May 17, 2012 • 33 mins
What will the Earth be like in 5,000 or 50,000 years? In this far-sighted episode, Josh and Chuck explore how Earth may change over time. Listen in to learn more about humanity's odds of survival -- and how technology just might save us.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from house stuff Works dot com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is always Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, maker of some fine yarns, spinner of yarns,
(00:27):
your yarn spinner. I am uh, I guess I am
too to a certain extent, part time seamstress. Yes, but
you only make these suits of light formed by Matta doors.
That's right, Josh, Chuck. Yes, how's it going? It's great.
I can't wait to hear the interrupt with this. Why.
(00:48):
I don't know, because I thought this is a pretty
interesting thing that we're doing. I agree. This is not one,
not two, but three articles in one that's right, combined
ms mashed, taken totally out of context and repeated incorrectly. Yeah,
we might be all over the place on this one.
Not necessarily. I've I've I've discovered a structure to this.
(01:09):
So and follow me. Okay um, let me give you
the intro first, Chuck, h have you heard of the
Kio satellite? No? Okay um. If you read Ben Bolan's blog.
You would have heard of age written about it twice.
Who yeah, um stuff, they don't want you to know.
(01:29):
It's Ben Bowling. Car Stuff's Ben Bowling, just a general
man about town of awesomeness, Ben bowl And he wrote
about the Kio satellite, which was originally conceived and I
think by a French artist named Jean Marc Philippe. So
if you didn't believe me that he was French, I'll
bet you do now. Um. And his idea was to
(01:49):
basically create a time capsule and launch it into space. Right,
so he had standard stuff, um, standard time capsule stuff.
You know, a drop of human blood encased in a
diamond with the human genome engraved on the outside of it.
Kim Kardashian's bikini. Yeah, um the uh, let's see a
sample of air water, Um, basically earth wind and fire
(02:14):
but without the fire and with air, and then a
CD of earth wind and fire which would be great
and water. Yeah, I don't know why you wouldn't put
it in in. There would be a fun little ironic twist.
He got a bunch of um, a bunch of press
because one of the cool things that he's invited people
to do is to enter your own message whatever you
(02:36):
want to say, UM, up to six thousand characters, which
is still substantials, fure paragraphs. UM. And originally, since this
was from you could send it your submission in via
regular mail or as Time Magazine put it in two
thousand electronic mail. UM. Now I'm quite sure you can
only go to Kyo dot org and enter through the website. UM.
(03:00):
But then all of this will be compiled into again
based on the Time magazine report a CD ROM. Now
it'll be transcribed onto some DVDs. UM. Now those things
should have been launched like five times. But he's seeking
private funding. It's a good idea. People are with it.
Has no one ever done this? No, But the the
(03:21):
whole point of it is is all this stuff is
going to be put into Seid like shot in the
space and it's going to be given I'm not quite
sure how a fifty thousand year orbit, and then after
fifty thou years it should fall to Earth hopefully be discovered. Um.
Within all this will be some sort of pictogram depicting
how to create a DVD player, and then interesting, some
(03:42):
future civilization would be like, oh it's a DVD, it
will just pop it in our DVD player and then,
oh my gosh, I can't believe what um Mitch mausch
fourteen had to say about about what life is like
on Earth fifty years? Yeah, what is this l well mean?
And he chose kio because apparently, k e oh are
(04:06):
the three most common phone names in all the world's languages.
It's a pretty good idea. I love it. At the
very least, it coincides with one of the articles. We're
talking about what will the Earth be like in fifty
thousand years? Boom intro done, nice job, Uh, And to
get the fifty thousand years, Josh, we are going to
(04:26):
also touch on the articles five years in five thousand years,
and through this I'm also going to be uh disseminating information.
I found a Live Science article that hit and and
(04:46):
they sort of culled um opinions from scientists all over
the world on what might be going on, and that's
all within the next two hundred years. And the story
is not good. Well, yes, so here's here's the structure
I mentioned previously, Chuckers. There's a couple of ways to approaches, right.
(05:07):
We're so we're talking about the fifty years from now, Um,
there there's one. There are two big questions. One will
humans be around each of these periods, And there's two
possible answers, yes or no. And then depending on the answer,
we choose you, we choose our own adventure, and we
end up with treasure or being chased by pirates. Right.
(05:28):
The other possible answer is okay, if humans are around,
how advanced is our technology and specifically how advances our
ability to tap energy, which apparently is totally correlated with
how advanced or technology will be? Right, So I guess
approaching the idea where humans aren't around for any of this.
(05:49):
Just go watch a documentary called Life After Us or
Life After People. I didn't get to watch it. It's cool,
I'm gonna watch. It's a very neat little hour and
a half documentary that was a mini series like some
time Ago on some other channel. Um, but it is
a neat little um documentary like what if? And it
shows like what how long? Basically the Earth will erase
(06:10):
any mark of humanity after we're gone? And it doesn't.
It takes a very it takes a startlingly short time,
and the dogs go feral and it's crazy. Really Yeah. Um,
but let's say humans are around, especially in that five
hundred years scenario. Well before we get there, can I
read some of these highlights and this is in the
(06:31):
next you know, up until so this in the immediate future,
some of us it will still be alive. I'll just
read a few of these. By the year just to
scare you. Uh, less rainfall could reduce agricultural yields by
up in some parts of the world. Uh. World population
will be seven point six billion by up to eight
(06:55):
percent of the coral reefs in the world will be lost. Yeah,
because of increased ten richers in the sea and higher acidity. Right,
was it lower a cidity? I think it's higher. Acidity
is higher okay, um and the Arctic Sea could be
ice free in the summertime by the year twenty three.
And these are recording to you know. That was specifically
James Overland of the n O A A and Muin
(07:18):
Wang of the geophysical research letters from you dub So
I'm just not I'm not trying to preach some wacky
global warming conspiracies here quoting from other people. Okay, by uh,
ocean acidification okay, it is acid could kill off most
(07:38):
of the coral reefs. At least four hundred bird species
could become endangered or extinct due to deforestation and people
eating them. In Australia, all your Aussies out there, there
will likely be an additional heat related deaths per year. Josh,
(07:59):
it gets worse. Between one point one and three point
two billion people will experience water shortages and up the
six million people will go hungry. You know, it's crazy.
We we've talked a lot about this, like what happens
when we run out of water? Um, the climate porn
one where we like warned against exactly what we're doing
right now. Um, we've talked about a lot of this.
