 Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOZO Radio 103.9 LPF. I'm here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, August 21st, 2022. I'm Larry Rhodes, our daughter five, and as usual, we have our co-host, Wombat on the line with us. Hello, Wombat. Hey, I'm the Wombat. And the guests today are Red Pirate Higgs. Welcome from Western Canada, D. John Richards from over in England Way. Hello. And guest Joe Skye out of Texas. Welcome, Joe. Swedish, oh, sweet Steve's not with us today. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we'll talk about religion, religious faiths, gods, holy books, and superstition, and souls. And if you think that you're the only nonbeliever in your town, well, you're probably not. And Knoxville, in the middle of the Bible Belt, we have a group of over a thousand others. And we'll tell you more about that group after the mid-show break. Wombat, what's our topic today? We're going over a mailbag today. All listener comments that we have in our backlog, all the ones that were thankful for. But you know what? I like to think of that as just the appetizer. No, not the appetizers, but like the sweet, sweet, sweet bundles of cherries and on top of a delicious cake that I like to build out of starch and carbohydrates. And I think who better to lead us through that piecemeal slices of deliciousness than our own Red Pirate Higgs for a weekly vacation? Please lead us in our invocation. Our newly lord, who worked in a colander, I'll dente be thy noodles, thy blood be rum, thy sauce be enough with meat as it is with vegetables. Give us this day our garlic bread and deliver us some carbs and lead us not into ketwism. For thine are the meatballs and the noodles and the sauces and the grog whenever and ever. So happy to talk to everybody today. I hope everyone's having a good time. Guys, I had a really vivid dream that I had to do a lot of car repairs. And I woke up and I realized that nothing's wrong with my car. I just had a really exciting dream about having to buy all these pieces of equipment. And I was so excited to wake up and be like, oh, I'm going to be such a cool mechanic. And then I realized not my car is perfectly fine. I was just like, aw, geez. Oh, well, but you know what? It's not bad to be healthy. It's not bad to have a working car. What else can I say? You got to count the genuine moments of happiness and not taken for granted. Speaking of which, that or five, I'm going to throw it up to you. How you been telling me some moments of happiness that you've had last week? Well, yesterday I took my bike out again, my motorcycle rode for a couple hours. That was a very nice day. It was about 83 degrees. Perfect. I played on my quest to virtual reality, first person shooters and stuff. I've also got a chess game in there that you have virtual opponents virtually. I mean, you got the board right in front of you and you can actually move pieces and stuff. It's great. So I imagine Larry with like the headset and he's just staring like this. And his family walks in is like, dad, are you awake? He's like, no, I'm just playing chess. I'm waiting for the other guy to move. He's like, you're sucking up batteries. John Rich is how you been? What's going on? Yeah, everything's fine here. Thank you. We've got guests at the moment. So there's a total of six children or girls as we've done playing football in the garden and dumping each other in the pool occasionally. How many touchdowns have they made so far? No, sorry, the wrong game. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Pretty ball. Oh, foot's association football. I see. I see. The real football. Yeah. Not bad. Not bad. Yeah. Nice. Very cool. Very cool. Drey Pirate, tell me some moments of happiness for you. What's going on? Well, Friday we had our monthly past acts. So we gathered together and feasted and had a good time. And one of our, or two of our newest members are actually planning to get married and I will be there. I will marry them. Very cool. He will be the first pastafarian wedding in Canada. We're going to take him out here. Yes. Wait. Because I'm an appointed marriage commissioner in British Columbia. There's only four statements that are required by law to be made by the celebrants. Outside of that, they can dress it up any way they wish. And so they've decided to go with the pastafarian theme. And we will really play it up. So and we're going to record it. We're going to let the news agencies know local and provincial. So that we can just pretty well say, look, we're here. We're not going away. You better recognize this and get over it. We're here. We're here. Get used to it. Right. Drey, I got a question for you. You've done marriages before. Have they all been in the U.S.? Like where have they been, if not Canada? Well, they've all been in Canada. So you said this is the first in Canada? First. First. Pastafarian wedding in Canada. The theme. So were the other ones not pastafarian themed? No, no, no, that because marriage commissioners in in BC in Canada, they're they're appointed by the Ministry of Vital Statistics. And it's the secular option available to people, right? I see. Because the only other marriage celebrants are are of religious nature. So this is the secular option that's available to people. But like I say, because right currently, you know, BC doesn't recognize us as a religion, so they can't give me any grief. You know, like we're playing two sides of the field here. And either way, we're going to get recognized in a little airtime, I think is going to happen. So guys, I'm going to ask one last question. Please forgive me for belaboring the point. So this is a religious optioned wedding where the theme will be pastafarianism. Is that it? Or is it a secular themed wedding where it's pastafarianism? Correct. The latter. OK. Yes. Just to get it done as the secular option, even though it's a religious option. Correct. Yes. You're just causing chaos. That's all. Yes. Just more operation. You're just like stirring the pot. It's like all the same stuff. You got it right. What's the strangest wedding you've ever done? For me, it was the vampire wedding. Oh, yeah. No. I'm an ordained minister. I can marry people too. Yeah. No, I did one in