Speaker 1: Pushkin. One night in April twenty nineteen, a group of
Speaker 1: Israeli scientists were trying to land a spacecraft on the Moon.
Speaker 1: The spacecraft was called the Bearasheet, which means in the
Speaker 1: beginning in Hebrew, it's the first word of the Book
Speaker 1: of Genesis. The unmanned Israeli craft was about five feet tall,
Speaker 1: a little chamber with four extended legs and some solar
Speaker 1: panels on top. The whole thing was coated in gold foil,
Speaker 1: like an oligarch's sushi order chersh hamersh a bar. The
Speaker 1: launch had gone smoothly. Berescheet's lander separated from the rocket
Speaker 1: that had catapulted it into space. Then, for more than
Speaker 1: a month, it traced an elliptical orbit around the Earth,
Speaker 1: going further and further out until it could be captured
Speaker 1: by the Moon's gravity. Now, finally, the Bearsheet was sinking
Speaker 1: down toward an ancient volcanic field on the Moon, a
Speaker 1: place known as the Sea of Serenity. All of Israel
Speaker 1: was excited. The landing would be the culmination of years
Speaker 1: of work. In Los Angeles, an entrepreneur called Nova Spevak
Speaker 1: was watching the landing on a live stream. He wasn't
Speaker 1: just a space fan. He had a lot at stake
Speaker 1: in the Bearasheet mission. It was the culmination of years
Speaker 1: of work for him too. He knew how it was
Speaker 1: supposed to go down. But then they were doing the
Speaker 1: landing maneuver, which basically involves rotating the spacecraft at high
Speaker 1: speed while it's kind of speeding towards the Moon. That
Speaker 1: maneuver is very precise and involves a lot of computer
Speaker 1: controlled firings of different thrusters. Were the spacecraft try to
Speaker 1: enable the engine. All of a sudden there was an
Speaker 1: alert and things were flashing red on mission control in Israel,
Speaker 1: and we're seeing and something's wrong. We have the main
Speaker 1: engine back on. No, but it's not no, no I.
Speaker 1: A sensor is reporting data that can't be right. So
Speaker 1: either the sensors failed or the spacecraft is losing its orientation.
Speaker 1: The main engine is back on, but we have lost
Speaker 1: communication with a spacecraft. Nova's heart was in his mouth
Speaker 1: because on board the Bearsheet was a library. You could
Speaker 1: say it was the library of Nova's dreams, a message
Speaker 1: in a bottle. The library was a backup of the
Speaker 1: world's knowledge. It was designed to be stable and robust,
Speaker 1: enough to last a billion years, a way of saying
Speaker 1: to future civilization, we were here and perhaps away for
Speaker 1: twenty first century humanity to cheat death. It was meant
Speaker 1: to survive eternity on the moon, but had it made
Speaker 1: it there, nova had no way of knowing. Chersh hammersh
Speaker 1: ah bar. Two. This is Into the Zone, a podcast
Speaker 1: about opposites and how borders are never as clear as
Speaker 1: we think. I'm Harry Kunzru. We're at the last episode
Speaker 1: of the season and finally dealing with the biggest binary
Speaker 1: opposition of all. This is a story about knowledge and
Speaker 1: tiny animals. It's about dark ages and the darkness of space.
Speaker 1: It's about viruses and permafrost and the strange things that
Speaker 1: can happen on the fuzzy border between life and its opposite.
Speaker 1: Not death, necessarily call it non life. They say you
Speaker 1: only die when the last person who remembers you is dead.
Speaker 1: If we could send memories of ourselves to the far future,
Speaker 1: wouldn't that be a little like making ourselves immortal. In
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty nine, as part of the New York World's Fair,
Speaker 1: the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company buried what it called
Speaker 1: a time bomb under a Plaza in Queens. This rocket
Speaker 1: shaped container held a variety of everyday objects, such as
Speaker 1: a fountain pen, a set of alphabet blocks, and a
Speaker 1: pack of cigarettes. It also housed glass fials of seeds
Speaker 1: and a microfilm, a fancy new technology back then, with
Speaker 1: about ten million words of text and a few thousand pictures.
Speaker 1: Westinghouse later changed the name of the time bomb to
Speaker 1: the much less fusing time capsule, And if you want
Speaker 1: to find out about it, you might want to listen
Speaker 1: to episode ten of My Fellow Pushkin Night Jill Lapaus show,
Speaker 1: The Last Archive. There's something irresistible about addressing oneself to
Speaker 1: the future. As a kid, I remember writing a message
Speaker 1: for a time capsule that was going to be buried
Speaker 1: outside the offices of a children's publisher. But time capsules
Speaker 1: have always been a thing. Ancient Chinese emperors built armies
Speaker 1: to escort them to the afterlife. In seventeen ninety five,
Speaker 1: a bunch of freemasons, including former American revolutionaries Samuel Adams
Speaker 1: and Paul Revere, put a brass box inside the cornerstone
Speaker 1: of the new Massachusetts State House. Inside the box were newspapers, coins,
Speaker 1: and a silver plate engraved by Paul Revere himself, who
Speaker 1: was both a fast rider and a master silversmith, all
Speaker 1: of us Chinese emperors. Paul Revere me, we're trying to
Speaker 1: do the same thing. We were trying to time travel.
