Disposing of Radioactive Waste in Space

Welcome to the Rest of Science, I'm Hanah Frey and I'm Michel Stevenens. And it's Field Notes today, which means one of us brouought an object and I'm calling this series Hannah's Boring Rocks. Oh, another episode of Hannah's Boring Rocks. Now You would not believe how heavy my bag was this morning with all these rocks. O they're big heavy ones. I've got I think this might be my favorite rock From just looking at it from afar, you want to guess why it's my favoriteck Oh, wow. it looks like a Tuber some kind of like potato relative, but it's a rock. It's a rock. It's definitely a rockg for those of you who are watching say fosilized. It is fosilized. Yeah. Well bos. It used to be a tree. It did not used to be a tree. Well, I don't have a confirmation of this by the way, because this is a rock. It's quite dense. So it looks like It looks like a very knotted kind of knee like a if you imagine an alien, like a gray classic alien and you ripped its knee off an inch above and below. It's got little thin legs coming out of this weird knotted joint but its real color is Oh, well, it's interestingly, it's kind of a brownish bray A gown is spray Iested a spoonism in real life. is aming. Al almost never see them. You almost ever see them in the wild. that was one It's a brownish gray, but there's Facks of like purplish pink on it. Yeah. I'm not sure what that is actually. I'm not sure what that is. And then there's places where it's been chipped and you can see a dark It almost like a blackish milky black color inside. And again, should I lick it I think you can lick this one safely Oh, no, wait, I took it Okay, so this one is a lot denser Wait a little pendant one. How do I have It is not as spongy, not as pumusy Um I don't understand what it is though. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Scientists have found that cancer risks usually increase with age and size, but some species defy the odds. For example, deep sea Greenland sharks. 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For more information about Cancer Research UK their research and breakthroughs and how you can support them Visit canancerreesearch UK dot org slash the rest is science Let's talk about Peeroni's disease or PD It's not widely talked about and some men may feel reluctant to bring it up But it's more common than you'd think PD can happen when scar tissue builds up under the skin of the penis, causing a curve or the bump during an erection that for some men, may lead to pain during intimacy and impact mental health A trusted urology specialist can help diagnose PD and walk you through your options, including non surgical treatment Visit talkboutpD. com Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun. Army hung on her every word. My champions, I have sold my chariot on Carvana. 'Twas a lovely SUV, an inexplicably queenly offer. They're even coming to the castle to collect it Tolite, We feast An offer you can feast on. seell your car today on Carmana Pick up these m Okay, so this is this is a rock that I found on holiday many, many moons ago when I was in the Dorin in France. And we were at this river beach and there was you know all of these like normal little rocks. and this one was poking out. It was like, that air that's a weird rock, isn't it? And as I picked it up, it's like the things that I notice about it, okay. So it's very knobbly. It does look like a knee or maybe a shoulder. Yeah. But the thing that really marks this out as'm I haven't had this confirmed, by the way, but like I'm ninety nine percent sure that this is a fossil. Specifically I think this is fossilised reindeer from partly because of where I found it, but also the shape of it, I think is like part of a shoulder bone. But the thing that really demonstrates, I think that this was once a bone, is that when you look at the edge of it, you can see these this very regular pattern So it's very dense around the outside and then there's almost a circular ring on the inside, which has this pitting that looks like it was once bone marrow. And it's not just at one edge. you see it actually every time that the stone is kind of cut at these different different junctions of where the bone might have been, you can see essentially where the bone marrow once was, It's kind of most clear right at the very end Wow, so it used to be a bone, but it's just been like mineralized. It's been mineralized. and now it's a rock. and now it's a rock that tells us something about the shape of this. very ancient animal. Okay, so I think I have a few more clues about what this animal, you know was doing and why it turned up in this river bed in the dooror. But the first thing I want to say is about how fossils even made because what you're holding in your hand is no longer the bone of an animal. That's right. There's no biological material or very little biological material in there at all Because fossils are actually rocks, right? They're not They're sort of the rock shape of the bone that once was. That's right. It's like a Not even a ghost of the old animal. It's a think a pretnder A prettender of the old bone. So