Citation Needed - Canals on Mars

Episode Date: December 24, 2025

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was erroneously believed that there were "canals" on the planet Mars. These were a network of long straight lines in the equatorial regions from 60° north to 60° south latitude on Mars, observed by astronomers using early telescopes without photography. They were first described by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli during the opposition of 1877, and attested to by later observers. Schiaparelli called these canali ("channels"), which was mistranslated into English as "canals". The Irish astronomer Charles E. Burton made some of the earliest drawings of straight-line features on Mars, although his drawings did not match Schiaparelli's.

Hello and welcome. Citation Needed, podcast where we choose a subject, create a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Heath, and I'll be hosting this discussion about Mars. And I'm joined by our Snickers, Twicks, and Milky Way, Tom, Cecil and No. Yeah, I'm not sure if I'll really satisfy you or if you'll just, you know, want to be done.

But okay, yeah, yeah. And we're only doing left Twix because the right one was cool with the January 6 pardons, so we're not doing that one anymore. Yes, and I got to be the space one. Nice. And Eli is here. Gross. Gross. The ASMR of candy bars, everybody.

Tried to work through boomer peanuts to enjoy a sweet treat. Twix and Milky Way have no fucking peanuts. They do have peanuts in them. It's a secret. It sounds so stupid. It's crazy. You don't know. It's crazy.

Cecil? He's mute Eli for the rest of the episode? Done and done. He's been waiting for you to ask that for years, man. Audible on an episode since like 235, so it's fine. We just tell him he's on like a dog running on a treadmill. He's basically Glenn Beck's George Washington for us at this point. Exactly, exactly.

All right. Noah, what person place thing, concept phenomenon or event? Are we going to be talking about without Eli today? The canals on Mars. Okay. What are the canals on Mars? Well, sorry to spoil the ending, but they are an optical illusion. Or a collective delusion, depending on how generous you want to be.

But however you describe the psychology, the story begins in 1877 when an Italian astronomer named Giovanni Scaparrelli was looking at Mars through a telescope and he noticed a bunch of long, straight lines. So he dutifully draws what he sees and he dubs these heretofore undocumented features canally. This is an Italian word that can translate to channel, canal, gully, or duct. But when American reporters saw the claim, they went with the decidedly man-made sounding canal and the myth was born. It would take almost 50 years for astronomers to prove they didn't exist and another 50 to convince the public that they had already proved it. This gives me hope that if we have 50 more measles epidemics will

we'll just rediscover how great vaccines are, right? I actually see so I clicked on the comments section from a 2017 article about the canals of Mars being an optical illusion and you're very optimistic right now. Very optimistic. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay, so before we dive into the story, I want to throw a big nod to the book, The Martians,

the true story of an alien craze that captured Turn of the Century America by David Barron. That book inspired this episode. it was a super fun read. But if you decide to check it out on audiobook, be forewarned that the narrator has the annoying habit of doing accents whenever he's quoting people. And those accents are like citation needed sketch levels of skill.

He does a French that sounds German, a Scottish that sounds Indian and an Italian that sounds like he's trying to pick a fight with Cecil. Other than that, no complaints. Getting a little meta. The history of astronomy is something. much better. If you believe that every single person involved sounded like Boston Lady. That's how I'm saying.

Okay, that's the rest of the episode. 100%. Yeah. Okay, because look, the reason that happened is this narrator was reading this big, boring space book and he was like, oh, fuck, this sucks. No small parts, Rick. No small parts. Hello, it's a me.

It's so much strong. I'm a guy. It is. But the thing is he didn't commit to the bit because Cecil, Cecil, so many of the major players in this fucking story are from Boston. He could have saved him. Oh, man! There was even a woman from Boston. Yeah, right.

Get on our level. So the story here really begins the first time somebody pointed a telescope at Mars and went, well, what the fuck is all that shit? What the fuck is all there? Exactly. By 1666, Giovanni Domenico Cassini first noticed that the planet had polar ice caps. And in 1781, William Herschel of episode one, 44 fame showed that those caps shrank and grew with the seasons.

