There But For Science: Blood Navigation

that that food prize. I guess the food prize of knowledge in this case, and when they find it, uh, when we find it, it's on the Greater Meals and uh. And when this science slime doesn't find it, well, the tintrals of inquiry tend to dive back, and the system

knows which tunnels are fruitless. So this scenario is somewhat true even in times before science, or times during which scientific inquiry was still held back by various shortcomings, because humans still proceeded on a basically by a trial in

her basis. And there's no surer way to air than to base a hypothesis on purely magical thinking, right, because today we're going to be talking about some sympathetic blood magic, some magical thinking that has supposedly been at least proposed, if not actually used, in the history of what would you call it seafaring navigation, uh, finding one's one's allies under cover of deep ocean and determining one's place on

the globe. Now, I like this metaphor Robert of the slime mold as as as the model of scientific progress, because one of the interesting things about scientific progress is we can almost definitely say that progress is actually made in science. In other realms, it's debatable whether progress is made. People argue about whether there's actual progress in philosophy. We just had our interview with our Scott Baker, and Scott did not seem to think that philosophy actually made much progress.

He said, you know, we're still asking the same questions that we were asking thousands of years ago, and we don't really have new answers to them. Science isn't like that. Now we definitely know things that we used to not know, and we can use that knowledge, and yet there's nobody at the top of the scientific process. There's no brain of science making decisions about what's knowledge, what's not knowledge, what's true, what's not true, what areas are the best

to explore. So in the way you use this analogy of the slime mold, it's almost like a a It's a process that's blind from the top down and yet really does make true progress from the bottom up. Yeah, there's no there's no brain here in the slime mold. There's no king of science, no secret caball running the

whole scientific operation. And I think the fact that science is like that, that it doesn't have a top down control process, that it's just this emergent phenomenon that nevertheless produces real results and actual progress in the world that you can be quite sure are real progress. It it's one of those things that makes it hard to define. And we've talked about the difficulty before in defining science and producing a definition of science that is quote necessary

and jointly sufficient. We talked about that back in our episode about you know, beyond this veil of testing, like whether things that were maybe post empirical could still be considered science. And so a necessary and jointly sufficient list of properties to describe science would be something that describes everything within the category of science and nothing outside of it. A good example would be a list of properties that are necessary and jointly sufficient to describe a triangle. Right.

A triangle is a closed two dimensional figure with three straight sides and three angle three angles. This rules in everything that is a triangle, and it rules out everything that is not a triangle. Sometimes it's really difficult to do something like that with science. How can you come up with a list of properties that describes everything that generates true scientific knowledge and rules out everything that doesn't.

So it seems to me sometimes science might be more like the concept of a game, things that fall into a category that Wittgenstein would have called family resemblances. There's sort of like overlapping similarities between the things we call science, But there's no list of properties that everything has an equal measure and that nothing that is not science can claim. But nevertheless, we do know some really basic categories that we can say pretty much seem like they pretty much

always appear in science. Right. One of them is going to be subjecting ideas to empirical testing. That means you can't just do science in the hypothetical at some point it needs to encounter a test in real world conditions, right. And then the other thing is the um when successful science produces ideas that generate accurate predictions about reality. So if you're doing science right, you should be able to predict the future with the ideas you create from it.

That's right now. There are plenty of inherently supernatural notions, of course that that cannot be proven one way or another. But when you engage in this process to produce a definite, measurable result, then you have something. If you're if you're gonna work some sort of magic and and there's a definite result, something measurable, something observable. If you set out down this path, you're gonna get an answer, and uh, you can probably know what that answer is going to be.

If if you you, if you have you know a

fair amount of scientific reasoning about you. Yeah. I think one way of putting what you're getting at here and and correct me if I'm wrong, is that if there is genuine magic power in the world, you actually should be able to do science to detect it, Like even if the causes of it are not necessary early physical as we would understand the classical concept of physicality, if there's some other kind of property in the universe guiding it, we should still be able to do science to detect

magical phenomena as long as the magic behaves in a consistent way. I think this is the thing that's crucial to me. And maybe from here I would split proposed magic into two categories. There are two camps of it. One is what you might call magical law. In this sense, it's something that happens in the universe, and it happens outside the laws of physics, and yet it's still behaves consistently. You do the same stimulus, you get the same results. So every time I cast a spell of the same type,

I get the same actual outcome. The other one I would call capricious magic, and this is magic where it's not really clear what the consistency of cause and effects should be. Maybe it works, sometimes it doesn't work other times. If you have a magical system like this, you really can't do science on it, because the idea of science is that you can reproduce your results, right. Yeah, Well, this makes me think of a few different examples here.

So obviously the existence of God, like a big g God, a divine being that created the universe, that is most degree that that's not the kind of thing you can really scientifically prove one way or the other. Right, there could be, there couldn't be. In science doesn't really give you much help knowing the answer, right, and you can always sort of adjust your parameters for that question to

lean one way then or the other. But what an area where it becomes a little more interesting is when you look at let's say, the healing powers of prayer. And there have been a number of studies that have looked into this. This is an area where, on one hand, it seems rather straightforward. You know, okay, this person praise and then we can see if if health changes, But of course you're you're engaging not only like magical thinking,

but also varying levels of psychological responses. Right, you could have a placed effect and stuff like that. And that's why if you wanted to do a genuine good prayer study, it would need to be blinded with proper scientific procedures, so the people and administering the study and the test subjects and all that don't in fact know whether they're

the ones being prayed for or not. But then on the other hand, something like turning um staffs into serpents or water to wine stuff is like a genuine miracle, uh, that's where it's very clear. Yeah, where there's no like mediating chance effects, right, unless you ended up explaining in a way by sort of the you know, thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test kind of a scenario, and then you're opening it up to you know, you don't know what's going to happen, right,

you put it back in the capricious magic category. Not to say that if you believe God behaves that way that you necessarily believe your your deity to be capricious. But at least the outcomes seem capricious, there's no way to predict them, and if there's no way to predict them, then there's really no way to test it to see if it's true. So we're gonna continue talking about this topic.

But essentially, as the title of the episode suggests, we're we're kind of playing a what if game to some degree as well as we discuss UH as we dive into some history and some science here, because it's always it's endlessly fascinating to to play what if games with history. So, what if European imperialists had suffered more from the New World illnesses the native people suffered the old world pathogens? What if the wrong herald had won at the one

the Battle of Stanford Bridge in ten sixty six? Uh? And and what if the divine win did not save Japan from Mongol invasion? Okay, but these are all fairly standard historical outcomes. I mean, we like to play the game of alternate history. You know, everybody plays it, with the Man in the High Castle as one example of how many people have played this. What if the access powers of one World War two? What would the world look like? But that's all that's all non magical? Are you?

