The Infinite Monkey Cage - Technofossils - Sarah Gabbott, Mark Miodownik and Aurie Styla

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

Brian Cox and Robin Ince dig deep into the strata of an imagined human history to unearth the curious concept of technofossils. Joined by paleobiologist Sarah Gabbott, material scientist Mark Miodownik and comedian and tech enthusiast Aurie Styla the panel unearth how the everyday objects that we throw away today compare to fossils of the past. Together, the panel investigates how these modern artifacts could degrade over time to become the fossils of the future. From old smartphones buried in bedside drawers to sprawling landfill sites, they imagine how these remnants of the Anthropocene might puzzle future archaeologists—and speculate on what these researchers might infer about our technology, customs, and way of life.Series Producer: Melanie Brown Assistant Producer: Olivia Jani Executive Producer: Alexandra FeachemBBC Studios Audio Production

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I found myself holding the satellite, ground weight 2,000 pounds, honourable weight zero. 13 minutes presents the Space Shuttle. Listen now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robert Inns, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Now, we are at the Bloomsbury Theatre, which is actually the place that Brian Cox and I did our very, very first gig. About two years before we started doing this series, and it was a kind of mash-up of science and music, and I came on and did some jokes about Schrodinger's cat, and Brian came on and sang, I'll be your long-haired lover from Liverpool. Then I had my hair cut shortly after.

Personal safety reasons. This is what I love about Brian He didn't have his hair cut We replaced the previous hair that he had On his head And then in fact we replaced your head Because you're kind of like a replicant Wurzel Gummidge, aren't you really?

They've started adding little bits of grey in your hair now So that you look more human They take it from you I'll tell you what They're going to start harvesting other people Not much of a crop left there is there So today we are talking about fossils And not only the fossils of ancient animals and plants, but the fossils of the future, techno fossils.

What remnants of our 21st century civilization will survive into the far future? And what might the inhabitants of that future be able to infer about our technology, customs and way of life? To help us unearth the answers, we are joined by someone interested in decay, someone interested in clay, and someone interested in replay. And they are... I'm Mark Mio Dovnik. I'm Professor of Materials and Society at UCL. and the techno fossil I think that archaeologists of the future will be most confused about

are these rectangular lozenges of material that they'll find everywhere and when they analyze them they'll find there's more than 50% of the period table are in them and they'll come to the conclusion that okay this is a race of people who worship the period of table

worship the god of chemistry and carried around these lozenges which they called smartphones full of materials. Hello, I'm Sarah Gabbitt. I'm Professor of Paleontology at the University of Leicester, and the techno-fossil, I think,

will be most confusing to archaeologists of the future is also the smartphone. So, second choice would be the red telephone box. They're already completely complexing to anybody under the age of 30, especially if they go in

side one and smell them and the other thing about them imagine this archaeologist of the future thinking you know what is this giant what is this cabinet for it's incredibly heavy i can barely open the door the telephones are no longer in there why did people go in them what were they for i think that's going to be pretty puzzling uh your what drew towards fossils that's your you know your area is less techno and more fossil isn't it yeah so i'm a paleontologist and um i'm I just really love learning about life on the planet. And I decided, from a very early age, I wanted to learn about ancient life.

So you do that through the fossil record. What's your favourite thing that you've seen? You just thought that is ridiculous. So there's a fossil from a place in Canada called the Burgessale, which is about half a billion years old. And it's called Opa Binia, and it's absolutely insane. It has five eyes on stalks. It has this weird kind of proboscis thing coming out the front

with a big kind of pincer on the end You can't really see the legs, it does have legs And all along the side of the body Are all these crazy flaps that it used to kind of swim with It looks like something out of somebody's weird imagination Okay, my name's Orry Stuyler I'm a stand-up comedian, actor and broadcaster And I think the techno fossil

The archaeologists are going to be most confused about in the far future is wide roll cellar tape and the reason I say that hear me up the reason I say that is assuming the world gets just a little bit more hotter as we have seen it happen cellar tape can lose its consistency

and stickiness right especially the clear ones so I think they'll unearth it look at it and think this toilet roll doesn't really look like it's conducive so at some point and you know and you know when you need to rush and you can't even find the toilet roll in like a public toilet imagine trying to find a little bit that you've got to peel it back

and then maybe potentially wipe. I think they'll look at it and go, I think these people back in the history are just crazy. Can I also say your mime of looking for the toilet paper for those at home is the most beautiful thing. You actually did become the Andrex puppy at that moment. Beautiful. Anyway, this is San Pablo.

