SGU Episode 699

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Introduction

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, November 28^th, 2018, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening folks.

S: Cara is off this week. We're all prepping. We're going to be out of town this weekend. We're going to be at the Smithsonian and then doing an event for the Capital Area Skeptics on Saturday. So I got home from work yesterday.

B: Cool.

E: Yes.

S: And my younger daughter was home. She's 15. And she was a little verklempt. Right?

E: Oh.

B: Her lamp didn't work?

S: So she's like, she's a little worked up and she doesn't get worked up over a lot. And she's like, so like something really bad happened. I'm like, okay.

E: Oh no.

J: Here we go.

E: Oh, the laundry.

B: Don't say it that way.

S: And the water.

S: She says-

B: Where's the dog?

S: She says Stephen Hillenburg died.

J: Oh yeah.

E: Oh.

S: Now for those of you who don't know, Stephen Hillenburg was the creator of SpongeBob SquarePants.

J: Now didn't he also voice SpongeBob?

S: No.

E: No, he didn't.

J: Who voiced him?

S: Tom Kenny?

B: Yeah. That sounds right.

E: Yeah.

S: Yes, we met at Dragon Con this year. So yeah. That's how big a role SpongeBob played in her life. That she was like emotionally upset that this guy should be just the creator. He was young too. He was 58.

B: Oof.

S: He announced in March of last year, of 2017, that he had ALS.

E: Ah, damn it.

J: And it went pretty quick, huh?

S: Yeah. Then from that point forward, he said, listen, I'm going to try to work as long as I can. But he asked for privacy, which is why you weren't hearing a lot about it.

E: Oh my gosh. Of course.

S: And then it was announced yesterday, as we're recording this, that he had died the day before of complications of ALS. So yeah. Very, very unfortunate.

E: Steve, where is science right now in the battle with ALS? Where do we stand?

S: We are lost in the field.

E: Oh my gosh. We've made no progress in this?

S: No. You can't say that. It's not that we've made no progress. At the basic science level, research is active. We're learning lots of stuff. We understand what's going on a lot more than we did. But it's one of those diseases where so far, the more we learn, the more complicated it becomes and the more we realize how much we don't know. And what's been extremely frustrating is how little of the basic science research has translated into actual clinical treatments. So it's still, we're just nibbling around the edges in terms of altering the course of the disease clinically. We can't really stop it. We can't reverse it. We can't cure it. So we basically have extended survival like 20%. That's the fruit of all of the research that we've done so far.

E: Do the quacks and cranks move in on that position and basically say, hey, science can't solve this, so why not try our remedy?

S: Yeah. Oh yeah. So ALS patients are targeted and are victims of all kinds of quackery.

E: Oh gosh.

S: It's a hard diagnosis to take. And so yeah, absolutely. It's a vulnerable population. So of course they get targeted.

B: What about genetic manipulation with that? Are we at the point where we could even think about that?

S: So there is an inherited forms, actually multiple inherited forms of ALS and those would probably be the most amenable to genetic treatments. So it might be true in 10 or 15 years. We'll be using CRISPR to cure people with genetic ALS. But with sporadic ALS, we don't really know what causes it. And it's one of those things where it's not one disease. It's probably multiple factors conspiring together in different ways in different people. Yeah. It's tough. It's a really, really, really tough disease.

E: Steve, I recall you saying a while ago, this is going way back when, that roughly does it take 50,000 lives annually? And is that still the rate or is it being diagnosed more? Are we better at identifying it?

S: There are about two cases per 100,000 people per year. And I think we're not getting any better at diagnosing it because it's actually not that hard to diagnose. You know, it declares itself pretty definitively because it's relentlessly progressive.

E: Gee whiz. And does it attack a certain age group more than others?

S: Yeah. The risk of it increases with age, but the peak age of diagnosis is between 55 and 65. But that's only because there are fewer people as you get past 65. The risk for an individual keeps increasing as you age.

E: That was Hillenburg. He's right in the middle there.

S: 58, yeah.

J: And there's nothing you could do to improve your odds of getting it?

S: Not that we know of, no.

J: Is it painful?

S: No. In and of itself, it doesn't cause pain. Your muscles waste away and you get weak. It doesn't affect anything else. It's purely a motor disease. I mean, there are syndromes where you have ALS plus other stuff, but ALS itself is purely motor.

E: Is it proper to say a person died from ALS or complications related to ALS?

S: I mean, it's the same thing. I mean, it depends on how you manage it, but for most people who decide to let the disease take its course, in other words, they don't, you get to the point where you can't breathe, right? You're too weak to breathe. And then at that point, people either are in hospice and we make them comfortable or they have to permanently go on a ventilator. Most people decide to go to the hospice route.

E: Sure.

S: At that point.

B: Really?

S: Yeah. So I mean, that's dying of the disease. You get too weak to breathe because the disease itself progresses. Complications of the disease would be like you caught pneumonia or you asphyxiated, you choked on something you couldn't swallow. That would be a complication of the disease. If you just progressed to the point where you couldn't breathe, that's of the disease itself. You know what I mean? But that's a subtle distinction. So, but getting back to SpongeBob though, I do want to, I mean, yeah, get people updated on ALS, but also that was my favorite cartoon to watch with my daughters.

E: Sure.

S: It was the most intelligently written children's cartoon because it really wasn't, and it's not like South Park or The Simpsons, which are really an adult oriented cartoon, even though kids like it too. SpongeBob was a kid's cartoon but it was so well written. It was almost like they wrote it so that parents could watch it.

B: Oh, God, yes. Absolutely.

S: You know?

E: Oh, definitely.

B: There are some episodes now, like creepy Halloween type episodes and stuff, or just especially funny ones. I'll just go back once in a while and just watch it by just by myself. It's like, that's funny. Come on. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.

S: No, because there was layers. They had layers in it. It's a layer. The kids are laughing on one layer and the parents are laughing on a totally different level.

J: That's always the best writing. You know, that's what you want. You want the because if the adults don't enjoy it, it's not good for movie going or viewing, you know? So the, did you know that SpongeBob's personality was influenced by Stan Laurel, Pee Wee Herman, and Jerry Lewis?

S: That makes sense.

J: Does that make sense?

S: But I just, I think probably, I think it was Monday, so it was like the day before he died or the day before we learned that he died, I was having a long conversation with my daughter about the SpongeBob movie because she's interested in writing and we were talking about the structure of narrative, right? And I used the SpongeBob movie as an example because the movie is written explicitly to follow the epic quest narrative arc, right?

J: I didn't know that.

S: And it's actually a meta joke. Like it's so in your face, the epic, like Campbell's epic quest, that if you know that it's funny on that level. But my daughters didn't, totally didn't see that level to the movie, but like my wife and I did. So that's why we were, again, we were sort of enjoying this movie at different levels. And like, all right, so here's like one joke where SpongeBob is saying at the end, like if I didn't want to do like A or B, and like he gives two real examples, then he says, or some other third thing, which is funny, like you know it's funny, but we say that all the time, or some other third thing now, it's like a runny joke, but it's especially funny because like if you read anything about narrative structure or screenplay or whatever, it's like there's the rule of threes, right?

J: Of course, yeah.

S: Yeah. So Autumn was learning about the rule of threes, and I'm like, that's why that line in the SpongeBob movie was so funny, because he couldn't think of an actual third thing, so he just said, or some other third thing. I had to say something.

E: Clever.

J: I have a favorite SpongeBob moment.

S: That was the level of the humor, it was great.

J: Do you guys have a favorite SpongeBob moment? Because I have one.

S: Yes. Yes.

E: Sure.

S: I do.

J: This was inspired by Steve's oldest daughter, Julia.

S: I know what you're going to say.

J: The video, the show, SpongeBob is like the guy that's watching somebody back up a car, and he's telling him-

S: But it's a ship. It's a ship. They're backing up the ship.

J: It's a ship. Yeah, it's a ship, but they drive the ships. And he's going, you're good, you're good, you're good. And the whole while, the guy that's piloting the ship is scraping the whole right-hand side like terrible. Oh my God. SpongeBob is such a weird character, because you don't know... What is his major malfunction, Steve? Did you ever figure it out? Is he just a goof?

S: He's a goofy goober. He's hopelessly naive. He's like the maximally infinitely naive character. He's good hearted, but he's just a goofball, yeah. He is a perpetual kid.

J: His actual name was supposed to be Spongeboy. That was the original name, Spongeboy Ahoy.

S: Spongebob is funnier.

E: That is better.

S: My favorite moment when he's trying to prove how tough he is, so that he can get into the tough bar, and he says, I'll have you know, I stubbed my toe last week while watering my spice garden, and I only cried for 20 minutes.

J: Did you guys know that Hillenburg, he taught marine biology?

S: Oh, yeah?

J: Yep.

E: That's why the adventures took place in the sea.

J: SpongeBob's one of those things. It got deep into the culture, and he was very lucky to come up with it, and very talented to come up with SpongeBob, and it's sad to see him go.

E: Wow. 1999, and still going. Amazing.

J: Longest running show on Nickelodeon, man.

B: Oh, really?

E: Mainstay, sure.

B: SpongeBob was huge. I haven't watched it in so long, and from what I gather, the latter season just didn't quite keep up, which is hard to do, but it still got a balloon in the Macy's Day Thanksgiving Parade.

