Radiolab - Bigger Little Questions

Episode Date: December 22, 2017

We're back with Part 2! When we dumped out our bucket of questions, there was a lot of spillover. Like, A LOT of spillover. So today, we’re chasing down answers to some bigger, little questions.   This episode was reported and produced by Annie McEwen, Bethel Habte, Latif Nasser, Matt Kielty, Simon Adler and Tracie Hunte. Special thanks to Stephen Brady and Staff Sergeant Erica Picariello in the US Air Force's 21st Space Wing. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See?

Yeah. Okay, ready. 321. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krollwitch. This is Radio Lab. And this is part two of our attempt to answer some listener questions that have piled up over the years, gathering digital dust in our inbox.

And a few of them in this round come from kind of. close to home. Yeah. In any case, starting us off this round is a question asker who has developed quite a reputation

here at Radio Lab. The inimitable. Scott Little. I'm just a normal dude, man. Scott spoke to our producer Latif Nasser. Now, Scott, he actually sent us a lot of questions

that caught our attention. Yeah, they don't stop. I can't slow this brain down. Questions like... I truly do not even remember like writing. Why is the moon devoid of all color? But when I read them, I was like,

Oh, yeah, that sounds like me. Have we seriously not translated any animal languages yet? Is there a reason? Coconut's look a lot like chimpanzee heads, or is that just a coincidence? But then we zeroed in on one of Scott's questions that at first seemed kind of simple, but it got really big. Okay. When a space shuttle goes into space, how do they make sure it doesn't hit any satellite? Is it just radar, or is there some kind of complicated system that tracks all of them?

And since we talked, just kind of looking up about this, you know, about like how many satellites are actually up there and what are we even calling space junk and has this affected anything yet. You know, it's just like it goes from like kind of informational to like almost like this sort of doom and gloom real fast. Like there's so much junk up there. Like it's going to be impossible to leave the Earth's atmosphere pretty soon. And I don't know. I just kind of, I'd be curious to see who's in charge of all this. That's what I want to know. Who's in charge here?

Who's in charge of space? Okay, is everybody there? Yeah, I'm here. I've got Colonel Walsh, and she's willing to talk to you about space surveillance. Okay, great. Ma'am, can you still hear us? Yes, I'm here. So I couldn't actually find anyone who is literally in charge of space,

but I did find what I think is pretty much the next best thing. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Mia Walsh, and I'm the commander of the 18th Space Control Squadron. I think your title has got to be the coolest title of anyone I've ever interviewed. My title is the coolest title, the commander of the 18 Space Control Squadron. Yeah, that's like you should have like an action figure, I think. That would be amazing. It would be a very tiny action figure.

Okay, so let's start from the top. When a space shuttle goes into space, how do they make sure it doesn't hit any satellites? Well, we keep track of what's called the Space Catalog. Which is like a giant logbook of all the man-made stuff, rounding us in outer space. A little over 23,000 objects. Oh, wow. So whenever there's a launch, anything manned or unmanned, we'll track it against the existing

things in the catalog and we'll make sure that it doesn't hit anything on the way up. Or make sure it doesn't hit anything while it's up there. And then if there is a chance of an actual collision, they send out an alert. The notifications we create are called conjunction data messages. Uh-huh. And so we send several thousand of those every day. What? Within those several thousand, we have a more refined, what we call emergency criteria.

Yeah. And we issue between six and ten of those per day. What? That's a lot. At the same time, but when you consider we're tracking 23,000 objects, it's not too bad. But on top of those 23,000 objects, it turns out there's even more stuff out there. But she says it's basically just too small to be able to track. We think that they're probably more like a half a million, close to half a million objects.

What? What? So you have like almost none of them? It sounds like that. But just remember that some of those 500,000 objects are very, very tiny pieces of debris. So like give me a sense, like how big, how small? What are we, yeah, what are we talking about? They're as small as sizes of flex of paint.

Oh, man. So there's no way you can track like half a million flex of paint. that feels like impossible. No, and actually, if you Google space shuttle and fleck of paint, you can see a pretty famous picture of this shuttle window that was hit by a fleck of paint and the kind of damage that it can do moving at that speed. Tell me what kind of damage you can do moving at that speed.

Yeah, what would I see if I saw that picture? So it went through several layers of the shuttle window, and they determined that it was from a fleck of paint, from just, you know, a tiny fleck. So you've got almost half a million pieces of this itty-bitty, based junk. And when it comes to that stuff, it's really just a matter of keeping our fingers crossed and monitoring the situation so that we can react to it if something happens. Okay. Well, so, so when I, when I called this listener, he's like, he's a little bit,

um, paranoid. And then the one interesting thing I, I came from this is this thing. I think it's called the Kessler syndrome. Is that what it is? The Kessler effect. That's what it is. So this NASA scientist got this thing named after him where he's like, we might get to a point where we have so much stuff in space that, like, something will collide with, like, two satellites will collide, and that collision will cause so much debris, that it will basically be like this giant thing where just, like, things are just exploding around the earth for, like, years and years and years.

