Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Are you sitting comfortably? If so, I'll begin. My proposition is that there isn't quite enough bad news about these days. So we'll go for broke. The work I want you to relish in the Science Show today is The Little Book of Cosmic Catastrophes. That could end the world. What can happen? What will happen? The Science Show to end it all.
Hello Robin Williams with Always Look on the Shite Side of Life as Eric Idle might have said.
But before you run away in fear, fed up with wars, knifings, political tribes and collision, meet Dr. Sarah Webb from Melbourne, who prefers her bad news to be at least two billion years away. And here's why. Just listen. There's a cover of the New Scientist magazine for November. Our precarious universe, why the cosmos could vanish before you finish reading this magazine.
Does this surprise you, Sarah? It does and it doesn't. I think this is one of two theories. One could be the simulation theory that the universe could end at any moment just because it doesn't actually exist. And I do think about that on a daily basis, probably more than once, maybe five times a day at minimum.
A simulation, in other words, like the Truman Show, as if everything is just set up to make you convinced that something is true. And people get to those incredible lengths, as they did in the film, The Truman Show.
And this is what someone somewhere or something has done, probably an AI thing on some far distant Wotsit. So that's possible, is it? In theory, anything is possible. So there's five key ideas of what simulation theory could be.
I think the most believable one is that it's probably not true because we can't do it. I mean, we are quite full of ourselves, but we think that we're the smartest things in the universe that we know of right now. And we are very smart, but we're not that smart. We can't build computers powerful enough to even simulate our galaxy down to a subatomic structure. It's just impossible. And so to simulate the entire universe would require a computer so big and so powerful, it's actually physically not possible with the physics that we have.
So even though I think about it five times a day, every time I think about it, I'm like, no, you're fine. You are real because physics says you probably are. And then I move on with my day. You obviously had fun with your book, Cosmic Catastrophes. That could end the world. It's the full title.
But do you have fun with catastrophes? I do. I don't know what that says about me as a person, but I've always, always been fascinated in the unknown. And I think it goes back to being a little girl and like deep apologies to my parents who might be listening. I would ask some questions at like five years old asking like, where does the universe end? And how does it exist? And what happens if we go into a black hole? And just endless questions always. And
And I think it was always my curiosity of the unknown. And I was always drawn to the cataclysmic, the exciting, the exploding and the mysterious. Do you know Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer who knew quite a bit about physics, of course, and I interviewed him in New York and told him a couple of things about where he'd made a mistake on page 145. But he wrote a book called A Choice of Catastrophes. Do you think we have a choice? I think it would be fascinating if we had a choice of a catastrophe. I think
Two, the universe is not completely deterministic. We do have free will, thank goodness. But physics is kind of deterministic. So the fact that our son will die, it's a shame, but it will happen. And even Bruce Willis couldn't do anything about it. No, which Bruce Willis could do anything. LAUGHTER
But what you describe is at least 4.5 billion years away, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. We've got at least 4.5 billion years until our sun actually dies. The kind of upsetting news is that we've got about a billion years to get ourselves together enough to leave the planet because in a billion years our oceans will be too hot. Everything, it's going to be catastrophic. But that's a very, very long time and we know that humans have not been on this earth for too long, a couple hundred thousand years in the state that we are in.
And so I really do believe that how fast we've progressed in the last couple hundred years, from the technological enlightenment, the industrial revolution, to where we are now, that's not an impossible feat to think that humans might be able to go and habitate elsewhere. At least I hope they do. And that doesn't necessarily mean leaving the solar system, but it might. However, when our galaxy...
is approached by Andromeda, as you put in the book. They're going to merge, aren't they? They are. They are. Don't look so pleased. I'm so excited and I wish I could be alive to see it. So they are going to merge. And this is really pretty common in the universe. You get big galaxies merging quite frequently. And our galaxy has already undergone minor mergers. So we've had tiny little galaxies integrate into ours. But when Andromeda is coming full force, they will collide. And it does sound insane. It sounds like everything's going to end and actually won't.
There's so much space between stars that not many stars will actually die. In fact, we will get new stars born thanks to star formation processes. But it means that our position in the new galaxy, Milkdromeda, will be different. So we might be a little bit further away from the centre or we might be closer to the centre. That is going to be incredible. This is, again, on a four to seven billion year timescale. So unfortunately, we can't see it.
But if we could, the night sky would literally change so different that you could not describe what it would look like right now. Do you mind if I call you Goldilocks as well? Sure, I'll be Goldilocks. Which brings the moon in because if the moon weren't doing what it does, if we had two of them like Mars does, Phobos and Deimos, and all those other influences, or if the moon went out a bit further or even worse, descended...
We'd be chips, wouldn't we? We would be. The moon is kind of one of these, it's like a cosmic coincidence that is brilliant because if you look at every other planet in our inner solar system, so all the rocky planets, Earth, Venus, Mars, Mercury, we're the only one with a big moon. Mars does have those two little moons and we think they're just asteroids that got caught. One's going to fall away, one's going to fall into Mars. But our moon is solid. It is big and it's stable and it's been there for billions of years.
And it is responsible for a few different things. We know that the moon helps with the tidal forces. We've got tidal forces from the sun and the moon. As they work together, we get liquid moving around the surface of the earth.
