Anthropocene: The Age of Man

that have accumulated on the Earth. We look at the chemical signatures from the past and trying to piece together exactly what the world was like, what caused it to be like that, and what made it in What ended that period? What catastrophic events ended that period in Earth history and gave birth to a new age. So inevitably we end up looking at our own period of time and what happened when we look at the age of humans as a geologic period, what indeed of aliens in

the distant future? Time travelers, what have you travel to the Earth and find this world devoid of humans, but are able to look back through geology through chemistry and peer at our age, what would we make of it? Well? And I think it's a very interesting question because I think so often we are preoccupied with the past, particularly when we look at the time scale, we just think

about everything that has happened before us. We understand ways in which we are affecting the earth, global climate change or something that comes up quite a bit. But as you say, I don't think that we have taken this stance before. We've tried to go out ten thous years from now and visit the geologic time scale and see what it would look like with the age of man.

And this is what we're gonna talk about today, this idea, this anthroposyn this age of man that is replacing the current Holocene that we are in, this period of time um that has been relatively stable in terms of climate and resources, and trying to take a look at how we are actually going to how we are affecting the Earth, and what it will look like many years from now. And this is going to be kind of a dust statement to to talk about, because you know, we all

know this. At some point Homo sapiens were not the dominant species and we're not quite as accessible as we are now. But there was a time um during life when Homo sapiens really had to be careful about the way that they conducted themselves because they could easily be a meal for megafauna, for a large predator. Or there were times in history where you've seen something called bottlenecks, and this is when the population, the Homo sapien population

went below two thousand people. If you can imagine where the population dives down so far that the chances of the species can tinuing really diminishes, and then also you get into increasing problems of genetic diversity as well, and the population begins to get down that low, and of course you've got circumstance us during that time, that's thought

that there weren't as many resources available. But now we take it for granted that Homo sapiens, you know, have always been strong and here and and been the dominant force on Earth. But really this is a fairly new in the full geologic time scale view of things. This is a fairly new development. Yeah, because we're as humans were still afraid of things. We're still afraid of sharks seating us, we're still afraid of of stray dogs, biding us.

We're afraid of diseases. We're afraid of the death that we haven't exactly figured out how to defeat yet. I mean, and and everything has come into this humans versus this, humans versus that scenario. But we look back in the past, right, and there was a time when animals were a definite threat to humans. There was a time when disease was more of a threat. Now it's still a threat, but there were times when an outbreak of disease could potentially

wipe out the species. And today, to too many modern observers, you might think, well, we basically haven't have it knocked right, outside of the chance that the shark might eat me, outside of the chance that the disease might topple some of us, humanity is here to stay, right, Yeah, humanity is here to stay. And you have to look at it this way that when we began to hunt wooly mammoth's,

we began to change the landscape. Um, you know, from ancient aqueducts to cloud seating for Beijing Olympics to try to have better weather. We have been trying to alter our landscape. And geographers Earl Ellis and Navin Ramakuti argue that we are no longer disturbing natural ecosystems. Instead, we are now we now live in human systems with natural

ecosystems embedded within them. Yeah, the mammoth thing is really interesting because generally when you start thinking about, okay, when did humans really start tinkering with things, you tend to think back twelve thousand years to this, this turning point when we begin to develop agriculture. Because this this allows a number of things to take place. We've discussed this before.

Suddenly you're able to grow a surplus of food, You're able to stay in one spot, You're able to devote certain members of society to specialist tasks, be that task the development of essentially the early sciences, to culture, to religion, to star or naval gazing, to fine tuning the agricultural processes that society is depending on the birth of the city. All of these things rise up from that turning point.

But you go back much farther in history and you find that the mammoth populations are dropping, in part because you have natural climate change taking place, but also mammoths are tasty, mammoths are useful, use every part of it right, it's it's a fabulous product. Early humans couldn't get enough of it, and so they were hunting it to extinction. And without the mammoths around to graze and eat the birch that grew, um, that kept everything kind of a grassland.

