AS149: Pale Blue Dot, Part 1

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:31 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Atheistically Speaking with your host Thomas Smith. This is episode 149. Alright, well, the time is upon us. I've been talking about the book club for a good while here, at least a month if not more, and we finished our first book Which was, of course, Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan. And we finished that about, I think, like a week ago. So this is the episode I promised. I got a number of guests from the book club to come on and just talk about a brief part of the book or two or three that they really enjoyed. You as listeners would get some of the benefit of our reading, even if maybe you didn't have time to read the book yourself, or you've never read it, or you've already read it a long time ago, or any number of things.

0:01:19 Thomas: But I want to encourage everyone to join the book club at Goodreads and search for Atheistically Speaking, or people who are in the bookclub, after listening to this episode, maybe keep in mind on the current book you're reading, keep in mind what you might want to talk about so that in a few months when we're done with the Steven Pinker book, I can have more people on because it was a much longer book. So please keep that in mind, and just as you're writing, maybe you find a part you like, just set a little sticky note there or something, or just write it down, and then it would be really fun to present that next time. So without further ado, let's get to our Presentation of Pale Blue Dot with a guest you may remember from a past show, Marcel.

0:02:15 Thomas: So Marcel, let's go ahead and talk about, uh, just the, the, uh, the sort of impressions you wanted to talk about from Pale Blue Dot. Oh.

0:02:23 Marcel: It was actually, I've never read, I'm almost, almost ashamed to admit, but I never read the book by Carl Sagan, so it was my first one, and I liked it a lot, I had this little thing in the beginning of the book, yes, this chapter called, the great demotions, yeah. He shows that, yeah, our increasing knowledge, our place in the universe has shifted from the center to almost nothing, yeah.

0:02:43 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:02:53 Thomas: Yeah, that was really interesting thing, he goes through a series of discoveries that shows, how, you know, in the beginning it seems like, oh, everything's for us, we're the center of the universe, everything, and then the more we discovered, the more that goes away, until virtually, you know, present day scientifically there's nothing special about us, I mean, we're a little bit special in that we're the only intelligent life we know of, of, uh, but, but other than that, temporally, uh, uh, you know, spatially, all that stuff, we're, we're in no place special, I thought that was really interesting.

0:02:58 Marcel: Yeah. Yeah. So that was, that was an interesting part of the book. And there was a footnote. It's actually on page 31, well, I like numbers.

0:03:41 Thomas: Me. Too, yeah.

0:03:43 Marcel: I'm a physics teacher. And so once in a while, I let my students do these simple calculations. For instance, I let them calculate if you want to supply the Netherlands with wind energy. And then I let him calculate how many wind turbines you would need. And if you line them up, all these wind turbines, how long a row you would have would be needed. And then the result is that you would meet a row from Amsterdam all the way to Siberia or something.

0:04:21 Marcel: So that's what I like about numbers, just to get a feeling about it.

0:04:25 Thomas: To illustrate, yeah. Wow.

0:04:26 Marcel: And that was his footnote. And so Sagan is talking about, well, how insignificant we are. And what he does is he does this little computation. He computes the volume of the entire universe, the observable universe, so which is like 96 billion light years across, and then you take a sphere and then you just compute that, it's very simple computation, and then you compute the volume which we actually inhabit, so that's the surface of the earth, well, not the entire surface, just because we don't inhabit the oceans and not the deserts and not the poles, and so we have about a quarter of the surface and we occupy, yeah, in when you go up, well, of course we have some multi-storage buildings, but that's only very small part of the service, so the main part of service, we only occupy the first 10 feet.

0:04:46 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

0:05:36 Marcel: And so then you get a volume and then, and then you got a ratio of how much of the volume, so, and that's an unbelievably small number.

0:05:45 Thomas: That, that strikes me, well, first off, the volume of the universe has got to be a very, uh, well, there's got to быть some scientific notation going on in that number. I'll say.

