SGU Episode 104

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SGU Episode 104
July 18th 2007
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 103                      SGU 105
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
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Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, July 18^th, 2007, and this is your host, Steven Novella, President of the New England Skeptical Society. This evening, we're going to have a shorter than usual episode. We have an interview scheduled with Brian Trent coming up in just a moment and that interview will be the entire show for this week. Unfortunately, this was unavoidable. There were a combination of personal events this week. Skeptical rogue Jay Novella is getting married in a few days. This we were planning on. We were planning on Jay's wedding and we were going to try to work around it. However, unfortunately, there was also a death in the family. So the combination of those things did not leave us time to do a full episode. But we're still going to bring you the interview that we had scheduled with Brian Trent. So let's go to that interview now.

Interview with Brian Trent ()

• Author of Never Grow Old: The Novel of Gilgamesh
• http://briantrent.com/

S: Joining us now is Brian Trent. Brian, welcome back to the Skeptics' Guide.

BT: Thank you very much. It's great to be back.

S: Brian is a professional essayist, screenwriter, and novelist and we interviewed you actually a little over a year ago about your book, Remembering Hypatia, and now we invited you back to discuss some essays that you've written on immortality.

BT: Right. Well, it's been kind of a subject that's interested me lately. My newest book just came out, Never Grow Old, and it deals with the mythological analysis of immortality, but I have also done scientific readings on it as well. So it's been a subject that's interested me for a long time.

S: Well, you're also a columnist for the American Chronicle, and you do have an article in there on this topic, and you do discuss the history of man's obsession with immortality. So why don't you tell us about that?

BT: Well, it's interesting. I mean, the oldest story that we know of, and actually the story that I used to base my new book on, is the Gilgamesh legend. This is back when they were pressing stories into wet clay. It was before scrolls, way, way, way before ancient Greece. And the first story that we know of is about man's obsession with immortality. It's been, as far as we know, from the dawning of sentience with our species and the dawn of our civilization. This is a subject that our recognition of our own mortality and the desire to increase our longevity and our life and to remain existent is something that's obsessed us for a long time. In ancient China, the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, was obsessed with immortality. He sent people all around the world to find the elixir of life. He had his body encased in a full suit of jade from head to toe, because they would believe that jade was the bone marrow of Pengu, the creator god. It would have regenerative properties. The Egyptians are an obvious example. They're just a lot of stock in the idea of immortality, even though it didn't work out very well for them, since even though they would remove all the organs of the body and put them very carefully into penultimate jars, they would discard the brain.

S: Right. That was an unimportant organ. Scrape it out through the nose, throw it away, yes.

BT: But it's going into everything. One of the lesser-known adventures of Gulliver on Gulliver's travels was he went to an island of immortals where people would live forever, but they would keep aging. You had these people who would become these babbling, helpless idiots, but they would be around forever. They were just sucking up all the island's economy to try to take care of them and keep them fed. Because they wouldn't die off, you just had that population of immortals ever increasing and ever destroying what society they had, which I think is pretty farsighted of Jonathan Swift to write something like that, because that's obviously one of the concerns if some of the new scientific explorations of this subject turn out to bear fruit. It's a relevant philosophical and cultural and political subject in time.

B: Was that a prevalent topic in his day? I know a lot of the islands that Gulliver visited was basically a commentary on society. So how did that really apply to his contemporary society when he wrote that?

BT: Yeah, and that's what I was able to cover. Swift is, I think, what I consider one of the true literary geniuses. He also was a hopeless misanthrope. His views on humanity were extremely dismal. It's almost hard to read some of his works sometimes because he has such a dark view of human nature, but he also was, like I said, very farsighted and he's just analyzing different islands. Each one of those islands, like you said, provided him an opportunity to analyze religion, government, war, different aspects of cultures. I think it just came in time. He might have been thinking that far ahead. Certainly people were was obsessed with the idea of immortality since Gilgamesh, so it may have crossed his mind, but that certainly allowed him—it's a very relevant metaphor that he left us. I believe it was—I think they were called the Stroldbrugs or Stroldbugs or something like that was the name of the island. It's been some time since I've read the book, but I do recall that very vividly.

S: But it does bring up a point that you also write about, which is—we could talk about the scientific question of immortality in a moment, but you also write about just the impact that this would have on society, on civilization, and the reactions that different segments of civilizations are likely to have to the prospect of immortality.

