The Rest Is Science - Will A 25 Year Old Space Pen Still Write?

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

A pen designed to write in space sits unopened for 25 years. Does it still work?In this episode of Field Notes, Michael Stevens finally opens a treasured souvenir from his time at Space Camp: a genuine Fisher Space Pen that has been waiting decades for its first scribble. From there, the conversation launches into the challenges of living in space, why astronauts abandoned pencils, and what happens to your sense of direction when gravity disappears.Along the way they investigate whether eight billion people clapping could damage a building, discover why the ISS is constantly falling towards Earth, and ask whether the Kardashev Scale tells us anything meaningful about the future of civilisation.-------------------For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience⁠⁠Cancer 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.⁠⁠-------------------Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack MeekAnimator: Sam BensonVideo & Social: Bex TyrrellAssistant Producer: Lucy LipscombeProducer: Simona RataSenior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-CarterHead Of Digital: Samuel OakleyExec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the rest is science. My name is Michael Stevens. And I'm Hannah Fry. And today on field notes, I've brought an object from my childhood that we're going to do some experiments on. Oh. And by experiments, I mean one experiment that I've been waiting to do for 25 years. Yeah. Yeah. I want to finally do it. It's going to be recorded so it's worth it. Has much of your life been building up to this precise moment, Michael? No. I'd say about once every seven years I remember and I go, oh yeah, I should do that.

Come on. It ends today. Play the game for me here. Be like, yes. I had a dream. I'm sorry. I dream about this every night. I sweat constantly worrying about it.

And today it's going to finally all happen. It's a big day. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Scientists have found that cancer risks usually increase with age and size. But some species defy the odds. For example, deep sea. Greenland Sharks. They can grow over six meters long, weigh more than a small car, and yet live for up to 400 years. Now, understanding how Greenland Sharks, cellular repair and immune systems,

seem to have managed to keep them cancer-free for centuries, that could open up exciting research pathways. Essentially, over millions of years, evolution has been running the world's most successful cancer prevention trial. And sometimes breakthroughs can be found in unusual places. So by exploring the unexpected, cancer research UK scientists are uncovering new ways to tackle over 200 types of cancer. 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 cancerresearchuk.org slash the rest is science. Should you do that first? Let's do that first. Let's get it out of the way. It's going to be quick.

We'll do audience Q&A after. And we'll do a Q&A, yeah. We're going to look at your questions afterwards. So here's the deal. I don't know if you know this about me, but I went to space camp as a kid, three summers in a row. Earned my gold wings. I'm kind of a big deal. Don't like to brag. I don't like to brag. Where is space camp? Okay. I think you're going to have to give us a bit more detail because the whole summer camp thing is not really a British. thing. Yeah, so it's a summer camp for kids who are like, yeah, I don't really want to be doing like outside stuff. I don't want to. But do you stay away from home? Yeah, yeah. It's like a sleepaway camp. How long does it last for? It lasts for like maybe just a week or two weeks. I can actually remember. But I did, there's multiple places where you can do space camp. I did the space camp in Hutchinson, Kansas at their Cosmosphere. And I loved it. I mean, you get to train like you're an

astronaut. How old are you at this point? High school age. Okay. So I would say like 14, 15, 16. Got you. All right. I'm there. I'm there. Yeah. Okay. So they've got the like gyroscope thing that you have to get spun around on and plug all the cables in and pass these tests. And then you're assigned to a crew, a space shuttle crew. And you're either the commander, the pilot, the mission specialist, whatever. And you've got to do a whole mission. And you've got to do a whole mission. And, And you're, like, judged based on how well you do the mission. Oh, so so fun. It's very fun. And you learn so much. The different years had different focuses.

You'd focus on the history of spaceflight. And then another year it was, like, the future of spaceflight, which was sort of just like all robotics, especially back then. I had to, like, get scuba certified because a lot of weightless training on Earth is done in a neutral buoyancy suit in water. being neutrally buoyant means you don't sink or float. You're just floating there. And they've got these things called busy boards underwater. And you've got the busy board is full of different nuts and bolts and switches and things. And you've got to like tighten a bolt.

But of course, you tighten it and your body moves. Oh, that's good. So you've got to relearn how to position your arms and like be stable. Anyway, I absolutely loved it. And as a memento from the cosmosphere, I bought a space pen. And I never used it. because it was just so special. Okay.

