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It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions give you to be a survivor, bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. And John, this week, Catherine asked me if I could clear the table and I looked at her and I said, I bet I could if I got a running start. I mean, the reason that's a funny joke is because you definitely couldn't. I've seen you jump.
Because you're just picturing my shins hitting the table right on and look on my face as I did it. I mean, you couldn't clear the table in either way. Like you couldn't jump over it nor could you jump its length. Yeah, no, I definitely not.
I could get up onto it. I bet. You could get up onto it belly first. Yeah, that's what I mean.
Isn't that what clinton table means where you jump and you slide on your belly over it and then you land on your hands on the other side before we get to questions from you, our beloved listeners, we do need to acknowledge something that is always true when we record this podcast, but it's perhaps more relevant than the average week, which is that we record this a week before it comes out. So as we're recording this, it's Monday, November 2nd, you are living in Monday, November 9th or later, a world that is potentially quite different from the world in which we are living and not only because AFC Wimbledon played their first game back at Plalane tomorrow. Really? Yeah, wow, it's a big day for you, John.
I know I am very excited to watch it on my phone. I wish that I was going to be there in real life with my dad, also your dad, and other friends and family and our kids and everything. And it was going to be amazing, but not. Yeah, so usually we are unstuck in time when we like it that way, where we can separate ourselves from the going on in that particular moment.
But in this situation, your world is different than our world. Hopefully, right now we are dealing with uncertainty. Hopefully, you are not dealing with more uncertainty than we are dealing with right now. And hopefully, it's less.
But we don't know. So we are going to record this podcast unstuck in time, except for that little note. Right, beginning with this question from McKenna, which is a real evergreen question. Thank you for sending in one McKenna that we could answer at any moment in human history.
This is the question here, John and Hank, help five exclamation points. How do I get better at communicating my feelings to question marks? I'm a teenager exclamation point. It's hard exclamation point advice on the subject to be otherwise very much appreciated exclamation point.
McKenna, what I love about your question is that it captures something is how effectively it communicates your feelings. Exactly. It captures something fundamental about teenage life, which is that essentially everything ends with an exclamation point or a question mark. But it is a time of life that at least for me was defined primarily by exclamation points and question marks.
Yeah, that's what they should call it. Or an understand that there are three stages of life, kid, teenager, and adult. Yes, same thing as my kids were like that. Yeah.
People often say, I'm not a teenager yet. I'm like, you got a way to go, but there's more kid than just this kid. Yeah, but there is something to it. Right?
Like there is something about adolescence that's different. Yeah, yes, sorry. I think McKenna, there's a possibility that you were never good at talking about your feelings. It's just that you just didn't have as many before.
It's just that now for the first time in your life, you want to be good at it, which I would say is excellent progress. Yeah. You're aware, like I remember being a young kid and having deep emotional experiences, but they were so disconnected from language that it didn't even really occur to me that I could share them. And then when I did try to share them, both like my literal vocabulary, but also my vocabulary in the sense of being able to even understand what I was feeling were pretty limited.
And so I really struggled to express myself emotionally when I was a young kid. And then when I was a teenager, I suddenly, A, had really intense, overwhelming feelings all the time. And B, I had an expanded vocabulary, but I also had like the feelings were so intense. It was almost like I couldn't exaggerate them.
You know, like if I said, if I said something like, I've never been this happy, I meant it. Same thing with like, I've never been this scared. That was also true. Yeah.
And I think that you hit on an important thing there, which is that it is hard to understand our feelings. It's hard to understand where they're coming from. It's hard to understand what they mean. It's hard to have any feeling of control over them.
And so we can't understand something. You can't communicate about it. And so I think of like that's a really important part of the desire to communicate your feelings is also the systems that you are creating right now that I am still creating that I use to understand how I'm feeling, which is a complicated thing, and changes a lot moment to moment, but also can be, you know, very big. And but I also don't always have a super great response.
People ask me all the time, how I'm doing it. I'm like, I'm just not going to check right now. Thanks. I'd rather not look.
Right. Yeah. I don't want to consider it too closely. Yeah.