the way do you get a fossil, okay? I mean, you need a very, very, very special set of circumstances. You have to be unbelievably lucky. The estimates are that only one in a billion bones will ever make it into being a fossil. Yeah, which is phenomenal. It's phenomen. It's so weird out of everyone alive today Not even a full skeleton will be fossilized in the future C completely if you take one in a billion bones They're not going to be able to make a whole skeleton of a person who was alive in twenty twenty six. No. It's phenomenally rare for this to happen for there to be a fossil The way that they happen, first off, you need a sort of lucky accident. You need when an animal to die, it needs to be buried almost instantly by soft soil sediment, by mud, something like that, silt, salt, whatever it might be volcanic ash. And the reason why you need that that rapid burial is so that you don't get scavengers coming along and eating all the flesh and ripping the bonespart so that they're not even foundound together. Yeah, or even twoing on the bones. even on the bones You know, if a creature dies just in a kind of open grassy plane, it's game over, no muscles there. What happens when it is buried is that over time, all of the fleshy stuff will decay and you'll be left with just the hardest biological material, the bones But inside the bones, you'll have these like cavities, these porr spaces where you know bone marrow, where blood vessels and so on once were. So then the next step, so once you've had that lucky accident, you've just got these bones that buried. the next step is something called perm mineralization. Essentially, what happens here is that you get really mineral rich ground waterater that passes through wherever this thing is buried, seep through. And then as the water filters through these microscopic little pores, I mean, we're talking millions of years here, like really, really, really long time You get all the minerals that are dissolved in the water that end up slowly, slowly slowly molecule by molecule, replacing the organic matter inside until the original bone ends up becoming this solid stone. You also then need loads of new sediment to kind of pressurize it down to solidify that into rock. And then the most unusual bit is it then needs to be pushed up to the surface and actually found by somebody before it ends up decaying into nothing Yeah. So here's the thing about this particular one. I mean it's unbelievably unlikely, unbelievably unlikely that any boneess ever made into a fossil, and incredibly, incredibly unlikely that you might just chance bom ones. I feel extremely lucky to have found this one This one, though, where it was in France, this particular area in sort of the middle of France, they have these very famous caves there This is where the oldest cave paintings have been found You know what're talking. That's where we're talking all around there So in the last ice age, which is about fifteen thousand years ago or so there were human settlers. We know that there were human settlers that were living inside of those caves but also There were an enormous number of reindeer wandering around. Yeahah. and they wound up in the cave paintings. They wound up in the cave paintings, absolutely. But they were also this really great source of meat, okay The humans were eating, when they were having like reindeer buffets left Rhion Center Monday through Sunday And what would happen when the humans would eat these reindeer is they would discard the bones inside the caves in this like pile of bones that would then very easily get covered over by kind of silt on the floor, you know sediment from the top falling down. And so there is an increased number of bones of reindeers that were eaten I sayed humans Now I said this is only fifteen thousand years ago, right? So This is actually probably what's known as like a pre fossil. It hasn't gone through the full fossilization process But at some point then, the caves shifted, the geology of things shifted, the river kind of washed in eroded some of it away, brought this bone. This is what I'm saying, right? I'm saying that this I'm this is like Prehistoric trash, right? That's that's what I think this is. So you're saying that some of these Early human artists could have eaten that here, right? I think so. I think that's what we're looking at ye. It could have been the muse that inspired one of their cave paintings, which is very cool. Or fueled it, indeed Now if there definitely been fossils been found that have signs of being cut by humans, right? I don't know. I'm not an expert. so I've looked quite closely and can't see anything that looks really distinctively like a cut mark as opposed to something that's just been like slightly smashed along the riverbed. Yeah. But nonetheless, that's what I'm going for. I think this is an ice age snack That's really cool. Isn't it? That's really, really cool. It's such an important part of Not just animal history on Eth, but human history and art history. Exactly. red stuff on it, I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is. It looks like paint. It does look like paint. It looks