255: No Such Thing As A Bouncy Asteroid

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing As a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Anna Chaczynski.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Andy.

My fact is that when Britain declared war in 1914, they accidentally did it in the wrong format and they had to swap the letters, otherwise Britain would not technically be at war.

Wow.

What kind of format was it?

I don't know.

I don't know if it was in landscape or in some kind of...

What they declared with a painting.

Or emojis.

I don't know.

I have no idea.

But this is from an article in the Times Literary Supplement, which is great, by the way.

Highly recommended.

And there was a British diplomat called Harold Nicholson, who was working at the Foreign Office.

And one day he was told, we've declared war on Germany, but we screwed it up.

And we sent the letter, which doesn't quite say the right phrase, I think.

I think what it was, was they thought that Germany had declared war because they intercepted some thing over the radio waves.

But actually, Germany hadn't declared war.

And so the letter said we accept your declaration of war.

But what they actually wanted to say was we declare war on you.

Because Britain was obliged to go to the defence of Belgium and Germany had violated Belgian territory.

And so, yeah, so.

That's a sort of you can't fire me, I quit situation, isn't it?

It's very much like that.

Yeah.

It's like getting a text message saying, I'm having an affair too.

And then you have to withdraw that.

And just say.

And just say, I'm having an affair.

It's like getting the text message saying, I'm having an affair, and then your spouse says, I wasn't having an affair.

What What are you talking about?

Guys, I really think you should do these kind of things face to face.

But Nicholson had to go to the German embassy at night, and he went so late in the day that the German ambassador, who was Prince Lichnovsky, he was in his pajamas in his bedroom, and he had the letter declaring war on a tray by his bed.

And Nicholson had to do the old switcheroo.

Amazing.

And he says that he didn't notice.

The prince didn't notice.

He thought it was just a social visit to say, well, sorry, we're at war now.

And was this, this was after they'd officially declared war.

It was just they were like, oh, we've got a bit of the paperwork wrong.

We've got to swap that.

Was that night?

That evening, yeah.

So, what had happened was Britain had given an ultimatum to Germany saying, if you don't get out of Belgium, we're going to declare war.

And then it got to the evening, and they thought Germany had declared war, but they hadn't.

And then when it got to midnight, that was our ultimatum had kind of hit then.

It was actually 11 p.m.

11 p.m., sorry.

It's very important.

It's very important.

You see, if I wasn't in charge, we'd never go to war, would we?

But poor old Lishnovsky was so upset, wasn't he?

So he was the ambassador.

And I always think ambassadors must have such a difficult job in war because they're friends with everyone in the country they're in.

So he was mates with all the Brits.

He was very good friends with Asquith and his wife, Margot Asquith.

So Margot, Asquith's wife, actually went to visit Leshnovsky about an hour or two before war was properly declared and just went to comfort him and say, sorry, this is rough, isn't it?

And he was sobbing, saying it's all over.

And he knew Nicholson as well.

Did he?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because when Nicholson went to visit him, he was in his nightclothes.

The last thing he said to him was, Give my best regards to your father.

I shall not, in all probability, see him before my departure.

Yeah.

And they hated the Germans.

So

the ambassadors.

Yeah, so the ambassador's wife said to Margot Asquith on just the 2nd of August, so two days before we went to war, to think that we should bring such sorrows to an innocent and happy people.

I've always hated and loathed our Kaiser.

Have I not said so a thousand times?

He and his friends are all brutes.

Wow.

So they were not pleased about it.

No, and I suppose if you are an ambassador, you're going to have a more rounded worldview, aren't you?

Yeah.

You know, probably.

I don't know.

Yeah.

I've never been one.

And Nicholson, oh, sorry, just on Nicholson, then he later went on, people might have heard of him because he later went on to marry writer Vita Sackville West.

Oh, really?

In a kind of marriage of convenience because I think he was gay and she was a lesbian or they were maybe both bisexual, but they kind of got married so that she could inherit her ancestral home of Sissinghurst.

We're sure it wasn't a phrasing mistake and he didn't mean to say would you mind buying some milk.

He accidentally wrote would you marry me after this?

Sorry, I meant to say I don't.

I've not heard of her.

Is she a big author?

She's a poet and a

she's quite famous.

Cool.

I mostly know her because she has a weird name.

Right.

It kind of sticks in your head, doesn't it?

Yeah.

So George V also sort of, lots of people declare war officially.

George V is one of the people who sort of announced to the nation that we were at war.

And his diary is very interesting because it's so matter of fact.

So his diary on that night, he wrote it just before he went to sleep.

And he, it was a short entry.

He said, I held a council at 10.45 in the evening to declare war with Germany.

It is a terrible catastrophe, but it is not our fault.

And then he said, the crowds were all cheering.

When they heard war had been declared, the cheering was even more terrific.

Went to bed at midnight.

And that's just, that's that.

That's the start of the First World War.