Sarah, can we start with the definition? So what is a fossil? So a fossil to a paleontologist is any remain of past life. So that can be bacterial life or fungi, animals and plants, usually from way back. So some of our earliest fossils are about 3.5 billion years old all the way through to, you know, very recent fossils that are forming today. And those very early fossils, so 3.5 billion years old, not long within a billion years of the formation. of the earth. What are those? Blue-green algae are some of the earliest forms of life, so these cyanobacteria,

and they're kind of like little traces in the rock, and when there's a lot of them, they form these kind of lumpy, pillowy layers, and those are some of the earliest fossils. How much, in terms of the percentage of life on Earth, like even if we just say, say post-Cambrian explosion, how many of those will be fossilized? What do we recognize? in terms of percentage, because there's a lot that doesn't fossilise, isn't that? Yeah, that is a really good question, but it's almost impossible to answer because we don't know what hasn't become fossilised. I once read that if you took the entire population, and I don't know if this is founded on much data,

okay? I think you're going to say, I don't know if this is legal. No, well, when I finish my story, you'll see that it isn't legal. So if you take the entire population of the United States, which is, what is it now, 300 million, okay, and then basically kill them all, the fossil record would basically comprise of about one quarter of one human skeleton that would make it through to the fossil record. Oh, so it's extremely unlikely, but a given a single organism, a given organism will be. result in a fossil? Would Trump be a techno

fossil? So I'm just thinking of all that all that work that's gone in, the orangey makeup that must have built up. Is that, would that count as a techno fossil that comb over and that stuff? I think so. I think he's probably got a high preservation potential. That is the

loveliest thing I've ever heard said about him. Mark, we talking about techno fossils, you mentioned in your introduction that the phone has 50% percent of the periodic table.

So that's what, about 40 or 50 different chemical elements in it. I'm tempted to say, can you list them? Like the song, you know. Yeah, yeah, I should first at the song at this point. It's a remarkable statistic. I know, it's incredible, isn't it? And if you think about it, I mean, we've made this incredible technology that, you know, you just touch it and it knows that you've touched it.

And we, you know, have this incredible silicon chips inside them and all these wires and the lithium battery and so on. and each one of those elements we've we've got from mines all around the world so hundreds and hundreds of mines and then we dug the rock out and we've got those elements out and then we've assembled them as incredible layers and incredible technology and it's gone around the world many many times in terms of the supply chain and then finally you get this lozenge of material which is your magical kind of entry into the world like without one you're kind of not a person anymore right in a weird way.

And you are given this kind of present of all these wonderful materials. And almost nowhere on the packaging does it tell you that it is such an amazing kind of achievement of human society. What is the most, a couple of the most surprising examples because these are obviously, some of them are very advanced materials, I suppose,

that do very specific things. There's gold in there because, and you think, why should they be goldenating? But you can't see the gold. because it's inside the silicon chips and the connectors. But why use gold? It's so valuable, because it really is the best conductor of electricity. And it makes a big difference having gold in there. And there's 300 times more gold in a kilo of smartphones than a kilo of gold ore.

So it is really worth collecting smartphones. And I'm convinced this is why people instinctively don't get rid of them, but put them in a drawer. At some level, people have picked up on the gold feeling. in their hands. Orie, you are fascinating technology, aren't you? So you must have that thing where every now and again you do look at something in your hand

or you look at something in the house and you think, yeah, what will I make of this? You know, what would someone else make of these things? Yeah, for me, I think the thing that fascinates me the most and phones are a great example of this is the size of something. Like, for example, a phone used to be the size of a suitcase, now it's down to something that can go in the palm of your hand.

