0
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Guess what, Will?
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What s up, Mango?
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I ve been trying to write a promo for our podcast, Part-Time Genius, but even though we ve done over 250 episodes, we don t really talk about murders or cults.
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I mean, we did just cover the Illuminati of cheese, so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy.
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We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food and how do dollar stores make money?
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And then, of course, can you game a dog show?
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So what you re saying is everyone should be listening.
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Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
0
SPEAKER_00
Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception.
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I m Andrea Gunning, and now we re sharing an all-new story of betrayal.
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SPEAKER_00
Justin Rutherford.
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Doctor, father, family man.
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SPEAKER_00
It was the perfect cover to hide behind.
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SPEAKER_04
Detective Weaver said, I m sure you know why we re here.
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I was like, what in the world is going on?
0
SPEAKER_00
Listen to Betrayal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
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SPEAKER_03
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
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I m Josh, and there s Chuck.
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And this is Stuff You Should Know.
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It s just Josh and Chuck today.
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That s all right.
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Don t freak out, Chuck.
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We re going to make it just fine.
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I m just glad we re recording.
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This is just a little inside baseball here.
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This is our third attempt at this recording sesh.
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Yeah, well you diffused my inside joke to you that I didn t have enough time to prepare for this episode.
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Yeah, my internet went out because of a windstorm last week.
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And then we were like, you were kind enough to be like, we ll just do it next Thursday.
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And then yesterday, your internet had problems.
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And I said, well, let s just do it tomorrow morning.
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Because, you know, Friday morning at 855 is when the voice is in perfect shape.
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Right, which was also very kind of you.
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So we ve been kind to one another throughout this ordeal, at least.
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You got to do that, people, if you want to stay married.
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Yeah, definitely.
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You want the other person to hold your hand, you better be kind.
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But I m excited to finally, and you know, probably, it was probably good that I had a lot more time with this, because this is one of those sort of thought experiment-y, get your brain in the right frame of mind kind of episodes, and we love doing these, and this is going to be a good one.
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Yeah, for sure.
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So what we re talking about today, Chuck, is the Silurian hypothesis, which if I could do anything with this thing, I would rename it.
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I d be like, guys, that was a terrible decision.
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Keep listening, everybody.
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I promise it s interesting.
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So the whole thing came out of, we ll explain in a second, but we should probably talk about where it came from and why we don t like this name.
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The whole thing came out of a meeting between a guy named Adam Frank, who s an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, and a guy named Gavin Schmidt, who s the bigwig director for the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a NASA joint.
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Yeah.
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And Adam Frank went to Gavin Schmidt and said, hey, I m trying to figure out if we could find ancient defunct civilizations elsewhere off of Earth.
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What would I look for?
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And the reason he was doing this, this is a, it s an answer to the Fermi paradox.
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Where is everybody?
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Well, one answer is, well, they were here, but now they all died out.
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So Adam Frank is looking for evidence that they were there.
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And Gavin Schmidt said, let me just stop you right there and up the ante here.
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Well, actually, you know what Gavin Schmidt said?
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What?
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He said, let me tell you something, Professor Frank.
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Hey.
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And Professor Frank said, oh, God, if I had a dime for every time somebody did that.
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Right.
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So, so close.
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Yeah.
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Schmidt was like, hey, buddy.
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What d you say?
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I ll one-up you?
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I ll up the ante.
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Okay, I ll up the ante here.
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What if it s planet Earth?
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And what if there were ancient civilizations here, my friend?
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Yeah.
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And they said, check please.
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Yeah, Adam Frank just vomited directly all over Gavin Schmidt s desk, very famously.
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Yeah, I mean, I think they sort of started chatting about this thing.
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And we should point out that, you know, what we re going to they wrote a paper.
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We ll get to that in a second.
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And they named it Solarian hypothesis.
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But neither one of them think like, oh, I think this is what happened.
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Right.
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It s more, you know, it s a thought experiment.
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It s what happens when two remarkably intelligent people get together sometimes and take LSD.
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One of the other things about it that I think makes it worthwhile, too, first of all, these guys were the first scientists to seriously explore the idea, which you can apply science to anything like that.
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And even though they don t think it s correct, they don t rule it out.
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You can t rule it out.
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There s not enough information to rule it out, right?
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Yeah.
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But the other thing that it does is it provides kind of like a guide to see what we re doing now, what signals we re going to leave in the far future as well.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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So I imagine they went to another venue, they went to a bar afterward to have a drink.
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Yeah.
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Keep this party going.
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And they were like, well, you know, there s been enough time for something like this to have happened.
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Yeah.
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Because when you look at the fossil record, the the oldest thing that we know of is a cyanobacteria fossil.
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That s about three and a half billion years old.
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That was from the ocean.
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Yeah.
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And if you re talking about complex life,
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then you only have to go back about 540 million years ago to the Cambrian explosion.
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So, like, anything beyond that was, you know, stuff like cyanobacteria that we know of, at least.
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So, any prior intelligent species wouldn t theoretically be older than that Cambrian explosion.
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Yeah, they call it an explosion because everything went from single-celled organisms, like you were saying, to basically all the types of animals on the planet today.
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It exploded.
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It s just the best name for it.
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You really can t add to that.
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But there s another guy, another character we need to add here, and his name is Jason Wright.
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I like this guy.
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He s an astronomer at Penn State.
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And he said, whoa, whoa, guys.
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And this is in a separate paper that I think even predated the Silurian hypothesis paper.
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He was sitting next to them, overhearing them at the bar.
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Right.
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They were like covering their work while they were...
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So, Jason Wright says, not to them directly, but in general, he s like, okay, we don t know that you have to stop the Cambrian explosion to look for intelligent life on Earth in the past.
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And the reason why is because we have a really, like that s using a really limited definition of life.
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that s using the kind of life that has certain body plans with a central nervous system.
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Some have like backbones, some don t, some are jellyfish, doesn t matter.
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Like, what if there s other kinds of life out there?
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What if some of those single-celled organisms had gotten together and formed like a hive mind colony that was capable of intelligent industrialization?
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We wouldn t know that.
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Like, think out of the box, guys.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Because, you know, it s hard to wrap your head around
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all we know is us and what happened with the development of how we got to now.
0
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So he s like, you know, turn that off, everybody, because that could have happened, what Josh Clark just said.
0
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And they were like, who s Josh Clark?
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And they said, oh, you ll find out soon enough.
0
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He said, or maybe there was another Cambrian-like explosion that happened way, way back before that, and maybe they didn t leave any fossils behind, or so few that we didn t find them.
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Or maybe, you know, there was a cataclysm that destroyed everything, like there was this complex life, it destroyed everything, and it kind of just rebooted the system with these single-celled organisms, and that s what we know as the start.
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Right.
