Oceans: What Remains to Be Discovered?

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Hello, I'm Robin Inks.

And I'm Brancox.

And in a moment, you're going to be hearing me say, hello, I'm Robin Inks.

And I'm Brancox.

Because this is the longer version of the Infinite Monkey Cage.

This is the podcast version, which is normally somewhere between 12 and 17 minutes longer than that that is broadcast on Radio 4.

It's got all the bits that we couldn't fit in with Brian over explaining ideas of physics.

I do object to the use of the word longer, though, because that's obviously a frame-specific statement.

Yeah, we haven't got time to deal with that because even in the longer version, we can't have a longer intro.

Can we just let them listen?

I've got an idea.

Can we just have a podcast version of this intro to the podcast, which can be longer than the intro to the podcast?

And then we're going to have a podcast version of the podcast intro to the podcast.

I'm going to get started by now, but if you're still hearing this, I don't know what's going on.

Then we're going to have a podcast, podcast, podcast version of the podcast, and then it would do podcasts.

Hello, I'm Robin Ace.

And I'm Brian Cox.

Now, today's show is about oceans, a subject that's actually had us engaged in intense research.

This is entirely true.

At one point, Brian went, I really need to know a lot more about this.

And so he decided to actually check with an expert and went to the internet and downloaded his own book.

Which, as he downloaded it, went, oh, this is a rip-off, isn't it?

Who's the only one who's done that?

This is an old one.

It was Wonders of Solar System from 2009 or something.

And it was about seven quid.

I thought it was going to be about a pound by this time.

But it was honestly, you know, there's clichés about yourself.

I opened it, and the first page was me staring at the sky like I don't know.

Look at those lovely stars.

No, you weren't even pointing, you were being enigmatic.

I'm looking at a thing, but you don't know what it is.

Shiny, shiny.

Or is it a black hole filled with danger?

Hmm.

Anyway, sir.

It's not me, is that Orville?

It isn't.

It is.

You are Orville.

I see you as a thought of Keith Harris's that's just run wild.

So that's what's happening.

Anyway, the main reason he wanted to check it was one of our guests who'll be introduced shortly, or maybe Mike, quite a long time with this intro.

He went, oh, he's been down five kilometres deep in the ocean.

Well, I've been down very deep as well.

I've been at least three kilometres.

How far was it?

Well, I thought I'd check then.

I couldn't remember.

It was two.

Yeah.

It's still, you know, two kilometres.

Anyway, today's inframud cage, we're going to be talking about the great mysteries of our oceans, what still remains to be discovered, and how might these discoveries transform our lives.

So to explain the world beneath us, we have another panel of experts, and they are...

I'm John Copley.

I'm a marine ecologist, ocean explorer, and I'm the first British person to dive more than three miles deep.

And...

And the...

Sea creature I think is probably most unusual is a deep sea animal called a benthic siphonophore.

And I like that because it does look like a spaghetti monster.

It's got this incredible shaggy body with all these polyps, long trailing tentacles over the seabear, this head-like structure on a ratchety neck.

And it looks like something out of science fiction.

And for the aficionados, it actually looks like the aliens from Space 1999 episode The Bringers of Wonder.

I was just going to say that.

That's the image I had in my head.

Hello, I'm Helen Scales.

I'm a marine biologist and a writer.

My latest book was Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells.

And I think the most unusual sea sea creature is a thing, well, a group of creatures called the Argonauts.

They are the only octopus that live inside a shell.

And for a very long time, scientists thought that they didn't make their own shells, but that they stole them from other animals and then sailed off in them like little boats across the waves, like little octopus pirates.

Right, I'm Andy Hamilton.

I'm here representing the listeners who struggle to follow this stuff.

And I think

my most extraordinary sea creature, I think, is the octopus because it has the ability to signal its emotions by changing colour.

And I always think that's an extraordinary thing.

I always think

how much conflict would have been saved in the world if humans could do that.

If in a pub when things were turning a bit tasty, you could just say, all right, he's turning orange now, walk away, or go away.

I'll tell you what, Brian Cox does that as well.

If you bring up homeopathy, talking about

colours.

It's wonderful.

And this is our panel.

John, something that I love about this, when people like you're on the show is, I imagine when you're lecturing to other scientists and you say that you've been five kilometers down in the ocean, they don't immediately go, ooh, so it must be nice to get there.

And it is, when you think of the distance of five kilometers, if you walk it, and then you imagine just going down into the oceans and how difficult it is for us to to do this.

Can you just run us through what do you go through as you are journeying down that distance into an ocean?

Well, it's an interesting comparison, isn't it?

Because five kilometers is

a short walk, but it can take us to somewhere that really to us is like another world when we go vertically down five kilometres.

So, what's it like?

Well, you're in a very small craft, you're actually in a hollow metal ball because that's got to protect you from the pressure where you're going.

And I love the bit at the start of the dive: you're not connected to the ship, it's just you and two other people crammed into this hollow metal ball two meters across inside, and you're in there for 10, 12 hours, no toilet facilities.

