Something You Should Know - How to Handle Difficult Moments and Emotions & Could an Asteroid Destroy the Earth?

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

Ever worry that an elevator you are in will somehow come loose and drop? Or that a big spider will come after you and bite you? This episode begins with some insight into these and other common worries and whether or not that could likely happen. https://www.realsimple.com/work-life/life-strategies/everyday-dangers-not-to-worry-about How well do you handle difficult emotions that come your way? Do you try hard to push them aside and focus on the positive or do you confront those tough emotions head-on? Harvard Medical School Psychologist Susan David joins me to discuss difficult emotions that life certainly brings and how best to experience and deal with them. Susan is author of the book Emotional Agility (https://amzn.to/3lbAiaf) as well as host of the podcast “Checking in with Susan David” (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1504596643). You can also take her Emotional Agility Quiz at https://www.susandavid.com/#ea-quiz How could brushing your teeth and flossing impact how well your brain works? Listen as I reveal some interesting research that will have you brushing and flossing good tonight! https://www.ameritasinsight.com/wellness/health-and-wellness/dental-health-may-affect-mental-health Did you know that rocks from outer space are hitting the earth all the time? Tons and tons of rocks! What would happen if a big asteroid hits the earth – could it wipe us all out? Here to discuss that and explain the difference between meteors, meteorites and asteroids and why they are important is Tim Gregory. He is a is nuclear chemist and former research scientist at the British Geological Survey and author of the book Meteorite: How Stones from Outer Space Made Our World (https://amzn.to/3kbfrCD Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know is all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future.

Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, wherever you get me wrong. I'm not anti-happiness. I like being happy. But what happens when we push aside difficult emotions in the service of forced or false positivity

is there is a real psychological cost. Also, how your dental health can affect your mental health and asteroids and meteors. Could they collide with the Earth and cause catastrophe? After all, a lot of meteors come our way. Every year, about 40,000 tons of rock makes it to the Earth's surface. And in fact, most of that actually ends up falling into the ocean. It's only in a few places that we find meteorites. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared.

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And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts.

Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. I imagine you have a lot of things to worry about. So let me start by taking some of those things off your plate, minor though they may be.

First of all, have you ever been in an elevator and it stops at your floor and it bounces around and feels like it's just going to plummet down the whole shaft? Well, that's one thing you can stop worrying about. The elevator won't fall. Elevators just don't. There are far too many fail-safes in place. You ever worry that you'll be struck by lightning if you carry an umbrella in a storm? Well, metal does not attract lightning.

So if you get struck, it's because you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it has nothing to do with what you're holding in your hand. Have you ever been on a train platform and you're waiting for the train and you think, well, what if some crazy person runs up to me and pushes me on the tracks and kills me? Well, yeah, that never really happens. In fact, in 2009, they surveyed this and they found that out of 34 million passenger train trips, only 17 people died, including people who fell by accident. A train platform is actually a very safe place to be. You ever have a big hairy spider on the wall

and you think it's going to jump on you? Well, spiders don't jump. They crawl, except for maybe one or two species that live in the forest. But if a spider is in your house, he's not jumping. Spiders are never inclined to come after people. And that is something you should know. So here's an interesting way to look at your life.

You live your life as a series of experiences and interactions with others. And while that's going on, your mind is interpreting all of these experiences and interactions. And that's how your life goes. Some people seem to navigate all of that pretty well. Others of us, less so, because our emotions and the things we tell ourselves and our interpretation of what's happening to us gets in the way. The people who do this really well have what you might call emotional agility. They are able to handle what comes at them and move on.

And when you look at your life, I think there are a lot of us who wish we were more agile, that we had more emotional agility. And perhaps we can have more emotional agility. Renowned psychologist Susan David has studied this thoroughly. Susan is an award-winning psychologist at Harvard Medical School. She is a speaker and a podcast host. She hosts a TED podcast called Checking In with Susan David, and she is author of a very successful book on this topic called Emotional Agility. Hi, Susan. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, I'm delighted to be here today.

