Dying In Space, Trapped Water, and What's Hidden In Pi?

Almost every human who has ever lived has one thing in common: they were born and died on Earth. Except for three people. Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens uncover the extraordinary story of Soyuz 11, the Soviet cosmonauts who became the only humans ever to die in outer space, and what their deaths meant for the future of human spaceflight. But that raises a bigger question: what exactly is trapped on Earth, and what can escape? Is the water left inside discarded plastic bottles being locked away forever? Is Earth itself slowly leaking water into space? Can you really trap a monkey simply because it refuses to let go of something shiny? And are your phone number, your name and every other possible sequence of numbers really hidden somewhere inside the digits of pi? From space exploration and the Soyuz 11 disaster to Earth's water, animal behaviour and one of mathematics' biggest unanswered questions, Hannah and Michael investigate what gets trapped, what escapes, and what might have been hiding in plain sight all along. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience Cancer 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-CarterChief Digital Officer: 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.

• 0:00Hannah Fry?

  Welcome to The Rest is Science. I'm Hannah Fry.

• 0:02Michael Stevens?

  And I'm Michael Stevens. And every single human ever has been born and died on Earth.

• 0:12Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, short episode today.

• 0:16Michael Stevens?

  Or is it?

• 0:16Hannah Fry?

  What?

• 0:18Michael Stevens?

  Except for three people. I want to start today by talking about the only three humans to have not died on planet Earth.

• 0:26Hannah Fry?

  Oh, Lord. Okay. We're talking astronauts.

• 0:32Michael Stevens?

  No.

• 0:32Hannah Fry?

  What?

• 0:34Michael Stevens?

  We're talking cosmonauts.

• 0:35Hannah Fry?

  Oh, okay.

• 0:37Michael Stevens?

  A cosmonaut is what the Soviets called someone who went to space. And I like that name so much more because what is an astronaut? They're someone who knots, who travels the astros, the stars. But we don't. We travel around one star, the sun.

• 0:53Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 0:53Michael Stevens?

  What does a cosmonaut travel around? The universe. In a way, we're all cosmonauts, though. So actually, they're both kind of bad names, but...

• 1:02Hannah Fry?

  It would have been better to be like a...

• 1:04Michael Stevens?

  An outer space knot.

• 1:06Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, or like a solar system knot. I mean, to be honest, I'm sorry, but if you're at the ISS, yes, you're in space, technically. Well done. But you're only just...

• 1:15Michael Stevens?

  I know. I don't want to be the guy, but you started it. The ISS astronauts are basically still on Earth.

• 1:22Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 1:23Michael Stevens?

  I mean, if the Earth was the size of an apple, where are they? You can't even get your fingernail close enough to the apple. I mean, you can. You can dig your fingernail into it. But you put your finger on it, your fingernail is further away from the apple than the ISS astronauts.

• 1:35Hannah Fry?

  It's pathetic, really. You're still within the magnetic protection of the planet. You're not getting, you know, radiation in the same way. Look, I'll accept the people who've gone to the moon, right? Artemis, that crew, I accept that they are something naughts. But really, they're moon-earth naughts, moon-earth system naughts.

• 1:56Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, they are cis-lunonauts.

• 2:04Michael Stevens?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 2:07Hannah Fry?

  As if they weren't cool enough already, some astronauts have now added cancer scientists to their CEB. They are making use of microgravity conditions in space to carry out experiments.

• 2:18Michael Stevens?

  That's because the same thing that lets astronauts experience weightlessness also affects how cancer cells grow, behave, and respond to drugs.

• 2:27Hannah Fry?

  And back down on Earth, Cancer Research UK is working with astronomers to explore tumors with technologies that are typically used to map the Milky Way, which I think gives you an idea of just how complex this disease is.

• 2:40Michael Stevens?

  That's right. There are over 200 different types of cancer. But by pushing boundaries and embracing the latest technologies, Cancer Research UK has helped double cancer survival in the UK over the past 50 years.

• 2:51Hannah Fry?

  And today, it is continuing to save and improve lives around the world. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/restiscience.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Observe: The North American Dad. 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles, and says, "Dang, that's a good offer." The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle, no one called him "boss." He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply.

• 3:36Michael Stevens?

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 4:06Hannah Fry?

  Cis-lunonaut, there you go.

• 4:07Michael Stevens?

  So, I mean, we're getting ahead of ourselves, but you're right. The Artemis 2 crew holds the record for the farthest a human has ever gone from Earth. And they recently broke that record by going 1.6% further than the previous record holders, which was the crew of Apollo 13. So the record stands at 406,711 kilometers. It's about 250,000 miles away from Earth.

• 4:32Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 4:33Michael Stevens?

  That's the furthest we've gone. Robots that we've made have gone a lot further.

• 4:37Hannah Fry?

  I agree.

• 4:38Michael Stevens?

  The robot record is currently 25.6 billion kilometers.

• 4:42Hannah Fry?

  Oh, wow!

• 4:43Michael Stevens?

  Billion.

• 4:44Hannah Fry?

  What's that, Voyager?

• 4:45Michael Stevens?

  Voyager 1. But not only have humans, you know, gone not that far from Earth, really. Even our robots have gone far, but like, barely left the solar system.

• 4:58Hannah Fry?

  They're not even up to another star yet.

• 5:00Michael Stevens?

  Voyager 1 is 0.006% of the way to another star. Okay, I could find you seven experts today that would tell you that technically it's still in the solar system.

• 5:13Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 5:14Michael Stevens?

  It's left the heliopause, but is that really the edge of the solar system? If it slowed down to a stop, it's going back to the sun. Give me a break.

• 5:22Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 5:22Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 5:23Hannah Fry?

  Okay, well then, no.

• 5:24Michael Stevens?

  But every human who's left, even the ones who have gone record-breaking far, have come back. Except for three. Well, they did come back, though, but they didn't come back alive.

• 5:37Michael Stevens?

  But that's the... I'm spoiling the end, kind of. I mean, I already said that they died there.

• 5:40Hannah Fry?

  Well, no, actually, you haven't said that they died there. You just said that they weren't...

• 5:44Michael Stevens?

  They didn't die on planet Earth. They couldn't be living on Venus.

• 5:47Hannah Fry?

  You said "born to," right? So I don't want to, like, preempt the end of this, but it might be that they were born in space.

• 5:52Michael Stevens?

  Oh, I've just said...

• 5:54Hannah Fry?

  You said "born and died."

• 5:55Michael Stevens?

  Not everyone's been born and died, yeah.

• 5:57Hannah Fry?

  It's still a great mystery that I'm waiting to uncover.

• 6:01Michael Stevens?

