Stuff You Should Know - The Silurian Hypothesis

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

The idea that we aren’t the first advanced civilization to live on Earth sounds like a fringe theory, but it raises a good question: How can we be so sure that a civilization didn’t arise and die on Earth so long ago that any trace of it has been erased?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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and subscribe today. Hey there, I'm Dr. Maya Shankar, and I'm a scientist who studies human behavior. Many of us have experienced a moment in our lives that changes everything, that instantly divides our life into a before and an after. On my podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, I talk to people about navigating these moments. Their stories are full of candor and hard-won wisdom. And you'll hear from scientists who teach us how we can be more resilient in the face

of change. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And this is stuff you should know. It's just Josh and Chuck today. That's all right. Don't freak out Chuck. We're going to make it just fine. I'm just glad we're recording.

This is just a little inside baseball here. This is our third attempt at this recording sesh. Yeah. Well, you defused my inside joke to you that I didn't have enough time to prepare for this episode. Yeah, my internet went out because of a windstorm last week and then we were like, you were kind enough to be like, we'll just do it next Thursday. And then yesterday, your internet had problems. And I said, well, let's just do it tomorrow morning because, you know, Friday morning at 8.55 is when the voice is in perfect shape.

Right. Which was also very kind of you. So we've been kind to one another throughout this ordeal at least. We've got to do that, people. If you want to stay married. Yeah, definitely. You want the other person to hold your hand, you better be kind. But I'm excited to finally, and you know, probably, it was probably good that I had a lot more time with this, because this is one of those sort of thought experiment-y, get your brain in the right frame of mind kind of episodes. And we love doing these, and this is going to be a good one. Yeah, for sure. So what we're talking about today, Chuck, is the Solurian Hypothesis,

which if I could do anything with this thing, I would rename it. I'd be like, guys, that was a terrible decision. Yeah. Like, keep listening, everybody. So right, exactly. I promise it's interesting. So the whole thing came out of, we'll explain it in a second, but we should probably talk

about where it came from and why we don't like this name. The whole thing came out of a meeting between a guy named Adam Frank, who's an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, and a guy named Gavin Schmidt, who's the big wig director for the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a NASA joint. And Adam Frank went to Gavin Schmidt and said, hey, I'm trying to figure out if we could find ancient, defunct civilizations elsewhere in, you know, off of earth. What would I look for? And the reason he was doing this, this is a, it's an answer to the Fermi paradox.

Where is everybody? Well, one answer is, well, they were here, but now they all died out. So Adam Frank is looking for evidence that they were there. And Gavage Schmitt said, let me just stop you right there and up the ante here. Well, actually, you know what Gavin Schmidt said? What he said? Let me tell you something, Professor Frank. Hey, and Professor Frank said, Oh, God, I had a dime for every time somebody did that right so so close

Yeah, Schmidt was like hey, buddy What'd you say? I'll one-up you I'll up the ante. Okay, I'll up the ante here What if it's planet Earth and what if there were ancient civilizations here my friend? Yeah, and they said check, please. Yeah, I don't Frank just vomited directly all over Gavin Schmidt's desk very famously. Yeah, I mean, I think they sort of started chatting about this thing. And we should point out that, you know, what we're going to, they wrote a paper, we'll get to that in a second, and they named it Solarian Hypothesis, but neither one of them think, like, oh, I think this is what happened.

It's more, you know, it's a thought experiment. It's what happens when two remarkably intelligent people get together sometimes and take LSD. One of the other things about it that I think makes it worthwhile too, first of all these guys are the first scientists to seriously explore the idea, which you can apply science to anything like that and even though they don't think it's correct, they don't rule it out yeah you can't rule it out there's not enough information to rule it out right yeah um but the other thing that it does is it provides um kind of like a a guide to see what we're doing

now what signals we're going to leave in the far future as well yeah absolutely so uh i imagine they went to another venue, they went to a bar afterward to have a drink, keep this party going. And they were like, well, you know, there's been enough time for something like this to have happened. Because when you look at the fossil record,

the oldest thing that we know of is a cyanobacteria fossil that's about three and a half billion years old that was from the ocean. Yeah. And if you're talking about complex life, then you only have to go back about 540 million years ago to the Cambrian explosion. So like anything beyond that was, you know, stuff like cyanobacteria that we know of at least. So any prior intelligent species wouldn't theoretically be older than that Cambrian explosion. Yeah. They call it an explosion because everything went from single-celled organisms like you

were saying to basically all the types of animals on the planet today. It exploded. It's just the best name for it. You really can't add to that. But there's another guy, another character we need to add here, and his name is Jason Wright. I like this guy. He's an astronomer at Penn State. And he said, whoa, whoa, whoa, guys, and this is in a separate paper that I think even predated the Silurian hypothesis paper.

