Technofossils - Sarah Gabbott, Mark Miodownik and Aurie Styla

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And then I had my hair cut shortly after, for personal safety reasons, actually. This is what I love about Brian. He didn't have his hair cut. We replaced the previous hair that he had on his head. And then, in fact, we replaced your head, because you're kind of like a replicant Wurzel Gummidge, aren't you, really? LAUGHTER They've started adding little bits of grey in your hair now, so that you look more human. It's an illusion. Yeah, they take it from you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll tell you what, they're going to start harvesting other people for so long.

Not much of a crop left there, is there? So, today we are talking about fossils. And not only the fossils of ancient animals and plants, but the fossils of the future, techno-fossils. What remnants of our 21st century civilisation will survive into the far future, and what might the inhabitants of that future be able to infer about our technology, customs, and way of life? To help us unearth the answers, we are joined by someone interested in decay, someone interested in clay, and someone interested in replay. And they are... I'm Mark Miodovnik. I'm Professor of Materials and Society at UCL.

And the techno-fossil I think that archaeologists of the future will be most confused about are these rectangular lozenges of material that they'll find everywhere. And when they analyse them, they'll find there's more than 50% of the periodic table are in them. And they'll come to the conclusion that, OK, this is a race of people who worshipped the periodic table, worshipped the god of chemistry, and carried around these lozenges, which they called smartphones, full of materials. Hello, I'm Sarah Gabbert. I'm Professor of Paleontology at the University of Leicester. And the techno-fossil I think will be most confusing to archaeologists of the future is also the smartphone.

So, second choice would be the red telephone box. They're already completely complexing to anybody under the age of 30, especially if they go inside one and smell them. And the other thing about them, imagine this archaeologist of the future thinking, you know, what is this giant, what is this cabinet for? It's incredibly heavy. I can barely open the door. The telephones are no longer in there. Why did people go in them? What were they for? I think that's going to be pretty puzzling. What drew you towards fossils? That's your, you know, your area is less techno and more fossil, isn't it?

Yeah, so I'm a paleontologist and I just really love learning about life on the planet. And I decided from a very early age I wanted to learn about ancient life. So you do that through the fossil record. What's your favourite thing that you've seen that you just thought, that is ridiculous? So there's a fossil from a place in Canada called the Burgess Shale, which is about half a billion years old. And it's called Opabinia and it's absolutely insane. It has five eyes on stalks. It has this weird kind of proboscis thing coming out the front with a big kind of pincer on the end.

You can't really see the legs. It does have legs. And all along the side of the body are all these crazy flaps that it used to kind of swim with. It looks like something out of somebody's weird imagination. Okay. My name's Ulrich Styler. I'm a stand-up comedian, actor and broadcaster. And I think the techno-fossil that archaeologists are going to be most confused about in the far future is wide-roll sellotape. And the reason I say that... Hear me up.

The reason I say that is assuming the world gets just a little bit more hotter as we have seen it happen, sellotape can lose its consistency and stickiness, right? Especially the clear ones. So I think they'll unearth it, look at it and think, this toilet roll doesn't really look like it's conducive. So at some point... And you know when you need to rush and you can't even find the toilet roll in like a public toilet? Imagine trying to find the little bit that you've got to peel it back and then maybe potentially wipe.

I think they'll look at it and go, I think these people back in the history are just crazy. Can I also say your mime of looking for the toilet paper in the... For those at home, it was the most beautiful thing. You actually did become the Andrex puppy at that moment. Beautiful. Anyway, this is our panel. Sarah, can we start with the definition? So what is a fossil? So a fossil, to a paleontologist, is any remain of past life. So that can be bacterial life or fungi, animals and plants. Usually from way back.

So some of our earliest fossils are about 3.5 billion years old, all the way through to, you know, very recent fossils that are forming today. And those very early fossils, so 3.5 billion years old, not long, within a billion years of the formation of the Earth, what are those? Blue-green algae are some of the earliest forms of life. So these cyanobacteria. And they're kind of like little traces in the rock. And when there's a lot of them, they form these kind of lumpy, pillowy layers. And those are some of the earliest fossils.

How much, in terms of the percentage of life on Earth, like even if we just say, say, post-Canberra and explosion, how many of those will be fossilised? What do we reckon in terms of percentage? Because there's a lot that doesn't fossilise, isn't there? Yeah, that is a really good question, but it's almost impossible to answer because we don't know what hasn't become fossilised. I once read that if you took the entire population, and I don't know if this is founded on much data, OK? I thought you were going to say, I don't know if this is legal.

