Listener Questions #55

Daniel and Kelly answer listener questions about how much oil is left underground, how parasites recognize "new" hosts, and when to date the birth of technology. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:55Daniel Whiteson?

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• 1:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Do dinosaurs really turn into underground crude oil? And how much could be extracted without too much toil?

• 1:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  When a new host comes to town, how long before parasites chow down?

• 1:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Our ancestors used rocks and sticks to solve problems, which is cool, but was combining them together with knots the very first tool.

• 1:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whatever questions keep you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's answers will make it right.

• 1:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe of listener questions, episode number 55.

• 1:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  55.

• 1:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Also not prime.

• 1:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Also not prime.

• 2:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Weinersmith. I study parasites and space and I don't know where I'd be without technology.

• 2:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist who likes to think about aliens and to sail, which means I do know a lot of nuts.

• 2:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa, you know how to sail?

• 2:21Daniel Whiteson?

  I do not sail. I live here near the ocean. Of course I know how to sail. It's the best thing to do on the water.

• 2:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Dude, I lived in Santa Barbara for two years and I didn't try to surf once. Living near the ocean doesn't mean anything. Well, all right, where's the coolest place you've sailed to?

• 2:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, I once sailed all around the coast in Denmark over a summer with some friends. Yeah, we would sail, then we would stop in a harbor. We would fish and eat dinner. It was really nice, you know?

• 2:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Every time I talk to you, it's like, there's some new country you have a passport to that I didn't know about, or some additional language that you speak, or some like incredible adventure you've been on that is like a revelation to me. You have a pretty cool life.

• 3:02Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm just kind of old and so, you know, I've been around.

• 3:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Dude, being old is not necessarily correlated with lots of awesome experiences.

• 3:10Daniel Whiteson?

  That's true. Though at dinner the other night, I revealed to Hazel, when we were talking about the Nobel Prize in Physics, that I refused an invitation to go visit the experiment in Antarctica. And she was like, what? You could have gone to Antarctica and you said, no, I want to go to Antarctica. And Katrina's like, I want to go to Antarctica. And I was like, you guys are crazy. Antarctica is terrible.

• 3:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  I have no desire to go to Antarctica.

• 3:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Right, exactly. I was like, they probably don't have kombucha in Antarctica, you know?

• 3:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. That's important.

• 3:41Daniel Whiteson?

  I think there's a flavor of exoticism to it that they imagine. I'm not sure.

• 3:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's cold.

• 3:46Daniel Whiteson?

  It's miserable, right? I always remember how you guys described how space is like a worse version of Antarctica and nobody wants to go to Antarctica.

• 3:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 3:56Daniel Whiteson?

  And that really resonated with me, but now I realize Katrina or Hazel might have been like, actually, I do want to go to Antarctica. What are you talking about? So, they've been jokes.

• 4:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, thankfully, there are lots of different kinds of people on this planet who enjoy different kinds of experiences. Our friend Scott Solomon, who's been on the show multiple times, he led a group of, I think, Rice alumni to Antarctica. And as part of the trip, they jumped in the water.

• 4:22Daniel Whiteson?

  No.

• 4:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 4:23Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm getting cold just thinking about it.

• 4:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  I, every time I see him, I'm like, I think you might be nuts. Cause I think about that experience and I was like, you're a person who did that. Why? But anyway, he's also a wonderful human being. He's much more of an adventurer than I am, so.

• 4:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, and he's got a great book called Becoming Martian, which you should check out.

• 4:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Absolutely. Yep, love that book.

• 4:42Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, but today we're not talking about Mars or Antarctica or Daniel's weird family. We're answering questions from listeners and the first question comes from Tomaso.

• 4:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  From Austria.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Hello, Daniel and Kelly. This is Tomaso from Austria. I have a question about fossil fuels and in particular, I was wondering whether we know how much oil there is under the crust of Earth and how we could get an estimate for that. Also, how does oil form? How do pressure and heat transform dead microorganisms like plankton and algae into oil? I happen to recall the absence of oxygen is crucial, otherwise these dead microorganisms would decay. But what does decay mean in this sense? How does the presence of oxygen change the picture? And how much do we know about the process leading to the formation of fossil fuels in general? Thank you very much and keep up the good work.

• 5:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ooh.

• 5:36Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so Tomaso is probably sitting in a cafe, eating an incredible pastry, sipping a delicious coffee and wondering about what's going on under the soil.

• 5:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  That sounds pretty awesome, actually. But okay, so how, how does oil get under the soil in the first place? How is oil made?

