ASM133 It's a Patron Show (Part 1)

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coming to you from los angeles with no audience it's an old-fashioned episode of ask science mike [Music] well hello my friends it's good to talk to you again uh it's been a while since i've done a normal ask science mic episode and this one's not like completely normal uh this is a patron episode so i've asked my patrons on patreon to ask questions for this week's show and they did in fact they asked so many that i can't possibly do this in one show it will be hours and hours long so i think what i'll do instead this week uh for your thanksgiving is i will just record um like an episode a day until they're done and uh you know hopefully we'll be done uh by wednesday so maybe three episodes this week which is really fun because holiday weeks have my lowest download numbers which is really common in the podcast world so i'm just going to do as many questions off the top of my head as i can and answering off the top of my head so these aren't pre researched answers it's like a live episode and that these are not fact fact checked like a normal episode of ask science mike is and uh well we'll go for i don't know 45 minutes and see how many of these questions we can cover um real quick i want to let you know a couple things one the paperback for finding god in the waves is out and uh and selling really well so like i can tell that uh 14 bucks or 10 bucks is a much better price point for you all than the hardback was uh and then uh i've got a few events on the calendar in the next year so let's talk about my events in february february 7th i'll be in orange county excuse me yeah orange california for an ask science mike live and then february 10th i'll be in cincinnati ohio for ask science mike live and then february 23rd i'll be at a revive 2018 in san diego so a lot of local stuff coming up um so i'd love to see you any of those this sunday by the way i'll be preaching at the first united methodist church in costa mesa my friend sarah heaster so if you're in costa mesa i'd love to see you this sunday and uh that's it if you've been thinking about having me come to your college or your church or your conference in 2018 uh don't wait anymore my calendar is filling up really fast next year so if you're interested just go to ask sciencemike.com click on the speaking tab in the menu and that will take you to chafee management my booking company who can work something out with you about getting me in your town at your college your conference your church wherever you'd like me to speak i do enjoy going and seeing you all face to face much more than i enjoy sitting alone in my studio and recording i always have to pretend i have more energy than i do because i can feel so lonely also i want to apologize for the irregular schedule when i go on tour i'm finding that uh i have less mental stamina that i'm used to and that i often get plagued with these migraines once i get home so it's like my body realizes i can rest and then it rests with a vengeance and doesn't let me work so what do you say let's answer some questions josh on patreon said if we end up establishing a permanent mars colony what can communication look like between earthlings and marshings marshings martians is what's written not martians will it eventually just be like people in different countries talking to each other on the same internet or facetiming and texting each other or something more complicated and separate josh it would definitely be something more complicated and separate here's why mars is really far away so let's imagine there was a moon base for a second the moon's a lot closer to the earth than mars is but the moon has a a second or more uh distance from the earth at light speed so a light second and that means best case for you to type google.com and press return and some information to go down to the earth to google servers on earth and then go back to the moon round trip is going to be more than two seconds and on normal internet connections in the world today that process happens in fractions of one second it happens in milliseconds is what we measure ping time in typically and gosh today with broadband internet ping times can be you know less than 10 milliseconds but anything less than 80 is pretty good um and so this this this increasing ping time means it takes a lot of time for your computer to request data and for it to get back you would also imagine that all communication would happen via satellites or communication dishes and you'd have much more limited bandwidth in between the earth and the moon so when we see that today people in rural areas on earth right now often use satellite internet connections to connect to the internet and because they have to send their information you know thousands of miles above the earth's surface if i remember correctly it's it uh it's like 18 000 miles excuse me while i i google that geo synchronous orbit geosynchronous orbit at the equator is 26 000 miles okay yeah yeah middle earth orbit is 18 000. so uh that's a long way 26 000 miles and because that the ping times the latency on the internet connection goes up a lot then the internet's just a lot less usable and if you look at something like uh australia which is not in space they all share a small amount of fiber compared to their population to connect to the rest of the internet and so they have very low bandwidth caps on their internet connections they're not allowed to use very much data okay so now imagine the complications of australia or the moon and now have a a round trip ping time that is 20 minutes you know in a really good time of year maybe 17 in a bad time of year more than 20. that's not possible the the the the protocols that power the internet just aren't