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SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
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And they went, Whoa, buddy.
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It s pretty cool.
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Can I pay for this guy s drink?
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SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_03
Can I buy you a beer?
0
SPEAKER_03
So, um, Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank are like, we think we re onto something here.
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Let s, let s kind of flesh this out a little more.
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And I think it was Gavin Schmidt who, um, suggested they call it the Silurian hypothesis.
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And the reason they call it the Silurian, that s, I think, a period or an epoch or something in Earth s history, 500-something million years ago.
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But they weren t naming it after that.
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They were naming it after a race of lizard people who are characters on Doctor Who.
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Yeah.
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Do you have any Doctor Who experience?
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SPEAKER_03
None.
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I feel like it s like this whole thing out there that s just waiting for me to meet it.
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And I m like, I don t know.
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I mean, I ve never, I don t know anything about it, but I just caveat that because there may be emails coming in that are like, they re not lizard-like people.
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They are this, like, I have no idea.
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I looked at pictures of them like you did, and they look like lizard reptilian type creatures.
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They do.
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So, I mean, for all intents and purposes, if you re not super into Doctor Who, they re lizard people.
1
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I really, really hope so.
1
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The reason that they named it after this race of lizard people in Doctor Who is that in the Doctor Who universe, they lived about 300 million years ago, which would actually place them in the Carboniferous period, not the Silurian.
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And apparently all Doctor Who fans are aware of that.
1
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Because they re all Doctor Franks.
1
SPEAKER_06
Right.
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But, um, the, they supposedly, uh, survived a bunch of cataclysms here on earth by moving underground and hibernating until things cooled off a little bit.
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And now they re back in the Dr. Who universe.
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So they would be like the ancient civilization.
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And so there s two reasons why I find that unfortunate that they named it after that.
1
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One, it just makes the whole thing silly.
1
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To a degree, apologies to Doctor Who fans, but this is an actual academic exercise they re engaged in.
1
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It has a silly thing out of the gate.
1
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I mean, again, we re not saying Doctor Who is silly, but it d be like us coming up with the family ties hypothesis or something.
1
SPEAKER_02
Right, right.
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Like it s named after a TV show.
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It says, like, before you even read the abstract, don t take this seriously.
1
SPEAKER_06
But it s meant to be taken seriously.
1
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It s not tongue in cheek at all.
1
SPEAKER_06
The paper isn t, at least, or the hypothesis.
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SPEAKER_06
The other reason why is because every single
1
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author who wrote any piece or article about this hypothesis afterward uses a hypothetical lizard race to discuss what we would be looking for.
1
SPEAKER_06
And it s so obnoxious, man.
1
SPEAKER_06
So we are not going to do that.
1
SPEAKER_02
No, no.
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We re not even going to try to guess what they would be like or look like.
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They re just the hypothetical ancient industrialized civilization that we re looking for.
1
SPEAKER_06
So if we re looking for something like that here on Earth, Chuck, what would we start to look for?
1
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Well, and I mean, those are sort of the questions these guys started.
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I guess they went to another bar and started asking.
1
SPEAKER_02
They re pretty sloshed at this point.
1
SPEAKER_02
And they start asking even more questions, I guess, after they got over the... I mean, hopefully they didn t have to argue about Solarian.
1
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I m praying they were both Doctor Who fans and that Dr. Frank didn t have to convince old Gavin, you know?
1
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I think it might have been the other way around.
1
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And based on the titles, I think Frank would have had to go along with it.
1
SPEAKER_02
OK, well, either way, they started to sort of ask these big questions.
1
SPEAKER_02
And what it really comes down to are.
1
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two main questions.
1
SPEAKER_02
What should we be looking for?
1
SPEAKER_02
And in order to think about what should we be looking for, a good place to start is, well, what are we leaving behind that a future archaeologist or geologist might look for?
1
SPEAKER_02
And when they started poking around a little bit, they found that, you know, there s some stuff here that does bear a resemblance to like possible signals that something could have happened.
1
SPEAKER_02
as far as an ancient industrialized civilization that just went away.
1
SPEAKER_06
Like you can t hear it, but my jaw just dropped.
1
SPEAKER_02
All right, Josh s jaw is on the floor.
1
SPEAKER_02
We re going to seek some medical attention and we ll take a little break and we ll be right back.
1
SPEAKER_03
Guess what, Mango?
1
SPEAKER_03
What s that, Will?
1
SPEAKER_03
So iHeart is giving us a whole minute to promote our podcast, Part-Time Genius.
1
SPEAKER_04
I know, that s why I spent my whole week composing a haiku for the occasion.
1
SPEAKER_04
It s about my emotional journey in podcasting over the last seven years, and it s called Earthquake House.
1
SPEAKER_03
Mango, I m gonna cut you off right there.
1
SPEAKER_04
Why don t we just tell people about our show instead?
1
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, that s a better idea.
1
SPEAKER_04
So every week on Part-Time Genius, we feed our curiosity by answering the world s most important questions.
1
SPEAKER_04
Things like, when did America start dialing 911?
1
SPEAKER_04
is William Shatner s best acting work in Esperanto.
1
SPEAKER_04
Also, what happened to Esperanto?
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SPEAKER_03
Plus, we cover questions like how Chinese is your Chinese food?
1
SPEAKER_03
How do dollar stores stay in business?
1
SPEAKER_03
And of course, is there an Illuminati of cheese?
1
SPEAKER_03
There absolutely is.
1
SPEAKER_04
And we are risking our lives by talking about it.
1
SPEAKER_04
But if you love mind blowing facts, incredible history and really bad jokes, make your brains happy and tune in to Part Time Genius.
1
SPEAKER_03
Listen to Part Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1
SPEAKER_01
A new season of Bridgerton is here.
1
SPEAKER_01
And with it, a new season of Bridgerton, the official podcast.
1
SPEAKER_01
I m your host, Gabrielle Collins.
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SPEAKER_01
And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.
1
SPEAKER_01
Colin Bridgerton has returned from his travels abroad.
1
SPEAKER_01
Is Betrothal written in the stars for the eligible bachelor?
1
SPEAKER_01
Meanwhile, the ton is reverberating with speculation of who holds Lady Whistledown s pen.
1
SPEAKER_01
We re discussing it all.
1
SPEAKER_01
I sit down with Nicola Coughlin, Luke Newton, Shonda Rhimes, and more to offer an exclusive peek behind the scenes of each episode of the new season.
1
SPEAKER_01
Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix.
1
SPEAKER_01
Then fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton, the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1
SPEAKER_01
Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday.
1
SPEAKER_07
Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception.
1
SPEAKER_07
I m Andrea Gunning, and now we re sharing an all new story of betrayal.
1
SPEAKER_07
Stacey thought she had the perfect husband.
