Just how realistic are Stargate plot devices when compared to actual science? We’ve brought two minds together to answer some of these questions! Stargate Atlantis and Universe on-set Science Consultant and real-life astrophysicist, Mika McKinnon, joins “Rodney McKay” actor David Hewlett on Dial the Gate for a LIVE episode and audience Q&A!

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Timecodes
00:00 – Opening Credits
01:05 – Welcome and Episode Outline
03:00 – Welcoming Mika and David, Mika Discusses the Moon
11:05 – The Pandemic with Seismic Stations, Cautions on Set
14:38 – Robots Gathering Data, Mika’s NASA project, Making Science Accessible
18:14 – What does it mean to do science? Problem-solving and failure
21:05 – Climate Change, Weather Disasters
22:42 – Sagittarius A Black Hole, planets, and how things taste
27:46 – Wormhole & containment vessel, time travel, space, natural disasters
41:32 – Zero Point Modules
46:19 – Destiny, New Telescope
56:04 – The Pulsar in SGU’s “Incursion”
57:58 – Aliens, Planetary Protection, Starlink and Space Junk
1:02:59 – Humanity and Adaptability
1:11:09 – Prepping for Disasters
1:12:37 – Fan Questions: transfer of consciousness into AI, medical advancements
1:17:58 – What is Zero Point Energy?
1:19:20 – Organic Materials to Make Space Ships
1:21:59 – What is the wormhole based on
1:24:53 – Thanking Mika for Joining Us
1:25:43 – David Hewlett’s Tech Bandits
1:28:38 – Learning at Your Own Pace and Active Learning
1:34:39 – Wrapping up with David Hewlett
1:41:11 – Post interview Housekeeping
1:44:48 – End Credits

***

“Stargate” and all related materials are owned by MGM Studios and MGM Television.

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read
Hello everyone and welcome to episode 134 of Dial the Gate, my name is David Read. This is a special episode for me, it’s something that I’ve been wanting to put together for a while now. Stargate consultant, Stargate fan girl and real life astrophysicist Mika McKinnon, who was on set as the science consultant for Atlantis and Universe is joining us along with Rodney McKay himself, David Hewlett to discuss Stargate science. We have several topics that we’re going to discuss for the first half of the episode. In the meantime, on youtube.com/dialthegate our moderators are taking your questions in the live chat to David and Mika that I will ask them in the second half of the program. I appreciate you tuning in and I think we’re going to have a eye opening discussion. I think it’s going to be very interesting some of the topics that we’re going to come up with. Before we get started, if you like Stargate and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, it would mean a great deal if you click that like button. It makes a difference with YouTube’s algorithm and will help the show continue to grow its audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend and if you want to get notified about future episodes click the Subscribe icon. Giving the bell icon a click will notify you the moment a new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last minute guest changes. Clips from this live stream will be released over the course of the next several days on the DialtheGate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. As this is a live show we have our guests on with us live, this is not pre recorded. Again, you can submit your questions at youtube.com/dialthegate to the moderating team who will submit those questions over to me and then I will pick some of the better ones. This is a Stargate science specific episode so I’d like to keep the questions as much as possible geared in that direction. Without further ado, let’s go ahead and bring in our guests for this episode, Mika McKinnon, science consultant, Stargate Atlantis, Stargate Universe, David Hewlett, Rodney McKay, all of Stargate in general. Hello, sir. Hello, ma’am. How are you?

David Hewlett
It’s like real genius and fake genius.

Mika McKinnon
We’re just not going to clarify which way around that goes.

David Hewlett
it’s pretty apparent, I think.

David Read
Mika how are you? How are things going? So good to have you back.

Mika McKinnon
I’m doing well. I’m having fun. I’ve got my whole little collection of rocks just out of scene. I’ve got excitement to be able to talk about all of our on screen science instead of real life doom. Doing fictional doom sounds way better right now.

David Hewlett
Fictional Doom is always so much more pleasant isn’t it? It’s also much more visually pleasing.

Mika McKinnon
There’s all these things we can be like, “absolute worst thing that can happen” and then make it worse and worse and worse and nobody dies in the end. It’s perfect, I love it, it’s like the ideal form of disaster.

David Hewlett
And someone steps in, does a lot of talking and then solves it, it’s done.

David Read
There are reasons like Dante’s Peak, in terms of like a disaster movie, I think that’s the quintessential disaster film; you’ve got James Bond against the volcano. Theorizing allows us to create things like this, watching them on television without actually experiencing them in person.

David Hewlett
I guess that’s it. I wondered if it was going to change because the pandemic. I wondered if people were going to want more…but disastrous still seems to sell.

David Read
Absolutely. I remember when the pandemic first started and I started seeing copies of Stephen King’s The Stand fly off shelves, the mini series. It’s like, “Really? Seriously?” I guess people just like to scare themselves.

David Hewlett
Remember when we couldn’t get a copy of 1984. About five years before that 1984 was like just off the shelves, you couldn’t find it anywhere.

Mika McKinnon
My only consulting project during the pandemic so far was for Moonfall so I am definitely seeing the interest in having over the top catastrophic disasters.

David Hewlett
Moonfall, I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it was so ridiculously silly.

David Read
Oh, absolutely it is.

Mika McKinnon
I was very, very excited. First of all, it’s the king of disaster movies, right? Bucket list item for a disaster geophysicist being like, “let’s do that.”

David Hewlett
And creator of Stargate. Roland Emmerich we’re talking about just for those who don’t…

Mika McKinnon
Yeah. So I’m a science consultant in the film industry and one of the things I get to do is effectively be a one-on-one science tutor for the writers and the directors. They say, “Hey, here’s this world or this story, this environment” and my job is to go “let me tell you more. Let me teach you the science, let me give you all these extra ideas. Which direction do you want to take your story in?” One of the chunks of how I was saying, “Okay, so here’s what we know about the moon and how we know what the internal structure of the moon.” In geophysics we say things “ring like a bell” when you have an earthquake. It makes the entire surface, it’s acoustic waves, so we call it “rings like a bell for a couple of days.” That line made it into the movie and it made very, very, very happy.

David Hewlett
in reference to a hollow moon, admittedly,

Mika McKinnon
During the Apollo missions they did do seismic experiments. They had little seismometers on the moon.

David Hewlett
One of the things they want to put on the moon now is the new versions of those right?

Mika McKinnon
Oh, it’d be so fun. There’s currently one on Mars, the Mars InSight Lander has seismometers on it. We tried to send a seismometer there with a Viking mission, but it was on the top of the lander and it blew in the wind, so it was a really good weather station, unfortunately. It took about 30 years to land one three feet lower. On the surface and just this last week, it detected the largest earthquake ever on another planetary body. Normally it’s been detecting things that are like the equivalent of magnitude 3, which is like if a truck passes your house and it rattles a little bit, that’s what a magnitude three would feel like. This was a magnitude 5, which is if a truck ran into your house, or a giant punched the side of your house is how that would feel. So pretty cool.

David Hewlett
I love this whole sensor thing. There’s been such a boom in the creation of sensors, I’m so excited for the next like 10 years for space. There’s so much stuff that we’re gonna get within the next decade that’s going to come to fruition. I’m so excited to go to the internet every morning, there’s always something, a blackhole or whatever.

David Read
Mika, so I have to ask you, being a consultant on Moonfall, is there no chance in hell that the moon is hollow on the inside? We know that for a fact?

Mika McKinnon
We are very, very, very certain what the moon looks like on the inside. We’re very good on that fact that it is solid. Not only is it solid, but the top surface of it…So on Earth, the crust is the flexible yet solid thing coating the Earth. The plate tectonics moving around, everything moves at the rate your fingernails grow and that’s why we have earthquakes. On the moon, the crust still exists, doesn’t move, no plate tectonics, but instead of being mostly solid, it’s actually been shattered because there’s been so many things banging into it over the years. We know that because of how the earthquakes move through it. The seismic signals are all chewed up and reverberate as if it’s like on a gravel beach or something. We have a really good idea of what that looks like.

David Hewlett
Does it have a core like it? Does it have a magnetic core? It’s surely not as strong as ours?

Mika McKinnon
It’s not really magnetic because it doesn’t have that liquid core. So center of the Earth, if you watched The Core in the 90s…

David Read
I love that movie.

David Hewlett
I was there too.

Mika McKinnon
Yep. Turns out, it actually has a really good geology 101 lecture where they go hot metal moving fast creates an electromagnetic field. So the structure of the Earth, kind of like a peach, they do the demonstration in that particular movie. We’ve got the thin little crust that we all hang out on and that’s as far as we’ve actually ever been and physically seen. Everything else we know from geophysics, which is what my specialization is. Geophysics is like a cross of James Bond villain and MacGyver, you go around to these exotic places, you land a helicopter on a glacier or something like that, put out all of your fancy equipment, try not to get bears chewing on your cables and then you push a big red button and you do something to disrupt the planet. You shock it with 2400 volts of electricity, you blow up explosives, you do something and it creates a signal. It goes through the Earth and you get the signal popping up the other side and it has changed in between. It’s a Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you have the answer, what was the question? Like you have got the 42, what does it need to get that question in the first place? That is geophysics, that’s the entire science of Geophysics. From that, we know the entire interior structure of the earth because we can see things like how fast earthquake waves travel through. Based on their speed we know what type of rocks they have to be and we know that there is a liquid outer core and a solid inner core on the earth because some types of waves only go through solids. If you’re in a swimming pool you can shove water at somebody but you can’t wave water back and forth at somebody. If you do like a jump rope, you can wave it back and forth and you can get that side to side, that shear wave. You can’t get that in a liquid. We see the shear waves disappear as they’re traveling through the Earth and then they pop back out again on the other side so we know there’s liquid in our outer core. Nothing like that on the moon.

David Read
So we can infer that based on what we’re observing?

Mika McKinnon
Yeah. It’s so close to being magic, but it’s actually mathematics. I love it and it’s just bonkers the things you can find out. During the pandemic we could actually tell what countries had locked down when and how well people were following them because we could see it on our seismic stations.

David Hewlett
Oh my god, seriously?

Mika McKinnon
Yeah. I was part of a big team of geophysicist all around the world. I think there was 100 of us looking at our seismic stations during lockdown, the paper’s in Nature [scientific journal] and it’s the global quieting. Everything suddenly went “shhh.”

David Read
Yeah, we’re not driving our vehicles anymore.

Mika McKinnon
Not driving our vehicles, not landing planes, way lower pedestrian traffic. We didn’t have the cruise ships, none of them. It was amazing.

