Science Friday - ‘Possibility Of Life’ Book, PFAS Sewage, ‘Smart’ Play. April 14, 2023, Part 2

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

Is Anybody Out There? The Quest For Life In Space It’s one of humanity’s biggest fundamental questions: “Is there life elsewhere in the universe?” But despite years of searching, it’s a query that still has no answer.  That conundrum also opens up a whole string of other inquiries, from how to best search for signs of life, to whether we’ll be able to make sense of what we’re seeing.  The search for life elsewhere can also help us learn about our own existence. How many of what we consider the basic rules of life on earth are really just suggestions, or convenient accidents?    A new book tackles these riddles through the lens of both science and science fiction. Science writer Jaime Green, author of the book, The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos, joins Ira to talk about the science, history, and philosophy of our search for alien lifeforms, and takes questions from callers.  The SciFri Book Club will be reading this book together in May—you can read along with us next month. Find everything you need to know on our May Book Club page.   Farm Fertilizers Can Contain ‘Forever Chemicals’ From Sewage The Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant is a pollution success story. Over the last several decades, it transformed Boston Harbor from a nationally embarrassing cesspool into a swimmable bay. The treatment plant takes everything the people of Greater Boston send down their sinks, toilets, showers and washing machines — plus industrial waste — and treats it. The treated water is clean enough to let out into the ocean. The remaining sludge gets recycled into fertilizer that’s used in nearly 20 states. But now that fertilizer is raising fresh concerns. That’s because wastewater treatment plants like Deer Island were not built to handle the toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS. The treatment process concentrates PFAS chemicals in the sludge, and therefore in the fertilizer, leading environmentalists and public health advocates to call for an immediate end to its use. Others are not sure that a full ban on sludge-based fertilizer, or “biosolids,” is the answer. But there is widespread agreement that we have only begun to grasp the extent of the problem. To read the full article, visit sciencefriday.com   When AI And Dementia Intersect As AI becomes more advanced, it’s also becoming a bigger part of our lives. That’s especially true of smart speakers, which to some of us, act as another member of a family: answering simple questions, reminding us about appointments, and entertaining children. But what parts of our privacy are we giving up to make our lives slightly more convenient?  That’s the focus of a new play called “Smart,” which tells the story of four characters: a woman, her aging mother who has dementia, an AI programmer who works for a tech  company, and a smart speaker named Jenny.  Ira speaks with the writer of “Smart,” Mary Elizabeth Hamilton, about how she wrote the play, how the science behind AI inspired its plot, and the connections between AI hallucinations and dementia-induced hallucinations.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Irafledo. Later in the hour, a new play about smart speakers, AI, and dementia, an interesting combination, and how PFAS chemicals end up in fertilizer by way of sewage sludge. But first, it's one of the biggest fundamental questions, is there life elsewhere in the universe? That question, you know, it opens up a whole string of others like, how do we look for it? Will we know it if we see it? will we be able to make sense of what we're seeing? And how many of what we consider the basic rules of life here on Earth are really just suggestions?

Maybe they don't work so well someplace else. Well, my next guest tackles these questions and a whole lot more through the lens of both science and science fiction. And we want to hear your thoughts as well. What would most intrigue you about finding a new kind of life? What questions do you have? You make the call, but you have to make the call. Our number is 844-724-8255-8-4-Sight-Tock or tweet us at SciFRI. Jamie Green is a science writer and author of the book The Possibility of Life, Science, Imagination,

and our quest for kinship in the cosmos out next week from Hanover Square Press. She joins me from the studios of Connecticut Public and Hartford. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi. Thank you so much for having me. Nice to have you. I just want to tell our listeners that the SciFRI Book Club, yes, we'll be reading this book together in May, and you can read along with us next month. More information at ScienceFriiday.com slash book club.

Let's get right into this. Let's start with the basics. How do we define life? Because it doesn't sound from reading your excellent book that we really quite have the answer to that. No, we absolutely don't. And there's actually a school of thought that looking for a definition of life is a totally misguided project.

You know, Carl Sagan wrote this essay in the 70s about all. the possible definitions we like for life that we have and for every single one you can find exceptions if you say that life consumes fuel to self-sustain itself through energy well so does a fire and the reason that definitions like that fail is because life isn't a linguistic term that we invented that we can define it's a fundamental property of the universe and so there are actually some researchers who say that we need to have a theory of life like a physics of life, the same way that Newton and Einstein gave us a theory of gravity. In order to recognize and find life, we need a physics of life to do that too.