So let's start by explaining what it means to have emotional agility. Emotional agility at its most fundamental level is the psychological skills that we need to be healthy with ourselves. The way we deal with our thoughts, our emotions, and our stories so that we can thrive in a complex world. And emotional agility has a number of components to it. The first is the ability to be compassionate with yourself and your emotional experience. The second is the ability to be curious so that you can learn from what your emotions or stories are telling you about your needs and your values.

And then the third is emotional agility is the ability to bring about these kinds of changes for yourself on the ground. And so that often requires courage. Are most of us emotionally agile or could most of us use a little work? So that's a great question, Mike. What we know is in times of complexity, people actually have a very predictable outcome, which is that when the world is complex and changing around us as it is, we tend to become much more narrow and much more rigid. And so what you find more and more is people locked down into rigid denial. They get victimized by their Twitter feed. We get hooked on being right or wrong. And so emotional agility are skills that we can all learn, but we know that in very particular contexts, they are stymied and we need to draw

on more of ourselves so that we can bring the best of ourselves forward. And often you hear that the way to bring the best of ourselves forward is to focus on the positive, to not dwell in the negative and all your problems, but to be grateful for what you have and build on that. And I'll give you an example of this. You know, the idea that we should just think positive or the idea that happy thoughts all that matter. What that basically does is it can lead us into situations where we get caught off guard by our difficult emotions, because often what we've been doing is we've been pushing them aside. We've been saying, you know, I shouldn't be stressed. I shouldn't be feeling lonely. You know, yes, there's a pandemic, but at least I've still got

a job. And, you know, so you discount your experience. And when you do this, you aren't actually able to use your emotions as they were intended, which is to help you to understand your needs and your values and to adapt. And so what's really fascinating is I think more than ever, we have this bias in our society against difficult emotions. And yet, it's our capacity with these difficult emotions that actually helps us to adapt in times of complexity and change. Well, that seems like a fine line to me because, yeah, you need your emotions, your difficult emotions, but some people tend to wallow in it. And, you know, there is something to be said for looking at the bright

side and being happy. So, Mark, don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-happiness. I'm a very happy person. I like being happy. I once edited a 90-chapter handbook on happiness. But what happens when we push aside difficult emotions in the service of forced or false positivity is there is a real psychological cost. The first is we aren't actually developing skills to deal with the world as it is, you know, not as we wish it to be. The second is we know that people who have a goal about, I've just got to be positive, I've just got to be happy, actually become less happy over time. Because often that person is saying things like, I'm bored in my job, but at least I've got a job. And then five years later, they're still bored in their job, but at least they've got a job. And what they haven't been doing is saying, gee, I'm bored. What is this boredom signposting?

It's signposting that I need greater levels of learning and growth. How can I actually access that? So it's not that I'm anti-happiness, but what I am is really speaking out about this idea that there's good and bad emotions, positive and negative, and that as human beings, we should be positive all the time. You know, there is extraordinary power in showing up to our difficulty motions and developing skills around those difficulty motions, because that's what actually helps us to adapt to the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. So where's the balance? Where's the, I mean, if you're going through a tough time, do you just

sit and dwell on the tough time? And I know you're going to say, no, I'm not saying dwell. But it seems like you need to also get a break and try to get some perspective on the world. Yes. So there's some very, very important emotional agility strategies. The first is often when people are experiencing difficult emotions, what I found is that around a third of us firstly push aside these difficult emotions. So they'll say things like, I've just got to be positive, or I've just got to get on with it. And I call this bottling. And often people are doing this with really good intentions, which is they're busy

and they're trying to get on with life or they don't want to dwell. The opposite is what I call brooding. Brooding is when people get stuck in their difficult experience and they focus in on those. And it's almost like bottling is you carrying a very heavy load of emotional books, but you're carrying it very far away from you. What we know is that at some point you will likely drop the books. And that comes out as, you know, the snide comment at the Thanksgiving dinner table, being caught off guard when suddenly things don't happen as you expect. In other words, you lose your job or you get a diagnosis that brings you to your knees. So bottling we know doesn't work, but of course, as you highlight here,

brooding doesn't either. Brooding is where you are holding those emotion books so close to you that you are unable to see the world, to look into the eyes of your child, and to see the trees and to be in life. And so neither bottling nor brooding work. And this is where emotional agility is such a critical skill set. It's firstly about doing away with this idea that there's good and bad emotions, or I shouldn't feel feel this or I should feel that. And it's instead about listeners facing into this is what I do feel. And, you know, Mike, I recall when I was young, when I was around 15 years old, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And I recall my mother telling me to go and say goodbye to him the day

