Tech News: Airlines Warn 5G Could Lead to "Catastrophic Event"

Published Jan 18, 2022, 10:56 PM

We're on the eve of AT&T and Verizon switching on their C-Band 5G networks and several airlines warn that the tech could cause a "catastrophic event" in the form of delays and cancellations. What's going on? Plus HUGE news about Activision Blizzard and more.

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Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? This time for the tech news for Tuesday, January two. Yes, I just forgot the date and I had to look at my computer to see what it was. But let's get to the tech news. Tomorrow, A T and T and Verizon will be switching on the C band five G service around the United States, and the airline industry as a whole has issued a warning that there will likely be quote unquote catastrophic delays as a result. All right, so if you're not all caught up on this, here is what is going on. A T and T and Verizon purchased nearly all of the C bay and five G spectrum at auction, and those companies have been prepping a rollout of five G service for months. The aviation industry appealed to have that rollout delayed, citing concerns that the frequencies within that spectrum could potentially interfere with sensitive airplane equipment like radio altimeters, which tells a plane how far off the ground. It is uh. Some aircraft use automated landing procedures in which radio altimeters play a crucial role. Understandably, if an automated system is to bring an aircraft in for landing, it has to know where the ground is. Anyway, there's been this bit of tug of war between the telecom industry and the aviation industry in the United States over the whole matter. Now, since the service switches on tomorrow, January, the aviation industry has said, hey, yo, we might see cancelations ripple across the nation and in the world because we're not cleared to fly all the aircraft sent our fleet into all the hubs under all circumstances. Okay, so the big fear here is that in low visibility situations, interference from five G could lead to tragedy, and that, obviously we want to avoid that. The airlines are asking providers like A T and T and Verizon not to offer five G service within two miles of major airports. In other words, don't operate it, don't transmit in five G anywhere within two miles of one of these major hubs. I read a really interesting article written by Patrick Belton, and I apologize Mr Melton for butchering your name, But he wrote a piece called why does five G only pose a problem for US airplanes? And this was on the site light reading dot com that's l I G h t Reading And UH I thought it was a great article and it's a fantastic question to ask, why are we really only hearing about that here the United States? Why aren't we hearing about in Europe? And uh five G service has been around in countries like South Korea for a while with no reported problems. Now in Europe, the frequencies they use are just a tad lower in the spectrum than here in the United States, and the frequencies that radio altimeters use are around like forty two hundred mega hurts or four point two gig hurts if you prefer, which provides enough of a gap between the altimeter operating frequencies and five G that Europe has essentially said we're not concerned. We've been told two hundred mega hurts is the buffer that we need to make sure everything is safe. This has more than two hundred mega hurts, we should be fine. It's actually more than two hundred mega hurts here in the United States, too, but we're still seeing this big issue. So Belton suggests that the real thing at play here is money, specifically the money that would be needed to upgrade altimeters in aircraft. See the Federal Aviation Administration here in the U S the f a A has cleared certain aircraft as being safe to operate, and that the f a A has tested the altimeters against potential five G interference and found them to be robust. They do not there is no interference fear. But there's no single altimeter standard in place within the aviation industry, so just because some altimeters are safe doesn't necessarily mean that all of them are, and it could mean that some aircraft will have to switch out this important gear before they're able to operate safely. But then the question is who pays for those upgrades? Well, the telecom industry would really like the aviation companies to do it, and the aviation industry would really like the telecom industry to do it. Essentially, what the aviation industry is saying is, hey, these things work great. You're the one who's bringing the interference into the whole situation, so you should have to pay for it. And the telecom industry is saying, hey, we outlined the parameters of this ages ago. Everyone agreed that two mega hurts was enough of a buffer. That's in place. If you're saying it's not enough of a buffer, even though we had already agreed upon it, well then that's on you and you have to fit the bill. And that Belton says, is really what is this is all about. It's that it's more about political maneuvers and an effort to cover the bill than it is about the technology itself. Now that might well be the case, and like I said, Belton's article is well worth a read and I recommend you check it out. Personally, I'm hoping the f a A can continue the tests to make certain that things are safe and clear and and that way open up the way for regular operations for all airlines. I think the most important thing is to make sure that no one is at risk of a terrible accident due to interference. It sounds to me like such an outcome would be unlikely, But when it comes to these kind of stakes, I feel like you have to be certain right. When people's lives are at stake, you can't just say it should work right. That's not good enough. Last Friday, Bloomberg