Well, it's interesting you bring up Newton and Einstein because there was a progression there, right? Where would you say we are in a physics of life in that progression? Would it be at Newton versus getting up to Einstein at this point? Oh, no, we're not even at Newton. Like, we don't have the right terms. you know, I've heard it explained in terms of chemistry that we're still in alchemy. Like we're mixing stuff up and trying to figure it out. But we haven't come up with even figuring out like what are the fundamental terms, the same way that for physics, Newton figured out that it was mass and position in time and speed, you know, and everything comes back to that.

We don't have that for life. We don't know if it's complexity or energy or inertia or information or something else. Because we did try to make it in glass jars once, didn't we? And we still probably try to do that. Yeah, that, I think you're referring to the Miller-Yury experiment to try to figure out the origin of life and try to figure out was it plausible. And the study of the origin of life has largely continued to follow that path. You take some plausible building blocks, put him in a situation that you hope mimics the conditions on the early earth and see if you can figure out what comes first and, you know, what do you have to put in a bottle and shake around in order to get RNA? Because the one thing we do know for sure is at some point, once at least on Earth, something that wasn't alive turned into something that's alive.

And by doing this, you're sort of limiting yourself to what you'll find in the cosmos, aren't you? Well, yeah, I mean, if you don't limit yourself, we've got all of chemistry and the entirety of the cosmos to look at. So, of course, we do have to put some constraints on it. And it makes sense to start with what's familiar because we haven't nearly exhausted that search. We haven't even scratched the surface. But there is a question in the study of the origin of life, just like there is in the search for life beyond Earth. Are we being too Earth-centric? Or do we have this one example of how it worked and we know it worked and Earth is full of life?

So why not at least start with something similar? Yeah, because there have been biologists who talked about if we would start evolution all over again, right, from the beginning, it wouldn't turn out to be us again. Yeah, that's a really big open question that also informs how we imagine life on other planets, like if, and this is a huge if, let's say life on another world has something, has similar categories to plants and animals, which is by no means guaranteed. Then the question to ask is, would those organisms come up with similar solutions to the problems that their environments throw at them, as happens on Earth. And we see on Earth,

and this is convergent evolution, where different animals independently come up with the same solutions. You know, the body shape of a dolphin and a shark, totally independent. The eyes of humans and octopuses are very anatomically similar, but evolved totally independently. The big question is, is convergent evolution the rule? Or is it just a couple of cool examples? that we can find in an otherwise random world. Right. If you're not sure what you're going to find out there in terms of the chemistry, the biology, it makes sense then to just look for evidence that it exists, right? So you don't have to know the exact chemistry.

Yeah, and that's actually one of the arguments that some researchers use to advocate looking for technology first, because looking for life's chemistry, it's very small. It's hard to see. It's hard to know if, you know, the oxygen and water vapor, that we might detect in an exoplanet's atmosphere comes from life or comes from just whatever geochemistry is going on on that planet. But if we found a satellite, if we found a radio transmission with a clear pattern in it, like technology could be much more obvious. The way one scientist put it to me was not all life is elephants.

But if you found an elephant, you would know that you had found life. So you might as well look for the big stuff, the obvious stuff, and start there. So you're looking for some signature. Exactly. That life existed and created something, left it behind. Right, left it behind or is possibly still using it. But what's nice is it doesn't matter. And we don't need to know how they used it, what it was for, what it meant to them.

It's just like if we see some solar panels, like nature doesn't make solar panels. Not yet. Let's go to the phones because a lot of people want to talk about this. Of course, Seema in Spokane. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi there. Cima, are you there? Yes.

I am. I am. Yes. Thank you for taking my call. Go ahead. My question is, if life on Earth is based on carbon, would life elsewhere could possibly be based on something else beyond carbon, and would that be classified as life?

Good question. I'm going to put that to Jamie. because in your book, you use a lot of science fiction, and a lot of science fiction films and movies we've talked about not a carbon-based but some other form, right? Yeah, it's usually silicon. And the reason is that carbon is really good for life because it has four binding sites on the atom,

and so it can make long, complex molecules. It likes to make repeating chains of carbon. And silicon also has four binding sites on the atom. It just is a bigger atom. There's like one extra shell of electrons. on the inside. So that does mean that there are some differences, but it's like the first go-to as a carbon replacement. And so one example that I write about in my book is there's an episode of Star Trek of the original series where there's like a mining colony and miners are