designed for that kind of latency so we'd have to create some kind of specialized protocol for deep space packet communication and it would be extremely slow so it would make a lot more sense to build a small local internet on mars where most of your browsing is local you know you go to google.mars you go to wikipedia.mars you go to netflix.mars and all of those companies hopefully if we had a mars colony would have servers on mars it would actually make more sense it'd be faster and more efficient to load up physical media with you know caches of google's data stores a full copy of wikipedia netflix movies and send them on rockets with the colonists than it would be to stream or transmit through deep space uh so it would be it would be incredibly complicated you basically have two separate internets that synced periodically and that sinking process every packet sent between the earth and mars would be very expensive now i could be completely wrong but i do have a background in network design and a deep interest in deep space so i think that's probably a decent answer so thank you okay now joel has a question why do you think people reportedly lived to be so old before the flood and why was that the cutoff i think people reported to live such a long time before the flood because that's a mythological account it contains historical elements but if you look at the ages of people in the old testament they tend to use significant digits indicating divinity or blessing and they leave out a lot of other digits and um i think that's it i think it's a storytelling mechanism that doesn't translate well into modern society so by asking that question joel i assume you have a relationship with the bible where you read it maybe more literally than i do and that that's fine um but for my account the bible is uh written by people about their experiences with god and because of that uh it's not historically or scientifically authoritative which it doesn't need to be that be a waste of what the bible is good for what the bible is great at is helping us understand a common struggle to know and to serve god over the span of history if you'd like to know more about that kind of reading the bible i would recommend a book called the bible tells me so by dr peter enz okay and rachel asks when did american christianity become so aligned with the republican party i'm assuming i'm assuming it hasn't always been the way it is today rachel that's a great assumption one thing americans are terrible at is awareness of world or even american history especially in protestant circles we tend to project our present assumptions and relationships back onto the past but it's not all that controversial that there were two major movements in uh the gop's current stranglehold on white christians emphasis on white christians we don't want to take the experiences of the white church and make that represent the entire church in america especially because the white church is shrinking and churches of color are growing when we talk about the millennial exodus from church for example we are largely discussing a white phenomenon millennials of color are not leaving their churches as much as white millennials there's two movements that i can remember that created the current alignment one is the establishment of the moral majority who jerry falwell was the founder of that started in 1979 and that was basically a call for christians to be politically active this caused significant movement on issues like abortion which evangelicals once thought of as a catholic issue and turned conservative evangelicals into one of the most reliable organized voting blocs in the country which the republicans took advantage of at the same time through something called the southern strategy and that literally took the south from being mainly democratic to primarily republican and many historians say that was by using racist language and imagery so the democrats became too associated with the civil rights movement and the republicans saw votes up for grabs and they took them and that's why the republican party is not aligned with christianity in general but white american christianity in particular and i can't wait to hear emails about that one [Music] hannah asks what are your thoughts on crispr cast 9 and its implications for biology and bio ethics hannah i'm totally excited about crispr cas9 for those of you who don't know this has been big news in the biological sciences and medicine crispr and cast 9 are two molecules that used in conjunction allow us to cheaply and reliably edit dna and ooh that sounds spooky i know but if it works if it works consistently and it's durable this could open completely new treatments for genetic disorders this could let us address create powerful treatments for cancer for sure but any any disease that's a genetic component could be addressed with crispr cast 9. so really excited to see it develop the second part bioethics obviously i'm as concerned as anyone else about what could happen to crispr cast 9 if it was combined with market forces so i don't want crispr cast 9 therapies to only be available to wealthy people and i i am reticent to see people use crispr cast 9 as part of the reproduction process uh to you know pick eye colors and i want i want a really smart athletic child can we insert those genes i think maybe then we are setting ourselves up for trouble potentially but as a baseline i think the technology is incredibly promising and i can't wait to see it address human suffering in the world justin asks how do spiral dynamics and the enneagram interact for example how would a blu-9 react differently from a red 9. justin i love the enthusiasm behind the question i want to emphasize that both the enneagram and spiral dynamics are models with which we interrogate