The Engineering Of A NASA Space Pen

A pen designed to write in space sits unopened for 25 years. Does it still work? In this episode of Field Notes, Michael Stevens finally opens a treasured souvenir from his time at Space Camp: a genuine Fisher Space Pen that has been waiting decades for its first scribble. From there, the conversation launches into the challenges of living in space, why astronauts abandoned pencils, and what happens to your sense of direction when gravity disappears. Along the way they investigate whether eight billion people clapping could damage a building, discover why the ISS is constantly falling towards Earth, and ask whether the Kardashev Scale tells us anything meaningful about the future of civilisation.-------------------For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience⁠⁠Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.-------------------Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠-------------------Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack MeekAnimator: Sam BensonVideo & Social: Bex TyrrellAssistant Producer: Lucy LipscombeProducer: Simona RataSenior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-CarterHead Of Digital: Samuel OakleyExec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Michael Stevens?

  Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Science. My name is Michael Stevens.

• 0:04Hannah Fry?

  And I'm Hannah Fry.

• 0:05Michael Stevens?

  And today on Field Notes, I've brought an object from my childhood that we're gonna do some experiments on.

• 0:11Hannah Fry?

  Oh.

• 0:12Michael Stevens?

  And by experiments, I mean one experiment that I've been waiting to do for 25 years.

• 0:18Hannah Fry?

  No.

• 0:19Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I wanna finally do it. It's gonna be recorded, so it's worth it.

• 0:22Hannah Fry?

  Has much of your life been building up to this precise moment, Michael?

• 0:25Michael Stevens?

  No, I'd say about once every seven years I remember, and I go, oh, yeah, I should do that.

• 0:30Hannah Fry?

  Come on.

• 0:31Michael Stevens?

  It ends today.

• 0:32Hannah Fry?

  Play, play the game for me here. Be like, yes, I had a dream.

• 0:36Michael Stevens?

  I'm sorry. I dream about this every night. I sweat constantly worrying about it. And today, it's gonna finally all happen.

• 0:45Hannah Fry?

  It's a big day.

• 0:53Michael Stevens?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 0:55Hannah Fry?

  Scientists have found that cancer risks usually increase with age and size. But some species defy the odds.

• 1:02Michael Stevens?

  For example, deep-sea Greenland sharks. They can grow over six meters long, weigh more than a small car, and yet live for up to 400 years.

• 1:13Hannah Fry?

  Now, understanding how Greenland sharks' cellular repair and immune systems seem to have managed to keep them cancer-free for centuries, that could open up exciting research pathways.

• 1:24Michael Stevens?

  Essentially, over millions of years, evolution has been running the world's most successful cancer prevention trial. And sometimes, breakthroughs can be found in unusual places.

• 1:34Hannah Fry?

  So by exploring the unexpected, Cancer Research UK scientists are uncovering new ways to tackle over 200 types of cancer. Their work has helped to double survival in the UK over the last 50 years, and continues to save and improve lives around the world.

• 1:50Michael Stevens?

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/the rest is science.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Hi, this is Gary Lineker from Goalhangers, the rest is football. This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee, and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas, or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate, an easy transfer, and no surprises along the way. Wise keeps things simple. Wise is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies. Most transfers arrive instantly. Wise uses the mid-market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees.

• 2:47Speaker 02

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• 3:44Speaker 03

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• 4:07Hannah Fry?

  Should we do that first?

• 4:08Michael Stevens?

  Let's do that first. Let's get it out of the way. It's gonna be quick.

• 4:11Hannah Fry?

  We'll do audience Q and A after.

• 4:12Michael Stevens?

  And we'll do a Q and A. Yeah, we're gonna look at your questions afterwards. So here's the deal. Uh, I don't know if you know this about me, but I went to space camp as a kid, three summers in a row.

• 4:23Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 4:23Michael Stevens?

  Earned my gold wings. I'm kind of a big deal.

• 4:27Hannah Fry?

  Don't like to brag.

• 4:28Michael Stevens?

  I don't like to brag, but...

• 4:30Hannah Fry?

  Where is space camp? Okay, I think you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to give us a bit more detail because the whole summer camp thing is not really a British thing.

• 4:37Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, so it's a summer camp for kids who are like, yeah, I don't really wanna be doing like outside stuff. I don't wanna...

• 4:43Hannah Fry?

  But you, do you stay away from home?

• 4:46Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, yeah. It's like a sleepaway camp.

• 4:48Hannah Fry?

  How long does it last for?

• 4:49Michael Stevens?

  Uh, it lasts for like maybe just a week or two weeks. I can't actually remember, but I did, there's multiple places where you can do space camp. I did the space camp in Hutchinson, Kansas at their Cosmosphere and I loved it. I mean, you get to train like you're an astronaut.

• 5:06Hannah Fry?

  How old are you at this point?

• 5:08Michael Stevens?

  Uh, high school age.

• 5:10Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 5:11Michael Stevens?

  So I would say like 14, 15, 16.

• 5:16Hannah Fry?

  Got you. All right.

• 5:16Michael Stevens?

  Those ages.

• 5:17Hannah Fry?

  I'm there, I'm there.

• 5:18Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, okay. So they've got the like gyroscope thing that you have to get spun around on and plug all the cables in and pass these tests and then you're assigned to a crew, a space shuttle crew, and you're either the commander, the pilot, the mission specialist, whatever. And you gotta do a whole mission and you're like judged based on how well you do the mission.

• 5:39Hannah Fry?

  Oh, that's so fun.

• 5:39Michael Stevens?

  It's very fun and you learn so much. The different years had different focuses. You'd focus on the history of spaceflight. And then another year, it was like the future of spaceflight, which was sort of just like all robotics, especially back then. I, I had to like, uh, get scuba certified because a lot of weightless training on earth is done in a neutral buoyancy suit in water. Being neutrally buoyant means you don't sink or float. You're just floating there. And they've got these things called busy boards underwater and you've got, the busy board is full of different nuts and bolts and switches and things and you've gotta like tighten a bolt. But of course, you tighten it and your body moves.

• 6:19Hannah Fry?

  Oh, that's fun.

• 6:19Michael Stevens?

  So you've gotta relearn how to position your arms and like be stable. Anyway, I absolutely loved it and as a memento from the Cosmosphere, I bought a space pen.

• 6:32Michael Stevens?

  And I never used it because it was just so special.

• 6:35Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 6:35Michael Stevens?

  And I still haven't used it.

• 6:37Hannah Fry?

