SGU Episode 739
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| SGU Episode 739 |
|---|
| September 07th 2019 |
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"Discover the mesmerizing beauty of the blue sea slug, a true ocean gem!" |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro[edit]
C: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 Sunday, September 1st, 2019, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody.
US#01:Jay Novella, Evan Bernstein, and our brother from down under Richard Saunders.
S:Thank you guys for joining me. We're at Dragon Con 2019. This is one of our most fun shows every year because we get to be at Dragon Con. The audience is filled with people in awesome costumes. We're having a lot of fun. I just always love this episode.
U:You guys having a good time? No.
S:Thank you for joining us.
J:This is also the only episode that we do in full Star Trek regalia. When do you get a chance? Actually, when we're recording at home in our offices, we're wearing Star Trek. I was never told we needed to do that. No, you don't need to. Get with the program, Bob. The option is there. So we have an hour. We have a lot of great news on it. We're going to get right to it.
S:Today, September 1, also happens to be the anniversary of the Carrington event. You guys remember the Carrington event, don't you?
U:Of course you don't.
S:Thank you for joining us today. Yep, the Earth was just walloped with a CME, a coronal mass ejection, a storm of ions from the sun, and our newly installed telegraph infrastructure was fried by that CME. There's a lot of damage done. Of course, now imagine what would happen if a similar thing hit us today. We had slightly more electric infrastructure Thank you for joining us. Thanks for watching.
J:See you next time.
B:And we're also being sarcastic because our government is doing nothing about hardening our electrical infrastructure. They don't have backup transformers.
S:They're not preventing, they're not hardening the grid itself. Steve, if McDonald's can harden our arteries, the government can harden our grids. If this type of a Carrington-like event hit us directly, it's quite plausible that we wouldn't fully restore power for years. How would it go through the shell? I know. I mean, it's like a tragedy. We would go dark. There would be no SGU for months or years. I mean, that's putting a nice icing on time. It wouldn't be years. It would probably be into the decades before we had full recovery.
J:But I mean, this would affect the whole planet.
S:Oh, absolutely. In fact, in 2012, there was a near miss. Nine days, we got by and just missed a Carrington-like event. They did a cost analysis of it at the time back in 2013, in which in the United States alone, upward estimates of the amount of damage measured in dollars, $2.6 trillion
J:And that's probably an underestimate. That's the things they could think of.
US#03:And that's not including a lot of the downstream consequences.
E:It's always worse than you think. Probably double that is probably a better estimate. So it's going to be trillions of dollars is what it's going to cost. So you would think it would be worth investing billions of dollars to prevent that from happening. If your device isn't on, is it safe? No, it's more about the size of the device. You're saying that size matters? Yeah, it does matter.
S:I keep hearing this, I don't like what I'm hearing. Yeah, it would take a pretty big event to fry your iPad. But again, the grid, we're literally sending wires across the country. That would definitely be affected. And that gets affected even by much lesser episodes. And also our satellite, we have quite a few satellites up there. So it's not just no electricity, it's no GPS, no satellites, no communication satellites. They're gone, because they would also be fried as well.
J:So anyway, happy anniversary to the Carrington event.
S:We'll look forward to the next one. I think we briefly mentioned this before. We didn't really do a deep dive on this. These people are planning to storm Area 51.
: News Items (06:14)[edit]
News Item #1: Carrington Even 160 Year AnniversaryNews Item #2: Storm Area 51News Item #3: Hurricane Dorian - No NukesNews Item #4: Australopithecus anamensisNews Item #5: Human Effects on the EnvironmentNews Item #6: Genome Wide Association Study of Same Sex BehaviorNews Item #7: Pluto Is Still Not a Planet https://www.space.com/pluto-still-a-planet-nasa-chief-says.html
S:These people are planning to storm Area 51. Tell us what's the update on this. Is this really going to happen? All right. They celebrate UFOs and this sort of culture and phenomenon. And each year it happens, but this year's going to be a little bit different.
E:And all thanks to this one silly post in Facebook page that went up, Storm Area 51, where it says, we will all meet up in rural Nevada and coordinate our parties. If we Naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Let's see them aliens. So you may have remembered this. Evan, can you demonstrate a Naruto run for us? I actually cannot, but you want me to... Can somebody in the audience who's not wired with mics demonstrate for us a Naruto run? Anyone? No? No takers? If anybody does it, I'll give you a sticker. Here we go. There you go. Yes! Oh, wow. The best. Now, I don't know about you guys, She not only looked like she was running faster, she ran faster. No bullets would ever, ever.
S:And she wasn't shot, it works. Right, so they're going to Naruto run Area 51. Right, so what is this all about?
J:Well, we have maybe perhaps Joe Rogan to thank for this because not long ago back in June he had on the Joe Rogan experience Bob Lazar, who is a, you know, In response to that interview,
S:A college student, his name is Matty Roberts, 20-year-old college student.
E:He decided to, as just a little joke, he's going to post this event using Facebook and put that in as the descriptor. In a couple days, he had about 40 people who were either interested or, quote unquote, going to the event. And not a few weeks later, as many as two million people on Facebook decided that they were either going to be going to or were interested in the event. Okay, so, ha ha, a lot of fun, real funny here, but it's turning into a real problem, because what is happening is that, because this is coming up in just a couple of weeks, the local towns, the local counties near Area 51 are bracing for a convergence like they've never seen before. They anticipate tens of thousands, maybe 100,000 or more people that are going to be converging in these areas. Which is Thanks for joining us Because of the overflow of people that they're going to have coming in, they just cannot handle it. They don't know what to do, so they're putting it out as a statewide crisis. Evan, I love the fact that when this thing first occurred, when millions of people started signing up for Storm Area 51, the people at Area 51 were like, this is a hardened military base? And we shoot people who trespass onto our base, so don't do that. Do not infiltrate a secure, maximally secured secret military base. We shoot people for that. And they're probably hardened against CMEs as well.
S:Thank you for joining us. Thank you.
E:You told me something surprising, Evan. How big is Area 51? Roughly the size in square miles of the state of Connecticut. That's the actual geographic area. Now, obviously, they're not utilizing all of that. Most of it is just barren desert brush. That's about it. You could do things that are like explode nuclear bombs or test secret military aircraft. Fly aircraft and jets everywhere that need to go without being so easily spotted.
S:Well, I mean, is anyone really thinking, though, that anybody is taking any of this seriously?
E:Like, are they really going to... Well, the people protecting Area 51 are taking it extremely seriously, and they're issuing warnings almost daily to remind them, do not do this, do not do this, do not cross our border, do not come in here.
S:It's going to get ugly. It's going to get ugly, is what they said. So no guarantee for your safety if you cross over that line.
E:But you're right, Jay. We don't know. The whole thing started as a goof.
