Dying In Space, Trapped Water, and What's Hidden In Pi?

7:42Michael Stevens:It wasn't like people were going to LAX back in the 70s and having to walk miles and miles, just like we do today. Yeah. And no one ever thought, I wonder if I could put wheels on this.

7:53Hannah Fry:No, it was a very different situation. But I think the point is, is that irrespective of the wheelie suitcase thing, at the same time, I think when you get all this is some technology from the 1970s from Earth, it's like, wow, that is that's primitive.

8:07Michael Stevens:But the Russians were sending people to live up in orbit at this point in time, in a space station, which like, honestly, 1971, that's still the 60s. Yeah. OK. Culturally in America or even in. Well, I don't know anything about what it was like to live in Soviet Russia. But the point is that right away they send up a mission which was called Soyuz 10. And they're going to have these guys, these three guys live on Soyuz 1. But they fail to dock. They kind of get attached, but they can't get a hard dock accomplished. So they abandon the mission, come back down. Soyuz 11 goes up and it has three people aboard.

8:47Michael Stevens:They are Georgi Dobrovolski, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Pasaev.

8:53Hannah Fry:Okay. Okay.

8:54Michael Stevens:The three of them go up. They launch on the 6th of June, 1971. The very next day, they're docking with Soyuz 1 and it's successful.

9:03Hannah Fry:Uh-huh.

9:03Michael Stevens:So they go inside and start just living there. They do experiments. They do all kinds of, you know, looking down at Earth, evaluating its ice caps and its climate patterns. And they try all these things. They're living there. 22 days. Right. More than three weeks. They're up there. Yeah. On the 11th day, there's an electrical fire.

9:22Hannah Fry:Okay, that sounds serious.

9:24Michael Stevens:That sounds really scary. Also, when they got there, their first steps into the space station were also terrifying because it was like full of smoke.

9:32Hannah Fry:What?

9:33Michael Stevens:And no one had even been in there yet.

9:34Hannah Fry:Okay, so hold on. So the space station gets sent up on its own. gets into orbits orbiting around then they take a Soyuz capsule to go up and meet with it and

9:43Michael Stevens:dock into it they open the doors smoke everywhere yeah I would be oh my gosh can you even imagine I know so they they have to like go in figure out what's causing the smoke and then go back into their Soyuz capsule and wait for the smoke to get filtered and cleared then they get to go back in and they live there and they do for again 22 days okay so a little bit more than three weeks there's an electrical fire on the 11th day like this is a scary a scary trip sorry i thought the

10:13Hannah Fry:electrical fire and the smoke were the same thing no what was the smoke when they first arrived

10:16Michael Stevens:i actually don't know i don't think anyone knows just happened to be filled with smoke the the soviet union not famous for telling everything to the whole world and that's going to come up later So even after the electrical fire on the 11th day, they still stay for another 11 days. And then it's like, OK, let's go back to Earth. So they get in. This is on the 29th of June, 1971.

10:40Hannah Fry:They leave, undock, and they go radio silent.

10:45Michael Stevens:But the Soyuz capsule is automatic. It's going to come back down to Earth. It's got parachutes. It crashes into the ground, which is by design. They don't like the Americans fall into the ocean. They parachute, slow down, and then they've got rockets that explode just before they hit the ground.

11:00Hannah Fry:Just to soften their landing.

11:01Michael Stevens:I mean, soften is an exaggeration. It's survivable.

11:05Hannah Fry:Right.

11:06Michael Stevens:But it was not comfortable.

11:08Hannah Fry:How long between them undocking and then landing?

11:10Michael Stevens:Only a matter of hours.

11:11Hannah Fry:Right.

11:12Michael Stevens:So the rescue crews get there, as they normally do to help the crew out. They knock on the capsule. No response. Oh, my gosh. The rescue crews open the hatch and the crew is dead inside.

11:24Hannah Fry:Whoa. But do they know when they died?

11:27Michael Stevens:They do now. And they may have known then. But for two years, the Soviet Union didn't tell anyone what had happened. They did a state burial for the astronauts, for the cosmonauts. But they wouldn't say what happened. And this caused a lot of panic in America for all space agencies. This was an experiment to see what happens when people are in space for longer than the Apollo astronauts were.

11:54Hannah Fry:Is it that experience of being in space is the thing that ends up causing your death?

