*Guitar riff*

MAKO: Warning. This show contains adult themes and language including no death for once.

SQEAKY: Dysevidentia is an inability to reliably process evidence and this is a podcast all about it.

MAKO: This episode was released on November 22nd, 2021...

SQEAKY: ...and we're discussing dysevidentia because it is clear millions of ancient alien astronaut enthusiasts are suffering from it.

SQEAKY: I am Sqeaky.

MAKO: And I am Mako.

SQEAKY: We discuss logic and evidence because someone has to pick up History Channel's slack.

MAKO: You can support us by becoming a Patron at patreon.com/dysevidentia.

SQEAKY: If you spent all of your money carving giant megaliths for alien spaceships to land on in your backyard you can still like, subscribe, and leave a review to help us out.

MAKO: If you have a paper you have written or a small business to plug, let us know.

SQEAKY: Today we are going to discuss Annunaki and ancient aliens.

MAKO: But first, Sqeaky is going on a rant.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: Is that date correct?

MAKO: Looks correct.

SQEAKY: I feel like I used my 2022 calendar.

MAKO: I mean... Fifteen plus seven is in fact twenty-two.

SQEAKY: That's how math works?

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: Mmm... Been writing software so long I can only plus one and minus one.

MAKO: Ahah.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: So many people are talking about freedom. Freedom to run their businesses how they want, freedom to skip the vaccine, freedom to say anything at any time. These same people never talk about responsibility. Responsibility to not discriminate in hiring practices. Responsibility to not infect people with preventable diseases. Responsibility for the results of what they say. In some places, it is illegal to discriminate based on gender or race when hiring. Even in places where it is legal, it is generally shunned. The people clambering for the freedom to discriminate when hiring are the first to complain when that freedom is used against them. They choose not to understand that reciprocity is the responsibility of all members of a society. The people demanding freedom to be unvaccinated are at best uneducated. Often when they are on death's door from COVID, they are demanding the vaccine. At that point, it's too late. They would know that if they hadn't shirked their responsibility to understand their own decisions. Likely, they wouldn't be anti-vax if they had responsibly educated themselves. People ignore the results of their words while demanding the freedom to say anything. For many, this just means creating an environment hostile to people different from themselves. But for many with a platform it means creating a hostile society. That is exactly what some people want. Horrible people. Most of the people defending public displays of discrimination and similar bullshit are the first to complain when they're excluded from spaces specifically to be safe from their intolerant bullshit. When a seventeen-year-old kid brings a gun to a protest that he had no business being at, the people sharing the ideas that got him there share in their responsibility. What pisses me off the most about this is when these people ignore that they have the freedom to express these fucked up views because they are in a position where their in these areas are already solved. You don't hear rich white guys complain about racist or misogynist hiring practices. These are pretty much the only people claiming these issues don't exist. When I say rich, I don't mean wealthy. Plenty of middle class folk are deluded here too. Only people who have been living in a mostly disease-free society have the opportunity to complain about vaccines. People living with endemic polio and measles are clambering for vaccines and they did in the US when those were problems here too. Only people who are free from rampant disease death are free to complain about vaccines. Now we have people complaining about freedom of speech when they have uncensored microphones and want to say things that get other people killed. I don't mean just that one trial, or just anti-vaxxers. Many are doing it. I feel that freedoms implicitly come with responsibilities. And I'm going to start pointing that out when talking with people about any of these issues. I'm still getting people who tell me "What about my freedom to be unvaccinated?" And I'll start with "What about your responsibility to be educated?" That is partially an appeal to emotion, but they weren't responding to facts anyway.

*Guitar riff*

MAKO: It's just- This is- it takes a little bit of a mental warmup for this kind of skullfuckery- I don't know.

SQEAKY: You wouldn't need a mental warmup if your brain were smoother.

MAKO: You're not wrong. Why would I want smooth brain?

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: So how's it been Mako? It's been a whole two weeks since we've had an episode.

MAKO: It's been okay.

SQEAKY: So everybody and their brother, going so far as to have all of the Democrats of Nebraska, came out and corrected me on my pronunciation of Samhain.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: Wow.

SQEAKY: No kidding, the following day I was listening to another podcast, the Knowledge Fight guys and the Cognitive Dissonance guys, both pronounce it better. They called it sam... uh Sam-wen or Saw-wen. Either of those are apparently the appropriate pronunciation.

MAKO: Something about it not originally being English?

SQEAKY: Yeah. Old Gaelic/Celtic.

MAKO: So-

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: Applying English pronunciation, however clear it may seem at a glance, is apparently not quite correct.

SQEAKY: This is what we get for not checking every single word through a pronunciation filter.

MAKO: Yeah...

SQEAKY: Meh. It's what happens when you learn by reading stuff. Sometimes you say arch-i-pa-lego.

MAKO: Bone-apple-tea. No wait, that's pronunciation.

*Sqeaky laughs*

SQEAKY: Uh, other corrections. Uh, two episodes ago, so in episode nineteen in the COVID minute, I called it- I think we both called it the "emergency standard of care". We meant to say "crisis standard of care". And then in one part of the Halloween discussion, I said nowhere in Europe had trick-or-treating before 1900, uh but there were some places where it was in Scotland as much as five years before that so depending on whether or not-

MAKO: I didn't really correct it at the time because I couldn't find obvious sources on that.

SQEAKY: I had it in one of the sources, the 1895 thing.

MAKO: Ah.

SQEAKY: But some people in Scotland will say that the UK isn't part of Europe and they wouldn't care about a correction, but some other listeners cared. Like Americans were like nope, UK is definitely part of Europe.

MAKO: Yup.

SQEAKY: I dunno.

MAKO: Okay.

SQEAKY: We get corrections from different people.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: And one of their- Minor oversight, I said --and this was just one of our passing conversations about bird extinction I think-- I called the passenger pigeons at least once, and I meant to say carrier pigeon each time.

MAKO: Mmm.

SQEAKY: I would like to thank the Secular Democrats of Nebraska for their corrections. It's nice to know that a group like that even exists. I will go ahead and plug them in the show notes.

SOURCE [6:33] Secular Democrats of Nebraska on Twitter - https://twitter.com/SecularDemsOfNE

SQEAKY: And if you want to correct us on things we've said or done wrong, there's a whole bunch of ways to do that. So one way to definitely get our attention is to go to patreon.com/dysevidentia and give us money, we will definitely notice. So and thank you to our Patreon support Kaiju Halina.

SUPPORT US [6:47] Dysevidentia on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/dysevidentia

SQEAKY: There's also our subreddit, which is just reddit.com/r/dysevidentia.

CONTACT [6:51] Dysevidentia on Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/Dysevidentia/

SQEAKY: On Twitter, @dysevidentia.

CONTACT [6:53] Dysevidentia on Twitter - https://twitter.com/dysevidentia

SQEAKY: On Discord, and the link is incomprehensible, we'll put it in the show notes.

CONTACT [6:57] Dysevidentia on Discord - https://discord.gg/EZtcgdsCDA

SQEAKY: Email, contact@dysevidentia.

CONTACT [6:58] Dysevidentia by email - Contact@dysevidentia.com

SQEAKY: We also have a YouTube channel-

CONTACT [7:00] Dysevidentia on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBbU3rnK52CXUkK0cJ-o29g

SQEAKY: -and of course dysevidentia.com.

CONTACT [7:01] Dysevidentia.com - https://dysevidentia.com

SQEAKY: On to COVID?

MAKO: Eh, well, Class Sports, the other thing.

SQEAKY: Oh! Yeah, we did want to let a listener know, Class of Sports, we did get a... a paper to read from them but we're gonna make sure that we go over that and give it a little time. We just got it earlier today before the recording so we didn't want to uh... gloss over anything.

MAKO: Cover it in the next episode.

SQEAKY: Cool. Or we'll get back to him.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: We won't cover everything necessarily, but resuming it's something worthwhile. It was about the Pledge of Allegiance and how susceptible young people are to manipulation. Seems like it's right up our alley.

MAKO: A bit, yeah.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: Shasta's bark was awfully loud.

MAKO: Yup. It'll almost certainly pick that up.

SQEAKY: She's an adorable puppy but could you not yelp right when we're at the end of a good long one?

*Mako sighs*

SQEAKY: Good long one...

MAKO: Giggity.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: So there's been a fair bit of COVID news.

MAKO: Definitely an uptick since the last time we covered it. It was starting to get quiet kinda.

SQEAKY: Yeah, there'd been a fewer celebrities talking about it for a while there and not a lot of new medical advances. There's the new COVID pill that they're giving out-

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: -so it's nice that there's more treatments. I don't know that we need to go too in depth on that here.

MAKO: No.

SQEAKY: If you get COVID and it gets bad enough, I presume doctors will get it to ya.

MAKO: We have more in our arsenal to fight COVID infections than we did before, which is good. But then there's the bad...

SQEAKY: Oh you mean Aaron Rogers?

MAKO: Well I was talking about the uh, upward trend of COVID.

SQEAKY: Oh. That's- Yeah you're right. Deaths and cases are probably worse. Pretty much everywhere on the globe case count is increasing. I pulled some numbers for Europe, I pulled numbers worldwide, and I pulled some numbers for the US.

SOURCE [8:27] Trending up in europe - https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/regions/europe/

SOURCE [8:28] 5 million deaths worldwide - https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: In most places, deaths and case counts track each other pretty closely, but here in the US they are starting to diverge, so we've had more cases but the death count is going down indicating that the availability of monoclonal antibodies and these other treatments and just generally not having the healthcare system under such a heavy load is making it easier for people to get the treatment they need.

SOURCE [8:35] Trending up in the US, but deaths are down. - https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/

MAKO: Yep. COVID is being a little bit less lethal compared to before.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: But all of our previous spikes for COVID coincided with the holiday season and we are now entering the holiday season, so.

SQEAKY: Didn't we have one over summer like right around the 4th of July and or Memorial Day? Yeah okay, nevermind.

MAKO: They weren't as aggressive as the Thanksgiving ones. The Thanksgiving ones were always very aggressive.

SQEAKY: Yeah you can see it in the charts, it's kinda ludicrous.

MAKO: Yep.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: If you are meeting with family for the holidays, make sure everyone's vaccinated and boostered if that's appropriate for your situation.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: And try to keep it small. We're having a few people over for Thanksgiving but it's going to be ten total family members so it's going to be pretty small.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Try to minimize the risk. And we're all vaccinated, almost all of us have boosters who can.

MAKO: Yeah I still need to get my booster.

SQEAKY: Yeah you just have the J&J don't you?

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: That's one of the less effective ones against delta. I mean it's still better than not being vaccinated, but...

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Once you get it combined with the Moderna or Pfizer you'll be like-

MAKO: And it's been about six months so it's effectiveness has waned.

SQEAKY: I was speaking with the person when I got my booster, apparently if you got the J&J, the new rules are you can get a booster two months after.

MAKO: That's both great and terrifying.

SQEAKY: You don't you don't have to. I think the- I think right now they're still thinking that if this goes on like this, it's gonna be six month boosters for everybody.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: And if that happens --everyone went to boosters-- it's going to be very safe. As long as you don't use homeopathic boosters. You're staring at me like you have no clue what I'm talking about.

MAKO: Nah I... I mean I can put those words together, I know what you're getting at and I'm just thinking those aren't boosters.

SQEAKY: Well I'm going back to Aaron Rogers.

MAKO: O-kay.

SQEAKY: So professional athlete, star quarterback, I don't know something, he's good at sports I guess. But for some reason people thought that meant that they should listen to him for anything else and uh, he claimed to have been vaccinated- In a press conference he was point blank asked if he was interview- interviewed- he was point blank asked if was vaccinated. The hell was I trying to say? Injected. I was trying to combine injected and vaccinated and I got interviewed. Whatever. And he said yes, and he felt it wasn't a lie because he had used a homeopathic vaccine.

MAKO: O-kay. That's an interesting claim.

SQEAKY: So he got COVID, exposed to a bunch of people, and he contacted Joe Rogan for medical advice.

MAKO: Even Joe Rogan says he's not an expert don't listen to him for medical advice.

SQEAKY: Well that didn't stop Aaron Rogers.

MAKO: Of course not.

SQEAKY: He did the whole ivermectin thing, he was benched for a little while, the status of that changed the last couple days but I don't follow sports too well so I don't know what the current status of it is except to say we definitely shouldn't be listening to athletes for medical advice.

MAKO: Definitely not.

SQEAKY: We- I first heard about it in a Reddit discussion but I verified it. It's been all over the news, so we've got NBC Sports, uh I like the Wikipedia summary, it's just a great no bullshit summary. They even bring up a couple of the names.

SOURCE [11:16] mega wealthy athlete skips vaccine, gets covid then claims he is the victim -https://old.reddit.com/r/vaxxhappened/comments/qnnn7j/antivaxxer_quarterback_is_just_an_asshat/

SOURCE [11:21] Peers pan Aaron Rodgers for his lies - https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2021/11/07/terry-bradshaw-unloads-on-aaron-rodgers-you-lied-to-everyone/

SOURCE [11:27] Wikipedia has a great no bullshit summary -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Rodgers

*Sqeaky laughs and sighs*

SQEAKY: They call him Karen Rogers or Throw Rogan.

MAKO: Interesting names.

SQEAKY: What?! He's... he's just taken Joe Rogan's advice but he can throw the ball, so, yeah. Anyway. And then there's also New York Post, they're not a great news source but they have a link to the video and...

SOURCE [11:47] Sort of tabloidy but this round out the three sources - https://nypost.com/2021/11/05/aaron-rodgers-furious-over-vaccination-drama/

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: Sources I got three different links to Reuters for the different regions for COVID numbers. Was there anything else we wanted to discuss there? Anything you have on COVID?

MAKO: Not particularly.

SQEAKY: Alright, on to Annunaki?

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Fun times.

*Guitar riff*

*Keyboard clicking sounds*

MAKO: Hehehe, Star Citizen go brr.

*Crane sounds, then crashing and breaking*

MAKO: Not again!

SQEAKY THE ANNUNAKI: Human. Assume the anal probe position.

MAKO: What the shit Sqeaky? Who gave you a crane?

*Computer breaks*

SQEAKY: Did you feel like you were being abducted by aliens?

MAKO: I swear to Zeus...

SQEAKY: Well if you don't feel abducted we can't use that as research.

MAKO: You destroyed my computer.

SQEAKY: Eh. You can get a new better one custom made at abkkustomz.com.

MAKO: Is that abk-kustomz.com?

SQEAKY: Sure is! I know some of the crew over there, they're smart and eager to please.

MAKO: Wait wait wait- How will I afford a computer after paying for a new roof.

*More breaking sounds*

SQEAKY: You should use code "evidence". You'll get ten percent off your new custom computer.

SPONSOR [12:55] Buy a custom computer and 10% with code "Evidence" from ABK Kustomz - https://www.abk-kustomz.com

MAKO: But a new roof is in the thousands!

SQEAKY: Oh- I still have this crane. Let me put that roof back on.

*Crane backing up, more crushing noises and objects falling*

MAKO: You can't just-

SQEAKY: Here, you can hold it on with this roll of duct tape.

*Duck tape sounds*

*Mako sighs*

MAKO: Thanks. Now get out.

SQEAKY: Okay!

*Crane reversing into the distance*

MAKO: I need to- I need another moment to mentally prepare for this transition.

*Duck tape again*

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: So, ancient aliens and Annunaki.

MAKO: Yup.

SQEAKY: I know there's a subtle distinction between these two things on a sort of a... subcategory of the other or...

MAKO: Annunaki is a subcategory of ancient aliens, yes.

SQEAKY: And then that's both tangentially related to the concept of ancient astronauts which is just-

MAKO: Uh, near as I can tell, ancient astronauts and ancient aliens are pretty much synonymous.

SQEAKY: When I've been talking to people they uh... they've been reserving the ancient astronaut label for the people, the humans as opposed to the extraterrestrial component of it. But it is always related to extraterrestrials.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: I guess on that, try to look at the... look at this from the outside in. The first thing we tried to do was get a... get an idea of what these people believe.

MAKO: Yeah. We want to have something that- as close as we can get to a concrete claim for us to look at the possibility of, to investigate, see if we can gather any evidence for.

SQEAKY: Yeah so I started some discussions on Reddit. Nothing major or amazing, but I did ask what people believed, what good sources were. We spoke with someone who has a close emotional tie to someone who fervently believes in Annunaki and asked them what this person believes. I mean there are some themes, but in terms of getting at truth there's no consistency.

SOURCE [14:16] - Reddit conversation to attempt to establish what they believe - https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/qkl6pi/anybody_have_any_good_sources_on_annunaki_or/

MAKO: Yeah not really.

SQEAKY: So uh, some of the themes are --like so many conspiracy theories-- do your own research, don't trust experts and scientists.

MAKO: Oh yeah you get a comment where somebody was like make sure they're vetted.

