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Tickets go on sale to the general public June 30th at somethingworthknowing.com. So come build a better world with us on September 16th and experience something worth knowing you can get your ticket at Complexly.info slash something. Welcome to Dear Hank and John. Yours out for a think of the Dear John and Hank.
It's a podcast where two brothers enter your questions if you give me advice and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC, Wimbledon, John. I was just at the store trying to get a thanksgiving turkey and they just weren't very many of them and they were all quite small and I said, did they get any bigger to one of the employees of the grocery store and they said to me look straight in the eyes and said, they said, man, no, they're dead. A story that is obviously made up because of course I've not spoken to anyone in the grocery store and would not do that. Nor am I getting a thanksgiving turkey because of how my thanksgiving gathering will be as you might expect.
Very small. Yeah, same here. We will be having a four-person thanksgiving. We're calling it the bad thanksgiving, but we're calling it the bad thanksgiving to hopefully help make next thanksgiving not the worst thanksgiving.
Yes, that's right. I'll say this now. So as a science guy, I'm very excited about MRNA vaccines, very excited that they are seem to have high efficacy and will be available to some people fairly soon. It's very exciting, very big news for a lot of different reasons.
But one of the things that this means is that it is more important than ever to decrease the spread of this disease, which I know can feel like an insurmountable problem sometimes, but like every person who doesn't get COVID in the next few months is a person who may never get COVID because the vaccines will be available. So that's the thing that we're fighting for now, whereas before we didn't really know what the end game was, now we do. And so now there is a very good reason to be taking every precaution we can because we are protecting certainly not just ourselves, but also our neighbors and all of the healthcare workers who are working very hard right now in very difficult circumstances and need our support. Yeah, we received a lot of emails this week from nurses and doctors and CNAs and lots of other people who work in hospitals who are just under extreme, extreme stress right now.
And I'm so sorry. And I don't really know what else to say. Like we thought about what we can say. And all I really know how to say is that I'm sorry.
And I hope that things get better soon. And I'm sorry that you are being asked to do these Herculean tasks in really difficult circumstances. Anyway, it's a comedy podcast. And we're going to answer your questions because that's what we do.
That's what we do. That is what we do. We have a small role to play and we will play it. It's true.
Some people save lives with their work. Some people sit in their basement talking to their brother offering dubious advice to listeners who write in with ridiculous questions. Such as beginning with this one from Kevin who writes Dear John and Hank, how much sand can I take from the beach before it becomes immortal? Nope.
Thanks, Kevin. That's not what it says. How much sand can I owe? What do you think was becoming immortal?
The sand was mentioning that if you took enough sand away from the beach that the sand that you've removed from the beach would become a kind of sand monster that needs to return to the beach and then spends the rest of all time like trying to reunite with its former self. And so I had to figure out how much sand it takes to make that immortal sand monster. But it turns out the question is a little bit different. The question is how much sand can I take from the beach before it becomes immoral?
Kevin, that's not as good of a question as an original question. I mean, it's still a very good question. I like it because it's not about what's legal and not legal. It's about the morality of the situation.
Like, what am I taking from others? Like, what if I diminish to this shared resource, which I think is a great question. Now, sand is pretty immortal as far as things go. Like, everything has an end, but sand is longer away.
It will become rock eventually. But even then, it will still be pretty sandy. Kevin, the answer to your question, and I've done some studies about this. So you can't say that you can take no sand away from the beach because all humans take sand away from the beach when they walk away from the beach.
I would love to take no sand from the beach. If they were a way to take no sand from the beach, I would pay $5 for that. Yes, like the general rule when you're interacting with natural spaces is take nothing, leave nothing. But in the case of a beach, like, it forces you to take sand.
So the question is, I will come, I'm with your forever. We are friends, I will be on your car now. So the question is how much sand can you take? Yeah.
And I think the answer is the amount that is attached to your body is the right amount after you try to remove all of the sand is the most sand you can take from the beach. I think after that, it does become unethical because if everyone was taking a two liter bottle of sand off the beach, then eventually the beach would be less good. Right. Here's, I have a different solution to this problem, which is you can take the amount of sand as long as you're not going to, in some way, financially benefit from the sand.