Speaker 1: We were burying parts of ourselves as a way of
Speaker 1: reaching out into the future, transcending our normal lifespans. With
Speaker 1: the arrival of space exploration, people stopped just thinking about
Speaker 1: the future on Earth and began to wonder about how
Speaker 1: humanity should present itself to other intelligent life forms. What
Speaker 1: kind of cosmic dating profiles should we build to get
Speaker 1: potential partners to swipe right? And after the invention of
Speaker 1: atomic weapons and the growing consciousness of the environmental crisis,
Speaker 1: we began to wonder seriously whether we'd be around to
Speaker 1: witness the future at all. This was the world in
Speaker 1: which Nova Spivak grew up. When I was about eight
Speaker 1: years old, somebody gave me a big green book. It
Speaker 1: was a blank, giant, eight hundred or a thousand page book,
Speaker 1: sort of a hard bound dictionary or encyclopedia, but completely blank,
Speaker 1: and I thought that was just the greatest present. I
Speaker 1: was constantly thinking about what would I write in this book?
Speaker 1: Growing up in Boston in the nineteen seventies, Little Nova
Speaker 1: felt he had a special destiny. Not long after getting
Speaker 1: that gift, I had this vivid dream I was an
Speaker 1: adult during a time where some terrible environmental catastrophe took
Speaker 1: place that caused the authorities around the world to come
Speaker 1: to the conclusion that the air was not safe to breathe.
Speaker 1: It's an epic science fiction novel of a dream in
Speaker 1: which he's one of a small number of people who
Speaker 1: survived the apocalypse and live in giant underground capsules. There
Speaker 1: were these giant concrete cylinders, I mean huge. Each one
Speaker 1: could have thousands of people living in many, many levels,
Speaker 1: and they were kind of drilled into the ground. In
Speaker 1: Nova's dream, which really earns this cosmic soundtrack, a long
Speaker 1: time goes by. After a while, the giant cylinders begin
Speaker 1: to sink into the ground and most people are suffocated.
Speaker 1: Nova is one of a small group of survivors who
Speaker 1: make it out. He realizes he's amongst the last people
Speaker 1: alive who remember the world as it was before the disaster.
Speaker 1: That world doesn't exist, so what of it should we
Speaker 1: preserve and how and why? And so those discussions led
Speaker 1: to a decision to create a book of knowledge of
Speaker 1: every other history of everything we knew. And in order
Speaker 1: to do that, you had to have a person whose
Speaker 1: role was to sort of be in charge of that project,
Speaker 1: and that person was me. That person was known as
Speaker 1: the Keeper of the Book. Then in Nova's dream, he
Speaker 1: dies and he gets reborn, and he dies and he's
Speaker 1: reborn again. Like I said, it's an epic dream. And
Speaker 1: then in my next life in the dream, um I
Speaker 1: who I was the next Keeper of the Book. And
Speaker 1: then it started speeding up, and then I saw life
Speaker 1: after life flashing by it high speed, like maybe a
Speaker 1: hundred of them, and I could see everything about that
Speaker 1: whole life. But it was like that, And then I
Speaker 1: just couldn't remember it would be, and I saw I
Speaker 1: was like this lineage of Keepers of the Book going
Speaker 1: off into the future. Finally, little Nova has a vision
Speaker 1: of a guy with a long beard living in some
Speaker 1: kind of hut cave. It's a far future version of himself,
Speaker 1: Keeper of the Book, the last guardian of the knowledge
Speaker 1: of civilization. By now you're probably getting a picture of Nova.
Speaker 1: He's hyperactive, driven, talkative, the kind of guy who probably
Speaker 1: gets his way in negotiations just by wearing the other
Speaker 1: person out. His day job is tech entrepreneur, but he's
Speaker 1: also a utopian, someone who finds other worlds more interesting
Speaker 1: than this one, though this one has made him rich.
Speaker 1: You know, I did a lot of work on open encyclopedias,
Speaker 1: used the Wikipedia really intensely, worked on darkast Kalo project,
Speaker 1: organized knowledge and build intelligent ages later became series built
Speaker 1: data and analytics companies or natural language processing. Built all
Speaker 1: these tools. Adult Nova got to thinking about what would
Speaker 1: happen to all that knowledge if something went wrong. Now,
Speaker 1: maybe he could do something about it. He could be
Speaker 1: a real keeper of the book. We need to make
Speaker 1: a long term copy of the Wikipedia that also can
Speaker 1: never be destroyed and that will be found in the
Speaker 1: distant future, like a backup copy. That got me thinking
Speaker 1: about how to send the Wikipedia to the Moon. I realized, well,
Speaker 1: why not put it on the moon? Backing up humanity
Speaker 1: on the moon sounds like a wise idea. Particularly these days,
Speaker 1: our systems and societies feel ever more fragile. If a
Speaker 1: catastrophe does happen, maybe our knowledge can go into hibernation
Speaker 1: and then be resurrected to help build a new civilization
Speaker 1: in the future. Like how the classical texts copied and
Speaker 1: preserved by dark age monks eventually kickstarted the Renaissance. No
Speaker 1: Va Spivak calls the Lunar Library humanity's gift to the future.
