347 - Under Alien Skies - Phil Plait

Introduction and skeptic culture

0:00You can go to kitted.shop and use the code SMART50, S-M-A-R-T-5-0 at checkout, and you will get half off a set of thinking superpowers in a box. If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, check it out, middle of the show.

0:30Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 347.

1:00Let me ask you a question here. How many of you here today used to believe in something, used to, past tense, whether it was flying saucers, psychic powers, religion, anything like that? You can raise your hand if you want to. I mean, I imagine, yeah, not everybody's born a skeptic, right? A lot of you are raising your hand. I'd even say most of you from what I can tell. Now, let me ask you a second question. Second question is, how many of you no longer believe in those things and you became a skeptic because somebody got in your face screaming and called you an idiot?

Phil Plait and The Amazing Meeting

1:40That is the voice of astronomer and science communicator Phil Plait, who is our guest. In this episode, we're going to talk about his new book, Under Alien Skies, A Sightseer's Guide to the Universe. And I want you to know that that's what this episode is mostly about. But first, I would like to go on a tangent to tell you a little bit more about that audio, where it came from.

2:15It's a lecture that Plait gave more than a decade ago at a gathering, a yearly convention called The Amazing Meeting. So where does this leave us? How do we attain that goal of a rational, reasonable, enlightened society? And the key is obvious, to me at least, it's communication, right? The best idea ever thought of in the history of humanity is useless unless someone communicates it. It will die in the test tube.

2:45And in our case, what we're communicating here to people is not something they necessarily want to hear. So our demeanor, how we deliver this message, takes on crucial, crucial importance. What is The Amazing Meeting? Well, it is a gathering of scientific skeptics. And it gets its name from the amazing Randy, James Randy, who was a stage magician who gained fame as one of the first really mainstream scientific skeptics.

3:16And he started gaining that fame in the 1970s for publicly challenging the claims of the supposed psychic, Ernie Geller. Geller claimed he could read minds and bend spoons and move objects via telekinesis. And in 1973, Geller appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, supposedly to demonstrate all of this, to move objects around on a table. But it's a very cringy watch because beforehand, Randy helped the producers prepare all those props to ensure no trickery could be used by Geller.

3:52See, Randy knew the ins and outs of this sort of stage act, and he could see right through it. He saw that Geller was a stage magician pretending to be a psychic or a person with psychic powers. And on the show, for about 20 minutes, Geller keeps failing over and over again, trying to move things around, things that do not budge, while the crowd just waits. And the whole time, he makes these very weak excuses for why it's not working. And it's worth checking out if you've never seen it.

James Randi on The Tonight Show

4:24Here's some audio. If you have just joined us, we are talking with Furi Geller, who claims and has performed some very astounding feats. We have a variety of objects sitting here. We have also, as per your request earlier this afternoon, and if you want to try that or whenever you feel like it, one of our staff members did some drawings which have been sealed in an envelope. And I'd like you to take your own pace when you feel like you want to try anything. Do you want to try that particular experiment first? When I'll feel for it.

4:55When you're here? Sure. Geller then holds his palms above the objects. Metal canisters, keys, nails, pocket watches, that sort of thing. And after an excruciating period of silence and zero movement, Johnny offers him several opportunities to explain himself. To which Geller replies, he just isn't feeling it that day. Let's skip ahead a bit. He is really suspicious. I'm having a hard time with you.

5:26I don't mean to be, all right? I really thought. No, no, just keep looking.

5:32And I'm telling the viewers, if I miss, then I miss. I won't pass here. Usually I pass if I... Usually I pass if I don't feel for it. But if I'm wrong, then I'll be wrong. Yeah. So it never works. And eventually Johnny says, OK, we have to wrap this up. And it's very awkward how they just say, well, here it is. Well, it doesn't leave us much, does it? Well, we do have three empty canisters.

6:07We have three empty canisters there. And we have seven over here.

6:12And a bent spoon. And a spoon. And a spoon that's got a slight bend in it.

6:19No, I'm really, I'm not trying to be patronizing at all. I wanted this to be of great success tonight for you. Johnny, I feel very good. But I feel very good. OK, we'll take a break and we'll come right back. Yuri Geller never recovers from this. He tries. And he keeps performing. And James Randi keeps debunking him. And they have sort of a public feud that ends with Randi rising to fame and prominence. And he becomes a professional debunker, exposing charlatans and con artists who claim to have magic powers.

6:52In fact, he appeared on The Tonight Show to demonstrate the trick of psychic surgery and how damaging and dangerous it was to fraud people into believing they could have their tumors removed by someone with magical hands. And he demonstrated all of that on The Tonight Show, live, in front of millions of people, showing that psychic surgery was just a form of sleight of hand. It was a kind of stage magic. OK, James Randi is here tonight.

7:23And he is the author. James Randi is the author of The Fate Dealers, and he's best known as an investigator of psychic and miraculous claims. Would you welcome, please, the amazing Randi. After some chit-chat at the desk, Randi walks out onto the stage where a man is lying shirtless on a platform with a bowl of water at his side and a bag of cotton balls on the other side. And Randi explains to the audience what he's about to do. And then he gets to work, rubbing the man's stomach, until...

8:00Something bursts, blood spurts from under his hands, and then he begins to seemingly remove gory, squishy, stringy things. At times, it appears like Randi's hands are going deep inside this man's belly, and Randi just keeps producing meaty clumps of goop. The audience laughs and groans, and Randi drops some of those bits into the bowl of water.

8:31It's a wild performance. And at one point, he slowly yanks out something that seems substantial, something important, a big, stretchy thing that might be an organ, to which Randi says... Oh, no, that doesn't come out. Eventually, helped by James Randi and magicians like him, a community formed around scientific skepticism and critical thinking.

The goals of scientific skepticism

9:07In 2003, thousands of people of that movement began gathering at yearly conferences called The Amazing Meeting, named after The Amazing Randi. And our guest in this episode, Phil Plait, from the very beginning, was one of the most prominent and active voices in that movement. He's a PhD-level astronomer who worked with NASA on the Hubble telescope. And he blogged about anti-science and misinformation and motivated reasoning and intellectual humility, all under the title of the bad astronomer.