  All right, so we got to start way back at the moon landing. The United States puts people on the moon first. And so the Soviet Union basically scraps any lunar landing plans for people because that's been done. The next big challenge, they figure, is living in space. So they proceed to create and launch and install the very first space station. And it was called Solut 1. Solut is Russian for salute. It's also Russian for fireworks.

• 6:33Hannah Fry?

  Is it?

• 6:33Michael Stevens?

  So they call fireworks salutes. Trying to look up how to pronounce "solut," you know, as the Russian word, I just found a whole bunch of videos about fireworks.

• 6:43Hannah Fry?

  Amazing.

• 6:43Michael Stevens?

  But that was the very first space station. Solut 1 was installed in orbit around Earth in 1971.

• 6:50Hannah Fry?

  I mean, in the history of space travel, that feels like, oh, okay, well, they'd done quite a lot of stuff by then. But if you think about what was happening on Earth in the 1970s, I mean, this is like, your computers are still using punch cards, right? When was the microchip invented? Around about then.

• 7:07Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 7:08Hannah Fry?

  I seem to remember reading once that the wheelie suitcase was invented after people landed on the moon.

• 7:15Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it was. And that is a kind of a shock, but at the same time, there are so many reasons why. Have you dove into this?

• 7:22Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. Well, the thing is, is that airports weren't big in the same way that they are now. You wouldn't like go on a big family holiday in quite the same way. Men were the ones who were mostly traveling. I mean, there are reasons. It's not that we couldn't have invented it. It's not like the idea was impossible.

• 7:38Michael Stevens?

  It wasn't like people were going to LAX back in the 70s and having to walk miles and miles, just like we do today.

• 7:46Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 7:46Michael Stevens?

  And no one ever thought, "I wonder if I could put wheels on this."

• 7:49Hannah Fry?

  No, it was a very different situation. But I think the point is, is that irrespective of the wheelie suitcase thing, at the same time, I think when you get, "Oh, this is some technology from the 1970s from Earth." It's like, wow, that is, that is primitive. But the Russians were sending people to live up...

• 8:08Michael Stevens?

  In orbit, yeah.

• 8:09Hannah Fry?

  In orbit at this point in time.

• 8:10Michael Stevens?

  In a space station, which, like, honestly, 1971, that's still the 60s.

• 8:15Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 8:15Michael Stevens?

  Okay, culturally in America, or even in, well, I don't know anything about what it was like to live in Soviet Russia. But the point is that right away, they send up a mission, which was called Soyuz 10. And they're going to have these guys, these three guys, live on Solut 1. But they fail to dock. They kind of get attached, but they can't get a hard dock accomplished, so they abandon the mission, come back down. Soyuz 11 goes up, and it has three people aboard. They are Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Pesayev.

• 8:49Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 8:49Michael Stevens?

  Okay, the three of them go up. They launch on the 6th of June, 1971. The very next day, they're docking with Solut 1, and it's successful. So they go inside and start just living there. They do experiments, they do all kinds of, you know, looking down at Earth, evaluating its ice caps and its climate patterns, and they try all these things. They're living there 22 days.

• 9:12Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 9:13Michael Stevens?

  More than three weeks. They're up there.

• 9:15Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 9:15Michael Stevens?

  On the 11th day, there's an electrical fire.

• 9:18Hannah Fry?

  Okay, that sounds serious.

• 9:19Michael Stevens?

  That sounds really scary. Also, when they got there, their first steps into the space station were also terrifying because it was like full of smoke.

• 9:28Hannah Fry?

  What?

• 9:29Michael Stevens?

  And no one had even been in there yet.

• 9:30Hannah Fry?

  Okay, so hold on. So the space station gets sent up on its own, gets into orbit, it's orbiting around. Then they take a Soyuz capsule to go up and meet with it and dock into it. They open the doors, smoke everywhere.

• 9:42Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 9:43Hannah Fry?

  I would be, oh my gosh, can you even imagine?

• 9:47Michael Stevens?

  I know. So they, they have to like go in, figure out what's causing the smoke, and then go back into their Soyuz capsule and wait for the smoke to get filtered and cleared. Then they get to go back in, and they live there, and they do, for, again, 22 days. Okay, so a little bit more than three weeks. There's an electrical fire on the 11th day. Like, this is a scary, a scary trip.

• 10:08Hannah Fry?

  Sorry, I thought the electrical fire and the smoke were the same thing.

• 10:10Michael Stevens?

  No.

• 10:11Hannah Fry?

  What was the smoke when they first arrived?

• 10:12Michael Stevens?

  I actually don't know. I don't think anyone knows.

• 10:15Hannah Fry?

  Just happened to be filled with smoke?

• 10:16Michael Stevens?

  The Soviet Union, not famous for telling everything to the whole world. And that's going to come up later. So even after the electrical fire on the 11th day, they still stay for another 11 days. And then it's like, okay, let's go back to Earth. So they get in. This is on the 29th of June, 1971. They leave, undock, and they go radio silent.

• 10:41Michael Stevens?

  But the Soyuz capsule is automatic. It's gonna come back down to Earth. It's got parachutes. It crashes into the ground, which is by design. They don't like the Americans fall into the ocean. They parachute, slow down, and then they've got rockets that explode just before they hit the ground.

• 10:56Hannah Fry?

  Just to soften their landing.

• 10:57Michael Stevens?

  I mean soften is an exaggeration. It's survivable.

• 11:01Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 11:02Michael Stevens?

  But it was not comfortable.

• 11:04Hannah Fry?

  How long between them undocking and then landing?

• 11:06Michael Stevens?

  Only a matter of hours.

• 11:07Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 11:08Michael Stevens?

  So the rescue crews get there as they normally do to like help the crew out. They knock on the capsule, no response.

• 11:15Hannah Fry?

  Oh my gosh.

• 11:16Michael Stevens?

  The rescue crews open the hatch and the crew is dead inside.

• 11:20Hannah Fry?

  Whoa. But do they know when they died?

• 11:23Michael Stevens?

  They do now, and they may have known then. But for two years, the Soviet Union didn't tell anyone what had happened. They did a state burial for the astronauts, for the cosmonauts. But they wouldn't say what happened. And this caused a lot of panic in America for all space agencies.

• 11:43Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 11:43Michael Stevens?

  This was an experiment to see what happens when people are in space for like longer than the Apollo astronauts were.

• 11:50Hannah Fry?

  Is it that experience of being in space is the thing that ends up causing your death?

• 11:54Michael Stevens?

