seems to me. When they say superconductors, like really advanced superconductors, interferometers, and magnetic generators. And of course, and not to ever be forgotten, money. A really good BLT sandwich. Right. MLT, a mutton, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. So look, it's in the news. It might not be completely bonkers that one or two or a half dozen scientists or there was one scientist at NASA that looked it over, said, yep, you know what, this isn't as crazy as it seemed like it did 20 years ago. It's worthy of more time and energy. You know, definitely not billions of dollars, but definitely, you know, Some funding just in case because you just don't know because if you're not breaking the laws of physics that's a damn good rule of thumb to say hey at least we're like yeah not you know trying to reverse engineer reality here. Yeah I mean it's interesting just to say that I mean we couldn't achieve this in you know millennia of research but there could be civilizations out there that are potentially doing this and then you could then you know look for the you know the side effects now the signature But the other thing, Jay, that the Alcubierre Drive does, that one effect that was calculated is that as you're traveling through this warp bubble, it could potentially pick up a lot of the energetic particles that are flinging through space and release them when you reach your destination.

B:So then the side effect would then be that when you arrive at your destination, you would utterly destroy it, like on a planet. So it's a weapon. So yeah, so it could be considered a weapon and not a good way to travel because basically you can't really care about your destination because you could just blow it apart. That's funny. I watched the first season of some Netflix science fiction show that was kind of mediocre and the science was not very good, but they actually got that right. They had a warp bubble to go faster than light and they had that exact thing happen. Where they could use it as a weapon, you know, to blow up whatever, wherever they are. If they direct it, you know, at a planet, they could arrive and then destroy, release the energy that they gathered and blow it up. That's interesting because I must have looked that up somewhere.

S:Yeah, but there seems to be, yeah, yeah, I'm sure. It was, yeah, I remember that was all in the news a while back. But I mean, it seems to have a simple workaround. Just arrive a few light minutes away from your destination and blow the crap out of, you know, empty space. And then just travel sending me to your destination. I mean, it doesn't seem like such a... In what? Well, I'm assuming that your craft would survive that.

B:Perhaps not, but in the reading I've done, I never got that indication that the ship would actually not survive just your destination. But it is possible. Yeah, it's interesting that it doesn't break the laws of physics, that there are non-trivial technical hurdles that may never be solvable. Just because it doesn't break the laws of physics doesn't mean that it could ultimately work. Going from the universe's worth of energy to Jupiter's worth of energy is a big change, and that's just in 10 years. So if they keep massaging the theory, maybe they'll figure out a way to do it that's not quite so

S:Yeah, for me the big, the funnest part is the idea that you are exceeding the speed of light, but you're kind of not. It's like how the far reaches of the observable universe can move away faster than the speed of light because it's nothing specific is moving faster than light, but it's space, space itself. And if you can warp space, you could potentially travel faster than light. So it does kind of sneakily get around what you think might be a fundamental limit. But you're not really breaking any any laws of science by doing that.

B:Yep. OK. All right. Thanks, Jay. So, Evan, we got this email and it was, you know, we were trying to figure out if this is real or not. Is my TV spying on me?

News Item #3 - TVs and Phones Communicating (43:10)

• Is Your Smartphone Listening to Your Conversations? 

B:Is my TV spying on me? Oh, what did you find out? What a big question. Yeah, thanks to the wonderful world of Reddit, right? But in any case, it was just posted the other day. Here's what it says, okay? TVs emit a tone during ad breaks that are inaudible to humans but that smartphones are listening for.

S:Now, corporate entities can link the TV and phone as belonging to the same person. It means government entities can play a tone through the TV and ping all the phones in the room, identifying the whole group.

E:That's the claim. Allow me to paraphrase that claim a little bit. I think it needs a little clarity. So I'm going to give it to you in the form of an example. All right, here's the example. Hey guys, I'm going to download an app to my smartphone. I'm calling it the ABC app. And that's just an example. That's not a real app. I'm just painting a picture. Okay, so here I am downloading ABC app. Great. It's on my phone and it's doing what it's doing. What it's actually doing doesn't matter. Let's say it collects baseball scores for me in real time. Here come the baseball scores. I'm home. I'm near my TV. TV's on, and I'm watching Oprah. No, wait. I'm actually watching Dr. Oz. Dr. Oz is on. Oh, no. He's going to commercial break. Now, what would you say if I told you that upon the Dr. Oz show going to commercial, an audio beacon suddenly emits from the television, which transmits at a frequency that my human ears cannot detect, and this audio beacon emitting from a signal embedded in the commercial, is being detected by my smartphone, which is in the room with me, and the reason it's being detected is because that ABC baseball app I put on my phone contains a feature specifically designed to detect that beacon. Ooh, smart. And there's more. It's more. So my ABC app detects the beacon. GPS puts a stamp on it, time, location, where the beacon was detected, and that information makes its way back to the company that designed the feature buried within the app. Now that company knows where I was, what commercials were being watched by me. How does it actually know what commercials? Well, because a feature of the app I mean, all of that technology exists. Why would a TV be able to emit a tone humans can't hear? What do you mean? It would just be like above our audible threshold. Right, but why would a TV need that? So that it can communicate with the other devices. So specifically for that ability. Specifically for that purpose. It sounds conspiratorial, doesn't it? So they're working with the TV makers, like you gotta give this TV this extra ability

C:So that we could make more money.

