The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - 107: The Science of Discworld Pt. 2 (Pettier, and Full of Academics)

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel, read and recap every book from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in chronological order. This week, Part 2 of our recap of “The Science of Discworld”. Rocks! Bones! The End of Life as We Know It!Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail]: www.patreon.com/thetruthshallmakeyefretWant to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on twitter @joannahagan and follow Francine @francibambi Things we blathered on about:Alex from Mars' comment - /r/TTSMYF Wild yams & elephants tweet (@MythicAfricans) - Twitter Fire and Ice by Robert Frost - Poetry Foundation The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, by Stephen Brusatte - Goodreads TEN NEGLECTED EXAMPLES OF “ANCIENT” SCIENCE FICTION - Balladeer's Blog The fiction that predicted space travel - BBC Culture The Bone Wars: how a bitter rivalry drove progress in palaeontology - BBC Science Focus Magazine Brontosaurus Stomps Back to Claim Its Status as Real Dinosaur - National GeographicFigments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind by Ian Stewart - Goodreads Alan MacMasters: How the great online toaster hoax was exposed - BBC News Why People Once Thought Mice Grew Out of Wheat and Sweaty Shirts - WIRED Music: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com

God, we're technologically viable, aren't we? Oh, that's a weird way to put it. Yeah, sure. I've read a lot of weird shit about science today. I forgot which words mean what. I seem to be constantly being a fucking dichotomy or something. I've been very into wanting to present more masks recently, but then also conversely, I really, really want to make and wear a beautiful ball gown. So, I'm not sure I can do like a mask ball gown, but I also like would like to go to a masked ball. Close enough. Then maybe afterwards a mask ball.

Sorry, darling, I'm going to the masquerade. Oh, you're getting your ball gown ready? No, no, my leathers. Listen to the pronunciation, darling. It's very important. Masquerade, no. But I think so you can do both. I think every day, although even though it's you, you're not going to be wearing a ball gown. So, you can do what you want and then just for the balls. I'm not invited to enough balls. No, no, we don't. Well, I don't think we'd like high society really, but it does mean we don't get much opportunity to wear dresses we like. I just want to like walk down some stairs dramatically while some music plays. I don't think that's too much to ask. No. Preferably, while everyone turns around and sort of gasps

and clutches their pals a little bit. What I wonder with venues like that is how does one leave? Because I wouldn't want to leave the same way I came in. You don't want to be perceived like that as you are leaving the party. No, absolutely not. There must be a ground floor alternative for leaving. Possibly with some more stairs to run down so you can do it a little bit dramatically while hoiking your skirt a little bit. Yeah. We're both just thinking of Cinderella now, aren't we? Yeah. I went down a rabbit hole when I should have been doing something else and ended up watching a couple of songs from Into the Woods. So, every song from Into the Woods is now stuck in my head at the same time. I really like that film and I haven't watched it in ages,

but I think I'll probably do what you do and just watch a couple of songs on YouTube because it's a fucking long film. I want to see Johnny Depp being weird. Yeah. I feel like if I'm going to rewatch it, I'm just going to skip all of the wall bits because I value my sanity. Yeah. I don't mind the rest of it. It's just that one song and it sticks in my head. And it's creepy as fuck. Yeah. And it's Johnny Depp. Yeah. I spent so long watching Johnny Depp as a teenager. Honestly, it doesn't really click with me if I'm seeing him in stuff that he's like Johnny Depp. But in that one, he just is so much. He is being very Johnny Depp. It's just like full Iq whenever I see him now, which is a bit disappointing. Like Edwins is at hands.

I could easily watch still, I think. I'm not sure I can do Pirates of the Caribbean. Yeah, I think that might be the line. Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom being bicons. Pirates. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, did you say Vikings or am I going there? No, I said, I said bicons. Oh, sexual icons. Right. I'm sorry. You just said a word that wasn't a word. Sometimes I've heard it as a word. It was kind of related to CE travel. No, I did not say Vikings. I know they're also not bisexual in the film, but they both very much have that energy. I see. Yes. I would like to see them play

Vikings now. I've said it though. Yeah, if we can do that now, I think they could do that. I would watch the fuck out of that. Yeah. Yeah. I say weathered. I don't know how weathered Keira Knightley is. Pretty sure she still sees that. I never see her in perfume adverts and everyone's airbrushed a fuck in those. Well, Hollywood, if you're listening, and I'm assuming you are, get on to us. We'll write the script for the Keira Knightley or Orlando Bloom Viking movie. Yeah. Working title. Brackets. Oh, dear. There was so much being around family yesterday. One of my cousins has just recently had a baby, so baby arms there. And there was so much talk about, oh, when they're this age and when they're this age and child development. And one of my other

cousins who's childless is there, but she's also a pediatric surgeon, so knows about babies. So there was just me standing next to it like, today I saw a balloon. Now, see, I find the when they're that age talk useful when I can be bothered to absorb it. Because later, when you are talking to people, and you were expected to contribute to the conversation, quite often, I'm in the situation where somebody tells me something and I have to go, is that good? So like, oh, yeah, you know, it's three months old and she's learned Latin. I'm like, is that normal or bad behind? She's how tall at that age? Can she drive? At what point do we start saying tall rather than heavy or long? Do you say long about baby? Exactly. So I should pay more attention when

this conversation is going on around me. I did with my nephew, but that's just because he was abnormally long and has continued to be the child as a stick insect. How is he? I've done a bit of babysitting recently, haven't you? I've had a couple of days, I've got one next week because the teachers are on strike, which is so sweet because it's the day the new series of the Mandalorian starts and he's really excited because he gets to watch the new episode of the Mandalorian Auntie Joes. Oh, that's nice. So we're having chocolate chip cookies and Mandalorian Day. That's good. It is so easy. It's been so easy to make this child like me. I'm just willing to talk about Star Wars and bake cookies. Yeah. I mean, he's a millennials dream, really, isn't he?

Yeah. Pop nerd culture and cookies. Fuck. Haven't got him into the Marvel stuff, so I can't impress him with my knowledge there, but I'll give him a few more years. Yeah. It's all a bit much for some of that age, isn't it? How old is he? Six now? Like seven. Seven. He's about this long. Hasn't learned Latin. Terribly behind. We're all horribly ashamed of him. Well, I assume I learned it as a toddler and forgot as is the normal way. It comes away with your baby teeth, does it? That's normal. Informative language. Obviously, when I was still Catholic, I spoke fluent Latin. Fluent Catholic. Basically. Which is like Latin, but more judgmental. Yep. I spoke very judgmental Latin,

but as soon as I lapsed, so did the Latin. Well, that's all right then. You don't want to accidentally break out into Latin. You'll get exorcised. Ironic, too. I bet he wants to exercise. My current motivation for making myself go for a walk every day is that there is a nice little cafe that's only about 15 minutes away, so I can go for a little walk and get a little cappuccino and walk back and have a little treat. Oh, that's nice. Oh, I have a bakery now. Oh, cool. I've adopted my grandmother's bakery. Oh, did they live indoors or outdoors? Outdoors. Yeah, that's good. Although, I'll have to keep an eye on it if we get like frost, frost. Next week, then we are getting cold, cold. Yeah, it should be okay. It just can't be