SQEAKY: Yeah make sure that whatever the person is saying is vetted and I'm like vetted by who and they're like make sure-

MAKO: The author...

SQEAKY: -the author vets it.

MAKO: It's like yeah.

SQEAKY: It's like well...

MAKO: They can just say that like how is that vetting?

SQEAKY: Yeah it's... well, this person probably trusts Zachariah Sitchin...

MAKO: They're... Well- No okay. If I were to give them the benefit of the doubt, they were probably saying something along the lines of "Make sure your source shows their work" and...

SQEAKY: They're from the conspiracy theory subreddit, that's... that's...

MAKO: Like I said-

SQEAKY: That's too much credit.

MAKO: That's maximum giving them the benefit of the doubt.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: Even then like these people are in a position where I have to question whether or not they know what showing your work in this looks like.

*Sqeaky laughs*

SQEAKY: They do like to do things like disregard experts, particularly on what hieroglyphics or ancient Sumerian writings mean.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: We mentioned it in our previous episode, Deep Space Deep Dive.

SOURCE [15:34] Deep Space Deep Dive - https://dysevidentia.transistor.fm/episodes/deep-space-deep-dive

MAKO: Where we touched on Annunaki before.

SQEAKY: There's uh, complete translations of all of the examples of Sumerian writing that we have for example. 'Cause so many of these beliefs are that aliens visited ancient Sumeria and gave these people something.

MAKO: Not just Sumeria but y'know other ancient civilizations like Egyptians as well.

SQEAKY: So when somebody comes along and then translates and says "I've retranslated this tablet and said aliens showed up and interbred with humans" that's uh, that's some bullshit.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: If we've already translated that tablet as like, a leger for corn trading or whatever.

MAKO: In the case of...

*Mako snorts*

MAKO: Sitchin, he was trying to make these claims while having no background in Sumerian texts that we were able to find.

SQEAKY: I mean, that's very generous implying that.

MAKO: Well that much is- We can't say for sure that he didn't pick up a textbook at some point and try to teach himself Sumerian.

SQEAKY: Okay, I st- that's fair. I'm just imagining a guy back in the 60s and 70s and 80s getting a whole bunch of Sumerian tablets mailed to him and decoding them from scratch at home.

MAKO: Yeah.

*Sqeaky laughs*

SQEAKY: I highly doubt this happened but it's possible I guess.

MAKO: Regardless how the skill did or did not form, the other experts who do make a regular job of translating Sumerian texts all disagreed with him.

SQEAKY: And more with the disagreeing. Stepping away from Sitchin. The different members of the community believe different things.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: And I asked the skeptic subreddit as well, and the skeptic subreddit seemed to be under the impression that a lot of people believe the History channel's Ancient Aliens series. Pretty much nobody does, even in the conspiracy theory groups. Everyone was panning that over there too because it's so obviously bullshit. And I tried watching an episode. They're all up on YouTube now.

SOURCE [16:58] - Doesn’t really match what most skeptics think they believe - https://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/comments/qkl5j2/anybody_have_any_good_sources_on_annunaki_or/

MAKO: Regrettably.

SQEAKY: Good job History channel, continuing to destroy your credibility for likes. But uh, they're more mixed when it comes to books and more in depth content. Even though all the conspiracy theorists appear to dislike the History channel content. Some of them say Sitchin is a good source, some of them say it's not. Some of them say specifically Chariot of the Gods is a good source, some say it's not. They're all suggesting that you do your own research and vet it and that you're not relying on anyone else's research and vetting ignoring how that's really hard or impossible. And none of the conspiracy theory people seem to go to academia.

MAKO: No.

SQEAKY: So that's problematic.

MAKO: Not that we were able to see anyway.

SQEAKY: So yeah, so our listener who uh, has that connection with someone. He did have some very specific beliefs that this person, that this ancient alien believer subscribed to.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: I know you did some more research on these, but he was a big believer that scientists are lying, mu- that- I can't say this without laughing. And this is a common thread, this is not just this one person. Lots of people believe that...

MAKO: Oh yeah.

SQEAKY: ...humans couldn't do it, whatever it is. Build some monument-

MAKO: People have it in their heads that these are ancient peoples with very very limited means and they couldn't really do anything extravagant or marvelous as a result of their limitations.

SQEAKY: And depending how we define marvelous that might be true, right. You're not gonna see any microchips or electrical lights before there's infrastructure to make electricity, so... yeah you can still do marvelous things but it's going to be on the order of fantastic stoneworks and woodworks, metalworks.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: But you're not going to see a rocketship or a spaceship so these people dig around for evidence of rocket ships and try to make it seem like clearly someone else intervened. Another belief was that the Baghdad Battery- which we've talked about that before.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Right, we're not even certain it was a battery, and if it was it was likely just used for electroplating.

MAKO: So actually I had- Do you want me to cover that in detail right now? 'Cause I did actively research that one.

SQEAKY: Okay. So, let's... let's save that for just a moment.

MAKO: Sure.

SQEAKY: But, let's go ov- let's finish up the beliefs.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: This person believes that the Baghdad Battery was used for light.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Out of hand that's ridiculous.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: Because that requires infrastructure making LEDs or light bulbs, that requires knowledge of vacuums, glass-blowing, fancy wires that are either tungsten or bamboo, none of that existed in ancient Egypt. Person claims lasers were used to cut blocks because that's ridiculous also. We see tool marks, right we see like...

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: ...lines where saws were used. This person believes that the Annunaki, this group of ancient aliens came to Earth to mine gold. Stupid for a whole bunch of reasons that we'll cover I'm sure.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: And this person picks on little words like Kingship or various ancient god beliefs to try and insert a powerful extraterrestrial entity and say this was God. And this was one person. And every person who believes these things is going to believe something slightly different, so trying to approach it is going to be very difficult. So what you should do is get Mako to research it for you.

MAKO: Oh my god.

*Sqeaky laughs*

SQEAKY: Sorry sorry. You did do the bulk of the research for this next segment though.

MAKO: Yes I did. And yeah, I did focus my research on these specific claims. And there is more to the whole Annunaki ancient aliens thing than we could cover in one episode. Probably more than we could cover in ten episodes. I did focus my research on the claims that are being made by this one specific person. And there is a lot to ancient aliens and Annunaki so... like more than there- we would be able to cover in even ten episodes, we're probably not going to do ten episodes on all of this, but yeah we need to focus somewhere and I decided to focus on the claims if this individual person.

SQEAKY: We discussed this earlier and you didn't like this analogy, or this- whatever. I pointed out how easy it is to make up bullshit...

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: ...and how hard it is to debunk bullshit.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: People can make bullshit literally faster than we can just talk about it. So as soon as we make ten episodes, there'll be ten more episodes worth of content.

MAKO: Well... Okay. That is both awesome and terrible. Because if they feel they need to make up new bullshit then that means they are moving the goalposts, they are acknowledging what we are saying and they're moving the goalposts on our account.

SQEAKY: Oh that would be pretty awesome. I was just thinking they're making bullshit because that's how they make money.

MAKO: Well some of them do, yes. I imagine most of the people we got feedback from on Reddit are not making money off of this.

SQEAKY: That's probably true, but they're making bullshit for their own reasons a lot of them.

MAKO: They just feel it's correct. That's how these things usually go.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: I'm glad they're trying to be correct. At least they're wrong honestly.

MAKO: Regrettably.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: So, what topics... What topics do we have? Where do we want to start for this?

MAKO: Okay, so the one that you particularly picked on. The Great Pyramid is one place where I did focus and the specific claim that humans could not have made them.

SQEAKY: But they're so big, of course humans couldn't make them.

MAKO: Well... So the size of the pyramids is one part of the claim. The size of the stones is another part of the claim.

SQEAKY: They're so precisely cut. Humans couldn't ever do that. We can't do it today!

MAKO: Well, that's just false.

*Sqeaky laughs hysterically*

MAKO: That particular claim, there isn't much research necessary for that one because if you just look at the pyramids, you would tell they're not cleanly cut.

SQEAKY: Yeah. It's so good, sorry.

MAKO: But okay okay. If you want to give them benefit of the doubt, they can just say "Oh but weathering". Okay sure, that does happen. And then you look at the interior of the pyramids which is far far far less subjected to weathering and you still have tons and tons of imperfections.

SQEAKY: This is gonna come up later, but I love it when the alien proponent takes a piece of paper or razor blade and fails to slide it between two solid pieces of stone they're like "Look it doesn't fit!" And I'm like that wouldn't work with two bricks laid on top of each other either. Like, they're gonna be touching each other. You can't fit a solid object in there and they're like "This is an example of how precise it is" and then you see the gap. You could stick a pencil in you're like argh.

MAKO: Yeah you move it like two inches over and there's the gap and it slides in just easy.

*Mako laughs*

SQEAKY: Yeah it's- These examples of everything is so precise, it's so bullshit.

MAKO: Yeah.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: Sorry I'm- But yeah these are some of the claims that I presume you're going to refute.

MAKO: Well specifically focusing on what humans could and could not have done. And I did start --'cause personally I found it more interesting-- I did start with some explanations that are not super widely accepted about how this could have been done, one of them is definitely more outlandish than the other but it came up when we were watching Ancient Aliens Debunked, the spiral ramp theory.

SQEAKY: Yeah. Was that one of the good ones or is that a bad one?

MAKO: That is a really good one.

SQEAKY: Oh cool. For the listener, we did find this documentary that was suggested by a Redditor named UltimateFrog and he suggested we watched this Ancient Aliens Debunked, which was a pretty good source. They cited most of their sources, we think they could do better there. Uh and they also did go out on a limb for some weird stuff. It's clear that guy wanted to be a believer, but when he did his research he dug in and found not just places where these ancient alien researchers were wrong, but where they systematically lied.

SOURCE [23:38] Ancient Aliens Debunked - https://www.ancientaliensdebunked.com/

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: And that really tears the foundation out of all of this. Anyone pushing alien aliens falls into two categories: Duped believer or systematic lying propheteer.

MAKO: Pretty much.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: So this guy, he is a French researcher. I know it's- The first part is Jean-Pierre but I don't know how to pronounce the last name here.

SQEAKY: Uh, Houdin?

MAKO: Houdin, maybe.

SQEAKY: It's like Houdini without the "i". But Houdini was American-Italian.

MAKO: It still-

SQEAKY: This is-

MAKO: -sounds like a little bit too English, I don't know.

SQEAKY: We'll issue a correction next episode, we're going with Hoe-den.

MAKO, laughing: No.

MAKO: Okay, his theory is not really mainstream but of all the non-mainstream theories it is easily the best and depending on what additional surveys and information is gathered on the pyramids may- has a real chance at becoming the correct theory.

SOURCE [24:43] The Khufu Pyramid Revealed - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGqfdXkAQMk

SQEAKY: So he's making predictions and they're falsifiable.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: Woah! Amazing!

MAKO: Yeah, the big problem to falsifying his claims though is the Egyptian government's red tape. He needs to get approval to go on-site and he's not getting it.

SQEAKY: Why would the Egyptian government ever be worried about European powers coming in and screwing around with the Pyramids.

MAKO: Yeah pretty much.

*Sqeaky sighs*

MAKO: It's unfortunate. I- I think this is something that is worthwhile to test, but-

SQEAKY: Sorry-

MAKO: -it is what it is.

SQEAKY: -I keep distracting you but you're saying his his theories his-

MAKO: So he believes that a really strong explanation for how they moved the stones in position as they were constructing the pyramid was through a series of internal ramps --that we can't see from the outside, hence internal-- and they would go to a corner and then they would rotate the stone and then resume sliding it along that ramp.

SQEAKY: So each ramp is sort of aligned with one of the four outer faces of the pyramid.

MAKO: Yes. At approximately a seven percent grade.

SQEAKY: That's uh... a fairly gentle upward slope which makes sense considering these are big heavy stone blocks they're moving.

MAKO: Yes. So, he also theorized that the Grand Gallery, it has no real architectural and near as I can tell no actual ceremonial purpose inside the pyramid.

SQEAKY: Is the Grand Gallery just a big room in the pyramid?

MAKO: Yeah it's a big room that's right next to the King's Chamber.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: And I mean we now have a modern staircase in the Grand Gallery so people can like move around easily in it but it just seems largely purposeless and he believes that the reason it's there was to provide a counterweight for another lift opposite of it along the edge of the pyramid.

SQEAKY: Sort of as a channel connecting up to the other side where you could of put ropes are something through.

MAKO: Ropes and a lift and this lift would be used to bring the sixty ton granite blocks that are used for the ceiling of the King's Chamber.

SQEAKY: Oh I see. So you could carry through this other Grand Gallery and the tunnel attached to it, you could bring up a bunch of smaller weights, bring them up to the top-

MAKO: No the rocks would be brought up from the opposite side, the edge of the pyramid. The Grand Gallery is just the location for the counterweight.

SQEAKY: Well the the... what I'm trying to say is uh... the counterweight. You have to get the counterweight up to the top, so you'd carry some small rocks up there, put that in some sort of sled or something, slide that down into the Grand Gallery... Maybe I'm deeply confused. Go ahead and keep going, maybe it'll make sense to me.

MAKO: The way that their artist's renditions made it appear is it was a large wooden contraption that were- had- was attached to ropes on the top side of the pyramid that was still under construction and then there was another sled that was on the edge of the pyramid.

SQEAKY: Okay. Do-

MAKO: So it just made it easier so people with far fewer workers could pull on the sled in order to lift it up with the counterweight's help. And the Grand Gallery itself was where the counterweight would slide over.

SQEAKY: Oh okay so that big whole hallway is the Grand Gallery.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: Ah. That makes sense now, okay. So at the top of the Grand Gallery you'd start with some weight, you'd throw some rope down into the ramp area where you're pulling the things up, you'd tie these two things together and presumably you have people pushing on the rock to lift it and pulling or pushing on this big wooden sled thing, maybe putting some weight on it to pull that down, and then moving a big sixty ton granite block up into the pyramid is possible.

MAKO: When you have a counterweight, where you're putting like forty tons onto something-

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: -you're eliminating two-thirds of the weight of this giant prohibitive stone.

SQEAKY: Okay and then you could bring the counterweight up in pieces- or the counterweight could even be the workers couldn't it? You could have a bunch of workers on this sled.

MAKO: They presumed that they used a large amount of smaller stones in the counterweight.

SQEAKY: Okay that makes sense. I follow now.

MAKO: Yeah, so but okay. That's one way... and it's not really falsifiable because we can't really talk to an Egyptian and ask them directly "Why is this Grand Gallery here?" At least not without time travel, unfortunately. But the better evidence for his theory is because of the internal ramps, he believes that those internal ramps are largely still there. At certain points of the ramps where they reached the corners, they were walled off and blocked but the uh, the primary parts of the ramps along the edges would still be there. And unfortunately again he's not able to go in and actually investigate that, he hasn't gotten permission from the Egyptian government and may never unfortunately, but he did conduct some micro-gravimetric scans.

SOURCE [28:52] Micro-gravimetric scans - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_gradiometry

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY from the future: Correction time. We found another issue when we were doing our editing and fact-checking everything we said. Jean-Pierre Houdin was not the person who performed the gravimetric scans. That was a survey team looking for a secret chamber in 1986. However, the survey team did produce that picture with spirals that look like internal ramps. But for the rest of this discussion, when we say he did it, that survey team did it.

*Guitar riff*

MAKO: And I actually had to look this up on Wikipedia to understand what exactly this meant.

SQEAKY: Is this the thing where you test how strong gravity is right beneath your feet?

MAKO: It's not necessarily directly beneath your feet but yeah, you're testing the small changes of gravity in an area.

SQEAKY: So he held this tool that does this measurement over different parts of the pyramid to see how thick the pyramid was based on how much it's gravity changed?

MAKO: Something along those lines. I don't know-

SQEAKY: Wow.

MAKO: -if he was actually on foot, I don't know-

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: -the specific instrument he used, but he did create a map of the changes in gravity over the area of the pyramid and the scan did show areas of less mass that coincide almost perfectly with where he predicts internal ramps are.

SQEAKY: So these ramps would have hollow areas because you don't want to be building y'know pyramid walls on a seven degree grade.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: So you could detect this by an absence of gravity corresponding to the shape of the ramp.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: So that implies that there's hollow...

MAKO: Empty spaces along the stretches of these internal ramps in the pyramid that have been walled off.

SQEAKY: Are these uh... gravimetric scans precise enough that we get a picture or an image out of it?

MAKO: Uh yes. And one of my sources, the YouTube source, actually shows you the image that they produce from the scan.

SQEAKY: Well that's amazing.

*Sqeaky starts typing*

SQEAKY: Let me go take a look at that and we'll...

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Oh here we go they got a whole bunch of computer shit going on at forty-four minutes in. There we go, they're building up a 3D model of it. Y'know what this looks like? This looks really fuckin' boring.