No, well, when I finish my story, you will see that it isn't legal. So, if you take the entire population of the United States, which is, what is it now, 300 million, OK, and then basically kill them all, the fossil record would basically comprise of about one quarter of one human skeleton that would make it through to the fossil record. Oh, so it's extremely unlikely. Extremely unlikely. A given organism will result in a fossil. Would Trump be a techno-fossil? So I'm just thinking of all that work that's gone in, the orangey make-up that must have built up.

Would that count as a techno-fossil, the comb-over and that stuff? I think so. I think he's probably got a high preservation potential. LAUGHTER That is the loveliest thing I've ever heard said about him. LAUGHTER Mark, talking about techno-fossils, as you mentioned in your introduction, that the phone has 50% of the periodic table. So that's, what, about 40 or 50 different chemical elements in it. I'm tempted to say, can you list them? LAUGHTER Like the song, you know. Yeah, yeah, I should burst into the song at this point. It's a remarkable statistic. I know, it's incredible, isn't it?

And if you think about it, I mean, we've made this incredible technology that, you know, you just touch it and it knows that you've touched it and we, you know, have these incredible silicon chips inside them and all these wires and the lithium battery and so on.

And each one of those elements, we've got from mines all, you know, all around the world, so hundreds and hundreds of mines, and then we, you know, dug the rock out and we've got those elements out and then we've assembled them into incredible layers and incredible technology and it's gone round the world many, many, many times in terms of the supply chain. And then finally you get this lozenge of material, which is your magical kind of entry into the world. Like, without one, you're kind of not a person anymore, right? I mean, in a weird way.

And you are given this kind of present of all these wonderful materials. And almost nowhere on the packaging does it tell you that it is such an amazing kind of achievement of human society. What is the most, a couple of the most surprising examples, because these are obviously, some of them are very advanced materials, I suppose, that do very specific things. There's gold in there because, and you think, why should there be gold in it? But you can't see the gold because it's inside the silicon chips and the connectors. But why use gold? It's so valuable.

Because it really is the best conductor of electricity and it makes a big difference having gold in there. And there's 300 times more gold in a kilo of smartphones than a kilo of gold ore. So it is really worth collecting smartphones. And I'm convinced this is why people instinctively don't get rid of them but put them in a drawer. When they're not... At some level, people have picked up on the gold feeling in their hands. Orid, you are fascinated in technology, aren't you?

So you must have that thing where every now and again you do look at something in your hand or you look at something in the house and you think, yeah, what will I make of that? You know, what will someone else make of these things? Yeah, for me, I think the thing that fascinates me the most and phones are a great example of this is the size of something. Like, for example, a phone used to be the size of a suitcase. Now it's down to something that can go in the palm of your hand.

In my eyes, if it becomes more complicated, naturally it should be bigger because more is added to it. But it's total opposite in the other way around and that's probably the most fascinating element for me. Sarah, you spoke about this strange organism, this five-eyed thing that was found in the Burgess Shale which would have lived, what, about 500 million, 550 million years ago or so. Could you take us through the process of how that fossil was formed? Sure. Although I've now picked one of the most controversial fossils around for trying to explain how fossilisation works. It could be a trilobite or something.

Let's just go through, yeah. So generally speaking, if most people think of fossils, they think of things like, you know, trilobites, ammonites, shells, and of course dinosaurs. And these are all the parts of animals that are mineralised, so shells, bones and teeth. And all of that stuff has, you know, a fair chance, although as we talked about earlier, not a great number of them will make it through to the fossil record, but they have quite a good chance of being fossilised because it's durable material and it's mineral and it lasts.

However, we do get an amazing fossil record of surprising features and tissues and animals which are entirely soft-bodied. So opabinia, that weird creature I was talking about, is exactly that. It doesn't have any mineralised parts at all, and yet it became preserved. Throughout the fossil record, we have eyes, we have guts, we have organs, we have skin, we have all these, you know, tissues that usually decay away. And generally speaking, what happens is, as they're decaying, they get mineralised very rapidly, before they've decayed away, by a variety of different minerals. So it's this kind of balance between decaying and mineralising.

And that's, you know, the sum of the fossil record. Can I ask that question about, you know, the mineralisation that happened with Vesuvius? And Pompeii, right? Is that a fossil? Because that's a mineral... You've described everything that's kind of fossilisation. Vesuvius erupts. The human figures that are frozen in motion. Yeah, and they're caught in the... So they've been mineralised very fast, is that right? So that is a fossil, then, or...? Yeah, so those are fossils. So fossils can be a lot more kind of wide-ranging than people think. So the fossils can be everything from that to, you know, the classic bones and so on.