Speaker 1: He thinks humanity can become bigger through the physical act
Speaker 1: of flinging its knowledge into space. Like I was just
Speaker 1: a sort of spack on a planet, but now my
Speaker 1: footprint is as wide as the Solar System. It's a
Speaker 1: different feeling, and I think everybody should have that feeling
Speaker 1: because it changes our sense of self. You know, that's important.
Speaker 1: If you really want to have a multiplanetary civilization, you've
Speaker 1: got to make people feel like they're part of a
Speaker 1: multiplanetary civilization. It's inspiring, isn't it. This intergalactic team building.
Speaker 1: Nova's vision of transcending the limits of time and space
Speaker 1: builds on some of the most famous projects of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century. In nineteen seventy seven, around the time Young
Speaker 1: Nova was dreaming his epic dream, the two Voyager spacecraft
Speaker 1: were launched, each carrying a Golden record, essentially a very
Speaker 1: durable version of a vinyl LP. They held messages of
Speaker 1: greeting from humanity to the rest of the universe. We
Speaker 1: step out of our Solar system into the universe, seeking
Speaker 1: only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called
Speaker 1: upon to be taught, if we are fortunate, this version
Speaker 1: of us, the Voyager Record, has already traveled beyond the
Speaker 1: Solar system. It's a penpal letter to the cosmos, a
Speaker 1: few lines about who we are and what we care about.
Speaker 1: But no Va. Spivak wanted to send out more than
Speaker 1: a few lines. He wanted to send all of it,
Speaker 1: all human knowledge, the whole thing preserved on the Moon.
Speaker 1: But first he got involved in history's most ridiculous mission
Speaker 1: to Mars Nova. Spivak wanted to build a lunar library
Speaker 1: to back up the world's knowledge and give human civilization
Speaker 1: a future among the stars. He set up a nonprofit
Speaker 1: he called Arc Mission, a play on Arc and Archive.
Speaker 1: Since nineteen seventy seven and the days of Voyager and
Speaker 1: the Golden Record, the technology of data storage has improved
Speaker 1: beyond all measure, but the basic questions are the same.
Speaker 1: What do you send and how do you send it?
Speaker 1: Digital storage is cheap and plentiful, but it has its limits.
Speaker 1: How can you be sure that your hard drive won't
Speaker 1: be corrupted by unshielded radiation and space. How can you
Speaker 1: be sure that aliens or future humans will even understand
Speaker 1: what you've created. You need something that will last. That
Speaker 1: was the thinking behind Golden records, durable analog materials, preferably
Speaker 1: made of something rare to signify value to an alien race.
Speaker 1: Novaspivack hit on quartz glass. It's super hard. They use
Speaker 1: it to make spacecraft windows, and he met a guy
Speaker 1: who knew how to use a laser to etch unbelievably
Speaker 1: tiny images into it. They estimated an etched ball of
Speaker 1: quartz glass would last fourteen billion years, which seemed like
Speaker 1: enough time even to them. The question was what should
Speaker 1: they put on it. A science fiction saga, the three
Speaker 1: volumes of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy Etched in Glass. When
Speaker 1: I was a kid, I was a big science fiction fan,
Speaker 1: and I was into Asimov's Foundation trilogy partly because they
Speaker 1: were the only books that had a lead character called Hurry.
Speaker 1: In Foundation, Hurry Selden is a future super scientist who
Speaker 1: invents a discipline called psychohistory, which is basically making models
Speaker 1: or projects based on loads of data about the past.
Speaker 1: You can see why he'd be appealing to tech guys.
Speaker 1: In the novel, Harry Seldon lives in a time of decadence.
Speaker 1: The Galactic Empire is collapsing. Using psychohistory, Harry Selden produces
Speaker 1: what he calls the Seldon Plan and which I call
Speaker 1: the hurry Seldon Plan, a project to determine the right
Speaker 1: time and place to set up a new society. If
Speaker 1: he gets it right, it will shorten the coming Galactic
Speaker 1: dark Age by thousands of years. And it was through
Speaker 1: the Foundation Novels that Nova Spivak made a connection with
Speaker 1: another Asimov fan and god involved in the most springbreakish
Speaker 1: mission in the history of spaceflight. One day, Nova was
Speaker 1: scrolling through the Twitter feed of Elon Musk. Musk was
Speaker 1: going to use his cherry red Tesla as a dummy
Speaker 1: payload to test out his new Fulcan heavy rocket. His
Speaker 1: plan was to slingshot his car so it crashed landed
Speaker 1: on Mars. Here's Elon describing the first convertible to exit
Speaker 1: our atmosphere. It just has the same seats that like
Speaker 1: a normal car has. It's just literally a normal car
Speaker 1: in space, which I kind of like the absurdity of that.