the winter outside in the snow and wearing plaid pajamas. We were all wearing plaid pajamas. Oh, that's the strangest one so far. I've actually gone to a pirate themed wedding before. What's that? I've gone to a pirate themed wedding before in a suit because no one told me it was pirate themed. So I just pretended I was one of the hostages. Hey, what's up there? I did a steampunk wedding once. Oh, yeah. I was the the efficient in that one. And I did, I married two ladies. This was before it was legal and we just, they just went through the ceremony because they wanted to make it semi-official. Wow. Look at that. It's good on you, Larry. Good on you. Skye, were you saying more things? No, nothing important. Okay. Well, then let me ask you, what's going on with you in the last week? How you been? Tell me some of your happy moments. The past week has been really good for me. I've basically just been studying. I am rereading Richard Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus and I'm also reading his book, Proving History, which is about Bayesian analysis. Yeah. And I'm an author. Richard Carrier. Okay. Oh, yeah, yeah, right on. Yeah. Do you, do you check out Bart Ehrman at all? I weed Bart Ehrman, but I don't really check out his website or anything like that. I think he is a top notch scholar, but I just agree with him on some key issues. Guys, that's such a scientific topic and no better way to transition than into some of the scientific comments that we got on some of our last week's episodes. And a lot of these come from Dada's Trading Room. One of the mainstay commenters on the channel. We appreciate it. And some from some others as well, but we're going to go through them all today. Just want to let you guys know we really appreciate the comments. Feel free to leave them, whether you're watching on Larry's channel, Dredd's channel, my channel or on John Richards. Feel free to leave a plug and we'll get to them in the show. Today's solely dedicated on mail bags. And then if we run out, we'll go into some other topics too. But we'll throw the first one out to John Richards. John Richards last episode, we were talking about UFOs, Loch Ness and Bigfoot. Oh my. And we were talking about life potentially existing on Mars and some issues that might exist with like a low atmosphere and some of the harsh conditions that are there for life. And so Dada's Trading Room mentioned that there's actually a place on earth in Canada of all places where the conditions are Mars like. This environment is under snow and ice where there is no air. Scientists have actually found life there, bacterial life that works in a different way than the bacterial life in oxygen. This fact may signify that there's similar life that's possible on Mars. And the surprise will be if we don't find life on Mars. You can check it out at SCTI Davon Island Research Camp. Comments. Let's have a conversation. Dred, you want to go first? Go for it. Yes, sure. So one of the biggest issues with looking for current life on Mars is that it doesn't have a magnetosphere, right? So cosmic rays and other deadly radiation hits the planet unabated. And relentlessly. So back billions of years ago where it might have had a magnetosphere, it would have had the protection that life could have flourished. But at this point, they're looking for signs of past life, I think, more than current life. Just for those reasons, right? That's a good point. Yeah. Gamma radiation can be a real killer. You know, that's what I was going to say. I understand that tardigrades can survive cosmic rays. That's true. You're right. Yeah, for years. They're really weird organisms. Our correspondent is absolutely right. There's a place in the high Arctic region of Nunavut, Canada, which is permafrost. It's always frozen. And so it's pretty hostile. There's salt there as well. And so it's miraculous that life has been found there, but it just goes to show. Miraculous, you say. Yeah, wonderful. Maybe I'll take I'll take back. Well, amazing. Of course, astounding. Because awesome is a biblical word too. Yes, it is. No, they aren't. Those are just regular words. Religion has tried to take a monopoly. They belong to everyone. Yeah, we want them back. Give us back are awesome. You can keep miraculous. Let us keep awesome. We have skateboarders that use it all the time. But the thing is that what Dallas Stingy Bob said isn't quite so surprising because life began on this planet. We're pretty sure in a non oxygen atmosphere. Yes, that's right. And it still exists anaerobically, respiring without oxygen in places where there's no oxygen. In fact, one of our family members has just recovered from a nasty condition called necrotizing fasciitis. Oh, my goodness. Odds are not good on that one. That's for sure. Absolutely. Well, she's fine. Thank you. After all, a lot of operations and still dressings being changed, but she's making it. But that is a condition where a bacterium that normally breathes oxygen is trapped under the skin in a place where there is no oxygen, turns anaerobic and starts eating up your own flesh. So it's not a good idea. But these organisms do exist in places where there's no oxygen. In fact, if you've ever drunk a beer or a wine, then you've taken advantage of anaerobic respiration, because that's what yeast does when it makes alcohol. So this is not a surprising aspect of it. But as Dred says, what's surprising is that it's unlikely to have survived still extant in Mars where there's now no magnetosphere and no ozone layer. So Mars is blasted with all the nasty radiations all the time. And the likelihood is if we ever colonize it, we're going to have to be under domes or underground because of that. And the other problem it's got is it's so small, it can't retain an atmosphere of any thickness. So forget terraforming it. That's my... Yeah, right. That's my thing. There's not enough gravity to maintain an atmosphere of any substantial density. No. There's a couple of things I'd love to say. It'd be funny if the indication of whether or not there's been intelligent life on the planet is if there's a layer of plastic meets layers and layers of seismic rock. Right? Yeah, if we find a tweaky wrapper on Mars, we'll know. Like it always