SYSK Distraction Playlist: How Terraforming Will Work

in three stores. That one click and clack, by the way, r P R I P legend. Man, that was a sad one. Was he click or clack? You know? Always got that confused? Um it was Tom right, I want to say click but um but as Tom who died and his younger brother Ray still around. Yeah, it was a great show man. Yeah, my house is off to MPR for like immediately like lowering the flag and making a big deal out of it, I mean like it

was cool. Yeah, he certainly taught us a thing or two if they did about just everything we know, kind of being natural goose leaving it in everything. So hats off to you, sir, so Chuck. Moving along to terraforming, Um, did you know that a recent study found that even if we instituted a global one child policy like China, but global sure, which is less than a hundred years away now, Um, it's like eighty five years away, that's not that far, we'd be able to keep the population

at about current levels. A lot of people would say the current level is too much as it is. But if we didn't do anything and continued on this pace of growth, we've hit about twelve billion people. By that is a ton of people. It's a lot of folks. There's a that's a lot of stretch on resources for agriculture, for fuel, energy, all that kind of stuff, and it's it's caused a lot of people numbers like this, studies like this. It's caused a lot of people to say, Um,

how are we going to support all of these people? Yeah? Did you know a lot of people poo poo that notion. Oh yeah, I had no idea when I did that little video and overpopulation. A lot of people are like, this is not a problem, this is a conspiracy. There's a there's a there's a definite division between camps. There's the gloom and doom camp who say like, we're screwed, and then there's the other camp who says we'll always technologically advance our way out of trouble like this, right,

is that what you're saying. I don't know what the point was. I think there's just there's a camp that says overpopulation is not an issue like people say it is. Well, I think a few people redistributed people. It's possible that that could alleviate overpopulation if it is a thing, But I think most people I can't even say that. Some people would say that agriculture has what's called a carrying capacity, and we've talked about mouth this before, um, and that

we are possibly stretching it right now. UM. So a lot of people, the ones who do believe in the overpopulation problem, are starting to look to the stars and saying, hey, man, let's figure out how to exploit other planets too, so the human race can survive. Isn't that what Interstellar is about? That new movie? Yeah, And and it was totally I didn't think, like, oh, Interstellar, this will be timely, like the two just happen to coincide. Is about terraforming, or

is it just like, hey, go find a place that's hospitable. Well, according to what Michael Caine says in the preview, it's about just going to find a hospitable plan which is a search that is currently underway and has been for a while through NASA's Kepler Um Observatory. They've been looking

for exoplanets, and supposedly right now they have. They're eighteen hundred and fifty four confirmed exoplanets, forty one undred and seventy three unconfirmed, and all of them are between ten light years and twenty five thousand light years from Earth. Pretty far it is right now, it's it's prohibitively far.

But there are planets out there that exist in what's called the Goldilocks zone, which is they orbit a star and they're just far enough away from the star that they're not going to burn to a crisp, but they're not so far away that you're going to freeze to death. Hence the Goldilocks zone. Not too hot, not too cold, got it. That's cute. So that's one thing we could do. We could go find a planet that's like ready made for us to live on. If it I doubt that

exists though. Yeah, and plus, even if we did find it, like I said, the closest exo planet that we know of, I think is about ten light years away. That means it would take a photon, which travels at the speed of light, ten years to get there. We can't travel anywhere near the speed of light, so it might as well not exist, so all you know, we're not so. Alternately, a lot of people are proposing to take a planet or a moon or an asteroid or something and turn

it into something habitable for us, and that's terraforming. Yeah, find a nice little fixer upper planet, go in there and flip it and move humanity there to ruin it. Maybe have a meltdown in front of the cameras, make a couple of stupid things, cliffhangers. Boom, you've got yourself a serious that's right, terraforming. We did a short video about this once about a hundred years ago, where we explained it in sixty seconds. We should just try that again, No,

just press play and sit back. We also did one of lunar building a lunar base. Yeah almost at a lunar base on the Moon, but that's redundant. Yeah. Uh, and that's another idea, is what we could just build lunar bases and stuff. I think Russia is doing that, right. They announced in May or June they want to build a like habitable base up there, right. They plan to spend several hundred million dollars and put it on the Moon and just start mining the Moon. They want to

get a jump on the rest of the humanity. And it's pretty smart. But building a lunar base, or building a base anywhere, a floating city on venus or anything like that, that's not terraforming. That's building a base somewhere or floating city somewhere. Yeah, we're talking about changing the atmosphere of a planet and more. Yeah, which requires a substantial amount of energy, a lot of foresight, and and a tremendous amount of patients and money. Yeah I have money.

