Latest / Stuff You Should Know / The Silurian Hypothesis

Transcript

The Silurian Hypothesis · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
0:11
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
0:13
Speaker 2: Chuck and this is stuff you should know. It's just
0:16
Speaker 2: Josh and Chuck today. Yeah, that's all right, don't freak out, Chuck.
0:20
Speaker 2: We're gonna make it. Just sorry.
0:23
Speaker 1: I'm just glad we're recording. This is just a little
0:26
Speaker 1: inside baseball here. This is our third attempt at this recording. Sessh.
0:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, well you diffuse my inside joke to you that
0:34
Speaker 2: I didn't have enough time to prepare for this episode.
0:37
Speaker 1: So, yeah, my internet went out because of a windstorm
0:41
Speaker 1: last week, and then we were like, you were kind
0:45
Speaker 1: enough to be like, we'll just do it next Thursday.
0:47
Speaker 1: And then yesterday your internet had problems, and I said, well,
0:52
Speaker 1: let's just do it tomorrow morning, because you know, Friday
0:55
Speaker 1: morning at eight fifty five is when the voice is
0:57
Speaker 1: in perfect shape.
0:58
Speaker 2: Right, which was also very kind of you. So we've
1:01
Speaker 2: been kind to one another throughout this ordeal.
1:03
Speaker 1: At least you got to do that. People. If you
1:05
Speaker 1: want to stay married.
1:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely, you want the other person to hold your hand,
1:09
Speaker 2: you'd better be kind.
1:11
Speaker 1: But I'm excited to finally and you know, probably it
1:13
Speaker 1: was probably good that I had a lot more time
1:14
Speaker 1: with this, because this is one of those sort of
1:18
Speaker 1: thought experimentee, get your brain in the right frame of
1:23
Speaker 1: mind kind of episodes, and we love doing these, and
1:26
Speaker 1: this is going to be a good one.
1:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. So what we're talking about today, Chuck,
1:30
Speaker 2: is the Silurian hypothesis, which if I could do anything
1:34
Speaker 2: with this thing, I would rename it. I'd be like, guys,
1:37
Speaker 2: that was a terrible decision.
1:38
Speaker 1: I keep listening everybody, so right, I promise is interesting.
1:42
Speaker 2: So the whole thing came out of we'll explain in
1:45
Speaker 2: a second, but we should probably talk about where it
1:47
Speaker 2: came from and why we don't like this name. The
1:49
Speaker 2: whole thing came out of a meeting between a guy
1:53
Speaker 2: named Adam Frank who's an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester,
1:57
Speaker 2: and a guy named Gavin Schmidt, who's the big wig
2:01
Speaker 2: director for the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a NASA joint. Yeah,
2:07
Speaker 2: and Adam Frank went to Gavin Schmidt and said, hey,
2:10
Speaker 2: I'm trying to figure out if we could find ancient
2:14
Speaker 2: defunct civilizations elsewhere in you know, off of Earth. What
2:20
Speaker 2: would I look for? And the reason he was doing this.
2:22
Speaker 2: This is a it's an answer to the family paradox,
2:26
Speaker 2: where is everybody? Well, one answer is, well, they were here,
2:29
Speaker 2: but now they all died out. So Adam Frank is
2:31
Speaker 2: looking for evidence that they were there. And Gavin Schmidt said,
2:35
Speaker 2: let me just stop you right there and up the
2:38
Speaker 2: ante here.
2:39
Speaker 1: Well, actually, you know what Gavin Schmidt said. What he said,
2:43
Speaker 1: let me tell you something, Professor Frank hey, and Professor
2:47
Speaker 1: Frank said, oh god, I had a dime for every
2:51
Speaker 1: time somebody did that, right, so so close. Yeah, Schmidt
2:56
Speaker 1: was like, hey, buddy, would you say I'll one.
2:58
Speaker 2: Up, you'll up at okay, up.
3:01
Speaker 1: The ante here? What if it's planet Earth? And what
3:05
Speaker 1: if there were ancient civilizations here? My friend? Yeah, and
3:09
Speaker 1: they said check please.
3:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, Adam Frank just vomited directly all over Gavin Smith's desk,
3:16
Speaker 2: very famously.
3:17
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I think they sort of started chatting
3:19
Speaker 1: about this thing, and we should point out that, you
3:22
Speaker 1: know what we're gonna They wrote a paper. We'll get
3:25
Speaker 1: to that in a second, and they named it Silurian hypothesis.
3:28
Speaker 1: But neither one of them think like, oh I think
3:30
Speaker 1: this is what happened. It's more, you know, it's a
3:33
Speaker 1: thought experiment. It's what happens when two remarkably intelligent people
3:37
Speaker 1: get together sometimes and take LSD.
3:41
Speaker 2: One of the other things about it that I think
3:43
Speaker 2: makes it worthwhile too. First of all, these guys are
3:45
Speaker 2: the first scientists to seriously explore the idea which you
3:49
Speaker 2: can apply science to anything like that, and sure they
3:52
Speaker 2: even though they don't think it's correct, they don't rule
3:54
Speaker 2: it out. Yeah, you can't rule it out. There's not
3:56
Speaker 2: enough information to rule it out right.
3:58
Speaker 1: Yeah.
4:00
Speaker 2: But the other thing that it does is that it
4:02
Speaker 2: provides kind of like a guide to see what we're
4:07
Speaker 2: doing now, what we're going to leave in the far
4:10
Speaker 2: future as well.
4:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely so. I imagine they went to another venue,
4:15
Speaker 1: they went to a bar afterward to have a drink,
4:17
Speaker 1: keep this party going, and they were like, well, you know,
4:20
Speaker 1: there's been enough time for something like this to have happened,
4:24
Speaker 1: because when you look at the fossil record, the oldest
4:27
Speaker 1: thing that we know of is a cyanobacteria fossil that's
4:31
Speaker 1: about three and a half billion years old that was
4:34
Speaker 1: from the ocean. And if you're talking about complex life,
4:38
Speaker 1: then you only have to go back about five hundred
4:40
Speaker 1: and forty million years ago to the Cambrian explosion. So
4:44
Speaker 1: like anything beyond that was you know, stuff like soundo
4:49
Speaker 1: bacteria that we know of at least, so any prior
4:52
Speaker 1: intelligent species wouldn't theoretically be older than that Cambrian explosion.
4:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, they call it an explosion because everything went from
5:02
Speaker 2: single celled organisms like you were saying, to like basically
5:05
Speaker 2: all the types of animals on the planet today. Yeah,
5:08
Speaker 2: just like it exploded. It's just the best name for it.
5:12
Speaker 2: It really can't add to that. But there's another guy,
5:15
Speaker 2: another character we need to add here, and his name
5:18
Speaker 2: is Jason Wright.
5:19
Speaker 1: I like this guy.
5:20
Speaker 2: He's an astronomer at Penn State. And he said, whoa,
5:24
Speaker 2: whoa guys, And this is in a separate paper that
5:25
Speaker 2: I think even predated the Silurian hypothesis paper.
5:29
Speaker 1: He was sitting next to them overhearing them at the bar.
5:32
Speaker 2: Right, they were like covering their work while exactly so,
5:37
Speaker 2: Jason Wright says, not to them directly, but in general,
5:40
Speaker 2: he's like, Okay, we don't know that you have to
5:43
Speaker 2: stop at the Cambrian explosion to look for intelligent life
5:48
Speaker 2: on Earth. In the past. And the reason why is
5:51
Speaker 2: because we have a really like that's using a really
5:54
Speaker 2: limited definition of life. That's using the kind of life
5:58
Speaker 2: that has certain body plans with the cent nervous system.
