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The year’s best celestial event was, without a doubt, April’s solar eclipse. The moon went in front of the sun to cast a 115 mile wide shadow on Earth. A swathe of North America was showered in sudden darkness. In honor of the eclipse, the Radiolab team made a show about the star of the show: the moon.

We think we know the moon — we know that humanity visited it, that it’s a shiny white rotating rock in the sky. But what else really? In today’s episode, the team tells us about the moon’s formation, moon dust, moon-quakes, moon volcanoes, how the moon causes the tides on the Earth, and what the temperature up there is like. Turns out, we’ve barely scratched the surface.

For more, check out Rebecca Boyle’s book, ‘Our Moon: How the Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution and Made Us Who We Are’

Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton. Production help from Tanya Chawla. Sound mixing by Joe Plourde.

Sign up for Radiolab for Kids’s newsletter! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up here.

Radiolab for Kids and Terrestrials are supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, X Facebook, Threads and TikTok @radiolab.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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The year’s best celestial event was, without a doubt, April’s solar eclipse. The moon went in front of the sun to cast a 115 mile wide shadow on Earth. A swathe of North America was s...

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LULU: Hey there, Lulu here. We are coming up on the new year. And, you know, we're in our last days of 2024, and this is a time when many people are looking back. They're making lists of the best books or the best songs or the best movies. Well, I want to consider the best celestial events of 2024. And it is just no question, no contest. The thing that takes the cake was the total solar eclipse back in April of course the moon went in front of the Sun at just the perfect distance that made it so that a swathe of North America was showered in sudden darkness. I skipped work that day. It was a Monday. My wife skipped work too. We got our kids out of school, we bought a bunch of chips and drove five hours to Indiana so that we could be in the path of totality. And in those moments where the moon finally closed over the sun, the temperature suddenly dropped, the birds got all quiet. A guy next to us started playing the pan flute, just (humming). It was so eerie and so neat, um, and so today what I want to do is play you a show that the Radiolab team made in honor of the eclipse that's all about the moon! The moon, the thing allowing for that eerie darkness. It turns out that shiny, glowy, nice white thing in the sky that you can find at night. Well, you might not really know it as well as you think you do.

LULU: But hopefully that'll change after you listen to this episode. So here we go. I'm going to play you the episode, sit back, relax. It kicks off with Radiolab’s Molly Webster telling me and Latif Nasser why she was so excited about the eclipse.

MOLLY: So you may have heard we had a big solar eclipse, which I was unabashedly pumped about. I’ve never - I don’t get into eclipses so much but this was my year.

LULU: Comin’ in every day with the glasses on.

MOLLY: [Laughs] So basically an eclipse is, like, the moon gets between the Earth and the sun, and so then it, like, blocks the light of the sun. And the shadow of the moon is cast upon the Earth. And the shadow is actually about 115 miles wide.

LATIF: Okay.

LULU: Oh! Interesting.

MOLLY: And so as the Earth rotates, the shadow of the moon sweeps across the Earth.

LATIF: Hmm.

MOLLY: Passing over mountains and forests and cities and towns—and maybe your house.

LATIF: Fully—fully blocking.

MOLLY: Fully—fully blocking. That's why this one was such a big deal. It was a total solar eclipse.

LULU: Okay!

MOLLY: And so when we were thinking about this eclipse, I was like, okay, how—like, would there be an interesting way for our show to cover this? And I started to notice this funny thing, which is that everything I was coming across was all about ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The sun.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The sun.]

MOLLY: ... the sun.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Understanding the sun is important for understanding our place in the universe.]

MOLLY: What happens to the sun, what we can learn about the sun. But also ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: There it is!]

MOLLY: ... if it wasn't about the sun ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: There it is!]

MOLLY: ... it was something about Earth and Earthlings.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I'm speechless. I'm literally speechless.]

MOLLY: About what we'll feel or what it'll be like.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Bumper-to-bumper traffic.]

MOLLY: About ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: How the atmosphere behaves.]

MOLLY: ... the atmosphere. About ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: These amazing shadows.]

MOLLY: ... the shadows, the light, the wind.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: About what you should keep in mind when it comes to our furry friends.]

MOLLY: And I was like, wait, what about the moon?

LULU: Hmm.

MOLLY: Like, the only reason any of this is happening is because of the moon, and yet we're treating it like it's like the, you know, silly best friend who only has a couple of scenes.

LULU: Treating it like the photo bomber ...

MOLLY: Yeah.

LULU: ... in the way of the thing.

MOLLY: Yeah. And I'm like, you're cau—this—the only reason this is happening is because the moon's causing it.

LULU: Yeah.

MOLLY: And no one's really talking about it. And I feel like that's sort of the case with the moon. Like, it doesn't really get talked about that much. It sort of gets short shrift.

LATIF: What are you talking about? People talk about the moon all the time! There was just like a—wasn't there a whole thing about something that landed on the moon and fell over, and everyone was, like, rooting for this thing on the moon? And I mean, just in general, aren’t we- NASA's going back to the moon. We already went to the moon. We haven't gone to the sun. Like ...

MOLLY: Yeah, fair point about the sun. We haven't gone there.

LATIF: [laughs]

MOLLY: But I would just say, like, I feel like you see the moon, so you think you know about the moon.

LATIF: Sure.

MOLLY: But I don't—like, what do you know? Like, tell me what do you know about the moon?

LATIF: Um ...

LULU: Okay.

LATIF: Craters. It has craters.

LULU: Craters.

MOLLY: Uh-huh.

LULU: It's, um, a rock, I think? That is in orbit with us.

LATIF: Yeah.

LULU: It's circling us.

LATIF: Yeah, that's right.

LULU: Uh, does it also spin? Probably?

LATIF: Yeah.

LULU: Yeah.

LATIF: Yeah.

LULU: Okay.

LATIF: Sure. [laughs]

MOLLY: Okay, so just to sum up your—your deep knowledge of the moon is that it's a round rock that orbits the Earth ...

LULU: Like, it's a round rock ...

MOLLY: ... and that may or may not spin.

LATIF: Yeah. And has craters. You forgot about the craters.

LULU: It has craters! And it has craters.

MOLLY: Right. Right. I think you've just underscored my point.

LATIF: Okay. Fair.

MOLLY: That I think we think we feel like we know a lot about the moon because we spend a lot of time looking at it, but I would say that one, like, that's kind of the collection of facts most people know about the moon. But it's ...

LATIF: And that we've been there. That we've been there, of course.

MOLLY: Yeah, exactly. So that's the other thing is that we often think of the moon in relation to us, and I just felt like when I realized this I thought: oh, the moon is our closest neighbor, and it feels a little weird how little we know about it.

LATIF: Hmm.

MOLLY: It feels a little rude. And so I just started to wonder: can I know this cosmic neighbor more than it may or may not be round and rocky? Like, can I get to really know it? And so that led me to this idea that what we should do today is a moon show.

LATIF: Ah, nice!

LULU: Like, you want a profile of the moon.

MOLLY: I absolutely want to profile the moon.

LATIF: Yeah!

MOLLY: And that—that is what we're going to do. We're gonna do, like, a birth, a middle age ...

LULU: Ooh!

MOLLY: ... a death!

LULU: Oh. I don't want it to die.

MOLLY: Well, just stay tuned, Lulu.

LULU: Okay.

MOLLY: Stay tuned. Okay, so the first part of our moon profile comes from managing editor Pat Walters.

PAT WALTERS: Yeah, so when we started working on this moon show, I got curious about where the story starts.

LATIF: Okay.

PAT: Like, where did the moon come from?

LULU: Um, I mean, I guess I've always thought it sort of just was something in space whizzing by, and Earth's orbit caught it at some point.

PAT: Hmm.

LATIF: Hmm.

LULU: Maybe?

LATIF: I think I always thought that it was just like—it's always been around. Like, it came from wherever the Earth came from, and they've always just been here together.

PAT: Yeah. Yeah, good guesses. Not correct.

LULU: [laughs]

PAT: But those are both ideas that people have had for a long time.

SIMON LOCK: Yeah, so there were sort of a number of different suggestions.

PAT: This is according to Simon Lock. He's a research fellow at the University of Bristol in England.

SIMON LOCK: And I study the formation and early evolution of planets.

PAT: And the moon.

SIMON LOCK: Mm-hmm.

PAT: And he says for most of modern history, people thought what you thought.

SIMON LOCK: Another idea was that the moon could have actually been sort of thrown out from the Earth itself.

PAT: Like, as the Earth was spinning, a chunk of it flew off and became the moon.

SIMON LOCK: An idea called fission.

PAT: This was apparently a Darwin idea.

SIMON LOCK: Not the Charles Darwin, but his son, I believe.

PAT: George.

SIMON LOCK: Yeah.

PAT: He actually thought the Pacific Ocean was the hole left behind by the moon when it flew off into space.

LATIF: Weird!

PAT: Totally, yeah! And also wrong.

SIMON LOCK: What all scientists probably agree on is ...

PAT: Simon says what most likely happened was a bit more explosive.

SIMON LOCK: Yeah. The moon formed as the result of a giant impact.

LATIF: Like, a giant, like, of what? Like, a giant impact? What does that even mean here?

PAT: Well, I should say there are a couple different versions of this theory, but the one Simon told me is wild. And it starts about 4.4 billion years ago.

LATIF: Okay, so let's begin at the beginning.

PAT: Okay, so just to set the scene.

SIMON LOCK: The overall picture is this.

PAT: We're on Earth. And Earth is only about 100 million years old.

SIMON LOCK: So it's quite early in the whole history of Earth. It's really sort of the—you know, still in the overture of Earth.

PAT: But even in these early days, it looked kind of like Earth does now.

SARAH STEWART: Just imagine a slightly smaller Earth. It probably had oceans and an atmosphere.

PAT: This is Sarah Stewart.

SARAH STEWART: Professor at the University of California at Davis.

PAT: And she and Simon explained to me that if you were standing on this baby Earth all those billions of years ago, gazing up into the night sky, it would have been full of stars, just like it is now. The stars would look different because they won't yet have reached their current configuration. But it would be a starry sky.

LATIF: Yeah.

PAT: If you were staring up at it, at some point a new little glimmer would have appeared in the sky. Next night, that dot would've gotten bigger. Night after that, a bit bigger still. And by the time it got big enough for you to tell what it was, which is a planet that's rushing towards Earth at 20,000 miles an hour, it would have consumed the entire sky, and then smashed into the baby Earth.

LATIF: Dramatic.

PAT: Yeah.

SARAH STEWART: The energy, the collision dumped into the Earth was the power of the Sun. And as a result ...

SIMON LOCK: You vaporize—vaporize—so turn to gas, the rock of Earth.

PAT: And, of course, the planet that hit it. And what's left ...

SIMON LOCK: Is this sort of huge, swirling ball of gas.

PAT: A big spinning cloud.

SIMON LOCK: But made out of vaporized rock.

PAT: And Simon says the cloud is extremely wide ...

SIMON LOCK: Ten times the size of the present-day Earth.

PAT: ... incredibly hot ...

SIMON LOCK: 2,000 Kelvin or so.

PAT: ... and spinning super fast.

SIMON LOCK: The central part is rotating with a sort of three-hour day.

PAT: But it doesn't stay that way for very long.

SIMON LOCK: It's cooling really rapidly, causing the vapor to condense into droplets of magma.

SARAH STEWART: Clouds are forming that are magma clouds

PAT: Sarah Stewart again.

SARAH STEWART: The magma droplets fall.

PAT: As rain, basically.

SARAH STEWART: And the magma rain would have been torrential.

PAT: Pretty quickly, the magma rain starts clumping together with ...

SIMON LOCK: Bigger lumps of molten rock.

PAT: And at some point, several of these lumps clump together and start ...

SIMON LOCK: Pulling nearby stuff towards it, and using that to grow in mass.

PAT: And this lump of magma, this will eventually become the moon. And the rest of this rocky gas cloud, that will become the Earth.

SIMON LOCK: Yeah. The moon is forming within this huge extended Earth.

PAT: But the gas cloud version of Earth ...

SIMON LOCK: It's contracting.

PAT: ... is getting smaller as it cools, and more and more of the gas turns into liquid magma. Until eventually, Simon says ...

SIMON LOCK: This sort of wonderful dramatic moment ...

PAT: Where the moon, which has been forming inside the gas cloud of Earth ...

SIMON LOCK: Would emerge from the Earth as sort of this newly-born satellite.

PAT: And begin orbiting the Earth. And that, according to Simon and Sarah's theory, is how we got our moon.

LATIF: What? So it literally popped out of us?

PAT: Yeah.

PAT: And how long did this whole process take?

SIMON LOCK: The—the moon probably takes about, you know, on the order of ten to a few tens of years to form.

PAT: Ten years?

SIMON LOCK: Yeah, it's fast.

LATIF: What? That took less than one of us. Less than me or you, less than our life.

PAT: Yeah. And what I think is so amazing about this moment is that it didn't only give birth to the moon.

SIMON LOCK: This event is really significant not only because it formed the moon, but it also actually formed the Earth if you think about it.

PAT: Like, before that giant impact, there was a version of the Earth, but it was different. It was smaller, it was made of different stuff. It wasn't, like, tilted off at a slight angle away from the sun in the way that it is now. Like, if the giant impact hadn't happened, it's not just that we wouldn't have a moon, but Earth wouldn't really be Earth in the way we know it. This moment when the moon became the moon is also ...

SIMON LOCK: How Earth became Earth.

PAT: Cool. Yeah, amazing. Um ...

PAT: And not only were they born in the same moment, but they're also sort of twins.

PAT: What do we have here?

PAT: Like, when you look at a moon rock ...

PAT: What's that?

MUSEUM CURATOR: You can hold that, by the way.

PAT: Oh, I can hold it? Oh my God!

PAT: ... which I actually got to do recently at a museum in Maine.

PAT: It's quite heavy.

MUSEUM CURATOR: Yeah.

PAT: Yeah.

PAT: It looks surprisingly familiar.

PAT: In some ways it's, like, not that dissimilar from rocks that I've held before.

PAT: It just looked like a chunky gray and black rock.

PAT: But obviously it's from the moon.

MUSEUM CURATOR: It's a rock.

PAT: Which is insane to think about. [laughs] But yeah, it's just a—it is just a rock.

PAT: And it turns out it's not just that moon rocks look like Earth rocks, but if you were to break them open and examine their geochemistry, you would find that Earth rocks and moon rocks are almost identical.

LATIF: Wait, can I just understand—because okay, so if you tell me they're the same ...

PAT: Yeah.

LATIF: ... I would just be like, oh, of course. Like, everything in the universe is—or everything in the solar system was made at the same time. Like, of course this thing is gonna have the same as that thing. Like, would—is Mars the same?

PAT: No.

PAT: This looks quite different.

PAT: I got to hold a piece of Mars at that museum, too.

LATIF: What?

PAT: Yeah, it was awesome.

PAT: I can't believe this is a piece of Mars.

PAT: And it looks totally different than a moon rock or an Earth rock.

PAT: It looks more metallic.

PAT: Kind of red with green streaks through it. And according to Simon, is also geochemically very different.

SIMON LOCK: Because all of the things that were happening in the galaxy ...

PAT: As the solar system's forming ...

SIMON LOCK: ... produce different amounts of different elements.

PAT: In different parts of the solar system.

SIMON LOCK: Yeah, exactly.

PAT: So Mars looks different than Venus or Mercury, but Earth and the moon look the same.

SIMON LOCK: And nothing else in the solar system looks quite the same.

PAT: Why, if the moon and the Earth are made of the same stuff and both were sort of born out of this one explosive moment, why didn't the moon just become a little Earth?

SIMON LOCK: Yeah, just because it's so much smaller.

PAT: Hmm.

SIMON LOCK: So it is only about one percent the mass of the Earth, but what that means is that the moon can't really hold onto an atmosphere. If you, you know, open, you know, a bottle of air on the moon, very quickly that'll get driven off into space.

PAT: So it's not big enough, so meaning it doesn't have enough gravity to hold that stuff down?

SIMON LOCK: Yeah. This is why when you see, you know, the astronauts bouncing across the surface of the moon, they can do that just because the gravity's so much lower.

PAT: Hmm.

SIMON LOCK: And so the force that's holding onto our atmosphere just doesn't work as well when it—the gravity's that much lower.

PAT: Okay.

SIMON LOCK: And without the atmosphere, none of the rest of it can happen.

LATIF: Oh, that is kinda shocking and it makes you—because it's like the whole—you know, so often we talk about, like, oh it's the Goldilocks zone, and it's like we're in the right spot. Like ...

PAT: Like, distance from the sun and everything.

LATIF: Yeah, exactly.

PAT: Yeah.

LATIF: Like, it's like oh, this is perfect for being habitable. But then you look at the moon and you're like, oh, it makes life and Earth seem pretty special and rare and unique again in a way.

PAT: Yeah. Like, if that giant impact that gave birth to the Earth and the moon had gone down a little bit differently, and some chunk of Earth had gotten blasted off into space and we had ended smaller, we might not have been able to develop oceans and birds, dogs, babies, music. We might have just ended up like a slightly bigger version of our cold, dry, airless twin, the moon.

LULU: Managing Editor Pat Walters. [laughs] All right, Molly. Where are we—where are we going from here? That felt kind of like a punctuation point, this poor, dusty dead moon.

MOLLY: Honestly, by Pat's description, it sounds kind of dead to me too. But I want to liven it up. I want to take you up there and liven it up.

LATIF: But there's nothing alive. What are you gonna do?

MOLLY: There is, it's true. There are no palm trees or anything up there.

LATIF: [laughs]

MOLLY: But—but there is, it turns out there's just so much stuff happening there. I am sort of a pressure cooker of facts, and I just have to tell them to somebody.

LATIF: Okay.

LULU: We will continue to moon you after this short break.

MOLLY: Yeah! [laughs]

BREAK

LULU: We’re back, with reporter Molly Webster.

MOLLY: So you are my captive audience. Are you ready?

LULU: Let's do it.

MOLLY: So the moon does look a lot more like Earth than I would have expected.

LULU: Huh!

MOLLY: There are craters that Latif remembered.

LATIF: Right.

MOLLY: Plus it has a bunch of mountain ranges ...

LULU: Okay.

MOLLY: ... a point that's higher than Everest.

LATIF: Hmm!

MOLLY: Scientists have found moon caves.

LULU: Ooh!

MOLLY: And they've also found volcanoes that are billions and billions of years old.

LULU: With—with—with lava?

MOLLY: With lava.

LATIF: Whoa!

MOLLY: It's very, very dry old lava.

LATIF: [laughs] Okay.

MOLLY: But really, the first thing I learned about the moon that really arrested me and made me want to know so much more about it is that the moon is covered in soil that kind of looks like sand. People will call it moon dust ...

LATIF: Hmm.

MOLLY: But it's incredibly sharp.

LATIF: Whoa!

LULU: Like a little grain of it?

MOLLY: Yeah, a tiny, tiny grain of it is, like, razor sharp.

LULU: Hmm.

MOLLY: And it is that way because there's no wind on the moon or flowing water.

LULU: Oh!

MOLLY: There's nothing to, like, erode and give you ...

LULU: And, like, dull it?

MOLLY: ... that soft, like, fine surface.

LULU: Hmm.

LATIF: So, like, let's say you're on the moon, you take off your boots and you try to do the beach, squish your toes in the sand thing, just like the instant you put your foot down it'd get all cut up or—like ...

MOLLY: Likely, yeah.

LATIF: … like, how—whoa!

MOLLY: And then probably before that happened, depending on where you were, it would either burn up or freeze your foot.

LULU: What?

MOLLY: You wouldn't—because, like, the temperature on the moon is super extreme.

LULU: Hmm.

MOLLY: It's like, one scientist said to me it's either kill ya hot or kill ya cold.

LULU: [laughs]

MOLLY: And that's because on the moon, if you're in the sun, it can be something like 250 degrees Fahrenheit.

LULU: Wow!

MOLLY: But if you're out of the sun, it can be -250 degrees Fahrenheit.

LULU: Whoa!

LATIF: That's like 500-degrees difference.

MOLLY: Yeah, it's a 500-degree difference, and the other thing is that on the moon, there is no sunrise and no sunset.

LATIF: Hmm. What do you mean?

MOLLY: You just turn from day to night or night to day. Just goes from light to dark or dark to light. Just like—boom!

LATIF: What?

MOLLY: And so it's kind of like just pulling up a blind and it's like—boom!—there's the sun.

LULU: Huh!

LATIF: Whoa! Okay, so—okay, so so far we have—so there's the dirt, there's the—there is the temperature extremes, there is the lack of dawn and dusk, um.

MOLLY: And so what those temperature shifts do on the moon ...

LATIF: Mm-hmm?

MOLLY: ... is they actually cause the moon to shake.

LATIF: Really?

MOLLY: Yeah, there are moonquakes.

LULU: What?

MOLLY: So many kinds for actually so many different reasons. The ones I think are sort of super interesting are the ones that are caused by the tides.

LATIF: With our tides?

MOLLY: With our tides.

LULU: Oh.

MOLLY: And basically how that works is the moon causes the tides on the Earth, which means the moon's gravity pushes and pulls the water in the oceans on the Earth.

LULU: Right.

MOLLY: Which then changes the gravity of the Earth, which actually fiddles with the moon itself again. It's like a feedback loop.

LULU: Huh!

MOLLY: And moonquakes are happening quite often. So just know when you look up there, it's trembling.

LATIF: Stage fright.

LULU: Oh, that's lovely!

LATIF: Yeah.

MOLLY: I know.

LATIF: And I guess when you're—like, when we're looking at the moon, the whole thing is kind of grayscale, right? Are there colors on the moon?

MOLLY: Everything is pretty gray. One thing I did hear was that when things land on the moon, like an asteroid or a meteor, there's like a whiteness to it that's really bright. It's almost like newborn material that has hit from—from far away in the solar system. And then over time, as it starts getting pummeled by, you know, the solar wind from the sun and different types of, like, charged radiative particles from space, that those cause that whiteness to kind of like heat and condense and heat and condense, and then it becomes dark. And so the moon seems like it's a place of light and shadow.

LULU: Hmm. I feel like having this conversation with you, I think you were very successful in your premise. But more than that, like, it's like—this—most of our images are either the ones we can see with the naked eye where it's this, like, comforting twinkle. It's this source of light in darkness. And it's so twinkly and forgiving and welcoming, and then it's like, "No. Take off your shoes. Welcome to this place. The dust is daggers. You're gonna bleed if you scrinch into the dust."

LATIF: Temperature extremes!

MOLLY: I mean, it is probably both twinkly and dagger dust, and then also cold and alive. And probably a thousand other things, because we still don't know it that well. Like, in all of time, we've only spent three-and-a-half days up there. It hasn't—we haven't actually spent that much time on the surface of the moon.

LATIF: Oh really?

MOLLY: Yeah. Three days and, like, a handful of hours.

LULU: We've only—that feels—I mean, quite literally like we've only scratched the surface. [laughs]

MOLLY: Exactly. We really don't know this friend of ours that well, actually.

LULU: Huh.

MOLLY: And, like, one of the things that came out of these conversations with scientists is just how many questions they still have about the moon and, like, how much we have yet to discover about it.

LULU: Hmm.

MOLLY: And it's just like, you know, they would just rattle them off, like, what is the history of impact events on the moon? Or what is the moon like below the surface? Or why don't we ever see moonquakes on the far side of the moon?

LULU: Hmm!

MOLLY: Or what is the little bit of lunar atmosphere that is up there made of? And how can the moon help us understand other planets? Like, the list goes, like, on and on. Like, someone sent me a 120-page NASA book ...

LULU: Wow!

MOLLY: ... that was a lot about the questions on the moon. So it just feels like what we've done here is, like, this is what we know about the moon day to day right now.

LULU: Yeah.

MOLLY: But that could just get blown up again in—as we learn more.

LULU: Yeah. But still I just—I don't know. It's like, instead of going to bed thinking about the little boys fishing off the moon, which is a nice image, I'm gonna think about the long-ago volcanoes exploding on it.

MOLLY: Young lunar craters, that's what you're gonna go to bed thinking about.

LULU: I am. For real. It's beautiful. It's beautiful.

MOLLY: Yeah.

LULU: That'll do it for today. I truly do think about the volcanoes on the moon now when I'm trying to fall asleep I picture the different colors their lava may have been because apparently the lava was composed of different minerals. I picture them purple, yellow, and green. I'm not sure if that's accurate, but it's what I like to think about If you want to send us a picture of volcanoes on the moon or anything else that this show inspired you to think about, you can send it to terrestrials @wnyc.org, t -e -r -r -e -s -t -r -i -a -l -s at w -n -y -c dot org.

LULU: Anyway, I hope all of you have a happy New Year, and I'm going to just drop the hint that we have a special treat coming for you on New Year's Day, A little gift, a little offering from the terrestrial team. We hope you'll check it out. That'll drop early in the morning on New Year's Day. Until then, thank all of you for listening. Catch you once we've completed another lap around the sun.

CREDITS: This episode was reported by Molly Webster, Pat Walters, Becca Bresler, Alan Gafinski, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sarah Qari, Simon Adler, and Alex Neeson. Produced by Matt Kielty, Becca Bresler, Pat Walters, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Alan Goffinski, and Simon Adler. It was edited by Becca Bresler and Pat Walters, fact checkers Diane Kelly and Natalie A. Middleton, original music and sound design by Matt Kielty, Becca Bressler, Jeremy Bloom, Maria Paz Gutierrez, and Simon Adler, mixing help from Arianne Wack.

CREDITS: Special thanks to Rebecca Boyle, whose new book is Our Moon, How the Earth's Celestial Companion transformed the planet, guided evolution, and made us who we are. Also to Renee Weber, Paul M. Sutter, Matt Sigler, Sarah Noble, Chucky P., Sarah Stewart, and Patrick Leveron and Daryl Pitts at the Maine Jem and Mineral Museum in Bethel, Maine. Radiolab is supported by the Simons Foundation, who's in the Path of Totality Initiative, celebrates the April 8th Total Solar Eclipse, more at inthepathoftotality dot org. Thank you for listening. Until next time.

EMMA: Hi, I’m Emma and I live in Portland, Maine. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

TAMARA: Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radiolab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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Today we bring you an episode from our friends over at Atlas Obscura. It's about something that for centuries people thought was a tall tale, something sailors would occasionally spot out in the waves like mermaids or the Loch Ness monster, but most people on the land didn't think was real. Until one day, when a satellite in the sky was able to solve the case.

Host Dylan Thuras tells us the story of a satellite scientist and a ship captain in search of gigantic swaths of bioluminescence that radiate up from the surface of the sea over thousands of square miles.

For more, check out the Atlas Obscura podcast. It’s an audio guide to the world’s wondrous, awe-inspiring, strange places. In under 15 minutes, it’ll take you to an incredible site, and along the way you’ll meet some fascinating people and hear their stories. Listen Monday through Thursday to explore a new wonder.

Sign up for Radiolab for Kids’s newsletter! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up here.

Radiolab for Kids and Terrestrials are supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, X Facebook, Threads and TikTok @radiolab.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Today we bring you an episode from our friends over at Atlas Obscura. It's about something that for centuries people thought was a tall tale, something sailors would occasionally spot...

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LULU MILLER: Yo, ho, ho, yo, ho, ho, hey, you salty sea dogs, hello, ho, ho, hi, this is Terrestrials, I am Lulu, and I'm singing in a subpar impression of a sailor because today's story takes place at sea on a boat. It's about something that for centuries people thought was a tall tail, something sailors would occasionally spot out in the waves like mermaids or the Loch Ness monster, but most people on the land didn't think it was real until one day, in the recent past, a new kind of technology, a satellite in the sky taking pictures and collecting data, was able to solve the case. It's a beautiful tale about this earth, and it comes to us from our friends over at the Atlas Obscura podcast. We wanted to share their work today because like us, they make a podcast that is all about cool stories that take place on this earth. Neat animals, neat places, things you might not have heard about that make this planet feel a little more alive and wondrous. So this is a great one. It is literally sparkling with delight. And I will say no more except to hand it off to their host, Dylan Thuras. Here we go.

DYLAN THURAS: Like all good sea stories, this one starts on a dark night aboard a big ship hundreds of miles out to sea. John Briand, the captain of an oil tanker called the SS Lima and his wife Brenda, were standing up on the deck.

JOHN BRIAND: It was such a lovely evening. We were actually just taking some time out chatting with the officer of the watch and just enjoying what was a particularly calm night and there was no moon. I remember that, there was no moon.

DYLAN THURAS: The Lima was sailing south through the Arabian Sea. There was no land in sight, just glassy water rippling softly in every direction, all on a dark and moonless night. And that is when one of the officers spotted something on the horizon. The ship was sailing towards a strange, bluish, whitish glow, emanating up from the surface of the water.

JOHN BRIAND: Something on the horizon was getting brighter. Once we went to enter this area, and I mean it was just from horizon to horizon.

DYLAN THURAS: John had been a sea captain for more than a decade. He'd sailed around the world multiple times. He'd weathered major storms. He'd even motored over the face of a tsunami swell. But Captain John Briand had never seen anything like this.

JOHN BRIAND: It was bright. I mean, it lit things up. Once you were in it, I would say you could probably read a newspaper with some decent print on it.

DYLAN THURAS: Wow.

DYLAN THURAS: I'm Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today, we're going in search of that otherworldly glow, looking for these gigantic swaths of bioluminescence that radiate up from the surface of the sea over thousands of square miles. For one night in January 1995, Captain John Briand and the SS Lima sailed into these luminous waters, gliding through a white glowing ocean for hours on end, until these mysterious waters finally faded away. Not to be seen again. At least, not until an inquisitive satellite scientist stumbled onto the case. More after the break.

DYLAN THURAS: In 2004, a group of meteorologists were meeting at a conference on the West Coast of the United States.

STEVE MILLER: Well, I'm Steve Miller, not the famous one, unfortunately, But I work here at Colorado State University as a research scientist.

DYLAN THURAS: Steve's a satellite guy. For decades, he's been using satellites to study the Earth's atmosphere, first at the U .S. Naval Research Laboratory and now at Colorado State University.

DYLAN THURAS: Do you have a favorite satellite?

STEVE MILLER: Do I have a favorite satellite? Oh boy, I'm going to get in trouble with my sponsors if I answer wrong here. Actually I do. The satellites that carry the day/night band are the ones that are closest to my heart. Those are the…

DYLAN THURAS: And back in 2004, at this meteorological conference, Steve and his colleagues were learning about some new cutting-edge satellite technology, including what would become Steve's favorite kind of sensor, the day/night band. And these new sensors were going to be able to take incredibly high-quality images of the Earth from space, even at night, with almost no visible light.

STEVE MILLER: I was at a meeting with a few colleagues and we had this kind of lunchtime discussion, you know, thinking outside of the box. And, you know, the topic of bioluminescence came up.

