The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - 150 Years of Moon Crabs, Blowing Things Up, and Asbestos Obsession

Episode Date: May 18, 2022

Enjoy this super special bonus episode celebrating Popular Science's 150th birthday! The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Click here to follow our sibling podcast, Ask Us Anything!  -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's code weirdest for 20% off. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton.com. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not sure those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors

of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Pribita Saha. And I'm Corinne Iosio. Welcome to the show for a very special bonus episode. We are not back from our break yet, listeners, but we will be soon. We'll be back in your feeds for a regular season, sometime during the summer. But we just had to pop in to say hello for a very special occasion. And Corinne, why don't you give our listeners the 4-1-1? The big, big secret.

The big big secret is that popular science, is 150 years old this month. Oh my goodness. We look great. Yeah, we do. We old. We're still kicking and it's been an amazing ride. I think everybody on this call has been with Pops I at least three years at this point.

I've been with Popsie the majority of my professional life, which is just a wild, wild thought. But it means that we've got all kinds of friends of. fun stuff going on as we throw ourselves this Susquecentennial birthday party, not least of which is finding as many excuses as possible to say the word susquecentennial because it's fun. So if you've been on popsight.com over the last couple weeks, you've probably seen us recirculating some awesome gems from our archives.

We have our new digital issue that's out on stands. That's all about metal, which was a theme that we saved, especially for our 150th anniversary, because that gives us the opportunity to talk about all kinds of different technological innovations that are happening now in the context of basically humankind's journey through tech and innovation, which is also the story of metal. And we did a lot of thinking about what being 150 years old means. And as people, living things, creatures alive on this planet who have not been 150 years old, it required a fair bit of introspection.

And we've arrived at themes, we would say, because we think thematically. We're pretty good at that. And, you know, we talked about how we were ahead of our times and on the bleeding edge of all kinds of things. But one thing that we saw, the more and more we looked at our archives, especially towards the early 20th century, was that pop-s-eye was really freaking weird sometimes. And naturally, that meant that we needed to do a very special episode of this very show. A very special episode. Yay!

So, yes, listeners, we are going to share some of our weirdest old-school pops-eye facts. And like I said, we'll be back for regular programming sometime this summer. And definitely keep an eye on your feeds as if you aren't, you know, already listening. to back episodes every day, of course. But just in case you're not, we will have a couple additional bonus episodes between now and our full return. So definitely stay tuned.

But that's all in the future. And now we're going to look to the past. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting for 150 years, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide

what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually is. Corinne, why don't you start with your teas? I want to talk about rodents in outer space, and that's not an allusion to mice on the International Space Station. Excellent. Okay. I want to talk about, the bonkers story behind one of the most beloved vintage pop-sci covers and how it speaks to the hubris of man. That's all. Man specifically. Yeah, man, like one man.

One dude. With several friends who were also men, but mostly one man. Pripito, what's your tease? Well, speaking of the hubris of man, I'm going to look at the history of how we thought asbestos would save us, even after we knew it was killing us. I'm making these muffins asbestos I can. That's how old I am. That's my age. Oh, my gosh.

Wait, what's not from? It's from one of just a great era of weird internet video. It's the one where she makes muffins and it's like fish muffins. I'm making these muffins as best as I can. Anyway, sorry, that's not just playing on loop in my brain my entire life. Well, why don't we start with asbestos, a nice cheery beginning? Sure. Cheery is definitely the right word.

All right, let's go. Let's get into it. So in terms of the list of magical materials that people thought they could use for everything, before really understanding what those products could do to the human body, asbestos ranks pretty high up there. Lead is another strong example, but we will get more into that in our metals summer issue. But just so you know, asbestos is not even like a monster. modern technology in any way. Archaeologists have found traces of it in Macedonian funeral

shrouds from first century common era. And others have found it in classic Byzantine wall paintings, ancient Greek clothing, and even early Inuit lanternwitz. So like what is it? Because that I clearly don't really know what asbestos is if it can be that old. I didn't think asbestos was found. I thought it was made. It is made. So it is made. So it's, It's true asbestos is made from naturally occurring materials in the earth. So these hints that these archaeologists found were in the forms that we see it in products today. So the reason that there's so much love for asbestos is because on the chemical level, it's quite a powerful mineral. It's actually an umbrella term for six silicate-based compounds, which are found in pretty

