[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And we're on the Earth.

JAD: It's a good way to start.

ROBERT: Yes. And we ...

JAD: Just get the basics out of the way.

ROBERT: Yes. You want to know our location? I'll tell you something else: as you all know, the Earth spins ...

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: ... at a particular rate.

JAD: It does.

ROBERT: The Earth ...

JAD: Once a day.

ROBERT: ... also circles the sun every ...

JAD: All the way around.

ROBERT: ... year.

JAD: Yeah, 365 of those.

ROBERT: And then there's a moon which marks the months. Now these various astronomic events, which we rely on to tell time, seem fixed to us. But oh my God, I was very surprised to find out that the things that define time have been changing and changing radically. And there's evidence on Earth for what used to be.

JAD: And today we're gonna tell you three stories that in their own various ways kind of unfix it, would you say?

ROBERT: I would say. I would say. We're gonna unfix time in this hour.

JAD: In an earthly sense.

ROBERT: In an earthly sense. And we're gonna begin—well, we'll begin with a discovery I—it wasn't me, I read about it, but that I learned about, and it involves a little creature in the sea called a coral.

NEIL SHUBIN: Coral's a shell-y animal. A little creature. It's—there's animals ...

ROBERT: That's Neil Shubin.

NEIL SHUBIN: I'm a paleontologist, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. Just like a clam has an animal—a clamshell has an animal inside it, so do corals.

ROBERT: A little fleshy, wormy thing?

NEIL SHUBIN: Exactly. And it wears its skeleton on the outside. And because they sit in the same place for their whole life, they're really sensitive to local environmental changes.

ROBERT: Meaning what?

NEIL SHUBIN: Think about it this way: let's just sort of think about what happens to a creature as it lives its life in the water, which is what these things do. You know, we live in a world of cycles, of cycles on cycles. Temperature rises and falls, light rises and falls. The tides rise and fall several times in the course of a day. So you think about what that means for creatures living in water.

ROBERT: What it means for corals, says Neil, is that they're growing ...

NEIL SHUBIN: They're slapping on new skeleton if you will. New shell.

ROBERT: ... in time with these cycles of rise and fall, of light and dark, hot and cold. And ...

ANDY MILLS: Hello, hello.

EMILY GRASLIE: Hi!

ROBERT: You can actually see these changes written onto their shells, maybe into their shells.

ANDY: Emily!

EMILY GRASLIE: Andy!

ROBERT: And that's why Andy Mills and I called up our pal, Emily Graslie, whose job is ...

ROBERT: What is it?

EMILY GRASLIE: I'm the chief curiosity correspondent of the Field Museum in Chicago.

ROBERT: That's your actual title?

EMILY GRASLIE: The chief curiosity correspondent, yes. It is.

ROBERT: You brought some corals, did you?

EMILY GRASLIE: We have many corals. We have corals all over the studio desk right now. [laughs]

ROBERT: All right.

EMILY GRASLIE: All right. Let's cut—cut it.

ROBERT: Because when you cut into these shells ...

EMILY GRASLIE: Oh, it's warm!

ANDY: There's a little bit of water we can spritz it on there, cool it off.

ROBERT: Right off, you can see a pattern. You see these grey stripes.

EMILY GRASLIE: And they're all—I mean, they're all different variations of gray, but some are really dark gray and some are—are tan.

ROBERT: They're like bands running either through or across the shell.

EMILY GRASLIE: They kind of radiate out like the bands of a tree.

ROBERT: And between the bands there are spaces. You got a stripe, then a space, stripe then a space, stripe then a space. But ...

EMILY GRASLIE: When you hold it up close to your eye ...

ROBERT: If you look closer in between the stripes, you can see sort of...

EMILY GRASLIE: Wow! You can see the lines. Wow!

ROBERT: You can see that the spaces are filled with—with faint little lines.

NEIL SHUBIN: And that's where the piece of this story is just so fascinating.

ROBERT: Because in 1962, a paleontologist ...

NEIL SHUBIN: Professor John Wells.

ROBERT: ... was looking at some corals just like these.

NEIL SHUBIN: He was just sitting there saying, "Okay, well what can we figure out from coral shells?" So what he did is he did something really simple. He says, "Well, golly gee..."

ROBERT: "Why don't I count the number of little lines between these bands just—you know, just to see." So he starts counting, gets to, you know, 100, 200 lines, 300 lines. 310, 320. And every time he counted ...

NEIL SHUBIN: He got a number.

ROBERT: Around ...

NEIL SHUBIN: Around 360, 365.

JAD: Wait a second!

ROBERT: [laughs] Familiar number, no?

NEIL SHUBIN: Doesn't take a lot of inference that hey, maybe those individual rings represent, you know, a daily pattern.

ROBERT: Meaning each of these little lines actually equaled a day.

JAD: And why—they're not just making a gray mark after 365. What are the gray lines?

ROBERT: Well, the thicker lines are the times of the year when the coral grows a lot. But if you've got a summer coral that grows a lot in one summer, then it goes quiet, then it grows a lot the next summer, so that's—again, that marks a year. That—those big bands, are kind of like, [hums Auld Lang Syne]—Happy New Year! [hums Auld Lang Syne]—Happy New Year! [hums Auld Lang Syne]—Happy New Year!

NEIL SHUBIN: There are actually calendars and clocks inside each of these things, you just have to know how to read them.

ROBERT: So this guy, Professor Wells ...

NEIL SHUBIN: What he did was then—this is the really bold bit, I thought, which is he then said, "Well, okay that's a living coral, let's look at some fossils."

ROBERT: He was, after all, a paleontologist.

NEIL SHUBIN: You know, so he was at Cornell University, and Cornell University is surrounded by rocks around, you know, 370 or so million years old. And he collected some nice corals, and there are a lot of nice coral fossils known from there.

ROBERT: And he opened up these ancient skeletons.