BT: Right. It's a subject—I mean, I'm a fan of scientific progress. I'm a fan of a lot of humanistic philosophies, and certainly I consider death, aging and death to be a mechanical problem. That can be solved through mechanical means, but that doesn't make me blind to the very real conundrums and the very real ramifications of that research. As I mentioned, I think that was the article, too, that I mentioned where, what do you do when you have an immortal board of directors on a company, or you have senators who have languished in the Senate of a particular country for 500 years? What happens to the arts when you don't have the—mortality has been a muse for music, for writing, for so much. One thing I suggested was that, much as Anne Rice implied and explored with her vampire novels, the idea of something that an immortal sentient being might find things plenty to be upset about, because even though you're not necessarily dying, it's not your own mortality you're exploring, the world around you still changes. You are a constant in a universe that is defined by change. Certainly when you consider the laws of entropy and the fact that the stars are going to burn out, our star itself is like an arrow shot. Its timeline, the hourglass has been turned. It's not going to be there forever, so I believe that as a species we'll still find plenty of things to motivate us artistically. Of course, if I'm wrong, you're looking at more or less the calcification of progress and the calcification of inspiration.

B: Well, death, even if we were immortal, death would still happen. There would be catastrophic accidents and maybe even suicide, so I think that would make death even more tragic and something that artisans could treat as a muse. Imagine how tragic a death would be if somebody dies when they're 50, when you know they could have lived for millennia. It's still a tragic thing.

BT: Right, that is a very valid point. I know when I spoke to Michael Rose at the University of California at Irvine about his research on breeding quote-unquote immortal fruit flies, he talked about the idea there was still a mortality distribution curve. Unless you're going to get into more transhumanist ideas, I'm not a big fan of some of the ideas of that community, but it's difficult to predict the science. It's very difficult to predict where things might go. I find some of the arguments very counterproductive, quite frankly, whether or not they're right, but the construction of the minds is a physical thing, even though pop culture and certainly religion have the idea that there's this spiritual dimension to it. If it is a physical entity with neurosynapses and the construction through our lives of bridges that have been built as we, as our reflexes develop and as we encode memories, could that be transferred digitally? Would you always have backup copies of a certain mind? Would the future Albert Einstein or future Joe Citizen be preserved digitally so that there really would be no final death?

B: Yeah, the medium isn't all important. It's really the pattern that's really important. It doesn't have to be this electrochemical substrate. It could be silicon or something much more exotic.

S: It could be, but it's not just a pattern. I don't think that our existence is simply a pattern. It's a combination of the pattern and the hardware. The question is, could we migrate our consciousness over to another medium without losing the actual continuity of the self?

B: Right. That's a key concern in my mind, is the continuity. I don't care if they were able to duplicate my mind in any other medium and then destroy the biological residue. That residue is me. You'd have to maintain continuity. That's why some of the ideas I've heard about where it's a slow metamorphosis of your biological brain into something more hearty and the new substrate, that's appealing to me because there wouldn't be any break where you exist in two places or you don't exist and they recreate you type of thing.

S: Yeah, there would be a period as a hybrid where you were both biological and digital and then eventually the digital you would predominate over the biological, but at every point it's still you. Otherwise, as you say, you just got a clone who may have all of your memories and everything, but it isn't a continuation of yourself. But for civilization, that wouldn't really matter. It would still be entities with memories hundreds or thousands of years old that are inhabiting our civilization.

R: But it's funny because when we talk about immortality like that, we don't usually think in terms, or at least I don't think in terms of what would be best for society, like keeping a hold of the memories of these individuals. Instead, I think about what would be best for me living on and on.

B: Absolutely. Me, me, me.

BT: Yeah. There's no denying that there is a selfish driving force behind that. Even going back to the Gilgamesh legend, it was when Gilgamesh loses his friend in Quito, he goes off in search of immortality because he is totally devastated, completely ripped apart. This is one of his best friends in life, but he's not looking for immortality for himself because he doesn't want to suffer that same fate. So yeah, I mean, sir, I certainly agree with Rebecca. I mean, it definitely does have that idea that it is a selfish thing. But on the other hand, I mean, we're blessed and cursed to be, as far as we know, the most remarkable species to ever evolve in this world, 500 million years of life.

S: And just to clarify, so we don't get any emails, you're referring to multicellular life.