11:58Michael Stevens:We don't know. I mean, we think we've thought of everything. But what does having no weight force do to you over three weeks? What does just I don't know what other things could be up there? There could be space viruses for all we know. We know that the Apollo missions haven't encountered that yet. They put the first Apollo crew in quarantine for weeks just in case there were moon viruses. I mean, you have to get yourself into that mindset. And now you've got these three Russian cosmonauts who didn't survive. And you don't know why. Dead on arrival. Dead on arrival. Did they die in the arrival or before?

12:34Michael Stevens:No one knows. So America is like freaking out. Should we go ahead with Skylab? Should we be doing space stations? What happened? And it wasn't until two years later that the Soviet Union finally said, okay, here's what happened. When they undocked at 1047 Greenwich Mean Time on the 29th of June, all of the explosive bolts that were supposed to go in sequence all went at once. And that explosive force broke the seal that's supposed to automatically shut off and keep the air pressure where it should be. So the air came out.

13:06Hannah Fry:Oh, wow. So they suffocated.

13:08Michael Stevens:They suffocated. Oh, that's awful. They suffocated way above the Karman line, which is at 100 kilometers. That's where we define space as being because to fly at that height, you have to go at orbital speed just to get enough lift from the air. So basically you're orbiting. You're in space. You're in outer space. They were at 168 kilometers, so 104 miles above the surface when they lost all air in their capsule. And again, the capsule automatically came back down to Earth, but they were all dead already, probably within the first minute. and one of them was found near the ventral valve thing like he was trying to cover it up but later on where the air was escaping because it didn't close later on a cosmonaut who was afraid of this who did not trust this system tested that even if you tried to manually close it it took too long to close so there was no hope that's that's such a tragic detail that they were

14:09Hannah Fry:trying that they knew what was happening had worked out what the problem was and were trying to amend it before it was too late yeah oh my gosh so their capsule landed back on earth 90 kilometers southwest of karazal kazakhstan and on that spot an obelisk a three-sided obelisk has

14:30Michael Stevens:been erected with a little circular fence around it and i've never been there but it's one of my my dream bucket list locations because it is the memorial and the site not of their demise but of our recognition that for the first time in human history our species did not end on earth yeah

14:51Hannah Fry:that we could die beyond the cradle right goodness me so hang on that means then that no one else has ever lost their life in space. That is also a wild idea.

15:06Michael Stevens:It is wild. I mean, it shows how serious we are about safety. There have obviously been disasters since. Challenger, for example. Those accidents all happened under the Kármán line, much, much more within Earth's atmosphere.

15:22Hannah Fry:This is where the NASA space shuttle exploded after takeoff.

15:27Michael Stevens:Yeah.

15:27Hannah Fry:And all seven people who were on board lost their lives.

15:31Michael Stevens:Yeah, I was five days old when that happened. And it was my grandma's birthday. And I went to space camp for three years when I was a teenager. And everyone still felt the guilt and the terror of that day.

15:44Hannah Fry:Well, because there was a teacher on board, wasn't there?

15:46Michael Stevens:There was a teacher on board.

15:48Hannah Fry:Like a non-astronaut.

15:50Michael Stevens:Yeah, it was a non-astronaut. And Richard Feynman found that it was a problem with the O-rings on the solid rocket boosters. And that was the responsibility of a team. And there was a lot of terrible feelings. Then there was the space shuttle Columbia on re-entry, lost the whole crew. But only three people have died far enough away from Earth that we consider the place of their death outer space.

16:16Hannah Fry:Goodness me. Earlier this summer, I got to spend some time with Christina Koch, who was one of the Artemis astronauts. And one of the conversations I had with her was about how she had mentally prepared for the idea that death was on the table. Yeah. And she told me that NASA had been sort of a bit evasive about putting an exact percentage on the chances that the mission would fail. A few days before they launched, NASA finally revealed they did a press conference or whatever it might have been, where they revealed that their chance of a catastrophic failure, where the astronauts would lose their lives, was about one in 30, which is about, whatever that is, 96 % chance of success.

17:04Hannah Fry:And Christina was like, okay, that's higher than I thought it was going to be. And then I thought we were like 99 % sure we were coming home. Yeah, 99 versus 96.

17:14Michael Stevens:It's a big difference when it's life or death.

17:17Hannah Fry:It's pretty spicy. But she also talked about how her crew had had these conversations with each other about what they would do if the worst thing happened. And for them, the worst thing that could possibly happen would be that you would be in the capsule and know that you were not coming home. You would know that there was something that had happened that meant that you are not going to make that return journey. you are essentially going to be in the unbelievable blackness of space and slowly lose your life. Yeah. Which I think is like such a dark thing to imagine. But her and her crew, they all had like spoken about it.

