Endless Thread - Emily Kwong takes us to science camp

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

Grab your telescopes because this week on Endless Thread Ben and NPR Short Wave host Emily Kwong take us down two science-related internet wormholes. First, Emily introduces us to the intergalactic world of astronaut fan fiction, starring the crew of the 2026 Artemis II moon mission. Then, Ben takes us through the r/Science discourse on a new LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) study mapping an ancient Amazonian civilization. Show notes: Short Wave (NPR) Between change and upgrade (Artemis II fan fiction, Wattpad) Scientists Uncover Hundreds of Hidden Structures Beneath The Amazon (r/Science) This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Emily Kwong, what's up? Ben Brock Johnson, what is up? I'm so happy to be here. I'm happy you're here. Fellow video game nerd, as I recall. That's right. That's right. Nerds unite.

You co-host a podcast called Shortwave from NPR. What is the shortwave short description? New discoveries, everyday mysteries, and the science behind the headlines. And then our theme song goes like, do-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-do. Heck yeah. This is shortwave from NPR. That's us.

Well done. Well done. And you guys are doing something special this summer. So summer is stretching on for a few more days. I hear you've been at camp, tech camp. Yes. Every summer we go to camp. We went to space for space camp.

We went under the ocean for sea camp. This time, we are going deep into our tech fascination. What is the future? of anything. Cool. So we talk about sky taxis. We talk about AI in the military. We talk about cybersecurity.

We talk about human consciousness. It's really fun. Episodes come out on Mondays. You're going to co-host Endless Thread with me today. Thank you for being willing to do this. Woo! Take over. I'm so excited.

I love internet rabbit hole. So this is like a chat between friends, you know. Love it. You have something for me about fan fiction, which sold. Tell me more. Do you read fan fiction? I'm embarrassed to say I do not.

Why are you embarrassed? I don't know. I feel like that's a nerd thing that I should do, but I don't do. You know what I mean? You can't tick all the boxes. There's just not enough time.

That's true. This is a story about fan fiction, which is funny because Shortwave is thoroughly nonfiction. But, of course, every once in a while in science news, something captures people's minds and their imaginations run wild. And that has absolutely happened with the Artemis II mission. People are extrapolating beyond reality into the imagined lives of these astronauts, and it's all over the internet.

And I found a whole bunch of Artemis II fan fiction that I want to talk about today because it's so good. Please tell me more. Again, I'm in, I will read this fan fiction with you. Okay. I'm going to read excerpts. Okay, please. I can't wait. I guess just to take a step back,

did you follow Artemis 2 at all? So this is the one that recently landed in the water. They did. This is a crew of four people. They did land in the ocean because they were coming back from... They were coming back from the moon. Ding, ding, ding. That's right.

For some reason I got nervous about those questions. I was like, do I, am I crazy? What's Artemis? Oh, God, I forgot. No, no. And there was a guy wearing a turnstile shirt on one of the NASA People was wearing a turnstile shirt. And I was like, okay, this guy thinks he's pretty cool.

That's cool. It's amazing what details stick out when you're watching. Honestly, history being made. This was NASA's first crude. So with people, lunar flyby in 50 years, 10-day mission, four astronauts. They didn't land on the moon. They went around the moon. Came back to Earth.

Splashed in the ocean. You saw it video footage. Yes. Taggartie, Splashdown. Sending post-land in command now. Splashdown confirmed. It's 707 p.m. Central time, 507 p.m. Pacific time. Integrities astronauts, back on Earth. I feel like it restores your faith in humanity whenever, like, a mission like this happens.

And you're like, all right, a bunch of people work together to do something really cool. And now we're like all watching it and feeling like it's really cool. That's cool. Yeah, it's like, oh, humans, we did something together in a cooperative way. Good job us. Honestly, I think the fascination. obsession fan fictionalizing of, these astronauts has entirely to do with them as people.

