Unexplainable - Moon poop

Episode Date: July 21, 2021

Astronauts left something on the moon that could help unlock the origins of life itself. For more, go to http://vox.com/unexplainable It’s a great place to sign up for our newsletter, view show transcripts, and read more about the topics on our show. Also, email us! [e-mail] We read every email. We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes about five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: vox.com/survey Support Unexplainable by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Give more than a gift for less. Give AncestryDNA. Visit ancestry.ca today. Offer ends May 10th. Terms apply. Just a quick heads up. This week's episode is about poop, and we don't always talk about it using the word poop. So if you'd rather not hear a certain swear word a bunch of times,

we've got a bleeped version in our clean feed over at vox.com slash unexplainable. It's unexplainable. I'm Noah. from Hassanfeld. It's been over half a century since the U.S. first landed astronauts on the moon, 52 years ago, this week, actually. But NASA is hoping that the next few years are going to look pretty different. Our goal is to launch the first woman and next man to the South Pole of the Moon in 2024. NASA's newest program is called Artemis. The twin sister of Apollo. And she was the goddess of the moon. But Artemis won't just be another Apollo.

This time when we go to the moon, we're actually going to stay. And that is a significant difference between what we're doing today and what we did back in 1969 through 1972. This time, astronauts won't simply be walking on the moon. We're going to learn how to live and work on the surface of another world for long periods of time so we can take that knowledge to Mars. Mars may be a very long-term target, but Artemis is really about scientific research on the moon. And there's lots of interesting questions. questions NASA is trying to answer there. Like how much water ice is in the moon's south pole? Or how could that water be used as life support for a moon outpost? Or what can all the impact

craters on the moon tell us about exactly how it formed? But there are other less heralded, unanswered questions that maybe NASA should consider looking into. And they have to do with what the Apollo astronauts left behind. Science reporter Brian Resnick and I talked about this a couple years ago on Vox's Daily News Show Today explained. It was the first time Brian and I had reported something together, just asking weird questions and seeing where they lead us. And in a lot

of ways, it was kind of the origin of this show, unexplainable. So we thought we'd play this weird journey we went on, which goes all the way to the creation of life itself. But it starts with some 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, you know, shit, and you desiccated it and dried it evolves 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. Like, there's a thing 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,

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?

I, 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.

Surely do. And I tried to broach the question really tactfully. Because 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 a decent 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 and an astronaut not being sure if he took a shit on the moon. Like, I would that 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 all the human artifacts that had been left on the moon. And this is where they list like 96 bags of human waste, which includes astronaut diapers, like urine. So all this stuff would be potentially testable and potentially host life. Does Charlie think it's alive? Oh, yeah, he shot it down like immediately. That stuff's been out to expose 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 thing. 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. 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 to 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, 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, like, 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. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, they take the VIP treatment

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Wait, no. What are you talking about? That poop can explain the universe and this is a really old idea. What? 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 like forms it with like Plato? This is really gross. Yeah. I mean, that's the basic idea. Yeah. But since Dundas is no longer alive, I talk 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' essay, and we went through some of these myths. So the fond 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 Bima 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 excreets 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, roast quickly, and becomes land. Okay, shit is somehow fertile. It's like a substance of creation? Is this 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 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. Did 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 Nowat, the Aztec language, you can see that their view of shit was really different. The word for goals in Nowat was costique tail quidlop. And it translates as yellow sacred excrement.

In other words, holy shit. Holy shit. For the asex, 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 Teokwezat, 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 sense while you're telling me about this, but it's like 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 dom. Sure. Your 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 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 with that. This theory that you've just lean out Like, makes the most sense for me. Like, you can see shit. You can see things growing from it.

Like, that is the aha. Like, 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 X, Nilo. 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 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 just sort of spontaneously started here. But if we do go back to the

moon and we find that any of that bacteria is still alive, 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's 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 just starts on planet Earth here from Whizbang, 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. This episode was reported and produced by Brian Resnick and Noam Hassanfeld. Edits from Sean Ramasdorum and Irene Noguchi.

Mixing from Afim Shapiro and me, Christian Ayala. Fact-checking from Will Reed and Alex Pena. And music from Noam and the Macerius Brighamster Cylinder. The rest of the Unexplanable team is Meredith Hodnott, Mandiguan, and Bird Pinkerton. Lauren Katz heads up our newsletter, and Liz Kelly Nelson is the VP of Vox Audio. You can sign up for our newsletter at Vox.com slash Unexblanable, and send any thoughts you might have to Unexplanable at Vox.com. Unexplanable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll see you next Wednesday.