Yeah, there were loads of because they had a speech in Parliament, didn't they?

Uh, was it Grey or someone did a speech in Parliament?

And everyone was outside kind of expecting that war was going to be declared.

Uh, and there was a mob in London who attacked the German embassy, and at the same time, there was a mob in Germany that attacked the British Embassy in Berlin.

Really?

Throwing stones.

That is kind of a microcosm of the next four years.

Yes.

There's someone else who we know where they were when war broke out, and it's Adolf Hitler.

And the interesting thing is, we know, because there was a photograph taken of this huge crowd in Munich at a place called the Odeon Platz, and they're all celebrating, as lots of people, lots of crowds all over Europe celebrated the outbreak of war.

They thought it was a good thing.

And you can see, if you zoom in, Hitler in the crowd with a really big droopy moustache.

Yeah, but this is the crazy thing.

So the photo was taken by a photographer who later became Hitler's official photographer.

And in one of the very early bits of Nazi propaganda, Hitler, they tracked down this photo.

They thought you saw Hitler in the crowd, and they retouched his moustache to turn it into the toothbrush moustache that Hitler later adopted.

Oh, if only we all had photographers to retouch photos from our youth.

My parents would be so thrilled.

Well, apart from he kind of retouches them all to make it look like he did when he was older.

It's true.

It's like giving yourself a mullet in a photo from the 80s.

It's really weird.

Yeah, but you're always ashamed of how you dress when you were younger, whether it's a weird bushy moustache or you've got your stupid long hair from the 70s.

Sorry, it's not like giving yourself a mullet, is it?

No, no, it's not the opposite.

It's the opposite, yeah.

It's taking away the mullet.

Yes.

Because the mullet's embarrassing.

It's like a thick moustache.

It's like the Pope going back to his baby photos and putting a big hat on the mullet.

That's exactly what it's like.

Did you read that one of the other amazing pieces of protocol they had to go through that day when Britain declared war was that the, was it the Foreign Office, sent out loads of telegrams to all the consulates around the world that we were vaguely affiliated with, warning them we're about to go to war.

So this is sort of in the afternoon going on early evening.

All these telegrams were sent out and the Foreign Office clerks had to send them out and all they had to do was fill in a pre-written telegram that said, just to warn you, Britain is going to war with blank.

And they just wrote the word Germany because they'd had them pre-written for about 10 years.

It's so good that, isn't it?

They just knew that they were going to go to war eventually.

It's like, you know, when you are a kid and you have birthday invites and it says you are invited to blank's party.

It's exactly like that, isn't it?

It is.

Do you think some were accidentally they forgot to fill them in and consciously just left guessing?

I would have, for a laugh, put a different country in just one telegram, just so one British territory overseas thinks we're at war with Switzerland or something.

Yes, yeah.

Or do you think they sent it to Germany and it just said you?

Oh, yeah.

Oh yeah.

Real privilege.

The most senior clerk got to do the you one.

I was just reading generally about what happened as soon as war was declared and obviously a lot of soldiers had to be conscripted and that led me into just looking into conscription and I read about this thing which I'd not heard of I don't know if you guys have but the Pals Battalion have you heard of that

this was so obviously they had to work out what was the best way to get people sort of passionate about joining the war and one of the ideas was the idea that if you signed up with a friend of yours, there was a promise that you would both be in the same battalion.

So professional golfers were known to sign up with each other.

There was the Grimsby Chums, and that was former schoolboys from Winteringham Secondary School in Brimsby.

It was a terrible idea, actually, because if you're going to go to war and have to see all these people around you dropping dead, I'd rather they weren't all my mates.

I know, I guess it's a morale thing, though, up until that point.

Well, the idea is that you might fight harder if it's to save your friends, I think.

Yes, yeah.

There was in Thebes, they had a secret band of an army where they were all lovers, all gay lovers, and so they would all be in this army together and they would all

Thebes in the Spartan

innovation.

Although actually the war between Sparta and Athens did go on until 1996.

What?

No.

Come on now.

It was one of those ones, you know, where they don't sign the peace agreement.

Yeah.

And so in 1986 they signed a symbolic agreement that Sparta and Athens were no longer at war, even though they'd both been part of modern-day Greece for about a thousand years.

So I think we may have briefly mentioned the Berwick-upon-Tweed thing before.

So there's this, the town of Berwick-on-Tweed, they mistakenly believed that they were at war with Russia for about 150 years after the end of the Crimean War.

So that ended 1856.

And it's because there was this really complicated history with Berwick-upon-Tweed, because it's right on the border of England and Scotland.

And it went, it changed hands about 13 times.

And there was a 1502 agreement between England and Scotland, which said that Berwick-upon-Tweed is of, but not within, the Kingdom of England.

Actually, it had been sorted out in 1746.

It was all fine.

If you didn't mention Beric upon Tweed, there was no problem.

It was still included.

But the town, no one really knew that.

It didn't sort of get through.

