Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
Speaker 1: We just recorded an episode about the Ordovician period and uh,
Speaker 1: and you don't need to listen to that one to
Speaker 1: understand what we're going to talk about in this episode.
Speaker 1: But we did spend a lot of time discussing a
Speaker 1: certain period in earth ancient history that we look at
Speaker 1: through geology. We look at the various layers of sediment
Speaker 1: that have accumulated on the Earth. We look at the
Speaker 1: chemical signatures from the past and trying to piece together
Speaker 1: exactly what the world was like, what caused it to
Speaker 1: be like that, and what made it in What ended
Speaker 1: that period? What catastrophic events ended that period in Earth
Speaker 1: history and gave birth to a new age. So inevitably
Speaker 1: we end up looking at our own period of time
Speaker 1: and what happened when we look at the age of
Speaker 1: humans as a geologic period, what indeed of aliens in
Speaker 1: the distant future? Time travelers, what have you travel to
Speaker 1: the Earth and find this world devoid of humans, but
Speaker 1: are able to look back through geology through chemistry and
Speaker 1: peer at our age, what would we make of it? Well?
Speaker 1: And I think it's a very interesting question because I
Speaker 1: think so often we are preoccupied with the past, particularly
Speaker 1: when we look at the time scale, we just think
Speaker 1: about everything that has happened before us. We understand ways
Speaker 1: in which we are affecting the earth, global climate change
Speaker 1: or something that comes up quite a bit. But as
Speaker 1: you say, I don't think that we have taken this
Speaker 1: stance before. We've tried to go out ten thous years
Speaker 1: from now and visit the geologic time scale and see
Speaker 1: what it would look like with the age of man.
Speaker 1: And this is what we're gonna talk about today, this idea,
Speaker 1: this anthroposyn this age of man that is replacing the
Speaker 1: current Holocene that we are in, this period of time
Speaker 1: um that has been relatively stable in terms of climate
Speaker 1: and resources, and trying to take a look at how
Speaker 1: we are actually going to how we are affecting the Earth,
Speaker 1: and what it will look like many years from now.
Speaker 1: And this is going to be kind of a dust
Speaker 1: statement to to talk about, because you know, we all
Speaker 1: know this. At some point Homo sapiens were not the
Speaker 1: dominant species and we're not quite as accessible as we
Speaker 1: are now. But there was a time um during life
Speaker 1: when Homo sapiens really had to be careful about the
Speaker 1: way that they conducted themselves because they could easily be
Speaker 1: a meal for megafauna, for a large predator. Or there
Speaker 1: were times in history where you've seen something called bottlenecks,
Speaker 1: and this is when the population, the Homo sapien population
Speaker 1: went below two thousand people. If you can imagine where
Speaker 1: the population dives down so far that the chances of
Speaker 1: the species can tinuing really diminishes, and then also you
Speaker 1: get into increasing problems of genetic diversity as well, and
Speaker 1: the population begins to get down that low, and of
Speaker 1: course you've got circumstance us during that time, that's thought
Speaker 1: that there weren't as many resources available. But now we
Speaker 1: take it for granted that Homo sapiens, you know, have
Speaker 1: always been strong and here and and been the dominant
Speaker 1: force on Earth. But really this is a fairly new
Speaker 1: in the full geologic time scale view of things. This
Speaker 1: is a fairly new development. Yeah, because we're as humans
Speaker 1: were still afraid of things. We're still afraid of sharks
Speaker 1: seating us, we're still afraid of of stray dogs, biding us.
Speaker 1: We're afraid of diseases. We're afraid of the death that
Speaker 1: we haven't exactly figured out how to defeat yet. I mean,
Speaker 1: and and everything has come into this humans versus this,
Speaker 1: humans versus that scenario. But we look back in the past, right,
Speaker 1: and there was a time when animals were a definite
Speaker 1: threat to humans. There was a time when disease was
Speaker 1: more of a threat. Now it's still a threat, but
Speaker 1: there were times when an outbreak of disease could potentially
Speaker 1: wipe out the species. And today, to too many modern observers,
Speaker 1: you might think, well, we basically haven't have it knocked right,
Speaker 1: outside of the chance that the shark might eat me,
Speaker 1: outside of the chance that the disease might topple some
Speaker 1: of us, humanity is here to stay, right, Yeah, humanity
Speaker 1: is here to stay. And you have to look at
Speaker 1: it this way that when we began to hunt wooly mammoth's,
Speaker 1: we began to change the landscape. Um, you know, from
Speaker 1: ancient aqueducts to cloud seating for Beijing Olympics to try
Speaker 1: to have better weather. We have been trying to alter
Speaker 1: our landscape. And geographers Earl Ellis and Navin Ramakuti argue
Speaker 1: that we are no longer disturbing natural ecosystems. Instead, we
Speaker 1: are now we now live in human systems with natural
Speaker 1: ecosystems embedded within them. Yeah, the mammoth thing is really
Speaker 1: interesting because generally when you start thinking about, okay, when
Speaker 1: did humans really start tinkering with things, you tend to
Speaker 1: think back twelve thousand years to this, this turning point
Speaker 1: when we begin to develop agriculture. Because this this allows
Speaker 1: a number of things to take place. We've discussed this before.