BT: And you've had very successful species like the dinosaurs and other organisms which have lived and died and changed, but in such a short period of time of our species, of upright walking hominids, and then of course the very, very short history of our civilization, which you can trace back to 5,000 B.C., maybe a little more, as far as it depends on who you consult and the different records and different cities A on Earth. But we've done so much in such a short period of time, it is a curse in a way that we're so keenly aware of how fragile we are. We forced our way to the top of the food chain. We didn't have natural armor. We didn't have poison sacks. We weren't these bulky titans. We were, frankly, a fallen ape in a way that had to stand upright to look over the tall grasses to survive in the savanna region of Africa, and just happened to have freed up our hands. We could start using tools, and throughout this whole process, we've constantly remade our environment. We're the ultimate shapers. We can cut down trees and build a house. We defy nature. We defy the elements at every chance we get, and I frankly celebrate that. There's nothing... Winter is a deep freeze that happens in this world, and species or cows are killed off. Well, we defy that. We become little Prometheus's. We light our fires. We persist through the glacial ages. We persist through whatever is thrown our way. The idea that us expanding our lifespan to points like that, to quote-unquote indefinite... I mean, it's a flashy, sensationalist term, immortal, but the idea is longevity research, way beyond the seven, eight, maybe nine decades that we are granted by nature's design, I think is inevitable. I think it's something that is a very important scientific problem, probably, as far as we're concerned, maybe the most important one right now.

S: Right. We're hitting a lot of points that I want to come back to. One was, as Rebecca mentioned, the difference between what's good for the self and what's good for civilization, and that, I think, is at the crux of a lot of this. I mean, you could argue that our mortality, as you were saying, has a lot of strengths for society, for civilization. There's constantly new people coming up with new ideas and fresh eyes on the world, and the old and stodgy and calcified are moved out of the way to make room for what's new. And what would be the long-term impact of having scientists controlling the upper echelons of science but locked into their ways of thinking that are maybe centuries old? There's a quip, which I think is a bit outdated, but it goes that science progresses on the deaths of those who came before, so new ideas only take hold when the people who are clinging to the old ideas die off. To the extent that that's true, extremely long lifespans would impede progress, because it would lock in these old ideas.

BT: Of course, that does bring up an interesting question as well. You look at Isaac Neumann, you look at a lot of luminaries throughout history, Archimedes and so forth, who accomplished things very early in their lives. Historically, especially in the history of science, a lot of discoveries seem to be made by people who are in their 20s or in their 30s. But is it because people gradually get older? Is it so that it's set in their ways so much as just whatever driving OCD or whatever it was that was really pushing them onward to be fanatical about something? Do they kind of, as their bodies age, as they settle into older eras of their lives, do they just kind of calm down and that spark, that burning kind of tends to evaporate a little bit? Or is it just people do get set in their ways no matter what, and they're not open to new ideas because they harden like those old Mesopotamian clay tablets?

S: That's a really good point because there actually is a neurological basis for people getting set in their ways. Yeah, there's a pruning effect that goes on in the brain where you lose neurons, you lose the ability to make entirely new pathways, etc. So, from a purely neurological basis, the brain becomes set in its ways. And what if, again, through bioengineering, we can fix that? Would people keep a more youthful outlook and a more nimble mental picture of the world if they had a brain that was perpetually 20 years old? That's something that I don't think we're going to know until we get there.

B: Yeah, that pruning seems like a form of pathology to me, Steve. That's something that we would address. If we were to make ourselves live indefinite lifespans, I mean, I wouldn't want to make myself equivalent to a 50-year-old. I'd make myself biologically equivalent to a 25-year-old.

S: Right. And when that happens, then we'll have a much better notion of how much of the stodginess of old age is neurological and how much is just psychological. It's just that you've been there, you've done that, you've done everything, and you're set in your ways, and you're too tired to change.

B: Right. But it's still no reason not to pursue this, some of these problems that people have with like the ossification of your psychology or the overpopulation, these things that I think we will address, and they're not deal killers for me in any way.

BT: Right. I agree completely with that. I think that the problems, we have a habit of surviving. When we're confronted with a challenge, we make it work somehow. And overpopulation and other issues that come up, I think we'll deal with them in due time. Historically, you expand to alleviate overpopulation pressures, but there's also things kind of balance out. There's the equilibrium that's established, and people probably wouldn't be having kids as frequently. I don't think they're aggressive. They're not deal killers.