E: Oh, yeah.

S: All right. Well, we have a good show coming up.

News Items

News_Item_1 (m:ss)

• [url_from_show_notes _article_title_] 

S: We're going to get right into some news items, including a pretty heavy one, Jay. The U.S. government just came out with a report on global warming.

J: Oh, boy, yeah. This has been kind of like an escapade. It's the one that's following this story of global warming, and the science of global warming, and the denialism of global warming. This is the fourth National Climate Assessment Report, and it was recently published on November 23rd, which happened to be Good Friday, and unfortunately, there was nothing good in it, because the science is good, but what they're saying is pretty remarkably bad. In the 1990s, the U.S. Congress mandated that this report on global warming, it should be published. They wanted it to come out every four years. It has to be focused on global warming and its effects on the United States, and it's put out by the U.S. Global Change Resource Program. These reports are presented to Congress and the U.S. President, and the goal is to inform politicians, decision makers, public health officials, emergency planners, utility and natural resources managers, the general public. This information needs to be given to everyone. It's sourced through 13 federal agencies, including, and you don't have to remember this verbatim, but keep this list in mind, NASA, the EPA, the Smithsonian, the National Science Foundation, USAID, the Departments of Defense, Energy, Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, the Interior, State, and Transportation. That is a massive list of U.S. agencies. Now, it summarizes the latest findings on climate change and how these changes will impact the environment, things like the economy and society in general, like what's going to happen if it goes unchecked, and it goes into details about what we should do as well. What should the U.S. be doing to combat global warming?

S: Although, it stops short of making specific policy recommendations.

J: Not policy recommendations, but it talks about, like, if we do this, these things might be effective. You know what I mean?

S: Yeah.

J: You know, which the data's already been out there.

S: Yeah, it talks about the goals, not the mechanisms.

J: So this year's report analyzes the likely outcomes, right? You know, what will human welfare be like, societal, environmental impacts of climate change? And the report illustrates what the possible outcomes are if the U.S. doesn't take action against global warming. And it also goes into some different countermeasures that could reduce some of the worst outcomes. That's what I was talking about. It warns that the world is heading towards catastrophic climate change. And if drastic measures are not taken against greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, we are going to be in extraordinarily bad shape. When I say we, that means globally, humanity will be in bad shape. But I thought that the first sentence really, it just summarized the whole thing really well. So here it is. We are now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities. The impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future. But the severity of future impacts will depend largely on action taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the changes that will occur. That's it in a nutshell. Now, it goes into detail about what changes we can already measure, like extreme weather, extreme droughts, more energetic hurricanes, frequent and heavily destructive wildfires. You know, California, if you've been paying attention to the news. And the least amount of temperature change will be 1.3 degrees. That's what they're saying. That's the absolute lowest temperature change from pre-industrial levels. And the worst will be 6.1 degrees. These are in Celsius.

E: Whoa.

B: Oh.

J: Now, it's 6.1 degrees. They're saying that if any temperature reaches above 3 degrees, from 3 up, it's devastating and long-term consequences. You know, we're talking like legit massive die-off of species, of humans, massive loss of property, land coastal areas.

B: Dogs and cats living together.

J: The next few things I have here that I listed out that I want to read to you, this is all the bad stuff. Ready? The report goes into detail saying that there'll be degradation in clean air and water. Crop pollination. Wood and fiber production. Think about that. Clean air and water. Crop pollination. Without crop pollination, you don't have crops. And wood and fiber production, I mean, wood is far and away like wood and steel. You know, these are the things we build our reality out of. Fiber production to name the most obvious, like take cotton out of the equation. So like I said, increase in coastal flooding, wildfires, a die-out of important native species. You know, like imagine if animals that are hunted for food, like fish as an example. Imagine if we have a major drop-off in oceanic fish. Well that's a huge chunk of the food that a huge chunk of the human population lives on day to day. And then they were talking about massive increases in disease and insect outbreaks. So climate change will dramatically impact something else that I found very interesting. They were saying the cycle of rain and snow. Now it's good that it doesn't rain a lot every day. And it's also good that it's not dry every day, right? You want a balance and you don't want either one of those two extremes to get too extreme. So what climate change is going to do is it's going to turn up the volume on the extremes. So we'll have these intense droughts and then these intense torrential downpours. And that is going to impact everything. That's going to impact one of the things I probably wouldn't have thought of at the top of the list is energy production because hydroelectric power plants, crop yields would significantly change down into the very low numbers. Soil erosion would be horrible. There would be rampant insect growth that would eventually spread disease. And this you could draw an absolute straight line between all those things I listed to economic hardships and price increases, food shortages humans will have to deal with much more hotter weather. That will increase human mortality rates and the report just simply suggests a drastic reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. So when I say simply, I don't mean it's simple to do it, but it's just reduce carbon dioxide emissions. That's what we need to do. So anyone following global warming wasn't surprised to find out that the White House released this report on Black Friday. On Black Friday. Now that is not a coincidence. You know, they released the report two weeks before it was actually supposed to get released. The authors of the report were shocked that it was released when it was because the White House did it strategically hoping to bury it and there's politics for you. You know, politicians are making decisions like this deliberately. You know, you don't release a report like that on Black Friday. You know, anyone that is following politics knows that that's just give me a break. You know, you don't release that Thursday after Friday afternoon on Black Friday when everyone is with family and shopping and no one's reading the news, no one's paying attention.

S: And Trump's response to this fairly thorough report put out by his own government was, I don't believe it.

E: OK. There you go.

S: That was his response.

E: Great.

S: Did you guys see the ManBearPig episode of South Park this season?

J: Well, the new one. You mean the one where they hated it?

E: No, I've not seen the new one.

J: Yeah, the new one.

E: But I heard about it. I heard about it.

S: It's great. So, to me, this is a little bit of a bright spot in all of this because what I'm seeing is that the effects of global warming are starting to become so obvious. You know, like, oh, we're having the worst fire ever and the worst hurricane ever. And I mean, is this all a coincidence or this is exactly the kind of things that we've been predicting for the last 20 years we're going to start to happen around this time when with global warming. And so we're seeing some people on the reasonable right like Max Boot, who's a conservative columnist, although he's anti-Trump, wrote a column recently saying, I was wrong. I was wrong on global warming. I believed all of the denialist rhetoric and now it's clear that I was wrong. I looked at the science and the science is pretty clear. The authors of South Park, same thing. They thought that Al Gore was an alarmist about global warming and they basically made fun of him with his whole man-bear-pig thing on their show. And now they're doing a show basically saying you were right and in the show, of course, man-bear-pig is real. But the thing that's brilliant is the people who are denying man-bear-pig in the face of the the blatant evidence and they're just repeating all of the global warming denial rhetoric, but in the face, like the bears literally killing people behind them over their shoulder.

E: Oh, yeah.

S: And they're denying it. And then they see it and he's like, well, what are we going to do about it, you know? So the thing is, the global warming denial approach is the conclusion is we do nothing, that we don't have to do anything about this. That's their conclusion. You know, pseudoscience and denialism as a pseudoscience starts with the conclusion and then reverse engineers back from there, right? So if that's your preordained conclusion, it doesn't really matter what you use to get there. So you start by saying, well, the planet's not warming. And then once that becomes too obvious to deny, it's like, well, OK, maybe it's warming, but it's a natural cycle. It's going to get better. It's like, OK, no, it's man-made. It's like, well, even if it's man-made, it's not going to be a problem. Nope, it's going to be a problem. Well, what are we going to do about it? If China's not going to do anything about it and India's not going to do anything about it, it's nothing we could really do. It's going to cost too much, blah, blah, blah. It's like, actually, no, it's going to be cost effective. So I was sent a commentary in The Wall Street Journal, which is basically their editorial policy as global warming denial, that was quoting this report and saying, oh, this report came out, and it's not going to be so bad. It's only going to cost us half a trillion dollars a year by the end of the century. We can afford that. Basically, it was like, we can afford global warming. We don't have to worry about it. If you compare that, it's like 10% of our economic growth between now and then. It's no big deal, nothing to see here. And then they're quoting like the most extreme alarmists. Again, it's like that, if you say you want to do anything about global warming, you're an alarmist, right? That's the premise. And what really needs to be done about it is minimal to nothing. But I do see that they're starting to say, OK, maybe we should have a carbon tax, maybe. You know what I mean? Like they're starting to, the denialism is starting to crumble at the edges. Here is Senator Ben Sasse. I think his response is typical. So he says, I think the real question, though, becomes what do you do about it? Because you can't legislate or regulate your way into the past. Right now, you don't hear a lot of people who put climate as number one issue. You don't hear a lot of them offering constructive, innovative solutions for the future. It's usually just a lot of alarmism. What the U.S. needs to do is participate in a long-term conversation about how you get to innovation. And it's going to need to be a conversation, again, that doesn't start with alarmism, but that starts with some discussion of the magnitude of the challenge, the global elements to it and how the U.S. shouldn't do, shouldn't just do this as a feel-good measure, but some sort of innovative proposal. This is right out of South Park, where they're literally going on, yes, I think that we should begin to talk about having a conversation about what we could possibly...

E: Yeah, right. Let's form a committee to talk about a committee.