Speaker 1: I just happened to be there watching when it happened,
Speaker 1: and I tweeted back to him and threw a bunch
Speaker 1: of friends as well. Dear Elon, you know you can
Speaker 1: find the tweet. I did find the tweet, Nova says,
Speaker 1: dear Elon, we made you a data crystal that lasts
Speaker 1: fourteen billion years, containing Asimov's Foundation trilogy wait less than
Speaker 1: five grams, and we sent it along on the ride
Speaker 1: to Mars, and Musk replies, Asimov's Foundation books should definitely
Speaker 1: be part of the mission. They're amazing. We then had
Speaker 1: to get to his officer trying to make that really happen.
Speaker 1: For months, Nova and his team couldn't even get Musk's
Speaker 1: people to respond to his messages. Finally, they made contact
Speaker 1: through a random friend of a friend, and Musk agreed
Speaker 1: to meet. It was the most important pitch of Nova's life. Eventually,
Speaker 1: he looks up. His assistant is sitting there. She's kind
Speaker 1: of breathlessly with us, and he looks up. He says,
Speaker 1: who are you? What is this? What is this about?
Speaker 1: I've got real work to do. Get out. At that moment,
Speaker 1: Nova knew that if he didn't get Musk's attention right
Speaker 1: there and then it was all over. So forget the presentation.
Speaker 1: Forget the fancy pedestal. I just whipped the thing out,
Speaker 1: dropped the crystal in his desk, and I say, that
Speaker 1: is the Foundation Trilogy. He's like, that's the Foundation Trilogy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That He's like, what is its crystal? It's quarts crystal.
Speaker 1: You know, we wrote the Foundation Trilogy into it with
Speaker 1: a femto second laser and you agreed to take it
Speaker 1: to Mars on Twitter and then a spark of recognition
Speaker 1: appeared to light in Elon Musk's brain. Maybe he did
Speaker 1: remember something about that, you know. He thinks it's like
Speaker 1: a gift and we're like, no, that's like a million dollars. Okay, sorry,
Speaker 1: but no. So I like grabbing it back from him
Speaker 1: and he's like grabbing He's like, no, it's mine. I'm
Speaker 1: keeping it. I'm like, no, you're taking it to Mars.
Speaker 1: He's like, no, I'm putting it in my personal library.
Speaker 1: I have a collection of stuff. And I realized, okay,
Speaker 1: fuck it, and I pull out one of the other
Speaker 1: ones from my pocket and I say, look, fine, it's
Speaker 1: a deal. If you take this one to Mars, I'll
Speaker 1: give you another one for your library. And he's like deal.
Speaker 1: When the Falcon Heavy launched elon Musk's Tesla into space.
Speaker 1: In the driver's seat was a mannequin dressed in a spacesuit.
Speaker 1: It was called Starman after the David Bowie song, and
Speaker 1: in the car's glove compartment was a ball of quartz glass.
Speaker 1: Novas Bevac's first prototype ARC was one of those great
Speaker 1: moments in life. The plan was to crash land the
Speaker 1: Tesla onto the surface of Mars, but they missed, sending
Speaker 1: the car into a thirty million year orbit around the Sun.
Speaker 1: Bottom line is by missing Mars. Ultimately, it became the
Speaker 1: longest lasting library in human history and the first in space.
Speaker 1: Because three bucks is a library small, but it is
Speaker 1: a library. It is a library, a library in a
Speaker 1: car that has now exceeded its thirty six thousand mile
Speaker 1: warranty thirty two thousand and four and twenty eight times
Speaker 1: while driving around the Sun. The ARC that Nova Spivak
Speaker 1: would send up to the Moon on the Bearacheet mission
Speaker 1: was much more ambitious. The ARC mission had found a
Speaker 1: way to etch tiny photographic images onto nickel readable by
Speaker 1: an ordinary optical microscope. Using this technology, they made a
Speaker 1: sort of sandwich with twenty five very thin nickel sheets.
Speaker 1: The first four were fully analoged and contained many thousands
Speaker 1: of pages of text and photographs. They also contained instructions
Speaker 1: on how to read the other twenty one, which were
Speaker 1: DVD masters etched using the same technology. It's a very
Speaker 1: clever design. Each layer gets more complex and teaches you
Speaker 1: how to read the next. So what did they put
Speaker 1: on it? Wikipedia? Sure, but more than Wikipedia. When you're
Speaker 1: in the business of backing up all human knowledge, you
Speaker 1: have to ask what knowledge is worth while. This problem
Speaker 1: came up on the Voyage Emission too. When it was
Speaker 1: launched carrying the Golden Records, there were some disagreements about
Speaker 1: what to include. A panel was convened to decide, headed
Speaker 1: by the famous astronomer Carl Sagan. The record included some
Speaker 1: pictures encoded in the same way as digital information can
Speaker 1: be sent over a phone line using an analog modem.