NEIL SHUBIN: And he did the count.

ROBERT: And 100 days, 200 days ...

NEIL SHUBIN: He was expecting ...

ROBERT: 300 days ...

NEIL SHUBIN: ... 360 to 365.

ROBERT: 368.

NEIL SHUBIN: Then lo, and behold he found ...

ROBERT: 400?

NEIL SHUBIN: Between 400 and 410.

JAD: Really?

NEIL SHUBIN: Yeah, and he looked at lots of specimens.

ROBERT: That number, the 400 number kept showing up.

JAD: What is—what does that mean?

ROBERT: Well, that means that it's—it's now reasonable to think that back in the day, you know, 380 million years ago there were more days in a year. And he published a paper saying more or less that. And right away, clam scientists said, "Well, if that's true for corals then it's gotta be true for my animal, the clam." And the oyster people said, "Well, it's gotta be true for oysters." And mussel folks says, "Gotta be true for mussels."

NEIL SHUBIN: This paper set off a bit of a cottage industry of folks applying this technique to other species. In looking at these other species, they found that the general trend is absolutely correct.

ROBERT: That when you compare modern animals to ancient animals, you will find they record, the old ones, more days in a year.

NEIL SHUBIN: So you go back to a time period called the Ordovician, which is about 50 million years ago, a typical year had about 415, 410 days in it.

ROBERT: Really?

NEIL SHUBIN: If you go to the time period I work on in the Devonian, about 360 million years, probably about 400 or so. What you see is the number of days in a year has declined from over 400 to what we have now, which is 365.

ROBERT: So—so we have lost 40 days since the ...

NEIL SHUBIN: Yeah since the—since creatures first started to walk on land.

ROBERT: So now comes the obvious question: why? Why would there be more days then than there are now?

JAD: Okay, wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. So a year, a year is a trip around the sun.

ROBERT: It's a trip—yeah, that's right.

JAD: And days, days are when we spin around as we're going around the sun. Okay, so then—so maybe if you want to squeeze more days into a year, maybe it just means the trip around the sun took longer back then?

ROBERT: Well, if you ask astronomers about that, I asked Chris Impey at the University of Arizona. And he says ...

CHRIS IMPEY: There's no sense that the length of time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun is changing.

ROBERT: Because the Earth's orbit around the sun is basic physics and it hasn't really changed significantly. He's pretty sure of that.

JAD: So then what is it?

ROBERT: Well, Chris says the answer takes us back about 4.5-billion years to a time when the Earth was very young.

CHRIS IMPEY: So there was this crazy period of time lasting about 50 million years.

ROBERT: Which they called "The great bombardment period."

CHRIS IMPEY: There was still a lot of debris left over from the formation of the solar system, so the meteor impact rate was thousands of times higher, the Earth was still, like, a tacky magma. And so there was—there was hail, brimstone, endless rain. I mean, a kinda crazy time, really. And a bit of that mayhem, of course, we think, gave birth to the moon.

ROBERT: There was a huge collision, and a rock about the size of Mars banged into us, flung a hunk of Earth shrapnel into orbit, and those pieces coalesced and became our moon. Which is now sort of parked right next to us.

CHRIS IMPEY: And so it sort of tugs us around in a kind of hefty way. And the biggest ...

ANDY: Wait, that's us. I thought we tugged the moon.

CHRIS IMPEY: Oh, it—it works both ways, you know? We tug the moon and the moon tugs us and the force is actually equal.

ANDY: So it's kinda like a dance.

CHRIS IMPEY: It's a dance.

ROBERT: I tug the moon and the moon tugs me ...

CHRIS IMPEY: Exactly, it's a celestial waltz.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] I see the moon, the moon sees me. Down through the leaves of the old oak tree.]

ROBERT: And it's that dance, that waltz, that explains why the Earth used to have 450 days in a year, then 400 days in a year, and now only 365.

JAD: Well, I don't see how this explains anything yet.

ROBERT: Well, first of all let's just remember what a day is. A day is a full spin of the planet from the sun coming up in the morning, then going down, coming up the next morning. So one spin, a total spin, equals a day.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: We all know that. Now today, we make 365 of these spins as we orbit the sun. That would be a year.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: But back when the Earth was born, when it was all by itself dancing alone, in those days it spun faster. It was making more of these spins as it went around the sun, so a year had more days in it, but then along comes the moon to join the dance, and now here's the key, according to Chris.

CHRIS IMPEY: Earth is spinning faster than the moon is orbiting it.

ROBERT: A dance partner takes a month to come around us, we take—foom—24 hours—foom! And you know how it is when you're dancing with a partner who's slower than you are, then you have to—you have to tug 'em along, which is what has happened here gravitationally. We are constantly tugging the moon along, it is constantly dragging us down. There's a transfer of energy here that over billions of years has caused the Earth's spin to slow down just a little bit, a teeny, teeny bit. And as the spin has slowed, well, our days have gotten longer.

CHRIS IMPEY: And if you do the math, you calculate that the day is getting longer by 1.7 milliseconds each century.

JAD: 1.7 milliseconds each century?

ROBERT: What this means on a daily basis is that today was 54 billionths of a second longer than yesterday. And the day before that was 54 billionths of a second longer than the day before. And the day before that was 54 billionths of a second longer than the day before that, which was ...

NEIL SHUBIN: And if you extrapolate that out over the, you know, millions of years people like me think about ...

ROBERT: That's Neil Shubin again, the paleontologist.

NEIL SHUBIN: That becomes quite significant.

ANDY: So you're telling me—you're telling me that today is the shortest day of the rest of my life.

NEIL SHUBIN: Yes.

ROBERT: Andy worries about these things.

NEIL SHUBIN: Well you're not gonna live longer because of this, I'm sorry to say. But ...