starts with the fossil fuels, the oil, and then a bunch of drilling lines. And then next, you know, just a layer of plastic and then just rock, rock nuclear radioactive rock and then rock, rock, rock, rock. And that's it. And you're like, there was when the life was and it can give you a good impression of like where was intelligent life at what point in time like cutting a tree and seeing like the rings. The rings. It was then and then they move themselves up afterwards and then next, you know, there's no atmosphere and that's what happened. Yeah, there you go. But I know we like to go to tardigrades. Did you guys know there was a bunch of other microorganisms they shut out into space too? There's worms. Tape worms are also really popular. They can withstand radiation. They are the parasite that can grow in your intestines. You can break them in half and each segment is its own being. They just feed each other sort of like a train. They like to just push new treats down. Yeah. The thing about it is with parasites, you've got to have a food animal, you know, a host and that requires all kinds of evolution before the parasite can ever come about. It's kind of a later thing, I would think. But also and that's the thing with viruses, right? Is that they hijack other cells replicating machinery in order to exist. They can't exist independent of that. But also because they don't follow the same rules as organisms do or in most... Because they don't have organs. They can also hibernate or basically go into like this non-active state for long durations of time. And then if they get rehydrated or if the conditions are just right or if they reach a specified temperature, they're back alive again, even though they've not been active for like hundreds of years. It's just really... That's the premise of alien, right? The eggs just sit there dormant until the guy breaks the little light layer there and out of the box and sucks his face. It's the exact same thing, how we had some breakouts where people were going to like Egyptian tombs to be realizing, oh, there's golden stuff here and next thing you know, there's another smallpox outbreak. It's just like, yeah, those viruses were just waiting to latch on to somebody and then walk out with them. It's crazy. Hey, John Richards, what's up? Interestingly, we were talking about this with our guest on Free Thought Hour, only last night, which you can now see as a podcast on Free Thought Channel. Very interesting guest. Took us through the development of complexity. Development of complexity? Highly recommended. One of our best Free Thought Hour conversations. Yeah. In fact, I did want to make a little point on intelligent design here. When you design something from an engineering point of view, you want to make it as simple as possible, less fueling moving parts, the less parts needed, the less SKUs needed. Most simplistic way to transfer energy from one system to the next. No additional heat, no additional movement. We have a lot of complexity in our bodies. We have, you know, twice as many nipples as most people would ever need in the corner of the population. But like when you talk about bacteria that can go under your skin and then convert into an anaerobic state and start consuming living flesh, that is just more examples in my head of just, why would you need that function? Why would you intelligently design that when it could lead to so many problems? One last. It's not a benevolent God thing, is it? Right. Not a benevolent God, not an intelligently designed Zerner. Yeah, not a smart God. Right. No, there's never 4,000 genetic diseases that doesn't seem very intelligent. Yeah. Dredd, I'm also going to plug this one. I think we should have had a guest from Australia because if there's that much radiation, we can guarantee there's not intelligent life, but it might just be really ugly life. There you go. And that's not a stab at Australia. They just mean they have a lot of ugly, crazy animals out there, especially bug lights. Dredd, I'm also going to throw this other one out to you. This is a question we had from last week, but it's not on space particles. It's more on viruses because we're talking about viruses. I'd love to get your feedback on that as well. Apkin commented on the episode of UFOs, Loch Nose and Bigfoot, oh my. She asked, hey, I'm going to slightly disagree with the dangers of viruses, that being if aliens were to come to Earth and potentially give us their viruses or we go to another planet and we give them our viruses. If the analogy would be better if every time humans go in the ocean, we have a chance of infecting prawns with human diseases. For us to infect the aliens and vice versa, there would need to be more genetic similarities than life on Earth has. This is always the case since some diseases can jump species, but it's a larger barrier than some people take into consideration. What do you think about that? Just hang on a sec. I got this. Well, Walter is distorting himself out. I'll come in on that. Yeah, you're the biologist here. What's up? Yeah, yeah. So what we're talking about here is zoonosis, the transfer of diseases between species. And it does happen in both directions. There's a recent case of a dog having been infected with, I'm not sure if it was COVID or one of the diseases that was previously found in humans. So that's exactly what it is, zoonosis. That is what all been started as. Yeah, yeah. It came from. It jumped from animals in the live market. And we'll hand on. We're giving it back. Yeah. Yeah. Down to five. Yeah, I was thinking that there might be a good argument to be made for the fact that life on other planets, if it exists, might have the same DNA structure as us. And the reason I say that is that all Earth was made to all the common elements. The most common elements are the most common here. And that would be the same in other, could be the same on many other planets. And if we started with certain replicating molecules, then that are made out of certain atoms, elemental atoms. Why wouldn't that happen on other places as well? I mean, it could be a very common thing throughout the universe. You never know. And then they would just develop their DNA pretty much the same way we did. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I've been listening to some interesting podcasts with, you know, on that very topic. And that suggests that the mystery of life is not really that mysterious. If you look at it as chemical... Combination. Chemical actions that happen naturally and that the first replicators are really just processes that happen naturally and take chemical exchanges down to their lowest state, which, you know, is like photons being emitted by atoms by, you know, electrons just moving down into a ground state, right? It's just part of nature. It's just that's how it works. It's not as mysterious as we all think. And maybe the very precursors to life are just these natural chemical processes that generated the first replicators. And those replicators just become more complicated and life then being sort of just an emergent property. Absolutely. But it doesn't have to be necessarily a decrease in energy level. I mean, I know sometimes that happens. In fact, in the case of crystallization, the reason that the particles come together into that format is because they contain less energy than when they're buzzing around in a solution. You think about mitochondria and the adenosine triphosphate, that cycle there, where adenosine triphosphate ATP turns into ADP, diphosphate. And so that's a loss of... It is in that case, but it needs some atom, right? So it's an exchange in energy. Well, the complete cycle, you need to pump in some energy to restore the ATP. And of course, that can happen in lots of places in the universe where there's energy being released by massive stars, for example. So it can be a build up as well as a... In other words, it's... It's an exchange. It's what it is. It's an exchange. So what we're basically saying is there could be localized native states or low energy states towards the lowest energy state where a molecule is happy enough to be right there because it might even take more energy for it to get to the next transition point. And so it will settle on its way down, sort of like going down steps of stairs, right? And because of that, just because we see how life works here on Earth may not necessarily mean how it works in other places, but it could also mean that we are trajectory... Since we're all working on trial and error using the same base parts, there might be a lot of similarities in space somewhere to life here. And from my point of view, the only thing I'm saying is two things. One, it'd be really polite of us not to try to contaminate another planet when we see it. And we should be thoughtful how we approach another intelligent life, whether it's using robots that might use a lot of radiation or emissions to send signals back to Earth that might be sensitive to the life forms that are on that planet. Like they might hear Wi-Fi, for example. And that'd be like, man, why is this robot screaming Wi-Fi? I hate it. We can't hear it, but maybe they can. Who knows? Something weird like that. But the other thing is, if we took the inverse and we replaced it and the alien visited us, and we're so happy, we have the White House all surrounded by this thing, and it comes out of the spaceship and it's just sneezing. And then it's like coughing and it's pooping on the floor. It's like, ooh, ooh, ooh, please get back in your spaceship. That's great. It's like, I won't contaminate you guys. Don't worry, we're in three different life forms. It's like, yeah, this is a lot. We did a lot of things. This is politeness thing, in my head. It's fine, corrective stuff, isn't it? You never think of sick aliens. Well, you're sick aliens. Dred, one extra question for you before we get into more science stuff. Dred, have you ever thought about a noodle-themed turban? Maybe your problem in Canada, distinctive head covering. So it sounds like you could probably get away by wearing a turban and have noodles on the turban. Have somebody knitted that white? Yeah, we really have tossed these ideas around. But again, it's arbitrary, right? I mean, I've actually talked to a couple of my Sikh friends who would be willing to dress me up in a turban. And I posed that question actually to the uppity ups at ICBC to say, if I go in and claim I'm a Sikh, what would you do? Would you say you can't possibly be a Sikh because you're not the right color? You know what I mean? Seriously, seriously, right? Because no Sikh of Indian ethnic origin is ever questioned. Nobody says, are you, what religion are you? And certainly, nobody at ICBC likely who isn't a Sikh likely knows what Sikhism is all about. They couldn't tell you what Sikhs believe or even what Hindus believe or anyone else that isn't Christian because they don't really care, right? They're just very myopic. And I'm certain that Sikhs only got the right to wear their turban after a considerable protest and just by sheer numbers, right? Yeah, so speaking of irrational conclusions, let's talk about hypothetical particles. Well, can we take a break? That's a nice segue. At the bottom of the hour, we are done. Okay, okay, okay. So we have so many more comments to go through, guys. We'll go into that in the next episode. Stay tuned for the second half of the Digital Freethought Radio Hour and WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be right back after this short break. Welcome back to the second half of the Digital Freethought Radio Hour and WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Let's talk about the atheist society of Knoxville for just a second. ASK was founded in 2002. We're in our 20th year and have over a thousand members. We have weekly in-person meetings at Knoxville's Old City at Barley's Taproom in Pizzeria. Look for us inside at the high top table so if it's pretty weather outside on the deck. We also have a Tuesday evening ASK Zoom meeting. And if you'd like to join us, email us at askanatheistatnoxvilleatheist.org or let's chat s-e at gmail.com and we'll send you the link. You can also find ASK online at Facebook, meetup.com or at their website. Meetup, I'm sorry, Knoxvilleatheist.org or you can just Google Knoxvilleatheist. It's just that simple. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to meet up and do a search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Stop one. Well, where do we want to pick up? Hey, we're going to be talking about mail bags and all the listener comments that have come through. We got everybody and we're highly happy to have so many wonderful comments to go over. They inspire a lot of conversations and feel free to add more. We're going to go straight into it. Dred, two comments for you regarding right to education from the show, right to education. We were talking about particles. First question is, Dred, you need to deliver. So it's about entangled particles. We were talking about that. How do you measure entangled particles if they are instantaneous and they're faster than the speed of light? How can we detect them if nothing we have is faster than the speed of light? That's just the both of those part of questions. I'm not saying you do have the answer. I'm just wondering, it's a good thought experiment. How do you measure something that's immeasurable with our current techniques? And I think you're right. You just said it there. It's more of a thought experiment. It's the math that makes sense. So this idea that you could measure or you could determine that particles are entangled that are light years apart. Of course, that's impractical. In terms of actually measuring these things to demonstrate that that's the case. But certainly, the math is pretty sound. And that's more of what it's being relied on than actual, it's a thought experiment as opposed to a real experiment. Right? I love mathematics because that, it gives you the freedom to be able to do it because you're working with such well-defined variables. Rarely that you get three of anything in real life. But in math, you can just declare three, even prove three and just work with those assumptions that you have these well-defined things. And I think thought experiments have their place. Yeah, absolutely. Richard Feynman, one of the greatest minds of the current era, he said that he doesn't understand quantum mechanics and that anyone that makes that claim probably doesn't know what the hell they're talking about. Right? I mean, it works, right? We have FMRIs and different technologies that are totally reliant on the fact, on the math, quantum mechanics is the case. But a lot of people, there's still a lot of unanswered questions with respect to what it really is all about. Interestingly, just on the 16th of this month, a bunch of prominent scientists met in Vancouver to start the Quantum Gravity Institute, which is a new institute well-funded that is going to explore the connections between Einstein's special relativity and quantum mechanics because that's still currently a big mystery right now. And also, skepticism of quantum mechanics is not the same thing as dismissing that their ideas are actually accurate or true. The default position of science is I don't know or we can't reach a conclusion yet. Yeah, and we still don't have a grand unified theory. Hopefully they'll find one. Just going to finish, a lot of these times when we're talking about these theories, it's because we're looking at these unknowns and trying to come up with narratives or thoughtful experimentations to try to come out with standards. And the cool thing about standards is those can be tested, those can be demonstrated, those have utility. But some thought experiments have utility too, even though they haven't been converted or precipitated down to a standard yet. And so we work with the thought experiments lacking any sort of measurable or feasible way to measure these concepts that we're talking about. But we may precipitate them into better standards when we have that technology or have that capability in the future, who knows. But at least until then, it's not that they don't exist, it's just that we don't know. And I think it's okay to say you don't know in science or if something's undefined to say it's undefined or inconclusive at this point. And a very important, yeah, I was going to just say that to add to that, that a very important aspect of science and an appropriate understanding of it is that scientific theories are models, right? They're only models of the way we think the universe works. It is not direct experience. They're just how we model things and how we understand them. It's not necessarily the absolute way it works. It's just our understandings. And by that, I mean, even like things that we think we have a very strong grasp on, like gravity, like that's the model, right? And we might be subject to change as we learn more about gravitational forces in the future, right? John, it sounds like you're about to say something. Go ahead. Well, most of what I was going to say has been said now, actually, but what we're looking at here is the difference between conceptualizing, which is maths, you know, and observing, which is the science bit. And we've conceptualized gravity, and we've conceptualized quantum mechanics. And those models sometimes have a decent match to what we observe, in which case we run with them while they're working. But then who knows what we're going to discover tomorrow? We certainly, if we look back, we've certainly been, it found it necessary to change, to ditch old models and change them for new models, like the model of gravity, which has changed from Newton's laws of motion to relativity. These are all thought experiments. And there's no way of saying that they are congruent with reality. We just run with them until they're falsified. Yes, that's right. And it's a Bayesian, it's a Bayesian thing, right? With the understanding that all new evidence goes on our priors. Right. With the understanding that as long as the math checks out, we can run with these until we have problems or improve them. But we understand that they are models. They are functionally models, right? Yeah. And in the case, and in the case of entanglement, it's a mathematically sound idea. But until we find some way of separating one of the partners and sending it 100,000 miles away and observing that one change simultaneously, it's not being evidenced. Right, it's all true and principle. Yes. It's the equivalent of packing your suitcase for an ideal trip to Japan that you haven't really gotten the tickets for or anything like that