So people kept naming it in official documents as a kind of just-in-case.

They couldn't remember whether it was included.

So

people thought that they had been left out and that they were still at war with Russia.

And this is the really sweet thing.

In 2006, there was a kind of exhibition about this in the town, about this interesting, you know, kink of history.

And it was Berwick's War with Russia weekend.

And apparently, as part of it, they had a what-if reenactment, which I think is the best.

Surely the what-if involves Berwick being flattened within 30 seconds.

Russia going about his business.

I was just looking a little bit at the declaration of the Second World War, and the Second World War was kind of declared by two Nevilles.

So it was obviously.

Gary and Phil, was it?

It wasn't Gary and Phil, Phil, no.

It was obviously there was Chamberlain, but then there was also Neville Henderson.

He was the British ambassador in Germany, so it was his job to go and actually tell the Germans that we were at war.

But it might have been because of a mistake.

Again, a little bit like this error in 1914.

So it was August 30th in 1939, and Henderson went and met Ribbentrop, who was their Hitler's foreign secretary.

And apparently, things got really tense.

You know, Henderson was saying, please stop invading all these countries.

Please don't do the Poland thing.

And they came really close to blows.

They almost started punching each other.

And then Ribbentrop said, okay, we're going to give you our last offer.

We're going to give Poland the last offer.

And Britain was obviously basically represented Poland at this point.

And so Ribbentrop read over the last offer, but Henderson's really pissed off with Ribbentrop at this point.

So he didn't really listen.

And Ribbentrop read over it really, really fast, sped through it, apparently.

And then Henderson went, okay, fine, give me the copy.

And Ribbentrop said, no, not going to give you the copy.

Hope you're paying attention.

And so Henderson didn't know what had just happened, didn't really know what the offer was.

It was kind of deliberately convoluted.

And said, and then Ribbon Trump said, You've got to respond by midnight.

And that this confused everything, and within a couple of days, there was war.

Wow.

Yeah, so always pay attention.

Yeah.

I don't think that's a message.

Sorry, who was Ribbon Trump?

I could see you all switch off then, and we've gone to war.

Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that there's a bacterium that can freeze water just by touching it and these bacteria are used to make artificial snow in ski resorts.

That's crazy.

It's amazing.

How fast if I dropped one of these bacteria into my glass of water, is it frozen straight away?

No.

So

it tends to do it with plants.

It goes into the plant cells and it freezes the water in the plant cells so it can access the nutrients inside the plants.

But the way that it does it is it has a protein on the outside of the bacterium and they can shift the molecules around of the water.

And the water then orders in, like kind of gets into a lattice, into a template, which is what ice is really.

And then it can also remove heat from the water in the same way that a refrigerator removes heat from...

the inside of it.

So it gets hotter, but it removes heat from the water itself to make it into ice.

And the plants don't like that, presumably.

The plants do not like being killed, no.

Because actually, any frost damage that you see is usually down to this bacterium.

Really?

Yeah, so if you have a plant at, say, minus four degrees, minus three or four degrees, it should be fine because the water inside it can super cool.

It won't turn to ice until a little bit later than that.

But if it has this bacterium in it, then the bacteria will turn the water, which would have been liquid, into ice and it can kill the plants.

Bastard.

So

bastard.

That's what the frozen.

Sorry.

What I find amazing is that this is being used in artificial snow making, as in, you must have to have so many hundreds and hundreds of millions and billions of these bacteria to make lots of artificial snow.

How do you breed?

I guess they just

produce

bacteria.

You just leave one alone for 20 hours and then you go back to the bill.

I read a single cell bacteria in a 12-hour period, they can produce 70 billion bacteria from a single cell bacteria.

That's how quick that they are.

That's so small, isn't it?

Because if they were like human-size,

overcrowding of the world would have happened in a second, wouldn't it?

Yeah, definitely.

And that, think of all those generations.

That's one great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great-grandfather who has 70 billion children.

Oh, God, who do you think you are?

The thing is, with these guys in particular, who can turn this water into ice, they can do it even after they're dead.

Wow.

So, the company Snowmax, who make this artificial snow, they get dead bacteria because the bacteria still have the protein on their outside, which can make the water turn into ice, even though they're not alive anymore.

It's not a great PR line, though, is it?

Using the dead corpses of

billions of bacteria.

Well, the thing is, real rain probably has these guys in it as well.

So most real rain or snow has to have some kind of nucleus which the water goes around.

And they think that generally speaking, it's this particular bacteria that's most common in rain around the world.

Really?

Because all rain starts sort of frozen up there but then how is the bacteria not able to freeze it as well once it's in rain form down with us?

Yes because it'll be too warm at that stage.

The bacteria only really works around the zero mark.

Things are kind of freezing anyway.

And that's why you don't get many ski slopes in places like Barbados.

Yeah, that's right.

The bacteria can't do it in the heat.

Have you guys heard of the British Gut Project?

No.

No.