It's like some sort of locust plague of space junk. Swarmed with a locust plague of space junk. and that it'll be impossible to leave the Earth's atmosphere anytime soon. What would you say to Scott? Hey, Lateef, this is... Let's see, Steve. Yeah. You know, we have a job to track those objects,

but a question like that is, is this kind of out of our realm of responsibility? Okay, okay, no problem. But, well, can I... And just let me ask another question, then tell me, if you can't answer it, that's fine. too, which is he also brought up something called the Keslo effect. Do you know about that?

Or have you heard of that before? Which is the idea that there's a possibility that two satellites will collide and then they'll create debris and then that'll make a domino effect and cause all kinds of other collisions and then it'll be a whole giant debris field. Sure. We've heard of it, the Kessler effect. Oh, Kessler. Sorry about that.

Yeah, we're very familiar with the concept. Yeah. And is that something you worry about or no? Hello? Hello? Hello? I guess it's a concern, sure, but I think the members of the squadron do such a great job tracking everything that's up there that we would hope that that wouldn't happen. Not that, not the answer I was hoping for.

Yeah, me neither. I got to admit, I started this whole thing thinking that Scott's fear was kind of crazy, but then after that conversation, I started researching it for real. and online, I found this video of Kessler himself. The beginning of the space program, there was a general attitude, that space was a big sky, that you could put anything in it that you wanted and not fill it up. And he basically says exactly what Scott did. If we don't change the way we operate in space,

all this results in an exponentially increasing amount of debris until all objects are reduced to a cloud of orbiting fragments that are capable of destroying any spacecraft that attempts to operate anywhere within that cloud. Which would mean no satellites, no weather satellites, no GPS, no any other kinds of satellites. And then in the future, if things go really badly, you know, we'd just be stuck here forever and ever on Earth. The Earth. Our next question comes from this guy in Brooklyn, and he is...

Five, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, five. That would be five. Five years old. Oh, five, five, five, five, five. And I interviewed him in my kitchen. Who are you, Tagey? My name is Tage, and I'm your son. Okay, tell me your question.

My question is, why is the Earth called Earth? Why is the Earth called Earth? I don't know why. Do you have any guesses? The Earth just came up with the name. The Earth came up with its own name? I think. Okay.

Okay. Should I found out? and then tell you. Yes. My first stop, was a guy named Peter. Yeah, this is Peter. Peter Berry. I'm an isotope geochemist.

I work at the University of Oxford. I'm a researcher here. Am I right that you have some kind of loose affiliation with NASA? Or is that not right? Very loose. In a sense that, I mean, I do a little bit of planetary work. I've worked on some lunar samples in the past. You've worked on lunar samples?

Yeah, so I've actually done some isotope work on lunar samples. He's actually one of the few people on the planet who's held the moon in his hand. So here's my question. I think it's pretty simple, but maybe there's a story there. I don't know. Question comes from Tage via me, his dad.

Why is the Earth called the Earth? Well, that's a really interesting question. The Earth is actually, so this is an old Saxon word derived from English German roots. In German, Earth has said, Erda, I believe. Earth in German.

And of course, all these words are originally. derived from like a mother language like an Indo-European mother language but what it means in German and what it means in all those old languages is actually just means soil or ground. Oh. Huh. All the other planets, all the other visible planets have these really, you know, awesome names and they're all named after Roman god. I mean you have Mercury that moved really quickly around the Sun.

So it got its name from the Roman messenger god. Then you have Venus, which was this bright, beautiful orb glowing in the sky. So we named it after the goddess of love. And of course, Mars, which was fiery and red. And so we named it after the god of war. Earth is the only planet, which isn't named after a Roman god. It clearly has this much different etymology. Peter ultimately referred me to another guy at Oxford.

Hello. Classicist. Hi, can I speak to Gabe, please? Hi, I'm speaking, yeah. Hi, Chad. This is Gabriel Berry. I can tell you a bit about who the proto-Indo-Europeans probably were. Sure. Proto-Indo-Europeans.

Yes. So basically what Gabriel Barry told me is that you could trace this whole thing, the word er-urda back to this group of people who lived. Maybe 6,000 years ago. This is like way before J.C., way before the Greeks or the Romans. The proto-Indo-Europeans lived in basically what's now Eastern Europe. So these were really people from the steps of Russia. Don't know a lot about them.

We know they moved around a lot. Quite a nomadic people couldn't, for whatever reason, settle down. But he says at some point, maybe about 5,000 years ago, they moved from the steps of Eastern Europe and Russia and swept into Europe. It seems they drove chariot. and they came on horseback in a huge wave and settled all the way from Britain down to northern India. So imagine this wave of people on horseback spreading all over Europe and into India and speaking this language that would ultimately branch out into English and German and French and Hindi and Portuguese

and like 400 some odd languages. As they spread across Europe and across down into India and Iran, the thought is they started to slow down. settled down. And that's when they became farmers. And that's when they started spending a lot of time looking down at the dirt. We have lots of words for farming from proto-Indo-European words like plow or furrow or er. Er, as in the word that would become earth. But at that early point, it just meant dirt.