6:01
Speaker 2: Some have like backbones, some don't, some are jellyfish. Doesn't matter, Like,
6:07
Speaker 2: what if there's other kinds of life out there? What
6:09
Speaker 2: if some of those single celled organisms had gotten together
6:12
Speaker 2: and formed like a hive mind colony, right that was
6:16
Speaker 2: capable of intelligent industrialization. We wouldn't know that, like think
6:21
Speaker 2: out of the box, guys.
6:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, because you know, it's hard to wrap your
6:25
Speaker 1: head around all we know is us and what happened
6:29
Speaker 1: with the development of how we got to now. Yeah,
6:34
Speaker 1: So he's like, you know, turn that off, everybody, because
6:37
Speaker 1: that could have happened what Josh Clark just said. And
6:39
Speaker 1: they were like, who's Josh Clark? And they said, you'll
6:41
Speaker 1: find out sooner enough, he said, Or maybe there was
6:44
Speaker 1: another like Cambrian like explosion that happened like way way
6:49
Speaker 1: back before that, and maybe it's maybe they didn't leave
6:54
Speaker 1: any fossils behind, or so few that we didn't find them,
6:58
Speaker 1: or maybe you know, that was a cataclysm that destroyed everything,
7:04
Speaker 1: like there was this complex life. It destroyed everything, and
7:07
Speaker 1: it kind of just rebooted the system with these single
7:10
Speaker 1: celled organisms, and that's what we know is the start, right, Yeah,
7:15
Speaker 1: And they yeah, whoa buddy.
7:16
Speaker 2: I know it's pretty cool.
7:18
Speaker 1: Can I pay for this guy's drink?
7:20
Speaker 2: Yeah? Can I buy you a beer? So Gavin Schmidt
7:23
Speaker 2: and Adam Frank are like, we think we're onto something here.
7:25
Speaker 2: Let's let's kind of flush this out a little more.
7:28
Speaker 2: And I think it was Gavin Schmidt who suggested they
7:32
Speaker 2: call it the Silurian hypothesis. And the reason we call
7:36
Speaker 2: it the Silurian that's a I think a period or
7:38
Speaker 2: an epoch or something in Earth's history five hundred something
7:43
Speaker 2: million years ago. But they weren't naming it after that.
7:46
Speaker 2: They were naming it after a race of lizard people
7:50
Speaker 2: who are characters on Doctor Who.
7:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you watch Do you have any doctor who experience?
7:57
Speaker 2: None? I feel like it's like this whole thing out
7:59
Speaker 2: there that's waiting for me to meet it, and I'm like,
8:03
Speaker 2: I don't know.
8:04
Speaker 1: I mean, I've never I don't know anything about it.
8:06
Speaker 1: But I just caveat that because there may be emails
8:10
Speaker 1: coming in that are like they're not lizard like people.
8:13
Speaker 1: They are this like, I have no idea. I looked
8:16
Speaker 1: at pictures of them like you did, and they look
8:18
Speaker 1: like lizard reptilian type creatures.
8:21
Speaker 2: They do. So that I mean for all INtime process
8:23
Speaker 2: is if you're not super into Doctor Who, they're.
8:25
Speaker 1: Lizard people, I really really hope.
8:27
Speaker 2: So the reason that they named it after this race
8:30
Speaker 2: of lizard people and Doctor Who is that on the
8:32
Speaker 2: in the Doctor Who universe, they lived about three hundred
8:36
Speaker 2: million years ago, which would actually make them place them
8:38
Speaker 2: in the Carboniferous period, not the Silurian and apparently all
8:42
Speaker 2: Doctor Who fans are aware.
8:44
Speaker 1: Of that because they're all Doctor Frank's right.
8:47
Speaker 2: But they supposedly survived a bunch of cataclysms here on
8:53
Speaker 2: Earth by moving underground hibernating until things cooled off a
8:56
Speaker 2: little bit. And now they're back in the Doctor Who universe,
8:59
Speaker 2: so they would like the ancient civilization. And so there's
9:02
Speaker 2: two reasons why I find the unfortunate that they named
9:04
Speaker 2: it after that. One it just makes the whole thing
9:07
Speaker 2: silly to a degree. Apologies to Doctor Who fans, but
9:11
Speaker 2: it it like this is an actual, like academic exercise.
9:15
Speaker 2: They're engaged in. It has a silly thing out of
9:17
Speaker 2: the gates.
9:18
Speaker 1: It's a tea. I mean again, we're not saying doctor
9:21
Speaker 1: who is silly, but it'd be like us coming up
9:23
Speaker 1: with like the Family Ties hypothesis or something right right,
9:27
Speaker 1: Like it's named after a TV show.
9:28
Speaker 2: It says like before you even read the abstract, don't
9:31
Speaker 2: take this seriously. But it's meant to be taken seriously.
9:35
Speaker 2: It's not tongue in cheek at all. The paper isn't
9:38
Speaker 2: at least or the hypothesis. The other reason why is
9:41
Speaker 2: because every single author who wrote any piece or article
9:47
Speaker 2: about this hypothesis afterward uses a hypothetical lizard race to
9:54
Speaker 2: discuss what we would be looking for. And it's so obnoxious, man,
9:58
Speaker 2: So we're not going to do that. We're not even
10:01
Speaker 2: going to try to guess what they would be like
10:03
Speaker 2: or look like. They're just the hypothetical ancient industrialized civilization
10:07
Speaker 2: that we're looking for. So if we're looking for something
10:09
Speaker 2: like that here on earth, Chuck, what would we start
10:13
Speaker 2: to look for?
10:14
Speaker 1: Well? And I mean those are sort of the questions
10:16
Speaker 1: these guys started. I guess they went to another bar
10:19
Speaker 1: and started asking. They're pretty sloshed at this point, that's
10:22
Speaker 1: gonna say, and they start asking even more questions. I
10:25
Speaker 1: guess after they got over the I mean, hopefully they
10:28
Speaker 1: didn't have to argue about Silurian. I'm praying they were
10:31
Speaker 1: both Doctor Who fans and that doctor Frank didn't have
10:34
Speaker 1: to convince Oh Gavin, you know, I think it might.
10:38
Speaker 2: Have been the other way around, and based on titles,
10:41
Speaker 2: I think Frank would have had to go along with it.
10:43
Speaker 1: Okay, Well, either way, they started to sort of ask
10:47
Speaker 1: these big questions, and what it really comes down to
10:50
Speaker 1: are two main questions, what should we be looking for?
10:55
Speaker 1: And in order to think about what should we be
10:57
Speaker 1: looking for, a good place to start art is well,
11:01
Speaker 1: what are we leaving behind that a future archaeologist or
11:05
Speaker 1: geologist might look for?
11:07
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
11:08
Speaker 1: And when they started poking around a little bit, they
11:11
Speaker 1: found that, you know, there's some stuff here that that
11:14
Speaker 1: does bear a resemblance to like possible signals that something
11:18
Speaker 1: could have happened as far as an ancient industrialized civilization
11:23
Speaker 1: that just went away.
11:26
Speaker 2: Like you can't hear it, but my jaw just dropped.
11:30
Speaker 1: All right, Josh's jaws on the floor. We're going to
11:33
Speaker 1: seek some medical attention, and we'll take a little break
11:35
Speaker 1: and we'll be right back.
11:36
Speaker 2: Definitely, child.
11:44
Speaker 1: Y s K.
11:48
Speaker 2: Stucks.
11:50
Speaker 1: I don't know that you know it stuck and sucks that.
11:53
Speaker 2: It's a great name.
11:54
Speaker 1: I could remember.