  Is that what you have brought with you today, Michael?

• 6:39Michael Stevens?

  That's what I've brought with me.

• 6:40Hannah Fry?

  Is the experiment that we get to write with your space pen?

• 6:42Michael Stevens?

  A Fisher space pen. What's a space pen? Many of you may know, but for those who don't, a space pen is based on the pens that Fisher made for the astronauts in the Apollo program and maybe other programs. I don't actually know its history. It's been a while since I was in space camp.

• 6:58Hannah Fry?

  That's okay.

• 6:59Michael Stevens?

  What makes a space pen different? This is the bullet variety.

• 7:01Hannah Fry?

  It looks like a bullet.

• 7:03Michael Stevens?

  It looks like a space age pen. And this isn't the one that the astronauts used. They used one that looked more like a regular pen. This one really leans into the whole like, do I look space age?

• 7:13Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 7:14Michael Stevens?

  Anyway, a regular pen, like a regular ballpoint pen, really needs gravity to work. You, you have a ball at the tip that's covering the opening that the ink is filled into. And when you roll that ball, the ball rolls, the ink falls onto the ball. And as the ball rolls, the ink goes onto the paper. But if you don't have any weight, if you're in a weightless environment, then there's nothing to pull the ink down.

• 7:42Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 7:42Michael Stevens?

  So famously, you can't use a regular ballpoint pen very well upside down.

• 7:48Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely.

• 7:49Michael Stevens?

  And the inks and the mechanisms don't really work underwater, all these things. But the space pen was built to work in a zero G environment.

• 7:57Hannah Fry?

  Now, this is, there is that old story, isn't there? That the NASA space program spent 70 squillion trillion billion pounds in creating a pen that would work in space and the Russians just used a lead pen.

• 8:10Michael Stevens?

  Wah wah. Yeah. However, that's not, that's not true.

• 8:13Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 8:14Michael Stevens?

  Basically, yeah, every time you bring up a space pen, there's always that one dude who's like, yeah, and the Russians just used a pencil. And it's like, dude, no, they didn't. I mean, maybe they did, but I don't know what they did.

• 8:25Hannah Fry?

  It's a bad idea.

• 8:26Michael Stevens?

  It's a bad idea because what do pencils do? They create a lot of debris. When you write with a pencil, there's in a weightless environment, like up in orbit, there's little pieces of graphite that float around and now you're going to breathe them in, or they're going to get into the electronics and graphite can conduct electricity. It can cause a lot of problems. You want to erase something, you've got little bits of rubber floating in the air.

• 8:51Hannah Fry?

  Bad idea.

• 8:51Michael Stevens?

  Your pencil breaks, you can always sharpen it, which creates an enormous amount of debris. And without gravity, to get all the debris into one place, the floor, it's just polluting your entire spacecraft. So the pen was a great idea. It works by having, let me open it up. Oh, it hasn't been opened in like, like I said, like 25 years.

• 9:14Hannah Fry?

  Exciting.

• 9:15Michael Stevens?

  It's got a tube of ink inside and then it's filled with, above that, a pressurized gas.

• 9:24Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 9:25Michael Stevens?

  So instead of using gravity to feed the ink, it uses pressurized gas to push it out. So when you've used up the pen, you have to buy these special space pen pressurized refills. Now, because of that, and because of the qualities of the ink, this can write underwater, it can write upside down.

• 9:42Hannah Fry?

  Wow.

• 9:43Michael Stevens?

  There was even a Seinfeld episode about space pens and like everyone couldn't believe that you could write upside down with it. I don't know what happens after 25 years.

• 9:52Hannah Fry?

  Well, I'm wondering, will the ink have dried out?

• 9:54Michael Stevens?

  They say no. It says that the pen stays good for like 100 years.

• 9:59Hannah Fry?

  Cause I guess if you can write underwater, it can't be water soluble, which means there's no water in it.

• 10:04Michael Stevens?

  It doesn't dry out.

• 10:05Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 10:05Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. So I'm looking at it right now and I see a little, what looks like a speck of ink. Two specks of ink.

• 10:14Hannah Fry?

  What color is it?

• 10:15Michael Stevens?

  The ink, I think, is like a dark blue. And if I look at the tip, it looks pretty gunky, to be honest. I'll get some footage for you guys, up close footage, before, before we use it. It's, it's really, I don't know if this is clear, it's really gross.

• 10:36Michael Stevens?

  It looks like it's been used a lot and a bunch of ink is collected.

• 10:40Hannah Fry?

  Did you use this when you first got it?

• 10:42Michael Stevens?

  No, I've never used it because it was a space pen. Oh, my gosh, if I use it up, then I won't have any ink and I won't be able to do upside down writing. So I never did any upside down writing. I would like for you to do the honors, though.

• 10:55Hannah Fry?

  No, I don't feel special enough.

• 10:58Michael Stevens?

  Okay, that looks really neat, though.

• 11:00Hannah Fry?

  It does. It's a really, really beautiful pen.

• 11:02Michael Stevens?

  I've never even put the the cap on the back. That looks so sweet. Okay, here's some paper. And here's the pencil, the pen.

• 11:09Hannah Fry?

  Really, really? Oh, my gosh, I feel so honored.

• 11:13Hannah Fry?

  Shall I start by writing upside down?

• 11:14Michael Stevens?

  Let's make guesses. I actually, I don't think it's going to work.

• 11:17Hannah Fry?

  Okay, let's see if it works.

• 11:20Michael Stevens?

  Does it work?

• 11:21Hannah Fry?

  Straight away.

• 11:22Michael Stevens?

  Straight away? How's it feel? Is it like smooth or?

• 11:25Hannah Fry?

  It feels like a normal biro.

• 11:27Michael Stevens?

  Okay, now go upside down. Hundred eighty degrees. Yeah, like that. Like you're floating around, you're approaching the moon, you need to make a note.

• 11:37Hannah Fry?

  My writing's a lot less neat up here.

• 11:39Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, but it's but it's still working, isn't it?

• 11:40Hannah Fry?

  It is.

• 11:41Michael Stevens?

  Nice.

• 11:42Hannah Fry?

  Now let's do it underwater.

• 11:44Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, well, I don't have any water, but I mean, I'm just, I'm not gonna, I'm just gonna trust them on that.

• 11:50Hannah Fry?

  It does. That's amazing.

• 11:52Michael Stevens?

  All right, now let me, let me try it.

• 11:53Hannah Fry?