E:Not the TV, Bob, it's embedded in the commercial itself. No, you're not getting it, dude.

B:Yeah, but the TV speaker needs to have that volume.

C:You'd have to build a speaker that could produce- Not that volume, that pitch.

B:Yeah, the pitch.

S:Yeah, the frequency of sound that only that humans can't hear.

B:And the dogs- But aren't we going to assume that the band is beyond

S:Our hearing because our hearing varies from like young people can hear a lot more tones than old people.

B:So aren't we going to assume that there is actually a wide band that's built into the TV to a certain extent?

E:I understand it's not going to be like an extreme tone.

B:But like, there's always going to be a buffer on either side.

S:Because otherwise, wouldn't your dog go crazy though?

C:Your dog does sometimes go well, it depends.

B:What if it's lower? What if it's lower, not higher?

S:We need to tune in our dog.

C:All right, but Evan, is this actually happening or is this an urban legend? Well, here's the short answer. The technology does exist, but whether it's currently happening right now, that's unsubstantiated, but it apparently has happened. Really? It has happened? Yeah, it has happened. Interesting. Here's what we know. The technology is known as or commonly called crust device tracking. So this is software that shares information from one of your devices to another of your devices, potentially all the devices that you have that are computer related, internet connected.

E:It identifies what ads that you're looking at on your smartphone, on your computer, wherever else. And it matches the information with your other objects, your tablet, your laptop, or whatever else it is. Yeah, we see that all the time. You're shopping for something and then you see ads for it on a completely different device. Now the advertisers, people in the advertising world, they've developed a lot of techniques for this device matching. The more accurately they can track your activities, the easier it is for them to advertise to you. But television's a bit different. Still a major medium, not necessarily an internet-based device. Yes, we have a lot of smart TVs today, and it's become kind of a standard thing. But think back in 2013, guys. How many people had their smart TVs hooked up?

C:There were fewer, a lot fewer.

E:And those ads really could never be that targeted. They just had to use like Nielsen data to figure out how to target to who's watching. It's never individually targeted. That's right. And you would need access to those TV service providers information to figure out those kinds of metrics, which you can't easily get. So, well, what is the TV? What are the primary functions? Displays video and audio and makes audio. So, with the advertisements themselves, you have to embed a signal in there that a smartphone could recognize, right?

C:If you could do that, that would open a huge stream of data, and that is what actually happened.

E:The leading company behind it is a technology company called Silverpush. Silver Push is a feature in the applications that you'll download on your phone that the audio beacon is embedded in, and that's what allows you to sort of connect to other devices wirelessly through the internet and so forth. But at the same time, it can also pick up that beacon if it's coming through the audio, which you can't hear, through a television commercial. They put it in the commercial itself, Bob. Thanks for watching. Look, now they're talking to each other. And that is gold. Advertisers will pay a company a lot to have that kind of profile. You can go into your phone and look at every app that has access to your microphone. And if you see something there that you didn't give permission to or you don't know what it is or what it's doing or why it needs access to your phone, your microphone, you could check it out or turn it off. That's right. I believe you can. You can set those kinds of preferences for each app. Now, there might be a malicious app that gets around those requirements, but usually they weed those apps out of the store.

S:So the recommendation is don't buy an app as the moment it comes out. Give like Apple or Google or whatever a couple of weeks. Now, this was 2013-2014, which seems like a long time ago, and technologically speaking, maybe it was five years ago.

E:The technology actually gained some traction, and people and organizations quite reasonably started to raise privacy concerns about this technology.

S:I mean, when you're accepting these apps, are people really giving those apps permissions on their smartphones to capture TV audio and send it back to a third-party data collection company to sell to other companies? Probably. Nobody reads the terms. Exactly. Nobody reads the terms.

E:In fact, there is a German antivirus security company named Avira, A-V-I-R-A. And they analyzed the SilverPush tracking code and they found an upsetting level of detailed data being collected and sent insecurely back to SilverPush. Because of this, Avira's security software detected SilverPush as a Trojan malware. That's how they define it. By early 2016, the Center for Democracy and Technology, they alerted the Federal Trade Commission about these concerns, specifically Silverpush. Eventually, not long after, Federal Trade Commission warned app developers, they sent out a warning to stop using code that listened for sound and beacons to track mobile owners' TV watching habits. What? They just warned people? They warned them. Oh, come on. That's not going to work. That did work. A week later, Silverpush ended its unique audio beacon service. They claim not because of the FTC, but it was just a business decision. Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, plausible deniability, don't know. It's awfully strange, though, that a week later, they decided to shut it down. This is the main one that we know about. So yes, it has happened. Is it currently happening? I don't know.

US#01:I mean, maybe it is happening.

