SGU Episode 733

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SGU Episode 733
July 27th 2019
"Satellite solar sail unfurls in space, showcasing innovative technology for future exploration."
SGU 732                      SGU 734
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
"Humans are pattern seekers. It’s how we’ve always made sense of the world: Our ancestors wouldn’t have survived if they hadn’t realized that plants tend to flourish after rainfall or that sabertooth tigers tended to eat them. But sometimes we’re just a little too good at finding meaning in the noise, occasionally unable to separate real patterns from those of our own imagining."
Emma Grey Ellis - journalist, WIRED
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Show Notes
SGU Forum

Intro

Voiceover:You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality. Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, July 24th, 2019, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody. Cara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jay Novella. Hey guys. And Evan Bernstein. Good evening, folks. So guys, we have a big trip coming up at the end of the year and we finally got our schedule locked in so we could share it with you.

US#01:So we will be, yeah, it's gonna be a lot of fun.

S:We're gonna be in Los Angeles on Saturday, November 23rd and we will be doing one or two events on that day. Saturday, November 23rd in Los Angeles. The details are still being worked out, but save the date there. Then we're heading down to the South Island of New Zealand. We'll be doing a little bit of vacationing in Queenstown, but if there are any locals who want to hook us up with good, fun things to do with our family, let us know. And then we'll be going to Christchurch for the New Zealand Skeptical Meeting. That'll be from November 29th to December 1st. And then we'll be going to Melbourne. Some of us actually will be stopping off in Wellington on December 2 and 3. We'll be working there doing a super-secret project we'll be telling you about later, but I don't know, do you think it might be possible to do a little bit of a meetup when we're in Wellington, Jay? Jay Novella Absolutely not, no. Steven Novella No, too busy? All right, Jay says no. And then we go to Melbourne for the Australian Skeptical Conference. That'll be from Friday, December 6th through the 8th. So we will be – of course, the SGU will be there. We'll be doing live shows. We'll be giving talks. We'll be doing private shows. We'll get those ticket sales going soon. And we're going to be fleshing out some other events. If you have any suggestions or interest, whatever, let us know. But that's our big down-under trip. It's been four years? The one you have to keep your eye out for is we're going to be at Dragon Con this year. And we will be having a private SGU show. And we're going to do exactly what we did last year. We're going to rent a room in the hotel that we're staying at.

E:And it's great. It's awesome. Yeah, it worked out really well.

C:This hotel is fantastic. But we could say it's going to be Saturday at 8 p.m.

J:Saturday. Yeah, Saturday at 8 p.m. I'll make sure that the Eventbrite listing is up by the time you're hearing this. So, Steve, that URL to the DragonCon 2019 SGU Private Show is almost exactly what I just said. It's https colon forward slash forward slash SGU DragonCon 2019, that's all one word, and I'm not spelling out the word 2019. It's 2019 dot Eventbrite dot com. So that's SGU DragonCon 2019 dot Eventbrite dot com. The soft cover version of our book will be out this fall, so we'll be able to sell it at these events that we're going to. It'll be after DragonCon, but it'll be for the New Zealand and Australia events. And the book will have some new material in it, I hear. It will. It will, as soon as I write it. All right, so we're going to do another entry of our fairly new segment called What Do You Know, where one of us talk about something interesting that we learned recently that we'd like to share with everybody.

Whaddya Know (03:40)

Beryllium None

J:All right, so we're going to do another entry of our fairly new segment called What Do You Know, where one of us talk about something interesting that we learned recently that we'd like to share with everybody.

S:So what do you guys know about beryllium? Like the element? Yes. I know. I know that it's an element. I do know that for the classic Trek episode, Mudd's women, or is it I, Mudd? I, Mudd, they offered a raw body to Uhura and the body was a, was it titanium beryllium alloy? That'd be a good alloy, titanium beryllium. Do you know what number it is in the periodic table? The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted

B:I heard about beryllium. I heard about beryllium.

S:I realized I know very little about it and so I started reading up on it and it's a fascinating element.

E:So it's a metal. It's like a steely gray metal and it has some very interesting and very useful properties.

S:So first, it's lighter than aluminum. It's only two-thirds the weight of aluminum. So it's a very light metal, but it's stiffer. It had like, hang on, hold it. It's got a greater specific stiffness than steel. All right. That's a very, very specific term. That means it's stiffer by weight than steel. Right. But the equivalent volume of steel may be stronger, but by weight it is stiffer. So that means it's great for structural uses, right? So if you want to build... It's light and stiff. Yeah, it's light and stiff. It's perfect for aerospace, right? It also has an extremely high melting point, 1287 degrees Celsius.

E:That's like higher than all of the other solid metals.

S:So it can withstand certain things in life. Yeah, so it's used in nuclear reactors. It also is non-magnetic, so being ferromagnetic is a problem, and it's good for applications where you want non-magnetic material. It is very conductive of both heat and electricity, and the one downside to it that limits its utility is that it's very toxic. Okay. Yeah, it's a very toxic element.

E:So you can't... You can't eat it?

S:Yeah, it tastes very sweet. In fact... Oh, that's dangerous. The original name for the element was glucinium. Oh, interesting. As in glucose, as in sweet. But then it was named after beryllose, which is the Greek name for the mineral beryl, which is the ore, one of the ores of beryllium. It's also beryllium is something you would find in precious gems like emerald. Beryl gives it its green color. So, it is an incredibly essential element for a lot of technology. It is considered to be a strategic element by the United States. Beryllium copper alloys are highly useful because it's very conductive, again, very stiff, very strong material. It's stiff in that it could be a little brittle as well, so it wouldn't be good in applications where being excessively brittle is a problem, but of course you could make alloys out of it. So you could tweak the properties of alloys by what materials you mix it with. So beryllium alloys are used in high-speed aircraft, missiles, spacecraft, communication satellites. They're used in X-ray machines because beryllium is transparent, relatively transparent to X-rays, which is an interesting property. It's used in your cell phone. Your cell phone probably has some beryllium in it. I probably have a little beryllium in me. It is the primary ingredient used to make the mirrors in the James Webb Space Telescope. Most of the beryllium is mined You never hear about it. Beryllium. And it's a cool name, isn't it? Beryllium? It is, I do. I've always loved it. Beryllium. It totally sounds like a science fiction... It does.

E:...metal that they... Yeah.

S:I was talking to Jay about it. I was like, in a way, like sometimes I like to think like if mithril silver actually existed, what would it be in real life? There's no extra element out there that we don't know about. All right, let's go through the list real quick, Steve. What do you mean there's no extra element? Mithril has what properties? It's super light, super strong, it's bright, silver shiny. It's seemingly magical.

J:So a beryllium alloy could get you pretty close to the qualities of mithril silver.

S:If you had a silver beryllium or even platinum beryllium alloy, it's good for armor because it's light and it's very strong.

J:I don't think it would hold an edge, but of course you make an alloy with steel or you can use a beryllium core for the stiffness and then you put a steel outer layer on for the edge and the hardness.

S:I do think that just because it's so light and strong, it does have the key properties that are often touted for certain magical materials like mithril. Very exciting. It is. A beryllium-titanium alloy would be amazing. That would be a good thing to make your robot body out of. Okay, let's go on to some news items.

News Item #1 - Telescope Protests (09:38)

• Hawaii Telescope Protest Shuts Down 13 Observatories on Mauna Kea 

S:Okay, let's go on to some news items. Jay, you're going to start off by getting us updated on these Hawaiian telescope protests. We've talked about this before, but what's going on? Yeah, it's been an unfolding story. So on the main island of Hawaii, hundreds of protesters are blocking the construction of a new 30 meter telescope. That's that's pretty damn big. The location is on Mauna Kea, which, if you remember, was in science or fiction not too long ago. Right, guys? It had something to do with the height. Remember, like this this mountain? It's the highest mountain from the base. But of course, the base is underwater. Right. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

J:So, there are currently 13 telescopes on the mountain now, and this is because of a few different factors, and these are really fun factors here.

S:First, it's near the equator, which what, Bob? It means that the atmosphere is a little bit thinner than in other places?