like it got some paint splashed on it a long, long time ago. It could also be that that's been in my house for quite a long time, and it could be that my daughter just decided to paint it decor. I be hon that is also a possibility. That's very much a possibility But but yeah, that's my artteifact for that. I love it. Thank you for showing that to me. You were welcome. Youave you ever found a fossil? Uh yeah, I mean, I found like fossils in some rocks in my grandparents' yard, like little shells and stuff. Yeah Yeah, I I'm making it sound like it wasn't cool, but just there were so many of them, it didn't seem very special. Wait, where's this in Kansas? Yeah us Incredible what? you open up the rocks and found shells inside. Oh, yeah, like so many guys think I've never had that experience. Oh, really? It was like o they're just in a fossil and it was like you wouldn't even keep them because it was just like, w Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hm How did you know what rocks they were going to be in Because it was a rock. I mean, it was all of them. was a certain kind of rock that was used as like a retaining wall. And it was very much like a striated kind of thing and sheets would break off. And you'd be like, oh, there's fossils here. There's all these shelled animals. Yeah. Beause I guess in a way turn you turn the sort of probability on its head, right? The chance of any of us becoming fossils is almost zero. At the same time, if you're in a particular part of the world which did have the conditions in which to create fossils, then your chances of finding them are really high. Well, right, and sure, we're also looking at like a billion years of history in that one rock. L it's not just all the little shelled prehistoric creatures that we were living at a certain time, it's like Billions and billions and billions of them over millions and millions of years all had like a little bit of a chance of being a fossil. So you eventually find like a dozen fossils. just in this this one rock I've been down to the Jurassic coast. This is where Mary Anning made her name, right who sort of collected the fossils. You know that she sells sea shells. Was it about her? Not Mary Anning? No kidding. Yeah. So Mary Anning, she was like like a girl. she was young, right? when she found like the first dinosaur fossil. Absolutely I've been down there because you know, there really was at one point this plethora of these things down there on the Jurassic coast I'm south of England. I've been down there, didn't find anything. Hm. I mean Did I try very h? I'd already had my m. I'd already had my reind dead you know, snack find sort of Ice Age KFC. I'm looking up when Mary Anning found this stuff. Yeah, because I just think it's very cool that major discoveries, okay So This is in the early eighteen hundreds. Right which I just find so cool because it means people like George Washington didn't know that dinosaurs ever existed. Oh, that's such a fun idea. Isn't that funny? Yeah, that's really nice. But the thing is is that presumably people had found these. I remember hearing a story about some British academics who were this is like nineteen fifties or so Who are visiting China went to a Chinese medicine center shop And I don't know if you've ever been to one of these, but they are the most amazing places. They have like, all, it feels like you're in ancient apotheery, which you sort of are in a way. Yeah. You know like mushrooms and like snakes and like fried lizards and everything you can imagine on the walk And these academics were in there and they were like, what what's that giant bone that you've got Oh yeah, yeah, that's Dragon Thigh. So okay drag Dragon thigh. Let's have a look it. Any it' from Iiguanadon. Wow. Well of course because before Marary Anning, people had found things. Yeah, they didn't know what they were. They didn't know what they were. They would think, hey, this must be a cyclops. It's proof of these mythological creatures even factacts from early humans, like sharpened stones They were found all the time. back in the day and people called them Thunderstones and thought that they were maybe something from the gods or from the sky. But it really was like one of the first axes ever made. you know Wow Yeah Is that cool? Like it blows my mind how quickly we kind of forget our own past. I'm obsessed with The understanding of pre history in antiquity To what extent did people in ancient Greece conceive of time before agriculture, for example, and in human history and it's hard to know because we only have so much from them, but there wasn't someone and I forget who it was who wrote about how the Greeks Meaning him, ancient Greeks like us used to be nomadic. pre agriculture people And I think the idea came from the fact that there were nomadic people that they could witness who like didn't have language in the same way. And they'd be like, I think we were like them before too and that There's some story here. There's also, I think, Eerodotus believed it could have been him. It could have been some other historian believed that he could trace his genealogy back to the gods He'd go