David Hewlett
How are you getting that data though? Are you getting that data by just working at yourself or was AI doing this stuff? How were you…?

Mika McKinnon
The seismic stations are always recording because we want to be able to look for earthquakes and also for brand new killer bombs. That’s why we have a seismic network in the first place.

David Hewlett
Fire those suckers up again.

Mika McKinnon
Now there’s this huge advent of people using Raspberry Pi’s to make little at-home seismic stations.

David Hewlett
I love Raspberry Pi’s, I’ve got like six of them.

David Read
It ridiculous what you can do with them.

Mika McKinnon
A shaken boom is you can attach effectively a three dimensional microphone to it and that will be your seismic station. A boom would be doing an infrasound monitor to it if you wanted to check for explosions. Those are all over the world and they’re just run by people at schools, at museums, in their home, whatever.

David Hewlett
I could just like put one in my backyard?

Mika McKinnon
Yeah, yeah and then you just release the data. You’re like, “surprise.”

David Hewlett
Oh, that’s great.

Mika McKinnon
Because we use them for outreach they tend to be in the city core so we can really see it super, super clearly on all of those. We just look for the background noise that we’re always trying to filter out so we can look for earthquakes and instead we’re looking at the background noise and we’re able to see that it was all just quiet.

David Hewlett
God, I hadn’t even thought of that. That’s amazing.

Mika McKinnon
So cool. It was a collaboration that started on Twitter because geophysicists were being like, “hey, look, my station got really quiet. Anyone else see that?” I’m acting like, “yeah, L.A., totally silent.” I found that super reassuring in those early days of the pandemic when it was like really lonely. You’d look out the window and see people going about their lives. you’re like, “I’m behaving.” You get this reassurance that actually no, everybody’s in this together. It’s a lot less reassuring now.

David Hewlett
Of course, weirdly, I was in the film industry so we were actually out blowing things up in the field. I was on See, we were literally blowing up things in fields.

David Read
Yeah, but you were doing it safely with every precaution known to man at that time.

David Hewlett
Oh my god yeah, like testing every second hour. It’s like crazy. My nose has never been cleaner.

Mika McKinnon
I filmed two different documentaries during that. One of them was the camera person and the sound person with me, everybody masked up, I’m not. Everybody else was on an iPhone watching.

David Hewlett
Oh yeah. On See our show runner was basically a phone that walked around. I muched prefer it actually when he was on set, which is weird, that’s not usually the case. It was like having a human cellphone avatar just sort of walking around.

Mika McKinnon
We totally need those little robots doing that now, remote access bots.

David Hewlett
I was reading about that with exploring the moon. I never understood why they always sent these big robots out. I was like, “why don’t they just send a little one?” Now apparently they’ve got little ones, like little RV type things that can drive around and get data for us as well, which is kind of exciting.

David Read
When are we going to deploy these things?

David Hewlett
I think it’s like, well, we’ll get told.

Mika McKinnon
My research project right now, I’m with Project ESPRESSO. It’s a NASA funded project where I’m with SETI, so technically right now, I’m a SETI scientist…

David Hewlett
Sweet!

Mika McKinnon
If you ever wondered about extraterrestrial terrestrials, that’s my current job. So project ESPRESSO, the big overarching goal of the project is to create a tool set where you can put it on the side of robots and have it be in orbit around a comet or an asteroid or a small moon or something and go where is interesting? Where is safe? Let’s find the overlap in the center, land there. I’m on team “where is safe?” looking at landslides on these comets and asteroids and things.

David Hewlett
Amazing!

Mika McKinnon
We also have a little rover that we’re building out and we’re trying to use as an outreach rover where we want to put all of our tools that you would use on it because we want to make science more accessible. Science should be for everybody. The basic concept of science is be curious and learn about your universe. There’s nothing that says you have to do X, Y, Z in order to be a scientist. But doing geoscience, there’s this huge bias that you need to do field work. That’s a big limitation. If you have a physical limitation, if you’re a parent and have care responsibilities at home, whatever it is, you can’t go out into the field. But, if you look at planetary science, all of our field work is done by robots. The Curiosity Rover is a geochemist, InSight is a geophysicist, Juno around Jupiter is another geophysicist. So we’re trying to make this robot where you can have your classroom log into it and direct it around an outcrop and take samples and do little spectrometry and do photography or whatever else. We’re working on that, hopefully it’s gonna be doing another test run in June. I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to go or not, it kind of depends what happens with the little baby vaccines and crossing the border.

David Hewlett
Oh, right. Yeah, of course. What are the rules on that now?

David Read
So in theory, you in your classroom could rent time on this thing and go on a field day.

Mika McKinnon
If it’s NASA then you get to do it for free because it’s government funded. There should be public services, you shouldn’t have to rent things.

David Read
Like renting time out, you would have designated time.

Mika McKinnon
That’s another area of field work, the huge expense sense, right? It’s hard to do field work unless you got the money to go somewhere.

David Hewlett
Well, we’ve sort of grew up in a time when the way it was presented was that only these large organizations could do this stuff. It feels like more and more recently we’re seeing more DIY, homegrown stuff, you’re seeing like little personal satellites and stuff. I’m so excited about that because as just a nerd who’s interested in this stuff the idea that people could actually take part in it without actually having to be a part of these giant organizations or corporations or whatever it is, I just find that absolutely intriguing.

David Read
Accessibility is broadening.

Mika McKinnon
There’s a concept of what does it mean to do science? At its core, science is you come up with an idea of how you think things will work, cause and effect, and then you do experiments to see whether or not they happen. What happens every time you revise a recipe for your favorite chocolate chip cookies? You have a theory “this recipe will produce these characteristics of cookie.

David Hewlett
Small burnt things in the oven for me.

David Read
Yeah, it’s chemistry.

David Hewlett
Yeah, you guys were the early computers. Exactly. Yeah.

Mika McKinnon
You test it by eating the cookie and then once you’ve eaten the cookie you revise your recipe by longer cooking time, shorter cooking time, more butter, less oil, different ratio of white and brown sugars, whatever else. So every recipe book is actually an experimental logbook. We don’t talk about that because how dare we think that cooking, a traditionally feminine task, can be science, a traditionally masculine task, even though the earliest scientists computers were all women doing maths.

Mika McKinnon
My grandma was a computer.

David Hewlett
It’s funny, the recipe thing is interesting because. I did a little lecture about problem solving, how do we teach kids problem solving for the future. One of the things I said was the most important skill to have is dealing with failure. Failure is just a way for you to learn something, if you don’t fail at something you’ve learned nothing. When I screw up a recipe I blame my son, kick the dog and get angry, but that doesn’t help. If you go “okay, so what do I do next time that will fix it?” That’s what you want to teach the kids going forward. It’s amazing because my understanding of recipes is like, “if you followed it perfectly it was gonna work every time,” that was it.

David Hewlett
If the recipes right, yeah. But also you have your own equipment that may be a little different too.

Mika McKinnon
Exactly, your oven might be off. Recipes are written for being at a particular temperature and pressure, which is not going to be true if you’re at elevation. It’s gonna depend on what ingredients are available in your location…

David Hewlett
And what the hell’s roughly chopping?

Mika McKinnon
How big is this really?

David Hewlett
Give me a size for roughly chopped.

David Hewlett
How do you get anything done at home? I would feel like you’re just doing science experiments all the time.

Mika McKinnon
Pinching, like a pinch of something, right? Nonstandardized recipes, having different unit conversions, all sorts of things. There’s all sorts of ways that science is in everything. Another one would be knitting is applied geometry and algebra and it’s literally binary code. Knitting is a Turing complete programming language so you can do anything with it, so just tactile programming,

Mika McKinnon
What else is life right? I think that I understand how my day is gonna do, science is the most powerful tool there is. Let’s kind of go to the depressing aspect of “let’s look at the world around us right now in the middle of a pandemic with ongoing climate change and worsening weather related disasters every freaking year.”

David Hewlett
And killing each other

Mika McKinnon
Wherever you are, have your emergency kit ready because wherever you are, this next couple of months of weather are going to be terrible.

David Hewlett
California’s already got wildfires now, right? They’ve already started California, the wildfires?

Mika McKinnon
I’m up in Vancouver where Stargate filmed and last year we had a heat dome of the hottest temperatures we’ve ever had. We had floods, we had fires, we had landslides that literally cut Vancouver off from the rest of Canada for a while. We had a meteorite strike, small, it was very small, but we did have one. We had a tornado, everything just everything.

David Hewlett
We had a truck rally, that’s all we got.

Mika McKinnon
It was fun. Because we have science we understand cause and effect, or we can figure out cause and effect, we have a process for determining cause and effect, which means we can imagine any future we want and take the steps to get there. So it turns into a question of will as opposed to a question of capacity. That’s like a moment of optimism with all the doom.

David Read
Well, I want to explore something that I thought was absolutely stunning. Dave actually wanted to bring this up. We have our first photos as of just a couple of days ago, our first photos of Sagittarius A, which is the massive black hole that we have been orbiting since time immemorial. I’m gonna pull this up here so that everyone can have a look at it. This is truly amazing stuff here, this photograph of this thing that we are we are orbiting. How long does it take for us to complete an orbit of this Mika?

Mika McKinnon
It takes a very, very, very long time. The dinosaurs were still around before we made a complete orbit around.

David Read
Oh, wow.

David Hewlett
And aren’t we looking straight at it or something? It’s almost like we’re looking down the eye at this point.

Mika McKinnon
Yeah. So my coolest piece of completely useless, no application science about this…

David Hewlett
Best science ever

Mika McKinnon
Is that blackholes are totally messy eaters, right? They’re gobbling things down, they’re worse than toddlers, they spray gas and shredding stars all over the place. That’s what we’re seeing, we’re seeing everything around it. That nebula, Sagittarius B., smells the same as raspberry rum.

David Hewlett
Really?

Mika McKinnon
Yeah. Yeah.

David Read
How do we know that?

Mika McKinnon
Anytime you want to look at stars and figure out what they’re made out of you take the light from them and split them into rainbows. Youu look at the rainbows and where you have little black lines in those spectra tells you what elements are present there. How we know what various stars are made out of is by looking at the light. All of astrophysics is looking at light and trying to understand what on earth it is doing and how it’s getting there.

David Hewlett
Also big drinkers. Is that how that gets…?

Mika McKinnon
Well of course. Fluid dynamics of alcohol is kill your grad students, it’s relatively cheap and you can do a whole bunch of things with it. I personally did it for volcanoes for the most part, I can do really fantastic cocktails…

David Hewlett
The flaming shooters, were you good at the flaming shooters?

