xkcd

In light of the results of last week’s election, I want to acknowledge what many of you already know. Good, sound science and data look like they’ll be in short supply in the upcoming Trump administration. That’s tough to stomach, since we know beyond any doubt that science saves lives and evidence-based policy-making is essential for us as a country, and for the entire world and all of its inhabitants. I want to take a moment to reassure you that the Union of Concerned Scientists is here, and we are prepared to bring the fight for science to have a seat at the table to every facet of our federal government. We’ve been around for over 50 years, and we will continue to work every single day. Period.

Visit ucsusa.org to find action items, ways to support our work, and resources and blogs you might find helpful in this time of uncertainty and worry. Our next episode will break down the election in detail, but today I want to give you all something a bit lighter. The tunnel may be long, but we have to look for the flames that light our way forward. If you’re new here, welcome. The only thing you need to know for this episode is that I’m a volcanologist, and that science will not be silent.

I’m your host Jess Phoenix, and this is science.

JESS: I am so excited to talk with the luminous Randall Munroe, creator of the incomparable webcomic, and, let's be real, cultural phenomenon, that is xkcd. Like many of my favorite people, Randy is a multi-hyphenate human. He's an author and an engineer, and a Hugo award winner as well. And it's hard to overstate the cultural impact your work has had on society since you first started putting pen to paper, or perhaps pixels to screens is a little bit more apt. Thanks so much for being here. And I wanted to start by referencing my personal gateway drug sample of xkcd, which was comic number 162, which I'm pretty sure I saw on LiveJournal. And, you know, you're now on comic number 2,993. So, at any rate, your comic on angular momentum is what first invited me into your world. And I wanted to ask, what made you decide to show your audience your blend of humanity and curiosity, using wildly emotive stick figures?

RANDALL: I don't know. I mean, I think we all, everyone wants to, you know, reach out to other people and find people who are interested in the kinds of things they are. And a lot of the time, when I started drawing comics, I was in college, I was sitting in class, I was just doodling stuff I was thinking about. I had one job where I worked at a front desk overnight. And I was... I had one of those spinning chairs. And people would, like, no one would come through from, like, 2 a.m. to 4 a.m., and so I was just sort of sitting there. And one of the things I would do is I would just start myself spinning in the chair, and see how long I spun. And I had been learning about angular momentum, and so I was thinking, wait a minute, that... If I'm spinning, isn't it imperceptibly but still slightly slowing down the spin of the earth? And I drew a comic about that. And it was really exciting to see that I was not the only person who thought about that kind of thing. A lot of people would write to me, or send messages or something, be like, "Oh, wow. I didn't know that there's someone else out there who thinks about, like, optimizing your path when walking across a grid at, you know, on your college campus," or spinning in chairs to try to alter the spin of the earth. And for me, it was like that, but even more profound, because I was learning there were a lot of people out there who were interested in that kind of stuff too. And I thought that was really exciting. It's been really amazing to get to find out that the stuff that you're sitting around and thinking about and interested in, that you think, "This can't possibly be going on in anyone else's head, right?" to find out that it often is.

JESS: So, when you're writing these books, how much of the work that goes into those is for fun? Just like, "Oh, this seems like a fun thing to talk about," versus how much do you usually deliberately try to convey? Like, how much specific information are you trying to put in here, versus, "Hey, this sounds cool?"

RANDALL: Well, I've done comics occasionally about this phenomenon of how, like, for someone, you know, with a certain kind of personality, or, you know, a certain approach to these things, it's really easy to trap us by, like, giving us a riddle that seems like it's solvable, but we're not totally sure how to solve, but we think we can solve it. And people can derail me for, like, an entire day just by sending me, like, an interesting puzzle, or a question that they want answered, because I'll just immediately go off, you know, diving down rabbit hole after rabbit hole of research to try to answer this question. And so, part of what I tried to do with "What If?" was harness that in some way, where it's like, well, wait, if I'm gonna be spending, you know, eight hours when I should be doing something more productive, researching to answer this person's question about Superman physics, or lava or rocket design, I might as well, like, take all the stuff I learned, and write it up, and share it with more people than just the person who asked me.