And you're free, you're not connected from the ship, you're ready to go off and explore on your own.

And there's this sort of moment of peace at the surface.

You're getting rocked about by the waves, and then you start to sink below the waves.

The colour through the porthole just deepens, it gets bluer and bluer and bluer until it's this incredible luminous black, the deepest blue you can possibly imagine.

And then you're, you know, eventually you're beyond the reach of sunlight.

So, by a thousand meters deep, you're beyond the reach of the sun's rays.

There's still light, though, out there, because life makes its own light, so little squirts and flashes, and you kind of join the dots in your mind to imagine what creatures are making them.

If you ever do turn on the lights, what's making them is weirder than what you've imagined, usually.

And you sink like a stone, and it is very peaceful, and you're gently sort of spinning a bit like a sycamore seed falling off a tree.

And then eventually, you arrive after a few hours, you arrive at the seabed, and then it is this very different

looking landscape because everything down there is shaped by completely different processes to what we're familiar with on land.

On land, we've got it, it rains and you know, rivers carve out valleys and all that kind of thing.

No, down in the deep ocean, we have organic detritus, what we call marine snow, raining down all the time and creating soft plains of mud.

But then there's volcanic activity, but the lava quenches instantly when it hits cold seawater.

So the landscape looks so different.

And you pick your way across it in this little pool of light, and you're aware of this vast darkness stretching around for hundreds of miles around you.

But what if you were not in that vessel?

How far can a human descend, and what would be the effects?

So, that's the great thing about these vessels.

We're in that hollow metal ball, we stay at normal atmospheric pressure.

So, we don't have to decompress, we don't have to do things that scuba divers do when they dive deep.

We can pop straight out of the craft when we get back to the ship.

If we weren't in that craft, yeah, our bodies are not designed for this world.

So, if we go down just 10 meters, then the pressure increases one atmosphere.

So at 10 meters deep, it's about the same pressure as it is inside your car tyres.

And it's another atmosphere for every 10 meters below that.

So at 5,000 meters deep, it's 500 times atmospheric pressure outside you.

And your craft's got to withstand that.

So if we were to go to the International Space Station, yes, all right, we have to sit on a giant firework and get accelerated to escape velocity, and hats off to those who do that.

But once you're on the space station, it's one atmosphere of pressure difference between the inside and the outside, and it's pushing out.

And, you know, we can make car tires that can withstand twice that.

So, you know, that's not such a big engineering challenge for pressure.

But for deep ocean craft, no, it's 500 atmospheres or more, if you were to go deeper than that, all over the surface of your craft.

So, give you some idea of what that pressure is like.

Imagine, if you will, Robin, imagine that you're wearing a pair of stilettos,

and Brian.

That didn't take me as long as I hoped.

Wow, I look great.

Brian is sitting on your shoulders.

Andy is sitting on Brian's shoulders.

Henry is sitting on.

Why am I.

That sounds very risky.

I'm on top of Brian and he's in stiletto.

Okay, Andy, you're in the stiletto.

Thank you.

Okay.

Brian is in the middle.

Yeah, that's better.

And we're doing very well in Spain on the circus turn.

But basically, 17 people stacked up sitting on each other's shoulders, with the person on the bottom wearing a pair of stilettos.

The pressure through the heels of those stilettos, that's over

every part of the surface of the hull of your craft at 5,000 meters deep.

And it's a round ball so that it distributes that pressure evenly across the surface.

So the craft I was in, it has titanium walls 71.5 millimeters thick, and then two meters of space that we're in inside.

If it were not perfectly spherical across that whole diameter to less than half a millimeter, the pressure wouldn't be evenly distributed and it would be pretty catastrophic for us.

Yeah, it does cross your mind because I, as I said, I it was a different craft.

I or my the one I went down it was called Alvin, yours was the Japanese one, wasn't it?

Yeah, that's right.

Mine, the one was called Shinkai for the deep dive.

But even it does cross your mind.

It did it's a question maybe.

It did to me, because you sort of hear it, you don't quite hear it creak, but you can imagine that, can't you?

And they keep testing things.

I did it in Albin anyway, so they kept pressing this little button and this little beep kept going.

And every single little beep that went off, I was like, What's that beep?

You know, beep, can't can't be good beep and you're just going testing testing the integrity of the hole around the windows I think so so so the windows the the perspex windows they don't seal very well until they've got pressure on them so sometimes they always say if you if you see a leak have a taste of it if it's salt water maybe you should tell someone if it's fresh water it's probably just condensation from your breathing and so on not a lot you can do though is it because at five kilometers it takes hours to get up whatever happens at that depth no there's not a lot you can do but on the way down the windows are perhaps leaking a little bit and you think salt water

And my first ever dive, which was actually many years ago with the US Navy in one of their subs, they like to try and freak you out as a scientist.

And so the pilot, we got on the bottom, we were at 2,200 meters on that one.

We got on the bottom, and the pilot stood up and undid the hatch.