  Could you imagine a twenty five year old, oh, wait, how long, how, yeah, you were fifteen, right? So a twenty five year old pen, like a normal biro, that you just, you'd have to scribble it for ages.

• 12:04Michael Stevens?

  Oh, yeah, straight away. This is working like it's fresh out of the box. Like, it feels fresh.

• 12:09Hannah Fry?

  That's exciting.

• 12:10Michael Stevens?

  Wow, Fisher, nice job with the Space Pen Bullet Edition. Mine is, here's what's so funny. I looked up, um, I was trying to find exactly what year this was made, and I couldn't find it exactly. It isn't written on any of the literature that came with it. So I I looked on eBay to see if other people had said, and I found the same model with this like faux red velvet interior. And, oh, man, talk about feeling old. They're all on eBay as vintage Fisher Space Pen. And I'm like, vintage? Things from my childhood are vintage?

• 12:43Hannah Fry?

  They are now vintage, I'm afraid.

• 12:44Michael Stevens?

  Retro, old geezer man's space pen.

• 12:48Hannah Fry?

  But we're talking probably from the nineties, right?

• 12:50Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, yeah, this is gonna be late nineties, so more than twenty five years old.

• 12:57Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I think I was probably more like 12, 13 when I started space camp. So it's, it's, it's, it's held up well. I'm really excited.

• 13:06Hannah Fry?

  I like how the font that they've chosen for Space Pen is really similar to the font that you see at the beginning of Star Wars when they're going off into the distance.

• 13:15Michael Stevens?

  Yes, they've got pretty much the same typeface and it's even warped, so it looks like it's receding away, just like Star Wars.

• 13:22Hannah Fry?

  Just like space.

• 13:23Michael Stevens?

  So that's cool. I mean, as I've established previously, I'm not really a pen guy, so I'm probably not going to just start using this a bunch.

• 13:30Hannah Fry?

  I don't think you should. It's, it's good for another 75 years.

• 13:32Michael Stevens?

  It's good for another 75 years.

• 13:34Hannah Fry?

  I think you should put it in a time capsule, bury it in your garden and say, if you find this and the year is 2100, answer this survey using this pen.

• 13:45Michael Stevens?

  Using this pen. Don't worry, it'll work. Oh, I love that. Well, I mean, that's all I, I, I wanted to do.

• 13:51Hannah Fry?

  It's great. I really enjoyed that.

• 13:53Michael Stevens?

  Field notes journey.

• 13:53Hannah Fry?

  That's absolutely lovely. That's absolutely lovely.

• 13:56Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I'm really glad. I'm glad that we tried it out because I was always afraid to. I was afraid, first of all, I was like, it needs to be recorded. You gotta, everything needs to be turned into content.

• 14:06Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely.

• 14:07Michael Stevens?

  And we've done it.

• 14:08Hannah Fry?

  We have. I want to see what the Soviets use instead of a Space Pen.

• 14:11Michael Stevens?

  Okay, yeah. Did they have their own Soviet Space Pen? Or did they actually use pencils and they just like grit their teeth and bared it?

• 14:20Hannah Fry?

  What did you say? Fisher? Paul Fisher? Do you know, he did it himself. Paul Fisher. It was, um, as in, he paid for it. It was his own company's money.

• 14:30Michael Stevens?

  Oh.

• 14:31Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. And then he pitched it to NASA afterwards.

• 14:32Michael Stevens?

  It wasn't commissioned. NASA wasn't like, hey, we need a pen. We need a writing utensil that will work in a weightless environment.

• 14:39Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 14:40Michael Stevens?

  He just said, I've got this for you for a problem I think you might have.

• 14:44Hannah Fry?

  So here's the thing. He did all of the research with his own money, invested about a million dollars of his own company's money to develop it.

• 14:50Michael Stevens?

  A million dollars back then is a lot of money.

• 14:55Hannah Fry?

  And then he pitched it to NASA and they were like, yeah, great. They, they tested to make sure it wouldn't explode or burn. And then they were like, we'll have 400, $6 a pen.

• 15:03Michael Stevens?

  Oh, no.

• 15:04Hannah Fry?

  That's it. That's all I got back.

• 15:07Michael Stevens?

  Well, that explains why they sell them so aggressively to this day.

• 15:11Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 15:12Michael Stevens?

  They're like, we've got to make back.

• 15:13Hannah Fry?

  Somehow.

• 15:14Michael Stevens?

  A lot of millions of dollars in today's money.

• 15:17Hannah Fry?

  So here's the sort of punchline to the whole story about the Soviets using pencils. Actually, it turns out Soviets used the exact same fish.

• 15:24Michael Stevens?

  Oh, they did.

• 15:25Hannah Fry?

  Space pen as well.

• 15:26Michael Stevens?

  So was this guy like during the Cold War, he's like playing both sides. He's like, you know, NASA, NASA's got space pens and the Russians are like, fine, fine. The Soviets are like, oh, we got to have them too. And there's like this, not an arms race, but a, but an ink race.

• 15:42Hannah Fry?

  Yep.

• 15:42Michael Stevens?

  To see who can have the best upside down writing.

• 15:44Hannah Fry?

  Looks like it.

• 15:45Michael Stevens?

  Well, they're both using the same one.

• 15:47Hannah Fry?

  Both using the same one, at least in the ISS. You only need one, one form of ink to stock.

• 15:51Michael Stevens?

  Do they use these on the ISS still? I would think you'd, you'd, you'd have to. Maybe they don't use this bullet shaped one. As I've seen actual astronauts using space pens and they've got like clips and they look more like a regular writing utensil, you know? This is less practical, but again, it's more, you know, flashy.

• 16:11Hannah Fry?

  Spacey, spacey. Yes, they do. They still use them on the ISS. I reckon he made his million dollars back by now, do you?

• 16:17Michael Stevens?

  I, I, I hope so.

• 16:19Hannah Fry?

  It's the universal standard, apparently in space. He's, he's actually got a monopoly in space.

• 16:24Michael Stevens?

  Well, who, who else is making a pen like this? I mean, it's kind of like, you only need one kind.

• 16:31Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. Apparently there are, there are two main models that are officially NASA approved. The AG seven.

• 16:37Michael Stevens?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:38Hannah Fry?

  Which is the classic one and the CH four, which is slightly sleeker. It's the house pen of the ISS. Yeah, I quite want one, even though I don't really like writing with ballpoint pens and, and the fact that you have to buy a pressure, a pressure cartridge.

• 16:52Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I know, I know. Well, you can't have this one because it is.

• 16:57Hannah Fry?

