Stuff You Should Know - What is the future of Earth?

Episode Date: May 17, 2012

What will the Earth be like in 5,000 or 50,000 years? In this far-sighted episode, Josh and Chuck explore how Earth may change over time. Listen in to learn more about humanity's odds of survival -- and how technology just might save us. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, maker of some fine yarn spinner of yarns.

You're a yarn spinner. I am. I guess I am too, to a certain extent. Part-time seamstress. Yes, but you only make the suits of life formed by matadors. That's right, Josh. Chuck. Yes. How's it going? It's great. I can't wait to hear your intro for this. Why? I don't know because I thought this is a pretty interesting thing that we're doing. I agree. This is not one, not two, but three articles in one. That's right. Combine and mishmashed, taken totally out of context, and repeat it incorrectly. Yeah, we might be all over the place on this one. Not necessarily. I've discovered a structure to this. So follow me. Just lead me. Okay. Let me give you the intro first. Chuck. Josh. Have you heard of the Keo

satellite? No. Okay. If you read Ben Boland's blog, you would have heard of it. He's written about it twice. Who? Yeah. Stuff they don't want you to know is Ben Boland. Carstuff's Ben Boland. Yeah. Just a general man about town of awesomeness Ben Boland. I love Ben. He wrote about the Keo satellite, which was originally conceived in, I think, 1994 by a French artist named Jean-Marc Philippe. So if you didn't believe me that he was French, I'll bet you do now. And his idea was to basically create a time capsule and launch it into space, right? So he had standard stuff, standard time capsule stuff, you know, a drop of human blood encased in a diamond with the human genome engraved on the outside of it. Kim Kardashian's bikini. Right. Yeah. The, let's see, a sample of

air, water, basically earth wind and fire, but without the fire and with air. And then a CD of earth wind and fire, which would be great. And water. Yeah. I don't know why you wouldn't put in there. That'd be a fun little ironic twist. He got a bunch of, a bunch of press, because one of the cool things that he's invited people to do is to enter your own message, whatever you want to say. Cool. Up to 6000 characters, which is still substantial, a few paragraphs. And originally, since this was from 1994, you could send it your submission in via regular mail or, as Time Magazine put it in 2000, electronic mail. Is that what they said? Yeah. Wow. Now I'm quite sure you can only go to keo.org and enter it through the website. Yeah. But then all of this will be compiled into,

again, based on the Time Magazine report, a CD ROM. Now it'll be transcribed onto some DVDs. Now this thing should have been launched like five times, but he's seeking private funding. It's a good idea. People are with it. Has no one ever done this? No. But the whole point of it is, is all this stuff is going to be put into a satellite shot in a space, and it's going to be given, I'm not quite sure how, a 50,000 year orbit. And then after 50,000 years, it should fall to earth, hopefully be discovered. Within all this will be some sort of pictogram depicting how to create a DVD player. And then some future civilization would be like, Oh, it's a DVD. I'll just pop it in our DVD player. And then, oh my gosh, I can't believe what Mitch Moush 14 had to say about what life

is like on earth 50,000 years ago. Yeah. What does this LOL mean? And he chose keo because apparently, keo are the three most common phonemes in all the world's languages. This is a pretty good idea. Sure. I love it. At the very least, it coincides with one of the articles we're talking about. What will the earth be like in 50,000 years? Boom, intro done. Nice job. Thanks. And to get to 50,000 years, Josh, we are going to also touch on the articles, 500 years and 5,000 years. And through this, I'm also going to be disseminating information. I found a live science article that hit 2020, 2030, 2050, 70, 80 and 2100. And they sort of culled opinions from scientists all over the world on what might be going on. And that's all within

the next 200 years. Nice. And the story is not good. Well, yes. So here's the structure I mentioned previously, Chuckers. Okay. There's a couple of ways to approach this, right? Okay. So we're talking about the earth 500, 5,000 and 50,000 years from now. There are two big questions. One, will humans be around at each of these periods? Sure. And there's two possible answers, yes or no. And then depending on the answer we choose, we choose our own adventure and we end up with the treasure or being chased by pirates, right? Okay. The other possible answer is, okay, if humans are around, how advanced is our technology and specifically how advanced is our ability to tap energy, which apparently is totally correlated with how advanced our technology will

