Just How Screwed Are We If Thwaites Glacier Collapses? | Lightning Round

this video is supported by brilliant wanna hear something crazy it's the last day of january and this is actually the first video i've recorded in 2022. yeah i went on a shooting spree in early december so that i could get some time off for the holidays but also so that i could sort of upgrade my studio around here i've got some new things going on new camera i've got a new little switcher over here and a few other things that there's no way you care about at all and if i've done my job then there's no way you can tell that i did any of it i've also got some new production equipment to shoot better sketches which i had one last week and you guys gave me a lot of great feedback on that which i appreciate i also feel like i should just speak to the elephant in the room here which is i've got this little dot on the side of my face long-term viewers of the channel know that from time to time i've got to do some treatments on my face for pre-cancerous sun damage spots and this is one of them there's another one over here on the side a little skin rashy that you probably can't see because i'm from the side but anyway in case you're wondering why somebody put out a cigarette on my face that would be why point is this is the official start of 2022 for me and i've got a lot of exciting things in the pipeline but first i'm going to kick things off with a little lightning round video featuring questions from patreon as always if you want to see a deep dive video on any of these topics just let me know in the comments and that could totally be a thing either way let's do this [Music] john regal asked wouldn't life be objectively better if we started daylight savings in march and never fell back in the fall dude yes i am i'm completely on board with you on this daylight savings time is just one of those things we started doing like a hundred years ago and it made sense then but not so much now like school starting at seven a.m like why it was originally meant as a way to save on fuel and energy costs during the war years in the early 20th century the idea being that if we push time back so the sun would be out later in the day uh people wouldn't need to use as much to power their lights and heat their homes but this whole switching back and forth thing it's actually kind of dangerous yeah it messes with people's sleep cycles and this is kind of a crazy fact but apparently heart attacks go up 24 in the weeks following the switches in the spring um it actually goes up and falls well but not nearly as much now i'm not a morning person but don't you think it's kind of crazy that just changing your sleep pattern by one hour is enough to kill some people but if you're more of a money guy financial markets usually take a hit in the week after a switch too so some people have proposed getting rid of daylight savings time but as john points out there's also a movement to make it permanent like it's january when i record this so basically we just wouldn't spring forward in march there's a lot of good reasons for this first of all just going back to the whole energy savings thing i mean the fact of the matter is more people are awake to take advantage of that extra hour of sun in the evenings and in the mornings and it would make the evening rush hour less fatal because people wouldn't be driving home in the dark a study by rutgers said we could save 343 lives a year crime would go down because more crimes are committed in the dark of night than in the dark of morning and we just give an extra hour of recreation which is beneficial not for physical health just alone but for mental health as well so yeah i'm totally on board of course it's easy for me to say that because i'm kind of a night owl morning people might disagree what i mean morning people james younger dds asked how do we actually know the observable universe is expanding at its edges um okay so that was just a small part of his overall question but to save time i'm just gonna flash up on screen now so you guys can pause the video and read the rest of it here here you go so there's a lot to unpack here and not a lot of time talk about it in this one particular video so let me just speak to this in terms of how i understand it and we'll see how this goes so dr james mentions red shifting in his question that of course is the phenomenon where light that's traveling away from us shifts red on the light spectrum and light coming toward us shifts blue sometimes called negative redshift and we've learned from looking at thousands of galaxies over the years that the further they are away from us the more they are red-shifted so the further away they are the faster they're moving away from us by the way we know this because of a supernova called a type 1a supernova that explode in predictable ways and produce light with specific wavelengths so that we can you know kind of use that as a baseline when we you know find one of these galaxies um depending on how red shifted that supernova light is we know how fast the galaxy is moving away from us so as we go deeper and deeper into the universe that light red shifts so far that it slides into the infrared spectrum which is why the web space telescope is designed primarily for infrared and so yeah the the best explanation that we have as for why more distant galaxies are traveling away from us faster than the closer ones are is that space itself is expanding everywhere in all directions you can imagine two pieces next to each other on a checkerboard if the size of the square's double the pieces right next to each other would only move