But I mean if if you take money and the amount of time, I would say the amount of time is more depressed seeing them the amount of money you're going to have to sink into it, because what we're talking about is stuff that's not going to take place until millennia have passed. Yeah, there's all sorts of ranges of how long it might take the terror form of planet from a thousand years to twenty years. I saw, yeah, for Mars to for us to be able to go to Mars and take off a helmet and be like.

Michio Kaku has a very cheap idea. Have you ever seen his little short video he explains in sixty seconds? What is he what's his idea? He's like, you know, there's lots of CEO two under the surface, and all we have to do is heat that up a little bit and jump start the process, and then it creates a what he called a catalytic effect and it just

sort of sustains itself. Well, it's yeah, so that's called what he's talking about is called the standard paradigm that Mars has not CEO two on the planet, that if, like he says, you can just melt it, it will

create an atmosphere that traps heat. You know, we have a problem with c O two on this planet, which is another reason people say we need to go find another planet and create a greenhouse effect, and that will trap heat, which would melt more c O two and more and more, and it will just create this cycle. Do there what we don't want to do here exactly jumps started. Let's let's talk about Mars. Man, You've got some time to wrap about Mars and and why Mars

is frequently pointed to as an ideal locale for terraforming. Yeah, if you listen to our April episode on Mars, then you know a lot about mars um. But we're gonna recap some of it. Mars is a very cold, dried, dusty place now, but it used to be wet and warm and a lot more like Earth than a lot of surrounding planets. So they think we can just get it back to that state, then we've got a good start.

Probably the key to Mars, more than anything else, that makes it a the likeliest candidate for terra for me, is that the Martian day is twenty three point seven hours. I think it's almost exactly like Earth's day, right, getting shorter or no, twenty four point seven hours, I'm sorry, twenty four hours and thirty seven minutes something, yes, point seven is thirty seven minutes, isn't sure. I just wanted

to give it a relatable So it's close. It's it's very close to the Earth day um, and that indicates that it spits so if Mars is already spinning, it has a huge leg up over the competition in the terraforming contest. So many many years ago, Mars was wet, there was volcanic activity, and it was getting bombarded by asteroids. That right, that did two things chuck, two huge things for Mars. One, these asteroids were bringing in gases or compounds that Mars needed to have an atmosphere, right, it

was applying the planet with it. And then the volcanic activity was taking these, um, these compounds and elements that were locked into rock and stuff like that and recycling them back into the atmosphere, which was sustaining the atmosphere, right, Yeah, which was great as long as that was going on. But once those volcanoes stopped and it was lousy with volcanoes. Once they stopped doing their recycling, gig uh, it basically

absorbed all that stuff and locked it in the the planet. Yeah, the same thing would happen here, apparently, like if we didn't have volcanic activity. Um, what volcanoes do. One of the things they performs atmospheric recycling, which is taking this stuff that you normally have an atmosphere that's been absorbed by by the soil or by rock and boiling it, melting the rock and spewing it out as a gas

back in the atmosphere. And like you said, when Marsh stopped doing that, it's the recycling process stopped, and all of a sudden you just had a static atmosphere that

slowly was stripped away. Another part of the problem was Mars cool that the core, and that means it lost its magnetic field, so the upper atmosphere was not being held in place any longer by the magnetosphere, so the solar winds were just stripping it away, and all of a sudden, Mars had this very thin atmosphere that wasn't they couldn't trap heat any longer, and the whole planet, like you said, got really dry and really cold like

we know it today. That's right, and uh, completely uninhabitable. UM. A couple of other things Mars doesn't have going for it. UM is it's not very close. It's what like six months away to get there. Yeah, I guess yeah. I think it's like a six month trip to get to Mars. Uh. And that's a long way to go if you want to make regular trips. It's cost prohibitive, yes, but compared to the Moon, which you can get to like lickt ease play that's like a weekender six months is that's

pretty distant. Um. But the fact again, the fact that Mars has this history of um being able to hold an atmosphere and surface water, two huge factors in an a habitable planet. UM and the fact that, uh there's stuff that's necessary for life, like c O two and things like that trapped on the planet already in a frozen form really just kind of is a is a bright flashing neon signed to people saying, hey, man, come