• 5:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. This is really cool and I held my nose and learned a little bit of chemistry to understand how this all happens because, you know, actually, sometimes chemistry is interesting. I know.

• 6:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 6:04Daniel Whiteson?

  This is very off-brand for me. So the popular conception is like dinosaurs died and got squeezed into oil, but it's a little bit more complicated than that. You know, you have organic matter like plants and animals and little microscopic marine organisms and they do turn into oil, but it's complicated. Like normally when stuff dies and doesn't turn into oil, you have this process, you know, like stuff dies and is filled with all sorts of useful materials for the rest of life on Earth. You've got proteins, fats, sugars, carbon, all sorts of resources. And typically you have like bacteria and fungi break it apart and use it for metabolism.

• 6:49Daniel Whiteson?

  This is what you call rotting, right? It's like, why if you forget your yogurt in the back of the fridge for six months or whatever and you open it up, it's colorful and there's stuff growing on it because it's resources and eventually something will eat it and microbes can eat everything.

• 7:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  And Katrina's excited and the rest of us are grossed out.

• 7:05Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. And so this is what decay means at the molecular level, right? It's not like the atoms have disappeared. You've got the same carbon and oxygen and whatever, but these microbes are doing chemistry on it. So you have big, complex organic molecules that were in the living thing, you know, the like raccoon that died or the fern that passed away. And it gets chemically transformed into simpler substances. And normally when you die and you're in the atmosphere and there's lots of oxygen, then most of that carbon ends up as carbon dioxide because oxygen-fueled pathways are very efficient and very powerful. And so typically you get like organic carbon plus oxygen turns into like carbon dioxide and water and energy.

• 7:49Daniel Whiteson?

  And so if you have a lot of oxygen around, it's not a great place for preserving carbon or organic material, right? Because it tends to get reprocessed and reused and recirculated back into the environment. So there's this carbon cycle and carbon like exists in organisms and then they die and their carbon gets released with the help of oxygen. That's the normal thing that happens, okay?

• 8:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, got it. And if anybody wants a more geologist-specific answer to that question, we had my friend Callan Bentley, a geologist on the show, on one of our first listener question episodes to talk about that. But I'm loving this chemistry version. Thanks for taking one for the team.

• 8:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. And so you don't get oil when there's oxygen around, right? But if you don't have oxygen around, you have anaerobic microbes, microbes that don't require oxygen and they can still decompose material. There's like other chemical pathways. So if you don't have oxygen, it doesn't mean nothing decays. It's just a different pathway. Maybe it's less complete, right? And so if you bury organic molecules, for example, and then there's no oxygen available, then you can use anaerobic processes to break it down.

• 8:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 8:58Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. And so that gives you the opportunity to create some oil. So what happens is you have like microscopic organisms, maybe living near the surface of a lake or whatever, they die, they sink, they reach the bottom, there's some sediment there that accumulates on top of them. Now you have an oxygen-poor environment, all right? And it's buried deeper and deeper because you have this sediment laying down and that's the raw material from which crude oil can eventually form. Okay, so you need those dead organisms and you need an oxygen-poor environment and then you need a bunch of other stuff to happen. So this first gets transformed into an intermediate step called karrigan, which is complex chemistry. I was trying to read and honestly, my eyes glared over and I couldn't even understand it.

• 9:42Daniel Whiteson?

  But it turns into these complex, insoluble mixture of large organic molecules. Okay, that's what karrigan is. And then to go from karrigan to oil, you need the right temperature and the right pressure. As stuff gets buried, it gets deeper into the earth, which weirdly is hotter, right? We think of like, oh, the earth is cold, but it's only cold on the very top surface. As you dig deeper into the earth, it's warmer because it's hot down there because of the pressure and you're closer to the center, et cetera. And that helps drive chemical reactions, which breaks down some of those complex organics into smaller hydrocarbons. And crude oil is just liquid hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are things with a carbon backbone and hydrogens on them.

• 10:26Daniel Whiteson?

  So if it's in this right window of temperature, like between 60 and 120 C, then it breaks down and you get crude oil. If it's too hot, then it breaks down, you get like natural gas and it cracks it off and maybe even drives off all the hydrocarbons. You just get graphite. If it's too cold, then it doesn't break down enough. So you got to die, you got to fall to the bottom somewhere, you got to get covered in sediment. And then you have to arrive at the right temperature to get broken down into crude oil. And this takes a long time.

• 10:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is it mostly dinosaurs?