*Mako laughs*

SQEAKY: Yeah these fuckers don't talk about aliens, they're not flashing bright lights at us, they have computers models of like stone blocks, like they're seriously busting out some... like CAD lookin' Fusion 360 software where it's like "And this is how much weight is on this corner of the stone block." Ok- Oh wow yeah look at that!

SOURCE [31:05] A side of the pyramid density scan possibly revealing a ramp - https://hdbui.blogspot.com/2010/05/density-imaging-of-cheops-pyramid-3d.html

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: I could easily see how that could be anomalies from the scanning process, whatever that looks like. Or I could see how that is an accurate representation of what's going on internally. And you've already vetted this source?

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: And I trust you so if you say that's likely to be a ramp I'll trust you there.

MAKO: Well okay. I'm not going to go so far as to say it's likely to be a ramp, like you said it could be anomalies but this is, in my opinion, actionable evidence.

SQEAKY: I would agree. It's not proof, but it's evidence.

MAKO: Yeah. And yeah, actionable at that. Like the- I don't-

SQEAKY: Like you could do something based on this.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: You could go digging for ramps and make-

MAKO: Even if the Egyptian government doesn't want specifically him to go in onto the site, having some team that knows what they're looking for to go in there and investigate this lead is in my opinion worthwhile.

SQEAKY: He could send along equipment or instructions and say hey, do X, Y, and Z and we'll learn something.

MAKO: Yeah. All of these things, the counterweight system, the internal ramp, and moving stones along these kinds of grades, these are readily doable for Egyptians at the time. And this is... So for a lot of other pyramids --quickly covering the the mainstream understanding-- is that a lot of these pyramids are constructed simply using ramps. Like exterior ramps that are just built to the height that is necessary to build a pyramid as high as it needs to go. And the reason that this is believed is because there is very strong evidence that other pyramids are built this way. But the Great Pyramid, that was made for Khufu, is much much larger and- I like, I even saw a comment from one person who was like "Yeah, be very dubious of any theory that tries to explain just the Great Pyramid and not any others" and I'm here thinking hold on, when you're talking about construction at different scales you're often going to be confronted with different problems so they're going to need different solutions. I mean certain things are still going to be there. Like we have every reason to believe they're still using sleds.

SQEAKY: Yeah carving Mount Rushmore is different than carving something in your high school art class.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: So the... the same principles might be at work where you- you're carving, but different tools are going to be used at different scales.

MAKO: So if you're making a pyramid that has say a thirty degree inclination and it only goes up maybe a hundred feet, you're not going to need a whole lot of ramp material.

SQEAKY: That's still a big ass structure though.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: A hundred feet tall, that's like a ten story building. But a thirty degree ramp, you're right. You could just cover it in dirt and then pull yourself up to the top.

MAKO: The Great Pyramid, I don't know exactly what the slope is, I wanna say it's closer to forty-five and it is like a hundred-and-forty meters.

SQEAKY: So in freedom units, that's like... that's like four-hundred-fifty feet?

MAKO: Something like that.

SQEAKY: Yeah okay.

MAKO: It is absolutely gigantic. And people have estimated if the- the Egyptians were to actually make a normal ramp like constructing these other smaller pyramids, they would actually require more material than what it took for the pyramid to be made in the first place. So, we can't just blindly apply the ramps... the normal ramp theory to the Great Pyramid. And that's where these conspiracy theories come from and these alternative theories come from is attempting to explain a few missing details for engineering at this scale.

*Sqeaky starts typing*

SQEAKY: Give me just a second.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Okay I just went ahead and pulled up some numbers on height 'cause I will still like stimied 'cause you're still talking about scale and like the different construction methods. According to the Wikipedia, the Great Pyramid is forty-hundred-and-eighty-one feet tall, or a hundred-and-forty-six meters.

SOURCE [34:25] Pyramid height on Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Okay. We're sitting in Omaha right now. Not a big city, there's like a million people who live here so we're not like a small rural town either. And we have a few skyscrapers. The two tallest in town are one, First National Center, is a forty-five story building and comes in at six-hundred-thirty-four feet, a couple feet taller than the pyramid. But the second tallest building is Woodmen Tower. I actually worked in Woodmen Tower for a little while 'cause I worked for Woodmen of America. It's thirty floors and it's four-hundred-seventy-eight feet tall.

SOURCE [34:53] Omaha “skyscrapers” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_Omaha,_Nebraska

SQEAKY: And you can see it from anywhere in town. You can be literally five miles away, look at the correct places on the horizon, and see the word "Woodmen" on top of it.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: So the Great Pyramid is three feet taller than Woodmen Tower, and we're saying nah, nah, we're going to use the same construction process on that using the smaller, the smaller pyramid that might be the size of my house. Clearly something different's gonna happen.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: That's just expected. Yeah, when I saw that comment from that other person I was just like yeah no you, different scales require different solutions. You're not acknowledging that so... Okay just go away.

SQEAKY: Okay I'm gonna add these two Wikipedia entries to our sources.

*Sqeaky types*

SQEAKY: Omaha "skyscrapers" with scare quotes. Okay, sorry for all that noise.

MAKO: Mhm. Okay so, the next theory is one that is... It's largely dismissed. And, only reason I bring it up is because specifically the claim humans couldn't have done it. This theory is something that I do not think the Egyptians did do. There is a huge amount of complexity involved with it but technically the technology was available in ancient Egyptian times to make it happen. It is technically possible. So, the- just that mandatory disclaimer out of the way, it's possible but outrageously unlikely because of how complicated it is. There's another guy named Chris Mace-y, Massey? Mace-y? Massey?

SQEAKY: I don't know that's weird. Let's go with Muh-sigh.

MAKO: Sure.

SQEAKY: We're gonna get corrections, let's go hard.

MAKO: O-kay.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: Hate this plan but it is what it is. Okay, so he believes that the ancient Egyptians constructed the pyramids using water.

SQEAKY: Water exists? That's plausible so far.

*Mako laughs*

MAKO: I can see the question mark. So this was a theory that was popularized a few years ago and made a couple of smallish rounds in news and then kinda went away entirely and he's putting forth the idea that they would carve out these stones, they'd leave them in the quarry, they would create a channel from the quarry to the Nile, and they would create air-filled animal skins, seal them up, they would attack them to the blocks, wait for the Nile to flood which would lift these blocks off of the ground in the water and then they would- huge trains of these blocks like attached to beasts of burden, they would guide them down along the bank over to the Great Pyramid or at least to another on channel in the uh, in the Grand Cosway I think is what it's called that goes up to the Great Pyramid. He postulates that this was originally used for just a channel of water to move these blocks after removing it from the quarry, up the river to this Cosway, to the Pyramid and then there was a kinda like with channel locks, there would be wooden locks for controlling water flow and a water shoot going up the side of the pyramid and they would just carefully place these blocks into these locks and then let buoyancy lift the blocks up to the top of the pyramid.

SOURCE [37:38] Chris Massey's theory on how the great pyramid of khufu was built - https://engineering-society.com/chris-masseys-theory-on-how-the-great-pyramid-of-khufu-was-built/

SQEAKY: It sounds easier to signal aliens.

*Mako laughs*

SQEAKY: I mean I get what you're saying, but the physics of all this, there's a big wooden structure that's on the side of this thing, you're talking about a wooden structure that would be water tight for four-hundred fuckin' feet high in the air, a hundred-forty meters, that's uh...

MAKO: Slight correction. The door lock would be wooden, but the main shoot itself would be stone.

SQEAKY: Oh so it's like a channel built into the side of the pyramid?

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Is there any physical evidence to support that?

MAKO: No.

SQEAKY: So it doesn't violate physics, but there's not a lot of evidence for it.

MAKO: Correct.

SQEAKY: Okay. You did caveat and say that that was how it worked the whole time and even then- that might be partially correct. Maybe they attached animal skins and wooden rafts to these things at the quarry, waited for the Nile to flood, moved them in closer-

MAKO: We do-

SQEAKY: -and then moved it up on internal ramps.

MAKO: We do know that they did move some stones by boat along the Nile.

SQEAKY: We do have pictures of that don't we? Or pictograms where they've drawn it in like hieroglyphics and...

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: We know that that is a thing that they did do, but engineering complicated locks that move up the largest structure of the ancient world, that's something else entirely.

SQEAKY: Well again it was the largest thing at the time. No matter how they did it, it was going to be impressive.

MAKO: Yeah. They do have a video that a couple of other things that talks about this. They do have a video where they try to explain the step-by-step process of constructing a pyramid using this technique and that was pretty informative and towards the tail end of the video they briefly cover high-level details for things they consider evidence for this theory. I don't remember all of them. I do remember there was uh, what appeared to be flood damage near the bottom of the pyramid and this would support the idea but like...

SOURCE [38:57] Building the Pyramids of Egypt ...a detailed step by step guide - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1y8N0ePuF8

SQEAKY: That also could be flooding.

MAKO: Yeah, 4,000 years, there's probably going to be some flooding, you're going to experience water damage, but also I tried to look up other things that corroborate that, I couldn't really find any.

SQEAKY: Corroborate the flood claim or corroborate them using water this way.

MAKO: That there was flood damage there.

SQEAKY: I see.

MAKO: Yeah 'cause I wanted to get some other context 'cause they were clearly presenting it through their own lens and if there was flood damage I wanted to see that through a more neutral lens if it were true and I couldn't find that.

SQEAKY: Okay, that makes sense.

MAKO: Yeah. So I did also find a research paper where they absolutely did confirm a canal extension that connected the Aswan quarry to the Nile, so that's neat. They were doing something with water and their quarry. The simple explanation is just what was depicted in the hieroglyphs where they were moving stone on a boat but I dunno it's something that vaguely supports this theory.

SOURCE [39:55] Canal extension confirmed by geophysical surveys - https://www.academia.edu/10374166/CANAL_EXTENSION_CONFIRMED_BY_GEOPHYSICAL_SURVEYS_ASWAN_OBELISK_QUARRY_ASWAN_EGYPT

SQEAKY: So this all comes back to the central idea that these people weren't dumb, they just didn't have the benefit of all the- all of the technology and all of the engineering we already have.

MAKO: Yeah, they were quite smart.

SQEAKY: They devised a means of moving rocks, we know they floated rocks down rivers using technology, not that boats and animal skins are super high tech, but it's high tech enough to move a big chunk of rock and then they custom built some system, likely some sort of ramps with counterweights and whatnot to get these rocks up onto the pyramid.

MAKO: Especially considering that they managed to do all of these things when the strongest metal they had available to them was copper.

SQEAKY: That's pretty good.

MAKO: It was pretty impressive. They were limited by materials mostly. Like they did really well for what they had, and if they had more they would've done more. I mean it's again like you said, it's not that they were stupid.

SQEAKY: Alright so these other sources you have though. Let's just hit those URLs real quick.

MAKO: Yep. Oh, there- Okay so one other source that does talk about the more traditional, the mainstream belief of how these things were constructed- sorry, the pyramids were constructed. We did find a ramp that was- had some really interesting construction. It was at the stone quarry, Hatnub, Hat-nib? I dunno. Smooth ramp flanked by staircases and post holes.

SOURCE [41:19] This 4,500-Year-Old Ramp Contraption May Have Been Used to Build Egypt's Great Pyramid - https://www.livescience.com/63978-great-pyramid-ramp-discovered.html

SQEAKY: So things you could stick like a wooden beam into and then...

MAKO: Wrap some rope around it and then have people on the stairs pull up a sled.

SQEAKY: That's pretty- That's pretty clever. Give people a good high traction surface to work with like stairs.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Pull rocks up a smooth thing.

MAKO: And they say using this they could handle slopes of twenty percent. That's a very aggressive slope.

SQEAKY: That's rough. I don't like doing that on my bike.

MAKO: Yeah. And then even better, the tools that were recovered from the site where this ramp was located had the inscription of Khufu. So we do believe that this ramp w- existed and was used at the same time of the great period- Great Pyramid's construction.

SQEAKY: So again a bunch of corroborating evidence. Not hard proof, but the body of evidence is painting a picture.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: But this was a quarry so this was a tech that was used to take stone out of the quarry but it could have been applied in other places. Probably not to the scale of putting stones on top of the Great Pyramid, that's just- again the amount of material required is more than the pyramid itself to create that ramp but this is a tech that could be used in conjunction with other things to help bridge that gap.

SQEAKY: Okay. So it seems like the big mystery is- 'Cause we have confirmed some things. They definitely used these ramps to get the stones out of the quarry or up this one incline. They definitely used water to float some of the rocks out. We know how they did some of this. The big mystery is still how did they get the rocks on top of the pyramid-

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: -and we have ideas for that but no confirmed definitive stuff.

MAKO: Based on my research, the strongest theory I think is the internal ramp hypothesis.

SQEAKY: Seems good. So, some of your citations here. The ramp contraption you got from- you've got a- you have a link to LiveScience. For some of the more conventional methods you have a... a link to the BBC and they have an article about the Great Pyramids.

SOURCE [43:00] Building the Great Pyramid - https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/great_pyramid_01.shtml

SQEAKY: You've got a link to a paper at academia.edu. engineeringsociety.com describing Chris Massey's theory about the channel locks.

MAKO: Yep. And a YouTube video describing it as well.

SQEAKY: Okay. There's that.

MAKO: More approachable that way.

SQEAKY: You also have a Wikipedia link to micro-gravimetric scans and the BBC's description of Jean-Pierre How-den's- Can't say it with a straight face.

MAKO: Okay.

SQEAKY: With Jean-Pierre Houdin's non-mainstream internal ramp theory. Okay, that's a bunch of good sources for this.

MAKO: Ye.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: When point black- Point blank asked if he had been vaccinated- What, what did I say?

MAKO: Point black.

SQEAKY: Yeah it's what happens when you leave the "n" out of point blank. What?!

MAKO: Okay.

SQEAKY: I accidentally said a color, oops. Get a box of Crayola.

MAKO: Like right now? Like go get one?

*Guitar riff*

MAKO: So the next broad claim that I started researching right after that is the notion that the stones for the great pyramids were cut with lasers.

SQEAKY: Which is obviously true.

MAKO: Fuck off.

*Sqeaky laughs*

*Mako sighs*

MAKO: So, now we... We pretty much know that they were quarried. So there is kind of a smoking gun so to speak for this particular claim, rather that these stones were quarried out of the ground.

SQEAKY: I mean, we have spots where they were carved out of the ground and probably some that are halfway carved, right?

MAKO: Eh, pretty much.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: We have... We have an obelisk. It is... it is pretty popular. An obelisk that is still attached to the ground and I'll even show you this image right here.

SQEAKY: But it's busted?

MAKO: Yeah so we believe that it was abandoned because of this fracture. The fracture occurred at some point while it was still being quarried and they were like "Well we can't use this obelisk anymore."

SOURCE [44:40] Obelisk making technology in ancient egypt - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obelisk_making_technology_in_ancient_Egypt

SQEAKY: So we'll be sure to link to this.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: There's a Wikipedia picture, right? But imagine it looks like a dick, and the tip has been broken. A broken dick. It looks like a broken dick.

MAKO: It- I could not describe it that way. I do not understand why you uh...

SQEAKY: Am I wrong?

MAKO: A little bit?

SQEAKY: I mean it's big. But it clearly has a tip.

MAKO: Okay, moving on.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: We're just- We're moving the fuck on. So this is... What is it actually called...

*Mako types*

SQEAKY: I remember this. This does have a real name.

MAKO: Yes it does.

SQEAKY: Is it the Aswan Obelisk?

MAKO: That sounds correct.

SQEAKY: I'm sure we'll get corrections on our pronunciation there too so why don't we call it Ass-one.

MAKO: I'll- Just the Wikipedia article is "Unfinished obelisk".

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: Yup. And it's in the Aswan quarry. Okay, so that is pretty much a smoking gun for how old this works. They clearly were carving out the stone around the obelisk and they were gonna start carving the stone underneath it as well until it was detached and then they'd smooth it out and we're very confident this is just how they got the stone out of the ground. Exactly how they removed the stone... okay there's a bit less agreement there, there is the belief that it was just struck repeatedly by many many workers with other stones until they just chipped the stone off gradually until they got it into the shape they wanted. And if you look at the picture again of the obelisk itself, it definitely seems to have some marks that make you think that that is possible.

SQEAKY: That they were striking it repeatedly?

MAKO: Yeah, those indentations that they have.

SQEAKY: Yeah definitely looks like it's been worked or mu- I don't want to say machined, but if I saw that today I'd presume it was some sort of automatic pounding type situation.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Looks like had happened. Maybe like jackhammered or something.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: But I could just imagine... I could also imagine replacing that effect with a team of a dozen slaves pounding their way at it.

MAKO: Yeah. Copper wouldn't do so great here but there are other things they did manage to work into the workflow using copper. So we know- We have a very good idea that just- that is how that worked. And for making finer cuts- skipping to the bottom of my sources here. Uh for making finer cuts, we do have very high confidence in that they also used slabbing saws they just had a very --this was covered in the Ancient Aliens Debunked-- uh-

SQEAKY: This is those copper tools they were talking about?