9:42And he became an advocate for science communication, which led him to serve as the president of the James Randi Educational Foundation from August 2008 through 2009. And as this movement grew and gained ground, confronting everything from moon landing deniers to anti-vaxxers, pre-COVID anti-vaxxers, and flat earthers and Bigfoot believers and peddlers of fake cures and magical medical practices, Plait started to grow concerned about a general attitude within that community, a sort of pitiless loathing,

10:17often born out of escaping oppressive religious communities or pseudo-cults or conspiracy groups, and then looking back on your former beliefs and attitudes and ideas in anger. It started to seem more like the movement wasn't interested in persuading people to come over to their way of seeing things, to communicate the value of skepticism and the scientific method, but to consider the others as a big them. And Plait felt like that would, in the end, lead the movement farther from its goals.

10:52So he spoke up about all that. So again, I ask you to remind you, how many of you lost your faith, your belief, because someone called you an idiot, right? I suspect that most of you, like me, you lost your beliefs gradually. It didn't happen overnight. I didn't wake up one day and decide to disbelieve or it just happened. It took a while, months, years, I don't know, to be honest, I don't remember, but it wasn't overnight. And it wasn't because someone insulted me or got in my face. We saw Randy on those clips earlier today, and I'm not sure exactly about the timing when he did the psychic surgery,

11:27but I remember watching that and laughing and laughing and thinking that that was awesome, that that's a terrific way to do it, to make people laugh and to tell them it's a trick, and, you know, you engage them, and it's funny. And that really helped me become an active skeptic and to do what I do today. And, you know, that was 20 years ago. I mean, I really started thinking about my own beliefs. I was a huge, I've mentioned this many times in previous times, UFOs and out-of-body experiences and the Bermuda Triangle, I was huge into that stuff.

12:00And you know what? And now look where I am, right? I used to be a believer in all of that, but today I write a skeptical blog. I've written a skeptical book. And for a year, I was the president of one of the premier skeptical organizations on the planet. You may have heard of it.

12:17And I suppose you could call me a skeptical success story. I didn't seek out to do this, but I guess the way I did it worked, and it resonated with some people, and I'm really glad about that. But if someone had told me when I was 13 years old that my belief in UFOs was stupid, and that I was an idiot, and that stuff clearly isn't true, where would I be sitting right now? Wouldn't be here. I should probably tell you that Phil Plait clarifies, both in this speech and later, when he has been asked about this speech, that what he is asking people to do only applies when the other party is willing

12:51to have this kind of conversation when they're willing to argue in good faith, as they would say. Phil Plait quotes Roadhouse here. He says, I want you to be nice until it's time to not be nice. Okay, that's an important caveat, and it's missing in the edit that I put together of the speech, which, by the way, it has been edited because the whole speech is about half an hour long. You can find it in lots of places online. And it's not terribly controversial to say that when somebody is being attacked and insulted,

13:22they tend to get defensive, right? They're not in the best position to be either rational or self-introspective. It's going to be very difficult to change their mind when you're doing that. Taking the low road doesn't help. It doesn't make you stronger. It doesn't make you look good. And it doesn't change anyone's minds. What is the goal of what you're trying to do? And don't confuse taking the high road with being weak and being passionless. It's quite the opposite. I've struggled with this myself,

13:53and I found it takes substantial strength and magnifies my passion. So after all this, I think I can sum up my points like this. First, always ask yourself what your goal is. When I was a kid, there was a commercial about going on diets, a sign you could put on your refrigerator that says, is this trip necessary, right? Is this argument necessary? What is your goal? What are you trying to accomplish? Before you blog, before you leave a comment, before you engage a pseudoscientist, before you raise your hand, before you send that email,

14:25ask yourself, is this going to help? Is this going to allow me to achieve my goal? And you also need to ask yourself, will this impede me from achieving that goal? Is this just to make me feel better, or am I trying to change the world? And second, and not to put too fine a point on it, don't be a dick. Our guest in this episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast

15:01is Dr. Phil Plait, astronomer and science communicator, world-famous Big S skeptic, an advocate of critical thinking and intellectual humility. And that lecture in particular, the Don't Be a Dick Lecture, was very impactful on me. I remember watching it years ago and thinking, oh, here's somebody I should follow, check out what they do, read what they write, and tell people about it. And now I get the chance to do that all these years later here on this show, but not really about skepticism and critical thinking and the scientific method.

15:32We're going to talk about his new book, Under Alien Skies. But we will mention all those other things too, including a little aside about the modern interest, the current interest in UFOs, which have come back in a big way. All of that after this break.

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19:13And now, we return to our program.

The resurgence of UFO beliefs

19:20What do you think about UFOs making it back? They came back in a big way. What's going on? They're everywhere. They're on TikTok. They're on Twitter. What do you think? If I had to sum up everything about this resurgence of interest in UFOs, I think I would just say nothing has changed. And for people who didn't grow up in the 70s when UFOs were a huge deal

19:51and everybody talked about the Bermuda Triangle and all this stuff. Chariots of the gods. Chariots of the gods and Close Encounters which is a movie I love but was a movie that was riding on this wave of everybody believing in UFOs. And the thing is nothing has changed. We have, I tell people, we have a billion cameras on this planet and yet there is still no clear footage of one of these things. I see reports and I'm like, that's Venus. You're describing Venus. You're looking at Venus.

20:23This incredibly bright thing that's following me in my car. That's Venus.

20:29Balloons in June when people start getting married and they do those candle lanterns and bags. They're like, they're basically hot air balloons but they're small and those get reported as UFOs. And okay, Navy pilots are seeing these things and it's like, yes, we have had reports of UFOs from pilots for decades. And again, we know what a lot of these things are that they are objects that are hard to identify and the footage I've seen from the Navy fighters and everything, it's like, that's a balloon.