And presumably it just meant like this dirt, like this specific little piece of dirt right here that I'm plowing. But somewhere along the way, that word er-erda became the word for all dirt. The whole ball of dirt. Basically the word that starts being used for Earth becomes the same word is used for then the globe and also quite often some sort of goddess. We have no idea when that switch happened exactly. I mean, we know within a few thousand years. But whenever it was, that strikes me as a pretty important moment for us people.

Can I ask you some questions, Tadji? What? When did you discover that Earth was a planet? When I was on it. No, no, really. When did you discover? Do you remember when you learned that the Earth was a ball? Mm-hmm. When?

When I was two. You don't remember, do you? I do. No, you don't. Yes, I do. Little Nest. At Little Nest. According to Tage, I mean, I don't know.

This is what I could get out of him. That moment for him happened at daycare, this place called Little Nest in Brooklyn. Yeah, Vanessa did it. It was a day when his teacher Vanessa had them do this little project. She said we were going to make our own person earth. Our own what? Our own person earth.

What does that mean? That means learn about the earth and make a... Earth with two eyes and some legs and some arms. Oh, I see. I see. They were basically making these earth puppets, and he says after they did that. I was sitting on the rug. You were sitting on the rug? Is that where you have your best ideas?

Mm-hmm. He was sitting on this little rainbow-colored rug that they have, holding his Earth puppet. And I was thinking of the earth was round, smooth, round, and it's a planet. By the time we get from the proto-Indo-Europeans to the ancient Greeks and Romans, which is a couple thousand years, you begin to see the concept of Earth rising up. It goes from a simple word that means dirt or soil to Mother Earth, a goddess. So it went in the opposite direction of the other planets.

It started as this lowly, dirty thing beneath our feet. and then became divine. When I told Tage this answer, he was disappointed. He was actually hoping that the Earth was named by an alien. Daddy, now can I ask another question? Yeah, you got another one? Go ahead. Sun made.

How is the sun made? You mean like how did the sun become the sun? Man, that's another good question. How is you repeating it so I can understand? Do you ever look at someone and wonder, what is going on inside their head? What? What, what, what? How does he know that? I mean, why is he so sure? Sorry, I'm going to get lice on my brain, right?

If BFF is best friends forever, what is BFO? Best friends often. Okay, yep. Are you ready? Are you ready? I am all ready. Do you see what I'm doing? Do you do?

Does Dunkin' Donuts have it? Maybe. No, no, no. Like here in America, they have people come in. I think somebody comes with the truck. What? What do you do with it? Wait. You have done it before. Wait, how do they do that? I don't even understand that question.

Wow. Maybe I should tell Simon that we're in here. Next up. Yes, just a senior coffee black, please. All right, 68, thanks. Thank you. Thank you. The Adler family.

As in producer Simon Adler and his dad, Tim. Yep. So a couple weeks back, I'm just heading out of town now. I asked my old man, my dad, to record himself going on. on a drive. All good road trips deserve a cup of coffee. And being the frugal individual that I am, I decided that a drive-thru it of McDonald's

would be the appropriate place to fuel up. He and my mom live in northwestern Wisconsin in a small little city town called O'Clair. I'm going to drive country roads. And specifically what I had asked him to do was to go drive on the county highways just outside of town. Passing through farm field areas.

There are very few cars on the road that I'm on. And the reason I asked him to do this was because for as long as I can remember, he's had this nagging question. A question that he bombards me with every time I'm home. Off times when we're talking on the phone, he'll bring it up.

Simon. Can you hear me? Yeah, yeah. Over the dinner table, over email. I mean, I've heard about this at least 600 times. What does mom think about all this? I've never asked her. Oh, I don't know. She just rolls her eyes. Okay.

Here he goes again. Yeah, yeah. So what's happening? Yeah, so do you want me to tell you why I'm recording, or do you want me to... I knew we would get to it, so you can tell me now. I thought maybe it was going to be like a puzzle that I had to figure out. Okay, well, let me just prompt you with this and see how well you take the bait here. Do you know the question I'm talking about, and could you just tell me what that question is? The question is, well, let me back up. An example is this. A person will be riding a road bike down a lonely country road.

Two other people will be walking their dog on the side of the road and a semi-trailer truck will then be coming down that road. Okay, so we've got three different actors here and nobody else for miles and miles and miles. And there is not, you haven't, the biker hasn't seen another car, truck, or pedestrian for miles on this road.

Okay. But what will happen is all three of those actors will come together at the exact same point and the exact same time. creating a dangerous situation, first of all, but then it's just this spark and then it diffuses. And you could sit on that stretch of road for six more years and not find that happen. And the key thing here, my dad says, is he, Tim Adler, witnesses this sort of thing.