0:05:54 Marcel: Yeah, yeah, I see. Of course, it's in powers of 10. So the ratio of where we live in, it says in the footnote, it's a 10 to the power minus 37. Yeah, so you have a zero point, and then you get 37 zeros, and then a one, so that's nothing close to a percentage, so. It's an incredibly small number, and that's what we, where we actually live in, so, uh, uh, so yeah.

0:05:57 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

0:06:31 Marcel: I thought that was very interesting, yeah, yeah.

0:06:31 Thomas: It's It's interesting. Well And, and I, not this wasn't, I don't think related too much to the book, but I'll just bring it up for fun, um, that is interesting when you talk about fine-tuning, isn't it? I mean, it's weird that to think that the universe is fine-tuned for us, but then we take up just an astronomically small percentage, you know. Now, people will say, or apologists will say well, it doesn't, that doesn't matter it's just that it's fine-tuned to create life somewhere but I don't know, I just don't buy the waste of space.

A lot of these arguments come down to like yeah, but it's juste there's so many assumptions you'd have to make and so many weird things you'd have to say about God. Like I just, if there were a God, I just don't think there would be this vast waste of space that's completely hostile to life everywhere. What's the point of all of it? What's point of like Orion's belt? What are some of the stars they're doing? You know, what's the part of the galaxy of some of galaxies that we haven't even observed yet? You know? Like, what are they, if it's really for us, what are the doing there? I just, I don't buy it, you know?

0:06:57 Marcel: Yeah.

0:07:49 Marcel: And Then, and, and for instance, the, like the, uh, even the, the closest other galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, we only know about it for a hundred years, or even less we never knew it was even there, let alone the hundreds of a billion of other galaxies, we only know about them a couple of decades, yeah.

0:08:01 Thomas: Right, yeah. Yeah, less, yeah, right.

0:08:14 Thomas: And I think that's something mentioned in that part of the book you talked about in the beginning. I find that so interesting. I can't remember if it was this book or another, but there's an astronomer, I think a living female astronomer as of when I read this book. This could have been a Dawkins book now that I think about it, but it was related. It said that in her lifetime it was referred to as, uh, Orion, oh, what was it, the, the galaxy, the, the Andromeda galaxy was like the Andromeda cluster, and they thought it was just a couple stars, you know, and, and textbooks had it listed so much differently, you know, we thought it was just, oh, there's some distant stars here, there's the this cluster here, you know. And that's such a literally astronomical difference to go from thinking, well, here's our galaxy and then there's some other things around it, but that's about it.

0:09:08 Thomas: To go from that to, no, no. There's actually, what, hundreds of billions of galaxies. That's just insane.

0:09:14 Marcel: It's Crazy, you know, this picture, the Hubble deep space, yeah, I find it's really fascinating. They just looked with the Hubble telescope at a very dark spot in the universe, and they looked for a couple of days at the same spot, and then in this picture you literally see hundreds of galaxies, and uh, yeah, it's mind-boggling, really.

0:09:16 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

0:09:35 Thomas: Just, yeah yeah. Yeah. Mind blowing. Yeah. I love that. And I, man, I feel like I could just look at that stuff for hours. It's just so it's so interesting.

0:09:48 Marcel: Yeah. Oh. Yeah. I do that I look at that stuff for hours. Oh.

0:09:55 Thomas: Yeah. I, I wish I, I wish I, if I didn't live in where I do, maybe someday, if I can move to the country, I, I want to buy a telescope that's just so cool. I saw somebody, uh, uh, Facebook friend through some sort of atheist stuff, he, now it's so easy to kind of use telescopes, and then I think he was even able through his iPhone or something to take a long exposure picture, yeah.

0:10:04 Marcel: Yeah. Yeah.

