Today, Explained - Holy shit

Episode Date: July 19, 2019

On the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing, Vox’s Brian Resnick says astronauts left something up there that could unlock the origins of life itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of Today Explained is brought to you by After the Fact. Believe it or not, After the Fact is a podcast from the Pew Charitable Trusts. It brings you data and analysis on the issues that matter to you, the environment, the economy, public health. Find out more about the show at pewtrusts.org slash explained. That's pewtrusts.org. Noam Hassenfeld, your producer, reporter here at Today Explained. You've been cooking something up in the studio to mark the 50th anniversary of the moon landing tomorrow.

What have you been up to? So I was talking to Brian Resnick, senior science reporter at Vox. Friend of the show. Friend of the show. And he took me on this kind of long, winding moon journey. Nice. And then like halfway through, we kind of switched gears and I ended up taking him on a weird journey. Huh.

Where does it start? So it starts with the fact that everyone wants to go to the moon. Right now. What's old is new again. There is a big push to return to the moon. Make no mistake about it. We're in a space race today. Just as we were in the 1960s. And the stakes are even higher.

Who are we talking about? Like Elon Musk? Who wants to go to the moon? Yeah, so Elon Musk does want to go to the moon. He thinks he can get to the moon by 2021. India is launching a moon mission in a few days, actually. A few days? Now the countdown for India's second moon mission,

Chandrayaan-2, has finally begun. Chandrayaan-2 will be launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Research Center. China is going, South Korea wants to go, Russia wants to go, everyone wants to go. And of course, NASA wants to go back. It's been called Apollo on steroids. What does NASA want to do on the moon again?

Two big things. One, they want to put the first woman on the moon. Nice. And this is part of what they're calling the Artemis program. The new mission is called Artemis. It's named after the Greek goddess and the twin sister of Apollo. Ah! And that program is scheduled for 2024.

Okay. The other big thing they want to do is basically set up this permanent outpost at the moon, and they're calling this the Gateway. The Gateway to what? Mars? The point of the Gateway would be to serve as a testbed for deep space operations. And it's also going to be the gateway to any other part of the moon. Sounds like a pretty exciting time to be the moon. Yeah, it's probably the most exciting time for the moon in the last 50 years.

Brian told me that for now, NASA's got one major target on the moon. Yeah, it's probably the most exciting time for the moon in the last 50 years. Brian told me that for now, NASA's got one major target on the moon. Right now, NASA's eyeing, it's called the South Pole Achen Basin. It's one of the oldest, deepest impact craters on the moon. But there's some other spots that would be fascinating. Like, there's also a case to go back and visit some of the Apollo sites. Just for fun? Well, we've left some very important things behind there. What did we leave? We left trash bags.

Is there something, like, special in the trash bags? So there are 96 bags of human waste left on the moon from all the Apollo missions. Human waste? Yeah, we're talking about poop. We're talking about vomit. We're talking about basically anything that came in contact with us that we just left on the surface of the moon, basically just to save weight for the return mission. So they could carry a lot of moon rocks and cool soil and all that type of stuff. So we got bags of shit on the moon. There are garbage bags with shit in them on the moon, yes.

So should the astronauts have been taking the bags of shit back with them instead of the moon rocks? No, no, because actually they set up this fascinating unintended experiment. So if you took a mass of human feces, poop, whatever we want to call it, shit, and you desiccated it and dried it in evolved water, about half of its weight is bacteria. It represents this enormous array of life. There's something like a thousand species of microbes that live in our gut. And life has been evolving here on Earth for billions of years.

And that whole time that life has been evolving and changing and thriving here on Earth, the moon has been dormant and dead. It's not just that there's no life on the moon. The moon itself doesn't move. You leave a footprint there. There's nothing to blow it away. When the Apollo program brought humans to the moon, we brought life to this dead world for the first time in billions of years. And then we just left life there. The answer to whether that life is still living or how long it lived while it was on the moon

really points to some fascinating questions about the origin of life on Earth. And one of the most fascinating questions in astrobiology, which is, what is the upper limit for the resiliency of life? And can life exist in space? So if I can understand this correctly, about 50 years ago... Exactly 50 years ago. Astronauts started this accidental experiment where they left bags of shit on the moon. And you want to find out if the bacteria in those bags is still alive.