Are you planning to explore with me, how would history look different if magic had been real to a certain extent? Because, yeah, any of these events, if they had occurred, they would not have changed our understanding of physical reality. But we're gonna look at a couple of cases where some degree of if not scientific investigation, then then then at least semi scientific and inquiry went into a scenario and attempted

to solve a real world problem with essentially magic. Either if any of these cases had gone differently than yes, we would have we would have an age of magic, because it would have changed everything. We would live in a drastically different world. Okay, well, I have faith in you, Robert. I want to follow you down this rabbit trail, so so take me wherever you're thinking we need to go.

All right, we're gonna do a quick break and when we come back, we will consider a world, a magical world where navigation of the high seas depends on the magical torment of dogs. All right, we're back. So we're gonna be talking now about longitude and the then the the actual problem of longitude is it related to too high season navigation? Okay, Now, which one is longitude? That's east west direction, right, Yeah, that's right. Longitude is east

west positioning. Uh. Latitude is north south positioning and uh and and we'll get into too why this is a problem in a bet. But first of all, let's let's let's break down, um, the potential solution that was that was that was instrumented, and that entails the use of sympathetic magic. Okay, Now, sympathetic magic dates back to humanity's

distant prehistoric past. This is the idea that you can heal a wound by treating the weapon that caused it, or that possession of an individual's toneo clippings gives you power over the former owner that you have to hide your hair after you cut your hair, so which doesn't get it to use it against you. Really, I mean, there's a there's a rich variety of sympathetic magical uses throughout history. Yeah, sympathetic magic, I think is considered a

major class of of magical behavior. And this is the Scottish anthropologist James Frasier actually wrote plenty about sympathetic magic. We've talked about Fraser on the show before. I always want to call him Frasier, but there's not that extra I in his name. So James Fraser wrote The Golden Bow, you know, one of the big influences on T. S. Eliott, one of the big influences on modernism generally. It was this anthropological work that was attempting to explain the origins

and of religious customs around the world. And it is a fascinating book to jump into. It's one of those that I've never read cover to cover, but I jump into different chapters and read them. And Fraser, I think would not hold up to modern scrutiny in terms of anthropological methods. So I'm sure a lot of what he reports is not necessarily corre act to data about you know, different people's all over the world. It's based on a

outmoded anthropological data gathering method. You know, he's relying on all these weird anecdotes and stuff. But he also just has a lot of really interesting analytical things to say about the way people think about magic and the way people think about religion, and the relationship between different magical and religious ideas. So he breaks down sympathetic magic into two different categories. One is homeopathic magic, which is the law of similarity, and the other is contagious magic, which

operates on the law of contact. So I'm going to read a quote where he talks about the difference of the ideas here quote. Homeopathic magic is founded on the association of ideas by similarity. Contagious magic is founded on the association of ideas by contiguity. Homeopathic magic commits the mistake of assuming that things which read symbol each other are the same. Contagious magic commits the mistake of assuming that things which have once been in contact with each

other are always in contact. But in practice, the two branches are often combined, or, to be more exact, While homeopathic or imitative magic may be practiced by itself. Contagious magic will generally be found to involve an application of the homeopathic or imitative principle. And I think there's a lot to what he's saying there. We've got this general idea that you can use one thing that's like another thing in order to have some kind of magical influence.

I think of a you know, a doll that represents a person, looks like them, and you can use that to manipulate the person. But almost any time you have the idea of contact, you can't just touch a random thing to a person. Usually, maybe in some cases you can touch a random thing to somebody's arm and then

now you've got power over them. Usually it seems like it needs to be a thing that has some kind of sympathetic route with the person, like it's it's it was formerly a part of their body, or it's something that belonged to I don't know, a member of their

family or something like that. Now, another one of the key observations I think Fraser makes is that in the mind of the magic believer, quote logic is implicit not explicit, And I think this is one of the things that's key to understanding what magic is when when we try to reckon the idea of magical thinking versus scientific thinking. And I would put it like this, with scientific explanations, a lot of times when you when you see a phenomenon in the world, it doesn't seem to make much sense.

You don't understand why it happened. But when you get a scientific explanation, it starts to make more sense. Right, And the deeper you go, the more everything fits together and the call usal relationships become clear. Magical thinking, on the other hand, means that the more you try to explain exactly how magic works, the less sense it makes. Yeah, just think about watching fantasy movies or reading fantasy books.

I would say in my experience, I don't know if maybe you'll disagree, but in my experience, the more general and vague the magic, the easier you accept it, and the more explicit it gets about magic powers, how they work, where they come from, the function of magic objects all that. If it gets really deep into the weeds, almost like trying to explore the scientific causation underlying magical influence, it becomes more and more ridiculous and makes less and less sense.

At least in my experience, I would agree with without in most cases, I think that they're the rare exception. And one of the reasons, one of them the many reasons I love this series so much is that our Scott Baker's dark fantasy series, though the Second Apocalypse, like, he has a really thought out magical system that's ultimately based in philosophical models, So that one works for me. But I think for the most part, you're You're correct.

There's a certain I think part part of the thing is here is so you have a wizard on the screen and casting a spell using you know, homeopathic magic or contagious magic perhaps, like both of these are forms of magic. It kind of made to make a subconscious sense to us in just in our daily lives. But for instance, with with contagious magic, I instantly think of examples of someone's someone's like, oh, you know, I shook hands with a famous person. I'll never wash this hand again.

Four sentiments of like, oh, this this shirt was touched by by, uh, you know, Paul McCarthy. I can never wash this as Paul McCarthy. Yeah, Paul McCarthy the Beatle, Right, Paul McCartney McCartney. McCarthy, sorry, I've got a lot of man you got ripped off on eBay, Robert Darnet Paul McCarthy, Um, yeah, I thought he was really down on communism for an old school rocker. But anyway, uh my My point being that both of these types of magic kind of play into the ways we we think about objects and we

think about contact. Oh totally. Yeah. I think it's interesting that that you see homeopathic alternative medicine still being practiced today. The idea, you know, and and it really does have a root in this idea of homeopathic magic because here it's the idea of similarity gives things magical influence over one another. In homeopathic medicine, so called medicine. The it's the idea is basically that like cures like one the thing that produces one effect will also cure that effect. Yeah, yeah,

this is a good point. Now, I mentioned this weapon example earlier, and that's going to be a key to what we're discussing about the idea that you could heal the wound by treating the weapon that caused it. Okay, so if I walk up to you and stab you with a bowie knife and then later I feel bad about and I want to heal you, but I can't find you. I could just what rap bandages around the knife. Yeah, it's kind of like like he's been stabbed. Get this

knife to a hospital. A certain extent um, This was a real idea that was that was that was rather popular in the seventeenth century because it all entails this thing that was called the powder of sympathy. Oh boy, that sounds great already. Yeah, this was the idea. Here was simply dust the weapon and the special powder, and you in turn treat the wound it created. It's a it's you know, it's kind of a spooky action at

a distance kind of scenario. This particular notion was concocted by natural philosopher uh Sir Kenelman Digby, who through sixteen sixty five distant relative of Arthur Digby Sellers. He wrote a book on this subject, Discourse on the Powder of Sympathy, and it went through like twenty nine different editions and so popular stuff. I guess, yeah, it it made the

