Dan Snow's History Hit - How the Earth Shaped Human History

Episode Date: March 22, 2020

Great leaders? Industrial change? Revolutions? If you thought these were the things that shaped history, think again. Back by popular demand, I was thrilled to be joined by bestselling author Lewis Dartnell. He explained how modern political and economic patterns correlate with events which happened not decades or centuries ago, but hundreds of millions of years before human civilisations existed. Pretty mind-blowing stuff. Perhaps more relevant than ever in these uncertain and weird times, it’s never been more compelling to understand Earth’s impact on the shape of human civilisations. Enjoy. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about the bombing war featuring James Holland and other historians, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV We have got a special offer on at the moment- use code 'pod3' for a month free and the first THREE months for just £/€/$1 per month.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History here. Back by popular demand, we've got Lewis Dartnell. Lewis Dartnell is on the podcast. Now, Lewis Dartnell's the kind of guy who you meet and wonder what the hell you've been doing with your life. He is not only a professor of science and communication at the University of Westminster, but he's a popular science writer. He's written The Knowledge, How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch,

which, when I first read it, seemed like a fun thought experiment, and now, in these interesting times, feels like an essential instruction manual. He goes through all the essential, foundational, scientific underpinnings of our society. Explains how you can sort of fast-track it if you find yourself in a state of nature, without any utilities, without industrial farming, without anything you need, without medicine. All you do is read that book, break the glass, take the book out of the cabinet, put it in your grab bag. More recently, he has written the best-selling and fantastically interesting Origins about how the earth made us, about how the geology, the rocks and minerals

beneath our feet have shaped the course of our history, most of the time without us knowing it. He came back on the pod because we can't get enough of lewis darnell and we chatted about how many things we see around us many much of our politics our culture the way we vote is determined by what goes on beneath our feet or in the air around us and above us it was super interesting super interesting listen i hope everyone's finding this period of lockdown wherever wherever you are in the world, I hope you're finding it tenable. It's difficult being at home with the kids. It is difficult trying to work.

I'm finding it difficult. I'm worried about the world. I'm worried about my family or about my community. It's difficult to maintain your mental health and your physical health. Wash your hands, cough into your elbow, isolate if you have symptoms, and then look out for what you can do in the community. into your elbow, isolate if you have symptoms, and then look out for what you can do in the community. I'm hugely privileged to have been able to offer my apartment in London, which is now empty, to frontline healthcare workers. I'm so happy to think it's going to be used and not set empty, so

please don't underestimate what is within your network, what is within your power to do. We're going to go through some things together, everyone. I'm going to do what I can to help with education, entertainment, information at this time. We're going to up the output of podcasts. We are trying to keep the flow of films going to History Hit TV. We've got historians, fantastic historians are uploading video for us all the time from the security there in homes. So thank you to all of them people like Alice Roberts for reaching out and getting in touch. It means a huge amount. Watch over the next few days and weeks on our social media platforms on historyhit.tv which as always you can get absolutely free. You can go and use the code POD3. You get a month for free and then you get three months for just one pound euro or dollar for each of those three months.

And frankly who knows where we're going to be in four months time, everyone. So that doesn't sound like a bad trade. You can watch the World's Best History Channel for four months for just three pounds, euros or dollars by using the code POD3HISTORY at TV. I'm also going to be thinking about some kind of book club idea. I'm going to talk to Greg Jenner next week, and we will find out a way to stream that live. I'll let you know on the podcast as we work on the technology, but the best way is stream that live. I'll let you know on the podcast as we work on the technology, but the best way is to stream that live so you can all join in our conversation. In the meantime, everybody, enjoy the excellent Lewis Dartnell.