S: Yeah, this is not far off from what South Park was making fun of just a couple of weeks ago. The guy has no awareness. Right? But you get that. It's all like, oh, we can't have any of this alarmist. Let's just begin to explore this and talk about thinking about having a conversation about innovating and blah, blah, blah. It's like, as long as we don't have to actually do anything.

J: The problem is the deniers out there are all revolving around the same maypole. It's the same rhetoric. It's so predictable. It's like any time you see any kind of debate, and I was watching Bill Nye talk to some senator about it, and it's like they're not even being innovative in what they're saying. It's like what you just said, Steve, they're like, well, first off, you're not a scientist, Bill. I'm not a scientist. No one really understands this.

S: Yeah, it's just doubt and confusion.

J: And then it clicks over to Bill, and he's like, you don't have to be a genius to understand this. The fact is that we have a scientific consensus, and we have to respect that consensus and respect what those people say, and then it clicks back, and every time it clicked back, it was just more denial and more confusion and not actually trying to help the situation in any way.

S: I think it's multifactorial. I mean, clearly, there's a lot of money flowing from the oil industry to people who are taking the denialist position, but in addition, I do think, and we talked to a lot of true believers there as well, I think that they've created a narrative, and the narrative is that these crazy liberals are using climate change as a way to push through their socialism and to take control of industry. That's the narrative, and they believe it. We talk to a lot of people all the time who actually believe that narrative, and nothing you say has any effect because it's all a liberal conspiracy, and they're utterly convinced that that's the case. And once again, once you crawl inside of a conspiracy theory, you have rendered yourself immune to facts and logic. And so that's the people who I think will never change their mind. Florida will be under six feet of water, and they'll have some excuse about it's all a liberal plot.

E: It's temporary.

S: Yeah, right. And then I've actually I've heard people say, well, it'll cost less to just deal with the effects of global warming than to prevent it from happening. How do you know? I mean, that's just, it's like, whatever the argument they can come up with so that we don't have to do anything, because doing something is somehow giving in to the crazy liberals in their mind. It is absolutely a triumph of motivated reasoning and ideology and narrative over facts and reason. And the scientific consensus is strengthening. It's moving consistently in the direction of higher and higher degrees of confidence that man-made global warming is happening. And the consequences are not going to be good. And it's not just about money. I mean, the thing that was good about the government report is they said it's actually cost effective for us to prevent this from happening. It will cost us less to prevent global warming than it will cost to deal with the consequences of it. And so even if you're taking a narrow economic argument, it makes sense to start to do things to actually prevent it. But it's, you can't just count up the numbers because also people's health are going to be adversely affected, right? Not just from the direct pollution, but also by increased temperatures. So this will make people sicker and increase the number of deaths due to climate and due to pollution. And that is going to have a huge cost associated with it as well. And then it's not for nothing, I mean, displacing people from coastal cities. Like, yeah, we could deal with it. I'm sure we'll adapt. You know, they say, yeah, we'll build levees. We'll adapt. OK, yeah, sure. But it's going to be extremely disruptive. It's going to be a massive negative impact on our quality of life collectively.

J: Well, I mean, and how do you put a value on one life, 10 lives 10,000 lives, you can't even calculate it. You know, this is what we, there's no question that if we believe in the science, that we have to take massive action and everyone's going to...

S: But the thing is, the action can also just be making our energy infrastructure better. You know what I mean? It's like, even if you don't believe in global warming, a lot of the things that we could do to prevent it or to minimize, you can't prevent it, but to minimize it at this point are things that are beneficial in and of themselves.

E: I mean, my gosh, why would we stick with old, worn out, damaging technologies? That's not how we are we still driving Model T Fords? Of course not. I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy to think that way. Why wouldn't you want to be more progressive in your technology, in preserving your environment? It makes no sense.

B: Yeah. Not just that. How could you possibly advocate? Yeah. Let's potentially put the climate over a tipping point where there probably could literally be like no way to come back in any way reasonable. To me, that's the most ridiculous. Why would you even want to flirt with that possibility to reach some point where the climate just settles into some new place that's like, oh boy, what's going to happen now where it's like you really can't predict with any certainty? Why would you want to even do that? Get that huge gamble.

S: Oh, Bob, you're just being an alarmist, Bob.

J: Another thing that Bill Nye said was that, he's like it's smart for countries to invest in technologies that are going to counteract this because it's going to be massively valuable. It's going to be a huge investment in technology that you would sell to the world.

S: All right. Let's move on.

News_Item_2 ()

• [url_from_show_notes _article_title_] 

S: So have you guys heard that they changed the kilogram?

B: Yeah. About time.

E: They changed it?

S: Yeah. Well, they tried to keep how much a kilogram is as stable as possible, but they changed the reference. So this is-

E: Oh, it's no longer that weight, that dumbbell kind of shaped thing?

S: Right. Le Grand K. It was a cylinder, right? So in 1879, the kilogram has been defined by definition by the weight of a physical artifact, a cylinder of platinum and iridium, right? This is the International Prototype Kilogram or the IPK. And then copies of that were made and sent to standard institutions around the world. I think the US had a couple of them, whatever. And then those were used as then standards, the standard kilogram in their area. So if you had to calibrate a scale, you would use your local copy of the kilogram. Then every now and then, you would ship it back to France and compare it to the prototype to see how far off it is.

E: So that changed.

B: But who would actually make that comparison locally? Who would actually do that? Universities or government institutions?

S: Yeah. Yeah. Businesses? Scientific organizations? Yeah. Bob, everybody would. Eventually, every scale gets calibrated off of that.

B: Well, Stu Leonard's isn't calibrating with any standard. You know what I mean?

S: No. But the scales that they bought, that technology was calibrated to a copy of a copy probably of the prototype.

J: Yeah. But when you say a copy of a copy, are you saying that there is a diminishment in accuracy from the copies?

B: Sure.

S: Yeah. But it's so tiny. It doesn't...

B: Thousands of millions of atoms difference.

S: Yes. Right. But unless you're doing scientific research, it doesn't matter, right? If you're measuring the weight of produce or something, it's not relevant.

B: Yeah. It's millions of a penny.

S: Right. But if you're trying to do a scientific measurement, it could be. But there's a problem with the physical reference, right? Because it changes over time, no matter how careful you are. Further, this is something that I didn't think about explicitly until I was researching this topic.

B: roton decay?

S: No. It's hard to scale. What if you need a scale that you're using to measure tons or micrograms?

E: Right.

S: It still has to come off of that kilogram.

B: Oh. Errors magnify.

S: Yeah. But not only that, but so you can't calibrate a microgram scale with a kilogram. You have to use that... You have to do multiple intermediate scales to work your way down or to work your way up, right? So it's not scalable easily. That does introduce errors, and it's just very time-consuming. So all of the other metric measures have, over the years, gone over to something universal. It's not based upon a physical artifact, not an artifact-based reference.

B: But a constant of nature.

S: Yes. An idea-based constant, a constant or a physical law-based reference. And the kilogram is the last one to do that.

B: Yeah. What took so long?

S: Well, I'll tell you what took so long is we literally didn't have a way to do it. We didn't have a way to base a mass measurement on a physical property that was accurate enough. We didn't have the accuracy. So now we do. And so it was waiting for a scale, a balance, that was accurate enough to serve as the standard. What we have now is the Kibble balance. Have you ever heard of that, Bob, a Kibble balance?

B: I have. Maybe.

E: My dog has.

B: I think I heard and then forgot.

S: Yeah. There's only like six of them in the world. I tried to find out the exact number, but I couldn't find any primary reference. But that's what I read as a secondary reference. So there's not many of them. It's single digits, whatever there are. So it's based upon a couple of laws, right? So it's based upon E equals MC squared, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. It's also based on another physical property where it is Planck equation, energy equals the frequency of radiation times Planck's constant. And since you have energy in both of those equations, you could then make HV equal to MC squared. And so now we have an equation with mass in it and with frequency in it. So if you could measure the frequency, you could then measure, you can calculate the mass. Does that make sense?

B: Yeah.

E: Yep.

S: So we needed a very precise measure of Planck's constant because that's in the equation two, which we now have. So that was another barrier, right, Bob? So now that we have... So they used a Kibble balance in order to precisely measure Planck's constant. And now we can use an agreed upon precise number for Planck's constant with a Kibble balance to precisely measure a kilogram. So that completed the circle. So let's see. The Kibble balance is based upon Josephson's constant and the von Klitzing constant. These relate electrical resistance to frequency. So it basically uses the force produced by a current carrying wire in a magnetic field to balance the weight of a mass.

J: So it uses the force?

S: It uses the force, yeah. So you could measure precisely the force necessary to balance the weight and that on a Kibble balance. And then that could give you... If you know Planck's constant, you could calculate a precise mass. So then you could define a kilogram in this way.

B: And you could scale up and down.

S: And it's infinitely scalable. That's the beauty of it. Yeah. Exactly. So that's the... It's very, very useful because of that scalability.

B: Wow. This is fascinating.

S: Yeah. Isn't that great? Science and technology moves forward.

E: Now what becomes of the...

S: Artifact. The cylinder.

B: I saw it on eBay.

S: It becomes a historical artifact, but it will no longer be necessary as an actual reference. But now it's just a historical curiosity.

