ASM183 Time, Plastics, and Universal Basic Income

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time plastics and universal basic income all that and more on this week's episode of ask sciencemike welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer questions about science faith and life i'm your host mike mcharg and this week i'm really excited 100 of this week's show questions are about science so kind of going back to the old school origins of the program i think it's gonna be a ton of fun so if you've got nothing else going on what do you say let's get it started well some really big news to start off the program this week uh my friend michael gunger and i who co-founded something called the liturgists if you haven't heard of it the liturgist podcast is a much more popular podcast than the one you're listening to now and michael and i went on a very small tour two city tour of boulder colorado and portland oregon for something called tabs and wafers which was us kind of celebrating the search for spirituality and community and advocacy and change through all the different ways that people do that both inside and outside the church it was really really funny i don't think i've laughed that hard in a long time i don't think i've cried that hard in a long time it was a wonderful event and so we are going to do more of them so june 28th will be in kansas city june 29th will be in atlanta july 26 minneapolis july 27 chicago august 2nd la with a show right here where i live in los angeles california august 16th will be in tempe september 21st san francisco september 27th dallas september 28th houston and september 29th austin so that's a good number of shows for this second wave of tabs and wafers we'll probably do even more of them but we'll see how these go and and then announce plans after that but you can get tickets to all those shows right now just by going to ask sciencemike.com and clicking on the button that says events that will let you see all the tabs and wafers events plus i'll also be at the wild goose festival this year along with michael gunger and hillary mcbride and william matthews we're going to be there as the liturgists so that'll be july 11th through july 14th in hot springs north carolina so pretty extensive touring plans this year and if i'm coming anywhere near you you know i'd love to see you ask sciencemike.com and then click on events hello science mike i have a question for you about time does time exist thank you well this is a great question and one i have spent an absurd amount of time thinking about and researching and it might sound strange to ask a question like does time exist after all we are experiencing time right now i'm experiencing it as i record this episode and you're experiencing time as you listen to it we know we're experiencing time because you don't know what i'm going to say next but you do know what i've already said right we have this vantage point where there's some information that comes to us later there's information that has already occurred in this information that we experience right now right that's time so we certainly experience time so how on earth could anyone ask if time exists well believe it or not in physics time is much more mysterious than it is in our everyday lives but i want to start by saying that yes time does exist and even in physics time exists you know i often hear people saying that time doesn't exist heck i've said it myself but when people say that time doesn't exist they mean time doesn't exist as humans intuitively experience it and it's true that the time we experience every day at most is something that happens on a local scale or within a single reference frame let's unpack that first of all to say that time exists in physics is definitive let's talk about some some ideas in physics like speed or velocity or acceleration all of those concepts require a unit of measurement along a temporal axis if we're talking about your speed we might talk about how many kilometers you're moving in an hour or a minute or a second right to get speed if we're talking about velocity we're going to add some kind of a heading to that speed measurement if we're talking about acceleration we're gonna have to double up like if we talk about the acceleration of earth's gravity well we're gonna talk about meters of second meters per second per second of acceleration right uh doubling up to show that that rate is changing at some predictable rate the rate of acceleration so or the excuse me the acceleration rate is constant in earth's gravity well but it means every second in earth's gravity well you will accelerate 9.8 meters per second okay so if you start at zero a second later you're at 9.8 a second later you're at 9.8 times 2. basically is how those kind of measurements work a little off the central point though so that makes no sense let it go the important thing is simply that we use time in physics all the time uh when we say that time doesn't exist in physics we're talking about the fact that there is no universal clock a second where i am uh sitting in my house in la crescenta california is going to be different than a second on the international space station or different for a second on the curiosity rover on mars we are experiencing subtly different seconds in all of those reference frames all those places all of those perspectives right so there is no universal clock a second it's not a second everywhere and there's no universally simultaneous now because the passage of time varies there's no such thing as you know something that happens at the same time everywhere that doesn't exist we learned that from albert einstein einstein showed us that time and space are part of a single fabric of the cosmos space and time together form space time and space time is a warpable fabric oh boy this is going to be a tough question to do without visuals