Episode 145: Transcript
Episode: 145: The World’s Humblest Heroes, from Plumbers to Tardigrades
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] So, Charlie Jane, if you could have one kind of basic maintenance task that was like fixed by magic, like it could be plumbing, it could be like street maintenance, your computer setup, whatever, what would you pick?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:15] Man, it's so hard because as you are probably more aware than most people, I have a really troubled relationship with the physical world, the physical world and I don't always get along super well. So I'm like, there's so many things that I wish I could just fix with magic. I wish I could find lost objects by magic. I wish I could definitely make all of my technology work better with magic. But I think I'd have to say as somebody who really struggles with cleaning and like just keeping my space clean, if I could just have like a sorcerer's apprentice kind of thing where like a mop and some buckets, which obviously turned out great in that movie, like no, problems whatsoever.
Annalee: [00:00:52] But you would do it right though. You would figure it out.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:54] Yeah, if anybody could totally ace involving like the physical world and complicated magical stuff, it would totally be me. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But if I could just snap my fingers and have like magic cleaning in my apartment, that would be incredible.
[00:01:09] How about you?
Annalee: [00:01:10] So you're opting for domestic maintenance.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:14] Basically, yeah, I am.
Annalee: [00:01:16] I think kind of continuing on that theme. I think I would opt for sewer maintenance.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:23] Yes!
Annalee: [00:01:23] I would like magical sewer maintenance.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:27] Oh my God. Yeah.
Annalee: [00:01:27] It's rainy season right now, which is good. I'm glad we're getting some rain here in Northern California, and in San Francisco when we get too much rain, our sewers overflow, the drains get clogged, but the sewers overflow because we have a dual use sewer system. So the sewers overflow runs through the same system as water runoff. So that means when it rains the sewer is overflowing in many areas of the city. So, you get a really nice smell.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:00] Yay!
Annalee: [00:02:00] Going with the fresh rain smell, you also get the not so fresh poop smell.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:03] Yeah, it’s a real problem.
Annalee: [00:02:05] So I think what I want is something like aquamancy, like some way of redirecting the water or I was thinking, like, bioswaleomancy, because one of the ways that we're trying to deal with water runoff in San Francisco is to build these bioswales, which are little areas of greenery that absorb the water instead of just shooting it all down the drain, so if we could make bioswaleomancy happen. Very specific.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:33] I need you to write this fantasy trilogy now, Annalee. I need to read about all of the epic struggles of bioswaleomancy.
Annalee: [00:02:42] You probably figured it out already, but you are listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction, society, and bioswaleomancy.
[00:02:54] I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction, and my forthcoming nonfiction book is called Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:05] It's such an amazing book. I'm so excited for everybody to read it. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I write science fiction. I sometimes write comics. Marvel Comics just published a trade paperback of my mini-series New Mutants: Lethal Legion, which I literally just found out like an hour ago, was also nominated for a GLAAD Media Award. So, yeah.
Annalee: [00:03:23] Woo! So cool! Wow. I just found that out, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:29] And we're so excited to introduce our wonderful, heroic—
Annalee: [00:03:33] Amazing!
Charlie Jane: [00:03:33] Just incredible new producer, Naya Harman. Naya, hi!
Naya: [00:03:38] Hello, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to join the team.
Annalee: [00:03:42] We are just so happy to have them on board. They're already doing amazing stuff and helping to write episodes and just like being generally badass.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:50] So awesome. Just being a total MVP, just so incredible.
Annalee: [00:03:56] So today, we're going to be talking about a humble class of heroes whose lives are devoted to infrastructure, maintenance, and repair. We're going to talk about heating engineer rogues, space janitors, and of course, the Super Mario Bros. movie.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:11] Of course.
Annalee: [00:04:11] I mean, gotta have plumbers. I think that is sort of adjacent to bioswaleomancy.
[00:04:18] And later in the episode, we're going to head down to Antarctica, where our guest Ariel Waldman spent her summer vacation studying the environment and the tiny creatures who live there, including tardigrades, the world's greatest microscopic animals.
[00:04:31] Also, on our mini episode next week, we'll be talking about our mixed feelings about Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, the recent movie version. We'll also be talking about our less mixed feelings about some other recent YA shows, like Percy Jackson.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:46] Yeah, and by the way, did you know that you are listening to a podcast? It is entirely independent and not supported by corporate anything. And we live entirely on your support and your donations and your love.
Annalee: [00:05:00] And your love.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:00] And I was going to say love and like, yeah, and we have a Patreon. We have a Patreon and you can join it. And for like, just, you know, a few bucks a month or whatever you could spare. You know, however many zingots you can throw in there, it really helps us to keep the podcast going. And then you get mini episodes in between every episode, you get access to our Discord channel where we're just hanging out and talking about everything, and you get to be part of our community and you get to have like a much deeper relationship with the podcast. And that can be yours for just a few bucks a month and anything you give us goes right back into keeping the podcast awesome and keeping Naya around and just keeping everything going.