Suddenly you have forests ringing up, darker forests absorbing more light. Right, So you end up with a warmer climate because of it. So here already due to the things humanity wants, the things that it feels it needs to combat in the world around it and take from the world around it, that contributes to changes in the planet. Yeah, and I guess some people would argue that that was really the

beginnings of when we began to alter the landscape. Um. You know, was thought that it was the more agrarianxieties societies that cropped up ten thousand years ago, that that's when humans really began to change the landscape for better or worse. But you can point to this, You can point to rolling manloths in the hunting of them that

had a direct correlation with how the environment changed. Um. So if you kind of fast forward a bit and you had, you know, to to modern day and you had mentioned um, extra terrestrial life forms, if they were to cruise by our planet, they would see a very human stratigraphical signal. And when I'm thinking of, are the satellite photos of the Earth at night lit up by fossil fuel combustion. I mean, you could cruise past our planet and say, oh, there's something up, there's something going

on there. Yeah, they're burning their past to create this present lit electric world of power and energy. And if in fact, as we've discussed before, as we're trying to figure out where extraterrestrial life may exist in the universe, we're looking for the same type of signals because we look to ourselves as the only model of intelligent life

in the universe is the only one we have. So therefore the simplest equation to follow is that what exists here would exist elsewhere if there is anything alive elsewhere. So we look for that same level of fossil fuel

consumption of energy, uh, energy consumption and energy output. Yeah, so it looks so So think about those satellite photos and think about the fossil fuel combustion and the beautiful sort of fireworks display of light throughout the world that actually has real time signatures in the Earth settlement, and that's we're gonna talk about today. We're gonna talk about this idea again that we are now in the age

of man. And if you doubt this, there's a statistic out there that says that there will be a million person city built every ten days over the next eighty seven years. So you have to start to think about the implications of that. And we discussed in the Ortivisian podcast this idea that when when you live on the earth here, you just continue to build up layers and layers of sediment. So now we are building up these layers of human sediment. Yeah. To see, it's just a

simple example of that. If you've we've mentioned London in the past and how London has all these various levels of Like walking down one street in London, a particularly long street in London, you encounter bits of architecture from throughout that city's history, and if you take down into the earth, you'll travel down through the layers of history

for this one city. The same way that we look at geologic time, and we're trying to figure out exactly how future analysis of geologic time will look at this age of humans. Yeah, so we should probably talk about the Holascene period, because this is what we have identified the period that we are in up until about I guess the nineties, when this idea of antipascene came onto

the scene. Here. Ye, so Earth was emerging from an ice age, So we had the end of a period of of cold entering a period of a summer, if you will, a very long summer in which humans yea. So we have about something what twelve thousand years now in this Holocene period. And uh, some scientists will say that they think that this era ended and they think they can pinpoint it to about two hundred years ago with the advent of the steam engine. And this is

according to Ken called the Ara. He is a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institute of Science in California. He says that steam engines allowed the extraction and transportation of coal, which ushered in the Industrial age. So previous to this development, it would take huge acts of nature to drastically all to the earth settlement. Yeah, you really can't overstate the importance of steam power for human civilization. It affected our ability to travel around the world. It affected our ability,

like you said, to change the landscape around us. It affected our ability to grow things, It souped up our ability to depend on agriculture, It changed our ability to wage war on each other. I mean it really a manufacturing and affect every level of of human society and human culture. That's right. If you had to choose one thing that you would say hinged on that that changed technology for better or words going forward, I guess you

could point to the steam engine. And uh, I actually wrote an article on how Stuff Works about the steam technology. So put steam technology, steam power into how stuff works dot com search bar and you find out what I can feel is a pretty good article that goes through the history of it and how it really changed the