But I also think that there's something magical and wonderful about having a name for something that you didn't know how to name or finding language for an experience that you didn't know you could ever have language for because it helps you to hold it and grasp it and it helps you to share it. So again, when I think about like what worked for me when I was younger about expressing my feelings, I think about two things. One, writing or, you know, other forms of what's called self-expression. Because a lot of times like you can write your way or talk your way through to the feeling.
And then the second thing is that when you can't, sometimes you can have art or something else do a little bit of that work for you. So you can say, I don't really know what I'm feeling, but I think if you read this book, it might help you understand where I'm coming from. Or if you listen to this song, it might help you understand where I'm coming from. Now, that doesn't always work.
Like I had this image in my mind that whenever I played a song for someone when I was 16 years old, I get it. Exactly. Yeah. Actually, I think I lost a girlfriend over that very thing once.
I was like, Oh, wow. I love this song. I think it says a lot about our relationship and she was like, I think that you are wrong. Yeah.
Well, there's no pressure quite like someone saying, I really want you to listen to this song so that you can understand how I feel about you and then watching you listen to it. So actually now, I'm kind of talking my way through this. I'm back to my original thought, which is try to write it down and don't tell them to listen to a song. Tell them to listen to a song on their own time.
Right. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah.
Well, and also I think that like, you know, art is always interpreted in different ways by different people, but it is also a way to communicate something that is impossible or very difficult to communicate. So I think it can be a very good tool. It can also be a good tool for even understanding where you are at because otherwise it may not be easy to understand a feeling that you're having. Indeed.
I mean, look, McKenna, I'm 43 years old and yeah, talking right now, I realize that I have no idea what I'm feeling except that it's a lot. Yeah, it's mostly up in my sort of like upper teeth. For me, it's right behind my solar plexus. Yeah.
And it's a mix of the dawns are going home and the void. Anyway, here's another question. Is from Connor who asked, steer Hank and John, could the dinosaurs have seen the meteor ultimately meteorite that killed them before it like, you know, killed them? Or would it have gone from the atmosphere to the ground so fast that they would have died before seeing any fireball?
If the latter is that how you want to go out corpses and comets? Connor? No, Connor. No.
I do not want to go out in a mass extinction event. That's one of my number one goals. Yeah. Yeah.
I want to I want to have a sense of continuity of like the continuance of the human story. I've always felt like there is nothing in this world as narcissistic as believing that the end of your world means the end of the world. I hadn't even occurred to me that someone could feel that way. I want to live in the first one one millionth of one percent of human history.
That is my goal, Connor. And I'm trying to live in accordance with that value. Hank, did the dinosaurs see what was coming? Many, many of them did.
The wall, the ones that did didn't didn't last the day probably. Right. Light travels very fast. So if you could see something, you will see it before it kills you.
If it's bright enough, I guess, would be the thing. If it is visible. If it's coming from space. Like if it's coming, right, there's the number of things that can kill you that you don't see coming.
That's true. Yeah. But yeah, it would have been a big bright fireball in the sky that would have seen it explode, but it probably exploded before it hit the ground. So we sort of have this image of like a giant rock like running into the earth, but there's probably a series of explosions where it sort of like rammed into the atmosphere so hard that it exploded before it hit the actual ground.
And they would have been able to see that and then they would have died in a number of ways soon after if it was visible to them. Yeah. Shockwave, there probably would have been like a 10.1 magnitude earthquake. So that's like bigger than anything that we've experienced in human time scales.
Yeah. Keep going. This is doing wonders for my anxiety. Give me more.
So like the wind would have been so big that it would have picked up anything, anything. I won't say anything that wasn't nailed down, but nothing was nailed down back then. So anything, and then it would have taken that and put it like on the front of the shockwave and that that stuff would have hit the dinosaurs physically. So we often talk about these big shockwaves as if they're a wind.
And yes, even the pressure of the shockwave can kill you easily. It's also the stuff that is carried along in the shockwave. So even if it is, the shockwave isn't enough to on its own kill you, the stuff that's carried in it would be. With each level, I just feel worse and worse.