E:We don't know about it. They're doing it under the radar, per se, or not without all the right permissions. Because the FTC is now aware of it and issuing warnings on these things. But as Steve said, it comes down to good digital hygiene, right Jay? I think we've used that term before. And among that is setting the preferences on your apps correctly. Make sure that your phone, your smartphone, which is basically one big tracking device if you think about it, will not automatically turn on the microphone capability to pick up things that you don't want it picking up. Yeah, but obviously, there are things you can do as an individual to protect yourself. But I also think, kind of like the conversation we were having earlier about the obesity issue, there are, there's only so much you can do. And I think it is important to, you know, stay, keep your eyes open about these kinds of things. It doesn't mean you have to be a conspiracy theorist. But if you actually do care about that trade off between privacy and convenience, just realize that engaging in social media,

C:Utilizing these apps that make your life a lot easier, ultimately the goal for almost all of them, the way they make money, is trading in your personal data because advertisers want to sell you shit. Yeah, that's exactly correct. So do you guys remember, not too long ago, about the first interstellar object detected, Aumuamua? Aumuamua.

News Item #4 - Second Interstellar Object (53:50)

• Potential Second Interstellar Object - NeuroLogica Blog 

C:Aumuamua. Yeah. Aumuamua. It was an asteroid with maybe a little comet-like features, but not really a comet, that was long and cigar-shaped and was tumbling end over end. We didn't spot it until after it already passed by the Earth.

S:If you look at a trajectory map, like a map where you're basically looking at the whole solar system, like with the planets, the orbits of the planets and the sun, and the trajectory of Oumuamua, it's like hitting a bullseye, right? Like it just grazes the sun. And if you extrapolate that out to interstellar distances, it's an amazing, it was amazingly aimed pretty much right at the sun. But statistically speaking, that should be happening, right? No, statistically, it was a hundred million to one shot. Why is that so against the probability that things like this, given the vastness of the universe and the number of objects that are out there, you would think something like this is supposed to be happening? But that's the question. How many objects like this? Are there, based upon our estimates of how many interstellar objects should be passing through, should be kicked out by other solar systems and therefore be passing through our system, the probability of this object coming that close to the Sun was a hundred million to one.

E:That's remarkable. Yeah, but you say coming this close to the sun, but I mean, how much did its orbit change due to the gravitational pull of the sun?

S:I mean, it wasn't necessarily aimed right at the sun. It could have been aimed at Earth but then slowly, slowly went a little bit closer to the sun because of the gravitational attraction. Now, Bob, being in the inner solar system itself is 100 million to one. Okay. If you look at that image, It gives you some sense of scale, but then you have to extrapolate orders of magnitude and you realize that it missed the sun by the slightest of round-off errors.

B:You know what I mean? It basically was aimed right at the sun. And the probability of that, you begin to understand why that was such a low probability event. Sure. But here's the thing.

S:Everything like that's low probability. But it's not low probability in that that specific thing happened. It's low probability in that anything within that range of the Sun happened. For this degree of a close encounter to happen, it should happen once every hundred million years, right? That's basically one way to look at it. And the fact that it happened, it was just an amazing cosmic coincidence, like a hundred million to one cosmic coincidence.

B:Or the alternative is there's a lot more of these objects out there than we think there are.

S:We way underestimated the number. We way underestimated how many of these objects there are. Now that led, if you guys remember, that led a Harvard astronomer to say, well, maybe it's neither. Maybe that thing is an alien craft. Oh yeah, I remember that. Remember that? The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Cara Santa Maria, Jay Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and Evan Bernstein. But here's the thing. The other answer is that there's just a lot more interstellar objects than we calculated based upon our models of solar system formation.

B:These things get kicked out of early solar systems, and maybe just a lot more of them are getting kicked out than our models predicted.

S:And so, if that's the case, if that hypothesis is true, that is testable. And the way to test that is to look for more interstellar objects. If we start seeing lots of interstellar objects, well then that's your answer. It wasn't that big a coincidence, we've just vastly underestimated how many of them there are. And you're about to tell us that there's another one? Yes, I'm about to tell you that we've identified, just two years later, two years later identified a second potential interstellar object. And you know, you have to follow things over time, and the longer you follow them, the more accurate you can plot. But luckily, we're seeing this thing on its way into close approach. It didn't already pass. Close approach is going to be in early December. Neat.

C:This is a

S:So this is called the the the object is more clearly a comet this is just a full-on comet and it was discovered by an amateur astronomer called Borisov and the object was named after him so it's designated it has a number like they all have numbers but it's being called nicknamed Borisov after the discoverer. So that's one aspect to this, right? We have our second interstellar object that just two years later, so okay, that's probably the answer. It's not an alien spacecraft. There's just a lot more of these things than we thought there was. But there's another interesting question now. So because it's outgassing, because it's a comet, right? And it's going to do a lot more of that as it gets closer to the sun. Again, its close approach to the sun is in December, when it's going to be, you know, putting out the most gas. Is it the same or different than comets in our solar system? Because there's a signature, right? There's a signature to the gaseous components of comets in our solar system. And we want to know, are comets all over the galaxy the same or are they different? The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe Yeah, like it hasn't been rotating around the Sun basically, like everything else. Yeah, it's not orbiting. So it's on like a parabolic orbit, not an elliptical path, a parabolic path. It'll just whip around the Sun and go away and leave.

