The Rest Is Science - A Paleontology Of The Future

Episode Date: June 21, 2026

What will humanity leave behind? In this episode, Professor Hannah Fry and VSauce's Michael Stevens explore the traces humans leave behind and what those traces reveal about how we think. From Tranquility Base, where humanity's first footprints on another world still sit undisturbed in lunar dust, to a three million year old pebble that may represent one of the earliest signs of symbolic thought, they uncover how ordinary objects can become extraordinary windows into our past. Why would one of our ancestors carry a rock that looked like a face? Who owns the artefacts we leave beyond Earth? And what might future generations learn from our footprints, tools, jokes, habits, and settlements scattered across the Solar System? ------------------ For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience⁠⁠ Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Attribution for images used, no chanages have been made. W. Bulach - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 Jerzy Strzelecki - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 Rakot13 - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 Museum of Human Evolution - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 Robert G. Bednarik - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek Animator: Sam Benson Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe Producer: Simona Rata Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter Head Of Digital: Samuel Oakley Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the rest of science. I'm Hannah Fry. And I'm Michael Stevens. I got a question for you, Hannah. Tranquility base. Familiar with the place? Where they landed. It's where they landed. They being Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. When they landed on the moon and they became the first humans to walk on a celestial body that's not the Earth, they did it at what we call tranquility base.

And a lot of crap is still there, like hundreds of things, bags of their poop, as well as the more obvious ones like the flag they planted. lower half of the lander. Any bags of beard hair, Michael? They have not confessed to leaving any beard hair on the moon. I like the idea there's a pegboard that's just all their offshoots. Bags of poop, though. Footprints as well? The footprints? Now, when they left the moon, they had to use this big propulsive blast to escape its gravity. And that blast probably knocked the American flag over. And we know it did because one of them, I forget who, one of them witnessed the flag being knocked over by their ascent. In subsequent missions to the moon, they planted the flag much further from the lander. Sure. And those are still standing. Okay. But the flag is still there. It's just on the ground. It's also

been probably bleached white because there's no atmosphere at all. So solar radiation on the moon is so much stronger than here. I mean, even if it was on Earth and you left it outdoors, it would have, it would be bleached white by now. Yeah. So they're like white flags of surrender now that America has on the moon, one of which has fallen over. It's a historical place And no one's been back We barely know its status We've had some satellite photos of it

But they're they're from high up Above the moon And the stuff on the moon is so small You can't really make it out Can't even make it out How close do you think NASA Will allow someone to get to it Well I mean surely they can't

They can't stop other people going They can't Right What if like the Chinese are like well, you know what? I don't want there to be a bleached white American flag on the ground. I'm going to change it for a Chinese flag. Yep.

And I'm going to dance around on Armstrong's footprints and erase them forever. You're so rude. Now, here's the thing. And this is the rub of today's episode. They can't stop you. No international law can stop you. That is what this episode is about. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research, UK.

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Their work has helped to double survival in the UK over the last 50 years and continues to save and improve lives around the world. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, and breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit Cancer Research, UK.org slash the rest is science. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you. It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer.

Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature... Wait, for this price? Moment. Old Navy's drapeed denim wide leg. Okay, so Hannah, the strongest rule is that NASA has requested that please no one get within 75 meters of the landing site.

Oh, that's it. Because of the historical significance. Because of the historical significance. Because they don't own it. The United States of America agreed in the Outer Space Treaty of the 70s that, yep, no one owns outer space. It's part of the common heritage of mankind. However, I should clarify, that treaty that they agreed to says that outer space belongs to no nation. But technically, it's not illegal to go there, right?

It's illegal for a country to say they own tranquility base, but it's not illegal for Hannah Fry to hitch a ride on a private rocket, go up there and vandalize the whole historical location. Yeah, proved that it wasn't there after all. It was just filmed in a studio. Yeah, exactly. When it comes to the future of space travel and humans in space, I always find myself going, yeah, yeah, yeah, colonizing exoplanets, whatever. What about building a park on Mars that preserves its surface and atmosphere as it was before we changed it? Like, I want the preservation of these places. The moon can become this big metropolis, but there should be large, interstellar or inner,

interplanetary parks. Right. So instead of a national park, it's like an interplanetary park. Exactly. That should be agreed upon and set aside so people can enjoy the way the moon was before it got its human makeover. Right? I have a question, though. I feel quite certain that you can, as like a sort of quite joke, Christmas present for somebody,

buy like a square foot of the moon. You can give someone money in exchange for a piece of paper that says you, you own a piece of the moon is what you can do. But you do not own the moon. You don't own that piece of the moon. There's no authority. You're saying all those certificates that have on my wall are worthless. They're probably worthless unless you could get a country, preferably one with a strong military, to accept them.

I've got enough of them that I'm technically a lord on the moon. Do you actually have some? Oh, shoot. That would be cool. I mean, especially you got him as gifts and it wasn't like he wasted your own money on it. I do think I have a star. A star, like, named after you or something? Right, okay.

