The Infinite Monkey Cage - Oceans: What Remains to Be Discovered?

Episode Date: January 30, 2017

Oceans: what remains to be discovered? Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by Andy Hamilton, Professor Jon Copley and marine biologist Helen Scales, as they look at the riches still remaining to be discovered deep within our oceans. The deep ocean remains the last great unexplored frontier of our planet, and as Brian and Robin discover, what we might find there could provide us with some extraordinary insights and applications. We've only just begun to touch the surface, literally, in terms of identifying and learning about the huge and varied life forms that live in our oceans -from the microbes that could inspire and generate new drugs to fight antibiotic resistant diseases, to the deep sea snails with iron clad shells, that may lead to the development of new super-strong materials. Even the humble limpet is providing inspiration to material scientists and engineers: the limpets' teeth, it turns out, are made from the strongest natural substance on the planet. Producer: Alexandra Feachem.

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply.

Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And in a moment you're going to be hearing me saying, hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. 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. 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? Yeah, it will be available very soon. Hopefully it's started by now, but if you're still hearing this, I don't know what's going on. And then we can have a podcast, podcast, podcast version of the podcast and then it would be podcast. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. Now, today's show is about oceans,

a subject that's actually had us engaged in intense research. And 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. So... Which, as he downloaded it, went,

oh, this is a rip-off, isn't it? Not the only one who's done that. This is an old one. It was Wonders of the 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 cliches about yourself. I opened it and the first page was me staring at the sky.

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, so... It's not me, is it? It's Orville. It is. 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 happened. Anyway, the main reason he wanted to check it was one of our guests, who'll be introduced shortly, or maybe might quite a long time with this intro. So that's what's happened. Anyway, the main reason he wanted to check it was one of our guests, who will be introduced shortly, or maybe in quite a long time with this intro. Well, 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 checked, and I couldn't remember. It was two. But still, you know, two kilometres. Anyway, today's In From A Mug 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... LAUGHTER 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 sea, but 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 gonna 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 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. Walk away. I'll tell you what, Brian Cox does that as well, if you bring up homeopathy.

It's a myriad of colours. It's wonderful. And this is our panel. John, something that I love about when people like you are on the show is, I imagine when you're lecturing to other scientists and you say that you've been five kilometres down in the ocean, they don't immediately go, o immediately go oh 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 do this can you just run us through what do you go through as you are journeying down that that distance into an ocean. It's an interesting comparison, isn't it? Because five kilometres 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, there's just you and two other people crammed into this hollow metal ball two metres 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'll be on the reach of sunlight. So by 1,000 metres deep, you'll be on 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 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 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 rains and 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 metres, then the pressure increases one atmosphere. So at 10 metres deep, it's about the same pressure as it is inside your car tyres. And it's another atmosphere for every 10 metres below that. So at 5,000 metres 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 tyres 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 is... That didn't take me as long as I'd hoped. Wow, I look great. Brian is sitting on your shoulders. Andy is sitting on Brian's shoulders. Hang on, no. Why am I...? That sounds very risky. I'm on top of Brian and he's in stilettos.

OK, Andy, you're in the stilettos. Thank you. Brian's in the middle. Yeah, that's better. And we're doing very well in Spain on the circus, sir. 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 metres 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, as I said, it was a different craft.

The one I went down in was called Alvin. Yours was the Japanese one, wasn't it? Yeah, that's right. Our one was called Shinkai for the deep dive. But even it does cross your mind. 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. They did it in Albion anyway. So they kept pressing this little button, and this little beep kept going. And every single little beep that went off, I'd go, what's that beep? You know, beep can't be good. Beep. And you just go testing. Testing the integrity of the hole around the windows, I think. So the windows, the Perspex windows,

they don't seal very well until they've got pressure on them. So sometimes, and they always say, if you see a leak, have a taste of it. If it's saltwater, maybe you should tell someone. If it's freshwater, it's probably just condensation from your breathing and so on. Not a lot you can do, though, is it? At five kilometres, 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, oh, it's saltwater. 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 metres 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, I suppose, down to 40 metres 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 50 metres 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 metres. So a lot of the life is up there in the shallows where the sunlight is. And that's why 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 by meter 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

is 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 those are species that are going to have to get used to things being a bit boisterous. Lots of corals that grow there, and there's a lot of energy there as well. There's big waves crashing.