out in the cold for like multiple weeks at a time. That's probably fine. Yeah, so hopefully it'll be all right. I should get a bakery. It's going to... One thing I want to do this spring and summer is get the garden sorted. I've only got a tiny garden and it really should be sortable. I, because my balconies are like patio balconies, I've just got loads of pots and at the moment, like, they're on hardly any live plants in any of them. Yeah. My daffodils are coming up, but there's also, despite the fact that these are pots, they still desperately need weeding because, I guess, birds around stuff. Oh, yeah, for sure. You live right near a bunch of trees as well. So, I desperately need to go dig up lots of weeds and then plants and stuff that I actually

want to grow. Tulips should be coming soon. Yeah, my daffodils are just a couple of them are picked up flowers and the tulips coming up. I saw snow drops when I was walking in a graveyard last week, but they were very pretty and lots of them that made me very happy. Yes, lots of snow drops around. They're good. I'm going to get a bunch of honeysuckle for the garden I decided and apparently you can get lots of different types of honeysuckle, which I didn't realise. Yeah. Only some of them are fragrant, so I need to watch out for that and I want fragrant honeysuckle. But they flower at like really different times. So, if I play my cards right, I could have like a garden full of flowering honeysuckle for like six months of the year. Oh, it'd be like a floral

calendar. Yeah, but for that one plant is really unhelpful. I would know. Honestly, if I get to the point where I'm not sure what time of year it is within two months, I might be in more trouble and it can be solved with the plants, but it's good to have the backup. Should we be hit by bursts of gamma rays? Which I'm hoping doesn't happen. Yeah, but if it does, you've got your honeysuckle. Exactly. There's always the honeysuckle, as they say. The old wives tale, got your honeysuckle. Don't need to worry about gamma rays. Yep. It's weird how some of them just don't catch on as saying. Yeah, I've tried so long to make that one happen and apparently it's just not going to happen.

Maybe we need to find an old wife to help us out. Yeah, I don't know any old wives. Oh, no, I think even if I'm being self-deprecating, 31 is pushing it a bit. We'll have a think. You're not an old wife yet. Yeah, not yet. I was about to use the word old soul then and I nearly threw up, so that's... God, I hate that. All right, let's go get a coffee and then we'll try and talk about some science. Yeah. Do you want to make a podcast? Yeah, I do want to make a podcast. I'm not convinced I'm going to be much good at it today, but I want to try.

Hello and welcome to The Tree Shall Make You Threat, a podcast in which we're usually reading a recapping every book from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, one as time in chronological order. I'm Joanna Hagan. And I'm Francine Carroll. And this is part two of our discussion of the science of Discworld volume one. Yay, part two of two. Part two of two, because we only split the book in half because we didn't think there was that much to talk about.

Yes, there probably was, but I think we still made the right choice because this isn't a podcast while in theory, where we just spend an hour and a half talking vaguely about science we don't know a lot about. Yes, and I think it's probably best to keep it that way. Yeah. Before we crack on, this is a spoiler-like podcast, obviously heavy spoilers for the science of Discworld, I guess, and the inevitable fate of the universe. Oh, no. But we will avoid spoiling any major Discworld plot points past Nightwatch,

the book in the Canon that we are currently up to. We will, of course, save any discussion of the Shepherd's Crown until we get there so you, dear listener, can come on the journey with us. Which, although it may seem like it takes eons, is, in fact, a barely perceptible flicker of a second when it comes to deep time. How many grandfathers is it until the Shepherd's Crown? Point two. Good maths, I'm not going to question that. But he dies young.

Right, follow up. Follow up, follow up. We had a lovely Reddit comment from our resident Martian, Alex. Alex, I agree that Pluto is, in fact, very cool. I'm not sure if I made that clear enough in the last episode, but I have a lot of respect for Pluto. Alex also said, on the sci-fi-inspiring science and also kind of on the narrative imperative thing, I recently finished reading Becky Chambers to be taught if fortunate, which is a really beautiful little novella about science and exoplanets and humanity. At the addition, I have had a conversation between her and her science consultant slash

mother talking about questions of science and how much you can massage scientific understandings for narrative reasons. On a more personal and smaller note, it's really hard for me to unravel whether my love of space or my love of books about space came first. I can say with quite a bit of certainty that science fiction and bookshelves like Star Trek and things have helped me quite a lot in getting to where I am. I'll be banging my head against a paper or struggling with imposter syndrome, but then I'll read, watch something about the wonder of exploration. I'll remember why I'm doing it, which is a lovely space thought. Yeah, we get to the wonder of exploration in

this part of the book as well, don't we? Which although I'm not sure we've noted down explicitly, I think it is a lovely thing. The human need to find out, find new places, yeah. It is a delight. Oh, and not really. As evidenced by the fact, Joanna, keeps trying to get into the Marianas trench to see those deep sea fish. I want to go see the deep things in the ocean. Why am I not a marine biologist? Fine, but we need to get you some kind of diving bell. You can't swim down that bar. I'm not really a very strong swimmer. Well, you just need to be a really good sinker. It's getting up again. I'm quite dense. I'm quite dense. I think I'll be all right. I'm very solid.

For someone who has a lot of existential crises, I certainly have plenty of mass. Well, existential crises, funnily enough, reacts with oxygen to make us solid. It's one of the reasons sea creatures are so chill. Oh, that makes a lot of sense. Blobs. Blobs. Exactly. Blobbing along. Also on Twitter, a very fun conversation was having had... I don't believe you. Sorry. Immediately false.

Super Cognita was talking about anthropomorphised deaths going through character development and how unique was Discworld's death specifically. I remember the word psychopomps, which I'm very proud of. It's a good word. Psychopomp. I can't remember which episode we first talked about. Psychopomps would have been first, maybe the first episode of this very podcast, obviously this very podcast, but maybe the very first episode. Probably. It quite possibly could be, but whether we remembered the word at the time, I don't know. It was a long time ago.

Well, I remember telling you about it and you being delighted, but I don't know if it was podcast or not. That actually sums up quite a lot of my memories. I cannot remember what we've talked about on the podcast and what we've talked about excitedly via the group chat. Well, back then, Joanna, it wasn't even a group chat. We used to meet for coffee. Oh, those were the days. Quaint, I know. Quaint and delightful. Before the end times began.

Francine, would you like to tell us what happened previously in the science of Discworld? Yes, I certainly would. Previously on the science of Discworld, ponders high tech, high risk invention generates energy in excess, way, way in excess. But luckily, heck saves the day, channeling the potentially devastating psalmic overload into a baby universe. The wizards are fascinated by their new toy, if a little surprised by an abundance of celestial spheres and a complete lack of space turtle in narrative direction. One round world emerges from the elemental chaos Rincewind has given the opportunity to experience a new flavor of virtual mortal peril.

He's also given a sandwich, which is a little more palatable. Eventually, the spark of life catches and begins to take shape. The shape is blob. Can you take it from there, Joanna? I think I need exactly 37 seconds to process the shape is blob. Well, no, you've gestured emphatically in a blob like way. On this audio format, I think I made it very clear. In fact, it was just as helpful in audio as it was in video, I'm sure. That is an accurate statement.

That is definitely an accurate statement. Right, in this section, which goes from chapter 25 through to the end of the book. And the end, sorry. And the end of the universe. The librarian's in L space looking for evolution. He interrupts a writer while hex ponders. The librarian returns with a simple depiction, but the wizards are still confused and the burst is cogitating. Rincewind watches blobs until the world freezes over once more than thaws and life begins to thrive in the oceans.