J:No, I don't think the equator feature is about, it's the height of the mountain. It's all about the height, you're above. But being at the equator means it moves all the way, it rotates all the way around. If you were in the North Pole, you'd only get to see half the sky, right? If you're on the equator, you get to see the whole sky. But it's all about being above most of the distortion effects of the atmosphere. I said that, though, because I heard, I read, I didn't say heard, I definitely read that there are going to be a lot of rocket facilities are going to be on the equator because it's easier to get into orbit from the equator than it is.

S:That's right. But that's because of the rotation of the Earth. Yeah, that imparts a velocity of like a thousand miles an hour just by launching at the equator. And the UFOs don't fly over the equator, so they don't block the... Yeah. Right. It's a no-fly zone for ET.

B:So the truth here is that it's low humidity and relatively clear skies near the summit. It's also far enough away from the city lights to give it a great view of the night sky and some of the world's largest telescopes happen to be there.

J:I wonder why it's because of all these properties.

B:So we have the twin 10M Keck telescopes and the 8.2 millimeter Subaru telescope.

J:These are two very big and unbelievably frequently used telescopes and both of the teams that work at these telescopes Have unfortunately been evacuated on July 16th because the protests started on the 15th. So why would hundreds of people protest and block the construction of this new 30 meter telescope? What's wrong with science people? What's wrong with this? There was already a four year delay because of a lawsuit trying to claim the construction permit wasn't valid. But why did they do that? Hawaii State Supreme Court ruled that the 1.4 billion dollar project is valid and can continue construction on the 15th. But the protesters' main point wasn't about the permit. That was just them trying to block the construction, and the reason why they're doing it is because the mountain is sacred. It's sacred. It really has religious meaning to them, and culturally, these types of landmasses and these types of constructs have some type of sacred properties. Yeah, and when we talked about this last fall, we talked about that specifically, they feel like they've already given up enough. As far as what is already there and any more is going to do a level of irreparable harm to their society, their culture, their institutions there, essentially, that they'll never be able to get back at this point. So they feel like this is the line in the sand they're going to draw. Exactly. Evan, you totally hit the nail on the head. It took me a while to find that exact fact. I had to read a lot to get to that point.

E:And you know a part of me is like come on this is like this mountain is perfectly poised to have telescopes but at the same time you know I do also agree with conservation and and you know like let's not you know just because it is a great thing to have this 30 meter telescope doesn't mean that we should haphazardly just be you know building things everywhere. So I'm moderately torn.

J:As much as I want to see the telescope go up, I'd like to make sure at the very least that they're not like hurting the, you know, whatever. There could be indigenous creatures there. There could be, you know, it could be... Now here's a question. Let's talk about this. What if the telescope facilities ruin the skyline? What if, you know, like when you look at the mountain, it just looks like it has a bunch of stuff on it now, and it's not as beautiful as it once was? The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, That's a bit subjective. And of course, you can design this project and execute it in a way to be maximally respectful to the environment and minimally destructive and make sure you clean up after yourself and all that good stuff.

S:And I think they've already gone through all of that, those kinds of objections. But I think the most valid thing here for me is that it's their island. And we're invading it. We basically took it over. And they're like, hey, you know, we should be able to say what happens to our own land. And you guys are the foreigners here. And, you know, you're kind of just stepping all over our sacred mountain. I've been following this story and there's been a lot of back and forth and trying to work with the indigenous people to be maximally respectful and to make sure that they're involved in the decision making process. And I had the sense that that was moving in a positive direction, so I was a little surprised. But I'm obviously, I'm not there, like embedded in what's happening. Just from the reporting that I was reading, I thought, oh, okay, they're making some progress here. They went back, they engaged with the community, they're getting them involved. It seemed like they were trying to do the right thing. So I think this is a last sort of ditch protest, maybe by individuals who felt that they weren't part of the process, or just who were never in agreement with it to begin with. But I think their complaints are totally valid. I just hope that we can work out an understanding so that they can feel invested in and part of this wonderful science that we could do by using the natural resource of that mountain without disrespecting their culture and their ownership and their history. The tricky thing here is, Steve, it really is just like what Evan said. They're like, enough's enough. We've already made so many allowances. When is it going to stop? I guess that's one of their questions. I think to say, too, that everything looked like it was trending in the right direction and stuff, which may be true, but we have to remember that all of the reporting that we're reading is etic reporting. It's written by Westerners.

J:It's not written by the people, so it's maybe not that surprising that there would be a big protest because we don't know the state of the indigenous groups and where they sit and stand with all of this. And I think it's such a tough thing, right, because even the way that we're talking about it right now is very like them, they, them, they.

C:But it's, from their perspective, our country and our mountain. This is their home Maybe. We don't know, because we don't know what the parameters are. Yeah, we don't know. I'm saying, I hope. I hope it's not. I hope so, too. I can't dictate that. The worry, though, is just that we have a very long history of coming to understandings through means that haven't always been, have almost never been, kosher means.

S:You know what I mean? We're conquerors. Yeah, coming to an understanding with the indigenous people oftentimes doesn't really mean coming to an understanding. Doesn't always end well for them. 17th, 18th century examples are not good ones.

C:But even modern examples, there's usually some level of coercion or some level of, you know, cultural kind of muscle that comes into play that may be pretty nuanced and it may not be overt. And so we have to remember that as well, that like being in a position of privilege and power and authority and trying to push, push, push, push, push is not always the most appropriate way to go about these things.

E:And that is why this is taken, are we in the fourth year? This is a bigger issue that we've talked about in other contexts as well.

C:The deep issue is balancing the history of colonialism and imperialism and abuse in many cases. Thank you so much for joining us today.

S:Okay, I get that you've been hunting whales your whole existence, but you know, it's just not a sustainable thing anymore. It may not be your fault that it's not sustainable, but that's the fact. No, it's our fault that it's not sustainable. I get that, but we still have to deal with the reality that that's the way it is. Yeah, but I think the way we deal with that reality should be more painful for us So thank you for joining us. They're generally not. Generally indigenous traditions are pretty sustainable. I disagree, Cara. I think that is a naive view of history. That is just another Western bias. That is the benign native Western romantic image that we have that's not always true. Indigenous native peoples have historically been horrible to their local environment. That's just a historical fact. And they've enslaved other people and done all the horrible things that we've done in our past as well.

C:Yeah, but I'm not talking about that. I'm specifically talking about sustainability.

S:No, but they arguably wiped out the megafauna of North America. That was not sustainable, you know, for example. That's a very broad brush that you're painting. I don't think it's fair to say that the indigenous groups have done that. Of course it's a broad brush, but you were painting with a broad brush. I'm just saying it's Yeah, I think it is fair to paint with a broad brush that the vast majority of indigenous cultures have had sustainable land practices.

C:I think I can paint that broad brush.

S:I think we can pick out certain situations in which land practices were less sustainable, but I think especially when compared to modern post-industrial land practices,

C:Oh, sure. Absolutely. Indigenous land practices are more sustainable.

S:Well, I think that mainly comes down to population.

C:You can't make a comparison. Absolutely. Yes, you can. And you have to. And that's why I think when we say things like, well, we can't just let them have carte blanche, like, oh, what? Yes. First of all, it's not our place to let anybody do anything. If somebody owns the land that they live on and lives in a part of the world, they have carte blanche. It's not our job to impose our ideas on them. If they're doing something that then affects our culture and society in a negative way, yeah, then a conversation can be had. But it is not our God-given right to put telescopes on mountains all over the world. I agree. That's not what I'm saying. I can't agree with that completely, because if we talk about the whale hunting thing, that's definitely outside the borders of whatever land they historically own. They're hunting a species, which again, it's not their fault that they're on the brink of extinction, but that's the reality now, and we have to deal with that. But I think it's also really unfair to kind of have that conversation. I remember when I used to live in New York and I had this amazing roommate and he was so funny.

S:And I came home once and I went to eat some ice cream out of the pint that was in the freezer. And I was like, Mike, you ate all the ice cream. And he was like, I ate a little bit of the ice cream. I just happened to eat the last little bit at the very bottom. That's kind of true because we basically hunted whales to extinction.