He was sitting next to them overhearing them at the bar. Right, they were like covering their work while they were... Exactly. So Jason Wright says, not to them directly, but in general, he's like, okay, we don't know that you have to stop the Cambrian explosion to look for intelligent life on Earth in the past. And the reason why is because we have a really, like that's using a really limited definition of life. That's using the kind of life that has certain body plans with a central nervous system.

Some have like backbones, some don't, some are jellyfish, doesn't matter. Like what if there's other kinds of life out there? What if some of those single-celled organisms had gotten together and formed like a hive mind colony that was capable of intelligent industrialization. We wouldn't know that. Like think out of the box guys. Yeah exactly because you know it's hard to wrap your head around all we know is us and what happened with the development of how we got to now. Yeah. So he's like, you know, turn that off everybody

because that could have happened, what Josh Clark just said. And they were like, who's Josh Clark? And he said, oh, you'll find out soon enough. And he said, or maybe there was another like Cambrian like explosion that happened like way, way back before that. And maybe it's, maybe they didn't leave any fossils behind or so few

that we didn't find them. Or maybe, you know, there was a cataclysm that destroyed everything, like there was this complex life, it destroyed everything and it kind of just rebooted the system with these single-celled organisms and that's what we know as the start. Right. Yeah. And they went, whoa, buddy. we know is the start. Right. Yeah. And they went, Whoa, buddy. I know.

It's pretty cool. Can I pay for this guy's drink? Yeah. Can I buy a beer? So, um, Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank are like, we think we're onto something here. Let's, let's kind of flesh this out a little more. And I think it was Gavin Schmidt who, um, suggested they call it the salurian hypothesis. And the reason they call it the Silurian hypothesis. And the reason they call it the Silurian, that's I think a period or an epoch

or something in Earth's history, 500 something million years ago. But they weren't naming it after that. They were naming it after a race of lizard people who are characters on Doctor Who. Yeah. Do you have any Doctor Who experience? None, I feel like it's like this whole thing out there

That's just waiting for me to meet it and I'm like, I don't know I mean, I've never I don't know anything about it But I just caveat that because there may be emails coming in that are like they're not lizard like people They are this like I have no idea. I looked at pictures of them like you did and they look like lizard reptilian type creatures. They do. So that, I mean, for all intents and purposes, if you're not super into Dr. Who, they're lizard people.

I really, really hope so. The reason that they named it after this race of lizard people in Dr. Who is that on the, in the Dr. Who universe, they lived about 300 million years ago, which would actually make them, place them in the Carboniferous period, not the Silurian, and apparently all Doctor Who fans are aware of that. Right, because they're all Doctor Franks. Right, but they supposedly survived a bunch of cataclysms here on Earth by moving underground and hibernating until

things cooled off a little bit. And now they're back in the Dr. Who universe. So they would be like the ancient civilization. And so there's two reasons why I find that unfortunate that they named it after that. One, it just makes the whole thing silly to a degree, apologies to Dr.

Who fans, but it, like, this is an actual like academic exercise they're engaged in and it has a silly thing out of the gate. It's a tea. I mean, again, we're not saying Dr. Who is silly, but it'd be like us coming up with like the family ties hypothesis or something, like it's named after a TV show. It says like, before you even read the abstract, don't take this seriously. But it's meant to be taken seriously.

It's not tongue and cheek at all. The paper is, at least, or the hypothesis. The other reason why is because every single author who wrote any piece or article about this hypothesis afterward uses a hypothetical lizard race to discuss what we would be looking for.

And it's so obnoxious, man. So we are not going to do that. No, no. We're not even going to try to guess what they would be like or look like. They're just the hypothetical ancient industrialized civilization that we're looking for. So if we're looking for something like that here on

Earth, Chuck, what would we start to look for? Well, and I mean, those are sort of the questions these guys started. I guess they went to another bar and started asking, they're pretty sloshed at this point. Yeah, I was going to say. And they start asking even more questions, I guess, after they got over the, I mean, hopefully they didn't have to argue about Solurian. I'm praying they were both Doctor Who fans and that Dr. Frank didn't have to convince old Gavin. You know?

I think it might've been the other way around, and based on the titles, I think Frank would've had to go along with it. Okay, well either way. They started to sort of ask these big questions, and what it really comes down to are two main questions. What should we be looking for? Right. And in order to think. What should we be looking for? And in

order to think about what should we be looking for, a good place to start is, well, what are we leaving behind that a future archaeologist or geologist might look for? And when they started poking around a little bit, they found that, you know, there's some stuff here that does bear a resemblance to like possible signals that something could have happened as far as an ancient industrialized civilization that just went away. Like you can't hear it but my jaw just dropped. Right.

All right. Josh's jaw is on the floor. We're going to seek some medical attention and we'll take a little break and we'll be right back. Selena. Selena. Celia Cruz. Azucar. Peril G. La Bichota. Christina Aguilera. Xtina. Just to name a few. We're serving the whole story.