• 10:58Daniel Whiteson?

  It's not mostly dinosaurs, actually. It's mostly tiny marine animals and plants. The plants tend to mostly turn into coal because it starts with a different stuff and you end up in a different environment. And so the things that turn into oil are mostly like little marine animals, microscopic marine animals from the past.

• 11:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thank you for powering my car, Zo Plankton.

• 11:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. And pressure matters also, but it's not as important. The typical popular explanation, like it's crushed under the pressure is a little bit too simplistic. So that's making oil. But like, if you just make oil, it's a liquid, it'll drip down through holes in rock to, you know, deep, deep within the planet, we'll never see it. In order for it to be an oil field that we can recover, it's got to accidentally trickle down into like a bowl. So you need like some source rock where this is happening, that makes the oil. And then you need like a porous reservoir to hold it. So you need like another kind of rock that has gaps in it the oil can fill and something underneath it the oil cannot go through.

• 12:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got it.

• 12:09Daniel Whiteson?

  So you need this, like, all this stuff to randomly happen for the oil to be there and extractable. A lot of the oil that was made on the earth is like so deep down or mixed in with stuff we'll never be able to extract it from. Tomaso asks like, how much oil could we ever get? You know, there's no single meaningful number for how much oil is under the earth's crust. There's like a vast, vast amount of oil in the earth that we'll never be able to extract. And what's extractable is kind of like an economic question. When the price of oil goes up, it's feasible to extract more complicated, more expensive to extract oil and sell it. When the price of oil goes down, people shut that stuff down.

• 12:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so have we found all of the big pockets of oil because we know what to look for? Or is this process like so hard to predict where it happened or where it could happen that like there could be giant deposits we've just never even seen? Can we predict where this stuff is going to be?

• 13:08Daniel Whiteson?

  If you could predict where undiscovered oil was, you would be a trillionaire. Like, it's a trillion dollar problem. The oil companies spend a lot of money, they hire a lot of mathematicians and modelers to try to understand this. It's an inference problem. You have sparse measurements, you have a little bit of geological knowledge, you have physical models for where stuff might happen. But not only do we now have a lot of data, also, we don't understand all these processes. And it's kind of chaotic, which means it's sensitive to really small changes. So it's very, very hard to predict where should you drill? If you knew how to do that, then you could make a trillion dollars and that's not even an exaggeration. Like, it's a huge economy, right? And they spend billions on research and billions on exploration because when they find it, it's worth trillions.

• 13:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 13:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Right? And so there's enormous amounts of oil dispersed through sedimentary rock, but a lot of it is like not very concentrated, inaccessible, energetically and economically unattractive. You know, how much actually exists is, you know, is unknown, but it's vast, like much greater than the amount of oil we've extracted. But most of it, we will never be able to extract and don't want to extract because it would just be ridiculously expensive and useless.

• 14:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is there an answer for the question of like, how many more years are we likely to have all the oil that we'd need for the stuff that we use oil for? Or is that question too difficult? Because who knows when like, we're going to have more solar panels or more wind and maybe we won't want oil? Or, yeah, what do you think?

• 14:41Daniel Whiteson?

  It depends on how expensive energy is. Because if energy becomes really, really cheap, if tomorrow somebody invents fusion and it's easy to build and run, energy becomes basically free, then we're not going to drill any more oil, right? We're not going to have any, it's not going to be economically feasible. If on the other hand, everything else breaks, we go into a nuclear winter, we have no solar power or something, then it was going to be even more important and then we will extract more. So like how much we need depends on the prices of so many other things and technology. Or if somebody invents some new technology that can like extract oils from really deep in the earth. So it depends on too many factors to make any predictions, really.

• 15:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got it. Okay, well, let's send this question back to Tomaso and see what he's got to say. Hope the pressure's not too great.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  Hello, Daniel and Kelly. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to dig into my question. Keep up the great work. Ciao.

• 15:45Speaker 04

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• 16:12Speaker 05

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• 16:36Speaker 06

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• 16:57Speaker 05

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• 17:20Speaker 01

  Hello?

• 17:21Speaker 06

  Hey, it's me, your wallet.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Oh, hey.

• 17:25Speaker 06

  I was just wondering if we could maybe take it easy this week?

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 17:29Speaker 06

  Really?

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Yep. I'm shopping at Food Lion.

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  And MVP savings.

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  Obviously.

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• 17:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Next up, we've got a question from Joe from Florida. We love getting questions from Joe. Joe's a longtime listener, so let's hear what Joe has to say.

