ASM043 Ask Science Mike LIVE in Lakeville, MN

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coming to you from the hosanna student ministries in lakeville minnesota it's ask sciencemike live

[Applause]

hey everybody it's so great to be with you again this week sorry for missing last week's show i have literally been all over the globe doing speaking events and i just didn't have time to make an episode but we're back with everybody's favorite thing ask science mike live i don't know what's going to happen this is the first time we've ever done one with students and there's no telling what kind of curveballs could follow but let's not worry about that instead let's get it started [Music] hi my name is natalie last night you mentioned that humans didn't discover the color blue until a few thousand years ago but how did we discover the color blue oh man i hate how good that question is how did we discover the color blue man i have no idea i'm glad i gave that caveat there's a thing that happens in culture and especially in the church world that drives me nuts that people are afraid to admit their ignorance and so what happens too often is people get a question they don't know and they just kind of tap dance and so i'm going to start by saying i don't know well so one of the greatest mysteries in anthropology is where language came from we don't know when or how language emerged in human societies for good reason spoken language came before written language and spoken language didn't leave a record it just sort of happened so what we understand from the way language happens now is somebody notices something and they try to describe it and often words are born when people make hybrids of other words and then other times people just like invent a new sequence of sounds to describe that thing and then they repeat it they deal it enough it gets popular it becomes a new word so carrot cake when someone made the first carrot cake they're like i made a cake i put carrots in it so it's a carrot cake and that was just like these two known things that are descriptive uh but once when we sort of identified blue as something distinct from green which it was not before i don't know i'm gonna guess that was probably born out of the arts but i'm not positive i know that uh early in art history blue is a really difficult color to fabricate it's really expensive uh and that may be responsible for his regal connotations throughout history but i'm very proud to say on the first question of the show no clue [Music] my name is grace hey grace good to see you hey good to see you too um i have a question about black holes oh i'm excited and you have notes so i know it's gonna be a good one yeah and i'm just wondering um could our world potentially like get swallowed into a black hole oh you're gonna hate this answer absolutely our world could potentially get swallowed into a black hole the good news is it's very unlikely so first of all let's talk about what black holes are because that helps there's this thing called gravity you're all fans trust me that's keeping us from just floating into space right now so for example like at the equator the earth is spinning you know like a thousand miles an hour so without gravity you would just fling off into space going a thousand miles an hour it would be a terrible scene when you get gravity intense enough it causes weird stuff for example stars act as lenses for light they have so much gravity they bend the path that light takes and we in astronomy we use stars and galaxies to do something called gravitational lensing to act like a giant telescope so we can see something farther away than that galaxy more clearly how weird is that we do that today okay einstein predicted it way back in the day we started doing it relatively recently when you compress something enough that gravity kind of folds in on itself you get a black hole we have no idea what's in a black hole complete mystery because the laws of physics break down what we do know is a black hole is surrounded by something called a event horizon and once something falls into the event horizon it can't come out gravity's too intense it's like a you bend the fabric of space-time to the point that it closes back on itself you just have this pocket of weird space in the black hole anything can be compressed enough to become a black hole if we compressed one of you enough you would become a black hole you become a very small black hole and you'd evaporate quickly through something called hawking radiation which we're not even going to talk about why they even mention it now here's the bad news about black hole well here's the good news the good news is black holes are incredibly useful there's a supermassive black hole at the center of the milky way galaxy and it helps hold the whole galaxy together because it's so heavy because galaxies spin so fast that stars themselves should be flung out into space right so black holes are a huge part of what holds galaxies together black holes plus something called dark matter who's heard of dark matter who knows what dark matter is if you're raising your hand you're lying nobody knows what dark matter is dark matter is a word scientists use for the reason galaxies don't fly apart the math says galaxies should fly apart and they don't so that's the good thing both sound spooky black holes and dark matter but both keep galaxies together we like galaxies together because that way you can get planets okay we like planets because i don't know i just don't think we'd do very well without planets the bad thing is sometimes two black holes orbit each other and one of them's smaller and if it's orbit goes fast enough and gets disturbed by say a third black hole it can be shot loose from its orbit with the orbital velocity it had from orbiting its larger sibling and what does that mean it means all through the universe there are black holes accelerated to a high fraction of light speed just zipping through empty space and if they run into something that thing becomes part of the black hole so there is always a very small chance that at any moment our planet or our sun could be consumed by a roving black hole don't freak out i see some pretty dour faces here's the good news space is big space is so ridiculously unfathomably big that it messes with your intuition for example in the relatively near cosmic future andromeda and the milky way are going to collide with each other these two