SIO136: Don't Surf on Tsunami, and Other Disaster Advice from Mika McKinnon

Transcript

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

0:00:27 Thomas: To Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 136. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Alright, I am so excited for today's interview. Seriously, this was so fun. Mika McKinnon is joining me. She is a geophysicist. She is a master of disaster, as she says. She specializes in disaster, and also she's a sci-fi science consultant, and actually not just sci-fi, as you'll here. She's a science consultant for lots of different art and media, but so cool. So much to talk about in terms of disasters and why Armageddon is terrible, and why other movies are better or worse, or that kind of thing. What it's like to do her job, which is really fascinating, and also what it's like to do science consulting for TV shows and movies.

0:01:19 Thomas: So fun. Such a cool person. Without any further delay, let's head on over to my interview with Mika McKinnon. Mika, how you doing today?

0:01:35 Mika: I am doing quite well. It's an unusually sunny day for me.

0:01:39 Thomas: Oh, where are you? Are you in San Francisco?

0:01:41 Mika: For the moment, I am. I just got back from one trip and I've got another one coming up in a few weeks. Actually, you know, one week I get to go visit a rocket launch.

0:01:49 Thomas: Oh, that is so cool. Yeah, I, for one, about the sunniness, I was just in Chicago and I literally jumped on a flight where I was like freezing one day in Chicago. I looked at what the temperature was going to be at Sacramento airport and I thought it was a joke. I was, like, I can't even, the difference was like 60 degrees. It was insane. And so, yeah, it is very sunny here in California right now and hopefully, you know, enjoy it.

0:02:14 Mika: Yeah, Normally home is in British Columbia and Vancouver, the temperate rainforest, so I'm much more accustomed to having perpetually overcast skies.

0:02:21 Thomas: It. Right, right, right. Well, you get that California sun. That's good. Well so you seem to go back and forth. Are you based out of anywhere in particular?

0:02:29 Mika: I am fairly nomadic. I am always somewhere on the West Coast. I've moved upwards of 30 times now, but never more than five minutes from my beloved Pacific Ocean. So as long as I'm somewhere near the Pacific, it's got to be home.

0:02:42 Thomas: Oh, that's really cool. So let's talk about your background, because I'm so excited. I've wanted to talk to you about the consulting you do in general for different sci-fi and all that, because that's something I'm very interested. I've never spoken to anyone who's actually done that. But let's go into your background first and talk about why you're a geophysicist, but maybe why you chose that field or something about your journey in that.

0:02:55 Mika: Yeah.

0:03:07 Mika: So I am a physicist and geophysicist, and I specialize in disasters, and I also work in science fiction, or really any type of fiction. I've also worked on non-sci-fi shows like Madam Secretary, where my job is to help plausible storylines. It's almost a form of one-on-one science tutoring for the writing department to help them figure out how to have more interesting stories. In my non-si-fi world, I work as a field geophysicist. Field geophysics is a bizarre field that's kind of a mix between MacGyver and James Bond villain. And so what it looks like is you go fly somewhere remote, normally in a helicopter, land on this beautiful glacier that nobody has stood on for hundreds of years, and lay out.

0:03:18 Thomas: Oh, wow.

0:04:00 Thomas: And then you have to make a volcano out of a paperclip or something. Is that, yeah.

0:04:03 Mika: Yeah, Well, I mean, and then you like, you're trying to figure out something about the Earth's subsurface secrets. So you want to know what is happening below the ground without actually spending all the money on a drill hole to go below the ground. And you do this by laying out a whole bunch of extremely sensitive, very expensive equipment, then doing something to provoke the planet. So this could be layout.

0:04:26 Thomas: It's like saying something really mean or no, no. Yeah.

0:04:28 Mika: Yeah, like just Absolute cruel. So it could be laying out a bunch of metal pegs and then zapping 2400 volts of electricity into the ground and seeing how the the electricity is modified as it goes through the ground. And so you end up, it's very Douglas Adams. You end up with the answer and you have to figure out the question. You end up with how did the signal change? And you need to try and understand what geology did it go through in order to change.

0:04:29 Thomas: Yeah.

0:04:54 Thomas: Oh, very interesting. So there's probably like, maybe there might be multiple possibilities in terms of what could be underneath, but you're trying to narrow down what the most likely thing that would have caused that answer is.

0:05:08 Mika: So, yeah, so it's a form of inversion modeling is the type of mathematics it is. And there's literally an infinite number of solutions. And you have to try and decide what are the most likely and plausible solutions based on all the other information you have. So I said, okay, we zap it with electricity and see what comes out the other side. Well, another thing you could do is put down geophones, which are three-dimensional microphones. They sense vibration in all three dimensions. And then you blow something up. You create a fake earthquake by hitting a big red button and setting off explosives. As I said very James Bond villain. And depending how quickly those vibrations travel and reach the microphones, the geophones, then you can tell the density of the rock. So if you have the densityof the rock and you know its electrical properties and maybe you throw in some magnetic properties in there, all of these things, you can piece them together and go, okay, what's something that's incredibly dense and conducts electricity well?

0:05:17 Thomas: I take

0:06:04 Mika: Darby gold. How about something that is extremely magnetic and extremely dense? Oh, maybe I found some iron ore. And you kind of piece together what the answers are. The MacGyver.

0:06:14 Thomas: It if you find a giant thing of gold, you're just like, oh, nothing, totally nothing here. Let's go pack it up, everybody. And then you just come back later.

0:06:19 Mika: Oh, The very, like, I had an incredibly awkward field job at one point where I found gold on Native American burial grounds where the company I was working for at the time did not get adequate permissions in advance. It was a very ethically, it was a job that made me feel like I was making the planet a worse place. It was definitely one of my less fun jobs.

0:06:28 Thomas: Oh, oh wow. Ouch. Okay.

0:06:49 Mika: So the way MacGyver comes into all of this is, okay, you've got this gorgeous, beautiful, extremely sensitive equipment that you're like hauling around on back roads, carrying in a backpack, slinging out in the dirt and then getting rained on. On. It's all going to break. Everything breaks. And then you have to fix it with whatever's in your pockets. So I used to, with one of my jobs, I have to bring a generator with me, a great big old Honda 500 watt generator. Because, you know, that's just a casual thing to throw in your backpack, right? Just the fact that it takes two people to lift it, much less move it anywhere. Which also meant that I'd bring a hairdryer with me and use that to like dry out electronics and get so much grief because oh you're such a prissy girl bringing like a hair dryer into the field and I'm going no it's a legitimate tool that I need to do in order to fix my equipment and if it just so happens I already have it I might as well just you know dry my hair too so

0:07:45 Thomas: Yeah. Oh that's so cool. Yeah I wouldn't have thought of that. You've got all kinds of different situations to be prepared for there. You're also like a Cub Scout too kind of thing. You can always be prepared.

0:07:48 Mika: Yeah.

0:07:58 Mika: It's Or Well, I mean, if you can't bring all the stuff you actually need, so that's where the MacGyver comes in, where, where I've also done things like, I had to build a voltmeter out of a light bulb in order to track out a short in something. Because I didn't actually have a proper multimeter at the time. Or figuring it.

0:07:58 Thomas: Yeah yeah.

0:08:14 Thomas: So at what point did you Were you able to gather this competence in like electronics and stuff? Was that part of your training? Did you have to figure that out on your own? I mean, I don't imagine it's a geophysics course or is it?

0:08:28 Mika: So I did take electronics classes. But really the key and most important thing about doing field fixes is realizing it's already broken. And if you can't fix it, your half million dollar project is shot. So what are you going to do? Try and fix it. And if you break it worse, oh well, you're in the same situation, so you just kind of trial and error on it.

0:08:52 Thomas: Yeah.

