The Skeptics Guide #1100 - Aug 8 2026

Live from Christchurch with guests George Hrab, Andrea Jones-Rooy, and Brian Wecht; Special Segment: SGU Down Under; News Items: Telescope Ranch, The Fate of Earth, The Science of Community, Terraforming Mars, Fauci Under Fire, AI Satellites, AI Solves 90 Year Math Puzzle; Science or Fiction

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Today is Saturday, August 1st, and we are here in Christchurch, New Zealand, at the 40th Anniversary, I guess, Conference of the New Zealand Skeptics.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  This is your host, Steven Novella. You don't have to go quote for that one. I know you were about to. As always, I am joined by Bob Novella.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Jay Novella. Hey, guys.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  And we have three guests with us. This is our Nauticon crew. We have Brian Wecht.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Hi, folks.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Andrea Jones-Roy.

• 0:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Hello.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  And George Ropp.

• 0:59Speaker 04

  Geronia.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  So, as I said, you know, this is the 40th Conference for the New Zealand Skeptics. That's quite a record of, you know, continuous skeptical organization, self-sustaining for 40 years. That's quite impressive. But you know what? I learned the other day, and it's surprising that I didn't already know this, but The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, we've been doing this for 21 years, not quite 40 years, but we are the longest-running science podcast in the world.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  The world, Steve, the world.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  The world.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  It's amazing.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're the first one that has continued without a break, so.

• 1:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, somewhere before, but they've sort of faded off.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  We were right at the beginning of podcasting, and the podcasts weren't even a category in iTunes yet, and really, there was like maybe a sixth-month window where you might have beaten us, and there were a couple in there, but they have since stopped. The next closest one that we could find was The Naked Scientist, which didn't start for about six months after us.

• 2:03Speaker 04

  Wow. That's amazing. That's like a big deal. That's like a big, big deal.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  And it's surprising you just realized that.

• 2:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Well, I was being interviewed yesterday by Andy. Andy, I think, was here somewhere. Raise your hand, Andy, if you're here. There he is. And he said it, and I'm like, shit, is that true? I never verified it, so we verified it as best we could. It's like, yeah, okay, that's true.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  We're gonna blast that everywhere.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  We've been having a great time in New Zealand. It's really been a fantastic trip. And I have one question for everybody in the audience here. Why is your moon upside down?

• 2:33Speaker 01

  What is going on here?

• 2:34Speaker 04

  Seriously.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  It is amazing. I mean, you know, we talked about Flat Earth. There's occasionally, it is like the craziest conspiracy theory out there, but it just always strikes me. It is so trivially easy to prove it absolutely 100% wrong, right? I mean, just Orion, like the constellation Orion, also upside down. Like, it's undeniable. It's right there.

• 2:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Based on whose perspective, Steve.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Well, it doesn't, relatively, relatively, it doesn't matter which one. The point is they're flipped, and the only way that could possibly happen is on a spherical earth.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Well, and the cool thing is, when we showed up in the southern hemisphere, the moon was a really nice crescent. So we went from this to this, and it was like, hell, yeah. You could just really see it. You know, it's pretty much full right now. It was full yesterday or something.

• 3:19Speaker 05

  Steve, you're forgetting.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  That's less impressive.

• 3:21Speaker 05

  You're forgetting a very obvious argument, which is, it could be a flat earth that's surrounded by a whole bunch of mirrors.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Oh, that's true.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. They're not making that argument, though.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Space mirrors.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Don't give them any ideas.

• 3:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, fair.

• 3:31Speaker 04

  But there was a lovely moment in Australia where you and Iran, our friend, were debating as to what we were actually seeing, moon-wise.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's not a mirror image flipped. It's like 80 degrees flipped. And we were just trying to get our language aligned, because I'm like, it's not flipped this way. He's like, I know, it's flipped this way. Eventually, we figured out what we were talking about, yeah.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  It was curious, because like two sort of astronomy experts, on a certain level, were just talking past each other, and we were watching it in the street as it occurred. And I thought, you know, it can be confusing as to what's like, you know, what's the shadow? And what's the thing? And how does it work? So even people that sort of really know their stuff.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Well, it was also about like what time it was in Sydney versus what time it is in New York. I said, well, forget about that. What about what time it is in China? Or whatever. It's like, okay. Yeah, it's hard to fully, fully imagine it in your head sometimes.

• 4:20Speaker 04

  It's just, yeah, it was fun.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  And when they walked away from that conversation, they both whispered asshole under their breath.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  But we were talking about Jay.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  So what's been your favorite part of New Zealand so far, guys? You guys are awesome. My god, your country is so unbelievably gorgeous.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  My god.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  It's like getting punched in the face with wonderfulness, particularly around where they built Hobbiton, because they picked it because the land has like a certain type of shape to it, you know? I know you're used to it, but I beg you not to be used to it, because the rest of the world doesn't have it.

• 4:57Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think Jay's been to like Glenorkie and Queenstown then, have you?

• 5:02Speaker 01

  We've been to Queenstown.

• 5:03Cara Santa Maria?

  And particularly Hobbiton is the most beautiful to you.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Well, I just love the land there. You know, it has like a velvety green look to it, and I just like how.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  That's fake grass, Jay.

• 5:14Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a movie set, Jay.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  Last time we were here, we had a, whatever, 12, 15 years ago, when we were all together here last time, we got a private tour of the Weta Workshop, which was amazing, and we couldn't talk about it. That was the cra- we had to sign, you get like eight podcasters in a room whose whole life is talking about cool stuff they see, and they were like, you have to sign this paper and never talk about what you've seen here. And we saw the coolest stuff, but amongst what they were doing was making these massive, it looked like World War I statues, sort of these big boots and guns. And we were sort of saying, what is this for? And they said, well, we can't tell you what it's for, but it's gonna be really cool.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  For giants.

• 5:53Speaker 04

  Well, for giants, essentially. Well, I finally, I know the rest of the crew saw this a couple of years ago, but I finally got to see at Tapapa, is that how you say it? Yeah, and the World War I Gallipoli exhibit, and it was.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Incredible.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  The most moving thing I think I've seen in a very, very long time.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Very powerful.

• 6:12Speaker 04

  It was so brilliantly, beautifully done. To see what we had seen being built in Situ in the museum was just, that was amazing from a technical standpoint, but the emotional, the emotional impact, Bob got a wonderful picture of me just sort of overwhelmed next to this, you know, this massive giant soldier. Just brilliantly done, just absolutely brilliantly done. If I take nothing else away from this whole trip is the combination of technicality and precision in making those, but also the smartness of the impact to really show the sacrifice that was made at Gallipoli. It's just fantastic.

• 6:49Speaker 05

  I study war and data around war for a living, and was more moved by that exhibit than I've been by, believe it or not, any spreadsheet I've looked at. But truly, I'm looking at spreadsheets of like casualties and things, and then the artistry that really brought it to life. And I would agree, you know, Jay, another thing, so the museums, I think the natural beauty, of course, but I think the thing that has really struck me, and particularly here in Christchurch, and I know you all have real problems, and there's affordability, and there's issues and all of that, but I just walk around, just leaving, I already love the library, you guys know that, but just walking around outside, there was like a van that offers free laundry services, and you could just show up and get your clothes, like wash your clothes.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Really?

• 7:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 7:31Speaker 05

  Right outside, and just people are out singing, and it's clean, and it's.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  You're sure the van wasn't a trap?

• 7:37Speaker 05

  Well, I went inside and gave them my personal ID and my passport.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Oh, that's smart. Yeah, you always give people your passport to hang on to.

• 7:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, my bank account is at zero, but I'm not too worried about it, because I'm gonna stay here. So, no, but I was just noticing it all, and I finally was like, how do I describe this to my fellow countrymen? And I was like, oh, New Zealand feels to me like the answer to the question, what if we cared about each other? Like, that's how I feel when I'm here. I don't know if that is a lived experience, but as an outsider, that has been my experience.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  I did a lemur encounter at the Wellington Zoo, which is pretty similar to the laundry van in many ways. What I learned is that lemurs are matriarchal, so the females are in charge, and the lowest-ranking female ranks higher than the highest-ranking male. And I also learned that lemurs are fucking stupid. They're real dumb, and apparently they can't figure out even simple puzzles. So they're not one of the smarter primates. They're notoriously dumb. So we watched them pick up a plastic bottle with some vegetables inside, and they could have just literally turned it over and had the vegetables fall out, mystified, couldn't do it. It was amazing.

• 8:48Speaker 05

  I've been there.

• 8:49Cara Santa Maria?

  They are pro-simian.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  And Brian, that was just a guy in a suit, by the way. I don't know if you're aware.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  It's still magical, you know, he was really committing and I think that's what I care about the most.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know what your reaction is gonna be to this, but like Hobbiton is amazing. Do you agree, or is it weird? Is like, you guys kinda over it? Yes, no? You don't look like you care about it at all.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  But we got to go into the interiors and I turned into a 10-year-old kid again. I couldn't believe how cool that was. It was such a, they did a really, really great job. I love the fact that they had the roots of the tree growing through the room. Like, it was incorporated into the architecture. It was really amazing. The detail was amazing.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  It's also fun to be, look, I was a Peter Jackson fan before it was cool. I'm talking bad taste era, right?

• 9:36Speaker 04

  Meet the Feebles.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  Meet the Feebles. And then he went big budget with The Frighteners, right? Which I actually like a lot.

• 9:43Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that was fun.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  And what was the, was there another, in there? Heavenly Creatures, of course, thank you. It's just exciting. I've never, you know, I've been to Auckland before for about two days, but I felt like, you know, finally I'm in the land of Peter Jackson.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:58Cara Santa Maria?

  I really enjoyed the spa in Rotorua.

• 10:03Cara Santa Maria?

  I went to Waikiki, which is like a really beautiful Maori spa and really, really enjoyed it.

• 10:09Speaker 04

  Like the biggest building in Rotorua, by the way. Like, literally, like the biggest building with the spa.

• 10:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Gorgeous, hot springs. Highly recommend.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  All right, George, you're gonna start us off with this bit of fun about, uh, public telescopes.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, this was a fun little story that I found, uh, about 80 miles east of, uh, San Angelino, Texas. There's a gentleman named Bray Falls. He's a 24-year-old astrophotographer, uh, who just has his telescope set up and he does all kinds of pictures. Well, he's offered this service now that he calls a telescope ranch. And you can send him your telescope and because he's in a dark skies, Bortle One Zone. Now, if you're unaware, uh, there's nine levels of the Bortle Zone, nine being the most, uh, the, the, the, the least suitable for viewing stars. That's like a city is usually a level nine. Uh, a Class One, which is what, what San Angelino, Texas is,

• 11:05Speaker 04

  is, um, it's the darkest. Uh, um, you can see pretty much some constellations, you can see, it's so hard to make out the constellations because there's so much background noise. So the stuff you would see normally, you can't quite see because you see so many other stars that it just confuses the whole thing. Zodiacal light is visible and that's the faint diffused sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust. Ooh, right? Like dark. We're talking dark. So because he has this great location, he basically thought, oh, let me set up and offer a service where people can send in their telescopes. He attaches them to these mounts, uh, makes them remote controllable,

• 11:45Speaker 04

  attaches them to the internet and then all these people, whenever they want to, they can just look at their telescope through their computer, download high-res images or, or, or whatever they want to do that way. He mounts them so they're, uh, so they're perfectly parallel to where they need to be. Each scope is mounted and aligned perfectly with the celestial plane. So they're all parallel to Earth's axis of rotation. So you can use it. Um, during the day, it's all protected. It's all covered by this retractable roof and then at night it opens up. And again, anywhere in the world you are, you can send him your telescope. It's like a hundred bucks a month, basically, to, uh, to, to, to farm out your telescope. Remote viewing starts with a remote control

• 12:28Speaker 04

  and folks all over the planet can view and download high-res images. And I just thought this was the coolest thing. It's just such a nice, like, obvious thing to do. A hundred bucks might be a little bit steep, but considering that you'll have every night, pretty much a guaranteed beautiful viewing, uh, I think it's well worth it. I love this story.

• 12:47Speaker 05

  So I live in New York City and we have some roof access in our building and so I thought this is amazing. We're gonna get a telescope. And we got a telescope and I've had it for years and so far the only two things I've seen are the moon,

• 12:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 12:59Speaker 05

  the other way around and, uh, inside of a hotel a few blocks away. That's why I can see very clearly. So I'm gonna add this to my list.

• 13:05Speaker 04

  Another moon.

• 13:06Speaker 05

  Another moon. Full.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Andrea, which one did you enjoy more?

• 13:11Speaker 05

  I'll talk to you after the show.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:12Bob Novella?

  Is that like a level 12 where you are? Is that, does it go up, that scale go that high to 12?

• 13:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's that level 50s, New York City. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I live in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. It's just, uh, sort of an hour outside of Philadelphia and we just have this, it just stinks because there's this light, light capture that happens with the valley. But literally if you go 20 minutes in any direction, it's great. So, but not, not a level one. My goodness. Has anyone ever been to a level one?

• 13:37Speaker 01

  No, I'm trying. I mean, my last two attempts to go to a dark sky location like that got, rained out, basically. So I'm gonna keep trying. Hopefully it'll happen one day. So every time we come to the Southern Hemisphere, like especially Bob and I, but we all wanna see the southern sky. And like the first two times, we didn't see anything because we were either in a city or, you know, we just, we never had an opportunity to do it. Finally, the third time, we're actually in New Zealand and that was one of our attempted dark sky events, got rained out. But then we were in Christchurch at the last time we were here. We drove out about 20 minutes and it wasn't technically a dark sky, but it was dark enough that we could see everything and we needed to see. We were able to see the Magellanic Cloud. That's how dark it was.

