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Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name

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Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.

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Speaker 1: Time for an episode from the Vault. This one originally

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Speaker 1: published on Marche and this is called the Nile Inundation.

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Speaker 1: This is an episode we did on the on the

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Speaker 1: regular flooding of the Nile, and so we get into

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Speaker 1: some great mythological and scientific connections to that. All right,

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Speaker 1: let's dive right in. Hail to you, hoppy sprung from Earth,

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Speaker 1: come to nourish Egypt of secret ways at darkness by day,

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Speaker 1: to whom his followers sing, who floods the fields that

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Speaker 1: ray has made to nourish all who thirst. Let's drink

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Speaker 1: the waterless desert his due descending from the sky. Welcome

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Speaker 1: to stot to Blow your Mind product and by heart Radio. Hey,

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Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is

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Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going

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Speaker 1: to be talking about inundation. That's right. And we we

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Speaker 1: opened there with a reading from the translation from m

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Speaker 1: Lithium in Ancient Egyptian Literature, a book of Readings, Volume one,

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Speaker 1: The Old and Middle Kingdoms, um. And this is referring

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Speaker 1: to a particular deity who is associated with, but not

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Speaker 1: the sole representation or embodiment of the inundation the annual

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Speaker 1: flooding of the Nile. Right, So this would be the

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Speaker 1: god we've been saying. Hoppy. He He is a god

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Speaker 1: whose name in English is usually spelled h a p

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Speaker 1: y uh. And I have not I searched in Vain

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Speaker 1: to find a correct pronunciation for this name and could not,

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Speaker 1: But I think it's Hoppy yeah. And I think also

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Speaker 1: Hoppy sounds a little less like happy, Like I have

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Speaker 1: an inclination to not want to call a god by

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Speaker 1: the name happy, but at the same time, as we'll

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Speaker 1: discuss so later on, like this is ultimately a very

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Speaker 1: joyful deity. Everybody loves Hoppy. Hoppy is happy, so it

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Speaker 1: wouldn't be the worst faux pa. Now, one thing I

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Speaker 1: like about Hoppy is that Hoppy is the god that

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Speaker 1: embodies not not just a physical geo fact, not just

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Speaker 1: an object in the world, but a process within a

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Speaker 1: geo fact. So Hoppy is not the god of the Nile,

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Speaker 1: but the god of the seasonal cyclical flooding of the Nile. Right.

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Speaker 1: Or or you can even get more specific in saying

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Speaker 1: that he is he is one of various gods that

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Speaker 1: is tied up with the inundation. Uh So, depending on

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Speaker 1: like what aspects of the inundation you're focusing on, uh,

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Speaker 1: be it positive or negative, or the origin, etcetera, there

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Speaker 1: are different deities that can come into play. And it's

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Speaker 1: it's super fascinating to break it down because ultimately you're

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Speaker 1: talking about something that that that was so central to

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Speaker 1: ancient Egyptian life and therefore became so central to their

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Speaker 1: their worldview and cosmology. It makes sense that you would

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Speaker 1: have a cast of deities as opposed to a single deity.

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Speaker 1: Summing it up, now, Rob, did you end up thinking

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Speaker 1: about doing an episode on the Inundation of the Nile

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Speaker 1: because of that earlier episode we did this year on

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Speaker 1: the Tempest Stela Um? I think it was every time

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Speaker 1: we've touched on something that involves ancient Egypt, I've been

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Speaker 1: reminded that this is a great episode idea, or at

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Speaker 1: least I don't know it's a great episode, Dada, but

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Speaker 1: one that I was interested in covering um just because

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Speaker 1: I was I was reading a book that I'm going

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Speaker 1: to reference here in a bit, uh pick this up

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Speaker 1: around Christmas. I think Egyptian Mythology, A Guide to God's

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Speaker 1: Goddesses and Traditions of Ancient Egypt by Geraldine pinch Um,

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Speaker 1: and Uh, part of it is encyclopediaic and cyclopedic. Part

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Speaker 1: of it is more just an overview of Egyptian mythology

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Speaker 1: and UM and Egyptian history at least as as much

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Speaker 1: as is necessary to understand the mythology and um. And

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Speaker 1: this author went into this affair amount and UM. I

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Speaker 1: just hadn't thought about it, uh in these terms before,

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Speaker 1: or certainly in this much detail. And I thought this

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Speaker 1: would be a fascinating topic to look at because not

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Speaker 1: only is it a chance to sort of geek out

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Speaker 1: on Egyptian mythology and talk about, you know, ancient civilizations,

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Speaker 1: but also I feel like a trend that that we've

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Speaker 1: found on the show before is any time we take

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Speaker 1: a particular mythology and analyze it and try and break

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Speaker 1: it down like, it helps us understand other mythologies more,

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Speaker 1: and it it helps us understand sort of the whole

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Speaker 1: human exercise itself a little better. And in this case,

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Speaker 1: I think we end up getting into some very interesting

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Speaker 1: scientific territory as well. Yeah, absolutely, um, and and they're

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Speaker 1: they're actually actually future episode of stuff to blow your mind.

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Speaker 1: We can do that kind of um launch off of

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Speaker 1: some of the broader themes that we end up exploring

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Speaker 1: a little bit in this episode. So we are going

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Speaker 1: to be talking a bit about mythology here at at

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Speaker 1: the top of the episode. And as we've discussed before

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Speaker 1: in the show, there are numerous angles from which to

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Speaker 1: approach a given cultures mythology. That there are tales and

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Speaker 1: traditions that emerges a way of explaining the physical world,

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Speaker 1: to explain the origins or the end of things, to

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Speaker 1: tackle questions about life and death, and to ponder a

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Speaker 1: great many contemplations of objective and subjective reality. Uh. They

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Speaker 1: can provide a framework by which to interpret our lives,

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Speaker 1: give our lives meaning or to say, empower rulers, and

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Speaker 1: even to provide creative outlets and and provide entertainment. So

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Speaker 1: we don't want to leave anyone with the idea that

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Speaker 1: there's just one way to interpret a myth and cosmology,

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Speaker 1: one way to to dissect it, one way to skin

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Speaker 1: the cat as if you will, Nor do we want

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Speaker 1: to limit the capacity for creativity and complex thought in

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Speaker 1: ancient people. But without a doubt, environment and place are

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Speaker 1: one of the factors that influence the creation of a mythology,

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Speaker 1: because of course mountain gods don't emerge simply because the

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Speaker 1: mountains exist. No, there has to be a connection of experience. Uh.

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Speaker 1: And and this, uh, this made me pick up a

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Speaker 1: book I hadn't looked at in a while. I think

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Speaker 1: I picked this up in college um by Jonathan Z. Smith,

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Speaker 1: titled to Take Place, and in it, uh, Smith quotes

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Speaker 1: Alan Gusso, an environmental artist, who said, quote, the catalyst

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Speaker 1: that converts any physical location, any environment, if you will,

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Speaker 1: into a place is the process of experiencing deeply. A

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Speaker 1: place is a piece of the whole environment that has

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Speaker 1: been claimed by feelings. Oh yeah, I think that is

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Speaker 1: so true. The world is full of natural environments, but

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Speaker 1: within those natural environments are places. And what makes a

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Speaker 1: place a place is the is the part of the

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Speaker 1: environment that you remember and talk about. Yeah. So, so

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Speaker 1: on one level, you can go very specific with this.

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Speaker 1: For instance, Smith's book deals primarily with ritual in relation

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Speaker 1: to place, in particular constructed ritual environments. But you can

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Speaker 1: also you can pull out I think, and you can

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Speaker 1: look at at the bigger picture, and you can look

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Speaker 1: at something like a great river, uh, large bodies of water, mountains, etcetera.

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Speaker 1: And you know these, you know, the mythology is full

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Speaker 1: of of this relationship between humans and there and then

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Speaker 1: then their environments. You know, how how we feel about it,

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Speaker 1: how we interact with it, for sure, but then how

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Speaker 1: we feel about it, what hopes are tied up in it,

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Speaker 1: what fears are tied up in it, the order, the

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Speaker 1: chaos and uh and so a lot of that is

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Speaker 1: very visible, uh in is going to be very visible

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Speaker 1: in our discussion about the Nile. So to kick things off,

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Speaker 1: let's just remind everybody a bit about Egypt and the Nile.

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Speaker 1: Uh So, Egypt, the Egypt you know from a modern map,

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Speaker 1: is located in the northeastern corner of Africa, but it's

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Speaker 1: technically a transcontinental country because it is it's uh. It

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Speaker 1: also includes a very southwestern corner of Asia that's connected

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Speaker 1: by land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. There's a

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Speaker 1: very long history of human civilization here. Rock carvings date

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Speaker 1: back to roughly ten thousand b C. Though the pre

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Speaker 1: Dynastic period generally the earliest Egyptian period discussed by historians

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Speaker 1: stretches from fifty five hundred to thirty two hundred b C. Now,

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Speaker 1: for starters, as as we did, we definitely mentioned in

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Speaker 1: the Tempest Stela episode UH that also dealt with with

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Speaker 1: ancient Egypt, the northern portion of Egypt, closest to the

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Speaker 1: Mediterranean was thought of as Lower Egypt, while Upper Egypt

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Speaker 1: is the region that is to the south. Furthermore, we

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Speaker 1: know the world of the known world was much smaller

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Speaker 1: to the ancient Egyptians. The full extent and size of

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Speaker 1: Africa was unknown, and as Geraldine Pinch points out in

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Speaker 1: her book, the known world for the ancient Egyptians in

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Speaker 1: the third millennium extended roughly from modern Greece and Turkey

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Speaker 1: in the north to Ethiopia and the south, and from

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Speaker 1: Libya or what is modern day Libya in the west

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Speaker 1: to what is currently Iraq in the east. Now, the

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Speaker 1: defining characteristic of Egypt is of course the mighty Nile River,

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Speaker 1: which cuts through its center and empties through the Nile

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Speaker 1: Delta into the Mediterranean Sea. The Nile itself flowing north

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Speaker 1: out of its flows north out of its two primary

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Speaker 1: tributaries the Blue Nile and the White Nile. The Blue

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Speaker 1: Nile stems from Lake Tana and modern day Ethiopia, and

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Speaker 1: the White Nile stems from Lake Victoria further south on

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Speaker 1: the borders of Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. It's worth noting

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Speaker 1: that Egypt itself gets extremely little rain. Some of some

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Speaker 1: of the northern areas. I was reading a little bit

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Speaker 1: of rain every year, like maybe a few millimeters, but

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Speaker 1: most of the country gets basically no rain at all

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Speaker 1: on average. And uh, that's pretty interesting to consider, like

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Speaker 1: being completely tied to a river or tributaries of that