Go back and listen to it. Everybody agreed. Uh, sea
(08:21):
levels could rise in New York City by more than
three ft flooding Uh Brooklyn Queen's Coney Island. So let
me let me add something there. Three ft it's a
meter roughly, and there's um that's that's totally within the
predictions of sea level rise due to global warming. Right
about half a meter to two meters is what's predicted.
(08:43):
So one meter in there, if the sea levels rise
by one meter in the US will lose ten thousand
square miles of dry land in the southwest. If the
sea levels rise one meter um in India, Bangladesh and Indonesia,
they will lose, respectively, six thousands square kilometers, thirty thousand
square kilometers and thirty four thousand square kilometers of dry
(09:05):
land lost. And believe me, Indonesia doesn't have much more
than thirty four thousand square kilometers of dry land to
give up, right um, and the total of twenty four
million people will be displaced. I know that that's that's
three ft that's think about it. I mean like, it
doesn't seem like much, but it goes, you know, a
(09:27):
ways back. Plus also we lose all those wet land buffers,
so erosion um really takes a hold as well. Well.
They also along those lines predicted that coastal population is
going to balloon to about five billion. People already live
along the world's most populous populated river basins, so everybody's
(09:48):
gonna have to move back a little bit, everybody back up.
So while this is happening too, by the y, while
some places are flooded, other places gonna be drying out.
Oh yeah, desertification, And we've talked about that. It's about
that and then flash forward, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will
be much higher than any time during the past six
(10:09):
and fifty thousand years, Ocean pH levels will be the
lowest they've been in the last twenty million years, and
the ability of things like coral crabs, oysters, any kind
of shelled fish exoskeleton probably isn't going to be alive
in a quarter of all species of plants and land
(10:30):
animals could be driven to extinction. So that's okay, So
let's say chuck that tomorrow. Everybody's like, we're going all
wind power. Everybody just prepared for some dark couple of years.
But we're gonna be fine. We're done doing fossil fuels tomorrow,
and we don't put any more anthropogenic c O two
(10:50):
into the atmosphere. If we did that, within a few
decades ce A two levels would go back to normal
whatever you could consider normal without human contribution. But then
about years from now, we could expect to enter another
ice age, which the last a hundred thousand years. So
you're starting to get the idea that humans just being
(11:12):
us on a planet, just burning fossil fuels, dead plants
and animals for energy. It's as extremely primitive as you're
about to see. Um, we are in trouble one way
or the other. Oh yeah, and dude, that's not even
talking about extinction level events that are gonna happen at
some point. That's normal glacial stuff that may happen millions
(11:34):
of years from now. But at some point something will
destroy humanity. Okay, yes, agreed. But over the short term,
say five years, we have, Um, we have a a
big challenge to stay alive. Um. We have to basically
become Our technology has to outgrow the frequency of catastrophic events,
(11:57):
things like a meteor comment and ice age client a change. Um.
And that's Michio Kaku talking. Um. But if we can,
if our civilization can advance fast enough that we can say, oh,
there's a comment that's coming and there's going to be
a mass extinction event. Luckily our technology is sufficient that
we can go out there and destroy it before it
(12:17):
gets anywhere near Earth will be fine. Well, we should
be able to ensure our survival at least here on
the planet. And the way to do that is to
go from what we are now, which is essentially a
type zero civilization, to a Type one civilization. Yes, we
should go ahead and mention this that's very important. Uh,
the Kim Kardashian scale. That's twice in one episode. I
(12:40):
don't even know it. I don't even know who she is.
Hardly that's good, okay. Uh. Russian astrophysicist Nikolai kardas Chev
um put forth his theory that our technical advancement is
in direct correlation to how much energy we can consume
and tap into harness. Yeah. Yeah, uh, type one, which
(13:00):
we're not even there yet. We're type zero right now.
As we can harness everything on this planet period, every
kind of energy we can tap into, right, but it's
um it should be any type of energy that's available
that's non extracted. Basically, any kind of non harmful energy
is kind of the caveats, So it's basically solar radiation,
(13:21):
nuclear fusion, that kind of thing. We use a billionth
of the Sun's No, there's a billionth of the Sun's
energy available to us on Earth through solar radiation. We
currently harness a millionth of that. So we have a
ways to go. But if you look at our progress
over the last hundred years, we were harnessing like zero
(13:42):
of it pretty much, and now we're harnessing a million,
So it's quite possible, according to Michio Kaku, that will
be able to harness a UM within a hundred years.
Well yeah, they say that. Over the past ten thousand years,
are scientists estimate that we have evolved a hundred times
faster than at any other time. So if that continues,
(14:05):
then hopefully we can keep pace. I mean, just look
at our advances in lighting over the last hundred years.
I mean that we went from fire to incandescent light
bulbs to compact fluorescence. Um. Yeah, I feel like we're
we're exponentially advancing. Agreed. So if we moved to a
(14:26):
type one, we harness a hundred percent of the energy
on the planet, we become UM. By definition, according to Cardaschef,
a planetary a truly planetary species, where like we probably
have a universal language, we're all communicating via the internet,
like we are earthlings, and we no longer see ourselves
as Americans or Mexicans or Latvians or um whoever? Right, right,
(14:53):
exactly um. And as a result, our technology should be
advanced enough that we can control roll things on the
planet that threatened us, like I say, just or climate change.
So if we can do that, then we ensured our
survival here on Earth, at least from those sort of
natural disasters. Exactly. Good point, Chuck, because we could always
(15:15):
kill ourselves via war or something like that, or we
may enter the Singularity before we've sufficiently attached ourselves. The
machines become post human, and if the Singularity takes off
before then we are doomed. All right, let's get through
these next to it real quick man. Type two means
(15:36):
we can summon the power of an entire star system.
That's pretty pretty impressive, which um Freeman Dyson, Yeah, physicist,
he said that his his whole thing is that um,
a type two civilization could like basically put a gaggle
of satellites around a star and um like harvest its
(15:56):
energy like that. Yeah, and he just for the record, Uh,
michio Ki who says we might be able to get
to type one in a hundred years and Dyson says
it's going to be more like two. Still A sounds
too bad, No, I mean that's a that's leaps and
bounds from where we are now. And Type three, Josh,
the geekiest of all. We can command energy on a
galactic scale. I don't even know what that means. I
(16:22):
think basically it means like, um, so we can get
other solar systems. Yeah, we can harness the energy of
more than one star at once, and we would have
power beyond anything we could conceive of. Probably also by
that time, that would, I guess, mean that we were
capable of interstellar travel, which would probably mean that if
(16:43):
there's anybody else out there, we're contacting them, which hopefully
doesn't mean we're at war with them, but probably does
at least at first. So you mentioned technology growing, It's
a little something called Moore's law. Uh, computer speed and
complexity levels every eighteen months. If that continues, then potentially
(17:04):
in the not too distant future, there could be a
lot of robotics going on controlling these things instead of people,
or in addition to people. What do you think about that.
