The Paracast

by Karl Mamer

Welcome back to Podcasting Without Pity. Every other week I listen to a different True Believer podcast and give you my sceptical summary, a summary lacking in pity and sometimes even good taste.

This week we have The Paracast. Guess what that's about? Woo. In the unlikely event you think it's a podcast for British paratroopers, the show's logo features some Kirlian photography hand shit.



Hosts Gene Steinberg and David Biedny have been cranking out the woo weekly since 2006. There are over 130 shows there. What to choose, what to choose? Three jump out at me.

1. We've got an interview with Bud Hopkins. This one jumps out at me because I thought Bud Hopkins was dead. But it turns out I was thinking of John Mack. I guess there were two old dudes convincing stressed out housewives that all their unexpressed angst was not being caused by an emotionally detached husband who is stopping each night on the way home from work and meeting other married men for emotionless man-on-man sex in public washrooms. No. Their problems are being caused by nightly space alien abductions. Hey, anything not to have to confront your husband about the weird semen stains you keep finding on his shirt collar.

2. We've got an interview the Lloyd Pye. Pye has been toting a 900-year-old hydrocephalic skull from trekkie convention to trekkie convention trying to convince anyone who will listen that a skull most competent doctors immediately recognize as a birth defect is in fact evidence of an alien/human hybrid.

3. We've got a two-fer: an interview with some guy named Eric Julien who wrote a book called The Science of Extraterrestrials: UFOs Explained at Last and comic book artist Neal Adams. Fans of the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe will remember Neal Adams as an, ummm, interesting guest on that show.

I decided to listen to all three. Even though each show is about 2 hours long and this took about 6 hours of my not so valuable time, I'm sort of glad I did. While I've stated clearly this is Podcasting Without Pity, after listening to three shows, I did find I appreciated the actual hosts of this show. As one reviewer on iTunes notes, these two guys are not your typical Saucer-Tards. They seem pretty sceptical of most claims and don't mind ruffling feathers. An examination of all the one star ratings by the saucer-tards and their vindictive reviews indicates they're not exactly being cheered on by the tinfoil-haired set. One woman in her iTunes review raged that The Paracast is hosted by a third-rate writer and a, gasp, computer FX guy. Googling, it turns out one of them has published several computer guides (you try writing 300 page manuals, lady, and tell me if third rate writers are up to that) and the other host worked for ILM.

Keep reading...

As the hosts themselves noted in one episode, most of their saucer-tard guests are pretty much used to telling their tales before like minded saucer-tards, who just lap up their prepared, rehearsed spiel. Gene and David ask them questions even sceptics sometimes don't think to ask. Like one guy was relating his harrowing tale, told in his book of course, about being on a saucer for 10 hours. The Paracast crew asked him why nowhere in this ten hour ordeal did he ever mention where he went to the bathroom. How many times do you have to take a piss during 10 hours? I know I'd have to see a man about a mule at least twice. The guest was gob smacked and only managed a rather implausible "I didn't pee. I'm just good at holding it in." I'm sorry, I can't mock two guys who can so effectively coldcock a saucer-tard on a popular woo podcast.



In another episode, a guest was spewing the old chestnut that all our technological advances since the 1950s have come from reverse engineered crashed saucer technology, and not, as we've been led to believe, hard work by hundreds and thousands of smart engineers and research scientists giving up any hope of ever being seen as attractive to the opposite sex. The hosts pointed out that claim is ridiculous on the face of it. Space aliens clearly are centuries, if not millennia, ahead in technology. Imagine if an F15 crashed in the middle of the Civil War and the Union recovered it. What exactly could they learn from it? The ability of a more primitive civilization to reverse engineer technology that is indistinguishable from magic is patently unbelievable.

Alright, so I decided to give the Neal Adams episode (the April 22, 2007 ep) my full-on treatment, because after Neal's appearance on SGU and his widely read follow-up correspondence with Dr. Novella^{2 3 4}, there are people out there that simply can't get enough of Neal. But, alas, before we get to Neal we have to listen to this Eric Julien character.