Dan Campbell Hello again, Dan. It's been good to see you. You've been doing well? Lewis Dartnell I've been doing all right. I've been doing all right. You know, sort of pandemic-adjusted terms I'm doing all right. I've been doing all right, you know, sort of, you know, pandemic-adjusted terms, I'm doing all right. Yeah. What I want to, since I lost, so I've now gone back and read your back catalogue, so I'm even more excited to see you again. I just love, I think we could have more of a conversation about some of the things that you identify in your work that are shaping the world today, as we all know, down to things like, you

know, the next US election. Sounds good, yeah. But let's start with the Mediterranean because I'm just sort of I love the sea and I love the effect it's had on us and you've got some you make a very interesting point about that great inland ocean. Yeah so one of the points I'm making in Origins is these deep links between features of the planet and the grand themes and trends of human history. And one of the things that we all learn about at school is about the Mediterranean being this bubbling cauldron of cultures and societies and civilisations. And we learn of course about the ancient Romans, the ancient Greeks, but also about the Phoenicians, the Minoans

and the Etruscans. And when you think about it, all of this activity over hundreds and thousands of years around the Mediterranean has been mostly around the northern shorelines of this oval, elliptical shaped inland sea. It's not smeared evenly around the lips of this sea. And the two sides, the north and south coastline of the Mediterranean, are really very close to each other, a couple hundred miles, which is nothing in kind of nautical sailing terms. So there's something of a mystery in history,

if you see what I mean. Why is there this distribution, this pattern between north and south? And the answer to this becomes really clear when you look back in Earth's history and where the Mediterranean was formed from in the first place. And so hundreds of millions of years ago, all of Earth's continents were crammed together into a single giant, single continent, Pangea, the all land. And as this supercontinent began to fragment and break up, a huge ocean, which was called the Tethys, gradually became swallowed up and destroyed. As first Africa began riding

north and also India broke off and began riding north to then recollide back into Eurasia. And as Africa rode north to recollide back into Eurasia, it as Africa rode north to recline back into Eurasia it swallowed up the Tethys Sea that was kind of getting in its way and all that remains now of this once vast ocean is basically a puddle, a remnant of the Tethys which is what we call Mediterranean today. And this fact that it has been Africa riding north into Asia and importantly it's been Africa that's being subducted beneath Europe means that the northern coastline of the Mediterranean has been crumpled up into this great big linked chain of hills and mountains which have then become submerged with

the rising of sea levels after the last ice age so it's become a drowned landscape. The Northern Med is full of hundreds of islands and archipelagos and inlets and bays and coves and natural harbours. The North Med is ideally set up, in just a pure geographical sense, ideally set up for seafaring societies, for moving things around and trading when going over land is much harder for most of history. Whereas if you look at the other coastline, the African coastline, and literally just look at a map or just imagine your head, it's almost ruler straight because the land is being subducted and swallowed into the depths, into the interior of the earth. And pretty much the only exceptions, the general rule, the thousands of years

of history through the Bronze Age and then the classical era through the Middle Ages, have been the civilization of ancient Rome, sorry, the civilization of ancient Egypt, which effectively huddled along this linear oasis of the River Nile through the Sahara Desert and Carthage, which came to oppose even the might of the Romans until they were utterly destroyed in the wars and pretty much wiped off the face of the map. And now that you're mentioning it, Carthage is the only kind of little natural harbour that you think of? It's the only natural harbour you can find in a thousand miles along North African coastline. So naturally, as a seafaring trading nation, a state, that's where they establish themselves. And so for thousands of years there's been this sharp disparity, distinction between

two sides of the Mediterranean Ocean. And that all comes down to earth movements and platex. This is why I love you dude, this is so cool. Does that also mean the process of crunching up on that northern coast, is that what also has produced sort of nice deposits of different minerals and metals and is that the process of being smunched up? Smunched, I'm going to put that into the next book. So I fitted the word clunch into my book as one of my innuendo bingo words in Origins, there is clunch. Soench. So the closing of the Tethys Ocean and the creation of the Mediterranean as a puddle crumpled up clearly the Alps along the southern margin of Europe,

but it also crumpled up ripples much across Northern Europe and we still feel those ripples of the collision of Africa into Europe as far north as Britain and London. So the London... South Downs. The South Downs. And then the rippling of the Cretaceous, that chalky landscape.