[00:05:41] So, you can find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. Okay, let's get plumbing!
[00:05:51] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Annalee: [00:06:23] So, I just saw the Super Mario Bros. movie from last year and it got me thinking about speculative stories that feature people like plumbers who work on infrastructure and maintenance and it's actually this whole trope in science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:38] Yeah, I really enjoyed that film and I thought it was super fun.
[00:06:44] I did think it was interesting that they really build up at the start of the movie that like Mario is a plumbing genius, like there's a huge flood in Brooklyn. And he's like, they're digging in the wrong place. And he goes and finds the right place. And then that superpower of his never comes up for the rest of the movie. He's never like, I can defeat like King Koopa by changing the valves on this one. I was waiting for that.
Annalee: [00:07:07] I mean, we did get to see him acing a number of tasks that are from the games that are…
Charlie Jane: [00:07:12] Well, yeah.
Annalee: [00:07:12] Plumbing-adjacent tasks.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:15] There are a lot of pipes, I guess. He's running around a lot of pipes. It's true. There’s pipes, I’ll allow it.
Annalee: [00:07:19]I think one of the most iconic movies, that deals with an infrastructure hero is Brazil from the 1980s. And in that movie, the hero of the movie is this guy, Sam, who's living in this government-controlled apartment in this sort of bureaucratic dystopia and his heater is broken and he's just, he's dying. He's sweating like crazy. He keeps calling the government mandated maintenance organization, which is called Central Services.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:52] Central Services!
Annalee: [00:07:55] [Singing] They do the work, you do the pleasure.
[00:07:57] And they are in charge of duct maintenance. And he's on the phone, he's sweating, and it's just taking incredibly long amounts of time. And then suddenly, this guy rappels into his window with duct tools, and it turns out he's Harry Tuttle, a heroic heating engineer.
Brazil Clip: [00:08:17] Listen, this whole system of yours could be on fire, and I couldn't even turn on a kitchen tap without filling out a 27B-6. Bloody paperwork, heh.
[00:08:27] I suppose one has to expect a certain amount.
[00:08:31] Why? I came into this game for the action, the excitement. Go anywhere, travel light, get in, get out, wherever there's trouble, a man alone. Now they got the whole country sectioned off. Can’t make a move without a form.
Annalee: [00:08:42] So he's played by Robert De Niro in this incredible, funny role. And I love that he talks about how he got into this business for the excitement. And he's really sad that, like, bureaucracy has eroded the joy of this job. And this scene is just a really famous moment in the movie. It's often quoted. It's in a ton of memes. There was even, just as a fun kind of side fact, the Robert De Niro character mentions how he has to fill out a form 27B-6, and that was actually the title of this really popular blog about hacking on Wired.com, about 10, 15 years ago. So it was, even then, a big part of the culture.
[00:09:32] And this whole idea sums up, I think, one of the key struggles in these stories about infrastructure heroes, because they're always up against some giant bureaucratic morass or some other systemic problem that's preventing them from just doing their jobs and having nice lives.
[00:09:49] And in Brazil, obviously Central Services is this kind of fascist bureaucratic nemesis of the free engineers. And basically red tape is the enemy of good infrastructure.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:01] Yeah, it’s interesting, when you think about how many dystopias, like, how many of our great dystopias, especially the ones that kind of lean into the Kafka-esque side of dystopia, there's often, like, a component of infrastructure to it.
[00:10:14] Part of what makes it dystopian is that the infrastructure is crumbling and you're not able to fix it, or the infrastructure is designed in a way that's so rigid that it kind of forces people to operate a certain way instead of adapting to people's behavior and, you know.
Annalee: [00:10:29] Like planned obsolescence.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:32] Yeah. And obviously we have real life examples of this. The Soviet Union notoriously had some infrastructure problems, I think you could say. The United States now has some pretty dystopian infrastructure problems. And I think I would say that it's interesting that it's like, the government is bad and bureaucracy is bad, but oftentimes in real life, it's that the government wants to fix infrastructure, but there's too many private kind of libertarian-ish entities who are like, no, you can't fix that because it's in my neighborhood and I can't, you know, blah, blah, blah
Annalee: [00:11:02] In the United States, I think that that's definitely true, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:07] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:11:07] I think every country has its own variation on that because I suspect there's other nations where the government is in charge of infrastructure and the problem is the government, but here in the States, definitely. And there's a lot of stories that deal directly with that.
[00:11:21] One of the things that I've noticed in a lot of these stories is that other than bureaucracy, the big problem that these heroes face is that they're treated like garbage. They're at the bottom of the social hierarchy. They're abused. They're neglected. And this becomes a really great way of criticizing capitalism because the best position from which to criticize capitalism is from the bottom, from the working class.