And so, what I do is not so much think, like, what do people need to know, you know, what's the... How much information can I cram in here? Instead, what I do is I wanna get to an answer. Like, that's the thing that always really pushes me. Like, it is, someone asks me a question, and I'm not, like, excited about doing research, necessarily. Like, it's not like the idea of doing math is fun. But I'm excited to find out the answer. And so, I'll deploy whatever tools I can, you know, which would be, like, research, math, science, etc., to try to figure out what that answer is. And then once I've got it, I usually find that there were, like, 20 approaches that didn't work out, and also some interesting stuff I learned that didn't have to do with the answer, but it was interesting anyway. And so, at the end of that whole process, I think, "Okay, what is the most interesting piece of this?" Like, what are the most interesting things that I have learned along the way? And how can I show people the answer that I got? Because that's what, you know, got us started on all this. And also, the parts of the research that were useful to figure it out, or that were just too cool not to mention.

JESS: I got it. So, there is a winnowing-down process. And so it's not an entire brain dump, but it really is that core of curiosity, is what it sounds like, that just kind of undergirds everything you do. What are your thoughts about the... It's sort of a still-nascent field of science communication. And obviously, your comic is more than just science, but you do a lot of science communication. But how do you think people making a deliberate attempt to communicate science to a broad audience, how can that help us navigate, kind of, the chaos of modern times?

RANDALL: I certainly grew up consuming, you know, books and shows and, you know, media that was, in retrospect, science communication, you know, everything from the books by Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, etc. The TV show "Mathnet," on PBS, is... Square One TV, which had a little segment called "Mathnet," I revisited recently. It was an educational sort of variety show about math. And watching it, I recognized, "Oh, wow. I see a lot of my later career in this show," and I did not realize how much this was influencing me. I don't know exactly what, whether they were trying to accomplish exactly what they did. But they were sharing stuff that I found really interesting and exciting and useful, and that shaped how I think about the world.

You know, if you wanna share stuff with people outside of your field, you have to present it differently. And I think that's something that is hard to do. It's always hard to put yourself in the shoes of people who don't know all of the things you know. That's something that's really, really struck me with writing about science, is it's hard to remember what it's like not to know something. And so, it can be really challenging to try to think, like, "How did it feel before I understood this?" so you can figure out how to express it in a way that people will understand. And, you know, that's something that I struggle with. And I think it's hard to do maybe without condescending to people. That's something that it's sort of, I see people, you know, talk about struggling with. Like, you need to simplify things without talking down to people. And that's a challenge. And I always... So, I always just try to think about what did I feel like before I understood this? And what was it that made it click for me? And what drew me into it in the first place? And then I just try to, like, think about, like, how would I share that with my past self? And figure that maybe that'll also work for people who are in the place I was in before I started looking into this whatever random topic it is.

JESS: I think that's relevant advice, and I think that is something that has been neglected in the sciences. And it is the same. It's not like you're communicating something in, you know, an alien language. Like, you're communicating ideas and principles that affect all of us, but scientists have been...I guess, just neglected that side of our training. It hasn't been...it's not like every scientist has been required to take a communication class. I think we're moving that way, but we're not quite there yet. But do you have a few personal favorite examples? And they could be from your work, or from stuff that you've seen out and about, just examples of science reaching the public, and changing lives, in a good way?

RANDALL: Oh, man. I don't know. That's a tricky one. I'm thinking about... There are some cases of people kind of identifying a problem, and then bringing it to the attention of the public, and then the public, you know, the policymakers and stuff, like, reacting to it and doing something about it. You know, we had people... There's the example of, like, the ozone hole, where we figured out that these compounds were breaking down the ozone layer, and then passed the... And this circulated around. People said, "Oh, looks bad." You can see the big picture of the, the color map of the ozone thickness, and there's a giant hole over the southern part of the globe. And it's very vivid. It, like, seems bad. It is bad. And it's kind of easily digestible, because you have that picture. And then we, you know, in the '90s, passed the Montreal Protocol. You know, we really banned a lot of those compounds, and have made a lot of headway on that. And that's sort of what the hope, when you have something where you want to affect policy in some way, where there's a problem, and there's something that it's important for people to learn about.

But I also think that I really feel like my life, personally, was changed just by people, like, learning about the things that we don't understand. You know, like learning that there are all these mysteries out there that we have not figured out answers to. When I was a kid, I found books on physics, and I read things like, you know, I mentioned there's Carl Sagan. There's...I read a lot of those sort of pop science books, that would talk about, you know, the problems of string theory and quantum mechanics, and unifying relativity with quantum physics, and figuring out the ultimate theory of everything. And I thought that was so fascinating. It's like, "Oh, there's this thing we don't understand, and someone needs to go figure it out."

