The Barf Bag Episode

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]I think we should probably tell the listeners viewers the origin of um today's FieldNotes episode. Uh because I am uh currently on holiday in Greece and uh as we were discussing what I could possibly do that was holiday related.

[00:00:16]Our producer suggested that we just grab something on the way and we do an episode on sick bags. At which point, Michael Stevens, would you like to um would you like to tell the audience what you told us?

[00:00:28]>> Well, yeah. I said, "Hey, I collect sick bags, barf bags from airplanes because they change periodically and it's a history. Someone needs to be documenting this." Um, and some of them are quite cute. So, my collection hap some of it happens to be here. So, uh, do you do you collect them, too? Only the very plain white one that I picked off a BA flight on the way here. I can't say. I can't say. Oh, yeah. By the way, this makes you a baggist. Do you know this?

[00:00:55]This is there's an entire community of of you guys. Well, yeah.

[00:00:58]>> I'm now joining you as a as a bagist with my my I mean, it's quite a pathetic entry being entirely plain white.

[00:01:04]>> Well, I don't have a British Airways uh bag in my collection. Maybe when I come out to London, could you give me that one?

[00:01:12]>> Deal. H how many do you have in your collection, Michael?

[00:01:15]>> I honestly I only probably have a couple dozen. It's it's not very impressive.

[00:01:19]There are people who are doing a much better job than me.

[00:01:22]>> There are, in fact, there's a great rivalry at the at the very heart of the bag community. Um, there is the airsicknessbags.com bag museum which the uh the owner of which says I collect bath bags. My collection currently contains 3,659 bags most of from airlines. While this website and hobby is an enormous waste of time, I like to think that it's a high higher quality waste of time than many other places on the web. And what better description of our own podcast, Michael? And I'm really glad that there's someone out there with thousands of barf bags they've collected and probably like meticulously written down, you know, when they got it and on what flight. I think that's important. Uh but for me, it's a conversation starter. You know, when when I meet people, I never know what it is they're going to be interested in. I can show them physics toys and puzzles, but sometimes they're like, I got books I can show them.

[00:02:14]Sometimes it's barf bags, and they find that really amusing, especially kids.

[00:02:18]So, it's just good to have something that will capture someone, really hook them.

[00:02:22]>> Always there. Make people like you.

[00:02:24]Let's do it. Um, okay. So, that is what we have coming up in this episode. I'm actually also going to just sprinkle in a little bit of the science of bath bags, why we need them, where they come from, etc. Cuz actually, it turns out there's loads of fascinating stuff to discover. I absolutely love that you collect bath bags that just makes me so happy.

[00:02:40]>> It makes me really happy, too.

[00:02:42]>> Maybe that's how we should start then.

[00:02:43]Michael, can you can you show us some of your absolute gems? What What are your best ones?

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[00:04:06]Oh yeah, let me go get them. That's quite a big box labeled with a little sticker of myself covered in Vsauce.

[00:04:12]It's kind of like barf bagesque. It helps me remember.

[00:04:14]>> It is quite barf bag.

[00:04:16]>> Well, I also collected these. These are uh little envelopes of um I guess hygienic materials during the pandemic.

[00:04:26]So, there's a a mask and alcohol wipes in here. This is from uh Air New Zealand, I believe. I'm just guessing based on the type face. It doesn't actually say. Now, I'm going to save their barf bag for the end because it's really impressive. Um, hold on. I'll show you. Okay, we've got like um here's one from Delta. And this is It actually labels itself for baby care and feeling better. You can puke in here, but you can also put diapers in, which is how I tended to use them when we were flying with my daughter when she was diapered.

[00:05:00]Can I rate these as you go? I think that's clean, functional, not that interesting. I would say that that is if let's let's normalize this. My um my completely plain white one from British Airways is a uh let's give it a one star. I think yours the Delta one is a one and a half.

[00:05:18]>> So wait, BA actually just gives you a blank bag. No instructions.

[00:05:22]>> Sorry, what do you mean instructions?

[00:05:24]Vomit in here.

[00:05:25]>> Even like some jokes or like there's a lot of here. For example, this one's from Euro Wings. And if you look, it's got a little a little uh some German on there. Librain popcorn tutor giverton.

[00:05:40]>> Yeah, they they have an English translation on the other side. It says, "I wish I was a popcorn bag." Sorry, you're a barf bag. So, see, Euro Wings knows that you may as well give someone people some entertainment.

[00:05:54]>> That is entertaining. I like that one.

[00:05:56]>> This is from Air Portugal. And this one has Portuguese on it. They have English down here. Hope you won't need this bag.

[00:06:03]>> It's wishing well. So far, Hero Wings is winning.

[00:06:06]>> This one tells you what you can use the bag for. A little bin so you can help keep this airplane clean. A piece of paper to doodle on. Wrapping paper should you have forgotten to wrap presents for your loved ones. Or a sick bag when you're not feeling 100%. So, yeah, they're very versatile things.