So I was looking at microbiomes and how there's a theory that your bacteria in your stomach can affect your mood.

So they've done experiments on mice where mice with no microbes in them got twice as stressed when scientists freaked them out as normal mice did, with normal microbiome.

So there's a theory there.

But the British Gut Project is this enterprise which is trying to map the whole gut microbiome of the British population.

And they're basically crowdsourcing poo

in the post.

In the post?

Yeah.

But you do have to pay.

You can't just send them poo in the post.

So.

How much do I have to pay to put poo in the post?

It's 75 quid.

But they are trying to build up this whole picture of the nation's microbiome health.

It's been tried in America already, and it's really interesting seeing a whole population's general health.

So they're trying to sequence the DNA.

So they will send you a breakdown of your own DNA.

But it's not going to be a good method of finding out the population's health because you're only going to get the weirdos who are willing to shit in an envelope and send it to a scientist.

Can I also say, if you're upset with a British gut project, how do you show your displeasure?

Because you can't send poo in the post.

You send them an empty sample pot and then bulletproof.

Wow.

It's weird sending them your poo though, because I half imagine getting a thing about going, you're 50% corn.

You know, just anything that's, I don't think that's how sequencing DNA works.

You know, when they say that humans and cons share like 75% of their DNA, is that?

These guys, yeah.

Wow.

In China, it's smoggy, I read, and there are bacteria that live on the smog.

So they live inside the smog and they can eat the smog.

And that sounds like quite cool, doesn't it?

Because maybe it gets rid of the smog.

But unfortunately, they fart out even worse chemicals.

So you're just replacing one pollutant with another.

Do we not have another kind of bacteria that can eat the worst chemicals?

I get the feeling that they'll fart something even worse after that.

That's really funny.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Chaczynski.

My fact is that women who are applying to be Qing dynasty concubines had to spend a night sleeping with the Emperor's mother first so that she could check they didn't snore.

Yeah, this is so the selection process to be a concubine was so arduous and there were so many steps to it.

This is actually in this amazing thing that's on the South, it's been published by the South China Morning Post, but it's it's in collaboration with the forbidden palace museum and i would so recommend it they've done a series of chapters detailing life in the forbidden city and this is about yeah so there were these concubines who lived in the forbidden city with the emperor and to become one you had to well first of all every every single Manchu woman in the kingdom had to apply to become a concubine.

So you weren't allowed to marry until you'd applied to check the emperor didn't want to marry you.

This was all girls between 13 and 16.

And they did this sort of call out every three years.

And then they'd come, and God knows how they whittled it down from that many, but they whittled it down to about 100 who would be monitored really, really carefully by all these females already in the Forbidden City.

So, for things like

weird skin abnormalities, body odour, they were really strict on body odour and anything else that might be wrong with them.

And then they were whittled down to finalists who are kind of taught like a finishing school how to behave.

Very much like the X Factor, isn't it?

It's so X Factor, yeah.

Although they don't do the body odor thing,

spend a night sleeping next to Simon Carroll.

But I know how they whittled it down.

It was in that brilliant piece.

So when the Ming Dynasty...

Which was the one just before?

Yes.

We've got records of how they whittled it down.

So they picked 5,000 young women, and then they eliminated 1,000 on the first day for being too short or tall or fat or thin.

And the second day, they got rid of another 2,000 based on their voices and general manner.

You've got 2,000 left.

Well, that is actually like X Factor, isn't it?

On your voice.

It's true.

Third day, they got rid of another thousand because the hands or feet weren't right.

I haven't seen the X Factor, but I don't think that phases in that.

So you've got 1,000 left.

Yeah, because foot inspection was a massive thing.

Yeah.

Feet are so important.

Yeah.

Then you've got 1,000 left, and then you have gynecological examinations, which apparently get rid of another 700.

Wow.

I do not know how.

I got to say, I kind of at this stage wish I'd been kicked out for being too tall shot up.

And then you have a month of testing for the remaining 300.

Yeah.

But in that final month, is it right that they get taught sort of incredible skills that they might not have learnt?

Painting, reading, walking?

It was very much my fault.

One of those skills that you'd never learn unless you're in the Flynn Palace.

You walk back into your village, you've changed.

Everyone else are rolling around down the road.

Oh, she thinks she's so off herself.

There was a book that was saying they were taught to have, they had to have dainty feet and they were taught to have a titillating walk.

Yeah.

Had to be titillating.

But yeah, and sleeping next to the mother, the mother was the final hurdle you had to cross and she was the most senior woman.

Boss level.

How many do you know got through to that final phase?

I think the finalists, there were 10, I think, or maybe there were five at that point, but we were down to a manageable number.

Because the mother doesn't have, you know,

there's only one Emperor's mum, so she can't spend all her time.

Unless she sleeps with them all at the same time, but then how do you know who's snarring?

Yeah, oh yes, you just blame it on the person next to you.

And it was to check for things like sleep walking or sleep talking, all body odors again, she had to be very careful with.