And I still haven't used it. Is that what you have brought with you today, Michael? That's what I've brought with me. Is the experiment that we get to write with a space pen? A Fisher space pen. What's a space pen? Many of you may know, but for those who don't, a space pen is based on the pins that Fisher made for the astronauts in the Apollo program

and maybe other programs. I don't actually know its history. It's been a while since I was in space camp. That's okay. What makes a space pen different? This is the bullet variety. It looks like a bullet. It looks like a space age pen.

And this isn't the one that the astronauts used. They used one that looked more like a regular pen. This one really leans into the whole like, do I look space age? Right. Anyway, a regular pen, like a regular ballpoint pen, really needs gravity to work. You have a ball at the tip that's covering the opening that the ink is filled into. And when you roll that ball, the ball rolls. The ink falls onto the ball.

and as the ball rolls, the ink goes on to the paper. But if you don't have any weight, if you're in a weightless environment, then there's nothing to pull the ink down. Right. So famously, you can't use a regular ballpoint pen very well upside down. Absolutely. And the inks and the mechanisms don't really work underwater, all these things.

But the space pen was built to work in a zero-g environment. Now, there is that old story, isn't there, that the NASA space program spent 70 trillion trillion billion pounds in creating a pen that would work in space and the Russians just used a lead pen. What, what. Yeah. However, that's not true. Okay. Basically, yeah, every time you bring up a space pen, there's always that one dude who's like, you know, and the Russians just used a pencil.

And it's like, dude, no, they didn't. I mean, maybe they did, but I don't know what they did. It's a bad idea. It's a bad idea because what a pencils do? They create a lot of debris. When you write with a pencil, in a weightless environment, like up in orbit, there's little pieces of graphite that's float around and now you're going to breathe them in or they're going to get into the electronics. And graphite can conduct electricity. It can cause a lot of problems.

You don't want to erase something. You've got little bits of rubber floating in the air. Your pencil breaks, you can always sharpen it, which creates an enormous amount of debris. And without gravity to get all the debris into one place, the floor, it's just polluting your entire spacecraft. So the pen was a great idea. It works by having, let me open it up. Oh, it hasn't been opened in like I said, like 25 years. Exciting.

It's got a tube of ink inside. And then it's filled with above that a pressurized gas. Okay. So instead of using grass. gravity to feed the ink, it uses pressurized gas to push it out. So when you've used up the pen, you have to buy these special space pen pressurized refills. Now, because of that, and because of the qualities of the ink, this can write underwater. It can write upside down. Yeah. There was even a Seinfeld episode about space pens and, like, everyone couldn't believe that you could write upside down with it. I don't know what happens after 25 years. Well, I'm wondering, will the ink have dried out? They say no. It says that the pen stays good for like a hundred years.

Because I guess if you can write underwater, it can't be water soluble, which means there's no water. It doesn't dry out. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm looking at it right now and I see a little, what looks like a speck of ink. Two specks of ink. What color is it? The ink, I think, is like a dark blue. And if I look at the tip, it looks pretty gunky, to be honest. I'll get some footage for you guys, up-close footage, before we use it.

It's really, I don't know if this is clear. It's really gross. It looks like it's been used a lot and a bunch of ink has collected. Did you use this when you first got it? No. I've never used it because it was a space pen. Oh my gosh, if I use it up, then I won't have any ink and I won't be able to do upside-down writing. So I never did any up.

upside down writing. I would like for you to do the honors though. No, I don't feel special enough. Okay. That looks really neat though. It does. It's a really, really beautiful pen. I've never even put the cap on the back. That looks so sweet. Okay, here's some paper. Go on. Here's the pencil, the pen. Really, really? Oh my gosh. I feel so honored. Should I start by writing upside down? Let's make guesses. I actually, I don't think it's going to work. Okay. Let's see if it works. Does it work? Straight away.

Straight away. How's it feel? Is it like smooth? It feels like a normal barrow. Okay. Now go upside down. 180 degrees. Yeah.

Like that. Like you're floating around. You're approaching the moon. You need to make a note. My writing's a lot less neat up here. Yeah, but it's still working, isn't it? It is. Nice.

Now let's do it underwater. Yeah. Well, I don't have any water. But, I mean, I'm just, I'm just going to trust them on that. It does. That's amazing. All right. Let me try it.

Can you imagine a 25-year-old, oh wait, how long? Yeah, you were 15, right. A 25-year-old pen like a normal barrow that you'd have to scribble it for ages. Oh, yeah, straight away. This is working like it's fresh out of the box. Like, it feels fresh. That's exciting. Wow, Fisher.

Nice job with the Space Pen Bullet Edition. Mine is, here's what's so funny. I looked up. I was trying to find exactly what year this was made. I couldn't find it exactly. It isn't written on any of the literature that came with it. So I looked on eBay to see if other people had said. And I found the same model with this like faux red velvet interior.