0:08:52 Mika: Um, it's Also Well

0:08:53 Thomas: So it's the kind of thing where like if you lose that day or something or like the fuel to get out there, whatever, it's such a big investment that it's not as though you can just say, well, this is shot. We'll try again. Ah,

0:09:06 Mika: You could maybe lose a day, but if you're way out in backwoods British Columbia and you're hours and hours and ours from the nearest anything, it's not like you're losing a day, you're using like three or four weeks. And when like every single one of your field assistance has a standby rate of like $200 a day to sit around, and you have to feed people out in these remote camps, and like the bed space and bringing in the food, and then your, your higher level people are paid even more, suddenly your standby time could be thousands of dollars.

0:09:18 Thomas: Yeah.

0:09:38 Thomas: That is super cool. Cool. If there isn't already, there should be a movie about you and then they're about that. And then you can consult on it as well. That, that would be best of both worlds.

0:09:42 Mika: So You Oh It'd be perfect It's, I admit, one of the things I constantly, so I, I like to communicate science, and I like to tell, I'm a storyteller about how I give the narrative of how science works, and I love working on fiction, but I can't generate fiction on my own, I don't like, it's just not one of my things, so instead I, I leave breadcrumbs and go like, hey, wouldn't it be really fun to have a geophysics character who does things How about One in space, it'd be amazing, it'd be like MacGyver on the moon. Come on, let's do it.

0:10:02 Thomas: Right. Oh my gosh. I love it. I do the same thing with philosophy. I don't know that, you know, I'm not going to say I'm, I'm doing the work you're doing, but in, on my philosophy show, I like to do the Same Thing where it's like, oh, that Would Be Such a Good Concept for Something, but I'm not gonna do it. Someone else, listen to the show and make it.

0:10:34 Mika: Yeah. Could you just, could you just make this for me? Come on. You know, you want to.

0:10:39 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. So as a disaster fan, I guess, what's your favorite disaster, real or potential?

0:10:47 Mika: So I, I do not like real disasters. My job is to try and make it so disasters are going to happen no matter what, my job is to try and make it so the fewest people die, there's no unnecessary death from disaster. And that's my favorite, disasters are the ones where we have a great big huge event and nobody gets hurt and nothing gets damaged, so So there's things like subduction zone earthquakes in the Aleutian Islands, and if they're sufficiently remote, yes, you have a giant earthquake, like a magnitude eight earthquake that spawns a tsunami, and nobody feels it and nobody is impacted, so we just get cool science and I love those.

0:11:07 Thomas: Totally agree.

0:11:26 Mika: As For my favorite fictional disaster, this is a breadcrumb, it's, it's a thing I want to see in real life. So the Pacific Ring of Fire is the tectonically active zone surrounding the Pacific Ocean. And in some places, you have transverse earthquake zones, so the plates are sliding side to side. And you get earthquakes like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, or the Loma Prieta, the first televised earthquake, or Northridge, anything like that. So they're relatively shallow, intense earthquakes.

0:11:26 Thomas: Right, yeah, huh. What's that? Sorry, can you

0:11:55 Mika: Earthquakes.

0:11:55 Thomas: Explain more? What's That Loma one? I don't know that I know that one.

0:11:57 Mika: So Loma Prieta was 1989 San Francisco earthquake that happened during the World Series. And so, yeah,

0:12:02 Thomas: Oh, I was gonna say, okay, this, never mind. I think my dad was at that game. Anyway, that's super cool.

0:12:08 Mika: I was up in Marin Headlands watching the city burn. That's not a grim image right there. So these transverse zone earthquakes, these side-to-side plate motion earthquakes, are relatively shallow and intense. And they're city-destroying earthquakes. They're what happened in Haiti. They're all over California, as anything on the San Andreas Fault is one of these side-to-side earthquakes. You can also have subduction zones, one plate going underneath another. And this would be all the places you have the really, the big nasty volcanoes. So the entire Pacific Northwest, New Zealand, Chile, Japan. And when those earthquakes happen, they're They're usually offshore and there's a big vertical change in the plate, which means that you it's like throwing a pebble into a pond.

You trigger a tsunami and the tsunami spreads across the Pacific Ocean. So some of the most devastating earthquakes in the world are all subduction zone earthquakes. So that's the 2005 Sumatra earthquake out of Japan that swamped the nuclear facility and led to a whole bunch of chaos from that. In the Pacific Northwest, our last one was the 1700, January 26th, 1700 at 10 a.m. There was an earthquake off the coast of Vancouver Island that generated a tsunami so bad it was recorded in Japan. So these are great big, huge earthquakes. They send out tsunami. 1964 out of Alaska actually hit Hawaii bad enough to bend all of the parking meters. So

0:12:23 Thomas: Wow. Okay. Yeah. Wow,

0:13:37 Mika: They were parallel with the ground, which is like amazing and devastating imagery to look at.

0:13:38 Thomas: Whoo. Yeah, I wouldn't even thought you could do that. Like, that that's incredible.

0:13:44 Mika: Um, so yeah, yeah. Tsunami are really nasty. The disaster I would love to see in visual effects in a movie and not in real life is one of these.

0:13:54 Thomas: Yeah gotcha. Understood. You're, you're compassionate. We're not talking about actual, you know, death though, but just scientifically, fictionally.

0:13:58 Mika: Yeah. So yeah. Yeah, so tsunami and open ocean travel about the same rate. The jet plane travels and They're very small in open ocean. Like they're only a couple inches tall, and then they come into shore and they, they do something called shoaling, which is they slow down, they bunch up, and they get taller. So as a tsunami shoals, it slows down from jet airliner speeds to highway speeds, and it grows from a few inches tall to tens of feet tall, so like the height of a short building. I would love to see a visual effects scene of a tsunami generated somewhere in the Ring of Fire hitting the Port of Long Beach, the largest port on the western coast in LA, and picking up those millions of cargo containers and chucking them across the LA basin at highway speeds, because LA basin is almost dead flat, so that's the the visual effects disaster I'd love to see, that I never want to happen in real life. So

0:14:07 Thomas: Right.

0:14:58 Thomas: Yeah Yeah. Wow. That's fascinating. Is there, that's interesting. I've never thought of a tsunami here, you know, once again, being a California resident, is there a reason, am I just ignorant or is there reason geologically that they tend to go toward like, you know, Japan and all that rather than toward the West coast?

0:15:14 Mika: We have gotten lucky, is what it comes down to. Tsunami are not locally generated in California because our earthquake zones go side to side instead of one going underneath another, so we're not going to locally generate a tsunami. However, every time there's a big earthquake in, uh, South America off the, the West coast, so Chile, or up in the Pacific Northwest, so Alaska down through, actually, Northern California, honestly, um, those can send tsunami going up and down the coast. For the last couple of years there have been a couple of tsunami watches, inches, tsunami warnings. And we've gotten lucky in that by the time the tsunami has reached California, it's only been a few inches tall, so most people don't even notice there's a tsunami. However, they've still killed people, which

0:15:17 Thomas: Okay. Gotcha.

0:16:01 Thomas: Wow!

0:16:02 Mika: How does a wave that's a few inches tall kill anybody? How does a series of waves that's A few Inches Tall kill anybody.

0:16:07 Thomas: Yeah, that is what what my next question would be.

0:16:09 Mika: Buddy. Yeah.

0:16:10 Thomas: So tell me.

0:16:10 Mika: So, They generate really intense currents and people are just foolish enough to go, "Hey, I'm gonna go surf a tsunami," ignoring the fact that tsunami is not a thing you can surf. Anyway, even if it was, tall it's not a beautiful cresting wave like on the tsunami warning signs. It looks instead like a really rapidly rising tide. It's a wall of water, not like a curling crest. So ignoring you could never surf it anyway.

0:16:15 Thomas: Sweet people back.

0:16:34 Thomas: Why is that exactly? I would have thought it's just a kind of wave, but you're saying even if we have a tsunami that's the same size as a wave, it's going to look totally different?

0:16:35 Mika: Yeah.