yet. But you have the suitcase ready to go. Yes. You've got the tickets. But until then, we can pack the tickets. We can put chopsticks in there. We can do all sorts of stuff. There's subway maps, all sorts of stuff. We're free to do that in the right headspace. Well, we haven't gotten the tickets yet. That's a very good analogy. And we were talking about this last night with Chet Anderson. And it's the difference between nominalism, which is the understanding that we've got something going on in here which doesn't necessarily match something out there. Like numbers are all conceived. If you look into the universe, you won't find a three. Exactly. We apply the concept of three onto... Abstract concepts, yes. Exactly. We apply that onto three points in the universe and designate it a three. But the alternative, of course, is Platonism, where Plato used to think that there must actually be a three out there that we have to discover and then identify it. And so he thought, for example, that somewhere there was a cow in reality that you had access to so that you could compare what you observed with this... This ideal... What would you call it? You know, it's like the standard yard. Yeah, the absolute. The absolute. Yeah, yeah, but the world doesn't work like that. No. Plato was wrong. He was. Data five. Go for it. Yeah, getting back to the question of being able to test quantum linking and all that at extreme distances. We don't have to take them light years apart. I mean, we can measure time down to a nanosecond now. And if we could get two particles separated by the width of the earth, say, or between earth and the moon, I mean, light takes us one and a quarter second just to get to the moon. If you could get a particle there and we could test whether it instantly flips or not with current technology. Yeah, but that would be in defiance of the uncertainty principle, right? Heisenberg's uncertainty. You can't both know the vector of particle is traveling in. And it's... Well, we're not worried about its vector or traveling or any of that. We're talking about its state. True. You know, whether it's... There's more simplification. We just don't have a piece of equipment that's that fast yet. And then after we determine... After we have a piece of equipment that is that fast, is it that piece of equipment operating on the same thing that we're trying to prove in the first place? Because that's a problem. Because if you have a machine that measures quantum entanglement that's powered by quantum entanglement, how do you verify that quantum entanglement actually works? It seems like you have a biased piece of equipment. Because I can make a magic detector that runs on magic that always says it's magic, right? It's just... Get a piece of tape on a box that just says, it's magic. And I just run it around the room and just be like, hey, it's all magic guys and this runs on magic. So therefore it's right. But that was what I was saying about certain technologies that already exist that make use of the principles of quantum mechanics without necessarily being able to prove certain aspects of it are true experimentally, right? And I would say... Tanglement is already being taken advantage of in certain technologies by virtue that it works in principle, that the math is right. And it doesn't take a demonstration that these things are true experimentally because they work in practice. But that is also something we should be considered as... I'm going to use a word here, don't forgive me if you're using it, but that's a dangerous path to go down. Only because when we standardize something, it's an actual approach where we don't use the word in the definition in the simplest sense. You have to have a alternative strategy to test something rather than just here's the thing I'm trying to test and here's the method I'm using, which is the thing I'm trying to test and therefore it works. It's like that's not a standard. It wouldn't pass any sort of standardizing body. It has to be a different means to test it. And it has to be a well-tested regular way to test it. That's not a declaration that it's non-existent or not trainable or not existent. It's just you have an inclusive way to test it. So the default position is it's inconclusive, which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It just means we don't have a way to test that in a reliable way. And I think the more reliable way we can test it, the more confidence we can put on it actually existing. And if it's useful in the meanwhile, fantastic. But until then, we need a way to test it. That's better than just part of it's kind of working because Jerusalem exists in the Bible, but that doesn't mean that Jesus did, right? Or God does. Or New York and Spider-Man. Exactly, like New York and Spider-Man. So we have to really, really hone our methodologies here. John Rich, you just saw your hand up. What's up? Well, I was a bit confused because we were talking about in practice and experimentally. And I think they're the same thing. I was going to say that. Are we testing the same thing or are there two things that are correlating to each other? Like how are we proving that one is causing the other or are you just saying these two things are the same and we're testing in two different capacities in two different places? Well, I mean, if you if you create a circuit or something that depends on a physical principle when the circuit works and repeatedly works and works in many different states and many different occurrences, couldn't you say that those are scientific experiments proving the principle is correct? Unfortunately, it looks like I don't believe you can. There are if there is if that was if you could be proven that that's the only way that could happen. For example, I'm just going to throw this one out. Why not? What if pixie magic existed and pixie magic is the thing that's causing these entangled particles to flip and swap? And that's an option. Well, it's if I prove that it's the scientific thing and not pixie magic, great. But until then you still have pixie magic on the table. And so how do you prove that it's not pixie magic? There's could be a wealth of other credential scientific possibilities for a lot of these things