Okay. Like, it's just stacked this crew. So you have the pilot, Victor Glover. He's the first person of color to travel to the vicinity of the moon. We call amazing things that humans do moonshots for a reason. Love it. Then you have mission specialist

Christina Cook, who's the first woman in human history to do this. Houston, we have you the same, and it is so great to hear from Earth again. There's this amazing photo of her in front of a window with her braid just free floating. And I saw so many artistic representations of Christina's braid. Wow. And people being like, wow, I wish I could be a woman far away from Earth.

Far away in the moon. Then you have Commander Reid Wiseman dedicating a crater of the moon to his late wife, which was very beautiful. Here's actually a clip of it of everyone honoring Carol. And to round it all out, mission specialist Jeremy Henson, just being a very lovable Canadian. It was unifying, it was multinational, multicultural, and reminded us truly through their work that we are one.

We are of one human group on this planet. And this very winning group of humans reflecting our humanity back to us inspired droves of fan fiction. And it's on Tumblr, it's on Wattpad, It's on fanfiction.net. I would love to read you some. Please. I wanted to give you a story you could sink into.

So I'm only going to read the preamble. Let's call it like the book jacket. Not even the prologue. We're book jacket level. Okay. This is on wattpad.com. It's written by blues drafts. It's four parts.

The most recent part was published just a few weeks ago. It's been two months since launch day, nearly five weeks since their return and barely three weeks since their last press tour. Slowly, their group chat is getting quieter and quieter. Not that they didn't text at all, but slowly everyone is getting settled back into their lives. Their hobbies, family gatherings, quiet mornings on their veranda. Church, whatever is important to them. Wow.

And it feels good, right? Why is it then that Christina suddenly begins to feel lonely, even despite all of the online love she slowly, accepts. Does she know? That's what I'm wondering. I don't know. No, she's very good about being online. What or who is missing that has been around every day prior to their return? Question mark. Then a note from the author, not a ship, just them being besties. So this is just a fan fiction about these four friends missing each other. That's so lovely. Like coming back from camp and being like, guys, our friendship bracelets. Oh my God. That could have gone in so many different directions.

and so I'm really glad that it went in the direction that I went in. I love just a story about friendship. I mean, what great story is not ultimately about friendship? So this sounds really nice. Ben, I did bring a fan fiction that is going exactly the direction you fear. It is a romance fan fiction featuring Christina Cook, and a lot of this fan fiction does. She seems to play a starring role in people's imaginations.

They just love imagining her fall in love. The disclaimer says, in this story, Christina is portrayed as a lesbian. and this is purely fictional and is not meant to reflect her real-life sexuality. I fully respect Christina and her relationship with Bob. They seem genuinely happy together, and I wish them nothing but the best. Heart emoji. That being said, here is the prologue for We Were Never Just Friends.

Oh, boy. A small group of people was gathered near a conference room. Flight directors, engineers, support staff, and among them stood a woman Sarah recognized instantly. For a moment, the world seemed to slow. Oh, boy. Christina Cook. Sarah hadn't seen her in years. The last time they'd stood in the same room,

they'd been teenagers wearing matching cheerleading uniforms, laughing about... Oh, my God. Laughing about homework and weekend plants. I think so many teenagers write these. Like, all they can relate to is verandas and homework. I can't remember the last time of veranda was even, like, in my head. Anyway, go on.

Back then, they had spent nearly every... day together. Now, Christina stood confidently among NASA's finest dressed in a flight suit bearing her name and Mission Insignia. That's an SAT word. Wow. She looked older, of course, more experienced, more accomplished, but unmistakably

the same. This fanfic has 42 chapters. Oh my God. Has been viewed thousands of times. People love these astronauts. They love imagining them in situations.

There's even fanfiction that crosses over into the Percy Jackson universe. Okay. Did you ever read those books? No, but I know of them. Percy Jackson, I don't read them. He's like the son of a god, like the Greek myth gods.