• 14:21Bob Novella?

  That was the most impressive. I mean, galaxies that are like the 200,000 light-years away, seeing with your unaided eye was just, uh, it really re-inspired me to, to love, you know, night sky watching.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  We tried this time. So we have, you know, with the Sky Apps, we're, to this, actually driving away from Hobbiton. We pulled the bus over because it was a very clear night. It's like, let's just go for it. We saw some good stuff.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  It was good.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Southern Cross, you know.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  The moon was washing out the Magellanic Cloud.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right, yeah.

• 14:47Speaker 05

  Steve did have us get up at 6:00 AM one morning to see the sky before the sunrise.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, in between moon set and sunrise, yeah.

• 14:55Speaker 04

  And all the, the cows were very curious as to what we were doing. We were just by this field of cows and they started walking towards us like, ooh.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Well, cows hate astronomy.

• 15:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, notoriously.

• 15:05Speaker 05

  Astrology, yes, astronomy.

• 15:07Speaker 04

  Right, they're all astrologists, yeah. All milk signs.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  All right, Bob.

• 15:13Speaker 05

  It's just the way to them.

• 15:13Bob Novella?

  Oh boy, here we go.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Tell, what's gonna happen to the Earth when our sun starts to go pre-nova?

• 15:20Bob Novella?

  All right, well, I, I wanna lead with good news, everyone. It's, it's no longer certain that the, the Earth is gonna be engulfed and devoured by, by the, the sun as it expands at the end of its life. A new study suggests that, um, that, that, that won't happen. But so let's go through some of the details. The paper here is called "The Fate of Earth During the Sun's Giant Phases." And yes, there's multiple giant phases for the sun. And what strikes me here is that, how can scientists know this stuff? How do they know with, with a, a degree of certainty, um, that in five billion years, what's gonna happen with, with the, and, and, you know, the sun at the end of its life? And the, the answers are probably a little bit obvious. There's the laws of physics. We know the laws of physics.

• 16:04Bob Novella?

  And then we've got models that have been based on millions of observations of, of stars all over the universe, um, and simulations. So yes, using these tools, we can be quite informed about what will probably, or what could happen in the far, far distant future, billions of years from now. So all of that, all of that background makes scientists confident that this is basically what's gonna happen, um, at the end of the sun's life. So you, it's gonna, what's gonna happen is hydrogen is gonna be depleted in the core. It's no longer gonna be fused in the core. And when that happens, the core will contract and slowly heat up. And it takes a little while, a surprising while, for fusion, for fusion to happen with the helium. But while, before the helium fusion happens though, it's gonna, what it does is it heats up a shell of hydrogen

• 16:49Bob Novella?

  and causes intense fusion in that shell. And that puffs up the sun hundreds, like 250 times its current diameter. It's so, it's gonna devour, engulf, um, Mercury and then it's gonna engulf Venus. They're gonna, they're gonna be gone during that phase. Now, the Earth is not gonna be happy at that time because it's still gonna be amazingly hot. There's gonna be no life on Earth at that point. It's gonna be basically a molten ball. But it will probably still be a thing. It's still gonna be there in orbit around the sun. The next phase though is the, is called the AGB, Asymptotic Giant Branch Phase. So this is, this is a, a similar phase, but it has some very interesting differences.

• 17:29Bob Novella?

  Because the, the helium runs out in the core and when the helium runs out, the core is basically carbon and oxygen. It's gonna contract and that's gonna heat up as well. And that heating up, because the, the core's not gonna fuse because there's just not enough gravity to cause carbon to fuse. But it's gonna heat up the two shells that are right around the core there. It's gonna be the helium and hydrogen shells. They're gonna heat up so much that they-

• 17:51Speaker 01

  How much will they heat up?

• 17:52Bob Novella?

  So much. It's gonna heat up so much that the, the expanding sun can, can extend 1 AU, which is basically where the, where the Earth is. So that's, that's the point where the Earth can totally buy the farm if it goes out that far. But also during that time, this outer expanding shell is so tenuously attached by gravitation that it can just expand out into space and just keep going with the solar wind. So the, so the sun is also losing, losing mass as well. So what we have is a, we have a tug of war. There's a tug of war between the Earth. Because you have, imagine the swelling sun and the, in this tug of war, the, um, what do you guys think, what happens to the sun's rotation when it expands, when it expands greatly? What's going on with the rotation?

• 18:37Speaker 01

  It slows down.

• 18:38Bob Novella?

  It slows down. Conservation of angular momentum. The sun is going to be, then as a whole, it's going to be spinning a lot more slowly. So that's going to affect the tidal forces. And it's very similar to the moon, because you imagine the moon and the earth are tidally interacting, and the moon is tugging on the tidal bulge of the ocean, and that's actually making the moon go faster and the earth spins slower. So the moon is going farther away, and the earth's days are getting longer and longer. So something similar happens with the sun and the earth. As the sun expands, there's going to be a tidal bulge that is going to, not speeding up the earth, but it's going to pull on the earth oppositely, because it's going much faster, and that's going to cause it to get closer and closer. It's going to lose orbital energy and get closer and closer to the sun.

• 19:22Bob Novella?

  So that's where things can go absolutely wrong. But the tug of war here, though, is also the sun is losing mass. And when the sun loses mass, it's going to be, it's going to have a less gravitational pull, so the orbits are going to get farther and farther away. So it's basically, who's going to win this tug of war? The tidal forces kind of pulling the earth in, or this mass loss that's going to let it go into a higher orbit? So that's the real question. Now, the previous models said that these tidal forces are going to be strong enough where it's going to, the orbit of earth is going to get too close, and it's going to be just burnt to a cinder. But this new research now, that's talking, that's using much more physically realistic models. It has updated stellar evolution models.

• 20:05Bob Novella?

  So using this new information, it basically decided, or concluded, that these tidal forces are going to be a lot weaker than we anticipated, that the other models have said. So if these tidal forces are a lot weaker, then that means that the earth could be far enough away from the sun not to be engulfed by the sun.

• 20:22Speaker 04

  Isn't everything, like, burned off the earth by this point, though?

• 20:25Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Earth is molten at this point, and we're long gone.

• 20:28Speaker 04

  There's no water, there's no, like, everything.

• 20:29Bob Novella?

  No water, no life, everything is, many, many years prior to that, the water has boiled off. So it's not been a fun...

• 20:36Speaker 04

  So this is just whether the actual earth itself is still...

• 20:37Bob Novella?

  Yeah, this is the actual body of the earth.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  The rock, yeah.

• 20:40Bob Novella?

  Right. The interesting thing here is that they look at a star, L2 Puppus, which is an interesting name for a star. They looked at the star, and this star, they calculated, had the, almost the exact mass that the sun had at its birth. But this star is also at this AGB phase, where it's at its maximum size. So they can, it's kind of using this star as a proxy for the sun. And looking at this star, it seems to them that the mass loss, you know, is favorable for the earth. So they got a couple of reasons now to be very optimistic that the earth is going to survive. Now, I know the earth is just going to be a molten ball, but if you extrapolate that forward, then you could potentially have the old earth, you know, cooling and getting solid eventually, orbiting a white dwarf.

• 21:24Bob Novella?

  Life, it's possible, it's feasible, that life could evolve on this, on this old earth that we're on right now. And it could even, potentially even regain an atmosphere, but who knows what kind of life could evolve on this? But it is possible, if it's in the right position and everything aligns up, it could potentially happen. And it's fun to think that a life that has evolved on that earth, looking back and wondering, hey, I wonder if there was any life on the earth before the giant phase of the sun? It's just an interesting idea that that could happen, but...

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Bob, in this model, was there any mention of what happens to Mars?

• 21:56Bob Novella?

  Uh, no. I think Mars is in decent shape, right?

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:00Bob Novella?

  I mean, it's far enough away, it's quite far.

• 22:02Speaker 04

  That's good, because we'll all be living there at that point.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's kind of my point.

• 22:05Bob Novella?

  All the cats will be living there, at least. But what?

• 22:08Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I mean, we know it's not going to get pulled into the sun itself, but how hot will it get at the maximum expansion of the sun?

• 22:16Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that was interesting to think about. That's outside the scope of the study. I don't know, but it's definitely going to be, it's going to be warming up over there. For a while, anyway.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  All right, Andrea.

• 22:25Speaker 05

  Right.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Can we use social science to tell us about communities?

• 22:29Speaker 05

  We sure can. And believe it or not, I will not be speaking about political science for once in my life. I will be speaking about psychology and sociology instead.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  Thank God.

• 22:40Speaker 05

  And so, yes, finally. Not everyone cheering at once. So I have been reflecting on the role of community in our well-being as groups, as individuals, for multiple reasons. But two big ones over the past couple of weeks are that, you know, we've gone through Sydney, and now we're here, and it's lovely to meet other skeptics and LA, and just realize that you're not fighting the fight alone, and being around each other, and that feels nice. And then also, when we were all at Hobbiton, Jay and I and a couple others were talking about how fun it would be if we all just lived there together. And for one, A, that's going to happen, we're going to figure it out, and we're going to be the tour. But also, it would be beautiful, because it's a beautiful place and all of those things, but it also just would be nice, even if we had to live in regular houses, to all live

• 23:25Speaker 05

  near each other, and we all live near each other, and sort of support each other in that way. And that feels like a very basic thought. And so I thought, gosh, what is the research on whether having a community, what community means, what does it do? Does it actually improve our well-being? And if so, why and how? And lo and behold, there is a very recent review article that was published just a month or two ago, called "Social Cohesion, Social Capital, and Mental Health: A Review of Current Evidence and Future Research Directions." And so I thought I would talk about two things that they focus on, which is, if we think about a sense of community, and it sort of seems very obvious that community is good, makes us feel better, why?

• 24:10Speaker 05

  They divide it into two, or they say the research kind of really lives in two categories. One is social capital, and one is social cohesion. And both of those things matter. So social capital in this context is simply, people in your community have things that you don't have that might be helpful. So go to the neighbor, can I have a cup of sugar? Go to Jay, can I borrow your lawnmower? So on, right? It could be money, it could be moral support, it could be whatever. And that's usually what people study when they study community. And by the way, community truly means any group. So this could be people in a neighborhood, classmates, all of us, friendship groups, coworkers, any sense of community. Cohesion is less studied.

• 24:49Speaker 05

  And cohesion is a resource of trust, which is, I believe that if I go to you, you will share your sugar with me. You will, in fact, pour some sugar on me.

• 25:03Speaker 05

  I did not plan that, Bob, I'm very sorry.

• 25:05Bob Novella?

  That's a deep cut. I don't know what you're talking about.

• 25:07Speaker 05

  Okay, right.

• 25:07Speaker 04

  So the capital is what you have to spend, and cohesion is the spending of it.

• 25:11Speaker 05

  Right. So cohesion is sort of like the market of generosity, because social scientists insist on turning good things into markets, all right? So they said, what is the study of social cohesion? It's not just, there's more to it than just being in a group that has cool stuff that we can give each other, right? It's this feeling that I could give it to you, it's this trust, it's this belief that people around me care about me, and all of those things. Some researchers have studied this, but there's limitations on how we've looked into it. One problem is that there's very little research that actually goes out and measures social cohesion directly. A lot of times, when we think about social cohesion, we look at things like, what percentage of people in a community voted? I accidentally talked about politics. What percentage of people voted?

• 25:56Speaker 05

  And they kind of infer from that that there must be some cohesion, because you're voting, because you care about your neighbors and your community, and so on. But you're not really measuring that. And so only very few studies have actually gone in and tried to measure social cohesion. Do you trust your neighbors? Do you think that other people care about you? Will you be supported in the event of hardship? The other problem with this is that we often measure it from an individual perspective. And I thought this was super interesting. So social scientists, generally speaking, we start from the perspective of the individual. So if I want to measure how much social cohesion is in this group, I might go in a survey and say, how much do you think there is? Scale of 1 to 10. How much do you think there is? Or maybe I'd ask five or six different questions about trust and kindness and generosity and so forth.

• 26:38Speaker 05

  This paper points out that we could instead think of social cohesion at the group level. And the analogy they gave is vaccines and herd immunity. So if we think about an individual getting a vaccine, yes, I'm less likely to get, say, COVID, or if I get it, it'll be less serious. But it's also the case that if enough of us get the vaccine, I don't need to explain it to New Zealand, this is the one country where I really don't have to explain, but if enough of us get the vaccine, then even the people who don't have the vaccine are protected. And so this paper said, well, what if we think about social cohesion as a kind of herd immunity? What if having social cohesion isn't just good because I individually feel like I can trust other people, but what if it's a net benefit?

• 27:20Speaker 05

  So even people in the community who think they can't trust each other, or think that someone won't be there to help them, what if they are somehow protected as well? So the final piece of this, and again, this is just a review, is they said, well, okay, if this herd immunity theory is true about social cohesion, what would it be about this quality of a group that would help protect people? And in this case, the dependent variable of interest is mental health outcomes. Obviously, we could think about economic outcomes, physical health outcomes. But what is it about this social cohesion at the group level that could cause us to have fewer mental health issues at a community level? I will say, they do find that, and the effect sizes are small, but it's an ecological measure

• 28:04Speaker 05

  for an individual outcome, and so it's expected that they would be small. The effects are small, but they do find, indeed, that according to these specific measures of social cohesion, you do see this kind of, like, community-level resilience, not removal, but resilience and lower rates of depression and suicidality. We do not see an effect on psychosis, and I'll leave to the psychologist to explain the, get into the weeds on the differences. But I want to ask you all, why do you think this intergroup trust, this kind of intergroup sense that someone will help me, or... Just being in a community where people will help each other, even if I don't think people will help me, why might that be protective against, say, depression or suicidality? What comes to mind?