that we're working on. The way how we define that it's one and not the others is by standardizing our process. And I don't think we have the tool sets necessary to like standardize entangled particles. We can make use of them through models that are useful, but I don't think we have gotten there yet. Go ahead. Everyone raise their hands. So this is and this is what I was getting to because until recently, no, we haven't been able to image an atom. Yet the our whole society is predicated on atoms existing to our current understanding of how they are. You know, at first it started with Rutherford and the Goldfoil experiment. And then Neils Bohr came up with the idea of a quantum or quantized orbits and all this kind of stuff. So despite our lack of understanding of how things really work, the principle that they work in the ways they do as we model them are the important points because that's how our technology works. It works on the premise that the understanding we currently have of how things work is true and correct. Despite the fact that we cannot necessarily image or prove definitively that these things work in the way that we think they do. If that makes sense. Yeah, models are. So I dread you're hitting a good point. The models are still useful, even if our understanding takes time to catch up to them. Yes. Yeah. And our models can be incomplete, but we still must. I mean, this is what I was saying about this physics, gravity, quantum gravity institute being started because there are many unanswered questions with respect to how quantum mechanics and special relatively work together. This is the grand unified theory that Dutter 5 was talking about or the theory of everything, TOE, as they call it. You're right. In the interest of time, I want to maybe hopefully condense this and continue this. I'll make another topic. But I like to think of it as like a lunch table and you have philosophers on one side of the table. Then you have your theorists, your mathematicians. As you work your way down, you have your scientists who are like, hey, these are really good ideas. I like listening to these guys. And right next to them, you have your engineers who are like, you got to make this applied and practical because you're not following objective testing protocols. Like if you actually want me to build this, if you want this to actually work, what are you talking about? Put it in like actual tolerances for me. And so like when I hear, hey, it's working on the philosopher's side of table. It's like, this works, guys. This makes sense on the engineering table. It's just like, what are you guys talking about? Please make this make sense. Like Sheldon Cooper says, engineers are the oompa-loompas of science, right? They make things happen. Right, right, right. And so I say, it's fun because all this whole table is what's propelling science forward. But it's most important that we realize that each side has its function. And it's worthwhile to listen to all the whole table saying and not necessarily be persuaded by this one side. And again, the default position of science is that it's not true. It's you got to prove it better or come to a better conclusion or use a better methodology to demonstrate it. And it's good to be skeptical in the meanwhile. So we got a lot of comments. I'd really, really like to get to them. Joe Skye, did we get to the one? We haven't gotten to yours yet. Let's see. So Joe Skye, we had a question from someone who asked if you had seen the original oldest images of Jesus in an art piece called earliest depictions of Jesus in art. It's a collection of art by useful charts. And what's interesting is in the earliest ones, he's a guy who looks like a typical Roman dude without any beard and wearing a Roman turmenic and a mantle and not a toga. And then later on, he has curly hair depicted of people of that time period all the way down to a sculpture who sculpted his face who looks, the final work looks just like the sculptor himself. And what do you think about that? Of course. How about that? I have not seen these particular pieces of art. What I have seen is some fourth century art where Jesus does look Palestinian. And the interesting thing is, is that some of these art pieces depict Jesus performing his miracles with a magic wand. Okay, not bad, not bad, not bad. John Riches, do you have any thoughts? Was it from Harry Potter? That one? No. Was you wearing round glasses? John Riches, do you have any more comments on that? Well, images of early images of Christ, I think the oldest one is in a Greek freeze where he's depicted as a toddler and he strangely resembles Apollo. Well, you know, I don't know if you've ever seen 22 Jump Street, the movie. Oh, I think I've seen the TV show. Well, there was the movie that came out much, much later. And of course, 22 Jump Street was a church wherein was a Vietnamese Jesus on the cross. And there was a big joke about that. It was a very funny part, but yeah. Later, I'm also going to throw this question out to you. I've seen Santa Clauses that are white. I've seen Santa Clauses that are black. And it's just depending on where I'm going to. I've seen Korean Santa Clauses. I feel like, do you feel like there's a similar tie there where people just see what they want to see in their Jesus? Especially if they live near places that are surrounded by big pieces of butter? Have you seen Santa Clauses on a cross? I've seen that. A friend of mine in Japan took a picture of a department store display around Christmas. Apparently the Japanese love Christmas. But they don't quite get it. And in the picture, there was a Santa Claus on a cross. How can he deliver the presents? How will he deliver the presents? So dark. They had a theory in movies where a lot of them followed the Christ narrative, like Star Wars, Matrix. A lot of these have the main character basically do all the points where he's persecuted for trying to do something that's good and then comes back after a period of absence to kick the bad guy's butt and inspire a lot of people to be better than they are. Like that is like a trope in storytelling that probably predated the Bible. Well, Joseph, you're familiar with Joseph Campbell and that Joseph Campbell actually assisted