0:10:23 Thomas: And he got like this awesome picture of Jupiter, and yeah, you know, that, that's, that's something that obviously we're, we're years and years and years past, but still it's really cool to see an amateur do that and get like a really nice picture of Jupiter, and I, man, it's just looking at that thing thinking that giant, literally, you know, gas giant is is out there, you know, it's so crazy, I love it, and I

0:10:23 Marcel: Yeah, it is Yeah, well, in the area where I live, it's, it's really, it's really hard to, to look at sky, we, we have all this very close by, we have, have all these greenhouses, and they have lights on during the night for the, for the plants to grow, so we have really a lot of light pollution, you hardly see any stars at night, so it's really

0:10:49 Thomas: Yeah Yeah.

0:11:08 Thomas: It's it's really cool to go to a place with like no light pollution, it's just a totally different universe. Yeah, so. Uh, I think you had another topic, right? All

0:11:11 Marcel: Yeah Yeah. Yeah. That's more in the end of the book, um, he talks about, uh, well, it's very interesting, he, about terraforming Venus and Mars and how it could be done, and it's kind of interesting, he talks, for instance, about could send a rocket with some microbes and bacteria to Venus which we have selected, that could live in the, in the atmosphere of Venus on the acids, which would, uh, transform the acids and, and produce, uh, oxygen, and, uh, so then it would, uh, yeah, it would probably take millions of years, I guess, or a hundred thousand years, but then it will transform the atmosphere into a more Earth-like atmosphere, and he has some ideas similar to that for Mars as well, fact he says Mars would be a lot easier to terraform than Venus, yeah.

0:11:24 Thomas: Right.

0:12:02 Thomas: I would Think, yeah.

0:12:21 Marcel: But then he is trying to make a case, well, I think the book was written in the 90s, wasn't it?

0:12:27 Thomas: I think it was early 90s. Right, eventually.

0:12:28 Marcel: Yeah. And well, he's trying to make a case to go to Mars, even to have a permanent settlement or something, and well, gives two reasons for it, to do it, and one of it I I agree with, but the other one, so one is just, uh, because we can, and because it's interesting and because we are explorers. And I think, yeah, that's, I can always will be people who would volunteer to, to go there and, and just because it's, it's a, it, it is a, I think it's an interesting, um, but the other oney, he has a more, uh, he tried to make a more compelling case and he said, well, when we are, when we stay on Earth, our fate would be the same as the dinosaurs. We will be hit by an asteroid at some point in the future.

0:13:24 Thomas: Yeah.

0:13:25 Marcel: Eventually. And we could go extinct because that, so when we would occupy two planets, then yeah, then we will go extinct on the Earth. Well, that's bad. But then we are still on Mars and we could go back to Earth and recolonize it or something. So it would improve our chances of survival.

0:13:36 Thomas: We're yeah.

0:13:47 Thomas: It's like diversifying our portfolio, our human portfolio.

0:13:50 Marcel: Yeah, yeah. But I thought, well, Yeah, but Well, we now we've seen we've seeing all these pictures of Mars. Well, when the book was written, we had all these rovers over there, but it's such a barren place with there's really, you can't survive there in any way at the moment. And then I think, well even Earth, when it's struck by an asteroid, I think the chances of surviving on Earth struck by asteroid are still, well to my feeling, are still much, much higher than surviving on Mars. Because here you will have, you have all this biological and I think,

0:13:51 Thomas: Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It

0:14:33 Marcel: Yeah, if you're, it's kind of, well, now I'm thinking as an engineer, if your goal is I want to survive an asteroid impact, there are other things you can do. We could build an underground on Earth.

0:14:34 Thomas: Would have to be a pretty and right Right. That's a good point.

0:14:49 Marcel: We could build an Underground City or a world to live in and then wait for the well, it's kind of a nuclear winter, what you get after an asteroid impact.

0:14:49 Thomas: Yeah. I think you're right. I I think that as much as I love Carl Sagan, and uh, and I'm looking for any excuse for space exploration, I think that particular argument is probably not too good. Like you say, we, I bet we could just build some, some sort of underground bunker, and just stick one guy there.