And then you passed.

But a lot of girls didn't want to pass, obviously, because it meant that you had to abandon your village and your family and all your friends and live forever in this massive forbidden city with this creepy old man.

Yeah, he might not come and see you though, because weren't there lots of concubines?

Yeah, some of them had tons, didn't they?

Well, yeah, you had different levels.

You You had your base level concubine and then it went to higher rankings all the way up to you're the empress.

Boss level.

Yeah, exactly.

And there were about 20,000 by the Qing dynasty.

20,000 concubines.

Concubines, consorts,

yeah.

Plymy.

Wait a minute.

20,000 women in the Forbidden City.

20,000 women.

I'm just trying to work out the timings of this.

How many did you have to have sex with in that amount of time?

Goddess.

Yeah.

You know, to be frank.

Well, they did have problems with that.

There was one emperor called Emperor Wu, not part of the Qing, but he had 5,000 women, too many to either remember who he actually wanted to sleep with, but he knew that they were all very pretty.

So what he used to do was go around in a cart that was carried by goats.

And when the goats got tired, wherever they parked, that's who he went and had sex with that night.

Yeah.

Surely there's an easier way to remember who you fancy.

He fancied them all, I think.

That's the idea, is the concubines, he just thought they're all very beautiful.

So wherever the goats stop, that's where I'll get off.

And some of the concubines who wanted,

and many of the concubines actually did want to have relations with him because maybe it wasn't.

You'd have children and they would become emperors.

Exactly.

So, what they used to do was leave little bits of treats outside the door for the goats

to trick them into stopping.

Wow.

And then there's other ones who, because they wanted to make sure that there was not too much jealousy amongst the concubines, because if you slept with one of the concubines, that raised her level and suddenly your surrounding concubines might get a bit too jealous and fights break out and so on.

They used to have a rotation calendar that was done for certain emperors.

So they would make sure that you never slept with the same concubine in the same week or something like that.

You know, we have written records of that.

So I read on this website, Anna, that you were talking about that in the 10th century, calendars were used to keep track of the sex life rather than of day-to-day life.

It was so closely monitored.

That can't be.

You're not saying I'll meet you on the 29th of the Emperor's shagging Rachel.

And I think we should bring it back to our royal family.

Yeah, there was a branch of the imperial government that was set up in the 1670s called the Office of Respectful Service.

And this was to formalize that, really, and make sure secretaries were installed to keep tabs on the sexual activities.

And so every single concubine that visited the bedroom, they'd have to take note of it.

They'd have to find out what actually happened in there.

Because again, the ranking system, you have to have

it.

I found this interesting.

Apparently there was only one monogamous Chinese emperor who was called Hong Zhi.

And he was only monogamous because he was extremely close to his mother, and then his mother was murdered by a concubine.

So that rather put him off the idea of concubinage.

Yeah.

Except the one, presumably.

I think he took a wife.

He took a wife.

Yeah.

He took a wife.

They could do that sometimes, couldn't they, concubines?

There was an emperor called Zhiajing, which I'm sure I'm pronouncing wrong, but 18 of his concubines kind of ganged up on him and tried to kill him.

They drove hairpins into his crotch and they wrapped a silk cord around his neck and tried to strangle him.

Wow.

The guy with the clipboard in the corner saying, I don't know what I record this as.

Heavy, heavy petting?

Well, the Empress, Empress Fang, then had all the conspirators killed.

They were all executed.

But Jia Jing, he decided to move out of the Imperial Palace and became a Taoist magician who spent his whole life having sex with virgins and drinking magic potions made from bodily fluids.

Wow.

That affected him quite badly.

Yeah.

And that counts as being a magician?

Because I'd be disappointed if I went to a magic show and all he did was drink blood and urine and have sex with virgins.

Would you?

You've clearly never been to a David Blaine show.

I think the magic was other stuff.

Right.

So

did he stay as Emperor?

He did, but basically he just ignored all of his duties that he was supposed to do as Emperor and did all this magic.

And Petrie.

D got a magic shake constantly trying to show you another trick.

Saying that we are at war with four separate groups of people.

Can we have some decisions, please?

Ooh, pick a card.

Just on eunuchs, so because they were the other group of people that were allowed in the Forbidden City, you couldn't have men with their parts because then they might impregnate the women.

So there were thousands and thousands of eunuchs, and it was actually a good gig, because it's the only way you can work really close to the Emperor and his government.

But I think

there was one drawback, wasn't there?

The application process was

a bit tedious.

Imagine if they chop your cock off and then they said, but sorry, you snarl.

But the way they did it was they put you on a chair with a hole in the seat.

Oh, really?

And then you just whip something underneath it and it's gone.

I mean, was it the testicles that were released?

It was the first one.

It was the hole on the floor.

Yes, yeah.

You've got to get rid of all of them.

And I think we've said they used to then have to carry them around in a pouch we've mentioned before.