And this kind of liquid transport or nutrient transport billions of years ago would have been absolutely vital for the very first building blocks of life to be able to move around. And so if we didn't have the moon, we might not have life. And the moon itself, we think, was a complete accident. We think it was actually a planet named Theia.
and the Earth crashed into the Earth. It was cosmic collision right there. And there's a few different ways that we think the moon could have formed, but one key way is that there was debris that was flung up and it formed within something called a Roche limit and it clumped together and it formed the moon that we see today. I remember when that theory was broadcast, in fact, publicised from a certain astronomer at the Australian National University decades ago.
and published in the journal Nature. We were terribly excited and thought, well, what fun. But Goldilocks is about all these coincidences which come together. I mean, the fact that you, Sarah, are here, if you look at your own family history, it is so unlikely. On the other hand, you could say all the people who might have existed who don't. So seeing what's actually here...
We know it's here because we look around and so it is. So something rather than nothing is the really big question. Is something much more likely because it's in the physics or what? I think we have existence bias because we exist.
And so this is a big question that we ask ourselves because we haven't found alien life. Contrary to some articles online, we do not have aliens. We have not found them. We have no signatures of them, but we think they're probably out there. And we're making this semi-naive but I think very optimistic assumption that we exist and it took a lot for us to exist, a lot of tried and failed species, a lot of changes on the earth, a lot of different things that allowed us to exist and
Maybe someone else does out there. And the universe is so, so big that it would be very, very sad if it didn't. And I think when you look at how big everything is, so a galaxy alone has over 400 billion stars. We think that there's at least two trillion galaxies in the universe. That is septillions amounts of stars and planets. And it would be shocking if we were the only ones. Even if it's a low probability of existence, I think hopefully life is out there.
And, of course, there was that equation written. Actually, it's in your book where you look at the number of galaxies and the number of possible Earth-like planets. That was Frank Drake. I interviewed him 50 years ago. That's incredible.
This is so amazing. He was really brilliant because he's like, this is a stats problem. We know the answers to some of these things. We know star formation rates. We can estimate how many galaxies, all of these different things. It's a fun equation. And it's changed over time. The more we've learned about the universe, the more precise we can get this equation. And so if we solve it for today with what we think we know about the universe and the fact that we exist,
you get, I believe it's 15.5 million species minimum that should be technologically advanced. So the key thing here is that you have to be able to use radio waves to communicate or electromagnetic light to communicate.
which we do very well here on Earth with lots of radio microwaves. And that's an amazing number, 15.5 species that could be intelligent like us. And then you realise how big the universe is and it really humbles you and makes you... It makes me a little bit sad because it means that the chances, even if this equation is spot on, dead right, the chances of us being in a galaxy with another intelligent being are very, very slim. I'm going to ask you a complicated question now. Prepare yourself.
I have a dear friend in Oxford called Catherine Blundell. She is a professor of astrophysics and she enables girls in five different girls' schools around the world to look at, well, mainly planets. One of their favourites, obviously, is Saturn. Yes. Yes, you sigh. But Saturn...
some of its rings. What's going on? So the fascinating thing is Saturn didn't always have its rings and we know it as the ringed planet. But they are this combination of comets and asteroids being ripped apart as they got too close and they're clumping together. So it's how our moon formed, this kind of clumping process.
And they're slowly either falling into Saturn or if they're at the right limit, they are forming moons around Saturn. And we know that that will end in, you know, not in our lifetimes, but hopefully in a human's lifetime, they might look up and not see the rings of Saturn. A similar thing is with the eye of Jupiter, the red spot on Jupiter, that giant storm, enormous, it's about the size of the Earth. You can think of it as an enormous hurricane that is also basically evaporating.
And so that will likely be in a few hundred years' time, people will look at our images and our art depicting Jupiter and Jupiter won't look just like that anymore. And it's always changing. Does it worry you? No. Quite sanguine. Have you ever been tempted to write fiction? I have. I actually have two stories that I'm working on at the moment. I don't know if anyone would ever want them.
Contact me if you do. But they're all sci-fi because I read a lot of sci-fi. It's my favorite genre. I mean, I'm biased because I am an astronomer. But I think it's one of these escapism things where you can put in the wonder of astronomy or the wonder of science and take it off planet. And so I have two ideas that I'm working on at the moment. One involves the end of the world, a running theme in my life apparently. And one involves the future of the world. And we'll see. Thank you. You're welcome.
Dr. Sarah Webb, Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, with cosmic catastrophes. Such fun. No immediate threat. May the Goldilocks spell of everything being just right, moon, tides, atmosphere, continue. But one catastrophe that's hardly changed much is how little we know publicly about who the scientists are as people and how many women do great work.
Last year, for instance, the Science Show broadcast the story of Dr Louise Webster, who in 1971 was lead author in the journal Nature, announcing the discovery of the first ever black hole found. An Australian at the University of New South Wales. Did anyone notice that programme, that story? Fat chance. It came from Marcus Chown's book, A Crack in Everything.
Why is it important that we remember these scientists as people? Is it obviously so that you can, in her case, know that they were great women? For instance, as we saw downstairs here at the Royal Society, the first woman to be called a scientist in the English language in 1834, in fact, Mary Somerville. These people are role models, but not if they're invisible scientists.