Speaker 1: The Voyager pictures show all sorts of things and all
Speaker 1: sorts of people. The music is pretty great, probably because
Speaker 1: one of the people choosing it was Alan Lomax, the
Speaker 1: famous sound recordist and preserver of folk culture. But there
Speaker 1: were problems. Sagan and his committee wanted to include a
Speaker 1: photograph of a naked man and woman, but seventies America
Speaker 1: couldn't handle it, and the photo had to be replaced
Speaker 1: by a line drawing. Somehow, the drawing, which was intended
Speaker 1: to be racially ambiguous, got Caucasianized, and even the drawing
Speaker 1: was too much for some old NASA bureaucrat who insisted
Speaker 1: that a small vertical line be removed so that the
Speaker 1: woman would not appear to have genitals. A bean was fine, apparently,
Speaker 1: but not Evolver. As a result, this wonderful example of
Speaker 1: misogyny has recently exited the Solar system. Nova Spivak has
Speaker 1: thought a lot about how to avoid misinforming aliens about sex.
Speaker 1: To us, it might have been an artwork, but to
Speaker 1: them they form an entire scientific theory about life on Earth,
Speaker 1: which reproduces a sexually. In his space library, Nova included
Speaker 1: crowdsourced material and a copy of something called the Rosetta Disc,
Speaker 1: an archive of one thousand, five hundred World languages. Archmission
Speaker 1: is a private organization, so they had to attract sponsors.
Speaker 1: Some space on the tiny Nickel Library was allocated to
Speaker 1: private archives and to a time capsule for the Israeli
Speaker 1: Space Agency. Nova also approached his friend, the fantastic, the formidable,
Speaker 1: the entirely flat, a guesting mister David Copperfield, and he
Speaker 1: created a library of the secrets to all of his magic,
Speaker 1: the magic of David Copperfield, starting David Cornfield. I'm somehow
Speaker 1: not surprised that Nova as friends with David Copperfield. These
Speaker 1: tricks of his, they're not just tricks, they're engineering achievements,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of science and technology behind it.
Speaker 1: All of that is in one of our vaults. Some
Speaker 1: of the space library, including Copperfield's magic, tell all his secret,
Speaker 1: but Nova promises none of it's naughty. He did not
Speaker 1: send pawn into space. But there is physical stuff in
Speaker 1: the library. We got some artifacts that were from sacred
Speaker 1: caves or at special religious monuments, or even from the
Speaker 1: bones of some saints, and a little piece of the
Speaker 1: body tree and it might just be a piece of
Speaker 1: sand from a shrine or another place of religious significance.
Speaker 1: They were at it, they thought they'd attached some actual
Speaker 1: living things. Tardi grades are microscopic eight legged creatures that
Speaker 1: were first seen by an eighteenth century German biologist. He
Speaker 1: thought they looked like little bears, and sometimes they're still
Speaker 1: cooled water bears. They're puffy and have tiny claws and
Speaker 1: are weirdly cute, which is unusual. Most micro animals tend
Speaker 1: to look like they've come out of a horror movie.
Speaker 1: Tardi grades have been around almost six hundred million years.
Speaker 1: When times are tough, like a sudden drop in temperature,
Speaker 1: they shared ninety five percent of the water in Their
Speaker 1: fat little bodies then go into a state called cryptobiosis,
Speaker 1: which literally means hidden life. In this state, they're almost
Speaker 1: impossible to kill. Nova Spivak's team encased some dehydrated Tardi
Speaker 1: grades in resin and attached them to the package. The
Speaker 1: Tarte grades and the library were shot into space, or
Speaker 1: at least that's what I read. Almost every article written
Speaker 1: about the mission mentions the Tardi grades living creatures on
Speaker 1: the Moon. It was the big story. But when I
Speaker 1: asked Nova about it, what Tarte grades? You're denying that
Speaker 1: widespread reports that Tartar grades were part of the library.
Speaker 1: I can neither confirm nor deny that there are Tartar grades.
Speaker 1: I believe there are, but actually the way we did it,
Speaker 1: it was like flipping a coin where one side is
Speaker 1: put Tartar grades, or maybe put Tartar grades, and the
Speaker 1: other side is I have no idea. At this point,
Speaker 1: I'm finding the conversation very weird. When I say the
Speaker 1: story about the Tarte grades was everywhere, I mean everywhere.
Speaker 1: It was the first thing I heard about Nova or
Speaker 1: the art mission. So was noa just ballshitting me? Why
Speaker 1: was he being so kg Well? Perhaps because of what happened.
Speaker 1: As the Bearasheet was descending towards the Moon, the scientists
Speaker 1: in Israel that were conducting the mission realized that one
Speaker 1: of the engines had stopped firing. They only had a
Speaker 1: few seconds to think. They decided to reboot the engine.
Speaker 1: That that caused the whole system to reboot. We seem
Speaker 1: to have a problem with our main engine. We are
Speaker 1: resetting the spacecraft. Try to enable the engine. We have
Speaker 1: the main engine back on it. No, but it snug No. No,
Speaker 1: The basheet lander crashed, crashed on the Moon. Then the
Speaker 1: Israelis sent a blurry, low resolution picture which showed a
Speaker 1: new crater on the Sea of Serenity. The lander or
Speaker 1: its wreckage was too small to see. The thing is
Speaker 1: if the library had been broken open, then it was
Speaker 1: possible that Tardi grades had been scattered on the surface
Speaker 1: of the Moon. I'm pretty sure that wasn't supposed to happen.