17:57Hannah Fry:They had like therapists, they had psychologists, they had, you know, a whole team of people supporting them with the mental aspect of all of this. And she said that they were all like, OK, you know what? We're going to be pretty stoic about this. We're going to manage to be really stoic about it. but then she said that this whole thing came back to basically bite her on the ass when they were doing re-entry because as they were doing re-entry one of her crewmates was reading out the gravitational force on the re-entry vehicle and was reading out you know i can't remember what the numbers are but like let's say 3.1 3.4 3.8 3.9 but her audio wasn't working perfectly so she just heard as they're going through this unbelievably the riskiest moment of all is the re-entry okay it's so easy for the vehicle to just essentially burn up on arrival right it's really the angle that you come in out it's just extremely delicate but the audio wasn't working properly so all she heard her crewmate say was like 7g 8g only heard the second digit point exactly oh my gosh so she was there thinking okay okay we're gonna die that's it but then she was like but hang on a second if we're gonna die surely he'd be less chill about this yeah than he is yeah and then she thought well no because we've spoken about this and we've all decided to

19:13Michael Stevens:be stoic oh no maybe we are gonna die oh no yeah so you should always agree guys if we're in trouble let's panic that way i will know exactly because yeah i've talked about this before on airplanes when turbulence is bad i look at the flight attendants and they're almost always bored and And that calms me down so much. Right. If I saw a flight attendant being like, I'd be like, oh, no. Okay. Oh, no.

19:38Hannah Fry:We're in trouble. Do you know what? Actually, this summer, I had the first time I've ever had a really spicy flight. Oh. I've been on a lot of flights. And you get bad turbulence sometimes, and it's like, okay, it's not that bad. Yeah. But this one, we got caught in a thunderstorm really badly. Got hit by lightning over and over and over again. The captain tried to make these landings and then had to abort the landings twice. but in the aborted landing he was like climbing climbing climbing getting the hell out of Dodge and the turban's was so bad and I around me there were people who one person was like hiding their passport in their pants because their their reasoning was okay well when we die then you'll be able to identify my body maybe my children will know I mean yeah it's worth a go there were people like writing letters to their children honestly everyone was really scared and we got off the flight i was like don't get me wrong i wasn't like completely zen about it i was like okay this doesn't look good this is like this is not this is definitely the worst situation i've been in but when we landed when we fought we also then had to do an emergency landing in another airport and then we got more fuel and then we were able to take off and then by that point the storm had cleared but uh when we were at the luggage carousel i was sort of standing there waiting and there was a couple of people who came up to me and they said they're like they know about the show whatever they know the rest of sites and so on they came up to me and they were like they said during the flight they were looking to see if i was panicking oh wow so had they listened to our earlier episode about turbulence i don't think so specifically okay but they were like okay look if hannah fry is panicking i'm panicking that's a problem yeah well i mean reasonably like

21:15Michael Stevens:rationally turbulence doesn't take down airplanes it can be very dangerous because of injuries if You're not strapped in. You can hit your head. That's how fatalities happen from them. It's like a head injury just because you weren't strapped in. But yeah, turbulence just means the air all around you is moving. Okay. You're like a raisin suspended in jelly or jello and it's wobbling and it doesn't feel good. And they try to avoid it on commercial flights.

21:42Hannah Fry:It can. So I think that that is definitely true when you're in cruising altitude. I think on landing is a slightly different beast.

21:50Michael Stevens:Oh. Oh, because you're like closer to the ground.

21:53Hannah Fry:Well, I think that it ends up affecting your landing, especially if you're like trapped in a storm with extremely low visibility. I think it can be pretty dangerous.

22:01Michael Stevens:OK, so there is a time when you should be panicked by turbulence.

22:08Hannah Fry:I mean, look, there's still it's still the safest, safest mode of transport per mile, which I always think is a bit of a cheat. Okay, back to Soyuz 11.

22:16Michael Stevens:After that tragedy, the Soviet Union changed the routine and now they only sent up two cosmonauts in a capsule. That way there was room for them both to wear their pressure suits. So if pressure was lost in the capsule, they would still have air.

22:31Hannah Fry:Right. That's interesting. Yeah. And do they still do that now?

22:36Michael Stevens:They still wear those suits today in the Soyuz capsules.

22:40Hannah Fry:I mean, you would, wouldn't you? You'd be like, I'll just...

22:42Michael Stevens:Why not?

22:43Hannah Fry:I'd rather have it on.