20:59That's another plane. We know this. But, you know, they get out there and people just really, really, really want them to be alien spacecraft. And I have to tell them, it's like, you just got to be critical about this and say, what if it's not? What else would it be? Does it make sense that this might be just an airplane seen from far away? And there are videos out there debunking this stuff that are really great. But you have to really, really go out there and look for them because for every one of those, there's a thousand of people taking a picture of an airplane

21:30flying over the horizon saying it's, you know, it's a UFO. Come to take them. I saw a great one. It was someone that was just filming the clouds out of their commercial airliner and something whizzed by, but, you know, you're passing it. It isn't whizzing by you. You're whizzing by it. And, yeah, in the blur, very fast iPhone footage, you're like, what? That's a strange oblong silver object I cannot tell the size of. But then, like,

22:00you get the wisdom of the crowd jumped on top of it and someone did the hard work of identifying the exact balloon that you would get at a child's birthday party that had made it all this way up there. Oh, I think that's the video I'm talking about. Yeah, it's one of the ones. Oh, is it? Yeah. I wonder what you would think of it, especially when we blew up a couple of balloons recently that were from other countries. It's out there. There's a whole lot of X-Files music being played over short videos on the internet now. And it fascinates me that it returned with such strength

22:32and power to a new generation of UFO believers. Well, sure. You know, we want to believe in the mysterious. And, you know, we want to know that there's more to life than what we see in our mundane lives. And I don't mean to say everybody's life is mundane. I'm just saying just, you know, in general, you live your life, you go out day by day doing things, and then you see something that looks like an alien spacecraft, suddenly your life gets a lot more exciting. And I was a huge UFO nut

23:03when I was a kid right through high school. And around the time I started learning science and learning to examine evidence better, I started to realize, like, I'm not so sure about this. And I get a lot of, back in the day when I was debunking a lot of this stuff, I had a lot of big names. You'd recognize a couple of them emailing me, calling me a jerk. You know, you just don't want to believe this. You just want things to be all cut and dry, and you don't want to believe in aliens.

23:33And it's like, are you kidding me? Way more than you do. I want there to be an alien coming. I was raised on Star Trek and lost in space and space 1999 and Star Wars. And I want a spaceship to land in my backyard and say, hey, want to come see Saturn? Yes. You know, yes. What would I, you know, what price would I pay for that? And that the price would be quite high. And so I, I absolutely want to believe in this stuff. But I also know as someone who is,

24:04who has done this sort of thing for a long time, the more I want to believe something, the more skeptical I have to have to be about the evidence I'm shown. And it doesn't mean I'm, I'm, I'm a cynical or trying to prove it wrong. What I'm trying to do is analyze it fairly and say, are there other explanations? Are there things people aren't telling me? Is, is this conclusion that somebody comes to the only conclusion you can come to? And, you know,

24:34what happens with all of this UFO stuff is the answer is, you know, I'm not seeing alien spaceships here. I'm seeing other things that we understand a lot better. That was so well put. It's almost like you should do this for a living.

Under Alien Skies and sci-fi writing

24:54Hi, I am Phil Plait. I'm an astronomer and science communicator and author of four books, including the just recently published Under Alien Skies, A Sightseer's Guide to the Universe. I love this book, Mr. Phil Plait, because it tricked me. It tricked me. I thought those, I read all the information about it. I thought I had a notion of what I was getting into. And then it turned out to have a lot of like, oh, this man wants to write sci-fi books because he's doing

25:25a good job. every introduction has a little sci-fi moment where someone is arriving or they are putting on their space suit or they're walking out into a place or they're floating above it. And it reminded me of the things that I loved in sci-fi when I was a kid. I grew up with a liquor cabinet full of my dad's old sci-fi books. But I always loved when they would actually describe looking at things.

25:56They'd actually describe going to places, like the process of all of it before the plot kicked in. And I dig that when I watch a movie that was like my favorite part of Dune, the new Dune. Just the feeling of scale, the feeling of, oh, you'd have to do special things to go here to there. Am I right? Were you playing with some sci-fi stuff with this? Oh, absolutely.

26:19I've said that I'm a frustrated science fiction writer and that's not really true. I wrote short stories in high school, right? Terrible short stories. And I've dabbled here and there, but I've always enjoyed writing science and never really had, I guess, the patience, I suppose, to plot out a science fiction novel. However, in my last book, Death from the Skies, I came up with this idea of having a short vignette, and I mean really short, just a few hundred words, describing sort of

26:50a scenario of, say, an asteroid impact or something like that and then talking about the science of it. And it's not that I thought, I'll just repeat that formula here. I actually asked my publisher, you know, I did this in the last book, but is it okay if I do the same sort of thing here where I open each chapter, say a chapter about Saturn, and I'll open it with a short story about somebody who is actually experiencing, visiting Saturn up close. And they were like, yeah, sure, fine. And I did it in, most of it is done

27:20in second person. So I say, you know, you are standing here. The reason being, well, as you say, I mean, the motivation for me personally being that, yeah, I mean, I could tell the same story you did. I grew up watching science fiction on TV and in the movies and reading the books. and when you're a kid, the plot only has to really be daring do. There's a monster and we have to take a rocket to go there and kill it. And, and, and, you know, they're flying over Mars and I'm like, whoo. And nowadays, you know,

27:51I like things like plot and character and themes.