And, oh, man, talk about feeling old. They're all on eBay as vintage Fisher Space Pen. And I'm like, vintage. Things from my childhood are vintage. They are now vintage, I'm afraid. Retro, old geezer man space pen. But we're talking probably from the 90s, right? Yeah.

Yeah, this is going to be late 90s. So more than 25 years old. Yeah, I think I was probably more like 12, 13 when I started space camp. So it's held up well. I'm really excited. I like how the font that they've chosen for Space Pen is really similar to the font that you see at the beginning of Star Wars when they're going up into the distance. Yes, they've got pretty much the same typeface and it's even warped so it looks like it's receding. way, just like Star Wars.

Just like space. So that's cool. I mean, as I've established previously, I'm not really a pen guy. So I'm probably not going to just start using this a bunch. I don't think you should. It's good for another 75 years. It's good for another 75 years. I think you should put it in a time capsule,

bury it in your garden and say, if you find this and the year is, 2,100, answer this survey using this pen. Don't worry, it'll work. Oh, I love that. Well, I mean, that's all I wanted to do. It's great. I really enjoyed that. As my little field notes journey. That's absolutely lovely.

That's absolutely lovely. Yeah, I'm really glad. I'm glad that we tried it out because I was always afraid to. I was afraid. First of all, I was like, it needs to be recorded. You got to, everything needs to be turned into content. Absolutely. And we've done it.

We have. I want to see what the Soviets used instead of a space pen. Okay, yeah. Did they have their own Soviet space pen? Or did they actually use pencils and they just like, gritted the consequences? Bared it. What did you say? Fisher.

Yeah. Do you know, he did it himself. Paul Fisher, it was, as in, he paid for it. It was his own company's money. Oh. Yeah. And then he pitched it to NASA afterwards. NASA wasn't like, hey, we need a pen.

We need a writing utensil that will work in a weightless environment. Yeah. He just said, I've got this for you for a problem, I think you might have. So here's the thing. He did all of the research with his own money, invested about a million dollars of his own company's money to develop it. A million dollars back then is a lot of money. And then he pitched it to NASA and they were like, yeah, great. They tested to make sure it wouldn't explode or burn. And then they were like, we'll have $400, $6 a pen. Oh no. That's it. That's all we got back.

Well, that explains why they sell them so aggressively to this day. They're like, we've got to make back a lot of millions of dollars in today's money. So here's the sort of punchline. into the whole story about the Soviets using pencils. Actually, it turns out, Soviets used the exact same fish space pen as well. So was this guy like, during the Cold War, he's like playing both sides? He's like, you know, NASA, NASA's got space pins. And the Russians are like, fine, fine. The Soviets are like, oh, we got to have them too.

And there's like this, not an arms race, but an ink race. Yep. To see who can have the best upside-down writing pin. It was like it. But we're both using the same one. Both using the same one, at least in the ISS. You only need one form of ink to stock. Do they use these on the ISS still?

I would think you'd have to. Maybe they don't use this bullet-shaped one. As I've seen actual astronauts using space pens, and they've got like clips, and they look more like a regular writing utensil. This is less practical, but again, it's more, you know, flashy. Spacey.

Yes, they do. They still use them on the ISS. I reckon he made his million dollars back by now, do you? I hope so. It's the universal standard, apparently, in space. He's actually got a monopoly in space. Well, who else is making a pen like this? I mean, it's kind of like you only need one kind.

Yeah, apparently there are two main models that are officially NASA approved, the AG7, which is the classic one. And the CH4, which is slightly sleeker, is the house pen of the ISS. Yeah, I quite want one. even though I don't really like writing with ballpoint pens and the fact that you have to buy a pressure a pressure cartridge. Yeah, I know. I know. Well, you can't have this one because it is...

It's going in your time capsule, my time capsule. Yeah, too right. Too right. All right, should we have a break? Let's have a break. And when we come back, we're going to look at your questions. This segment is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. For years, many of the proteins that cause cancer

have been considered undruggable. And backed around, 85% of our proteins are considered undruggable, which is like a biological iceberg. Our current drugs only touch the fraction, the tiny fraction that's above water. But Cancer Research, UK scientists, they are working to change that. Their scientists are diving beneath the surface to try and target these proteins. And to do it, they are taking inspiration from a household chore that most of us try to avoid. So today we are asking, can taking out the trash save lives?

