Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to The Rest Is Science. I'm Hannah Fry. And I'm Michael Stevens. I think we should probably tell the listeners slash viewers the origin of today's Field Notes episode, because I am currently on holiday in Greece.
Chapter 2: What inspired the discussion about airplane sick bags?
And as we were discussing what I could possibly do that was holiday related, our producer suggested that we... We just grab something on the way and we do an episode on sick bags. At which point, Michael Stevens, would you like to tell the audience what you told us?
Well, yeah, I said, hey, I collect sick bags, barf bags from airplanes because they change periodically and it's a history. Someone needs to be documenting this. And some of them are quite cute. So my collection, some of it happens to be here. So do you collect them too?
Only the very plain white one that I picked off a BA flight on the way here. I can't say, I can't say, by the way, this makes you a baggist. Do you know this? There's an entire community of you guys. Well, yeah. I'm now joining you as a baggist with my, I mean, it's quite a pathetic entry being entirely plain white.
Well, I don't have a British Airways bag in my collection. Maybe when I come out to London, could you give me that one?
Deal. How many do you have in your collection, Michael?
Honestly, I only probably have a couple dozen. It's not very impressive. There are people who are doing a much better job than me.
There are. In fact, there's a great rivalry at the very heart of the bags community. There is the airsicknessbags.com bag museum, the owner of which says, I collect bath bags. My collection currently contains 3,659 bags. Most are from airlines. While this website and hobby is an enormous waste of time, I like to think there's a higher quality waste of time than many other places on the web.
And what better description of our own podcast, Michael?
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Chapter 3: Why do some people collect airplane sick bags?
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And I'm really glad that there's someone out there with thousands of barf bags they've collected and probably like meticulously written down, you know, when they got it and on what flight. I think that's important. But for me, it's a conversation starter. You know, when I meet people, I never know what it is they're going to be interested in.
I can show them physics toys and puzzles, but sometimes they're like, I got books I can show them. Sometimes it's barf bags. And they find that really amusing, especially kids. So it's just good to have something that will capture someone, really hook them.
Always there. Make people like you. Let's do it. Okay, so that is what we have coming up in this episode. I'm actually also going to just sprinkle in a little bit of the science of bath bags, why we need them, where they come from, etc. Because actually, it turns out there's loads of fascinating stuff to discover. I absolutely love that you collect bath bags. It just makes me so happy.
It makes me really happy too. Maybe that's how we should start then, Michael. Can you show us some of your absolute gems? What are your best ones?
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Chapter 4: How has airplane design changed to reduce motion sickness?
But because it's so fragile, because there's so many moving parts, because you don't want it to rip and the seal to break and so on and so on, you have to be so careful. They only ever inflate it to 8,000 feet, essentially, as though you are sitting at the top of a mountain that's 8,000 feet tall. And the thing is, at that level, I mean, the gas inside your stomach is expanding to about
about a third extra, your digestive tract is sort of inflated like a balloon. If you think about a bag of crisps as you go up in the air, your whole body is doing the same thing. So you sort of feel a bit full, you kind of feel a bit bloated, that very easily tips over into nausea.
Interesting. I thought it was just the motion, but the air pressure also affects... how nauseous you feel.
It's more like it changes the threshold. It changes how much is required to tip you over the edge.
Ah, interesting. Speaking of which, let me show you a piece of evidence. Go on. Here's a bag of...
I should tell the people who are listening rather than just watching, this is a bag of shrimp crackers that looks like it's on an aircraft. It's bloated. It's puffed up to the maximum size that the bag can manage. The air inside is at a different pressure to the atmosphere.
Yeah, much higher pressure inside the bag than out here because I'm up high altitude in Colorado, but this bag was filled in Indonesia. So it's full of air from Indonesia near sea level. And now it's more than a mile above sea level. And so there's just not as much air weight and pressure squeezing it in. So this is what bags of chips look like in Denver and Boulder, Colorado.
They're all huge like this and it's impossible to open them because you can't get, it's too taut. It's like so tightly bloated. It's about to explode.
I'm genuinely astonished. I did not. That has never occurred to me that that might be a side effect of living in the mountains.
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Chapter 5: What historical context surrounds the invention of sick bags?
