StarTalk Radio - Appetite for Destruction

Episode Date: March 28, 2013

Paleontologist Peter Ward explains how life's tendency toward self-destruction has led to massive extinction events in Earth's history. What does the past -- and the smell of rotten eggs -- have to teach us about the fate of humanity? Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome back to StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I'm also the director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium, accompanied by Lynn Kopplitz, professional comedian. Today, we're going to be talking, we titled this Appetite for Destruction, which is all about ways... My dating life. It's about all the ways Earth wants to kill us.

My dating life. The astrophysicist, we have our own list of ways the universe wants to kill us. And I don't think much about Earth as a hazardous place. But there are people out there who do. Okay. Like people who see the fossil record. Like paleontologists. People who dig up dead animals.

Awesome. We have some for the show, do we? Indeed. You know where all some for the show, do we? Indeed. You know where all the best people are, Neil. We dig them out. We find them. We know where they are. We know where they've been. We know where they're going. You know, in terms of planet-wide catastrophe,

in astrophysics, one of the most deadly things out there is an asteroid impact. And people say, oh, they won't affect us. It'll happen in the next election cycle. Or it happened to the dinosaurs. Do you know how much we plow through every day? We plow through nearly 100 tons of meteors a day.

Really? A day. If you go out at night and see shooting stars, add it all up every spot on Earth, it comes to about 100 million tons. Where do they all land? Did I say 100 million? Sorry. 100 tons. Not 100 million. I'm they all land did i say 100 million sorry 100 tons i'm sorry but still a lot million yeah so it is it is huge it is huge and it's bad and most of

them are little and they burn up in the atmosphere and it's not a problem it's the big ones that can create planet-wide catastrophe we used to think it's big enough it makes a crater if you happen to be standing where the crater got made you're're fried. Well, not fried. You're vaporized. Okay. Okay. Then we learned that if you make a crater, you're changing the atmosphere of the earth because some of that crust goes into the atmosphere. Plus, it creates heat that burns forests and you change the climate. And so it was not until we studied asteroids hitting Earth that we had any kind of deep understanding of how climate can affect the entire stability of life on Earth. This is what we learned. This is very interesting.

It's what we learned. And what we need here is our favorite Bill Nye to set the mood for the show. Oh, yeah. Are you ready for my boy? Yeah, sure. Bill Nye. Let's see what he has to say on the subject of extinction. Almost every species that's ever lived here on Earth is not here anymore. They're almost all gone. Extinct. You and I are a trace of the 1% left over after

3 billion years of evolution. And you might think, all that time and we're it? Actually, we're it right now. Just by way of example, the ancient dinosaurs were it in their day, or days, about 130 million years worth, and we've barely been here one percent of that. And there's simply no reason to think that we homo sapiens are going to turn out any differently. We too will disappear, though I admit there's no hurry. In fact, if you're like me, and I know I am, I'd like humans to go extinct as slowly as possible, with perhaps a few exceptions. What got the ancient dinosaurs was a big impacting object from space and its concomitant climate change. We might be headed for the same result without the rock on the head because

climate change is serious business, especially for us high on the food chain humans. But by understanding our Earth as a planet in space, we just might be able to delay our otherwise natural extinction. Let's give it a try. For StarTalk Radio, I'm Bill Nye, the science guy. Did he actually use the word concomitant? He did, and something happened. Bill Nye sounds like he's on some sort of, like, downer. Like, he was very calm and quiet. But he wasn't manic.

He wasn't as manic, I guess, when he's talking about Earth's destruction and kind of brings him down a bit. Yeah, maybe so. Maybe so. Well, it turns out he knows all about asteroids. I know all about asteroids. But what I don't know as much about is ways that Earth wants to kill us. And I have to find someone who's an expert on this, and it's Professor Peter Ward. He's a paleontologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and he thinks about this stuff all the time. He's not only a paleontologist.

Sounds like a great guy to have for dinner. He's not only a paleontologist. He's a biologist, and I count him. he's not only a paleontologist he's a biologist and i count him i give him some astro credits as well because he thinks about the the role of the universe as well but he doesn't think we should be worrying about asteroids he's got other a list of the planet itself has a problem has it out for us we have a problem down here down here on earth and let's sign up let's find out how he thinks that way interesting you know astrophysicists are not guiltless with regard to scaring people. We've got asteroids that we're tracking that we know have earth in our sights.