I think that if we're not already fused to those machines,
machines were slaves, which is trans humanism. Yeah, right, which
I mean if you're looking at it, over a hundred years,
(17:26):
we're so close to mastering genetics that there's if we
stay on this track, it's pretty much impossible that we
won't have diverged from evolution, taken ourselves out of natural selection,
because we'll be able to fix ourselves. So well that
really the only thing that we just genetics alone, the
(17:46):
only thing we wouldn't be able to fix probably is death. Well,
don't be so sure. Uh, there's a Cambridge University geneticist,
Aubrey de Gray who has said these famous words, the
first person to to be one thousand years old is
certainly already alive today. Uh, and whether they realize it
or not, barring accidents in suicide, most people that are
(18:09):
forty years old or younger now can expect to live
for centuries. She's definitely on me, Aubrey. Maybe not British,
perhaps he or she Weslie Leslie definitely sherlock out there
as far as his or her predictions. But scientists do
(18:31):
think that we are. I mean, they can already extend
the age in other mammals and laboratories, and we're funding
it to the tune of two point four billion dollars
a year anti aging. So yeah, who knows. And we
talked about this before. To cryonics. Cryonics is all coming
back together. Uh, let's see what else, chuck. So five
(18:51):
years we will most surely be around, I would say,
and we will either be a suffering primate species in
the sweltering he or freezing um and and iceage that
began because we abandoned fossil fuels without thinking it through. Um.
But we'll probably still be around, right, especially if you
(19:12):
look at catastrophic global change, it will probably be okay,
most of us will be those of us in life. Um,
what about five thousand years from now? Seventy two? Are
the seven thousands now? Yeah? Seven seventy yeah, two twelve. Yeah.
(19:32):
This this thing is blowing my mind so much. I
don't even know a year it is now. Uh. Robert
Lamb wrote this one, and he says that if we
reach that type one status, then that's great news because
then we've been able to stave off ecological disaster by
being able to control these things and harness energy elsewhere.
(19:54):
But he also points out, like we said earlier, warfare,
warfare and uh self destruction might do away with us. Sure,
if we're gonna type the chief type two status, then
the sky is the limit or the galaxy is the limit? Right? Well,
that's the one with interstellar travel, I believe, um. And
(20:15):
then he also talks about diverging through trans humanism post humanism,
where if we take ourselves out a natural selection, that
will probably looking back, be a point where it's a
significant as Homo sapiens diverging from Neanderthals or whatever happened
back there, because you know, there's a lot of speculation
(20:36):
that humans are like six Neanderthal and like tem percent
something else, and like we're we we very much interbred
with these um individuals we were competing with as well. Interesting,
so I guess it wouldn't be diverging, but um, say
the extinction of UM Neanderthals and the skyrocketing of Homo
(20:58):
sapiens because think about we're talking about fifty years ago.
Fifty years ago, Home of Sapiens were just now reaching Europe,
and Neanderthals were very much still around and alive and
possibly taken to the seas because they think that they
were the first ones to UM basically build canoes. Yeah,
(21:18):
they've gotten a bad rap and they're just now starting
to be understood. Interesting. Yeah, if you don't know your pass,
you don't know your future. Josh, Well, that's the that's
kind of one of the basis of this this little
exercise we're doing now. It's kind of like if you
look at where we've come, especially if you're talking about
how quickly we're progressing. I mean five hundred years ago, um,
(21:41):
who was it? Pontsa daily On discovered the Turks in
the cake coos in fifteen twelve, twenty years after the
Age of Exploration began, Like at where we are now,
we go to Turks and cacause right now, if we
had a lot of money, dude, we can go to Mars.
Not really not us, but we can land things on
a robotic cameras. That's like the beginning of the new
(22:03):
Age of exploration. But humans, they'll colonize Mars at some point.
I look that that's another question to this whole thing
as well, like what will the Earth look like? If
you look at the first two in five years and
five thousand years. Robert took a really ethnocentric view of it.
He made it about humans. But you kind of wonder,
especially in the five thousand year thing, like will we
(22:24):
just be like Earth is kind of played out. We're
gonna leave and there won't be anyone here, will be
on Mars or will be somewhere else, and the Earth
will just be like, Man, I'm glad I thought this
guys would never really rape and me while my junk. Yeah,
I believe so, man, do we need to talk about
(22:47):
actual procession? This is the one. Yeah, we kind of
do because this one if you ask me, fifty thou
years from now, No, humans won't be around. I don't
think so. But we'll have either left or we will
have diverged so much from humans as we are now,
(23:08):
they we won't be around. And if we, if there
are like human descendants, uh, they will be at such
peace with the Earth that like we can talk about
it almost in its natural state of what it will
look like in fifty years. I'm going with the extinction
level event. Okay, but let's back up and talk about procession.
(23:30):
Do you understand this? Yeah? So basically, you know, the
Earth as it rotates around the sun, or as it
revolves around the sun, it also rotates spins on its axis,
the imaginary line that goes from the south pole in
the north pole. The thing is is it doesn't spin
in a perfect tight spiral. And we talked about this before.
(23:51):
It's not like a a patent manning throw. It's more
like a tim tebuff throw. It's got a little wobble
to it, you know what I mean. So at any
point in time, the Earth is wobbling between I think
twenty one two point one twenty two point one. Okay,
(24:12):
So if it's a twenty twenty two point one, it's
a lot closer to being vertical, perfectly vertical, which means
that there's a lot less difference in the seasons. If
it's over at a twenty four point five degree angle,
the seasons are so different that they could actually be
about lopsided from where they are now, where in the
northern hemisphere we would have um summer in the winter
(24:36):
and vice versa. Um. That's just that's just over like
a sixteen thousand year cycle, right. There's also something else
called um obliquity, which is a forty two thousand year
cycle UM, which is kind of like the the extreme
of procession. What does that mean? It's the same thing,
but it's over a longer period. That's the one with
(24:59):
the tilt, okay, where the toil goes fully back and forth.