[00:11:51] And I think that's really. What's happening in a movie like Space Sweepers, which we've talked about before on the show. It's just this incredible movie from 2020.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:00] Love that movie.
Annalee: [00:12:02] Our point of view characters are members of this class of space janitors, and they're really poor, they have bad equipment, and it's really dangerous to be out there grabbing space junk, because if you get in the way, even of a tiny piece of space junk, it's going so fast that it can just rip through your hull, and your ship is depressurized and you're screwed.
[00:12:25] Or it actually goes through your body. You could be killed by like a floating piece of dust, basically. So, that is a great example of how, in that scenario, it's a corporation that owns all of these orbital habitats, and this is a class of people living in precarity who are completely at the mercy of capitalism, but they wind up, figuring out a way to band together. And through friendships and through connections at work, they are able to kind of fight back a little bit. And I think that's another one of the traits of these shows is that friendship and solidarity, like non-family solidarity, becomes a really important aspect. Mm hmm.
Space Sweepers: [00:13:13] Space is full of trash. Expired satellites, abandoned space vehicles and leftover space construction materials have collided to form millions of scrap metal parts precariously floating in space.
[00:13:28] Workers risk their lives to chase down space debris flying 10 times faster than a speeding bullet just to be able to afford their next meal.
[00:13:35] Look, I will be the first to admit that our Eden is not perfect, yet.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:39] Yeah, and you know, I want to mention another Korean film actually, Snowpiercer by Bong Joon-ho. There's this train going through the tundra. Earth has become a frozen wasteland and the only life is on this train and you have this thing. I briefly worked on a TV show based on Snowpiercer and this is the thing we talked a lot about is like, how do you keep all these systems running?
[00:14:06] The train has to be moving at a constant velocity. There's track maintenance that has to be performed on a train that never stops moving. It's a really fascinating situation that obviously has a very heightened realism to it.
[00:14:16] I wanted to mention a book that I just finished reading, literally yesterday called The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. He's this incredible fantasy author and The Tainted Cup is really all about infrastructure. It takes place in a secondary world where there are these giant sea walls that protect the empire from these leviathans, these weird sea creatures that sometimes try to come ashore and just destroy everything. And their blood has magical effects. And so, people actually use their blood to enhance people. But you have to keep these sea creatures out.
[00:14:50] And basically the entire plot of the novel is that there's a murder mystery that involves some engineers who work on these sea walls and it happens in such a way that it causes some infrastructure damage. And people have to cope with that while also solving the murder.
[00:15:06] There's this wonderful moment about a third of the way through, where some of the characters are traveling and the detective who's kind of the Sherlock Holmes character in the book, a woman named Anna kind of says, well, the real empire people think about these engineers who build the seawalls and there are these heroic figures that we all look up to, but what really keeps the empire going, the real empire, is the people who built these roads that we're riding on right now.
Annalee: [00:15:30] Ugh, I love that.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:31] Like, the roads are the heart of the empire, they're the blood of the empire, and it's this really beautiful moment. And part of the thing that they keep talking about in the book is like, what is the empire?
[00:15:44] And basically, it always comes back to the empire is infrastructure. Whatever keeps the infrastructure going and keeps these giant monsters out of our lands is helping to keep the empire alive. Anything that gets in the way of that is a problem, a threat, and you meet all these characters who are heroic infrastructure workers who are going to go risk their lives to stop the giant monsters and fix the walls and stuff. It’s so cool. It’s such a great book.
Annalee: [00:16:08] I love that. I feel like because of the fact that so many of these stories involve people who know each other through work, there's a lot of kind of what you might call like work family relationships.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:21] Sure.
Annalee: [00:16:21] That are really utopian. So we get these really dystopian visions and I'm thinking a lot about Wall-E.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:27] Oh!
Annalee: [00:16:30] Which is this horrific vision of the future of Earth, actually kind of like Space Sweepers, in that earth has just become a garbage dump. But then Wall-E, the robot, is such a wonderful sweet character and the relationships that Wall-E forms with the other robots are just beautiful and ultimately redemptive and it's sort of suggesting that infrastructure is what you make of it.
[00:16:57] When we were talking about this episode before, actually I think Naya was bringing up like how Wall-E is such a great character because he does things with the garbage, you know, he doesn't just throw it away.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:07] He recycles.
Annalee: [00:17:10] He recycles it and he enjoys it and he is proposing this other way of dealing with this problem of infrastructure.
[00:17:18] And I wanted to mention one other thing, which is that infrastructure is also a social, like there's a whole aspect of these stories that's about kind of social infrastructure. Lower Decks, the Star Trek animated series is a great example of this because one of the things that they always joke about on the show and by the way, we had an interview with the showrunner, Mike McMahan, which you guys should all go check out and listen to. But on the show, they're always joking about how their job is second contact, not first contact. So, they come in and they're maintaining these social relationships. They're not discovering new things. They're just, they're maintenance. They're social maintenance.