world as we know it. Yeah, and if you doubt this, um consider that there has been data retreat from glacial ice cores and it shows the big of a growth in the atmosphere at concentrations of several greenhouse gases, in particular c O two and c H four, And the data coincides with James Watt's invention of the steam engine in seventy four. So that's just one human marker of these sort of ways that we have scarred or shaped the earth. Think about fiber optics, lining in the ocean floors,

manufactured materials like aluminum and steel. Essentially these are new this is a new layer of human made strata. Yeah, it's estimated by at least eight three of the earth

verse land surface had been directly affected by humans. That's everything from cutting down a forest and planning a bunch of crops, to erecting a city, to turning what was formerly a grassland and into asphalt, to laying down cables to running power lines across the wilderness and the meaning name of the world pretty significant, right and the earth land right, but still you still have some significant changes

going on underneath the water as well. And then again these are sedimentary and geochemical signals that are exactly the kind that geologists used to mark where one period of

Earth history ends and another begins. And in the BBC program The Age We Made, geologist gen Zala Suits actually shows a reporter where a railway cutting exposed a clear line in rocks made one dred and eighty million years ago and this um actually mark the Torracian extinction event in the early Jurassic when dinosaurs is beginning to dominate. And Zala Suit says that in a similar way, we will see clear marks in the rocks that will show us where one one age was divided into another and

and where you can see the human handprint on the earth. Um. He's saying that the rocks of the ant Passyne would show an accumulation of novel chemicals like artificial PCBs, among many other things. Yeah. I mean that it's an important thing to mention. We're chemically altering the world as well. It's not just we took a bunch of stone and a bunch of metals and we built a city out of it, or that we live up the night. Uh. Chemically,

we're changing what the earth is. Yeah. And before we talk about how we we've changed the earth chemistry, let's talk about humans as a force of nature. We talked about this idea of sediment being moved around, but again it wasn't you know, previous to humans, it was really ice ages, supervolcanoes, um, huge events that changed the landscape, mass extinctions of animals. You know. Again, this was something

that we attributed to nature in the past. But now again with sediment changes, here is a very clear picture of how we are the largest force in the movement of sediment on our planet, and that is compared with what's moved by ice, wind and rivers. And this is according to James Vitski, he's an earth scientist at the

University of Colorado, Boulder. He says that that rivers carry thirteen billion tons of settlement to the ocean, and we now mine eight to nine billion tons of coal, and that by thirty's predicted that we will reach thirteen billion tons of coal mining. And that does not include aggregate materials like gravel and sand, which is another thirteen billion tons. Hydraulic cement and iron ore both each another two billion tons. Yeah.

On the point about water, as of two thousand and five, humans had built so many damns, then nearly six times as much water was held in storage as flowed freely in rivers, right, And this is important because again you don't want necessarily your rivers to overflow into your cities, and that's why we try to control it. But it is another example of how we are sculpting the earth

and changing it to meet our needs. And you cannot deny that there there is the hampret of humanity on the earth now, right, I mean, it's it's kind of the idea of a damned river like that is what we have done to the planet. The planet itself as a damned river with the natural flow of things, has been messed with so that we can get something we want out of it, damned and not damned. Right. Yeah,

and then we've got agriculture. We produce food for the seven billion of us, and that's the earth surface that's used for production of crops and pastures. And this doesn't actually take into account how the land around it is also influenced by agriculture, whether it's runoff um or the chemical trace of synthetic nitrogen. So again, think back to that example of the mathoths. Without the mammoths, forests sprang

up and change the atmosphere. Eventually humans get around to knocking down a lot of those forests so that they can grow crops, and this is also going to have a huge effect on the atmosphere. Yeah. And I had read somewhere that the reason why some of this is hard to get our heads around is because we have abstracted so many of what, so much of what we do and how we see ourselves apart from animals um

that we no longer see ourselves as animals. And this is just something that is an indirect pros says, Yes, we build cities, we build homes. Oh, by the way, you know, we're taking away the habitats of certain creatures and it's just leading to extinction. Well, and then I to a certain extent, I feel like people also look to animal models and they're like, well, a bird has a nest um, an it's built a colony. These are all just versions of what we are doing. But you