mysteriously dying and the enterprises sensors aren't detecting any life signs. They're like, there's no one down there. And then they realized that their detection system is calibrated for carbon-based life forms. And this is a silicon-based creature. It turns out acting defensively. It's got eggs and stuff. And so it's essentially made of rock. And so like when it gets hurt and the doctor has to take care of it, he basically spackles it with concrete. As for whether that's plausible, there are some challenges. Silicon really likes binding with oxygen. That's sand and rocks and things like that, which are solid and inert at Earth's temperatures. But it's possible that higher temperatures, it could be at higher temperatures, it could be an even better, you know,

foundation for biochemistry than carbon. So does that mean we must use our tools? We must create a detector for silicon-based life also if we're looking for life? No, because we can't look for everything all at once. You know, just like telescopes have a limited bandwidth. You know, the JWST is looking at infrared. That's what it's doing. Similarly, and it's analogous, it's not like exactly about telescopes, but you have to narrow down your search. You can't just look at the sky and say, okay, who's there? You have to decide if you're looking for techno signatures or biosignatures, if you're looking for radio waves or lasers or different kinds of biochemistry. So if you're good, you got to start somewhere. Well, where we usually start, NASA has always started, has been

follow the water, right? Yeah. Because we assume all life must have water. We don't actually assume that all life must have water, but again we know that the only life we know of does require water. And water is also a pretty

special compound. It's a fantastic solvent, which is really important for our chemistry. It also is lighter when it freezes. So ice floats, which is extremely rare that a solid would be less dense than it's liquid, which means that fish can survive the winter, you know.

So water is, and we also know that water is all over the galaxy. It's not hard to figure out many different ways for rocky planets like Earth to get water. So it seems like a reasonable assumption. Again, like carbon. It's not, we're not saying that all life definitely requires water definitely requires carbon, but it's sort of like with convergent evolution. It's like, is this just what life on Earth happens to use, or does life on Earth use these materials because they are the absolutely best suited materials to life? Yeah, we've got to limit what we can. We're going to talk more about life in outer space, alien life, Jamie Green, science writer, author of the book The Possibility of Life, Science, Imagination, and our quest for kinship in the cosmos.

We're taking your calls 844-8255-8-4-Sai Talk, or you can tweet us at SciFRI. Stay with us. We're going to open those phones up right after the break. We'll be right back. Hey there, podcast listeners. I were here with a simple request. If you're listening to this podcast, learning something, enjoying yourself, please go to ScienceFriiday.com slash support to make a donation.

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And thanks. You're listening to Science Friday. I am I, Rifledo. We're talking about life out there in a cosmos with Jamie Green, author of The Possibility of Life, Science Imagination, and our quest for kinship in the cosmos, our number 844-724-8255, or you can tweet us at SciFri. So many people, let's go to the phones. More imagination there than I've got questions for us.

Let's go to Thomas in Denver. Hi, Thomas. Welcome to Science Friday. Hey, thanks for having me. Hi, go ahead. So my question was, actually, it connects to the idea that you were talking about water being sort of a precursor for life, is that I was wondering is that when we think about life, maybe we should expand our definition to consider like patterns in the world. because in a lot of planets, gas giants that cannot support, you know, a physical life like we, like we are,

rocky planets typically would support physical life, but the idea that every celestial body has energy fields, an electromagnetic field, a gravitational field, I've just thought about the idea that maybe life could be a pattern. The idea that there are patterns formed, and that sort of leads to the fractal of life. But the idea that patterns in an electromagnetic system or in a gravity system to be considered sort of a form of life in a way. Let me ask Jamie. Jamie? Yeah, I mean, that really illustrates the connection, that life is just one manifestation of physics, you know,

and that from the Big Bang, there have been small variations in the universe, that it's not uniform, it's not even. And through the movement of time, information accumulates. You know, I talked to one researcher who says that a molecule is a record of all of the events that led up to its creation. And similarly, life is the same. And the way that she differentiates life is that life crosses a certain complexity threshold, that it requires information, like it requires instructions in order to be built. And it requires a memory. And for us, our DNA is that memory.

It's, you know, where all of the instructions for how to remember, how to remember, how to. to build a body and to live come from. And so then when you start expanding farther out and looking for more expansive definitions of life or more expansive theories of life, I should say, you have to decide, like, is there a line between alive and not alive? Or are we just another manifestation of the universe seeking increasing complexity, holding off entropy for a little bit longer, you know, with the use of energy. It also evokes for me a few of the science fiction books that I write about in my book. One of them is Stonyiswef Lem's Solaris, which has been made into a few movies also, where the alien entity is something like a planet-spanning ocean.