And one thing that I really wish I had sort of learned earlier was how many really simple problems are also unsolved. I was really delighted when I learned how much we don't know about very basic processes, like... Like, it was only in the last few, a decade or so that we really got a handle on why ice is slippery. I found a paper on that, where it's like, there's a common explanation you always hear. That explanation is wrong. But we weren't sure what the right one was. There are similar things, like, we don't know how lightning gets started in clouds, partly because it's hard to go up there and check them. We don't know... We don't have good models for how sand flows. There are all these, like, very simple, practical problems, where lots of people have worked on them, but it's just very hard.

And sometimes science is presented as, like, well, we've solved, we've figured out all this stuff, and there are now these big, deep fundamental questions, and you have to go work at a particle accelerator to tackle those. And it was really exciting for me to learn that there are problems, like, in kind of everyday physics, where we don't know the answer. And in other fields too. You know, like, I'm sure you've run across a lot of these, where it's like, what's going on in this mountain? No one has climbed up there to look, so we don't know.

JESS: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the big one in vulcanology is that we can't predict eruptions. And so, everyone is, "Oh, when is it going to erupt?" I don't know. I mean, we can look at clues and available evidence, and tell you when it's likely, but we can't say, "Oh, yeah. Next Tuesday at 7:00." Like, I wish we could. But, yeah. Those are the exact mysteries that I think drive a lot of scientific curiosity, and I think it's important to not lose sight of the forest for the trees, because we're all trying to go to particle accelerators when we still have these very basic things. And, I mean, a discovery that happened when I was a working geologist, pretty much right out of grad school, and I saw it, they figured out in real time, was why do the rocks at Racetrack Playa in Death Valley move? And when I started studying geology, they didn't know. And then they figured it out. So, it's, like, these things are happening in our lifetime. And that gets me excited.

RANDALL: So, why are the rocks moving?

JESS: So, it's because there is a cycle of freezing and melting that goes on in the playa, and it's very shallow. The water table's really high there. And so, basically, when the water freezes, and the ice is present, the rocks actually slide along the surface. And then when it melts, the rocks stop. So, that's why they have those big, long tracks after them. And they didn't...

RANDALL: And so this all comes back to the mystery of why ice is slippery.

JESS: It's ice, man. Everything's ice. So, because, like, okay, you got me all excited, and I'm like, all right, let's talk about what's exciting. So, your work is super eclectic. I mean, I love that you reference iambic pentameter and, you know, M.C. Escher, and then also particle physics in what you do. Your interests are pretty darn varied. So, what are a few things that have you really excited for the future right now? I mean, on any kind of future. Doesn't have to be science future, but, you know, if it's science, bonus points.

RANDALL: Man, I don't know. I've always, for a long time, I've been really excited about every time there are new discoveries with exoplanets, you know. Like, when I was a little kid, we didn't have solid confirmation of any of these, and now there are thousands and thousands of them. And every time we launch a new instrument, and get a new glimpse of, like, "This is what's going on in the atmosphere of this planet. This is a new type of planet we didn't know existed," I find that stuff really exciting. But, you know, and I don't mean to pander here, but I just find myself thinking about geology a lot. Like, I didn't do any of that in school. I didn't do, you know... I didn't take any geology classes in school, but I've been walking around on tectonic plates for my entire life.

JESS: I hope.

RANDALL: And I just find that, I find it really kind of mind-bending to think about the spans of time involved. You know, like, where I live up, in the northeast, I'm on rocks that originally formed from, I think, a volcanic arc in the southern hemisphere, like, near Antarctica, and that migrated across, you know, migrated north, and that was, like, you know, 450, 550, 600 million years ago, that migrated north, collided with North America, got sort of sutured on 400 million years ago. And then they've just been sitting here. And it's just so weird to me that I can walk outside and look down at this rock. And it's been there for a span of time that is, like, impossible to wrap your head around. And the fact that we've got this whole other, you know, we move around, we walk around on the surface, we pick up objects, we, like, you know, run water, we do all this fun stuff manipulating the world around us. And then, like, underneath, there's a similar process happening, but just on a time scale that's, like, a million times slower. I don't know. It's like, it's hard for me to think about things sometimes. It's the way people talk about, like, looking into the abyss, or, like, staring up at the stars being a kind of terrifying experience, because you realize how small you are. I feel that way just, like, looking at rocks. And so, anytime I run into someone who knows about geology, I always end up, like, I just wanna ask them questions about, like, what parts of the Earth they study, and what they, like, when things happened, and what happened there, and it's just like there's an entire other story happening, you know, right under our feet.