Speaker 1: Suddenly you're able to grow a surplus of food, You're
Speaker 1: able to stay in one spot, You're able to devote
Speaker 1: certain members of society to specialist tasks, be that task
Speaker 1: the development of essentially the early sciences, to culture, to religion,
Speaker 1: to star or naval gazing, to fine tuning the agricultural
Speaker 1: processes that society is depending on the birth of the city.
Speaker 1: All of these things rise up from that turning point.
Speaker 1: But you go back much farther in history and you
Speaker 1: find that the mammoth populations are dropping, in part because
Speaker 1: you have natural climate change taking place, but also mammoths
Speaker 1: are tasty, mammoths are useful, use every part of it right,
Speaker 1: it's it's a fabulous product. Early humans couldn't get enough
Speaker 1: of it, and so they were hunting it to extinction.
Speaker 1: And without the mammoths around to graze and eat the
Speaker 1: birch that grew, um, that kept everything kind of a grassland.
Speaker 1: Suddenly you have forests ringing up, darker forests absorbing more light. Right,
Speaker 1: So you end up with a warmer climate because of it.
Speaker 1: So here already due to the things humanity wants, the
Speaker 1: things that it feels it needs to combat in the
Speaker 1: world around it and take from the world around it,
Speaker 1: that contributes to changes in the planet. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: guess some people would argue that that was really the
Speaker 1: beginnings of when we began to alter the landscape. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, was thought that it was the more agrarianxieties
Speaker 1: societies that cropped up ten thousand years ago, that that's
Speaker 1: when humans really began to change the landscape for better
Speaker 1: or worse. But you can point to this, You can
Speaker 1: point to rolling manloths in the hunting of them that
Speaker 1: had a direct correlation with how the environment changed. Um.
Speaker 1: So if you kind of fast forward a bit and
Speaker 1: you had, you know, to to modern day and you
Speaker 1: had mentioned um, extra terrestrial life forms, if they were
Speaker 1: to cruise by our planet, they would see a very
Speaker 1: human stratigraphical signal. And when I'm thinking of, are the
Speaker 1: satellite photos of the Earth at night lit up by
Speaker 1: fossil fuel combustion. I mean, you could cruise past our
Speaker 1: planet and say, oh, there's something up, there's something going
Speaker 1: on there. Yeah, they're burning their past to create this
Speaker 1: present lit electric world of power and energy. And if
Speaker 1: in fact, as we've discussed before, as we're trying to
Speaker 1: figure out where extraterrestrial life may exist in the universe,
Speaker 1: we're looking for the same type of signals because we
Speaker 1: look to ourselves as the only model of intelligent life
Speaker 1: in the universe is the only one we have. So
Speaker 1: therefore the simplest equation to follow is that what exists
Speaker 1: here would exist elsewhere if there is anything alive elsewhere.
Speaker 1: So we look for that same level of fossil fuel
Speaker 1: consumption of energy, uh, energy consumption and energy output. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it looks so So think about those satellite photos
Speaker 1: and think about the fossil fuel combustion and the beautiful
Speaker 1: sort of fireworks display of light throughout the world that
Speaker 1: actually has real time signatures in the Earth settlement, and
Speaker 1: that's we're gonna talk about today. We're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: this idea again that we are now in the age
Speaker 1: of man. And if you doubt this, there's a statistic
Speaker 1: out there that says that there will be a million
Speaker 1: person city built every ten days over the next eighty
Speaker 1: seven years. So you have to start to think about
Speaker 1: the implications of that. And we discussed in the Ortivisian
Speaker 1: podcast this idea that when when you live on the
Speaker 1: earth here, you just continue to build up layers and
Speaker 1: layers of sediment. So now we are building up these
Speaker 1: layers of human sediment. Yeah. To see, it's just a
Speaker 1: simple example of that. If you've we've mentioned London in
Speaker 1: the past and how London has all these various levels
Speaker 1: of Like walking down one street in London, a particularly
Speaker 1: long street in London, you encounter bits of architecture from
Speaker 1: throughout that city's history, and if you take down into
Speaker 1: the earth, you'll travel down through the layers of history
Speaker 1: for this one city. The same way that we look
Speaker 1: at geologic time, and we're trying to figure out exactly
Speaker 1: how future analysis of geologic time will look at this
Speaker 1: age of humans. Yeah, so we should probably talk about
Speaker 1: the Holascene period, because this is what we have identified
Speaker 1: the period that we are in up until about I
Speaker 1: guess the nineties, when this idea of antipascene came onto
Speaker 1: the scene. Here. Ye, so Earth was emerging from an
Speaker 1: ice age, So we had the end of a period
Speaker 1: of of cold entering a period of a summer, if
Speaker 1: you will, a very long summer in which humans yea.