common rocks such as serpent to night rocks and igneous rocks rich in magnesium and iron. So we were mining a lot of asbestos in the 1800s and 1900s. There were entire asbestos mining towns in the Midwestern U.S. and even up in Canada. So once it's mined from rock and broken up, and you can see some pretty cool photos of this online, it doesn't really look like rock. It's actually this white, fibrous material that kind of emerges from the mineral. And it looks a lot closer to

what you would imagine in, you know, the crumbling ceiling tiles in a classroom. So it's very unique in that way. And it also feels not that you should go around touching it, but it also feels very feathery light in comparison to other fibers we use like cotton and rayon. But it's super, super strong. And it's fireproof, which is why it ended up in so many modern products and technologies and even those ancient ones that I mentioned before.

So I'm going to keep nerding out on chemistry in asbestos. the reason that asbestos is fireproof, and I'm going to give a very glancing summary here, but it has a sky-high melting point of 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, and it actually sheds heat as you warm it up, so it gets cooler because the compounds release the water that's bonded within their molecules. Another reason why it was so popular in manufacturing is because it's really, for a mineral, it's really easy to manipulate into different materials and different structures. So once we had factories everywhere and once people were really tapped into materialism,

asbestos was being added in everything, from housing shingles to car breaks to the yarn and baby blankets and into uniforms for first responders. So you can kind of maybe see why people loved it so much. I mean, it was keeping babies and firefighters safe, at least on the surface. And this is where we get into the Popsie archival twist, but not really a twist. We were kind of, our writers were just kind of following the trend of espastos. everything. But if you look back on some of our issues, even our extremely early ones from, you know, the 1870s, we were talking about how asbestos was this kind of miracle material. And one of my favorite articles is from the December 1927 issue by a writer named Orville

H. Neen, who unsurprisingly wrote a lot about Plainsw. when he wasn't writing about asbestos. But he had this article called Clothes Woveen from Rock, and it was just a love poem to asbestos, which is, I don't know how, I don't know him personally, so I don't know how he really felt about it, but he definitely put it on for this article. So he talks about how he sets this scene of a fire

at a shell oil well and talks about how all these asbestos-clad men just walked away from it unscathed because of the power of the material. And this particular line really stood out to me. Quote, with asbestos armor and tools, men can fight the fiercestest fires known since first the disgruntled Prometheus stole the Pyrex secret from the gods.

Wow. Corinne, would you let that kind of editorializing into the magazine these days? I would say, I'd put a little query on it and say, who are we attributing this to? Yes, this came from Orville's brain and soul, I believe. Deep, deep in there. I will say we weren't right about a lot of things, but we'll talk about that later. Exactly. I know that's going to be a running theme.

And yeah, even in the, I'm going to get a little bit ahead of myself here before I switch to the health part. But even in the 1980s, Popular Science Magazine was talking about using asbestos in, you know, just like home DIY projects. And in this March 1987 issue, we actually got a really, outraged but rightfully outraged reader letter in response to one of these DIY stories. And the reader wrote John P. Russell from Dallas, Texas. I was distressed to read that you are encouraging homeowners to wrap up the asbestos insulation in their basement heating lines. And this was from a few issues ago.

And then he goes on to talk about how a lot of the U.S. agencies, you know, had started to reverse their recommendations on using asbestos, especially like on the personal level. So going to rewind again. Going back to Orville's article, that was in 1927. And really, he was just a few years into that first wave of people understanding or actually publicizing the ill effects of asbestos. It started with some medical research out of England where a couple of physicians actually went into asbestos factories and looked at the long-term conditions on the workers there. So just to think in the early 1900s, we were at a point where there were just asbestos-making factories.