And specifically with London, the Lower Thames Valley is running along one of the kind of down dips, this great rippling of the Earth's surface, which has been filled in with a huge amount of clay during an earlier period of Earth's history when the sea levels lapped up and deposited lots of seafloor mud in what would become the Thames Basin. And so one of the key facts about London is that London is an awful place for trying to build skyscrapers. You're trying to build on mud. You have to build incredibly deep foundations for skyscrapers like the Shard and the Canary Wharf. But London on the other hand, because of that, is ideally set up for tunnelling, for the oldest tube network in the world and now still one of

the most extensive tube networks. Whereas New York and Manhattan is the opposite. New York has got rippling of rocks which give you foundations for towering skyscrapers in lower Manhattan and also in Midtown. So in New York the distribution of skyscrapers perfectly mirrors the geology below the ground that's invisible. But London is an expression of the rippling of the Alps and the collision of Athens. But did that colliding effect, you see I'm too stupid, but did the precious metals or useful metals, are they laid down before that or does the process of clunching mean that's why you hear about Greek and Etruscan and Spanish access to those kind of key metals in that. So copper is a key metal.

Copper is laid down right on the bottom of the seafloor and on hydrothermal vents. There's a lot of copper being laid down right now in the middle of the Atlantic, in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, as the ocean itself is still spreading. Don't tell the man that. So people are starting to talk about deep sea mining. Oh, great.

But during the Bronze Age, they, without really understanding what was going on, found you could get access to deposits of copper even though it was laid down right on the bottom of the sea floor. Because with the destruction of the Tethys and the ancient ocean being swallowed up with Africa riding north, a scoop, literally like a kind of ice cream scoop dollop of ancient ocean crust was picked up and slapped right back down into the middle of Cyprus. And Cyprus and the Trudos mountain in the middle of Cyprus is a dollop of ancient oceanic crust with really rich copper ore deposits and the Minoans realised they could walk up the side of this hill, mine

into the side of it, get incredibly rich copper, which they mixed with tin from Cornwall, and the granite deposits there, and that was the raw materials for thousands of years of the Bronze Age, with this tectonic earth movement that made it available to us. Once you mix tin and copper together, you're on the moon in about 5,000 years. It's incredibly quick, exactly. It makes you look like you were anatomically modern humans for hundreds, 200,000 years or something? Give or take, exactly. And then the dudes discover the piece of crust, the ice cream scoop,

and then, you know, Apollo 11. In quite short order. It really is, and it's been accelerating, getting quicker and quicker. So three million years of Stone Age technology, picking up bits of rock and bashing them against each other for the Bronze Age a few thousand years ago, the Iron Age about a thousand years ago, and nowadays it's steel, aluminium, tungsten, aluminium, all of these technological metals that are getting faster and faster and faster. And you're right, to have gone from digging

up the raw material to the Bronze Age, to landing the moon, has been incredibly quick turnaround. So Providence handed those northern Mediterranean... I mean that's why it all begins there. They've got the natural materials, they've got the harbours, they've got it all going on. Yeah, the geography has provided for them what is needed for building flourishing civilisations. And in thinking about it you've probably got enough useful geography for trade and communication but a bit for defense as well. So it's that kind of quite nice mix. So in the same way that those societies benefited enormously and went on to become hegemonic,

who's got the good stuff today? Like what's the equivalent? So in a sense, we are still very much in the Iron Age. Things have moved on in terms of the number of different metals we've been using since ancient Rome, but we still mine and produce more iron and steel than any other metal. But with the modern world, with our industrial chemistry and making things like artificial fertilisers and the kind of chemistry and the catalysts needed for that, but also in particular for all the electronics that we use. So if I were to ask you Dan

how many metals, different kinds of metallic elements do you think you have on your person right now? You might have a bit of copper, maybe some steel, maybe a bit of aluminium. I'm a man of steel. So I would, yeah I mean I guess I've got five metallic elements on me. And I think that's a pretty reasonable guess. You've probably got nearer 30, if not 40, different metals on your person right now if you have a smartphone in your pocket. And these are trace amounts of weird exotic metals that have special properties for electronics or the magnet

and the vibration motor of your buzzing vibration alarm for your phone. And these are the rare earth elements. And it is true that in the modern world 80% of global supply of these rare earth elements is coming out of China. And what we're seeing at the moment in the trade war between the US and China, two of the largest superpowers on the planet today, are having a bit of a tussle. China, if you'll excuse the pun, is literally holding the trump card. The states cannot afford for China to turn and say,

okay guys, we've had enough of your tantrums, no more rare earth elements for you. We are cutting off your supply. They did something similar in a dispute with Japan a number of years ago. So it's not that China has the only deposits of rare earth elements around the world, but they are able to mine it economically at the moment because they're smeared quite thinly around the earth's crust, whereas we find rich deposits of iron concentrated in a particular place. Whereas we were talking about earlier, rich deposits of iron concentrated in a particular place. Whereas we were talking about earlier rich deposits of copper or tin for different geological reasons, dolloped and concentrated in one place. These rare earth elements are just smeared and averaged all over the world. There's nothing that's concentrated. So surface area is useful?