Speaker 1: So we have about something what twelve thousand years now
Speaker 1: in this Holocene period. And uh, some scientists will say
Speaker 1: that they think that this era ended and they think
Speaker 1: they can pinpoint it to about two hundred years ago
Speaker 1: with the advent of the steam engine. And this is
Speaker 1: according to Ken called the Ara. He is a climate
Speaker 1: scientist at the Carnegie Institute of Science in California. He
Speaker 1: says that steam engines allowed the extraction and transportation of coal,
Speaker 1: which ushered in the Industrial age. So previous to this development,
Speaker 1: it would take huge acts of nature to drastically all
Speaker 1: to the earth settlement. Yeah, you really can't overstate the
Speaker 1: importance of steam power for human civilization. It affected our
Speaker 1: ability to travel around the world. It affected our ability,
Speaker 1: like you said, to change the landscape around us. It
Speaker 1: affected our ability to grow things, It souped up our
Speaker 1: ability to depend on agriculture, It changed our ability to
Speaker 1: wage war on each other. I mean it really a
Speaker 1: manufacturing and affect every level of of human society and
Speaker 1: human culture. That's right. If you had to choose one
Speaker 1: thing that you would say hinged on that that changed
Speaker 1: technology for better or words going forward, I guess you
Speaker 1: could point to the steam engine. And uh, I actually
Speaker 1: wrote an article on how Stuff Works about the steam technology.
Speaker 1: So put steam technology, steam power into how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com search bar and you find out what I
Speaker 1: can feel is a pretty good article that goes through
Speaker 1: the history of it and how it really changed the
Speaker 1: world as we know it. Yeah, and if you doubt this,
Speaker 1: um consider that there has been data retreat from glacial
Speaker 1: ice cores and it shows the big of a growth
Speaker 1: in the atmosphere at concentrations of several greenhouse gases, in
Speaker 1: particular c O two and c H four, And the
Speaker 1: data coincides with James Watt's invention of the steam engine
Speaker 1: in seventy four. So that's just one human marker of
Speaker 1: these sort of ways that we have scarred or shaped
Speaker 1: the earth. Think about fiber optics, lining in the ocean floors,
Speaker 1: manufactured materials like aluminum and steel. Essentially these are new
Speaker 1: this is a new layer of human made strata. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's estimated by at least eight three of the earth
Speaker 1: verse land surface had been directly affected by humans. That's
Speaker 1: everything from cutting down a forest and planning a bunch
Speaker 1: of crops, to erecting a city, to turning what was
Speaker 1: formerly a grassland and into asphalt, to laying down cables
Speaker 1: to running power lines across the wilderness and the meaning
Speaker 1: name of the world pretty significant, right and the earth
Speaker 1: land right, but still you still have some significant changes
Speaker 1: going on underneath the water as well. And then again
Speaker 1: these are sedimentary and geochemical signals that are exactly the
Speaker 1: kind that geologists used to mark where one period of
Speaker 1: Earth history ends and another begins. And in the BBC
Speaker 1: program The Age We Made, geologist gen Zala Suits actually
Speaker 1: shows a reporter where a railway cutting exposed a clear
Speaker 1: line in rocks made one dred and eighty million years
Speaker 1: ago and this um actually mark the Torracian extinction event
Speaker 1: in the early Jurassic when dinosaurs is beginning to dominate.
Speaker 1: And Zala Suit says that in a similar way, we
Speaker 1: will see clear marks in the rocks that will show
Speaker 1: us where one one age was divided into another and
Speaker 1: and where you can see the human handprint on the earth. Um.
Speaker 1: He's saying that the rocks of the ant Passyne would
Speaker 1: show an accumulation of novel chemicals like artificial PCBs, among
Speaker 1: many other things. Yeah. I mean that it's an important
Speaker 1: thing to mention. We're chemically altering the world as well.
Speaker 1: It's not just we took a bunch of stone and
Speaker 1: a bunch of metals and we built a city out
Speaker 1: of it, or that we live up the night. Uh. Chemically,
Speaker 1: we're changing what the earth is. Yeah. And before we
Speaker 1: talk about how we we've changed the earth chemistry, let's
Speaker 1: talk about humans as a force of nature. We talked
Speaker 1: about this idea of sediment being moved around, but again
Speaker 1: it wasn't you know, previous to humans, it was really
Speaker 1: ice ages, supervolcanoes, um, huge events that changed the landscape,
Speaker 1: mass extinctions of animals. You know. Again, this was something
Speaker 1: that we attributed to nature in the past. But now
Speaker 1: again with sediment changes, here is a very clear picture
Speaker 1: of how we are the largest force in the movement
Speaker 1: of sediment on our planet, and that is compared with
Speaker 1: what's moved by ice, wind and rivers. And this is
Speaker 1: according to James Vitski, he's an earth scientist at the
Speaker 1: University of Colorado, Boulder. He says that that rivers carry
Speaker 1: thirteen billion tons of settlement to the ocean, and we
Speaker 1: now mine eight to nine billion tons of coal, and
Speaker 1: that by thirty's predicted that we will reach thirteen billion
Speaker 1: tons of coal mining. And that does not include aggregate
Speaker 1: materials like gravel and sand, which is another thirteen billion tons.