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Speaker 1: river for your only sources of water. There there is

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Speaker 1: all most you can almost count on the fact that

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Speaker 1: no rain is going to be coming down out of

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Speaker 1: the sky. It's just the river or bust. But it's

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Speaker 1: also interesting that while it has been that way for

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Speaker 1: thousands of years, it was not always that way. That's right,

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Speaker 1: if you go back to the the truly ancient path

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Speaker 1: like basically prehistoric egypt Um, you go back, you go

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Speaker 1: back to this period of time, and you know, for

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Speaker 1: thousands of years, northern Egypt and northern Africa in general

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Speaker 1: had a wetter climate, grasslands and animal population stretched across

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Speaker 1: areas that are now just complete desert, and the the

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Speaker 1: the life that you would find there. The animals also

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Speaker 1: included nomadic peoples who ranged across the grasslands, while of

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Speaker 1: course still other humans enjoyed the rich environment along the

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Speaker 1: coasts of the Great River. Yeah, and this damp period

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Speaker 1: in ancient prehistoric Africa is one of the reasons that

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Speaker 1: you can, for example, find beautiful rock carvings at places,

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Speaker 1: say in the middle of the Sahara Desert that could

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Speaker 1: not support human life today or not, and not a

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Speaker 1: sustained sedentary life there today. Yeah. So so yeah, these

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Speaker 1: areas that are now desert were once um more more

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Speaker 1: filled with life, but then the land began to dry

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Speaker 1: out and that left the river as the main thing,

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Speaker 1: really the only thing to cling to and pinch. Rights

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Speaker 1: that this would have been a period of not only

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Speaker 1: great climatic change but also cultural change, and that it

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Speaker 1: might have helped shape the idea in Egyptian mythology that

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Speaker 1: the world was once different, and of course we see

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Speaker 1: this in other cosmologies as well, the idea that there

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Speaker 1: was a world before, that there was a life before.

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Speaker 1: But it's interesting to think of that about that in

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Speaker 1: terms of of of climate change. Yeah, totally so by

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Speaker 1: the fourth millennium BC, agricultural communities, you know, it certainly

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Speaker 1: cropped up along the Nile, and uh, the resulting world

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Speaker 1: of the ancient Egyptians was rather unique. So you had

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Speaker 1: host wild deserts that were difficult to cross that made

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Speaker 1: up nine of Egyptian territory, cutting them off from uh,

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Speaker 1: from from these uh you know, other lands to the east, west,

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Speaker 1: and south and also sufferance serving as a buffer zone

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Speaker 1: between them and these lands. These sort of empty lands

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Speaker 1: were called the red lands. Um. Though Uh, it's also

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Speaker 1: worth noting that you have mountains in some of the

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Speaker 1: desert regions that did offer mineral wealth. So it wasn't

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Speaker 1: just it wasn't simply a case of well, there's nothing

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Speaker 1: out there that that was of use to the Egyptians. Uh,

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Speaker 1: but certainly in terms of like the thing that gave

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Speaker 1: you life on a daily basis, that that was tied

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Speaker 1: to the Nile. Meanwhile, to the north you had where

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Speaker 1: the Nihil empties into the Mediterranean Sea, you have the

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Speaker 1: vast salt marsh, and and then of course the Mediterranean itself.

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Speaker 1: And Pinch notes that the Egyptians were never enthusiastic seafares,

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Speaker 1: and they're kind of a rarity and being one of

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Speaker 1: the very few coastal cultures to worship no deities of

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Speaker 1: the sea. That's interesting. I never thought of that before. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: because I mean you think about certainly, um uh, you

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Speaker 1: know Greek traditions. You know, you see the mighty role

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Speaker 1: that Poseidon plays, and not only Poseidon, but various other

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Speaker 1: um see gods and goddesses minor and major that we're

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Speaker 1: you know that that that we're also worshiped, and sometimes

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Speaker 1: we're worshiped instead of Poseidon, and all kind of are

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Speaker 1: kind of caught up in the more or less canonized

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Speaker 1: versions of of Greek mythology that we have today. Well,

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Speaker 1: in Greek and Roman mythology, I think you can absolutely

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Speaker 1: see this duality of the ocean embodied in the gods

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Speaker 1: and monsters that are associated with it. Because the sea

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Speaker 1: is a place of great opportunity, so it's often sort

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Speaker 1: of associated with wealth somehow, but it is also a

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Speaker 1: place of great danger, and it's temperamental and it's unpredictable. Uh.

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Speaker 1: You know, Poseidon is often just like the jerky ist

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Speaker 1: of gods. Yeah, and so we're gonna see a lot

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Speaker 1: of that same duality in the ancient Egyptian treatment of

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Speaker 1: the Nile, because, I mean, a river is not a

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Speaker 1: docile thing, especially when you're talking about a great river

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Speaker 1: like like the Nile, which is depending on how you're

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Speaker 1: measuring it against the Amazon, it's either the longest river

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Speaker 1: on Earth or like the second longest. It is it

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Speaker 1: is undoubtedly a great river, uh, and which means it

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Speaker 1: has great power to both create and destroy. And key

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Speaker 1: to that is the inundation. So the Nihil is subject

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Speaker 1: to This annual inundation occurs between May and August UH,

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Speaker 1: caused by a combination of monsoon rains and melting snow

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Speaker 1: in the mountains of Ethiopia, and as a result, the

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Speaker 1: Nile River expands, the Nile River explodes, It floods low

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Speaker 1: lying lands and the Nile River basin, and the Nile

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Speaker 1: delta Uh. Not only does it water the lands, it

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Speaker 1: also deposits a thick layer of silt, so the waters recede,

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Speaker 1: they leave behind rich and fertile soil that is ideal

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Speaker 1: for agricultural use. Yeah, and this proves really important in

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Speaker 1: things you'll later see, like the technology that the ancient

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Speaker 1: Egyptians figured out in order to irrigate their crops, which

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Speaker 1: involved um often ways of constructing dikes and canals and

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Speaker 1: stuff where you would let in the waters of the

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Speaker 1: flooding Nile as it comes in from the highlands. Uh

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Speaker 1: and and then you would just let that water sort

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Speaker 1: of sit there and soak in the in the irrigation

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Speaker 1: ditches for a while before you'd eventually let it run

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Speaker 1: back out into the river later on. And I think

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Speaker 1: the idea there was not just that it would moisten

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Speaker 1: the soil, but that you were you were trying to

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Speaker 1: give it time for the mineral rich silt that comes

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Speaker 1: down from the highlands and the river to settle onto

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Speaker 1: the bottom and and sort of bring the vitamins I

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Speaker 1: know they're not vitamins, but the but the minerals and

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Speaker 1: uh and chemical riches of that soil to help put

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Speaker 1: put the nutrients into the soil in your fields that

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Speaker 1: your crops need. Yeah, the link here to irrigate ation

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Speaker 1: is U is certainly worth noting because uh, with with

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Speaker 1: the inundation, we're talking about natural irrigation. And this is

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Speaker 1: this is where our you know, our our our ancestors

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Speaker 1: understanding of of what is would be possible with with

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Speaker 1: unnatural irrigation man made irrigation. Uh, you know what they

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Speaker 1: could do in terms of okay, well, you know we

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Speaker 1: have this flooding that occurs, but what if we try

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Speaker 1: to control the flooding? And this is of course not

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Speaker 1: a tail specific to um to Egypt. We see this

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Speaker 1: in uh In in all the the the great civilizations

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Speaker 1: of old, you know, the the importance of the floodplain

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Speaker 1: and then the the eventual technology that emerges in managing

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Speaker 1: the waters in order to enable agriculture to continue to

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Speaker 1: flourish in a way that could be you know controlled.

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Speaker 1: Oh there are great Chinese myths about controlling the flow

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Speaker 1: of rivers. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, So this is this is

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Speaker 1: a trend, like like a referenced earlier, Like we could

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Speaker 1: we could go from here and do a whole series

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Speaker 1: of episodes, invention based episodes just on um irrigation technology,

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Speaker 1: because human history is basically a story of humans figuring

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Speaker 1: out the best ways to manage their water supply. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: that's exactly right. But I wanted to mention another aspect

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Speaker 1: of the Nile and I know you've got thoughts about

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Speaker 1: this too, which is that so we were saying that

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Speaker 1: sometimes gods of the sea are kind of fickle, they're

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Speaker 1: kind of unpredictable there that they can be dangerous at

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Speaker 1: the same time that they can represent great wealth, you know,

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Speaker 1: you you can the sea can be your livelihood, but

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Speaker 1: also it can bring storms that crash you against the rocks.

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Speaker 1: And the same thing can be very true of the Nile,

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Speaker 1: but in a different way. So on the banks of

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Speaker 1: the Nile, for for the farmers and the crops that

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Speaker 1: support Egyptian civilization, there would be this flooding season that

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Speaker 1: would allow you to moisten your fields and nourish your crops.

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Speaker 1: But if the flooding season fails in either direction, if

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Speaker 1: the waters either do not climb high enough or if

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Speaker 1: they climb too high, it's disaster, right yeah, yeah, If yeah,

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Speaker 1: you don't get enough water, then you're not gonna get

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Speaker 1: enough flooding and you're not gonna grow enough food. Um,

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Speaker 1: if you get just the right amount, then it's perfect

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Speaker 1: because you're gonna get enough food to feed the entire

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Speaker 1: population plus more. You know, that's surplus. That is such

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Speaker 1: a vital aspect of of the rise and and and

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Speaker 1: you know, and sustaining nature of civilizations. But then yeah,

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Speaker 1: if you get too much water, then it's overflowing of

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Speaker 1: the flood zones. Then it's destroying communities, it's drowning people,

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Speaker 1: it's causing death and destruction. Yeah, and you saw this, uh,

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Speaker 1: this version of the calamity coming through in one interpretation

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Speaker 1: of the situation that was being described in The Tempest Steela.

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Speaker 1: I remember there was this idea that the Nile is

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Speaker 1: flooding for some reason, and it says that there are well,

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Speaker 1: there's one passage that I think was somewhat open to interpretation,

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Speaker 1: but it sounded like it was talking about the bodies

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Speaker 1: of dead people floating like skiffs of papyrus in the water.

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Speaker 1: And uh and so yeah, obviously like if the water

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Speaker 1: has come too high, I can destroy your towns. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: So uh. Pinch nicely summarizes this by saying, quote, the

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Speaker 1: whole welfare of the country depended on this one phenomenon. Uh.

