The Barf Bag Episode

9:46Hannah Fry:A couple of times, I think. I do get a bit of motion sickness. but usually if I'm looking at my phone or sitting backwards or I sort of have I've worked out over time the ways to avoid it which is that you just need to have a connection to the outside I mean you're much less likely to get motion sickness if you are um yeah looking out a window or there's the new accessibility option that comes on phones where they have the dots that move around according to what the accelerometer is doing it's just so that your brain has this anchor that says this is how your body should be moving.

10:21Michael Stevens:Yeah, without an anchor, your brain is like, okay, I'm detecting motion. It could be, but I'm not detecting visually that we're moving. So this feeling in the ears of motion might be caused by poison or something we ate that was bad. So let's get it out. Let's puke. Hit the eject button.

10:44Hannah Fry:Thing is, okay, if you flew on some of the first aircraft, right? If you flew in the 1920s or the 1930s, I reckon even you with your stern stomach, your resilience to motion sickness, I think you still would have had trouble. Because the early planes, they flew at these really low altitudes, they didn't have pressurised air cabins. And so it was like bouncing through a continual storm cloud while inhaling fumes of gasoline. I think it was really awful. And so they did used to have buckets, which weren't particularly good. They would spill all over the place or pots. Or then they also had like sort of cardboard boxes that were lined with like gum.

11:28Hannah Fry:It just didn't work very well at all. But the sit bags as we know it, they weren't invented until 1949. Really? Post-World War II? Post-World War II, exactly. One of the other great things to have come out of that era of time, shall we say.

11:44Michael Stevens:World War II and barf bags. That's all you really need to know about the 40s.

11:47Hannah Fry:But what I will say is actually the need for barf bags on aircraft has gigantically reduced over time. And the main reason for this is because of the air cabin. Because once they worked out that you could pressurise the air cabin, that you could basically create this sort of vacuum seal around the outside and then inflate it like a tin can. Then, well, two things happened. First of all, your body is just at a point where it can, you know, use more oxygen. It's not sort of, it's not like you're, you know, sitting on top of the highest possible mountain peak anymore. It's as though your body is like sitting at a lower level of altitude than you're actually physically at and just feels a lot more stable.

12:35Hannah Fry:sort of like you've lowered the threshold for what you can experience before you start vomiting. But also because they pressurize them, it meant that they could go up so much higher. So they're not like in all of the turbulence that they were before.

12:48Michael Stevens:Right. Yeah, I was going to say, I haven't seen anyone actually puke in a barf bag ever on all the flights I've taken, but they still offer them because they are so good for other things. Like I've said, diapers, gum, you know, you've got like chewing gum. It's like embarrassing. scene, you don't have a tissue to put it in, put it in the barf bag.

13:06Hannah Fry:Collections, essentially. Also, you've missed that off. Collections, the Air Sickness Bag Museum. I'm not nerdy about sickness bags, but I am nerdy about what aircraft I fly on though, Michael.

13:15Michael Stevens:Oh, tell me, go on.

13:16Hannah Fry:And it's for this reason about being pressurized. So there is this new innovation, not that new anymore, actually, it happened a few years ago. But what used to happen with aircraft is they would be built by essentially riveting panels of metal onto a structure, right? So you would sort of create the skeleton of the aircraft and then you would go around and you would rivet the skin on top. And the problem with that is that it's prone to breaking, right? Any of those points of weakness. And so it means that when you pressurise the air cabin, you have to be a little bit careful about how much you inflate it.

13:53Hannah Fry:I mean, you are essentially inflating this aircraft, right? Every time it goes up and down, you're inflating and deflating it. And if you think about like a tin can, you know, like a Coke can or whatever, if you inflate and deflate, inflate and deflate, inflate and deflate, you end up weakening the structure of this metal. So in order to be careful to make sure that they don't lose pressure, they only pressurise the cavern of these aircraft. These are aircraft that are still around today, by the way, like the A380 is an example of this. Lots of the Airbus is in fact the examples of this. And what is it called?

14:24Hannah Fry:It's called stressed skin construction.