  We don't know. I mean, we think we've thought of everything, but what does having no weight force do to you over three weeks? What does just, I don't know, what other things could be up there? There could be space viruses for all we know. We know that the Apollo missions haven't encountered that yet. They put the first Apollo crew in quarantine for weeks, just in case there were moon viruses. Okay, I mean, you have to get yourself into that mindset. And now you've got these three Russian cosmonauts who didn't survive. And you don't know why.

• 12:25Hannah Fry?

  Dead on arrival.

• 12:26Michael Stevens?

  Dead on arrival. Did they die in the arrival or before? No one knows. So America is like freaking out. Should we go ahead with Skylab? Should we be doing space stations? What happened? And it wasn't until two years later that the Soviet Union finally said, okay, here's what happened. When they undocked at ten forty seven Greenwich Mean Time on the twenty ninth of June, all of the explosive bolts that were supposed to go in sequence all went at once. And that explosive force broke the seal that's supposed to automatically shut off and keep the air pressure where it should be. So the air came out.

• 13:02Hannah Fry?

  Oh, wow. So they they suffocated, isn't it?

• 13:04Michael Stevens?

  They suffocated.

• 13:05Hannah Fry?

  Oh, that's awful.

• 13:06Michael Stevens?

  They suffocated way above the Karman line, which is at a hundred kilometers. That's where we define space as being because to fly at that height, you have to go at orbital speed just to get enough lift from the air. So basically you're orbiting, you're not, you're in space, you're in outer space. They were at a hundred and sixty eight kilometers, so a hundred and four miles above the surface. When they lost all air in their capsule. And again, the capsule automatically came back down to Earth, but they were all dead already, probably within the first minute. And one of them was found near the ventral valve thing, like he was trying to cover it up. But later on, some other-

• 13:45Hannah Fry?

  Where the air was escaping from?

• 13:46Michael Stevens?

  Where the air was escaping because it didn't close. Later on, a cosmonaut who was afraid of this, who did not trust this system, tested that even if you tried to manually close it, it took too long to close. So there was no hope.

• 14:02Hannah Fry?

  That's that's such a tragic detail that they were trying, that they knew what was happening, had worked out what the problem was, and were trying to amend it before it was too late.

• 14:12Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 14:13Hannah Fry?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 14:14Michael Stevens?

  So their capsule landed back on Earth, ninety kilometers southwest of Karazol, Kazakhstan. And on that spot, an obelisk, a three sided obelisk has been erected with a little circular fence around it. And I've never been there, but it's one of my my dream bucket list locations because it is the memorial and the site, not of their demise, but of our recognition that for the first time in human history, our species did not end on Earth.

• 14:46Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 14:47Michael Stevens?

  That we could die beyond the cradle.

• 14:51Hannah Fry?

  Right. Goodness me. So hang on, that means then that no one else has ever lost their life in space. That is also a wild idea.

• 15:02Michael Stevens?

  It is wild. I mean, it shows how serious we are about safety. There have obviously been disasters since Challenger, for example. Those accidents all happened under the Karman line, much, much more within Earth's atmosphere.

• 15:17Hannah Fry?

  This is where the NASA Space Shuttle exploded after takeoff.

• 15:23Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 15:23Hannah Fry?

  And all seven people who were on board lost their lives.

• 15:27Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I was five days old when that happened. And it was my grandma's birthday. And I went to space camp for three years when I was a teenager. And everyone still felt the guilt and the terror of that day.

• 15:41Hannah Fry?

  Well, because there was a teacher on board, wasn't there?

• 15:42Michael Stevens?

  There was a teacher on board.

• 15:44Hannah Fry?

  Like a non non astronaut.

• 15:47Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it was a non astronaut. And Richard Feynman found that it was a problem with the O rings on the solid rocket boosters. And that was the responsibility of a team. And there was a lot of terrible feelings. Then there was the Space Shuttle Columbia on reentry, lost the whole crew. But only three people have died far enough away from Earth that we consider the place of their death outer space.

• 16:12Hannah Fry?

  Goodness me. Earlier this summer, I got to spend some time with Christina Koch, who was one of the Artemis astronauts. And one of the conversations I had with her was about how she had mentally prepared for the idea that death was on the table. And she told me that NASA had been sort of a bit evasive about putting an exact percentage on the chances that the mission would fail. A few days before they launched, NASA finally revealed, they did a press conference or whatever it might have been, where they revealed that their chance of a catastrophic failure, where the astronauts would lose their lives, was about one in thirty,

• 16:56Hannah Fry?

  which is about whatever that is, ninety six percent chance of success. And then Christina was like, okay, that's that's higher than I thought it was gonna be. And then I I thought we were like ninety nine percent sure we were coming home.

• 17:08Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, ninety nine versus ninety six, it's a big difference when it's life or death.

• 17:12Hannah Fry?

  Too spicy. But she also talked about how her crew had had these conversations with each other about what they would do if the worst thing happened. And for them, the worst thing that could possibly happen would be that you would be in the capsule and know that you were not coming home. You would know that there was something that had happened that meant that you are you are not going to make that return journey. You are essentially going to be in the unbelievable blackness of space and slowly lose your life.

• 17:44Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 17:45Hannah Fry?

  Which I think is like such a dark thing to imagine. But her and her crew, they all had like spoken about it. They had like therapists, they had psychologists, they had, you know, a whole team of people supporting them with the the mental aspect of all of this. And she said that they were all like, okay, you know what? We're gonna be pretty stoic about this. We're gonna, we're gonna manage to be really stoic about it. But then she said that this whole thing came back to basically bite her on the ass when they were doing reentry. Because as they were doing reentry, one of her crewmates was reading out the gravitational force on the reentry vehicle and was reading out, you know, I can't remember what the numbers are, but like, let's say three point one, three point four, three point eight, three point nine.

• 18:28Hannah Fry?

  But her audio wasn't working perfectly. So she just heard as they're going through this unbelievably, the riskiest moment of all is the reentry, okay? It's so easy for the vehicle to just essentially burn up on arrival, right? It's really, the angle that you come in at, it's just extremely delicate. But the audio wasn't working properly. So all she heard her crewmate say was like, seven G, eight G, nine G.

• 18:52Michael Stevens?

  Only heard the second digit.

• 18:54Hannah Fry?

  Exactly.

• 18:54Michael Stevens?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 18:55Hannah Fry?

  So she was there thinking, okay, okay, we're gonna die.

• 18:59Michael Stevens?

  That's it, yeah.

• 18:59Hannah Fry?

  But then she was like, but hang on a second. If we're gonna die, surely he'd be less chill about this than he is. And then she thought, well, no, because we've spoken about this and we've all decided that we're gonna be stoic. So maybe we are gonna die.

• 19:12Michael Stevens?