My book is about stories of people and their personalities and how they made their discoveries. And I think it's really important for children to realise that science is done by people. Science in schools is often presented with the end result. You know, you're presented with Newton's laws. You don't realise that Newton was actually an unbelievably difficult character, had feuds with everyone, was totally unreasonable. But if you'd learnt that about him, maybe you'd think, well, maybe I could be a scientist because they're people.
And as far as women are concerned, yes, unfortunately, there are a large number of women who've contributed to science who've been massively overlooked. In astronomy, Cecilia Payne.
Cecilia Payne was the person who applied quantum theory in the 1920s, the newfangled theory of atoms and their constituents, to stars. And she was able to determine from the light coming from the Sun, the spectrum of the Sun, and it was 98% hydrogen and helium. Since the Greek times, people have thought the Sun was made of iron. So this was completely against the accepted beliefs. And in fact, Henry Norris Russell, who was a very important astronomer in America at the time,
made her say in her thesis this result is almost certainly incorrect. Ten years later, when he discovered it was correct, he got the credit. And so she discovered what most of the universe was made of. And just another one to think of as fundamental physics. The most important idea in the whole of fundamental physics came from a woman. Emmy Noter in 1918, a German scientist,
She found that the great conservation laws of physics, like that energy is never created or destroyed, only converted from one form into another, these great conservation laws are trivial manifestations of what we call underlying symmetries. And what they look for at the Large Hadron Collider is symmetries. And this is the guiding light of modern physics, yet nobody knows the name of Emi Nota.
We do know the name of John Bolton because he was played in the movie. You have it in your book, who played him. He was in fact trained as an engineer. He was in Cambridge. How did he get to go to Australia?
That's right. So he did physics at Cambridge during the Second World War. And the recruiter for the British Navy was C.P. Snow, Lord Snow, who coined the term the two cultures for science. A novelist. Fantastic novelist. He wrote some wonderful novels about British atomic bomb project called The New Men. Wonderful novelist.
And he assigned Bolton to the Navy. He ended up on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific and he visited Australia. And when the war ended, he really liked Australia because he had asthma and the climate was good for him. And he had a girlfriend in Sydney. So that's why he stayed. And then at the end of the war, having been involved with radar...
He noticed that there was an outfit on Dover Heights, which is smack in the middle of Sydney, really. So what happened there in Dover Heights? Yeah, well, he applied for this job, which was at the Radio Physics Laboratory. And after the Second World War, the people who'd worked on radar, which, of course, had been very important in winning of the Battle of Britain, and some of the radar engineers had gone on to become radio astronomers.
And he got this job. And Joe Paulsey, who was the head of the radio physics laboratory, had this fantastic idea. Now, the big problem with radio waves is they've got a million times the wavelength of normal light. And what that actually means is that the radio telescopes give you an image which is a million times blurrier.
But it turns out there is a way to compensate for that and that's to have a bigger telescope. The bigger the telescope, the finer the detail. But if you built a telescope that was more than 100 metres across, it would collapse under its own weight. So what you needed to do is use multiple telescopes. But Paulsy had this fantastic idea. In fact, it was a television aerial, a Yagi aerial, on the cliffs at Dover Heights, very close to where Cook landed in the 1770s.
And basically, you use this to pick up radio waves. And the radio waves from the sky come to your antenna, your Yagi antenna, by two routes. They come directly and they come reflected off the surface of the sea because the sea is a conductor which bounces radio waves off it. And this means that it's as if there's another telescope in the sea. There's an image of the telescope in the sea. So you get actually, effectively, two radio telescopes,
separated by twice the height of your cliffs. And this gives you much finer resolution. And when they did this, they discovered extragalactic radio sources. It was still so crude, they could only say there's one in Cygnus. They called it Cygnus A, it was Bolton who coined that. They found one in Taurus. Taurus A turned out to be the Crab Nebula, the remnant of an explosion of a supernova.
And this was really unbelievable to find sources of radio waves. No one believed it. This is why it's weird that some radar engineers thought that radio astronomy was possible. Because all stars, when you get to very long wavelengths, hardly emit anything at all. So there was no expectation that you would see anything if you used a radio telescope, if you looked at the radio sky. But here were the sources. So the race was on from that point. This was early 1950s.
to find out what they were associated with. And this would require bigger and bigger telescopes, and they started building at Cambridge and in Australia, at parks, dishes which were on railway tracks, so they could move apart and effectively synthesise a bigger telescope. Well, there was Bolton, and he was involved in developing this, and the set-up was so famous that there was a call from Pasadena...
would he come and help them make one for themselves? That's right. I mean, in fact, I was a student at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and I used to go to this observatory, which is in Northern California, a radio observatory called Owens Valley.