[00:18:00] And that’s a source of humor, but also part of what makes them great because they're making everything stay in place.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:07] And often a lot of the second contact is like, we're going to set up a relay, we're going to build a thing, we're going to fix your thing that's been broken. There’s a lot of episodes of Lower Decks where they show up and just fix stuff, but also those characters on Lower Decks, they are the ones who do the mechanics. They're the ones who go around swapping out the power conduits and doing all that stuff that you never really hear about on other Star Trek shows.
Annalee: [00:18:29] For sure. They are doing physical and social infrastructure there.
[00:18:36] I want to finish up by talking about something that goes back to that clip from Brazil when we meet Tuttle and he's like, I got in this for the excitement! I feel like there's not enough storytelling that shows infrastructure maintenance and infrastructure building as heroism, as exciting in and of itself.
[00:18:58] And certainly in the Super Mario Bros. movie, we do see that. Although not enough of it, as you pointed out. Like, we don't get to see him using his plumber powers as much as we would like.
[00:19:09] But I think that the game Minecraft is a perfect example of teaching us as we play it, as we enjoy it, that there's something really utopian and pleasurable about just building stuff. And I mean, Minecraft can be played in a million ways and yes, you can play it as just like fighting monsters if you want to, you can make it into something more like a traditional shoot em up game, if you want. But I think most people, including me, when we play it, it's really just making stuff.
[00:19:41] It's just really fun to imagine how would I build this? Would I dig down? Would I stick it in the sky? Like, what would be a really cool way to recreate this building or whatever strikes my fancy?
Charlie Jane: [00:19:57] Yeah. And, you know, I mean, that's such a wonderful example and it's so engaging. It's so immersive in like that process.
[00:20:06] I feel like one of the defining features of science fiction and fantasy is fascination with megastructures. Things like, you know, the wall in Game of Thrones, the Death Star in Star Wars, like what Roz Kaveney always calls the big dumb object in space, kind of. There's big obelisks and big kind of giant Dyson spheres.
Annalee: [00:20:26] Also, our friend, Deb Chachra, in her new book, she talks about charismatic mega structures.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:34] I love that.
Annalee: [00:20:36] It's a great book. It's called How Infrastructure Works. We'll put a link to it in the show notes.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:40] That’s such a great quote. That’s such a great phrase. I'm going to start using that.
Annalee: [00:20:45] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:45] That's going to be part of my everyday. I'm going to use that every day in conversation. But you know, you have these giant mega structures and every once in a while you kind of get a little bit of a hint of like what goes into maintaining them or keeping them up like in obviously Star Wars: Andor, you see one little part of the Death Star being built.
[00:21:05] There's a little talk in Game of Thrones about how do we keep the wall from falling down or how do we maintain the wall, or why are we not maintaining the wall? But I feel like that's a thing that I'd love to see more of in science fiction and fantasy is just, how do these things stay intact?
Annalee: [00:21:20] Yeah, I think that's what heroes of infrastructure are all about. They're just about fixing things and reminding us that, you know, maintaining infrastructure is actually an incredible adventure.
[00:21:31] But also, and I think this is really important, that the people who do it deserve to be treated with dignity and that they need to have resources to do their jobs well. And I gotta say, I'd rather join a party of plumbers and infrastructure engineers than a party of warriors and billionaires.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:48] Amen.
Annalee: [00:21:50] That's for sure.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:51] Hell yeah.
Annalee: [00:21:51] Coming up after the break, we'll be talking with National Geographic Fellow Ariel Waldman, who spent her summer in Antarctica doing research and filming a documentary.
[00:22:01] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:22:03] Ariel Waldman is an Antarctic explorer, a filmmaker, and an expert on human spaceflight who served as the chair to NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Advisory Council. She's also an author, and her latest book just came out a few months ago. It's called Out There: The Science Behind Sci-Fi Film and TV, and I highly recommend it.
[00:22:24] So, welcome to the show, Ariel.
Ariel: [00:22:27] Yeah, thanks for having me.
Annalee: [00:22:28] So let's just get right down to it, because you had a pretty unusual summer vacation, so what were you doing in Antarctica this past summer?
Ariel: [00:22:37] Yeah, so I went to Antarctica several months ago, and this was my second expedition, and I was, there to do a couple of things.
[00:22:47] One was, I was an embedded researcher on the McMurdo Dry Valley's long term ecological research team, which is a mouthful, but they do some of the most amazing climate change research and research about a unique area of Antarctica, that some people have, equated to being very Mars-like, and they've been doing research there since 1993.
[00:23:08] The second reason I went there was, as a filmmaker. So I was filming a nature documentary, entirely self-shot, over the two months that I was there to really showcase this really unique region of Antarctica known as the Dry Valleys.
Annalee: [00:23:25] Wow. That is so cool. So, you basically went to space in a certain way.