Got you, and then you have eccentricity, And this one
is more about the revolution around the sun, right where
the orbit of Earth around the sun is it goes
over a I think in ninety two thousand year year
(25:20):
ninety seven thousand year cycle. It goes from a close
to a perfect circle too in the lips and as
it's going through that when you factor in obliquity and procession, Chuck,
what does this all mean? At some point you have
a much colder Earth than in other points, which is
what it counts for ice ages. They think that's right
(25:42):
about every Uh, well, they last for about a hundred
thousand years and in between, which is where we are now,
we got about ten thousand years of pretty good weather. Yeah. Um,
we are, like I said, right smack in the middle
of the one. And scientists think, um, the next ice
age will reach its peak in about eighty thousand years. Yeah,
so as far as our fifty thousand your prediction, not hours,
(26:05):
but the fifty thou your prediction, we will not likely
be in the next ice age, although ice will be encroaching.
They think as far south as like New York City. Well,
not necessarily, because I did. I ran across the study
that said the next ice age we'll start about fift
dred years from the time that carbon dioxide levels don't
exceed like two forty five parts per million volume. So
(26:27):
when's that I don't know because we're way above that now, gotcha.
But it would have to come back down. And then
once that happened, in about fifteen hundred years, we'll be
in an ice age. Again. This is all scary stuff,
but I think about it. That's if we have an
advanced to a type one civilization. If we have, then
we'll have figured out how to write the Earth on
(26:48):
its axis and there it will just be spring all
year round and everybody will just be happy as larks.
It's like Guatemala, it will land of eternal spring. That's right.
Are we two extinction level events? Yes, this is the
one that will be the toughest to deal with. I
think so busta rhymes the extinction level event. Uh. If
(27:08):
you look back, like we said, you got to look
back to your past and your future over our four
billion plus history of the Earth. Um apocalypse is global
apocalypse has happened. It's unavoidable, whether or not it's an
impact event like an asteroid or a comment or some
sort of gas related expelling event which happened, or the
(27:34):
scariest of all, Now that I've read up on it
the super volcano, which is pretty scary, like tectonic activity
basically causing a volcano that would block out the Sun
for ten to twenty years. Yeah, which is what happened
at the end of the Permian Period, which I don't
think it was coincidence that the supervolcano erupted at the
end of the Permian Period. I think it ended the
(27:54):
Permian period two million one years ago. Yeah, million years
the great Dying, as they call it, the Permian Triassic
extinction event. And they don't know that it was it
was a super volcano, um the eruption of the Siberian traps.
They don't know for sure, because you can't know something
happened two hundred fifty million years ago. They think it's
(28:17):
could have been an impact event, maybe uh uh anoxia,
which is when the oceans became really depleted depleted of oxygen,
maybe some other gas event, or maybe a combination of
the super volcano and anoxia and an impact event sort
of all converging to basically wipe out most every living
(28:39):
thing on the planet. Yeah, like of all marine species
and um, how much of all land vertebrates. That's crazy.
This eruption the Siberian Traps super volcano erupted for one
million years and it took the volume of lava was
between one and four million cubic kilometers and it took
(29:02):
thirty million years for the Earth to recover. That's a
big dying. And it was also the only known mass
extinction of insects in the history of the Earth, because
usually insects will live through stuff. Yeah they're fine, but yeah,
this one wiped out. Apparently there used to be big
scary insects. Yeah, there was like a cockroaches like three
ft long, and dragonflies just as long. And so the
(29:23):
super volcano took care of that, and it could take
care of us one day very well. May of course,
that is if we're here and we haven't figured out
how to advance to even a type wine civilization. If
that's the case fifty years from now, we deserved it.
I'm surprised there hadn't have been a super volcano movie.
I think that's what that one with Pierce Brosnon was
(29:44):
shooting for it to kind of missed the mark well
because it was just local. Yah, It's like, oh no,
it'll destroy parts of Los Angeles, not cover the world.
That's it man. So I think that said definitively what
will happen on Earth five thousand and fifty thousand years
from now? And if you are around in fifty thousand
(30:05):
years and we're wrong, you can send us an email
and complain about it. Yeah, and tell us what you
thought of the Keyo satellite. Yes. Uh. If you want
to know more about what the Earth will be like,
type those words into the search bar how stuff works
dot com. We have some pretty cool future stuff on
this website. And I said the search bar, which means
it's time for listening to my old Josh. I'm gonna
(30:30):
call this Cannibalism on the High Seas. Just finished listening
to the podcast and the dinner party. Uh. You mentioned
this is one of the very few instances of cannibalism
and human history. Uh did you say that? Um? Yeah, okay,
I did, all right. I was just picking up William
Aaron's work. I recently learned of another one that I
thought it would share the story of the whaling ship
(30:52):
to Essex. We talked about that in the in this
Weird ND this weird position right now because we have
recorded the whaling episode. Oh, talk about that, but it's
not out yet, okay, point time is catching up with us. Um.
The Essex took off a whaling expedition from Nantucket to
South America in the eighteen hundreds. The ship harpooned a
(31:12):
sperm whale, then exacted revenge by ramming the small whaling
skill but also a large boat, which sank. The large
boat would sank quickly. Twenty men made it into a lifeboat.
There's many rations and equipment that they could get aboard,
and we're a drift for ninety days, um, as we
can expect. Once the rations insanity began to run low,
(31:35):
they began casting lots to see who would be the
unfortunate savior. To the rest of the party. The interesting
anecdote that our instructor told us and she took a
class apparently, uh. Rather than just outright shooting the short sticker,
they would wait, sidle up close and mutter reassurances like yeah,
you know, you're doing okay for now, We've got a
couple of days. If we wait, we might hit land.
(31:58):
And then suddenly spot something up on the far side
of the ship, and the man turned to look capal.
He became dinner. It's just like so ruthless. Everything's gonna
be okay. Look over there. I'm not sure how true
this is, And in the case of cannibalism, it's hard
to say if that approach is more humane or not.
I can only think I probably wouldn't want to see
(32:18):
it coming. The boat finally made it. Uh in there
and there were only eight of the twenty men left. Um.
And apparently this inspiration for Moby Dick, which I think
is what we're talking about, right. And there's a whole
book on the Essex. It's supposed to be awesome. So
that's from Ashley with two e's awesome. Thank you very much. UM,
thanks for that. Very weird. It is weird the way
(32:40):
time works. I could have stopped that, but I just
figured that's fun. Already told her I read it. UM.