  Oh, no. Yeah, so you should always agree, guys, if we're in trouble, let's panic. That way I will know. Because, yeah, I've talked about this before on airplanes. When turbulence is bad, I look at the flight attendants and they're almost always bored. And that calms me down so much. If I saw a flight attendant being like, I'd be like, oh, no.

• 19:32Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 19:33Michael Stevens?

  Oh, no.

• 19:34Hannah Fry?

  We're in trouble. Do you know what? Actually, this summer, I had the first time I've ever had a really spicy flight.

• 19:40Michael Stevens?

  Oh.

• 19:40Hannah Fry?

  I've been on a lot of flights and you get bad turbulence sometimes and it's like, okay, it's not that bad. But this one, we got caught in a thunderstorm really badly, got hit by lightning over and over and over again. The captain tried to make these landings and then had to abort the landings twice. But in the aborted landing, he was like climbing, climbing, climbing, getting the hell up, dodging. And the turbulence was so bad. And I, around me, there were people who, one person was like hiding their passport in their pants because their their reasoning was, okay, well, when we die, then you'll be able to identify my body. And then my children will know. I mean, it's worth a go. There were people like writing letters to their children. Honestly, everyone was really scared. And when we got off the flight, I was like, don't get me wrong, I wasn't like completely zen about it.

• 20:25Hannah Fry?

  I was like, okay, this doesn't look good. This is like, this is not, this is definitely the worst situation I've been in. But when we landed, when we, oh, we also then had to do an emergency landing at another airport. And then we got more fuel and then we were able to take off. And then by that point, the the storm had cleared. But when we were at the luggage carousel, I was sort of standing there waiting. And there was a couple of people who came up to me. And they said, they're like, they know about the show, whatever, they know the rest of the science and so on. And they came up to me and they were like, they said during the flight, they were looking to see if I was panicking.

• 20:56Michael Stevens?

  Oh, wow. So had they listened to our earlier episode about turbulence?

• 21:02Hannah Fry?

  I don't think so specifically, but they were like, okay, look, if Hannah Fry is panicking, I'm panicking too.

• 21:07Michael Stevens?

  That's a problem, yeah. Well, I mean, reasonably, like rationally, turbulence doesn't take down airplanes. It can be very dangerous because of injuries. If you're not strapped in, you can hit your head. That's how fatalities happen from them. It's like a head injury just because you weren't strapped in. But yeah, turbulence just means the air all around you is moving, okay? You're like a raisin suspended in jelly or jello and it's wobbling and it doesn't feel good. And they try to avoid it on commercial flights.

• 21:38Hannah Fry?

  It can, so I think that that is definitely true when you're in cruising altitude. I think on landing is a slightly different beast.

• 21:45Michael Stevens?

  Oh, what, because you're like closer to the ground, so a little shake.

• 21:49Hannah Fry?

  It ends up affecting your landing, especially if you're like trapped in a storm with extremely low visibility. I think it can be pretty dangerous on landing.

• 21:57Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so there is a time when you should be panicked.

• 22:03Hannah Fry?

  I don't know.

• 22:03Michael Stevens?

  By turbulence.

• 22:04Hannah Fry?

  I mean, look, they're still, it's still the safest, safest mode of transport per mile, which I always think is a bit of a cheat.

• 22:09Michael Stevens?

  Okay, back to Soyuz 11. After that tragedy, the Soviet Union changed the routine and now they only sent up two cosmonauts in a capsule. That way, there was room for them both to wear their pressure suits. So if pressure was lost in the capsule, they would still have air.

• 22:27Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 22:28Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 22:28Hannah Fry?

  That's interesting.

• 22:30Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 22:30Hannah Fry?

  And do they still do that now?

• 22:32Michael Stevens?

  They still wear those suits today in the Soyuz capsules.

• 22:36Hannah Fry?

  I mean, you would when you, you'd be like, I just.

• 22:38Michael Stevens?

  Why not?

• 22:39Hannah Fry?

  I just, I'd rather have it on.

• 22:40Michael Stevens?

  And when they're like, you know, guys, we're gonna try to pack three in today, so no suits. I'd be like, sorry, I can't make it.

• 22:46Hannah Fry?

  Oh, yeah, I'm all right.

• 22:48Michael Stevens?

  Gotta take my daughter to school.

• 22:49Hannah Fry?

  Exactly.

• 22:50Michael Stevens?

  So let's take a break and when we come back, we're gonna talk about some other things that may or may not be leaving Earth.

• 23:11Michael Stevens?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 23:14Hannah Fry?

  Dentist appointments, MOTs, routine checkups help us to spot faults early before we need a root canal or breakdown at the side of the road. And cancer screening is the same idea.

• 23:25Michael Stevens?

  It's about aiming to spot cancer early before symptoms show and when treatment works best. The UK's breast, bowel, and cervical cancer screening programs, developed with Cancer Research UK, save thousands of lives every year.

• 23:38Hannah Fry?

  Today, Cancer Research UK is backing innovations that could transform the future of screening. Picture a smart bra that could one day detect breast changes as it's worn, making screening more accessible.

• 23:51Michael Stevens?

  And AI trained on a database of over 10 million mammograms that helps doctors spot early signs of cancer.

• 23:58Hannah Fry?

  Research like this saves and improves lives.

• 24:01Michael Stevens?

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

• 24:13Speaker 03

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• 25:13Michael Stevens?

  I wanted to tell that story, the story of the three humans to be the first to have not died on planet Earth. Georgi Dobrovolski, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Petsyev. They represent the beginning of a story. They were the first humans to die not on planet Earth. But unfortunately, they will not be the last.

• 25:36Hannah Fry?

  Unless we stop all space travel right now.

• 25:38Michael Stevens?

  Unless we stop all space travel altogether.

• 25:41Hannah Fry?

  Seems unlikely.

• 25:41Michael Stevens?

  Which we won't, and we shouldn't. But that was a very big moment in human history. And I have a watch, actually, it's not this one I'm wearing today, but I have a watch that has a little engraving on the back commemorating them and the Soyuz 11 crew. Because yeah, it's a story you don't hear that often.

• 25:59Hannah Fry?

  No, I didn't know those names.

• 26:01Michael Stevens?

  A lot of it comes from the secrecy of the space race and the Soviet Union not wanting to say what they were doing or what happened. But the capsule, yeah, it landed in Kazakhstan. And as I was reading about this story again, I got really into Kazakhstan.

• 26:20Michael Stevens?

  Let me tell you this, there are 44 countries on Earth that are landlocked. They have no access to the oceans from their borders. There are only two countries that are doubly landlocked.