C:It is kind of effed up of us to say you can no longer hunt because they're critically endangered, I think. I'm a cultural contextualist. I think there are certain cultural practices that are fundamentally amoral across the globe and I fight against those cultural practices. But beyond those core cultural practices, I don't think it is my place to impose my moral view. Yeah, that was where I was going with that exactly, Cara, is the idea that there are certain things like oppression of women or enslavement or murder or whatever, where we could say, all right, like it or not, we do live in a global world. To some extent, we're all one species. We all share this planet. I do think we could say Yeah, there are certain things that we can impose upon other cultures because they're just a basic fundamental things that we all have to agree on, even if we all haven't gotten there yet.

S:And I do think like not hunting a species to extinction is one of those things. And that has to take priority over like who gets the blame. I think that with the who gets the blame thing is a good reason to say like, okay, we will compensate you. We will bend over backwards to compensate you for the fact that we have basically effed you out of your basic historical means of sustainability, because we hunted whales to the brink of extinction, so now you can't do it anymore. The problem is that's just an idealistic view. We don't do that. We can't even pay reparations in our own country. I'm saying you should do that, and I think we can do that. We are building international institutions that I do think can do some of that. I would like to see in this case is going back to what Jay was saying at the very beginning and again I don't really I haven't researched this issue you know nearly even to the extent that Jay has

C:So I'm not sure where I stand on it, but I am interested. You talked about all these, this constellation of reasons that this mountain is a perfect site.

S:Are there no other equally interesting, viable, almost as good sites?

C:No, there are. They have backup sites they would go to if this falls through.

E:I think they were actually very close to using the backup site.

C:So why are we fight, we, I don't want to say we, why is the fight so intense for this one? Because this site's better, cheaper, and it's American. I think those are... Right, because it's American, right? The other sites are... I think it's literally the best choice. South of the equator. It is. On the planet. It's the best choice other than, you know... The backups. No, other than the cultural ramifications. Right, right, right. So that's why, listen,

S:I certainly hope we can work it out, but I would be okay with being deferential to the indigenous populations. I think that's a good default position.

C:The other analogy here that I wanted to bring up really quick is releasing carbon into the atmosphere, right? Western civilizations have basically used up the world's carbon budget and now we're telling developing nations that, sorry, you can't release any more carbon into the world. You can't build your coal-fired

S:Thanks for watching. Or be okay with them. I know the let them is problematic, but be okay with them. Say, okay, yeah, fine. We burned our way through coal, and now you get to do the same thing. The fact that the Earth is going to be, you know, the environment is going to be horrific as a result, I guess we'll just have to live with that. I don't think that that's the conclusion that we come to. I think we say, all right, our bad. We didn't know it at the time, but we were using up a limited budget for the world. We used up your budget, too. Also, we knew. Well, we didn't really, really know. We knew. 150 years ago. 150 years ago. No, but that's not when we used most of that coal, is it? No, that's not. Well, I don't know if that's true. I mean, whatever. That's a different argument. Yeah, I know, but that's the problem. You know what London was like 200 years ago? Oh, London and America were equivalent. They were choked with coal. We're the West. We're no different from one another in that. My point is that before and after we knew it was a problem, and we continue to, we are still doing it.

C:We are still burning our way through the world's carbon budget.

S:And so I think if through the UN, through the world gets together and says, right, what are we going to do to try to mitigate global warming?

C:I absolutely think that that gets taken into account. And it does. It currently is.

S:I mean, nobody's arguing that. It's just it's broken.

C:It's a very broken system, as we know.

S:And we are not doing

C:What we can try to do is hedge and mitigate and try our best to always be really, really humble and really understanding and try not to maintain an us versus them mentality, which we have historically maintained for our entire existence. And that's what gets us into this problem. But it's a thorny mess with no easy solutions, is the other... For sure. But I also think that we've been talking about things like carbon emissions and about things like whale populations that are being decimated. But this is a telescope, and although it's going to bring us amazing knowledge, it's not potentially going to save lives. It might. But ultimately, I do think that sometimes the risk-benefit analysis has to come into play, like the actual critical effect it's going to have on people has to come into play.

S:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I agree. I mean, I would be disappointed if they can't work it out so that everyone's happy.

C:That's what I want. But it wouldn't be as devastating as, oh, these species of whale goes extinct. That's like, I feel much more strongly about that, you know. I think we all do, yeah. All right, all right. I have the solution, Steve. Okay, tell me. What? They should knock down the other telescopes and just put up this new awesome one. Thanks for joining us.

S:Bob, tell us about LightSail 2.

News Item #2 - LightSail 2 (29:33)

• LightSail 2 Just Deployed Its Sails in Space, And It's a Glorious Moment For Science : ScienceAlert 

S:Bob, tell us about LightSail 2.

S:Alright guys, the Planetary Society's LightSail 2 CubeSat has deployed its sails in Earth orbit as a prelude to sailing and testing the technology around the Earth for the next year or so. So definitely a milestone in solar sails. So many of our listeners, I'm sure, and you guys have heard about the Planetary Society, right? Founded in 1980 by Bruce Murray, Louis Friedman, and of course, say it Evan, Carl Sagan.

B:It's the world's largest nonprofit space organization. And Sagan was its first president, by the way. And now, of course, the president is some guy named Bill Nye, I think. The history of solar sailing is interesting. Who first suggested it, guys? When? Give me a date or a name. Solar sailing. Oh, gosh. First suggested? First suggested. Leonardo DiCaprio. Yes, in Titanic. It's like, I'm sinking. I wish I had a sail right now. No, I would say Arthur C. Clarke. Oh, yeah. It's going to be a cycle. Not quite. Johannes Kepler. Oh, my god. He was in the early 1600s. Kepler suggested this? That surprised me a bit, too. I was closer. But if you think about it, it makes sense, because all you really have to do is look at a comet, right?

E:Look at the comet tail, always pointing away from the sun.

C:And he's hypothesized that maybe there's a cause and effect going on there.

S:And in fact, he actually wrote a letter to Galileo in 1610.

B:He wrote, provide ships or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes, and there will be some who will travel even that void. My gosh. Really cool. And then the next big milestone that I found was Arthur C. Clarke's Sunjammer book he wrote in 1964 that mentions solar sails. That's what I was thinking of. Yeah, I'm sure. So now Carl Sagan was really among the very first to really push for non-fictional solar sails. He was actually on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1976. And he pulled a model of a solar sail out from behind his seat, and he said it can go out from the sun, it can tack inwards to the sun, and because it has a constant acceleration, it can get you around the inner part of the solar system a lot faster and a lot more conveniently than the usual sorts of rocket propulsion. And remember, this is 1976 and 34 years later before we really, really had the first really successful solar sail deployment. And this was in 2010, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA. This was a demonstration flight. It was the IKAROS in May of that year. NASA That same year, later in that year, November, also launched a small CubeSat cell named NanoCell-D. So those are the two big launches previously. The Planetary Society actually, they almost became the very first to launch a solar sail. This was in 2005, but they had some issues with the launch. And this was their Cosmos 1, and unfortunately, that didn't get a chance to be deployed. Otherwise, they would have been the first. But since then, really, this active solar sailing has been in a moribund state. Really not a lot happening, nothing dramatic since 2010. And that ended yesterday, July 23. The Planetary Society was, well, they didn't actually launch it, but this is this is their CubeSat. Is this the one that launched? Last month, Bob, about a month ago, this went up? Yes, it was June 25th. It launched June 25th, and the CubeSat is basically a tiny, tiny satellite about as big as a shoebox. Yesterday, it was commanded to unfurl its thin Mylar sheet. The sheet was actually, if you saw the comparison, compare a shoebox and put that in the middle of a boxing ring. So that's the comparison, the ratio of the CubeSat compared to the unfurled solar sail. So pretty cool, pretty dramatic. And over the next year, it will prove, basically one of the main things it wants to do is prove that you could actually navigate and do stuff. And it's going to be changing orbits using just a solar sail, no fuel, nothing else but the photons from the sun imparting their momentum to the sail. And what's going to Well, that means, well, yeah, if you're going to increase orbit, you're going to you're going to be accelerating. But that means I guess by the nature of the design, it means that as you get farther away on one side, you're going to get closer on the other, which means that eventually, that the drag will eventually cause it to deorbit and crash or burn up and burn up in a year or so. But that won't matter because their goal is to show that this actually is viable and kind of set the stage for really starting to share their design, not only share their design, but eventually in the future, you know, maybe creating these commercial applications for small satellites. You could use them to, you know, to increase your orbit, your altitude. You could do it for, and eventually you could do it, who knows? Hopefully we'll see spaceships that can use it and have some sort of role in exploring the solar system. Launch probes? Absolutely. No fuel going anywhere in the solar system. That's amazing. Of course, it could take some time depending on how it's applied. Let's see, Bill Nye quote time, he said, solar sailing is in its infancy, but it may become a game changer. We'll soon be able to send our solar sail spacecraft to all sorts of destinations in our solar system and perhaps to another star system one day. And of course, that brings me to one of the aspects of this that I'm very, very excited about. That's the whole idea of laser assisted solar sails. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Cara Santa Maria, Thank you for joining us today. There's nothing there to decelerate it, really, not enough. But in 20 years, you could actually get to the closest star system, the Centauri system, in 20 years within a fraction, a tiny chunk of a human lifespan, which is just so amazing to imagine that we could potentially get some imagery from really close. And we know that there are exoplanets in that system, and some of them have very promising signatures for the potential of life. So that's something that It's just one of those grand engineering things that I think would be just so fantastic to really start taking even more seriously than we're doing now. And I will end with a quote from Sasha Sagan. She says, this is still one of the most feasible pathways to have real interstellar space travel in the future. Sasha Sagan, writer as well as the daughter of some guy named Sagan. Very quickly, the item I wanted to talk about this week has to do with free speech and practicing medicine without a license.