11:56
Speaker 2: That's the name of it. It's a great name. All right,
11:59
Speaker 2: stucks net with an X.
12:01
Speaker 1: All Right, So we're back, and we were talking about
12:04
Speaker 1: where you might or what you might look for if
12:07
Speaker 1: you're looking for a previous advanced civilization and sort of
12:10
Speaker 1: the obvious first place. You know, we're going to start
12:13
Speaker 1: easy and get a little more complex here. It's just
12:15
Speaker 1: like all the all the physical stuff, Like if you're
12:18
Speaker 1: an industrialized, intelligent civilization, you're going to have industry and
12:23
Speaker 1: cities and factories and things and skyscrapers and buildings, and
12:28
Speaker 1: it's hard to wrap your head around all that stuff
12:30
Speaker 1: being gone one day when you're living amongst it. But
12:33
Speaker 1: like the life of a skyscraper is about fifty years
12:36
Speaker 1: without human intervention to you know start. You know, that's
12:39
Speaker 1: why when you go to New York, every building has
12:41
Speaker 1: scaffolding on it practically, because you have to keep those
12:44
Speaker 1: buildings up. They start falling apart because of corrosion and erosion.
12:49
Speaker 1: So without that, even though it's hard to imagine, everything
12:52
Speaker 1: will eventually be gone. And we're talking about in the
12:55
Speaker 1: grand scheme of the big, big timeline, so like hundreds
12:58
Speaker 1: of millions of years.
12:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but for a city itself, I mean, apparently
13:02
Speaker 2: water intrusion is a big problem for all of those
13:05
Speaker 2: tall buildings as well as erosion and corrosion and all that.
13:11
Speaker 2: They're like, it's not going to take millions of years
13:14
Speaker 2: for them to go away. We're talking thousands to tens
13:16
Speaker 2: of thousands of years.
13:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, and our.
13:18
Speaker 2: Cities will be just completely rubble, especially ones that are
13:23
Speaker 2: built on like solid ground or rocky ground well above
13:28
Speaker 2: sea level, because those are the ones that are most
13:32
Speaker 2: like open and left vulnerable to the processes of erosion
13:36
Speaker 2: that sweep across Earth's surface and wipe the whole thing clean.
13:40
Speaker 2: And yeah, it wouldn't take very long. The stuff that's
13:44
Speaker 2: underground might be a little more easily preserved, like they're
13:49
Speaker 2: you know, any under any city, there's a huge network
13:52
Speaker 2: of infrastructure of pipes and cables and tunnels and hard
13:57
Speaker 2: hats and stuff like that that conceivably, even after the
14:01
Speaker 2: city above is long gone, that stuff could could be
14:05
Speaker 2: preserved to a certain degree.
14:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And we should shout out this guy
14:09
Speaker 1: that did you dig him up? Or was that Livia
14:13
Speaker 1: I think found him. Yeah. His name is it starts
14:17
Speaker 1: with the J, but as yan Zeala Schevitz, and he's
14:21
Speaker 1: a paleontologist at the University of Lester. Nice work, oh
14:26
Speaker 1: boy in the UK. And we shout him out because he,
14:29
Speaker 1: you know, he sort of let us down this path
14:31
Speaker 1: of looking underground, potentially looking underwater because things would just
14:36
Speaker 1: deteriorate a lot slower down there. But he's just a guy.
14:40
Speaker 1: I just want to recommend if you're if you want
14:43
Speaker 1: to get into some heady sort of YouTube stuff, just
14:48
Speaker 1: google yan Zella Schevitz. It's z A l A s
14:51
Speaker 1: I E V I c Z. Because I went down
14:55
Speaker 1: a little because we had so much extra time, just
14:57
Speaker 1: a little bit of a rabbit hole. This guy, he
15:01
Speaker 1: has a bunch of YouTube where he speaking to the
15:03
Speaker 1: university groups and classrooms and things, and he's just super
15:07
Speaker 1: smart and interesting.
15:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, the stuff he's into is super cool too. But yeah,
15:11
Speaker 2: he himself gets it across really well.
15:14
Speaker 1: I like it.
15:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, so he points out he was the one he
15:18
Speaker 2: I think he chose San Francisco. Like San Francisco's a goner.
15:21
Speaker 2: It's not gonna be around very long once we're gone.
15:24
Speaker 2: And by the way, I keep saying once we're gone.
15:26
Speaker 2: Remember that amazing two thousand and seven book The World
15:29
Speaker 2: Without Us by Alan Weisman.
15:31
Speaker 1: Never heard of it?
15:32
Speaker 2: Oh, yes you have. It was like all the thing
15:35
Speaker 2: back in two thousand and seven. They made like TV
15:37
Speaker 2: shows about it and all that. So this guy basically
15:39
Speaker 2: went to the trouble of figuring out in five years,
15:42
Speaker 2: ten years, fifty years, one hundred years, thousand and so on.
15:45
Speaker 2: That sounds familiar what the planet would be like, yeaf
15:48
Speaker 2: if humans just suddenly vanished, And like he goes into
15:52
Speaker 2: detail of like the processes of erosion and crosion, what
15:55
Speaker 2: effects it's going to happen. It's just so fascinating.
15:58
Speaker 1: That's super cool.
15:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is super cool. Like the series, at least
16:01
Speaker 2: one series I think on like Science Channel or something
16:03
Speaker 2: like that was what was worth watching too. But that's
16:07
Speaker 2: I mean, that has a lot to do with what
16:08
Speaker 2: we're talking about. So the top side city's gone, the
16:12
Speaker 2: stuff underneath might be preserved, but the cities that are
16:15
Speaker 2: built along water and there's a lot of cities that
16:18
Speaker 2: are built along water. Yeah, they like say New Orleans
16:22
Speaker 2: is actually built below sea level. When people are gone
16:26
Speaker 2: from New Orleans, New Orleans is gonna go away really quick,
16:29
Speaker 2: but it will probably get preserved or at least covered over,
16:33
Speaker 2: if not preserved by a lot of the muck, the
16:35
Speaker 2: delta muck that's brought down the Mississippi River, and that
16:39
Speaker 2: will could conceivably create the conditions to preserve the whole
16:42
Speaker 2: city in some form of fashion.
16:44
Speaker 1: Totally. But and you know, a lot of the thought
16:47
Speaker 1: experiment is like introducing things and poking holes in it.
16:52
Speaker 1: There's not a lot, like you know, if you lived
16:54
Speaker 1: in an urban area. It's kind of hard to think
16:58
Speaker 1: that there's not much urban area in the world, but
17:01
Speaker 1: there really isn't. I think the liberal estimates have it
17:06
Speaker 1: at about a little less than three percent, like two
17:08
Speaker 1: point seven two point eight percent of the world has
17:11
Speaker 1: been urbanized. Some people put it as low as one percent.
17:15
Speaker 1: So there's there's a lot of just land out there still.
17:19
Speaker 1: So you're looking if you're looking for an ancient civilization,
17:24
Speaker 1: I mean, who's not to say that it could have
17:25
Speaker 1: been like fifty percent of the earth, But chances are
17:28
Speaker 1: it would be something a little more like what we're doing.