So China being a large country is useful, but actually with these rare earth elements, we co-mine them. You mine rare earth elements with something else that has a market value and you get the rare earth elements kind of along the side. That effectively cheapens their production. What I like about your work as well is that as a sailor, it's not just the stuff under our feet, but it's the stuff going on in our atmosphere. Because any student of maritime history knows that we just got blown around. We literally did it.

Yeah, Christopher Columbus, everyone's like, oh, it was amazing. I mean, it was an impressive maritime feat, but you do just put the sails up and get blown from A to B. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows,

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. But the trick, though, as I'm sure you know, Dan, is you need to know where to be to pick up the wind blowing the right direction.

True. He almost spiked it into the doldrums. So the doldrums are unavoidable. The doldrums are just a feature of the way the atmosphere circulates above our planet, about the equator where the warm air is rising. Okay, so hang on here, let's get, so we've got the sun, boom, energy from sun hits the earth, mostly at the fat bit. Mostly around the middle, around the midriff, around the equator.

And then what's that do to weather? So around the equator, you tend to get warm air that rises, just like the radiator in your house, in your home. And that warm, moist air rises, cools down, and a lot of that moisture condenses. So around the equator is where we find all the rainforests of the planet. That air then rolls over through high altitude and sinks back down again to the surface of the Earth at about 30 degrees north and south. That's dry, descending air from high altitude. That's where we find most of the deserts around the planet.

Deserts and rainforests are just the atmosphere moving around. And then to get back to the equator, where it started from, to complete that loop, the atmosphere blows across the surface, which is just what we call the winds. And the only other important fact in this global pattern is that the entire planet is turning beneath its atmosphere as the atmosphere churns. And this gives what's known as the Coriolis effect that deflects the winds to one direction. So either side of the equator you have a broad band of winds that always, always blow towards the west. Those are the trade winds. And then outside the trade winds towards the poles where

the atmosphere is churning in the opposite direction, you get a wide band of winds that always, always blows towards the east, those are the westerlies. So the critical realisation in the early days of age of sail, age of exploration, age of discovery from our European point of view, was you can map the winds and the ocean currents that are blown around by them in exactly the same way you would map landmark features on the ground, on the continents. And you can use these conveyor belts of winds as like a wind machine and you just hop back and forth between different streams to blow you first one way across an ocean and then bring you back again with a full load to sail. Which is why the Portuguese discovered Brazil on the way to South Africa.

Yeah. So the Portuguese were trying to the way to South Africa. Yeah. Crazy. So the Portuguese were trying to clear around the bottom of Africa to get across the Indian Ocean to the source of the spices. And in order to get around the bottom of Africa, following the way the winds blow, you stumble across South America. The reason that Brazil speaks Portuguese whereas the whole rest of South America speaks Spanish is simply that is the way the wind blows.

We talked in our last conversation the reason that California was so geopolitically crucial for hundreds of years is that it's the only place the winds will deliver you to once you cross the Pacific Ocean from China. That's just where you arrive. That's where you have to put your cities and your ports to resupply. Arguably, the greatest influence of the subsequent playing out of history was the North Atlantic Trade Triangle. This was established in the early days of

the Industrial Revolution when the British and then the rest of North Europe had worked out how to get machines to make stuff for us. How do we mass produce really cheaply things like clothes and textiles and weapons? And we then sailed those manufactured machine-made things down the old Portuguese route to the bulge of North West Africa, sold our manufactured goods and loaded up our ships with human labour, with slaves. People were abducted, thrown into chains, taken across the trade winds passage to the colonies in North America where they're forced to work on plantations, growing raw plant products, so tea, coffee, sugar, cotton. And then those raw