Oh, it happens to me a lot. All the time. I would say it happens once every two weeks. Upcoming, we have the possibility of an event. On the day I sent him to record himself, after 10 or 15 minutes of not seeing a single other car on the road, he came around this bend. There's a manure wagon being driven by a tractor right down the road. And yes, we hear it all happens. The manure wagon is going down the road.

A tractor has just pulled out on the road. And now I'm passing by. and all three happened at the exact same place. It just happens. What is your question then? Is it why does that happen? Or is it... I guess the question is,

why does this happen to me? And does it seem to happen to others as well? Okay. I think it's quite complicated. I don't know if you... Does your father get the thing where... To get to the bottom of this, we called up a man who he thought might just...

have the answer. I'm a professor, I'm actually Professor Sir David Spiegerhalter. Wait, did you say you're Professor Sir? Does that mean you've been knighted? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're a knight. Yeah, yeah. You're the first knight I've ever spoken to. I'm honored. Oh, it's truly honored. Oh, it's nothing much. Cambridge is stuffed full of those hundreds, there's three a penny around here. The probability of me talking to a... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, very high indeed, yeah. Professor Sir David is a statistician. We're pretty dull. And when I ran my old man's questioned by him, his response.

I get quite a lot of stories like this. People contact me and they get very anxious, in fact, because they feel that something's going on in their lives, that making things happen all the time, they're getting signs from the environment around them. I mean, a term is, it's known as synchronicity. Synchronicity. You know, there are these peculiar faculties of the psyche.

That was the term that Carl Jung invented for this. That it isn't entirely confined to space and time. Carl Gustaf Jung, you know, the famed psychoanalyst of the 20th century. You can have dreams or visions of the future. He had the idea that there was actually some force behind nature that we didn't currently recognize that did drive these things to happen, something beyond the normal rules of physics and quotes rationality. So he really believed that there was this external force.

I think he just wasn't a very good statistician. Because, Sir David says, when you start to look at it. at the events in our lives in terms of their probability. Every single event that happens to us is unbelievably unlikely and unpredictable. So the crucial thing that measures its sort of surprisingness is the unlikeliness of it occurring at some point of a reasonable period. And just, I don't know, I'm trying to make this as concrete as possible. So if you're driving down a street that has, I don't know, three cars per 10 miles and two bikers per 10 miles, like how likely, is it that over the course of those 10 miles, you're going to intersect the way that he does.

The likelihood of that happen in any particular 10 miles or any particular hour is very low. It's a surprising event. But if your father drives a lot, the likelihood of it happening over, I don't know, maybe a week or two weeks, only a month, is very high. Sir David says, think of it this way. So let's say my dad would consider one of these intersections to be a meaningful coincidence, a synchronous event. if a semi-truck and a biker pass him within five seconds of each other. Now, if in one hour of driving my dad sees, say, 15 cars and five bikers, the math tells you that the likelihood of one of each of both a car and a bike,

passing him in the same five-second window, is about one in seven thousand. But think of how many of those five-second ones. windows there are in any given week or month. In fact, think of each of these five-second windows as like one spin of a roulette wheel. A giant roulette wheel with 7,000 different numbers that you could bet the ball would land on. But... Get your bets now, ladies and gentlemen. And this is key. When my dad's driving, it's not like he only gets one spin of the wheel or one chance to see one of these synchronous events. Instead, place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.

It's like every five seconds he gets to try again. And given that he drives like three hours a week, when you do the math, what you end up with is a 31% chance of him experiencing this in any given week. Meaning, if he's looking for it, he should definitely expect to see one of these at least once a month. So you have to not look at just the event, not just the particular thing your father observed. you have to think of all the chances for those things to occur that didn't occur. You know, you've got to think of all the stuff you're not seeing. How are you?

Pretty good. See that fish? Quite the fish. It was like his third cast and bang. He gets that thing. I called my dad back to break the news to him. All right. You want the answer?

Yes. So, a weeker... I explained it to him from the history of Jung to the fact that he's really just got to pay attention to all the times these coincidences aren't happening. Right. And when you look at it. from that angle, it's statistically to be expected. There, I understand. I understand. It's a little hard to swallow. I'm a little more Jungian than most. It does make sense from a statistical analysis. But why does it keep happening to me? So these things do happen to some people, and I've got a lot

of admiration to these people, because your father's obviously a great man. You know, it does happen to people who are very sensitive and aware and they notice their environment. They're actually very mindful people that happens to. And I suppose what I'm saying is this is a really admirable, you know, characteristic trait. Well, there's no question this makes my day when I've heard that I've been praised by a knight. Tell his highness that someday we should go out for a cup of tea. Not to bring it down, though. He heaped all this praise on you. I'd love to meet him. I'm sure he's wonderful. But then concluded by saying... But I would, I think I would say that he's not very special.

Well, you didn't really have to tell me that. Yeah, sorry, sorry. Now, that's okay. I'm going to just listen to the first part. All right. Okay. Enjoy the rest of the day and the week. Thanks. I love you and I'll talk to, tell Mama give her a call and hopefully tomorrow morning. Very fine. I love you too. Bye-bye. you later. Bye-bye.