It's not made of water, but it's like they call it an ocean. And it's completely impenetrable, completely incomprehensible, but it's trying to communicate with the humans somehow. And they really don't even know how conscious or self-aware it might be. And we could have similar questions about complex structures in the cosmos. It also makes me wonder, does a structure in the cosmos need to be alive in order for us to appreciate its complexity and its long life? You know, our galaxy is meaningful only if we think of them as alive, or can they be their own beautiful, powerful, strange thing? Let's talk a bit about habitability. In other words, can a planet hold life?

Is the planet the right size? Is it the right distance from its star or have liquid water? But I was fascinated by what you talked about in your book, about how important the planet having a moon around it and all the things a moon adds to the survivability and the planet itself. Talk about that. Yeah, this is another one of those tricky things that we run into when we only have one example to extrapolate from, because we can see all the ways that the moon is important to life on Earth.

And then we start wondering, is that important for all life? So our moon is proportionally to the Earth very big for a moon. And that's because it was formed in this special way where late in the formation of the solar system, a Mars-sized body smashed into the Earth. and they're, you know, shooting lots and lots of material into orbit, which a lot of it coalesced as the moon. What that impact did, scientists think, was to thin the Earth's crust. A lot of the crust went up in the explosion and became moon, which we only were able to verify when the Apollo missions brought moon rocks back to Earth and they could be analyzed. And it's possible that that thinning of the crust is why we have plate tectonics.

And plate tectonics turns out to be vital for regulating the levels of carbon in the atmosphere. Carbon gets trapped in seabed sediments, which gets subsumed back into the mantle of the earth. Volcanoes release carbon. And it's this whole feedback cycle that may be what keeps Earth from turning into a snowball or, you know, barring human intervention, getting too hot for life. The moon also gives us tides. And life began in the oceans and came on to land much later. And it's possible that having tidal zones where it was sometimes wet, sometimes dry, facilitated that transition. The moon also keeps the tilt of the Earth's axis very consistent.

Mars's axis kind of wobbles up and down. And Uranus orbits completely on its side. One astronomer likened it to a rotissory chicken, which I thought was so, it's like, yes, now I can picture that. that. But Earth's tilt is pretty steady, and the moon helps it stay that way, and that tilt is what gives us the seasons. If there was no tilt, there would be no seasons. If there was an extreme tilt, the seasons would be much more extreme, and it would be a lot harder to live on the planet. Let's go to Lucy on the phones in Ohio. Hi, Lucy, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira, thanks for taking my call. I really appreciate this discussion. It's fascinating.

thinking that it's not so much a semantic or philosophical or even biological question. I don't think we can get around the ethical or moral aspect of if we found life on other planets, if we can't seem to respect or recognize life here. And in fact, we talked about Star Trek a couple times today on the show, and I've watched many episodes of the original series. And one of the things that I always took away is that in order for humans to respect life anywhere, we have to live by a moral compass. So I don't think we could be trusted with the information if we did find it.

I think it's still a fascinating question and may be important to know for our own edification, but I don't know that we can be trusted. Thank you. Wait, wait, stay, can you stay for a second? Sure. If you say, can we be trusted, what do you mean by that? Well, look around you at what's happening to the way we treat each other and animals on this planet. and the environment. I just don't believe we've demonstrated that we can be accountable or

humane or compassionate towards a new life, except our own. Okay. Let me, Jamie, what do you think about that? That's a question that comes up a lot. At astrobiology and setty conferences, there will often be on a panel an anthropologist or a dolphin researcher who points out this exact thing that we are very bad at recognizing intelligence in other creatures on earth, even if we look not too far back in human history, even among other human beings. And that we need to be very cautious. And we don't have a great track record with this. You know, Ira, your question about what are we worried about happening? You know, what trust do we not have in ourselves?

state. Like, what's the situation where an alien's well-being is going to be in our hands? If we find microbes on another planet in the solar system, it's very important that we are mindful of contamination for scientific reasons and for ethical reasons. You know, this came up when it was thought that there had been phosphine detected in the atmosphere of Venus, which was a potential biosignature. That didn't pan out, but some people were like, cool, we got to send probes. to Venus, we got to find what's there. But even microbes on another planet, like, do they have a right to their lives? Do they have a right to not be tampered with? Do they have a right for us not to interfere with their environment? And Star Trek does offer guidance in terms of the prime directive,