ROBERT: No, so this moon dance does not affect the ticking of time, it just affects what we choose to call a day. And by the way, one of the consequences of this dance is as we lose a little energy to our moon every year and the moon picks up a little energy from us, because these things are always equal. Think about, like, when you throw a ball, the more energy you use, the further the ball is away from you.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: Well, as we add a little more energy to the moon, the moon very slyly moves a little further away from us. Every year it's about ...

CHRIS IMPEY: A couple of inches.

ROBERT: According to Chris.

CHRIS IMPEY: Yeah.

ROBERT: And he says if you go back about four billion years ...

CHRIS IMPEY: The moon was originally about 10 times closer than it is now.

ROBERT: 10 times closer?

CHRIS IMPEY: Imagine the moon looking 10 times bigger than it does now. That would have been crazy.

ROBERT: Whoa!

CHRIS IMPEY: Also, the days would have been six hours long.

ANDY: Six hours long?

NEIL SHUBIN: To me, what this says is that everything that we take for granted as normal in our world, you know, ice at the poles, seas in certain places, continents configured the way they are, the number of days in a year, all that is subject to change. And all that has changed. All that has dramatically changed over the course of the history of our planet. And that includes how we measure time itself. So you know, when I'm sitting in a hole in the middle of the Arctic digging at a fish fossil, every now and then, you know, I pinch myself and say, "Here I am in the Arctic digging at a fish fossil, you know, that lived in an ancient subtropical environment." You know, the juxtaposition between present and past sometimes is utterly mind-blowing. But it's very informative about our own age in that we—you know, we think things are eternal but they're not. They're—they're everything is subject to change. Change is—is the way of the world.

ROBERT: And before we go, I just want to play you a little bit of a—can we do this? Can we just add an end to the end?

JAD: Yeah, sure.

ROBERT: Because that's what I'd like to do. I was talking to Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's an astrophysicist and who thinks about spin, which we've just thought about, thinks about the inner solar system, which we've just thought about. So here's him and I talking about holding onto time.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: It's a little goofy, but here it is, just for the fun of it.

ROBERT: So if you're on Earth and you're walking in—you know, around Quito on the equator, if you're walking at four miles an hour, you know, your—your day will go sort of the normal way. The sun will rise behind you, go overhead and then go down to the other side.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, if you're stationary.

ROBERT: If you're stationary.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It'll be the 24-hour day, yes.

ROBERT: Yeah.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: If you started walking on the equator, depending on which direction you walked, your day will either last longer or shorter. Okay? So if you walk west, the faster you walk, the longer your day will become. You could walk at a pace where you have a 25-hour day, a 27-hour day. There's a speed with which you could walk on the equator and the Earth going west, where your day lasts forever. And that is the rotation rate of the Earth. You would have compensated ...

ROBERT: What is the—roughly that would be a gerbil.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: A gerbil running on a beach ball, a rotating beach ball. So that would—on the top of a beach ball. So that speed for the equator is about a thousand miles an hour. So the equator moves a thousand miles an hour, and that gives—gives us the 24-hour day. If you wanna go a thousand miles an hour the opposite direction, you will stop the day. The sun will never move in the sky, and you will have a—and your day will last.

ROBERT: Superman did that once, I think when he had this thing with Lois.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Superman would have so messed up everybody on Earth for having stopped the rotation of the Earth, reversed it and then set it forward again.

ROBERT: Yes, he did that.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: He would have scrambled all not—anything not bolted to the Earth would have been completely ...

ROBERT: Would have flown off?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, yeah. So depending on your latitude, any equatorial residents, if you stop the Earth, they were going at a thousand miles an hour with the Earth. You stop the Earth and you're not seat-belted to the Earth, you'll fall over and roll due east a thousand miles an hour. In our mid-latitudes—we're in New York, you can do the math— moving about 800 miles an hour due east. And stop the Earth, we will roll 800 miles an hour due east and crash into buildings and other things that are attached to the Earth.

ROBERT: That are attached to the Earth.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: All right?

ROBERT: But let's—going back to Venus now ...

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, you want to go to Venus? Isn't this enough for you?

ROBERT: No! I wanted to—the whole point was to go to Venus, 'cause it's so different there.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah. On every way. [laughs] No, it's about the same size and about the same surface gravity. But that's it. It's 900 degrees Fahrenheit, it's a runaway greenhouse effect, it is heavy volcanic activity that repaves the surface periodically so there are very few craters on Venus.

ROBERT: Just unpleasant in general.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Unpleasant. It rotates very slowly.

ROBERT: Well, that's why I wanna stop.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah.

ROBERT: So how slowly does it rotate?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You know, I don't remember the exact number.

ROBERT: It's like four miles an hour or something like that.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, I—yeah, it's some very slow rate at its equator. Slow enough so that you don't need special—you don't need airplanes to stop the sun, you don't need special speed devices. You could probably trot and stop the sun on the horizon, or wherever the sun is in the sky.

ROBERT: So if you're that guy from Jamaica, what's his name?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Usain Bolt.

ROBERT: Usain Bolt. Like, and you're—you happen to be on Venus for a little while. And you decide to go for a run, what happens to Usain during the run?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay, so normally, the sun would rise in one direction and set in the other. Depending on which direction you chose to run in, you could—you could reverse your day and have the sun rise in the opposite side of the sky than it normally would. And—but I think Venus is rotating slowly enough that you wouldn't have to be Usain Bolt. I'd have to check my numbers on this.

ROBERT: Oh, I don't think you would. But maybe you—in order to have the sun actually sort of, seem to go backwards? That's what you're saying is the sun would go backwards?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

ROBERT: So you'd be having lunch. You're Usain Bolt and you decide, "Now I'm going to run." And the sun's going backwards towards the morning's horizon?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yes, you can reverse the sun. That's correct.

ROBERT: Wow!

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: In fact ...

ROBERT: That is a really good reason to sprint.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Wait, wait.

