ASM190 Humans in Space, Midnight Anxiety, Talking to Water

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humans in space midnight anxiety and talking to water all that and more on this week's episode of ask [Music] [Applause] i'll talk sciencemic he got problems he won't stop there but he'll talk and talk and talk until he flew in the face science faith in life welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life and really whatever you want to talk about i'm your host mike mccarg a non-expert college dropout what the heck why am i hosting a podcast because questions are important and people should have a non-judgmental and supportive environment to be curious so let's get it started i've just got to tell you how much i've been enjoying the liturgist tour called tabs and wafers which is me and michael gunger crossing the country not to the northeast sorry although northeast friends we have some other things coming up for you and we talk about um community and friendship and spirituality and the war on drugs and uh it's really an unexplainable event the venues we've gone to these aren't churches you know we usually do stuff in churches or community centers and this is like actual clubs where concerts and comedians do their thing this is our first time trying that kind of experience and uh these venues have never had something like tabs and wafers happen and so what i've been really interested in is hearing what security people and venue managers and bar managers describe tabs and wafers as and the thing i've heard most often is that tabs and wafers is a stand-up comedy show where people cry a lot and that's just perfect so in typical liturgist fashion the only way to understand it is to be there it is a lot of fun it really is and i i enjoy the mix of people that are there you know uh also in typical liturgist fashion there's a mix of people who identify as christians and people who don't and it's just a really fun fun fun dynamic to have so in september on the 21st we'll be in san francisco one of my favorite cities in america september 27th will be in dallas september 28th houston separate september 29th austin which will be the last tabs and wafers stop now for those of you who are like hey i can't get near those cities that's okay we're going to release a tabs and wafers podcast after the tour is over also in nashville october 19th i will be at the christian transhumanist conference which is exactly what it sounds like so if you want more information on any of those events and you want to grab tickets just go to ask sciencemike.com and click on the events tab and uh you'll be able to find out everywhere i'll be and get all the information you need [Music] hi mike this is deacon godzilla from lawrence kansas i have two questions one is a little bit longer and more detailed so i'll send that in a separate message this one is pretty straightforward i was wondering if you had seen the article on wired magazine entitled are humans fit for space a herculean study says maybe not and it outlines the scientific studies that were done on the twin brother astronauts and the evidence seeming to suggest that human bodies are just simply not designed or evolved to the point where we can tolerate sustained space flight over long periods of time and just wondered if you had thoughts on that article on the studies that went into it and on its implications for future mars missions thanks deacon it's so good to hear from you and uh i shouldn't be surprised that you sent a question with an article i hadn't read but wanted to so uh i completely missed that piece by wired and i just thank you for sharing it i really enjoyed it for those of you listening who haven't read our humans fit for space in wired magazine uh just go to asklinexmike.com click on episode 190 and in the show notes i'll have a link to that article and it is really really good it's very well written it's very thorough it's very accessible it's everything i look for in science journalism uh the reason i missed it is i've been super busy uh finishing up my next book uh so the last week um last two weeks really have i was in alaska in the arctic circle and then working on the book so i've been kind of you know completely disconnected from media uh for yeah 14 15 days now uh more about the book later i don't want to waste your question talking about my book other than to say that's why i missed that article and uh here's what happened in that piece we you know we already know that space flight is hard and we'll get into why that is as we talk more but how dramatically does living and traveling in space affect the human body well now we have some interesting data in the form of a twin study so we had an astronaut who had a twin and uh they went through a parallel set of physical examinations while one spent over a year in space and the other stayed on the surface of the earth which is fascinating twin studies are really really great ways to start teasing out the interplay between genetics and environment but we want to say right up top that this was a twin study with a very small sample size it was just one set of twins twin studies usually involve multiple sets of twins and then you know where once complete set of twins can act as a control group as opposed to one half of a pair of twins acting as a control group because this twin study only involved one set of twins we don't know if what was seen in the study was caused by being in space or being in a highly stressful environment the international space station is stressful it's loud there's a lot of mechanical equipment there it's smelly uh not only body odor and and off-gassing plastics but space itself has a smell or rather things that have been in space or exposed to space smell something like fireworks actually um we don't know why it probably comes down to radiation but uh launch and landing is also really stressful on the body because of the intense g-forces that your body goes through um so there's a lot of stress involved in space travel we do know that a lot of things happen and we saw happen in this