  That's going in your time capsule, my friend.

• 16:58Michael Stevens?

  My time capsule.

• 16:59Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, too right, too right. All right, should we have a break? Come back and do.

• 17:03Michael Stevens?

  Have a break and when we come back, we're going to look at your questions.

• 17:05Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 17:13Hannah Fry?

  This segment is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. For years, many of the proteins that cause cancer have been considered undrugable.

• 17:20Michael Stevens?

  In fact, around 85% of our proteins are considered undrugable, which is like a biological iceberg. Our current drugs only touch the fraction, the tiny fraction that's above water.

• 17:32Hannah Fry?

  But Cancer Research UK scientists, they are working to change that. Their scientists are diving beneath the surface to try and target these proteins. And to do it, they are taking inspiration from a household chore that most of us try to avoid.

• 17:47Michael Stevens?

  So today, we are asking, can taking out the trash save lives?

• 17:52Hannah Fry?

  Okay, here's the thing, right? Cancer starts when our genes end up going wrong and make and spit out these faulty proteins that tell cells to grow uncontrollably, right? And what standard drugs do, they are designed to block the cancer-causing actions of faulty proteins. It's a little bit like plugging a leak, right? Sort of like a physical block that stops it from working. But it relies on the faulty protein having this pluggable leak, right? A rigidly shaped area that drugs can get in and attach to to physically stop the protein from working. The problem is that lots of cancer-causing proteins are really disordered. There's no clearly shaped part that the drugs can attach on to. And that's essentially why they are considered undrugable.

• 18:35Hannah Fry?

  But some of these proteins, they end up driving cancers in children and young people. And that is where it is especially challenging to develop really effective treatments. Because right now, virtually all the treatments that we have for kids and young people are just borrowed from adult treatments. But the biology of children and young people and their cancers are just completely different. And so we need to find different ways to treat it.

• 19:00Michael Stevens?

  Here's the question, what if the key to drugging the undrugable was already inside of us? Well, our cells have their own sophisticated waste disposal system to help them get rid of the rubbish proteins that are damaged or misshapen or no longer needed. Basically, the cell attaches these tiny molecular Trash bags to the proteins that it wants to throw out. And then those tags tell the whole machinery inside the cell to take that protein and unfold it, shred it and recycle its parts. And those parts are basically just amino acids, the building blocks of proteins that the cell can then use to build new proteins. Interestingly, this whole cell recycling disposal system is called UPS.

• 19:45Michael Stevens?

  It really is a kind of parcel delivery system, by the way, but is it united? No, UPS stands for Ubiquitin Proteosom System. Ubiquitin is the tag and the proteosom is the bin. So let's talk about rubbish. How can we hijack our body's internal rubbish disposal system to treat cancer? Well, Cancer Grand Challenges and their partners are supporting a team of international scientists to find ways to develop therapies for solid tumors in children, including degrader drugs, which hijack this bin system, this rubbish disposal system to go after proteins that scientists once thought were undruggable.

• 20:25Michael Stevens?

  They can attach trash tags, not trash bags, trash tags, okay, to cancer-causing proteins that tell the cells to chuck them out. So the teams are designing degrader drugs to target five faulty proteins. And they've already identified a few promising compounds that could put a protein that drives childhood neuroblastoma in the bin. A neuroblastoma is a cancer that develops in nerve cells, neuro, of children mostly younger than five years old.

• 20:53Hannah Fry?

  Right, you can see the potential for this and what an unimaginable difference it could make to really countless lives. This idea of Cancer Grand Challenges, by the way, is an initiative that supports international, interdisciplinary teams to try and solve these big unsolved mysteries in cancer research. I mean, you could imagine a giant scientific escape room, you know, you've got the puzzles are like nothing you've ever seen before and you get teams all together. But the prize at the end, if you manage to solve them, it could, it could change really everything. But this idea, these degraders, they have this power to. Potentially cross the blood brain barrier to also treat brain tumors,

• 21:34Hannah Fry?

  which is a wall that most drugs really struggle to penetrate.

• 21:39Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, this trash tagging technique could help us treat children and young people with better drugs that aren't as harsh on their developing bodies.

• 21:48Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, this is the next step in a very long legacy. Over the last 50 years, around 35,600 children and young people with cancer in the UK have survived into adulthood, thanks in part to Cancer Research UK's work.

• 22:02Michael Stevens?

  And with continued breakthroughs like that, the number is only going to keep growing. So it turns out, taking the bins out really can save lives.

• 22:10Hannah Fry?

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/rrestisscience.

• 22:20Speaker 04

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• 22:50Speaker 05

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• 22:53Speaker 06

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• 23:57Hannah Fry?

  All right. Well, we've had one question that has come in that actually quite relates to what you're describing. It's from Luthien, who says, I was listening to your episode about orientation. I now want to know if astronauts, especially those in deep space, internally experience the sensation of bodily rotation, or if, rather, they lack an internal sense of orientation due to the lack of gravity and thus the lack of up and down, and therefore experience something more akin to the world moving around them.

• 24:25Michael Stevens?

  Hmm.

• 24:26Hannah Fry?

  I mean, the pens definitely feel it.

• 24:27Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 24:28Hannah Fry?

  The pens definitely feel the lack of gravity.

• 24:30Michael Stevens?

  The pens have a built in gravity, though. They have this built in direction, which is the direction that the pressurized gas is pushing. But for a human, our inner ear, the little like stuff floating around in that fluid, it doesn't have an up or down.

• 24:46Hannah Fry?

  Doesn't have an up or down. Well, there is a little bit of gravity going on in there, but generally you can tell rotation. That's essentially what it can test. So I think if you are spinning in space, you still know that you're spinning. But loads of astronauts, they talk about how if you don't, I mean, you're not getting like blood rushing to your head in the same way. That's sort of same physical sensation.

• 25:09Michael Stevens?

  When you're upside down, it doesn't feel any different.

• 25:11Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. So instead, it doesn't feel like, oh, look, I flipped upside down relative to the spaceship. It's more like, oh, the spaceship has rotated around me.

• 25:20Michael Stevens?

  Interesting.

• 25:21Hannah Fry?

  So astronauts say that their frame of reference, as it were, is where their feet are. So it's like, up and down to them remains fixed and everything else changes around them.

• 25:29Michael Stevens?

  Oh, that makes so much sense. I never even thought about that, though. And when I first heard that question, I thought, oh, no, they, they're going to feel rotation because you can.

• 25:37Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 25:37Michael Stevens?