Which is better in a lot of ways, but just feels worse because it's further away. Well, my dream is to have a extraterrestrial park named after me. I don't really care where, but I would love for it to be like, hey, this is the like Michael Stevens Lunar Park. You know, be sure to pick up your trash, you know, that kind of thing. A lot of people just want a bench, you know? A bench, I would just, I just want a park on the moon, okay? I'm a simple guy.

That's too much to ask. Michael enjoyed looking at this moon. No tombstone. You know what? Give up on my like memorial toilet idea on Earth. A memorial toilet on the moon, however, is still in the running. I still want that. Yeah, my dream is that there will be a day where people can visit the moon and there's like

boardwalks they walk on to walk around tranquility base. And they can see the first human footprint on the moon. Now, we're not sure what its state is. Was it damaged by the propulsion from the lander lifting off? We don't know. We haven't gotten close enough, but the momentos that they left, the little plaque that says, you know, hey, humans came here in peace and whatever. That's all still there. I guess I just really love the historicalness of it.

In fact, there are only four archaeological sites that do not like. within the boundaries of a nation. Of a nation. Okay, so Tranquility Bay being one. That's one. Are there others on the moon? How you define an archaeological site is pretty vague. But there hasn't been a lot of official action taken for the other Apollo landing sites or other lunar probe landing sites.

But the state of California and the state of New Mexico have declared tranquility base to be of historical importance to the state. Okay. And the only reason, Texas hasn't, which they should have a claim too because mission control was in Houston, they actually have in their constitution that they cannot claim a historical section of land unless it's within the boundaries of Texas on Earth. So anyway, the point is tranquility base is a significant archaeological site that's not inside a nation. There are three others and they're all the, well, no, two of them are the same kind of thing and one of them is not. Oh, okay. I reckon surely the ocean has got to be the source of some of this. I reckon Titanic? The Titanic wreck.

Okay, there's going to be another wreck then. Something like, oh, what about where the meteor hit? Oh, the dinosaur. Yeah. No, that's within the boundaries of a nation. Oh, is it? At least part of it, I'm sure. Yeah. But also, that cannot be an archaeological site because let's define archaeology. Has to be human made. That's right. Archaeology is the study of the material culture of humans. Okay. Now, often we think of archaeology as being prehistoric stuff, like the oldest of the old stuff, a little clay pot or something.

But archaeology just means material culture. So there can be an archaeology of the 1970s. Sure. Last week. Yeah, of last week. There can be an archaeology of what the heck did I have for breakfast? And you're looking at the fork and the stain on the fork and you're going, oh, yeah, I had the omelet that turned in a little. scrambled eggs. Yeah. See, and you've just done archaeology.

Eggs royale. And this isn't, this isn't me joking. This is really what it is. There's, there's contemporary archaeology where people are studying the material culture and what we can learn of the past from it of things that aren't even that old, of things that are like happening now even. Okay, all right. So I've got two to get, yeah? Yeah, so you've got the Titanic and Tranquility Base. Right. One of, one of them, another, I think another one has got to be a sort of sunken something. There's another sunken ship that happens to be sunk outside of the boundaries of the nation. Mary Rose?

I don't think, I didn't know it. Go on. It's the SS Republic, about 100 kilometers off the coast of the U.S. state of Georgia. Okay. It was full of gold. Right. And I think in the 90s, a company, a private company, managed to get like a third of its gold, which was worth millions.

I don't even think it's been resolved yet, but there's some. Is there still some down there? There's two thirds of its gold is still down there. You know what? Forget going to try and try and. Quillity base. I'm going down there. To the SS Republic. I can't believe more people aren't trying to go there. Hello. The problem is I think that there's a lot of disputes around it, as you would imagine. It's treasure. They're not going to be looking the whole time, though.

The last one, you're also not going to guess. Okay, well, wait, wait, let me try, let me try, let me try. So is it not in the ocean? It's not in the ocean. And it's not on another planet. Nope. Including the moon. So it must be, and it's not part of a nation. So it must be Antarctic. Dang, that's good. Yeah. I reckon maybe Shackleton's ship. No. So it must have been some sort of polar explorer. Not so much explorer, actually.

Not so much explorer. Go on, tell me. Hector Station. Does that ring a bell? No. Hector Station was a very old whale oil factory. Wow. Back before patrolling in products, like completely crushed the market for whale oil, you would catch whales and then you'd have to like squeeze out their juice.

And that was great for lamp lights and all kinds of things. And sea shanties. But you can only squeeze out so much. Like if you really want to get your money's worth out of a whale, you've got to boil the whole whale. But transporting a whale back from Antarctica to where you can boil it, very cost prohibitive. So at Hector Station on Desolation Island, that's really the name of it. Desolation Island, Antarctica, they built a big whale boiling factory. And the tanks are still there

And they look so cool Wait, can I see photos of these? Look it up. It's like steampunk style, right? It's that era of metal boilers And they've been abandoned for more than 100 years And they're all rusted And it's so, it's so middle of nowhere.

Okay, and it's like, whoa, that looks so sci-fi. It's sci-fi. That's the right word for it. Okay, so it looks like, for those of you who are listening, It looks like the diving suits that people used to wear in the very earliest days of exploring the bottom of the ocean. So you have these gigantic rusted domes. You would just pop a whale in one of those domes and then boil it up. I think they stored the whale oil in those.