And Hollywood reminds us that these things have happened in the past and will happen again. Thank God for Bruce Willis. Okay. I got him on speed dial for the next time. Save me, Bruce. Here comes another asteroid. But I saw both movies

i saw armageddon with bruce and of course the other one which had we got most of its science right um which was deep impact of course so i know how to take out life on earth with methods of death and destruction that the universe provides but i understand that you're telling me earth is no less hostile to life on earth which of course is opposite everyone's sort of stereotype of earth being this haven for life in the cosmos. Hey, look, if you look at the fossil record, it's just littered with dead bodies. Lots and lots of bones.

Lots of fossils through time. Fossilized dead bodies. Yeah. Otherwise, you found some other place in there. Every once in a while, it's more than just dead bodies. It's piles of dead bodies. We have these short-term, really nasty catastrophes in the past. 20 years ago, 50 years ago, a million years ago?

Hundreds of millions of years ago to 65 million years ago. It was the last big, big one. So these are major extinction episodes. Yeah, mass extinctions. Okay, so I know how many asteroids are flying around. I have a pretty good sense of how often they're going to hit Earth. So I can hand you an asteroid anytime you need to take out, anytime you need to assault life on Earth.

So are you using them or not? Yeah, well, look, in 1980, there was a great discovery that dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid. And then for the next 20 years, we paleontologists decided everything must have been killed by asteroids. Why not? I'm handing you for free. I'm giving it to you, so use it.

And that's why the two movies came out. It was a consequence of all of us guys finding the dead bodies that you guys the astronomers threw at us okay this is collaboration of death here so what's going to kill us next time yeah that's the bad news it turns out that in the end we can only find one of these mass extinctions having been caused by rocks from space and that was the dinosaurs all right and the rest are caused by what al gore territory global warming you're gonna to get all Al Gore on me now. The earth was Al Gord. So he's going to, that's my interview with Peter Ward in my office a few months ago.

And there's much more of that, of course, where he gets into detail. He's not someone you want to hang out with before bed. Why not? It's a little scary. He sounds a little gleeful, though, as he speaks about it. Well, yeah, because he has work as long as things are going to— Oh, he's got paid. He gets paid.

Yeah, so there are five major extinction episodes in the history of the fossil record, but the two big ones that we think of is the one that ended the Cretaceous period, and that was what we call the K-T extinction 65 million years ago. That's the famous one that took out T-Rex. And where is the K-T extinction in the lineup of the big five? Well, okay, it's not one of the most severe ones. In fact, it's down the list a bit because only 70% of all species went extinct from that. Okay, so let me talk like every man, like my mom at home.

My question is then if there were major huge extinctions before the KT and we bounced back, what's the big if we get wiped out again? It depends on who's the we that's bouncing back. That's the difference. You're saying like cabbage will come back and we won't. Exactly. It's not everybody comes back after it. And so the biggest one on record.

Cabbage with tails. That's scary. Did you see Attack of the Killer Tomatoes? It's a movie. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we got another subject ready to be movied. So another great extinction episode was what we call the Permian-Triassic extinction.

And it's the PT extinction. That's the biggest ever. All right. That happened about 250 million years ago. It killed 96% of all marine species and 70% on land. So all told, it was about 90% of all marine species and 70% on land. So all told, it was about 90% of all species of life on Earth. And that was a bad one. That was a... You think?

So no one can find... 96% of all species on Earth. That was kind of bad. No one can find... Very genius. ...an implicating asteroid for that. So this is what sent Peter Ward back to the drawing board. Oh, so you think it wasn't an asteroid.

It was just Earth. Something just happened. Not that one. And that got him thinking a little. That was the biggie. So let's find out how he connects the fact that there's no asteroid record of that extinction. Oh, you got me hooked now. That's interesting.

Okay, let's see what he's got to say about this. My interview with Peter Ward. Gaia is the Greek name for Mother Earth. The Gaia hypothesis from the great James Lovelock suggests... The biologist, James Lovelock. Yes, and the astrobiologist in a way, because James Lovelock really is an astrobiologist. He was the first to look at Mars' atmosphere and say, you know, there's probably not life there. Because if there were life there, we would see record of it in the atmosphere,

as Earth shows the presence of life, and that is astrobiology. So, Glovelock says that life makes a planet better for life. This is a very nice deal. Life comes along, it changes elemental cycling, it changes the nature of the planet, it changes the way in which carbon and sulfur and phosphorus move through the system, and makes it better for more life. You know, it didn't occur to me to think of it this way, but typically we ask ourselves, let's find a planet that could sustain life. So you'd want to look for a planet that, life as we know it, so you'd look for a planet that might have oxygen.