Mika McKinnon
The volcanic eruptions or doing the evaporative mixing of doing a hard liquor with heavy cream on top. Actually I did that during the Stargate wrap party.

David Hewlett
That’s always a mistake, any shot with cream is just a mistake.

Mika McKinnon
I was doing science experiments, I wasn’t drinking them. “Take a look at this cool evaporative pattern because it makes a little fractly, like webbing going on.” Science experiments, man, how much cream can you get? We totally look at booze and figure out what’s going on with it. Then we start trying to figure out what do various places smell like based on what their chemical composition is? Unsurprisingly, Uranus actually does legitimately smell like farts.

David Hewlett
No, seriously?

Mika McKinnon
Yes, seriously.

David Hewlett
Oh, that’s great.

David Read
There’s something beautiful about that realization.

David Hewlett
Yeah, Uranus smells like farts. That’s just sounds perfect.

Mika McKinnon
Yeah, it’s just true. The universe has come together the way it should. The milkway galaxy smells like raspberry rum.

David Hewlett
Raspberry rum. I like the smell that sounds. That makes you want to drink.

Mika McKinnon
Yeah. We need a sci-fi series about a field astrophysicist who has to go around and travel to these various places and poke the gas clouds and be like, “I wonder what that is like?” [big sniff]

David Hewlett
I’m obsessed with molecular biology right now. There’s a whole thing in one of the crash courses about the guy, I can’t remember the guy’s name, who was basically experimenting with urine. He was obsessed with urine and how this product was going to explain how our bodies work and everything. One of them was how it tasted. All of a sudden I felt that I perhaps didn’t have the dedication that other molecular biologists might have in that situation.

David Read
It’s gonna taste like urine.

Mika McKinnon
There’s that whole thing about which sciences can you lick? I’m Geo. You can lick some of the science and not other science. Some is very, very useful to lick, it’s a great way of identifying which evaporates. You can do grain size detection, all of that. There’s some rocks you really really shouldn’t lick; anything brightly colored. Turns out that it is heavy metals that are really toxic, Cinnabar is bright red and has mercury in it. Any of the really, really bright green uranium based minerals, again, do not lick, that’s just a bad move.

David Hewlett
There needs to be a book “do not lick!”

Mika McKinnon
Universal, do not lick.

David Read
I have a list of a few questions that I came up with here that I wanted to throw at Mika so the Dave’s could bounce their feelings and thoughts off of. Rodney went through the wormhole countless times but I was always wondering, were this thing real Mika, would we need some kind of containment vessel to prevent us being ripped apart? Considering what we know about about these things and what we can theorize.

Mika McKinnon
There’s a whole bunch of different ways of creating wormholes in terms of what style you want. In Stargate we use traversable wormholes using a Schwarzschild radius. We wanted it to be a specific size and the real key trick to them is that you need negative energy density in order to make them happen. What negative energy density means is you take vacuum and then you suck more out of it. Then surprise, you’ve got negative energy density. Scientifically it works out, mathematically it works out, engineering problem [not so sure].

David Hewlett
How to suck a vacuum out of a vacuum? Yeah.

David Read
How can you get nothing from already nothing?

Mika McKinnon
Just a teeny tiny engineering problem. I’m a scientist, I don’t need to solve the engineering issues that are somebody else’s issue.

David Hewlett
Are people trying? They must be people trying?

Mika McKinnon
That particular one would require a whole lot of energy to get to the point where you can get negative energy density but that was the basic building blocks of the Stargate wormholes. They had a lot of radiation to go with them, in part because you’re…

David Hewlett
See, that’s why I’m losing my hair.

Mika McKinnon
There we go, it was too much wormhole travel over time. That would be the challenge of that. We could come up with a couple of other ways of doing it. We did experiment with what could other wormholes look like sometimes in the background equations. We did things occasionally like we fed the energy of a solar flare into a black hole in order to get time travel. Those are equations you can all fit together, there is nothing that breaks in the physics of that. It’s just why would you ever do it?

David Read
Well to save Kennedy, of course.

Mika McKinnon
Well, of course. For time travel to work you need to be traveling through space as well. But something I really really love, this small tiny little detail, in order to have time travel make sense you can only get two out of three things. You can have cause and effect, this thing happens and then that thing happens. You can have time travel, where you change the order of events and time can go backwards, or you can have the Doppler effect. So redshift blueshift or like when an ambulance goes by and goes “wooooo” with the pitch shifting. You can get two out of three in order to have a physically consistent universe. Stargate, we don’t have the Doppler effect for the most part. We did that in one episodem, but aside from that one episode…

David Hewlett
We have writers. That’s how we solve the problem, with writers.

Mika McKinnon
Totally works.

David Read
So we would need special equipment you think in order to get through?

David Hewlett
To protect us from radiation and stuff.

Mika McKinnon
It depends on your health and safety standards. You can do most things once. It would not shred you as you go through, you wouldn’t have to deal with the spaghettification of dealing with blackholes. It’s kind of like how the sequel to The Martian is everybody dies of cancer. The long term issue with traveling through a Stargate too much is everyone’s life expectancy gets lower. In the real life space programs we actually limit how long astronauts can do flight missions because they have a lifetime radiation exposure limit. So same sort of concept on that.

David Hewlett
And basically as soon as you’re out of the atmosphere you’re toasting, right? Is that basically it?

Mika McKinnon
Every time you see the Northern Lights, Aurora Borealis, that is happening because you have charged particles from the sun hitting the Earth’s magnetic field. The magnetic field of the Earth is a shield, we have a giant shield that our planet very happily gives us. If you go outside that shield then suddenly you get bombarded by all those charged particles. The space station is inside the magnetic field of the Earth but the moon is not. During the Apollo mission one of the backup plans was if there had been a coronal mass ejection, if the sun had burped and sent charged particles towards the Earth and given us a beautiful light show of Aurora Borealis, it would have also baked the astronauts. There would have been just kind of like, “Oh, well.”

David Hewlett
Sorry, we overcooked the astronauts.

Mika McKinnon
Oopsies. That’s one of the major major problems when we’re talking about sending humans out into deep space exploration or even to the moon. We need to have some sort of radiation shielding going on.

David Hewlett
Is there radiation shielding on the space station? There must be to some extent, isn’t there? Or is it that it doesn’t need it? It’s only 400…what is it? 400 kilometers up or something crazy?

Mika McKinnon
It’s still inside the Earth’s magnetic field so we don’t have to worry about the charged particle aspect of it. Although they go over the Northern Lights so you can see like the beautiful green light underneath.

David Hewlett
That’ so cool.

Mika McKinnon
They have to worry more about collisions with things so they have blankets of Kevlar on the space station.

David Hewlett
Especially now with the Russians blowing up satellites and stuff.

Mika McKinnon
One of the biggest causes of damage to other satellites is paint flecks.

David Read
I’ve heard these little paint chips or like bullets.

Mika McKinnon
Yeah, cuz they’re going supersonic speeds, right? To be in orbit means something is falling around the earth and missing constantly. So it’s falling at escape velocity for the Earth.

David Hewlett
It always looks so peaceful doesn’t and the reality is just like it’s like, “aaaaah.” It’s always like [gentle lullaby] but the reality is [racing car speeding past you].

Mika McKinnon
Well, Earth is like this little teeny, tiny little pebble in this entirely hostile universe. The upside of space tourism is that maybe we can get a bunch of very rich and powerful people to realize that our planet is small and fragile and delicate. We are all stuck here together, there is no Plan B and if we cannot maintain habitability on the Earth we will die anywhere else. Going somewhere else is just death. It’s just terrible terrible death.

David Hewlett
That’s why I like the robots going. It doesn’t feel like a job for bags of chemicals, it feels like this is a job for robots. I love the idea of, you’re talking about science being available to everybody, the idea of being able to go to another planet without having to go to another planet, probably makes more sense anyway.

David Read
That’s why we have M.A.L.Ps in Stargate.

David Hewlett
That’s it, M.A.L.P. The M.A.L.P. I love the M.A.L.P.

David Read
There is a very legitimate reason

David Hewlett
M.A.L.P on a stick.

David Read
M.A.L.P on a stick.

David Hewlett
That’s it. I M.A.L.P on a stick all the time by the way. Of all the things that I learned from Stargate, I will frickin tape a camera to anything. We had the roof to do, I had like a big stick up there…I love M.A.L.P on a stick.

Mika McKinnon
Real life volcanologist should spend more time doing that same basic premise. I originally did volcanology and I moved to landslides for my disaster specialization in part because volcanologists have this horrible, horrible, horrible culture of going towards the erupting volcano and then occasionally getting caught in eruptions. They have the lowest life expectancy of any scientist and I’m like “no, no, I’m done with this.” This summer they’re like “hey, just go camp out on the side of a live volcano to monitor the eruption” and I’m like “NO!”

David Hewlett
What about all the gas and stuff too? The chances of being poisoned as well is not a big issue here?

Mika McKinnon
It’s just terrible.

David Hewlett
I’m not sure I would have then jumped to landslides personally. I would have been something like the science of sleep.

Mika McKinnon
With disasters, one of my earliest childhood memories is sitting in Marin Headlands, watching San Francisco burn during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the first televised earthquake. That was like a very superhero origin story of “okay, I will never be this helpless again when this city needs me.” I was like this tiny little small child drawing crayon drawings about like, “I will save the city from earthquakes,” but turns out landslides.

David Hewlett
Yeah. Landslides. It’s a good one. Especially in Vancouver and that area around BC.

Mika McKinnon
We’ve got all these baby volcanoes; rotten, sloppy rock, all layered like that. Then glaciers came through and chopped the toes off everything so they’re unstable, we get a lot of rain and then they get shaken by earthquakes. You’re just like [panicking].

David Hewlett
And you burn down all those forests. There’s nothing holding that soil in place.

Mika McKinnon
Death by landslide are one in a million per year pretty much everywhere in the world because that’s how much money we’re willing to spend to stop you from dying in a landslide.

David Hewlett
Toronto we just pave everything, it’s fine.

Mika McKinnon
No problems with that.

David Hewlett
We just pave nature. Paved nature, the problem is solved.

David Read
Well it won’t grow back.

Mika McKinnon
In eastern Canada we have this really cool thing called Quick clay. When you have old ocean floor, it’s no longer ocean now, it’s land, but it means you have clay that has salt in its structure. Because you have salt in its structure, if you get it wet it will suddenly collapse and turn into a liquid. There’s this amazing documentary from the 70s of recent Norway that is like the most 70s documentary ever. Everybody with their cute mustaches and tiny little short shorts.

David Hewlett
Short shorts, I love the short shorts.