DYLAN THURAS: Bioluminescence, that's light emitted by bacteria and animals. If you've ever seen a firefly before, you've seen bioluminescence. And in the ocean, bioluminescence is incredibly common. You might have even seen waves lighting up as they crash against the beach. That's the work of dinoflagellates, these little bioluminescent bacteria. But the light that bioluminescence gives off is generally pretty weak. So, as Steve and his colleagues were chatting around the lunch table, kind of BSing about what these new day/night band satellites might be able to pick up, they wondered if these satellite sensors would be powerful enough to pick up bioluminescence from space.

STEVE MILLER: But we really didn't have a good answer for that, it was just kind of throwing it out there. And then after the meeting is when I went online and started looking around to try to, you know, look for different kinds of bioluminescence that may or may not be able to be seen by these new satellites. And that's when I came across a website.

DYLAN THURAS:  A website about bioluminescence. And on this website, Steve Miller found an unusual excerpt from a Siemens report. It was almost a decade old, and it had been submitted to the Marine Observer by the captain of an oil tanker called the SS Lima. Captain John Briand.

STEVE MILLER: He says, "At 1800 universal time, on a clear, moonless night."

JOHN BRIAND: There was no moon. I remember that. There was no moon.

STEVE MILLER: A whitish glow was observed on the horizon, and after 15 minutes of steaming, the ship was completely surrounded by a sea of milky white color with a fairly uniform luminescence. The bioluminescence appeared to cover the entire sea area from horizon to horizon.

JOHN BRIAND: And I mean it was just from horizon to horizon.

STEVE MILLER: It appeared as though the ship was sailing over the field of snow, or gliding over the clouds.

JOHN BRIAND: After just a few minutes, all we had behind us was just a black line where we'd been.

STEVE MILLER: Amazingly black against the white water. And that's the end of what happened.

DYLAN THURAS: It's a strangely poetic entry in a ship log.

STEVE MILLER: Yeah, yeah, I think so, and I think that people...

DYLAN THURAS: To Steve, This sounded too good to be true, because this wasn't ordinary bioluminescence. This definitely wasn't dinoflagellates crashing on the beach. This patch of glowing water was inexplicably gigantic.

STEVE MILLER: Steaming through something for six hours must be a pretty large area of

glowing water, maybe large enough to be seen from space.

DYLAN THURAS: Steve wanted to know more. As it turned out, although there was almost nothing in the scientific literature, sailors had been writing about this for a long, long time. They'd even given the phenomena a name.

STEVE MILLER: These things are called milky seas. And upon more digging, you find that these events, fantastic as they are, they've been reported by vessels in the Northwest Indian Ocean and the oceans around Java and Indonesia for centuries now.

DYLAN THURAS: The Milky Seas turn up in some prominent works of seafaring fiction. Both Moby Dick and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea reference these huge glowing patches of water. And Charles Darwin even wrote about seeing one as he sailed around South America. Steve found a professor in England who'd compiled all of these references in one report, and there were well over 200 of them. But despite all of this sailor lore, scientifically, no one really knew anything about them.

STEVE MILLER: It's been more part of the folklore of mariners and science fiction than it has been part of scientific knowledge up to this point. So it's kind of exciting to come across something like that and think, well, now we have perhaps a means to go and look for one of these things, and now we have a report from the Lima that's telling us exactly where and when one of these was cited.

DYLAN THURAS: Unlike the sea captains who came before him, Steve Miller didn't have to sail every inch of the ocean, hoping to happen on a milky sea. Steve was a satellite guy, and he had Captain John Briand's exact coordinates from the SS Lima in 1995. It was relatively early for this kind of nighttime satellite imagery, and it would be using old technology, and the resolution would be pretty terrible. But Steve thought that maybe, just maybe, there might have been a satellite passing over that spot where John Briand and his crew had sailed the Milky Seas a decade earlier. Steve started searching through old satellite records. It was, to be honest, kind of a hail mary.

STEVE MILLER: There's a lot of considerations in terms of, well, is this a date when the satellite was passing over that area? Was it the right conditions of light in the sky?

DYLAN THURAS: A satellite had to be in the right position. It had to have the right kind of sensor. Even small amounts of light, like the moon being out, would be bright enough to drown out the Milky Sea. But Steve Miller got lucky. There was a satellite overhead on that night. It happened to have a low light sensor that could take decent images in the dark. And as Captain John mentioned, it just so happened to be a moonless, cloudless night. And so now, almost 10 years after a satellite had snapped that picture, Professor Steve Miller was staring at that very square of ocean on his computer screen.

STEVE MILLER: Um, and I really didn't see anything at first. In fact, it showed really just what looked like a fingerprint smudge on the monitor. But when I grabbed the box that the image was plotted within and I dragged it across the screen to go do something else, I noticed that the smudge moved with it, and I moved it back, and the smudge moved again up and down, left and right, and so it was part of the image, in other words.

DYLAN THURAS: That smudge containing the SS Lima was 15,000 square kilometers. It was a smudge the size of Connecticut, then it was glowing. The Milky Seas were real. And they were absolutely enormous.

DYLAN THURAS: Do you remember sort of the your emotion when you- when you realize that this wasn't a smudge?

STEVE MILLER: Yeah, I still, I still do. And I, you know, in fact, as you were asking the question, it almost played the tingle up my back going up to the base of my skull. And I’ve realized that, you know, I was seeing something that was tied back to all of this folklore. And these reports that we were never truly sure whether, you know, these were just wild tales told by seafarers over the centuries who had too much whiskey on board or something, you know, and they just were trying to make life interesting. But yeah, I mean, it was very exciting.

DYLAN THURAS: Do you remember who you told first?

STEVE MILLER: I ran down the hallway to try to tell my boss Jeff Hawkins. He wasn't in his office. And so I, I immediately went over to his boss and his boss's boss and the other building and told them

DYLAN THURAS: Steve's a scientist at heart. His work involves a lot of precision and math and a kind of non-romantic rationality. But he still can't deny the vast cosmic wonder of the milky seas. Something out of 20,000 leagues under the sea, seen glowing from a 1000 miles above the Earth.

STEVE MILLER: And even in the scientific writing around this, I find myself sometimes, you know, gravitating towards more colorful writing because it's just such a, you know, inspiring and exciting thing. It's always kind of a nice epiphany to realize that there's things right here on our own home planet that we still don't truly understand and kind of mysteries on our own planet. We don't always have to look way out to the depths of space in the cosmos to find these fascinating things.

DYLAN THURAS: It was almost 20 years ago that Steve found that smudge and fell in love with the romance of the Milky Seas. Since then, Steve's been on the search for more of them. He's become the satellite and bioluminescence guy. And he's famous for his work on those day/night band satellites.

STEVE MILLER: People have kind of made fun of my name and called it, well, it's the Steve Miller band now. So I guess that's what I get out of all of this.

DYLAN THURAS: Over the years, Steve Miller and his band have had some huge breakthroughs. The first time Steve spotted the Milky Seas, it was a moment of wild good fortune. He just happened to go looking and stumbled onto an image of an astounding and unexplored scientific phenomenon. It was his moment of inspiration. The last 17 years have been perspiration, figuring out how to find these things without a ship's report. And less than a year ago, in 2021, Steve and his team published a paper about how to filter out this extraneous glowing light that's given off by the atmosphere. And using this technology, he and his team have successfully identified multiple examples of Milky Seas. And they were able to see these on satellite images in real time. They were the ones who spotted them from satellites, not from a ship. But even though Steve's been able to capture the milky seas via satellite multiple times now. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about them. Why and how do they form? What are the bacteria that create them feeding on? How deep do they go? Just how many bacteria even congregate in them? Unlike other bioluminescent bacteria, the bacteria that they think make up the milky seas, Vibrio harveyi, they don't glow on their own. Instead, they do something called quorum sensing, and they only start to glow when they sense that the group has gotten big enough. For that to happen, it takes about 100 million bacteria per cubic centimeter of water. Think about how many cubic centimeters of water are in a patch of ocean the size of Connecticut. Steve's done the math. There are more bacteria in the Milky Seas than there are stars in the universe.

DYLAN THURAS:  Did finding the Milky Seas sort of change the way you thought about the world at all?

STEVE MILLER: You know, it's exciting. I don't think that we've gotten to the point where we, we feel we understand these things. I just think that there's a lot more to be done. So I don't want to sit on my laurels at this point and just think about, you know, how great it was, you know, to have done this. I think that I'm still very much in the active phase of trying to learn more.

DYLAN THURAS: Does some part of you wish you could go and like, you know, sail across the Milky Seas yourself?

STEVE MILLER: Oh, absolutely. I think that's my life goal at this point is to be able to-

DYLAN THURAS: Your life goal is to sail across the Milky Seas?

STEVE MILLER: Oh, I'd love to do that. Yeah, and it'll be great. You know, with the new generation of satellites, if we could spot one, you know, and given that they do tend to occur over multi-day times, kind of form a SWAT team if you will, to get out to one of those and sample it, and, you know, in my case, maybe just swim in it, who knows.

DYLAN THURAS: I want to give a huge thanks to Steve Miller for telling me about his work searching for the milky seas. I've talked to him a couple of times over the past few years and it is always just an absolute delight. I hope that he gets to swim in the milky seas and I hope I can come with him. I also want to thank Steve Haddock who is a marine biologist who also worked on this research and took me out on a boat to see bioluminescence, but I think that is a story for another day.

DYLAN THURAS: Our podcast is a co -production of Atlas Obscura and Witness Docs. This episode was produced by Sarah Wyman. The production team includes Doug Baldinger, Camille Stanley, Willis Ryder Arnold, Manolo Morales, Gianna Palmer, Tracy Samuelson, John DeLore, Casey Holford, Peter Clowney This episode was sound designed and mixed by Chris Naka. Our theme and end-credit music is by Sam Tyndall. I'm Dylan Thuris, wishing you all the wonder in the world. I will see you soon. Witness docs from Stitcher.

LULU MILLER: All right, that'll do it for today. Lulu here again, reminding you that if you liked today's story, go check out the Atlas Obscura podcast. They've got new stories coming out every day. Little 15-minute bursts of daily wonder, fascinating places, mind -blowing stories. And you can find it by searching for the Atlas Obscura podcast wherever you listen to podcasts or going to atlasobscura.com/podcast. Check them out. They are truly wonderful. Catch ya in a couple spins, this dirty old planet of ours.

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In less than 10 days, the world will witness the winter solstice, or the shortest day of the year. Half of the Earth will be tilted the farthest away from the sun, and we will plunge into the dark. So today we thought we’d play another story about the dark. One of the darkest places in the universe actually: a black hole. But not just any black hole, a really tiny black hole, the size of an atom.

We start the story on a calm morning in Siberia. All of a sudden, a large ball of fire appears in the sky. A forest was flattened, roofs were blown off houses, windows were shattered, fish were thrown from streams. This was the “Tunguska event.” But what happened? What hit Earth? It’s still up for debate. Radiolab producer Annie McEwen explores the possibility that it might have been a tiny black hole. Then Senior Correspondent Molly Webster asks what happens to the stuff that falls into a black hole, and tells us about how finding an answer culminated into her writing a children’s book called “Little Black Hole!”

Special thanks to Matt Caplan, a physicist at Illinois State University who worked on a team whose recent paper taught us what the impact crater left behind by a primordial black hole would actually look like. We also want to thank Priyamvada Natarajan and Brian Greene.

Articles:

Read more about the Tunguska impact event!

Check out the paper which considers the shape of the crater a primordial black hole would make, should it hit earth: “Crater Morphology of Primordial Black Hole Impacts”

Curious to learn more about black holes possibly being dark matter? You can in the paper, “Exploring the high-redshift PBH- ΛCDM Universe: early black hole seeding, the first stars and cosmic radiation backgrounds”

Books:

Get your glow on – check out Senior Correspondent Molly Webster’s new kids book, a fictional tale about a lonely “Little Black Hole.”

Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton. Production help from Tanya Chawla. Sound mixing by Joe Plourde.

Sign up for Radiolab for Kids’s newsletter! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up here.

Radiolab for Kids and Terrestrials are supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, X Facebook, Threads and TikTok @radiolab.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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In less than 10 days, the world will witness the winter solstice, or the shortest day of the year. Half of the Earth will be tilted the farthest away from the sun, and we will plunge ...

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LULU: Hello. It's Lulu. And I am talking like this because here in the Northern Hemisphere anyway, we are fast approaching the darkest day of the year. That's right. The winter solstice is just about a week away. That's the day when the night is the longest and the day is the shortest. And in honor of that, I thought I would play a really neat story about one of the darkest places in the universe, a black hole. Only this story isn't about those giant black holes you've probably heard of. No, this is about the littlest, teensiest, tiniest black hole that I've ever heard about. It's so small it could fit in your pocket. Although you probably would not want to put it there. We are going to hear the story from the wonderful Radiolab reporter Annie McEwen. She sat down to tell the tale to me and reporter Molly Webster.

ANNIE: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

LULU: Well, where do you want to start?

ANNIE: Where do I want to start? I want to start in Siberia.

LULU: [laughs] Okay.

ANNIE: So the year is 1908. It is June. It is a bright, sunny morning. And in this remote part of Russia, it's mostly forest, swamp, bugs, reindeer. The few people in the area are waking up, stretching their legs, making breakfast, and everything's cool.

LULU: Okay.

ANNIE: It is promising to be just a beautiful day. But that is all about to change, because just after 7:00 am, something appears low in the sky, as bright as a second sun.

LULU: Hmm.

ANNIE: From oral histories gathered years later, people reported looking up and seeing this thing rocketing towards Earth, faster than a bullet. It quickly grows into a giant ball of fire, dragging behind it this tail of blue and white light.

LULU: Whoa!

ANNIE: It arcs across the sky, disappearing over the horizon. And then a shockwave pulses through the forest, flattening trees, shattering windows, throwing people to the ground. The earth shakes, boats are tossed from rivers. Some people reported a hot blast of wind. Others reported a colossal amount of smoke and fire. And luckily, because it's such a remote region, despite the fact that 800 square miles of forest were flattened, only somewhere between zero and three people are killed.

MOLLY: Huh. Wow!

ANNIE: And I don't know, have either of you heard of this before? It's called the Tunguska event?

LULU: No.

MOLLY: I've never heard of it.

LULU: Tunguska.

ANNIE: Tunguska.

LULU: Is that—that's the town?

ANNIE: That's the nearby river.

LULU: Okay.

ANNIE: And today, this is still considered the largest impact event in recorded human history. So an impact event ...

MOLLY: So there's a something that, like, hit us.

ANNIE: Yes. Well, maybe.

LULU: Hmm, okay!

ANNIE: So a bunch of scientists go plunging into the forest to try to figure out what the heck just happened. They scramble over fallen log after fallen log, through dense bog after dense bog for miles and miles until finally they realize they have no idea what happened out here.

LULU: [laughs] Okay. Really?

ANNIE: Yeah. They can't find any evidence of what caused this huge explosion.

LULU: Wait, what?

ANNIE: Like, they sort of figured this must have been an asteroid, so they thought they'd find debris from an asteroid. Like, space rock.

LULU: Yeah.

ANNIE: They don't find a single bit of space rock in this whole area.

LULU: Weird!

ANNIE: And not only that, an asteroid that would've caused this much destruction should've left probably something like a three-quarter-mile-long impact crater, and they don't find any crater whatsoever.

LULU: That's kind of spooky!

MOLLY: In 800 square miles of destruction, there was, like, nothing from space?

ANNIE: Yeah.

MOLLY: Not even a hole. This is why people think UFOs exist.

ANNIE: Yeah. And I think that, like, that's what the—the scientists were like, "Well, we have to—we have to find what obviously should be there." And so all kinds of ideas cropped up. Like, some people thought it was maybe like a natural gas bubble that burst from beneath Earth's crust. But that doesn't explain, like, the bright light in the sky. Some people thought maybe it was like a strange kind of volcanic eruption. But again, doesn't really explain the light moving through the sky.

LULU: Right.

ANNIE: One guy for a while thought that he had found the crater and it was a lake, but then the locals were like, "Yo, that lake was here. It's been here forever." But so the main theory, and the one that holds strongest today, is that it was an asteroid—a really big one.

LULU: Okay.

ANNIE: Estimates put it at 120 feet across, 220 million pounds.

MOLLY: Oh my gosh!

LULU: It's like an office building.

ANNIE: Yeah.

LULU: Or like an apartment building headed toward planet Earth.

ANNIE: Right. And the theory is that it came into Earth's atmosphere at kind of a weird angle, and so it stayed in the atmosphere and started to overheat. And it got so hot that it eventually just went boom!

LULU: Wait, but then are there some chunks? Or it's just dust and fire and energy?

ANNIE: So that's the thing. Like, that's a real question. Like, shouldn't there be some pieces of this, like, somewhere out there? Like, some sort of evidence?

LULU: Yeah!

ANNIE: And that's the part that is still a little weird.

ANNIE: What do you think of that?

MATT O'DOWD: That does seem strange, doesn't it?

ANNIE: I think it does.

MATT O'DOWD: Yeah. But, you know, it's pretty plausibly an atmospheric explosion, and I think, you know, most scientists have sort of dusted their hands off and moved on to the next question with regards to Tunguska.

ANNIE: It's not a cold case? It's not like, oh, on the shelf!

MATT O'DOWD: Well, I think in some people's minds it is.

ANNIE: Hmm.

MATT O'DOWD: Some still believe it wasn't an asteroid.

ANNIE: This is astrophysicist Matt O'Dowd.

MATT O'DOWD: Professor at the City University of New York, Lehman College.

ANNIE: And I reached out to Matt because I had recently seen him on his side gig ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, PBS Spacetime: Have you ever asked what is beyond the edge of the universe?]

ANNIE: ... this really awesome physics YouTube show ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, PBS Spacetime: What would it take to build a starship?]

MATT O'DOWD: … which is called PBS Spacetime.

ANNIE: Talking about this really wild ...

MATT O'DOWD: Absolutely. [laughs]

ANNIE: ... alternate theory of what could have caused the Tunguska event of 1908.

MATT O'DOWD: Which is the black hole.

LULU: Wait ...

MOLLY: That's ...

LULU: What? [laughs]

MOLLY: That's different.

LULU: Like, a black hole, like a space black hole did this? Like, how? I don't know, radiated a death wave toward planet Earth?

MOLLY: [laughs]

ANNIE: No, Matt's talking about a black hole actually hitting Earth.

MATT O'DOWD: Exactly.

LULU: What?

ANNIE: Which sounds impossible, because usually when we're talking black holes ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: My God, right out of Dante's Inferno!]

ANNIE: ... we're thinking about these big, terrifying, churning places in space where gravity is just so strong that not even light can escape it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's a monster, all right.]

ANNIE: They eat stars and planets and gas. And they have all these almost like supernatural qualities, like they ...

MATT O'DOWD: … warp the space around them, change the flow of time, and all of that awesome stuff that comes out of general relativity.

ANNIE: But if one of these black holes approached Earth, its gravitational pull would be so strong that ...

MATT O'DOWD: Earth would be, they call it spaghettified.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The black hole is pulling us in!]

ANNIE: The entire planet would begin to stretch towards the black hole, and then as it punched in ...

MATT O'DOWD: Earth would essentially follow it through the hole that it made.

ANNIE: What?

MATT O'DOWD: So you can imagine Earth just folding in afterwards, and it would probably follow the black hole in this kind of stream of super hot stuff.

ANNIE: Until all of Earth, everything on it, everything in it is ripped apart into individual atoms and Earth is devoured.

MATT O'DOWD: Right, so ...

ANNIE: That's so awesome.

MATT O'DOWD: It's awesome.

ANNIE: Not what happened. [laughs]

MATT O'DOWD: But you would also notice, you know?

ANNIE: Right, right, right. We would all agree today, that was a black hole.

MATT O'DOWD: Exactly. Right.

ANNIE: Okay, so this obviously is not a very plausible explanation for the Tunguska event.

LULU: No.

MOLLY: No.

LULU: Certainly not.

ANNIE: But that's because there's one very important difference between these black holes and the one that potentially destroyed 800 square miles of Siberian forest, which is that rather than being this giant monster, the Tunguska black hole would have been a really, really ...

MATT O'DOWD: Teeny tiny ...

ANNIE: ... monster.

MATT O'DOWD: Very small.

LULU: Wait, black holes can be little?

ANNIE: Yeah, like, really small.

MOLLY: Like how small?

MATT O'DOWD: Like, very tiny. Like ...

ANNIE: Itty bitty.

MATT O'DOWD: ... so small.

ANNIE: I mean, could it fit on my hand?

MATT O'DOWD: Yeah, I mean ...

ANNIE: Are we talking like a peanut?

MATT O'DOWD: We're talking, like, the size of a hydrogen atom.

ANNIE: Oh, an atom!

MATT O'DOWD: Yeah.

LULU: Oh my goodness! That is very small for a black hole. Okay.

ANNIE: Now so these tiny little black holes are special black holes because typically, a black hole gets made after a star explodes.

LULU: Yeah.

ANNIE: But these tiny little black holes, they got made in this one particular explosion.

MATT O'DOWD: 13 and a half billion years ago, in the Big Bang.

ANNIE: Which was a very great day for existence.

MATT O'DOWD: Yeah, exactly. Awesome.

ANNIE: But a very upsetting day for gravity.

MOLLY: Because, like, the Big Bang was the explosion outward where things became free of gravity in a way?

ANNIE: Yes. Everything had been packed together in this really tight, dense ball, and then this little dense ball was this rapidly expanding ocean of ...

MATT O'DOWD: … hot hydrogen and helium.

ANNIE: ... these bright, swirling gasses.

MATT O'DOWD: Glowing.

ANNIE: And gravity was like, "Oh my God, I have to get all this back in that tiny little hole again!"

MATT O'DOWD: Exactly.

ANNIE: "For one minute I fell asleep!"

MATT O'DOWD: Seriously.

LULU: So gravity is stressed.

ANNIE: Gravity is stressed, and immediately begins ...

MATT O'DOWD: Trying to turn the whole universe into a black hole.

ANNIE: Trying to grab everything and pull it back together, which is not possible.

MATT O'DOWD: Mostly it fails, you know, happily.

ANNIE: Because the expansion of the Big Bang is just too powerful. But everything is still ...

MATT O'DOWD: ... so hot and so dense and so compacted together ...

ANNIE: ... that gravity is able to grab some of this stuff, crush it together to create ...

MATT O'DOWD: … what we call primordial black holes.

ANNIE: Black holes from the beginning of time. And the idea is that these black holes have been just out there all this time, spinning through the universe, doing their thing, devouring stars and planets and other black holes, but over time, as the universe expands and things start to spread out more and more, space starts to get, well, pretty empty. And there's this weird thing about black holes, which is while they eat things up when they can, they are also very slowly spitting stuff out. Which means if they spend long enough moving around in empty space, they will, slowly over billions and billions of years, shrink—even down to the size of an atom.

MATT O'DOWD: Exactly.

ANNIE: So Matt explained that even though these primordial black holes could be as small as an atom ...

MATT O'DOWD: Still, they could be very massive.

ANNIE: ... there is still a huge amount of stuff packed into that small space.

MATT O'DOWD: So ...

ANNIE: ... it's an atom, but with the mass of ...

MATT O'DOWD: An asteroid, basically.

LULU: Oh!

ANNIE: And the other thing is that super big black holes, they usually sit in the middle of a galaxy with everything spinning around them. These little primordial black holes, they're kind of like untethered. And since everything in the universe is swirling and spinning and moving around ...

MATT O'DOWD: They do have to cross the orbits of other objects.

ANNIE: Other objects like planet Earth, for instance.

MATT O'DOWD: Exactly.

ANNIE: And it's possible, or so the theory goes, that on a beautiful June morning in 1908, one of these primordial black holes, a particularly small one about the size of a hydrogen atom, but with a mass equal to an office building-sized rock was zooming along at 62 miles a second, about to make a direct hit with a certain patch of Siberian forest.

LULU: Okay. We're back.

ANNIE: We're back. You ready for impact?

MOLLY: Oh my God, yeah!

ANNIE: All right, let's do it.

MATT O'DOWD: Mm-hmm. Okay. Now?

ANNIE: Now!

MATT O'DOWD: Okay. All right, so this primordial black hole punches through the atmosphere.

ANNIE: Like a tiny needle of gravity.

MATT O'DOWD: And stuff gets pulled towards that gravitational build.

ANNIE: Stuff like nitrogen molecules, carbon dioxide ...

MATT O'DOWD: Oxygen molecules.

ANNIE: And this tiny little black hole begins to eat. It devours molecule after molecule after molecule, and each one of those molecules ...

MATT O'DOWD: As it fell into the black hole ...

ANNIE: ... becomes hotter than the surface of a star, radiating ...

MATT O'DOWD: An enormous amount of heat and energy.

ANNIE: And with all that energy, around the black hole, this halo begins to form. And it's not very big, but it is shining ...

MATT O'DOWD: With the power of several Hiroshimas.

ANNIE: And in that moment, if you'd been standing in the Siberian forest looking up at the sky, this would have looked exactly like a second sun rocketing through the sky, pulling behind it a tail of blue and white light. As it got closer and closer to the surface of the Earth, it would suck stuff from the atmosphere into it, and that would actually create enough heat and energy ...

MATT O'DOWD: ... to be equivalent in energy to an asteroid exploding.

ANNIE: Which meant this tiny primordial black hole was creating these enormous ...

MATT O'DOWD: Shockwaves.

ANNIE: And what did that sound like?

MATT O'DOWD: I imagine a ginormous kaboom.

ANNIE: Cool!

MATT O'DOWD: That would flatten forests ...

ANNIE: Knock people over, throw boats out of rivers, shatter windows.

MATT O'DOWD: And then it would hit the ground, and it should actually leave a crater.

LULU: Oh!

MATT O'DOWD: But ...

ANNIE: This one would be much smaller ...

MATT O'DOWD: Sort of a column.

ANNIE: ... thinner. Definitely not what the scientists had been looking for.

MATT O'DOWD: And it would have been harder to find.

ANNIE: It would also be very deep, because while an asteroid stops when it hits the Earth, the black hole doesn't even slow down.

LULU: What?

ANNIE: And as it plummets through the Earth ...

MATT O'DOWD: Through its whole passage ...

ANNIE: ... it would be generating these seismic waves.

MATT O'DOWD: These rings of earthquake expanding from around this bullet shooting through the Earth. And the earthquakes wouldn't be strong, but they would be global.

ANNIE: Meaning every single person, plant, animal on Earth ...

ANNIE: Everyone would just be like, [shaking sound] "What the heck?"

MATT O'DOWD: "Was that a little earthquake?"

ANNIE: Hmm.

MATT O'DOWD: Huh.

ANNIE: Anyway, as this little black hole rips through Earth, it would be eating or burning all the molecules of rock or dirt that it hit.

MATT O'DOWD: And some stuff does follow the black hole, but some stuff just gets super hot.

ANNIE: Leaving behind this trail that ...

MATT O'DOWD: It would at first be molten, and then it would solidify into this column of solid glass.

LULU: [gasps] Like a glass light saber all the way through Earth?

ANNIE: Yes!

MATT O'DOWD: Yeah.

LULU: Stop it!

MATT O'DOWD: This long tunnel of altered material.

LULU: Wow!

ANNIE: And then it comes out somewhere?

MATT O'DOWD: And then yeah, there would have to be an exit wound.

LULU: Wait, where would the exit wound be?

ANNIE: Well, it depends on what angle it came in at.

LULU: The angle?

ANNIE: Yeah. Like, if it had been a perfect shot directly through the middle of the Earth, it would be in Chile somewhere, but ...

MATT O'DOWD: Back in 1908, it could have easily been in the ocean somewhere, and we probably wouldn't have noticed.

ANNIE: If you were on a boat or standing nearby, would you be like, "Oh my goodness! That was—that was something that came up through the floor of the planet and it made a boom, and then there was a bright light."

MATT O'DOWD: It would be like a shooting star coming out of the ground.

ANNIE: That's so crazy!

MATT O'DOWD: Right?

ANNIE: That whole journey through the Earth would have taken this little black hole about two minutes, and then it would continue on making its way through the universe.

LULU: And as it goes forward on the rest of its journey, is there a little bit of 1908 forest floor Siberia inside it?

ANNIE: In some very altered form, yes.

LULU: But okay, I am wondering, like, how many people think—or how likely is it that this is what happened? Or is this, like, a pretty thought exercise?

ANNIE: Well, this is kind of a pretty thought exercise, but it doesn't mean that it's never happened or it's never going to happen. Tunguska just gives you kind of like a case study for, like, okay, well is it possible that it could have been? And these scientists found out yes, it is possible. And statistically, something like this either has happened in Earth's history or truly might happen in Earth's future.

LULU: Well, now that we know there are little black holes out there everywhere, when we come back from a short break we are gonna meet one up close, personal, intimately. Stick with us.

[BREAK]

LULU: Lulu.

MOLLY: Molly.

LULU: Radiolab. Black holes. So this next one comes to us from you, Molly.

MOLLY: Indeed.

LULU: So what have you got?

MOLLY: So when Annie came to our pitch meeting and she was like, "Have I got a story for you guys. It's about tiny black holes." I was like, "Whoa, Annie! Rolling up with your little black holes pitch? Like, I've got one, too."

LULU: [laughs]

MOLLY: And mine is a little black hole story that just took me in a completely different direction than the one that I or the show normally does.

LULU: Hmm.

MOLLY: And it came out of this conversation that I had with a physicist, Brian Greene, who's like a popular science dude. And we were just having a chat one day, and he told me about this mystery that consumed physicists for decades.

LULU: Okay.

MOLLY: Which is that when things fall into black holes, they seem to just vanish. No one's ever been inside a black hole, we don't know how to look inside of a black hole, so it seem—seemingly from our perspective like matter disappears.

LULU: Hmm.

MOLLY: But physicists were like, how can that be? Because the first law of thermodynamics says that nothing can be created or destroyed.

LULU: Mm-hmm.

MOLLY: So what happens to the stuff after it falls into the black hole?

LULU: Like, a star goes in ...

MOLLY: Star goes in.

LULU: ... and we don't know.

MOLLY: And you don't know, like, did the star get crushed?

LULU: Mm-hmm.

MOLLY: Is the star through a wormhole out somewhere else? Did the star burn up? Like, there are guesses, there are theories, but at the time no one knew. I mean, talk about a black box, you know? It was one of the biggest mysteries.

LULU: Hmm.

MOLLY: And then Stephen Hawking came along and proposed a solution, which is that even if we can't see what's happening inside of a black hole, the way that matter works is that, you know, occasionally particles are just shot out of things into the universe, right? A particle could come off of you, a particle could come off a chair, particle could be spit out of a black hole. And so he just—he came up with this, like, idea which we now call Hawking radiation, that—that is supported by math, which is a statement I don't fully understand.

LULU: [laughs]

MOLLY: But came up with this idea that if you got to the surface of a black hole, the black hole would be spitting out particles that contained information about, like, what was inside of it.

LULU: Oh, interes—so wait, so it's like the particles would come out, and they might have little clues about, like, the interiority of a black hole?