MAKO: Yeah and they'd drop grains into the cut and then they would just run the saw back and forth and let the grains themselves do the cutting.

SOURCE [46:53] Ancient Egyptian Stoneworking Tools and Methods - http://www.oocities.org/unforbidden_geology/ancient_egyptian_copper_slabbing_saws.html

SQEAKY: Yeah so for the listener, just imagine a flat piece of metal, any metal works it doesn't matter what the metal is, can probably even get away with plastic if you really wanted to...

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: ...but you'd rub it over a surface and you'd put some sort of abrasive between your saw, your piece of material, whatever it is you're pulling back and forth, and your workpiece, the stone you're cutting, and you just pull and push the sand back and forth because sand has little particles of quartz which is very hard and very durable in it, you wind up abrading a way a portion of the material you're working which is why you could use probably even a wooden beam or something. But I'd imagine you'd use copper 'cause it holds up better and when the copper breaks off, the little bits of copper can help cut too. So you're rubbing this... the flat copper thing edge on the piece of wood and you keep adding more of this fine sand and your fine sand is cutting away and I'd imagine it'd leave you with a very smooth cut after a while.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Yeah 'cause any time I want to smooth something out I use sandpaper.

MAKO: Yeah.

*Sqeaky sighs*

MAKO: So it's pretty apparent early on in my research that this was just how it worked- not lasers. But I kinda wanted to... I was gonna say channel my inner mythbuster, I don't have access to lasers --yet-- but-

SQEAKY: We're workin' on it. We're workin' on it!

MAKO: We are working- Like no joke, we are working on it. But I don't want to actually test this but I did want to do research and like, well if it were a laser could we falsify that? And the answer is kind of, yes. So I did quickly look up the materials used in the Great Pyramid. It is by-and-large limestone. Uh, 5.5 million tons of limestone. 8,000 tons of granite, and half-a-million tons of mortar.

SOURCE [48:25] Great Pyramid of Giza Materials - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza#Materials

SQEAKY: 500M tons of limestone?

MAKO: 5.5 million tons.

SQEAKY: Oh okay okay okay sorry sorry. 5.5 million tons of limestone, 8,000 tons of granite, and how many tons of-

MAKO: Half a million.

SQEAKY: Half a million tons of li- of of of-

MAKO: Of mortar.

SQEAKY: -of mortar.

MAKO: Was used in the construction of the Great Pyramid, yes.

SQEAKY: That's a fuckload. That's like, six million tons of stuff plus some granite.

MAKO: Yes.

*Sqeaky and Mako laugh*

MAKO: Yes it is. Good job.

SQEAKY: I was just- You give me round numbers. It's like why are we measuring the granite? The granite is a rounding error here.

MAKO: Yes and that granite was uh, as far as I'm aware, used almost exclusively on the King's Chamber.

SQEAKY: Is that that one room that they put that as a support members across the top?

MAKO: Yes. That they needed- According to Jean-Pierre Houdin.

SQEAKY: So they have some structural granite but the rest of it is limestone and mortar?

MAKO: The sweeping majority of it is.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: Mortar and limestone.

SQEAKY: Yeah. Lasers wouldn't even be a good tool for cutting this. People who are saying lasers are just speaking out of ignorance.

MAKO: Hold on.

SQEAKY: Oh! Oh!

MAKO: Hold on.

SQEAKY: Oh!

*Mako chuckles*

MAKO: So I did manage to find a research paper from 2004 that was investigating industrial uses for laser stone cutting and they specifically tested it on marble and limestone.

SOURCE [49:34] Structural Analysis of the heat affected zone of marble and limestone tiles cut by CO2 laser - https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.474.9008&rep=rep1&type=pdf

SQEAKY: What happened?

MAKO: Uh, they successfully cut the stone.

SQEAKY: How'd the cuts look? Did they look good or did they look like ass?

MAKO: The short answer is they looked melty.

SQEAKY, laughing: That's just wanted of my new marble countertops.

*Mako laughs*

SQEAKY, laughing: That good melty look.

MAKO: Okay. So yeah I wrote down some notes from this 'cause I actually read the research paper in full. It's a pretty short one, a good easy read.

SQEAKY: What's the URL for that one?

MAKO: Uh this is the citeseerx.ist.psu.edu.

SQEAKY: So citeseer. They're just rehosting another paper. Okay.

MAKO: Sure. So I did write down for the laser nerds out there, this is a CO2 laser, it had a maximum output power of 2.5KW and a wavelength of 10.6 micrometers.

SQEAKY: That's a pretty big one. If you're gonna buy one of those machines from China, you can buy a... a forty watt laser for like 800 bucks. And if you start dropping real money, you can get a kilowatt laser for like ten grand.

MAKO: They did say this was for industrial purposes. I quoted a particular section of this: Laser cutting involves a thermal process that consists of rapid and localized heating of the stone with the formation of a blue colored plasma at energy densities of about ten to the seventh watts per square centimeter in a melt shearing process.

SQEAKY: So, for perspective, watts. Okay. Ten to the seventh watts, that's uh.... Ten million watts? Sixty watt light bulbs, that's a typical incandescent light bulb to like light up one room. If I'm doing my math right that's like 160, 170,000 sixty watt light bulbs, but you're cramming all of that down into the size of one fingernail? Yeah, that would obviously melt stone.

MAKO: That might seem super obvious to you, me, and most of the listeners quite honestly, but I wanted to specifically quote this section because it establishes that heat being applied to the stone causing it to melt and then to uh...

SQEAKY: Separate? To cut?

MAKO: I was gonna say like kinda to aerosolize but yeah it just it goes through changes of the state of matter in order to remove it and seperate the stone into two seperate pieces.

SQEAKY: So like, you're saying if you laser cut some rock you don't want to breathe that?

MAKO: Probably not, no. Definitely not.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: Okay.

SQEAKY: Ruined my weekend plans.

MAKO: So, there is heat related damage along the cut edges of the stone. Go figure.

*Sqeaky laughs*

SQEAKY: We cut the stone with heat. It... it got warm. Oops. Okay, yeah. That would leave evidence, it would like as you say look melty, there might be stress fractures-

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: -from heating and cooling.

MAKO: So a lot of the melty appearance, we could once again go back to "Well it's been around 4,000 years, it's weathered."

SQEAKY: How weathered does something get in the Sahara desert?

MAKO: I mean, there's wind and there's sand.

SQEAKY: I guess, but I mean...

MAKO: It did-

SQEAKY: Did it get rid of all the melty evidence all over the thing?

MAKO: No-

SQEAKY: Preposterous yeah.

MAKO: Not all and certainly less so, much less so in the interior.

SQEAKY: Oh yeah, there's not sandstorms on the inside of the pyramids.

MAKO: No. Uh so, okay going more onto the study, it found that moltenizing marble and limestone created an abundance of calcium oxide along the cut surfaces due to thermal decomposition of calcium carbonate.

SQEAKY: So chemical traces.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: Did we find those on the pyramids?

MAKO: Not that I was able to find at all.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: So yeah. With- We've actually done stone cutting with a laser for industrial purposes. Granted it was a CO2 laser, maybe that matters, maybe it doesn't, probably not, but it left behind calcium oxide and we would see that in abundance in the Great Pyramid if it was laser cut and near as I can tell we do not.

SQEAKY: What about the granite rocks? Do you have-

MAKO: I was unable to find anything for industrial cutting of granite with lasers.

SQEAKY: Oh so it's just impractical. If it works somebody would be doing it somewhere. Okay.

MAKO: I guess that's one interpretation. I don't- I don't wanna make too many claims there but yeah, I looked and I couldn't find anything about laser cutting granite.

SQEAKY: Okay. That makes sense.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Even then I presume if we did there'd be chemical evidence.

MAKO: Oh yeah, absolutely. It's the same basic idea. You're applying a shitload of heat that's going to cause some kind of chemical change at the cut site and that's going to leave something behind.

SQEAKY: So on that fuckload of heat.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: Ten million watts?!

MAKO: Ten to the seventh. Ten million. Yeah.

SQEAKY: That sounds incredibly high but I guess that's per square centimeter.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: So they wouldn't have to be hitting the whole area. I know they have laser cutters that are like ten watts or two point five watts and those can engrave metal and carve wood-

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: -but I guess they're just doing it over a tiny tiny area so.

MAKO: They didn't go into a lot of detail as to like the exact size of the cut so they may be fiddling with the numbers, the laser might be smaller than a square centimeter, I don't know I didn't really get that kind of information from the paper but uh, per square centimeter. Ten million watts. This is what they said.

SQEAKY: So if they do bring it down to like one square millimeter, they could do that with like a hundred watt laser because it would be- y'know if you had a hundred watts-

MAKO: Maybe not a hundred, that still sounds a little low but yeah yeah yeah, lower yeah.

SQEAKY: Yeah, you're right you're right. But some fathomable amount, right. 'Cause just a hundred thousand watts is like a bunch of houses?

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: But a hundred thousand watts per square centimeter but only for one square millimeter, that's totally doable.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: If they are doing it over such a tiny area they could also be like adjusting the focal distance of the laser so maybe they're taking multiple passes.

MAKO: Yeah they did describe that it takes a little bit of time for the cut to occur. They- I didn't read anything about passes, they were just like yeah it happens over a period. It's not like a lightsaber or anything that just does an obnoxiously clean cut in just one pass like you see in some sci fi movies or anything like that no, they have to hit it with a laser, they keep it there for the cut to complete and they move very slowly.

SQEAKY: Yeah. So maybe our lasers aren't as good as alien lasers.

MAKO: Well we don't have an exact idea for how long the aliens took according to these allegations.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: The paper did describe it as like not being an instant cut or anything like it took time to cut through the stone.

SQEAKY: Ah, stupid lazy lasers.

*Mako snorts*

MAKO: Okay. So, but on this topic of cutting stones with lasers, I did find something else. This is just an honorable mention, it's weird, it was almost certainly not the result of a laser, at least that's not the dominant theory, but there is a stone in Saudi Arabia, the Al Naslaa.

SOURCE [55:27] Al Naslaa, Cut that is very large and clean - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Naslaa

MAKO: Look at that picture.

SQEAKY: That's a very clean cut.

MAKO: Yeah, a little- It's very understandable to look at that and be like shit, that ain't natural.

SQEAKY: But even then that's a thing you could do with that sawing method we discussed earlier, if... ancient pranksters were-

MAKO: Committed? That's a huge stone.

SQEAKY: Yeah that that that dude next to it looks tiny. It's seriously like four times the height of that dude but you could cut that stone with a copper saw and a bunch of sand...

MAKO: You could.

SQEAKY: Looking around, it's Saudi Arabia they do appear to have an abundance of sand.

MAKO: Indeed. So...

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: Periodic rain and sandblasting from just weather conditions there is the primary theory for how that cut was made but we don't actually know.

SQEAKY: It could be artificial or it could be natural.

MAKO: Yeah. But it's almost certainly not lasers.

SQEAKY: That- That seems reasonable. It would look more melty.

MAKO: Yes, yes it would.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: So...

SQEAKY: So dumb.

MAKO: To wrap that up, no, lasers did not cut the stones. It would leave behind evidence we don't have that evidence.

SQEAKY: Is that all of our sources? Is there anything else you wanted to dig into?

MAKO: There's so much more. That's it for cutting stones with lasers.

SQEAKY: So uh, the other sources were oocities.org, looks like they're discussing some of the saws, the Wikipedia page for Al Nastaa, that clean cut stone, citeseer has the main paper discussing laser cutting of marble and uh limestone, and Wikipedia you used for the materials of the Great Pyramid, and then another Wikipedia link for the broken obelisk where they have the nice pictures that anyone can look at.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Okay fantastic.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: I get my giant megaliths at Costco. They're big enough they come in 1-packs.

MAKO: Ahah.

SQEAKY: What? It fits on the cart right next to the 12-pack of grand pianos.

MAKO: What fucking cart are you using?

SQEAKY: The ones Costco gives you. They're Costco-sized.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: Just put a 12-pack of carts in your cart and just cart off your monoliths.

*Sqeaky yelling in lowercase while falling into a Costco cart*

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: What's the next thing you wanted to discuss?

MAKO: The Baghdad Battery.

SQEAKY: Oh you teased this earlier.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: Okay so, how many lightbulbs can it power? All of them?

MAKO: None of them.

SQEAKY: Could it power the lasers they used to cut the things-

MAKO: Absolutely not.

SQEAKY: -you just died in the previous- No? How many spaceships can it make fly?

MAKO: None.

SQEAKY: How long to charge a Tesla?

MAKO: It can't.

SQEAKY, disappointed: Aww.

MAKO: Okay. So, the quick and dirty for the Baghdad Battery is the claim is just false. Like there's literally nothing to support the claim.

SQEAKY: It wasn't a battery at all?

MAKO: No.

SQEAKY: Damn. I was on the side of a, this was likely a battery. Okay.

MAKO: Uh not near as we can tell though. It had some pieces that were missing to make it an actual battery. It was very close in construction to a battery, which I get why people jump there.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: So under alternative hypothesis on the Wikipedia article for the Baghdad Battery, Professor Elizabeth Stone of Stony Brook University- how incredibly appropriate. She is an expert in Iraqi archaeology and in an interview that she had after returning from an archaeological expedition, she stated that she doesn't know a single archaeologist that actually believes these were batteries in any form.

SOURCE [58:23] Baghdad Battery - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery

SQEAKY: Daw. Okay.

MAKO: So it's just not accepted within the scientific community that these were batteries, not even for electroplating. Even though they technically could have been used for electroplating, there's nothing else to support the claim. This doesn't really occur- We haven't really recovered any other batteries like this, even the current Baghdad Battery is currently missing.

SQEAKY: Uh oh!

MAKO: People looted the museum and the Baghdad Battery is one of the things that was looted and it has not been returned.

SQEAKY: During the uh, Iraq War?

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Oh- Oh goodness. Okay. So we got rid of Sadaam but we also got rid of his phone charger from the ancient world.

MAKO: This was back in like 2003 I think.

SQEAKY: Yeah, 'cause with the post-9/11 wars.

MAKO: The museum was looted, Baghdad Battery was among the things that was looted, it has not been returned. We don't know where the Baghdad Battery is right now.

SQEAKY: Probably some rich asshole's personal collection.

MAKO: Almost certainly, yes.

SQEAKY: That's... Well that's better than destroyed.

MAKO: Uh, so, the battery like I said, it was missing a few components to make an actual battery, there's no artifacts that have been electroplated nearby the battery, there's no other real batteries that we've found that are like it, so there's not really anything other than it is ninety percent of the way to being an actual battery in construction to suggest that it was a battery.

SQEAKY: If left to their devices at this tech level they might have eventually discovered electroplating but no ev- no physical evidence they did.

MAKO: Yeah. Pretty much. So, people did try to test the battery hypothesis. They were like okay, maybe the parts that are missing to make it a battery, they were just lost to the sands of time so to speak and maybe it really was a battery. What could it do? So people would put a... some acidic liquid in there, usually some kind of juice, like uh one researcher in particular tried grape juice.

SQEAKY: Grape juice is a common medium for uh, homebrew like craft batteries. Lemon juice, wine, vinegar, these are all choices they could use.

MAKO: Mythbusters also tested this and they used lemon juice.

SQEAKY: That makes sense.

MAKO: But when uh... Arne Egg-o-bra- I'm sorry.

SQEAKY: So on the theory that we have to issue corrections, Arne Eggebrecht. Yeah I think you were close, egg-e-brekt.

MAKO: Yeah. I- I apologize. I'm gonna move on.

SQEAKY: I own it, I'm fuckin' it up.

MAKO: Sure.

SQEAKY: Tell us about Arne.

MAKO: They- They tested the battery hypothesis using grape juice and the result they produced was half a volt.

SQEAKY: Is that enough to electroplate?

MAKO: Kind of.

SQEAKY: 'Cause if you're only doing things like the Pharaoh's sceptre, you don't need scale, right. If the Pharoah can have a solid gold sceptre 'cause no one knows what electroplating is, you could throw y'know-

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: -a sceptre in a solution and let it sit for a month if you need to.

MAKO: You could technically make that work.

SQEAKY: Huh, interesting.

MAKO: Uh I mean it has a few other problems, you have a bunch of grape juice but anyway, Mythbusters also tested this. They created terracotta jars, they filled it with lemon juice, and they connected them in series so they had ten of these connected to one another and they were able to produce a whopping four volts.

SQEAKY: This was their arc episode where they winded up hooking up a car battery to one of these and shocking one of their buddies, right?

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: That was a fun episode.

MAKO: So these things couldn't really produce a whole lot of power. There isn't even really strong evidence that it was used for electroplating. There's a bunch of other theories for what the Baghdad Battery was used for. None of them really have mainstream acceptance. The short answer is we don't really know what it was for. There's just- isn't enough evidence to lean towards one thing over another. But-

SQEAKY: Well I mean we did find a jar- a clay jar with acidic remnants on the inside. Is it so preposterous it was a jar full of wine?