E: Does that mean we can touch it now?

S: That's a good question.

B: You could spit on it now.

S: I mean, they'll probably still keep it. It was in a double bell jar. I guess they'll probably still keep it there. Why not?

E: It'll wind up in a museum.

J: What do you think a scientist would do if they're walking it around and they drop it? Would they pick it up, brush it off, and just put it back on the small bell jar?

E: First they look around to make sure nobody saw that.

S: There's a big dent in the side of it.

E: Five second rule.

S: They can't even touch it with their skin. They had to handle it with gloves. Even like your fingerprint would change the weight of it.

E: That's crazy.

J: You can't handle the kilo.

S: All right. Thanks.

News_Item_3 ()

• [url_from_show_notes _article_title_] 

S: All right, Evan, you're going to finish off the news section with an update on the Mars InSight lander.

E: Yeah, InSight. Once again, we humans have successfully landed a machine on the planet Mars. It's called the InSight mission. InSight stands for the Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport. InSight, yes. It's a robotic lander designed to study the deep interior of the planet Mars. We know a lot about its atmosphere. We know a lot about its surface. We do not know a lot about its interior. This is going to help us. A few little stats on the project, manufactured by Lockheed Martin, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Though it's a NASA project, it is also a multinational effort comprised of scientists and engineer from multiple disciplines, including personnel and companies from the United States, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. It launched back on May 5th, 2018. That is our official birthday, isn't it, May 5th, SGU day. It rode aboard an Atlas V-401 rocket and successfully landed at the Elysium Planitia on Mars November 26th, 2018, so just a few days ago. Yeah. It took almost seven months to get there. It traveled 438 million kilometers and touched down. I love when these things happen. It's so exciting.

B: As Douglas Adams said, a ballet of technology.

E: It's so much fun to watch the control room when these things are happening, because everybody is so tense. I mean, you can see people biting their fingernails and rocking back and forth in their chair. You're feeling the emotion. You're feeling the excitement. When it actually happens and the moment is announced, everyone just breaks out in celebration and high fives and hugs. It's awesome.

B: Oh, yeah. Can you imagine? I mean, this is not only the culmination of a project. I mean, they've spent years on this, but one big, bad mistake, one big conversion from metric to some other non-metric can totally kill it, and that's it. You just lost like five or 10 or more years of research and your degree. All this stuff you lose, because this is obviously incredibly difficult. They messed that up, man.

E: It's so risky.

B: You're done. It's like, oh, that's it. Now what do we do?

E: Yep. Yep. It's only as good as the weakest link in the chain, as they say, but this chain was strong the whole way through. Now that the lander is down, before the scientists actually hit the start button for InSight to conduct its experiments, the scientists today are now working with the InSight test simulation here on Earth. They're calling it Foresight, and it's a way that they can do rehearsals and tests and scenarios to play out here on Earth in a simulated Mars environment. So when they game these things ahead of time, they can reset it as many times as needed, and it will really help reduce the chances of something going wrong when they instruct InSight to get to work. Here's the thing. Scientists don't know exactly where on Mars InSight is, but they have a rough idea. They've got it down to a few, I think a five square kilometer area, but they're trying to hone in on it again. They have been able to learn some more about its location, but it's going to take probably another week, maybe two, for them to nail it. And the observers that are going around Mars currently will be able to confirm some more pictures for us later on next week. So we'll know much more about this next week, exactly where it is. Now their initial analysis is suggesting, this is the news today, because it landed two days ago, but today they're saying that they hit pay dirt, or rather pay sand. They believe that InSight landed inside the rim of a very small crater, which has a nice blend of sand, which gets everywhere, right Jay?

J: Yeah. It's coarse.

E: It's coarse. But it's good, because the sand inside of the crater has fewer large rocks and other things to get in the way. So it's on a nice bed. And they're saying it's not too sandy either. So there's adequate support in this spot to support the weight of InSight appropriately as it goes into its full operational mode. So they're very optimistic about where it actually did touch down. And they're going to be able to dig, they said with no problem, one of the instruments, it's called the HP3. It's a heat probe instrument. They're going to measure the temperature of the interior of Mars. And they say getting through this level of sand and down below will be, should be no problem. They anticipate it's going to go very well. So they hit a real good sweet spot where it landed.

S: Good.

E: That's where we are.

S: I watched the whole news conference they had. Everyone's so excited. But it sounds like it just went, it's going perfectly well. So far it's a really successful mission.

E: Definitely is. Definitely is. It's got a couple of different devices on there. There's the HP3, which is the temperature reader, the seismic detector. It's going to map out the seismic waves of the planet that it's generating. And there's also a radio science experiment called RISE, and it's going to measure the wobble of Mars's pole. And they're also going to use RISE to sort of help them hone in on exactly where this is, where it is, and they'll be able to track it in to actually locate it, which is why they think maybe in another week or so they're going to find out exactly where this is, pinpoint it.

S: Cool.

E: Continue their tests. And in a couple of weeks, they'll be digging and getting to work. So more to come on InSight.

S: Awesome.

B: And to bring it full circle, I'll end with a Facebook meme I just saw. Scientists have again landed a spacecraft on a proverbial dime on a planet 40 million miles away that rotates at 241 meters per second. I think I'm going to trust them on this climate change stuff.

E: Very good point.

Who's That Noisy? ()

Answer to previous Noisy:

_brief_description_of_answer_ _perhaps_with_a_link_

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

J: So last week I played this noisy. [plays Noisy] What the hell is that, guys? What is it? What is that noise?

E: Had a little bit of a treble quality to it, but I don't think that's right.

J: The worst guess came from Nathan Spahn. Nathan said it's a vacuum tube radio from the 1930s switching between different frequency bands.

E: Why is that the worst one?

J: I know. I asked myself that. Somebody has to have the worst guess, and that's why I just put it in that slot. I thought it was a fun idea.

S: It was an erudite guess.

J: Yeah. I've never heard that noise that he's saying. I'd like to hear that noise. But no, that is not the correct answer. So the notable answer came from someone who signed... His Gmail account is always geologizing, and I think his name is Devin Coetzee. So thank you for the email, Devin. He's from South Africa and currently teaching high school geography in the UAE. And he starts his email. I'm so angry with myself for this noisy. I thought I'd sent it in the 21st of October, but never sent it to the Who's That Noisy email. I used Steve's email as a backup and it failed. Ha, Steve. Thanks a lot for forwarding that to me. So this week's noisy, the noisy is seismic waves traveling through the Arctic ice shelf recorded on super sensitive seismic sensors. One more time, super sensitive seismic sensors. For a period of two years, showing various changes in melting of the uppermost layer of ice. I hope you all keep well, love the show, binging every moment I can since I only became a true skeptic in 2014. So there it is. That's what it is. It's a wonderful noisy, super entrenched in science and global warming. So I love it. But the winner for this week, this comes in from John Garrett. And John said, hi, Jay, long time, first time. You're always asking for noisies. And last month I finally heard one I wanted to send to you. I love your segment and I often have decent but always wrong guesses. Don't we all? My wife and I have a two month old daughter, Lucy, and life is busy as you can imagine. So I just saved my noisy figuring I'd get back to it later. So now we fast forward to this morning, Lucy and I were listening to the November 17th show. And we get to the Who's That Noisy segment and they hear the exact noisy he was going to send me. And he said, it's the humming of the Ross ice shelf.

New Noisy ()

J: Now I have a new noisy. This noisy deserves no explanation. And here it is.

[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

J: So of course I need to know who that person is. And I would like also to know what they were wearing during that recording. I'm just kidding. You can email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

short_text_from_transcript

Announcements ()

J: Guys. We are 180 patrons away from reaching our goal of 3000 and 3000 as you know, is my goal to become a full-time employee, 180 people.

S: Getting close.

J: We're so close. We're so close guys.

S: We want to get there by the end of the year. And to help that along, we are going to have a holiday special, Jay, tell them all about it.

J: Oh my God. This one took a lot of work. So lots of people have been asking for signed copies of the book, which we understand. So this is what we did. Now this is a multi-tiered thing. I'm going to explain it to you, but know ahead of time that you're going to go to a page on the website. And I'm going to tell you what that page is right now, because I'm going to make up the name of it right now. It's the skeptics guide.org forward slash SGU holiday, 2018, no spaces, no, nothing SGU holiday, 2018. When you go to that page, you're going to be, you're going to see three options that you have. Option number one, you can download an image. The image is going to be a mad lib. You know what a mad lib is? It's a sentence that's not complete that you get to fill in some details on. It basically will let you fill it in and say the gift giver, which is you is giving a present to the person that's receiving it. So I was like, Steve is giving Jay this present. And the present is, the first version of it could be a gift of patronage. You can give them a gift account at Patreon. The way that you would do that is simply go and create them an account. Then when you fill out the form on the webpage, you're going to tell me how long you want it to last. And I will email you when you, when it expires. So if you say, Hey, I want to give someone a $30 present or a $40 present, you're going to give them three or four months at the $8 level, then I'll email you when you want it to expire and to remind you to expire it and help you, exchange hands with the person if they want to continue the membership. That's the simplest thing. You download the file yourself. You can give it to them as a Christmas present and it would take you all of 10 minutes to do everything you need to give someone a Christmas present. Level number two, you want to buy someone a signed copy of the book and you fill out the form that says, I want to buy a signed copy of the book. You pay us through PayPal and I will mail you a signed copy of the book.