MOLLY: Yeah, they would be like, "Hey, I'm a particle and I'm telling you that there is a brown rock in here." Like, it would give you a hint of what the black hole has gobbled.

LULU: Oh!

MOLLY: Or what the black hole has seen or intersected with.

LULU: Ooh! Okay.

MOLLY: And the thought is is that all of these particles that are shot out of the black hole kind of gather on its surface and create a glow.

LULU: Hmm!

MOLLY: Yeah, which I just thought that was so beautiful, this, like, somewhat beastly object that none of us understands is revealing parts of itself to the rest of the universe.

LULU: Mmm.

MOLLY: So I learn about all this stuff and I'm like, "Oh, that would be a really cool story. And normally what I'd do is I'd do a lot of, like, reporting, and then I'd put a bunch of voices together and we'd put it on air.

LULU: Mm-hmm.

MOLLY: But—but the idea of a glowing black hole never stuck with me in kind of like a science report-y way. It more started just to remind me of people. And I just thought, "Oh, Little Black Hole would be a great children's book character."

LULU: Hmm.

MOLLY: And so I made it one. I wrote it into a kids' book.

LULU: Indeed you did. I have it right here in front of me.

MOLLY: Yay!

LULU: It is called Little Black Hole.

MOLLY: Yay!

LULU: Okay, and will you—will you flip to the first page of the story, and just read us the first couple pages of the story?

MOLLY: Okay. "There once was a little black hole who loved everything in the universe: the stars, the planets, the space rocks and the space fox, even the flying astronauts. The little black hole loved her friends.

MOLLY: "One day a star came by. The little black hole built a space castle with her. 'La la la,' they sang as they built and soared. The little black hole was having so much fun. She couldn't wait to show the star more of the galaxy. Maybe they could even watch one of the moons rise together."

LULU: The rest of the book is so beautiful and what happens is that the little black hole, she doesn't understand why, but anytime she gets near to someone, they disappear, because she sucks them inside, because she's a black hole. And Molly realized…

MOLLY: Once I started to write the book, I'm like, "Oh, I'm the little black hole."

LULU: Hmm.

MOLLY: You know, I'm the youngest of—of four sisters.

LULU: Mm-hmm.

MOLLY: And growing up, I felt like they were constantly, like, leaving.

LULU: Hmm.

MOLLY: Especially as they each got older and, like, went off into the world and then, you know, it was just me. And then I was just like—I just wanted them to come back into my orbit again.

LULU: Yeah.

MOLLY: Did I say the word "orbit" when I was a kid? No, but I was always just like, "Why are you leaving? When are you coming back?" And, like, feeling this sense of, like, loss. And I've had that feeling again and again with other relationships as people come and go. And that kind of echoey solitude is like something that I've always contended with and has been like a daily part of my life.

LULU: Hmm.

MOLLY: And then at one point, I just had this feeling which was like, even if people aren't with me, these people are out there and they love me and they know me and they believe in me. And that somehow makes charging through the world, like, more doable.

LULU: Hmm.

MOLLY: And so for the little black hole, when she glows and sees her friends, she realizes, like, there is a support network somewhere around her, in her, with her, and that just helps her look to the next thing.

LULU: Molly's book again is called Little Black Hole. The illustrations are gorgeous. Maybe I’m biased, but I think it would make a pretty fantastic winter holiday present for the young science lovers in your life. And that’ll do it for today. Thanks so much for listening. Enjoy the winter solstice! More stories about this lumpy old planet of ours, and the space outside it, coming, in two weeks.

LULU: This episode was reported by Annie McEwen and Molly Webster.

MOLLY: It was produced by Annie McEwen and Becca Bressler, with help from Matt Kielty. Fact-checked by Diane Kelly, and edited by Alex Neason.

LULU: Sound design by Matt Kielty and Annie McEwen, Jeremy Bloom. Mixing by Jeremy Bloom, and dialogue mixed by Arianne Wack. Special thanks to Matt Caplan, a physicist at Illinois State University who worked on a team whose recent paper taught us what the impact crater left behind by a primordial black hole would actually look like.

MOLLY: We also want to thank Priyamvada Natarajan and Brian Greene. And we dedicate this episode to our newest, favoritest, littlest black hole, Annie McEwen's baby boy.

LULU: And then finally a reminder that Molly's children's book is now out everywhere. You can find it online, you can find it in bookshops. It is called Little Black Hole. Illustrated by Alex Willmore, and it is full of heart and beauty and darkness. And it's all based on science.

LULU: Before we go, Molls, do you have any last BHFs? Black hole facts? BHFFs? Black hole fun facts to share?

MOLLY: [laughs] I do. I do, always. Did you know most black holes generally have a best friend?

LULU: Who?

MOLLY: A star.

LULU: Wait, what do you mean? That's just like always nearby?

MOLLY: Yeah.

LULU: Like—like what's his name? Flounder in the Little Mermaid?

MOLLY: Exactly. Exactly.

LULU: Wait, but, like—wait, in what way, for real?

MOLLY: The star orbits the black hole. They're sort of floating in space together, and then depending on how close they are, they may eat it all.

LULU: [laughs] At some point. My jaw is so wide right now. I never knew that!

MOLLY: Or they may just, you know, grab up little bits of it and hug it pretty close.

LULU: That is wonderful. I am—I'm so happy to know that. All right, well thanks so much for listening. Enjoy all the little black holes hitting you. Bye!

[LISTENER: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Anna Rascouët-Paz, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Sachi Kitajima Mulkey. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi. My name's Michael Smith. I'm calling from Pennington, New Jersey. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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Radiolab co-host Latif Nasser was putting his child to sleep one day when he noticed a poster of the solar system on the wall. It showed that Venus had a moon called Zoozve. When he looked it up, the internet told him that Venus did not have a moon. And searching “Zoozve” gave him a bunch of Czech results about zoos. This moment sets Latif off on a curiosity odyssey. What is the mystery behind this moon? Turns out, it’s both a moon and not a moon. And we get to name one.

And now that you know all about quasi-moons, we have some fun news! Radiolab, along with the official governing bodies of space, want YOU to pick your favorite name for one of Earth’s newly discovered quasi-moons. Go to radiolab.org/quasi-moon to vote for the finalists. The winner will be chosen soon, so go help name a MOON!

Special Thanks to Larry Wasserman and everyone else at the Lowell Observatory, Rich Kremer and Marcelo Gleiser of Dartmouth College, and Benjamin Sharkey at the University of Maryland. Thanks to the IAU and their Working Group for Small Bodies Nomenclature, as well as to the Bamboo Forest class of kindergarteners and first graders.

Articles:

Check out the paper by Seppo Mikkola and Paul Wiegert (whose voices are in the episode), along with colleagues Kimmo Innanen and Ramon Brasser describing this new type of object here (https://zpr.io/Ci4B3sGWZ3xi).

The Official Rules and Guidelines for Naming Non-Cometary Small Solar-System Bodies from the IAU Working Group on Small Body Nomenclature can be found here (https://zpr.io/kuBJYQAiCy7s).

All the specs on our strange friend can be found here (https://zpr.io/Tzg2sHhAp2kb).

Check out Liz Landau’s work at NASA's Curious Universe podcast https://zpr.io/QRbgZbMU2gWW) as well as lizlandau.com

Videos:

Fascinating little animation of a horseshoe orbit (https://zpr.io/A9y6qHhzZtpA), a tadpole orbit (https://zpr.io/4qBDbgumhLf2), and a quasi-moon orbit (https://zpr.io/xtLhwQFGZ4Eh).

Posters:

If you’d like to buy (or even just look at) Alex Foster’s Solar System poster (featuring Zoozve of course), check it out here (https://zpr.io/dcqVEgHP43SJ).

Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton. Production help from Tanya Chawla. Sound mixing by Joe Plourde.

Sign up for Radiolab for Kids’s newsletter! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up here.

Radiolab for Kids and Terrestrials are supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, X Facebook, Threads and TikTok @radiolab.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

# included[].attributes.show-title
Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Radiolab co-host Latif Nasser was putting his child to sleep one day when he noticed a poster of the solar system on the wall. It showed that Venus had a moon called Zoozve. When he l...

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All right.

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You're listening...

Listening...

...To Radiolab

… for Kids!

Radiolab.

From...

...WNYC.

See?

LULU: Hey there, Lulu here. First of all, I wanted to let you know about something very cool going on just beyond planet Earth, which is that it turns out that there is more than one moon orbiting around planet Earth. This is a somewhat recent discovery. There are a few littler moons dancing and orbiting and bobbing and weaving in different patterns. They are what's called quasi moons. And we need your help in naming one of them. This is real. The official governing bodies of space are handing the decision over to you to vote on what would be the best name for one of these moons. Earlier this year, we ran a contest and got thousands of submissions from around the world for what would make a great name for one of these moons and it is now down to the finalists, and we want you to go check them out and then vote on your favorite! Which you can do by heading on over to radiolab.org/moon, radiolab.org/moon. The winner will be chosen soon. And again, this is totally real. That is what that quasi-moon will be named till the end of time. So this is your chance to leave your imprint on the heavens one more time,

radiolab.org/moon. Uh go help name a moon.

LULU: Alright today we have an odyssey for you. We have a story that begins in a bedroom in California and then takes you all the way to outer space. It is such a fun ride and it is led by Radiolab co-host Latif Nasser who is so excited to tell you about it that that alone provides fun. So that's all I'm going to say. Buckle up, bring your space ice cream because we are leaving this planet to hear about something that for many, many years people only dreamed about. Okay, so here we go, I'm handing it off to Latif Nasser in conversation with me.

LATIF: We're gonna start with a mystery about the universe that I stumbled across in my kid's bedroom.

LULU: Oh!

LATIF: Okay, so about a year ago, I was putting my son to bed, my two-year-old son. You know that moment where it's like, okay it's time. Like, I'm—boop, in the crib, right?

LULU: Spike the football, run out of the room. [laughs]

LATIF: Right. Exactly. So as I was doing that I, like, looked up to the adjacent wall at this poster that we have up, a kid's poster of the solar system, And I, like, notice something, which is that Venus on this poster, Venus had a moon. And I was like, "That's weird. I don't remember Venus having a moon."

LULU: Huh.

LATIF: But, like, what do I know? I don't know. You know?

LULU: Right.

LATIF: So I put my kid to bed.

LULU: Huh.

LATIF: So then I went back to my bedroom and then I just look up on my phone, does Venus have a moon?

LULU: Mm-hmm?

LATIF: And the first thing that comes up was a NASA website, and it says, "Venus does not have a moon."

LULU: Oh!

LATIF: Yeah.

LULU: Okay.

LATIF: But then the next morning after my son wakes up, I look at the poster again, and on the poster, Venus very much has a moon. And not only does it have a moon, the moon has a name.

LULU: Okay.

LATIF: Wait, I'm actually gonna have you read it. Okay, one second. Okay, so I'm unrolling the poster here.

LULU: Oh! Oh, it is in high detail.

LATIF: Right. Okay, and here: tell me what this moon is called.

LULU: Okay. I'm straining my eyes here. Zoozve? Zoozve?

LATIF: Yeah, Zoozve.

LULU: [laughs] Okay.

LATIF: When you see the name, I'm like, that's too weirdly specific to be an accident.

LULU: Right. That's not just like a poster designer being like, "A little dot would look cute here."

LATIF: Right.

LULU: Like, it's labeled. Okay.

LATIF: Right. Okay, so then I started googling Zoozve.

LULU: It's a nice googleable word.

LATIF: It's a very googleable word. And there's—there's nothing. Like, there were literally no results in English.

LULU: What?

LATIF: The results were all in Czech.

LULU: Huh.

LATIF: And they were about zoos. And I'm like, that's not the thing I'm looking for.

LULU: Mm-hmm.

LATIF: So I was like, okay where do I go from here?

LULU: Yeah.

LATIF: Uh Hi.

LIZ LANDAU: Hey, Latif. How are you?

LATIF: I'm good. How are you?

LATIF: So I called up my friend. Her name is Liz, Liz Landau.

LATIF: As just like a space nerd, but then also you as a professional space nerd.

LATIF: She has spent the last 10 years working with the media department at NASA.

LULU: Oh!

LATIF: And before that she used to be CNN's space correspondent.

LULU: Okay.

LATIF: And so I told her, I showed her the poster.

LIZ LANDAU: Duvet?

LATIF: Zoozve.

LIZ LANDAU: What? [laughs]

LATIF: It's, like, supposed to be a moon for Venus.

LIZ LANDAU: I've never heard of this.

LATIF: Okay. There are no moons of Venus, right?

LIZ LANDAU: Right.

LULU: Hmm!

LATIF: So at this point, the next logical step ...

LATIF: Your signature is very cryptic.

ALEX FOSTER: Yeah, I've changed it to just writing my name now, because ...

LATIF: ... was to track down the person who made the poster.

LULU: Oh. Oh, good. Okay.

LATIF: A guy named Alex Foster.

ALEX FOSTER: I'm an illustrator, and I'm from Margate, which is, like, the southeast coast of the UK.

LATIF: And I was basically like, "Did you put Zoozve on here as a joke?"

LATIF: Like, old mapmakers would make up fake towns. Or like a little hidden signature or something? Or is it your dog's name?

ALEX FOSTER: Um, no, no. Basically, I don't know—I don't know about this stuff. Like, I wanted to make a solar system map, so I looked online and did a bit of research.

LATIF: He says he found a detailed list of all the moons online, and there it was.

ALEX FOSTER: Z-O-O-Z-V-E.

LATIF: But then when I tried to find that same list, I couldn't find it. I mean, I was, like, scouring the internet. And nothing.

LULU: Huh! Weird!

LATIF: But then around that same time, I got this text from Liz.

LIZ LANDAU: So in my head, because you had said Zoozve ...

LATIF: Zoozve.

LIZ LANDAU: ... I was like, "Oh, it's Zoozve."

LATIF: It's Zoozve.

LIZ LANDAU: But then I sort of like, looked away for a minute and I looked at it again, and I was like, what if—what if it's not Z-O-O-Z, what if it's 2002? And so I just googled "2002-VE," and I found this object.

LATIF: What?

LULU: Oh!

LIZ LANDAU: Which I did not know existed before.

LULU: Okay. [laughs]

ALEX FOSTER: It's probably my writing as well. Like, I write in all caps. I thought it must have been "Z" rather than "2."

LATIF: And so when I told Alex about the mix-up, he realized he'd misread his own notes.

ALEX FOSTER: And I thought that the name "Zoozve" made more sense. [laughs]

LULU: [laughs]

LATIF: So anyway, okay, okay ...

LATIF: So long story short, there is a thing next to Venus, and it is called 2002-VE.

LIZ LANDAU: It was discovered in 2002. That's why it's called 2002-VE.

LATIF: 2002-VE68, if you're being technical.

LIZ LANDAU: Yes.

LULU: But it's not a moon of Venus?

LATIF: So I thought that there was a simple answer to that, but it turns out there isn't. It's not a moon of Venus, but it's also not not a moon of Venus.

LULU: Okay.

LATIF: Because 2002-VE—which I'm just gonna keep calling Zoozve—is a mischievous weirdo character that defies long-held rules of our solar system and upends, at least for me, the way I think about the entire universe.

BRIAN SKIFF: [laughs] I mean, I actually have no formal training in astronomy, believe it or not.

BRIAN SKIFF: I just have a BS in physics, which I just barely got. [laughs]

LATIF: So this is Brian.

BRIAN SKIFF: I am Brian Skiff.

LATIF: He does in fact work in astronomy.

BRIAN SKIFF: At Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. I am a research assistant.

LATIF: Brian and his colleagues kicked off this brand new asteroid scavenger hunt. LONEOS, is that how you pronounce it?

BRIAN SKIFF: Yeah. The Lowell Observatory Near-Earth Object Search. NASA likes acronyms when you put in grant proposals.

LATIF: [laughs] And what they did was ...

BRIAN SKIFF: We refurbished a wide field camera of a special kind.

LATIF: Essentially their job was to scan ...

BRIAN SKIFF: A substantial fraction of the sky.

LATIF: Every single night.

LULU: Hmm.

LATIF: And what they were looking for were ...

BRIAN SKIFF: Potentially-hazardous asteroids.

LATIF: And it is in this nightly hunt that Brian discovers Zoozve.

LULU: Okay!

LATIF: It looks like an asteroid about the size of the Eiffel Tower.

LULU: Oh! Okay.

LATIF: Imagine something kind of gray and pockmarked and potato-shaped.

LULU: Oh!

BRIAN SKIFF: I had no notion that I had even discovered it.

LATIF: But fast forward a year, and ...

SEPPO MIKKOLA: [laughs] Can you see my face?

LATIF: I can see your face.

LATIF: ... Zoozve catches the attention of this other scientist.

SEPPO MIKKOLA: In Finland, my name is pronounced simply, Seppo Mikkola.

LATIF: Back in 2003, Seppo was an astronomer at the University of Turku, studying ...

SEPPO MIKKOLA: Celestial mechanics.

LATIF: Basically orbits.

SEPPO MIKKOLA: It's all very simple, actually.

LATIF: Seppo says that when he first noticed Zoozve, he realized it was in a ...

SEPPO MIKKOLA: Very strange-looking situation.

LATIF: As in its orbit didn't really make sense. So ...

PAUL WIEGERT: Hello?

LATIF: ... Seppo calls up his colleague, whose name is Paul.

SEPPO MIKKOLA: Paul Wiegert from Canada.

LATIF: Whom I also called.

LATIF: He's also an orbit-studying astronomer at the University of Western Ontario.

PAUL WIEGERT: Yes.

LATIF: And he says in order to fully understand how weird Zoozve's orbit is ...

PAUL WIEGERT: Let me think about the best way to explain this. So ...

LATIF: ... you have to understand this one fact about the solar system.

PAUL WIEGERT: It's an ironclad rule of our solar system ...

LATIF: That every celestial body moves in an orbit. And even though it can get gravitationally nudged around by other things near it, it primarily orbits one thing.

PAUL WIEGERT: And so the moons orbit planets, the planets orbit the Sun.

LATIF: The Sun is pulling on everything in the solar system, that's true. But moons, including ours, are much closer to their planets, so it's looping the planet. And that's what Paul says objects in our solar system generally do. Everything hula-hoops one bigger thing.

PAUL WIEGERT: Yes.

LULU: Got it.

LATIF: Now Seppo and Paul look at Zoozve ...

PAUL WIEGERT: Making careful calculations, computer simulations and so forth.

LATIF: And what they find is it's being pulled around by the Sun's gravity, so it orbits the Sun. That's its primary partner. But weirdly ...

PAUL WIEGERT: Even though it's orbiting the Sun ...

LATIF: Venus is also keeping this tiny gravitational toehold on it. And because of that, while Zoozve's going around the Sun ...

PAUL WIEGERT: It actually stays relatively close to Venus and loops around it.

LATIF: ... it circles Venus too.

PAUL WIEGERT: To our amazement, it's orbiting both. Revealing, if you will, the first quasi-moon known in our solar system.

LULU: "Quasi" meaning just like a small moon?

LATIF: "Quasi" meaning neither moon nor not moon. It's this mysterious in-between thing that's the first anyone has ever discovered anywhere in the universe.

SEPPO MIKKOLA: Quasi-moon or qwazy moon. Which one is correct pronunciation?

LATIF: When you say it, I like 'qwazy' because it sounds like 'crazy.'

SEPPO MIKKOLA: [laughs]

LULU: So, like, Latif, this is neat, but it does seem like just one sort of weird little pebble out there ping-ponging around in the whole solar system. Like, why—why has it captured your attention? Why do you care about it so much?

LATIF: Okay, so much of it goes back to the poster, right?

LULU: Hmm.

LATIF: The map.

LULU: In your kid's room.

LATIF: In my kid's room, but really at least for me in my head. The solar system diagram that we all see in school, and it's like you have the Sun and then you have all the planets, and it's like a beautiful, perfect circle inside a circle inside a circle inside a circle inside a circle, and they all have, like, tracks, right?

LULU: Right. And it's predictable. You can keep your watch by it.

LATIF: Yeah, exactly. It's a clock. We live in a clock, right?

LULU: Right.

LATIF: Then Zoozve doesn't seem to fit neatly within that system. It's a weirdo. It's a rule-breaker.

LULU: But don't you think Zoozve's still operating within a bigger clock? Like, it might still just be following different rules.

LATIF: Sure. There are rules, there are definitely rules. But the thing is, Zoozve is following rules that we can never fully grasp.

SEPPO MIKKOLA: Mathematically, it's impossible to follow it.

LATIF: ... you just cannot calculate where Zoozve is gonna go next.

LULU: Hmm! Like, for example, we know that Zoozve is gonna leave Venus at some point.

LULU: Oh.

LATIF: But we don't know what it's gonna do after that. It's a mystery!

LULU: Okay, that is exciting.

LATIF: And by the way, Zoozve is not the only unpredictable free spirit out there in the solar system. It's just the beginning, because since 2002, scientists have started finding lots more of these quasi-moons.

LULU: Hmm!

LATIF: And these other quasi-moons, some of them behave in even weirder ways than Zoozve does.

LULU: Huh. Okay.

LATIF: There are ...

PAUL WIEGERT: The Jovian Trojan asteroids.

LATIF: Even though they're orbiting Jupiter, they don't circle it.

PAUL WIEGERT: They actually stay ahead of or behind Jupiter as all of them go around the sun. There's a group which always stay in front of it, and another group which always stay behind it.

LATIF: Like secret service agents or something.

PAUL WIEGERT: Yeah, something like that.

LATIF: Then there are horseshoe quasi-moons, which look like they ...

PAUL WIEGERT: Start out in front of the planet ...

LATIF: Orbit part way around the planet ...

PAUL WIEGERT: And then they stop and slow down ...

LATIF: Turn around, go back the other way.

LULU: Wait, how do they stop and slow down and turn around?

PAUL WIEGERT: [laughs] It's the planet's gravity that causes this advance and retreat motion.

LULU: Weird!

LATIF: It's gonna get weirder here. There's some that do, like, a comma shape.

LULU: Hmm.

LATIF: Like back and forth.

LULU: [laughs]

LATIF: And those ones are called tadpoles.

LULU: [laughs] That's cute!

LATIF: And Earth has a bunch of quasi-moons, too.

LULU: We do? How many have they found?

LATIF: There's at least, like, seven of them, I think.

LULU: What?

LATIF: And all of these are all different. Like, we have some Trojan moons, we have some horseshoe moons.

LULU: Wow!

LATIF: And so now, when I think of that same map, it's like full of all these weirdo characters, all dancing around like a fantasia, you know?

LULU: No, I feel that.

LATIF: And for me, like, for Zoozve to enter my life in this totally random way because some illustrator accidentally put it there, and it ended up in my kid's room, and then Zoozve itself was this, you know, rock star that let me in on this secret that this place we live in is stranger and more connected and more filled with chaos and possibility than I ever thought, like, that's what I want, and that's what I want my kid to go to bed thinking about every night.

LULU: Okay, that is pretty beautiful.

LATIF: Yeah. Right?

LULU: That gave me—that gave me the shin tingles.

LATIF: Zoozve, right?

LULU: Zoozve. Right. Go, Zoozve!

LATIF: [laughs] Okay. So Lulu, this was supposed to be the end of the story.

LULU: Mm-hmm. It felt like an end.

LATIF: It felt like three ends. But as I was reporting, this other possibility opened up.

LULU: Uh-huh?

LATIF: And I just could not—I could not resist. It is a way to put Zoozve on the map for real.

LULU: Whoa! What do you mean?

LATIF: I'll explain after the break.

LULU: Okay. [singing] How do you solve a problem like a Zoozve? How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? You can't because gravity—and we're gonna follow Zoozve as she tears another hole in the universe into a new possibility. Okay. Continue.

LATIF: [laughs]

[BREAK]

LATIF: Okay. So this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser.

LULU: I'm Lulu Miller.

LATIF: Back to Zoozve.

LULU: Mm-hmm.

LATIF: So when I was talking to Paul Wiegert, remember who's the guy who helped figure out this was a quasi moon ...

LULU: Yeah.

LATIF: ... he said this, like, one line, kind of not even what I was asking about but, like, once he said it, I couldn't unhear it.

PAUL WIEGERT: All asteroids, when they're first seen, are given what's called a 'provisional designation.'

LATIF: 2002-VE is just the name it got auto-assigned when it was discovered.

PAUL WIEGERT: Not its final name.

LATIF: And it hit me, like, 2002-VE68 is a—is a terrible name.

LULU: [laughs]

LATIF: It, like, sounds like a car serial number.

LULU: Yeah. It's not the right name for this beautiful creature in the sky. I hear that.

LATIF: And that's when I got the idea that I/we have gotta name it.

LULU: Wait, can you do that?

LATIF: Well, so I asked Paul, like, who's in charge of naming asteroids?

PAUL WIEGERT: The privilege of suggesting a name goes to the discoverer.

BRIAN SKIFF: It turns out that is me.

LATIF: So I went back to Brian Skiff, the guy who discovered Zoozve.

BRIAN SKIFF: In the early days, one was encouraged to be, you know, imaginative.

LATIF: He's discovered over 50 asteroids, and has named a bunch of them.

BRIAN SKIFF: In the early '80s, we had four asteroids numbered consecutively. We named them for the Beatles

LATIF: He told me about a bunch of other weirdly-named asteroids.

BRIAN SKIFF: There was a Swiss astronomer that named it for his favorite airline, which is Swiss Air.

LATIF: So random!

BRIAN SKIFF: An astronomer named one for his cat, Mr. Spock. [laughs]

LATIF: Oh my God! And hearing him say all these names, like, it just occurred to me ...

LATIF: Do you think it would be possible to actually name this thing Zoozve?

LULU: [laughs] Oh my God, yes. Yes!

BRIAN SKIFF: Yes. I guess that is possible.

LULU: I mean, it has to be—you have to immortalize the typo. It needs to be Zoozve.

LATIF: It should be Zoozve.

LULU: It wants to be Zoozve. There's no better name.

LATIF: So now theoretically, you just have to, like, send a request to the powers that be, and then they will name it?

BRIAN SKIFF: Yes. Yes.

LATIF: And you are thinking favorably of naming it Zoozve?

BRIAN SKIFF: Oh, I wouldn't think of that at all. [laughs]

LATIF: You would not name it Zoozve?

BRIAN SKIFF: No.

LATIF: Um, but ...

BRIAN SKIFF: I think the answer is no.

LATIF: The answer is no? Okay, can I make a case to you?

LATIF: And Lulu, as you know, I am nothing if not persistent. That's like my number one superpower.

LULU: [laughs] This is true.

LATIF: So ...

LATIF: The illustrator, he mistook 2002 for ZOOZ ...

LATIF: ... I tried to make the case. And in the process, I realized I actually—I had forgotten to tell Brian the whole story behind the name Zoozve, like, with the poster and everything. And when I did ...

BRIAN SKIFF: Oh! Wow!

LATIF: It was a mistake.

BRIAN SKIFF: Wow! [laughs]

LATIF: It was a mistake. So he made an error, but I kind of fell in love with the error.

BRIAN SKIFF: Wow. Yeah, that's kind of interesting.

LATIF: And there's nothing else in the whole world called Zoozve.

BRIAN SKIFF: Zoozve! Wow.

LATIF: Would you like to name this asteroid Zoozve?

BRIAN SKIFF: It would be interesting if the story of this mistake could be compressed down to 300 characters.

LATIF: Brian was like, "Okay, it's a great story and all, but in order to submit the form to request the name, everything you're telling me has to fit in 300 characters or less."

LATIF: Okay. We can do that?

BRIAN SKIFF: Yeah, sure. That's enough of a little twist that that would be very interesting ...

LATIF: Right?

BRIAN SKIFF: ... to see if it gets by the naming committee.

LULU: Wait, wait, naming committee?

LATIF: Yeah. So basically, when Brian submits the name, it would then have to be reviewed by this group called the IAU.

BRIAN SKIFF: The International Astronomical Union.

LATIF: Those are the name keepers. Name deciders.

BRIAN SKIFF: Yeah

GARETH WILLIAMS: Well, the official term is the Working Group: Small Body Nomenclature. Which is a bit of a mouthful.

LATIF: Yeah.

GARETH WILLIAMS: So we normally just call it the WGSBN.

LATIF: It's very cool what you do you, but I do think maybe you need a better name?

GARETH WILLIAMS: [laughs]

LATIF: So this is Gareth Williams. He's an astronomer who worked at Harvard for many years, and is the secretary of that working group. so Gareth explained that the working group is ...

GARETH WILLIAMS: Responsible for naming asteroids and comets.

LATIF: And it's made up of ...

GARETH WILLIAMS: 11 voting members.

LATIF: Who are astronomers who live all over the world.

LATIF: So I very quickly figured out that it's a lot more than just a rubber stamp, and that Gareth and the entire working group take that vetting pretty seriously.

GARETH WILLIAMS: Basically, it's a majority vote.

LATIF: Okay, so hypothetically, how does one make their case to these 11 people? Do you all gather together to discuss the proposals in some marbled hall somewhere?

GARETH WILLIAMS: [laughs] Marbled hall. No, we don't have formal meetings.

LATIF: They do everything online.

GARETH WILLIAMS: Any member of the working group can log in to the website through a special interface and vote on the names whenever they feel like it.

LATIF: Got it.

LATIF: Basically, I just became even more convinced that it all goes back to that—you know, that 300-character statement.

LULU: Hmm.

LATIF: Because that's what all the members of the working group are looking at when they cast their vote.

LULU: Okay, so what did you end up writing?

LATIF: Here is the sentence. Are you ready?

BRIAN SKIFF: Okay.

LATIF: So I actually did call Brian back to read it to him before he submitted it.

LATIF: Here it is. And it's actually—so the requirement is 360 characters.

BRIAN SKIFF: Oh, okay.

LATIF: And this is actually only 287 characters. So we got even gravy. If there's something you want to add in there, like, whatever, there's room. Okay, here's what I got. "As the first quasi-moon ever discovered in the universe, this object deserves a name as rare as its orbit. When artist Alex Foster drew this object on a solar system poster for kids, he misread the temporary name, 2002-VE, as Zoozve, thus coining this original, odd and memorable name."

BRIAN SKIFF: That sounds fine.

LATIF: Yeah?

BRIAN SKIFF: Oh, yeah. Yeah, we might, you know, change "kids" to "children" and, you know, very minor tweaks. But other than that ...

LATIF: Okay, great. Easy. Done.

BRIAN SKIFF: It sounds fine to me.

LATIF: Do you think they'll—do you think they'll do it? What do you think is gonna happen?

BRIAN SKIFF: I guess I don't have a good feeling for that.

LATIF: Okay.

LATIF: So after that, Brian officially submitted the name proposal to the working group.

LULU: Okay.

LATIF: And our sense was this kind of thing usually takes a couple months.

LULU: Right.

LATIF: That was about three-and-a-half months ago. But then we scheduled ...