back like, I don't know. fourteen generations and I come from, you know, the gods who created the world. But then he went to Egypt and he phharohs there and they were like, Oh you like history, you like old things. Well look here and they showed in this hall. and there was a statue of like every phharaoh And it went back like fififty pharaohs And all of them are these like humans they have records of, and he's like, oh my gosh, humanity is so much older than I thought Wow. becausecause they've tracked the years of the reign for all these pharaohs going back further than I even thought humans existed And this was this like major moment for Western thought to go, wow Humans, like where did we really come from? Oh, that's interesting. Yeah I think you sometimes get traces of what our ancestors thought through stories You know, I always think look, this is something it becomes impossible to prove. you this is not falsifiable. But things like the story of Atlantis where there was, you know a really great city that was one day flooded by this great wave that kind of came and took everything away Okay, there's been people who've looked quite seriously for where this might be We do know that there were some human civilizations that were genuinely washed away by, you know sort of in one day.. I think one of the really great candidates for this is I think it's called Dogerland. Do you know about Dogerland? Oh, that used to be part of England. Exactly. It used to connect England over to Denmark and France, the continently And one day there was this shift in the tectonic plates up by you know off the coast of Norway, this unbelievable tsunami that you I mean, inconceivable of how big this thing was and came in and just completely washed away all of these sediments. I mean find you find sediment sitting on top of human settlements inand in Scotland, you know, sort of five thousand hundred miles inland where this tsunami kind of came and covered over everything. So And I sort of wonder like how much of those stories that we still have around are actually based on real things that really happened And they were shared like orally only Yeah And so they became what very much feel like myths today. Yeah. And yet yeah. The flood myths that we see in the Bible that we see in Gilgamesh could have been a story from thousands of years before where maybe the Mediterranean suddenly filled up. Right just it felt like the entire world was flooded And these things may have happened and then they wound up getting written down as stories of like, yeah, this happened. But again, it's a game of telephone that's gone through a hundred generations, maybe not a hundred, but dozens and generations Dozens and dozens. Well I think may maybe a hundred, right? Maybe these same stories in some form or another end up being passed down You know, more than a thousand. I don't want to hear those stories. L I want to know if someone in say, like Ancient, you know, Mesopotamia has like a great, great grandfather who was like there was a time before writing you know, when your ancestors were kids, they had just had to talk to each other. They didn't have any of this written word This modern stuff. Yeah. Yeah we had to find things to eat. We didn't have fences. Yeah. the problem is that human Civilization and like technological change was so slow that there wasn't like just a generational gap. likeike, ah, you know We didn't have a concept of interior consciousness when I was a kid. We were all just spirits, you know, but like that at some point that changed and I'm fascinated by when people realized, o man We didn't We didn't used to have opposable thumbs, you know Yeah. Unfortunately that happens so slowly. we don't have that story of like Oh, we were living in trees when I was a kid and now you've all got homes and containers. But look at you with the invention of the bucket. Yeah. Oh yeah. The kids are all about wheels nowadays. They're not living in the moment. Yeah. But here's a nice thing to imagine, literally all of that time, while all of that stuff was going on, you know, Dogerand and stories of Atlantis and all of these different Greek philosophers, this was hiding in a trash pile in a cave in France. Yeah, waiting to become what you would find so many years later Now I should tell you, if you do find fossil as many as ago there I found this one. If you do find a fossil, you are supposed to leave it there or take it to a museum. That's a very good point. Yeah. tellell someone because even even moving it changes what we know about. It's story and what we can learn from it. Don't do what I did. many, many years ago. Good lesson it'site cool,' theren' it? Yeah. It's pretty cool. All right, we're going to come back after the break with some of your questions. Hey parents How do you make smarter choices for your kids' college today? That's where Sally can help With Sally, you can find scholarships, funding options, tools, and guidance all in one place And if you need a loan, Sally has options for different families and different situations College is only worth it if you do it right. So don't just help your kid go. Help them go smarter