No Character Limit

We can be so focused on the details of the battle over science that sometimes we forget to pull back and look at the story that it has really painted for us. In this last episode of the Hiding From Ourselves series we take an honest look at what the scientific evidence is showing us about our impact on the world - and this goes far beyond mere climate change. The main source used for this episode...

In this third episode on exploring how to determine what is quality information we continue explore the climate change debate and the origins of why such a seemingly lopsided debate never won in favor of the fact-finders. How long have we known about climate change really? How far back was it known to be a problem? Were climate scientists really believing there was going to be "global cooling" in...

In this second episode on exploring how to determine what is quality information we continue following the ongoing debate on the purpose of science in a post-nuclear era into the 1980s. Do scientists have a moral and ethical responsibility to protect the planet or should they remain amoral stewards of policy-makers, leaving moral judgment to them? Legacy scientists from the Manhattan project, as w...

How do we know what information to trust and what to stay away from? Whether you find yourself wanting to question the science or prove the skeptics wrong, this episode is for you. In this episode you can find multiple stories where experts were proven wrong by those outside of their field, where once established fact was upended forever, as well as plenty of individuals, scientists, and industrie...

In this long awaited first bonus episode dedicated to Ultima Thule we take a look at some associated documentaries, research findings, and related information that has come up since Ultima Thule was first written in 2022. Consider the motivations of a Nazi that wanted to send people into space, learn about the long-lost sibling of the Sun, whether dark energy is speeding up or slowing down, and wh...

In this final episode of Ultima Thule we return to ancient Greece, where the term Thule first originated, and learn about their origin story of the Universe and how it compares to what we know about the Universe today. We then consider the concept of Ultima Thule through time and how people viewed the existence of the Earth, Moon, Sun, and stars from ancient Egypt to the Catholic Church. We make s...

We have finally reached the final chapter of Ultima Thule: Unraveling the Unknown. In the penultimate episode we see how humans have come to view Earth by looking back at it from space, known as the overview effect. But the primary focus of this episode is to try and understand what is both the most abundant and vacant thing in the universe - empty space. We look at first-hand accounts of what spa...

In this final episode of the largest meteorites to have ever hit Earth we focus on the most famous impact of them all - the Chicxulub impact that killed the dinosaurs. We explore what living at the time of impact must have been like and learn about the science behind how we know that it happened. Despite the most accepted theory by mainstream science we also learn about how the story of Walter and...

In the third installment on some of the largest meteorites to have ever hit Earth we explore some of the larger but lesser-known impacts on the planet. These include the impact sites of Chesapeake, Popigai, Manicouagan, Sudbury, and the largest of them all - Vredefort. We explore which may have been possible multiple-impact events, how they would've affected the world at the time, and how they con...

In this second episode on some of the biggest meteorites to have ever hit the planet we explore whether or not a large meteorite has ever hit a city. Currently, there are claims that this has happened twice in ancient times - at Tall el-Hammam in Jordan and Ch'ing Yang, China. But the evidence for each are very different. We uncover that the evidence for one of these is completely false and explor...

This is the first of four episodes dedicated to some of the biggest meteorite impacts in the history of the Earth. Today's episode is dedicated to the most mysterious - the 1908 Tunguska Event. What is actually known about what happened on that June morning in Siberia over a century ago? Where does the baseless speculation end and the evidence begin? In this episode we look at the evidence left be...

In the last episode we explored how much people will pay to possess a meteorite and the wide ranging prices depending on the type of meteorite. But we saved the most valuable meteorites for this episode starting with the pallasite, which can go for hundreds of thousands of dollars for a slice. We learn about the first widely studied pallasite found by Peter Simon Pallas, a brilliant naturalist tha...

What happens when a rock from space falls onto our planet of complex property and ownership rights? Is it finders keepers? Is it owned by whose property it lands on? What if it hits you, do you own it? Welcome to the wild world of ownership rights of meteorites. In this episode we learn about some of the most well known meteorite hunters including Mike Farmer, Robert Ward, Darryl Pitt, and Robert...