study your intercranial pressure increases in space because your body relies on gravity to drain fluids out of your head and and that doesn't happen without gravity and people can have eye troubles you see a a cognitive decline over time uh the longer you're in space although a lot of that um returns to baseline within six months of getting back on the earth but not all of it there are some permanent physical and genomal changes that happen to people who stay in space for a long time right so there's real effects real impacts on the human body from space travel so what do we do oh my gosh uh well this this study just gave more specifics on something that i already knew to be true which is that space flight is very dangerous it's very difficult for humans and that's saying something because humans are remarkably adaptable animals if you think about it our physiology our bodies are set up to help us survive in equatorial hot humid environments that's kind of our native range uh now i'm a a human of european descent so i've got this pale skin and this straight hair the pale skin is designed to help me you know get more vitamin d with less sun exposure the straight hair is to help me let water you know not designed but adapted to allow water to flow more easily off my body in a rainy environment right so my my dna is from the british isles and a lot of my physical features are adapted to that but not quite because i still have this capacity to sweat uh like all humans i'm a tropical primate and i have a phenomenal cooling capacity and with if you just took someone like me and just plopped me in the british isles without civilization without shelter without clothing i'd freeze to death so what's remarkable is that i have these changes this straight hair this pale skin and yet still most of the fundamental features of a tropical ape because humans can adapt environments to themselves by building shelter by creating clothing right we're great at adapting environments to ourselves i just spent several days in the arctic circle it was remarkable that humans can survive even thrive in such challenging environments but space is another level of challenging because everywhere on earth we have two essential things for human life number one is a really consistent gravity well we've evolved in the 9.8 meters per second squared gravity well of earth and our body relies on that gravity to keep our fluids circulating through our body to maintain muscle and bone density uh and number two the earth has a a magnetic field and that magnetic field actually protects us from most of the radiation happening in space when we leave our atmosphere and when we get into microgravity environments we lose those two things and it's really really difficult on our bodies that means a mission to mars is a very risky proposition the longest we've had someone in space is about a year and that's in a low earth orbit still with some protection from the earth's magnetosphere a mars mission could take three years or more during that time astronauts would be in microgravity most of the time they'd be on mars they'd be in low gravity environment mars doesn't have a magnetosphere and there'd be a lot of radiation exposure be very dangerous to the immune systems of those astronauts it would increase their risk for cancers they'd be at risk of permanent cognitive impairment these are significant challenges but they're not unsolvable in my opinion through engineering we can simulate gravity with centrifugal force that's why in sci-fi movies you see these rotating space stations right we can create really sophisticated shielding for spacecraft one idea that i've seen is to store the water both the clean water and the wastewater and the recycling system uh converting wastewater back into clean water on the outside of a spacecraft because water is a great radiation shield so it's not that these are unsolvable problems in engineering but it is that they are challenging and expensive problems um ultimately it's probably most viable uh to build interplanetary spacecraft in orbit and that means we'd have to build an orbital supply chain manufacturing facilities might make sense to start getting our materials from asteroids instead of blasting them off the surface of the earth and rockets right so this becomes a very very sophisticated um effort we'd have to build a space economy and uh with no guarantee that it's ever financially viable in and of itself that's a big risk so it's a political question of whether humans could be fit for space and space travel i think exploration of space is important obviously but i i don't like to treat space like a backup plan for the species we've got a great planet right here that we're just treating horribly and my first priority is to learn to treat this planet better and actually that's part of why i support space travels when we send people yes but also robots to other celestial bodies we learn more about how our planet formed how our climate cycles function and ultimately learning about venus and mars and europa and other planets and moons in our solar system can help us better understand how to take care of earth our marvelous and miraculous home which we are certainly fit for and i wonder if perhaps learning to take care of the earth which we are fit for could ultimately enable us to be fit for space travel [Music] if we're going to explore other worlds it's going to take the brilliance of today's children to get us there and that's why i'm so excited that kiwi co is a sponsor of ask science mike kiwiko is a learning company but hold on not that kind of learning company they're not boring kiwi co creates hands-on learning experiences in the field of steam that's science technology engineering art and mathematics and i absolutely love kiwico the way it works is you get a subscription and they send a developmentally appropriate uh kit to your child every month and you can pick different lines of kiwi crates some are more craft centered some are more engineering centered and you can change at any time my teenage children teenage children love