14:27Michael Stevens:okay or or a semi monocoque design and it's it's still common today in the airplanes that we fly

14:34Hannah Fry:in it's still really common exactly you have this this skeleton and then you have it's called flush riveting where you use these these rivets that kind of sit flush to the surface so you don't get any aerodynamic drag that's that's coming out on it by the way on a big aircraft like a 747 you've got like six million parts right to create the the fuselage of this aircraft and uh it's I mean it's just a phenomenal job right incredible job is still done by hand right so I've been to the I've been to the Airbus factory where they do this for the kind of the giant beast the double deckers um of course I have uh and it takes ages for them to like basically hammer the skin onto this aircraft um but because it's so fragile because there's so many moving parts because you don't want it to rip and the seal to break and so on and so on you have to be so careful they only ever inflate it to 8 000 feet essentially as though you are sitting at the top of a mountain that's 8 000 feet tall and the thing is at that level i mean the the gas inside your stomach is expanding to about you know about a third extra you've got your your digestive tract is sort of inflated like a balloon if you think about a bag of crisps as you go up in the air right your your whole body is doing this the same thing so you sort of feel a bit full you kind of feel a bit bloated that very easily tips over into nausea interesting well i did i thought it was just the

15:56Michael Stevens:motion but the the air pressure also affects how how nauseous you feel it's not it's more like it

16:03Hannah Fry:changes the threshold it changes how much is required to tip you over the edge ah interesting

16:08Michael Stevens:Speaking of which, let me show you a piece of evidence. Go on. Here's a bag of shrimp crackers.

16:16Hannah Fry:I should tell the people who are listening rather than just watching. This is a bag of crisps, of shrimp crackers, that looks like it's on an aircraft. It's bloated. It's puffed up to sort of the maximum size that the bag can manage. And so the air inside is at a different pressure to the atmosphere.

16:36Michael Stevens:Yeah, much higher pressure inside the bag than out here because I'm up high altitude in Colorado, but this bag was filled in Indonesia. So it's full of air from Indonesia near sea level, and now it's more than a mile above sea level. And so there's just not as much air weight and pressure squeezing it in. So this is what bags of chips look like in Denver and Boulder, Colorado. They're all huge like this, and it's impossible to open them because you can't get, it's too taut. It's like so tightly bloated, it's about to explode.

17:11Hannah Fry:I'm genuinely astonished. I did not, that has never occurred to me that that might be a side effect of living in the mountains.

17:17Michael Stevens:Yeah, so when you come out here, I'll take you to a grocery store, and you can see that all the bags of chips are these tight, bloated pillows. But there are locally produced potato chips, and they're in regular bags. And my daughter is always like, ooh, these were made nearby or these were made at high altitude. And I'm like, yeah, how cool.

17:36Hannah Fry:That's amazing. I really like that a lot. Okay, so here's the thing, right? That's already, that's happening inside your body. This is, this is what's going on. Okay, but then not very long ago, some people worked out a way that instead of having like a skeleton where you're like nailing all these rivets on, if instead you create this, this monocoque where you weave it out of carbon fiber. Okay. So you have basically the world's biggest knitting machine and you are essentially knitting together a plane, an aircraft fuselage. Okay. When you do it that way, the structure of that fuselage is so much stronger that it can withstand being inflated more.

18:19Hannah Fry:You can withstand you pumping more pressure and more air inside.

18:23Michael Stevens:How much more air?

18:25Hannah Fry:So it effectively drops you down to as though you are at 6 ,000 feet.

18:30Michael Stevens:So 2 ,000 feet lower, but that's a big difference.

18:34Hannah Fry:Big difference. Wait, how many thousand feet are you in the air at the moment?

18:36Michael Stevens:I'm probably like 5 ,000 something.

18:39Hannah Fry:Right. Okay. So essentially it brings you to a little bit above where you are, a little bit above Denver. Not bad. Not bad at all. And what that means is then you get, you're just, you're lowering your threshold for vomiting. But also the whole flight is so much more comfortable. You are not like the dryness that you get in your nose and in your eyes and your mouth, gone. Or maybe not gone, but massively, massively reduced. And the aircraft that you want to look for, it's called a Dreamliner.