0:16:46 Mika: So that's because it's a really, really, really long wavelength. It's actually, it is a wave, just like the tide is a way, but the tide has a wave with a wavelength like half that of the circumference of the earth. We get two tides a day, we get too high tides today, we have two wave crests a day, so it's really slow moving. And And whether or not a wave will curl and give you that beautiful shape depends on the wave height compared to the steepness of the slope, which then in turn depends on the wavelength of the wave and all of these things. And what it ends up being is that it's effectively a tsunami is always a shallow water wave, which means it's already gotten the shape that it is going to get way out in open ocean, which is a wall of water. Like there's just, there's nothing steep enough for it to curl and break.

0:16:47 Thomas: Huh. Oh, okay. Right, right. Gotcha. Gotcha.

0:17:36 Thomas: So when people try to surf it, what happens?

0:17:39 Mika: Break. So, so if you try and surf like a few inch tall tsunami, first of all, you're not going to see it, there's not any wave there. And second is just a really, really strong vicious current. It's like going out into the world's strongest riptides. So what happens is people try and surface tsunami, or like go and try and take photos of it and then drop their keys in the ocean and chase after them, I don't know why, um, and they get caught up and the incredibly strong currents wiped off their feet and die. And it happens like pretty much every time we have one of these itsy bitsy teeny tiny, hey it's mostly harmless, tsunami, and it still kills one or two people because they're just not, not paying attention and not respecting the power and the strength of all that water just because it doesn't look flashy.

0:18:23 Thomas: Okay. Well, you heard it here, guys. Don't, don't surf a tsunami, everybody. That's valuable life lessons.

0:18:24 Mika: No, no, no, wading in the tsunami.

0:18:29 Thomas: No, that's really interesting though. I mean, I, I didn't know all that. I didn't know that. I thought it was essentially a wave, but yeah, that when you talk about the, the wavelength and all that, I guess that, that makes sense. That's crazy.

0:18:29 Mika: Yeah, Well, so there's, the there's a couple of myths about tsunami. One is it's going to be a big curling cresting wave. The The next is going to be, if it's not big, it doesn't kill you. The next chunk is people go, "Okay, it's only one wave and," or the first wave is strongest and everything after that is no big deal. No, it's a whole series of waves. Any of them can be the biggest. And when you have the water coming in and then going out and coming in, going out, cause you've got waves coming in and like on top of each other. Well, those two waves crashing, one going in, one going out, are going to have constructive interference. And you're going to get like, first you could have constructive interference which means like the wave actually gets taller, like just like a hitting resonance, is kind of like, um, if you

0:19:16 Thomas: Yeah. It'S just that they Could, isn't it like all kinds of things, they could either cancel or they could double or yeah, okay.

0:19:21 Mika: Yeah, Yeah, And that you also just get ridiculously strong currents. Now, one of the, all right, here's a, an obscure piece of, of disaster, to go with this, which is, um, tsunami has a period of about 15 minutes, well, somewhere, somewhere between 10 minutes and a half hour. And a period means how long it takes for one wave to go past. Sometimes that period equals the resonance frequency of a bay or an inlet or something like that. And then a resonance frequency is the rate at which something wants to move. So anytime you play on a playground swing and you swing back and forth, what you're doing is you're finding the resonance frequency. Of what is the best way to swing back forth, and you pump your legs and lean, lean back so you build up bigger and bigger and bigger, and you can also do this, uh, like with a wine glass, and you tap the side, and if you tap the side about once every half second, you can actually generate a wave that will get bigger and bigger and inside the

0:19:33 Thomas: That's

0:20:23 Mika: Wine glass. If you do it in a bathtub and scooch back and forth, it's about a 10 second thing. So if you go scooch, scooch, scooch, you can actually build a bigger, bigger, bigger wave and have it splash all over the floor and make a huge mess and make somebody yell at you. When a tsunami does this in an inlet or a bay, it resonates and creates a sesh, is what we call it. It also happens if you've got landslides into lakes, or in the Great Lakes, there's some wind, at some times of year, that the wind wave hits the resonance frequency of one of the Great Lakes. And it creates this wave that is two, three, four times taller than a normal wave would, would be in that area. Yeah.

0:21:01 Thomas: Crazy, wow.

0:21:01 Mika: So even small tsunami can actually be much, much, much worse in an enclosed space. So I, I'm from British Columbia, uh, Port Alberni actually managed to have a tsunami that was significantly worse than the tsunami at the source area because it resonated. When I was talking about Hilo Bay in Hawaii, the 1964 Alaska earthquake, part of why that tsunami was so devastating, dating, is because its period and the resonance period of the Hilo Bay were the same, and the tsunami resonated and got bigger and bigger and better trapped inside that bay.

0:21:35 Thomas: I think it's like, like a Tesla oscillator, right, where it's kind of that principle. I saw it on a Mythbusters, it was super cool where they could like get this steel beam to oscillate a ridiculous amount that you would not think possible by hitting that resonating frequency, and then it just kind of ticks it up a little more each time, right at the apex, you know, right at the peak of the wave, and then it gets it to just go out of control. So it's, I think it's related, right? Similar principle.

0:22:02 Mika: Yep, absolutely. Resonance frequencies are really scary that way. There's also a very classic engineering failure, I think it was in Tacoma, where they did the bridge and the wind hit a resonance frequency together and the bridge was just toast.

0:22:03 Thomas: Oh yeah. That bridge. Yeah. It really, it turned into like a noodle. It's just crazy. Wow. Yeah, that's super cool. So where were you for Armageddon and why couldn't you have prevented that awful movie? That's my next question. The hard hitting questions, what happened in Armagedon to make that movie be so unscientific and awful?

0:22:21 Mika: Yeah. Yeah. So you can, oh, you can't help anybody who won't help themselves. So one of the coolest things about, um, the last decade and a half is that there's been the rise of the science consultant in entertainment. And my theory is, is that this is based on effectively the rise of the internet, because first you have the internet fan forum where people can geek out out together. And then next you can do freeze frame and, and like pour over a particular scene or rewatch it really easily and then be able to like find every single Easter egg. So suddenly it becomes a lot easier. It's a, it's effectively a very cheap form of fan service to hire a scientist to hide these Easter eggs in your visual background.

Um, so I said before, part of being a science consultant is, uh, in the entertainment industry is being a one-on-one science tutor for of the writing's room. Another aspect of it can be being the stunt handwriting for your actors. So anybody who's ever watched Stargate Atlantis or Stargate Universe knows my handwriting incredibly well because I was a stunt handwriting. I was on set. And anytime you have your genius scientist up at the board trying to solve things, we can't have them stumped by F equals MA.

0:22:51 Thomas: All right. Yeah.

0:23:49 Mika: We can't them stump by a high school physics equation for like basic Newton's laws. It needs to be something more challenging than that, but it can't be total nonsense, it needs to be recognizably challenging, so my job was to come up with things that were, uh, plausible, recognizable, yet also not well known, so that you would not just be like, "Oh, well, that's easy, look it up in the back of the book." So it involved doing a lot of things like, uh, one of my favorites was feeding the energy of a solar flare into a black hole in order to have an energy source to create a traversable wormhole, a traversable wormhole meaning one that's big enough for people to travel through. So that was fun to do. I had another where they asked me to to provide 40 feet of equations, the first time in my life I'd ever been, you know, asked for equations by length instead of by content

0:24:01 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:24:37 Thomas: For the, for like the gigantic, like blackboard type thing where it's just like, oh, okay.

0:24:41 Mika: Yeah they're just like we just want more math uh, just 40 feet on, what, don't know. Uh, so I ended up going from, I started with, um, multi-universe theory, went through quantum dynamics, I went through a few more, like, physics and thermodynamic steps, and then ended up in atmospheric science and storm formation, all in like this massive connection of interlinked equations

0:24:44 Thomas: Yeah.