don't see in the animal world. You don't see it too to thee the extent that we carry it out, to the extent that it is, it is changing the planet. I mean about it really about the only the only things that as far as life goes when when you look back through a lot of time, see early emergence of organisms that changes the atmosphere, that that contributes to

a huge change in the atmosphere. And then you also see as vegetation takes hold that also has an atmospheric effect and also cuts down on the weathering that can take place on the planet. But outside of a lot of those early changes like this is this is the one like beavers were not changing the lens gape in a significant way. Leave it to the humans. Right. Yeah, well, and I'm thinking too, even something like the collapse of the honeybee colonies, which has been in the news a

lot in the last five or so actually ten years. Um, this is a great mystery. Now there are some ideas about the cause of it, and they're pointing to pesticide, saying that this is changing the pesticides are actually changing the behaviors of honey bees. And we already know that honeybees are central to the way that our ecosystem plays itself out. So again it's it's just problematic because these

are indirect things that are happening. Um, but it's hard for us to, i think, get our heads around it and see it for the actual damage that is doing

to the land, into the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean to say nothing of most of the various invasive species that we're having to worry about in the world today, A vast number of those can be laid at the feat of humans who have either enabled one species to spread to an area that it previously had no access to, or changes in the environment or in the or in the atmosphere that that caused an animal to change from

one area to another. So well, and see this is the this is the thing about the in passy, and that I think that the main point that a lot of geologists and scientists are trying to make is that all of this is being captured. Um. It's being captured

in sediment, is being captured in chemical markers. So people will be able to look back and say, okay, there you know the the amount of pollen wasn't as present as it was in these areas, and you began to make this story for yourself of Okay, there could have been a collapse with the honeybee uh colonies, or these animals were in this area when they shouldn't have been, or they became extinct in this area. So it's not

just the fossil record, it's the chemical signatures. Um. It should probably take a break, but when we get back, we're going to talk about these chemical signatures, how we are changing the earth chemistry, and I probab ms you will have a bit of good news in there too. Eventually, all right, we're back talking about what humans have done to the planet. And I tell you one one personal example that I ran into the other week keeps ringing in my mind. I was at The Desert Museum in

Arizona outside of Tucson. Really cool place. It's really not so much a museum as it is a botanical garden with animals. Get to see a lot of cool cacti, other modes of desert vegetation. Get to see really cool animals like the have alina, various lizards. There was a coyote hiding there somewhere. But they also had little prairie dogs. Yeah, yeah, and they were adorable. We haven't hit them, just as they were coming out and they were they were looking around,

so we were just really eating it up. They're like, oh, they're so cute. They're amazing looking how they're watching, you know, observing the way that that some are watching out for hawks overhead and the others are busy feeding or seemingly snuggling with each other. It was the adorable creatures. Did

they give you giant foam hammers to pump from? No, they didn't, but but in a way it was like a bomb to the head when other tourists showed up, because there was one in particular where the only thing the guy can muster is he he asked, I wonder what those tastes like? You know, which, which is a very kind of human thing too. It's like you're you're your only way of relating to this animal is to think what it might taste like and how it compares to other animals that you eat. I mean, that's that's

a very narrow way of looking at the world. But the best though, was another tourist wanders up and it's like a father and a sign. And at first I'm like, oh, it's a father in the son. They're looking at the prairie dogs. It's nice that the son, who is apparently he's older, It got the impression who was in the National Guard or in the military or something. And he starts telling his father, how ah, these things they infest everything. They just all over the base. We have to go

ahead and kill him at all. And I wanted to shake them and say, say, the prairie dogs are not the creatures infesting things, like the humans are the creatures that are infesting things. Humans are the invasive species that have spread to every continent on the planet and have, as we're discussing here, drastically changed most of those continents, and that we're working on the last one. Just give us time. But I doubt they would have. I would