• 28:47Cara Santa Maria?

  My guess is that it's not teasing out the variables of just having social support versus not having social support. And like, having social support is the most predictive for positive mental health outcomes. Like, even more than, like, when I see patients, you know, if they are financially stable, okay, I'm less worried. If they are educated, I'm less worried. But ultimately, if they are isolated and alone, they are, that's like, the biggest red flag for me, that they're gonna have poor outcomes. And I think that speaks to what you were talking about with depression and anxiety versus something like psychosis, which is largely neurological, and, and environment

• 29:30Cara Santa Maria?

  is gonna have less, it's gonna account for less variance as, as the causal factor there.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, is it enough to just say that we're social creatures and we need interaction, and the absence of it is, is a negative effect on our mental health?

• 29:44Speaker 05

  I mean, I, I agree with you, and I think this is where, social science can be very valuable, because it does seem like, yeah, it's as simple as that. But you could then, from a policy perspective, say, well, what is it about social interaction that gives us this better well-being, that, that protects us against these particular kinds of mental illness? Is it simply enough to go to a cafe and buy stuff? Or do I have to go and have dinner with friends? Right? Is it enough to say hi to people when I walk around? Or do I need to have, is it about clothes? What, what if I'm arguing in every interaction? Right? So we can kind of get in the weeds and say, well, what is it? Right? And so, so the four mechanisms that they, that they zoom in on, and that have been the most researched on these fronts. So one is literally, kind of combining what you two have said, is that literally the

• 30:26Speaker 05

  act of interacting in any way protects against lower mental health outcomes. And, and so to the most, and to your point, the most likely, you know, some of the biggest predictors of being very, very depressed are being widowed and not having friends. Right? And so there is something where it's like, interactions of any kind can be supportive. But there's actually more to it. So another mechanism is that in general, there is this sense that if other people in the community trust each other, again, even if I don't trust any of these guys, I will benefit, because we'll also see reduced crime. You're not gonna harm people or steal from people, A, because I think you might give me the sugar, and B, because you just don't, it's just not necessary. Right? I was, I needed a piece of paper just now at the library, and I went over to the printer

• 31:10Speaker 05

  and just took one, I don't know if that's illegal. But in the United States, that would've been locked up. Like, I went up to the printer, and I was like, there's no way this is unlocked. And it just was, and I just took a piece of paper. Like, that's social cohesion, my friends. Right? It's, it's, it's the resources there, and you're sharing it freely. Right?

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Man, I'm gonna go take all that paper.

• 31:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, we're taking paper home, right? Yeah, okay.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Let's go get it, everybody.

• 31:30Speaker 04

  Is it a subconscious peace of mind kind of thing?

• 31:34Speaker 05

  Well, getting there. So, so, so the third of the four of these, the third one is, is maybe where you're, where you're going, which is that it can buffer what they call an adverse effect on mental health of some other thing. So you have a family member die, you lose your job, or some other thing that would be something that would cause you to feel very, very, very bad. It can be this sort of support network against an, an actual bad thing that's happening. And, and so that might be this kind of subconscious feeling that, like, my whole world isn't over just because X, Y, or Z horrible thing happened?

• 32:10Cara Santa Maria?

  I, I would probably, I would argue that that probably is most of the variance in this, in this study, is, is the buffering effect. Everybody, like, things are good when things are good, and you're okay being alone when things are good. But in life, people struggle, and you have to have social support when you're struggling. And if you lack social support when you're struggling, it can take, oh, this is hard, and I'm kind of sad, to, I'm suicidal. You know, it can go from, this is a, a, a change in my mental state, to, this is now pathology that can have devastating behavioral effects.

• 32:51Cara Santa Maria?

  And that buffering effect is, it doesn't sound like they did a great job of, like, teasing out, because these are all just like constructs, and they overlap very heavily.

• 32:59Speaker 05

  So these are, this is a review article, so each one of these is like, a handful of studies that focused on the interactions, a handful that did crime, and so there's certainly overlap.

• 33:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. And so when you're talking about something like a buffering effect on mental health struggles, like, that's a construct. Like, they, they're like, we're gonna define this, and then we're gonna develop a way to study it. But they're also catching these other things as well.

• 33:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. And the last one, very related, and I'm curious if, if this was, was your experience here in Christchurch, is that it's also something that various studies have shown is very, very helpful in cases of public health emergencies and natural disasters. So knowing that, again, even if you personally are alone, knowing that you're in a community of people that are supporting each other, can help you kind of be more resilient to those things. Exactly to Kara's point, this paper also says, and this is something that, again, feels so obvious, but we barely have concrete data around this stuff. I mean, most of this stuff is truly from this kind of secondary data and these inferences, and, and certainly needs more refining. And so one big future direction for this research is measurement. How are we gonna get more specific about what kind of interaction, what sort of buffering

• 34:05Speaker 05

  effect, what sort of adverse things? There's also basically no research on, does this operate the same way among different genders, different racial groups, different income levels? There's also research that needs to be done, that has not been done, on, are we talking about a bridging or a bonding type of social capital or social cohesion? So bridging is, or something, let me say bonding, is where people of relatively equal status, say, hierarchy in a company, or, or in a community, we all bond together and we support each other. But then there's also bridging social capital, which is when I, someone who's, say, politically on the left, builds community with someone on the right, or someone who's very, very wealthy builds community with someone who is very, very poor.

• 34:49Speaker 05

  And so that kind of social capital is, is not really studied as much as that horizontal, which is another area of future work.

• 34:55Cara Santa Maria?

  And I guess I would just caution that, like, I think sometimes all sciences can be compartmentalized, and a bit navel-gazy, and a bit, like, segmented. There's a ton of research, for example, on what you just mentioned about class, or about gender, for example, but it might just not be from the economic perspective, or from a sociologic perspective. Like, in the psychological literature, I can say unequivocally that female friendships have a very strong buffering effect, and that male citizens, by and large, lack the

• 35:33Cara Santa Maria?

  level of intimate friendship that is required for that type of mental health buffering. We see a massive, a huge difference between female and male friendships, that, you know, just speaks to social pressures. Like, you know, there's nothing essentialist about this, these are just kind of pressures that, that different societies have on individuals. But we have a lot of, we have a lot of evidence to support that as well.

• 36:00Speaker 05

  And, and I think this also kind of brings up this question of, like, so what do we do about all of this? And, and I appreciated that this article made a distinction between, a lot of times when we talk about mental health protection, we talk about deficits. So people are lonely, they are poor, they're going through a bad experience. And this particular article said, you know, what if we think about it in terms of assets? How could we bring more into a community? So if we have a community of people who, who inject more social support, more social cohesion among one another, is that something, again, going back to the herd effect, that even, say, a, a man, or, or someone who doesn't have any friends, or, or in general male friendships, they might still benefit from being in a community where others are socially cohesive, even if they themselves are not yet?

• 36:44Speaker 05

  And so that kind of group-level lens was something that I found very striking.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  This is all observational research, of course. And as Kara's saying, it's always constructs involved. But I wonder, what would it take to get us to an experimental research paradigm? Virtual reality probably isn't robust enough?

• 37:00Speaker 05

  Well, one of the things they call for in future research is exactly that, where they say, look, and a lot of social science, unfortunately, is very observational, or, if it's experimental, it's so isolated, you almost wonder how you can apply it more broadly.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Like, these weird experimental economics things, where they give a bunch of undergraduates $200 and see what they do with it.

• 37:18Speaker 05

  Exactly. It's like, go gamble and see what happens.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Well, Andrew, why don't they just go to a neighborhood, like, pick one house, like, okay, they're safe, and they kill all the other neighbors?

• 37:25Speaker 05

  That's an idea, yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  And then they could just see what the reaction is.

• 37:28Speaker 05

  Well, so, so, short of killing other people, one of the questions is, is there a way, and maybe more in the field experiment, or even a natural, clever, natural experiment capacity, is there a way to go in and sort of engineer social cohesion? And if you could find two neighborhoods that are otherwise comparable, and it's an X, Y, and Z thing that you think might matter, could you very deliberately somehow? But, but the question is how, right? Like, you can't just, if you inject, like, half the population and say, like, be friends with each other, like, be the Truman Show, is that enough? That feels not right, and it also seems like the effect should take longer than most people have the capacity for in a study. So, so maybe AI, that could be interesting.

• 38:06Speaker 04

  With the Sims?

• 38:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, or the Sims, or something like that.

• 38:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but, I mean, there could, there could be, it would be very expensive, and I don't know if it would tell us much more.

• 38:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:15Cara Santa Maria?

  But you easily could have a group of families living in some sort of living facility or large community with, you know, specific mandates, and then others living in another community with specific mandates, choosing to engage in this experiment, choosing to undergo that, live there for one year. You know, over here, you guys keep to yourselves, you have everything you need to be self-sufficient, you minimize social interaction, and over here, you know, in order to do whatever. Yeah, exactly, you have cooperative living, and then you just see what happens. The problem is, you're always gonna have all these different confounding variables that come into play, and that's why, I mean, you mentioned this in your, in your talk earlier, but like, the social sciences, when you get a PhD in a social science, you are

• 38:58Cara Santa Maria?

  required to, I, I think I took, like, eight statistics courses over the course of my training, and, and very often, individuals who are learning, some, what are considered like, really hard sciences, might maybe take one physics, or one statistics course.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  I have a PhD in theoretical physics, and I took zero statistics classes.

• 39:16Speaker 05

  So don't trust anything he says.

• 39:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and, and, and most of it is because...

• 39:19Speaker 04

  So, so, Brian, what, what percentage would that have been?

• 39:24Speaker 02

  I'm not qualified to comment on that, George.

• 39:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. And, and most of that really is because there are sciences where you can literally take a mouse and you can engineer this mouse to do this and that mouse to do that and you can compare the two and then you can say these are how they're different. You just can't do that with people. You just can't. It's not ethical.

• 39:38Speaker 05

  The closest I would think would, that would be very compelling and maybe plausible is something in the category of a natural experiment, which I don't know if you guys talked about a lot on the show, which is like, maybe something happens that a community comes together for some reason that has nothing to do with an adverse external effect or some other reason, and then you could, you could sort of start to make some inferences that way. But the causal tracing is, is effectively impossible from the observational data.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. If we do have like general AI that's at the point where we could model a human brain, then we could experiment on them. But then that would have the same ethical considerations, right? Well, everyone, we're gonna take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Monarch. Yeah, Monarch is a paid personal finance app and it helps you track all your accounts, right? Your spending, your budgets, bills, if you have any goals, your net worth, and it's all in one place. It connects you to your financial accounts so you can see where your money is going and you can plan ahead.

• 40:33Cara Santa Maria?

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• 40:59Bob Novella?

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• 41:14Speaker 01

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. I want to talk a little bit about terraforming Mars. First, I'm gonna ask you guys a question. This is not about whether or not we should terraform Mars or not, but I'm just interested in what your opinions are on whether or not you think it's technologically feasible to terraform Mars. And what I mean by that is to alter it so that it has a sufficient atmosphere and temperature and protection from radiation, et cetera, so that humans could live on the surface without any spacesuit, without any protective gear. What do you, what do you think, George?

• 41:49Speaker 04

  No way.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  No, ever? No way, ever?

• 41:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't think the, the math and the resources could ever work.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  What do you think, Bob?

• 41:56Bob Novella?

  I mean, based on what's there, no.

• 41:58Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, when you say feasible, do you mean possible?

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, possible.

• 42:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Or do you mean probable?

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Within the laws of physics.

• 42:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, is it possible even if it made no economic sense?

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Interesting. Okay, that's a different question.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  It is.

• 42:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Of course, it's possible. Within the laws of physics, yes. It has to be possible. I mean, you need, you need a huge source of liquid water or, or ice that you can turn into liquid water. You need that alien spaceship where you put your handprint in and it heats up Yeah. the ice and it melts and then for a very short amount of time between when you can't and then you can breathe on the surface of Mars. One, one minute later, you can breathe, yeah. I, I, remember that?

• 42:37Cara Santa Maria?

  And you're saying this has to be on the surface? It can't be like in lava or like underground at all?

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Yes, on the surface. Like, the whole planet.

• 42:44Bob Novella?

  That is terrible.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Do you have any thoughts on this?

• 42:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I have known you long enough that I'm sure the answer is no. But I think it might, I would, independent of your influence, I would, I'm with Jay, that I think, I think it could be possible. And I think Bob's comments earlier about how little, you know, our changing views about what's gonna happen to our solar system and the sun and so forth. I mean, maybe the next round of life on Earth, we'll be able to figure out a kind of technology that gets us there.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  So, the, we've talked about this before. The reason why I want to talk about it again is because there's a recent paper that's, that essentially came to the conclusion that changing technology in the last 20 years is such that we need to reevaluate the plausibility of terraforming Mars. That maybe it's actually possible to do it and we shouldn't rule it out. Well, based on what new information or technology? So, that's a good question. But the, here, what often happens is, there is like technological progress, but it doesn't change the baseline calculation, right? The math is still the same. So, here's the, the, there are things we could do, certainly, to terraform Mars. For example, you could warm up the surface so as to melt the polar caps. That would release a certain amount of water vapor and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which

• 43:58Speaker 01

  then would have a greenhouse effect, which would warm it up further. There would be a certain amount of water that would be released. And if you heat it up enough, then water that is frozen in the Martian regolith would also liquefy. And so, at some point, you could have liquid water on the surface of Mars. You could have an atmosphere breathable as top. You'd need to have enough oxygen. You need to make sure that there isn't too much carbon dioxide. But the, the question, so do we have the technology to, to make that kind of stuff happen? Theoretically, obviously, this would, it would take a thousand years to do it with current technology. But here's the problem. The problem that's not addressed by this paper and that hasn't changed and that the science is actually, in the

• 44:40Speaker 01

  last 10 years, has shown, is more difficult than it was originally hoped. And that is, the, the big problem is what? What is like the most limiting factor to terraforming Mars?

