Bigger Little Questions

Summary

Radiolab – "Bigger Little Questions"
WNYC Studios | December 22, 2017
Hosts: Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich

---

Episode Overview

Radiolab’s “Bigger Little Questions” episode ventures into an array of quirky and profound listener queries, using science, history, and a dash of philosophy to seek answers. The episode’s freewheeling curiosity spans topics from space junk and the etymology of “Earth,” to coincidences on lonely country roads, the physics of snow tubing, and the origins (and artistry) of fat. Playful banter and inventive storytelling tie together serious investigation and whimsical wonder.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Who’s in Charge of Space Junk?

Featuring: Scott Little (listener), Latif Nasser (producer), Lt. Colonel Mia Walsh (US Air Force, 18th Space Control Squadron)

• Listener’s Question: Who makes sure the space shuttle avoids all the satellites and debris up there? Who’s in charge of space?
  • Scott Little: “Who’s in charge here? Who’s in charge of space?” [03:22]
• Lt. Col. Walsh’s Response:
  • Her squadron tracks over 23,000 man-made space objects with a global space catalog.
  • Every new launch is checked to prevent collisions; if a risk arises, “conjunction data messages” (collision alerts) are issued—thousands sent daily, with 6-10 genuine emergencies per day.
  • Quote: “We think that there are probably more like a half a million, close to half a million objects.” [05:28]
  • Many objects are too small to track: “They’re as small as flecks of paint.” [05:48]
  • Damage from tiny debris (like paint flecks) can be significant, piercing shuttle windows.
  • When asked about “Kessler Syndrome” (the risk of space being unusable due to cascading debris collisions):
    • Walsh: “I guess it’s a concern, sure. But...we would hope that that wouldn’t happen.” [08:50]
  • Conclusion: The current system is robust, but not omnipotent, and the threat of runaway space debris is real if orbital practices don’t adapt.

---

2. Why is the Earth Called ‘Earth’?

Featuring: Taeji (child), Jad (host/dad), Peter Berry (isotope geochemist, Oxford), Gabriel Barry (classicist, Oxford)

• Child’s Question: “Why is the Earth called Earth?”
  • Taeji: “The Earth just came up with the name.” [10:38]
• Peter Berry explains “Earth” comes from Old Saxon/Germanic roots meaning soil or ground. Unlike other planets, Earth’s name isn’t mythological but mundane.
  • Berry: “All these words are derived from a mother language...But what it means...is actually just…soil or ground.” [11:30]
• Gabriel Barry traces the etymology to Proto-Indo-European roots.
  • Early societies were nomadic, but as they settled and farmed, “earth” shifted from dirt to the whole globe.
  • Quote: “That word, er, urda, became the word for all dirt, the whole ball of dirt.” [14:10]
• The distinction: Earth’s name evolved from the ground beneath us, growing in stature, even becoming goddess-associated, while other planets’ names are mythological top-down.
• Memorable Moment: Taeji’s creative guess and recollection of his “person Earth” art project at daycare [16:14]; his disappointment at the non-alien origins of Earth's name.

---

3. Are Improbable Country Road Coincidences Actually Strange?

Featuring: Tim Adler (Simon’s dad), Simon Adler (producer), Prof. Sir David Spiegelhalter (statistician, Cambridge)

• Listener’s Observation: Why do rare events (like a cyclist, semi, and dog walker all converging) seem to happen so often on empty roads?
  • Tim: “I guess the question is, why does this happen to me and does it…happen to others?” [22:52]
• Statistician’s View:
  • “Synchronicity,” a term from Jung, describes meaningful coincidences, but probability explains it:
  • While any single event is unlikely, the vast number of “tries” over time (driving hours, weeks) makes even rare events probable.
  • Spiegelhalter: “You have to think of all the chances for those things to occur that didn't occur.” [27:08]
  • For Tim’s scenario, math says there’s a 31% chance of it happening in any given week, if he drives regularly.
• Takeaway: What feels eerie is statistical inevitability, filtered by human pattern-seeking.
  • Spiegelhalter: “It does tend to happen to people who are...very sensitive and aware and they notice their environment...admirable characteristic trait.” [28:06]
  • Tim: “It's a little hard to swallow. I'm a little more Jungian than most...” [28:06]
  • Spiegelhalter: “But I would say he’s not very special.” [28:50]

---

4. Can You Go 100 mph Down a Hill in a Snow Tube?

Featuring: Evan Becker (questioner), Destin Sandlin (engineer & Smarter Every Day host), Tracy Hunt (producer), Paul Rousseau (skydiver)

• Listener’s Challenge: Debating if it’s possible to reach 100 mph on a standard snow tube down a mountain.
  • Evan: “Can you reach 100 miles per hour...on an everyday snow tube...in earth's atmosphere, not in a vacuum?” [36:03]
• Destin’s Expertise: Discusses drag and friction. Initially confident, references a sled world-record: 83.4 mph (below target).
• Compromise: If you “drop” from a plane (vertical descent, no ground friction), terminal velocity in a tube would exceed 100 mph.
  • Paul Rousseau: “Well, yeah, it’s totally possible. I’ve done it...over 120 [mph].” [42:47]
  • But: Is this cheating? It's not "down a mountain."
  • Group Argument: The spirit of the question vs. technicalities—playful debate over semantics (43:01–44:00).
• Conclusion: Physics says yes with vertical drop; earthbound snow tubing, no documented evidence.

---

5. Can We Build (and Love) an Island of Fat?

Featuring: Annie McEwen (producer), Arn Hendriks (artist, Amsterdam), Tom McCollum (aqueous geochemist)

• The Artist’s Quest: Dutch artist Arn and collaborator collect kitchen and butcher fat to construct a floating “island of fat” in Amsterdam’s harbor, inspired by reports of “fatbergs” in London sewers.
  • Arn: “Fat...wants to be seen, it wants to be on stage. It wants some appreciation.” [48:11]
  • Fatbergs (11 double-decker buses in mass!) spark city-wide battles—but Arne wants to celebrate, not demonize, fat.
• The Deeper Question: “Was there first life or first fat? Or, when did fat start?” [50:45]
• Geochemist’s Science:
  • First fats were fatty acids—simple hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon compounds—formed after star explosions, pre-dating Earth.
  • Tom McCollum: Describes how “fat flowers” (fatty acids) naturally join to form membranes—an essential step in the origin of life.
  • Quote: “The fat ball, these fatty little threesomes that floated in from outer space and maybe landed here…was the first container that made life possible.” [55:28]
  • McCollum: “I don't think there is any way to really have anything like...a living being without having a membrane or something to separate it from the surroundings.” [55:39]
• Art and Awe: Arn's delight in the poetic answer—that fat was truly the beginning of separateness and life.
  • Arn: “This is what I’ve always dreamt of. The [fat]berg starts to generate enthusiasm and love...” [57:22]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On space debris:
  • Lt. Col. Walsh: “You can see a pretty famous picture of this shuttle window that was hit by a fleck of paint and the kind of damage that it can do moving at that speed.” [05:58]
• With childlike wonder:
  • Taeji: “The Earth just came up with the name.” [10:38]
• On striking coincidences:
  • Prof. Spiegelhalter: “Every single event that happens to us is unbelievably unlikely and unpredictable.” [24:46]
• On technicality in snow-tubing physics:
  • Destin Sandlin: “If it’s clear that I’m wrong, I’m gonna retract. Okay? So here’s where I would go with this...” [39:44]
• On the poetry of fat:
  • Arn Hendriks: “Fat wants some appreciation...I love it. I know that when I’m there, I really love that little sort of thing that is there in the water.” [50:32]
• On the birth of life:
  • Tom McCollum: “There is a theory...when these little fat flower bubbles form...maybe...a little bit of RNA [joined]...you have a cell for the first time.” [54:40]

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Space Junk & Kessler Syndrome: [02:13–10:06]
• Name of the Earth/Etymology: [10:08–17:47]
• Road Coincidences & Probability: [19:03–29:04]
• Snow Tubing at 100 mph: [34:53–44:02]
• Island of Fat & Fat Origins: [44:22–58:01]

---

Tone and Style

Radiolab’s hallmark blend of playful humor, childlike curiosity, and genuine awe permeates the episode. The hosts and guests trade scientific precision for accessible metaphors, thoughtful tangents, and moments of delighted surprise. The tone remains light, warm, and inviting, but always driven by a passion to chase questions—big and little—wherever they lead.