J:This was a joke that somebody put out there in the interwebs and got way out of their control almost immediately.
E:And this guy was interviewed. He was like, I didn't expect this to happen. This was just a joke. I was just trying to increase the likes on my Facebook page. That's literally what he said. Well, it worked. Thanks for joining us.
S:I think Evan's right. I'm sure there's a lot of people for whom it's a joke. For a lot of people, it's going to be a festival. Festival! They really want to take down the man and expose the aliens. This is their one chance to do it. This is a great idea. Why didn't we think of this before? Do they actually think, though, that they're going to jump the fence and crack open a hangar and there's going to be like Thanks for joining us.
J:We'll be right back.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (13:07)[edit]
J:We'll be right back.
E:No, it's coming in a sense you'll hope that they'll use restraint in case some people with these desires can make their way. I really doubt that they'll get anywhere even close to anything. Well, I mean, it's a powder keg. Imagine a typical military grunt armed with an automatic weapon who's guarding Area 51, who's probably never had to fire their weapon in anger ever. And now 100,000 people are running at them. The whole point is to overwhelm the defenses of the base. If enough people are doing that, it's plausible, regardless of what their instructions are, that one or more of these kids can panic and start shooting people.
S:Which would be a terrible situation. The people are like X-wings storming the Death Star because it wasn't designed to defend against them. Look for the exhaustion. They'd find the floor. That's right. But if they Naruto run, won't they just run right past the guy with the gun? Well, that's the point. Yeah, that's the point. That's the idea. You spray bullets. You know, they can't get everyone. Steve, is anyone saying that, hey, maybe this is a conspiracy theory to get all the UFO nuts in one place? Where'd they go? I don't know. They never showed up.
B:Come on, Bob. I like the way you think, man.
US#03:You would think the idea of harboring aliens in Area 51 is just so outdated and archaic, but it's not.
J:There are still so many people who really, truly believe it. And there are photoshopped pictures of flying saucers in hangars at Area 51.
B:There you go. There's a flying saucer. But it's not just in this country. In Australia we have our own secret area. It's right in the center of the country near the city of Alice Springs. It's called Pine Gap.
E:Pine Gap is a joint US-Australian facility. It's a secret facility. As far as I can possibly know, and as far as the general population knows, it's for monitoring satellite chatter, picking up things, sending intelligence to Canberra or to Washington or to both.
S:Did you say a joint US alien facility?
US#03:Did I say a joint US alien or a joint US Australian? Okay, I misheard you, sorry. That would have been a good Freudian... So where is it? Is this near... It's in the center of the country. It's not far from Uluru or Ayers Rock, the big rock in the center of the country. It's in the middle of the desert. It's in the middle of the desert, but it's near the town of Alice Springs, which is quite a substantial town. So there have been rumors of people trying to penetrate Pine Gap because there are certain Australian UFO believers who think that that's the place in the world that the government, the U.S. government, are breeding aliens in the middle of Australia. Of course it all makes sense! That's where you'd go... Now when you say breeding aliens... Yeah, just wait. It gets better. So about four years ago I went to a paranormal conference and one of the speakers was talking about alien abductions and so on and so forth. And these are the points they made. There has been a 17-year truth embargo by the US government on alien matters. There are new human hybrids on the planet. One is called Mia.
J:So if you find Mia, let me know. Now remember, this is a few years ago.
US#03:President Obama, as one of his last acts in office, will disclose the truth about UFOs. President Clinton, as one of her first acts in office, will disclose the truth about UFOs. So on and so forth. Aliens known as Grays, think of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, are here to make alien-human hybrids, which are also vegetarian. That's good to know. Vegetarian or vegan? Oh, that's a good point. They said vegetarian. And people accuse us of making stuff up about the UFO crowd and all sorts of things. I'm not making this up. This is exactly what they said. There is a secret base at Pine Gap. And at this space, they, the government, are creating clone alien robots that can abduct humans. Clone alien robots? Clone alien robots, so three in one. That's like the mutant Teenage Ninja Turtles. A clone, a clone, okay, so wait, let's reverse engineer this. A clone. A clone of an alien, presumably. It's a clone of an alien that has become robotic, so isn't that a cyborg? Is it? But if it's a clone, you're implying the DNA of some kind or some type of genetic material. It really should be a clone alien cyborg.
J:I think we could all agree on that, right?
US#03:It's a clone alien cyborg.
J:I think you're overthinking this. No, Richard, I think that you're missing out on a book opportunity. I think you're right. It was funny, now I remember it, of course there was about four speakers on the stage, and each one would come up with a point, and then each one would try to outdo it, and each one would try to outdo it. It was the best show in town as far as I'm concerned.
S:But the point is that they said that they knew people who tried to sneak into Pine Gap to find out the truth, which is exactly this sort of thinking. They did it one at a time. One at a time, that was their mistake.
J:They didn't storm it. Speaking of storms,
US#03:We are facing down the barrel of Hurricane Dorian. It's a Category 5 hurricane. You should all panic because it's heading our way. No, it's not. So it's in the Atlantic and it's heading towards the Bahamas. So it's hitting the Bahamas. It's hitting the Bahamas. And it's the strongest hurricane ever recorded to hit the Bahamas.
S:It's the second most powerful hurricane recorded in the Atlantic. So it's powerful, it's strong, it's powerful. So what you're seeing on screen is the projected pathways of the hurricane. It's basically swooping up the eastern coast of the United States from Florida, Georgia, and on upwards. We'll probably feel some of that in Atlanta. I'm hoping it's not going to keep me from flying home. Now there's one scientist, if you look at the image, there's one lone scientist who thinks it's going to go back out to sea. And one guy who thinks it's going to go across Florida. Everybody else is like, We'll be right back.
J:And also the other point that we often have to clarify, because we got this wrong initially too, is that the increasing temperatures that we're seeing, average temperatures with global warming, don't cause more hurricanes.
Science or Fiction (20:04)[edit]
Theme: None
Item #1: The pink dragon millipede spits flammable liquid onto its prey, which in the hot sun may actually combust.[1]
Item #2: The ruby seadragon uses its bright red color as camouflage.[2]
Item #3: The blue dragon sea slug spends most of its life floating upside down on the ocean surface, it feeds on Portuguese man o’ wars, and steels their venom for their own defence.[3]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | Item #1 |
| Science | Item #2 |
| Science | Item #3 |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|
J:And also the other point that we often have to clarify, because we got this wrong initially too, is that the increasing temperatures that we're seeing, average temperatures with global warming, don't cause more hurricanes.
J:They just make the hurricanes that occur more powerful.
E:So you're like that aliens guy with the weird hair. I'm not saying it's global warming, but it's global warming.