George Lucas in fashioning that story based on the themes throughout history in mythology. The downtrodden, the uncooperative hero who thrust to the forefront of the destiny you've never anticipated. Speaking of being thrust into a destiny you never anticipated, let's talk about hell. Larry, we've got a question from hell for you. Have you ever heard of modern hell? And the burning in fire hell is just called the old hell. The new hell is a psychological hell where one is tortured psychologically like a sinner is presented with a situation preparing them to satisfy their lust, but they can never get that satisfaction. Have you ever heard of those two hells, Larry? All I heard of the first one, of course, the new one is not, I'm not that familiar with, but if it is contingent on the existence of a soul, I think we're in the same problem we had with the early hell. I don't believe the soul suggests every other living thing on the planet dies and we believe that that's it. It's over, but not humans. No, we've got to live forever. No, I don't believe that we do. I don't believe that souls are real. I don't believe they go anywhere after the die, of course, for that reason. So, you know, the new hell has the same problem as the old one. Not bad. Not bad. Are we getting close to the end of the show? I think. Pretty close. Time for the final words here. I'll throw one last log into the fire. Maybe we can do a longer forum episode on sciences because we seem to all love that, but I'd say I've done some SC with a friend of mine who's at work, and he was telling me during, while we're in the parking lot, just chatting up after a game of disc golf that either the universe came from nothing or God made it, right? Because to him, those were the only two options because he looked around and everything to him looked like it was made by God and designed by God. And the only alternative he can consider was nothing, which didn't make any sense to him. And I'd say like the idea that you've reduced your options to a false dichotomy to whether it's the thing that you really like to be true is correct or something completely unreasonable is a false way to prove something is actually true. The way that we demonstrate that things are true when we standardize it is by looking at the process that we're inspecting and making sure each point connects to a logical connection, which means that we need a way to test it that doesn't rely on the premise that we're talking about. And since we don't have a God detector or anything that can measure miracles, we can't claim that God exists on the scientific point of view. God is inconclusive. It's not a default. It's not a default. But that same methodology applies to any other thing that the theorists that are talking about on the other side of the table, even if we're sitting at the same science table, if they're talking about something that we can't test, doesn't mean that it's not true. Just means that we've reached an inconclusive conclusion that their method actually works. And if they say, well, it works on these other things, like that's great, but we're not talking about those other things. We're talking about the fundamental thing that we're all trying to get from point A to point B and we don't have a way to test that yet. It doesn't mean that it's not true. It means we can still make useful things out of it. That's fantastic. That's even better than what God is giving us right now. But we can't conclude that it exists until we have a better way to work on it. And that's our new problem. And we can work on that together. So let's work on that. And in the meantime, in the meantime, it's perfectly all right to say, I don't know. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. It's the most honest answer sometimes. And you shouldn't be persecuted for it, God. We'll talk about that maybe in a future episode. Jared, Pirate, what would you like to plug and feel free to throw your stuff out? You can find me, let's chat on these YouTube. Feel free to leave a comment. We'll go over them in the future episode. Yeah. Well, you can find my stuff on my YouTube channel. It's Mind Pirate, M-I-N-D-P-Y-R-A-T-E. I livestream this at 7 a.m. on Sunday mornings, Pacific Daylight Time. And I also do the Global Atheist News Review at 11 a.m. Sunday mornings, PDT, and I'm looking forward to doing that later this morning. Yep. Yeah, click and subscribe. Love to see you. Cheers. Cheers. Arr. John, what do we got? Well, yeah, as Tred said, you and you two, Ty, will be in, you've both accepted. Thank you. We'll be on the panel of Gann Rev, Global Atheist News Review, in a few hours. And that's on Free Thought Channel, where all our other stuff is, including the Free Thought Hour interview show that I referred to earlier on in this show. John, my only umbrance with you on a deeply personal level is that tugboat will never get to the left side of your screen. It just really bothers me. It's just like, it's kind of like, oh, you pushed it back again. Guy, anything that you'd recommend we check out before next week? My content can be found on Facebook, on the Nova City and Chronicles. I talk about things of interest to atheists. I talk about biblical historicity. Well, it's my blog. I talk about what I feel like. Nice. Nice. It's your blog. You should be able to use your party and you can do whatever you want. Doubter 5, anything that you'd like to plug before or out since you haven't written any books about atheism. Yeah, I do have a book out. It's called Atheism. What's it all about? It's on Amazon. My content generally can be found at digitalfreethought.com. Be sure to click on the blog button. It'll take you to our radio show archives, Atheist songs and many articles on the subject. If you have questions for the show, you can send them to askanatheistatnoxfilatheist.org or let'schatse at gmail.com or just leave a comment below the videos. If you're having trouble leaving religious police behind, you can find help in recoveringfromreligion at recoveringfromreligion.org. Remember, everybody is going to somebody else's health. The time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it. Enjoy your life and we'll see you next week. Say bye everybody. Bye everybody.