Speaker 1: Hydraulic cement and iron ore both each another two billion tons. Yeah.
Speaker 1: On the point about water, as of two thousand and five,
Speaker 1: humans had built so many damns, then nearly six times
Speaker 1: as much water was held in storage as flowed freely
Speaker 1: in rivers, right, And this is important because again you
Speaker 1: don't want necessarily your rivers to overflow into your cities,
Speaker 1: and that's why we try to control it. But it
Speaker 1: is another example of how we are sculpting the earth
Speaker 1: and changing it to meet our needs. And you cannot
Speaker 1: deny that there there is the hampret of humanity on
Speaker 1: the earth now, right, I mean, it's it's kind of
Speaker 1: the idea of a damned river like that is what
Speaker 1: we have done to the planet. The planet itself as
Speaker 1: a damned river with the natural flow of things, has
Speaker 1: been messed with so that we can get something we
Speaker 1: want out of it, damned and not damned. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then we've got agriculture. We produce food for the
Speaker 1: seven billion of us, and that's the earth surface that's
Speaker 1: used for production of crops and pastures. And this doesn't
Speaker 1: actually take into account how the land around it is
Speaker 1: also influenced by agriculture, whether it's runoff um or the
Speaker 1: chemical trace of synthetic nitrogen. So again, think back to
Speaker 1: that example of the mathoths. Without the mammoths, forests sprang
Speaker 1: up and change the atmosphere. Eventually humans get around to
Speaker 1: knocking down a lot of those forests so that they
Speaker 1: can grow crops, and this is also going to have
Speaker 1: a huge effect on the atmosphere. Yeah. And I had
Speaker 1: read somewhere that the reason why some of this is
Speaker 1: hard to get our heads around is because we have
Speaker 1: abstracted so many of what, so much of what we
Speaker 1: do and how we see ourselves apart from animals um
Speaker 1: that we no longer see ourselves as animals. And this
Speaker 1: is just something that is an indirect pros says, Yes,
Speaker 1: we build cities, we build homes. Oh, by the way,
Speaker 1: you know, we're taking away the habitats of certain creatures
Speaker 1: and it's just leading to extinction. Well, and then I
Speaker 1: to a certain extent, I feel like people also look
Speaker 1: to animal models and they're like, well, a bird has
Speaker 1: a nest um, an it's built a colony. These are
Speaker 1: all just versions of what we are doing. But you
Speaker 1: don't see in the animal world. You don't see it
Speaker 1: too to thee the extent that we carry it out,
Speaker 1: to the extent that it is, it is changing the planet.
Speaker 1: I mean about it really about the only the only
Speaker 1: things that as far as life goes when when you
Speaker 1: look back through a lot of time, see early emergence
Speaker 1: of organisms that changes the atmosphere, that that contributes to
Speaker 1: a huge change in the atmosphere. And then you also
Speaker 1: see as vegetation takes hold that also has an atmospheric
Speaker 1: effect and also cuts down on the weathering that can
Speaker 1: take place on the planet. But outside of a lot
Speaker 1: of those early changes like this is this is the
Speaker 1: one like beavers were not changing the lens gape in
Speaker 1: a significant way. Leave it to the humans. Right. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: and I'm thinking too, even something like the collapse of
Speaker 1: the honeybee colonies, which has been in the news a
Speaker 1: lot in the last five or so actually ten years. Um,
Speaker 1: this is a great mystery. Now there are some ideas
Speaker 1: about the cause of it, and they're pointing to pesticide,
Speaker 1: saying that this is changing the pesticides are actually changing
Speaker 1: the behaviors of honey bees. And we already know that
Speaker 1: honeybees are central to the way that our ecosystem plays
Speaker 1: itself out. So again it's it's just problematic because these
Speaker 1: are indirect things that are happening. Um, but it's hard
Speaker 1: for us to, i think, get our heads around it
Speaker 1: and see it for the actual damage that is doing
Speaker 1: to the land, into the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean to
Speaker 1: say nothing of most of the various invasive species that
Speaker 1: we're having to worry about in the world today, A
Speaker 1: vast number of those can be laid at the feat
Speaker 1: of humans who have either enabled one species to spread
Speaker 1: to an area that it previously had no access to,
Speaker 1: or changes in the environment or in the or in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere that that caused an animal to change from
Speaker 1: one area to another. So well, and see this is
Speaker 1: the this is the thing about the in passy, and
Speaker 1: that I think that the main point that a lot
Speaker 1: of geologists and scientists are trying to make is that
Speaker 1: all of this is being captured. Um. It's being captured
Speaker 1: in sediment, is being captured in chemical markers. So people
Speaker 1: will be able to look back and say, okay, there
Speaker 1: you know the the amount of pollen wasn't as present
Speaker 1: as it was in these areas, and you began to
Speaker 1: make this story for yourself of Okay, there could have
Speaker 1: been a collapse with the honeybee uh colonies, or these