0:25:03 Thomas: I have, that's so funny. I've always wondered about that when you see that crap on a, on a white and sometimes like I have a little bit of background, I can recognize some of it. I took a lot of calculus. I was really into that, but, but like most of the time I can't, you know, it's something I have no idea. And I always wonder, like, is that nonsense or did somebody actually put some effort into it? Sounds like if you worked on it, then it's at least not nonsense for the most part, right?

0:25:04 Mika: Yes and often it's actually got Easter eggs and spoilers for upcoming episodes, so yeah I'll

0:25:31 Thomas: What? OK, that's awesome. So it sounds going back to what you led this off with. It sounds like the Internet pedant has done some good in the world, because like if they're on those forums talking about all the, like, "Well, this was kind of wrong here and this was wrong," it sounds like that has maybe led to producers wanting, or somebody, whoever, wanting there to be more actual science content. Oh,

0:25:34 Mika: Yeah.

0:25:54 Mika: And then that led to things like the National Academy of Science put together the Science and Entertainment Exchange, which is like a matchmaking program between content creators and scientists, uh, so Scientists volunteer to be in their database and like get a little bit of screening and some training and how do you work with fiction, because it's a bit different than than working with reality. Surprise. And any sort content creator, anyone from a Hollywood writer to a game developer to anything like that, can call up the exchange and say, hey, I need to talk to a brain surgeon, and the exchange will help like go through their database and set up that conversation so that you can get access to these scientists, and these scientists can help create more interesting content. So

0:26:03 Thomas: Wow.

0:26:33 Thomas: That's so cool. What is something that you see that you wish people would get right? You know, like you wish you could go consult them on science and fiction. Whether it's, it was always, for the longest time, it Was always sound in space was really annoying, but I also kind of understand why, you know, you need it. But I don't know. No, I also think it's really cool and dramatic when it's like totally silent.

0:26:55 Mika: It can be it really can be, um, so for me, I, I have a slightly bizarre perspective in that I think it's way easier to to destroy something and then create it. It's really easy to criticize what everyone got wrong and it's hard to come up with ways to make it right. So I love watching B grade sci-fi movies and then attempting to justify all the weird crap they pull. Like, just be like, how do we make this make sense? The things that bother me are a a lot of our education comes from our entertainment. It is subversive education through the things that we watch. And I really like it when we are sharing culture in a way that makes the world better.

I love it when we have more diverse people represented doing science because, hey, then we're shaping the cultural concept of who does science and what does science look like. I liked The Martian in a large part because of the concept of the collaboration that was going on. Where I get frustrated is when are taught that will get people killed. So an example of this, Yeah, so an example, this would be San Andreas. San Andreas was in a lot of ways, I loved it as a movie. I mean, you've got a cute brunette girl who wins hearts through that disaster preparedness and knowledge, is she's pretty much the fangirl version of me. I'm just just like, yay, I'm so happy, um, and almost everything in the movie is actually good science advice.

0:27:05 Thomas: Yeah, right. Right. Yeah.

0:27:57 Thomas: Like surfing on tsunamis.

0:28:17 Thomas: Really?

0:28:17 Mika: I mean, admittedly, they've taken an earthquake that would happen in Pacific Northwest and put it in California, which is like, eh, you know, they just shifted it because we'd much rather destroy LA and San Francisco than we would Portland and Seattle. Like, I understand this, I've lived in both cities

0:28:31 Thomas: Yeah. Why? That's so funny. No one ever wants to destroy those nice places. They're like, just get Reveille. Just destroy that. They just hate everybody.

0:28:32 Mika: Exactly. Well, I think there's a lot of that comes from, you know, the people writing. Writing these have to live in L.A. is a little bit of pent up rage there.

0:28:39 Thomas: Yeah. Working in the industry. Yeah. Like get back at all this traffic, oh,

0:28:46 Mika: Yeah. And they did a sci fi what if of what if we could predict an earthquake a long time in advance. And I mean, it is vaguely based off of the science of earthquake early warning systems. We can in California, we could have an earthquake early morning system if only we would pay for it. And admittedly, it would only give us between, you know, a couple of tens of seconds of warning. We use the detection of the P wave, the primary wave, the pressure wave that comes first in order to do a countdown clock for the arrival of the secondary wave, the shear wave and the surface waves, all the love waves and relay waves and all of that that cause damage.

So you could get a countdown block and you're like, Oh, 10 seconds doesn't do much except for 10 seconds is enough to take your like sharp pointy scalpel out of open heart surgery. It's enough to pull over to the side of the road. It's enough to get the hell out of the kitchen where all the plates and cups and knives and all of that are going to fall on your head. Like, there's enough time to grab your baby and hide under a desk and hold the the table. Like, 10 seconds is actually a huge amount of time for disaster warning, so

0:29:03 Thomas: Yeah, wow, oh, that, like, right,

0:29:48 Mika: Yeah.

0:29:47 Thomas: Yeah, it's Certainly better than nothing, so that's based on on the whatever the event is, it was, it compressed the air first and then is that what it is, or, oh,

0:29:50 Mika: Uh, so it's, uh, when waves are traveling through the earth, uh, so, uh, an earthquake is actually of extremely low frequencies, um, acoustic wave, so you Get a primary wave first, which is a pressure wave, and then you get the sheer waves, the secondary waves, the S waves, and then you got all the surface waves, and the surface wave are the things like the Love wave and the Rayleigh wave and all the things that cause like the rippling motion. You can actually get like seasick and nauseous feeling during an earthquake.

So San Andreas, you know, it did this big sci-fi what-if of could we predict an earthquake like minutes and days in advance instead of like tens of seconds, and there's no science behind that, that's just pure sci-fi, but then it gives a lot, lot of good disaster advice throughout the movie. It does the drop, cover, and hold on, it does the tsunamis are coming, it does how do you deal with a tsunami, like, it does all of these great things, and then it gives one piece of extremely bad advice that would get people killed, which is the triangle of life, an incredibly persistent myth built on absolutely nothing. It's

0:30:07 Thomas: Okay, okay. Oh, What is this? I admit I haven't seen this movie, so sorry, right,

0:31:01 Mika: So the triangle of life, it also shows up as an internet meme all the time. And the idea is when an earthquake happens and collapses a building, then the corners of the building are still intact and that's where you'd survive. So you should go hide in those corners and not under a table or anything like that. And the problem with that is, first of all, it's assuming your earthquake codes are terrible and your building is going to collapse, which is just not true in North America.

We have really really good earthquake building codes and they're actually enforced, um, yes, there are a lot of places, like older places, particularly pre-1980s, that are relic and grandfathered in and aren't up to seismic code anymore, but even then, you're generally speaking more at risk of things falling on you inside the building than you are of the building falling on. Like, that's just, you're more worried about like the lamp and the ceiling tiles falling on you, not the wall, so the triangle of life bit is just like, great, so now you've taken yourself out of a position of safety and you're trying to run around, which is really great for breaking your leg, because earthquakes, they move the ground and you fall, and the most common cause of injury in in earthquakes in a North American context is heart attack from people

0:31:49 Thomas: Right, gotcha,

0:32:18 Mika: Panicking, so it's like, great, no, just, you did so good for so much of the movie, and then you had to like fling this terrible piece of advice in there, yeah,

0:31:58 Thomas: Huh, wow, so, they really thought you you run to like the corner of your building, huh? I always I Always heard, uh, door frame, is that, is that good, no good, take?

0:32:30 Mika: Where it's like, no, no, no, drop, cover, and hold on. So The trouble with a door frame is if there's a door in it, the door is gonna take you out.

0:32:42 Thomas: You out?

0:32:42 Mika: Well, the door is going to slam into you if

0:32:42 Thomas: How, what do you mean, my my doors weigh like two pounds, they're super thin, maybe for that reason, I don't know.