ROBERT: I think.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, but who cares about the sun anymore?

ROBERT: Me! If I were Usain Bolt— if I go up to him, I say ...

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Is the sun telling you when to eat lunch? I don't think so.

ROBERT: [laughs]

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Your stomach is telling you when to eat lunch. You're saying, "Okay, Usain. You eat breakfast but you wanna have lunch real soon? Run so that the sun is now at the top of the sky so now you're—you can legally have lunch." No!

ROBERT: You are not buying my poetic premises at all today.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I'm sorry, this is the 21st century, Jack. And the sun is— we wake by alarm clocks, not by roosters and sunlight. I'm sorry. Just doesn't work that way.

ROBERT: I wish I could help you out by thinking—let's suppose ...

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I am not gonna depend on running so that the—on Venus to get the sun in the middle of the sky at my command so that I can have lunch.

ROBERT: [laughs] Okay, all right. But let's suppose you're a rooster and you like to crow at dawn. Just a deep feeling in you.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You could totally mess with a rooster this way.

ROBERT: Yes, that's what I wanna do.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Usain Bolt carrying a rooster with ...

ROBERT: Usain Bolt carries a rooster on Venus. He does a remarkably fast sprint. The rooster, having started the run in the middle of the day, well past the crowing period, feels a strange compulsion to crow two hours into the run.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Because he ran backwards to the sunrise, rather than to the sunset.

ROBERT: Well, he ran forwards but the sun went backwards relative to him.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yes, he went—yes, he ran in the other way to reverse the sun back to sunrise. Yeah, and the rooster is gonna—will need therapy. [laughs]

[MUSIC: Well, it's a marvelous night for a moon dance, with the stars up above...]

JAD: Well, okay. I — I can think of nothing else to do at this point except take a break.

ROBERT: Okay. So I'm gonna lie down but I'll—what's your name again?

JAD: Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: Okay. Mine's Robert Krulwich.

JAD: We'll be back. No, we're not actually going anywhere, so we're not really being back.

ROBERT: No.

JAD: Just we'll—we'll rejoin you after this break.

ROBERT: After this small turn of the Earth.

[LISTENER: This is Christine Stone from Maplewood, New Jersey. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org]

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JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab, and next up...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: What's so interesting about the cicada sounds is when you just hear it for the first time, you just hear white noise. You just hear "shh." It's just noise. But when you learn what's going on, you can hear the different parts of the orchestra.

ROBERT: That's David Rothenberg, composer and professor and writer. And what he's gonna do is he's gonna take that huge wall of insect sounds and get really into it, really start to dissect it.

JAD: Ooh.

ROBERT: But what he really loves to do—really!—is he likes to play music with animals. So he goes around and finds individual animals or groups of animals to duet with. One of the first times he tried this was with a ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Well, that was a white-crested laughing thrush. Washington has them, Bronx Zoo has them. They thrive very well in zoos. But what they do is they sing duets, the males and females together.

ROBERT: So that's animals singing with animals. But here's what he did. He went to the national aviary, which is in Pittsburgh.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: First I stepped into the big tropical aviary where you wander and the birds run—are flying freely. It's a big warm, kinda moist space.

ROBERT: He got there ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Before the aviary opened. Like, 6:00 a.m.

ROBERT: And there were—when he walked into the cage, there were dozens of different kinds of birds flying around.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And I was walking with my clarinet.

ROBERT: Playing up to the trees.

JAD: Why is he doing this?

ROBERT: Well, he just wanted to see what would ...

[clarinet music]

ROBERT: That's him, by the way. And he wanted to see what would happen.

JAD: All right.

ROBERT: And as it turns out, nothing happened. The birds just more or less ignored him.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: By then, I was kind of—kind of lost interest. Like, nobody's paying attention to this. It's a bad idea. And then all of a sudden ...

JAD: Ooh, hello!

DAVID ROTHENBERG: The laughing thrush was interested.

[clarinet and bird sounds]

ROBERT: That's the thrush. One little guy, brown feathers, dark beak.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Because at that moment ...

[clarinet and bird sounds]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Anyone would say, "Hmm."

JAD: They're, like, doing call and response.

ROBERT: Yeah.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: "This is interesting. Something's happening here. This bird and this clarinet is doing something together."

[clarinet and bird sounds]

ROBERT: So as you're—as you're playing, what's going on in your mind at this point?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: I was just imagining I was sitting down with a musician who I maybe couldn't talk to, who spoke another language besides English. And I couldn't talk to this musician, but I could make music together with them.

[clarinet and bird sounds]

ROBERT: Okay, so that was his encounter with the thrush. Let me take you on another little adventure, just before we get to our big thing. After a variety of bird duets in which I'm sure he frustrated many a thrush, he then did a duet with an entirely different animal.

[clarinet and whale sounds]

JAD: What the ...?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Well humpback whales, the best thing about that story is nobody knew they sang until the 1960s, so you can ...

ROBERT: I—don't whales spend most of their time except for the tops of them underwater, so where would you be?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: They do. Good point. I was broadcasting my clarinet through an underwater speaker.

[clarinet and whale sounds]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Listening with headphones to what's coming out of the underwater microphone.

[clarinet and whale sounds]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And you hear this duet from down there, live clarinet and whale.

JAD: [laughs] This is so bizarre! What does the whale make of this?

ROBERT: I—we—I don't speak whale.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: The thing about humpback whales is, unlike most animals, they change their songs from year to year. They're interested in new sounds, so all the humpback whales in any one ocean are singing one song, and then they change it altogether. No one knows why. Why do they want to change their song if they all want to sound the same?

[clarinet and whale sounds]

ROBERT: Well, when you sung your song with the whale, did the whale react like the thrush?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: I think it's different, but I would say the whale seemed to change what he was doing.

ROBERT: Now, it can be a little hard to hear exactly what David's talking about. It took me a few listens to pick out the distinguishing moment, but here's what the whale was doing when David showed up.