So the show opens with their theme music, which sounds a lot like every single new age CD that's been released since Tubular Bells. You can just picture people sitting cross-legged in their loft apartments, gluten-free organic pasta boiling on the stove top in a copper pot bought from the fair trade store, surrounded by patchouli scented candles, chanting mantras to themselves, while this music plays in the background. Some voice run through a vocoder introduces the hosts.

Gene starts the show about the angry all caps emails they were getting following the Lloyd Pye interview. After showing Pye the door they proceeded to trash his theory. It was quite delicious. But I guess Pye didn't see it that way. They wonder what Pye is whining about. They let Pye promote his limited edition Starchild pop-up book, signed by the woo-ist himself. They even let Pye make some clearly actionable statements that his book was pretty much guaranteed to appreciate in value. Now, if I recall from that time I worked for a publicly traded dot.com (JustDayOlds.com, a B2C portal that sold day-old products like bread, newspapers, and sushi), we couldn't legally make statements like "our stock is going to just take off and will never lose value!" Anything that sounded even the least bit positive like "someone actually PayPal'ed us 50 cents!" we had to footnote with a disclaimer that it was a foreword looking statement and not a promise of future performance. But hey when you've been carrying around a hydrocephalic's skull for half a decade, you're probably not thinking too clearly.

Gene and Dave spend the top of the show outlining why they think Pye is a pseudoscientist. He tries to fit evidence to his theory. He takes his skull to expert after expert who tell him "nope, just a birth defect" and then eventually stops when he finds the one medical guy who will tell him what he wants to hear. ("Finally I found a doctor who will tell me these polyester threads under my fingernails are a biological disease, and not just from me scratching my stretch pants!")

After their little bitch fest about Pye, they break for a promo. I guess the show is sponsored by some saucer-tard (god I love this term, can you tell?) magazine.

After the promo we're kind of dumped into the interview with the science of saucers guy, Eric Julien. The hosts ask him another one of those great questions you might not get from the tinfoil wearers: what do you mean exactly by the "science" of extraterrestrials? Now if you listen to the Science Watch podcast, the hosts endeavour each podcast to supply a short, concise definition of science. Each week the hosts always manage to sum up all of science in about 3 or 4 short sentences. Julien, on the other hand, rambles for about 10 minutes. Other than something about there being a contradiction between quantum mechanics and Relativity, the rest seems to be just word salad. He has a bit of a strange accent and that also makes it hard to figure out what the fuck he's saying. From the way he keeps putting H's in front of every word he speaks, I'm guessing he's French.

Julien is a) reminding me why Marcel Marceau was such a popular French entertainer to North American audiences b) the perfect example why, if you can't fit your scientific theory on a tshirt, it's probably total and complete bullshit.

Evolution: Survival of the fittest, common descent with modification.

Relativity: E=MC²

Germ Theory: Microorganisms are the cause of disease.

Plate tectonics: The continents are drifting on a viscose asthenosphere.

Julien's Science of ETs: The hscience hof hETs his ha hscience hwhere hscientific hideas hknown hand hunknown hto hscience hare hunderstood hthrough hscientific hprinciples hestablished husing hscience. hIt's hclear hto hscience hthat hnot hall hof hwhat his hknown hto hscience hhas hbeen hdiscovered hwith hscience hand hmy hbook hreveals hET hscience hthat hI hscientifically hestablish husing hscience.

One of these things does not go with the other. N'est-ce pas?

After a good ramble, the hosts cut him off and try to establish some basic principles. Julien, it turns out, has been contacted by UFOs. He's an abductee. Sure, why not. David (I think it's David) wonders where these aliens have come from. A guy that's ostensibly figured out their science probably knows which star they're coming from. Julien doesn't disappoint and pins it down: "they're from a galaxy and the universe. They come from Sirius. They come from the Orion belt. They come from everywhere. It's very difficult to say they come from here or there."
This guy rambles like a first year student bullshitting on a Sociology 101 mid term essay. Do the saucer-tards really buy this shit? Co-host David doesn't. Gene tries to hold his feet to the fire. "Don't they say to you 'we're from such 'n' such a place…'?"