0:32:49 Mika: They're gonna break Your your fingers still, like, so, and there's Also the issue of like, okay, so you've managed to protect yourself from the building collapsing directly on top of you and things from falling directly on top of, how about that bookcase next to it that you've matched and not secure properly, and all the books that you haven't secured properly, which are now pelting you, like, again, it comes down to things inside your building are more harmful to you than the building itself for the most part. So that's why we say drop, cover, hold on, and it's a hold on because otherwise your desk is going to walk away and leave you stranded

0:32:50 Thomas: Okay, well, assuming we solve the door, there's a lot of door frames, by the way, maybe your kitchen doesn't have a door.

0:33:24 Thomas: Yeah,

0:33:24 Mika: All by yourself, again, yeah.

0:33:24 Thomas: Well yeah, Because the desk wants to survive too, so it's like, ah, I'm getting under a door frame, yeah, I've

0:33:28 Mika: Exactly, it's bailing out, yeah, or another example of like harmful advice in a disaster movie is, I'm going to totally date myself here, I say the Core, so the Core was

0:33:40 Thomas: Seen the Core, okay, cool, now we can talk the Core, that was a stupid movie, but anyway, go, going, oh,

0:33:41 Mika: Yeah, yeah, so the court of basic idea is that we, we as humans, have somehow managed to screw up the, um, the outer core of the Earth, which is, uh, the the core of the Earth is, uh, an inner core of solid iron, and then outer core of liquid iron, and as that liquid iron, hot metal moving fast, generates the electromagnetic field, um, which all that is real, yeah, yeah, so, um, without electromagnetic field, it's pretty much, every time we see aurora, you should be thanking our planet it for not letting us die.

So, uh, the sun produces high energy charged particles, it burps them out because the sun is a mean nasty bastard, um, and these high energy charge particles go flinging across space, and if we were caught out in them, we would get zapped, um, and instead, we've got a beautiful delicious, uh, magnetic field on our, around our planet, and it takes, it traps and captures these charged particles, and they excite the atmosphere, they excites the charged ions in the atmosphere, and then produce these beautiful glowing aurora, so we get beautiful dancing green and purple and pink aurora instead of sudden death. It's really quite convenient, I'm all in favor of magnetic fields, um, but it's actually one of the the challenges of if we ever want to do human habitation on other planets. Well, Mars

0:34:03 Thomas: Yeah, which we need, right, for for radiation and stuff, or something like that, yeah, yeah, yeah, how

0:35:08 Mika: Does not have a magnetic field, really, um, yeah.

0:35:12 Thomas: Long would, uh, would Matt Damon survive on Mars? Is there any potato radiation shield you can make, or yeah, try

0:35:17 Mika: So my my biggest problem with The Martian is the sequel should be called "And Everybody Dies of Cancer," um, so it's, it's not so much the immediate sudden death, yeah, exactly, it's most space movies currently with the technology as we currently have it is the SQL is "Everybody Dies with Cancer" answer, um, and it's even for like the moon base, uh, so our International Space Station actually is not that high up in space, it's actually protected by our magnetic field, our astronauts are still protected by our magnetic field for the most part, but If you go beyond that, if you go beyond the Van Allen radiation belts, which, um, we did that with the, uh, the Orion test launch, uh, two, three years ago now, and then before that it was the Apollo missions, like, we very rarely go out of the Van Allen belts unless we're doing an interplanetary

0:35:27 Thomas: A lot of space movies, like that, oh, huh, so Stupid

0:36:03 Mika: Mission.

0:36:03 Thomas: Question. The moon, beyond that, beyond the event, or how, how's this? Okay, so when we went to the moon, gotcha, oh,

0:36:03 Mika: Yeah. Yeah. So the Apollo missions went outside of this, they are no longer protected by our magnetic field. So when the astronauts were on the moon, if there'd been a major solar storm, they would have had some radiation issues, and there was actually a backup speech for everybody dies, um, so that was like, that was one of those things we were just like, well, roll the dice, hope it's okay. Yeah.

0:36:24 Thomas: Wow, so It's the kind of thing where, had they spent, what, x number of days up there, not even if there isn't some sort of event, isn't it ultimately, if they spend enough time, are they in significant danger?

0:36:39 Mika: So You've got the, the just like, like the prolonged radiation. And right now, like astronauts in the International Space Station or even commercial jet pilots, they have increased exposure to radiation, which leads to increased cancer risk, which is part of why it's so absolutely horrifying that astronauts do not get health care for life.

0:36:39 Thomas: Yeah.

0:36:57 Thomas: What?

0:36:57 Mika: So messed up. NASA should really provide lifelong health care for astronauts, particularly because they keep doing medical testing on them to see what the long-term impacts are. So, you know, bully your congress people over that one, um,

0:36:57 Thomas: Yeah. I would, that's ridiculous, so It sounds like, the, it's not just the magnetic field then, because if pilots are getting it, is there some other, okay.

0:37:10 Mika: Yeah. So it's, yeah, so there's also a thinner atmosphere, you get increased exposure with height, and the higher, higher up you are, the more exposure you have. So the core yeah the core, the premise of the core is that we as humans have done something to cease circulation of the magnetic field, and now everybody is dying in kind of hilarious ways and having like flash sunburns and things like that. It's all sorts of beautiful. And they decide to climb into an unobtainium submarine, because unobtanium is the best geological material that's completely unobtainable, thus has amazing properties, and go drilling into the center of the Earth and fix the problem. Which, you know, I suppose that was a spoiler, but if you're getting spoilers on movies from the 90s, I'm not really not feeling that much sympathy.

0:37:19 Thomas: Okay. But back to the core yeah yeah

0:37:59 Mika: Sympathy, um, and I mean, and they restart the magnetic core, the, the circulation, and thus the magnetic field, and yay, everybody is happy. And I'm okay with the movie up until this point, like, honestly, it teaches more geology more accurately than most first year undergrads pick up in their geology classes. They do the structure of the earth, they talk about magnetic fields, they have like different types of, of, uh, earthquakes happening, like, there's all sorts of, of stuff in here that's actually pretty good. The point that drives me insane is when we're leaving and heading back to the surface for our happy ending. And they say they're coming up in a gap in the tectonic plates somewhere near Hawaii. And my problem with this is that if you pick one place on the entire planet that is as far as possible from a gap in the tectonic plates, it is Hawaii. White.

0:37:59 Thomas: That's okay, Right.

0:38:54 Mika: So tectonic plates are the rigid yet flexible crust and a little bit of lithosphere that make up the surface of our planet. And they move around at about the same rate your fingernails grow, a couple centimeters per year. And as they move round, the joins in the tectonics plate, if they move side to side, that's a transverse zone, San Andreas Fault, you get earthquakes. If they go one underneath the other, subduction zone, Pacific Northwest, Japan, all of that, you get the big subduction-zone earthquakes. If they pull apart, you got a mid-ocean ridge. Uh, like all down the center of Atlantic.

0:39:01 Thomas: Yeah so that's where you'd want to go, right? Yeah.

0:39:26 Mika: Yeah. Like that one's actually quite, quite friendly. It's the one that doesn't have big disasters associated with it or the East Africa rift zone or Iceland. Both actually are places where the plates are pulling apart. So over and that you get a really specific type of disasters, depending on what type of tectonic boundary you're at. Um, and you get specific types of volcanoes, like, uh, as subduction zones, you get the really mean nasty volcanoes. You get Mount St. Helens, you get Krakatoa, you get all the ones that create giant, enormous eruptions that kill everybody. Like that's what happens in subduction zones. Hawaii has volcanoes, but they're friendly, kind volcanoes. They're ones that have lava that just kind of burbles and you can walk away from it.

0:40:11 Mika: It's a hot spot. So it is not a gap in the TikTok plate. It is like having a candle underneath the crust, and it's heating it up, and it is heating up oceanic crust. An oceanic crust does not have much silica content, which means the gas can escape really easily. Somewhere there's a continental crust, somewhere of more solid land, has more silica, it traps the gas, the gas builds up pressure, and then everything explodes in chaos and death.