For NPR news and classical music, 89.3, WP&E, Green Bay. I want to ask you one question. All right? Where am I? Just relax, can you tell me what you are? I'm a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. Now let's see.

Where am I? Where was I? Where do I go? Where am I? Hi, this is Jacob calling from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred Peace, Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.W.Sloan.org.

I listened to Radio Lab so much that I actually had that part memorized. Chad. Robert. Radio Lab. And we are back. With more questions. Okay, so next up... Yeah, my name's Evan Becker. We're going to go to Boston with Evan Becker. And here is his question.

So I grew up in the Boston area. Still live in Boston today. It's kind of relevant to this question is... Evan, it turns out, is something of a... snowboarder. Yep. You know, I've been snowboarding for 20 plus years or so. And friends and I traditionally go up to New Hampshire, Vermont,

you know, New England area to go skiing. And, you know, a many years back on one of these group trips they took. We were skiing, and they had recently opened a snow tubing course. And by the way, that tiny, that's our producer, Tracy Hunt. And everybody's looking at the snow tube course, and someone just posed a question of, like, how fast you think that thing goes? And then another friend jumped in and said, like, I bet you I could get that up to like 100 miles an hour,

easily from the top of the mountain. Like, no way. You couldn't even do that in purpose conditions. And from this small little disagreement. The great debate began from there. And, like, that was in 2004. Oh, my God. So it's been going on for more than a decade.

And over these 10 years going back and forth and back and forth on this question, Evan and his friends gradually focused in on the rules of this argument. And eventually, they came on this very specific wording. So the question is, in perfect conditions, within the Earth's atmosphere and not within a vacuum, can you reach 100 miles per hour going down a mountain on an everyday snow tube? Like an inner tube?

Like the same thing that you'd get if you went to the local hardware store or something like that. Nothing fancy, nothing overly engineered, things like that. And still to this day, some of Evans' friends are. You're like, we can break 100 miles an hour. We can. But Evan... I just don't see that it can happen. He says no.

You cannot do this. But... I think it can happen. I think it can happen. That is Destin Sandlin, host of an extremely popular YouTube channel called... Hey, it's to be Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. And this is important, Smarter Every Day, because he is very smart on his channel.

What Destin does is he proposes... So you've probably observed that cats almost always... land on their feet. Questions. Today's question is why. Questions a lot like Evans, which he then proceeds to answer. Let me introduce you to Gigi, the stunt cat. I think, Dustin, you're also an actual rocket scientist a little bit?

I've only said that one time. My mom corrected me very quickly. She's like, no, I'm what's called a flight test engineer. So we test missiles and helicopters and stuff like that. Well, can I say one thing before we start? Sure. I feel like before we jump to the answering part of this conversation, I want to appreciate the question. So I'm wondering, is there some physical, are there some physical reasons why 100 would be really hard to do in an intertube down a hill?

Yeah. So this is what I thought about when I first heard the question. So if you think about going down a hill, there's two things that are slowing you down. The first one is the friction with the snow, and the second one is the air resistance. Which for Destin all boils down to something that he calls drag. It's a one-half times the density of the air. Times the coefficient of drag. So this started as a really simple question in my mind. And as I started gaming out how to do this without killing a person,

the more I thought about it, the more I realized it can get very, very complicated. Yeah. I mean, I can show you all those equations, but I can't work them out on the back of an envelope, mostly because math is hard. Still, he did tell us that he was pretty confident that he could get this tube to go down more than 100 miles an hour down the hill. Yes, I'm saying that it can happen. And are we sure that somebody hasn't done this

and posted like their GoPro video on YouTube? Well, there is a Guinness World Record or Gravity-powered snow sleds. Whoa, whoa, whoa. What's the World Records piece? What is it? Okay, so at this moment, Destin's wife, Tara Sandlin, she's in the studio because she's with him on vacation in New York, and she's been looking at her iPhone at the Guinness World Records website. Gravity-powered snow sled.

134 kilometers per hour. Wait, 100. That's over 100. Oh, no, it is it? It's 83.49 miles per hour. Gravity power sled? I'm over here questioning everything about what I believe. I mean, this is a big moment for me.

A sled is meant for velocity. A tube is not. You think that would be faster? 83 miles an hour? We're too slow here. So here's the deal. I'm different than most people. I'm not going to die in this foxhole if it's clear that I'm wrong.

If it's clear that I'm wrong, I'm going to retract. Okay, so here's where I would go with this. This is what I would do. The real big thing that the tube causes a problem in my mind is all the friction on the mountain. Right? So, I mean, within the bounds of the question, because he went to all these great lengths to define what we could do and what we couldn't, he did not tell us what slope the mountain had to be on. And so what we're going to do is we're going to go to the worst possible mountain imaginable, which is straight down, a cliff, basically. Okay, are we all on the party line? And so with the help of producer Tracy Hunt.