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Speaker 1: And because of this, the ancient Egyptians seem to have

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Speaker 1: felt both uniquely blessed and uniquely vulnerable. And um, yeah,

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Speaker 1: that's that's interesting to think about it. Again. You see

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Speaker 1: shades of this in a in a lot of mythologies

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Speaker 1: that the idea that you're ultimately depending on on some

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Speaker 1: sort of you know, natural abb and flow that you

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Speaker 1: do not control. There's a certain amount of chaos uh

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Speaker 1: to this system, even if there is uh still some

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Speaker 1: order that you can cling to. Now um as we

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Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, they're multiple Egyptian gods and goddess is tied

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Speaker 1: up with the inundation and ultimately with the Nile. Uh. Oh, well,

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Speaker 1: if you if you were ever read anywhere, if you

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Speaker 1: see like a god or goddess of the ancient Egyptian

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Speaker 1: pantheon described as the god of the Nile, then that

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Speaker 1: is that isn't that is at least an oversimplification of things,

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Speaker 1: because there is no one true god of the Nile.

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Speaker 1: There's no one uh central god even of the inundation,

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Speaker 1: but rather different divine beings that represent different parts of it,

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Speaker 1: which which is uh which also me I think makes

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Speaker 1: a lot of sense because again, if this river and

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Speaker 1: this annual flooding is so central to life and your

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Speaker 1: view of the the of the universe, then it's going

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Speaker 1: to be too They're too complicated to have one figure,

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Speaker 1: one sort of you know, humanoid apparition summing it all up, well, yes,

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Speaker 1: and I think you can see ways in which the inundation,

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Speaker 1: the yearly inundation of the Nile, took up so much

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Speaker 1: of the brain space of ancient Egyptian peoples that it

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Speaker 1: becomes a central sort of meta for for anything that

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Speaker 1: is overwhelming or unpredictable, or bringing great great riches or

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Speaker 1: bringing bringing great destruction. I was looking at a different

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Speaker 1: part of Geraldine Pinch's handbook on Egyptian mythology, and there's

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Speaker 1: one part where she's talking about one of the stories

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Speaker 1: of the poisoning of the god Ray and I think

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Speaker 1: the story I believe is called the True Name of Ray.

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Speaker 1: And uh, there's a part where she quotes from the

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Speaker 1: from a translation of the text that said, after he's

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Speaker 1: been poisoned, that the poison had overwhelmed his body, like

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Speaker 1: the inundation overwhelms everything in its path. So it's just

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Speaker 1: this ready made metaphor. It's the imagery that easily comes

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Speaker 1: to mind whenever you're thinking about, uh, any number of

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Speaker 1: different dynamics. Yeah. Yeah, And the same way that we

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Speaker 1: depend so much on various technologies today, is there there,

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Speaker 1: you know, to draw our metaphors from to make sense

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Speaker 1: of what we're doing and the world we're living in. Well,

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Speaker 1: I mean, I might compare it to the metaphor of

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Speaker 1: like the metaphors of the seasons and many other cultures,

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Speaker 1: that the inundation metaphor could be as common and easily

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Speaker 1: accessed when one is searching for something with which to

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Speaker 1: compare the thing you're talking about right now to the

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Speaker 1: way that we so easily reach for metaphor, is about

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Speaker 1: winter turning into spring, you know, spring and sprong or

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Speaker 1: something like that. Is the winter of our discontent? Exactly? Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and you would say something more on the lines of

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Speaker 1: now is the inundation of our discontent or our content

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Speaker 1: depending on how it goes, It's in inundation time in America.

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Speaker 1: Uh so, you know, we have more on on the

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Speaker 1: deities in a bit, but basically the inundation itself was

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Speaker 1: seen as part of the divine order of things or

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Speaker 1: or MOTT which is generally spelled M A A T

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Speaker 1: in English, and the creator of all things, though ultimately

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Speaker 1: there's less emphasis on this. In an ancient Egyptian mythology

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Speaker 1: is the Sun, uh you know, the the ancient Egyptians,

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Speaker 1: where the children of the Sun and the Egyptian world existed.

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Speaker 1: At the center. Uh and in its divine order. Uh,

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Speaker 1: you know, all encompassing and in surrounding it, you had

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Speaker 1: the primeval waters of None, out of which the creator

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Speaker 1: God emerged, and the nile and the inundation extend out

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Speaker 1: of the nun So they're flowing out of that as well. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and what you said reminds me of something else I

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Speaker 1: was just reading about recently, about the idea of primeval waters.

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Speaker 1: One thing that's really interesting about a lot of mythic

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Speaker 1: geography or cosmology around the world is the idea of

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Speaker 1: waters that are beyond the mundane waters. You know, so

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Speaker 1: you've got your rivers, lakes, and seas that are just

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Speaker 1: sort of part of the world. But then there are

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Speaker 1: waters beyond. And these could be beyond some kind of

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Speaker 1: physical horizon or beyond some kind of like time or

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Speaker 1: metaphysical horizon. Uh, so they're there are often waters that

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Speaker 1: exist underneath the earth, and some mythic cosmology's or waters

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Speaker 1: that surround the continents, or even waters that sur round

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Speaker 1: the sky. I mean a lot of ancient people's thought

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Speaker 1: that the sky was somehow full of a flood, and

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Speaker 1: you could easily see that, you know, when the when

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Speaker 1: the skies break open and it rains. That's water falling

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Speaker 1: down from above. But then also there are waters that

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Speaker 1: there are tons of stories about waters that existed and

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Speaker 1: flooded everything before the creation of the world. I was

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Speaker 1: reading about this in the Encyclopedia of Creation Myths by

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Speaker 1: the scholar David Lehming, who argues that no motif occurs

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Speaker 1: more often in creation myths around the globe than that

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Speaker 1: of primordial waters. It is the single most common theme

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Speaker 1: of cosmic origin stories in all of human culture, uh

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Speaker 1: and that it's central to a number of different kinds

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Speaker 1: of creation myths, like the creation out of chaos myths,

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Speaker 1: the earth diver type creation myths. All of these have

429
00:24:51,280 --> 00:24:55,400
Speaker 1: waters that existed before there were lands and and all

430
00:24:55,440 --> 00:24:57,400
Speaker 1: of the you know, living things on them and all

431
00:24:57,440 --> 00:25:00,560
Speaker 1: of the order there. There's some kind of previous time

432
00:25:00,680 --> 00:25:06,119
Speaker 1: of an expanse of undifferentiated ocean. And so the question

433
00:25:06,200 --> 00:25:09,760
Speaker 1: is like, why are there so many creation myths involving

434
00:25:09,880 --> 00:25:14,240
Speaker 1: this landless cosmic ocean before before the current order of

435
00:25:14,280 --> 00:25:17,040
Speaker 1: the world. And Leaming actually has thoughts about why that

436
00:25:17,160 --> 00:25:19,639
Speaker 1: is so. Just to read from his entry here, he

437
00:25:19,640 --> 00:25:23,560
Speaker 1: says there are several reasons for the ubiquity of this motif.

438
00:25:23,880 --> 00:25:27,760
Speaker 1: All cultures naturally recognize water as a necessary source of

439
00:25:27,800 --> 00:25:32,040
Speaker 1: life and survival, making it a useful symbol of creative fertility.

440
00:25:32,600 --> 00:25:37,840
Speaker 1: Large masses of water are uncontrollable and therefore aptly representative

441
00:25:37,880 --> 00:25:42,520
Speaker 1: of chaos. In tandem, these two symbolic functions lead us

442
00:25:42,560 --> 00:25:47,600
Speaker 1: to the idea of potential as yet unformed creation. Oh

443
00:25:47,640 --> 00:25:49,399
Speaker 1: and he and he also talks about the idea of

444
00:25:49,720 --> 00:25:53,560
Speaker 1: waters as traditionally often having UH sort of a divine

445
00:25:53,640 --> 00:25:58,320
Speaker 1: gender associations like uh waters in some ways being mythically

446
00:25:58,359 --> 00:26:02,840
Speaker 1: associated with female qualities and having to do with maternal

447
00:26:02,920 --> 00:26:05,680
Speaker 1: waters and and creation of the earth as a kind

448
00:26:05,720 --> 00:26:09,280
Speaker 1: of birth. But the central idea is that water is

449
00:26:09,359 --> 00:26:12,840
Speaker 1: necessary for every aspect of life, and yet the oceans

450
00:26:12,880 --> 00:26:17,600
Speaker 1: are untamed and untamable sort of chaos embodied. And this

451
00:26:18,080 --> 00:26:21,120
Speaker 1: these two things come together to create the the ultimate

452
00:26:21,240 --> 00:26:25,720
Speaker 1: human vision of a chaos of potential before the world.

453
00:26:25,800 --> 00:26:28,560
Speaker 1: We know, Yeah, absolutely, we see that. Yeah, and we

454
00:26:28,560 --> 00:26:31,760
Speaker 1: see they reflected here as well. Yeah. So I don't know.

455
00:26:31,800 --> 00:26:34,920
Speaker 1: It's like when whenever I picture the creation myth that

456
00:26:34,960 --> 00:26:38,639
Speaker 1: says creation from the void or creation from chaos, I'm

457
00:26:38,680 --> 00:26:41,400
Speaker 1: always picturing space. You know, my my brain has been

458
00:26:41,400 --> 00:26:46,080
Speaker 1: fed with science fiction. So I'm picturing inner interplanetary interstellar space.

459
00:26:46,200 --> 00:26:48,440
Speaker 1: Maybe I can see a starfield in the background, But

460
00:26:48,480 --> 00:26:50,560
Speaker 1: that wouldn't make sense because if it's supposed to be

461
00:26:50,560 --> 00:26:53,240
Speaker 1: creation out of nothing or from chaos, there wouldn't be

462
00:26:53,240 --> 00:26:55,439
Speaker 1: stars yet that's some kind of order. It would just

463
00:26:55,520 --> 00:26:59,240
Speaker 1: have to be space. But but really, maybe to be

464
00:26:59,320 --> 00:27:02,399
Speaker 1: more in the tradition of of ancient human thinking, I

465
00:27:02,440 --> 00:27:06,000
Speaker 1: should be picturing waters. Again, that's not true for every

466
00:27:06,040 --> 00:27:09,760
Speaker 1: culture and every creation myth, but it's shockingly common. Yeah.

467
00:27:10,240 --> 00:27:12,840
Speaker 1: So so again in the in the Egyptian tradition, we

468
00:27:12,920 --> 00:27:17,200
Speaker 1: have Noon that that's the primeval waters, and Noon feeds

469
00:27:17,320 --> 00:27:21,400
Speaker 1: the Nile and the inundation Um. And then on top

470
00:27:21,440 --> 00:27:23,600
Speaker 1: of that we also have the foreign lands and deserts

471
00:27:23,640 --> 00:27:26,040
Speaker 1: that border Egypt, and these are realms of chaos or

472
00:27:26,119 --> 00:27:31,119
Speaker 1: is fet but um. Again, the Nile was thought to

473
00:27:31,160 --> 00:27:33,399
Speaker 1: flow from Noon and therefore is the work of the

474
00:27:33,400 --> 00:27:35,639
Speaker 1: Creator God. And there are several different versions of the

475
00:27:35,640 --> 00:27:39,320
Speaker 1: Creator God Uh. And specifically, the floodwaters were said to

476
00:27:39,359 --> 00:27:43,760
Speaker 1: flow from the two secret caverns formed by the Creator Sandals.