Ariel: [00:23:31] Feels like it, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:33] That’s amazing.
Annalee: [00:23:33] So, one of the things that I feel like always gets left out of stories of cool expeditions and research like yours is how did you get the support and funding to go. You obviously didn't just kind of out of nowhere appear there.
Ariel: [00:23:50] Yeah, it's been a journey, I’ll say that.
[00:23:53] So, the first time I went to Antarctica, I got a grant from the NSF Antarctic Artists and Writers program, and it took me five years of trying to get that grant to finally get it. And once I got it, there's no funding that comes with it. It just sends you to Antarctica, which is great, but then, it didn't pay for any of my equipment or my time, and so I did crowdfunding through my Patreon to support that expedition.
[00:24:21] This second expedition, I worked with a research team. They were able to secure the spot for me, and then again, it was something where I had the ticket to go, but it didn't pay for any of my equipment or my time. And so, this time around, I applied for a grant through National Geographic, and was able to get a grant and it funded some of my equipment, some of my time, and allowed me to hire an editor and a music composer for the film.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:51] That's amazing.
Annalee: [00:24:52] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:52] So, can you give us a sense of what your daily routine was like in Antarctica? What's it like to just be there?
Ariel: [00:24:57] So, there's kind of a dichotomy. So, part of the time while I'm there, I'm at McMurdo station, which is the largest station in all of Antarctica by an order of magnitude. At the height of summer, there's like a thousand people there, literally a thousand. And so you're in like this tiny town, and you live in a dorm room, and you go to a cafeteria. You have set meal times, and it's actually, for Antarctica, quite comfortable. But the other half of the time, I'm actually out in the field with six other people. No one around for many, many miles. I'm sleeping in a tent in, you know, five degree Fahrenheit weather, and it's freezing, and it's cold, and it's not my favorite thing to sleep out in the cold. But, you know, when I wake up, I'm out there doing field work. So, I'm out looking at different areas, taking samples.
[00:25:52] For me, in this recent expedition, a lot of it was filmmaking. And so for me, it was getting out there with all my equipment by myself, setting it up for 30 minutes in the frigid, frigid cold. And then shooting myself or different creatures, you know, and by creatures, I mean like microbial mats and gooey things that are on the ground. So, it was a lot of work in terms of standing still with a lot of camera equipment and sort of freezing my butt off every day.
Annalee: [00:26:21] But you're also doing research with this research group on top of that, right? They're looking at climate change and how that's affecting Antarctica. And I mean, I've read a lot of scientific papers about how the glaciers are melting in Antarctica. There's a lot of calving of glaciers, and one was kind of floating toward Argentina, I guess. And I'm wondering, what are you doing for your research, but also, were you actually able to see ravages of climate change, with your eyes, or was it more something that you still have to measure with scientific instruments?
Ariel: [00:26:53] So, yes, but the area that I work in in Antarctica is a little bit different from the peninsula. So, the peninsula of Antarctica is the most northern facing area of Antarctica, and so it's seeing the most warming. Where I am, I'm about 77 degrees south, so decently south. And the area that I work in, the Dry Valleys, is the largest area of Antarctica that's not fully covered in snow and ice. And so it's a really unique region where you can actually see the continent itself not totally covered in ice, which is really cool.
Annalee: [00:27:27] Wow.
Ariel: [00:27:27] But the glaciers there are a bit different than the glaciers that you hear about in the news, the ones that are calving into the ocean. This region, these particular glaciers that I'm looking at, don't let out into the ocean. They're actually on dry land, dry permafrost in some cases. And those ones receive relatively minimal melting so far.
[00:27:53] But the thing that's really fascinating is that that relatively minimal melting of glaciers in the dry valleys creates a different issue in which there are frozen lakes in the dry valleys and in these frozen lakes there's microbial mats and tardigrades and rotifers and all these like creepy awesome organisms that live under these frozen lakes that are forever frozen year round.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:16] Oh wow.
Ariel: [00:28:16] Looks totally alien like, otherworldly, some of it looks like cotton candy, like pink cotton candy coming up from the bottom of the lake, and so it's really cool.
[00:28:29] But what happens with relatively minimal melting, and it is getting slowly warmer, wetter, and windier in this area, is that it fills those lakes, and those lakes grow in size, and as those lakes grow in size, from the glacial melt, so the glaciers like melting into these frozen lakes, they grow in size. And then what we're seeing is that they are slowly, slowly getting less frozen in the summers.
[00:28:54] And it's predicted by the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research Group, that in the next 10 to 40 years, these forever frozen lakes that have been this way for millennia may no longer be frozen year round and the disruption that that means is that all those cool alien-like cotton candy microbial mats that have these really unique ecosystems that have been undisturbed for a long, long time.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:22] Oh, man.