S:Well, but it's true that because there's more energy, more heat in the ocean, hurricanes pick up power as they go over the ocean. They're picking up all that heat energy from the ocean. Then they deliver that energy to the land as they make landfall. Then they might go back out and they pick up energy again. So they're kind of going up and down in their energy. And so warmer planet, warmer ocean, more powerful hurricanes.
J:And we are statistically seeing more frequent powerful hurricanes.
S:Would we have seen Dorian? Would it have been a category four, not a category five, were it not for global warming? Again, it's chaos. You can't predict at the weather level. But statistically, we're going to see more storms like this. I think that's the bottom line. They're called typhoons, I think, in Australia, right, Richard? Cyclones. So, cyclone is a hurricane. Yeah, it's more or less the same thing. It's not good. It all depends on the north or south of the southern hemisphere. It has a different name. Tornadoes have different names in the southern hemisphere as well. Right, but they do not spin in different directions. They're called tornadoes. Tornadoes are different then. What? No, you said that tornadoes are called something different? I thought that every storm had a different name in the southern hemisphere.
E:Jim, Bruce, Harry?
US#03:Here comes Fred again. Well, you guys do call a heated sandwich, like a panini, a toastie.
J:Yeah. And? You have a different name for something, for everything.
US#03:We were talking about this piece earlier, and I pointed out to Ray, or somebody asked, is it really true that they all hurricanes were named after women before a certain time? Yeah, that's true.
J:The protocol was they all had to be female two-syllable names.
US#03:And then either, you could take your pick, either somebody realized that that was sexist or they ran out of names.
J:And so they said, we have to expand our options here a little bit. So then they started going back between female and male names.
S:And then they also expanded it to more than two syllables. That's why we have Katrina, right, three syllables. But there was a time, when we were younger, it was all two syllable female names. The most famous cyclone in Australia hit the city of Darwin on Christmas Day, 1974, and just devastated Darwin. It was called Cyclone Tracy. Tracy, yep, fit the pattern. All right, but my question to you, Bob, is could we prevent this hurricane from making landfall if we nuke it?
US#03:That actor, Slim Pickens, had arguably the best line in any movie ever, like he had the best line. Now, who remembers 1941? He gets captured by a Japanese submarine, and he had a popcorn box.
S:Like the, what do you call it, the caramel popcorn?
US#02:Little compass prize.
J:And there was a little compass in there and they were going through his stuff, the popcorn, and they're going through and they find the compass and he grabs it and swallows it. And they needed the compass because the submarine's compass broke and they needed it. So they start pouring stuff down his throat to make him poop it out, right? And they're like, you see him like his pants are half on, and at some point he goes, you ain't getting shit out of me! I was like six years old when I saw that, and that was the funniest thing I had ever seen. That was like the only funny part of that movie, by the way. He was much better For example, Jack Reed from the San Diego National Labs, he thought about this in the 50s, but he wasn't trying to say, let's wipe it, let's stop it.
S:He was more thinking, let's weaken it and maybe direct it somewhere else.
J:But I could kind of cut some people some slack.
B:Perhaps if you never Googled it, or you didn't ask your science advisors about it, I could kind of see how you would think that a nuke would just break it apart and disband a hurricane. Or if you thought a little bit more intelligently about it, well, maybe we could mess with the convection cycle, but that assumes you know what a convection cycle is. But the bottom line is that the power of a hurricane, the bottom line is that it's just way too powerful for something like even a nuke to do any damage. A hurricane is essentially a country-sized heat engine. It's a gargantuan heat engine, and the energies involved are truly mind-boggling. So you can look at it a lot of different ways. If you look at the kinetic energy of the winds, we're talking 1.5 trillion watts of kinetic energy every day. That's half the electrical generating capacity of the United States. And that's just the winds. If you look at the heat released in terms of cloud and rain formation, that's 600 trillion watts of heat energy every day. That's 200 times The energy, the electrical generating capacity of the world, and these numbers are from the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, and they're probably a few years old, but you get the idea of what we're talking about in terms of the power that's in that. So if you look at it from a nuclear perspective of a nuke, okay, compare it to nukes, a good size hurricane, probably weaker than Dorian, if you wanted to recreate the energy profile, you'd have to drop a 10 megaton bomb, how often? Every 20 minutes. Every 20 minutes, 10 megaton bombs. Wait, to duplicate the energy? That's being released, it's being flung around here and there. So that's roughly 666, great number, Hiroshima-type bombs. Every 20 minutes or 2,000 an hour. So that gives you an idea of what we're talking about in terms of dropping a nuke. What do you guys know the biggest bomb ever dropped? Thank you for joining us today.
J:Manhandling a half a billion tons of air, you'd have to migrate that into the middle of the hurricane in order to actually, to kind of make the pressure, to make it this bad. But I know what would happen.
B:How would you even do that? I know what it would do. So imagine 180 mile an hour winds, now make them radioactive. That's exactly it. If you dropped a nuke, it might get a little bit bigger, but what you would end up with is a radioactive hurricane that within the trade winds would send the fallout all around. And if that got into the stratosphere, we're talking all over the planet, you would have this fallout. So yeah, it's not a good idea, and I recommend against even thinking about that anymore. So hopefully it won't happen. It's not going to happen. Hopefully it won't happen. I'm done guessing what's going to happen. Hopefully 100,000 people won't storm Area 51. All right, this is a picture of a skull of an early hominid. This is Australopithecus anamensis. And you are among the first people to ever look at a full skull of Australopithecus anamensis because this was just recently discovered and presented to the world. This is a early Australopithecus species.
E:So Australopithecus is what came before the genus Homo, right?
S:So we're Homo sapiens, Homo is our genus. Australopithecus is the genus that came before, the one that humans are part of. It was considered pretty clear, you notice I said was, that Australopithecus afarensis, Lucy, Lucy being the most famous example of that. You guys know why it's called Lucy? The daughter of the... Nope. It was named after a hurricane. Nope. So when they discovered it, they were playing Lucy and the Skyward Diamonds. Wow, that is cool. That's cool. So anyway, Lucy is like the most complete skeleton we have from an Australopithecine, an excellent specimen, and it's close to the line leading to the Homo genus, right?
B:And of course, whatever was the predecessor to Homo as a genus is a predecessor to humans.