22:44Michael Stevens:And when they're like, you know, guys, we're going to try to pack three in today, so no suits. I'd be like, sorry, I can't make it.

22:51Hannah Fry:Yeah, I'm all right.

22:52Michael Stevens:Got to take my daughter to school. Exactly. So let's take a break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about some other things that may or may not be leaving Earth.

23:29Michael Stevens:We'll see you next time. Unlock your potential at Equinox. Start today at equinox.com.

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24:10I'm Glenn Washington, host of Snap Judgment from KQED.

24:14Hannah Fry:Every week, Snap drops you inside someone's biggest decision. The kind of decision you can only make once. With everything on the line, what do you believe? What do you want? And what would you risk to get it? Find out. Tap to listen now to Snap Judgment from KQED on Spotify.

24:45Michael Stevens:I wanted to tell that story, the story of the three humans to be the first to have not died on planet Earth. Yorgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev. they represent the beginning of a story they were the first humans to die not on planet earth but unfortunately they will not be the last unless we stop all space travel right now unless we stop all space travel altogether seems unlikely which we won't and we shouldn't but that was a very big moment in human history and i have a watch actually it's not this one i'm wearing today But I have a watch that has a little engraving on the back commemorating them and the Soyuz 11 crew.

25:30Michael Stevens:Because, yeah, it's a story you don't hear that often.

25:32Hannah Fry:No, I didn't know those names.

25:35Michael Stevens:A lot of it comes from the secrecy of the space race and the Soviet Union, not wanting to say what they were doing or what happened. But the capsule, yeah, it landed in Kazakhstan. And as I was reading about this story again, I got really into Kazakhstan. let me tell you this there are 44 countries on earth that are landlocked they have no access to the oceans from their borders there are only two countries that are double landlocked i remember

26:08Hannah Fry:this is a quiz question okay what are they okay kazakhstan nope it's one of the 44 that are

26:14Michael Stevens:landlocked.

26:15Hannah Fry:Okay, Azerbaijan, it's one around there.

26:18Michael Stevens:It's around there, and one of them is not around there. It's one of the stands.

26:25Hannah Fry:Yeah, one of the stands. Uzbekistan?

26:28Michael Stevens:Correct. By the way, you can remember this because you've got Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Turkmenistan is closer to Turkey. That's how on a map I can always get it right. Uzbekistan is north of Turkmenistan and it's doubly landlocked. To get to the ocean from Uzbekistan, you've got to go through at least one country that is also itself landlocked. What's the other one?

26:50Hannah Fry:Is it in Africa?

26:52Michael Stevens:Nope.

26:53Hannah Fry:Then I don't know. Is it somewhere really small like Liechtenstein?

26:57Michael Stevens:It's Liechtenstein. You got it. That's pretty good. I would not have gotten that right until I read about it. I feel so smog. It was really good.

27:07Hannah Fry:Thank you so much. That was really good.

27:09Michael Stevens:Kazakhstan is the largest by area landlocked country. But here's the bonus lightning round for all the marbles question. Yeah. What is the largest landlocked country by population?

27:25Hannah Fry:Oh.

27:27Michael Stevens:I would never have got this right.

27:30Hannah Fry:Okay, so I think not in Europe. It's not in Europe. That's me searching through Europe.

27:35Michael Stevens:All of you listening or watching, write your guess down below and hit the like button to lock in your answer. Man, I hear that so often on Reels and I just can't stand it. I know me neither. Drives me insane. But still, do press like. Yeah, like. And if you really want to lock it in, subscribe.

27:53Hannah Fry:Yeah. Okay. I think not South America. Nope. Not North America. Nope. So we're talking Asia or Africa. Mm-hmm. It could be like Mongolia, like around there. No. Bhutan.

28:12Michael Stevens:Nope. Still the wrong continent.

28:14Hannah Fry:Also, is... Oh, wait, Africa. Yeah. Okay. Landlock country in Africa. So right in the center. DRC.

28:20Michael Stevens:No.

28:21Hannah Fry:Central African Republic. Is it in the middle of Africa?

28:24Michael Stevens:Nope. Oh. I would not have... Even though I could find it on a map right away. We should do an African countries quiz, by the way, because I've been doing this game called borderline.world. Every day I'm finding them. But I guess I haven't paid enough attention to who's landlocked and who's not because I wouldn't have even known this country was landlocked unless I really thought about it. North of the Sahara? I would say it's east of the Sahara. Maybe southeast.

28:53Hannah Fry:Ethiopia?