What else? Yeah. Well, I mean earlier than that, there's a very high likelihood that before the wind, before the earthquake, you'd get thermal radiation. So just the heat, like infrared radiation would make it so hot that everything would catch on fire.
So that would be like the first thing, would be the heat. And that's like second. So like you see it and then like seconds later, you'd get the IR. And then minutes later, it would be like the ejecta falling down from the sky.
Like an hour later would be the shockwave, traveling at the speed of sound rather than speed of light. Right. Yeah. And then but there's also interestingly, if you're further away and you can't actually see the impact, you would be able to see an effect of this before the sort of like planet-wide catastrophe of the dust that would make it cold for a very long time.
That actually caused the extinction. Not it wasn't like the impact that caused the extinction. It was the right. It was the two years of darkness.
The years of darkness. Yeah. What you would see before the years of darkness would be meteors and meteorites. But not the one, because what happened was a huge amount of like stuff got thrown up into the sky and much of that stuff never fell back down.
That's how big the impact was. It like went off into space. But much of it did fall back down. And so you would see that as meteors and meteorites potentially very, very far away.
Wow. And so that would be weird if you were dinosaur. You'd be like, wow, that's quite a meteor shower. Like to the extent that it's like way more than a meteor shower and much bigger rocks than in a typical meteor shower.
So it'd be brighter. Balloids, as they call them. Mostly this all makes me think that like humans in the Middle Ages who were very scared of comets were on to something. Like it was something of a well-founded concern.
Yeah. Well, anything new in the sky is concerning. But it turns out that it wasn't just like, oftentimes it's like, oh, a new thing, I'm concerned about it. But then it's like, oh, a new thing, I'm concerned about it.
And just by chance turns out to be something of concern. And that is the case with impactors, potential impactors. Great. Well, that really helped me, Hank.
Thank you for that exhaustive explanation of the murderous events that occurred before the two years of darkness that resulted in many more murderous events. I think 50 years from now, we will be able to detect and deflect any potential asteroid impact. Great. Any potential like sort of like some earth damaging asteroid impact.
So like, like, we just need to we just need to dodge 50 years of bullets. Yeah. On like tens of millions of your timescale, which is the timescale that impacts happen, then I think that that's a pretty like that we got a pretty good chance. Next question comes from Taylor who writes Dear John and Hank, I'm a year 11 history student, Taylor, you're not allowed to brag about being from the United Kingdom and or Australia by saying things like, I'm a year 11 history student.
Okay. So I'm going to rewrite your question for you, Taylor. I hope you know this is impersonal. Dear John and Hank, I'm in 11th grade and I've been watching many of John's old Crash Course videos.
They're very helpful, by the way. Thanks so much. Anyway, in the videos you have a segment where John reads a mystery document and has to guess who wrote it. And if he guesses correctly, he's fine, but he guesses incorrectly, he gets shocked with an electric pen.
My question is, were you really shocked with an electric pen? And if so, what did it feel like, Taylor? This I've seen this question. Yeah.
Like 50 times in the last week, we get this a lot, but like recently, it's like there must be some meme out there that I don't know about something went viral somewhere. And because I've been asked about it. Every time I speak to a group of high school history students on zoom or whatever, it's the first question. The answer is, yes, you could get these little shock pens anywhere when we were kids.
They were a very popular gag gift. Yeah. And we did have a shock pen. There were a couple episodes where like we couldn't find it, or we left it somewhere, and we didn't have it on set.
And in those occasions, you can sort of tell that I'm faking. Interesting. But almost all the time we used the shock pen, I did really shock myself when I got an answer wrong. I found, as has been proven in many psychological studies, that it did not make me better at guessing the author of the mystery document.
If anything, it made me worse. It made me very nervous. Yep. But we did.
Yeah, we did have a shock pen. It did not hurt much, I have to say. It's very, it was like an exaggerated version of, and you've never had this experience, Taylor, because I think you live in Australia, but it was an exaggerated version of when it's cold outside and you build up static electricity, and then you touch another, I don't know, a wall or something, and you have that electric shock. It was sort of like the biggest one of those you've ever felt, but it was smaller than any proper experience of being shocked.