S: Yeah, I agree. And we also, there's some potential upsides to this in that imagine having people around who are 500 years old or 1,000 years old. That's a living history and a living memory that could be invaluable. And just imagine the potential wisdom and insight that such longevity could produce. I mean, that could actually become an incredible resource for civilization and for humanity.

R: Although, what about the ability to forget things? I mean, when you're 500 years old, what do you fiddle around with in the brain to make sure that it holds on to certain memories? But in the end, sometimes it's kind of nice to forget things.

B: Forgetting is absolutely crucial.

R: It is.

B: If we didn't forget, we couldn't.

R: We'd go nuts.

B: We would go absolutely nuts.

S: Yeah.

R: Right. So, I mean, that would be a huge hurdle where you've got, yeah, somebody who's lived for 500 years, but they're only going to be crystal clear on the memory of the last 10 or so.

BT: That's a great point. That's great. Do you guys recall the movie Strange Days with Rob Lines?

B: Yeah. Yeah.

BT: It was where they could record memories and then play them back. And Angela Bassett makes a great point with just what Rebecca said was one of the characters in the movie is so obsessed with reliving old memories. And she says to him something to the effect of, memories were designed to fade. They're built like that for a reason.

R: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is another good movie about that.

S: That's true.

B: I have to see that, yeah.

S: So we may be living in like a 50-year window that's moving through time and memory for 100 years.

B: But even that will change. Even that is totally ephemeral because if you say these things are going to happen,then we'll also be in some ways, even if in minor ways initially, augmenting mind and memory such that there won't be any fading. I mean, that's another form of –

R: Yeah. That's what we're saying.

S: Maybe we won't want to do that. Right.

R: Yeah.

S: Or people could choose. People may decide they want a little freshening up of the mind and clearing out of the mental closets and fading away some of the old memories.

R: I'm a pack rat. I could never do that.

B: Offload the memories to some external hard drive. It's like, yeah, I'm going to forget about these for a little while. I want to watch that movie for the first time again. And you watch the movie. That's fine. I mean, hey, it's going to get boring after a while. You might as well get some freshness back into the mix.

R: Yeah, if somebody spoils Harry Potter for you, you can just rewind, erase, re-read.

B: Just stay off the net.

P: Brian, on another point, the gods are adorned with many qualities, vulnerability, infallibility, but immortality is one of their prime powers. So, what happens to faith if humans start becoming effectively immortal?

BT: A lot of organized religion strength is obviously derived by the dual roots of fear of death and the promise of something beyond that. So, when you take that away, when you're saying, well, this is the world we know for certain and we can keep this, that need, I think, is negated to a point. I suspect that people have a need for some kind of spirituality. I think we enjoy our monsters. We enjoy our mythology. We enjoy creating myths. The techno-myth, even. The old gods are gone, but there are creatures in the wilderness. There are aliens in a hangar somewhere. We still create that. We still have a love for that. I think we still like the hero worship in a certain way, but I definitely think it would be a death now to the religions that we know today. Certainly, if history teaches us nothing else, governments come and go, civilizations come and go, religions come and go. I don't think that the ancient Greeks ever really thought that Zeus would not be worshipped, that goats and lambs and cows would not be sacrificed to him at some point in the future. So, I suspect the same thing will happen. I see spirituality becoming maybe more Earth-based, maybe more reality-based.

P: Well, even dispelling the very great motivator and fear of death with regards to religion, you still are stuck with the mystery of creation, the other end of things. You still need answers for that, and I think people will still stretch, as you say.

B: That's true. That's true. We might never get a good handle on that, but regarding religion and faith, I don't think they have to be diametrically opposed. I think that you could still have faith in a god and an afterlife because – we throw around the word immortality, but it's a bit of a misnomer. You could talk about philosophical immortality, but practically, you're not going to live forever with any of the technologies that seem to have some potential. Some people have even put estimates that if you look at statistics, you will live between 1,200 and 5,000 years, because eventually something catastrophic is going to happen to you. A meteor is going to land on you. Something is going to happen eventually. The longer you live, chances are it's going to happen. But even if you discuss things like, say, backing up your mind and making 1,000 copies and going to the four winds, you could extend that greatly, I think. But eventually, say there's a few of you left, and at the heat death at the end of the universe, you're going to die one way or the other eventually. So you could always say, well, I'm going to live a billion years, but eventually I'll die and then I'll go to heaven. So I don't think it's an either-or thing.