But of course, the hatch is this wedge of metal being held in by all that pressure, and no human could possibly pop it open.

You're perfectly safe with the hatch undone at the bottom.

Helen, we've got a beautiful description there of going into the deep ocean, and we're going to talk about what that's like and what life lives down there later.

But you're a very experienced diver.

You spend your time in that, what, I suppose, down to forty meters or so, the top level of the ocean.

Could you describe what that's like?

So, yeah, I mainly scuba dive, but also free dive.

So, that I enjoy a lot actually, just kind of holding your breath and swimming down and being very free.

So, none of this expensive technology keeping you alive, just you and your lungs.

But really, that top bit of the ocean, the first, yeah, the first maybe fifty meters is where most of the life is, really, because it's where the sunlight is.

You told us how dark it gets as soon as you get past about 50 meters.

So, a lot of the light is a lot of the life is up there in the shallows where the sunlight is.

And that's where all the beautiful, you know, wonderful things we can go and see, things like coral reefs and kelp forests and seagrass beds and all that kind of wonderful, bustling life and ecosystems is in that top part of the ocean.

And scuba diving is just a really fun thing to do as well.

I mean, it's the closest you're going to get to being a fish, frankly.

I was going to ask if you could break down a little bit, meter meter by metre, the kind of

the change in the kind of life forms that we see.

Sure, I mean, that'll depend where you are.

So, take on the place I know the best is the tropics, and I've luckily spent a lot of my time in the very warm parts of the world.

So, there, the water's very clear, so the sunlight will penetrate quite deep.

So, you've got quite a sort of good range of

depths that things can live at.

So, the very, very shallow parts on, say, a coral reef, you will get lots of corals that grow there, and it's quite there's a lot of energy there as well.

There's big waves crashing.

So, there's the species that are going to have to get used to

things being a bit boisterous.

So, they're fast-growing species of coral.

They're ones that are kind of branching and grow quickly.

And lots of colourful fish will be around there because that's the sort of thing that they'll hide amongst and they'll feed on those corals.

And as you go deeper, the shapes of the corals change as the light does slowly kind of diminish and things do get a bit bluer.

You get bigger, flatter coral plates which kind of gather more of that sort of sunlight because corals they're animals but they do have tiny algae inside them.

so they do need to harness energy from the sun as well with these symbiotic partners that live inside them.

So, I guess really about 10 meters down, perhaps 10 to 15, is where you tend to get most of the life.

That's a you get loads of, yeah, fish and sharks, and corals will be really fantastically diverse.

And then it tends to drop off a little bit.

But really, one of the really interesting things we're just starting to discover about the slightly deeper reefs is that actually they go corals go down much deeper than we thought.

It was really thought that maybe 30, 40 meters was about the limit of corals because of these algae that live inside them.

But actually, that's partly because that's as deep as normal scuba divers can go.

Go any deeper than that, and you start to get into trouble with the air that you're breathing, and it takes you a long time to come back up because of all these gases and so on.

But now we're getting the technologies to be able to go to, say, 60, 70, 80 meters, and finding that there are still reefs growing down there, which is rather wonderful.

So it's almost like these places are too shallow for the kind of wonderful machines that John goes down in, but they're too deep for scubas.

So, there's this kind of in-between bit that we missed.

It's interesting, actually, because I suppose one of the themes of this programme is the unexplored nature of the oceans.

And the idea, I suppose we can all imagine that the ocean floor five kilometers down is not very well explored.

But as you say, just that 50, 60, 70 meters, just because of the limits on scuba diving technology, essentially, is full of unexplored regions and unexpected animals and plants.

Yeah, exactly.

It was a kind of missing in-between bit.

And we're still finding stuff in those shallower waters, too.

There's still so much we're kind of learning.

Because even though, I mean, you say John was talking about spending a whole day going down to the bottom of the ocean, but as a scuba diver, you can only really spend an hour or two at a time.

So we're kind of visiting, we're really sort of brief visitors to this world, to these sorts of depths.

And then we have to come back up again and wait and go back down.

It's not like any other biologist, you can roam around forests for hours at a time.

We can have this sort of limited time that we can visit.

Are you a a diver, Andy?

I would be if I could swim.

Oh, you don't, the diving bit's fine.

It's just the rest of it you have problems with.

I can do a good plummet.

I can, I can.

No,

I really like, you know, no, I don't regard any holiday as having started unless there's been a boat trip.

You know, and I really like the sea.

And I've got, and the downside of not being able to swim is I have nearly drowned myself a couple of times.

But I did improvise a kind of diving method.

We were in in a place called Islamu Harris with my my wife Libby and um I got very excited.

I had a snorkel mask, you know, and um it was a place where if you held a packet of biscuits, your arm disappeared into this cloud of tropical fish.

It was really exciting.

And I discovered that if I sat on this rock, um, which is the fish's sort of favourite place, but every now and then a wave would take me out of my depth, but I realized if I didn't panic, the same wave would bring me back in.