17:31
Speaker 2: For sure, And so like you were saying, like, that's
17:33
Speaker 2: one of the cool things about this as a thought experiment,
17:36
Speaker 2: Like you raise this point and then you like poke
17:38
Speaker 2: holes in it, then sometimes you can kind of support
17:41
Speaker 2: it instead. And so, like a legitimate question would be, like,
17:45
Speaker 2: why are we assuming that an ancient civilization from millions
17:49
Speaker 2: of years ago in Earth's history had cities? Yea, and
17:53
Speaker 2: point the reason why if they have any kind of intelligence. Typically,
17:57
Speaker 2: the more of an intelligent organiz you put together, the
18:01
Speaker 2: more advanced it becomes. Like twelve thousand years ago, there
18:05
Speaker 2: was something like fifteen million people across all of planet
18:09
Speaker 2: Earth tops. But then as we started to grow in
18:12
Speaker 2: density thanks to agriculture and animal domestication, all of a sudden,
18:17
Speaker 2: our technology started to develop at a really rapid pace geologically speaking,
18:22
Speaker 2: and now here we are. So we could assume that
18:24
Speaker 2: there'd be some form of density, because you need x
18:27
Speaker 2: number of intelligent organisms to advance to an industrialized civilization,
18:32
Speaker 2: one would imagine, So there's actually a legitimate reason to
18:35
Speaker 2: think that they would have cities that we could look
18:37
Speaker 2: for the problem is this, Chuck, and you know this
18:40
Speaker 2: as well as I do. We'll see the Earth does
18:45
Speaker 2: not like things like cities and ruins or fossils. Let's
18:50
Speaker 2: talk about fossils.
18:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that seems to be the next best
18:55
Speaker 1: place to start looking. If let's say the buildings are gone,
18:59
Speaker 1: fossils are or how we know what happened in our
19:02
Speaker 1: distant past. But fossils are tough, just because of how
19:06
Speaker 1: rare they are and how hard it is to make one,
19:10
Speaker 1: and how sort of lucky it is that they happen
19:13
Speaker 1: to begin with, and that we find them. The t
19:16
Speaker 1: rex is a great example, just a little like back
19:19
Speaker 1: in the envelope math. Some estimates say that somewhere in
19:23
Speaker 1: the neighborhood of twenty thousand t rexes at any given
19:26
Speaker 1: time during their run, we're walking stomping around planet Earth
19:30
Speaker 1: with their tiny little baby arms. They were around for
19:33
Speaker 1: about two and a half million years. That comes out
19:36
Speaker 1: to roughly one hundred and twenty seven thousand generations on
19:40
Speaker 1: the lifespan of a t rex. So we're talking total, roughly,
19:44
Speaker 1: of course, about two and a half billion individual t
19:47
Speaker 1: rexes that lived and died at any point in their history,
19:53
Speaker 1: and we only found fifty fossilized skeletons, which is about
19:58
Speaker 1: two millions of one percent of the total population.
20:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, I should forewarn you that two millions of one
20:05
Speaker 2: percent is my math personally, but I did use an
20:09
Speaker 2: online percentage calculator like three different times to make sure
20:12
Speaker 2: so it's it's accurate.
20:13
Speaker 1: My friend, Oh, I know the math people are always
20:16
Speaker 1: checking checking you. I was about say, getting your back,
20:18
Speaker 1: but really trying to.
20:19
Speaker 2: Prove you're getting I got a target on my back,
20:22
Speaker 2: that's what they're trying to get.
20:24
Speaker 1: Uh. But you know the movie Jurassic Park, as silly
20:28
Speaker 1: as some of that stuff was with great movie, don't
20:31
Speaker 1: get me wrong, but you know the the mosquito being
20:34
Speaker 1: covered in amber, Like if you if you look at
20:37
Speaker 1: that movie, like that one mosquito got trapped in amber.
20:40
Speaker 1: And that's kind of what we're talking about here, is
20:42
Speaker 1: just sort of the dumb luck of the fossil happening
20:46
Speaker 1: to begin with a and then that fossil that's buried
20:50
Speaker 1: eventually getting pushed up to the Earth's surface where we
20:53
Speaker 1: can find it, right but within the window between it
20:56
Speaker 1: popping up and it being findable to it eroding to
20:59
Speaker 1: where it's not findable anymore. It's like it's it's all.
21:03
Speaker 1: I mean, that's why we don't have, you know, billions
21:05
Speaker 1: and billions of fossils, is because it's just really rare
21:08
Speaker 1: to make one and find one.
21:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, not just making one, but yes, finding one. It's
21:13
Speaker 2: all a product of time and space and a really
21:15
Speaker 2: complex formula. And I saw an article called how Can
21:20
Speaker 2: I Become a Fossil? By John Pickerel from twenty eighteen
21:23
Speaker 2: on BBC really well worth reading.
21:25
Speaker 1: Did it start listening to the Doobie Brothers.
21:29
Speaker 2: Nice, Oh yeah, rip Dicky Bets.
21:32
Speaker 1: Huh well not Almond brothers, but sure, well yeah, I
21:36
Speaker 1: know I knew that, but yeah, okay, I mean they're
21:38
Speaker 1: both brothers. Yeah yeah, same time period, Rip Dicky Bets.
21:41
Speaker 1: That was that was a tough one.
21:42
Speaker 2: If you had been in my brain, it would have
21:44
Speaker 2: been no, I got yeah, of course.
21:46
Speaker 1: And it's also nine twenty.
21:47
Speaker 2: So John Pickerell cited an estimate that one tenth of
21:51
Speaker 2: one percent of all the species that have ever existed
21:56
Speaker 2: has had one of their individuals fossilized. Oh wow, so
22:00
Speaker 2: just really tiny, tiny percentages of fossils are ever created.
22:04
Speaker 2: But and also I got to just say this quote too.
22:07
Speaker 2: There's another article called the scene as a joke.
22:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, I thought you were going to skip this one.
22:10
Speaker 1: This is great.
22:11
Speaker 2: Yeah. A guy named Peter Brannan who's a science writer,
22:14
Speaker 2: wrote it, and basically he's explaining like just how insignificant
22:18
Speaker 2: humans have been on Earth, even as much as we've
22:23
Speaker 2: affected Earth. It's just how insignificant it actually is, and
22:26
Speaker 2: how easily Earthball shake our our stuff off. Yeah, but
22:30
Speaker 2: he had this great quote. I think you should say it.
22:32
Speaker 1: Oh, okay, do you know where he's from so I
22:37
Speaker 1: can prepare.
22:38
Speaker 2: No, let's say Austria, Cherk.
22:43
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess that's sort of German. I'm just
22:45
Speaker 1: going to read him as American. This is this is
22:48
Speaker 1: a great quote. Each fossil was its own miracles, sampled
22:51
Speaker 1: randomly from almost two hundred million years of history. A
22:55
Speaker 1: few stray, wind blown pages of a library.
22:59
Speaker 2: Isn't that great?
23:00
Speaker 1: Yeah? That really drives it home.
23:02
Speaker 2: It really does. So hats off to Peter Brandon and
23:04
Speaker 2: John Pickerel. Definitely go read those and also go watch
23:07
Speaker 2: youtubes of Yon Zelhevich, z Lushevich.
23:11
Speaker 1: Right, Zela Schevitz kind of likevitz.
23:14
Speaker 2: Right but with a Z.
23:16
Speaker 1: Yeah.
23:17
Speaker 2: So all of that said, though, we have discovered really
23:23
Speaker 2: really old fossils. The oldest hominid our ancestor, the oldest
23:27
Speaker 2: indisputable ancestor to humans, Australipithecus and amensis, was walking around
23:34
Speaker 2: four and a half almost four and a half million
23:37
Speaker 2: years ago, and we have a skeleton of that guy.
23:41
Speaker 2: So as miraculous as fossilization and discovery of fossils is,
23:44
Speaker 2: it does happen.
23:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, And that's hominids are our old buddy. Yan
23:51
Speaker 1: Zelisovitch is like, you know what else could happen is
23:55
Speaker 1: we're creating a bunch of potential techno fossils as we advance,
24:00
Speaker 1: Like somebody could find a smartphone one day, somebody could
24:04
Speaker 1: find a grocery bag that's been fossilized. Sure, the more
24:08
Speaker 1: likely thing that's going to be found is not some
24:11
Speaker 1: smartphone that you could plug in and then reboot.
