Ask A Genius 1507: Planck Time, Alien: Earth, and the Politics of Risk
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/09/01
Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner probe the smallest meaningful time: the Planck scale, below which structure and causality fail. Rosner notes uncertainty’s tradeoffs and wonders if extreme densities, like near black holes, alter effective scales. They recap Alien: Earth episode four: an eye-parasite subjugates “Victoria,” a sheep rendered via live, animatronic, and CGI doubles; gamma spikes imply agency amid five alien types and synth children. Shifting to policy, they discuss CDC turmoil, RFK Jr.’s anti-vax influence, and gun saturation. Safety tech like biometrics is ignored; deaths persist. Long term, Rosner imagines “downloadable brains” as protection when politics blocks progress.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s the smallest increment of time under which you could say there is any information in the universe?
Rick Rosner: You’ve got to go back to quantum mechanics for that. The Planck scale sets the smallest unit of measurement. Below the Planck length in space or the Planck time in duration, reality becomes a seething foam. Space doesn’t have a defined shape. Causality itself breaks down.
Jacobsen: So below that threshold, there isn’t enough structure to extract any information?
Rosner: You can always make arbitrarily small intervals of time or space meaningful by blasting enough energy into them. That’s where the uncertainty principle comes in. You can measure a particle’s position as precisely as you want—by slamming it with another particle of very high energy.
But the tradeoff is that, by pinning down its position in space and time, you create enormous uncertainty in its momentum. That’s the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The more precisely you measure one quantity, the less precisely you can know the other.
So yes, you could design an experiment where arbitrarily small increments of time hold non-zero amounts of information. But under normal conditions in our universe, there’s a practical cutoff. Below the Planck scale, it is not possible to extract meaningful information.
And it’s the Planck stuff—the fundamental times and distances determined by Planck’s constant, which are unimaginably small.
Jacobsen: There’s a related question I’ve been wondering. If you pack enough information—or matter—into a small enough space, can you change the effective scale of space?
Rosner: Well, imagine that you create more particle interactions in one region than in the rest of the universe. Wouldn’t that more precisely pin down where those particles are located? I’m thinking of the environment near a black hole, where matter is so densely packed that it should, in principle, specify particle positions more precisely than elsewhere. Their de Broglie wavelengths could be shorter, maybe? Alternatively, the particles might appear more massive due to these interactions.
Also, I watched the ten minutes of episode four that includes an encounter between an alien tentacled eyeball and a sheep—a beautiful sheep, as sheep go. The producers actually said on the companion podcast that they cast a particularly striking sheep, and her name is Victoria. If I hadn’t listened to the podcast, I wouldn’t know that.
Jacobsen: It turns out there are three Victorias. There’s the live sheep, there’s an animatronic version, and there’s a CGI version. Because certain things happen to Victoria that obviously couldn’t be done to a real animal. How does that scene progress with the alien eyeball and the sheep?
Rosner: The alien is designed around the concept of the eye as a universal organ—something found across many species. This creature exploits that. It leaps onto your face, rips out your eyeball, inserts itself into the socket, runs its tentacles into your brain, and takes over control of your nervous system.
Jacobsen: So what happens specifically with the sheep?
Rosner: They hook the sheep up to an electroencephalograph to monitor brain waves. After the alien implants itself, the characters notice spikes in gamma wave activity. They comment that this must be an intelligent creature because it’s producing brainwave patterns beyond what the sheep would usually generate.
Jacobsen: Was there much commentary about it on the podcast?
Rosner: Not much. But it’s effective storytelling. Episode four marks the halfway point of the season, and unlike many eight-hour shows that drag, this one is tightly packed. The show has enough going on to sustain the runtime.
You’ve got five or six hybrid characters—human children whose consciousnesses were transferred into adult synthetic bodies. You’ve got five distinct alien types. You’ve got an android played by Timothy Olyphant. You’vegot other enhanced characters that blur the line between human and machine. There are enough creatures and personalities in play to keep an eight-hour story compelling.
I watched a show called Culprits. Back on the alien series for a moment—quick question. Do we know anything about the other creatures? So far, we’ve seen the tentacle parasite, the “super tick,” and the regular Xenomorph we’ve known for 46 years. That’s three. Do we know the other two?