S: But also you're going to send us information on how you want to personalize. We will personalize every book.

J: Yeah. But you could also say they like this, they like that, make up something and we'll, we'll come up with something for you. No problem. Or have Jay or Bob make a funny drawing. We'll do anything you want. The third level, this is the motherlode. I'm formally naming it the motherlode. You are going to give someone a signed personalized copy of the book and you are going to give someone to some degree, a gift membership to our, our, to become a patron of the SGU.

S: Yeah. So it's both together.

J: It's both together. Now, if you do that, what I will do is I will print out the card for you and I will fill it out with the information that you want me to put in there. I'll make it, it'll, it'll be better cause it'll be done on computer and not be done, by somebody writing it with a magic marker. But the cool thing is, is I will package that on top of the book cause the card will be the size of the book cover. So in essence, you're going to get one package. It'll be the book with that card and packaged inside of it. And all you have to do, I'm going to mail it to you and all you got to do is wrap it and give it to them. It's very simple and very easy Christmas present. So the instructions will be on a page called the skeptics guide.org forward slash SGU holiday 2018 you'll see the three different things that you can do. So please do help support the SGU. If you can, you can give the gift of reason. Give our book, give the gift of patronage and anybody that becomes a patron during this three week special that we're running is going to get a link to a, a video that only those people will be able to see. So no existing patrons are going to see it. It's all only going to be patrons that join from the first to the 25th. But if you want that book delivered to you before Christmas, you better order it before the 15th.

S: And supplies are limited because you only, you only got a a lot of books that we're assigning and once they're done, they're done.

J: Yeah.

S: All right. Thanks for all of that Jay.

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups ()

Question_Email_Correction #1: _brief_description_ ()

S: We're going to do one email. This is a fun email. I had a good time researching this. This question comes from, it's written, it says regards Kick from the Netherlands.

E: I like that.

J: That's good. That's clever.

S: And he writes, this might make a nice segment on the classic skeptics subject of Atlantis. This channel on YouTube claiming to have found Atlantis in the Sahara has a few million views already. It did make a good segment for the show. I got two blog posts out of this email because first I went down, I went down one rabbit hole and that led me to a tangent leading to a second rabbit hole. You'll see. So, okay. The video. Video's by a guy named Jimmy and Jimmy believes that he has found Atlantis in Africa. And he thinks that it's the so-called eye of the Sahara or the Richat structure. That's R-I-C-H-A-T. And he makes all kinds of parallels between Plato's description of Atlantis and this structure and said, there you go. It's got to be it. Right? Classic pseudoscience in that he is he's taking all of the superficial similarities and then really exaggerating their specificity and their significance. And he's ignoring all the fatal flaws or just like really dismissing them with some very casual hand-waving. So it's good like when you have your conclusion, this is like motivated reasoning, right? It's a great example of it. Okay. So, quickie background on Plato.

J: It's a thing that kids play with. It comes in all these different colors.

S: That's right.

J: You know, you can eat it, but you shouldn't, but you can.

E: It's a little salty.

S: So, Plato wrote about a mythical city of Atlantis that was beyond the pillars of Hercules, which is basically beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, which means in the Atlantic Ocean.

J: And it predated him by what, 9,000 years, Steve?

S: His source by 9,000 years. That's 11,600 years ago from today, 9,600 years ago from Plato. And he said that, so it's the ancient advanced civilization that displeased the gods and then the gods destroyed them in a night of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and the islands sank into the ocean and they were never heard from since. He used it as a rhetorical device when discussing his perfect moral city of Athens and the Atlanteans were attacking the Athenians, right? So, they were the evil empire a long time ago and far, far away. If you recall.

E: Yeah, sure.

S: That lecture we had on it used that analogy.

E: That's right. Kenny Feder talked to us about that.

S: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. You have the initial question of, did Atlantis even exist? You know, did Plato intend this to be a real claim that the city actually existed sometime in the past? If we just look at it that way, not archeologically, just historically, right? The consensus is that Plato was using Atlantis as a rhetorical device and he didn't really, he wasn't making a serious claim that, yes, this place Atlantis really existed. But actually I think that when you're talking about the existence or non-existence of these historical places or mythical or legendary places that you shouldn't fall into a false dichotomy, right? It's not as if the Atlantis as described by Plato existed or it's 100% mythology. It's probably a complicated combination of many things, of culture, of the kinds of things that people believed at that time, their own narrative about their own history, stories about other places that were destroyed by volcanoes or whatever, gets woven into this, okay, like he didn't, Plato didn't make it up out of whole cloth. There's probably lots of inspirations that went into his neat little story about Atlantis. What we can say is that the Atlantis that Plato described is mythology, right? He did not have knowledge. There was no chain of reliable knowledge that came down from Atlantis to Plato. Even if you make assumptions that like Plato was horribly wrong about the date, maybe it was only a thousand years before he lived or whatever. Some people try to do that. It's only like 3,000 years ago, not 11,000 years ago, to make it more plausible. It's still, that's a thousand years. We have no chain of provenance for that information, you know what I mean? And there's no other reference to it, only references to Plato.

J: Right. He's the only person that ever brought it up.

S: Yeah. Before Plato, there's no reference to it. Now, there are actual historical ancient places that we only have one reference to. So that is not a fatal flaw to the claim in and of itself. But you have to think, what's the plausibility that Atlantis existed based on Plato's reference to it? It's very thin. And even if there are some tendrils of history that found their way into the legends that resulted in Plato's description of Atlantis, it's not Atlantis. It's not the mythical Atlantis of Plato's description. It's very similar to when we talked about the historicity of Jesus. Maybe some guy or multiple people existed whose life events got woven into the Jesus myth, but the Jesus of the New Testament didn't exist, right? As a historical figure. Same kind of thing. So it defies saying it's not 100% myth or 100% fact. It's mostly legend, but you can't rule out that there's some real tendrils in there from something transformed out of recognition from whatever they were originally. I also liken it to Robin Hood.

E: OK. Mm-hmm.

S: You know, the legend of Robin Hood is based on a lot of real stuff. You know, that was a real place, and King Richard was real, and the Crusades were real, and Nottingham existed. That doesn't mean that the legend as told was of a real person, that it's historical or factual. You know what I mean? Robin Hood is a fictitious character, but there's elements of real history woven in there. Imagine what that's going to be like in 10,000 years or even 1,000 years, especially without, if we don't have the continuity of culture that we currently have. But anyway, so Atlantis probably doesn't exist. So even saying that I found Atlantis is really problematic. What did you find? What is that place? You know, is that place the Atlantis as described by Plato in his writing? I mean, there's no reason to think that that exists. Did you find something that maybe something happened to that could have been an indirect inspiration for elements of the story of Atlantis? Perhaps you're now getting so many steps removed, who knows? But let's go over the specific claims. So Atlantis, as described by Plato, was an island, but there was concentric circles of land, like two concentric circles of land and then a central island, and therefore three concentric circles of water, like canals. And then there was a canal that ran down the middle of it, connecting all of the waterways to the central island. And it was in the middle of the ocean, right? Or at least it had to be connected to the ocean. But again, this is sort of where you choose the details you want. And say, look, Plato got that exactly right. And then you ignore the details that you don't want, because they have nothing to do with the find.

B: It's an interesting shaped mountain peak.

S: Yeah. So you look at this, it's actually not a mountain. It's a dome.

E: Volcanic, isn't it?

S: It's a dune. It's not volcanic either. And it's not a meteor impact, although you might think that from looking at it. But what it is is a dome that collapsed. So yeah, so it's a geological structure. There's no question that it's a geological structure. And geologists have been poring over it for years because it's a very interesting geological structure. And even Jimmy now has to admit that, yeah, OK, it's a natural structure, but maybe they built Atlantis on the natural structure. Special pleading. That's just a nice little example of special pleading. And the circles it's not like they're walls. And they're not really complete. You know what I mean? They sort of go all the way around, or they're more a little like overlap on each other, like a spiral would a little bit. But here's a massive problem to his claim. This whole thing is 1,200 feet above sea level.

E: Oops.

J: That doesn't work.

S: If anything, yeah, it's like that's a fatal flaw. If anything, the ocean was lower thousands of years ago. So there's no way this thing could have been accessible from the ocean, in which case Plato's description cannot possibly match it. But Jimmy just doesn't even address that issue, that fatal flaw to this location, which is massively inland. It's inland, and it's way too high above the ocean. He says, oh Plato said it was built out of black, white, and red rocks. And you could find rocks of those colors on the site. You could find rock-colored rocks at the site, but not, again, walls, not worked stone. There isn't a single worked stone anywhere to be found. And it's not any different than any other similar location in terms of the colors of the rocks. Of course, Plato also said there was platings of copper, and brass, and silver, and stuff there. None of the metals. Well, what about the complete absence of any artifacts? So some of Jimmy's apologists say, well, what if a tsunami came through and wiped away all physical evidence that there was anything there? It's like, you're telling me there was an advanced city on this location, and we can't find a pottery shard. That does not exist.

E: Sorry.