28:54Michael Stevens:Correct.

28:55Hannah Fry:Is it? Do you know what? I thought about that and I was like, no, I think because you come up from Somalia, right? And then Ethiopia. I thought it had a coast. Ethiopia is landlocked.

29:04Michael Stevens:Yeah, it is. Okay, thank you.

29:05Hannah Fry:So I wasn't the only one who was like, oh, I didn't know that.

29:07Michael Stevens:But yeah, I guess it's surrounded by like Somalia and Eritrea. It just doesn't touch the ocean. Wow. Yeah. Wow. So humans have for the most part been trapped on Earth our whole lives. There have been some cracks in that rule. We've got three who got far enough out that they didn't die here. I don't think we'll be trapped forever. But what about the water we throw away in water bottles? When you throw away a water bottle and there's a little bit of water still in it, or even like just some drops, that water is locked in plastic and it's thrown away. And will it ever come out? Like it's in this like barely degradable bottle, fresh potable water that's then thrown into landfills for who knows how long.

30:02Michael Stevens:I first heard about this because it went pretty viral on social media, this concern that we are trapping an immense amount of usable, fresh water in landfills.

30:16Hannah Fry:In its own little coffin. In its own little plastic, like permanent coffin.

30:21Michael Stevens:And so I dove into this and there's a lot of fear mongering around it that the calculations about how much water gets essentially sealed away from use every year ranges from 7 million to 22 million gallons a year.

30:38Hannah Fry:What? That's insane. A year?

30:40Michael Stevens:A year.

30:41Hannah Fry:That's insane.

30:42Michael Stevens:So we're talking about –

30:44Hannah Fry:Who's not emptying their water bottles before they recycle them?

30:46Michael Stevens:Then it's not even about people who are throwing away like half filled bottles. The 7 million gallon number, which is 29 million liters per year. That's based on if on average only 5 % of the bottles thrown out have half a tablespoon in them. What? The 22 million gallon number, which is 83 million liters. That's based on more like 40 drops are in every single bottle.

31:15Hannah Fry:Sorry, I don't think I realized how many bottles of water we're getting through.

31:19Michael Stevens:I didn't either. When I first looked at these, I figured the math could be wrong. And so I looked this up and it's like, no, this is very on target for how many water bottles not just are being made, but we know are being thrown away into landfills. Like in America alone, it's like 60 billion a year. That's how many are made. How many are being thrown out, we don't totally know. But it's a lot. So this sounds a little bit frightening. Yeah. But here's the truth. Okay, while it's true that we are throwing out an enormous amount of water bottles and they have moisture in them, one, plastic doesn't permanently seal stuff up forever.

32:01Hannah Fry:Because all you need is a little crack and then it will seek back into the water.

32:03Michael Stevens:A little crack is all it needs. Yeah. And these bottles aren't just like thrown whole into the landfill. They are compacted multiple times.

32:12Hannah Fry:So they have splits in them.

32:13Michael Stevens:Yeah. Yeah. They're crushed with like more force than the weight of a car on them in order to compact them.

32:19Hannah Fry:There's something quite nice about the idea that like all you need to do is just like give the water away to escape and it'll get back to us.

32:24Michael Stevens:Yeah. And there have been companies apparently that have worked on ways to make bottles that will more quickly give that water back up.

32:31Hannah Fry:OK.

32:31Michael Stevens:But I'm not sure how necessary it is because, again, they're compacted by the collection services. And then at the landfill, they're compacted. They drive these huge machines over the landfills to just squish it down. And like I said, the bottles themselves don't seal things up forever. I think within 500 years, it's decomposed a lot. But even within 100 years, you would definitely expect water to be able to get out of it. On top of that, even if we just assume that all the water in every bottle that's thrown away never gets out, they all have their lids on and they never decay away. 83 million liters, 22 million gallons of water is a lot, but it's also not a lot.

33:19Michael Stevens:If we did that every year for 15 years, we would have only trapped away one trillionth of Earth's water.

33:27Hannah Fry:When you say one trillionth of Earth's water, are you talking about all the water? All the water. Or are you talking about fresh, clean, drinkable water?

33:33Michael Stevens:I'm talking about all the water. So, I mean, but I mean, still, come on, Hannah, a trillionth of Earth's water? I still don't like it. 22 million gallons is about 33 Olympic-sized swimming pools. That feels kind of big, but that's about what lands on a square mile of land when it rains one inch. Oh, it's nothing. This is actually a really cool question because it forces you to come up with ways to figure out what is this amount.