Ariel: [00:29:22] Will get very disturbed. and these ecosystems will fundamentally change when they no longer have ice cover over the top all the time because it'll get very turbid. There'll be just a lot of disruption in those frozen lakes. So it's a different story of climate change that people aren't really used to hearing. And it's a little bit more nuanced, but it still deals with melting and how that can change an ecosystem.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:45] So this is like your last chance. This is our last chance to really study them. Before they're potentially like…
Ariel: [00:29:51] Oh yeah, I mean, absolutely. So, so studying, especially the microscopic organisms, which is kind of my specialty. So, I go there and I film tardigrades and, and microbial mats and all these microscopic ecosystems. It's so important to be filming them right now, because if we don't, we might be losing things very soon without even knowing what we've lost.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:12] Wow.
Annalee: [00:30:12] Okay. So, I have two questions. One, which was just, when you say a frozen lake, you just mean that the top of the lake is frozen, right? So, it's water underneath. It's not completely frozen.
Ariel: [00:30:23] Correct.
Annalee: [00:30:25] So how are you like getting in there and filming this stuff and tell us about tardigrades.
Ariel: [00:30:31] Yeah, so thankfully I am not physically getting in there. There are actually special divers who are amazing people.
[00:30:38] So a lot of these research groups will have divers with them who come and they put a hole into the top of the frozen lake and they are diving, you know, kind of 24/7 because it's forever sunlight in the height of summer in Antarctica.
Annalee: [00:30:55] Amazing.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:55] Wow.
Ariel: [00:30:55] The big joke with the research teams is you work until the sun goes down, which of course it doesn't.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:02] Oh my God.
Ariel: [00:31:02] Yeah. So, they hire these divers, these divers go in and they sample these mats. A lot of the mats in this frozen lake system are called lift off mats because they sort of coat the bottom of the lake, kind of like a carpet, like a fluffy carpet, and eventually, the gases, like oxygen and, and so on, that are happening in these microbial mats, because there’s life there, kind of push these little carpets off of the floor, and eventually they lift up, and then float to the top of the ice for the frozen lake and then they get frozen in the ice and then they sort of like over years work their way from the bottom of the ice to the top of the ice. And the thing that's really cool is you can still find totally viable, microscopic organisms even though they're getting frozen in the ice for several years before they hit the surface.
[00:31:55] So yeah, tardigrades. Tardigrades are in these microbial mats, but they're also in the soils of the dry valleys. They're in the glaciers. You can kind of find them most places. Not everywhere, but in most places. And they're just, I don't know, they're adorable and cute.
[00:32:12] I assume most people listening to this podcast know what a tardigrade is and are kind of squeeing at the fact. But in case you don't know, you know, they're tiny animals, literal animals that are around a third of a millimeter in size, sometimes they can be a little bit larger, and they have eight legs and claws, and I always say that they look like little gummy bears with claws, because they waddle around, they're super cute. And they're kind of like their own organism, they're really fascinating. They're kind of their own little tree branch in a sense, under the animal kingdom.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:44] Aw.
Ariel: [00:32:45] I don't know, they're adorable. In Antarctica, there's kind of, in the area that I study, there's two main tardigrades. One is like, more of a predator tardigrade, will eat nematodes and rotifers and potentially even smaller tardigrades. And the other is a—
Charlie Jane: [00:33:04] Ooh.
Annalee: [00:33:04] What? A cannibal tardigrade?
Ariel: [00:33:04] There is a cannibal tardigrade.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:08] What? That's terrible.
Annalee: [00:33:10] No! You're ruining my, my image of the cute, water bear.
Ariel: [00:33:13] I mean, so the other one that people are more familiar with is the cute one that is, you know, a vegetarian, eats moss, you know, super cuddly looking.
[00:33:23] But yeah, the Milnesium tardigrade, which is the sort of more predator one, looks a little less cuddly. It’s a little bit more dominating, a little bit more, I kind of view it lion-like, you know?
Charlie Jane: [00:33:34] Wow, so there's water bears and water lions, and so these are extremophiles, right? They can survive in like—
Ariel: [00:33:39] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:39] Legendarily, they can survive in space. Like they can survive all kinds of conditions.
Annalee: [00:33:44] Is that actually true? Like just let's debunk if needed.
Ariel: [00:33:48] Yeah, so I would say it's half true. All the headlines you've read about tardigrades being like hardcore and they can survive anything and da da da, it's half true.
[00:33:59] So, yes, they can, but they need warning. And so, for instance, if you take a tardigrade who's having a great time and you flash freeze it, you've just killed your tardigrade.
Charlie Jane: Awww.
Ariel: [00:34:10] Like, not so tough after all. But in Antarctica, ideally, like, you're not having huge cold snaps, but again, climate change may be changing that a bit, but you're having gradual increases and decreases.