Mika McKinnon
It’s great. But eastern Canada has that as well. You can have Quick clay slides. If somebody’s really careless with say, piling up a bunch of dirt in one place and overloading it, it can collapse the clay structure and it turns into a cascading failure where the the entire Earth just goes [slides slowly]. It is a slow moving but implacable landslide that just eats more and more ground and turns it all into a liquid as it goes. It can go on a 1% slope. You’re standing in a field being like, “how is the ground moving?”

David Hewlett
Mika where’s the safest place to be now? If you could choose anywhere in the world right now given what’s going to happen in the next 30 years or something, where would you live?

Mika McKinnon
Well, I’m in Vancouver for good reasons.

Mika McKinnon
You like Vancouver…yeah.

Mika McKinnon
As climate change is happening and weather patterns are shifting, as Australia gets hotter and drier, a lot of that rain is coming to Vancouver and getting trapped in our mountains and coming down. There are probably with too much rain but I really like the idea of having just a lot of fresh water.

David Read
Fresh water is much better than drought.

Mika McKinnon
Yeah, we have the itsy bitsy, teeny tiny problem of giant earthquakes with one plate going underneath another. It gets stuck, when it eventually goes, the last time it happened it was like a mag 9 earthquake that sent tsunamis that flooded chunks of Japan. It was bad and we think that’s gonna happen sometime soon ish. That bit isn’t so good. The whole heat dome was also not so hot.

David Hewlett
You’ve got to get yourself a great lake like us. We’ve got just a giant body of fresh water and it’s fantastic. We just pollute the crap out of it.

Mika McKinnon
Everywhere has disasters, it’s what disasters are you comfortable with? I’m familiar with earthquakes so I like the West Coast. I get really freaked out when there’s tornadoes and hurricanes and sort of storm that has a countdown to Doom. Like “in five hours it’ll hit. Get off the roads.” I’m like, “Nope, I’m out. We’re done with this.”

David Hewlett
I just like tracking things from the basement. I feel great. I’m sure this will flood at some point too. I say that because I installed the sump pump.

Mika McKinnon
Floods and fires, most common disasters everywhere. It’s okay, you can up your odds of surviving a disaster by getting to know your neighbors. Easiest way to increase your odds of survival.

David Hewlett
Be nice to your neighbors.

Mika McKinnon
Yeah. If things go terribly, terribly wrong, the first responders on scene aren’t the police or the firefighters or paramedics, it’s the people who are physically closest to you, which means your neighbors. If you can have good relationships with your neighbors, if you throw community block parties, if you do daycare pickup exchanges, if you have dog walking people…

David Hewlett
You’re saying I gotta be nice to people to survive? God damn!

Mika McKinnon
They built community resilience. It’s like putting little coins into the piggy bank of goodwill that you smash open in case of disaster.

David Hewlett
But I’ve been working so hard towards being the “get off my lawn” guy.

Mika McKinnon
Unfortunately, if you want to…

David Hewlett
My wife’s nice. My wife is nice enough for two people. So there you go.

Mika McKinnon
She’ll survive and you will by association.

David Hewlett
Right exactly.

David Read
I have something that David is very familiar with and probably you as well Mika.

David Read
Oh, nice.

David Read
[holds up a diagram of a ZPM] So this was the MacGuffin of Atlantis. How much do we have charged in the one that we have and can we get others? Mika, how feasible is vacuum energy sustained in a battery of this type? How possible is that? What are the odds we’d be destroying someone else’s reality if we tried to do it?

Mika McKinnon
This is the Zero Point Module? The ZPM.

David Hewlett
Thank you. “Zed” PM.

Mika McKinnon
Exactly. Come on. We’re doing the Canadian science hour here.

David Hewlett
No, there’s only one way to say it.

Mika McKinnon
Exactly, “Zed” PM. You need to have your negative energy density, which as I said, the science checks out, the maths checks out, the physics is totally golden, the engineering is a little itsy bitsy problem.

David Hewlett
These engineers, they’ve really got to catch up.

Mika McKinnon
Right. You can make a vacuum and suck more out of it in order to make it more vacuumy or you can take something that’s at absolute zero, in Kelvin, so literally the definition of cold, and chill it into a negative temperature. Considering zero Kelvin is when nothing is moving and heat is movement, that’s a tiny engineering problem.

David Hewlett
Kind of difficult? A little difficult?

Mika McKinnon
A tiny, tiny engineering problem.

David Hewlett
My little desk fridge is going to do that?

Mika McKinnon
Probably not, no. We were also constantly talking about Naquadria and so the geology, right? We want to find the energy density from it. I have spent so long being like, “okay, so how would we have the mineralization of this? What would the characteristics be?” We know they are triagonal crystals, we’ve seen them a couple of times, we know their cross section of them. We know they amplify energy which is a little bit like a kyber crystal in Star Wars. So what would it’s characteristics be? So far I have figured out that Naquadria is on the “do not lick list.”

David Read
I suspect so. Naquadria or naquadah? Naquadria is the more specialized version of it.

Mika McKinnon
Both of them are on the “do not lick,” refined, unrefined.

David Hewlett
David just don’t lick either of them okay..

David Read
Okay. I just want to be specific.

Mika McKinnon
So the problem is because they amplify energy, there’s a good chance that they’re gently radioactive. That turns into a problem because they glow and that we use them as an energy source. It could be there’s radioactivity. It could be fluorescence because there’s a lot of rocks in real life that glow. It could be piezo electricity or it could be something else. Like quartz, no problem. Quartz is piezo electric, if you smash quartz it glows. Your window is geo chemically the same as quartz.

David Read
Like glass?

Mika McKinnon
Yeah. If you smash it it won’t glow so please don’t take that experiment at home.

David Hewlett
Sorry Jane, Mika said it would glow.

Mika McKinnon
Fluorescence is any of the rocks that glow under UV light. Like fluorite, literally, they’re named for the same thing. But anything that’s radioactive, even if it’s just alpha emitters, an alpha emitter can be blocked by your skin but if you lick it you’re ingesting it and suddenly you’re creating problems. So just no go. Don’t do it.

David Hewlett
I like the way that licking has become a real issue for you.

Mika McKinnon
It is.

David Hewlett
This is what happens when you have a child, isn’t it? You start worrying about what people lick.

Mika McKinnon
People got really weird about the rock licking scene in Star Wars where a little foot soldier goes, [lick] goes out “salt” They were like, “what? Why would they do that?” I’m like, “No, that is geologic fanservice right there.” I went to the Great Salt Lakes in Utah and I went out into a field of little white crystals along the edge of the lake and I scooped down and I licked it. Instinctively, that is what I did. What else am I gonna find? Of course, it’s salt. It’s the Great Salt Lake, it’s in the name. It’s such an easy way to identify salts. By the way, you should not actually lick he Great Salt Lake because there’s been so much industrial things happening there. There’s all sorts of heavy metals and toxins in the salt. It’s a bad idea to lick it, I did it anyway.

David Read
For science though.

Mika McKinnon
It was fun.

David Hewlett
Look for science.

Mika McKinnon
None of my rocks currently in front of me are ones that are useful to lick. I was just checking. I chose poorly,

David Read
Mika. In Universe Destiny was way out there in the cosmos. If she keeps traveling in one direction, like the surface of an expanding or contracting balloon, will she eventually come back around to where she started?

Mika McKinnon
So we got to do the cosmic microwave background radiation as a plot point in Destiny. It is really, really exciting to me because that was my very, very first research project as like a wee baby proto scientist, I was looking at the cosmic microwave background. Big Bang happened, everything goes exploding outwards, as it explodes outwards it cools down. 300,000 years after the Big Bang everything cools down enough that atoms can form, electrons and protons and all that clamped together. It went from being this big plasma mess to a transparent, clear universe. There’s a wall of static at 300,000 light years after the Big Bang. Because nothing can travel faster than light, the largest structures that can be in there are 300,000 light year cone across. If we look at the shapes in the static, we can find out what the shape of the universe is. When I was doing this back as my wee baby scientists phase, we had got the critical number of what the beginning of the universe looks like, which means what does the end of the universe look like? It’s a different path, if it is less than one or greater than one? Our answer was one, plus or minus one. We’re like, “Oh, this is useless.” To bring it back to Stargate, one of the times where McKay was visiting Destiny…

David Hewlett
The one and only time.

Mika McKinnon
They finish solving the plot related science and they’re standing in front of these sets of equations and they’re arguing. They’re arguing about what is the shape of the universe and what does the beginning and end of the universe look like? From that the implications are things like, what is dark matter? What is the exact proportions of regular matter, dark matter, dark energy, regular energy, all together? What is the shape of the universe? Are we going to eventually end in a big crunch or forever expanding outwards? All of that was debating about the cosmic microwave background radiation. David and David, David Blue, actually had me teach them just enough science that they could decide which side of the argument their characters would be on.

David Hewlett
Right, I remember that.

Mika McKinnon
David Blue saying expanding forever and David Hewlett saying it would crunch back down.

David Hewlett
Yeah. I’m big on crunches?

Mika McKinnon
Eli was right and we did not know that for a couple more years afterwards.

David Hewlett
Okay. I didn’t need to know that.

David Read
So it’s not going to contract, it’s going to continue to expand forever?

Mika McKinnon
Faster and faster and faster and we don’t know why because it’s dark energy. And what is dark energy?

David Read
We don’t know and most of our universe is made up of it.

David Hewlett
Wait a second. Why would McKay think it was going to crunch then? If it was wrong.

Mika McKinnon
Cuz he didn’t know at the time. But you know, he’s got good company because Albert Einstein actually named it his biggest mistake to actually have this number at all. He was like, “I should have just set it so the universe never changed.” Then Hubble did the experiments that saw, and all of his computers crunching the data and the numbers but Hubble is the only one who gets credit, saw that the universe was expanding. Einstein changed that number again, the cosmological constant, in order to match the Hubble expansion. It turns out it is actually expanding faster and faster and faster and faster so he was wrong yet a third time. I think that McKay would be pretty happy to be in the company of Albert Einstein for getting things wrong.

David Hewlett
He’s okay with that, yeah, and given what he knew at the time. He can only work with the data he’s got.

Mika McKinnon
Exactly.

David Read
So can we infer that because of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe that Destiny would not come back around to Earth in time?

Mika McKinnon
Well, the universe is very, very, very big and Destiny, last we checked in, was about to leave the Milky Way. There is a very, very long way to go; there’s more galaxies in space than there are grains of sand on the beach. We’re about to see more of them with the new space telescope that launched, the Just Wonderful Space Telescope, JWST.