have probably ruined their vacation. I really wanted to say that, you know, because it's it's it all tends to wind up at our feet, you know. Yeah. But then there's this problem of that's been the dominant philosophy for humans. I mean, manifest destiny is you know something that that that arose um when when America is expanding, But that is that's a perspective that most humans have taken, is that we are going to dominate, and we are going to bend nature to our will and how dare nature

creep upon us? Uh? And we will try to manipulate life for us at every single level that we can, you know, from from d NA to a cloud seating. Yeah, and its human being. Since we've discussed before, we're notoriously bad at judging or specifically acting on long term risks. And that's just within our own lifetime. That's that come down to should I study for the exam tonight or should I go out and party? And then you end

up going partying instead. But then when you when you deal with it with much larger periods of time that span a whole multiple generations, it becomes even harder for us to actually act on it, and we end up again caught in this narrow perception of my life and the things around me and the things I need to maintain this level of goodness. Well also feel like on a technological level, we really are only beginning to understand the impact of what the last seventy eighty years and

technologies have brought to our feet. And I'm thinking in particular this conundrum of synthetic nitrogen. Yes, because synthetic nitrogen is something that we were able to begin to harness in the nineteen thirties. It was in our atmosphere, we couldn't quite figure out how to manipulate it for our use. And then let me and behold, biochemists figured out how nitrogen could be taken out of the atmosphere and break

it down with bacteria to create fertilize. Yeah. Particularly, this is a man by the name of Fritz Haber um round nineteen hundred, young MP chemist in Germany. There's an excellent radio lab segment titled how do you solve a problem like Fritz Haber And Uh, It's a fascinating story because see, at this point in time, everyone is really starting to worry about how we're gonna feed these growing populations, and it continues to be a problem today, but at

the time that it was getting pretty serious. How do you grow enough food to feed everyone? So Haber happens on a solution. Again, he's experimenting, and he makes his breakthrough about how to pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere, essentially, to borrow the term from Radio Lab, how do you turn air into bread? Turn how to turn to basically make food out of thin air and enable humanity to

continue all these things that it's doing. And it's of course, what's the dark side to the friends Haber story, as as I'll leave Radio Lab to explain it to you, is that he ends up having a role in the creation of some particularly devastating chemical agents in the Second World War. So go go listen to that when you get a chance. It's dark and insightful. But here's the thing, and that that that's that's where the conundrum comes in.

You have synthetic nitrogen, harnessing it, you can use it for fertilizer, you can grow many more crops, feeding many more people. But the problem is is that now it's being leached into the soil is being leached into um into the atmosphere, and when you have the combustion of fossil fuels with atmosphere nitrogen, that produces nitrogen oxides which have created basically a global nitrogen cycle which is completely

controlled by the human species. And this if if you doubt the hand of man on the world and it's markers, you can look directly to this to say that we are a force of nature ourselves when we can control the nitrogen cycle on our planet. Yeah, we Again, we're not just building things out of other things. We're altering the system itself, and it's and it's pretty terrifying when you start thinking of it in those terms. So then you have this problem of reactive nitrogen washing into the

oceans and causing coastal dead zones. Even the most remote areas of the world have isotopic markers in the layers of sediments in places like the Arctic pointing to increased amounts of human engineered nitrogen. So again, we've got the record here for for all to see in ten thousand years from now at least, So what can we do about it? What can we actually do at this point? And again, the big thing here. It's kind of like building bases on the Moon, or exploring other planets, or

any any substantial human achievement. We've got to actually want to do it and have there There has to be the political will to get it done. But what could

we do if we wanted to do something? Well, I mean, we have a couple of things up our sleeves, but I think one of the main things is that we have to have a perspective change and um And I think this is why some people are pushing for the adoption of this antipathying term, because they're saying that once you say, yes, this is the age of man, then people will become more responsible when they realize that on the geologic time scale all that they are now responsible

