Listener Questions #17

24:21So we wouldn't have tides to mix the primordial soup. We wouldn't necessarily have as much of a tilted axis. Even nocturnal predators wouldn't have the light of the moon at night to hunt. The moon has been there for so long that it's kind of interesting to see how it would be different without it. But also, there are so many planets that have more than one moon. We're kind of unique in that way. How would life evolve differently with more moons? I know there's a lot to unpack there. I appreciate all the hard work. Keep it up. Look forward to hearing from you guys. Well, this is a great question, which is exactly what I would expect for a fellow citizen of Virginia.

25:06Which is what, a Virginian? Is this a Richmondian? rich mindian virginian richard is a virginian a fellow virginian and richard is doing something which i do all the time and which i love seeing in people which is thinking about how the universe could be different why is it this way and that's like one of the big questions of science that's why we do science to understand is the way our universe works an accident is it happen for a reason? Are those reasons important? Do they determine why we're here? All these things help unravel the context of our lives. So yeah, awesome, Robert. Thank you for thinking big.

25:45Or maybe Robert's just writing a science fiction novel and needs some help. And we're happy to do that too. Yeah, no problem. No problem. So this question has a lot of angles. You could think about whether life would have evolved if Earth never had a moon, or you could think about what would happen if we lost our moon? So I started with that one because it's sort of like a fun science fiction scenario. Like, hey, we have a moon. Are we going to have it forever? Is it possible we could lose our moon? And the answer to that is yes. You know, people think about the solar system as sort of static and this slow moving parade of planets around the sun that's been happening forever.

26:22But that's not true. The solar system is kind of chaotic. It's just on longer time scales than we mostly think about. The order of the planets we have today is not the same order of the planets we've had forever. Planets have migrated in and then migrated out. There are theories that we had another gas giant that when Jupiter and Saturn migrated to the inner solar system and then back out, one of these was tossed into outer space. So there might be like a lost sibling planet out there. I like to imagine the noise it made as it got flung out into space. Why me?

26:59Exactly. And maybe that planet had like the best climate in the whole solar system. Maybe the solar system lost its California in that interaction. That's fine. And we'll never know. That's fine. And so in a similar way, we could lose our moon. You know, something could like hit the moon and deflect it and knock it out of orbit. In fact, right now, scientists are tracking a new interstellar comet. This is a piece of the universe that comes from another star, like a big chunk of rock and ice thrown out of another solar system that's passing through ours. And we don't think it's going to hit the Earth or that close, but it's moving really, really fast.

27:36And if it did hit the Earth, wow, that would be devastating. And if it hit the moon, it could certainly knock it out of orbit. You know, I remember when I heard that, my first thought was, oh, all right, hitting the moon, that would be like a bummer for a lot of reasons. But that would be better. And then I'm like, wait a minute, maybe that wouldn't be better. Or it would be better, but like not much better. In fact, there's a great science fiction novel called Seven Eves, which starts out with some aliens basically destroying our moon. It's never really explained how it happens, but most of the book has to do with trying to survive the destruction of the moon.

28:10Because if it turns into rubble and then starts falling to Earth, then you're filling the atmosphere with this stuff. And you basically have a nuclear holocaust on Earth. It's end of days kind of stuff. So we don't want our moon to be obliterated into dust, but it could also just be knocked out of our orbit. We could just lose it and go wandering into the solar system. And so that lets us think about like, well, what would life be like on Earth if we didn't explode the moon, if it just sort of like drifted away somehow? Well, the moon plays a big role in biological experience, right? We know, for example, that the moon causes tides, right?

28:43High tide and low tide. This is because of gravitational tidal forces. That's why they're called tidal forces. And the physics here is really fun. And it sounds complicated because it's gravity and all that stuff, but it's pretty basic. You know, one side of the Earth is closer to the moon than the other side of the Earth. And so the moon's gravity pulls on the Earth harder on the closer side than the further side. So it turns the Earth into something like a football instead of a sphere. It's like squeezing the Earth. And the water on the Earth is the squishiest bit. And so it responds the most.