Evan? I'm here. And Destin could you? Yeah, I heard Evan. Can you hear me? We wanted Evan the questioner to hear how Destin's going to work this. thing out. Good. We're all together. Super excited to hear what the answers are. Yeah, so this is ultimately a question about terminal velocity, right? So in theory, if we were to go straight down,

like out of an airplane, we would go as fast as we could ever go because the only thing contributing to the terminal velocity at that point would be drag. No friction at all. And so would you accept the answer? If I'm able to go 100 miles per hour straight down out of an airplane, for example, would you say that it is possible? Maybe even if our, you know, even if our hill is only one degree off of, you know, straight down towards the earth, that still counts as the hill, right? Yeah, I guess so. You know, I mean, yeah, as long as it's going downhill in the earth's atmosphere, yeah. So I want to call, uh, I've got a buddy named Paul here in Alabama. He owns a place called Scott Ave Alabama. I go to church with him and see him all the

time and, uh, I think he'd be game. So is that, could you, could you, Could you, Destin, like, I don't know, like two-way call him from your phone or something? Is that what you think you're going to try to do? Yeah. So Paul Rousseau, here we go. What's up, man? Are you ready for me to merge you? All right, Paul, are you there?

Yes, sir. Oh, oh, hi, Paul. Okay. How's we going? And we have Evan, who had this crazy question about snow tubing. Okay. So, Paul, let me kind of set the stage here. Okay.

So, Destin, explain. the whole inner tube thing, and he tells his friend, Paul, like, we want to know is if you could jump out of a plane, go straight down, could you break the 100 miles per hour barrier? Is that safe? Can you do a test like that? Well, yeah, it's totally possible. I've done it. What? Wait. You've done it with an intertube?

Absolutely. And a raft as all, like a full-size-hour. What? Yeah. Paul says that on two different occasions, he and a bunch of friends jumped out of an airplane carrying an... inflatable flotation device in one hand, and I had a watch with a little computer that track their speed on the other. How fast did you go?

In both cases, it was over 120. Really? No. Yeah. But yes, it's 100% possible. Well, that doesn't count. It doesn't count. It's the same.

It's as if he had a virtual mountain that he jumped off of. The question specifically said on the mountain, like these guys have been arguing about this for a decade. And we're going to come back to them and be like, no, no, just drop it out of an airplane? No, this is cheating. No, it doesn't resolve anything. You can be down a mountain and not touching the mountain. True or false? That's where you go to law school. You're in stuff like that. Well, did you read the question? I am now hereby recusing myself from this whole affair. We have, we have ceased to truly, in good faith, answer the question. What do you mean? And furthermore, we get the guy on the phone and we hoodwink him into accepting a renegotiate

contract here of the question. No, that's, no, he got bullied. I would not be a party to this. I know. Tell us where we're going next. So the next one is from our producer, Annie McEwen. Hello, Annie. Hello, Judd.

So what are we going to be talking about today? I don't know. What question do you bring us? Okay, so this one is a little bit different because it didn't come in the form of a question. It came in the form of a very tantalizing email. From a fellow named Arn Hendrix. Arn Hendricks. Yes, from Amsterdam.

Good morning. Hi, is this Arn? Yes, it's me. And he basically said, hey, I'm Arn, I'm an artist. And I just want you all at Radio Lab to know that me and my friend... We are building an island of fat. An island of fat. Yeah, I know.

I was like, of all the things to build an island out of, why fat? I'm just fascinated by it. I just like thinking about it. What was like, what's the thing that made you start looking at, fat in a curious way. What was the moment? Well, the real moment. The real moment was, I was sitting together with a friend of mine, Mike Thompson, and we were in a train going to Amsterdam, and we started talking about fat, and that it was such a strange thing, fat, and why was there so much of it? Were you eating fat, or were you feeling fat? Or what? I don't know. I mean, we're weird guys.

Right. We talk about things like this, but we're probably eating fat, like chips or fries or something. And then we started talking about how in the English newspapers There had been these news stories about fatburgs These fatburgs that are under the ground in the sewers of London Just like wreaking havoc And there was one... Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, time out.

What? Bell that bird? Fatburg. It's actually in the Oxford Dictionary since 2015. It's like an actual word now, Fatburg. Like an iceberg? Yeah. Wait, in the sewers?

In the sewers. Wow. What did those look like? Well, I mean like sort of imagine an iceberg, I guess, but this one's floating on the water in the tunnels underground in London, and it's made entirely of fat. Yeah. And a little while ago, Arne and his friend Mike actually got to go down into the sewers

to check out these fatbergs. And that was an amazing experience. They're sort of like wading through it with these wader, hip waiters on, pushing bits and pieces of fat aside. It's just this strange sort of trampoline of gooey stuff inside of the sewer. Wait, yeah, let me look it up. Wait, is that a picture of it? Of a fatberg?

Yeah. Oh, my God. Wow. Yeah, so it's like this like clumpy, lumpy mass of garbagey fat stuff. It's gray and brown, and it's sort of like filled with all this sewer stuff. Worms live in it. Ew. Whoa.