David Read
So tell us about this. What’s going on with this thing?

Mika McKinnon
It’s the replacement for the Hubble, the Hubble is still working as much as it can. It’s really, really cool in that it has this origami lens. A mirror for the telescope tells you how big and how far it can see and instead of having just one mirror, it’s like this gigantic mirror with all these pieces that had to unfold and wedge into different ways.

David Read
it looks like the main deflector on the original enterprise almost.

David Hewlett
It’s gorgeous. It’s really is gorgeous.

Mika McKinnon
It’s so beautiful. It’s so so beautiful.

David Hewlett
And fragile, I can’t get over how fragile it is, that it works!

Mika McKinnon
It took forever to actually get built and launch. It was 15 years late by the time it launched.

David Hewlett
Didn’t they also add stuff? They added stuff that wasn’t originally…like the infrared thing was not supposed to be there, right?

Mika McKinnon
The science got better over time and the funding changes and there’s a bunch of political stuff as well. One of the problems we have to be careful about is when you’re getting it from where it was built to where it launches, you send it by boat. They were worried about it getting hijacked by pirates.

David Hewlett
Really?

David Read
If you’re on the high seas. Can you imagine ransoming this thing?

Mika McKinnon
This has happened to telescope mirrors before. They got hijacked and ransomed, the telescope mirrors, actually happened, just not to this particular telescope.

David Read
Yeah, keep that one off the books when you’re transporting it. Let the manifest say something else.

David Hewlett
If you ever want to see your telescope again, you’ll send a million dollars to….

David Read
What are you going to do? Of course you would, they’re gonna smash this thing to pieces.

Mika McKinnon
Yeah, that was one of the fears. Once they got it to the launchpad and they hooked it up onto the rocket and everything they had to delay the launch. One of the things that went wrong is that the locking bolts holding it in place slipped.

David Hewlett
You don’t really want that vibrating.

Mika McKinnon
Oh man, don’t drop it, don’t drop it.

David Hewlett
I love that little zone before they actually got to test it where they’re like, “this could be like a billion dollars we just threw into space.”

Mika McKinnon
It’s still being tested and coming online, hey’re doing all the test images and all that. But so far, first light has actually been better than anticipated. It’s performing better in real life than our model said it would, which is incredible. I’m really really, really hoping we’ll get a new version of the Hubble deep field. image. At one point in time a scientist booked time on the Hubble to go point at the most empty patch of sky they could think of and I just want to photograph that. That’s where we get that image of all of those galaxies, just from looking at the empty spot inbetween stars. I really, really, really hope that JWST, I really am not happy with its official name, will get to do a version of that as well.

David Read
What percentage of resolution is it greater than Hubble? Is it like 200 times? 1000 times?

Mika McKinnon
They can’t actually do a direct analog because they see different things for different purposes. Part of the purpose of the JWST is to try and identify things like atmospheres around planets in other solar systems.

David Read
Wow, they can see that?

David Hewlett
Looking for life, looking for life.

Mika McKinnon
That is the hope, that is the hope.

David Read
If they can do that, they can take pictures of aliens reading their newspapers in their backyards.

Mika McKinnon
If we can only look at things based on the light from really far away, like we can’t go up and poke anything.

David Hewlett
Or lick it.

Mika McKinnon
What chemicals would tell you whether or not there was life there. You want to find things that disappear quickly so that they have to be constantly regenerated, would be one way of looking at things. So dynamic atmospheres, which could also be geologic activity. There’s trying to figure out what is the signature of life when you only have one little planet to base everything on. You’re like, “well, we’ve already learned that all of our original theories of planetary formation that were based on our cute little solar system were completely wrong.” As soon as we start finding other solar systems, we’re like,” oh, whoa, lets throw it all out and try again.” We’re like, “hey, the original idea was really dense stuff goes first and that’s why we have the rocky planets and then the really light stuff is farther out.” That’s why you have Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus, Neptune all fluffy out there. Then we started finding things like Jupiter, but in the orbit of Mercury.

David Read
So we’re just wrong about how they’ll organize.

Mika McKinnon
Yeah, just shred it, throw it away, start over. So yeah, we’ll find out so many things. I don’t even want to guess it what we’ll find out because whatever it is, it is going to be so much cooler. These are the times it’s really fun to be able to work in sci-fi. Bringing it back to Stargate again, one of the challenges in Stargate Universe was at one point they asked me for an astrophysical big baddie that could kill everybody every 22 minutes. The original idea was what if we just had a pulsar that was going really slowly. A pulsar is like a lighthouse of death in terms of high energy particles coming around. The jets go out either end and as it rotates, you get the little flash flash flash come past. But, pulsars rotate on the millisecond, not 22 minutes. So, just slowing the Pulsar down…

David Hewlett
Sucks for TV!

Mika McKinnon
Will also slow down with electromagnetic field is doing. Instead of getting death rays it’s gonna be like if you had fridge magnets and we’re doing cartwheels. You’re generating an electromagnetic field but it’s not gonna kill itanybody, you’re not even gonna notice it. So instead, we went “alright, how about if we have a starving pulsar, one that’s just on the brink of being able to produce those jets and not. Then we give it a feeder star nearby, just a normal regular star that as it gets close, the Pulsar greedily grabs its gas, gets a little bit bulkier, spits it out, going flash, flash, flash and as soon as that star goes away again, then it goes quiet. You can put that star in a 22 minute thing.” We’ve never seen anything like this in real life but it checks out, the astrophysics makes sense. Why couldn’t you have a system like this? That’s what we did in Stargate Universe and then three years later, astronomers found one in real life.

David Hewlett
Sweet.

David Read
The rotation was different, it was like 44 minutes or something?

Mika McKinnon
The timing was different but the mechanics were the same.

David Hewlett
It was more of a HBO show than network television show. The timing…

Mika McKinnon
Extend it all out.

David Hewlett
Yeah. For a feature film maybe.

David Read
Mika, about the aliens? Let’s say we do have a space vehicle that can go out there and come across something, someone way out there.

David Hewlett
M.A.L.P.

David Read
What are the odds that anything out there, especially now that we know that solar systems don’t even organize like ours does, that these guys, gals, things that we encounter, what are the odds they would look remotely like us?

David Hewlett
Or carbon based?

David Read
Yeah. Is there a design logic that’s feasible given gravity, atmosphere and an Earth type civilization, or is it all just “anything goes?”

Mika McKinnon
Well, what I want to do before having that is I would like us to go to Enceladus or Europa or any of the other icy moons and go digging underneath the surface and see what we find. We have found life everywhere on Earth. We have found life in the clouds, we have found life seven kilometers underground in a mineshaft in solid rock, we have found life sealed underneath Antarctica for in Lake Vostok for tens of thousands of years, literally everywhere we have found life. I would like to send little robots around and see if there is anything living in the clouds of Venus. Is there anything underneath the ice sheets of Europa?

David Read
Io, something’s going on there.

Mika McKinnon
Io is just incredibly volcanically active. You know what? There are extremophiles who hang out in volcanoes, they’re there. I would love us to do a better survey of that but right now we’re held back a bit by planetary protection. Planetary defenses protect the Earth from everything else. Every year there’s big multi agency practice runs of what happens if we see a giant asteroid coming towards Earth.

David Hewlett
We call Roland Emmerich.

Mika McKinnon
Exactly, like any of those, can we do anything like Deep Impact or Armageddon in order to move them so they don’t actually…?

David Hewlett
Deflect.

Mika McKinnon
Yeah, that’d be planetary defense. But planetary protection is protect the rest of everywhere else from our nasty Earth germs. Right. That’s why the Cassini mission around Saturn, when it finally ended, we crashed it into Saturn, so that we didn’t accidentally have our nasty little robot covered in human sneezes and everything hit one of the ice moons and contaminate it. How terrible would it be to find life on another place and be like, “Oh, we brought that with us.”

David Hewlett
What about the materials though? Is there any chance the materials could interact with stuff? We’re still polluting to some extent, are we not? We’re still throwing our trash at other planets.

Mika McKinnon
We’re just kind of picking which ones we’re willing to do that. Mars is turning into an entire robot graveyard.

David Hewlett
Well, the fact that it’s hard to get off our own planet at this point given the amount of trash we’ve got revolving around.

Mika McKinnon
Oh, yeah. We’re just adding the mega constellations up there and entirely destroying the concept of having stars and a night sky. We’re just doing that because a billionaire wants to. I would have thought that stars were a human right, but no,

David Hewlett
That’s interesting isn’t it because they’re saying that Starlink is going to basically change the ability to to do any of the astronomy, photography and stuff. I know that was one of the big things they were talking about.

Mika McKinnon
No, you see lines across everything now. There’s just going to be more of them because one billionaire can’t do things without another billionaire getting all competitive about it. Amazon’s also been approved to do their own mega constellations so let’s have two of them up there and then they can crash into each other. It’ll be great.

David Hewlett
We’ve got Woz, you heard about Steve Wozniak’s project? He’s got a company that tracks space junk and is looking at how they can start clearing it up. He wants some kind of a system that can either net or somehow start cleaning it up.

David Read
Some of the stuff is moving so fast, it would have to be a super net to stop stuff.

David Hewlett
Or moving as fast as it.

Mika McKinnon
There’s definitely experiments about doing it and there’s some test projects. But again, it’s that concept of we have the capacity, we have the scientific method, we can do cause and effect, just do we have the will and the interest in it? Humans are not really good at anticipating disaster, we…

David Hewlett
No, we suck at scheduling.

Mika McKinnon
We’re really bad with that, low likelihood high impact events; everyone’s going to win the lottery, nobody’s going to be alive when the big earthquake happens.

David Hewlett
Or a pandemic hits.

Mika McKinnon
Yeah, or that we no longer have stars or whatever else.

David Hewlett
Whenever I get too low on this stuff about what miserable virus we are as a species, I still have this perhaps stupid faith in our ability to adapt and our ability to innovate. I feel like technology, while it has definitely made huge issues for us, I still believe that it is the solution.

David Read
Agreed.

David Hewlett
As you said, we just need to spend some money on it. Right?

Mika McKinnon
Yeah. We have to have political will. We have to we can do anything, we just have to decide we want to do it.

David Hewlett
But that’s the question I guess, when does that happen? I’m not sure what more we would need.

Mika McKinnon
I was a lot more optimistic before the pandemic happened. I totally had this core idea that at some point we would have our basic decision to collectively work together and now we have all sorts of debates for…

David Hewlett
The invasion of Ukraine as well, just with the fuel. I was feeling pretty good about the fact that we were looking for green alternatives and now it’s how do we start digging up more oil? My father talks about, he’s not a climate denier, a climate emergency denier. he says, “I remember reading articles about London, England back in the horse drawn carriage days about how there were these doomsday things about how London was going to drown in horse poop.” At this rate it was gonna be everywhere, and of course, now we have cars.