  But you're only going to really feel rotation if you rotate quickly.

• 25:41Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 25:42Michael Stevens?

  But if you're just doing stuff and you're incidentally, you've turned yourself 180 degrees in your process of work, or slowly while you're sleeping or something, they're strapped down while you're sleeping. But you're gonna, of course, you're gonna say, hey, the whole ship's upside down.

• 25:58Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 25:58Michael Stevens?

  It's not me. And of course, upside down is like a very arbitrary concept up there.

• 26:03Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely, because there's no, there's no such way as up, really.

• 26:05Michael Stevens?

  I mean, there's like down towards Earth, but you certainly don't feel a force pulling you to Earth. There's definitely gravity. That's why I'm always careful to say weightless.

• 26:13Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 26:14Michael Stevens?

  I'm okay saying zero G, because they don't feel a G. They don't feel a G because that's the force.

• 26:20Hannah Fry?

  They're not accelerating in a particular direction.

• 26:22Michael Stevens?

  I don't like saying zero gravity, because there's definitely gravity. There's gravity. That's why the International Space Station doesn't just drift away. Um, in fact, the gravity that they feel up there is, is still, it's not a hundred percent what you feel on the surface of Earth, but it's more than fifty. It's somewhere in between.

• 26:39Hannah Fry?

  Is it?

• 26:39Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, if you, if you built, I think we talked about this in a previous episode.

• 26:43Hannah Fry?

  What, the space elevator one?

• 26:44Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I think it maybe was that one. We talked about if you built a skyscraper that was so tall, its roof was at the height of the International Space Station's orbit. I think it would have something like seventy percent gravity up there. You would maybe feel different, but you certainly wouldn't be like, whoa, I'm on top of the building. You'd be like, I'm on top of the building.

• 27:04Hannah Fry?

  Well, wait, why is that not the same on the ISS then?

• 27:06Michael Stevens?

  Because they're falling. They are in free fall. If you imagine yourself in an elevator, its cable has been snapped, you're going to be floating weightless in that elevator because there's nothing to resist your, uh, attraction to Earth. And so that's what they're doing. It's just that they're falling, but they're also moving to the side so quickly that as they fall, the curvature of the Earth falls with them. So they never get any closer to it. That's what, that's what an orbit is, a successful, you know, orbit, a stable orbit.

• 27:38Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely.

• 27:38Michael Stevens?

  So it is weird to think that you could stand on top of a building that was, what, how high? Four hundred kilometers? You could stand on the top of such a building and you could see the ISS swoop, just fly by so quickly. It wouldn't feel like it was falling as you watched it, because it would be traveling horizontally so quickly. That you would just be like, yeah, it was there and now it's, it's way past me.

• 28:03Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely. But it would be falling, because if you imagine drawing a like tangent out from where you are, as it follows the curvature of the Earth, it will be below that line very quickly.

• 28:12Michael Stevens?

  And of course, it does fall, uh, over time because of friction. There's enough air up there that they do.

• 28:21Michael Stevens?

  Slow down and that means they fall closer to the earth. Or hold on, let me, let me rephrase that. Because of the friction, over time, like over the course of weeks and months, the ISS does drop in altitude. And it needs periodic boosts to go back up a little bit higher. And so I did a, I actually did a short video about this where I was like, if all life on earth was destroyed by some calamity and the only living things left were the astronauts in the ISS, how long would they have?

• 28:55Hannah Fry?

  Well, they would eventually spiral down into earth, right?

• 28:57Michael Stevens?

  They would, because they, they, they need periodic deliveries of propellant for the boosts that to reboost them back up into their, the orbit they want to be in. They could certainly very easily have enough food, enough water. They, they generate oxygen, the ship is going to give them enough of all that stuff. The limiting factor is altitude. That's what they will run out of first.

• 29:21Hannah Fry?

  How long would it take?

• 29:22Michael Stevens?

  About like a year and a half, maybe 15 months.

• 29:25Hannah Fry?

  Wow.

• 29:26Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, like that's, that's how long they would have. And they'd be like, look, we've got, you can easily have enough food. You could have enough water and air to last more than 15 months. You could have two, three years worth of those kinds of supplies. But altitude, you will run out of first.

• 29:41Hannah Fry?

  Altitude's the thing. You know, some astronauts on the ISS in particular, they also say, just going back to the question, that if they close their eyes, they sort of lose perspective of, of direction altogether.

• 29:52Michael Stevens?

  Oh, sure.

• 29:53Hannah Fry?

  Kind of feels like they're just a disembodied brain. And then they kind of open their eyes, it's like, surprise.

• 29:59Michael Stevens?

  You've got a body.

• 30:02Hannah Fry?

  Like the space, the ISS is in disorientation.

• 30:06Michael Stevens?

  Wow. Yeah, that would be trippy.

• 30:09Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, completely. The spit trick doesn't work, basically. The spit trick that you can use in avalanche.

• 30:15Michael Stevens?

  You can't spit and watch where it goes to figure out which way's up or down.

• 30:19Hannah Fry?

  No go, no go. Okay, this is a question from David. Could a building be damaged by resonance if everyone clapped in unison all at once? What if the entire world clapped at once? What if they were all densely packed in the Isle of Wight and clapped?

• 30:34Michael Stevens?

  Okay, well, okay, here's the thing. I looked this up and you can find like little short videos other people have made about this question of like, how damaging would it be if we all clapped at the same time? And a lot of them are just what you would expect. It's like a whole bunch of like AI animations of the earth exploding.

• 30:55Hannah Fry?

  Great.

• 30:56Michael Stevens?

  While they tell us that everyone clapping at once would be like maybe as loud as a jet engine for like a second if you were close. And you're like, give me a break. It's a, it's kind of anticlimactic. But the problem is, first of all, you gotta get everyone together in one place. Because if we all just clapped where we were, it would attenuate through the air and it would basically not even matter.

• 31:19Hannah Fry?

  Well, also, the speed of sound is extremely slow. So if you clapped where you are, when you're in Kansas or Denver, whatever, and I clap in London, effectively by the time those two claps would meet each other, they'd just be off.

• 31:32Michael Stevens?

  They're not, they're not, yeah.

• 31:34Hannah Fry?

  They're not synchronized.

• 31:34Michael Stevens?

  The clap is like compressing air and then that compression wave travels, but it gets weaker and weaker and weaker. So when I clap in Colorado, you don't hear it here. Anyway, if we got us all into one place, we could all clap together and sound adds up in a way that isn't quite like just normal arithmetic. But we could probably get eight billion people to clap together and make a noise in the like 200 decibel range.