24:15
Speaker 2: Right, they'd be like, let's see what pictures this guy.
24:17
Speaker 1: But it might be something like a brick or a
24:20
Speaker 1: glass bottle that's you know, that clearly human made, that's
24:24
Speaker 1: like artificial in shape, and it may be stamped with
24:28
Speaker 1: like a company name or something like that. Like something
24:31
Speaker 1: like that is more probable for a future anthropology archaeologist
24:36
Speaker 1: to find as a techno fossil. Yeah, so, or plastic, right.
24:41
Speaker 2: Plastic is another good one. We actually don't know how
24:44
Speaker 2: long it takes plastic to break down to its constituent parts.
24:47
Speaker 2: We know that it breaks down into really really small particles,
24:52
Speaker 2: but there's still like microparticles of plastic. It's like intact
24:56
Speaker 2: particles of plastic. Right, And if a future like race
25:03
Speaker 2: discovered our plastic, they'd be like, this is really bizarre. Yeah,
25:07
Speaker 2: because by definition, the plastic we make is artificial. There
25:10
Speaker 2: are like polymers in nature like cellulose that are an
25:13
Speaker 2: analog to our plastic, but all the plastic we make
25:16
Speaker 2: is not found in nature. So if they found that,
25:18
Speaker 2: they'd be like, this is kind of weird, what's going
25:20
Speaker 2: on with this?
25:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure.
25:23
Speaker 2: And then chicken bones too, chuck, hmmm.
25:27
Speaker 1: Have you ever seen there was an Instagram account it
25:29
Speaker 1: may have been called Atlantic Chicken Bones that we're just
25:32
Speaker 1: these great pictures of chicken bones in parking lots and
25:36
Speaker 1: sidewalks all over Atlanta.
25:37
Speaker 2: Right, So that's a really great point. There's the people
25:40
Speaker 2: who are like all bully on the anthroposceine, the idea
25:44
Speaker 2: that the humans are creating our own geological era or epoch, say,
25:50
Speaker 2: like chicken bones are probably a pretty good bet for
25:54
Speaker 2: like fossilized evidence of our presence. Because we raise and
25:58
Speaker 2: kill so many chickens at Box the Mine, their bones
26:01
Speaker 2: get everywhere, and they are anatomically different from all other
26:07
Speaker 2: kinds of chickens because we've bred them to be different,
26:09
Speaker 2: like have huge breasts and not be able to walk
26:12
Speaker 2: in all sorts of terrible stuff. So if you found
26:15
Speaker 2: other chicken bones in the fossil record, and then you
26:18
Speaker 2: found our broiler chicken bones, you'd be like, what is this?
26:21
Speaker 2: And also why are they in Antarctica?
26:24
Speaker 1: Right? I also want to point out, since I brought
26:28
Speaker 1: up Atlanta chicken bones, I am a lover of fried chicken,
26:31
Speaker 1: as you know. Yeah, it's probably my favorite food. And
26:33
Speaker 1: I have been known to have car chicken.
26:37
Speaker 2: As long as there's no shower chicken, I'm still that's
26:40
Speaker 2: still fine on the sand that.
26:42
Speaker 1: No, you want to keep it crispy, you don't want
26:43
Speaker 1: any humidity in there. But I've always resisted the urge
26:47
Speaker 1: to toss my chicken bones because I have dogs, and
26:51
Speaker 1: I walk dogs, and if you're not paying attention, that
26:53
Speaker 1: dog can snap up at chicken bone on the sidewalk
26:56
Speaker 1: pretty easily. So just a psa there, try and keep
26:58
Speaker 1: those chicken bones in the box.
27:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, and chicken bones can splinter so readily that it
27:03
Speaker 2: can really hurt your dog's throat stomach. You don't want
27:05
Speaker 2: a dog eating chicken bones.
27:06
Speaker 1: Okay, Yeah, did I ever tell you this will be
27:09
Speaker 1: quick about when my deceased dog Buckley ate an entire
27:14
Speaker 1: drummet that fell off the grill. No, it popped off
27:18
Speaker 1: many years ago Buckley left us, But I looked down.
27:21
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, shoot, chicken bone or chicken drummet,
27:25
Speaker 1: and it was just gone. And it was gone so fast,
27:27
Speaker 1: and Buckley was there, but I was like, he wasn't
27:29
Speaker 1: chewing or evening. I was like, what happened to that thing?
27:32
Speaker 1: Ten minutes later? Oh no, he barfs up a hole.
27:39
Speaker 1: He swallowed it whole, a whole chicken drummet that was
27:43
Speaker 1: still steaming from the heat of the grill.
27:47
Speaker 2: So good.
27:48
Speaker 1: So it was like, I mean, thank god he did that,
27:50
Speaker 1: because that would not have been good.
27:52
Speaker 2: No.
27:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, he swallowed that thing like a pill, and then.
27:55
Speaker 2: When he threw up, he wiped his mouth.
27:56
Speaker 1: He's like, totally right, yeah, I think he thought it
27:59
Speaker 1: was worth it.
28:01
Speaker 2: So I said something earlier, Chuck, we were talking about ruins, fossils,
28:05
Speaker 2: all that stuff. I said that Earth doesn't really like
28:07
Speaker 2: that kind of stuff, and I was right.
28:13
Speaker 1: Are you setting me up?
28:14
Speaker 2: Yeah?
28:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, because here on Earth we have plate tectonics,
28:19
Speaker 1: we have a situation where if you're talking about the
28:21
Speaker 1: ocean crust, it subducts below the lighter continental crust and
28:26
Speaker 1: it's going to push everything down, down, down toward the
28:29
Speaker 1: mantle where it melts and then eventually comes back up
28:33
Speaker 1: via like a land volcano, maybe an undersea volcano, to
28:37
Speaker 1: form a new crust. And it's just like this this giant,
28:41
Speaker 1: super super slow recycling conveyor belt.
28:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, it takes I think, on average, about two hundred
28:47
Speaker 2: and fifty million years for new crust to go through
28:50
Speaker 2: that whole cycle. That's just on average. It can take
28:53
Speaker 2: hundreds of millions of years longer. Yeah, take less, but
28:56
Speaker 2: that's just kind of generally how slow it is. The
29:00
Speaker 2: point is is that after X number of millions of years,
29:04
Speaker 2: that crust is what and everything attached to it is
29:06
Speaker 2: totally gone. Once it hits that mantle, it doesn't discriminate
29:10
Speaker 2: everything gets melted. Everything gets melted in the middle. What
29:14
Speaker 2: about on land, Well, land is not subject to the
29:20
Speaker 2: forces of like subduction, right, but it does have that
29:24
Speaker 2: erosion through wind and water, and everything just kind of
29:28
Speaker 2: gets recycled in its own way. Plus also the plates
29:34
Speaker 2: that do collide with one another, and there's you know,
29:37
Speaker 2: continental fault lines obviously too, that produce earthquakes when they collide.
29:41
Speaker 2: The stuff anywhere near those edges gets all kinds of
29:45
Speaker 2: messed up. Yeah, and that's how a lot of mountain
29:47
Speaker 2: ranges form. And then there's the Himalayas. The thing is
29:51
Speaker 2: is that erosion, that process of erosion that completely recycles
29:55
Speaker 2: Earth's surface over X number of years. An eighty eight
29:59
Speaker 2: million year, the Himalayas will be gone. It'll just be
30:02
Speaker 2: a meadow where they's.