1
SPEAKER_07
Doctor, father, family man.
1
SPEAKER_07
It was the perfect cover for Justin Rutherford to hide behind.
1
SPEAKER_08
They led me into the house and I mean, it was like a movie.
1
SPEAKER_08
He was sitting at our kitchen table.
1
SPEAKER_08
The cops were guarding him.
1
SPEAKER_07
Stacey learned how far her husband would go to save himself.
1
SPEAKER_08
I slept with a loaded gun next to my bed.
1
SPEAKER_00
He did not just say, I wish he was dead.
1
SPEAKER_00
He actually gave details and explained different scenarios on how to kill him.
1
SPEAKER_08
He, to me, is scarier than Jeffrey Dahmer.
1
SPEAKER_07
Listen to Betrayal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1
SPEAKER_05
Stuxnet.
1
SPEAKER_05
Who?
1
SPEAKER_05
Stuxnet.
1
SPEAKER_00
Say it one more time.
1
SPEAKER_00
Stuxnet.
1
SPEAKER_05
I don t know what that is.
1
SPEAKER_05
You know what Stuxnet is.
1
SPEAKER_05
Is it in this?
1
SPEAKER_05
Stuxnet.
1
SPEAKER_05
Stuxnet.
1
SPEAKER_05
It s a great name.
1
SPEAKER_05
Yeah, I quit saying Stuxnet.
1
SPEAKER_05
That s the name of it.
1
SPEAKER_05
I know.
1
SPEAKER_05
It s a great name.
1
SPEAKER_05
All right.
1
SPEAKER_02
Stuxnet with an X. All right.
1
SPEAKER_02
So we re back and we were talking about where you might or what you might look for if you re looking for a previous advanced civilization.
1
SPEAKER_02
And sort of the obvious first place, you know, we re going to start easy and get a little more complex here.
1
SPEAKER_02
It s just like all the physical stuff.
1
SPEAKER_02
Like if you re an industrialized intelligent civilization, you re going to have industry and cities and factories and things and skyscrapers and buildings.
1
SPEAKER_02
And it s hard to wrap your head around all that stuff being gone one day when you re living amongst it.
1
SPEAKER_02
But like the life of a skyscraper is about 50 years without human intervention to, you know, start.
1
SPEAKER_02
That s why when you go to New York, every building has scaffolding on it, practically, because you have to keep those buildings up.
1
SPEAKER_02
They start falling apart because of corrosion and erosion.
1
SPEAKER_02
So without that, even though it s hard to imagine, everything will eventually be gone.
1
SPEAKER_02
And we re talking about in the grand scheme of the big, big timeline.
1
SPEAKER_02
So like hundreds of millions of years.
1
SPEAKER_06
Yeah, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_06
But for a city itself, I mean, apparently water intrusion is a big problem for all of those tall buildings, as well as erosion and corrosion and all that.
1
SPEAKER_06
It s not going to take millions of years for them to go away.
1
SPEAKER_06
We re talking thousands to tens of thousands of years.
1
SPEAKER_05
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_06
and our cities will be just completely rubble, especially ones that are built on like solid ground or rocky ground, well above sea level, because those are the ones that are most like open and left vulnerable to the processes of erosion that sweep across earth s surface and wipe the whole thing clean.
1
SPEAKER_06
And yeah, it wouldn t take very long
1
SPEAKER_06
the stuff that s underground might be a little more easily preserved.
1
SPEAKER_06
Like there, you know, under any city, there s a huge network of infrastructure of pipes and cables and tunnels and hardhats and stuff like that.
1
SPEAKER_06
That conceivably, even after the city above is long gone, that stuff could be preserved to a certain degree.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, for sure.
1
SPEAKER_02
And we should shout out this guy that, did you dig him up or was that Livia?
1
SPEAKER_06
I think Livia found him.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, his name is, uh, starts with a J, but it s Jan Zelisiewicz, and he s a paleontologist at the University of Leicester.
1
SPEAKER_06
Mm hmm.
1
SPEAKER_06
Nice work.
1
SPEAKER_02
Oh, boy.
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SPEAKER_02
In the UK.
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SPEAKER_02
And we shout him out because he, you know, he sort of led us down this path of of looking underground, potentially looking underwater because things would just deteriorate a lot slower down there.
1
SPEAKER_02
But he s just a guy.
1
SPEAKER_02
I just want to recommend if you re if you want to get into some heady sort of YouTube stuff, just Google.
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SPEAKER_00
Jan Zelisiewicz, it s Z-A-L-A-S-I-E-V-I-C-Z, because I went down a little, because we had so much extra time, just a little bit of a rabbit hole.
2
SPEAKER_00
Watching this guy, he has a bunch of YouTubes where he s speaking to university groups and classrooms and things, and he s just super smart and interesting.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the stuff he s into is super cool too.
2
SPEAKER_01
But yeah, he himself gets it across really well.
2
SPEAKER_01
I like that guy.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
So he points out, he was the one, he, I think he s, he chose San Francisco.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like San Francisco is a goner.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s not going to be around very long.
2
SPEAKER_01
Once we re gone.
2
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, I keep saying once we re gone, um, remember that amazing 2007 book, The World Without Us by Alan Weissman?
2
SPEAKER_00
Never heard of it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh, yes, you have.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was like all the thing back in 2007.
2
SPEAKER_01
They made like TV shows about it and all that.
2
SPEAKER_01
So this guy basically went to the trouble of figuring out in five years, 10 years, 50 years, 100 years, 1000, so on.
2
SPEAKER_00
That sounds familiar.
2
SPEAKER_01
What the planet would be like if humans just suddenly vanished.
2
SPEAKER_01
And like he goes into detail of like the processes of erosion and corrosion, what effects it s going to have.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s just so fascinating.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s super cool.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it is super cool.
2
SPEAKER_01
And like the series, at least one series, I think on like Science Channel or something like that was worth watching too.
2
SPEAKER_01
But that, I mean, that has a lot to do with what we re talking about.
2
SPEAKER_01
So the topside city s gone, the stuff underneath might be preserved, but the cities that are built along water, and there s a lot of cities that are built along water.
2
SPEAKER_01
They, like say New Orleans, is actually built below sea level.
2
SPEAKER_01
When people are gone from New Orleans, New Orleans is going to go away really quick.
2
SPEAKER_01
But it will probably get preserved or at least covered over if not preserved by a lot of the muck, the Delta muck that s brought down the Mississippi River.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that will conceivably create the conditions to preserve the whole city in some form or fashion.
2
SPEAKER_00
Totally.
2
SPEAKER_00
But, and you know, a lot of the thought experiment is like introducing things and poking holes in it.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s not a lot, like, you know, if you live in an urban area, it s kind of hard to think that there s not much urban area in the world, but there really isn t.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think the liberal estimates have it at about a little less than 3%, like 2.7, 2.8% of the world has been urbanized.