LULU: Oh my God, are you about to—are you about tell—okay, okay, okay. Keep going.

LATIF: So we scheduled a time for when he would have the verdict.

LULU: Mm-hmm.

GARETH WILLIAMS: Yep. I hear you.

LATIF: Oh, great. I can hear you.

LATIF: So we got on the phone for the moment of truth.

GARETH WILLIAMS: Okay, let me just check my phone.

LATIF: Great.

GARETH WILLIAMS: For the—I'm logged in on my phone to the voting site.

LATIF: Okay.

GARETH WILLIAMS: Let me just check—let me just refresh the page.

LATIF: Oh my gosh, this is so dramatic! I'm like—I'm—I'm holding my breath here.

GARETH WILLIAMS: Well, I'm very pleased to announce that the Working Group for Small Body Nomenclature has approved the name Zoozve.

LULU: Oh!

LATIF: [laughs] Oh my God!

LULU: Are you serious?

LATIF: Wow!

LULU: Are you serious?

LATIF: Yeah. They're naming it Zoozve.

BRIAN SKIFF: Oh, wow! Great!*

LATIF: I also just broke the news to Brian Skiff, the discoverer of Zoozve, who helped us propose the name.

BRIAN SKIFF: Well, that's a great little coup on everyone's part.

LATIF: And ...

ALEX FOSTER: Oh good. That's so cool!

LATIF: Yeah.

LATIF: I also called Alex Foster.

LULU: The poster guy?

LATIF: The poster guy.

LULU: Oh!

LATIF: To be like, your mistake is now etched in the heavens.

LULU: Yeah.

LATIF: Forever.

LULU: Oh!

LATIF: Now having gone through what we went through, that retroactively makes the poster correct.

ALEX FOSTER: Oh, that's amazing. Wow!

LATIF: [laughs]

LULU: How do you feel?

LATIF: I mean, I feel awesome. Like, it's like, I don't know. It's the first thing like it that we ever found, and now it has a weird, one-of-a-kind name, so that feels right.

LATIF: How do you feel?

GARETH WILLIAMS: I feel happy. I think it's a suit—I think it's a good name.

LATIF: Can you tell me what you voted?

GARETH WILLIAMS: Well, since it's now been approved I can say that I voted for it.

LATIF: I want to—I just want to give you a big hug right now.

GARETH WILLIAMS: A virtual hug it will have to be, since we're quite a few miles apart. [laughs]

LATIF: Yes. Yes.

LATIF: Has anything ever been named after a typo before?

GARETH WILLIAMS: After a typo? Well, that's an interesting one. I'm having a hard time thinking of a prior example of a typo.

BRIAN SKIFF: Gee whiz, I can't think of anything right offhand either. [laughs]

LULU: Wow, that is wild! [laughs] This funny little thing you, like, squinted at, this typo that a poster designer put on a piece of paper that reached your eye, that then led you on this whole chase, like, that that is now immortalized and will outlast all of us in the sky.

LATIF: Yup.

LULU: Alright. That'll do it for today. Biggest thanks to Latif Nasser. Biggest thanks to Zoozve. And biggest thanks to you for listening. We'll be dropping back down to this lumpy old planet of ours to discover what wild secrets we can find there. Bye.

LULU: This episode is reported by me, Latif Nasser, with help from Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. It was produced by Sarah Qari. Original music and sound design contributed by Sarah Qari and Jeremy Bloom with mixing help from Arianne Wack. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly and edited by Becca Bressler. Special thanks to Larry Wasserman and everyone else at the Lowell Observatory as well as to Rich Kramer. Thank you to the IAU and their small but mighty working group for Small Bodies Nomenclature as well as to the Bamboo Forest class of kindergarteners and first graders who also have small bodies. Liz Landau who you will remember cracked the 2002 V.E. Mystery. You can hear her work on NASA's Curious Universe podcast. Also wanted to give a special mention to illustrator Alex Foster.

EMMA: Hi, I’m Emma and I live in Portland, Maine. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

SUSANNA: Hi, this is Susanna calling from Washington, DC. Leadership support

for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore

Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simon Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton

Foundation. Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan

Foundation.

# included[].attributes.body
We start this story off with a question. Are human beings innately violent?

Then we head to East Africa with Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, who spent his summers studying wild baboons there. Baboons are a textbook example of a hierarchical, male-dominated, and aggressive society. But one day, Sapolsky noticed that a troop of baboons became unexpectedly gentle. They deviated from the usual aggressiveness so characteristic of them and groomed each other. The key question was how do these guys unlearn their entire childhood culture of aggression, something supposedly built-in? Sapolsky tells us that tale — a moment he describes as one of the best science moments of his life.

For more: Read Robert Sapolsky’s account of his 21 years studying baboons in Kenya.

Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton. Production help from Tanya Chawla. Sound mixing by Joe Plourde.

Sign up for Radiolab for Kids’s newsletter! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up here.

Radiolab for Kids and Terrestrials are supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, X Facebook, Threads and TikTok @radiolab.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

# included[].attributes.show-tease
A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

# included[].attributes.show-title
Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

# included[].attributes.tease
We start this story off with a question. Are human beings innately violent? Then we head to East Africa with Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, who spent his summers studying wi...

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LULU: Hey there. Lulu here. Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate. I am thankful to you for real, I am really, really thankful to you for listening to our show. We love making it for you. And another thing I feel thankful for is the story I am about to play you. I really do. It's a story that gives me hope when I'm feeling worried about humans, when I'm feeling worried about the fact that they can sometimes be mean or greedy. And so I wanted to play it for you today. Don't worry, it's not about humans, it's about animals. It is a story about baboons.

LULU: Baboons, they are primates like us. They look a little like really muscly, muscly monkeys with lots of fur and a really furrowed brow. They're kind of scary looking. They are known to fight one another if they, you know, get into a conflict over territory or food. They can even tear each other apart. And well, because we are primates like them, sometimes people say that in our true nature, we're like them too. That if left to our own devices, we too just naturally are greedy or violent or territorial. But this story shows another possibility. That maybe this supposed truth of human nature isn't so true. You'll see what I mean as you listen along, handing it off now to hosts, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich.

JAD: To get things started, let's just take the question that was just in the air: are we human beings violent forever and forever and forever, amen? Is that just who we are?

ROBERT: That's a good question.

JAD: It's a good question, right? And the people who usually say yes …

ROBERT: Yeah?

JAD: ... say yes because—in part, because of our ancestors.

ROBERT: We're like them, they're like us. That's how it goes.

JAD: On the other hand, let me tell you a story.

ROBERT: I was hoping there would be another hand.

JAD: Yes. Do you remember this guy?

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: I'm Robert Sapolsky. I'm …

ROBERT: Oh, yeah. That's Robert Sapolsky.

JAD: We've had him on the show a couple of times. He's a neuroscientist, spends most of the year at Stanford.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: ... being a lab rat scientist, doing neurobiology in the lab.

JAD: But in the summers …

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Most summers I go and spend time in East Africa, in the Serengeti studying wild baboons there.

ROBERT: Why—what is it—what is he working on? What's his reason to be there?

JAD: Well, Sapolsky's interested in studying stress. The effect that stress has on the body. And it turns out, baboons are a perfect source of data because they're always under stress. You know, the one thing we know about baboons, and have known forever, is that they fight …

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Baboons …

JAD: ... constantly.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: ... not just metaphorically, but literally have been the textbook example of a highly-aggressive, male-dominated hierarchical society. Because these animals hunt, because they live in these aggressive troops on the savanna, parentheses just like we humans used to, and thus we evolved very similarly, they have a constant baseline level of aggression which inevitably spills over into their social lives.

JAD: Which is why he studies them. So what Sapolsky does basically, is he goes into the bush and he watches.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Here are field notebooks. And there's a floor of them there. And a whole shelf there.

JAD: His office is covered with these field notebooks, each one containing detailed notes of who groomed who …

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: And who's not getting along with who, and who's messing around with who in the bushes.

JAD: And he tells the following story of a particular moment in his baboon watching which completely changed his life, changed how he sees the world. It happened about 30 years ago. Sapolsky was a young guy just out of grad school studying his first troop.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: My—my first baboons.

JAD: A troop he really loved.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: These were animals I was very connected with.

JAD: In most ways, it was a pretty average group.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Yeah, your basic baboon troop. The males, highly aggressive, dumping on each other.

JAD: Because that's just what males do.

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: Or so he thought.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Okay, mid-'80s, a big boom in tourism in Kenya. Wonders for the economy, lots of new lodges, lots of lodge expansions. And there happened to be the next territory over, a tourist lodge.

JAD: And this one particular lodge, he says, had gotten really big really fast.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: And during that time, the lodge greatly expanded their garbage dump.

JAD: Which means basically, that they just dug a hole out behind the lodge.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: And then each day, a tractor came out with the leftovers and dumped it there.

JAD: So what we're talking about here, if you can nasally imagine, is a big steaming pile of trash, half-eaten food baking in the sun, smell wafting in the breeze for miles and miles and into the nostrils of baboons everywhere. So it was not long before a troop of baboons—not Sapolsky's, but one nearby …

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Discovered the garbage, and just started feeding on it. And here they are eating leftover desserts and chicken whatevers.

JAD: To find a dump full of food must be to a baboon like—like wandering into heaven.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: It's manna in the wilderness.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: So this troop almost immediately shifted their entire behavior to they just slept in the trees above the garbage dump, and instead of getting up at six in the morning to start foraging, they would waddle down around two minutes of nine. And the tractor would show up at nine o'clock and dump the food, and they would have 20 minutes of sheer frenzy. And then they'd go back to sort of being couch potatoes.

JAD: And this is how it went for a while.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: So they're over there living off of garbage, and somehow some of the males in my troop figure this out.

JAD: These males think, "We gotta get in on this. We've gotta go over there and take their food."

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: What emerged was each morning, a bunch of males would run a kilometer or so to the garbage dump and fight their way in to get some of the garbage.

JAD: So every morning there'd be a showdown, basically.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Yeah. And they would come back with canine slashes and stuff like that. And …

JAD: But they'd also have drumsticks, cakes, hamburgers. And this ritual, says Sapolsky, went on for years.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: And then a few years into it, I got word that there were a couple of baboons in this garbage dump troop that looked awful and something was wrong with them.

JAD: Some guys from the lodge had called him and said, "Hey, you better get down here and look at this." And when he got there, what he saw was horrible.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Animals with rotting hands walking on their elbows. I mean, just really bad. So trying to figure out what this is about, get veterinarians involved. And we finally figure out it's tuberculosis.

JAD: Turns out some infected meat had been thrown in the dump and then eaten by the baboons. And this was really bad news because while tuberculosis in people is a really slow moving disease …

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: TB kills non-human primates in weeks, and it's a nightmare of a disease for them.

JAD: In just a short time, the garbage dump troop was completely decimated. Not to mention that the tough guys in Sapolsky's troop, the ones that had gone to the dump every morning, they got it too.

JAD: They have the same kind of rotting hands, and …

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: They all die of it.

JAD: Oh, wow. That must've been really kind of tragic to witness.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: This was not a good period for me. You know, these were my animals. I had—I had grown up with these guys.

JAD: But, you know, while Sapolsky was heartbroken now that half the alpha males in his troop were dead, he did notice some strange things started to happen. Changes.

ROBERT: How did they change?

JAD: Well, grooming spiked.

ROBERT: Grooming. So you and I sit on a branch, and I take little fleas out of your fur.

JAD: Yes. Well, you know, usually when a female grooms a male, the males never reciprocate. But suddenly, they were. Even weirder …

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: You saw adult males sitting in contact with each other and grooming each other.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: You know how—how rare that is? It'd be like, if suddenly in the middle of round five of a heavyweight bout, Mike Tyson just decided to stop boxing …

ROBERT: And nuzzle his opponent. [laughs]

JAD: Or comb Evander Holyfield's hair.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: It would be like that.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: If you're a baboonologist, it would have been less shocking if these guys had wings, or were photosynthetic or something. Up to then I had seen, like, 30 seconds of male-male grooming in the course of 15 years.

JAD: But at the time, Sapolsky kind of wrote it off. This was just some freak event that wasn't gonna last. So he actually stopped studying them.

ROBERT: Even after that big investment of time?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Scientifically, they were ruined by such a non-natural event removing half the study subjects.

JAD: Oh, as a scientist it became less interesting to you.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: You know, that was the rationale. It was just too painful to go and watch these guys. So I moved to the other end of the reserve about 40 miles away and started with a new troop there. And for six years, I would not go anywhere near this corner of the park, because I just didn't want to be there.

LULU: We’ll be back in a moment.

LULU: Alright we’re back. On with the story.

JAD: Now fast forward six years, and we come to the moment that really changed things for him, really flipped him into a different way of thinking. And it happened kind of by accident.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: So about six years later, I'm out there for the first time with who was soon destined to become my wife, and decided I wanted to kind of show her where I had grown up. What part of the park …

JAD: Aww, you wanted to go to the old haunt.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Yeah, basically. So went there, and the troop was there.

JAD: And they were acting pretty much the same as before: lots of grooming, not so much fighting.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: And isn't that nice? And they're still, like, this great remnant troop.

JAD: And he's sitting there with his wife just pointing out all the different baboons. "Oh, there's Tiva, and there's—I don't know, whoever." And then it hits him.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: This epiphinal whatever.

JAD: Wait a second!

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: There was only one male left who had been there at the time of the TB outbreak.

JAD: Dun dun dun!

ROBERT: I don't follow this. What? One male?

JAD: Stick with me for just one second and you will get it.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: The thing about male baboons, first thing you gotta understand, is around puberty, the males get a little antsy.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: They get itchy, they're bored and they just pick up and leave. So in a troop, any of the adult males grew up someplace else.

JAD: Which meant that these new guys that were coming into Sapolsky's troop, were coming in from the outside, from the old world order.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: The jerky, real dog-eat-dog world out there.

JAD: Which would mean that this whole kumbaya situation should evaporate the moment these guys show up. But it didn't. It stuck.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Oh my God! The new guys are learning we don't do stuff like that here.

JAD: And if the new guys are learning a new way, well, that means the old way, the violent way, isn't the only way.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: And this—this floored me. It was one of those moments. It will be one of the three or four best science moments in my life. The key question was how do these guys unlearn their entire childhood culture of aggression, blah, blah, and somehow learn we don't do stuff like that around here?

ROBERT: Well?

JAD: Well, what?

ROBERT: Well, how do they unlearn something that was supposedly built in?

JAD: Oh. Well, he doesn't really know exactly.

ROBERT: Oh.

JAD: But, but but but, here's Sapolsky's hunch. Here's his hunch. And this is really cool. It may have to do with that precarious moment when the new guy comes in. Now normally what happens in this sort of status quo, is that the new guy arrives and it's just a really bad experience for him.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: It's awful. I mean, you look at them and you just identify with, like, freshman year at college or something. They're completely peripheral. Every male who's higher ranking dumps on them.

JAD: And even worse, this freshman baboon is completely ignored by the ladies.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: And you just sit there and say, "Somebody groom him. Somebody groom him! Come on!"

ROBERT: Why don't they groom him?

JAD: Well, because if they did …

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Some adult male would have attacked them.

ROBERT: Oh.

JAD: So the ladies hang back while he's out there biting and clawing and trying to scratch his way in. And what you've got here is a cycle that has existed for a long, long time. But if you make one small change, just remove the alpha male, take him out of the equation, suddenly …

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: The females are more relaxed, and more likely to take a social gamble of reaching out to somebody new. The key thing is the females.

JAD: Sapolsky thinks that it's all about timing. If the females can get to the new guy early enough, everything's different.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: It's remarkable. In your typical troop, it's three months on the average before the first female grooms you. In this troop? Six days.

JAD: Get out! Six days as compared to three months?

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Yeah. And in a world in which from day one as an adolescent male you're treated better, something about the aggressiveness melts away.

JAD: It has been 20 years.

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: Yes. 20 years. And Sapolsky's original baboon troop is still operating in this peaceful mode, even though dozens of new males have come and gone at this point.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: And the idea that something that was thought to be so unchangeable could change and change quickly and then stay changed as a result of something so airy and undefinable as culture, well, that has caused Robert Sapolsky, dare I say it, to hope.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Absolutely. And it's not something that I do by nature.

JAD: [laughs] You're not a hopeful guy by nature.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: No, not at all.

LULU: Alright, that'll do it for today, hoping that whoever you are, wherever you are, you get a little break today and maybe a moment to pause and think about who and what you are grateful for in this world. And if it's a person, maybe even let them know. If it's an animal, maybe go give him a hug. Again, I am truly, truly grateful to you for being here for these nature stories. We'll have another one coming in two weeks.

EMMA: Hi, I’m Emma and I live in Portland, Maine. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

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We start off in a cathedral full of animals – hermit crabs, parrots, hamsters, dogs, cats and bunnies – being blessed. We then wonder, do the animals feel grace? What do we really know about what goes on inside an animal’s mind? Do they also experience gratitude, despair or anger? How much emotionality do humans and animals share? And can we measure it?

We get the story of a rescued whale that may have found a way to say thanks to its rescuers. And then we speak to behavioral scientist Clive Wynne, and head of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard, Alexandra Horowitz, to decipher the whale’s behavior.

Guests in the episode include: Mick Menago, Tim Young, James Moskito, Holly Drewyard, Clive Wynne and Alexandra Horowitz.

For more: Read “Inside of a Dog” by Alexandra Horowitz.

Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton. Production help from Tanya Chawla. Sound mixing by Joe Plourde.

Sign up for Radiolab for Kids’s newsletter! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up here.

Radiolab for Kids and Terrestrials are supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, X Facebook, Threads and TikTok @radiolab.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

# included[].attributes.show-tease
A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

# included[].attributes.show-title
Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

# included[].attributes.series[].about.body
Terrestrials is a show for people of all ages that explores the strangeness that exists right here on Earth. In each episode, host Lulu Miller (co-host of Radiolab) will introduce you to a creature or earthly phenomenon that will defy your expectations of how nature is supposed to work. Along the way, you'll encounter a chorus of experts, including scientists, surfers, hip hop artists and…a "Songbud" named Alan (indie punk musician Alan Goffinski) who creates original songs for key moments of confusion, discovery or awe. New episodes drop Thursdays. Listen in with your whole family. Or all alone.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

LISTEN TO TERRESTRIALS  | SUPPORT TERRESTRIALS | TERRESTRIALS WANTS YOUR FEEDBACK! | PRESS INQUIRIES  | BECOME A SPONSOR | CONTACT US

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

# included[].attributes.series[].logo-image.alt-text
Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

# included[].attributes.tease
A rescued whale appears to find a way to express thanks.

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Alan Goffinski (he/him), is an arts administrator, songwriter, and producer from Charlottesville VA. He is the former Executive Director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative and the Charlottesville Mural Project—two city-wide organizations that utilize art and culture as a way for people to better understand themselves, each other, and the world around them. He is also a founding member of the Indianapolis-based whimsical performing arts collective Know No Stranger which has been described as “Sesame Street but for adults... but also for kids.” He produced the experimental music radio program Telemetry in partnership with the University of Virginia. Early in his career, Alan spent years making music in a nationally touring indie-punk band (signed to Victory Records) prior to becoming a social worker specializing in early childhood development. He began making kid’s music under the moniker Little Skunks as a fun way to be a part of the day-to-day lives of his nieces and nephew.

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Ana is an audio producer and host who came to WNYC in 2021 to work on Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials. Before that, she produced and hosted Mosaic, a show about immigration experiences from Rhode Island Public Radio. In a former life, she played jazz bass and thinks about everything in terms of rhythm, conversation, and harmony.

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Mira Burt-Wintonick (she/her) -- For the past 20 years, Mira’s been creating, story editing and sound designing various shows. Her work often explores grief and complex emotional landscapes (Love Me, Sorry About The Kid, Welcome to Paradise) but she’s also made some absurd comedy podcasts (WireTap, PenPals). She recently directed Wintopia, a feature documentary film about her late filmmaking father, Peter Wintonick, and his search for Utopia.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].bio
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

Her book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, is an international bestseller, translated into 11 languages. It was chosen as a Best Book by The Smithsonian, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, Brainpickings, The Washington Post and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She has also won honors from The National Academy of Sciences, the Associated Press, the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and most recently an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Swarthmore College.

She reports on a range of scientific topics with a special interest in disability, mental illness, and ecology. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She serves as a Contributing Advisor to nature magazine Orion and she was the co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia—a radio show about psychology, emotion, and human behavior. She recently published her debut children’s book, Trucky Roads, about trucks and, you’ll never guess this… roads. She lives in the Chicago area with her wife and two sons.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].lede
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].about.body
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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Producer Sarah Qari, smiling and standing proudly in the foreground of a field of sunflowers.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].description
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].tease
Investigating a strange world.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].bio
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

Her book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, is an international bestseller, translated into 11 languages. It was chosen as a Best Book by The Smithsonian, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, Brainpickings, The Washington Post and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She has also won honors from The National Academy of Sciences, the Associated Press, the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and most recently an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Swarthmore College.

She reports on a range of scientific topics with a special interest in disability, mental illness, and ecology. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She serves as a Contributing Advisor to nature magazine Orion and she was the co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia—a radio show about psychology, emotion, and human behavior. She recently published her debut children’s book, Trucky Roads, about trucks and, you’ll never guess this… roads. She lives in the Chicago area with her wife and two sons.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].lede
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].about.body
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

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Producer Sarah Qari, smiling and standing proudly in the foreground of a field of sunflowers.

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About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

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All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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Investigating a strange world.

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Artist Ashley Eliza Williams was so shy growing up that they found it hard to speak to people.  Instead, they withdrew from the world of humans and found comfort in the forest, where they spent hours exploring, scavenging and collecting, eventually discovering lichen. They began painting portraits of lichen’s wild, colorful, and fuzzy shapes.

In time, Ashley learned that lichen is actually a composite organism, a mixture of two species — algae and fungi — working together to live. This idea originally challenged evolutionary theory so much that scientists didn’t believe it. But lichen had so much more to teach us.

Chef Prashanta Khanal fills us in on the food science of lichen, and how its collaborative powers also extend to making certain foods healthier! Learning that lichen draws its strength from collaboration eventually encouraged Ashley to break out of their shell and reconnect to the world, where they would find not just friends and collaborators, but their true love.

Since the release of this podcast, artist Ash Eliza Williams goes by Ash and uses they/them pronouns.

Check out Ash Eliza Williams’s beautiful paintings.

Visit chef Prashanta's cooking blog, the Gundruk, for more on Nepali food history and recipes.

This episode features punk rock legend Laura Jane Grace, who makes a musical cameo on the song The Fuzzy Ruckus. Watch the music video and find the link to stream on our songs page.

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC studios. This episode was produced by Brenna Farrel, Mira Burt-Wintonick, Alan Goffinski, Ana González, Tanya Chawla, Joe Plourde, Sarah Sandbach, Valentina Powers and Lulu Miller. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Transcription by Caleb Codding.

Special thanks to Siya Sharma-Gaines, Niran Bhatt Scharpf, Scott LaGreca, and Sarita Bhatt.

Our advisors are Ana Luz Porzecanski, Andy J. Pizza, Anil Lewis, Dominique Shabazz, Liza Demby, Princess Daazhraii Johnson and Tara Welty.

Learn more about storytellers, listen to music, and dig deeper into the stories you hear on Terrestrials with activities you can do at home or in the classroom on our website,

Terrestrialspodcast.org.

Badger us on social media: @radiolab  and #TerrestrialsPodcast or by emailing us at terrestrials@wnyc.org.

Sign up for our NEWSLETTER for trivia, resources, music, fun facts, worksheets, and much more at terrestrialspodcast.org.

Visit the Terrestrials website to learn more about the show, meet our team, listen to the songs and discover fun activities, drawing prompts, music how-tos and games that educators, parents and families might enjoy together.

If you’d like to “badger” a future expert, suggest story ideas or feedback, email us at terrestrials@wnyc.org.

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Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Terrestrials is a show for people of all ages that explores the strangeness that exists right here on Earth. In each episode, host Lulu Miller (co-host of Radiolab) will introduce you to a creature or earthly phenomenon that will defy your expectations of how nature is supposed to work. Along the way, you'll encounter a chorus of experts, including scientists, surfers, hip hop artists and…a "Songbud" named Alan (indie punk musician Alan Goffinski) who creates original songs for key moments of confusion, discovery or awe. New episodes drop Thursdays. Listen in with your whole family. Or all alone.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

LISTEN TO TERRESTRIALS  | SUPPORT TERRESTRIALS | TERRESTRIALS WANTS YOUR FEEDBACK! | PRESS INQUIRIES  | BECOME A SPONSOR | CONTACT US

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

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Artist Ashley Eliza Williams was so shy growing up that they found it hard to speak to people.  Instead, they withdrew from the world of humans and found comfort in the forest, where ...

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Lulu Miller: Three, two, one! Imagine …

Ashley Eliza Williams: … You're slowing way, way down.

(As you slow down, you hear a sound almost like the tiniest animal snoring. Then, a jungle bed of sounds opens up around you. Strings pluck and helicopter seed-notes whirl around.)

Lulu: And your body is turning strange colors.

Ashley: Bright safety-cone orange.

(Beside you, another plant whirrs to life.)

Ashley: Or a toothpaste green.

(The clink of metal tapping a glass full of water.)

Lulu: (As Lulu talks, a slimy sound spreads between her words, too.) And as you slowly spread over a rock …

Ashley: You're eating the rock. [A moment.] And you might be being nibbled by a caribou.

(Ow! Nibble nibble–the caribou is getting you!)

Lulu: You have become–

Ashley: –A lichen!

(The sounds around you go quiet.)

Lulu: Alright, now is the part where I make you sing the theme song with me.

(Drums and a theremin trade a rhythm back and forth as the theme song starts.)

Songbud Alan Goffinski: (Joined by Lulu) Terrestrials, terrestrials, we are not the worst, we are the …

Ashley: (Unable to finish the song, embarrassed.) I don’t know! I–my brain is gone.

Lulu: (Trying to help Ashley guess.) We're not the worst. We’re the …

Ashley: (Excitedly.) The best!

Songbud Alan: (Finishing the song.) … Best-rials!

Ashley: Oh man!

Lulu: You got it! (Lulu claps for Ashley.)

Ashley: Okay.

(Like raindrops in a storm, the music steadily drips back.)

Lulu: Terrestrials is a show where we uncover the strangeness waiting right here on Earth. I am your host, Lulu Miller, joined as always by my song bud …

Songbud Alan: (Through autotune–it sounds like there are three Alans, maybe more!) Woah-ho-ho!

(With two deep drum beats, the music starts coming down heavier.)

Lulu: Alan.

Songbud Alan: Lichen, love it, want some more of it!

Lulu: And this season we are looking at creatures that are usually …

Songbud Alan: … Overlooked. (Songbud Alan shushes us. It’s a secret!)

(The theremin drones back, like a nice mosquito.)

Lulu: And today’s lichen lover is …

Ashley: Ashley Eliza Williams! And I am an artist …

Lulu: … Who paints …

Ashley: … Lichens! I'm obsessed with lichens! (Ashley laughs gently.)

(Our friend the theremin returns, this time driven on by a melody played by a calliope – an instrument you might hear at a circus!)

Lulu: Now, even if you don't think you've ever seen lichen, you probably have. It’s that often green or yellow fuzz that grows up trees or on top of rocks.

I honestly used to think it was a kind of mold.

(Uh-oh–the music winds down! Then it turns scary, like electronic nails on a chalkboard.)

Ashley: I mean, some people think they look like something has gone wrong, and [Lulu laughs.] they try to power wash them off things.

Lulu: I mean, I get that! It looks [Searching for a word.] kinda scuzzy!

Ashley: (Laughing as if to say, “Fair!”.) But, when you get up close, lichens are extremely beautiful.

(A bright twinkling sound enters into the music. It feels lighter now.)

Lulu: And Ashley knows this because when she walks through the forest, she wears a necklace with a special charm at the end called–

Ashley: –A loop. It's a little magnifying glass.

Lulu: Huh.

Ashley: And when I look at lichens really closely under this magnifying glass …

(The music deepens–not scary, but rich, mysterious, exciting!)

Lulu: She sees a different world.

Ashley: Some of them look like antlers.

Lulu: Fuzzy little reindeer antlers.

Ashley: Branching in all directions.

Lulu: Some of them …

Ashley: Kind of look like sea creatures.

Lulu: Or …

Ashley: Bubbles and cups.

(Bubbles flow up in between and around all the other sounds.)

Lulu: Some look like tiny heads of lettuce with tons of wrinkly leaves.

Ashley: And when you look inside the wrinkles, there are even more wrinkles! (Lulu laughs at the thought.)

Songbud Alan: Wrinkles on wrinkles on wrinkles on wrinkles!

Lulu: And the deeper she looked into lichen, she saw not only textures, but messages!

(The twinkling comes back, a little faster, a little more excitable than before.)

Lulu: Messages that could help humans trying to heal the earth–and one very special message that would help her overcome a fear she had been carrying since childhood.

Ashley: Yes!

(A beat.)

Lulu: All right. So our story starts millions of years ago–

(With one plunk, all the other sounds go away. In the empty space, you can hear wind rushing.)

Lulu: –When the Earth’s land was much more barren.

Mostly a lot of rocks. And, at some point, lichen shows up and begins spreading and chomping its way all over those rocks.

(Snack time for the lichen! It chomps away at the rocks just like you might eat broccoli. The bright sounds of the forest from before come back, too, now with birds chirping.)

Lulu: And as it chomped, it helped turn the rocks into soil, which made a nice cozy place for trees and other plants to take root and grow.

(Roots sink deep into the soil. Even more bugs and animals chime in.)

Lulu: And slowly the lichen spread farther and farther, all over the planet, to every corner, in almost every imaginable color. And one day, in 1985, a little baby girl is born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

(The jungle full of animals goes quiet, leaving only music behind. Then, little by little, the sounds of an Appalachian forest creep in.)

Ashley: The thing is, there were lichens all around, but I didn't really notice them.

(Frogs croak in the forest.)

Lulu: Ashley was outside a ton as a kid.

Ashley: There was a creek behind my elementary school and I liked looking for all the little fishes and the bugs–the water bugs. I was fascinated by the water bugs.

(A bird twitters in the middle of the mountain forest.)

Lulu: And even though there were lichens right under her nose …

Ashley: They were invisible to me.

Lulu: Now, part of the reason Ashley spent so much time in nature was that being around humans–in big groups, at school or parties–was really hard.

(The forest sounds fade out. In their place, mysterious electronic sounds come in–maybe the sounds of a time machine?)

Ashley: I was an incredibly shy kid. Um, so I didn't really speak much … Or really at all. I didn't speak at all, um, for a couple of years in school.

Lulu: At–at all?

Ashley: Yeah. [A moment of quiet.] I so badly wanted to connect to other people. But for some reason I couldn't quite do it. It was too scary to kind of say a word. And I re-remember kids kind of asking me to speak or telling me to speak and I remember feeling kind of paralyzed, like I actually couldn't speak.