And the first thing that they noticed was the really poor lung health in some of these laborers. You know, after years of working around this material, they were getting like really bad scarring on their lungs, which was leading to the point where, you know, they were having respiratory conditions and like the rest of their organ systems were breaking down. So these British physicians, you know, they published it in medical journals. but then they also got the country's government involved. And these factories were inspected. There were more long-term studies on people working around asbestos. And this was kind of the first health movement against the material.

And it just launched further research into other fatal conditions that asbestos could lead to, specifically here in the U.S. So once we get to the mid-1900s, we start to see the first studies looking at connections between asbestos and not just lung conditions, but also mesothelioma, which is a form of cancer that emerges in lung, heart, and abdominal tissue. So essentially what happens is the very thing that makes asbestos so cool to builders is what also makes it dangerous to people. Those fine, fibrous threads, when breathed in, they get lodged in people's organ tissues.

And then that builds up and inflames over time, and it can lead to, you know, life-threatening cancers. So in the U.S., we saw this really hit and impact firefighters because a lot of the gear that was used in protective equipment was asbestos paste. Like that was the power of asbestos again. So I think the firefighter studies really kind of kicked up the outrage here in the States. Most of those came out in the 70s, 80s, but there have been even more recent studies on, you know, retired firefighters. And again, the mesothelioma rates in that population are much higher than the general American public. But despite all that really strong science behind how bad asbestos is for us, it's still not banned. You don't find it as much in products and definitely not as widespread in common household items today.

It's not in firefighting gear anymore, but technically any company can still use it and sell it in the U.S. So the EPA did try to ban it in the late 80s, but basically the ban was because asbestos was so widely used, the ban was seen as like to general and it was shot down by a U.S. federal court. And the EPA has kind of like tried to outright ban it in like smaller doses in the years since. But actually just this month we probably got like the biggest EPA challenge on asbestos that we've seen like in decades. And basically the agency is, trying to blanket ban it or any of it that's left in the U.S. So it might be the kicker for asbestos.

Obviously, it's been removed from a lot of houses, from a lot of schools and buildings. So it's not as much of a threat anymore, but we're still understanding it's, you know, environmental contamination consequences still. There's still a lot of medical research to be done. there. But it's definitely one of those things where, you know, if we could redo history, centuries, millennia of history, then asbestos might be one of those things that we could undiscover or scrub out. And then we wouldn't have published love odes to a carcinogen. Yes, exactly. Yeah, that's what I got. I think there are probably

lots of those examples if you look back in any science magazine of, you know, technologies gone terribly wrong. And we're still figuring them out as we go as well. I'm still glad. I'm grateful that I'm not sleeping under an asbestos covered weighted blanket every night. Let's just say that. You would be so warm. Oh, I don't want to be that warm.

No, it's too warm. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? I'm talking about mood.com. They have an incredible line of cannabis gummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code weirdest. I'm not a smoker myself, but I do love the occasional weed gummy to, you know, help me go off to Dreamland. and I can't have one right now because I have a new kit, and, you know, I definitely miss it a little bit. But maybe you can have a weed gummy, and you can get one at mood.com.

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Best of all, everything's backed by Mood's 100-day satisfaction guarantee, and like I said, you can get 20% off with code weirdest. I'm eyeing Mood.com's Delta 9-THC buttercream carmels because in addition to not being able to have THC, I also can't have dairy right now. So the idea of having a caramel that also me me out and sends into Dreamland sounds very nice. And speaking of fun edibles, moot.com has delta 9 THC freezer pops. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest. That's code weirdest for 20% off. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank,

We roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for citizens back. All right, we're back. And I'm going to go next. So listeners, we are enjoying facts from Popsize's 150 year history because we are celebrating our 150th anniversary. Make sure you check out all of the great content we have for that on Popsai.com and on digital newsstands with our latest. digital edition of the magazine, which has a metal theme. It's great. Maybe we'll do another episode just about the metal issue later. But anyway, so one of our big anniversary projects was making

a nice new home for buying some of our favorite vintage Popsite covers. If you have been living under a rock, you might not know. Popsi has some really awesome oil painting and watercolor magazine covers from throughout our history. And you can now buy some of them as like high quality prints directly from us. We'll make sure all of that info is in the article accompanying this episode on popside.com slash weird. But if you look at the store and you see the adorable little copy explaining what every cover is, I wrote that.