S:And then there's, but there's other australopithecine species as well, and you know, the more fossils we discover, the more complicated this branching bush is getting. But we had this, like, jawbone and a tooth from another australopithecine species that was older than Afarensis, than Lucy, but that's it, that's the only specimen we had. And so we didn't know exactly where it fit into the lineage. Where do we put it on this branching tree? But now we have an almost complete skull that matches that same specimen. So now we know a lot more about Australopithecus anamensis than we did before this specific specimen. In fact, there was another specimen that we had. It was just a bit of skull. And we didn't know, what we knew was that it was 3.9 million years old. Sometimes if a bone is in a well-dated sediment, so sometimes sediments have radioactive decay going on, we could say, yeah. This layer right here is 3.8 million years old. Here's the skull, and this layer right here is 3.9 million years old. We have a really good idea how old that skull is. So we had this piece of Australopithecine skull that was 3.9 million years old, but we weren't sure what species it was, but we thought it was Anamensis. Now that we have a full Anamensis skull, we know that it wasn't an Anamensis skull. It was Australopithecus afarensis. So the new skull that they found helped them actually accurately identify the piece that they found. That they could tell us was 3.9 million years old. Well, we already knew it was 3.9 million years old, but now what that does is it pushes the age of afarensis back to 3.9 million years. So, how old is a species? It's as old as the oldest specimen we've found of that species. So now we knocked back the age of Australopithecus afarensis. And the Anamensis skull that we are looking at, this complete skull, is 3.8 million years old. Again, very reliably dated in the same way. So in a single stroke, this one specimen moved up the youngest age of Anamensis and pushed back the oldest age of Afarensis so that they now overlap by 100,000 years. And so we previously did not know that. We did not know that these two species overlapped. And in fact, this is all happening in Ethiopia. And the thinking was that perhaps Anamensis directly evolved. This population of Anamensis we're seeing in Ethiopia evolved into Afarensis in Ethiopia. That there was no overlap because A evolved into B. Now there is overlap by at least 100,000 years. Which is a long time, although it's kind of nothing geologically, but it is a long time. And again, it's at least a hundred thousand. Is it possible? So that means there's some branching occurred, which just complicated our picture of that period of time of human evolution. But don't you think, I mean, you ever think like, is it possible here that this could actually be a cloned alien robot? So the other thing I want to point out about this, so it's cool, so it basically, we used to say, yeah, afferent just probably gave rise to Homo, the genus Homo, now we're like, nah, we're not quite so sure.
J:Things got more complicated, not less complicated, so all bets are off, because now there's different branching points of australopithecines, and either one of them could have led to our genus.
S:Job security for anthropologists everywhere. We're out there, like Bob and I were talking about this again when we were prepping, and it's like the puzzle piece, like you have a puzzle, but there's no borders to the puzzle, right? It's a borderless puzzle, and you're finding pieces that are fitting in, but every now and then you find a piece that's outside of where you're putting the puzzle. The puzzle just got bigger, so now when you find that piece that is outside of what you already know, the puzzle itself gets bigger, and you actually know less. You actually, when you find something, the known unknowns increase more than the known unknowns. This finally makes sense to me. This is exactly like Lost. You're saying there are known knowns and known unknowns. Unknown unknowns. Right, so this is like we turned an unknown unknown into a known unknown. I do want to also point out that the lead author on this discovery was, I'm going to butcher this name and do the best I can, Johann Haile Selassie.
J:So he is an Ethiopian, and he's a native to Ethiopia and a professor at the University of Ethiopia.
US#03:And this is part of a trend of
S:You know, local African researchers doing their own research. And the problem was not a lack of researchers or a lack of desire, but a lack of funding. Native African researchers had a hard time getting funding for their paleontology, so you basically have a bunch of American and English guys doing all the paleontology in Africa. So this is a good trend. They're actually trying to get funding to the locals to research their own country. So we have Ethiopians doing paleontological research in Ethiopia, which is a nice trend. OK, let's move on.
: Skeptical Quote of the Week (35:20)[edit]
"Even the most outspoken of the critics must admit that long before we had print and film media to "spread the word," mankind was engaged in all forms of curel and despicable behavior. To attribute war, kiling, and violence to film, TV, and role-play games is to fly in the face of thousands of years of recorded history."- Gary Gygax None
S:OK, let's move on. I need to answer your question, Jay. It just occurred to me there is an actual cloned alien robot in the room. It's a cloned Australian cyberman down the back. Hey! Hey! We've detached him from a lot of his Cyberman parts at this point. You met David Tennant, didn't you? I saw the picture on Facebook. No way. That's awesome. That is awesome, man. All right, Jay. One question that often we ask is, for how long have we been screwing up our environment?
US#03:We know we're doing it now, but when did we start doing it? Well, you know, we all think that it started when, in the 50s, the Industrial Revolution, when we started to burn fossil fuels?
S:Well, it was like the 1850s. And making cement. Cement is horrible for the environment. It's a great building material.
J:So there's a new study that explains how humans have been changing the global landscape for thousands of years, and they're saying since 1000 BCE.
S:And this is when people started to abandon foraging, and they started to farm, because farming was predictable, and it actually could feed a lot more people.
J:So we have existing estimates today that use calculations that what they do is they try to extrapolate, well, how many people were alive in this block of years, and how much farming would it take in order to feed them? And then they could say, okay, if it would take this much farming, because we knew they were farming then, sorry, if it takes this much farming, Thank you for joining us today. We'll be right back. That collected and analyzed expert opinions of archaeologists around the world. So here's what they did. The researchers divided the surface of the earth, excluding Antarctica, into 146 regions. And then 255 archaeologists with expertise in ancient land use. We're asked about 80 questions in a survey, and the survey asked a lot of questions about what were humans doing with the land, and then they said, go back 10,000 years. And these are experts. And they also asked them, which was very important to this study, how confident with error bars are you in every answer that you give? And as you know, scientists are supposed to be very honest about their error bars. So the results were that hunter-gatherer lifestyles declined globally between 10,000 and 3,000 years ago and was replaced with farming, right? So by about 1000 BCE, all the world's regions were now practicing. Thank you for joining us. So they're saying that they think it could go as far back as 10,000 years with pretty good error bars. But no matter what, drop dead is at least 3,000 years. And at that 3,000 year mark, they're saying, and it was significant. Now, nothing compared to the emissions that were being pumped out in the Industrial Revolution. But it was significant enough to say that we might have to really recalculate the time frame of the Anthropocene, right?
S:Did I say that correctly? Yeah, Anthropocene, yeah.
J:Right, so if you don't know what that is, that is a new era of man where scientists are saying, you know, we are changing the environment so significantly that it's a new era, right? The era of plastic, the era of radiation, you know, like one of the isotopes first, you know, the man-made isotopes enter the rocks around that could be found a million years from now. It's still a little controversial, we have to say. Will an anthropologist a million years from now know we were here? I think that's still an open question. Some are saying, come on, we're a blip. They might not notice. Just because it's such a short period of time. But we are definitely, there might be a really thin layer where we're changing. Yeah, the geological strata. Well, yeah, you're not saying, like, well, people know that we were here. You're saying, well, from an archaeological standpoint, will there be a record?