---

Final Takeaways

“Bigger Little Questions” is a celebration of restless curiosity, showing how even the silliest questions can lead to the profound: statistical inevitability behind supernatural-feeling events, the evolutionary poetry in the origin of fat and life, and the humbling scale of our place in space. Radiolab’s approach invites listeners to embrace wonder and never stop asking "Why?".

---

Selected by Radiolab staff.
Transcript analysis and summary by podcast summarizer AI.

Transcript

[A]

What are you doing in a meeting?

[B]

That could have been an email.

[C]

That's right, you're losing interest. Don't let it happen to your money too. Vanguard's CashPlus account can't help you at work, but we can help with your savings because Vanguard believes in giving you more. So how much interest could you earn? Find [e-mail] cashplus offered by Vanguard Marketing Corporation member FINRA and SIPC.

[B]

Another negative pregnancy test.

[C]

But this Black Friday, you can feel.

[D]

In control of your conception journey again.

[C]

And get pregnant 10 times faster. It's Mira's biggest sale and it could help you to stop feeling lost. Even if your cycles are long and ovulation has felt impossible to find. Mira measures four key hormones with clinical.

[B]

Accuracy so you can finally see what your body is doing and time things.

[D]

Right to get pregnant.

[C]

Get 30% off Mira for Black Friday. Check out MiraCare.com.

[B]

It'S never too early for Lowe's Black Friday deals. Snag some of our biggest savings of the season right now, like 25% off select pre lit artificial Christmas trees. And get yourself free select Dewalt cobalt or Craftsman tools when you buy a select battery or combo kit before the Black Friday rush. Because everyone loves free stuff, right?

[C]

Lowe's.

[B]

We help you save valid through 123 while supplies last. Selection varies by location. Oh, wait, you're listening.

[A]

Okay. All right.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

All right.

[B]

You're listening to Radio Lab Radio from wny. See?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay, ready? Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

[E]

I'm Robert Kilowicz.

[B]

This is Radiolab. And this is part two of our attempt to answer some listener questions that have piled up over the years, gathering digital dust in our inbox. And a few of them in this round come from kind of close to home.

[E]

Yeah.

[B]

In any case, starting us off this round is a question asker who has developed quite a reputation here at Radiolab.

[E]

The inimitable Scott Little.

[A]

I'm just a normal dude, man.

[B]

Scott spoke to our producer, Latif Nasser. Now, Scott, he actually sent us a lot of questions that caught our attention.

[A]

Yeah, they don't. They don't stop. I can't slow this brain down. Questions like I truly do not even remember.

[B]

Like writing, why is the moon devoid of all color?

[A]

But when I read them, I was like, oh yeah, that sounds like me.

[B]

Have we seriously not translated any animal languages yet?

[A]

Is there a reason coconuts look a lot like chimpanzee heads? Or is that just a coincidence?

[B]

But then we, we zeroed in on One of Scott's questions that at first seemed kind of simple, but it got really big.

[A]

Okay, when a space shuttle goes into space, how do they make sure it doesn't hit any satellite? Is it just radar or is there some kind of complicated system that tracks all of them? And since we talked just kind of looking up about this, you know, about like how many satellites are actually up there and what are we even calling space junk? And has this affected anything yet? You know, it's just like, it goes from like, kind of informational to like almost like this sort of doom and gloom real fast. Like there's so much junk up there. Like it's gonna be impossible to leave the Earth's atmosphere pretty soon. And I don't know, I just, it's just kind of me curious. I'd be curious to see what, what, who's, who's in charge of all this? That's what I want to know. Who's in charge here? Who's in charge of space? Okay, is everybody there?

[B]

Yeah, I'm here.

[A]

I've got Colonel Walsh and she's willing to talk to you about space surveillance.

[B]

Okay, great.

[A]

Ma', am, can you still hear us? Yes, I'm here. If you could.

[B]

So I couldn't actually find anyone who is literally in charge of space, but I did find what I think is pretty much the next best thing.

[A]

I'm Lieutenant Colonel Mia Walsh and I'm the commander of the 18th Space Control Squadron.

[B]

I think your title has got to be the coolest title of anyone I've ever interviewed.

[A]

My title is the coolest title. The commander of the 18th Space Control Squadron.

[B]

Yeah, that's like you should have like an action figure.

[A]

That would be amazing. It would be a very tiny action figure.

[B]

Okay, so let's start from the top. When a space shuttle goes into space, how do they make sure it doesn't hit any satellites?

[A]

Well, we keep track of what's called the space catalog, which is like a.

[B]

Giant logbook of all the man made stuff surrounding us in outer space.

[A]

A little over 23,000 objects.

[B]

Oh, wow.

[A]

So whenever there's a launch, anything manned or unmanned, we'll track it against the existing things in the catalog and we'll make sure that it doesn't hit anything on the way up or make sure.

[B]

It doesn't hit anything while it's up there. And then if there is a chance of an actual collision, they send out an alert.

[A]

The notifications we create are called conjunction data messages. So we send several thousand of those every day.

[B]

What?

[A]

Within Those several thousand. We have a more refined, what we call emergency criteria.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And we issue between 6 and 10 of those per day.

[B]

What? That's like a. That's a lot.

[A]

It seems high, but when you consider we're tracking 23,000 objects, it's not too bad.

[B]

But on top of those 23,000 objects, it turns out there's even more stuff out there. But she says it's basically just too small to be able to track.

[A]

We think that there are probably more like a half a million, close to half a million objects.

[B]

What, so you have, like, almost none of them?

[A]

It sounds like that. But just remember that some of those 500,000 objects are very, very tiny pieces of debris.

[B]

So, like, give me a sense, like, how big, how small. What are we. Yeah, what are we talking about?

[A]

They're as small as sizes of flecks of paint.

[B]

Oh, man. So there's no way you can track, like, half a million flecks of paint. That feels, like, impossible.

[A]

No. And actually, if you Google space shuttle and fleck of paint, you can see a pretty famous picture of this shuttle window that was hit by a fleck of paint and the kind of damage that it can do moving at that speed.

[B]

Tell me what kind of damage it can do moving at that speed. What would I see if I saw that picture? Yeah.

[A]

So it went through several layers of the shuttle window, and they determined that it was from a fleck of paint, from just a tiny fleck.

[B]

So you've got almost half a million pieces of this itty bitty space junk. And when it comes to that stuff.