• 44:51Bob Novella?

  Resources on site.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  The onsite resources. There just ain't enough water and oxygen on Mars to terraform it so that it's habitable to humans.

• 45:01Bob Novella?

  Habitable.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  So, right now, the atmosphere is less than, slightly less than 1% of an atmosphere of our, of our atmosphere. Yeah, you have to bring in asteroid, ice asteroids. We need volatiles, right? What's called volatiles.

• 45:12Bob Novella?

  Comets, so basically.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  So, that's, that would be one thing, yeah. So, you, one, one way around that is to bring the resources to Mars, which basically means crashing a bunch of comets into Mars. And we can get those from the

• 45:27Bob Novella?

  Oort Cloud.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Oort Cloud or the, or even in the Kuiper Belt. You just find big chunks of ice floating out there and you would have to alter their orbit so that they would eventually collide with Mars. Now, we're talking tens of thousands of years. I mean, this would take a really long time to make this happen.

• 45:45Bob Novella?

  Yeah, how many, how many comets would we actually need?

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Hundreds. It would require hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of comets to get, so, to get to the point where we, where we think we would need to be. Now, the one bit of wiggle room here is that we don't know exactly how much water and volatiles are frozen in Earth, in, in Mars's crust. So, until we have a firm number on that, we can't say exactly. But the estimates so far are not promising. And that has, that's going in the other direction. Like, the more data we have, the less promising it seems. But I always get interested at these news items where they focus on one thing and as if it changes the whole equation. And no, it doesn't. It's still, you still have the same fundamental

• 46:31Speaker 01

  problems we always had. There isn't enough stuff there to do it without importing all the volatiles. And that would take a massive engineering, sending a ship in, out past Pluto, latching onto a comet or whatever, and altering its trajectory to then hundreds of years later smash into Mars is no minor engineering feat.

• 46:53Bob Novella?

  By the way, if you're going to the Oort Cloud, right? I mean, basically, that's, that's a little bit farther than beyond Pluto.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Well, Oort Cloud, yeah. I'm thinking Kuiper Belt.

• 47:02Bob Novella?

  Okay, all right. Because the Oort Cloud is like a

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Oort Cloud is light, is one light year.

• 47:05Bob Novella?

  One light year away. That's quite far.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  If we had to go, if we had to get mined resources from that, then it's thousands and thousands of years.

• 47:11Cara Santa Maria?

  But like, we don't have to.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  No, we don't.

• 47:13Cara Santa Maria?

  That's why, I know that you kind of like shut it down at the beginning. So, you're like, I'm not gonna talk about whatever. But, but my question

• 47:20Speaker 01

  But you're gonna talk about it anyway.

• 47:21Cara Santa Maria?

  My question to you, I'll just point it to you. Why?

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Well, right now

• 47:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Why are we even talking about this?

• 47:26Speaker 01

  We, I think it's, right now, it's really just an abstract scientific question. It's like a thought experiment. Is it even possible? What would it take? There is no pragmatic reason to do it right now. Clearly.

• 47:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Will there ever be a pragmatic reason to do it?

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Well, I don't want to say ever, because there may be. I mean, who knows where in a thousand years or 500 years, we may have an infrastructure in our solar, we may be occupying multiple bodies in our solar system. At some point, it may be like, yeah, it's not a bad idea and we can do it, you know? This is, and the assessment of how easy or plausible it is, I'm sure would be completely different 500 years from now than it is today.

• 48:04Bob Novella?

  And Steve, what about, what about the scientific advances from that technology? Point, pointing to the Earth, helping the Earth, and maybe in the future, the way things are going, we may need to terraform Earth in the future and make it more habitable.

• 48:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's ultimately the point, right? Is like, why are we spending always so much time talking about whether or not Mars is terraformable when we know, like, oh, there's not an atmosphere? Well, we have an atmosphere and we're ruining it. And it's much easier to just unruin a functional atmosphere

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 48:33Cara Santa Maria?

  than it is to make a whole new atmosphere from scratch.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Of course it is. But it's not, I don't see it as a zero sum game or an either or. It's just, we obviously have to take care of the Earth and protect our atmosphere and our environment and do all of that. This is not of, let's do this instead of protecting the Earth. That's insane. But the question is, hey, maybe one day we might want to expand to Mars. And why not?

• 48:54Speaker 05

  Well, and I think it's, it's

• 48:55Cara Santa Maria?

  That's not an answer. Why not is not an answer.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  It's more of like, it's a thought. Why not is why we've done everything awesome in history. But it's a thought experiment.

• 49:02Cara Santa Maria?

  No, usually why, usually the answer is resource, you know, to gain resources, to exploit resources, to spread out an empire. There's usually reasons why. People don't go, I'm gonna go all the way to the other side of the world just 'cause.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Well, that's why they went to the top of Everest, right?

• 49:20Speaker 05

  Well, look how great that turned out.

• 49:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 49:22Speaker 04

  It's almost like saying, can we alter the orbit of Mars to bring it closer to Earth?

• 49:27Speaker 01

  That's an even bigger problem.

• 49:28Speaker 04

  But that's what I mean, but it's like, but

• 49:30Cara Santa Maria?

  But why?

• 49:30Speaker 04

  Is it that much?

• 49:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 49:31Speaker 04

  That's what I'm saying.

• 49:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 49:32Speaker 04

  Like, that's just as ridiculous a concept to me

• 49:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Me too.

• 49:36Speaker 04

  as terraforming Mars. Like, oh, it's

• 49:38Speaker 01

  That's orders of magnitude more difficult.

• 49:39Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, but it's

• 49:40Bob Novella?

  Well, how about?

• 49:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but to the same effect is the

• 49:43Bob Novella?

  How about this? Kara, we've been now, we've been investigating how to terraform Mars, and now, one of the conclusions seems to be, that's not gonna work. So, Earth is really, really our only shot here. So, can you admit that that's actually helpful for?

• 49:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that you took all that time to get to the same

• 50:01Bob Novella?

  All that time?

• 50:02Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but what I'm saying is, you're saying

• 50:04Bob Novella?

  But hey, but knowing that

• 50:05Cara Santa Maria?

  The big outcome is the whole point, right? What's the point of terraforming Mars is to learn that we can't terraform Mars?

• 50:11Bob Novella?

  I just think it's interesting that it could make people even more dedicated to preserving the Earth, knowing that we don't have a plan B.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  It's a question worth asking, at the very least. Like, you might say, just give up on it immediately, but just asking the question, can you terraform Mars to make it habitable? That is not a worthless question to ask, right?

• 50:28Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I'm not saying it is. I'm saying that very often, when we engage in these conversations, we are not talking about why. And I think why has to come before how.

• 50:38Speaker 05

  I mean, I think it's a valuable question. A, I think the value of curiosity and imagination and the thought experiment is real, and you can really bring people into the sciences by capturing their imagination with, you know, why can't we live on Venus? Well, here's what we're gonna learn. Why couldn't we live on Pluto? And ask all of these sorts of questions, and I think that can be a fun way to engage. It's also a fun way, or a useful way, of thinking about, yeah, what technology do we have? What sorts of things are we actually capable of? And I think Bob made this point, is, you know, in the process of saying, well, we'd never have this, and we'd never have that, does help us realize how precious what we have is. And there are people who need convincing that we don't have this eject button that we can go to, and you never know what sort of resilient crop, or airproof, whatever,

• 51:23Speaker 05

  we might come up with in the process of playing this out. And for now, as far as money going to different things, I'm much more worried about money going to endless wars, as opposed to these sorts of research projects.

• 51:33Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think that, like, what you're saying speaks exactly to my point, because everything you just said framed it as, this is why we shouldn't, this is why we can't, this is why we won't, instead of the constant framing of, can we? How will we? And I think that that's what Elon Musk is doing, I think that that's what a lot of techno-optimists are doing. They're saying, how can we put resources into this? Let's really continue to dig deep into the positive benefit of exploring this. But I think that's important framing. Like, this is why we won't ever live on Venus. This is why it's a terrible idea to terraform Mars.

• 52:09Speaker 05

  And this is why my money's on Jupiter.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  I think in general, though, I think it's, just to push back on the general principle, totally fine to say how before why.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree, I was gonna push back on that.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  Right? A lot of things, in general, happen, because think about playing with stuff as a kid, or when you're first learning science, or whatever, you just start messing with stuff, and something interesting happens, then you say, oh, why did that happen? Right? This is how, I mean, a lot of my own research got done, so I'm just playing around with math, it's like, oh my God, I just did a thing, why did that work?

• 52:37Cara Santa Maria?

  But you just said why, not how.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  But you do the how first, that's what I'm saying, is you do the how by messing with it and getting it into some configuration, and then you ask the question, oh, that was interesting, why did that happen? So, I strongly disagree that you have to start with why before how.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  But he wasn't saying, what's it used for? And that, you're, I know you're not saying this, not trying to strike a straw man out of it, but to the extreme, that's an argument against all basic science research. We don't have to know what it's going to ultimately be used for. I see this as basic science, theoretical research, and we can't anticipate where we're gonna be. Maybe in 500 years, we have to farm Mars, or we're all gonna starve to death, who knows? I don't see the downside of having the technology.

• 53:16Cara Santa Maria?

  I think by definition, this is applied research, not basic research, and I think we do have to ask ethical questions when we engage in applied research. There is a big difference.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  They're not mutually exclusive. I mean, to give you a perspective, like, when the, if you go back in history on when the mRNA platform, the very beginnings of research were happening, that eventually led to the mRNA platform, they had absolutely no idea that it was gonna lead to the mRNA platform.

• 53:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. They weren't saying, let's terraform Mars, and let's figure out all the science to get us there. They were just doing basic research.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:50Cara Santa Maria?

  And then we were able to develop a vaccine from that. That's the same point I'm making.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  But I think, I think, you know, everyone kinda said it, like, it's interesting, it's a thought experiment, it could lead to bigger and cooler ideas, it might gain some interesting information about the planet, doesn't necessarily mean we're, like, let's, you know, Kara, this is so pie-in-the-sky future, like, if we wanted to do it today, it would be like just pushing Legos around, like, nothing would come out of it. There's no point in even thinking about doing it today. This is the kind of thing where, like, maybe in hundreds of years, this starts to become plausible.

• 54:25Speaker 04

  Why would you dismiss the idea of changing the orbit so easily? Which is just, no, it's just as equally impossible as terraforming. It feels like, oh, well, that's ridiculous.

• 54:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. That's somehow more impossible.

• 54:38Speaker 04

  But the impossible, crazy one, we should talk about.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Because we can alter the course of comets, we cannot alter the course of a planet.

• 54:47Speaker 04

  Well, so far.

• 54:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Not yet.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, not yet, but, yeah, with no plausible extension of our current technology, but we could do it today if we wanted to. We're experimenting now with altering the orbit of asteroids

• 54:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  as a defense shield against the Earth.

• 55:01Speaker 04

  Sure, sure.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  So, I mean, I see no problem in asking the question, and again, actually, the whole research about terraforming Mars is really just studying Mars. It's like, right? So, which is fine, which is basic science research, we're just trying to understand the planet. That knowledge also informs our question of, well, how hard or easy it would be to terraform it. And I see that mainly today as a complete thought experiment, because we're so far away from it being pragmatic.

• 55:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, and I think it's just

• 55:28Speaker 01

  And we may never, may never wanna do it. It's just a fun thing to throw around.

• 55:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I think it's just important that we say that.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:34Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, instead of the, because there are people out there who are, have billions of, trillions of dollars, who are actually talking about doing this.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  That's the issue here.

• 55:43Cara Santa Maria?

  And that is real resource allocation. Like, that's money that actually, and it is a zero-sum game, when it comes to the global economy.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  All right. Kara, what's Fauci up to?

• 55:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Oh. So, this is a decidedly Americocentric topic that I think has global implications, and so that's why I think it's important to talk about. So, first and foremost, just as, you know, in case some folks in the audience don't know, and people listening at home don't know, how confident are we? Does everybody, I guess, here in New Zealand, in this room, not everybody in New Zealand, know who Dr. Anthony Fauci is? Okay, I see a lot of nods. Just as a quick reminder.

• 56:23Speaker 04

  Can we just say that's amazing?

• 56:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm, I know, I know.

• 56:26Speaker 04

  Again, just to stress, how hip you people are, it's amazing.

• 56:30Cara Santa Maria?

  So, Fauci served in the federal government in the United States for 54 years. He started his career in 1968, when he joined the National Institutes of Health, the NIH, as a clinical associate in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the NIAID. In 80, he was appointed chief in the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, and then he was named the director in 84. And then he continued until he stepped down from all government positions in December of 2022. Over the course of his career, just as a reminder, he was an absolutely essential member of teams who were the architects of PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

• 57:14Cara Santa Maria?

  He did early research identifying treatment strategies for HIV and AIDS. He has published, or I should say authored, or co-authored, over 1,300 peer-reviewed publications throughout his career. Specifically, most of his research has been on immunology, that's his area of expertise. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008 by none other than George W. Bush.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Can I just say, just to put that into context, the 1,300 scientific articles, not to take anything away from that, but when you run a lab, you get your name on every scientist who works in your lab.

• 57:48Cara Santa Maria?

  You do.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Right?

• 57:49Cara Santa Maria?

  And you also have an obligation to ensure that those papers are

• 57:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely, but he wasn't, like, conducting 1,300 experiments.

• 57:56Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but he was overseeing that many experiments. They were happening under his purview.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:00Cara Santa Maria?