that he died. And then the blur after his death, the months and days and experiences of really trying to hold it together. This feeling of, oh, I'm okay. When anyone asked me, I'm okay, I'm okay. I became the master of being okay. But in truth, we were struggling as a family and I was struggling individually. And I recall this English teacher when I was around 15 years old, handing out these blank notebooks. And she said, write, tell the truth, write like no one is reading. And that simple act was revolutionary for me. It actually shaped my entire life and my career as a psychologist and an emotions researcher, because I was invited to move away from this narrative of, I'm okay, let's just be positive, into the space of showing up to the reality of my experience. And this is not now getting stuck in the reality,

it's rather showing up to it. And what do I mean by that? What I mean is firstly, doing away, as I mentioned, with this idea of, I can't feel, I shouldn't feel, and instead showing up to I do feel. And with that, there is an enormous amount of self-compassion that becomes necessary because, of course, we live in a world that would have us believe that we are in a never-ending Ironman or Ironwoman competition, where being kind to yourself is about being so-called weak or lazy or dishonest. But Mike, what we know is that when people are kind to themselves, when they have their own back, it actually creates a space that allows them then to take risks, be more honest, and to forge forward. And so compassion is actually a

really important part of psychological health and well-being. So in a very practical way, how do you do that? So one way that we can get unstuck in, you know, the experience of our emotions is by labeling our emotions effectively. Often we use labels, Mike, like, you know, I'm stressed. But there's a world of difference between stressed and disappointed or stressed and exhausted. And when we label our emotion more accurately, it allows us to understand the cause of the emotion and actually what we need to do in relation to that emotion. So that's one strategy that can help us to get unstuck. And there are others too. Well, that's a good one because sometimes I think that. I think

I'm stressed, but I'm really not stressed. Maybe I'm just tired or maybe I am disappointed, but I don't think I know that at the time. I think maybe I can see that later. Yeah. And I think this is why this practice of really recognizing that often when we are or two other options? What it can help you to do is to get more granular with that emotion. And that then helps you ahead of time to actually understand what it is you need to do so that you're not at the point where you completely burnt out, but rather in the space of thinking, gee, I need a little bit of time to myself or gee, I've got to have this really difficult conversation, and this is this thing that I'm calling stress.

We're discussing how we all handle our emotions in life, the good ones and the bad ones. And my guest is Susan David. She is author of the book Emotional Agility. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining,

a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest.

Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices,

and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back. And in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Susan, I want to talk about when life isn't all bad or all good, and you're not necessarily dealing with some big huge emotional issue but there are people who for example would go on a vacation and they're having a great time

and then they get a waiter at lunch who's a jerk and that's all they can talk about that's ruined their vacation and somebody might listen to you and hear you say, well, you need to, you know, focus on and appreciate the emotions that you're feeling. Others might say, you know what? It's one moment in an otherwise wonderful vacation. Let's not stop and examine it. Let's just get over it. Move on. Don't let it bother you.

Be happy. And so your thoughts on that? Rigidity is when we have normal thoughts, emotions, experiences. So a thought might be, gee, the vacation's ruined. An emotion might be an emotion of stress or anger, grief, or an experience or story. Some of our stories were written on our mental chalkboards when we were five years old about whether we're creative, what kind of love we deserve, what kind of life we deserve. And these thoughts, emotions, and stories are actually normal. They're normal human experiences. But when we are rigid, what is rigidity? It's basically defined by

treating these thoughts, emotions, and stories as fact. I'm being undermined, therefore I'm going to shut down. We believe something and it becomes the coloring of everything. And so emotional agility is the skills when we show up to that emotion or that thought with compassion and say, gee, it kind of sucked that I was hoping for this beautiful celebratory dinner on vacation and we had this awful waiter and that sucked. And you show up to that in a way that's kind of compassionate with yourself. What it allows you to do is to move on. And so there are these, you know, very important skills of emotional agility that allow your emotions to have a place in the world, but not to be dominating your world. Because of course, our emotions are data, but they're not directives.

