Science Friday - Remembering Frank Drake, History of Air Conditioning. Sep 9, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

The Hot And Cold Past Of The Air Conditioner In the Northeast, the leaves have started changing colors, heralding the season of pumpkins, sweaters, and the smell of woodsmoke. But in some parts of the country, the heat hasn’t let up. In cities like Dallas, Phoenix, and Miami, temperatures were up in the high 80s and low 90s this week—and with climate change, the U.S. is only getting hotter. But humans have come up with an ingenious way to keep the heat at bay: air conditioning. Widely considered one of the greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century, the technology has transformed how and where people live—and it’s prevented countless deaths. But it comes at a cost, and if we’re going to keep up with a warming climate, we’re going to need some other tricks to stay cool. Remembering Frank Drake, Who Listened To The Cosmos Last week, astronomer and SETI pioneer Dr. Frank Drake died at the age of 92. Dr. Drake was a key figure in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence—from Project Ozma in 1960, to the founding of the SETI Institute. He collaborated on the ‘Golden Record’ that Earth sent to the stars on board the Voyager space probes. Drake also created a mathematical way of estimating the probability of discovering signs of intelligent life, a calculation that became known as the Drake Equation, and spent years advocating for the search for alien life. Drake appeared on Science Friday many times over the years. Here, in excerpts from conversations recorded in 2010 and 2016, he talks with Ira about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and his role with the Voyager Golden Record project. Our condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues. 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, remembering the life and work of SETI pioneer Frank Drake. But first, Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer, right? But even as we look forward to pumpkin pie and cozy sweaters, parts of the country are still gripped by stifling heat. For example, California, high temperature records have been set this past week, reaching as high as 116 in Livermore just outside of San Francisco. And we've seen the deadly impact of hot weather in Europe and Asia all summer long. A new poll by Gallup shows that this extreme heat has a negative impact on people's sense of well-being around the world. And since global warming means it's still going to keep getting hotter, the only tool many people have to survive is

air conditioning. Named one of the greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century by the National Academy of Sciences, air conditioning has completely transformed how and where we live. Last year, in collaboration with St. Louis Public Radio, we took a look back at more than a century of AC and what it means to live without it. Here's that story, reported by Ella Fetter and Shayla Farsen. In the summer of 1904, visitors to the World's Fair in St. Louis were in for a rare treat. And it wasn't the giant Ferris wheel, or the elephant made of almonds, though those were both fantastic. It wasn't the obvious kind of fun, really, or anything you could see or touch. It was something that you felt.

So imagine this. It's August, and you've come all the way to St. Louis to see the absolute cutting edge in human achievement. Maybe you checked out the aeronautics competition or the X-ray machine that could look right inside you. But by late afternoon, you've been wandering for hours. You're milling through these crowds and it's hot and it's humid. You're just melting when you step into this one building, the Missouri State Building. And inside, it feels so good. Because tucked in the basement is a 30-ton refrigeration plant,

allegedly capable of dropping the temperature to just 70 degrees on a 90-degree day. Engineers gushed about it in that year's Journal of Ice and Refrigeration. Its 60-horsepower motor, its horizontal double-acting ammonia compressor, and the delight of those who experienced it. Visitors not aware that the building was artificially cooled were struck with wonder and were unable to account for the very perceptible change felt in the temperature. Now, artificial cooling, it wasn't totally unheard of at this point. The trading room at the New York Stock Exchange, the Cornell Medical School's dissection room,

both of them got their own cooling systems in just the last few years. But in 1904, for most people, artificial cooling would still have been a novelty. Something they might have heard about, but wouldn't have experienced for themselves. Local newspapers loved the installation. In some cases, devoting multiple paragraphs to it, the St. Louis Republic wrote, quote, Entrance into the Missouri building from the glaring heat outside will be instantly followed by the most delightful relief from the oppressive weather encountered in promenading the grounds. The relief did not last long. Just two weeks before the end of the fair, the Missouri State

building burned to the ground. It actually happened while the fair was still going. thousands ran over to watch the building burn. And though the fire brigades did their best, they couldn't save it. The story of air conditioning, though, that was just beginning. In many ways, St. Louis was the perfect place to introduce people to artificial cooling. Sheila Farzan is a reporter at St. Louis Public Radio. It sits right at the spot where the Mississippi and Missouri rivers come together. And in the summertime, the combination of heat and humidity can feel.

almost tropical, like breathing through a warm, wet towel. And for a long time, people just had to find workarounds, turn on a fan, sit on the porch, sleep outside in city parks. And then came air conditioning. Many people credit Willis Carrier as the inventor, but his systems were really building on what others had done before. Willis Carrier was an interesting guy because he was somebody who had the right, call it knows, and he was in the right place at exactly the right time. Salvatore Basel is the author of Cool, how air conditioning changed everything. Carrier was a young engineer working for a company in Buffalo that made heating and ventilation systems. And in 1902, he got an assignment.

