Dark Side of the Earth

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Hey, Lottiff Noster here.

So one of the things I've always loved about being at Radiolab is that we take a kind of obsessive pleasure in trying to get you closer than you've ever been to things that are

an asteroid.

Unimaginably big.

Put it at 120 feet across, 220 billion pounds.

Oh my gosh.

Or microscopically small.

Into the tiny bits of the nucleus of the atom.

Or far away.

There's a place at the edge of our solar system.

Right at the edge of the edge.

Or right there in front of us, but hidden from view.

A sort of organ inside the human body that scientists had completely missed.

And we go to absurd lengths

to make things so fantastically distant from our everyday lives feel real.

I found one!

We built a cloud chamber in our studio.

Made a 500-person choir sing the spectrum of color of mantis shrimp seeds.

One of the very first radio labs i ever heard made me actually feel like i touched a star oh my god they're so bright that's really cool

sometimes getting close is about getting in the mind of the beginner there are many possibilities in the mind of the expert there are few emotionally close i got i get choked up um why does that choke you up um

Because it's so profound.

We always try to get the person at the heart of the story to be the one to tell it.

Like, what if she died?

Like, what would happen?

Like, would we have a funeral?

In their own voice.

Did she know I was there?

And if she didn't know I was there, did she wonder where I had gone?

And did she feel alone?

And is she scared?

We hope those efforts have given you something.

A laugh on a hard day, a factoid to drop at a party, a moment that made you feel less alone, even just something to wonder about when you're lying in bed in the middle of the night.

And now, here's where I ask you, any of you who are willing and able, to give us something back.

We need your support to keep building cloud chambers and visiting quasi-moons and creating elaborate soundscapes so we can feel and see and taste and touch the abstract.

The best way to do that is to join the lab, Radiolab's membership program.

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And when you join in, it also gets you fun stuff, exclusive merch, bonus content, ad-free listening, and right now a beautiful Radiolab poster.

Go to radiolab.org slash join to become a member or check out the poster.

Also, even if you don't give, next week in this feed will be a short little holiday gift for you where, I mean, I can't even believe I got to do this interview.

We will hear from a person in charge of a space mission that if you asked me last week, I would have said was impossible.

Like you couldn't even write this into a movie.

No one would believe you, but it actually is happening, and you're going to hear about it here next week.

As for right now, uh, while we're making that little extra-bitted radio for you, I want to offer you this story we did back in 2012,

which takes you to a place that fewer than 300 people have ever been with a view of the universe that is,

to say the least, striking.

Here is Dark Side of the Earth.

Wait, you're listening.

You're listening

to Radio Lab.

Radio Lab from

W-N-Y-C.

Save

rewind.

Hey, I'm Jad Abum Rai.

I'm Robert Quillwich.

This is Radio Lab.

The podcast.

And we've just finished our In the Dark tour, which is the thing we've been, you know, yammering on about for the last year.

And we wanted to play for you in this podcast one of our favorite stories from that show.

Now, this was designed for the eye as well as the ear, this particular performance, so you will not see the Palobolis Dance Theater, which means you will not see

pretty amazing stuff happening on that stage.

Yeah.

Strangely beautiful shadow plays on a huge white canvas on a gigantic stage.

You could go to the website and you can see pictures at radiolab.org.

Yeah, these guys are really,

they do, yeah.

They really are.

We should also note that this story was scored live by the amazing Tao Win with Jason Slota on the drums, Jamie Riota on the bass, and it was recorded masterfully at UCLA's Royce Hall by Reverend John DeLore.

So here it is.

So for our final segment,

we were thinking through this show.

We thought, you know, who would have a really interesting perspective on darkness?

Maybe somebody who works in a rich, dark environment, astronauts, for example.

Yeah.

So we called up NASA and talked to an astronaut.

We connected our little studio in New York to their studio in D.C.

to talk to an astronaut, but he was a little late.

And here's the funny thing.

When you are on hold with NASA, this is literally what you hear.

This has a blast-off feel to it.