Rincewind's trying to file rocks, but the luggage has landed on Round World. The psychotic suitcase comes in handy as the wizards begin to transport specimens and observe the crab civilization until another catastrophe hits Round World and Rincewind. A hex is considering ex-intelligence and the lecturer's designed a giant limpid. There's progress among the amphibians. The lizards are evolving, but the wizards are depressed and they head to the world to see what's going on. After further catastrophe and a great leap forward, the lizards have gotten bigger. Ponder writes new rules and civilizations getting further in the sea until another extinction event. The gloomy wizards wonder why life

doesn't travel and after another big freeze, they catch backsliders into the sea. The wizards discuss ending the project but agree to one day more. The deans teaching the apes but they'd rather play in the surf and the luggage tumbles out of the strata to Rincewind's total lack of surprise. The librarian's not happy about apes getting eaten and he visits with sharp rocks to teach violence and cookery. It's going to be up to Rincewind to close the reactor and the Round World's looking apocalyptic as the wizards go to visit the newly girdled earth. There's an alarm in a big pyramid and hex-like intelligence left. The rest have travelled up and off-world. The wizards get in a cylinder and the world

breaks apart again. The wizards plan to close things down and hex notices recursion occurring. The world's important and Rincewind's to take care of it. The bursas close the reacting engine and there's magic fall out of it. Rincewind carefully takes the world to his office as an uncertain bursa appears and disappears. The Round World spins a turtle. Now this to me tells me that we're in this world as canonically in the same universe as Round World, right? Or A Disque World is. And A Round World. Just very far off into the future. Yeah. It's good to know. So, helicopter and loincloth watch. Yep. Yep. Now I have done that in the right order. The both of us in helicopter watch, I think.

Loincopter and Helicloth watch. Helicloth, that's a great name for something. We need to invent a helicloth. Let's not invent a loincopter. Okay. Yeah, no, quite right. But as we've discussed before, of course, it is a helico. A helico and pter, isn't it? The two parts of that word. Oh, yes. Helico. Sorry. Please continue. Yeah, because you interrupted something so important. The bolus that could potentially be used to fling us into space by way of twiddling. That covers helicopter. Yeah. I feel like we almost got to loincloths a lot with a lot of civilizations. Yeah, we missed a loincloth. We did. We missed the loincloth in the blink of an

apocalypse. Oh, well. Brief other bits we keep track of. We have a mention of million to one chances. Mm. The book ponders the death of asteroids. No, the death of dinosaurs holding an asteroid. Yes, that's fair. So that's our death presence of the week. And not really something we keep track of, but I also noticed a call back to last week, we were talking about Tasmanian Tigers' brain book rack, and there was a little bit about Tasmanian Tigers in this. Oh, there was, isn't there? Yes. Saying that there's no movie about it or something. And also, they may not have technically gone extinct. Oh, yeah. Yeah. People are sure they've seen them. Yes, well. I think I heard a bit about that on a recent episode,

no such thing as a fish. Ah, quite possibly. About people still looking for them. Hmm. I'll revisit that. Right. A relevant elephant, I have one. I can't remember which elephant I first noted down, but they were mentioned several times. Um, then Cameroon. Wild yams are foraged from the forest, where they are also eaten by elephants, which are important in Vaca cosmology. So the wild yam is considered a link between humans, elephants, and jengie, the protective forest spirit. And that's from a tweet I found a while ago, and they linked to a very cool study about it, which has all kinds of complex and esoteric looking diagrams involving yams and elephants. So I will link to that for you listeners.

Francine sent me one of the diagrams, and it made no sense to me. It's true. It makes no sense to anyone, probably, apart from the people who know a lot about that. Fair. Quotes. Quotes. Would you like to go first? They were obviously attempting to control their world. And what good did it do them? A million tons of white hot ice smack between the ice stalks. Senior Wrangler. And I've put a bonus one in, because I know just you did as well, because it's related. And this is Ridcully, Pontifricating. You know, I thought all you had to do is get a world working. And before you could say creation, there'd be some creature who'd stand up, getting a grip on its surroundings,

gaze with a certain amount of intelligence at all at the infinite sky, and say, that thing's getting bigger. I wonder if it's going to hit us, said Rince Wind. Rince Wind. That remark was extremely cynical and accurate. Sorry, Arch Chancellor. What have you got there? I think this is after one of the first extinction events, The Wizard's Witness. Ah, I've got an idea, said the dean, beaming. We can get Hex to reverse the thermic flow in the catholic matrix of the optimized bi-direction octagonate, can't we? Well, that's the opinion of four glasses of Sherry, said the Archance, liberously to break the ensuing silence.

Oh, he's being cold as ice. I really love the sort of nod to the nonsense Star Trek techno babble. Reverse the polarity of the engine flow. Yeah. And then you've got the Bersar saying, what I think are actual scientific things throughout, and getting much the same reaction, although a little kinder. Yes, but he does also at one point say that jelly is the fifth element. That seems right. What a surprise coming to this. Jelly surprise.

Is jelly surprising? Well, it depends how it's served. I'll come back to you on that, but not when you expect it. If some kind of 1970s gelatin salad turns up during my talking point, Francine. I was going to try and serve you a segue with the cold as ice thing, but then we got on to jelly and I'm not sure how to help now. So continue. Yeah, I'm just going to keep going. I'm shoehorning in a quote, which isn't actually from the book, but the book is making lots and lots of references throughout to things ending in ice and fire. And whether it's intended as a reference to this or not, I assumed it was based on the

Robert Frost poem, which is one of my absolute favorites. Some say the world will end in fire, some say an ice. From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire, but if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction, ice is also great and would suffice. He's a good poet. Fucking love that poem. Yeah, I didn't add that. Do you know what? I love that poem and it didn't occur to me while I was reading it, so thank you for bringing that up.

Yay, I've got a line in there then. In there then? God, between the two of us, we can form sentences. Oh, we're doing well with some of these syllables. I'll tell you that. Add them together, we've got problems. Characters. Characters? I haven't done much for characters this week because this isn't a hugely narratively driven book.

No, apart from the grand narrative, of course. Well, yeah, it's the universe. But the luggage is here. Yay, an old friend. It is nice to see the luggage again. We've now confirmed he can have a massive fucking meteorite dropped on him and he's fine. Are we surprised? Meteorite Park.

He explained it in there. Yeah, I didn't learn the difference. That's not to criticise the good scientific writers of this book. That is to criticise my ability to hold information when presented with this much of it. But I love the introduction of the luggage turning up as them looking and sort of saying this. Something's gone for a paddle. It had hundreds of little legs. Something's paddling, sir. Something's going for a paddle, sir. It was probably the strangest cry of warning since the famous.

Should the reactor have gone that colour? And Rince Wins can't really explain it. Well, he's probably looking for me. Sometimes loses track. What a good little luggage. He is a good little luggage. He is very hard to get rid of. And that's what you want in a luggage.

And then briefly, the Bursar who has read a lot of Hexa's printouts and therefore developed possibly some rationality. Yes. Well, I like it. I like it was briefly explained in the last section, wasn't it? Just that he's good at maths and there's a lot of us that there's fucking insane. I'm paraphrasing that slightly. Yeah. I think he's having a lovely time and it's nice to see him have a lovely time. It is. He explains that the luggage may consist of a subset of at least N dimensions,

which may coexist with any other set of greater than N dimensions. Very sensible. He saved Rince Wind as well. He did save Rince Wind. A slight shout out to Rince Wind actually, because I do like to point out when he's being a decent sort. He was trying to help the leg thing. And also when he thought that the librarian was going to do harm on Round World, he did much with slight reluctance, go and run to try and help.