And I was taught by a guy called Al Moffitt, an American, who was a student of John Bolton. And I kept hearing this name, John Bolton. John Bolton had founded this observatory. So this weird thing, after the Second World War, only two countries were interested in radio astronomy, Australia and Britain. And incredibly, America took no interest. But by the 1950s, they realised they'd been left behind. And so they needed to build a radio observatory. So Caltech, which is in Pasadena, as you say, a suburb of Los Angeles, built
they poached John Bolton. And John Bolton went over to California and he scouted all these sites and he found a site which was in the high desert between the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the White Mountains, about five hours' drive north of Los Angeles, and he said, this is a good place to build a radar observatory. He then went back to Australia in 1960 to found the Parks Observatory, which is in New South Wales. And they said to him, you can't resign your tenured professorship at Caltech to go where?
To a sheep's paddock in New South Wales? What? Yeah, but he did. And he is the only person to have founded major observatories in the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere. But Parkes, of course, became very important. And it was with Parkes that the mystery of the extragalactic radio sources was solved.
because in 1962 the Moon several times was going to pass in front of one of the radio sources, it was called 3C273, which had been found at Cambridge, it was in the third Cambridge catalogue. It was going to be occulted by the Moon, the Moon was going to move across it. Now we know the position of the Moon precisely.
So if we could actually see the moment 3C273 vanished and reappeared, we could find out where it was. Bolton found where it was. He worked on aircraft carriers in the Pacific, and he'd had to fix radar equipment on the fly in emergencies. And it turned out that to actually observe 3C273, the Parkes dish, which was 64 metres across...
had to look so close to the horizon it really couldn't reach there. So he immediately cut the housing around the bearings and did all sorts of modifications on the fly so it could do that because of his experience in the Pacific.
And they located a position and the position was sent to Caltech. American radar astronomer called Martin Schmidt went to Mount Palomar, which at the time was the biggest optical telescope in the world. And he found there was a tiny star there at the location. And he took the spectrum of this star and it was completely mystifying. And he took the spectrum back to Caltech. And for five months, none of his colleagues could make any sense of it at all.
until one morning Bolton had written to him from Australia and said we want to write a paper about 3C273 for the journal Nature can you write an accompanying paper and he thought well all I can write is it's totally mysterious I've got no idea what this object is and he was just fiddling around and he thought well I know what I'll compare it with the spectrum of something that I know which is the spectrum of hydrogen the most common element in the universe and when he did so
he realised that what he was seeing in this spectrum was the spectrum of hydrogen shifted by 16%. Well, this was incredible. That meant that this object was moving at 16% of the speed of light. No star, and it looked like a star, had ever been found that was moving even 1% of the speed of light. But it could be a galaxy, and Hubble, Edwin Hubble, had discovered the universe was expanding, and the further away a galaxy was, the faster it was receding, and that gave it what we call a red shift.
But that would mean that this star was a thousand times further away than Andromeda, the nearest galaxy. But it was bright. When you did the calculations, you realised to be as bright as it was, it had to be pumping out a hundred times more light than a galaxy.
And 3C273, it was already been known that it was fluctuating in brightness on this time scale of maybe a few weeks. That tells you that the object has to be small, smaller than a few light weeks across. So it seemed to be something that was maybe the size of the solar system, but pumping out 100 times the light of a galaxy. And this was what we now realize were quasars.
Quasi-stellar object. That's right, quasi-stellar objects. They were a sensation, an absolute sensation. John Bolton and someone in Tasmania called Groot Reber and indeed Ruby Payne Scott, who did the maths, were the three people in Australia, actually, doesn't matter where they came from,
who invented radio astronomy. Absolutely. I mean, my book is about how black holes have come in from the cold, how they were initially thought to be so ridiculous as to not even be the preserve of science fiction, but they've gradually moved into the centre of science and we now know they play some mysterious role in making the universe the way it was. And it wasn't until I started writing my book that I realised...
What an enormous contribution there was from Australians and New Zealanders. Massive. So the entire chapters of my book are about people like John Bolton, Louise Webster, Roy Kerr, who found the shape of the space-time around a spinning black hole. Massive contribution from these people. Yeah, you mentioned the film in the beginning. And finally, of course, the dish, the film itself.
Who played John Bolton? Do you know, I've not actually seen The Dish, the film, but it's obviously a famous... Wasn't Tom Hanks, was it? Sam Neill. Sam Neill, okay. Sam Neill. Was he in Jurassic Park? He was, and he's a New Zealander, which is appropriate. They do make such a huge... I mean, really, Australia and New Zealand have punched way above their weight in astronomy, and probably in many other sciences as well. We all know...
Rutherford discovered the nucleus at the centre of the atom. Massive contribution. Ruby Payne Scott, how interesting, she was the first woman radio astronomer. And she observed the sun. And remember that initially, the reason that people thought it might be worth doing radio astronomy was in 1942. Radar in Britain, which was trying to detect raids from German fighter planes, had
had been overwhelmed in 1942 and a British astronomer had been able to say that the jamming had come from the sun. They thought the jamming was coming from the Nazis but in fact it came from the sun. So after the Second World War, Ruby Paine Scott, her particular interest was the sun and she discovered quite a lot of interesting things about the sun. But in a way that was a kind of bit of competition for Bolton who was interested in extra galactic radio sources. But
But between them, they pioneered radio astronomy. Ruby Payne, Scott, Greg Reber and John Bolton, all from Australia. And that was Marcus Chown, whose marvellous book tells it all. It's called A Crack in Everything, the science show on Radio National. MUSIC
Catastrophes. An exploding universe. So let's come down to Earth and explore a breaking supercontinent and how Australia became the home of great deserts. Let's leap to Alice Springs where Professor Steve Morton of Darwin University is holding his own enthralling book, Australian Deserts, Ecology and Landscapes. Now, I want you to think back. I know you're getting on a bit, but if you're going to go back 90 million years...
and look down on Australia as it was. Were there many deserts then? No, we were part of Gondwana land 90 million years ago and stuck way south of our current position. So it was cold and moist.