reported that the US Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, is investigating Meta slash Facebook. Specifically, the FTC is looking at Meta's virtual reality or VR division, and whether or not the company has engaged in tactics to suppress competition. Now, considering the fact that Meta Slash Facebook has a long history of taking actions that I think you could reasonably argue amount to suppressing competition, this doesn't come as a big surprise. Many Oculus fans were upset when Facebook, after acquiring Oculus, then tied the VR services to Facebook accounts, meaning if you wanted to play VR games using an Oculus you needed a Facebook account in order to do it. Moreover, Oculus being one of the most popular VR platforms out there, commanded a pretty large slice of the market share, and thus it kind of locked developers into creating stuff that had to work with Facebook. See, if you're a developer, you don't want to spend all your time and money and resources to build out stuff for platforms that very few people use. That's just bad business. Like It's like it's like locating your store in the middle of a forest where there's no towns nearby, You're not gonna get any foot traffic, right, so you go to where the people are, and if the people happen to be on a system that happens to tie in with Facebook, that's how you have to play ball. The FTC is looking to see if Meta has purposefully made moves to squash an attempts to compete in the VR space, and considering the buzz is still going very strong for the concept of a metaverse, this kind of problem does get serious. I'm pretty sure that Meta the company is really trying to establish itself as the definitive metaverse company ups in an attempt to be the company that defines the standards that all of their companies will have to conform to in order to be part of any kind of metaverse in the future. Otherwise you're just gonna get a bunch of little kind of pocket universes that aren't uh, you know, they don't work with one another, right, That would be really frustrating. So whether the FTC will throw a wrench into the gears of Meta's plans, that remains to be seen. A lot of folks online are showing very little confidence in that. They argue that lawmakers in the US have largely stripped the FTC of its enforcement capabilities over the years, but we'll have to see The Activision blizzard story of one, in which multiple employees came forward accusing the company of fermenting a toxic and hostile work environment, continues. In twenty two, the Wall Street Journal reports that the company has quote fired or pushed out more than three dozen employees and disciplined about forty others since a lie as part of efforts to address allegations of sexual harassment and other misconduct end quote Further, the w s J reports that, according to people who are familiar with the situation, the plan was to release a report about all of this before Christmas of one, but Activision CEO Bobby Codeck mixed that idea, saying it would make the problems seem worse than what it really is. Uh huh. Look, I don't know if that's true, because the problem actually sounds pretty darn bad no matter how you slice it, and if w s J's sources are telling the truth, CODEC decided to hold back on the revelation that the company had taken action against like seventy plus employees. Makes it sound even worse right, it's not a good look if the company is hiding this. Again, that's assuming that the sources are giving accurate information, but I've got no reason to believe otherwise. I should also add Activision management have said that the company is instituting new policies to address these corporate culture issues, including you know, any pay disparity that there is there, and adopting a zero tolerance rule for you know, when it comes to harassment, specifically sexual harassment. My hope is that the company can really turn around and create a positive, creative and profitable environment. But stay tuned because there's another story related to this that's a big if factor in this. Now. I'm a casual gamer and I love games, but I don't want games at the expense of someone's dignity or mental health or pay or anything like that. So here's hoping that Activision is in fact on the right path and that employees in the future will feel comfortable and proud of being part of that company. Also, while we're on the subject, let's find a different revenue path that endless micro transactions. That last bit is way less important, But as I was writing that last story, a bigger one about Activision hit my news feed, So this actually impacts what I just said, and that story is that Microsoft has announced it intends to acquire Activision Blizzard for sixty eight point seven billion dollars in a cash transaction. Sixty eight point seven billion with a B dollars. Wow. Microsoft just last year finalized this acquisition of the video game company Bethesda, which is known for titles like Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Dishonored, and Doomed, at least the most recent incarnations of Doom. If Microsoft buys Activision Blizzard, it will become owner of one of the oldest game companies around, because Activision began as a group of folks from Atari who left the company and then started their own game company. Obviously, all of this comes in the middle of that scandal we were just talking about, and all the chaos going on at Activision Blizzard right now. I'm not sure if Microsoft is the solution to Activision Blizzards problems, although obviously the company will have to make massive changes in order to kind of distance itself from that very ugly situation that's currently an Activision Blizzard. And I also don't know if this acquisition will actually go through Microsoft has a bit of a dodgy history with regulators. However, that