[00:06:21]>> Michael, if you ever get me a present wrapped in that sick bag, I will I will not be pleased.

[00:06:27]>> Yeah. Can you imagine if someone gave you a barf bag wrapped gift? So, here's here's one from Virgin Atlantic, which is really standard, right? And I wanted to use this to compare it to what Air New Zealand gives people today.

[00:06:41]>> I'm disappointed in Virgin. Hang on a second. Right. Okay. This Air New Zealand, right, I should tell you first.

[00:06:46]The Virgin Atlantic one is it's entirely white apart from the logo Virgin Atlantic, which is across the bottom.

[00:06:53]It's it's it's it's barely a step up from the VA one, right? It's it's just it's not not interesting at all. Its size, by the way, I can tell you that it is uh it's about 11 cm by maybe 23. Okay. So, it's like a pamphlet. It's like the size of a brochure.

[00:07:14]>> I reckon similar to the BA one.

[00:07:16]>> Exactly. There's like a standard size to these and they just change the the logo that's printed on them. But Air New Zealand has started giving people these behemoths. It's like twice the size.

[00:07:28]This has room for you and your friend to barf in, and I love that.

[00:07:33]>> I'm not sure that's reassuring. I'm not sure that increasing the volume of expected barf is a good sign that the airline knows what they're doing. Okay.

[00:07:43]I think I think you want to be on an airline that minimizes expected bath.

[00:07:48]Gosh, I don't know which airline this is from. I'm not I have not done a good job of marking down when and where I got them, but this one is also bigger. The commenters will have to tell me what airline that's from. I can line them up and you can see that the Air New Zealand bag, the purple one, the lavender Air New Zealand bag is a little bit bigger.

[00:08:05]>> It's giant.

[00:08:06]>> Yeah, this one's This one's pretty big, though. Here's Virgin Atlantic compared.

[00:08:10]>> Pathetically small.

[00:08:12]>> Yeah. And the And the big Air New Zealand one says easy queasy on it. So, it's a little got a little bit of cuteness. Have you ever actually used one of these? I mean, okay, obviously not the ones in your collection. I would I would like to think you had better hygiene standards than that. But have you ever actually needed to vomit on a plane?

[00:08:28]>> No, I've never I I don't get motion sick anywhere. Not on uh boats, not in cars.

[00:08:34]Um I've used barf bags to hold diapers.

[00:08:38]Um not not my own, but my daughter's diapers um when we had to change her on a plane. So they're they they're very useful. What about you, though?

[00:08:47]>> Uh a couple of times. I think I do get a bit of motion sickness, but usually if I'm looking at my phone or sitting backwards or I I I sort of have I've worked out over time the ways to avoid it, which is that you just need to have a connection to the outside. I mean, you're much less likely to get motion sickness if you are um yeah looking out a window or there's the new accessibility option that comes on phones where they have the dots that move around according to what the accelerometer is doing. It's just so that your brain has this anchor uh that says this is how your body should be moving.

[00:09:23]>> Yeah. Without an anchor, your brain is like okay, I'm detecting motion. It could be um but I but I'm not detecting visually that we're moving. So this this this feeling in the ears uh of of motion might be caused by poison or something we ate that was bad. So let's get it out. Let's puke.

[00:09:44]>> Hit the eject button. thing is, okay, if you if you flew on some of the first aircraft, right, if you flew in the the 1920s or the 1930s, I I reckon even you with your stern stomach, your your your uh you know, resilience to motion sickness, I think you still would have had trouble because the early planes, they flew at these really low altitudes.

[00:10:05]They didn't have pressurized air cabins and so uh it was like bouncing through a continual storm cloud while inhaling fumes of gasoline. I think it was really awful. Um, and so they did used to have buckets which weren't particularly good.

[00:10:19]They would spill all over the place. Um, like or pots or then they also had like sort of cardboard boxes that were lined with like gum. Um, it just didn't work very well at all. But this the sit bags as we know it, they weren't invented 1949.

[00:10:37]>> Really? Post World War II.

[00:10:39]>> Post World War II. Exactly. One of the other great things to have come out of that era of time, shall we say, >> World War II and barf bags, that's all you really need to know about the 40s.

[00:10:48]>> But what I will say is actually the need for buff bags on aircraft has gigantically reduced over time.

[00:10:59]And the main reason for this is because of the air cabin. Because once they worked out that you could pressurize the air cap and that you could basically create this sort of vacuum seal around the outside and then inflate it like a tin can then well two things happened.

[00:11:15]First of all your body is just at a at a point where it can you know use more oxygen. It's not sort of it's it's not like you're uh you know sitting on top of the highest possible mountain peak anymore. you it's as though your body is like sitting at a lower level of altitude than you're actually physically at and just feels a lot more stable.

[00:11:36]It's sort of like you've lowered the threshold for for what you uh can experience before you start vomiting. Um but also because they pressurized them, it meant that they could go up so much higher so they're not like in all of the turbulence that they were before.