but you can imagine that we can measure space time with different rulers and when we imagine the space part of space time we can use three different rulers and those rulers are let's label them height width and depth right so if we take something in space and we label those rulers and centimeters we can tell you how many centimeters centimeters tall wide and deep a given object is we have another ruler that's a temporal ruler and we mark it with seconds and that's another way of measuring space time through a temporal measurement so you might not think we can measure an object with seconds but we can measure its position over time using not three but four coordinates its height its width its depth and time uh so if we took the center of an object and and measured it against some fixed point in space um we could say how many inches it was higher uh deeper to the right or left of that object and then we could add seconds and we could plot the movement of something through space over time we would be measuring space time that way and what we know about space-time is it's really funky when you get into deep gravity wells so let's see a deep gravity well like a black hole black hole says something called an event horizon that's the point when even light can't escape a black hole because gravity's pull is too intense and if you get in a gravity well that deep it is going to muck with the flow of time very significantly space-time also gets warped by speed more specifically the fraction of light speed a given reference frame is traveling so the reason nothing can go faster than light speed in our universe is because from your own perspective if you moved faster than the speed of light you would arrive at your destination before you left from your own perspective and we know that is not possible uh so no time travel no moving faster than the speed of light in our universe but if you're moving very close to the speed of light time for you will progress much more slowly than someone who's not moving very close to the speed of light we know that we have experiments to back it up so time moves slower when you're in deep gravity like at the event horizon of a black hole or whenever you're moving faster believe it or not when you're on an airplane time moves just a little bit slower than it does on the ground and that means when you combine distance and speed and gravitation you can do really strange things you can take objects that are or excuse me reference frames or points of observation that are you know thousands or millions of light years apart you can get them going at a good velocity and do the math to figure out you know what uh the point of observation would be between those two points and then you can change the speed and the direction of one of those objects and you can do that math again and you'll sweep the intersection of their object of their observation points by more than human history right so you can imagine if you had a little spaceship far enough away and you pointed it towards the earth and you could somehow resolve the earth at that distance you might see 2020 and then if you change the direction of your spacecraft move at the same speed in the opposite direction and look at the earth again you might see earth before civilization isn't that wild that's completely possible plausible inside of our physical understanding of the cosmos that does funny things to our conception of time very very funny things of course things can only propagate in our universe at light speed gravity everything is limited by light speed so when people say time doesn't exist what they often mean is that the arrow of time isn't known to physics today we know that in physics equations work the same way no matter which direction the arrow of time is flowing in theory if you hold an egg up and you let it go and it falls the ground it shatters and you were able to immediately reverse all the energy of every piece of that egg in exactly the opposite way that it came to rest at that point they would all converge together and jump back up in the air and land in your hand right that doesn't happen though does it we don't we don't actually experiencing physics as being reversible but on paper the math works so the only thing we've seen to support an arrow of time at all is that entropy must increase in any closed system right that's that's what leads us despite the mysteries around the mathematics of time and the reversibility of most ideas in physics the reason we believe that there is an arrow of time is entropy one of the reasons my the way i sign letters is peace love entropy is to denote the inevitability of the passage of time and its capacity to claim all things our observable universe began in some highly ordered state and then becomes less so over time that's really all we know about the arrow of time today and the strangeness of space-time in relativity and the reversibility of all the equations we see in physics are what lead people to say that time does not exist but clearly as a fabric of the cosmos time does exist it's just nothing like we imagine it each day if you're really curious about this i'm going to post links to a couple of great books that cover time in depth on the show notes this week on asksciencemike.com just look for episode 183 this episode of ask science mike was sponsored by kiwico and i'm so thrilled that it was because i love kiwiko it is a service that allows children to have fun and i mean have fun learning about concepts in science technology engineering arts and mathematics the way it works is you go to kiwico.com science and you sign up for a free kiwi crate i'm going to send you an age-appropriate crate with projects every month for your child to explore the disciplines of science technology engineering art and math they are super fun in my house we have hydraulic powered cranes and walking robots and felt