MAKO: Well okay. There was more than just the acidic remnants in it. There was the the copper rod and the other case.

SQEAKY: A drinking straw?

MAKO: Solid copper rod, thank you.

*Sqeaky laughs*

SQEAKY: I don't know. If we're still just sticking with mundane stuff there's tons of modern mixed drinks that use copper as a catalyst to encourage some other reaction to happen like a Moscow Mule. You-

MAKO: Sure.

SQEAKY: -you prepare that in copper mugs because it it modifies the flavor on it's way through.

MAKO: That is possible, yes.

SQEAKY: Yeah. I mean there's a million mundane explanations before we elevate this to aliens gave us battery tech.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Even if we take these fanciful explanations of electroplating, that's still miles away from aliens gave us battery tech.

MAKO: Yeah and it's really shitty battery- like why would they give us this of all things if they were giving us batteries?

SQEAKY: Locally sourced and sustainable thank you. What's the carbon footprint of this battery? One wine orchard? That's nothing for alien tech.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: Moving on. So this wasn't really enough power to do anything meaningful with. Like you're not gonna illuminate an entire pyramid. You're not even really going to illuminate a single lightbulb. That's even assuming you could construct a lightbulb.

SQEAKY: Well, are you going to go onto the evidence for torches?

MAKO: No. I didn't bother touching that.

SQEAKY: Yeah 'cause-

MAKO: Just focusing on the Baghdad Battery itself.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: Like even if you did have like run copper through the pyramids in order to put up a bunch of light bulbs like okay where's the light bulbs, but then you get into talking about like infrastructure for these wires. You don't want them to just be plainly exposed if they have enough power to power a light bulb then they have enough power to potentially harm somebody. You need those ideally tucked away and there's none of that infrastructure near as we can tell in any of the pyramids so it just it doesn't really work. And then there's just the range. The Baghdad Battery when producing power is producing a direct current. Anybody that knows a little bit more than the baseline about electricity knows that direct current doesn't go far. So the Great Pyramid is a very large structure. These volts, you're not going to be pushing that power very far.

SQEAKY: So I'm curious about the actual drop off there. I think the Great Pyramid might be at the limit of what we can do with modern DC but even then you're not talking about modern DC.

MAKO: Nope.

SQEAKY: You're talking about a battery that's defeated by a bank of lemons with nickel and copper nails stuck in 'em.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: This is- These are some feeble ass batteries if they're batteries.

MAKO: Which we have again no real evidence to say they are.

SQEAKY: It might just be mixed drinks for all we freaking know.

MAKO: Yep. Could be.

SQEAKY: So ancient people getting hammered. That seems really plausible. Uh, the main source for that you've got Wikipedia but you also mentioned this other paper, this other thing.

MAKO: Uh, well they're all things that are mentioned in the Wikipedia.

SQEAKY: Oh so, the sources of the Wikipedia article.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Okay.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: Sorry you head's been back with the ancient pyramids so all these new events just melt together.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Gotta stop using lasers on these ideas, man.

MAKO: Aye- No.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: So that discussion of the Baghdad Battery was pure gold.

MAKO: Oh my god. I see what you did there.

SQEAKY: Just like this segue.

MAKO: Uhuh, okay. So-

SQEAKY: You wanna tell us about-

MAKO: Gold. Yes. The claim that Annunaki was interested in our gold which if any of you have not seen the movie Cowboys and Aliens, it's actually kinda good, give it a watch.

SOURCE [1:04:54] Cowboys vs Aliens - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH7KZD5vGBY

SQEAKY: Yeah it- I'm not gonna say it was good but it was- I don't know, I didn't want the ninety minutes back.

MAKO: It was enjoyable.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: It was silly fun.

SQEAKY: Yeah the aliens came for our gold and they melted it out of the ground and then the cowboys shot 'em with guns 'cause there's gold in them our hills we're takin' it.

MAKO: Yeah, stop takin' our gold.

*Sqeaky laughs*

SQEAKY: So ridiculous.

*Mako laughs*

MAKO: We're using that.

SQEAKY: But it's like the same plot holes that apply to that movie apply to real life. There's so much gold in meteorites and shit in space that you have to pass to get to Earth.

MAKO: Yes. And that- Specifically that is what I dove really really deep into.

SQEAKY: Okay. So unless the aliens came from Mercury or Venus, they had to pass my the... the meteor belt, right? The asteroid belt

MAKO: Asteroid belt, yes.

SQEAKY: Astero- Yeah. The thing between Mars and Jupiter.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: And it's a big ass circle and it's even spherical in some ways. They have to go through that to get here and you're gonna tell us all about the gold there?

MAKO: Uh, roughly, yeah.

SQEAKY: Oh.

MAKO: Okay.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: Yeah. Yeah, so the problems with trying to extract gold from Earth, when you're looking at it from the perspective of a species that is not local to Earth that is-

SQEAKY: Well you gotta deal with cowboys. They can shoot you.

MAKO: Technically I did cover that.

SQEAKY: What?!

MAKO: No, hold on.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: Hold on. Hear me out. Hear me out. It's not as crazy as it sounds, trust me. No. The- So I wrote down uh, problems with this. Like we are a heavy gravity well, I mean not as heavy-

SQEAKY: Did you just call me fat?

MAKO: Yes.

*Sqeaky sighs*

MAKO: We're not as heavy as Jupiter, of course. But it's still a significant gravity well. Like it takes a lot of energy in order to escape.

SQEAKY: I mean, look at those rockets. Like from the SpaceX or from the Apollo missions or the Russian Soyuz rockets?

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: That little capsule on top, that's not... that's not how big they want the spaceships to be. Ninety percent of that thing is fuel because it takes a lot of fuel to lift your feel and lift the little spaceship at the top 'cause there's so much fuckin' gravity.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: And you're talking about hauling presumably industrial amounts of one of the heaviest elements out of this gravity well?

SQEAKY: Yeah that's ridiculous but if you're a conspiracy theorist you can wave that away by saying "Ah, superscience. They used anti-gravity, the same stuff they used to lift those stones that they cut with lasers."

MAKO: Sure, sure. Like well- Okay.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: You're not wrong. You can handwave away just about anything. This is still relevant when you're comparing it to alternative options which we'll get to in a moment. But just understand that is a problem, potentially. And then you have weathering conditions on Earth like maybe you have to worry about lightning strikes. That's something that happens on Earth.

SQEAKY: Not a lot of lightning in space.

MAKO: Nope.

SQEAKY: Regardless of what Star Trek would have you think.

MAKO: Oh, Star Trek. We love you.

SQEAKY: Not a lot of rain, either.

MAKO: Yeah. Maybe getting water into certain parts of your ship is a bad thing, maybe high winds are disruptive, maybe- I don't know. Like-

SQEAKY: Maybe you're the aliens from Signs and you melt in water.

*Mako sighs*

MAKO: Don't ever bring up that movie again.

SOURCE [1:07:34] Everything wrong with signs in 16 minutes or less - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdI00iQ03tE

SQEAKY, sheepishly: Sorry.

MAKO: Kay.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: And then, on top of all of that, you have potentially hostile indigenious life that you may have to interact with.

SQEAKY: That's why they didn't mine gold in Australia. They didn't have to contend with drop bears.

SOURCE [1:07:47] Drop bear legend information from the Australian Museum - https://australian.museum/learn/animals/mammals/drop-bear/

MAKO: So none of these things are in the asteroid belt. None of them.

SQEAKY: Just drop bears is a good enough reason to stay in the asteroid belt. I- I follow.

MAKO: God dammit.

*Sqeaky whimpers*

MAKO: So, sure, you maybe you do have tech where you hand wave away like the gravity well but like even if you have that tech, it's still going to be easier to just go to the asteroid belt. And then the question becomes, alright, what- How much gold is there in the asteroid belt? TLDR: A shit-ton.

SQEAKY: How much gold is there on Earth?

MAKO: A shit-ton. But not as much.

SQEAKY: Wow, okay. That's pretty much what I expected as answers but okay.

MAKO: Yeah, so I started out by trying to establish how much gold is in the asteroid belt. Simply asking that question plainly and I didn't come up with many answers because unfortunately, we don't have a concrete answer for that. We can't. We haven't surveyed every rock in the asteroid belt.

SQEAKY: Yeah but we can get an estimate. Like maybe-

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: -a range or something, yeah.

MAKO: Absolutely. And I did actually gather all the resources and did the math myself for this shit.

SQEAKY: Awesome.

MAKO: So, I started with a study on gold in meteorites and the Earth's crust. I ignored the Earth's crust part, just focusing on gold in meteorites.

SOURCE [1:07:34] Gold in Meteorites and in the Earth’s crust - https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1968/0603/report.pdf

SQEAKY: Okay so this is published by the USGS, United States Geological Survey.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: Okay. That's a good source.

MAKO: Yes. So, the gold content in the meteorites range from 0.003 parts-per-million (ppm), to 8.74 ppm.

SQEAKY: Do we have a point of comparison for that with gold here on Earth? Like how much gold is there in a modern gold mine?

MAKO: Uh I did not look that up.

SQEAKY: Okay I'll pull that up real quick.

MAKO: Sure.

*Sqeaky typing*

SQEAKY: Okay, so a little bit of quick googling and some questions and answers on the internet. There are some people who believe it's profitable to strip mine gold as long as there's uh, one of gold per 3.6 million grams mined.

SOURCE [1:08:15] Gold PPM for profitable mines - https://www.quora.com/At-what-concentration-ppm-is-gold-profitable-for-extraction?share=1

As long as there's a third of a part per million, so 0.3 ppm is profitable. So in this scale you have from .0003, that's clearly below that range, but up to 8.74...

MAKO: Clearly way above it.

SQEAKY: Yeah that's so- If you pick and choose your rocks, you can find the rocks that are heavy in gold and profitably mine gold at Earth standards. Don't know what alien standards are but...

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: If you're looking for easy gold, those super gold-dense rocks are way better than what we've got. Okay.

MAKO: So the next step I took was to establish what the mass of the asteroid belt is. This is difficult as you may presume because uh, it's kind of big and scattered over a very large area. So we're still in estimating territory but I found two different sources that took two different approaches to try and to answer that question and they did come up with some slightly different numbers but they're not wildly off. The first one that I looked up, they used known diameters for the largest objects and then they estimated average densities to create an estimate for the total mass of the asteroid belt. And the result they came to was... I did a whole lot of math here. It is 12.25 +/- .19 * 10^-10 solar masses.

SQEAKY: So the Earth is like a tenth of a percent of a solar mass, or something on that order. So what we're saying here is this thing is like a millionth or twelve millionths of a solar mass or something.

MAKO: So I converted to Earth masses right here.

SQEAKY: Oh look at that!

MAKO: And then I converted again to kilograms.

SQEAKY: Okay so you've got a range of about 2.4 followed by moving the decimal point twenty places over.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: So two followed by uh, twenty zeroes kilograms is in the asteroid belt. So it's a big number-

MAKO: That's the total mass of the asteroid belt, yes.

SQEAKY: But it's a fraction of Earth's mass. So using these other numbers we're looking at like uh... .004% the mass of Earth.

MAKO: Well-

SQEAKY: So it's tiny compared to the mass of Earth.

MAKO: And that's on the lower end and actually no, it's not meaningfully different but still .004%. That is one estimation. I found another paper. Regrettably the paper was behind a paywall. Fortunately the information I needed was in the abstract which is not behind the paywall.

SQEAKY: Okay, so.

MAKO: So this second group- Okay, the first estimate was from 2014. This one is from 2018. A bit more recent. And they used gravitational attraction to estimate mass of the asteroid belt and they came up with numbers that are not very far off I don't think...

SOURCE [1:12:05] Masses of the Main Asteroid Belt and the Kuiper Belt from the Motions of Planets and Spacecraft - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134%2FS1063773718090050

SQEAKY: Uh, these numbers are ten times bigger. There's a zero missing. But even if we except this range of .004% to .04%, this doesn't really make a difference. We're talking about less than one percent of Earth's mass.

MAKO: Oh yeah. Yeah. This is substantially less than Earth's mass.

SQEAKY: So our range is low .004% to high...

MAKO: .04%, yeah.

SQEAKY: Okay. That's... that's good numbers. You got a range of...

MAKO: Yup.

SQEAKY: Tiny compared to Earth-

MAKO: Regardless.

SQEAKY: -but you said there was a fuckload of gold out there.

MAKO: Yes. So there's a few different kinds of asteroids out there. There is class C- or type C rather, type S, and type M. Now the largest type M asteroid that we have located is called 16 Psyche, or just Psyche for short.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: It contains about one percent the mass of the asteroid belt. It has a heavy metallic composition as applied by it being type M.

SQEAKY: What are the other two letters? What's S?

MAKO: Silica.

SQEAKY: And C?

MAKO: I forget.

SQEAKY: Probably carbon?

MAKO: I know Cs are usually like comets, they have a lot of dust and...

SQEAKY: Oh, ice?

MAKO: Ice.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Okay. But not relevant to this discussion, okay.

MAKO: No, not really.

SQEAKY: But the types are about material classifications and type-M are highly metallic. Okay.

MAKO: Mhm. This asteroid is so large it is actually believed by some astronomers to be the stripped core, a protoplanet.

SQEAKY: That sounds big.

MAKO: Yes, it's quite big. And we can only do analysis on the surface of it right now. There is a mission to launch a satellite- or probe or whatever you want to call it... A thing to go out there to investigate. It's going to be launched sometime next year. It is going to catch up to Psyche in 2026 but yeah we're going to send out a satellite to do more in-depth analysis of it. We can only really examine its surface which appears to be dominantly iron and nickel.

SQEAKY: Okay, so it's one heavy chonker of a rock.

MAKO: Oh yeah, very much so. Uh, because it is so large and so obviously iron and nickel that's why they're like oh yeah, protoplanet. But, if they apply the estimates that we had gotten from the U.S. Geological Survey about the amount of gold that is in typical meteors to this stone, this asteroid, then we can get a range of the amount of- like based on its mass, which is provided on the Wikipedia article, we can get a range of how much of that is going to be gold.

SOURCE [1:14:23] Psyche 16 mass and more -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_Psyche

SQEAKY: Okay. So, this rock according, to these numbers you have here, it weighs between nineteen and twenty-five quintillion kilograms. That's a one followed by a fuckload of zeroes...

MAKO: Uh, I think eighteen.

SQEAKY: 'Cause it's millions, billions, trillions, quadrillions, quintillions.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: So this one object has... I'm gonna go ahead and just say 20,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilos of metal, and you're saying that 8.7 ppm are gold.

MAKO: Uh well again we have a range of .000 ppm to 8.74 ppm and I did do the math eight times to figure out depending on like if we're using the high end of the range or the low end of the range and also between two ranges that are provided for the potential mass for Psyche. So I produced eight numbers.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: And for the sake of gravity I can just list the lowest and the largest number. On the low end, applying all of these estimates, it would have 1.552 billion metric tons of gold.

SQEAKY: How much gold is on Earth? That we've like pulled out of the ground I mean, how much gold is in circulation?

MAKO: Far far less. I do have a USGS link that mentions this directly. About 244,000 metric tons of gold has been found and-

SQEAKY: A 187,000-

SQEAKY & MAKO: -has been dug up.

SQEAKY: So this one rock would have more gold than has been mined at all on Earth.

MAKO: Correct.

SQEAKY: On the low end.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: And it's just sitting there in space. The aliens would just need to find the biggest rock in the asteroid belt and melt the gold out of it.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: So they just need an oven. They need an oven! And a spaceship and you get- An oven and spaceship gets you 25,000,000,000 kilograms of gold?! Why the fuck isn't Elon Musk there right now?! I mean, he's too busy launching cars into space I guess.

MAKO: Something like that.

SQEAKY: He's probably working on it. He- I bet- I bet he's gonna make a claim at that.

MAKO: So I have another source that talks about the gold on Earth from WestCoastPlacer. They are really well sourced which is why I decided to go for it. I haven't ever heard of them before but given the amount of sources they got, looked pretty good. They do a bunch of math and they arrive at an estimate that there are 122,000,000,000 metric tons of gold in the top four kilometers of Earth's crust distributed all over the globe.

SOURCE [1:16:39] How Much Gold is Left on Earth? - https://www.westcoastplacer.com/how-much-gold-is-left-on-earth/

SQEAKY: Say that one more time. A hu-

MAKO: 122,000,000,000 metric tons.

SQEAKY: A 122,000,000,000 metric tons of gold on Earth. So that's more gold, but it's not nearly as available as this one rock. Okay, so this one rock on the low end would be twenty-five percent of the gold in Earth's surface.

MAKO: On the high end- I didn't cover that yet. The high end for Psyche based on all of your math is 22.27 trillion metric tons.