terra formed me. That's right. We'll talk about some of the steps that you have to take to terra form a planet like Mars right after this. Okay, so Mars is a good it's a good, nice old house that has good bones. Oh yeah, it's a great analogy, and we want to restore it to its former moist wet glory, which sounds really gross. Some people can't even hear the word moist. You know. Yeah, there's a whole it's like a yeah, I don't mind it. Uh so meetchokaku is

has the right idea. There are polar ice caps on Mars, which have a lot of CEO two, And if you jump start those and start to melt them, let's say, with solar reflective mirrors, bounce that sun over there that way. Uh, that might be a good way to get things started, right, And it's not going to take too terribly much energy um to melt those that sequestered c c O two because carbon dioxad. Basically what those polar ice caps are is dry ice. Like Mars has dry ice all over it.

That's from the atmosphere that was frozen, right, that's right, and um, dry ice sublimates that a hundred negative a hundred and nine degrees fahrenheight. Right, So if you can just direct some mirrors at it and just raise it to that temperature, all that c O two is going to go from ice and vaporizing to gas and it's going to float up and hang in that thin atmosphere.

And like we said, once you have that c O two in that thin atmosphere, you've just started this chain reaction that's going to create a cycle where the planet gets warmer and warmer, and the more and more CEO two sublimates and joins the atmosphere and you have a runaway greenhouse effect. Apparently the at the peak the calculations of the amount of c O two on Mars uh says that you would have a surface temperature of about a hundred and fifty eight degrees fahrenheight. That's great. Yeah,

it's a little hot, but that means water can be sustained. Um, that means that with that atmosphere, the air pressure will be increased, because right now the air pressure on Mars is pretty low too. I think it's about one percent of sea level here on Earth, which is another challenge. Yeah, well maybe once it's that hot, we can introduce hyper thermophiles because and I we'll get to Venus. But that's one of the ideas for Venus. And the idea is

you want you can't just plot humans down immediately. What what you're gonna have to start with is some basic form of life, some kind of bacteria perhaps that just starts doing its thing and uh chowing down on CEO two and the making oxygen, and uh pretty soon, like many thousands of years later, humans might be able to live there. Right. One of the that's that's almost like the intermediate steps. So the first step is to get

an atmosphere back on Mars. And to get an atmosphere back on Mars, you take Mitchio Cacus mirrors and melt the polar for his mirrors. But yeah, right, it's just nice to say his name. Uh. And you melt the polar ized caps of dry ice, and you create this atmosphere, and you allow water to to melt onto the surface, and then you add something like I think the likeliest candidate to cyano bacteria, which is incorrectly referred to as blue green algae. Who says that? Who says, what? Blue

green algae? That's the other term for it. But it's not analogy. It's like a protozoan, I think or something. It's a prokaryote, not a eukaryote like algae. Got man, I feel nerdy right now. It's the oldest fossil on Earth. I mean, that's kind of where it all began, right, That's what gave Earth. It's oxygen. So we're saying, hey, why not try the same thing on Mars. Got a

bunch of CEO two on Mars a runaway greenhouse effect. Well, it just so happens that Ciano bacteria eats CEO two, and not only does it eat CEO two, it converts that stuff into oxygen as a waste product. So all of a sudden, you have something, a living organism on Mars that's converting the atmosphere into something breathable for us humans here on Earth. The problem is you have to have water present for Ciano bacteria to live. But you're gonna have that water because you've melted the ice caps.

You've melted the ice caps to get the CEO to release, which is like negative a hundred nine. You need to raise the temperature to at least thirty two degrees to start melting the water, which requires even more energy. Where you're gonna get that, well, you're not gonna introduce any sound of bacteria until you have that water. Like that's the first goal. You can't have life without water exactly.