S: That does not happen archaeologically. You know, you can't have a city existing in a place for decades, hundreds of years, however long it was there, allegedly. And there's no evidence left behind. Then they say, well, we haven't looked. It's like, well, archaeologists haven't been looking, because it's not an archaeological site. But geologists have been looking, because it's a geological site.

E: And don't you think they would have called in the archaeologists if they saw something that might have even possibly resembled some sort of artifact?

S: Yes. I mean, one of the things that geologists do is figure out what's natural and what's man-made, right? If they came across anything man-made, they would be all over it, right? And then he does other superficial things, like Plato said there were mountains to the north. And look, there's mountains to the north. Wow. What are the odds? And there's a plain to the south. Like, OK. Actually, then he points to a sand, like a sand dune to the southwest. It's actually more west than south, but he's counting that as south. So he's kind of forcing the fit. So he's like just picking the things that sort of fit. He's forcing fits. He's using superficial similarities, high probability things, like what are the chances of a circular structures? There are circular structures all over the place. And ignoring fatal flaws. So this is just his claim is terrible. It's just terrible. So when you pile all up, it's like all the circumstantial evidence, you pile it up and you present it without any of the negative stuff, it can be compelling to the naive, right?

E: Sure.

S: So people watch as they go, wow, it's too many coincidences for this not to be onto something. It's like, no, actually there isn't. This is where the critical thinking comes in. When you're familiar with that process of circumstantial evidence and forcing fits and looking for things, you could make correlations out of anything, you know what I mean? If you really try hard enough. And he's not doing what he should be doing, what an actual scientist would be doing, which is trying to shoot down his own hypothesis, right? Because as soon as you start to do that, it collapses as the flimsy structure that it is. The guy's a crank is the bottom line. He's not a scientist. He's just a crank and he's getting millions of hits because he's trying to make a YouTube career for himself.

E: Jimmy the crank.

S: Yeah. So you would think that that's where the story ends. But there's at the current moment, 209 comments on my blog post about Jimmy and the reshot structure. And what's interesting is, I mean, a lot of people are just attacking skeptics, right?

E: Sure.

S: Saying like, oh, all you're doing is sniping from the sidelines. This is how science works. You make a claim and then other people pick it apart. If you don't want to do that, then you're not doing science. Get out of my way. You know what I mean?

B: Get out of my way. I love it.

S: And then all the apologizing. Wouldn't erosion have to... No. No. It would not have obliterated the evidence of a city on this location. If this were the location of a city, no. But here's the one that really caught my attention and that led me down the second rabbit hole. Multiple, multiple people made the analogy to Troy, which I've heard many times before as well. And it's just like one of those background claims. It's like one person wrote, Atlantis, a myth, perhaps the story, but is the story based on something? Let's remember, Troy was a myth until rediscovered in 1870. Another commenter writes, they laughed at Heinrich Schleiman. That's the guy who discovered Troy, but he found Troy and started for the most part, the science of archeology. Another guy writes, back in 19th century, the consensus of actual scholarship is that Troy is a myth. Thank you, Heinrich Schleiman, for not caring about consensus, right, in a way of dismissing the scientific consensus. One more. This is like an endless game of spot the logical fallacy by reading these comments. So I said, yeah, but we haven't found any evidence so they found evidence of Troy. We found no evidence of Atlantis. That's the difference between the two. And the commenter writes, yes, because they were digging. Before digging, Troy was a normal hill. Troy walls were found after archeological excavations. No digging were done in reshot structure, so nothing was found, obviously. So much for your logic. My logic, Schleiman used solely Homer text to locate Troy. Then he started digging and found it. Jim used solely Plato's text to locate Atlantis. When somebody starts digging, he, she may find it. Until you learn about how Troy was found, all you have is bad logic. Here's the thing. Everything in those comments is not true.

E: Other than that.

S: Yeah, other than that. But all of the skeptics in the comments were correctly pointing out that just because Troy turned out to be true, it doesn't mean that Atlantis exists, right? Just because that we didn't know that Troy was real, then Schleiman found it and we said, oh, okay, that Troy was real. That doesn't mean that every single thing in legend and mythology is real. And it doesn't really even lend plausibility to Atlantis, because you had, the texts are completely different. But then I said, yeah, but you know what, I bet you that even that story that I'm being told here, even though it's so I dismissed the logic, but I'm like, I bet you that that story is more complicated.

B: Yeah, of course.

S: And yes, and not only is it more complicated, it's so much more complicated that it's basically not true. So this is the second rabbit hole. Did we actually find Troy? And again, I go back to my original comment about false dichotomies. It depends on what you mean by Troy. And here's all the disanalogies here, the poor analogies. First of all, Troy was in the Trojan War that Homer wrote about in his epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, allegedly took place in the 12th to 13th century BC or BCE, if you prefer, which was 400 years before Homer wrote his poems, not 9,000 years, but 400 years. So that's a lot closer. And he was writing about mostly places that we knew existed, right? And in fact, at the time Homer was writing, there was pretty much continuous knowledge that Troy had existed, you know what I mean? Like at that point, Troy was part of history. And Troy was part of, was known to have existed from antiquity into modern times. So the idea that everyone laughed at Schleiman and the consensus was that Troy was mythology is actually not true. In fact, the place where Troy was found, Hisarlik, is in Turkey and the locals knew that that location was an ancient city and the local belief was that it was Troy. In fact, it was a tourist attraction. So hardly unknown. Now what is true is that in the 18th century, a guy by the name of Wolfe wrote a paper deconstructing Homer's Iliad and saying that actually a lot of this was pieced together from preexisting legends. So he did an analysis of the text and said that the most parsimonious interpretation is that the whole thing is mythology. And so there were people who were in that tradition in the 19th century, but it was a very short tradition, less than 100 years old. So it was actually only a recent belief that Troy was maybe mythology and it wasn't the consensus, but it was one school of thought. There were still plenty of archaeologists who thought that Troy was real. So it was much more complicated than saying that they all laughed at Schleiman. It's not true. In fact, there's a notion that Schleiman figured out where Troy was from Homer's text is completely not true. Schleiman, by the way, let me back up a little bit. He's a very interesting character.

B: You're good. You're good.

S: He was a rich guy, very smart, spoke a lot of languages, used that to trade goods. He was German and he made lots of money. He became so wealthy that he retired young and he became an amateur archaeologist in his 40s because he could. And he was fascinated with Homer's Troy and wanted to find it. And so he was looking for it, but he didn't know where it was. He's an amateur, although apparently very smart, although he also was apparently a con artist and a relentless self-promoter. He found another archaeologist by the name of Calvert, who was living on the land where Hisarlik was contained, where Troy was eventually found. And he did some preliminary excavations of Hisarlik and he believed that that's where Troy was. Now Hisarlik is what's known by archaeologists as a tell, T-E-L-L. A tell is a large mound that's artificially created by building on top of ruins, right? So it's like multiple layers of buildings, which eventually build up into a massive artificial mound. And when you see a tell, it's not like that one comrade who said it was an ordinary hill. No, it wasn't. It was a tell. Everyone knew that it was ruins. The only question was, what ruins are under there? And so Calvert was convinced that Troy was under there, but he didn't have the money to excavate it and he couldn't get a grant. So he went to Schleiman and Schleiman said, yep, I'll pay for the excavation. So then Schleiman did the excavation and didn't give Calvert any credit for the claim. He totally stole all the credit for himself, even though it was Calvert's idea. If Calvert were able to get funding, he would have been the guy who discovered Troy. Schleiman did not invent archaeology, by the way. He was just its first real popularizer. So there were many archaeologists that believed Troy existed. One of them told Schleiman where it probably was. Schleiman then excavated it. He did a very clumsy, amateurish job. He used explosives. He just destroyed evidence as he went. And he found what he claims were the treasures of Priam. Now Priam, Paris's father, king of Troy in the Trojan War in the Iliad, and said, therefore, this is Troy. This is not only Troy. This is the Troy of the Iliad, of Homer, because I found Priam's treasure. It turns out he probably faked a lot of that evidence. He almost certainly collected jewels and gold and stuff that he found there and then claimed to have located it all in one place. But he probably also purchased artifacts and faked artifacts and included them in the treasure to make it more big and impressive. However, despite all that, he did uncover actual cities in that location and did reinvigorate the belief that Troy was probably a real place. Later, more careful excavations found that there's actually nine cities in that location, which are called Troy 1 through 9. Schleiman found the alleged treasures of Priam in Troy 2, which was an early Bronze Age level, which was before the Trojan War and absolutely could not be the Troy of Homer. If the Troy of Homer exists there, it's probably Troy 6, because that's a late Bronze Age level. That's the right age. So just by dating it, and yes, there are big city walls that do match the description, roughly, it's plausible that what we're finding there at that time was a city similar to the Troy of Homer. Was it the Troy of the Trojan War? We get back to our false dichotomy again. The Trojan War, as told in the Iliad, probably never happened. But there probably were wars occurring in that location and probably some of those stories eventually got woven into this one nice poem that Homer wrote, you know what I mean? He probably he is bringing together a lot of these tendrils and then tying it up in a nice little story. And some of them are, were modified, were altered, were mixed in from other traditions. There's one speculation that because Poseidon is the god of horses and earthquakes and the ocean, that a city that was destroyed by an earthquake by Poseidon could have been interpreted as destroyed by a horse, which could have led to the Trojan horse legend. Who knows? But that's the kind of level that we're dealing with, right? It's like a 400-year-old game of telephone by the time you get to Homer. So there probably wasn't a Trojan War. There was probably lots of conflicts and maybe some of that information got incorporated into the Iliad and the Odyssey. Some of the details were only talked about after the fact in the Odyssey.