So, but of course, being inexperienced and excitable, I was making these noises,

which were noises of excitement as all these new extraordinary fish arrived.

You know, to Libby, who's about

five, six meters away.

Anyway, as we were walking back up the beach, this big fat American said to Libby, Oh,

I guess he doesn't know how to snorkel, right?

And she said, He doesn't know how to swim.

This guy looked appalled, but yeah, it sounds fantastic.

I would love to.

But swim to go in John's thing, just the image of you sitting on a rock underwater holding a packet of biscuits.

I was wondering

previous episodes of this, I know that at one point you told us about a contre-temp you have with a hippopotamus, you've had a naked battle with a scorpion.

Yes, I won that battle, you did, yeah.

You're here and fully clothed.

But what was, have you had any kind of experiences in terms of you know, a battle?

Obviously, you're not necessarily going into the oceans, but I've had one extraordinary experience.

We went to the Barrier Reef, and the boat we went on was a cheapo, underpowered version, so we got there late and the tide had turned.

I was going to go walk.

You didn't sail from London, did you?

No,

yeah.

We went from Clacton.

It was

a bunch of drops.

And so I knew it was a less than professional outfit because they were explaining.

They said, right, who here has scuba dived?

And Libby and my friend Guy Denkin, who I write outnumbered with, said, Yeah, we'd like to scuba dive.

All right, this is what you do.

You take this, you put it in your mouth, you don't take it out.

Which I think is not Paddy registered training.

So, anyway, but I, as the non-swimmer, said,

I'll be fine.

I'll walk.

I'd got special shoes, I would walk on the reef and look at things.

And sure enough, they went diving, and I got off the boat, and I'm walking around the reef.

And the water's about a foot deep to begin with, and it's brilliant.

I've got a mask, I'm looking at all these fish.

And then, about half an hour goes by, and then my shoulders feel cold.

I straighten up, and I realize that what had been a beautiful blue sky was now lead and grey, and the last bit of blue was about to disappear, and it disappeared.

I can't see the bottom anymore.

And the water now, when I stand up, I realize it's up to my chest because, of course, the tide is coming in.

So, then I think, right, well, I could walk back to the boat, but I don't know where the edge of the reef is.

And such was the professionalism of this outfit, there's no one on the boat.

So I think, well, I know they haven't got that much, they're going to come back from the dive soon.

So I'm standing in the ocean, and it's about, well, it's about 60 miles offshore, isn't it?

You know, I'm literally in the middle of a grey ocean.

And it's like I can feel a hand just pushing me in the chest.

That's the tide just sort of getting slightly stronger.

And so I'm counteracting that by saying stepping forward.

I'm saying, right, keep calm.

They're going to be back from the dive in a moment.

And I'm keeping calm.

And then gradually it gets, and I'm thinking, and the water gets up to about my neck.

And then sort of got my chin above the water.

And I'm thinking, right, I'm going to have to gamble any second now.

I'm going to have to walk back to the boat.

And it's getting, I'm thinking, what a stupid way to go.

What an absolutely stupid thing to do.

And then the water kind of boils in front of me, and Guy Jenkins pops out like it's like Poseidon in front of me.

But of course, from his perspective, what he sees is a head in the middle of the ocean.

And then we had the most English exchange you've ever heard in your life.

Because Guy looks at me and goes, Oh, hello.

He says, Are you all right?

I said, I'd quite like to go back to the boat.

Yeah, I'm all right.

Oh, okay.

So we devised this system, which was that Guy would walk back towards the boat, and if he disappeared, I was to stop.

There's three stories of intrepid exploration there.

Yeah.

John, I read a remarkable fact, which is that at three kilometres down, 3,000 metres, 50% of the species you see will be unknown to science.

You'll be discovering one in two of the things.

It'll be a new discovery.

So, can you give us some picture of the animals and the living things down there that we know about and don't know about this interesting zone?

Yeah, that's right.

So that statistic is a sort of global average.

There's some bits of the deep ocean we know a bit better than others.

The northeast Atlantic, people have been looking at for 150 years.

But the Antarctic, where we've been working recently, no, pretty much everything you encounter in the deep ocean is turns out to be new in some of the habitats that are down there.

And it's the great richness of marine life.

So we're finding new species of fish, we're finding new species of marine snails, you name name it, it's there.

But what I'm particularly interested in when we're talking about unexplored frontiers in the ocean is another bit that we rush past.

Helen was mentioning about rushing past this sort of mesophotic zone that's too shallow for these subs and too deep for scuba divers.

But even when we're in the subs, we tend to rush to explore habitats on the ocean floor.

And there's this vast volume that's the interior of the ocean, that's just the sort of ocean space, not near the seabed.

And that's where there are a lot of really exciting discoveries in the marine life, because in the the past, if you were trying to collect samples there with nets, a lot of the animals they they live their whole lives with never touching a a solid surface.

So they have these ethereal uh bodies made of jelly, they're like blown glass.

And they're also very delicate.

So if you trawl a net through there to see what lives there, all you get in the bottom of your net is a load of snot, and you can't tell what the animals were.