  He also received the National Medal of Science in 2005, and, you know, just multiple, multiple awards throughout his career.

• 58:07Bob Novella?

  How cool would that be? Get the National Medal of Science.

• 58:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I know, that's awesome.

• 58:12Bob Novella?

  I'd love that.

• 58:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Awesome.

• 58:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, then you'd be all respected, and you could do work, and

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:18Speaker 04

  There'd be no question as to whether you're

• 58:20Speaker 01

  You'd be bulletproof, right?

• 58:21Speaker 04

  Bulletproof.

• 58:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Bulletproof, yeah.

• 58:22Speaker 02

  Bob, have you tried writing in and just asking for it? I bet no one's done that.

• 58:25Speaker 05

  I bet right now might be the best time to write in and ask.

• 58:29Cara Santa Maria?

  That's true. So what is going on with Fauci now? If you have been looking at any of your news alerts over the course of the week, you may have seen that Fauci was recently the subject of a Senate hearing. Actually, on Wednesday, he was called before the Senate. And specifically, an American Senator Rand Paul has been spearheading these attempts to try and figure out, I don't know, whether Fauci is, I mean, honestly, like in his words, responsible for the COVID pandemic. So to summarize Rand Paul's position, that he's stated verbally multiple times,

• 59:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Dr. Fauci, in his role in the federal government, was funding, as Rand Paul sees it, gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, in laboratories, that then led to a lab leak, that then led to the global COVID-19 pandemic. So Dr. Fauci is personally, apparently, responsible for all lives lost during COVID. And the way that he is attempting to hold Fauci responsible is by first publishing what they're calling a diary, which I don't even know if that's like good terminology, but basically they're notes typed out, so not handwritten, but typed out notes that Fauci,

• 59:57Cara Santa Maria?

  we still don't know how they got access to this, but it looks like they may have been typed on a government computer. So over the course of sort of the latter years of his career, he was typing kind of daily journal entries of like what he did, who he talked to, especially around these early kind of COVID days. It looks like probably in service to the memoir that he was writing. So he wanted to make sure he was documenting things well. Fauci is not a young man, by the way. He's 85 years old. So he's documenting things so that he can remember them to be able to write this book. Somehow Rand Paul gained access to this and published the entire thing on the internet.

• 1:00:37Cara Santa Maria?

  So right here, I have 1,141-page document published by Rand Paul with a lot of private information in it, like people writing or emailing Fauci, calling Fauci, and him writing down, you know, like so-and-so called me to ask if it was safe to get the vaccine because they have a current outbreak of shingles, so-and-so, like people's private health information.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Unredacted?

• 1:01:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Unredacted, yeah. We know things about like, I mean, there are redacted portions, but we know things about like Barbra Streisand and Julia Roberts and like, you know, all of these famous people. And what's really infuriating is that, you know, the New York Times, for example, the headline that I have right in front of me, "Fauci in Private Diary: Reflected on COVID's Origins and His Own Fame." And then like, they really use inflammatory language within this article. It paints a portrait of Dr. Fauci as obsessed with himself, reveling in his own importance and the celebrities he knows, from the actress Julia Roberts to the singers Joan Baez and Barbra Streisand. And when you read the diary entries, the journal entries, there are things like, "Barbra

• 1:01:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Streisand called me to ask me if it was safe to get this vaccine," or like, you know, "When Julia Roberts reached out, she said, 'Oh, my God, I can't believe I'm talking to Dr. Fauci. You're so famous.'" Like, there were things that he probably wanted to use in his memoir, but they're not all like, "I'm awesome. Let me tell you how awesome I am."

• 1:02:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, but Kara, you know, like politicians shouldn't be bragging about themselves.

• 1:02:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, right.

• 1:02:08Speaker 04

  What kind of a degenerate would like, you know, name buildings after themselves?

• 1:02:11Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's the thing, too.

• 1:02:12Speaker 04

  It's so crazy.

• 1:02:13Cara Santa Maria?

  It's so hypocritical, but also, he's not a politician, right? He's a scientist who is appointed into these different roles because of his expertise. He didn't run for office. He is not there representing the people. He is there making informed decisions because of his level of both expertise in these areas of infectious disease and also his management abilities, right? And so this is somebody who, in a lot of ways, I mean, I don't want to say he thanklessly served, at least not most of his career. Sure, this career did bring him a certain level of public accolade. It brought him to White House Correspondence Dinners. It brought him into like the Washington elite circles. Exactly, as it should.

• 1:02:56Cara Santa Maria?

  But it became increasingly thankless over the last several years.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  And he's an advisor, right? He's not implementing a lot of this himself. He's, I mean, he's suggesting, right?

• 1:03:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Like, he's, so he was serving in these government roles, and then like, for Biden specifically, he was also Biden's advisor. And so what ultimately happened with Fauci is that he became, I believe, the scapegoat for everything that Trump and Trump's administration did wrong, right? As they continuously dropped the ball, as they pushed for politically advantageous policies that were not evidence-based, and then they saw loss of life, and then they saw negative ramifications, they needed somebody to scapegoat. And so they found the person who had probably the largest influence on policy.

• 1:03:50Cara Santa Maria?

  The problem is, they didn't do very often what was recommended.

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:03:55Cara Santa Maria?

  And so they really like to point to, for example, like, New York was ground zero. It wasn't the first place we saw COVID in the US. That was Seattle, but New York is where things got really bad, if you've ever watched some of the documentaries about, you know, the front lines of the pandemic. And basically pointing to Fauci's recommendations for the mayor of New York at the time and saying, "You directly recommended X, and therefore this many people died." And it just shows a blatant misunderstanding, right, of public health and public health policy. It also shows a really, I think, weaponized, I don't even want to call it a misunderstanding. It's a disunderstanding, right?

• 1:04:36Cara Santa Maria?

  A weaponized disunderstanding of the way the scientific method works. Because the journal articles show uncertainty, and they show, okay, this is what we know, and based on that, maybe this is what we should do. Oh, crap, we have more information, maybe we should take a step over here. And what Rand Paul is ultimately trying to do, which is why Fauci had to plead the Fifth 100 times on advice of his counsel, over 100 times in this last hearing. He just kept saying over and over, you know, "So that I don't incriminate myself. I'm going to plead the Fifth. I'm not going to answer your questions." The reason he did that is because Rand Paul's whole objective here is to catch him in a lie, because he has all of these thousands of pages of documentation.

• 1:05:19Cara Santa Maria?

  And so if he verbalizes something that they can sort of twist and argue is different than what he said at some point during this entire journey, they can say...

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  Six years ago or something.

• 1:05:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. They can say, "You've just perjured yourself. You've lied to the American people, and maybe then we can prosecute."

• 1:05:34Speaker 02

  And it doesn't matter that he was pardoned by Biden, because that would be for something else?

• 1:05:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Apparently, that would only be for anything he did up to that point.

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  I see, so the perjury now.

• 1:05:45Cara Santa Maria?

  And if he perjures himself in front of Congress, they can hold him, not just in contempt, but they can actually charge him, yeah.

• 1:05:50Speaker 04

  Isn't there a central hypocrisy to, or dichotomy, that they're both saying Fauci was responsible for the killing of a million people, but that also he misrepresented how dangerous COVID was? It was just the flu. Like, they want it both ways.

• 1:06:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course, they want it both ways, yeah.

• 1:06:08Speaker 04

  It's insane.

• 1:06:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they want to say, "You did the whole, you told us to mask, and you told us not to mask, and you, and when you told us not to mask, that was dangerous because we should have been masking. But then when you told us, oh, we need to mask, that was trampling on my, I don't know, First Amendment rights, so..."

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  It's actually worse than you're saying, Kara, because you're saying that, no, it is, because you're saying that the government now is throwing him under the bus for their own failures. Sure, that's true, but at its core, we are dealing with a conspiracy theory that came out of what we call the fever swamps, right, of the far-right political extreme in our country. This is rank conspiracy theory. So specifically, the idea that he is responsible for gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab is nonsense.

• 1:06:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  So first of all, he was in charge of an agency at the NIH, which funds medical research, which for a company that just contracted with the researchers who were doing the research. So it was like this really tangential connection. It wasn't the research itself. Also, the research that they're talking about was not gain-of-function research. Let me explain that very quickly. So gain-of-function research means that you're doing research on a virus, and you're making changes to the virus that make it more virulent, more deadly, right? Make it better able to infect and kill people or cause damage, right? Or resist vaccines or treatment.

• 1:07:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, which is important so that you can develop treatments.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  Well, but there are lots of regulations around gain-of-function research, and the NIH cannot fund gain-of-function research. But the research that they're talking about wasn't gain-of-function research, meaning it was not deliberately trying to make a virus more virulent or whatever. But the nuance is that, it's like, how hard do you have to try to not allow a virus to accidentally get more virulent while you're doing research on it?

• 1:08:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, because that's how evolution works.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Right, because that will happen incidentally, as opposed, so it's, you have to monitor the virus as you're researching for accidental gain-of-function. And what they were doing with the research they're talking about, there was some, you could see it as a gain-of-function, it was an alteration of function, which you could interpret as a gain-of-function, but it was incidental, it wasn't the point of the research, and they were monitoring it. So it's the most tenuous bullshit. He wasn't really funding it, it wasn't really gain-of-function research, and it was just, again, they're dumpster diving for anything that they could twist into a sinister story. And it wasn't a freaking lab leak.

• 1:08:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Like, we know it wasn't, I mean, like, all evidence points to a spillover, a spillover event, all evidence.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  The consensus of the scientific evaluation at this time... It came from chipmunks. I mean, everybody knows it. Well, we don't know the... We don't know the animal vector, so there is that little bit of uncertainty there. But all of the demographics, everything is pointing to the meat market, it almost certainly originated there, it was a spillover event. It's like, I don't know, 90% or so certain scientifically. The intelligence agency basically saying, "We don't know, but the Chinese are being squirrely." That's basically their whole, they don't say... It is a lab leak, or it's more likely to be a lab leak. They're just saying, we don't know.

• 1:09:29Cara Santa Maria?

  And to be fair, the agencies that are claiming that this is a lab leak are run by political appointees. And I think we have to be really careful.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  I don't think any agency is saying it's a lab leak. They're just saying we can't rule it out.

• 1:09:39Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but we have individuals within agencies who are pushing these agendas, and they have power and they have voices. But these individuals are not scientists themselves, and they are political appointees by the current administration. And so I think that's really disingenuous when you say, well, let's look at the science. This person, the spokesperson that we put in place to tell us what the science says, is on our team.

• 1:10:02Speaker 05

  It feels very akin, another game of client denial all over again, where it's like, let's just pick a few points of uncertainty. You don't know exactly what meat it was, or we can't say for sure it wasn't this, and then just use that as a crowbar to make everybody, or a lot of people doubt or think that this is a worthy thing to do.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  And also, this exact thing was predicted, this kind of spillover event. Like, we knew if there was gonna be another pandemic, this was, which there was going to be at some point. This was one of the ways it would happen.

• 1:10:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and we had playbooks for what to do, and the current president in his previous administration said, let's get rid of those playbooks.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:36Cara Santa Maria?

  We don't want to have a protocol for what happens when a spillover event eventually happens.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  And he got rid of the group of people whose job it was to have an immediate response to it.

• 1:10:48Speaker 04

  Because Obama appointed them.

• 1:10:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, right.

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  It's a whole thing to which on.

• 1:10:55Cara Santa Maria?

  The ultimate reason that I wanted to talk about this, as I alluded to at the beginning, that this is kind of a decidedly Americocentric news item that has global ramifications, is that this is a perfect example of the erosion of trust in public institutions that dictatorial, megalomaniacal individuals who have, you know, these delusions of singular leadership, these delusions of authoritarian.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  Sorry, who are we talking about?

• 1:11:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I don't even have to say it. This is what they do, right? It is in the playbook. It's to go through and systematically try to erode public trust in the very people who have spent careers earning public trust. Because once you start questioning the very experts that always felt like safe people to believe, now all of a sudden, I don't know who to believe, oh, look at this strong man, they will save us from ourselves. That is the whole point.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  Right. They create the chaos that they then rescue you from.

• 1:11:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Super dangerous.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  They want to get rid of the experts, the authority of the experts, and also data, because they don't want to be held accountable. They want to be able to say whatever narrative serves their purpose without any risk of being contradicted by experts or by data.

• 1:12:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the federal COVID-19 pages, the .gov American page with COVID-19 data, when Trump came into office, took that down in the second term, took down the COVID data and put up a lab-leak-exposed webpage. I mean, it's ridiculous. Abject, rank pseudoscience that the president is promoting. And now, like, people are saying, Fauci, like, my partner was saying earlier, he's like, he's cooked, he's cooked. And I'm like, oh, God, I hate that that is the sort of cynical view that we have. I know that history will not see him that way, but there is going to be a period

• 1:12:54Cara Santa Maria?

  where people don't trust him, because people just kind of believe the last thing they heard. And that just is heartbreaking to me, that somebody who dedicated an entire career to ensuring the health and public safety of the most vulnerable among us is being treated this way.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  Well, we're gonna give another light-hearted news item about someone else we all know and love. Jay, tell us about Elon Musk's plan for putting satellites in orbit. All right, let's get some numbers straight in everybody's head. So how many satellites do we have right now around the Earth? Anybody have an idea?

• 1:13:34Bob Novella?

  Functional or all?

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  Sorry? 16,000. Right, yeah.

• 1:13:39Bob Novella?

  Functional, functional.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  14,000, 16,000, in that zone. So Elon Musk has come up with a great idea, guys. He wants to deploy satellites that would serve as AI data centers that would surround the Earth. How many satellites do you think he's proposing to put in orbit? You guys clearly read.