• 32:03Hannah Fry?

  Okay, that's pretty loud.

• 32:04Michael Stevens?

  That's very loud.

• 32:06Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 32:07Michael Stevens?

  But you're still limited by how close you can get everybody. The, the world record loudest clap was actually achieved just in 2021 by a guy named Stephen Wallace. Who, I could not find how far away they measured the loudness. Cause of course loudness goes down by, what do they call it? A square?

• 32:29Hannah Fry?

  Inverse square law.

• 32:30Michael Stevens?

  Inverse square law. So if you're twice as far away, it's four times quieter. Anyway, Guinness World Records did not tell me how, what the rules were for how far away they measured, but there's a video of it. And he clapped and he hit 117 decibels. And that broke a record that had been around for 15 years. Before him, the loudest clap was 113 decibels. Now, I've watched the video.

• 32:57Hannah Fry?

  Right. Was it, was it, was it something special? Did he have like ginormo hands? Was he doing a special technique? Was it cupped hands, flat hands?

• 33:05Michael Stevens?

  I don't, I don't want to be catty on this podcast very often. But it seemed like.

• 33:11Hannah Fry?

  One in five episodes is okay.

• 33:13Michael Stevens?

  Because Guinness World Records made such a point to mention the audio company that did all of the recording and measurements. It sounded a little bit like they themselves pushed for Guinness to do this. Like, hey, we should do a loudest clap thing. Hasn't been broken in 15 years. And they just got like their intern to go in and the guy's just. I mean, they're loud claps. Like, I'm not putting, his technique is solid.

• 33:37Hannah Fry?

  But he didn't wake up, you know, one day as a child and be like, you know what? I need my life's mission to be. I've worked it out. It's gonna be clapping.

• 33:45Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, no, it wasn't that.

• 33:47Hannah Fry?

  Can I look at it?

• 33:48Michael Stevens?

  Look it up. Yeah, look up Stephen Wallace clap. And you'll find there's like a video on Facebook of it. It's during the pandemic also, so everyone's wearing masks in the video, which is, it's always such a like, oh, gosh, yeah, there was that period.

• 34:02Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, that's nothing, that does look like an intern. You're right.

• 34:06Michael Stevens?

  Right? I mean, again, I don't want to put anyone down.

• 34:11Hannah Fry?

  I do. That's rubbish.

• 34:13Michael Stevens?

  But just listening to that clip, I'm like, that's applause. That's regular.

• 34:17Hannah Fry?

  I think I've done louder claps than that in my life.

• 34:19Michael Stevens?

  I want to see someone who trained since childhood. And they only trained because when they were a kid, people made fun of how like big and cuppy their hands were. And they were like, I'm gonna triumph over this. And they like, that turned out to make their claps really loud. And then like, they even spent time in jail for clapping once and it was so loud, it hurt children's eardrums nearby. That's what I want to see.

• 34:43Hannah Fry?

  I want someone who has dinner plates for hands, right?

• 34:45Michael Stevens?

  Yes.

• 34:46Hannah Fry?

  And maybe webbing between each of their fingers in order to really focus those sound waves.

• 34:50Michael Stevens?

  Exactly.

• 34:51Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 34:51Michael Stevens?

  Or I want someone who's got like a technique and it almost feels illegal. You're like, well, yeah, I can clap loudly. And they're like, oh, yeah, watch this. I invented this. And they do this like weird clapping.

• 35:02Hannah Fry?

  Backwards, upside down.

• 35:03Michael Stevens?

  And physicists get involved and go, wow, it actually is like twice as efficient to clap that way. And where there's like a whole new way of clapping invented. Don't give me this like, uh, hey, guys, what's up? I'm here to set a world record.

• 35:15Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 35:16Michael Stevens?

  Nice.

• 35:18Hannah Fry?

  I wholeheartedly agree with you.

• 35:19Michael Stevens?

  And there are, there are new styles of clapping I'm discovering every day.

• 35:23Hannah Fry?

  Are there?

• 35:24Michael Stevens?

  And by every day, I mean, like, maybe 15 years ago, I found the fastest clapper. That is a record that I very, very much respect.

• 35:32Hannah Fry?

  Wait, can I guess? Can I guess? Instead of doing the normal way, do they do something where they like?

• 35:39Michael Stevens?

  Kind of, kind of like that.

• 35:40Hannah Fry?

  Fold their hand into and clap forwards and backwards.

• 35:42Michael Stevens?

  Kind of. They do it like this. Not, not regular clapping, but clapping like this.

• 35:48Hannah Fry?

  Oh, I've seen it.

• 35:54Hannah Fry?

  For the.

• 35:54Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. So I'll slow it down.

• 35:56Hannah Fry?

  For the purposes of people who are listening only.

• 35:58Michael Stevens?

  Yes, please.

• 35:59Hannah Fry?

  You just saw Michael do what was a really amazing impression of a circus seal.

• 36:05Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, basically sliding my palms across each other long ways, but then allowing enough of a gap.

• 36:13Hannah Fry?

  Oh, you've practiced this.

• 36:17Michael Stevens?

  I gotta work out more. But the point is that that is currently the way you can set the most claps per minute, you know, record.

• 36:26Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 36:26Michael Stevens?

  Which I love because it's a different way of clapping. And it reminds me of things like the high jump and how people used to jump over it with like a scissor kick. And then someone invented the, the flop.

• 36:37Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 36:38Michael Stevens?

  The Fosbury flop. And it was like, oh, my gosh, yes, that allows them to raise their center of mass higher than, than before. It allows them to clear a higher bar at least. I forget the physics behind it. But that stuff really, I love it.

• 36:52Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, we need more competition on this. Record your claps. See what, see, see how loud they come out. Let's, uh, let's get a community going. Let's get, let's get an annual conference. Let's get Clap-a-Con.

• 37:05Michael Stevens?

  Yes, we should do that. And, and I think it's important because guess what? You, all of us, are always clapping.

• 37:16Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 37:16Michael Stevens?

  This is not my joke, but the joke is that you never stop clapping. The distance between your claps just gets really long.

• 37:23Hannah Fry?

  Hmm. Nice. That's a lovely idea.

• 37:27Michael Stevens?

  It's a little bit of a like, you know, paradigm shift there.

• 37:30Hannah Fry?

  Lovely idea.

• 37:31Michael Stevens?

  You're welcome.