But once you do get the water going, which again you could use orbital mirrors, but you just have to concentrate them a little more to reflect more energy into a tighter spot. Um, you've got the cyanobacteria chomping away at the CEO two. It's producing oxygen. Some conservative estimates that i've seen are once you have the oceans or the surface water on Mars, which staggeringly to me, we

could do in a couple hundred years. Supposedly, that's nuts, man, Think about that, Like, Mars could be turned from a desert into a place with service water in a couple hundred years. That's not that far away, it's not. But after that, it would take about forty thou years for enough oxygen to be introduced in the atmosphere for a human to possibly walk around on Mars. Yeah, this is why it's so like far fetched to me. Well, it's

science fiction. It is far fetched. But if you take a long view of humanity and say, yeah, I mean there's no reason. What was the man in the extinction episode? How long does the average species last? Wasn't it like ten million years? We'll say it is even one million years. That means humans will be around supposedly. I'd be surprised well beyond forty thousand years. So we need to be thinking like in in these terms, because there's no way Earth is gonna last another forty tho years for us

unless we just radically re engineer ourselves. Yeah, I'm I get I don't. I never thought of myself as a dim and glimmer. But I must be because I don't I don't know if humans will be around forty years. I guess we'll see. Yeah, all right, we won't see that. But I mean, technically, it should only take an existential existential catastrophe to get rid of humans, Like we shouldn't

just necessarily die off as a species. It should It should take something like physics experiment gonnawry, or a nuclear war or biochemical attacks, something like that. Man will do it, yes, it would be as self injury, probably suicide, I guess, well, not suicide murder, murder humanity. So then there's two other things. And there's a guy named Martin Fogg who wrote a book called Terraforming Engineering Planetary Environments, and he basically laid out what you have to do to get Mars going um.

And again, Mars is the easiest one to do because it has that planetary rotation already. But additionally there's two other things you have to handle. One is UM, the atmospheric pressure. So apparently even at best Mars would um, it would be a lot like existing on a mountaintop here on Earth, Like the air would be thin. You'd

be like living on the top of Mountain Everest. You kind of you'd have to bring your own oxygen, you would so like, But maybe Tibetans and Ethiopian highlanders would make like great early inhabitants of you know, a terraform Mars, because they're already used to that kind of thing exactly. The other thing is is you need nitrogen. Nitrogen is vital of life and the atmosphere, and there's not much

nitrogen o Mars. No, So they're saying, well, then all you have to do is start directing commets ammoniu based ice sterroids I think is what they call them. Yeah, because I don't know if everyone knows this. Commets are I think one of the articles liking it two giant snowballs. And if you sent a comet and exploded it before it hit the planet, uh in theory would send ice everywhere, which would be pretty cool. But you need a lot

of commets, you you. It's not just like one comment you're done, no one, and done doesn't apply to there for man, we have to figure out how to steer these comments that way, which apparently is not I mean, using um astrophysics. I guess that's not it's not all the remo possibility to steer a comment and then hit it with a nuclear device to blow it up so that it explodes into shards and then rains down on Mars.

A lot of things can go wrong though. Yeah, you know, it's frought with complications and comments, but it is a viable way to introduce nitrogen to Mars, and it should ideally stick around, especially once you have an atmosphere um so that's Mars. It's probably the way we're gonna go. Keep an eye out because in a couple of centuries

there'll probably be some sas on Mars. Yeah, and I think that guy that you mentioned too says, even if we do manage to do this, it's going to be a constant process of reintroducing, uh, these these elements, these volatile elements to keep that atmosphere going. I don't I don't know if if Mitchocoko was right, if it would ever like self sustain. Well, it could if you do

that standard paradigm of creating a runaway greenhouse effect. What Martin Fogus saying is, why would you want to do that, because then you have a greenhouse effect that you have to deal with. I was wondering, and then you have to rein that in exactly, he takes a longer view of just slowly introducing stuff again and again to to to create this Martian atmosphere over a longer period, but um in a more granular way, right, Like more more

directed than just creating a runaway greenhouse effect. That makes more sense, a little more focused. So we'll talk about some of Mars's rivals for the terraforming game right after this. So I guess I'm Venus, and so I'm always hot because Venus is a very hot place. It's um very unlike Mars. But some people say Venus has a few things going for it. Namely, it's super close, closest planet

to us. Uh. We have similar almost well not identical, but very similar size and mass and a very thick atmosphere, just like Earth does. So there's a lot of similarities there. Um, But you're sort of working in the opposite direction of Mars. Is You've got a cool Venus down a lot, and there's lots of wacky ideas on how to do that, one of which is, what would you do if you were hot? Put up a big shade? Yeah, like one of those little umbrellas in a tiki drink. Yeah, just