0:15:00 Marcel: Yeah, so it would be a lot easier than going to Mars.

0:15:18 Thomas: Yeah, let's put a guy and a girl there, just like, you're stuck here, and, you know, no. Or I think that the odds of, yeah, and that worked great. That worked fine. I think also that asteroid, the kind of asteroid that would completely wipe us off the planet would be, I think the odds are pretty low on that, because that would have to be enormous. Um, they definitely asteroids or, or, uh, you know, can cause a lot of trouble, but to completely wipe all, to make it like you say, to making it worse than Mars. I think that's a very rare

0:15:18 Marcel: Yeah. Yeah. And we've done it before with Noah's Ark, by the way. Yeah.

0:15:54 Marcel: Yeah,

0:15:54 Thomas: Occurrence. Interesting.

0:15:54 Marcel: Yeah. Yeah. So I thought that wasn't really, really convincing. But

0:16:00 Thomas: Yeah. Well, I like it. I, I think that's, uh worthwhile criticism. Uh, but, uh yeah, it's, it, uh like you said, the book was in, I, I looked up 1994. So interesting. I wonder if, if, if he would have changed his opinion, if he had lived longer and seen more about Mars and all that, maybe he would've updated his books.

0:16:01 Marcel: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that was. Do we have time for another point? Yeah, because what I what I found very exciting was at a particular point somewhere in the middle. He's talking about Titan, which is the largest moon of Saturn.

0:16:23 Thomas: Oh, sure. Sure.

0:16:37 Thomas: The moon of, uh, yeah, yeah.

0:16:40 Marcel: And in this book, by the time the book was written, we only had the Voyager pictures of Titan and what we can see with an Earth-based telescope. And since Titan has a very dense atmosphere, you really see nothing, no details at all. It's just a smooth, yellowish moon, but in the book describes that, um, using, uh, earth-based telescopes and with radio waves and the information from Voyager, he already describes that there is probably liquids on Titan. And based on the anomalies of, um, the path of Titan around Saturn, they try to calculate, uh, what kind of surface fluids that could, could be there.

0:17:31 Marcel: And then they say, well, it wouldn't be oceans. Then, then, uh. Then the path would be a little different. And so, and then they predict, well on Titan, there will probably be like lakes of, uh yeah, liquid methane.

0:17:44 Thomas: The kid with methane. Yeah.

0:17:46 Marcel: So he wrote that in the nineties and now we've been there. So the Huygens probe landed on Titan and took pictures and the lakes are there and there are rivers and that's so astonishing.

0:17:55 Thomas: Oh wow. Yeah, yeah yeah. That's really cool.

0:18:00 Marcel: Yeah, I thought that was really, really cool. Oh,

0:18:03 Thomas: Yeah, there's so much, that astronomy is just the most interesting thing. I remember I, I don't know why I stopped up listening but I used to listen to, uh, is it just called Astronomy Cast, whatever, I

0:18:15 Marcel: Yeah. Yeah. Astronomy cast. Yeah. I listened to that one.

0:18:18 Thomas: I don't know why I stopped, I think I just like forgot about it or something because I listened to Star Talk but now it's been less and less about stars so I kind of, no yeah I know, I, I yeah, I, I should get back into because I, it was fun to go through step by step kind of how we've learned everything we have, it's, it's just so crazy. It's like, it's almost like, I don't know, geometry or something where it's like we start with one thing and then we're able to kind of deduce another thing and so on and so on. And once we were able to form, find like standard candles, then we can measure all, you know, how far away everything is. And then once we determined how we can check the wavelengths of light that certain things give off, we can tell what chemicals are in the atmosphere,

0:18:18 Marcel: Yeah. That's still running. Astronomy casts. They are. Yeah.

0:18:47 Marcel: Yeah. Yeah.