In my eyes, if it becomes more complicated, Naturally, it should be bigger because more is added to it, but it's total opposite in the other way around, and that's probably the most fascinating element for me. Sarah, you spoke about this strange organism, this five-eyed thing that was found in the Burgess Shale, which would have lived about 500 million, 550 million years ago or so. Could you take us through the process of how that fossil was formed?

Sure, although I've now picked one of the most controversial fossils around for trying to explain how fossilisation works. It could be a trilobite or something. Let's just go through, yeah. So generally speaking, if most people think of fossils, they think of things like, you know, trilobites, ammonites, shells, and of course dinosaurs. And these are all the parts of animals that are mineralised,

so shells, bones and teeth. And all of that stuff has, you know, a fair chance, although as we talked about earlier, not a great number of them will make it through to the fossil record, but they have quite a good chance of being fossilised because it's durable material and it's mineral and it lasts. However, we do get an amazing fossil record of surprising features and tissues and animals

which are entirely soft-bodied. So opubinia, that weird creature I was talking about, is exactly that. It doesn't have any mineralised parts at all, and yet it became preserved. Throughout the fossil record, with eyes, we have guts, we have organs, we have skin, have all these tissues that usually decay away.

And generally speaking, what happens is, as they're decaying, they get mineralized very rapidly, before they've decayed away by a variety of different minerals. So it's this kind of balance between decaying and mineralising. And that's, you know, the sum of the fossil record. Can I ask that question about, you know, the mineralisation that happened with Vesuvius and Pompeii, right? is that a fossil?

You've described as everything that's kind of fossilisation. The Suvius erupts. The human figures that are frozen in motion. They're caught in the... So they've been mineralised very fast. Is that right? So that is a fossil then?

Yeah, so those are fossils. So fossils can be a lot more kind of wide-ranging than people think. So the fossils can be everything from that to the classic bones and so on. And they can also be holes. So you can have something like an animal or a bone

or even a person that gets encapsulated and then they decay away, but they leave a fantastically, you know, intricate void space, which then gets later mineral-rich waters go in and mineralize it. So sometimes you don't actually get that fossil itself, but you get an imprint of it or a void. I was wondering, actually, just mentioning Pompeii, have you ever thought how you would, if that happened to you, I presume you wouldn't like to be found kind of, you know,

just looking for the end of the toilet, paper, you know, what is the way that you would like to be found, do you think? You mean like the position, if you... Yeah, for you to be remembered in eternity and for tourists to go, I wonder what he was up to. Remember this is also broadcast in the afternoon on Radio 4?

Just narrowed down the list of possible answers. I don't... How would I... Go out, like, how I work. So, he died on stage, so he's there with a microphone in his hand and just on stage and, so on the sudden all of a sudden, just like that. It's actually

It's terrifying though, isn't it, psychologically, to die on stage for eternity? Yeah. And it does... Oh, that's some circle of hell there, isn't it? Depending where I am, at least I could say,

well, I mean, it looks like he killed the room as well. Yeah, you know. And it does, it does raise. Nice. That works too. It does raise an interesting question, actually, about the...

So there's a microphone there, which is a piece of electronics, and then there's a human body. So if a Pompeii-type incident happened in central London, she's unlikely, I suppose. Do you have any sense what would be preserved and how there? Would the microphone survive, or would the biological entity be more likely to survive? So how hot is the ash, I think. So this foam, I think, is going to melt into a kind of film.

But the metal grid, I mean, it's a sort of steel, isn't it, I think, the actual body of this. So that's going to be fine. and be in place so you're beholding that and then I think the rest of it will be absolutely preserved as it currently is probably and then the question I always wonder about the fossil thing is so you're on stage you're killing it and and then I always think of fossils as flat things

so then do we have to kind of have flatten you in order to think about what you will look like in the future is that a prerequisite for a fossil on the whole if you end out like most dead animals and plants you either end out at the bottom of a lake or the bottom of the ocean you get buried by layer upon layer

upon layer of sediment and then you get squashed and so a lot of fossils are flat but by no means all of them so preserved at our like fittest weight that's what I'm hearing so they always see me oh he was in great shade that would be forever

two dimensional you might say the joke fell flat that's the only body That was beautiful, because someone went for it, and the others went, no, no, do not encourage the academic. Sorry, you use this term, the mineralisation. So in a, I suppose, I was going to say a typical fossil, but you've, I'll likely describe there's no such thing as a typical fossil. But how much of the constituents of the animal are preserved? So can you do chemical analysis, mass spectrometry, can you even extract DNA fragments, from them, or is it really just an imprint

that's been turned into something else? A lot of organic molecules in fossils do remain intact and we can analyse them using mass spectrometry and we can compare them even to organic molecules that are around in living creatures today.