Julien informs the Paracast boys that the blue aliens he's been in contact with are from a planet called something like "Eh moon ya". Blue aliens? Ehmoonya? Ah, it's like this guy watched Yellow Submarine and Adult Swim after a nice repast of hallucinogenic crème brûlée and merged the Blue Meanies with the Mooninites.

Gene and David got a live one here. They ask another question the saucer-tards never stop to ask. Why the fuck did they pick you? If you were going to pick one human to communicate complex science, hell, communicate English, why would you pick some guy that puts H's in front of every word? Wouldn't they, I dunno, snap up Neil deGrasse Tyson?

Here's another common thread that joins all these abductions. Utterly insignificant people get taken away in saucers, are told the secret to life the universe and everything, are charged with a sacred mission to tell the world about the secret as this message is paramount to human survival. So naturally they pick hayseeds as their spokesmen. And their message is never "here's the complex formula for the cure to cancer or cold fusion". It's always touchy feely stuff that would have the Hands Across America organizers go "oh man, that's just pandering to your audience."

Anyway, I guess Slices, Dices and Julien French Fry was scooped up by the Mooninites to tell the world, for one thing, Ehmoonya has one third less gravity than our Earth and their vertical leap is beyond all measurement.

I dunno. When the hosts ask him how does he know they're actually ETs, he goes off on another ramble about time being recursive. When I think of my work day, this actually makes sense. We're nearly 20 minutes into this podcast and he's finally said one thing that makes sense. He goes for another five minutes rambling about the recursive nature of time. It's like a fractal, man.

After this we have my favourite part of the show, their little sounder that they're going to a commercial break. We hear two loud bangs. It sounds like the hosts put two bullets in their guest. But I guess it's not the sound of bullets being pumped into the head of a sauce-tard. It's supposed to be, I dunno, docking clamps releasing from a UFO or something.

The podcast spends a bit of time hawking Fate magazine. Read all about UFOs and angels. Sure. Whatever.

Anyway, the hosts try to start this segment from square one with this guy and ask him if what he's saying is the ETs have tried to pass on some information to share with the rest of the world. Julien takes this as another opportunity to ignore the question at hand and goes into a long ramble about his past. I guess Julien was a pilot for Air France. This goes a long way in explaining why Air France planes keep sliding off the end of runways. They're hiring abject idiots.

He also claims he was an air traffic controller. I'm not sure the world of aviation was any safer kicking him upstairs. So, what I'm hearing is the guy had a high stress job. He, naturally, goes bonkers and starts thinking elements from Yellow Submarine and Aqua Teen Hunger Force are real.

I guess his whole history stuff is to establish he, and not Stephen Hawking or even Pamela Gay, was the logical choice for bringing the world this super science knowledge that ummm errrr what exactly? It's astounding? Time is fleeting? Madness takes its toll? I try to listen closely, but not for very much longer. I've got to keep control. So I start fast forwarding a bit. He's babbling about dreams he had of UFOs. Fast forward more. He's still talking about his dreams. Fast forward even more.

Gene jumps into the middle of his psycho babble and reminds him he's not actually answered the question of how does he know these are extraterrestrials? Oh well, simple, Julien answers. They're not extraterrestrials per se. You big sillies. They're actually extratemporals.

Aw Jesus.

Gene tries a different approach. "Eric, if you're saying they're extra temporals, not of this time, how do you know they're time travelling space aliens and not just Earth people from the future?"
I would have asked "how do you know this isn't just some wild delusion?". And Gene's question strikes me initially as him just trying to layer on more woo, but after listening to several of these podcasts, I'm thinking he's more just trying to ask "you claim it's this one bullshit idea, but why that bullshit idea and not this bullshit idea over here? Why limit yourself?"

The hosts give up and try to get Julien to talk about some science. Since the guy, you know, wrote the book on the science of ETs, he should have the corner on what the blue ETs are using to power their TARDIS.