Lulu: She said she'd blush and the kids would sometimes start laughing.

Ashley: Oh, it was terrible. I hated it. I was so embarrassed.

Lulu: So Ashley started avoiding people as much as she could.

(We leave the time machine and move back to the forest, with all its sounds.)

Ashley: I spent a lot of time by myself reading and spending time in the woods. And because I wasn't talking very much, I became really curious about quiet beings.

Lulu: Like snails. Or ferns. Or those water bugs rippling the water.

(Plink-plink-plink go the water droplets, dripping and ringing in the woods.)

Ashley: Creatures that are quiet and maybe easily overlooked.

Lulu: She would stare at their movements and colors and try to understand them.

(Back out of the forest, an exciting melody begins to bounce up a keyboard.)

Ashley: That's probably why I became an artist. Because painting and making art is a kind of way to communicate without words.

Lulu: So Ashley painted and she drew creatures of the forest. And when she grew up, she landed a dream job, teaching art at Colorado State University. Only problem? Because teaching means talking in front of big groups of students …

Ashley: I was a wreck before every single class.

(The music softens, like a sunrise, delicately exploring the waking world.)

Lulu: So to calm her nerves, she'd go for runs through the mountains before class, just as the sun was coming up.

Ashley: The light would change, and the rocks would turn different colors.

Lulu: And she decided she wanted to paint a portrait of one of those rocks. But, as she started looking closely at it …

(Scritchy-scratchy lichens grow just as Ashley notices them.)

Ashley: I realized there were little creatures growing on the rock.

Lulu: Lichens! She was noticing lichens for the first time.

Ashley: They were all different colors: bright yellow and tangerine orange and–and strange blue-green.

Lulu: And she thought, “Forget the rocks–I want to paint these!”

(Ashley’s brush moves against the canvas, scritchy-scratchy just like the lichen.)

Lulu: And as she painted more and more of their wild shapes, she began to wonder ...

Ashley: … Who they were.

Lulu:  She couldn’t tell: Were they mushrooms? Were they plants?

(A glimmer.)

Lulu: And we’ll get back to that. But the thing that really amazed her as she started to research them was just how much they could do.

(Plucky strings begin to play.)

Lulu: ‘Cause it turned out lichen doesn’t just live on rocks and trees.

Ashley: They live on metal. They live on statues and gravestones, even on the backs of bugs.

Lulu: (Shocked.) What?

Ashley: Yes.

Lulu: Kind of bobbing along as it goes?

Ashley: Yes.

Lulu: Just catching a ride?

Ashley: Yes. Yes!

Lulu: They can also live in the freezing cold.

Ashley: In the far Arctic, under lots and lots of snow!

Lulu: Or the burning hot.

Ashley: In the desert.

Lulu: Or right after a volcano erupts!

(A volcanic eruption explodes onto the scene, and the plucky strings speed up as if running away while playing.)

Ashley: Huge explosion!

Lulu: After the lava rolls through …

Ashley: Some of the first creatures to arrive are lichens.

Lulu: They can even live–

Ashley: –Unmoored!

(After an exciting musical moment, the strings and volcanic winds give way to a soft breeze and the sound of wind chimes.)

Lulu: In the wind.

(A moment to enjoy the wind.)

Lulu: And because of all this, many species of lichens are what’s known as …

Songbud Alan and Lulu: Extremophiles! (A hard rock guitar riff plays.)

Lulu: Yeooooow! [Laughs. Then, with heavy emphasis on each ‘extreme,’ continuing.] Extremophiles: creatures going to the EXTREME, living in an EXTREME environment, and for an EXTREMELY long time.

Ashley: The oldest lichen, I believe, is 9,000 years old.

Lulu: (Gasping, then choking, then coughing.) Oh my god!

Ashley: And–

Lulu: I'm authentically choking on my water. Here, hold on.

(Ashley laughs.)

Lulu: Wow!

Ashley: I was shocked too. Yeah, 9,000 years old in Sweden.

(A low chord begins to play, taking us back in time.)

Ashley: Imagine being that old! [Lulu laughs.] And, like, those lichens have seen a lot of things.

Lulu: The building of the pyramids. The invention of the wheel. Wooly mammoths!

And because they've been around for so long, they contain messages. Messages they've recorded about the past.

So if you were to look out at a field of lichen with a trained eye, you could tell when there was a flood, or a fire, or someone trespassing.

Lulu: And so, lichens are used by historians and forest rangers and even [A beat.] detectives.

(A 1960-style detective theme song begins to take shape.)

Ashley: Lichens can help us solve crimes. (Lulu laughs.)

Lulu: She is not kidding! Lichens have been used in court cases! And they can also tell us about things we can’t see with our own eyes.

Ashley: Like, the color of the lichen will change in areas with worse air pollution.

(The theme song changes a little, becoming lower, growl-ier, with horns playing every few beats. In the background, someone coughs–oh no, air pollution!)

Lulu: Huh. So, like, you wouldn't even need some fancy device.

Ashley: Right!

Lulu: You could just go walk around in a forest.

Ashley: Yes!

Lulu: And see: It is healthy here.

Ashley: Yeah!

(We’re back in the 1960s musically. It’s Adam West’s Batman, but with lichen.)

Lulu: It is dangerous here.

Ashley: Yeah!

Lulu: Neat!. They are like these understated superheroes –

(Pfoo-pfoo-pfoo!)

Lulu: –That can do all kinds of things that almost no plant or animal on Earth can do.

(A grand superhero detective finale, and the music is gone!)

Lulu: Which got me wondering …

[To Ashley.] How are they able, like … What do you think the source of their superpower is? Like, just the fact that they [A breath.] can last so long? They can live on sand …

Ashley: Yeah.

Lulu: … They can live after lava, they can live in the air, they can live under snow …? Like, what is their power? Where does it come from?

Ashley: Um, well …

(New synthesizer music starts. It’s almost time for the break!)

Lulu: Ashley has the answer. And she’ll tell us! Right after a short break.

(The break. After commercials, the podcast returns with the crunching of feet in snow. A plucked cello melody accompanies the footfalls.)

Lulu: Terrestrials … is back.

Ashley: We are in Maine.

Lulu: And we …

Ashley: Of the Northwoods.

Lulu: Are on a hunt.

Ashley: And it's just basically snowy everywhere.

Lulu: A lichen hunt.

Ashley: Okay.

Lulu: With artist Ashley Eliza Williams.

Ashley: So I'm crouching down [Footsteps stop.] and I'm gonna dig into the snow [Digging starts.] and see if I can find some lichens.

Lulu: We’ve just come across some boulders covered in about six inches of snow.

Ashley: (While brushing away snow.) Alright, I'm dusting the snow off the surface.

Lulu: And, peeking out from under the white fluffy snow …

(Shiny new lichen music sparkles. It’s magic!)

Ashley: I see a lichen!

Extremely bright, kind of tangerine-colored lichens. And it's living under here–under the snow.

Lulu: So the question we left off with was: “How?” [Laughingly.] How is lichen so boss? How can it survive in such extreme places, like under this snow where very few other things can live?

(The sparkles drift away. A stringed instrument bounces a melody up and down over the sound of wind, or maybe cars, outside.)

Lulu: And get ready, because the answer might scramble your brain a bit–might shatter a hard line you thought existed in nature. Because remember how Ashley couldn’t tell at first if lichen were plants or mushrooms? Well, it turns out …

Ashley: They're not a plant. And they're not a mushroom.

Lulu: They're a plant [Mysterious UFO sound effects float up into the atmosphere.] AND a mushroom.

Ashley: It's a plant and a fungi together.

Distorted Voice: Together … !

Lulu: Lichen is what's called a composite organism. One organism, made up of two–or more!–species. So when Ashley looks close at one splotch of lichen growing off of a rock, the thing she is looking at? It's not one thing!

Ashley: It's actually not an organism, it's a relationship.

Lulu: Wait, the matter that we're seeing, these wild shapes and cups and antlers … Like, that is a relationship in physical form?

Alma: Yes!

(Drip-drip-drop goes the music as it comes to a halt.)

Lulu: It's a strange idea. But here's what she means. When you look at lichen under a microscope, it looks a little like a hug. The mushroom–or the fungi–is giving a big hug, totally surrounding the plant part called algae.

Ashley: They're kind of fitting into each other like puzzle pieces.

(As Lulu talks, a xylophone plays softly underneath.)

Lulu: What goes on in this hug allows lichen to do incredible things because the fungus gives the lichen fungi powers–it can sip water from the air, and minerals from the soil and provide shelter for that soft algae center.

Ashley: The fungus kinda protects the algae.

Lulu: And the algae … Well, that gives the lichen plant powers. That lets it do the incredible, magical-seeming trick of using sunlight to turn air …

Ashley: … Into sugar.

(Lulu says “Tada”! as a tiny xylophone does a quick run of notes.)

Lulu: And that hug is the secret to how lichen can handle so many extreme environments: Arctic tundra, deserts, lava fields, even air itself. Lichen can find a way to get the food and strength it needs because of the multiple species [Emphasizing each word.] that it is.

Ashley: They're a community!

Lulu: … Which was such a strange idea.

Ashley: To be a bunch of different beings all squished together …

Lulu: That when scientists first suggested that's what was going on inside lichen …

(The music fades out.)

Lulu: People just didn't believe it.

Ashley: It totally upended everything we know about what we think of as an organism.

Lulu: Huh.

(A moment of quiet.)

Lulu: This was back in 1869, about a decade after Charles Darwin published his big book, On the Origin of Species, which talked about how creatures compete with one another to survive. And many people took that to mean that to succeed at life you had to compete.

(Dramatic music plays, as if we are about to play the world’s biggest game of biology football.)

Songbud Alan as “Coach Darwin”: (Whistles.) It's a dog-eat-dog world out there! Do you want to win?

Songbud Alan as “Teammate”: (Unconvincingly.) Uh, yeah?

“Coach Darwin”: I said, do you want to win?

“Teammate”: Yeah!

(Others chime in.)

A Chorus of “Teammates”: Woo! Survival of the fittest! Survival of the fittest!

“Coach Darwin”: Now get out there and crush the competition!

(The “team” cheers, claps, and chants excitedly.)

“Teammate”: Yeah!

Lulu: And then along comes this scientist who said, “Wait! Look at what’s going on inside lichen! These two different species are …”

(The music slumps to a slow halt.)

Ashley: … Working together.

(Soft, thoughtful music lays down a bed of sound.)

Lulu: It seemed bonkers to a lot of scientists at first. But the more they looked under microscopes at lichen, the more they saw the truth inside: These two different species working together to become one organism.

They even had to invent a whole new word to describe it.

Ashley: The word symbiosis actually came from scientists studying lichens.

Lulu: “Sym,” meaning “together,” and “bio,” meaning “life”–working together to live!

Distorted Voice: Symbiosis.

Lulu: And what is wild is that that hug inside of lichen? Well, if you zoom out you can see how it extends to all kinds of creatures outside of it.

In the Arctic, for example, because lichen can stay alive in the freezing snow throughout the winter, then so can caribou and reindeer nibbling up lichen until spring.

(Crunchy snow and crunching animals make almost the same sound on top of each other.)

Lulu: Or in the deserts of Libya, lichen growing on hot rocks, helps sheep survive through dry spells.

(Sheep bleat, a “baa” here and a “baa” there – everywhere a “baa, baa”!)

Lulu: Or on the snowy foothills near Mount Everest, there is somebody else finding crucial nourishment from lichen.

Prashanta Kanal: (Searching.) I'm on page 40 … 42.

Lulu: This is Prashant Kanal flipping through a cookbook he wrote of recipes from Nepal, where he lives.

Prashanta:  … Garlic cloves, ginger ...

(Lulu hums, thinking about how it might taste and smell already.)

Prashanta: One onion. And a handful of lichen.

(A game show buzzer goes off – lichen food, for people! Then, soft, arpeggiated notes bounce up and down for a gentle background sound.)

Lulu: This is a recipe for a lichen curry called the yangben faksa.

Now, some lichen is poisonous, so don’t go around tasting it–but!–Prashanta explained that in the eastern region of Nepal there grows a lichen that is totally safe to eat. And in the generations that the Limbu people have been living on those often-snowy hillsides, lichen became an essential food.

Prashanta: Yeah. yeah.

Lulu: And a tasty one too.

Prashanta: I've never seen anyone who has tried lichen and they didn't like it.

Lulu: Everyone is likin’ lichen? (Already laughing at her joke – the two words sound the same out loud!)

Prashanta: (Laughing a little, but not as into it.) That's a good one.

Lulu: Sorry.

Prashanta: Yeah.

Lulu: (Still laughing gently.) Okay!

Lulu: When Prashanta learned that lichen helped his ancestors … Well, it changed how the lichen curry tasted to him.

Prashanta: Food tastes better if you know the–the history. It changes the experience and somehow the food becomes even tastier.

(The music slowly fades out as Lulu talks.)

Lulu: And back to our shy artist Ashley. When she learned that lichen was actually a community of species helping one another, it made her question something that she had believed for a long time.

Ashley: I, you know, for a long time thought I maybe didn't need people. (Laughs shyly.)

Lulu: She had the woods, the quiet. But looking closely at lichen started to change her.

(Emotional, low, slow music kicks up.)

Ashley: The fact that lichens are stronger because they're a community, um, is something that's really stayed with me. And as I've gotten older, I realize that I very much need people. I–I very much need a community.

Lulu: Scary as crowds can be, she started to believe that there could be people inside them who could support her, inspire her, make her laugh … or, you know, help her survive.

Ashley: Lichens show us that we need–that we need each other.

Lulu: So she started pushing through her fears and attending concerts, lectures by scientists, art openings, and even [Pausing briefly for suspense.] going to the grocery store when it was busy, instead of 6 AM when no one would be there.

Ashley: (Laughing and reflecting.) Yeah!

Lulu: And even though it often terrified her to do these things …

Ashley: I have met some of the most fascinating people [Laughs.] on the planet.

Lulu: Including a certain someone named …

Ashley: Uh, Jason!

Lulu: A scientist with spiky black hair and kind brown eyes. And one spring day, he asked Ashley if she wanted to go on a date.

Lulu: Were you n-nervous?

Ashley: Oh my goodness. I was incredibly shy with him.

Lulu: But Jason didn't seem to mind that Ashley was quiet.

They went to an art museum and stood shoulder to shoulder.

Ashley: Looking quietly …

Lulu: … And carefully at all kinds of art.

Ashley: And he was able to do that. And I was really impressed by that.

(The music fades down.)

Lulu: She was also impressed by what kind of science he did.

Ashley: One of the things that drew me to him is that he studies shy galaxies.

Lulu: Shy galaxies? Like sp–like in outer space? There are … ?

(Twinkling stars intertwine with a repeated drumbeat.)

Ashley: Yes.

Lulu: What does that mean?

Ashley: So when you think of a galaxy, you might think of these, you know, galaxies with bright spiral arms.

Lulu: (The two talk over each other.) Flashing, a lot's going on, they're showy? Okay! They're flashy.

Ashley: (Enthusiastically.) Yeah!

Lulu: Yeah, yeah. Literally flashy. Okay.

Ashley: Yes! [Chuckles lightly.] But he is interested in the galaxies that not many people care about. The little, quiet galaxies that don't make very much light.

(A keyboard melody draws us out into space.)

Lulu: In other words …

Ashley: They're kind of like the lichen of space.

Lulu: The lichen of space!

Ashley: Yeah, he's looking at these little smudges in the sky that are really easy to overlook …

(ZAP! goes a sound almost like teleportation across the vast darkness of space.)

Ashley: … While I'm kind of crouched down on the ground looking at these tiny little lichens that are also overlooked. And I think that's really romantic.

(The music wraps up as one more teleportation ZAP! rings out.)

Lulu: (Ashley laughs softly and sweetly.) Aww. I do too. Well here’s to lichens–of all kinds.

(Drums! Guitar feedback! Could it be time for another Songbud moment?)

Lulu: Oh no!! Songbud’s got a famous punk star with him: Laura Jane Grace!

Laura Jane Grace: Woo!

Lulu: … And they’ve both got electric guitars.

Songbud Alan as “Fungus”: Whether you're Algae,

Laura Jane Grace as “Algae”: Or you're Fungus,

Both: We're gonna make a fuzzy ruckus!

Fungus: I'm not likin’ what you're likin’.

Algae: And you're likin’ what I don't. ‘Cause if I'm Algae,

Fungus: And I'm Fungus,

Both: We're gonna make a fuzzy ruckus!

Fungus: I eat rocks!

Algae: I photosynthesize!

Fungus: It’s hard to believe,

Algae: But you’re growing on me.

(Fungus says “Oh!” and laughs.)

Both: The coldest cold, the hottest sun, whatever anybody throws at us,

[A spoken chorus.] Oh, oh, we grow together better than alone.

Oh, oh, we grow together better than alone.

[Singing.] We thrive united, not apart.

We face the day together, all as one.

[The spoken chorus again.] Oh, oh, we grow together better than alone.

Oh, oh, we grow together better than alone.

[Singing.] We found our own way to play the game, to change the rules, and stay alive!

We don't survive without each one.

Algae: I’ll drink the wind, you eat the sun.

Both: A culture all our own.

We're likin’ this alliance that we've grown!

Algae: Whether you're Algae,

Fungus: Or you're Fungus,

Algae: We're gonna make a fuzzy ruckus.

Both: Together we are stronger than alone.

Lulu: Alan Goffinski and Laura Jane Grace, everybody.

Laura Jane: Woo, yeah!

(A tambourine jingles.)

Lulu: And that is it. That is the end of Terrestrials. There's nothing else cool about to happen.

(Suddenly, out of nowhere, trumpets … well, uh, trumpet! It’s The Badgers!)

Lulu: (Whispered.) What's that?

Badger #1: Excuse me, I have a question.

Badger #2: Me too.

Badger #3: Me three.

Badger #4: Me four.

Lulu: (Whispered, but somehow loudly.) The Badgers.

(The Badgers theme song plays underneath the questions.)

Lulu: Listeners with badgering questions for the expert. Are you ready?

Ashley: Yes!

Alma: I'm Alma, and I'm six and I’m almost turning seven.

Are all lichens okay to eat, or–or are some dangerous?

Ashley: Okay, so, they're eaten in all kinds of different cultures, including–

Lulu: –Nepal, as we already learned, and also–

Ashley: –In India, where they're in a popular spice called garam masala.

Lulu: (Gasps.) Garam masala! I have that in my spice rack right now! So there’s–there’s lichen in my kitchen right now.

Ashley: Yeah!

Lulu: But reminder: Many in the wild are poisonous! So don’t go lickin’ lichen!

Rosalind Chao: Hi, my name is Rosalind Chao. I'm an actor from Star Trek. Could lichens survive on the moon?

Ashley: They’ve actually put lichens into space.

Lulu: Wait, like, shot ‘em up in a rocket ship?

Ashley: Yes! Yes! They–they did! They  …

Lulu: And then, like, let ‘em out the door?

(Whoosh! The lichens get sucked out of the spaceship!)

Ashley: Yes! And they go dormant, out in outer space. But, when they bring them back to Earth, they can revive them and they're still alive.

Lulu: We could not do that.

Ashley: No, we could not do that. And very few other beings on Earth could do that.

But lichens can do that.

Niran: Hi my name is Niran. I’m 7 years old. My question is: Are lichen half-dead creatures?

Ashley: Nope. So they're actually double-alive [Lulu laughs.] because they are, um, uh, a fungus and an algae. And actually maybe triple-alive because they're also bacteria.

(The Badgers theme song gets quiet, then fades out. In its place: Bubbles in space! Slow, gentle, mysterious, they float around a piano melody.)

Lulu: Wow. So wait, the community just went from two to maybe three, maybe four, maybe five, and beyond?

Ashley: Every time a new paper comes out–or more information comes out–about lichens, we're learning that they're made of more beings.

Lulu: Huh.

Ashley: (Laughingly.) So, the community just keeps getting bigger and more complex.

Lulu: All right. Gonna leave it there. But one last question! A question for you, listener. If you had to team up with another species, which one would it be? Let us know your answer. Shoot us an email or a drawing at …

Songbud Alan and Lulu: (Singing over barking dogs, xylophones, bubbles, and autotune.) terrestrials@wnyc.org

Lulu: (Giggles lovingly.) Terrestrials was created by me, Lulu Miller, with WNYC Studios.

This episode was produced by Brenna Farrel, Mira Burt-Wintonick, Alan Goffinski, Tanya Chawla, Ana González, Sarah Sandbach, Joe Plourde, Valentina Powers and me.

Fact-checking by Diane Kelly.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation.

[Goofily.] Thank youuu!

Also, huge shout out to our advisors for this season of Terrestrials: Ana Luz Porzecanski, Princess Johnson, Anil Lewis, Tara Welty, Liza Steinberg-Demby, Andy J. Pizza, Sophie MIller, and Dominique Shabazz. [Emphatically.] We could not have made this without you!

Special thanks to Siya Sharma-Gaines, Niran Bhatt Scharpf, Scott LaGreca, Sarita Bhatt – and you, for listening!

If you like our strange little show about the Earth and the creatures on it with the occasional singing, uhh, please rate and review us and share with your friends! It–it really does make a huge difference.

See you in a couple spins of this dirty, old planet of ours.

(The bubbles in space are back in full force, and as the episode drifts into the stars, so do we. That’s all for this episode!)

Since the release of this podcast, artist Ash Eliza Williams goes by Ash and uses they/them pronouns.

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Alan Goffinski (he/him), is an arts administrator, songwriter, and producer from Charlottesville VA. He is the former Executive Director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative and the Charlottesville Mural Project—two city-wide organizations that utilize art and culture as a way for people to better understand themselves, each other, and the world around them. He is also a founding member of the Indianapolis-based whimsical performing arts collective Know No Stranger which has been described as “Sesame Street but for adults... but also for kids.” He produced the experimental music radio program Telemetry in partnership with the University of Virginia. Early in his career, Alan spent years making music in a nationally touring indie-punk band (signed to Victory Records) prior to becoming a social worker specializing in early childhood development. He began making kid’s music under the moniker Little Skunks as a fun way to be a part of the day-to-day lives of his nieces and nephew.

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Ana is an audio producer and host who came to WNYC in 2021 to work on Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials. Before that, she produced and hosted Mosaic, a show about immigration experiences from Rhode Island Public Radio. In a former life, she played jazz bass and thinks about everything in terms of rhythm, conversation, and harmony.

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Mira Burt-Wintonick (she/her) -- For the past 20 years, Mira’s been creating, story editing and sound designing various shows. Her work often explores grief and complex emotional landscapes (Love Me, Sorry About The Kid, Welcome to Paradise) but she’s also made some absurd comedy podcasts (WireTap, PenPals). She recently directed Wintopia, a feature documentary film about her late filmmaking father, Peter Wintonick, and his search for Utopia.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].bio
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

Her book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, is an international bestseller, translated into 11 languages. It was chosen as a Best Book by The Smithsonian, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, Brainpickings, The Washington Post and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She has also won honors from The National Academy of Sciences, the Associated Press, the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and most recently an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Swarthmore College.

She reports on a range of scientific topics with a special interest in disability, mental illness, and ecology. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She serves as a Contributing Advisor to nature magazine Orion and she was the co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia—a radio show about psychology, emotion, and human behavior. She recently published her debut children’s book, Trucky Roads, about trucks and, you’ll never guess this… roads. She lives in the Chicago area with her wife and two sons.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].lede
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].about.body
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].about.people[].image.alt-text
Producer Sarah Qari, smiling and standing proudly in the foreground of a field of sunflowers.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].description
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].tease
Investigating a strange world.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].bio
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

Her book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, is an international bestseller, translated into 11 languages. It was chosen as a Best Book by The Smithsonian, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, Brainpickings, The Washington Post and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She has also won honors from The National Academy of Sciences, the Associated Press, the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and most recently an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Swarthmore College.

She reports on a range of scientific topics with a special interest in disability, mental illness, and ecology. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She serves as a Contributing Advisor to nature magazine Orion and she was the co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia—a radio show about psychology, emotion, and human behavior. She recently published her debut children’s book, Trucky Roads, about trucks and, you’ll never guess this… roads. She lives in the Chicago area with her wife and two sons.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].lede
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].about.body
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].about.people[].image.alt-text
Producer Sarah Qari, smiling and standing proudly in the foreground of a field of sunflowers.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].description
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].tease
Investigating a strange world.

# included[].attributes.body
Have you ever seen an island on a lake? On an island? On a lake? On another island? Josh Calder has. Working in a dusty room of a library, he first saw one on a map, and has been fascinated with these “recursive islands” ever since. Songbud Alan Goffinski takes us on a wild journey into these secret bullseyes hiding all over planet Earth. We learn from ecologist Elba Montes why recursive islands breed species found nowhere else on Earth, and thus are hotbeds of evolution.

Check out Josh Calder’s website for more island information and trivia.

Check out Timbre, the wonderful musician featured in this episode.

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC studios. This episode was reported, produced, and features original music composed by Alan Goffinski. Our team includes Alan, Mira Burt-Wintonick, Ana González, Tanya Chawla, Sarah Sandbach, Valentina Powers and Joe Plourde. Fact checking by Natalie Middleton.

Special thanks this episode to kid advisors Lola and Evie Young, and to Julie Abodeely, Sarita Bhatt, Shannon Webb-Campbell, Jae Johnson, Jeremy Stern. And thanks to the musician Timbre for plucking her harp and singing along to this episode.

Our advisors are Ana Luz Porzecanski, Andy J. Pizza, Anil Lewis, Dominique Shabazz, Liza Demby, Princess Daazhraii Johnson and Tara Welty.

Learn more about storytellers, listen to music, and dig deeper into the stories you hear on Terrestrials with activities you can do at home or in the classroom on our website,

Terrestrialspodcast.org

Badger us on social media: @radiolab  and #TerrestrialsPodcast or by emailing us at terrestrials@wnyc.org

Sign up for our NEWSLETTER for trivia, resources, music, fun facts, worksheets, and much more at terrestrialspodcast.org.

Visit the Terrestrials website to learn more about the show, meet our team, listen to the songs and discover fun activities, drawing prompts, music how-tos and games that educators, parents and families might enjoy together.

If you’d like to “badger” a future expert, suggest story ideas or feedback, email us at terrestrials@wnyc.org.

Listen to just the songs from Terrestrials.

Sign up for Radiolab’s newsletter! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up here.

Radiolab for Kids and Terrestrials are supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, X and Facebook @radiolab.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

# included[].attributes.headers.brand.logo-image.alt-text
Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

# included[].attributes.headers.links[].title
Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

# included[].attributes.show-title
Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

# included[].attributes.series[].about.body
Terrestrials is a show for people of all ages that explores the strangeness that exists right here on Earth. In each episode, host Lulu Miller (co-host of Radiolab) will introduce you to a creature or earthly phenomenon that will defy your expectations of how nature is supposed to work. Along the way, you'll encounter a chorus of experts, including scientists, surfers, hip hop artists and…a "Songbud" named Alan (indie punk musician Alan Goffinski) who creates original songs for key moments of confusion, discovery or awe. New episodes drop Thursdays. Listen in with your whole family. Or all alone.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

LISTEN TO TERRESTRIALS  | SUPPORT TERRESTRIALS | TERRESTRIALS WANTS YOUR FEEDBACK! | PRESS INQUIRIES  | BECOME A SPONSOR | CONTACT US

# included[].attributes.series[].tease
A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

# included[].attributes.series[].logo-image.alt-text
Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

# included[].attributes.tease
Have you ever seen an island on a lake? On an island? On a lake? On another island? Josh Calder has. Working in a dusty room of a library, he first saw one on a map, and has been fasc...

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The Bullseye: Treasure Hunt to Recursive Islands

# included[].attributes.transcript
Lulu Miller: Three, two, one.

Songbud Alan Goffinski: Imagine you are surrounded by water …

(The podcast dives deep down underwater all around you.)

Lulu: Which is surrounded by land …

Songbud Alan: Which is surrounded by water …

Lulu: Which is surrounded by land …

Songbud Alan: Which is surrounded by, you guessed it, water …

Lulu: Which is surrounded by land …

(Songbud Alan and Lulu keep repeating back and forth, sounding more and more like chipmunks until it is impossible to tell what they are saying! A drop of water falls right in the middle of all the land, interrupting them.)

Lulu: You have become …

Songbud Alan: … A recursive island.

(Bubbles of sound float up around you, electric and shimmering.)

Lulu: Alright, now this is where I make you guess the theme song. I have a hunch you're gonna get it.

Songbud Alan: (Singing the theme song.) Terrestrials, Terrestrials! We are not the worst, we are the …

Songbud Alan: (Finishing his own song.) Uhh, Bestrials … ?

Songbud Alan: (Singing.) Bestrials!

Lulu: Terrestrials is a show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth and sometimes break out into song. I am your host, Lulu Miller, joined as always by my song bud–

Songbud Alan: (Jumping in, with autotune.) Ahoy there!

Lulu: Alan.

Songbud Alan: (Still with autotune.) Psyched for recursive islands!

Lulu: This season we are looking at creatures that are usually …

Songbud Alan and Lulu: (Together.) Overlooked! [A beat.] Shh!

Lulu: Okay! So, Alan, first things first: What the rock is a recursive island? (Alan laughs.)

Songbud Alan: Okay, so “recursive” just means repeating over and over and over and over and over and over again.

Lulu: Okay.

Songbud Alan: Island means … Well, island.

Lulu: Okay, got that. Okay, okay. So a repeating island.

Songbud Alan: Exactly. Meaning it's:

Songbud Alan: (Singing the unofficial theme song of this episode with autotune that gets more and more intense with each phrase.) An island! On an island! On an island! In the ocean!

Lulu: (Laughing.) Okay!

Songbud Alan: And not only do these things look cool–I mean, from outer space, one would look like a bullseye–

(Bullseye! An arrow thunks right into an island target)

Lulu: Woah, right!

Songbud Alan: –They are ecologically almost magical, because they can grow strange plants and animals found nowhere else on earth.

Lulu: Ooh! Alright, well, we’re doing things a little differently today because you fell in love so much with these strange powerful little bullseyes [Chuckle.] called recursive islands–

Songbud Alan: Mhm.

Lulu: –That I’m backin’ away from the mic, and you’re gonna take us on a journey to visit some of them!

Songbud Alan: Right! And we’re gonna kick things off with the guy who made me fall in love with recursive islands: Josh Calder.

(Upbeat music moves slowly but methodically, a funky drum beat underneath ringing, echoing synthesizers.)

Josh Calder: This is Josh.

Songbud Alan: As a kid, he was super into collecting toy cars and action figures, but in college he developed … a new hobby.

Josh: The polite term is “hobby.” The less polite term is “obsession.” (Laughs.)

Songbud Alan: Back then, he had a job working in a special dark and dusty part of the library known as the map room.

Josh: I think some librarian sent me down there. So I was looking at thousands of maps.

Songbud Alan: And his job was to organize all these maps.