gardens and um customized lights and all kinds of exciting things my children have built and enjoyed now i i really have to give a shout out to kiwiko here because my daughters are 11 and 13. they are not at an age where you would imagine they would necessarily like to be engaged in steam projects or really anything other than instagram and hanging out with their friends but my kids look forward to the arrival of kiwi crates and they set the devices down and start building and making as soon as they arrive i've gotten tons of feedback from listeners who've given kiwiko a try and had a great experience even my close friends kids have signed up for kiwico it's amazing and because you listen to ask science mike kiwiko is going to do something really cool they're going to send you a crate for free so if you'd like your child to learn more about science engineering art math and technology in a way that's fun just go to kiwico.com science to get a hold of your free crate today our next question came in via email and it reads hi science mike can you do a show on plastic i'm totally overwhelmed with trying to reduce the amount of food packaging that i choose to bring home from the grocery store thanks maggie gosh maggie that's a great and very timely question and there is no easy answer um you know i'll talk a little bit about the major types of plastic pollution and where they come from and you can make differences in like how you buy and shop but part of what's going to be required is also contacting companies and telling them you're concerned with plastic pollution as a consumer that's probably one of the most powerful things that you can do if enough people complain about plastic containers then companies will respond if you're a an industrial scale producer then using plastics makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons they're easy and cheap and easy to keep sanitary and they increase shelf life and do all these things that industry values so we as consumers will probably have to make it clear that we're going to change our purchasing habits based on the amount of plastic that goes into packaging and speaking of that let's kind of go over where plastic is used in food supply and by far by far the biggest contributor of plastic waste in the food system is food wrappers and containers candy bar wrappers potato chip bags uh plastic single use bins for donuts and and croissants in the bakery section the bags around loaves of bread right there's plastic everywhere wrapping and containing the food that we eat some 31 percent of plastic pollution in the environment uh that comes from food comes from food wrappers and containers this is a big cultural thing we like being able to tear open a plastic wrapper and an eat a candy bar energy bar but that's a huge source of plastic pollution the next one would be bottle and container caps at 15.5 percent but caps just kind of float on water and take a long time to break down so and some environmentalists believe that plastic ingestion is a major factor in of population declines for birds that live around water so bottle and container caps are a big source of course number three plastic bags at 11.18 percent we know they're terrible um only three percent of plastic bags are recycled despite the wide public knowledge around their dangers and a lot of people don't use reusable bags so they are they're a real problem straws and stirrers make up 8.13 percent of food-based plastic pollution that's a lot i don't know that i support straw bands because of how it impacts disabled people but i do think straws should move to a by request only item that would allow us to ensure that people who can't drink without the use of a plastic straw are able to but the rest of us uh don't drown the earth in a really hard to recycle hard to manage form of pollution beverage bottles uh make up 7.27 percent now you might wonder well gosh why do bottle caps make up more pollution than beverage bottles beverage bottles get recycled more often relatively high some like 74 percent get recycled so that's great that's good news for recycling good news for the planet but beverage bottles make a big difference and so you can lower the amount of beverages you buy that come in a bottle that will help a lot we're a sodastream family at my house so we like our fizzy water but we make it at home so there's no bottles and then takeout containers made six point two seven percent of food paste food based plastic pollution right um so we get to go food and we then have these takeout containers that find their way into landfills and into the ocean so what can you do like easy things is definitely you know take reusable um bags to the grocery store unless you have medical needs go ahead and skip the straws uh use a refillable water bottle if you like sugary or or sparkly drinks get the equipment that's not expensive to make your own sodas at home you can avoid plastic packaging anything you see that's in a plastic package see if there's an alternative think about hand soap people love to squirt liquid hand soap but those those plastic bottles last forever and if you refill them you can actually put bacteria in your hand soap so good old bar soap is a great alternative and buy in bulk anytime there's more stuff in a container that's less total plastic give up plastic plates and cups right you know just wash wash some dishes uh which is a pain i get it i hate doing it myself um focus on recycling only nine percent of people in the united states recycle excuse me only nine percent recyclable material in the united states is recycled much lower than 30 percent in europe or 25 percent in china uh really really really really bad behavior there us not surprisingly um and then you know watch watch litter a huge amount of plastic pollution came from beaches people just dropping things in near and around the ocean um yeah you you've