[A]

It'S really just a matter of keeping our fingers crossed and monitoring the situation so that we can react to it if something happens.

[B]

Okay, well, so when I called this listener, he's a little bit paranoid.

[A]

And then the one interesting thing I came from, this is this thing, I think it's called the Kessler Syndrome. Is that what it is? The Kessler Effect? That's what it is. So this NASA scientist got this named after him, where he's like, we might get to a point where we have so much stuff in space that, like, something will collide with, like, two satellites will collide, and that collision will cause so much debris that it will basically be like this giant thing where just, like, things are just exploding around the Earth for, like, years and years and years, like some sort of locust plague.

[B]

Of space junk swarmed with a locust plague of space junk and that it'll be impossible to leave the Earth's atmosphere anytime soon. What would you say to Scott?

[A]

Hey, Latif. Just a second. Latif, this is Steve. You know, we have a job to track those objects, but a question like that, is this kind of out of our realm of responsibility?

[B]

Okay, okay, no problem. But, well, can I. And just let me ask another question, then tell me. If you can't answer it, that's fine, too. Which is. He also brought up something called the Keslow effect. Do you know about that or have you heard of that before? Which is the idea that there's a possibility that two satellites will collide and then they'll create debris, and then that'll make a domino effect and cause all kinds of other collisions, and then it'll be a whole giant debris field.

[A]

Sure, we've heard of it. The Kessler Effect.

[B]

Oh, Kessler. Sorry about that.

[A]

Yeah, we're very familiar with the concept.

[B]

Yeah. And is that something you worry about or no? Hello?

[C]

Hello?

[B]

Hello?

[A]

I guess it's a concern, sure. But I think the members of the squadron do such a great job tracking everything that's up there that we would hope that that wouldn't happen.

[E]

Not the answer I was hoping for.

[B]

Yeah, me neither. I got to admit, I started this whole thing thinking that Scott's fear was, like, kind of crazy. But then after that conversation, I started, you know, researching it for real. And I. Online, I found this video of Kessler himself. At the beginning of the space program, there was a general attitude that space was a big sky, that you could put anything in it that you wanted and not fill it up. The problem that you quickly run into. And he basically says exactly what Scott did. If we don't change the way we operate in space, all this results in an exponentially increasing amount of debris until all objects are reduced to a cloud of orbiting fragments that are capable of destroying any spacecraft that attempts to operate anywhere within that cloud. Which would mean no satellites, no weather satellites, no gps, no any other kinds of satellites. And then in the future, if things go really badly, you know, we'd just be stuck here forever and ever. On Earth.

[C]

The Earth.

[B]

Our next question comes from this guy in Brooklyn, and he is 555-555-5555. That would be five five years old.

[C]

555-555.

[B]

And I interviewed him. Dad, are you going to go in my kitchen? Who are you? Taeji.

[C]

My name is Taji and I'm your son.

[B]

Okay, tell me your question.

[C]

My question is, why is the Earth called Earth?

[B]

Why is the Earth called Earth?

[C]

I don't know.

[B]

Why do you have any guesses?

[C]

The Earth just came up with the name.

[B]

The Earth came up with its own name, I think. Okay, should I find out and then tell you?

[C]

Yes.

[B]

My first stop was a guy named Peter.

[A]

Yeah, this is Peter.

[B]

Peter Berry.

[A]

I'm isotope geochemist. I work at the. The University of Oxford. I'm a researcher here.

[B]

Am I right that you have some kind of loose affiliation with NASA or is that not right?

[A]

Very loose in the sense that. I mean, I do a little bit of planetary work. I've worked on some lunar samples in.

[B]

The past, but you've worked on lunar samples?

[A]

Yeah, so I've actually done some isotope work on lunar samples.

[B]

He's actually one of the few people on the planet who's held the moon in his hand. So here's my question. I think it's pretty simple, but maybe there's a story there, I don't know. Question comes from Tage via me, his dad. Why is the Earth called the Earth?

[A]

Well, that's a really interesting question. The Earth is actually. So this is an old Saxon word derived from English, Germanic roots. In German, Earth is said Erda, I believe, Erd in German. And of course, all these words are originally derived from like, a mother language, like an Indo European mother language. But what it means in German and what it means in all those old languages is actually just means soil or ground.

[B]

Oh.

[C]

Huh.

[A]

All the other planets, all the other visible planets have these really, you know, awesome names, and they're all named after Roman gods.

[B]

I mean, you have Mercury that moved really quickly around the sun, so it got its name from the Roman messenger God. Then you have Venus, which was this bright, beautiful orb glowing in the sky. So we named it after the goddess of love. And of course, Mars, which was fiery and red. And so we named it after the God of war.

[A]

And Earth is the only planet which isn't named after a Roman God. It clearly has this much different etymology.

[B]

Peter ultimately referred me to another guy at Oxford. Hello, classicist. Hi, can I speak to Gabe, please?

[A]

Hi, speaking. Yeah, hi, dad.

[B]

This is Gabriel Barry.

[A]

I can tell you a bit about who the proto Indo Europeans probably were.

[E]

Sure. Proto, Proto Indo Europeans, yes.

[B]

So basically what Gabriel Barry told me is that you could trace this whole thing, the word Ur, Urda, back to.

[A]

This group of people who lived maybe 6,000 years ago.

[B]

This is like way before JC, way before the Greeks or the Romans.

[A]

The proto Indo Europeans lived in basically what's now Eastern Europe. So these were really people from the steppes of Russia.

[B]

Don't Know a lot about them. We know they moved around a lot.

[A]

Quite a nomadic people, couldn't, for whatever reason, settle down.

[B]

But he says at some point, maybe about 5,000 years ago, they moved from.

[A]

The steppes of Eastern Europe and Russia and swept into Europe. It seems they drove chariots and they came on horseback in a huge wave and settled all the way from Britain down to northern India.

[B]

So imagine this wave of people on horseback spreading all over Europe and into India and speaking this language that would ultimately branch out into English and German and French and Hindi and Portuguese and like 400 some odd languages.

[A]

As they spread across Europe and across down into India and Iran, the thought.

[B]

Is they started to slow down, settle.

[A]

Down, and that's when they became farmers.

[B]

And that's when they started spending a lot of time looking down at the dirt.

[A]

We have lots of words for farming from proto Indo European words like plough or furrow or, as in the word.

[B]

That would become Earth. But at that early point, it just meant dirt. And presumably it just meant like this dirt, like this specific little piece of dirt right here that I'm plowing. But somewhere along the way, that word, er, urda, became the word for all dirt, the whole ball of dirt.

[A]

Basically, the word that starts being used for Earth becomes the same word is used for then Earth, you know, the globe. And also quite often some sort of goddess.

[B]

We have no idea when that switch happened exactly. I mean, we know within a few thousand years, but whenever it was, that strikes me as a pretty important moment for us people. Can I ask you some questions, Teji?

[C]

What?

[B]

When did you discover that Earth was a planet? When I was on it. No, no. Really? When did you discover. Do you remember when you learned that the Earth was a ball?

[C]

Mm.

[B]

When?

[C]

When I was 2.

[B]

You don't remember, do you?

[C]

I do.

[B]

No, you don't. Yes, I do. Little Nest at Little Nest, according to Tage, I mean, I don't know, this is what I could get out of him. That moment for him happened at daycare, this place called Little Nest in Brooklyn.

[C]

Yeah, Vanessa.

[B]

It was a day when his teacher Vanessa had them do this little project.

