ASM052 Empaths, Genesis, and Life in Space

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empath genesis and life in space all that and more on this week's episode of ask science

[Music]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life it's the first episode of 2016 and it's great to be back after the holidays and i'd love to see you at one of the many events i've got coming up which you can learn more about at asksciencemike.com just click on the tab labeled events but enough about that let's get it started [Music] hey mike thanks for all you do um before listening to your podcast i always felt like an outcast for looking at faith through a critical lens i love the concept and idea of genesis being more of a story of mimetics rather than a story of genetics it makes so much more sense that god is more concerned with the origin of our relationship with him rather than our own origin story i'm still working through a few things though um the first is how do we reconcile a poem like genesis with the intersection of of real historical people and the historical world um where is the line where the paradigms of genesis collide with us with people that that were our ancestors i mean the other has to do with the idea of the human brain rebelling against god's creation or dare i say his memetic yeah what makes us so special as opposed to other animals or even god himself um does like the deep rooted shame that came from the fall yeah where does that come from and does that set us apart from other animals like how and does like the human soul even have a part in genesis again thanks for all you do mike uh you've honestly really helped me love god and love his church and people all over again i haven't done a genesis question in a while so i thought it'd be fun to kick off a new year with our origin stories in the bible it's a question i get a lot this idea how do we know what is poetic versus mythic versus real history in genesis and in the bible and i empathize i used to have a very similar question it's kind of hard to remember that perspective though because this is an issue i've put to bed and that's because i used the same approach i would use for literally any historical document the bible is a collection of books it's an ancient library now it spans you know 1500 years 1800 years of writings but at its core it's just a library of books written by people uh and i along with the church believe that those books were written about god now most of the church would also say they were directly inspired by god to some degree i would agree that they were inspired by god in the way that a journey song might be inspired by love but i don't think that god actually dictated or directed the bible's formation in any meaningful sense so i don't separate those stories from people they're written by people and learning more about the historical context of that author and that author's audience helped me understand more about that passage of scripture so i i do understand the earliest parts of genesis to be very poetic but later parts of genesis were intended to be some form of historical record the question is how accurate is that text versus other sources of historical information like archaeology or anthropology or just secular history the fact is a lot of the details in genesis don't line up terribly well with our modern understanding of ancient history but here's the thing history isn't like physics the evidence that we sift through to understand human history is nowhere near as consistent or reliable in the picture that it offers us as say a particle accelerator is at describing quantum physics all historical claims have some degree of uncertainty associated with them that's much higher than the harder sciences like physics or biology so i kind of hold the claims of modern historians very much with an open hand understanding that further archaeological and historical insights may change them now that means there's some things i strongly that are in genesis the idea that there were two people who are were responsible for the entire species adam and eve doesn't seem to be a very well-based claim or that an exodus of millions of people from egypt doesn't seem to have good historical grounding these are accounts that through oral history probably had their origins in real events but by the time they were recorded they were mythicized to some degree that does not mean that those stories can't teach us about people's relationship with and understanding of god the real value of these books is precisely that it's a depiction of a long journey people have had with god and i don't think that makes those books less valuable i think it makes them more valuable the point of the bible is not to tell me you know hard modernist history about ancient israel or babylon or egypt it's not to give me a strict chronology of every generation of human being but instead what these books do is show and record an ongoing developing discussion and even debate about who god is and what god wants and what's god's what is god's character and that gives me a lot of peace now if you'd like to learn more about approaching the bible that way my friend pete ins has a book called the bible tells me so that's fantastic he's got another called inspiration and incarnation that's really good and i always recommend my friend rob bell's series on the bible that's on tumblr you can google it and i'll have links in this week's show notes now in terms of what makes us special you know genesis does elevate us compared to other animals and you mentioned a couple of things one our capacity for shame which is something that's denoted from our very elaborate ability to imagine what other people might think of us our brains build models of what other people's brains model about us but that's true of all social animals so to some degree any social animal that's a vertebrate and large brain some excluding bees and ants for example can experience some degree of shame and you mention a soul i don't think there's any universally agreed upon definition of what a soul is so i'd have to sit down and talk with you about what your specific assumption about a soul is for example even ancient hebraic and then modern christian ideas of soul are pretty radically different i think what separates us from other animals which by the way