Which they were proud of.

The last eunuch of China fell out with his family when they threw his genitals away.

The eunuch never spoke to his family again off the battlefield.

I think that's fair enough.

I would be so annoyed if my mum threw away a body part of mine.

When you go back to visit your parents and they've like changed your bedroom and they turned it into a study or something, that's really upsetting.

Yeah, that's true.

But so the reason they threw it away is because during the Cultural Revolution, there was a whole thing about you need to discard anything that was seen as old society.

And if you had anything that was old society, yeah, you put your whole family at risk because you owned something from the...

So they saw his genitals as part of that tradition, yeah.

So they threw it away.

An amazing thing about his life.

This guy, Sun Yao Ting, the last eunuch, he died in 1996.

Yeah, wow.

This is really recent history.

Yeah.

Well, concubinage, I don't know how you pronounce that word, but concubinage, concubinage, was only banned in Hong Kong in 1972.

Yeah.

And it's still not uncommon, I think.

It's not as frowned upon to have lots of mistresses in other parts of China.

And there's a saying in China, well, someone who's Chinese on the internet said, we've got a popular saying which explains why Chinese men need multiple women but women are expected to just have one man and it goes one teapot is usually accompanied by four cups but have you ever seen one cup with four teapots

sounds similar to something I have seen on the internet but

two concubines one cup is

completely different but equally profound meaning to that concubinging sounds like a old

Netflix kind of it's not concubing

Concubinage just sounds like you're chucking them out.

Oh, well, there is a good argument for concubing because there's a new TV show in China which is about Yang Chi Palace and it's hugely popular.

It's the most googled TV show of the year 2018, despite the fact that Google is largely banned in China.

That's how hugely popular it is all across Asia, lots of other countries as well.

It's been streamed 15 billion times and it's about the rivalry between concubines in the Forbidden City.

So concubing is actually a perfect word for watching this show a lot.

15 billion, that means everyone on Earth, on average, has watched it twice.

I know.

Yeah.

I'm just saying it's a lot.

It's a lot.

But I guess there are a billion.

I haven't seen it, so someone's watched it at least three times.

Yeah.

I've watched it two million times.

I think there are just a billion people in Asia.

A billion people in China, aren't there?

1.3.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And more outside that, but we're still within Asia.

Yeah.

Asia's population is very high compared to the rest of the world.

I shouldn't have been surprised at 15 billion.

It's a lot.

I mean, how many people live in Asia?

Is it about 4 billion?

It's a very large

business.

Including India.

Oh, no.

Cheating.

Well, I'm including India.

Oh, right.

Then five.

Yeah, 1.3 billion in China, 1.3 billion in India.

Probably about 100 million in Bangladesh or something.

Right.

Indonesia.

It's another biggie.

But they've still all seen it more than twice.

That's the amazing thing.

Even all of these people, you know.

How do they get anything done?

Why is China so productive if they're all constantly watching this thing?

Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that some meteors skim off the earth as if they were a stone skimming across the waters.

That's very good.

Who is throwing them?

Yes, good question.

That's so profound.

I know.

I've made that a bit more poetic, and And probably scientists listening are thinking, you dick, that's not what they do.

But they don't skim off the Earth if you count the Earth as the ground that we walk on today.

No, exactly.

That would be incredible.

That would be the best factor we've ever done if no one knew that.

What this is, is

this is meteorite.

Imagine if the meteor that came to kill the dinosaurs just went

straight back into space.

That would be extraordinary.

What this is, is we obviously

have an atmosphere, and the atmosphere is what burns up.

When we call a meteor a meteorite, it's because it goes through a layer of the atmosphere, it's very cold, burns it up, and then that lands on the Earth.

Sometimes when a meteor comes into the Earth's atmosphere, it's on such an angle, almost a parallel angle to the Earth's atmosphere, that it just bounces off.

They're called Earth Grazers.

They don't make it down further.

They literally get a lift, a boost off the atmosphere, pushing it back up, sometimes slowing its speed, but it makes it back out and just hurtles back into space.

Imagine if you could skim it off the Earth and then off Mars and then off Venus.

Wouldn't that be extraordinary?

But yeah,

we know that it happens a lot and a lot of people have seen it with the naked eye, but we haven't actually recorded too many of these.

I believe in 2006 was only the fourth time that we've ever caught on camera what is known as the Earth Grazers, the ones that come in and skim off.

So what does it look when you see it with an

naked eye?

Does it look like a meteor, but it just doesn't burn up?

No, it does burn up.

So you see the flaming meteorite, as it were, coming in, but because of the angle, angle it suddenly just takes a turn and heads off But do you see it take a turn then with the naked eye?

I guess what you see is the flame go out

You just see you just yeah, you see it streaking across the sky and then kind of vanishing Is it right to say then that it comes in and it goes very slightly into the Earth's atmosphere and then bounces out again?

So when it's in the Earth's atmosphere, that's when it's burning up and that's what you see but then it disappears exactly.