rounds uh. And he would in this book he would describe how he could he could make a patient jump by putting addressing from the patient's wounds into a basin full of this special powder. So it is sort of like, h It's like a remote acting sympathetic magic catalyst essentially. Yeah, and I actually have have some instructions on how to make it, uh that I'm gonna read. You're gonna jump in with some some explanations here as needed, But this

is Digby's own words. Okay, take good English vitriol, which you may buy for twopence a pound, And of course vitriol means sulfate, usually sulfuric acid. Dissolve it in warm water using no more water than we'll dissolve it, leaving some of the impurest part at the bottom undissolved. Then pour it off and filter it, which you may do

by a coffin of fine gray paper. The coffin that's what I have here, Uh, put put into a funnel, or by laying a sheet of gray paper and a sieve and pouring or water or dissolution of vitriol into it by degrees, setting the sieve upon a large pan to receive the filtered liquor. When all your liquor is filtered, boil it in an earthen vessel glazed till you see a thin scum upon it. Then set it in a cellar to cool, covering it loosely so that nothing may

fall in. After two or three days standing, pour off the liquor and you will find at the bottom and on the sides large and fair green crystals like emeralds. Drain off all the water clean from them and dry them. Then spread them abroad and a large flat earthen dish and expose them to the hot sun in the dog days, taking them in at night and setting them out in the morning, securing them from the rain. And when the sun hath calcimed them to whiteness, beat them to powder.

And set this powder again in the sun, stirring it sometimes, and when you see it perfectly white, powder it and sift it finally, and set it again in the sun for a day, and you will have a pure white powder, which is the powder of sympathy. I like how there is almost the You get the feeling that he's inserting unnecessary steps to make it more work, to make it

seem more likely to have a real efficacy. Yeah, and this this reminds me of other recipes that I've read from particularly books on alchemy, whether it'll be this kind of convoluted recipe, instructions that entail moving it in and out of the sun, hiding it in a basement, and in the more magical examples like making sure that it's exposed uh to sunlight at the right degrees and through

the you know, like a westward facing window, etcetera. I've got a theory about this, let me know what you think. Probably not a very well developed theory, more of a hypothesis. My idea is that spells and instructions like this, for for all these potions and things have all of these complicated steps, maybe not consciously, but they often do because they're exploiting the sunk costs fallacy. I think about the sunk costs fallacy a lot. I think it determines a

lot of our decisions. The sunk costs fallacy is that you are more likely to continue investing in something, or more likely to continue believing it or to think it was a good idea. If you've already expended a lot of personal time, money, or energy on it, You're you're trying to convince yourself that you have not wasted your resources. And thus, if you tell somebody well, uh, you know, just get this one thing from the store and grind it up into a powder and it has magical powers.

You've not made them go all in with it, right, and so if it doesn't work, they're just like, well I got ripped off. But if you make them spend days and days and doing all these complicated, laborious steps, you might be able to exploit their desire not to have feel that they have wasted their time. Un Thus, they're more likely to be like, wow, yeah, I think

it works. Yeah, I mean it's it's it's it's kind of like if you if you have poor in assembly instructions for a piece of furniture and you have to backtrack and reassemble and switch things around at the end of it. I mean, I'm not going to add I'm not going to add on the additional feeling of defeat by thinking it looks bad. I'm gonna tell myself, no, this thing looks this looks good. It's worth the money, it's worth the time I spent assembling it and partially

disassembling it. It was it was worth the effort. Or I think some people may encounter this with a recipe. You know, you spend half a day making a cake, Um my mind will not be able to just survive the reality of that cake not tasting absolutely delicious. And I think it has Uh, it has a similar effect even if you're not actually trying to convince yourself it's

not bad. So I think about if I spend a lot of time working on a dinner, if I put a lot of work into it, I enjoy it more in the end, even if it's not like it turns out bad and I'm trying to convince myself it's actually good. Even if I think it's actually pretty good, I just like it more if I worked on it a lot. Now, in the case of the powder sympathy, obviously we're we're going with working assumption that this does not work. This

is purely magical thinking. But you can easily imagine a scenario where this is used and it seems to work. Either there's just sort of a you know, the psycho somatic effect of someone thinking that you're you're healing them and they just puts them at ease a little bit and then they heal naturally, or you know, it's just kind of the roll of the dice. You think of the imperfect medical understanding of the time, poor wound treatment, uh,

confirmation bias. And it just sort of the idea too, that just the mere fact that anyone's giving, you know, some amount, just the fact that you're changing the dressings so that you can dip the dressings in this magical powder might might play a role. Oh yeah, totally. I mean, I think that's often the case with a lot of these magical treatments, is that in many cases they might have actually done something helpful, but it was just an

unnecessary byproduct of what they thought they were doing. Yeah, so we're we're left with the situation then, where Yeah, this idea of the powder of sympathies out there, it's it's not working, but it may seem to work in some cases, and the the idea remains somewhat popular. So that leaves the question if enough people believe that the powder of sympathy is working or maybe working, or there's something to it to the magic here, what else can

you do with it? Could you perhaps tackle one of the most pressing challenges of the day is this where longitude comes back in exactly and again longitude is east west positioning and latitude is north south, and in navigating by c it pays to know exactly where you are. Now, all you need is a peek at the altitude of the noonday sun one and a few glances at a table that gives the sons a declination for the day,

and then you've got your latitude. So it's not so hard to know how far north or south you are, right, but at the time to calculate longitude one hand to depend largely on what's known as dead reckoning. Oh boy, that sounds good. Yeah, this is calculating your current position based on your previous position. Uh and uh and uh and and known or estimated speeds over elapsed time and course. Oh wait a second, so that's not as cool as I imagine. It's not like using a skull holding it

up to the sky in a certain way. No, now, you're just talking about something that sounds very approximate and often wrong. Right. It's you end up it's rife with cumulative errors. So essentially what you're doing here is like the first time that you like each leg of the trip, each point uh you know, on on the on the map. Um, it gets gets the further out you get, You're you're

a little more prone to air. It's kind of like a game of telephone, right when you start with one word spoken whispered into ears, and it goes around in a circle, and by the end it may or may not resemble the original word. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you're saying, like, you know, you started at fifty degrees west, and then you say, well, I think we went maybe about a hundred miles west today, so we're at this new point west. And then I think maybe we went about a hundred

miles the next day. So you think, but each time you do that, you're reckoning from your previous guests about how far west you were right, And then you're you also have to factor in what kind of tools do I have to measure these things? Can I can accurately gauge, like, truly accurately gauge how far I've come? Do I do I have an accurate understanding of what time it is? Uh?