And it's these kinds of skills in emotional agility that enable us to do this. One example being the one that I gave earlier, which is this accurate labeling of the emotion. I'm not angry with the waiter. I'm actually disappointed because I was hoping for a special connection with my spouse at the dinner table. And that allows you then to say to yourself, okay, how can I bring myself with connection to this next opportunity that we have on vacation? As I think about it, if I'm upset with the waiter, if I show up to that emotion and focus on it for a moment, it makes it a bigger deal. It's better to just ignore it, just forget about it.

Yeah, and I think that what we're doing is we're choosing one example, which is a vacation. And really what I'm talking about here is our tendency to deal with our difficulty motions in a particular way. Of course, you know, if I'm going into a job interview and I've just had a fight with my spouse, I'm not going to be focusing on the fight with my spouse in the job interview because that's not going to be helpful. At that particular moment in time, I might very well want to compartmentalize and

push aside the difficulty motion. There's nothing wrong with the occasional bottling or brooding. What is the counterpoint to that is that we know when we look at the psychological research of what it is that enables greater levels of resilience and greater levels of effective relationship, what we find is that when people have a tendency to bottle their difficult emotions, the way that they often come across to others is being very standoffish, lacking vulnerability. We even know that leaders who are upset, say, with their team and bottle their emotion, I'm just not going to talk about it. I'm going to ignore it.

We know that the team's blood pressure increases, which is astounding. The team doesn't even know that the leader is bottling emotions. We know there's an emotional cost. And we know that people who, as a tendency, bottle their emotions emotions actually over time have lower levels of well-being. So what's the skill? What's the way to do this? Because it's fine to sit and talk about this dispassionately and disconnected from an event and it all sounds perfectly great, but in the moment when you're upset or when there's something going wrong, it's very hard to sit back and go, well, you know, Susan said what I should really do. How do you engage this when you're feeling flooded? and give bad news to a patient's family. One of the ways that they can ground themselves in that heightened emotion

and move away from their heads into their hearts is simply by touch. And what I mean by touch is as tactile human beings, put your hand to your chest when you are feeling heightened and stressed is a very powerful way, given that human beings are so tactile, of reminding yourself that you are here and putting your feet on the ground, breathing. These are things that we can access very quickly, but when we live in a world that so often feels like it's in our head, we forget to do this. And so this is one way that we can ground ourselves, that we can enter into the moment away from a difficult emotion.

Another way that we can do this is by starting to create some separation between us and our emotion. And, Mark, one example is if you hear yourself saying something like, I am sad, I'm sad, I'm so angry, I am angry. You can 100% of me is the emotion. I am the emotion. But it's almost like, in that case, the emotion is like a cloud in the sky. You know, you are the cloud. But Mike, you know, we on the cloud, we are the sky. And so one way we can create that space is by instead of saying, I am angry, I am being undermined, is to notice the thought emotional story for what it is. It's a thought, an emotion, a story. It's not a fact. So I'm noticing a feeling of anger. I'm noticing that this is the thought that I'm being undermined. Now, this might sound

like a linguistic hack, but actually what it is doing is it is creating critical linguistic and therefore psychological space between you and the emotion so that you are able to bring other parts of yourself forward. You know, your wise, kind, compassionate values connect itself. Well, I like this message. You know, this idea of being compassionate towards yourself just seems to make so much sense because we are so hard on ourselves all the time, it seems. Somebody said, you know, if a friend treated you the way you treat yourself inside your head, they wouldn't be your friend. And yet we're so hard on ourselves.

And giving ourselves a break seems like that would feel really good. We've all had that experience, Mike, of being in a restaurant and you see a little child running off and exploring. And then the child looks back and sees the parents or caregivers there and kind of giggles and then runs off and explores more. You know, what's really going on there, what's happening is the child knows that there is a safe base. The child knows that if it runs into issues, that it will be protected. And it's knowing that the child has a safe base that actually allows the child then to explore and learn and be curious. And it's the same applied to ourselves. There is a child in every one of us. And when we have our own back, it allows us to, instead of fighting with whether we should or shouldn't feel something, instead to say, this is what I do feel and I can be kind to it and I can be kind to myself.

