The Skeptics Guide #827 - May 15 2021
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.
Your escape to reality. Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, May 12th, 2021, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Cara Santamaria. Howdy. And Jay Novella. Hey, guys. Evan is away this week. He's still working on Texas. We've got that extension, but he'll be back next week. A little bit of an update from last week. We were talking about the Chinese rocket that was out of control, that was coming back. Yeah. They had no idea it was basically an uncontrolled reentry, which is not a good thing. But it finally came down late Saturday night, I believe, last week. So it crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean. So fortunately, nobody was hurt.
Didn't land on any villagers or anything. But it just got lucky. But we said like 75% is going to hit the water.
Yeah, nobody got killed and it went into the ocean. Yeah. NASA rebuked them, you know, saying that this is not, you know, how you handle this. You need a plan. You know, you got to spend the extra little bit of money here to give it a controlled reentry because worst case scenarios are bad. I mean, imagine this landing in Manhattan.
What news update do the hosts give about the uncontrolled Chinese rocket reentry?
I mean, imagine that. So you can't just depend on the roll of the dice. And so NASA, you know, kind of, you know, had some words. um but and this was the second time that this happened and um and i don't remember make anyone making a big deal of it the first time i think i just i missed that one i'm not sure how much of a big deal it was but i consider this you know not a trivial thing um you know and they're they're building a space station and that's and that's wonderful but man come on and now they're saying that china's blaming the u.s for hyping fears um and stuff and uh you know it's In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't probable, but it doesn't matter because worst-case scenarios were not amazingly unlikely, and they could have been devastating.
People could have died.
Yeah, if you accidentally discharge a weapon and it happens to miss everybody, it doesn't mean it was okay or that you weren't being careless.
Yeah, you still usually get tried for that.
But it doesn't sound like they have any intention of not doing it again.
Yeah, that's why we need some type of international rules that everybody just has to follow. And I don't know how we would achieve that because if a country doesn't want to do it, then the only way to pressure them to do it would be with sanctions and all sorts of political maneuvers. It's really too bad, you know, because I was hoping that China was going to have a much better response.
Yeah, they're saying that Beijing was being treated unfairly. And they pointed to the reaction to debris from a rocket launched by U.S. aerospace company SpaceX that fell to Earth in the state of Washington or, yeah, on the Oregon coast in March. I wasn't aware of that. So I really can't comment on that because I don't know too many details. I mean, was it a, is this really an apples to apples comparison? Was it really an uncontrolled kind of unplanned, not unplanned, but was this as uncontrolled and intended as a Chinese rocket? I don't know.
I mean, sometimes sometimes you do everything right and bad stuff still happens.
Sure.
That's just bad luck. Sometimes you're negligent and bad stuff happens or you're negligent and you skate by by luck. The outcome isn't the ultimate test. What the ultimate test is, were you were you going by the rules? Were you were you being responsible or were you being negligent?
The reason we've changed our wording when we talk about public health, people don't use the term anymore. You'll notice this if you open your ears. People don't use the term car accident anymore because it implies that most crashes on the road are accidental. But unfortunately, most of them are negligence. Most of them could have been prevented. And so we actually use the term automobile crash now.
Mm hmm. Yeah.
For that same reason.
That's a good idea.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:16
2
What news update do the hosts give about the uncontrolled Chinese rocket reentry?
1:16–20:33
3
How does the new brain‑computer interface study decode imagined handwriting?
20:33–1:06:39
4
What evidence and mechanisms suggest SARS‑CoV‑2 could integrate into human DNA?
1:06:39–1:39:23