A printing firm came to the company with a problem, that summer humidity was causing paper to swell. And that would mean that it would print incorrectly. And rather than a crisp image, they were getting a blur. They needed something to control the humidity. So Carrier got to work. At first, he tried chemical drying, using a bunch of desiccant. But that contaminated the air with salt droplets and resulted only in, quote, ruining two perfectly good pairs of expensive shoes.

So he changed tactics. He knew that if you lower the air, temperature, it'll bring down the humidity, too. It took a few more years of experimenting with cool air, but finally, he cracked it. In 1906, he landed on the basic model he'd use for decades to come. Carrier realized that he was onto something, and he borrowed a phrase that was being used in cotton mills, air conditioning. Not air cooling, air conditioning. Because for Carrier, this wasn't just about making it cold. It was a top-to-bottom makeover of the air with four essential components. Cleanliness, control of humidity, control of temperature and circulation.

This was from a promotional video from the 40s. These would never have been commercially possible but for the discoveries and air conditioning developments of Dr. Carrier and his associates. In the early decades, air conditioning was mostly used in factories, not for the comfort of workers, of course, but for the quality of the product. Like macaroni has to be dried at just the right humidity. Otherwise, it would sour or sometimes crack. Or if you're spinning cotton, it can't be too dry. Otherwise, the thread will break. On the other hand, something like chocolate cannot be manufactured in a hot environment at all. Many chocolate manufacturers would actually close down for the whole summer. Same with

chewing gum. It was in those days too sticky to work with during the summer. But with systems like carriers, manufacturing could chug along. Carrier tried to promote air conditioning just for comfort, too. For years, Carrier would say, why not have a house that is available for you all the seasons of the year so that you could really live there in the summer rather than going away to the seashore? No one was interested because hot weather was something that you put up with. God gave it to you. and you had to deal with it. There was a very Victorian sensibility that hot weather was simply a given. You would have a fire against cold, but as far as heat, you lived through it.

It was also just very expensive. The first modern home air conditioner was another company's, frigidaires, and it weighed 600 pounds, cost as much as a car, and didn't work all that well. But then Carrier found the perfect customer. Movie theaters. movie theaters were in a very bad way by the 1920s. They were famous for being places where the air was unbreatheable. In 1925, Carrier installed a system in New York's Rivoli Theater.

Now, theaters in those days could get very hot, so audiences had all come prepared with fans. And even though the system was starting to run, it hadn't quite kicked in, and people were fanning away. Carrier was standing at the back of the auditorium, very nervous, but then, And they began to feel the cool, and he noticed all the fans gradually beginning to stop. Also there that day was Adolf Zucor, the president of Paramount Pictures. And after seeing this incredible display, he walks up to Carrier and tells him, yes, the people are going to like it. And this was actually a very unheralded moment, because this was the first time in human history

that the average person for the price of a movie ticket, could go somewhere and become cool during the hottest summer heat. That was a revolution. Bang. All of a sudden, every other movie theater in the United States had to catch up. Yes, you lucky people, just sit back for a moment, relax, and notice the delightfully clean, cool, and refreshing atmosphere of this scientifically air-conditioned theater.

This is from the 40s. It would run before the show started. I love that this is the selling point. It's not the great movies you're going to see. The key is it's going to be cold. So at first, air conditioning was just about good times and macaroni. But pretty soon, it went from luxury to necessity. The real shift happened after World War II.

Air conditioners were becoming more affordable. And in the 50s, there were a lot of new houses being built cheaply, so think, poorly insulated, with these big modern windows. basically what one writer at the time called TV-equipped hotboxes. Air conditioning them was essential. And over time, mortgage lenders and insurers went from treating air conditioning as an unnecessary amenity to covering it, or even requiring home builders to plan for it. And by the late 70s, about half of U.S. households have systems installed. And air conditioning changed how and where people lived.

Skyscraper's would be deeply uncomfortable without air conditioning. especially on those upper floors. The Sunbelt states, like Florida, Texas, and New Mexico, they start growing much faster than many other parts of the country. And a lot of people think air conditioning allowed that to happen. And for those who had air conditioning, it wasn't just keeping them comfortable. It wasn't just letting them sleep soundly on summer nights. It was actually saving their lives.

Which brings us to St. Louis in 1980. I started working for St. Louis two months out of high school. It wasn't, that was 1977. Gary Ludwig is the fire chief in Champaign, Illinois. We met up at his house one weekend in August. And Gary told me he originally enrolled at St. Louis University to become a doctor. But his scholarship money wasn't enough to cover tuition. So at 18, he joined a federal program that trained people to be first responders. Sometimes you'd be on a fire truck and sometimes you will be in an ambulance. And a lot of times I wound up finding myself on an ambulance because they were shart-staffed. A year later, Gary was hired as a paramedic captain. And he was just a kid, really, learning on the job. One of the first times he went out, he says he helped carry a woman who was in labor, down six flights of stairs. And she's having this baby in the back of the ambulance. And I have no idea how to deliver a baby.