• 18:16Speaker 06

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. Joe here from Florida. I recently discovered sturtelfish, which are hybrids of an American paddlefish and a Russian sturgeon. And besides not really knowing how that happened in the first place, I did have a question, to Kelly's delight, about parasites. Now, understanding the complex life history of many parasites, my question was, how long does it take for a parasite to quote, "figure out" how to engage with a new species, especially one that's a hybrid? Look forward to the response. Hope it's not too gross. And thanks again, guys.

• 18:52Daniel Whiteson?

  So Kelly, are there always parasites munching on everything or does it take them a while to figure it out?

• 18:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, it can be a little complicated. All right, so Joe wanted to know about hybrids of American paddlefish and Russian sturgeon, but he gave me an out where I could talk about their parasites instead. And so I'm putting off the first part of his question because it turns out it depends on like ploides and this complicated genomic stuff. And actually, I want to get a guest on the show to talk about ploides because this is like something I don't really know much about. So what we're going to say is, it is surprising that these two fish can hybridize because they come from different families. And so if you're me and your head, you're going kingdom, phylum, order, family, genus, species. So usually, you know, if we're getting hybridization, it's often between species in the same genus.

• 19:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  They're kind of closely related, maybe they didn't even split that long ago. But here, they're different families. They split a long time ago, but somehow they're still able to reproduce.

• 19:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Isn't that sort of the definition of species, though? So how is it possible for things that are not the same species to reproduce if being the same species means you can reproduce?

• 19:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  You should listen to What Makes a Species, our interview with Scott Egan, where he pretty much is like, this is complicated, we do our best to define species, but nature doesn't really care that we would like to have more like strict categories for these things. Sometimes hybridization happens anyway.

• 20:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Right. And there's even some example of like a circular definition of species where like, anyway, it's complicated.

• 20:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, ring species. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Great interview with Scott. Folks should go back and listen to that one. But the other part of Joe's question is essentially, how long is it going to take for parasites to recognize this new creature, this hybrid, as something that they could infect? And to give a quick answer to that before getting into what I think is an even more sort of interesting, bigger question, so I looked for papers where folks had looked at hybrids between two different fish species and then what happened with their parasites. And the answer seems to be that the parasites recognize the hybrid almost immediately. And the hybrids, and this is, this is an example, because you found an example in

• 21:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  nature doesn't mean that you understand the phenomenon at all. But in the like two examples that I found, the hybrid could be infected by the parasites from both of the parent species.

• 21:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. What a gift.

• 21:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right. So they were immediately recognized by more parasites than either initial parent species would have been recognized by, which is a bad situation to find yourself in. Although they had fewer of each parasite, they could still be recognized. Okay, but to me, a more maybe interesting way of getting at this question is an unfortunate natural experiment that we are doing over and over and over again, which is to say, we are moving species from their home ranges to different parts of the globe, and they bring their parasites with them.

• 21:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 21:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  And when they bring their parasites with them, those parasites have the opportunity to then infect the native hosts in the new range. So they're alien parasites that now have a chance to, yay, to possibly infect all of the parasites in the host range. And we call this parasite spillover, which is a little bit unfortunate. I think this is the second time in as many listener questions episodes where a biology term has been used to describe two things where it probably would have been better to have different terms. People often refer to spillover as situations where parasites from wild animals end up in human populations. But we also use that term to refer to alien parasites

• 22:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  being able to infect the native host population.

• 22:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Interesting.

• 22:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  So this does happen. For example, in the United Kingdom, there are parapox viruses, like think of this as, I don't know, squirrel pox, a pox upon your squirrel house. And invasive gray squirrels brought this virus to the United Kingdom where it ends up being worse for the native red squirrels. So in this case, the virus can recognize the red squirrels as a host, and the red squirrels are not as well prepared to fight back. Their immune systems are just not really tuned to the presence of this virus. And so the native red squirrels are getting knocked out by this virus. That's not a big deal for the gray squirrels that brought it over.

• 23:23Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm definitely on the side of the red squirrels in this one.

• 23:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I'm on the side of the red squirrels, too.

• 23:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, you always gotta pick a side.

• 23:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. We learned that in the syphilis episode. So, but spillovers don't always happen. For example, we introduced cane toads into Australia. Daniel, did you ever see that documentary with the like, loads and loads and loads of cane toads in Australia where the roads were getting slippery because there were so many cane toads on the roads? Or was this just like a formative moment for ecologists?