27:56But that sort of daring do is a lot of fun to think about. And just having a vignette to describe, say, what happens to an astronaut who, a space tourist who finds himself in, or herself inside an asteroid by accident, basically, was, it was too much fun not to do it that way. And the point being, so that was sort of my motivation. But then the, the other side of it as a writer is that I wanted

28:27to draw the reader into the story I want, I didn't want to just write another science book where I'm saying, here's what Mars looks like and there's this giant volcano and there's this huge valley. I wanted to say, you're hiking across Mars. This, a dust storm comes up. Here's what you, here's what you see. Here's what you feel. Here's what you have to do and have it all informed by science. So yeah, it's science fiction, but it's, it's, it's a description of what it would be like to really be at these places

28:58and experience them. It's great. I, I really felt some moments of, oh, I'm feeling vicarious awe through this, uh, very talented science communicator and writer doing the thing. It was really nice. I, especially, and I'm going to get into it in a minute, especially like arriving, uh, at the rings of Saturn and like you, I felt like the feeling that I thought I would get in. You do a great job of keeping most of the book is through human eyeballs instead of telescopes, which is a different way to describe this sort of stuff. And the,

29:29you get the feeling like you actually have traveled there or you heard someone who did go there, come back and tell you a story about it. And I find that really well done. So I don't think there's a question here except to say, thank you. That's really cool. Well, thank you. And I appreciate that. And in fact, um, the, I don't want to say motivation or inspiration, but the, one of the, one of the reasons I wrote this book is that, um, I, I take my telescope out sometimes. I haven't done this in a while,

29:59but I'll go to public events or at Halloween, I used to take my telescope out and I write about, uh, these gorgeous images of galaxies and nebulae and all this stuff. And when I do all this stuff, the most, one of the most common questions I get is, does this stuff really look like this if you were there? You know, I'm looking at it through a telescope and especially when they're looking at Saturn, they can't believe that, uh, what they're seeing through the eyepiece really does look like the photographs in,

30:30in books, uh, smaller and less detailed, but Saturn looks like Saturn even through a small telescope. And so I'd get that question on, you know, if you were there, what would this look like? And it turns out that answer is not always straightforward. Sometimes it is. Like with the moon and Mars, the answer is yes. Um, with a gas cloud, the answer is actually no. It depends on what you're talking about and, and, and where you are. And I, and again, I just, I didn't want to just describe photographs. I want this to be

31:00immersive. And so that's how I, that's why I wrote it that way. And I'm, I'm glad you appreciated that. That's great. With the web telescope just be actually going viral and being memed up left and right. I've been very surprised at how, how much of TikTok content was about the, the new images from web and how people were, a lot of people, and you, the best part of TikTok are their comments and people would comment on things. And there'd be good science communicators talking about it. And they'd ask like, that's a real thing.

31:31A lot for, it was a whole generation of people are like, wait, the, those pillars of creation things are those, does that, that's a thing? Like, and they're like, yeah, how big is it? And they start explaining the size of it. You can feel people's brains exploding in the comments over and over again. They lose their cynicism. It's really nice. Yeah. I love that. We know in the, that nebula, the, the pillars of creation is part of what's called the Eagle Nebula, which is a decently bright nebula up in the summer for the Northern Hemisphere. And I've observed it a million times through my telescope. You can, you can, through the eyepiece, you don't see those pillars.

32:02You see the overall nebula. But then when Hubble released its, its pillars of creation image, and this would have been in the 1990s. This is a long time ago. I mean, it blew everybody away. People have been talking about Hubble for years, but that was sort of the first maybe image that really soaked into the public consciousness. And it's been around a long time. It's been re-observed by Hubble. And what's really cool is because James Webb, the JWST is such a much larger telescope

32:33and season infrared. The image is familiar, but different. And the resolution, the detail, and all of it, I love how it is reigniting people's excitement about astronomy. So that's fantastic.

Hubble telescope history and background

32:47Yeah, it's, your book comes out at a great time for all of this. Just from your world, from the world that I come from too, like the scientific skepticism and critical thinking, I remember that early movement and that was something that reached out to me and was very happy to be, to make contact through podcasts and other things with that stuff. And then, you know, watching it schism out and become all sorts of different divisions and everything. Your don't be a dick speech was an instrumental part of my development

33:18as a person because I was feeling it already. I was like, I think I agree with a lot of what's going on here and I'm very happy it exists having grown up in the Bible Belt. But, wow, a lot of these people sure are like assholes and punching down and not very empathetic and clearly it's deeply influenced my work. So, I don't know, that's just an aside to say, hey, thanks again for doing that. But I feel like it's already part of the sort of back and forth of the coming generation and maybe you laid

33:49some groundwork for that. Thank you. Yeah, that speech, the title of it was called The Goals of Skepticism and I wanted to talk to people about, you know, look, what are you trying to do here? Are you trying to get people to think critically about their beliefs or the things that they hear or are you just trying to be superior and score points off of them? Yeah, I got a lot of flack for that, you know, telling people don't be a dick and it turns out a lot of people who are dicks are going to be a dick when you tell them not. Yeah, surprisingly, surprisingly. And also,

34:20for people who would be listening to this, you mentioned Hubble. We should probably mention you have a bit of a connection with Hubble, is that correct? A bit. Yeah, I was in graduate school, I was just finishing up my master's degree when Hubble launched in actually April 1990 and I don't know when this will air but we are recording this on the anniversary of its launch, in fact, 33 years ago. 420? April 20th and it was deployed

34:52out of a space shuttle on the 23rd, 24th, I think, something like that a few days later. And I was looking for a PhD research project and I talked to my advisor and he said, well, you know, I'm part of this big project looking at exploding stars. Do you want to do that? I was like, uh, yes. And then two weeks later I was like, I have made a huge mistake. And it kills me.

35:23Nobody remembers really, or the younger generation doesn't even know that when Hubble launched, the mirror wasn't ground correctly. It was the wrong shape and for two years we got fuzzy images and it was a nightmare. I spent those two years trying to figure out what to do with data that were really fuzzy and it was awful. But eventually I got my degree and got a job at working at a small company that was contracted to NASA to work on a camera called STIS,

35:54the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph that was launched on board Hubble in 97. And so we, the camera was being built and it had to be understood. We had to figure out, you know, light goes in one end, what comes out the other, that sort of thing. That was my job. And I did that for several years. And it was, it's the, instrument is still on Hubble. It actually shorted out at one point and they had to replace the circuit board a few years back. But it's still working and it's amazing. I have nothing to do with it now, but it's still kind of amazing to, you know,

36:25a press release will come out or a paper with observations from that camera and I'm like, holy crap, that thing is still working. That's amazing. That's so cool. It's so cool. That and Voyager, just the fact that they're still doing their things. And I should do this too, but I should complete your arc before we go into Saturn, which is the first thing I want to talk about.