I don't know a lot about the whale oil business. No. No, me neither. Wow, this is absolutely incredible. Okay. And then there's like sheds that are all falling apart. And inside it looks very much how you would expect a kind of Victorian-era whaling station to look incredibly weathered, but also just, I don't know, archaic, basically. Exactly.

And unlike a lot of other Victorian-era artifacts, this one is really untouched because no one goes there. No one's built a, you know, a pizza hut in the McDonald's next to it. It was just abandoned and it's just been there frozen. So it's not being affected by the same kinds of erosion and weather events. I mean, obviously the weather in Antarctica on Desolation Island is not great. But it's called Desolation Island for goodness. It's free from human intervention. So no one owns that.

No one owns the land of Antarctica. Yeah. It doesn't belong to any particular nation. Because no one lives there permanently. You know, I think that they have only ever been. Let me see. The number of people born in Antarctica is zero. No.

Is it not? It's not zero. Some pregnant person went to Antarctica. By that logic, if you take the American rule of if you're born in this land, you're a citizen of it. It's a country of four people. But Antarctica doesn't have birthright citizenship. It has no citizenship. It's not a nation.

No. It is like by treaty a heritage site for all mankind for scientific research. It's 11, by the way. 11 people have been born. Yeah, and it's not by accident. They were planned geopolitical maneuvers by Argentina and Chile. Yeah, to strengthen the territorial claims over the island. Sure.

I was going to say that's a political move. You don't just go there and you're like, oh, I'm kind of pregnant. Whoops! Where did this come from? Oh, whoops, I missed the boat back. Guess I'll have to deliver it here and become famous. Yeah, I get it. I get it.

So, in fact, if you'll indulge me, I've got some cool things. about archaeology that I want to share. And it's always. It's forming a bedrock of where we're going probably in this episode. So when it comes to archaeology, not only is it kind of cool to realize that you can have an archaeology of any time period, but also the definition of an artifact is really neat. How would you define an artifact? Hmm, let me see. I would say it's an object that holds some interest or value. Yeah, basically. I mean, technically, an artifact is just an object, a physical object, that was made or altered by a human. But then that means everything is an artifact, including the rubbish that you've chucked out.

Yeah, that's an artifact for sure. Garbageology, garbology, it's like a whole like emerging field of how to study the behaviors, the diets and the mindsets of people even just last year as opposed to 20 years ago. You can look through their garbage. I mean, if you, we had a field notes a little while ago, maybe coming up, depending on when they release in the schedule, where we had some garbage of ice age humans. Exactly.

Exactly. And so here's what's actually pretty cool about it. That fossil that you showed or will show in a future episode isn't an artifact. It's an eco fact. Go on. Because a human didn't make it. It was grown by the reindeer. And the human maybe altered it, but it was all just evidence.

of maybe a meal that they had. So like the bones that you chuck in the bin after your KFC are eco-facts. Yes, they're called eco-facts or bio-facts. And those are things that used to be alive that have some kind of significance to human culture. Have interacted with the human at some point.

Yeah. And the human may not have technologically done anything to them, but the fact that we find a bunch of bones in that location means that this is where they slaughtered the animals or where they ate or it's where they dumped their trash. Seeds and pollen, those all show us as well things about the lives of humans. But the humans weren't like actively meaning to change these things. But here's where it gets really, really neat.

There's also a thing called a geofact. Go on. A geofact is a natural rock formation that looks like a human made it, but didn't. Okay. Okay. Yes. So this is not something that is geological that has interacted with humans in some way. This is something that you think might be human linked but isn't.

Yes. Are we talking here about like, for example, the hexagonal rocks that you get, like Giants Causeway, for instance, where it's like they look so perfectly sculpted that it's really difficult to believe that they occurred by nature. Yeah, yeah. You could call that a geofact. In general, it helps if someone, or if there's a, even still a continuing debate over whether or not its shape is natural, coincidental, or human made. Right.

So, for example, the Venus of Tantan. Look it up. Okay, hold on. Now, we've all seen these Venus sculptures. These are some of the oldest artistic creations of representing the human form. Are you looking at it? This is like Jesus in the toast, isn't it? Exactly.

Like Jesus in the toast. So for those of you who are listening, Venus of Tantan is a, rock and it could be an artifact or it might be a geofact. There's actually a lot of debate around this, but it's a rock that is shaped somewhat like a person. Can I give a description of it? Please. Okay. You've seen those fertility objects that people have crafted tens of thousands of years ago, in particular where they really accentuate like a woman's bust or a woman's hips or a woman's thighs. And there's something of that about this. It's essentially a rock. It's about six centimetres tall. It's quite blob shaped. But it looks like it could be just a bad plasticine model

of a human. And the things that kind of give away that it's been interacted with is that it, when held upright, it almost looks like it's got split into two legs. And then there's sort of like a quite flabby butt that hangs over the edge. But I can completely see how turn this another way and it's just actually a normal rock with a crack in it. Exactly. It's really hard to tell and no experts fully agree on whether or not the anthropomorphic shape of that rock is a coincidence or if it's actually a piece of art made that way by an early human. And by early, I mean early. So the Venus of Tantan was a rock found in 1999 in Morocco, and based on the sediments it was found and it's been dated around 300 to 500,000 years before present.