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I know. It's a great name. All right. Stuxnet with an X. All right. So we're back and we were talking about where you might or what you might look for if you're looking for a previous advanced civilization and sort of the obvious first place you know we're gonna start easy and get a little more complex here it's just like all the all the physical stuff like if you're an industrialized

intelligent civilization you're gonna have industry and cities and factories and things and skyscrapers and buildings. And it's hard to wrap your head around all that stuff being gone one day when you're living amongst it. But like the life of a skyscraper is about 50 years without human intervention to start. That's why when you go to New York, every building has scaffolding on it practically. Because you have to keep those buildings up.

They start falling apart because of corrosion and erosion. So without that, even though it's hard to imagine, everything will eventually be gone. And we're talking about in the grand scheme of the big, big timeline, so like hundreds of millions of years. Yeah, yeah, but for a city itself, I mean, apparently water intrusion is a big problem

for all of those tall buildings, as well as erosion and corrosion and all that. Um, they're like, it's not going to take millions of years for them to go away. We're talking thousands to tens of thousands of years. And our cities will be just completely rubble, especially ones that are built on like solid ground or rocky ground, um, well above sea level, because those are the ones that are most like open and left vulnerable to the processes of erosion that

sweep across earth's surface and wipe the whole thing clean. And yeah, it wouldn't take very long. The stuff that's underground might be a little more easily preserved. Like, you know, under any city there's a huge network of infrastructure, pipes and cables and tunnels and hard hats and stuff like that. That conceivably, even after the city above is long gone, that stuff could be preserved to a certain degree. Yeah, for sure. And we should shout out this guy that, did you dig him up or was that Livia?

I think Livia found him. Yeah, his name is, starts with a J, but it's Jan Zelasiewicz. And he's a paleontologist at the University of Leicester. Mm hmm. Nice work. Oh boy. In the UK. And we shout him out because he, nice work. Oh boy, in the UK. And we shout him out because he sort of led us down this path

of looking underground, potentially looking underwater, because things would just deteriorate a lot slower down there. But he's just a guy I just want to recommend, if you want to get into some heady sort of YouTube stuff, just Google Jan Zelasiewicz. It's Z-A-L-A-S-I-E-V-I-C-Z, because I went down a little,

because we had so much extra time, just a little bit of a rabbit hole. Watching this guy, he has a bunch of YouTubes where he's speaking to university groups and classrooms and things, and he's just super smart and interesting. Yeah. The stuff he's into is super cool too.

But yeah, he, he himself gets it across really well. I like the guy. Yeah. So he points out, he was the one he, I think he's, he chose San Francisco. Like San Francisco is a goner. It's not going to be around very long. Once we're gone. And by the way, I keep saying once we're gone, um, remember that amazing 2007 book, the world without us by Alan Weisman.

Never heard of it. Oh, yes, you have. It was like all the thing back in 2007, they made like TV shows about it and all that. So this guy basically went to the trouble of figuring out in five years, 10 years, 50 years, a hundred years, thousands, so on. That sounds familiar. What the planet would be like after if humans just suddenly vanished.

And like, he goes into detail of like the, the processes of erosion and corrosion, what effects it's going to have. It's just so fascinating. That's super cool. Yeah, it is super cool. And like the series, at least one series, I think on like science channel or something like that was,

was worth watching too. But that's, I mean, that has a lot to do with what we're talking about. Um, so the, the topside city is gone. The stuff underneath might be preserved, but the cities that are built along water, and there's a lot of cities that are built along water. They like say New Orleans is actually built below sea level. When people are gone from New Orleans, New Orleans is going to go away really quick, but it will probably get preserved or at least covered over if not preserved by a

lot of the muck, the Delta muck that's brought down the Mississippi river. Um, and that will conceivably create the conditions to preserve the whole city in some form or fashion. Totally. But, and you know, a lot of the thought experiment is like introducing things and poking holes in it. There's not a lot, like, you know, if you live in an urban area,

it's kind of hard to think that there's not much urban area in the world, but there really isn't. I think the liberal estimates have it at about, a little less than 3%, like 2.7 2.8 percent of the world has been urbanized Some people put it as low as 1% So there's there's a lot of just land out there still so you're looking if you're looking for an ancient civilization I mean who's not to say that that could have been like 50% of the earth

But chances are it would be something a little more like what we're doing. For sure. And so like you were saying, like, that's one of the cool things about this as a thought experiment. Like you raise this point and then you like poke holes in it. Then sometimes you can kind of support it instead. And so like a legitimate question would be like, why are we assuming that an ancient civilization from millions of years ago in Earth's history had cities?