E: Well, geez, what's next? We're going to go looking for the freaking Cyclops and send a team out to find out the Minotaur?

S: Yeah, exactly. So it's still not clear. It is still not clear if that is the Troy of Homer. So it wasn't true that we didn't think it existed. It's not true that afterwards we knew it existed. It wasn't true that there were other archaeologists who didn't believe in it or that they laughed at Schleiman. Schleiman also screwed up a lot. He didn't actually find what he said he found. There are papers today deconstructing that claim the claim that this was, that this is Troy. It's still not completely accepted. And it's just a mess. It's just a complete and total mess trying to find out what actually is going on there. And the idea that, well this, again, the actual myth of Troy is now the story that the Atlantis apologists are telling, which has evolved into, oh, they all laughed at Schleiman because the consensus was that Troy was a complete myth. And then he found Troy and proved it was real.

E: All wrong.

S: Yeah, it's just, it is, that's apocryphal, right? That is not what actually happened. I knew a lot of this stuff, but it really crystallized for me, like how little we actually do know about the past, about the ancient past, and how hard it is, these little thin tendrils of evidence that we have. So the claim that a narrative like the Iliad and the Odyssey was based on a real city, Troy, therefore Plato's writing is based on a real city, Atlantis. That's the logic that they're trying to use, but it does not stand up to scrutiny. It just falls apart when you actually look, even scratch even a little bit beneath the surface. And I'm giving you a hyper-simplified version of these things, right? This is what I've been able to wrap my head around on these topics. I'm sure if there's an actual scholar listening to the show, an archaeologist or a scholar on Plato or Troy, yes, I'm missing a lot of nuance.

E: Oh, you missed a bunch of stuff.

S: I'm sure, absolutely. I'm missing a lot of nuance, but again, this is like, this would be a three-hour show just on this topic, just to get to any kind of, that's like, you could teach a course on this. You can watch, you can write multiple volumes of text about this. Of course, we're not going to get to that level, but I think I tried to give a good impression of, at least you could see a little bit how deep it goes and that these simplistic narratives that people are using for rhetorical purposes are nonsense, are just complete nonsense. Because I think both Troy and Atlantis have really captured the imagination. That's why there's so much interest in them. There's something very romantic about these stories and about these places. They have good marketing. I also think there's a lot in the name, like the name Atlantis is cool. I think that's like Nostradamus's fame is 99% that he has a really cool name. Right?

B: Right.

E: What's in the name?

S: I mean, Nostradamus has the coolest prophet name ever.

B: It's pretty awesome.

B: And the Disney Atlantis movie, I actually like that.

E: Oh, gosh.

S: That was, oh my God. That was total nonsense.

E: Based on a true fiction.

S: Let's move on. Well, I guess it's time for science or fiction.

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Science or Fiction (h:mm:ss)

Item #1: _item_text_from_show_notes_ Item #2: _item_text_from_show_notes_ Item #3: _item_text_from_show_notes_ Item #4: _item_text_from_show_notes_

Answer	Item
Fiction
Science

Host	Result
Steve

Rogue	Guess

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

S: Each week I come up with three news items or facts, two real and one fake. And then I challenge my panelist, Scott Fix, to tell me which one is the fake. Guess what the theme is this week?

J: Christmas.

S: Archaeology. Archaeology.

E: Archaeology.

S: Yes.

E: Ar.

S: Are you ready?

E: Yar.

S: Okay. Here we go. Examination of the ruins of the great library of Alexandria result in an estimate that it once contained 700,000 scrolls. Number two, the Voynich manuscript is a 15th century book entirely written in an unknown language or code and full of mysterious images of plants, zodiac signs, and other undecipherable images. And item number three, the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal is a 2,600 year old archaeological find containing 30,000 clay tablets and fragments. Evan, go first.

Evan's Response

E: The examination of the ruins of the great library of Alexandria. They're saying it once contained 700,000 scrolls. So, therefore, they must have counted the shelf space. I mean, or something equivalent, right? Is that, that must be how they're basing it.

S: That's the idea.

E: Yeah. And I suppose you could do, I think you could flesh that out pretty accurately and come to a pretty good.

J: It gets them close, right?

E: Yeah, it gets you pretty close. On a scale of 700,000. Okay, so maybe it was 698,000 scrolls. I have a feeling that one's right. The Voynich manuscript. The 15th century book. Voynich, I say. Written in an unknown language or code full of mysterious images, plants, zodiac signs, and other undecipherable images. Gosh, I don't know a lot about this one. I've heard of it. Yeah, weren't Yale scholars trying to figure this damn thing out? And it is. It really is a mystery wrapped inside an enigma and a puzzle. How's that go? And, yeah, I think it's, I think to this day it remains indecipherable. I think that one's right. Now, this last one, the Royal Library of Ashbury Park is a 2,600-year-old archaeological find containing 30,000 clay tablets and fragments. This is the one I've not heard of before. In India?

S: Iraq.

E: Iraq. Modern-day Iraq, huh? Mesopotamia. Oh, 2,600 years old.

S: At that time it would be Assyria or Neo-Assyria.

E: Okay, all right. It doesn't really help me. I don't know what to do. Well, I have a feeling, I'm pretty confident about the Voynich manuscript. I know nothing about this Royal Library, the Great Library of Alexandria. I'll say it's the Great Library of Alexandria. I think that their estimates didn't come to the conclusion of 700,000 scrolls. It's either an order of magnitude larger or smaller than that. How's that?

S: Okay. Jay?

Jay's Response

J: Okay, this is really hard, Steve. Wow. My first question about the first one about the Great Library of Alexandria is, were there ruins? If there were ruins, because it burned down a long time ago. What kind of ruins would we have? If it burned down, then what would we know? What would the ruins tell us that would be able to give us an estimate of 700,000 scrolls? I think I agreed with what Evan said. Maybe it was its capacity. Most of the stuff that it had in there were in scroll form and not actually in what we would consider to be a book form. I don't know that. I'm just saying. If it's scrolls, then maybe they could figure how many could they fit. But that would be very hard to do because how big were the scrolls? What about the variability in size of the scrolls? I would imagine that if they have a number like 700,000 scrolls, that that was written down by someone. So I'm not sure the ruins would say that it held 700. That the ruins would be able to, through science, they'd be able to figure that out. The second one, the Voynich Manuscript. Now, I have definitely heard of it. So, yeah, there's not much to say because it is a mystery. It is a very weird thing. I always thought that it was like somebody was having fun creating their own thing. You know what I mean?

E: Yeah.

J: So, I mean, I don't know if the Voynich Manuscript has anything to do with that. But, I mean, everything here seems okay with me. And then we've got the Royal Library. And, again, I agree with Evan. Agree, whatever. I haven't heard of this. I don't know. I don't have much to go on here. 30,000 clay tablets and fragments. Is that a lot? I mean, I would imagine a clay tablet. I always kind of picture it like in the biblical sense. You know, like this big clay thing. You know, I've seen them in museums. I don't know. Like a clay tablet versus another clay tablet. How big are they? Is 26? I mean, is 30,000 a lot? Probably. Sounds like a hell of a lot. So I don't know, Steve. Okay. So let's do this. I'm going to the first one, though, again, I think I'm hitting on something there. I'm going to go out on a limb here, and instead of picking the last one about the Royal Library of Asher Ben-Tapal, I'm going to say that there's something wrong with the first one about the Great Library of Alexandria.

S: Okay, Bob.

Bob's Response

B: Yeah, I thought similarly to both you guys, the second two, the Voynich manuscript, I don't think I've heard of that. And I was thinking maybe it is just these scribblings and kind of a joke. But the thing is, though, if you created a whole book of nonsense, you could mathematically prove that, yes, this contains no information. You could actually determine that, I think. I could still see that happening. And the same for the last one with the Royal Library. I mean, I don't know enough to say whether it's reasonable to have 2,600 years ago to have such a number of clay tablets. I don't know. So the only one that's really rubbing me wrong is the one I know most about, which isn't that much, admittedly, but the Great Library of Alexandria. And, I mean, the way you're phrasing this is a little bit sketchy. You don't give any evidence of when this examination of the ruins was done. It kind of leads you to think that it was a recent examination. And then, of course, I think, well, what the hell's left? How the hell are you examining anything about the Great Library at this point? I just agree with everyone else that the Great Library is fiction.

E: Oh, boy.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: Well, let's go to number two, then, since you guys all agree on number one. The Voynich Manuscript is a 15th century book entirely written in an unknown language or code and full of mysterious images of plants, zodiac signs, and other undecipherable images. You all think this one is science. And this one is science. Yep, this one's cool. It's a mystery. We still don't know.

B: Still a mystery, huh?

E: Still a mystery.

B: People with modern computers and code breaking.

S: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a whole book. It's handwritten. This is in the age just before the printing press, right? So the thinking is—

B: Language, right? Probably a language.