[whale sounds]

ROBERT: It was doing this thing where it would go up and then down, and up and then down. Over and over. And here's what it started doing a few minutes after he'd been playing the clarinet.

[whale sounds]

ROBERT: The whale kind of extends the note.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Whales tend to go "eurgh," and clarinets tend to go "oooh." They play a steady tone, you know? And so the whale was trying to play a more steady note.

[whale sounds]

JAD: Maybe? I don't know.

ROBERT: You can't hear that? Just a little bit of an extended line. It's "ohhh." Instead of "eurgh" it's "ohhh."

JAD: I mean, it's awesome. I love listening to this, but I don't—I mean, I don't — it just sounds like the whale's still doing whale.

ROBERT: Well, David says that when he played the recording to some of the—to whale scientists ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: They all are shocked.

ROBERT: All?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Every scientist I played that to was—did not believe that what I played them was actually a live recording. They thought I'd done something to it, which I didn't.

ROBERT: I mean, they—they never heard a whale make a sound like that, I'm assuming.

JAD: Which implies that the whale was reacting to his clarinet?

ROBERT: Well ...

JAD: Because maybe the whale was just saying, "Shut up! Shut up up there!"

ROBERT: [laughs] Well, however you want to resolve it, like, we—we should move on to the real purpose of our gathering here this afternoon, or whatever time you're listening to this.

JAD: 2:00 a.m.

ROBERT: Which is that he then turned to this sound right here.

[cicadas sound]

JAD: The plague.

ROBERT: This is the sound of lots of cicadas, and when you and I hear it, I mean, it just sounds like an enormous block of monotonal noise.

JAD: Yes, sir.

ROBERT: Just screech, you know? An elaborate screech.

JAD: Annoying.

ROBERT: But David says actually, if you know what's going on in here, if you learn to dissect it, well ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Pretty soon, you can pick out up to nine separate sounds made by the three related species of cicada that are there at the same time.

LYNN LEVY: Can you—can you walk us through the nine different sounds?

ROBERT: Yeah.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Well, at least some of them.

JAD: By the way, that was our producer Lynn Levy.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Okay we have three basic species that come out. Whenever there's an emergence, they're all there.

ROBERT: So now—I didn't, you know, realize that this was—when you're walking through the woods and you hear this enormous white noise, what you're actually hearing are three different kinds of cicadas, three different species singing three very different songs that are all mixed together so you can't tell them apart.

JAD: Huh.

ROBERT: And then each one of those songs—each of those three—has three parts, which is how you get to the number nine. In any case, here are the three species. This is number one ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Magicicada cassini makes the white noise sound "shh."

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And they—they swell together, they synchronize, so they'll all go "shh."

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And then they fly around a bit. Do that now: jump up from your seat, and you get back in and you do it again.

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: There you go.

ROBERT: Okay, so that's species number one. Now here is species number two.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Magicicada septendecula is making, like, "ch, ch, ch."

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: It's kind of irregular.

[cicada sound]

ROBERT: So that's the bebop guy.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Kind of, yeah. And there's fewer of those, and they're quieter so less is known about them.

ROBERT: Can I hear that one again?

[cicada sound]

ROBERT: So we got the white noise one, the bebop one, now here's number three.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Magicicada septendecim. The most popular known sound. And that's going ph—the pharaoh sound: "pha-roah."

[cicada sound]

JAD: Wow!

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And the thing is, when you actually hear millions of them, all you hear is "Eee."

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: If you take one and multiply it hundreds and then thousands of times, its tail disappears. You just hear this tone.

JAD: And I mean, this is what we hear, but what would the cicada hear in all of this?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Ah, well this is the whole story.

ROBERT: Well, see the thing about cicadas is that the cicadas who sing here are the males—just the guys—and they sing for—it's the mating song, really. You know, there are lots of songs you sing, but this is one of those kinds. And the idea being ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: The females hear all this sound and they find the males. Like, the grand mess of music like a disco or it's called the lek by biologists, which pretty much means "disco" anyway. And then ...

ROBERT: If you were a guy looking for a date, you might not join with lots of other guys, but these animals join together for what purpose?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: So the females can find them.

ROBERT: But if you've got, like, a billion cicadas crowded into a disco, then how do you—how does a single male and a single female notice each other?

JAD: They don't have to. They just bump into each other and then it's on.

ROBERT: No.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: 17 years ago, John Cooley and David Marshall discovered things were more complicated than that. They discovered the females make a sound after the male finishes his sound.

ROBERT: So say you're one of these males ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Going "pha-raoh, pha-raoh." And the female has to make a wing flick, this tiny little flick exactly one third of a second after the male stops.

ROBERT: Really? So it's like, "pha-raoh," "dit."

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And then—nobody imagined such a thing was going on. They didn't imagine insects were doing anything this complicated.

ROBERT: Well, for one thing, it sounds like that would be a male-to-female bit of business. One-to-one. When you listen to all these animals you don't think they ever have one of them, they're like so many of them.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Millions of males are making the pharaoh sound, but when you're close to one, you know, the female hears "pha-raoh" if there's one close enough, she makes the wing flick, and the male knows to approach her a little bit and he goes on with his second sound, it's called, by John Coolie, "quart two." Quart-two is like ...

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: "Pha-raoh, pha-raoh, pha-raoh." And then she makes the wing flick again.

ROBERT: Same one?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: As far as we know.

ROBERT: Okay. And where does that tell mister—mister I love you guy?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: It's time to start mating and make the third sound.

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Which is more like "da, da, da, da, da, da, da..."

ROBERT: Let's do that again. So you—your hello is "pha-raoh."

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Yeah.

ROBERT: I'm getting closer, is ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: "Pha-raoh, pha-raoh, pha-raoh..."