And that in turn then allows us the capacity to explore and to learn and to love. Excellent. Well said. And we'll leave it there. Susan David has been my guest. She's an award-winning psychologist at Harvard Medical School, and the name of her book is Emotional Agility. You'll find a link to that book and to her website in the show notes. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown.

I'm Megan the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me,

we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. From time to time, you hear in the news that perhaps an asteroid is coming very close to the Earth, or could hit the Earth and cause all kinds of problems, or that meteors could hit the Earth because, well, because space seems to be loaded with all these rocks and debris flying around.

And certainly there have been a lot of movies and TV shows that contemplate the possibility of what would happen if asteroids or meteors hit the Earth. So what are these things? Is there really a danger of some huge calamity should the Earth be hit by a big meteor or an asteroid? Tim Gregory knows. He is a nuclear chemist and former research scientist at the British Geological Survey, and he's author of the book Meteorite, How Stones from Outer Space Made Our World. Hey, Tim, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you for having me, great to be here. So what is the difference between a meteor and a meteorite and what are they? Meteors and meteorites are easily confused because you know they sound the same and they're kind of on the

same topic but they're actually completely different things. So a meteor is another name for a shooting star. And that is, it's the light phenomenon that occurs as a rock streaks through the Earth's atmosphere at hypersonic velocity, and its speed causes it to glow incandescent, which is why we can see them. And in fact, most shooting stars or meteorites that you can see with the naked eye are nothing more but sand-sized grains of rock falling through the atmosphere. And so even tiny rocks can put on quite a light show. And the fire, the heat that's generated as these stones fall through the atmosphere, it actually destroys most of them and they never make it to the ground.

But the lucky few that do make it to the ground, the big ones that survive the fiery passage, they land on the Earth's surface as rocks. And we call these rocks meteorites. And so the meteors, they're the streaks of light that are caused by rocks shooting through the atmosphere. And the meteorites are the surviving remnants. And it's these surviving remnants that tell us a great deal about the solar system. Because meteorites are rocks from other worlds, mostly asteroids, but sometimes we get meteorites from the moon and Mars as well. And because the asteroids are small

worlds, they never quite made it to planethood. You know, these asteroids are mostly city to small country sized lumps of rock orbiting the sun. And that's where the meteorites come from. And so by studying the meteorites, we've learned a great deal about the asteroids from which they originate. How many of these things are flying around us and headed towards us? And I mean, what are the numbers? It's a startling fact that every year about 40,000 tons of rock makes it to the Earth's surface, which sounds like a lot, but you know, the Earth is quite a big place. And so even 40,000 tons of rock spread over the entire Earth is pretty thin.

And so it's barely noticeable. And in fact, most of that actually ends up falling into the ocean because Earth is about 70 percent covered in ocean. And most of what does land on the land, we never find it. It's only in a few places that we find meteorites. But in space, there are countless numbers of these things. There are millions of asteroids, and there's space debris littered all over the solar system, but it's mostly just confined to the asteroid belt. So there are 40,000 tons worth of rock that come to the Earth every year.

Is that what you said? Yeah, that's right, 40,000 tons. And most of it arrives in the form of tiny moats. You know, there's probably some in the room that you sat in right now. Or if you're listening to this walking outside, it's probably pittering down all around you. The fact that all these rocks are headed this way, why does it seem that none of them ever have any kind of major impact? Like you say, we don't even notice them. How come there isn't some just big thing

that hits us every once in a while? So most of the rocky debris that exists in space exists as tiny little motes of dust, and it's mostly these motes of dust that make up the bulk of what falls to the Earth, and so we just don't notice it because it's mostly just really small. But you would think that occasionally, and every once in a while we hear in the news

that there's an asteroid that's, you know, within several million miles or whatever it is. But there's never any big collisions. No, and that's a good thing because a big collision would spell a lot of trouble for us. Most of the things in space, thankfully, well, I guess it comes down to two things, right? First of all, most of the things in space are tiny. The fraction of rock that's locked away in relatively large bodies is really small. It's mostly just smatterings of dust. And secondly, space is really big. And so the chance of an encounter with a relatively large asteroid or a piece of space rock is really, really small. Although other geological timescales, I should add that those small chances add up to inevitability.