News Item #3 - Free Speech vs Licensing Professionals (37:47)

• Practicing Medicine Without a License Is Not Free Speech - NeuroLogica Blog 

B:It was a very good legal decision, which was important. We really dodged a bullet here. It's one of those things that didn't get a lot of attention, I think, within skeptical circles, but actually this is a critical legal precedent that is absolutely essential. So, all right, here's the back story.

S:A woman by the name of Heather Del Castillo is a – she books herself as a holistic health coach based in Florida and she was essentially being disciplined by the state of Florida for practicing medicine without a license. Because she was charging for her health advice, and she's not qualified. She's not licensed, she doesn't have the qualifications, and so that runs afoul of the healthcare licensing laws in the state of Florida. So the Institute for Justice, which is a libertarian public interest law firm, decided to defend her case, and they made, their legal defense was That Del Castillo has a First Amendment right to free speech, and that the state of Florida cannot impede that free speech by saying that it's not legal for her to give her health advice. So that was their legal theory. The judge completely dismissed that theory, like out of hand, said, nope, you are incorrect. So this is a very critical concept. The idea is that while, yes, the First Amendment grants citizens very broad and well-protected rights to free speech, there are certain limits. There's a lot of confusion on when the First Amendment even applies. If you are ever engaged online, you will read people screaming about their free speech rights all the time or their First Amendment rights on issues that are not First Amendment issues. The First Amendment only applies when the government is involved in some way. Yeah, they cannot stifle your speech. So if somebody wants to ban you from the comments of their blog, that is not a First Amendment issue. You essentially have, the First Amendment does not grant you a right to speech on someone else's private venue. All it says is Congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom of speech. So, it's only a First Amendment issue when the law or the government is involved in some way. But even then, there are certain exceptions to First Amendment protection, some of which are obvious, some of which may not be so obvious. So, for example, child pornography is not protected speech. Obscenity is a tricky one. Obscenity can technically be banned, can be censored, but the state really has the burden of proof there, and over the years, it seems that individuals have been given more and more leeway. That is kind of fading away as one of the exceptions. You cannot incite somebody to immediate specific violence. You also cannot make credible threats against somebody that puts them at risk. So it has to be a credible threat, and it has to actually put somebody at risk. And of course libel and slander, but of course those claiming libel and slander have a very high bar legally, and the assumption of innocence is on the person being accused. But here's the relevant exception here, and that is commercial speech. So there is still freedom of commercial speech, but it is much more limited than private or personal speech, because commercial speech can be regulated when the state has a compelling interest to do so, as long as they are doing it in a minimalistic and very narrowly tailored So the state could say, there is a public interest in restricting this kind of commercial speech, so we are going to do it in this very specific way, which doesn't tread on speech more generally than it has to. So for example, fraud. Your right to free speech doesn't give you the right to defraud other people, and the state has the right to essentially criminalize or limit your ability to commit fraud because they have an interest, a free market, in maintaining the law and protecting its citizens from being defrauded. That is the exception that's relevant in this case. The judge decided in his decision, he specifically says, the state has a compelling interest in order to protect the public interest against health fraud. So they have a right to maintain quality of standards of care and ethics Through the licensure process and that means they have to be able to restrict people from Engaging in those professions without a license. Otherwise, the license means nothing, right? So imagine what the what this country would be like Oh, if you know if Heather Del Castillo won this case if the judge decided that okay your freedom of speech means the state cannot enforce professional licensure laws that would mean that Thank you for joining us today. You could still say they wouldn't be able to prescribe medication or maybe do surgical procedures or whatever, but I don't think I'm making a slippery slip argument to say that if free speech were used as an excuse to essentially eliminate licensure for professions, that would not be far behind. You would essentially lose any ability, the state would lose any ability to regulate that kind of behavior if that, once that legal precedent were set. So this is a critical legal precedent. I'm very happy to see that it was affirmed in the Florida federal court because otherwise it would have been an absolute disaster. Are they going to, is this woman going to appeal? Yeah, they're appealing. The war's not over, but it's a big victory for a battle, yeah. Yeah, this is a good victory. I don't think—my hope is—I'm not an expert on this area, but I do pay attention very closely to this—that the only time the Supreme Court would listen to it is if the appellate courts disagreed or there was clarification needed.

E:But if all the lower courts are agreeing that, yeah, states have a compelling narrow interest in regulating professional commercial speech in order to maintain their rights to police licenses, right?

S:If that's the case, then the Supreme Court has no reason to hear the case because all the lower courts agree. But whatever, you can never really predict those things completely. You never, ever know. That's right. That's right. OK, let's move on. All right, Cara, so tell me how much of autism is genetic?

News Item #4 - Autism Genetic (45:32)

• A new study reinforces the conclusion that autism is primarily genetic 

S:All right, Cara, so tell me how much of autism is genetic? What does the science say? The science says most of it, to be honest. So there's a new study that just came out where it was actually a really big, intense epidemiological study. So what they were looking at is a cohort of five different countries, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Israel, and Western Australia. And they looked at over 2 million children from these countries over the span of like 15 years. Like for a lot of them, it was like birth until they're age 16. The spans were a little bit different country to country, but that doesn't matter.

C:On average, they were looking at birth to 16 years for 2 million children. across these five countries. And what they wanted to do is pull out how many of them ended up being diagnosed with autism or something along the spectrum. So they they lumped everything together, autism spectrum disorders, and they found that amongst these over 2 million, 22,156 had been diagnosed within that developmental period with autism spectrum disorders. And once they did all of their fancy-schmancy statistical calculations, they found that the approximate amount of variance that was accounted for by purely genetic factors was 80%. 80% heritability. That's a big chunk. And so we've got to remember that the other 20% could be a number of things. So they weren't specifically looking at that 20%. They were specifically looking at heritability, which means that everything that was not heritability falls into that other bucket. So this could be environmental factors. This could be, we were discussing earlier, like epigenetic things, like things that could potentially turn genes on or off. It could also be de novo mutations. Yeah, just random, like new stuff popping up. So yeah, if the child has a mutation that they didn't inherit from their parent, that would be in that 20%, right? Not in the 80%. Even though it's still technically genetic. It's still genetic, you're right, but anything that's not heritability, and that's the important thing, because I think a lot of terms get thrown around in the coverage of this. And it is kind of complicated, like you have to kind of know a little something something about about genetics to understand it.

S:They also looked at maternal factors.

C:Apparently, this is an argument from the anti-vaxxer crowd, right?

S:So we've known for a long time that the main argument that we generally hear in anti-vax propaganda is vaccines cause autism, right? That's like the number one thing we hear.