Sally d. com slash go parents Let's talk about a condition many people haven't heard of It turns out, it's more common than you'd think Heyrony's disease, or PD for short PedD can happen when scar tissue builds up under the skin of the penis This can cause a curve or a bump during an erection and for some men, lead to pain during intimacy and may impact mental health It may also lead to anger and frustration deression, lower self esteem. and even withdraw from sexual activity and physical intimacy Because of this, some men could feel embarrassed or reluctant to talk about PD The actual cause of PD isn't always known In some cases, it may be linked to a minor injury or repeated injuries during sex or other physical activity. The good news is PD is treatable. If you notice a curve with a bump, a trusted urology specialist can help diagnose it walk you through your options, including non surgical treatment To learn more about Pyroni's disease, visit talkaboutpD d. comot Study and play! Come together on a Windows eleven PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows eleven PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft three hundred sixty five preremium and a year of Xbox GamePass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows dot com slash student offer Whw S supppplies last ends june thirtieth turnerms at aka. mS slash collollege PC All right, first question for you, Michael. this is from Matt, who asks What would happen to Earth if the sun simply vanished for seventy two hours Geez. In some ways, not a whole lot In other ways an enormous amount. Like if the sun The Sn disappears. justust magically, it's like gone, you know, there's nothing caught. It didn't get sucked in by a black hole or anything else. All we need to worry about is the sun's gone. U, It would take eight minutes for us to find out notot just the light from the sun, meaning its entire shape, it would continue to be in the sky for us as we receive its last, you light. It's gravity too would still act on us. We would continue to orbit this non existent now star. Thin. we wouldn't And Earth would still move, but it would just start moving tangentially out in a straight line out of its orbit. Like being flung off of a little roundabout. It would Yeah, but you know, I don't think we would even feel it. Yeah because our orbit is so big that the difference between curving such that after three hundred and sixty five days, you're back to where you were It's not much different than just going in a straight line So I don't think we would heal much. Honestly And then here's the thing, like for the first three days, it would be dark Right? Um, and it would get colder, but not that quickly. Earth holds in heat pretty well And so for just three days, I think we would all be um. I don't know toally fine. I think Definitely parts of the world would be fine Um, surprisingly If if you wait too long, it gets very cold and the only place you can live is going to be around places where there's immense geothermal heat available. So Yellowstone would be good. I Iceland would be good. You could people could still live there we could dig down you could dig down down at the bottom of the ocean, where you've got geothermal vents and a lot of heat the creatures, the little microorganisms that live there, They wouldn't know the sun was gone. They don't even know there is a sun. They live in complete darkness, but they get all the nutrients and heat that they need from the Eth itself They're literally independent of the sun They only need the sun in the fact that like it helps Wow, no, they don't even need it. I wonder, But then at the same time, you do get some decomposing matter, right that falls down to the bottom of the ocean. I mean, I'm just thinking here about that rule that people say, o Oh all energy comes from the sun, everythingthing comes in the sun. That's what I'm king But actually if you get decomposing biological matter that falls to the bottom of the ocean and that's they' feeding on, that's where they're sort of indirectly getting energy from the sun. Definitely. I think there are though, extremophiles that do not rely on decay m that can live off of the minerals gases that come out of these geothermal vents. Wow And they like almost never needed a son Because if the sun hadn't formed, but Earth had out of this protoplanetary disk, or if Earth had formed and then gotten flung out into interstellar space. There still would have been enough heat. Well, I mean, I don't know if life would have evolved, but like let's assume that that still happens. It could have just been fine on this completely dark planet where it's always night. Matt's question says that the sun comes back after seventy two hours. Yeah. And that's where things get a bit a bit spicy because Earth going in this orbit normally the sun disappears and it just flies out tangentially. But three days later, boom, bunch of gravity's back. Is it going to get pulled back into a now very different orbit? I would assume so in which case Uh, then yeah, then things are bad because you've got a sun back and you've got night and day again But you're now