David Read
We think our way out of problems though.

David Hewlett
Yes, that’s the hope.

David Read
Londons aqueduct system, I remember reading something about it, how they installed the sewers. It was just a marvel of human ingenuity.

David Hewlett
We’re doing carbon capture and stuff now, I hope there’s ways around it. I do worry a bit about going to other planets when we haven’t really quite figured out our own yet have we?

Mika McKinnon
Well, it’s that whole concept of Earth is easy mode, right? If you cannot maintain a habitable environment on Earth, you will not be able to artificially create a habitable environment on another planet.

David Hewlett
Oh god, I didn’t think of that, of course.

Mika McKinnon
We have some billionaires who want to go do space exploration and all that and go “let’s do commercial private tourism, colonization of Mars.” Firstly, colonization, there’s some issues with that. I’ve worked mining, I have made the world a worse place upon occasion. I’ve worked in mining towns and the labor history of mining towns is really straightforward. The whole reason we have unions is because of coal miners and the whole concept of living in company towns and the shortened lifespan and the idea that your boss can control your groceries. How much worse does that get when your boss controls your access to air, heat, water and food.

David Read
The whole vertical system.

David Hewlett
Protection from radiation.

Mika McKinnon
At this point, I’m feeling actually somewhat optimistic at the wave of unionization happening in the United States. That is one of my like, “hey, this is less terrible than it could be. Maybe we can get a little bit more socialization going on.” Turns out saying being a socialist is a naughty word. It only really makes sense if you’re incredibly rich. For everyone else it’s actually really nice to have public goods and services and the safety net and health care.

David Hewlett
The issue I always have is as soon as you get large groups of people run by smaller groups of people there’s always issues, that’s the frustrating thing. Maybe technology will allow us to change that.

David Read
The internet has just been a mind blowing thing in terms of everyone getting a chance to say what they think online. Whether or not you agree with it, is something else.

David Hewlett
As long as you’re not in China, Russia.

David Read
Yeah, but even the VPNs. So just getting the technology out there.

Mika McKinnon
I clearly have an interest in false news and misinformation and the erosion of the concept of expertise. I work in disasters, my specialization is in disasters, I can tell you a whole lot about landslides, I can tell you a lot about like disaster communication and how do people respond and interact. There are other people who’s entire focus is on how do you get evacuation orders to be obeyed? They have spent time on that specific exact problem and figured out things. If you have a woman giving the order you’re more likely to have compliance than if you have a man giving the order because you can take out the toxic masculinity aspect. If you have someone older giving the order, as opposed to someone younger, you get more compliance because older people will dismiss that young whippersnapper of not knowing what they’re talking about.

David Hewlett
I do it all the time.

Mika McKinnon
Ideally, you want your most grey haired little old lady on the radio being like “the storms are coming, batten down the hatches right now.”

David Hewlett
“Oh please dears.”

Mika McKinnon
Exactly, it works way better. There’s a reason why all the little emergency voices and the test pilots are all women’s voices. Then you’ve got the cultural aspects as well where it doesn’t work to have the Prime Minister of Canada giving an order about flood evacuations in First Nations territories because we got a long history of genocide in Canada. You have to go through the tribal structures instead, This is all stuff that we know and that we can use if we just listen to people who actually are experts about it and expertise has value. There’s amazing things in that you can go out and get access to experts really easily right now. The number of people who show me their rocks and go “I found a pretty rock, can you tell me about it” is amazing and wonderful. I’m so glad to be able to support that curiosity and let people engage with the world around them and practice their observation and all of that. It also means that because there’s such a flat threshold that all voices can be treated equally, when no, definitely expertise should be listened to just a bit more on things that are relevant.

David Hewlett
What do you think has changed that? Why has that changed so much? Is it social media?

Mika McKinnon
There’s a lot of reasons for that and that is getting way outside my lane to try and go on. Actually my brother worked on that to some extent. There’s a whole lot of things like false equivalencies in how we do media coverage. Right now we’re seeing a lot of people, a lot of journalists, get switched on to the climate beat who don’t have the background in it. Media is paying less and less and less so you just take whatever you can get money for and write articles and you don’t have to have that beat expertise, that depth of understanding and so you’re stumbling all over it. We saw a lot during the pandemic of there are ways to talk about vaccines that increase the likelihood of people getting vaccines. But we were having all sorts of reporters who’ve never done health reporting ever who are looking at a study of five people who are all a particular demographic and being like, “this is the thing that tells us all we need to know.”

David Hewlett
Well the matha skills too, right? Especially when you’re dealing with very large or very small numbers, people just don’t have a concept of it. I struggle with that myself and I’m actually interested in it. Whereas most people, I think, just accept percentages and random statistical data that comes from nowhere.

Mika McKinnon
I work with numbers all the time. I can’t actually, mentally, like dealing with 20% or one in five odds is challenging. Hello, puppy dog.

David Hewlett
This is Huzzah.

David Read
Hello, Huzzah.

David Hewlett
There you go.

Mika McKinnon
I have to give the best disaster preparedness tip which is make sure you always have a selfie of you with your pet. If there’s a disaster and you get separated, that is a way of doing identification and also of establishing ownership for reunification. Like, “yes, this is my dog.”

David Hewlett
This is my disaster, though. This is the disaster right here.

Mika McKinnon
I just think that’s a nice little bit of disaster preparedness. People often get overwhelmed by the idea of preparing for disaster and go, “well, I have to do all of these things and it is too much so I’ll do nothing at all.” The answer is no, no, do what you can, anything is better than nothing. Literally just thinking things through increases your odds of survival. If you have a pet and you’re watching today, please take a photo of yourself with your pet and be like, “yes, I have done my disaster preparedness improvement for the day.”

David Read
Absolutely.

David Hewlett
It’s funny because my family would laugh at me because I would do fire drills and things. I was just like, “well, what do you do? If there was a problem I don’t want to work it out on the day. Let’s all just meet here and there you go, we’re fine.” Baz was excited because I said “yeah, you can break that window.”

David Read
Given this circumstance, yes. I have some questions submitted by fans. I am so thankful we’ve got 250 people watching today so thank you all for tuning in?

David Hewlett
What! Shouldn’t you be at work? Oh, it’s Saturday.

Mika McKinnon
It’s Saturday.

David Hewlett
You’re right, good point.

David Read
General Maximus says “A question for Mika. Your excitement and enthusiasm for science is awe inspiring. Have you ever wished the technology existed so you could transfer your consciousness to AI so you could live for longer and continue to spread your knowledge to more people?”

Mika McKinnon
No, I like being me. I like the very humaneness of things, I like that we are fragile, squishy creatures in this giant hostile universe. We have got to help each other out and have that connection. That to me is really motivating in itself.

David Hewlett
I am the total opposite of that. I totally want to be mechanical. I don’t like this big bag of squishy chemicals. I want to be floating around in a bucket somewhere surrounded by robot.

Mika McKinnon
I think there’s also an element of my privileges showing. If I had chronic pain, believe me, I’d be like, “I am a biochemical mess. I don’t what this is, this is chemically…”

David Hewlett
Yeah, my shoulders hurt. Maybe that’s it?

Mika McKinnon
Let’s just get out here. But no, I like licking rocks and petting yarn, I like the very tactile exploration of the world. One of my favorite aspects is being able to poke and touch and feel.

David Hewlett
That’s so funny though because I think we both have a similar sort of love of this stuff. Obviously you have the knowledge, I just have the interest. Sorry, you have the skills, I just have the love of it. I’ve always been obsessed with the technological side of being human, I love this sort of the man/machine combination.

David Read
I think it comes down to a question of how much could you transfer? How much of you would go? Would your tactile experience go or are we just talking about a brain in a machine? Mika?

Mika McKinnon
Well, we also already have argumentation, right? I normally wear glasses. I’m doing contacts right now so I’ve got that going on. There’s people who have artificial limbs. There’s a huge, huge, huge number of people with uteruses who have implants; literally they are now cyborgs. If you’ve ever had an IUD, congratulations, welcome to the cyborg core. Hearing aids…

David Read
Glasses is in some sense cybernetic.

Mika McKinnon
It’s an augmentation, right? It’s make things better. If I were to time travel back I would be one of the people who’s eaten by a saber toothed Tiger because I can’t see very well. I have a focal range that’s in the centimeters I am so near sighted that I can’t see outside of arms reach.

David Hewlett
That’s like Jane. It’s like she’s looking through Coke bottles.

David Read
The number of people who are alive today because of refrigerated insulin. It’s extraordinary how technology extends our lives now, it’s ridiculous.

Mika McKinnon
So very topically, how many babies are still alive because they have access to formula? Breast feeding it hard, breast feeding is incredibly hard. The nutritional components of this, right now we have some serious freaking issues on that one.

David Hewlett
I know, you can’t get access to specific stuff now.

David Read
There’s a formula shortage.

David Hewlett
Formular shortages right?

Mika McKinnon
Yeah. The lack of information about this where people are like, “oh yeah, just start breastfeeding again.” You’re like, “well, first of all, it’s not just a fountain or tap you can turn off.” Second of all, if you’re in the United States, you have six weeks before you’re back at work.

David Hewlett
Seriously? Six weeks?

Mika McKinnon
That’s it, six weeks and then the birthing parent must be back at work. You have to be able to pump at work and pumping is hard and a lot of workplaces have ridiculous conditions for it, or illegally deny access to pumping, which can just completely disrupt the entire supply. Not everybody can produce milk in the first place and not every baby can eat every formula. Soy and cow’s milk are in a lot of formula yet soy and cow’s milk are two of the top allergens. You have got to pick just the right one, it’s got to be the right brand and if you try and switch too quickly you can cause all sorts of problems. The amount of misinformation is horrifying and all these parents in Canada right now, all the parenting forums, have like little babies that are like, “Ooooh, I feel so bad for our Americans, can we ship them formula?” Which we are not allowed to do.

David Hewlett
Are we not allowed to do that?

Mika McKinnon
Can’t send it across the border, it is restricted.

David Read
I know we are trying to reach out to Ireland.

David Hewlett
Because it is protected?

Mika McKinnon
Because there’s different regulations for food safety in Canada which is also why we don’t have a food shortage right now. We have different inspections so we don’t have a single plant that was continually infecting the formula with salmonella and other horrendous things. It’s all a big preventable mess.