0:40:10 Thomas: Why is that right?

0:40:35 Mika: So and that's a huge difference in what type of disasters you're going to get, right?

0:40:34 Thomas: Yeah, I get it yeah So there's no, there's no gap in Hawaii?

0:40:42 Mika: So no, it's hot spot, so they could have done the line, we're coming up in a hot spot somewhere near Hawaii, and had it be completely 100% accurate. And that like, my problem is, is that you've got such drastically different disasters that I don't want someone thinking about Hawaii when I'm talking about subduction zone earthquakes. And I mean, Mount St.

0:40:51 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:41:07 Mika: Helens, like those are a really big difference. No,

0:41:08 Thomas: I've never thought about that, that's why, so there's not really any like huge risk of a giant eruption in Hawaii then, sure?

0:41:19 Mika: It's, I mean, you can definitely like, slow moving lava can still kill people if you're careless, like if you wouldn't like lay in the path of the lava. It's actually yeah, well, oh, uh, so there's actually a fieldwork story of somebody surfing on lava, but it was actually, uh, it's a Russian pair of scientists got on a like a raft of intact rock and surfed down, uh, a lava flow, collecting samples.

0:41:24 Thomas: Try to surf on it, uh, that is too scary What? Are you doing? Don't do that, that's really scary, uh, more

0:41:44 Mika: Yeah. Yeah yeah that's that's definitely in the list of fieldwork I would not be willing to do

0:41:51 Thomas: Yeah yeah more, uh, don't, don't dues, don't try that ever at home or anywhere.

0:41:52 Mika: Yeah Uh, there's, um, there's a chemist called Derek Lowe who runs a blog called Things I Won't Work With, that he talks about all the terrifying chemistry that he's just like, no, just don't work with it. It's gonna kill you, it's going to like melt through concrete, it's gonna like explode and then stink like highly concentrated skunk. And based on that, I started doing the field work I won't do, and it includes a raft down a lava flow is totally in field work I will not do.

0:41:57 Thomas: Yeah, oh, Wow, Wow. Yeah. Yeah, no, I, I hear you. That's, I agree with that. Uh, what about, um, so what are some shows or movies that you think has gotten science really good and that you'd recommend for like good solid science content?

0:42:25 Mika: Well,

0:42:37 Thomas: Everything you've worked on.

0:42:36 Mika: I was actually I was yeah, of course, obviously everything I've worked on, which is like a weird collection of things that I'm actually not allowed to list all of them, so you know you just have to guess um, I did get to work on Star Trek: Discovery, which was super fun, got to work on Stargate, of course, um, worked on No Tomorrow, which is a romantic comedy about the end of the world with unbelievably accurate asteroids, if you want to learn all about like, like, what would we do if an asteroid was actually coming to kill us? Oh yeah, it's all in there, in the framework of a romantic comedy.

0:42:45 Thomas: Okay. Well, anything you're allowed to list that you like, oh, nice huh

0:43:10 Mika: Makes me super happy. And then Madam Secretary, got to work with them for doing permafrost melt, and the long-term climate change results of that. There's actually super, super cool research that's been going on for a couple of decades now. Scientists just, like, dumping enormous amounts of fertilizer in permafrost and seeing what it does, uh, turns out not good, uh, and punchline, oh no, we're doing it accidentally through climate change, so that's not going to be fun, um, so

0:43:09 Thomas: That's super cool, yeah, hmm, oh wow, right

0:43:43 Mika: I really like this concept of actually being able to explore worst case scenarios or just unpleasant scenarios in the context of science fiction, or in the context of fiction, so we can go, okay, so what if we do this, what if we do that, like cultural change, if this is what does a scientist look like, what does science do, what, what is the practice of science, all makes me really happy. And it's actually one of the things I was really proud of in, um, Stargate Universe, is that I've been working with the people for so long that it, it built up into the way that I see science as a collaborative sort of practice, that everybody is welcome and everybody has something to contribute, um, and it is not just the superstar star, but also everybody else is, is participating, actually ended up being a kind of a fundamental aspect of how the characters and the plots developed, um, which made me really happy, yeah

0:44:34 Thomas: That's super cool, so you think that like historically there's been too much of a myth of like one sort of misunderstood man in a lab coat off by himself somewhere doing all the work and figuring it all out for us, oh,

0:44:47 Mika: And science is much more collaborative, or, like, having the the cultural image of The Big Bang Theory, I can't watch The Big Bank Theory because I look at that and go, yes, there are some people in science who are that terrible, why would you work with them, why would you give them grant money why would you ever hire these people they're awful

0:44:58 Thomas: Thank god you said that I uh I hate that show god I hate that show. Okay. I'm so glad. I wasn't going to say anything, but I really detest that show anyway.

0:45:05 Mika: Yeah it's well, I mean, they're one of the shows that have hired a long-term science consultant and for that awesome, like they're like, you can find good math in that show but I find the practice as Davis Hellinger, but, um, I find the process of science, of how science was presented in there, to be really quite unfortunate and I don't like, like, yes, there are people like that, but that's not how I see science, and that's That's not how, how the people that I work with and the things that we do, you don't have to have that sort of bratty competitiveness to be good at science. You don't have to be a genius. You don't have to, you know, you have to know how to have the single genius motif. It doesn't,

0:45:11 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Actually. Yeah, I think I know who that is, but now I'm blanking. Yeah good. Yeah Yeah. Hmm. Yeah.

0:45:43 Mika: It, it's one of, one of the scientists I admire most is a woman called Vera Rubin. And she discovered, roughly speaking, a third of the universe. Uh, she, she figured out the black, uh, dark matter, matter, so all the stuff that we can't find. Where we go, um, we start looking at galaxies, and galaxies are spinning, just like if you were spinning on your office chair, and if you put your arms out you spin one way, if you pull them in tight you spin another way, or, like, a figure skater in the Olympics how you've got your your mass distributed changes how you spin.

Well, she looked at the spin of galaxies and went, oh, that does not match up with what we can see, that does not match up with the mass of the stars we're seeing, and figured out that there had to be a big chunk, chunk of matter that we couldn't see, uh, which is dark matter, and dark matter might be things like massive compact halo objects, so, like, um, a ring, a halo around galaxies that have a whole bunch of, like, dead dark planets in them, or it could be wimps, uh, weakly interacting massive particles, so things like neutrinos that just go zipping through everything and are really hard to detect, and we have to have, like, giant underground water pools in the Antarctic hunting for

0:46:07 Thomas: Yeah, so cool. Right?

0:46:47 Mika: Tiny flashes light as a single neutrino sparks against something. Um, so she found this, like, giant chunk of the universe that was missing, uh, and then spent the rest of her life trying to prove herself wrong. Like, she just collected more and more and more, and, like, kept trying to find any other theory that explain it and be like, can we come up with anything that makes more sense than this? And at the same time, she did a huge amount of mentoring, and she did things like, um, she personally self-funded paternity and maternity leave for postdocs at her university until she managed to effectively guilt trip the administration into giving postdoc paternity, paternity leave. Um, when talking to her former students, they all have stories about, like, she really listened to them, treated them seriously. Even when they were students, she treated their ideas as if they were coming from equals, because they are equals, that just this huge amount of respect and inclusion. And, uh, every time somebody with a little girl would come visit her house, she'd give them a copy of The Paper Bag Princess.

0:46:47 Thomas: Right. Wow.

0:47:51 Mika: She'd keep, like, huge copies, like a huge stack of copies in her house. And it's a children's book about a princess who goes and rescues her prince. And he's really bratty and image-centric. And she ends up being like, well, screw this, and goes off and has ventures on her own instead. She's like, the world needs more self-rescuing princesses who understand they don't need a prince.