[C]

She said we were gonna make our own.

[B]

Our person Earth. Our own what?

[C]

Our own person Earth.

[B]

What does that mean? That means learn about the Earth and.

[C]

Make a Earth with two eyes and.

[B]

Some legs and some arms. Oh, I see, I see. They were basically making these Earth puppets. And he says, after they did that, I was sitting on the rug. You were sitting on the rug? Mm. Is that where you have your best ideas?

[D]

Mm.

[B]

He was sitting on this little rainbow colored rug that they have holding his Earth puppet.

[C]

And I was thinking, I was thinking of. The Earth was round, smooth, round, and it's a planet.

[B]

By the time we get from the proto Indo Europeans to the ancient Greeks and Romans, which is a couple thousand years, you begin to see the concept of Earth rising up. It goes from a simple word that means dirt or soil to mother Earth, a goddess. So it went in the opposite direction of the other planets. It started as this lowly dirty thing beneath our feet and then became Div. When I told Tage this answer, he was disappointed. He was actually hoping that the Earth was named by an alien. Daddy. Now can I ask another question? Yeah, you got another one. Go ahead.

[C]

How was the sun made?

[B]

How was the sun made? You mean like how did the sun become the sun? Man, that's another good question.

[C]

How?

[B]

The same question I did. Yeah, I know. I was just repeating it so I could understand it. Are you asking me how was the son born? Do you ever look at someone and wonder what is going on inside their head?

[A]

What?

[E]

How does he know that? I mean, why is he so sure?

[B]

Sorry, I've got lice on my brain.

[C]

Right.

[B]

BFF is Best Friends Forever. What is bfo?

[E]

Best Friends Often. Okay. Yep.

[B]

Are you ready?

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Are you ready?

[E]

I am all ready.

[B]

Do you see what I'm doing?

[E]

What are you doing?

[A]

Boink.

[E]

Does Dunkin Donuts have it?

[B]

Maybe.

[E]

No, no, no. Like here in America, they have people come in. Then I think somebody comes with a truck.

[B]

What?

[E]

What do you do with it? Wait, you have done it before?

[B]

Wait, how do they do that?

[E]

I don't even understand that question.

[C]

Wow.

[E]

Maybe I should tell Simon that we're in here.

[A]

Thank you for waiting. I'm going to help you.

[B]

Next up. Yes, just a senior.

[A]

Coffee, black, please. All right, 68 cents. Thank you. Thank you.

[B]

The Adler family.

[E]

As in producer Simon Adler and his dad, Tim.

[B]

Yep.

[D]

So a couple weeks back, I'm just.

[A]

Heading out of town now.

[D]

I asked my old man, my dad, to record himself going on a drive.

[A]

All good road trips deserve a cup of coffee. And being the frugal individual that I am, I decided that a drive through of McDonald's would be the appropriate place to fuel up.

[D]

He and my mom live in northwestern Wisconsin in a small little city town called Eau Claire.

[A]

I'm going to drive country roads.

[D]

And specifically what I had asked him to do was to go drive on the county highways just outside of town.

[A]

Passing through farm field areas. There are Very few cars on the road that I'm on.

[D]

And the reason I asked him to do this was because for as long as I can remember, he's had this nagging question, a question that he bombards me with every time I'm home. Oft times when we're talking on the phone, he'll bring it up.

[A]

Simon, can you hear me? Yes, yes.

[D]

Over the dinner table. Over email. I mean, I've heard about this at least 600 times. What does mom think about all this? I've never asked her.

[A]

I don't know. She just rolls her eyes. Okay, here he goes again.

[D]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

So what's happening?

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

So do you want me to tell you why I'm recording or do you want me to?

[A]

I knew we would get to it, so you can tell me now. I thought maybe it was gonna be like a puzzle that I had to.

[D]

Okay, well, let me just prompt you with this and see how well you take the bait here. Do you know the question I'm talking about? And could you just tell me what that question is?

[A]

The question is. Well, let me back up an example is this. A person will be riding a road bike down a lonely country road. Two other people will be walking their dog on the side of the road, and a semi trailer truck will then be coming down that road.

[D]

Okay, so we've got three different actors here and nobody else for miles and miles and miles.

[A]

And there is not. You haven't. The biker hasn't seen another car, truck, or pedestrian for miles on this road. Okay, but what will happen is all three of those actors will come together at the exact same point and the exact same time, creating a dangerous situation, first of all. But then it's just this spark, and then it diffuses. And you could sit on that stretch of road for six more years and not find that happen.

[D]

And the key thing here, my dad says, is he, Tim Adler, witnesses this sort of thing.

[A]

Oh, it happens to me a lot. All the time, I would say. It happens once every two weeks. Upcoming, we have the possibility of an event.

[D]

On the day I sent him to record himself. After 10 or 15 minutes of not seeing a single other car on the road, he came around this bend.

[A]

There's a manure wagon being driven by a tractor right down the road. And yes, here it all happens. The manure wagon is going down the road. A tractor has just pulled out on the road, and now I'm passing by, and all three happened at the exact same place. It just happens.

[D]

What is your question then? Is it, why does that happen or is it.

[A]

I guess the question is, why does this happen to me and does it seem to happen to others as well?

[B]

Okay.

[E]

I think it's quite complicated. I don't know if. Does your father get the thing to.

[D]

Get to the bottom of this, we called up a man who we thought might just have the answer.

[E]

I'm Professor. I'm actually Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter.

[D]

Wait, did you say you're Professor Sir? Does that mean you've been knighted?

[E]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[D]

You're a knight.

[E]

Yeah, yeah.

[D]

You're the first knight I've ever spoken to. I'm honored.

[E]

Oh, it's nothing. But Cambridge is stuffed full of. There's hundreds, there's three a penny around here.

[D]

The probability of me talking to a.

[E]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Very high indeed. Yeah.

[D]

Professor Sir David is a statistician.

[E]

We're pretty dull.

[D]

And when I ran my old man's question by him, his response.

[E]

I get quite a lot of stories like this. People contact me and they get very anxious, in fact, because they feel that something's going on in their lives, that making things happen all the time. They're getting signs from the environment around them. I mean, the term is. It's known as synchronicity. Synchronicity.

[A]

You know, there are these peculiar faculties of the psyche.

[E]

That was the term that Carl Jung invented for this, that it isn't entirely.

[A]

Confined to space and time.

[D]

Carl Gustav Jung, you know, the famed psychoanalyst of the 20th century.

[A]

You can have dreams or visions of the future.

[E]

He had the idea that there was actually some of form force behind nature that we didn't currently recognize that did drive these things to happen. Something beyond the normal rules of physics and quotes rationality. So he really believed that there was this external force. I think he just wasn't a very.

[D]

Good statistician because Sir David says, when you start to look at the events in our lives in terms of their.

[E]

Probability, every single event that happens to us is unbelievably unlikely and unpredictable. So the crucial thing that measures its sort of surprisingness is the unlikely likeliness of it occurring at some point over a reasonable period.

[D]

And just, I don't know. I'm trying to make this as concrete as possible.

[E]

So good luck.

[D]

So if you're driving down a street that has, I don't know, three cars per 10 miles and two bikers per 10 miles, how likely is it that over the course of those 10 miles you're gonna intersect the way that he does?

[E]

The likelihood of that happening any particular 10 miles or any particular hour is very low. It's a surprising event. But if your father drives a lot, the likelihood of it happening over, I don't know, maybe a week or two weeks, only a month is very high, Sir, David says.