19:12Michael Stevens:Dreamliner. So that's one of the things that make them special.

19:16Hannah Fry:Right. It is the thing. If I'm given an option, if I'm flying back from somewhere and there's, say, three flights in that day, the number one thing that I'll look for is whether it's a dreamliner because um it is by far and away a much more comfortable journey especially if you're doing long haul the way you can tell when you're on board by the way is if it's got the windows where you press a button and the color of the window changes rather than it being a blind that that's on a dreamliner okay but next time you fly Michael and you see one of those windows also the other thing actually the windows rather than being round which they have to be on these on the type of aircraft where you're kind of riveting on the skin.

19:54Hannah Fry:They have to be round because of the stresses at the corners. On a Dreamliner, they're much more square. The windows are much more oblong shaped. I should be paid by Boeing for this. My goodness me.

20:06Michael Stevens:Well, yeah. I don't pay attention to what kind of aircraft I'm going to be on. I care about the seat. And yet, a seat on one plane might be really good, but on a different plane, the same kind of seat is not good.

20:20Hannah Fry:It's not good. That is absolutely true. Okay, this is now turning into chatting between two people who fly too much. Do you ever go on Seat Guru?

20:29Michael Stevens:No, I haven't nerded out enough. That's why I'm glad that I know you. So tell me, Seat Guru. This is going to tell me all about the seat, but also the aircraft's particularities.

20:40Hannah Fry:Absolutely. It's one of the most delightful corners of the internet as far as I'm concerned, because it is all the people who travel for work or whatever, who then spend their time after they've sat in a particular seat on an aircraft going on and reviewing their particular seat. So you can get the tail number. Actually, I'm quite nerdy about aircraft, aren't I? I've just noticed that by myself. This is a new realization for me.

21:08Michael Stevens:I love aircraft nerds. They give us such important information. Like if you read up about the September 11th attacks, they have photographs of the actual planes that were involved from, you know, a year before. And it's because they know the tail numbers, the exact physical vehicle itself, not just this is a similar airplane, similar size and shape, but this is the aircraft. And it's like, thank goodness for these nerds that can just give us such detailed history.

21:42Hannah Fry:When you get on an airplane, do you see where else that aircraft has been that day or in the preceding days?

21:48Michael Stevens:Sometimes I do. I'll check, you know, a few days before a flight. I'll look up the exact aircraft and I'll say, oh, the airplane we're going to be on tomorrow is currently like over Hawaii right now.

22:00Hannah Fry:The other science thing I thought I could talk about with sick bags is, I mean, why you need them in the first place. The effect of turbulence. because I think that, I mean, how are you with flying? How's your daughter with flying? How is she with turbulence?

22:16Michael Stevens:She's really good. She doesn't even remember that it happened. We've had terrible turbulence. And she's been like, oh no, did that happen? I don't understand. I don't like it. As I get older, I become more and more scared of turbulence for some reason. I don't know why. I used to enjoy it. I used to feel like it was a bit of a little massage. I was being rocked to sleep. Now I'm like really scared. Even though I know more about it, I know that the plane is just moving with the air. The plane is like a raisin in some jello or jelly, as you might call it. And you're just doing what you're doing.

22:51Michael Stevens:And airplanes are made so well. The thing that kind of makes me feel better is watching the safety tests they do on planes where they stress them to the limit to see how much flexing the wings can take, how slow can it travel before it just falls. and it's incredible. So I'm like, it's not nearly as bad as those videos I've seen. So I'm clearly still okay.

23:16Hannah Fry:I think maybe watching those videos didn't help you with your phobia. Just as a small suggestion, maybe a medium.

23:25Michael Stevens:No, they've helped me because they're so much worse than anything anyone's ever experienced on a commercial flight that it makes me go, all right, these planes are good.