Let's see if you have a note about something that
we've already talked about but hasn't been released, we will
be very impressed. See if you can do it, UM,
send it to us as a tweet UH at s
y S a podcast. You can get with us on
(33:03):
Facebook at facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know,
or you can send us an email at Stuff Podcast
at Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com. MHM
(33:27):
brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready, Are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from house stuff Works dot com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is always Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, maker of some fine yarns, spinner of yarns,
(00:27):
your yarn spinner. I am uh, I guess I am
too to a certain extent, part time seamstress. Yes, but
you only make these suits of light formed by Matta doors.
That's right, Josh, Chuck. Yes, how's it going? It's great.
I can't wait to hear the interrupt with this. Why.
(00:48):
I don't know, because I thought this is a pretty
interesting thing that we're doing. I agree. This is not one,
not two, but three articles in one that's right, combined
ms mashed, taken totally out of context and repeated incorrectly. Yeah,
we might be all over the place on this one.
Not necessarily. I've I've I've discovered a structure to this.
(01:09):
So and follow me. Okay um, let me give you
the intro first, Chuck, h have you heard of the
Kio satellite? No? Okay um. If you read Ben Bolan's blog.
You would have heard of age written about it twice.
Who yeah, um stuff, they don't want you to know.
(01:29):
It's Ben Bowling. Car Stuff's Ben Bowling, just a general
man about town of awesomeness, Ben bowl And he wrote
about the Kio satellite, which was originally conceived and I
think by a French artist named Jean Marc Philippe. So
if you didn't believe me that he was French, I'll
bet you do now. Um. And his idea was to
(01:49):
basically create a time capsule and launch it into space. Right,
so he had standard stuff, um, standard time capsule stuff.
You know, a drop of human blood encased in a
diamond with the human genome engraved on the outside of it.
Kim Kardashian's bikini. Yeah, um the uh, let's see a
sample of air water, Um, basically earth wind and fire
(02:14):
but without the fire and with air, and then a
CD of earth wind and fire which would be great
and water. Yeah, I don't know why you wouldn't put
it in in. There would be a fun little ironic twist.
He got a bunch of um, a bunch of press
because one of the cool things that he's invited people
to do is to enter your own message whatever you
(02:36):
want to say, UM, up to six thousand characters, which
is still substantials, fure paragraphs. UM. And originally, since this
was from you could send it your submission in via
regular mail or as Time Magazine put it in two
thousand electronic mail. UM. Now I'm quite sure you can
only go to Kyo dot org and enter through the website. UM.
(03:00):
But then all of this will be compiled into again
based on the Time magazine report a CD ROM. Now
it'll be transcribed onto some DVDs. UM. Now those things
should have been launched like five times. But he's seeking
private funding. It's a good idea. People are with it.
Has no one ever done this? No, But the the
(03:21):
whole point of it is is all this stuff is
going to be put into Seid like shot in the
space and it's going to be given I'm not quite
sure how a fifty thousand year orbit, and then after
fifty thou years it should fall to Earth hopefully be discovered. Um.
Within all this will be some sort of pictogram depicting
how to create a DVD player, and then interesting, some
(03:42):
future civilization would be like, oh it's a DVD, it
will just pop it in our DVD player and then,
oh my gosh, I can't believe what um Mitch mausch
fourteen had to say about about what life is like
on Earth fifty years? Yeah, what is this l well mean?
And he chose kio because apparently, k e oh are
(04:06):
the three most common phone names in all the world's languages.
It's a pretty good idea. I love it. At the
very least, it coincides with one of the articles. We're
talking about what will the Earth be like in fifty
thousand years? Boom intro done, nice job, Uh, And to
get the fifty thousand years, Josh, we are going to
(04:26):
also touch on the articles five years in five thousand years,
and through this I'm also going to be uh disseminating information.
I found a Live Science article that hit and and
(04:46):
they sort of culled um opinions from scientists all over
the world on what might be going on, and that's
all within the next two hundred years. And the story
is not good. Well, yes, so here's here's the structure
I mentioned previously, Chuckers. There's a couple of ways to approaches, right.
(05:07):
We're so we're talking about the fifty years from now, Um,
there there's one. There are two big questions. One will
humans be around each of these periods, And there's two
possible answers, yes or no. And then depending on the answer,
we choose you, we choose our own adventure, and we
end up with treasure or being chased by pirates. Right.
(05:28):
The other possible answer is okay, if humans are around,
how advanced is our technology and specifically how advances our
ability to tap energy, which apparently is totally correlated with
how advanced or technology will be? Right, So I guess
approaching the idea where humans aren't around for any of this.
(05:49):
Just go watch a documentary called Life After Us or
Life After People. I didn't get to watch it. It's cool,
I'm gonna watch. It's a very neat little hour and
a half documentary that was a mini series like some
time Ago on some other channel. Um, but it is
a neat little um documentary like what if? And it
shows like what how long? Basically the Earth will erase
(06:10):
any mark of humanity after we're gone? And it doesn't.
It takes a very it takes a startlingly short time,
and the dogs go feral and it's crazy. Really Yeah. Um,
but let's say humans are around, especially in that five
hundred years scenario. Well before we get there, can I
read some of these highlights and this is in the
(06:31):
next you know, up until so this in the immediate future,
some of us it will still be alive. I'll just
read a few of these. By the year just to
scare you. Uh, less rainfall could reduce agricultural yields by
up in some parts of the world. Uh. World population
will be seven point six billion by up to eight
(06:55):
percent of the coral reefs in the world will be lost. Yeah,
because of increased ten richers in the sea and higher acidity. Right,
was it lower a cidity? I think it's higher. Acidity
is higher okay, um and the Arctic Sea could be
ice free in the summertime by the year twenty three.
And these are recording to you know. That was specifically
James Overland of the n O A A and Muin
(07:18):
Wang of the geophysical research letters from you dub So
I'm just not I'm not trying to preach some wacky
global warming conspiracies here quoting from other people. Okay, by uh,
ocean acidification okay, it is acid could kill off most
(07:38):
of the coral reefs. At least four hundred bird species
could become endangered or extinct due to deforestation and people
eating them. In Australia, all your Aussies out there, there
will likely be an additional heat related deaths per year. Josh,
(07:59):
it gets worse. Between one point one and three point
two billion people will experience water shortages and up the
six million people will go hungry. You know, it's crazy.
We we've talked a lot about this, like what happens
when we run out of water? Um, the climate porn
one where we like warned against exactly what we're doing
right now. Um, we've talked about a lot of this.
Go back and listen to it. Everybody agreed. Uh, sea
(08:21):
levels could rise in New York City by more than
three ft flooding Uh Brooklyn Queen's Coney Island. So let
me let me add something there. Three ft it's a
meter roughly, and there's um that's that's totally within the
predictions of sea level rise due to global warming. Right
about half a meter to two meters is what's predicted.