[D]

Think of it this way. So let's say my dad would consider one of these intersections to be a meaningful coincidence, a synchronous event, if a semi truck and a biker pass him within five seconds of each other. Now, if in one hour of driving, my dad sees, say, 15 cars and five bikers, the math tells you that the likelihood of one of each, of both a car and a bike passing him in the same five second window is about 1 in 7,000. But think of how many of those five second windows there are in any given week or month. In fact, think of each of these five second windows as like one spin of a roulette wheel, a giant roulette wheel with 7,000 different numbers that you could bet the ball would land on.

[A]

But get your bets down, ladies and.

[D]

Gentlemen, and this is key. When my dad's driving, it's not like he only gets one spin of the wheel or one chance to see one of these synchronous events.

[A]

Instead, place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.

[D]

It's like every five seconds he gets to try again. And given that he drives like three hours a week, when you do the math, what you end up with is a 31% chance of him experiencing this in any given week. Meaning if he's looking for it, he should definitely expect to see one of these at least once a month.

[E]

So you have to not look at just the event, not just the particular thing your father observed. You have to think of all the chances for those things to occur that didn't occur. You know, you got to think of all the stuff you're not seeing.

[A]

How are ya? Pretty good. See that fish?

[D]

Quite the fish.

[A]

It was like his third cast and bang, he gets that thing.

[D]

I called my dad back to break the news to him.

[A]

All right, you want the answer? Yes.

[D]

So I explained it to him from the history of Jung to the fact that he's really just gotta pay attention to all the times these coincidences are happening, right? And when you look at it from that angle, it's statistically to be expected.

[A]

There. I understand, I understand. It's a little hard to swallow. I'm a little more Jungian than most. It does make sense from a statistical analysis, but why does it keep happening to me?

[E]

So these things do happen to Some people. And I've got a lot of admiration these people because your father's obviously a great man. It does tend to happen to people who are very sensitive and aware and they notice their environment. They're actually very mindful people that it happens to. And I suppose what I'm saying is this is a really admirable characteristic trait.

[A]

Well, there's no question this makes my day. When I've heard that I've been praised by a knight. Tell His Highness that someday we should go out for a cup of tea.

[D]

Not to bring it down, though. He heaped all this praise on you.

[E]

I'd love to meet him. I'm sure he's wonderful.

[D]

But then concluded by saying, but I would.

[E]

I think I would say that he's not very special.

[A]

Well, you didn't really have to tell me that.

[D]

Yeah, Sorry. Sorry.

[A]

No, that's okay. That. I'm gonna just listen to the first part. All right.

[D]

Okay.

[A]

Enjoy the rest of the day and the week.

[D]

Thanks.

[B]

I love you.

[D]

And I'll talk to. Tell Mom I'll give her a call, hopefully tomorrow morning.

[A]

Very fine. Love you, too.

[D]

Okay, talk to you later.

[A]

Bye. Bye.

[B]

Your home.

[A]

For NPR News and classical music, 89.3 wpne, green bay.

[B]

I want to ask you one question.

[A]

All right? Where am I? Where am I? Excellent question.

[B]

Just relax. Can you tell me where you are?

[A]

I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. Now, let's see. Why am I right?

[B]

Where was I?

[A]

Where am I? Where do I go? Where are you right now? Do you know where you are? How did you get here?

[B]

Oh, Christ. Oh, Christ.

[E]

Where am I?

[A]

Where am I? Where am I?

[B]

Oh, come on.

[A]

On, come. Oh, gosh. Where am I? Oh, my God. Oh, God. Where am I?

[B]

Stop.

[D]

Hi, this is Jacob calling from Tufts.

[B]

University in Medford, Massachusetts. Radiolab is supported in part by the.

[D]

Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about [e-mail]. i listen to Radiolab so much that I actually had that part memorized.

[C]

Radiolab is supported by bilt. Nobody wants to pay rent, but if you have to, BILT works to make it more worthwhile. By paying rent. Through bilt, you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and more. But it doesn't stop there. You can dine out at your favorite local restaurants and earn additional points, get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios, and enjoy exclusive experiences just for BILT members every month earn points on rent and around your neighborhood, wherever you call home by going to joinbilt.com Radiolab that's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com Radiolab.

[B]

Radiolab is supported by Rippling Finance. Teams often spend weeks chasing receipts, reconciling spreadsheets and fixing errors across disconnected spend tools. This can be frustrating, and that's not software as a service, that's sad software as a disservice. If you've been thinking about replacing stitched together tech stacks with one platform for all departments, Rippling can help. Rippling is a unified platform for global hr, payroll, IT and finance, helping people replace their mess of cobbled together tools with one system designed to help give leaders clarity, speed and control. By uniting employees, teams and departments in one system, Rippling works to remove the bottlenecks, busywork and silos in business software. With Rippling you can choose to run hr, IT and finance operations as one, or pick and choose the products that best fill the gaps. Right now you can get 6 months free when you go to rippling.com Radiolab learn more at R-I P P L-I-N-G.com Radiolab terms and conditions apply.

[C]

Hey, I'm Molly Webster and this is.

[B]

An ad by BetterHelp.

[C]

So it happens every year. The seasons are changing, the days are getting shorter, and basically once it becomes dark outside of my window, I feel.

[B]

Like the rest of the world disappears and I'm alone and there's nothing left.

[C]

To do but watch television. This November, Better Help is asking everyone to reach out to our people. That could be your family, your friends, your neighbors, and to resist this call of the cocoon.

[B]

And yeah, reaching out can take some courage. I've got text messages from January I.

[C]

Haven'T responded to and you know what? I'm gonna write them back right now.

[B]

Hi, sorry I've been missing.

[C]

How are you? Why don't we all do this sooner?

[B]

Therapy is the same.

[C]

BetterHelp makes it easier to take that first step. You just fill out a short questionnaire.

[B]

And they find a licensed therapist who.

[C]

They think you'll like.

[B]

Our listeners get 10% off their first.

[C]

Month at betterhelp.com Radiolab that's betterhelp.com Radiolab Radiolab is sponsored by OMG yes.com There is new research on pleasure that's actually fascinating and the site OMG yes makes it accessible to everyone. OMG yes shares finding from the largest ever study into women's Pleasure and intimacy. In partnership with researchers at Yale and Indiana University, they asked tens of thousands of couples what they wished they'd discovered sooner. They found the patterns in those discoveries. And all that wisdom and pleasure and intimacy is organized as hundreds of short videos, animations and how to's on omgs.com and guess what? Half of OMGS users are men. Hooray for generous lovers. Right? You'll find specific research backed techniques. It's the science of sexual generosity in action. See what they discovered [e-mail] that's OMG yes.com.

[B]

Chad Robert, Radiolab. And we are back with more questions.

[E]

Okay, so next up.

[A]

Yeah, my name's Evan Becker.

[E]

We're going to go to Boston with.

[B]

Evan Becker and here is his question.

[A]

So I grew up in the Boston area, still live in Boston today. Kind of relevant to this question is.

[E]

Evan, it turns out is something of a snowboarder.

[A]

Yep. You know, I've been snowboarding for 20 plus years or so and friends and I traditionally go up to New Hampshire, Vermont, you know, New England area to go skiing.

[E]

And you know, many years back on one of these group trips they took.

[A]

We were skiing and they had recently opened a snow tubing course.