And I think I was more nervous than the mother was. By 1980, Gary had a few years of experience under his belt. He used to drive this station wagon packed with medical equipment around St. Louis. And when there was an emergency, he was usually the first person there, even before the ambulance arrived. But on July 1st that year, the temperature started rising. On a typical July day in St. Louis, you get a high of about 80 degrees. That day in 1980, it reached 105. And that was just the beginning.

For the next 19 days, temperatures were. were in the upper 90s and low 100s, almost every day. Yesterday set a record for power use. 108 degrees today beat the record all to smithereens. This is what summer should be, starting off in May about 80, and peaking off in August about 98 degrees, but we have been nowhere near normal this year. It would become one of the worst heat waves in recent history,

with extreme heat stretching all the way from Texas to Washington, D.C. And in St. Louis, as the temperatures rise, the calls start coming in faster and faster. So the emergency rooms are starting to fill up. There is one day I know that we hit 350 calls for EMS in a 24-hour period, which was probably 200% or more above our normal limit. So when you have something like that, you don't have enough resources. You have calls stacked up sitting there waiting for someone to dispatch an ambulance. So Gary was working these long shifts, sometimes 16 hours at a time, running from one call to another.

And he still can't forget some of the things he saw. This one time in particular has really stayed with him. In a warning to listeners, some of what you're about to hear is disturbing. We break the door down. We go inside, and sure enough, we find a person on a bed. And as I said, I've seen many dead bodies. my career, but I have never seen a dead body like this before because there was no human farm there at all.

The body had basically turned to jelly. Into our shock, and I say shock, there's a lady laying next to him. And she's delusional. She's suffering either from heat or whatever. We don't know what she's suffering from. So we're able to load her up on a stretcher and get her out. the door and as we're taking her out the door, she turns and says, are you going to take him also? And in going to call after call, Gary quickly notices a pattern. The victims of this heat wave

tend to be older, lower income, and they don't have air conditioners. I don't know how many times I would walk in and I would find some elderly person. Again, their home will shut up and they're sitting in a chair in front of a fan. That's all they had to cool themselves and they're dead. You know, the fan, all this is doing is blowing hot air on them. Their body temperature still rose to 105, 100, 600, 70, 7, 800, 8, 110 degrees. We found some with 115, 16 degree heat indexes on their body. At least 1553 people died in St. Louis during the 1983 heat wave. So many that the local newspaper, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, began printing the names and ages of the dead.

The city medical examiner told the paper they were running out of places to put the bodies. Unnecessary deaths from the lack of air conditioning would continue, unfortunately, up until this day. Ella Fetter continues with the story of AC after this short break. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking this hour about how air conditioning has transformed America. Back to Science Friday's Ella Fetter with that story.

An air conditioner works by taking heat from inside your home, or your office or your car, and dumping it outside. Usually, it does that with a refrigerant, a kind of liquid that easily evaporates. The liquid runs through the air conditioner's pipes, and as it evaporates, turning from liquid to gas, it draws the heat out of the air, cooling the air down. But then, that heat needs to go somewhere. So the air conditioner squeezes the refrigerant back down into a liquid, forcing it to release all that heat again, and throws that heat again, and throws that heat.

heat outside. And that's the cycle. Suck the heat from the inside, dump it outside, over and over again. I like to imagine a very industrious hamster running back and forth with buckets of heat. Our fact checker Lauren Young suggests that you imagine the hulk, hulking out with heat, then compressing back into a human and letting that heat out again. Whatever works for you. Your body works in kind of a similar way, except for instead of a refrigerant, it's sweat. When you heat up, the sweat evaporates off your skin, taking the heat with it. And your body, as it circulates your blood, keep sending heat to the surface. Hot blood to the skin, cooled blood back down into your body.

On and on, with sweat, the cooling engine at the heart of it all. But sometimes your body gets so hot and dehydrated, you actually stop sweating. And that's when you're in real trouble. Heat stroke. Your internal temperature gets to be 105, 100, 100, 600, 7, 108 degrees. And since you stop sweating, what happens is that your body has no more ability to calm itself down, and that's why the body temperature rises. So it cooks your brain, is what it does.

It virtually just cooks your brain, and it also impacts all your organ systems. The fact, you just die. If you look at deaths in the U.S. over the decades, you see a consistent pattern. Most people die in the winter when it's cold. Flues and other respiratory diseases spike and heart attacks, but they also die when it's extremely hot. And so researchers at the University of Virginia decided to look at data going back to the 60s. And they saw that at first, predictably, whenever there was very hot and humid weather, people died. They saw a spike in excess deaths.