C:The Sun's gravity is not enough to curve it back in and to capture it. So it's got way too much velocity energy.

S:It could not have fallen in, for example, from the Oort cloud.

C:Which is really the only other place that a distant comet would come from, would be the Oort cloud.

S:So anyway, whether it's the same as comets from our solar system or it's different, that'll be interesting, right? We'll learn something more about the composition of stuff in the galaxy. Maybe it came from a more metal-poor region of the galaxy. I don't know, we'll see what it shows. And we could use spectral analysis, we can actually see what it's made of, what the gases it's putting out are made of. And we'll be able to compare it. So we're gearing up the astronomers around the world for this one pass of this object. These interstellar objects tend to be going pretty fast, so we've got to train our telescopes on it, but we'll have between now and December when it gets its close approach. And then we'll be able to see it as it goes away too, but we'll have I guess six months or so of good observing. I wonder how visible it will be. Like the tail. Will it have a commentary tail? Will it get close enough to the sun to really have a nice tail? Imagine if it was naked eye visible. Better than goddamn Halley's Comet which is a total bust. The latest update is that astronomers are saying this is officially an interstellar object. It's unambiguously interstellar.

B:It's no longer potential, it's confirmed. On December 7th, it'll come within 186 million miles of the Sun, so about twice the distance as the Earth. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Cara Santa Maria,

S:Oh my gosh. Yeah, so we may get a chance to see it. Holy crap. Oh, we have to go, us and the entire conference will go outside that evening and try to look for it. I hope, I hope it's within our visuals range.

B:Oh my gosh. No clouds, no clouds. No clouds in the right direction, right?

S:You have to be an unobstructed view of the correct direction.

E:Ooh. Cool, cool, cool.

S:All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:02:44)

S:All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

S:Okay, last week I played this noisy.

E:Royling liquid. It's a rocket launching an explosion.

S:I think the Challenger, but that's not exactly it, but that's what comes to mind. Justice Smith sent in a guess.

U:He said, hey, Jay, is someone using a jet propane torch to light some fireworks which then explode? That is not correct, but it is a very good guess because you explained that crazy noise at the end, which I noticed all of you heard this time.

E:Another listener named Mark Constantine said, hi, this sounds like an axe or knife getting sharpened on a grinding stone or possibly some sort of stone grain grinder. It reminds me of the old stone grinders I saw people in markets in Korea using to grind grain.

J:So that's that's a pretty interesting guess. I can I could hear that as well. I have sharpened a knife or two in my day, but that is also not correct. I have another guess. I have a few more guesses here. Patrick McCombs said, love the show. I'm guessing this is a recording from inside a launching toy rocket. And he kind of agrees with you guys, but that is also not correct. But we do have a winner. Now before I announce the winner, anybody want to do another last ditch guess? I'll give you a really big hint now since we're at the bitter end here, ready? This noise is the most important part of it, ready? That noise actually made several listeners say, I wasn't 100% sure until I heard that noise at the end. Slow motion flatulence. One of those vaping cigarettes exploding. A listener named Derek Rethans said, hi, this sounds like a curling stone sliding on ice and at the end hitting the other stones. Oh, hey, curling. I love curling.

U:If you don't know what curling is, you should definitely look it up, because it's kind of visual.

J:But it's like a shuffleboard. A shuffleboard, but the curling stone has a handle on it. And it's heavy and they're big.

E:And there are two sweepers that will tune the ice so the curling stone goes in the direction that they want it to go in.

J:And then, of course, it can hit other curling stones, like Evan said, like shuffleboard. But my God, don't things sound like other things? It really blows my mind. I've learned a big lesson.

E:Very humiliating. I mean humbling.

J:There's a difference. Same root though, same root. Yeah, so that noise he was sent in by Patrick. John Stone, you think it's a coincidence that his last name is Stone? I don't think so. So I have a new noisy for everybody. This noisy is really cool. I hope that I get as many cool guesses to this noisy as I got this past week. Man, I get a lot of guesses and a lot of variation on the guesses. It was really fun. And I thought I'd say this. I listen to every single noisy that people send in.

US#08:I can't use the vast majority of them for lots of different reasons.

J:A lot of times it's the recording quality or the noise itself isn't loud enough, although it's provocative. But sometimes it just doesn't hit all the check marks that a noise needs to. But that should not dissuade you. If you've sent something in the past and I didn't use it, just say, you know, don't be mad, don't be sad, just send something else in. You'll get there eventually. And it is a lot of fun. I really enjoy going through all the noises every week and getting to chit chat with a few people here and there. So guys, this one is cool. I think you'll really enjoy it. That's the chanting that's going on in the background during Eyes Wide Shut, the orgy scene.

US#04:If this is another talking sea creature, I'm going to lose my shit. Right? Because it is shit-loosable if it's yet another sea creature that can localize. This was sent in by a listener named Les Ohlhauser, and I'm going to warn everybody right now.

U:This is literally, this is how bad it is.

E:When I do the reveal on what this thing is, there is somebody's name that is attached to this sound that I can't pronounce. So get used to it, okay?