Wow. So if it was created by a very early Homo sapien or some other Hominid, then that means that it is the oldest by far known representation of a human form or a hominid form. But experts don't know. And I think it almost feels like they might both be right. It could be both. It could be a geofact and an artifact, meaning an intelligent creature may have found that and gone, this kind of looks like a person. I'm going to cut these grooves a bit deeper and add to it so it even looks more like a person.

Right. But it already did to begin with, and that's why we don't see as many signs of human action as we do. But maybe we see some. So it may have been Earth and humans working together to make a little statue of a person. Because remind me where we are at this point. So 300,000 years ago, I mean, there's tool use at this point, right? There's fire, all that kind of stuff. Yeah.

But the actual species, Homo sapiens, is just beginning. Right. So it could have been Homo erectus that found that. But it's not like they have knives because they haven't got metal. No, but they would have had other rocks. Right. Flints and things. Yeah, scraped on it or whatever.

When it was found, the rock that it was found among, did it belong there or did it look as though it was in a natural environment, as it were? That is a beautiful question, because it brings me to the very next kind, the last kind of artifact I want to talk about. I'll tell you what, I think we should probably go for a little break. Yeah, yeah. And we'll be back in a moment with more. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. In the UK, nearly one in two people will first. waste cancer in their lifetime. The question is, could science stop cancer before it begins?

In over the past 50 years, cancer research UK has helped double cancer survival in the UK. And that's proof of what research can achieve, like take cervical cancer. Almost every case is caused by HPV, the human papillomavirus. And when scientists uncovered that link, prevention became possible. Indeed, it did by a vaccine. And it's protection that works way before the cancer itself can actually grow. After the vaccine was introduced, cervical cancer rates in England were nearly 90% lower than expected in women in their 20s. I mean, we're now genuinely at a point where this is a disease that is disappearing in younger women in the UK. This is something that I really hope my daughters

will never have to deal with. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash rest is science. We're back and there's more. The Venus of Tantan did not look like it just kind of naturally wound up there. And so here's a great word, maniaport. Oh, I love it. Okay.

Manuport is like the word manuscript. Okay. Manuscript means handwritten. Manuport means hand carried. Love it. And so a manuport is something that we find that has not been technologically altered or made by humans. But it's in the wrong place. But it's in the wrong place.

Oh, I love these. Same with the Venus of Tantan. It might have been that an early hominid, could have been homo sapien, saw it, said, that's a cool rock, picked it up, carried it with them, showed it to their friends. Maybe they did some extra scraping to like really accentuate the human form that they saw in it. And then they lost it. And then we found it later. It's out of place. So it's a maniaport. But whether or not it's just a maniaport or if it's actually an artifact because it was. made is an unknown question. But let me bring up an even cooler manuport. I'm absolutely here for this. This is you're talking my language. Okay. So this is cooler. Sorry, did you say rocks, Michael?

Yes, I will have a long conversation about rocks. Thank you. This is my favorite. It's called the Maka Ponskot Pebble. And it was discovered in the 1920s, but based on where it was found, it's been dated to nearly three million years ago. What? Yes.

Wait, is that when it was formed? No, that's when it was laid on the ground. Right, because it's found amongst other sediments. That's right. It's been found amongst other sediments and other layers have piled up on top of it for almost three million years. To be precise, I don't know how they've dated this to this degree, but it's 2.95 million years ago it was left on the ground and lost. Where is this again? This was discovered in South Africa.

Okay. In the 1920s. Right. And for those of you who are watching, this is what it looks like. For those of you listening, it looks like a pebble that happens to have three little divots cut in it like the holes in a bowling ball. Looks like a face. It looks like a face. It looks like a really a crude skeleton.

Yeah, it does look like a bit of a skull, doesn't it? Mm-hmm. But it's been studied really intensively. And there's just no evidence at all that this was. carved by a creature. And I say creature because there were no homo sapiens three million years ago. This would have been, in fact, in the same sediment, like nearby, they found skeletons of australaphythus specimens. That's like an early hominid before humans as homo sapiens evolved.

Okay? This becomes almost certainly a manuport, almost certainly an instance of, oh, let me also clarify, that it's made of jasperite. And the nearest jasperite that you could even find is at least 32 kilometers away from where it was found. I love this so much. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. So it's hard to believe anything but the story that three million years ago, an Australopithecus, an early hominid animal that no longer exists, that probably walked up right. We don't even know.

All we know is that a creature of that age, of that era, found that rock. and for some reason carried it for dozens of kilometers, probably because they thought, guys, this kind of looks like a face, right? Oh my gosh, that is the coolest, coolest thing. It's really cool, and it's really, because it is so old, it also gives us a peak at what might be at least a bridge into the first abstract symbolic thought that hominids ever had. Because maybe this creature thought it was worth holding onto because it had the face inside it.

Because basically the creature did the Jesus in the toast thing. It was like, that's pretty cool. Exactly. The Jesus in the toast thing, the peridolia thing. Now, animals fall for this all the time. I mean, you can put a cucumber behind a cat. And if it turns and looks, it'll think it's a snake at first often and jump, right? This is like not new.