These become issues. Oh and I should also note you also need an accurate longitude latitude reading to make up for an up to ten degree difference in magnetic north versus true north on certain trade route. Okay, okay, So by the sixteenth century we had a pretty good method for determining longitude by land, depending on the use of Galilee and moons of Jupiter as an astronomical clock. But this was far more difficult to carry out by sea,

so you needed a better method. Is it going to be magic, Uh, we're gonna get to a Yeah, we're gonna get to some magic here. Now, not everybody trying to tackle this problem was trying to tackle with magic. There's a great deal of terrestrial, celestial, and mechanical solutions that were making the rounds. And this was also a stirred on by the fact that there was there at least a couple of hefty prizes, the most notable being that offered by the British government in seventeen four team

the Longitude Prize. So there's there's there's not only fame and the solution of a problem at stake here, there's also a cash reward. You could already be a winner if you have some magic powder. Yeah. So enter an anonymous author. We have we have no idea who this was, but they printed a pamphlet titled Curious Inquiries being six Brief discourses. Uh. Now, a great many commentators insist that this entire pamphlet is just a work of satire, poking

fun as scientific practice. It's kind of a mad magazine or even you know, maybe a more more opt to comparison would be a modest proposal, right, Jonathan Swift. The idea being here that we should we should eat the poor, Yes, yeah, but not everybody agrees that it was definitely satire. So in the book Longitude, there's the true story of a loan genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of this time.

Historian Davis Sobel says that it's more difficult to determine if the pamphlet prevent presents the idea as a serious solution or a mere satire. So it's not necessarily clear, right, which one it's supposed to be. Yeah, it kind of It just depends on who the commentator is. Then that sounds like the perfect zone for comedy. Yes, and and I do have to before we get into the grizzly details here and let everyone know that there's no evidence that anyone ever actually tried this out, Uh, but it's

been makes for an interesting discussion point here. So the solution that's proposed in this pamphlet depends entirely on the powder of sympathy. You take a wounded dog with you to see, and you leave someone back home on shore to dip the dog's bandage into the sympathy solution every day at noon. This will cause the dog you yelp out in pain. Informing you that quote the sun is upon the Meridan in London. Compare that hour to the

local time and you can now calculate longitude. Now, this whole thing would depend not only on sympathetic magic, but also on the effect working across thousands of miles. Uh, and also without the dog healing, because I remember, the whole scenario is that the powder of sympathy can be used to to treat, to heal the wound, to heal the wound by treating the weapon or the dressing, And in this case you are just hoping to keep the dog's misery going. So navigate. Yeah, that's horrible, and so

this might actually require additional injuries to the dog. So I gotta admit I was reading about this last night a little bit, and I had my dog sitting next to me on the couch, and I felt so sad. It is it's a even if I mean I'm not a dog owner, but this is a horrific notion. And yet, as a Sobell points out, the author of the pamphlet goes on to state that quote, submitting a dog to the misery of having always a wound about him is no more macabre or a mercenary than expecting a seaman

to put his own eye out for the purpose of navigation. Now, now what does that mean? So they were like stabbing sailor's eye so they could be good navigating. This sounds like just another level of of of grotesque magic. But uh, she explains. English navigator John Davies had this this backstaff that he developed in and this improved on an older cross staff or Jacob's staff, and this was used, um uh, this was what was required to measure the height of

the sun above the horizon, uh, in navigation. And you do it by looking directly into the glare of the sun with only a darkened bit of glass to protect you. And so just a few years of this was enough to destroy that, you know, one's eyesight in your favorite eye. So you have a lot of of you know, the older sailors about and they'd be blind in one eye

from using this method at the time. Now, I don't think that I don't know about the argument that this is is the same thing as torturing a dog, especially in the name of magic, as opposed to simply, you know, making solar observations. But there you go. It's in the pample. The takeaway from today's episode is staring at the sun it works, gets results. Okay, so let's answer the obvious question. Uh, why didn't this work? Assuming you mean the powder of

the powder of sympathy? Why why did this not work? Why was this this dog option? Uh, not even remotely feasible because it involves of magic powder exactly. Yeah, it has no basis in science or the natural laws of the universe as we understand them. Now, some of you might be thinking, oh, well, this is this is what I've seen described as a spooky action at a distance.

Isn't there something in quantum mechanics that says that you can have two items become a quantumly entangled, two particles come into contact, and as a result, any change to one of the particles creates an instantaneous change in the other. Yeah, this is a phenomenon and quantum mechanics the idea of entanglement, where if two particles are entangled, you can separate them

across vast distances. You can take them, you know, opposite ends of the galaxy, and then supposedly looking at one of these particles will instantaneously tell you something about the state of the other. Um. Now, I've actually I've read criticisms of the idea that this can be used to enable, for example, faster than light communication, because you automatically assume,

m oh wow. So if you could do that, you could take them to opposite ends of the galaxy and they still have an influence on one another, then couldn't you use that to send messages instantaneously from one end to the galaxy to the other. The physicists that I've read say, no, that is not possible. You still cannot send information faster than light. Uh, there are there are facts about how the system works that means that. That means that you can't encode information in one in a

way that can be received at the other end. So even even are even the scientific ideas that we have today that most resemble sympathetic magic could not work as we understand them within these parameters. No, because they're not sympathetic magic their quantum intent. Alright, So our next question what if it had worked well on one hand as umberto echo rights in the Island of the day before.

I mean, imagine anyone who's read that book, you were already familiar with the powder or sympathy and this this dog angle from that. If this had worked, you would have had a world where global trade and travel depends on the torment of dogs. So this is the alternate history we're being asked to consider here. Yeah, just kind of horrific magical alternate reality. But then that's the thing.

If if the dog trick works, and that means the powder of sympathy works, that means that any number of sympathetic magical scenarios are also true, And it just opens the Pandora's box of of magical possibility and magical complication of life. Of course it does. I mean, if magic

is magic, then I don't know how to finish that sentence. Yeah, well, I mean everything is different then, yeah, I mean you have you know, magical spies running around, Voodoo dolls are are just like everybody has a voodoo dogs just a growth industry. You're gonna have one for everybody. You know, just to make it's like a cold war of voodoo

for everybody. Now, one thing I do want to point out about the kind of magic you're talking about is, if we go back to my earlier distinction between magical law magic that operates by law and has consistent results versus capricious magic, this would seem to be something that's more like magical law right there there, insisting that this would work every time. It would be a dependable principle of nature. Oh yeah, it would have to be, otherwise

you wouldn't be able to base navigation around it. Because again, this was this was life and death like that. That was the I can't really stress that enough that that was the whole reason for this, this quest for a solution to the longitude problem. So it's not like you're praying to one of the gods to make the dog on your ship give you the longitude correctly, and it may work or it may not. Their idea was if

if anybody actually believed this. The idea was that this could be depended on and in that sense, maybe it wouldn't actually change all that much other than it would make the world a much worse place because of all these people cutting dogs. But it wouldn't change all that much in terms of our understanding of reality because it would still be yet another dependable principle. Yeah now, and I imagine everyone's wondering at this point, Okay, well, what

actually solved the problem? How did we actually uh figure out a way to accurately determine a longitude? Fun fact, nobody knew how far they were easter or west until they had iPhones. Well there's actually there's actually something to that, but um, the main individual that's credited with it was solving the problem initially is that eighteenth century clockmaker John Harrison.