Yes. He cares about his stupid little forever dying world. He does. And I think it's very sweet the weird little creatures upon it. Yes. I like the way he was sorting rocks out as well. Whether they're friendly or not. It's good to know. Always organise your rocks lads. Next time we're out and about, we should keep an eye out, start getting this selective rock breeding down. Yeah. Let's definitely selectively breed some rocks.

But before that, should we talk about locations? Yeah. It seems more productive. We get to see L Space. Yeah. Very briefly, I thought it was quite cool. I'm not sure if we really... We have seen him go through it before, but it wasn't described quite like this. But there was the occasional burst of noise on the other side of the shelves, rapidly changing as though someone was playing with handfuls of sound

and a flickering in the air. Someone talking was replaced with the absorbent silence of empty rooms, was replaced with the crackling of flame and displaced by laughter. But that was a very cinematic moment, I thought, and also great to have a little peek there into the forbidden section of the universe. Yes. We need more of those. And then I noted a couple of round world places as well

that I didn't know much about, so I had a quick look at. One of which is Lake Manakugan. And I'm sorry I haven't looked up to see if I'm pronouncing that right. That's a very circle one, yeah. Very circle one that's evidence of an impact crater. Oh, the one that had the peak in the middle from the rock. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it has like a central island, so it's like a massive ring.

And it's huge, like it's clearly visible from space. It covers 750 square miles, so it's bigger than London, which is about 600 and so square miles. So quite a bit bigger than London. And yet there's a central peak on the island called Mount Babel, which is 952 meters above sea level. So it's close in height to like Mount Snowden in Wales, which was formed by post-impact uplift.

So it's like a bit of crossed rock. Melty rock. Just up. Look at this shit. Yeah. So I think that's very cool. And now I really want to visit there. Yeah. Where is it?

See the Quebec. Quebec. Bit of a track, but all right. Find some other bits to do. We've got time after recording the rabbit hole on Monday. Yeah, it pops Quebec. We can get a protein. Yes.

Finally, they might even do vegetarian one by now. You can get vegetarian protein in Quebec, I'm sure. The other, well, not round world, but our universe place is the Oort cloud. Is that how you pronounce that? Oort. I think it's Oort. It ought to be. The Oort cloud is so far away.

So first in perspective, so an AU is an astronomical unit, which is roughly the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Not an alternative universe, got it. Yeah. AU in this sense does not mean alternative universe. So for some perspective- How many grandfathers is that? Big. Good, good, good.

The Oort cloud is very far away. An astronomical unit is roughly the difference between Earth and Sun. So from the perspective Pluto is 30 slash 50 astronomical units away from the Sun. It's all, it's always elliptical, which is why it's sometimes 30 units away, sometimes 50. It's like between the two. The Oort cloud inner edge is somewhere between 2000 and 5000 astronomical units away. That is far.

And its outer edge is somewhere between 10 and 100,000 units away. The reason it's a cloud and not a belt is because the objects within the Oort cloud don't travel in a shared orbital plane. So rather than it being like one orbit around us, it's like a shell around the whole solar system. Oh, interesting. So that's the thing that's scared will happen with Earth, isn't it? If we reach a point with like bits of space debris,

and it'll be very, very difficult to leave the Earth then if that happens. Yeah. So we get, the Oort cloud is considered the main source of what we call long period comets. So those are comets that have an orbital period of over 200 years, but it's often much longer than 200 years. Like there are comets that haven't passed by Earth since humans evolved. Okay. So these are comets that are knocked out of the Oort cloud somehow.

Like these are rocks and bodies that have been knocked out of the Oort cloud and become comets. So they can be knocked out by things like tidal forces generated by the galaxy. Big tide. Big tide. Passing stars can affect them. And they get headed on like a path towards the center of the solar system in elliptical orbits. But these orbits are huge and sometimes like they'll pass Earth once in 70,000 years. Okay.

Wow. Yeah. Much longer than 200 years. Wow. Okay. 200 years is like the minimum for it to be considered a long period comet, as opposed to a short period comet. But they're also much brighter.

They're what we call great comets. Okay. So like one of the recent examples is the hail bob comet which passed Earth and was visible in 1997. And the reason they're bright is because they've barely passed through the inner solar system. So they've got more volatile elements because they haven't burned up yet. So. And they're more reflective. Basically, all these elements are doing cool things.

And they're what create the incredible tail that you see as a comet goes by. Cool. So that's why the alt cloud is very cool. And I'm very excited about it. Okay. Well, I'm sure it's very excited about you. Oh, thanks alt cloud. It's about being far away and very cold and dark.

I've just clicked onto one of these NASA websites. And I think I've actually clicked onto the children's explanation. No, the NASA website is just like that. Okay. It's helping. I mean, I'm glad I'm grateful for it. But I had the same thing when I was looking up Pluto last week. And then I realized that the NASA website is just like that.

Yeah, okay. Ah, super. That is a location. It is a physical space. It's just a very big one, very far away. What other locations are there? That was what I really noted down, because apart from that, we have the consistently

breaking apart and coming back together round world. I suppose the girdle, the world girdle, as you put it, that's nearly a location. That was me shoehorning in a bit of Shakespeare, because I was worried we hadn't been literary enough for a while. Is there a world girdle in a Shakespeare? In Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck says he'll put a girdle on the earth in 30 minutes

when he's sent off to do something. Oh, I see. Is that like a looking for stripey paint type thing? Yeah, no. He's meant to pluck the love and idleness flowers so he can go and anoint the eyes of the Athenians that are faffing about in the woods. Oh, obviously.

You're every nature. For japs. You know, when I'm bored, let's go anoint the eyes of some Athenians. Athenians still exist. I just don't think they'd like it. Have you never anointed the eyes of an Athenian Francine? Not in the woods, no.

Ah, well, you're missing out. It's quite quite impressive, I suppose, yes. If you must anoint the eyes of an Athenian, why not get back to nature? What are they doing there? Right, I think we're wandering very far off from what we should be talking about, but yes, the girdle of space elevated type things

around the earth is a very cool concept. Yes, we are now in the aught cloud of the episode plan, so let's... Let's head back towards the centre of the solar system at some point in the next 70,000 years. Yeah. Okay, little bits we liked Francine. There's a bit, when we're talking about dinosaurs,

as we are at length, where the authors say, right now, paleontologists believe that tyrannosaurs were scavengers, not predators. We'll stick our necks out and dispute that conclusion. Yes, tyrannosaurs may not have been fearsome predators, hunters, but if they weren't, that doesn't make scavenging the only option. We simply can't see these animals as enormous vultures

with their tiny front feet scrabbling at a decaying corpse and that great head hidden in the abdomen of a dead sauropod. They'd be delighted to know at this point that that's definitely not the going theory. Steve Bressetti's fantastic The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. I must have recommended it on the podcast before. I'm doing so once again. Goes into detail here.

It says, maybe you've heard the rumour that T. Rex liked its meat dead and rotten, that Rex was a scavenger, a seven-ton carcass collector, too slow, too stupid, or too big to hunt for its own fresh food. This accusation seems to make the rounds every few years. One of those stories that science reporters can't get enough of. Don't believe it.

It defies common sense that an agile, energetic animal with a knife-toothed head nearly the size of a smart car wouldn't use its well-endowed or anatomy to take down prey, but would just walk around picking up leftovers, etc., etc. Yes, goes into further detail about that. I also wanted to mention that because one of my favourite things about that book is that the author bullies T. Rex as something heinous.