That was true in the 60s. That was true in the 70s. But by the 90s, the pattern fades. More and more people are surviving the heat. And the researcher's best explanation was air conditioning. It's not to say there aren't other factors, like maybe better medical care, but air conditioning, not surprisingly, is a big one. And the researchers found that the more homes with air conditioning in a region, the fewer people die. But while the law generally requires landlords to provide heating, for the most part, air conditioning has been

considered optional. Nice if you can get it. Except maybe that's starting to change. I'm really glad we're here today to finish this up. We all know what this bill does and why we're here. Last year, Montgomery County in Maryland passed a bill requiring landlords to provide air conditioning from June to September. This is Tom Hucker, president of the county council at the final vote. He sponsored the bill. We've had a requirement for heat for a very, very long time because it really is a life or death issue if people don't have heat. And air conditioning has become a life or death issue as well, not just a comfort issue. I recently spoke with Tom and he says, before this bill, they'd received a lot of tenant complaints about lack of air conditioning or failing air conditioning.

And this bill just made sense. For decades, governments have required landlords to provide heat during winter months. When tenants don't have work in heat, unfortunately tenants perish in the cold. So in a world with climate change and rapidly increasing temperatures year after year, we believe we need to require air conditioning as well. Montgomery County isn't the only one doing this. Arizona law considers air conditioning an essential service, so your landlord has to fix it if it breaks. And Dallas mandates refrigerated air from April to October. But in most places, it's not required, St. Louis included, and someone has to fill in the gaps. Good morning.

It's morning, late in August. Here's Shayla Farsan again from St. Louis Public Radio. I've been driving around St. Louis with a team of air conditioning installers from a nonprofit called Energy Care. It's just past 10 a.m. when we pull up in Jennings, a suburb of North St. Louis. The sun beats down on a little brick house with a peaked roof. Inside, 70-year-old Gloria Van has two fans running on full blast. She's glad to see the techs, and we talk while they work. This heat has really made it hard.

It's been a really, really hot summer. Yes. And at our age, by the time we walk from my door to the car, it was time to pass up. Keeping the house cool is a full-time job for Gloria and her husband David. She tells me about all the ways they've changed their lives and schedules just to work around the heat. Cooking only in the morning or very late at night. baking almost never and constantly moving fans all day from room to room. She says they did have two window air conditioners, one for the bedroom, the other for the living room.

But this summer, one broke. The other one started leaking all over the floor. That's when Gloria heard about energy care. It's one of a handful of nonprofits that helps low-income and elderly people in St. Louis pay for their utility bills. She asked them if they did repairs. They said, no, we'll give you a brand new air conditioner, or two if you want. I told her, I said, well, I don't really want to overdo it. You didn't want to ask her two months. No, right. Right.

And she said, no, we'll come. And we'll put two in. I said, thank you, Jesus for God's. It was disgusting. It takes about 20 minutes to install two air conditioners in Gloria and David Vann's home. As the nonprofit workers pack up their tools and paperwork, Gloria pauses in front of the humming little air conditioner and holds out her palm. Oh, wow, you can feel that cool coming off of it.

For now, the vans can relax just a little, knowing they won't have to wake up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, or work so hard to keep the house cool. Right, right on. Take care now. By the end of the season, energy care will have installed more than 200 air conditioners in St. Louis. But cooling this city is an uphill battle. Most St. Louis homes are like pizza ovens. They're made of brick. And that means once they get hot, they stay hot. And they're old.

Most were built before 1939. Sometimes the only way to survive the heat is to get outside. So why did you guys decide to come to the pool today? Because it was hot and it's not very hot. On a boiling hot August afternoon, I had to the Fairground Park swimming pool. J.C. and Thalia Uneze and their cousin, Skyler Wilson, were there that day, cooling off. Main advantages of the pool, they say, it's spacious and clean.

You don't really see a lot of bugs, which we like that there's no bugs. Talia, who's 15, and enjoying this remarkably bug-free pool, says they have to keep their air conditioner running all day, but the house is still warm. Our aunt that just turned 85, that house was newly built when she moved into it. So that was like, I think maybe the 1930s or something. So it's like what she said, there's cracks everywhere. So the heat comes in no matter what. I'm on the third story and I have my own air conditioner there that I keep on all day. This pool is actually in the zip code where energy care installs the most air conditioners.

at the far northern tip of the city. Like other U.S. cities, there's a stark racial and economic divide in St. Louis. It's cut in half by a street known as Del Mar Boulevard. North of Del Mar, neighborhoods are predominantly black and lower income. The south side is mostly white, more affluent. People in some of these south side neighborhoods live up to 14 years longer, on average, the north city residents. Myesha Johnson is an environmental justice advocate in St. Louis,

and she says some neighborhoods even feel hotter than others. I noticed that the closer we are to the river seems to be a little hotter. I never understood that. I thought it would be the other way around. And that's where most of the black and brown communities are. There's some research backing this up. In 2018, a master student in Geography, used satellite data to calculate land surface temperatures in St. Louis and found a distinct band of heat along the Mississippi River and the downtown corridor. And it's not just St. Louis.