Julien's answer again sounds like Sociology 101 essay padding. "What is the energy? This is the question itself." Arg. He goes into more psycho babble about the energy is the difference between two time flows.

After another ten minutes of Julien's rambling psycho babble, the hosts then pose a question which I think firmly puts them in the woo camp, although it's at least internally sceptical. They note so many alien stories ultimately involve deception, how does Julien know he's not being hoodwinked by the Mooninites? The logic seems to go like this. All these abductees, contactees, experiencers, channelers, alien consciousness hosts, hybrid caring space baby surrogates, and semen donors are given predictions by the saucer people like in 1997 there will be a major landing, the Earth's magnetic poles will shift in 2001, Tom Cruise will stun the world that he's renouncing show business and entering the Catholic priesthood. And none of these predictions ever, ever, ever come true. Ergo, the aliens are deceiving us.

So how do you think Julien is going to answer that question? How do you know you're not simply being deceived by these space aliens? Right. He just lays on more psycho babble. We're now 40 minutes into this podcast and he hasn't said a single thing about his science of ETs that can be tested by science.

Gene mercifully announces they don't have a lot of time left and poses Julien one last question: Why should we take your pile of steaming psycho dung seriously?

Julien answers with the typical True Believer response to that kind of question: "I don't ask anyone to believe me." Sure. You just wrote a whole book trying to convince people about the science of ETs. I guess Darwin wasn't asking anyone to believe him about evolution when he wrote Origin of Species. But then he goes into a long, back-patting list of all the (unnamed) scientist who have been stunned by his science. Since all these unnamed PhDs in physics totally grok his schlock, you should too.



After some words by the hosts to Julien that he's not supplied any actual science they show him the door. Oh thank god. After a break, the hosts come back to sum up and share the true skinny on their guests. This Eric Julien is the nut bag who, back in 2006, was claiming a crop circle told him the space aliens were going to pumpkin bomb Earth with comet fragments . Why? Well, because the USA had a secret plan to nuke Iran. The aliens, fans I guess of Farsi soap operas, were preparing this retaliatory strike. Phil Plait, of course, gave Julien a public pants down spanking over this foolishness.

When the comet didn't hit Earth, Julien claimed it was because he warned the world, the USA was secretly forced to secretly cancel their secret plans for a secret attack on Iran. You gotta love claims that are insulated from falsification. Anyway, because the US government listened to Julien and didn't nuke Iran, the aliens moved the comet out of Earth's path and the day was saved. Thanks to Julien. Yeah. Thanks.

Here, let me set myself up to be the future saviour of mankind.

People, unless you change your ways [in some nebulous, ill-defined fashion], New York is going to be devastated by a giant marauding lobster on November 1, 2008! Mark my words! Act now!

Gene and Dave, in their post-game analysis, tear Julien a new one, although they probably should have done this when the cracker was actually on the phone. They decide to wash their hands of Julien and then proclaim they're going to get on to some real stuff. Of course when you define "real stuff" as Neal Adams' expanding hollow Earth "theory", you might be using "real" in a fashion new to the editors of the OED.

Alright, finally, we get to the man of the hour, after a 50 minute warm up show. Ladies, gentlemen, X-Men fanboys, I give you Neal Adams.

Gene announces Neal and gives a teaser type summary of Neal's "theory". Everything we think we know about how planets are formed is wrong. Right, Neal?

Neal says not so fast. First Neal wants to wax philosophically and kind of set up the framework of his special pleading. See. We've been wrong about everything. Since we're wrong about everything, we're wrong about the very foundations of physics and astronomy. Since we're wrong about all of science, the only other theory that can explain it all is Neal's theory and therefore it wins by default. Got it?

Neal notes every century someone comes a long and goes "that stuff that you thought was right is wrong."