And so although it's not a problem in the short or medium term, a large asteroid impact, you know, whether it be a city sized asteroid or asized asteroid, is something that we're going to have to think about on the long-term future. And so when these rocks that hit the Earth and you look at them, what are they made of? That's a great question. So one of the things that distinguishes meteorites from normal rocks that you might just find littering any sort of hillside is their exterior. Because as they fall through the atmosphere, these meteorites heat up incandescent. And this basically vaporizes and melts the outer layer of the stone

as it falls. But there comes a point in its plummet towards the Earth that it slows down enough that it becomes cold. And the molten rock that coats it freezes to form this fusion crust and these these this fusion crust that surrounds these meteorites are sort of sort of like a black glassy luster that coats these rocks and that's what gives them away as meteorites a lot of the

time but you know for most meteorites that fall it's actually quite difficult to tell just by looking at them that they're extraterrestrial many of the minerals inside meteorites that fall, it's actually quite difficult to tell just by looking at them that they're extraterrestrial. Many of the minerals inside meteorites are very common on the Earth. And, you know, for all but the rarest meteorites, it's very difficult to tell from their texture and their internal characteristics that they're extraterrestrial. The most obvious kinds of meteorites to identify are the iron meteorites because, you know, as the name suggests, they're made mostly of iron. These are the ultra-dense meteorites because, as the name suggests, they're made mostly of iron. These are the ultra-dense meteorites that are famous for being magnetic and super-dense. But aside from those, most meteorites are made of what on face value would look like ordinary rock,

and so they're quite difficult to distinguish. So there's never been a meteorite that scientists have looked at and gone, whoa, gee, we've never seen this element before. This is new. We've never seen everything that comes. We basically know what it is. Almost everything. So it's really interesting that, you know, the chemical composition of meteorites is essentially the same as the chemical composition as the earth, which when I first learned this, I was quite surprised. But then when when you think about it and it's not something that we think about perhaps every single day because it's kind of mind-blowing but the earth is just another celestial body

orbiting the sun just like just like mars just like venus just like the asteroids and so it's no surprise that the elements from which meteorites are made are also the elements from which the earth is made the the the thing that distinguishes meteorites chemically are the it's got some slight chemical quirks it's really about the concentration of some of the elements in meteorites are quite different from the earth rocks but in terms of the you know that the presence of the periodic table on the earth we find that in meteorites as well there are no elements that we find in meteorites that we don't find on the earth, for example, although their abundances do differ somewhat. So, you know, when you watch Star Wars or Star Trek and the ships are up there and they're like kind of squeezing between all these rocks that are just kind of floating in space. Is there anything really like that out there?

Or because space is so vast, the chances of running into any of them are pretty slim? Unfortunately, that's exactly right. You know, like you say in movies and often science documentaries as well, the asteroid belt is depicted as this sort of jam-packed rush hour on the highway lane full of rocks jostling past each other as they orbit the sun. But in reality, the average distance between asteroids in the asteroid belt is vast. And so they very rarely come upon each other. And it's really interesting because back in the 60s and the 70s, when missions were being planned to the outer solar system, there were quite a few scientists at the time who were quite cautious about flying precious spacecraft

through the asteroid belt in case they collided with an asteroid. But it turns out that they're so far apart that there's basically zero chance of hitting an asteroid belt on your way into the outer solar system. Thank goodness for that, eh? And so when you say they're really far apart, like millions of miles? Yeah, thousands and hundreds of thousands of miles between asteroids.

They're rather sparse. And so what are meteor showers? Meteor showers are times of the year when there's a higher than average flux of meteors or shooting stars passing through the sky. And meteor showers, they're kind of related to meteorites, but they're actually caused by comets rather than asteroids. Now, comets, they orbit the sun in what we call elliptical orbits. So they don't orbit in nice circles like the Earth does.