This is a pattern. Across the U.S., lower-income neighborhoods and places with more people of color are often hotter than wealthier, whiter ones. A lot of that has to do with lack of trees and green spaces. also large roads and building complexes that retain a lot of heat. One study found that historically redlined neighborhoods are on average five degrees warmer. Maisha is worried the heat's only getting worse. It's never been that hot that we can think of. Each year it gets hotter and hotter and the season lasts longer. Climate change will affect regions of the U.S. in different ways.

In Florida, sea levels will rise. California will get drier. And Missouri will get a lot hotter. When you look at the cities that will heat up the most in the next few decades, St. Louis and its suburbs are right at the top. Getting people a few more window air conditioners helps right now. It could even save their lives. But in the long run, Maisha says it won't be enough.

As organizations, we can't keep saying, oh, this is what you need, this banday will help. Air conditioning, for all its life-saving, technological wonder, might not be the answer. So remember, air conditioning works by taking the heat from inside and dumping it outside, which means that as you're cooling down, your neighbors, your block, your city, it's actually getting hotter. There was one study looking at Phoenix that estimated all the heat dumped out by air conditioners was adding up to an extra two degrees in some areas. And then there's the fact that air conditioning in America uses so much energy.

Even though newer individual air conditioners can be pretty efficient, in the U.S., all that electricity costs about $29 billion a year. And that's just for home air conditioning. The good news is, at least the refrigerants being used, are less harmful. Remember in the 80s when everyone was worried about CFCs, the chloroflorocarbons, like Frion, which was used as an aerosol propellant and as a refrigerant, Not only did CFCs help carve a hole in the ozone layer, they're also very potent greenhouse gases. So they got phased out, replaced with less harmful alternatives.

The bad news is most of the electricity used to power air conditioners comes from fossil fuels. So they're still contributing to climate change. And then there are all the other air conditioners, like in cars running on gasoline, using somewhere from 7 to 10 billion gallons of it each year. Fortunately, air conditioners are not the only way to stay cool. After all, humans existed a long time before AC, and we came up with some very clever ways to keep buildings cold. Things we might take for granted now. Like just courtyards.

They provide both lots of cross-ventilation and shading. Or kind of a similar concept, the Dog Trot House. Used to be pretty common in Appalachia. Basically, a house with a big hole right down the middle that let air pass through. Or in truly extreme heat, there's just living underground. The world had been through a trial by fire. You might recognize Cuber P.D. from post-apocalyptic movies like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, if you caught that. It's a mining town in the Australian Outback. It's famous for its underground motels, churches, and homes.

And yeah, it kind of looks like the end of civilization. But living underground, it does keep you cool. So we've got living underground, courtyards, dog-trot houses, but best of all is the centuries-old technique of beaming your heat into space. It was mostly in Iran, as far as we can tell, about three to 500 years ago. Ashwat Rahman is a professor of material science and engineering at UCLA and a co-founder of sky-cool systems. And he says, in Iran's ice houses, these places where they made and stored ice, they took advantage of a strange phenomenon. So basically they had a thin, flat pool of water. And they would be doing this in the winter, so it's not super warm to begin with.

But even though the air temperature almost never got to freezing, that thin sheet of water, if it was exposed to the sky sufficiently, it would freeze overnight. That's because of radiative cooling. It's actually something that all materials do naturally. It's a basic property of nature that if you're at a particular temperature, you as a material will emit or radiate heat away, and the wavelengths at which you radiate that heat away

will depend on your temperature. So that's what you see on night vision cameras, all the infrared radiating off of things. The hotter they are, the brighter they glow. And what happens when you put something out on a very clear night is it can radiate out so much heat that it actually cools down, maybe even freezes. So nine years ago, Ashwa,

was a PhD student when he learned about this. I was very curious about this because it sounded pretty amazing. It's passive cooling that you don't need to do anything. All you need to do is have something outside exposed to the sky and it cools down. It's almost too good to be true. So it was very perplexing. Why hadn't this been developed further? Why weren't we using this everywhere?

One of the problems was that this effect was only happening at night. Because during the day, yes, you are still emitting heat as infrared. but it's totally canceled out by all the heat you're getting from the sun and your surroundings. So when we began working on it, we asked, well, can we enable this effect during the daytime as well? And if we could enable it during the day, that would be potentially extremely exciting because then you could achieve the same kind of passive cooling effect, but during the hottest hours of the day when we need air conditioners and refrigerators the most. What Ashwath and his team ended up developing was a little more sophisticated than a pool of water.

something that was really good at cooling down and basically counteracting the whole greenhouse gas effect. So greenhouse gases. Think of them as a big invisible blanket over our planet. We send out heat as infrared radiation. Our blanket catches it, sends it back down, keeps us nice and snug, sometimes a little too snug. But the blanket doesn't catch everything. So if you emit heat at just the right frequencies of infrared, it can blow right past the blanket. and into space. So Ashwath and his team designed these films down to their nanostructure so that they were very good at two things.