i believe very much that we are also animals is our ability to create with intention and i think when uh it says that we're made in the image of god that might be kind of the the portrait that i'm seeing is here we have an account of a god who created everything through thought with intention and the rest of creation keeps creating for example stars make more stars trees make more trees fish make more fish etcetera but those are either automatic or instinctual functions but humans paint and write humans create architecture uh cities and cars and automobiles and iphones and all of those things involve this process of thought creating and i think maybe that's the image of god the capacity to create and with it comes responsibility because our agency is attached to choices which means we can use our image for good or for evil [Music] our next question comes from mckinney liz m via twitter using the hashtag asksciencemike and she asked how can this organism survive in space are there other organisms that can also live in space and then she had a link that went to an article that discussed an animal called the tardigrade also known as the water bear now a couple of things in your question we have to define really what it means to survive and then we also have to talk about organisms that can live in space so for this question i'm going to only discuss organisms that are terrestrial in origin organisms that came from earth we don't know if there might be extraterrestrial organisms that can in fact live in space we're only going to talk about earth based biology now there are these little tiny microscopic animals called tardigrades they have been on the earth for a very very long time 500 million years and they have a remarkable ability to dry out and be in very harsh environments very cold environments or very hot environments or even environments with radiation and then to sort of pop back to life when they're exposed to water again now they can survive truly harsh conditions just a couple degrees higher than absolute zero tardigrades have been shown to survive in experiments they can survive in temperatures much higher than most other organisms and the way they do this is to basically pull in their head and their little tiny eight legs and curl up into a ball through some not fully understood molecular change become nearly indestructible they go into a state of suspended animation where their metabolism is less than 100 of a percent of its normal rate and in this state some tardigrades create proteins or antifreeze like chemicals or antioxidants that help prevent cellular damage but we've even found that when their dna is damaged by radiation tardigrades are able to repair their dna once they're animated again it's really really remarkable and because of that tardigrades have been found on satellites uh and other spacecraft and when they've been brought back to earth they're they're fine the them to water and they come back a critical point they're not living in space they're not functioning they're not feeding or growing or reproducing they're just in a state of suspended animation now there are some other bacteria that can do that and because of that nasa actually has protocols for sanitizing spacecrafts in accordance with their possibility to pollute other planets or or objects in the solar system since we're searching for life on other planets we don't want to accidentally seed some heavenly body with life and then think we've discovered life on it if that makes any sense and organisms like tardigrades that are so hardy make that a necessity now here's the thing we don't know exactly how tardigrades do it because different tardigrade species you know may or may not create these anti-freeze proteins may or may not flood their bodies with antioxidants they seem to have different strategies that all favor this resiliency now it does make us wonder why they're so resilient in the first place compared to other life on earth even you know bacteria that in many cases can turn themselves into an endospore and survive harsh environments tardigrades are even more tough than most of those well we found that the most ancient tardigrades that their entire evolutionary history has occurred exclusively in the oceans don't have this remarkable capacity so it's possible that tardigrades were very early colonizers of land on earth you know when there was nothing on the earth other than you know maybe some simple organisms tardigrades were there as well and in this period of drying and flooding and you know alkalinity or acidic environments these little microbes the ones that were the toughest in the kind of the roughest period of earth geological history that involved life were the ones that survived and so evolution appears to have favored or gifted the tardigrade with truly truly remarkable capacities to survive in very extreme environments [Music] as this program has grown i've been approached by a lot of companies who want to sponsor ask science mike and i've never accepted i've never done it i value your time even though they're good companies i wanted to make sure if i ever brought on a sponsor it was somebody i thought that could actually make your life better and a product that i personally use and enjoy and recently that happened i was approached by a company whose product i already use and love and it's called sanebox and they've been gracious and sponsored this episode of ask science mike email drives me crazy sometimes it's so essential to getting work done and life done but it can be overwhelming and even though i'm really methodical and organized in my approach to email i still find that it can be overwhelming and it's not just the spam there's a lot of messages i want but that aren't very important in terms of getting my work done or meeting with friends or just doing things that day now i've tried a myriad of apps and filters and different systems to streamline my email and frankly most have been more trouble than their worth they were either too hard to set up or require too much work to maintain well sanebox is a service that scans your email and filters out everything but what you really need and that's messages from actual people you know it doesn't delete any of your other email it just moves it to another folder you can sort through when you have enough time it used