Yes. And gradually it moved north. It broke away, Robin, and drifted across the Indian Ocean until ramming into New Guinea. During that process, of course, it entered the mid-latitudes, which around the world are where deserts are found. And it's there where aridity began. Yeah. So about 20 million years ago in the Miocene epoch, it began. Of course, during that 20 million years, there's been all these
chopping and changing as the climate switched. And during the last ice ages, we went through a whole series of revolutions, of course. So it's been gradually intensifying. And in the last, what, 20,000 years?
It's got warmer from the last cold phase when the Great Sand Dune Deserts formed. Great Sand Dune Deserts, a bit like, as you mention in the book, the Sahara, which most people imagine is what most of the deserts are like, but they're not like that at all. There's so many different ones. Yes. So you started in the right place. The best way to begin to understand the deserts is that age. They're ancient. And because the continent was drifting independently in its own plate,
across the Indian Ocean, it's undergone nothing in the way of geological rejuvenation, just a bit of volcanic activity at the edges.
But by and large, what you see today, you could have seen 10 and 20 million years ago, and across it is scrawled the results of erosion and redeposition and reworking and wind dispersal. All that activity has been superficial, leaving the bones of the landscape intact. Now, one thing that confuses the whole thing, and always when I explored the Red Centre, for example...
Desert. It's not deserted. There's so much there. Yeah. So here's the second thing. It is dry for most of the time, but because of the Australian climate, this peculiarity we have, driven by the El Nino Southern Oscillation, we have the chancellous rainfall of any part of the globe.
And that means that sometimes that aridity is erased by flooding rain. And it's that rainfall which, in fact, governs the way that you see the system today. Because when it does rain, there is the opportunity for all this perennial plant growth to establish.
They get their roots down, continue growing through the inevitable next dry period because so much of that water is stored somewhere in the soil, in massive soil moisture stores. But you give some examples in the book. Let's start with one of them where you've got a particular flower and around it are those flowers of that species.
you've got 50 different species of bees, 50 of them. Yeah. Why is that the case? This uncertain rainfall, this switch between long-term dry conditions and occasional aridity-erasing rain provides enormous opportunity for a vast array of life histories. That's what's been tantalising for me as an ecologist as I've come to understand the place.
You've got these boom and bust species like the yellow billy button, the flower you refer to, and you've got long-term stayers like desert oaks and mulga bushes, which are there for sometimes hundreds of years because they've got their roots down into the soil moisture stores.
And so there is ample opportunity for insects, all sorts of life histories across that spectrum from a week-long daisy flower all the way back down to a desert oak, which is there for the long term. That's what's really exciting about Inland Australia is that diversity of life histories that can be supported given this unusual climatic pattern. And also you've got sheer numbers. Now, when I was growing up in Vienna, we had a little pet bird called
That was my first encounter with an Australian called Schnooky, a budgerigar. And I always thought that budgerigars were more or less solitary. And there, of course, in the book is recorded the gigantic numbers of the budgerigar flying around. Yeah, spot on. It's a classic example of the boom and bust.
Because the birds are seeking out those places where there has been massive production after flooding rain and when they find these abundant resources, seed resources, they settle and if there are river gums or cooler bars nearby in which nesting hollows are available, there they'll stay and they'll nest. And they'll continue to do that until the resources begin to run dry and then they'll move on. Now, you're dead right, Robin. Recently we had terrific rains, 2022 rain.
And my friend, Mike Gillam, who's done all the photographs in the book, he travelled to northern South Australia and he brought back photographs of these massive aggregations. I said to him, how many birds are there? And he hesitated. He didn't want to talk about it. And I said, how many? And he said, I think there's a quarter of a million birds.
One flock? Yes. Enormous numbers. So that's what the boom and bust environment can give you, is enormous production occasionally. But the budgie is a wonderful example of another problem we have as ecologists in trying to comprehend the nature of the place.
Up till now, we've tended to want to categorise Arizona birds. Nomads, residents, migrants, pastoral migrants, hyper nomads. We get all these categories and we know in our hearts that none of them actually work. The birds ignore them. The key question is not which sort of category does a bird belong to? The key question is what is the variety, the range of movements that these birds can exhibit?
The budgerigar can exhibit everything from sedentary behaviour through to hyponormatism, depending on the circumstances. It's a wonderful place. How long have you been there? On and off now, 40 years. 40 years. And have you covered most of the ground? Not a whisker. Let me give you another example. You talked before about the amazing variety of bees. Well, consider the beetles, Robin. I reckon there's probably 60 species of
60 families, should I say, of beetles in arid Australia. There are probably 20,000 species. There is not one ecological study of a beetle in arid Australia, to my knowledge, not one.