It may surprise people to know that plastic, man-made plastic, we think can last millions and millions of years. So all this stuff about it, you know, degrading away over a few hundred years. It can do if it's blasted by sunlight and broken down by photo degradation. But the plastic that ends out, out of sunlight, out of oxygen and in cool environments, so basically any ocean floor will do for this is probably going to last millions of years. And I can tell you that

because the answer to Brian's question. So we have little green microscopic algae around today that if you analyse their little cell walls, they are made of something called algernam, which is almost chemically indistinguishable from polyethylene. If you go to a site in Germany called the Messel Oil Shale, which is famous for having amazing preservation of mammals and insects and plants and so on, but the coolest fossil and the mesol is exactly the same species of small green algae

and if you analyze that cell wall it's also exactly the same material so in other words this algae is making a biopolymer which is almost chemically indistinguishable from polyethylene and that is surviving completely unscathed in sediments for 48 million years years. People make biodegradable plastics now. I mean, they might also survive millions of years, right, if they fall into the sea and they get covered up. And I just got this kind of really strange, because people sort of feel like, if I'm buying biodegrading materials, I'm doing a good thing. And you're like, no, they have to be in exactly the right situation to biodegrade. And it's usually not where you've just put it as you flung your poo bag into the bushes. And that could, that poo bag with this biodegrading could be there in millions of years time. It could. We should say, by the way, that we are aware for the radio four audience

that you are not the kind of people to throw your poo bags into the trees. That's very much, Vernon K on Radio 2. Also, I meant to say dog poo bag. Sorry. I think you're going to get yourself in more trouble as you explain this, because I think that's what they've presumed,

but now they've realised that you live a very broad life, and in fact, we've never see him, Paul. Foring for the toilet paper, he's just out fresco out there. No. Just throw it. It's someone who loves technology, but I'm sure, you know, very aware of sometimes where some of that technology comes from, sometimes the kind of footprint left behind.

Is it something that worries you? I do what I can, I guess, based on a general approach. Like, I drive an EV car, so that's me telling myself it's somehow helpful to some degree. It's a piece of technology that I know leaves. a level of a footprint but compared to others and there's that kind of approach that I have but I also know there's probably more work to do especially after hearing 48 million years

that something can potentially last but I wouldn't know what the answer to that is it's only going based on Googling going how can I make sure that the things that I buy don't leave as much of a footprint but I think in this world anything that you buy technology based is always going to leave at least a little one somewhere you know techno fossils really are just man-made stuff

all the objects and the materials that we make that may end out becoming fossilised and, you know, lasting thousands of years or millions of years or whatever. All of this stuff that we buy and consume more and more of, you know, because all of these consumption figures are actually accelerating even though we know it's bad.

Then, you know, I think we really need to start thinking about, you know, what is the legacy that we're going to leave the planet? Let's take a city like London filled with materials some advanced materials, some very basic materials. What are the ones that are the longest lived, that will survive the longest? I mean, it depends on what conditions they're kind of subjected to as they come down the strata's. So let's say it's sort of like a sedimentation process and they get hotter and hotter and compressed. Then the metals will melt.