for the changes made to Earth. It's not just oops, we did this and this happened. Um And I'm thinking too that that this is not just the long view, but as more and more technologies come online and people like Aubrey de Gray, the bio gerontologists, she says that we could live to a thousand years. He says that the first person to reach the age of five has already been born, who can be maintained like a classic car,

so to speak, with all the different technologies. But this is coming online and that people will naturally begin, hopefully to adopt this long view perspective. And right now, you know, we sort of quibble about, well, this is very expensive to bring in this technology that helps um for you know, to ameliorate some of the problems that we have. But the fact of the matter is that we do have bioadaptive technologies that could render waste really a thing of

the past. It reminds me of the movie The Mission, if you've seen this with Jeremy Irons and Robert de Niro. At the very end of it, there's a character who is having to come to terms with some arguably bad decisions that he made that had some some horrible repercussions, and another character says to him, well, thus is the world, as if to say, hey, this is the world. We just have to live in it. Sometimes you've got to do bad stuff to live in this world. And he responds, no,

thus thus is the world? Thus have I made it? Saying that the world that we're making excuses for is a world that we have increasingly created through our own mistakes, wrongdoings and this attitude of of living in a world where the rules are already set well, and I think largely we have lived that way. But again, I think that we're beginning to get it beat on what happens

with technology over a hundred year period. And I think that to me, the most amazing part of this story, and perhaps the most uplifting if we can use this information right, is that over the last two hundred years, we have vastly changed the climates. Um, we've vastly changed the way our our world looks and it's sculpted. We could do the very same thing, but in ways that we're intentional and that made sense for the long haul. Yeah, and there are a lot of people working on this.

There are some fantastic designs just coming out all the time. We we feature a lot of them on the Facebook page and the Twitter. You know, it'll be this kind of design for a for an ecologically sound city or an ecologically sound household. Countless new technologies are always being

dreamed up, if not actually developed. It's just to what extent are we willing to actually invest in them and make make the jump Well, and um, I mean there are ideas like compossible cars and gadgets, um, And really what we need to look toward is and we've talked about this number many, many times, but this has been This is the year that we will reach about nine and a half billion inhabitants. And of course, where are we going to get the food, Where are we going

to get the space? So we need to think about innovations that are tailored to the needs of the poorest and new plant varieties that can withstand climates that are harsh. We need to about technologies to recycle phosphorus. Then now, of course when you talk about new plants, you're talking about genetically modified organisms. So it's give and take, right. Yeah,

It's kind of like the bathtub. It's like a little more hot water because the bath too cold, a little more cold water because the bath is too hot, and then at what point does the water simply overflow? Well, the thing is is that we we are a self aggrandizing species, right, And this is where I think this works to our advantage, because if we really want to have an age of man and own this and uh and be within the fossil record or the geological time scale and say this is the age of man, we

actually have to exist for a lot longer um. You know, these periods are quite long. So if we begin, if we go at the rate that we are, and we were to use up um a lot of the resources of Earth and make it not so that it's not very habitable, especially with so many people coming online in the year, then we may not have this. It may not even be able to point to this because we may not be alive. I mean, ultimately, do you want it to be the age of man or do you

want it to be the human event? This is near blip in geologic time in which humans arrived on the scene, changed the world around them, and then brought about their own extinction and pretty quick succession. Right would it be lovely if ten tho years from now someone could point to this age and say, ah, here's this crazy stuff that they were creating in the air, and then you can see all this other evidence in which they began to sort of tinker with that and and create substances

that worked better with the natural world. So there is hope if we want it, um. But but there there's a lot of serious stuff on the table that we need to think about. Really and again we need to I do believe we need to start thinking about it as the age of man, as not this not an age in which we live, but an age of us that we are dictating, and so we need to we need to step up and and make some changes. This