Speaker 1: animals were in this area when they shouldn't have been,
Speaker 1: or they became extinct in this area. So it's not
Speaker 1: just the fossil record, it's the chemical signatures. Um. It
Speaker 1: should probably take a break, but when we get back,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about these chemical signatures, how we
Speaker 1: are changing the earth chemistry, and I probab ms you
Speaker 1: will have a bit of good news in there too. Eventually,
Speaker 1: all right, we're back talking about what humans have done
Speaker 1: to the planet. And I tell you one one personal
Speaker 1: example that I ran into the other week keeps ringing
Speaker 1: in my mind. I was at The Desert Museum in
Speaker 1: Arizona outside of Tucson. Really cool place. It's really not
Speaker 1: so much a museum as it is a botanical garden
Speaker 1: with animals. Get to see a lot of cool cacti,
Speaker 1: other modes of desert vegetation. Get to see really cool
Speaker 1: animals like the have alina, various lizards. There was a
Speaker 1: coyote hiding there somewhere. But they also had little prairie dogs. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and they were adorable. We haven't hit them, just as
Speaker 1: they were coming out and they were they were looking around,
Speaker 1: so we were just really eating it up. They're like, oh,
Speaker 1: they're so cute. They're amazing looking how they're watching, you know,
Speaker 1: observing the way that that some are watching out for
Speaker 1: hawks overhead and the others are busy feeding or seemingly
Speaker 1: snuggling with each other. It was the adorable creatures. Did
Speaker 1: they give you giant foam hammers to pump from? No,
Speaker 1: they didn't, but but in a way it was like
Speaker 1: a bomb to the head when other tourists showed up,
Speaker 1: because there was one in particular where the only thing
Speaker 1: the guy can muster is he he asked, I wonder
Speaker 1: what those tastes like? You know, which, which is a
Speaker 1: very kind of human thing too. It's like you're you're
Speaker 1: your only way of relating to this animal is to
Speaker 1: think what it might taste like and how it compares
Speaker 1: to other animals that you eat. I mean, that's that's
Speaker 1: a very narrow way of looking at the world. But
Speaker 1: the best though, was another tourist wanders up and it's
Speaker 1: like a father and a sign. And at first I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's a father in the son. They're looking at the
Speaker 1: prairie dogs. It's nice that the son, who is apparently
Speaker 1: he's older, It got the impression who was in the
Speaker 1: National Guard or in the military or something. And he
Speaker 1: starts telling his father, how ah, these things they infest everything.
Speaker 1: They just all over the base. We have to go
Speaker 1: ahead and kill him at all. And I wanted to
Speaker 1: shake them and say, say, the prairie dogs are not
Speaker 1: the creatures infesting things, like the humans are the creatures
Speaker 1: that are infesting things. Humans are the invasive species that
Speaker 1: have spread to every continent on the planet and have,
Speaker 1: as we're discussing here, drastically changed most of those continents,
Speaker 1: and that we're working on the last one. Just give
Speaker 1: us time. But I doubt they would have. I would
Speaker 1: have probably ruined their vacation. I really wanted to say that,
Speaker 1: you know, because it's it's it all tends to wind
Speaker 1: up at our feet, you know. Yeah. But then there's
Speaker 1: this problem of that's been the dominant philosophy for humans.
Speaker 1: I mean, manifest destiny is you know something that that
Speaker 1: that arose um when when America is expanding, But that
Speaker 1: is that's a perspective that most humans have taken, is
Speaker 1: that we are going to dominate, and we are going
Speaker 1: to bend nature to our will and how dare nature
Speaker 1: creep upon us? Uh? And we will try to manipulate
Speaker 1: life for us at every single level that we can,
Speaker 1: you know, from from d NA to a cloud seating. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and its human being. Since we've discussed before, we're notoriously
Speaker 1: bad at judging or specifically acting on long term risks.
Speaker 1: And that's just within our own lifetime. That's that come
Speaker 1: down to should I study for the exam tonight or
Speaker 1: should I go out and party? And then you end
Speaker 1: up going partying instead. But then when you when you
Speaker 1: deal with it with much larger periods of time that
Speaker 1: span a whole multiple generations, it becomes even harder for
Speaker 1: us to actually act on it, and we end up
Speaker 1: again caught in this narrow perception of my life and
Speaker 1: the things around me and the things I need to
Speaker 1: maintain this level of goodness. Well also feel like on
Speaker 1: a technological level, we really are only beginning to understand
Speaker 1: the impact of what the last seventy eighty years and
Speaker 1: technologies have brought to our feet. And I'm thinking in
Speaker 1: particular this conundrum of synthetic nitrogen. Yes, because synthetic nitrogen
Speaker 1: is something that we were able to begin to harness
Speaker 1: in the nineteen thirties. It was in our atmosphere, we
Speaker 1: couldn't quite figure out how to manipulate it for our use.