29:11Most people don't realize, though, that all of the Earth gets squeezed. They're these things called land tides that move the distance of the surface of the earth relative to the center by meters. Yes. As the moon goes around the earth, it squeezes and massages the earth, changes its shape. Not just the water, but the land also changes its shape. Lies. That's amazing. Yes. These are lies propagated by flies that the government drops over California. Infected with conspiracy theories. Mm-hmm. Well, you could be dropping worse things probably. Yeah. So most people know about the moon's effect on water tides, but not so much about the moon's effect on the earth, right?

29:54And also the sun gives us tides, right? Like the sun is much further away, but it's also much more massive. So if you got rid of the moon, we would still have tides, right? Tides are a combination of the sun's tides and the moon's tides, which is one reason why tides are complicated. Like if you look at a tidal chart, it's never like it goes up, it goes down, it goes up, it goes down. It's a simple sinusoid. It's complicated. It goes up, it goes down, it comes up less, it goes down more. It's really complicated. And that's due to the sun and the moon and the shape of the inlets and stuff. Tides are really complicated.

30:25Isaac Newton started working on them hundreds of years ago. And it wasn't until like 100 years ago or so that we had a pretty solid understanding of the physics there. Tides made my PhD super confusing. Because I had to go out and collect snails when the tide was low. And I would always think like, oh, I remember when the tide was the other day. I'm going to extrapolate forward. And, you know, it was not as predictable as I wanted it to be. Yeah, I know. They're complicated. Yeah. And people think that this complexity might have really been important for the development of life. Like, number one, if you got rid of the tides, a lot of life by the seashore would be very confused.

31:02And a lot of assumptions they make and things they rely on would be thrown into chaos. So the conditions for life on Earth would be drastically different. And some things would live and some things would not live. But also historically, people imagine that tides played a role in the evolution of life, that when you're on the border between fresh water and salt water, you have these brackish water systems. And there's a lot of mixing up that happens. And you can imagine water sloshing up into these tide pools and mixing this bit of biochemistry with that bit of biochemistry. And maybe that even plays a role in abiogenesis.

31:34A lot of this is very speculative, right? Like, hmm, maybe it is. And this seems like a compelling story. None of it is the kind of science where we can like, let's do the experiment. Let's have an earth without a moon and an earth with moons. And let's see if life starts more often. It's just sort of more like a reasonable sounding story. And that doesn't make it like non-scientific. It just means, hey, this is the most we can do right now. Sort of think about it clearly and try to imagine. So we don't know the answer to like, could life have evolved without a moon? Would life evolve differently without a moon?

32:06But there are strong arguments to make that it's certainly possible. So estuaries are ecosystems where freshwater meets saltwater. If you didn't have the moon, would estuaries narrow? Yeah, there'd be a narrower band there, right? Because it'd be less mixing, right? Because the moon brings the saltwater up further into the freshwater. Absolutely. Estuaries play an important role for ecological services and they're economically important because they end up being places where baby crabs and baby fish that we like to eat start their lives. So anyway, let's keep the moon. There, I've decided. The moon makes things yummy.

32:44Yeah, sure. Yeah, the moon makes yummy things. And the moon also affects global weather in other ways because it changes current patterns. You know, it helps stabilize climates by mixing up the air. Like it's pulling on the air as well. So it's not just water. It has all sorts of effects on the air and on the land. In addition, of course, the moon provides light at night, right? It's like essentially a huge mirror in space reflecting the sun down to earth. And so any critter that takes advantage of a little bit of moonlight for hunting is going to be disadvantaged. This is another in the category of things would be different.

33:20We don't know exactly what that would mean, but we can sort of speculate intelligently. And it seems certain that it would dramatically change the conditions for life. Would it be good for our favorite creatures, which are rats? Would it help them hide at night? It would. It'd be good for rats that are out at night, especially because it'd be bad for owls, right? Owls that do a lot of rat eating. But also it would be good for astronomers. You know, having a moon is really bad when you're on the ground with your telescope and you want to look at some star and then boom, you have this huge sun mirror shining into your eyeballs.

33:55It's a lot harder to have dark nights. So a lot of our dark nights are ruined by a moon. So, you know, maybe there's a conspiracy out there among astronomers to get rid of the moon. Hey, guys, knock it off. Knock it off. We need the moon. And there's even more dramatic effects that the moon plays on the Earth. It's not just the tides. It's not just the air. It's not just the night. But the Earth's rotation and tilt are strongly affected by the moon because the moon is pretty big, like especially for our moon, right? Lots of moons in the solar system are much smaller than our moon. but our moon is big enough that it carries a significant fraction of the angular energy of the earth moon system so people think that the earth rotation itself is affected by having a moon and that the tilt of the earth is sort of moderated by the moon so like if we didn't have a moon earth tilt might be even crazier might be much deeper that would affect seasons it absolutely would affect seasons or it could also have no tilt right and we can end up with no seasons And so the Earth's rotation and the Earth's tilt is a product of this balance between the Earth and the moon.