Yeah. And just to make, like, totally sure, is there any chance we could go back and there's just no bags? Well, I did call one of the surviving Apollo astronauts. You called an astronaut and asked him about his shit? It was one of the more embarrassing phone calls of my journalistic career, calling him up. I called Charlie Duke, who was on the moon for around three days with Apollo 16. And what did he say? Did he take a shit on the moon?

So I called him up. I think he was sitting in an airport. Charlie Duke. And I tried to broach the question really tactfully, because, you know, I'm asking this distinguished man if he took a shit on the moon. And it's like an embarrassing question to ask, but like, you know, I'm asking this distinguished man if he took a shit on the moon. It's like an embarrassing question to ask, but like, you know. Well, not really embarrassing, but go ahead. Yeah, so did you leave human waste on the moon? We did, left urine that was collected in a tank in the descent stage.

And I believe we had a couple of bowel movements, but I'm not sure. Wait, he's not sure if he took a shit on the moon? Nothing has made me believe more in the conspiracies around the Apollo missions than an astronaut not being sure

if he took a shit on the moon. Like, that would be, like, my number one memory. But we are sure that there is shit on the moon, right? Yeah, NASA actually has an absurdly detailed document of like all the human artifacts that have been left on the moon. And this is where like they list like 96 bags of human waste, which includes astronaut diapers,

like urine. So all of this stuff would be potentially testable and potentially host life. Does Charlie think it's alive? Oh yeah. He shot it down like immediately. potentially testable and potentially host life. Does Charlie think it's alive? Oh, yeah, he shot it down, like, immediately. Yeah. That stuff's been out there exposed to cosmic radiation for 47 years. I'd be really, really surprised if anything ever survived. Is Charlie right? So I said before that the moon is kind of this unchanging place, but it's also very harsh.

Here on Earth, we have this protective magnetic field that protects us from really intense radiation coming from just everywhere in the galaxy. So cosmic radiation kind of like just blasts holes through subatomic scale things. It's just like the moon is not protected from cosmic radiation. If I'd have stayed up there for 47 years in this human body, I'd be dead because of the cosmic radiation. Two, there's wild temperature swings on the moon. So from day to night on the moon, it's like a couple hundred degrees Fahrenheit of difference.

The temperature range is extreme in our landing spots, from minus 200 and something to 200 and something Fahrenheit. It's hot and it's cold. It's freezing and it's hellish. It's everything. It's the moon. It doesn't have any protection from the sun and from the worst parts of the sun. So it seems pretty unlikely it's alive. Is it even possible it's alive? Well, life really surprises us a lot and often. So there is life in all sorts of places that you wouldn't necessarily expect it. So at the very bottom of the ocean floor where pressures are immense and there's like no sunlight,

life can survive thousands of years, you know, trapped in ice. There have been experiments where microbial life has been flown in space, actually flown on the Apollo missions, and it survived largely. Like they were holding it out the window or something? Yeah, yeah, they were like on a stick, like it was like a hitchhiker. And it survived? And it survived, yeah. This is why it's an open question.

Okay, so it seems likely that the bacteria in the shit is dead. It's possible, though, that it's alive. You're saying NASA should go back, check it out, get the shit. Why? It's an idea called panspermia. Okay.

Have you heard of this? No, panspermia. So it's the idea that life didn't start on Earth, that it started somewhere else, and it came here. Maybe it hitched a ride on an asteroid. If something could survive or at least be revivable from a dormant state after being on the moon for 50 years, it actually lends a lot of weight to this idea that maybe life didn't begin here. You know, like take a bong rip now. What if life is something that propagates itself across the universe naturally? Kind of like how light propagates itself across the universe.

So a star emits light and then that light will hit everything. Because light just spreads naturally at the speed of light. Like what if life is kind of like a radio wave like that? And I guess we're basically, by studying the moon poop, testing whether the medium of space can allow life to transfer. Yeah, it helps us understand if life is like a property of the universe itself, or if it's this rare crazy fluke that we see around us. You know what, Brian? I'm looking to poop to explain the origins of life.