to be that when i opened my email for the first time each day i'd have hundreds of emails in my inbox and it they weren't the ones that i really needed most of them were newsletters or offers from companies i follow or questions for this show and those were things that i want but they weren't things that i needed as soon as i opened my email well believe it or not after i started using sanebox i only have a handful maybe five or ten emails in my inbox every morning which makes it a lot easier to get moving in that critical first part of the day so unlike other solutions sanebox works with any email host and absolutely whatever email applications you're already using you don't have to change anything about your setup it works so well it's like having an assistant who filters all your email for you it's that good now sanebox is doing something really special they're offering 25 off any of their subscriptions to any of my listeners that's almost half off the cost of a yearly subscription so if you'd like to get control of your email with like really no effort just go to sanebox.com sciencemic and get your 14 day free trial and 25 off any subscription thank you sanebox for supporting this program [Music] our next question came from drummondzak on twitter who asked why do the planets orbit the sun in a flat plain and is the rotation of the sun a factor at all that's a fantastic question and one i struggled with for months when i first realized it's an odd thing if you learn about the formation of stars and planetary systems you have a cloud of dust a very large cloud of dust typically called a nebula that over time gravity pulls tighter and tighter in the center of that cloud a star will form enough gas gets close enough together that gravity pulls hard enough to start nuclear fusion and then this new star sends a shock wave out into the surrounding cloud of gas and that can help create planetary systems so that's why a lot of times we believe you have these rocky planets like mercury and the earth and venus and mars towards the inside of a solar system and then gas giants as you move out into a solar system that could be a factor but the weird thing is if you look at our solar system all of the planets are like on the same track and you would think in this big 3d cloud planetary orbits would be at all different angles but what we see is they're all basically at the same angle pluto before it was kicked out of the planetary society and became a planetoid or a dwarf planet had the most differential orbit you know mercury's is a little out of whack as well but in general all the planets are remarkably flat in their path around the sun and it doesn't make sense at first it took me a long time to research and find out why that happens and it turns out it's physics so if you have a closed system of particles which a cloud of gas is a cloud of particles if you were to add up all the random motions in that cloud you'd find that it was some non-zero value they don't all cancel out right and so there's a law called the conservation of angular momentum that basically says in closed systems over time as all these particles run into each other they're going to cancel out anything that doesn't agree with that sum of momentum okay so that's why first of all not only our planetary systems tend to be flat there's a lot of flat galaxies accretion disks around black holes are flat lots of closed system phenomenon in our universe start in a some sort of cloud formation and move towards a flat disc uh and that's because over time ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping all these particles through collisions transfer energy to each other and change each other's momentum and and as that happens trillions and trillions and countless numbers of time it things tend to flatten out so a cloud tends to turn into a disk over time and by the time a star is born by the time gravity is pulled in enough of these particles towards the center of this mass they tend to be very flat and we found as we look at exoplanetary systems other stars that have their own planets they tend to be flat as well and it's just as simple as the law of the conservation of angular momentum now if that's a little bit hard to follow on a podcast just go to ask sciencemic.com and click on the show notes for this episode and i've got a youtube video up there that will have some visuals that make this really easy to understand but it turns out it's just science it's just physics it's not even directly related to the rotation of the sun although the rotation of the sun is related to the conservation of angular momentum both phenomena emerge from the same source hey science mike i was wondering if you had any scientific thoughts on the concept of being an empath for those who may not know what an empath is an empath is known as someone who has the paranormal ability to apprehend the mental or emotional state of another individual and this can be seen in people who tend to absorb other people's emotions and essentially take them as their own so if you have a friend and they're sad then you if you were an empath would also be as sad as they were even though whatever happened to them that made them sad did not happen to you i know about the mirror neuron theory and how it is applied to this topic but i guess i just wanted to know your thoughts on it thanks for all you do even though i've done more than my fair share of freaking out over the new star wars movie uh i have to be honest i'm actually more of a star trek guy than a star wars guy and my earliest forays into science fiction involved star trek now in my formative years the uh star wars flavor of that era was a show called star trek the next generation and there was a character on that program called counselor troy who was an empath she had the ability to read other people's emotional states with great detail even over distances it's a pretty remarkable stuff as terms of a storytelling device and i was always intrigued watching the interactions between counselor troy who was an empath and commander data data wow that was terrible i'm sorry guys i'm sorry folks look at that correcting my gender language on the fly sorry but i'm an idiot anyway so watching commander data and counselor troy talk because data didn't have any feelings and didn't understand feelings