So you cannot, you can't remove sand or, like, in a way that's like, well, I need sand for this. And so I'm going to, instead of buying it at the store, I'm going to take it from the beach. That's definitely immoral. Yes.
But you can take an amount of sand that is like a memento. Right. And so it beyond just like, if you want to fill a vial with sand, but like, if it's a memento, it isn't about the amount. It's about the existence of the sand.
So like having one of those water jugs that you put on the water jug cooler is that what that's called at the workplace? Not really, but I know what you mean. Those like 10 gallon jugs. You can't fill that in sand.
Yeah. Yeah. Because that's not a memento. You can fill like a test tube with sand.
Yeah. And then you're like, this is my test tube collection of the sands that I, the beaches that I go to. And here's all the different sands, which would actually be a very cool collection. It's pretty cool.
And you can see that like, usually you're like, all sands are same, but then if you go to different beaches and you actually can compare them, then it's become square that all sands are different. Yeah. So Kevin, that's the answer. We think you can take like a test tube worth of sand for your own personal appreciation and enjoyment.
John, I have a really important question that I need to get to immediately. And it is this question has now stretched through three episodes and from Beatrice who asks Dear Hank and John, but mostly Hank, on episode 265, you talked about how the impact of the meteor that killed the dinosaurs was so big that a lot of stuff went into space and never came down. Does this mean that there are dinosaur fossils in space? Whoa, in the future, whoa, there will be space paleontologists, not the muse Beatrice.
Whoa. This question blew my mind. Oh my God. So here's the thing.
And I don't know how to do the math on this, because there's two things that could mean there are no bits of dinosaur in space, but they're they might both be not true. So one is that just the process of having enough energy, like put into you means that a piece of dinosaur would vaporize on its way to space. And the other is that they're just like for the proportion of the earth that was hit by the asteroid, individual dinosaurs is going to be a very small percentage. And it may be so small percentage that it is unlikely that any amount of dinosaur actually reached space.
But it seems totally possible to me. I think the first one, the first thing definitely dinosaur teeth are just as hard as rocks. And so dinosaur teeth, it seems to me, I believe at this point, I need to wouldn't they get burnt up in the atmosphere? No, they're like if rocks can make it, then teeth can make it.
Teeth and rocks are similar in their hardness. Okay. And so I like, I am willing to say that there is a good chance that there are dinosaur, like at least one dinosaur tooth in space. So it's possible, would all these things be an Earth's orbit or is it possible that some of them got hit so hard that they were completely they're not even related to Earth, they're like headed out of the solar system.
It'd be pretty hard to escape the solar system is my guess. They could easily escape Earth's orbit and be an orbit around the Sun. They would have to have in the 65 million years found some sort of stable place to exist. Those gravitationally stable places do exist.
They may have also followed on the Mars or Venus, which is the most likely place for them to go. Oh my God, though. How cool is that, Hank? How cool is it?
Right. We find it. We're walking around Mars looking for signs of life and we find it too. We're like, we did it.
We found, but no, we didn't do it. It turns out that that dinosaur tooth just made the journey. It made it. Oh my God, that's mind-blowing.
I love it. This must be how you feel when you read science fiction. I love it. That's so thrilling to consider.
It's so thrilling to consider the idea that floating around Earth more likely the Sun could be dinosaur fossils. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.
Well, and not even fossils because if they went into space, like if there was actual flesh that went into space, it would just be mummified. Oh, you're telling me. I think about that all the time. You don't have to tell me what happens to flesh when it goes to space.
That's one of my top 20 apocalyptic worries. Well, we can talk about it more if you want because you have another question in which flesh may end up in space. Oh, I'd rather not. I'd rather not.
I, you know, one of the many things that we completely take for granted as humans is the atmosphere. What an atmosphere. No, I, I've read so many posts on Reddit and Facebook and Twitter over the last like three weeks trying to understand the incredibly weird times in which I find myself. And not one time have I read a single piece of media that paused to acknowledge that if it were not for the atmosphere, we couldn't be having any of these incredibly stupid conversations.