I told you I was cold. It's bigger in the summer. It's fine. Opposite. But yeah. And by the time Scarparelli was making it as a number anyway. So I'm lying. It was a fucking lie.

So it doesn't matter. Yeah. So, but by the time Scaparelli was making his erroneous observations, we actually knew quite a bit about the red planet. We knew that its day was almost the same as Earths. We knew it's axial tilt. So we knew that it had.

seasons and kind of the severity of those seasons. We knew that it had an atmosphere. We didn't know how much of one it had, but we knew there was one there. And we also knew it's density and size, which meant that we could work out how strong gravity would be there. There are also a lot of important things that we didn't know at this point. So the telescope that Scepeurelli was using had a 22 centimeter lens. Get the fuck out of it. Right. Right. Right two fucking centimeters. It's insane. Right. Well, okay. So to give you some context, a hundred beginner Telescope for kids.

It was bigger than a fucking baby son. I'm okay? It's 22 bigger small. It feels crazy. The way I'm not sure. Is that big? Give me that space loop.

All right. So again, I'm done. Thank you. Thank you. So, no, but to give you

an idea, to give you a comparison here, you could go out and buy a $100 beginner telescope for kids from Walmart. and it would be three times as powerful as the telescope he had, right?

And for those of you who have never looked at the planets through a telescope, I should emphasize here that you don't get a great view. There's a fuck ton of air between the telescope and Mars, and it distorts the shit out of all the light reflecting between the two. So what that means is that no matter how well you dial in your telescope, your view of the planet kind of like fuzzes in and out as the air conditions fluctuate. Plus, your neighbor's daughter is about to turn 15. so like, what do he even need?

Jesus Christ, right? Heath gets it. I mean, I do not get it. I don't understand. I rebuke this. I rebu what is happening? Cecil.

Cecil. Now, these days, we've got a lot of cool ways to counteract that atmospheric shit. Thank you, Boston lady. Medium cool. You fire a laser alongside your telescope and measure the way that the atmosphere is distorting it in real time. And then you use that information to warp your telescope's mirror in such a a way as to zero out the atmospheric interference. And that

is only medium cool. Because if you want to be all the way cool, you put down the telescope and you talk to a girl. No, no, no, you launch your telescope into space. Because some dudes will do literally anything to avoid talking to a girl.

Okay, some of these guys were definitely doing it to avoid talking to girl. I can't argue with that. But neither of those options were available to scaporellic. So, So what we had to do was just watch until the air stood still for a second, and then you kind of like try to draw what you saw before the air fucked you up again. It's a game of musical stairs.

Exactly, yes. Now, as you can imagine, that wasn't a method to induce it to great observations. And since nobody really knew what they were looking at, most astronomers had concluded that the very large dark patches they saw were oceans rather than shadows. and faint lines became vast rivers and lines of still disputed origin become canals. And once Scaparelli,

with the help of America's historically sensationalist press, had put the idea of canals into people's minds. Damn near everybody who looked at the planet saw them. Actually makes you wonder what the hell they discover

if Freud had been an astronomer. Right? That's a dick. It's all dicks. There's a dick in sand. So I was a dick. When I saw that, I was reminded of the time

that the Mars rover accidentally drew a giant cock and balls. Well, basically the official story is was that a accidentally did a perfect nerds who have done this down to the centimeter, we're like,

what? Yes. And then we turned around and got a picture of it. What are the odds? You guys true steaming cum, too. It's kind of obvious. No. What had to come from somewhere?