a little bit where the pieces on the other side of the board moved really far away because all the squares between got bigger and it's thought that past a certain point the galaxies are actually moving away from us faster than the speed of light relatively speaking they aren't moving through space faster than light but the expansion of the space in between is pushing them away from our position faster than light meaning their light will never reach us and we will never know they were there now the question mentioned the possibility that maybe eventually we might see this red light shift back into blue meaning it was moving back towards us that sounds a lot like the big crunch the idea that the universe would eventually collapse down on itself due to gravity but the mass seems to show that the universe doesn't have enough gravity or enough mass to produce the gravity um to pull it back from where it's already going in other words it's already expanded past the point where the mass in the universe and the gravity from it could possibly pull it back together but maybe his web and some other really big telescopes come online we'll get a better idea of exactly what's going on out there at the edges of the universe fishtail asked i was talking to an associate who's run a couple of unsuccessful bids for lieutenant governor on an independent ticket he told me that the 14th amendment protects our privacy the 14th amendment prevents the government from making laws that reduce our liberties i honestly don't know if there's a written definition or set of statutes that define privacy as a liberty regardless of whether privacy should or should not be a liberty is it currently defined as one uh this is way outside my expertise this is like hiring a plumber to ask him about 18th century french poetry no offense to the plumbers out there that are also jacques fans sorry larry but based on very limited research on my part uh just for this video it looks like privacy is not mentioned specifically in the constitution but the 14th amendment does have a clause that's known as the privacy clause that's been used in cases involving privacy the full text of the 14th amendment contains five sections the privacy clause is in the first section and it reads no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the united states nor shall any state deprive any person of life liberty or property without due process of law so the privacy clause of the 14th amendment has been used to make judgments in the supreme court relating to things like whether you can teach your children foreign languages whether married couples can use contraception whether it was legal to view pornography in your own home whether you have the right to refuse life-saving treatments or whether you have the right to engage in homosexual activity and if i may opine for just a moment you know we hear a lot these days about how our freedoms are being taken away and whatnot but i think it's important to have the perspective that at different times in different parts of the united states you could be arrested for doing any of these things yes you could be arrested for being gay in the united states until 2003. 2003 justin timberlake had the number one song when this supreme court ruling was made so yeah this class has been used in many ways for wide-ranging applications but the one you're probably thinking of is privacy in the age of the internet and that's still something that's being worked out from what i can tell there was a landmark decision in 2018 where a guy was arrested after police tracked his location info from his phone without obtaining a warrant this was ultimately ruled unconstitutional in carpenter vus of course law enforcement agencies have been getting around this by just simply buying your data from data brokers the way marketing companies do because in the age of the internet and social media we are the product and the customer is whoever has the money to buy it even the government i know there are stricter rules on the books in europe whereas china has basically become a surveillance state at this point so which direction we wind up going i guess we'll see but like i said i'm i'm not an expert in this and by the way you may be hearing about the 14th amendment quite a bit these days because it was actually written right after the civil war and one of the sections in it section 3 specifically has a provision saying that any elected member of congress that participated in rebellion against the union could not hold office anymore and so some people are now using that against some of the congress people that were involved and supported the riots that took place on january 6 last year so it probably won't go anywhere but that's a thing john regal also asked our eyes evolved to be sensitive to a narrow band of light we call the optical band because that represents the sun's peak output with the drastically different looking cosmos and other wavelengths what societal implications could you imagine if the sun was 10 more massive or 10 less massive uh okay so this is a super interesting question but it's also kind of impossible to answer without knowing how exactly we would experience those things i actually did a video a while back that explored how things would look if we could see all the different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum you can go check that out if you want but the one to me that seems the most interesting and has the most interesting possibilities would be if we could see infrared light because then we could see heat signatures coming off of each other so you would be able to just see at a