(08:43):
So one meter in there, if the sea levels rise
by one meter in the US will lose ten thousand
square miles of dry land in the southwest. If the
sea levels rise one meter um in India, Bangladesh and Indonesia,
they will lose, respectively, six thousands square kilometers, thirty thousand
square kilometers and thirty four thousand square kilometers of dry
(09:05):
land lost. And believe me, Indonesia doesn't have much more
than thirty four thousand square kilometers of dry land to
give up, right um, and the total of twenty four
million people will be displaced. I know that that's that's
three ft that's think about it. I mean like, it
doesn't seem like much, but it goes, you know, a
(09:27):
ways back. Plus also we lose all those wet land buffers,
so erosion um really takes a hold as well. Well.
They also along those lines predicted that coastal population is
going to balloon to about five billion. People already live
along the world's most populous populated river basins, so everybody's
(09:48):
gonna have to move back a little bit, everybody back up.
So while this is happening too, by the y, while
some places are flooded, other places gonna be drying out.
Oh yeah, desertification, And we've talked about that. It's about
that and then flash forward, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will
be much higher than any time during the past six
(10:09):
and fifty thousand years, Ocean pH levels will be the
lowest they've been in the last twenty million years, and
the ability of things like coral crabs, oysters, any kind
of shelled fish exoskeleton probably isn't going to be alive
in a quarter of all species of plants and land
(10:30):
animals could be driven to extinction. So that's okay, So
let's say chuck that tomorrow. Everybody's like, we're going all
wind power. Everybody just prepared for some dark couple of years.
But we're gonna be fine. We're done doing fossil fuels tomorrow,
and we don't put any more anthropogenic c O two
(10:50):
into the atmosphere. If we did that, within a few
decades ce A two levels would go back to normal
whatever you could consider normal without human contribution. But then
about years from now, we could expect to enter another
ice age, which the last a hundred thousand years. So
you're starting to get the idea that humans just being
(11:12):
us on a planet, just burning fossil fuels, dead plants
and animals for energy. It's as extremely primitive as you're
about to see. Um, we are in trouble one way
or the other. Oh yeah, and dude, that's not even
talking about extinction level events that are gonna happen at
some point. That's normal glacial stuff that may happen millions
(11:34):
of years from now. But at some point something will
destroy humanity. Okay, yes, agreed. But over the short term,
say five years, we have, Um, we have a a
big challenge to stay alive. Um. We have to basically
become Our technology has to outgrow the frequency of catastrophic events,
(11:57):
things like a meteor comment and ice age client a change. Um.
And that's Michio Kaku talking. Um. But if we can,
if our civilization can advance fast enough that we can say, oh,
there's a comment that's coming and there's going to be
a mass extinction event. Luckily our technology is sufficient that
we can go out there and destroy it before it
(12:17):
gets anywhere near Earth will be fine. Well, we should
be able to ensure our survival at least here on
the planet. And the way to do that is to
go from what we are now, which is essentially a
type zero civilization, to a Type one civilization. Yes, we
should go ahead and mention this that's very important. Uh,
the Kim Kardashian scale. That's twice in one episode. I
(12:40):
don't even know it. I don't even know who she is.
Hardly that's good, okay. Uh. Russian astrophysicist Nikolai kardas Chev
um put forth his theory that our technical advancement is
in direct correlation to how much energy we can consume
and tap into harness. Yeah. Yeah, uh, type one, which
(13:00):
we're not even there yet. We're type zero right now.
As we can harness everything on this planet period, every
kind of energy we can tap into, right, but it's
um it should be any type of energy that's available
that's non extracted. Basically, any kind of non harmful energy
is kind of the caveats, So it's basically solar radiation,
(13:21):
nuclear fusion, that kind of thing. We use a billionth
of the Sun's No, there's a billionth of the Sun's
energy available to us on Earth through solar radiation. We
currently harness a millionth of that. So we have a
ways to go. But if you look at our progress
over the last hundred years, we were harnessing like zero
(13:42):
of it pretty much, and now we're harnessing a million,
So it's quite possible, according to Michio Kaku, that will
be able to harness a UM within a hundred years.
Well yeah, they say that. Over the past ten thousand years,
are scientists estimate that we have evolved a hundred times
faster than at any other time. So if that continues,
(14:05):
then hopefully we can keep pace. I mean, just look
at our advances in lighting over the last hundred years.
I mean that we went from fire to incandescent light
bulbs to compact fluorescence. Um. Yeah, I feel like we're
we're exponentially advancing. Agreed. So if we moved to a
(14:26):
type one, we harness a hundred percent of the energy
on the planet, we become UM. By definition, according to Cardaschef,
a planetary a truly planetary species, where like we probably
have a universal language, we're all communicating via the internet,
like we are earthlings, and we no longer see ourselves
as Americans or Mexicans or Latvians or um whoever? Right, right,
(14:53):
exactly um. And as a result, our technology should be
advanced enough that we can control roll things on the
planet that threatened us, like I say, just or climate change.
So if we can do that, then we ensured our
survival here on Earth, at least from those sort of
natural disasters. Exactly. Good point, Chuck, because we could always
(15:15):
kill ourselves via war or something like that, or we
may enter the Singularity before we've sufficiently attached ourselves. The
machines become post human, and if the Singularity takes off
before then we are doomed. All right, let's get through
these next to it real quick man. Type two means
(15:36):
we can summon the power of an entire star system.
That's pretty pretty impressive, which um Freeman Dyson, Yeah, physicist,
he said that his his whole thing is that um,
a type two civilization could like basically put a gaggle
of satellites around a star and um like harvest its
(15:56):
energy like that. Yeah, and he just for the record, Uh,
michio Ki who says we might be able to get
to type one in a hundred years and Dyson says
it's going to be more like two. Still A sounds
too bad, No, I mean that's a that's leaps and
bounds from where we are now. And Type three, Josh,
the geekiest of all. We can command energy on a
galactic scale. I don't even know what that means. I
(16:22):
think basically it means like, um, so we can get
other solar systems. Yeah, we can harness the energy of
more than one star at once, and we would have
power beyond anything we could conceive of. Probably also by
that time, that would, I guess, mean that we were
capable of interstellar travel, which would probably mean that if
(16:43):
there's anybody else out there, we're contacting them, which hopefully
doesn't mean we're at war with them, but probably does
at least at first. So you mentioned technology growing, It's
a little something called Moore's law. Uh, computer speed and
complexity levels every eighteen months. If that continues, then potentially
(17:04):
in the not too distant future, there could be a
lot of robotics going on controlling these things instead of people,
or in addition to people. What do you think about that.