plant products were taken across the Wesley Band back to Britain, North Europe, where we used our machines to transform that raw plant material into useful things, turning cotton fibres into clothing and textiles, which we then took back down the Portuguese route to North Africa and so on and so on. So this North Atlantic trade triangle is like a huge economic cog sat right across the ocean being blown round and round by atmospheric circulation but generating huge profits for its masters, for those slave masters. And we see these fingerprints of atmospheric circulation even in the global map today about where major cities were founded and where trade routes and this whole pattern of European expansion and colonialism and empire building was dictated by where you

have to put your fortresses and your ports, which was dictated where you establish your long-range trans-oceanic trade routes, which was dictated by where the winds blow. There's this direct correlation between the two. I find it amazing when you look at older cities, like... Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that

inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Cape Towns and the 100 years old, which are sort of established by European imperialists as they entreated. And I kind of find it amazing about modern cities. I mean, like Vegas, because I love going to Vegas.

It has no right to live in the desert. It's just amazing that, you know, unlike London is there because of this, you know, it's a port, it's on the mouth of a big river. The port is the widest point that you can still bridge the river, the London Romans and same as St Peterborough, wherever. But some of these modern Chinese, when they just go, we're in a different paradigm here, we're just going to build an insanely inappropriate place. And pour more concrete in a year than has been poured in human history. It's phenomenal what China is achieving.

But actually, do you know why Las Vegas is where it is? It's sunny. It's sunny, but importantly, it's just over the state border from California. Oh, so you can gamble. So you can gamble. So the state laws were different. And Nevada, the state, realised it had a problem. So California is on one side of the mountain range. The moist winds blowing from the ocean get pushed up, rain, so in California you can grow stuff, you can have agriculture and feed yourself. It was also benefiting from the geological bounty of that same mountain range providing gold. Nevada, other side of the

mountains, no rain, it's in a rain shadow, it's desert. And the only way it could find support itself was effectively taxing California by inviting enticing people from California just over the state border into its gambling halls and casinos. So you're right, it still is connected with our deeper geological past. Speaking of Nevada, a swing state, very exciting swing state in the November election, what, I mean, this is come on, you're on shaky ground here when you try and say that all this deep history can affect the outcome of Brexit or the presidential election, aren't you? Or maybe not.

Convince me. So, one of my favourite stories from the whole of Origins, when I was researching and writing this book, were these astonishing links between the planetary and the political. How even the rocks beneath your feet seem to influence how people choose to vote in elections, what leader they want. And I show in the book the election map for the most recent presidential election in the US, and particularly in these southern states. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the southern states of the US are mostly Republicans, a big sea of red. But there are some Democrat voting counties and they're not scattered randomly across the map. You notice there is structure, there is a pattern to where people have voted Democrat.

They voted for Hillary Clinton rather than Donald Trump. And if you see a structure... And the structure, the pattern you see is this distinctive, very conspicuous crescent arcing its way across the southern states. And that doesn't correspond to anything on the ground. There are Democrat voting counties either side of the Mississippi River,

but this crescent doesn't correspond to a mountain range or to hills or anything you can actually see in the landscape. And it only becomes apparent when you look at the rocks underground, and particularly rocks which are 80 million years old, Cretaceous-age rocks. And there is a stark correlation between rocks beneath your feet

that just happen to be 80 million years old and people voting Democrat. This makes no sense right now. These people are not geologists. They're not digging in their back garden or their backyard their backyard, and going, ah, my back garden, the rocks here, they're 100 million years old. I've got to vote for Trump now. I wanted to be a liberal. I wanted to vote for Hillary, but now I've got to be a Republican. But what is happening is there is this long chain of cause and effect of one thing leading to the

next, reaching back through hundreds of millions of years of planetary history and the recent centuries of our history. And the rocks laid down 80 million years ago during the Cretaceous, when Earth's sea levels were much, much higher than they are today, were basically sea floor mud. The ocean lapped up right through the middle of North America. And the rocks, those rocks, 80 million year old rocks, have been re-exposed by erosion now along that particular crescent and it was realised in the early 1800s that that sea floor derived rock gives you a soil which is exquisitely thick and black and fertile for growing cash crops like cotton, things