Okay, here's the thing, right? Cancer starts when our genes end up going wrong and make and spit out these faulty proteins that tell cells to grow uncontrollably, right? And what standard drugs do, they are designed to block the cancer causing actions of faulty proteins. It's a little bit like plugging a leak, right? Sort of like a physical block that stops it from working. But it relies on the faulty protein having this plugable leak, right, a rigidly shaped area that drugs can get in, and attached to to physically stop the protein from working. The problem is that lots of cancer-causing proteins are really disordered. There's no clearly shaped part that the drugs can attach onto.

And that's essentially why they are considered undruggable. But some of these proteins, they end up driving cancers in children and young people. And that is where it is especially challenging to develop really effective treatments. Because right now, virtually all the treatments that we have for kids and young people are just borrowed from adult treatments. But the biology of children and young people and their cancers are just completely different. And so we need to find different ways to treat it. Here's the question. What if the key to drugging the undruggable was already inside of us? Well, our cells have their own sophisticated waste disposal system to help them get rid of the

rubbish proteins that are damaged or misshapen or no longer needed. Basically, the cell attaches these tiny molecular trash bags to the proteins that it wants to throw out. And then those tags tell the whole machinery inside the cell to take that protein and unfold it, shred it, and recycle its parts. And those parts are basically just amino acids, the building blocks of proteins that the cell can then use to build new proteins. Interestingly, this whole cell recycling disposal system is called UPS. It really is a kind of parcel delivery system. by the way. But is it United? No, UPS stands for ubiquitin proteosum system. Ubiquotin is the tag and the proteosum is the bin. So let's talk about rubbish. How can we

hijack our body's internal rubbish disposal system to treat cancer? Well, cancer grand challenges and their partners are supporting a team of international scientists to find ways to develop therapies for solid tumors in children, including degrader drugs, which high hijack this bin system, this rubbish disposal system to go after proteins that scientists once thought were undruggable. They can attach trash tags, not trash bags, trash tags, okay, to cancer-causing proteins that tell the cells to chuck them out. So the teams are designing degrader drugs to target five faulty proteins, and they've already identified a few promising compounds that could put a protein that drives childhood neuroblastoma in the bin. A neuroblastoma is a cancer.

that develops in nerve cells, neuro, of children mostly younger than five years old. Right. You can see the potential for this and what an unimaginable difference it could make to really countless lives. This idea of cancer grand challenges, by the way, is that it's an initiative that supports international interdisciplinary teams to try and solve these big, unsolved mysteries in cancer research. I mean, you could imagine a giant scientific escape room. You know, you've got puzzles on like nothing you've ever seen before. And you get teams altogether. But the prize at the end, if you managed to solve them, it could change really everything.

But this idea, these degraders, they have this power to potentially cross the blood brain barrier to also treat brain tumors, which is a wall that most drugs really struggled to penetrate. Yeah, this trash tagging technique could help us treat children and young people with better drugs that aren't as harsh on their developing bodies. Yeah, this is the next step in a very long legacy. Over the last 50 years, around 35,600 children and young people with cancer in the UK have survived into adulthood, thanks in part to Cancer Research UK's work. And with continued breakthroughs like that, the number is only going to keep growing. So it turns out taking the bins out really can save lives.

For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit Cancer Researchukuk.org for a little bit more. slash rest is science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. In the UK, nearly one in two people will face 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 papilloma. 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. All right, well, we've had one question that has come in that actually quite relates to what you're describing. It's from Luthien, who says, I was listening to your episode about orientation. I now want to know if astronauts, especially those in deep space, internally experience the sensation of bodily rotation. Or if, rather, they lack an internal sense of orientation due to the lack of gravity and thus the lack of up and down

and therefore experience something more akin to the world moving around them. I mean, the pens definitely feel it. Yeah. The pens definitely feel the lack of gravity. The pens have a built-in gravity, though. They have this built-in direction, which is the direction that the pressurized gas is pushing.

But for a human, our inner ear, the little stuff floating around in that fluid, it doesn't have an up or down. It doesn't have an up or down. Well, there is a little bit of gravity going on in there, but generally it can tell rotation. That's essentially what it can test.