• 23:53Daniel Whiteson?

  No, for sure. And like, then they introduced like rabbits to eat them, and the manager introduced something to eat the rabbits. And then eventually they had to choose like apes or something? I don't know.

• 24:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think, you know, maybe some of that story is not quite right, but, but.

• 24:08Daniel Whiteson?

  You're so gentle in your fact checking, Kelly. I love it.

• 24:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  So are you, though. You're always, every once in a while afterwards, I'll be like, wait a minute. Like later that night, I'll be like, Daniel was saying I was wrong earlier today. He was so nice about it. I didn't realize.

• 24:20Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So that's Daniel's distorted memory of some video he saw in second grade. Tell us the real story.

• 24:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I, I'm not going to go into like, the long history of what we did after the cane toads were introduced. But what I'm going to say is that cane toads are a problem because they produce a toxin that in their native range makes them unpalatable for things that would want to eat them. But now you plop them down in Australia, and there's a bunch of stuff that, you know, don't know to avoid them because they don't have any evolutionary history with them that taught them that these toads are toxic and they'll kill you. So pets would try to eat the toads and then they would die, for example. And a lot of native species as well would try to eat the toads and then they would die. And so the toads didn't really have a lot of predators in the area because they had this amazing defense. But the toads also brought with them a lung worm, like a parasite

• 25:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  that lives in their lung. We've talked about this lung worm parasite in the past. This is not rat lung worm. This is something different.

• 25:14Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't like it.

• 25:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  I also don't like any parasites in lungs. But it turns out that this parasite was not able to jump into the native frog and toad populations.

• 25:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Interesting.

• 25:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  We don't know why, but it looks like it has stayed with just the cane toads. So the good news is that this lung parasite is controlling the toad population to some extent. Obviously, the toads are still out of control, but maybe it could have been even worse without the parasite. So thank your local lung worm.

• 25:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Wait, the toads are still out of control like today?

• 25:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, they're still there.

• 25:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Like, if you're driving around Australia, you'd have to watch out for the toads?

• 25:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  I, I don't think that they are as thick as they used to be. I would guess, and actually, I didn't research this, but I would guess that some of the native parasites have probably jumped into the toads.

• 25:59Daniel Whiteson?

  As thick with toads makes me think of like, Australia as a piece of toast and somebody's like, spreading toads across it, like a thick layer of marmite. Or is it Vegemite they eat down there?

• 26:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  They eat Vegemite. Yeah, I think. Yeah, that's something. So.

• 26:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Vegitoad. All right.

• 26:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Gross. Okay, but so what I wanted to know when I started to research this question, and I think I knew the answer beforehand, but I figured I'd look for it anyway. But do we have a framework to predict when a parasite should be able to jump into a native host population? So like, if you were to take a nematode and plop it down in Utah, and you knew which hosts were available in Utah, could you predict which one of the native hosts were going to pick up that parasite?

• 26:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Or is biology too complicated?

• 26:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. All right, done. Biology is, is too complicated. There are some things we think matter. As a person who studies animal behavior, I'm happy to say that behavior matters. So the first thing is, do the native hosts engage in behaviors that would cause them to encounter this parasite at all in the first place? And so that depends on knowing like, where the risky areas are for the parasites, what the native hosts are doing in the area. So behavior matters. And then if a parasite manages to encounter a native host, is the host immune system prepared to attack that parasite? Or is the parasite able to even recognize that as a suitable host? And we don't have a great framework for when that's going to happen. So like, some parasites are generalists, which is

• 27:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  to say, like Toxoplasma gondii can infect almost any mammal. So if you plopped Toxoplasma gondii down in front of a mammal it's never seen before, there's a pretty good chance that it can infect it because that generalist is just good at mammals across the board.

• 27:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 27:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  But for my PhD, I studied a brain infecting parasite of California killifish. And you don't find this parasite in any of the other fish in the salt marsh. So if you plopped that parasite in a population that had maybe another fish in the same genus, it's possible it could infect that. But if it was anything farther out than like, the genus level, I would guess that it probably can't infect it. Because this is a specialist parasite that is pretty tuned into one kind of host.

• 28:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 28:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  So that's a little helpful from a predictive standpoint. But some parasites also have complicated life cycles. We had a whole episode on parasite life cycles. And so some parasites need to go from, for example, snail to fish to bird, and then back to snail again. And so when you bring them to a new environment, they need to replace all of those hosts. And so you might be more likely to not see those parasites come from one area to another because now they don't just need to find one new host, they need to find an entire life cycle that they can fit into. And the probability of that happening is a little bit lower. Does that make sense?