0:19:04 Thomas: Just all this stuff. It's really, really cool and it just puts it puts religion to shame because there's not and I know people argue, well, it's, you know, science and religion are compatible, yeah, it's like, man, the achievements of astronomy and science are just so mind-blowing and and versus the quote-unquote achievements of religion. I just, uh, that's a thought I have from time to time, but anyway, yeah. Yeah, that's really cool. Thanks for pointing that out.

0:19:07 Marcel: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When you go to church, you hear the same story over and over and again. And with Christmas, every time it's the same history. But when you listen to scientists now or 10 years ago or 20 years ago, the story changes. Always there's new stuff. And the new stuff is, well, it's always fascinating. So that in 10 years time there will be more fascinating new stuff and it's yeah it's great I love it

0:19:45 Thomas: Right, yeah, absolutely. All right, well, Thanks a lot for coming on.

0:20:06 Thomas: Hey everyone. I know I always tell you about supporting me on patreon.com/atheist, which I definitely encourage you to do. But I wanted to also tell you that I know there are many people who can't afford to support me on Patreon. So I wanted give you a couple of easy ways you could support the show that you know and love without costing you a penny and without taking too much of your time. So if you go on atheisticallyspeaking.com you can see I now have an Amazon banner set up on the side. If you click on that before you purchase something through Amazon, then I get a tiny percentage of it and it's absolutely free to you. So I would only ask you to do it because it's completely free to and I'm sure no one will even notice once you start doing it.

0:20:00 Marcel: Yeah

0:20:53 Thomas: It'll just be like you're buying anything from Amazon, but it'll give me a tiny percentage. So that's a way you can help the show out without costing you anything. Also, one more way is to go to iTunes and write a review for the show. It's very helpful and it helps me be seen more so that the show can grow. Thank you so much. And I hope that if you aren't able to contribute on Patreon, that you'll do one of these couple free, easy ways that you can support the show because it takes a lot of work and it's a very easy way to give back. Thank you.

0:21:27 Thomas: Alright, next up to talk about the pale blue dot is Danielle. How are you doing, Danielle? Doing good. I also wanted to that Danielle runs the bookclub on Goodreads, so thank you so much for doing that. I really appreciate it. So what would you like to talk about on Pale Blue Dot? Jeez.

0:21:45 Danielle: Yeah, so I thought I'd talk about just kind of the differences and similarities between Sagan's books, because I've read seven of them now. And

0:21:57 Thomas: That's a lot considering you only wrote five too? That's like awesome. No, I'm just kidding. Oh.

0:21:59 Danielle: No, he's written 20, I think, something like that. Yeah.

0:22:03 Thomas: Wow. That's about. Yeah.

0:22:06 Danielle: So there's still a lot more to read. But there's a lot of, they definitely all kind of touch on the same core concepts, um, you know, he's a really big in environmentalism, um, I feel like every single one of his books touches on the, um, the ozone layer and global warming and things like that, so there's definitely some of that in this book even though it's not really about the Earth, it's about, you know, human future in space, but kind of goes on the the same topics of just, you know, we need to preserve ourselves in order to get to space or continue exploring, right?

0:22:09 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:22:51 Thomas: Probably be best if we weren't all on fire before we. Yeah. Before we got into space. Well, that's interesting. What are some of the ones you've read? Have you read, uh, let's see, I've read Dragons of Eden, Contact. Contact was a long time though, I, I could reread that one. What, what, is oh Really, huh. What have you read? There are just a few, I don't oh Demon Hunter, okay, I was gonna say I hadn't heard of those first two actually. So the man

0:23:11 Danielle: Those, are two I haven't read. Yep. I've read um, Cosmic Connection, um, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Demon Haunted World. Yeah. Right

0:23:26 Thomas: Did write a lot of books. Oh.

0:23:28 Danielle: Yeah, Billions and Billions and and varieties of scientific experience and Cosmos.