So he created the first clock that was accurate enough to determine longitude at sea, most notably here that the Jeffreys Watch and the Sea Watch, which is also known as H four. And this revolutionized a navigation and greatly improve the safety of sea travel. And then after that we had other technological advances. They would introduce wireless time signals sent by telegraphy radar, the radio based Lauren system, and of course GPS technology. Alright, that's the big one.

And again coming back to your your comming on iPhones, like once we once we have the GPS in place like that. That certainly just fixes everything in terms of knowing where you are in the world and moving around anyway. So please just confirmed to us we we don't know any evidence of dogs actually being tortured for navigation. That didn't happen in reality, as far as we know, as far as I know, it did not happen, and certainly

do not try it, because you're a monster. If you do, well, I feel much better now now we cannot say the same with the with the with definite accuracy for rabbits. And that's what we're gonna we're gonna get to next. After a break, all right, we're back. So we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna transport ourselves in time. Now we're gonna we're gonna move on up to the twenty century, all right, So we're gonna chase the connection between UH

seafaring navigation or seafaring communication and blood magic. Yes, to the modern era, that's right, that's right. So inevitably we're talking about military matters and military research here, and UH military interests have always pushed technological advancements. I mean in weaponry obviously, but also in everything from food storage to communication and in times of war, and certainly in times of total war. Uh, this has a way of of

of even absorbing non military explorations. I mean, just consider German rocketry. During the Second World War. You had all these minds that in many cases had dreamed of space exploration, and they were maneuvered into developing, uh, weapons of mass destruction instead, such as the the V weapons like the V two rockets. And after the flames of the Second World War died down, of course, the Cold War set in.

The race was on to to perfect one's weaponry, to advance to a state of superiority over your rival superpower. And with nothing short of nuclear war haunting the horizon, what wouldn't you try? What a riskier, even unlikely avenues

wouldn't you explore in hopes of gaining that upper hand. Yeah, I think sometimes it's easy for us today to look back on on Cold War myopia, on the you know, the behavior of the leadership in both the Western Powers and in the Soviet Union, and to kind of and to I don't know, think like, wow, how paranoid and

stupid they were. Now I'm not saying that they necessarily behaved wisely I think in most cases they probably didn't yet during the Cold War, it's uh, if you put yourself back in the past during the Cold War and you take away the fact that you know how everything turned out, it's easy to understand why people were highly motivated by fear and and and and as we're going to be discussing the with the scientific exploration of essentially paranormal phenomenon, uh, you know, this is a this is

an area where you can also make that make the argument, well, had that had the slimy and the slime mold tentacle of science really truly explored that cavern? Well, and how do we know for sure that this kind of this this part of the maze doesn't lead to the food reward. I mean, one of the things about the slime Mold of Science not having any top down control means that sometimes, uh, one one tendril might not know what the other tendrils

are doing, right, Uh. Is so one tendril might be creeping down an avenue that is in fact a dead end and has been explored before, or might be creeping down some avenue in secret, so that other tendrils might not know what it's doing because it's exploring some some cavern in secret. And that's something we we often get in the development of military and defense technology. Right and of course our our our example, our metaphor of the slime mold is science is kind of the ideal shape

of science. But in times of war, you may have someone come in and say, actually, I'm going to be the king of science right now, Hey, get this tendral down this hallway because I really need this to work, or I think it could work. But boss, that's a bad hallway. It doesn't work, it doesn't matter. It starts sending slim down there, and we'll we'll worry about it

and uh, you know, five to ten years. Okay, So the hallway we're gonna be talking about in this section is going to be parapsychology, right right, And we see this plan in the history of both US and Soviet experimentation. Uh, you know, looking into parapsychology and specifically mind control being a big one. Uh. DARPA uh certainly explored the possibilities.

You had Sydney Gottlieb, who was head of the Office of Technical Service at the CIA, and he spearheaded such projects as MK Ultra, which I imagine a number of you familiar with this is the project that explored the possibilities of l s D enabled mind control. Yeah, we explored that a little bit, I think definitely in the episode where we talked about what mind control would feel like if it were possible. That's right, we did. And

then of course the Soviets were conducting their own experiments. Uh. And this, now, this is a situation where we don't always have the best primary sources on what exactly was going on. It's kind of there's a game of telephone going on here. There's kind of a situation of dead reckoning with the reporting of what the Soviets were actually up to. Yeah. Now, as far as U. S. Intelligence services, we do now have some declassified documents and still have

parts redacted in some cases and all that. But uh, but yeah, we have descriptions now what was going on for example in the c i A. Yeah. But meanwhile with the Soviets, there's some areas where we have less information. For instance, there's the study combiled by the Rand Corporation for DARPA, and they make special mention of Russia's plan to launch psychics into orbit into orbit. Yeah, in spaceships

or just naked. Um, I assume in space ships, but I'm thinking of psychic space gods just flying naked through space looking down over the prairies of the United States. Well, there is a certain guild navigator vibe. It is for sure totally So the quote from this particular report is regarding a precognition. We found only one unverified report by a Soviet investigator that a program was being planned to train astronauts to quote foresee and to avoid accidents in space.

What it was clear from the context that he was referring to precognitive process. Now, hold on a second. If you were developing in the Cold War context, you've got projects somewhere deep in your defense research agencies to develop precognition where you know what's going to happen before it happens, would you really primarily think to employ it by having astronauts look into the future to make sure there's not

going to be an accident during their space mission. That just doesn't seem like the primary way that people would put this use. Yeah, I mean, it makes you ask is as true as as false? Is this Russian disinformation certainly could be certainly saying Hey, what are we up to while we're shooting psychics into space? You better get on that. Think about that and not this, uh, this, this, this other thing that we're working on. It's actually a

legitimate threat. Yeah, I mean that's a big thing when you're considering defense capabilities in the Cold War context, not just Cold War, I mean throughout the history of of you know, great powers interacting with one another. But it's

certainly there in the Cold War. Is that a lot of capability that was developed, or capability that was just talked about, was not necessarily for the purpose of executing that capability in a real scenario, but was for the purpose of provoking some kind of impression or behavior on

the other side. So, if you're doing research for some kind of US defense or security agency, you might want to put out reports creating the impression for the Soviets that you have some kind of capability you don't really have, just because you want them to react to it in a certain way, and vice versa. Yeah. Like another example that was brought up in that same Randah paper was the idea that one might be able to use psychokinesis

to disrupt an intercontinental ballistic missiles electronic guidance system. Yeah, so that, like imagine it, the the the nuclear death is coming down in the form of this warhead, and then all this psychic soldier needs to do is look up at it, concentrate just right, and click something inside it. So they've detected a launch. The president immediately picks up the phone, dials up the Long Island medium. Yeah, exactly, get her on the k those must get those missiles

out of the air. Now. Of course, researchers, researchers were ultimately on both sides interested in all forms of extrasensory perception. We you know, we have we have documents and releases on things like tele epathy, claric clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, um, voluntary nervous system control, faith healing, the use of dowsing rods and UH and UH and dermo optics, UH, the ability to, for instance, to see with one's own hands,

that sort of thing. So there was a lot of stuff that was at least, uh, at least looked into, if not you know, thoroughly explored. And of course this, this whole scene is tremendously interesting, and we could devote multiple podcast to just its exploration. But Robert, I know you want to talk about cutting animals. Yes, that that's our focus here today is the the use of blood

magic in a in a nautical sense. Well, okay, So one source that we looked at that I thought was pretty interesting was this article by a national security journalist named Sharon Weinberger. And so this article was published in I Tripolice Spectrum, I think just a month or so ago. But it's from a book called The Imagineers of War, so it's an adapted chapter and the article was called

the Bunny the Witch in the War Room. I like that. Yeah, yeah, the C. S. Lewis connection, establishing a little bit of which would that be homeopathic or contagious magic? With C. S.