So I think if you are spinning in space, you still know that you're spinning. But loads of astronauts, they talk about how if you don't, I mean, you're not getting like blood rushing to your head in the same way. That sort of same physical sensation. When you're upside down, it doesn't feel

any different. Yeah. So instead it doesn't feel like, oh, look, I flipped upside down relative to the spaceship. It's more like, oh, the spaceship has rotated around me. Interesting. So astronauts say that their frame of reference, as it were, is where their feet are. So it's like up and down to them remains fixed and everything else changes around them. Oh, that makes so much sense. I never even thought about that, though. And when I first heard that question, I thought, oh, no, they're going to feel rotation

because you can. Yeah. But you're only going to really feel rotation if you rotate quickly. Right. But if you're just doing stuff and you're incidentally, you've turned yourself 180 degrees in your process of work or slowly while you're sleeping or something. They're strapped down. Yeah, yeah. But you're going to, of course, you're going to say, hey, the whole ship's upside down. Yeah. It's not me.

And of course, upside down is like a very arbitrary concept up there. Absolutely. Because there's no such way as up, really. I mean, there's like down towards Earth, but you certainly don't feel a force pulling you to Earth. There's definitely gravity. That's why I'm always careful to say weightless. Yeah.

I'm okay saying zero G because they don't feel a G. They don't feel a G because that's the force. They're not accelerating in a particular direction. I don't like saying zero gravity because there's definitely gravity. There's gravity. That's why the International Space Station doesn't just drift away. In fact, the gravity that they feel up there is still, it's not 100% what you feel on the surface of Earth, but it's more than 50. It's somewhere in between.

Yeah, if you built, I think we talked about this in a previous episode. The space elevator one. Yeah. I think it maybe was that one. we talked about if you built a skyscraper that was so tall, its roof, was at the height of the International Space Station's orbit, I think it would have something like 70% gravity up there. You would maybe feel different, but you certainly wouldn't be like, whoa, I'm on top of the building. You'd be like, I'm on top of the building.

Well, wait, why is that not the same on the ISS then? Because they're falling. They are in free fall. If you imagine yourself in an elevator that cable has been snapped, you're going to be floating weightless in that elevator. in that elevator because there's nothing to resist your attraction to Earth. And so that's what they're doing. It's just that they're falling, but they're also moving to the side so quickly that as they fall, the curvature of the Earth falls with them.

So they never get any closer to it. That's what an orbit is, a successful orbit, a stable orbit. Absolutely. So it is weird to think that you could stand on top of a building that was what, how high, 400 kilometers? you could stand on the top of such a building and you could see the ISS just fly by so quickly. It wouldn't feel like it was falling as you watched it

because it would be traveling horizontally so quickly that you would just be like, you was there and now it's way past me. Absolutely. But it would be falling because if you imagine drawing a tangent out from where you are, as it follows the curvature of the earth, it will be below that line very quickly.

And of course, it does fall. over time because of friction. There's enough air up there that they do slow down and that means they fall closer to the earth. Or hold on, let me rephrase that. Because of the friction over time, like over the course of weeks and months, the ISS does drop in altitude. And it needs periodic boosts to go back up a little bit higher. And so I actually did a short video about this where I was like, if all life on Earth was destroyed by some calamity and the only living things left were the astronauts in the ISS,

how long would they have? Well, they would eventually spiral down into Earth, right? They would because they need periodic deliveries of propellant for the boosts to rebust them back up into the orbit they want to be. They could certainly very easily have enough food, enough water. they generate oxygen. The ship is going to give them enough of all that stuff. The limiting factor is altitude.

That's what they will run out of first. How long would it take? About like a year and a half, maybe 15 months. Wow. Yeah. Like that's how long they would have. And they'd be like, look, you can easily have enough food. You can have enough water and air to last more than 15 months.

You could have two, three years worth of those kind of supplies. But altitude you will run out of first. Outtitude is the thing. You know, some astronauts on the ISS in particular, they also say, just going back to the question, that if they close their eyes, they sort of lose perspective of direction altogether. Oh, sure.

It feels like they're just a disembodied brain. And then they kind of open their eyes as like, surprise. You've got a body. Like the space and the ISS is in disorientation. Wow. Yeah. That would be trippy. Yeah, completely.

But the spit trick doesn't work, basically. The spit trick that you can use in Avalanche. Yeah, you can't spit and watch where it goes to figure out which way's up or down. No go. No go. Okay, this is a question from David. Could a building be damaged by resonance if everyone clapped in unison all at once? What if the entire world clapped at once? What if they were all densely packed in the Isle of White and clapped?

