What Are The Odds You'll Become A Fossil?

12:23Michael Stevens:That's very much a possibility.

12:26Hannah Fry:but um but yeah that's my that's my artifact for the day i love that thank you for showing that to

12:30Michael Stevens:me you are welcome you ever found a fossil uh yeah i mean i found like fossils in some rocks in my grandparents yard like little shells and stuff yeah i guess i don't know i'm making it sound like it wasn't cool but there's just there were so many of them it didn't seem very special

12:45Hannah Fry:wait where's this in kansas yeah that's incredible what you open up the rocks and found shells inside Oh, yeah. Like so many. I've never had that experience. Oh, really? It was like, oh, there's another fossil.

12:57Michael Stevens:And it was like you wouldn't even keep them because it was just like, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

13:02Hannah Fry:How did you know what rocks they were going to be in?

13:04Michael Stevens:Because it was a rock. I mean, it was all of them. It was a certain kind of rock that was used as like a retaining wall. And it was very much like a striated kind of thing. And sheets would break off. And you'd be like, oh, there's fossils here. There's all these fossilized, shelled animals.

13:23Hannah Fry:Because I guess in a way you turn the sort of probability on its head, right? The chance of any of us becoming fossils is almost zero. But at the same time, if you're in a particular part of the world, which did have the conditions in which to create fossils, then your chances of finding them are really high.

13:40Michael Stevens:Well, right. And sure, we're also looking at like a billion years of history in that one rock. Like it's not just all the little shelled prehistoric creatures that were living at a certain time. It's like billions and billions and billions of them over millions and millions of years all had like a little bit of a chance of being a fossil. So you eventually find like a dozen fossils just in this one rock.

14:05Hannah Fry:I've been down to the Jurassic Coast. This is where Mary Anning made her name, right? Who sort of collected the fossils. you know the she sells seashells was it about her it's about mary anning no kidding yeah so

14:18Michael Stevens:mary anning she was like like a girl she was young right when she found like the first dinosaur

14:24Hannah Fry:fossil absolutely um i've been down there because you know there really was at one point this plethora of these things down there on the jurassic coast in the south of england i've been down there didn't find anything i mean did i try very hard i'd already had my find i'd already had my reindeer, you know, snack find. Sort of Ice Age KFC.

14:46Michael Stevens:I'm looking up when Mary Anning found this stuff. Because I just think it's very cool that major discoveries. Okay. So this is in the early 1800s. Right. Which I just find so cool because it means people like George Washington didn't know that dinosaurs ever existed.

15:08Hannah Fry:Oh, that's such a fun idea. Isn't that funny? Yeah, that's really nice. But the thing is, is that presumably people had found these. I remember hearing a story about some British academics who were, this is like 1950s or so, who were visiting China, went to a Chinese medicine centre shop. And I don't know if you've ever been to one of these, but they are the most amazing places. They have like, oh, it feels like you're in a kind of ancient apothecary, which you sort of are in a way. Yeah. you know like mushrooms and like snakes and like fried lizards and everything you can imagine on the wall and uh these academics were in there and they were like what's what's that giant bone that you've got oh yeah yeah that's dragon thigh um so okay drag dragon thigh let's have a

15:52Michael Stevens:look at it anyway it's from an iguanodon wow well yeah of course because before mary anning people had found things yeah they just didn't know what they were they didn't know what they were They would think, hey, this must be a cyclops. It's proof of these mythological creatures. Even artifacts from early humans, like sharpened stones, they were found all the time back in the day. And people called them thunderstones and thought that they were maybe something from the gods or from the sky. But it really was like one of the first axes ever made. Wow. Yeah. Isn't that cool? Like it's it's it blows my mind how quickly we kind of forget our own past.

16:30Michael Stevens:I'm obsessed with the understanding of prehistory in antiquity. To what extent did people in ancient Greece conceive of a time before agriculture, for example, and in human history? And it's hard to know because we only have so much from them. But there was someone, and I forget who it was, who wrote about how the Greeks, meaning him, ancient Greeks like us, used to be nomadic pre-agriculture people. And I think the idea came from the fact that there were nomadic people that they could witness who, like, didn't have language in the same way. And they'd be like, I think we were like them before, too.

17:14and that there's some story here.