He clearly loves them very much and is very interested in them, but he never manages to mention them without bringing up the arms. That's what we've got here. By this having tyrannosaurs that were over 35 feet long, one and a half tonnes in weight, the big deep skulls, muscular jaws, banana-sized teeth, pathetic arms. There's no mistaking their signature look, huge head, athletic body, sad arms, muscular legs.

Its tail was long and muscular, its legs stocky, its arms laughably tiny. The forelimbs looked useless, puny things with two stubby fingers, comically out of proportion to the rest of the body. On and on! Amazing. Anyway, read that book, everybody, and I'm glad to say it looks very much like,

certainly T. Rex and I'm pretty sure all the tyrannosaurs were not scavengers. What's next? Names. Names of things. What about them? There's a couple of different things I wanted to look at the names of here. One of them is the Brontosaurus versus Apatosaurus naming, because someone in the book is clearly very fucking bitter about this name issue. And apparently about the Brontosaurus being referred to as the Apatosaurus.

It's mentioned twice. There's a last now named Apatosaurus. I think it's Apato and not Apeito, I'm not sure. Could be. There's a very grumpy footnote that also mentions the Aeohippus, the Dawn horse that's now apparently called the Hierocatherium. So, on the Brontosaurus, Apatosaurus front. The Brontosaurus was never renamed the Apatosaurus.

So, Apatosaurus means deceptive lizard. Brontosaurus means thunder lizard, as the book says. The Apatosaurus is a genus in the family Diplodocidae. Diplodocidae, Diplodocus, yeah. So, both the Brontosaurus and the Apatosaurus. Diplodocidae keeps the doctoral. Both the Apatosaurus and the Brontosaurus were originally discovered during the Bone Wars. The Bone Wars, our favorite wars.

The Bone Wars. Well, maybe they're drawing with the EMU Wars for our favorite wars. Can I just point out my incredible amount of self-control that I did not go down a full Bone Wars rabbit hole because I was tempted? Have we not done that in the past? I guess we maybe haven't on this podcast. We have in real life. We've definitely talked about the Bone Wars in real life.

I don't think we've done a Bone Wars, like, random tangent on the bogus. In short, the Bone Wars was a paleontology rush in the 19th century. Like the Gold Rush, but bones. And Petia because it was full of academics. The Bone Wars title of your sex tape. Yay. Also Petia and full of academics. So the Apatosaurus was found first, which is why it gets the naming priority.

It was decided in 1903 that the Brontosaurus wasn't distinct enough to be its own genus, and therefore it was actually a species of the genus Apatosaurus. Okay. Which means it no longer gets its own name because the Apatosaurus was named first. But this was, even after this was decided in 1903, it was still really hotly debated in paleontology circles. Like this was drama, which is why Brontosaurus was still widely used and why it became a very popular well-known name for the dinosaur.

They were like very petty paleontologists insisting that these colors, since they had dug up, were definitely this species, this Bronto species. But we're insisting they were labeled as the genus Brontosaurus, even though that apparently wasn't supposed to be a thing anymore. Right. In the 70s, extremely similar skulls seemed to conclude that the Bronto was just a species of the Apatogenus. But then in 2015, there was a further study with a much wider range of specimens,

and that concluded that Brontosaurus is sufficiently different and is its own genus. So Brontosaurus is our dinosaurs. Hooray! Oh, well, I hope that's satisfied whoever wrote that footnote. Yep. And I'll link to a National Geographic article about that as well. And then there was a very similar divergence with the Aeohippus, the Dawn Horse, the Hierarchetherium.

Horses are a much better name. It is very much so. But again, it was a very similar thing. It was two similar things. And then originally, they were two similar. So Aeohippus went under the umbrella of Hierarchetherium, and then later research actually proved they were two separate genuses. I see.

All right. Well, even so. So Aeohippus is a thing in its own right again. Okay. Well, that's good. I'm glad. A couple of other interesting names I wanted to look at. One was the flying dinosaur, the Quetzalcoatlis.

Oh, okay. Okay. We've had something about those before, I think. We have. So the Quetzalcoatlis was a pterosaur from the Lake Cretaceous period. The Quetzalcoatlis northropii is the genus and species. So it's named for the Aztec-feathered serpent god, Quetzalcoatl. We've talked about that serpent god on the podcast before, and I've still not made

sure I'm pronouncing it properly, so I'm very sorry about that. But the northropii comes from John Northrop, because he used the shape of the Quetzalcoatlis in designing tailless aircraft, which kind of revolutionized air travel. And so it was named in his honor. Cool. The Quetzalcoatlis sounds like a colder version of the Quetzalcoatl, isn't it? Yeah. It's like the ice version.

Yeah. I love that. Oh, and the last name I wanted to look up was Buckminsterphilarine, which is the element they found that should assist in building the cables needed for space elevators. Yes, yes, yes. But I thought that was a really weird fucking name. So it's named for Richard Buckminsterphilar, who is, again, I could have gone on a massive

tangent. He is a fascinating guy. He was an architect, writer, a designer, a philosopher, and he was a futurist. He was fascinated by futurology. And Buckminsterphilar popularized, he wasn't the first person to do it, but he was the guy who became really famous for doing it and using it a lot, the geodesic dome in architecture. Like the one in Cornwall.

Yes. So it's a hemisphere based on a geodesic polyhedron. So it's a triangle lattice, which allows very thin material to bear quite a lot of weight. Because of the way it's distributed across the triangles effectively. Across the triangles, you say. And that's why the element was named for him, because the molecular structure is a geodesic polyhedron. Oh, cool.

Oh, that's interesting. Yes. I like it when you get the tangential names like that. It just shows the kind of wonderfully niche, like connections people make in their head when they're, when the academics in those fields, they go, oh, look at that. It looks like that, the architecture that guy does. I like him. He's also into

future stuff. Things. So let's, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And then something else I noted that's not so much science related as discworld, science related.

So that's meturgical, I suppose. Yes. The morphic bounce hypothesis. Ah, yes. Which is why it's potentially easy to turn someone into a frog or a mouse, but it takes a lot of magic to turn someone into, say, an orangutan. But turning into a pumpkin into a coach was so easy that even a crazy old woman with a wand could do it.

I wonder who that's referring to. And I like the idea that the wizards have put a lot of thoughts into how chain, chain spells work and how they unravel the victim's morphic field and then bounce them back. So a frog is simple because they don't have to go far, but an ape is a long return journey. But pumpkins and wooden coaches are similar enough because they both occupy vegetable spaces. And I like this. I'm sorry. No, no.

You go ahead. At the end of that explanation, by the way, there was a guy called William of Ockham who was mentioned. And I think that's Ockham Razor. Is that right? Yes, because it says he would have grown a beard. Oh, well done. There we go.

I highlighted it as a look into that to get the reference and that I didn't. So I was hoping you might have, but you just got the joke. There we go. Yeah, occasionally I understand jokes. But I like that because different books with wizards versus witches go into different details of why it's easy or complicated to turn something into something else. And they have very different rules because they're different types of magic. Yeah.

And somewhere in this book, I can't remember if it's that bit or slightly different, but it made some funny quip about how in certain parts of Lanka people were bouncing from shape to shape all the time because they've pissed off the witches or something. But I think that was in the earlier part, yeah. But it was in reference to evolution type stuff. Yes, that's it. Cool. Aha.

Dinosaur civilization? Question mark, question mark. I just like the idea of this. I just mentioned once or twice in the book, just saying that dinosaurs were around for fucking ages and it was fucking ages ago. We don't know that they didn't evolve something that we might recognize as a civilization. And I don't think it's as mad kappa theory as all that, to be honest, because the more we learn about other animals that are currently sharing the planet with us, the more surprised we are.