in terms of how to interact with other intelligent species. But also one of the wonderful things about that show is it proposes an entire worldview that is, you know, caring. And the earth in that case is post-scarcity, post-poverty, post-war, pretty socialist. You know, there is a very deep ethic running through all of it. It's not even just the prime directive. There's, you have a lot of ethical decisions to make when you are directly interacting with another species or even potentially sending them messages. Lucy, thank you for that question. I hope it answered it. Thank you both. You know what I find interesting about our discussion here and about what Lucy raised

and your references, your references about how to treat other life is all, it takes it all from science fiction. Like we have to depend on Star Trek to bring it up, to talk about it. Why are we not thinking on our own about these things? It is also something that's discussed in scientific communities using other animals as, reference points and also, you know, figuring out what the protocol could be if there was detection of an alien signal, if a signal was received, because there are many governments on Earth and there are entities with radio telescopes who could send a message with, like, who's in charge, who decides how to act as a single unified diplomatic entity? So these are conversations

that happen in science. But the reason that science fiction is so important is that science fiction is where very creative, insightful writers and storytellers are imagining out the implications, or imagining out the possibilities. If this, then what? If we make this choice, what would happen? You know, sometimes that's imbued with cynicism, sometimes it's imbued with hope, but that means that the entire genre represents a suite of possibilities, like really robust thought experiments that have a very important part to play in all of this thinking. Do you think if we found extraterrestrial life, let's say there was bacteria on Mars, that the polarization of our community, of the way the United States is so polarized,

might use, each one might use it for its own propaganda purposes? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think absolutely if they cared enough. It's a really interesting question to me. whether the discovery of non-intelligent, simple life on another world would feel revolutionary on Earth. I think there are a lot of people out there who probably think that we've found life on other planets, whether it's on Mars or, you know, through JWST on exoplanets. Because something else that I learned while researching this book that I thought was fascinating was that for most of modern human history from the,

Renaissance to, I don't know, the 1900s or maybe even the Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s, people thought that there was life on other worlds. Once Galileo discovered that the planets were spheres, were worlds, people started imagining life on them immediately, and the line between fiction and scientific speculation was much fuzzier then. And even, you know, in the 1900s, people thought they saw canals on, like, you know, People lived their lives thinking there was a civilization on Mars, and it did not make Earth any more peaceful. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

Talking about Life in Outer Space with Jamie Green, author of The Possibility of Life, Science Imagination, and our quest for kinship in the cosmos. I want to go to the phones to a question, oh, for a question that kept popping up, let me go. Somebody else is asking it now also. Let's go to Frank in Pittsburgh. Hi, Frank. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Great to be on. Ira, I'd like to hear your guests' comments on the Fermi paradox, which says that the probability is there's a lot of life out there. And if that's so, where are they?

Does she think that perhaps there's something inherent in biological life that makes it destroy itself, maybe the natural selection competitive thing, or maybe it takes too much energy to get off planet, and very few can do it. I'd like to hear our comments on that. Yeah. I think that there are lots of ways to explain why we wouldn't see other life. Like if life is cheap and happens on lots of planets, it's very possible that civilizations are living their lives on their planets

and have not come to visit us. You know, there could be an alien base inside the clouds of Jupiter, and we wouldn't know. There's so much of even just our solar system. that is unexplored. There could be stuff in the, you know, in the asteroid belt. Who knows? Like, there could be alien probes and satellites there. But for me, it's not the fact that we haven't encountered alien life that makes me feel a little pessimistic about the odds. For me, it seems like life on Earth arose very easily. Life on Earth arose just. about as soon as conditions allowed, you know, as far as we can tell. And that was simple,

single-celled life, like bacteria or Achaea, single cells that don't have any complex structure, even within the cells, let alone evolving into multicellular organisms. And then it took two billion years, billion with a B, for complex life to arise. And that is eukaryotic cells, which are with a nucleus, with complex structures, with organelles. You know, you might remember them from like 10th grade biology. And that two billion year weight suggests to me, as much as I want the universe to be lousy with life, that that step might have been hard. It might have been lucky.

It might be rare. And that happened because one single-celled organism gobbled up the other, and the one that got subsumed went on to basically become our mitochondria. which are the powerhouse of the cell, they're how we get our energy. And that energy may have been required for the development of internal structures, the development of multicellularity, the development of everything you see with the naked eye.

And that makes me wonder if simple life and bacteria are great, nothing against back, I mean, some of them are. And they are incredibly innovative chemically, but they're not structurally innovative. They don't build structures of themselves. very much. You know, they don't evolve into multicellularity. That kind of life could be very common, but I worry that, and I don't think about this in terms of the Fermi paradox, usually, because there are plenty of other reasons to explain why we wouldn't have had visitors.