be? Sure. Right? Yeah. So I guess approaching the idea where humans aren't around for any of this, just go watch a documentary called Life After Us or Life After People. I didn't get to watch it. It's cool. I know. I'm going to watch it. It's a very neat little hour and a half documentary that was a mini series like some time ago on some other channel. But it was a neat little documentary like What If and it shows like how long basically the earth will erase any mark of humanity after we're gone. And it takes a very, it takes a startlingly short time and the dogs go feral and it's crazy. Really? Yeah. But let's say humans are around, especially in that 500-year scenario. Well, before we get there, can I read some of these

highlights? Okay. And this is in the next, you know, up until 2100. Okay. So this is an immediate future. Yeah. We'll still be alive. I'll just read a few of these. By the year 2020, just to scare you, less rainfall could reduce agricultural yields by up to 50% in some parts of the world. Okay. Wow. World population will be 7.6 billion. By 2030, up to 18% of the coral reefs in the world will be lost. Yeah, because of increased temperatures in the sea and higher acidity, right? Was it lower acidity? I think it's higher acidity. Is it higher? Okay. And the Arctic Sea could be ice free in the summertime by the year 2030. That's crazy. And these are according to, you know, that was specifically James Overland of the NOAA and Muyan Wang of the geophysical

research letters from UW. Right. So I'm just not, I'm not trying to preach some wacky global warming conspiracies here. Oh no. I'm quoting from other people. Okay. By 2050, ocean acidification, okay, it is acid, could kill off most of the coral reefs. At least 400 bird species could become endangered or extinct due to deforestation. And people eating them. In Australia, all you Aussies out there, there will likely be an additional 3200 to 5200 heat related deaths per year. 2080, Josh. Oh, it gets worse. Between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people will experience water shortages and up to 600 million people will go hungry. You know, it's crazy. We've talked a lot about this, like what happens when we run out of water. The climate porn one where we like warned

against exactly what we're doing right now. Yeah. We've talked about a lot of this. Go back and listen to it. Everybody agreed. Sea levels could rise in New York City by more than three feet, flooding Brooklyn, Queens, Coney Island. So let me let me add something there. Three feet. It's a meter roughly. It's a lot. And there's that's that's totally within the predictions of sea level rise due to global warming, right? Yeah. About a half a meter to two meters is what's predicted. So one meter in there, if the sea levels rise by one meter in the US, we'll lose 10,000 square miles of dry land. 90% of that in the Southwest. If the sea levels rise one meter in India, Bangladesh and Indonesia, they will lose respectively 6000 square kilometers, 30,000 square kilometers and

34,000 square kilometers of dry land lost. And believe me, Indonesia doesn't have much more than 34,000 square kilometers of dry land to give up, right? And a total of 24 million people will be displaced. Wow. I know that that's that's three feet. That's think about it. I mean, like, it doesn't seem like much, but it goes, you know, a ways back plus also we lose all those wetland buffers. So erosion really takes a hold as well. Well, they also along those lines predicted that coastal population is going to balloon to about 5 billion people and 20% already live along the world's most populous populated river basins. Right. So everybody's going to have to move back a little bit. Everybody back up. So while this is happening to by the year 2080,

while some places are flooded, other places are going to be drying out. Oh, yeah, desertification. We've talked about that. And then flash forward to 2100 atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will be much higher than any time during the past 650,000 years. Yeah. Ocean pH levels will be the lowest they've been in the last 20 million years. And the ability of things like coral, crabs, oysters, any kind of shelled fish exoskeleton probably isn't going to be alive. Yeah. And a quarter of all species of plants and land animals could be driven to extinction 25%. So that's okay. So let's say Chuck, that tomorrow, everybody's like, we're going all wind power. Everybody just prepared for some dark couple of years, but we're going to be fine. We're

done doing fossil fuels tomorrow. Yeah. And we don't put any more anthropogenic CO2 into the atmosphere. If we did that, within a few decades, CO2 levels would go back to normal, whatever you could consider normal without human contribution. But then about 1500 years from now, we could expect to enter another ice age, which will last 40,000 to 100,000 years. So you're starting to get the idea that humans, just being us on a planet, just burning fossil fuels, dead plants and animals for energy, which is extremely primitive as you're about to see. We are in trouble one way or the other. Oh yeah. And dude, that's not even talking about extinction level events that are going to happen at some point. That's normal glacial stuff. Yeah. I mean, that may happen millions of years