So there's lots of steel, huge amounts of steel in London and cast iron, brilliant material, wonderful materials, really allowing us to live the way. we want to live. That will probably, if it gets hot enough, just return to the earth's core and our core is iron. And so in some ways you might think of that as our long-term plan for that material. You know, the concrete on the other hand, 50% of everything we make by weight is concrete. And that is like liquid rock when it's poured and it is got the constituents of rock and won't melt as it goes down and will, yeah, become part of the. the earth's crust and be this

incredible sedimentary layer so those are things that I think are the major materials actually London's built up and there's brick and clay and stuff it's like we're in this big experiment at the moment we don't really know what's going to happen

to these materials you know the plastic I'm using an analogue from nature which is very plastic like to try and interpret what is going to happen to plastic in the future because a lot of these materials have been around for such a short period of time

that we haven't had the time to do the experiments on them to work out what's going to happen. I mean, there are bacteria that eat certain types of plastic that have been found in landfill and we think that they've kind of evolved to eat it and actually in the labs at UCL where I work, we're trying to artificially evolve bacteria that will eat it better.

And if that was to really be successful that approach, There's sort of two futures, as I say it. One is that we kind of can recycle plastics much better using these bacteria in vats. It'd be more like recycling would be more like going to a brewery, or you use a microorganism to kind of recycle our material. And another possible future is that we get so good at that, and it escapes into the world, and then starts just eating everything.

And then there will be this enormous sludge that will be knee-deep in. This massive biofilm. Yeah. One of the featured of our civilization, apart from, the structures and the cities and the bridges that we've talked about. There's information. So of the storage devices that we have, what are the longest lived? Is it possible that someone could dig something off in a million years or 10 million years and recover the information? I think the best fossils of that is actually going to be some of the simplest. So it's going to be

paper and it's going to be children's drawings on paper. And the reason I think this is that paper is basically just cellulose and cellulose has a really good fossil record so there are fern leaves that are 180 million years old from the Jurassic and they are perfectly well preserved you look at them with a big magnifying equipment and you can actually see cell nuclei you can even see chloroplasts and you can see chromosomes in the act of dividing that's how well-preserved 180 million year old leaves can be. And we get loads of leaves in the fossil record. So paper is kind of cellulose and it's leaves. So that has a really good chance of being preserved. And the reason I say children's drawings is they use pencils. And we make 20 odd billion pencils every single year. So although,

you know, as adults, we don't use them, pencils are graphite and graphite has remarkable staying power. And we have graphite that's 3.8 billion years old. So I think it's rather charming to think that some of the best fossils of communication are going to be a kid's picture of their house and their mom and their dad and their dog. So get off fortnight and do what you're supposed to do. Draw some pictures. Yeah, exactly. You're a travelling comedian. Have you been to the Pencil Museum in Keseek? It is a very good pencil museum. It's a nice gig near there, yeah.

Yeah, it's great. If you're not being to the pencil museum, you are missing out. You're missed out of it. Because it's not just a pencil museum. There's also a cabinet which shows the history of the eraser as well. So I love it.

I genuinely love the pencil museum. Did you see how smug he said that, the history of the eraser as well? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be my Rooka-Hauer speech and the Ender Blade Runner. I've seen the pencil museum in Kessig. I've seen erasers off the coast of Lancaster.

So we've talked about all these various things and pencil drawings and so on. So if you took a landfill, the nearest landfill site to hear, whatever it is, and you imagine that nothing happens to it and we go back in a, someone goes back in a million years' time and you go through it, what is going to be left in there and what is going to have disappeared? Most stuff is going to be left, I think. So landfill sites are obviously a bit of a black box. The managed ones, we encapsulate everything in.

guess what, sheets of plastic in layers and nobody's done much work excavating landfills because it's obviously not a very nice job and also it's quite difficult to get health and safety around that but those that have been excavated most stuff's kind of mummified and so there are newspapers that are completely

readable back from the 1970s and there are even kind of bits of people's last dinner that are semi-mummified lots of us are working on plastic recycling technology but it is going to take a long time to actually be able to recycle plastic properly. And so there's some people who say, well, we shouldn't be sort of using terrible recycling methods now. We should just be putting all the plastic into a landfill because then we can leap ahead once we finally manage it how to recycle it properly. And we'll have these big presents that we'll leave to our future kids are these enormous landfills of plastic,