C:And usually the goalpost gets moved around a lot, like first, or not first, but it was thimerosal. It's specifically the MMR vaccine. It's not actually one vaccine, it's the vaccine schedule. There are too many all at once. It's kind of hard to chase all the arguments because each individually requires a lot of science to unpack. They're not all the same argument. But I think in the minds of most people who don't really have the, I guess, scientific or maybe medical knowledge to understand the nuance, It's easy to paint all of those arguments with a broad brush and so just in general, you know, vaccines are bad and autism rates have, you know, gone through the roof in the last 20 years and it seems to be linked to vaccines. Obviously, this has been debunked time and time again. You don't need us to tell you on this show about, you know, Wakefield studies being debunked, him losing his medical license and basically going deep into kind of the crackpot world. Continuing to try and to try and push this rhetoric, like even with that recent, what was the documentary that he made recently? Vaxxed. Vaxxed. Yeah, I mean, it's like, come on, man, like, just stay in the shadows for a while. But so you know, you don't need us to tell you about all of these large arguments that we talk about constantly on SGU. This new study, it's nothing really new, because there have been multiple studies that have been published showing a similar They did, I mentioned, look at maternal, how do they phrase it, maternal factors, I think. So these would be things like mom getting a vaccine while she was pregnant, mom getting, you know, a viral infection while she was pregnant, nutritional intake while she was The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted The vast majority of autism cases require some sort of complicated genetic, and I should say specifically, heritable code there. And we know that autism is not a single gene. We know it's not even a handful of genes. This is a very complicated spectrum of, I guess, what do we even call it now, syndromes? Well, there's… Disorders? Autism spectrum disorder. And that's what they looked at specifically in this study. They didn't look at autism alone, they looked at autism spectrum disorder. And that also opens up another conversation which we've had on the show before and I don't really think we need to open up right now, but it's something to think about, which is the way we diagnose these things is also kind of complicated. So spectrum disorder is more inclusive, right? And it's looking at a constellation of features that seem to point to this

US#05:Thank you for joining us.

C:Thanks for joining us today. But that said, regardless of how it's diagnosed, regardless that it's a disorder and not a disease per se, quote unquote, because we've talked about that a lot on the show, across the board, it's highly heritable. There's something going on in the genetics of that child that were passed down from that child's parents that is influencing their development of these autistic symptoms. And it is much more, it accounts for much more of the variance within these cases than anything environmental. And so basically, this just goes to show that the arguments as they stand right now from the anti-vaxxer groups don't hold water. The argument that, what's their big one? You were saying before, Steve, that like within the last 20 years, the number has like gone through the roof. So it must be because of the way that we're vaccinating. Well, that wouldn't be possible. It isn't possible because this is 80% accounted for by heritable factors. Yeah, but they also turn that around, too, and say, well, it can't be genetic because genetics can't change that quickly, can't change in 20 to 30 years. But their false assumption is that the increase in diagnoses is due to an increase in the actual incidence. And not just in how we diagnose these. We know it's not. We know that most of it can be explained by broadening the diagnosis, increased surveillance, diagnostic substitution. Basically, we're looking for it more.

S:And the best studies, in my opinion, show that if you apply the same diagnostic criteria exactly over different age cohorts, the incidence of autism is actually flat. And so the simplest conclusion is that autism rates are not increasing, that we are just diagnosing it differently.

C:Absolutely.

S:And I mean, and that is parsimonious. There's so many lines of evidence to support that. It's the family unit is different now. The way that we are, you know, that we care for our children is different now. The way that we're able to notice these kinds of symptoms is different now. It's, you know, it just makes much more sense. It's a much more parsimonious explanation. And that said, even beyond that, the fact that this study shows that 80% of the variance is accounted for specifically by heritable factors, right there it shows.

C:I think in a way it actually kind of takes also some of the burden, the psychological burden, off of parents who have been looking for answers. You know, there's nothing you could have done, right? There's nothing you could have changed. This is just the way that genetics work. Sometimes people, their genes combine in such a way that they end up with certain things going on in their lives. And like you didn't parent them incorrectly. You know, you gave them the nutrition that they needed. You gave them the life-saving vaccines that they needed. And those are all good things. And they were going to probably end up with these symptoms anyway. Right. And they probably had them as, you know, they were recognizing them younger and younger, the more we carefully looked for them. So, yeah, we're able to screen for autism like it in, like, I don't want to say infants yet, but like in young toddlers, right? Studies show clear evidence of autism features as early as six months. That's amazing. We may be able to push it back earlier than that, but definitely by six months. And that's I think just because it takes that long for the brain to develop to the point where you would see it.

S:And also, yeah, there's these kinds of behaviors too, or you have to contrast them to like neurotypical behaviors and like babies just don't have a lot of behaviors.

C:Like there are certain things that are obvious with babies, you know, certain disease states, but like, for the most part, there's not a lot that babies get, they don't give you a lot to work on.

S:But I bet you, I bet you there's more and more subtle manifestations that we will be able to pick up on. Like the way they move their eyes or whatever, just something we'll be able to say even earlier.

C:And those tend to be the ones that people are pointing to as like gaze and soothing, like capability to be soothed and things like that. I mean, it's a fascinating area of research. Obviously, a lot of people are working really hard on it because they see the pain that parents go through and the difficulty that parents go through when they first find out about the diagnosis and when they

S:Thank you for joining us today.

C:It's really cool that we're learning so much more about it, and it really bums me out that there's still a small but loud percentage of the population that is barking up the wrong tree, which is actually diverting attention from good research that could be done. Yep, absolutely. All right, thanks Cara. Evan, so I read this conspiracy theory that there are no birds in North America.

News Item #5 - Bird Conspiracy (56:46)

• Conspiracies Are For the Birds - NeuroLogica Blog 

C:Evan, so I read this conspiracy theory that there are no birds in North America. There's no boys. What? It's not a conspiracy. Explain this, please. Three words, folks. Birds aren't real. And the internet told me so. It's all right there. It's right in front of you. I mean, birdsaren'treal.com.

S:I mean, this is so official. Look, from what the front page says, there's this button in which you go to birdsaren'treal.com. They have this button right on their front page. It says, read their flyer.

E:Get it, flyer? Yeah.

S:I thought that was funny.

C:It's very simple. The flyer says, wake up.

E:Okay, I'm woke. What we think are birds are actually government surveillance drones. That's it. That's basically the whole flyer. Every bird is a drone? Every bird is a drone. Since when? Haven't there been birds since before drones? Since Nixon. That's right. It's all about Nixon. I'm going to get to the Nixon quote in a second. But for a little historical context, I mean, We have some situations here. Remember that mechanical owl that Hephaestus created and Athena sent to Perseus to help rescue Andromeda? The gods used that as a drone, basically a means for spying. Or how about the Hunger Games, right? Then they have mechanical birds to spy on the tributes in the Hunger Games.

C:So there's all sorts of precedent for this.

E:And then there is the quote from Richard Nixon.

C:Here it is.

E:We needed a way to keep an eye on the American citizens without them knowing. It was imperative for their own safety, of course. We hired only the best. It took years. We designed, built, tested, failed. But we persisted. Eventually, over decades, we had it. A fleet of covert technological surveillance devices unlike anything the world has ever seen. We called them birds. Yes, that is a – That's a real fake quote. On this website. And you have to take action now, Steve. They tell you, take action. Recent surveys have revealed 99.5% of the general public still believe in birds. That said, it is our duty – it's their duty – as bird truthers to remove the blinders from their eyes and welcome them into the light of truth. Together, we can shift society's perception of what flies above us. Okay, so does it take a trained skeptical eye to spot this parody? Actually, a squirrel should be able to recognize that this is 100% satire, let alone a person. Is this on the onion? You wish it were. It's an actual website. It could be, but no. Do you remember Saturday Night Live? They used to make commercials for fake products, right? Happy Fun Ball was one of them. I mean, this would be like, if you believed in this, you would believe that the Happy Fun Ball was a real product. Do you know what my favorite one was? My favorite recent one, Evan? Which one? Jon Hamm's Jon Hamm. Thanks for watching! So what we have here is satire, obviously.

C:Obviously. But are they trying to make a point to call out just how crazy some conspiracy theories actually are? It's a little unclear as to what the motivation is here and what the lesson is. What's our takeaway from this? What are we supposed to be learning from a website such as this? Well, how many people picked it up and ran with it? It's making the rounds. That's probably the lesson. Like, come on, people.