477
00:27:44,720 --> 00:27:46,199
Speaker 1: And so this is where we get into some of

478
00:27:46,240 --> 00:27:49,280
Speaker 1: the not all, but some of the the major deities

479
00:27:49,320 --> 00:27:52,160
Speaker 1: that are tied up with the Nile and specifically the

480
00:27:52,160 --> 00:27:58,640
Speaker 1: the inundation. So the creator god Kenum guards over these caverns,

481
00:27:58,640 --> 00:28:02,280
Speaker 1: it said, and also could be thought to control the inundation.

482
00:28:02,920 --> 00:28:06,119
Speaker 1: And he was often depicted as a human with the

483
00:28:06,160 --> 00:28:09,119
Speaker 1: head of a long horned ram, and was said to

484
00:28:09,200 --> 00:28:13,280
Speaker 1: have created human beings from the wet clay left over

485
00:28:13,440 --> 00:28:16,960
Speaker 1: from the inundation. Thus he's a god of of pottery

486
00:28:17,000 --> 00:28:20,280
Speaker 1: as well, kind of a god of creative technology, and

487
00:28:20,480 --> 00:28:22,960
Speaker 1: like a lot Like like all gods and goddesses, and

488
00:28:23,520 --> 00:28:26,960
Speaker 1: in long standing cultures, his exact role shifts over time.

489
00:28:27,000 --> 00:28:30,399
Speaker 1: There's an evolution, there's their changes that he's not a

490
00:28:30,440 --> 00:28:32,399
Speaker 1: singular thing but part of a tradition like all of

491
00:28:32,440 --> 00:28:36,320
Speaker 1: these these entities. But he's associated ultimately not only with

492
00:28:36,359 --> 00:28:39,560
Speaker 1: the creation of humans, but of technologies like boats, and

493
00:28:39,720 --> 00:28:44,080
Speaker 1: also with the birthing of of of newborn gods and kings.

494
00:28:44,520 --> 00:28:46,960
Speaker 1: So he is the god of the wheel as well,

495
00:28:47,160 --> 00:28:49,520
Speaker 1: and this is this is beautiful as well, the god

496
00:28:49,560 --> 00:28:52,680
Speaker 1: of the nocturnal son. He is the soul of ray

497
00:28:52,920 --> 00:28:58,240
Speaker 1: passing through the underworld. Wow. The nocturnal son. So that

498
00:28:58,240 --> 00:29:00,400
Speaker 1: that's when they have the idea that the on during

499
00:29:00,440 --> 00:29:02,360
Speaker 1: the day goes through the sky and at night goes

500
00:29:02,560 --> 00:29:06,240
Speaker 1: has to pass through the underworld. Okay, yeah, again, we

501
00:29:06,280 --> 00:29:08,560
Speaker 1: have to put our put our ourselves in the mindset

502
00:29:08,680 --> 00:29:11,760
Speaker 1: of of this kind of cosmology where there is only

503
00:29:11,920 --> 00:29:14,720
Speaker 1: our world, there is only Egypt, and where the sun

504
00:29:14,800 --> 00:29:18,040
Speaker 1: goes when it goes over the horizon, you know, it's

505
00:29:18,120 --> 00:29:21,520
Speaker 1: going into darkness. It's going through this uh, this arduous

506
00:29:21,640 --> 00:29:25,280
Speaker 1: journey so that it might come back up again and

507
00:29:25,520 --> 00:29:27,800
Speaker 1: light the world. Oh God, I wish I could remember

508
00:29:27,840 --> 00:29:30,360
Speaker 1: the details. Isn't there something about how in at least

509
00:29:30,400 --> 00:29:32,960
Speaker 1: one version of the story, the sun is a barge

510
00:29:33,080 --> 00:29:35,120
Speaker 1: that as it goes under the ground at night, it

511
00:29:35,160 --> 00:29:37,680
Speaker 1: gets attacked by the same monster every night, and that's

512
00:29:38,080 --> 00:29:40,600
Speaker 1: to be set by and by monsters, demons, and it

513
00:29:40,720 --> 00:29:43,600
Speaker 1: is it's like a group effort to fight off these

514
00:29:43,640 --> 00:29:46,400
Speaker 1: monsters and protect the sun so that it can come

515
00:29:46,400 --> 00:29:51,040
Speaker 1: back up the next day. It's gorgeous. Yeah. Uh So,

516
00:29:51,040 --> 00:29:53,800
Speaker 1: So that that's one major deity. And then one of

517
00:29:53,840 --> 00:29:56,240
Speaker 1: the other ones, of course, is is Hoppy, who we

518
00:29:56,280 --> 00:29:59,000
Speaker 1: talked about at the top of the podcast. The one

519
00:29:59,040 --> 00:30:02,320
Speaker 1: that's often spelled h ap y. It looks a lot

520
00:30:02,360 --> 00:30:06,120
Speaker 1: like happy And again that's not completely off the mark,

521
00:30:06,200 --> 00:30:09,840
Speaker 1: because this god is the personification of the positive aspects

522
00:30:09,880 --> 00:30:13,520
Speaker 1: of the inundation and is sometimes depicted as an obese,

523
00:30:13,560 --> 00:30:17,680
Speaker 1: green or blue man with pendulous breasts. Yeah. So sometimes

524
00:30:17,920 --> 00:30:21,000
Speaker 1: you'll see him represented with Uh, they don't always look

525
00:30:21,080 --> 00:30:24,360
Speaker 1: exactly like like organic human breasts, like sometimes they look

526
00:30:24,400 --> 00:30:26,960
Speaker 1: like a kind of strange like triangle coming out of

527
00:30:27,000 --> 00:30:30,120
Speaker 1: his armpit, at least some some of the illustrations I've seen,

528
00:30:30,160 --> 00:30:32,680
Speaker 1: But I think they are supposed to be breasts. Yeah.

529
00:30:32,760 --> 00:30:36,360
Speaker 1: And because ultimately he is nourishing. Um though, I have

530
00:30:36,440 --> 00:30:38,880
Speaker 1: to admit, like when when I picture him in my mind,

531
00:30:39,040 --> 00:30:43,320
Speaker 1: I imagine something like Max Rebo from Return of the Jedi,

532
00:30:43,440 --> 00:30:46,560
Speaker 1: you know, the keyboard player, um oh, because he's often

533
00:30:46,600 --> 00:30:49,200
Speaker 1: got blue or green skin. Yeah. And also I mean

534
00:30:49,240 --> 00:30:52,440
Speaker 1: Max Rebo has a very um you know, pleasant aura.

535
00:30:52,560 --> 00:30:56,440
Speaker 1: He's he's he's happiness in good times and thus is

536
00:30:56,440 --> 00:30:59,840
Speaker 1: is hoppy. All humans seeing hymns to him, the creatures

537
00:31:00,000 --> 00:31:03,440
Speaker 1: of joyce. So uh when when he's approaching So he

538
00:31:03,520 --> 00:31:06,360
Speaker 1: is the lord of fishes, he's the maker of grain,

539
00:31:06,840 --> 00:31:09,000
Speaker 1: and he also plays a key role in the vital

540
00:31:09,040 --> 00:31:13,080
Speaker 1: Egyptian myth of murdered Osiris uh as the waters of

541
00:31:13,160 --> 00:31:16,640
Speaker 1: inundation play a role in reviving him, just as they

542
00:31:16,680 --> 00:31:19,800
Speaker 1: revived the crops every year. But okay, so that's the

543
00:31:20,000 --> 00:31:23,280
Speaker 1: this is the pleasant side, the beneficial side of the inundation.

544
00:31:23,440 --> 00:31:26,160
Speaker 1: But of course the inundation has this destructive side as well,

545
00:31:26,240 --> 00:31:29,600
Speaker 1: this dark side, and it is personified by the distant

546
00:31:29,640 --> 00:31:32,800
Speaker 1: goddess Um, which you can, I guess you can kind

547
00:31:32,800 --> 00:31:35,240
Speaker 1: of think in in pinches writing. It's kind of like

548
00:31:35,280 --> 00:31:37,960
Speaker 1: this is the this is the goddess, but it is

549
00:31:38,000 --> 00:31:40,560
Speaker 1: also kind of a broad categorization of goddess that is

550
00:31:40,600 --> 00:31:45,760
Speaker 1: associated with different individual goddesses at times. Um. But basically

551
00:31:45,800 --> 00:31:49,560
Speaker 1: the idea here is that, first of all, it's the

552
00:31:49,800 --> 00:31:53,959
Speaker 1: distance thing again in the ancient Egyptian cosmology distance and

553
00:31:54,040 --> 00:31:56,959
Speaker 1: it probably means pushing you out into the desert and

554
00:31:57,040 --> 00:32:00,600
Speaker 1: towards those kingdoms of chaos, and so that that is

555
00:32:00,640 --> 00:32:03,880
Speaker 1: the place where the distant goddess is said to resides.

556
00:32:04,200 --> 00:32:08,720
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's depicted as having this terrible um leonine form. She's,

557
00:32:08,760 --> 00:32:10,480
Speaker 1: you know, kind of like some sort of giant lion,

558
00:32:11,080 --> 00:32:14,520
Speaker 1: and and so she inhabits these lands. Uh. She is

559
00:32:14,560 --> 00:32:18,960
Speaker 1: associated with with Ray or Rob, perhaps as a feminine

560
00:32:18,960 --> 00:32:23,600
Speaker 1: aspect of him or the soul i Uh. But she

561
00:32:23,720 --> 00:32:28,160
Speaker 1: becomes an uncontrollable and angry deity that therefore takes up

562
00:32:28,200 --> 00:32:30,560
Speaker 1: in the chaotic land. So she's kind of like a

563
00:32:30,680 --> 00:32:34,400
Speaker 1: shard of of the almighty Sun God, you know, She's

564
00:32:34,440 --> 00:32:37,959
Speaker 1: like a piece of him. But she's gone rogue and

565
00:32:38,080 --> 00:32:41,200
Speaker 1: is therefore a danger to the people of Egypt. Uh.