SQEAKY: Well that's enough gold that we'll start building wires and shit out of it. It'll be so devalued that we'll be like, fuck jewelry I'm gonna make electronics.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Not that we don't make electronics already but now we're just gold-plating things. And taking all of our Baghdad Batteries and hooking them up to our microchips and just making good contact but this we could cheaply make gold wire.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: And this is just one percent of the mass in the asteroid belt. And I was going to go through and do the math for the entirety of the asteroid belt after focusing on Psyche and I was like no okay I think we get the idea, and I cut myself off there.

SQEAKY: Y- You find the heavy metal rocks in the asteroid belt and you get the gold out of them.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Yeah. And if you need other heavy metals which are useful for things, maybe constructing spaceships, you use that too. It's not like iron is useless.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: I mean it's rigid and sturdy and makes steel and... and heck, if you just don't like the natives 'cause they shot you with y'know their six shooters as you were tryna take their gold you can drop it on them.

MAKO: So yeah. Why come down to Earth when you can just go to the asteroid belt.

SQEAKY: Well not even go to the asteroid belt. Just don't come all the way to Earth, stop short, get this thing. 'Cause you're also ignoring the cost to get closer to the sun. Moving further and closer away to a star-

MAKO: I didn't necessarily mean to go to the asteroid belt from Earth.

SQEAKY: No no no. I mean if you're if you're an alien coming from the outside, right.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: The fuel to get closer to a star as opposed to just enter an orbit, you have to spend fuel to slow down relative to the star or start power straight towards it. But if you miss the star you wind up going in a big elliptical arc. So, the closer you get to a star the deeper into the star's gravity well you get, the more fuel you have to spend to get there and then to get back out. Just like to get down to Earth from Earth's orbit, you have-

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: -spend fuel to get down and fuel to get back up. If you're coming from Zeta Reticuli or wherever, you have to pass by the asteroid belt, decide you're coming to Earth, spend a bunch of fuel to get closer to the sun, spend a bunch of fuel to get down to the Earth, spend a bunch of fuel to get back up to orbit, spend a bunch of fuel to get away from the sun.

MAKO: While hauling one of the heaviest elements, yeah.

SQEAKY: Or you just come to our solar system, stay two or three times further out from the sun, grab this rock, and you're probably good.

MAKO: Yup.

*Sqeaky sighs*

MAKO: You're certainly better off than coming to Earth and trying to extract it from the complicated mess that is Earth geology.

SQEAKY: So, some counterpoints conspiracy theorists might say. Some might say "Well how do we know they didn't get the gold from the asteroid belt?" Well because this dense gold is right the fuck there.

MAKO: Well-

SQEAKY: There's a ton of gold still up there so they didn't. They would've gotten the easy ones.

MAKO: Caveat. We don't know exactly how much gold is in Psyche. We applied a bunch of math and estimates to it but meteorites that do land on Earth, we do have good numbers on the amount of gold that's contained in them.

SQEAKY: Yeah but if Psyche landed on Earth, that would be uh...

MAKO: That would be disastrous, yes.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: Extinction level event.

SQEAKY: So it's hypothetically possible that aliens already melted this down, took out all the gold, all the stuff they wanted and put all the nickel and iron back.

MAKO: Specifically from Psyche but again we don't have any evidence of that and good news, we prob- if if they did do something like that I would imagine there would be signs of it and if there are signs of it we'll find out in 2026 when our probe gets up to Psyche and does in-depth analysis of it.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: So we'll be able to tell these people they're crazy in 2026.

SQEAKY: I mean we can already be pretty confident that these people are very wrong.

MAKO: We can be more confident in 2026.

SQEAKY: More evidence. Yup.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: Okay okay. We spent a ton of time doing gold math.

MAKO: Yes we did.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: So you cited the USGS a couple times, you have numbers for how much gold is on Earth, you've got westerncoastplacer.com for your source for that. Other sources for hosting papers, you've got springer.com which is a... a host which you said you got the uh, asteroid belt math numbers. I linked to Quora just for quickly asking at what concentration is gold mine profitable just so we could have that point of comparison.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: You've got a link to Cambridge for the mass of the asteroid belt also, and finally Wikipedia for just the basic information like the mass of 16 Psyche.

MAKO: Yup.

SQEAKY: Okay.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: I'm staring at you until you make a joke.

MAKO: No.

SQEAKY: Good enough!

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: So gold math, we're done with that. We'll set that aside for a little bit.

MAKO: Yup.

SQEAKY: You had another topic to dive into?

MAKO: Uh, Nibiru being the twelfth planet. So Nibiru is a very complicated thing. It has a lot claims that are attached to it and it's got a number of things that are kind of adjacent to it. Most of these things I'm going to be glossing over because the claim of Nibiru is a twelfth planet and a lot of the things surrounding that claim I feel can be addressed with appropriate context. And just real quick for that context, they do talk about uh Tiamat and Marduk being other things- celestial objects out there that interact with our solar system and do weird things and again I'm just gonna gloss over that stuff. I mean and Nemesis too. Ugh.

SQEAKY: Just to make sure that we have good context for everyone listening. For people that haven't heard of Nibiru, what would ancient alien enthusiasts say Nibiru is?

MAKO: It is a super earth with five Earth masses --so five times the mass of Earth-- that is on an extremely elliptical orbit, and orbit period of 3600 years-

SQEAKY: So what you're saying is it takes so long to go around the sun that one year for somebody on Nibiru would be a 136 years on Earth?

MAKO: A 3600 years on Earth.

SQEAKY: 3600 years.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: Oh I heard the wrong amount.

MAKO: 3,600 years for Nibiru to go around the sun.

SQEAKY: Well that's awfully convenient, that's like the same amount of time since they built the pyramids ago.

MAKO: Roughly, yes.

SQEAKY: Oh, I see why these numbers are popular. I suspect it gets one year longer every year?

*Mako laughs*

MAKO: Something like that.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: Uh, there were a bunch of people --not Sitchin-- that did claim that it would return in 2012 and obviously that didn't happen.

SQEAKY: Sitchin is smarter than to make testable claims.

MAKO: Well actually he did make the claim that it would return at some time in 2900.

SQEAKY: Yeah but by then he's already cashed all of his paychecks.

MAKO: Yes.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: Anyway.

*Sqeaky sighs*

MAKO: So, but to make matters worse is that Nibiru would as part of its extreme elliptical orbit, would get within one AU of our sun. So within the orbital space of the Earth itself. And this would be a problem because allegedly Nibiru is coming back in the solar system to collide with Earth and it's this big doomsday.

SQEAKY: Seems like the kind of thing NASA would be all over.

MAKO: Yes. Yes.

SQEAKY: But of course they aren't and the conspiracy theorist says so why...?

MAKO: NASA lies is the goto for these conspiracy theorists. They don't think they can trust anything from NASA.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: Okay fine.

MAKO: Anyway, so on the claim that Nibiru is the twelfth planet or even something like Ne- Oh my god. Okay, real quick, context on Nemesis. Nemesis is allegedly a brown dwarf that has similar orbital characteristics, that is similarly doomsday, gonna come into the inner part of the solar system and wreak havoc.

SQEAKY: So a brown dwarf would be a small star.

MAKO: That simply hasn't ignited, yes. Now a lot of the numbers I saw was claiming that it has seventeen Jupiter masses.

SQEAKY: Okay. But we would still see this thing probably, right?

MAKO: Pretty much so, yeah.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: We would actually probably see it's gravitational effects before we saw it.

SQEAKY: But we haven't seen-

MAKO: No.

SQEAKY: -anything that would de-

MAKO: Not even close.

SQEAKY: We would see planets in the outer solar system or objects in the Kuiper belt move around. And the Kuiper belt is a body of uh-

MAKO: Yo I'll get to the Kuiper belt.

SQEAKY: Okay, you'll tell us about the Kuiper belt later but it's more stuff that we know where it is in the solar system.

MAKO: Yep. Okay, so, got context established specifically addressing that Nibiru is the twelfth planet. The natural first question is okay, what are planets ten and eleven, and that's assuming you're counting Pluto, and if you're not what is planet nine? Ugh. Uh, the prob- The quick answer to that is people might say Tiamat is one of them... I don't know.

SQEAKY: What the fuck is Tiamat.

MAKO: It's another part of-

SQEAKY: They have this whole mythos of fake planets.

MAKO: Yeah. That collided with one another.

SQEAKY: Oh. So some of them are gone now.

MAKO: Conveniently, yes.

SQEAKY: And there's no physical evidence at all?

MAKO: That's implied, yeah.

SQEAKY: But if planets collided there'd be a ring or some shit.

MAKO: Well yeah. Matter does just disappear. Anyway, movin' on.

*Sqeaky sighs*

MAKO: This is all tangential to the notion of it being a twelfth planet. The claim originated from Sitchin himself who claims that he translated ancient Sumerian and the Sumerians made the claim that there are twelve planets at least. I don't- I don't know. Specifically that Nibiru is the twelfth planet. Okay like right there, we already know Sitchin is not exactly good at translating Sumerian. So it's probably just a translation error.

SQEAKY: Are we sure he can count to twelve?

MAKO: Pretty sure.

SQEAKY: He hasn't demonstrated much intelligence yet.

MAKO: Okay, granted, granted. Twelve is more than the number of fingers he has but he can lean on his toes.

SQEAKY: Okay I'll grant he can count to twenty.

MAKO: Ah, twenty-one, he is male.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: So with that question in mind, like what are these planets? It is very helpful to understand the context for why Pluto is no longer a planet.

SQEAKY: How much do you want me to step in here and say stuff?

*Mako laughs*

MAKO: So what do you want to say about Pluto's planethood?

SQEAKY: Well it's a dwarf planet.

MAKO: Yah.

SQEAKY: I mean, they just added extra categorization. If we want to like get angry at someone we can get really angry at Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He'll take the blame. He will even argue about it with you on Twitter.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: But him and a bunch of other astronomers got together and even had a vote and were like let's discuss some terminology. And it's not a matter of like he's saying Pluto doesn't exist, it's just there's a bunch of other objects that if Pluto is a planet these other things probably oughta be planets too.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: So they adjusted the definitions and said okay, a planet has to be big enough that it's round. A planet has to be big enough that it clears out it's orbit around a star, and it just so happens that neatly lines up with the categories of things we see in nature. Because Pluto's small enough it doesn't really clear out it's space around the star.

MAKO: No.

SQEAKY: There's other bullshit in its orbit. It is big enough to be round, but there's other objects that are almost as big as Pluto that aren't round.

MAKO: There's even one object that is just slightly smaller than Pluto in diameter but is more massive than Pluto.

SQEAKY: What a showoff. Just being more dense. Which one's that?

MAKO: Eris.

SQEAKY: Oh. Oh! I didn't know we had good numbers on the mass of Eris yet. But there's uh... what is it? Eris, Pluto, Charon, and Makemake, right? They're the ones out in the Kuiper belt?

MAKO: There's more than that but yeah.

SQEAKY: But I just mean the really big ones but yeah there's like four big ones out there. And then we have in the inner solar system... Crap, I can't remember it now.

MAKO: Ceres.

SQEAKY: Ceres, thank you. And Ceres is big and spherical and if you were standing on it it would have like one tenth Earth gravity, y'know you'd believe you were on a planet. So I mean if Pluto is a planet Ceres is a planet, Eris is a planet, so we either make a new category for dwarf planets or we have like a trillion fuckin' planets. That's the argument.

MAKO: Yeah. That's the quick and easy version of it. So Pluto was first discovered in 1930 and they were pretty quick to give it a planet designation 'cause it was- seemed big enough and it was orbiting the sun so yeah, why not.

SQEAKY: And they had planet fever going on back then. It was y'know the late 1700s and the early 1800s where we discovered Uranus and Neptune right?

MAKO: Eh, something like that, yeah.

SQEAKY: 'Cause for the longest time we only had the innermost six. I think we had out to Saturn for a long time.

MAKO: Yeah. Yeah Uranus and Neptune came together after advancements in telescope technology a little bit later. So, because yeah we needed those advancements because they are not visible to the naked eye under any circumstance.

SQEAKY: Yeah but if you just happen to have the knowledge of where to look and a pair of binoculars you can see Jupiter, the Galilean moons so y'know Ganymede, Io, Europa, you can see those around Jupiter and you can see Saturn and it's very big and obvious ring with just a fairly mundane pair of binoculars. Yeah.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Like I bought some binoculars for paintballing and went out and actually found both of those in the sky.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: And they're like 10x zoom. They're not amazing but I can see these things.

MAKO: So as far as like finding large bodies in the solar system goes, it was pretty quiet after Pluto's discovery and classification.

SQEAKY: So in the search for large bodies, did they just get quiet after they found your mom?

MAKO: Damn. Fuck you.

*Sqeaky laughs*

*Mako sighs*

MAKO: So in 1992, they discovered the first object that they identified as belonging to the Kuiper belt. This was originally labeled 1992WB1, and it was renamed later to 15762 Albion. Albion? I'm bad at pronunciation.

SOURCE [1:28:45] Albion Legacy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15760_Albion#Legacy

SQEAKY: Dude it's a body of ice that nobody gives a shit about.

MAKO: Well...

SQEAKY: They just numbered it, man. Nobody cares.

*Mako laughs*

MAKO: So this was the first of many. It was actually the very next year in 1993 that they discovered the next five trans-neptunian objects and just skipping ahead ever so slightly for this one detail-

SQEAKY: So trans-neptunian objects, those are just any objects out past Neptune, right?

MAKO: Yeah. And as of 2018, we have discovered and cataloged over 2,000 of these objects.

SQEAKY: What are the qualifications to get into this catalog? Is it any object we find or any object over a certain mass or...?

MAKO: Uh, I didn't see much. Like if it's detectable, if it has an orbit, if it's clearly gravitationally locked to our sun, then uh, then yeah. And it's beyond Neptune.

SQEAKY: Okay so that implies our gears is good enough to see it. It implies a certain minimum of size but we're not certain what that is.

MAKO: Depending on how far out it is which is another fun thing that I'll cover later.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: We have discovered a shitload of these trans-neptunian objects. An absolute shitload of them. And even before we got to 2000, we were steadily discovering more and more and people were starting to wonder more and more like okay well how do like- Do we want to redefine planet? Are any of these qualifying as planets? And for a while it was pretty simple because these objects were- Most of them were much smaller than Pluto and people were just like eh, it's not bigger than Pluto, whatever we don't care. And that was fine up until the discovery of Eris in 2005. The initial observations of Eris, we thought that it was actually larger than Pluto. That turned out to be wrong. It's slightly, marginally smaller than Pluto. But again like I said earlier, it is more massive and when people initially thought that it was larger than Pluto they were like well hold on, is this Planet X? There was a few media outlets that were actually calling it Planet X.

SQEAKY: Some context for what Planet X is. This is more conspiracy theory stuff. Do you wanna cover this or?

MAKO: Go for it.

SQEAKY: Back in like the 90s 80s and early 2000s a bunch of people thought that there was another planet out there and they were hypothesizing various things but sometimes hypothesizing it would have life on it and it would be gigantic and it would be affecting gravity in certain ways. We had some anomalous readings and various things of... of the outer solar system and we thought there might be a planet out there modifying Neptune's or Pluto's orbit there's just a lot of unanswered questions. And Planet X was supposed to answer all these unanswered questions and then we found Eris instead. That about right?

MAKO: The two- aside from the name, are not really all that connected. But yes. Some media people were like oh yeah, X is ten and this is gonna be the tenth planet and hey there's these other people who respond really really well when we put Planet X in our headlines.

SQEAKY: Yeah. There was fake tabloids claiming shit about Planet X and some people claimed alien stuff- It's stuff people don't talk about anymore because when people are super wrong from yesteryear, we just don't even remember.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: But Planet X was the subject of a bunch of stupid conspiracy theorist's stuff from back then so, whatever.

MAKO: A bunch of astronomers dismissing all of these extra trans-Neptunian objects as being just okay well it's not bigger than Pluto, it it's not even close to Pluto's size so how can we call it a planet. So now having something that doesn't fit that they're like okay well okay does that mean we definitely call this a planet, and the rate at which we were finding more and more of these trans-neptunian objects, they weren't dumb they knew that if they were to go ahead and rubber stamp that, there was gonna not be long until there was planet eleven or twelve, and then they're like well hold up, do we want to do that? Does that make sense? So they were finally forced to confront a more sane definition for what a planet is and isn't and that's when they came up with the rules that you described. So, before they came to that resolution though there were a lot of discussions.

SQEAKY: Oh yeah.

MAKO: And they proposed a lot of different things. People just wanted to give the uh... Eris the tenth planet designation and be done with it. Other people wanted to go one further 'cause they were like ah yeah that is a little bit inconsistent for us to just stop there. Let's make uh, Charon?

SQEAKY: Yeah. Pluto's-

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Partner.

MAKO: Yup. Let's make Charon and Ceres planets too. Just bring it up to a twelve planet system. Like well that's not great.

SQEAKY: So is this where Nibiru comes in as the twelfth thing or?

MAKO: Not quite.