So those are 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 these symbiotic partners that live inside them so So I guess really about 10 metres down, perhaps 10 to 15, is where you tend to get most of the life. You get loads of fish and sharks, and corals will be really fantastically diverse. And then it tends to drop off a little bit. But one of the really interesting things we're just starting to discover

about the slightly deeper reefs is that actually corals go down much deeper than we thought. It was really thought that maybe 30, 40 metres 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 metres

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 kilometres down is not very well explored. But as you say, just that 50, 60, 70 metres, 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 biologists. 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 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. No, I really like, you don't? The diving bit's fine. It's just the rest of it you have problems with. Yeah, I can do a good plummet. I can... No, I really like... You know, 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 a place called Isla Mujeres with my wife Libby, and I got very excited. I had a snorkel mask, you know, and 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, if I sat on this rock, which is the fish's sort of favorite 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 of excitement as all these new extraordinary fish arrived. You know, to Libby, who's about five, six metres 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... It's a beautiful image. I don't need to swim to go in John's thing.

Just the image of you sitting on a rock underwater holding a packet of biscuits. Going, rah, rah, rah. I was wondering, with previous episodes of this, I know that at one point you told us about a contretemps you have with a hippopotamus. You've had a naked battle with a scorpion. Yes, I won that battle.

You did, yeah. With the eight. I'm fully clothed. But what was... Have you had any kind of experiences in terms of, you know, a battle? Obviously, you're not necessarily often 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 and I was going to go walking. You didn't sail from London, did you? No, no, yeah. We went from Clacton. It was a budget job. 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 Jenkin, who I write, outnumbered with, said, yeah, we'd like to scuba dive. They said, right, who here has scuba dived? And Libby and my friend Guy Jenkin, who I write, outnumbered with, said, yeah, we'd like to scuba dive. Alright, 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. And 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. And I straighten up and I realise 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 and I can't see the bottom anymore and the water now when I stand up I realise is up to my chest because of course the tide, 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 60 miles offshore, isn't it? I'm literally in the middle of a grey ocean and and it's like I can feel a hand just pushing me in the chest that's the tide just so 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 keep 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 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. I'm all right. Oh, OK. So we devised this system, which was that Guy would walk back towards the boat and if he disappeared, I was to stop. That's three stories of intrepid exploration there.

Yeah. John, I read a remarkable fact, which is that 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. There'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 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 it, it's there.

But what I'm particularly interested in, when we talk 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 marine life, because in the past, if you were trying to collect samples there with nets, a lot of the animals, they lived their whole lives with never touching a solid surface, so they have these ethereal 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 and seeing what's about and it's a very challenging place to work but that's 90 i think of the living space on our planet i mean more than half our world is covered by water um that's more than 3 000 deep. So most of our planet is this deep, dark ocean. And a 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 resolution, and they beam their pictures up in real time. So you've got 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 categorise that creature in like, is it a fish, is it a mollusk?

We just have no idea because you have these weird, weird, kind of googly-eyed creatures float by and there are people going, look at that, turn the camera on that, what was that? And, you know, 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 and not polluted or contaminated, that's a good-sized drop.

That would naturally contain about a million bacteria 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. OK, 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. It's OK. 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. Factor a ten amongst friends.

But based on some Hubble Space Telescope data, anyway, it's 1.4 septillion. So that is a one and then a four 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 1,000 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 on 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 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 agree with you. Not 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 sulfur because you've got these microbes they're living off hydrogen sulfide and the the chemistry is a it's a different biochemistry in a sense in that sense isn't it so perhaps you could describe the the 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, you know, 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 away 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 the fluids

gushing out of the vents, use oxygen to oxidise it, and that's an energy source to live off. They can do the same thing with hydrogen, using oxygen. They can take hydrogen and they can use sulphur instead of oxygen to oxidise 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 Events, what I now realise 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 Azuic 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 70s. In Alvin, actually, the same submersible you went in, Brian. And I don't think we're 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. I think that's right. I should just ask, because you've explored parts of the oceans on Earth. Does it excite you that there may be these event systems, for example, on Europa,

Jupiter's moon? Yeah, absolutely. So Europa, Jupiter's moon, if you've got liquid ocean and you've got a huge amount of volcanic activity, its next nearest neighbour, Io, is probably one of the most volcanically active bodies in the solar system because of the tidal pull of Jupiter. So good candidate for deep seasea vents 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 recognise 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 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 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 sea monkeys. I'm sure some of you know, they were, and it was going to be this family of kind, they were little fish men and fish women with fish children.