Yeah, it does.

This is amazing.

This, by the way, is literally the case.

You dial 1-800 NASA or whatever, and this is like go-to-the-moon music.

Uh-oh.

Hello?

I hear someone breathing.

It's probably...

I'm breathing.

Oh, hello.

That's an interesting way to meet.

So this is our guy, Dave Wolf is his name.

He's a NASA astronaut.

Have been since 1990, over 20 years.

He wasn't really sure why we had called him.

What's our topic here?

So we explained to him that, you know, we're doing this show called In the Dark.

We're going to do it on stage in front of some very, very nice folks.

Do you have any stories that relate?

And right off the bat, he says.

You've triggered an interesting darkness story, I have.

Well, that's why we're calling you up.

Yeah.

Okay, you're taping and you're ready.

Yep, darkness is an interesting theme in space because there's nowhere

where the contrast between light and dark is any more extreme.

Dave has done dozens of spacewalks, and he says there have been times when he's just sort of out there floating in space next to the craft and maybe the uh the ship tilts a little bit and the wing blocks light that's coming from the sun or the moon and it creates a shadow.

And he says the darkness of that shadow is blacker than any black you thought it could be out there in space.

The shadow has no light in it.

There's not reflected light from dust in the air, the earth around you or clouds.

It's just pure absolute dark.

And you can reach into a shadow so deep, so black, that your arm can appear to disappear.

Wow.

Right in front of your face.

Your head is in the bright light,

and your arm is in this depth of darkness.

And it's just gone, like it's been cut off?

Yeah.

Wow.

But I do want to tell you an experience I had in my first space walk, late 97.

I had this experience.

It was from a Russian spacecraft.

You might remember the Mir

spacecraft.

So Dave was up there.

He was with two Russian cosmonauts.

And he and Anatoly Soloviev, they were suited up and getting ready to make their first walk into space, or his first walk.

And we did all the preparations to get the suits ready, and we're in the airlock.

And

the door opened and they floated out.

We flipped our tethers on outside

and he and Anatoly gently float to the work site.

And it was dark out and dark up in space means you're on the night side of the earth in the shadow of the earth and there were no external lights.

on this spacecraft.

This was really, really dark.

And we were over the ocean and at night that basically means you don't see the earth.

You don't see it at all?

Not at all.

When it's a moonless night, you don't see the earth.

In fact, all it might look like to you is the absence of stars.

I want you to imagine this with me.

He's up there in this darkness, and the earth, with all of us on it, is somewhere far, far below him, but he can't see it.

And all the while, and this is really important for what happens next, he is shooting through space.

He's rocketing across the dark shadow of the earth at five miles a second.

That is 16 times the speed that we're all moving right now because we are on the earth.

But he says at that moment, he didn't feel any of that.

It just felt like he was suspended in this cocoon of black.

Floating gently.

And he thought, all right, no problem.

This is kind of peaceful.

Because it was just me and the spacecraft and blackness.

And

suddenly...

This blazing light.

Blasts him from below.

What was it?

It was the sunrise.

You know, because he and the ship were moving so quickly at the sunrise, which normally happens here on Earth very, very slowly, calmly, at that speed up there, the sun comes screaming from the eastern edge of the earth straight across the earth, lights up everything in seconds.

And the earth lights up below me suddenly i can look down 200 miles and see that we're moving at five miles per second oceans whoosh clouds whoosh deserts whoosh and he's like

and i clutched onto these handrails like there's no tomorrow white knuckled in my spacesuit gloves because i suddenly had this enormous sense of height and speed.

He says it was sort of like if you're just standing comfortably on the ground and then someone just flips on the lights suddenly and you realize actually I'm not on the ground, I am on a 400,000 foot ladder.

Crazier still, in that sunrise moment.

The temperature also increases by upwards of 400 degrees.

In the moment?

In the moment.

Really?

This is the most extreme thing I've ever heard.

Are you air-conditioned or whatever?

Are you...

You are.

We are totally dependent on that spacesuit.