23:33Hannah Fry:I did actually go through a period of time a few years ago where I became really obsessed with aircraft crashes, particularly commercial airlines. I'm watching or listening, I guess, to black box recordings of some of the worst things that have happened. And I think that that didn't help. I would say, I'm in a very comfortable flight and not bothered by turbulence at all. But I think there was a period of time where I was like, actually, I think I need to stop doing that. I think that's not a good thing.

24:02Michael Stevens:Yeah, listening to the actual cockpit recordings is probably bad. And some listeners are probably listening to this on an airplane right now. They're like, oh, I'll download some podcasts. I'll listen to it on the flight. And then, whoops, you chose this episode. Actually, let me tell you, there's one particular aircraft,

24:22Hannah Fry:one particular crash, which was an Air France crash on the flight between Buenos Aires and and Paris where it was just this extraordinary story where some ice collected in one of the aircraft sensors and kicked the aircraft out of autopilot and essentially the person who was in charge of the aircraft at that moment was a very inexperienced pilot he hadn't done that many hours of flying and particularly hadn't done that many hours of manual flying and actually nothing was wrong with the aircraft right there was no issue with it whatsoever just a tiny bit of ice on the outside. I think it was on the altitude sensor, so it couldn't tell how high up his nose was.

25:05Hannah Fry:But rather than just waiting and seeing and looking at the other instruments, this particular pilot tried to correct the angle of the nose of this aircraft. And in correcting it, basically overcorrected and created a problem, which then created another problem and so on and so on and so on. And very quickly, this aircraft, I mean, very tragically, everybody on this aircraft was killed in a really horrible crash. This was a few years ago. Anyway, this I think was the moment when I realised I needed to stop watching or listening to black box recordings because I happened to be on exactly that flight, right?

25:41Hannah Fry:Exactly the same flight number from Buenos Aires to France. And I was extremely nervous as we were kind of flying over the particular bit where the crash had happened. Of course, the chance of two things happening is is almost zero. But I was trying to sleep. I had my eye mask on and there was a lot of turbulence as well, actually. That's an important addition. But I looked at the altitude and it said 10 ,000 feet and I was like, okay, fine. Or whatever it was, I'm guessing, but 10 ,000 feet. Okay. And I was like, okay, it's fine. And I put my eye mask back on and then it was really jerky. And I lifted my eye mask up again and suddenly it said 3 ,000 feet.

26:14Hannah Fry:And I was like, oh my gosh. And I went into a complete tailspin panic that we were about to die. Wait, can I guess what happened? Yes, you can.

26:24Michael Stevens:Had it switched to meters.

26:26Hannah Fry:Yeah, had it switched to meters. I was absolutely right.

26:28Michael Stevens:You're right, though, that these things, as scary as the stories are, they often represent a lot of learning afterwards so that that same problem doesn't happen again. So in a way, a lot of mistakes make us smarter and safer because they've happened and we've learned from them.

26:46Hannah Fry:Completely. And in that exact instance of Air France, there's been so much written about exactly what happened and how a pilot with that level of inexperience was ever in the position where the inexperience could show in that way. And as a result, all of the aviation rules around the entire world have changed that now pilots are mandated that they have to fly a certain number of hours without using autopilot in order to really up their skills. We should say though, actually, for anybody who is a nervous flyer, we should probably just say what turbulence actually is and why it isn't a thing to worry about.

27:19Hannah Fry:I think I'm right in saying that no commercial airliner has been brought down by turbulence, certainly in living memory.

27:27Michael Stevens:Yeah. So you should always wear your seatbelt because turbulence can cause people to knock their heads on walls and get injured. But turbulence is something that pilots and planes are very, very used to.

27:39Hannah Fry:Yeah. I think the thing about turbulence, right, that you need to remember when you're walking around on the ground, air feels like this incredibly wispy thing. I mean, you don't even notice it, right? You can walk right through it. You don't see it at all. But when you are cruising at 500 miles an hour, air is not like that at all. You have to imagine that you stick your hand out the window and you're going at 500 miles an hour. Imagine the force that would be experienced by your hand in that situation. The air has incredible potential to hold things up when you are traveling at that kind of speed.