0:48:08 Thomas: Yeah?

0:48:10 Mika: So she did all these amazing, incredible things and was, like. A deeply good human being. She scientifically was incredible. She was a good human. She made the practice of science better. She went through and she was like, she campaigned to make sure women were getting nominated for all these awards that never had women nominated for it. And when she died, she had not won a Nobel Prize, which means she'll never win a Nobel prize. So the woman who discovered a third of our universe will never win a Nobel Prize, because in physics, we've had two people win a Noble Prize, both in the first couple of years of the prizes and then never since then.

0:48:33 Thomas: Huh? Right? Yeah, they don't.

0:48:47 Thomas: Oh, did not know that. What? I just assumed there's one every year. I

0:48:52 Mika: No, no, no. The Nobel Prizes are deeply, deeply gender imbalanced. And when you look at the physics Nobel Prizes, it gets comedic almost. Most. We actually have a running joke that it's going to be somebody named Maria because it was Mary Curie and then her niece, I think, who was Marie as well. And then we haven't had anybody since then.

0:48:53 Thomas: Wow, wow. Geez.

0:49:15 Mika: It actually, it gets, yeah, it gets really disturbing. So the Nobel Prize nominations are confidential until 50 years later. And so I went through at one point and I did all of the Nobel Prizes for up through 1963, about who did nominations, uh, who won, all of that. Um, and yeah, it's, it's, it's really, really, really, really freaking depressing. Like everything about it is depressing. Um, where in between 1901 and 1965, there were 2,658 nominations for the physics Nobel Prize. And 93 of those nominations were for women or teams of one or are more women, um, and only two women ever won, um, yeah, yeah, and nine women total received those 93 nominations, like that's it, um.

0:50:04 Thomas: Well. I, I, I wouldn't have thought, I mean, it sounds like discovering dark matter, pretty, pretty core to, like, that seems like a, a Nobel Prize worthy accomplishment. Yeah.

0:50:04 Mika: Yeah.

0:50:16 Mika: I mean, like, Lise Meitner is actually, she's even more stereotypical for how, how badly off the nominations versus the awards are, in that she, she was nominated for the Physics Nobel Prize, I think it was, 26 times, and then Chemistry 19 times. So it was 48 nominations overall, no wins. And you're like, she's been nominated 48 times. Clearly people think what she discovered was important. She's the woman who figured out fusion. Like, fusion.

0:50:43 Thomas: That also seems like maybe something that you should get a prize for.

0:50:49 Mika: Yeah, just maybe.

0:50:51 Thomas: I mean, I'm just a layperson, but yeah, wow.

0:50:54 Mika: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, instead, the guy who stole her notes got the Nobel Prize.

0:50:57 Thomas: Oh, man. Well, all that is to say, it's good that we're moving toward better examples of science in popular culture. And it does seem like even science itself backs that up from the studies I've seen that if women have that role model in their lives, or hopefully maybe in their media that they're consuming, that it does make you think, "Oh, I can do that," and then you do it.

0:50:57 Mika: Yay. Yeah, so there's actually some really cool studies about, like, having children draw pictures of what a scientist looks like. And as we've had an increase in small children's programming that have more scientists of more different backgrounds, including like Dora the Explorer and things like that, that the image of what a scientist looks like more often resembles the kid, as opposed to white dudes with poofy hair and lab coats, which is what it used to be. But at the moment, you can also see a pretty sharp age drop off in that, where the older they get, the more likely they are to draw white men in lab coats. Uh So it's getting better, but it's certainly a long way to go still in in what science looks like, and there's really, there's huge problems of not just how do we get women into science and people of color into science, but how do we keep them there, how do we support them there.

0:51:39 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Right.

0:52:16 Mika: It's in a lot of ways, um, there are people who who would consider me to be part of the leaky pipeline because I work in industry as opposed to an academia. So did I fail science? Do I not count as a scientist because I don't work as a professor, because I have a master's in disasters, best degree title ever, but don't have a doctorate. Does that mean I'm not a real scientist?

0:52:39 Mika: And there are people who say I'm not.

0:52:36 Thomas: I was trying to think of something that rhymed with doctorate, but it didn't, I couldn't think of anything. Master's.

0:52:43 Mika: No, I, if I ever go back, it's going to be a doctor in doom.

0:52:47 Thomas: Okay. That's pretty good. Doctor do. Yeah, well, that, that's all, that's all really cool. And, and the work you're doing is amazing. I just, I guess the, the final question to go out here, I'm curious as a scientist, what, what are you most worried about? You know, what do, what are you worried about disaster wise, climate change or whatever it might be?

0:53:04 Mika: It's, it's really hard not to look at the world as it currently is and not feel existential doom, that We are conducting an uncontrolled, undirected experiment on the only habitable planet in our solar system. And quite honestly, Earth is easy mode. If you want to solve all our problems by escaping to another planet with moon bases or Mars bases or going to Titan or floating in the skies of Venus or whatever you want, you're going to have to do. How are you going to do that if you don't master reduce, reuse, recycle on Earth? If we, we can't control the climate on Earth, how do you think we're going to generate a livable atmosphere anywhere else where, if anything breaks, we die. It's Earth is easy mode and we're failing.

0:53:08 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm.

0:53:45 Mika: And that's that I can't think about it sometimes. And there's a lot of things that I do that are very earth conscious. Like I had a pet hedgehog. If you want to talk about one of the most environmentally friendly pets to have, look at one that eats a tablespoon of food a day. Like Like he's got a very light carbon footprint, but I've also done things like I fly commercially and I've flown in helicopters for work, which a helicopter flight is a great way to use up your carbon budget for like several years inside of a matter of seconds.

Like they just are really not, not an earth friendly way to travel. So I look at that and it's, there's a lot of inherent hypocrisy in the choices that we make. And I don't know if we have the the political will and the long-term thinking to save ourselves um and at this point I think we're already too late to maintain the society that we have it now we're gonna have to take a step down in the quality of life um and I think there's no way around that I think We're Gonna Have To Take A Step Down And The The Population Control

0:54:00 Thomas: Yeah.

0:54:20 Thomas: And

0:54:47 Mika: That There's No Way Around That Either It's Just How Long Can We Put It Off And How Long Are We Gonna to be in denial before we start dealing with it.

0:54:54 Thomas: Just, well, That's scary. This is Just climate change you're talking about, we're Not so You're far More worried About that than, like, a, you know, the big volcano or earthquake or something?

0:54:56 Mika: It's, oh yeah. I mean, and it's, well, yeah. And it's climate change also, it amps up all the disasters because you've Got more heat and more energy in the system, which means that you get things like hurricanes build in intensity far faster and to far greater intensity and larger number of them than previously, just because everything is warmer.

That you get indirect consequences of, because you got a warmer ocean, you've changed the saturation point of, um, of all the various acids, which means that you start dissolving the seashells, which means you start losing your zooplankton, which means you start loosing up higher and higher in the food chain, that all of these things are cascading consequences that we do not understand all of the systems on our planet well enough to be able to predict what all of them are.

So even just from a purely, like, objective viewpoint of looking at things clinically, I don't like that we're running an experiment without any concept of what it is we're actually doing, That we Can't predict what the outcomes are going to be. We don't have a valid hypothesis of, if we pump the carbon this fast, what are all the consequences.

And we're seeing some already, and effectively it's, it's making it so we have more intense disasters more frequently, at the same time, because of the way that we value real estate, like the, the types of geography that we value, we're cramming more and more vulnerable people into more and more marginal land, the people who are less, least capable of developing resilience to disasters.

So the people who can't take three days off work and evacuate in a full tank of gas are the ones who live in the area most likely to be inundated by a storm surge, that we've set the system up where, every way you look at it, people are going to die and people are going to lose, and there's no good reason or justification for it.

0:55:06 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Wow.