17:17Michael Stevens:There's also, I think, Eridotus believed, it could have been him, it could have been some other historian, believed that he could trace his genealogy back to the gods. He'd go back, like, I don't know, 14 generations and I come from, you know, the gods who created the world. But then he went to Egypt and he talked with pharaohs there and they were like, oh, you like history, you like old things. Look here. And they showed him this hall and there was a statue of like every pharaoh. And it went back like 50 pharaohs. And all of them are these humans that they have records of. And he's like, oh, my gosh, humanity is so much older than I thought.

17:58Michael Stevens:Because they've tracked the years of the reign for all these pharaohs going back further than I even thought humans existed. And this was this like major moment for Western thought to go, wow, humans, like where did we really come from? Oh, that's interesting.

18:15Hannah Fry:I think you sometimes get traces of what our ancestors thought through stories. You know, I always think, look, this is something that becomes impossible to prove. This is not falsifiable. But things like the story of Atlantis, where there was, you know, a really great city that was one day flooded by this great wave that kind of came and took everything away. And, okay, there's been people who've looked quite seriously for where this might be. We do know that there were some human civilizations that were genuinely washed away by, you know, sort of in one day. I think one of the really great candidates for this is, I think it's called Doggerland.

18:57Hannah Fry:Do you know about Doggerland? Oh, that used to be part of England. Exactly. It used to connect England over to Denmark and France, the continent essentially. And one day there was this shift in the tectonic plates up by, you know, off the coast of Norway. this unbelievable tsunami that you I mean inconceivable of how big this thing was and came in and just completely washed away all of these settlements I mean you find you find sediment sitting on top of human settlements inland in Scotland you know sort of 50 100 miles inland where this this tsunami kind of came in and covered over everything so and I sort of wonder like how much of those stories that we still have around are actually based on real

19:46Michael Stevens:things that really happened and they were shared like orally only yeah and so they became what very much feel like myths today yeah and yet yeah uh the the flood myths that we see in the bible that we see in gilgamesh could have been yeah a story from thousands of years before where maybe the Mediterranean suddenly filled up. It felt like the entire world was flooded. And these things may have happened. And then they wound up getting written down as stories of like, yeah, this happened. But again, it's a game of telephone that's gone through a hundred generations, maybe not a hundred, but dozens of generations.

20:24Hannah Fry:I think maybe a hundred, right? Maybe these same stories in some form or another end up being passed down more than a thousand years.

20:33Michael Stevens:I want to hear those stories. Like, I want to know if someone in, say, like, ancient Mesopotamia has like a great, great grandfather who was like, there was a time before writing. You know, when your ancestors were kids, they just had to talk to each other. They didn't have any of this written word.

20:57Hannah Fry:This modern stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

20:59Michael Stevens:We had to find things to eat. We didn't have fences. Yeah. The problem is that human civilization and like technological change was so slow that there wasn't like a just a generational gap. Like, oh, you know, we didn't have a concept of interior consciousness when I was a kid. We were all just spirits, you know, but like that at some point that changed. And I'm fascinated by when people realized, oh, man, like we didn't we didn't used to have opposable thumbs. You know, unfortunately, that happened so slowly. We don't have that story of like, oh, we were living in trees when I was a kid. And now you've all got homes and containers.

21:45Hannah Fry:But look at you with the invention of the bucket. Yeah.

21:48Michael Stevens:Oh, yeah. Kids are all about wheels nowadays. They're not living in the moment.

21:53Hannah Fry:Yeah. But here's a nice thing to imagine. Literally all of that time, while all of that stuff was going on, you know, Doggerland and stories of Atlantis and all of these different Greek philosophers, this was hiding in a trash pile in a cave in France.

22:08Michael Stevens:Yeah, waiting to become what you would find so many years later.

22:12Hannah Fry:Now, I should tell you, if you do find fossil, this is many years ago that I found this one. If you do find fossil, you are supposed to leave it there or take it to a museum.

22:21Michael Stevens:That's a very good point. Yeah, tell someone because even moving it changes what we know about its story and what we can learn from it.

22:29Hannah Fry:Don't do what I did many, many years ago.

22:32Michael Stevens:Good lesson.

22:34Hannah Fry:Still, it's quite cool doing it there, isn't it? Yeah, it's pretty cool. All right, we're going to come back after the break with some of your questions.

22:54Hannah Fry:This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. In the UK, nearly one in two people will face cancer in their lifetime. The question is, could science stop cancer before it begins?

23:06Michael Stevens:In over the past 50 years, Cancer Research UK has helped double cancer survival in the UK. And that's proof of what research can achieve, like take cervical cancer. Almost every case is caused by HPV, the human papillomavirus. And when scientists uncovered that link, prevention became possible.