their kiwi crates i love that it gets them off their screens and gets them doing something hands-on for learning i've also loved the way that building something helps my kids learn the principles behind it and ultimately helps them excel in school and the only reason i want them to excel in school is to learn how to excel in life so kiwiko is going to do something really really great for listeners of ask science mike if you go to kiwico.com science they will send you a crate for free completely risk-free so you can try kiwi co in your home again just visit kiwico.com science to redeem your completely free crate our next question came in from email and it reads hey mike just have a quick question for you i found some very intriguing videos online by a scientist named maraso emoto he claims that his experiments show that our words and tone of voice have an effect on plants and water crystal formation is there any legitimacy to this guy's work or is it [ \_\_ ] thanks for all you do on this show and the liturgist podcast josiah uh yeah moroso emoto's work is actually pseudoscience or as you put it [ \_\_ ] i get questions about it quite often and let's be honest the videos are in fact quite fun to watch i also think i don't think morasso uh is a charlatan and that i think he believes what he's sharing it's just not based in science uh effectively and you know i'll give you some links if you want to look into this more uh his work is just full of methodological errors he doesn't have proper controls he's very selective in what data he gathers he's very selective in how he interprets that data so there's no way to really mitigate bias introduced in his observations and uh i you know as far as i'm aware his work is universally rejected by the scientific community ouch um so no uh i mean you know our words and tone of voice certainly have some effect on water crystal formation i mean you know sound pressure waves do interact with water i suppose but probably not a measurable effect uh like he's talking about um that doesn't mean i don't think there's value in contemplating the notion that our posture in the world affects the world uh this is non-scientific but i have found that certain ways of being as i'm in my garden and feeding my birds if i walk a certain way and move a certain way then the birds don't fly away when i fill the feeders and i can have some really great encounters with wildlife so i get kind of the point that's trying to be made but no uh he's his work is not rigorous it's not scientific it's just something fun to see on youtube okay here's another email question hey mike love your podcast question i often find that as i try to fall back asleep after waking in the middle of the night that my thoughts tend to be a bit negative and fearful such as thinking of embarrassing situations from the past or think about what would happen if a certain friend or family member passed away soon is there any reason for these thought tendencies thank you for your time and your thoughts what a wonderful question that i think is very very common lots of people experience those kinds of nighttime anxieties um unfortunately the causes of nighttime anxiety are not well studied but the interaction of nighttime anxiety is well studied here's what i mean i can't scientifically answer why you have anxiety at night what i can tell you is not getting enough sleep increases nighttime anxiety and that can create a vicious cycle right so we don't know what's causing it initially but we know this can be a self-reinforcing cycle so it's really important to try and maintain good sleep hygiene uh in order to avoid this cycle deepening you know going to bed at a predictable time avoiding caffeine before bed avoiding alcohol before bed uh avoiding screens for an hour before bed avoiding physical activity right before bed all those sorts of things keeping your room very dark you know white noise can help etc etc etc improve your quality of sleep it will lessen the amount of anxiety that you experience you didn't say in your question whether you have anxiety during the day or not but we do understand that people with anxiety disorders are more likely to have these kinds of nighttime anxiety events and if you have an anxiety disorder and i will have a link on science mic to help you start to see if you may or not then treating the anxiety disorder itself can help i could pontificate on where nighttime anxiety comes from you know using a lot of things i've read i'm reticent to do that i mean i feel like it would give you a more comforting answer but especially right after a question about a pseudoscientist i don't want to just just riff on where nighttime anxiety comes from um i just say you know you really really really want to work on your sleep hygiene it happens to me sometimes i don't have a lot of anxiety most of the time but i do have seasons where i wake up in the middle of the night and uh taking off my science educator hat for a second putting on my your friend on the podcast hat something that has worked for me when my normal you know self-hypnosis uh sleep routine fails is to listen to the anxiety realize that it's coming from me and that the reason i have the anxiety and i'm worrying about something in bed is my brain's actually trying to troubleshoot potential problems in the future to come up with strategies that that's one of the most amazing things the human brain can do so i flipped the script on my nighttime anxiety instead of dreading it or fighting it or succumbing to it i think it i say gosh thank you for protecting us thank you for watching out for us i really appreciate it and now let's go to sleep worrying brain and i let's go to sleep together and just kind of that being aware when anxiety is coming interrupting it instead of fighting it kind of expressing gratitude for it and then uh just letting my thoughts drift away you know that's it's that's a riff on cognitive behavioral therapy but for me it really does help me get back to sleep [Music] okay last question this week is another email question hi science mike i have a question