First, they were really good mirrors. They were really good at reflecting away sunlight. And second, they radiated their heat away at very particular frequencies of infrared radiation, frequencies that could slip right past the greenhouse gases. And it worked. Like, usually, if you put something out in the sun, it gets hotter, right?

But Ashwatt's material, it got colder. So it's really counterintuitive. And the first few times I would just touch it, just to check that it was actually working, which of course ruins the experiment because you have to start it all over. So if you think about this, it solves a major problem that air conditioners have.

Instead of dumping the heat outside, making your surroundings hotter, you send it to space, technically cooling down the earth ever so slightly. And Ashwat's not the only one working on this kind of thing. You might have seen recent news about super white paint. So instead of a film, it's actually a paint, and you could paint it on, say, rooftops to cool them down.

All of this gives me these nightmarish sci-fi visions where we install these materials everywhere and accidentally freeze the planet. I mean, people have very seriously talked about putting mirrors out in space. You know, if you put it far enough away and it's substantially large, it can actually create a bit of a shadow. It's like the Simpsons episode, Mr. Burns does that. But we're obviously nowhere near that.

And right now, Ashwatt's company Sky Cool, they're not even trying to replace air conditioning. They're actually using these materials to cool down air conditioners, so they don't have to work quite so hard. Everyone I spoke to was emphatic that we will absolutely need air conditioning, no matter what, especially as the climate warms. But if we're strategic about it, if we combine reflective materials with the basics,

like more tree cover, designing buildings that shade themselves and naturally ventilate, then maybe, even though we'll still use air conditioning, we'll need a whole lot less. The old saying, everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it, is not quite true. Heating and air conditioning engineers have done plenty about the weather. The National Academy of Sciences lists air conditioning as one of the ten greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century. And it's true, our world would be unrecognizable without it. It's the big things, the skyscrapers, the movie theaters, the data centers. Think about computers without air conditioning.

But it's also that little drip on your head out of nowhere on a clear sunny day, or that ongoing battle with your office mates about whether it's too cold or too hot, and whether anything under 70 Fahrenheit is a sexist temperature. And it's also the hum, and the rattle of your ancient window unit that's lulling you to sleep on a hot summer night. In August, a period of intense heat gripped the city of St. Louis. Temperatures shot way up all the way to the mid to upper 90s. We were all ants under a magnifying glass, running from our air-conditioned cars to our homes.

But then one Wednesday. So I just came outside and I'm standing on my porch. in South St. Louis and it is an absolute downpour out here. I actually have to move because I'm starting to get a little wet. Just constant lightning and thunder and cicadas screaming. This is kind of our summertime soundtrack here. We'll get these, there you go. We'll just see these kind of incredible downpours in this city.

When the heat breaks, we'll have really, really hot days and then suddenly this one guy just opens up, and that's what's happening right now. We had a couple days of relief after that storm. We could come out of hiding, walk around outside again. And then less than two weeks later, the heat was back, worse than before. Because for all of our tricks and technologies, our refrigerants and pumps and compressors, all we're really doing is buffering ourselves from the outside world, giving ourselves a little bit of relief until nature decides to give us a break. Air conditioning. It provides comfort. It saved countless people. But at the end of the day, it's weather that rules our lives.

This story was a collaboration of Science Friday and St. Louis Public Radio. It was produced by me, Ella Fetter. And me, Shayla Farsan. With production help from... Me, Johanna Mayer. All of our music and sound design is by... Me, D. Petershmidt. We had research and fact-checking help from...

Me, Lauren Young. And Charles Berquist was the voice of refrigeration engineers from 1904. Special thanks to Andrew Aline for explaining to us how air conditioners work. And to Salman Craig and Komalianity for talking to us about cool building and city design. And to historian Adam Kloppy, who taught us all about the 1904 World's Fair. If you want to learn more about air conditioners, we had a great time reading Salvatore Basel's book, cool how air conditioning changed everything. We also found Gail Cooper's Air Conditioning America very illuminating. We've got more information and links up at Science Friday.com slash AC.

After the break, remembering the life and work of SETI pioneer Frank Drake. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Last week, the world lost an out-of-this-world astronomer who spent his career searching for intelligent life. out in the cosmos. Not only did Dr. Frank Drake create a formula to calculate the odds of finding intelligent life, the Drake equation, but he was the first to methodically search using radio telescopes. And with Carl Sagan, Andrian, and others, he designed a golden phonograph record, placed on two Voyager space probes that would leave our solar system into interstellar space, a physical signpost to any intelligent life announcing our existence.