which may then be really, really valuable because we'll have stopped. pumping oil out of the ground. It will therefore become a very expensive resource and oil is what we currently make plastic out of. And so the plastics in these landfills might then be this big present we leave to them. But it's probably unlikely to happen. We are already mining landfills for one material called fly ash. Basically it's soot. It's the leftovers from incomplete combustion in coal-fired power stations and it used to, you know, pollute our planet. And now we have these electrostatic precipitators which kind of suck it out of the

smoke before it goes into the atmosphere and this soot they're kind of like little spheres are about a tenth of a millimeter across and they look like tiny little moons they're all kind of pitted and cratered and obviously there's a lot of them so they go into landfills and we now mine

the landfills for this fly ash material and we have it we stick it into concrete as a substitute for sand And what do you think, you know, earlier on we were talking about Burgess Shale, listening to this conversation, what do you imagine of, you know, the future Burgess Shale of, you know, the techno fossils that are left behind, just thinking in the world that we have at the moment, when people find the equivalent, the techno equivalent of what was a living record, you know, in Burgess Shale. It's going to be a huge kind of, let's say a whole plate of different things you could have a look at and say this is what the past looked like. I don't think it's going to be very accurate

in terms of how we live day-to-day. So, for example, if you are going to say, like, vaping, I don't know how many people in this room do vape, but even though some people make it their personality, it wouldn't describe how we were today. It's like, for example, you described the phone earlier on being something that we look at and it's got all of these kind of elements in there

that people could see, but I don't think it would give an indication of just how addicted we are to this device. a culture of society, I think, is not to do with the things that we produce. It's how they relate to us as individuals and the connections that we have with them. And I think you'll have an idea of what maybe we have used, but not just how influential they were to us. Like, it always struck to me that, laces.

So they go, look, they had mobile phones, or they had these kind of lozenges that they prayed to the god of imperialic table and chemistry. But they still tied their shoes with string. This is the thing, yeah. How do we understand this? They had invented Velcro. It's the best adhesive mechanism that's easy to unlock and lock, and yet they stuck with the shoelace.

What is going on with them? There's going to be so many good stories around clothes, right? I mean, laces is such a good one. So if you think about it until fairly recently, most clothes were wool and silk and especially cotton. And in archaeology, you know, the oldest clothes, it's a real red-letter day for an archaeologist. they find any kind of garment preserved at all.

And one of the oldest is, I think it's about 5,000 years old. That's it. And it's a linen dress in a tomb in Egypt. So basically, you know, these biodegradable natural materials, they don't preserve. And now we are making 100 billion articles of clothing every single year, and about 60% of those are plastic. And we've heard that plastic is going to last a long, long time.

So you can imagine these kind of intelligent civilisations of the future and they're unearthing layer by layer and they're not finding anything, they're not finding, and then they find microplastic fibres everywhere, they find loads and loads of clothes everywhere because they're plastic, and they're going to kind of wonder, you know, did we walk around naked and then suddenly discover clothes,

you know, so there's going to be all these amazing puzzles that they're going to have to unpick. Are we allowed to mention the shoe event horizon at this point? Of course. Single shoe. Thank you. This is a that was Adam Hitchackers to the Galaxy reference,

but it is about the fact that every advanced civilisation in the end reaches the shoe event horizon, which is where they produce more shoes and clothes than anyone can ever wear, which means that everyone has to keep buying them all the time. That means everyone else goes out of business except the people who are selling shoes and clothes,

and then the whole civilization collapses under a big layer of shoe and clothes, and that is then compressed into a layer which you always find on every advanced planet after it's decayed. Just like that. that's insane it makes sense but I would never have thought

of that's crazy a lot of the discussion we've found so far has been about what happens to materials if we throw them away are they biodegradable and so on but some of the research into materials now is to build things that do not need to be thrown away

so I'm thinking in terms of things like self healing materials so this is the only way to escape the shoe event horizon is I think no I honestly do think this is true because this is the direction trajectory we're going. I mean, we are

sort of mad at the moment, the way we are just producing more and more stuff and we absolutely polluting the planet and poisoning ourselves and nature. The only way to do it is a, to stop that, but we all need stuff because we love it and we've evolved from creatures. We are materials