Okay. So get drop it in there. Although I'm sure with a helicopter they could. They've got a helicopter. there now. Draw better dicks, guys. So, okay, so among the many people backing up Scaparelli's assertions was an amateur American astronomer by the name of Percival Lull, who you may remember from episode 434. Now, honestly, this was almost an episode just like on Percival Lull, but episodes that are named after people look less interesting on the episode list. Regardless, Lull is what was known as a

Boston Brahman. That is, he came from a very distinguished old money inbred family from Boston, as close to royalty as America had before it elected, it's a mad king. And if you want to know how distinguished this family is, the city of Lowell, Massachusetts was named after his paternal grandfather, and the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts was named after his maternal grandfather. Yeah, well, they fucking named the blowhole after me, you pop his prick. Go fuck yourself. Babe, you should come out to chap a critic one of this time.

It's so exciting. Got a really good spot there. So Lowe went to Harvard, and he graduated with a degree in mathematics. and he was a genuinely smart guy and all, but after college he spent like the next six years running a cotton mill. So I don't think he was exactly on the cutting edge of mathematical thinking.

But then he broke off an engagement with another high society peer of his, which was downright scandalous at the time. So he kind of put himself into social exile. And he kind of overdid it a bit because he wound up in Japan. Motherfucker broke up with a girl so hard it yeated him to Japan.

What? Yes. Yeah, right. Apparently you could break. up that hard back then. And while he was living in Japan and he's writing books about their religion, a Korean delegation that was headed to America showed up and they got super excited to find literally anyone who spoke both English and any language that they could understand. Japanese in his case. So Lull takes a job assisting this historic delegation and he got himself back in the news,

which apparently gets you back in the good graces of high society, I guess. The Kennedy accent for broken Japanese must have been fun. Domo Aragato Yeah, right, right. Markis, Serpini. Now do Marky Mark. So, yeah.

He's cheating him up because he did a hate crime. Yep, he did. So in 1893, he moves back to the United States with the idea that he's going to devote himself to the study of Martian canals. But if he's going to do that, he needs a cutting-edge observatory. So he gets with the folks at Harvard. He flashes some of his old. money, money, and he convinces them to help

him build the Lowell Observatory. Step one is to find the right spot for it, and of course, given that your chief nemesis as an astronomer at this point is Earth's atmosphere, the ideal spot would be somewhere that has like really high elevation and really dry air. So ultimately, he settles

on the absolute gorgeous gem of a city, Flagstaff, Arizona. But that's where the locals have their ancient meth burial ground. Now, of course, at this point, the whole concept of canals on Mars is pretty widely accepted, even in most scientific circles. And it wasn't just that the word canali had been mistranslated. When astronomers looked at the planet, they saw these dark lines that were far too straight to be naturally occurring. And

if you have canals, you kind of have to have canal builders. So it was widely believed, even among many scientists, that Mars was probably inhabited. In fact, when the Parisian socialite Anne Emily Clara Guzsche or something established a prize of 100,000 francs to the first person to communicate with a celestial body. That was considered sound scientific philanthropy, and a lot of motherfuckers thought it was a race. Okay, yeah, sure. But it's also 1893.

So communicating with Mars was like, what, running outside and yelling, but upward? Okay, yeah. So that led to a lot of speculation about how one goes about communicating with the Martians, assuming that they're there. Radio wouldn't be discovered until 1895 or 1893 if you stand Tesla.

And it wouldn't be until 1901 that Gulliomo Marconi would manage to send radio signals across the Atlantic Ocean. So with that option not yet on the table, scientists started speculating about ways one could signal Mars. The most popular idea at the time was that we could make it like a giant mirror farm that could reflect light and geometric patterns. And then like you could see if they responded in kind. A less popular suggestion was that we could use the same mirrors to like burn messages into the Martian surface with reflected sun. light. So now to understand the rest of the story, you have to know that the idea, though, that we could flash reflective triangles and shit to Mars was kind of embedded in the public consciousness as a likely way to facilitate interplanetary communication. Because during observations

in 1894, a consortium of astronomers agreed that they did see a triangle reflecting back to them from the Martian surface. And sure, it was just the three points of a triangle. And sure, any three points that aren't in a straight line do form a triangle. And sure the astronomers were pretty sure that they knew what was causing those reflections. And sure, all of those things were naturally occurring things. But

none of that shit mattered. Because what the yellow journalism of the day said was, astronomers see triangle reflected back to us from Mars and the public assumed the Martians were just up there desperately trying to tell us triangle.