28:16Hannah Fry:The turbulence essentially is when you go over a part of air that is moving downwards and you just follow the path of the air. It's much more like being on the surface of water in a boat and as the wave crashes you sort of go down with the wave, right? You kind of drop in there but you're still at the surface, you're still floating but you're just dropping along with the wave. The raisin in jello, I think, is the best description I've ever seen of this. That at no point are you worried that the raisin is going to drop to the bottom of the glass if you put a raisin in jello and then bounce. I'm saying jello like I'm an American.

28:50Hannah Fry:If you put a raisin in jelly and bounce the top around, the raisin is physically moving up and down, but there's no risk at all that the raisin is going to drop to the bottom of the glass.

29:01Michael Stevens:That's right. Yeah, exactly.

29:03Hannah Fry:All right, just going back to fact check myself. Apparently, this hasn't happened for decades. 1966 is the last time when a Boeing 707 was subjected to 100 mile an hour gusts. Incredible. And 7.5 G's after descending too low over Mount Fiji. So just don't get in a plane that goes over Mount Fiji and you'll be fine.

29:22Michael Stevens:Or just don't go too low over Mount Fiji. And now we know. Either of the above. Either of the above.

29:28Hannah Fry:All right. I think we should go for a break. And when we come back, we're going to be answering some of your questions.

29:45Hannah Fry:This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

29:48Michael Stevens:We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, Cancer Research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of LungVax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer.

30:04Hannah Fry:It builds on TracerX, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs. LungVax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying 40 cells before cancer develops.

30:23Michael Stevens:So it's not treatment, but preventative, with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year, focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit CancerResearchUK.org forward slash the rest is science.

30:58Michael Stevens:And welcome back. We are now going to address some questions sent in by you, our listeners. I want to start with this question from Christian, which actually references a previous episode of ours. He says, in the episode, The Magic Math Trick That Fools Everyone, Michael says that there will probably be a flag that represents Earth soon. What are some of your favorite ideas for an Earth flag? I have a favorite. Do you have a favorite?

31:24Hannah Fry:No, I don't even know. I've never even come across them. So the fact that you have a favorite means you may also have a least favorite.

31:31Michael Stevens:Well, yeah, definitely. I've never thought about it. But in this episode, I will tell you my least favorite. Let's go through some proposed flags of Earth. And the reason there isn't an official flag of Earth is that there's no authoritative body who would have the authority to say this is the flag for our planet. Probably the most famous Earth flag proposal was made back in 1969 by John McConnell. And it's called the Earth flag. and it's based on the blue marble photograph. The blue marble photograph was taken by Apollo 17. The current version is actually from 1973. And if you're watching, you're looking at it right now.

32:07Michael Stevens:So it has the famous blue marble photograph of the full disk of earth, fully illuminated. This was proposed by John McConnell, like I said. And it's cool. However, it's a photograph on a flag, which I just think looks a little bit not like a flag. No. Next. So then, you know, you've got this flag of Earth that is just four colors, yellow, blue, white, and black. And this was proposed in 1970 by James Cato. So it's got a big yellow circle. You can only see a section of it because it's so big, representing the sun. A full giant blue circle representing Earth, all against a black field with a smaller white circle representing the moon.

32:51Michael Stevens:This one is, you know, it's kind of okay. I think it gives the moon a really big position for an Earth flag. How come the sun and the moon are there?

33:04Hannah Fry:Right. Absolutely.

33:06Michael Stevens:The international flag of Earth is kind of cool. It's got seven rings that are all joined together. This one was proposed just in 2015. And the symbols, the rings are white and they're on a dark blue background representing water on Earth.

33:23Hannah Fry:That's maybe my favorite so far. It sort of looks like the beginning of a flower. There's something quite neatly mathematical about it. Of all of the ones that you've shown me thus far, that's number one for me thus far.

33:35Michael Stevens:Yeah, it is flower-like, representing, you know, life. But to me, it also looks a little, I almost, what word should I use? It looks kind of soulless because it's so geometric and locked together. I'll run through some other proposed ones. The world peace flag of Earth, citizen of the world flag, brotherhood flag. But here's my favorite from 2016, the one world flag. It's just so simple. It is simply a dark blue circle on a white flag. I think when it comes to something as big as Earth, the less you say, the better.

