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George Nori with you, Cody Cassidy with us, how to Survive History. Cody tell us about the book How to Survive History. How long did it take you to work on it?
This took a couple of years. It was It was quite a lot of research. I and a lot of the disasters. The disasters I picked, I wanted to delve deep into them. I wanted to my background as a science writer, so I like understanding why the volcano at Pompeii was so destructive, or the asteroid at chick exclude what it did to the dinosaurs, and exactly the sort of mechanics behind it, and that that involves a lot
of research and and and speaking with the experts. And then on top of that, I had to figure out how to get out of these disasters, which which usually the best way of doing that was was talking to the archaeologists at Pompeii and just sort of asking them which direction would you run if you were there, and then uh sort of recording their answers and and and asking them why. So it did take quite a lot of work.
The Titanic went down nineteen twelve. It's made in voyage. How could people have avoided that tragedy other than not go on the ship.
Yeah, well, even if you were in third class, you would have time to escape. The Titanic sort of famously, as we all know from the movie, to quite a long time to sink, and it was very graceful as it did it, So you would have a bit of even if you were in third class, you would have time.
And so I would suggest that you would change into your finest clothing first when you first hit the iceberg, because the lifeboats were on the first class deck, and so your best chance is to sort of get invited to that exclusive floor and it would be best good
idea to look the part. And then we can sort of see from the passenger manifest of the life rafts that if you're on the left side, if you're a man, you should go over there, because there was sort of this policy on the Titanic where women and children were loaded preferentially. But we can see that sort of one side of the boat followed that a little bit more strictly than the other. So it would sort of depend
on who you were exactly where you should go. But even if you didn't make the life raft, which is a possibility, they only had space for about a further their passengers. You could swim probably too well. It maybe depending that boats are about five hundred yards away and the water was about twenty seven degrees so in that temperature you have about fifteen minutes before your arms and
legs become two nune to swim. So the world's best ice swimmers can do five hundred yards in seven minutes, so fifteen minutes is a tough ask, but it is possible.
The Titanic, of course, was hailed it as one of the best ships ever unsinkable and everything else that smashed and do how big was that iceberg?
Massive? Yeah, that Titanic was almost eight hundred feet long, and it was. The iceberg actually weighed more than the Titanic, and the Titanic actually barely scraped it. It really only scraped the front right side for about three hundred feet of its of it of the ship in it, and so it uh, it really only did it almost the
Titanic almost stayed a float. They put bulwarks, these prevention these walls within the ship to prevent water from flooding the whole deck or the whole hole if it one hole appeared and they and it could float if it didn't punch punch holes in the four of them, and it punched holes behind five. So that's why it actually sunk so slowly and almost didn't sink. If they had made the walls on these bulkheads a little bit higher,
it actually would have would have floated in. And for Titanic sister ship, they did remodel it so that the walls were higher, and had they done that with Titanic, it actually would have would have floated long enough to at least be rescued.
That movie put Leonardo DiCaprio on the map, didn't that?
Yeah? And uh it did, and uh there were some people who survived in the water, but none that survived on doors. I uh, there was one overturned life raft, so you can't There is no door to find like they do in Titanic, like Leonardo fails to do, but there are if you don't want to make the swim, you can sort of maybe wrestle for a spot on an overturned life wrapp and a few people did survive on this tody.
Had you been offered an opportunity to take that submersible down to see the Titanic, albeit two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a seat. But let's say they invited you to go as as a journalist.
Would you have gone? I would not have Maybe I would have been curious until but I saw I saw as sort of a TV program recently on what that sub looked like on the inside, and it looks sort of like a soda can.
It's kind of claustrophobic.
It looks very costerphobic to me. And at least according to this program, it was controlled by a very old video game controller, so that might have given me a bit of pause. I don't I wouldn't love it regardless, but I definitely wouldn't have liked being in there, in
that small in that small ship. Although I will I haven't seen the sort of That submersible was named the titan which is a very interesting name because one of the sort of famous coincidences of all time is that about fifteen years before the Titanic sank, an author wrote a book about an unsinkable ship hitting an iceberg right where the Titanic did, and he called that ship the Titan.
The book is called The Record the Titan, so I have to assume that the owner of the submersible knew that story and that's why he named it's submersible that. But it's an odd choice because the point of the Record the Titan is that it's sort of man's folly to create to believe that a ship would be unsinkable.
So it's an odd choice with that submersible. I'm not seeing many reports on why they think it lost communications in hour and forty five minutes into the dive.
I haven't either. I think the best guess is that it somehow lost power, but it should have still been able to if it had just been lost power. There's many backup systems to enable it to rise. A lot of these submersed actually are designed so that if they do lose power, they automatically right.
Float right back up. Right. Yeah, there's there's there's something one of one of a couple of things has happened. In my opinion, one it has crushed and blown up or something like that where there's nothing to rise right now, or in the in this particular case, they got stuck somewhere. You know, maybe they're trapped in part of the wreckage of the Titanic and it can't go up, it's it's hitting something.
Yeah, that's for me, at least, the scariest scenario. That would be terrifying if I were down there.
But even that, they should they should still have had communications. So that's I mean this, this could have been a full blown catastrophic event here.
Yeah, that to me, that makes the most sense. Or if there there's a possibility too, that they did rise, that they've lost communication and are now just sort of floating.
Well, but they've got so many planes out there in the area, you would think somebody would.
Spot them, you would think, or that they had some way of tracking it. I don't know why I did not have that system. I don't know.
And they're hearing these bangs and clayings every thirty minutes so far, which tells you that it's time by a human.