We're sending them the code for 30 lives. They're just button masher's on a PlayStation controller. It isn't even a different type of system. Hopefully we'll make some progress. First, quick break for some oppropos of nothing. And I said, I'm not going to be my own free, but I'm going to pay a professional. You got a. Barclare. Barclare. I have glorious news. What is it, Dave? The humans

are signaling us. They are. Are we sure they're not just at war again? No, no, no. Look. Look, see? Triangle. They signal triangle. Let me see that. Well, that does look like a triangle. Right? But what does it mean? I think it's just like a test to see if it works. Probably. Smart. Smart.

So we should send them a triangle back. Okay, okay. Triangle back. And, uh, all right, now what? Well, see if they send us a triangle. I mean, they're already sending us a triangle. That already happened. Maybe they will send us two triangles. Okay.

Okay, this is obviously stupid. We need to send something with meaning. We need to communicate. Should we send a message? We can't. We don't know their language. Of course. Perhaps we could send a picture.

Of what? It needs to be something that say we're friendly, and we come in peace. And we wish to cooperate. Yes. You want to send our junk? I was just taking that too. Me too.

Okay, let's do barclars, though. It's bigger. Ah. Thanks, Dave. I mean, it's true. And we're back. When we left off, astronomers were accidentally doing a

Meisner exercise with three rocks on Mars, just yelling. trying to go back and forth to each other. What's next? So the Lowell Observatory is completed in 1894 and Percy spends like

months making some of the most detailed and painstaking observations of the Martian Service ever taken. But of course, there's no astrophotography at this point, so he just sketches shit by hand which leads to a lot of interpretation. So what he sees is all kinds of canals,

way more than Sceperrelli ever saw. He also noticed that they weren't always there and and sometimes where there used to be only one canal now there's two canals but instead of concluding that there that meant that they were just shadows or tricks of the light he concocted a fantastical theory that a new infrastructure bill passed the martian senate they really are aliens yeah right yeah it's actually pretty close so okay so one of the weaknesses is longer on it was so okay so one of the weaknesses in the canal theory was the size issue. We know how big Mars is. We know how far away it is, which means that

you can calculate how wide a canal would have to be to be visible from Earth. And to be visible, even at opposition, that is the closest pass that Mars makes to Earth in its orbit, the canal would have to be like 15 miles wide. That's about 24 kilometers. That is an insane width for a canal. The Amazon, the widest river on Earth, is less than half that at its widest. feels like the ever-given thinks that's a great size for a canal actually. Okay, yeah. That's the boat that got stuck, everyone. I know you forgot, but there was a boat and it got stuck.

I remember that. Thank you. But Loll, I looked at it. I looked up that joke. As long as you remember right now, how much to laugh. Yeah. But Loll came up with an admittedly brilliant hypothesis to explain this crazy width. Maybe what we were seeing wasn't the canal itself, but rather the vegetation growing around

the canal. Right? So, like, what if Mars was much like Egypt at the time in that everything's a desert except for this thick concentration of vegetation around the rivers? Not only would that explain why they would be visible from so far away, but that would also explain why they appeared and disappeared, right? The vegetation is being harvested and the canals are being like shut off seasonal. No, no, that makes no sense. Everyone knows if you trim the bushes, it makes things look bigger, not small. Well, that's what we tell ourselves anyway, yeah. Now, to explain why any of this. This is a story about optical illusions, right?