C:Because I'm going to slice and dice this name up to ribbons next week, and you're going to laugh, but please don't hate me for it.

J:Steve, I already tried. This is really funny, because the guy that sent it in, Les actually said, pretty much, good luck with the name, and he laughed. That's how bad it is. So we had this really cool thing happen to us at Nexus. So we are all friends with Brian Wecht, and you might know that Brian Wecht is a physicist. He also is one of the people that are in the band called Ninja Sex Party. And what's really cool was Brian joined us for the Skeptical Extravaganza. Do you guys remember this? Oh yeah, it was a lot of fun. Heck yeah. And George, hi George. Oh hi, I didn't see you there, I'm sorry, I'm in the corner. I often stand here in the back, I don't know if you even realize that. So Brian's a friend of mine. You know, Brian and I went to that same high school. My dad was his science teacher. How cool is that? Oh, wow. That is nuts. I know. When I found that out from you, I'm like, what? This is such a small world. You know, how weird is that? Totally. So Brian joined us for the Skeptical Extravaganza. We had a great time.

S:And after the show, Brian said, guys, you know what?

J:This show is really good.

US#04:And I think that you guys should talk to the touring company that I work with that they might be able to work with you. So long story short, We call them up, and over the past three months, we have been working with them to build the Skeptical Extravaganza tour. We are taking the Extravaganza on tour.

J:It's going to be the entire SGU crew, and George is the leader of the band, so to speak. He is the MC, he is the person running the entire thing. If you don't know what the Extravaganza is, it is, at its core, it's a comedy show. It's a show where we make fun of science and critical thinking, we do demonstrations, we talk about psychological things, there's a lot of fun improv things that we do, easy bits for the audience to understand and relate to, we talk about pop culture, so it's basically a two-hour show where we just go for it, and it's a ton of fun, and every single show is different, just because of the improv. Yeah, the content is never the same, even if the format is the same. So our tour starts when we are on the first leg of our New Zealand Australia trip. We're going to LA. All of the information for you will be on SkepticsGuide.eventbrite.com. You'll see basically all of our private show recordings there, and then next week we will be opening up tickets for the Skeptical Extravaganza Tour.

US#04:It'll start with our first date in LAX and the other dates are firm, but we have to put all the details in.

J:So to make this less confusing, if you're interested in seeing us at a private show, we're going to have one in LA, one in New Zealand, and one in Melbourne. Then you could go to skepticsguide.eventbrite.com and all that information will be there for you. It's very easy. And then if you're interested in coming to see us on our tour in a city near you, especially if you're in LA, then we will announce next week, and George will be also announcing this on his show, the place where you could go purchase tickets for that. And of course, we will be talking a lot more about this as the weeks roll by. So the first one will be Saturday, November 23rd. In Los Angeles at the Dynasty typewriter venue that starts at 2.30. And then we have an event booked Friday, January 31st in Pittsburgh at the Rex Theater. Saturday, February 1st in Philadelphia at the, is that Perlman? Is that how you pronounce that? Perelman? That's right. And then Sunday, February 2nd in Brooklyn at the Bell House.

S:And we have several other dates that we are currently looking for, but we haven't confirmed yet, but these are all in the Northeast. That's sort of where we're We're going to be focusing our initial touring, except for the LA one, because we're all going to be in LA as we're traveling to New Zealand and Australia. Do you guys know how exciting this is? Yes! Like in Philadelphia and New York. Brooklyn! We're doing the show, we're going on the road, we're putting a band together, guys. We're not only going to paint the barn, we're going to put the barn on the back of a van and take it with us! No, it's really cool. It's one of those things, like, I didn't believe any of it, All the way through the process. This is really going well. This is great. This is wow. This is really like, you know, and it finally like other it's happening It's definitely happening.

US#04:So please do come check us out guys We were going to be probably doing all the all the major cities up and down the eastern seaboard. We absolutely will be traveling to the California side of the world And, if you have an idea about us possibly doing this show in your city, especially if you have a skeptical community, let us know.

J:We'd love to talk to you about it. You can email us at info at theskepticsguide.org with the subject line extravaganza and I'll definitely chitchat with you if you like. Help us kick off these first couple shows we have to show that this is a viable kind of idea. You know, really, let's fill those theaters in Pittsburgh. Let's fill it up in Brooklyn and in Philadelphia. Get as many friends and as many fans as we possibly can to show that not only is this a great idea, but it's going to be fun and a viable business model. Yay! Right, that will help. And just to keep an eye out for the city, because we're negotiating for Boston, for other cities in DC, other cities in the Northeast, and we're looking at venues.

US#04:We're going to be in Portland in February, and so we're looking to book Portland and Seattle venues in February, so keep an eye out for those as well. Again, the tickets for the ones we've already booked will come on sale next Friday.

S:That's October 4th. They'll come on sale, but keep checking back and we'll keep updating you when new cities get locked in. Go for it.

J:If you're the kind of person that wants to travel from Pittsburgh to Philly to Brooklyn and see all three shows, all three shows will be different. They're similar but they're different at the same time.