566
00:32:41,200 --> 00:32:44,840
Speaker 1: Though there are myths associated with her retrieval by Onerous

567
00:32:45,080 --> 00:32:48,960
Speaker 1: the the mythical hunter who brings the solar Lion back

568
00:32:49,000 --> 00:32:52,640
Speaker 1: to Egypt too much rejoicing. So Pinch writes that the

569
00:32:52,680 --> 00:32:56,680
Speaker 1: implication of the various distant goddess myths is that quote,

570
00:32:56,800 --> 00:32:59,360
Speaker 1: if the destructive anger of the Solar eye is not

571
00:32:59,560 --> 00:33:03,120
Speaker 1: balanced by the justice and truth personified by Matt, the

572
00:33:03,160 --> 00:33:06,560
Speaker 1: world will slide into chaos. And again, different goddesses are

573
00:33:06,600 --> 00:33:10,880
Speaker 1: associated with this role Uh, depending on the exact account,

574
00:33:10,920 --> 00:33:15,000
Speaker 1: including Uh, Bastet, hath Or, and others. Now, again, there

575
00:33:15,000 --> 00:33:18,000
Speaker 1: are multiple additional gods that factor into the inundation in

576
00:33:18,000 --> 00:33:20,800
Speaker 1: one way or another. UM. And again we have to

577
00:33:20,840 --> 00:33:23,160
Speaker 1: remember the central role that it played in Egyptian life,

578
00:33:23,200 --> 00:33:26,280
Speaker 1: all the sacred connotations that absorbed. We're not gonna attempt

579
00:33:26,320 --> 00:33:29,280
Speaker 1: to list them all here. Um. You can read about

580
00:33:29,320 --> 00:33:32,080
Speaker 1: about many of them in Pinches Egyptian Mythology book if

581
00:33:32,080 --> 00:33:34,280
Speaker 1: you want. There are also some other excellent texts out

582
00:33:34,280 --> 00:33:38,160
Speaker 1: there on on Egyptian deities. But there is one in

583
00:33:38,200 --> 00:33:41,200
Speaker 1: particular I wanted to bring up, and that is heck At.

584
00:33:42,120 --> 00:33:45,320
Speaker 1: This is a frog headed goddess who plays a vital

585
00:33:45,400 --> 00:33:48,560
Speaker 1: role in childbirth and the rebirth of the dead. So

586
00:33:48,600 --> 00:33:52,600
Speaker 1: she's she's the divine midwife. So she's a follower of

587
00:33:52,640 --> 00:33:57,840
Speaker 1: hope and um sometimes a female counter counterpart of of

588
00:33:58,240 --> 00:34:02,400
Speaker 1: of of keydom and if frequent motif on ivory wands,

589
00:34:02,520 --> 00:34:06,120
Speaker 1: which are these kind of boomerang shaped pendent things that

590
00:34:06,200 --> 00:34:09,920
Speaker 1: were that were used to protect women and children, um.

591
00:34:09,960 --> 00:34:12,000
Speaker 1: But plenty of the elder actually wrote on some of

592
00:34:12,000 --> 00:34:15,440
Speaker 1: this talking about the frog motif, apparently commenting that the

593
00:34:15,480 --> 00:34:19,960
Speaker 1: Egyptians thought that frogs spontaneously emerged from the mud left

594
00:34:20,120 --> 00:34:24,719
Speaker 1: over by the inundation, which is interesting because on one hand,

595
00:34:24,760 --> 00:34:27,680
Speaker 1: of course that's that's not exactly how it works. Obviously,

596
00:34:28,000 --> 00:34:30,440
Speaker 1: the mud of the inundation is not giving birth to

597
00:34:30,480 --> 00:34:34,920
Speaker 1: the frogs. But but, but but that flooding is what

598
00:34:35,040 --> 00:34:37,600
Speaker 1: makes the reemergence of the frogs possible, you know. It

599
00:34:37,719 --> 00:34:42,000
Speaker 1: is the the annual sustaining um uh flood. It is

600
00:34:42,040 --> 00:34:44,520
Speaker 1: the is the bringing of the water and the bringing

601
00:34:44,680 --> 00:34:48,760
Speaker 1: of the nutrients that make life possible in Egypt. Yeah,

602
00:34:48,840 --> 00:34:51,040
Speaker 1: that's really interesting. Now I wonder I don't know if

603
00:34:51,040 --> 00:34:54,160
Speaker 1: Plenty is correct in ascribing that belief to the ancient Egyptians,

604
00:34:54,200 --> 00:34:56,640
Speaker 1: but he is. But if he is correct, that would

605
00:34:56,640 --> 00:34:58,960
Speaker 1: be in keeping with a lot of theories throughout history

606
00:34:59,000 --> 00:35:02,160
Speaker 1: about the spontaneous generation of animals from certain types of

607
00:35:02,239 --> 00:35:06,480
Speaker 1: especially damp sorts of conditions. Now, one thing I was

608
00:35:06,520 --> 00:35:08,920
Speaker 1: thinking about is that, of course, things are different in

609
00:35:08,960 --> 00:35:11,920
Speaker 1: the Nile today because of human technology. You know, in

610
00:35:11,960 --> 00:35:15,400
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, Egypt implemented a system of dams and

611
00:35:15,440 --> 00:35:18,640
Speaker 1: reservoirs to control the flow of the Nile pretty much

612
00:35:18,719 --> 00:35:21,720
Speaker 1: with with complete success. Now like the people of Egypt,

613
00:35:22,120 --> 00:35:24,880
Speaker 1: of course, have been using various forms of dams and

614
00:35:24,960 --> 00:35:27,720
Speaker 1: dikes and irrigation on the Nile for thousands of years,

615
00:35:27,760 --> 00:35:31,600
Speaker 1: but with modern techniques and modern technology that were available

616
00:35:31,600 --> 00:35:34,919
Speaker 1: in the twentieth century, I think the real keystone here

617
00:35:35,080 --> 00:35:38,680
Speaker 1: was the construction of the aswan Hi Dam under Nassa

618
00:35:38,760 --> 00:35:43,000
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties. UH. Following that, Egypt was essentially

619
00:35:43,040 --> 00:35:46,239
Speaker 1: able to end its flooding cycle like that it could

620
00:35:46,280 --> 00:35:49,680
Speaker 1: now store up excess water from the rainy season to

621
00:35:49,760 --> 00:35:52,960
Speaker 1: be released in a controlled way even during the traditional

622
00:35:53,080 --> 00:35:56,400
Speaker 1: dry season, which of course would just be a revolutionary

623
00:35:56,480 --> 00:35:59,600
Speaker 1: change for the Egyptian people. But at the same time,

624
00:35:59,640 --> 00:36:03,000
Speaker 1: I have wonder, like, in in mythological terms, does this

625
00:36:03,080 --> 00:36:05,640
Speaker 1: represent a kind of de acide? Is this a slaying

626
00:36:05,680 --> 00:36:10,239
Speaker 1: of Hoppy? Um? Yeah, you could look at it that way, right,

627
00:36:10,320 --> 00:36:13,200
Speaker 1: like the like this is the tale of how humans

628
00:36:13,200 --> 00:36:17,040
Speaker 1: finally um conquer the gods. But on the other hand,

629
00:36:17,120 --> 00:36:20,360
Speaker 1: you could say, well, um, you know Kenom was the

630
00:36:20,560 --> 00:36:23,320
Speaker 1: is kind of a god of technology as well as

631
00:36:23,320 --> 00:36:25,960
Speaker 1: this god tied up with the inundation, so you know,

632
00:36:26,080 --> 00:36:29,040
Speaker 1: he's he's kind of president at the victory celebration. So

633
00:36:29,400 --> 00:36:32,560
Speaker 1: it's it's he's ultimately some of these entities are tied

634
00:36:32,640 --> 00:36:35,680
Speaker 1: up in the same the same tale. I mean, also,

635
00:36:35,920 --> 00:36:38,040
Speaker 1: Hoppy in a way, he would be there right because

636
00:36:38,040 --> 00:36:41,880
Speaker 1: he's all about the good stuff that comes with the inundation. Um,

637
00:36:41,960 --> 00:36:45,000
Speaker 1: And that I mean, the story of modern technology is

638
00:36:45,040 --> 00:36:49,320
Speaker 1: that the the the negative connotations are are never completely dispelled,

639
00:36:49,400 --> 00:36:53,080
Speaker 1: So the distant goddess is never that distant. Well, maybe

640
00:36:53,120 --> 00:36:55,319
Speaker 1: you could think about it now that that Hoppy is

641
00:36:55,440 --> 00:36:59,200
Speaker 1: just h embodied in the water that sits in the

642
00:36:59,239 --> 00:37:02,680
Speaker 1: reservoir high in the damn and has just released gradually

643
00:37:02,680 --> 00:37:05,400
Speaker 1: throughout the year. So instead of sending his blessings in

644
00:37:05,480 --> 00:37:09,000
Speaker 1: an unpredictable way, his blessings can now be distributed in

645
00:37:09,040 --> 00:37:12,400
Speaker 1: a very organized and orderly way. Instead of being a

646
00:37:12,440 --> 00:37:16,480
Speaker 1: comedian or music of you know, a music star that

647
00:37:16,840 --> 00:37:21,120
Speaker 1: that periodically appears at the casino, Hoppy has a residency

648
00:37:21,440 --> 00:37:24,200
Speaker 1: at this point, so you can count on him being there.

649
00:37:28,560 --> 00:37:32,320
Speaker 1: Thank So, I've got another thing I want to talk about,

650
00:37:32,360 --> 00:37:33,960
Speaker 1: and this is going to take us into the realm

651
00:37:33,960 --> 00:37:38,600
Speaker 1: of biochemistry because I was thinking about the cycles associated

652
00:37:38,600 --> 00:37:42,120
Speaker 1: with the flooding of the Nile and uh, this this

653
00:37:42,239 --> 00:37:45,600
Speaker 1: led me to a really interesting article that was published

654
00:37:45,840 --> 00:37:48,680
Speaker 1: just a few months ago, was in December of and

655
00:37:48,719 --> 00:37:51,640
Speaker 1: it was a news feature for the journal Nature, written

656
00:37:51,680 --> 00:37:55,760
Speaker 1: by Michael Marshall that was called how the first life

657
00:37:55,800 --> 00:38:01,320
Speaker 1: on Earth survived its biggest threat Water. So we've discussed

658
00:38:01,320 --> 00:38:03,080
Speaker 1: this a bit on the show before, but obviously one

659
00:38:03,120 --> 00:38:06,560
Speaker 1: of the biggest outstanding puzzles in all of the biological

660
00:38:06,600 --> 00:38:10,400
Speaker 1: sciences is the origin of life on Earth. You know,

661
00:38:10,480 --> 00:38:15,719
Speaker 1: assuming that the first living cells evolved from precursor chemicals

662
00:38:15,760 --> 00:38:19,000
Speaker 1: somewhere in the early history of the planet, how did

663
00:38:19,040 --> 00:38:21,759
Speaker 1: that happen? You know, what were the conditions that led

664
00:38:21,840 --> 00:38:24,839
Speaker 1: to that, How common are those conditions and could they

665
00:38:24,840 --> 00:38:28,680
Speaker 1: be replicated? So for a long time, the dominant thinking

666
00:38:28,719 --> 00:38:33,319
Speaker 1: among biochemists has been that the earliest chemical precursors to

667
00:38:33,520 --> 00:38:36,000
Speaker 1: life as we know it must have arisen in the ocean.