Yeah. I remember we on tour had a shocking device. Was it that panel? Was it a different thing?
I think it was a different thing. Yeah. I can't remember. We did it.
We had a game where we lost the thing, and we got the other person we got shocked. And it was fun. But yeah, we've had so many dumb bits on tour now that I think about. We also, I'm project for awesome, like last year, I got a dog shock collar or two years ago, and actually got myself shocked for, which is the worst thing.
It was trivia about the companies that I run and the people who work for them, which is the thing that stressed me out the most to get wrong, right? When it's like, you don't know that Rachel has a dog, and I'm like, no, I don't care about my employees at all. Have you ever seen that SNL sketch where it's like for $5 name Justin Bieber's girlfriend in 2007, and then they're like, okay, now for $500,000, this is your best friend Jeff, and this is his girlfriend of seven years. What's her name?
Yeah, this is a bad side. Megan writes, dear John and Hank, I'm finally living in my own apartment, and it's nice overall, but it's weird making my dinner and eating it alone. And I'm kind of super tired of like just scrolling as I eat, but it feels empty and eerie to just eat all by myself without any noise or anything. How can I spice things up here?
Pumpkins and penguins, Megan music. Oh, so we got to get really into music. You think so? No, I think that of the two of us on the only one who's lived alone.
Is that correct? I mean, basically, I've lived in an apartment by myself, but I've always like had neighbors that were on the level of like Seinfeld, where you could sort of walk into their places. When did you live in an apartment complex that had neighbors on the level of Seinfeld? When I first moved to Missoula?
Okay, but okay. All right, a little bit, but you were in, yeah, you weren't like, I have lived by myself for a long time, for years and years. And in my experience, there are great things about living with yourself and they're challenging things. And the single most challenging thing for me about living by myself was eating dinner.
What I found was that if I ate dinner, Hank, I don't know if you know this about me, but among the many weird writing jobs I had early on in my professional life, I was a reviewer of audiobooks, which per hour was the worst money I've ever made, right? Because I would like listen to an audiobook for 20 hours and then I would spend like 10 hours writing a 200 word review for which I was paid $25. But the great thing about it was that I discovered that if I listen to an audiobook while I'm eating my dinner, then I can transition immediately into doing the dish or dishes, depending on the quality of the meal I had prepared for myself. And I could not stop listening to the audiobook.
So it started to feel like it was one thing, like the making of the meal, the eating of the meal and the cleaning of up after the meal were one thing. And that allowed me to do all three of those things in like a focused and determined way. So that's what I recommend. Sort of like lumping the tasks?
More like the three things start to feel like they are all part of the same thing, which is not really a task even. It's like living. It's like ritualized, all right. I was able to ritualize it, which helped me.
And the other thing is that when I was living alone, I tried to take advantage of the things that were good about living alone, like the advantages to it, like being able to read whenever I wanted to, and being able to watch whatever TV I wanted to whenever I wanted to. Well, here's it. Johnny, here's the opposite question from Cassie who asks Dear Hank and John, I've been living by myself for the last seven years. I'm about to move into a place.
Megan, we should just put you in contact with Cassie because Cassie knows how to do this better than either of us seven, seven years. Yeah, she's an expert. I will now be sharing a bathroom in a kitchen with two other people who I barely know. How does anyone go about consolidating things with new roommates?
I have all of my own silverware, cookware, plates, cleaning supplies, etc. Also, I have my own routines. I've only ever had two roommates previously, and they were both people that I have known for a pretty long time before we moved in together. I'm not sure how to do this whole thing.
Thanks Cassie. Well, first of all, cleaning supplies, just lump them together. You're going to get through them. You're going to use it all.
Don't throw any of that away. Silverware is a little, it's a little bit of an in-between space for me. Yeah, well, it depends on like, is it a full set? Yeah.
And like, I didn't have one of those until I was married. So it was just sort of like cobbled together silverware. And in that case, I feel completely comfortable, you know, just having the amount that fit in the drawer. I never really, from the age of about 21 until the age of about 29, I did not really know where any fork I owned had come from.
Right. You know, I didn't know the origin story of any of my forks. Well, I definitely went to the Goodwill and I bought four of each thing. That's how I forked up.