ROBERT: Now we're kissing etc. etc. is ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: "Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da..."

ROBERT: So now you know when the cicadas come, when you hear this massive roar, what you're really hearing is an orchestra of sex. Just think: all these little animals getting ready to do what they were born to do, what they've been waiting 17 long years in the ground to do. And all the while, it's the songs that matter.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: They're, like, following these little rules, simple rules that together shows how very simple organisms can create things of great complexity and beauty. Each individual doesn't have to know that much about the whole, and still interesting things happen. Which—which gives you a different view of human life. You're one little part in this giant thing. You don't have to really know what's happening, but you're doing your little bit for the whole of creation or evolution or life or music, and you do your own little thing and you're not sure where it leads.

ROBERT: But for the individual cicada, for Tommy cicada or Betty cicada, it's all pretty simple: they have their sex, they lay eggs on twigs of trees, the eggs hatch, and then tiny little larvae cicadas will fall to the ground and then they'll burrow into the warm earth.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And attach themselves to roots of trees.

ROBERT: And then start sucking the fluid from tree roots. And they will do this for years and years and years.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And they're slowly growing.

ROBERT: And then for some reason that nobody can quite fathom, at the exact same moment it's party time.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: There are different broods of them, so different years you can go somewhere in the country and maybe there's some coming out.

JAD: And why is it that the one that's about to come out here in the northeast, why does that happen only every 17 years? Why 17?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: The honest answer is we really don't know. We do have some evidence of how they keep track of the years, which is that the cicada monitors the temperature. We don't know how, but that's what they pay attention to.

ROBERT: So in the ground, they're not just eating tree juice, they're also—they've got a little thermometer.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Somehow they're pinging—they have a little counting thermometer. They count the number of years, then they know when to come out. A few years ago at my parents' house, I did see one in the wrong year. You know, every year a few of them wake up, "Where's the party?"

ROBERT: Oh, really? You have Rip Van Winkle ones?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Yeah. Not—they don't always count correctly, you know? [laughs]

ROBERT: Oh, really? That must be a lonely experience.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Yeah, the lonely cicada, looking for its kind, the wrong year, the wrong place.

ROBERT: Can they go back down, and go back to the ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: I don't think so, no.

ROBERT: Or the jig is up?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: They change. They come from their larval stage and the wings had come out. They can't crawl back and lose the wings.

ROBERT: Oh.

LYNN: Did it sing? That lone cicada?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Yeah, it was singing.

[cicada sound]

LYNN: To no one.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: To no one. To me.

ROBERT: And you can kind of imagine David picking up his clarinet ...

[clarinet and cicada]

ROBERT: ... and joining in.

[clarinet and cicada]

ROBERT: Thanks to John Cooley and to David Marshall. And now Jad wants to say something.

JAD: What do I want to say?

ROBERT: About Lynn Levy's favorite song?

JAD: Oh, and if you go to—yes, and if you go to Radiolab.org, you can download a song from David Rothenberg's album chosen by our producer Lynn Levy. It is her favorite song. You can download it for free. Also, David Rothenberg has a new book out called Bug Music.

ROBERT: And if you happen to be on the East Coast, we have a—well, you can do this from any coast you like, but we have a map where you can track where these little critters are popping up.

JAD: I'll be frying 'em up, making some tempura.

ROBERT: No you won't. No you won't.

JAD: I'll be makin' tempura!

ROBERT: No, because the little guy will come up to you and go "ticka, ticka, ticka" on your leg.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: So you'll drop to the ground and burrow into the earth, and we won't see you for—I don't know. It'll be, like, either 13 or 17 years.

JAD: All right. Up next, we're gonna—we're gonna—we're gonna go—we're gonna leave the ground where the cicadas live and are burrowing right now or whatever they're doing, and we're gonna go up to space.

ROBERT: Oh, that'll be—that'll be nice. That's a nice change of pace.

JAD: It is.

ROBERT: It's colder. It's very, very, very, very dry.

JAD: Change of space and a change of pace.

ROBERT: Yes, it is.

JAD: Okay. Well, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Keep listening.

[LISTENER: This is Alicia Bridges calling from Saskatoon in Saskatchewan. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org].

[ADVERTISEMENT]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: So, we've been talking about rotating and crawling into the Earth, and rotating around the sun and ...

JAD: Time.

ROBERT: Time.

JAD: Space—well, no. We haven't talked about space yet. That's about to happen. In this next segment, we're gonna go up into space—200 miles above the Earth. This story actually comes from a live show we did years ago called In the Dark. It was a sort of big, broad collaboration with video people and—and dancers. And this is one of our favorite stories from that show.

ROBERT: Yeah.

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

ROBERT: So here it is.

JAD: So for our final segment, we were thinking through this show, we thought, you know, who would have a really interesting perspective on darkness?

ROBERT: Maybe somebody who works in—in a rich, dark environment. Astronauts, for example.

JAD: Yeah. So we called up NASA, talked to an astronaut. We connected our little studio in New York to their studio in DC, to talk to an astronaut, but he was a little late. And here's the funny thing: when you are on hold with NASA, this is literally what you hear ...

[music]

JAD: This has a blast-off feel to it.

ROBERT: Yeah, it does.

JAD: This is amazing!

ROBERT: This, by the way, is literally the case. You dial 1-800-NASA or whatever, and they—this is the go-to-the-moon music.

JAD: Uh-oh. Hello? I hear someone breathing.

DAVE WOLF: It's probably—I'm breathing.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: That's an interesting way to meet.

JAD: So this is our guy. Dave Wolf is his name, he's a NASA astronaut.

DAVE WOLF: Have been since 1990, over 20 years.

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

DAVE WOLF: What—what's our topic here?

JAD: So we explained to him that, you know, we're doing this show called In the Dark, we're gonna do it on stage in front of some very nice folks. Do you have any stories that relate? And right off the bat, he says ...