We have seven and a half thousand species of ants. There is nothing else quite like this, except in the tropical forests of Central America. It's a phenomenal place with strange and exciting arrays of animals, all responding to this gradation from the bust, the long dry spells, all the way through to the flooding rain. What about the mysterious creature?
The mystery that you reveal in the book as one of your colleagues says, hey, I've seen it. I now...
know where it is. And it was a marsupial mole. You're right. Two species, Ijarajari and Kakarotul, western desert names. You know what? We don't really know anything about them. There's a couple of people who've made valiant efforts uncovering how such a strange creature, a burrower and an insectivore, somehow manages to meet energy demands and
using the most expensive way of locomotion you could imagine. Some of these creatures persist, and they've done so since their evolution in Gondwanan rainforests. It's only quite small. So we're talking 10, 15 centimetres long, maybe 15 grams. Living alone underground? Almost certainly solitary. What a life! LAUGHTER
We honestly don't know anything about them. They're a marsupial mystery. I love the way you've raised that example because multiply that a million times, thousands of times for all those creatures about which we don't know anything yet but which successfully make their living in this uncertain place. Well, let's look at the kind of range because if you're going out the west where Steve Hopper is looking at aspects of burning with Indigenous people,
And you've got, you're in the centre, the Red Centre as well. Yeah. How many people are covering how much land to understand deserts? Not very many. Scientists are thin on the ground. You know, that's one of the main reasons I wrote the book, Robin, because I wanted to honour the country and my excitement with it. I wanted also to honour the few scientists who have made these wonderful contributions and then present all that in a book written in plain English so that anybody who's interested in what we scientists think we know about it
can gain access to that scientific knowledge. But it's thin on the ground. I'm not complaining about that because most Australians live in the coast. There's only a few of us who want to live out in the inland. And wanting to, you actually put this very nicely because when asked why you stay there, you say the space, the range, the quietness. Yeah. Well, I just love it. It just suits me. I'm a far horizons man.
Once you've experienced that pull of looking over the horizon and realising that you never really quite get to the end of it, well, it's tantalising, which is a word I've used a few times because that's what it is. It's the most satisfying place for those who love that sense of space and freedom. Everywhere else seems overcrowded after you've lived in this sort of place. I know the feeling, but how much relationship has your formal research got with Indigenous people?
Oh, it's been quite fundamental. You asked before how many scientists are there. Well, not very many. The real knowledge is held by Indigenous people. What we will learn about marsupial moles in the end will come from Indigenous people.
So I've been privileged on a couple of occasions to work closely with Aboriginal people and knowledge is its own character. It's course steeped in ecology, but it's far more than that because after a while you begin to realise that a story about the sand goanna or a marsupial mole quickly ramifies out into a connected story which is part of the law, the chukupa in Western Desert language. So that chukupa is not just knowledge of land and ecology, it's also about knowledge
the knowledge of people and how they interrelate, and it's knowledge of how ancestors formed the entire landscape and all the beings that inhabit it. So it's not just a story about ecology, it's an integrated view of the world, which I think is just a remarkable contribution to human knowledge, Robin. Give me a couple of clues of places you've been to quite recently to do some research.
My place is about 70 kilometres south of Alice Springs. We have a place in the bush, half embedded in the side of a sand dune, and at the moment my obsession is the crickets. In any place you can find ten or a dozen crickets. Inland Australia is particularly rich in them and they are representative of this vast array of animals about which we know little but which almost certainly are relying for their food source on fungi.
The place is nutrient poor. The nitrogen levels are about half of what you find in desert soils in other parts of the world. Phosphorus is about a third, maybe a half of the levels found in other parts of the world. So the key plant nutrients that sort of fuel plant metabolism are
are very poor in inland Australia. As a result of that, plants are constantly growing more roots to seek out more nitrogen and phosphorus. And they can do that because they can keep metabolising because they've got access to the soil moisture source. Now, as a result of all that, though, they are unpalatable to most herbivores. And I think...
I don't know this. I think what's going on is that fungi are undertaking one heck of a lot of the breakdown of this massive array of carbohydrate, which is otherwise indigestible.
And it's those fungi and all the little hyphae that are growing through the soil that crickets and beetles and so many other organisms are harvesting to fund their own lifestyle. So there's another way in which the peculiarities of the place are still hinted at but are not understood or poorly understood. Can citizen scientists help you? Because the work you've described is looking at the micro part,
of soil and insect and those sorts of relationships. Whereas, of course, many citizen scientists want to go out and spot dolphins or when the 5,000 pelicans arrive at Lake Eyre.
or those huge numbers of other creatures we've mentioned. So citizen scientists, can they help at all? Oh, of course they can. We mentioned before that scientists are so thin on the ground. Anyone who's making any form of systematic observation can make a contribution. Choose your topic. Plant life, insects, bird movements, mammals...
Reptiles, you name it, of course they can contribute because the knowledge base is so thin. I mean, the only thing is you've got to be systematic and you've got to find a way in which to feed your information into some wider form so that scientists like myself can begin to synthesise it. But the opportunities are enormous, yes. Terrific. It's a wonderful book and it's on sale at the Australian Museum in Sydney, the oldest museum, isn't it? Nice, I've just been to see it.