0:23:30 Thomas: Yeah awesome all right so yeah, go, uh, continue, sorry to interrupt you rudely

0:23:39 Danielle: Yeah. So I, uh, yeah, I don't know that I have too much more to say. I think this is one of my favorites. Um, it's just kind of, I dunno, some of them can get, um, a little bit more, um. I dunno. They don't seem like they have a core, um, concept behind them. So he just kind talks about a bunch of different topics and it's just kind of wrapped together in a book, so this one's a little bit more focused since it's really, you know, about human future in space, so I like that more about this book. Um, I think my favorite is probably Billions and Billions, um, so that, you know, has the same thing where it just kind of, it doesn't have as, um, as much of a core concept as, um, Pale Blue Dot does, but I think I really like like the last chapter or the last few chapters in Billions and Billions, I didn't realize that that was published posthumously.

0:23:40 Thomas: Yeah

0:24:38 Danielle: And so the last Chapter was just Sagan kind of talking about his struggles with his health issues and just going through surgeries and all of that. And then Anne writes an epilogue just kind of writing about what he's done and what his legacy is. Yeah, it was really really touching to read that, um.

0:24:49 Thomas: Oh man yeah yeah Well, uh, with Pale Blue Dot, would you mind, is, is there any part of it that you read that stuck with you that maybe you could briefly explain to the listeners and just for the sake of summing up a part of it for people who maybe didn't read it? What do you think?

0:25:23 Danielle: Yeah, I think that what touched or stuck with me is, um, just kind of his really optimistic views of what the future could be, um, like I think I think Harley was gonna talk about just kind of how it wasn't very realistic, um, about his vision of the future and how, you know, we'll go off and create all these new new, um, colonies on different planets and just kind of live in all these different places, it's, you know, it's very much very futuristic like a lot of science fiction is and, um, I don't know, it's just it's really, um, very hopeful to read and yeah, that's kind of his take on things is to make make things more inspirational and less, you know, so much realistic or, you know, spans of when this might happen, but just this is what could happen.

0:25:39 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:26:19 Thomas: It's kind of depressing how unrealistic any sort of significant space travel is. It's not exactly the most interesting book, like, hey guys, we're never getting anywhere, it's too far away, guess what, this just in, space big, not too too much empty space, uh, never gonna happen, that that book. Yeah. It wouldn't be too interesting, so I, I agree, I, I think, but who knows, I mean, you just never know

0:26:25 Danielle: Yeah. Right. Right. I really like, yeah, I really, like, when he writes about the Voyager and the plates and just kind of, you now, like this, this is never going to be found, But we put all of these things on it just in case it might be found. And you can hear, you know, the brainwaves of my wife as she thinks about me and stuff like that.

0:26:46 Thomas: Yeah oh yeah yeah yeah that's awesome oh

0:27:09 Danielle: And, you know, whale calls and all sorts of just humanity and what life is like on Earth. It's just, it's so optimistic.

0:27:09 Thomas: Weird yeah, yeah captain kirk's gonna, going to find those whale calls at some point. Captain Kirk and Spock are going to have to track him down. Yeah, I, I agree, and, um, I think that it's interesting, I wonder if his part of, I mean, there's a lot of reasons for that, I'm sure, like he wanted to obviously write a good book, an optimistic book, but but also nothing's funnier than people from 100 years ago who thought everything we've ever could invent was already going to be invented, you know.

0:27:22 Danielle: Right? Right.

0:27:47 Thomas: It's like maybe maybe it's a smart move for him for his legacy to make all these predictions, because predicting, like, nah, things are going to level off, uh, you know, uh, RAM is going to stop at about 64 kilobytes, you know, like a stick of RAM, and, uh, hard drive, you know, if you predict a bunch of stuff that's never going to change, I mean, it's, that's usually, those aren't the best predictions, there's usually, uh, those are usually pretty laughable in a few years time, and who knows, maybe there will be some breakthrough that will allow us to, I don't know, bend space or something, I'm doubtful, but maybe, and then it would change everything, I mean, once you had something to that degree, some discovery to that degree, I'm sure things would unfold really quickly, and then

0:27:47 Danielle: Well

0:28:33 Thomas: We'll all be talking about how much of a genius Carl Sagan was for predicting all this stuff. Yeah.