Lewis guess homeopathic? Yeah, I think so. Now some of you may have heard Weinberger because she was recently a guest on NPRS Fresh Air, which he talks about about about this book and about uh, this particular chapter here, and Weinberger points out that in the US a lot of this this zeal for paranormal research, uh, it came together in the wake of the nine seven Soviet sput

Nick launch. So Washington ends up moving after this to prioritize research via the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. That this was the first space agency, and it is the entity that becomes DARPA. Yeah, And to get into the relevant part of Winburger's article. So you, Robert, you already mentioned this guy, Sydney Gottlieb, who was apparently quite a character. He was a chemist by original training, but he was the head of the Central Intelligence Agency's Office

of Technical Service. I think you already mentioned that division earlier in the early nineteen seventies. In in the early nineteen seventies, this division had contracted the Stanford Research Institute to carry out a program of experiments in the field of parapsychology, which we already mentioned. A parapsychology is paranormal psychic phenomena. So some of the stuff we've already mentioned, telepathy, telekinesis, precognition,

remote viewing. I think they were specially into remote viewing because it was like it was like having a spy plane that could go inside an enemy base and just see what was on anybody's desk and all that. If it actually worked. And of course this is something that's explored in a lot of uh science fiction treatments, including

a Stranger Thing so or a firestarter. Yeah. You know, anytime you have a shadowy government lab, you often find echoes of of this of these experiments there, right, So it's obvious that if there were anything real to be discovered in this arena, like if there is anything to parapsychology, of course it would be of tremendous use to military

and intelligence agencies. So the the director of the of our PAT at the time, the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the early nineteen seventies, Stephen Luca Sik, recalls going to visit Sydney Gottlieb in nineteen seventy one, and apparently one of the subjects Scott Lee wanted to talk about with talked talked to him about was bunnies stead bunnies

and their use in strategic nuclear arms positioning around the world. Now, in nineteen seventy a book had been released in the United States called Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, and this book claimed to document the findings of Soviet research into psychic phenomena such as esp. It was saying, look the Soviets are already

making great strides in parapsychology. They're already figuring out how to do all the CSP stuff, and this apparently spurred these American officials to get into the game. Now, I haven't read this book, but I did a little reading about it, looking at some of the things that appear to be talked about in it, some things reviewers have said, and admitting that I haven't read the book, it looks to me very sketchy. It looks to me like this

book perhaps fraudulently reports or at least credulous. Lee passes on reports of EESP results as if they're genuine. Now, maybe I hope I'm being fair. Maybe I'm not being fair, And if I got into it, the authors would show a little little bit more skepticism. But I'm um, I'm a little bit wary of anything that is passed on as true from the contents of this book. Just at first glance, now you might be thinking, wait a minute,

where do the bunnies come in. Well, according to the allegations in this book by by Ostrander and Schroeder, one experiment used a supposed psychic connection between mothers and recently born infant mammals to establish communication across difficult physical barriers. Specifically, this involved nuclear submarines. Now, in the Cold War, strategic defense for both the United States and the Soviet Union meant being able to offer a credible threat of nuclear

retaliation in the event of an act of war. So you might ask somebody, wait a minute, you know, if we don't want to start a world war and kill everybody, why do we need nuclear weapons? And the reasoning at the time given by both powers was well, we need them as a credible threat of retaliation to prevent the other side from attacking us first. And one of the most important things that you could do in order to make sure that you had retaliatory power was to make

sure that you had some hidden weapons. So you might have ground based weapons all over the place is but the enemy might know where some of those are. You know, you never know how good the spying is. But if you could launch missiles from a deep water submarine, there's you know you could keep. You could move them all over the place in secret, and the enemy wouldn't be able to take out all of your capabilities, so you

could always retaliate. And the submarines could always stay hidden as long as they stayed submerged deep in the ocean. And this is where we get the idea of these these nuclear subs with nuclear missiles going out and essentially just hanging out in the ocean in case they are needed.

But this sort of defeated the purpose because if you wanted your slb ms as they were known submarine launched ballistic missiles to respond quickly to an attack, you would need to be able to have rapid wireless communication with your nuclear subs, right, you need to get the message out to them that it's time to retaliate. It wasn't easy to get a message to these crafts submerged so deep underwater. And one leeged Soviet solution, according to Ostrander

and Schroeder, was psychic rabbit research. So the theory went something like this, You've got an inherent psychic link that's created between the brain of a mother and her immediate offspring. If a baby rabbit is killed, supposedly, it's mother will be able to know this instantly, even at a great distance. So hypothetically you could keep a mother rabbit in a cage on a submarine and keep its baby back at

the home base. And if you needed your nuclear sub to rise up to the shallows in order to receive orders to execute a launch, you would just kill the baby rabbit. Now immediately the mother should start showing symptoms of distress. And note that's kind of a vague work like,

what does distress look like in a rabbit? Rabbit not only a rabbit, a rabbit that's kept on a submarine, right, it would know psychically that it's baby had perished, and this would mean the person watching over the rabbit on the submarine would signal the officers and the sub would rise to the proper depth to receive orders. Now, according to Austrander and Schroeder, the Soviets claim their experiments were successful and the technique worked. I doubt it, yeah, I

just we'll discuss. I just can't imagine that scenario in which this works. So I'm skeptical at multiple levels of this. I don't know whether they actually did this or not. It's reported that they did this, but I'm skeptical of the reports. Uh. And of course, even if they did actually try it and claim that it worked, I don't

believe them. Yeah, though I do like the story of this in how it reveals kind of a lunacy of of nuclear war and retaltory attacks, you know, and and and certainly goes along rather nicely or frighteningly with various stories we have about like near incidents of of false launches. Yeah, God, those are terrified. Uh. And it's it's arry how close we've come in some scenarios to an accidental nuclear war. Uh. You know, the worst possible outcome that there could be

on planet Earth would be a nuclear exchange. And and it's it's terrifying to think that such a thing could happen without incredibly deliberate I mean, it's terrifying to think it could happen for any reason. But it's just added absurdity that it could happen by accident. Yeah, and even more absurdity to say it could happen because you misinterpreted