• 37:32Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, it's a bit like, um, when I was about 13 years old, I, I deliberately opened a brackets and I've actually just been writing inside that bracket for ever since.

• 37:42Michael Stevens?

  Oh, yeah, there, I think I saw a tweet once where a guy was like, oh my gosh. In, in, in ninth grade, I said, quote, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I forgot to ever say end quote. So the, like, most of my life has been something I've attributed to Ernest Hemingway.

• 37:59Hannah Fry?

  Ah.

• 38:01Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 38:03Hannah Fry?

  Okay. To answer your question then, David, we're, we're not damaging any buildings.

• 38:07Michael Stevens?

  No, no, no, no, no. It, it, it would be loud. It would be uncomfortable, but the building would be more in danger of just all those people.

• 38:15Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 38:15Michael Stevens?

  Like physically, trying to physically pack it full of that, like as many people as you could. That would be much more damaging than the combined, um, volume of a clap.

• 38:24Hannah Fry?

  Unless the new clapping technique really elevates things.

• 38:28Michael Stevens?

  Unless and until ClapperCon generates a whole new style of human clapping, which it will.

• 38:35Hannah Fry?

  Okay. All right. Last question. This is from Jordan. What are your thoughts on the Kardashev scale? Have there been further developments on this theory since its inception over 60 years ago? Where do you think we, Earth civilization, land on it currently? And do you think we'll get it in your lifetimes? Okay, we should probably start with what it is.

• 38:54Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 38:54Hannah Fry?

  So this is an idea from the 1960s, the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev. And he was trying to categorize how hypothetical alien civilizations might distinguish themselves from one another based on the amount of energy that they can harness, right? So type one, this is a civilization that is totally able to use all of the energy resources that are available on their planet, right? So, you know, all of the energy that's floating around on Earth. By the way, we're about. Naught point seven at the moment, maybe naught point seven three, I think is the.

• 39:29Michael Stevens?

  Cause, cause what, what are we missing?

• 39:30Hannah Fry?

  Uh, I mean, loads. Uh, we're still like digging up dead dinosaurs and using that to, to power most of.

• 39:36Michael Stevens?

  But so, so this scale doesn't actually mean all energy, like we find a way to break the laws of thermodynamics.

• 39:44Hannah Fry?

  Sure.

• 39:45Michael Stevens?

  And get waste heat energy back into, right?

• 39:49Hannah Fry?

  No, it's more like there's loads of wind power that we're missing. There's loads of solar power that we're missing. I'm not sure about nuclear power, actually. I think that that, does that still count? I think it does still count.

• 39:59Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. So I guess I'm wondering, um, I'm only vaguely familiar with the scale, but like.

• 40:04Hannah Fry?

  I'll be honest with you, me too.

• 40:05Michael Stevens?

  To, to reach one, to use all the energy of your planet, does that mean that you're literally creating nuclear explosions out of all the matter in your planet? Obviously not. I think it must mean that it's within your technological ability to harness energy of all kinds. But no, you, or you are harnessing it.

• 40:23Hannah Fry?

  No, I think it's beyond your technical ability. I think it's, I think it's that you have the ability to harness all available energy that your planet has, apart from destroying matter.

• 40:34Michael Stevens?

  Okay. Okay. All right.

• 40:36Hannah Fry?

  I think it's that. I mean, honestly, can I be honest with you? I think the whole thing's nonsense.

• 40:40Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I, I find it really annoying because they get so into it and they're like, oh, when are we, it, it emotionally matters to them that we become a type three civilization. And I'm like, what, why are you?

• 40:50Hannah Fry?

  Why? Okay. So, so let's, let's, to, to finish off. So type one is like you use everything up in your, you can use all the energy in your own planet. Type two is that you can use the entire energy output of, of, of your star.

• 41:02Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 41:03Hannah Fry?

  So the idea that we, that to, to be able to do that is maybe you have something like a Dyson sphere or maybe like an entire cluster of mirrors that surround the sun, these satellites that go out and surround the sun and take all of the sunlight. And then transport this single beam into a way to, to harness all of that energy. And then that can be used to, you know, do whatever you want. And then type three is that you have a civilization that is capable of, of using the entire energy resource of a galaxy.

• 41:29Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 41:30Hannah Fry?

  Right. Which is. Crazy.

• 41:32Michael Stevens?

  And so then this, this one thing that this leads to is the idea that, okay, well, if there are highly intelligent life forms out there that have reached, uh, level two.

• 41:42Hannah Fry?

  Sure.

• 41:42Michael Stevens?

  Then we should be able to see their stars, you know, flickering, uh, because of the spheres of energy collectors put around the.

• 41:51Hannah Fry?

  Because they've got loads of mirrors around them.

• 41:52Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 41:53Hannah Fry?

  And there was a situation a few years ago, Tabby's star, where astronomers got really excited. Amateur astronomer found it first. This is Tabitha Boyerjan, um, who found this star about fifteen hundred light years away from Earth, and it was like dimming and brightening in an unusual way. Now, normally, when you get an exoplanet that passes in front of a star, it does dim the light, but it does so in actually a really tiny way. Even if you get a planet like the size of Jupiter, it does it in a really small way. But this particular star was like, the dimming was really significant, and everyone got very excited about it. And we're like, we found one. We found a planet, we found an alien civilization that is using a, the, the Dyson sphere to harness energy from their own sun. And, and there you go. Um, and it turned out it's just actually interplanetary dust.

• 42:38Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 42:39Hannah Fry?

  So probably not. Um, but people were really excited. They were like, there's a genuine possibility.

• 42:43Michael Stevens?

  And that's the thing, this scale gets people very excited. There are so many videos on YouTube about the scale, about Dyson spheres, Dyson rings, and it's, it's exciting because it's like sci-fi technology. And because I think it's, it's not just a, a, a cool futuristic idea, but it's like a, a hierarchy of like, okay, that means that you're at two.

• 43:06Hannah Fry?

  It feels quantitative, right? Even though it's actually very hand wavy.

• 43:10Michael Stevens?

  Yes, yes.

• 43:12Hannah Fry?

  So, so Carl Sagan calculated that we're at naught point seven. The current estimates are that we're at naught point seven three, you know, around about now. I mean. If you project forwards and we continue with a increase in global energy consumption of three percent per year, then we'll become a type one civilization who are sort of less than one at the moment in like a hundred years or so.

• 43:34Michael Stevens?

  A hundred years. Yeah, so it gives you like a, like a personal goals, right? Like, I'm gonna help us get to a type one civilization sooner. And that means that we need to get fusion or whatever. We need to better harness this other form of energy, the, the energy in the tides and the waves, right?