34:03Hannah Fry:Right, totally.

34:04Michael Stevens:I mean, ultimately, the water doesn't stay trapped forever.

34:07Hannah Fry:Which I'm okay with. You know, one thing that I really want to look into more is this question about water and data centers. Because while they do use a lot of water, I wonder whether it's one of those situations where it sounds like a lot of water. But then you compare it to, say, the meat industry. And actually, it's really pathetic in comparison.

34:31Michael Stevens:Yeah, water amounts are hard to compare because we often give them in gallons. but when it comes to like water on earth all of the water not just fresh but we're talking about like quadrillions of gallons just the numbers are too big you can't make a dark and as i was doing research for this i'm finding water given in cubic miles in tons in gallons in liters and it's like ah what is a lot and what isn't a lot also i've got an even other twist so so earth is already losing water. Like literally, it's not trapping it forever, but it's jettisoning it out. I mean, the earth isn't doing this, but the water molecules themselves can leave our planet for good.

35:11Michael Stevens:And they do this through evaporating up and they become clouds. They come back down. It's a water cycle. But some managed to get up high enough that solar radiation can actually break the oxygen and and hydrogen atoms apart and then either through being energized by more solar radiation or just because of like random thermal reasons uh there'll be an oxygen or a hydrogen atom that has enough speed to literally escape velocity earth i mean the only thing is there's no way you're getting

35:40Hannah Fry:that back you're not getting that back at all and it's not being replaced whatsoever the stuff in the water bottles may eventually return to us exactly okay and so it's estimated that every year

35:51Michael Stevens:two million gallons of water are lost from this planet. 9.3 million liters is lost to space. But there's one more wrinkle because Earth does gain water from comets. I mean, maybe particles from comets. Solar system rain. From solar system rain, which comes in the form of ice and space debris, meteors, space dust that falls to Earth. And I saw an estimate that every year about a million liters are gained. So it's 270 ,000 gallons of water comes to Earth. But the point is water is not trapped on Earth. And even the water that we throw away sealed up in bottles isn't permanently trapped. But have you heard of a monkey trap?

36:45Hannah Fry:Honestly, this episode feels like I'm playing whack-a-mole with myself.

36:50Michael Stevens:No, it should feel like a smooth, connected railroad track. You're amazing.

36:59Hannah Fry:Okay, sorry, go on. Okay, corner turn, monkey trap, go.

37:03Michael Stevens:A monkey trap. I'm sure you've heard of this. It's a common story that to trap a monkey, or sometimes different animals are used, but what you do is you build this box with a hole in it, and you put something shiny in the box. Right. And then the monkey wants the shiny thing or whatever the bait is. And they put their hand through the hole and they grab it.

37:24Hannah Fry:Right.

37:25Michael Stevens:But once they've made a fist, their hand is too wide to come back out of the hole. And it works because their brain is so simple they cannot give up the bait, the treat, the shiny object. And so they just stay there.

37:39Hannah Fry:Oh, that's adorable.

37:40Michael Stevens:That they won't let go of it. I first heard of this in the book Where the Red Fern Grows, where the main character makes a trap like this for raccoons. He takes like a tree stump, drills a hole, puts in some aluminum foil and then hammers a bunch of nails in to make it really narrow. The raccoon is like, oh, yeah, I'm stuck. But doesn't let go. But I won't let go of this treasure. Anyway, these types of traps.

38:04Hannah Fry:How long will they stay there?

38:05Michael Stevens:None time.

38:07Hannah Fry:None time.

38:08Michael Stevens:They're not real.

38:09Hannah Fry:Oh. Oh.

38:10Michael Stevens:They're popular in discourse because it's this metaphor for how humans, we will often want something so badly that we refuse to let go even though it's trapping us.

38:21Hannah Fry:To our detriment.

38:22Michael Stevens:To our detriment, yes. Then we need to be able to let things go and give things up and we can free ourselves. It's a great story, but they're not real. A raccoon will reach into a trap, and so will a monkey, and grab a shiny thing. But if you then come up to catch it, it lets go and runs. Right. It's got a hierarchy in its head. Yeah.

38:42Hannah Fry:And Shiny Thing is not beaten by not wanting to be killed by being human.

38:48Michael Stevens:Yeah, exactly. So again, I still think that the lesson isn't totally like bad, but the analogy is to something that isn't real.

38:57Hannah Fry:Okay.