from now, but at some point, something will destroy humanity. Okay. Yes. Agreed. But over the short term, say 500 years, we have a big challenge to stay alive. We have to basically become our technology has to outgrow the frequency of catastrophic events, things like a meteor, comet, an ice age, climate change. And that's Michio Keikou talking. But if we can, if our civilization can advance fast enough, that we can say, Oh, there's a comet that's coming and there's going to be a mass extinction event. Luckily, our technology is sufficient that we can go out there and destroy it before it gets anywhere near earth. Right. We'll be fine. We should be able to ensure our survival, at least here on the planet. And the way to do that is to go from what we are now,

which is essentially a type zero civilization to a type one civilization. Yes, we should go ahead and mention this. It's very important. The card, Kim Kardashian scale. Oh, hey, that's twice in one episode. That's crazy. I don't even know. I don't even know who she is hardly. That's good. Okay. Okay. 1964 Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev put forth his theory that our technical advancement is in direct correlation to how much energy we can consume and tap into. Harness. Yeah. Yeah. Type one, which we're not even there yet. We're type zero right now. Yeah. As we can harness everything on this planet. Period. Every kind of energy we can tap into. Right. But it's, it should be any type of energy that's available that's non extractive, basically any kind of

non harmful energy is kind of the caveat. So it's basically solar radiation, nuclear fusion, that kind of thing. We use a billionth of the sun's no, there's a billionth of the sun's energy available to us on earth through solar radiation. Okay. We currently harness a millionth of that. Wow. So we have a ways to go. But if you look at our progress over the last 100 years, we were harnessing like zero of it pretty much. And now we're harnessing a millionth. So it's quite possible, according to Michio Keku, that we'll be able to harness 100% within 100 years. Well, yeah, they say that over the past 10,000 years, our scientists estimate that we have evolved 100 times faster than at any other time. So if that continues, then hopefully we can keep pace.

I mean, just look at our advances in lighting over the last 100 years. I mean, that we went from fire to incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescence. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like we're we're exponentially advancing. Agreed. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take to America's public enemy. Number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that will piss

you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. The street stove podcast combines hip hop lyrics and quotes from some of the greatest to ever grace a microphone. This quote comes to us from the late great Nipsey Hussle. I want to bring in a quote from Jay Z, a lyric from him, one of the goats, Eminem, of course, and adds words of timeless philosophy and wisdom from some of the most influential stoics. Let's take one of the

Stoics Marcus Aurelius, right? And this comes to us from Epictetus. This also leads to a stoic quote from Seneca, right? And he says, the greatest obstacle to living is expectation, which depends on tomorrow and waste today. I am Dramos and you may know me from my other podcast, Life as a Gringo. And if you like me, man, you could definitely use a daily shot of inspiration. And that's exactly what I'm giving you here. Listen to the street stoic as part of the Micutura podcast network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. So if we move to a type one, we harness 100% of the energy on the planet. We become by definition, according to Kardashev, a planetary, a truly planetary species where,

like we probably have a universal language, we're all communicating via the internet, like we are earthlings and we no longer see ourselves as Americans or Mexicans or Latvians or whoever, right? We're earthlings. Right, exactly. And as a result, our technology should be advanced enough that we can control things on the planet that threaten us like ice ages or climate change. So if we can do that, then we insured our survival here on earth. At least from those sort of natural disasters. Exactly. Good point, Chuck, because we could always kill ourselves via war or something like that. Or we may enter the singularity before we've sufficiently attached ourselves to machines, become post human. And if the singularity takes off before then we are doomed.

All right, let's go through these next two real quick. Okay, man. Type two means we can summon the power of an entire star system. That's pretty, pretty impressive. Which Freeman Dyson? Yeah, physicist. He said that his whole thing is that a type two civilization could like basically put a gaggle of satellites around a star and like harvest its energy like that. Yeah. And he just for the record, Michio Keiku says we might be able to get to type one in 100 years. And Dyson says it's going to be more like 200. Still it's not too bad. No. I mean, that's a that's leaps and bounds from where we are now. Yeah. And type three, Josh, the geekiest of all, we can command energy on a galactic scale. I don't even know what that means.