just got to use your eyes and look at those things in the grocery store what uses more packaging and what uses less and less packaging is better for the planet and probably better for your health less processed things tend to have less packaging so that's one way to start reducing the amount of plastic that you produce with your household hey science mike so to be totally transparent this is the fifth or sixth time that i am recording this question um because i'm getting tongue-tied so okay my husband and i were recently talking about what life forms might evolve from humans in the distant future once humans are long gone this is something that i think is super fascinating and growing up i thought that humans would always be around just because i was a like young earth creationist and like super fundamentalist and thought that humans were like essential to the plan of you know the universe so any uh theories or hypotheses that you know science might have about what life forms could evolve from humans would be super interesting to hear about thanks it's a really fun question to think about you know what where what could we evolve into um there's no question that we are evolving i hear people ask a lot are humans still evolving absolutely we've actually been evolving faster at least in terms of our rate of genetic variation since the dawn of civilization than we did before that so human evolution has not stopped not by any means if we look at what's happened since we've become culture animals our brains and bodies have been getting smaller believe it or not not larger smaller that doesn't mean we're getting dumber bigger bigger bodies need bigger veins to control them so just we're physically smaller less brain mass is required to handle that although when you look at our teeth and you look at our brains some anthropologists wonder if maybe our species is self-domesticating because you're seeing similar changes between us and our pre-agrarian ancestors as you might see between wolves and dogs or um you know other other animals that have been domesticated cows sheep all that kind of stuff domesticating domesticated animals have a little bit softer easier life right um and humans we've kind of put ourselves in these wonderful pens and and reduced our exposure to predation or competition with other predators one possibility is that our brains and bodies continue to get smaller because we don't have to run down prey anymore and over time our genetics uh respond to that maybe we'll start to edit our own genes before that happens though that that could be fascinating we could be looking we could be the first self-directed evolving species we may start to choose the direction in which we evolve and that that could be good or that could be terrible um it's possibly start to augment ourselves biologically with technology that's another possibility for us that it's kind of new on the evolutionary front um it's also possible that we are in the process of creating a version of earth that our genetic lineage can't survive in at all and what do i mean well if you look at the amount of carbon in the air right now there's more carbon or atmosphere than there has ever been with human beings on the planet so we have put a phenomenal amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and it will take time for the earth's climate to catch up with that carbon but it will over some period of decades by the end of the century we could be looking at eight degrees of warming fahrenheit that's a lot that's a lot of warming it's a lot of that's a lot of climate change that's a lot of sea level rise that's a lot of desertification um it may be that our most tropical focused genetic variations become the direction of the species or it may be that we can't adapt fast enough we're in the middle of a mass extinction event based on the rate of species lost on this planet species loss on this planet that's terrifying animals our size tend to not make it through mass extinction events so you kind of this fascinating thing where on the one hand we seem to be self-domesticating we might have the opportunity to have self-guided evolution to evolve along with technology or we may be changing the planet so much that we can't live in it anymore and um gosh honestly i don't know uh what family of animals might be most likely to move into an agrarian lifestyle after hours depending on how how broad the collapse of the bioweb is during this mass extinction event event caused by human activity um yeah we may we may roll back significantly in terms of complex life and an evolution may may lose hundreds of millions of years of of work um nervous laugh there it's really really frightening um i'll have an article on the show notes um and scientific american that explores kind of where homo sapiens could go but but my answer is we're not going anywhere unless we face our behavioral tendencies head on and reduce and eliminate the rate of species loss on the planet and reduce and then eliminate our net contribution to carbon in the atmosphere otherwise there isn't an exciting future in human evolution okay our last question came in via email and it reads hey mike first time asker long time listener it's way too early to be talking about the 2020 election but one of the candidates andrew yang has been talking a lot about how automation is the fourth industrial revolution and is coming for so many of our jobs he proposes implementing a universal basic income or freedom dividend as he calls it of one thousand dollars a month to help ease americans into the next phase of our economic transition we've already seen so many manufacturing jobs automated away self-driving cars and trucks are on the way eliminating the need for many drivers self-service stations are eliminating retail and some fast food jobs computers can read x-rays better than radiologists software can sort through