Speaker 1: And then let me and behold, biochemists figured out how
Speaker 1: nitrogen could be taken out of the atmosphere and break
Speaker 1: it down with bacteria to create fertilize. Yeah. Particularly, this
Speaker 1: is a man by the name of Fritz Haber um
Speaker 1: round nineteen hundred, young MP chemist in Germany. There's an
Speaker 1: excellent radio lab segment titled how do you solve a
Speaker 1: problem like Fritz Haber And Uh, It's a fascinating story
Speaker 1: because see, at this point in time, everyone is really
Speaker 1: starting to worry about how we're gonna feed these growing populations,
Speaker 1: and it continues to be a problem today, but at
Speaker 1: the time that it was getting pretty serious. How do
Speaker 1: you grow enough food to feed everyone? So Haber happens
Speaker 1: on a solution. Again, he's experimenting, and he makes his
Speaker 1: breakthrough about how to pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere, essentially,
Speaker 1: to borrow the term from Radio Lab, how do you
Speaker 1: turn air into bread? Turn how to turn to basically
Speaker 1: make food out of thin air and enable humanity to
Speaker 1: continue all these things that it's doing. And it's of course,
Speaker 1: what's the dark side to the friends Haber story, as
Speaker 1: as I'll leave Radio Lab to explain it to you,
Speaker 1: is that he ends up having a role in the
Speaker 1: creation of some particularly devastating chemical agents in the Second
Speaker 1: World War. So go go listen to that when you
Speaker 1: get a chance. It's dark and insightful. But here's the thing,
Speaker 1: and that that that's that's where the conundrum comes in.
Speaker 1: You have synthetic nitrogen, harnessing it, you can use it
Speaker 1: for fertilizer, you can grow many more crops, feeding many
Speaker 1: more people. But the problem is is that now it's
Speaker 1: being leached into the soil is being leached into um
Speaker 1: into the atmosphere, and when you have the combustion of
Speaker 1: fossil fuels with atmosphere nitrogen, that produces nitrogen oxides which
Speaker 1: have created basically a global nitrogen cycle which is completely
Speaker 1: controlled by the human species. And this if if you
Speaker 1: doubt the hand of man on the world and it's markers,
Speaker 1: you can look directly to this to say that we
Speaker 1: are a force of nature ourselves when we can control
Speaker 1: the nitrogen cycle on our planet. Yeah, we Again, we're
Speaker 1: not just building things out of other things. We're altering
Speaker 1: the system itself, and it's and it's pretty terrifying when
Speaker 1: you start thinking of it in those terms. So then
Speaker 1: you have this problem of reactive nitrogen washing into the
Speaker 1: oceans and causing coastal dead zones. Even the most remote
Speaker 1: areas of the world have isotopic markers in the layers
Speaker 1: of sediments in places like the Arctic pointing to increased
Speaker 1: amounts of human engineered nitrogen. So again, we've got the
Speaker 1: record here for for all to see in ten thousand
Speaker 1: years from now at least, So what can we do
Speaker 1: about it? What can we actually do at this point?
Speaker 1: And again, the big thing here. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: building bases on the Moon, or exploring other planets, or
Speaker 1: any any substantial human achievement. We've got to actually want
Speaker 1: to do it and have there There has to be
Speaker 1: the political will to get it done. But what could
Speaker 1: we do if we wanted to do something? Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: we have a couple of things up our sleeves, but
Speaker 1: I think one of the main things is that we
Speaker 1: have to have a perspective change and um And I
Speaker 1: think this is why some people are pushing for the
Speaker 1: adoption of this antipathying term, because they're saying that once
Speaker 1: you say, yes, this is the age of man, then
Speaker 1: people will become more responsible when they realize that on
Speaker 1: the geologic time scale all that they are now responsible
Speaker 1: for the changes made to Earth. It's not just oops,
Speaker 1: we did this and this happened. Um And I'm thinking
Speaker 1: too that that this is not just the long view,
Speaker 1: but as more and more technologies come online and people
Speaker 1: like Aubrey de Gray, the bio gerontologists, she says that
Speaker 1: we could live to a thousand years. He says that
Speaker 1: the first person to reach the age of five has
Speaker 1: already been born, who can be maintained like a classic car,
Speaker 1: so to speak, with all the different technologies. But this
Speaker 1: is coming online and that people will naturally begin, hopefully
Speaker 1: to adopt this long view perspective. And right now, you know,
Speaker 1: we sort of quibble about, well, this is very expensive
Speaker 1: to bring in this technology that helps um for you know,
Speaker 1: to ameliorate some of the problems that we have. But
Speaker 1: the fact of the matter is that we do have
Speaker 1: bioadaptive technologies that could render waste really a thing of
Speaker 1: the past. It reminds me of the movie The Mission,
Speaker 1: if you've seen this with Jeremy Irons and Robert de Niro.
Speaker 1: At the very end of it, there's a character who
Speaker 1: is having to come to terms with some arguably bad
Speaker 1: decisions that he made that had some some horrible repercussions,
Speaker 1: and another character says to him, well, thus is the world,
Speaker 1: as if to say, hey, this is the world. We
Speaker 1: just have to live in it. Sometimes you've got to
Speaker 1: do bad stuff to live in this world. And he responds, no,
Speaker 1: thus thus is the world? Thus have I made it?
