Welcome to the nonprofits. Another exciting episode that can only go up. Now. When I say up, I don't mean that kind of up, but I'm talking about looking up Aaron. Once you go ahe and fill us in.
Yeah.
Earthlans are witnessed to a once in a civilization event as Comet su Chin Sean Atlas, or as it is technically known, Sea Slash twenty twenty three A three has been visible from Earth since the end of September and will continue to be visible to the end of October of twenty twenty four, as on the comets to eighty thousand year journey around the Sun. The last time this commet was seen by any creature on Earth, wooly mammos were walking around and Homo sapiens were still hunters and gatherers.
For those of North America, if you look up to the southwest about ninety minutes after sunset, you should be able to see the comet. Up until October twentieth, humans have done wild, unpredictable things when they see unprecedented celestial events like this. Is this comet important of things to come? Or a reason to let our human freak flag fly? This story is from Earth dot com by Eric Rawls, published September twenty ninth, twenty twenty four.
Thanks Aaron, And I've got to say that, being the oldest person on the panel, I just want to assure that everyone that I was not around the last time this comment came around. It was closed.
But that's really not Actually that's really good.
But on that note, you know, eighty thousand years does seem like a long time, But in the realm of the universe, we were to take the universe and say, compress it down a timeframe that we could understand better, how long would eighty thousand years be, and say, compare it to the universe?
Yeah, the Earth, the universe, last I've heard it was thirteen and a half billion years old. I've heard some people say fourteen billion, but I went with thirteen billion. If you compress thirteen billion years down into one year of time, that means the comment was last year point zero zero zero five to nine percent of the entire life of the universe, which equals about three seconds ago.
That's how that's how long the universe is. The comet was eighty thousand years in our term galactically speaking, or you know, universe speaking, it's like three seconds ago, and human population, the human civilization has even been around for a second. So uh, it's it's it's old, it's been around for a while, but it's also very very young.
Well, I've got to say that I'm pretty fascinated with astronomical astronomical things. When I was a kid, I bought a telescope and was just absolutely fixated with with a lot of these things. But I know that many people don't really know the difference between one celestial object to another. So ahs one or can you share some clarification on that.
I'm glad you asked. I mean, I love science clearly, so allow me to get a little bit nerdy and technical here for a moment. You know, there are a lot of objects up in space, you know, so what is the difference between all of these space things? So an asteroid is a rock and metal, you know, there can be a combination of both and iron and stuff like that, and they come from the asteroid belt that's between Mars and Jupiter. Then you have meteor which is
not actually an object. It's more like the burning effect that results from a meteoroid when it enters the atmosphere and it starts to burn. And then a meteoroid is what most people think of as a meteor or the confused part of the names. As I say, the meteor is just the light that it reflects, so it's a meteoroid. There's a chunk of an asteroid from the asteroid belt, and the comet, which is what we're talking about here,
is mostly ice and dust. Sometimes it can sort of grab rocky objects along the path because it's traveling so fast and it's made of ice, so you know, stuff kind of sticks to it, and so a comed is just kind of like a bunch of space junk. That's why they're often called dirty snowballs.
Well, I have to first say that when Steven mentioned the eighty thousand years and you seem to be buying into that too, I just want to go ahead and start out with lies of the Devil, because we all know that the world is actually six thousand years old and started on a Tuesday around three pm, So I don't know what you guys are talking about.
Timeline was humid in the Genealogy of Jesus found in Luke chapter three.
Amen, brother, and I'm glad you're aware of it now. Stephen I know that you're an artist, so I know that you're going to look at this from a from an artist perspective. What do you see in this whole story about this comment and it's eighty eighty thousand year trip? What do you see with this?
Like I cannot rap remember, I just you want to know how how good I am with numbers. I just found out today that I sent a package. I thought I was sending it to my address, but I like mixed up two numbers. I sent it to four or five one and said five four one. I've lived here for two and a half years and I still can't keep my address right. That that's how well numbers click in my brain. Right, So eighty thousand years is just
what does that even mean? And especially like the idea that this comet is, you know, orbiting the Sun and it's spending most of its time out beyond Pluto, like it's that far away and yet still the Sun is what is like whipping? It's still the Sun is pulling? Like how how how does this work?