35:02And there's another fun thing that's happening there, which is that as these two are sort of massaging each other, right, tidal, and they're using their angular momentum to massage each other, and it takes some energy to squeeze the Earth into a football. As it does that, it's losing some of its angular momentum. And so the moon is actually getting further and further away from us every year. And not by like some tiny amount, like microns or something. It's happening by one centimeter per year. I mean, that's still a tiny amount. I thought you were going to tell me like a mile a year or something.

35:35But, you know, I'm still concerned because I'm Kelly and I'm concerned about everything. But like the centimeter doesn't sound like a lot. Convince me it's a lot. Well, it's not a lot for a year. But if you have a lot of years, that's a lot of centimeters. Imagine what the moon might have looked like a million years ago or two million years ago as our ancestors are walking across the plane. they had a bigger moon in their night than we did. Dinosaurs saw a bigger moon. Yes, exactly. Oh, that's kind of cool. Yeah. Okay. Dinosaur astronomers had an easier time understanding the surface of the moon because it was closer.

36:09Now I care. Did dinosaur entomologists drop sterile insects on Californians? Californians? One of my favorite dinosaur stories is somebody who reconstructed the path of the asteroid that hit the earth 65 million years ago. And at least one of the possible paths includes a close flyby before it actually hit. So that means that dinosaur astronomers had plenty of warning. Oh, wow. They could have seen this thing in the sky before it hit like weeks beforehand and prepared. But man, they didn't fund astronomy enough. So there's a lesson, folks. Fund astronomy. That's right. Dinosaur NASA should have gotten a lot more money.

36:49And on that note, you know, this interstellar comet is fascinating and it's not going to hit the Earth. So nobody should worry. But, you know, if it was pointed at the Earth, then we would have very little time to do anything about it, which means we should be getting ready to do something about it before we spot these things. So like we really should be spending more time and energy on Earth Protective Services, if you ask me. So that's two squares on your DKEU bingo card, if you're not keeping track. There's existential dread and more funding for science. Especially because these things could be lobbed in our direction by aliens.

37:23So there's another bingo square for you. Oh, bing! Yep, yep, yeah. Oh, sorry. We still got to hit on cannibalism and poop. We'll get there. All right. So if we lost our moon or if Earth never had a moon, we're looking at a very different situation for life. We know that life on Earth would change a lot or may have not evolved or could have evolved very differently. I don't have any reason to believe this, but my hunch is that if Earth didn't have a moon, we still might have gotten life. It just would be very different. It's easy to say these conditions were required for life to turn out as we know it.

37:56Therefore, life wouldn't have evolved if you don't have those conditions. But I think it's also equally likely that life just would have been weirder and different. But the other side of Robert's question is not just losing our moon, but what about more moons? What if Earth had two moons or seven moons? What would that be like? And is that possible? And yes, it is still possible at this fairly mature stage in the solar system to get more moons. We think this happened a lot with Jupiter and Saturn, for example. Some of their moons were formed as the planets formed, sort of leftover stuff that was too far out and moving too fast to fall into the planet, sort of the same way the planets didn't fall into the sun.

38:30And these moons tend to orbit in the plane of the solar system. But some of the moons have like wacky orbits. And this might be because they're captured. They're just something that came by and the gravity of Jupiter or Saturn grabbed onto it. And so the Earth could do that too. You have some chunk of stuff from another solar system or from somewhere else in the solar system comes by at the right angle and the right velocity. The Earth could grab it and then we could get two moons. And then we'd have even wackier tides. If you had to guess probabilistically, if something comes close to Earth. Yeah, zero.

39:03Oh, yeah. Okay. So it would be more likely to smack into us and do damage than create another moon, right? Yeah, absolutely. Most likely it hits us or it totally misses us. But to get captured, you need to have exactly the right velocity and radius match, right? Like, you know, first year physics, you can do the orbital mechanics. At every radius from the Earth, you need a specific velocity in order to be in orbit. And so those things have to match and the angle has to match. And so, yeah, it's unlikely. But, you know, obviously it has happened. There definitely are moons that have been captured.