30:05
Speaker 1: That's one of my favorite sort of facts of the
30:07
Speaker 1: show right there. Yeah, it's hard to imagine this stuff,
30:10
Speaker 1: but yeah, what is it eroding at like point one
30:12
Speaker 1: millimeter per year? And again we're talking these we're talking
30:17
Speaker 1: on timelines of hundreds of millions of years here, right,
30:20
Speaker 1: So eighty eight million years, Yeah, that's it just go
30:23
Speaker 1: romp in the meadow.
30:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, because even if we're just going back to the
30:25
Speaker 2: Cambrian explosion. And you can argue that you can go
30:28
Speaker 2: back further like Jason Wright did. But even if you're
30:30
Speaker 2: just going back five hundred and forty million years, that
30:32
Speaker 2: means continental crusts have like reinvented themselves twice since then. Yeah,
30:37
Speaker 2: the Earth's surface has been recycled countless times. Apparently the
30:43
Speaker 2: oldest surface stretch of Earth is only is like less
30:47
Speaker 2: than two million years old.
30:49
Speaker 1: Oh geez, that's really young. Yeah.
30:51
Speaker 2: And the reason all this stuff is hard to imagine,
30:53
Speaker 2: like the Himalaya is going away, is because our sense
30:55
Speaker 2: of time is so limited to about the span of
30:58
Speaker 2: a lifetime, yeah, plus a couple of decades. Maybe that
31:03
Speaker 2: when we start to think a tens and in hundreds
31:06
Speaker 2: of millions of years into the future of the past,
31:08
Speaker 2: we just stop. It just doesn't It doesn't really make
31:11
Speaker 2: sense to us unless we really apply ourselves with episodes
31:14
Speaker 2: like this.
31:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
31:16
Speaker 2: So you've got plates colliding, you've got glaciers do all
31:21
Speaker 2: sorts of They move entire regions around like bulldozers. But
31:24
Speaker 2: even something as humble as the movement of earthworms through
31:27
Speaker 2: the soil over enough time, that's going to erode fossils, ruins,
31:33
Speaker 2: subterranean networks of pipes, and essentially we're back to square
31:39
Speaker 2: one trying to figure out what to look for for
31:41
Speaker 2: an ancient civilization.
31:44
Speaker 1: Are we done almost? All right? Maybe we should take
31:48
Speaker 1: a break and we'll come back and talk about why
31:52
Speaker 1: we're striking out and where we go next.
31:54
Speaker 2: Definitely should also stuck.
32:09
Speaker 1: You know what, Stuck.
32:12
Speaker 2: That's a great name.
32:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the name of it.
32:15
Speaker 2: It's a great name. All right, stucks net with with
32:18
Speaker 2: an X. Okay, chuck. So we've seen that we can
32:21
Speaker 2: dismiss the archaeologists, Thank you everybody, and bring in the geologists.
32:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, like, take your take your whip, take your fedora,
32:33
Speaker 1: pack it all up, go take a break because the
32:36
Speaker 1: geologists are on the scene. You can doctor Jones, you
32:39
Speaker 1: can take a seat.
32:40
Speaker 2: Right, So, I can't even like, what are the geologists like?
32:46
Speaker 2: They just they don't have a movie franchises like the
32:48
Speaker 2: archaeologists do.
32:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean they're not looking for grails, they're looking
32:53
Speaker 1: for residue. So it's not it's grabby.
32:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess they're the thing that you most associate
32:59
Speaker 2: with is like a slight coffin a really large, empty room.
33:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, like there the would never be a movie called
33:07
Speaker 1: Indiana Jones and the Ancient Tree Ring. No, you know, no, unfortunately.
33:14
Speaker 1: But that's what we're talking about, is the fact that
33:18
Speaker 1: if we were to have a future geologists look back,
33:22
Speaker 1: that's what they would likely be looking for. Like, forget
33:25
Speaker 1: the fossils, They're gonna be looking for just little bits
33:28
Speaker 1: of residue by looking at these tiny little layers of
33:32
Speaker 1: sediment that we deposit every day all over the place
33:36
Speaker 1: that eventually becomes rock. And this is how we know
33:39
Speaker 1: look back at our own past to learn things. That's
33:41
Speaker 1: how we knew that the dinosaurs were exploded basically because
33:46
Speaker 1: of that asteroid, and that Cambrian explosion happened because we
33:51
Speaker 1: have studied geology.
33:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, we've learned to study those layers that get put
33:56
Speaker 2: down and put down. And the problem is on Earth's surface,
33:59
Speaker 2: as we've seen, there's the process of erosion, and there's
34:03
Speaker 2: an entire layer across the whole globe. It's not just
34:06
Speaker 2: in one spot, but there's a billion year stretch of
34:11
Speaker 2: the geological record that's just gone. It's missing this. Yeah,
34:16
Speaker 2: I hadn't either. It's called the Great Unconformity. And like
34:21
Speaker 2: we'll just never know what was there, what happened during
34:23
Speaker 2: that time, because there's no record of it. They think
34:26
Speaker 2: that it was just a period where there wasn't a
34:28
Speaker 2: lot of sedimentation put down, but there was a lot
34:31
Speaker 2: of erosion.
34:32
Speaker 1: Yeah.
34:32
Speaker 2: So some people suggest that it was during Snowball Earth
34:35
Speaker 2: one of those periods where like ice sheets cover the
34:38
Speaker 2: entire globe three miles thick, and that they could erode stuff,
34:43
Speaker 2: you know, pretty cleanly across the globe. It's a pretty good,
34:46
Speaker 2: pretty good theory. But stuff like that happens. So when
34:49
Speaker 2: we're looking on Earth's surface, you run into problems. But
34:53
Speaker 2: because that oceanic crust takes so much longer to recycle,
34:57
Speaker 2: we could look there and conceivably find something hundreds of
35:00
Speaker 2: millions of years old.
35:02
Speaker 1: Yeah. I also got to say Snowball Earth is I mean,
35:04
Speaker 1: that's the next great Netflix show waiting to happen.
35:07
Speaker 2: Maybe that's about an adventurous geologist.
35:10
Speaker 1: Maybe, so I love it. So, Yeah, going back to
35:14
Speaker 1: underwater seems to be a better bet than because of
35:19
Speaker 1: stuff like the Great Unconformity. Going back underwater, where that
35:22
Speaker 1: process is of wearing stuff away is much much slower,
35:25
Speaker 1: is probably a better bet for us and a better
35:28
Speaker 1: bet for future geologists.
35:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, because all the stuff that enters the ocean, or
35:34
Speaker 2: is born and lives and dies in the ocean, it
35:36
Speaker 2: becomes detritus that eventually tumbles down to the ocean floor
35:42
Speaker 2: and it gets locked in as sediment there, and it
35:45
Speaker 2: happens really really slowly, Like I think zero point eight
35:50
Speaker 2: centimeters every thousand years is about the average sedimentation. So
35:55
Speaker 2: that means that so far we have accumulated about point
36:00
Speaker 2: one six centimeters of ocean sediment that would bear our presence,
36:04
Speaker 2: possibly even bear the signals that we ever lived. But
36:08
Speaker 2: we're doing we're adding to it every day thanks to
36:11
Speaker 2: things like nitrogen fertilizer that we overuse that enters the
36:17
Speaker 2: water sheds and eventually goes to the ocean and then
36:19
Speaker 2: goes and gets trapped in sediment. And so if you
36:22
Speaker 2: were a future archaeologist or geologist and you were looking
36:25
Speaker 2: at the layer where we existed, you'd be like, what
36:28
Speaker 2: is all this nitrogen suddenly doing here? And then also
36:33
Speaker 2: what are these weird polymers that used to be our plastic?