36:44Yeah, what do you do these days? What takes up your time? This, writing and talking about things in a very, in a very generic sense. I, oh gosh, what do I, what do I do now? I was, I was writing, I was writing for Sci-Fi Wire for several years and they let me go and then I ramped up my newsletter, which is at badastronomy.substack.com and you can subscribe for free and I have an issue every week for free,

37:15but if you pay a little bit of filthy lucre, you can get Tuesday and Thursday editions as well. I write for Scientific American. That's been incredibly enjoyable. I read that magazine when I was a little kid and to be able to write for it now is kind of staggering. I write twice a month for an app called Sky Safari. It's one of my favorite planetarium apps. You know, you can turn it on and say, oh, where, where is this star?

37:45And it'll, it'll point out the constellations for you and all that kind of stuff. And that's, that was great when they approached me and asked me to write for them as well. And I'm, I'm still poking around looking for other things, but in the meantime, you know, when you write a book, it's two years and then you do the interviews for it and you give talks about it and everything. So that's been, that's been sort of my life for the past few months.

Touring Saturn and its moons

38:04I will now promo your book. I want to. Excellent. I want to get into, I'm going to go backwards. I was thought about start on the moon and like talk about different things, but I just want to talk about Saturn first because I had that experience you're talking about. I, my first time to visit California, I got to go to the Griffith Observatory. They had a thing where you could look through the eyepiece of a gigantic telescope and look at Saturn. He had to stand in line and then you were watching everyone in front of you go, oh, as they, yeah,

38:35yeah, over and over again. And I was like, this can't be, I mean, I've seen Saturn a thousand times on TV and in books and stuff. And then you get there, you put your eye up to the piece, you see it in all its glory and you immediately, electricity goes through your veins, ice goes through your stomach, you float above into the heavens. And it really is unbelievable. And I got a chance to do that again with a friend who has a pretty good telescope in, in the, you know, the backyard. And same thing. It's that you can't,

39:06I'm assuming this still happens to you every time you look at it. Oh, absolutely. And, and, um, it, listening to you, I'm, I'm sitting here smiling. Uh, I, I've written about this and I have to, I'll have to dig up that article. I wrote it many years ago talking about, uh, showing Saturn again to, to Halloween trick-or-treaters. A lot of the times they would look through the eyepiece and, and you'd hear them say, you know, whatever the slang, the current slang is for kids for basically saying cool. And then sometimes they'd, they'd look through the other end

39:36of the telescope. Like, you know, are you holding a picture up? Are you holding a book up? When I, you know, when I'm looking through the eyepiece, like, nope, this is it. And in fact, um, I've done a lot of star parties, um, uh, where you stargazing events where you go out and a bunch of amateur astronomers will bring their telescopes. And I love doing these for a lot of reasons because I'm an amateur astronomer at heart. I still go out and use my telescope, uh, when I can. And I love going to like the biggest telescope there, which nowadays can be quite large and, and looking at something

40:08that I'm used to seeing through my smaller telescope and you look at it through a bigger one and you see a lot more detail, a lot of fainter stuff. But I still think that to this day, my favorite thing is simply, uh, showing people Saturn. And when somebody who hasn't seen it before, you hear these stories and you just, you just told yours and the listeners are probably going, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm here to tell you when somebody who has never looked through a telescope before or maybe has, but has never seen Saturn, sees it for the first time, that gasp of awe,

40:39that, you know, holy crap that they say or you see their eyes widen when they look at it. It's amazing. It brings me such joy to be able to show people things like this and especially, or, or an added part of that for me is because that's, that's how I got started. My parents bought a crappy Tasco telescope, this department store telescope that, you know, it was, it was fine, but it wobbly and all that kind of stuff. It wasn't very good, but it was good enough. And they set it up in the driveway

41:10and I looked at Saturn when I was, I don't, I don't even know, I don't remember, I was maybe five years old and that did it. I mean, that really was my inspiration. And if you talk to a lot of astronomers today and astronauts, they say the same thing. It's, you know, I saw Saturn or the moon through a telescope and I knew this is what I wanted to do. So it can be life-changing. In the book, you call it the gateway planet. Yeah, yeah. That's a great phrase. I made myself laugh when I first thought of that phrase, but it really, I mean, it really is true. If you've never done

41:41any astronomy thing before and you see Saturn through a telescope, you're like, I want more. I need more. I want to see, you know, what else is there. And it just opens up this, well, I mean, it opens up a universe for people. Well, in the book, you imagine, all right, there's some sort of technological advancement has allowed us to get out there to take a tour, to take some sort of cruise, a sightseeing space mission to visit Saturn, the planet. And it involves

42:12taking a rocket that eventually hooks up or you're transport, you're taken over to a balloon to float there. I don't want to talk over this. Like, what would be the experience early on of approaching this enormous celestial object and with its incredible, unique feature that you probably paid to go see? That's the thing you want to see are these giant rings. What would be like the first elements of that? As I was writing this or just sort of scoping it out, thinking, how am I going to do this?

42:43And again, every chapter, pretty much every chapter, is a mix of narration and exposition. So there's like a little bit of science fiction element. You are, you know, you go to the observation deck of your ship, you look out, you see Saturn and the captain comes on the intercom and is telling you we're this far away. And then I, you know, I end that little section and then talk about the science leading up to that point. And I do this several times, especially in the Saturn chapter

43:14because there's just so much. And I kept, I kept writing and writing and it's like this chapter is 20,000 words long and it can only be seven. So what am I going to do here? And even then, I just like, there was so much more I wanted to talk about. But I felt like, I think the thing to do is to say, okay, we're approaching Saturn and from a certain distance, it's just a star in the sky, just like it is from Earth. But if you get close enough, it starts to look distorted because it's, it's got these rings around it. Now, Saturn as a planet is about

43:45oh gosh, nine, nine times wider than Earth. I think something like that, nine or 10, very roughly. But those rings are much larger. They stretch very roughly 200,000 miles, which is three quarters of the distance between the Earth and the moon. So this, this is an immense thing that you're, you're approaching and seeing. But from far enough away, it just looks like an ellipse. You're just sort of seeing the same sort of thing that Galileo saw when he looked through his telescope,