But it's that step in our history that gives me the most pause. Thinking that maybe we think it's more common than it really is. It's Jamie, it's a wonderful book, Jamie Green, science writer, author, of the book, The Possibility of Life, Science Imagination, and our quest for kinship in the cosmos out next week from Hanover Square Press. Thank you so much for talking with us today, because it's a fantastic book and sums up all kinds of thoughts. Thank you so much, Ira. You're welcome. And a note, the SciFright Book Club is reading The Possibility of Life next month. You can find out more, including how to win a copy on our website, ScienceFriiday.com

slash book club. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about PFAS chemicals. You know, they are everywhere. But what happens when they end up in sewage from the drain to the grain? Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Irafledo. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local stories of national significance. You know, about half of the sewage sludge produced in the U.S. gets turned into fertilizer. Sounds like a good way to reuse nutrients.

But PFS, you know, those pesky forever chemicals that can cause health problems, are also finding their way into fertilizer and thus into our food. And it all starts with a flush. Here to tell us how PFAS travels from our drains to our grains is Barbara Moran, climate and environment correspondent at WBUR, based in Boston. Welcome to Science Friday. I hear you chuckling a little bit about that. Hello. I love that. Drain's to grains. Well, let's start on that journey. Give us the beginning of that journey. How does it get there?

So I feel kind of stupid admitting this, but I always thought that the stuff that goes into the wastewater treatment plants was just stuff you flushed down the toilet, right? But it's everything. It's like stormwater and the stuff that leaks out of landfills and the stuff out of septic tanks and industrial water waste, right? So there's a lot of PFS in all of that wastewater, right? And that all goes to wastewater treatment plants. And there's a lot of bad stuff in there. The person who sort of made me aware of this idea with this woman named Laura Orlando, and she is a civil engineer who spent her whole career studying wastewater. And here's how she described it.

What gets into wastewater is just about everything that we use in our society, because it's the pollution sink for what's out there, which is a big deal when we're talking about PFS. So all of this stuff, including PFS, goes to the wastewater treatment plant. It gets concentrated in the sludge and then it ends up in the fertilizer. And so if it's in the fertilizer, then it's in our food. It is complicated, right? That it gets in some food, it looks like, but not other food.

And nobody's quite sure exactly how much PFS in the fertilizer gets into the food. and this is an area of really sort of cutting-edge study that's mostly happening up in Maine, because Maine is where they've had a huge problem with contamination from this fertilizer. So the farmers must be really worried about this if they know it's on their land. Yeah, so Maine had a program for years of wouldily putting a lot of this sludge-based fertilizer on farmlands. And a few years ago, farmers started detecting really high levels of PFAS in milk and meat up in Maine. And it's really taken a toll on farms up there. And as a result, a number of farms have had to close.

And Maine is really far ahead on doing a lot of the science and trying to figure out how much P-FATs gets from fertilizer into what types of food. Like this one guy, the state toxicologist in Maine, he told me that, like, for corn, it seems to get into the leaves of the corn, but not really in the kernels, right? Which is interesting, right? because that might make a difference for what you could feed the cows. Well, if it's going from our drain to the grain, as we said before, why can't the water treatment plants just remove the PFS as it flows in and flows out? This is what I asked them. I went to Deer Island, which is one of the biggest wastewater treatment plants in the world.

That's where all Greater Boston's wastewater goes. And I said, well, why don't you just filter it out? And they just laughed at me. And it's mostly because of the volume, right? It's like Deer Island takes in something like over 300 million gallons of wastewater a day. And it's just filtering the PFS out of that volume of wastewater coming in. It's just it's impossible to do. So, Ira, this is the best part.

So I got to go up on top of the sledge tank, right? So I have this piece of tape on top of the sledge tank. So this is with David DuS who runs the whole treatment plant. So right under our feet is like how many gallons of? About three million. gallons of sludge that spends about 22 days on site before it actually gets pumped to our pellet plant for conversion to a fertilizer. Barbara, you get to go to the best places.

I know. I was so like 3 million gallons of sludge, right? And this is the sort of great tragedy of this whole story. I mean, it's really sad because, you know, it's not like we're going to stop making sludge. Right, right, right. And you have to do something with. it, right? And the fertilizer kind of seemed like a good idea. And then if it turns out that that isn't just, is not going to work, it's like, what are we going to do with it?

Are the facilities at least testing for PFAS compounds? In a few states, in Massachusetts, they do test now. A few states they do, most places they don't. Yeah. So there's not a lot of testing. So it's hardly even known how much is in the sludge, how much is in the fertilizer, how it is getting into food. This is really sort of new science. If the sludge, let's say, didn't get turned into fertilizer, where else could it go? What could you do with it?