We have ants that farm. We have fucking killer whales teaching each other across generations as a bit of intelligence foreshadowing for you. I think that there's really no reason at all why you shouldn't have had T-Rexes do, not T-Rexes necessarily, but- No, they've got stupid arms. Yeah. Pathetic from the expert on them.

It's going to hurt more, hasn't it? The dude clearly loves them, but he can't help there and all about the arms. I'm buying wholesale into the theory that there's probably some kind of- Well, not probably, there's potentially some kind of dinosaur-like civilization going on that's just been wiped away off the planet. And I find it oddly comforting that at 65 million years or so, whatever we've done will also be wiped off the planet. And whatever typos we publish will no longer be available.

But so we did, it was one of our first rabbit holes. You did- Nuclear semiotics. Nuclear semiotics. And obviously the hope is that those will last up way after our civilization has gone. Imagine if you did a typo and that this is not a place of order. Oh, no. The one carved into stone, it would be, wouldn't it?

Yeah, yeah. There might be spelt alarm like in the book. Maintenance. Oh, I don't know why they did that. I don't know. I don't know. They made me laugh. I've been saying, I've been saying alarm to myself and giggling quietly all day.

Mood. Francine, have you got any old ideas about spaceflight? Oh, I do, I do, I do. So we mentioned in the book the 1648 Bishop John Wilkins list of ways you could leave the ground. So we've got spirits, getting lift from birds, wings to your body, flying chariot, usual. Hans Shelflin apparently depicted Alexander the Great carried in space by two griffins. I was unable to find an image of this. Listeners, if you have one, please send it to me because I would be very interested in that.

For reasons- And we're quite into Alexander the Great. Yes. And griffins I quite like and would definitely be, what's the word, elevated by Alexander the Great being there even though obviously in reality it's the other way around. Bernard Zamagna conceived of an aerial boat and others suggested the use of balloons. So I went on a little, a very fun little tandem finding various older theories of a flight.

We had a very old sci-fi, sci-fi from Johannes Kepler, yes, called Somnium 1634, where he imagined demons transporting one to the moon, which is not very sci-fi at all. But I mentioned because I like this idea, the journey is a shock to humans, so they're sedated for the trip. Extreme cold is also a concern, but the demons use their powers to ward it off. Another concern is the air, so humans have to have damp sponges placed in their nostrils in order to breathe. Well, he's put some thought into it, hasn't he? He has.

A couple years later, 1638, we have Bishop Francis Godwin, who imagined a flock of trained swans, although again, not much scientific grounding. What he did have was a pretty good description of weightlessness on the journey. Ah, a little bit of prescience there, finally in this little list. Serano de Bergerac, who we touched upon last week, his sequel to Voyage to the Moon, Voyage to the Sun, had a less impressively prescient form of space travel than the first one. Um, he misconstrued the way vacuums worked

and depicted his hero traveling in a large box designed of multiple layers of hollow crystal. I'm quoting here from a blog post I will link to. When the sun's heat exhausted the air in the crystal, it formed a vacuum and drew the box toward the sun. Which isn't how vacuums work, but is imaginative and pleasing. And sparkly. And sparkly. Yes, I love, you know me, I love retrofuturism,

and today I've just gone far, far back into the retro part of that. 17th century retrofuturism. Yeah, there are some super pictures of like the aerial boat and stuff as well that were mentioned here. Yes. Ha, I love it. I'm delighted by this. So tell me, Joanna, what about numbers?

Statistics. Statistics. Tell me about those. You know all too well that one of my absolute favorite topics is the absolute bollocks that statistics can get used for despite it not being helpful. Yes. And I am completely fascinated by the misuse of statistics, by statistics and coincidence.

So this very broad overview of bits of this that I enjoyed. The book mentions statistical fallacies, and it goes into a very good explanation of the, what's it? Yes. I was having a look at other statistical fallacies, and one of the most famous ones is the McNamara fallacy. Okay. Also known as quantitative fallacy,

which is making assumptions based purely on quantitative metrics and ignoring all other factors. So it's named for Robert McNamara, who was the US Defense Secretary in the 1960s, because he declared the US had won the Vietnam War, based purely on the fact that Vietnam had a higher body count. Ah, I see. Just imagine being so shit you've got a statistical fallacy named after you.

I wish that wasn't so easy to imagine. But yeah, the book goes into a lot of stuff about statistical clusters and coincidence. Obviously, my favorite thing I like to scream at people is that correlation does not equal causation, because you can have two wildly different things and say that. Anyone who's ever said that did eventually die. Clearly, in that case.

I think one of my favorite examples of that used was in the church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster book, where they had a graph proving that dwindling numbers of pirates caused global warming. I know. It's one of those things that's been so passed around now. It's almost kind of passe, but it was a very good thing to be imagined, I thought, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, that whole thing.

It was all very cleverly written, especially because I was studying philosophy at the time, and it went very into all the stuff I was studying in a really logical way. Just was spaghetti. The UFO Roper Pole was another thing in this I really loved, where they were claiming that people had been abducted, but actually, it just proved a lot of things about sleep paralysis.

Absolutely. Which I love that it goes into these ideas of, you know, UFOs are now the explanation for sleep paralysis, and in the past, it was hauntings, or witches, or... Yeah, you know, I've had often, not often, but I've had sleep paralysis lots of times, and I've never got the presence thing with it. I only get the, I can't move it, which I suppose is better,

but I would like to see what demons I get. Not actually, I'm going to regret summoning them now until I've ever... I've never experienced sleep paralysis. I don't know what it's like at all. I did hear a weird conversation with a guy on a podcast. I think it was like the Scrubs podcast or something. He was just a random guest who called in. Who said that his sleep paralysis demon was Alf.

It's in the little alien thing from the TV show. Like every time he got sleep paralysis, he just saw Alf, the weird little alien sitting on him. That sounds right, yeah. One last bit on the statistics is that in the section talking about obvious sample spaces, it tells the story from Scandinavian folklore. King Olaf of Norway in a dispute with King of Sweden about ownership of an island, so they agreed to throw dice for it.

The Swedish King throws a double six. Olaf throws the dice, one six. The other splits in half so that one face shows a six and the other shows a one. Which I don't know if you remember the last hero. I do. Oh yes, I knew I'd seen it. So there we go. So we found... Because I thought in the footnote mentioned the quote from the book,

mentioned the lady luck bit. And I was like, oh, I'm sure I've seen it at the actual dice going in half bit. But it hadn't been written yet. So clearly that inspired the bit in the last hero or the bit of research came up from the last hero and went in this, one of the two. I know a couple of last hero we bits weren't there in this book. Yes, it would have been around the same time because it was 1999. Yes, of course, yeah.

But yeah, it's cool to find the actual bit of folklore behind it. Yes, that delights me. And again, I was very good and didn't go down a rabbit hole because there are only so many hours in the day. There are. And I needed to finish researching before we started recording. Ideally, I didn't finish that today. Yes.

That's fine. Do you want to talk about extolligence? God, I guess. You can do it, I believe in you. Extolligence, very cool concept, I think. Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart. And it says one of these ones again that they came up with from the Figments of Reality book.

They published quite close to this, 97, I think it was. Extolligence works alongside intelligence to make up the mind. And they work together in this recursive feedback loop to make a mind of mind, is how they explain it in the book. The first time it's mentioned is right in the first section, which was what lay ahead had the shape of intelligence, but only in the same way that a son had the shape of something living out as brief life in a puddle of ditch water.