2
SPEAKER_00
Some people put it as low as 1%.
2
SPEAKER_00
So there s a lot of just land out there still.
2
SPEAKER_00
So if you re looking for an ancient civilization, I mean, who s not to say that it could have been like 50% of the earth, but chances are it would be something a little more like what we re doing.
2
SPEAKER_01
For sure.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so like you were saying, like, that s one of the cool things about this as a thought experiment, like you raise this point and then you like poke holes in it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Then sometimes you can kind of support it instead.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so like a legitimate question would be like, why are we assuming that an ancient civilization from millions of years ago in Earth s history had cities?
2
SPEAKER_01
And the reason why, if they have any kind of intelligence, typically the more of an intelligent organism you put together, the more advanced it becomes.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like 12,000 years ago, there was something like 15 million people across all of planet Earth, tops.
2
SPEAKER_01
But then as we started to grow in density,
2
SPEAKER_01
thanks to like agriculture and animal domestication, all of a sudden our technology started to develop at a really rapid pace, geologically speaking, and now here we are.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we could assume that there d be some form of density because you need X number of intelligent organisms to advance to an industrialized civilization, one would imagine.
2
SPEAKER_01
So there s actually a legitimate reason to think that they would have cities that we could look for.
2
SPEAKER_01
The problem is this, Chuck, and you know this as well as I do.
2
SPEAKER_01
We ll see.
2
SPEAKER_01
The earth does not like things like cities and ruins or fossils.
2
SPEAKER_01
Let s talk about fossils.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, that seems to be the next best place to start looking if, let s say, the buildings are gone.
2
SPEAKER_00
Fossils are how we know what happened in our distant past.
2
SPEAKER_00
But fossils are tough just because of how rare they are and how hard it is to make one and how sort of lucky it is that they happen to begin with and that we find them.
2
SPEAKER_00
The T. rex is a great example.
2
SPEAKER_00
Just a little like back in the envelope math, some estimates say
2
SPEAKER_00
that somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 T-Rexes at any given time during their run were walking, stomping around planet Earth with their tiny little baby arms.
2
SPEAKER_00
They were around for about two and a half million years.
2
SPEAKER_00
That comes out to roughly 127,000 generations on the lifespan of a T-Rex.
2
SPEAKER_00
So we re talking total, roughly, of course, about two and a half billion individual T-Rexes that lived and died at any point in their history.
2
SPEAKER_00
And we only found 50 fossilized skeletons, which is about two millionths of one percent of the total population.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I should forewarn you that two millionths of 1% is my math, personally.
2
SPEAKER_01
But I did use an online percentage calculator like three different times to make sure.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it s accurate, my friend.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I know the math people are always checking you.
2
SPEAKER_00
I was about to say getting your back, but really trying to prove you wrong.
2
SPEAKER_01
No, they re not getting my back.
2
SPEAKER_01
I ve got a target on my back.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s what they re trying to get.
2
SPEAKER_00
But, you know, the movie Jurassic Park, as silly as some of that stuff was with it, great movie, don t get me wrong.
2
SPEAKER_00
But, you know, the mosquito being covered in amber, like, if you look at that movie, like that one mosquito got trapped in amber.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s kind of what we re talking about here is just sort of the dumb luck.
2
SPEAKER_00
of the fossil happening to begin with, A, and then that fossil that s buried eventually getting pushed up to the Earth s surface where we can find it, but within the window between it popping up and it being findable to it eroding to where it s not findable anymore.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like, it s all, I mean, that s why we don t have, you know, billions and billions of fossils is because it s just really rare to make one and find one.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, not just making one, but yes, finding one.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s all a product of time and space in a really complex formula.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I saw in an article called, How Can I Become a Fossil?
2
SPEAKER_01
by John Pickerell from 2018 on BBC.
2
SPEAKER_01
Really well worth reading.
2
SPEAKER_00
Did it say, start listening to the Doobie Brothers?
2
SPEAKER_01
Nice.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah, RIP Dickie Betts, huh?
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, the Allman Brothers, but sure.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, yeah, no, I knew that.
2
SPEAKER_00
But yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, they re both brothers.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
Same time period.
2
SPEAKER_00
RIP Dickie Betts.
2
SPEAKER_00
That was, that was a tough one.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you had been in my brain, it would have been.
2
SPEAKER_01
No, I got you.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, of course.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it s also 920.
2
SPEAKER_01
So John Pickrell cited an estimate that one tenth of one percent of all the species that have ever existed has had one of their individuals fossilized.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh, wow.
2
SPEAKER_01
So just really tiny, tiny percentages of fossils are ever created.
2
SPEAKER_01
But and also, I got to just say this quote, too.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s another article called Anthropocene is a joke.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I thought you were going to skip this one.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is great.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, a guy named Peter Brannan, who s a science writer wrote it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And basically he s explaining like just how insignificant humans have been on earth, even as much as we ve affected earth, just how insignificant it actually is and how easily earth will shake our, our stuff off.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
But he had this great quote.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think you should say it.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh, OK.
2
SPEAKER_00
Do you know where he s from?
2
SPEAKER_00
So I can prepare?
2
SPEAKER_01
No, let s say Austria.
2
SPEAKER_00
You jerk.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I guess it s sort of German.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m just going to read him as American.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is a great quote.
2
SPEAKER_00
Each fossil was its own miracle sampled randomly from almost 200 million years of history.
2
SPEAKER_00
A few stray windblown pages of a library.
2
SPEAKER_01
Isn t that great?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that really drives it home.
2
SPEAKER_01
It really does.
2
SPEAKER_01
So hats off to Peter Brannan and John Pickerel.
2
SPEAKER_01
Definitely go read those and also go watch YouTubes of Jan Zelishevich.
2
SPEAKER_01
Zelishevich, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Zelishevich.
2
SPEAKER_00
Kind of like Manischewitz.
2
SPEAKER_01
Right, but with a Z. Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
So all of that said, though,
2
SPEAKER_01
We have discovered really, really old fossils.
2
SPEAKER_01
The oldest hominid, our ancestor, the oldest indisputable ancestor to humans, Australopithecus anamensis, was walking around four and a half, almost four and a half million years ago.
2
SPEAKER_01
And we have a skeleton of that guy.
2
SPEAKER_01
So as miraculous as fossilization and discovery of fossils is, it does happen.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, absolutely.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s hominids.
2
SPEAKER_00
Our old buddy Jan Zelisiewicz is like, you know, what else could happen is we re creating a bunch of potential techno fossils as we advance.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like somebody could find a smartphone one day.
2
SPEAKER_00
Somebody could find a grocery bag that s been fossilized.