a giant one. Yes. Basically, the idea is to block all sunlight from Venus and cool it um And apparently in about a hundred years, venus is atmosphere which is pretty substantial, like you said, and almost all CEO two would freeze and fall to the surface. Well, there's a lot of sulphururic acid there is, but um, this this atmosphere would freeze and create a surface layer, just like on Mars, like how the CEO two is locked in the polar ice caps would be doing the same thing

with Venus. Then you'd have to go in and deal with this frozen atmosphere, which is kind of a thing, but you could use it to your advantage, Chuck, because the leg up like I said that Mars has over Venus is that the Martian day is about twenty four hours long, right, Well, the Venusian day is about a hundred and sixty days long, which means it rotates way

too slowly for us to be habital for us. So if you take this atmosphere and you freeze it, and you create this frozen hulk of a planet, you can actually make it spin faster if you can blow the atmosphere off into space in a directed manner. Yeah, and actually inshow correction, that's a hundred and sixteen uh days is the length of their day day. There you go. But I think anything over a hundred you just call

a big problem. Yeah, it's too long. So if you can figure out how to blow the atmosphere, the now frozen atmosphere off of Venus in the direction that it's already rotating, you could conceivably spin up speed up the rotation of Venus. Yeah. One of the other problems with Venus is is there's no water. Um. And as everyone knows, like we said, you need water for life. But then we come back to our common idea of driving these

comics and exploding them and creating water that way. And then the hyperthermals which I mentioned thermophiles sorry that I mentioned earlier, are these organisms that can thrive in really hot temperatures. Um, and we're talking really hot. I think that the service temperature of Venus is something like eight hundred degrees fahrenheight eight in seventy two, which is four

d and sixty seven degrees celsius. Yeah. The problem is we We haven't found anything on Earth, any hypotherrmophiles that can handle that kind of temperature and pressure yet, but they think they exist. Yeah. Did you mention the pressure of the atmosphere on Venus. It's two hundred times the pressure at sea level here on Earth. It's a problem

as well. But if you could find a hypo hyper thermophile that could sustain that and a sulfur and then they do though, Yeah, and then yeah, because I think some of them are by thermal vents under underwater, you know, they surf sulfur. We just haven't found any of that can sustain that kind of heat and pressure yet. It's only one way to find out, and that's the launch them towards Venus and see what happens. Basically, in fact,

the planet is what you're talking about. Yeah. Um, so the problem with all of this is is too to freeze Venus, it's going to require a lot of energy to reflect all all the light from the surface. Uh too, bit the frozen atmosphere out in the space is going to require even more. Basically, it would require the amount of energy that the Sun puts out in an entire year. It is crazy, It is crazy. Now but have you

ever heard of the Cardassian scale? Sure, so then you know there's type one, Type two, and Type three civilizations, and a Type one civilization uses all of the available energy from the star. So, like all of this energy that hits the Earth normally from the sun, if you could harness all that, you'd be a Type one civilization. We're not even there yet. Type to civilization could harness all of the energy at the that's created at the star, not just the stuff that makes it to your planet.

And if you could harness that, if you're a Type too civilization, you could be doing this kind of terraforming, no problem. But no sweat man. But I mean, if you think about it, if you have a couple of like leaps forward in understanding, a couple of geniuses are born and live and advance human understanding over the course of a few generations, you could conceivably hit something like

that in a hundred years. So, I mean, it's not it's not out of the wrong possibility that we could be doing stuff like this a hundred two hundred years from now. Yeah, venus. Another idea they have instead of these huge giant um shade sales would be to have a big, floating, pressurized geodesic sphere city that people basically would use the atmosphere because the atmosphere is okay above the sulfur cast of that is but um. That would provide shade and then eventually it would cool the planet

down enough. Just by creating a shadow. They'd be simultaneously sucking the CEO two out of the atmosphere and breaking it down into carbon and oxygen as well, supposedly, so be doing like two things at once. It's not a bad idea. Yeah, sounds efficient, a little more efficient. And apparently if you pressurized um like a indoor city or something like that, a floating city, and put it into NUS atmosphere, it would naturally float in the atmosphere. It

would stay put. Yeah, I think that was the same for the The solar mirror wouldn't have to be attached to anything either off off of Mars. I think it would just be held in place by I think gravity and what solar bubble gum. And then of course, chuck there is the moon. Seems pretty unlikely. The one thing that the moon has going for it is its proximity. Basically, Yeah, basically, it's like the moon is close. It's small, so you're not gonna have to spend a lot of money getting there.