It?
Just like I know if for myself, if I hopped into a car and I drove away from anything for forty thousand years and no point when I say, you know what, I kind of want to I feel like I should turn around and go back to where I came from after forty thousand years. I'm like, no, I am gone. I do not owe you anything. I'm going to just keep on going in direction. I'm going, I
am not turning around. And yet for this comment, it is out there for so far, for so long, and he's like, you know what, I still I just can't. I just can't say no to that, son. I just got to keep on being tugged around by it. It just blows my mind.
Well, I've got to say that with the name, and I'm not even to try to enunciate it. I'm glad Aaron had that job, and I'm going to leave it with him. And I'm just gonna call it the Dorothy Dorothy comment, because clearly it thinks there's no place like home.
So it's coming back now. Seriously, though, Aaron, why do you think there's this tendency with us and then I don't meet us, particularly on the panel, but human tendency to assign meaning to celestial events like comments, and and how how do you think that that influences our understanding of science versus mythology.
Oh, I think it's I think it's built in. I think it's it evolved. Our brains evolved to be storytelling brains. Don't know why. It must have something with survival and being able to notice things that are dangerous to us and surviving those dangers.
But we are.
Our brains literally make up stories on what's happening in the world, literally make things up. And so when you see a come in the sky, oh my gosh, what the heck is that? It must mean the world is about to end or some other Or you see in eclipse a solar eclips or a luminary eclips Oh my gosh, what does that mean? The sun is red? Oh my gosh. So your brain is your brain has to know, and it wants to know so bad that it just makes
shit up and makes stories up. And that's what That's the beauty of science is the beauty of science is it eliminates that bias that we have. It takes all the biases that we have, the confirmation biases, the ad popular biases, the you know, all those minds that we have, and it gets rid. It tries to get rid of them, and it tries to see the world for the way it really is. It tries to find out what is the truth, how does the world really operate? What is
that big thing in the sky. Is it a monster coming to devour the earth or is it something else? In science then investigates and tries to figure out what's the truth here, what's going on. Unfortunately, we live at a time where science is kind of came. Without science, we wouldn't be talking on these electronic devices, we wouldn't have the Internet, we wouldn't have the travel that we have.
We wouldn't be able to understand that a comment is just a hawk ice that's literally falling towards the Sun and melting, and that's why we see it has the long tail.
Right.
Without science, we wouldn't know that an eclipse is just the Earth getting in the way of the Sun or the moon Moon getting away of the Sun and blocking it from the Earth's view. So science is an invaluable to it to helping us understand the truth of what real reality is like. Without all our storytelling, nonsense in our brains getting in the way.
And without science, you would not be watching the nonprofits.
You would not be that is absolutely not and speaking of science, I hail science. I think I hail science. I completely agree, And you know, I think that you hit on several good things talking about you know, science and how it takes away these buys and these allow us to look at the data and sort out things. And but that also kind of goes the question I wanted to talk to you about, AJA is about you know, we have computer simulations that we can calculate these things.
I know that some people look at this and go, yo, you're you're taking the mystery away. You're you're you're taking the fun out of it by breaking it down in the numbers. But what about you? How do you feel about that? I know you have you enjoy science. Does it deepen your appreciation of these type of events that we have been able to learn so many things, and we obviously don't know everything, but that we've been able to learn this and understand and predict these types of things.