Yeah, yeah. He's like the son of Poseidon. It's in the Greek myth zone. My kids read this stuff. Yeah, so this one is fanfiction. Dot net, the author's Kitsunei Mason. So in fanfic culture, I guess Percy Jackson has like an established fanfic sister that doesn't exist in the books named Chloe. Whoa.

They're basically in Yellowstone. And they're kind of sitting around at the edge of camp. Okay. And they're talking about the Artemis mission. So far makes total sense. Chloe tipped her face up toward the afternoon sky. Artemis 2. First woman and first person of color to fly a loo.

lunar mission, a short pause. I think it's kind of perfect. Wow. So Artemis II has not only made an impact in our universe, it has made an impact in fictional universes, including existing IP. I love that, and I love that it's like, you know, we think about representation, right? And it's kind of cool to see this like extra layer representation that's happening in fanfic because kids are like, this is so cool. Well, okay, I'm making an assumption that some teenagers are writing this fan pick, which maybe they're not. Who knows? Apologies if it's you and you're a middle-aged person. You keep on your craft. Yeah, do it. But like it's cool that people are, they're so inspired by this sort of multicultural aspect of the crew that they are now like expanding that universe,

which, you know, again, like results in more representation. And that's cool. And sounds fun. Yeah. People can like see themselves more in these astronauts. which I think is why we're getting this phenomenon. Emily, thank you for exposing me responsibly to astronaut fanfic. I appreciate it. I did keep it safe for work. That's true. Don't even look what else is out there.

All right. So in a minute we're going to talk some more. And I'm going to bring you a story of the so-called lost cities of ancient history. Every episode of Planet Money begins with a question. Can we help people rise out of poverty by improving the neighborhood where they live? What would you build on a piece of land when all the normal rules go out the window? What do robot chefs mean for the restaurant industry? Planet Money helps you find answers by going to places, watching people, and sometimes robots at work, and asking questions.

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slash creative studio. You want to talk about poetry? Yeah, we do, Henry Winkler. I'm journalist Faith, Sayley. I'm poet Maggie Smith, and we are the co-hosts of You Could Make This Beautiful, where we talk to actors. Oh my God, poetry emergency. Comedians. We met on poetry dates.com. And teachers about poetry in all its forms. It's just one of those poems where you're like, if I read this to someone on a day,

we're going to get the check. You know what I mean? You could make this beautiful, wherever you get your podcasts. So we are back with Emily Kwong. Hi. Fanfic lover. I never said that. I said fanfic appreciator. Fanfic appreciator.

NPR shortwave nerd. That's true. I got a story for you. You ready? I'm ready. I'm thinking a lot about time right now. I just had a birthday. I'm a Leo.

As I get older, I find myself recognizing kind of like the echoes of history a lot more in the world around me. What does the natural environment look like where you live? Because of urban development, I feel like I don't know. It's like hidden from me. And that's sad because before I came to NPR, I worked in Sitka, Alaska for a community radio station. And I knew very intimately what was up with the land, the shape of it, the mountains, the buildings were all very low. But where I live now is kind of a mystery because it's covered.

Okay, that's a great answer. I will say that in the northeast where I live, if you spend any time in the woods, you're likely to come across these stone walls, crisscrossing the middle of the forest. Oh, yes. I'm from Connecticut. Oh, yeah, that's right. We're both Connecticututions. So I feel like I've been thinking about these stone walls recently. It's easy to forget that they are just piles of rocks plowed up from fields.

And those fields were actually farmland, which means the forest wasn't a thing where the stone walls. walls currently are, right? Like it wasn't, it didn't used to be forest. Yeah. Humans were here doing their thing. We were here and it looked very different in some of these environments because of what we were doing. So I've become more interested in history than I used to be, and I'm not talking so much about the Roman Empire here as I am civilizations we, or at least I know less about, which is why I got interested in this Reddit post from several weeks ago now. Okay. I was in R slash science, which I'm sure you've been in before, Emily, as the co-host of of a shortwave. It's a pretty large subreddit where all kinds of things get posted, but

according to the subreddit rules, everything posted has to be peer-reviewed research. No summaries of summaries, no editorialized or sensationalized titles. We will come back to that idea. This is why I love them, though, that they hold themselves to that standard, which is rare on the internet. Truth is not a premium. Exactly. Same. I love this. So there was a post there that really popped off recently. 20,000 up votes, more than 500 comments at the time of taping. I want you to read this post title. Scientists uncover hundreds of hidden structures beneath the Amazon. That's the headline. Quote, the scale of the archaeological record suggests that many other regions across