All hail the atmosphere. No gods, no kings. Only the atmosphere. Only the thin, thin shell of gas.
It's like easier to get out of in terms of direction than driving to Seattle. Hmm. Seattle is further away than space, John. Well, I think it depends on where you are.
Actually, if you're in Seattle, it's not, it's not, it's for you, for you. And also, it's significantly easier to drive sideways than it is to drive up. It's true. Really hard to drive up.
My car has never, never done that. This next question comes from Kat who writes, is the stereotypical pirate accent based on a real accent? And if so, from when and where, by the way, if it sounds like we're asking a lot of silly questions, it's because we're just, we are. And also the minute I read this question, I realized that I've never considered the answer.
And I am completely fascinated to learn about it. Yeah. When and where does the pirate accent come from? The curiosity is killing me, Kat.
Oh, that's funny. Oh, nicely done. It's such a strange thing because we all know the pirate accent, but we all also know if we like search deep in our souls, that this isn't how pirates talked, right? Yeah.
Like we know this is made up. And it turns out, it was made up by a man whose name was Robert Newton, who played Long John Silver and a 1950s Disney movie called Treasure Island. Wow. Really?
Yeah. Wow. Yeah. He made it up.
He based it on the West Country and Southwest England, which is where he lived. And it was also where Long John Silver was from in the book, but not where pirates were from in real life. Who were from all over the place, but English pirates were mostly from London. So it would have talked like Londoners, probably like, I don't know.
There's a lot of different London accents. So I don't know, maybe a bunch of different London accents. That is fascinating. And so all of the like are that that's only like 50 years old, or 70 years old, forgetting that we are not actually close to the year 2000.
Yeah. Because in my heart, it'll always be about 2003. Yes, I have this problem all the time. And we'll never stop having it.
But accents are so cool. And we're often asked like, when did the American English and British English diverge? And so like, when did we stop speaking like British people? Is sort of the, I guess, the sort of root of that question?
But that's not how it works. Because British people continued to also change the way that they spoke. And so it's not like the people in the 1700s in America spoke the current British accent. They spoke the British accent that was around then, but since then both of those accents have diverged from that common ancestor.
Yes. So it's much less like we descended from chimpanzees and much more like chimpanzees and us both have a common ancestor. Exactly. Yeah.
I will say that the flat American accent that you and I not to brag are both absolute masters of is what I choose to be. Sometimes I want to be a little bit British. Maybe go a little bit Wisconsin for a year for some reason. I could handle you going a little Wisconsin for a year, much more than I could handle you bringing back your fake British accent, which just the thought of it makes like, it's so bad.
No, yeah, I just broke out into a fever. Is it? I'm sweating. Okay, which is more embarrassing.
Yeah. Okay, here are my two most embarrassing things I think about a lot. One, my year of fake British accent. Nice.
Oh, for no reason. Oh my God. Which is so uncomfortable. It is a sweaty moment.
Two, I got invited to give a fancy speech at a fancy event with lots of influential people in the audience. And I decided to get up on stage and instead of wearing my lanyard, like a normal human, I thought I would be, I don't know, innovative, but really just quirky. And so I wore the lanyard around my neck and then with my arm through it, like it was a purse and put it was way too tight. And so it was like, bunching up on my chest.
Well, the answer to your question is that while that second mortification is much more recent and so it feels profound, the greater mortification by far is faking a British accent or a ye or I disagree because I did that second thing when I was 35 years old. Oh, yeah. I was just replaying my modifications last night. It's something that my brain loves to do in Lewis Street.
I actually read an after scene reviewed episode about this. Yeah. And I was able to pull one out of the archives. You know, like sometimes you think that they're gone.
Yeah. And you just like, it's also you're flipping through your record collection and you're like, Oh, yeah, I forgot that I have that album by John Coltrane. He was like, Oh God, yeah, no, how could I have forgotten that? Uh huh.
Are you going to tell me? No, it's not bad. Yeah, I've got one that I've never told anyone. Oh, based on the modifications you're willing to share, the ones that you aren't willing to share must be truly epic.
Pretty bad. I have a much like, yeah, actually, I'll tell it. I'll tell it. I'll tell it.