And it's because it's small, you're not gonna spend a ton of money fixing it up. It's the budget terraforming idea. I guess the Russians are already be living there at this point. Um. I don't know if the moon is very viable though, Well, you'd have to again bombard it with something to get it to spin faster, because right now it's days Earth days right. Yeah, they said like

a hundred comments at least about the size of Haley's comment. Yeah, to get it just spinning faster, and perhaps knock it off its axis a bit and give it seasons, which would be nice. Like we have here on Earth, and my money's on Mars. It's got everything you need except for nitrogen, and that you can just deliver however you like. I kind of like the shell idea that you sent along,

kin Roy. He's an engineer who's basically says, why don't we just in case a small planet and a huge shell made of kevlar and steel and dirt, Yeah, and just create like a huge geodesic dome around a planet. I guess the question is where are you gonna get all that dirt? I don't know, because that is the it's it's an essentially greedy you're mostly sitting dirt. Then you create an atmosphere between the shell and the dirt. Yeah, where where's all that dirt coming from? Adobe? Adobe sphere?

I don't know. I think that's a pretty neat idea. I'd be, you know, I too, be all artificial that you have to have artificial light because you're inside a dome um and apparently you would have like air locks and stuff to account for, like the vacuum. I don't know about that though. That sounds like he was saying the atmosphere be just thin enough for gravity, would be just light enough so that humans could fly around. I

swear he added that I saw that. He's like, just as sweeten the pod a little more, yea, to make it that much more cool, you'll be able to fly. So anyway, we'll eventually ruin this planet and need something. Hopefully we'll have had the foresight to have started terraforming in time. Well, they're they're already working on it, are they. Well, people are talking about it, proposing ideas theoretical ideas. I don't think they're like building. They should be the asteroid Slinger.

They should have started in the nineteenth century. They're building a comet sling in Texas as we speak. If you want to know more about terraforming, you can take that word in the search part how stuff works out com And since I said search bar, it's time for Chuck a very special edition Thanksgiving edition of That's right. We are here to say thanks because it's around Thanksgiving, because

my friend, it is Thanksgiving. Is it Thanksgiving Day? Yes? Well, of course it's the thurs Day unless you're in Canada and in which case happy late belated Thanksgiving. Yes, because they do. There's in like October weirds. I think so too. So who do we have to think? Yeah, I mean we have. For those of you who have never heard this segment, we have listeners that send us gifts from time to time and it is always very much appreciated and very nice, and so here they are. Yeah, I'm

gonna start with the second page. If you want to start with the first base, sure you go ahead, Chuck Uh. Anthony Savino sent us from his Etsy shop Swiss Chisel, a lap laptop and business card holders made out of old wine barrel staves, and he makes all kinds of stuff out of these things. So check out a store which is Swiss Chisel. Yes, and Matt Perky from Evolved

Workforce dot com sent us some mugs. Matt's aim is to refine drug testing for states where marijuana is legal, so he can get an idea of what your intoxication is immediately after something like an accident or whatever. Yeah, I was wondering about that well, because he's legalizing, like if your job, you know, if you have to get drug tested, this guy's on it. Interesting. Evolve workforce dot com is that where the mug came from? Okay, I thought that was a hint. New York, New York. The

band sent us a promo CD, which is terrific. So we always like getting music from our musician friends, so thanks for that. Yep. Mike do Deck from the Clicky Post dot com c l I c K Y p O s T send us Cube pen holders of his own making. He also sent us some awesome pilot Metropolitan Fountain pens and Rhodeo dot pads. Mike is a pen person and he wanted to share his his passion with us,