But what you're saying is it would only have oxygen if it already had life. had life so you can't find a brand new spanking brand new fresh planet that has conditions suitable for life because life made the condition suitable for itself yeah it's really terraforming we keep thinking let's go earth-like mars and make mars earth-like terraforming like turn mars into a place like earth and eden and then we go all move there after we trash the earth the only way to do that though is with lots and lots of micros and billions of years and this whole thought that we could do it really quickly turn red Mars to green Mars through machines or whatever it's you need the great periods of time so the Gaia hypothesis spelled G a I a that was that it's got a lot of mileage out there

in the biological community the assertion that life is good for life, that life creates conditions on Earth that life likes, and that if Earth goes out of equilibrium, life brings it back in. This is very, very maternal. It's a maternal philosophy. I know Gaia. She is maternal. She lives in D.C. She's my friend.

She's your friend. Now, wait. I have a question. Yeah, what? So, what he was saying about Mars, about trying to create, we'll never make the red planet green. Well, if we do, it would take like millions of years. It's not just something-

Well, of course, because it's Mars, and Mars is a big gas ball. Everybody knows that. No, no, no. Gas ball? Not gas. Whatever. Dry. Whatever.

It's not right. High. I don't know. Neil, I'm not the astrophysicist, clearly. Here's my point. It's small, cold, dry. Isn't there another planet that's closer to us? There are. Mars, among all planets, is the only one we would ever have any chance of terraforming into something like Earth.

So we can't pump anything in there? If it is something, we don't know about it yet. And it would take long time to accomplish that. Well, it seems like we waste a lot of time on other things. Couldn't we put a little time into trying to create a backup planet? Here's my point. If we could do that to Mars, then we would have the power to fix Earth. That's how I look at it.

Hmm. That's what I think. Oh, we'd fix Earth. Yeah, but we should still have a backup. When we come back from the break, we're going to take a break in a couple minutes. When we come back, we're going to find out that we've got an opposite hypothesis

to the Gaia hypothesis. Did you know that one such thing exists? Did you know about that? No, but I'm interested. Oh, okay. Everything's... Tell them what's happening. Everything's happening crazy in the studio right now,

and our producers are telling us to go to clips and not go to clips, so we're losing our mind. No, we're not losing our mind. I am. We're going to find out, because there was the Gaia hypothesis saying Earth is its protective mother. Is it Gaia or Gaia? Gaia.

Okay, so they're saying it's its protective mother who will take care of itself. It will take care of its own. It will take care of its own. Advanced by James Lovelock. But Peter Ward is suggesting that Earth is a deadly force unto itself and you cannot possibly call it Gaia. And so he's come up with another kind of hypothesis and he has named it. And we will find out what that will be. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson here with my comedic co-host, Lynn Coplitz.

We're talking about all the ways Earth wants to kill us. And we're getting clips from my interview with Peter Ward. Peter Ward, the paleontologist from the University of Washington, who's made a career out of thinking up, dreaming up ways Earth wants to kill us. So have the Baptists. What is that? That's a good point. Good point.

So he didn't invent the concept. He decided to come back. My pastor's going to call me. Now I'm going to get in trouble. The Gaia hypothesis is that Earth is a protectorate mother. And he had a whole other point of view on this. And let's find out where he's coming from.

Medea was Jason's wife, Jason and the Argonauts, the great legends. I saw that movie. I did too, with the skeletons. Yeah, the old version. That was like the last of the great stop-action models of skeletons and creatures and things, but she was married to Jason? Yeah, she was a sorceress. Her father, King Aeetes, was in charge of the golden fleece,

which had been stolen from the Greeks. The Greeks sent all their heroes to bring it back. Now, why they fought so much over this fleece, that part is lost in the mist of time, but Jason went out, stole the fleece, stole Medea, who was the woman who tended the fleece, brought her back, and then promptly went out and cheated on her. And she was so upset about this, having had two of his children already, that bad mother, she went out and slew her children with a knife to spite the bad husband. Wow. Because we normally think of the mother protecting children no matter what. And she's just got really pissed off, apparently.

Yeah. And the analogy here is that if we look at deep Earth history, life hasn't been this wonderful thing that makes the planet better and better. Life is perpetually suicidal. We see life trying to kill itself off and doing a really good job at it over and over and over. He's wrong. What do you make of that? He's completely wrong.