E:Look how obviously fake this is, and you still are buying into it. Yeah, but here's the thing. So I do think, although there's no tell, meaning that they don't say specifically this is satire anymore. Not yet. But some people speculate that this is just all an attempt at branding to sell t-shirts and swag, and that it probably will work. They have an online store at the website, and they are actually selling these things.

C:Or the other speculation is that this is sort of a sting operation against those silly conspiracy theorists.

S:But I don't like this kind of thing because it does just pollute the environment. And when you think about it, is this really more ridiculous than the flat earthers? Not really. More ridiculous. Yeah. It's about on the same level, and some people think that people parroting, using the Flat Earth as a parody, actually gave it a lot of its early steam, right? Not that I'm predicting this is going to turn into a conspiracy theory that people actually believe in. Right, a movement of some sort. But it really isn't that different from the Flat Earth movement, you know? It has the same components, that's right. Yeah, it's just as absurd.

E:It's within the same order of magnitude.

S:I don't agree with pulling off hoaxes or this kind of parody, but presenting it as real, I don't believe that is an effective form of skeptical activism. I think it will basically backfire when you try to do things like that. I don't think it would accomplish anything. Because the stated goal is often, well, this will expose them for how gullible and stupid they are. It's like, OK, well, you don't really need to do that. I mean, they're sort of doing that on their own. And no one who would see that is going to be compelled by this example. In any case, all you're really doing is making yourself untrustworthy and potentially accidentally creating another belief system. Yeah. We've seen it happen. We have seen it happen. Well, gosh, I mean, 20 years ago, if we had predicted 20 years ago that the flat earth craze would get to the level that it has gotten to today, no way you would have taken that bet. There was absolutely no way you could have seen that coming. Yet here it is. Now, I do like satire, legitimate satire. Yeah, me too. Because I think it could be a great way to expose the fundamental contradiction or logic or whatever position. But when I've done it in the past, I've always labeled it as satire.

E:And I learned that lesson the first time I published on my blog a really satirical article. I actually got contacted by journalists who legit thought it was real. Was that the alternative engineering article? Yeah.

S:It's still one of my favorite articles. It's so good. But I'm like, this is not real. This is satire. But they were serious journalists. So from that point forward, I clearly label it as satire, so there's no mistake. You know what the other recent example of this is? Maybe not to this extent, but it's a little similar. The Let's Storm Area 51 phenomenon. Oh my gosh, in which hundreds of thousands of people are interested in doing this crazy thing in September in which they're going to try to rush. This is not real. I just did this to get clicks on Facebook. He said that.

E:Right, after he got his 16,000th click. Yeah, but I don't know if anyone's taking it seriously. Maybe somebody in there is. But he was also saying, we're going to Storm Area 51 running Naruto style, you know, that anime style with your arms behind your back facing forward. That was clearly just a goof. But it does take on a life of its own, and again, these things get out of the originator's control.

S:And this prompted, because Area 51 is an actual secure military base, and they said, just to make no mistake here, it's not a good idea to storm a military base, which is defended Right. Armed soldiers. You see, they tend to take these things seriously, defending them. You don't care if you're running like, you know, some comic book dude. Like, it doesn't matter. We're going to shoot you. Right. Don't do it. And you know, since then, it has also spawned the plan to storm the Loch Ness, to find the Loch Ness Monster. That's got like 40,000 signatures. Oh, I saw that. What are they going to do? People are going to drown if they die. And Let's Storm the Bermuda Triangle is also out there now.

E:Because now it's become kind of a joke.

J:They should storm the Apollo 11 landing site. Yeah, the movie set, right, where they think...

E:Thanks for watching. Well, yeah, some people are not well, and I like to call them a bit reality detached. I think that's putting it kindly. Reality challenged. So we'll see. We'll see if anybody actually tries to storm Area 51. Hopefully not. Okay.

S:Be careful out there, guys. Jay. Yes. It's Who's That Noisy time, but before you get us up to date on Who's That Noisy, you have a little bit of a correction to make from the previous one.

Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:06:32)

S:It's Who's That Noisy time, but before you get us up to date on Who's That Noisy, you have a little bit of a correction to make from the previous one.

E:But I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell you right out of the gate to those of you listening to Who's That Noisy, I'm sorry. I am sorry, legitimately. This is what happened. I'm kidding. I'm partially kidding.

S:So what happened was I reported on a news item about which was this, Steve, because I'm a couple of weeks ago.

C:Yeah, it was at least two weeks ago.

S:This was the one about the female Russian cosmonaut.

J:And in that, Who's That Noisy, I said, and I don't remember my exact wording, I said something along the lines of, and this is a recording of her upon re-entry, and she died, and I thought that I threw out there a little Just to clarify, Valentina Tereshkova was the first female cosmonaut in space. She's absolutely alive. The question was, was that a recording of another female cosmonaut that predated her? And I think you got the fake first woman cosmonaut confused with the real first woman cosmonaut. But there's never any question that Valentina has survived, landed, and is still alive. I didn't research it.

S:I took it on... You took it at face value. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by And in the 80s, you know, Russia was still kind of like, you know, big bad, you know, like it was like, you know, fear the Russian government type of thing.

J:And I know that they're very secretive. And I thought, yeah, I wouldn't put it past them to hide, you know, one of their cosmonauts getting killed. Well, they did hide that. So that's the thing. So there were a lot of conspiracy theories in the West about the Soviet space program hiding accidents and deaths. And it turns out that they did do that, but they were only hiding Once that occurred on the launch pad, like there was one where the rocket blew up on the launch pad and I think 120 people were killed. Oh my gosh. And they covered that up, but not in space because the U.S. They couldn't hide it.

S:The U.S. was tracking whatever was happening in space. And this all goes back to the late 50s and 60s when the space race was heating up and both the countries were dumping tons of money into innovation and everything. And this is really borne on people's, the societal fear of the Russian government and their secrecy. And the secrecy doubled and tripled down on people speculating, and that speculation turned into the missing cosmonauts. Yeah. And it's pretty cool.

J:The missing cosmos, though, in retrospect, that was all fake. It was all fake, but legitimately there was people talking about it and feeling, you know, there was a lot of buzz about this, like it was one of the things that people talked about. But wait, then who is the recording actually of? Oh, that's a good question. Because Steve has this totally nailed, but there was these couple of dudes out where in Italy, Steve? Yeah, two Italian amateur radio operators claimed to have just happened to capture this radio signals of the cosmonaut burning up on re-entry. But the thing that really made, there's a couple of things that make it suspicious, but the big one is the same two, I think they were brothers, This is a

S:So one is their names were, this is what Wikipedia says, the Ejudica Cordiglia brothers, Cordiglia, Cordiglia, right? Cordiglia. Cordiglia. Yes, the Cordiglia brothers. So one thing was the ham radio at that time was very popular. They were saying that if you measured the tower, you could tell what frequency the person was transmitting at. That was one of the things I read about this.

J:Yeah, but Jay, at that time, did you know that at that time the radios were actually made out of ham? I would love to believe that because think about it, think about it, you're in a survival situation, you're at a ham radio, and you get hungry, and you're like, okay, I mean that's why we make them out of ham and they eat it. So there was a, Steve, check this out, there was a bunch of things that they heard. They heard in May 1960 a manned spacecraft reports it's going off course. November 28th, 1960, a faint SOS Morse code signal that they heard from a spacecraft leaving Earth's orbit. You know, there was one in February of 1961, April of 1961, May of 1961, October of 1961, November of 1962, November of 1963, and April of 1964. So the November of 1963 female cosmonauts... The Soviets were busy killing off their cosmonauts. That was, but that one in November 1963, that was the female cosmonaut dies during re-entry. Now I got emailed from a listener who is a ham radio connoisseur, and Gorman, because he eats the ham radio when he's doing it, he said that the Russian accent was not legit. That words were not said correctly and whatnot. And the correct protocol when your spaceship is burning up is to scream into the microphone as loud as you can and not talk about how much you love your country, like you just basically scream. And they didn't do that, and that's how we know it's a fake. All right, Jay, so get us up to date on Who's That Noisy? So last week I played This Noisy. Let's lots of clicks and springs and things moving around. Guys, you want to take a stab at this? It's almost like tumblers on a lock, you know, trying to open a lock, but amplified. Well, so a listener named Glenn Brady said, OK, I'm going to guess that this week's noisy is dialing on a Decadic rotary dial telephone.