I think that if we're not already fused to those machines,
machines were slaves, which is trans humanism. Yeah, right, which
I mean if you're looking at it, over a hundred years,
(17:26):
we're so close to mastering genetics that there's if we
stay on this track, it's pretty much impossible that we
won't have diverged from evolution, taken ourselves out of natural selection,
because we'll be able to fix ourselves. So well that
really the only thing that we just genetics alone, the
(17:46):
only thing we wouldn't be able to fix probably is death. Well,
don't be so sure. Uh, there's a Cambridge University geneticist,
Aubrey de Gray who has said these famous words, the
first person to to be one thousand years old is
certainly already alive today. Uh, and whether they realize it
or not, barring accidents in suicide, most people that are
(18:09):
forty years old or younger now can expect to live
for centuries. She's definitely on me, Aubrey. Maybe not British,
perhaps he or she Weslie Leslie definitely sherlock out there
as far as his or her predictions. But scientists do
(18:31):
think that we are. I mean, they can already extend
the age in other mammals and laboratories, and we're funding
it to the tune of two point four billion dollars
a year anti aging. So yeah, who knows. And we
talked about this before. To cryonics. Cryonics is all coming
back together. Uh, let's see what else, chuck. So five
(18:51):
years we will most surely be around, I would say,
and we will either be a suffering primate species in
the sweltering he or freezing um and and iceage that
began because we abandoned fossil fuels without thinking it through. Um.
But we'll probably still be around, right, especially if you
(19:12):
look at catastrophic global change, it will probably be okay,
most of us will be those of us in life. Um,
what about five thousand years from now? Seventy two? Are
the seven thousands now? Yeah? Seven seventy yeah, two twelve. Yeah.
(19:32):
This this thing is blowing my mind so much. I
don't even know a year it is now. Uh. Robert
Lamb wrote this one, and he says that if we
reach that type one status, then that's great news because
then we've been able to stave off ecological disaster by
being able to control these things and harness energy elsewhere.
(19:54):
But he also points out, like we said earlier, warfare,
warfare and uh self destruction might do away with us. Sure,
if we're gonna type the chief type two status, then
the sky is the limit or the galaxy is the limit? Right? Well,
that's the one with interstellar travel, I believe, um. And
(20:15):
then he also talks about diverging through trans humanism post humanism,
where if we take ourselves out a natural selection, that
will probably looking back, be a point where it's a
significant as Homo sapiens diverging from Neanderthals or whatever happened
back there, because you know, there's a lot of speculation
(20:36):
that humans are like six Neanderthal and like tem percent
something else, and like we're we we very much interbred
with these um individuals we were competing with as well. Interesting,
so I guess it wouldn't be diverging, but um, say
the extinction of UM Neanderthals and the skyrocketing of Homo
(20:58):
sapiens because think about we're talking about fifty years ago.
Fifty years ago, Home of Sapiens were just now reaching Europe,
and Neanderthals were very much still around and alive and
possibly taken to the seas because they think that they
were the first ones to UM basically build canoes. Yeah,
(21:18):
they've gotten a bad rap and they're just now starting
to be understood. Interesting. Yeah, if you don't know your pass,
you don't know your future. Josh, Well, that's the that's
kind of one of the basis of this this little
exercise we're doing now. It's kind of like if you
look at where we've come, especially if you're talking about
how quickly we're progressing. I mean five hundred years ago, um,
(21:41):
who was it? Pontsa daily On discovered the Turks in
the cake coos in fifteen twelve, twenty years after the
Age of Exploration began, Like at where we are now,
we go to Turks and cacause right now, if we
had a lot of money, dude, we can go to Mars.
Not really not us, but we can land things on
a robotic cameras. That's like the beginning of the new
(22:03):
Age of exploration. But humans, they'll colonize Mars at some point.
I look that that's another question to this whole thing
as well, like what will the Earth look like? If
you look at the first two in five years and
five thousand years. Robert took a really ethnocentric view of it.
He made it about humans. But you kind of wonder,
especially in the five thousand year thing, like will we
(22:24):
just be like Earth is kind of played out. We're
gonna leave and there won't be anyone here, will be
on Mars or will be somewhere else, and the Earth
will just be like, Man, I'm glad I thought this
guys would never really rape and me while my junk. Yeah,
I believe so, man, do we need to talk about
(22:47):
actual procession? This is the one. Yeah, we kind of
do because this one if you ask me, fifty thou
years from now, No, humans won't be around. I don't
think so. But we'll have either left or we will
have diverged so much from humans as we are now,
(23:08):
they we won't be around. And if we, if there
are like human descendants, uh, they will be at such
peace with the Earth that like we can talk about
it almost in its natural state of what it will
look like in fifty years. I'm going with the extinction
level event. Okay, but let's back up and talk about procession.
(23:30):
Do you understand this? Yeah? So basically, you know, the
Earth as it rotates around the sun, or as it
revolves around the sun, it also rotates spins on its axis,
the imaginary line that goes from the south pole in
the north pole. The thing is is it doesn't spin
in a perfect tight spiral. And we talked about this before.
(23:51):
It's not like a a patent manning throw. It's more
like a tim tebuff throw. It's got a little wobble
to it, you know what I mean. So at any
point in time, the Earth is wobbling between I think
twenty one two point one twenty two point one. Okay,
(24:12):
So if it's a twenty twenty two point one, it's
a lot closer to being vertical, perfectly vertical, which means
that there's a lot less difference in the seasons. If
it's over at a twenty four point five degree angle,
the seasons are so different that they could actually be
about lopsided from where they are now, where in the
northern hemisphere we would have um summer in the winter
(24:36):
and vice versa. Um. That's just that's just over like
a sixteen thousand year cycle, right. There's also something else
called um obliquity, which is a forty two thousand year
cycle UM, which is kind of like the the extreme
of procession. What does that mean? It's the same thing,
but it's over a longer period. That's the one with
(24:59):
the tilt, okay, where the toil goes fully back and forth.