It's actually, like, a pretty rich tradition. Really? What the heck are you talking about? I'll tell you in a minute. In the middle of this podcast, we're going to take a quick break to talk about another podcast. They asked me to talk about a few numbers first. A two, a comma, a five, and then a ton of zeros, and then seven, just picture a seven, easy. And their significance becomes clear in an

episode of the Pew Charitable Trust podcast after the fact. Here's a preview. With $2.5 trillion generated annually, the ocean would be the seventh largest national economy in the world. I'm guessing that's like all the oceans combined, but still pretty impressive. There's all sorts of fun facts and figures and analysis like that in the Pew Charitable Trust's podcast, After the Fact. It's kind of like an audio exploration of how we can use data to make a difference in the world today. You can find it on Stitcher. You can find it most anywhere you get your podcasts. Check it out at pewtrusts.org slash explained. Again, that's pewtrusts.org slash explained. Today, today explain.

Wait, no. What are you talking about? Poop can explain the universe and this is a really old idea. What? So bear with me for a second. Okay. After we started talking about how, you know, we should look to the poop on the moon in order to find out about human history, I started looking around and I found this article from the anthropologist Alan Dundas about all of these societies across the world who have myths where the world is created from shit. Created? Like some celestial being takes a dump and forms it with like Play-Doh?

This is really gross, yeah. I mean, that's the basic idea, yeah. But since Dundas is no longer alive, I talked to an old friend of his, Robert Siegel. And this is not the Robert Siegel from NPR. This one is... Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Aberdeen here in Scotland. So Robert pulled out Dundas's essay and we went through some of these myths. So the Fon people in Benin in West Africa have a myth where a cosmic serpent creates mountains by

pooping all over the land. In India, there's a version of a creation myth where the character Bhima poops on Rama's head. The feces is thrown into the water, which immediately dries up and the earth is formed. There's a Japanese goddess who gives birth to other gods who are created from her poop. In other versions, a worm excretes the earth, or the world is formed from the excreta of ants. And then there's this Chukchi myth from Siberia where there are these two figures, Raven and his wife. Raven's wife tells Raven

to go and try to create the world. Raven's wife gives birth to twins, and Raven wants to help too, but isn't sure how. Then Raven flies and defecates. Every piece of excrement falls upon water, grows quickly, and becomes land. Okay, shit is somehow fertile?

It's like a substance of creation? Is this the idea? It seems like there's this sort of common trope in myth that shit is somehow related to the creative process. Dundas goes even further. He sort of equates shit with another sort of brown,

muddy substance that a lot of us may be familiar with from Genesis, which would be the creation of man from dirt. So did these cultures like revere shit? Like we tend to find it repulsive or like I'll speak for myself. I tend to find it repulsive, even though I think I can find, you know, awe in like what's happening in it. These cultures, how do they see shit? I can give you one example, which is the Aztecs. I spoke to a professor who wrote- How much research did you do on this?

I went seriously down the poop rabbit hole on this one. I talked to Cecilia Klein, who's a professor emeritus at UCLA, because I stumbled across an article of hers with the subtitle, The Significance of Holy Shit in Ancient Mexico. Great title. Apparently everybody loved that title. And if you take a look at Nahuatl, the Aztec language, you can see that their view of shit was really different.

The word for gold in Nahuatl was costique teoquitlat, and it translates as yellow sacred excrement. In other words, holy shit. Holy shit. For the Aztecs, it was a way of literally curing disease, restoring order and balance to the universe. Someone who had been enslaved could be freed if he stepped on a pile

of human excrement. And it kind of brings something extra to the idea of holy shit. You know, for us, it's just a way of putting two things together that don't sort of belong. You know, I mean, it's just a way of saying, wow. But for the Aztecs, the term teoquitla, which translates as holy shit, would have had a much more profound and doubled meaning. I'm feeling like I'm getting a little bit of a sense why you're telling me about this, but it's not quite crystallizing for me. So I understand why cultures around the world will look at shit and say, oh, this is important. There's interesting things here. This is a part of life and humanity. But I don't understand why it would be in all these creation myths. So there's no real conclusive answer on this, but there's a bunch of different

explanations and some of them are kind of wacky. Hit me with something really wacky here. Okay, let's start with Dundas' theory. He's the dead professor who wrote that essay about all those poop myths. His alive friend, Robert Siegel, walked me through it. He argues that males don't get pregnant. They're jealous, okay? And what they do to compensate in their myths is to attribute creation to something that's a supposed alternative to pregnancy, which is shitting.