First problem, Neal doesn't really define what he means by "wrong". Copernicus wasn't 100% wrong about heliocentricism. He mostly got it right. He just thought orbits were perfect circles. Kepler came along and fine tuned it. Orbits were ellipses, not perfect circles. Newton came along and tweaked Kepler's laws. Einstein then came along and tweaked Newton's laws of universal gravitation. Same deal with germ theory. Germ theory was tweaked by the discovery of viruses. Now germ theory is being tweaked by the discovery of prions. In sum, lots of science isn't wrong. It's mostly right. The science gets fine tuned.

Neal then plays the "they got upset at Galileo" gambit. Since we all laughed at Galileo and Galileo endued up having the last laugh (hundreds of years after he was dead, of course), we shouldn't be so quick to laugh at a goofy comic book artist trying to re-write basic science. As Carl Sagan noted, they did laugh at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Neal then goes on to summarize the standard theory of how planets and solar systems come to be born and gets it wrong, creating a silly straw man version that he'll ably knock down shortly.

First, a brief summary of the correct version:

1) Big bang spewed hydrogen, helium, and trace bits of lithium.

2) Gravity eventually pulled all this together into first generation stars.

3) These stars fused the elements. Smaller stars fused up to iron. Bigger ones fused everything above iron when they exploded as super novas.

4) This material came back together again to form second generation stars and now these heavier elements also formed planets.

Anyway, Neal stresses we believe this based on authority. Those darn scientist tell us X and we have to believe X. You'll remember from my last instalment of Podcasting Without Pity, the creationists also echoed this theme. Science is authority driven. It's thousands of highly competitive, independent, creative thinkers all advancing science using other's findings because those findings actually work. And they work because they're true.

Neal then proceeds to knock his straw man down. Since the solar system was formed by all this stuff coming together and bashing into each other, why has this process magically stopped? Why isn't stuff still bashing into each other and forming new stuff? Why don't we see the planets in our solar system growing rapidly today?

Errr.

Neal doesn't seem to grasp there is limited matter. After about 4.5 billion years, most of the stuff in this region has come together via gravity to form the planets. Stuff, of course, is still bashing into planets. Just ask the dinosaurs. But we're not going to see whole new planets being created, especially before our eyes in a human lifetime.

Further, we see things like stellar nurseries. We do see this stuff coming together in places where older stars have blown apart and now those clouds of elements are coming together again to form new stars.

Neal sums up: the reason we don't see the planets growing is because it's a stupid theory to begin with. You will note Neal bases a lot of his theory not on observation and experiment but on simple personal incredulity. Since it doesn't appeal to a comic book artist, it must not be true. There is a theory out there that tall blond women don't like short, fat bloggers like me. That sounds like a stupid theory to me. But that doesn't mean it's not true.

Neal, not content knocking down his current straw man, stuffs it up a bit more by claiming some scientist say the solar system was formed only out of a cloud of hydrogen, while others claim it was formed out of meteors. Errr. Neal really needs to understand the difference between first generation stars and second generation stars like our sun. "You guys gotta decide if it's hydrogen or meteors before you come at me with your theories."

Neal, I wasn't aware any scientist was seeking your peer review or even gave a flying fuck what you think.

Neal claims if the meteorite theory is true then the only meteorites we find in the solar system that are 4.5 billion years old are chondrite meteors and those, for reasons never given, can't form planets. Neal wraps up by concluding since this theory is so obviously stupid, we need a better theory. And then he chuckles. You'll notice through this interview Neal does this a lot, laughing at his own jokes, which aren't really jokes. Last time I saw someone laughing this much at himself, who wasn't taking a dump in a shopping cart and wearing a winter parka in August, was that Tom Cruise in that Scientology video that kept getting deleted from YouTube.

Neal explains he's had this brilliant insight because he's been able to study this not only logically but as a kind of scientific Renaissance man. Neal proclaims he's studied all the sciences, and the problem with scientists (real scientists) today is they don't get exposed to all the other sciences. Not like Neal. You study astronomy, you don't get exposed to physics, chemistry, math, and probably some biology. Oh wait. You do. Jesus. Could this guy be any more deluded about his mastery of all human knowledge? It seems to me anyone who has a PhD in any science, must first complete a Bachelor of Science, and one generally has to take the basics from all the sciences. Neal somehow presumes because he read a couple Idiot's Guides, he's learned more about the basic sciences than someone who had to take a range of basic science courses as an undergrad?