And they can also be holes. So you can have something like an animal or a bone or even a person that gets encapsulated and then they decay away, but they leave a fantastically, you know, intricate void space, which then gets later... Mineral-rich waters go in and mineralise it. So sometimes you don't actually get that fossil itself, but you get an imprint of it or a void. I was wondering, actually, just mentioning Pompeii, you know, have you ever thought how you would...

If that happened to you, I presume you wouldn't like to be found kind of, you know, just looking for the end of the toilet paper, you know? What is the way that you would like to be found, do you think? You mean, like, the position? Yeah, for you to be remembered in eternity and for tourists to go, I wonder what he was up to. Remember, this is also broadcast in the afternoon on Radio 4. Just narrow down the list of possible answers. I don't... How would I put... God, like, how I work.

So he died on stage, so he's there with the microphone in his hand and just on stage and... So all of a sudden, just like that. It's actually... It's terrifying, though, isn't it? Psychologically, to die on stage for eternity. Yeah. And it does... Oh, that's some circle of hell there, isn't it? Well, depending on where I am, at least I could say, well, I mean, it looks like he killed the room as well. Yeah, you got it. And it does raise... That works, too. It does raise an interesting question, actually, about the...

So there's a microphone there, which is a piece of electronics, and then there's the human body. Oh, yeah. So if a Pompeii-type incident happened in central London, it's unlikely, I suppose. Do you have any sense what would be preserved and how there? Would the microphone survive, or would the biological entity be more likely to survive? So how hot... Yeah, how hot's the ash? I think... So this foam, I think, is going to melt into a kind of film, but the metal grid... I mean, it's the sort of steel, isn't it, I think, the actual body of this.

So that's going to be fine and be in place, so you'll be holding that. And then I think the rest of it will be absolutely preserved as it currently is, probably. And then the question I always wonder about the fossil thing is, so you're on stage, you're killing it. Yeah. And then I always think of fossils as flat things. So then do we have to kind of flatten you in order to think about what you will look like in the future? Is that a prerequisite for a fossil?

On the whole, if you end out, like, most dead animals and plants, you either end out at the bottom of a lake or the bottom of the ocean, you get buried by layer upon layer upon layer of sediment, and then you get squashed. And so a lot of fossils are flat, but by no means all of them. So preserved at our, like, fittest weight. That's what I'm hearing. So they always see me, oh, he was in great shape. That would be forever. Two-dimensional, DeLore. They might say the joke fell flat. That's the only problem.

That was beautiful, because someone went for it and the others went, no, no. Do not encourage the academic. Sorry, you used this term, the mineralisation. So in a, I suppose, I was going to say a typical fossil, but you've eloquently described there's no such thing as a typical fossil. But how much of the constituents of the animal are preserved? So can you do chemical analysis, mass spectrometry? Can you even extract DNA fragments from them? Or is it really just an imprint that's been turned into something else?

A lot of organic molecules in fossils do remain intact, and we can analyse them using mass spectrometry, and we can compare them even to organic molecules that are around in living creatures today. It may surprise people to know that plastic, man-made plastic, we think can last millions and millions of years. So all this stuff about it, you know, degrading away over a few hundred years, it can do if it's blasted by sunlight and broken down by photodegradation.

But the plastic that ends out, out of sunlight, out of oxygen, and in cool environments, so basically any ocean floor will do for this, is probably going to last millions of years. And I can tell you that because the answer to Brian's question. So we have little green microscopic algae around today that if you analyse their little cell walls, they are made of something called algonam, which is almost chemically indistinguishable from polyethylene. If you go to a site in Germany called the Messel Oil Shale, which is famous for having amazing preservation of mammals and insects and plants and so on.

But the coolest fossil in the Messel is exactly the same species of small green algae. And if you analyse that cell wall, it's also exactly the same material. So in other words, this algae is making a biopolymer, which is almost chemically indistinguishable from polyethylene, and that is surviving completely unscathed in sediments for 48 million years. People make biodegradable plastics now. I mean, they might also survive millions of years, right, if they fall into the sea and they get covered up. And I just got this kind of really strange, because people sort of feel like, if I'm buying biodegradable materials, I'm doing a good thing.

And you're like, no, they have to be in exactly the right situation to biodegrade. And it's usually not where you've just put it as you've flung your poo bag into the bushes. And that poo bag with the biodegradable could be there in millions of years' time. It could. We should say, by the way, that we are aware for the Radio 4 audience that you are not the kind of people to throw your poo bags into the trees. That's very much Vernon Kay on Radio 2. Also, I meant to say dog poo bag. Sorry.