Okay. Well, okay, here's the thing. I look this up and you can find, like little short videos other people have made about this question of like how damaging would it be if we all clapped at the same time and a lot of them are just what you would expect it's like a whole bunch of like AI animations of the earth exploding. Great. While they tell us that everyone clapping at once would be like maybe as loud as a jet engine for like a second if you were close and you're like, give me a break. It's a it's kind of anticlimactic. But the problem is, first of all, you've got to get everyone together in one place

because if we all just clapped where we were, it would attenuate through the air and it would basically not even matter. Well, also, the speed of sound is extremely slow. So if you clapped where you are, when you're in Kansas or Denver, whatever, and I clap in London, effectively by the time those two claps would meet each other, they'd just be off. They're not, they're not, yeah. They're not synchronized. The clap is like compressing air and then that compression,

wave travels, but it gets weaker and weaker and weaker. So when I clap in Colorado, you don't hear it here. Anyway, if we got us all into one place, we could all clap together and sound adds up in a way that isn't quite like just normal arithmetic. But we could probably get 8 billion people to clap together and make a noise in the like 200 decibel range. Okay. That's pretty loud.

That's very loud. Yeah. But you're still limited by how close you can get everybody. The world record loudest clap was actually achieved just in 2021 by a guy named Stephen Wallace, who I could not find how far away they measured the loudness. Because, of course, loudness goes down by what do they call it a square. Inverse square law. Inverse square law. So if you're twice as far away, it's four times quieter.

Anyway, Guinness World Records did not tell me what the rules were for how far away they measured, but there's a video of it. And he clapped and he hit 117 decibels. And that broke a record that had been around for 15 years before him the loudest clap was 113 decibels. Now, I've watched the video. Right. Was it something special? Did he have like gynormo hands? Was he doing a special technique?

Was it cupped hands, flat hands? I don't want to be catty on this podcast very often, but it seemed like... One in five episodes is okay. Because Guinness World Records made such a point to mention the audio company that did all of the recording and measurements, it sounded a little bit like they themselves pushed for Guinness to do this. Like, hey, we should do a loudest clap thing. Has it been broken in 15 years. And they just got like their intern to go in.

And the guys just, I mean, they're loud claps. Like, I'm not putting, his technique is solid. But he didn't wake up, you know, one day as a child and be like, you know what, I need my life's mission to be. I've worked it out. It's going to be clapping. Yeah. No, it wasn't that.

Can I look at it? Look it up. Yeah, look up Stephen Wallace. Clap. And you'll find there's like a video on Facebook of it. It's during the pandemic also. So everyone's wearing masks in the video, which is, it's always such a like, oh, gosh, yeah, there was that period.

Yeah, that's nothing. That does look like an intern. You're right. Right. I mean, again, I don't want to put anyone down. I do. That's rubbish. But just listening to that clip, I'm like, that's applause.

That's regular. I think I've done that to clap from that in my life. I want to see someone who trained since childhood. Yeah. And they only trained because when they were a kid, people made fun of how like big and cupy their hands were. And they were like, I'm going to try. triumph over this. And they like, that turned out to make their claps really loud. And then like,

they even spent time in jail for clapping once and it was so loud. It hurt children's eardrums nearby. That's what I want to see. I want someone who has dinner plates for hands, right? Yes. And maybe webbing between each of their fingers in order to really focus those sound waves. Exactly. Yeah. Or I want someone who's got like a technique and it almost feels illegal. You're like, well, yeah, I can clap loudly. And they're like, oh yeah, watch this. I invented this. and they do this like weird clapping thing and physicists get involved and go wow it actually is like twice as efficient to clap that way

and there's like a whole new way of clapping invented don't give me this like oh hey guys what's up here to set a world record yeah nice I wholehearted liberty and there are new styles of clapping I'm discovering every day are there and by every day I mean like maybe

15 years ago I found the fastest clapper That is a record that I very much respect. Wait, can I guess? Instead of doing the normal way, do they do something where they like, kind of, kind of like that? Fold their hand into and clap forwards and backwards. Kind of. They do it like this.

Not regular clapping, but clapping like this. Oh, I've seen it. Yeah, so I'll slow it down. For the purposes of people who are listening, Aaron. Yes, please. You just saw Michael do what was a really, amazing impression of a circus seal. Yeah, I'm basically sliding my palms across each other long ways, but then allowing enough of a gap. Oh, you've practiced this.

I got to work out more. But the point is that that is currently the way you can set the most claps per minute, you know, record. Yeah. Which I love, because it's a different way of clapping. And it reminds me of things like the high jump and how people. People used to jump over it with like a scissor kick and then someone invented the flop. Yeah, backwards. The Fosbury flop.

And it was like, oh my gosh, yes, that allows them to raise their center of mass higher than before. It allows them to clear a higher bar at least. I forget the physics behind it. But that stuff really, I love it. Yeah, we need more competition on this. Record your claps. See what, see how loud they come out. Let's get a community going.