U:That's a 10 unit based rotary dial phone.

J:I'm really old, and this guy, like, I gotta tell you, when I re-listen to that noisy, it certainly does in the beginning sound like somebody's dialing on an old style rotary phone. That is not the correct answer, but it was a good guess.

E:Next email was from John Henry and he says, Hey, Jay, longtime listener and fan, but my first guess at a noisy.

J:It's an Enigma machine. If it's not and you want to record your own noisy of an Enigma operating, you can go to the National Cryptology Museum. That would be cool. Maybe I'll pull that out someday. Not correct. Now, the winner. Now, who do you guys think won? I give you a guess. He was at Nexus. Oh, no way. Oh, SILAC? Nope, but good guess. Joe Bega Donuts? Charlie Ross. Charlie Ross. Charlie. Charlie is our beloved friend at Google, and he's a patron. And he sent me this guess while we were both at Nexus, which was really funny. So he says, is this one of those super old adding machines with a crank handle? The kind from super old war era cartoons? And the answer is yes, it is.

C:Absolutely is.

S:Good guess, Charlie. I actually used one of those machines.

J:Do you know why? You know who had one? My dad. Grandfather. No, our father had one in his office when we were kids, and I would freaking use it. It was fun. You press the buttons and they stay down, and then you crank the handle. And it tallies up the numbers. It tallies up the numbers and it prints it out on a piece of paper that comes out like a receipt. Yeah, there was a hundreds digit, a tens digit, a single digit. Purely mechanical, purely mechanical.

S:But it had such a satisfying, like when you pull the crank, Thanks for watching!

J:I would love to have my little PC or my Apple IIe or whatever it was from 1975 or whatever that was, you know what I mean?

B:Those were my first crappy little computer, which was worthless, but now would be awesome if I had it.

J:Steve, you could get one on eBay. They sell them all the time, and they're not really that expensive. Yeah. I remember you, Bob, and I were at the Apple Store, and what year could this have been? Early 80s?

S:I don't even remember.

B:It was like the Apple IIe just came out.

S:Yeah, early 80s. I think that was early 80s. And the guy was putting the, there was a panel you can open up on this computer. You can lift off like a big section of the part where the monitor rests on to get into the innards of the computer where the motherboard is and all the components.

J:And the guy was closing the lid, and he hit it really hard, and it clicks back into place. These things were made very solid. And he goes, you can't break your apple. And Steve turned to me and Bob and said, did you hear what he just said?

S:We were blown away.

J:That probably was the sales pitch. Thank you for watching. So to give you

S:My grandmother gave it to me.

E:She was an antiques dealer.

S:The noise you hear is me adding the numbers one nine three four and one nine nine six and clearing it. And that's that clear that that wonderful clearing. Hang on. One nine three four plus one.

J:What was the second number?

C:It was Carl Sagan.

J:He says Carl Sagan's birth year and death year.

S:Oh, 996.

J:OK. And another cool thing he said, you know, he says, why? Like, why did I pick those dates? Well, my grandmother's daughter, my mother, graduated with Carl Sagan and he even signed her yearbook. How about that? OK, here's the answer. Three thousand nine hundred twenty. There you go. Thank you, Evan. And Carl called his mother vivacious and hard to understand. And then, I think this was a guy, Bob, that said that we were the Bob and Jay conglomeration, right? Oh, he can't tell the difference between your voices? No. Because he always writes, Dear Bob or Jay. That's what he says at the top of this email. Dear Jay or Bob.

E:So that was the second time that Carl Sagan has come up in this episode, so I'm going to tell you a third reference to Sagan. Are you ready?

J:Oh, because things happen in three, right? Yes. So you know that my dog died a couple weeks ago, and my wife couldn't wait to get another dog, so we rescued this dog from Tennessee. He's like a husky Australian cheap dog mix, and guess what his name is? No, guess what his name was?

S:Now, this is the name that he has on the listing for the rescue. This is not the name we're giving him. Right. He already had this name.

E:This is the name that he was given by whoever.

S:His name is Sagan. Yeah, Sagan. Love it. Ooh, coincidence? I think so. We're going to go pick them up and I'm going to have a new puppy dog named Sagan. And because of all of this, because Steve's wife Jocelyn was feverishly looking up dogs on like Pet Finder and doing all the research and all that. So then, you know, my wife and I lost our dogs like three years ago. So we've been talking about getting one. We Steve is like, you know, Steve and Josh were sending us pictures of dogs. And next thing you know, we're going out looking at dogs. And then the next thing you know, we find a dog and we adopted a dog on Monday. Yeah. And his name is Lando. And he's awesome.

J:He's awesome. Of course, his name is Lando. Yup, he's so adorable. Puppies are so much fun. Everybody knows it. And everybody wants to talk about their puppy and nobody wants to hear about it. So anyway, I have a new Noisy. It's not your puppy, is it? No, sir. Thank you, sir. Okay, so this week's Noisy was sent in by a listener named Ben Nolting. And here's the sound. If you think you know what this noisy is, if you want to sign up for Dragon Con 2019 and come to our private show.

U:Yes. Just kidding. Do not email me about this. Only email me about who's that noisy. You can email me at WTN at the Skeptic's Guide dot org. All right. Thank you, Jay. It's time for science or fiction.

Science or Fiction (1:20:56)

Theme: None Item #1: New research finds that artificial canned laughter decreased the degree to which subjects found comedy funny. Item #2: A new study finds that the working memory of chimpanzees is substantially similar to that of humans. Item #3: Researchers studying Asian elephants find that females living with sisters had significantly increased probability of annual reproduction.

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

Host	Result
Steve

Rogue	Guess

U:It's time for science or fiction.

J:Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Are you guys ready for this week? Yes. Yes. Okay. There is no theme this week. No theme, just three news items.

S:Here we go.

US#01:Item number one, new research finds that artificial canned laughter decreased the degree to which subjects found comedy funny.

S:Item number two, a new study finds that the working memory of chimpanzees is substantially similar to that of humans. And item number three, researchers studying Asian elephants find that females living with sisters had significantly increased probability of annual reproduction. Jay, go first. And here I am going first. All right, the first one here, new research finds that artificial canned laughter decreased the degree to which subjects found comedy funny. Well, I happen to know some fun things about artificial canned laughter, like the machine that this particular person invented to do it for TV shows. The laugh track. The laugh track, yeah. It was pretty complicated and pretty cool. There's quite a history on it. So, you know, saying that canned laughter decreased the degree in which subjects found comedy funny. I mean, I can

J:The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and Evan Bernstein. Well, I'll just say like in the study, you know, it's artificial canned laughter. In other words, the laughter sounds artificial. That's kind of the point of the study. Gotcha. All right. Thank you. That's very important. I'm glad I was thinking out loud there. OK, so I would tend to think that that's true because the canned laughter, when you hear it, it takes me out of the moment. I'm listening to the laughter and I'm not laughing with the laughter. OK, a new study finds that the working memory of chimpanzees is substantially similar to that of humans.

S:Wow, okay. I would think that we would have known this earlier if this were that true. Substantially similar to that of humans.

J:The working memory, so okay, so we're talking about their moment-to-moment memory, like, you know, the short-term memory that's allowing you to stay in context with reality. I mean, I would imagine that it has to be there. They have to have that. But then I would think that our hard drive might be a little bit more nuanced than theirs. But that's OK. I got to read this last one. I'm not sure about that. Last one here. Researchers studying Asian elephants find that females living with sisters had significantly increased probability of annual reproduction. Why would Asian elephants, if they're living with their female, if they're living with their sisters, have it significantly increase their probability of annual reproduction? Now, it could be that more of them attracted more males. I would hate to think that this has anything to do with their cycles and all that, because I've read things saying that that is incorrect, that women's cycles don't sync up and all that nonsense from hormones and pheromones, whatever. OK, so one of these has to be fake, Steve. Damn you, Steve. These are all these are fascinating and really, really good. It's definitely between the chimpanzees and the elephants, the elephants. And I would say that the elephant one is the fake. Okay, Cara. I think I'm gonna have to say the opposite. I think that looking over all three of these, it's really hard to know which one it is. But I wouldn't be surprised if even if the laughter sounds fake, people still have heightened responses to jokes like to TV. Because I do think that there's this really strong psychological construct. Like when you watch TV alone, it's really rare that you laugh out loud. But if there's other people around, and they're laughing at something, it really does increase your kind of humor response.