We're each going to get a bucket and keep it in our basement. There you go. Thank you, Barbara. So, right, this is the problem. You can landfill it and or you can burn it. Right. Right. And those are terrible.

Like, so landfill, it gives off methane and then the PFS is going to leak out. into the leachate anyway, and then you burn it, and it's unclear if that is going to totally destroy the Pfas. So this is the trouble, right? There's no great solution. You know, Pfas, as you know, Pfas are everywhere. They're in everything. How big of a deal is it that we're being exposed through fertilizer then? Yeah, that is a great question. And some people give just that argument. They're like, look, it's in the air, it's in the dust, it's in the drinking water. Maybe this will put a little bit in the food, but so what? I mean, the counter argument to that is, okay, if we do know that it's somewhere, you should try to cut that source off, right? That just because it's every,

it doesn't mean it's bad. And if there's a known source, we should try to deal with it. And you should at least be measuring it and trying to understand it so that we know how exposed people may be getting from that. So I don't think anybody could argue with the need for more measurement and and understanding of what exactly is happening. So where do we go from here? Are there any solutions underway? Yeah. So a lot of environmental groups and public health officials are saying, well, let's just stop spreading

it on land, right? Let's just be, because if we don't know what to do, why don't we just stop using it? And Laura Orlando, who we heard from before, put it best. There is no safe concentration of PFS, right? And so adding it to soil as a fertilizer, it's a disconnect from the reality of the harm of this family of chemicals. And so the logical thing to do is just not spread it all over the place. You know, one is tempted to say maybe we could come up with a water filter that would remove it from the drinking from the drain, right? But then that really wouldn't be the solution because you have PFS coming from all these other places.

Oh, well, hi, you're on to something because you're smart. Actually, this is something that's been tried out and worked in having industrial sources that are sort of known producers of PFS filter or pre-treat their wastewater before it goes to the treatment plants. And that does get the levels down a bit. And also getting all their drinking water treated would help get the levels down. So there are ways out there to pre-treat the water to get less P-FX in it. So there are some people looking at solutions out there. And it would also be helpful to know just how much of it is out there, which we're not quite sure either. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I know we laugh about it, but it is a big problem.

It gets so overwhelming sometimes that I do go into this sort of gallows humor with it. But it is important to figure out what's going on, right? I mean, we should be measuring this stuff. We should be getting a handle on it. Well, Barbara, we're always happy to have your humor and your gallows with us on science. Friday. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. You're welcome. Thank you. Barbara Moran, Climate and Environment Correspondent at WBUR, based in Boston. Do you have a smart speaker or many smart speakers in your home? As a techno geek, I just have to have one of each to see how they work. I've got a Siri, a Google, Alexa, and I'll have whatever new one comes out. You know why?

Because as AI is becoming more and more advanced, it's becoming a bigger part of our lives. And that's especially true about smart speakers, which to some of us act as another member of the family, answering simple questions, reminding us about appointments, when to take our meds, entertaining our kids, but what parts of our privacy are we giving up to make our lives slightly more convenient? That's the focus of a new play called Smart, which tells the story of four characters, an aging mom with dementia, her daughter who lives with her and is her caregiver, and an AI tech worker who secretly monitors conversations mom and daughter have in their homes through their smart speaker. Their lives become intertwined with a smart speaker called Jenny, the fourth character in this play.

Full disclosure, Smart was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which also helps support Science Friday. Joining me is Smart's playwright, Mary Elizabeth Hamilton, based in Brooklyn, New York. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Mary, why did you want to write a play? then about tech and smart speakers caring for aging parents? We just got an Alexa. This was five or so years ago for my partner's mother who had dementia caused by a stroke.

And it was meant to help her to communicate with her kids who lived far away. And we had the Alexa in our apartment for a couple of weeks before giving it to her as we figured out how to use it and how to communicate with her about how to use it. And so I became interested in the ways that these devices can be used to communicate and to help people who are struggling with language and memory issues. Right. And so much has happened in those years, in the AI space since then. We now have chatGBT. It's evolving. Did you feel that you needed to update the play as those years went along? Yeah, certainly. It's funny writing a play about technology because any time it all passes and it pretty quickly, feels outdated. So I did try to look into ways that the play could be updated. But yeah, I certainly did read a lot anyway about the new developments with AI and chat GBT and had a lot of late-night

conversations with chat GBT as I was trying and procrastinating writing the play. And it's fascinating the ways that it's changed in just a few years. Did your questions and responses from chat GBT make it into the play? You know, not in any overt way, but at one point I was, I was struggling with this scene at like 3 a.m. one night and I was like, chat, ChachyBT, could you write me this scene? And I told it the sort of various components and the characters and the gist of the conversation. And it wrote this hilariously, you know, really the dialogue is, is bad, but it's so funny because it went to the extent of like having them have this conversation about tech, but also sort of, of this awkward flirting.