• 28:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, fascinating. Though, you know, a lot of this seems like you're extrapolating from one system to another. You're making educated guesses based on your experience. But in reality, these systems are very complicated and like, they hinge on little details, don't they? So what would you say like, your confidence is in any of these predictions?

• 29:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  It depends, because it's biology. So, so, you know, I would say, I would feel pretty confident that if you took the parasite that I studied for my PhD, and you tried to infect a bass, you know, like, this infects killifish. If you tried to infect a bass, I'd say zero chance that's going to happen, you know? But if you tried to infect another killifish in the same genus, I think there's some chance that it could make it up to the brain, and it could do its thing in the brain. So yeah, I think for each instance, it depends on knowing something about, you know, how broad the range of hosts that parasite can use, what else the parasite requires. So I don't think it's possible to have it across the board, like, prediction system, because a lot of it does depend on the details of the system.

• 29:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. All right.

• 29:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right.

• 29:54Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, Joe. I hope that answers your question. We have hybridized your question with our answer. And we hope that it isn't a parasite in your mind.

• 30:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amazing. A plus, Daniel.

• 30:07Speaker 06

  Thank you, as always, for that diverse response. I was particularly surprised that, at least from a parasite susceptibility standpoint, being a hybrid is the worst of both worlds. It doesn't delight me that parasites are quite so good at what they do. Though, I'm not dealing with a layer of cane toads strewn across our landscape. In such case, I might have a different perspective. On that point, Daniel got the W for being the most gross. So kudos on that. It's actually impressive our interconnected world doesn't have more pestering parasites plundering people. To me, it's one more reason why we should be funding scientists across all fields, because knowing these things, especially in the biological world of, it's complicated and it depends, is way better than getting caught off guard

• 30:49Speaker 06

  with an unexpected lung worm paying a visit. Looking forward to that upcoming discussion on sturtel fish, and cheers to you both.

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• 32:42Speaker 01

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• 32:43Speaker 06

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• 33:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Our last question for today is from Lauren and is about the origins of technology.

• 33:36Speaker 05

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. I tie a lot of knots, even made a profession of it for a while. And I explained to people that while rocks and sticks were obviously the first tools humans picked up, the real revolution came about when someone decided to tie a rock to a stick using some sort of fiber. I call this the birth of technology. Am I fooling myself? What do you think?

• 33:58Daniel Whiteson?

  So I love this question and I have questions about this question. Like, what profession is it where you tie knots? Like, is that being a sailor? Is that being like a professional knot demonstrator? What is the deal?

• 34:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  What about if you're, maybe if you teach people how to like climb rocks? What are professional rock climbers called? There's like a cool.

• 34:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Is there some scientific name for it?

• 34:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that's not what I'm asking. Maybe it is. All right. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe does climbing or does tours with climbers.

• 34:30Daniel Whiteson?

  So really fascinating question and a great excuse to like dig into the history here, you know, and think about what do we mean by tools or what do we mean by technology? Right, like if you just pick up a rock, you can use it to do stuff. Or if you pick up a stick, you can use it to do stuff, right? But that's using something that already exists. And what he's asking about is like combining stuff to create something that didn't exist before. And I think he suggested that that's like the birth of technology.

• 35:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  But what if you like sharpen the stick or hit the rock in such a way to like sharpen it? So now you can do something new with it. Does that become technology?

• 35:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's a fascinating question. Like, is there a big difference between combining objects and just adapting objects? And of course, you know, the answer is going to be it's subtle, but it's fun to think about anyway. And so let's go all the way back and think about like just tool use before we even think about technology, like just using tools. And the thing that always blows my mind is that tool use is not unique to humans.

• 35:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 35:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Right? Chimpanzees use sticks to like stick in the termite hole, pull them out and slurp on them. They use stones to crack nuts. Sea otters, like crows use tools. Maybe some insects, I think, use tools.

• 35:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Crows are amazing the way they use tools. They'll like bend metal wires so that they can stick it down a tube to pick something up that has a loop. And they need to like get it up through the, it's like the problem solving and the tool creation is just like, wow, crows are smart.

• 36:04Daniel Whiteson?

  In that tiny little brain, right? Really incredible.

• 36:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 36:07Daniel Whiteson?

  And the thing that I love is that we've been using tools since before we were humans. Right, Homo sapiens are like 100, 200,000 years old. But we have evidence of stone tools that go back more than a million years.