So thank you very much. Mike. All right, we have an anonymous gift so one sent us a postcard from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glencoe, Georgia, along with the junior Federal Agent badges for all three of us, and have mine in my wallet. Ye you really do, don't you do? Huge thank you to Chloe the candy maker, who is also a ghost tour guide, who sent us tons of amazing candy from mckinaw Island, Michigan, where I used to go sometimes as a child, so I was

very happy to get this. Y. Yeah, and um, we want to say good luck and safe travels to you and your sister and your world tour Chloe, be safe. Big thanks to Annie from Brisbane, Quinsland, Australia send us a megacre package for real of Australian treats. Uh. Tim TAM's I think you love those things, right man? I went crazy for this and Carmelo Kids were pretty good as well. Violet Crumble's picnic Boost Hero. There was some weird stuff in there, but there God, man 've got

some crazy candies. Uh. Thanks to Andrew Parr for an entire puzzle dedicated to Stuff you should Know in the World of Puzzles win Or two thousand fourteen issue. It was awesome. Oh boy, this is one of my favorites. Rob henion Um from sin Us those awesome stuff you should know bookends made from industrial fasteners and they are super cool. They're really heavy and they're awesome. And you can get information at more Metal Welding at gmail dot com or more metal dot Etsy dot com. It's like

quality quality stuff. Uh. Kevin pelo Quinn from Kevin polo Quinn dot com. That's k E v I N p e l o q u I N and Red Dad Tease. I think those are both of his sites. Uh. He gave us an amazing illustration of Steve Zesu from The Like Aquatic looking pensively toward the horizon, which I have up in my cubicle. Oh, I wonder where that was from. That's from Kevin pelo Quinn. Uh. Lauren and Megan from Chopsticks for Salamanders. They've got a pretty cool cause they

sent him. Uh sent us stay less steal reusable chopsticks. And this is a big deal because chopsticks are honestly, they're kind of a problem. Uh. They sell these to help prevent destruction of forests um from those little cheap wooden ones. And they're the same forests where they where they get these the wood for these things, where salamanders live.

And so every year sixty billion pairs of chopsticks are thrown away and a lot of salamanders are having their forests, forests and habitats destroyed because of your sushi addictions, which I have as well. So get some of these. You can learn more at Chopsticks for Salamanders dot org. Nice. Um, we got a postcard. It's been a while since we

did this. We got a postcard from one of our announcing the birth of one of our newer fans, Clyde Avery Thomas, who was born at one fifty eight am on January sixteenth, two thousand fourteen, in Traverse City, Michigan. I thought, you say it's like six by now. He probably is, but um, he most likely came out a little frost bitten because it's cold up there. But congratulations to and Drew and Janelle Thomas on the birth of

your son. Yeah, and happy first birthday pretty soon, pretty soon. Uh. Mike and Cassidy Lord from Athens Georgia who send it's a postcard from Cambodia. Um while in Borneo, I know, wrapped your mind around that interesting? Uh. Sarah Austin gave us a very chic and rugged handmade leather cardholder wallets, which are pretty awesome. Rachel Crandall for the line drawing of stuff you should know written in Gallifrayan. It's the language apparently that uh time lords and doctor who of

the time Lords. So I'm not a Doctor Who fan, but I appreciated the gift. Yeah, that was pretty cool. Julie from Austin, Texas sent as a postcard from the Shed Aquarium in beautiful Chicago, Illinois. Thank you, Julie. Oh boy, Lois Olsen. This is my favorite gift I've gotten. Very simple but awesome. The mini quilts they are. It's basically a little tiny not a tiny. It's a small place matt that you use in place of a coast right, it's mug rugs bigger than a coaster, smaller than a placement. Yeah,

a little rectangular thing. And I often at dinner will have like maybe a beer, maybe a glass of water, maybe a cup of coffee, shot of whiskey, and I put everything down on my little mug rug and if anything spills, it soaks it up. It's better than a coaster. It doesn't stick like a coaster. It's like it's gonna revolutionize the coaster industry. I love them. So thank you

Lois Olsen for that. Thank you to Brett Arnold, who won our horror fiction contest if you'll remember, he sent us a copy of his book Avalon and you can get Avalon on Amazon dot com. And then lastly, for this one, UM, we want to thank Joe and Lynda Heckt for sending us tons of stuff, including customized stuff you should know mugs with hints to UM podcast topics that they'd like to hear stuff about. They put them on a mug and have them made and send them to us mugs. They send us copy of the DVD

American Amazon. They gave us ten bucks to watch it O man. So they're the best. They are very great people. So thank you to everybody, and we still have more people to think left. Um eventually. Yeah, that's this is part one, right, but we are grateful for each and every one of you and all of you listeners out there, whether you send us stuff or not. We're thankful to all of you and we hope you're having a wonderful holiday no matter where you are in the world. Agreed,

Happy Thanksgiving, Happy Thanksgiving. You all for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com