36:37
Speaker 2: From all this stuff, all the plastic that ends up
36:39
Speaker 2: in our oceans, those will eventually fall down to the
36:42
Speaker 2: bottom and become trapped in the sedimentary layer. Two.
36:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that super soaker that your kid lost beyond
36:50
Speaker 1: the point where the waves would bring it back in
36:53
Speaker 1: is eventually going to end up at the or the
36:55
Speaker 1: trash that is floating around the ocean. All that stuff
36:59
Speaker 1: is going to go down as well. And so this
37:02
Speaker 1: is going to lead behind like a trace, a sediment trace,
37:05
Speaker 1: where a future geologist might say, well, hey, I see
37:09
Speaker 1: that there was this specific time period one hundred million
37:13
Speaker 1: years ago where there was a spike in nitrogen, or
37:15
Speaker 1: a spike in these weird human made polymers, or maybe
37:19
Speaker 1: they didn't know that there were humans.
37:20
Speaker 2: But either way, like we're lizards.
37:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, something that doesn't jibe with what we have going
37:26
Speaker 1: on today. There are all these weird spikes, So there
37:29
Speaker 1: was clearly something going on in this time that we
37:32
Speaker 1: now think of as our time here on planet Earth.
37:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, because that's how we we find mysterious signals in
37:39
Speaker 2: the geological record. You compare it to what's above and
37:41
Speaker 2: what's below it. And if something suddenly appears or disappears,
37:44
Speaker 2: you know, like it's like look here, look closer here.
37:48
Speaker 2: Now radioactivity will probably be a marker that will be
37:51
Speaker 2: behind two from all the nuclear tests, there'll be plutonium
37:56
Speaker 2: two forty four and iodine one nine, which have half
37:59
Speaker 2: lives in the millions, tens of millions of years. If
38:02
Speaker 2: we end up going out in a massive nuclear war,
38:05
Speaker 2: you bet that will leave quite a signal in the
38:07
Speaker 2: geological record. And one of the other things about leaving
38:12
Speaker 2: like a record in oceanic crust is that the Earth
38:16
Speaker 2: goes through cycles of like cooling and warming and cooling
38:19
Speaker 2: and warming, and when it cools, the sea levels decline.
38:23
Speaker 2: It gets sucked up into ice, and so what's under
38:26
Speaker 2: the ocean may end up hundreds of miles inland, right
38:31
Speaker 2: future archaeologists to find, probably more easily than they would
38:35
Speaker 2: if it were underwater at the time.
38:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. So you know, sort of striking out
38:40
Speaker 1: all over the place such that our old astronomer friend
38:43
Speaker 1: Jason Wright is like, maybe Earth is not the place
38:46
Speaker 1: to look. Maybe you should be you know, we should
38:48
Speaker 1: be looking on a place like Mars that doesn't have
38:50
Speaker 1: plate tectonics and is probably a better, more hospitable place
38:56
Speaker 1: for some ancient thing to be discovered one day.
39:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, and not necessarily a Martian civilization, but an intelligent
39:03
Speaker 2: Earth civilization that sent probes to Mars or something like that.
39:08
Speaker 2: The European Space Agency also points out that if anybody
39:11
Speaker 2: had been around to send like a probe out into
39:15
Speaker 2: geosynchronous orbit the furthest reaches of geosynchronous orbit around Earth,
39:20
Speaker 2: it would still be there. It's orbit wouldn't have collapsed yet.
39:24
Speaker 2: So you know, we need to look for sixty six
39:28
Speaker 2: million year old probes spinning around Earth. That's a good
39:31
Speaker 2: good start too.
39:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, so all of this sort of presents a paradox
39:35
Speaker 1: it's pretty interesting, which is that if you're going to
39:38
Speaker 1: be an industrialized civilization that lasts long enough to leave
39:43
Speaker 1: something behind for some future geologists to find, then that
39:49
Speaker 1: means that you found some sort of sustainable way to survive.
39:54
Speaker 1: And if you found a sustainable way to survive, that
39:56
Speaker 1: means you're not making as much of a findable im
40:00
Speaker 1: packed on Earth. You're living more sustainably, and so you're
40:03
Speaker 1: not dumping plastics into the ocean or nitrogen into the
40:06
Speaker 1: ocean and sort of cleaning up your act and erasing
40:10
Speaker 1: your path a little bit better. If you're not doing that,
40:13
Speaker 1: then that means you haven't found a sustainable way to live.
40:16
Speaker 1: So that means you're going to as society die out
40:18
Speaker 1: much quicker, so you're going to be just a shorter blip.
40:22
Speaker 1: So either way, it's just going to make things more difficult.
40:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, whether you're long lived or short lived, the record
40:27
Speaker 2: you leave is going to end up just being a
40:29
Speaker 2: blip in the geological record.
40:31
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, again on that huge timeline.
40:34
Speaker 2: So like, I'm sure some people are pulling their hair out.
40:38
Speaker 2: They're like, how then, like it is even impossible to
40:42
Speaker 2: find signals that an ancient civilization existed or what signals
40:45
Speaker 2: will we leave too? And yes there are, And what
40:49
Speaker 2: you want to look for is not like traces of
40:52
Speaker 2: fossils or strange appearances of elements in the geological record
40:57
Speaker 2: and sediments. Instead, you want to look at the impressions
41:00
Speaker 2: that the effects of those things had on Earth, because
41:04
Speaker 2: those get locked into geological records and they can stay
41:07
Speaker 2: around for a very very long time, so much so
41:11
Speaker 2: that we can look back into Earth's far, far far
41:15
Speaker 2: distant past. Yeah, and we see signals that were like,
41:19
Speaker 2: can't rule out that this some industrialized ancient civilization produced
41:24
Speaker 2: these effects on Earth because we don't know what.
41:26
Speaker 1: Happened, yeah, exactly, And what we're talking about is something
41:30
Speaker 1: called a hyper thermal event where three things kind of
41:33
Speaker 1: line up, which is an abrupt extinction of maybe not everything,
41:39
Speaker 1: but many, many, many species. That's pretty obvious. That coincides
41:43
Speaker 1: with a build up of carbon in the atmosphere and
41:46
Speaker 1: a lot of rapid coastal erosion. All of those three
41:50
Speaker 1: things happening at once is called a hyper thermal event,
41:53
Speaker 1: and it's a pretty good indication that something really really
41:57
Speaker 1: big happened to wipe out most.
42:00
Speaker 2: Yes, and usually the hyperthermal events we found are caused
42:04
Speaker 2: by negative carbon isotope extrusions, which is basically just a
42:08
Speaker 2: different way of saying a ton of organic CO two
42:11
Speaker 2: was pumped into the atmosphere and it had all of
42:14
Speaker 2: these telltale marks, sea level rise leading to erosion, mass extinctions,
42:20
Speaker 2: dogs and cats living together, all that stuff, right, And
42:23
Speaker 2: so if we look in the past, there are events
42:26
Speaker 2: that coincide with this. One of them is the Paleocene
42:29
Speaker 2: Eocene Thermal Maximum, the PETM. It took place about fifty
42:33
Speaker 2: six million years ago, so basically after the dinosaurs died
42:37
Speaker 2: out and right after mammals started to take over Earth,
42:41
Speaker 2: it got really hot. And I was trying to figure
42:44
Speaker 2: out how hot the surface tempts and the Arctic Sea
42:49
Speaker 2: were about seventy three degrees farrenheight twenty three degrees celsius.