And a pipe. And a pipe. And a pipe, and they were very humanoid. 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 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 like the film footage of... You know, there was one brilliant one where all these cuttlefish, I think maybe a squid, all got together, had the most massive orgy, basically.

Well, 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 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... I'm not sure he needed to be quite that French. And it used to have terrible... Do you remember, it used to have terrible music that sounded like it was being done on a styrofoam? I don't agree with that.

You know, I remember building a model of his ship. Oh, the Calypso? Yeah, I had an Airfix model of it that I built. I loved the footage. It was just... Once you watched a model of his ship. Of the Calypso. Yeah, I had an air-fixed model of it that I built. I loved 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-reference as well?

I remember there was that kind of sotto voce, that kind of... You know, sometimes over-reference, as you look at things, removes some of the wonder, rather than just that bit of going, blinking hell, look, there's cuttlefish having an orgy and now they've been eaten by their children. Sometimes you want a different level of excitement.

Maybe, yeah. I mean, yes, maybe rather stupidly I'd like a programme where somebody does what I would do, which is go, bloody hell! But it's not something... Zutalize! I think you're going to defend Jacques Cousteau. No, 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 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. And the sharks are actually climbing in the cage at this point, and it's all getting very scary, and I was like, surely we wouldn't do that these days. Eventually Cousteau did agree. He was like, actually, yes, we should bring them up. But it was this idea 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... I think, to be honest, strictly between us, I've heard that Attenborough's killed four interns already. Shirt off, hat on, goodbye. Because he's a national treasure. It's all been covered up. Andy, 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 ten fish heads on it. So the great white shark didn't associate the ship with food, 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 why it keeps coming back. 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 for you know 4.3 meters i think that's about 15 feet sort of lunged at the the lure and misjudged it i think they're quite inaccurate in the last bit sharks aren't they when they and he and um so me and my daughter is about directly directly above this, a few feet, and its nose got stuck in the cage in front of this bloke, and then 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, 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'll 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 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 can go... One of the charges, I suppose, that's levied 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 ask, 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 that 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 call tubicles,

these lumpy bits on the flippers of humpback whales, which are great aerodynamic properties. We can learn from that. And it's very much learning from the ingenuity of nature. What else? You can now enjoy a 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 synthesised. 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 realising. 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, we haven't got on to you,

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, a couple that we noted when we were reading 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, 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. 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. 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 today. 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 of thousands of metres beneath the waves. So these are really shells made out of iron? Yeah, yeah. They're scaly-foot gastropods, is the thing we call them,

and they have these very strange shells made partly with iron compounds in them, 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 favourite 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'd 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. 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 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. here'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 Jack Sorgut goes with a girlfriend. So, thanks very much to our guests, who have been John Copley, Helen Skelton, 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, er... 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... And we couldn't find a stand-up.

No. 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 very, you know, with a 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. LAUGHTER I just enjoy annoying people. Most people think the answer is a third. That's the consensus. But as Brian said, 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'm 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 a half, 50%. So if it's entirely randomly chosen, that's the case. However, that's not what I meant. When I say I bumped into someone in the street, I knew them.

It meant that when they said one of their kids definitely was a boy, we're limiting it to families that essentially only have a boy or at least 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 was working on. We'll be covering that again. Here we go again. So thank you very much. Thank you, Professor Richard Wiseman. Goodbye. Turned out nice again. Till now, nice again. 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.

And it's not going to end for a while either. It's a nested infinity of podcasts. You could probably sum it up like a... This is my life. You just end up with a podcast. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long.

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