39:32So it could happen to us. Whoa. And so it would affect the tides. They would be even more complicated for grad students trying to plan their experiments. Trying to go get snails. Yeah. It could affect the Earth's tilt and spin if it's a big thing. Right. So it could have a real impact. And those two moons then would have complicated interactions. They could even like squeeze each other and induce like, you know, stuff going on inside those moons. You could end up with like a volcanic moon in the sky. That would be pretty awesome. Could we get a ring? Could they break each other apart and give us a ring?

40:03Absolutely, yeah. The moon could destroy the other one or the other one could destroy the moon. We could end up with a ring. It could be really fascinating. So is this something you should worry about? It's pretty unlikely that we would lose our moon any time in your lifetime or your children's lifetime or the next thousand years. If we lose the moon, it's pretty survivable. If the moon gets destroyed, then yeah, you'll be glad you built that bunker. But, you know, I think you have bigger things to worry about. I think you should be more worried about screw worm than moons. And science funding.

40:34And science funding. All right. Well, thanks very much for that question, Robert. Let me know how your science fiction novel is turning out. Awesome. Thank you, guys. So basically, we don't know. And I kind of love when this happens because it's finding the edges of what we know and don't know. And it just shines a light on areas of future research, you know? Maybe if we figure out how the moon or moons might play a part in evolution, then that might help future SETI-type programs to search for exoplanets with only one moon, if we find that that's a critical part of life creation. or focus on planets that have moons and ignore the ones that don't, whatever that case is.

41:18But I appreciate it. Thank you very much. And yay, go fund research.

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43:44all right we're back and we're answering questions from listeners and we're going back from physics into the gross world of biology so finish up that snack before you listen to the rest of this episode let's listen to a fantastic question from anthony Hello, Daniel and Kelly. I'm Anthony from Orlando, Florida. I enjoy your podcast and learn a great deal from you both. Your recent conversation on prions was fascinating and scary. I believe there was a comment in that discussion on synthetic blood. What is the progress in developing synthetic blood for general use? Are we any closer to it being used?

44:23Would it be universal or type like regular blood. Again, thank you and love your podcast. All right, Kelly. So what is blood anyway? Yeah. So it's complicated. It's not, it depends, but it's complicated. So blood, depending on how you want to slice it, blood can be three or more things. So one of them is plasma. This is like the fluidy part of your blood. It's something like 55 % of your blood. I've never understood why do they call it plasma? Because to me, plasma is a gas that's been heated it up until you get ions. Is there some similarity between physics plasma and blood plasma? Gosh, you know, if I had to put money on it, our plasma came first.

45:05And so I don't know the answer, but you guys probably stole it from us. Fair, fair. All right. So it carries stuff around like electrolytes and hormones and antibodies is made by your immune system. And it's the bulk of blood, like 55 % of blood. It also carries around stuff that helps with coagulation. So like when you get a cut and your cut sort of clots up and makes a scab. And then about 44 % is red blood cells. And inside of the red blood cells is hemoglobin. And hemoglobin is what carries oxygen to different parts of your body. And then the last part is platelets. And these are like little parts of cells that are really important for coagulation and clotting up wounds.

45:57So as somebody who's naive about biology, I always imagine the blood is like, you know, it's a circulatory system. It's like the highway for the body. Everything that needs to go from one place to another gets dumped into the blood and then somebody else pulls it out. And so we're talking about water, electrolytes, antibodies, red blood cells, platelets, all this stuff is just flowing through the blood and useful to some bits of the body. Is that fair? Yes. Your blood vessels are the highway system moving the blood around. So then why do we have different types of blood? What makes blood A or B or O or whatever?

46:25Yeah, right. So we've known about this for a while. So I'm just going to quick back up into history. So for a while, we were like infusing blood from dogs into people or blood from lambs into people. Actually, I think it was mostly lambs. And there was a bit of a religious, like, lambs are sort of innocent, lamb of God sort of thing. And so that's the right kind of animal to be putting into our bodies. And so for a while, lamb blood was going into people. But we learned that not only is it bad to put blood from other animals into humans, it can also be bad to switch blood from one human to another.