legal documents more quickly than lawyers and paralegals the list goes on with so many people potentially out of jobs is universal basic income a viable solution thanks for all you do david well david first of all i want to know i want you to know that i love your question the problem is i share your question i don't i don't know i have the concerns about automation i have deep concerns about the continuing aggregation of capital at the top wealth percentiles or fractions of a percentile in the global economy but i don't think we can definitively answer questions about universal basic income scientifically here's why there are very few universal basic income trials and i don't know of any that have been completed and even when they are completed um giving some thousands of people a basic income is going to have a very different economic impact than giving millions of people a basic income economics is a really powerful field but it's so hard um i don't know why it is but if you if you give me different cosmological models to consider i can do a decent job of telling you which ones do a good job of representing a consensus view in the sciences if you give me different theories on how the brain functions different models and neuroscience i can i can do a pretty good job of weighing in between them but economic models my gosh i just don't know how to differentiate between the quality of given economic models very well at all i just want to admit that i want to on your question by answering it but boy i am just like super super unqualified to answer economic questions um my understanding based on reading a lot is that healthy economies need capital or money to move around to be healthy that's what creates health in an economy is money moving around when people hoard money economies are unhealthy when money flows through economies then those economies are health healthier for everyone involved and i also know that every economic model or theory or governance system that humans have tried since the dawn of civilization produce economic inequality because capital meaning money and political power which is often just a proxy for money are tools that allow people to aggregate more capital and more political power even in the so-called planned economies around the world in most economies rich people continue to get what more wealthy now oddly enough we do see data that that even the very wealthy are healthier and happier when there's less inequality in a society but based on how people behave given incentive structures is if you have the ability to get more money you tend to do it when you have the ability to be in power over other people you have a tendency to undergo some psychological changes that lead you into self-favoritism and dehumanize people who work for you it's very strange it's very consistent so we have this kind of bizarre thing where power and wealth tends to want to grow more power and wealth and it changes the psychology of the person that holds the power and the wealth um and then you get these great pools or aggregation of of capital uh among the wealthiest people and then economies start to grind to a halt everybody gets miserable and then you have revolutions that's kind of how the cycle goes and new people take the power and some of the old rich people get eaten or simply taxed heavily depending on what style of revolution occurred and then the money moves around a little bit and then new people get in charge and then they start to aggregate all the money again so what's fascinating to me about universal basic income would be baking into a given economic model the notion of moving capital right so some way you're always insuring an injection of capital into an economy into markets and it's a good theory i think it's a good theory um because if it if unemployment becomes high unemployment becomes a fixed feature of an economy due to automation it doesn't matter how low the cost of producing a good earth service is if there are no consumers with the money to buy it companies need customers with income in order to make money in order like in a capitalist economy to pay dividends to their shareholders or to have growth prospects so it's actually it's in the short term interest of a company to automate and to lower wages but it's against the long-term interest of an economy and therefore the companies within it to constantly lower the number of employees and constantly lower their wages so if companies can't get their heads around that and they have incentive not to with quarterly reporting and a high pressure on growth and profit growth in margins then universal basic income might be a way to recalibrate our economy and keep things from grinding to a halt as unemployment rises alongside increased automation now i could be completely wrong we are talking about a theory with a very very little support from experiment um and observation but the fundamental notion that economies need capital to move in order to be healthy seems to support that in the future a solution like universal basic income may in fact be needed well it's another week another ask science mike boy my head's kind of soupy after that one that was some show thanks for all those questions even the one on economics um it was a harder one to answer it was fun to talk about science again i've done so many uh so many life advice questions in the last few months but i really enjoy the science ones uh so i want to thank andrew golucky for helping find some science themed questions this week he does pre-production for the show i want to thank greg nordin for producing editing and sound designing ask science mike i want to thank jeb bottaford for writing and recording the amazing assignments mike theme song and of course i want to thank all of my patrons for making a science mic and my entire life possible thanks for listening and i'll talk to you next week