So there's lots of discoveries to be made from just going there and sitting in the darkness there and seeing what's about.

And it it's a very challenging place to work, but that's ninety percent, I think, of the living space on our planet.

I mean, more than half our world is covered by water that's more than 3,000 meters deep.

So most of our planet is this deep, dark ocean.

And the really cool thing I find is, because one of the other things we do to figure out what's in the deep ocean, as well as going there, is to lower down cameras and have remotely operated vehicles and stuff.

But these days, the cameras are brilliant and really high.

high resolution and they beam their pictures up in real time.

So you've got sort of scientists in labs actually all around the world kind of tuning in and talking about what's up on the screen.

And so often, something comes up, and people are like, What is that?

We have never seen anything.

We can't even categorize that creature in like, is it a fish?

Is it a mollusk?

We just have no idea.

Because you do these weird, weird, kind of googly-eyed creatures float by, and there are people going, Where?

What?

Look at that, turn the camera on that.

What was that?

And you know, and just

you just dangle a camera down and you see new things.

John, we've talked about the sort of large creatures, spectacular creatures, but I suppose a lot of the interest is in the microbes down, particularly around the vents, where the biochemistry of the ecosystem, the ecosystem itself is absolutely alien from our perspective.

Yeah, I think the microbes are another great frontier for ocean exploration.

And they're so numerous as well.

So if I were to take a millilitre of surface seawater from somewhere that's clean, you know, not polluted or contaminated, that's a good sized drop.

You know, that would naturally contain about a million bacteria in in one drop.

So, if I wanted to have as many microbes as there are stars in our Milky Way galaxy, about 300 billion, then I'd need about 30 litres of seawater, which is about half a bathtub.

So, half a bathtub of seawater, as many life forms as stars in our galaxy.

Okay, so we can try and do some big sums now and see who's got the big numbers.

Is it astronomers?

Is it marine biologists?

So, let's think about

living microbial cells in the world's oceans and stars in the observable universe.

Okay, how many stars do astronomers reckon there are in our observable universe?

Well, they added a zero casually to their estimate a few months ago.

Yes, factor of 10 amongst friends.

But based on some Hubble Space Telescope data.

Anyway, it's 1.4 septillion.

So that is a 1 and then a 4 and then 23 zeros.

All right, so that's a pretty big impressive number.

All right, what about microbes in the ocean?

So I told you about a million per mil and so on.

That's at the surface.

Going to the deep ocean, there are fewer microbes.

It drops to about a thousand per mil in the deep ocean, unless you're near one of the deep sea vents that I study, where it gets exciting again.

But knowing that distribution, our estimate for living microbial cells in the oceans is 4.1 octillion.

So that's a 4 and then a 1 and then 26 zeros.

So do the sums, it means there are nearly 3,000 times more microbial cells living in our oceans than stars in the observable universe.

Or, as I like to think of it, 3,000 living universes in miniature out there waiting for us to explore them.

And we can get out there, we can immerse ourselves in that living cosmos right now today.

That's why I'm a marine ecologist and not an astronomer.

I remember,

I love it.

I love the way you always stutter after things like that.

Oh, no!

Cosmology's been trumped.

Don't say Trump.

These vents, I remember when I went down there and saw them, and the surprise to me, which

is that, for example, they're surrounded by these sulfur mats of sulphur, because you've got these microbes that are living off hydrogen sulfide.

And the chemistry is a different biochemistry in a sense, in that sense, isn't it?

Perhaps you could describe the interesting interesting differences between these microbes, particularly around vents.

So there's lots of different ways that microbes can make a living that we've discovered from exploring these environments.

It's really expanded our minds about how life can find a way in the universe, potentially.

So any sort of chemical

compound that might contain some source of energy, life will crack a way of tapping into it.

And that's what we see at these environments like these deep-sea vents.

So you've got some microbes that can take hydrogen sulfide in what's the fluids that are gushing out of the vents, use oxygen to oxidize it, and that's an energy source, okay, to live off.

They can do the same thing with hydrogen using oxygen.

They can take hydrogen and they can use sulfur instead of oxygen to oxidize it and get the energy.

So lots and lots of different ways that we're trying to understand.

And it's the partnerships that the animals form with the microbes that are key to understanding the patterns of life down there.

So when we go down and we see who's living where, and this is what I'm trying to figure out at Deep Sea Vents, what I now realize is the organism is not just the animal, it's the animal and its microbial partner.

And you need to look at both to understand why it's living where it is and what it's doing.

And of course, like for a long time, until actually quite recently, we thought nothing lived that far down in the deep ocean.

It was this kind of idea of the azoic seas.

Like how could anything survive where there's no sunlight?

And all of this stuff that we're talking about, these bacteria that use sulphur to harness energy instead of using sunlight, like you know, photosynthetic plants do, that's the key to being able to thrive in these deep places.

You know, we only discovered these deep sea vents in the seventies, in Alvin, actually, the same

submersible you went in, Brian.