38:57Michael Stevens:There's no known animal that will refuse to let go of a treasure and allow itself to be trapped. But I wanted to make sure. So I looked into like, what can I really trap an animal's body in? and that can't get it back out. And as it turns out, it's very common, but it's not the hand, it's the head. What do you mean? Heads are kind of wedge-shaped, and so is the fur on an animal and its ears. And so raccoons, especially in bears, often get their heads stuck in things. Wow. Because they can go in, but coming out, they can't, because the fur can go this way, but it can't go back this way, and same with the ears.

39:36Michael Stevens:So goats, raccoons, bears, They all can get trapped in things with their heads.

39:42Hannah Fry:I feel like this happens sometimes with people in iron railings.

39:46Michael Stevens:It happens to people too. So I wonder if this helps us improve the life lesson. Like it's not so much that you need to let go of the things you treasure. You need to just stop poking your head into stuff.

40:03Hannah Fry:Basically, if someone passes you a shiny thing and it looks too good to be true, just leave it well alone. That's right.

40:09Michael Stevens:Just leave things alone. Mind your own beeswax. That's the real lesson from real animal life. Don't reach for anything new. With your head. There's something cool about that. Reach for it with your hand. You'll be able to get it out as long as you let go.

40:28Hannah Fry:But don't reach for it with your head.

40:28Michael Stevens:But if you reach for it with your head, if you go in head first, that's when problems can arise.

40:34Hannah Fry:You know, people take really great philosophers, Confucius, you know, whatever, whoever else it might be, and really elevate them as great thinkers. Actually, this stuff's easy. We're coming up with these left, right, center.

40:45Michael Stevens:Honestly, it's a piece of cake. Okay, you just look up animal traps and you learn everything about human behavior. Yeah, done. We should be life coaches. We should be. You've got more traps. Go on, give me more traps. Okay, this is a bit of a stretch. Even I'm saying it's a stretch. I looked it up and your phone number and my phone number are not in the first two billion digits of pi.

41:08Hannah Fry:How do you know what my phone number is?

41:12Michael Stevens:I am I not supposed to? I'm joking. Well, why?

41:17Hannah Fry:How do you know?

41:18Michael Stevens:You can search. I mean, you can search like digitally. I didn't I didn't like look at all the digits with my own eyes.

41:24Hannah Fry:But hold on. OK, right. A, I want to know how this is linked to Trapped. How this is linked to Trapped. B, did you specifically search our phone numbers?

41:34Michael Stevens:Yeah, with and without country codes.

41:36Hannah Fry:Okay, interesting. Yeah, because there's just this common thing,

41:40Michael Stevens:and I've been looking into it a lot, hearing it a lot. And we've talked about it on the podcast before, which is this idea that like every finite string of digits is somewhere in Pi. Absolutely. Including your address, your phone number, a coded version of Moby Dick. It's all hidden in there. And that is not necessarily true. We have not proven yet whether or not pi is normal. And we also don't know if it's rich, where rich means that it contains every possible string.

42:15Hannah Fry:And normal means that every number or combination of numbers are equally likely to appear.

42:23Michael Stevens:That's right. None are preferred. Right. And the reason that there are those two different distinctions is that if you are normal, then you are rich. You contain every string. But if you contain every possible string, you might not be normal. Yes. Because you can imagine a number that contains like every number in order, but there's like a million zeros between each number. In which case, or an exponentially growing number of zeros. So that number contains them all, but it's mainly zeros. Okay. So anyway, we do not know if Pi is normal. And this question was first asked, like, I think maybe at least 100 years ago, more than 100 years ago.

43:05Michael Stevens:And we still aren't even close to knowing how to prove whether it's normal or not. So your phone number may never appear in Pi.

43:15Hannah Fry:So is the question here, what actually is trapped within the digits of Pi?

43:19Michael Stevens:Thank you. You see how obvious this was? it's about trapped what's trapped in pi and what's not honestly i absolutely love spending

43:28Hannah Fry:time with you this is like a an excellent adventure i've got more your phone number

43:33Michael Stevens:is in the first like few trillion digits of pi i can't tell you exactly where guys if you if you

43:39Hannah Fry:want to know my phone number now that's a very big clue that's all you have to do it's somewhere in the first trillion digits just try them all because the online encyclopedia of inner Integer Sequences has a, it's one of my favorite pages.

43:54Michael Stevens:I love that. It's just so, it's so out of this world. It's like, okay, how many digits of pi do you need to find every digit? How many do you need to have every two digit number? How many does it take before every three digit number has shown up? Right. And we have so far found every single one, two, three, four, five digit number all the way up to 11 digit number. Right. They all exist in Pi within like all the digits that we have found so far. But we haven't found enough of Pi to say that all 12 digit numbers are inside Pi.