668
00:38:36,080 --> 00:38:40,520
Speaker 1: This is the classic primordial soup idea, right that somehow

669
00:38:40,560 --> 00:38:43,520
Speaker 1: in the ancient oceans that would have been the swirling

670
00:38:43,640 --> 00:38:48,560
Speaker 1: mix of organic molecules of carbon based chemistry, and then

671
00:38:48,600 --> 00:38:52,120
Speaker 1: gradually those molecules would kind of come together and form

672
00:38:52,280 --> 00:38:55,360
Speaker 1: the molecular building blocks of life. This was something that

673
00:38:55,480 --> 00:38:59,120
Speaker 1: was advocated by people like JBS Haldane, and there are

674
00:38:59,160 --> 00:39:03,239
Speaker 1: still some theory is about life emerging, but about the

675
00:39:03,239 --> 00:39:06,400
Speaker 1: first precursors to Earth life emerging in parts of the ocean,

676
00:39:06,520 --> 00:39:10,480
Speaker 1: for example, around deep hydrothermal vents. That's one of the

677
00:39:10,480 --> 00:39:13,120
Speaker 1: the versions of this theory that's still going today, but

678
00:39:13,520 --> 00:39:17,279
Speaker 1: an alternative explanation has been really gaining some traction in

679
00:39:17,360 --> 00:39:22,160
Speaker 1: recent years. Um because what seems absolutely clear is that

680
00:39:22,200 --> 00:39:25,400
Speaker 1: you need water in order to put together the first

681
00:39:25,480 --> 00:39:28,840
Speaker 1: building blocks of cells. So these building blocks would include

682
00:39:28,880 --> 00:39:33,680
Speaker 1: things like DNA or RNA, which are information carrying molecules,

683
00:39:33,719 --> 00:39:36,839
Speaker 1: but then also things like proteins that can do the

684
00:39:36,880 --> 00:39:41,439
Speaker 1: work of metabolism in life. But that doesn't necessarily mean

685
00:39:41,800 --> 00:39:45,640
Speaker 1: that the ocean is the best place for those chemicals

686
00:39:45,680 --> 00:39:49,120
Speaker 1: to come together. And Marshall in this article calls attention

687
00:39:49,160 --> 00:39:51,879
Speaker 1: to the research of a scientist named John Sutherland, who

688
00:39:51,920 --> 00:39:56,760
Speaker 1: is a biochemist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

689
00:39:56,800 --> 00:40:01,160
Speaker 1: at Cambridge Marshal rights quote. Several studies suggest that the

690
00:40:01,200 --> 00:40:06,000
Speaker 1: basic chemicals of life require ultra violet radiation from sunlight

691
00:40:06,080 --> 00:40:09,480
Speaker 1: to form, and that the watery environment had to become

692
00:40:09,600 --> 00:40:14,440
Speaker 1: highly concentrated or even dry out completely at times. In

693
00:40:14,520 --> 00:40:20,399
Speaker 1: laboratory experiments, Sutherland and other scientists have produced d n A, proteins,

694
00:40:20,440 --> 00:40:24,640
Speaker 1: and other core components of cells by gently heating simple

695
00:40:24,760 --> 00:40:29,839
Speaker 1: carbon based chemicals, subjecting them to UV radiation, and intermittently

696
00:40:30,000 --> 00:40:33,120
Speaker 1: drying them out. Chemists have not yet been able to

697
00:40:33,120 --> 00:40:36,960
Speaker 1: synthesize such a wide range of biological molecules in conditions

698
00:40:37,000 --> 00:40:40,600
Speaker 1: that mimic seawater. So, in other words, if these studies

699
00:40:40,640 --> 00:40:43,240
Speaker 1: are going in the right direction, it may be evidence

700
00:40:43,320 --> 00:40:46,560
Speaker 1: that the origins of life itself are not in the

701
00:40:46,960 --> 00:40:50,759
Speaker 1: deep dark of the ocean, but in the cyclical flooding

702
00:40:50,880 --> 00:40:54,360
Speaker 1: and drying out of something like a sun baked puddle

703
00:40:54,600 --> 00:40:58,239
Speaker 1: or stream bed on the surface of a continent. So

704
00:40:58,480 --> 00:41:01,480
Speaker 1: in effect, we're talking about not the inundation but a

705
00:41:01,560 --> 00:41:04,920
Speaker 1: kind of primeval inundation. Yeah, I mean this, the seasonal

706
00:41:05,000 --> 00:41:08,720
Speaker 1: flooding and drying out of I mean the metaphorical connection

707
00:41:08,760 --> 00:41:11,799
Speaker 1: to the nile here is fascinating, and in some ways

708
00:41:11,800 --> 00:41:14,759
Speaker 1: the similarities are not just like aesthetic or superficial, like

709
00:41:14,840 --> 00:41:17,960
Speaker 1: you could say that there are actually there are there

710
00:41:18,000 --> 00:41:22,080
Speaker 1: are There are significant similarities in the causal effects of

711
00:41:22,080 --> 00:41:24,839
Speaker 1: of what's going on in these two cases. We'll get

712
00:41:24,880 --> 00:41:26,759
Speaker 1: to more of that as I go on. Um. So,

713
00:41:26,960 --> 00:41:31,280
Speaker 1: not all biochemists agree with this direction, obviously, but Martial

714
00:41:31,360 --> 00:41:33,919
Speaker 1: rites that quote. It offers a solution to a long

715
00:41:34,080 --> 00:41:38,640
Speaker 1: recognized paradox that although water is essential for life, it

716
00:41:38,800 --> 00:41:43,200
Speaker 1: is also destructive to life's core components. And now remember,

717
00:41:43,239 --> 00:41:44,719
Speaker 1: you know we we talk on the show a lot

718
00:41:44,719 --> 00:41:47,319
Speaker 1: about how water is an amazing chemical because it is

719
00:41:47,320 --> 00:41:51,840
Speaker 1: a master solvent. It's a polar molecule with the terrible clause,

720
00:41:51,960 --> 00:41:55,520
Speaker 1: you know, these two hydrogen claws, that this molecule will

721
00:41:55,560 --> 00:42:00,239
Speaker 1: dissolve almost anything, and the molecules necessary for life tend

722
00:42:00,280 --> 00:42:04,560
Speaker 1: to break down over time when submerged in water. Martial

723
00:42:04,640 --> 00:42:08,319
Speaker 1: rights quote, Proteins and nucleic acids such as DNA and

724
00:42:08,480 --> 00:42:12,400
Speaker 1: RNA are vulnerable at their joints. Proteins are made of

725
00:42:12,520 --> 00:42:16,920
Speaker 1: chains of amino acids, and nucleic acids are chains of nucleotides.

726
00:42:17,320 --> 00:42:20,400
Speaker 1: If the chains are placed in water, it attacks the

727
00:42:20,480 --> 00:42:24,719
Speaker 1: links and eventually breaks them. And he quotes the biochemist

728
00:42:24,800 --> 00:42:28,720
Speaker 1: Robert Shapiro who famously said that when you're talking about

729
00:42:28,840 --> 00:42:32,640
Speaker 1: organic chemistry, quote, water is an enemy to be excluded

730
00:42:32,680 --> 00:42:36,239
Speaker 1: as rigorously as possible, which which is so funny because

731
00:42:36,239 --> 00:42:38,600
Speaker 1: I mean, what we're normally thinking about when we're thinking

732
00:42:38,640 --> 00:42:41,279
Speaker 1: about water in life is how necessary water is, and

733
00:42:41,320 --> 00:42:46,240
Speaker 1: it is necessary, but uncontrolled inundation of water will destroy

734
00:42:46,360 --> 00:42:50,880
Speaker 1: the very information and machinery necessary. Uh too, that's underlying

735
00:42:50,960 --> 00:42:54,080
Speaker 1: all life and all cells on Earth. Yeah. Again, the

736
00:42:54,200 --> 00:42:57,520
Speaker 1: very duality that is summed up in and in these

737
00:42:57,840 --> 00:43:01,040
Speaker 1: these these deities that we discussed here. Yeah. Yeah, So

738
00:43:01,080 --> 00:43:03,960
Speaker 1: you can see almost a kind of like the irrigation

739
00:43:04,080 --> 00:43:06,640
Speaker 1: systems and the systems of dams and dikes that are

740
00:43:06,719 --> 00:43:10,080
Speaker 1: used to manage the nile, that actually there's something similar

741
00:43:10,120 --> 00:43:13,480
Speaker 1: going on in our cells. Like the cells in organisms

742
00:43:13,520 --> 00:43:17,239
Speaker 1: today keep very tight control on the movement of their

743
00:43:17,280 --> 00:43:20,960
Speaker 1: water contents to prevent the water in their cytoplasm. And

744
00:43:21,200 --> 00:43:23,600
Speaker 1: the cytoplasm is the kind of gel that makes up

745
00:43:23,640 --> 00:43:27,520
Speaker 1: the interior of a cell, uh to keep the water

746
00:43:27,600 --> 00:43:31,160
Speaker 1: in their cytoplasm from harming the genetic material and proteins

747
00:43:31,200 --> 00:43:34,360
Speaker 1: that it surrounds. Marshal in this article quotes a synthetic

748
00:43:34,400 --> 00:43:39,400
Speaker 1: biologist from the University of Minnesota and Minneapolis named Kate Adamala,

749
00:43:39,640 --> 00:43:42,719
Speaker 1: who says, quote, we are taught that cytoplasm is just

750
00:43:42,760 --> 00:43:45,960
Speaker 1: a bag that holds everything and everything is swimming around.

751
00:43:46,400 --> 00:43:50,200
Speaker 1: That is not true. Everything is incredibly scaffolded in cells,

752
00:43:50,520 --> 00:43:54,000
Speaker 1: and it's scaffolded in a gel, not a water bag.

753
00:43:54,560 --> 00:43:57,640
Speaker 1: So cytoplasm is mostly made of water. I think it's

754
00:43:57,640 --> 00:44:01,440
Speaker 1: something something like eight percent water by mass or something.