I think basically it means like so we can get other solar systems. Yeah, we can harness the energy of more than one star at once. And we would have power beyond anything we could conceive of. Probably also by that time, that would, I guess, mean that we were capable of interstellar travel, right, which would probably mean that if there's anybody else out there, we're contacting them, which hopefully doesn't mean we're at war with them, but probably does at least at first. Right. So you mentioned technology growing. It's a little something called Moore's law. Yeah. Computer speed and complexity doubles every 18 months. If that continues, then potentially in the not too distant future, there could be a lot of robotics going on, controlling these things

instead of people or in addition to people. Yeah. What do you think about that? I think that if we're not already fused to those machines or slaves, which is transhumanism. Yeah. Right. Which I mean, if you're looking at it over a hundred years, we're so close to mastering genetics that there's if we stay on this track, it's pretty much impossible that we won't have diverged from evolution, taken ourselves out of natural selection, right, because we'll be able to fix ourselves so well that really the only thing that we just genetics alone, the only thing we wouldn't be able to fix probably is death. Well, don't be so sure. Oh, okay. There's a Cambridge University geneticist, Aubrey de Grey, who has said these famous words,

the first person to live to be 1000 years old is certainly already alive today. Crazy. And whether they realize it or not, barring accidents and suicide, most people that are 40 years old or younger now can expect to live for centuries. She's definitely on the Aubrey, maybe not British, perhaps. Yeah. He or she is Wesley. Leslie is definitely Sherlock out there as far as his or her predictions. But scientists do think that we are, I mean, they can already extend the age in other mammals and laboratories. And we're funding it to the tune of $2.4 billion a year, anti-aging. Oh, yeah. Who knows? And we talked about this before, too. Cryonics. Cryonics. It is all coming back together. Yeah. Let's see. What else, Chuck?

So 500 years, we will most surely be around, I would say, and we will either be a suffering primate species in the sweltering heat or freezing and an ice age that began because we abandoned fossil fuels without thinking it through. But we'll probably still be around, right? Especially if you look at catastrophic global change. Yeah. We'll probably be okay. Most of us will be. Those of us inland will be. What about 5,000 years from now? This is 72 or the 7,000s. No. Yeah. 770-12. Yeah. 2,012. Yeah, yeah. Man, this thing's blowing my mind so much. I don't even know a year it is now. Robert Lam wrote this one and he says that if we reach that type one status, then that's great news because then we've been able to stave off ecological

disaster by being able to control these things and harness energy elsewhere. Right. But he also points out like we said earlier, warfare and self-destruction might do away with this. Sure. If we're going to achieve type 2 status, then the sky is the limit or the galaxy is the limit. Right. Well, that's the one with interstellar travel, I believe. Yeah. And then he also talks about diverging through transhumanism, posthumanism, where if we take ourselves out of natural selection, that will probably, looking back, be a point where it's as significant as homo sapiens diverging from Neanderthals or whatever happened back there. Right. Because you know there's a lot of speculation that humans are like 6% Neanderthal and like 10% something else and like

we very much interbred with these individuals we were competing with as well. Interesting. Yeah. So I guess it wouldn't be diverging but say the extinction of Neanderthals and the skyrocketing of homo sapiens. Right. Because think about, we're talking about 50,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, homo sapiens were just now reaching Europe and Neanderthals were very much still around and alive. I know. Isn't that crazy? And it possibly taken to the seas because they think that they were the first ones to basically build canoes. Really? Yeah. Wow. They've gotten a bad rap and they're just now starting to be understood. Interesting. Yeah. If you don't know your past, you don't know your future, Josh. Well, that's kind of one of the bases of this little exercise

we're doing now. It's kind of like if you look at where we've come, especially if you're talking about how quickly we're progressing. Yeah. I mean, 500 years ago, who was it? Ponsidillion discovered the Turks in the Caicos in 1512. Right. 20 years after the age of exploration began. Look at where we are now. We go to Turks and Caicos right now if we had a lot of money. Dude, we can go to Mars. Not really. Not us, but we can land things on Mars. Sure. Robotic cameras, please. Yes. That's like the beginning of the new age of exploration. Yeah. But humans, they'll colonize Mars at some point. I believe that. Yeah. That's another question to this whole thing as well. Like, what will the Earth look like? If you look at the first two

in 500 years and 5000 years, Robert took a really ethnocentric view of it. He made it about humans. Sure. But you kind of wonder, especially in the 5000 year thing, like, will we just be like, Earth is kind of played out. We're going to leave. Right. And there won't be anyone here. It will be on Mars or will be somewhere else. Yeah. And the Earth will just be like, man, I'm glad I thought this guy's would never leave. Rape me of all my junk. Yeah. Are we at 50,000? I believe so, man. Do we need to talk about axial procession? This is the one. Yeah, we kind of do because this one, if you ask me 50,000 years from now, no, humans won't be around. I don't think so. In what 50,000? Yeah. I think that we'll have either left or we will have diverged so much