C:So my guess is that whether it sounds real or fake, we're just so desensitized to the fact that laugh track sounds fake, that they still That one's the fiction that it actually increased the degree to which subjects found comedy funny. Okay, Evan. Oh boy. Well, I think I'm going to disagree with both Jay and Cara. I don't like it when Evan does that on his own. I see it differently. Laughter, it's almost like yawning, the contagious aspect of yawning. I think maybe laughter has a similar sort of contagion element to it. And if that were somehow artificially generated, it would not have the same impact.

E:Thank you for joining us. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and Evan Bernstein. To that of humans, the human experience is just, you know, gosh, so many degrees removed from what the Chimpanzees experience that I don't see how their processing in the memory department can really be. The last one about the females living with the sisters for the elephants. I just think with that one that elephants are communal animals and creatures. They do live in herds and have families, and it's established that there's an impact there because of that very nature of the elephant herd, the elephant pack. I'm not sure what you exactly call it. That's it for today. All right, Bob, you get to break the tie. Wouldn't be surprised one way or the other on that one.

C:You know, we could hold in working memory what, seven chunks at the same time?

E:And if you put a new one in, the other one slides out, that type of thing.

B:I think that's related to working memory. I mean, sure, I could see chimpanzees having something very similar to that. The one that I disagree with and I agree wholeheartedly with Cara about is the canned laughter. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Cara Santa Maria, and Evan Bernstein. OK. All right. So since you two guys chose number one, we'll take these in reverse order. We'll start with the third one. Researchers studying Asian elephants find that females living with sisters has significantly increased probability of annual reproduction. Jay, you think this one is the fiction? Yep. And this one is science. Of course. Yeah, because elephants are... That was funny, Jay. I'm Jay Novella.

S:So the study shows that for long-lived social mammals, they were studying the idea that there's a benefit to the social structure. They were specifically looking at Asian elephants, and they wanted to know if you had a female Asian elephant, what's the probability of successfully having a baby over the course of a year reproducing? And that probability was significantly increased if they were living with a female relative, especially a closely related relative like a sister, and especially if that sister was zero to five years younger than they were. And this effect was stronger for younger female elephants. So the question is, why would this be the case? And the idea, again, this study doesn't tell us why this is the case, just that it is the case. But the researchers speculate that younger female elephants just don't have the skills, the chops, you know, to make this happen, and that if they have the social support structure from other closely related females, that that gives them an advantage. So, they're just not mature enough to know what to do. In general, in the animal kingdom, they find that there are, for social mammals, especially long-lived social mammals, there tends to be very complex, close female social hierarchies. And the thinking is that this is a result of the fact that the females of the species tend to stay together. Where as the males tend to leave and go out to find a mate, the females stay together throughout their whole life. Their whole lives they may remain as a social unit and that they need to support each other because it's the nature of the role that they fill domestically and that there's advantages to evolving these support structures. Yeah, especially in elephants. I don't know about Asian elephants, but in African elephants, it's like, oh, it's a matriarchal society. The bulls are off on their own. Yeah, exactly. That's cool. OK, let's go back to number two. A new study finds that the working memory of chimpanzees is substantially similar to that of humans. Evan, you are out on your own again, thinking that this one is the fiction. Well, everyone else very nervously thinks that this one is science.

C:Steve, that's cruel to do this. This one is science, not this time, Evan. Sorry.

S:This was a bit surprising because, you know, people are smarter than chimpanzees, right? There's no question about that. And so working memory specifically is the ability to hold several bits of information in your head for a short period of time. For example, like one example they give in the study is so that you remember the beginning of the sentence when you get to the end of the sentence, right?

E:That's sort of your short-term working memory.

S:So that you could do math. You need to be able to hold those numbers in your head. So this was the paradigm that they came up with to test the chimpanzees. And they also did the same thing in children. They used chimpanzees versus human children in this study. They would show the chimpanzee that they were putting food into different little boxes that were different shapes and colors and also lined up in a row so they would be in a different arrangement. And then, so the food was in some of the boxes and not in others. And then the chimpanzees would have to search for the food. And of course, once they found food in one box, there would no longer be food in that box. So if they were, the boxes were covered up and then revealed again, the chimpanzee would have to remember which box they already have taken food from because there would no longer be food there. And so they used that as a way of measuring like how many boxes in would the would the chimpanzee remember its recent choices, which is another function of short of this working memory, remembering choices that you just made. And they found that the range was very similar to that of humans, that most of the chimpanzees, the ones that performed well, were able to remember four boxes. I think the best performing chimp was able to remember seven, so that, you know, 4 to 7 is in the human range in terms of bits of information for working memory. That's so cool. Yeah, but also they found that chimpanzees had the same — it wasn't just the sheer number — the same effects that we see in humans, they also demonstrated in chimpanzees. So if they were given a distracting task, it reduced their ability to remember Thank you for watching. And the object features, so they would remember the boxes based, because they could move the boxes around, right? So then they're not in the same place. The chimpanzees would still be able to remember based on the features of the box itself. But the children, so children had essentially the same working memory as the chimpanzees, but they were able to engage in more sophisticated strategies that the chimpanzees didn't use. For example, some of the children hit upon the idea of going systematically, like from left to right, whereas the chimpanzees never hit upon that as a strategy. So the kids were smarter than the chimpanzees, but their just raw processing power, if you will, in terms of their working memory was basically the same. Always again, how similar we are to chimpanzees is endlessly fascinating. You know, there's always antecedents to anything that we think is uniquely human. There's antecedents in the animal kingdom and of course chimpanzees are our closest cousins, so that's always the best place to look. Okay, this means that new research finds that artificial canned laughter decreased the degree to which subjects found comedy funny is the fiction, and Bob and Cara, you are correct, it increased the degree to which people found comedy funny. This is being reported as the dad jokes. I don't know if you guys saw the reporting about this. So they basically told people jokes that were not funny, like what's the best day to cook food? Friday. Thank you, Evan. Both the fake and the genuine laughter increased the degree to which the subjects rated the jokes as funny, but the genuine laughter had more of an effect.

J:So there was a diminished effect from the artificial laughter, but it still made people laugh more and think they were funnier.

S:It didn't have this opposite effect, this reverse effect. So that kind of makes sense, but yeah, even fake laughter, it still gives us the social cue that something is funny and we contagiously laugh. So good job, Bob and Cara. Cara, high five! All right, Evan, take us home with a quote.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:37:38)

"Humans are pattern seekers. It’s how we’ve always made sense of the world: Our ancestors wouldn’t have survived if they hadn’t realized that plants tend to flourish after rainfall or that sabertooth tigers tended to eat them. But sometimes we’re just a little too good at finding meaning in the noise, occasionally unable to separate real patterns from those of our own imagining."  – Emma Grey Ellis - journalist, WIRED, (description of author)

S:All right, Evan, take us home with a quote. Humans are pattern seekers. It's how we've always made sense of the world. Our ancestors wouldn't have survived if they hadn't realized that plants tend to flourish after rainfall or that saber-toothed tigers tended to eat them. But sometimes, we're just a little too good at finding meaning in the noise, occasionally unable to separate real patterns from those of our own imagining.

E:That was written by Emma Gray Ellis. She is a journalist with Wired online, Wired magazine, and she writes about science and planets and other interesting things. So check her out, Emma Gray Ellis. I wouldn't say occasionally, I'd say all the time. Oh yeah. It's like every day. Occasionally all the time. Yeah. Heck yeah. We don't even know we're doing it. Right. We are pattern-seeking all the time. All right, guys, well, thanks for joining me this week.

U:Sure.

E:Thanks, Steve. Steve, I didn't win Science of Fiction this week. I know. That's right, Jay. I didn't either. I sense a comeback in your near future. Regression to the mean, Jay. Statistically, I'm due. Regression to the mean.

S:You're going to regress to that mean, Jay. Don't worry about it. Thank you. Statistics are on your side. All right. All right. Until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

E:Thanks for watching!

S:Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking.

J:For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org.

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