But to look at a rock and go, hey, that's kind of like our. faces and then to pick it up and carry it with you is a different sort of behavior. Raccoons and birds, they love interesting things. They like shiny things. I mean, look, I've got a dog who has who has had a branch that they were obsessed with, you know, that they really particularly wanted to keep and take home. That's right. And I think there's a lot of things they love about that stick, but I don't think that it abstractly resembles a prototypical geometric shape that they're used to like their own face.

And maybe, maybe it's, this is just a coincidence, maybe just the fact that these marks on it that have this face-like structure is just a total fluke. But it does seem extremely unusual that you would have this artifact that have been carried so far in an era where so few creatures could do it. Exactly. And it not be because of what it looked like. Yeah. And I want to take, I want to be careful. Your dog might actually look at that stick that he loves for she.

She that she loves and go, you remind me of my mother, but probably not. But I'm open to that possibility. But there are a lot of other reasons why a dog would carry a stick around. They love chewing on sticks. But there aren't a lot of other reasons to carry this stone around for so long. So it could be evidence that as early as three million years ago, hominids were starting to think and see and categorize in these ever-increasingly abstract ways. Do you know what? I think that's my favorite story you've ever-treated.

told me. Oh, really? I really, really, really love that. I really love that. Maca Pons got pebble. It blew my mind when I read about it. It's geology and anthropology and like the wonder of humanity and our existence and where we came from and our ancestors. But there's something also that just like really connects us, but we're all sort of the same, right? All creatures like, hey, look at this cool thing. Isn't it awesome? And then the idea that there's this one physical object that has had this journey that then has been found. And now all of us are like, wow, what is this? There's something so alien and yet so comforting about it.

I want to eventually get into talking about space archaeology. Just before, go on, sorry. No, go ahead. Well, I don't know. I think. This better be important. This better be good. The thing that I often think about is that this idea that we are so locked into that every single parcel of

land within a nation has titles, deeds, ownership. I mean, this really wasn't always the case. No. No, and it doesn't have to be the case. And it doesn't have to be. And it sort of, if you think about it in nature, it doesn't make any sense for, it doesn't make any sense that you would have hard, distinct boundaries between landscapes that say this is mine and this is yours. Well, animals are certainly territorial. Sure. But humans have constructed a giant edifice of ritual and law and enforcement around this concept of ownership. And it's incredibly intricate.

And unlike other animals, humans also do things pretty differently because, like, a wolf pack might claim their territory, right, and defend it or whatever. But they don't ask questions that we can, like, well, wait a second. If this is our territory, how far down does it go? And how far up? Are those birds in our territory? They don't. They don't ask that. But people ask us all the time.

I think we've actually been emailed this question quite a few times. Okay. Okay, so I own my land. But like how far up into the sky does my claim go and how far down? When a plane goes over my house, do I own it? That's right. Does it need to pay me rent? Does it, yeah, can I charge them for the few seconds that they were over my property or the fraction of a second?

And you can't. There was an ancient, like, Latin phrase, and I'm not going to even try to pronounce it. But the phrase meant whoever owns the soil owns everything up to heaven and down to hell. Right. And that just made sense to them. But of course, they had that saying before the invention of airplanes, before the discovery of oil. Mm-hmm. Before it was recognized that deposits of certain metal ores would be valuable as a separate right to sell or give to others.

And so today, how high above your land and how down below it you own is either very legislated based on where you live or not at all because it just doesn't come up. Right. People will say things like, well, do I own like three miles below me? Sure. Why not? Really? It's never going to come up. Yeah. Like, what are you going to do with land three miles below your house with like the rocks down there?

How are you going to get at them? You have the right to them, perhaps, but you don't have the right to bring in the heavy machinery required to do a super deep borehole down below your ground because of all kinds of regulations and ordinances. So you just can't ever get to it? You just can't get to it. Okay, but then the oil one is a really interesting example because what if there's an oil. oil field that goes underneath your house? Do you have a right? Do you have a claim over that portion? Again, it depends on where you live. In most places in Texas, you don't. They make it very clear that you own the surface rights to your property. And that's because there's a lot of

oil there and they thought about this and they've already sold all the rights to any oil found in this area to certain companies or individuals. So if you find oil, you probably found someone else's oil. And that can be very annoying. And then when it comes to the The airspace above your land, the Supreme Court in the United States actually had to say something about this because people were complaining about airplanes. And by people, I mean, at first it was farmers that airplanes were flying too low over their land. And the Supreme Court was like, here's the problem. Like, I know it's been this thing for a long time that you own everything up to heaven above your land. I mean, it's in Latin for going to say.

It's in Latin. You know, it's very persuasive. but it's just not reasonable anymore. Like we cannot allow all landowners to constantly be leasing out their airspace to every single airplane that might have to fly over. And so the answer in most jurisdictions is that you own the area above your land up to a height of reasonable use. What is that, though? What is reasonable use? It depends on what you're doing. Like you cannot build a structure of a certain height because of different zoning restrictions.