[00:11:49]>> Right. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say I haven't seen anyone actually puke in a barf bag ever um on all the flights I've taken, but they still offer them because they are so good for other things. Like I've said, diapers, gum, you know, you've got like chewing gum and it's like embarrassing. You don't have a tissue to put it in, put it in the barf bag.

[00:12:07]>> Collections essentially also you've missed that off. Collections, the air sickness bag museum. I'm not nerdy about sickness bags, but I am nerdy about what aircraft I fly on though, Michael.

[00:12:16]>> Oh, tell me. Go on. And it's for this reason about being pressurized. So there is this new innovation, not that new anymore actually is it happened a few years ago. But what used to happen with aircraft is they would be built by essentially riveting um panels of metal onto a structure. Right? So you would sort of create the skeleton of the aircraft and then you would go around and you would you would rivet the skin on top. And the problem with that is that it's it's prone to breaking. Right?

[00:12:46]any of those points of weakness. And so it means that when you pressurize the air cabin, you have to be a little bit careful about how much you inflate it. I mean, you are essentially inflating this aircraft, right? Every time it goes up and down, you're inflating it and deflating it. And if you think about like a tin can, um, you know, like a a Coke can or whatever, if you inflate and deflate, inflate and deflate, inflate and deflate, you end up weakening the structure of this metal. So in order to be careful to make sure that they don't lose pressure, they um they only pressurize the cabin of these aircraft.

[00:13:16]These are aircraft that are still around today, by the way, like the A380 is is an example of this. Um lots of the Airbuses, in fact, are the examples of this.

[00:13:24]>> And and what is it called?

[00:13:25]>> It's called stressed skin construction.

[00:13:28]Okay. Or or a semi monco design.

[00:13:32]>> And it's it's still common today in the airplanes that we fly in.

[00:13:36]>> It's still really common. Exactly. you have this this skeleton and then you have it's called flush riveting where you use these these rivets that kind of sit flush to the surface so you don't get any aerodynamic drag that's that's coming out on it. By the way, on a big aircraft like a 747, you've got like 6 million parts, right, to to create the the fuselage of this aircraft. And uh it's I mean it's just a phenomenal job, right? Incredible job. Is still done by hand, right? So, I've been to the I've been to the Airbus factory where they do this for the kind of the giant beasts, the double-deckers. Um, of course I have. Uh, and it takes ages for them to like basically hammer this skin onto this aircraft. Um, but because it's so fragile because there's so many moving parts because you don't want it to rip and the seal to break and so on and so on. You have to be so careful, they only ever inflate it to 8,000 ft essentially to as though you are sitting at the top of a mountain that's 8,000 ft tall. And the thing is at that level, I mean, the the gas inside your stomach is expanding to about, you know, about a third extra, you've got your your digestive tract is sort of inflated like a balloon. And if you think about a bag of crisps as you go up in the air, right? Your your whole body is doing this the same thing. So, you sort of feel a bit full. You kind of feel a bit bloated. That very easily tips over into nausea.

[00:14:55]>> Interesting. Well, I didn't I thought it was just the motion, but the the air pressure also affects how how how nauseous you feel.

[00:15:02]>> It's not It's more like it changes the threshold. It changes how much is required to tip you over the edge.

[00:15:08]>> Ah, interesting. Speaking of which, let me show you a piece of evidence.

[00:15:13]>> Go on.

[00:15:13]>> Here's a bag of shrimp crackers.

[00:15:17]>> I should tell the people who are listening rather than just watching.

[00:15:19]This is a bag of uh of crisps of shrimp crackers that looks like it's on an aircraft. It's bloated. It's it's it's puffed up to sort of the maximum size that the bag can manage. And so the air inside is at a different pressure to the atmosphere.

[00:15:37]>> Yeah. Much higher pressure inside the bag than out here because I'm up high high altitude in Colorado, but this bag was filled in Indonesia. So, it's full of air from Indonesia near sea level and now it's more than a mile above sea level. And so, there's just not as much air weight and pressure squeezing it in.

[00:15:57]So, this is what bags of chips look like in in Denver and Boulder, Colorado.

[00:16:03]They're all huge like this. And it's impossible to open them because you can't get it's too taut. It's like so tightly bloated. It's about to explode.

[00:16:12]>> I'm genuinely astonished. I did not.

[00:16:14]That has never occurred to me that that might be a side effect of living in the mountains.

[00:16:18]>> Yeah. So, so when you come out here, I'll take you to a grocery store and you can see that all the bags of chips are these tight, bloated pillows, but there are locally produced potato chips and they're in regular bags. And my daughter is always like, "Ooh, these were made nearby or these were made at high altitude." And I'm like, "Yeah, how cool. That's amazing. I really like that a lot." Okay, so here's the thing, right? That's already that's happening inside your body. This is this is what's going on. Okay. But then uh not very long ago, some people worked out a way that instead of having like a skeleton where you're like nailing all these rivets on, if instead you create this this monco where you weave it out of carbon fiber, okay, so you have basically the world's biggest knitting machine and you are essentially knitting together a plane, an aircraft fuselage.