[E]

And by the way, that tiny, that's our producer, Tracy Hunt.

[A]

And everybody's looking at the snow tube course. And some would just pose the question of like, how fast do you think that thing goes? And then another friend jumped in and said like, I bet you I can get that up to like 100 miles an hour easily from the top of the mountain. And was like, no way, you couldn't even do that in perfect conditions.

[E]

And from this small little disagreement, the.

[A]

Great debate began from there. And like, that was in 2004. Oh my God. So it's been going on for more than a decade.

[E]

And over the years, 10 years going back and forth and back and forth on this question, Evan and his friends gradually focused in on the rules of this argument. And eventually they came on this very specific wording.

[A]

So the question is, in perfect conditions within the earth's atmosphere and not within a vacuum, can you reach 100 miles per hour going down a mountain on an everyday snow tube, like an inner tube, like the same thing that you get if you went to a local hardware store or something like that. Nothing fancy, nothing overly engineered, things like that.

[E]

And still to this day, some of Evan's friends are like, yeah, we can break 100 miles an hour. We can.

[A]

But Evan, I just don't see that it could happen. He says, no, you cannot do that.

[B]

But I think it can happen. I think it can happen.

[E]

That is Destin Sandlin, host of an extremely popular YouTube channel called hey, it's me, Destin.

[A]

And welcome back to Smarter Every Day.

[E]

I'm, and this is important, Smarter every day. Because he is very smart on his channel. What Destin does is he proposes.

[B]

So you've probably observed that cats almost always land on their feet.

[E]

Questions.

[B]

Today's question is why?

[E]

Questions a lot like Evans, which he then proceeds to answer.

[B]

Let me introduce you to Gigi, the stunt cat.

[C]

I think, Destin, you're also an actual rocket scientist.

[A]

A little bit.

[B]

I've only said that one time. My mom corrected me very quickly. She's like, no, I'm what's called a flight test engineer. So we test missiles and helicopters and stuff like that. Well, can I say one thing before we start? Sure. I feel like before we jump to the answering part of this conversation, I want to appreciate the question. So I'm wondering, is there someone, Are there some physical reasons why 100 would be really hard to do in an inner tube down a hill? Yeah. So this is what I thought about when I first heard the question. So if you think about going down a hill, there's two things that are slowing you down. The first one is the friction with the snow, and the second one is.

[E]

The air resistance, which for Destin all boils down to something that he calls drag.

[B]

It's a 1/2 times the density of the air times the coefficient of drag times the cross sectional. So this started as a really simple question in my mind. And as I started gaming out how to do this without killing a person, the more I thought about it, the more I realized it can get very, very complicated. Yeah, I mean, I can show you all those equations, but I can't work them out on the back of an envelope. Mostly because math is hard.

[E]

Still, he did tell us that he was pretty confident that he could get this tube to go down more than 100 miles an hour down the hill.

[B]

Yes. I'm saying that it can happen. And are we sure that somebody hasn't done this and posted like their GoPro video on YouTube?

[C]

Well, there is a Guinness World Record.

[B]

For gravity powered snow sled. Whoa, what is that? What's the world record?

[E]

What is it?

[C]

She's passing me the phone.

[E]

Okay, so at this moment, Destin's wife, Tara Sandlin, she's in the studio because she's with him on vacation in New York and she's been looking at her iPhone at the Guinness World Records website.

[C]

Gravity powered snow sled, 134 kilometers per hour.

[B]

Wait, 100? That's over 100.

[C]

That's 83.4.

[B]

That's under gravity power sled. I'm over here questioning everything about what I believe. I mean, this is a big moment for me. A sled is meant for velocity. A tube is big. I think that would be faster. 83 miles an hour.

[E]

We're too slow here.

[B]

So here's the deal. I'm different than most people. I'm not gonna die in this foxhole. If it's clear that I'm wrong. If it's clear that I'm wrong, I'm gonna retract. Okay, so here's where I would go with this. This is what I would do. The real big thing that the tube causes a problem in my mind is all the friction on the mountain. Right. So, I mean, within the bounds of the question, because he went to all these great lengths to define what we could do and what we couldn't, he did not tell us what slope the mountain had to be on. And so what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to the worst possible mountain imaginable, which is straight down a cliff, basically.

[C]

Okay, are we all on the party line?

[E]

And so, with the help of producer Tracy Hunt.

[A]

Evan, I'm here.

[C]

And Destin Kajou.

[B]

Yeah, I heard. Evan, can you hear me?

[E]

We wanted Evan, the questioner, to hear how Destin's going to work this thing out.

[C]

Good.

[A]

We're all together, super excited to hear what the answers are.

[B]

Yeah. So this is ultimately a question about terminal velocity. Right. So in theory, if we were to go straight down, like out of an airplane, we would go as fast as we could ever go, because the only thing contributing to the terminal velocity at that point would be drag.

[E]

No friction at all.

[B]

And so would you accept the answer? If I'm able to go 100 miles per hour straight down out of an airplane, for example, would you say that it is possible? Maybe. Even if our, you know, even our far hill is only one degree off of, you know, straight down towards the earth, that still counts as the hill, right?

[A]

Yeah, I guess so. You know. Yeah. As long as it's going downhill in the Earth's atmosphere. Yeah.

[B]

So I want to call. I've got a buddy named Paul here in Alabama. He owns a place called Scott Ave. Alabama. I go to church with him, see him all the time, and I think he'd be game.

[C]

So could you, Destin? Like, I don't Know, like two way. Call him from your phone or something. Is that what you think you're going to try to do?

[B]

Yeah. So, Paul Rousseau. Here we go. What's up, man? Are you ready for me to merge? You?

[A]

All right.

[B]

Paul, are you there?

[A]

Yes, sir.

[B]

Oh.

[C]

Oh.

[A]

Hi, Paul.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

How's it going?

[C]

And we have Evan, who had this crazy question about snow tubing.

[A]

Okay. Hi there, Paul.

[B]

So, Paul, let me kind of set the stage here.

[E]

Okay. So Destin explains the whole inner tube thing, and he tells his friend Paul, we want to know is if you could jump out of a plane, go straight down, could you break the 100 mph barrier?

[B]

Is that safe? Can you do a test like that?

[A]

Well, yeah, it's totally possible. I've done it. What? Wait, you've done it with an inner tube? Absolutely. And a raft as well. Like a full size rattrap.

[B]

What?

[A]

Yeah.

[E]

Paul says that on two different occasions, he and a bunch of friends jumped out of an airplane carrying an inflatable flotation device in one hand, and they had a watch with a little computer that tracked their speed on the other.

[C]

How fast did you go?

[A]

In both cases, it was over 120.

[B]

Really?

[A]

Yeah. But, yes, it's 100% possible.

[E]

It does count.

[B]

It's the same.

[E]

It's as if he had a virtual mountain that he jumped off of.

[B]

The question specifically said on the mountain, like, these guys have been arguing about this for a decade and we're gonna come back to them and be like, noonu, just drop it out of an airplane.

[A]

No, that's cheating.

[B]

It doesn't resolve any therapy. You can be down a mountain and not touching the mountain. True or false.

[E]

That's where you go to law school and stuff like that.

[B]

Well, did you read the question? I am now hereby recusing myself from this whole affair. We have ceased to truly, in good faith, answer the question. What do you mean? And furthermore, we get the guy on the phone and we hoodwink him into accepting a renegotiated contract here of the question. No, that's.

[C]

No.