And that meant that I spent a lot of time just tooling around in our archives. which you can access both through popside.com and through Google books. And this one in particular, I'm going to describe it. It'll also be linked on popsight.com slash weird, but it's from November 1931. And it's this very like deep, dark, saturated painting of a guy staring at what looks like a volcanic eruption. and he's like got a headset and he's talking into a microphone. This painting is by Edgar F. Whitmack, by the way, who did a ton of pop-side covers. And he's like tinkering with something that looks like a xylophone.

It's really the only way I can describe it. And so you might think it's some kind of like old-timey soundboard that he's using to like broadcast news of this eruption. but no, in fact, it's actually a detonation device because he is causing the eruption and it's not an eruption at all. So, in fact, the event that this cover is commemorating was the intentional detonation of around 6,000 pounds of gunpowder inside the crater at the summit of Lassen Peak in California. Why? You may ask. And the answer is more like why not. There is no good answer why. I'll tell you that right from the start.

But I will share a little bit. Because. Yeah, I'll share a little bit about what I learned. Like I said, the hubris of a man. And that man is L.W. Collins. But I'll get to him in a minute. So, yeah, Lassen Peak's last real eruption was, in fact, a real doozy, a historical event, worthy of commemoration on a Popside cover.

But that is not what this cover is commemorated. And it started on May 30th in 1914 with a small friatic eruption, which according to the U.S. Geological Society is a steam-driven explosion that happens when the water that's either on the ground or beneath it gets heated up by magma, lava, hot rocks, or new volcanic deposits. And basically, those materials can reach temperatures higher than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. night. So that's hot enough to make water boil away so quickly that it makes a burst of steam. And those little, you know, flash bombs of water cause these little eruptions. I'm not going to go too deep into volcanology for this explanation, but I will say that

I do think there's a common misconception that a volcanic eruption is like one type of thing and it like happens and it's big and terrifying and it's done. And actually, like a lot of volcanic eruptions are really like many days or months or years of smaller eruptions and some big ones. And it's all very fascinating and you should Google it. But that little burst of steam-related activity that was near the Peaks summit, and that kicked off a year of more than 150 additional explosions just in that next year. And then during May of 1915, that shifted into lava flows, avalanches, and mud flows full of volcanic debris, which are known as Lahars. And then that whole kerfuffle culminated in a pyroclastic flow, which is the kind of like chaotic, fast-moving eruption people tend to think of when they hear eruption.

And that was on May 22nd of 1915. And the eruption column went around 5.5 miles into the air above the summit, so it was a bigon. And it devastated the land for several miles around it. And there was actually ash reportedly falling like 300 miles away. And then there were some intermittent small eruptions for around two more years. And Lassen has been quiet ever since, except for this one time in 1931, thanks to this one guy. So I actually had a pretty hard time finding info on this spectacle outside of the pages of Pop site itself, presumably because of the National Park Service would like rather forget it.

That's my guess. That's totally fair. But I did find this great historical blog on Lassen County's history run by local Tim Purdy, great blog, Tim. And according to both his research and what we have written. in the 1931 Popsie. The explosion was devised as a celebration by one L.W. Collins. He had become the Lassen Volcanic National Park's first superintendent in 1922.

And there had been big changes, including like a highway to bring in visitors to stare at the volcano and stuff. And according to Purdy, Collins' plans for a giant park dedication in 1931 were, quote, widely criticized. But I don't know how widely or how, because that's the only reference to that I can find because Popsie sure did not criticize him. That was not really what we were about in 1931. Everything is awesome, like asbestos. Yeah, one thing I learned going through our back issues is that we sure did say, gee whiz, this inventor says this unicycle is going to replace cars,

and we definitely believe him. Very, very little skepticism. But what are you going to do? It was 1931. Anything was possible. So apparently, you know, he arranged this big pyrotechnic show. And I am actually opening up the original article to reference here because there are several key things I really want to share. So apparently for days, pack trains full of rockets.