S: But the fear of death won't be there if you know you can live a ridiculous amount of time from a human perspective or as long as you want. And so I do think that the emotional desire and need for this belief in an afterlife will diminish with this. But I also, Brian, that religions will evolve and adapt to this changing psychology and the changing situation of human existence, just as they have.

R: It could have a very positive impact on religion in one way. One mode of thinking about it might be, well, God has decided to give us immortality and now this is heaven. Basically, we're living in heaven on earth, so let's make the best of it.

BT: Make it good, exactly. And you know something? They won't be sacrificing themselves to get a few score of virgins in some afterlife.

S: That's a good point. We'll take on a different meaning if you're giving up hundreds or thousands of years of life and not just expecting. He's giving up a few decades.

B: But still, there'd be people that wouldn't accept it, wouldn't join the club, and of course they would have died and there'd only be immortals left. But it's amazing to think that.

BT: In a way, it would almost be like, not that it was imposed, but what you're talking about, yes, there would always be people. Those would be your Amish, the equivalent of that in the future, whatever they're called themselves, the naturals or the pure births. But in a way, it would almost be a social Darwinism of a sort. Not that I'm advocating such a thing at all, but I'm just saying I think it would sort of happen that those people would die off and their children or their grandchildren would kind of join the fold of this extraordinarily long-lived human community.

S: It certainly would be a huge lure. When you start to get 70, 80 and your body is falling apart, it's right there, the elixir of life, the ability to rejuvenate and be young again. You'd have to have a pretty strong ideology to pass that up, I think.

B: But we know how strong ideology can be.

S: I know, it's true. I'm not saying that it wouldn't exist, but it'd be interesting to see how that plays out. It'd be a very interesting experiment. I do think that society in general will evolve and will adapt to this, just like, as we said, religions are. Getting back a little bit to some points you brought up before about becoming calcified in your profession. Brian, you wrote about what would the marriage vow of till death do us part mean in this type of situation. But I think those institutions will just adapt. I think people will start to think of a career, a marriage, whatever, in terms of, this is what I'm doing for the next 50 years, and then after that all bets are off. We might even really strongly encourage or force people to switch professions. You've been a geologist for 100 years, you have to stop now and make way for other people. You're done.

B: That's interesting, yeah.

BT: Negotiating a term of service. You'd fall in love, oh sure. But you would negotiate a term of service for the marriage. Maybe it would be like, what would the other 50 years, and if we want to renew, well the option is there.

S: Well, you'd have to think in those terms.

R: I'd like to re-up, but you need to work out.

B: Take this exercise pill.

R: Lose 10 pounds.

S: What do you see as being the major source of opposition to this?

BT: Well, I mean two things. Obviously, the mechanical problems themselves, and we've identified the Hayflick climate, we know about oxidation, we know there are certain things. But these are, unfortunately, the way we deal with these, they have negative effects right now. I mean, they have the unraveling of chromosomes, the telomeres. They have telomerase, I think it's called, which is supposed to repair that, but it has carcinogenic side effects. So, I mean, obviously there's a certain mechanical problem. But honestly, the major problem is absolutely ideological. When I talk to people about it, and again, I'm not a transhumanist. I find it to be very interesting, and I think it's certainly a very worthwhile pursuit of the scientific community. But this is where we're leading anyway. But a lot of people just can't wrap their minds around the very idea of that. A lot of people balk at it. They don't want to even think of it in terms of that, because I think they've been brought up ingrained, like it's hardwired at this point through so much conditioning and through the idea that death is inevitable. I mean, the article that you've been referring to, Steve, a lot of the inspiration behind writing that came from reading Marcus Aurelius' book, Meditations. And he's probably one of the most enlightened rulers we've ever had in history, certainly one of the best Roman emperors. And time and time again, on almost every third page, he's drilling home the idea that death is inevitable. Yesterday, we're a blob of semen. Tomorrow, we're going to be embalming flu and ash. And it's so technological, this repetition of this idea. I just got the impression that he was really trying to convince himself and trying to come to terms with, I think he lived 57 years, to terms with the death of himself in time. And I thought about, you know what? Is it that inevitable, really? I mean, if it is a mechanical problem, certainly. People used to live, we were hunter-gatherers. I've read that the life expectancy was, at the most, like 25 years. And I mean, now we can expect 70, 80, 90 years. It's something that's possible. We know people who do it. We know people who have reached 122. It was that French woman I can't recall her name offhand. And even the definitions of death have changed. It used to be where your heart stopped, you were dead.