0:28:39 Danielle: I think he's pretty realistic on just, you know, never being able to surpass that, I mean, he talks a lot about just you're being able the contact, um, some, you know, alien species or something and just like send a message, wait two years for the reply, you know, and then, or if it's close two years, more like 10, 15, 100 years right

0:28:39 Thomas: Yeah yeah that would still be incredibly interesting though, I've never ever thought about that, like if we could say, I mean, how cool would that, how big of an event would that would be, you know, that would probably get more views than the last episode of M*A*S*H, you know, like everybody's okay, we're scheduled to receive the alien message that we sent, you know, but the last one we received 15 years ago or whatever. Yeah, that's interesting. Thank you for coming on again, thank you from managing the book club. I appreciate it so much. This is my favorite thing that I've done with this show, this book club.

0:29:21 Danielle: Nope

0:29:31 Thomas: I really, I really like it.

0:29:31 Danielle: No problem Yeah.

0:29:50 Thomas: Well, that's it for the Pale Blue Dot portion of today's episode. I've got a couple more guests for Thursday. You, you know, I've got a few minutes here, and I'm never going to pass up the opportunity to give you guys a little bit more content, so I got a couple of good comments on the last show, which was comments on another show. The last show was Live Listener Feedback, where I had a few people on to talk about the Elijiah T. episode, and I got a few comments. So, Mike Paps, Thomas, I think I have an analogy for you regarding the difference between faith and even trust and things like the problem of induction or the idea that we're just a brain and a vat. I agree, the latter are not things we accept on faith. Here's the analogy.

0:30:35 Thomas: Imagine you're kidnapped, taken in an airplane, have a parachute strapped to your back, and are thrown out the door. When you pull the ripcord, is it because you have faith it will save you? I would say no, it's because you're left with no other choice than to try it. Just as we have no choice but to live our lives using induction and assuming we aren't a brain in a vat. Excellent, excellent comment. I totally agree. I look at it that very same way. And I want to tie in the faith comment. I got another comment on faith here. Regarding your wife, my wife, anyway, I have zero faith that she is faithful. English is funny, he says. He or she, I guess. The user is called ConversionTube. I'll assume you are male based on demographics. If I were a betting man, well, I'm assuming I'm a man, I don't know. If I were a betting genderless person, I would bet that you're male because of my, you know, not my demographics, but atheist demographics.

0:31:27 Thomas: But, but that's another story. Conversion Tube, Z. I'll use Z. Z says, I have a rather large body of evidence. She is faithful to me. Now, again, I could assume you're male because your wife is female. But hey, the recent Congress, or not Congress, the Supreme Court decision makes it even more likely. Now, I'm going out of my way to be ridiculous here. So, Conversion Tube, small list. She calls me every day asking how my day was. She asked my opinion, blah, blah. She touches me. She requests to spend a lot of free time with me on and on. Studies show there's also a long list of indicators that your spouse may be cheating, and she meets almost none of the criteria. That large body of evidence justifies my belief that she is faithful. I don't need any faith. I think I agree, and I want to tie it back to the last comment. I just don't see how the word faith operates, people.

0:32:22 Thomas: This is one of, um, religious people's favorite things to pull out in a debate. Certain people, not everybody, but Dinesh D'Souza, or I'm trying to think who else, I think there was a, maybe Rabbi Shmuley, I don't know, one of the, on the Jewish side of the debate against Sam Harris, and I think back when Hitchens was alive, I remember hearing this, oh, do you have faith that your wife is faithful to you? No, it doesn't cheat on you, you need to have faith in your wife, you get blah, blah, it's doesn't make any sense to me, because it is, it just has no function. I go about assuming that my wife is faithful to me until I have reason not to. There's no, there's no faith, doesn't come into it. As soon as I have some evidence, I see something, I check her phone for some reason, or I see, once I have some reason to suspect, I'm giving her benefit of the doubt.