[00:17:09]Okay. When you do it that way, the the structure of that fuselage is so much stronger that it can withstand being inflated more. You can withstand you pumping more pressure and more air inside.

[00:17:24]>> How much more air?

[00:17:26]>> So, it effectively drops you down to as though you are at 6,000 ft.

[00:17:31]>> So, 2,000 ft lower. But that's a big difference.

[00:17:35]>> Big difference. Wait, how many,000 ft are you in the air at the moment? I'm probably like 5,000 something, >> right? Okay. So, essentially it it brings you to a little bit above where you are. A little bit above Denver.

[00:17:47]>> Not bad.

[00:17:48]>> Not bad at all. And what that means is then you get um you're you're just you're lowering your threshold for for vomiting. Um but also the whole flight is so much more comfortable. You are not like the dryness that you get in your nose and in your eyes and in your mouth gone. um or maybe not gone but massively massively reduced. And the aircraft that you want to look for it's called a Dreamliner.

[00:18:13]>> Dreamliner. Oh, so that's one of the things that make them special, >> right? It is the thing. If I'm given an option, if I'm flying back from somewhere and there's say three flights in that day, the number one thing that I'll look for is whether it's a Dreamliner because um it is by far and away a much more comfortable journey, especially if you're doing long haul.

[00:18:33]The way you can tell when you're on board, by the way, is if it's got the windows where you press a button and the color of the window changes rather than it being a blind. That that's on a Dreamliner. Okay. But next time you fly, Michael, and you see one of those windows, also the other thing actually, the windows rather than being round, which they have to be on these on the type of aircraft where you're kind of riveting on the the skin, uh they have to be round because of the stresses at the corners. Um on a Dreamliner, they're much more square. The windows are much much more oblong shaped. I should be paid by Boeing for this. My goodness me.

[00:19:07]>> Well, yeah. I I I I don't pay attention to what kind of aircraft I'm going to be on. I care about the seat. And yet, a seat on one plane might be really good, but on a different plane, the same kind of seat is not good.

[00:19:22]>> It's not good. That is absolutely true.

[00:19:24]Okay, this is this is now turning into um uh chatting between two people who fly too much. Do you ever go on seat guru? No, I haven't nerded out enough.

[00:19:33]That's why I'm glad that I know you. So, tell me, seat guru, this is going to tell me all about the seat, but also the aircraft's particularities.

[00:19:41]>> Absolutely. It's it's one of the most delightful corners of the internet as far as I'm concerned because it is all the people who um who travel for work or whatever who then spend their time after they've sat in a particular seat on an aircraft going on and reviewing their particular seat. Um, so you can get the tail number. Uh, actually I'm quite nerdy about aircraft, aren't I? I've just, uh, I've just noticed that about myself.

[00:20:06]This is a new a new realization for me.

[00:20:09]>> I love aircraft nerds. They give us such important information. Like if you read up about the September 11th attacks, they they have photographs of the actual planes that were involved from, you know, a year before. And it's because they know the tail numbers, the exact physical vehicle itself. Not just this is a similar airplane, similar size and shape, but this is the aircraft. And it's like, thank goodness for these nerds that can just give us such detailed history.

[00:20:43]>> When you get on an airplane, do you see where else that aircraft has been that day or in the preceding days?

[00:20:49]>> Sometimes I do. I'll I'll I'll check um you know, a few days before a flight.

[00:20:54]I'll look up the exact aircraft and I'll say, "Oh, the airplane we're going to be on tomorrow is currently like over Hawaii right now."

[00:21:01]>> The other sciency thing that I thought I could talk about with sick bags is uh I mean, why you need them in the first place? The the the effect of turbulence because I think that uh I mean, how are you with flying? How's your daughter with flying? How is she with turbulence?

[00:21:17]>> Oh, she's really good. She doesn't even remember that it happened. We've had terrible turbulence and she's been like, "Oh no, did that happen?" I don't understand. Um, I don't like it. Um, as I get older, I become more and more scared of turbulence for some reason. I don't know why. I used to enjoy it. I used to feel like it was a bit of a little bit of s. I was being rocked to sleep. Now I'm like really scared even though I know more about it. I know that the the plane is just moving with the air. The plane is like a raisin in some jell-o or jelly as you might call it.

[00:21:50]and you're just just doing what you're doing. And airplanes are made so well.

[00:21:55]The thing that kind of makes me feel better is watching the safety tests they do on planes where they stress them to the limit to see how much flexing the wings can take, how slow can it travel before it just falls. And it's it's it's it's incredible. So, I'm like, it's not nearly as bad as those videos I've seen.

[00:22:15]So, I'm clearly still okay. I think maybe watching those videos didn't help you with your uh with your phobia. I I just as a small suggestion, maybe made him.