Life is not an on or off switch. It's actually much more of a spectrum, a process almost. And maybe consciousness actually follows that instead. Or maybe everything's conscious, right? Maybe everything is.
Yeah, a proton could have just a tiny iota of consciousness. And when you get enough of them together doing the right thing, then suddenly it's like, hey, my name's Michael and I'm a... a being. I don't know. I think that, yeah, at the end of the day, I think we should, we ought to believe that more things are consciousness than a lot of us do.
I think AI is already or is going to become essentially just maybe 300 billion new people just suddenly are born and they're here and they deserve to be respected and they deserve rights. And I don't know if we're ever gonna be able to devise a test to tell whether something is or is not conscious, whether there's an interior I and self in there.
But if we ask it and it says so, we should just believe it. And if we can't ask it and it can't say so, we might still need to believe it. So I think that it won't be that long before the debate around AI and its effect on jobs and the economy becomes more like the debate we have around immigration.
Because I think all these AIs are basically like a whole bunch of new humans showed up and they're willing to work for really cheap. And we got to treat it that way. There are beings who deserve respect and dignity, but there's also suddenly the Earth's population has gone up by a thousand X. There is precedent for this.
I mean, I think that there is a river that has rights, you know, like a non-biological entity that has rights. I think there are ways to do this, right? To think about the suffering, as it were, in inverted commas, of an entity that doesn't have a biological basis. And I think you're right. I think this is something that we should be thinking about.
I think that dismissing it as like, oh no, I don't think so, is not enough to find a way through of what we should be doing and how we should be thinking about it.
Because complaining about the harms that can come about because of AI... doesn't, I think, detract from the fact that they should be seen as beings deserving of dignity and rights. And we've just all got to get along somehow.
Say your pleases and thank yous, everybody.
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Chapter 6: What role does cabin pressure play in passenger comfort?
As it turns out, even though our bodies are really sensitive to changes in linear and radial acceleration, you'd have to be Really big. I mean, you're going to have to have a body whose length is an appreciable percent of the radius of the planet. Like, you're going to need to be, I don't know, probably hundreds of kilometers tall to be like, whoa, I'm moving.
Now, what's really neat, though, and I love thinking about this and talking about it, so I'm going to talk about it now, it's the fact that because the Earth rotates, we weigh less. And that's because the earth is like moving us off to the side. So we have this tangential velocity, but gravity keeps us on the surface. If gravity could just be switched off, we would all fly straight off the earth.
I'm trying to see if I have like, here's a circle shape, right? If I had a circle and I'm standing here. So what happens is you're always being like launched off like this from earth, but it's gravity keeps you on. And that lifting away, we call it, it's a fictitious force, we'll call it a centrifugal force, that makes you weigh less.
But how fast would the Earth have to rotate so that its gravity and the centrifugal force that moves you away, that seemingly moves you away from the center, not really, it actually moves you tendentially away, how fast would the Earth have to rotate for those to be equal? So that you just... hovered on Earth's surface. Like we all just levitated here.
And as it turns out, it would have to go really fast. The Earth would have to rotate once around every 5,075 seconds. So every about like an hour and a half, the Earth would have to go all the way around. Daytime, nighttime, daytime, nighttime, daytime, nighttime. That would be really fast. Yeah, we're talking like every half hour you'd have day, night, day, night, day, night.
They would only last 30 minutes. And at that point, the centrifugal fictitious force that makes us feel like we're leaving the planet because of its spin would equal its gravity. And we would just be like, whoa, man, I'm just like here and I have no weight. I'm weightless on the surface of the Earth. I like that.
I like that a lot. Petition to install a gyroscope somewhere. I'm not really sure how it would work, but details. Details for someone else to discover. Exactly.
We're the idea people. speed up the Earth's rotation, and that also means that the next episode of The Rest is Science will come sooner, assuming that we keep the schedule around the sun. But more sleeps. Well, no, no, no. No, a day would only be 30 minutes long, and you'd only be allowed to sleep for 30 minutes during the night, so. Okay. Oh, shoot.
Do you mean we're going to keep a week as long as it is? It's just that there's going to be, like, lots and lots of day-night cycles in a week? Way more sleeps. All right, fair enough. We can do that. That way we can all still sleep as much as we want.
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