Yeah, good point. And the reason why, if they have any kind of intelligence, typically the more of an intelligent organism you put together, the more advanced it becomes. Like 12,000 years ago, there was something like 15 million people across all of planet Earth tops. But then as we started to grow in density, thanks to like agriculture and animal domestication, all of a sudden our technology started to develop at a really rapid pace, geologically speaking. And now here we are. So we could assume that there'd be some form of density because you need X number of intelligent organisms to advance to an industrialized civilization, one would imagine. So there's

actually a legitimate reason to think that they would have cities that we could look for. The problem is this Chuck, and you know this as well as I do. We'll see. The earth does not like things like cities and ruins or fossils. Let's talk about fossils. Yeah. I mean, that seems to be the next best place to start looking. If, let's say, the buildings are gone, fossils are how we know what happened in our distant past. But fossils are tough just because of how rare they are and how hard it is to make one and how sort of lucky it is that they happen to begin with and that we find them. The T-Rex is a great example. Just a little like back

in the envelope math some estimates say that somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 T-Rexes at any given time during their run were walking, stomping around planet Earth with their tiny little baby arms. They were around for about two and a half million years. That comes out to roughly 127,000 generations on the lifespan of a T-Rex. So we're talking total, roughly of course,

about two and a half billion individual T-Rexes that lived and died at any point in their history. And we only found 50 fossilized skeletons, which is about two millionths of one percent of the total population. Yeah. I should forewarn you that two billionths of one percent is my math personally But I did use it online percentage calculator like three different times to make sure it's it's accurate my friend Oh, I know the math people are always checking checking you. I was about to say getting your back, but really trying to prove No, they're not kidding. I got a target on my back. That's what they're trying to get

But you know the movie Jurassic Park As silly as some of that stuff was with the great movie. Don't get me wrong But you know the the mosquito being covered in amber like if you if you look at that movie like that one mosquito got trapped in amber and that's kind of what we're talking about here is just sort of the the dumb luck of The fossil happening to begin with a and then that fossil that's buried eventually getting pushed up to the Earth's surface where we can find it,

but within the window between it popping up and it being findable to it eroding to where it's not findable anymore. It's like, it's all, I mean, that's why we don't have, you know, billions and billions of fossils, is because it's just really rare to make one and find one. Yeah. Not just making one, but yes, finding one, it's a, all a product of time and space in a really complex formula. And I saw an, an article called, how can I become a

fossil by John Pickrell from 2018 on BBC really well worth reading. Did it say start listening to the Doobie brothers? Oh yeah. RIP, Dicky Betts, huh? Uh, well the Almond brothers, but sure. Well, yeah, I know I knew that. But yeah.

Okay. I mean, they're both brothers. Yeah. Yeah. Same time period. RIP, Dicky Betts. That was, that was a tough one. If you had been in my brain, it would have been.

No, I got you. Yeah, of course. And it's also nine 20. If you had been in my brain, it would have been. No, I gotcha. Yeah, of course. And it's also 920. So John Pickrell cited an estimate that one-tenth of one percent of all the species that have ever existed has had one of their individuals fossilized.

Oh, wow. So just really tiny, tiny percentages of fossils are ever created. And also I gotta just say this quote too, there's another article called the Anthropocene is a joke. Yeah, I thought you were gonna skip this one, this is great. Yeah, a guy named Peter Brannon, who's a science writer wrote it. And basically he's explaining like just how insignificant

humans have been on Earth, even as much as we've affected Earth, just how insignificant it actually is and how easily Earth will shake our stuff off. Yeah. But he had this great quote, I think you should say it. Oh, okay. Do you know where he's from?

So I can prepare? No, let's say Austria. You jerk. I mean, I guess it's sort of German. I'm just gonna read him as American. This is a great quote. Each fossil was its own miracle sampled randomly from almost 200 million years of history, a few stray windblown pages of a library. Isn't that great? Yeah, that really drives it home.

It really does. So hats off to Peter Brannan and John Pickrell. Definitely go read those and also go watch YouTube's of Jan Zelasiewicz. Right? Kind of like Manecewicz. Right. But with a Z. Yeah.

So, all of that said though, we have discovered really, really old fossils. The oldest hominid, our ancestor, the oldest indisputable ancestor to humans, Australopithecus anamensis, was walking around four and a half, almost four and a half million years ago, and we have a skeleton of that guy. So as miraculous as fossilization and discovery of fossils is, it does happen.

Yeah, absolutely, and that's hominids. Our old buddy Jan Zelasevich is like, you know what else could happen? Is we're creating a bunch of potential techno fossils as we advance. Like somebody could find a smartphone one day, somebody could find a grocery bag that's been fossilized. Sure. The more likely bag that's been fossilized.

The more likely thing that's going to be found is not some smartphone that you could plug in and then reboot. Right? It'd be like, let's see what pictures this guy had. But it might be something like a brick or a glass bottle that's clearly human made, that's artificial in shape and it may be stamped with like a company name or something like that. Like something like that is more probable for a future anthropologist or archaeologist to find as a techno-fossil.