Drake was a frequent guest on this program, and I'd like to play for you some excerpts, beginning with the time in 2010, when he talked about his first attempt to search for life out there using a radio telescope in 1960 called Project Asma. Well, I had been fascinated with the idea that there was intelligent life in space for many, many years at that point, and I had constantly been looking for ways by reasonable ways, by which we might find it. And nothing was reasonable until about 1957, when we were building the first large radio telescopes

in this country, and some very much improved, more sensitive radio receivers had been invented. And if one just did the calculations of the strength of signal that could be detected with the combination of the new telescope and the radio receiver, it turned out to be a signal no stronger

than we were then ourselves, transmitting into space. And so it seemed reasonable to search because we didn't have to assume some super civilization or something like that. They just had to be like us and we could find them. And so we proceeded. In fact, what you're talking about, if I remember correctly, are signals that escape our own broadcasts. I think famous Carl Sagan worked with you, used to talk about I Love Lucy escaping out into space and people would be, well, not judging us by what we watched on television, but at least tuning in on our signals, and that's the kind of stuff you were looking for?

That's the kind of stuff, although that stuff is not as easy to detect as some other things, such as our radar systems. That's what we could have detected back in 1960. Today, we still are not able to detect our own television broadcast, but a civilization slightly more advanced than us could do that. And you created an equation back then, which still, bears your name that's used to estimate the potential number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy, the Milky Way, the Frank, known as the Frank Drake equation.

Yes, it's an equation which gives us an estimate of the number of detectable civilizations there are in our galaxy, and what it does is to quantify all of our understanding about the history of a planetary system, using our own system as a model, how planets form, what the variety of planets might be in a system, what planets might give rise to life, and then taking to account the probability that life arises and intelligence arises and actually a detectable technology is developed. A crucial factor in it is the length of time that a civilization remains detectable. We have been detectable for about 50 years, but that's one of the great unknowns, which means that we can really use this equation only as a very crude guide as to how difficult our search is.

But it's a start. Frank Drake, there were people who had suggested years ago that we should not only be listening, but instead of just sending out our radar signals, we should be sending out our own coded intelligence signals. What's your view on that? Well, I have a view on it. Those things are suggested because it seems only fair. If we're searching for signals from them, we should be reciprocating by sending signals to them. But to me, it isn't necessary because we already send a multitude of signals in the form of our television, our radar signals and such.

We have made our presence known. The Earth is surrounded by a huge shell full of our signals, which stretches out more than 50 light years now. Thousands of stars have received our television programs, our radar signals and such. and such. And for us to transmit something in addition to this would be simply adding a little bit of frosting on an already very large cake. And I think our resources are better spent in searching than in frosting a cake. And more than that, we have been in a way bamboozled by science fiction. Science fiction is wonderful. It excites our imagination. But if you get serious about it and just look into the realities of what it takes to travel to another star, to exploit its research,

sources, you find out that we, there is nothing we have that is worth the cost that it would take to go get it and take it home. And so exploiting other civilizations, which works well on Earth, does not work in the cosmos because the great distances between the stars creates a cosmic quarantine. We cannot harm each other, but we can help each other. Surely you must have put some thought to what other life might look like. Right. Well, there are things you can say about that. One thing is that they will not be identical to us. The course of evolution, the various steps which led to our exact anatomy, physiology, will not be repeated.

On the other hand, I like to say, we're a good design, and so a lot of them may resemble us. Standing upright is very useful because you have limbs free to manipulate tools, which is necessary if you're to have technology. The head needs to be on top for self-defense. to gather food and such. The eyes need to be in the head so that there's a short nerve pathway to the brain. And so basically, we're an optimized design for a creature that lives on a planet like the Earth.

Back in 1977, I had just finished interviewing Carl Sagan about his latest book. We walked back to my office to chat and we sat down. He asked me what projects I was working on. I mentioned in passing that I was collecting natural sounds like thunder and rain and I even got an earthquake. Dr. Sagan went quiet for a second and asked if I could close the door. He then went on to describe a project he was working on, creating a record like a vinyl LP, but this one would be gold-plated. It would contain sounds

of Earth and be placed on the Voyager spacecraft that would soon be launched and find their way out of our solar system. And could I send whatever sounds I have? had, send a copy of my tape to Annie, he said. Annie is, of course, Andrian, who with Dr. Frank Drake, Carl Sagan, and a small team of artists and scientists were rushing to create this golden record in time for the launch of the two spacecraft later that year, 1977. And after jaunce passed Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, the voyagers would go where no spacecraft had gone before to interstellar space.

NASA asked would Sagan and his team create a message to send to the stars for anybody who or anything that might be able to pick up that record? The result of that question is one of the most storied objects in space history, the golden record, part-time capsule, part interstellar greeting. The record contains the story of Earth and of us, and among its contents are a diagram of DNA, a stellar map of Earth's position in the cosmos, and a music. of Louis Armstrong, and also the sound of a kiss. In 2016, Frank Drake returned to the show to talk about the genesis of the record and the photos and the sounds on the disc. The roots of this go back before the record

to a previous thing we sent into space, which was a plaque on the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft. NASA asked Carl, at the time those were about to be launched, think of a possibility of putting a message on it. And he came to me and we talked about it. We were colleagues all the time in those days. And I suggested we do a plaque with certain things drawn on it,

including a map using pulsars to show the location of the Earth with respect to other places in the galaxy. The result was that plaque, and it was a very simple thing with a few, crude sketches of human beings on it and other things. But that created a great deal of interest. So a year or two later, when it came time to launch the Voyagers, NASA said, hey, we want to do that again. And they went back to Carl and said, well, can you put a message on the Voyagers? Well, we happened to be vacationing together at the time in Hawaii.

