Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Why Emotional Agility is So Important & Is Earth Safe from Asteroids?

Episode Date: November 12, 2022

How likely is it that your umbrella will attract lightning in a storm or that the elevator you are in will suddenly drop? Ever worry that a big spider will come after you and jump on you? This episode begins with some insight into these and other common worries and whether or not they could likely happen. https://www.realsimple.com/work-life/life-strategies/everyday-dangers-not-to-worry-about Are you good at handling difficult emotional situations? Do you try hard to push negative emotions 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 we all face and offers advice on how best to experience and deal with them. Susan is author of the book Emotional Agility (https://amzn.to/3lbAiaf). You can also take her Emotional Agility Quiz at https://www.susandavid.com/#ea-quiz How could brushing your teeth and flossing have an effect on your brain? 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 Rocks from outer space are hitting the earth all the time - tons and tons of rocks! So what would happen if a really big rock, like an asteroid hit the earth – would it wipe us all out? Here to discuss all this 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) PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! We’re all about helping you find ways to get more out of life… that’s why we want you to listen to Constant Wonder. Constant Wonder is a podcast that will bring more wonder and awe to your day. Listen to Constant Wonder wherever you get your podcasts! https://www.byuradio.org/constantwonder Did you know you could reduce the number of unwanted calls & emails with Online Privacy Protection from Discover? - And it's FREE! Just activate it in the Discover App. See terms & learn more at https://Discover.com/Online You’ve earned your fun time. Go to the App Store or Google play to download Best Fiends for free. Plus, earn even more with $5 worth of in-game rewards when you reach level 5!  We really like The Jordan Harbinger Show! Check out https://jordanharbinger.com/start OR search for it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen!  https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, some common everyday worries you need not worry about at all. Then, there's a lot of emphasis today on positivity and being happy, which may not always be a good thing. So, Mark, don't 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, so only in a few places that we find meteorites. All this today on Something You Should Know. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic.

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Download Bumble and try it for yourself. 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. 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 lock 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 are 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. You know, 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. 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 know, you carrying a very heavy load of emotional books, but you 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're 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 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, you know, the months and days and experiences of really trying to hold it together. You know, 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 the experience of our emotions is by labeling our emotions effectively. Often we use labels, Mike, like, 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 more likely to be emotionally rigid is when we get stuck in these labels and we start using them in a very patterned way. But if you get into a different way of being with your emotions where you say, I'm using this label of stress, but actually what are one 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're 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. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress.

Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual.

That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com. 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. A story, you know, 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, like 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. Like, it's better to just ignore it, just forget about it. Yeah, and I think that, you know, 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 emotions 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,

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 passionately 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? When doctors are about to go 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. like 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, you know, Mike, one example is, you know, if you hear yourself saying something like, I am sad, I'm sad, I'm so angry, I am angry. You can hear that what you're doing in this is you are defining yourself by the emotion.

You know, I am all of me. 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

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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? Now, just recently, after 10 months flying in space, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART,

successfully impacted an asteroid in space in the agency's first attempt to move an asteroid and alter its path. I was excited when that happened, and I remember an interview that I did with Tim Gregory. He's a nuclear chemist and former research scientist at the British Geological Survey and author of a book called Meteorite, How Stones from Outer Space Made Our World. NASA's DART technology didn't exist back then, but when you listen to Tim, you'll be glad that it exists now and begin to understand just how important this technology is to our world. Hi 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 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. 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 in fact, most of that actually ends up falling into the ocean because Earth is about 70% 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 are the 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 over 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 a country-sized 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 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 are 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 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 the iron meteorites because you know 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 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 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 thing that distinguishes meteorites chemically are that 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 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 and 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 we'll 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 a lot, you know, there are lots of

ideas as to how we deflect asteroids, but no one's exactly sure how to do it. 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 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, you know 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 you kind of formulated all this thinking during the Cold War when we were pointing the extinction gun at each other across the globe.

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 planetary annihilation and the extinction of the species. 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. I hope you'll do that today. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? 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. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions.

I asked Danielle, what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched in cooler temperatures. You got this. No, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true?

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