DAVE WOLF: You've triggered an interesting darkness story I have.

JAD: Hmm.

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

JAD: Yeah.

DAVE WOLF: Okay. You're—you're taping and you're ready?

ROBERT: Yeah.

DAVE WOLF: Darkness is an interesting theme in space because there's nowhere where the contrast between light and dark is any more extreme.

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

DAVE WOLF: Is blacker than any black you thought it could be. Out there in space, the shadow has no light in it. There's not reflected light from dust in the air, the Earth around you or clouds.

JAD: It's just pure, absolute, dark.

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

ROBERT: Wow!

DAVE WOLF: Right in front of your face. Your head is in the bright light, and your arm is in this depth of darkness.

JAD: And it's just gone? Like it's been cut off?

DAVE WOLF: Yeah.

JAD: Wow!

DAVE WOLF: But I do want to tell you an experience I had in my first space walk. Late '97 I had this experience.

JAD: Okay.

DAVE WOLF: It was from a Russian spacecraft. You might remember the Mir.

JAD: Yeah, sure.

DAVE WOLF: Spacecraft.

JAD: So Dave is up there. He was with two Russian cosmonauts. And he and Anatoly Solovyev, they were suited up and getting ready to make their first walk into space—or his first walk.

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

JAD: Door opened and they floated out.

DAVE WOLF: We clipped our tethers on outside.

JAD: And he and Anatoly gently float to the work site.

DAVE WOLF: And it was dark out. And dark up in space means you're on the night side of the Earth, in the shadow of the Earth. And there were no external lights on this spacecraft. This was really, really dark. And we were over the ocean, and at night that basically means you don't see the Earth.

JAD: You don't see it at all?

DAVE WOLF: Not at all. When it's a—a moonless night, you don't see the Earth. In fact, all it might look like to you is the absence of stars.

JAD: Now I want you to imagine this with me: he's up there in this darkness, and the Earth with all of us on it, is somewhere far, far below him, but he can't see it. And all the while—and this is really important for what happens next—he is shooting through space, he is rocketing across the dark shadow of the Earth at five miles a second. That is 16 times the speed that we're all moving right now, 'cause we are on the Earth. But he says at that moment he didn't feel any of that. It just felt like he was suspended in this cocoon of black.

DAVE WOLF: Floating gently.

JAD: He thought, "All right."

DAVE WOLF: No problem.

JAD: This is kind of peaceful.

DAVE WOLF: Because it was just me and the spacecraft and blackness. And suddenly ...

[crash noise]

DAVE WOLF: ... this blaze of light ...

JAD: Blasts him from below.

ROBERT: What was it?

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

DAVE WOLF: And the Earth lights up below me. Suddenly, I can look down 200 miles and see that we're moving at five miles per second.

JAD: Oceans whoosh, clouds whoosh, deserts whoosh, and he's like "Ahh!"

DAVE WOLF: And I clutched onto these handrails like there's no tomorrow, white-knuckled in my spacesuit gloves, because I suddenly had this enormous sense of height and speed.

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

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Crazier still, in that sunrise moment ...

DAVE WOLF: The temperature also increases by upwards of 400 degrees.

ROBERT: In—in the moment?

DAVE WOLF: In the moment.

ROBERT: Really?

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

ROBERT: Are you air-conditioned or—or whatever? Are you ...

DAVE WOLF: You are. You're totally dependent on that space suit. But the colors, what you're seeing on that Earth is so spectacular: the greens and blues and the delicate pastel-like colors, and the contrasts and the brights are just—aren't present in anything I've ever seen other than up in space.

JAD: Dave and his Russian buddy Anatoly, they're out there for hours doing repairs on the ship. So they are—because of their speed they're going in and out and in and out of these days and nights.

DAVE WOLF: So it's 90 minutes of a light-dark cycle. So you have 16 nights and 16 days for every Earth day.

JAD: Which means, as they're working, this change is happening over and over and over, every 45 minutes they go from blazing light to quiet dark. Blazing light to darkness.

DAVE WOLF: You can get lost. You get stories of people doing space walks that lose their orientation or feel like they're falling.

JAD: So he says the only thing to do in that circumstance is just to focus on your job. Look straight ahead. Only at the screw, only at the screw.

DAVE WOLF: Don't look down is kind of the—it's real in this business.

JAD: So we would've been perfectly happy to end the story right here because Dave and Anatoly finished their repairs, job well done. They get ready to come back into the spacecraft, but we cannot not tell you what happens next.

ROBERT: Yeah, because this—this first was a very different kind of darkness.

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

DAVE WOLF: But when it was time to come back in ...

JAD: They couldn't get back in.

ROBERT: You were locked out of your spaceship?

DAVE WOLF: You could call it locked out. We—we were trapped outside, yes.

JAD: Essentially, their airlock was busted. They couldn't re-pressurize it, and if you can't get it at the right pressure, you can't re-enter.

ROBERT: Oh no!

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

JAD: Wait a second. Ran out of—meaning oxygen or what?

DAVE WOLF: Oh, yeah. We had plenty of oxygen, it turns out. What you run out of first is your carbon dioxide scrubbing unit that takes the CO2 out of your suit. And now the problem with this one is, usually in a space accident, you figure it'll only hurt for a moment. But when you die of CO2 intoxication, that drags out. That's not—that's a miserable way to go.

ROBERT: What does he mean? Did you ever find out?

JAD: I looked it up. What happens is first you get a headache, and then your muscles start to twitch. Eventually your heartbeat starts to accelerate faster, faster, faster. You go into convulsions, and then you die.

DAVE WOLF: Luckily, the life support system has an extra cartridge. That gave us an extra six or so hours. We used all that, and trying to fix the hatch and we couldn't get it to hold air. And we were done.

JAD: Did you know you were done?

DAVE WOLF: Yeah, yeah. Pretty much. And ...