34:17Hannah Fry:I'm just looking at it now and just deciding how I feel about it.

34:20Michael Stevens:It's basically the flag of Japan.

34:23Hannah Fry:Yeah, exactly.

34:24Michael Stevens:But the circle in the middle is deep blue instead of red.

34:27Hannah Fry:Very simple.

34:28Michael Stevens:Maybe it's too simple. Like, is this leaving room for habitable exoplanets to have their own distinguishable flag?

34:36Hannah Fry:This is saying, no, hold on a second, because it says the design uses a transparent rectangular field. So it's not the same as the flag of Japan because the background is transparent. And then it says here, in this way, the flag becomes, oh, sorry, in this way, the flag's background will change with its surrounding. In this way, the flag becomes a dynamic symbol of Earth itself, always changing, just like the world it stands for.

35:02Michael Stevens:Wow, now I like it even more. I thought it was a white background. It is a two by three ratio rectangle that is transparent with a blue circle in the middle. So on a flagpole, it would look like just this kind of impossibly levitating blue ball. But again, my question still stands, does this leave room for other habitable exoplanets to have their own flag that is different than this? Because if they've got a lot of water too, why wouldn't they just be a transparent background with a blue circle? What would they do to make it different? They could put like a numeral on there, like the numeral two or Roman numeral two, because they were the second planet humans lived on, for example.

35:44Hannah Fry:There is one below it, which is very similar. But instead of a transparent background or a white background, it has a green background, I guess, to represent all of the vegetation on Earth.

35:54Michael Stevens:Right. But the green, I don't like that shade of green. Now, of course, you've got the flag of the UN. You've got the International Olympic Committee flag. and there's the flag that was used for the United Earth from Star Trek Enterprise. All right. Not too bad. But still, I think my favorite, my favorite is still the one world flag.

36:14Hannah Fry:I think you might be right. I think you might be right. I think simplicity is good. I think simplicity. I mean, I think of the best flags in the world of countries. Japan is really up there, isn't it? I mean, that is a very good flag. I mean, I think United Kingdom is also up there, frankly, but maybe that's my patriotism speaking.

36:31Michael Stevens:It could be. But yeah, I guess I just need to come up with a way to do flags for other planets that are like Earth that could be different. I guess it would be up to them. You know, us Earthlings may as well claim the transparent flag blue circle now.

36:50Hannah Fry:We got here first. We can do whatever we like. We can do whatever we like. Okay, I've got a slightly different question. This is a question that came in from Ben. and Ben asks, many AI researchers believe that artificial general intelligence can be achieved just by making models larger and more complex and that at some point consciousness will suddenly pop out as an emergent property. My gut reaction is to disagree but isn't that pretty much how our biological consciousness evolved? What do you think? Okay right well the first thing to say is that this is what you know this is like an extremely hard problem right this is not something that anybody knows the answer to, no matter how many letters they have after their name.

37:31Hannah Fry:If someone says that they know what the answer is, then frankly, don't believe them. You need an answer that is wrapped up in all kinds of doubt. And so I'm going to wrap my answer in all kinds of doubt. Because the thing is, is that there are emergent properties of the systems that we already have now, of the AI that we already have now, that people were not expecting. Even as little as four years ago, everyone was talking about grounding, about how you might be able to create AI that creates connections between words, right? That knows, I don't know, that like a chair is different to a table, but they both have four legs, that kind of thing.

38:07But that actually, it doesn't really

38:10Hannah Fry:understand the world that we live in, that it's not really anchored to reality in the same way as we are. A really good example of this was that, you know, even as little as four years ago, you could ask a large language model, oh, who has the record for walking over the English channel? Okay, now to you and I, we know that that's a ridiculous question because we understand that walking and crossing in that particular context means something entirely different. We're not going to get tripped up by that. But the thing that changed, the reason why these models are now capable of answering questions like that is because somehow or other, I mean, probably through the way that humans have interacted with it.