Yeah. So... Or plastic, right? Plastic is another good one. We actually don't know how long it takes plastic to break down to its constituent parts. We know that it breaks down into really, really small particles, but they're still like micro particles of plastic. It's like intact particles of plastic, right? And if a future race discovered our plastic, they'd be like, this really bizarre Yeah, because by definition the plastic we make is artificial There are like polymers in nature like cellulose that are an analog to our plastic

But all the plastic we make is not found in nature. So if they found that they'd be like this is kind of weird What's going on with this? Yeah for sure and then chicken bones to Chuck mmm Have you ever seen it there was an Instagram account, it may have been called Atlanta Chicken Bones. No. That were just these great pictures of chicken bones in parking lots and sidewalks all over Atlanta. Right. So that's a really great point. There's the people who are like all bully on the Anthropocene,

the idea that the humans are creating our own geological era or epoch, say like chicken bones are probably a pretty good bet for like fossilized evidence of our presence because we raise and kill so many chickens it boggles the mind, their bones get everywhere and they are anatomically different from all other kinds of chickens because we bred them to be different, like have huge breasts and not be able to walk and all sorts of terrible stuff.

So if you found other chicken bones in the fossil record and then you found our broiler chicken bones, you'd be like, what is this? And also, why are they in Antarctica? Right? I also want to point out, since I brought up Atlanta chicken bones, I am a lover of fried chicken as you know. Yeah.

It's probably my favorite food and I have been known to have car chicken. As long as there's no shower chicken, I'm still, it's still the same. No, you want to keep it crispy. You don't want any humidity in there. But I have always resisted the urge to toss my chicken bones because I have dogs and I walk dogs and if you're not paying attention, that dog can snap up a chicken bone

on the sidewalk pretty easily. So just a PSA there, try and keep those chicken bones in the box. Yeah, and chicken bones can splinter so readily that it can really hurt your dog's throat, stomach. You don't want a dog eating chicken bones, okay? Yeah, did I ever tell you, this'll be quick, about when my deceased dog Buckley ate an entire drumette that fell off the grill?

No. It popped off many years ago, Buckley left us, but I looked down and I was like, oh shoot, chicken bone, or chicken drumette, and it was just gone. And it was gone so fast fast and Buckley was there But I was like he wasn't chewing or anything. I was like what happened to that thing ten minutes later mmm He barfs up a hole he swallowed it whole a whole chicken drumette that was still

Steaming from the heat of the grill So it was like I mean, thank God he did that cuz that would not have been good No, yeah, he swallowed that thing like a pill and then when he threw up he wiped his mouth. He's like totally Yeah, I think he thought it was worth it So I said something earlier Chuck we were talking about ruins fossils all that stuff I said that earth doesn't really like that kind of stuff. And I was right. Yeah.

Yeah. Are you setting me up? Yeah. Yeah, well, because here on Earth we have plate tectonics. We have a situation where, if you're talking about the ocean crust, it subducts below the lighter continental crust and it's gonna push everything down,

down, down toward the mantle where it melts and then eventually comes back up via like a land volcano, maybe an undersea volcano to form a new crust. And it's just like this giant super, super slow recycling conveyor belt. Yeah. It takes, I think on average, about 250 million years for new crust to go through that whole cycle. That's just on average, it can take hundreds of millions of years longer, it can take less, but that's just kind of

generally how slow it is. The point is, is that after X number of millions of years, that crust is, and everything attached to it is totally gone. Once it hits that mantle, it doesn't discriminate. Everything gets melted. Everything gets melted in the mantle. What about on land? Well, land is not subject to the forces of like

subduction, right? But it does have that erosion through wind and water, and everything just kind of gets recycled in its own way. Plus also, the plates that do collide with one another, and there's continental fault lines obviously too that produce earthquakes, when they collide, the stuff anywhere near those edges gets all kinds of messed up. And that's how a lot of mountain ranges form and then there's the Himalayas The thing is is that erosion that process of erosion that completely recycles Earth's surface over X number of years

In 88 million years the Himalayas will be gone. It'll just be a meadow where they were That's one of my favorite sort of facts of the show right there. Yeah. It's hard to imagine this stuff, but yeah. What is it eroding at like 0.1 millimeter per year? And again, we're talking on timelines of hundreds of millions of years here.

So 88 million years, yeah, that's it. Just go romp in the meadow. Yeah, because even if we're just going back to the Cambrian explosion, and you can argue that you can go back further like Jason Wright did, but even if you're just going back 540 million years, that means continental crusts have reinvented themselves

twice since then. The Earth's surface has been recycled countless times. Apparently the oldest surface stretch of Earth is like less than 2 million years old. Oh, geez. That's really young. Yeah. The reason all this stuff is hard to imagine, like the Himalayas going away,

is because our sense of time is so limited to about the span of a lifetime. Yeah. Plus a couple of decades maybe, that when we start to think it tends in hundreds of millions of years into the future or the past, we just stop. It just doesn't really make sense to us unless we really apply ourselves. With episodes like this. Yeah, exactly. So you've got plates colliding, you've got glaciers,

they move entire regions around like bulldozers, but even something as humble as the movement of earthworms through the soil, over enough time, that's going to erode fossils, ruins, subterranean networks of pipes, and essentially we're back to square one trying to figure out what to look for, for an ancient civilization. Are we done? Almost. All right, maybe we should take a break and we'll come back and talk about why we're striking out and where we go next. Y-S-K, K-P-S-A, kid. Juan Gabriel. Juan Guiz. Selena.