and counselor troy therefore couldn't read data's feelings pretty wild stuff now in terms of the science of empaths well like telepathy or you know psychics all those things don't really have any grounding in modern science if they exist they uh have been remarkably successful at avoiding detection or measurement of any kind we just don't see empathic or telepathic behaviors or evidence that show up in studies and studies have been done now i say that but at the same time i have seen a really remarkable mentalist feats and i have seen people who appear to have some form of telepathy and i've also seen people who have remarkable capacity to read the emotional states of other people and i don't think there's anything paranormal to that i think that's happening in human brains we're a social species and we devote an incredible amount of our neurological real estate to measuring and estimating the emotional states of other people and the most successful humans in our history have been the ones who are the best at basically guessing with high accuracy what's going on in someone else's head so people who have a high degree of natural empathy who develop that gift who develop that talent by interacting with a lot of people i would imagine would re appear remarkably like an empath they may even feel like it's a paranormal activity because it's not coming from their consciousness it's not coming from the parts of the brain associated with conscious thought or with analytical reasoning and instead it's it's coming from the more intuitive parts of the brain the more emotional parts of the brain and they're reading a lot of cues they aren't even consciously aware of in other parts of their brains that are then being fed to their prefrontal cortex and their conscious awareness and i think that is a true gift i'm a remarkably empathetic person i don't know that i'd call myself an empath but a lot of the reason my work is successful is because when i talk to people and i hear their stories or when i read your emails or listen to your questions i feel what you're describing when someone you know sends a question and they're obviously in anguish and i hear it in their voice or read it in the text i go to that place emotionally with them and i typically uh you know there's a part of the show where i talk about scientific insights and that's actually pretty pretty easy stuff because i'm good at remembering about science but there's another part where people ask me for advice and i've always wondered why that part of the show happens or is successful at all and i think it's because i have that emotional empathy with people and i literally just tell people how i've managed my own similar feelings in the past it's just that simple and i think that might be the mechanism only to a larger degree that's at play with people who would describe themselves as empaths so i want to be clear i think there are people who are kind of fraudulent and pretend to be empaths or have high degrees of empathy and try to play it off as a paranormal effect but i also believe there are people whose brains are just very good at estimating other people's emotional states who genuinely believe that's a paranormal phenomenon and who also genuinely help other people with their feelings and traumas so i'm not against that i just want to be clear that it doesn't have a grounding in science as we understand it and as a good skeptic and a good scientist i will quickly turn on my heels and change my position in the event that i am shown convincing evidence towards the idea that paranormal empaths are a thing as i mentioned at the top of the program there are a ton of events on my calendar uh in january i'm going to be at the sundance film festival with the wind rider forum if you're at sundance come by wind rider i'm going to be there michael gunger is going to be there with me we're going to do some on-site litter just podcast recording with filmmakers really excited about that immediately after sundance i'm going to be in fort smith arkansas at the first presbyterian church and then just a little while later the liturgists are going to phoenix arizona and los angeles california to put on lost and found so that's just in the next couple of months four really great opportunities to meet you and hang out so if you're in those markets let me know if you'd like to learn more go to mikemcarg.com events or just go to asksciencemike.com and click on events and you can learn more about where i'm going to be and when there's a lot more stuff that's coming that's not on the calendar yet but that's a little further into the year into the spring and into the summer and i've actually got a ton planned for the fall as well there's going to be plenty of chances to see me all over the united states in 2016. so keep your eyes open now the questions have just about stopped coming in over the holidays which i get everybody's not on their computers everybody's not listening to podcasts we have a huge backlog of questions we could spend dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of episodes just answering questions we've already got but i always love new questions and i tend to favor the newer questions when i put the show together so uh if you'd like to have your question on the show just go to asksciencemike.com you can type out a text question or record a voice question right there of course you can also submit questions on social media using the hashtag asksciencemike i've been featuring some of the twitter questions lately and i do want to thank a few new things and a few old things as well in 2016 for the first time in addition to the wonderful support of listeners through patreon we've got a couple of people who sponsor the show so i do want to thank the wedgewood circle for their grant that's helping make this show possible and i want to thank sanebox our first sponsor ever if you'd like to get that you know 14 day free trial and 25 off of subscription to sanebox just go to sanebox.com science mike and of course this episode was produced by my boy my dog greg nordin the amazing canadian and our theme song was written by jeb bodford if you need some podcast music for any original music composed written recorded and produced jeb is the guy who can do it all thanks for listening everybody and i will see you next week [Music] you