[B]

He got bullied. I am. I would not be a party to this. I. I know.

[A]

Where to go. Wow.

[B]

Please tell me now.

[C]

How much you care.

[A]

Please, please tell me now.

[E]

Tell us where we're going next.

[B]

So the next one is from our producer, Annie McKeown. Hello, Annie. Hello, Judd.

[E]

So what are we going to be talking about today?

[B]

What question do you bring us?

[C]

Okay, so this one is a little bit different because it didn't come in the form of A question. It came in the form of a very tantalizing email from a fellow named Arn Hendricks.

[E]

Arn Hendricks?

[C]

Yes, from Amsterdam.

[A]

Good morning.

[C]

Hi, is this Arn?

[A]

Yes, it's me.

[C]

And he basically said, hey, I'm Arn. I'm an artist. And I just want you all at Radiolab to know that me and my.

[A]

Friend, we are building an island of fat.

[C]

Are building an island of fat.

[E]

An island of fat.

[C]

Yeah, I know. Like, I was like, of all the things to build an island out of, why fat?

[A]

I'm just fascinated by it. I just, like thinking about it.

[C]

Well, what was. Like, what's the thing that made you start looking at fat in a curious way? What was the moment?

[A]

Well, the real moment. The real moment was I was sitting together with a friend of mine, Mike Thompson, and we are in a train going to Amsterdam, and we started talking about fat and that it was such a strange thing, fat. And why was there so much of it?

[C]

Were you eating fat or were you feeling fat or what?

[A]

I don't know. I mean, we're weird guys, right? We talk about things like this, but we're probably eating fat like chips or fries or something. And then we started talking about how in the English newspapers there had been these news stories about fatbergs, these fatbergs.

[C]

That are under the ground in the sewers of London just, like, wreaking havoc. And there was wine.

[A]

What?

[B]

Time out.

[C]

Spell that Fatberg. It's actually in the Oxford Dictionary since 2015. It's like an actual word now. Fatberg.

[E]

Like an iceberg?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Wait, in the sewers?

[C]

In the sewers.

[B]

Wow. What do those look like?

[C]

Well, I mean, like sort of imagine an iceberg, I guess, but this one's floating on the water in the tunnels underground in London and is made entirely of fat. Yeah. And a little while ago, Arn and his friend Mike actually got to go down into the sewers to check out these fatbergs.

[A]

And that was an amazing sort of.

[C]

Like wading through it with these waiter hip waders on, pushing bits and pieces of fat aside.

[A]

It's just this strange sort of trampoline of gooey stuff inside of the sewer.

[C]

Wait. Yeah, let me look it up.

[B]

Wait, is that a picture of it of a fatberg?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Oh, my God. Wow.

[C]

Yeah, so. So it's like this, like, clumpy, lumpy mass of garbagey fat stuff. It's gray and brown, and it's sort of like, filled with all this sewer stuff.

[A]

Worms live in it.

[E]

Ew.

[B]

Whoa.

[A]

Fungus grows on it.

[C]

And it just like completely blocks the old brick tunnels underground.

[B]

So this is like, this is like based on the things people have eaten. There's so much fat in people's diets and it ends up in the sewer?

[D]

No, no, no.

[C]

It's just like, it's like people throwing fat away. Like taking baking grease, throwing it down the sink. Cooking fat down the sink.

[B]

What?

[C]

Yeah. And in September of this year in London, they found a fatberg in the sewers that weighed as much as 11 double decker buses. That's how much fat.

[B]

Shut up.

[E]

I know it's in one place.

[C]

In one place.

[B]

Oh, my God.

[C]

Yeah. And of course.

[B]

Engineers at the Thames Water Company in Britain say they've launched a sewer war against a giant fat.

[A]

Blob clogging London's sewers the way it's.

[C]

Described in the news.

[A]

That is always a monster.

[B]

A horde of fatty monsters.

[A]

There can never be something positive. It needs to be a monster. It needs to be battled. We've Conquered has a bad rap, but.

[C]

I mean, Arn felt like maybe fat isn't a monster. Maybe it's just like this, this giant thing in the world that's, that's trying to express itself.

[A]

It wants to be there, it wants to be seen, it wants to be on stage. It wants some appreciation.

[C]

Fat trying to have a voice and say, like, listen to me, I am here. Don't throw me down your sink. I'm important. I make up 20% of your body. Da, da, da.

[B]

He's a fat evangelist.

[E]

Celebrate fat.

[C]

In some ways he does. He is, he is celebrating. And so he said, you know, if as an artist you're trying to explore water, you don't just drink it out.

[A]

Of a glass, you swim in the ocean. You have to ride your bicycle through a rainstorm. This is when you will start to appreciate water in a different way.

[C]

So he's trying to do the same kind of thing with fat, experience it in all these different ways.

[A]

We wanted to walk on it. We wanted to sort of make fat angels, you know, the snow angels. We want to make fat angels. We just want to have this different relationship with fat, I guess.

[E]

And is that where he came up with the majestical idea of building a fat island?

[C]

That's right.

[B]

Did he actually make one?

[C]

Yeah, yeah, he's making one right now. He's got like this spot off the wharf in Amsterdam, and right there in the ocean water, he's building this little floating blob of fat.

[A]

We're melting fat. We're rendering fat from waste materials from the butcher. Sometimes we're just buying it and we're melting it and then pouring it onto the island, making it bigger and bigger.

[C]

And right now it's like 15ft across, and it's just. Just like they're hanging out, bobbing up.

[A]

And down and side to side. And it's sort of, you know, it's alive, it moves. It's. It. You know, it's always changing. So we give ourselves maybe another half year or a year, and then it should be finished.

[C]

And could you. How actually, how big do you hope to get it? Can you think of, like, as big as a truck or a blue whale or bigger.

[A]

Bigger than, like a baby? No. No. Oh, my God. That would be amazing. Yes, of course, my dreams are like that. My dream is that I wouldn't be able to see the end of it. But that's not really realistic, I suppose. I mean, the size of two or three trucks would be amazing already. And then you have a real thing. I mean, I'd probably be able to stand on it. That's the thing. I would like to be able to stand on it. That would be pretty good. Then you can really safely call it an island somehow.

[C]

Definitely. Yeah.

[A]

It's a bit strange. I know it's strange, but I know that I love it. I know that when I'm there, I really love that little sort of thing that is there in the water.

[C]

Do you have. If we were to use this as part of the show, I need you to give me some kind of question that I can try and answer about fat. And it sounds like you are. Are doing a lot of questioning.

[A]

Well, I would really like to know when, like, I'm very, very, very curious about the relationship between life and fat. Was there first life or first fat?

[C]

Okay.

[A]

Or even when did fat start? Because we know when certain species of animals started and when the. We know more or less when the universe was created. Right. But when did fat start? When was the first fed? Okay, this is something that I would love to know.

[B]

When was the first fat?

[E]

The first fat?

[B]

That's interesting.

[C]

Yeah. And actually, it turns out that the very, very first version of fat has been around for a pretty long time.

[A]

As long as our solar system has been around before.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

So is this like Big Bang we're talking or.

[A]

Well, no, it would have been after that, after a star formed and exploded. Then you could start forming these.

[C]

Okay. So this is aqueous geochemist Tom McCollum.

[A]

I am in my pajamas.

[C]

Oh, that's so great. I got ahold of him during the Thanksgiving week. So Tom told me that the earliest, earliest version of fat was a carbon.