Yeah, I haven't. That's what I've heard. That they're sort of suspecting that there's noises going on. I don't. That's sort of a terrifying thought. So perhaps they are just stuck down there.
What's even sadder is even if they find them, they're running out of time to get them to the top.
Yeah, I think there's only a few there's certainly no humans that there's only a few ships in the world that it can get down there, And I don't think they could get there in time. So I think I read that the best hope is to maybe have one of these robots sort of loop a cable around them and haul them up. But that's quite a long cable even so, a lot of logistical difficulties.
Crazy, it really is. They should have had backup systems for identification and buoys and all this other stuff.
Yeah, I don't It doesn't seem like they were. They took enough safety precautions.
We're going to take calls with Cody Cassidy next hour. You talk to him a little bit about the nineteen oh six earthquake in San Francisco. How could people have prepared for that?
Well, the first step would be San Francisco is a lot of it has been built on what amounts to sort of pioneer trash and instill on the lowlands, the sort of creepy The city sort of creeped into the Bay as we needed more space for the people hunting for gold and the gold rush and that is a particularly bad place to be during an earthquake because that sort of soil liquefies and behaved sort of like water when the earthquake rolled through. So the first step is
to not be on San Francisco's lowlands. But that was really only the beginning, because the earthquakes severed basically every gas and water maine in the city. So fifty fires plus broke out across the city and there was not a drop to put them out. So the fire department the only way that they tried to put it out was to sort of detonate buildings along roads to try to build a big fire line, but that actually just made problems worse by spreading the fire, and so three
quarters of the city eventually was eventually destroyed. And so really the only way for the best way I would suggest to get out is to make it to the water. And there was sort of a Dunkirk like evacuation. Basically every bay, every boat in the bay came to San Francisco and helped sale people away because there were no bridges at that time. So that's what I would suggest, to get to the water as quickly as possible.
How devastating was that nineteen oh six earth quake.
Oh it was. I mean, it's still like the record for at least justice for inflation, for the most financial damage the city has suffered in the disaster. It was three quarters of the city basically was burned. There was almost nothing left and that had that had to be rebuilt, and so the earthquake was really only the beginning of
the disaster. And we actually don't really even know how many people died because records were so poor back then anyways, But then City Hall also burned down, in all the records of people who are living here gone, so it's sort of a pretty inaccurate but certainly quite a high number of fatalities.
The Black Death that hid Europe. Your take on that, sure.
Yeah, some people call this the greatest catastrophe to ever befall mankind. When it hit London, it's almost unimaginable. But in eighteen months, forty percent of the city of London died. This is one hundred thousand people who were living in London at the time died in just eighteen months. So
it's really an absolutely unimaginable catastrophe. But if you were there, you shouldn't actually leave London because it was actually even worse in the in the rural areas because the the plague was spread by fleas which were riding on rats, and so these rural farms actually had because they had more rats and fewer people when the rats were killed by the plague, that the fleas would jump onto the very few people there. So if you were one of them, the odds that a fleet and infectic flee would get
you were actually higher. So it's better to stay. As bad as it is in London or any big European city at this time, it were better to stay there, and you shouldn't all. The final point is not to get a cat either or a rat trap, because that's what I thought initially, that you would try to kill all the rats around you, But it turns out that a dead rat is actually even more dangerous because that means that's fleas have to jump onto you, perhaps if
you're nearby. So stay in the city and don't get a cat.
How did this disease wane or fall apart?
What happened to it? It basically just infected and either killed or immunized everybody in the city, and maybe even more importantly, every rat in the city because and.
It just died off on its own.
Yeah, there was just no not enough people left to infect. It's sort of a herd immunity, and the plague has a sixty fatality rate, and so once forty percent of the city died, that means basically everybody in the city caught it. And once you've caught it, you're either immune or dead. So that eventually the plague had normal people who have affected. But it died back, But that doesn't
mean it died permanently. It's sort of just retreated and actually kept coming back in waves every generation or so for hundreds of years, so it's really just a temporary relief.
And what has happened to it now.
Well, now into that bacterials can kill the plague or can rescue you if you take them in time, and they didn't of course have penicillin back then, but they still are breakouts, and usually they happen after I had droughts when a lot of the rat population or they're in rodents. Generally the rodent population dies and so this sends a lot of foods looking for new hosts. But if you if you take penaphillin in time, it should be okay.
Of every catastrophe you've written about in your book How to Survive History, which would you say is the single worst one?
Well, I wrote about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. This is sixty six and a half a million years ago, and this is the only one in which I spoke to a lot of experts that only one of them said maybe a human had a chance to survive. So this would be pretty pretty unlikely. It's it's an absolutely spectacular event. It was a rock six miles wide a hit or of traveling ten miles per second, and.
Would have gotten all of us.
Yeah, I mean basically this No mammal larger than a raccoon survived derived the impact, and really the only dinosaurs that did were some ground nesting birds. So even though it hit in the Yucatan, it killed almost the entire Western hemisphere because the blast, the impact was like one hundred million times largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. So it was a thousand foot tsunamis sort of rain of fire.
All the earth that it lifted up came falling back to Earth and as fire, and then it eventually coated the stratus here in this oil. Basically, this vaporized oil that blocked out the sun for about ten years, so it was sort of global freeze.
It was.
It was a spectacular and very devastating event.
Some say that by wiping out the dinosaurs it made way for humans. What do you think of that?
Yeah, that's certainly that's certainly true. I think dinosaurs has been doing quite well for quite a long period of time, much longer than the humans have been around, so it by killing them off, I think it paved the way for mammals as small as we were, even some mammals that survive, and that paves the way for us, I think absolutely.
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