all the way from australia about history maybe even science and the bible i am at university and two major areas of study for me are sociology and agriculture through what i have picked up over the last few years i've come to associate the idea of the fall with humans transition from hunter gatherer to agricultural society hear me out in the bible adam is cursed to work the ground while eve is cursed to paraphrase the patriarchy that's clever when humans started to farm and settle we got possessive over land and women we got a bunch of diseases from living in our own [ \_\_ ] and i would add also living among animals we damage the environment and develop systems of wealth and depression i once even heard agriculture described as humanity's biggest mistake oh wow if this is true then it really seems like transition to agriculture bears a strong resemblance to the ideas of the fall or original sin or whatever i can't see any way that the authors of genesis could have possibly known all this but i can't help but wonder if this is somehow more than a coincidence having long since rejected fundamentalist ideas of adam eve and sin i've been struggling to find meaning in the story of the fall and this explanation is so far the only thing that has come close to making any sense of such a bizarre story so my question is what are your thoughts on all this is it purely coincidence or is there any chance the bible could intentionally be making this connection thanks for the work you do christa bell oh gosh um this is why i love genesis i haven't been a biblical literalist in a long time but i do love the genesis creation poem i think i enjoy it more today than i ever did in the past including when i thought it was a literal telling of the formation of the cosmos at the hands of a being god why do i love it so because genesis reminds me that ancient people were not less intelligent than modern people right they had the same capacity to think about the why behind how the world works they were just as curious as we are maybe even more so they had the same quirk in their brains that we have in ours which is that we have a capacity to imagine what other people are thinking and something called a theory of mind that is common to social animals but we project consciousness onto things that to my knowledge aren't conscious at all that's how our theory of mind creates things like religion it's fascinating and so you can imagine these ancient people in a culture that had a mix of nomadic and agrarian lifestyles they were living closer to the natural world than we do today so they had a lot of time to observe wild things but they also whether they were agrarian or nomadic uh had a significant investment in animal husbandry so they had close encounters with different domestic animals largely sheep and if you're wondering how the world came into being and you're a human you're going to spend a lot of time wondering what's different between me and a sheep why i mean we there's something clearly different about us but what is different and if you thought about that long enough you'd probably come up with something like well i understand morality i have a knowledge of good and evil and because of that knowledge i'm the one taking care of the sheep and gosh in a lot of ways it looks like sheep have the easier life right if you're a human and you look at the natural world wild animals appear to be carefree that's not true by the way wild animals encounter significant stress on a near-constant basis predators are always hungry prey are always trying to not be eaten but from our perspective it looks like it's easier to not be a human than to be a human mainly because we worry so damn much so for me of course the bible makes those connections because genesis is an attempt for the people of abraham some 3 500 years ago to make a more modern riff on some other ancient creation poems with a different kind of god and a different relationship to people and it was a bit more philosophical than like a you know prior babylonian myth and i think that's cool as hell i don't think it means that like there was some uh anachronistic anthropological insight in the genesis creation poem i don't think god like snuck in a little you know modern era anthropology into an ancient text as a clue for us that there's a divine being looking over all this i just think the authors of genesis were very clever they had great observations and they came up with frankly a hypothesis for how the world could have come into being and turn that into a mythology that allowed them to find collective meaning as a people that's what humans do best i'm all for it that's why i love genesis so much you have survived yet another episode of ask science mike congratulations i'd like to thank all of my patrons who make this show possible if you'd like to join them you get to pick the questions of the show get a little additional interaction with me and we're going to do a patron only show again in the near future you can learn more about that by going to patreon.com sciencemic or ask sciencemike i don't know so go to asksciencemike.com and click the patreon button oh gosh by the way keep sending your questions you know the downloads for the show are up probably higher than they've ever been but the number of questions we get has never been lower it's actually fallen dramatically over the last year so i don't know if you all are running out of questions or just assume yours will never have a chance to air uh but right now you have the best chance you've ever had to get a sh a question on ask sciencemike so if you want to submit a question just go to asksciencemike.com scroll down to the bottom and you can type out a question via email or record a voicemail for the show we'd love to hear your question either way i'd like to thank greg nordin for production and sound design i'd like to thank uh caitlyn hermstad for producing ass science mike jeb bodaford for writing the theme song and the patrons for making the show possible thanks for listening everybody and i can't wait to talk to you next [Applause] week