glance if somebody had a fever or was lying or embarrassed it's like the way we blush like it's a it's a subtle thing now right but if we could see an infrared it would be glaring and obvious and i feel like as a society like it would it would change a lot of things like would we all be equipped with a kind of a lie detector like would lying and deception be basically impossible or would we evolve to be able to control our body temperature to counter that like what if we evolved to be able to like send signals to each other by rushing blood to the surface of our skin and patterns and send messages that way like we're human cuttlefish or something but to your point about belief systems yeah i mean i imagine that constellations in the sky would have totally different names and and shapes because we're seeing other stuff that we can't see now obviously that would have affected at least you know ancient religions now it's an interesting question like i've always wondered what kind of religious beliefs might have come out if the earth had rings you know because depending on where you are on the earth you would experience those rings very differently like the further north and south you go the more they become just like an arc across the horizon but if you're living near the equator it would just be like a line that sort of splits the sky there would be calendar days that relate to when the sun crosses the rings or reflects off the rings in a certain way there may be long periods of darkness or at least you know reduced light when the sun goes behind the rings this might cause different seasons it's i don't know it's fun to think about brian beswick asked did mit discover the physical dividing line between the quantum and classical physics so brian pointed me to an article from mit dated january 5th titled physicists watch as ultra cold atoms form a crystal of quantum tornadoes i'm going to repeat that slowly physicists watch as ultra cold atoms form a crystal of quantum tornadoes sure i'm qualified to talk about this okay so basically if i'm reading this right the researchers were wondering if quantum particles would behave differently at ultra cold temperatures and by that i mean down to like 100 nanokelvin so they did that with a cloud of about a million sodium atoms and then confined them with an electromagnetic field and then spun them and what happened was they were immediately uh moved into sort of a long needle-like structure and then according to the article quote the needle began to waver then corkscrew and finally broke into a string of rotating blobs or miniature tornadoes a quantum crystal arising purely from the interplay of the rotation of the gas and forces between the atoms do you know what this means because i don't richard fletcher one of the researchers in the project said this crystallization is driven purely by interactions and tells us we're going from the classical world to the quantum world so basically these quantum particles were in a state where classical interactions should have been suppressed and it should have behaved in a quantum superposition but they didn't and basically this makes us have to kind of rethink where the line is between quantum and classical physics i'm sure someone in the comments has a much better educated explanation of this uh please go check out the article in the description and enlighten all of us if you would mark hoffman asked where does hardware end and software begin [Music] doesn't anybody want to know my favorite color it's teal obviously i mean maybe i'm using the wrong definition of hardware and software but i think of the hardware as the actual physical parts of the computer and the software as the the code the the ones and zeros that are that are stored on the hardware and i guess in that way software is really more of a concept than a physical thing kind of like a story you know is a is a mental thing and it's made up of of sentences and words and letters but in a book is what those words and letters are printed on i mean is this basically a question about how information is stored on a computer like physically how that works because that's definitely something we never think about but it has a really big impact on our lives i may have to get back to you on this one and last but not least robin tennant colburn asked if thwaites lets loose has anybody created models for the immediate coastal impact when the breach occurs how fast how bad how soon could it happen is there a good chance that it won't or won't soon is there a plug-in model to crunch the numbers so to answer your specific question about plug-in models no i couldn't find anything like that but if somebody does know someone please do you know share it in the comments but yeah we've been hearing a lot about the thwaites glacier lately and for good reason um so let me just kind of give a quick primer for anybody that's not familiar with it the thoughts glacier is a massive glacier in antarctica about the same size as florida and it's dangerously close to collapse like possibly in the next five years scientists uh pretty recently sent a submarine under the ice shelf at the foot of the glacier and um this is kind of what bumps up against the continental ridge underneath the ocean and basically acts like a door stop just kind of holding the rest of the glacier back so yeah what they saw was way worse than anybody was expecting it was thinner than they thought and there were obvious fracture points this is a process that's already started so yeah if this ice shelf breaks apart it would basically set the rest of the glacier in motion and send it pouring out into the sea