So in 2006 there was one it was just it was a bright fireball is what you would have seen in the sky sky, and this was seen over Japan.

And it made it to 55 miles from the Earth's surface.

Wow.

So that it gets really close.

And then it just looked down and thought, nah.

All right, mate.

These guys look lame.

Yeah, so it was there for 35 seconds that you could see it.

And yeah, so and then it just disappears

back into space in the distance.

It's crazy.

This is actually related to that, not about meteors, but with spaceships, that same effect is a major concern they have have when bringing spaceships back to Earth.

So, one of the hardest things if you're controlling a spaceship is re-entering, because you have to get the angle at which you re-enter completely spot-on.

And if you go at too sharp an angle, then you're going too fast and there's too much friction, and then you burn up.

But if you're going at too shallow an angle, if it is really shallow, then again, there's this risk because the Earth is a sphere, that you'll sort of skim across the atmosphere, but then come back off of and miss it.

Just miss the Earth.

You'd have thought it's a big enough target.

So one of the biggest problems with Apollo 13 as they came around from the other side of the moon was on top of everything else is that because their instruments were down, that exact thing was going to happen to them.

They were not on the right trajectory to come back into Earth.

So they had to make a thrust.

basically with the naked eye with the earth in the distance using that as a target to get themselves back into the right position.

Otherwise that might have happened to them.

Although I've read a few things, and maybe James, you know more about this, about

things wouldn't really bounce off the Earth.

You don't just bounce off into the dense.

No, no, of course not.

So there's no spring that you can hit.

There's no solidity in the Earth.

But it's just the fact that the Earth is circular.

So if the Earth was flat, which some people argue...

Here we go.

I cut this out every week, Ellen.

It's just that it can't get through those dense layers.

So it effectively goes straight.

But because the Earth is a curve, then it comes straight off it again.

There's another kind of quite cool Earth grazing thing that you can watch.

A few people have been lucky to see it.

It's called a meteor procession.

This is really cool.

So, when it does come into that zone of the atmosphere where it starts heating up, often a meteor will break into little bits.

And that's sometimes when we see meteor showers and so on.

It's why you see so many.

So, what will happen is this meteor will come in, it'll start breaking up into bits, but still enough of it is there to head back out into space and not come down.

However, it will now be about 10 of them that will fly back off into space.

So you'll just see what looks like, because they're all on the same trajectory, just like an air show, a procession going over you, flying over it, but of flaming balls.

Yeah.

It's kind of like a meteor shower in a way, which always fun.

And I didn't realize that...

I think this is going to be one of those things that it's unbelievable I didn't know, but I didn't know that meteor showers happen so regularly, like at the same time every single year, and that they're all named after the constellation they come from, which is nice.

So you've got Orionids or Geminids, and there are 112 meteor showers every year, always happen at the same time, because it's what the Earth just intersects with the comet tail at the same time.

And I guess over many thousands of years, then it changes as the comet moves away.

But

I didn't really know that.

And how do you say, is it the Perseids or the Persades?

So the Perseid meteor shower that people might have seen.

That is called, I just quite like this origin of what it's called.

It's usually referred to as the Tears of St.

Lawrence.

And that is after St.

Lawrence, who is that that Christian deacon who the Romans burnt him in AD 258 and he's the one who, you know, they put him on a barbecue.

Oh, roasted him on a barbecue.

And then he, apparently, according to legend, was the guy that said, I am already roasted on one side.

If you would have me well cooked, it is time to turn me onto the other.

It's such a good, it's a great story.

It's so lucky.

It's great.

What you actually said was, ah!

Well, that's that in Latin.

I've got a religious connection to all this too.

So there is an argument.

It's only an argument and we'll never know the truth.

But there's an argument that.

There's a bit in the Bible where St.

Paul has a conversion.

He's on the road to Damascus.

He's called something else for that and then he becomes Paul.

He's called Saul.

He's called Saul.

And then he and Saul becomes Paul.

So there is an argument that he just saw a meteor.

Because and the account, there are several different accounts of it.

He sees a big flash, I think, doesn't he?

Exactly.

He says it's brighter than the sun.

Tick.

It can be brighter than the sun.

He fell over.

Tick.

That would happen.

Why?

Well, it can be a shockwave if a meteor arrives.

Oh.

Tick.

Oh, really?

He also says he heard a big noise.

Tick.

And he was blinded, which could happen.

Well, but do you know that?

But that also could be a truck.

Couldn't it?

No, I don't know.

Bright lights.

Tick.

Yeah.

Falls over.

Tick.

Loud noise.

Tick.

That's true.

And it would have been more miraculous in a way to produce a truck at that time.

Hey, just speaking of that idea you said of it's not as crazy as a meteorite hitting the Earth surface itself and bouncing off.

Oh yeah.

There is a

Mars 2.5 million years ago.

A rock left the surface of Mars, shot out into space.