(A map opens under the watchful eye of a librarian. As Songbud Alan narrates, each phrase comes to life with sound.)

Songbud Alan: So as he'd smooth them out on these huge tables, he would let his finger run across the green mountains, [Wind rustles through the mountains and over the map.] the blue lakes … [The whooshing of a wave rolling onto the shore.] And one day, he did a double take–emphasis on “double.”

Josh: I just noticed on some map, “Oh, look, there's an island nicely contained within another island!”

Songbud Alan: (Once again singing the episode’s theme.) An island! In a lake, on an island, in the ocean!

Songbud Alan: His recursive island obsession was born.

(Persistent, anxious music follows Josh’s fascination.)

Josh: I began to think, “Well, where else are there?” (Josh fades under.)

Songbud Alan: He begins scanning maps of the ocean, looking for little bullseyes.

Songbud Alan: Goat Island in Lake Erie, Wāwāhi Waka island in Aoteroa New Zealand …

Songbud Alan: Islands nestled in lakes on islands.

Songbud Alan: (Overlapping.) Isla Cabritos … Okishima Island, Japan …

Songbud Alan: And one day, he notices something on the island of Luzon in the Philippines.

(The music fades out to make way for the episode’s unofficial theme!)

Songbud Alan: (Singing, getting more layered with each level.) An island! In a volcano crater lake! On an island! In a lake! On an island! In the ocean!

(Hip-hop music picks up.)

Songbud Alan: It was a triple bullseye! The lake inside the volcano crater had an island inside of it named Vulcan Point. Our buddy Josh was enchanted.

(The music returns to the light, airy music from before.

Josh: Take a look at that. That is a lovely one.

Songbud Alan: And he just kept searching for more triple island bullseyes, spending hours and hours combing through hundreds of pages of maps.

(Another map crinkles as Josh turns to a new page. The music becomes slow and heavy, like molasses.)

Songbud Alan: Eventually, Josh's eyes ventured to the easternmost point of Canada.

Josh: I noticed there was quite a large island on an island in Newfoundland.

Songbud Alan: Newfoundland is an island itself. A big one. And it’s dotted with lakes like Swiss cheese. And right there, in one of those lakes, there was a triple bullseye island that–on Josh’s map, anyway–had no label.

Songbud Alan: (Singing the unofficial episode theme song.) An unlabeled island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island in the ocean.

Josh: (Laughs.) Yeah.

(The music picks the pace back up, excited, moving quickly now–it has somewhere to be!)

Songbud Alan: And to Josh’s eye, it looked even bigger than the more famous triple island in the volcano. But he wasn’t sure, so …

Josh: I was just like, “I think I'll just go there.”

Songbud Alan: Determined to lay eyes on the island, young Josh made his plans for a journey to the Great North.

Josh: I got on a bus and a train and a ferry and took a small inflatable boat in a backpack to Grand Lake in Newfoundland and inflated it and–

(A paddle hits the water.)

Songbud Alan: –Paddled out toward that next ring in the bullseye–

Josh: –Then hiked for a couple of days.

(Josh’s shoes crunch through his imagination, remembering his adventure.)

Songbud Alan: … Scanning for wildlife …

Josh: Are there polar bears that far inland that will eat me?

Songbud Alan: As he hiked through deep wilderness …

(More sounds of Josh hiking.)

Josh: I was going up a creek, and I slipped and fell with my 60-pound pack and my camera filled up with water.

(Luminous music, like light filtering through deep blue water, begins to play.)

Songbud Alan: And eventually he came to the next ring of water, and saw beyond it a tiny island.

(A beat.)

Songbud Alan: He blew up his little inflatable boat and he began to paddle.

Josh: (Sounding distant, echo-y.) I rode out there and set up my tent.

Songbud Alan: And as his hands touched the dirt, of what he was now sure was the center of a triple bullseye, he realized that on that night …

Josh: (Still far away.) I was the only person on the triple island.

Songbud Alan: In his tent, completely alone, Josh was surrounded by the wonder of a place like this. [Wind meanders around as Alan continues to narrate.] The wind seemed to carry whispers of all the people who had been drawn to these special islands long before Josh. [A bird chirps.]

Of the Beothuk, and the Mi’kMaq, who have fished, hunted, and cherished this very land for centuries, calling Newfoundland “Ktaqmkuk,” meaning “across the waters”.

Or beyond them, in Japan, where a bullseye island called Chikubu is said to be home to gods who grant wishes.

Or in Aoteroa/New Zealand–where a bullseye called Mokoia Island is believed to have enchanted soil.

(Music and wind and more birds chirping.)

Songbud Alan: As Josh trundled off to dream that night, alone beneath the bright stars of the subarctic sky, he was now sure that the largest triple island was not inside that far-off volcano, but likely right there.

(The wind suddenly vanishes, as if sucked up in a vacuum. The music changes tone again, becoming lower, slower, reflective.)

Lulu: When we return, we are gonna hear from someone who knows how sacred these islands are–not just to people–but to plants and animals all over the planet.

Songbud Alan: Like snakes!

Lulu: What?

Songbud Alan: (Imitating a hissing snake, with a rattle, too.) Ssssssssstick with us!

Lulu: (sounding scared, but trying to play along.) Okay.

(A rattlesnake break!)

Lulu: (Talking over a tone that indicates we are back from break.) Terrestrials is back! I’m Lulu, here with Alan, and I thought we were doing an episode about recursive islands, but before the break you just told me we’ve gotta hear something about snakes?

Songbud Alan: Yep!

(Snakes!)

Songbud Alan: So, picture, if you will, a scientist named Elba Montes.

Elba Montes: Hi!

Lulu: Okay.

Songbud Alan: She’s crouching down in some grasses.

Elba: From the island of Ibiza.

Songbud Alan: Near Spain. [A beat. A box clacks as Elba touches it.] She’s reaching her hand into a small wooden box–a trap–and pulling out two brown and black spotted snakes.

(Another click as the wooden box opens.)

Songbud Alan: Oh my goodness! These snakes do not look happy. (Elba laughs.)

Songbud Alan: Elba studies animals that live on islands, like these rather lively horseshoe whip snakes.

Songbud Alan: One of them is just swinging its head around back and forth, is it–is it trying to bite you?

Elba: (Laughs.) Yeah.

Songbud Alan: Did it get you?

Elba: Yeah, it bit me several times.

Songbud Alan: And you’re just, like, not even flinching! (Elba laughs in response.)

(High-pitched drones play softly in the background, like UFOs hovering just outside of Earth’s orbit, as fascinated by islands as we are.)

Songbud Alan: Because she knows this one’s not venomous, and cool creatures like these are why she is here! It turns out islands are really good at making strange lifeforms–brightly colored snakes.

Elba: Really beautiful!

Songbud Alan: And long-beaked birds that exist nowhere else on earth.

Elba: Islands are less than 7% of land on the planet. However, 20% of the species of the world are on islands.

Songbud Alan: Oh, wow.

Elba: And also, 50% of all endangered species are on islands.

Songbud Alan: Elba explained that because islands are cut off from the mainland, that makes them hotspots for evolution to make weird things happen: plants and animals growing and shrinking and sprouting new colors or textures, in ways that are perfectly suited to their little island habitats.

Elba: That’s right.

Songbud Alan: And because recursive islands are even more cut off …

Elba: They are like biodiversity treasures.

Recursive islands are even more unique, yeah, and special. You can find amazing features in animals and plants that have evolved on islands. Um, for example …

Songbud Alan: She told me about some fascinating species that could only be found on islands.

(The music changes tone to a jazzy beat, drums and a shaker moving back and forth, back and forth, lending a comic undertone to their conversation.)

Elba: Okay, so, a giant bird on New Zealand that was 12 feet tall.

Songbud Alan: Wow. That's bigger than Big Bird himself!

Elba: Also, a giant rabbit on the Balearic Islands that weighed 26 pounds.

Songbud Alan: 26 pounds! That's the Easter Bunny! (Elba laughs at the thought.)

Songbud Alan: And Elba says, our volcano island with the lake around it?

Elba: We can find the world’s only sardine that can live in–in freshwater.

Songbud Alan: Ooh, tasty! I wonder if those canned fish would be less salty.

Elba: Right. [She laughs, and so does he.] In some islands of Italy there was a dwarf elephant.

Songbud Alan: An elephant shorter than me?!

Elba: On Mediterranean islands, a dwarf hippopotamus!

Songbud Alan: This hippo’s barely up to my waist!

Elba: Yeah. Right.

Songbud Alan: Wow. I had no idea. How have I never heard of a dwarf hippopotamus? It is the cutest thing to me.

Elba: Because–no, because they are extinct.

Songbud Alan: Oh my gosh.

(No more shakers–the music spreads out, slows down, takes in the gravity of these incredible animals, now extinct.)

Elba: Yeah. When the humans arrived to those islands, they, um, ate them, or killed them, and they died.

Songbud Alan: That's tragic.

Elba: Yeah, it's really tragic.

Songbud Alan: Of course not all humans hunt animals to extinction. Elba explained that there have been many communities–many of them indigenous to islands–who have figured out how to co-exist with the rare creatures that surround them. And their techniques–and their voices–need more attention.

Elba: Yeah, for sure. That's the goal of studying islands, to have more knowledge about them so we can protect them better.

Songbud Alan: I mean, it sounds like you're saying we need to protect these places because the land on islands–and especially recursive islands–really is, like, sacred, almost, for plants or animals. Like, it makes special things.

Elba: Yeah. They are really a–a treasure.

Songbud Alan: (Singing slowly.) Evolutionary science. It’s the magic of the islands. (Songbud Alan’s voice echoes, pitching down each time.as he and Elba laugh.)

Songbud Alan: So back to young Josh. He returned home from his big trek to Canada where he’d set foot on what he thought could be the world’s biggest triple recursive island! But he had a hard time finding anyone who cared. Because, remember, this story took place long ago, before the internet.

(The sounds of dial-up internet play: A gritty back-and-forth of discordant electricity. After a moment, new music enters, the gentle muzak of a community forum.)

Songbud Alan: So Josh didn’t know about people like Elba who loved islands as much as he did! In fact, back then, there weren’t any websites about islands … until, well, Josh made one.

Josh: My website was the very first for, like, island trivia.

Songbud Alan: Suddenly Josh has a digital bridge from his own little metaphorical island to island lovers all over the world. He could share his discoveries with people who shared his interest, and, even better, he could learn from them–about the science of recursive islands, and about all the people who were psyched about recursive islands long before Josh.

He learned from them about secluded bullseye islands with temples, unique geography, cool creatures–islands he could go to, set foot on!

Josh: I think I’m officially around 608.

Songbud Alan: (Laughing, impressed and a little surprised.) Woah.

(The song goes quiet, then turns to a

Songbud Alan: And even though his wife, and kids, and friends, and coworkers, and neighbors don’t completely get his island obsession, Josh never turned away from the thrill of searching for little bullseyes–little doorways to worlds full of biological treasures. And one day, after, who knows, maybe thousands of hours of squinting at maps …

Josh: Huh.

Songbud Alan: He noticed, even farther north in Canada …

Josh: Huh!

Songbud Alan: (Picking back up the episode’s unofficial theme song.) In the frigid waters of the Arctic Ocean, on Kitlineq Island, in a lake, on a smaller island, in an even smaller lake, there's another unlabelled island!

Songbud Alan: (Chuckles.) It's still fun.

And at four acres–just bigger than two soccer fields–this island would take the crown as the biggest known triple island. Among the island enthusiasts, Josh, with his eagle eyes and eagerness to share the location and layered stories of these islands … He was a LEGEND! Until …

Jeopardy! Announcer: This is Jeopardy!

Songbud Alan: Here comes drama!

Jeopardy! Announcer: Here are today's contestants. A software engineer from Salt Lake City, Utah: Ken Jennings. (Ken’s name echoes over and over, the start of a nightmare.)

Songbud Alan: A clean-cut trivia icon with a winning smile, Ken Jennings was unstoppable with the buzzer on the quiz game show, Jeopardy!

He raked in millions in prize money and eventually became the show’s new host.

Jeopardy! Announcer: Here is the host of Jeopardy!, Ken Jennings!

(A light-hearted spin on the Jeopardy! theme music plays as Songbud Alan continues.)

Songbud Alan: What does this have to do with recursive islands? Well …
One area of trivia that Ken was particularly good at was geography trivia. And back in 2012, five years after Josh shared his post about the world’s largest triple island (hiding in Canada), Ken published an article about the location of the same island. An article titled, “Ken Jennings Finds One More Thing Canada Has That No One Else Does.”

Josh: But, uh, he didn't find it.

(Dun dun dun!!)

Songbud Alan: (Feigning outrage.) Ken, you scoundrel! And while Ken told us he never meant to suggest he, like, “found it”-found it …

Josh: Because it's more fun to say Ken Jennings discovered it, it became attributed widely to him.

Songbud Alan: Josh doesn't seem to hold much of a grudge against Ken. After all, he knows this island isn't his island. This corner of the world has long been appreciated and honored by the people who call it home–who’ve lived there for generations.

But after all this time watching Ken bask in the spotlight for getting people excited about what possibly is the biggest triple bullseye on the planet …

Josh: I was like, “This is a stupid, tiny thing, but it's my stupid, tiny thing!” (He chuckles.)

Songbud Alan: Josh got to work, doing what Josh does so well.

Josh: I was like, “Eh, I'll just find a bigger one.”

Songbud Alan: So off he went! Scouring maps, all alone, hour after hour, year after year, for seven years, until–huh!–he saw it.

Songbud Alan: (Singing the unofficial theme song anew.) In the North Atlantic Ocean. On Baffin Island. In Nettling Lake. On an unlabelled island. He noticed an unlabelled lake.

(A dramatic pause.)

Songbud Alan: (Singing.) With yet another even bigger unlabelled island!

Songbud Alan: Ayooo! And this island was bigger than five soccer fields–more than doubling the size of the previous largest-known triple island!

Songbud Alan: Oh yeah, Josh! Sit back down, Ken Jennings.

(Plucky, upbeat music enters in.)

Songbud Alan: You know, it's hard to not root for the guy who, without expecting much, went all in on his quirky little obsession and started sharing the beauty of these sacred spots with the rest of us. And some might say, “Big whoop, they're just dots on a map.” But, thanks to scientists like Elba, and thanks to people all over the world, from the Miqmak and Inuit to the North, to the people of the Philippines, Japan, New Zealand, and beyond who have revered and co-existed with the life on these recursive islands for centuries, we all still have treasures to search for–and protect!

Songbud Alan: (Singing over a lightly plucked harp, sunshine in strings.)

Keep searching, you keep–keep searching.

Keep searching, you keep–keep searching.

Keep searching, you keep–keep searching.

Keep searching, you keep–keep searching!

Songbud Alan: Sometimes I like to think of my brain like its own little island, full of all my unique ideas and thoughts about stuff. And when I meet a new friend like Elba or Josh, it's like I'm building a bridge to their little brain. And as we get to know each other, I learn the cool things that are going on in their noggins, and they get to see things through my eyes.

Songbud Alan: (Picking back up.)

Doesn't always matter what you're trying to find

As long as you keep searching,

Yeah, the world feels alive.

Doesn't always matter what you're trying to find

As long as you keep searching,

Yeah, the world feels alive.

Songbud Alan: So hey, for all of our sakes, never stop searching! And never stop sharing what's inside that amazing brain of yours.

Songbud Alan: (Singing.)

If you feel like you're stranded and nobody understands

All alone on an island building castles out of sand

Just wait, just wait, just wait for the world to catch on

Keep searching, keep searching, yeah you gotta keep, keep going

Keep searching, you keep–keep searching

Keep searching, you keep–keep searching

Doesn't always matter what you're trying to find

As long as you keep searching, yeah, the world feels alive,

On an island, in a tiny lake

On a bigger island, in a big old lake

On another island, all alone, all alone in the ocean

Just floating and nobody knows it

Keep searching, you keep, keep searching

Keep searching.

Lulu: Alan Goffinski, everybody! With harp and vocal accompaniment by the musician Timbre. And that’s it, that’s all that’s happening today. Nothing else cool about to …

(Suddenly, out of nowhere, trumpets … well, uh, trumpet! It’s The Badgers! Lulu gasps.)

Lulu: (Whispered.) What's that?

Badger #1: Excuse me, I have a question.

Badger #2: Me too.

Badger #3: Me three.

Badger #4: Me four.

Lulu: (Whispered, but somehow loudly.) The Badgers.

(The Badgers theme song plays underneath the questions.)

Lulu: Listeners with badgering questions for the expert. You ready?

Elba: Yeah!

Mona: My name is Mona and I'm turning five and, um, what's your favorite island?

Elba: Maybe the island of Elba, because that's my name. (She laughs.)

Gus: My name is Gus. I am six years old. And my question is how, um, animals move [Hiccups.] from island to another island.

Elba: They can go swimming, they can fly, and they can also raft. (A gentle laugh.)

Songbud Alan: Raft?

Elba: Yeah, some animals go on debris like a raft, floating on the water from one island to another.

Songbud Alan: You're saying, like, a frog might just hop on a log and float off to another island?

Elba: Yeah! Yeah, I know of snakes that arrive to islands rafting, yeah.

Songbud Alan: (Imitating a snake again.) Sssssurf’sssss up!

Chase: Hi, my name is Chase and I'm nine years old [A big inhale.] and I want to know, do islands float?

Elba: Some of them do. For instance, the Uru people of Bolivia and Peru live on a group of about, uh, 120 floating islands in Lake Titicaca.

Songbud Alan: Are you saying they make their own islands?

Elba: Yeah, they do. They use bundles of dried reeds to make islands.

Songbud Alan: That's so cool.

Elba: It's amazing, yeah.

Theo: Hi, I'm Theo and I'm seven. Can you order pizza from an island?

Elba: Yeah, yeah, of course. But not all of them. Some islands are too tiny for people to live on them.

Michael R. Jackson: Hi, I’m Michael R. Jackson, playwright and composer of the musical A Strange Loop. Recursive islands are kind of strange loops. If you could rename them, what would you call them?

Elba: Um, maybe “re-re-recursive island.”

Songbud Alan: A re-re-recursive island?

Elba: Yeah.

Lulu: (Pretending to be a Badger who called in, and not a Badger in the studio.) Hey! I’m Lulu. I’m 41. And my question is, what if I was on a triple recursive island, okay? So I'm on an island that's in a lake that's on an island–

Elba: Hmm.

Songbud Alan: Yeah.

Lulu: –That’s in the ocean. And what if, on that Island, I was carrying a bowl of soup, and in that bowl of soup, I put a little crouton, and on that little crouton, I put a tiny thimble of water [Both laugh as they realize what Lulu is doing.] and in that tiny thimble of water, I put a tiny crumb. Would that be a five–a quintuple island? [Elba and Songbud Alan laugh sweetly at the idea.

Elba: Probably, yes.

Songbud Alan: How about that? A quintuple island!

Elba: I'm sure you have an island at some level, right? So, yeah?

Songbud Alan: That'll be a new record.

Lulu: Alright, Alan, I guess we should leave it there. Although I gotta say, I can’t stop thinking about the recursive island inside the volcano. Is it, like–could it be in any danger?

Songbud Alan: Well actually, yes! Because [Pfoo! A puff of smoke erupts! Audio of people checking in on each other after the eruption plays up.] … in 2020 it erupted.  [Lulu gasps.] And, yeah, the island disappeared.

(Lava flowing sounds.)

Lulu: Oh no! Did–did the lava just melt it?

(Bubbling bubbling bubbling until–sizzling, the water dissipates.)

Songbud Alan: No, even wilder! The water around the island? It all got all boiled up.

Lulu: No way!

Songbud Alan: Yeah, just sizzled right into the air, just turned into steam. For years and years, without water surrounding it, it just wasn't an island at all anymore … except …

Lulu: Hmm.

(Upbeat music signals the hope of an ever-changing world.)

Songbud Alan: The rain eventually filled up that volcano cauldron again, and the island has returned!

Lulu: Woah! So it's a resurrected triple-recursive volcano island?

Songbud Alan: It's back, babyyy!

Lulu: Woo!

Songbud Alan: It just goes to show you, the world keeps changing.

Lulu: (Singing Alan’s song from earlier.) Keeps, keeps changing! (Both laugh.)

(A beat.)

Lulu: Alright, we’re gonna leave it there.

Terrestrials was created by me, Lulu Miller, with WNYC Studios.

This episode was reported, produced and all of the music created by none other than the talented Mr. Alan Goffinski! Woohoo!

Our team includes Alan, Mira Burt-Wintonick, Ana González, Tanya Chawla, Sarah Sandbach, Val Powers, and Joe Plourde, with fact-checking by Natalie Middleton.

Special thanks this episode to kid advisors Lola and Evie Young, and to Julie Abodeely, Sarita Bhatt, Shannon Webb-Campbell, Jae Johnson, Jeremy Stern.

And thanks again to the musician Timbre for plucking the harp strings [Lulu imitates the harp.] and singing along!

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation.

Thank you!

And finally, if you have a topic–a story, a creature, a person–you think has been overlooked who we should cover, shoot us an email at :

Songbud Alan and Lulu: (Singing over barking dogs, xylophones, bubbles, and autotune.) terrestrials@wnyc.org!

Lulu: Woohoo! And that’ll do it for today. Thanks so much for listening! See you in a couple spins of this dirty, bullseye-covered, old planet of ours. Woo woo woo woo woo woo woo woo woo woo! Bye!

# included[].attributes.twitter-headline
The Bullseye: Treasure Hunt to Recursive Islands

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Alan Goffinski (he/him), is an arts administrator, songwriter, and producer from Charlottesville VA. He is the former Executive Director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative and the Charlottesville Mural Project—two city-wide organizations that utilize art and culture as a way for people to better understand themselves, each other, and the world around them. He is also a founding member of the Indianapolis-based whimsical performing arts collective Know No Stranger which has been described as “Sesame Street but for adults... but also for kids.” He produced the experimental music radio program Telemetry in partnership with the University of Virginia. Early in his career, Alan spent years making music in a nationally touring indie-punk band (signed to Victory Records) prior to becoming a social worker specializing in early childhood development. He began making kid’s music under the moniker Little Skunks as a fun way to be a part of the day-to-day lives of his nieces and nephew.

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Ana is an audio producer and host who came to WNYC in 2021 to work on Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials. Before that, she produced and hosted Mosaic, a show about immigration experiences from Rhode Island Public Radio. In a former life, she played jazz bass and thinks about everything in terms of rhythm, conversation, and harmony.

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Mira Burt-Wintonick (she/her) -- For the past 20 years, Mira’s been creating, story editing and sound designing various shows. Her work often explores grief and complex emotional landscapes (Love Me, Sorry About The Kid, Welcome to Paradise) but she’s also made some absurd comedy podcasts (WireTap, PenPals). She recently directed Wintopia, a feature documentary film about her late filmmaking father, Peter Wintonick, and his search for Utopia.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].bio
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

Her book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, is an international bestseller, translated into 11 languages. It was chosen as a Best Book by The Smithsonian, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, Brainpickings, The Washington Post and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She has also won honors from The National Academy of Sciences, the Associated Press, the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and most recently an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Swarthmore College.

She reports on a range of scientific topics with a special interest in disability, mental illness, and ecology. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She serves as a Contributing Advisor to nature magazine Orion and she was the co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia—a radio show about psychology, emotion, and human behavior. She recently published her debut children’s book, Trucky Roads, about trucks and, you’ll never guess this… roads. She lives in the Chicago area with her wife and two sons.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].lede
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].about.body
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].about.people[].image.alt-text
Producer Sarah Qari, smiling and standing proudly in the foreground of a field of sunflowers.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].description
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].tease
Investigating a strange world.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].bio
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

Her book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, is an international bestseller, translated into 11 languages. It was chosen as a Best Book by The Smithsonian, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, Brainpickings, The Washington Post and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She has also won honors from The National Academy of Sciences, the Associated Press, the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and most recently an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Swarthmore College.

She reports on a range of scientific topics with a special interest in disability, mental illness, and ecology. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She serves as a Contributing Advisor to nature magazine Orion and she was the co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia—a radio show about psychology, emotion, and human behavior. She recently published her debut children’s book, Trucky Roads, about trucks and, you’ll never guess this… roads. She lives in the Chicago area with her wife and two sons.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].lede
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].about.body
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].about.people[].image.alt-text
Producer Sarah Qari, smiling and standing proudly in the foreground of a field of sunflowers.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].description
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].tease
Investigating a strange world.

# included[].attributes.body
BLAST OFF! NASA just sent a spacecraft to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, and on the side of that spacecraft, they included a poem. Not just any poem — a poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. A poem that’s supposed to represent all of humanity to the universe. No biggie.

Host Lulu Miller opens up the floor to kids from all over the country to ask Limón and NASA scientist Cynthia Phillips questions about the mission, outer space, poetry and what a space slushie might taste like. Listen to find out the answers to all their burning questions.

Read Ada Limón’s poem, “In Praise of Mystery,” here.

Read about and follow the Europa Clipper mission here.

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Ana Gonzales, Mira Burt-Wintonick and Lulu Miller, with help from Tanya Chawla, Alan Goffinski, Sarah Sandbach, Valentina Powers, and Joe Plourde.  Fact checking by Natalie Middleton.

Huge special thanks to the teachers and schools we worked with, including:
Simone Larson, Sarah Gates, Kaleb Wagoner, StreetLab, and CMSP 327 in the Bronx.
Also to WNYC’s Community Partnerships editor, George Bodarky, and to Gretchen McCartney, Michael Taeckens, Vaughan Ashlie Fielder, and biggest thanks to ALL the kids with badgering questions from all over the country with great questions. We couldn’t get to all of them, but we appreciate all of you.

Our advisors are Ana Luz Porzecanski, Andy J. Pizza, Anil Lewis, Dominique Shabazz, Liza Demby, Princess Daazhraii Johnson and Tara Welty.

Learn more about storytellers, listen to music, and dig deeper into the stories you hear on Terrestrials with activities you can do at home or in the classroom on our website, Terrestrialspodcast.org.

Badger us on social media: @radiolab and #TerrestrialsPodcast or by emailing us at terrestrials@wnyc.org.

Visit the Terrestrials website to learn more about the show, meet our team, listen to the songs and discover fun activities, drawing prompts, music how-tos and games that educators, parents and families might enjoy together.

If you’d like to “badger” a future expert, suggest story ideas or feedback, email us at terrestrials@wnyc.org.

Listen to just the songs from Terrestrials.

Sign up for Radiolab’s newsletter! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up here.

Radiolab for Kids and Terrestrials are supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, X and Facebook @radiolab.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Terrestrials is a show for people of all ages that explores the strangeness that exists right here on Earth. In each episode, host Lulu Miller (co-host of Radiolab) will introduce you to a creature or earthly phenomenon that will defy your expectations of how nature is supposed to work. Along the way, you'll encounter a chorus of experts, including scientists, surfers, hip hop artists and…a "Songbud" named Alan (indie punk musician Alan Goffinski) who creates original songs for key moments of confusion, discovery or awe. New episodes drop Thursdays. Listen in with your whole family. Or all alone.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

LISTEN TO TERRESTRIALS  | SUPPORT TERRESTRIALS | TERRESTRIALS WANTS YOUR FEEDBACK! | PRESS INQUIRIES  | BECOME A SPONSOR | CONTACT US

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

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BLAST OFF! NASA just sent a spacecraft to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, and on the side of that spacecraft, they included a poem. Not just any poem — a poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Ad...

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OLD-TIMEY NEWS ALERT SOUNDS AND SPACEY SOUNDS

LULU: [in an old newscaster voice] We interrupt your regular Terrestrials programming to bring you breaking news in the world of space… and poetry. That’s right breaking space-poetry news: because NASA has just launched a spaceship from Planet Earth! that will travel all the way to one of Jupiter's moons – a moon called Europa. And that spaceship is carrying fuel and radio transmitters and telescopes and thermal cameras and...a poem. That's right. A poem that is on its way out into the stars.

LULU: Yes, I’m really serious about all this. So… WHY? Why send a poem into space? And why send it to that moon in particular? Because Jupiter has, like dozens of them. Well, that is what we are talking about today. And to help we are joined by NASA scientist, Dr. Cynthia Phillips, who has spent months, years – how, how long Dr. Phillips, working on this mission?

CYNTHIA: It's been years. It's been, you know, maybe I don't want to say how many years, but it's been a lot of years.

LULU: Wait, tell us how many years! how many years

CYNTHIA: Well, so we, we first started planning this mission almost 25 years ago

LULU: Woah.

CYNTHIA: When we were visiting the Jupiter system with a previous spacecraft called the Galileo and the pictures and observations that Galileo took of Europa were so cool that we were like, We have to go back. We have to go back with a mission that just studies Europa.

LULU: Wow. And we are also joined by the one person on Earth selected to write the poem worthy of being engraved on this spaceship, 25 years in the making:  U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. Hi!

ADA: Hello! It's so wonderful to be with you today.

LULU: Um, that doesn't sound like a stressful assignment at all.

ADA: Oh, no! [sarcastically] No stress. Very easy to try to write a poem that will be engraved on a spacecraft that hopes to speak for all of humanity.

CYNTHIA: No pressure.

LULU: Ada, Cynthia I am so excited to have you here today…AND now is the part where i make u sing the theme song with me

ADA: Haha

LULU and ALAN: [singing] Terrestrials, terrestrials, we are not the worst, we are the –

ADA: Best-rials.

LULU: Yes you got it! I am your host lulu miller, joined as always by my songbud,

Alan: [singing] Woo hoo hoo

LULU: Alan!

ALAN: [sings] REACHING FOR EUROPA WITH A POEM! HELLO!

LULU: Now, usually the way Terrestrials works is that I narrate a story about something strange that happened right here on earth. And at the end, I get out of the way and let kids ask questions to the expert involved in the story. And the thing is… that part, when I move away from the microphone, turns out to be pretty much everyone’s favorite part. And so, for news as momentous as this launch, and with guests as esteemed as a NASA scientist and the US Poet Laureate, I thought I’d turn over the mic to the people who ask the best questions: YOU. Our listeners. Over the last few months we collected questions from kids all over the country, and beyond, questions about what is going on with this mission, why it matters to science, and why poetry is part of it. So, you’re gonna hear mostly from them, from you, from yourselves… Cynthia, Ada, you guys ready?

ADA: I am absolutely ready.

CYNTHIA: This is going to be great

EVAN: Hi my name is Evan, and I’m 9 years old. So the spaceship is going to one of Jupiter's moons. How many moons does Jupiter have?

CYNTHIA: Uh, you know, that's one of those hard questions, right? so, cause we're always discovering more. I think the latest number I saw was like 95 moons, but I could be wrong. They could have found another one last week I haven't heard about yet. So, there's a lot, a lot of moons.

LULU: Ok, so, almost 100 moons. Are they ever like, I'm just picturing suddenly like someone playing pool. Do those moons ever collide with each other?