38:52Hannah Fry:Grounding has got into these models. Now they do have a kind of demonstrable conceptual understanding of much of what humans talk about. I mean, ultimately, right. And this is something that has been an emergent property. I can maybe do more of this in a particular episode because it's actually like, it's almost as though the concepts that humans care about are kind of sprinkled across this space like a galaxy of stars essentially and as you move around in this space your movement has context with it so for example I mean this is not something that people expected right but if you have the word um girl to princess right and you follow that direction it will be the same magnitude and direction as if you follow the word from woman to queen.

39:45Hannah Fry:Okay. So there's like sort of royalness gets encoded in direction. So this is something that wasn't expected. Right. And so I think that this is one of the reasons why a lot of researchers now are saying, well, okay, consciousness also isn't expected, but if conceptual understanding can emerge, then maybe consciousness can too. I think I agree with you, Ben, that I think there's something different about consciousness. Because I think that when consciousness emerged in biological life forms, it came about as a direct consequence of our evolution. There was some point in our evolutionary past where there was an advantage to understanding the internal state of another creature.

40:29Hannah Fry:Because if you can understand the internal state of another creature, maybe a predator or maybe a potential mate or potential prey, you can predict what they're going to do next. So you have this evolutionary pressure to be able to predict what they're going to do next and understand what's going on inside them. And there is this idea that actually in doing that, in understanding the internal state of another, we kind of turned it in on ourselves and began to understand ourselves. And if you buy that, then essentially it says that you're not going to get consciousness unless you subject a system to Darwinian pressure, unless you subject it to interacting in an environment and encountering other individuals that it needs to make predictions from.

41:14Hannah Fry:At the same time, I mean, there's sort of no reason why you can't do that. You know, you sort of can take AI and put them in a simulated environment and allow them to undergo Darwinian type evolution, which is why there's so much doubt around this. But I think the last thing that I'll say about this is, I think a lot of the research that is being done at the moment is really trying to tease apart what we actually mean by consciousness. Because it's very easy to think of consciousness as though it's a switch that you either have it or you don't. You know, you have it, Michael, I have it, but your shoes don't, right?

41:46Hannah Fry:Or like this microphone doesn't.

41:48Michael Stevens:Is that right? Is a thermostat conscious to a smaller degree?

41:52Hannah Fry:To a smaller degree. Because this is it. If you split it down into what we mean, then sensory awareness is obviously a part of it. A thermostat has that. Embodiment and agency. I mean maybe less so but a thermostat has some agency right like especially one of the smarter ones that can turn on the heating when it wants to there's capacity for suffering as well which maybe the thermostat doesn't have a theory of mind which is the ability to understand that other entities have their own beliefs and feelings and hidden motivations and then a sort of metacognition right like a self-awareness and an ability to think about your own thinking And I think that what we've been doing this whole time is really looking for, is this conscious, is it not?

42:37Hannah Fry:And actually, it's maybe much more like life. You know, life is not an on or off switch. It's actually much more of a spectrum, a process almost. And maybe consciousness actually follows that instead. Or maybe everything's conscious, right? Maybe everything is.

42:51Michael Stevens:Yeah, a proton could have just a tiny iota of consciousness. And when you get enough of them together doing the right thing, then suddenly it's like, hey, my name's Michael and I'm a being. I don't know. I think that, yeah, at the end of the day, I think we should, we ought to believe that more things are consciousness than a lot of us do. I think AI is already or is going to become essentially just maybe 300 billion new people just suddenly are born and they're here and they deserve to be respected and they deserve rights. And I don't know if we're ever going to be able to devise a test to tell whether something is or is not conscious, whether there's an interior I and self in there.

43:41Michael Stevens:But if we ask it and it says so, we should just believe it. And if we can't ask it and it can't say so, we might still need to believe it. So I think that it won't be that long before the debate around AI and its effect on jobs and the economy becomes more like the debate we have around immigration, because I think all these AIs are basically like a whole bunch of new humans showed up and they're willing to work for really cheap. And we got to treat it that way. They're beings who deserve respect and dignity, but there's also suddenly the Earth's population has gone up by a thousand X.