US#04:You can see us in LA and you can see us in Brooklyn and have a completely different night on both nights and enjoy it in just unique ways. I love writing this show. I love putting you guys through all kinds of embarrassing rigmaroles. That to me is the most exciting thing to see you guys. Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor We rewrote this show and rebuilt it from the ground up. We love the show as is, but we decided that we wanted to give it a really strong backbone of critical thinking. In a fun, vaudeville format.

J:And you want to explain to them what these guys, what this program, what this line of thinking is about. Bring them to the show and they'll go, oh, I get it now. Okay, I understand. This is what this is about. It's not all just a heedy wordplay, but it can be fun like this. So it's a great opportunity for non-self-labeled skeptics to come to the show. So bring everybody you possibly can.

S:George, we're actually like, this is legit.

J:We're working with you now.

S:I'm so psyched about this.

US#04:I know, I know. It only took ten years, but here we go. And I will say this, not only did George make me cry the day that we met, George makes me cry at least every other extravaganza. Yeah, that's part of the goal. Humiliation in tears for Jay Novella, live on stage across the country. Looking forward to it, George. So yeah, the first one, our inaugural show will be for the new version 2.0, because we've done this a bunch of times.

J:It's been great every time. And there's a lot that's similar, but this is sort of version 2.0 that will be launching in LA on November 23rd. So we'll see you there. We'll see you there. Thanks, guys. All right, one really quick email, and then we're going to go on to science or fiction.

Emails (1:16:05)

J:All right, one really quick email, and then we're going to go on to science or fiction.

US#04:This comes from Mark Prince from Atlanta, and he writes, You have a great, thought-provoking show.

S:I don't think I'd heard you talk about survivorship bias. I found an example below, but could you give the fans some more examples? So yeah, very quickly, what is survivorship bias? It's a nice little thing that, you know, interferes with the way we think about data and information.

US#04:It's essentially dead men tell no tales, right?

S:If you're only counting the people who survive, then that biases the data that you're looking at. So we see this in medicine all the time, a classic example from my own specialty. If we look at, for example, the effects of a medication on stroke, and let's say that the medication increases the risk of stroke, but when we do the study it looks like it decreases the risk of stroke, well how would that happen? Well, if people taking the medication have more heart attacks and die, they're not around to have their stroke. We're only seeing the survivors, right? So that's why we have to look at stroke-free survival. You can't just look at stroke incidents because, you know what I mean? So you have to count people who, also people who die from their heart attack. I remember one time people said, oh, parents are so careful today with their car seats and this and that. When we were kids, we didn't have any of those things and we were fine. It's like, yeah, we're alive. The kids who died are not around to think back upon their childhood. Yeah, well, there's a filter. We survived the filter. There's a filter, right. So that's another survivorship bias. You know, it's just one of the many biases that are introduced as a confounding factor whenever you're looking at data in retrospectively or epidemiologically where you're not controlling all the variables experimentally, right? So when we're doing Any kind of observational study, this is just one of many types of biases that can influence if you don't think very carefully about how you're gathering the data. You have to make sure you're looking at everybody, not just counting the people who are around. Yeah, and I think that's an important point you made, too, because sometimes we use the term loosely. We don't always talk about people who died during the study. Like, sometimes we're even talking about dropouts of a study or, you know, people who just aren't involved in the conversation anymore. Right. Surviving could be a metaphor. They're not literally alive. They could have been filtered out in other ways, exactly. They survive in the study or whatever, or they survive in the school, or they're still taking the intervention or whatever.

C:They're still around to be counted when people that were filtered out are not. It's lost data that biases the outcome. All right, let's move on to science or fiction.

S:It's time for science or fiction.

Science or Fiction (1:19:16)

Theme: None Item #1: Astrophysicists have proposed a workable model for gamma-ray bursts that involves them exceeding the speed of light without breaking the laws of physics. Item #2: Scientists have been able to genetically engineer protein in cells rendering them sufficiently magnetic to be manipulated by an external magnetic field. Item #3: A new analysis finds that a Mars colony could be self sufficient for food for one million people within 100 years.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Item #2
Science	Item #1
Science	Item #3

Host	Result
Steve

Rogue	Guess

S:It's time for science or fiction.

S:Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Just three regular news items. Are you guys ready for these three regular news items? Yes, sir. All right, here we go. Item number one.

US#08:Astrophysicists have proposed a workable model for gamma-ray bursts that involves them exceeding the speed of light without breaking the laws of physics.

S:Item number two, scientists have been able to genetically engineer protein in cells, rendering them sufficiently magnetic to be manipulated by an external magnetic field. And item number three, a new analysis finds that a Mars colony could be self-sufficient for food for one million people within 100 years. That means 100 years after the beginning of the colony. We know what that means. Well, it could have meant a hundred years from now. You're right. Never mind. All right, Bob, go first. Oh, yay. You haven't gone first in a while, Bob, I don't think. What the hell am I supposed to do with this one? So, astrophysllsis. Good start. So they got a model for gamma ray bursts that involve them exceeding the speed of light without breaking the laws of physics. What does that even mean? Gamma ray bursts, perhaps they're warping space around them. Thank you for watching!