Thanks. Thank you, Robin. Steve Morton in Alice Springs, a professor at Darwin University there. His book is Australian Deserts, published by CSIRO. And our final book, or books, plural, is presented by Taronga Zoo. The author is Kristen Darrell. And Kristen, how come so many? Kristen.
Because there's a lot to share and a lot to talk about and lots and lots of animals and four isn't even enough, but that's where we're stopping for the moment. I'd like to do more by spending a lot of time in both the zoos and experiencing the incredible work
that the people do here at Taronga. Much of that work, which happens behind the scenes that you don't see as a visitor. I'm just inspired to share the stories of the animals and the work that the keepers do to look after them, as well as all the other wildlife around the zoos as well. Now, avoiding for the moment, briefly, poo at the zoo, unless I get typecast.
What about party animals? Do animals have parties? No, they don't. We don't anthropomorphise animals. But the party is actually one of the two kids that feature in the books that I've made up. Ollie, it's his birthday. And as a special treat, he gets taken to Western Plains Zoo near Dubbo as a very special weekend away. But of course, Sophia and Ollie have been training to be volunteers at the zoo and can't help themselves but get involved in...
into the depths of what's happening. But there are some special birthdays happening at the zoo. The little black rhino is turning one, which is a really important celebration and allows us to talk a bit about how the black rhinos are endangered and the incredible work that the zoos are doing in conservation and breeding in that space. So in all the stories, I try to use the real animals and what's happening with the real animals
to, in a really fun way, let kids see through Sophia and Ollie's eyes to learn as the children in the story learn about the amazing work that's being done. Plus there's the amazing new wildlife hospital at Western Plains where you can actually see procedures happening in the hospital through big viewing windows. So Sophia and Ollie get the experience of doing that and watching some amazing work on animals from the zoo, but also an animal that gets brought in from outside Australia
in the wild that needs to be looked after. So they get an experience of all of that, plus some of the work the volunteers do behind the scenes with, there's a special echidna called Smudge that's an actual animal that the zoos rescued Smudge or looked after it, rehabilitated it. Then Smudge went out to Western Plains to be sort of conditioned before being released into the wild.
So in my story, the kids get to do some enrichment for Smudge, which is inspiring, like getting the animal to move around in the space, do natural behaviours to teach them about foraging for food. But it's also about engaging their minds and keeping them active as they gradually prepare them to go back to the wild. I've been avoiding poo long enough. Poo at the zoo. Yes. And your young heroes are grading poo. Thank you.
I couldn't believe it when I read that. That was definitely one of the highlights of my preparation for that book. I'd watched some of the Taronga television show and there was an episode called Poo at the Zoo and I thought that would make a brilliant book title. But I need a story. It's not just enough to say there's poo at the zoo. I had the wonderful opportunity to come in and interview a koala keeper at Taronga in Sydney and
And I got introduced to the koala Mateo. That is one of the koalas in the breeding program here. That was at the Taronga Institute for Science and Learning at the time. And I started speaking with the koala keeper about looking after koalas because I wanted to include koala as a legacy species in the stories.
and she started telling me that there's this extra training that any keepers go through when you're going to look after a koala and they're all around poo. And I thought, oh, good, here we go. This is my story. So they count the poo every day because there's a certain number of poo for a healthy koala. 100 to 200 poos a day is healthy, so they need to count it, but then they also grade it one to five. So that was a wonderful opportunity for,
for Sophia and Ollie to experience what it would be like to pick up poo, hold poo and test that poo for what grade it needs to be. And I won't spoil too much of the story. Suffice to say that Ollie and Sophia will never look at a soft serve ice cream quite in the same way again. Yes, I see. I'm a bit surprised, of course, that this creature which sleeps for 22 hours a day
according to another zoo book, would have the time to go to poo more than occasionally. I ask kids when I talk to them a lot, how many poos do you think a healthy koala would do in 24 hours? And not many get up to that sort of number. But koalas primarily poo when they're awake and they do manage to do it, but sometimes they can also poo when they're asleep a little bit. But they just get it done, I guess. It's just they save it up and very active pooers when they're awake. Extraordinary. Yeah, well...
You've got under here night owls as well. Yes. It's hard to have a favourite when you write four books very close together, as I did with these. But night owls is a really special place in my heart. It's a book of almost in two parts. The first part is they explore the zoo doing a treasure hunt where they're using clues about animals to try and figure out which animal it is. And they have to find that animal in the zoo.
But the second half, they get the opportunity to be in the zoo at night and they get to help out with the roar and snore. Where we are. Where we are speaking right now, which is, it's very fabulous. And I experienced the night time staying at the Zufari Lodge in Western Plains.
And the Royal Install here is the same wonderful program. And seeing the animals at night, the way they use red torches and the animals come to life in different ways at night. So that was a wonderful thing to be able to again show through the children's eyes.
But then what's even more special to me was that the kids walk through the zoo with one of the other volunteers to go and see JR the echidna being moved at night because JR only comes out at night and they needed to move him. But as they're walking through the zoo, they start to get scared because of sounds. Like this familiar place to them suddenly becomes foreign and different and they start to get really freaked out by the noises until they stop.