0:33:16 Thomas: There is not a lot that hinges on this question for me. Assuming I have no pointers, you know, assuming I have no evidence that she is cheating on me. There's not a lot that rides on this. I don't sit around. I wonder what people's lives are like. Maybe I'd lead a different life, but I don't want to sit around fretting like, oh, is she cheating on me? Oh, I don't know. I just have to have faith. It's like, no, I'm, I'll assume that just like you do with most things. I mean, I'll assume I'm employed until someone tells me I'm fired. I don't need to sit and have faith that I'm employed. Like you just, you carry on essentially. And I think that sort of does tie to what Mike Papps was saying. You don't really have a choice. I mean, I guess I do have a choose in the sense of faith in my wife.

0:34:01 Thomas: I could just decide I don't have faith or something. But again, it's illogical and it's, I think it's a way that religious people try to smuggle the word faith into everyday conversation and say, oh, see, you deal with this every day. You have to have faith. So therefore, our faith is just the same as that when really that's just not true. I mean, I don't have faith that my wife is faithful. I just don't even think about it until I have some reason to believe otherwise. So that's how I live my life. Let's see. I think there was one more that I I wanted to talk about, ah, I think you would still be, so, uh, conversion tube also said that he thought you said there are no consequences to people not being conscious. Uh, as in when I said I, there wouldn't be, nothing would change if I were, you know, if I, if I suspected people don't actually have consciousness, nothing will change.

0:34:57 Thomas: He said, there absolutely are consequences. Your behavior changes. If you believe they have no consciousness, you will treat them differently and your opinion of their lack of consciousness will affect every decision you make regarding them. Simple example, why would you even bother saying hi as a greeting or ask their opinion about anything? Why bother? They aren't conscious. I think maybe you misinterpreted this and Derek commented pretty effectively on this. No, you actually nothing would change because the every single, the whole thing with philosophical zombies is every single outward appearance is that they do have consciousness. It's just you can't know for sure. So the reason I would still say hi to people is because every single thing would be the same. It would be same as now. If I don't say hi, I'm not going to say hi. If I say hi someone, they will say, hey, man, what's going on?

0:35:44 Thomas: You don't like me? What? You know, it'll be all those same factors that they are now. Now, it's just I can't know that there's that spark, that magical thing of consciousness that I have. I can't know for sure that other people have that. And if I decided they didn't, honestly, nothing would change because people would still respond to pain and it would still seem as though maybe they're feeling some kind of pain. They might not be conscious, but they could still feel pain, I think. Just basically every outward appearance would be the same. So for me, there wouldn't be any change in consequence. I don't know. Maybe for conversion, I'll call you your first name. Conversion. People should use their names on this. So when I read their comments, it makes more sense. Maybe it would be different for you.

0:36:29 Thomas: And maybe that means you put more value on the internal magic of consciousness happening. I don't know. I think that you can't really know for sure. And since nothing would change, like everything would be the same, to me, I wouldn't behave any differently because people would still say, ow, if I poked them, you know, I would still have the instincts of not wanting to hurt other people and not, you know, so for me, nothing would change. I don't know. That's how I think of it. And that's how typically the philosophical question is posed that way, that all outward appearance is exactly the same. So I think by definition, you almost would have to act the same because if the outward appearances are exactly the same, what would you change and why?

0:37:20 Thomas: And how would that affect you once you changed it? So I don't know. That's how I feel about it. Let me know if you still disagree. But okay. So, I just wanted to take some time to read some very thoughtful comments. I thank you guys for the comments all the time. It's my favorite thing to read your guys' feedback and to have you on the show. And I've had a lot of that lately. It makes me really happy. All right. Well, I will see you guys on Thursday for part two of Pale Blue Dot.