Is this like a Freud idea? Yeah, it's sort of like flipping Freud on its head. Instead of penis envy, you have pregnancy envy. Okay. I think it's a bit over the top. And so does Robert. I just think that's excessive. Yeah.

For another sort of less grandiose theory, we can just say that at like a fundamental level, shit is the first thing that you create. And so at a very, very basic level. The involvement of shit is making creation natural. Okay. We went from psychoanalytic to, well, this is like the first thing any human can create. So anything that created us, like it's the first thing they do.

They take a dump. Sure. The world's here. Okay, I get that. Right. Theory three, which makes even more sense, is that not only is shit the first thing that you create, but, like, shit itself is creative. You know, shit used as fertilizer is maybe the grandest example of shit being associated

with things positive. It's almost miraculous that, you know, you can put it on the ground and it totally speeds up the creative process. Because look, what are you doing with shit in creation myths? You're turning it into something usable, something necessary that one can't do without. This theory that you've just laid out

makes the most sense for me. You can see shit. You can see things growing from it. That is the aha. We were talking before. It's like a seed. Exactly. It creates a lot of potential for more life.

But there's still a pretty fundamental question here. There are lots of ways of reading myth. And the issue should be, what do you learn about myth you might not have learned otherwise? We have this idea that sometimes creation has to be like poof, something out of nothing. In myth, you know, they call that creation ex nihilo. And I guess these myths focusing on poop, I feel like they kind of tell us that we can view creation as being something out of something. So I think it is transformative.

It's taking shit and it's turning it into a building block, a plant. You know, what comes out of it? Everything comes out of it. Well, then in the astrobiological sense, like thinking about if something like shit or microbes, whatever, could seed life on Earth. And we have to think about the thing that came before it. And we have to think about how maybe the Earth isn't this like kind of special Eden where all the magic happened and life started and thrived. And it's kind of a similar thought scientifically. Like we have to think about what preceded the Earth. Like it just didn't

pop out of nowhere. There was an antecedent. There was another place with life before it. And that's why we have life here. And that's a shift. And, you know, the major accepted scientific explanation for the origin of life on Earth is that, it sort of makes it seem like some of these creation myths maybe had it right in a way that science might not. Yeah, but if they even have the right idea, they didn't have, like, the... I mean, it was just a guess.

But, I mean, even if it is a guess, it points to something bigger. You know, maybe it's just this impulse to say we don't think of creation as something that comes from one spot. We actually think creation is just transformation. Maybe creation doesn't really even exist.

I like that view better. To me, the universe then spirals out. A creation myth that starts on planet Earth here from whiz bang, there's life here, is actually a lot simpler than thinking about how life travels from planet to planet, even like across solar systems. Thinking of all the things that have to happen for the web of life to spread across the galaxy is amazingly more complex than any story that has ever been told. If it has happened, I think the story of life becomes so much more spectacular

and the origin of it might be even further and further back than we can possibly ever see. Like, that's even... That becomes even unspeakable to think about how broad and how intricate and complex the real truth of life is in the greater universe. Brian Resnick reports on science for Vox. Noam Hassenfeld reports on all sorts of shit for Today Explained.

Irene Noguchi is the show's executive producer. Afim Shapiro is the engineer. Bridget McCarthy, Halima Shah, and Amina Alsari produced the show. Alex Pena and Will Reed are the interns. And the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder is definitely from outer space. Thanks to Matthew Spellberg and Brother Jonah

for help with today's episode. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher and we are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thanks again to After the Fact for supporting the show today. The After the Fact podcast comes from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Pew is spelt like, you know, few, but with a P. After the Fact is spelled much like it sounds. The show brings you data and analysis on the issues you care about, the environment, the economy, the public health situation in the country.

Find out more about the show at pewtrusts.org slash explained. Again, that's pewtrusts.org slash explained.