David Hewlett
We used to cross the border all the time because we were at Point Roberts and I was always amazed of how, on a weekly basis, there would be different declarations of things that weren’t allowed to cross the border, whether it’s a tomato or Mexico or something else. Crazy, yeah.

David Read
Jonas wants to know, Mika, what exactly is zero point energy?

Mika McKinnon
It’s negative energy density. If temperature is things moving around and zero Kelvin is when nothing is moving at all, tthen you make that colder, you have negative energy density. If you have a total vacuum with nothing in it and then you take stuff away, that is negative energy density. If this is making your head hurt, congratulations, you have wrapped your head around it successfully. It is that weird and unintuitive. We have never seen it in real life. It is an engineering problem.

David Hewlett
The engineers are taking a beating in this podcast.

Mika McKinnon
Of course. So I’m a Canadian, right? In Canada, geoscientists and engineers, we go through a ceremony where we get married to our work. I have a silver ring…

David Hewlett
Shut the front door. Seriously?

Mika McKinnon
Yeah, I went through a wedding ceremony with my work. My ring has seismic signals and crossed hammers on it. It’s silver ring because I’m a geoscientist and I had to swear that I would only do what I’m capable of doing; stay in my lane. I will be paid fairly for my work because if I allow myself to get undercut, I undercut the entire profession and it is no longer sustainable to have skilled people in it. I will make mistakes and that’s okay as long as I fix them. The vows are incredible. Canadian Engineers take their own version of this and they walk away with an iron ring. If you see somebody on the pinky finger of their working hand, silver ring is the geoscientists, iron ring is the engineers, W’re supposed to wear it on our working hand so that when we’re signing off on documents we’re reminded of our oath of obligation.

David Hewlett
So for actors we don’t do anything. We make a commitment to lie, convincingly, on a regular basis.

David Read
Yeah, everyone’s got their lane.

David Hewlett
Yeah, exactly. That’s my lane I’m sticking to it.

David Read
Teresa Mc – question for Mika and potentially David. “What organics could possibly be used to make a spaceship, like a Wraith ship, if any at all, especially here on Earth? Would there be any that would be suited to help make something that would survive in space?”

Mika McKinnon
If we want to have radiation shielding the easiest way to do that is to carry around your water. That would also give you a supply of water but water is really good at blocking a whole bunch of stuff. Encasing you’re ship in ice would be a really a handy thing to do in terms of creating some shields/

David Hewlett
Not like a skin of tardigrades or something?

Mika McKinnon
If your coating it in ice in all likelihood there are Tardigrades on it. We know from past experience that when you duct tape them on the outside of the space station, they stay alive. A billionaire crashed some Tardigrades onto the moon which I bet are still alive there too.

David Hewlett
We actually…seriously, we crashed Tardigrades…?

Mika McKinnon
Without permission, didn’t tell anybody till after the crash already happened. It was like “by the way…”

David Hewlett
Sorry, I just populated the planet.

David Read
Wow. They’re just so small.

David Hewlett
They are until they attack us when we show up on the moon.

Mika McKinnon
Yeah, well we already left several hundred pounds of vomit and poop which has been sitting there getting irradiated for this entire decade. I’m pretty sure there’s something growing there that we don’t want.

David Hewlett
There’s a poop monster on the way.

Mika McKinnon
Yeah, unintentional science experiments.

David Hewlett
One of my favorite Doctor Who episodes was about this organic ship that was alive. I was always fascinated by that, the idea that there was a vessel that grew and protected its crew by actually being alive. It was green so it could use chlorophyll, it was just a great, great concept.

David Read
Doctor Who’s got some good episodes out there, man. Mika, you kind of blew by this earlier and I was like, “Ooo, ooo, more information, please.”

David Hewlett
We gotta get Mika out of here too, she’s got kids to feed.

David Read
Yes, so are you good for another 15, 20 minutes?

Mika McKinnon
I don’t think I can go that. Or I can allow the small children to come in my cabin and sit in the background.

David Hewlett
Yeah. Tell that to the child.

David Read
Okay, so you want, five minutes?

Mika McKinnon
Sounds good.

David Read
Okay. Is the wormhole based on a black hole or white hole physics or something more mystic, the one that we use in the show? You said that the specific kind of wormhole that’s used in the series was an XYZ wormhole. I forget what you said.

Mika McKinnon
It was a Schwarzschild wormhole with a traversable radius. It means it’s a traversable wormhole so you can go back and forth on it, Schwarzschild is the exact type of formulation of it. There’s a whole bunch of different ways to do the math and that’s the one we picked. It was actually picked by Steve Conway who is a string theorist and he was one of my roommates at the time at grad school at UBC. Stargate came looking to the campus saying “we need a string theorists” because it’s the smartest scientists they could think of. I heard about that and said, “hey, Steve, go and take the job. Take it, take it, take it.” So he joined Stargate SG-1 and he literally would put his thesis notes in episodes before he ever actually published papers on them. They published in Stargate first then Steve found a pretty girl in a telescope in South America and left. When Stargate came back, I went, “Oh, me, me, me.” By then I realized they didn’t need the smartest scientist, they didn’t actually need a string theorists, they needed a creative and excited scientist. I showed up on my first day and was absolutely awestruck, I went around with big huge eyes. I don’t have any photos from the first day with any of the actors because I was too nervous.

David Hewlett
That’s right, you were nervous. I remember you said that..

Mika McKinnon
It was my first job outside of summer camp counseling and I was in grad school, I was still technically a student; an eternal student at that point. I’d never been on set before but everyone was like super, super, super friendly and taught me things like why you don’t wear bright, flashy colors so you don’t distract everybody.

David Hewlett
That’s a reason to wear them, just wear them. That’s the whole point of it.

Mika McKinnon
That’s for the actors, not for the scientists who are hanging out back. It was really, really fun and I got to keep coming back. Yeah, so Steve picked the original wormhole style and I stayed with it because it worked really well for what we were doing. We stay consistently with that same type of wormhole formulation. Before Steve it was actually Kenny Gibbs, the prop master, used his high school physics textbook.

David Read
Wow.

Mika McKinnon
High school physics textbook to grad student in string theory to disaster geophysicist.

David Hewlett
Quite the combo.

David Read
Quite a ride. Mika this has been such a treat having you on to educate us about all these these goings on right now. This is a trip. I’d love to have you back once again down the road here.

David Hewlett
I just love it.

David Read
I feel bad. We have like four pages of questions, I feel so bad that I took so much of my time rather than getting to them. We’re gonna have to use them at some point.

Mika McKinnon
Save them for next time

David Hewlett
Do it again, why not?

David Read
And David, thank you.

David Hewlett
Oh a pleasure. I love it. An opportunity to learn from Mika, come on, I’m there, I’m there.

David Read
Mika, we really appreciate all the time that you’ve given us. David, could you stay on for a minute and talk about Tech Bandits?

David Hewlett
Yeah, sure.

David Read
Okay. I’m gonna let Mika go.

Mika McKinnon
Byeeeeeee.

David Read
Thank you, be well.

David Hewlett
Lovely to see you.

David Read
All right, tech bandits. So what’s going on with you brother? I’m gonna adjust the camera in real time here so everyone can see.

David Hewlett
What’s nice about it is it’s the Mikas of the world I’m looking for, right? It’s the people who are excited about this stuff. I feel like kids go into school like Mika, excited about everything and curious about everything, and then that just sort of gets bludgeoned out of them very quickly. It certainly was for me. It’s amazing to me to read stuff about education now, what people’s theories on education and stuff, to realize that taking things apart wasn’t me just breaking things.

David Read
No, you’re exploring how the world functions and everything else. I took all of my Star Trek toys apart at one point in my life just to see the little sound devices on the inside that made the Klingon Bird-of-Prey noise.

David Hewlett
How do they work? Yeah. That’s it. I mean, it’s nice if you can put them back together again sometimes. I was never good at that part so much. I was amazed at how much I learned just by pulling stuff apart and I was also concerned that kids weren’t doing it. Technology has become so sort of blackbox; it was like “oh an Xbox breaks so you throw it out and get a new one.” That’s probably part to do with the privilege to which I’m exposed but the idea that you would throw that out was just bizarre. I was like, “no, you want to take it apart, see how it works.” Once kids realize they can do that, it is amazing how excited they get about it. One of the things I’ve been trying to do recently is I’d like to get an educators perspective on some of the stuff we’re doing. My sister is actually a Child Development Specialist, not the one from Stargate, another one. I’m going to get her to help me out with some stuff there to try to come up with a little bit more of a little manifesto or something like that just so other people can start doing this stuff. I’m also working on the garage so that the local nerds can come in and use my 3d printers and CNC machines and stuff. I’ve got all this fun tech sitting around, I can only play with so much. The whole point of it all was that, pre-pandemic, was the kids could play with it. I don’t want to go back into the schools now, I don’t see the point of it. It makes more sense for me to have a space that the kids can come to. The online stuff has just been an eye opener to me. The kids wanted to have a discord channel, they wanted to talk on Discord, they wanted to stream our chats. It was nothing I planned for originally. It was basically Baz’s idea. I started doing it and I’m like, “Oh, this opens it up to the entire world.” I just love it.

David Read
One of the things that I’m so thankful for in this new era that we’re moving into is learning at our own speed, taking our time. Not everything must be done in 10 minutes, little bite size XYZ. I have a concern as we continue to move forward. There was there was an episode of Stargate SG-1 called Sentinel. In this episode, this was right after you were introduced, SG-1 goes to this planet where the goa’uld have taken over because one of our rogue teams broke their security system. The people hadn’t used it, hadn’t taught themselves the maintenance of the Sentinel for generations. They just relied on it continuing to exist without knowing what it was or how it worked. I watch a lot of our young people now accept these things and accept other devices and just in general accepting the reality with which it’s being presented to them without asking themselves, “how does this work?” Computer monitors and televisions still blow me away. How is all that information organized exactly in the right shape and exactly in the right order? What is telling it to do that? Of we’re not curious about our world, at what point do we lose interest in curiosity in that and just accept that “well, what we have we’ve always had and we always will.”

David Hewlett
The COBOL programmers got pulled out of retirement because of the y2k issue. Still, to this day, there’s people pulled in for banking and stuff because these systems are built around a programming language that people don’t know. It’s interesting. one of the things that I like about sort of the future for this stuff as well is that it’s not just the sciencey science. As AI gets better at creating simulations for us and finding patterns for us, our skills as humans will be become more important. All of a sudden that creative side, the odd perspective on things, the Mikas of the world, become far more valuable because they have a uniquely human perspective on this stuff.

David Read
And a desire to share for free, the information for free, to the world.