So the reason we got this mixed up theory of the origins of solar systems is because a theory like this needs the input of so many different experts. Yeah, I guess that's why evolution just never got off the ground, what with needing biologists, geneticists, physicists, and geologists all coming together on the same page. Ain't gonna happen. Right?

After demolishing the theory of stellar/solar system formation, Neal then gives us a summary of plate tectonics. Plate tectonics is the theory that the continents all sit on a viscous layer of semi molten rock and float around. This is why we get earthquakes. The continents float into each other. The continents break apart and float off in other directions. Anyway, Neal isn't buying and spins a little story making it seem like this was all authority driven stuff. In fact, plate tectonics was a pretty hard sell for most of the 20th century. It wasn't until they started mapping and measuring the sea floor did the evidence to support continental drift emerge.

And then, according to Neal, they cooked up this crazy idea about Pangaea, all the continents used to be one land mass. Like they just pulled this out of their butts. Well, no. It emerged from the evidence. We found similar fossils on all the major continents from the same geological time. How do we explain that? Well, similar animals means they had to be able to get from Africa to South America to Australia to Europe. Since they can't build boats, these land masses must have been connected.

The problem Neal has with this is he simply doesn't like the idea that there was, for a time, one big land mass on one side of the planet. I think Neal is under the impression the theory claims the Earth started this way, with just one big land mass, instead of at one point in time all the continents by random chance bashed into each other. If you throw five plates on a table and vibrate the table, and make it so when the plates touch, they stick and it takes forces to unstick them, odds are those five plates, at some point, are going to vibrate into each other, and stick for a time until forces start to work them apart.

To Neal, who can't imagine this happening in the great expanse of time, it makes more logical sense if the world started off much smaller than it is now, with no oceans between the land masses. Instead it was one big crusty Earth and then, here's the money shot, the Earth expanded from the inside out.

Oh dear.

The hosts jump in. "Ummm Neal, what about the oceans?"

Neal says there were no oceans. There were only shallow seas in the continents. We have all this evidence of shallow seas in, say, North America. That we can mine salt up in Michigan is evidence of this. And that's true. And odd we don't see those seas anymore. Neal reasons that's because as the Earth grew and the continents cracked apart, the water then ran into the cracks, making the oceans.

So where did those great inland seas go and why don't we see them today? Neal neglects that ocean levels have changed through history. At one point the world was a lot warmer and we didn't have ice caps. As we all know from talk about global warming, higher oceans means that water is going to run inland. So when there were no ice caps, the oceans spilled inland and we got seas. As the Earth grew colder and water was frozen into ice caps, the oceans were no longer sending water inland and these inland seas dried up (and left us nice salt beds).

Neal believes if his hypothesis is correct, we should not find fossils under the oceans we have today because that's all new stuff. But we do find such fossils. I think Neal has confused "we don't find many" with "none". Neal ignores subduction. The ocean floor plates are bashing into each other. It's a blender down there. Fossils get crunched up by this action.

Neal concludes only an expanding Earth explains all his observations. One problem, he needs a mechanism for the expansion. Oh well, simple. The Earth (all planets actually, including the moon) is hollow and there's this plasma in the middle of the Earth, and it's spontaneously generating new matter, which then causes the Earth (and all other planets and moons in the universe) to blow up like balloons. But wait, don't those astronomers and those pesky laws of thermodynamics tell us the big bang produced all the energy and matter we're ever going to have and you can't create more of it? Neal borrows from quantum mechanics. QM tells us sometimes a particle and antiparticle will spontaneously form out of nowhere. While this seems to violate the conservation of mass and energy laws of thermodynamics, the particle and anti particle quickly destroy each other. So we have a +1 and a -1. 1-1=0. It all balances out.