But the colors,

what you're seeing on that Earth is so spectacular.

The greens and blues and the delicate pastel-like colors, the contrasts and the brights just

aren't present in anything I've ever seen other than up in space.

Dave and his Russian buddy Anatoly, They're out there for hours doing repairs on the ship.

So they are, because of their speed, they're going in and out and in and out of these days and nights.

So it's 90 minutes of a light-dark cycle.

So you have 16 nights and 16 days for every Earth day.

Which means as they're working, this change is happening over and over and over.

Every 45 minutes they go from blazing light

to

quiet dark.

Blazing light

to

darkness.

You can get lost.

You get stories of people doing spacewalks that lose their orientation or feel like they're falling.

So he says the only thing to do in that circumstance is just to focus on your job.

Look straight ahead.

Only at the screw.

Only at the screw.

Don't look down is kind of the it's it's real in this business

So

we would have been perfectly happy to end the story right here because Dave and Anatoly finish their repairs, job well done, they get ready to come back into the spacecraft.

But we cannot not tell you what happens next.

Yeah, because this starts with a very different kind of darkness.

Yeah.

And that darkness, we will get to right after this break.

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Heyo, Lulu here.

As you have likely heard, this summer the federal government defunded public media in America.

Here at WNYC, that has resulted in a loss of $3 million each year that we cannot count on anymore.

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Thank you so much for listening and standing with us when we need you the most.

Hey, Latif Radiolab picking back up with our story of astronauts Dave Wolf and Anatoly Soloviev.

So the two of them pull themselves by their tethers to come back into the airlock to go back in.

But when it was time to come back in...

They couldn't get back in.

You were locked out of your spaceship?

You could call it locked out.

We were trapped outside, yes.

Essentially, their airlock was busted.

They couldn't repressurize it.

And if you can't get it at the right pressure, you can't re-enter.

And we worked on it for four or five hours and ran out our resources.

Wait a second.

ran out of oh yeah

oxygen or what we have plenty of oxygen it turns out what you run out of first is your carbon dioxide scrubbing unit that takes the co2 out of your suit and now the problem with this one is usually in a space accident you figure it'll only hurt for a moment but

when you die of co2 intoxication that drags out that's not that's a that's a miserable way to go.

What does he mean?

Did you ever?

What happens is first you get a headache,

and then your muscles start to twitch.

Eventually, your heartbeat starts to accelerate faster, faster, faster.

You go into convulsions, and then

you die.

Luckily, the life support system has an extra cartridge that gave us an extra six or so hours.

We used all that

and trying to fix the hatch and we couldn't get it to hold air.

And

we were done.

Did you know you were done?

I mean you were.

Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

You mean done like in over?

Yeah, yeah, no more ideas.

Done like in dead.

So

they decide, okay, we got to do something.

Last ditch maneuver, if we can't get our usual airlock to work, maybe we can make a new one.

Because, see, on the Mir space station, it's this big cylinder with these rectangular modules that jut out, and one of those modules is the airlock.

But there are these adjacent ones, which are normally just living quarters.

They thought, well, if we can't get our usual airlock to pressurize at the right pressure, maybe we can go to the next one over and try and pressurize it.

Essentially, treating that next module in as an airlock.

And we opened the hatch into that next module and in order though to go into it we had to disconnect our umbilicals because you can't close a hatch over your umbilical right and the umbilical was providing our cooling to our suits so as soon as we disconnected well that gives you maybe five eight minutes at max before you before you what

I don't even want to talk about it it's so bad

did you Did you look that up?

Yeah, I looked this one up too.

Essentially what happens is you boil inside your spacesuit.

In a very ugly way.

So,

Dave and Ed Tony think, okay, we've got to get through this tiny hatch into this room, and they've got to do it fast.

But they also know.

If you struggle hard and go too fast, you won't get much time at all in that suit before that heat builds up on you.

So he thinks, okay, hurry, hurry, but slowly, slowly.

What I did not anticipate was as soon as we disconnected our umbilicals that the visor would fog up and you'd now be having to feel your way through.