Here's what I'm thinking, though. Let's say I've got a neighbor that I'm really intensely dislike. Yeah. I'm talking about this in my sort of, you know, London townhouse, okay? Can I build a really, really, really, really, really tall ladder, okay? On my land above my house. And then a platform that goes over the top of their house that just blocks out the sun so they don't get any sun. No. You probably can't. I'm sure there are regulations on what sorts of structures you can build on your land. Okay, new idea. Can I get a hot air balloon and permanently hover above their house? Well, you've got to have a license to operate a hot air balloon because other people could be harmed by mistakes that you made or accidents caused by your operation of a hot air balloon. So what I'm getting at is that if you say you own the airspace above your home, but also airplanes can fly over it, then what does it really mean to say you own it?

Because there are already laws against all the different ways we can imagine using that space. same with the space down below. Now that does bring up some pretty fun questions like, all right, all right, but who owns the center of the earth? Right. Because also, actually, if you think about the surface and going down to the center, if you peel it off in shells, they get smaller and smaller as you go down. Yeah. So there's more and more claims on. That's right.

So the wedges of land on the surface, they just come to a point at the center. A teeny, teeny tiny in the center. So someone made a joke once that like near the center of the earth, like, Like everyone's your neighbor. It's true. And so, again, there hasn't been a lot of official judicial rulings on this because it never comes up. Right, but there's good stuff down there. There's good stuff down there.

Really good stuff down there. I mean, to put this into perspective, the earth is, what's the radius of the earth? It's 6,371 kilometers, on average. On average. Okay, I was going to say there's definitely. Let's be precise here. Excuse me, which axis are we measuring here? But all that matters is 6,000 is a really big number.

And that's the distance from the surface of the earth to the center. Mm-hmm. The deepest anyone has ever dug is not 6,000, not 1,000, but 12. 12 kilometers is the depth of the kola super deep borehole. What? Which the Russians dug. That's nothing. It's nothing.

It's only a third of the way. way through the crust. It's like not even close to the next part, the mantle that we all learn about in school. And like, we haven't even gotten halfway there. This is really destroying my plans to dig all the way through and have a bungee jump system. Yes. That you just bounce back and forth forever. The borehole that they dug, I think a lot of the reason they did it was it was a sort of inverse space race.

See how far you can go? Yeah. And can we beat the Americans at it? because America had tried something like this and they gave up. And so the Russians were like, well, we didn't beat them to the moon, but we can beat them to the mantle. How hard could it be? How hard could it be? Turns out terribly hard and surprisingly hard and frighteningly hard.

Go on. Here's what they did. So they start digging, right? And they just are going to dig and they get deeper and deeper. And they don't really know what to expect. Like one hypothesis was that there's not going to be any water after a certain depth because the, ground will become too densely packed for even water to permeate. Too much pressure. But they kept finding water, like liquid water, way deeper than any scientists at the time thought was possible.

Like pools of water, or are we talking about just sort of soaked into the porousness of the rock? I actually don't know. I don't think they found underwater ponds, but it was wet. Also, they figured that down there, you know, beyond 10 kilometers down, the temperature could be of, above boiling, like 100 Celsius, 212 Fahrenheit. Gosh, that is hot. Yeah, they expected it to be hot, but it was hotter than they'd expected. Instead of being about 100, it was like 180 Celsius, like 365, like hot roasting potato temperature. Whoa.

Down 12 kilometers below the earth. And we still don't know why it was so much hotter than expected. Yeah. Obviously, the first thing you go to is hell is real. and they were getting close. I feel like that's the only sensible explanation. So they stopped. Like they just stopped.

And not because they were scared because at that pressure and heat, the stone, the rock that they were drilling through stopped acting like stone and acts like plastic. And the drag, like the grip that the material had on the drill bit just made it not, it didn't work.

I also want to know, for 12 kilometers down, did they have like stages where it's like you start off with a really big bore? and then you have a slightly smaller one and then a slightly smaller one. Or are you just like, is it just a one 12 kilometer long drill bit? It's just, oh no, they don't have a 12 kilometer long drill bit, but they, I don't know how you drill a hole that deep.

Right. I don't know, actually. Yeah. But I have always wondered, like, where are these 12 kilometer long drill bits? Exactly. Watch out guys coming through. They've got shafts that I'm sure are like segmented and they'll drill until it's at the bottom. Then they have to like pull it up.

and they'll only pull up to like a joint and then they'll separate at the joint add in another section and then go down so you're not having to pull the whole thing out every time Yeah, that makes sense I actually went on Jimmy Kimmel to talk about this borehole This exact ballhole

I mentioned it in a video And then someone from his team called up And they were like Jimmy wants you to talk about big holes I can do that Jimmy And I played up the heat thing a bunch on the show I was like it was hotter than they expected and they stopped.

But I didn't, I didn't explain that it was because of the material properties of the stone. That wasn't because a demon came out or anything. What you're saying is we get the extended, we get the director's cut version that you did not give for Jimmy. That's right. This is the extended director's cut of my Jimmy Kimmel appearance. Okay, so I wanted to say some. When was this, by the way? The borehole, the cola super deep borehole was completed in 1989, reaching just a little over 12 kilometers in depth.