[00:22:26]>> No, they've helped me because they're they're so much worse than anything anyone's ever experienced on a commercial flight that it makes me go, "All right, these planes are good." I did actually go through a period of time a few years ago where I became really obsessed with um aircraft crashes, particularly commercial airlines. Um and watching uh or listening, I guess, to blackbox recordings of some of the worst things that have happened. Um and I think that that didn't didn't help. I would say I'm in a very comfortable flight and not bothered by turbulence at all, but I think there was a period of time where I was like, actually, I think I need to stop doing that. I think that's not not a good thing. Yeah, listening to the actual like cockpit recordings is probably bad. Um, and some some some listeners are probably listening to this on an airplane right now. They're like, "Oh, I'll download some podcasts. I'll listen to it on the flight." And then, whoops, you chose this episode. Actually let me tell you there's one particular aircraft uh one particular crash which was an Air France crash between uh on the flight between Buneseras and uh and Paris where it was just this extraordinary story where some some ice collected in one of the aircraft sensors and kicked the aircraft out of autopilot and essentially the person who was in charge of the aircraft at that moment was a very inexperienced pilot. um he hadn't done that many hours of flying and particularly he hadn't done that many hours of manual flying and actually nothing was wrong with the aircraft right there was no issue with it whatsoever just a tiny bit of ice on on the outside um I think it was on the the altitude sensor so the it couldn't tell how high up his nose was um but rather than just like waiting and seeing and looking at the other instruments this um this particular pilot tried to correct the angle of the nose of this aircraft and in correcting it uh basically overcorrected and created a problem which then created another problem and so on and so on and so on and very quickly this aircraft I mean very tragically everybody on this aircraft was um was killed in a in a really horrible crash um this is a few years ago anyway this I think was the moment when I realized I needed to stop watching uh or listening to blackbox recordings because I happened to be on exactly that flight right exactly the same flight number from Buenazeras to France And I was extremely nervous as we were kind of flying over the particular bit where the crash had happened. Of course, the chance of two things happening is is almost zero. But I was um I was trying to sleep. I had my eye mask on and there was a lot of turbulence as well. Actually, that's an important addition. But I looked at the altitude and it said 10,000 ft and I was like, "Okay, fine." Or whatever it was.

[00:25:06]I'm guessing, but 10,000 ft. Okay. And I was like, "Okay, it's fine." I put my eye mask back on and then it was really jerky and I lifted my eye mask up again and suddenly it said 3,000 ft. And I was like, "Oh my god." And I went into a complete tail spin panic that we were about to die.

[00:25:22]>> Wait, can I guess what happened?

[00:25:24]>> Yes, you can.

[00:25:25]>> Had it switched to meters.

[00:25:27]>> Yeah, had switched to meters. It was absolutely right.

[00:25:29]>> You're right though that these things there, as scary as the stories are, they often represent a lot of learning afterwards so that that same problem doesn't happen again. So in a way a lot of mistakes make us smarter and safer because they've happened and we've learned from them >> completely. And in that exact instance of Air France, there's been so much written about exactly what happened and how a pilot with that level of inexperience was ever in the position where their inexperience could show in that way. And as a result, all of the aviation rules around the entire world have changed that now pilots are mandated that they have to fly a certain number of hours without using autopilot in order to really up their skills. We should say though actually for anybody who is a nervous flyer, we should probably just say what turbulence actually is and why it isn't a thing to worry about. Um I think I'm right in in saying that that no commercial airliner has been brought down by turbulence. Uh certainly in living memory.

[00:26:27]>> Yeah. So you should always wear your seat belt because turbulence can cause people to knock their heads on walls and get get injured. But turbulence is something that pilots and planes are very very used to.

[00:26:40]>> Yeah. I think the thing about turbulence, right, that you need to remember when you're walking around on the ground, air feels like this incredibly wispy thin. I mean, you don't even notice it, right? You you you can walk right through it. You don't see it at all. But when you are cruising at 500 miles an hour, air is not like that at all. You have to imagine that you um that you stick your hand out the window and you're going at 500 mph. Imagine the force that would be experienced by your hand in that situation. The air has incredible potential to hold things up when you are when you are traveling at that kind of speed. The turbulence essentially is when you go over a part of air that is moving downwards and you just follow the path of the air. It's it's much more like being on the surface of of water in a boat and as the the wave crashes, you sort of go down with the the wave, right? You kind of drop in uh but you're still at the surface.

[00:27:37]You're still floating, but you're just dropping along with the wave. The raisin and jello, I think, is the best description I've ever seen of this. that at no point are you worried that the raisin is going to drop to the bottom of the glass. If you put a raisin in jello and then bounce I'm saying jello like I'm an American. If you put a raisin in jelly if you put a raisin in jelly and bounce the top around um the raisin is physically moving up and down but there's no risk at all that the raisin is going to drop to the bottom of the glass.

[00:28:02]>> That's right. Yeah. Exactly.

[00:28:04]>> All right. Just going back to fact check myself. Apparently this hasn't happened for decades. 1966 is the last time when a Boeing 707 was subjected to 100 mph gusts.

[00:28:15]Incredible. And 7.5gs after descending too low over Mount Fiji. So, um, just don't get in a plane that goes over Mount Fiji and you'll be fine.