23:24Hannah Fry:Indeed it did, by a vaccine. And it's protection that works way before the cancer itself can actually grow. After the vaccine was introduced, cervical cancer rates in England were nearly 90 % lower than expected in women in their 20s. I mean, we're now genuinely at a point where this is a disease that is disappearing in younger women in the UK. This is something that I really hope my daughters will never have to deal with.

23:44Michael Stevens:For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash rest is science.

24:19Hannah Fry:podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

24:25Michael Stevens:No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets.

24:27Hannah Fry:They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet, so Hank decides to bring back the$1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft

24:36Michael Stevens:Excel to look at his sales and costs and help him see if he can afford it. Copilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now Hank's has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza.

24:49Hannah Fry:Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at m365copilot.com slash work.

25:02All right.

25:03Hannah Fry:First question for you, Michael. This is from Matt, who asks, what would happen to Earth if the sun simply vanished for 72 hours? Oh, geez.

25:14Michael Stevens:In some ways, not a whole lot. In other ways, an enormous amount. Like if the sun disappears, just magically it's like gone. You know, there's nothing caught. It didn't get sucked in by a black hole or anything else. All we need to worry about is the sun's gone. It would take eight minutes for us to find out, right? Not just the light from the sun, meaning its entire shape. It would continue to be in the sky for us as we receive its last, you know, light. Its gravity, too, would still act on us. We would continue to orbit this non-existent now star. But then we wouldn't. And Earth would still move, but it would just start moving tangentially out in a straight line out of its orbit.

26:00Hannah Fry:Like being flung off of a little roundabout.

26:03Michael Stevens:Yeah, but, you know, I don't think we would even feel it. Yeah. Because our orbit is so big that the difference between curving such that after 365 days, you're back to where you were. It's not much different than just going in a straight line. So I don't think we would feel much, honestly. And then here's the thing. Like for the first three days, it would be dark, right? And it would get colder, but not that quickly. Earth holds in heat pretty well. And so for just three days, I think we would all be, I don't know. We'll be fine. I think there are definitely parts of the world would be fine. Surprisingly, if you wait too long, it gets very cold.

26:49Michael Stevens:And the only place you can live is going to be around places where there's immense geothermal heat available. So Yellowstone would be good. Iceland would be good. You could, people could still live there. Or you could dig down. You could dig down. Down at the bottom of the ocean where you've got geothermal vents and a lot of heat, the creatures, the little microorganisms that live there, they wouldn't know the sun was gone. They don't even know there is a sun. They live in complete darkness, but they get all the nutrients and heat that they need from the earth itself. Like they're literally independent of the sun.

27:24Michael Stevens:They only need the sun in the fact that like it helps. Well, no, they don't even need it.

27:29Hannah Fry:I wonder. But then at the same time, you do get some decomposing matter, right, that falls down to the bottom of the ocean. That, I mean, I'm just thinking here about that rule that people say, oh, all energy comes from the sun. Everything comes from the sun.

27:42Michael Stevens:Yes, that's what I'm talking about, too.

27:44Hannah Fry:But actually, if you get decomposing biological matter that falls to the bottom of the ocean and that's what they're feeding on, that's where they're sort of indirectly getting energy from the sun.

27:53Michael Stevens:Definitely. I think there are, though, extremophiles that do not rely on decaying matter that can live off of the minerals and the gases that come out of these geothermal vents. Wow. And they almost never needed a sun because if the sun hadn't formed but Earth had out of this protoplanetary disk or if Earth had formed and then gotten flung out into interstellar space, there still would have been enough heat. Well, I mean, I don't know if life would have evolved, but like, let's assume that that still happens. They could have just been fine on this completely dark planet where it's always night.

28:30Michael Stevens:Now, Matt's question says the sun comes back after 72 hours. And that's where things get a bit spicy because so Earth is going in this orbit normally. The sun disappears and it just flies out tangentially. But three days later, boom, a bunch of gravity is back. Is it going to get pulled back into a now very different orbit? I would assume so. In which case, yeah, then things are bad. Because you've got a sun back and you've got night and day again. But you're now much further away from the sun. Too far, I think, for liquid water to exist. So I don't know how far the Earth would go in three days.

29:12Michael Stevens:How far away from the sun. It wouldn't be good. I'm just wondering, again, around geothermal areas, there could still be liquid water. I don't think it would mean the end of life. I think it would definitely be a major change.