from humans as we are now. We won't be around. And if there are human descendants, they will be at such peace with the Earth that we can talk about it almost in its natural state of what it will look like in 50,000 years. I'm going with the extinction level event. Okay. But let's back up and talk about procession. Do you understand this? Yeah. So basically, you know, the Earth, as it rotates around the sun, or as it revolves around the sun, it also rotates spins on its axis. Imaginary line that goes from the South Pole to the North Pole. Yeah. The thing is, is it doesn't spin in a perfect tight spiral. And we talked about this before. It's not like a, um, a Peyton Manning throw. It's more like a Tim Tebow throw. It's got a little wobble to it. You know what I

mean? Yeah. So at any point in time, the Earth is wobbling between, I think, 21 degrees. 22.1. 22.1 and 25, 24.5. Yeah. Okay. So if it's a 20, uh, 22.1, it's a lot closer to being vertical, perfectly vertical, which means that there's a lot less difference in the seasons. If it's over at a 24.5 degree angle, the seasons are so different that they could actually be about lopsided from where they are now, where in the Northern Hemisphere, we would have, um, um, summer in the winter and vice versa. Right. Um, that's just, that's just over like a 16,000 year cycle, right? Yeah. There's also something else called, um, obliquity, which is a 42,000 year cycle, um, which is kind of like the, the extreme of precession. What does that mean? It's the same

thing, but it's over a longer period. That's the one with the tilt. Oh, okay. Where the tilt goes fully back and forth. Gotcha. And then you have eccentricity. And this one is more about the revolution around the sun, right? Where the orbit of earth around the sun is it goes over a, I think a 92,000 year, 97,000 year, 97,000 year cycle. It goes from a close to a perfect circle to an ellipse. Yeah. And as it's going through that, when you factor in obliquity and precession, Chuck, what does this all mean? At some point you have a much colder earth than at other points, which is what accounts for ice ages they think. That's right. About every, uh, well, they last for about 100,000 years and in between, which is where we are now, we got about 10,000 years of pretty good weather.

Yeah. We are, like I said, right smack in the middle of the one and scientists think the next ice age will reach its peak in about 80,000 years. Yeah. So as far as our 50,000 year prediction, not ours, but the 50,000 year prediction, we will not likely be in the next ice age, although ice will be encroaching, they think as far south as like New York City. Well, not necessarily because I did, I ran across a study that said the next ice age will start about 1500 years from the time that carbon dioxide levels don't exceed like 245 parts per million volume. So when's that? I don't know because we're way above that now. Gotcha. But it would have to come back down and then once that happened in about 1500 years, we'd be in an ice age again.

Okay. This is all scary stuff. But think about it. That's if we have an advance to a type one civilization. Exactly. If we have, then we'll have figured out how to write the earth on its axis. And there it will just be spring all year round. Everybody will just be happy as larks like Guatemala. It will land a maternal spring. That's right. Are we to extinction level events yet? Yes. This is the one that'll be the toughest to deal with. I think so. Buster Rimes, the extinction level event. If you look back, like we said, you got to look back to your past and your future over our four billion plus history of the earth. Apocalypses, global apocalypses happen. Yeah, they happen. It's unavoidable whether or not it's an impact event like an asteroid or a comet

or some sort of gas related expelling event which happened or the scariest of all now that I've read up on it, the super volcano, which is pretty scary, like tectonic activity, basically causing a volcano that would block out the sun for 10 to 20 years. Yeah, which is what happened at the end of the Permian period, which I don't think it was coincidence that the super volcano erupted at the end of the Permian period. I think it ended the Permian period 250 million one years ago. Yeah, 151 million years ago. The Great Dying, as they call it, the Permian Triassic extinction event. And they don't know that it was a super volcano, the eruption of the Siberian traps. They don't know for sure because you can't know something that happened 250 million years ago. They think

it could have been an impact event, maybe anoxia, which is when the oceans became really depleted of oxygen, maybe some other gas event, or maybe a combination of this super volcano and anoxia and an impact event, sort of all converging to basically wipe out most every living thing on the planet. Yeah, like 95% of all marine species. Yeah. And how much? 70% of all land vertebrates. That's crazy. This eruption, the Siberian traps super volcano erupted for one million years. And it took the volume of lava was between one and four million cubic kilometers. And it took 30 million years for the earth to recover. That's a big dying. And it was also the only known mass extinction of insects in the history of the earth. Wow. Because usually insects live through stuff.