ROBERT: What do you mean, "Done?" Like in "Over?"

DAVE WOLF: Yeah, yeah. No more ideas.

JAD: Done like in dead. So they decide, "Okay, we've gotta do something. Last-ditch maneuver. If we can't get our usual airlock to work, maybe we can make a new one." Because see, on the Mir space station, it's this big cylinder with these rectangular modules that jut out, and one of those modules is the airlock. But there are these adjacent ones, which are normally just living quarters. They thought, "Well if we can't get our usual airlock to pressurize at the right, you know, pressure, maybe we can go to the next one over, and try and pressurize it."

DAVE WOLF: Essentially treating that next module in as an airlock. And we opened the hatch into that next module. And in order, though, to go into it, we had to disconnect our umbilicals, because you can't close the hatch over your umbilical, right?

ROBERT: Right.

DAVE WOLF: And the umbilical was providing our cooling ...

JAD: Hmm.

DAVE WOLF: ... to our suits. So as soon as we disconnected, well that gives you maybe five, eight minutes at max.

JAD: Before you—before you what?

DAVE WOLF: I don't even want to talk about it, it's so bad.

ROBERT: Did you—did you look that up?

JAD: Yeah, I looked this one up too.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: Essentially, what happens is you boil inside your space suit.

DAVE WOLF: In a very ugly way.

JAD: So Dave and Anatoly think, "Okay, we've gotta get through this tiny hatch into this room," and they've gotta do it fast. But they also know ...

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

JAD: So he thinks, "Okay, hurry, hurry, but slowly, slowly."

DAVE WOLF: What I did not anticipate was as soon as we disconnected our umbilicals the visor would fog up. And you now be having to feel your way.

ROBERT: So you're blind?

DAVE WOLF: Yeah. You can spit and kinda get a little area through the fog, so I'm in the airlock trying to make my way into the next section, and I was crawling along the wall, moving into the next section, and I spit on my visor, you know, to make a little hole to look through and get a hint. And it was an area I had been sleeping in some weeks before, and I had left a picture of my family taped with scotch tape on the wall. And I spit on the visor, and I—my helmet light went there, and there was this picture of my family. Right here in this moment as I was scooting across the wall in what was likely my last minute. So this is how it's gonna end. So this is it. And it looked so strange. There they are. And I look back at that, and I shudder.

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

DAVE WOLF: But it didn't strike me really until months later on the Earth, how—how close that had been and what a strange situation.

ROBERT: This Russian guy must be your best friend. Like, he must be—you have to probably call each other and say—20 years later you go "Whew!"

DAVE WOLF: Well, not many people have been through anything like that together, and—and are there to talk about it. And you just reminded me of something.

JAD: So we're gonna leave you with one last story from Dave, who's kind of a story machine. This is from that same stay in space, involves the same friend, Anatoly. They were out there doing some work on the ship, you know, floating in space again. And then Mission Control radios in, tells them to pause for a while.

DAVE WOLF: We had a period where we had to wait through the night to go on with our work. So he says, "Look, David,"—all in Russian, of course—"I wanna show you something." And we hooked our tethers on, pushed ourselves about six feet away—we had about six feet of tether.—so that our eyes couldn't see anything but out in space. And I—I turned my air conditioner down a little so it was kinda warm, and I was floating in this space suit just looking out into the blackness of space. And I felt like I didn't have a space suit on. It was so comfortable. The air temperature was just right. I felt like I was just out in the universe, in the stars. I couldn't see anything but stars all around me and I couldn't feel anything, outside a spacecraft going five miles per second out in the universe.

JAD: Was that what he wanted to show you?

DAVE WOLF: Yeah, I think so.

ROBERT: This is his rocking chair on the front porch thing.

DAVE WOLF: Or a hammock, almost. He didn't want to talk. He said, "Let's just be quiet. Turn your helmet light off, so you don't get any reflected light. Just relax. Rasslablyat. Relax, relax, relax, relax."

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

JAD: Like 2,000 tiny little lights from the seats, like a canopy of stars. We saw this happen again and again. Like, 18 times I think we performed this? And every time it was just, like, breathtaking.

ROBERT: Yeah.

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

ROBERT: Very, very special thanks to Meg Bowls who found our astronaut.

JAD: She found Dave Wolf.

ROBERT: Yeah. Also to Pilobolus, the dance company, and to the Piloboli.

JAD: Yes. Starting with Inmar Kubovi.

ROBERT: Lily Binns.

JAD: Matt Kent.

ROBERT: Renée Jaworski.

JAD: Greg Laffy.

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: And the dancers...

ROBERT: Chris Whitney.

JAD: Heather Favretto.

ROBERT: Anthony Oliva.

JAD: Christina Conjure.

ROBERT: Evan Adler.

JAD: Hannah Kashif.

ROBERT: And the Olvera twins Edwin and ...

JAD: ... Roberto. We love you guys.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Demetri Martin, thank you so much for coming and, you know, creating this show with us. Thao Nguyen and Jason Sloda, thank you so much to them. And Mike Faba.

ROBERT: Jake Fines.

JAD: Serena Wong.

ROBERT: John Belor.

JAD: Melissa LaCasse.

ROBERT: Dave Foley.

JAD: Nick Nussiforo.

ROBERT: Caitlin Fitzwater.

JAD: Rebecca Lehrer.

ROBERT: And Roslin Lutine

JAD: Lutes!

ROBERT: Lutes. Most of all, most, most most of all to Ellen Horne, who loved doing this and made it so fun to do.

[LISTENER: Hey, this is Liza, and it would be unlike me to pass up a staff credit. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Soren Wheeler is senior editor. Jamie York is our senior producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, David Gebel, Tracie Hunte, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Arianne Wack and Molly Webster. With help from Valentina Bojanini, Nigar Fatali, Phoebe Wang and Katie Ferguson. Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris.]

 

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