S:I mean... Yeah, if we die out in a thousand years, and then aliens come here and look at the Earth, well, they know we were here a million years from now, 10 million years from now, whatever. Yeah, they have to find the Statue of Liberty like Mel did on the beach. I think they said Mount Rushmore would last, though. Oh, my God, it all makes sense now. We're going to blow ourselves up by trying to get rid of a freaking hurricane. Damn you! You bastard as hell! You blew it up! You bastard!
J:That moment, man, when I first saw that moment in that movie.
S:Maniacs. Maniacs, yeah. And the girl's sitting on a horse, and she's looking at it like, what the hell is wrong with this guy?
J:I remember exactly what I was thinking when I was watching it.
S:That girl is hot. Yeah. Well, we were kids, yeah.
J:She was meant to be. So that's pretty much it.
US#02:I find this to be so impactful, though, because when you go, the archaeologists went from 500 years to possibly 10,000. But let's just give you a nice round number. Conservatively 3,000. 3,000.
J:So, and it's true, and this is, we're part of nature, this is what we do, right? And right now we're using about 13% of the land on the earth and all the good land, you know, and basically all of the arable land, you know, to a certain point of quality. There's not really anything left for us to farm. That's why they're burning down the Amazon to make more plants. That's why when we talk about GMOs, we're not just talking about making strawberries taste better, we're talking about... Well, that's a good use of that. Of course, yeah.
S:Of course it is. Don't get us into the whole banana hub, Bob, because we're about to get, you know, Cavendish are about to go bye-bye, which is freaky, because what the hell am I going to put in my Rice Krispies if we don't have bananas? That would be really crappy. So anyway, I forgot what I was going to say. We're going to have to do a couple quick hits now on the rest of the news items.
J:A couple more quick things, very, very quickly. I've been asked about this so many times already, I wanted to answer it quickly. There was recently a genome-wide association study, and the headlines are reading, there's no gay gene. There's basically no correlation between genetics and being They used same-sex behavior, was their operational definition here. So even a single encounter was considered same-sex behavior.
S:But what they really found was far more nuanced, and to some extent it's not surprising. What they found was that there's a complex interaction between many genes and developmental processes and environment that lead to this complex behavior. Of course that's what they found. But specifically, they could say definitively now, there is no single gay gene, period. But there are probably hundreds of genes that influence same-sex behavior, but only five that were statistically significant. And what that means is, not that the others are not real, it means we can't be sure, but that just the effects are too small to get to statistical significance with the size of the study that they did. So, and those five genes, this is again another important component here, they're for sex hormones, right? So that adds a lot of plausibility to the fact that they're actually related to sexual behavior. So, what does this mean? The fear is immediately, and a friend of ours who is gay said my immediate fear was this is going to be used to attack, you know, homosexuality. See, it is a choice. You're not born with it. But that's not what this study shows. This study shows that it's a complex interaction between a lot of genes and development. It doesn't mean it's a choice. It doesn't mean you're not born gay. It means that it's both genetic and epigenetic and developmental. And again, no duh. Of course it is. This is what they were expecting to find. That's the way genetics operates. It's a complex interaction among, you know, the development and epigenetic factors, etc. There's very few things for which there is a blank gene. We've kind of already figured all that, the single gene dominance stuff, we've figured most of that out already, and all the complicated stuff is complicated. That's what this means. Yeah, so don't read the headlines and think, oh, there isn't genetics of homosexuals? No, that's not what the study is saying. All right, Bob, you were going to do this, right? Quickly. Pluto. So Pluto, is it a planet? It's not a planet. What's going on? What's the update? Jim Bridenstine, a NASA administrator, said recently in public, just so you know, in my view, Pluto is a planet. It's the way I learned it, and I'm committed to it. Forget the International Astronomical Union. I learned it this way in high school, dammit. So Steve's right. The International Astronomy Union, they decide the definition of a planet.
B:And over, what, 13 years ago, they said you've got to be in orbit around the sun, you need to be somewhat spherical because of the amount of mass and gravity, and you've got to clear out your orbit to a certain extent. And yeah, that's a little bit problematic, but it makes a lot of sense because you don't... Otherwise, if Pluto remained a planet and the Kuiper Belt filled with similar Kuiper Belt objects that's similar in size, some even bigger than Pluto, we would have ended up with, you know, 15, 20, 30, 50, 100 planets in our solar system. And that's kind of crazy, right? You don't want to have that many planets. Well, it really is. So you need a good definition, I agree. But I mean, I think you could make a reasoned argument against For Pluto to be a planet, like for example, Alan Stern, he's the guy who was in charge of New Horizon, the Pluto mission, he says that a planet should be based on geophysical features. And if you do that, if you look at Pluto that way, it's clearly a planet in terms of it has mountain ranges, it has an atmosphere, it has an interior ocean, it has a core, it has a moon. So if you look at these objects in that way, I think you could clearly say, and this is an argument that I think the NASA administrators should have made. That's five moons. Right, that's right. Thanks for watching. It was kind of jokey. My sense was that it was a little bit jokey, but still, this is the NASA administration. You shouldn't be saying stuff like that. If you really passionately believe that, then throw a bone towards an argument that's somewhat more reason than, that's what I learned in school, therefore I'm not going to change my mind, really? That's the message you're giving across here? Whatever. Hey everyone, we're just breaking into our live show at Dragon Con to do a couple of extra bits.
J:We're actually back. We're recording this a few days after we got back from Dragon Con.
B:Do you guys all have a good time? Outstanding. Oh my god, it's always fantastic. It's always a ton of fun. What was the most interesting costume you saw? I saw an Emperor Palpatine that scared both myself and my daughter. That's how good it was. Oh yeah? And I don't scare easily.
S:It was all very cool because he was flanked by a bunch of imperial guards and they were just maniacally sort of just walking through the crowd and the crowd parted ways for him. It was pretty impressive. I like costumes that include role-playing, you know?
B:Yeah, oh yeah, it's always more fun.
E:I saw the mayor from the Nightmare Before Christmas, you know, terrible news folks, you know that guy?
S:That guy.
E:Yeah, so I was like, oh I just loved it. Like, you know, seeing something that is one of your favorites, you know, like just out of the blue, you turn a corner and you're like, oh my God.
S:So I took a picture for Bob, because I knew, like it's very hard, like you can't like tell someone, hey go look for the guy in this costume, because people wear different costumes all the time.
J:You know, a lot of people that frequent Dragon Con have one, two, three, four costumes. I did, you know, the funniest thing I saw while I was with Bob though, we saw about, what Bob, 30 blow-up dinosaurs. You know, like those costumes that you put on and there's a fan in there that blows up the costume. And then they all went over and were dancing in front of the DJ and it was so funny. That was a lot of fun. Yeah, that was great. It's like a mob. I'm still so tired. You know, we're working really hard on the Dragon Con. Then, you know, once all the work is done, we typically have dinner really late because we're working. And then, you know, after dinner you're like, I want to go see some costumes. So you can't help but stay up late because you're just trying to absorb all this. So it takes me days to recover from a good Dragon Con. My favorite costume was a creepy robot girl from Five Nights at Freddy's game. I was chatting with her and she won best in show for one of the costume contests. I know they have a lot of different costume contests. For one of them, she won best in show. It was wonderful. It was a work of art. God damn work of art. Beautiful. Yeah, the detail was really amazing.