29:26Hannah Fry:Well, because, I mean, even if you had a situation where night and day, summer and winter were messed up, even if you were still allowed to have liquid water, let's say, but actually the plants that we have, I mean, many of them would just die because they are so perfectly tuned to the rhythm of the planet that they just would not be able to survive. And it's one of the reasons we bring plants inside and they're just like, what? You can't deal with the difference in light.

29:54Michael Stevens:Yeah. So I don't think it'd be the end of life though. I think there are plants that would be like, oh, we are, you know, thousands and thousands of miles further from the sun than we used to be. I mean, tens of thousands. I don't know. How fast does the earth orbit the sun? I'm going to guess, look it up, but I'm going to, I'm going to put in a guess. I'm going to guess that it's like a hundred thousand miles a day. 67 ,000 miles per hour. Okay. About 66 ,000 miles per hour. So after three days, the Earth would be, you know, like 300 ,000 kilometers further away, which is kind of, where is the Moon?

30:35Hannah Fry:Well, that's what I was thinking. I think it's about 10 times the distance between here and the Moon.

30:40Michael Stevens:The Moon is about 400 ,000 kilometers away, but the Earth only orbits 100 ,000 kilometers away. Oh, per hour. Hour, yeah. Oh, goodness. Yeah, so you're right. The Earth would be much further away from its current position than the moon is from us. Yeah. So, yeah, that would drastically change the climate. It would be. I don't think it would be the end of life. Okay, well, then it's fine. It's fine. I mean, let's do it.

31:07Hannah Fry:Look, it's still a scientific experiment. It's still going to gain knowledge overall. I'm thinking let's do it. Let's do it. Okay, next question. This is from Anna. Hannah, Michael, I have some gossip. Oh. Actually, there's no gossip. But why do we love it so much? How did it evolve? Is it true that humans evolved language because they wanted to gossip? Okay, I unashamedly adore gossip. Yeah. I think anyone who says they don't is lying. I like nice gossip, by the way. I don't like mean gossip. Avoid mean gossip. But this is absolutely something that we are evolved to adore. um this is uh some work by dunbar uh that she's referencing in her question here uh who argues again this is something that's quite difficult to falsify it's really difficult to sort of say this is the definitive answer but dunbar anyway argued that human language didn't evolve to coordinate hunting or like attack dangerous predators or whatever but that instead it was like a form of vocal grooming so when you look at monkeys they're all happily grooming each other it's really delightful it feels really nice same as someone stroking your hair you know it's like it's a lovely lovely thing but because we have these larger social groups you can't you can't physically do that you can't sort of physically go around and massage each other but instead if you're chatting about social relationships uh you're kind of doing the same thing but just in a wordy way instead you know you're building a fire you're like gossiping about the group over there.

32:39Hannah Fry:You're connecting all together at the same time without needing to necessarily physically touch one another.

32:44Michael Stevens:Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think that the type of communication that would be needed to organize a hunt or, you know, assign roles in helping tend a fire is one thing. But what happens to a language when what's pushing its development is gossip? it's just that's just so much bigger and faster yeah totally let me look up the etymology of gossip because it's actually pretty cool it comes from god god sip no yeah let me as in god absolutely loves a drink from that delicious cup as in like god child oh meaning a relative yeah so yeah the The word gossip comes from the word god-sip, meaning a relative, a sibling.

33:34Michael Stevens:And so gossip was talk about the people that you knew closely. And I think that we know them closely in the way that we do uniquely as humans because we talk about them. We don't just see them and their behavior, but we have versions of them in our own heads. And we are this social animal that's social in a way that's different than an ant or a bee, which are also hyper social. Yeah, yeah. But we... We're cognitive social. We're cognitive. We're judgmentally social.

34:06Hannah Fry:Which also makes sense though, because if you think that our societies are built on mutual cooperation, you know, it kind of does make sense that you need a mechanism to identify who's being a bit selfish, to identify who's like happy to eat meat but refuses to go on the hunt, you know?

34:21Michael Stevens:That's right. I think that some of that is even like just the surface. I think we are social creatures in terms of judgment, we come up with completely arbitrary, unrelated to cooperation and survival reasons to judge people's behavior. We come up with rituals, which is defined as a thing that literally doesn't cause anything specific. You just do it. Why? Because it doesn't need to be done. And yet it does. Give me an example. An example would be things like burial practices, rain dances, the various ways like ceremonial statues are treated. You know, these things have no obvious causal connection.