Selena. Celia Cruz. Azucar. Peril G. La Bichota. Christina Aguilera. Xtina. Just to name a few.

We're serving the whole story. From rags to riches. And all the tea in between. I'm Lilliana Vasquez. And I'm Joseph Carrillo. And we're the host of Becoming an Icon and a New World. And we're the host of Becoming an Icon and a New World. And we're the host of Becoming an Icon and a New World.

And we're the host of Becoming an Icon and a New World. And we're the host of Becoming an Icon and a New World. And we're the host of Becoming an Icon and a New World. And we're the host of Becoming an Icon and a New World. And we're the host of Becoming an Icon and a New World. And we're the host of Becoming an Icon and a New World. between. I'm Liliana Vasquez and I'm Joseph Carrillo and we're the host of Becoming an Icon Season 2. Guess who's back in a house and we're bringing you even more stories behind the world's biggest stars in Latin music. Certified Latin Royals. Consider us your star sleuths, your cheese my besties, digging beneath los mejores exitos to bring you everything you didn't know about your favorite Latin icons. Hey, you know what, my boo?

You're my favorite icon. Oh, Joseph. Listen to Becoming an Icon, part of the Michael Thurow Podcast Network, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I never thought I'd take my three young kids to Sicily to solve a century-old mystery, but that's what I'm doing in my new podcast, The Sicilian Inheritance. Join us as we travel thousands of miles on the beautiful and crazy island of Sicily, as I trace my roots back through a mystery for the ages and untangle clues within my family's origin story, which

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business in the United States. And it has amazing guests such as Alex Hermosy, Laila Hermosy, Cody Sanchez. We pull in these amazing interviews with other people that are not only great marketers, but actual operators. And the icing on the cake is Neil and myself were also operators as well. So we share learnings from the trenches. We share secrets that we otherwise wouldn't be sharing with other people. And we also share other advantages that will help you get ahead of your competition.

So all you have to do is listen to marketing school every weekday on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Stuxnet. Who? Stuxnet. Say it one more time. Stuxnet.

I don't know what that is. You know what Stuxnet is. Is that a nurse? Stuxnet. Stuxnet. It's a great name. You gotta quit saying Stuxnet. That's the name of it.

I know. It's a great name. All right. Stuxnet with an X. Okay, Chuck. So, we've seen that we can dismiss the archaeologists. Thank you everybody. And bring in the geologists. Yeah, like take your, take your whip, take your fedora, pack it all up, go take a break, because the geologists are on the scene. You can, Dr. Jones, you can take a seat. Right. So I can't even, like what are

the geologists like? They just, they don't have a movie franchises like the archaeologists do. Yeah. I mean, they're not looking for grails or looking for residue. So it's not, it's grabby. Yeah. I guess they're the thing that you'd most associate with is like a, a slight coffin and a really large empty room. Yeah, like there would never be a movie called Indiana Jones and the Ancient Tree Ring. No. You know?

No. Unfortunately. No, sadly. But that's what we're talking about is the fact that if we were to have a future geologist look back, that's what they would likely be looking for. Like forget the fossils, they're going to be looking for just little bits of residue by looking at these tiny little layers of sediment that we deposit every day all over the place that eventually becomes rock.

And this is how we look back at our own past to learn things. That's how we knew that the dinosaurs were exploded basically because of that asteroid and that Cambrian explosion happened because we have studied geology. Yeah, we've learned to study those layers that get put down and put down. And the problem is on Earth's surface, as we've seen, there's the process of erosion. Yeah. And there's an entire layer across the whole globe. It's not just in one spot, but there's a billion year, um, stretch of the geological record that's just gone.

It's missing. This is crazy. I'd never heard of this. Yeah, I hadn't either. It's called the great unconformity. And, um, like we'll just never know what was there, what happened during that time, because there's no record of it. They think that it was just a period where there wasn't a lot of sedimentation put

down, but there was a lot of erosion. So some people suggest that it was during snowball earth, one of those periods where like ice sheets cover the entire globe three miles thick and that they could erode stuff, you know, pretty cleanly across the globe. It's a pretty good, pretty good theory, but stuff like that happens. So when we're looking at Earth's surface, you run into problems, but because that oceanic crust takes so much longer to recycle, we could look there and conceivably find something hundreds of millions of years old. Yeah, I also

got to say, Snowball Earth is, I mean, that's the next great Netflix show waiting to happen. Maybe that's about an adventurous geologist. Maybe so. I love it. So yeah, going back underwater seems to be a better bet than because of stuff like the Great Unconformity. Going back underwater where that process