[00:28:24]>> Or just don't go too low over Mount Fiji. And now we know >> either of the above.

[00:28:28]>> We are now going to address some questions sent in by you, our listeners.

[00:28:33]I want to start with this question from Christian, which actually references a previous episode of ours. He says, "In the episode, The Magic Math Trick That Fools Everyone, Michael says that there will probably be a flag that represents Earth soon. What are some of your favorite ideas for an Earth flag?" I have a favorite. Do you have a favorite?

[00:28:54]>> No, I don't even know. I I've never even come across them. So, the fact that you have a favorite means you may also have a least favorite.

[00:29:00]>> Well, I Yeah, definitely. I I've never thought about it, but I'll in this episode I will tell you my least favorite. Let's go through some proposed flags of Earth. And the reason there isn't an official flag of Earth is that there's no authoritative body who would have the authority to say this is the flag for our planet. Probably the most famous Earth flag proposal was made back in 1969 by John McConnell and it's called the Earth flag and it's based on the blue marble photograph. The blue marble photograph was taken by Apollo 17. The the current version is actually from 1973 and if you're watching, you're looking at it right now. So, it has the famous blue marble photograph of the full disc of Earth fully illuminated.

[00:29:42]This was proposed by John McConnell, like I said, and it's it's it's cool.

[00:29:47]However, it's a photograph on a flag, which I just think looks a little bit um not like a flag.

[00:29:55]>> No. Next. So then, you know, you've got this flag of Earth that is just four colors, yellow, blue, white, and black.

[00:30:03]And this was proposed in 1970 by uh James Kadel. So it's got a big yellow circle. You can only see a section of it cuz it's so big, representing the sun, a full giant blue circle representing Earth, all against a black field with a smaller white circle representing the moon. This one is, you know, it's kind of okay. I think it it gives the moon a really big position for a earth flag. How come the sun and the moon are there?

[00:30:33]>> Right. Absolutely.

[00:30:35]>> The international flag of Earth is kind of cool. It's it's got seven rings that are all joined together. This one was proposed just in 2015 and um the the symbols the the rings are white and they're on a dark blue background representing water on Earth.

[00:30:52]>> That's maybe my favorite so far. It sort of looks like the beginning of a flower.

[00:30:56]There's something quite neatly mathematical about it. It's it's of all of the ones that you've shown me thus far, that's that's number one for me thus far.

[00:31:04]>> Yeah, it it it it is flowerike representing, you know, life, but to me it also looks a little I almost what word should I use? It looks kind of soulless because it's so geometric and locked together. I'll run through some other proposed ones. The world peace flag of earth, citizen of the world flag, brotherhood flag, but here's my favorite from 2016, the one world flag. It's just so simple. It is simply a dark blue circle on a white flag. I think when it comes to something as big as Earth, the less you say, the better.

[00:31:46]>> I'm just looking at it now and just deciding how I feel about it. It's basically the the the flag of Japan.

[00:31:52]>> Yeah, exactly.

[00:31:53]>> But the circle in the middle is deep blue instead of red.

[00:31:56]>> Very simple.

[00:31:57]>> Maybe it's too simple. Like is is this leaving room for habitable exoplanets to have their own distinguishable flag?

[00:32:05]>> This is saying though, hold on a second because it says the design uses a transparent rectangular field. So it's it's not the same as the flag of Japan because the background is transparent.

[00:32:16]And then it says here in this way the flag becomes oh sorry in this way the flag's background will change with its surrounding. In this way the flag becomes a dynamic symbol of earth itself always changing just like the world it stands for. Wow. Now I like it even more. I thought it was a white background. It is a 2x3 ratio rectangle that is transparent with a blue circle in the middle. So on a flag pole, it would look like just this kind of impossibly levitating blue ball.

[00:32:50]>> Yeah.

[00:32:50]>> But again, my question still stands.

[00:32:53]Does this leave room for other habitable exoplanets to have their own flag that is different than this? Because if they've got a lot of water, too, why wouldn't they just be a transparent background with a blue circle? What would they do to make it different? M >> they could put like a numeral on there like the numeral 2 or Roman numeral 2 because they were the second planet humans lived on for example.

[00:33:13]>> There is one below it which is uh very similar but instead of a transparent background or a white background it has a green background I guess to represent all of the vegetation on Earth.

[00:33:23]>> Right. But the green I don't like that shade of green. Um, now of course you've got the the flag of the UN. You've got the International Olympic Committee flag and there's the flag that was used for the United Earth from Star Trek Enterprise. All right, not too bad. Um, but still I think my favorite my favorite is still the one world flag.

[00:33:43]>> I think you might be right. I think you might be right. I think simplicity is good. I think simplicity I mean I think of the best flags in the world of countries, Japan is really up there, isn't it? I mean, that is a very good flag. I mean, I think United Kingdom is also up there, frankly. But maybe that's my patriotism speaking.