• 36:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 36:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Right, so before we were humans, so tools are older than humanity. Right, there was a person walking across the earth using some like handheld axe a million years ago that they had intentionally sharpened for this use.

• 36:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 36:38Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, to kill a creature or to skin a creature or butcher a creature or butcher another human or whatever. Like, what was it like to be that person? Anyway, they probably thought it was some pretty fancy technology.

• 36:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, and fill out cannibalism on your DKU bingo card. I feel like you tangentially referenced it because it's close enough. I'm giving it to us.

• 36:57Daniel Whiteson?

  There you go. And so like, you know, to reference what you mentioned, like even modifying a tool is not uniquely human. You know, because pre-humans modified stones and, you know, there are some animals like will strip leaves off of sticks before they use them and shape materials for a purpose. As you mentioned, like crows will like bend a piece of metal. But when you do something like tie things together, then I think maybe there is a threshold you're crossing there because you're not just like finding something useful and maybe optimizing it a little bit. You're combining objects to do something that have really a very different functional system. You know, like, you know, stone is hard and sharp. Your stick gives you reach and leverage. So now your stick is doing something that it just really wasn't doing before.

• 37:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  And just to be clear, you and I are talking about how we feel like technology should be defined. You haven't gone through the history of technology literature to see how.

• 37:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, no.

• 37:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Folks, okay, got it. So this is, this is our gut feeling.

• 37:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Our non-expert thoughts about this on a Friday morning, yes.

• 38:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, well, and they asked us, so here's what we think. Okay, cool.

• 38:04Daniel Whiteson?

  But I think it's really fascinating, the knot portion of this, right? It's not just combining tools. You have a stick and you're a rock and you combine them into an axe, which feels different than just your original hand axe or your stick. But the knots themselves are kind of sophisticated technology. Like, first of all, rope. Rope is not easy, right? You can't just like find rope around. You have to find fiber around from plants or maybe from animals, select it, process it, twist it, combine it. Right, so rope is like complicated. I, I know from my research in watching Naked and Afraid, this TV show, that.

• 38:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 38:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Have you never seen this show?

• 38:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  No.

• 38:47Daniel Whiteson?

  They drop people in a random location and they're literally naked and they have to survive for 21 days. And they like find water and find food and build, you know, crude technology. It's bizarre and amazing.

• 39:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 39:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Especially, it's amazing because why do people do it? There's no prize. All you get at the end is like an iced coffee and a cheeseburger and a congratulations.

• 39:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Holy cow.

• 39:09Daniel Whiteson?

  But still, and these people suffer. Oh my God, the mosquito bites, let me tell you. Anyway, back to rope making, it's complicated. And beyond ropes, knots themselves are complicated. You're taking something which is a straight string and now you're changing its topology. You're just like arranging it in a way that it'll do this thing where it won't slip. You know, where two strings come together to make one. And why that happens is fascinating. And it's like whole region of mathematics called knot theory, exploring like what arrangements will make a knot? What behavior various arrangements have? Can you predict it? Can you derive knots? Can you, you know, it's a fascinating area.

• 39:53Daniel Whiteson?

  It's very mathematical, right? Because these things are about patterns and organization and solutions. I once sat in on a knot theory class for a few sessions until I realized, wow, I do not have the mathematics to handle this. I am not prepared.

• 40:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, I would not be prepared either.

• 40:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So now you have stones, the sticks and other basic elements. But the knots really help you do something new, which is like reliably bind things together. So now the kind of things you can make is much more complicated. You have axes, but also spears and nets and traps and clothing and shelters and boats. And like, once you can combine things, you can really do zillions of mechanical things you couldn't before. Rigging and pulleys and like, think about all the elements of a sailboat that require connecting things and combining different materials.

• 40:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 40:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Nobody's finding something like a sailboat in nature, right?

• 40:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, no, probably not.

• 40:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. And it's funny how foundational strings are. I was thinking about how like in freshman physics, we have the concept of a string, like a physics string is an essential element of many, many problems. You have like, you know, a pulley on a string or a weight is hanging from a ceiling or something. And we use it as this sort of like ideal way to transmit a force. That's how we treat it in freshman physics problems. But that's really what it's doing. It's like, take a force and transmit it from here to there and maybe even bend it around a corner. It's really incredible as a concept, you know, like inventing a string is like, you know, a deep thing. And so what you can do then is create lots of different kinds of technology.

• 41:35Daniel Whiteson?