mortars and that 6,000 pounds of gunpowder had to, you know, toil up the steep trail to the summit to create this artificial explosion, which was controlled by that single operator with that little thing that looks like a xylophone so that they could do it from nice and far away. There were several engineers involved. I mean, luckily, they didn't just like say what the heck will figure it out live. they did plan this out quite a bit, given that it was happening in a national park. And yeah, according to the Popsite article, like people watched it from miles away, everyone was thrilled by the brilliant display, thousands of spectators, weeks of anticipation,

you know, et cetera, et cetera. My favorite line in this article, though, is for probably the first time in history, The spectacle of a mighty volcanic eruption was reenacted by man. And that's just such a 1931 reporter move to be like for probably the first time in history. I don't know how to confirm or deny that. So take what you will. But according to that historical blog from Tim Purdy, the wind actually blew the smoke away so quickly that it didn't look like a real eruption to anybody. not that I think it would have really looked like a real eruption, let alone the giant one they were supposedly trying to evoke.

It was just like basically setting off a very large firework on top of a mountain. But apparently the effect was like basically ruined. But people did say it looked pretty. And that's that's all I know about that. And Lassen stands quiet to this day, except for. for that one time with all the gunpowder. With the tiny boom. And Popside was there to tell the tale.

I love this cover, though. Yeah, it's really beautiful. And it is a hilarious story. And there's just a lot of stuff people tried for the heck of it. And I think the wildest thing is that they really referred to this as like an artificial eruption, like full-throatedly. they thought they were harnessing the power of God to make this volcano erupt. And it was just like a little like,

poop, boom. You think it was film footage of it? Nothing is referenced. And, you know, there is some old pop-sized stuff where they talk about the kind of like newsreels on the scene. So I don't think they did. There are, there's a drawing, as is often the case, in early pops that. They have drawings instead of photos.

I think because it was at night, like 1931, I can't imagine any photo they would take would be all that good. Or there is, and they were so embarrassed. They were like, oh, my God. From what I have read, it didn't look anywhere as cool as it did on the cover. So maybe they just kind of, you know, decided to. take artistic license. But yeah, that's my story.

I had wanted to put together just like a quiz of like weird stuff that you could find in the pages of Popsie. And I did not have time to you. But I will say that in just one issue I was flipping around in from, oh, gosh, I want to say like 1917, I found a story about tattoos, a bunch of ads on various work at home schemes, including training to become a mushroom hunter so you could sell mushrooms to restaurants. Men and women, the advertisement said, could harness the financial power of the mushroom. That was so generous of that.

Yeah. Yeah. A lot of good stuff like that. Anyway, seeing the like, I work 10 hours a week from home, but I just paid off my mortgage style ads and an article about, like, Tate. tattoos and like how to fix your radio. I was like really what has changed. Very little.

Very low. Would you trust a self-trained mushroom forager? I don't want to freak anyone out, but if you eat mushrooms in a fancy restaurant, they were probably sold to the restaurant by a self-trained mushroom forager. Especially, is it like it truffles specifically, yeah? Well, truffles for sure, yeah. Truffles, no, that's a whole other bag, yeah. You're not going to mistake anything else for a truffles.

truffles. That's pretty safe. There's actually there's a real common with morels are obviously a mushroom that a lot of people know how to identify even who don't know other mushrooms and they'll pick them like in their backyard. There's a thing called a false morale. I don't think it actually looks the same, but apparently it's a common enough problem that people will pick false boroughs. And false morals aren't that bad for you to eat, but the problem is that when you cook them, release basically rocket fuel fumes. So that's pretty bad when that does happen at restaurants, which I don't think has happened in a while. Anyway, point being, a lot of mushrooms are cultivated, but a lot of the kind of fancy wild foraged ones. People just learn how to do that and then sell

them to restaurants. But the mycology community is like pretty intense. So I think if anybody tried to like half-ass that they would get uh it's self-policing yeah i just hope those foragers were not reading the not early 1900s pops die guy yeah i probably wouldn't would not trust that mushroom training program personally speaking but i don't know maybe i'll try to dig it out but yeah early readers of pops i had a lot of class i had a lot of class ads to get through, to get to the good stuff. So the next time you complain about our ad load on popshigh.com, just keep that in mind. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with more facts. Have you ever rearranged your furniture and discovered the carpet