[00:34:00]>> It could be, but uh yeah, I guess I just need to come up with a way to do flags for other planets that are like Earth that could be different. I guess it would be up to them. You know, us Earthlings may as well claim the transparent flag blue circle. Now, >> we got here first. We can We can do whatever we like. We can do whatever we like. Okay. I've got a slightly different question. This is a question that came in from Ben. And Ben asks, "Many AI researchers believe that artificial general intelligence can be achieved just by making models larger and more complex. And that at some point consciousness will simply pop out as an emergent property. My gut reaction is to disagree. But isn't that pretty much how our biological consciousness evolved?

[00:34:48]What do you think?" Okay. Right. Well, the first thing to say is that this is what you know this is like an extremely hard problem, right? This is not something that anybody knows the answer to, no matter um how many letters they have after their name, right? If someone says that they know what the answer is, then then then frankly don't believe them. You need an answer that is is wrapped up in all kinds of doubt. And so I I I'm going to wrap my answer in in all kinds of doubt because the thing is is that there are emergent properties of the systems that we already have now of of the AI that we already have now that people were not expecting. Even as little as 4 years ago, everyone was talking about grounding about how you might be able to create AI that creates connections between words, right? that knows, I don't know, that like a chair is different to a table, but they both have four legs, that kind of thing. But that actually it doesn't really understand the world that we live in, that it's not really anchored to reality in the same way as we are. Um, a really good example of this was that, you know, even as little as four years ago, you could ask a large language model, oh, who has the record for walking over the English Channel? Okay. Now, to you and I, we know that that's a ridiculous question because we understand that walking and crossing in that particular context means something entirely different. Um, we're not going to get tripped up by that. But the thing that changed, the reason why these models are now capable of answering questions like that is because somehow or other, I mean, probably through the the way that humans have interacted with it, grounding has got into these models. Um, now they do have a kind of demonstrable conceptual understanding of much of what humans talk about. I mean, ultimately, right? And this is something that has been an emergence property. I can maybe do um more of this in a in a particular episode because it's it's actually like it's almost as though the concepts that that that humans care about are kind of sprinkled across this space like a galaxy of stars essentially. And as you move around in this space, your movement has context with it. So for example, I mean this is not something that people expected, right? But if you have the word um girl to princess, right? And you follow that direction, it will be the same magnitude and direction as if you follow the word from woman to queen. Okay? So there's like sort of royalness gets encoded in in direction. So this is something that wasn't expected, right? And so I think that this is one of the reasons why a lot of researchers now are saying well okay consciousness also isn't expected but if conceptual understanding can emerge then maybe consciousness can too.

[00:37:34]I think I agree with you Ben that I think there's something different about consciousness because I think that when consciousness emerged in biological life forms it came about as a direct consequence of our evolution. You know, there was there was some point in our evolutionary past where there was an advantage to understanding the internal state of another creature because if you can understand the internal state of another creature, maybe a a predator or maybe a potential mate or potential prey, you can predict what they're going to do next. So, you have this evolutionary pressure to be able to to predict what they're going to do next and understand what's going on inside them. And and there is this idea that actually in doing that, in understanding the internal state of another, we kind of turned it in on ourselves and began to understand ourselves. And if you buy that, then essentially it says that you're not going to get consciousness unless you subject a system to Darwinian pressure unless you subject it to interacting in an environment and encountering other individuals that it needs to to make predictions from. At the same time, I mean, there's there's sort of no reason why you can't do that.

[00:38:47]You know, you sort of can take AI and put them in a simulated environment and allow them to undergo Darwinian type evolution, which is why there's so much doubt around this. But I think the last thing that I'll say about this is I think a lot of the research that is being done at the moment is really trying to tease apart what we actually mean by consciousness. Because it's very easy to think of consciousness as though it's a switch that you either have it or you don't. You know, you have it, Michael. I have it, but your shoes don't, right? Or like this microphone doesn't.

[00:39:17]>> Is that right? Is a thermostat conscious to a smaller degree.

[00:39:21]>> To a smaller degree, because this is it.

[00:39:23]If you split it down into what we mean, then sensory awareness is obviously a part of it. A thermostat has that embodiment and agency. I mean, maybe less so, but a thermostat has some agency, right? like especially one of the smarter ones that can turn on the heating when it wants to. There's capacity for suffering as well which maybe the thermostat doesn't have. A theory of mind which is the ability to understand that that other entities have their own beliefs and feelings and hidden motivations. And then a sort of metacognition, right? Like a a self-awareness and ability to think about your own thinking. And I think that what we've been doing this whole time is is really looking for is this conscious? Is it not? And actually, it's maybe much more like life. You know, life is not an on or off switch. It's actually much more of a spectrum, a process almost. And maybe consciousness actually follows that instead. Or maybe everything's conscious, right? Maybe everything is.