2
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
2
SPEAKER_00
The more likely thing that s going to be found is not some smartphone that you could plug in and then reboot.
2
SPEAKER_01
Right.
3
SPEAKER_03
Like, let s see what pictures this guy has.
3
SPEAKER_04
But it might be something like a brick or a glass bottle that s, you know, that clearly human-made, that s, like, artificial in shape, and it may be stamped with, like, a company name or something like that.
3
SPEAKER_04
Like, something like that is more probable for a future anthropologist or archaeologist to find as a technofossil.
3
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_04
Or plastic, right?
3
SPEAKER_03
Plastic is another good one.
3
SPEAKER_03
We actually don t know how long it takes plastic to break down to its constituent parts.
3
SPEAKER_03
We know that it breaks down into really, really small particles, but they re still like micro particles of plastic.
3
SPEAKER_03
It s like intact particles of plastic, right?
3
SPEAKER_03
And if a future race discovered our plastic, they d be like, this is really bizarre.
3
SPEAKER_03
Because by definition, the plastic we make is artificial.
3
SPEAKER_03
There are like polymers in nature, like cellulose that are an analog to our plastic, but all the plastic we make is not found in nature.
3
SPEAKER_03
So if they found that they d be like, this is kind of weird.
3
SPEAKER_03
What s going on with this?
3
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, for sure.
3
SPEAKER_03
And then chicken bones too, Chuck.
3
SPEAKER_04
Have you ever seen, it was an Instagram account, it may have been called Atlanta Chicken Bones, that were just these great pictures of chicken bones in parking lots and sidewalks all over Atlanta.
3
SPEAKER_03
Right.
3
SPEAKER_03
So that s a really great point.
3
SPEAKER_03
There s the people who are like all bully on the Anthropocene, the idea that the humans are creating our own geological era or epoch.
3
SPEAKER_03
Say, like, chicken bones are probably a pretty good bet for, like, fossilized evidence of our presence, because we raise and kill so many chickens, it boggles the mind.
3
SPEAKER_03
Their bones get everywhere.
3
SPEAKER_03
And they are anatomically different from all other kinds of chickens, because we bred them to be different, like, have huge breasts and not be able to walk and all sorts of terrible stuff.
3
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_03
if you found other chicken bones in the fossil record and then you found our broiler chicken bones, you d be like, what is this?
3
SPEAKER_03
And also, why are they in Antarctica?
3
SPEAKER_04
Right.
3
SPEAKER_04
I also want to point out, since I brought up Atlanta chicken bones, I am a lover of fried chicken, as you know.
3
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, it s probably my favorite food.
3
SPEAKER_04
And I have been known to have car chicken.
3
SPEAKER_03
As long as there s no shower chicken, that s still fine in the sand that I m keeping.
3
SPEAKER_04
No, you want to keep it crispy.
3
SPEAKER_04
You don t want any humidity in there.
3
SPEAKER_04
But I have always resisted the urge to toss my chicken bones because I have dogs and I walk dogs.
3
SPEAKER_04
And if you re not paying attention, that dog can snap up a chicken bone on the sidewalk pretty easily.
3
SPEAKER_04
So just a PSA there.
3
SPEAKER_04
Try and keep those chicken bones in the box.
3
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, and chicken bones can splinter so readily that it can really hurt your dog s throat, stomach.
3
SPEAKER_03
You don t want a dog eating chicken bones, okay?
3
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, did I ever tell you, this will be quick, about when my deceased dog Buckley ate an entire drumette that fell off the grill?
3
SPEAKER_04
No, it popped off many years ago Buckley left us, but I looked down I was like oh shoot chicken bone or chicken drumette And it was just gone, and it was gone so fast and Buckley was there But I was like he wasn t chewing or anything.
3
SPEAKER_04
I was like what happened to that thing ten minutes later He barfs up a hole he swallowed it whole oh
3
SPEAKER_04
a whole chicken drumette that was still steaming from the heat of the grill.
3
SPEAKER_04
So it was like, I mean, thank God he did that.
3
SPEAKER_04
Cause that would not have been good.
3
SPEAKER_04
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_04
He swallowed that thing like a pill.
3
SPEAKER_03
And then when he threw up, he wiped his mouth.
3
SPEAKER_03
He s like totally worth it.
3
SPEAKER_04
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_04
I think he thought it was worth it.
3
SPEAKER_03
Um, so I said something earlier, Chuck, we were talking about ruins, fossils, all that stuff.
3
SPEAKER_03
I said that earth doesn t really like that kind of stuff.
3
SPEAKER_03
And I was right.
3
SPEAKER_04
Are you setting me up?
3
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, well, because here on Earth we have plate tectonics.
3
SPEAKER_04
We have a situation where if you re talking about the ocean crust, it subducts below the lighter continental crust and it s going to push everything down, down, down toward the mantle where it melts and then eventually comes back up via like a land volcano, maybe an undersea volcano to form a new crust.
3
SPEAKER_04
And it s just like this giant, super, super slow recycling conveyor belt.
3
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, it takes, I think on average, about 250 million years for new crust to go through that whole cycle.
3
SPEAKER_03
And that s just on average, it can take hundreds of millions of years longer, it can take less, but that s just kind of generally how slow it is.
3
SPEAKER_03
The point is, is that after X number of millions of years, that crust is, and everything attached to it is totally gone.
3
SPEAKER_03
Once it hits that mantle, it doesn t discriminate.
3
SPEAKER_03
Everything gets melted.
3
SPEAKER_03
Everything gets melted in the mantle.
3
SPEAKER_04
What about on land?
3
SPEAKER_03
Well, land is not subject to to the forces of like subduction.
3
SPEAKER_03
Right.
3
SPEAKER_03
But it does have that erosion through wind and water and everything just kind of gets recycled in its own way.
3
SPEAKER_03
Plus, also,
3
SPEAKER_03
the plates that do collide with one another, and there s, you know, continental fault lines, obviously, too, that produce earthquakes.
3
SPEAKER_03
When they collide, the stuff anywhere near those edges gets all kinds of messed up.
3
SPEAKER_03
And that s how a lot of mountain ranges form.
3
SPEAKER_03
And then there s the Himalayas.
3
SPEAKER_03
The thing is, is that erosion, that process of erosion that completely recycles Earth s surface over X number of years,
3
SPEAKER_03
In 88 million years, the Himalayas will be gone.
3
SPEAKER_03
It ll just be a meadow where they were.
3
SPEAKER_04
That s one of my favorite sort of facts of the show right there.
3
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_04
It s hard to imagine this stuff, but yeah.
3
SPEAKER_04
What is it eroding at, like, 0.1 millimeter per year?
3
SPEAKER_04
And again, we re talking on timelines of hundreds of millions of years here.
3
SPEAKER_04
Right.