I mean, if you turn that into a supercellar, you know, you could have swimming pools down there, you could have cinema rooms down there, ballrooms down there. It's really narrow. It's like this. It's like you couldn't really even fit your head down it. Yeah. Okay. Swimming pool for ants. A swimming pool for ants.

That's right. But it's a swimming pool for no one right now because you know what they did? Tell me. They just welded a lid over it. What? Yep. So there's like a little, like, smaller than a manhole because there's, you know, it's a swimming pool. because this is a thin borehole

and they've just welded it over and you can't even like drop things down it. Okay, but if you did, if you did open it up and just like drop something down it and be like, listen for 12 kilometers before it hits the bottom. How long would that take, I wonder? It's a very simple calculation.

You know, I think people falling down wells, by the way. It used to be a quite common occurrence. And it doesn't happen like it should anymore. Times are just getting more. Sometimes I think we forget to be grateful about the society that we live in now. But falling down a well is not something that we continually have to be able. That's right. Like kids today are all on their phones.

Back in my day, they were falling down wells like God intended. Yeah. I mean, look, wells just, they're great. But I think that like even when I was a kid, there was baby Jessica who fell down a well and was rescued. Who's baby Jessica? Oh, my gosh. You're so not American. I know.

What gave it away? Look it up. guys. It's a heroic story. Since then, I think just municipal water supply to rural areas has made wells a lot less prevalent and a lot less therefore dangerous. All the same

though, that cola borehole is all... Super deep borehole. Give it credit. It's almost certainly full of water now. Probably right? A boiling at the bottom. Ooh, maybe it's a bit of a geyser. A bit of... You mean a geyser?

Is that how you guys pronounce geyser? A geyser. A gazer. It's a word with double meaning. A bit of a gazer. Right. But geyser also means like an old person.

A geys, it's definitely male. Okay. Somebody who would enjoy football and drinking pints of beer. That's so different. In America, a geyser is a really old person. Is it? Oh, look at those geysers. And it's like some people who can barely walk.

Oh. Yeah. It's sort of like a bit of a wide boy, you know? No, I don't. Someone who probably enjoys betting. That's what a geyser is to you. Or it's a spout of water from geothermal heat. Yeah, because that's what happens there, right?

It's that you have a really long crack that runs down or a hole that runs down, I mean, nowhere near as far as the super deep borehole. But if you get like a crack that appears so not just vertically but horizontally where you get superheated water. Oh, like a kettle, like a natural kettle, right? And then the pressure difference can mean that that will sort of need to. to release as it builds up, the pressure builds up and it releases and then you end up these like, you know, spouts of water. You get them in Iceland a lot, for example. Yeah.

And you call it a geyser and I call it a geyser. Yeah. I actually have a feeling it might be an Icelandic word. Because I don't live that far away from Yellowstone National Park. Oh, yeah, of course. Where you've got Old Faithful. I think they're called Geysers because the first English speakers to see one were like, hey, what's that?

And some dude was like, ah, that's just the old faithful guy. And then he realized it was his superior and goes, sir. That's called a belabored pun. I enjoy that. I enjoy that. Giza is, it is an Icelandic word. And you do say it Gyser in British English. I didn't just make it up.

I'm sure you didn't. Yeah, it is a hot spring in southwestern Iceland called Gyser. Gieser. Old Norse means to gush. So the word geyser for the natural phenomenon comes from the Icelandic Gyser. Can I tell you the Americanism, the American word that annoys me the absolute most. Entres to mean main course. I know.

That is so annoying. I know. That has been a huge point of confusion for my daughter because she sees on a menu entree. And my wife considers that the appetizer. Which is in France, it's the starter. As it should be, because the word is like the introduction. the entrance, the entree. But then in America, I don't know why,

but I'm sure there's a good reason why. Now it means your main course. It does. And so my daughter hears from my wife that it means appetizer, and then from me doing the etymology that it means the beginning. And then we're like, but disregard what we've said, because actually it means the main course. There was once when I was filming in Northern California

with the Uruk tribe with some indigenous Americans, talking about ownership of land. I mean, the whole idea of land being kind of cut up into parcels that are owned by individual people is something that just didn't make any sense at all. Yeah. It's the indigenous Americans. And it's still ongoing fights about exactly that. And I was there filming with them about a story around a river and the ownership of the river.

Anyway, I got on really well with this chief. It was really amazing. And as we were chatting, I mentioned to him how much, how annoying I found the entree thing. And I sort of said to him, you know what? I think the worst thing about Americans, the worst thing about Americans is that they do this, right? Is that this is what they do. And his response was, okay, oh, really, okay, the worst thing, the worst thing. The worst thing of all.

That's the thing that annoys you, the absolute most. Everything else they've done to the tribe that you're here to see. Pails in comparison to this entree business. Right, but hear me out, though, because here's my argument, because I'm I think what's clearly happened there is that they've sort of taken a bit of French culture, yeah, taking it for their own and not paid any respect for the origin of where it came from. So it's the same thing. Thin end of the wedge, Michael. Yeah.

My goodness. I found another man you've got to show. You got a show to me. Because it's really good. Okay, 300,000 years ago. Okay. Also Morocco. Oh, oh, I know what it is.