Amazonia may have been far more densely populated and intensively modified than previously assumed. So how do you feel about this title? Does it feel sensationalized? to you, it feels pretty measured, right? I would say so, yes. The words suggests, may have, then previously assumed, are all the kinds of, like, yellow lights that science writers like myself put up to say, like, we don't know for sure. Exactly.

So don't quote us too much. Okay. So the paper that all of this is based on is the work of archaeo-anthropologists at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Uh-huh. But they were looking at the Amazon. on rainforest with LIDAR technology, which, as we all know, Emily stands for, LIDAR is long infrared detection analysis radiography. That was an amazing guess. And I couldn't have done it. It's much

less cool sounding than the one you just gave it. It is light detection and ranging. Oh, right. Ranging. So, you know, lasers and stuff. We're shooting lasers. things and measuring the time it takes for the lasers to bounce back towards their origin. Self-driving cars use this, right? They use this in building scans. Yes. Mapping elevations of land. These archaeo-anthropologists conducted a LIDAR survey and found 400 new human-made structures beneath heavy rainforest. That is so cool. It's so cool, right? Can you guess why we think they're human-made? At the New York Post, I'm looking at the pictures, which is what's really making me say it's so cool because they look like crop circles just in their geometry, like this footprint of a building foundation. I don't know, but it's like perfectly square what the LIDAR is showing. Or circular. Some of them are circles. Some of them are squares. Some of them are rectangles. Yeah.

And I think that's the perfect answer. Like it's the way that they look that makes us think that they are human made. Right? Yeah, yeah. These massive square shapes and extremely straight pathways, some of them really wide, almost like avenues. Yeah. And part of what this apparently suggests is perhaps like the stone walls in the forest in the northeast in Connecticut, is the landscape wasn't always incredibly dense rainforest. It actually looked quite different because of human intervention. So when you look at the data images, the LIDAR survey returned, you can see these kind of huge areas of rainforest.

forest, and they're interrupted by these very square, 90-degree angled structures and lines. And really what apparently we mean here by structures is that, you know, this is like changes to the earth, and it's sort of like ditches and flat areas. And the people studying this think that these structures are the remnants of the Akiri civilization. Do you have you ever heard of this civilization? So this is apparently a pre-Columbian network of communities, and they were apparently this kind of interconnected web of communities throughout the jungle. The Kiri civilization apparently existed in southwestern Amazonia from roughly 600 BCE to

850 CE. So before the common era and then the common era, which is about, I guess, 1,500 years, apparently, that this civilization existed. So one interesting aspect, Emily, of this civilization is how abruptly it disappeared. Mysterious. One theory, as you probably might guess, considering what we know about the history of this part of the world,

one theory is disease. We know about the devastation brought on by smallpox, brought over by Spanish colonists in the Americas hundreds of years later. So Reddit is this place. I find a lot of value in the user comments. Believe it or not,

usually you don't read the comments, but I always like to read the comments. There's also a lot of trash, as we know. But this is this place where you can learn a lot from commenters and other Redditors. So the thread on this post is a good example of that for me. Some top comments talk about a New York Times bestselling book called The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston. Have you ever heard of this book? I hadn't either. I did not read the book in the last three days preparing for this conversation. But maybe I will now. Some of the

author's work was published in The New Yorker, also National Geographic. Douglas Preston's book looks at a group of documentarians, Honduran and American archaeologists looking for rumored, lost cities in what is now eastern Honduras and using LIDAR to do it. This most recent paper published in the journal Nature, the one that we're talking about with all these 400 new structures that they've found, one of the big takeaways was that the Akiri civilization was maybe much larger than previously thought, overturning assumptions with data from this new LIDAR survey that discovered these 400 new structures.