S: Well, it's probably a code. I mean, it's probably not a made-up language. So one hypothesis is that this is the whole thing's a hoax, right? But that's not the dominant belief. The other hypothesis is that this is a personal book.

E: A diary?

S: It was not a diary. So before the printing press, before you could go and buy a copy of a book people would curate information and write their own book out of the information they needed from multiple other references, right? You would go to a library or whatever, and then you would—

E: Oh, it's the equivalent nowadays of downloading your information and storing it all in one device.

B:Like a mixtape.

S: Exactly.

E: A mixtape.

S: This is a mixtape. So whatever information is in there, this person wrote it for themselves, and therefore they're the only ones who had to read it. And so they wrote it in some notation or code or whatever. So what the hell is it then? If you look at this book, what the hell is going on here? There was a recent paper that the hypothesis is that this is a book about women's medicine. It's a medical book about women. A lot of the pictures are of women, of naked women, of like weird shit with naked women. So they're thinking maybe this is just a pre-scientific book of medical treatment of women and female ailments. And that's why there's a lot of picture of plants. Maybe it's an herbology kind of text that he's copying here, parts of what was thought to be female anatomy. You know, there's obviously a lot of magic mixed in as well, which there would be in a pre-scientific medical text. Could be a lot of alchemy, whatever. So that's possible, but that hasn't really gained wide acceptance, that hypothesis. And a lot of other scholars have kind of ripped it apart a little bit. So I'd say at this point, really, that's just a hypothesis that has not been proven. And it needs further examination, I think, before that hypothesis is really supported. But no one has totally cracked the code, right? This guy just thinks, oh, look, these abbreviations could be the kind of abbreviations that were used for herbology or whatever from these other texts. So there's some tantalizing clues there, but no one's cracked the code, which is interesting, right?

B: Yeah, I just see an article here. AI didn't decode the cryptic coinage manuscript. It just added to the mystery. It made it worse.

E: Oh, great.

S: And it could be the the imaginative ravings of some kind of practitioner who just was making up weird crap about how we thought the female body worked. Who knows?

Steve Explains Item #3

S: Okay, let's go on to number three. The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal is a 2,600-year-old archaeological find containing 30,000 clay tablets and fragments. You guys all think this one is science, and wouldn't that be amazing if we have 30,000 tablets from 2,600 years ago? What a treasure trove of knowledge of the ancient world that would be.

E: Would.

S: And that one is science.

B: Yeah, baby!

S: Good job, guys. This is like the best archaeological find that we have in a way. It's 30,000.

B: Better than the Dead Sea Scrolls?

S: 30,000, Bob, and older than the Dead Sea Scrolls. And some of these tablets are, like, complete. When I say fragments, I'm not talking about a little chip. I'm talking about, okay, they have half of this one, two-thirds of that one. There's a piece broken off of it. But I've seen pictures of, like, complete tablets covered in writing, and it's literature, it's history, it's science, it's government records, it's all kinds of writing from the time. This is a massive library, and 30,000 is a lot. That's huge. This is the single biggest window we have into that time and place in history, the Near East, basically, from the Bronze Age. Very awesome. Okay.

E: Now we know.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: All of this means that examination of the ruins of the Great Library of Alexandria results in an estimate that it once contained 700,000 scrolls is fiction because both of those components are fiction. We don't even know where the ruins of the city of Alexandria are. And 700,000, while that is quoted as a figure for the number of scrolls it contained in its heyday, is almost certainly an overestimate, probably by an order of magnitude.

J: So I nailed it, Steve. I nailed it.

B: We all did.

E: Some of us nailed it first.

J: I didn't say that. I didn't say that, Evan.

S: You got the first part.

J: I'm saying that I nailed it. I didn't say Evan didn't and Bob didn't.

E: Okay, fair enough.

S: You got most of the way there, Jay. We don't even know if the Great Library of Alexandria existed. How about that?

E: Wait. What? Wait, Hypatia?

B: Don't even say that to me. Next thing you'll tell me, Atlantis doesn't exist.

E: Or leprechauns.

B: Or Eskimos.

S: The story that Sagan tells in Cosmos is largely a fiction.

E: Oh, no.

S: It's a nice, tidy little story like the Trojan War that probably is just as loosely based on reality.

J: See, this is why I don't believe in anything.

S: Well, you got to be very, very careful about any kind of simple story like this. So, all right. What was the Great Library of Alexandria?

J: Well, what we know, it was great.

S: It was probably something that it is based on probably did exist. And it was the Temple of the Muses. The Muses were – and that's where we get the term museum from, right? This was the museum. And that did contain a records room, a book room, right? So, they did have a book collection, which probably did not look like a big open library with stacks of shelves. It was probably just a series of rooms where people could go to study and learn. And there was books stored in each room, or in this case, scrolls.

J: And did you ever hear, Steve, that any ship that came into the port –

S: Yeah, yeah. The idea was that any ship that came into the port, they would have to turn over all their scrolls. And they would be copied and they would be given back the copies. And the originals were kept in the Library of Alexandria. Who knows if that's true or not. So, here's the thing. We're not really sure what the building was like. We have no information about the building itself, right? No architectural information. The ruins have not been discovered. We're not really sure what was in there. Some guy estimated that probably at that time, there probably only were about 30,000 scrolls of knowledge in the world. And so, 700,000 is massively an overestimate, unless you're including a lot of, again, government bureaucratic reports and stuff like that. If you add up all of the literature that existed at the time, etc., there probably was only 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 scrolls worth of information at the time. I don't know how accurate that estimate is. But the estimates of how many scrolls probably were in the Temple of the Muses ranges from about 30,000 to 700,000. But the 700,000 figures totally pulled out of someone's backside. There's no data to support that. And it's probably almost certainly a massive overestimate. Now, there was no, like, oh, the library was in its heyday and it was burned to the ground, right? We don't know what the fate of the library was. But what we can piece together, it was probably destroyed over decades, maybe even centuries of neglect and events happening. There may have been a fire at some point. There is writing that Julius Caesar burned part of it when he was there. The city was a central point. It was a very volatile location. And it was sacked a lot of times, Alexandria. But there was also sub-libraries, like other places where books were kept. It's not clear if the scrolls were kept in the same place that the school was. So all these questions exist. So, again, that neat little story of that it was like the center of knowledge in the ancient world and it was destroyed is certainly not true. The other thing is there were hundreds of libraries around the ancient world at that time. And the idea that this was unique is also probably nonsense. So, anyway, it actually – I was actually happy when I was, like, doing a deep dive on this today. It's like, okay, so it wasn't as much of a tragedy as sort of we've been led to believe. It wasn't that big a deal. I mean, it was probably a great collection of scrolls. Absolutely. It was a center of learning. It probably was a massive collection there. And it was lost to history, but it's not clear exactly how or why. And it probably was multiple events over a long period of time. But there's no reason to think that it was a unique collection. There were competing libraries that were probably as big elsewhere.

J: So I'll say it, Steve. We don't know shit about it.

S: Yeah, and we haven't found it, you know. Some people think that it's – we probably will – if we looked under Alexandria, we may find the ruins of what was the Temple of the Muses.

E: So in Cosmos, when Carl Sagan was on the streets there and he actually walked into a small little doorway into this dust-filled room and said –

S: All CG, yeah.

E: Well, no, not – yeah. But he was – what was he basing his information off of?

S: Yeah, again, that's sort of one version of events, but it's not really scholarly.

E: Oh, boy.

S: It did serve his rhetorical purpose as well for that show, but it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.

E: Oh, he was pulling a Play-Doh on us.

S: Yeah. Yeah, totally.

E: Wow.

S: I have to say.

E: You got to follow the bouncing ball here. It moves quickly. Jeez. It's a hell of a simulated reality we're living in, I tell you. Very, very creative creators, whoever they are.

S: Yeah. But there are reports of Hypatia being the daughter of the last librarian in Alexandria, and she was killed by a Christian mob, apparently. But it's not – the library may not have even existed at that point, you know.

J: Well, I learned a lot tonight, you know.

E: Yeah, we touched on a lot of cool stuff.

S: Yeah, I like archaeology.

Skeptical Quote of the Week ()

(quoted text)  – _alternate_display_text_for_name_ (_birth_year_-_death_year_), (description of author)

S: Okay, Evan, give us the quote.

E: "Atlantis continues to captivate people's imaginations because it offers the hope that lost ideals or some untapped human potential will someday be uncovered, not the masonry blocks of a dead civilization." And that was written by Kevin Christopher in 2001 in an issue of Skeptical Inquirer.

S: Yeah.

E: And the main sentiment there is that, yeah, Atlantis is more – really more of an idea. And that's what people – that's why we keep coming back to it, and people are fascinated with it. And some have legitimate wanting to understand it and learn about it and figure out what really may have been going on. And there's others like Jimmy out there who are taking a whole different cranky approach to it. So...

S: Right.

E: It's a good reminder.

S: All right. Thanks, Evan.

E: Thanks.

S: All right, guys. Well, thanks for joining me this week.

J: Right. You got it, Steve.

B: Sure man.

E: Thanks, Steve. See you in D.C.

S: Yep. We'll see you guys in D.C.

Signoff

S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

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Today I Learned

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

References