people. So it's not like we're going to go around naked, I don't think it's that we're going to want all that stuff, we're going to want our phones and we're going to want our clothes, but they just need to last a lifetime and so we only have to buy a few of them. And that seems like a crazy thing because we're so used to constantly

getting dissatisfied with a shirt although this one's great but in general and sort of saying I don't want it anymore the other reason we get rid of stuff is because it breaks but what if what if we could design a phone when a small crack happened and it started to malfunction

it would heal itself what if we could make a washing machine that did that what if we could make a car that did that what we could make an aeroplane a train a road that can do that and then we're into that's a future I want to happen, right? That's why I do start to take over though

because I think you've given them a... This is like a David Cronenberg nightmare with an extra kind of lemony freshness to it as well. It has possible downsides, but we're on the trajectory to a very predictable downside that's boring, whereas at least we could have a downside that's pretty interesting. But what about...

Can you imagine, you know, someone who loves technology at that point where enough people have smashed into other people's heads because they've got their head down, that they go, do you know what, I think I'm bored of the phone now. You know, can you imagine that there might be a point where eventually people go, do you know what, that's enough now?

So there is a point with all of us where that's enough technology for us at that point. And there could be advancements above it, but all of us will get to that. Some of us in the room have probably hit that point. I'm not going to say who you are, but likely you probably would still prefer to book holidays on television.

text and it's do you see what I'm like so you get to that point where you're like that's me that's all I want but technology will always advance I'm not at a point where it's hit that kind of that peak for me but I can

see myself almost like peaking off of my interest on certain new bits of technology phones used to be something we just spoke on now we watch TV shows on and there's going to be a point where phones now might be plugged into us so it's in our glass and then after a while it's the convenience of it being in our eyes.

And I mean, I'm already at the point where I wouldn't want it to be in my glasses. I definitely wouldn't want it to be in my eyes, but somebody else would. And then someone may live virtually within that form of technology and look at the things that we are using now mobile phones as archaic and, in essence, fossils to them. If we told our grandparents or our great-grandparents that TVs would be flat against the wall, that for them was what they saw in Star Trek, and be like, that's crazy, that could never happen.

Mark, I want to just pick up on the materials science. Because often, I think we think of materials that we spoke about this evening as kind of just things that are kind of low-tech. They're the thing out of which we build stuff. But this idea that you can design materials such that they do things actively, like you said, a self-repairing,

is a glass cover on a phone, for example. Could you speak about some of the research that's going on now? with these smart materials that can do things, high technology materials. So there are these things called smart materials which sort of change shape if you put an electric field across them

or you heat them up. And that was kind of novel in the 1960s, 1970s, but a whole set of people kind of thought, can we make materials a bit more lifelike? So can we make materials that not just can change with respect to a temperature or sunlight, but they can sort of do that and then detect that they're damaged in some way and then use that change in shape to repair themselves.

So that whole kind of trajectory is now called animate materials. And they're not alive, but they are man-made. And there's a whole series of them out there. There's kind of self-repairing concrete. There's self-reparing asphalt for roads. And that is being tested in the M-25 now. So the idea that a road will repair itself and therefore last instead of 10 years, 30, 40, 50 years

is ongoing research that is being tested currently. How does that work? So you get a crack in the road. The crack disappears. Yes. So it turns out when you look at why potholes form, and I know potholes is a special word to say in an audience like this. So why do they form?

It turns out that we make most of the whole. of our roads asphalt, which is a mix of 95% stones and 5% a liquid called tar. And you don't think of it as a liquid because it's so viscous. It's much more viscous than honey, but it is a liquid and it's moving around the whole time. And that's the key to the self-healing. So if a big truck comes over and a tiny crack opens up, then if it's hot enough on a hot day, the liquid actually will re-heal just from normal thermodynamics, those capillary action.

But when the temperature goes down and that happens in the winter, that crack doesn't heal up and so you get this point where it gets bigger and bigger and then a bit of stone falls out and then you have a puddle and then that fills with water it freezes and the hole gets bigger and that's a runaway pot hole and it's too late to intervene at that point

so a lot of the science of self-healing roads is to try to get the cracks in the winter to self-repair without it having to be hot so you can do it two ways you can either have they put encapsulated oils into the road mixture, and that's the one that's being tested in the M25. So when the crack opens up in the winter, it cracks open these little capsules of oil, and the oil makes the tar a little bit less viscous, and it basically gets it to flow.