SQEAKY: We're kinda gettin' lost in the weeds but okay.

MAKO: Eh it's just history lesson today.

SQEAKY: Sure.

MAKO: If they started just giving away these planet designations then there would be a lot of them. And so especially if uh Charon is labeled as a planet, going off of similar diameters and masses and Makemake, Sedna, Gonggong, Quaoar, and-

SQEAKY: What about our moon?

MAKO: Yeah. Uh then also Orcus from the other list I was listing off. They ended up settling on the key part of what makes a planet a planet is that it clears its local neighborhood of debris. That is the key component that made Pluto lose its designation.

SOURCE [1:33:31] Why Pluto is not a planet - https://www.space.com/why-pluto-is-not-a-planet.html

MAKO: But if we're leaving it at just that, then I mean that's a pretty easy thing to uh, to detect for the most part. There are some caveats to that, again get to that in a moment but as anything that's Neptune or closer, or even a little bit ways out of Neptune depending on its size, we're going to be able to see something that's able to clear out it's local neighborhood.

SQEAKY: We'll see a big gap in those thousands of options you mentioned in the Kuiper belt.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: So yeah if we're leaning on that definition there's pretty definitively just eight. But if we're not leaning on that definition, there's catastrophically more than twelve. So it's just- It's a nonsensical claim when you're looking at the facts of modern astronomy.

SQEAKY: Well I agree with you there that if we're sticking rigidly to the definition of planet Nibiru wouldn't be a planet. But if it were some big ass thing that had a 3600 year orbit, maybe it wouldn't clear this stuff out, maybe it still exists, maybe it would cause problems. It's not like ancient Sumerians cared about our modern definitions of planet.

MAKO: Well there's other problems-

SQEAKY: Oh yeah.

MAKO: -with this.

SQEAKY: Lay into 'em.

MAKO: Soon.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: But no the- It's not that I necessarily disagree with you, but it's more that okay well we're making the presumption that these were a people that were deceptively advanced and we're weighing that possibility against the possibility that someone just fabricated things like Tiamet and Nibiru and um Marduk and just said oh yeah those are extra planets and we'll just call it the twelve and be done like-

SQEAKY: And we have real physical evidence that like hey, if there were a planet out here we'd expect less of this bullshit to be in the Kuiper belt. We're weighing physical evidence versus one dude who's already known to be a liar fabricating something.

MAKO: Yeah. It's arbitrary and it doesn't make sense with the facts that we have. It would be much more, much less, even granted they may not care about our definitions but there would have to be some kind of classification and it just- the number twelve doesn't really make sense with any intelligible classification that we have based on what we now know.

SQEAKY: Oh I see what you're getting at. There's no reason to call Nibiru the twelfth planet based on any physical pattern or property we can actually observe.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: So Sitchin probably made it up.

MAKO: Yeah it just-

SQEAKY: So no matter how we look at it, Sitchin made it up.

MAKO: Yeah. Just- Yeah. It's made worse by the other details like the size- the mass rather of Nibiru and it's extreme orbit which I'll cover in a moment but uh just as a fun little thing I did put a- the list of trans-neptunian objects Wiki article in our show notes and there is so much here.

SOURCE [1:35:57] List of trans-neptunian objects - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_trans-Neptunian_objects

MAKO: This isn't even a complete list. These are just the numbered trans-neptunian objects and there's a whole nother separate list for non-number trans-neptunian objects.

SQEAKY: Cool.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: Is there anything that people should specifically look for if they want to explore that. Is there anything interesting to look at?

MAKO: Uh they do have a image where they showed the- comparatively like the sizes of different trans-neptunian objects.

SQEAKY: Oh cool. So we can see a bunch of 'em and see which ones are like round and what they might look like.

MAKO: Yeah, roughly.

SQEAKY: Cool. So I can see Charon and Pluto up in the corner, there's Eris, there's Haumeamea and it's like weird football-shaped spinning end over end nonsense.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: Yeah there's a ton of 'em.

MAKO: These are just the biggest ones.

SQEAKY: Yeah the ones that are big enough to mostly be round. If Haumeamea wasn't spinning so fast it would be round. Okay. That's pretty cool.

MAKO: Say the biggest ones that we have confidence in their size about. There are other ones of comparable sizes like Sedna for example, but they're weird and we don't have as much information about them.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: Anyway.

SQEAKY: So our sources for that is you got space.com on history of Pluto, you've got the Wikipedia article on Albion, that first Kuiper belt object we found-

MAKO: Yup.

SQEAKY: -that first- yeah. And then uh... the Wikipedia list of trans-neptunian objects. What's uh the next thing you wanted to dive into?

MAKO: So it's still about Nibiru. But uh, for reasons that if I had to recall I would be unable to I seperated them out into separate claims about Nibiru, but the notion that Nibiru is on a collision course with Earth.

SQEAKY: Well it doesn't exist so of course it's going to collide with Earth.

MAKO: For something that doesn't exist I can equally make the statement of course it won't collide with Earth.

SQEAKY: Yeah but then you're not using conspiracy theorist logic. I mean do your own research, come on.

MAKO: I did-

*Sqeaky laughs*

SQEAKY: I love it when conspiracy theorists tell me "Do your own research!" and I'm like dude I just cited fifteen sources what do you think I didn't do my own research for?

MAKO: Right? Like, he didn't see if like the people vetting them are on the up and out like no- Okay let's just go straight into this. So again, five Earth masses. It comes within one AU of the sun-

SQEAKY: Of the sun or of the Earth?

MAKO: Of the sun.

SQEAKY: Okay. For reference, an AU is an astronomical unit. It's just the distance between the Earth and the sun on average.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: It's smaller than a light year, it's bigger than a mile, it's reasonable to measure things in AU because the Earth is actually pretty close to the sun.

MAKO: And then the 3600 year orbital period. These are things that have been claimed directly by Sitchin. So, I did some quick looking around for... trying to uh... Initially I was actually trying to look for simulations, Nibiru simulations. And go figure, most of the people that are bothering to simulate Nibiru are people I really don't want to use as a source.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: Uh there was one person who was using universe sandbox to simulate it instead and he didn't appear to be in on any of this, he was just like messing around. But I don't think Universe Sandbox is gonna have the precision to... to give real information and insight here.

SQEAKY: For reference, Universe Simulator is a video game where you simulate the solar system. You can do things like see what happens if two Earths collide or y'know stuff like that.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Yeah. What if I take this uh... this mountain dew can and launch it at Earth at the speed of light? Right you can see what happens.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: You have to import a mountain dew can but there's a community of people that make objects. You can throw them at each other and put them in orbits around each other and stuff.

MAKO: It's silly fun but it's not a scientific instrument. So unfortunately, I was unable to find really good videos on simulations that I found to be credible so. I did find a few others. I did find Cosmophobia. They have- well they're a website that's dedicated to taking irrational fear about the cosmos and addressing them.

SOURCE [1:39:23] Cosmophobia on Nibiru - http://www.cosmophobia.org/nibiru/

SQEAKY: We uh, discussed them in our last episode on this topic.

MAKO: But wait, they have a page on Nibiru. They cover the poor translations from Sitchin, they're like yeah no this guy, he's not good at translating don't trust his translations. And then they took the information that Sitchin did provide about Nibiru and just applied them to Kepler's laws.

SQEAKY: So Kepler, that guy that knows a few things about how orbits work.

SOURCE [1:39:50] NASA on Johannes Kepler - https://www.nasa.gov/kepler/education/johannes

MAKO: Uh yeah, yeah.

SQEAKY: Yeah like Johannes Kepler, he has like this big telescope named after him? Yeah that guy.

MAKO: That guy.

SQEAKY: Okay yeah.

MAKO: The guy who's uh, equations we still use to go everywhere in the solar system-

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: -and beyond.

SQEAKY: Yeah him and Neuton did some uh, heavy lifting for NASA in the beginning there.

MAKO: Yep. So he kinda knows what he's talking about. We've uh, actually tested his map and his predictions. Workin' out great for us so far.

SQEAKY: Yup. Got us to the moon and stuff.

MAKO: Yeah, and beyond.

SQEAKY: Yup.

MAKO: Way beyond.

SQEAKY: Yup.

MAKO: Okay so, yeah Kepler's laws. We plugged in what we know about- air quote know about Nibiru into the equation and that equation gives us a uh, the farthest reach of Nibiru's orbit would have to be at 469 au.

SQEAKY: So how far out is Pluto in AU for example?

MAKO: Uh, looks like at its worst just shy of fifty.

SQEAKY: Okay so, the Earth is one AU, Mercury is about forty percent of an AU so about .4 AU away. Venus is about .7 AU away and Mars is about 1.5, 1.6 AU away from the sun.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: So just to give us perspectives, right. So Mars is about sixty percent further, Venus is about thirty percent closer to the sun, Pluto is fifty AU out already. So now you're talking about something that is going to be thirteen times further out- that's- That's not right. Nine times further out than Pluto? It's gonna be 450 AU out?

MAKO: Uh... get the exact number oh exact- 469 AU.

SQEAKY: Okay. So it's gonna be- It's gonna be nine times further out than Pluto. Okay.

MAKO: At its worst. Yeah, Pluto at its worst, yes.

SQEAKY: Yeah, okay.

MAKO: Well comparing both they're worsts.

SQEAKY: That doesn't even sound like it's still in the solar system. That's uh... about one percent of a light year out there. That's pretty fuckin' far. Okay

MAKO: Yeah. That is indeed nuts far.

SQEAKY: But the nearest star other than the Earth is like the Proxima star system and they're like four or five light years away.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: So this is still clearly much closer to us so this doesn't eliminate it completely.

MAKO: No, but-

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: -next detail does.

SQEAKY: Oh.

*Mako laughs*

MAKO: We have that kind of extreme orbit where it goes that far out and then comes within one AU-

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: -and-

SQEAKY: Where it's modifying its orbital- or it's distance 450 fold, it's gonna be much slower out there and much faster in here.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: 'Cause that's how orbits work.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: And when it's reaching that peak velocity as it's wrapping around the sun, it will be moving at pretty much the solar escape velocity.

SQEAKY: Okay. For reference, the escape velocity of any gravity well is the speed at which if you're travelling in a straight line and if you're at that speed or higher, that gravity well won't ever stop you. You'll just escape it. So like the escape velocity here on Earth is about eleven kilometers a second, so if you can get a rocket that shoots you up at twelve kilometers a second, you just don't come back down ever. You just go up, you do wind up losing a bunch of speed because the planet is still pulling you, right. So you might have way less than that speed when you're out there. So, how fast is it going?

MAKO: Uh, I believe they said it is about forty-two kilometers per second.

SQEAKY: Forty-two kilometers per second.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: That's not actually all that fast. The Earth's travelling about 10,000-

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: The Earth- yeah yeah okay so. We're in the same regime. I converted it into kilometers per hour and I've got the Earth going about 110 or 107,000 kilometers per hour and this thing's going about 150 or 160 kilometers per hour.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Okay. It's going about an extra fifty percent faster than us around the sun.

MAKO: It's orbit is extremely eccentric and... Okay, there was another claim by another guy.

SQEAKY: Yeah. That seems to be barely possible by the physics of it so far.

MAKO: Barely possible if we are to presume that there is some fuzz in the numbers and that fuzz ends up actually being on the lower end, then it's technically possible-

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: -when you don't account for other things disturbing its orbit because its orbit is exceedingly eccentric.

SQEAKY: And eccentric is a... is an astronomical technical term. It just means "not round". So Earth's orbit is non-eccentric 'cause it's a very round orbit. Not perfectly round as compared to Pluto or Neptune's orbit which is slightly more eccentric, then compared to an orbit like Halley's Comet. Halley's Comet has a very eccentric orbit 'cause it's near the sun, closer to the sun than the Earth some of the time, and then way the fuck far out in the distant solar system the rest of the time. So this thing would be flying at a big ellipse around the sun and just barely able to do it as per physics. So that's interesting. I would've expect this to have categorically ruled it out, but okay. And what is the escape velocity of our sun?

MAKO: About forty-two kilometers per second.

SQEAKY: Oh! And this thing's travelling about forty...

MAKO: That's why I said like-

SQEAKY: Just barely, just barely.

MAKO: If we presume fuzz, it by a hair is technically possible.

SQEAKY: Okay okay. So this is implausible 'cause there's no evidence for it, there's no cleared out space for it, and we've never seen it.

MAKO: And that just accounting orbital velocity when it's near the sun.

SQEAKY: Okay yeah.

MAKO: Again, when it's interacting with other gravity wells as it's coming into the inner planets...

SQEAKY: It would do something to the other planets.

MAKO: Jupiter would mess it up pretty bad. Jupiter would probably actually disturb its orbit enough to eject it out of the solar system.

SQEAKY: That makes a ton of sense actually.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: 'Cause if it just falls a little bit towards Jupiter then passes on by, it's picked up extra speed and now it's travelling forty-three kilometers a second and off it goes.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Okay. So that is implausible. I agree still technically possible, 'cause what if the orbital periods all happen to line up so it's never done that?

MAKO: Well if this was a permanent resident of the solar system, that kind of disturbance would occur at some point in the astronomical history of the solar system. The only real way to give the benefit of the doubt is to presume Nibiru is a captured rogue planet and even then it would probably only survive three or four orbits around the sun.

SQEAKY: So then for people not up on all the astronomical terms, a rogue planet is a planet not around a star. The idea you just proposed is that we have a rogue planet wandering the galaxy and our sun just kinda picked it up and it happened to be travelling at just a reasonable pace to go around our sun. Okay. I was imaging some sort of situation where it happened to just be in a uh... orbital pattern where it just happened to not match. Like uh, the different Galilean moons. They happen to have periods that match up with each other where for one orbit of the innermost one the next one makes two orbits and the one outside that makes four orbits so they all happen to line up in this nice little gravity based thing but I don't know that that could happen with whatever Jupiter's orbit is and this thing's orbit is.

MAKO: It is the prevailing belief of actual astronomers that yeah no it can't.

SQEAKY: Okay yeah. Well I mean it was already the prevailing belief of astron- of astronomers that this is bullshit so...

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: We're just layering on layers of implausibility but nothing that categorically rules it out. And I'm just going for that categorically- categorically ruling it out 'cause that is so nice to just tell these people "look, it's impossible, next". Ugh. This is gross 'cause each one of these layers is like ninety-nine percent chance it doesn't happen. Ninety-nine percent chance it doesn't happen.

MAKO: When you're talking about something that is potentially as much as 400 AU out, even something that has five Earth masses, um-

SQEAKY: We would've seen-

MAKO: -modern technology- Actually no.

SQEAKY: We might not have seen it?

MAKO: We we we could miss it. If it's 400 AU out and five times the mass of Earth, I mean it's possible.

SQEAKY: Yeah. So really what we're relying on right now is that Sitchin is full of shit and he is the primary source for all of this.

MAKO: I mean everything else is pretty categorically ruled out. I mean-

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: -in- We've shaved off like alright, sure, we haven't categorically removed it but we've removed ninety-nine percent of possibility. And then within that we removed another ninety-nine percent of possibility. Sure we haven't hit zero but-

SQEAKY: It's just nice to hit zero 'cause for a bunch of these things we can just go straight to zero.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: Okay so there was um uh... a fun little quote from Mike Brown who was on an interview on the Discovery channel about this topic. He says that it's not impossible for the sun to have a distant planetary companion, such an object would have to be lying very far from the observed regions of solar system to have no detectable gravitational effect on the other planets. A Mars-sized object could lie undetected at 300 AU, Jupiter-size object- this is a little ridiculous. Could lie undetected at 30,000 AU. To travel- and this is him just talking about the the 2012 doomsday stuff. We couldn't detect it therefore it must be far out there. If it were to catch up to the Earth- so to cover like a thousand AU in two years 'cause he was making this in 2009, he was talking about the 2012 doomsday belief. The object would have to be moving at 2400 kilometers per second which exceeds the galactic escape velocity.

SOURCE [1:47:36] Nibiru Cataclysm Scientific Rejection - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_cataclysm#Scientific_rejection

SQEAKY: See things like that rule it out.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: This... The the- For it to be close enough for us to detect it, so all of these people saying "It's gonna show up in 2012". In 2010 we would've seen it or it would... or we're missing a giant thing that's gonna be highly disruptive and functionally a giant solar system sized bomb. It's gonna fly through and disrupt the fuck out of everything.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Ugh.

MAKO: So-

SQEAKY: And it won't be in orbit it would just fly the fuck out.

MAKO: And they did of course move the goalposts and they said it would happen in 2020 and that didn't happen. We know it's not gonna happen anytime soon 'cause we're not seeing any of those things. But-

SQEAKY: Yeah. If it were close enough that it's orbit were coming around, we'd see it. It wouldn't be 450 AU out. It'd be inbound.

MAKO: Yeah. He also claims that- or says that the claims made about Nibiru's orbit isn't consistent with orbital mechanics but he didn't provide a huge amount of detail on exactly how.