CYNTHIA: Yeah, no, no, that's a good question. And yeah, collisions are possible. [collision sounds] Most of those collisions would have happened sort of early on in the solar system, back when everything was kind of new and things were crashing into each other. [more collision sounds] Nowadays, things have kind of settled down.

LULU: So a bunch of kids wondered… of all those moons.

AMRITA: Why Europa?

Cynthia: Yeah, so, the Jupiter system, so it has these moons that are really, really cool looking moons, and one of them, Io, that's close to Jupiter, it has volcanoes that are erupting like all the time. [VOLCANO SOUND]

LULU: With like lava and?

CYNTHIA: Mm hmm. There's like lava flows. There's plumes. There's like these sulfur deposits on the surface. We sometimes call it the pizza moon because it, seriously, it looks like a pizza. There's like red and orange and yellow and then like these little dark circle things that are actually, they’re lava flows but they kind of look like anchovies

LULU: What!

CYNTHIA:  Or like olives

LULU: Wow. love that, ok

CYNTHIA: So yeah, so, Io is totally this pizza moon. But then Europa, it's the next one out and its surface is covered with ice.

SFX CRACKLE

CYNTHIA: And then some of our models started showing us that actually under all that ice, there could be water.

WATER/SHINY SOUNDS

CYNTHIA: We think that Europa has more water than all of Earth's oceans combined.

LULU: Really?

CYNTHIA: So a huge ocean. So yeah It's a crazy place. When we think about water out in our solar system, like way out far away from the sun, this huge ocean.

WAVES AND WATER SOUNDS

LULU: [in a state of wonder and amazement] Gosh, an ocean in space.

CYNTHIA: Yeah

WAVES AND WATER SOUNDS CONTINUE

LULU: Turns out the tagline to NASA’s mission to Europa is: “Exploring Jupiter’s Ocean World”

CYNTHIA: The reason why we've been working on this Europa mission for 25 years is that as soon as we found that ocean, we were like, “There could be life in that ocean.”

LULU: Wow.

LENOX: Hi I’m Lenox. I’m 9 years old. I heard that the space craft is named “The Clipper”. Do you know why it’s named that?

CYNTHIA: Uh, yeah. So back in the 1800s, there were these giant sailing ships, and one of them was called the clipper ship. And it was a ship that had like these big sails on it, and it was very fast. And so they kind of like the imagery of this sailing ship.

LULU:  It's like a sailboat in space. looking at maybe oceans in space. That’s neat.

CYNTHIA: Yup.

LULU: Nautical-themed. It's fitting.

CYNTHIA: Yes.

WAVES AND WATER SPRAY SOUND

AARNAV: My name is Aarnav Rudraraju. I’m 10 years old. My question is:  How big is the spacecraft?

CYNTHIA: The whole spacecraft is going to be as big as a basketball court,

LULU: Oh!

CYNTHIA: So it's going to be gigantic.  This is actually one of the biggest spacecraft that we've ever built and launched.

LULU: Wow. And just to be clear there aren’t any humans on it. It's purely machine?

CYNTHIA: Yeah

GRAYSON: Hi my name is Grayson. I’m seven years old. My question is: what if the spacecraft blows up?

CYNTHIA: Mmm. That's one of the scariest things about launch. Once it launches, once it's safe in space, then the chances of it blowing up are pretty small. BUT yeah, that's one of the, it's one of the scariest parts of working on a mission like this. You could spend 25 years working on something and it doesn't work. You know, something happens, something blows up..

LULU: What on earth would you do if it did?

CYNTHIA: I'd cry. Seriously. Like, I, you know, I'd cry. Because this is, you know, the spacecraft's like a friend.

EVA: Hi I’m Eva I’m 9 years old.: Have you touched the spacecraft?

CYNTHIA: I have not touched it, but they don't let me touch things, right? You have to be really, really special to actually get to touch it.

LULU: Ha ha

CYNTHIA: But, I have breathed the same air as it.

LULU: So, you’ve been in the same room with it, or?

CYNTHIA: I've been in the same room. Yeah. So we were building it in this giant clean room. And so everyone who goes in there and all the stuff it has to be cleaned and then cleaned and then cleaned again. So we make sure we don't bring any dirt or dust or microbes or particles with us. And so I actually got to go in the clean room and, you know, they had an engineer who was making sure I didn't get too close to the spacecraft, but I got to go pretty close. And I was, seriously, I was sitting there. I was so excited.

LULU: Did you blow it a little kiss or like enclose any secret meditation or prayer on it for good luck?

CYNTHIA: I didn't, but I definitely said hi to it. Like I definitely, I sent it some mental kind of like, “good luck, you're awesome,” kind of wishes to it.

LULU: Alright, switching gears to the poem engraved on the surface of that very spacecraft. A lot of kids asked a version of this question, but I am gonna toss it to Jude, aged 5, who, when he heard NASA was sending a poem into space asked simply:

JUDE: What for?

CYNTHIA: That's a really good question. So NASA has a tradition of putting little messages on its spacecraft. And one of the most famous was one that went on the Voyager spacecraft. So these were two spacecraft that were launched in the 1970s. They're actually still going…And, we think in, you know, like thousands of years, they might make it to a different star system.

LULU: Wow.

CYNTHIA: And so when the spacecraft were being designed, um, scientists realized that maybe if there's an alien civilization out there, these spacecraft might be the first signs of Earth that they ever find. Um, and so they wanted to put a message on it. And they put it in the form of what's called The Golden Record.

NEEDLE DROP, VINYL STATIC. SAXOPHONE IN.

LULU: So like an actual physical record like the kind you’d put on an old fashioned record player to play music?

CYNTHIA: Yeah! But instead of just putting music, they put sounds from Earth. So they put people talking

LULU: in 55 different languages

VOYAGER SOUNDS: Hola y saludos a todos…

CYNTHIA: and they put sounds of nature

LULU: Birds, chimpanzees, whale song

VOYAGER AUDIO crying baby

LULU: A mother soothing her baby

VOYAGER AUDIO mother saying oh come on now

LULU: Songs from India, Senegal, Peru....

VOYAGER AUDIO singing

LULU The sound of a train..... Of thunder.....  Of a kiss!

VOYAGER AUDIO ENDS kiss sound

CYNTHIA: And they basically put all sorts of things that represent the earth and humanity as a species.

LULU: How beautiful.

CYNTHIA: Yeah. And there's even like a little map on the record, that maybe an alien civilization could use to figure out where this thing came from.

LULU: Huh. Was there a record player in those spacecrafts shooting out way into space?

CYNTHIA: No, but there's instructions on how to build one, right?

LULU: Oh! That’s amazing!

CYNTHIA: And so the assumption was, you know, if these aliens are smart enough to be able to, you know, like, find our spacecraft and understand our message, then they can understand the instructions for how to like, how to build this record player to play it.

LULU: Are they in, like, English or is it Ikea where you get the stick figures or...?

CYNTHIA: You know, that's a good question. I think it's more, like diagrams. So yeah, I think it's like Ikea style.

LULU: Um wow okay but so going back to Jude’s question of “why send a poem into space”, your answer is basically that it’s supposed to be a message from earth on the off chance an alien actually encounters it?

CYNTHIA: yeah and whether or not anyone actually ever finds these things, it's a way of symbolically bringing humanity along for a ride. I think it's a really important process to go through thinking about, you know, what would we want to say? What traces of Earth would we want to bring with us? What is, what is the best of ourselves that we could take with us beyond this planet into space?

LULU: Woah. What a question!

CYNTHIA: Yes

LULU: So turning now to the one person on earth that NASA hoped could answer that question in verse form–

ADA: Ugh

LULU: U.S. Poet Laureate, Ada Limón.

ADA: We definitely need to get Taylor Swift to write this instead

LULU:Hahaha. We’ve got some questions for you.

ASHWIN: Hello. My name is Ashwin. I’m 10 years old. and my question is: How did you feel when NASA asked you to write the poem?

ADA: Yeah, wonderful. We all hopped on Zoom. And the team at NASA explained the importance of Europa, the importance of the mission. And as they talked, I thought, Oh, I absolutely am so interested in doing this. And I immediately said, yes, yes, yes, yes. I want to do it. Thank you so much for asking me. Wow. What an honor.

LULU: No pause. You didn’t sleep on it? In the room?

ADA: No pause. No pause. And then as soon as we got off the call, I thought. Oh, no, how am I going to write this poem?

LULU AND ADA: Hahaha

ADA: And I thought, how difficult this is going to be. And so I went from this enthusiastic, wholehearted, yes, with my whole body to being basically terrified.

MENGSU: Hi everyone! I am Mengsu. I’m a teacher. My question is, was there any mandates to write the poem?

ADA: Yeah, no, they gave me some parameters. You know it needs to be, um, something that is able to be read by someone who is in fourth grade, and it needed to include water. And it needs to be, I think it was under 200 words.

LULU: Hm

ADA: And that's, that's where the real sort of fear and anxiety set in.

LULU: Because how do you actually represent something so big in so few words?

ADA: Yeah exactly..

LULU: Now before we move on to how Ada tried to move through that fear, we just got SO MANY questions from kids about WHAT THE HAIKU a POET LAUREATE is, that we’re gonna to play a brief [dooo doo doo!] lightning round we are calling

Lulu and Alan SINGING: WHAT- aerate is a poet LAUREATE?

ADA: Laughs

LULU: Number one:

LEO: Hi Im Leo. My question is: Wait, so are you, like, the best poet in the world?

ADA: Um no, Leo, I am not the best poet in the world. But I was chosen by Dr. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, to be the 24th poet laureate. And what that means is that I am asked to expand the audience for poetry.

LULU: Number two:

ANIRUDH: Where do you work as the Poet Laureate? And who do you work for?

ADA: I work for the Library. The Library of Congress, the largest library in the world.

LULU: Hmm

ADA: And it has so many different types of  books, but also it has things like. The contents of President Lincoln's pockets

LULU: What?

ADA: On the day that he was shot.

LULU: Gasp!

ADA: Yes.

LULU: What's in what there?

ADA: Well, he has a few different spectacles, and one pair of spectacles that he had clearly mended with a piece of thread because they were falling apart.

LULU: Wow. Number three:

REMMY: Hi my name is Remmy, and I’m 10 years old. What do you usually do as a poet laureate?

ADA: I spend a lot of time on the road and I give readings all over the United States. I speak to a lot of high schools and different schools and  different libraries. In fact, I only have four more states to go to.. And then I will have gone to every single state in the United States.

LULU: What are the four left?

ADA: Oh, well, I have North Dakota and South Dakota, Maine and Alaska

LULU: Wow, neat. And that concludes

LULU/ALAN: [singin g] what-aureate is the poet laureate.

LULU: So, back now to your questions about the mission at hand, the mission to Jupiter's moon, the mission to this faraway space ocean…

ROBILIANA: Hi, my name is Robiliana Santos Soriego, and I’m 16 years old. If there is marine life in the ocean, in the moon, what flavor would it be?

Cynthia: Whoa

ROBILIANA: Like, if we ate it would it taste different than the food we have in our oceans?

CYNTHIA: laughs You know, that's a, that's, that's not a question I thought about before.That's a really good question. Um, so, so yeah, if there's life on Europa, Very likely, it's a completely separate, independent origin of life that's totally different from Earth. And so it's possible that, you know, we don't even know if that life will be based on DNA, on the same amino acids that ours are based on. And so, if we find life on Europa, there's no guarantee that it even would be edible for humans, BUT you know, maybe we'll have discovered, like, a new flavor of the tastiest fish ever…

LULU: And any guesses from little things, you know about anything about its chemical composition? Like, I don't know what it might like, would it taste a little more nitrogeny?

CYNTHIA: Yeah, like, if you're making a frozen drink out of Europa, what it would taste like, you know. You're making a slushie, right? And so you take some of Europa's ice, and then you'd have to, it'd have to be a little bit salty. It could have like sulfur

CRASH

LULU: Raining down from nearby Io’s volcanoes

CYNTHIA: and be kind of stinky.

LULU: Would it maybe be fizzy? [ZZP SFX] Like if there's carbon dioxide up there?

CYNTHIA: Yeah! You know, probably the chances are it's much more likely to be gross than it is to be delicious, but you never know…

ALAN: [sings] It’s an icy salty fizzy slushee. Maybe sour maybe stinky. Probably won’t want to drinky (slurp slurp ahhh)

LULU: Alright, well, the spacecraft that just might be able to get better answers to that question has just begun its long journey to Europa... and when we come back, we are gonna hear the poem  that Ada finally wrote and hear questions from you about what it mean. Stick with us.

[BREAK]

LULU: Terrestrials is back. I am Lulu: and right now, as I say this, a spacecraft is soaring through space towards one of Jupiter's moons...called Europa, a moon that likely has an ocean on it. BTW if you would like to watch video of the launch of the spacecraft and read updates on the Clipper, can do that by heading on over to NASA plus. That’s plus dot nasa dot gov.

LULU: When we left off, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón had been asked to write a poem that would be engraved on the outside of the spaceship to represent a message from all of humanity! No bigs. But she was stuck. Like real stuck.

ADA: Terrified.

LULU: So we resume with the tale of what she did to move through that… which we learned about thanks to questions from kids all over the world

ELIZABETH: My name is Elizabeth and I’m 10 years old. What steps did you take to write the poem?

ADA: Well, I had about three months to write the poem. And I was going to Hawaiʻi, to a town, I'm not kidding, named Haʻikū,

LULU: ha!

ADA: and I was staying in the house of a former U.S. Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin, And so my husband and I went there. It's inside an incredible palm forest. All of these beautiful, different varieties of palm trees. And so I got to watch all of the different species of birds and all the geckos inside and outside the house. And I had this real space to think and sit with the idea of what I wanted to offer. And so I began writing the poem

SCRIBBLE SOUNDS AND MUSIC

ADA: I was trying to imagine the audience being sort of out in space, right? Whether there were other beings out there, whether the audience was the stars themselves

LONELY SPACEY MUSIC

ADA: And I kept imagining a loneliness.

LONELY SPACEY MUSIC + SCRIBBLES

ADA: And so, I would read a draft to my husband, and he would say, “Hmm, you know, I think you need to stop writing a NASA poem.”

LULU: What do you think your husband heard when he said that?

ADA: I think he was hearing maybe more of a scientific approach, more stiff and formal type of writing. Maybe more of, um, following the assignment. Thinking of it as, um, presenting facts about Europa. Poets have one really beautiful way of procrastinating. And let me tell you about it.

LULU: Ok.

ADA: What we love to do is research.

LULU: Laughing

ADA: And it means that instead of writing the poem, I think, you know what, I'm going to go Google everything about this moon of Jupiter. And it's a wonderful distraction, and it's a great way of learning. But it often doesn't actually help you make the poem. but it is our way of, um, just not writing.

LULU: Laughing

ADA: So, I think that that's part of what I was doing was thinking, “Oh, I'm going to teach people about Europa.” And that’s what he was hearing. And so what I needed to shift was, “Oh no, I need to speak to Europa and have this be a reaching out”.

LULU: Was there anything that like–a bird or a tree or a moment–that led you down the right path, the rabbit hole that would turn into the more us poem? I dunno. There might not be. But, do you have anything in your head?

ADA: Yeah! I was in Hawaiʻi, and I was staring at this palm frond and the palms really move. They sort of glow and move. They have a bounciness to them in the wind. And there was a little gecko that was stuck on the underside, that was completely upside down. And he was hanging on this palm frond. And I thought, “How amazing! That little dude is just, you know, bouncing in the wind back and forth.” And I thought of the line: we too are made of wonders.

LULU: “We too.” Meaning, like, Europa and Earth are both made of wonders?

ADA: Yeah. That's where the poem shifted. Then I realized that really the audience was us here on this beautiful planet. And it includes everyone on earth. And it also includes plants and animals. So it needed to be from all of us to all of us and the, “I”, “me”, “Ada” had to be taken out of it. And that's where the poem really reached a momentum, where I could follow it through.

MAADHAV: Hi. My name is Maadhav Sharma. I’m 11 years old. What did you struggle with to come up with in this poem?

ADA: Oh, that's a great question. Um, I think that what I struggled with the most was how to use a we. Um, to be honest, I am someone that's always been a little suspicious of a we, um, you know, as a Latina, as, um, a woman, there are times where I even think of “we the people” and I think, am I included in that “we”? I want to know if I'm included in that “we”.

LULU: And that, of course, is from our constitution

ADA: Exactly. And so I think that as a poet, I often don't use we, And so, um, I think the most difficult thing I had to do was actually surrender to the “we”. And remember that, uh, that the “we” had to represent everybody and to try to include trees and animals and plants. And so I had to really release that idea of the “I” and make room for my most communal voice.  And that was where the poem took hold.

LULU: Really took hold. That poem is now engraved into the spacecraft, and Ada's words are literally touching the cold of space, collecting stardust as they blast towards Jupiter’s moon. She did it. She found a way to write a message from ALL of us here in this water world to Jupiter’s waterworld… in under 200 word. Um alright, well, would you be up for, for reading it?

ADA: I would be honored.

ADA READS: In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa

Arching under the night sky inky

with black expansiveness, we point

to the planets we know, we

pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,

we read the sky as if it is an unerring book

of the universe, expert and evident.

Still, there are mysteries below our sky:

the whale song, the songbird singing

its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

We are creatures of constant awe,

curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,

at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.

And it is not darkness that unites us,

not the cold distance of space, but

the offering of water, each drop of rain,

each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.

O second moon, we, too, are made

of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

We, too, are made of wonders, of great

and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,

of a need to call out through the dark.

CYNTHIA: My first reaction was just “Wow.”

LULU: NASA scientist, Cynthia Phillips again.

CYNTHIA: And I think my second reaction was also, “Wow.”

ADA: We got to visit the jet propulsion lab. And we got to see the Europa Clipper being built in the clean room. and I went into a sound booth and recorded the poem and I think I did it maybe three or four times. And when I came out, I hadn't realized that the sound was being pumped into the next room over.

CYNTHIA: Oh my goodness, if I thought reading it myself was amazing, listening to her read it, oh. It makes me tear up, honestly.

ADA: When I came out, everyone was crying and clapping.

LULU: Oh!

LULU: Alright now, uh, back to our kid questions:

OWEN: Hello my name is Owen, and I’m 10 years old. My question is why do the words in the poem not rhyme?

ADA: Let me tell you, I love a good rhyme! There are a few moments. If you read closely, there are some rhymes.

LULU: Mmm!

ADA: Let's see if I can read one for you, ok. “We are creatures of constant awe/ curious at beauty/ at leaf and blossom/ at grief and pleasure…”

LULU: Aw! Yeah. Wait, where is it?

ADA: Leaf and grief.

LULU: Oh yeah!

ADA: Um. If you see “each drop of rain/ each rivulet/ each pulse/ each vein.”

LULU: Ah, rain and vein!

ADA: So, actually, there are rhymes throughout the poem, my friend. Ha ha ha

AMY: My name is Amy. My age is 13. The line that I liked was “We too are made of wonders, Of great and ordinary loves”. What does “ordinary loves” mean?

ADA:  Oh, I love that you asked that question. You know, I was thinking about how poets and artists and all of us, we like drama. We like big loves. We like really epic stories. We like everything to be at a ten! And I wanted to praise the little loves. Maybe it's the love between two friends and they're just friends and they can say, I love you. Maybe it's like, just like you and your mom and you can say, Oh, I love my mom. The moment where you can say, I love that coffee cart guy, ha who gives me the good donut, I love that, that bird in the tree, I love that everyday when I get on the bus that particular bus driver always says howdy instead of good morning.

LULU: And that line again, in the poem, you're talking about the similarities with Europa and the water up there, and also the ordinary loves up there. What kind of ordinary loves do you imagine might be on Europa?

ADA: Yeah. I mean, I'm so curious because it could just be, you know, the way certain elements love each other so that they bond, you know?

LULU: Haha yeah!

ADA: It’s just the different kinds of attachments that happen every day.

MUSIC ENDS

SAMANAA: Hi, I'm Samanaa. I'm 13 years old. My question is, the things we've sent up so far mostly focuses on the good parts of being human, but what about the bad parts, like war and climate change?

ADA: Yeah, I think that's a great question. I don’t want to not recognize how hard we can be on one another and the destruction we’re so deeply capable of. And that’s there in the poem. That's one of the reasons that I wanted to put in, “grief and pleasure.” You know, that there's sun and shadow, but then it's followed by the line, “it is not darkness that unites us”. The selfishness, the lean towards war, the things that keep us separate. I don't think that those things define us..

LULU: Okay speaking of sending up our… uh, less..  Good parts of us,  I have a question, myself, for NASA Scientist Cynthia, that is going to really switch gears here. Uh, my colleague Latif Nasser told me there might be some… poop… up on the moon, on Earth’s moon. Because when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first astronauts who landed on the moon, when they were up there they were up there for a while and they had to go, and they just left it in a baggie that’s probably still there. Is that true?

CYNTHIA: That is actually true.

LULU: Gasp!

CYNTHIA: So we've sent 12 astronauts to the moon. Um, and you know, when you got to go, you got to go, even if you're an astronaut, even if you're on the moon. So there literally are bags of trash on the moon that had astronaut poop in them. And, you know, it's kind of a gross thing to think about, but science, there are scientists who like thinking about really gross things. And so they've actually thought about, well, you know, that poop has now been there for like 50 years sitting on the surface. Could any of it …And, you know, you think about your poop. Like, why is it so gross? It's because it's filled with bacteria. Like, could any of it have survived there for 50 years? We have no idea. But isn't that kind of an interesting question? I mean, it's a gross question, but it's kind of an interesting

LULU: And like you could find out, right? If we went back and opened the bag, and like are there little bugs in there?

CYNTHIA: Yes. So literally, NASA, people have actually thought about designing a mission to go back and bring back an Apollo astronaut trash bag from the moon, bring it back to Earth and study it. And look at those poop samples and see, is there any, are there any microbes that managed to somehow survive on the surface of the moon for 50 years?

LULU: Wow. So, and like –

CYNTHIA: it's a gross question, but it's not a crazy question.

LULU: No, it's profoundly interesting scientifically,

CYNTHIA: Yeah, yeah, it is. It is.

LULU: And I guess instead of calling that the famous Apollo mission, which is Greek for sun, you could call it, I'm just looking this up, Kaka! The Kaka Mission, which I think we all know what that is Greek for.

CYNTHIA: Hahaha I love it

LULU: Gosh, that makes me think differently, like, tonight when I look up at the moon. Just picture what else is up there.

CYNTHIA: There is poop on the moon.

LULU: Hahahaha thanks.Thanks for going with me there. Alright! Last few kid questions before we let you both go. This one’s for Ada.

ELI: Hi My name is Eli. And I’m 14 years old. Do you feel like a part of you is going to space?

ADA: I do. I do feel like a part of me is going to space.

MUSIC ENTERS

ADA: Because I made the poem and the line breaks and the stanza breaks, that you have. my own breath in it. The way that I read it, the way that I, ya know, made the poem. And, so, in some ways it is my little, little human breath is going

SOUND DESIGN BREATHING

CAITLIN: My name is Caitlin and I'm 14 years old. I want to know why people would think that people in Europa would speak English if there's people on our planet that don't even understand English.

CYNTHIA: That’s a great question. We've transited messages into space using radio waves. And those messages have been encoded using math. Because we think that math is probably a much more universal language than say like English or Spanish or something.

LULU: Hmm

CYNTHIA:  Um, but yeah. So the message that we're sending with Europa Clipper, it was written in English, but we thought about the whole other language thing. And so we basically, we took the word for water in just over this huge variety of languages as spoken by a native speaker, and then we encoded those into these waveforms,

WORDS:Aqua, ur, miri

CYNTHIA: The languages were chosen by a team of professional linguists to, to represent languages from, you know, every different language family.

WORDS: miso, amasi, nero, vater, vesi…

CYNTHIA: In the center of the design, is the encoding for the american sign language word for water.

Droplet sound

LULU: That sign by the way is made by holding up your three middle fingers like a W, and then bouncing them on your chin a couple times

CYNTHIA: Yeah

LULU: I love that

ASHANTI: Hi, my name is Ashanti. 13 years old.  How can feel the astronauts, when they go to space, how they feel a long time with they no have family or friends with them?

CYNTHIA: Hmm. Yeah, that's a really good question. So yes, I think that being in space is an intensely lonely experience. What I've heard from astronauts who are up on the International Space Station, um, the favorite thing that they like to do whenever they have time when they're not working or sleeping is they like to look out the window down at the earth.

LULU: Hmm

CYNTHIA: So, yeah, I think that they miss their friends and their family and their homes. I think it's hard. I think it's a really exciting and fun thing to be an astronaut. But it's also a hard job.

LULU: And you think that looking out the window is a kind of longing?

CYNTHIA: Yeah. Yeah.

LULU: It’s a kind of evidence of loneliness?

CYNTHIA: To say, yep, the earth is still there, you know. I will get to go home.

ETHAN: Hi, my name is Ethan. And I’m 12 years old. Do you think there are any similarities between writing poetry and space exploration?

CYNTHIA: I think there really are. When you write a poem, you're trying to, in a few words, capture something that's bigger than the poem itself. And you think of a spacecraft? It's something that's crafted. It's something that's, that's engineered, that's, that's created, right?

LULU: Craft, right.

CYNTHIA: And you know, poetry, right? You're crafting a poem. It's kind of the same hands on sort of almost artisan nature in both cases, right? So you're crafting it, but then you send it out into the world. You send it out into space, and you see what comes back. I can imagine what, say, the new pictures of Europa are going to look like, but I have no idea. It might find things that we never dreamed of when we built the spacecraft, just like a poem or a song can take on meaning and resonance beyond kind of what was originally intended.

ADA: And that's what's sort of fun about poetry, is that it begins in curiosity and then it ends in more curiosity. And exploration is the same way. We begin with a question. We get a little bit of an answer, and that means Oh! That leads us to another question.

LULU: I love that, it’s like all of that intense crafting of a spacecraft or a poem that comes from the human mind, gets you far beyond the human mind.

ADA: Yeag. All of the arts and science in that way exist in questions, in wonder, in interrogation. They really make a beautiful pairing.

LULU. Well, that is the best place to leave it. Ada, Cynthia, Congratulations on the launch. I will be crossing my fingers as your words and work continue out into… the unknown. Thanks so much for talking to us

ADA: Thank you so much. It has been such a pleasure to talk with you all.

CYNTHIA: Thank you for such great questions. This was really fun.

LULU: Ummm a few exciting tidbits before we go. First of all, Ada’s poem is now available as a gorgeous childrens book. It’s called In Praise of Mystery. It’s also available in Spanish: Elogio al Misterio. The illustrations are by Peter Sís. They are celestial and beautiful. Get a copy. Wrap up in the poem and all its imagery.

Big shout out to Latif Nasser and his TV show Connected. Which you can watch on Netflix. That’s where he talks about the poop stuff. He has a whole episode about poop. Not just on the moon, but also in other places. Go check that out. He is just as wonderful on TV as he is on the radio. And finally, if you'd like to keep tabs on the Clipper as it heads out to Jupitar’s moon, see photos, read updates and so much more, just check out the links right there in our show notes.

Terrestrials was created by me, Lulu miller with WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Ana González, Mira Burt-Wintonick and me. With help from Tanya Chawla, Alan Goffinski, Sarah Sandbach, Valentina Powers, and Joe Plourde. Fact checking by Natalie Middleton.

HUGE SPECIAL THANKS TO THE TEACHERS and schools we worked with, including:
Simone Larson, Sarah Gates, Kaleb Wagoner, StreetLab, CMSP 327 in the Bronx - go sharks!
And also to WNYC’s awesome Community Partnerships editor, George Bodarky,
and to Gretchen McCartney, Michael Taeckens, Vaughan Ashlie Fielder, and BIGGEST THANKS TO ALL THE BADGERS. Kids with badgering questions from all over the country - literally hundreds of you- with great questions, we couldn’t get to all of them, but we appreciate ALL OF YOU.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. THANK YOU!

Catch you in a couple spins of this watery old planet of ours. Blowin’ a kiss to the Clipper. SMOOCH SOUND!

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Alan Goffinski (he/him), is an arts administrator, songwriter, and producer from Charlottesville VA. He is the former Executive Director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative and the Charlottesville Mural Project—two city-wide organizations that utilize art and culture as a way for people to better understand themselves, each other, and the world around them. He is also a founding member of the Indianapolis-based whimsical performing arts collective Know No Stranger which has been described as “Sesame Street but for adults... but also for kids.” He produced the experimental music radio program Telemetry in partnership with the University of Virginia. Early in his career, Alan spent years making music in a nationally touring indie-punk band (signed to Victory Records) prior to becoming a social worker specializing in early childhood development. He began making kid’s music under the moniker Little Skunks as a fun way to be a part of the day-to-day lives of his nieces and nephew.

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Ana is an audio producer and host who came to WNYC in 2021 to work on Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials. Before that, she produced and hosted Mosaic, a show about immigration experiences from Rhode Island Public Radio. In a former life, she played jazz bass and thinks about everything in terms of rhythm, conversation, and harmony.

# included[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Mira Burt-Wintonick (she/her) -- For the past 20 years, Mira’s been creating, story editing and sound designing various shows. Her work often explores grief and complex emotional landscapes (Love Me, Sorry About The Kid, Welcome to Paradise) but she’s also made some absurd comedy podcasts (WireTap, PenPals). She recently directed Wintopia, a feature documentary film about her late filmmaking father, Peter Wintonick, and his search for Utopia.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].bio
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

Her book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, is an international bestseller, translated into 11 languages. It was chosen as a Best Book by The Smithsonian, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, Brainpickings, The Washington Post and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She has also won honors from The National Academy of Sciences, the Associated Press, the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and most recently an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Swarthmore College.

She reports on a range of scientific topics with a special interest in disability, mental illness, and ecology. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She serves as a Contributing Advisor to nature magazine Orion and she was the co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia—a radio show about psychology, emotion, and human behavior. She recently published her debut children’s book, Trucky Roads, about trucks and, you’ll never guess this… roads. She lives in the Chicago area with her wife and two sons.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].lede
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].about.body
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].about.people[].image.alt-text
Producer Sarah Qari, smiling and standing proudly in the foreground of a field of sunflowers.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].description
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.shows[].shows[].tease
Investigating a strange world.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].bio
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

Her book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, is an international bestseller, translated into 11 languages. It was chosen as a Best Book by The Smithsonian, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, Brainpickings, The Washington Post and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She has also won honors from The National Academy of Sciences, the Associated Press, the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and most recently an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Swarthmore College.

She reports on a range of scientific topics with a special interest in disability, mental illness, and ecology. Her written work has been published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR and beyond. She serves as a Contributing Advisor to nature magazine Orion and she was the co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia—a radio show about psychology, emotion, and human behavior. She recently published her debut children’s book, Trucky Roads, about trucks and, you’ll never guess this… roads. She lives in the Chicago area with her wife and two sons.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].lede
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist. She is the Co-Host of Radiolab (with the wonderful Latif Nasser). And she is the Host/Creator of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials, all about nature. She was Radiolab’s first producer 20 years ago, and it is a thrill to return as Co-Host to the world’s best team.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].about.body
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].about.people[].image.alt-text
Producer Sarah Qari, smiling and standing proudly in the foreground of a field of sunflowers.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].description
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# included[].attributes.appearances.hosts[].shows[].tease
Investigating a strange world.