Then in 1962 that rock finally landed on Earth as a meteorite in Nigeria in Zagami.

And it's known as the Zagami.

meteorite.

And sometime soon in the future, that very same bit of meteorite is going to become a meteorite again, except this time back on Mars.

Because in in 1996, we put some of that meteorite back onto a ship.

So we've relaunched it out of our planet, and it's part of the Mars Global Surveyor, which has been going around Mars, but we've lost contact with.

So very soon, that satellite is going to go into, it's going to be sucked in by the orbit of Mars.

I'm just going to be so pissed off.

Imagine if you're like, I've traveled for 2.5 million years to get away from that place, and you've literally just put me straight back.

Yeah, that's true.

That's incredible, though.

That's a very cool fact.

Yeah, it's like a cool poetic justice, isn't it?

I think it's amazing how these rocks get from one place to another.

Like, for instance, when the dinosaur asteroid came down, it comes down, it breaks through the atmosphere, basically pushes all the atmosphere out of the way, causes a vacuum.

And so when it hits the ground and loads of rocks come up, they all get sucked into space.

Oh, wow.

And so you could theoretically have some rocks from the dinosaur age that have since made it onto the moon.

And there could theoretically be dinosaur fossils on the moon.

like probably not, but theoretically it could be.

There was an article about this recently.

Yeah, there's a round of little surface, isn't it?

There's a piece of rock that they think maybe it's from Earth, but they need to do more testing.

In fact, that one you're talking about, Paul, I think they do,

like you say, they're not sure, but they're pretty sure it is from the Earth because it was the way you can tell it how it was formed, and it was formed in a way that either it's from the Earth or they have to change the way that the history of the Moon

because they think it couldn't have come up to the surface of the Moon in the right time.

So it's a bit complicated.

But yeah, it's...

But that could be the oldest known Earth rock, and they found it on the moon.

The oldest known bit of Earth is not a rocket.

It's about four billion years old.

It's incredible.

Except is it because they brought it back to Earth?

They must have done that.

Yeah, it came on Apollo 14, I think.

What are the odds of bringing back?

Did you come back with some moon samples?

We've got some bad news.

We feel so cute.

Probably that spaceship crossed with the Martian one and the two rocks waved at each other, going, going back home.

Yeah, going back home.

Why have we got such strict immigration laws in the universe?

We keep on sending foreign rocks back where they came from.

No wonder conspiracy theorists don't think we went.

The only rocks we've got are fucking from here anyway.

Can I just say one thing just about the Tunguska?

So the Tunguska event was this massive explosion.

Was it in 1908?

It was so big, it cast light over the whole world.

And at the time,

the night skies glowed so brightly that people in Asia, which we know is heavily populated, so probably quite a lot of people,

people in Asia read their newspapers outdoors at midnight and apparently at least one golfer got in a round at 2.30 in the morning in St.

Andrews in Scotland.

That is amazing.

That's you.

That's the 1908 version of you, Jay.

Does it look like the world's ending here?

Wow, I think I could get nine in there.

So a meteor.

heading towards the earth if it's a smallish size we would call that let's say a meteor meteoroid meteoriting the earth if it was bigger it's an asteroid right so it's a it's a size thing

So in movies, whenever we try to prevent an asteroid from hitting the Earth, they always send up some kind of big nuclear device to blow it up.

And there's so many plans going on with NASA and independent bodies of scientists who are trying to work out the best way to stop potential asteroids from hitting the Earth.

And there's some that want to wrap it in a sail and sort of sail it in a different direction.

But one thing I read is they don't ever really want to go for the nuclear option because obviously you blow it up and then suddenly you're sending a lot of rocks to Earth.

But what I didn't realize is they're nuclear rocks now.

So you've made them radioactive.

So you would actually just make the whole situation doubly worse by spreading radiation everywhere where it hits.

I mean we have this ridiculous policy where we can't bring a strand of hair into space in case it infects Mars and I can't believe we're even considering sending radioactive rocks out into space.

Yeah.

I think the key would be to push it, wouldn't it?

That's the current best theory because there's a guy at NASA who's called the Planetary Protection Officer.

He's an awesome guy, but he's very low-key about the whole thing.

So his name is Lindley Johnson, and he's responsible for it, basically.

But he's only got eight members of staff.

So if we get hit by an asteroid, is it his fault?

Effectively.

But he was asked about it.

He said, Do you feel a lot of pressure being the planetary protection officer?

And he said, it doesn't stress me out that much.

Well, I want someone to be a bit more

actually because who does he answer to?

If we do get all annihilated by an asteroid,

what he's going to go into the cockroach's office.

The cockroach will say, well done.

You've been working for us all this time.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

And Chaczynski.

You can email em our podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account at no such thing.

You can also go to no such thingasafish.com.

We have all of our previous episodes up there.

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We're going to be touring all around the UK in March.

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Please get some tickets.

We hope to see you there.

We'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.