• 26:34Hannah Fry?

  I remember this as a quiz question.

• 26:36Michael Stevens?

  Okay, what are they?

• 26:37Hannah Fry?

  Okay, Kazakhstan.

• 26:38Michael Stevens?

  Nope. It's one of the 44 that are landlocked.

• 26:42Hannah Fry?

  Okay, Azerbaijan, it's one round there.

• 26:45Michael Stevens?

  It's a, it's around there, and one of them is not around there. It's one of the Stans.

• 26:52Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, one of the Stans. Uzbekistan?

• 26:54Michael Stevens?

  Correct. And by the way, you can remember this because you've got Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Turkmenistan is closer to Turkey. That's how on a map I can always get it right. Uzbekistan is north of Turkmenistan and it's doubly landlocked. To get to the ocean from Uzbekistan, you've gotta go through at least one country that is also itself landlocked.

• 27:15Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:16Michael Stevens?

  What's the other one?

• 27:17Hannah Fry?

  Is it in Africa?

• 27:18Michael Stevens?

  Nope.

• 27:20Hannah Fry?

  Then I don't know. Is it somewhere really small, like Liechtenstein?

• 27:24Michael Stevens?

  It's Liechtenstein.

• 27:25Hannah Fry?

  Oh, yes!

• 27:27Michael Stevens?

  That's pretty good. I would not have gotten that right until I read about it. This is really good.

• 27:34Hannah Fry?

  Thank you so much.

• 27:35Michael Stevens?

  That was really good. Kazakhstan is the largest by area landlocked country. But here's, here's the bonus lightning round for all the marbles question.

• 27:45Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 27:46Michael Stevens?

  What is the largest landlocked country by population?

• 27:51Hannah Fry?

  Oh.

• 27:54Michael Stevens?

  I would never have got this right.

• 27:57Hannah Fry?

  Okay, so I think not in Europe. That was me searching.

• 28:00Michael Stevens?

  It's not in Europe.

• 28:01Hannah Fry?

  That was me searching through.

• 28:01Michael Stevens?

  All of, all of you listening or watching, write your guess down below and hit the like button to lock in your answer. Oh, man, I hear that so often on reels and I just can't stand it.

• 28:12Hannah Fry?

  I know, me neither. It drives me insane. But still, do press like.

• 28:15Michael Stevens?

  But still, yeah, like, and if you really wanna lock it in, subscribe.

• 28:20Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. Okay, I think not South America.

• 28:24Michael Stevens?

  Nope.

• 28:25Hannah Fry?

  Not North America.

• 28:26Michael Stevens?

  Nope.

• 28:27Hannah Fry?

  So we're talking Asia or Africa. It could be like Mongolia, like around there.

• 28:37Michael Stevens?

  No.

• 28:37Hannah Fry?

  Bhutan.

• 28:38Michael Stevens?

  Nope. Still the wrong continent.

• 28:40Hannah Fry?

  Also, is, oh, wait, Africa?

• 28:43Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 28:43Hannah Fry?

  Okay, landlocked country in Africa, so right in the center, DRC?

• 28:47Michael Stevens?

  No.

• 28:47Hannah Fry?

  Central African Republic. Is it in the middle of Africa?

• 28:51Michael Stevens?

  Nope.

• 28:51Hannah Fry?

  Oh.

• 28:53Michael Stevens?

  I would not have, even though I could find it on a map right away, we should do an African countries quiz, by the way, because I've been doing this game called borderline.world. Every day, I'm, I'm finding them. But I guess I haven't paid enough attention to who's landlocked and who's not, because I wouldn't have even known this country was landlocked unless I really thought about it.

• 29:11Hannah Fry?

  North of Sahara?

• 29:13Michael Stevens?

  Hmm, I would say it's east of the Sahara, maybe southeast.

• 29:20Hannah Fry?

  Ethiopia?

• 29:21Michael Stevens?

  Correct.

• 29:22Hannah Fry?

  Is it?

• 29:22Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 29:22Hannah Fry?

  Do you know what? I thought about that and I was like, no, I think, because you come up from Somalia, right? And then Ethiopia, I thought it had a coast, but Ethiopia's landlocked.

• 29:30Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it is. Okay, thank you. So I wasn't the only one who was like, oh, I didn't know that.

• 29:34Hannah Fry?

  I didn't know that either.

• 29:34Michael Stevens?

  But yeah, I guess it's surrounded by like Somalia and Eritrea. It just doesn't touch the ocean.

• 29:40Hannah Fry?

  Wow. Wow.

• 29:44Michael Stevens?

  So humans have, for the most part, been trapped on Earth our whole lives. There have been some cracks in that, in that rule. We've got three who got far enough out that they didn't die here. I don't think we'll be trapped forever. But what about the water we throw away in water bottles? When you throw away a water bottle and there's a little bit of water still in it, or even like just some drops, that water is locked in plastic and it's thrown away and will it ever come out? Like, it's in this like barely degradable bottle, fresh potable water that's then thrown into landfills for who knows how long.

• 30:29Michael Stevens?

  I first heard about this because it went pretty viral on social media, this concern that we are trapping in immense amount.

• 30:37Hannah Fry?

  Usable water.

• 30:38Michael Stevens?

  Of usable, fresh water in landfills.

• 30:43Hannah Fry?

  In its own little coffin.

• 30:44Michael Stevens?

  In its own little plastic, like permanent coffin. And so I dove into this and there's a lot of fear mongering around it, that the calculations about how much the water gets essentially sealed away from use every year ranges from 7 million to 22 million gallons a year.

• 31:04Hannah Fry?

  What? That's insane. A year?

• 31:07Michael Stevens?

  A year.

• 31:08Hannah Fry?

  That's insane.

• 31:09Michael Stevens?

  So we're talking about.

• 31:10Hannah Fry?

  Who's not emptying their water bottles before they recycle them?

• 31:13Michael Stevens?

  Then it's not even about people who were throwing away like half-filled bottles. The 7 million gallon number, which is 29 million liters per year, that's based on if on average, only 5% of the bottles thrown out have half a tablespoon in them.

• 31:30Hannah Fry?

  What?

• 31:31Michael Stevens?

  The 22 million gallon number, which is 83 million liters, that's based on more, like 40 drops are in every single bottle.

• 31:41Hannah Fry?

  That, sorry, I, that is, I don't think I realized how many bottles of water we're getting through.

• 31:46Michael Stevens?

  I didn't either. When I first looked at these, I figured the math could be wrong. And so I looked this up and it's like, no, this is very on target for how many water bottles not just are being made, but we know are being thrown away into landfills. Like in America alone, it's like 60 billion a year. That's how many are made. How many are being thrown out, we don't totally know. But it's a lot. So this sounds a little bit frightening.