Speaker 1: Saying that the world that we're making excuses for is
Speaker 1: a world that we have increasingly created through our own mistakes,
Speaker 1: wrongdoings and this attitude of of living in a world
Speaker 1: where the rules are already set well, and I think
Speaker 1: largely we have lived that way. But again, I think
Speaker 1: that we're beginning to get it beat on what happens
Speaker 1: with technology over a hundred year period. And I think
Speaker 1: that to me, the most amazing part of this story,
Speaker 1: and perhaps the most uplifting if we can use this
Speaker 1: information right, is that over the last two hundred years,
Speaker 1: we have vastly changed the climates. Um, we've vastly changed
Speaker 1: the way our our world looks and it's sculpted. We
Speaker 1: could do the very same thing, but in ways that
Speaker 1: we're intentional and that made sense for the long haul. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there are a lot of people working on this.
Speaker 1: There are some fantastic designs just coming out all the time.
Speaker 1: We we feature a lot of them on the Facebook
Speaker 1: page and the Twitter. You know, it'll be this kind
Speaker 1: of design for a for an ecologically sound city or
Speaker 1: an ecologically sound household. Countless new technologies are always being
Speaker 1: dreamed up, if not actually developed. It's just to what
Speaker 1: extent are we willing to actually invest in them and
Speaker 1: make make the jump Well, and um, I mean there
Speaker 1: are ideas like compossible cars and gadgets, um, And really
Speaker 1: what we need to look toward is and we've talked
Speaker 1: about this number many, many times, but this has been
Speaker 1: This is the year that we will reach about nine
Speaker 1: and a half billion inhabitants. And of course, where are
Speaker 1: we going to get the food, Where are we going
Speaker 1: to get the space? So we need to think about
Speaker 1: innovations that are tailored to the needs of the poorest
Speaker 1: and new plant varieties that can withstand climates that are harsh.
Speaker 1: We need to about technologies to recycle phosphorus. Then now,
Speaker 1: of course when you talk about new plants, you're talking
Speaker 1: about genetically modified organisms. So it's give and take, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: It's kind of like the bathtub. It's like a little
Speaker 1: more hot water because the bath too cold, a little
Speaker 1: more cold water because the bath is too hot, and
Speaker 1: then at what point does the water simply overflow? Well,
Speaker 1: the thing is is that we we are a self
Speaker 1: aggrandizing species, right, And this is where I think this
Speaker 1: works to our advantage, because if we really want to
Speaker 1: have an age of man and own this and uh
Speaker 1: and be within the fossil record or the geological time
Speaker 1: scale and say this is the age of man, we
Speaker 1: actually have to exist for a lot longer um. You know,
Speaker 1: these periods are quite long. So if we begin, if
Speaker 1: we go at the rate that we are, and we
Speaker 1: were to use up um a lot of the resources
Speaker 1: of Earth and make it not so that it's not
Speaker 1: very habitable, especially with so many people coming online in
Speaker 1: the year, then we may not have this. It may
Speaker 1: not even be able to point to this because we
Speaker 1: may not be alive. I mean, ultimately, do you want
Speaker 1: it to be the age of man or do you
Speaker 1: want it to be the human event? This is near
Speaker 1: blip in geologic time in which humans arrived on the scene,
Speaker 1: changed the world around them, and then brought about their
Speaker 1: own extinction and pretty quick succession. Right would it be
Speaker 1: lovely if ten tho years from now someone could point
Speaker 1: to this age and say, ah, here's this crazy stuff
Speaker 1: that they were creating in the air, and then you
Speaker 1: can see all this other evidence in which they began
Speaker 1: to sort of tinker with that and and create substances
Speaker 1: that worked better with the natural world. So there is
Speaker 1: hope if we want it, um. But but there there's
Speaker 1: a lot of serious stuff on the table that we
Speaker 1: need to think about. Really and again we need to
Speaker 1: I do believe we need to start thinking about it
Speaker 1: as the age of man, as not this not an
Speaker 1: age in which we live, but an age of us
Speaker 1: that we are dictating, and so we need to we
Speaker 1: need to step up and and make some changes. This
Speaker 1: is the tough love talk. There's a great quote in
Speaker 1: Daniel Quinn's Ishmael which, if any if you're interested in
Speaker 1: any of these topics, I highly recommend reading that novel.
Speaker 1: He makes a really strong philosophical argument for most of this,
Speaker 1: and I believe this book arises from pretty much the
Speaker 1: same period as the as the idea that this age
Speaker 1: of man exists. Yeah, actually, I mean mentioned to you
Speaker 1: that age of Man was put forward by Paul J.
Speaker 1: Krutzen and Christian schwad Role and this was in the
Speaker 1: early so so roughly there. But the Daniel quint Quinn
Speaker 1: quote goes as follows, Man's destiny was to conquer and
Speaker 1: rule the world, and this is what he's done. Almost
Speaker 1: he hasn't quite made it, and it looks as though
Speaker 1: this may be his undoing. The problem is that man's
Speaker 1: conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And
Speaker 1: in spite of all the mastery we've obtained. We don't
Speaker 1: have enough mastery to stop devastating the world or to
Speaker 1: repair the devastations, and we've already wrought. So there you go.