[00:34:26] And so when they can feel that the conditions are about to get not great, they can go into a tun stage. And in that stage, like a little ball almost. They can survive desiccation, they can survive extreme cold, survive for years on end, if need be, until conditions get nice. But they need a little bit of a warning to do that. And then I will even say a caveat on that caveat, is that, the research team I work with is the soils team and they specialize in, sampling these critters that are in the soil and then we take them back to the lab and we slowly freeze them down and we do this in a very gradual way.
[00:35:08] We keep them at one temperature for like a couple of days, another temperature for another couple of days. So, we try our best to do that gradual freezing down so that we can then ship these samples back to our labs and study them further. But even by doing that, we still will lose a significant percentage of tardigrades and other creatures that are supposed to be able to survive everything.
[00:35:33] So the reality is some tardigrades will survive, and if you instantly kill them, they will die. But if you slowly do it, some will still die, but some will definitely make it out. So, you know, we do have tardigrades that we've frozen for a decade and then we'll defrost them and some of them will pop out and be totally cool, which is amazing, you know, after 10 years, but some of them don't make it.
[00:35:58] So that’s sort of the nuanced take on it.
Annalee: [00:36:01] And is it the same thing with going into vacuum? Like they would have to gradually go into vacuum how would that?
Ariel: [00:36:08] That's a great question. And I actually haven't read the papers on that, so I don't know. But my inkling. based on working with tardigrades would be, again, they need to have some sort of a heads up, because the protective state for them is the tun.
Annalee: [00:36:23] Yeah.
Ariel: [00:36:23] So if they're already in a tun and then you, put them in the vacuum of space, they'll probably be okay.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:31] Oh, wow.
Ariel: [00:36:31] But if they're alive and wiggling around and you just put them to the vacuum of space, I would be tempted to say they're gonna die.
Annalee: [00:36:37] Yeah.
Ariel: [00:36:39] So it's all about, like, getting them into that protective state that allow some of them to survive.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:43] Just like any kind of cryosleep.
Ariel: [00:36:46] Yeah, exactly.
Annalee: [00:36:47] Also, this feels like it bodes poorly for cryosleep. It's like, well, most of them make it, you know.
Ariel: [00:36:53] Yeah. And I mean, that's the reality of cryosleep. Which I talked about briefly in my Out There book, which is just like, typically when we see it in movies, like something goes really wrong. It's always like a device where, like something goes very wrong once cryosleep is initiated. And I mean, you could say there's some, some inspiration from nature for that.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:16] Yeah. Cryosleep has always felt very unrealistic to me for a bunch of reasons, but yeah, I can imagine a 50% fatality rate might be optimistic for that, you know, for sure. So, can anybody go to Antarctica? Do they have to go through a process like the one you went through? Like, how do I go to Antarctica? I want to, like, I'm packing my bags.
Ariel: [00:37:36] Yeah. So, I mean, there's a few different ways to consider. The fastest way that will just get you there that a lot of people are doing now is, you know, tourism for better or worse. And so that usually will put you behind by like $10,000 or so. So, it's a lot of money. and that usually puts you on a ship and you sort of cruise around the edge of Antarctica. Maybe you get to go on a little boat and then get right on the edge of Antarctica and see some penguins. And actually, this past year, Antarctica crossed its most tourist season ever. It was estimated that there was 100,000 people who went to Antarctica, in the last season, which is a lot. Most of them are on boats.
[00:38:19] So, that's one option. But if you want to actually, like, live and work in Antarctica, so to speak, there's a few other options. So one is that, as I mentioned, McMurdo Station has around a thousand people at the height of summer. The majority of those people are not actually scientists. They are people working various jobs from IT jobs to carpenters to fire people. You know, it's a small town, so it needs electricians and people to work in the cafeteria and everything. So, a lot of people actually will end up applying to jobs for their country’s Antarctic station.
[00:38:55] And I've heard good things about that. Sometimes it takes applying a couple of times or a few times for you to get a call back. But then once you do, then, you’re actually working in Antarctica for a few months and actually getting to see the land itself and not just cruise up to the edge, which is pretty cool.
[00:39:16] And then if you're, you know, more on a researcher academic track, there's certainly looking up people who regularly do work in Antarctica and talking to them and asking about if they have grad student positions or postdoc positions and building those relationships. It's not an instantaneous thing. It's often a thing where you build relationships and eventually something works out. That's one option.
[00:39:40] And then options are more similar to my experience. The NSF Antarctic Artists and Writers Program just came back for the first time last year after a hiatus. And so, I believe they'll be opening up applications again this year. So that's also something. And again, that took me five years of applying to get it. But it's an option. And for me, when I was trying to figure out, since I'm not an academic and I don't have money to be a tourist, I thought, well, I did go to art school. That is something I'm qualified to do. And I had learned that the artist program, there was around 60 applicants a year. So, I figured, you If I've got like a one or two shot in 60 to go to Antarctica through doing art, that's probably my best bet. And I was probably right. It was my best bet. It took me a long time, but I think for some people that's a really great thing to consider.