42:53
Speaker 2: That's what you find today around the Panhandle in the
42:56
Speaker 2: Gulf of Mexico. These are the Arctic seeds today. The
42:59
Speaker 2: global annual surface temperatures about fifty nine degrees farent height
43:03
Speaker 2: fifteen celsius. Yeah, back then it was ninety degrees farent
43:06
Speaker 2: hyder thirty two degrees celsius. Like, that's the global temperature,
43:10
Speaker 2: the average across all of the globe. So it was
43:13
Speaker 2: really really hot. And they have traced that to tons
43:16
Speaker 2: of carbon dioxide suddenly appearing in the atmosphere causing all
43:20
Speaker 2: these changes.
43:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that lasted for about one hundred thousand years.
43:24
Speaker 1: But that's not the only one. There have been other
43:27
Speaker 1: events similar to that in the Cretaceous period, in the
43:31
Speaker 1: Jurassic period, in the Palaeozoic era, and then in the
43:36
Speaker 1: six million years since the PETM the Paleocene Eocene thermal Maximum,
43:43
Speaker 1: there were even more of those hyper thermal events. And
43:46
Speaker 1: again they sort of all bore the same similarities, right.
43:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, because there's only so many ways that Earth responds
43:54
Speaker 2: to being messed with yeah, and so like all of
43:58
Speaker 2: these things kind of do bear a strike similarity, and
44:02
Speaker 2: there are things, there's natural things that you can point
44:04
Speaker 2: to that could have caused them, like massive volcanic activity
44:08
Speaker 2: across Earth, or a sudden huge depositive shale ended up
44:12
Speaker 2: in the mantle and got recycled very quickly, and all
44:15
Speaker 2: sorts of CO two was released in the air. Who knows.
44:18
Speaker 2: But what Schmidt and Frank basically point too is like,
44:23
Speaker 2: and again they don't think this is correct. They say, like,
44:27
Speaker 2: you can't rule out, yeah, that this is a marker
44:30
Speaker 2: of an ancient civilization creating climate change in exactly the
44:34
Speaker 2: same way that we're creating climate change today, because we
44:38
Speaker 2: are laying down the foundations of a geological signal that
44:44
Speaker 2: will be detectable hundreds of millions of years in the
44:46
Speaker 2: future as a hyper thermal exactly like the ancient hyper
44:51
Speaker 2: thermals we've discovered in Earth's past.
44:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is basically, if we do ourselves in with
44:57
Speaker 1: climate change.
44:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, because they're predicting if we just keep going with
45:00
Speaker 2: fossil fuels just for the rest of the century, by
45:03
Speaker 2: the end of the century, will have increased the global
45:06
Speaker 2: temperature by about four point eight degrees celsius, which is huge.
45:10
Speaker 2: Is that qualifies as a hyper thermal maximum, and that
45:14
Speaker 2: PETM like the biggest hyper thermal maximum that ever happened
45:17
Speaker 2: all of a sudden, that took place over like one
45:19
Speaker 2: thousand plus years. We're doing this in a couple hundred years,
45:24
Speaker 2: so it will really stick out in the geological record.
45:27
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think the PETM had a five to seven
45:33
Speaker 1: celsius degree rise, and if we're looking at four point
45:36
Speaker 1: eight in that spend of time, that's trouble.
45:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's just by the end of the century.
45:40
Speaker 2: Who knows if we just keep going. We're not quite
45:42
Speaker 2: sure when the whole thing will study itself out and
45:45
Speaker 2: what the peaks will be when it does, you know.
45:47
Speaker 1: Yeah.
45:48
Speaker 2: So there's one other thing that I found really interesting
45:50
Speaker 2: is that the fossil fuels that we're using to create
45:55
Speaker 2: inadvertently this hyperthermal and Earth's geological record is create from
46:00
Speaker 2: the mass extinctions from the past. Those die offs turned
46:05
Speaker 2: into fossil fuels that we use today to essentially add
46:11
Speaker 2: all that carbon to the atmosphere, which is creating these
46:14
Speaker 2: warmer conditions. Yeah. And then if you take it one
46:18
Speaker 2: step further, We're eventually going to create these mass extinctions
46:21
Speaker 2: that will create the fossil fuels for another industrialized civilization
46:25
Speaker 2: to come tens of millions of years in the future.
46:29
Speaker 1: That's right. We're just insignificant, aren't we. Yeah, but also
46:33
Speaker 1: overly significant somehow.
46:36
Speaker 2: That's right. If you really want to get that driven home,
46:39
Speaker 2: go read Peter Brandon's The Anthropistine as a joke. It
46:42
Speaker 2: really it almost made me feel like fine about climate
46:45
Speaker 2: change because it just in the grand scheme of things,
46:48
Speaker 2: it's so insignificant. I had to be like, no, no,
46:50
Speaker 2: it matters. It's important. Stop thinking like that. Yeah, uh
46:55
Speaker 2: so you got anything else?
46:57
Speaker 1: I got nothing else. This is long a way did
47:00
Speaker 1: for us and a lot of fun.
47:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's hope we remembered the press record.
47:04
Speaker 1: Oh god, I would just retire.
47:09
Speaker 2: Well, since Chuck said he would just retire, of course,
47:11
Speaker 2: that means he's triggered.
47:12
Speaker 1: Listener mail, Yes, this is a story from Dylan. This
47:19
Speaker 1: is one that I know about or knew about, but
47:22
Speaker 1: I don't know if we ever talked about it. But
47:24
Speaker 1: it's a pretty interesting little thing. Okay, hey guys, I've
47:28
Speaker 1: been listening to you for about two years. Helps cut
47:30
Speaker 1: down on my commute and I often learn a lot
47:32
Speaker 1: during the hitchhiking up. You were talking about the Curb
47:35
Speaker 1: Your Enthusiasm episode where Larry David picks up a sex
47:39
Speaker 1: worker so he can ride in the carpool lane to
47:41
Speaker 1: a Dodgers game, and I wanted to let you know
47:43
Speaker 1: something about that episode. Did you know this?
47:45
Speaker 2: No? I thought this was amazing.
47:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, that episode was actually used to help secure an
47:51
Speaker 1: alibi for a man, Juan Catalan, who is arrested for murder.
47:55
Speaker 1: They filmed the episode during an actual Dodgers game, and
47:58
Speaker 1: it just so happened that one and his family were
48:00
Speaker 1: sitting in the same section as Larry David when they
48:03
Speaker 1: were filming, and Wan's lawyer used the raw footage from
48:06
Speaker 1: the episode to help exonerate him. So they picked up
48:09
Speaker 1: this guy for murder. Yeah, and they proved him wrong
48:12
Speaker 1: thanks to this Curby Your Enthusiasm footage. He was like
48:15
Speaker 1: he was at the Dodger game. He couldn't have done it.
48:17
Speaker 2: God did not want one in jail.
48:19
Speaker 1: Amazing. There's a short documentary on Netflix called long Shot,
48:23
Speaker 1: and it is truly one of the stories you can't
48:25
Speaker 1: believe is true. Thanks for the years of entertainment. I
48:28
Speaker 1: love sharing the knowledge with you guys, food Listener mail,
48:31
Speaker 1: Stay positive and keep testing negative. Dylan.
48:35
Speaker 2: Awesome, Dylan, You're a cool cat we can tell. Thanks
48:38
Speaker 2: a lot for that great email. That was amazing and
48:40
Speaker 2: we will definitely go watch Long Shot very soon.
48:43
Speaker 1: Totally.
48:44
Speaker 2: Do you want to get in touch with this like
48:45
Speaker 2: Dylan did, You can send us an email. Send it
48:47
Speaker 2: off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
48:54
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
48:57
Speaker 1: more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio up Apple Podcasts,
49:01
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
49:09
Speaker 2: MHM