Well, it is. Now I'm picturing Tom with one of those spinny discs around his deck. I told you not to blink. You're being rude. All right. So now, to explain why any of this would make sense, Lull had to concoct this whole story of a dying

Mars where Mars had lost most of its water to desertification and all the remaining water is trapped in the planet's ice cap. So the Martians entered into this like planet-wide geoengineer. engineering project to dig huge canals that distributed the meltwater every year and kept their civilization going. So Lull bundled these theories together in a lecture series that would become one of the most influential in American history. It would make Percival Lull a celebrity,

and it would firmly entrench the idea that there were people living, like intelligent creatures living on Mars in the public psyche. Now, most astronomers, even at that time, rejected Lull's fantastical speculations. That's not how science works. But since when does the overwhelming majority of experts' thoughts sway public opinion, right? So the public went with the theory they liked better, and that was Loles. And we all figured out that wasn't how reality is determined. And the masses never again shows a compelling narrative that fit their biases over the evidence. And what followed were endless days filled only with peace and love.

I want that timeline so bad, Tom. Of course, this empirical evidence of a technology, of a technologically advanced Martian civilization, really ramped up all the efforts to win the Talk to Martians Prize. And this is where future citation needed subject to Nicola Tesla comes into the story. Because Tesla is a guy who's like undeniably brilliant, but also talks a lot of wild bullshit to give himself in the press. Right. So at this point, he's locked into a sort of an inventor's battle with Gouli Elmo Marconi for who could send a, like a radio message the farthest. And Marconi was kicking his ass at it.

So much that like early radios were often referred to. as Marcones. And Tesla knew that if he wanted his name to be associated with something other than a low-res overpriced truck for assholes, he needed a comeback. Now, Marconi had already beaten him to transmitting messages across town, across counties, across the English Channel, and across the Atlantic Ocean. So the only thing left, really, was to be the first to trade radio signals with Mars. Now, of course, Tesla wasn't Percival Lull rich. He was fucking live at the Waldorf Astoria Rich, but to build a radio transmitter capable of communicating with Mars, he would need financial backers. Or backer, if he could net a fish big enough, and he did.

Because the fish he netted was fucking JP fucking Morgan. He convinced Morgan to give him $150,000 to build it in exchange for access to any patents that he might develop along the way. That is the equivalent to like $6 million today. Or depending on how you do the math, it can be up as much as $40 million, depending on how you do the math. Now, Tesla would fuck that up by losing track of his original mission and trying to use the tower to transmit electricity without wires. So Morgan wouldn't reinvest when Tesla needed more money to finish the project.

But the fact that he backed out had nothing to do with trying to radio the canal builders being a silly. The Earth is just waiting for Mars to swipe on them so they can start communicating, just rubbing their hands together. Just calling up Tesla being like, hey, I know you're like a genius or whatever. That's why I gave you the $6 million. million dollars, well, in like 20, 25 money, or like 40 million possible, depending on the math, like I might have given you 40 million in 2025 money. I don't know why I specifically named that year, but that's the amount I gave you.

Anyway, every time I check out your tower, it's just like lightning bolts shooting everywhere, and there's like a pile of identical dead guys in the backyard. I don't know what that's about. Are you doing the radio thing or something weird and different? So meanwhile, Lull's credibility is taking a major hit in the scientific community because while he's waiting for the next Martian opposition, he decides to turn his telescope to Venus. And after a long series of observations, he's determined that Venus also has canals.

What? Yeah, it's a spoke pattern radiating out from the middle. And pretty much everybody in any scientific community knows that that's fucking nonsense. because Venus has a visually impenetrable layer of clouds over it, so it would be impossible to see anything. The working theory now is that he stared at the whiteness of Venus's cloud cover for so long that he was seeing the blood vessels in his eyes and drawing those. So Lowell was determined to regain his scientific credibility.