galaxies kind of a bummer i mean a car collision is bad what happens when two galaxies collide nothing statistically it is very unlikely that as these two galaxies each with hundreds of millions of stars collide that any two stars will run into each other why because space is really really big so yes it is absolutely possible and plausible that the earth at any moment could be consumed by a roving black hole but the good news is you're probably more likely to win the lottery 13 or 14 times in a row [Music] hi i'm brandon do you believe in reincarnation do i believe in reincarnation nope no i'm just kidding that's a joke um i believe in resurrection i believe that resurrection is the language of the cosmos i think it's fascinating that every star that exists today is made out of another star that died and blew up and then made a new star i think it's fascinating that every planet is made of the guts of an old star i think it's interesting that all of us here today are the resurrection of our lunch right that was tissue that was alive that was not alive then we ate it and in a few hours most of it's us except the stuff that we flush it's kind of a nasty image i know but the point being somehow written into the fabric of creation is a cycle of birth death and resurrection so many people who like science as much as i do find it deeply deeply strange incredulous silly that christians believe that there was once a man who was god who died and was resurrected but i think that's just god's signature i think it makes total sense that when god was trying to say this guy this guy was different that he would use resurrection to explain that now statistically i understand that belief in reincarnation has never been more common in the united states than it is right now that even a lot of christians believe in some form of reincarnation and here's where i get really weird i admit i don't actually know what happens when we die i can't measure it in a lab i don't have a particle accelerator that shows me i have no scientific evidence for what happens when i die and yet my experiences with god my time with god and the collective experience of everyone who's ever followed jesus a group we call the church leads me to a profound hope that on the other side of that great curtain i'm reunited with the one who made me all that said i'm not particularly preoccupied with what happens when we die to me the far more interesting question posed by the gospel is not what happens when we die but what happens when we truly live what does it mean to make the kingdom of god near what does it mean to carry forth this old testament idea of shalom of god's perfect peace what does the world look like when in the example of jesus i choose not what i'm entitled to but instead i choose to be broken and poured out for others in the same way that jesus was broken and poured out for me so reincarnation to me moves the stakes to some other time you know paul said don't be so preoccupied with heaven as to be useless here on earth and that's an admonishment i take very very seriously i'm way way way way more present with god when i spend time one-on-one with a homeless man who no one will ever touch and i invest in him as a friend than what i think about what might happen when i die the gospel i believe is found when we get our hands dirty [Music] hi my name is tegan um okay what is the science behind speaking in tongues oh yes that's such a good one so there's this fascinating thing called neuro theology neuro theology the principal founder was a guy named andrew newberg to me he's like katy perry taylor swift and t-pain all rolled into one he's a neuroscientist and he uh for someone who talks about theology doesn't actually talk about what god is like very much he's a neuro theologian so what he does is study the brains of people who believe in god because you can measure that right you can put some in a brain scanner and there's something really interesting about people who speak in tongues if you look at all forms of spiritual prayer and meditation they're neurologically very similar and very powerful speaking in tongues is a totally different animal so when when traditional christian prayer meditation or even buddhist prayer or whatever is islamic prayer any of these things you see character activity where the prefrontal cortex is occupied the anterior cingulate cortex activates the hippocampus activates and westerners the left temporal lobe which is associated with language activates in easterners the visual cortex activates because they don't pray in language they pray with imagery but either way it's pretty similar and for people who are very they're masters of prayer their parietal lobe shuts down your parietal lobe among other things is responsible for your understanding and awareness of physical space and proximity i've experienced that when i go into a deep state of prayer when i finish there's a moment where i'm disoriented when i open my eyes i'm a bit surprised by my surroundings because i forgot about them because in my prayer i felt like i was in the presence of god in all those cases your limbic system is not terribly active that's nothing like speaking in tongues the science of speaking in tongues neurologically is that your limbic system the part of your brain that gives you the most powerful feelings lights up like a christmas tree and your prefrontal cortex the part of your brain you traditionally associate with your consciousness gets quiet and when you speak in tongues something fascinating happens your limbic system talks your limbic system never gets to talk your limbic system gets analyzed by the prefrontal cortex who coordinates with your temporal lobe and then describes what happens in tongues your rat brain your mammal brain gets to talk all by itself is it any wonder that people who speak in tongues feel like someone else is speaking through them neurologically that's accurate the normal part of their brain that talks is pretty much asleep or at best observing when people are genuinely speaking in tongues it's fascinating to me i grew up southern baptist and for christians southern baptists are remarkably uncomfortable with the supernatural because if you're in church and someone raises their hands you go whoa or if you're in church and someone claps you go whoa we're stoics we sing we reflect if someone speaks in tongues you look for an interpreter and if there isn't one you get to tell them they're unbiblical