B:The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, What is it in Martian soil that's not good? There's some stuff in there that's just not amenable to growing stuff. But they could potentially, they could put some things with the pea. But I mean, new analysis. Sure. I mean, that's not nearly as egregious as something exceeding the speed of light like a gamma ray burst. Perchlorate. Yes. I was right about the pea. You mentioned in this Speed of Light one in the gamma ray burst, workable model. That's real interesting. It's not just... Steven Novella

E:What you're saying by that workable model implies a step above just thinking about it. Yeah, they did all the math and it all works out. Yeah, they worked it through. They didn't just think about it, yeah. I'm leaning towards that one being the fiction as well. But genetically engineering protein in cells, the protein inside the cells, rendering them sufficiently magnetic.

S:What?

E:How? What's going on there in the protein of the cells? You do this with and then and then manipulated by an external magnetic field. I mean, if the speed of light thing is making a little more sense to me than this external magnetic field and proteins.

S:Oh, that's not good. So those are two fictions.

E:And then the Mars colony, self-sufficient food for a million people, 100 years. OK, that one's just an analysis. All right. Working model. I think that one's going to be a correct one. Oh, gosh. So Protein cells, external magnetic fields. Gosh, I just don't see it, but we're- It's so stressful! It's terribly stressful. I'm sorry, Bob. I'm gonna go with this external magnetic field one. It's my gut feeling one, and I'm just gonna go with my gut. I don't like either of them, though. I think they're both fiction. Okay, Cara. Maybe just to spread things out a bit, I might go with the Mars thing. I feel like these are like numbers, very specific numbers, and also It's, you know, really far away. Everything would have to be built from scratch. It would all have to be terraformed. It would have- and when you said within 100 years, do you mean of the first people arriving or of like a colony being like developed? Of the first people touching their feet down on Mars? Yeah, I feel like it's, it seems reasonable at first blush, but when you really start to think about it, I bet you it's more like 1000 people within 100 years instead of a million or something like that, or 10,000.

C:So I'm gonna say that that's the fiction. So the first one about the astrophysicists saying that they have this gamma-ray burst that involves them exceeding the speed of light. This could very easily be explained, Steve, by gravitational waves warping the space-time fabric. I'm very comfortable with this now since I did a news item on it this week. I don't know what they're talking about here, actually, or how, but it just sounds fun. When you calmly state something, people will think, oh, he knows what he's talking about.

J:The second one here though I do have a bone to pick with the one here about the genetically engineering proteins so they become magnetic. I'm really not agreeing with this one and I think because I'm going last I think I think I know what Steve did here. I don't think that this is about cells. I think this is about nanoparticles. That's what I think Steve changed. I don't think that cells can become magnetic themselves. I think that they'd have to be infused with something else to become magnetic. And this last one about Mars colony, absolutely, 100 years, within 100 years, feed a million people on Mars, yeah. I mean, I'm playing a Mars simulator game right now, and yeah, I'm feeding like, you know, 300 million people, so no big deal. So I'm going to say that the middle one is the fake, the one about the external magnetic field hubbub, that's not true. Okay, so you guys are all spread out, so I will take them in order. Number one, astrophysicists have proposed a workable model for gamma-ray bursts that involves them exceeding the speed of light without breaking the laws of physics. He sounds so happy. Because Bob is sighing while I'm saying that. I know and you're giggling and I love it. Bob thinks this one is the fiction and this one is... Science! How is that? How the hell is that?

S:What is wrong with you, Bob? What is it? What's the gimmick here? What's the gimmick? What do you think? There's no warp fields. It's not warping space. But the gamma ray bursts are not traveling in a vacuum.

US#08:They're traveling through a gas cloud.

S:They're going faster than the speed of light in the gas cloud, but not faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, and it technically doesn't break Einstein's Law.

E:Oh, that's such bullshit.

S:So, is that what you're going to argue with these astrophysicists?

J:No, I'm just the way you wrote it.

S:I sometimes will leave out key pieces of information. That doesn't make it wrong. It's just that you have to infer what's missing. See that, Bob? No, that's really not fair. Yeah, no, it sucks when you fail miserably. So they say that it explains observed data better than previous models. So, however, it does introduce a new thing that they didn't previously know.

B:It does involve Cherenkov radiation. Bob, you know about Cherenkov radiation? Yeah, sure.

S:Yep, a type of light created by superluminal motion that was not previously thought to be generated, to be important in generating the light curves of gamma-ray bursts. So it does make a prediction about what we might observe in future gamma-ray bursts, but it does... Yeah, like a gamma-ray burst needs to be more deadly. Yeah, let's throw in some Cherenkov radiation on top of it. You know, it'll fry your whole planet and the beam is probably, could be like a light year wide, but yeah, throw some extra nastiness in it. So they say the older models, the older gamma-ray burst models neglected time-reversible light curve properties. Their model explains it, but then it introduces the Cherenkov radiation. So we'll see what the net effect of those two things are.

B:But yeah, the key is always that it's traveling faster than light in a medium, not a vacuum. Okay, let's go to number two. Scientists have been able to genetically engineer protein in cells, rendering them sufficiently magnetic to be manipulated by an external magnetic field.