• 32:13Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 32:14Michael Stevens?

  But here's the truth. Okay, while it's true that we are throwing out an enormous amount of water bottles and they have moisture in them, one, plastic doesn't.

• 32:26Michael Stevens?

  Permanently seal stuff up forever.

• 32:28Hannah Fry?

  Cause all you need is a little crack and then it will seek back.

• 32:30Michael Stevens?

  A little crack is all it needs.

• 32:32Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 32:32Michael Stevens?

  And these bottles aren't just like thrown whole into the landfill. They are compacted multiple times.

• 32:39Hannah Fry?

  So they have splits in them.

• 32:40Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. They're crushed with like more force than the weight of a car on them in order to compact them.

• 32:45Hannah Fry?

  There's something quite nice about the idea that like, all you need to do is just like give the water away to escape and it'll get back to us.

• 32:51Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. And there have been companies apparently that have worked on ways to make bottles that will more quickly give that water back up.

• 32:57Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 32:58Michael Stevens?

  But I'm not sure how necessary it is because again, they're compacted by the collection services. And then at the landfill, they're compacted. They drive these huge machines over the landfills to just squish it down. And like I said, the bottles themselves don't seal things up forever. I think, you know, within 500 years, it's decomposed like a lot. But even within a hundred years, you would definitely expect water to be able to get out of it. On top of that, even if we just assume that all the water in every bottle that's thrown away never gets out. They all have their lids on and they never decay away.

• 33:37Michael Stevens?

  Eighty-three million liters, 22 million gallons of water is a lot, but it's also not a lot. If we did that every year for 15 years, we would have only trapped away one trillionth of Earth's water.

• 33:53Hannah Fry?

  When you say one trillionth of that's water, are you talking about all the water?

• 33:56Michael Stevens?

  All the water.

• 33:57Hannah Fry?

  Talking about fresh, clean drink of all water?

• 33:59Michael Stevens?

  I'm talking about all the water. So, I mean, but I mean, still, come on Hannah, a trillionth of Earth's water?

• 34:07Hannah Fry?

  I still don't like it.

• 34:08Michael Stevens?

  22 million gallons is about 33 Olympic sized swimming pools. That feels kind of big, but that's about what lands on a square mile of land when it rains one inch.

• 34:20Hannah Fry?

  Oh, it's nothing.

• 34:22Michael Stevens?

  This is actually a really cool question because it forces you to come up with ways to figure out what is this amount?

• 34:29Hannah Fry?

  Right, totally.

• 34:30Michael Stevens?

  I mean, ultimately, the water doesn't stay trapped forever.

• 34:34Hannah Fry?

  Which I'm okay with. You know, one thing that I really want to look into more is this question about water and data centers. Because while they do use a lot of water, I wonder whether it's one of those situations where it sounds like a lot of water. But then you compare it to, say, the meat industry. And actually, it's really pathetic in comparison.

• 34:57Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, water amounts are hard to compare because we often give them in gallons. But when it comes to like water on Earth, all of the water, not just fresh, but we're talking about like quadrillions of gallons.

• 35:09Hannah Fry?

  Just the numbers are too big, you can't make a direct.

• 35:11Michael Stevens?

  And as I was doing research for this, I'm finding water given in cubic miles, in tons, in gallons, in liters. And it's like, ah, what is a lot and what isn't a lot? Also, I've got another twist. So, so Earth is already losing water. Like literally, it's not trapping it forever, but it's jettisoning it out. I mean, the Earth isn't doing this, but the water molecules themselves can leave our planet for good. And they do this through evaporating up and they become clouds, they come back down. It's a water cycle, but some manage to get up high enough that solar radiation can actually break the oxygen and hydrogen atoms apart.

• 35:52Michael Stevens?

  And then either through being energized by more solar radiation or just because of like random thermal reasons. There'll be an oxygen or a hydrogen atom that has enough speed to literally escape velocity Earth.

• 36:04Hannah Fry?

  I mean, the only thing is, there's no way you're getting that back. You're not getting that back at all and it's not being replaced whatsoever. The stuff in the water bottles may eventually return to us.

• 36:13Michael Stevens?

  Exactly. Okay. And so it's estimated that every year, 2 million gallons of water.

• 36:22Hannah Fry?

  Is escaping.

• 36:23Michael Stevens?

  Are lost from this planet. 9.3 million liters is lost to space. But there's one more wrinkle because Earth does gain water from, from comets, not com- I mean, maybe com- like particles from comets.

• 36:37Hannah Fry?

  Solar system rain.

• 36:37Michael Stevens?

  From solar system rain, which is, comes in the form of ice and space debris, meteors, space dust that falls to Earth. And I saw an estimate that every year about a million liters are gained. So it's 270,000 gallons of water comes to Earth. But the point is, water is not trapped on Earth. And even the water that we throw away sealed up in bottles isn't permanently trapped. But have you heard of a monkey trap?

• 37:11Hannah Fry?

  Honestly, this, this episode feels like I'm playing whack-a-mole with myself.

• 37:17Michael Stevens?

  No, it should feel, it should feel like a smooth, connected railroad track.

• 37:23Hannah Fry?

  You're, you're amazing. Okay, sorry, go on. Okay, corner turn, monkey trap, go.

• 37:29Michael Stevens?

  A monkey trap. I'm sure you've heard of this. It's a common story that to trap a monkey, you, or sometimes different animals are used. But what you do is you build this box with a hole in it and you put something shiny in the box.

• 37:43Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 37:44Michael Stevens?

  And then the monkey wants the shiny thing or whatever the bait is. And they put their hand through the hole and they grab it.

• 37:50Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 37:51Michael Stevens?

  But once they've made a fist.

• 37:53Hannah Fry?

  Oh.

• 37:54Michael Stevens?

  Their hand is too wide to come back out of the hole. And it works because their brain is so simple, they cannot give up the bait, the treat, the shiny object. And so they just stay there.

• 38:06Hannah Fry?

  Oh, that's adorable.

• 38:07Michael Stevens?

  That they won't let go of it. I first heard of this in the book, Where the Red Fern Grows, where the main character makes a trap like this for raccoons. He takes like a tree stump, drills a hole, puts in some aluminum foil and then hammers a bunch of nails in to make it really narrow. The raccoon is like, oh yeah, I'm stuck.

• 38:26Hannah Fry?

  But doesn't let go.

• 38:26Michael Stevens?

  But I won't let go of this treasure. Anyway, these types of traps.

• 38:30Hannah Fry?

  How long will they stay there?

• 38:32Michael Stevens?