and have to be quiet right it's like baptist thing it's only when i started to study neuroscience that i realized what a powerful form of prayer that was and again also completely unique it's fascinating stuff if you'd like to read more about that there's a book called how god changes your brain by andrew newberg and uh it's amazing it's a fantastic read and it's super accessible he has a good good section on tongues in there hi my name is ike um this is a question about lagrange points um so i know there's like a few between us and the moon and mars i think too um is it possible that we could like build either like a control center or a base in there since the effect of gravity is so low there yeah might be like the nerdiest question in the history of the show i love it lagrange points are a side effect of three body gravitational interaction now you get it any three objects in the universe with mass create lagrange points now so technically a an earth mike carter lagrange point but since carter and i don't have very much mass especially carter our lagrange points aren't significant but when you look at a larger system like the earth the moon and the sun it gets interesting so uh there are five lagrange points in any three body system l1 l2 and 3 l4 and l5 l5 is on the far side of the third body so l5 not particularly interesting uh for us what is interesting now they're they're all different sizes now here's why they're interesting if you're in a lagrange point of three-body system gravity is kind of canceled out so if you can get into a lagrange point just kind of stay there you don't need a lot of fuel to maintain your relative position to those three bodies that's what's fascinating about them so we tend to put like satellites and wmap probes and other things in lagrange points because once they get there they're really stable at least the big ones i can't remember i think that the two on the side are relatively unstable so we tend to focus on the three that are in line with the two major bodies i can't remember forgive me either way there are a lot of scientists who advocate for putting some kind of command center or refueling station so that we have a platform to do larger exploration of the solar system here's a problem they're not close we spend most of our energy today in science putting humans into something called low earth orbit that's where the international space station is about 100 kilometers higher that's where the hubble space telescope is we call that space shuttle range the space shuttle could get to low earth orbit but not much farther to get to lagrange points you need more fuel you need more stuff and so it would be a commitment to do supply runs on an ongoing basis to a lagrange point that we're just not at right right now it takes like an act of god or at least an act of congress which might be more difficult to go to another heavenly body with people it's a big deal to get to the moon right now much less mars and it's less effort to go to mars once than it is to go to a lagrange point and then to mars the idea would be is if we're ever frequenting other celestial bodies especially the asteroid belt it would make a lot of sense to have something sitting out there until then mostly what we keep at those points are observational satellites things that look at the earth things that look at the stars we do a lot of solar observation in the grange points really fascinating stuff and i'm actually a member of several nerd societies one is called the the planetary society and uh gosh i've got my pen i have another one basically that the point of the society is to advocate not only going to mars but setting up a lagrange colony to make mars more accessible and i pay an annual due for that because i'm really weird [Music] hi i'm ali will it ever be possible for humans to use a hundred percent of their brain power absolutely when humans uh use 100 of their brain power that happens today we call that a grand mal seizure uh so this is a big misunderstanding in the popular look at the brain your iphone has like probably three four billion transistors on a cpu it is not useful to use them all at the same time right what's interesting what does the math of an iphone is using some fraction of them and your brain is exactly like that you don't want to use all your brain but all of your brain gets used sometime for example part of your brain when activated makes you feel very angry and another part when activated makes you feel very sad if you used a hundred percent of your brain you'd be very angry and very sad and very surprised very happy very confused very hungry and very full all the time it would not be a particularly useful way to live so the the idea mainly given to us by comic books those bastions of scientific accuracy is that humans use a fraction of their neurological gifts it's just not true now that said we can be wasteful of the gifts of our brain i consider most hours watching television wasted right i don't watch a lot of tv i tend to try to do things that let me maximize the effectiveness of my brain to make it help me accomplish the goals that matter the most to me i try to help my brain have a better memory to think sharper to be more loving to be more forgiving to be more serving and those are all choices i make so although i don't think we should be moving to try to use a hundred percent of our brains i think the core idea there of using our brains better over time is something every person should strive for [Applause] hi i'm megan um what happens when somebody collapses during intense prayer or worship what happens when someone collapses during intense prayer or worship step one no one has brain scan that because to brain scan someone you have to like have them lie down in a brain scanner and you can't collapse when you're already laying down i'm actually not making a joke that's just true um i suspect that they're they're putting themselves into basically a flight or fight state through the constant emotional high that they're elevating their blood pressure high enough long enough that creates a strain on both their brain and their heart and that they have a blood pressure crash and just traditionally kind of pass out um or that it's um social conditioning so you can kind of put people into light state to self-hypnosis if they see people do things enough if they they believe hard enough i don't want to misspeak here i'm not talking about someone pretending i'm