I think you're going to get yourself in more trouble as you explain this, because I think that's what they presumed. But now they've realized that you live a very bored life. And in fact, we never see him pouring for the toilet paper. He's just, al fresco out there. No. Just throw it. This is Matt Rogers from Las Cultures with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Las Cultures with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Hey, Bowen, point of order. It feels like nothing is what it says it is anymore. Point of answer? It's because everything has a catch.

Hey, or it turns out to be something else entirely. Like a total catfish situation. Exactly, Bow. Except for Hotels.com. Yeah, that one's pretty literal. Because it's Hotels.com. It's in the domain. You go there, you book hotels, hundreds of thousands of them. And hold up, that's it? That's it. And when stays are booked as a member, rewards are earned every time. Every stay? Every stay, no tracking or managing, just rewards that can be used like cash on future bookings. Which, by the way, already feels nicer than most rewards programs. Okay. Yeah. Members can also get up to 20% off bookings, so savings start right away.

Does that mean no weird restrictions? And no blackout dates. Book what works when it works. It's actually really fitting of real travel. So the name is Honest, you're saying? And the rewards are too. Exactly. Hotels.com. It's all in the name. Hey, what up, y'all? Summer moves like a great jam session. You start with one idea, one direction, and then it shifts. Somebody calls. Energy changes. You take a detour. That's the beauty of it. For me, summer's always been about discovering new sounds, new places, new people, new ideas. You start one place, end up somewhere completely different. And somehow, that's exactly where you're supposed to be.

I've always had my spots along the way. Starbucks has been one of those constants. Before a session, on the way to a gig, and between conversations that turn into something bigger than you expected. It's part of that movement, part of that rhythm. And summer's got its own soundtrack, too. You can almost hear it without trying. Life's happening all around you, that feeling of staying open to whatever's next. Sometimes, it's the smallest things that lock you into that moment. What you're holding, what you're sipping. The new Tropical Butterfly Refresher from Starbucks. Guava and Passion Fruit flavors with mango-pineapple-flavored pearls. Cold, colorful, alive.

Feels like something made for the day that's still unfolding. And that's the thing. Sometimes, one small stop changes the whole mood of your day. Start your summer rhythm with Starbucks. Try the new Tropical Butterfly Refresher from Starbucks. Hi, I'm Dr. Jake Goodman, and I'm the host of Beyond the Script, a podcast where I sit down with pharmacists to answer all those health questions that you forget, or maybe are too embarrassed to ask when you're at the pharmacy counter.

In this episode, all about women's health, Amy Lynn Safaty-Valentine, a CVS pharmacist from Long Island, New York, talked about just how often women approach pharmacists with questions about menopause symptoms. When it comes to patients that are really suffering with the symptoms of perimenopause or menopause, it's really important for them to be evaluated by their OB-GYN because there are a lot of prescription medications that can help with that. If someone is really opposed to taking medications, there are a few lifestyle modifications that they can do, like avoiding caffeine and spicy foods, trying to stay hydrated, have a regular sleep cycle, get some exercise.

Those are all things that can kind of help to limit the symptoms. Hear the full conversation, plus so many fantastic insights into all the stages of life when it comes to women's health. Listen to Beyond the Script, a podcast from CVS Pharmacy, wherever you get your podcasts. MyBo. MyBo. MyBo. Dry eyes still feel gritty and tired? With MyBo, eyes can feel MyBo. MyBo, her fluorohepsilactane ophthalmic solution is the only prescription dry eye drop that directly targets the number one cause, too much tear evaporation. Don't use if allergic to MyBo. Remove contacts before using and wait at least 30 minutes before putting them back in.

Eye redness and blurred vision may occur. For more info, talk to your eye doctor, call 1-844-MYBO-YAH or visit MyBo.com. MyBo, yeah. Already someone who loves technology, but I'm sure, you know, very aware of sometimes where some of that technology comes from, sometimes the kind of footprint left behind. Is it something that worries you? I do what I can, I guess, based on a general approach. Like, I drive an EV car, so that's me telling myself it's somehow helpful to some degree. It's a piece of technology that I know leaves a level of a footprint, but compared to others.

And there's that kind of approach that I have, but I also know there's probably more work to do, especially after hearing 48 million years that something can potentially last. But I wouldn't know what the answer to that is. It's only going based on Googling, going how can I make sure that the things that I buy don't leave as much of a footprint. But I think in this world, anything that you buy technology-based is always going to leave at least a little one somewhere. You know, techno-fossils really are just man-made stuff.