and if this ice shelf itself gets loose in the ocean it could raise global sea levels by one to two feet now that wouldn't happen overnight it's a glacier it moves at glacial speed but um it would definitely speed it up big time for example they used to think it would be like the year 2100 or so before we would see that kind of level of sea rise but another thing it might be closer to like 20 50 or 20 60. and one to two feet is bad enough but once that glacier ice actually melts into the ocean it could raise a sea level six to eight feet which we could see by 2100 and just to add an extra dash of yikes to the whole thing um just like the way the ice shelf is kind of holding back the thwaites glacier it's thought that losing the thwaites glacier could trigger a loss of the entire west antarctic ice sheet and this could add a total sea level rise of 11 feet when all is said and done considering the 40 of the world's population lives in urban areas near coastlines that would be a massive problem so basically the fate of about 3.2 billion people are in the hands of one relatively small strip of ice holding back this massive glacier which itself is holding back an even bigger ice shelf and that small strip of ice is crumbling before our eyes now again this isn't a next year kind of thing even if the ice sheet falls apart tomorrow it would take decades for the glacier to fully flake off the ocean and even more decades to melt but once that ice shelf goes it'll basically set forth some events that can't be stopped it'll be an event that affects our descendants for hundreds of years unless we manage to drastically lower the global temperature meaning removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and do it in the next couple of decades which not only are we not removing them or even slowing their growth and the fact is we are still accelerating our emissions 2021 was a record year sorry another record year so it's not like this ice shelf collapse would trigger a global tsunami or anything like that though some headlines definitely made it sound like that i saw one headline that said described it as a don't look up level event it's a bit of an exaggeration but it's a tipping point one that we don't really have any way of coming back from and just another reason why our great great great grandkids are gonna just really hate us i think that's how we know that time travel will never be a thing because if it was they would be zapping over here and slapping each and every one of us in the face over and over again so yes there are a lot of problems we need to solve if we want to keep those kids in the year 2150 from hating us so maybe one step that you can take is to check out the joy of problem solving course i'm brilliant through 28 lessons and 155 exercises you can get a sample of the best puzzles on brilliant along the way learn a little something about conditional logic associative properties logical paradoxes and even algebra shortcuts yes the learning platform that uses your problem solving ability to teach your advanced concepts has a course that supercharges your problem solving ability itself so it's a good place to start and of course once you've absorbed all that you can move on to some of the other courses on brilliant like the classical physics course the quantum mechanics courses applied science computer algorithms even competitive math and the thing about brilliant that's so brilliant is that it teaches you these things by problem solving like i was just talking about before this wires your brain to think like a scientist and superpowers your problem-solving abilities that can pay off in every area of your life plus you can do it on your mobile device and even offline so you can take it with you wherever you want to go if you want to get a taste of what i'm talking about you can try the first few problems of any course for free so if you're interested and you're one of the first 200 people who sign up for the premium subscription that gives you access to all their courses you can get 20 off if you go to brilliant.org answers with joe links in the description big thanks to brilliant for supporting this video and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon who are forming an awesome community helping keep the lights on around here and just being just really cool people very helpful especially in discord if you're not in discord go check it out but it's only for patrons so i got some new people i need to murder the names real quick we've got will cerret jake albert jj exclamation point tobias schmitz doug mal quit i think genevieve hall william krueger paul kopp uh jan roger or john roger alshag oscar watkins thomas perkins chris kelly's james younger dds who had one of the questions in this one john clay claudio souza paul dubois e.j daniel smith richard marcus and that's it for today but thank you guys so much for for supporting um just a quick note by the way like i said before i recorded a lot of videos in december so i'm really behind on patreon people and members um so if you signed up please be patient promise i'll get to you we got a system in place please like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here maybe check this one out because google thinks you'll like that one or any of the others at my face on the side of it down there and uh if you enjoy them i invite you to subscribe i come back with videos every monday and that's it for now you guys go out there have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 442,292

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Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 31 2022