They orbit in these sort of squished egg-shaped orbits. And so sometimes in their orbit, they're close to the sun, and sometimes they're really far away. And as the comets streak around the sun, when they get close to the solar surface, they begin to vaporize and boil. And these jets get issued forth from their surfaces and take with them little bits of space rock, little bits of space dust. And you can imagine after, you know, thousands and hundreds of thousands of orbits of these comets as they're orbiting the sun, they're blasting all this rock and shedding all this rock into space. They leave behind them a sort of dust trail. And every now and again, the Earth just happens to sweep through one of these dust trails. And that's what a meteor shower is.

It's when the Earth is sweeping through the debris left behind by a comet as it's been slowly destroyed by the sun, you know, as the eons pass by. And the reason that we can predict meteor showers with real accuracy is because we stream through these dust trails at the same point in our orbits, which, which of course means it happens at the same time in our calendar year. Because again, it's not something that we think about every day, but something as simple as your wall calendar is really an astronomical calendar. It tracks the Earth's orbit around the sun. And so we can predict these meteor showers in real precision. What about meteors and meteorites and meteor showers? And do people maybe not know that that would be really interesting to know?

One of the things that I didn't know before I started studying meteorites were the number of worlds for which we have samples of. You know, these asteroids in the asteroid belt, kind of going back to when we were talking about how they're depicted in the movies, they're often depicted as these sort of these dead worlds that don't really have much to tell us, not really much going on there. But the meteorites that originate from the asteroids tell us a great deal about those worlds. And by studying the meteorites using the same sort of science and the same sort of instruments and laboratories that we use to study earthly rocks, we've discovered that actually the asteroids are worlds in their own rights. They're far from just dead, lifeless worlds with nothing to tell us. They've got their own geological history and their own story to tell. For example, we found evidence that on some asteroids,

there were volcanoes in the first few million years of the solar system's history, which is just crazy because often we think of volcanoes as things that, you know, they only happen on the Earth and they used to happen on the surface of Mars and Venus. You know, there's not really many other places in the solar system where you get volcanoes. But in fact, we've discovered dozens of worlds that have that harbored volcanoes early on in the solar system's history. And so by studying the meteorites, we've really turned these asteroids from dead worlds into worlds in their own right with geological histories. And that is something that completely escaped me before I started researching them. You said at the beginning that a lot of the meteor, a lot of the things that fall to Earth come off of the moon.

But things don't fall off of the Earth and fly into space. So how come they fall off the moon and fly at us? All meteorites, they used to be part of a larger body, and they were ejected off the surface of those bodies by the same mechanism. And that mechanism is impact craters. And I guess this is best seen on the surface of the moon. You can even see the impact craters on the surface of the moon with the naked eye these are these these giant circle ball-shaped structures that were blasted out of the surface of a planetary body by an impactor from space and if this happens on bodies that are small enough

like the moon and like asteroids and crucially bodies without an atmosphere, the rocks can actually get fast enough, they can be kicked with enough energy to leave the gravitational field of their parent body and enter into planetary space. And then now and again, the Earth sweeps these pieces up and the lucky ones fall as meteorites. And it's a really interesting question that you ask about, you know, whether or not pieces of the Earth are being blasted off into space. The thing is about the Earth is that it's really big and so it has a really strong gravitational field. And so it's really difficult to give a rock enough energy to leave the Earth's gravitational field. And if you were to give it enough energy to leave the Earth's gravitational field, it would probably be completely destroyed in the process and never quite make it in anything we might recognize as a rock. And the Earth's atmosphere as well, that also acts as a brake that slows these rocks down as they're leaving and pulls them back down

to Earth. And so it's unlikely that we will find meteorites on the Earth on other bodies. Although there was a paper that came out in a journal last year that claimed to have found a piece of earth rock in one of the Apollo rocks that the astronauts brought back from the moon in the 1970s. But that's, it's hotly debated. There's been no hard evidence and no clear example of a piece of earth that's been found anywhere else. So you know the movie Armageddon? Yes. It's not an infrequent plot, I think, in books and movies where there's an asteroid headed to Earth and it will strike Earth and we will cease to exist.