All the objects and the materials that we make that may end up becoming fossilised and, you know, lasting thousands of years or millions of years or whatever. All of this stuff that we buy and consume more and more of, you know, because all of these consumption figures are actually accelerating, even though we know it's bad. Then, you know, I think we really need to start thinking about, you know, what is the legacy that we're going to leave the planet? Let's take a city like London filled with materials, some advanced materials, some very basic materials.

What are the ones that are the longest lived that will survive the longest? I mean, it depends on what conditions they're kind of subjected to as they come down the stratas. So, let's say it's sort of like a sedimentation process and they get hotter and hotter and hotter and compressed. Then the metals will melt. So, there's lots of steel, huge amounts of steel in London and cast iron, brilliant material, wonderful materials, really allowing us to live the way we want to live.

That will probably, if it gets hot enough, just return to the earth's core and our core is iron and so in some ways you might think of that as our long-term plan for that material. You know, the concrete, on the other hand, 50% of everything we make by weight is concrete and that is like liquid rock when it's poured and it is got the constituents of rock and won't melt as it goes down and will, yeah, become part of the earth's crust and be this incredible sedimentary layer. So, those are things that I think are the major materials, actually.

London's built up and there's brick and clay and stuff. It's like we're in this big experiment at the moment. We don't really know what's going to happen to these materials. You know, the plastic, I'm using an analogue from nature, which is very plastic-like, to try and interpret what is going to happen to plastic in the future because a lot of these materials have been around for such a short period of time that we haven't had the time to do the experiments on them to work out what's going to happen.

I mean, there are bacteria that eat certain types of plastic that have been found in landfill and we think that they've kind of evolved to eat it and actually, in the labs at UCL where I work, you know, we're trying to artificially evolve bacteria that will eat it better and if that was to really be successful, that approach, there's sort of two futures as I see it. One is that we kind of can recycle plastics much better using these bacteria in vats.

It'd be more like, recycling would be more like going to a brewery where you use a microorganism to kind of recycle our material and another possible future is that we get so good at that and it escapes into the world and then starts just eating everything and then there will be this enormous sludge that we'll all be knee-deep in. This massive biofilm. Yeah. One of the features of our civilisation, apart from the structures and the cities and the bridges that we've talked about, there's information. So of the storage devices that we have, what are the longest lived?

Is it possible that someone could dig something up a million years or 10 million years and recover the information? I think the best fossils of that is actually going to be some of the simplest. So it's going to be paper and it's going to be children's drawings on paper. And the reason I think this is that paper is basically just cellulose and cellulose has a really good fossil record. So there are fern leaves that are 180 million years old from the Jurassic and they are perfectly well preserved.

You look at them with a big magnifying equipment and you can actually see cell nuclei, you can even see chloroplasts and you can see chromosomes in the act of dividing. That's how well preserved 180 million year old leaves can be. And we get loads of leaves in the fossil record. So paper is kind of cellulose and it's leaves. So that has a really good chance of being preserved. And the reason I say children's drawings is they use pencils and we make 20 odd billion pencils every single year.

So although, you know, as adults we don't use them, pencils are graphite and graphite is, has remarkable staying power and we have graphite that's 3.8 billion years old. So I think it's rather charming to think that some of the best fossils of communication are going to be a kid's picture of their house and their mum and their dad and their dog. So get off Fortnite and do what you're supposed to do. Draw some pictures. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay. You're a travelling comedian. Have you been to the Pencil Museum in Keswick? It is a very good Pencil Museum. There's a nice gig near there, yeah.

Yeah, it's great. If you've not been to the Pencil Museum you are missing out. You missed out because it's not just a pencil museum. There's also a cabinet which shows the history of the eraser as well. So I love it. I genuinely love the Pencil Museum. Did you see how smug he said that? The history of the eraser as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be my Rutger Hauer speech in the end of Blade Runner. I've seen the Pencil Museum in Keswick. I've seen erasers off the coast of Lancaster. So we've talked about all these various things and pencil drawings and so on.

So if you took the Landfill, the nearest Landfill site to hear whatever it is and you imagine that nothing happens to it and we go back in a, someone goes back in a million years time and you go through it. What is going to be left in there and what is going to have disappeared? Most stuff is going to be left, I think. So landfill sites are obviously a bit of a black box.

The managed ones, we encapsulate everything in, guess what, sheets of plastic in layers and nobody's done much work excavating landfills because it's obviously not a very nice job and also it's quite difficult to get health and safety around that. But those that have been excavated, most stuff's kind of mummified and so there are newspapers that are completely readable back from the 1970s and there are even kind of bits of people's last dinner that are semi-mummified. Lots of us are working on plastic recycling technologies but it is going to take a long time to actually be able to recycle plastic properly.