Speaker 1: The Tardi grades were supposed to be enclosed in resin
Speaker 1: sleeping soundly as part of a reference library, not just
Speaker 1: hanging out in the sea of serenity. Were they alive,
Speaker 1: could they come out of their suspended state and revive.
Speaker 1: There's no water on the Moon, so it's highly unlikely.
Speaker 1: But if you look at it a certain way, because
Speaker 1: of the ARC mission, there is probably now life on
Speaker 1: the Moon. Life on the Moon. It's like the beginning
Speaker 1: of a Golden Age science fiction story. Nova knows very well,
Speaker 1: and a myth is what his project needs to get
Speaker 1: another chance. So yes, let's say the Art mission has
Speaker 1: put life on the Moon, but not everyone thinks that
Speaker 1: was Nova's decision to make. The reason Nova' Spevak is
Speaker 1: being so post truth about whether the tar degrades are
Speaker 1: on the Moon is because they got him into trouble.
Speaker 1: It turns out that he didn't tell anyone they were
Speaker 1: on board. If they were in fact on board, certainly
Speaker 1: he didn't tell the Israeli government. While there's no actual
Speaker 1: law prohibiting biological material being landed on the Moon, the
Speaker 1: fact that Nova did it without seeking governmental approval has
Speaker 1: some people worried. Even if the tar degrades aren't going
Speaker 1: to come alive and colonize the Moon, shouldn't there be
Speaker 1: some kind of official record of what we've put into space?
Speaker 1: Of course, if you think that all sorts of weird
Speaker 1: and dangerous hasn't been put into space with governmental approval,
Speaker 1: and then I have an unshielded nuclear reactor to sell you,
Speaker 1: or a cherry red tesla orbiting the Sun, you ask
Speaker 1: a simple question like is there now life on the Moon,
Speaker 1: and instead of an answer, you get back some microscopic
Speaker 1: creatures that may or may not be there in a
Speaker 1: state that may or may not be called life. When
Speaker 1: I started thinking about Nova, Spivak's crash landed library and
Speaker 1: the tardigrades on the Moon, the first thing I thought was,
Speaker 1: this sounds like the sort of thing Sophia is into.
Speaker 1: My name is Sophia Roost, and I'm a historian and
Speaker 1: anthropologist of the modern life sciences. I met Sophia when
Speaker 1: we were both fellows at the American Academy in Berlin.
Speaker 1: I was working on my novel read Pill. Sophia was
Speaker 1: doing something mysterious involving dead things and the Arctic Circle.
Speaker 1: We had to eat dinner with our fellow fellows every night,
Speaker 1: and over several months I got to know her pretty well.
Speaker 1: She has a dry sense of humor and a very
Speaker 1: particular set of intellectual interests. Sophia likes to watch scientists
Speaker 1: doing stuff. She's interested in how they understand the concepts
Speaker 1: they use, such as the concept of life. We will
Speaker 1: think we know what life is. It's the opposite of death,
Speaker 1: but beyond that, it turns out to be very difficult
Speaker 1: to define. When I went looking for the scientifically accepted
Speaker 1: definition of life, I found not one or two, but
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty three different definitions. More than it
Speaker 1: being a difficult thing to define it, I would say
Speaker 1: that the question of what is life is a really
Speaker 1: generative question, and has been for quite a long time.
Speaker 1: That's a very Sophiaish answer. She's basically telling me not
Speaker 1: to fall into a hole. She and her colleagues have
Speaker 1: already been down there and reported back. What we've found
Speaker 1: is that life tends to be defined according to certain
Speaker 1: kinds of things that people find value, but at a
Speaker 1: specific moment in time. So when you look at the
Speaker 1: way people have understood what life is. It actually says
Speaker 1: a lot about what we think about, what we value,
Speaker 1: what we care about, instead of defining life. Sofia tells
Speaker 1: me a story. It takes place in seventeen eighty five
Speaker 1: in the Duke of Tuscany's famous Cabinet of Curiosities, where
Speaker 1: the ruler keeps his collection of natural wonders. The cabinet
Speaker 1: has all the stuff you'd expect to find in such
Speaker 1: a place, skeletons, trays of bugs and butterflies, wax models
Speaker 1: of anatomical curiosities, strange things, and jars. The court physician,
Speaker 1: a man named Felici Fontana, is doing some secret experiments
Speaker 1: with a visiting French philosoph called Charles Dupati. So the
Speaker 1: question that was trying to be answered in this experiment
Speaker 1: was where does wheatlight come from? Tusk and farmers would
Speaker 1: save wheat from one season to the next, even though
Speaker 1: it all looked the same, some crops would get blint
Speaker 1: and some wouldn't. What was causing it? What Fontana had
Speaker 1: found and was that you could take a little drop
Speaker 1: of water and put it on the tip of a
Speaker 1: needle and bring it close to the grain of wheat,
Speaker 1: and if there were eelworms in the grain of wheat,
Speaker 1: even if they were desiccated, dry, seemingly dead, they would
Speaker 1: be revived by the freshness of the water and would
Speaker 1: begin to move around again. So this solved the mystery
Speaker 1: of wheat blight. Tiny worms, But how is it possible
Speaker 1: for them to come alive in this way? This seemed
Speaker 1: to Dupatian to Fontana as well, to be not just
Speaker 1: a sign that the eelworms had been paused right, that
Speaker 1: they were hibernating to use a modern term, and were revived,
Speaker 1: but that they were actually resurrected. They had been dead
Speaker 1: and were now alive again. And Dupati asked Fontana why
Speaker 1: he hadn't reported this, and Fontana, who was practicing Catholic
Speaker 1: as many people were at the time, said that he
Speaker 1: was worried that he would be excommunicated by the Church,
Speaker 1: because Christ can be resurrected, but eelworms cannot resurrection, a
Speaker 1: power that for a religious Catholic belongs to God, not man. Cryptobiosis,
Speaker 1: the state of suspended animation that Tarte grades go into,
Speaker 1: may not be resurrection in the way a Catholic would
Speaker 1: understand it, but it's a state that raises profound questions
Speaker 1: about the definition of life. If an organism isn't doing
Speaker 1: any of the things we associate with life, moving around, eating, growing,
Speaker 1: can we really say it's alive? If a dead thing
Speaker 1: can come back to life, was it ever really dead?