Extolligence would do for now, which is most cryptic fucking shit when you read it the first time. And then you have to go back later after it's been explained to you, because you're like, what? But basically, as they say, a lot of what makes us human isn't passed on genetically, it's passed on culturally. It's much bigger than us. It's a legacy.

We've talked about legacy on the podcast before, but this is our species legacy. It's what makes the build a human kits, as they put it, that perhaps bring us to where the rising eight meets the falling angel. Yes. I really like the idea of the build a human kits. And I thought that this the kind of species legacy thing, because as we were talking about humans aren't great at thinking long term on the whole,

but there is this instinct in us somewhere to preserve the species through this Extolligence. And I think it came up during the nuclear semiotics thing, this desire to pass on what we know, in this case a warning, to our distant, distant descendants. Even though there's no emotional connection really, it's deep within us to kind of create this thing. And I think that was very cool.

I also find it just an interesting topic because it ties in very closely with just different methods of communication, obviously. And so Extolligence, I suppose, became a thing with language. I suppose teaching, having the knowledge and showing the next generation is Extolligence, I suppose, but you can get a lot more in-depth with your implicit knowledge. You get the explicit stuff on top of it when you have language. And then the next key step would be writing. Yeah, and the book goes into printing, doesn't it?

Yeah, yeah, that's it. The invention of printing. Prior to the written language, Extolligence was passed on by word of mouth. You're very into, obviously, the idea of oral histories, of folklore and all of that stuff. I just love the idea of that all being part of this massive network. So I've never really put a name to it before. Yeah, no, it's fascinating, I love it. Like a little less optimistically, I suppose, the changes in it now are a bit troubling. I mean, they mentioned it in a more neutral way.

Obviously, the internet, that's the big current one, I suppose. Things like Wikipedia, that's still optimistic for a second. A fucking amazing piece of Extolligence. Can you imagine the concept of that? Everybody contributing like that in just such a collaborative way, and there are fuckheads on it, and you do need to double check your sources and all of that, but god damn it, what an undertaking. Encourage everybody to download the copy of Wikipedia every now and then,

just in case, and carve it into stone or something. All of you, because that would then be redundant. Quicksidebar and Wikipedia misinformation, but if you haven't read the story of the person who made up that they had invented the toaster, I highly recommend checking that out. Oh, yeah, yeah, we'll link to that. So I can love that. But when they talk about the internet in this book,

they mention that it's quite democratic because the views of the stupid and the credulous, as they put it, carry as much weight as the views of those who can read without moving their lips. This much has changed somewhat, I would say. Since the publication of this book, I would argue that too much of human intelligence is currently in the hands of a few people, and not even in the hands of a few people, but in the hands of a barely controlled algorithm. Yeah. Or rather, the end point is changed, but the process is not closely monitored,

or not closely monitored enough, which is why we have things like the past radicalization. That's why we have things like the rise of Andrew Tate. Yes. And other such nonsense is, I suppose the next big step is going to be AI in this ex-telegence. And at that point, I think we fully lose control of it. They talk about losing control of ex-telegence in the various ways, as soon as it can self-replicate, as soon as parts of it can

replicate other parts of it or whatever. But I think, obviously, as soon as we move into more and more powerful AI tools, then that really does take it out of our hands. Well, it's something they acknowledge in the book, isn't it, that the real test of true artificial intelligence is, can it develop ex-telegence? Can it be left to react to itself with its own culture and develop a cultural history through that? And it's interesting to imagine that our ex-telegence would be, at least in a large part, contained within something that had its own.

Yeah. And whether maybe it would be symbiotic. Maybe we could be optimistic about it again. Maybe we could be twin sons and not collapsing on each other in a burst of horrible gamma rays. Beautiful. I thought a nice summing up sentence from that section was, the dynamic of ex-telegence is emergent, or to put it another way, we haven't the faintest idea of what we'll think of next.

But it'll probably surprise us. Beautiful. I will say that there's a rabbit hole for you and a lot of our listeners and me when we have time, which is this whole emergent algorithm saying, as in when you take the building blocks of a network and put them together, they make themselves a network, that also goes into like ants and bees and things. That's all very cool. So we'll get into that another day.

Yes, I started reading that today. And I'm reading about that today. And then I confiscated it from myself because I realized how much I'd already written about brontosaurus. Ah, sentences make no sense outside of such a specific context. Speaking of specific context, not really. Let's be joyful. Let's be joyful.

Well, you were getting a bit existential there talking about the future of ex-telegence. And I think something this book does beautifully is find some kind of joy in this sort of weird existentialism. It's the thing I come back to. The reason I listen to this and the galaxy song from Monty Python when I'm sad is this how amazing and unlikely is your birth. Yeah. And the book really dives into it.

I think it's marvelous. It talks about evolution and it talks about humans coming almost by chance out of chaos. And it goes into convergent evolution and universals and parochials and convergent evolution and linguistics is one of my favorite things in the world. Oh, we need to have a conversation about that and AI at some point, which again ties into the fucking emergent, goddammit, why don't we live for longer? Because we haven't got time, Francine. I love the line from the book.

On an alternative Earth, intelligent crabs might invent a fantasy world shaped like a shallow bowl that rides on the back of a giant sea urchin. Three of them could at this very moment be writing the science of dish world. Did you know that some kind of urchin was the first animal in which we viewed the act of fertilization for the first time? No, I did not know that. Amazing. I don't know why I learned that today and I can't remember what context.

We've done some weird reading today. You sent me a picture of your collection of links and tabs and good Lord Francine. That's not mine. That's not mine. That's somebody else's. That was a random website I found while I was looking up extolligence. Oh, that makes more sense.

Yeah, it does look quite a lot like vice head of tabs, actually. So evolution and the unlikeliness of humans and there was this talk about, there must be this thing called blooded mindium. Something that keeps things striving for life. Blooded mindium, perhaps. It's an extension of narrative. It's the idea that there is an act of striving beyond chance that brings intelligent civilization about and really there isn't.

It's in many parts luck. Yeah. This, from our perspective, there is no blooded mindium. There is no narrativeium. There is no common sense in evolution. There's no, not necessarily a story there as much as, you know, people have tried to tell stories. Giraffes have long necks so they could reach the higher leaves.

Yeah, fucking giraffes. I got it spot by getting muddy and not driving off or something. I don't remember. I've got them all upstairs. The elephant got its trunk because it was trying to drink water and a crocodile grabbed its nose and pulled it out until it had a trunk. Happens to the best of us. I love those stories.

Best beloved. And as you mentioned, you have this idea of dinosaur civilizations that this actually could have happened over and over again. We have no way of knowing because there's no way to leave this. We are here, Mark, unless it's via misspelled nuclear semiotics. And on top of that, you have these disasters. Our planet is by no means the ideal habitat for life. The chance of survival is so small and this ties back into what I was saying about statistics

that life isn't more probable just because we happened. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a availability bias on like the grandest scale, isn't it? Exactly. That's the whole anthropic principle thing. And then within the narrative of the book, you get the wizard's reaction to it.

They're so unhappy. They're disappointed about the end of the crab civilization. That extra quote from earlier, a million tons of white hot ice smack between the ice stalks. It's so upsetting. It is. And they keep getting frustrated, things not improving. And you have rinse winds standing in the cliffs.