46:59and Austrian physician Carl Landsteiner in 1900 started mixing up different blood from different people and he was like well sometimes when you mix blood together it coagulates and sometimes it doesn't and it's always the same if you take blood from he wasn't doing these experiments in people he was like doing this in the lab as I understand it he was extracting blood from people in his lab and he was like you know if you extract blood from person a and person b every time you do that and mix the bloods together, it clots. But person A and person C's blood every time you do, it doesn't clot when you put them together.

47:33So what the heck is going on there? And he eventually gets the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for sort of figuring this out. And the answer is that blood have proteins that are sticking out on the cells. And some people have different kinds of proteins than others. And if two people have different proteins on their blood cells, then your immune system will recognize it as foreign and attack it. And that's what the clots are? And the clots are like the immune system clumping it up? Yes, exactly. Yeah. And so but so you asked, why do we have different blood types? And the answer, we do not know.

48:07And so for a while, it was popular to postulate that it had something to do with like our ancestry and where we came from, like type A blood is maybe, you know, like hunter gatherers. And so those people actually should be eating more of like a hunter gatherer diet because their blood is like, that's what it evolved for. But the answer is that blood types show up in primates before humans. So, you know, chimpanzees have blood types and we don't really understand. It could have something to do with differences in immune functioning. So, you know, maybe people with type A blood might be more susceptible to some virus that sweeps through the population and type B blood would be less susceptible.

48:46And this variability popped up at some point and then was retained because it helped some parts of the population avoid diseases. But the answer is we really don't know, but it happened before humans came around. All right. So then it can't be explained by, for example, irradiated flesh-eating flies distributed on the population by the government. Guys, those flies that are irradiated, it's a good thing. It's a good thing. The science is helping us. You Californians are always jumping to conspiracy theories. Oh, it's just so fun. It's just so easy. Now I see why they do it. It feels good, doesn't it?

49:23Yeah. You don't need evidence. It just needs a compelling story. That's right. All right. So we have all these things inside the blood. So why do we think about synthetic blood? Why do people work on making fake blood? So right now what we do is we get blood from donors. And that's great. And when you donate blood, often what happens is your blood is sort of separated out into different parts. The red blood cells, the plasma, the platelets. and they can go to different people depending on their need. A major need for blood, though, is trauma. So, you know, for example, if you get into a car accident and you lose a lot of blood when you get to the ER or when you get into the ambulance, they might want to try to increase the amount of blood that you have.

50:01And so donated blood gets used for that purpose. And then another important use for blood is in wartime. And here it's particularly hard to transport blood from blood banks back home because blood has a shelf life. So red blood cells are good for a bit more than a month, month and a half, depending on where you are and what their rules are. I think platelets are good for something like a week. And so this stuff isn't good indefinitely, and it takes a long time to get it from a bank to overseas, for example, if you're talking about a war situation. And so having synthetic blood would be great not only for these situations where, you know, it's hard to get the blood to where it needs to go, but also every once in a while we have shortages.

50:46So, for example, the Red Cross has declared blood shortages at different times. And so if you can't get enough blood from people, it would be nice to have synthetic blood. And the purpose of synthetic blood is really just to hold you over until your body can start making your own. Wouldn't it also be nice to have synthetic blood because then you could prevent like the spread of bloodborne diseases, right? Yeah. So, I mean, that's worth considering. But at this point, we have a lot of complicated screening procedures to find out if blood is carrying infections. And I believe that we extract out, for example, white blood cells before you give people blood because white blood cells could be carrying things like HIV.

51:24And so the probability that you pick up a disease from a transfusion in the United States and the UK is very low. It might be higher in other parts of the world, but we're very careful about screening it here. Yeah. And so how do the various human blood types connect to this question of like making synthetic blood where we have to make several different synthetic blood types? Well, so that's the great thing about synthetic blood is hopefully you don't have to worry about typing anymore because you can make synthetic blood that doesn't have those sort of proteins sticking on the outside that are going to attract the attention of the immune system.

51:56And so it would be helpful, for example, like, you know, imagine there's an accident and somebody whose blood type you don't know is going to need a bunch of blood. I guess you need to take all of the different kinds of blood with you, and then you need to take the time to get a small sample of blood from the trauma patients to figure out what kind of blood they have, or at least you need to make sure you've got enough of the universal donor's blood, which is type O, to bring with you. So it would be much less complicated if you didn't have to worry about blood typing at all, and you could just universally have a synthetic blood that you could bring with you that was more shelf-stable.