And maybe that's the origin story and I've just forgotten it. But like, I would look in, I remember looking in the silverware drawer and just being like, this is amazing. I mean, where did you come from? So many different kinds of books in here.
Where did you all come from? How did this happen? Did I steal you from the Golden Corral because I wouldn't put it past me? This is part of living life.
My personal feeling about this, what I've had roommates in the past is that my plates were pretty much mine, mostly because I don't think my roommates trusted me to have totally clean plates. So it was sort of, it sort of discouraged them from using my plates in the first place. But that's how it's always worked for me. Like my plates were mine.
And then the silverware was pretty much shared, but only because it came from very nebulous sources. Right. I mean, the things that you're going to have to worry about more than this furniture, if you're moving any furniture, is a big deal because it takes a huge amount of space and like you only need one couch probably. Right.
Right. And appliances as well because like, counter space is important. And you don't want to fill up every inter-counter space with like, this person's blender and this person's soda stream and this person's squeeze in art and this guy too many things. You have to like, yeah, you don't want four toasters in one apartment.
Yeah. And you also want to compromise on like, what appliances are necessary for your health and happiness. And you may be and also like refrigerator space is extremely important and must be maintained at all costs. That is actually the bigger issue in my experience is like, also when there's a diversity of opinions about whether or not to for instance, refrigerate peanut butter, if it's shared peanut butter.
Yeah. And as you know, Hank, refrigerated peanut butter is catastrophic on every level. It's you, because what you do with it, you can't spread it, which is the thing that peanut butter exists to do. Yeah.
And the big upside of refrigerating peanut butter is nothing because it doesn't need to be refrigerated. Yeah, somehow peanut butter can't go bad. And I don't know what that's about, but like, that's that's the situation. Yes.
I've never had it happen. Yeah, there's a lot of things you don't refrigerate. Like you don't refrigerate your jeans. And I don't know the exact reasons why I just know that you don't.
Yeah, it's true. But also the process of room mating is is a process of compromise. And it is also one of the chief question asking areas of the Dear Hank and Johnny inbox. So do not be surprised that conflict can and does arise.
But hopefully, I think the actual key is being able to have that conflict rather than having it like simmer and turn toxic and aggressive and everything else. And you're sending emails to strangers about it. And not like, yeah, like, hey, please read my question on the podcast. My question is, why does my roommate Juniper continue to refrigerate the peanut butter?
I hate her. And I'm like, I don't think I was really a question for the podcast. I think that was a question for Juniper. Yeah.
Yeah. So Cassie, it is definitely a weird experience to live closely with people you don't know well. I've had this experience before, but it can also be really wonderful as long as you keep those lines of communication open. It's like being in a band together.
It's like being in a family together. Like you've got to be able to talk. And if you don't, the resentment will just build up and build up. Yep, that's the main thing.
John, this next question comes from Sarah who asks Dear Hank and John, what's up with Kazoos? Thanks Sarah. That's a great question. Do you know that the Kazoo is the oldest musical instrument?
Like in terms of documentation in the history of the world? Really? I would have definitely thought it was like a flute. No, the Kazoo came first.
Wow, why do we call it a Kazoo? We call it a Kazoo because in ancient Mesopotamia, that was the name for it. Oh, isn't that wild? I definitely assumed that is the Sanskrit word for a Kazoo.
I definitely assumed that Kazoo was like a brand name from the 1950s. Kazoos, it sounds like a brand name from the 1950s. Kazoos are so old that one of the earliest examples of written language refers to a Kazoo. Whoa.
How long can I keep doing this before Hank realizes that I am full of crap? Oh man. Oh man. It seemed it seemed possible to me.
No, Kazoos are like a hundred, Kazoos are like a hundred and twenty years old. And then I was agreeing because I was confused and I was reading the etymology dictionary and I was like trying to figure out where so I was just like agreeing because I wasn't paying attention. Oh, and they're called Kazoos because they sound like Kazoo. Okay, it's an alteration of earlier Bazoo, which was what we called a trumpet because it sounded like Bazoo.