44:16his, his terrible little telescope that was first being used that opened up the heavens to everybody. So it was still an important invention, but it, the quality compared to today wasn't that great. When he looked through it, he just saw this distorted elliptical thing. And then as, as it got better, you could sort of see that there was a disc with this ring around it. And as you're approaching in a rocket, you see the same thing. And then you get more and more detail as you get closer and closer. And then because Saturn is, is this huge retinue

44:46of moons around it, some of which orbit it at a very large distance, you can start to tour these moons even before you really start to see what these rings in that planet are about. So at that point, I say, well, we're going to fly by this moon Iapetus, which is bizarre. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's this icy moon. So it's very white and reflective, but it's got this huge dark region on it, probably because of material spewed out by another moon has landed on it

45:17and darkened it. And it also has, it looks like a walnut. It has this, this ridge of mountains that goes all the way around its equator. And these mountains are very tall. They're several miles high. And from a distance, it looks like a walnut with that, you know, that, that seam, that ridge around it. And we don't know what that is. We don't know why that formed. It may have been from an impact. Some asteroids smacked into that moon, blew a lot of material off that then formed a ring around Iapetus and then eventually collapsed back down.

45:49Some people think that it might have formed when the moon itself formed. It was spinning really rapidly. And so material flowed to the equator and then froze there. All of these ideas have their, their, their support and their detractors. We don't really know which one is right. And it's kind of funny because I'm writing this as, you know, a hundred years in the future. You're on a spaceship and you'd think by then they'd know, but I can't say, well, we knew it was caused by this because we don't know right now. So I was like, you know, back in the 21st century, astronomers argued about they had to do that kind of thing.

46:20But it's that sort of thing. You approach these moons, you fly past them and then you get to the rings. And that was one of the most difficult things I've ever had to write. There's so much going on with the rings. So much of it is just bizarre. And to describe it, I want people to, you know, again, I want them to feel this. And so how do you describe the weird gravitational effects going on in the rings and really convey the beauty of it?

46:51And, you know, happily there's, there's, I was able to have an artist named Chris Jones put together some illustrations which really helped. And I have photos in the book as well, some color photos. But the hardest part of all of this besides just describing all this craziness in the rings was holding myself back and not talking about 10 other things that were going on. It was, it was hard. And I still, every now and again, I think, oh, I should have written about that. No, no, no, no, I'm good. No book's ever done. Just abandoned, as they say. Plus when you're writing a book,

47:22I'm sure you've had this experience. Everything is the book. Like you'll be making macaroni and cheese and you'll think, oh yeah, actually when you think about it, macaroni and cheese is kind of a way to describe craters on Mars. In a way, in a way, because everything, everything. Well, in fact, in fact, here we go. It's bizarre that you would say that several moons of Saturn are shaped like ravioli. And there are some ideas as to why. There's sort of these,

47:53when you think of a moon, you think of the spherical object or maybe slightly aspherical, maybe a little bit elliptical like a football or something. But these things are very, very flat and they have these wide brims around them like a flying saucer from a 1950s movie. And it's not 100% clear why they look this way. These things have very low gravity. So you can have these incredibly, it would be almost like a single mountain going all, a ridge going all the way around the equator of this thing, but it could be miles high

48:25on a moon that's only a few miles across. And so the low gravity helps this thing to keep it from collapsing. But it could simply be that there's material that falls down from the rings onto these moons. Or it could be that these moons have spun rapidly in their past and ejected material. And then the material settles back down onto the moon. Very complicated. If you look them up, ravioli moons of Saturn, you'll find them. And let me tell you. That's a great name for a band. That is a great name for a band.

48:56Or an album. That's a good name for an album. Ravioli moons of Saturn, yeah. And it was one of those things where I have a note, like write about Pan, write about Atlas, these ravioli moons. And it was just sitting back with my chin and my palm and my elbow on my desk and thinking, you know, that's another 800 words and I just don't have room for it. So it was killing me. And you do, you mentioned several though, like Hyperion, you talk about the black craters,

49:26the weird settling of goop in the craters that we're not quite sure what it is, but there's many different hypotheses. The Enceladus with the geysers coming out of it, these were things, these would be things you could pass by on your cruise towards Saturn. I think that's amazing. Yeah, and we didn't know about most of this stuff until the Cassini spacecraft orbited Saturn and it was there for 13 years taking close-up images of all this stuff and we knew a little bit, you know, Titan is this enormous moon of Saturn. It would be a planet in its own right if it weren't orbiting Saturn

49:56and it's the only moon of a planet that has a relatively thick atmosphere and it's orange. It's mostly nitrogen, like our atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, but it's also got a haze of particles in it that makes the atmosphere completely opaque. So from, if you were, in orbit around Titan and looking down on it, you just see sort of this orange fuzzy sphere. You wouldn't see the surface at all. But if you use infrared light or you use radar, you can map the surface and I talk a little bit

50:27about that and, you know, we knew that, we knew that stuff, but we didn't know what the surface really looked like until Cassini went there. We didn't know that Enceladus, this tiny little moon made of ice, was spewing a huge amount of water into space until Cassini went there. There's a ring of Saturn created by Enceladus blowing ice into space. And that, I don't know if that ring was known, that ring was not known before Cassini went there,

50:57I'm pretty sure. Because then it would have been suspected that Enceladus was blowing these geysers. And I don't think that was expected because I remember those images came down and everybody was like, what the heck is going on? everything about Saturn is like that. You could spend a life studying a single thing about Saturn and its moons and its rings.

51:21And so to tour it, to be in a spaceship approaching the rings, going above them and just sort of cruising along above the rings, it would be life-altering to be able to see all these bizarre effects. Oh yeah, just looking at it from here is life-altering. I didn't know, there are things there that I wasn't aware of. The bands, there are many different bands and they have their own classifications.

51:51There's these gigantic gaps between them. But the thing that blew my mind the most in this section was they're thin, they're 40 feet thick.