a distressed rabbit on a submarine. Right now, Hopefully what they had in mind, if anybody was actually thinking about implementing something like this, would be more what I talked about, not that you'd see a distressed rabbit and you just launch, but that you'd see a distressed rabbit, and that would mean Okay, come up from the deep water so you can receive a signal and then you'd get your complete

orders once you were at the surface. Right, So like if this, if this were utilized by the Soviets, you could also imagine a scenario we have like a Soviet sleeper agent hanging out in an apartment like cleaning guns and looking after a pet rabbit and the rabbits distressed and he's like, oh, I've got to go to the pay phone across town and await my call to see who I'm supposed to assassinate. Wait, so there would be

multiple levels of rabbits there. Oh no, wait, no, he wouldn't be communicating with a submarine that it would just be the rabbit, right, This would just the rabbit used as a means of communicating with you between agents and so in the US, getting rid of the number stations or you know, secret radio communications, just have rabbit. Yeah, it is this factor into the Americans at all. You've you've been telling me that I need to watch to pick up the Americans again, Like, I haven't gotten to

any rabbits if they're in there. But I'm not done with the series yet. The series isn't over yet, but I've not gotten any rabbits anyway. So reports ofsp research in the Soviet Union did help sort of create this climate of fear in US defense research circles. It's what we've talked about. It's the sort of I don't know, you might almost call it like conflict jealousy, you know, it's like advantage paranoia. If the Soviets are gonna have

psychic assassins, shouldn't we have them too. If their remote viewing, shouldn't we be doing some remote viewing as well. The Soviets have have our training clowning troops. If they have clown troops, we've got to have clown troops to start recruiting. But obviously, I mean, I think you'll probably agree with me that I doubt any either side ever had any real success at anything like this, And I almost doubt

how deep the research actually went on either side. I mean, I think you might get a few stories of some research on this, but they it probably didn't take them too long to figure out on both sides, however deep they went, that this was nonsense and it was never gonna work. Yeah, I guess you have to ask yourself like, imagine wherever you work, imagine a bad idea, like an

untotally unworkable idea, coming down from management. How long can that initiative live within your organization depends on how delusional management is. So and actually, no, that's a good point, because I can see that being a problem, for example, in your business scenario, if management does not respond well to negative feedback of criticism, as sometimes governments don't, especially

totalitarian governments. Imagine you are a Soviet scientist and you you're you're proper early you're exhibiting proper scientific skepticism, but you get orders from the top down telling you you need to figure out how to make psychic communication work for spies. You're like, Okay, I know that's not real. But if I tell my boss that I might just go to the Gulag, right, I've I've got to at least look like I'm I'm throwing due diligence at the problem. Yeah.

And of course we know from from other instances that the Soviet Union was not uh not immune to being totally anti science for political reasons. I mean, I think about like a like sinco ism, right, this this completely non scientific idea about biology and agriculture pushed like this sky trophimal sinko. Uh that they that they tried to implement. They tried to just make it science by force, say like, yes, this is what science is now. But you know it

wasn't true anyway. Back to the end of the story, So US defense and Intel research on parapsychology went down a lot of weird rabbit holes, so to speak. I had a bad pun. But the the ar per researcher George Lawrence, who had been assigned to work on the parapsychology research, later said, quote, I worked so long and so hard and dealt with so many fools and Charlatan's there is no question in my mind that all of it is bunk, all right, So much of the pretty

much all of it didn't work. And in this case, the rabbit scenario, if it was even truly attempted, obviously didn't work. But why doesn't it work? Well, I mean, how would it work? So I want to say effects in the world, if you can make a change in something, if you can cause an effect, it always appears to be mediated by the transfer of energy. In order to send a signal, you've got to direct some form of energy or matter transfer that makes a change in your

environment something you can detect. So, uh, you know, talking transfers acoustic energy back and forth. Writing a letter is storage on physical matter. You have to spend energy to move at one place to another. You can transmit by radio waves, that's energy. When you're talking about psychic transmission, you're proposing that information is being transmitted from one place to another with no known quantity of energy being exchanged in between. And first of all, that just doesn't drive

with anything we know about science. But also I want to just roll with the idea of maybe psychic energy is real, okay, And I want to just accept that as a hypothetical for for a second and apply some

critical thinking to it. Maybe you tell me if I'm being overly pedantic here, but I've got a prediction if psychic powers are real, if we do discover that, for example, humans or rabbits can wirelessly share thoughts with one another, I would think the effectiveness of this information transfer would have to be mediated by physical distance. Because if you're transmitting something between people's brains, think about your head like

an antenna, and antenna transmits omnidirectionally. And because of that, the further you get away from the antenna, much greatly proportionally weaker the signal is. It works by the inverse square law. So the further you get away, the much weaker the signal becomes, and eventually it's going to become indistinguishable from whatever other noise is floating around in the ether around you. So I don't see how you could have a psychic connection between a mother rabbit and a

baby rabbit. Even if such psychic connections are possible, they would really be detectable across hundreds of feet of ocean water and you know thou sens of kilometers. Well, and yeah, it also comes down to the fact that, like, why would it need to be that strong? If this were if this were an actual, essentially biological reality, it would be an involved biological reality. What purpose would it serve? Yeah, and we we know too that evolution weeds out, um,

you know, unnecessary energy expenditures. The claw on the crab is only going to be as big as it needs to be. So, like and under what scenario would rabbits have evolved to deal with not only the you know, the kidnapping of young but the but the transport of that young across the globe and then deep under the sea. That it doesn't it doesn't make any sense. Yeah, okay, well maybe we we've got to get to your alternate history hypothetical magic here. We already sort of have explored

this a little bit basically the same answer. Yeah, what what would have happened if the Soviets in fact discovered it is real? You can d communicate with submarines via via rabbits and you had to kill baby rabbits, which also makes me very sad to think about. How would history be different, Well, I mean a rabbit on every submarine. It would mean that you have psychic spies, precaga, astronaut cosmonauts, remote viewing and remote writing is just a standard espionage tool.