Let's get an annual conference. Let's get ClapperCon. Yes, we should do that. And I think it's important because guess what? You, all of us, are always clapping. Go on. This is not my joke. But the joke is that you never stop clapping.

The distance between your claps just gets really long. Nice. That's a lovely idea. It's a little bit of a like, you know, paradigm shift there. lovely idea. You're welcome. Yeah. It's a bit like when I was about 13 years old, I deliberately opened a bracket and I've actually just been writing inside that bracket for my time. Yes. Oh yeah. I think I saw a tweet once where a guy was like, oh my gosh. In ninth grade, I said, quote, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I forgot to ever say end quote. So the, like most of my

life has been something I've attributed to Ernest Hemingway. Yeah. Okay. To answer your question then, David, we're not damaging any buildings. No, no, no, no. It would be loud. It would be uncomfortable. But the building would be more in danger of just all those people.

Like, physically being in the same space. Like, as many people as you could, that would be much more damaging than the combined volume of a clap. Unless the new clapping technique really elevates this. Unless and until ClapperCon. generates a whole new style of human clapping, which it will. Okay, all right. Last question. This is from Jordan. What are your thoughts on the Kardashev scale? Had there been further developments on this theory since its inception over 60 years ago, where do you think we, Earth civilization, land on it currently, and do you think we'll get it

in your lifetimes? Okay, we should probably start with what it is. Yeah. So this is an idea from the 1960s, the Soviet astronomer, Nikolai Kardashev, and he, was trying to categorize how hypothetical alien civilizations might distinguish themselves from one another based on the amount of energy that they can harness, right? So type one, this is a civilization that is totally able to use all of the energy resources that are available on their planet. Right. So, you know, all of the energy that's floating around on Earth, by the way, we're about 0.7 at the moment, maybe 0.73, I think is the... Okay, because what are we missing?

I mean, loads. We're still like digging up dead dinosaurs and using that to power most of. But so this scale doesn't actually mean all energy. Like we find a way to break the loss of thermodynamics. Sure. And get waste heat energy back into, right. No, it's more like there's loads of wind power that we're missing. There's loads of solar power that we're missing. I'm not sure about nuclear power, actually. I think that that does that still count? I think it does still count. Yeah, so I guess I'm wondering, I'm only vaguely familiar with the scale. I'll be honest with you, me too.

To reach one, to use all the energy of your planet, does that mean that you're literally creating nuclear explosions out of all the matter in your planet? Obviously not. I think it must mean that it's within your technological ability to harness energy of all kinds. But no, or you are harnessing it. No, I think it's beyond your technical ability. I think it's that you have the ability to harness all available energy that your planet has, apart from destroying matter.

Okay. Okay. All right. I think it's that. I mean, honestly, can I be honestly, I think the whole thing's nonsense. Yeah, I find it really annoying because they get so into it and they're like, oh, when are we? It emotionally matters to them that we become a type three civilization. And I'm like, why are you? Why? Okay, so let's, to finish off, so type one is like you use everything up and you're, you can

use all the energy in your own planet. Type two is that you can use the entire energy output of your star. Yeah. So the idea that we, to be able to do that is maybe you have something like a Dyson sphere or maybe like an entire cluster of mirrors that surround the sun, these satellites that go out and surround the sun and take all of the sunlight and then transport this single beam into a way to harness all of that energy and then that can be used to, you know, do whatever you want.

And then type three is that you have a civilisation. that is capable of using the entire energy resource of a galaxy, right? Which is crazy. And so then this one thing that this leads to is the idea that, okay, well, if there are highly intelligent life forms out there that have reached level two, then we should be able to see their stars, you know, flickering because of the spheres of energy collectors put around the stars. Because they've got loads of mirrors around them. Right.

And there was a situation a few years ago, tabernia. be star where astronomers got really excited. Amateur astronomer found it first. This is Tabitha Bojjan who found this star about 1,500 light years away from Earth, and it was like dimming and brightening in an unusual way. Now normally when you get an exoplanet that passes in front of a star, it does dim the light, but it does so in actually a really tiny way, even if you get a planet like the size of Jupiter, it does it in a really small way. But this particular star was like, the dimming was really significant and everyone got very excited about it and we're like, we found one. We found an alien civilization that is using a Dyson sphere to harness energy from

their own sun. And there you go. And it turned out it's just actually interplanetary dust. Right. So probably not. But people were really excited. They were like, there's a genuine possibility. And that's the thing, this scale gets people very excited. There are so many videos on YouTube about the scale, about Dyson spheres, Dyson Rings. And it's exciting because it's like sci-fi technology and because I think it's it's not just a cool futuristic idea

but it's like a hierarchy of like okay that means that you're at two it feels quantitative right even though it's actually very hand-wavy yes yes so Carl Sagan calculated that we're at 0.7 the current estimates are that we're at

0.73 you know around about now I mean if you project forwards and we continue with increase in global energy consumption of 3% per year, then we'll become a type 1 civilization who are sort of less than 1 at the moment in like 100 years or so, 200 years. Yeah, so it gives you like a personal goals, right?