# included[].attributes.body
The Greenland shark is ugly. Its eyes look cloudy and dead. Its snout and fins are stubby. Its meat is poisonous. And that may be part of why most people have overlooked these sharks for so long. But there was a rumor circulating among Greenland villagers that this deepsea dweller could survive for centuries. Scientist John Steffensen went on a hunt to see if this was true and discovered that the Greenland shark can live for more than 500 years, making it the longest living vertebrate on the planet. Biologist Steve Austad explains how the shark avoids death for so long and discovers that its secret to longevity comes at a cost. It seems that to live a longer life, it opts out of some of the best stuff life has to offer: adventure, friends and companionship.

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Brenna Farrel, and Mira Burt-Wintonick, with help from Alan Goffinski, Ana González, Tanya Chawla, Sarah Sandbach, Valentina Powers, and Joe Plourde. Fact-checking by Natalie Middleton.

Our advisors are Ana Luz Porzecanski, Andy J. Pizza, Anil Lewis, Dominique Shabazz, Liza Demby, Princess Daazhraii Johnson and Tara Welty.

Learn more about storytellers, listen to music, and dig deeper into the stories you hear on Terrestrials with activities you can do at home or in the classroom on our website, Terrestrialspodcast.org. Badger us on social media: @radiolab   and #TerrestrialsPodcast or by emailing us at terrestrials@wnyc.org.

Visit the Terrestrials website to learn more about the show, meet our team, listen to the songs and discover fun activities, drawing prompts, music how-tos and games that educators, parents and families might enjoy together.

If you’d like to “badger” a future expert, suggest story ideas or feedback, email us at terrestrials@wnyc.org.

Listen to just the songs from Terrestrials.

Sign up for Radiolab’s newsletter! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up here.

Radiolab for Kids and Terrestrials are supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, X and Facebook @radiolab.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

# included[].attributes.headers.links[].title
Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

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A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

# included[].attributes.show-title
Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

# included[].attributes.series[].about.body
Terrestrials is a show for people of all ages that explores the strangeness that exists right here on Earth. In each episode, host Lulu Miller (co-host of Radiolab) will introduce you to a creature or earthly phenomenon that will defy your expectations of how nature is supposed to work. Along the way, you'll encounter a chorus of experts, including scientists, surfers, hip hop artists and…a "Songbud" named Alan (indie punk musician Alan Goffinski) who creates original songs for key moments of confusion, discovery or awe. New episodes drop Thursdays. Listen in with your whole family. Or all alone.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

LISTEN TO TERRESTRIALS  | SUPPORT TERRESTRIALS | TERRESTRIALS WANTS YOUR FEEDBACK! | PRESS INQUIRIES  | BECOME A SPONSOR | CONTACT US

# included[].attributes.series[].tease
A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

# included[].attributes.series[].logo-image.alt-text
Radiolab for Kids Presents Terrestrials Logo

# included[].attributes.tease
The Greenland shark is ugly. Its eyes look cloudy and dead. Its snout and fins are stubby. Its meat is poisonous. And that may be part of why most people have overlooked these sharks ...

# included[].attributes.transcript
Lulu Miller: Three, two, one!

Jonny Moens: Imagine your flesh turns to poison.

(Crunchy, dark guitar music begins to play, the soundtrack to an underwater spaghetti Western–the kind of music that would play as one person says to another, “This town ain’t big enough for the two of us,” but if they were sharks.)

Lulu: And your eyes turn cloudy.

Jonny: Your arms shrink into stubby fins.

Lulu: And you slip down into the deepest, coldest depths of the ocean.

Jonny: Swimming about, looking for something to bite.

Lulu: You are nearly invisible in the darkness.

Jonny: And then, suddenly, this little carcass–

(A ghostly fish-corpse, played by a theremin, drifts past.)

Lulu: –A corpse, a fish corpse, floats by.

Jonny: You sniff it.

Lulu: And instead of turning away from the stinking dead flesh …

Jonny: Chomp!

(Bubbles rush by as you bite down.)

Lulu: You have become …

Jonny: A Greenland shark!

(The music fades away.)

Lulu: All right, now is the part where I make you sing–

Jonny: Oh no.

Lulu: –The theme song with me. [She laughs.] Oh, yes!

Songbud Alan Goffinski and Lulu: (Singing over the theme music.) Terrestrials, terrestrials, we are not the worst, we're the–

Jonny: (Uncertain.) The best?

Songbud Alan Goffinski and Lulu: (Singing over the theme music.) The bestrials!

Lulu: Yeah! You got it! Terrestrials is a show where we uncover the strangeness waiting right here on Earth. I am your host, Lulu Miller, joined as always by my songbud …

Songbud Alan: (Singing with autotune, as if a robot.) Woo–hoo–hoo!

Lulu: … Alan!

Songbud Alan: Going deep and dark with sharks!

Lulu: This season we’re looking at creatures that are usually–

Songbud Alan and Lulu: (Together.) Overlooked! [A beat.] Shh!

Lulu: And today's very special storyteller is …

Jonny: My name is Jonny Moens, I'm a freelance science journalist. And I have spent a lot of my time underwater.

(Magical, soft music plays, a blanket of water above you.)

Lulu: Johnny’s mom is from Eritrea, on the coast of Africa, and his dad is from Belgium, in Europe–and happens to love scuba diving! So when they traveled between those places and beyond, they’d often explore the oceans.

Jonny: One of my most beautiful memories is watching manta rays glide over like massive kites.

Lulu: As soon as he was big enough to put on a scuba mask, Jonny would go out scuba diving with his dad, spending hours swimming among all kinds of cool creatures, like …

(As each one gives another name, the creatures swim past, leaving bubbles in their wake.)

Jonny: Sea turtles.

Lulu: Clownfish.

Jonny: Eels.

Lulu: Sea urchins.

Jonny: Moonfish.

Lulu: And …

Jonny: Whale sharks.

(“Dun-dun” goes Lulu in the style of the theme song from the movie Jaws.)

Jonny: White tip sharks.

(Dun-dun.)

Jonny: Leopard sharks.

(Dun-dun! Here comes something that could be scary … or scary beautiful!)

Lulu: All of which Jonny found, not terrifying, but …

Jonny: Beautiful!

Lulu: … Whereas Greenland sharks, even Jonny, a shark lover, admits …

Jonny: They look kinda dead.

(A bell tolls as Lulu laughs at Jonny’s brutal assessment. The ghostly theremin returns.)

Jonny: So their eyes look cloudy, like, glassy. And they also have these pinkish worm-like parasites–

Lulu: (Grossed out.) Ugh …

Jonny: –Dangling from their eyes.

Lulu: Wow, okay. But you have become utterly obsessed with this dead-looking zombie shark, because … why?

(The theremin exits out.)

Jonny: Because these sharks have a huge secret. They’ve got a secret power, if you will, that seems to let them break the harshest rule of life.

(As we move deeper underwater, new drums enter the scene, crawling along the deepest darkest parts of the ocean.)

Lulu: Hmm.

(A beat.)

Lulu: Alright, well, to find out what rule they are breaking, we gotta start many, many decades ago, when one baby shark–

(Alan sings the “Baby Shark” doo–doo melody in the middle of the background music, just for a second.)

Lulu: (Laughs.) –Is birthed into the frigid waters of the deep sea, where it is so dark–

(Bubbles flutter up towards the surface as we move underwater.)

Lulu: –It can’t see anything.

Songbud Alan: (As a Greenland shark.) Aha! But–who needs to see? I navigate the deep with electricity!

(Electricity charges up!)

Lulu: (Spoken.) That’s right, the baby shark can detect electricity coming from other creatures!

(Zap zap!)

Songbud Alan: Alone I prowl the ocean floor, I eat whatever I can find.

Dead whales and snails and flounder tails. [Crunch crunch!] Delicious! They’re all mine!

It’s nice for me down in the deep, where the pressure makes me hard to reach.

It’s home! It’s where I live and grow.

(Growing sound effects.)

Lulu: (Spoken.) And grow this shark does, scavenging the seafloor like a vulture.

Songbud Alan: Dead whales and snails and flounder tails! [Crunch crunch!]

Lulu: (Spoken.) Decade after decade, until …

Songbud Alan: I’m the size of a giraffe.

Imagine that!

Splish splash!

Imagine that.

(The music plays out.)

Lulu: And one day, this jumbo, death-breathed shark is swimming near the island of Greenland when, well, I’m sorry to say, it gets caught on a fishing line.

(An underwater struggle begins.)

Lulu: And is pulled out of the water.

(Whoosh!)

Lulu: Onto a fisherman’s boat.

(Thump!)

Lulu: And it is shortly after that that a jolly scientist named John Steffensen happens to pass by on another boat.

(Nautical accordion music plays.)

John Steffensen: Hello hello!

Lulu: And first glimpse this gray beast the size of a giraffe glimmering in the sun.

John: I just went, like, “Wow!” Just the size! That's kind of impressive animal. Nearly as big as the boat!

Jonny: And as he leaned in to get a better look …

(Songbud Alan, as the captain, laughs almost menacingly.)

John: The captain, he was laughing at me.

Lulu: Saying, basically, “We Greenlanders don’t really like Greenland sharks, because there’s almost nothing you can do with ‘em.”

John: Everybody know Greenland sharks. They are poisonous!

Lulu: So you can’t really eat ‘em. Can’t even use ‘em as dog food!

John: If you’re out with your team of sled dogs …

(Dogs howl, but then the howling gets weird. These dogs must have had Greenland shark meat. They sound a little sick to their stomachs.)

Lulu: You must never feed raw Greenland shark meat to them, because …

John: They’ll get drunk.

Jonny: Meaning intoxicated on the shark meat. It makes them woozy and confused.

John: And they'll run in 12 or 16 different directions.

Lulu: Okay, that would not be good on a sled.

Jonny: Exactly.

(Another moment of dogs howling in confusion.)

Lulu: So, the question remains …

Jonny: Why try to learn more about this Greenland shark if it tastes horrible and no one likes it?

Lulu: Yeah, why?

Jonny: Well, his–his reason was because he heard this rumor.

John: The rumor is they get very old.

Lulu: How old?

Jonny: Potentially centuries.

(Mystical, dramatic music builds as Lulu speaks, eventually featuring an entire string orchestra.)

Lulu: Legends said they could get two or three–or even four–centuries old, which would be older than the locomotive [A train blows its whistle.] older than entire forests, older than the United States!

That would make the Greenland shark older than any creature with a backbone. Older than whales and elephants or wizened old tortoises! Which, to John, just seemed …

Jonny: Really hard to believe.

Lulu: Because, you know, the end comes for us all–eventually! And for creatures like us, with a backbone–vertebrates–there seems to be a hard limit, a bedtime, for how late we can stay up living.

But if this rumor was true, then this stinky-breathed, cloudy-eyed, parasite-covered, hulk of a Greenland shark was shattering the limit to life.

Jonny: So he decides to do some digging.

(Detective music replaces the orchestra with a horn section, in the vein of the Pink Panther theme song.)

Lulu: Picture him picking up a magnifying glass and putting on a Sherlock Holmes hat!

… I mean, he didn’t actually do that, but, after that day in the boat, he would spend the next few years as a professional Shark Detective.

John: Right? (Chuckles.)

Lulu: John wants to crack the case. He wants to find out if the rumor about the shark’s age is true. And he’s only got one clue to go on, which is that the Greenland shark–

John: –Never stops growing in length.

Lulu: So as they age, they just keep growing and growing and growing … (Lulu fades out.)

(The detective music fades out.)

Lulu: And with that one trusty clue, “Shark Detective” John Steffensen got to work.

Jonny: And he tried multiple methods. So the first attempt–

John: In some fish, you can count “year rings.”

Lulu: Did he just say earrings? Fish with earrings?

(Plucky jazzy music plays.)

Jonny: Sorta. A lot of fish have these things called “ear stones”.

John: … Which is part of the balance organ in the head of the fish.

Jonny: And those ear stones, a bit like trees, will have rings inside them that mark every year.

Lulu: Woah. So, okay. If you found a shark and you took out the ear stone, you could just kind of count the–the rings and find out how old it is?

Jonny: That was the theory, but it didn't work.

(The jazzy music winds down and falls out of tune.)

Lulu: Why?

Jonny: It turns out, Greenland sharks, they don't have them.

Lulu: So cross that off the list. So what's his next thought?

Jonny: X-rays!

(And we’re back! The jazz music picks up where it started.)

Lulu: Ooh.

Jonny: The actual bones themselves can tell you a lot about how old a creature is.

John: I called the local hospital. And kind of asked, “Can I come with a shark and we can try to put it in the x-ray machine?” The boss came on the phone and he said, “Sure, when are you coming?” [He laughs, remembering.] So I went to the hospital right away!

Lulu: Apparently they were so excited to have a shark coming in for an x-ray that–

John: They postponed an old man with a broken arm. He was sitting in the waiting room!

Lulu: Poor dude with his broken arm! (She laughs at just how weird that must have been for the dude.)

Jonny: Yeah!

Lulu: So John goes to the front of the line with his shark. Well, just the backbone of a shark.

Jonny: They fired up the x-ray machine …

(The machine whirrs to life.)

Jonny: Took photos of the backbone …

(Zap!)

Jonny: And that’s when they discovered …

John: It didn't work.

(The music winds down again.)

Jonny: Their bones were too soft.

Lulu: (Clearly disappointed.) Oh …

Jonny: So he tries to use what's known as a CAT scan, which is basically another machine for photographing bones–

(The music whirrs back to life for just one second before winding back down a third time.)

Jonny: –But that doesn't work either.

Lulu: I mean, that's like three strikes, usually you're out. Like, why–why is he so obsessed with this? Why does he want to know the shark’s age so bad?

Jonny: Well, John thinks …

John: For any biological question, there’s an animal somewhere that’d be perfect to answer that question!

(Low, slow music creates a bubble around Lulu as she explains John’s idea.)

Lulu: Huh. Meaning, any question about how life works, like, “Why do we sleep?” or “Why do we die?” or “Do we have to die?”–as long as the question is about biology …

John: There’s an animal somewhere that’d be perfect to answer that question.

Lulu: Do you believe that, Jonny?

Jonny: (Breathing in, thinking.) I’m not sure I do. But it doesn’t really matter what I think, because John was sure!

Lulu: So after trying the ears and trying the bones, he decided the next place he would try was …

Jonny: Eyeballs.

Lulu: Eyeballs. [She laughs a big laugh.] Why?

Jonny: Well, back in the late 1950s, humans were testing lots of big new bombs, which released a lot of a chemical called Carbon-14 into the environment.

(Fwoosh!)

Lulu: Okay.

Jonny: And those chemicals can get trapped …

(Jonny continues to talk as Lulu narrates the shortened version.)

Lulu: Jonny explained that this chemical was absorbed into the bodies of the creatures alive back then … including baby Greenland sharks that were still in their mother’s womb. And it just so happens that eyeballs don’t change much over time.

Jonny: … Making the eye kind of like a time capsule.

Lulu: huh!

Jonny: So if you could find a shark with a lot of Carbon-14 in the very, very middle of its eye, you would pretty much know when it was born!

Lulu: Whoa! Because it would’ve been born not too long after those bombs.

Jonny: Exactly! And, because it would take a lot of meticulous dissection and grueling math, well, John knew just who to rope in.

Kirstine Steffensen: Hi.

Jonny: You’re like sort of his Guinea pig. Is that fair?

Kirstine: Yeah, kind of. (She laughs.)

Jonny: His daughter, Kirstine.

(The music changes tone, bouncing up and down.)

John: My daughter, she needed a project for her high school. So I suggested she would work on this, and she talked to the school master and he said, “Sure.”

Lulu: So he's going to make her figure it out. He's gonna make her do the hard part?

Kirstine: Yeah. (Kirstine laughs.)

Jonny: So her dad handed her a pair of shark eyeballs they had been keeping in the freezer.

Kirstine: I actually have the eye from the first shark in my apartment.

Jonny: What do you mean, you have it? [Chuckles lightly.] Like, where is it?

Kirstine: I have it on the–on the shelf. (She laughs.)

Jonny: You have, like, a jar with an eye?

Kirstine: Yeah. (She laughs.)

Jonny: (Jonny laughs right back.) That's not creepy.

Lulu: So Kirstine took these two frozen eyeballs her dad had given her. They were cold in her hands and they were pretty small.

Kirstine: Just about the size of a golf ball.

Lulu: Meaning they came from sharks that should be on the younger side.

Kirstine: Yeah.

Lulu: She put them on the table and sliced open each eye.

Kirstine: Cut open the eye lens and took out the nucleus of the eye, the very center of the eye.

(Pop goes the eyeball!)

Lulu: And then she sent them off to be analyzed for Carbon-14.

John: This is where it starts getting weird.

(The plucky spaghetti Western music returns.)

Lulu: Weird because the math was saying these smallish sharks …

Jonny: They were at least 200 years old.

Lulu: (Surprised at the sheer number of years.) What?

Lulu: Now, Kirstine had things to do, like graduate from high school, so that is when they brought in another scientist, Julius Neilsen, to head up the study. And he and the team spent years collecting way more sharks.

Jonny: 28 in total.

Lulu: Bigger sharks this time–sharks that had accidentally got caught in fishing nets or had died naturally. They analyzed them even more closely, they ran the calculations again, and finally they came to what they believed was the most accurate scientifically sound estimation of just how old Greenland sharks can get.

(The music speeds up, rushing around, and then freezes just as John shares the age.)

John: 272 to 512 years.

Lulu: Woah, so there could be sharks that are older than half a millennium down there?

(More low, slow music plays.)

John: It was, like, unbelievable!

Jonny: So this obviously is a shocking finding.

(A series of archived news clips play.)

Archival News, Today: … A jaw-dropping story this morning …

Archival News, CBS: … Scientists have discovered some sharks older than the United States …

Archival News, Global News: … For decades, scientists had suspected the Greenland shark was long in the tooth, but never realized they were ancient …

Archival News: … This means the Greenland shark lives longer than any known animal with a backbone. If we come upon a shark birthday party down there …

(The news stories fade out as Lulu returns to narrate what happens next.)

Lulu: This is when Jonny, our journalist, heard about the Greenland shark. He thought back to all those sharks he’d grown up swimming with as a boy and it never occurred to him …

Jonny: … That some of these sharks roaming around in the water had lived centuries and centuries. You know, back to medieval times, there was still this shark [Laughing.] in that same ocean!

Lulu: And when he looked around …

Jonny: It just seemed baffling!

Lulu: No one was talking about how–how the Greenland shark lived so long, how it seemed to break this sacred limit of life that applied to every other vertebrate on the planet!

(The music pauses.)

Lulu: So, when we come back, Jonny’s gonna use his powers of journalism–

(Fwoo fwoo!)

Lulu: –To find out the Greenland shark’s trick for longevity.

(Lulu takes a breath and the sound of something diving from high in the sky plays.)

Lulu: Catch ya after just a few more seconds of your life burn away.

(A clock ticks as the ad break begins!)

Lulu: Just kidding! You’re young. You’re fine. See you in a sec.

Lulu: (Singing the theme of the movie Jaws over a few waves) Terrestrials is back, and we are gettin’ sharky with Jonny!

(Funky music picks up.)

Jonny: Hey!

Lulu: So Jonny was on a quest to figure out how the Greenland shark shatters the limit to life and outlives all other vertebrates on the planet, and …

Jonny: I did speak to a guy.

Steven Austad: Okay. My name is Steven Austad.

Jonny: He’s a biologist at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.

Lulu: And while lots of other scientists all over the planet are racing to look at the Greenland shark’s blood or heart tissue to see if it has any secret chemical tricks that allow for its longevity, Steve looks more broadly at this group of creatures across the kingdom that are somehow able to live–

Jonny: –Way longer than everybody else.

(The music changes tone, taking us out to outer space. Stars twinkle around as Jonny and Steven introduce the oldest animals in our known universe.)

Lulu: Like the geezers of the animal–like, the super old ones?

Jonny: Exactly. The outliers–who happen to include …

Steven: Bats.

Jonny: Clams.

Steven: Mussels.

Jonny: Tubeworms.

Steven: Tortoises.

Jonny: And he tries to figure out how they do it, and if there are any common strategies.

Lulu: Okay. How does he think the Greenland shark does it?

Steven: Okay. There are three things.

Lulu: Alright. I'm taking notes. (Lulu writes as Jonny talks.)

Jonny: So number one, be big and gross.

Lulu: (Laughs.) Okay, why does that help you live longer?

Jonny: So, big, because just generally big creatures don't get eaten up as much.

Lulu: There's less things that can kill you, basically.

Jonny: (Agreeing.) Less things that can kill you. You're more intimidating to other animals.

Steven: Yeah, if you're the Greenland shark, then you probably don't have any predators except maybe whales.

Lulu: Okay.

Jonny: And gross because, well, if you're gross, then both creatures below and humans themselves won't eat you because you're disgusting.

Lulu: That's funny. It's like the–[Laughs.] it's, like, that yucky–the toxic meat, the yucky worm-like thing in the eye, all that–it's almost–all the stuff we were ridiculing about–making fun of it–is almost like a shield from death?

Jonny: Yeah, in a way.

Lulu: Okay. Number one, be big and gross. What is number two?

Jonny: Number two, be slow.

Steven: And the fastest speed that they've been recorded to swim at, uh, is slower than an 80 year-old walks.

Lulu: No, no. Like a–like a sweet old man slowly shuffling across the street? That’s how slow they move underwater?

Steven: Yeah! [Both laugh lightly.] A healthy 80 year-old walks about one meter per second, and a Greenland shark’s top speed that's ever been measured is about two thirds of that.

Jonny: Wow.

Jonny: And that’s why they are mostly scavengers. They’ll eat dead fish! And dead seals and dead–

Steven: –Reindeer and polar bears and–

Lulu: Reindeer?!

Steven: Yeah.

(A beat.)

Songbud Alan and Lulu: (Singing.) Let’s take a break to consider that a shark can eat a reindeer! Let’s take a break to consider Santa’s fleet in a shark belly. Jingle jingle–chomp!

(Back to the interview.)

Lulu: (Still reeling.) In their shark stomach?!

Steven: Yeah. Probably they died and fell in the ocean.

Lulu: Okay.

Jonny: They didn't, like, chase after them.

Lulu: Oh, okay.

Lulu: But how does being slow actually help it live longer?

Jonny: Well this is where things get really cool. It’s not just that it’s moving slowly. Its heart is beating slowly.

(A heartbeat: Thump-thump, PAUSE, thump-thump.)

Jonny: Its belly is digesting super slowly.

(Gurgling.)

Jonny: Which means, first of all, it doesn’t need to eat as much to power its body.

Steven: If there's a food shortage, you could probably go for years without eating. So I think …

Jonny: Years? Really, years?

Steven: They–they figure they can eat about one medium-sized seal a year.

Jonny: Oh wow.

Jonny: Which helps them cheat death, Because they can survive stretches of famine, or food shortages, that would knock out most other creatures.

Lulu: Woah.

Jonny: Yeah! And, perhaps even more important, it turns out, the faster your body goes …

(The music creates a sort of heartbeat: Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, no breaks.)

Jonny: Eating, moving, getting stressed …

(The heartbeat music thump-thumps even faster.)

Jonny: The faster these not-so-great chemicals are released into your body …

Steven: Free radicals that damage everything they touch.

Jonny: Heart tissue, bone tissue, brain cells …

(A beat without music.)

Jonny: But! If you live life in slo-mo–

(The heartbeat slows down again: Thump-thump, PAUSE, thump-thump.)

Jonny: –Like the Greenland shark, then those chemicals don't get released as fast!

Lulu: Weird. So the slower your body runs, the slower it wears down?

Steven: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Lulu: Wow! Okay. So be–be big and gross and real slow–slow it down.

Jonny: Yup. And the third thing is, be lonely.

(Quiet music, long droning notes, play on a deep string instrument.)

Jonny: They live deep in the ocean, away from other creatures and–

(A storm brews.)

Jonny: –Storms.

(Thunder and electricity charges up.)

Steven: –Or a lightning strike.

(Whoosh!)

Jonny: –Or motorboats with sharp propellers zipping by.

(A motorboat revs as it speeds past overhead.)

Jonny: So they’re less likely to get killed by a freak accident.

Lulu: Oh.

Jonny: And also … !

(A meandering drum line adds in to the music.)

Steven: They don't live in huge social groups.

Jonny: They don’t come together to interact much, but they’re less likely to catch viruses or diseases from one another.

Lulu: Hmm.

Songbud Alan: (Singing.) Alone I prowl on the ocean floor.

Lulu: So part of their sort of troll-like living deep in that lonely darkness, like, that's, that's kind of protecting them, too?

(The music changes direction. The percussion quiets as a soft flute melody plays underwater, shimmering through the blue.)

Jonny: Yeah. Being lonely and solitary actually decreases their chances of being hurt by all these different dangers in the world.

Lulu: There's something, like, a little sad to me about this–this bargain. Like, to live longer, you kind of have to opt out of the stuff of living, like, be away from adventure, be away from other creatures like you. You opt out a lot of …

Steven: You have a really boring life.

Lulu: Yeah. Like, opt out of life kinda …

Steven: Well, I’ve been thinking about my clams.

Lulu: Those old clams that Steve studies.

Steven: There are clams that live 500 years at the bottom of the sea, opening their shell occasionally.

(Bubbles burst towards the surface of the water all around you.)

Steven: You know, one of my clams, if I calculated, was born 65 years before Shakespeare was born.

Lulu: Woah!

Steven: And it’s just been sitting there. I think, what a dull existence. (They both laugh quietly, contemplating.)

Lulu: Haha. Yeah, it does get kinda boring.

Jonny: I see your point, Lulu, but we just know so little about the true lives of these sharks.

Lulu: Hmm.

Jonny: Maybe it’s kind of a party down there. Maybe it’s an adventure. [Lulu laughs.]Maybe they are doing things we haven’t even discovered yet. For instance, scientists only recently figured out that maybe these sharks can catch live prey.

Lulu: How?

Jonny: Using their electricity perception!

(The sharks charge up!)

Lulu: Oh.

Jonny: And another recent study suggests that Greenland sharks don’t even start to have babies until they're over 100 years old!

Lulu: Woah.

Jonny: Meaning they essentially get a hundred years to stay a kid.

Lulu: Like they’re little–they’re little Peter Pans down there? Forever young!

Jonny: Little Peter Pans, yep! Not forever, but for … long. Yes.

(Music plays.)

Lulu: (Laughing at Jonny’s technicality.) Alright. Well, touchée, Jonny, thank you for reminding us to keep our minds open! Especially in the dark.

Jonny: You are most welcome, Lulu.

Songbud Alan and Mike Kinsella: (Singing.) In the deep cold ocean we swim alone.

A little misunderstood, but we’re at home.

Yeah, we may seem gross

Oh-so-gross

On the deep, dark, and cold ocean floor

But what makes you think that you know?

(The instrumentation picks up.)

(Slowly.) We take it slow

You never tried to understand us

Seems like you can’t stand us

Steer clear

Don’t come near us

You fear us!

You never really tried to get to know

But that’s fine, we’re loving life down below.

(Spoken.) Oh, and by the way–

(Singing.) We’ll never understand

Why you freaky finless weirdos

Went and named us after land.

Lulu: (Spoken in a Valley Girl voice.) And we’re literally aquatic!

Songbud Alan and Mike Kinsella: (Spoken.) Weirdos!

(Slowly.) We take it slow,

We take it slow!

You never tried to understand us.

(The song ends.)

Lulu: Alan Goffin–[hehe fin]–ski, with special guest Mike Kinsella from the bands american Football and Owen! And that’s it. Terrestrials is over and there’s nothing else cool about to …

(Suddenly, out of nowhere, trumpets … well, uh, trumpet! It’s The Badgers!)

Lulu: (Whispered.) What's that?

Badger #1: Excuse me, I have a question.

Badger #2: Me too.

Badger #3: Me three.

Badger #4: Me four.

Lulu: (Whispered, but somehow loudly.) The Badgers.

(The Badgers theme song plays underneath the questions.)

Lulu: Listeners with badgering questions for the expert. Are you ready?

John: Yes indeed!

Cade: Hi, I’m Cade. I’m five years old. Is it true that when a mama shark is pregnant, her baby will sometimes eat each other in the womb?

Lulu: Oh my gosh, I’ve always wondered that. Is that true that baby sharks’ll eat each other inside the mommy’s belly?

John: That’s true.

Lulu: That’s true?!

John: Well, some sharks do it.

Lulu: Sand tiger sharks have definitely been found to do it. They will eat their brothers and sisters inside their mom’s belly!

John: But we know very little about the Greenland sharks with–with the young ones.

(Chomp!)

Dr. Yvonne Tsu: I’m Dr. Yvonne Tsu,and I’m 35 years old. My question is: Why are they so ugly and did their ugliness help them survive?

John: I don’t know if they're ugly. [Laughs.] And–and–no–but no, it won’t help them survive, because if you are living down 2000 meters, it’s pitch black anyway. [Lulu laughs.] So nope, nope, it has nothing to do with that. They look like they look, and that’s it.

Chris: Hi, I’m Chris, and I’m 77 years old. And my question is: Since they are so slow, would it actually be fine to swim with them?

John: Well, I–I would never do it. [Laughs.] That’s for sure! They have, like, two sets of teeth: In the bottom they–they have, like, the cutting teeth, like a razor blade, whereas in the upper part it’s just spikes coming down.

(The Badgers theme music fades out and makes way for the swirling cloudiness of the credits music.)

Lulu: (Wincing.) Ooh!

John: So I would not go in the water with them, nope. Never.

Lulu: Okay, noted. I’m gonna leave it there with the Greenland shark and its Swiss Army Knife of teeth and not tell you that part of the reason their skin is so poisonous is because there is urea in it, A.K.A. the ingredient in urine, A.K.A. pee–there is pee in their skin. I’m not gonna tell you that, ‘cause I’m nice.

Terrestrials was created by me, Lulu Miller, with WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Brenna Farrel, and Mira Burt-Wintonick, with help from Alan Goffinski, Ana González, Tanya Chawla, Sarah Sandbach, Valentina Powers, and Joe Plourde. Fact-checking by Natalie Middleton.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by The Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation.

Thank youuu!

Big special thanks this episode to Dr. Julius Neilsen, he has done a ton of incredible work on the Greenland shark and was a huge help on this episode; also to Jan Hannemeier; Holly Shields; Grace and Charlotte Beckerman–and to you, for listening!

Catch you in a couple spins of this watery ol’ planet of ours.

Woo woo woo woo woo!

(Whispered.) Bye.

(The credits music plays out.)