JESS: Yeah. That's... I appreciate the pandering. I will take that any day of the week. And I will tell you the thing that broke my brain. I mean, geology broke my brain from day one, because it is so... It's like, "Wait, you can explain mountains? Like, whoa." That was, like, giant revelation. But it was when I first set foot at the summit of Mauna Loa volcano, world's largest, as you know. In the summit there, at the time, when I first walked on those lavas, I was older than they were. And I was like, "Wait. This is a chunk of a mountain, and not just any mountain. Like, the world's biggest volcano. And I am older than what I'm standing on, this part of it." And I was just like, "What?" So, I mean, it just, the Earth is constantly creating and destroying itself. And I love that. It seems so much bigger than all of us. So, we are speaking the same language here.

And I do wanna talk about lava, because I have to, and you mentioned you wanted to talk about lava, so... So, this relates to your work. For the people watching this on YouTube, I have the copy of "How To" right here. This is...oop, wrong side. "How To," one of Randy's awesome books. And there is a chapter called "How to Make a Lava Moat." And in "How to Make a Lava Moat," you know, I'm very grateful that you... Or, "How to Build a Lava Moat." Let's get it right. And so, I'm very grateful that you took the time to discourage people from actually building home lava moats, because you pointed out the cost is prohibitive unless you're Elon Musk. But let's not give him any ideas. But I did wanna ask you how you determined, and you put it in this book, how did you determine that a serving size of lava is one kilogram?

RANDALL: Well, so, I wanted to discourage people from eating lava. And I was thinking, like, okay, lava's not very nutritious. And somehow that just led me to think, like, "Well, wait a minute. Do I know that for sure?" I'm pretty sure you shouldn't eat lava, but... And then I thought, if you made a nutrition label for lava, what would it look like? Because the nutrition label... I think that was sort of the moment I realized, like, wait, you could put one of those on anything. It doesn't have to be food. Like, they wouldn't put them on things that aren't food. But it's just a list of what's in it. You know, I can look up what's in lava. And so I, like, found some papers on, like... Like, lava doesn't have any carbohydrates, or, you know, like, doesn't have a lot of protein in there. But it does have potassium. You know, there's magnesium, you know, there's a bunch of these different elements. There's iron.

JESS: Lots of iron.

RANDALL: And so, I tried to figure out, if you took an amount of lava, you know, how much would it meet the RDA for each of these nutrients? This was one of my favorite things about doing a book, where we actually got a fact checker, who's... We had a couple of people who were... And it's fun finding people to fact check this kind of thing, because you really have to have, like, a specific attitude toward the world to take a question like this, and... Like, where do you even start in figuring out if that's right? And I remember that I got notes from the fact checker on that chapter, where it was like... And so I found a couple of people who are good at solving this kind of problem the way that I am. And I, that was my favorite fact-checking note, on the lava chapter, was, like, "This all looks good, except that magnesium number seems high. None of the lavas I've found had that much magnesium." And I was like, "Oh, maybe I initially found some, like, really magnesium-rich lava." But when I went back, I'm like, "You know what? You're right. That's too much magnesium." So, I fixed it. You know, the version in the book should be about right. So, if you are gonna put together a lava meal, that should be good for sort of an average, typical lava, but it varies so much. Like, I just tried to find, like, what are the most studied lavas.

So, you mentioned, when we were talking about lava the first time, you mentioned how it smells.

JESS: Yep.

RANDALL: And does it vary? Like, are there lavas that are, like, stinkier?

JESS: Yeah. Oh, yeah. For sure. It depends on...

RANDALL: Can you tell things about it?

JESS: Yeah, it depends on the sulfur content. If it's a really sulfur-rich area, you know, if the magma chamber has a lot of sulfur, if you see a lot of fumaroles, the, basically, the areas where the degassing occurs, which are usually marked by a lot of sulfur crystals, it's gonna smell really strongly of rotten eggs. If there isn't very much sulfur, it's a much more neutral smell. Then, you usually just smell burning, if there's any vegetation around. So, it's not directly the lava that is smelling at that point.