Just as people who believe in The Secret grasp to a misreading of quantum mechanics to shore up their woo, Neal grasps onto this aspect of QM to shore up his belief matter can come from nothing. Well, I guess he just has to demonstrate that not only can it hang around but can be created in sufficient quantities that it can build planets. I believe this particle creation isn't done in your fridge. You require literally parsecs of empty space before you have the probability of this happening.

Neal's next proof of his expanding Earth theory is that part of the Earth's crust is missing. True. Is that a problem? Well, Neal thinks it’s a problem. See, his reading of the standard theory of Earth's formation is Earth formed, there was a crust covering the whole planet, and we should see all of that crust today. Since we don't, since we can't account for some very large percentage of it, that's evidence for a growing Earth. Neal would argue that crust never existed. The world was ¼ its size, covered by a crust, the Earth expanded 4x, making big gaps in the crust. The problem with Neal's argument is it's yet another misrepresentation. It's a bit like creationists who demand a perfect fossil record. We'll never get that as there are many external factors that prevent a perfect fossil record or destroy such fossils before we can find them.

So how can geologists say Neal's theories are crap when 25% of the crust is missing? Well, simple. Just because the Earth started off with a nice 100% intact crust doesn't mean as it goes through life it will always have that crust. For example, my car had all its paint in 1996. Through a process of dings, car doors being swung too wide in parking lots, me misjudging how much room I had between another car and a brick wall, well, over time some of my car's paint is missing. Does this mean my car is expanding? Would my insurance company believe that? The same holds for the Earth. We've been hit by some pretty fucking big things. There's good evidence the moon was created when something pretty fucking big hit Earth and the knocked off hunk of Earth formed into the moon. There's good evidence the Gulf of Mexico took a big one.

So when scientists see a bunch of the crust missing, they don't go "ah, expanding Earth". They start looking for what might have smacked right into the Earth and vaporized that bit of crust.

The hosts then ask Neal if the Earth expanded, where did all the water come from? Because on a small world, we had these shallow inland seas, surely if they drained into the new cracks of the expanded Earth, there wouldn't be enough.

Easy. The little magic box in the middle of the Earth just makes every possible atom. It makes new oxygen atoms, it makes new hydrogen atoms, these combine as they bubble up. It also makes new gold atoms and new uranium atoms as well. Simple.

Isn't a theory great when you can just invent a process never seen before and there is no physics to account for it? Because according to those ivory tower scientists hydrogen, helium, and a bit of lithium were created after the Big Bang. After that a process called stellar nucleosynthesis took over the job of atom production. A guy won a Nobel prize for this and everything. Basically in most stars, in the pressure and vast heat, elements up to iron are fused. When that star dies, it sends that stuff out into the universe. Above iron, we need the crucible of a supernova. Since the heat and pressure in the middle of the Earth isn't nearly good enough to create anything, Neal has to invent new physics.

And how does he explain that different planets have, as best we can figure, different compositions? Shit. I dunno. With lasers and satellites, can't we measure the Earth and the moon? Shouldn't we notice these growing? But we don't.

In the final run up to the end, Neal gets into his most bizarre line of evidence for his expanding Earth claim. He believes dinosaurs were too big to move around in today's gravity. However, back during the dinosaur era, the Earth was 1/4 as big, hence gravity was 1/4, hence dinosaurs could get that big. Neal cites unknown engineers who support him in this claim. I'm not sure what engineers know about dinosaur anatomy. Bzzzt. Improper appeal to authority. 10 yards. You would think after a couple centuries of studying dinosaurs someone would have gone "hey, could such monsters walk in 1 g? If so, how'd they do it?" Of course people have done the calcs and see no problem.

Karl Mamer is host of The Conspiracy Skeptic podcast, a 12 part look at conspiracies of today and the not too distant past. Karl is also the world's greatest living proponent of Franglais. He also likes to bait Nigerian Bank Scammers and hosted his own podcast about teaching English in Seoul, South Korea. Karl lives in Toronto, Canada and works as a senior technical writer to pay the bills.