755
00:44:01,480 --> 00:44:04,960
Speaker 1: But there are structural features in cells that keep the

756
00:44:04,960 --> 00:44:08,040
Speaker 1: water from tearing up the important stuff again, kind of

757
00:44:08,080 --> 00:44:12,000
Speaker 1: like the structures built around the nile to manage its flooding. Yeah. Yeah,

758
00:44:12,040 --> 00:44:15,759
Speaker 1: so you can look at the things that civilization does

759
00:44:16,160 --> 00:44:18,680
Speaker 1: are only that in many cases the things that the

760
00:44:19,040 --> 00:44:22,239
Speaker 1: that are happening just in life itself. Right, But of

761
00:44:22,239 --> 00:44:25,400
Speaker 1: course that's that's once we have the cells that have

762
00:44:25,520 --> 00:44:28,799
Speaker 1: evolved today, think about how the first cells could have

763
00:44:28,880 --> 00:44:31,799
Speaker 1: evolved when they didn't have those structures in place yet.

764
00:44:32,320 --> 00:44:35,160
Speaker 1: So the implication is that if the earliest life arose

765
00:44:35,239 --> 00:44:38,480
Speaker 1: in some kind of natural condition, you know, it didn't

766
00:44:38,520 --> 00:44:41,960
Speaker 1: have cell structure to protect it. Yet those natural conditions

767
00:44:42,040 --> 00:44:46,160
Speaker 1: must have somehow placed limits on how and in what

768
00:44:46,400 --> 00:44:50,200
Speaker 1: ways things got wet. And again this brings us back

769
00:44:50,200 --> 00:44:53,680
Speaker 1: to the idea of places that would intermittently flood and

770
00:44:53,719 --> 00:44:56,520
Speaker 1: then dry out again. And the article goes on to

771
00:44:56,600 --> 00:45:00,440
Speaker 1: site some examples of recent studies supporting this idea. UH.

772
00:45:00,440 --> 00:45:03,640
Speaker 1: One example by a team including that researcher mentioned earlier,

773
00:45:03,719 --> 00:45:08,080
Speaker 1: John Sutherland, the biochemist from Cambridge UH. This study is

774
00:45:08,200 --> 00:45:12,560
Speaker 1: by Matthew W. Pounder, Beatrice Garland, and John D. Sutherland

775
00:45:12,800 --> 00:45:15,719
Speaker 1: published in Nature in two thousand nine called Synthesis of

776
00:45:15,800 --> 00:45:22,440
Speaker 1: Activated pyramidine Ribonucleotides in pre biotically plausible conditions. So basically

777
00:45:22,520 --> 00:45:24,960
Speaker 1: what happened here is that uh and this is summarized

778
00:45:24,960 --> 00:45:27,680
Speaker 1: by Marshall, but I trust his summary. Here he says

779
00:45:27,719 --> 00:45:30,360
Speaker 1: that the team managed to create two of the four

780
00:45:30,520 --> 00:45:35,239
Speaker 1: nucleotides in RNA out of some simple chemical precursors, so

781
00:45:35,280 --> 00:45:38,640
Speaker 1: this would be phosphate and some carbon based compounds. I

782
00:45:38,640 --> 00:45:41,799
Speaker 1: think cyanide salts were an important part of it. So

783
00:45:41,880 --> 00:45:45,120
Speaker 1: you just start with some chemicals in water and then

784
00:45:45,560 --> 00:45:48,520
Speaker 1: by dissolving those chemicals in the water too down to

785
00:45:48,560 --> 00:45:52,239
Speaker 1: a very high concentration, they were able to create two

786
00:45:52,239 --> 00:45:56,840
Speaker 1: of these four nucleotides by by some reactions that mimic

787
00:45:56,960 --> 00:45:59,080
Speaker 1: the kind of reactions that would take place in a

788
00:45:59,120 --> 00:46:02,520
Speaker 1: pool or st aam of water that was drying out

789
00:46:02,520 --> 00:46:07,759
Speaker 1: and concentrating while being exposed to sunlight, including UV radiation.

790
00:46:07,840 --> 00:46:11,200
Speaker 1: And the UV radiation was important and another study in

791
00:46:12,640 --> 00:46:15,680
Speaker 1: showed that researchers were were able via similar means to

792
00:46:15,840 --> 00:46:20,160
Speaker 1: create the precursors to proteins or lipids and another study

793
00:46:20,200 --> 00:46:22,480
Speaker 1: did the same to the constituents of d n A.

794
00:46:23,080 --> 00:46:25,880
Speaker 1: Here's what I thought that was interesting. Also, it references

795
00:46:26,000 --> 00:46:28,600
Speaker 1: a a researcher who's close to us. So there's a

796
00:46:28,640 --> 00:46:33,520
Speaker 1: biochemist named Moran Frinkle Pinter at the NSF NASA Center

797
00:46:33,560 --> 00:46:37,840
Speaker 1: for Chemical Evolution in Atlanta, and she and colleagues published

798
00:46:37,880 --> 00:46:41,600
Speaker 1: an article in p n AS in twenty nineteen that argued,

799
00:46:41,640 --> 00:46:44,600
Speaker 1: again this is marshall summary quote. It showed that amino

800
00:46:44,680 --> 00:46:49,120
Speaker 1: acid spontaneously linked up to form protein like chains if

801
00:46:49,160 --> 00:46:52,520
Speaker 1: they were dried out, and those kinds of reaction were

802
00:46:52,520 --> 00:46:56,080
Speaker 1: more likely to occur with the twenty amino acids found

803
00:46:56,160 --> 00:47:01,480
Speaker 1: in proteins today compared with other amino acids. That means

804
00:47:01,600 --> 00:47:05,680
Speaker 1: intermittent drying could help explain why life uses only those

805
00:47:05,719 --> 00:47:09,839
Speaker 1: amino acids out of hundreds of possibilities. Yet again, so

806
00:47:09,920 --> 00:47:12,880
Speaker 1: like if if this were the way that life on

807
00:47:12,920 --> 00:47:16,480
Speaker 1: Earth first evolved, it would explain some chemical features of

808
00:47:16,520 --> 00:47:19,120
Speaker 1: modern life that you might otherwise be able to see

809
00:47:19,239 --> 00:47:23,720
Speaker 1: is just kind of random or contingent. Another interesting finding

810
00:47:23,760 --> 00:47:27,400
Speaker 1: about those wet dry cycles. So several of the researchers

811
00:47:27,400 --> 00:47:29,680
Speaker 1: that Marshall talks about in this article point to the

812
00:47:29,719 --> 00:47:34,080
Speaker 1: importance again not just high concentrations of chemicals and reducing

813
00:47:34,120 --> 00:47:39,080
Speaker 1: pool of water, but the cycles specifically repeated wet dry cycles.

814
00:47:39,080 --> 00:47:41,920
Speaker 1: It gets wet, it gets dry, gets wet, it gets dry.

815
00:47:42,000 --> 00:47:44,759
Speaker 1: And one cool example he brings up his research going

816
00:47:44,800 --> 00:47:47,719
Speaker 1: back several decades by a couple of scientists who were

817
00:47:47,760 --> 00:47:51,080
Speaker 1: at you see Davis at the time, named David Deemer

818
00:47:51,120 --> 00:47:54,800
Speaker 1: and Gail BArch Field, and they were studying the formation

819
00:47:54,840 --> 00:47:59,319
Speaker 1: of lipids. Now, lipids are also long chain molecules like

820
00:47:59,440 --> 00:48:03,200
Speaker 1: protein is like DNA and RNA, and lipids generally do

821
00:48:03,280 --> 00:48:05,520
Speaker 1: not dissolve in water. You know, of course, you know

822
00:48:05,600 --> 00:48:08,800
Speaker 1: that oil and water don't mix well. Oil is a lipid.

823
00:48:08,960 --> 00:48:13,680
Speaker 1: Lipids include things like fatty acids and waxes, and cells

824
00:48:13,760 --> 00:48:16,200
Speaker 1: make use of lipids to survive. Cells tend to have

825
00:48:16,320 --> 00:48:20,600
Speaker 1: a protective membrane around them, the sack that holds everything inside,

826
00:48:21,040 --> 00:48:24,200
Speaker 1: and this protective membrane that goes all around the outside

827
00:48:24,440 --> 00:48:26,799
Speaker 1: is made in part of lipids. There's the thing on

828
00:48:26,880 --> 00:48:29,799
Speaker 1: them called the lipid by layer. Uh. And of course

829
00:48:29,800 --> 00:48:31,840
Speaker 1: cell membranes. They do a lot of things, but you

830
00:48:31,880 --> 00:48:34,680
Speaker 1: can think of them mainly as a means of chemical

831
00:48:34,800 --> 00:48:37,960
Speaker 1: control of what gets in and what gets out of

832
00:48:37,960 --> 00:48:40,120
Speaker 1: a cell. They're almost in a way like putting a

833
00:48:40,239 --> 00:48:43,799
Speaker 1: dam on a river, controlling the flow of materials rather

834
00:48:43,840 --> 00:48:46,560
Speaker 1: than just letting a free flow in in either direction.

835
00:48:47,000 --> 00:48:49,279
Speaker 1: And so here again this is martial summary of the

836
00:48:49,560 --> 00:48:53,160
Speaker 1: research by Deemer and Bartschfeld. To quote. They first made

837
00:48:53,480 --> 00:48:58,840
Speaker 1: vesicles spherical blobs with a watery core surrounded by two

838
00:48:58,920 --> 00:49:03,440
Speaker 1: lipid layers. Then the researchers dried the vesicles and the

839
00:49:03,520 --> 00:49:07,360
Speaker 1: lipids reorganized into a multi layered structure like a stack

840
00:49:07,400 --> 00:49:11,880
Speaker 1: of pancakes. Strands of DNA previously floating in the water

841
00:49:12,040 --> 00:49:17,160
Speaker 1: became trapped between the layers. When the researchers added water again,

842
00:49:17,560 --> 00:49:22,520
Speaker 1: the vesicles reformed with DNA inside them. This was a

843
00:49:22,560 --> 00:49:25,959
Speaker 1: step towards a simple cell. So you're beginning to see

844
00:49:25,960 --> 00:49:28,239
Speaker 1: ways that again you know, it's not knowing that this

845
00:49:28,320 --> 00:49:31,520
Speaker 1: is how it's happened, but very intriguing ways to imagine

846
00:49:32,280 --> 00:49:35,359
Speaker 1: cells structurally coming together for the first time. If you've

847
00:49:35,360 --> 00:49:40,520
Speaker 1: got chemical reactions in reducing concentrated water that are creating

848
00:49:40,560 --> 00:49:43,880
Speaker 1: molecules like DNA or RNA, and then somehow that DNA

849
00:49:43,960 --> 00:49:47,960
Speaker 1: or RNA is getting trapped inside layers of lipids, it

850
00:49:48,000 --> 00:49:51,040
Speaker 1: can start to function like the cells we know today.