Fungus grows on it. And it just like completely blocks the old brick tunnels underground. So this is like, this is like based on the things people have eaten, there's so much fat in people's diet. So you're a fish in the sewers? No, no, no, no. It's just like people throwing fat away. Like taking baking grease, throwing it down the food. cooking fat down the sink.

What? Yeah, and in September of this year in London, they found a fatberg in the sewers. They're weighed as much as 11 double-decker buses. That's how much fat. Shut up. I know, it's crazy. In one place? Oh my God.

Yeah, and of course. Engineers at the Thames Water Company in Britain say they've launched a sewer war against a giant fat blob clogging London sewers. The way it's described in the news. That is always a monster. A horde of fatty monsters. There never be something positive. It needs to be a monster.

It needs to be better. He's conquered it. The now familiar enemy. It has a bad rep. But, I mean, Arn felt like maybe fat isn't a monster. Maybe it's just like this giant thing in the world that's trying to express itself. It wants to be there. It wants to be seen.

It wants to be on stage. It wants some appreciation. It's fat trying to have a voice and say, like, listen to me. I am here. Don't put me down your sink. I'm important. I make up 20% of your body. He's a fat.

He's a fat. He's trying to celebrate fat. He does. He is. He is, he is, he is, he is, he is, he is, he is, he is, he is, he is, he is, he is, he is celebrating fat. And so he said, you know, if as an artist you're trying to explore water, you don't just drink it out of a glass. We swim in the ocean, you have to ride your bicycle through a rainstorm. This is when you

start to appreciate water in a different way. So he's trying to do the same kind of thing with fat, experience it in all these different ways. We wanted to walk on it. We wanted to sort of make fat angels. You know, the snow angels? We're going to make fat angels. We just want to have this different relationship with fat. I'm sorry. And is that where he came up with the majestical idea of building a fat island? That's right. Did he actually make one? Yeah, yeah.

He's making one right now. He's got like this spot off the wharf in Amsterdam. And right there in the ocean water, he's building this little floating blob of fat. We're melting fat. We're rendering fat from waste materials from the butcher. Sometimes we're just buying it and we're melting it and then pouring it onto the island, making it bigger and bigger. And right now it's like 15 feet across and it's just like there hanging out. bobbing up and down and side to side and it's sort of, you know, it's alive, it moves.

It's, you know, it's always changing. So we give ourselves maybe another half year or a year and then it should be finished. And could you, how actually how big do you hope to get it? Can you think of like as big as a truck or a blue whale? Bigger. Bigger than a blue whale? No, no. Oh my God, that would be amazing.

Yes, of course my dreams are like that. My dream is that I wouldn't be able to see the end of it. Oh, wow. But that's not realistic, I suppose. I mean, the size of two or three trucks would be amazing already. And then you have a real thing. I mean, probably be able to stand on it. That's the thing.

I would like to be able to stand on it. That would be pretty good. Then you can really safely call it an island somehow. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit strange. I know it's strange, but I know that I love it.

Yeah, I know that when I'm there, I really love that little sort of thing that is there in the water. Do you have, if we were to use this as part of the show, I need you to give me some kind of question that I can try and answer about fat. And it sounds like you are doing a lot of questioning. Well, I would really like to know when, like, I'm very, very, very curious about the relationship between life and fat. was their first life or first fat. Okay. Or even when did fat start? Because we know when certain species of animals started and when the, we know more or less

when the universe was created, right? Yes. But when did fat start? When was the first fat? Okay. This is something that I would love to know. When was the first fat? The first fat.

That's interesting. Yeah. And actually it turns out that the very, very first version of fat has been around for like a pretty long time. As long as our solar system has been around before. Wow. So is it like Big Bang, we're talking? Well, no, it would have been after that.

After a star formed and exploded, then you could start forming these things. Okay, so this is aqueous geochemist Tom McCollum. I'm in my pajamas. Oh, that's so great! I got a hold of them during the Thanksgiving week. So Tom told me that the earliest,

earliest version of fat was a carbon-hydrogen-oxygen compound called fatty acid. Yes. Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen. Mm-hmm. So first, you need hydrogen. And hydrogen comes along with the Big Bang. So we get that really early.

Then we have to wait for a star to form, a start to get old, a start to die, and explode. And then you get carbon and oxygen. Yes. And that carbon and oxygen, along with the hydrogen, is now sort of swirling around in this interstellar space dust stuff. And when those three things come together, they start to make these shapes. So we have like a chain of carbons linked together, and each one of those carbons has a couple of hydrogen bonded to it. So you've got a carbon-hydrogen chain. And then...

At one end is what's called a carboxyl group. And that's like a little group at the top. That's got carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in it. Yeah. So I like to think of it kind of like a flower. Like the stem of the flower is hydrogen carbon, the petals of the flower contain oxygen as well as carbon and hydrogen. And there's fat in its little flower-like shape, long before the earth existed, floating around in space. So then the sun and the moon and the earth and the planets form, and you've got our solar system.