being said, even with this acquisition, Microsoft would not be the largest video game company in the world. In fact, it would be number three, behind Sony Intencent. Those would be ahead of Microsoft. So there's a decent argument to be made that Microsoft isn't going to harm competition in the space, at least not globally, because it's not the market dominant party involved even with the acquisition. Oh Also, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadela says that this will play a part in the development of metaverse platforms because it's all about the metaverse. Baby. Anyway, it appears as though Bobby Kodik will continue as CEO of Activision Blizzard throughout the acquisition process US, but we'll likely to part the company once that process is complete, which is estimated to be sometime in three and then at that point the company will report directly to Phil Spencer, the CEO of Microsoft Gaming. Okay, it's Jonathan After I already recorded the whole episode, and I just wanted to jump in and say that the bit about codec leaving Activision Blizzard, that was my own interpretation on the news I'm seeing a lot of other news that has that being an open question about whether or not he would stay on with Activision Blizzard or if he would leave the company. So because of that, I just wanted to address it and say he may still be part of Activision Blizzard upon the acquisition, or he may leave. Uh. I don't have any insight information one way or the other, and I wanted to make that clear before we moved on. Okay, I'm gonna hand it back over to past Jonathan. Okay, we've got some more stories coming up, but before we do that, let's take a quick break. We're back. Elon Musk recently said that social media accounts that track his travel are becoming a security issue, according to Business Insider, and uh, yeah, that's a problem. And it's not a problem just for Elon Musk, gets a problem for anyone who's using social media accounts. And look, I make no secret about the fact that I am not a fan of Elon Musk, but I also feel strongly that as we have become more dependent upon various social networking apps and services, we've surrendered more information about ourselves, including our location and our plans and other important info and often we do this because the perceived benefit we get once we share that information appears to be legit. Heck, I remember when four square was a big deal. Do you do you remember four Square? Folks were using that app to check into locations all the time, all over the place and just broadcasting, hey, this is where I'm at. But obviously, as we hand over more private information, which then arguably at some level becomes public or at the very least much less private, then we also end up taking back step on stuff like security, Like the more information we share, the less secure we are. And you don't have to be a billionaire with a tendency to tick off folks for that to manifest as a security issue. I worry about folks who could be the target of stalkers, for example, because their online activity, as that the people who are targeted their online activity can end up putting them in danger, even if they're not actively trying to share their whereabouts online. Anyway, This is really just me reminding you that location based services can come with a risk, and it's good to look into which ones you use or which services you have that also incorporate location tracking. Maybe it's turned on by default and at least is a good idea to know which of those apps are doing it, even if you don't plan to turn it off, just so that you know what's going on. But um, yeah, like I've recently started scaling way back on the stuff that I use. Meanwhile, it's not like there's any surprise as to where I'm at. I'm always at home. But you know, that's beside the point. I I have started to really cut back on that because I've been growing more and more concerned about the risks involved. And these aren't new risks, by the way. It's not like things suddenly got dangerous. These are things that have been pretty much an issue ever since location tracking really started to become a thing. So I'm not saying like, hey, things just got dangerous. It's more like, no, they've always been dangerous. I just finally started paying more tension of becoming more concerned about it for myself, not telling anyone else what to do except just be aware, you know. After Jamie Zawinsky, who co founded the foundation Mozilla, tweeted his disappointment that the organization would begin accepting cryptocurrency donations, the Mozilla Foundation announced it was pushing the pause button on the whole initiative. The timeline for this has been pretty short. The Mozilla Foundation first announced the plan to accept cryptocurrencies for donations to the foundation on New Year's Eve. Zawinsky, who again co found in Mozilla, posted in a blog his strong disapproval for this move, which is putting it lightly, and he told Tech Republic writer Brandon viglia Rollo that quote, anyone involved in cryptocurrencies in any way is either a grifter or a mark end quote which, hey, I found someone who's even more critical of cryptocurrency than I am, and Zawinsky is like at least seventeen times smarter than I, And anyway, Zwinski's objections are similar to the ones that I have. One is that proof of work cryptocurrencies, of which Bitcoin and the current version of Ethereum are both proof of work cryptocurrencies, those are the kind that require massive amounts of compute power. If you have any hope of being an effective cryptocurrency minor, if you're not relying on electricity hungry systems, you are not going to compete and you will not mind any cryptocurrency. More powerful systems will beat you to the punch. So there is an incentive to build increasingly power hungry