B:So we have an idea for a costume for next year that we're going to try to get as many skeptics attending Dragon Con to help us with this costume. We need your help. This is not going to just be a costume. This is going to be an event. A performance. A performance. So I'm going to tell you what it is. We're going to do Borg evangelists.
S:But, Steve, isn't the better idea that you are the evangelist? You are patient number zero, right? I'm going to be a literal evangelist, but who has been Borgafied, and then I'm evangelizing for the Borg. Right, right. So trying to convince people to voluntarily join the collective, but it will be with the personality of an evangelist.
J:And then over the course of the weekend, we're going to the the size of the Borg collective will steadily grow throughout the weekend.
S:We'll have, we'll encourage people to bring their own Borg costumes, but we'll have, you know, Borg things like you could put a sleeve on or a thing on your head or whatever. So you have You can basically add the Borg template to whatever costume or not costume that you're already wearing, and then we'll just see how many people we can get to join the Borg Collective over the weekend. That will be fun. I have been assimilated! I am Borg again! The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Do you want peace of mind? You can join the Borg and you can have peace of minds. Many minds, many minds. What we think, though, would be fun is, like Steve was saying, Bob, you and I talked about this, that it could be a Borg mashup with any costume that you would wear at Dragon Con. So all you'd need is like one tube coming out of your neck and, you know, a Borg hand as an example, and then you're good enough, you know, because you're not fully Borg. The assimilation has begun. Yeah, there you go.
J:The assimilation process has begun. Exactly. So it'll be us plus as many of our fellow skeptics as possible, and the hope is that if we reach critical mass, Then we want to get just anybody at DragonCon to join us, you know, just put on this Borg element and now you're part of the Borg collective. Again, they could add it on over whatever costume they're already wearing. But the funniest bit that we came up with was that Steve goes out on Thursday night as a loner. Well, I think even at the first night I should have one guy with me.
S:Yeah, one dude that you've assimilated. Then Friday night there's four or five Thanks for watching!
J:So if you're interested, email us at info at theskepticsguide.org with the subject BORG, B-O-R-G, and just say, hey, I'm in. And then what we'll do is we'll put you on like a small little email group where we'll say, hey, here's some, you know, and then we could start hunting for BORG costume ideas together. You know, hey, I found this cool BORG thing or glove or, you know, the tubing you could get at Home Depot, whatever. We could just like coach each other on how to make these impromptu BORG costumes.
US#09:Yeah, plus we'll have a year.
J:And so, you know, we know we have some listeners out there, but like if you have a 3D printer that's doing nothing, you want to make some board components for us. This is part of the idea here is that we'll have a whole year to prep this, to put together the costumes, you know, not just for us, but for everyone that we assimilate. Yep. And I want to tell everyone a cool, like the coolest thing that happened to me at DragonCon this year was we met a listener named James. James started listening to the SGU when he was 12, which was 13 years ago.
S:And now he's 25. Yeah. Yep. So he introduced himself to us and I was blown away. I was totally blown away because, you know, we've talked to 12 year old, you know, our email 12 year old people who were listeners of the show. And, you know, it goes back a long ways, you know, and I'm like, wow.
J:You know, he was one of those people that found us when he was young and he's all grown up. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like it's funny because I had him stand up at our live show, which you'll hear us. You'll hear it in this show. I'll introduce him because they already have. OK. Yeah, but it's just funny to be talking to an adult who says, I've been listening to your show since I was 12. Yeah, we scolded him. Why not 11? And James was super cool. Like he was just, you know, exactly what you'd want the person to turn out to be that has been listening to you for his entire adult life. So James, thanks a lot, man. What a memory and what a cool thing to have happened to all of us that, you know, you've been listening that long and we'll see you at Dragon Con. He's going to go next year. He's already looking forward to seeing us again. Awesome.
S:So we earlier in this show, we talked about Hurricane Dorian, and it's still going strong as of Wednesday, September 4th when we're recording this extra bit.
J:So I wanted to just give some updated stats. It is one of the biggest hurricanes to hit the Atlantic. It's tied with second for just all Atlantic storms with wind speeds up to 185 miles per hour.
S:It is the strongest hurricane that's both east of Florida and north of the Caribbean. And it's also the strongest storm to make landfall and the strongest storm to hit the Bahamas. Yeah, so very, very powerful. It unfortunately devastated the Bahamas. As of this recording, the death toll is 20, but they're sure it's going to climb. And now it's sort of slowly making its way up Florida and then Georgia and the Carolinas. And that's a problem. The slowness is bad because the longer it lingers, the more water it drops. I remember the real damaging thing from hurricanes, the winds are bad, but the water does more damage. Yeah, water kills. Yeah, the water surges are bad and just the rain is bad if the storm lingers and drops a ton of it, which is what's happening. So we'll continue to track it. And, you know, we have to mention also that while you cannot know that any one individual storm is due to global warming, but powerful storms like Category 4 and 5 hurricanes are twice as likely now as they were 30 years ago. So, statistically, we're seeing more of these really powerful storms. And so, again, you don't know if Dorian would have happened without it, but there's more Dorians than there would have been if the oceans weren't warmer and had more energy in them. So the hurricane looks like, from the latest path projection, that it's going to make land in North Carolina, I think South and North Carolina, and then it's going to go out to sea. That's what we're hoping. Well, yeah, but when it goes out to sea, it builds up more strength, though. Yeah, that's true. It loses strength when it hits the land, and then it gains strength as it goes back down to sea. If it keeps going out, yeah. What we don't want to do is to go out, gain power, and then come back in. Right? Yep. That's true. Yeah.
J:And as of right now, it does not look like it's going to hit Alabama. Are you sure about that, Steve? I just thought I'd point that out. I read something where... Yeah. Okay. No. All right. And how about Montana? Is Montana safe? Montana, I think, is pretty safe. Thank goodness.
S:But you never know. Well, you never know what you're going to read. Spot the joke. Spot the joke, folks. All right, Jay, you're going to do a Who's That Noisy before we return to our live show. We just have science or fiction left. Of course, we all know what happened. It'll be interesting.
E:But before we get back to the live show and finish up with Science Fiction, Jay, get us up to date on Who's That Noisy. All right, guys, last week I played This Noisy.
S:Sounds recognizable, doesn't it?
E:Yeah, it's a Cylon.