Oh! I know what it is. Good. It's the air food cuddlefish. Yeah, the air food cuddlefish. Yes. Were you just looking them up? Or did you already know about it?

No, I'm just looking it up. Okay, so I didn't know if this would be appropriate for the podcast, but yes. Do you want to tell us about it? Sure, I can tell you. So this is, it's a cuttlefish fossil. Well, it's part of a cuttlefish fossil. Okay. But it was found at a site near the towns of Erfurt and Rusani in eastern Morocco,

found among a dense cluster of stone tools, right? So really early humans. No evidence of carving or shaping have been detected. Cutterfish fossils are not native to this region, I think. So it has been moved. It has definitely been manu ported. And the reason why this one is quite famous is because it looks very phallic, shall we say. Like so much so that Wikipedia doesn't even have an image of it on it.

Right. So I had to Google it. As soon as I googled it, everyone eating breakfast around me was like, this guy. Honestly, I couldn't believe it. You could not have this up on your screen at work. No. And so you can clearly see why a prehistoric, like earliest homo sapiens possible, because 300,000 years ago is about when our species emerged, saw that and was like, guys. Oh my gosh, you got to show this to Sarah.

And they like carry it around forever. It's a big joke. And it's a cuddlfish fossil that suddenly appears in Morocco very far from where it originated. This makes me, I cannot tell you how happy this makes me. Isn't it? It's like something that we share that hasn't changed in us for millennia. 300,000-year-old dick jokes. Yeah.

Absolutely amazing. And so what would you say is going on here? Because I don't think there's an experience that non-human animals have that's like this. We know that birds and raccoons and they all love curious, shiny things. Sure. But they don't hold them on, pass them around. As far as we know, especially for reasons that are so abstracted away, they might think it's curious because it's shiny. But they don't go, this looks like, remember that one time, Ted, when your pants fell down?

And then it's like a whole running gag their whole lives and through generations. But that's what these manuports represent. That's what they are. That's what they are. Absolutely amazing. Tell you what this makes me wonder, though, is like, in 300,000. years time, what are the things that are going to be left? What are the things that people are going to see where they infer how we are and how, you know, our own character and the

things that we find funny and the things that we find amusing? Exactly. And that's why I started with tranquility base because we are still living in constantly what will be archaeological sites for the future. And increasingly these significant, like super significant human archaeological sites will not even be on Earth. And so being mindful of how we preserve them is a great gift that we can give to people in the future. When Hector Station was being used in Antarctica, they didn't think like, hey, this is a great way for us to preserve Victorian industry. They just abandoned it and it's kind of falling apart and rusted. But we can say, no one touch tranquility base.

No one touch the perseverance rovers. And we can leave the curiosity. Leave it there. We're going to eventually make it an exhibit right in situ, right where it is. And this isn't just like a little like poetic dream of mine. It's happening now. And it makes me so happy. There's a group out of Chapman University and USC out of Southern California.

And they're running a program where they ran a program for for many years very recently just in the last three or four years. And the program was called the sampling quadrangle assemblages research experiment or square. Oh, okay. It's right. You academics. I know, I know. But here's what they did. They said, guys, the International Space Station is this whole new kind of human settlement.

Yeah. Where there are people who live there and they have to work with completely different variables. There is gravity. There's no G. There's no G. There's no weight. And we're just kind of like up. updating it all the time and new people come in and leave.

And like, we need to remember how early space livers lived. So they made little taped squares, quadrangles, all over the ISS. And like every few minutes or every few hours, the astronauts would take a picture of that square. Everything that was in that taped square. They didn't pose it. These weren't posed photos. This was just like, oh, I got to take that photo of the table. And they would do it.

And so you learn by looking at these like, oh, that's how often they use frosting. And hey, what was that? Oh, that's a thing that they were doing as this joke one day. And you tell the story very candidly, very fly on the wall about human culture in the 2020s in outer space. And it's preserved better than what probably would be left to people in the future if we didn't take photos like that. Absolutely. Otherwise, it just ends up being erased by what. comes immediately after it.

That's right. Yeah. That's it. I guess we're looking back in the past at these tiny little fragments, these like whispers of what went before. And it's only by actively and proactively making the choice to try and preserve what we have that we're leaving anything for the future. I know. And just like these Australopithecuses left us a funny face-shaped rock. And it shows us their transition from like,

ape thinking to hominid thinking, who knows what we're doing that in three million years will give evidence, important evidence of how we were, you know, changing from, say, a meat consciousness to an expanded or shrunk digital consciousness, right? And these are things that we take for granted. But preserving them, whether they be here on Earth or elsewhere, is, I think, not just a responsibility we have, but a really fun thing to do. Well, one way for you guys to preserve your love for this podcast is to like and subscribe, basically. That's a very good point. This is the archaeology.

Do you want people in the future to not know whether you were subscribed to the rest of science? Could your legacy live with that kind of embarrassment? Look, you need to do your part for humanity, okay? And it's very simple. Do your bit. Or as ever, you can send us an email to the rest of science at gohanger.com. And we will see you next time. certainly will. Thank you.

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