systems, particularly of the value of the cryptocurrency in question is in the stratosphere. But we're also in a world where this kind of power consumption is to put it, lightly look down upon, particularly when viewed in the lens of climate change concerns. Again, according to tech Republic, quote, a single transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain eats up the same amount of energy as the average US household on a seventy seven point eight day period end quote, so more than two months of use. That is a big old wowsers. Now Ethereum goes a little lighter. Ethereum. People are using specialized equipment to mind Bitcoin, but with Ethereum that's where you typically see the people who are using rigs that are reliant on things like really fast GPUs. Anyway, with Ethereum, the transaction requires the same amount of power as the average US house uses over eight days. So not as extreme as Bitcoin, but still pretty you know. Massive. Biglia Rollo asks the question if perhaps we are now seeing a turning point for cryptocurrency, if maybe that means we're going to see more organizations, perhaps governments, reject cryptocurrency in the future. If that's the case, well, that would likely blast the values of those cryptocurrencies. They would plummet if more and more other entities began to reject, and that in turn would impact the whole mining operations. Right Like, if the value of cryptocurrency goes drastically down, it would cost more to mind than you would get out of mining, So that would change everything. However, I'm not entirely sure that we're at the cusp there. I don't know that that's actually happening. There's a lot of money already wrapped up in crypto, and the evangelists for crypto have shown no sign of backing off. Then again, they have their own investment in crypto, right it depends heavily upon driving up enthusiasm about cryptocurrency. If confidence and enthusiasm drops out, they lose their their investment. So I think it's still a little too early to say this is the beginning of the end of cryptocurrency. I don't actually think that's happening. I think there might be, you know, more bumps in the road, But that's just my gut feeling. I'm not basing that on any like solid evidence or anything. Speaking of cryptocurrency. We've got another story about the related topic of n f T s or non fungible tokens. Now, n f T s are not cryptocurrency. Uh, they're digital tokens on a blockchain that represent ownership over something. So it's kind of like a digital certificate of ownership essentially. Anyway, recently, an n f T investment group calling itself Spice d a O made headlines when it placed the winning bid in a Christie's auction for a copy of a book about Alejandro Jodorowski and his attempt to make a film adaptation of the science fiction novel Dune. So you'all might not know this, but you know back in the nineteen eighties, uh, David Lynch, the experimental filmmaker and cheery weather reporter, made a done adaptation that received a mixed reaction, including from Lynch himself, and more recently had Denise Villeneus of releasing part of an adaptation, part one of the first do novel. However, before any of that, Jedderoski had made a pitch for doing this, and that pitch has become the stuff of legends, with folks like artist Salvador Dali being involved. At one time. Anyway, while that movie never materialized, a book about the whole thing did. But it's a very rare book. There are only a few copies known to exist, and that brings us to the auction now. The expected auction price was to be anywhere between twenty five thousand and thirty five thousand euro, but Spice d a Oh spent a whopping two point six million euro, like a massive amount, that's around three million dollars just to buy this book. And apparently the group thought that that purchase also gave them the copyright to the book, which would mean they could do whatever they wanted with the book, including distributing it for free, are making derivative works, or just chopping up the whole thing and selling all the individual parts of the book off as n f T s and then just destroying the original physical copy. But they didn't purchase the copyright. They purchased a book, so this would be no different from you going to a bookstore buying a copy of the latest Stephen King novel and then going home. Well, I mean you purchased a copy of the book, so you don't actually own the copyright to the book, right, You just have a copy of the book, because owning the copyright would be absurd that they wouldn't work. You know, you would only be able to have one copy of every single book because otherwise who owns the copyright with everyone going to the store. And actually, if I'm to make this more like an n f T it would really be more like you bought a digital certificate showing you owned a copy of that Stephen King book. You still wouldn't have the copyright. But apparently Spiced d Ao figured that the copyright was part and parcel of this auction. Now that situation has been held up to ridicule, however, I think it really points out to how poorly n f t s have been explained. Sometimes. I think that poor explanation has been on purpose because it can work to a scam artists favor. If the market doesn't really understand what's going on, they're more likely to agree to something that's not legit. So while I understand the temptation to make fun of Spice d Ao for this misunderstanding, I think it's far more fruitful to look at this as an indication that better education about n f t s is really needed so that folks don't fall into these traps. And again, I've made it no secret that I do not like n f T s. I I have a really bad feeling about them. I feel like it's just a speculative market that has not doesn't really have anything underneath it. Maybe in a universe where digital goods