0:56:44 Mika: And we refuse to do things like realistically look at New Orleans. New Orleans is a lost city. Miami is a Lost City. Those are already doomed. We cannot hold back what is going to happen to them over time. They are sinking. They are, and we have created a situation where they're going to sink faster by the way we've controlled the rivers that go through them. They're extremely exposed coastlines.

0:57:05 Thomas: So Like, we're, you're Saying we're, we're

0:57:07 Mika: We're having, it's

0:57:07 Thomas: At the point Of no Return with, like, even if, if we did everything that every environmentalist would want right now, still point of no return.

0:57:14 Mika: Too late. Yeah, they're already toast. And looking at things like that scares me because we are in denial about it. And the longer we're in denial and the longer we argue about the basic concept of this is a thing that is happening, the longer it's going to take to actually make real policy decisions about how are we going to prioritize our solutions for adaption? How are we going to reduce the amount of risk that we are undertaking because we can't we can's solve it. We can't. At this point, we cannot eliminate the risk. All we can do is change who and how people are exposed.

0:57:14 Thomas: Yeah. Wow. Jeez. Yeah.

0:57:53 Mika: That's what I get upset about. That's when I start like opening up the booze and going like, Can we just not think about this?

0:57:58 Thomas: Okay. Yeah, I'm with you. Let's do that. Let's, let's do, but also that reminds of another brilliant science piece of work, which is that, that sculpture of the, you know, politicians debating while it's, it's underwater, that kind of thing. I don't know if you saw that, but that's what came to mind when you were talking about that. But geez, that's a depressing note to go out on, but reality is depressing. I firmly believe that to be true.

0:58:25 Mika: So okay, I just like end on a slightly less depressing note is I do think that we

0:58:28 Thomas: You don't have to. Hey, don't feel obligated. I think, okay, go ahead if you want to, if you wants to.

0:58:32 Mika: Well, I mean, I work in disasters and it's in a kind of an inherently depressing field because I work with, like, trying to convince people to do things before it's too late and then usually only getting hired after everybody's died to try and make it not happen again. Like, it's, that's the nature of disasters is nobody wants to pay for it until too late. And then I work inside by the cotton candy field where I get to like play with everything that's ridiculous and outrageous that is never going to happen in real life. So, I mean, those two things balance out really nicely for me.

But a point of optimism is that we are now tackling more and more stories about long-term, high-impact, low-frequency disasters, so either black swan events or climate change in our fiction, that we're talking about that more, and we're talking about how do we deal with, like, what happens when we have climate refugees, what happens when we have a whole series of storms hit an area, that we are starting to talk about that more, and I'm optimistic that as we get there first in our entertainment, that maybe then we'll follow along in our actual real life policy, particularly as we're starting to see more things happen, like the series of hurricanes that took

0:58:44 Thomas: Oh man.

0:59:00 Thomas: Well,

0:59:47 Mika: Out Puerto Rico, that maybe we'll start going, okay, this is what is happening, let's stop talking about why and start talking about what are we gonna do.

0:59:57 Thomas: That is a slightly slightly uplifting note, but I'm still depressed. So I'm, I'm still gonna, gonna be drinking, but that's okay. Uh, I probably was anyway. All right. Mika McKinnon, thank you so much for coming on. That was super fascinating. Uh. It is really cool to hear about what you're doing. Um, seriously, thank you so much. And is there anywhere you want to point people to, to check you out, uh, you know, Twitter, that kind of thing?

0:59:59 Mika: Yeah. Um, So you can find me on Twitter as Mika McKinnon. I do a lot of freelance writing all over the place, and I, I love coming to conventions, so if you're hosting a convention and want to have somebody show up and talk about science and sci-fi, or, you know, get everybody really depressed so you boost those barbells, just go ahead, ask me out. I gotta be

1:00:34 Thomas: Yeah. Has anyone tried that model? Has any any convention, you know, let's try that business model.

1:00:39 Mika: Oh, I have, every year I go to Atlanta and I participate in the Evil Geniuses panel, where we sit there, we come up with really, really fantastic ways to kill everybody. So if you're in Atlanta, find me at Dragon Con every year. I'll make sure to give you a reason to drink.

1:00:47 Thomas: Oh man. That is so cool. Oh, that is so cool. But I interrupted your, your plugging. So sorry. Go on.

1:00:59 Mika: Oh, no, it's, yeah, you can find me on Twitter, you can find me at conventions, I'm happy to come out, Mountain Talk. One of my favorite talks right now is pre-apocalyptic party planning, how to clean through parties to lessen your chance of doom.

1:01:05 Thomas: Awesome. I love it. All right. Thank you so much, Mika. Uh, it's been an absolute pleasure. Keep up the good work. And I hope I do get to see you at one of those talks someday.

1:01:21 Mika: Thank you.

1:01:48 Thomas: Wow, what an interview, what a scientist, that was so, that is the, I want my little Phoebe to listen to this episode because that is so inspiring, and Mika is really inspiring to get women into science and sort of change the trends, you know, and change the stereotypes and make it so everybody can feel like that's something they can do, because what a career, that sounds so cool to be Mika. We're screwed and we're going to die of climate change. But that's fine. You know, we've got a few years. So in those years, we can be really inspired by Mika. And then, of course, I'll die of climate change. Or maybe not, if we can find enough Mikas and other scientists to help us. Or it's not even a question of that. It's a question of actual change in policy.

1:02:34 Thomas: And another reason, I know I always bring it back to this, another reason to get Republicans the hell out of office, because, because if you already didn't have enough evidence that the two parties are not the same and one party is actively harming us and the other isn't, even if you already thought it was like a tie, the fact that Democrats have been the only party that's making any progress on climate change and Republicans are the party that wants to back out, that already did back out of the Paris Climate Accords, all that stuff, it's a no-brainer, guys. Guys, that is what we need to do. We need to get science-oriented people. And maybe there will be some race where, like, the Republican is the science-oriented climate change person. That could be, in which case maybe that would be the right vote. But that's just not what it tends to be.

1:03:21 Thomas: And it's really going to cost us. Like as Mika said, I mean, that's some scary stuff. You know, when she's talking about Miami and New Orleans already being gone. I mean, that's that's scary. I'm going to be in New Orleans in like a month. So I'll let you guys know if I'm underwater. But no, in seriousness, that's super scary. And it's another reason why we need to rock that vote to use the 90s parlance. So thank you so much again to Mika. Thank you folks for listening. I've got another bonus episode due. I just recently posted on the free speech controversy of the guy who did the Nazi dog. And tell you what, that got an enormous amount of engagement because that's all people care about. They don't care about feminism or Black Lives Matter. They care about, can we still be ironic Nazis?

1:04:08 Thomas: Like, is our right to be ironic Nazis? That's the most sacred right, apparently, according to some corners of the internet. But at any rate, it does seem like a topic that warrants further discussion. I certainly have my opinions. So that might be something I do a bonus episode on. There's also the Sam Harris, Sean Carroll recording, where the beginning of which was, was really awful, when he talked about his reaction to the Ezra Klein interview, that was not good. Uh, there's some other stuff too, there's, uh, Jordan B. Peterson on Bill Marr. Um, so it'll be probably one of those things, could be a number of them, but, uh, coming up very soon, if you are a patron over at patreon.com/seriouspod, or if you're a member at, that's seriespod.com slash support. It's all the same. You get the benefits either way.

1:04:53 Thomas: Just the seriespod.com has no middleman. So that's one consideration. But either way, if you'd like to let me know what you'd like to hear, feel free to do so. Those are the ideas I'm considering. Let me know if you got to vote one way or the other. But either way, I'll have that bonus episode out, of course, before the end of the month because I owe you two per month at a minimum. And thank you so much for listening and supporting. And I will see you guys next week. I've got another great interview already in the can that I'm excited to bring you. But think... I think the state of our podcasting union here is strong, folks. So thanks for listening and being a part of that. I'll see you next week.