Yeah, Aaron said, you know, we have been able to do so many things through science, and science is just to me, it's amazing. And we have been able to learn some incredible things about the history of humans, the Earth, the galaxy, you know, the whole universe. In science is Athlete has helped us understand that the last individuals to witness this, you know, cosmic events more ancestors who first
wentured out of Africa eighty thousand years ago. And there are several factors that scientists can use and look at to determine when a comet will come close to the Earth and whether it has come close to Earth before. They can use computer simulation, which is extremely intricate and
complicated and detailed. They can calculate the speed, the size, the axis, the rotation, and they can observe the orbit for long periods of time to learn, you know, what shape the orbit has, whatever it's you know, a perfect circle or over all or whether it's just fluctuating, and how long it takes that orbit, you know, after it has gone through it a couple of times. So it's
just mind blowing. As Steven mentioned, what kind of work goes into getting more detailed history about these these objects because they can't look at any kind of object, like you said, you know, comments meteors, meteoroid's, asteroids, any kind of object and to you exactly what it was on what is going to be? And I wish this kind of stuff got a lot more attention.
I was very tempted to ask Steven a very simple question, and of course by simple, I mean, what do you think that cosmology would look like? Explaining a comment from the flat earth perspective?
But I'm not going to do that, just something that's just a glitch in the what's what's the I'm blanking on the celestial dome that's over.
Oh the firmament.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, It's all a big.
Yeah, Steven. I'm glad to ask you because now I know you knew not only explained it to me, but you've now converted me to be a flur. So it's kind of win win, right, So we can go and shut the show down and do our own thing. But actually I have a real question for you. Do you think that conversations about space and science can create a
more profound sense of curiosity exploration? And perhaps these things lead to people looking at the world in ways that have nothing to do with the comment or any of these things, and recognize that the world is a lot bigger than perhaps that they saw it before.
Exactly precisely, like I like, this conversation is reminding me of a book that me and the kids took out from the library a number of months back, and it was this, It was a story told by our rock that Neil Armstrong brought back from the Moon, and it
was just like, yep, here's my life story. I started off this way, and oh yeah, how I think it started off as on Earth and then there was a collision and whatever caused the moon like just kind of like giving the millions of years of history and just what went into creating the Moon and how this rock was on the face of the Moon for millennia and it hadn't even like looked back at the Earth since humans, you know, first came about on the Earth, that it
wasn't even aware that people were down here. And it was just so it was so neat to, especially for my kids, just to be able to open up their minds to this idea that the world is so the galaxy, the universe, the cosmos are so big, and it's just and especially because we're in a you know, a rural setting here, just to shake them free from any idea that what we see right here is basically all that there is. It is so much bigger and it's such a deep, wonderful place to explore and just to incite
curiosity and desire to know more. Absolutely, like, more of that information we have, the more we can share, the more we can wonder, and the more the more we wonder, the more we can dig in.
You know, I think that that's something that we all can be reminded sometimes, because it's easy to get wrapped up and think that, you know, the little small bubble you live in is the world, and obviously it isn't. There's a whole big world right here on this rock. But really, when it comes down to it, the rock we live on is really quite small and infitesimal compared to this vast universe that really, as Aaron pointed out, this eighty thousand year trek of a comment is still
just a very small portion of that universe. And aj I was wondering, I know that some people they tie themselves into a bubble of you know, studying religious texts. Do you think that their exposure to wonders of the universe, which this, in my opinion, even though it is a dirty snowball, is a wonder. It's a pretty cool thing. And so do you think that this wonder of a snowball dirty snowball that we're talking about here. Do you think that, uh, this is something that people will look
at and perhaps reconsider those religious texts. Do you think so?
I think they could, you know, like what Aaron said earlier about how we see the world and how we use science, and that that is exactly what we should be doing. We should be looking more so at at other books, not just the one book, because place is just so fascinating. So I'll never understand why people spend their lives studying scripture and grasping stars to make sense of these supernatural claims when they could just look up at the sky making effort to understand was actually truly
going on. After there's no heaven, there's no sky, Daddy, there's no supernatural involved. But I suppose that you know, the vastness of the cosmos can sometimes feel intimidating because it is just so complex and a lot of people have a hard time understanding it.
I think you're right. And one of the things that I wanted to reach out to Aaron on is that do you do you think that there's enough focus on scientific literacy and you know, and not just in astronomy, but in sciences in general. Do you think our society tends to gloss over that, or do you think that we could benefit from a greater focus on I think we.