S:A little bit, a little bit. It's Thomas, the train from everyone's youth. Remarkably correct, Evan. You've got your onto something there. So let me go through what listeners sent in. So Jim Kelly wrote in, Hi, I think this week's noisy was made by outputting audio from a computer through a Tesla coil.
J:No, that is not correct, but it does sound like I'd like to hear a human voice through a Tesla coil. So if you find something like that, send it to me.
E:Visto Tutti said, this week's Noisy sounds like a train conductor using what Dr. Seuss described as a whisper-ma-phone.
J:This is where a snurgly hose carries the sound of a human voice over some distance to a remote listener. I think the maritime term is speaking tube, but this Noisy was clearly train-based. That's not correct, although anything to do with Dr. Seuss is correct, so you are a sub-winner for this week regardless. So the winner for this week, though, was Rich Regalado. You may have recognized Rich's name because he's submitted before many times. Rich said, I believe this week's Noisy was recorded using a Sonovox. This is a device that was invented by Gilbert Wright in 1939 and preceded the talk box used by Peter Frampton on his song, Do You Feel Like We Do? The Sonovox used small loudspeakers attached to the performer's throat and would act as a larynx Sending the sound to be amplified by an instrument or synthesizer. The Who used the Sonovox on their original recording of Radio London 1967. So I've heard different explanations of how this works, but essentially from my understanding is it was two speakers that you put up against your throat and without talking you just mouth the words, and then your vocal cords Help shape the sound and your throat and larynx amplify it in a sense, and then the noise does come out of your mouth with the shape of words. So, it's really cool. I would love to try it out myself. But I do have a couple of cool recordings for you. So, one, I will play the sound again so you can hear it now that you know what it is. And to be clear, so people who had their larynx removed use that to communicate. Right. Here it is. Okay, now, Peter Frampton was mentioned here. Peter Frampton was using something called a TalkBox. And the TalkBox is like, you know, you may have heard this more recently, even though this was a very long time ago anyway, but more recent than Peter Frampton.
S:So you may have heard a Bon Jovi song where they use this talk box.
J:It's when you see a guitarist, or it could even be a keyboard player, and they have a tube going into their mouth, they're using the shape of their mouth to shape the sound, because it can read the pressure change. So here's Peter Frampton doing it better than anyone, and this is the song, Do You Feel Like I Do? This is wonderful, check this out. Oh, that live version of that song. I must have listened to it hundreds of times. It's so awesome. But there's other places that we hear this type of voice manipulation, so I want to play something for you guys and see if you can guess what movie it's from.
U:It's very astute of you to tie that back to Star Wars because Ben Burtt created those sounds.
J:The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and Evan Bernstein.
B:The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Cara Santa Maria, and Evan Bernstein.
J:The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and Evan Bernstein. People that create sounds for movies. I love all of that. That's probably why I love this segment so much. I was always, I loved when Evan had this segment because it was fun to guess. I love guessing. And then when Steve suggested I take it over, I was almost intimidated because I'm like, can I do this justice? You know, but I just love anything to do with sounds like, you know, created sounds or manipulated sound or, you know, trying to figure out what something is. It's very cool. And enough examples to last a lifetime. Yeah, there really is. I mean, I don't think I'll ever see the end, especially with you listeners helping me by sending the sounds that you heard, I don't know, this past week to WTN at the Skeptic's Guide dot org. Please do it, because I will definitely read your email. I respond to some people, just depending on how much time I have. And on that note, I have a new Noisy for this week. Ready? Here it is. If you think you know what it is, email me at WTN at The Skeptic's Guide dot org. Sounds like the mothership.
U:All right. Thank you, Jay. So guys, we will be in Christchurch, New Zealand from November 29th to December 1st. The SGU is going to be, of course, doing a live show.
S:We'll be giving some individual lectures and we'll be doing a private recording, which are always a ton of fun, Friday from 4 to 6. Jay, you're going to be setting up tickets for that soon. We'll let you know as soon as those become available. Right, so let me make it easy for everyone, this is super easy. Go to theskepticsguide.org, go to the homepage, scroll all the way down or click the events link, but if you scroll down you'll find our events at the very bottom, almost at the bottom of the page. And you'll see a link for the New Zealand event show in 2019, and then you'll see another link for the Skepticon event show which is in Melbourne.
J:Just click those, you'll be brought to a page that has everything on it, the whole schedule, links on where to buy tickets, and I really do need to get up those private shows this week, so probably by the time you see this, links for the private show registration will be up. Now I might not have all the details, but I will have the dates of those private shows. So if you're seeing like it's going to be in Melbourne, but I don't have the location yet, don't worry about it. It's going to be accessible, probably be near the main event anyway. So if you want to buy your tickets early. I'll put up as much information as I have, but we are still planning all the details out for these shows. Yeah, so the Melbourne one, that's December 6th to 8th in Melbourne. And actually, Thursday, December 5th, they're having a Skeptic's Trivia Night. So if you're there a day early, we'll still be there all week. Well, from Wednesday on, at least. Evan, you'll be there all week. The rest of us will be joining you on Wednesday. Yes. Hanging out, doing fun stuff. So that conference is going to be a lot of fun, too. And if you're going and you would like us to sign your book, feel free to bring it.
S:So I think we mentioned the soft cover of our book is coming out in October. So it'll be out by both of these conferences. And I am trying to arrange with our UK publisher, because those are the ones who distribute in New Zealand and Australia, to be selling our book there. I think that we should be able to work that out, but I don't have 100% confirmation from them yet. But we'll work something out one way or the other.
J:And if you already have the book, we'll be there to sign it at both conferences.
S:We'll put some time aside to have a book signing. All right, guys. Thanks for joining me for this second little bit that we did. We're going to now go back to our live show at DragonCon. We'll see how everyone did with science or fiction. It's time for Science or Fiction. Yes, here we are. Science or Fiction. I've all been waiting for this. Steve, you have 12 minutes. Yes, I know. So, three items, two real, one fake, and there is a theme.
US#01:And the theme this week, I'm actually recycling a theme that I've used at a previous Dragon Con, the theme is dragons.
U:These are real-life dragons.