And although I, of course, didn't use Chapch, GPT's scene, it sparked a scene that I, a new scene that I did right for the play. Yeah, because you can see that scene where there is awkward flirting going on. My specialty. And speaking of scenes, one of the staging choices that I love is that you combine different characters, living spaces, they're living spaces into the same room so that the programmer whose work involves listening in on the family smart speaker appears to be, you know, in the same living room as the woman and her mom.

And it really emphasizes that real people sometimes listen in on the conversations you have with the smart speakers, right? And there's been reporting from Bloomberg that backs that up specifically about Amazon's Echo Smart Speakers. Did you purposely incorporated that way, the creative process, make that choice? Yeah, for sure. that our scenic designer Aunt Ma, who's really wonderful and thoughtful in her choices, and she suggested having what she called like a lighthouse in the middle of their world. And I thought that was a really compelling idea. So, yeah, certainly having the two worlds kind of overlap and to the point where it's hard to

distinguish between them was very much a part of the early creative conversations that we had. You're listening to Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I have to also say watching the scenery change was worth the price of admission alone in that. They did such a great job, doesn't it? Yeah, it was great. One of the connections the play draws between people with dementia and AI, one of those connections is the hallucinations that can happen in both instances. And now I know that programs like ChatGBTT can occasionally spit out responses that are called hallucinations, which may seem factual and are confidently stated, right, but they're actually completely false.

And in the play, the mom has dementia-induced hallucinations, where she believes her dead husband is in the room with her and has conversations with him. Let me play a clip of the daughter caregiver Elaine, played by IKEA Trevette, talking with Gabby, whose job is to listen in on their conversations, played by Francesca Fernandez. My mom still has whole conversations with my dad, like he's in the next room. That's kind of sweet, too, no? He's been dead for eight years.

So the AI, they hallucinate. all the time, right? And it's revealing all this stuff about how we construct reality, like how rooted it is in our time and place. I'm not sure I think we construct reality. So your mom has this fixed memory of your dad, and maybe it doesn't match the time she's living in right now. The time we're all living in right now. But that's constantly being revised by new experiences and memories. Maybe she's experiencing a different time than you. I thought that was a tremendous moment in the play, Mary, why did you want to draw that connection? Well, I guess, you know, maybe that did come out of a conversation with chat, GBT as well,

but in reading more about the AI and the hallucinations, I think it's, although it's not literally the same, I don't think, is the way the human mind works when it's suffering from dementia or anything else. I think it does open up really interesting questions about how we construct reality. and make meaning and how rooted it is in our time and place. And when they're coming up with these false statements, as you said, my understanding is that they're just sort of searching through all of this vast amounts of data that they have access to and just coming to the wrong conclusion,

which I guess is not dissimilar to how we sometimes have false memories or look through our minds and find the wrong thing at any given point. And the way that that then becomes part of the larger conversation, you know, about what we all accept as truth in the world. world seems really interesting to me. Yeah, you also make the point there that we should accept people with dementia's realities. Even though they may not match our own, they're still valid realities for themselves. Sure. It just opens up all these really fascinating ideas to me about given the place we're at in the world and how difficult it is seemingly to agree on reality

with any two people. Good point. Do you trust smart speakers? You said you gave your smart speaker away. Do you still have one? I do have one. Yeah, my daughter was given a Siri at the start of the pandemic and it drove me crazy. I hated it. I unplugged it anytime she wasn't home. But she eventually convinced me in her very persuasive 10-year-old way that it's not really any worse than my phone or my computer or any of these other devices that are just everywhere in our lives. So I sort of came around to it. I now use it to time things or to listen to music and, you know, it is what it is. I guess. Well, Mary Elizabeth Hamilton, good luck with you on the play. Thank you.

Mary Elizabeth Hamilton, writer of the new play smart, playing at the Ensemble Studio Theater in New York City until April 29th. Go see it. And that's about all the time we have for this week. If you missed any part of the program or you would like to hear it again, yes, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Of course, you can say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or email us the old fast. fashion away, SciFri at Science Friday.com. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.