3
SPEAKER_04
So, 88 million years?
3
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, that s it.
3
SPEAKER_04
Just go romp in the meadow.
3
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, because even if we re just going back to the Cambrian explosion, and you can argue that you can go back further like Jason Wright did, but even if you re just going back 540 million years, that means continental crusts have reinvented themselves twice since then.
3
SPEAKER_03
The Earth s surface has been recycled countless times.
3
SPEAKER_03
Apparently, the oldest surface stretch of Earth is less than 2 million years old.
3
SPEAKER_04
Oh, geez.
3
SPEAKER_03
That s really young.
3
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_03
And the reason all this stuff is hard to imagine, like the Himalayas going away, is because our sense of time is so limited to about the span of a lifetime.
3
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_03
Plus a couple of decades, maybe, that when we start to think in tens and
3
SPEAKER_03
in hundreds of millions of years into the future or the past, we just stop.
3
SPEAKER_03
It just doesn t really make sense to us unless we really apply ourselves.
3
SPEAKER_03
With episodes like this.
3
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, exactly.
3
SPEAKER_03
So you ve got plates colliding, you ve got glaciers do all sorts of, they move entire regions around like bulldozers.
3
SPEAKER_03
But even something as humble as the movement of earthworms through the soil,
3
SPEAKER_03
over enough time, that s going to erode fossils, ruins, subterranean networks of pipes.
3
SPEAKER_03
And essentially, we re back to square one, trying to figure out what to look for, for an ancient civilization.
3
SPEAKER_04
Are we done?
3
SPEAKER_03
Almost.
3
SPEAKER_04
All right, maybe we should take a break and we ll come back and talk about why we re striking out and where we go next.
3
SPEAKER_02
Guess what, Mango?
3
SPEAKER_02
What s that, Will?
3
SPEAKER_02
So iHeart is giving us a whole minute to promote our podcast, Part-Time Genius.
3
SPEAKER_01
I know.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s why I spent my whole week composing a haiku for the occasion.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s about my emotional journey in podcasting over the last seven years, and it s called Earthquake House.
3
SPEAKER_02
Mango, I m going to cut you off right there.
3
SPEAKER_01
Why don t we just tell people about our show instead?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s a better idea.
3
SPEAKER_01
So every week on Part-Time Genius, we feed our curiosity by answering the world s most important questions.
3
SPEAKER_01
Things like, when did America start dialing 911?
3
SPEAKER_01
Is William Shatner s best acting work in Esperanto?
3
SPEAKER_01
Also, what happened to Esperanto?
3
SPEAKER_02
Plus, we cover questions like how Chinese is your Chinese food?
3
SPEAKER_02
How do dollar stores stay in business?
3
SPEAKER_02
And of course, is there an Illuminati of cheese?
3
SPEAKER_01
There absolutely is.
3
SPEAKER_01
And we are risking our lives by talking about it.
3
SPEAKER_01
But if you love mind-blowing facts, incredible history and really bad jokes, make your brains happy and tune in to Part-Time Genius.
3
SPEAKER_02
Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
3
SPEAKER_00
A new season of Bridgerton is here.
3
SPEAKER_00
And with it, a new season of Bridgerton, the official podcast.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m your host, Gabrielle Collins.
3
SPEAKER_00
And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.
3
SPEAKER_00
Colin Bridgerton has returned from his travels abroad.
3
SPEAKER_00
Is Betrothal written in the stars for the eligible bachelor?
3
SPEAKER_00
Meanwhile, the ton is reverberating with speculation of who holds Lady Whistledown s pen.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re discussing it all.
3
SPEAKER_00
I sit down with Nicola Coughlin, Luke Newton, Shonda Rhimes, and more.
4
SPEAKER_00
to offer an exclusive peek behind the scenes of each episode of the new season.
4
SPEAKER_00
Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix.
4
SPEAKER_00
Then, fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
4
SPEAKER_00
Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday.
4
SPEAKER_06
Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception.
4
SPEAKER_06
I m Andrea Gunning, and now we re sharing an all-new story of betrayal.
4
SPEAKER_06
Stacey thought she had the perfect husband.
4
SPEAKER_06
Doctor, father, family man.
4
SPEAKER_06
It was the perfect cover for Justin Rutherford to hide behind.
4
SPEAKER_05
They led me into the house, and I mean, it was like a movie.
4
SPEAKER_05
He was sitting at our kitchen table.
4
SPEAKER_05
The cops were guarding him.
4
SPEAKER_06
Stacey learned how far her husband would go to save himself.
4
SPEAKER_05
I slept with a loaded gun next to my bed.
4
SPEAKER_04
He did not just say, I wish he was dead.
4
SPEAKER_04
He actually gave details and explained different scenarios on how to kill him.
4
SPEAKER_05
He, to me, is scarier than Jeffrey Dahmer.
4
SPEAKER_06
Listen to Betrayal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
4
SPEAKER_01
Stuxnet.
4
SPEAKER_01
Who s Stuxnet?
4
SPEAKER_00
Say it one more time.
4
SPEAKER_01
Stuxnet.
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know it s Stuxnet.
4
SPEAKER_01
Is it in this?
4
SPEAKER_01
Stuxnet.
4
SPEAKER_01
Stuxnet.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s a great name.
4
SPEAKER_01
You gotta quit saying Stuxnet.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s the name of it.
4
SPEAKER_01
I know.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s a great name.
4
SPEAKER_01
All right.
4
SPEAKER_02
Stuxnet with an X. OK, Chuck, so we ve seen that we can dismiss the archaeologists.
4
SPEAKER_02
Thank you, everybody.
4
SPEAKER_02
And bring in the geologists.
4
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, like, take your whip, take your fedora, pack it all up, go take a break, because the geologists are on the scene.
4
SPEAKER_03
You can, Dr. Jones, you can take a seat.
4
SPEAKER_02
Right.
4
SPEAKER_02
So, I can t even, like, what are the geologists like?
4
SPEAKER_02
They just, they don t have movie franchises like the archaeologists do.
4
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I mean, they re not looking for grails, they re looking for residue, so it s not as grabby.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_02
I guess the thing that you most associate with is like a slight cough in a really large empty room.
4
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, like, there would never be a movie called Indiana Jones and the Ancient Tree Ring.
4
SPEAKER_02
No.
4
SPEAKER_03
You know?
4
SPEAKER_02
No.
4
SPEAKER_02
Unfortunately.
4
SPEAKER_03
But that s what we re talking about, is the fact that if we were to have a future geologist look back, that s what they would likely be looking for.
4
SPEAKER_03
Like, forget the fossils.
4
SPEAKER_03
They re going to be looking for
4
SPEAKER_03
just little bits of residue by looking at these tiny little layers of sediment that we deposit every day all over the place that eventually becomes rock.