Speaker 1: This isn't the first time that Tarte grades have been
Speaker 1: sent into space. I've written about some work that was
Speaker 1: done by the Italian Space Agency. They took some Tartar
Speaker 1: grades from leaf litter in Modna and put those into
Speaker 1: low Earth orbit for about two weeks, and while they
Speaker 1: were in orbit, they were able to lay eggs. Those
Speaker 1: eggs hatched and more Tarte grades came out, so in
Speaker 1: that sense that they're already extraterrestrials. There were also tartegrades
Speaker 1: that were left outside where they were exposed to radiation
Speaker 1: and extreme temperatures and vacuum of space, and those were
Speaker 1: also resurrected. Brought that to all out, and as I said,
Speaker 1: resurrected instead of revived, I promised to fear I'd cut
Speaker 1: that out the slip into religious language, but it's a
Speaker 1: perfect example of how tricky it is to think about
Speaker 1: the border between life and death, or life a non life.
Speaker 1: Imagine your Fellychif Fontana and Chel du Petit working in
Speaker 1: secret in the Duke of Tuscany's personal museum. Imagine knowing
Speaker 1: what the experiment is telling you, that dead creatures come
Speaker 1: to life again. Imagine knowing that you can't publish your
Speaker 1: findings because it shows you casually exercising God's greatest power,
Speaker 1: the power to animate dead matter, to give it an
Speaker 1: anima Latin for soul. It's our own new parlor tek right,
Speaker 1: sent tartegots into space and see how they do when
Speaker 1: they get back. It has that same kind of factor
Speaker 1: of wonder. But I mean, what does that tell us
Speaker 1: about the nature of life. There's this expectation of linearity, right,
Speaker 1: that life begins and it proceeds along one trajectory and
Speaker 1: then it ends, and once it ends, it stays ended.
Speaker 1: What if life isn't one half of an opposition, but
Speaker 1: a word for something that just increases in intensity, like
Speaker 1: turning a dial. And what if it turns out that
Speaker 1: the line of life can be dotted rather than continuous.
Speaker 1: The next time I speak with Sophia, she tells me
Speaker 1: about the time she went to the far North, to
Speaker 1: an Arctic land called Spalbud, and it's only town long
Speaker 1: year Bien outside of lanyere Bien. You need to have
Speaker 1: a gun license because of polar bearers. Polar bears do
Speaker 1: come into the town regularly, and a lot of people
Speaker 1: in land Urbean carry a rifle, but everyone who leaves
Speaker 1: the perimeter of the town needs to have one with them.
Speaker 1: So in that sounds, I guess slightly more exotic than
Speaker 1: other places. Sophia was there to visit the Spalbird Global
Speaker 1: Seed volt the world's largest archive of agricultural crops. Swalbud
Speaker 1: is the work of Carrie Fowler, the conservationist from Memphis, Tennessee,
Speaker 1: who was active in the Civil rights movement as a
Speaker 1: young man. He was present for Martin Luther King's last speech,
Speaker 1: I've Been to the Mountaintop. Fowler has many of the
Speaker 1: same preoccupations as Nova Spivak, that mix of utopian pragmatism.
Speaker 1: He's another keeper of the book. The knowledge he cares
Speaker 1: about is stored in the crops we plant, the work
Speaker 1: of generations and generations of farmers. He determined that actually
Speaker 1: most of the world seed banks were in places that
Speaker 1: were quite dangerous either for geopolitical reasons, or climentological ones,
Speaker 1: and proposed putting a vault buried deep within the permafrost
Speaker 1: below this mountain that I mentioned, Platyburget Mountain, that would
Speaker 1: be able to maintain an ambient temperature that would keep
Speaker 1: the seeds frozen for centuries even if the power has
Speaker 1: gone out on civilization. I suppose I should mention that
Speaker 1: I've been talking to Sophia during the early days of COVID.