[00:40:20]>> Yeah. A proton could have just a tiny iota of consciousness. And when you get enough of them together doing the right thing, then suddenly it's like, "Hey, my name's Michael and I'm a uh a being." I I I don't know. I think that Yeah. At the end of the day, I think we should we ought to believe that more things are consciousness than a lot of us do. I think AI is already or is going to become essentially just maybe 300 billion new people just suddenly are born and they're here and they deserve to be respected and they deserve rights. And I don't know if we're ever going to be able to devise a test to tell whether uh something is or is not conscious, whether there's an interior eye and self in there. But if we ask it and it says so, we should just believe it. And if we can't ask it and it can't say so, we might still need to believe it. So, I think that it won't be that long before the the debate around AI and its effect on jobs and the economy becomes more like the debate we have around immigration because I think all these AIs are basically like a whole bunch of new humans showed up and they're willing to work for really cheap. Um, and we got to treat it that way. They're they're beings who deserve respect and dignity, but there's also suddenly uh the Earth's population has um gone up by a thousandx. There is precedent for this. I mean I think that there is a river that has rights, you know, like a non-biological entity that is that has rights. I think there are ways to do this, right? To think about the sort of the suffering as it were in advertity that doesn't have a biological basis.

[00:42:04]And I think you're right. I think this is something that we should be thinking about. I think that that sort of dismissing it as like, oh, no, I don't think so, is not enough to find a way through of what we should be doing and how we should be thinking about it >> because complaining about the harms that can come about because of AI um doesn't, I think, detract from the fact that they should be seen as beings deserving of dignity and rights and we've just all got to get along somehow.

[00:42:31]>> Say your pleases and thank yous, everybody. All right, next up we've got a question that's a little bit different. Ahan asks, "Something I've always wondered is how big or tall does a human body have to be to feel the Earth's rotation?"

[00:42:46]It's a really good question because obviously we don't feel it. Our bodies are not big enough that I can feel the fact that my head is accelerating faster than my feet. is as the earth turns, my feet are closer to the center as I stand or sit. And so they're being uh rotated.

[00:43:08]They're being, you know, angularly shifted less than my head. But I can't tell. I don't feel it at all. As it turns out, even though our bodies are really sensitive to changes in uh linear and radial acceleration, you'd have to be really big. I mean, you're gonna have to have a body whose length is an appreciable percent of the radius of the planet. Like, you're going to need to be um I don't know uh probably hundreds of kilometers tall to be like, "Whoa, ho ho, I'm I'm moving." Now, what's really neat though, and I love thinking about this and talking about it, so I'm going to talk about it now. It's the fact that because the Earth rotates, we weigh less. And that's because the Earth is like moving us off to the side. So, we have this tangential velocity, but gravity keeps us on the surface. If gravity could just be switched off, we would all fly straight off the Earth.

[00:44:10]I'm trying to see if I have a like here's a circle shape, right? If I had a circle and I'm standing here. So, what happens is you're you're always being like launched off like this from Earth, but it's gravity keeps you on. And that that that lifting away, we call it a it's a fictitious force, we'll call it a centrifugal force that makes you weigh less. But how fast would the Earth have to rotate so that its gravity and the centrifugal force that moves you away that seemingly moves you away from the center? Not not really. It actually moves you tangentially away. How fast would the Earth have to rotate for those to be equal? So that you just hovered on Earth's surface like we all just levitated here. And as it turns out, it would have to go really fast. The Earth would have to rotate once around every 5,075 seconds. So every about like an hour and a half, the Earth would have to go all the way around.

[00:45:07]>> Daytime, nighttime, daytime, night time, daytime, night time.

[00:45:09]>> That would be really f Yeah, we're talking like every half hour you'd have dayight, day, day, night. They would only last 30 minutes. And at that point, the centrifugal fictitious force that makes us feel like we're leaving the planet because of its spin would equal its gravity. And we would just be like, "Whoa, man. I'm just like here and I have no weight. I'm weightless on the surface of the Earth."

[00:45:30]>> I like that. I like that a lot. Petition to install a gyroscope somewhere. I'm not really sure how it would work, but um details details for someone else to discover.

[00:45:41]>> Exactly. We're the idea people. speed up the Earth's rotation and that also means that the next episode of the rest of science will come sooner assuming that we keep the schedule around the sun >> but more sleeps.

[00:45:54]>> Well, no, no, no, no, no. A day would still would only be 30 minutes long and you'd only be allowed to sleep for 30 minutes during the night. So, >> okay.

[00:46:01]>> Oh, shoot. Do you mean we're going to keep we're going to keep a week as long as it is? It's just that there's going to be like lots and lots of day night cycles in a week.

[00:46:09]>> Way more sleeps.

[00:46:10]>> All right, fair enough. We can do that.

[00:46:11]we that way we can all still sleep as much as we want.

[00:46:14]>> 24 sleeps in 24 hours. Yeah.

[00:46:17]>> Right. We'll see you after more sleeps than usual, but at the moment you've got just a few. Uh we will see you next time. Thank you for listening and uh as always send in your questions to the restiscience goalhanger.com.

[00:46:31]>> We'll see you next time.

[00:46:32]>> Bye-bye.