And so there's some people who say, well we shouldn't be using terrible recycling methods now, we should just be putting all the plastic into a landfill because then we can leap ahead once we finally manage how to recycle it properly and we'll have these big presents that we'll leave to our future kids. Or these enormous landfills of plastic which may then be really, really valuable because we'll have stopped pumping oil out of the ground.

It will therefore become a very expensive resource and oils that we currently make plastic out of and so the plastics in these landfills might then be this big present we leave to them. But it's probably unlikely to happen. We are already mining landfills for one material called fly ash.

Basically it's soot, it's the leftovers from incomplete combustion in coal-fired power stations and it used to, you know, pollute our planet and now we have these electrostatic precipitators which kind of suck it out of the smoke before it goes into the atmosphere and this soot, they're kind of like little spheres, they're about a tenth of a millimetre across and they look like tiny little moons, they're all kind of pitted and cratered and obviously there's a lot of them.

So they go into landfills and we now mine the landfills for this fly ash material and we have it, we stick it into concrete as a substitute for sand. And what do you think, you know, earlier on we were talking about Burgess Shale, listening to this conversation, what do you imagine of, you know, the future Burgess Shale of, you know, the techno-fossils that are left behind, just thinking of the world that we have at the moment, when people find the equivalent, the techno-equivalent of what was a living record, you know, in Burgess Shale?

It's going to be a huge kind of, let's say a whole plate of different things you could have a look at and say this is what the past looked like. I don't think it's going to be very accurate in terms of how we live day to day. So, for example, if you are going to say like vaping, I don't know how many people in this room do vape, but even though some people make it their personality, it wouldn't describe how we were today.

It's like, for example, you described the phone earlier on being something that we look at and it's got all of these kind of elements in there that people could see, but I don't think it would give an indication of just how addicted we are to this device. The culture of society, I think, is not to do with the things that we produce, it's how they relate to us as individuals and the connections that we have with them, and I think you'll have an idea of what maybe we have used, but not just how influential they were to us.

Like, it always strikes me, that laces, like, so they go, look, they had mobile phones, or they had these kind of lozenges that they pray to the god of imperial table and chemistry, but they still tied their shoes with strings. Like, how do we understand this? They had invented Velcro. It's the best adhesive mechanism that's easy to unlock and lock, and yet they stuck with the shoelace. What is going on with them? Yeah. There's going to be so many good stories around clothes, right? Yeah. I mean, laces is such a good one.

So, if you think about it, until fairly recently, most clothes were wool and silk and especially cotton, and in archaeology, you know, the oldest clothes, it's a real red-letter day for an archaeologist. If they find any kind of garment preserved at all, and one of the oldest is, I think it's about 5,000 years old, that's it, and it's a linen dress in a tomb in Egypt.

So, basically, you know, these biodegradable natural materials, they don't preserve, and now we are making 100 billion articles of clothing every single year, and about 60% of those are plastic, and we've heard that plastic is going to last a long, long time.

So, you can imagine these kind of intelligent civilisations of the future, and they're unearthing layer by layer, and they're not finding anything, they're not finding, and then they find microplastic fibres everywhere, they find loads and loads of clothes everywhere, because they're plastic, and they're going to kind of wonder, you know, did we walk around naked, and then suddenly discover clothes, you know, so there's going to be all these amazing puzzles that they're going to have to unpick. Are we allowed to mention the shoe event horizon at this point? Of course. A single shoe. Thank you.

This is the Douglas Adam Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference, but it is about the fact that every advanced civilisation in the end reaches the shoe event horizon, which is where they produce more shoes and clothes than anyone can ever wear, which means that everyone has to keep buying them all the time, and that means everyone else goes out busy except the people who are selling shoes and clothes, and then the whole civilisation collapses under a big layer of shoe and clothes, and that is then compressed into a layer which you always find on every advanced planet after it's decayed. Just like that.

Yeah, that's insane. It makes sense, but I would never have thought of that. That's crazy. A lot of the discussion we've had so far has been about what happens to materials if we throw them away, are they biodegradable, and so on. But some of the research into materials now is to build things that do not need to be thrown away, so I'm thinking in terms of things like self-healing materials. So this is the only way to escape the shoe event horizon is, I think, no, I honestly do think this is true, because this is the trajectory we're going.

I mean, we are sort of mad at the moment, the way we are just producing more and more stuff, and we're absolutely polluting the planet and poisoning ourselves and nature. The only way to do it is to, A, stop that, but we all need stuff, because we love it, and we've evolved from creatures. We are materials people. So it's not like we're going to go around naked, I don't think.