[A]

Hydrogen oxygen compound called fatty acid.

[C]

Fatty acid?

[B]

Yeah, hydrogen, carbon, oxygen.

[C]

So first you need hydrogen, and hydrogen comes along with the big bang. So we get that really early. Then we have to wait for star to form, a star to get old, a star to die and explode. And then you get carbon and oxygen. And that carbon and oxygen along with the hydrogen, is now sort of swirling around in this interstellar space dust stuff. And when those three things come together, they start to make these shapes.

[A]

So we have like a chain of carbons linked together, and each one of those carbons has a couple of hydrogens bonded to it.

[C]

So you've got a carbon hydrogen chain.

[A]

And then at one end is what's called a carboxyl group, and that's like.

[C]

A little group at the top that's got carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in it.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

So I like to think of it kind of like a flower. The stem of the flower is hydrogen, carbon. The petals of the flower contain oxygen as well as carbon and hydrogen. And there's fat in its little flower like shape long before the Earth existed floating around in space.

[B]

Hmm.

[C]

So then the sun and the moon and the earth and the planets form and you've got our solar system. And on the surface of the Earth after it's cooled, you've got fatty acid. Now we don't know exactly how they got there, whether they formed on the Earth itself or came from like comets and meteorites smacking into Earth. But the important thing is that fatty acids are there and there's also a lot of water there. And the water is important because the thing about these little fatty acids is.

[A]

That it has a hydrophobic end to the molecule.

[C]

So hydrophobic means like scared of water. So it's like it is averse, not like water. So our fatty acid flowers, the oxygen end, the flower end, that's the end.

[A]

That kind of likes water. And the stem end doesn't like to be in water.

[C]

And so if there's water, the stems are like, gah, we need to get away from it. And so all these flowers form this. You can imagine it like a bouquet that is so full that it is a sphere. So all the flowers are on the outside because they love water, and all the stems are on the inside and they're hiding from the water.

[B]

That's interesting. So all the fat flowers join together because it allows the water hating parts to hide.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And the watering loving parts to be on the surface.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

But this is all like long pre life.

[C]

This is. Life has no idea what it is yet. Life hasn't even thought about coming on the scene.

[B]

Interesting.

[C]

But there is a theory. It's one of many theories out there, but there's an idea that when these little fat flower bubbles form in this sort of primordial sea, they're kind of.

[A]

Taking a little sample of the fluid that's surrounding them, inside with them. So whatever in your fluid, it's going to get trapped inside there.

[C]

So on the inside, they've got some things, some visitors. Some visitors. And the theory goes that maybe one of the things around in the sea that ended up getting pulled inside one of those fat bubbles was a little floaty bit of genetic material, like a little bit of rna. And then for the first time ever, instead of random bits of RNA floating around in a soupy sea, you have a cell for the first time, you have an inside. You have a. You separate from the soup around you.

[B]

So the fat ball, these fatty little.

[E]

Threesomes that floated in from outer space and maybe landed here.

[B]

Oh, so cool.

[E]

Was the first container that made life possible.

[C]

That's right.

[A]

I don't think there is any way to really have anything like we call a living being without having a membrane or something separate it from the surroundings.

[E]

Fat is really important. Profoundly important.

[C]

Fat is. Without fat, there would be no us. There would be no us.

[B]

I love it. We are built in houses of fat.

[E]

So that means when you get your soap bar out in the shower, you should give it some respect.

[B]

It's so fat.

[E]

Yeah, I think so.

[C]

Yeah. It is fat.

[B]

Is it?

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[E]

Oh, traditional soap is just fat, I think.

[B]

Really?

[E]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Shit, I didn't know that.

[C]

That's okay. You don't know everything, John.

[B]

I mean.

[C]

But I think I'm actually really excited for Arin to hear this because I feel like. I mean, what can convey awe the way that the beginning of life is.

[E]

Oh, you haven't told him this yet?

[C]

No, I haven't. Can you hear me?

[E]

Ooh, I wonder what he'll say.

[C]

Arn?

[E]

Yes.

[C]

Oh, great. Okay. So I called Arn again, and this time he was at a conference.

[A]

All my coats are covered in fat now. I had to go to this conference. I didn't know what coat to wear because they're all fatty. Luckily, I found an old coat, but, you know, everything is covered in fat. So weird how this is taking over my life and I just have to deal with it. Anyway.

[C]

So I wanted to tell you what my scientist told me. About the earliest form of fat. Can I tell you?

[A]

Yes, please.

[C]

Okay, so I'm trying to think of a way to put this succinctly. Okay. So I told him everything I learned. It makes a barrier between us and the rest of the world. It makes us.

[A]

Really?

[C]

Yeah. Yeah. And it could be that these, these like early, early fatty acids are the thing that make life as we know it possible.

[A]

I suspected it. I suspected it.

[C]

Really?

[A]

Why? Yes.

[C]

How did you.

[A]

I don't know. Intuition, I guess. It's beautiful. This is how it's supposed to be. This is what I've always dreamt of. The Burke starts to generate enthusiasm and love. And so nice that you are now telling me things that I don't know.

[B]

Oh, good.

[A]

This is what. This is why I live to have this kind of moment. So nice.

[C]

Thanks, guys.

[E]

Okay.

[B]

Yeah, nice.

[A]

Andy.

[B]

A lot of people to thank for this, these two episodes. This was actually a really real group effort. But particular props to producers Tracy Hunt and Matt Kilty for spearheading the whole thing and to Bethel and to Bethel Haptay for a huge production assist. And should you have a question that's. That's burning in your brain, we know.

[E]

Exactly who to send it to.

[B]

Send it to [e-mail] and also [e-mail] if he likes to get them.

[E]

No, he don't. Particularly. Not particularly. Post office box.

[B]

He does particularly like it when you stand on the sidewalk just outside his window and say krolwich. I'm furious with curiosity.

[E]

I don't. Because I'm on the fifth floor and you'd have to be very tall or in a tree.

[B]

Okay, we say we should say goodbye. I'm Jad Abumrad.

[E]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[B]

Thank you for listening and for questing with us.

[E]

Yes, questing.

[B]

I got a question for you. I got a question for you. Here's a question. What?

[C]

Why?

[A]

What? What?

[B]

What?

[A]

What?

[B]

What does this mean? You ask.

[E]

I've been wondering all day too.

[A]

Let's get to our next question.

[B]

And here it is.

[A]

Cheryl, how did you do that?

[B]

Do what? That.

[C]

What?

[A]

What?

[B]

What?

[A]

What?

[B]

That.

[A]

What? That what? Time for another question.

[B]

So let's get to it, players.

[A]

To be. I think I know the question.

[B]

Or not to be.

[A]

What's the question?

[B]

That is the question. That's the question.

[A]

Wow. I'm looking for a couple witnesses today. Why does the heathen rule? Give me a testimony. I know who the righteous suffer but I know that I know God that don't make no sense that I know that I know that I know that.

[B]

I know why do some things where.

[E]

You ask God, what happened to me? Why?

[A]

Why? To play the message, press 2. Hello, this is Timothy Adler, father of Simon Adler, from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is produced by Thorin Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Maria Matassar Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachel Puzik, David Gable, Bethel Hobke, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kilke, Robert Korwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Melissa O', Donnell, Arian Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Amanda Erenchik, Chima Oliay, David Fox, Nigar Fatali, Phoebe Wang, and Katie Ferguson. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. End of message.