And

I don't think we necessarily expected to find what what was found down there in terms of the amount of life.

And it's because of these amazing associations between, as you say, bacteria living inside snails and crabs, hairy chests and all that kind of stuff, which makes it possible to live in a completely different way.

Like you say, I mean, I think we are getting perhaps clues about maybe how life could exist in other planets because we're already discovering that it isn't just as we sort of for a long time thought it was about sunshine and grass and rabbits, and that's how ecosystems work.

You know,

it's a lot more complex, and all sorts of other things can be life on this planet.

That's right.

I should just ask, because

you've explored parts of the oceans on Earth.

I mean di does it excite you that there that there may be these event systems, for example on Europa, Jupiter's moon?

Yeah, absolutely.

And uh so Europa, Jupiter's moon.

Um if you've got liquid ocean and you've got a huge amount of volcanic activity, its next nearest neighbor Io is probably one of the vol most volcanically active bodies in the solar system because of the tidal pull of Jupiter.

So good candidate for deep sea events on Europa.

Going to be very challenging to explore them.

We can't remote control a vehicle over that distance with the time delay and everything.

It's going to have to be able to think for itself and it's going to need to know what it doesn't know to kind of recognize when there's a discovery to be made.

So, that's going to be quite a challenge.

But we're finding liquid water is potentially far more widespread in our solar system than we previously thought.

So, lots of places where there might be hidden oceans and possibly some sorts of microbial ecosystems in them.

I mean, it might be an unfair question, I suppose.

It's not a very scientific question, but if you were to guess,

would you imagine there's a fair chance of finding life down there?

I think microbial life, I mean, all we can go on is things appeared to get going pretty quickly in the history of the earth.

So it could be that with the right chemical element, metal elements and so on as catalysts and the right conditions, you know,

some of the metabolic processes are almost inevitable from the kind of chemistry that you might get.

So that's the only thing we've got to go on.

So it got going pretty quickly in the history of the earth.

So where else there might be those conditions in the solar system, yeah, there's a there's a good chance.

Andy, does this, in terms of looking at marine ecology, I think for a lot of people, probably in this audience, were put off at quite an early age because of purchasing sea monkeys,

which turned out to be absolutely nothing like they looked in the advert.

They weren't a kind of tall fish man with a pipe underwater and his family.

Which advert was that?

Oh, it used to be in all the comics, they used to have the sea monkeys.

I'm sure some of you

were, and it was going to be this family of kind of, they looked just little fish men and fish women with fish children and they pipe, and and they were very humanoid in look and they weren't, they were kind of like slightly active silt.

In fact, they weren't even that good.

And I feel that put a lot of people off what, in fact, we found out is a very exciting world.

I think what might also what maybe put a lot of people off was Jacques Cousteau.

Do you remember?

He used to go up.

I mean, I quite like the programmes.

I liked the

film footage of, you know, there was one brilliant one where all these cuttlefish, I think maybe it was squid, all got together, had the most massive orgy, basically, with all lots of colours.

It was great.

And then I think they then sort of, once they'd had the orgy, they died and floated to the bottom.

And then the babies came out and ate their parents, you know, which was, you know,

narratively a very good story.

Anyone who knows Andy's work will know that orgies and cannibalism are almost the end of every single episode.

Usually, usually where we start, yeah.

But I was always put off by Jacques Cousteau's narration, you know, that very, I mean, I know he was French, but I'm not sure he's not sure he needed to be quite that French.

And it used to have terrible.

Do you remember?

He used to have terrible music that sounded like it was being done on a style.

I don't agree with that.

You know, I was one of the, I remember building a model of his ship.

Yeah, I had an air fixed model of it that I built.

And I love that.

I love the footage.

It was just.

Once you watched a lot of them, I think you kind of got to know his tropes, you know, but

is it over-reverence as well?

I remember there was that kind of sotto-voche, that kind of thing, you know, that sometimes over-reverence as you look at things removes some of the wonderful one rather than just that bit of going, blinking hell, look, there's cuttlefish having an audit, now they're being eaten by their children.

Yeah, sometimes you want a different level of excitement, maybe, yeah.

I mean, I, that, yes, maybe rather stupidly, I'd like a programme where somebody does what I would do, which would go, bloody hell,

but it's not so,

I think you're gonna defend, you're gonna defend all the time.

No, I just I was actually just a couple of days ago watching back one of the very early Jacques Cousteau films, and they definitely did things differently back then.

I mean, the one I saw was about sharks, and what they did was they put one of their young

shirtless hat-wearing interns down in a cage

and then threw in a load of dead fish and just to kind of

excite the sharks.

They had a camera down there, and Cousteau was sitting on deck smoking his pipe, kind of watching this little screen, going, Yes, yes, that's fine, that's fine.

And these sharks are going crazy right in front of this guy in this cage.

And then they're getting more and more crazy.

And he's like, Yes, that's great, that's good.

We're stirring them up nice and well.

We want to see sharks having this food response.

This is what we want to see.