is the tough love talk. There's a great quote in Daniel Quinn's Ishmael which, if any if you're interested in any of these topics, I highly recommend reading that novel. He makes a really strong philosophical argument for most of this, and I believe this book arises from pretty much the same period as the as the idea that this age of man exists. Yeah, actually, I mean mentioned to you that age of Man was put forward by Paul J. Krutzen and Christian schwad Role and this was in the

early so so roughly there. But the Daniel quint Quinn quote goes as follows, Man's destiny was to conquer and rule the world, and this is what he's done. Almost he hasn't quite made it, and it looks as though this may be his undoing. The problem is that man's conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we've obtained. We don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world or to repair the devastations, and we've already wrought. So there you go.

We need the long view people. Yeah, so it's it can be a bit when I read Ishmael, it's kind of a harrowing, depressing read because it deals a lot with what we are, what we've done, and what we might not have the will to do. But like all of it, humans are capable of so much. I mean, just look at what we've done to the earth. It's most of it we've looked at in a very negative light here, but it's still a tremendous amount of change.

Imagine if we're able to work that back in another direction. Well, and imagine again too, if if you do live to be five or someone listening, well, perhaps you're the first person that lived to be five years old. I feel that that our behaviors would change with that sort of longevity. Yeah, so if you're listening, future five year old person, you know what to do. All right, Well, let's call over the robe it here and see if you can liven

things up with a little listener mail. All right, we heard from Adam Adam of course is the chief been this officer from having this pledge dot com travels around the world doing good and uh we get to live vicariously through his uh missives to us. School hats that time, I know, and it's cold enough for me you to begin wearing mine. I'm very excited. But he wrote in about our maps episodes and he says, Hi, guys, as you can imagine, maps are a daily part of my existence.

Being on the road, I've had to read more than my fair share, and they range from good to horrible, usually depending on the level of infrastructure in the city. I'm in Catman Doo, Nepal at the moment, and you can see on the attached pictures that there are no street names on the map. Thus all maps have schools, hospitals, hotels, restaurants, and other landmarks so you can navigate your way around. I think Robert has mentioned on the show that he's

been to Costa Rica. Throughout Central America, there aren't really addresses. I remember trying to find a bus company's ticketing offices which listed its addressed as quote, two hundred meters south of the high school, a hundred meters west of the church, a good sense of direction is necessary or command of Spanish to just ask locals, which what I inevitably always did. As for the reading the maps of places before going, I say it's the best. It's best to go and

experience everything when you get there. Thanks again for the great podcast, and take care. Indeed, in Costa Rica, that was the one thing I definitely remember. They're talking about how the maps really don't work, and a lot of it ends up depending on landmarks, but not only current landmarks, but the landmarks that haven't necessarily existed in like a

decade or so. Like one of the big ones was like, there's a Coca Cola bottling plant, I believe in the capital of Costa Rica, and that was still used as a reference point as a landmark even though it's no longer there. Let's see. That's what I think. It's really charming about Costa Rica. Yeah, yeah, because I don't know. I love I love that it's time doesn't necessarily exist there, nor do good roads. That's the roads are pretty autricious,

especially the ones going up to Monteverde. But but I've heard the argument that the reason that those roads haven't been improved because if you get a nice road going up to Monte Verde. Then how long before you have a casino in Monteverdi? How long do you have to the whole the very beauty of the place that everyone likes. It is kind of this mountain, kind of hippie, a lot of expatriots living there, Quakers. It's a really magical

place and I read everyone to go. But the road up there is terrifying, but perhaps for a reason, and that would be no good for sloths rights. Yeah, they hate casino because they're just they're too slow on the one. I know, I know, I wants to get behind a

sloth at a casino. All right, Well, if you have anything you would like to share with us about your travels, about maps or on the heels of this episode, about humanity's impact on the on the world and what we need to do going forward, if we were really to own this idea that this is the age of man, that we're living in a world that is sculpted from our selfish desires, let us know. You can write us through various methods. You can find us on Tumblr, where

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