When the Lost City of the Monkey God came out, a group of about two dozen scholars, archaeologists, and anthropologists wrote an open letter. This is according to the Guardian. They criticized the project. I'm going to read from the Guardian here. the scholars criticized National Geographic and the media for what they describe as the aggrandizement of a single expedition at the expense of years of research by scientists and decades of support from indigenous people of the dense rainforests in Honduras's Mesquedia region. I wish I could say that this is an anomaly in science, but it often is true that some new technology comes along. And LIDAR is very cool.

Let's be very clear. Yes. So new technology comes along and makes significant contribution to understanding something. And then indigenous science says, we knew all along. And their methods for knowing are not recognized by Western science. And it can create a lot of tension. Again, I go back to also to Sitka, Alaska, where I lived. It was a community that was on the Flinket Land.

And what I learned from that experience was, like, what does it really mean to know something? That is a cultural question. It's a social question. And what the standards are for something to be knowable and researchable depends on who you are. And scientists could stand to like step outside themselves and recognize that. So the paper itself seems very well done, restrained. It's in nature, which is a really credible journal. But yeah, the sensationalizing by the media does add to the narrative that like, oh, if it weren't for science, people wouldn't even know what was right in front. of them when actually that's not true. I should say I learned about this aspect of things from a Redditor in that R-slash-Science thread about this paper. Shout out to them. Shout out. I think it's Jindabine 1 is the user's name.

They posted a review from Cambridge University Press looking at how scientific archaeological publications that use digital technologies like LIDAR to support or prove or find things, these things can get sensationalized for the public. So I feel like we can endeavor to have wonder about these things. We can look at our physical environment and be tickled and excited and fascinated by the fact that they look different than they used to. And we can find civilizations and communities like really mysterious. That's okay, right? And good.

Like that's how we explore the world. But we should balance that with this understanding that, you know, many of our discoveries are actually just personal. That what we're discovering is something that other people have known all along or been. living amongst. And I hope that we can keep finding that balance. And yeah, that's my obvious, quote unquote, discovery through this Reddit thread. Look at you, looking at you adding yourself, no, the best scientists I know, and just to bring it back to Artemis and the excitement over, honestly, the diversity of the scientists who were there,

the best scientists I know balance their exploration and their wonder. with humility and respect. Oh man, I have to spend more time on science Reddit because this is like pretty nuanced. It's not bad, right? For the internet? For the internet? Not bad. Go internet. Well, you said it beautifully, Emily. This has been the Bro Jogan experience.

Thank you for joining us today. Thanks for joining this quong along. It was so great. That's a better name. I just came up with that. Seriously, thank you, Emily, co-host of Shortwave, for coming to hang on endless thread. It was a blast. Yeah, this is a great show.

I've loved being on it. I've loved listening to it. So keep up the good work. Thanks. Keep finding those nuanced takes on the internet. Likewise. Shortwave's tech camp series can be found in the shortwave feed from NPR and on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. We will also put links in our show notes for show.

This episode was spun up by myself and Emily Kwong. It was produced by Grace Tows. and Franny Monaghan, sound designed by Emily Jankowski. Our editor is Dave Shaw, our managing producer is Summit to Josie. Our production manager is Paul Vicus. The rest of our team is Emery Siebertson and Dean Russell. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between the dense Amazonian jungle and some hopefully not true problematic fanfic.

If you have an unsolved mystery and untold history or another wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, you can hit us up, Endless Thread at WBUR.org. Also, by the way, that guy, the NASA guy with the turnstile shirt, if you want to see a picture of that man, he's almost Ken Bone-ish in a way, if that makes sense. You can go to our subreddit, R-slash endless thread.