And then suddenly, and there's a shark expert with him, actually, this lady who I'm writing about, Eugenie Clark.

And she gently says to

Jacques,

I think we should bring him up now.

I think, and the sharks are actually climbing in the cage at this point and stuff, and it's all getting very scary.

And I was like, surely we wouldn't do that these days.

I mean, and eventually, Cousteau did agree.

He was like, actually, yes, we should bring him up.

But it was this idea of kind of pushing the animals into a frenzy and making them behave in a way that I don't think they would have done if they hadn't been kind of.

I think, to be honest, I mean, you know, strictly between us, I've heard that Attenborough has killed four interns already.

Shirt off, hat on, but hey.

But he's, you know.

Because he's a natural treasure.

It's all been covered up.

Well, you were early, we were talking, you've just been on holiday and you saw great white sharks, didn't you?

Yes, 4.3-metre-long great white shark.

It was fantastic.

They didn't use chum as such.

They used fish oil to sort of create a slick.

And then they had a lure with just sort of

sort of ten fish heads on it.

So the great white shark didn't associate the ship with food.

It just sort of because they whipped it away, just got this.

So the shark, I suppose, associates it with disappointment.

So I don't know.

But the extraordinary thing was that

my wife, my son, and my daughter were in the cage.

I wasn't on the cage, I was on the boat watching my family being dangled

in front of a great white shark.

But

there were sort of eight people in each of these cages.

But when the second lot got in, the great white shark,

4.3 metres, I think that's about 15 feet, sort of lunged at the lure and misjudged it.

I think they're quite inaccurate in the last bit sharks, aren't they?

When they eat.

And so me and my daughter Isabel were directly above this, a few feet, and its nose got stuck in the cage

in front of this bloke, and then it, to free itself, it flipped its tail and whacked the cage.

And then off it swam.

And then you heard a sound I've never heard before.

Eight human beings getting an adrenaline rush, laughing and going, woo!

And I was talking to one of the guys after the guy who'd been a few inches from this shark, and he said to me, I could hear its teeth on the cage.

It's an amazing thing to think you could hear the teeth.

There'd be very few people who can complete that sentence.

I can't believe that we've never got through so few questions because there's been, and I want to make sure, I don't know whether you're going to go.

One of the charges, I suppose, that's David against in space exploration, as you mentioned, for example, is that, well, curiosity is one thing, but

what's the use?

What is the use of exploring space?

So I could add, what is the use of exploring the deep oceans?

So space exploration has given us some spin-offs in our everyday lives.

It didn't give us non-stick pans and velcro, but it did give us pens that write upside down and tang, the popular soft drink in America.

Or pencils, as the Russians call them.

Exploring life in the deep ocean has also, and it is giving us, spin-offs in our everyday lives.

We're perhaps just not so aware of them.

So, they range from things like more efficient turbine blades for things like wind turbines based on those bumpy, what they're called, tubicles, these lumpy bits on the flippers of humpback whales, which great sort of aerodynamic properties.

We can learn from that.

And it's very much learning from the ingenuity of nature.

What else?

If

you can now enjoy

healthier yet creamier ice cream thanks to a protein from deep-sea fish, and it's not actually harvested from the fish, it's now synthesized.

And what it does is it keeps the ice crystals very small, so the ice cream is nice and creamy without having to add lots of cream to it.

So that's actually, I won't mention the brand, but that's actually one that we've probably eaten without realizing.

And then, of course, great medical potential as well.

Lots of things from corals for potential bone replacements for surgery, through to one of the greatest challenges I think facing our growing global population:

antibiotic resistance.

We need to keep innovating treatments and so on, and the microbes of the oceans are potentially great for doing that.

Well, Helen, you we haven't got onto it yet, but your interest and study of shells.

I mean, this is one of the things which starts so many children off with their interest: is walking the beach and they just put the shells in a bucket, very often then don't spend too long looking at them.

And you have, I mean, the couple that we noted when we read your book, iron-clad snail, things like this.

So, can you tell us what can we learn from, or what are some of the most fascinating shells, that the story that lies within them?

So, I mean, one reason I wrote this book really was partly to reveal the lives of the creatures that make shells.

You know, these aren't just lumps of dead calcium carbonate we found on the beach.

These are incredible remains of an amazing group of animals, the mollusks, which are some of the most ancient, successful, and diverse creatures that live among us today.

So, that's part of the story, but the other part is the human use of shells.

And this goes way back.

You know, these shells were the first jewellery, the earliest currencies, that kind of thing.

People have always seemed to have this weird fascination with seashells, and we've put them to all sorts of uses.

But it comes bang up to date.

We're still finding new, awesome things about shells and mollusks that have these kinds of applications, the kind of why-bother kind of questions.

Things like, well, yeah, you can discover, and we are discovering amazing things in very exotic, remote places, like the iron-clad shells that live on these vents deep in the ocean, hundreds, thousands of meters beneath the waves.

So these are really shells made out of iron?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're the scaly-foot gastropods, is the thing we call them.