S:Are you guys ready? All right, we'll poll the audience beforehand, so think of your answer, don't shout anything out. All right, number one. The pink dragon millipede spits flammable liquid onto its prey, which in the hot sun may actually combust. Item number two, the Ruby Sea Dragon uses its bright red color as camouflage. And item number three, the Blue Dragon Sea Slug spends most of its life floating upside down on the ocean surface. It feeds on Portuguese men of wars and steals their venom for their own defense. Now, I have one comment about this. Shouldn't it be Portuguese men of wars? Yes, I was just thinking that. Yeah, right? But apparently it's correct to say Portuguese man-o-wars. That's like, is it Jack and the pulpits or Jackson the single pulpit? I don't know. Okay. Sisters-in-law. So, sister-in-law, that's easy. All right, so if you think the fire-breathing pink dragon millipede is the fiction, we're going to do the single clap method. When I do this, when I get to here, you're going to clap. We'll practice, ready? All right, if you think the pink dragon millipede is the fiction, clap. If you think that the ruby sea dragon is the fiction, clap. And if you think that the blue dragon sea slug is the fiction, clap. Okay, so one and then two and three kind of tied, it sounds like to me. So they don't believe in the fire-breathing dragon millipede, we will see. We're going to start over here at Richard, who swept us all last night in his Australian version of science or fiction. But you get to go first, so reason your way through it, brother. Well, I'll come straight out with it. I think number one is the fiction, namely the millipede, mainly because the other two kind of, sort of, kind of make sense. Now, I don't know much about undersea camouflage, so yeah, why not a red color being compatible with some undersea environment?
J:And the venom stealing.
S:Now, there's a lot of weird stuff going on in nature, you know, there's wasps, I think, Lay their eggs in other creatures and control them and zombie ants, so why not venom stealing?
US#03:So from that point of view, I'll go with number one being the fiction. Okay, the millipede. Millipede. Yes, Evan. I'll go with the ruby red sea dragon as the fiction. My reasoning behind that is that it's probably not using it as camouflage, but rather to find mates, you know, to attract others of its kind, and the brighter you are, the more attractive apparently you are. I thought you were going to say because the red shirts always got shot first. Not all red shirts get shot first. Alright, red shirt number two.
E:Now Scotty wore a red shirt and he never got killed. That's because he stayed in engineering. I'm one of those guys. But he is dead. What did you say, Laddie? So I think the red guys, all they need to be is around things that are red, and that makes sense.
S:It's not that big of a deal.
J:There's probably red creatures or plant life that they're hiding amongst.
E:No big deal.
J:So that one is definitely not it.
S:The one where the guy, spending most of his time on his back and stealing venom, I love that guy.
J:I mean, I like to think of him as just like, he's lounging, and he's like, he doesn't make his own venom. He steals it.
S:From Man O' Wars.
J:Man O' Works? Man O' Wars. Yeah, I think I'm going to go with Richard and the audience and say that the first one in my reasoning is that, and this is really my answer, if there was anything that had the name dragon in it that spit out something that caught on fire, we would know about it. All right, and Bob. So the stealing venom, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That's number three. Number two, the color, the red fish. Could I ask you what depth it lives? Don't answer that. That's cheating, and I would have that answer. I don't need it. I don't need it. I know why he's asking that, and you can't give him that answer. I would adhere to Jay's objective. He has no idea why I'm asking that. I know exactly why you're asking that. All right. What do you got? Because the color red does not appear at a certain depth because of the light spectrum.
B:I saw that study done. All right. Bob, you underestimated Jay. Good job. Awesome, Jay. Don't leave me hanging. Don't leave me hanging. You actually went, wow, Jay's not stupid, right audience?
J:Jay. Thank you for watching. So yeah, red seems counterintuitive, but if you're at the right depth, the bright colors disappear. A lot of fish are very bright if you look at them, but they actually is a form of camera flash.
B:So I'm going to go with that and say that that's not fiction. So the first one was, yeah. Some liquid combusting in, oh, it's 90 degrees. This is going to catch on fire.
J:I don't think that's very safe. I'm not buying it, so fiction. Should we poll the audience? Yes, of course. All right.
B:If you think the pink dragon millipede that breathes this fire sort of is the fiction clap. If you think that the ruby sea dragon is the fiction clap. If you think the blue dragon sea slug is the fiction, clap. Alright, before you continue, I want to share one of the coolest things that happened with Dragon Con this weekend.
S:A person in this audience who is no longer a child has been listening to us since they were 12. Jay, just stand up and show them that you're a man now. James was 12 when he started listening to us, and I told him yesterday, I'm kind of like your dad.
J:So, you guys seem pretty confident. We'll start with the blue dragon sea slug, spends most of its life floating upside down on the ocean surface, feeds off Portuguese man o' wars, and steals their venom for its own defense. Everyone on the panel thinks that one is science. The vast majority The audience thinks that one is science, and that one is science.
S:And there it is. Isn't that beautiful? That is a blue dragon sea slug. You hear sea slug, and you don't think you're going to see something gorgeous, right? But that is a gorgeous animal. You know, Steve, if they captured like a hundred of them and threw them all around Area 51, I saw that picture. I'm like, that thing exists on Earth and I didn't know about it.
US#02:You know, it's really a beautiful, beautiful animal.
S:So look it up at podcast listeners at home. The sea, the blue sea slug. Very, very pretty. Yeah, it floats on its back and it feeds on man o' wars. That's the thing that I thought was really interesting. And yeah, so stealing venom is a common thing to happen in the ocean.
J:I'm going to
S:They're all thieves. All right, so let's go back to number two. The Ruby Sea Dragon uses its bright red color as a camouflage. Evan, you think this one is the fiction, like three people in the audience think this one is the fiction, and this one is science. Yes. You had me going right to the end. There it is.
B:Very, very pretty.
S:Very bright red ruby. Sea dragon and Bob and Jay are absolutely correct. It's a deep sea creature and red gets filtered out by that depth so there is no red light at that depth. And therefore, this creature is totally black at depth. See, I thought it was red the whole time. I thought it was red, that it lived in the shallows because it was blending in with like... No, but Bob was right.
E:It's because it's at depth. Because there's no red light to reflect off of.
S:Respect, man. Respect. All right. You're mostly right. All of this means It's got to be in Australia, right? It combusts, so there it is, it does exist, and it spits though, it doesn't spit combustible liquid, it spits cyanide. That's pretty bad. Steve, all kidding aside, that thing looks unbelievably made out of plastic. Yeah, because it's red. It's very brightly colored. Again, also very pretty in a different sort of way than the other creatures, but very, very nice. So good job everyone. Evan, we have just enough time for you to take us home with a quote. Even the most outspoken of the critics must admit that long before we had print and film media to spread the word, mankind was engaged in all forms of cruel and despicable behavior. To attribute war, killing, and violence to film, TV, and role-playing games is to fly in the face of thousands of years of recorded history. Gary Gygax.
E:And if I have to tell you who Gary Gygax is, there's the exit. Yeah, I mean, come on. This is the whole video games are making people go on shooting sprees? No. That's not what's happening. And that's a good point. Violence occurred long before there were video games or Dungeons and Dragons, even though Gary Gygax might have a personal reason for making that observation. All right, so this was a lot of fun.
U:We hope you guys enjoyed this show. Thank you all for joining us.
E:Thank you all for joining me this week. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.
S:The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info at theskepticsguide.org. And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com slash Skeptic's Guide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community.
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