4
SPEAKER_03
And this is how we, you know, look back at our own past to learn things.
4
SPEAKER_03
That s how we knew that the dinosaurs were exploded basically because of that asteroid.
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And that Cambrian explosion happened because we have studied geology.
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Yeah, we ve learned to study those layers that get put down and put down.
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And the problem is on Earth s surface, as we ve seen, there s the process of erosion.
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Yeah.
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And there s an entire layer across the whole globe.
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It s not just in one spot.
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But there s a billion year stretch of the geological record that s just gone.
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It s missing.
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This is crazy.
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I ve never heard of this.
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Yeah, I hadn t either.
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It s called the Great Unconformity.
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And we ll just never know what was there or what happened during that time because there s no record of it.
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They think that it was just a period where there wasn t a lot of sedimentation put down, but there was a lot of erosion.
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And so some people suggest that it was during Snowball Earth, one of those periods where ice sheets cover the entire globe three miles thick.
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and that they could erode stuff, you know, pretty cleanly across the globe.
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It s a pretty good theory.
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But stuff like that happens.
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So when we re looking on Earth s surface, you run into problems.
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But because that oceanic crust takes so much longer to recycle, we could look there and conceivably find something hundreds of millions of years old.
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Yeah, I also got to say, Snowball Earth is, I mean, that s the next great Netflix show waiting to happen.
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Maybe that s about an adventurous geologist.
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Maybe so.
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I love it.
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So, yeah, going back underwater seems to be a better bet than because of stuff like the Great Unconformity.
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Going back underwater where that process of wearing stuff away is much, much slower is probably a better bet for us and a better bet for future geologists.
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Yeah, because all the stuff that enters the ocean or is born and lives and dies in the ocean, it becomes detritus that eventually tumbles down to the ocean floor.
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And it gets locked in as sediment there.
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And it happens really, really slowly.
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Like, I think 0.8 centimeters every thousand years is about the average of sedimentation.
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So, that means that so far we have accumulated about 0.16 centimeters of ocean sediment that would bear our presence, possibly even bear the signals that we ever lived.
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But we re doing, we re adding to it every day.
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Thanks to things like nitrogen fertilizer that we overuse, that enters the watersheds and eventually goes to the ocean and then goes and gets trapped in sediment.
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And so if you were a future archaeologist or geologist and you were looking at the layer where we existed, you d be like, what is all this nitrogen suddenly doing here?
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And then also, what are these weird polymers that used to be our plastic from all the stuff, all the plastic that ends up in our oceans, those will eventually fall down to the bottom and become trapped in the sedimentary layer too.
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Yeah, so that super soaker that your kid lost beyond the point where the waves would bring it back in.
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is eventually going to end up at the bottom or the trash that is floating around the ocean.
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All that stuff is going to go down as well.
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And so this is going to leave behind like a trace, a sediment trace, where a future geologist might say, well, hey, I see that there was a specific time period, 100 million years ago, where there was a spike in nitrogen or a spike in these weird human-made polymers.
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Or maybe they didn t know that there were humans.
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But either way, like we re lizards.
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Yeah.
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Something that that doesn t jive with what we have going on today.
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Right.
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There are all these weird spikes.
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So there was clearly something going on in this time that we now think of as our time here on planet Earth.
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Yeah, because that s how we find mysterious signals in the geological record.
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You compare it to what s above and what s below it.
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And if something suddenly appears or disappears, you know something.
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It s like, look here, look closer here.
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Radioactivity will probably be a marker that will be behind, too, from all the nuclear tests.
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There ll be plutonium-244 and iodine-129, which have half-lives in the millions, tens of millions of years.
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If we end up going out in a massive nuclear war, you bet that will leave quite a signal in the geological record.
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And one of the other things about leaving a record in oceanic crust is that the Earth goes through cycles of cooling and warming and cooling and warming, and when it cools,
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the sea levels decline, it gets sucked up into ice.
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And so what s under the ocean may end up hundreds of miles inland for future archaeologists to find, probably more easily than they would if it were underwater at the time.
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Yeah, for sure.
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So, you know, sort of striking out all over the place, such that our old astronomer friend Jason Wright is like, maybe Earth is not the place to look.
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Maybe you should be, you know, we should be looking on a place like Mars that doesn t have plate tectonics and is probably a better, more hospitable place for some ancient thing to be discovered one day.
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Yeah, and not necessarily a Martian civilization, but an intelligent Earth civilization that sent probes to Mars or something like that.
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The European Space Agency also points out that if anybody had been around to send a probe out into geosynchronous orbit, the furthest reaches of geosynchronous orbit around Earth, it would still be there.
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Its orbit wouldn t have collapsed yet.
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So, you know, we need to look for 66-million-year-old probes
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spinning around Earth.
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That s a good start, too.
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Yeah, so all of this sort of presents a paradox that s pretty interesting, which is that if you re going to be an industrialized civilization that lasts long enough to leave something behind for some future geologist to find, then that means that you found some sort of sustainable way to survive.
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And if you found a sustainable way to survive, that means you re not making as much of a findable impact on Earth.
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You re living more sustainably.
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And so you re not dumping plastic.
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into the ocean or nitrogen into the ocean and sort of cleaning up your act and erasing your path a little bit better.
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If you re not doing that, then that means you haven t found a sustainable way to live.
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So that means you re going to, as a society, die out much quicker.
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So you re going to be just a shorter blip.
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So either way, it s just going to make things more difficult.
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Yeah, whether you re long-lived or short-lived, the record you leave is going to end up just being a blip in the geological record, right?
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Yeah, again, on that huge timeline.
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So, like, I m sure some people are pulling their hair out.
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They re like, how then?
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Like, is it even possible to find signals that an ancient civilization existed?
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Or what signals will we leave to?
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And yes, there are.
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And what you want to look for is not like traces of fossils or strange appearances of elements in the geological record and sediments.
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Instead, you want to look at the impressions that the effects of those things had on Earth.
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because those get locked into geological records and they can stay around for a very, very long time.
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So much so that we can look back into Earth s far, far, far distant past.
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And we see signals that we re like, can t rule out that some industrialized ancient civilization produced these effects on Earth because we don t know what happened.
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Yeah, exactly.
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And what we re talking about is something called a hyperthermal event, where three things kind of line up, which is an abrupt extinction of maybe not everything, but many, many, many species, that s pretty obvious, that coincides with the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere and a lot of rapid coastal erosion.
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All of those three things happening at once is called a hyperthermal event, and it s a pretty good indication
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that something really, really big happened to wipe out most everything.
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Yes.
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And usually, the hyperthermal events we found are caused by negative carbon isotope extrusions, which is basically just a different way of saying a ton of organic CO2 was pumped into the atmosphere, and it had all of these telltale marks of sea level rise leading to erosion, mass extinctions, dogs and cats living together, all that stuff, right?