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No one goes to Hank's for spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs. Help him see if you can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hank says, line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Copilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. Okay, we're back. And, uh,

Corinne, rodents, space rodents. Space rodents. Uh, so I'm going to start by asking everyone to just Picture a beaver. Just any regular earthbound beaver, dragging wood to a stream, building its little dam as water rolls off its lush, furry pelt. Now imagine that little lumber-munching lady, or dude, but with gigantic eyes, a huge chest, and a generally just lankier body, a lot less stout. Now, that picture you have in your brain right now is a beaver that perhaps might live on Mars, at least as described by science writer Thomas Elway in our May 1930 issue. So these outsized eyeballs are for taking in the fainter sunlight on the red planet. Extended limbs are formed in an atmosphere that perhaps has less gravity than we have on Earth.

again, this is a 1930s understanding of what Mars is like. And its bulbous chest is expanded so large to accommodate lungs that are big enough to take in oxygen, the scant oxygen that's in the Martian atmosphere. Now, these creatures, Elway freely admits, are fanciful, but he also would point out that they are certainly more realistic than any other notion of some human-like, being surviving on Mars, at least given what we knew at the time. So early 20th century notions of life in the solar system were generally fueled by an now outmoded idea of how the planets in our solar system formed.

And this idea posited that the planets were basically each expelled from the sun sequentially. So this means that those... Like reverse Pac-Man is what I'm just picturing. Exactly. Planet. Planet. Planet. Thank you.

So those at the closest distance, therefore, were the youngest planets and those at the furthest distance at the outer reaches of the solar system were the oldest. Therefore, our two neighbors, right, Mars and Venus. Mars, therefore, was our slightly older sibling and Venus was our slightly younger one. So Mars has just been through everything that Earth has been through just a couple million years sooner or a few billion years sooner, depending on whose time scale you're rocking with in 1930. This idea also bore something that's called a so-called life germ. And this life germ is the thing that, you know, again, in the planet scenario, goes on each subsequent planet and follows its evolutionary path. And the idea of a life germ actually came from a very prominent early physical chemist,

a Swedish guy named Svante Orranius, who later won a Nobel Prize for being the first to describe what we now call the greenhouse effect. But his idea at this point was the little life germ. And the little life germ idea is what our friend Thomas Elway was clinging to, trying to figure out what in the heck was going on on Mars. So let's look at our little beaver friend, or our large beaver friend, depending. First, there's the air thing. Now, at the time, spectroscopic studies of the Martian atmosphere, right, because at this point, we're still decades before the first orbiters and even further from the first probes and landers to get onto Mars. But even these early

readings said that the oxygen density in the atmosphere was only about 0.2%. Now, on Earth, we've got 21% oxygen. So we're talking like a full order of magnitude, less breathable oxygen in the atmosphere. So, okay, sure, the beaver needed to have very large lungs, but like a hundred times larger is sort of making this weird, oddly proportioned beaver all the more grotesque, at least in my mind. There's also the temperature, which Elway had suggested a beaver because, again, it's really lush pelt. But even then, so today we know that Mars averages around 81 degrees Fahrenheit. Even in the 20s, we understood that minus 121 degrees, something that really did happen. So these are going to also, not only to be very large chested, but incredibly fluffy beavers.

Elway also needed to explain how life had only made it as far as beavers or rodents or things like that on the planet Mars. If Mars was older than us and all of these other things were true, there should be people there. But there are no people there. So he walks through the logic, at least as it existed at the time. And so we start with life in Martian oceans. And then we can assume that it existed if it was to follow the same trajectory as Earth, right, you go ocean, ocean life, amphibious life, terrestrial life, et cetera, et cetera. So we can assume all of this existed because there were, there is water on Mars, right? There's ice caps.