Yeah, they're fine. But yeah, this one wiped out. Apparently there used to be big, scary insects. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there was like cockroaches like three feet long and dragonflies just as long and so the super volcano took care of that. Yeah. And it could take care of us one day. It very well may. Of course, that is if we're here, and we haven't figured out how to advance to even a type one civilization, right? If that's the case, 50,000 years from now, we deserved it. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our

government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. The Street Stove podcast combines hip hop lyrics and quotes from some of the greatest to ever grace a microphone. This quote comes to us from the late great Nipsey Hussle. I want to

bring in a quote from Jay-Z. A lyric from him, one of the goats, Eminem, of course, and adds words of timeless philosophy and wisdom from some of the most influential stoics. Let's take one of the stoics, Marcus Aurelius, right? And this comes to us from Epictetus. This also leads to a stoic quote from Seneca, right? And he says, the greatest obstacle to living is expectation, which depends on tomorrow and waste today. I am Dramos and you may know me from my other podcast, Life as a Gringo. And if you like me, man, you could definitely use a daily shot of inspiration. And that's exactly what I'm giving you here. Listen to the Street Stove as part of the Micutura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm surprised there hadn't been a super walk-in-in movie. I think that's what that one with Pierce Brosnan was shooting for. It's gonna miss the mark. Well, because it was just local. Yeah. It was like, oh no, it'll destroy parts of Los Angeles. Yeah. Not cover the world. Right. Yeah. That's it, man. So I think we said definitively what will happen on earth, 500, 5000 and 50,000 years from now. And if you are around in 50,000 years and we're wrong, you can send us an email and complain about it. Yeah. And tell us what you thought of the Keo satellite. Yes. If you want to know more about what the earth will be like, type those words into thesearchbarthousestoveworks.com. We have some pretty cool future stuff on this website.

And I said thesearchbarth means it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this cannibalism on the high seas. Just finished listening to the podcast on the Donner Party. You mentioned this is one of the very few instances of cannibalism in human history. Did we say that? Yeah. Okay. I did. All right. I was just picking up William Aaron's work. I recently learned of another one that I thought I would share, the story of the whaling ship, the Essex. We talked about that in this weird, weird position right now because we have recorded the whaling episode. We did talk about that. But it's not out yet. Okay. Well, I'll read this anyway. Time is catching up with this. The Essex took off a

whaling expedition from Nantucket in South America in the 1800s. The ship harpooned a sperm whale, then exacted revenge by ramming the small whaling skiff, but also a large boat, which sank, the large boat, which sank quickly. 20 men made it into a lifeboat with as many rations and equipment that they could get aboard and were drift for 90 days. As we can expect, once the rations and sanity began to run low, they began casting lots to see who would be the unfortunate savior to the rest of the party. The interesting anecdote that our instructor told this and she took a class, rather than just outright shooting the short sticker, they would wait, sidle up close, and mutter reassurance is like, yeah, you know, you're doing okay for now.

We got a couple of days. If we wait, we might hit land. And then suddenly spot something off in the far side of the ship. And the man turned to look. Capow. He became dinner. It's so ruthless. Everything's going to be okay. Look over there. I'm not sure how true this is. And in the case of cannibalism, it's hard to say if that approach is more humane or not. I can only think I probably wouldn't want to see it coming. The boat finally made it in there. And there were only eight of the 20 men left. And apparently was inspiration for Moby Dick, which I think is what we're talking about, right? And there's a whole book on the Essex. It's supposed to be awesome. Yeah. So that's from Ashley with two E's. Awesome. Thank you very much. Thanks for that. Very weird. It is weird. The way

time works. I could have stopped that, but I just figured. Let's see. If you have a note about something that we've already talked about, but hasn't been released, we will be very impressed. See if you can do it. Send it to us as a tweet at syskpodcast. You can get with us on Facebook at facebook.com. Or you can send us an email at stuffpodcast at discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging?

They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hey family, it's your boy Michael Cal. You're the funniest man on the planet. I'm excited to announce my new podcast, Michael talks to air. Body don't get twisted. Not everybody will be interviewing some of the greatest artists in the game from actors, musicians and comedians discussing some of the best topics. But most importantly, we're gonna be doing a lot of laughing and a lot of fun and talking that talk. Listen to Michael talks to everybody on Monday, Wednesday, Friday on the iHeart radio app,

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