I mean, not so much so that he would consider for one fucking second that he might be wrong about Martian canals. He would go to his deathbed without ever considering that. But in 1888, Lowell's friend and colleague, William Pickering, took the first successful photographs of Mars. Now, that was hard to do, of course, because of the same atmospheric issues that fucked up just looking. But Pickering's great innovation was just take a fuck ton of pictures

and hope at least some of them don't suck. Yeah, as someone with an iPhone camera roll full of only bad pictures, I can tell you this is not the winning strategy you think of us. Yeah, right. Well, okay, so Lowell figured he could do even better. so he put together the Lowell expedition, which he did not accompany, but he did pay for it.

And he also convinced Harvard to loan him one of the world's best telescopes for it, which seems really fucking hard to do when you consider that his proposal was that they should take that telescope to the Andes, carrying up the highest fucking mountain they could find, and take pictures of canals

that pretty much everybody else knew were imaginary at this point. Yeah, that's pretty much the same thing RFK did with public health just recently. Yeah, actually, no, you mentioned it. But the idea of getting high-quality pictures of Mars was too tantalizing, so Harvard loaned him the telescope, and his underlings went out and got the world's first high-quality pictures of Mars. Well, high-quality, you know, by the standard of the day. And those pictures showed no fucking signs of any canals.

But that somehow didn't dissuade Loll at all. He was just like, see? Look at them canals right there. And newspapers do not have we printed the photos complete with air. arrows pointing to the absolutely nothing that Lull was giving canalhood. A lot of the newspapers did him the favor of just like drawing canals on it. Hey, I forgot the Sharpie the telescope lens. Can you just throw this?

So, meanwhile, real astronomers are getting sick of Lull dominating the conversation with this bullshit. So they start doing experiments showing how fine detail can be easily misinterpreted as straight lines from a distance. over and over, they demonstrate this by having first school kids, but eventually trained astronomers draw what they saw on mock Marses that were placed at various distances. And what they found over and over again was that at a certain distance, the eye just starts connecting random shit together and making a straight lines out of it. That is a judicious and gentlemanly way to say, space is so boring it sends you into psychosis.

Noah, well done. How could this be boring? Yeah, but Eli, at least they proved it this time. without blowing up any teachers. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Wolf.

Now, of course, Jesus Christ. I didn't blow up any teachers. I already knew his post. Zero teachers at his job. They didn't blow up big bird. They did. Almost.

They did. Chicken out. Jim had been worse. Better than chicken out. Just a bucket of chicken falling from the heavens afterwards. Chicken little said the sky was. Do you guys know how awesome it would have?

been for them to have to do an episode. Obviously, they're not going to kill Big Bird. So they would have had to do an episode where Big Bird was like, but then I realized that I forgot Patty. And they're like, thank God, Big Bird. Although I will say, as somebody who lived through all of the challenger jokes of the 80s, like they would have written themselves way better if it had been Big Bird, right? Now, of course, so technology rolled on and better and better photographs of Mars made it

ever more clear that Scaparelli, Lull, and all the other canalists, as they were called, were just seeing optical illusions. And it wasn't just photographs. By 1909, spectroscopic data, that is, the analysis of light bouncing off a shit to see what's been absorbed in the meantime, showed that there wasn't even any water on Mars.

But Loll, by now three popular books worth have committed to the bed, insisted at this point that the canals were underground. Duh. That's a pipe, dude. With a boat in it? That's a tunnel. What is with you guys today?

We also used to hang out and talk about canals. I was kicking the shit out of that guy who fucks pigeons. It was great. Now, as much as... Tessel had sex with pigeons a lot. He had sexed as those. Just say, yeah. What?

So that people understand where that joke's coming from. Now, so as much as any of the world... Sorry. What? Now, as much as the world... Pigeons, Tom. You heard me. No, just one. They were monogamous.