Speaker 1: We're both working from home. You'd probably hear our children
Speaker 1: in the background. It's a scary time, and every conversation
Speaker 1: makes its way back to one thing. Well, Viruses in
Speaker 1: general are funny things. For as long as we've known
Speaker 1: about viruses, they've been these limits all objects more than
Speaker 1: anything else, I would say, the thing that straddles the
Speaker 1: division between life and death, or life and non life.
Speaker 1: My favorite definition of virus comes from this guy named
Speaker 1: Peter Medawar, who sort of mid twentieth century biologists who
Speaker 1: did a lot of work on graph versus host disease,
Speaker 1: but he was also a really prolific science writer, and
Speaker 1: he said that a virus is a piece of bad
Speaker 1: news wrapped up in protein, which is timely right. Viruses
Speaker 1: depend on the host cells they infect to reproduce themselves.
Speaker 1: They hijack that cell's metabolism and use it to make copies,
Speaker 1: and a number of scientists realized that there were probably
Speaker 1: bodies beneath perma frost and various parts of the Arctic
Speaker 1: Circle or slightly below the Arctic Circle that would still
Speaker 1: have extant nineteen eighteen flu in them. They sampled brain tissue,
Speaker 1: lung tissue, liver, and brought all of those samples back
Speaker 1: to the laboratory, and what they found was that there
Speaker 1: was still significant pieces of nineteen eighteen flu rna that
Speaker 1: could be sequenced and pieced back together, and in the
Speaker 1: lung tissue when it was warmed back to ambient temperature
Speaker 1: body temperature in the laboratory, the same bacteria that were
Speaker 1: in the lungs came back to life. On her trip
Speaker 1: to the Arctic Circle, Sophia went to visit the cemetery
Speaker 1: where scientists had exsumed the bodies of seven miners who
Speaker 1: died of the flu. She wandered the mountainside until she
Speaker 1: found the graves, seven white crosses, almost invisible against the snow.
Speaker 1: At the time, she was looking for traces of the past.
Speaker 1: Little did she know she was getting a glimpse of
Speaker 1: the future. The nineteen eighteen strain of the flu in
Speaker 1: all likelihood is something that, as we know it is
Speaker 1: incredibly virulent. It's something that now people are comparing COVID
Speaker 1: to write is it more virulent? Is it more deadly?
Speaker 1: How contagious is it? Right now, viruses are on our minds,
Speaker 1: but there are other things lurking in the permafrost, and
Speaker 1: with global warming, the idea that they might come back
Speaker 1: to haunt us is no longer hypothetical. There's smallpox virus
Speaker 1: from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that is still around
Speaker 1: in the permafrost. And then there are also a lot
Speaker 1: of diseases that we don't know about because they were
Speaker 1: around before we were. Recently, a frozen wooly mammoth which
Speaker 1: was about twenty thousand years old was thought and the
Speaker 1: bacteria that had killed it we're still alive in the
Speaker 1: mammoth tissue. Of all the borders I've explored in this season,
Speaker 1: between natives and migrants east and west, the real and
Speaker 1: the virtual, none is as fundamental as the boundary between
Speaker 1: life and death, and none is as ambiguous. Life isn't
Speaker 1: one half of an opposition, but an intensity that's dialed
Speaker 1: up and down, moving through a gray zone that we
Speaker 1: don't know how to name. Things can be alive than dead,
Speaker 1: than alive again, millions of seeds under an Arctic mountain,
Speaker 1: dormant viruses in the permafrost, a library on the moon.
Speaker 1: Maybe one day we'll understand or just accept that gray zone,
Speaker 1: and with that understanding, we'll be able to extend humanity's
Speaker 1: future in time and space, to send ourselves orbiting around
Speaker 1: the Sun with all human knowledge and a little crystal ball.
Speaker 1: What then, who would we be? What would we be?
Speaker 1: In thinking these thoughts, sometimes we feel like experimenters in
Speaker 1: a grand Duke's cabinet of curiosities, holding a drop of
Speaker 1: water on a pin, whispering forbidden words like resurrection. Into
Speaker 1: the Zone is produced by Rider Also and Hunter Braithway.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Julia Barton. Mer La Belle is our
Speaker 1: executive producer. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Music for this
Speaker 1: episode composed by Issy or Campo, also known as Student.
Speaker 1: Our theme song is composed by Sarah K. Petinatti, also
Speaker 1: known as Lipp Talk Special. Thanks to Jacob Weisberg, head
Speaker 1: of Fine John Schnaz, Maya Kanig, Kylie mcgliori, Eric Sandler,
Speaker 1: Emily Rostick, and Maggie Taylor. Into the Zone is a
Speaker 1: production of Pushkin Industries. If you enjoyed this episode, please
Speaker 1: consider letting others know. The best way to do this
Speaker 1: is by rating us on Apple Podcasts. You could even
Speaker 1: write a review and for a Spotify playlist of songs
Speaker 1: that inspired this episode. You can find me on Twitter
Speaker 1: at at Harry Kunzru. I'm fantastic, the formidable, the entirely flabbergast.
Speaker 1: Hurry Kunzrum, See you next time.