We see the marks of water on the Martian terrain and the Martian geology and on the landscape. we also see canals, which at one point were thought to be evidence of intelligent life, but the beavers had nothing to do with the canals. When people cite this story, they often say they thought that beavers ruled on Mars because of the canals. Maybe the beavers were hanging out in the riverbeds, which is what the canals actually are. But anyway, Martian food. But where the mole people? In the subway.

Ah, okay. Fair not. So fish emerged from the Martian oceans and became landfishes and they became reptiles. And eventually the reptiles became rodents. But on earth, rodents, as we know, evolution continued. At the time, we knew that ice ages, right, triggered mass extinctions. And mass extinctions just create remarkable shifts in species, species, replacing others. And at the time, nobody thought that Mars had ever had an ice age, right?

We didn't really know how any of the topography of the planet had formed. But now we know that that's totally wrong. In fact, even last year, researchers at Colgate University did some modeling that showed that the red planet had maybe as many as like 20 ice ages. Whoa. So, yeah, we're pretty much completely certain now in case we were still confused that these like Martian hell beavers never existed. And the beavers are only Elway's most famous space imagination adventure.

Six months earlier in December 1929, he presented yet another outlandish vision for life in the nearby solar system. And he put this one in the context of some new findings about volcanism on the moon and just like a new wave of research and insights about how the regolith and the different craters and lakes, lake beds, I should say, on the moon formed. So one of the astronomers who was looking at all of these new ideas around the surface of the moon was an astronomer named William Henry Pickering. And when he was observing the moon, he was seeing that there were shadows on the surface,

like changes in the craters. They seemed to be moving. and he suggested, perhaps, that these could be herds of migratory animals. Moon bison. Moon bison. So, of course, never to miss out on an opportunity, Thomas Elway completely took the bait and he said, oh, let's figure out what could live on the moon. So knowing that there was neither air nor water, he still looked for some earthly inspiration

to figure out what might... possibly be alive on the moon? And his answer was crabs. Of course, who famously don't need air or water. Everything is a crab. That's true. So here's how we put together our little moon crab friends. These creatures would need to have a hard outer shell lest their insides become their outsides in the extremely low gravity of the moon. Their eyes would gather energy via sunlight, sort of like a buggy, photosynthesis thing going on. Okay. And they also would chow down on silicone and iron that was in the regolith, and they would use

acidic secretions through little appendages under their shell to pull all of this stuff out. Remember, it all has to happen under the shell, again, lest all of their work be lost in the cruel, cruel vacuum of space. Right. They're pressurized, airtight shells. Mm-hmm. Perfect. So, and despite these hard.

exteriors. Elway imagines the critters is like slim and jointed and very light, quote, to suit both the soft surface of the moon and the lesser gravity. But we're not even at the best part yet. They have moon boots. And boots is a misnomer, perhaps, but they're more like snow shoes. Like he imagined broad, webby like feet, just something that would distribute their weight more evenly so that they wouldn't sink into the very fine moon dirt. I see. I see. And they also would apparently be able to get trace water from the surface and things

below the surface via fish like gills because, I mean, we've gone this far. Why the hell not? So, Elway's fantastic beasts such as they are in our modern context, right? they're laughable, they're completely absurd, but in fact at the time they were kind of just hard science fiction, right? We couldn't prove him right, but we also couldn't prove him wrong. And everything that he was saying, given the science of the time, could happen. Right.

It was nothing, there was nothing inherently more ridiculous about it than anything else. It's kind of, it's like when, I don't know, whenever, I feel like this happens less often now that there have been a lot of exoplanet discoveries. But when we first started talking about exoplanets, there was a big, like, people wanted to know, like, what would life look like if it evolved on this planet that we literally only know three things about? And also all of those things have a huge margin of error. So maybe they're not even true. But people did a lot of being like, well, because the light is so low from it. or star, they'd have evolved giant eyeballs. So anyway, it's kind of, we do still do this stuff. We do so. I think you've written that story. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There's just not, we just know now that