First of all, Medea was not a bad mother. Medea was completely understood. It was very fatal attraction-y. Oh, yeah. What happened was Jason was an idiot and told her after all, she leaves her father, her family, everything. She was like a princess. Right.

And Jason tells her, listen, I found another woman and she's younger. That's what made Medea lose it. That's what pissed her off. Yeah. So she was like, fine, you want the younger woman? Take her, but you're not going to have children. I'm killing them. Which was not right.

I'm not saying she was right. So now what I want to know. So you've got your hypothesis going now. You're on a roll. Right. So what I want to know is Ward saying. Peter Ward. Peter Ward.

I'm calling him Ward because I don't agree with him now. He's saying, who is he saying is Jason? He's saying the Earth is Medea? He's saying earth is medea ready to kill its children and its children we are we are the children on the earth no i think we're we're jason we're in that metaphor because we're the ones who are ignoring and being ignorant of earth and not paying attention to the sign she's sending us and she's like all right fine you want to stay here with your new moons and all that crap? Go ahead.

I'm just going to have you. This earth won't look like it did when you thought you loved it. I'll kill everything. The wrath. Yeah. So then all the vegetation, everything that lives here are the kids, are the children. The wrath of Medea scares the bejesus out of me.

You're mixing mythology with real biology. I guess there's a lot of room there no ward started it okay that's that's fine that's fine people to tweet if i'm wrong i'm not wrong you know peter ward actually has a book and he published a book in 2009 called don't say it like that like glenn doesn't have a book peter ward actually has a book. He's got a book. It's called the Medea Hypothesis. And so in it, he describes what it takes in order to create this environment. Christians have a book too. It's called the Bible, but you don't believe in the rapture. This one, you want to hear a rapture story? Check this out. So here's what happens. In a global warming scenario, the air temperature rises, and the temperature difference between the equator and the poles drops.

Okay? And if that drops, you don't have what we call a temperature gradient to drive ocean currents. And one of the more important ocean currents is top water goes north, let's say along the east coast. It gets to the North Sea, drops down, and cycles back along the bottom. gets to the North Sea, drops down, and cycles back along the bottom. Well, all the water that rode along the top became oxygenated by its contact with the air. When it sinks to the bottom, it brings the oxygen with it. So if you're living on the bottom of the ocean, a fresh supply of oxygen is coming to you

all the time. If you stop the ocean currents, you stop the oxygen supply, and you kill every oxygen-breathing creature at the bottom of the ocean, and their ecosystem gets replaced by anaerobic bacteria. That does not sound good. I'm not a scientist, but anaerobic bacteria does not sound pleasant. Anaerobic bacteria is bad. And we should find out what more Peter Ward has to say. But let me just tell you, one of the byproducts of anaerobic bacteria is hydrogen

sulfide, which we all know, even if you don't know its chemical symbol, even if you've never heard it, you have smelled it before. It's the smell of rotten eggs. It's nasty. The flatulence. The egg flatulence. Yeah, egg flatulence.

It's the flatulence of any creature that has anaerobic bacteria going on in its digestive tract. Or anyone in Alabama who has sulfur water. What in Alabama? Like well water. Well water. We always had well water. Oh, sulfur. And you can smell rotten eggs in there.

Yeah, yeah. And hydrogen sulfide would give you that smell. So let's find out what next Peter Ward has to tell us about this Medea hypothesis. Let's have a little jar and put in a little food and put in some beetles. And the beetles start eating the food. It's, wow, this is great. And they eat the food and eat the food and eat the food. And they reproduce like crazy. And there's more and more beetles and less and less food. Do the beetles ever stop and say, oh my gosh, maybe if we reduce our population, we can last a little bit longer? No.

They eat the food until the food is gone, then they all die out. And that's the principle by which life works. Life produces itself, reproduces to the point that it just overwhelms its system and kills itself. So you're telling me there's no harmony? What predator prey, they self-regulate, don't they? If there are too many tigers, then there's not enough prey. So then fewer tigers are born. The prey comes back. We've known about disequilibrium for a long time. So now you're telling me that Earth is in disequilibrium? Life is in total disequilibrium. This whole predator-prey business, I think you're looking

at the short term. If you look at the long term, 99.999% of all species that have ever been are gone. They're extinct. Lots and lots of those are extinct because a better predator came along and the prey never could evolve a solution to it. And very quickly they are extinct. All right. So the Medea hypothesis suggests that Earth is not this loving, caring mother nature Earth, but that in fact, Earth and life on it is hostile to Earth and life on it. Yeah, absolutely. It's not just Earth life.