much further away from the sun. N far I think, for liquid water to exist So u I don't know how far the Earth would go in three days, how far away from the sun It wouldn't be good I'm just wondering again, around geothermal areas, there could still be liquid water I don't think it would mean the end of life. I think it would definitely be a major change. Well, because I mean, even if you had a situation where night and day, summer and winter were messed up even if you were still allowed to have liquid water, let's say, but actually plants that we have, I mean many of them would just die because they are so perfectly tuned to the rhythm of the planet that they just would not be able to survive. And it's one of the reasons we bring plants inside and they're just like, what? You can't deal with the difference in light. Yeah. So I don't think it'd be the end of life though. I think there are plants that would be like, o, we are, you know thousands and thousands of miles further from the sun than we used to be. in ofou I dont fast does the Earth orbit the Sun I'm gonna guess Look at it up, but I'm going I'm gonna put in a guess. I'm going to guess that it's like one hundred thousand miles a day sixty seven thousand miles per hour Okay about sixty six thousand miles per hour. three days, the Eth would be like three hundred thousand kilometers further away, which is kind of Where is the moon? Oh, that's I was thinking. I think it's about ten times the distance between H in the moon The moon is about four hundred thousand kilometers away, but the Earth only orbits one hundred thousand kilometers per hour. Oh goodness. Yeah. So you're right. The Earth would be much further away from its current position than the mooon is from us. Yeah. So yeah, that would drastically change the climate. would be I don't think it would be the end of life Okay, well then it's fine. Let's fine I mean, let's do it Look, it's still a scientific experiment. It's still going to gain knowledge overall. I'm thin let's do it. let's do it. Okay, next question. This is from Anna. Hannah, Michael, I have some gossip. Actually, there's no gossip. But why do we love it so much? How did it evolve? Is it true that humans evolved language because they wanted to gossip Okay, I unashamedly adore gossip. Yeah I think Anyone who says they don't is lying I like nice gossip by the way, I don't like mean gossip, avoid mean gossip. but this is absolutely something that we are evolved to adore. U this is some work by Dunbar that she's referencing in her question here who argues, again, this is something that's quite difficult to falsify. It's really difficult to sort of say this is the definitive answer. But Dumbar, anyway, argued that human language didn't involve to coordinate hunting or like attack dangerous predators or whatever, but that instead it was like a form of vocal grooming. So when you look at monkeys, they're all happily grooming each other. It's really delightful. feels really nice same is someone stroking your hair, you know,k is a lovely, lovely thing. But because we have these larger social groups,t you can't physically do that. You can't sort of physically go around and massage each other. But instead, if you're chatting about social relationships, you're kind of doing the same thing, but just in a wordy way, instead. You know you're building a fire, you're like gossiping about the group over there. You're connecting all together at the same time without needing to necessarily physically touch one another. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think that the of communication that would be needed to organize a hunt or, you know, assign roles in helping Tenda fire is one thing. But what happens to a language when what's pushing its development is gossip?'s just that's just so much bigger and faster. Yeah, totally Let me look up the etymology of gossip because it's actually pretty cool. It comes from God Godsip. No. Yeah. let me As in God absolutely loves to drink from that delicious cup. As in like God child? Oh. meaning a relative, yeah So yeah, the word gossip. comes from the word Godsip Meaning a relative, a sibling And so gossip was was talk about the people that you knew closely. I think that we know them closely. in the way that we do uniquely as humans because we talk about them. We don't just see them in their behavior, but we have versions of them in our own heads and we I mean we are this social animal that's social in a way that's different than an ant or a bee, which are also hyper social. Yeah, yeah., but we We're cognitive social.ive We're judgmentally social. Which also makes sense though, because if you think that our societies are built on mutual cooperation, you know, it kind of does make sense that you need a mechanism to identify who's being a bit selfish, to identify who's like happy to eat meat but refuses to go on the hunt, you know? That's right Some of that is even like just the surface. I think we are social creatures in terms of judgment We come up with completely arbitrary, unrelated to cooperation and survival reasons to judge people's behavior. We come up with rituals, which is defined