What is a meteor shower and how is it different from the lone fireball streaking across the sky? It turns out that meteor showers don't come from asteroids but instead comets. In fact, debris from meteor showers, unlike fireballs, very rarely ever make it to the ground, burning up on the way down. This has made it extremely difficult for scientists to study remnants from comets on Earth so instead...

In the last episode we explored how meteors and meteorites have been intertwined with faith as far back as ancient Egypt and in to the modern day. But this fascination has a dark side - it creates large quantities of misinformation - both unintentional and intentional. In this episode we explore both kinds through looking at other possible historical meteorites including an alleged Nazi Tibetan me...

As extraterrestrial visitors meteors and meteorites have always fascinated humanity, but what role have meteorites played in the realm of faith? Whether it is the ancient crater at Lonar Lake in India, fireballs that fly across the sky over the Pacific Island of Mer, and possibly even the Black Stone of Kaaba, sacred to Islam there are signs that meteors and meteorites have a special role across a...

Of course, Ultima Thule was never truly on Earth but always in the heavens. Since time immemorial humans have looked up and wondered what they were looking at and what it must be made of. But every year roughly 44,000 tons of rock rain down on us in the form of meteorites. In this episode we take a crash course in the three main types of meteorites - chondrites, achondrites, and irons. Their origi...

With humanity finally able to reach Antarctica we were able to pull out ice cores that go much deeper back in time than anything from the Arctic, giving us the ability to peer back millions of years. But ice cores are not the only way humans are able to peer into the past and rocks found all over the planet allow us to see back to nearly the creation of Earth. And just like ice cores, rock samples...

The early 20th century Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration brought the whole of civilization to the last unexplored continent on Earth. Names like Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton, and Roald Amundsen became immortalized when each raced to be the first person to the South Pole. While honor and ego often butted heads during this era it can't overshadow the amount of skill required to reach thi...

Over the last couple of episodes we explored how humans pushed out of Africa into the rest of the world including the Americas. In this episode I recap how the climate changed over the last 100,000 years and shaped human survival. Overall, the Earth continued to descend into a much colder and drier climate than humans had ever experienced creating ice sheets five times thicker than the world's tal...

In the last episode we focused on humanity's efforts to leave Africa over the last 100,000 years. In this episode we continue to see how humans went on to populate every corner of the Earth, particularly the Americas as the first Americans came over in numbers as low as a couple-dozen. These were the first humans to truly take on the Arctic and learned to call it their home... but there was a brea...

In the last few episodes we've explore the Milankovitch Cycles and have come to understand how they impact the Humid Sahara discussed in the first episode of Ultima Thule . In this episode we go back only one eccentricity cycle ago - 100,000 years (or so) - and see what the world was like then for humans and how the Humid Sahara played an integral role to humans pushing their way out of Africa. We...

In the last episode we discussed the origins of climate science and how it came to give us insight into the climate of Earth's deep past. The climate trends discovered through science actually confirmed a mathematical theory of climate by a man who dedicated his life to the subject decades before climate science existed. Milutin Milankovitch had predicted the impact of the deep seasons of Earth -...

How many seasons does the Earth have? If you think it's only four then this episode is for you. It turns out that the Earth has several deep seasons that span for tens-of-thousands-of-years at a time. Ultimately these deep seasons play an integral role on the Earth's climate. But how much of a role and how do we know? In this episode learn about the science used to confirm Earth's weather and clim...

In this episode we conclude the chapter "To The Ends Of The Earth" by focusing on the island of Greenland. Greenland became a final frontier for humanity and one explorer was at the forefront of helping map and study it - Peter Freuchen. Not only would Freuchen go on to routinely defy death in one of the most lethal landscapes on Earth but he would establish a trading post there called Thule, in h...