And on the surface of the earth, after it's cooled, you've got fatty acid. Now, we don't know exactly how they got there, whether they formed on the earth itself or came from like... Comets and meteorite smacking into earth. But the important thing is that fatty acids are there, and there's also a lot of water there. And the water is important because the thing about these little fatty acids is that... It has a hydrophobic end to the molecule. So hydrophobic means like scared of water. So it's like...

Yeah, it is averse. It's not like water. Okay. So are fatty acid flower? the oxygen end, the flower end. That's the end that kind of likes water. And the stem end. It doesn't like to be in water.

And so if there's water, the stems are like, ah, we need to get away from it. And so all these flowers form this. You can imagine it like a bouquet that is so full that it is a sphere. So all the flowers are on the outside because they love water and all the stems are on the inside and they're hiding from the water. That's interesting. So all the fat flowers join together because it allows the water-hating

parts to hide. Yeah. And the water and loving parts to be on the surface. Yeah. But this is all like long pre-life. This is life is no idea what it is yet.

Life hasn't even thought about coming on the scene. Interesting. But there is a theory. It's one of many theories out there. But there's an idea that when these little fat flower bubbles form in this sort of primordial sea,

they're kind of taking... The little sample of the fluid that's surrounding them. Inside with them. So whatever your fluid is going to get trapped inside. So on the inside, they've got some things. Some visitors.

Some visitors. And the theory goes that maybe one of the things around in the sea that ended up getting pulled inside one of those fat bubbles was a little floaty bit of genetic material. Like a little bit of RNA. And then for the first time ever, instead of random bits of RNA floating around in a soupy sea, you have a cell. for the first time you have an inside. You have a U separate from the soup around you. So the fat ball. These fatty little threesomes that floated in from outer space and maybe landed here.

Wow, that's so cool. Where's the first container that made life possible? That's right. I don't think there is any way to really have anything like we call a living being without having a membrane or something. separated from the surrounding. Fat is really important, profoundly important. Fat is, without fat, there would be no us.

There would be no arm. I love it. We are, we are built in houses of fat. So that means when you get your soap bar out in the shower, you should give it some respect. Is soap fat? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, it is fat. Is it?

Yeah. Oh. Traditional soap is just fat, I think. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Shit, I didn't know that. That's okay.

You don't know everything, Dan. I mean. But I think, I'm a little. actually really excited for Arn to hear this because I feel like, I mean, what can convey the way that the beginning of life can? Oh, you haven't? No, I haven't. Can you hear me?

Oh, I wonder what he'll say. Arn? Oh, great. So I called Arn again, and this time he was at a conference. All my coats are covered in fat now. I had to go to this conference. I didn't know what coats were because they're all fatty. Luckily, I found an old coat.

But, you know, everything is covered in fat. Oh, yes. How this is taking over my life. But I just have to deal with it. Anyway. So I wanted to tell you what my scientist told me about the earliest form of fat. Can I tell you? Yes, please.

Okay. So I'm trying to think of a way to put this succinctly. So I told them everything I learned. It makes a barrier between us and the rest of the world. It makes us. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

And it could be that these like early, early fatty acids are the thing that make life as we know it possible. I suspected it. I suspected it. Really? Why? Yes. How did... I don't know. Intuition, I guess. It's beautiful.

This is how it's supposed to be. This is what I've always dreamt of. The Burke starts to generate enthusiasm and love and so. It's so nice that you are now telling me things that I don't know. Oh, good. This is why I live to have this kind of moment. So nice. Thanks, guys.

Okay. Nice, Annie. A lot of people to thank for these two episodes. This was actually a real group effort, but particular props to producers Tracy Hunt and Matt Kielte for spearheading the whole thing. And to Bethel. And to Bethel Hoptee for a huge production assist. And should you have a question that's burning in your brain?

We know exactly who to send it to. Send it to us at Radiolab at WNYC.org. And also, Crow, which at WNYC.org. He likes to get them personally. No, I don't particularly. Not particularly. Send them directly to him. I think they should go to the post office box.

He does particularly like it when you stand on the sidewalk, wrist outside his window, say, Crowell, I'm furious with curiosity. I don't because I'm on the fifth floor and you'd have to be very tall or in a tree. Okay, we should say it. We should take goodbye. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Crulwich. Thank you for listening and for questing with us. Yes. Yes. Questing.

What question? Here's a question. What is this meaning? you asked? I've been wondering all day too. Let's get to our next question. Here it is. So, how did you do that? Do what?

What? Time for another question, so let's get to it, Claire. It's to be. I think I know the question. Or not to be. What's the question? That is the question. Why?

To play the message, press two. Hello, this is Timothy Adler, father of Simon Adler, from Oaklaar, Wisconsin. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abramrad, and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Malia Matasar Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachel Puzick, David Gables, Bessel Hobtie, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kilty, Robert Quorwich, Annie McEwen, Lateef Nasser, Melissa O'Donnell, Aryan Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Amanda Aronchick, Chima, Oliai, David Fok, Migar, Fattali, D.B. Wang, and Katie Ferguson. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.

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