It's like, we're going to want all that stuff, we're going to want our phones, and we're going to want our clothes, but they just need to last a lifetime, and so we only have to buy a few of them, and that seems like a crazy thing, because we're so used to constantly getting dissatisfied with a shirt, although this one's great, but in general, and sort of saying, I don't want it anymore. The other reason we get rid of stuff is because it breaks, but what if we could design a phone when a small crack happened and it started to malfunction? It would heal itself.

What if we could make a washing machine that did that? What if we could make a car that did that? What if we could make an aeroplane, a train, a road that can do that? And then we're into, that's a future I want to happen, right? That's why I decided... What about when the washing machines start to take over, though? Because I think you've given them a... This is like a David Cronenberg nightmare with an extra kind of lemony freshness to it as well.

It has possible downsides, but we're on a trajectory to a very predictable downside that's boring, whereas at least we could have a downside that's pretty interesting. But what about, can you imagine, you know, someone who loves technology, but that point where enough people have smashed into other people's heads because they've got their head down, that they go, do you know what, I think I'm bored of the phone now. You know, can you imagine that there might be a point where eventually people go, do you know what, that's enough now.

So, there is a point with all of us where we get to where that's enough technology for us at that point, and there could be advancements above it, but all of us will get to that. Some of us in the room have probably hit that point. I'm not going to say who you are, but likely you probably, like, would still prefer to book holidays on Teletext. And it's, do you see what I'm, like, so you get to that point where you're like, that's me, that's all I want. But technology will always advance.

I'm not at a point where it's hit that kind of, that peak for me, but I can see myself almost like peaking off of my interest on certain new bits of technology.

Phones used to be something we just spoke on, now we watch TV shows on, and there's going to be a point where phones now might be plugged into us so it's in our glasses, and then after a while it's the convenience of it being in our eyes, and I, I mean, I'm already at the point where I wouldn't want it to be in my glasses, I definitely wouldn't want it to be in my eyes, but somebody else would.

And then someone may live virtual, virtually within that form of technology, and look at the things that we are, like, using now, like, mobile phones as archaic, and in essence fossils to them. If we told our grandparents or our great-grandparents that TVs would be flat against the wall, that for them was what they saw in Star Trek, and would be like, that's crazy, that could never happen.

Mark, I want to just pick up on the material science, because often I think we think of materials that we spoke about this evening as kind of just things that are kind of low-tech, and so they're the thing out of which we build stuff. But this idea that you can design materials such that they do things actively, like you said, a self-repairing, is a glass cover on a phone, for example. Could you speak about some of the research that's going on now with these smart materials that can do things, high-technology materials?

So there are these things called smart materials which sort of change shape if you put an electric field across them or you heat them up, and that was kind of novel in the 1960s, 1970s. But a whole set of people kind of thought, you know, if we could, can we make materials a bit more lifelike? So can we make materials that not just can change with, you know, with respect to a temperature or sunlight, but they can sort of do that and then detect that they're damaged in some way and then use that change in shape to repair themselves.

So that whole kind of trajectory is now called animate materials, and they're not alive, but they are man-made, and they do, there's a whole series of them out there, there's kind of self-repairing concrete, there's self-repairing asphalt for roads, and that is being tested in the M25 now. So the idea that a road will repair itself and therefore last, instead of 10 years, 30, 40, 50 years, is ongoing research that is being tested currently. How does that work? So you get a crack in the road. The crack disappears. Yes.

So it turns out when you look at why potholes form, and I know potholes is a special word to say in an audience like this. So why do they form? It turns out that we make most of our roads out of asphalt, which is a mix of 95% stones and 5% a liquid called tar, and you don't think of it as a liquid because it's so viscous. It's much more viscous than honey, but it is a liquid, and it's moving around the whole time, and that's the key to the self-healing.

So if a big truck comes over and a tiny crack opens up, then if it's hot enough, on a hot day, the liquid actually will reheal just from normal thermodynamics, those capillary action. But when the temperature goes down, and that happens in the winter, that crack doesn't heal up, and so you get this point where it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, then a bit of stone falls out, and then you have a puddle, and then that fills with water, it freezes, and the hole gets bigger, and that's a runaway pothole. And it's too late to intervene at that point.

So a lot of the science of self-healing roads is to try to get the cracks in the winter to self-repair without it having to be hot. So you can do it two ways. You can either have a... They put encapsulated oils into the road mixture, and that's the one that's being tested in the M25. So when the crack opens up in the winter, it cracks open these little capsules of oil, and the oil makes the tar a little bit less viscous, and it basically gets it to flow.