have more applicability across different platforms, I could see n f t s really mattering. I mean, that's like the whole Web three slash metaverse argument. But we're not there yet, and there's no guarantee that the stuff that's going on today is even going to be around by the time we do get there, So I'm not Yeah, I'm very negative about n f t s in general. You know, my heart goes out to all the elite athletes out there in the world who have dedicated pretty much all of their lives to becoming the best in their respective fields so that perhaps one day they might compete in the Olympics. That is a huge dedication. It requires, you know, discipline on a level that is foreign an alien to me. The Beijing Olympics have already been scrutinized for lots of legitimate reasons. One that China has a brutal history that ranges from denial of human rights to outright genocide to uh Several nations, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand with Sluania, have all announced a diplomatic boycott of the Games. Now, they're still allowing their athletes to travel to China and compete in the games. They're not, you know, pulling out the games entirely, but they're not sending any diplomatic officials to attend the games at all or to participate in any way. Three That because of the pandemic, the games are closed to all but quote unquote selected spectators, which really changes things dramatically for everyone involved. This is not that different from the Tokyo Games in many ways, and that Tokyo didn't allow anyone from outside Japan to come in as a spectator. China is doing the same thing. In fact, originally China had said they weren't going to allow spectators at all, but now they kind of walked that back a little bit and said that some selected spectators will be allowed to attend. Honestly, I think that's the responsible thing to do. Um, you know, I don't I feel badly for the athletes who deserve to be able to appear in front of in a pre should have crowd, but not at the expense of people's safety. That's the issue I have there, So I'm in agreement with that part, but it's still a big part of why these games are being scrutinized. Ah So presumably the spectators who are selected will not be anyone from outside of China. But fourth China is going to require all visitors to download an app called My twenty twenty two and it's for the purposes of COVID monitoring. So that's understandable, right, Like the idea that you need to have a way to verify that you have in fact received the vaccinations and the boosters and negative tests and all that. That makes sense, and it includes everybody like visitors, athletes, and media. But the reason that fourth item makes the list is that security experts have expressed concerns about this app. They say it has poor security and it lacks encryption for many of its files, and when you consider that those files are related to people's medical histories and personal information, that's a big red flag. So it could put individuals at risk from a data security standpoint. The experts also say they found a list of quote unquote censorship keywords built into the app. This raises a concern that the app might be used by the Chinese government to censor those who are attending the Olympics and prevent them from using their devices to communicate stuff that the government would rather folks not talk about, you know, like Gina Side for example. The experts suggest anyone going to the Beijing Olympics should use a burner phone and create an email address just for the purposes of that visit, to limit the impact that the app might have on them. But even with these precautions, you have to remember that everyone is going to have to submit some important information, including stuff like medical history and passport data. So another not so positive thing about the Beijing Olympics. I should go ahead and say to UH, I historically have got a pretty negative opinion about the meta around the Olympics, not the Olympic Games themselves, but rather like the International Olympic Committee. I've got some major issues with that organization and how it operates UH and appears to have lots of conflicts there. Um, So I don't mean to single out Beijing Olympics unfairly in this regard. There are issues I've seen with pretty much every Olympics and how they were conducted and how cities responded, including my own city of Atlanta back in But that's a discussion that I will spare you because I don't think there's a podcast that you can make that would make that that rant uh interesting to anyone other than myself. So we'll move on, and with that, we're gonna take another quick break and we'll come back with a few more stories. You know, as the great Tom Jones would say, it's not unusual in the world of tech to cover patent disputes. I'm pretty sure that's what that song was about. Companies are really big on generating and then guarding patents, So applying for a patent means that you have to make your invention public, right like, there two broad paths you can take when you invent something. One is you try and keep it secret, and you try and make it a proprietary the trade secret, and you don't share it with anyone, and you try to take advantage of the market with this trade secret in your possession. However, that might mean that someone else finds out how you're doing what you're doing, and they make a copy of it and they do the same thing, and you have no protection there because you kept it a trade secret. The other pathway is that you can apply for a patent. When you apply for a patent, you have to explain how you're doing what you're doing, at least in general terms. Um the actual specific implementation can be a little more nuanced, but you have to broadly explain how your invention works. And that means that anyone can get hold of that