• 43:51Hannah Fry?

  I mean, sure, sure. Then there's also this whole like philosophical thing about, oh, the most difficult part is the transition from naught point seven to one, because that's the bit when you've got enough power to exterminate your own planet.

• 44:06Michael Stevens?

  Ah, so you can fold it into the great filter and all those kinds of things.

• 44:10Hannah Fry?

  Exactly. The great filter being the answer to the idea of why haven't we heard this cacophony of sounds when we turned on, when we turned on SETI, when we, when we turned on the, the ability to look for other alien life forms and we didn't find any? Is it because they all wiped themselves out? Is it because there's this filter that, that essentially you get powerful enough, intelligent enough, capable enough that you knock out your own civilization?

• 44:33Michael Stevens?

  Yep.

• 44:33Hannah Fry?

  I think maybe the reason why I feel a bit dismissive of it, maybe dismissive is a bit too far, because I think it's a fun idea. But I think it's that. I think it's a fun idea. I think it's like a false quantification of things. And I think that it is just taken a bit too seriously.

• 44:53Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, perhaps. I think it's, it's fun. I think it's too focused on just energy and specifically certain ways of getting certain kinds of energy, where I think you could also build a scale about how broadly a species has, has pioneered, or what level of consciousness do they have? That could be a whole other thing, where maybe like harnessing more energy just actually becomes completely uninteresting. And what is more important is, you know, your, your, your lives inside the digital world or something.

• 45:26Hannah Fry?

  I think there's just a certain group of people who are like really obsessed with growth, you know?

• 45:32Michael Stevens?

  True.

• 45:33Hannah Fry?

  More and more and more, expansion, expansion and expansion. And I don't know whether this is just because I'm a bit older or more female, but I but I'm more interested in there just being a point where it's like, you know, this is actually enough, like this actually is enough. Like, I'm really, I'm, I think that there's an endless bound to my curiosity. I will constantly want to know more. That, that, that I want more of. I'd like cleaner forms of energy, but I don't think we need more.

• 46:05Michael Stevens?

  Well, yeah, more for the sake of more.

• 46:07Hannah Fry?

  More for the sake of more.

• 46:09Michael Stevens?

  So that energy prices can basically hit zero and we have access to everything and everyone has access to what they need.

• 46:15Hannah Fry?

  Sure, that would be nice.

• 46:16Michael Stevens?

  But you're right. I think there is this feeling of, well, but yeah, but there could be more. And then we could move up the scale and score more points. And you're like, for what reason? And they're like, well, because it's a kind of a cool story. Like, when a lot of people ask me about the scale, I can tell that what they really want is to just listen to really cool speculative science fiction.

• 46:34Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:35Michael Stevens?

  Which is awesome, but it's not what I'm good at. It's not my job.

• 46:37Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. And that, I think that's exactly it. That's it. Speculative science fiction is really fun.

• 46:42Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 46:42Hannah Fry?

  But it's fiction.

• 46:43Michael Stevens?

  It's a, it's a different thing.

• 46:44Hannah Fry?

  It's a different thing.

• 46:45Michael Stevens?

  It's not like, ah, yes, guys. Well, you know, next year, uh, the European Space Agency is going to be doing this thing that's going to move us up to a point eight on the scale. And everyone's like, yes, of course, like this is a real thing.

• 46:58Hannah Fry?

  Maybe we're being too harsh about this. Maybe everyone's gonna get really angry with us.

• 47:01Michael Stevens?

  About 20 minutes just.

• 47:04Hannah Fry?

  It is quite fun. It is quite fun.

• 47:07Michael Stevens?

  It is fun. I don't have anything else to add about it, though.

• 47:10Hannah Fry?

  No.

• 47:10Michael Stevens?

  Like, uh, oh, but here's, here's what no one talks about. What if you're a negative one on the scale?

• 47:17Hannah Fry?

  Right. Which is, so this is the, the idea that it's like you go down smaller rather than bigger. So you manage to harvest all of the energy from like atoms.

• 47:25Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. Why can't you just cease needing energy? That could be a goal, a goalpost, where you're like, actually, once you get to like one, you start to realize and become a species that needs to be at zero and you exist statically.

• 47:42Hannah Fry?

  Just suspended in.

• 47:44Michael Stevens?

  How's that for speculative science fiction? Just we, we, we, we find that the most intelligent life forms in the universe are all just statues because they've realized that that, just existing, just to be without change, is the ultimate.

• 47:58Hannah Fry?

  Is the ultimate. I mean, that's what the Buddhists think, isn't it?

• 48:01Michael Stevens?

  They're way ahead of intelligence.

• 48:05Michael Stevens?

  And if you listen to this podcast, you are way ahead of intelligence.

• 48:09Hannah Fry?

  The compliments are in abundance here. Maybe energy isn't, but there's no shortage, no scarcity of compliments. Thank you as ever for watching and listening to us. You can send us emails, [email protected]. Ask us questions either in an email or in the comments. Maybe we will be whiny and moany about your question too.

• 48:32Michael Stevens?

  We weren't whining and moaning about the scale. Okay, we were, we were just reacting to it, I think, as people who have spent the last 20 years constantly being told about it and asked about it.

• 48:45Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. What he said.

• 48:46Michael Stevens?

  So you're seeing us raw. This is real. This is real life, guys. See you later.

• 48:53Hannah Fry?

  Bye.

• 49:07Speaker 04

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot stop your new clients from emailing you at 3 a.m. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you be in three places at once. And while we can't help you organize your calendar, LinkedIn can help you land more clients so you have a calendar to organize. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness.

• 49:37Michael Stevens?

  Streaming October 30th on Paramount Plus. I'm Dexter Morgan. I've been killing killers for half my life. It gets to you. You're having a midlife crisis. I'm not ready for this. He's back. I'm older. I'm wiser. And sharper than ever. Things are gonna get messy. But if I can't believe in myself, I can't believe in anything. Dexter Resurrection. New season October 30th on the Paramount Plus Premium Plan.

• 50:08Michael Stevens?

  When everyone's finally together, what makes mornings even brighter? Keeping things deliciously. Whether you're pouring up a glass of morning refreshment or topping off festive drinks for a family brunch, Simply Orange brings that 100% fresh squeezed taste to every moment. Deliciously bright and delightfully easy, Simply Orange is made for all your seasonal gatherings. Simply Orange: Say Yes to Simple.