of wearing stuff away is much, much slower is probably a better bet for us and a better bet for future geologists. Yeah, because all the stuff that enters the ocean or is born and lives and dies in the ocean, it becomes detritus that eventually tumbles down to the ocean floor and it gets locked in as sediment there. And it happens really, really slowly. Like I think 0.8 centimeters every thousand years is about the average sedimentation. So that means that so far we have accumulated about 0.16 centimeters of ocean sediment

that would bear our presence, possibly even bear the signals that we ever lived. But we're adding to it every day, thanks to things like nitrogen fertilizer that we overuse that enters the watersheds and eventually goes to the ocean and then goes and gets trapped in sediment. And so if you were a future archeologist or geologist and you were looking at the layer where we existed, you'd be like, what is all this nitrogen suddenly doing here? And then also, what are these weird polymers that used to be our plastic from all the stuff, all the plastic that ends up in our oceans,

those will eventually fall down to the bottom and become trapped in the sedimentary layer too. Yeah, so that super soaker that your kid lost beyond the point where the waves would bring it back in is eventually going to end up at the bottom, or the trash that is floating around the ocean. All that stuff is going to go down as well. And so this is going to leave behind like a trace, a sediment trace, where a future geologist might say, well, hey, I see that there was this specific time period, 100 million years ago, where there was a spike in nitrogen or a spike in these weird human-made polymers, or maybe they didn't

know that there were humans, but either way like... Maybe they were like the weird lizards. Yeah, something that doesn't jive with what we have going on today. Right. There are all these weird spikes, so there was clearly something going on in this time that we now think of

as our time here on planet Earth. Yeah, because that's how we find mysterious signals in the geological record. You compare it to what's above and what's below it, and if something suddenly appears or disappears, you know, it's like, look here, look closer here. Radioactivity will probably be a marker that we'll be behind too.

From all the nuclear tests, there'll be plutonium-244 and iodine-129, which have half-lives in the millions, tens of millions of years. If we end up going out in a massive nuclear war, you bet that will leave quite a signal in the geological record. And one of the other things about leaving, uh, uh, like a record in oceanic crust is that the earth

goes through cycles of like, um, cooling and warming and cooling and warming. And when it cools, the sea levels decline, it gets sucked up into ice and so what's under the ocean may end up hundreds of miles inland for future archaeologists to find probably more easily than they would if it were underwater at the time. Yeah, for sure. So you know, sort of striking out all over the place such that our old astronomer friend

Jason Wright is like, maybe Earth is not the place to look maybe you should be you know, we should be looking on a place like Mars that doesn't have plate tectonics and Is probably a better more hospitable place for some ancient thing to be discovered one day Yeah, and not necessarily a Martian civilization, but an intelligent Earth civilization that sent probes to Mars or something like that. The European Space Agency also points out that if anybody had been around to send a probe out into geosynchronous orbit, the furthest reaches of geosynchronous orbit around Earth, it would still be there.

Its orbit wouldn't have collapsed yet. So, you know, we need to look for 66 million year old probes spinning around Earth. That's a good start too. Yeah, so all of this sort of presents a paradox. It's pretty interesting, which is that if you're gonna be an industrialized civilization that lasts long enough to leave something behind for some future

geologist to find, then that means that you found some sort of sustainable way to survive. And if you found a sustainable way to survive, that means you're not making as much of an findable impact on Earth, you're living more sustainably. And so you're not dumping plastics into the ocean or nitrogen into the ocean and sort of cleaning up your act and erasing your path a little bit better. If you're not doing that, then that means you haven't found a sustainable way to live.

So that means you're going to, as a society, die out much quicker. So you're going to be just a shorter blip. So either way is just going to make things more difficult. Yeah. Whether you're long lived or short lived, the record you leave is going to end up just being a blip in the geological record, right? Yeah, again, on that huge timeline.

So, like, I'm sure some people are pulling their hair out. They're like, how then? Like, is it even possible to find signals that an ancient civilization existed or what signals? Well we leave two and yes there are and what you want to look for is not the like traces of fossils or strange appearances of elements in the geological record and sediments. Instead you want to look at the impressions that the effects of those things had on Earth because those get locked

into geological records and they can stay around for a very, very long time. So much so that we can look back into Earth's far, far, far distant past. And we see signals that were like, can't rule out that this some industrialized ancient civilization produced these effects on Earth because we don't know what happened. Yeah, exactly. And what we're talking about is something called a hyperthermal event where three things kind of line up, which is an abrupt extinction of maybe not everything, but many, many, many species that's pretty obvious, that coincides with the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere and a lot of rapid coastal erosion. All of those three things happening at once

is called a hyperthermal event and it's a pretty good indication that something really, really big happened to wipe out most everything. Yes, and usually the hyperthermal events we found are caused by negative carbon isotope extrusions, which is basically just a different way of saying a ton of organic CO2 was pumped into the atmosphere and it had all of these telltale marks of sea level

rise leading to erosion, mass extinctions, dogs and cats living together, all that stuff. Right. And so if we look in the past, there are events that coincide with this. One of them is the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, the PETM. It took place about 56 million years ago. So basically after the dinosaurs died out and right after mammals started to take over earth, it got really hot.