S:Jay and Evan, you think this one is the fiction. But before I give you the answer, do either of you guys know about ferritin? Have you ever heard the term ferritin? Well, F-E-R, fer, implies iron or metal. Yes, that's right. No, it's metal that ferrets produce in their cages. Ferritin is a protein that actually is like a cage, Jay, although it's not a ferret cage. It's a cage-structured protein that corrals a bunch of iron, perhaps a million atoms of iron, and it's important in making hemoglobin for blood. So the idea was to genetically engineer a protein to hold so much iron it would respond to an external magnetic field. They didn't quite do it. This one is the fiction. What they did do was they made this crystalline structure that was able to hold orders of magnitude more ferritin with iron in one location, but they weren't able to get the iron into the crystals in the cells. So they weren't able to do it inside the cells. They had to break open the cells and then cram the iron into the crystals. So, it was really just a proof of concept that these crystals could hold enough iron in order to be manipulated by an external magnetic field, but they couldn't make them inside the cell. Not if it's all sequestered in these crystals. But the ferritin itself is like a million times too weak to be manipulated by an external magnetic field. So, yeah, we need to increase the ferromagnicity of the proteins by a million fold in order to get this to work. So that was what the idea was with the crystals. And it does work, those crystals could be manipulated, but you can't, they just can't get the iron inside them inside a living cell.

E:They had to kill the cell and break open the crystals and And then put the iron in there.

S:So it didn't quite work the way they were hoping. OK. All this means that a new analysis finds that a Mars colony could be self-sufficient for food for one million people within 100 years is also science. Yes. Science. Sorry, Cara. So the analysis, the title of the analysis is Feeding One Million People on Mars. But press releases could be feeding one million people on Mars. Steve, it's like that book, How to Feed. Oh yeah, how to cook humans, how to cook for humans, for 40 humans. So it was just a thought experiment, like could we theoretically, could a Mars colony ramp up its food production so that it could feed a growing colony that grows to about the size of a million people, and they concluded that they could get there within about a hundred years.

J:But it would take a vast investment in the food production infrastructure in order to do that.

C:And during that 100 years, you would need to import a lot of food from Earth.

S:Actually, if you look at it that way, it would take 100 years to get to self-sufficient. And until then, you're dependent upon a lifeline from a very distant planet. So they looked at what would the energy use be, what would the inputs need to be in terms of water and fertilizer and everything, and how would they be growing this food. In their model, we are growing vegetables, produce, staple crops basically, also insect production, lots of insects, and also cellular agriculture, so like lab-grown meat. So that was their model, insects, lab-grown meat, and staple crops. Oh great, so yeah, with an unlimited budget, of course we could do that. Yeah, with a big budget. It would be infinite, but yes, it would be very expensive, and while you're ramping up industrialized food production on Mars, you'd have to import a lot of food. Yeah, we're not even doing lab-grown meat on Earth yet, because it's too expensive. Right, oh yeah, there's nothing cheap about this. It was just theoretically, could we get there?

C:And they said, yeah, Mars could support a colony of a million people.

S:I'm never going to be okay eating bugs and that's it. That's my final statement. I'm going to make something one day with cricket flour and you won't notice. But when you tell me what will happen is I will completely lose it.

C:Are you allergic to shellfish? No, I'm allergic to fun. Okay, just making sure, because I don't want to accidentally poison you.

S:Well, can you not eat crickets if you're allergic to shellfish? Yeah, there seems to be something. If you eat crickets, will I give you crickets? No, there's something conserved in it that you might be allergic to.

J:Cara, if you feed me a cricket and all night all I hear is a goddamn chirping, I'm coming for you.

C:That's how that works.

J:Yeah, if you have a crustacean allergy, you may be allergic to crickets, but I'm not sure exactly what it is that you're allergic to.

C:Crickets!

J:Crickets!

C:But I don't know why. I don't either. It's the derivative.

J:Anyway, whatever, go on.

C:Crustaceans are insects of the sea.

J:Yes, they are, exactly.

C:I love arthropods. I doubt it's because you're allergic to chitin.

J:I mean, it must be something else. Yeah, whatever.

C:They're quote-unquote closely related. They're all arthropods. All right, Evan, give us a quote. All right, tonight's quote is in honor of those 75 people who made it to the gates of Area 51.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:34:20)

UFOs: The reliable cases are uninteresting and the interesting cases are unreliable.  – Carl Sagan, (description of author)

C:All right, tonight's quote is in honor of those 75 people who made it to the gates of Area 51.

S:This goes out to you.

C:UFOs. The reliable cases are uninteresting, and the interesting cases are unreliable.

S:Carl Sagan. I love that formulation of an observation that reminds me of what is unique to chiropractic doesn't work, and what chiropractors do that works is not unique.

E:It's the same thing. It's a very pithy way of putting things into clear focus. All right, well, thank you, Evan, and thank you all for joining me this week. You're welcome, Steve. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

S:Skeptic's 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 at theskepticsguide.org. And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com slash skepticsguide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.