Medea is everywhere. All life in the universe would probably operate by these principles. And the reason being, if we look at the NASA definition of life, it replicates... I don't even know what that is. And I used to hang out with NASA. So what's NASA's definition of life? It's a three-parter. It replicates, it metabolizes,

and it evolves. And the evolution, simply said, is... So by that definition, a star is alive because they reproduce themselves, they have a metabolism, and they evolve. And that's actually been said by several quarters saying, gee, you include stars, you could also include

crystals. But that said, evolution is that creatures produce more than the environment can sustain and therefore the best ones survive but if that is a basic tenet of life then life of course will be median in this regard all right so you're just bumming everybody out now you tell we'll all just go extinct no no no there's one great solution what's that the only out in the universe is intelligence. Intelligence gets you out of this nasty Medean cycle. Yeah, there's a lot going on there. A lot going on there.

Do you realize that there's certain parts of the world where algae can overgrow because of some nutrient that goes into their food supply? And when it overgrows, it can choke other life forms that might exist in that area. Okay, this is interesting. This is my question. Yeah, what's that? I lived in Florida growing up. I lived on the Gulf in Sarasota, Florida. And we would have red tide.

You know what I'm talking about? And all the fish would die. I mean, it was very biblical. Like, it was scary. And it would happen. It happens all the time. Yeah, they occur regularly in the Gulf Coast. You can't go outside or anything.

They occur regularly. People with asthma have to say, what is that? Is that the algae? Because I remember as a kid being told it was bacteria. There's certain types of microscopic algae that release toxins that kills fish and other animals and we can be harmed by those as well. And that cycling is something that you see. It's one of the ways Earth wants to kill us.

So that is what red tide is. Yes, it's exactly what red tide is. But can you stop it? Well, you'd have to get into the cycling of the ecosystem in order to interfere with that. And that could be dangerous initially if you don't really understand all the forces that are operating on it. You could have unintended consequences. Okay, okay. So this brings me to my next thing.

What's that? You know how people are using antibacterial soap? I never do. Right, because it kills off good bacteria. I mean, because some bacteria is good, right? Well, because my problem with antibacterial soap is that it doesn't kill all the bacteria. And if there's some bacteria that survives, it is resistant to your soap. And then you create this super bacteria.

I belong to a fitness center. They're cleaning stuff all the time. And I'm ready for a super bacteria to come out of fitness centers that is resistant to everything and takes us out the fittest people first. So am I right in asking that that's what you're saying could happen if they start messing with the algae in the ocean? Whatever that imbalance is, if you try to create a balance out of it, you could create another imbalance that you did not otherwise. And could be even bigger.

Could be even a bigger imbalance. With feet and teeth. With feet and teeth. That's right. So we have these- I'm fine with it. Just leave it. We'll get it later.

It's fine. We're used to red tides. I bought a place in the country a few years ago, and I thought, oh, I'll live in the city. Let me go in the country. And I'm out there. One year, there were locusts. The next year, there were caterpillars. The next year, there were these little stink bugs, these little round stink bugs.

And I thought to myself- Those are weird, thought to myself, nature is not in balance. We keep thinking that there's some happy equilibrium out there. And all I saw was one year after the next, something overrunning something else. And this is the middle of the woods I'm talking about. And so after the break, we'll get back to the whole story of hydrogen sulfide. This is StarTalk Radio. So the subjects today are all the way Earth wants to kill us. And I've been interviewing from a clip a couple of months ago when Peter Ward was in town. He's a paleontologist specializing in the way life can go out of equilibrium and try to kill us. And when you think about it, it's not that weird. Think of all the deadly weapons that animals have to kill other animals.

Yeah, but you still got me stuck. When you were talking about your summer home and how every time you go back there, your country home, every time you go there, the different animals have taken over. Different creatures. They're so out of equilibrium. I can't believe it. Stink bugs are gone, and then the ladybugs come. So my question is, are they killing each other, or are they just showing up and kind of running

each other out? Is it like the Puerto Rican Day Parade here in New York? I don't even know what that means. It's not like it's killing anybody, but when it shows up, everyone goes to the country, goes out to the Hamptons, because it's just so obnoxious. I don't even know what that means. So the ladybugs come in and they're like. Oh, so the other residents escape.

They just take off. Like they don't destroy. During the ladybug parade and during the caterpillar parade and during the stink bug parade. It's like New York, the Puerto Rican Day Parade or the gay pride parade. It's not that no one likes it. It's just that it's so, so in mass. I'll have to investigate. But it's just a matter of what the numbers are and how they come in and out.