And then the other thing is that, uh, you know, how how does all of this uh this uh, this newfound uh psychic technology, how does it all remain just within the government that doesn't end up trickling down to the private sector as well? Do you end up having a precog in every corporation, a scanner cop and every police precinct I hope So, so obviously that didn't come to pass, So we don't even have to consider it, but it's it's it's basically the same answer as in

a previous question. If this had been true, then what else would have been true? And it would have just completely changed our world? It would it would just be

magic or psychic phenomenon just utilized in every interest. Though I do want to point out if this were true again, it would follow the laws of magic as opposed to the capricious magic, or it wouldn't be useful, right, like if you if it's capricious magic that allows psychic connection between mother rabbits and baby rabbits, it would not be a dependable tool for communicating with your submarine officers if it only worked at a random amount per cent of

the time. Right, it has to work every time, otherwise it cannot be part of your your your your country's you know, defense protocol. Yeah, it has to work every time or a predictably high percent of the time. Um. Yeah. And so if it's just capricious, it's just apparently at random, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, like there's somebody up there making random decisions about it. Then this does just sort of become a part of science, right. We study

the phenomenon. We discover when it works, when it doesn't work, at what rate it works, and it becomes just part of the known laws of reality, even if we don't understand the mechanism. That's true. Now, obviously the blood magic with rabbits thing didn't didn't shake out. How did that? How did science step in and solve this problem? Well, this is actually kind of interesting, I think. So by the time the Cold War, obviously we had radio transmissions,

wireless radio where we could talk to submarines. That way, if they were at the surface of the water. Right, you go up to the surface, you put up a radio antenna, we can talk to you. But that sort of defeats the purpose of a submarine. Right you come up to the surface of the water, put up your antenna.

You are suddenly detectable to enemy enemy forces. Um. So the problem was that standard radio waves could not penetrate deep oceans to reach deep sea subs um And yeah, the question is was there any way to signal them without killing rabbits and without forcing them to rise to

the surface and reveal themselves. So the problem with penetrating deep sea water is that electromagnetic radiation, which is what we used to transmit radio waves is attenuated by sea wall water because seawater is a reasonably good electrical conductor, sort of similar to how radio waves will have a hard time penetrating a shield of conductive metal. Right, you can put a shield of conductive metal around you and prevent radio signals from getting to your cell phone or

to your brain or whatever. And it's standard frequencies. A signal just can't get very far under the ocean. But the extent to which a radio signal is attenuated is determined by the frequency of the transmission. The lower the frequency, the deeper it goes into the water. So how low would we need to make the frequency to get down to deep sea subs? Apparently you have to go really, really low. And this is where we meet my friend ELF. Ah, So the elves step in and solve everything. So we

do have a medical solution. It in fact is no, it's not. ELF stands for extremely low frequency. So FM radio, for example, operates on the scale of tens to hundreds of mega hurts in the radio frequency omega. Omega hurts is a million hurts. On the other hand, ELF transmissions occur at a scale of tens of hurts. So this is literally millions of times lower frequency than FM radio.

And as you know, frequency and wavelength are inversely correlated, right the the lower your frequency, the longer your wavelength. So we're talking about massive, massive, huge waves of electromagnetic energy. You might also know that if you want to generate a massively long wavelength, you need a massively big antenna. And in the in the idea of e l F transmission, these generally because you couldn't build an an antenna this big,

it was ridiculous of standard metal antenna. So instead what you had to do was essentially put together the form of extremely long assemblies of wires hung up on poles. And we're talking like dozens of miles long. And I've actually seen varying reports the length of these wires of the two known e l F transmitters in the United States. And I don't know if these varying reports reflect different stages on the project or just confusion or misreporting or what.

But and definitely in the realm of dozens of miles long, if not longer. But anyway, the United States supposedly had these two stations for e l F SU subcomms and It was one in clam Lake, Wisconsin, another one in Republic, Michigan. But what these things would do is have these huge long wires on poles that would sort of use the Earth itself as an antenna, and then it would bounce this ELF signal off the ionosphere and then back down into the water, and then it would reach the sub

of course, at great at great depth. Like that communication is one way. There's no way for the submarine to signal back. Also, communications transmitted by extremely low frequency had to be extremely simple because bandwidth is very low with that frequency. This is interesting. Basically we have an answer here that uses actual science, but that kind of has the same relationship. You couldn't. All you could do would be to signal the sub and make them reach a

position where they could be you could communicate with them. Yeah, basically you can say like, all right, come up for orders, it's time. Uh. Now. There were reports a few years back. Obviously things have developed since the late twentieth century. There were a few reports I read from I think around two thousand ten or so where lockeed Martin was developing a program called communications at Speed in Depth, and this would use different combinations of things to enable different types

of communication. One would be antenna booey's attached to submarines by cables that are several miles long, and this would allow subs to communicate both ways while staying deep and operating at normal speed. Another option was something I thought was interesting. It was an acoustic to r F booy system. So here the submarine launches a buoy or a plane drops a booy. Either way you've got a communication buoy

on the surface with the radio antenna on it. But then the buoy communicates with the submarine via acoustic transmission sound waves in the water which travel through the water fine over long distances, so that you have it, no dead rabbits required, as far as we know now. Now, who knows what happened when they're installing those giant antennas out in the Wisconsin and Michigan wilderness. I know. I think there was some environmentalist opposition to like the Reagan

administration wanting to do some various ELF communication projects. So I cannot say honestly that no rabbits were harmed in the making of this film, but at least they weren't killing baby rabbits to communicate with mother rabbits in a cage in the red room. All right, Well, you know, as we as we begin to close out here, I do want to throw in one more a little tidbit

here from from Sharon Weinberger. We have decided earlier. She points out that while the world of blood magic, submarine communication, and psychic soldier didn't come to pass, George Lawrence, the DARPA program manager that we mentioned earlier, he was super into this idea of brain computer interfaces. So she shares this, This is extra from the Fresh Air interview. He was part of this new age counterculture, which even at DARPA

was unusual at the time. He kind of belonged to the zeitgeist, and he was excited by the idea of communicating directly with the human brain. But rather than doing it through magicians or bunny rabbits, he said, suppose we can do it through computers. Now, I remember what I said earlier about using telepathy and and psychokinesis uh to uh, you know, to manipulate I CBMs, or indeed, to establish a quasi uh symbiotic relationship between a human brain and

computing equipment. Well, essentially what he did, uh And in the midst of all of this, uh, this magic and essentially you know, nonsense. I guess you could say he ended up laying the foundation for the field of brain computer interface and bio cybernetic computing, the very field that you and I discussed at length in our in our podcast episode Brain to Brain the Science of technotelepathy, and we've also discussed in our recent neuro security episode. Yeah, yeah,

it came up there as well. So it's it's it's kind of funny, right, because that kind of technology. I think we even commented on it when we were we were we were discussing it. It sounds a bit like magic,

doesn't it. It makes me think. There's a line in William Gibson's Neuromancer where he's talking, you know, the futuristic cyber punk environment and talking about technology reaching the point where humans can make their most magical ideas actually real, such as making a pack with the demon, which becomes possible in this book because it's you may end up

making a pack with an artificial intelligence. But we have a case herey where was something that is seemingly magical, the idea that that that one brain can speak to another via some sort of an interface, be a magical or technological. As the case ends up being, the only way to achieve real magic is not through magic, yeah, but through but through science, calling on the old, the

old slime mold itself. So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed this, uh, this this journey, this uh, this exploration into into history, into uh, into magic, into science. We really covered a lot of bases here. About the only thing we didn't do we didn't drag in a lot of mythology or or theology, but we uh, we hit on a number of topics here. This was a weird one, but I had a lot of fun. So so hopefully everyone out there feels the same. But hey, let us know about it. In the meantime, you can

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