  None time.

• 38:33Hannah Fry?

  None time?

• 38:35Michael Stevens?

  They're not real.

• 38:36Hannah Fry?

  Oh, oh.

• 38:37Michael Stevens?

  They're popular in discourse because it's this metaphor for how humans, we will often want something so badly that we refuse to let go, even though it's trapping us.

• 38:48Hannah Fry?

  To our detriment.

• 38:49Michael Stevens?

  To our detriment, yes. Then we need to be able to let things go and give things up and we can free ourselves. It's a, it's a great story, but they're not real. A raccoon will reach into a trap and so will a monkey and grab a shiny thing. But if you then come up to catch it, it lets go and runs.

• 39:06Hannah Fry?

  Right. It's got a hierarchy in its head. And shiny thing is not beaten by not wanting to be killed by being human.

• 39:14Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, exactly. So again, I still think that the lesson isn't totally like bad, but the analogy is to something that isn't real.

• 39:23Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 39:24Michael Stevens?

  There's no known animal that will refuse to let go of a treasure and allow itself to be trapped.

• 39:31Michael Stevens?

  But I wanted to make sure, so I looked into like, what can I really trap an animal's body in and that can't get it back out? And as it turns out, it's very common, but it's not the hand, it's the head.

• 39:42Hannah Fry?

  What do you mean?

• 39:43Michael Stevens?

  Heads are kind of wedge shaped and so is the fur on an animal and its ears. And so raccoons, especially in bears, often get their heads stuck in things.

• 39:54Hannah Fry?

  Wow.

• 39:54Michael Stevens?

  Because they can go in.

• 39:56Hannah Fry?

  But coming out is much harder.

• 39:57Michael Stevens?

  Coming out, they can't because the fur can go this way, but it can't go back this way. And same with the ears. So goats, raccoons, bears, they all can get trapped in things with their heads.

• 40:09Hannah Fry?

  I feel like this to happen sometimes with people in, in iron railings, you know?

• 40:13Michael Stevens?

  It happens to people too. So I wonder if this helps us improve the life lesson. Like it's not so much that you need to let go of the things you treasure. You need to just, stop poking your head into stuff.

• 40:30Hannah Fry?

  Basically, if someone passes you a shiny thing and it looks too good to be true, just leave it well alone.

• 40:34Michael Stevens?

  That's right. Just leave things alone, mind your own beeswax. That's the real lesson from real animal life.

• 40:43Hannah Fry?

  Don't reach for anything new.

• 40:47Michael Stevens?

  With your head. That, that's, there's something cool about that. Reach for it with your hand, you'll be able to get it out if, as long as you let go.

• 40:54Hannah Fry?

  But don't reach for it with your head.

• 40:55Michael Stevens?

  But if you reach for it with your head, if you go in headfirst, that's when problems can arise.

• 41:00Hannah Fry?

  You know, people take really great philosophers, Confucius, you know, whatever, whoever else it might be, and really elevate them as great thinkers. Actually, this stuff's easy. We're coming up with these left, right, center.

• 41:11Michael Stevens?

  Honestly, it's a piece of cake. Okay, you just look up animal traps and you learn everything about human behavior.

• 41:17Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, done.

• 41:18Michael Stevens?

  We should be life coaches.

• 41:19Hannah Fry?

  We should be. You've got more traps, go on, give me more traps.

• 41:22Michael Stevens?

  Um, okay, this one, this is a bit of a stretch. Even I'm saying it's a stretch. I looked it up and your phone number and my phone number are not in the first 2 billion digits of pi.

• 41:34Hannah Fry?

  How do you know what my phone number is?

• 41:38Michael Stevens?

  I, am I not supposed to?

• 41:41Hannah Fry?

  I'm joking. What, um, why? How'd you know?

• 41:45Michael Stevens?

  You can search. I mean, you can search like digitally. I didn't, I didn't like look at all the digits with my own eyes.

• 41:51Hannah Fry?

  But hold on. Okay. Right. A, I want to know how this is linked to trapped. How this is linked to trapped.

• 41:57Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 41:57Hannah Fry?

  Um, B, did you specifically search our phone numbers?

• 42:01Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, with and without air, uh, country codes.

• 42:03Hannah Fry?

  Okay, interesting.

• 42:04Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. Because there's just this common thing and I've been looking into it a lot, hearing it a lot. And we've talked about it on the podcast before, which is this idea that like every finite string of digits is somewhere in pi.

• 42:16Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely.

• 42:17Michael Stevens?

  Including your address, your phone number, a coded version of Moby Dick. It's all hidden in there. And that is not necessarily true. We have not proven yet whether or not pi is normal. And we also don't know if it's rich.

• 42:36Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:37Michael Stevens?

  Where rich means that it contains every possible, um, string.

• 42:41Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm. And normal means that every number or combination of numbers are equally likely to appear.

• 42:49Michael Stevens?

  That's right. None are preferred.

• 42:51Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 42:51Michael Stevens?

  And the reason that there are those two different distinctions is that you, if you are normal, then you are rich. You contain every string. But if you contain every possible string, you might not be normal.

• 43:03Hannah Fry?

  Yes.

• 43:03Michael Stevens?

  Because you can imagine a number that contains like every number in order. But there's like a million zeros between each number.

• 43:12Hannah Fry?

  Of course.

• 43:12Michael Stevens?

  In which case, or, or an exponentially growing number of zeros. So that, that number contains them all, but it's mainly zeros. Okay. So anyway, we do not know if pi is normal. And this question was first asked, like, I think maybe at least a hundred years ago, more than a hundred years ago. And we still don't, aren't even close to knowing how to prove whether it's normal or not. So, so your phone number may never appear in pi.

• 43:42Hannah Fry?

  So is the question here, what actually is trapped within the digits of pi?

• 43:46Michael Stevens?

  Thank you.

• 43:47Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 43:47Michael Stevens?

  You see how obvious this was? It's about trapped. What's trapped in pi and what's not?

• 43:53Hannah Fry?

  Honestly, I absolutely love spending time with you. This is like a, an excellent adventure.

• 43:57Michael Stevens?

  I've got more. Your phone number is in the first like few trillion digits of pi. I, I can't tell you exactly where.

• 44:05Hannah Fry?

  Guys, if you, if you want to know my phone number now, that's a very big clue.

• 44:08Michael Stevens?

  That's all you have to do. It's somewhere in the first trillion digits of pi.

• 44:12Hannah Fry?

  Just try them all.

• 44:13Michael Stevens?

  Because the online encyclopedia of integer sequences has a, it's one of my favorite pages.

• 44:21Hannah Fry?

  I love that website.