So it is that. They're not killing each other. They're just coming in in mass. I don't think they're killing each other. But I was just simply struck by how out of equilibrium nature, in fact, really is. What else? Compared to what we've always been told by others. And there are other ways we're killing ourselves.

Of course, we're releasing carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. been told by others. And there are other ways we're killing ourselves. Of course, we're releasing carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, and that's creating a climate shift that is altering Earth's average temperature. And by the way, we have evidence of what carbon dioxide can do to

a planet. We've got planet Venus. It is sitting to our left as we orbit the sun. It is 98% carbon dioxide. Atmosphere, it's nearly 100 times atmospheric pressure here on Earth. And it is 900 degrees Fahrenheit on Venus. And I did the math. You can cook a 16-inch pepperoni pizza in nine seconds if you just put it out on the windowsill. That doesn't sound bad.

Except you would cook right alongside it. Oh, that's hot. I'm sorry. You lost me at pizza. A little detail there. I'm me. You lost me at pizza. A little detail there. I'm sorry. You lost me at pizza. Let's find out what Peter Ward actually has to say about what bacteria does when it makes hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide is one of the deadliest gases known to man.

We're going to melt the ice caps from global warming. Weather gets bad. We have to run for the hills. Right. All right. But there's worse things. Even worse than that? Much worse.

Okay. So what's the worst thing that global warming can do? As far as most people understand, you can't go to the beaches anymore. But how bad could it be, really? You know, if Alaska is the new Hawaii, how bad could it be? Except that 70% of the world's population lives on the coastline. Well, humans can climb. Everybody can get better

shape just head for the high ground a new real estate boom all right so the past is littered with dead bodies that come from short terms of actually poison gas attack that is a consequence of global warming so i don't remember learning about this so where do you get the poison gas poison gas comes from bacteria that grow in the ocean if we remove all oxygen from the ocean. Now look, there's another movie here, The Day After Tomorrow. You remember that movie? I remember that. Yeah, yeah, where they break an ocean current and everybody freezes out except for New York, which gets hit by a tidal wave. Well, breaking the ocean currents is right. It will cause catastrophe. People don't talk much about ocean currents. It didn't get cold, it got warm.

Finding Nemo, ocean currents played a big role in getting around the ocean. I remember those turtles. Those turtles. Those were some cool surfing turtles. Dude. So the bad news about global warming is if we remove oxygen from the bottom of the sea, which happens after global warming. Look, when the oceans become really warm, warm doesn't hold oxygen.

Cold holds oxygen. Okay, plus non-moving water doesn't mix with oxygen, as any fish tank owner knows. Sure. If you take the bubbles out of the fish tank, you kill your fish. So let's turn all our oceans into a big sort of warm cesspool. Okay. And they do, just like a fish tank, they go all green on you, and the nasty

bacteria start growing, except these nasty bacteria produce flatulence. You tell me we have farting bacteria. I'm sorry. It's hard to say this with a straight face, but the same chemical. I had to say that. Flatulence is essentially hydrogen sulfide. I know hydrogen sulfide. You can get it in rotten eggs. Very deadly, deadly gas. Okay. But no one thinks it's deadly. We just think it smells bad. It smells bad because it's so deadly to us. We are detecting the tiniest, tiniest, very few molecules floating around.

You know it. We've come from a long history of exposure to this stuff in the past mass extinctions. So we've evolved to not like the smell. We've evolved to run. To run away from it. We know how dangerous this is. Our lineage, the mammals, go back 300 million years. We have repeatedly been gassed by this stuff.

We are the survivors of a number of hydrogen sulfide gas attacks. So we've got the capacity to smell it at a level that doesn't kill us. That's right. And 200 parts per million, 10 times what you can smell will kill you. That's bad. And that was the level that appears to have happened at least 12 times in the past 500 million years due to global warming. Okay, so you're telling me now, as global warming continues from our own actions, after we run to the hills,

the earth then smells like somebody's freshly used toilet. Got it. Then we die. If it gets high enough, yeah. And just because there's humans now, there were never humans any time in the past of these events. A hundred million years ago was the last of these. We're egging on this, no pun intended,

we're egging on this process. We're sort of accelerating a cycle that has happened multiple times before. Something rotten in the state of Denmark, except it's the whole world. What does that mean? Could you kill someone with your gas? Evidently, yes.

