Technofossils - Sarah Gabbott, Mark Miodownik and Aurie Styla

Introduction

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

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BBC Sounds

2:11BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robert Ince, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage. Now, we are at the Bloomsbury Theatre, which is actually the place that Brian Cox and I did our very, very first gig, about two years before we started doing this series. And it was a kind of mash-up of science and music, and I came on and did some jokes about Schrodinger's cat, and Brian came on and sang, I'll Be Your Long-Haired Lover from Liverpool. And then I had my hair cut shortly after,

2:43for 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?

Fossils Discussion

3:12So, 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.

3:44And 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.

4:15Hello, 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.

4:46And 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.

5:16And 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.

5:47You 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

6:20as 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

6:51in 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.

Fossil Definition

7:04Sarah, 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,

7:35not 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?

8:07What 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,

8:40which 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,

9:10the 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.

9:42I'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,

10:13and 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

10:44that 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

11:19than 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

11:51and 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.

12:22Could 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.

12:52And 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,

13:23and 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.

13:53Can 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.

14:24And 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,

14:55I 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...

15:26So 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.

15:57Oh, 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,

16:28so 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

17:01or 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.

17:27That 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?

17:59A 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,

18:30it 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,

19:03they 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.

19:35So 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,

20:06they 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.

20:32Also, 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.

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21:31rewards 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?

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24:59Already 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

25:2948 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.

26:00All 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

26:30what 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

27:00for 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.

27:30It'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

28:01that 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

28:32is 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?

29:04I 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

29:35see 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,

30:06pencils 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

30:38in Keswick?

30:41It 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.

31:11So 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,

31:42sheets 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

32:12time 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.

32:42It 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

33:13which 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