52:30This would solve a lot of problems. so most of the research so far has been done on making synthetic red blood cells so this is again about 45 of what blood is made of uh and initially what they were doing was they just got hemoglobin which is the part that binds to the oxygen and they were putting hemoglobin in people they were like well the important thing is the oxygen transport in an emergency to keep everything going yeah but hemoglobin interacts with other kinds of oxygen in the body so nitric oxide is used by our blood vessels to control vasodilation and vasoconstriction. So essentially to control how open or closed your blood vessels are.

53:11And so just putting hemoglobin in meant that the hemoglobin could interact with the nitric oxide and could tinker with vasodilation. That sounds bad. Or at least that was what was claimed by a meta-analysis that sort of changed the way the whole field felt about these things. And so, for example, there's a product called Hemopure, which was developed in the 90s. And it's essentially cow hemoglobin, which has been purified. And now it's only used in compassionate use cases like you absolutely need it to try to save someone's life. But there's some concern about it, you know, messing with vasodilation.

53:46But some doctors still use it. And in fact, there are doctors who argue that like, look, this isn't actually a massive problem because people are only using this for like a day or two before their body can start making enough red blood cells to replace them. This isn't a real long-term problem. We're overreacting. But the field has essentially decided that this pure hemoglobin route is not the best way to go. So what do you do? So there's a new company called Erythramir, and they're making a red blood cell analog. So essentially what they do is they get hemoglobin. In this case, they are extracting hemoglobin from blood that has been donated but is now past its shelf life.

54:28So if that blood doesn't get given to someone in time, they take it, they remove the red blood cell outer part, they extract the hemoglobin, and then they put the hemoglobin in a lipid layer that they have made. So they essentially like enclose it in a tiny fatty capsule. It's smaller than a usual red blood cell, but it keeps the hemoglobin from interacting with the nitric oxide and messing with the vasodilation stuff. And this is actually a really clever molecule. So it's pH sensitive, which is important. So when it goes to the lungs and you have high pH, it allows oxygen to bind to the hemoglobin.

55:07And then when you get to the parts of your body that are in need of oxygen, that ends up being a low pH environment. And the hemoglobin can like let go of the oxygen and the oxygen can go oxygenate your other cells like it needs to. which is like kind of fascinating to me. Like what a cool thing to have been able to figure out. And it's universal. So there's no compatibility problems. You don't have to type a patient beforehand. It's a freeze dried powder. And so you mix it with saline. So you essentially get this like plastic bag that with the divider in the center and you've got the like freeze dried erythromere on one side and saline on the other side, which is like salt water.

55:45That's the same sort of saltiness as our blood. and then you like break the divider between them. You mix the whole bag up and now you've got red blood cells or, you know, synthetic red blood cells that you're ready to give to a patient. And they're thinking this could be shelf-stable for up to two years. And they've like tried this at work that like actually carries the oxygen in the way that you need? They have done experiments on animals and it seems to be doing well in the animals and it seems like their lipid case for the hemoglobin gets, you know, processed by the digestive system the way you would expect it to.

56:19And you sort of pee it out when you're done with it. And so the animal studies so far have been promising. And a lead guy on the project is Dr. Doctor. And so I feel like we have to trust that this is being done well. Like his last name is Doctor and he has the title of Doctor. That's exactly right. Yes. And if he was at a German university, he could be like, Doctor Professor, Doctor Doctor. Yeah. Yes. Amazing. We should move him to Germany. So I'm really surprised that you can replace red blood cells with something so simple. Like, aren't red blood cells complicated? Aren't they doing something else?

56:55Is there anything else that red blood cells are doing that we're not capturing with just hemoglobin in a fatty drop? Probably, but you really just need to keep someone alive for, again, for the time that it makes for their bone marrow to make their own red blood cells. And so this is definitely just a short term solution to keep your heart kicking so that you have time to, you know, do the recovery on your own. This seems kind of amazing. Is this something you think we're going to see in hospitals and trauma centers? I think they're going to be starting experiments in humans in the not too distant future.