as a thing that literally doesn't cause anything specific. You just do it. Wh? Because it doesn't need to be done. and yet it does. Give an example. An example would be things like burial practices, rain dances the various ways like ceremonial statues are treated, you know, these things have no obvious causal connection and yet participating in these rituals, the way you paint your body, the way you act and don't act They don't have any real like scientific obvious reason to be done the way that they do, except that doing them means you're part of this group. this group of relatives, this small community, this gossip, the gossip is what enforces that and keeps us together. The silly little outfits academics wear. Exactly. And to this day, We often think of gossip as like a thing that is very feminine or a thing that is very like It's trashy. People think of it as trash and narrow. But yet, no, no, no. The vast majority of news we consume, even respectable news, is just gossip. Did you know what these anonymous members of the administration said about this And we go, oh, well, this isn't really gossip. this is important national security news. And it's both. Yeah, I totally agree. I also I have definitely discovered over the years that it depends what format you're delivering science stories in If you want to grab people's attention, you know if you're doing a reel or a YouTube show or whatever, absolutely the number one thing that I think in my head when I'm like, right, how am I going to script this is how do I make it sound as much like gossip as possible?? Be that is the thing that makes everybody's ears break up and everybody want to pay attention immediately because we just can't help it. We are so wired that way. We're wired that way. We want to hear those stories and we want to be part of those stories. I also think that Like what motivates me when I come up with how do I tell this story is how do I make this a thing that the viewers can then share so that they feel more interesting And they feel like when people talk about them behind their back and gossip about them, they'll say, wow, did you hear? Michael had a really good point about, you know this question and d d. And that's what people want. want el to make themselves more interesting in gossip about themselves. Yeah, you're right. I mean, everyone talks about like, o, make it shareable Yeah make it gospipable. Gosssipable. That's essenty what we're tal. Okay, last question, this one's from John Why don't we just chuck all radioactive waste into a volcano Well becausecause we don't want to destroy our species? I mean, is this a joke question? L Okay. No, it would be it would not be good. It wouldn't get rid of it. In fact, it would only make it hotter And a vol doesn't get rid of the radioactiveveness. It Well doesn't because volcanoes are actively like giving their molten contents onto the surface the only thing that we can do with radioactive waste that U I think really would make a difference is put it in the sun get it really far away Throw it into the sun and then it's not coming back. And like the sun's gravity will tear it apart, it'll get destroyed the atoms will still exist. You know, the sun's far away and Earth's atmosphere will protect us and there's already a bunch of radiation coming from the sun I think that's where we should be putting a lot of stuff that we want to get rid of that microorganisms can't get rid of, like styrofoam Um Put it in the sun. One tiny problem with that, just a slight objection to get it to the sun. I mean, you've got to put it in a rocket ship and blast it off the surface of the Earth. Right, whichich essentially means atttaching a bomb to it, you know? I think I think no. I think let's just bear. I think this is why we have to build the space elevator. Yeah. So then we can just put it in a little cart that gets carted up into to an orbital height and then we can just let it drift into the sun. and now it's not our problem anymore. Yeah. wouldouldn't that be nice falls into the sun, all it'll do is make the sun. a little tiny bit brighter. It'll also make the sun live less long Oh, that's what we're losing because the more mass the sun has, the hotter it burns, the quicker it burns through its fuel. Hey, we've got billions of years, don't worry. We've got billions of years. What's another couple, you know, literally like a big chunk of radioactive waste would probably take literally a nanosecond off the sun's light. it. Let's just do it. Let's just do it Okay, so in this episode we have we've decided that we're going to get rid of the sun, but not before we chuckled of our radioactive waste in there. mean This is the kind of gossip that you came for. If you enjoyed this episode, then please do like and subscribe on YouTube or leave us a comment. We read all of them. You can leave us a question underneath wherever you have found this podcast or send us an email, the rest is science at gohanger dot com dot Can you believe what Michael said about the sun? That was disgusting He's just Today don't respect The sun That's what we're talking about. Send us more gosip. We'll see you next time