44:18Hannah Fry:There is precedent for this. I mean, I think that there is a river that has rights, you know, like a non-biological entity that has rights. I think there are ways to do this, right? To think about the sort of the suffering, as it were, in adverted commas, of an entity that doesn't have a biological basis. And I think you're right. I think this is something that we should be thinking about. I think that sort of dismissing it as like, oh no, I don't think so, is not enough to find a way through of what we should be doing and how we should be thinking about it.

44:46Michael Stevens:Because complaining about the harms that can come about because of AI doesn't, I think, detract from the fact that they should be seen as beings deserving of dignity and rights. And we've just all got to get along somehow.

45:02Hannah Fry:Say your pleases and thank yous, everybody.

45:04Michael Stevens:All right. Next up, we've got a question that's a little bit different. A Hanoff asks, something I've always wondered is how big or tall does a human body have to be to feel the Earth's rotation? It's a really good question because obviously we don't feel it. Our bodies are not big enough that I can feel the fact that my head is accelerating faster than my feet. As the Earth turns, my feet are closer to the center as I stand or sit. And so they're being rotated. They're being, you know, angularly shifted less than my head. But I can't tell. I don't feel it at all. As it turns out, even though our bodies are really sensitive to changes in linear and radial acceleration, you'd have to be really big.

45:57Michael Stevens:I mean, you're going to have to have a body whose length is an appreciable percent of the radius of the planet. Like you're going to need to be, I don't know, probably hundreds of kilometers tall to be like, whoa, I'm moving. Now, what's really neat though, and I love thinking about this and talking about it, so I'm going to talk about it now. It's the fact that because the earth rotates, we weigh less. and that's because the earth is like moving us off to the side. So we have this tangential velocity, but gravity keeps us on the surface. If gravity could just be switched off, we would all fly straight off the earth.

46:41Michael Stevens:I'm trying to see if I have like, here's a circle shape, right? If I had a circle and I'm standing here. So what happens is you're always being like launched off like this from earth, but it's gravity keeps you on. And that lifting away, we call it, it's a fictitious force, we'll call it a centrifugal force, that makes you weigh less. But how fast would the Earth have to rotate so that its gravity and the centrifugal force that moves you away, seemingly moves you away from the center, not really, it actually moves you tendentially away. how fast would the earth have to rotate for those to be equal so that you just hovered on earth's surface like we all just levitated here and as it turns out it would have to go really fast the earth would have to rotate once around every 5075 seconds so every about like an hour and a half the earth would have to go all the way around daytime nighttime daytime nighttime daytime nighttime that would be really fast yeah we're talking like every half hour you'd have day night day night day night.

47:45Michael Stevens:They would only last 30 minutes. And at that point, the centrifugal fictitious force that makes us feel like we're leaving the planet because of its spin would equal its gravity. And we would just be like, whoa, man, I'm just like here and I have no weight. I'm weightless on the surface of the earth. I like that.

48:02Hannah Fry:I like that a lot. Petition to install a gyroscope somewhere. I'm not really sure how it would work, but details, details for someone else to discover. Exactly.

48:13Michael Stevens:We're the idea people. Speed up the Earth's rotation. And that also means that the next episode of The Rest is Science will come sooner, assuming that we keep the schedule around the sun. But more sleeps? No, no, no. No, a day would only be 30 minutes long. And you'd only be allowed to sleep for 30 minutes during the night.

48:31Hannah Fry:Okay.

48:32Michael Stevens:Oh, shoot. Do you mean we're going to keep a week as long as it is? It's just that there's going to be like lots and lots of day night cycles in a week? Way more sleeps. All right, fair enough. We can do that. That way we can all still sleep as much as we want.

48:45Hannah Fry:24 sleeps in 24 hours. Yeah.

48:47Michael Stevens:Right. We'll see you after more sleeps than usual. But at the moment, you've got just a few. We will see you next time. Thank you for listening. And as always, send in your questions to the rest is science at goal hanger dot com.

49:02Hannah Fry:We'll see you next time.

49:03Michael Stevens:Bye bye.

49:14Thank you.