And I was trying to figure out how hot the, the surface temps in the Arctic sea were about 73 degrees Fahrenheit, 23 degrees Celsius. That's what you find today around the panhandle in the Gulf of Mexico. Yeah. These are the Arctic seas today, the global annual surface temperatures, about 59 degrees

Fahrenheit, 15 Celsius. Back then it was 90 degrees Fahrenheit, or 32 degrees Celsius. That's the global temperature, the average, across all of the globe. So it was really, really hot, and they have traced that to tons of carbon dioxide suddenly appearing in the atmosphere,

causing all these changes. Yeah, and that lasted for about 100,000 years. But that's not the only one. There have been other events similar to that in the Cretaceous period, in the Jurassic period, in the Paleozoic era. And then in the six million years since the PETM, the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum,

there were even more of those hyperthermal events. And again, they sort of all bore the same similarities, right? Yeah, because there's only so many ways that Earth responds to being messed with. Yeah. And so like all of these things kind of do bear a striking similarity. And there are things, there's natural things that you can point to that could have caused them like massive volcanic activity across earth or a sudden huge deposit of shale ended up in the

mantle and got recycled very quickly and all sorts of CO2 was released in the air. Who knows, but what Schmidt and Frank basically point to is like, and again, they don't think this is correct. They say, like you can't rule out that this is a marker of an ancient civilization creating climate change in exactly the same way that we're creating climate change today. Because we are laying down the foundations of a geological signal that will be detectable hundreds of millions of years in the future as a hyperthermal exactly like the ancient hyperthermal we've discovered

in Earth's past. Yeah, which is basically if we do ourselves in with climate change. Yeah, because they're predicting if we just keep going with fossil fuels just for the rest of the century, by the end of the century we'll have increased the global temperature by about 4.8 degrees Celsius. Which is huge. That is a that qualifies as a hyper thermal maximum and that PETM like the biggest hyper thermal maximum that ever happened all of a sudden that took place over like a thousand plus years. We're doing this in a couple hundred years. So it will really stick out in the geological record.

Yeah. I think the, the PETM had a, a five to seven Celsius degree rise. And if we're looking at 4.8 in that span of time, that's trouble. Yeah. And that's just by the end of the century, who knows if we just keep going. We're not quite sure when the whole thing will steady itself out and what the peaks will be when it does. You know? Yeah. So there's one other thing that I found really

interesting is that the fossil fuels that we're using to create inadvertently this hyper thermal and earth's geological record is created from the mass extinctions from the past. Those die-offs turned into fossil fuels that we use today to, to essentially, um, add all that carbon to the atmosphere, which is creating these warmer conditions.

Yeah. And then if you take it one step further, we're eventually going to create these mass extinctions that will create the fossil fuels for another industrialized civilization to come tens of millions of years in the future. That's right. We're just insignificant aren't we? Yeah. But also overly significant somehow. That's right. If you really want to get that driven home go read Peter Branden's The Anthropocene as a joke. It really, it

almost made me feel like fine about climate change, because it just, in the grand scheme of things, it's so insignificant. I had to be like, no, no, it matters. It's important to stop thinking like that. Yeah, I know what you mean. So, you got anything else? I got nothing else.

This is long awaited for us and a lot of fun. Yeah, let's hope we remembered to press record. Oh, God. I would just retire. Well, since Chuck said he would just retire, of course, that means he's triggered listener mail. Yes, this is a story from Dylan. This is one that I knew about, but I don't know if we ever talked about it, but it's a pretty interesting little thing. Okay. Hey guys, I've been listening to you for about two years, helps get down on my commute, and

I often learn a lot. During the Hitchhiking F, you were talking about the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Larry David picks up a sex worker so he can ride in the carpool lane to a Dodgers game, and I wanted to let you know something about that episode Did you know this? No, I thought this was amazing. Yeah That episode was actually used to help secure an alibi for a man Juan Catalan who is arrested for murder They filmed the episode during an actual Dodgers game and it just so happened that Juan and his family were sitting in the same section As Larry David when they were filming and Juan's lawyer used the raw footage from the episode to help exonerate him.

So they picked up this guy for murder and they proved him wrong thanks to this Curb Your Enthusiasm footage. He was like he was at the Dodger game. He couldn't have done it. Yeah. God did not want Juan in jail. Amazing. There's a short documentary on Netflix called Long Shot and it is truly one of the stories you can't believe is true.

Thanks for the years of entertainment. I love sharing the knowledge with you guys through listener mail. Stay positive and keep testing negative. Dylan. Awesome, Dylan. You're a cool cat, we can tell. Thanks a lot for that great email. That was amazing, and we will definitely go watch Long Shot very soon. Totally. If you want to get in touch with us like Dylan did, you can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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