patent. Because patents are publicly filed, anyone can get hold of it and review it and see how you're doing what you're doing. However, the patent grants you the right to exploit that invention any way you want, and you have exclusive rights to exploit that invention any way you want, and that can include licensing that invention out to other parties. So that's why a lot of companies are big on generating and guarding patents. It's a way to get a market advantage. You can even make an enormous amount of revenue just licensing out patents and not actually doing anything yourself. Well, recently, the Swedish company Ericsson sued Apple for patent infringement. More specifically, the issue is that Apple secured a license for certain technologies that Ericsson holds the patents for, and the license expired. Now, Apple and Ericson have been deadlocked in negotiations relating to renewing that license, and once it expired, Erickson turned up the pressure by filing this lawsuit against Apple. There are twelve total patents involved here. Apple, for its part, has sued Ericson for its negotiating strategy. Now I'm assuming that Apple means that Ericson it is that, you know, they their whole plan was to run down the clock so that the licenses would expire and then Rickson could sue Apple. And thus the negotiations were dragging on because Ericson wanted to have this leverage. So I think that's probably the heart of Apple's lawsuit against Rickson. By the way, all of this pretty much played out the same way back in two thousand fifteen, which is when Apple and Rickson had to renew their licenses the last time, and ultimately that reached the resolution of up a new patent licensing agreement. So I expect we're going to see something similar happen this year. The Financial Times reports that last December, for the first time ever, electric vehicles outsold diesel vehicles in Europe. Diesel vehicles are more popular in Europe than over here in the United States. Like here in the US, you don't run into that many diesel powered vehicles. There are some, but most consumer vehicles are using gasoline powered engines, not diesel powered engines. Many European nations began to favor diesel after the various oil crises in the nineteen seventies. Diesel vehicles are more fuel efficient than gasoline powered cars. However, diesel vehicles still emit pollutents that they're different pollutants than the ones you get with gasoline powered vehicles, but they still pollute. And diesel vehicles really took a beating in the reputation department in the wake of Volkswagen's so called diesel Gate. That was when Volkswagen was found incorporating devices that were meant to full testing equipment when you were running emissions testing, so that the diesel vehicle appeared to be operating at a level of efficiency that it wasn't operating at when you actually had the car out on the road. Essentially, it was a switch, and the switch said, all right, if there's a test being performed, throttle back on all the operations so that the emissions test is we can pass it. And when you're you detect that we're actually out on the road, remove those throttles so that you don't have a hit to performance. That's essentially what was going on. Also, governments in Europe have been offering incentives and rebates for folks to move over to electric vehicles and simultaneously have been putting forth more strict rules about emissions, which has put a lot of pressure on car companies to switch to manufacturing electric vehicles because it has just become a technological hurdle that's possibly impossible to overcome to make a diesel engine that meets the criteria. So this is not just a simple story of people in Europe who want electric vehicles more now. This is a larger story about a concerted effort to make a fundamental change to the fleet of vehicles in operation in Europe, mostly in light of the issue of climate change. And finally, NASA's Curiosity Rover has discovered that the carbon bound to minerals on the surface of Mars has a high concentration of light isotopes of carbon, specifically carbon twelve. And the reason that this is interesting is that organic critters here on Earth are lousy with carbon twelve. So naturally this has led to a discussion about where did that carbon twelve that's found on Mars? Where is it coming from? And there are a lot of hypotheses. One of those is that the carbon twelve in fact is ancient evidence that life once existed on Mars. However, it's not the only hypothesis, right, so it's not a foregone conclusion that this is, you know, cut and dried evidence that life was once on Mars. There are other hypotheses that suggest the carbon might have come from other inorganic sources. And since so far we've yet to uncover any direct evidence of life on Mars, we haven't found any definitive fossils or anything like that, the question remains an open one. Now. It could well be that one day we'll discover the carbon twelve came from outer space. You know, maybe Mars passed through a cloud of gas and dust many many millions of years ago, and we find out that that's where the carbon twelve came from. Or maybe we'll establish that once upon a time, at least in microbial form, life flourished on the Red planet. Now. I think it's exciting in either case, because learning the source represents us pushing back our ignorance. I think it's always a good thing when we do that, like whether the answer is truly invigorating or not, but I will admit I would be way more jazzed to hear about life on Mars or to hear David Bowie's song Life on Mars. Gosh, I miss David Bowie. Alright. That wraps up the news for Tuesday, jan twenty two. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tex Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite

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