Is that ever really a concern or is that just Hollywood? So asteroid strikes are not a concern in everyday life. And I wouldn't even say they're a concern in the medium term. You know, when we think about, I don't know, the timescales of political cycles, when we think about maybe half a decade, a decade at most, they're not really a concern. But when we start looking further than decades and start talking about centuries and millennia, they definitely are a concern. There's a mission at the moment that's exploring an asteroid called Bennu. It's a mission by NASA called OSIRIS-REx, and it's orbiting Bennu, which is an asteroid that's a few hundred meters across. But the interesting thing about Bennu

is that there's a small chance that it might hit the Earth in the latter half of the next century. In fact, there's a one in 2,300 chance that it's going to hit the Earth sometime before the year 2200, which doesn't seem that long away. But, you know, it's the grandchildren of the people who are being born today who are going to have to face the real possibility that Bennu might hit the Earth. And the worrying thing is, is that if we did discover an asteroid that wasn't a collision course with Earth today, we wouldn't really know what to do about it. The technology to deflect asteroids doesn't yet exist. But if it's only a few hundred meters, well, you know, so what?

That doesn't sound very big. No, it doesn't sound very big, but, you know, when you're already traveling at tens of kilometers per second through space and then you fall into the Earth's gravitational field and you hit the surface at, I don't know, something like 20 kilometers per second through space, and then you fall into the Earth's gravitational field and you hit the surface at, I don't know, something like 20 kilometers per second, that's a lot of energy that's released. We're sort of talking about nuclear winter level amounts of energy

being released by the explosion. And so it's nothing to sniff at, even an asteroid that's a few hundred meters across. It would certainly cause regional devastation and could potentially cause massive global issues as well, depending on where it hits. And we don't have the technology to zap it out of the sky and blow it up? No, truth be told, nobody really knows what to do if we discovered that an asteroid was on a collision course with Earth. There are lots of really good ideas. So I'm afraid the Hollywood idea of nuking it Armageddon style

probably isn't a good idea because then instead of one large space rock heading towards you, you've got lots of tiny space rocks heading towards you and they're all radioactive. So that's probably not a good idea. It's more likely that it will give such asteroids a gentle nudge. So an example of how we might do that is by painting half of the asteroid white.

And the asteroid that's white will reflect more sunlight than the dark side of the asteroid. And that slight difference in reflectivity will very slowly push the asteroid out of its current orbit and into an orbit that's not going to hit the Earth. But there are lots of ideas as to how we deflect asteroids, but no one's exactly sure how to do it. Well, how do you find a guy to paint half an asteroid?

Where do you find him or her? Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, I was reading a book a few months ago by one of my favorite authors, Carl Sagan. I think he was Pale Blue Dot. And he was pale blue dots. And he was talking about the ethics of asteroid deflection. And I think he raised a really interesting point in that if we humans ever develop the technology to move asteroids and shift them around the solar system out of the way of the Earth, then it's not inconceivable

that we would also have the technology to deflect asteroids towards the earth and you know i guess we kind of formulated all this thinking during the cold war when you know we were pointing the extinction gun at each other across the globe and and whether or not as a species we're quite ready to have the technology to potentially shift asteroids towards the earth is something that i think we should have a very serious conversation about. Because I think if the 20th century taught us anything, it's that some people are perhaps a little too trigger happy when it might come towards, you know, planetary annihilation and the extinction of the species. We should be very cautious before we start developing such technologies. But I am optimistic that one day we will be ready.

And I'm looking forward to a long-term future on planet Earth for humanity. Well, it's interesting to think that all these rocks are falling out of the sky and hitting the Earth. And it's good to get some understanding of what it's all about and what the real potential danger is. Tim Gregory has been my guest. He is a nuclear chemist and former research scientist at the British Geological Survey, and the name of his book is Meteorite, How Stones from Outer Space Made Our World. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Could your dental

health affect your mental health? Apparently so. A group of dentists and psychiatrists teamed up on a study and they determined that our oral health is directly connected to our cognitive health. It turns out that gum inflammation can contribute to brain inflammation, which impairs mental function and increases the odds of developing dementia. Brushing and flossing for at least two minutes a day is the best defense to ward off periodontal disease, gingivitis, and inflammation, and that can keep your brain sharp. And that is something you should know.

Our audience continues to grow, and it's all because of people like you who share this podcast with someone they know. Our audience continues to grow, and it's all because of people like you who share this podcast with someone they know. I hope you'll do that today. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to

catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run.

15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll, of course, have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers.

It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now.