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  This son of a bitch wants to put a million satellites in orbit around the Earth. Now, right now, we have 14,000 satellites. There's a lot of junk up there. You know, things that are very, very small, like, can do massive damage to the space station and make it hard to navigate through low Earth orbit. Actually, it's 1.7 million. Well, 1.7 is the total number of applications before the FCC or for other regulatory bodies. 1 million are Musk. There are other companies who also want to do this, totaling 1.7 million. Yeah, there's another company called Reflect Orbital that wants to put movable mirrors, 50,000 movable mirrors in orbit to put sunlight in places on Earth where they need more, whatever, you know. I don't know, I think they want to vaporize people, but...

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  There are so many things wrong with this, I don't even know where to begin. Now, first and foremost, if they did it, there would be no night sky anymore. Yeah, forget dark sky, anything, anywhere, right? It would, it would, any data that we would be trying to collect from Earth about, about, you know, the nighttime sky would be totally corrupted. There just wouldn't, the data... Ground astronomy would be cut. So if they were, if they were to do this, first of all, there's no way to really undo it, as everybody knows. Like, we can't even pull the things down that are up there now, like, you know, and I highly doubt that there's gonna be a regulation involved with them having to have these things de-orbit themselves.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  Like, all the things that should be put into satellites, I doubt that that would even be a part of the consideration here.

• 1:15:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, Jay, I mean, it's, to some extent, it's the Wild West because we don't have a global body. I mean, we have some treaties, but those are optional to take part in. Like, ultimately, how do we enforce global regulations?

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  It has to be a global effort.

• 1:15:52Speaker 02

  You can just do it, right?

• 1:15:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly, you can just do it.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  Well, no, well, no one country, like, you know, the United States has the FCC, like, it has nothing to do with this, right? And who the hell is the United States to tell the rest of the world, you know, what can and can't be put in orbit? It has to be a global effort. And, you know, you would think, like, okay, this hits the news, and other countries should be like, oh, man, we've got to, we've got to put a body together to, like, be, you know, have the majority here, to, like, say, no, you're not gonna do that. Like, you know, Elon Musk has the money, and he has the company to do it. And if he gets the okay from the US government, which again, is meaningless, like, okay, the US government says, go ahead and do it. Like, you can't tell Mexico what's gonna happen in their sky, you know, like...

• 1:16:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but we can, like, we can say, you can go ahead and use this launch pad. And I think that's ultimately the only way to regulate this out. I think about, like, the death penalty in the United States. There are states that still use lethal injection, and the pharmaceutical companies are like, good luck getting the drug, right? But there's no way to stop somebody from launching a rocket if they're in a sanctuary country where it's legal to do so.

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  That's true, but I mean, there is political pressure, which is not meaningless. I mean, maybe in the current administration it is, but this is the kind of utterly, completely half-baked ideas that can come out of one corporation that could literally change the future of human history, for the worse. Obviously, for the worse, and we don't really have an arm to stop them, which, again, what Kara was saying, like, what can we do? But Jay, even if the satellites are designed to automatically de-orbit, right, which they should be, and maybe they will be. I'm not confident they won't be.

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  Impact on the atmosphere?

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you're putting up a million satellites, they have a certain lifespan, then they de-orbit. How many satellites would be de-orbiting every year, burning up in the atmosphere, you know, spreading their... Releasing chemicals into the upper atmosphere. Releasing elements and chemicals into the upper atmosphere.

• 1:17:52Speaker 02

  We've discussed it on the show, that it was very concerning, the chemicals, the aluminum and things that were released in the atmosphere. The impact is quite bad.

• 1:17:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's just on the way down. What about on the way up?

• 1:18:00Speaker 02

  This is just on the way down.

• 1:18:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like, rocket launches are not good for the atmosphere.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  Right. Imagine the number of rocket launches that are, that would be involved with this. Also, I mean, you're probably gonna get to the whole cascade effect, the Kessler syndrome. This makes this, I don't know, almost a guarantee. I mean, it makes it so much more likely that it's going to happen. It's like, it's kind of likely that it's going to happen already, right? Like, there's already enough stuff going on in orbit where one thing hits another thing and that, you know, and that collision creates even more stuff that can hit more stuff and that that's the cascade effect. You do, they do this and you could just say, it's going to happen. It's going to probably happen in a short amount of time. And then we are completely earthbound. Like, we will not be sending spacecraft into orbit anymore.

• 1:18:45Bob Novella?

  It could take a while, though, for the full Kessler effect to happen. But, but the ultimate, the end game there is that low earth orbit's gone. You'd no weather satellites, no helpful satellites for generations because you've got all this debris flying around. You can't, people can't fly through, nothing can really fly through.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  Imagine driving without your phone telling you where to go.

• 1:19:03Cara Santa Maria?

  I know.

• 1:19:04Speaker 05

  No one could ever do that.

• 1:19:05Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but really, like-

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  I don't want to live in that world.

• 1:19:08Cara Santa Maria?

  It is, it's, it's why I'm always asking the question, why? Like, is AI slop worth losing global positioning satellites? Is AI slop worth losing these weather satellites or these monitoring, this monitoring ability of global climate change?

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  Karen, we don't even need to do it.

• 1:19:28Cara Santa Maria?

  I know.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  AI centers can function on Earth just fine. Well, the sensible reason for this is to get rid of the NIMBY problem, right? So there are local communities who are pushing back against having data centers put in their backyard because it uses up a lot of electricity, uses up a lot of local water, their prices go up, and they don't want it. And so Musk is like, well, okay, well, we'll just put it in orbit.

• 1:19:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we'll put it in everybody's backyard.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  Put it in the sky, put it in everyone's backyard. And so it sort of gets rid of the NIMBY problem. And, you know, the one technical, you know, potential advantage is that they could all be powered by solar panels, so there's no energy problem. So sure, fine, but again, it doesn't solve the problem of you're putting a million freaking satellites into orbit and it's just not sustainable. And Bob, the Kessler syndrome happens much faster the more satellites there are. So, yeah, it might take a while.

• 1:20:18Bob Novella?

  Yeah, a million satellites. Well, how long would it take to get a million satellites up there? And that's going to take quite a while as well.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  It will, but then it'll be like a steady state where you're launching thousands a year and then a thousand or thousands a year are de-orbiting and then you just have a steady set of satellites up there.

• 1:20:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Elon Musk, I think his argument, whether it was for terraforming Mars, whether it's for these, I guess, skybound data centers, or whether it was for Starlink, he's often making arguments about bettering humanity. And his track record is just not good on that, you know? And I think at this point, I don't believe him. I just don't believe him.

• 1:20:55Speaker 02

  His track record is not good on anything.

• 1:20:56Cara Santa Maria?

  On anything, exactly. Like-

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  Well, I wouldn't go that far. Honestly, I loved my Tesla. I wouldn't buy one now.

• 1:21:02Bob Novella?

  And certainly not a Cybertruck.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  Tesla, I think it is the best EV company.

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  But overwhelmingly, he says shit he can't back up.

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  Starlink works pretty well, as well.

• 1:21:11Speaker 02

  That's two examples.

• 1:21:12Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, I think this might be an opportunity, and this is like kind of the most optimistic I can muster on this, is this could be an opportunity for the rest of the world. And this isn't like, oh, I'm going to make the children fix our problems, I'm going to make the rest of the world fix our problems. But we are seeing this strange situation where you have an individual person who, particularly with a government like the one in the United States right now, has power that seems to exceed that or freedom of a nation-state. So even treaties, you know, demonstrably don't particularly constrain countries, they're certainly not going to constrain an individual. We just don't have laws in place for that. Hopefully, you know, there could be a world where maybe the EU, maybe you all, maybe some other parts of the world say, okay, we need to actually think about space as a shared resource, you know?

• 1:21:57Speaker 05

  And I, you all will know more about how Antarctica is governed than I do, but these sorts of shared, sort of shared space policies that we actually adhere to at the international level might be what we need, and maybe this is a chance to bring those forward.

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  We absolutely need it. Because again, who gets to decide? Should it be one person, one company, one nation? No. Because the sky is a shared resource.

• 1:22:20Cara Santa Maria?

  And we need that anyway.

• 1:22:21Speaker 05

  Right, exactly.

• 1:22:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it breaks my heart that we have to wait until like a mustache-twirling madman like is right on the verge of taking it from us for us to actually act.

• 1:22:29Speaker 05

  The existence of things like NATO were in response to various other famously mustached men, actually, now that I think about it. It's mustaches is the problem here.

• 1:22:39Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think Musk has a mustache.

• 1:22:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, if he does, then it's over. But, but, you know, we are kind of, we have the things that we have that maybe are protective. Our episode on alliances shows that it's quite difficult to tease that out causally as well. But, but these things do unfortunately exist in response to something horrible happening. But you're right, it could be a way to galvanize into dealing with other problems that for sure don't have borders, like climate change and population displacement and things like that. I will also say, this is a very strong argument for terraforming Mars.

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  Now, the study that prompted this was, showed that in terms of just ground-based astronomy, the limit is about 50,000 satellites. I thought it was 100,000. Or 100,000. Beyond that, it's, it gets problematic. So a million is like an order of magnitude more than that. And the, the sky, it would brighten, just the light reflected by the satellites themselves. Think about this, there's so many satellites up there, the light that they reflect would increase the brightness of the sky by a considerable amount, to the point that there would be no dark sky anywhere. Absolutely astounding.

• 1:23:49Bob Novella?

  Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about one of our sponsors this week, Quince.

• 1:23:54Speaker 01

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• 1:24:12Cara Santa Maria?

  It's so true. I just did a big order. I got a wonderful linen outfit. I got a few new cashmere sweaters, some cashmere cotton blends, getting ready for this big trip, and Quince is the place to do it. I also love that they have 365-day returns. So anything that didn't fit quite right or I wanted it in a different color, super easy to exchange it and get a new piece right away.

• 1:24:35Bob Novella?

  So make your summer wardrobe easier. Go to quince.com/sgu for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash S-G-U for free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince dot com slash S-G-U. All right, guys, let's get back to the show.

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  All right, Brian.

• 1:24:57Speaker 05

  I hope yours is the most cheerful thing I've ever heard in my entire life.

• 1:25:00Speaker 02

  It's math, baby.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  Teach us some math.

• 1:25:04Speaker 02

  Teach us some math, okay. So, I like math, a lot. And one of the most interesting things about math to me is that you can formulate simple problems that are nevertheless very, very difficult to solve. And I'll give you probably the most famous example, the Goldbach conjecture, okay? The Goldbach conjecture says that every even number greater than 2 can be written as the sum of 2 primes, at least one way, right? You think, okay, you start checking examples, you're like, 4, cool. 2 plus 2, right? 2 plus 2. And then you just go up from there.

• 1:25:46Speaker 02

  We know the Goldbach conjecture is true for, I forget the exact number, I think it's 4 times 10 to the 18. Okay, we have checked every number from 4 up to 4 times 10 to the 18, and the Goldbach conjecture holds. But there is no general proof that it has to be true. It's the easiest thing to state and apparently very, very difficult to prove, okay? So in math, occasionally you get these, these problems that are easy to state and hard to prove. At the turn of the 20th century, written 1900, the mathematician David Hilbert published a very famous list of problems, which were like what he thought of as the, I think it

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  was 23 most important math problems that people should be thinking about going into the new century. And it turns out, he was a very influential guy, he published this whole list of problems, and they include things like the Riemann hypothesis, point gray conjecture, things like this. I'm just saying words, don't worry about what those are. But it turns out that this was, it guided much of 20th century mathematics, and some of these problems were resolved. In the positive, some of them were proved, sometimes counterexamples were, were shown. And many of these problems still remain outstanding today that people, people don't know.

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  But Brian, why should we solve these problems?

• 1:27:06Speaker 02

  Well, Steve, there are various answers to that, right? Sometimes they're, they get a deep truths about the structure of things like numbers or primes or whatever, like, or something like that. Sometimes they're just technical, interesting problems. There's a variety of things. Sometimes they have applications to other, you know, to the real world. There's no general why, except it's interesting math and maybe we'll learn something by, by solving them. So anyway, cut to the end of the 20th century. People want, these Hilbert problems were so successful that people wanted to do something similar, moving into the 21st century. So they asked this guy Steve Smale to come up with a list of problems, and he came up with a list of problems for the 21st century. And it's one of these specific Smale problems I want to talk about today.

• 1:27:50Speaker 02

  It's called the Jacobian conjecture. Okay? Now, it's a bit technical, but what the Jacobian conjecture has to do with is maps, that is to say, functions between some number of variables and the same number of variables. So for example, if I take, these are all polynomial functions. So to review, a polynomial is basically the simplest kind of function. A polynomial in one variable, let's say x, is just when you get, when you take x, you raise it to different powers, different integer powers, x, x squared, x cubed, x to the fourth, et cetera, and you add or subtract those together with different coefficients in front of them. Those are polynomials, and that's a polynomial in one variable.

• 1:28:32Speaker 02

  Polynomials in two variables, or three variables, or four variables, et cetera, are exactly the same kind of thing. All you do, or you multiply the different number of variables together, you can raise them to integer powers, and you can add them all together. It's basically the simplest kind of function that you can think of, and you can write down polynomials in any number of variables you want. So the Jacobian conjecture has to do with functions from three variables to three variables, four variables to four variables, et cetera, et cetera, right? Same number of variables to itself. And if you like, it's like mapping a plane, which would be two variables, to another plane, a three-dimensional space to another three-dimensional space, and so on and so on up.