you could sell back to Britain and get hard currency, get tools that you need in the early days of the colonies. And unfortunately, in that period of history, that meant slave labour, as we've already mentioned. And even today, even after hundreds of years after the Civil War and after emancipation of slavery and after the Civil Rights Movement, still today the greatest concentration of black African Americans live along that band of Cretaceous age rocks. People that unfortunately still today suffer from socio-economic issues of poor opportunity, poor salaries, poor health care. People that are therefore much more likely to vote for Democrat

politics and not Republican. And in fact also on that map in Origins in the book I show you a city called Montgomery. And Montgomery is the place where in the mid-1950s a woman called Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white gentleman on the bus. The entire epicentre of the entire civil rights movement, which revolutionised society across the US, began smack in the middle of that band of Cretaceous age rocks. That there is, beneath those proximate causes of politics and culture and sociology and economics, beneath that there is the bedrock of what the earth has provided, of the landscape, of the geology. Okay let's look at the present. We've done rare metals. What are the, given that now there's, or there is there, the decreasing importance of agriculture in the way that

we do things, or of iron arguably, what are the things today that you think, which have deep deep causes like that, which are which are fundamental to understanding our world? So we've talked a lot about raw materials in terms of metals and making tools and technology out of that but the other thing you need to drive a society to provide for society is energy and clearly today we are a carbon-fueled, a fossil-fueled society, civilization. And as we all know, that is having some unintended consequences in terms of releasing too much CO2 in the atmosphere and pushing the chemistry of the entire atmosphere, of warming up the planet with climate change. And in a sense, what we're experiencing right now are the unintended consequences to our civilization's solution

to a previous problem which was running out of energy in the 1500s and then into the 1600s. We were a timber-fueled economy back then. We grew trees for making our sailing ships and for burning to bake bread, to make bricks, to build things with, to brew beer. Any chemistry, any function of society where you need heat and warmth, you burnt a tree for that. And we were basically running out of trees. And we coppiced and allowed trees to grow back more quickly, but we were fundamentally hitting a limit on what our civilisation could do because of the energy supply until we realised we could dig underground and mine ancient

buried forests, the coal seams of Britain. Those coal seams were provided by another quirky chapter of our planet's history, the Carboniferous, around 300, 320 million years ago when something broke on planet Earth. Our planet's recycling system shut down and trees grew really vigorously in the climate back then. They died, they fell over, but then refused to rot. For millions of years, trees just refused to rot and build up these thick seams of coal which we started digging up and with the crude oil we're effectively mining another chapter in our planet's history when the recycling system of the oceans, not the continents, the oceans recycling system shut down and plankton the oceans grew vigorously died but would

not rot on the seafloor and built up shale which then became crude oil. So we're effectively cashing in on this bank, this reservoir of fossilised energy which has been a wonderful opportunity. It industrialised us, it drove us into our modern technological world, but we now have to find a way to turn our backs and decarbonise our economy again for all the ways that are now clear. And the wind and the sun are going to be critical? Exactly. So we're going to have to go back to, in a sense, more primitive technologies that we were using before coal

and oil anyway, a windmill, not for grinding millstones past each other to turn wheat grain into flour, into bread for us to eat, but instead building wind turbines, which do the same thing. They're more refined. They're more efficient. But we're now going to make electricity with them, rather than making flour and bread. Or a water wheel, we've now effectively reinvented as the hydroelectric turbine, which is phenomenally

more efficient, but the same basic principle. And clearly with coppicing, with growing crops and growing forests, we're harvesting sunlight, which we can do again with technology with ultra pure silicon with a solar panel. But what our scientists are trying to solve right now is, can we even cut out the middle man, cut out the sunlight and generate nuclear fusion on the surface of the earth itself. So if we harness the sun's own power source in little reactors on the earth and generate, provide for our society by using nuclear fusion. And slightly the frustrating thing for that is that many of our problems will be solved once we've cracked nuclear fusion. It's effectively

emissionless once you've got it up and running. And unlike nuclear fission and using uranium and plutonium, it doesn't leave lots of radioactive waste afterwards. It's much cleaner in that sense. And the joke has been nuclear fusion is about 15 years away and has been for the last 15 years, the last 30 years, and that just means we've not invested in it properly. I mean this is one of the problems of modern society. We need to convince our politicians to put their money where their mouths are and start investing in things that will take us to the next step. As we said it before, we'll say it again on this podcast, the amount of money we invested in fighter technology in the Second World War or in nuclear fission, and you just think