[00:40:36] And again, it's an artists and writers program. So again, I imagine there's a lot of writers listening to this podcast. And, so they also take in creative writing, poetry, and the like.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:47] Wow. That's so cool.
Annalee: [00:40:48] Yeah, I know that Kim Stanley Robinson spent a couple of summers in Antarctica, doing writing. So, yeah, it's definitely something that they love science fiction writers to do.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:58] Nice.
Annalee: [00:41:00] Yeah, you've really turned being a citizen scientist into a career, and I wonder if you have advice for people who are maybe not trained as scientists, but want to get involved in citizen science and help out with science. What are some good ways for people to do that?
Ariel: [00:41:15] Yeah, I think being a good artist can also make you a good citizen scientist in the sense that your job is sort of to do interesting work and get it out into the world. And not necessarily asking permission to do that, and I think that's, in a sense, how I got my start, because my start really began with creating a website way back when called Spacehack.org.
Annalee: [00:41:37] I love spacehack!
Ariel: [00:41:39] I know, yeah, I mean, it's still around, but like, it's a directory of ways to get involved in space exploration with or without a science background. And, it was just something I created because I was like, this doesn't exist. I've come across all these cool things people can do to get involved, but they're all really difficult to find and put together. And so I'm just going to curate a directory and put it out into the world. And like with any art, some of it resonates, some of it doesn't.
[00:42:08] And this really resonated with people at the time. This was 2008. And I think a lot of people who are interested in science often feel like they need permission, like you need permission to create, I don't know, a directory of cool birds or something, whatever it is. And I think the more people just create resources, be it a website or videos or what have you, I think it acts as sort of a foothold to begin realizing that you have something to say that's of use to the scientific community, because often curation or creating resources of some kind is actually really valued. People won't ask for it, but once you create it, they'll be like, wow, this is great. This is awesome. Why didn't this exist before?
[00:42:53] So that's certainly the, the route that I've taken to get more involved. Just creating things that bring me joy that I feel like should exist in the world and using that as a platform to build confidence that I have something to say and something to add in an area I'm interested in and so that's what I often encourage. Different people have different skills. It might be writing, it might be being a lawyer, it might be a roboticist, but you know, whatever it is, build something. Take your skills, however minimal they may feel, and apply it towards an area that you think is really cool, even if you don't know anything about it. And that's often when a lot of magic happens and you can begin building a career out of it.
Annalee: [00:43:33] And so to finish up, tell us when we might be able to see the documentary that you made or, or even just like pieces of it because I know you're kind of releasing little teases about it.
Ariel: [00:43:46] Yeah, that’s an excellent question. So, I'm currently in post-production on it. I had hoped to wrap up post-production last month, but that didn't happen. I'm finishing post-production now this year, definitely. I'm still sort of navigating the distribution for it. So, it might be something that shows up, either on YouTube or film festivals or streaming or a combination of those. But pretty much if you follow me on Instagram or my newsletter or Patreon or anything like that, you will definitely know about it.
[00:44:21] Certainly, if you follow me on anything, you will find out about the film because once it comes out, I'm not going to shut up about it. but it's called Antarctica Unearthed. And yeah, it's really just about all the amazing ecosystems of the Dry Valleys and this place that feels very alien-like that very few people ever get a chance to visit. So, it's really going to be wonderful to showcase Antarctica in a way that no one’s really seen it before.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:48] Thank you so much for joining us. So, you said people should follow you on all the socials. Where can people follow you on Instagram and everywhere else?
Ariel: [00:44:56] Yeah, so for most places, I'm just Ariel Waldman, just my name. On Instagram, I'm Ariel Waldman. On Patreon, I'm Ariel Waldman. So that'll get you there.
Annalee: [00:45:06] I can attest that following Ariel means you will get amazing videos and you will get some incredible glimpses of the Dry Valleys.
[00:45:14] Like you posted this like raw 10 minutes of just like flying over Antarctica in a helicopter and I watched the whole 10 minutes. I was fricking riveted. It was gorgeous. So yeah, definitely check that out.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:28] Gonna go look at that right now.
Annalee: [00:45:29] Yeah, you need it. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us.
Ariel: [00:45:34] Yeah, thanks for having me. This was awesome.
[00:45:36] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:45:39] You have been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. Thank you so much for being here. Remember, you can find us on Mastodon and Instagram as OurOpinions or OurOpinionsAreCorrect. And please come support us on Patreon. We're at www.patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:46:03] And any little bit helps. It makes us eat food and that makes our opinions more correct and helps me afford my CO2 monitor so I can keep the air in my office less toxic so that I don't fall asleep.
[00:46:11] Thank you so much to our amazing new producer Naya Harmon who is making all of this happen. And thank you to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez Nichols for our music and we will talk to you later. If you're a patron we'll see you on Discord.
[00:46:25] Bye!
Charlie Jane: [00:46:25] Bye!
[00:46:25] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]