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And so if we look in the past, there are events that coincide with this.
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One of them is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, the PETM.
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It took place about 56 million years ago.
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So basically, after the dinosaurs died out and right after mammals started to take over Earth, it got really hot.
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And I was trying to figure out how hot.
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The surface temps in the Arctic Sea were about 73 degrees Fahrenheit, 23 degrees Celsius.
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That s what you find today around the panhandle in the Gulf of Mexico.
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These are the Arctic seas.
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Today, the global annual surface temperature is about 59 degrees Fahrenheit, 15 Celsius.
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Back then, it was 90 degrees Fahrenheit or 32 degrees Celsius.
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That s the global temperature, the average across all of the globe.
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So it was really, really hot.
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And they have traced that to tons of carbon dioxide suddenly appearing in the atmosphere, causing all these changes.
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Yeah, and that lasted for about 100,000 years.
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But that s not the only one.
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There have been other events similar to that in the Cretaceous period, in the Jurassic period, in the Paleozoic era.
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And then in the six million years since the PETM, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, there were even more of those hyperthermal events.
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And again, they sort of all bore the same similarities, right?
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Yeah, because there s only so many ways that Earth responds to being messed with.
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Yeah.
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And so, like, all of these things kind of do bear a striking similarity.
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And there are things, there s natural things that you can point to that could have caused them, like massive volcanic activity across Earth, or a sudden huge deposit of shale ended up in the mantle and got recycled very quickly, and all sorts of CO2 was released in the air.
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Who knows?
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But what Schmidt and Frank
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basically point to is like, and again, they don t think this is correct.
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They say, like, you can t rule out that this is a marker of an ancient civilization creating climate change in exactly the same way that we re creating climate change today, because we are laying down the foundations
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of a geological signal that will be detectable hundreds of millions of years in the future as a hyperthermal exactly like the ancient hyperthermals we ve discovered in Earth s past.
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Yeah, which is basically if we do ourselves in with climate change.
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Yeah, because they re predicting if we just keep going with fossil fuels just for the rest of the century, by the end of the century, we ll have increased the global temperature by about 4.8 degrees Celsius.
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Which is huge.
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That qualifies as a hyperthermal maximum.
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And that PETM, like the biggest hyperthermal maximum that ever happened all of a sudden, that took place over like a thousand plus years.
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We re doing this in a couple hundred years.
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So it will really stick out in the geological record.
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Yeah, I think the PETM had a 5 to 7 Celsius degree rise.
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And if we re looking at 4.8 in that span of time, that s trouble.
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Yeah.
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And that s just by the end of the century.
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Who knows if we just keep going?
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We re not quite sure when the whole thing will steady itself out and what the peaks will be when it does, you know?
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Yeah.
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So there s one other thing that I found really interesting is that the fossil fuels that we re using to create inadvertently this hyperthermal and Earth s geological record is created from the mass extinctions from the past.
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Those die-offs turned into fossil fuels that we use today to essentially add all that carbon to the atmosphere, which is creating these warmer conditions.
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Yeah, and then if you take it one step further, we re eventually going to create these mass extinctions that will create the fossil fuels for another industrialized civilization to come tens of millions of years in the future.
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That s right.
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We re just insignificant, aren t we?
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Yeah.
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but also overly significant somehow.
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That s right.
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If you really want to get that driven home, go read Peter Brandon s The Anthropocene is a Joke.
5
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It really, it almost made me feel like fine about climate change because it just, in the grand scheme of things, it s so insignificant.
5
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I had to be like, no, no, it matters.
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It s important.
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Stop thinking like that.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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I know what you mean.
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So you got anything else?
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I got nothing else.
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This is long-awaited for us and a lot of fun.
5
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Yeah.
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Let s hope we remembered to press record.
5
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Oh, God.
5
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I would just retire.
5
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Well, since Chuck said he would just retire, of course that means he s triggered listener mail.
5
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Uh, yes, this is a story from Dylan.
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This is one that I know about, uh, or knew about, but I don t know if we ever talked about it, but it s a pretty interesting little thing.
5
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Okay.
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Um, hey guys, uh, I ve been listening to you for about two years, helps fit down on my commute, and I often learn a lot.
5
SPEAKER_01
Uh, during the hitchhiking ep, you were talking about, uh, the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Larry David, uh, picks up a sex worker so he can ride in the carpool lane to a Dodgers game, and I wanted to let you know something about that episode.
5
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Did you know this?
5
SPEAKER_02
No, I thought this was amazing.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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That episode was actually used to help secure an alibi for a man, Juan Catalan, who was arrested for murder.
5
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They filmed the episode during an actual Dodgers game, and it just so happened that Juan and his family were sitting in the same section as Larry David when they were filming, and Juan s lawyer used the raw footage from the episode to help exonerate him.
5
SPEAKER_01
So they picked up this guy for murder.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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And they proved him wrong thanks to this Curb Your Enthusiasm footage.
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He was like he was at the Dodger game.
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He couldn t have done it.
5
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God did not want Juan in jail.
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Amazing.
5
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There s a short documentary on Netflix called Long Shot, and it is truly one of the stories you can t believe is true.
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Thanks for the years of entertainment.
5
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I love sharing the knowledge with you guys through listener mail.
5
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Stay positive and keep testing negative.
5
SPEAKER_01
Dylan.
5
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Awesome, Dylan.
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You re a cool cat, we can tell.
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Thanks a lot for that great email.
5
SPEAKER_02
That was amazing, and we will definitely go watch Long Shot very soon.
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SPEAKER_01
Totally.
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If you want to get in touch with us like Dylan did, you can send us an email.
5
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Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
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Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.
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For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
5
SPEAKER_02
Guess what, Will?
5
SPEAKER_02
What s up, Mango?
5
SPEAKER_02
I ve been trying to write a promo for our podcast, Part-Time Genius, but even though we ve done over 250 episodes, we don t really talk about murders or cults.
5
SPEAKER_02
I mean, we did just cover the Illuminati of cheese, so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy.
5
SPEAKER_01
We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food and how do dollar stores make money?
5
SPEAKER_01
And then, of course,
6
SPEAKER_00
Can you game a dog show?
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SPEAKER_00
So what you re saying is everyone should be listening.
6
SPEAKER_00
Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
6
SPEAKER_01
Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception.
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SPEAKER_01
I m Andrea Gunning, and now we re sharing an all-new story of betrayal.
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SPEAKER_01
Justin Rutherford.
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Doctor, father, family man.
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SPEAKER_01
It was the perfect cover to hide behind.
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SPEAKER_02
Detective Weaver said, I m sure you know why we re here.
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SPEAKER_02
I was like, what in the world is going on?