So you can't Dutch oven somebody. What happens is, the smell is so evil, at a concentration much less than what will kill you, you run away from it and then you don't die. I don't understand that. If you look at OSHA, the Office of Occupational Safety Hazards Office, I forgot what the full acronym is, but it's a government office that regulates all of the chemicals that might be in scientific laboratories. that regulates all of the chemicals that might be in scientific laboratories. And the part of their book that describes deadly gases,

the one that's the scariest are the ones where, when it's at a high enough concentration for you to smell it, you're already past the deadly dose of it. That would be bad, right? And so we have no defenses against those gases. Hydrogen sulfide, fortunately, and according to Peter Ward, we have millions of years of mammalian evolution that allows us to detect it and say that it smells bad at a level way before it kills us. And if anyone who said, wow, this rotten egg hydrogen sulfide smells like perfume. I want more of it.

They simply died and didn't pass their genes on to a next generation. Once I was cleaning a gutter in L.A., like the sewage system. Okay. I know. This was before your career. I've had a lot of really glamorous jobs. Okay. And you had to drop a thing down there and test it because of the gas before you go down in the manhole.

Oh, yeah, yeah. And what kind of gas was that? That would be gases generated in anaerobic situations, which would have included hydrogen sulfide. Okay, because you can't smell that gas. No, no, you can't smell it. But there are other gases that you might not be able to smell that are produced down there, and they're trying to keep you alive. Interesting.

Let's find out. He made a judgment as to how soon this will occur. Next year, 10 years? Let's find out what Peter Ward says about when hydrogen sulfide is going to's find out. He made a judgment as to how soon this will occur. Next year, 10 years? Let's find out what Peter Ward says about when hydrogen sulfide is going to take us out. We have certainly a scenario now with the atmosphere increasing in its carbon dioxide content that mimics every one of these episodes that happened in the past that were deadly fatal. So you kill life in the ocean first. Yep.

And you do that because the whole world gets hot. Yep. And it's hot in the poles as well as the equator. You lose your winds, you lose your ocean currents, and you don't mix your water with the oxygen. It's your little tank again, turning all green and slimy. And if you have the snails in it, they multiply like crazy and then they all die. And then you don't want to go near it and your mom's screaming at you, clean out that fish tank. So one lesson here would be to tell everyone to turn off their bubbling machine in their fish tank if they want to get an understanding of what the future of the earth will be like.

Well, if you'd like to see stuff die, yes. I personally take the opposite tack. Okay, sorry. Double bubble. So if that's the case, you know, you can kill all your fish in a couple of days doing this. How long will it take this to happen to earth? Well, that's why probably no one will care because this might happen over the next couple thousand years. We know elected official right now would care. There you are.

We as a species better really care. So tell me, Peter, how soon will this happen and what should we do about it? Well, the first worst parts are going to be the rise in sea level, but that's just the first step. And then we have these bacteria starting taking over the oceans. Probably within the next century to two centuries, we'll really see the oceans begin to change state. When do we begin to smell like somebody's toilet? I would say within at least 500 to 1,000 years, it'll be very noticeable. Okay, so in the time that has passed since Columbus sailed, that much time into the future could lead to a situation

where all beachgoers will now be associated with the smell of flatulence. People of that time will notice the change. Yes. That is scary. It's a very rapid, very catastrophic, and it's happened over and over in the past. We've got to take a quick break, but more StarTalk when we return. This is StarTalk Radio. Welcome back. So, Lynn, do you realize this hydrogen sulfide, which before the break we were talking about how stinky it is and how deadly it is, it actually has a couple of positive applications. I don't know if you knew about this.

Really? There's still research going on in the lab, but at particular concentrations of it, it was shown just in 2005 that mice can be put in a state of suspended animation by applying a low dose of hydrogen sulfide to the air they breathe. And what happened? Their breathing rate dropped from 120 to 10 breaths per minute. And their temperature fell from normal sort of mammal body temperature down to near freezing. And so the effect became cold blooded. The mice survived that. Obviously, we put it in

a cold environment to watch what would happen. The mice survived that for six hours and showed no negative signs of health consequences. And so it's just an interesting fact. Another phenomenon, in 2008, it was shown that you can induce hypothermia in rats by exposing them to hydrogen sulfide. And why would you want to do this? Yeah. You saw my look on my face. I saw the look on your face. Because hypothermia is a condition where you might want to put your body in if you somehow died, and we need to get you to the operating table to bring you back to life.