B: Right, you stopped breathing, you were dead.

BT: You stopped breathing. I think it was the man who shot Liberty Valance who, you know, the guy gets shot, the doctor comes over to make sure he's dead, takes a swig of liquor, kicks him in the ribs, up, dead, you know? And now you have defibrillators. You have all kinds of ways of looking at expanding life, and it doesn't necessarily stop immediately, and there are ways to bring people back. And these are things that earlier cultures certainly think to be sorcery. So I just was thinking about that, and I thought, really, the ideological opposition, not even organized, it's just something you talk to people about, and they haven't even considered it, quite frankly.

B: And that definition of death, I think this is an important point, how the definition of death has been changing over the decades. And I think you have to look, what's the ultimate definition of death? And for me, it's brain death. When you cannot even infer the structure of your brain, the working structure of your brain, once you pass that boundary, then you are truly dead. Because if you cannot infer what the functioning state was, and in such a way, in such a fidelity that your memories would still be intact, once you pass that, then bam, you are irreversibly dead. Nothing short of a time machine can get you back. So I think that's the ultimate goal of the definition of death. When we reach that point, then that's it.

S: That's the ultimate theoretical limit of the definition of death. In the meantime, it's a technological definition. It's beyond the point where we could bring somebody back meaningfully. Well, Brian, your new book is Never Grow Old. Is that in stores?

BT: It is, and it's available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble. A lot of it is about the mythological aspect of the search for immortality, but it's also a cry, a humanist cry. I mean, Gilgamesh did a couple of speeches that I put into the book, which is about he's advised not to do this, and what are you trying to do? The world couldn't tolerate an immortal race of people. He's like, well, we'll reshape the world. And that's the crux of it. It's like, well, if the world's not going to make room, we will force it to make room. The clustered forest didn't really permit us to have permanent settlements. Well, we cut them down. And it's not necessarily about being so callous to the natural world so much as there's nothing wrong with the most brilliant and sentient species on the planet redefining things to further its own end. And a lot of this, I think, in the end, the final iteration, comes back to would better things come of this or worse things? Does humanity, you know, you're talking about an immortal Adolf Hitler, would not be necessarily a good thing. But then again, when you look at the products of humanity, I mean, the Da Vinci's and the Archimedes and the Galen's and the Lord Byron's and the people who have inspired us, the Diabasius, you know, going back to my first book, I tend to have more of an optimistic view of the human race, you know, at least until I get tailgated in traffic. But generally speaking, I think that we are a good species and we try to do the right thing. When we don't, I think it's through ignorance. I think it's... but that's a whole other subject.

S: Well, Brian, thanks again for joining us. It's always an interesting conversation.

B: Thanks, Brian.

S: Good luck with your new book.

BT: Thank you so much and great talking to you.

S: All right, take care.

P: Good night.

S: Well, that is all we have for this week's show. But we will be back next week with a full regular episode. We also have a very special interview for next week. You are definitely not going to want to miss this. One just brief announcement before we close. I would again like to remind everybody that The Skeptic's Guide and Skepchick is having a get-together on August 11th. This is in Brooklyn, New York, at the Voorhees Auditorium at 186 J Street. Beginning at noon, we will be recording a live episode of The Skeptic's Guide where our listeners can ask us questions and we will answer them live. We will have a get-together at the Voorhees Auditorium. After we record the show, we will be available to meet and greet with our listeners. And then there will also be casual events after the event itself as well. So we look forward to seeing you all there. And of course, we all want to extend a warm congratulations to Jay Novella on his wedding. He again is getting married on July 21st. And he is marrying a very lovely girl, Cheryl Wells, who in fact is the girl who does the audio introduction to the show. So congratulations Jay and Cheryl.

Signoff

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

S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by the New England Skeptical Society in association with the James Randi Educational Foundation. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at www.theskepticsguide.org. Please send us your questions, suggestions, and other feedback; you can use the "Contact Us" page on our website, or you can send us an email to info@theskepticsguide.org'. 'Theorem' is produced by Kineto and is used with permission.

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