Speaker 1: We need the long view people. Yeah, so it's it
Speaker 1: can be a bit when I read Ishmael, it's kind
Speaker 1: of a harrowing, depressing read because it deals a lot
Speaker 1: with what we are, what we've done, and what we
Speaker 1: might not have the will to do. But like all
Speaker 1: of it, humans are capable of so much. I mean,
Speaker 1: just look at what we've done to the earth. It's
Speaker 1: most of it we've looked at in a very negative
Speaker 1: light here, but it's still a tremendous amount of change.
Speaker 1: Imagine if we're able to work that back in another direction. Well,
Speaker 1: and imagine again too, if if you do live to
Speaker 1: be five or someone listening, well, perhaps you're the first
Speaker 1: person that lived to be five years old. I feel
Speaker 1: that that our behaviors would change with that sort of longevity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so if you're listening, future five year old person, you
Speaker 1: know what to do. All right, Well, let's call over
Speaker 1: the robe it here and see if you can liven
Speaker 1: things up with a little listener mail. All right, we
Speaker 1: heard from Adam Adam of course is the chief been
Speaker 1: this officer from having this pledge dot com travels around
Speaker 1: the world doing good and uh we get to live
Speaker 1: vicariously through his uh missives to us. School hats that time,
Speaker 1: I know, and it's cold enough for me you to
Speaker 1: begin wearing mine. I'm very excited. But he wrote in
Speaker 1: about our maps episodes and he says, Hi, guys, as
Speaker 1: you can imagine, maps are a daily part of my existence.
Speaker 1: Being on the road, I've had to read more than
Speaker 1: my fair share, and they range from good to horrible,
Speaker 1: usually depending on the level of infrastructure in the city.
Speaker 1: I'm in Catman Doo, Nepal at the moment, and you
Speaker 1: can see on the attached pictures that there are no
Speaker 1: street names on the map. Thus all maps have schools, hospitals, hotels, restaurants,
Speaker 1: and other landmarks so you can navigate your way around.
Speaker 1: I think Robert has mentioned on the show that he's
Speaker 1: been to Costa Rica. Throughout Central America, there aren't really addresses.
Speaker 1: I remember trying to find a bus company's ticketing offices
Speaker 1: which listed its addressed as quote, two hundred meters south
Speaker 1: of the high school, a hundred meters west of the church,
Speaker 1: a good sense of direction is necessary or command of
Speaker 1: Spanish to just ask locals, which what I inevitably always did.
Speaker 1: As for the reading the maps of places before going,
Speaker 1: I say it's the best. It's best to go and
Speaker 1: experience everything when you get there. Thanks again for the
Speaker 1: great podcast, and take care. Indeed, in Costa Rica, that
Speaker 1: was the one thing I definitely remember. They're talking about
Speaker 1: how the maps really don't work, and a lot of
Speaker 1: it ends up depending on landmarks, but not only current landmarks,
Speaker 1: but the landmarks that haven't necessarily existed in like a
Speaker 1: decade or so. Like one of the big ones was like,
Speaker 1: there's a Coca Cola bottling plant, I believe in the
Speaker 1: capital of Costa Rica, and that was still used as
Speaker 1: a reference point as a landmark even though it's no
Speaker 1: longer there. Let's see. That's what I think. It's really
Speaker 1: charming about Costa Rica. Yeah, yeah, because I don't know.
Speaker 1: I love I love that it's time doesn't necessarily exist there,
Speaker 1: nor do good roads. That's the roads are pretty autricious,
Speaker 1: especially the ones going up to Monteverde. But but I've
Speaker 1: heard the argument that the reason that those roads haven't
Speaker 1: been improved because if you get a nice road going
Speaker 1: up to Monte Verde. Then how long before you have
Speaker 1: a casino in Monteverdi? How long do you have to
Speaker 1: the whole the very beauty of the place that everyone likes.
Speaker 1: It is kind of this mountain, kind of hippie, a
Speaker 1: lot of expatriots living there, Quakers. It's a really magical
Speaker 1: place and I read everyone to go. But the road
Speaker 1: up there is terrifying, but perhaps for a reason, and
Speaker 1: that would be no good for sloths rights. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: hate casino because they're just they're too slow on the one.
Speaker 1: I know, I know, I wants to get behind a
Speaker 1: sloth at a casino. All right, Well, if you have
Speaker 1: anything you would like to share with us about your travels,
Speaker 1: about maps or on the heels of this episode, about
Speaker 1: humanity's impact on the on the world and what we
Speaker 1: need to do going forward, if we were really to
Speaker 1: own this idea that this is the age of man,
Speaker 1: that we're living in a world that is sculpted from
Speaker 1: our selfish desires, let us know. You can write us
Speaker 1: through various methods. You can find us on Tumblr, where
Speaker 1: we are stuffed to bow your mind. You can find
Speaker 1: us on Facebook, where again we are stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind, and on Twitter we use the handle blow
Speaker 1: the Mind, and you can also drop us a line
Speaker 1: at blow the Mind at discovery dot com. For more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics, Is It How
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com