SQEAKY: I'm gonna defer to his judgement on that one. I learned my orbital mechanics from Kerbal Space Program.

SUGGESTED SOURCE [1:48:55] Kerbal Space Program - https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/

MAKO: Uh and he did say that part of this belief is that Nibiru came close to Earth, it came close enough that it caused huge tidal disturbances, it was the cause of the Great Flood-

SQEAKY: Uh that would... that would've fucked with our orbit but we-

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: -have a super stable orbit and we know that because geology and history.

MAKO: Not only that but he says that if it did get close enough to cause those effects, we very likely lost our moon.

SQEAKY: Yeah that makes sense.

MAKO: And we still have our moon so.

SQEAKY: And our moon has been in a nice, stable orbit for a good long fuckin' time.

MAKO: Yup.

*Sqeaky sighs*

MAKO: So then just discarding those kinds of details I was like well okay, of all the trans-neptunian objects, what comes the closest? Well, none of them come close to the reported mass, unfortunately. Or fortunately, depending on how you think of it.

SQEAKY: And the reported mass is like five Earth masses, right?

MAKO: Correct.

SQEAKY: And we're talkin' like Pluto is tiny compared to Earth. It's like a few percent of Earth's mass.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: And most these objects are smaller than Pluto.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Yeah, okay.

MAKO: And so then I started looking at orbital periods 'cause 3600 years is pretty randomly specific. I did find one trans-neptunian object, the... I'm not gonna say it comes close- it doesn't. But the closest, 2012VP113 is the current designation. It is a trans-neptunian object and it has an orbital period of 4,136.24 years and that is the closest of all objects I was able to find. Five hundred years longer than what they said. Uh, but it doesn't match any of the other criteria at all. It's nowhere near the mass that they said, it does not come anywhere near Earth's uh, one AU orbital distance, it doesn't even get within Pluto's orbit. It orbits around the sun entirely outside of Pluto. Trying to like dig deeper into the veracity of these claims, we don't have Pluto as a planet anymore so the whole Planet X, planet ten, tenth planet whatever, that's not a thing anymore. Now they just call it Planet Nine, speculating that there is another large rocky body out there somewhere.

SOURCE [1:50:01] 2012 VP113 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_VP113

SQEAKY: Just to make sure I understand you here.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: Nibiru's one category of conspiracy theory nonsense for a planet that's out there, includes all the Tiamat and other weird planets that don't- definitely don't exist.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Based on Sitchin's lies. Planet X was the late 90s 'there's another big planet out there' milder conspiracy theory stuff, doesn't really involve Sitchin but lets go looking.

MAKO: It doesn't even need to really involve aliens it's just like oh...

SQEAKY: And then Planet Nine is the new incarnation that brings its own unique set of baggage from Planet X and from Nibiru.

MAKO: Well near as I can tell, Planet Nine is actually just the new name for Planet X. It doesn't-

SQEAKY: Oh.

MAKO: It's not really tied to conspiracy theories although it is often coopeted by uh conspiracy theories.

*Sqeaky sighs*

MAKO: It's just this notion that there's another rocky body out there.

SQEAKY: Okay. Okay. So it's not preposterous, they're just- It's lacking evidence.

MAKO: There is some evidence.

SOURCE [1:51:28] Planet Nine Evidence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine#Evidence

SQEAKY: Oh! Ooh, interesting.

MAKO: So there was a few astronomers out there that noticed the uh... some unusual clustering of these orbits. They took a look at this- not just a chart but like this but more complicated charts with many more of these objects, and they were like well okay these things kind of cluster up in a way that doesn't like seem entirely explainable if it was just arbitrary. So... A lot of astronomers don't really believe that this is good enough. I mean it's something, it's more than nothing, but like they do say early on if there is like a big rocky body out there, you would see the- a clustering of orbits and then somebody observed what we actually do and they're like okay, get more evidence and they've had a really tough time getting that evidence. They've tried to make guesses based on observations for where this object might be in the sky and observe there, and thus f- and they actually made these predictions with enough credibility that they've actually been able to get uh, telescope time with other scientists to do the search. So I mean they're not quacks, they're not crazy, they're putting out a theory that is unlikely but there's some evidence for and they're being pleasant about it.

SQEAKY: So this sounds like how science should work, it's like hey I have an idea, let's test it-

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: -if the test yields result A I'm right, if test yields result B happens I'm wrong, here's the experimental procedure, which one- which outcome do we get, A or B?

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: Yeah it sounds...

MAKO: That's what-

SQEAKY: It sounds like science. It sounds-

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: -really disconnected from the Planet X stuff I've heard of.

MAKO: Unfortunately so far every time they've tried to isolate a portion of the sky they believe where this object would be and observe it, they haven't seen anything.

SQEAKY: Well, why is that unfortunate? Just means there isn't a planet there. I mean I guess who doesn't want another planet it's free real estate.

MAKO: I want another planet. I want another- Yeah so they... they keep updating based on additional observations, they they get- take more information in, they update their model and they've updated a few times. They updated it in 2019 uh, and then they updated it again in August this year. So there's a very very recent update to their model and they think it would have about six Earth masses, it would have a semi-major axis of about 380 AU-

SOURCE [1:53:24] Planet Nine Updated Model - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine#Updated_model

SQEAKY: What is the semi-major axis is the size of the orbit?

MAKO: It... It's pretty much the average orbit.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: Uh, but okay. So the perihelion...

SQEAKY: As close as it gets to the sun.

MAKO: Yep. That one would be 300 AU or y'know plus eighty-five minus sixty. So it'd be as close within their model- within the range of their model, the closest it would be would be 200 AU.

SQEAKY: So four times further out than Pluto?

MAKO: Yeah. Really really far out there. They even have numbers for orbital inclination, I have a link that goes directly to these numbers. Now something that is six Earth masses, that's difficult to hide at only 240 AU but I mean if it was on the high end of their range for the distance from the sun and it was on the low end of their range for Earth masses, you're starting to get into that fuzzy area where our ability to detect it is questionable. And that's one of the things they're... they're relying on to keep going with this and I don't know maybe we'll find it, maybe we probably won't. They're just- there isn't enough- If I had to make a prediction right now I'd say probably not, unfortunately. There's not enough to make that claim. But they're still looking and that is the closest thing that I could find to anything relating to any of these conspiracy theories but even then like the notion that it comes into the inner planets- No. That just, that isn't anywhere. That doesn't happen.

SQEAKY: Okay. That uh... feels like a much more categorical rejection for these kinds of things where scientists aren't looking at all for anything like Nibiru, they're looking for this other planet that has very different orbital characteristics. Okay, yeah.

MAKO: Yeah.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: So it's 11:30 at night and in the interest of making sure I make it through this recording, here goes a Monster.

*Monster opens*

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: So we have one other source that we sort've just touched on and we didn't dig into for this so it was just this Ancient Aliens Debunked movie that we watched.

SOURCE [1:55:25] Ancient Aliens Debunked - https://www.ancientaliensdebunked.com/

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: It was a good three hours of documentary. I dunno, how much do you want to discuss this 'cause we're uh, we're pretty long on time as it is.

MAKO: Yeah we are. It's... It's a good documentary.

SQEAKY: I'd recommend people watching it if they're dealing with people who habitually bring up ancient aliens. You can just go to ancientaliensdebunked.com for this documentary. But uh, they touch on different parts of the History channel's ancient aliens series.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: And they address individual concerns they have with their storytelling.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: 'Cause the ancient aliens series on the History channel... They're damned dirty liars.

MAKO: Yup.

SQEAKY: There's no ifs whens or buts about that. It's to the point where the conspiracy theorists don't even believe them most of the time. And this group goes through and lays out really clean categorical explanations for each of these different kinds of lies. And they do a decent job citing their sources, it could be a lot better. So we were able to go through and find most of their sources and relate that to most of the points that they use to debunk ancient aliens but then there's some where they don't do the best job, so we couldn't lean on it a ton for this episode.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: They... they're- They did a really good job highlighting at least logical fallacies where the ancient alien would say "Ah there's no way this thing could be built, look at all these big strong men pulling this rock with ropes and couldn't move it a couple inches." Then the Ancient Alien Debunked people were like "Yeah look at this guy who's being clever and by himself lifted this fifteen rock using nothing but-"

MAKO: Sticks.

SQEAKY: "-scrap plywood."

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Yeah that guy was really clever too 'cause he's like "Look, I wedged something under a corner of the rock and I stood on the other side and lifted it up and..."

MAKO: Just kept on seesawing it and exploiting that gap, that tiny tiny gap that was exposed...

SQEAKY: Yeah he just kept putting a bunch of wood in the middle of this-

*Sqeaky resets*

SQEAKY: The guy was clever, yeah.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: And just tons of things like that where Ancient Aliens would say "It's impossible to cut this piece of rock, how would you ever do it?" and then someone else is like "Look, we rubbed sand on it and we abrated it away, we're cutting it."

MAKO: Or the jets are like "Oh, there no bird that has its wings on the underside clearly" like why stop at birds?

SQEAKY: Yeah, it's clearly a fish. They've- They've done other fish. It's just so many dumb things. And we watched it and it took... it took three hours of our life to watch it. It wasn't terrible but so much of it was... was ancient alien stuff and they just went through and debunked these things categorically one at a time. And just how dishonest the ancient aliens things- We shouldn't go over this, we'll just link to the source.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: 'Cause it's- If you're dealing with people who think ancient aliens are true, watch this. This is pretty good.

MAKO: Yeah. And it has the benefit of being able to convey things visually which we don't have and there's a lot of visual elements to debunking the stuff.

SQEAKY: Yeah, and uh... one thing I do dislike about this source. This person was a through-and-through believer of the ancient alien's ideas. Which is great that now he's debunking it and he knows how to debunk it and how to make that connection with other ancient alien believers and what evidence he believes, but it also means he's highly credulous and believes all other sorts of nonsense so there's a couple times where he veers off away from evidence and when he steers away from evidence, he says some really dumb shit. But, that's five, ten minutes of these three hours?

MAKO: Yeah that's-

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: Most of it is he's actually going over reasonable sources.

SQEAKY: Yeah when he's hitting sources, even someone as incapable as this guy, makes extremely compelling arguments and convinced me of a bunch of stuff, convinced Mako of a bunch of stuff.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: So I don't know, I take that as a lesson... to stick close to the evidence or stick close to my areas of expertise 'cause when this guy was talking about what, flood myths mostly? 'Cause he started talking about "Well this is why there's a worldwide flood" and we're like dude there was never a worldwide flood we just did the research for this. We have the evidence for that.

SOURCE [1:59:00] Episode 0018 The Big Flood (of nonsense). our biblical episode - https://dysevidentia.transistor.fm/episodes/0018-the-big-flood-of-nonsense

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: But the rest of it. He went over and talked about uh... Puma... Punkpumpuku.

SOURCE [1:59:06] Some actually are andesite, but many are sandstone - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumapunku

MAKO: Pumpuku.

SQEAKY: It is this place where carved a bunch a... rocks in South America to make these really interesting structures. Ancient Aliens of course said yeah, it's an alien landing site. They discussed the origin of uh, some of these other monuments and sites. Various Inkan sites, a place called Baalbek, Easter Island. Just one at a time, the Ancient Alien episodes he just debunked these claims one thing at a time and it's clear that Ancient Aliens was habitually cherry picking, lying, or ignoring inconvenient facts.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Like one- one lie that Ancient Aliens made multiple times was several times they said there's no way these things could be moved, there isn't any wood. And they ignore that where the rocks are coming from there's wood in the middle of that path or that the place was deforested. Like seriously, if you go to a Wikipedia page for deforestation, they have pictures of Easter Island. And Easter Island is the place with those big face statues out in the middle of the Pacific ocean.

SOURCE [1:59:52] Wikipedia on deforestation Uses Easter Island as an example - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Well, the reason it's deforested is they cut down all the trees to move all those big face statues. And the Ancient Alien people said there's no way to move these ancient face statues 'cause there's no trees but the ancient statues are why there are no trees. It's so painful. These people are just so fundamentally dishonest. And when you look at any source for anything related to Ancient Aliens, it all stems from dishonest people trying to make a buck. Ancient Aliens, their motive was to sell advertising on the History channel. So they just lied, made up fantastical shit, and they did. They made up a whole bunch of shit around crystal skulls or UFOs in art. Again those things are just debunked in this too. Or the Tolima Jets we were talking about.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: There was this ancient culture in South America that made little jewelry pieces out of silver and gold and some were clay and other stuff too, but they were just fancy lookin' animals. And there was one that was a carp, or a catfish, and people say "Oh it looks like a jet!" and they just made up lies about it too.

MAKO: They mocked up this modern jet and they were like "Oh we didn't alter anything" and they all took like a dozen things.

SQEAKY: Yeah they say we didn't alter anything and then on the screen show it completely different. Like "It's aerodynamically perfect!" Well what about all those parts you removed?

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Alright everyone who's backing this, who's credulous enough to believe this, is following the footsteps of people who knew they were lying. Right, Zechariah Sitchin is a dishonest just... fuckface. And he's deceived a bunch of people who trusted him, 'cause when you write a bunch of books, you gain a certain level of credibility just because you've written a bunch of books. Like Joe Rogan, there's no reason to listen to Joe Rogan but because he has a huge audience and he talks to a huge number of people and he's put out a ton of episodes, he has a certain level of credibility. But Joe Rogan's not saying anything deeply insightful or deeply intelligent.

MAKO: He's even occasionally saying damaging things.

SQEAKY: Occasionally? Like often, but sure whatever.

MAKO: Yeah... I don't listen to him, I don't know what all he says.

SQEAKY: Well...

MAKO: I just hear what's in the headlines.

SQEAKY: That's why you're not that damaged.

MAKO: Yay!

SQEAKY: Uh... People listen to things that feel good not necessarily things that are credible. The more times you hear a story regardless of who it's from, the more likely we all are to believe it. And it might not feel that way, you might feel that you're a hyperlogical rational person, but take a look at things you learnt when you were a child. Right, reexamine your belief in something core and original, Right, what country are you in? What stories did you hear about the country you were raised, right. Like lots of people hear about American exceptionalism who live in the United States. And then I started really digging in and for me what really started to chip away my American exceptionalism was comparing America's roads to India's roads. That made me stop feeling uh... exceptional about America real fast.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: Not that our roads aren't better, it's just if we're exceptional, we better be doing way better than India and we're not, we're not. And it's just like that for a ton of things where so many of these people have these emotional connections to these liars putting out the ancient alien mythos that they take it in a credulous way where they're not vetting it, and they feel disaffected by the normal power structures, by people like NASA, oh NASA's hired by politicians therefore must be liars. So I'm not gonna trust NASA, I'm gonna trust Sitchin or I'm gonna trust... or some of these other they're lying people, fuckin'...

MAKO: Erich von Daniken?

SQEAKY: Yes, Erich von Daniken is another one of these people that puts out books that are just full of shit.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: Let's go for some gender equality. What's her name? Fuckin' she's just went out of business doing it, she's- There it is. Barbera uh... Marciniak.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: She used to put out a newsletter just full of ancient aliens bullshit- and it was just bullshit! She appeared to just be fabricating shit, just cashing in. And now that there's not a lot of cash, she's kinda stepped out of the game. And these people who are willfully lying, right, they're making a ton of money by making some sort of emotional connection with people, getting behind the normal critical thinking barriers people have, and then selling them bullshit. And it's- If it were done the way the National Inquirer does it where it's... y'know "Read about batboy! Give us a couple bucks for some entertainment." That's one thing, we all can appreciate fiction, right. But nobody goes to watch the Avengers movie thinking it's true. These people are putting forward things claiming they're true and then you wind up with shit like preppers making end of the world level decisions wasting their life savings for bunkers to survive y'know a Earth-Nibiru collision in 2011. These people are damaging society, they're damaging our ability to handle truth and reality.

*Sqeaky sighs*

MAKO: Yup.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: So are there any last things we wanna say if people have to deal with-

MAKO: Good luck!

SQEAKY: -these followers? Good luck? That's what you've got? I would say if you have to deal with these people, attack their sources. Do it politely, diplomatically if you can. But to a... to a person. Everyone putting out these alien astronaut stories are either liars who started it and they're making money, or have been fooled by the liars making money. It's the two categories of people, there's no... there's no middle ground on this one. This one's really clean and wrapped up.

MAKO: Yep.

*Sqeaky sighs*

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: Thanks to Qeldaar for video and graphics work.

MAKO: And thanks to AlphaWolf294 for transcription.

SQEAKY: Thanks to all of our Patreon supporters. Our supporters at the Evidence Investigator level or higher include Jarod, DuktTape, Qeldaar, Lazori78, Steven Larabee, and Kaiju Halena. Thanks for listening and don't forget to like, subscribe, leave a review, or tell a friend.

MAKO: Copyright 2021, BlackTopp Studios, Inc. Intro music was Slow by Pit X, used with permission.

*Guitar riff*