And so that's being tested, but the other way to do it is you put little metal nanoparticles into it, and that's something that we've been doing, and then the nanoparticles will heat up if you drive a car over it with an electromagnetic wave, and then you get this artificial heating. So you basically drive vehicles around the M25, which basically help that road heal itself and therefore last longer.

I mean, this is probably very rudimentary, but is it like how Plato can kind of work where it forms a brake, and then the more that you massage the payload, then the brake disappears, and it's kind of like a new bonding, but for asphalt. Yeah, so yeah, in the sense that these surfaces are not... that crack is two surfaces opening up. They can be bonded back together.

And there's self-repairing paints on the market now that if you buy a very high-end car, you will be offered a self-repairing paint, and it will reheal little scratches from, you know, just wind dust completely itself, because it's got this very low viscosity kind of surface layer that will just close over and give it this pristine newness that, you know, young people have in their skin. LAUGHTER All the people lack and envy. I wish I'd mentioned Play-Doh. I'm hungry now. LAUGHTER You don't eat Play-Doh? Oh, my God, this is... Have you not read my book about the Play-Doh diet? It was the Play-Doh-er. It's absolutely huge.

Is he now, like, going to be a techno-fossil with the Play-Doh that's in his system? Is that going to be there forever? Years down the line, they're going to wonder if people ate Play-Doh after seeing... He's kind of self-preserving. That's what I say. Self-healing, self-preserving. I'll have a lovely, like, rainbow inside. Not like your dull old organs, everyone. So, we asked the audience... What are we asking, Brad? We asked the audience a question, now, what would you bury underground to most confuse future generations? What have you got, Brad? The physics GCSE paper I took yesterday.

LAUGHTER If anyone in this room contributed to it, what is wrong with you? That's from Peter. What have you got? So, just to repeat the question, what would you bury underground to most confuse future generations? The answer I've got here is Milton Keynes. LAUGHTER To be fair, I get it, because it is literally a grid with loads of roundabout cycles. Oh, no! Oh, man, there's a whole history to it, where a load of the people who were the architects who made it, Midsomer Boulevard is actually, like, the equivalent of a kind of Stonehenge thing. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, there's quite a...

A friend of mine worked on it and found out that the water mains were also attached to the gas mains and said that may be an issue when the fire trucks come, and that's why that got changed. This is very specific. A non-fungible token, the fact that people are daft enough to buy them has to be preserved, but how does one bury something that doesn't exist? That's a strange question. I've got an IKEA wardrobe with no Allen key or instructions. LAUGHTER Well, thank you very much to our fantastic panel, Auri Stylis, Sarah Gabbert and Mark Mierdofnik.

APPLAUSE Next week, we return to our regular all-in wrestling tournament. We do, because we've pitched... Oh, no, I can tell the people over there were imagining you in a leotard. Because we've pitched wasps against bees, dogs versus cats, and Jupiter versus Saturn, but now... It's the Lepidoptera special! Because in the blue, red, yellow, green and orange-tipped corner, it's the butterfly, and in the brown corner, it's the moth. So, we will... Well, actually, look, I'm going to give you a secret now, which you'll find out when this is the episode. It turns out butterflies are moths, so the entire episode is a waste of your time.

So just... LAUGHTER ..skip to the next episode, it's fine. It is true. And we only found that out about five minutes before the end of the episode. So next week, the inappropriately named Butterflies versus Moths. Bye-bye. APPLAUSE Do you want that nice again? How is it that some brands and products really capture our imagination, seem to be ahead of the game, but then somehow end up toast? I'm Sean Farrington, presenter of the BBC Radio 4 series Toast, which unpicks what went wrong with big business ideas. We hear from people directly involved in building the successes...

They were looking for us to build scale quickly, gain a dominant market position, and that's what we did. ..and get expert insight into why they faltered. So, in effect, Woolworths was being drained of cash, and people tried damned hard to save it. From FHM magazine to Woolworths via Nike's fitness band and FreeServe's internet service. Toast. Listen first on BBC Sounds. This is the new Weight Watchers. Built for real life and real results, no matter what mode you're in. Maddie went all in for her big day and lost 33 pounds. Emily lost 85 pounds and hit her goal while still living her life.

Weight Watchers gave me the tools, and I feel amazing. Join the millions of members and lose weight with the number one doctor-recommended weight loss program. Lose more at WeightWatchers.com. At six months, participants in a clinical trial of Weight Watchers program lost an average of 12 pounds. . . . .