The structure of Saturn's rings

52:02What? This is true? I need verification. So the rings are incredibly broad and you have to be careful with which words you use because they're wide, right? They're a couple hundred thousand miles across. But their thickness from top to bottom, you might think, well, you can see that they're thin, but you'd say, well, maybe they're a few miles thick. And no, they really aren't. And the thickness varies from section to section of the rings. There are different sections

52:32of the rings, the A and the B and the C rings, all these different things. But in general, overall, from top to bottom, there may be the size of a three-story building. So the analogy I use is that if you took a piece of paper, an eight and a half by 11 inch piece of paper that you write on, and you were to scale it up so that it were as wide as Saturn's rings, it would be thicker than those rings. And that's incredible.

53:05And so the reason is complicated. The rings are not solid. They're made of countless chunks of ice. And these chunks are not very big. Some of them are, you know, smaller than an ice cube you'd have in your drink. But even the big chunks are only a few yards across, most likely. And because of the way gravity works, Saturn's gravity tends to pull them into a flat disk. And any chunk that wants to go above or below that disk will hit another one that robs it of that height.

53:36And it kind of settles into this incredibly thin equatorial ring. And we see this all over the place. Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, they all have rings and it's the same sort of deal. But in the case of Saturn, because of how bright they are and how visible these rings are from a long way, these are the rings that we think about when we think of a planet with rings. And because of that, because they're very thin and because they are made of chunks, tiny chunks of ice, it could be rock, but it just happens

54:06to be ice. But because they are chunks and because they obey gravity, you start getting all these weird effects like a moon called Mimas, which looks just like the Death Star. Yeah, it's got that one crater. It looks exactly like it. Yeah, there's a gigantic crater called Herschel that was from an immense impact on this moon. So it looks like the main weapon of the Death Star. And Mimas orbits just outside the rings and its gravity pulls on particles in the rings in such a way that at certain positions, certain distances from Saturn,

54:37it pulls the particles away from their normal orbit. And so it carves these gaps basically in the rings. And there are tinier moons, moonlets, if you will, orbiting inside the rings that do the same sort of thing. And so the rings have all these gaps in them. But moreover, these moons, especially embedded in the rings, there's one called Daphnis, for example. It's tiny. It's like five miles across. And its orbit is ever so slightly tilted. And so as it moves up

55:08and down with respect to the rings by a tiny, tiny amount. But as it does, its gravity, as feeble as it is, pulls the ring particles with it. And it creates these ripples, these waves in the rings. And it's incredible. The images from Saturn, the images from Cassini are amazing of this thing. And I found some artwork recently of what it would be like if you were in that gap sort of coming behind, following behind Daphnis and seeing these ripples in the rings.

55:39Kevin Gill, a very talented astronomical image guy. He manipulates images and makes them beautiful, but also does a lot of artwork and did some of this stuff. And it's just phenomenal looking at this stuff. You can find it on Flickr if you look his name up. And it's just, it's completely beyond your reckoning. You would never have thought something like this would happen. And even astronomers who study the rings were like, you know, if there were a moon there and it was doing this,

56:09you might see something like this. But even they were like totally blown away to actually see this stuff happening. When you get to the part where you approach the rings, where like you, you start to go over the horizon of them and the plane of the ring goes across your entire, the entire breadth of your vision. It's like anyone listening and just, if you've ever been on like a tour of a very tall building in New York City, look out the glass and see the entirety of the city

56:40and you get this immense vertigo, but also awe feeling and you cannot gather everything by looking left or right. I've done this in New York and in Toronto where you just cannot believe how much stuff is out there for your eyes to take in that you can't take it all in at once. Or if you're, you visit a mountain and you're close to the mountain, you get that same experience or a large body of water. None of that would compare to these rings. Like you might even burn what I wish from a genie on this. Like what would it,

57:10what do you think would happen like bodily, viscerally for you to witness the sort of the plane of the rings finally emerging as you go over the edge? I'm not sure. That's a good question. My jokey, snarky answer is I'd probably throw up.

57:28If the artificial gravity works, I'd probably be okay. But on the spaceship, it's, I don't know. I have had that feeling of profound awe many times when I first saw the Grand Canyon. I live in Colorado. There's a canyon here called the Black Canyon, which is also magnificent.

57:48I've seen certain things through the eyepiece or experienced other things where you stand there just sort of gaping. Your brain is overwhelmed and it's just whizzing around. You're spinning around in your head and you can't really rationally comprehend what you're seeing. And it was one of these things where writing about Saturn and people have asked me, you know, of all the places in your book, which one would you really want to go to? And it's obviously, it's Saturn. That's what I want to do. And I think that comes across in my descriptions of it and the fact that we're spending

58:19so much time talking about it. But it was also as I was thinking about it and I realized you see these pictures of Saturn and you see the ring system from a distance. And it's a circle or, you know, it looks like an ellipse because you're seeing a circular disc at an angle. So it's like when you look at a glass of water and the rim of the glass isn't circular, it looks like an ellipse because you're looking at it from an angle. Same, exact same thing. And so you think, well, it's curved and if you were there you would see like, you would look down and you would see this curving thing

58:50below you. and no, these rings are so huge, they span such an immense distance that if you were right at the edge, the outer edge of the A ring, the big broad outer ring, and you were to look left and you were to look right, it would look like a perfectly straight line for a long way out and then right really far, far, far away, you would just start to see it curve away towards Saturn. And if you look to the other side to your left, say, you would see the same thing,

59:20a straight line going out and then finally way far away you'd see it curving because of perspective. Say you're standing in Kansas, that's a good example because Kansas is very flat.

