Introducing: The Rest Is Science

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1:24Hannah Fry:Hello, Daily Brightness listeners. I'm Michael Stevens. And I'm Professor Hannah Fry. Well, OK, firstly, thank you to these amazing hosts for letting us take over your channel to tell you about our new show for Goalhanger, The Rest is Science. Every week we take a fresh look at the familiar. We're going to be exploring the forces, the theories and the phenomena that shape how we live in, think about and see the world. we're going to pull apart what we take for granted to reveal the unexpected patterns and hidden logic just beneath the surface.

1:56Michael Stevens:Because that's what moves science forward. Not the polishing of answers, but the sharpening of questions. It's curiosity that sparks those, hey, wait, how does that actually work? Kind of a moment that changes the way we see the world.

2:09Hannah Fry:So, okay, here is a little glimpse of what is to come from our podcast. And if it sparks something unexplainable for you, then you can join us every Tuesday and Thursday for new episodes of The Rest is Science and we'll figure it out together.

2:23Michael Stevens:You mentioned earlier that a cup of water is like a rock smoothie, right? Because you've got rocks dissolved in it, magnesium and calcium. I would go a step further though and say that a glass of water is actually just a glass of lava. Right, right. Because I've talked about this before and I bring it up whenever I can. Ice is a rock. Sure. Because, well, hold on. Ice is a mineral. Because a mineral is just an inorganic material that is solid and has a definite crystal structure, which ice does. Water is important for life, but it's inorganic, actually. It would exist here whether there was life or not.

3:08Michael Stevens:And what that then means is that a cube of ice is made of a mineral. So it's a monomineralic rock. So melted ice is molten rock, lava. So water is lava. I'm here for this. And this is not a joke. Ice won the mineral cup back in 2015, I believe. Some geologists all voted on their favorite mineral, and ice finally got the recognition it deserves. Got the prize. Yeah.

3:36Hannah Fry:I mean, sure. I'm happy with that classification. If the rock people say it so, then I'm happy with it. They also move the same way. I mean, when lava gets spurted out of a volcano, it uses the way that it moves and behaves is exactly the same. What, like the fluid dynamics of lava? The fluid dynamics of lava is the same as water at that stage, yeah. A bit later on when it cools down, then it changes. Is it more like ice? More like ice. There's a transition phase where it's more like toothpaste, where it needs a certain amount of sheer forces in order for it to flow.

4:07Michael Stevens:But that would be analogous to like slush maybe?

4:09Hannah Fry:Maybe, yeah. So now that we've established that ice is a mineral and that water is lava, I think we'll take a little break.

4:23Hannah Fry:Okay, welcome back from the break. What we've established is that water is lava, but also everything that you drink and eat is also water. Therefore, everything you consume is lava. Pretty much.

4:36Michael Stevens:Pretty much. But let's talk more about the water on Earth and how much there is and what form it's in. Because I think we in our day-to-day lives are very biased to think of water as this splashy puddle stuff. It's in lakes and rivers. But that is basically not what water is on Earth at all. Go on. Well, Earth has a lot of water. And it's famous for having a lot of water on the surface. But it's not water that we can just come up and drink because it's too salty. Most of Earth's water is way too salty. It would kill you to drink it.

5:08Hannah Fry:Wait, when you say most, what are we talking here? What percentage of the water is?

5:11Michael Stevens:I'll tell you, I'm gonna have to pull up a chart because I wanna get these numbers just right. So here's the deal. Earth has a lot of water, but of all that water on the entire planet, both on it and in it, only 2.5 % is fresh. Meaning not salty. And the rest is salty. But that 2.5 % sounds small. But what we're looking for is even smaller because out of that 2.5%, almost 70 % is frozen in glaciers and ice caps. So not accessible to just come up and sip. And then another 30 % of that is groundwater, not up on the surface. So only 1.2 % of the 2.5 % that's fresh is on the surface basically.

5:56Hannah Fry:So wait, wait, it's 1 % of the 2.5%.

5:58Michael Stevens:1 % of the 2.5 % is surface fresh water, but we're still not done because surface is being used really broadly here. That includes 3 % of that 1 % of the 2 % is water in the atmosphere.

6:13Hannah Fry:Right.

6:14Michael Stevens:This is very small, but it's worth mentioning. 0.26 % of that little sliver is locked inside living organisms. Right. It's in your beef jerky. almost four percent of that little sliver is dampness in the soil so i can't just go up and like slurp it up i could stick some mud in my mouth and like try and suck on it we suck on it but what we think of as fresh water water from from creeks and springs and rivers and in lakes that is, I did the math here, 0.0072 % of all the water on earth. Wow. It is a tiny minuscule fraction of the 1 % of the 2.5 % that's not salt water.

7:01Hannah Fry:And if you think about it, all of the water that we effectively come into contact with, all the water we're drinking, all the water we're showering with, all the water you're putting in swimming pools, all of that is contained within that number.

7:14Michael Stevens:0.0072%. Yeah. But it's the water that is the star of the human show. It's what we swim in. It's what we get out of the tap and that we drink and that we have right here. There is no salt water around us right now.

7:27Hannah Fry:No, I'm not interested in the salt water. Thank you very much. We're interested in such a narrow kind of water. Of that tiny, tiny sliver, how much of that is in Coca-Cola?

7:37Michael Stevens:How much of that is tied up in - Yeah, how much is tied up in warehouses, in cans of soda and beer and brewed tea. Yeah, I don't know. I do know. Here's a fun fact. The entire volume of refrigerated space in the United States is equal to two thirds the volume of Mount Everest.

8:00Hannah Fry:Really?

8:01Michael Stevens:I can't tell if that sounds small or big.

8:03Hannah Fry:I think that sounds big. And the reason why I think it sounds big, I'm slightly obsessed with fridges. Yeah. which I appreciate isn't a normal sentence, but they're wild. Like they are tricking the laws of thermodynamics. I know. It's like you've managed to create this sort of tiny bubble in the universe where you have like sucked energy away. That's not what energy likes to do. Like it is miraculous that fridges have managed to work. I know.

8:32Michael Stevens:And they do it so simply.

8:34Hannah Fry:So simply.

8:35Michael Stevens:They're just squirting around a fluid and the fluid's properties are like, let's do it. Let's dump this heat out. Keep your yogurt nice and clean.

8:41Hannah Fry:I mean, also just think about before fridges existed, right? You could have lived, I don't know, for like most of the planet would never have experienced a cold drink, right? I know. Like it's just, it's wild to me that we've had this thing for like a hundred years or so, maybe a little bit more, 150 or so. I find fridges really, can we do a whole episode on fridges please?

9:03Michael Stevens:Yeah, we should. But where did all this water come from on earth? How old is it? How long has it been around? Well, it didn't get made on Earth, right?

9:11Hannah Fry:That's one thing that we know.

9:12Michael Stevens:Water isn't produced naturally on Earth, right? Correct.

9:14Hannah Fry:Which means it came here from space.

9:16Michael Stevens:Alien water.

9:18Hannah Fry:Alien water.

9:19Michael Stevens:Yeah, I've heard that it probably came from like comets that crashed into a dry Earth and they left all this ice. It's hard to imagine though how many comets that would be. I guess that's why they call that the heavy bombardment period when Earth was just getting smacked by these comets from way out beyond the solar system, made of ice, covered in ice, and they just delivered the oceans to us over time. Do we know how old the water is then? More than half of the water on Earth is older than the sun.

9:52Hannah Fry:How do they know that?