Like, I'm going to help us get to a type 1 civilization sooner. And that means that we need to get fusion or whatever. We need to better harness this other form of energy, the energy in the tides and the waves, right? I mean, sure, sure. Then there's also this whole like philosophical thing about, oh, the most difficult part is the transition from 0.7 to 1 because that's the bit when you've got enough power to exterminate your own planet. Ah, so you can fold it into the great filter and all those kinds of things. Right. The great filter being the answer to the idea of why haven't we heard this cacophony of sounds when we turned on, when we turned on SETI, when we turned on the ability to look for other alien life forms and we didn't find any.

is it because they all wipe themselves out? Is it because there's this filter that essentially you get powerful enough, intelligent enough, capable enough that you knock out your own civilization? Yep. I think maybe the reason why I feel a bit dismissive of it, maybe dismissive is a bit too far because I think it's a fun idea. But I think it's that. I think it's a fun idea.

I think it's like a false quantification of things. And I think that it is just taken a bit. too seriously. Yeah, perhaps. I think it's fun. I think it's too focused on just energy and specifically certain ways of getting certain kinds of energy where I think you could also build a scale about how broadly a species has pioneered or what level of consciousness do they have. That could be a whole other thing where maybe like harnessing more energy just actually becomes completely uninteresting and what is more important is, you know, your lives inside the digital world or something.

I think there's just a certain group of people who are like really obsessed with growth, you know? True. More and more and more, expansion, expansion, expansion. And I don't know whether this is just because I'm a bit older or more female. But I'm more interested in there just being a point where it's like, you know, this is actually enough. Like, this actually is enough. Like, I'm really, I'm, I think there's an endless bound to my curiosity. I will constantly want to know more. That, that, that I want more of.

I'd like cleaner forms of energy, but I don't think we need more. Well, yeah, more for the sake of more. More for the sake of more. Like more so that energy prices can basically hit zero and we have access to everything and everyone has access to what they need. Sure, that would be nice. But you're right. I think there is this feeling of, well, but, Yeah, but there could be more. And then we could move up the scale and score more points. And you're like, for what reason? And they're like, well, because it's kind of a cool story.

Like when a lot of people ask me about the scale, I can tell that what they really want is to just listen to really cool speculative science fiction, which is awesome, but it's not what I'm good at. It's not my job. Yeah. And I think that's exactly it. That's it. Speculative science fiction is really fun.

Yeah. But it's fiction. It's a different thing. It's not like, oh, yes, guys. Well, you know, next year, the European Space Agency is going to be doing this thing that's going to move us up to a 0.8 on the scale. And everyone's like, yes, of course.

This is a real thing. Maybe we're being too harsh about this. Maybe everyone's going to get really angry with us. We spent about 20 minutes just kind of phoning about it. It is quite fun. It is fun. I don't have anything else to add about it though. No.

Oh, but here's what no one talks about. What if you're a negative one on the scale? Right. which is, so this is the idea that it's like you go down smaller rather than bigger. So you manage to harvest all of the energy from like atoms. Yeah, why can't you just cease needing energy? That could be a goal, a goal post. Or you're like, actually, once you get to like one,

you start to realize and become a species that needs to be at zero. And you exist statically. Just suspended in the animation. How's that for speculative science fiction? Just we find that the most intelligent life forms in the universe are all just statues because they've realized that that just existing, just to be without change, is the ultimate. Is the ultimate? I mean, that's what the Buddhist think, isn't it?

They're way ahead of intelligence. And if you listen to this podcast, you are way ahead of intelligence. The compliments are in abundance here. Maybe energy isn't, but there's no shortage, no scarcity of compliments. Thank you as ever for watching and listening to us. You can send us emails, the rest of science at goahunger.com. Ask us questions. Either in an email or in the comments,

maybe we will be whining and moaning about your question too. We weren't whining and moaning about the scale. Okay, we were just reacting to it, I think, as people who have spent the last 20 years constantly being told about it and asked about it. Yeah. So you're seeing us raw. This is real.

This is real life, guys. See you later. Bye.