And we sat down and thought about, well, what should we do? Should we send another plaque? And I suggested that a better thing would be a phonograph record because it could contain much more information as well as sounds and music and good images. So that is how it started. And from that, grew the project to create the record. Frank Drake, many people might not realize that there are pictures on this record, 116 of them. How do you put pictures on a phonograph record? Well, you take the picture and scan it with a TV camera.

A TV camera turns a picture into a long oscillating waveform, which is what is sent to the TV set. You can do the same thing with sound. Sound is done in the same way as pictures are. And so the idea was to take the pictures and put them into the form of a TV transmission and record that on the golden record. My original calculation told me, like, we could only put about 10 pictures. We could only fit that many on the record in addition to all the music and other things. But turned out that was wrong. We could put a total of about 112.

And so we had the goal of picking the 112 pictures which best depicted life on Earth, our culture, our technology, our physiology, and all of that. That's not many pictures. So it was a very hard task to do. In addition, NASA asked us to add five more pictures, which were political. surprisingly, they were a list of the members of the congressional committees in the House and Senate who appropriate money to NASA. And we were to put on those pictures with the names in English text. And of course, we've always wondered ever since, what are the extraterrestrials going to make of that? Remembering the life and work of astronomer Frank Drake on Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

We're remembering SETI pioneer Frank Drake through past conversations on the show. This one from 2016. We'll pick up where Frank Drake has trouble with NASA agreeing to put parts of the human body on their golden disc. Now, you got a little pushback. You've got pictures of our anatomy. on the plaque, on the record, but you had a little bit of trouble in getting the pictures you really wanted

to put on there. You had to settle for something else, right? Oh, that's right. There were some very interesting challenges put to us, which was mainly not to offend anybody. So we started out wanting to give a totally realistic and comprehensive picture of life on Earth and of us, including all our physical.

physiology, NASA got very nervous because that implied we were going to have pictures of naked people and parts of naked people on the record, and they knew that could create a big public outroar. So we were instructed to have no nudity on the record, and also not to have any picture which depicted a religion, because they realized that putting any religion was going to antagonize people of other religions who, picture are not included. So there were several taboos, religion, naked people. We tried, we did in fact find what we thought was an acceptable picture of a naked human. It was a picture of a pregnant woman, but even that was not allowed by NASA. And the other thing they told us was that when we put in the detailed pictures of the human anatomy, all the various parts of our body, which there are about 12 pictures. We came to the pictures of genitals, and they told us, you may not construct a special

picture for use on the record. You've got to take a picture out of a textbook, because that way NASA can't be blamed for transmitting pictures of nudity to the universe. They just didn't want smut to the universe, as some people were accusing them of doing. And so we took a picture out of a textbook and made that the picture, which shows that part of human anatomy. And I've always thought that was going to be kind of a puzzle to the extraterrestrials too, because all the parts on the picture are labeled in English text. And, of course, they won't know what that means.

And this will be one of the great challenges to their linguists to figure all this out. Do you have any idea of what the chances of any life form discovering? The Voyager. I mean, it's already entered American culture. Isn't it, isn't part of one of the Star Trek movies, the Viger, and someone picks it up and makes a god out of it? The first Star Trek movie was about the discovery of the record. That's the basis of the whole movie. So, yes, it's already played a role in the construction of movies. the chances of it ever being captured are very small, to be honest. It's moving at about 10 kilometers a second. It's going to take it hundreds of thousands of years to approach another star, and it will not approach it very closely.

So it will only be a civilization with very sophisticated equipment, powerful radars that might find this and perhaps go out and capture it and explore what's on it. So in a way, it's our goodbye message to the universe. This is going to persist as a readable, decipherable record of us for literally billions of years. Beyond the time when our sun expands and swallows up the earth, it's going to last beyond the lifetime of mankind as we know it. now. So in a way, it's our going away message. At the same time, it is a message to us in that it tells us what we might find, what might come to our system either in the form of a record

or in the form of a radio message. It just alerts us to the fact that message is meaningful messages describing other worlds and the creatures on them can be sent across the stars between the stars in a form which can be captured and understood. Astronomer Dr. Frank Drake, dead at the age of 92. Condolences to his family and friends. If you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Of course, you can say hi to us all week on social media,

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or email us the old-fashioned way. SciFri at Science Friday. com. Send feedback. Tell us what you'd like us to cover. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.