You're blind?

Yeah.

You could spit and kind of get a little area through the fog.

So I'm in the airlock trying to make my way into the next section.

And I was crawling along the wall, moving into the next section.

And

I spit on my visor, you know to make a little hole to look through and get a hint and it was an area I had been sleeping in some weeks before and I had left a picture of my family taped with scotch tape on the wall and I spit on the visor and my helmet light went there and there was this picture of my family

right here in this moment as I was scooting across the wall in what was likely my last minutes.

So this is how it's going to end.

So this is it.

And look, it's so strange.

There they are.

And I look back at that and I shudder.

Now, of course, Dave and his partner made it back into the space station barely.

But it didn't strike me really till months later on Earth

how close that had been

and what a strange situation.

This Russian guy must be your best friend like

he was

probably call each other and say 20 years later you go.

Well not many people have been through anything like that together and are there to talk about it.

And you just reminded me of something.

So we're going to leave you with one last story from Dave.

He was kind of a story machine.

This is from that same stay in space, involves the same friend, Anatoly.

They were out there doing some work on the ship, you know, floating in space again.

And then Mission Control radios and tells them to pause for a while.

We had a period where we had to wait through the night to go on with our work.

So he said, look, David, it was all in Russian, of course, I wanted to show you something.

And we hooked our tethers on, pushed ourselves about six feet away.

We had about six feet of tether so that our eyes couldn't see anything but out in space.

And

I turned my air conditioner down a little, you know, so it was kind of warm.

And I was floating in this spacesuit, just looking out into the blackness of space.

And

I felt like I didn't have a spacesuit on.

It was so comfortable.

The air temperature was just right.

I felt like I was just out in the universe

in the stars.

I couldn't see anything but stars all around me, and I couldn't feel anything

outside of spacecraft going five miles per second out in the universe.

Was that what he wanted to show you?

Yeah, I think so.

This is his rocking chair on the front porch thing.

Or a hammock almost.

He didn't want to talk.

He said, let's just be quiet.

Turn your helmet light off so you don't get any reflected light.

Just

relax.

Raslabavayat.

Relax.

Relax.

Relax.

Relax.

Relax.

Now, had you been there in the theater, this is the moment where we gave everybody a little pinpoint of light, a little hand-carried star that they could put over their heads and wave together.

Like 2,000 tiny little lights from the seats.

It's like a canopy of stars.

We saw this happen again and again, like 18 times, I think we performed this, and every time it was just like breathtaking.

Yeah.

This whole show came together thanks to so many people on stage and off, and we want to make a couple of thank yous before we go.

Very, very special thanks to Meg Bowles, who found our astronaut.

She found Dave Wolf.

Yes.

Also to Palobolis, the dance company, and to the Palabola.

Yes, starting with Itemar Kubovi, Lily Binns, Matt Kent, Renee Jaworski, Greg Laffey, and the dancers.

Chris Whitney, Heather Pavreto, Anthony Oliva, Christina Conger, Evan Adler, Anakhif, and the Olvera twins, Edwin and Roberto.

We love you guys.

Dimitri Martin, thank you so much for coming and creating this show with us.

Tao Wynn and Jason Sloda.

Thank you so much to them and Mike Faba, Jake Fine, Serena Wong, John DeLore, Melissa Lacasse, Dave Foley, Nick Nusiforo, Caitlin Fitzwater, Rebecca Larry, and Rosalind Lutin.

Lutz.

Lutz.

Most of all, most, most, most of all, to Alan Horn, who loved doing this and made it so fun to do.

Hey, I'm Lemon and I'm from Richmond, Indiana.

And here are the staff credits.

Radio Lab was created by Jad Abimrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler.

Lulu Miller and Latzv Nasser are our co-hosts.

Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W.

Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhun Yanan Sambandan, Matt Kielty, Rebecca Lacks, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Kari, Sarah Sandback, Anissa Vitza, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster.

Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

Hi, my name is Teresa.

I'm calling from Colchester in Essex, UK.

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