And they're like, well, this is kind of a knockoff terrible trumpet. Let's call it the Kazoo. Yeah, but at least it wasn't from the 50s. Because if I had gotten at that right, I would have been angry.
No, they're from like the late 19th century, right? Yeah, correct. Well, I bet the earliest music instrument is some kind of flute though. Now I want to look at the earliest musical instrument were flutes.
It was made from bird bone and mammoth ivory from a cave in southern Germany. That's the earliest musical instrument ever found. All right, great. Well, at least I won that one.
Well, not really. I made you believe that written language started with a discussion of Kazoos. I think I win. I think you win.
I think I definitely win that. We've been doing this podcast for like eight years. And that's the first time you've ever done that. Well, you've got to be hank.
You've got to use it very judiciously. Right? Like if I did it every week, you'd be looking forward every week. And I wouldn't be able to trick you on that scale.
It's been a while since I've tried to pull off one of that scale and I feel really, really good. It's one of my favorite things and I can't do it publicly because people, because I can't affect my credibility as a science communicator. Right. You're a science communicator.
You can't share fake science. Oh, but back in college, I once convinced my roommate that we got herpes from oranges, but only because oranges come from whales. You know who's really good at that game is my best friend, Chris Walgreens. I am so gullible.
He's just so good at it. He once convinced me that we were walking up a hill in southern Indiana, like in the woods in December. And Chris convinced me that Larry Bird, the famous basketball player, had just walked past us. So we passed like a group of three people.
And like two minutes later, Chris is like, that was Larry Bird. And I'm like, what? No, it was like a 35 year old person and they're two children. And he's like, no, man, that was Larry.
And I was like, they weren't even tall. They weren't tall. They weren't old. But like 20 minutes later, I was like, I can't believe we saw Larry Bird here down here in Brown County.
What's he doing here? Yeah. Was he with his grandkids? And then finally, Chris is like, I mean, I really can convince you of anything.
Oh my God, that's amazing. Which reminds me, John, that this podcast is brought to you by Larry Bird. He called in, he sent us a message and he was like, I want to give you 376 Larry Bird's in order to get sponsored in your podcast. And I'm like, wow, Larry, that's an old goof.
I was listening to old episodes of the podcast. Way to dig into the archives there, Mr. Bird. Thanks for not just being like a new listener to the podcast, but for being a deep fan.
Yeah, we really appreciate that. We're also really grateful to our noted deep fan thermal radiation thermal radiation. Thank you for sponsoring today's podcast thermal radiation. It's like the second thing that kills you about the media, right?
That's the first thing. But that's okay. Okay. Fuck is also brought to you by John's shock pen.
It's real. It's a real shock pen. John was actually experiencing real pain while shooting Crash Course World History. And today's podcast is also brought to you by the happiest I had ever been when I was in high school.
It was the happiest I had ever been. But then like six hours later was the most scared and afraid I've ever been. And that's about right being a teenager. And that's on love.
I mean, for me, it was more on friendship. Oh, this episode of your Hank and John is brought to you by Shopify. There are a lot of things that stand between I have an idea and this is an idea that actually exists in the world and people are buying things from me. And that is what Shopify makes easier.
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So basically, our body is making chemicals all the time so that we can have our body be made up of stuff. And there are enzymes that do all this work. And most of those things we can make ourselves. But some of them we can't.
But one of the things we can make ourselves is cholesterol. And on the way to cholesterol, like their intermediate compounds, and one of them is called 7B hydrocholesterol. And that chemical exists in our bodies, but it's usually exists in our bodies on the way to becoming cholesterol, which we think we talk about in terms of it being bad, but it is also extremely necessary. It's just bad when it is out of balance.
What happens is it turns out that if that chemical gets exposed to UVB energy, it turns into vitamin D. And so our bodies, instead of figuring out how to make vitamin D, they didn't need to do that. They just like started to store a fair amount of that chemical, 7D hydrocholesterol in our skin. And that was how we figured out how to make vitamin D so that we wouldn't have to worry about actually manufacturing it because it was easier to just put it in our skin.
Wow. Or simpler, I should say. That's pretty cool. Yeah.