Because if something really bad happened to your arm. I just got so rude in my own head. Like, we need gas. Somebody gas her. Who had beans? Who had beans? She's dying dying somebody gas her so i don't so there's still a lot of interesting biophysics going biochemistry going on with

hydrogen sulfide that's interesting yeah yeah so just to keep watch that space so the point is if we're messing up the earth and earth will render us extinct by what we do to Earth, then what we really need are major sort of geoengineering projects to undo the bad that we're doing. And terraforming is one such, a version of terraforming. That's where we Algorify stuff. Algorify. I love new words with Algor in the word. So terraforming specifically is turning a non-fertile planet into a fertile planet, sure. But

if you have the power to do that, perhaps you have the power to get rid of the carbon dioxide, or to introduce some other gases, or to increase or decrease the oxygen levels. There must be ways to master Earth such that... Like artificially inseminate Earth?

Okay. Well, you said we're going to make it more fertile when it hasn't been fertile. Okay, or... No, that would be a planet that has no fertility at all. Yes. So, in fact, terraforming is sort of like artificially inseminating. No, no, no. But, no, no.

I'm backing back up to Mars. If you want to terraform Mars and make it a habitable green planet, conceptually, it's sort of like artificially inseminating Mars. Yes. So I'm not so stupid. I didn't say you were stupid. You're the one who said. I'm just saying. No, it's just that this negative show has gotten everyone a little upset.

But on Earth, we don't need to inseminate it because it's already filled with life. We want to protect the life that would end up extinct in the next extinction episode. That's all I'm saying. Neil just filled the room with gas and now I'm starting to go into hypothermia. I can't talk. Let's finish out my interview with Professor of Paleontology at the University of Washington in Seattle, Peter Ward, to find

out just what is the answer to... How do you solve this? What? Quickly, let's go to clip i guess i have a reaction against this idea that if we just simply abandon civilization and give ourselves back to nature and let nature take over and run rampant kind of like the alan weissman the world without us everything will go green again and all our troubles are over. You mean if the new age movement took over the world?

Yeah. And the whole environmental movement is predicated on the fact that all we humans have to do is go back to the way it was that we came along and kind of screwed everything up in the garden and let the garden regrow and things are fine. And I totally reject that point of view for several reasons. Well, they don't say that we all move back into caves, are they? They're just saying eat a little greener and drive a little greener. Isn't that right? Well, I come from the Pacific Northwest, and indeed they say we should go back into caves. There is really a strong movement, the back to the cave movement,

and toss all your stuff away. And personally, Gore-Tex really works well in the climate I live in. I think it's just crazy to think with 6.5 billion people that we can drop civilization to the point that Mother Nature or Mother Gaia, as this Gaia hypothesis

would have us think, takes over and rescues us. It's really that. Let's go back to nature and be rescued from our own folly. Be rescued. This is the... Will nature rescue us?

I'm not allowed to talk anymore. What? After that? Before the break? I'm a little out of control today, I've been told. That's all right. So the point is, he's trying to protect us, and one way is to prevent the CO2 going into the atmosphere. So you want to find sustainable energy.

Nuclear power is one of them. But nuclear is one of the other N words that people like to avoid in popular parlance. And so, but it's a means of producing energy that we so desperately need that does not have CO2 as a byproduct that would then kill us in hydrogen sulfide baths, hydrogen sulfide gas chambers. By the way, you know, hydrogen sulfide is more potent or as potent as is the gas they used in gas chambers back in prisons. Okay, before the show's over, can we say something happy and uplifting? This is horrible. I was like, when's it going to get happy? And then let's talk about gas chambers.

Right. Well, there's hydrogen fuel. It's a hydrogen. You get that. Hydrogen is all over the place. You get that in water. H2O, right? I mean, this is where you just...

Can we do it in the way we're building, like doing things green, so to speak? What does that mean? Oh, green buildings, right, are there ways that are very efficient in how they use energy. They don't lose energy to the air, out to the sky. The water sources are purified. The air is circulated. And buying those new green light bulbs, I use those. Does that help? So you use less energy.

All of that helps. All of that helps so that you don't make the carbon dioxide, so that Earth doesn't warm, so that you don't stop the oceanic currents, so that the anaerobic bacteria at the bottom of the ocean don't poison us with their toilet bowl gas. Not us. And we all need to do it. With the toilet bowl gas. That's the problem.

Not everybody does. We all need to do it. If you do it and your neighbor doesn't, it's like, what's the point? What's the point? We all need to do it. Right. Because we're all... Mom, if you're listening to the show, mom.

We're all in this chemistry experiment together. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. And as always, I bid you to keep looking up.