there aren't web-footed crabs on the moon, but we should stay humble. Yes, yes. A hundred years from now, someone will be laughing at something we're saying today. Yeah, and it was all very of the moment, right? Like only a few years earlier in 1926, like the first dedicated science fiction magazine called Amazing Stories published its first issue, right? Like, this was of a trend. And we've always just tried to make the best guesses we could with the information that we had, right? Like, there was a time where we didn't think that Venus was some terrible freaking hellscape, right? We thought that the clouds were like our clouds and that they were water vapor. And it was like swampy, rainforest-y good times going on down at the surface. And that is so not true. And now when we talk

about life on Venus we're talking about or life anywhere right we're talking about microbes and signatures in gaseous clouds that maybe could be a byproduct of tiny life from god knows how many billions of years ago um except on Europa which could definitely have a sentient squid that are just too smart to try to become a space fairing race I mean and people really like talking about series, the giant, giant, almost planet-sized body in the asteroid belt. There's a hard sci-fi set there, right? Yeah. That's where, like, that's the whole premise of the expanse is around our expansion

towards the asteroid belt. It's a charming story, these Martian beavers and these moon crabs, right? But it's also sort of telling that it's the, as we push the bounds of our science, right, beyond, like out into the solar system and out into deep space. Like the bounds of our science also expand the bounds of our science fiction, which is really cool, right? Like hard sci-fi means so much more than it did 100 years ago, almost 100 years ago when these stories were published.

I guess what I'm saying is maybe Luke Skywalker's out there. No, that was a long time ago, Corin. I know, but it's like black holes and other things. We know so much more. It could be out there. Yeah, I would love to... Infinite universes. I would love to pick...

I don't personally know any science fiction writers, but I'd love to pick the brain of one today just to learn what troves of known versus unknown information they get their inspiration from. Because it's easy to see, like, what people ran away with, you know, a century ago, like you just referenced. But because we're living in it today, a little harder for me, at least.

Yeah, and that actually reminds me. We do, there is a piece of the Popsie 150th anniversary's celebration that does pull in a little bit of sci-fi. So we also have a what's called a special interest issue magazine. You can see it, you know, on newsstands and in line at the Whole Foods. That's 50 visions for the next 150 years. And each chapter taps a science fiction writer to talk about. what they're seeing in terms of springboarding us into the future. So there's some really,

there's some things that, you know, are definitely rooted in reality. And there are some other things where it's like, you want to do what with my brain? Perfect. Yeah, that sounds great. Listeners, there is so much great stuff for the 150th. So definitely head on over to popsight.com to check it all out. Find our latest issue of the magazine on Apple News Plus or Zinio. If you're not subscribed, you can also find that and links to it on popsye.com.

But more importantly, what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? For me, it's that maybe I was being too hard on the Mars beavers and moon crabs guy. And maybe I am a moon crab guy. Maybe everything becomes a moon crab. Everything does become a moon crab. But no, it's true that I do have a very strong. I'm not going to like bet money on it happening, but I do really want there to be like some beautiful

fluorescent cephalopod-esque creature under the ice in Europa, and we're going to have to grapple with what it means to be intelligent because we're going to be like, this is the pinnacle of evolution, just floating around in the water, just vibes. Like we, this is humanity. We got it wrong.

Anyway, I really want that to be true. And maybe that makes me a moon crab guy. I will agree with Mars beavers because I knew about the article I knew about how it's been used in pop culture, but learning the philosophy of it really, really changes everything. Also, Corinne, when you were describing the giant beavers, for some reason, I just thought about Patrick Swayze with a beaver head. I don't know why. Well, yeah. I mean, it was also just I couldn't.

I'm opening Photoshop right now. Yes. All right. So the beavers and the crabs have it. Congrats, Corinne. I mean, congrats to the crabs. That's true. And listeners, don't forget, check out everything we've mentioned on popsai.com.

And don't forget to keep an eye on your feed because we will be dropping in at least one or two more times before we are back for our next. season sometime in the summer. So we will talk to you soon. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms. So subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsai.com slash weird. You can buy our merch, including weirdest thing, t-shirts, totebags, and mugs at popsye.threadless.com. is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing and audio engineering

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