we could do fusion, couldn't we? I mean, how hard can it be? We're pretty much there in terms of understanding the basic process. It's now an engineering problem not a fundamental physics problem. The lesson from the last 200 years of history is if you've got an engineering problem, you've got enough money, you can solve it. Yeah, it's a matter of time, it's a matter of investment, it's a matter of having the will to do it. And we did that with, as you mentioned already, landing humans on the moon. This is a moonshot project, this is a pyramid project, this is a cathedral project from the middle ages. We've just not bothered really doing it yet.

Very annoying. I loved your other book, by the way, which as I said I've just gone back and read. It's called The Knowledge and it's about, for everyone listening, it's just about if you found yourself alone on the earth, how could you get human society? Which actually, you and I might be working on a project together thinking about that in a really broad sense, but watch this space. But I often get asked when I'm at a talk, particularly like kids and going to schools, they're obsessed with the idea of one invention

that could have short-circuited a millennium of human development. Like what's the one thing, I mean, this is probably sure a stupid question for you, but what is the kind of a thing that would have been transformative if you'd taken about like antibiotics or whatever it might be? What's your answer? I'm going to steal your answer and tell the kids next time. Yes, so the knowledge is all about how you could, as a thought experiment, how could you reboot civilisation from scratch after some kind of apocalypse, some kind of reset event, i.e. what have been the most important knowledge and inventions in technology through our history that

you would want to leapfrog back to a second time around and accelerate redevelopment, i.e. how was our modern world built? And you could frame this as a fun thought experiment. What single thing could you whisper in someone's ear at some particular period of history when you've jumped back in a time machine that they would instantly get and know what to do with and would have everything else around them that they could actually exploit that understanding

to then change the subsequent development in a really profound way? Is it the expanding properties of heated water? So the steam engine has been phenomenally useful. But could you have told the Romans, could they have built a steam engine? I would argue probably not, because that concept that hot water expands in steam and gives you a force which you can harness, also requires, as we've just mentioned already,

engineering solutions to properly harness that power. So you actually need a lot of tool-making skill in making a cylinder for your steam engine, which derived in our history from basically the barrels of guns and artillery and ship warfare, that is precise enough that you can have a piston that smoothly moves up inside it. So there was difficult problems there. So I would argue that the Romans were exquisite glass makers. They made perfectly transparent clear glass for bottles and for vases and they noticed that some of those vases, if you look through them with water in them they make things behind them bigger. They've got everything in this concept about the lens for magnifying light, for focusing light, except understanding how you can mould glass

into a particular lens shape to then construct, for example, a microscope from it. So imagine how much history would have changed if we'd whispered in a Roman's ear, in Seneca's ear, this is the key to moulding glass, which you can do very well, into a particular shape, to give you a lens, put two lenses side by side, you've got a telescope, you've got a microscope, you now understand about germs, you now understand there are things which are so small you can't see them, but they get in your body and they make you sick. That is the root of germs and diseases and pandemics. I imagine how much that could have changed history if, you know, 1,500 years ago, 2,000 years ago,

we'd had modern germ theory, which took us into the 1850s to actually hit upon. I'm going to cut that out of the podcast and then that can be my answer now. Brilliant. What's the latest project? How can people follow what you're up to? Yes, so we're trying to get TV stuff up and running about both Origins and The Knowledge, and my publishers are getting quite keen on me writing the next book. So Origins was a Sunday Times top history book of the year,

which I was enorm excited slash smug about because I'm a scientist some people perceived it as an interesting history book so the next book is going to be another broad brush stroke interdisciplinary book looking at aspects of human history

and our technologies and our biology, us as animals and everyone can follow you on Twitter I'm Lewis underscore Dartnell and I'm easy to find on Google and our technologies and our biology, us as animals. Cool, and everyone can follow you on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter. I'm Lewis underscore Dartnell, and I'm easy to find on Google as well. Just search my name.

I'm lucky that Lewis and Dartnell are both uncommon names. It's what I expect from you. The deep past having a very huge benefit. There you go. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks again, Dan. Cheers. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go,

bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money, makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast.

If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. you