57:28So it's possible we'll see this. But but this is really hard because like, who do you decide to give it to first? It's going to be tough to design the human trials because we know that red blood cells donated from a human work. And so figuring out the first person who you're going to be like, oh, no, you're in a trauma situation. You might die, but we're going to give you this experimental thing, even though we could give you this other thing that we know would work. You know, that's a little bit difficult. And so I'm sure they're going to have a little bit of trouble designing and finding the right population to try this on.

57:56You can imagine the compassionate use. you could give this to trauma centers and then when they are in a situation where they just don't have blood and somebody's going to die, they're like, all right, well, let's dip into the fake stuff. Yes, absolutely. Yep. Or you could send it to folks who are out at the front lines in a war and they might not be able to blood type someone or something like that. So they can't tell and they might not be able to get blood donations. And so, yes, you absolutely can imagine situations where having this on hand as a backup could get you the data that you need.

58:28All right. And what about the rest of the blood? What about synthetic platelets? Yeah. So Dr. Ashley Brown's lab at North Carolina State University has a platelet-like particle that is in animal testing right now. And the animal tests have gone pretty well. So essentially what they did was they've got this like very tiny nanoparticle that they made. And it's like a tiny micro gel. So it's sort of soft and squishy. and they've attached to it a protein that binds with this thing called fibrin. So when your body starts to make a clot, fibrin is a protein that's used to sort of get that clot sticking together.

59:03And so essentially your body starts dealing with the wound and then you're putting this stuff in there, which is going to bind with the fibrin that's already in the clot and it's going to move the clotting process along more quickly. So it essentially finds where clots are forming by having this antibody that binds with something you find in clots. Or at least that's my understanding. And so they did it in mice and pigs and things went well. They said that they might be a few years before human trials and there's things that they want to do, like get clumping to work a little bit better. And this is definitely not like, oh, hey, we have created platelets again and everything that platelets do, we're able to do with this synthetic product.

59:44But it could be a really good measure for like, again, You know, there's a trauma situation. You just got to get somebody to the point where their body can recover and take over this work on its own. And so anyway, so the take home, Anthony wanted to know, how close are we? And the answer is that we've got synthetic blood components that are being tested in non-human animals, and the current designs would be universal if they work out. But we're mostly in the trial phase, and so we're still relying on blood from human donors more than anything else. There are some other products on the market that we didn't talk about, but sort of in general at the moment, we are mostly relying on human donors.

1:00:23And I'm sorry for all the vampires out there who still have some work left to do. true blood is not ready yet. I'm so glad you made a vampire joke because I feel bad. I fell down on the opportunity to make a werewolf joke in the moon question. You know, I know. So. Oh my gosh, Daniel, we could have had zombies and werewolves. And you know what? Let's, let's start recording again. We're going to do this again. All right. Well, that's exciting. And I'm also sort of surprised you're sort of like optimistic and upbeat about this. This seems like great news. have you spent some time in california recently what's going on no i know i'm surprised too uh you know i didn't get enough sleep and you know the it so all right here let's go ahead and we'll we'll do the kelly treatment all right it should be worth noting that we have tried things in the past that have not stuck so for example you know that the straight up hemoglobin without a like lipid layer you know was tried and we ended up deciding this is not really the solution for us So it's possible that will happen with these other things that we talked about today, too.

1:01:25So there's the Kelly treatment. All right. A little bit of cold water. But yeah, on the whole, this seems very promising. Yeah, it does. It does. And so I am really looking forward to when the vampires can come out of hiding and we can start dating them. Yay, science. That's right. That's right. All right. Well, let's see what Anthony thinks about our answer on synthetic blood. Daniel and Kelly, as usual, you guys knocked it out the park. I appreciate your answers. I learned a great deal. I was particularly interested in this because I have relatives whose religious convictions would prevent them from accepting blood transfusions.

1:02:04Perhaps as this science develops, they'll have another choice or an alternate decision that can save their lives possibly. I appreciate your answers. Love your podcast. Thank you. Okay, thank you everybody for these wonderful questions. We love hearing from you. Please do write to us to questions at danielandkelly.org. We say we will write back to everybody and we really, really mean it. We want to hear from you so that you can hear from us. We look forward to hearing from you. Have a good one.

1:02:37Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D &K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. Ice Cube's Big 3 season is heating up, and it all comes down to this.

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