personality and group dynamics respectively and i don't think those models are meant to be mixed i think doing so would take the models beyond what they were designed to do the enneagram is a pretty non-rigorous model um it's it's a great shorthand for having conversations about personality but its clinical applications are limited if they exist at all spiral dynamics is a little more rigorous and it you know um was used uh by nelson mandela to work towards peace in africa so that's pretty impressive but it's also based on some older assumptions and ideas and and really could use some updating so i wouldn't necessarily let sprout dynamics or the ideogram interact at all i would continue to use spiral dynamics to interrogate intragroup uh and inter group uh conflicts and discussions and i would allow the enneagram to be a shorthand for describing personality philip asks i'm hoping your science moniker extends somewhat into the soft sciences are there any resources that show a pure free market actually end up as beneficial as some of my more conservative friends say it would be i've heard a claim that it could solve everything from income inequality to environmental concerns and i'm not sure i believe that thanks well philip my opinion is not any more qualified than your friend's opinions especially if i'm not researching these questions um i would say there's economists that argue both of those positions one that the free market solves everything the other that uh more regulation is better or more government involvement and that exists on a spectrum from basically economic anarchy all the way to communism or socialism [Music] i don't know i know that in the world market today if we look at the economies that are doing really well at protecting the environment at reducing income equality at generating wealth you see that the social democracies of northern europe are killing it compared to the rest of the world so just based on that i would lean more towards a government-involved model the reason being free markets i think work great at first but once someone grabs enough capital once they get enough resources they become a de facto government they have the ability suddenly to dictate policy and to eliminate competition uh think about how hard it it was as mcdonald's took over fast food in america to start a local restaurant think about how retailers have suffered in the age of amazon and walmart and how job creation has kind of gone down with that walmart and amazon don't need as many employees to get goods to people as local retailers do so net employment goes down uh so all these things give us really troubling images of unregulated markets i can't think of a country that has an extremely unregulated market that that is doing well economically so that makes me kind of a social democracy guy [Music] hannah asks does science offer an explanation for otherwise normal and healthy women like me who have absolutely no biological drive to reproduce yes [Laughter] absolutely science explains that [Music] you might think that makes no sense from an evolutionary perspective [Music] but for some reason as women specifically get more economic empowerment and education they have fewer and fewer babies and this is universal across cultures and civilizations more educated economically empowered women have fewer or indeed no children you would think based on evolution that kind of resource availability would lead to lots and lots and lots of children but it doesn't it seems like as resources become more plentiful human females place bigger bets on fewer children and so when resources are scarce having lots of children is a way to try to ensure that some reach adulthood and that just appears to be the way our species does a selection of the next generation and it's no big deal i mean i think our culture tries to guilt people and make them feel ashamed if they don't want to have children and i don't think that's healthy or appropriate if you don't want to have children don't have children and don't let anyone tell you that evolution says otherwise [Music] sean asks what is the biological need for parents why do some animals have one parent i.e the one that raises the young and why do humans have two sean evolution tries different strategies to achieve its goal which is reproducing life life that can persist and endure through changes in the environment and so for example there's r collected and k selected species not collected selected and those are just basically whether you're going to have a lot of children or a few children that's all that means so our selected species have lots of offspring and k-selected species have few offspring that they invest more resources in and then that comes with different parenting strategies your higher investment strategy is going to be more likely to have that uh double two-parent or uh herd mentality in terms of uh investing in children and the single-parent model is going to be more common among uh the exponential growth lots of offspring idea of course some animals don't have an active parent at all and are born with enough instincts to try to make it on their own think of sea turtles sea turtles don't have an active parent uh in their um growth from birth so um and this speaks to the way that evolution being a blind watchmaker uh operating without intention but merely a set of rules isn't planning anything but instead is a system that allows life to adapt to changes on this planet [Music] nick says i have heard you mention that people are quite susceptible to suggestion i have noticed also in myself and others the tendency to be contrarian i am a minister slash leader who has struggled mightily with contrarian people could you explain the relationship between these two social reactions and what i'm misunderstanding