David Hewlett
For me Tech Bandits is more about me learning stuff than kids learning stuff, it really is. I try to stream at least once a week, it’s usually Monday or Tuesday, every week, for a couple hours. The best episodes for want of a better word, the best sessions, I find are the ones when I walk away and the kids have brought up something that I hadn’t planned on talking about. It’s an excuse to go out and look for something. There’s this is kid, Wolf Pup, in our group who’s constantly saying things and I will say like, “well, I don’t know about that.” I was like, “Oh my god, you’re right.” To me, that’s education because for me, I’m learning stuff. I don’t care, I don’t mind being wrong, I’m a frickin actor, I can be wrong about anything. But what did they get from it? They told a grown up something that he didn’t know. Right? Exactly. That’s the kind of thing that if I was a kid, the idea that a grown up would say to me, “oh my god, I was wrong, you were right.” That means something.

David Read
As a homeowner I am really big on self reliance as much as possible. The fact that I can go to YouTube and learn how to do X, Y, or Z on my water heater…

David Hewlett
I can help you with a sump pump, sump pumps all I got, and I’m very good at demo.

David Read
These tools are there for those who are curious to go and look. Sure you can hire a professional to come in and do it but if you learn how to do it yourself and learn how to do it at least correctly, without damaging anything or taking anything outside of code, there are resources for those who are intellectually curious and go, “oh that was actually kind of cool. What else can I pursue in that direction that I can teach myself or someone else?”

David Hewlett
The weird thing that I’m seeing more and more is this illusion of knowledge. People will watch a YouTube video and go, “oh, I know how to create a nuclear reactor.” Yeah. They’ve seen all the information and there’s a sense that because you’ve seen it, you understand it. I love tutorials, I do tutorials all the time. When I then sit down to use the software or do the experiment, I suddenly go, “oh, but how do you the….” It does make a difference, you have to get up and do things, you have to be active in this learning as well. It’s very easy to sort of kick back and just sort of watch science videos in the same way that you’d watch FailArmy or something.

David Read
It’s so easy to delude yourself.

David Hewlett
That’s it. But as you say, it’s a collective knowledge of human race. If I want to learn something I can go to YouTube, look it up, and I’m fixing some pumps. I love that. My dad says that too, he talks about with the boat stuff because he bought a hole in the water that you throw money into.

David Read
I’ve heard that that’s basically what is.

David Hewlett
I don’t know how he does it.

David Read
A friend of mine told me once, “owning a boat is like standing in the shower with your clothes on tearing up $100 bills.”

David Hewlett
Yeah, I guess my dad’s earned it though, he had to raise me for God’s sake.

David Read
How’s Kate doing? How’s Kate, and baby doing?

David Hewlett
Great. Oh my god, that kid is ridiculously cute. For some unknown reason whenever she sees me, she makes fart noises Yeah, it’s pretty cute. I could not get her to laugh. I tried everything. She laughs at everyone else except me but now at least we communicate with farts. The language of farts, it’s international, the universal language of farts.

David Read
My friend, it is truly wonderful to have you on?

David Hewlett
Oh, anytime, man.

David Read
Where can we go on and check out Tech Bandits? Where’s that available?

David Hewlett
Well I discovered something else. You break things and then you learn things. Apparently, if you change your user name on Twitch, it changes the name of your channel. If you go to davidihewlett on Twitch, that’s where you’ll see us. Techbandits.org, that’s where I’ll probably end up updating stuff. God I love it. I love the fact that you can do this, I love the fact that you’re doing this. How are you finding all this?

David Read
I am learning something new all the time. I just recently figured out how to add the podcast to all of the audio podcast channels.

David Hewlett
So you do like an audio version?

David Read
There’s an audio version that’s now available.

David Hewlett
I should pick your brains about that because I’ve thought about doing that with some of the Tech Bandit stuff.

David Read
All you have to do is port the content over to, I use Anchor, it is tied together with Spotify. They host your channel for free and you can actually do little advertisements. I’ve made $10 on it.

David Hewlett
Sweet. There’s something wildly satisfying about someone giving…I think I got like $1 from Google the other day and I was like, “oh my god, Jane!” She’s like, “oh my god, seriously?”

David Read
The fact that you can upload something and not have to deal with server maintenance is wonderful. If they’re willing to host it, and you can record your own ad at the beginning of it. What I did was show people how to use Anchor to make their own podcasts. I’m like, “I’m all down for that.” It’s really cool.

David Hewlett
What about merchandising? Any merchandise yet?

David Read
I have my own merchandise channel, that’s at the dialthegate.com/merch.

David Hewlett
Yeah, get it in there, get it in there.

David Read
I just created a new design based on the Wormhole X-treme logo from season five of Stargate SG-1.

David Hewlett
We need good merch, Stargate merch sucks. I have to do a call out that Barnacules Nerdgasm is here, he’s a wonderful friend of mine who I try to podcast with along with Ox every Saturday. We do tech talk, usually around like 1 or 2 on Saturday morning for me, Saturday for me, which is Saturday morning for me. He’s in the chat too. So everyone follow him as well, he’s wonderful.

David Read
What’s the name again?

David Hewlett
B A R N A C U L E S.

David Hewlett
Barnacules.

David Read
Barnacules, can you spell that for me?

David Read
And is this on Twitch?

David Hewlett
Nerdgasm is what he calls himself.

David Read
Twich.com/nerdgasm?

David Hewlett
I don’t what the Twitch channel is. Of course he can’t post it can he?. I’ll throw some links in the chat,

David Read
Yes, please do

David Hewlett
That’s probably the best way to do it.

David Read
Absolutely. All right. Anything else we want to wrap up on before we get you underway?

David Hewlett
No, that’s it. When can we do Mika again? That chat was great.

David Read
I feel so bad to everyone who submitted questions, we did not get to them. I had no idea we would get this much of a response. Let’s get summer out of the way and plan something for September?

David Hewlett
Absolutely. I’m totally in. If you don’t mind, I just love it because I actually get to learn stuff.

David Read
That’s exactly why I wanted to do this, for sure. She is so exceptional at enthusiastically sharing knowledge and that’s I think what’s so cool about it. I would have been on her heels constantly were she on set on the show that I was working on.

David Hewlett
She’s extraordinary. She loves it and she just makes you love it as well. Here we go, let me find Barnacules channel here, I never say right, I never ever say his name…

David Read
If you can post it here I’ll pull it up on the screen before we go.

David Hewlett
Copy. Here we go. Just post it in there. Can I do that?

David Read
You should be able to in the YouTube chat here.

David Hewlett
It’s a really long complicated…I don’t know why there’s so many…but that’s…definitely go and follow him as well.

David Read
The Twitch channel David H is talking about, Nerdgasmn_tv.

David Hewlett
Is that what it is?

David Read
Yeah, evidently so, here. Blonde guy, scruffy face.

David Hewlett
No! Blonde guy scruffy face.

David Read
Nerdgasm_tv?

David Hewlett
Is that right? I don’t know if that is the right one. Here. Let me copy this.

David Read
“Not Nerdgasm_tv, that’s not me” he said. That’s GateGabber, my producer.

David Hewlett
There you go. That’s a link to the actual channel, I put it in the Zoom chat.

David Read
Oh my Zoom chat. Let me pull this up there.

David Hewlett
I’ve also put it in the chat chat as well so it’s all there. Question for Rodney McKay “what were your thoughts about management?” Hmm, let’s talk about leadership.

David Read
That’s funny. Let me see here. Ah, Barnacules Nerdgasm, got it. Okay, this is him on YouTube, very good.

David Hewlett
It’s fascinating. He used to work for Microsoft and has a few thoughts on that, and a few thoughts on everything actually. He’s a fellow nerd. I don’t even know how we met. Oh that’s right, I came on to his podcast once and he never got rid of me. It’s like you, I tend to show up at these things and then you can’t get rid of me.

David Read
We love having Dave. All right, so we got him a shout out on the show here. I look forward to having you back on for season three later this year and bring Mika back if she is willing, if we didn’t drive her crazy, and we’ll talk soon.

David Hewlett
Fantastic man.

David Read
Thanks, brother.

David Hewlett
Thank you, everyone. Cheers!

David Read
Be well. David Hewlett, Rodney McKay on Stargate Atlantis, SG-1 and Universe as well. I have a couple of photos that I would like to share, a couple of pieces of artwork that I would like to share, from Salchat. She sent me these a couple of months ago and I said “we have a really big episode coming up really soon, you’ll want to maximize the view at that point.” Her sketch artwork is just sensational. This is obviously Paul as Carson Beckett. Carson again. This is Nicholas Rush from Stargate Universe portrayed of course by, god sakes, my brain is doing this to me right now. It’ll come back to me. David Blue as Eli Wallace in a very non-Eli type of costume. Let’s see here, this is Chloe of course played by Elise. Brian as Matthew Scott. I think this one is my favorite, the use of color here is just really sensational. Colonel Young. Sheppard. Sam. Torri Higginson, Elizabeth Weir. Robert Carlyle was the name I was missing, of course. This is a really cool one, Sheppard and McKay. McKay, I think he’s holding his Gameboy there and Atlantis on the horizon in the background. That’s just a really cool piece. All right, Dial the Gate is brought to you every week for free and we do appreciate you watching. If you want to support our show further buy yourself some of our themed swag. We’re now offering t-shirts, tank tops, sweatshirts and hoodies for all ages as well as cups and other accessories in a variety of sizes and colors at dialthegate.com. From the merchandise tab you can click on a specific design to see what items are being offered. Checkout is fast and easy, you can use a credit credit card or PayPal, just visit dialthegate.com/merch. I just uploaded a new Wormhole X-Tremists t-shirt. If there were Wormhole X-treme fans I figured that they would be called Wormhole X-Tremists, so that’s available now. My name is David Read, I appreciate you tuning in. Robert Murray Duncan is going to be joining us next week, next Saturday, I believe at, let me double check on the time here, 12 noon Pacific time. He played Seth in season three episode of the same name, as well as Melburn Jackson in season two. That episode was The Gamekeeper. We will have Robert Murray Duncan next week at this time. I appreciate you tuning in to Dial the Gate. My name is David Read. I appreciate my moderating team, Sommer, Tracy, Keith, Rhys, Antony. Jeremy, you guys make the show possible. Big thanks to my Producer Linda “GateGabber” Furey, to Frederick Marcoux at ConceptsWeb, he’s our web developer, he keeps the website going, as well as Jeremy Heiner, our webmaster, who keeps the site up to date as well. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate, I appreciate you tuning in and we will see you next week on the other side.