• 1:29:13Speaker 02

  So the Jacobian conjecture says that any time I can write down a polynomial function in n variables, if it satisfies a certain property, and I'm just going to say the words and then I'll talk very briefly about what they mean, which is that the Jacobian determinant is a constant, and basically this is some kind of smoothness of the, of the map, some kind of smoothness of the function, that I can take a map from these three variables, or n variables, I should say, to these n variables over here, satisfies a certain condition, that I can always find a polynomial that reverses it, that goes from where I ended up back to the original. Basically, I can invert my original thing. So if I know where I started, I know where I end up, and if I know where I ended up,

• 1:29:58Speaker 02

  I know where I started. And that's not always true. Sometimes there are reasons you can't do that, but the conjecture was that as long as this one condition is satisfied, I can always have some polynomial that maps from n variables to the same number of variables over here and reverse that. Okay? This is one of Smale's problems, and it was regarded as an interesting problem in, in math. Over the years, various people have tried to prove this. There was some disagreement in the math community, was it true, was it false? False means you found a counterexample, typically speaking. You can't actually prove that things are false, but not know a concrete example, but the easiest way to prove something false is to find a specific example where it doesn't work.

• 1:30:40Speaker 02

  And over the years, there was various debate and some attempted proofs that were then shown to be wrong, you know, stuff like this happened over the years. The mathematician Stuart Wang showed that it is, the Jacobian conjecture, in order for it to be true, the, the degree of the polynomials, that is, the powers you raise them to, has to be greater than two. So you can't do it just with squares, for example. Okay? So if we're looking for a counterexample, it's got to be cubes or higher. And a cube, by the way, here, if I have three variables like x, y, z, x times y times z is considered cubic in this regard, because it's a product of three variables. So this was an open question, math, for a while, and it just happened, a few weeks

• 1:31:22Speaker 02

  ago, during the World Cup final. The Anthropic employee, Levend Elpogi, and I sure hope I'm pronouncing his name right, which I guarantee you I'm not, decided to use one of the Anthropic LLMs, Claude Fable 5, to check the Jacobian conjecture. And on July 19th, he tweeted the following. I'm just going to read this to you. Hello there. This is all lowercase, by the way. Hello there, the Jacobian conjecture is false. Thanks to my close friend Akil for asking about it, and my other close friend Fable for working during the World Cup final.

• 1:32:02Speaker 02

  And then in the rest of this tweet, he wrote down a function in only three variables, which had a constant Jacobian determinant, but was not invertible. And that's what this picture you guys in the room can see. If you're not in the room, if you're just listening to this on the podcast, look up Wolf from Math World, Jacobian conjecture. You can see we have three points on the left that, under this function, all map to the same point on the right. And that is not invertible, because they all end up at the same place. You couldn't start at the point on the right and go back uniquely to a point on the left. So he found a function, or I should say Claude found a function, that satisfies the conditions of the theorem, or the conjecture, I should say, but doesn't work, but is not

• 1:32:47Speaker 02

  invertible. And he did it all by putting a few prompts into Claude in a few hours, I forget exactly how many, let's say, I don't know, a couple of hours. Claude Fable 5 found a simple, and you can look at it, it's three lines, they're just simple polynomials, they're not that high degree, very, very simple, in three variables, disproving this conjecture that had been open for over 90 years.

• 1:33:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Do you think that's good or bad?

• 1:33:13Speaker 02

  I think it's kind of awesome. Unfortunately. Now, look, I, I have very strong ethical objections to AI and, and things like that, but it's amazing. This is the kind of thing that computers are good at, which are grinding through, and if you look at this example, there's nothing really that notable about it. It's not like it was some simple thing. If it was a very, very simple thing right in front of your face, people would have found it already. It's complicated enough that you wouldn't just happen upon it, but if you were doing some kind of scan of possible functions, which is what presumably Claude Fable was doing, you would find it. And so it's exactly the kind of thing that, that AI is potentially good for, because

• 1:33:54Speaker 02

  it can go through, do a lot of examples, and say, oh, by the way, I found, I found this. And so this is also coming on the heels of, a few months or a month before that, there was another conjecture, called the Erdem Unit Distance conjecture, that OpenAI showed was false, found a counterexample for that as well. I'm not going to get into the details of that, but it's amazing that mathematicians are now working with AI to find pretty, you know, examples that are right there, you can write down, you can write them down, you can just check them, and these huge problems, open problems in math are just falling to, to artificial intelligence.

• 1:34:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, I feel like we, we talk about this a lot on the show, when, when researchers use AI to do, for example, computational chemistry, or protein folding, or, you know, scan through a bunch of different receptor types to find whatever, drugs or molecules with higher efficacy. How do we make it so that AI can only just do that?

• 1:34:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, that would be amazing.

• 1:34:56Cara Santa Maria?

  And not like write songs and poetry and make art?

• 1:34:59Speaker 02

  Because the other thing people are now using some of these LLMs for is, so these are counterexamples, right? And you might say, okay, well, AI can just do counterexamples. It scanned a thing, it wrote down a function, we checked it. And by the way, I should say, you should look, look up this counterexample, it's on the Wiki for Jacobian conjecture. All you, you literally just need high school calculus to check that this is right. It is so easy, you could check that it's right in like, no time at all, maybe five minutes. Very, very easy to check that this is an actual counterexample. But what people are starting to use AI for is to actually write out proofs. So now these models, what you can, what you can do is you can say, show me, you know,

• 1:35:40Speaker 02

  a mild example of this would be, teach me about, I don't know, conformal field theory or something, which I mentioned, I mentioned before. And they can produce something that looks like a scientific paper with equations and all the stuff, and write it out as if it's a real, real research thing, and then people can check it. Now, for more advanced math problems, where they're actually trying to prove it and not just find a counterexample, I think we are getting close to something, and this is in fact already happening, where AI cannot just find counterexamples, but can actually come through and do more complicated, interesting proofs.

• 1:36:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow. Yeah, but I mean, right, that's, that's the point. Like, it, it can be used for good, and yet, most of its applications are just pure crap. And I think that's like, a big problem. And I don't know what we do about that.

• 1:36:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:28Speaker 05

  Is there a concern? So when I think about AI, and yes, we can use it for, for useless, pointless things, you know, Keanu Reeves eating spaghetti and, and all that stuff, but we also, if this is a genuine use of that tool, right, then, then the analogy of like, okay, we were walking before and now we're on a bicycle, all the mathematicians are that much more powerful, they can scan through way more functions and go through way more things, is, does that mean that eventually the human is not needed? Or do we need the human for the metacognition to say, look for this, prove this? Are we making ourselves irrelevant, or do you not see that being?

• 1:36:59Speaker 02

  I think a lot of mathematicians and physicists have that exact fear. And it is extremely, I think, unclear at present, what the future, you know, flash forward 10 years, maybe five years, I don't know, what the role of humans in math and physics, theoretical physics, things like that, are. I, I You know, from talking to colleagues in this, people are concerned that their jobs are basically going to be irrelevant because in AI, which is kind of, you know, if you ask, there's an interesting paper by Matt Schwartz, who's a physicist at Harvard, asked, I forget which model, to, you know, help him write a paper in quantum field theory.

• 1:37:43Speaker 02

  And he wrote this whole thing, you can read it, I think it's on Anthropic, but I can't quite remember. He asked it to show a certain result, and he kind of walks through, and there were a lot of hallucinations, and the model messed up a lot of things, had to be carefully, carefully regulated, just like a first-year graduate student would, according to him. So, his assessment is that these LLMs are at present functioning like a first-year graduate student. Oh, boy. And that's clearly just the beginning. So I think if you're not, if you're a mathematician or a physicist, many other types of scientists as well, but math and theoretical physics are particularly susceptible to this because of the, you know, math, you state a thing,

• 1:38:25Speaker 02

  you walk step, step, step, step, step, there's the answer. I think you are wise to be concerned about your job security at this point.

• 1:38:33Cara Santa Maria?

  I just, I don't know, I just, I have to disagree. I think the job might change.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:37Cara Santa Maria?

  But I don't think that that means that the job, like, if most of what you are doing as a mathematician is, I don't know, like, I make a distinction sometimes, you look at NASA, for example, and NASA is mostly made up of engineers, and then there are also some scientists. And there are probably, there is probably some insecurity in basic engineering there, but I don't think that the science, for example, would be threatened. Like, if you are a mathematician who is mostly running through these different proofs all the time, yes, maybe that, like, but it'll, it'll offload that cognitive labor.

• 1:39:10Speaker 02

  Well, but, yes, however, the thing that I'm really saying here is that if someone can do it cheaper with just a computer by themselves, I think those jobs, yes, I think the job will change.

• 1:39:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:20Speaker 02

  But the number of jobs may be threatened as well.

• 1:39:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Completely.

• 1:39:24Speaker 02

  When people find someone that can, or something that can do it better, right?

• 1:39:28Cara Santa Maria?

  We shouldn't ensure that the coal jobs are still there just because we need the people to have the job.

• 1:39:33Speaker 02

  No, no, no, and I'm certainly not arguing that.

• 1:39:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, like, it will change, but just like in biology, when PCR was developed and people no longer had to, like, do it by hand, it just freed us up to do, like, more complex things.

• 1:39:45Speaker 05

  There will still be likely, I would imagine, at least a gap while we figure this out, where, where, you know, you think about industries where they're basically outsourcing the entry-level jobs to AI. So you're not hiring the first, second-year folks because a college student is comparable to an AI. But then the problem is, is in five, 10 years, you don't have anyone at the middle level who, who has any basic, so if you're not hiring the first-year grad students, the lab techs, in my graduate program, the reason we were able to go to school was because we did the grading for students, and if you don't need that, then we have this massive gap of, like, entry-level apprentice-type learning that you lose, that I don't know how we solve for.

• 1:40:21Speaker 01

  Brian, excuse me, I've been recording this conversation with ChatGPT, and it just told me that you three have to stop talking.

• 1:40:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. There is also an interesting, in math specifically, divide here between asking an LLM to do something and using something like Lean, which is an automated proof kind of system. And the whole idea behind Lean, which, would you know about Lean, is that it's ironclad, like, you put it in, it does the proof, it gets, you know, it's very hard to put stuff into Lean, like, you have to really learn how to do it. But the idea is that it follows specific ironclad steps, and the thing at the end is a proof. That is certainly not true at present for these LLMs, where they do have to be carefully checked by human mathematicians, especially in math, where the standard of rigor, rigor is so

• 1:41:12Speaker 02

  high that nobody's going to accept it just because it looks like math. It's like, whenever you're writing a paper, sometimes you put all the equations in, and then you write it out, and you're like, oh my god, I did science. And then someone comes along, it's like, no, it's wrong. So, just because it looks nice doesn't mean it's right, right? So you still need humans to go in and check carefully that it really meets the standards of rigor, which are appropriate for mathematics.

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  All right, a couple of things, I think we need to move on. So first, I want to see, can I reuse eating spaghetti?

• 1:41:38Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  Can you make that happen?

• 1:41:40Speaker 05

  Is that, who's the eating spaghetti?

• 1:41:41Bob Novella?

  Will Smith.

• 1:41:42Speaker 05

  Will Smith.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  Will Smith. All right, no, no, never mind that. All right. And, but yeah, the serious thing, though, is that, yes, in an optimistic world, this will free up physicists to, or mathematicians, so the grunt work, the brute force, we're going to, you know, look at this huge space and pick out the one counter example that, you know, informs us on this. It will be done by AI, it'll make, it'll make progress go faster, and mathematicians, physicists will be doing more interesting stuff and accomplishing more. That's, I think, the optimistic vision. And I hope that that is what will happen. I think that will happen to some extent. But there is that worry that, you know, in a line of what you guys are

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  saying, that, you know, it is, is this different than every other disruptive technology advance in that it's actually thinking for us, and it's thinking better than us? And what happens when that first-year graduate level is smarter than any living human physicist, mathematician?

• 1:42:43Bob Novella?

  Then that's wonderful. That's, that's kind of wonderful from my, in my point of view, because then, then humanity will be able to appreciate, at some level, this math that we are just incapable of producing on our own. Absolutely. I mean, I'm really extrapolating here, but at some point, it will reach that where, like, no human could touch it, no human could derive it, no hu, and we have to, we're going to have to learn how to be happy with that, because that's the way, that's where it's going.

• 1:43:06Speaker 02

  I think that, that's maybe giving in.

• 1:43:08Cara Santa Maria?

  It's also going to require a certain level of trust. At this point, we can still check.

• 1:43:13Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:43:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Once we are no longer capable of checking because it's beyond us, we just have to trust.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  That's right. I think everybody in the world needs to re-watch the movie Wally, like, every year.

• 1:43:24Bob Novella?

  Wally.

• 1:43:25Cara Santa Maria?

  I agree. I've never seen it.

• 1:43:26Bob Novella?

  Ah, yet another, not surprised.

• 1:43:29Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, I haven't seen it either.

• 1:43:30Bob Novella?

  We're going to fix that, we're going to fix that.

• 1:43:31Speaker 01

  All right, it is time to move on to science or fiction.

• 1:43:38Speaker 00

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  And for the first time ever, this science or fiction will be conducted by George Trump.

• 1:43:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, Stuart's woo. Uh, yes, a little bit of a theme. Surprise, surprise, music and science together. So, every week, Steve makes up three items, I made up three items, two of them are true, one of them is false, so we're going to try to find out which one is the fiction, which two are the science. Here we go. Number one. Brian May, the guitarist of the rock band Queen, holds a Bachelor of Science in Physics and a PhD in Astrophysics, both from Imperial College London. His doctoral thesis was titled, quote, "A Survey of Radical Velocities in the Zodiacal Dusk Cloud." Since earning his doctorate, he has remained highly active

• 1:44:39Speaker 04

  in the scientific community, working with NASA on missions like New Horizons and Osiris Rex. Item number two. Jerry Spizer, original drummer from the band Men at Work, was a physics major from La Trobe University. He is currently the foremost Australian scholar on the works of American architect and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller, whose generalized principles Spizer has used to coach the likes of pharma giant Bristol Myers Squibb and Melbourne Software Group Zero Corporation. And number three. Tom Schultz, the founder of the band Boston, is an MIT-trained engineer who designed and built his own recording

• 1:45:22Speaker 04

  studio in an apartment basement in the early 1970s. Among his many, many studio inventions was an unreleased proprietary headphone design that he eventually sold to Noel Lee from the company Monster Cable. Monster Cable then partnered with Dr. Dre's company Beats Electronics, which eventually went on to become the multi-billion-dollar brand Beats by Dre. We're going to start right next to me here with Bob. Oh, damn. We're going to go straight down the line. Robert, what is the fiction?