You think so? Yeah. That's what he said. He's honorable. Honorable pitching fucker. So, okay, so as much as the world of astronomy had rejected this ship by the 1920s, the public held on quite a bit longer. On the Wikipedia article about the canals, there's a map of Mars that was produced in

1962 that still showed straight-line canals all over the fucking thing. Now, that convention of outliers clinging to the canal theory would continue all the way up until we got actual close-up pictures from Mariner 4's flyby of Mars in 19, 65. And a lot of people at that point were like, well, maybe the canals are on the other side. Jesus Christ. Until we got the far more detailed pictures from the Viking orbiter in 1976. And that's just the kind of biased nonsense around Earther would spend. Well, around Mars or anyway, yeah.

So, okay. So now, of course, even the detailed maps from the Viking mission weren't enough to completely erase Loll's Martians from the fringe consciousness. All it did was kill them off, right? because the same mission that eventually gave us detailed maps of Mars also gave us a weird anomaly in a region of the planet called Sedonia that kind of looked like a human face. If you looked at it from the right angle at the right time of day and you assume the missing pixel of data in the middle of it was actually a feature that constituted a nostril.

So conspiracy theorists just shifted from long dying civilization to long dead civilization, and they claim that the face on Mars was left there as a message to future earthbound explorers. Yeah, and I know that sounds silly, but all one needs to do is look up future essay subject long-term nuclear waste warning messages to see that that is exactly the kind of thing.

That's a fascinating fucking subject, yeah. Have you seen the pictures? Yes, I have, yeah. So, okay, so I should also point out that the cautionary tale of Percival Lull did little to dissuade future cranks, or, hell, it might even have encouraged them given his celebrity.

And if you'd like to see how thoroughly one could ignore this cautionary tale, I would urge you to look up the career of Richard Hoagland. A guy who's obsession with illisory Martian artifacts set him on a career path from scientific advisor for CBS News to weird guy who gets a passing mention at the end of a citation needed episode about Mars cranks. All right. And if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be. Eli is willing to publicly defend three musketeers. and that's kind of admirable. It's like it's sad, but it's also tragic. My eye is tragic,

but you know, respect, I guess. What are you a demigorgon? Thank you. All right. Are you ready for the quiz? I sure am. No, if you think about it, the least interesting possible answer

is that we're alone in the universe and all will ever discover is some windblown rocks on an unimaginable distance away. I don't think you're going to say three musketeers is the least interesting possible. Good too. but I didn't want to dwell.

So tell us, Noah, why is space actually psychosis-inducingly boring? A, we're in timeout because of the holocaust. Oh, interesting. B, we haven't really made it a generation since then without a genocide,

so we're kind of still in timeout. Or C, fuck, they're never going to take us out of timeout. Nope. Yeah, secret answer D, and we'll never deserve it either. Okay, Noah. When you're building canals on Mars, what's the most useful tool?

A. A rivulet gun. B, channel locks or C. Aqueduct tape. Oh, good shit. Okay. Well, it's definitely a C so we can get another argument about whether it's aqueduct tape or aqueduct tape. Yeah, exactly.

So it's got to be a C. I know what people see mostly what they want to see. And what they want is to not be alone in an uncaring universe. drift and purposeless admits an unimaginably enormous and ancient backdrop of nothingness. I did that one. Hey, too fucking bad. Well, if the answer isn't A, we all need new careers, so I'm going to go with A. Too fucking bad. It's always the answer. Too fucking bad.

And Tom, you win, I guess. Sure. All right. You can do an essay. I'll teach you. All right. Well, for Tom, Noah Cecil, and Eli. I'm Heath. Thank you for hanging out with us. We'll be back next week, and I will be an expert on something else. Doing now and then, you can listen to Cognitive Dissin's, the No Rogan Experience, Dear Old Dads, God-awful movies,

scathing atheist, The Skeptocrat, and D&D Minus. That's so many shows. And if you'd like to join the ranks of our beloved patrons, you can make up her episode donation at patreon.com slash citationpod. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect with us on social media or take show notes, check out citationpod.com. I don't understand, Bigsby.

Why would the aliens send us a picture of an elephant spraying water out of its trunk? Perhaps they want us to shower us with their knowledge. Perhaps, Biggsby. Perhaps.