And they have these very strange shells made partly with an iron compound in them, of three-layered shells, and they're incredibly strong.

We think to kind of withstand predation from things like crabs, which can just hold onto them and squeeze for days.

And their shells are incredibly strong.

So, maybe that could help us make bio-inspired new materials that are also very strong.

We don't have to go to the bottom of the very deepest bit of the ocean to find cool new stuff.

One of my favorite things that came out just recently is the fact that limpets, which are those kind of boring snails that you see on the beach, I mean, everyone's seen them.

They don't look like much at all.

When the tide is out, they're just sort of stuck to rocks like little volcanoes.

And everyone's seen them.

But their teeth are made out of the strongest known biological material.

This has recently been uncovered.

It's way stronger than spider silk.

And they've been there all along.

It just took a scientist recently to come along and say,

How is it that their teeth don't fall apart?

Because they spend their lives kind of scraping food off the rocks.

Imagine doing that, you probably need dentures quite frequently replaced.

But these guys don't.

So they thought, well, let's have a look.

And they looked inside their mouths, took some samples of their teeth, and found they've got this amazing nanostructure.

Again, I think there's some iron compounds in there too, and they are incredibly strong.

So imagine what that might lead to, you know, great advances in materials that we can make ourselves.

It's a really

good teeth, and they were just there all along.

It's a lesson, isn't it?

Because nature is so wonderful wherever you look.

And as you say, the amount of the ocean that's unexplored must suggest that there are wonders to be discovered there.

Now, the final question was going to be about the resurgence of fascination in space via Chris Hadfield and Tim Peake, and what do we need to do to try and get that fascination back in terms of the underwater and undersea world.

And I think, in fact, you answered that over the previous half an hour.

Brilliant.

And so we asked the audience a question as well, for the purpose of balance, obviously.

And we asked them, what would you most like to discover exists in the deepest part of the ocean?

The watch I lost off that boat.

Oh, here we go, there's one from James, the cod particle.

The reason my wife is upset with me, it must be somewhere.

This one's poetic.

I don't care as long as it's bioluminescent.

Hopefully, an amazing blue cephalopod that looks like a sky full of stars.

Whereas James Solomon goes with a girlfriend.

So, thank you very much to our guests who have been John Cockley, Helen Skels, and Andy Hamilton.

Now, two weeks ago on the show, Professor Richard Wiseman gave a riddle to the audience.

One week ago, we gave the answer.

Six days ago, we started to get the emails and tweets complaining about the answer.

so uh well i complained about the answer as well oh we had quite an argument about that we had a proper we would have had a stand-up row but we were lazy and

we couldn't find a stand-up no the uh um the

So this was the riddle.

You meet someone on the street who has two children.

One of them is a boy.

What are the chances that the other is also a boy?

Now, the answer from Richard Wiseman was one-third.

But was that the answer?

You believed it was.

It's a complicated question, actually.

There are two answers to this, depending on very precisely how you pose the question.

It could be a third, it could be a half.

But I believe we have Richard Wiseman on the line now to explain himself.

Professor Richard Wiseman, are you there?

I'm here.

I'm here.

Yeah.

Richard, now, when you asked this question to us, and you know, very with great deal of confidence said the answer is one-third, and then we found out that, well, that's not, people aren't content with this.

Can you run us through why you have created such an enormous amount of agitation and anger amongst the Radio 4 audience again?

Well, it's mainly for pleasure.

I just enjoy annoying people.

Most people think the answer is a third, that's the consensus.

But as Brian says, it does depend on all sorts of assumptions.

So, if you think what I meant by the question was I go out into the street, it's full of families with two kids.

I randomly choose one of them, and then I randomly, closing my eyes, grab one of the children, and it's a boy the question is what's the likelihood of the other child being a boy then the answer is is a half 50%

so if if it's entirely randomly chosen that's the case however that's not what I meant when I say I bumped somebody in the street I knew them it meant that when they said one of their kids definitely was a boy with

limiting it to families that essentially only have a boy or have at least one boy and the question is is the other person a boy as well?

And that changes the probabilities and the answer becomes a third.

Right, now I think what you've learnt there, Richard, is never give a riddle to a physicist, they're pedantic.

Also, by the way, very quickly, because of that episode, can I ask you, in the last two weeks, have you yet seen a wolf eating a cabbage?

I haven't.

I haven't.

I've been on the lookout for them as well.

The question is, if you saw a wolf eating a cabbage, what's the likelihood that the other wolf with it would also be eating a cabbage?

That's the one I've been working on.

We'll be covering that again.

Here we go again.

So,

thank you very much.

Thank you, Professor Richard Wiseman.

Goodbye.

Podcast version of the podcast podcast.

Brian doesn't even know that you have actually now listened to the whole of the show.

And this is all he's been doing for the last 47 minutes.

I can't imagine that.

And it's not going to end for a while either.

It's a nested infinity of podcasts.

This is my life.

You just end up with the podcast.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

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Winner, best book.

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