44:32Hannah Fry:Which is what you need for a phone number.

44:33Michael Stevens:No. Your phone number without country code is how long? It's like 10.

44:38Hannah Fry:It's 11. It's 11.

44:40Michael Stevens:Okay. So yeah. Okay. Right. So your phone number. Another clue to my phone number, you guys. Your phone number's another clue. How long is mine? Without the country code, mine's only 10. What? What? Let me check. Yeah, mine's 11. Jeez, that's fancy. So hang on then.

44:59Hannah Fry:So we have proven that everyone's phone number is in Pi.

45:02Michael Stevens:Yeah, so yeah, yeah. Everyone's phone number is in Pi. So long as your phone number isn't more than 12 digits long. We have not proven that yet. Now, I should say that I would guess most mathematicians have a strong suspicion that pi is normal. It's normal. We just don't know how to prove it. And that's the wildest thing because we have proven that almost all numbers are normal. The ones that aren't normal are the ones that we know really well, like 42 and 7 and… 3.333 reoccurring. Yeah, one half, right? One quarter, one third. None of those are normal. But the vast majority of real numbers are normal.

45:44Michael Stevens:The vast majority of the irrational numbers. Rational numbers are like never normal. Correct. But the majority of the irrationals have been proven by Borel to be normal.

45:57Hannah Fry:And the majority of real numbers are irrational. Right. When it was like astronauts dying in space, this is definitely not where anyone thought the episode was going.

46:07Michael Stevens:But here we are. But here we are. And so I guess what I'm saying is, is the final frontier really space or is it pie?

46:17Hannah Fry:Has any human ever died within the digits of pie?

46:21Michael Stevens:I don't know, but I'd like to be the first. What a way to go. Because the thing is, pie is really overdone. OK, it's I get it. It sounds like a dessert.

46:31Hannah Fry:You've got pie on your T-shirt.

46:33Michael Stevens:I'm wearing a pie T-shirt. OK, it is so mainstream. dream. Like I'm sick of hearing about, oh, pie is so cool. First of all, pie is not random. Yeah. I can tell you exactly what the next digit will be. It's related to the circumference and diameter of a circle, guys. Okay. It's not random. It's non-repeating. Doesn't mean it's random. We don't have to talk about pie forever. But the point is that if I died within the digits of pie, however, that could somehow happen. I don't know. But if I did, I would get like memorialized every year on Pi Day. Everyone's always looking for Pi Day activities and like they need more and I'll give them one.

47:08Hannah Fry:As much as yours.

47:10Michael Stevens:Yeah. I think

47:12Hannah Fry:there is a way that you could be the first person to die in Pi. Tell me. If you worked out a way, which would be easy to do, to convert the numbers into letters, right? And then looked for the first time that a full name appeared, a sequence of numbers that translated to Michael Stevens is alive or Joe Bloggs is dead. Yeah. There could be a first person to die in Pi.

47:40Michael Stevens:Oh, there could be.

47:41Hannah Fry:There could be.

47:42Michael Stevens:Just using a simple like code. Yeah. So yeah, like zero zero is a space. Zero one is a and so on. Exactly. There will be a first name and death cause found in Pi. It's probably not Michael Stevens.

47:56Hannah Fry:It's probably not Hannah Fry either, sadly. Although it all depends on how you set up your code. I reckon there'd be a way that you could translate letters to make it so that it was you.

48:08Michael Stevens:It depends on the code. Okay, so 3.1 means H. Yes, exactly. 1.4 means A. I wonder if, yeah, how could you, you could set up a code to make Pi say whatever you wanted. Whatever you want. That's, see, now I'm learning things and I'm feeling, funny enough, less trapped than I did when this began. There's still so much out there to explore. Yeah. So I'm glad you guys came on this journey with us. Where we went, I don't know. No, agreed. But I've enjoyed it. I've enjoyed it. And it's always fun hanging out with you, but also with all of you guys. So leave us some comments below about your questions, your thoughts, your hopes and your dreams.

48:50Michael Stevens:And subscribe and follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts.

48:54Hannah Fry:We'll be back later in the week for an episode of Feel Nights. Until then, bye-bye. Bye-bye.

49:28Michael Stevens:Thank you. Start today at equinox.com.

50:01Michael Stevens:That's all systems down and new snap judgment miniseries from KQED. Tap to listen now.