So we're like, kind of like trees. We are a little bit photosynthetic and that step on one chemical pathway is done by the energy from the sun, not from us. That's amazing. Yeah.
Well, Hank, it's time for the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. I'll go first because tomorrow, as we're recording this or six days ago, as you're listening to it, a huge day in Wimbledon's history. We will briefly mention the fact that over the weekend, AFC Wimbledon played the franchise currently playing its trade in Milton Kean's got a 1-1 draw. Nothing in this world, but more uncertain than a 1-0 Wimbledon lead.
I mean, if we score before the 94th minute, it's too soon. So, score to great goal and then gave up a goal three minutes later, a game ended 1-1, whatever, good point away from home. The important story. There was also one, a game in between the last time we recorded.
So you are still doing well. We did. I think we're in 11th place right now, which I mean, I'll take that all day long. Yeah.
Two big stories that affect Wimbledon right now. One is the lockdown in the UK. It appears that the top four tiers of English football will continue playing. So that's that for now.
And then secondly, after over 10,000 days away from Wimbledon, away from Plow Lane, their stadium for over 100 years, Wimbledon are back home at last. They will play their first game at the new Plow Lane stadium, funded, built, and owned by the fans of the club tomorrow. Unfortunately, it will be in front of no fans. And so it will not really be Plow Lane, I think, to a lot of people until we can all be together there.
But it is a huge moment and an incredible testament to my mind of what can happen when a community sticks together and holds on to hope because everyone said that this was going to be impossible, that was gone and never coming back. The English FA itself said that football in that community, a football team in that community was not in the wider interests of the game. And Wimbledon fans have proven everyone wrong without a billionaire benefactor with nothing but togetherness and hard work for more than 30 years to get to this moment. So huge congratulations to everybody who worked so hard on this.
Thank you for showing the world the way back to Plow Lane and offering a different vision for what sports and what communities can be and can accomplish together. Well, this week in Mars News, John, a milestone in Mars News as well as the Perseverance Rover has passed the halfway mark to Mars. Oh, wow. Yeah.
So the spacecraft finished traveling 146.3 million miles on October 27th. So it's it's well past that now, which is the exact distances has left to travel before reaching Mars in February. Now, it isn't a direct midway point between us and Mars because the spacecraft is taking like a curved route. So you can't draw a straight line.
It's like sort of like, basically, Perseverance is continuing to orbit the sun as it moves toward Mars. So it, you know, it moves because it was moving very fast on it left Earth because how Earth is moving very fast, relative to the sun. While the Rover is traveling, the team has been checking in on it to make sure everything's working. They've been testing instruments and they've been uploading files.
Everything seems to be working just fine. Another fun fact right now, it takes about two minutes and 22 seconds for transmissions to go from mission control to the spacecraft because Perseverance is two minutes and 22 light seconds away from us. Wow. Which is wild.
When it lands on Mars, it'll be about 11.5 light minutes away. Actually, that will change as Mars gets further away from Earth, right? That's a big annoyance when you're trying to control spacecraft on Mars, but it's one of the things that we're getting better and better at planning the paths and also letting the Rovers make some decisions for themselves as they go across the surface of the red planet. That's so cool.
And it's kind of nice, Hank, that this week both the news from Mars and the news from Wimbledon are about Perseverance. Yes, they are. We find a way through. That's the greatest thing about us.
John, I'm glad we're making the podcast with you. Thank you for taking the time to chat. Yeah. And I like making podcasts.
Me too. Let's do it again next week. Oh, okay. And then the week after that until we die.
John, we're off to record our Patreon only podcast this week in stuff. Also, if you don't know this before this podcast, we did our live stream with our Patreon patrons, which is really nice to do. So you can go to patreon.com slash your hankotjonofanor about that. This podcast is edited by Joseph Tuna Metis, it's produced by Rosie Anna Halzer-Hossen, shared in Gibson, our communications coordinator is Julia Bloom.
The editorial assistant is the Bokei Chakra Vardy, the music hearing now and the beginning of the podcast is by the great gunerola. And I think they sang on our hometown. Don't forget to be awesome.