talking about someone being carried away with an experience and if that sounds weird let me describe to you why you're the same way any harry potter fans in here okay man that's low what a weird audience okay um i expected every hand because it's harry potter uh of the harry potter fans who cried when dumbledore died okay that's yeah dumbledore's not real he's not a real guy i went to london and i couldn't find hogwarts right and yet dumbledore dies and we cry because we make it real we invest in this character that doesn't mean like it's ridiculous to cry when dumbledore dies it doesn't mean art and culture and literature are useless any more than that like very possibly those sort of self-hypnotic states scientifically or self-induced doesn't make them unvaluable and in fact this is a tension we often face if you study it scientifically enough you will find some mechanism that describes why it happened deterministically mechanically materialistically and that leads us to believe that it doesn't have meaning but just because a clock has gears doesn't mean that its face doesn't tell time right the gears are just the mechanism that allow the time telling to happen in the same way that the neurological state is simply the mechanism that allows the spiritual experience to occur the fact that it's rooted in the brain doesn't make it any less real any less relevant or any less actionable these are still things that change us for family i guarantee you if someone would have had me in a brain scanner on the day i had the most powerful spiritual experience of my life they could have said what parts of my brain were doing it and it wouldn't have changed the impact it had on my life at all because where else would i experience something but my brain you can put me in a brain scanner and you can say my children's name and you can watch my anterior singing that cortex light up that doesn't mean that i don't love my children it just means that's where love lives in my brain [Music] [Applause] oh what is your opinion on evolution versus creationism wow okay what is my opinion on evolution versus creationism we did um an episode of liturgist podcast with me and a guy named michael gunger and we talk about evolution versus creationism for like 90 minutes uh so i'd encourage you to check that out the verses bothers me here's the thing i am an evolutionist i think that evolution via natural selection perfectly describes how we have so many different kinds of animals and plants and stuff on the planet today but i think when i talk about evolution i'm talking about the mechanics of what genesis is talking about when it says that from the dust we are made so some people read that from the dust we are made and they picture god reaching down from heaven and forming a man out of clay breathe the breath of life into that man and you had adam okay and then i look at the fossil record and genetics and all kinds of things like that and i say it looks very likely that all life on this planet has a single ancestor and that means some proteins with amino acids at some point made something like a cell and then that just kept on dividing and kept on living boy that sounds like a miracle to me because there's a thing we keep looking at planets and we keep not finding life i mean we have found thousands of planets the universe is teeming with planets we think there's 400 million stars in the milky way we think there could be a trillion planets and yet here on this one there's life so whether you're talking about bible creationism or whether you're talking about evolution that god guided either way life is a beautiful miracle it's just a gift i did nothing to receive i didn't make myself and i can't make another person by will i mean i can procreate that's not quite the same thing i've done that twice it was pretty cool but i didn't decide who this person would be my children came to me who they were and it was just my job to protect them and love them as god molded them god himself crafted my children into who they are see the thing is today i read a study from a sociologist and he was charting people's opinions and and in this study they found that if a person believes or accepts evolution and their church does not that's the most at risk group in the world to leave christianity in the world it's more moving than marriage equality it's more moving than poverty it's more moving than calvinism versus arminism and literally everything is more moving than calvinism versus harmonism i am not willing to watch a generation walk away from the church over such a trivial issue so if it is critical to how you understand god that the earth was made in six literal 24-hour days awesome if on the other hand you have trouble reconciling that with modern science and you can't accept god without also accepting evolution fantastic because the important thing is not how we got here the important thing is who got us here and what are we going to do about it it leaves me to look at my faith as something that's not a set of beliefs a set of propositions a set of data points but instead a willingness to stop doing what i was doing and go wait who's that guy you see when i read the gospels i read about 12 guys who didn't get it 12 guys who always made the wrong decisions 12 guys who constantly got it wrong they didn't know anything about a resurrection and most of the time when they talked about messiah they talked about the wrong thing right they thought jesus was going to overthrow the government were the disciples christians yeah they were the first christians but they weren't christians because of what they believed they were christians because when he said follow me they dropped their nets or left their tax business or left their doctor's office and they followed the man our faith is not about creationism versus evolution our faith is about a willingness to leave everything behind to follow that man who was god where he's going [Music] well that does it for this week's show thanks for listening everybody no more events in 2015 2016 starting to fill up so if you want to see where i'm going to be and when if you'd like to meet me in person i'd love to meet you just go to ask sciencemike.com and click events and of course if you'd like to bring ask science mike live to your church community college conference whatever i'd love to be there go to asksciencemike.com and click bookmike thanks for listening everybody and i'll see you next week [Music]