thanks um i don't know there's a lot of interaction between them our suggestibility doesn't mean agreeability uh what you're contrary and about could in fact be things that have been suggested to you through the environment uh intentionally or unintentionally um so think about advertisers why do advertisers like coke spend so much money literally the familiarity of seeing the name and the logo over and over and over and over again that familiarity is a form of suggestibility that when you walk down the soda aisle and you see coke and it's familiar you grab coke politics works in a very similar way the degree to which people can remember your name is a huge predictor for success at the ballot box um so that's just we're suggestible uh i'm going to talk about that a lot in my next book so i'm not going to dig much deeper right now and then being contrarian is simply a part of how you establish your social identity so everyone forms their beliefs by looking at what those around them believe in their community and most people find their beliefs align with their community some people form their beliefs in opposition with their community they're called non-conformists but their beliefs are still formed through suggestibility and social identity they just make everyday opposite day i guess [Music] david page says so the start of human consciousness genetic mutation divine intervention or a really gradual process any other opinions out there tell us the story mike please well since you asked so nicely i'll happily wade into an unsolved predicament in science and philosophy here's the problem talking about consciousness what the heck are you talking about what do you mean by consciousness consciousness is one of those words that everyone uses but no one agrees what it means i find macheo kaku's ideas about consciousness to be extremely helpful what is consciousness the ability to build a model of the world and then react to it that means a rock is not conscious it doesn't have a model of the world but in a very limited way a thermostat is why a thermostat knows the temperature and can respond to the temperature and then respond to the changes in the temperature brought by its own behavior your ac system is at a basic level consciousness are conscious in that definition and then plants would be much more sophisticated because they have more loops more feedback loops instead of just temperature sunlight sun direction soil ph soil nutrients the presence of pests and predators that consume the plant the chemical signals other plants send out in response to attack all of these things right so at that level consciousness happened pretty early as soon as organisms were able to build some model of reality and then just gradually adding more and more loops created more sophisticated consciousnesses like what we see in homo sapiens whose consciousness has to involve not only the temperature and uh the sun direction but a complex map of the environment so we can move and find food and shelter and mates and then because we're a social species we have to model what other consciousnesses are thinking about us and then we also incorporate the ability to contemplate time in our consciousness which requires a brain with something like 86 billion neurons that we achieved gradually through evolution [Music] aaron asks when i was a child my parents told me to ignore anything that said the world was millions of years old and like a good child that i was i obeyed now i believe in evolution i find myself trying to play catch up to understand can you give a brief overview of evolution and or point me to helpful websites or books um aaron i'd start with biologos.org i like biologos because they're going to present evolution in a way that's not shocking or difficult for people of faith especially christians with a biblical background so biologos is great in terms of a brief overview remember evolution just means change so everyone believes in evolution everyone agrees that evolution happens you evolved to be able to get out of bed this morning and put on clothes that was a change that was evolution the controversy is over darwin's theory of evolution via natural selection and evolution via natural selection is the idea that our genetic code mutates creates a change in organisms that most of the time are benign but sometimes are harmful or beneficial and when they're harmful those genes reduce the chance of an organism reproducing when they're beneficial they increase and this is how natural selection works more beneficial changes are more likely to make more copies of themselves over time an odd thing though as the environment changes an adaptation that was once beneficial can suddenly become harmful so let's suppose that you had an organism that had a mutation that caused it to grow much larger and so it was able to fight off more predators that's great until the climate changes and food becomes more scarce and suddenly this large body is too calorically expensive to maintain suddenly the smallest members of that species are the most fit for the environment and that's what fittest means it doesn't mean strongest or most aggressive or most powerful but simply most timely to the environment the organism is in and that in a nutshell is evolution via natural selection [Music] all right not bad uh that's 30 minutes of questions hopefully those answers were worthwhile and i'll talk to you again tomorrow for another episode of ask science mike if the mix sounds funny on this episode that's because i didn't send it to greg greg will be angry with me but i want him to have the week off with his family for thanksgiving so it's going to be old school this week as i record and edit these episodes of ask science mike thanks for listening everyone and i'll talk to you tomorrow