There’s something called “the Orchid,” but I haven’t gotten that far into the episode. If that’s another creature, that would bring us closer to five. By about halfway through this episode, we know of three, but not all of their capabilities, yet.
What else can we talk about?
Jacobsen: Several high-ranking people at the CDC just resigned. The acting head of the CDC—who had only been in place for a month—was fired and is being replaced by a vaccine skeptic.
Rosner: And some of her deputies walked out in protest. It’s a response to a cluster of bad policy decisions that will likely result in the needless deaths of thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of Americans. They’re dismantling the vaccine infrastructure, reinforcing anti-vax attitudes, and undermining public health.
They’ve also cut about half a billion dollars from mRNA research, mainly because of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He’s a longtime anti-vaccine activist, who has an addiction in recovery, and someone with a history of disturbing behaviour. And yet, he’s suddenly in charge of health policy decisions.
He only got that position because of his famous name, which Trump sees as politically advantageous. It helps shore up Trump’s support among anti-vaccine groups. Trump has a mixed record himself: on one hand, he launched Operation Warp Speed, which sped vaccine development; on the other hand, he downplayed COVID and spread misinformation.
His reasoning in appointing RFK Jr. seems less about competence and more about reinforcing his base. Trump enjoys associating himself with famous people. Kennedy’s name gives him star power, and his anti-vax stance appeals to Trump’s more conspiratorial supporters.
The danger is that Kennedy wants to dismantle the CDC and Health and Human Services entirely, with no clear replacement. And Trump, who has always loved breaking institutions, is happy to enable that. Add to that Trump’s own decline—he seems to show circulation and balance issues, maybe early cognitive decline—and it becomes even more dangerous.
So in sum: revenge, stupidity, and ego. That’s the mix.
Jacobsen: Any thoughts on the Minneapolis church shooting?
Rosner: The right is trying to make it about the shooter being trans. But the core issue remains the same: guns. The shooter had Nazi slogans and other extremist phrases painted on his weapons. He also left a manifesto. He was clearly unstable and hateful, but the fixation on whether he was trans or not is a distraction.
The real story is the availability of firearms. When these shootings happen, everyone scrambles to assign political labels—liberal, conservative, trans, straight, whatever—when in reality, the problem is that Republicans have done nothing for decades to curb the flood of guns.
There are about 470 million firearms in the U.S. for roughly 250 million adults. That’s about 1.9 guns per adult. The scale of availability makes this inevitable.
In the U.S., only about one-third of households own guns, but those households average around eight firearms each. Some of these numbers overlap or look contradictory depending on surveys, but the trend is clear: concentrated gun ownership.
And the people who own those guns overwhelmingly support Republicans. Most of them are fine with no progress being made. But there’s easy technology available to make firearms safer—biometric locks, for example. You can secure a gun by locking it or keeping it in a lockbox that is keyed to the registered owner, using fingerprint recognition. That’s established technology.
Not only is it not required, but if a major gun manufacturer advertises biometric safety features, the NRA attacks them for supporting “gun control.” Yet most Americans say they would support common-sense safety measures. The NRA, even after being prosecuted for fraud at the executive level, still has enough political power to shut down anything that makes guns safer or less accessible. Republican voters seem OK with that.
And the sheer number of guns in the U.S. means that the only real solution now looks science-fictional. We have about 36,000 gun deaths each year—roughly 100 per day—and about half of those are suicides. The U.S. murder rate is about 8–10 times higher than that of other developed nations like Spain or Canada. That’s unlikely to change anytime soon.
Which is why I think the “solution” is something like downloadable brains. A hundred years from now, people with enough wealth might be able to upload their brains into another vessel. Early versions won’t have perfect fidelity, but it would mean safety from disease and from being shot. Until then, I don’t see much making America safer from gun violence.
Back when Biden was in the Senate, he helped pass the 1994 assault weapons ban, which lasted 10 years. During that period, the number of mass shooting deaths dropped. But under current political circumstances, I don’t see anything like that passing again.
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