• 1:45:56Bob Novella?

  Um, I love the idea of these musicians being such geeks in a field outside, outside of music. I love it. All I could really say is, the one that stood out to me was Brian May. I mean, the accolades here are just seem, just so much more extraordinary than the other two. Physics, PhD in Astrophysics in Imperial College London, working with NASA on missions like New Horizons. To me, that just seemed like, he stood out from the other two, and it made me think that perhaps in this would be the fiction. If, I kind of hope it's not, because that would be wow, quite a wow, more so, I think, than even the other two. So I'll just say the Brian May is fiction.

• 1:46:40Speaker 04

  Okay, you say one. Jay, what do you have?

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, Brian May absolutely has those degrees. The guy is, don't laugh at me, I'm talking over here.

• 1:46:50Bob Novella?

  He's laughing at me because I'm saying crap, because I'm apparently wrong.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  Um, I also do believe that Brian May worked with NASA on those missions. I think that's science. I'll go down to Tom Schultz. Tom Schultz, absolutely trained at MIT, he's an MIT engineer, lots of, lots of information there, very interesting dude. So, yeah, I think that one is also science. I mean, I don't know exactly the whole pathway to the, to something that he created, getting to Beats, but, I mean, he created his own studio, and he created a ton of, of audio-based electronics and everything. The guy was, was not only, you know, an incredible musician, but he was a very, very good engineer. Yeah, and the guy, Jerry Spizer, from the drummer from Men at Work, I do not think that that guy did any of the things that are listed here, George. I think he played the drums very

• 1:47:38Speaker 01

  well, and I did like him with his, you know, his overalls, you know, that look was nice, you know?

• 1:47:44Speaker 04

  It worked.

• 1:47:44Speaker 01

  But that did not lead to him doing anything spectacular in the field of science.

• 1:47:48Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:47:49Speaker 01

  Fiction.

• 1:47:50Speaker 04

  Jay says two. All right.

• 1:47:51Speaker 01

  So, I mean, I've heard, you know, I knew Brian May was a physicist, so that all sounds perfectly crumulent to me. And I did hear, yeah, the stuff about Tom Schultz, I didn't know the details, but I, but I knew that he was an engineer, you know, that's probably the extent of it. Never heard about the drummer at Men at Work, I was a big fan of that group in, in my college years. That information never came across. I just don't, the whole Buckminster Fuller thing just seemed a little sus to me, so I'm going to say that that one is the fiction.

• 1:48:23Speaker 04

  Okay, Steve says two as well. Kara?

• 1:48:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, yeah, I have no idea. Why would I know this? I don't...

• 1:48:31Speaker 01

  Because of the internet.

• 1:48:33Cara Santa Maria?

  I think the one thing that stood out to me is like that all the Buckminster Fuller stuff is like very culty. Like, there's like a lot of weirdness around Buckminster Fuller and like people who kind of like evangelized him and turned him into a religion. So I was like, oh, maybe that's true, that somebody would be like obsessive with. But then there's like kind of a disconnect between being a scientist there. I don't know. But, okay, he was a physics major. That doesn't even necessarily mean that he graduated. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. So, an MIT-trained engineer in Boston, a physics major in Men at Work, and a, you know, a PhD in astrophysics in Queen. I feel like

• 1:49:17Cara Santa Maria?

  I would have heard, no, I wouldn't have. I don't care. I'm gonna go with the guys, and I'll say that. Jerry, is it Spicer or Spicer?

• 1:49:26Speaker 04

  Spicer.

• 1:49:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Spicer is the fiction.

• 1:49:28Speaker 04

  Okay, Kara says two. Andrea?

• 1:49:31Speaker 05

  All right. So, I also had known about Brian May. I share Bob's skepticism that that is some really high-level stuff that he's gone on to do. And I wasn't aware of that. I knew that he had a strong technical background. The, my main issue, George, with the Jerry Spicer Men at Work example is, you've chosen something from Australia, but surely there's a great example from New Zealand that you could have chosen instead.

• 1:49:57Speaker 04

  Or I wasn't sure which show this was for. I mean, it's like, brrr, huh, brrr.

• 1:50:02Speaker 05

  And you just defaulted to Australia? How, very, okay.

• 1:50:05Speaker 04

  Well, I guess.

• 1:50:06Speaker 05

  All right. All right. So, that one, the Buckminster Fuller, he's coaching a farmer child. What does it mean to coach a farmer child? There's a lot of question marks I have for the Men at Work one. So, I'm very tempted to say number two is the fiction, but I'm also like, I'm trying to not go with the crowd and see if there's some other thing that I'm not seeing. So, the Tom Schultz one, founder of the band Boston, I spent a little bit of time thinking, maybe he did invent a lot of things, but it wasn't a headphone design. And I was trying to talk myself into that one being the fiction, just to not follow the crowd. But I'm gonna follow the crowd and say number two is the fiction.

• 1:50:42Speaker 04

  Okay. Andrea says two as well. And finally, Brian.

• 1:50:45Speaker 02

  Well, look. There are three rock physics Bryans.

• 1:50:52Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:50:54Speaker 02

  Brian May.

• 1:50:56Speaker 04

  Brian May.

• 1:50:57Speaker 02

  Brian Cox. And Brian Weck.

• 1:50:59Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:51:02Speaker 02

  We all hang out.

• 1:51:05Speaker 04

  At the Brian Club.

• 1:51:07Speaker 02

  We're all best friends. Number one is science. Moving on to number three, the, you know, the story of Tom Schultz in the basement, you know, meticulously assembling Boston's first album is legendary. Approached that album with like this laser precision. That's why those songs are so well-crafted in part. I didn't know the rest of this, but the first part at least is true. So, I think I have to go with everybody else here, except Bob.

• 1:51:40Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:51:41Speaker 02

  I just don't know anything about the Men at Work guy. And that one is tweaking me whether the others, so I'm gonna say number two.

• 1:51:53Speaker 04

  Number two. Okay. I need my phone back, if you don't mind, please.

• 1:51:56Bob Novella?

  Imagine, just imagine, if I win. It'll be the best day of my life. It's almost certainly not gonna happen, but just imagine for a moment.

• 1:52:07Speaker 04

  Okay. So, yeah, everyone has said that two is the fiction, the Men at Work drummer, except for Bob, who has said that Brian May is the fiction. So, let's...

• 1:52:16Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, the audience.

• 1:52:17Speaker 04

  Oh, let's pull the audience. Yeah, great idea. So, yeah, we should have done that before, but that's okay. That's my failing as a first-time SNF. Okay, so if you think Brian, we're gonna clap together, okay, so we can hear this on the recording. If you think Brian May is the fiction, clap once. Okay? If you think Jerry Spicer is the fiction, clap once. If you think Tom Schultz is the fiction, clap once. Okay. Seems like they're agreeing with you guys. Tell you what, let's start at number three. Tom Schultz. Tom Schultz, founder of the band Boston, is an MIT-trained engineer who designed and built his own recording studio in an apartment basement in the early 70s. Among his many, many studio inventions

• 1:52:59Speaker 04

  was an unreleased proprietary headphone design that he eventually sold to Nolte from the company Monster Cable. Monster Cable then partnered with Dr. Dre to make Beats by Dre. This one is the fiction.

• 1:53:11Speaker 02

  Oh, you bastard.

• 1:53:12Speaker 05

  Sweep. Good job.

• 1:53:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it the headphone part?

• 1:53:15Speaker 05

  Good job.

• 1:53:16Speaker 04

  It is the headphone part.

• 1:53:17Speaker 05

  I was right, and then I followed the group. What a bad skeptic I am, oh my god.

• 1:53:20Speaker 04

  Andrea, you were right.

• 1:53:21Bob Novella?

  Yay.

• 1:53:22Speaker 04

  Tom Schultz did...

• 1:53:23Bob Novella?

  I'm so happy right now.

• 1:53:24Speaker 04

  He did invent a bunch of stuff, but he did not invent headphones by Dr. Dre. No, he did not do that. So, number two, Jerry Spicer. He is the original drummer for Men at Work, and he was a physics major before he joined the band. He's currently an Australian scholar, and he works and talks about Buckminster Fuller. And he goes to these companies and does these things, but it's very culty. Yes, it is very culty. So, that is science. And also, number one, Brian May. Indeed, he has all those degrees. He is a mofo of a scientist.

• 1:53:57Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:58Speaker 04

  And he, before he joined Queen, he studied that, joined Queen, finished his doctoral degree after sort of Freddie Mercury died, and has worked with NASA and all that. So, yes, so...

• 1:54:10Bob Novella?

  A sweep. Is this a sweep?

• 1:54:11Speaker 04

  A sweep for my first time.

• 1:54:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 1:54:13Bob Novella?

  This was the second-best outcome I could imagine, yes.

• 1:54:21Speaker 01

  George, you totally got me and Brian on that. Because, Brian, I had the same exact reaction you did, like that, right down to it. Like, the last part, oh, I don't know much about that, but everything else is true. It just seemed like the whole thing was true.

• 1:54:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was kind of a coin flip.

• 1:54:35Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:54:36Bob Novella?

  He's cocky experts, you know? What are you gonna do?

• 1:54:38Speaker 04

  Hell, yeah. Yay. Thanks for letting me do that, Steve. That was fun.

• 1:54:42Speaker 01

  Good job, George.

• 1:54:43Speaker 02

  That was great.

• 1:54:44Speaker 04

  Yay. Thank you.

• 1:54:45Speaker 01

  All right, Bob, give us a quote.

• 1:54:47Bob Novella?

  All right. "It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper, and it came back and hit you." New Zealand native Ernest Rutherford. The context of this...

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  Hey, I wanna know if Andrea has any idea what this is referring to.

• 1:55:06Speaker 05

  Me. All right. Well, I'm mostly just excited that you've chosen a New Zealand person as opposed to an Australian person. And no, I don't know.

• 1:55:13Speaker 02

  Well, what about, hold on. I wanna know if Jane and Kara also know what this is referring to.

• 1:55:18Bob Novella?

  I don't think a lot of people, I mean, this is kind of subtle. It's kind of nuanced.

• 1:55:20Speaker 02

  Is it? Wait, George?

• 1:55:21Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:55:22Speaker 04

  Is this like, is this like some atomic model or something?

• 1:55:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:28Speaker 04

  Wasn't it, wasn't it the thing?

• 1:55:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Why did I think it was Ernst? It's Ernest?

• 1:55:34Bob Novella?

  No.

• 1:55:35Speaker 01

  It's Ernest.

• 1:55:36Bob Novella?

  Ernest, yeah.

• 1:55:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay. Sorry.

• 1:55:38Bob Novella?

  So, back in the day, 1911, the modern, you know, the popular theory was the plum pudding model.

• 1:55:44Speaker 01

  Oh, he's saying plum pudding. That's right, plum pudding.

• 1:55:45Bob Novella?

  Plum pudding model of atoms. They thought that, they knew that electrons, these electrical charges were in the atom, but they, it needed to be balanced by the positive, because it was, atoms are neutral. So, they figured, J.J. Thompson, I think, figured that it's basically enmeshed in this, the electric charge is enmeshed in like a sphere of a diffuse positive charge, where it balanced out. So, that's why the electrons were the raisins, and the rest of it was the plum pudding. So, Ernest tested this by firing alpha particles, positive alpha particles, at a very, very thin gold sheet. And most of the time, you know, not much happened, but every once in a while, one would bounce right back. And that's what he's referring to. So, what it meant was that instead of

• 1:56:30Bob Novella?

  a diffuse positive charge, the atom had a nugget of positive charge in the middle. So, this was basically the birth of nuclear physics, which is why he's called the father of nuclear physics. Soon after that, they discovered the proton and the neutron. So, this was a huge deal, a huge deal. And I think it's interesting, well, for many reasons, but one is that every once in a while, the universe was just gonna slap you in the face and say, "Your model is wrong. It's way wrong." And this is what reality is closer to. This is a better model. The nuclear model was far better, and it led to so many amazing things. So, that's why Ernest Rutherford is an amazing guy. Read about him. Fascinating.

• 1:57:07Speaker 01

  But those are the best days in science, when you get slapped in the face and you're told that your model is wrong, because that's where the new discoveries are.

• 1:57:14Bob Novella?

  Right. That was a, yeah, that was like, well, not, what's a quote? Not eureka, but hmm, that's weird. And then what does that lead to? All of that stuff followed.

• 1:57:22Speaker 01

  That's what we need in particle physics, right? That we did not get out of the hey drunk, right?

• 1:57:27Bob Novella?

  Something not in the standard model, please.

• 1:57:28Speaker 01

  Something shocking. Nothing shocking, nothing hitting you in the face like this. All right. Well, this has been a wonderful show. Thank you all up here for joining me for this week's episode.

• 1:57:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:57:37Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:57:38Speaker 01

  Thank you, Steve. And thank all of you out there for joining us.

• 1:57:40Speaker 05

  Thank you for joining us.

• 1:57:42Speaker 01

  And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. 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 [email protected]. And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/skepticsguide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.