Could definitely benefit from from a focus on science. I think we could really benefit from a focus on understanding that humans are bias machines. We do not see the world the way it really is. And all you have to do to prove that is go do a search for.
Oh, what is it?
Of course, every time I want to say it illusions, optical illusions, Go do a search on the never optical illusions or audio illusions, and you'll see that our brain does not process the world in a truthful, accurate way. And so when people if people understood that we are just emotional, irrational creatures, and that the purpose of science isn't too you know, disproved, isn't to you know, tell
you that your religion is a lie. The purpose of science is to help us see the world in an accurate way, and then whatever the consequences of that is, let those consequences be. But science is there to show us the way the work, the way the world really is, and help us understand how things really work. Because when we understand how things really work, then we can control them, we can understand them, we can move forward, we could take advantage of them.
And yeah, well, and I was just wondering. I know that I'm going to go ahead and get all my family and friends together that are prepared for the comment. We're going to have a nice, big prayer meeting. Okay, No, maybe we're not. But you know, this is definitely one of those things that I think, and I think you're right, Aaron. I think that it's not our goal necessarily, or it's not the goal at all for science. Science is not
about a God claim. But I do think that scientific literacy does help allow certain bad beliefs to be perpetuated. And I think that when people learn things and they understand that somebody's not just pulling up a number of eighty thousand years out of their rectum and saying this is the official science, and they understand the science behind it, sometimes that causes people to reconsider their views now, and.
It can be read it can be threatening for science to reveal things about the universe that contradict our deeply held beliefs, and that's a really tough spot.
To be in. Yep.
And you know, for me, I was raised in a very conservative sect that almost everybody was younger Earth, but I wasn't. Well, my dad had a geology background, so he thought the idea of a young Earth was just absolutely stupid. But he also you know, so I learned a lot of things, like the global flood wasn't true, and that the Earth wasn't six thousand years old, but it is for some people. It's almost like it's a personal offense if you even imply that this could be
the case. And well, far be it for me to offend anybody. I would never do that. Okay, once again, but I was wondering, Stephen, did you have anything you wanted to wrap up with?
Like, the more we the more we know, the more we understand, the greater, the more the doors that will be opened up to us, the better we can understand our place in the world, and maybe hope we can save it from ourselves.
Yeah, and that I think you might have set a really high bar there, but yeah, we can hope for that. Now, any anything you want to close with?
Yeah, I wanted to add to what Aaron said about science. Literacy, science communication is inquitely important for society to grow and make progress, you know, like when I was rebeating this article, realize how little I know about astrophysics. But that is exactly what I love having experts explain it to me in simple terms, and you know that I can understand,
like I love listening to the gas tison. And there's another one saving host and fielder I think is her name, and they make learning about astronomy and physics fun and engaging. And there are so many other scientists sharing about whatever field, biology, genetics, archaeology. They have YouTube channels, podcast audio books, and they all open the conversation to the average person and invite them
to talk about whatever topic they enjoy. You know, you never know what might pipe your interest in, and you know, a completely new career in the scientific field. And it's one of the greatest benefits that we have in the age of information. There is easy and open and often free access to knowledge that everyone should be taken advantage of.
Well, this is a little awkward because I thought they scheduled you on the program tonight, Aja because of your technical astrophysics and expertise. So this is very unsettling. So I had to talk to somebody about that. But Aaron, is there anything you wanted to close with, Yeah.
We are emotional creatures. We're irrationally emotional creatures, and so science can sometimes get in its own way in trying to communicate the amazing universe that we live in. And so it's really important that when we focus when we tell scientific stories, that we tell stories and that can kind of seem disingenious or contradictory to science. But the best science communicators tell stories about the science and they help you feel the feel the importance of the science
and why it's there. And so remember, tell a story, Tell a good story that has basis in scientific fact and truth.
I think that's a good way to look at things because if you talk over your audience, no one's going to hear you. And with that type of approach of telling stories, you get people interested in engaged and wanting to learn more. And with that type of attitude, people will put the effort in to learn. Now, I will say though that I know that we have episodes is one of everybody know. Drop on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday at six pm Central Time,