RANDALL: That makes sense.

JESS: Yeah.

RANDALL: It's just seasoning on top of it.

JESS: Everyone thinks it must be disgusting. They're like, "Oh, how could you do that? I can't stand the rotten egg smell." And I'm like, "But it's not, like, sewer gas smell." It's a little different. Native sulfur's a little different, and I don't mind it. I mean, yeah, it stings your eyes, and the other acid gases don't do wonders for your respiratory tract.

RANDALL: Chemists always talk about sulfur, and to tell you what it smells like, you're like, "You know, like rotten eggs." And I think this is something that's changed some over time, because, do chemists all just have, like, eggs rotting in their houses? I don't actually smell rotten eggs. But I also really like the idea that chemists just, like, don't know about refrigeration, and all their houses are just full of rotting eggs all the time. So, they're like, "You know, that omnipresent rotten egg smell that we all have in our houses." So, when I was planning out a lava moat…I was curious if I could ask you...

JESS: Yeah.

RANDALL: I tried to figure out how wide you need to make a lava moat for it to be effective. Because, like, at first, I was thinking, I mean, any amount of lava, like, you probably can't even get near that. And then I tried to do the calculations, like, how much, you know, if you tried to, like, jump over a 1-meter-wide strip of lava, like, how badly you'd get burned. And it looked like you might not...like, that might not be enough to prevent someone from breaching your threshold. Like, could you jump across a lava stream if it was, like, narrow enough?

JESS: Yes. We do not advise that. Like, everyone listening, do not do this. You didn't get it from me if you did. You got you got it from Randy, not me, but...

RANDALL: Hey, no, no, no. I'm trying to keep people out. I'll have signs around my lava moat, that are, like, "Do not jump across this."

JESS: Okay. Yeah, well, no, you could totally do it. It is extremely hot. I have poked a river of lava with a stick, and the stick caught on fire, of course. And I have also lost my favorite pocket knife into a river of lava. And I did not reach in after it. I wanted to, but the heat, the radiant heat, was, like, "Oh, nope. Never mind. That's gone."

RANDALL: Did it sink?

JESS: It was subsumed. Because the lava was flowing, and it sort of, it pierced the crust, because the crust hadn't solidified yet. And so, it was just sort of slowly overtaken. It was like...

RANDALL: Okay.

JESS: It's like watching one of those, you know those little, the snakes you get for Fourth of July, then you, you know, you light them on fire, and then they carbonize and they curl around? It kind of looked like that was eating my knife.

RANDALL: Huh. Okay. Because, like, I always imagined... I mean, I always figured that lava would be a much more common thing to encounter, like quicksand, when I was a kid, because it shows up in media all the time. And, like quicksand, you'd see, you know, in cartoons or whatever, things falling into it, and sinking. But both lava and quicksand are, like, significantly denser than people.

JESS: Yes.

RANDALL: And so, like, I'm curious, like, what stuff actually can sink in lava, if it's, you know, molten enough?

JESS: let's say a person flings themself into a lava lake they're gonna hit a solid at first. Because lava is...it's a plastic solid. So, you know, essentially, you're hitting something solid, it's gonna hurt, but it's gonna start basically taking you into it pretty quickly. It's not "Terminator," either. So, yeah. There's all these misconceptions.

Okay, so, I wanna know what's coming over the horizon for you. So, is there anything that you can kind of tease for your fans out here in the scientific world?

RANDALL: I mean, I'm always sort of working on stuff, and waiting to see which thing, you know, is exciting enough or interesting enough or, like, complete enough for me to release it. I do have, coming up later this year, it is the 10th anniversary of my first "What If" book. And so, I'm releasing a version of it, where I've gone through and annotated it, and updated it with, like, margin notes showing, like, new stuff that has been learned since I wrote this, or occasionally, like, someone who has gone out and tested my idea in some way, and, like, got results, and they've shared them with me, and I can, like, talk about, like, "Here's what happened when someone tried this," for at least a few of them where that's possible.