851
00:49:51,560 --> 00:49:54,960
Speaker 1: Very cool. Yeah, I love it. It's the the primordial water,

852
00:49:55,120 --> 00:49:58,680
Speaker 1: so the the inundation all in one. Yeah. And and

853
00:49:58,719 --> 00:50:01,799
Speaker 1: of course again the key thing being these repeating wet

854
00:50:01,920 --> 00:50:05,680
Speaker 1: dry cycles as a means of getting the constituents of

855
00:50:05,760 --> 00:50:11,560
Speaker 1: life suspended inside protective lipid membranes. And uh and Marshall

856
00:50:11,640 --> 00:50:14,040
Speaker 1: of course mentions a bunch of other stuff. Actually, they're

857
00:50:14,080 --> 00:50:17,120
Speaker 1: they're subsequent research by Deemer and colleagues that has continued

858
00:50:17,160 --> 00:50:20,120
Speaker 1: to drive this logic forward. There's also some cool stuff

859
00:50:20,120 --> 00:50:22,760
Speaker 1: in this article about ways that you could think about

860
00:50:23,480 --> 00:50:27,000
Speaker 1: about wet and dry cycles is almost kind of an

861
00:50:27,080 --> 00:50:31,799
Speaker 1: evolutionary pressure on early chemical constituents of life by like

862
00:50:32,160 --> 00:50:34,920
Speaker 1: repeatedly wetting them and drying them out. There was this

863
00:50:35,040 --> 00:50:38,640
Speaker 1: process of uh, sort of winnowing out the weaker forms

864
00:50:38,640 --> 00:50:42,000
Speaker 1: of molecules and allowing the more robust types of life,

865
00:50:42,000 --> 00:50:46,080
Speaker 1: precursor molecules to to survive, a kind of evolution before

866
00:50:46,120 --> 00:50:49,359
Speaker 1: there's actually a cell, which is which is pretty interesting possibility.

867
00:50:50,040 --> 00:50:52,120
Speaker 1: But anyway, towards the end of the article it starts

868
00:50:52,160 --> 00:50:55,200
Speaker 1: talking about, well, so specifically, what kind of situation. Are

869
00:50:55,520 --> 00:50:58,560
Speaker 1: these scientists really imagining like where life could have arisen?

870
00:50:59,280 --> 00:51:03,200
Speaker 1: And so several researchers mentioned different ideas. One is the

871
00:51:03,200 --> 00:51:07,399
Speaker 1: idea of a partially flooded meteorite impact crater drying out

872
00:51:07,440 --> 00:51:10,959
Speaker 1: in the sun, maybe with streams running into and out

873
00:51:10,960 --> 00:51:14,720
Speaker 1: of it somehow, or perhaps a volcanic hot spring pool

874
00:51:14,800 --> 00:51:18,040
Speaker 1: with wet and dry cycles that its edges. So yeah,

875
00:51:18,040 --> 00:51:21,440
Speaker 1: I mean, this goes against the traditional idea of the

876
00:51:21,440 --> 00:51:24,160
Speaker 1: earliest life forms arising in the ocean, But I like

877
00:51:24,239 --> 00:51:26,400
Speaker 1: this new image that it's almost the kind of like

878
00:51:26,520 --> 00:51:29,160
Speaker 1: a tidal zone of a tiny ocean that may have

879
00:51:29,200 --> 00:51:31,520
Speaker 1: been no bigger than a puddle, you know, the part

880
00:51:31,560 --> 00:51:34,720
Speaker 1: of the rock surface that gets wet and then dries

881
00:51:34,800 --> 00:51:37,200
Speaker 1: out in the sun and then gets wet again could

882
00:51:37,200 --> 00:51:41,400
Speaker 1: be where the the oldest of our ancestors came from.

883
00:51:41,440 --> 00:51:43,920
Speaker 1: And then the article also mentions a bunch of other

884
00:51:43,960 --> 00:51:46,879
Speaker 1: studies that it comes back I think to be even

885
00:51:46,960 --> 00:51:51,040
Speaker 1: handed with reasons for thinking that oceanic origins, particularly those

886
00:51:51,080 --> 00:51:55,160
Speaker 1: around deep sea hydrothermal vents, could still be viable explanations.

887
00:51:55,200 --> 00:51:58,400
Speaker 1: According to some other experts, there's even like one hypothesis

888
00:51:58,440 --> 00:52:01,719
Speaker 1: about how you could pretend really create wet dry cycling

889
00:52:01,800 --> 00:52:05,160
Speaker 1: in and around the rocks, lining deeps events. So the

890
00:52:05,239 --> 00:52:08,200
Speaker 1: article as a whole is definitely worth a read. But

891
00:52:08,280 --> 00:52:11,000
Speaker 1: then one last thing that's cool is he connects this

892
00:52:11,360 --> 00:52:13,840
Speaker 1: strain of research to some of the goals of the

893
00:52:13,880 --> 00:52:17,120
Speaker 1: Mars Perseverance Rover around the Ja zero Crater on the

894
00:52:17,120 --> 00:52:19,600
Speaker 1: surface of Mars, because it's going to be looking for

895
00:52:19,680 --> 00:52:23,719
Speaker 1: possible signs of past or present life on Mars in

896
00:52:23,840 --> 00:52:28,080
Speaker 1: similar wet dry conditions. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, I mean that's

897
00:52:28,080 --> 00:52:30,440
Speaker 1: that that makes sense. So yeah, you know, in a way,

898
00:52:30,480 --> 00:52:36,280
Speaker 1: we're looking for the possible uh birth of of of life,

899
00:52:36,320 --> 00:52:40,319
Speaker 1: the birth of a new pantheon on Mars. Yeah, the

900
00:52:40,400 --> 00:52:44,560
Speaker 1: recurring blessings of Hoppy on another planet. Yeah space Hoppy.

901
00:52:45,200 --> 00:52:48,040
Speaker 1: I love it, uh, And I also love that that

902
00:52:48,120 --> 00:52:50,399
Speaker 1: we were able to, you know, to begin by by

903
00:52:50,440 --> 00:52:55,560
Speaker 1: talking about about mythology and um in irrigation and and

904
00:52:55,640 --> 00:52:59,480
Speaker 1: get into these these questions about life itself that ultimately

905
00:52:59,560 --> 00:53:03,279
Speaker 1: kind of loop back around into the mythological you know, uh,

906
00:53:03,640 --> 00:53:06,359
Speaker 1: the areas that are that are contemplated by both uh,

907
00:53:06,440 --> 00:53:09,280
Speaker 1: you know, science and mythology. Oh, this kind of stuff

908
00:53:09,320 --> 00:53:13,680
Speaker 1: that really gets my brain tingling. Yeah, absolutely, And like

909
00:53:13,719 --> 00:53:16,399
Speaker 1: we said, we uh, there are various jumping off points

910
00:53:16,440 --> 00:53:18,520
Speaker 1: from here, so we we I guess we can ask

911
00:53:18,520 --> 00:53:20,680
Speaker 1: the listeners to chime in, like what what would you

912
00:53:20,719 --> 00:53:22,480
Speaker 1: like next? You want us to do you want us

913
00:53:22,480 --> 00:53:25,239
Speaker 1: to talk about of Cyrus in a future episode? Do

914
00:53:25,280 --> 00:53:28,440
Speaker 1: you want us to to go all in on irrigation technology?

915
00:53:28,719 --> 00:53:30,719
Speaker 1: Or maybe you just wanted to go like partially in,

916
00:53:30,800 --> 00:53:33,680
Speaker 1: like I don't know, knee deep in irrigation technology. Uh,

917
00:53:33,880 --> 00:53:37,040
Speaker 1: what's your comfort level? Because it's I was looking through

918
00:53:37,080 --> 00:53:39,800
Speaker 1: some of it earlier and it's you know, super fascinating. Again,

919
00:53:39,960 --> 00:53:43,960
Speaker 1: human human civilization is kind of a story of irrigation technology.

920
00:53:44,080 --> 00:53:46,640
Speaker 1: So there's a lot to discuss. All Right, we're gonna

921
00:53:46,680 --> 00:53:49,400
Speaker 1: go ahead and close it out there, But in the meantime,

922
00:53:49,400 --> 00:53:51,000
Speaker 1: if you would like to check out other episodes of

923
00:53:51,000 --> 00:53:53,400
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind, you know where to find

924
00:53:53,440 --> 00:53:56,240
Speaker 1: them in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed

925
00:53:56,280 --> 00:53:58,600
Speaker 1: and you can get that, oh pretty much anywhere wherever

926
00:53:58,600 --> 00:54:01,880
Speaker 1: you get podcasts. Uh, you'll find core episodes on Tuesdays

927
00:54:01,880 --> 00:54:06,160
Speaker 1: and Thursdays, we try and slip in an artifact on Wednesdays.

928
00:54:06,280 --> 00:54:09,880
Speaker 1: Listener mails on Monday and Friday is weird how cinema.

929
00:54:09,960 --> 00:54:15,160
Speaker 1: That's the far less science, far less uh depth. It's

930
00:54:15,160 --> 00:54:17,839
Speaker 1: all about the weird films in those episodes, and then

931
00:54:17,880 --> 00:54:20,600
Speaker 1: we run a vault episode of rerun over the weekend.

932
00:54:21,200 --> 00:54:23,520
Speaker 1: So however, you get the show if the platform gives

933
00:54:23,560 --> 00:54:26,000
Speaker 1: you the power to do so, just rate, review, and subscribe.

934
00:54:26,320 --> 00:54:29,399
Speaker 1: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth

935
00:54:29,480 --> 00:54:31,960
Speaker 1: Nicholas Johnson. If you'd like to get in touch with

936
00:54:32,040 --> 00:54:34,520
Speaker 1: us with feedback on this episode or any other, to

937
00:54:34,560 --> 00:54:37,120
Speaker 1: suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello,

938
00:54:37,200 --> 00:54:40,080
Speaker 1: you can email us at contact and Stuff to Blow

939
00:54:40,120 --> 00:54:50,880
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is

940
00:54:50,920 --> 00:54:53,640
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my

941
00:54:53,680 --> 00:54:56,719
Speaker 1: heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or

942
00:54:56,719 --> 00:55:09,880
Speaker 1: wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. They persist joints

943
00:55:10,000 --> 00:55:13,399
Speaker 1: four point four po