We talked about how that was a reference to was it was it too Darwin? Could be. This idea of seeing like all of history in the, is that a conversation we had or is that something I read elsewhere? I think you read that elsewhere, but. Sorry, I've lost track of what I've had in conversations and what I've written down. I think that might have been in the book. Yeah.

Darwin taking inspiration from all the different life you could see in the cliffs. And eventually you have this full kind of breakdown that rinse wind has. Oh yeah. Love a rinse wind rant. Love a rinse wind rant. In a million years or so, his kid's going to be saying, wow, what a great world the big rat made for us. Or it'll be the turn of the jellyfish or something that's still bobbing around under the sea.

There's no future here. Chalk's made of dead animals. The rock is made of dead animals. And he starts talking about the limestone places. Our people are literally living in caves made from ancient blobs. It's this huge breakdown. But the book itself, although rinse wind gets so unhappy with it, the wizards are so frustrated by watching life get kicked out over and over again

because it's outside of their experiences. But it is what happens on the earth. And I think there's actually kind of a joy in this existential idea that whether or not things matter is up to us and that's something the book goes into. No one but us would care if we destroyed ourselves or if we were destroyed. And we're gone. And the book sort of poses the question of should we care and answers it immediately with yes, of course we should because we developed enough to invent ethics.

Yes, we invented caring. So let's fucking be good at it. The things matter because we invented the concept of things mattering. Yes. Yes, there's no point pretending we're not here in the way we are. No, there's no point pretending we don't feel a certain way when we hear about orangutans dying. Yeah, or the rainforest being cut down or the other examples it gives.

As I say, this is our read and this is our camelot. This is as good as it gets and we should make the most out of it. And I think there's something so incredibly joyful in forcing you to confront the fact that you're small and you're insignificant and you're incredibly unlikely and despite that, you develop the ability to think about whether or not it matters to care about it, to ramble about it on a fucking podcast because some genius invented the ability to have a fucking podcast. We're starting to get reclusive if we're not careful.

Oh God, I'm going to evolve. I evolved into Raichu. Sorry, I was building up to him. I love Raichu but I was building up to something there and I completely distracted myself from fucking poking one. No, you're fine. Yeah, it's a beautiful message in a book about science and in a book about science connected to a very silly world that flies through space on the back of a turtle.

I thought you were going to talk about us. More I know about this round world, the more I fail, I should be holding on. There is that though. We would care if we destroyed ourselves. We may be insignificant and hurtling through a giant, wide, cold and uncaring universe that keeps throwing rocks at us but we can care and therefore, I was trying to be joyful about this. But we can care and therefore we should and I think it's so incredible that we are able to think about the fact that we're insignificant.

And that that's something that makes this book really beautiful and it makes me so excited to learn about this sort of thing. The universe is vast and exciting and I get to find out words for it. We get to find out words for it and draw mad connections between things because of the fantastic ex-telegance that has been built for us and the weird chances of biology that gave us both the ability to and the interest in learning about fucking folklore and statistics and dinosaurs. What the fuck else have we covered?

Oh, I'll tell you, the obscure reference finial will go into that point. Well, let's do that. Let's do that. I don't have a more sentencing conclusion than where I just landed. I think you're getting too into the idea of grand overarching conclusions, Driner. It's just not necessary a lot of the time. Maybe this one it was actually.

I feel like at the end of the universe, we should probably have a final note to land on. I kind of like the idea that we don't. All right, let's just see what happens. We won't because the universal of ended fronting was kind of the vibe. All right. So obscure reference finial. Yeah, going from grand celestial dances to rats being generated from rubber sheeps, upset under the spectrum, one could say they used to think that rubber sheeps actually

generated rats, said Ridicully. Of course, that was just a superstition. It's really seagulls. And now we've mentioned before, definitely in one of the Patreon rabbit holes, but maybe on the podcast as well, the ancient belief that bees spontaneously generate from oxen castes, which was called bugonia. And I love that there was a word for it. The ancient Greeks very into that idea, certainly.

There's quite a few other spontaneous generation beliefs from old timey civilizations as well, which I quite like. That includes our civilization a few hundred years ago, by the way. Maggots being generated from dead flesh, very common one. That one makes quite a lot of sense as a belief because the fly in the maggot aren't obviously related. The fly lay pretty much invisible to us eggs and then maggots appear. Makes sense.

Slightly less explicable, I would say. The barnacle goose in the middle ages was thought that the goose barnacle gave birth to the barnacle goose. Which sounds like the start of an Alice in Wonderland poem. There's also the idea that various things, including piles of rags used to generate mice, or this slightly more involved explanation from Jean-Baptiste Van Helmont in the 17th century. If a soiled shirt is placed in the opening of a vessel containing grains of wheat, he wrote, the reaction of the leaven in the shirt with fumes from the wheat will after approximately

21 days transform the wheat into mice. Yeah. Now to me what's happened there is some mice have come in and eaten the wheat. Much in the same way, Joanna, that if you leave me in proximity of a bowl of pasta, a pasta bowl will turn into me. The pasta is gone and I am there and there is no other way I can think of explaining this. Pasta spontaneously generates Francine's. Also, a variation on the begonia was wasps coming from horse corpses.

And I like the idea that these things just came from slightly different animals. Yeah, that makes sense actually. Wasps coming from horses, bees coming from oxen. But of course, as Ridgully has taught us, it's only seagulls that are spontaneously generated. Now we know. Marvelous. Well, I think that's everything that we have decided to say about volume one of the Science of Discworld.

There are more to come, but not yet. Not yet. We are not taking a week off because we're already near the end of the month. Everything went a bit weird. So we are going to be back next week with part one of the Wee Free Men. Yay, we're into the Tiffany Aking Arc. I'm very excited to talk about this book. So until next time, dear listener, you can follow us on Instagram,

at the Two Shall Mickey Fret on Twitter, at Mickey Fret Pod, on Facebook, at the Two Shall Mickey Fret. Join our subreddit community, r slash ttsmyf. Send us your thoughts, queries, castles, snacks, and existential crises. At the Two Shall Mickey Fret Pod at gmail.com. If you want to support the podcast financially, go to patreon.com forward slash the True Shall Mickey Fret. And you change your hard-earned pennies for all sorts of bonus nonsense. We've got a new rabbit hole coming any day now.

Francine, do we know what it's about yet? Yes, but you don't. Okay, cool. And there's for castles and snacks gang. There's a few recipes up, kind of for Valentine's Day. I found the existential crisis board. Oh, yay. I just noticed it.

Sorry, just rubbing out this one that now it's just a smiley face, not a number on the existential crisis board. That's probably for the best. Ever since last existential crisis, smiley face, because we're happy about it. Yeah, we've decided to be joyful in our existentialism. Right, yeah, join Patreon. It's a fun time.

Please also rate and review us wherever you get your podcast because it helps other people find us because of the algorithms. The algorithms, the emergent ones, or just the normal ones, or whatever. Yeah, all algorithms. Use them for good. Use them for good. Give us five stars. One good use for algorithms.

That is the best use for algorithms is to give up a podcast five stars. Thank you very much. And tell people about us. That's not an algorithm. Just do that. Use your normal ex-delligence. Put us in the ex-delligence. Are we there already?

Yeah, I could be. Cool. All right, well, we've gone wildly off topic, just trying to get out of the episode. Until next time, dear listener, as above, so below. Hey, went better than I thought it would, given the inability of me to read the quote out at the beginning. Well, there was only really one way to go from there, and it was up. Yeah.

And we got there. Not quite out into space, but we got there. Cool.