We had one questioner who then went on to a music career, and I went to some of her concerts. It was cool. I include a bunch of details like that. And I also, because it's the 10th anniversary, I just tried taking a whole bunch of the quantities in the book, and multiplying them by 10, and then seeing, like, in the margins, like, "Here's what would happen if, you know, you ate 10 pounds of, 10 kilograms of lava instead of 1," or, you know, "Here's what would happen if this were moving 10 times faster." And often, the answer is just, like, "Similar destruction, except much more so," you know, and I get to... But occasionally, it's, like, quantitatively or qualitatively different. And so, I had fun doing all of that. And so, that'll come out at the end of the year.

JESS: Oh, that's cool. Well, we don't have long to wait, because we are close to the end of the year. So, I'll be looking forward to that. So, then I have a last question that's actually a two-parter for my guests here on "This is Science." The first part goes like this, okay? We are the union of concerned scientists. Randall Munroe, why are you concerned?

RANDALL: Ooh. I don't... I mean, just the general unimaginable scope of time and space that does not fit into my brain. I feel like there's a general existential concern about the world. I think I'm concerned about, you know, just a lot of the normal, the things that any one scientist [inaudible 00:36:46] is concerned about. I think, you know, as scientists, the there's sort of the obligation and the, to talk about and focus on climate change. It really is, like, the reason the Union of Concerned Scientists does so much, you know, communication about it, and the reason so many people talk about it, is that it really is a thing that we're doing that we should do differently, and it's, you know, hard to kind of get across and illustrate why that is, and what we need to do about it, but it's important. And so, I do spend a lot of time worrying about that, just, like, opening up the daily CO2 readings from Mauna Loa, you know, the...looking at, like, the rate of adoption of solar. I feel concerned about that. And also, I really appreciate people who combine that concern with, like, not being too pessimistic or too, like, fatalistic about it, because I don't think that's helpful.

I'm a big fan of Katharine Hayhoe. She's the writer and scientists who works on the IPCC report and the climate assessment, and she's talked a lot about seeing climate change as a problem, but a thing that we will make progress on, and are making progress on, and we just need to appreciate what things are working and what aren't, and do more of those. And she, I think, is one of the...she does a lot of very deep thinking about, like, how to talk to people from different parts of the country and the world about this problem. And I'm a big fan of her, so...

JESS: Likewise, likewise. She's great. So, there is, you know, we have to end optimistically, because I share the core of optimism that comes through in a lot of your work. But, what are you doing about your concern?

RANDALL: Gosh, I don't know. I think... You know, I've tried to not... Like, one of the things that makes talking about politics difficult is that it really encourages a kind of, like, lecturing people, which is, like, an impulse that I have the same as anyone. I drew a comic about, early on, about the compulsion to engage on the internet because there is someone who is wrong, and you have to tell them they're wrong, and yell at them. And I think that that's, like, often not very helpful, and people don't like being lectured to and condescended to. And so, one thing I've really tried to do is figure out how to just show people what I'm concerned about. And I did a giant, a chart, at one point, showing just the temperature history of the Earth over a long time scale. So, you have to scroll, and watch, like, the climate and the Earth has changed in the past. And, you know, it used to be really cold in the ice ages, and, you know, in the last glaciation. And now it's warmer. And so, I made it so you scroll, and you watch that change happen, and that change happens over, you know, thousands of years. And then, and you can see the line sort of weave back and forth as you scroll, and, like, the temperature climbs up to where it is now. And at the very end, you see how quickly the current temperature change happens compared to that. And it's just, like, suddenly, a sharp bend off to the side.

And I shared that just because, like, I felt like I hadn't seen it illustrated like that. And I don't wanna yell at people and be like, "You should be concerned about this." Instead, I tried to just show it. And I had a lot of people who wrote to me after, and they're like, "Wait. Is this true?" You know, like, "This seems really bad." And I was like, "Yeah, it does seem very bad." You know, but I try, so, I try to show people things that make me concerned, and then let them decide how they feel about them, instead of sort of yelling at them, and telling them "You should feel this way." Because all that does is make them feel like, well, if they don't feel that way, there's something wrong with them. Or they just don't like being yelled at, which, like, who does? And so, I think that's what I try to do, is I just try to, like, show people what it is that I am thinking about and concerned about, and why, and then just have faith that other people will feel the same way as me if they see the same things that I do.

Hang in there folks, and hang on to each other. Get ready, because there’s work to be done and we’ll need all hands on deck to do it.

Thanks to Randy Munroe, and to Omari Spears and Abby Figueroa for production help.

Keep going, Science Stalwarts!