Got you, and then you have eccentricity, And this one
is more about the revolution around the sun, right where
the orbit of Earth around the sun is it goes
over a I think in ninety two thousand year year
(25:20):
ninety seven thousand year cycle. It goes from a close
to a perfect circle too in the lips and as
it's going through that when you factor in obliquity and procession, Chuck,
what does this all mean? At some point you have
a much colder Earth than in other points, which is
what it counts for ice ages. They think that's right
(25:42):
about every Uh, well, they last for about a hundred
thousand years and in between, which is where we are now,
we got about ten thousand years of pretty good weather. Yeah. Um,
we are, like I said, right smack in the middle
of the one. And scientists think, um, the next ice
age will reach its peak in about eighty thousand years. Yeah,
so as far as our fifty thousand your prediction, not hours,
(26:05):
but the fifty thou your prediction, we will not likely
be in the next ice age, although ice will be encroaching.
They think as far south as like New York City. Well,
not necessarily, because I did. I ran across the study
that said the next ice age we'll start about fift
dred years from the time that carbon dioxide levels don't
exceed like two forty five parts per million volume. So
(26:27):
when's that I don't know because we're way above that now, gotcha.
But it would have to come back down. And then
once that happened, in about fifteen hundred years, we'll be
in an ice age. Again. This is all scary stuff,
but I think about it. That's if we have an
advanced to a type one civilization. If we have, then
we'll have figured out how to write the Earth on
(26:48):
its axis and there it will just be spring all
year round and everybody will just be happy as larks.
It's like Guatemala, it will land of eternal spring. That's right.
Are we two extinction level events? Yes, this is the
one that will be the toughest to deal with. I
think so busta rhymes the extinction level event. Uh. If
(27:08):
you look back, like we said, you got to look
back to your past and your future over our four
billion plus history of the Earth. Um apocalypse is global
apocalypse has happened. It's unavoidable, whether or not it's an
impact event like an asteroid or a comment or some
sort of gas related expelling event which happened, or the
(27:34):
scariest of all, Now that I've read up on it
the super volcano, which is pretty scary, like tectonic activity
basically causing a volcano that would block out the Sun
for ten to twenty years. Yeah, which is what happened
at the end of the Permian Period, which I don't
think it was coincidence that the supervolcano erupted at the
end of the Permian Period. I think it ended the
(27:54):
Permian period two million one years ago. Yeah, million years
the great Dying, as they call it, the Permian Triassic
extinction event. And they don't know that it was it
was a super volcano, um the eruption of the Siberian traps.
They don't know for sure, because you can't know something
happened two hundred fifty million years ago. They think it's
(28:17):
could have been an impact event, maybe uh uh anoxia,
which is when the oceans became really depleted depleted of oxygen,
maybe some other gas event, or maybe a combination of
the super volcano and anoxia and an impact event sort
of all converging to basically wipe out most every living
(28:39):
thing on the planet. Yeah, like of all marine species
and um, how much of all land vertebrates. That's crazy.
This eruption the Siberian Traps super volcano erupted for one
million years and it took the volume of lava was
between one and four million cubic kilometers and it took
(29:02):
thirty million years for the Earth to recover. That's a
big dying. And it was also the only known mass
extinction of insects in the history of the Earth, because
usually insects will live through stuff. Yeah they're fine, but yeah,
this one wiped out. Apparently there used to be big
scary insects. Yeah, there was like a cockroaches like three
ft long, and dragonflies just as long. And so the
(29:23):
super volcano took care of that, and it could take
care of us one day very well. May of course,
that is if we're here and we haven't figured out
how to advance to even a type wine civilization. If
that's the case fifty years from now, we deserved it.
I'm surprised there hadn't have been a super volcano movie.
I think that's what that one with Pierce Brosnon was
(29:44):
shooting for it to kind of missed the mark well
because it was just local. Yah, It's like, oh no,
it'll destroy parts of Los Angeles, not cover the world.
That's it man. So I think that said definitively what
will happen on Earth five thousand and fifty thousand years
from now? And if you are around in fifty thousand
(30:05):
years and we're wrong, you can send us an email
and complain about it. Yeah, and tell us what you
thought of the Keyo satellite. Yes. Uh. If you want
to know more about what the Earth will be like,
type those words into the search bar how stuff works
dot com. We have some pretty cool future stuff on
this website. And I said the search bar, which means
it's time for listening to my old Josh. I'm gonna
(30:30):
call this Cannibalism on the High Seas. Just finished listening
to the podcast and the dinner party. Uh. You mentioned
this is one of the very few instances of cannibalism
and human history. Uh did you say that? Um? Yeah, okay,
I did, all right. I was just picking up William
Aaron's work. I recently learned of another one that I
thought it would share the story of the whaling ship
(30:52):
to Essex. We talked about that in the in this
Weird ND this weird position right now because we have
recorded the whaling episode. Oh, talk about that, but it's
not out yet, okay, point time is catching up with us. Um.
The Essex took off a whaling expedition from Nantucket to
South America in the eighteen hundreds. The ship harpooned a
(31:12):
sperm whale, then exacted revenge by ramming the small whaling
skill but also a large boat, which sank. The large
boat would sank quickly. Twenty men made it into a lifeboat.
There's many rations and equipment that they could get aboard,
and we're a drift for ninety days, um, as we
can expect. Once the rations insanity began to run low,
(31:35):
they began casting lots to see who would be the
unfortunate savior. To the rest of the party. The interesting
anecdote that our instructor told us and she took a
class apparently, uh. Rather than just outright shooting the short sticker,
they would wait, sidle up close and mutter reassurances like yeah,
you know, you're doing okay for now, We've got a
couple of days. If we wait, we might hit land.
(31:58):
And then suddenly spot something up on the far side
of the ship, and the man turned to look capal.
He became dinner. It's just like so ruthless. Everything's gonna
be okay. Look over there. I'm not sure how true
this is, And in the case of cannibalism, it's hard
to say if that approach is more humane or not.
I can only think I probably wouldn't want to see
(32:18):
it coming. The boat finally made it. Uh in there
and there were only eight of the twenty men left. Um.
And apparently this inspiration for Moby Dick, which I think
is what we're talking about, right. And there's a whole
book on the Essex. It's supposed to be awesome. So
that's from Ashley with two e's awesome. Thank you very much. UM,
thanks for that. Very weird. It is weird the way
(32:40):
time works. I could have stopped that, but I just
figured that's fun. Already told her I read it. UM.
Let's see if you have a note about something that
we've already talked about but hasn't been released, we will
be very impressed. See if you can do it, UM,
send it to us as a tweet UH at s
y S a podcast. You can get with us on
(33:03):
Facebook at facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know,
or you can send us an email at Stuff Podcast
at Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com. MHM
(33:27):
brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
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