59:31You can see all the way to the horizon and the horizon is a circle around you and it's like you're standing on a plane, you're standing on a flat plane. But that's because the earth is so immense, so enormous that the curve of the earth isn't really visible from where you're standing. If you go up high enough, then yeah, you start to notice that the earth is curved. You look ahead and then you look to the right and left and you can see the horizon actually dropping down. But the earth is so big that from standing on it, you don't see that. It's the exact same thing with Saturn. At the edge of the rings,

1:00:02it's going to look like an architect basically drew a straight line right across the sky. And that is something that I almost never see in depictions of the rings. And I was like, I really want to describe this because I don't think people really get the enormity of this. And that was a way of kind of hammering home that you are seeing something so big, it's going to crush your mind into tiny little chunks of ice. You do a great job with it. And it made me almost, I think I almost got sad because like, I will never get

1:00:33to actually do this, but I got as close as I can get with Phil. I know. I know. Writing the book, there's a little bit of melancholy also writing this. It's like, well, I get to describe this, but I'm never actually going to see it. For anyone listening, this is the closest you're going to get to actually experiencing it. So you should probably get this book. And it's not just this. I mean, you talk about, I know, obviously I just wanted to talk about Saturn at length, but you got the moon, Mars, asteroids, Saturn, Pluto, red dwarf stars, places that have two suns, globular phenomenon, nebulae,

1:01:04black holes.

Standing on the moon and viewing Earth

1:01:06But oddly enough, one of the other things that really stuck out to me was imagining, we have some humans who have already done this, who have experienced this. I'm wondering how you imagine this moment of being on our moon and then looking up and seeing Earth. What would that be like? It's hard to, it's hard to know exactly what emotions you'd feel. It's difficult to predict that. And the one thing about writing this chapter about the moon,

1:01:37it's the first chapter in the book, and to some extent Mars, as well as asteroids and Saturn, is that we have sent space probes to these places. And so we know what they look like. And with the moon especially, people have been to the moon and we have their, you know, we have countless books talking about their experiences, including some that were written by the Apollo astronauts, and tons and tons of pictures that they took. And so in some ways,

1:02:07that part of the book was the easiest to write because I had so much previous experience to work on, especially since I'm of a certain age. I grew up with Apollo. I actually watched Apollo 15 launch from Florida. My family, we rented an RV and drove down to Florida and I, you know, I watched that rocket launch. So it was pretty amazing. And it had a profound effect on me. I can't remember how old I was, seven years old, maybe something like that.

1:02:35But to stand on the surface of another world and look up and see the same stars that you see from Earth, although they would have been tough to see. And I can talk about that in a sec. But the Earth is four times wider than the moon. The diameter of the Earth is about 8,000 miles. The moon's about 2,000. And so from the moon, the Earth looks four times bigger. And the Earth is, it's more reflective.

1:03:05The moon is actually, is actually a dark gray. And most people don't know that. And it's hard to grasp because when you see it in the sky, it looks white. But that's because you're seeing it against a dark sky typically. And it's sitting in full sunlight. And the contrast makes it look really bright. But in fact, if you look at the astronauts, the pictures of astronauts when they're standing on the moon, their knees, for example, are covered in this dust. And you can see that that dust is dark gray. And that's what the moon's color really is.

1:03:35The Earth, on the other hand, is several times more reflective. It's several times bigger. And so it's really, really bright. Not like the sun, but much brighter than a full moon is seen from Earth. And it's big. You can see details on it. You can see continents. It's the clouds would not, you wouldn't see like puffy clouds, but you could see, like when you see a satellite image of the Earth with a cloud stream stretching across North America or Africa or something like that. That's what you would see.

1:04:06And to think that you've gone so far that you have reduced the Earth to a disk in the sky, as big as it would look, you know, three days journey, three and a half days journey, and to go farther than anybody ever has. And the moon itself is remarkably colorless. It's gray. There's some brighter spots, some darker spots. But overall, there's not a lot of color to it. And the sky is black, even when the sun is up,

1:04:37because there's no atmosphere on the moon, to scatter the sunlight and make it light up. And the stars are hard to see because the Apollo missions landed on the daylit part of the moon, and your eyes adjust for that daylight. And so when you look up in the sky, even though it's black, you don't see that many stars. So everything's gray, everything's black, and then you look up and see this gorgeous blue, green, brown, white disk. I can't imagine how that would change a human being.

1:05:07There are astronauts who have spoken of this who are like, that's it. That's all. It changed everything. They have a very psychedelic experience just by peering at it. And then, you know, Carl Sagan's famous works about the idea of looking back upon it and talking about Earth rise and seeing it in phases. And the fact that, and you talk about this a lot in the book, that it stays in the sky for long periods of time in the same spot. It's like it's just there at all times. If you're standing in the right place on the moon,

1:05:38I'm imagining just how that would affect us if we were to build colonies there or build anything where people could visit it. I wonder what that would be like to have a stream of people going there and taking their pictures and putting them up on Instagram. It's hard to imagine. And the Apollo astronauts, I mean, we have some experience with this because the astronauts did it. But even in the later missions, they were only there for three days. People talk about Apollo 11 all the time, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins who remained in orbit around the moon while they were down there.

1:06:08But they were only on the surface for a few hours. And their total time outside the module was three hours walking around doing everything. It was basically get there, get your stuff done, and get your asses back to Earth. That's how that kind of worked because it had never been done before. And then by Apollo 17, we'd done it enough times that they could stay for a few days. But even then, there's a shift in your viewpoint, your Weltanschauung as the Germans would say, your worldview.

1:06:40But even then, it's not pervasive over a long period of time. And I wonder, when we build bases on the moon, and I try to avoid the word colony if I can, but if you have an expedition that goes to the moon, they build a base, scientific or whatever, and people live there. And if you read books like The Expanse or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein or any other thing, over time, people would get disconnected from Earth, I think. And how does that change your view? You're a quarter of a million miles away from Earth,

1:07:10but you can always see it. And it's just so beautiful up there in the sky. I don't know. I think about that, and I don't like to predict how people react because I'm not good at that. But in this case, certainly, you know, maybe one day we'll find out. But it's an interesting thing to think about.

Outro and podcast credits

1:07:56That is it for this episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast. For links to everything we talked about, head to youarenotsosmart.com or check the show notes right there in your podcast player. My name is David McCraney. I have been your host in those show notes. You can find my book, How Minds Change, wherever they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks. Details are at davidmcraney.com and I'll have all of that in the show notes as well, right there in your podcast player.

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