And they go, we know what's in this zoo. And they start to listen and they start to analyse, well, what could that be? And that's when they start to realise and learn about all of the actual wildlife that make Taronga in Sydney home that aren't the animals that you would normally see at the zoo. Do you mean young people can...
go away from their screens and look around them and take notice? They can, and it's a really important thing to do. One of the most fascinating things I discovered was about micro bats. I'm a bit of a bat lover. I love bats. I live next to some wildlife carers who looked after bats. And I found that Taronga has put roosting boxes all through the trees
to give the microbats more habitat with so much building of homes and things. And they live in hollows in trees. So they exist in and around the zoo, but you may not even realise that when you walk around. Then obviously there's bandicoots and possums and so many cool animals. And Ollie and Sophia are such a great example for what you can experience if you do just step away and look around you. And we have that wildlife all around us.
All over Australia, you have wildlife everywhere if you just open your eyes and have a look. It was really cool. So that's why I love that book so much. Are you consciously putting these lovely flavoured stories in to entice the children to science? Yeah, I am actually, very much am. And I think the world around us is such an incredible place and it is so full of stories.
And I'm a storyteller at heart. I have been for my whole life in one form or another. And for many years as a journalist, writing stories that were true. And I don't see any difference in the value of writing stories that are true or writing, as I do now, stories that are made up.
because we all have stories to tell and the world around us is so full of stories that are true, that even if you want to make them up as I did with the Taronga stories, there's so much fact in there that has inspired the journey. And it's stuff you couldn't make up, I don't think, even if you wanted to.
So science is one of those topics and areas where there is so much we know, so much still undiscovered, which allows scope for your imagination to go wild. And who knows, the thing you're imagining may be the truth down the track when we actually can investigate that further and find it. But I also hope to create curiosity in kids' minds. So when I talk a lot, we laugh about the poo, but when I talk to them about it,
Initially their reaction is, ooh, poo, and you're usually saying poo. But by the end of the conversation, they're racing off to find more cool facts that they can tell people about poo because there is so much more to it than just a stinky thing that you say. Tell me about the elephant.
poo. Oh, I love elephant poo. Elephant poo is the best. And the book. And the book. So I needed extra poo facts, of course. We couldn't just have the koala. And I discovered that you can make paper out of elephant poo. Apparently you can also make paper out of cow poo and horse poo, but I focused on elephant poo. And I thought to myself, Ollie loves collecting facts and he writes them all in a notebook. So when I was coming up with the second book, I'm thinking, hmm, what could Sophia give Ollie as a birthday present? I thought, ah,
Of course, she has to give him a poo paper notebook.
So in order to fully appreciate and understand what a poo paper notebook was actually like, I let my fingers do the walking and I found myself a poo paper notebook. And so I have a poo paper notebook that I proudly take with me to places that I go. And it's very interesting. It's sort of like a parchment paper almost because elephant poo, they only digest quite a small portion of what they eat. So what comes out the other end still has a lot of the hay and the grass and the things that they eat inside.
in it. Elephants are fantastic. I love elephants. I love their trunks. Do you know they have 40,000 muscles in their trunks? They can pick up a blade of grass or knock down a tree. And some of the babies, baby elephants, suck their trunks instead of thumbs. They don't have thumbs. And have you ever seen how baby elephants, they swing them sometimes and like they swing them in circles, their trunks, because they're playing with them. And it's really fun. No, I love elephants. I absolutely adore them. And they feature actually
in most of the books because they're just such magnificent creatures. They really are. Finally, the baby boom. What's that? Baby animals. Who doesn't love baby animals? It's spring. Spring has sprung. But what I tried to do with that, we focus a lot on the Sumatran tigers because the mother, Kartika, is pregnant and she's about to have her baby. So there's a lot of excitement about that.
The kids get to learn how you can monitor tigers. They put cameras in the nesting box, but they don't interfere unless there's absolutely no choice. So it's about the process of learning about how those animals give birth. But it's also talking a lot about how a lot of animals, like say the chimpanzees, would give birth in their natural spaces. Others are assisted. I have a soft spot for bearded dragons. We have a pygmy bearded dragon at home. So I've got some baby...
bearded dragons hatching, how they have one little tooth to break through the shell and it takes them a very long time to get out. So you see all sorts of different animals. The meerkats, so some animals say the meerkats have been in the burrow for quite a long time. So they're not born during the story, but they come out into the open during the story. We also included baby goats.
And a very surprise baby kangaroo, a joey, is born, which is like a paused pregnancy. So I knew nothing about that as well. So the kids get to learn all about how macropods can pause pregnancies and have a baby later on. Finally, I'm delighted that you have young people reading books and being so enthusiastic about
and indeed turning to science in the process. Yeah. Kids reading is so, so important. I work with the Australian Children's Laureate Foundation as well. That's our core work is to get kids reading and engaging with stories in whatever form suits them. Thank you.
My pleasure. Thank you. Four books in the Taronga series, suitably published by Penguin. Pooh at the Zoo, Party Animals, Baby Boom and Night Owls. Author, Kristen Durrell, whose family has two dogs, a pet snake, a pygmy bearded dragon. And next week, the Sound Show features another remarkable Australian woman, Felicia Huppert, and the promise of positive psychology. I'm Robin Williams, production by David Fisher.
ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more.