• 44:22Michael Stevens?

  So, it's so out of this world. It's like, okay. How many digits of pi do you need to find every digit? How many do you need to have every two-digit number?

• 44:34Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:35Michael Stevens?

  How many does it take before every three-digit number has shown up?

• 44:38Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 44:38Michael Stevens?

  And we have so far found every single one, two, three, four, five-digit number, all the way up to an 11-digit number.

• 44:46Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 44:46Michael Stevens?

  They all exist in pi within like all the digits that we have found so far. But we haven't found enough of pi to say that all 12-digit numbers are inside pi.

• 44:58Hannah Fry?

  Which is what you need for a phone number.

• 45:00Michael Stevens?

  No, your phone number with, without country code is how long?

• 45:04Hannah Fry?

  How long?

• 45:04Michael Stevens?

  It's like 10.

• 45:05Hannah Fry?

  It's 11.

• 45:06Michael Stevens?

  It's 11. Okay. So yeah, okay. Right. So your phone number.

• 45:09Hannah Fry?

  Another clue to my phone number, you guys.

• 45:11Michael Stevens?

  Your phone, no, there's another clue. Um, how, how long is mine? Without the country code, mine's, mine's only 10. What?

• 45:19Hannah Fry?

  What? Let me check. Yeah, mine's 11.

• 45:23Michael Stevens?

  Geez, that's fancy. It's a British thing.

• 45:25Hannah Fry?

  So we have proven that everyone's phone number is in pi.

• 45:28Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. So yeah, yeah. Everyone's phone number is in pi. So long as your phone number isn't more than 12 digits long. We have not proven that yet. Now, I should say that I, I would guess most mathematicians have a strong suspicion that pi is normal.

• 45:44Hannah Fry?

  It's normal.

• 45:45Michael Stevens?

  We just don't know how to prove it.

• 45:46Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 45:47Michael Stevens?

  And that's the wildest thing because we have proven that almost all numbers are normal.

• 45:52Hannah Fry?

  Uh huh.

• 45:53Michael Stevens?

  The ones that aren't normal are the ones that we know really well, like 42.

• 45:58Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 45:58Michael Stevens?

  And seven and.

• 45:59Hannah Fry?

  3.333 recurring.

• 46:01Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. One half, right? One quarter, one third. None of those are normal. But the vast majority of real numbers are normal. The vast majority of the irrational numbers, rational numbers are like never normal.

• 46:16Hannah Fry?

  Correct.

• 46:17Michael Stevens?

  But the majority of the irrationals.

• 46:20Hannah Fry?

  Yes.

• 46:20Michael Stevens?

  Have been proven by Boral to be normal.

• 46:23Hannah Fry?

  And the majority of real numbers are irrational.

• 46:27Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 46:28Hannah Fry?

  When it was like astronauts dying in space, this is definitely not where, where, where anyone thought the episode was going. But here we are.

• 46:35Michael Stevens?

  But here we are. And so I guess what I'm saying is, is the final frontier really space or is it pi?

• 46:44Hannah Fry?

  Has any human ever died within the digits of pi?

• 46:48Michael Stevens?

  I don't know, but I'd like to be the first. What a way to go. Because the thing is like pi is really overdone. Okay. It's, I get it. It sounds like a dessert.

• 46:58Hannah Fry?

  You've got pi on your T-shirt.

• 46:59Michael Stevens?

  Oh, I'm wearing a pi T-shirt. Okay. It is so mainstream. Like I'm sick of hearing about, oh, pi is so cool. First of all, pi is not random.

• 47:09Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 47:09Michael Stevens?

  I can tell you exactly what the next digit will be. It's related to the circumference and diameter of a circle, guys. Okay. It's not random. It's non-repeating. Doesn't mean it's random. We don't have to talk about pi forever, but the point is that if I died within the digits of pi, however that could somehow happen, I don't know. But if I did, I would get like memorialized every year on Pi Day. Everyone's always looking for Pi Day activities and like they need more and I'll, I'll give them one.

• 47:34Hannah Fry?

  March is yours.

• 47:37Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 47:38Hannah Fry?

  I think there is a way that you could be the first person to die in pi.

• 47:41Michael Stevens?

  Tell me.

• 47:42Hannah Fry?

  If you worked out a way, which would be easy to do, to convert the numbers into letters.

• 47:48Michael Stevens?

  Hmm.

• 47:48Hannah Fry?

  Right?

• 47:49Michael Stevens?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:49Hannah Fry?

  And then, uh, looked for the first time that a full name appeared. That a sequence of numbers that translated to Michael Stevens is alive or Joe Blogs is dead.

• 48:04Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 48:04Hannah Fry?

  There could be a first person to die in pi.

• 48:06Michael Stevens?

  Oh, there could be.

• 48:08Hannah Fry?

  There could be.

• 48:08Michael Stevens?

  Just using a simple like code.

• 48:11Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 48:11Michael Stevens?

  So yeah, like zero, zero is a space, zero, one is A and so on.

• 48:15Hannah Fry?

  Exactly.

• 48:16Michael Stevens?

  There will be a first name and death cause found in pi.

• 48:20Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:21Michael Stevens?

  It's probably not Michael Stevens.

• 48:22Hannah Fry?

  It's probably not Hannah Fry either, sadly. Uh, although it all depends on how you set up your code, doesn't it? I reckon there's a, I reckon there'd be a way that you could.

• 48:31Michael Stevens?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 48:32Hannah Fry?

  Letters.

• 48:32Michael Stevens?

  That's right.

• 48:33Hannah Fry?

  To make it so that it was you.

• 48:35Michael Stevens?

  Depends on the code. Okay. So 3.1 means H.

• 48:39Hannah Fry?

  Yes.

• 48:40Michael Stevens?

  14 means A. I wonder if, yeah, how could you, you could set up a code to make pi say whatever you wanted.

• 48:46Hannah Fry?

  Whatever you want.

• 48:47Michael Stevens?

  That's, see, now I'm learning things and I'm feeling, funny enough, less trapped than I did when this began. There's still so much out there to explore.

• 48:58Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 48:59Michael Stevens?

  So I'm glad you guys came on this journey with us. Where we went, I don't know.

• 49:05Hannah Fry?

  No, agreed. But I've enjoyed it.

• 49:07Michael Stevens?

  I've enjoyed it and it's always fun hanging out with, with you, but also with all of you guys. So leave us some comments below about your questions, your thoughts, your hopes and your dreams. And subscribe and follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts.

• 49:20Hannah Fry?

  We'll be back later in the week for an episode of Phil Notes. Until then, bye bye.

• 49:23Michael Stevens?

  Bye bye.

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