  And so Lauren is asking like, is this the birth of technology? And I think that's, you know, it's a powerful moment. It's maybe a pivot point in our history. I would say that's a little too strong to call it like the birth of technology. Before that, we still had technology, like making stone tools required some planning and training. You had to like teach other people how to pick a rock and choose one that you could turn into an axe and learn how to flake it so that you got a sharp point, right? Or, and similarly with sticks, like I'm sure people had spears made just out of sticks and they could sharpen them, et cetera. So before we combined things together, I would say that that's still technology.

• 42:17Daniel Whiteson?

  And so I don't think archaeologists would define technology as like beginning with tying stuff together.

• 42:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I've got a question for you. So did it go like stone, stick, rope? Because as you pointed out, rope is a complicated thing to make, even before you get to knots.

• 42:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 42:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so I guess I'm wondering, do you need technology to make ropes? Like, what do you need to make ropes?

• 42:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, well, you need some basic technology to make ropes. I think it's helpful to have something you can cut with, right? So you can select the fibers and more advanced stuff like spinning fibers together, right? Like going from wool to yarn requires some sort of fancy spinners. But I think that's more complicated because you're assembling like really short fibers into longer ones. But if you start with already longer fibers, you know, vines or other plant fibers, then I think it's probably not necessary. So I think it depends on the complexity of the rope.

• 43:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Cool.

• 43:12Daniel Whiteson?

  So I would guess that, you know, archaeologists who I didn't consult in this, in this answer would say that it's an important conceptual leap because now you're doing more engineering and less using. You're instead of like, I need something which does solve this problem, which does this thing. Let me go out and look for that thing. Instead, you're thinking. How do I put together the elements I find in nature so I can do that thing? Right? So you're combining specialized parts to get your tool rather than just like looking for a natural axe. And this is, you know, the foundation of engineering. This underlies like every complex machine we have. And so in that sense, the idea of

• 43:55Daniel Whiteson?

  a knot, which is like pulls things together, combines two primitive things into something more complicated, is a deep idea and a powerful moment. And so I don't know if it's the birth of technology, but I agree with Lauren that it's a huge transition in our ability to create a more complex set of tools than we had before.

• 44:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Can we? So you, you started by saying that tools are not the same thing as technology. Can I push you a little farther on that? Like,

• 44:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 44:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  What is technology then? Like, is that rock technology?

• 44:27Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, they're very closely related, obviously. Like, a tool is a specific thing. You use to do a task, right? You need to turn a screw, you get a screwdriver. That's the tool for the jobs. Technology, I would say, is more like, you know, the application of some tool or scientific concept to build some system. And I would include in that what we mentioned earlier, like, training, like, the transmission of knowledge from one generation to another, the knowledge of how to build the tool, you know? So it's like, more like the social apparatus around the tool than just the tool itself.

• 45:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  So like, a crow teaching the daughter crow how to bend the metal wire, that's technology? Or is that, because I feel like that's culture?

• 45:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I think it's, it's all connected. I think that culture is part of technology.

• 45:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 45:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Right? And, you know, you're creating new capabilities in the next generation by teaching them how to build this tool. I don't know, archaeologists, sociologists, anthropologists, write in and let us know what you think about this question, since maybe you actually know something.

• 45:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  And Lauren, what do you think about this answer? And what is your job, Lauren?

• 45:43Daniel Whiteson?

  How do you get paid to tie knots, Lauren?

• 45:45Speaker 05

  Daniel and Kelly, thank you so much for your answer. It was quite interesting. I agree that creating tools from rocks and sticks and also making the string itself were technological in nature. But I still maintain that the combining of the elements is an order of magnitude different. It is possible to make money tying knots. I tied knots in gold and silver and made jewelry. It's quite a change from tying them in string, but it was a lot of fun.

• 46:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Thank you, everybody, for going on this journey with us. We had a lot of fun. We appreciate that you share your curiosity and your questions with us. You can send us those questions at [email protected]. I am on a bit of a question hiatus until 2027 because I have so many amazing questions from you all that I still need to answer. I need a little bit of time to catch up, but send questions to Daniel.

• 46:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Please do.

• 46:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I look forward to hearing from you at a later date. Thanks.

• 46:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us.

• 46:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.

• 47:03Daniel Whiteson?

  He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, D and K Universe. Come engage with us.

• 47:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  You can email us at [email protected]. We really do want to hear from you.

• 47:19Daniel Whiteson?

  And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

• 47:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

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