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