35:02Michael Stevens:And yet participating in these rituals, the way you paint your body, the way you act and don't act, they don't have any real like scientific obvious reason to be done the way that they do, except that doing them means you're part of this group, this group of relatives, this small community, this gossip. The gossip is what enforces that and keeps us together.

35:25Hannah Fry:The silly little outfits that academics wear.

35:27Michael Stevens:Exactly. And to this day, we often think of gossip as like a thing that is very feminine or a thing that is very like... It's trashy. People think of it as trashy and narrow, but yet, no, no, no. The vast majority of news we consume, even respectable news, is just gossip. It's, did you know what these anonymous members of the administration said about this? And we go, oh, well, this isn't really gossip. This is important national security news. And it's both.

35:58Hannah Fry:Yeah, I totally agree. I also, I have definitely discovered over the years that it depends what format you're delivering science stories in. But if you want to grab people's attention, you know, if you're doing a reel or a YouTube show or whatever, absolutely the number one thing that I think in my head when I'm like, right, how am I going to script this is, how do I make it sound as much like gossip as possible? Right. Because that is the thing that makes everybody's ears prick up and everybody want to pay attention immediately because we just can't help it. We are so wired that way.

36:31Michael Stevens:We're wired that way. We want to hear those stories and we want to be part of those stories. I also think that what motivates me when I come up with how do I tell this story is how do I make this a thing that the viewers can then share so that they feel more interesting and they feel like when people talk about them behind their back and gossip about them, they'll say, wow, did you hear Michael had a really good point about this question? And that's what people want. They want fuel to make themselves more interesting in gossip about themselves. Yeah, you're right.

37:04Hannah Fry:I mean, everyone talks about like, oh, make it shareable. Make it gossipable. gossipable that's essentially what we're talking about okay last question this one's from john why don't we just chuck all radioactive waste into a volcano well because we don't want to

37:19Michael Stevens:destroy our species i mean is this a joke question like okay uh no it would be it would not be good it wouldn't get rid of it in fact it would only make it hotter and uh it doesn't get rid of the radioactiveness well it doesn't because volcanoes are actively like giving their their molten contents onto the surface. The only thing that we can do with radioactive waste that I think really would make a difference is put it in the sun, get it really far away, throw it into the sun, and then it's not coming back. And like the sun's gravity will tear it apart. It'll get destroyed. The atoms will still exist, but, you know, the sun's far away and Earth's atmosphere will protect us.

38:02Michael Stevens:And there's already a bunch of radiation coming from the sun. I think that's where we should be putting a lot of stuff that we want to get rid of that microorganisms can't get rid of, like styrofoam. Just put it in the sun.

38:15Hannah Fry:One tiny problem with that, just a slight objection, to get it to the sun. I mean, you've got to put it in a rocket ship and blast it off the surface of the earth, which essentially means attaching a bomb to it. I think no. I think let's just bury it.

38:31Michael Stevens:I think this is why we have to build the space elevator. So then we can just put it in a little cart that gets carted up into an orbital height, and then we can just let it drift into the sun, and now it's not our problem anymore. Yeah, wouldn't that be nice? And when it falls into the sun, all it'll do is make the sun a little tiny bit brighter. It'll also make the sun live less long. Uh-oh. That's what we're losing, because the more mass the sun has, the hotter it burns, the quicker it burns through its fuel. Hey, we've got billions of years. Don't worry about We've got billions of years. What's another couple?

39:08Michael Stevens:You know, literally like a big chunk of radioactive waste would probably take literally a nanosecond off the sun's life. Let's do it. Let's just do it. Let's just do it.

39:18Hannah Fry:Okay, so in this episode, we've decided that we're going to get rid of the sun, but not before we chuck all of our radioactive waste in there. I mean, this is the kind of gossip that you came for. If you enjoyed this episode, then please do like and subscribe on YouTube or leave us a comment. We read all of them. You can leave us a question underneath wherever you have found this podcast or send us an email, therestiscienceatgoldhunger.com.

39:43Michael Stevens:Can you believe what Michael said about the sun? It was disgusting. He's just, people today don't respect the sun. That's what we're talking about. Send us more gossip. We'll see you next time.

40:08Michael Stevens:You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's OmniShade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer at Columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on aloe lotion. You're welcome. Columbia. Engineered for whatever. We'll see you next time.