And so that's being tested, but the other way to do it is you put little metal nanoparticles into it, and that's something that we've been doing. And then the nanoparticles will heat up if you drive a car over it with an electromagnetic wave. And then you get this artificial heating. So you basically drive vehicles around the M25, which basically help that road heal itself and therefore last longer. I mean, this is probably very rudimentary, but is it like how Play-Doh can kind of work where it forms a break? And then the more that you massage the pay-Doh, when the brake disappears, and it's kind of like a new bonding, but for asphalt. Yeah, so, yeah, in the sense that these surfaces are not, that crack is two surfaces opening up.

They can be bonded back together. and there's self-repairing paints on the market now that if you buy a very high-end car you will be offered a self-reparing paint and it will reheal little scratches from just wind dust completely itself because it's got this very low viscosity

kind of surface layer that will just close over and give it this pristine newness that young people have in their skin all the people lack An envy. I wish I'd mention Play-Doh, I'm hungry now. You don't eat Play-Doh?

Oh my God, my God, this is... Have you not read my book about the Play-Doh diet? It was the Play-Dohet. It's absolutely huge. Is he now, like, going to be a techno-fossil with the Play-Doh that's in his system? Is that going to be there forever? Years down the line, they're going to wonder if people ate Play-Doh after seeing...

He's kind of self-preserving. Self-healing, self-preserving. I'll have a lovely, like, rainbow inside. Not like, your dull old organs. everyone. So we asked the audience, what do we ask them, Brad? We asked the audience the question. Now, what would you bury underground to most confuse future generations? What have you got, Brown? The physics GACSE paper I took yesterday. If anyone in this room contributed to it, what is wrong with you? That's from Peter.

What have you got of? So to the, just to repeat the question, what would you bury underground to most confused future generations? The answer I got here is Milton Keynes. To be fair, I get it Because it's literally a grid With loads of roundabout Oh, no! Oh man, there's a whole history to it Where a load of the people

Who were the architects who made it Mid-Summer Boulevard Is actually like the equivalent Of a kind of stonehenge thing And yeah, yeah, yeah Oh, there's quite a friend of mine worked on it And found out that the water mains Were also attached to the gas mains

And said that may be an issue When the fire trucks come And that's why that got changed. This is a very specific a non-fungible token the fact that people are daft enough to buy them has to be preserved, but how does one bury something that doesn't exist?

That's a very good question. I've got an IKEA wardrobe with no Alan key or instructions. Well, thank you very much to our fantastic panel. Already Styler, Sarah Gabbert, and Mark Mia Dofnik. Next week, you return to our regular all-in wrestling tournament.

We do. Because, because we've pitched... Oh no, I can tell the people over there were imagining you an a leotard. Because we've pitched wasps against bees, dogs versus cats, and Jupiter versus Saturn. But now...

It's the Leopard Doctor special. Because in the blue, red, yellow, green, and orange-tipped corner, it's the butterfly and in the brown corner it's the moth so we will actually look I'm going to give you a secret now which you'll find out with this to the episode it turns out butterflies are moths

so the entire episode is a waste of your time so just skip to the next episode it's fine it is true and we only found that out about five minutes before the end of the episode so next week the inappropriately named butterflies versus moths bye-bye

Until now, nice again. How is it that some brands and products really capture our imagination, seem to be ahead of the game, but then somehow end up toast? I'm Short Varrington, presenter of the BBC Radio 4 series Toast, which unpicks what went wrong with big business ideas. We hear from people directly involved in building the successes. They were looking for us to build scale quick. gain a dominant market position, and that's what we did.

And get expert insight into why they faltered. So in effect, Walwurst was being drained of cash, and people tried damned hard to save it. From FHM magazine to Walworth's via Nike's Fitness Band and Free Serves Internet Service, Toast, listen first on BBC Sounds.