Okay, Oh God, it's so embarrassing. So I made this video that got like 12 million views and it was the most viewed video about the conflict in Ukraine at the time, the conflict between Eastern and Western Ukraine, which becomes relevant. And the video is really good. And all the facts in it were so totally reliable, except that every time I said Eastern Ukraine, I met Western Ukraine and every time I said Western Ukraine, I met Eastern Ukraine, which is especially to people living in those regions is a fairly large error.
Yeah. Yeah. But like, that's just like, I can't, I still I still struggle with this because in my mind, things that are in the East are over toward my half of the country and things that are in the West are over toward your half of the country. Yeah.
And so for example, I believe in my heart of hearts that Great Britain is in Eastern most Europe on account of how it is to the East of me. I understand that other people Great Britain is in Western Europe, but the rest of Europe is more East from you. Well, sure, Hank, if you if you're an extremely sophisticated analyzer of East and West, but I'm not, that's the whole problem, right? So when I think about, where is Eastern Ukraine?
Oh my God, it's the part of Ukraine closest to me, because I'm on the East. Okay. I'm on the East. I feel you're thinking it has to be Eastern Ukraine because it's closer to me.
Then it is. Oh my God. Okay. And now I understand how you made that mistake.
And also the thing is, it's not that big of a detail to know if you're just trying to like understand the conflict. Yeah, but it's kind of just a detail. But if you're there, it's like, stop, stop now. It's like when, and this happens to me all the time, when people say to me, how long have you lived in Minneapolis?
And I say, oh, I live in Indianapolis. And then there's a pause because they are genuinely learning that those two places are different. Yeah. Yeah.
I also often get this with Missouri, because Missouri sound very similar. And so they're sort of like, put me in Missouri in their heads. Yeah. But like, they don't care.
I don't have a picture of what either of those places look like. No, they don't. They're just, they're trying to be polite. Yeah.
But they're like, actual coastal liberal elites. Yeah. Which and it shows. Yeah.
We would be if we were on the coast. It's true. It's true. But as it is, I have an extremely sophisticated understanding of what it's like to live in the middle of the country.
For instance, I know that Missoula is to the west of Indianapolis. And relatedly, John, we have a question from Maya who asks, Dear Hank and John, I grew up in Nebraska where there's very notably a lot of corn. Now that I have moved away, I find myself missing the Russell of cornstalk's in the wind, the quiet commotion of harvest and the expansive corn fields on the horizon. What's the big city equivalent of a corn field?
Any response would be amazing. Maya. Yeah. So every big city, pretty much in the United States, has a large cemetery.
That was the first thing that came to mind for me. Now, just like the closest thing I can get to walking through or you don't really walk through a corn field. You sort of walk next to a corn field usually. Maybe a public park, like maybe is Central Park, New York's version of corn fields?
I don't know. Well, here's the thing. I think that the people from a distance are my corn. And by which I mean the sounds of the city when you're not right up on it.
Yeah. And so that might be from like 24s up or even like five floors up. And it might be like from a ways away horizontally as well. But that's I love the noise of a city as long as I'm not too close to it.
And I love the noise of a highway and roads like the big semi trucks when their engine breaks as long as they're like not up in my head. And I used to live like on the highway and the train tracks here in Missoula. And initially that noise was very disruptive to me. But it took like five days before it wasn't bothering me anymore.
And then like a few weeks before I was like, I love this noise. Yeah, that's the thing. Like you start to associate like when we lived in New York, we associated the sounds of the city, except for the sounds of the pigeons who lived on top of our air conditioning unit engaging and fighting and or mating behavior other than that particular set of sounds. The sounds of the city began to feel comforting because I felt like, Oh, I'm not alone.
And I felt like, Oh, there's you know, lots of people out and about and I can go outside and join the great human fray. And that felt kind of like good. So much so that when we first moved to Indianapolis, I remember like the first night that we slept in our in our first home. I was completely freaked out by how silent it was.
And how can you be sure that it's safe if it's so quiet because I begun to associate feeling safe with hearing people's voices and hearing stuff happen outside. Yeah. So I think what will actually happen is that slowly the sounds of the city will replace the sounds of cornfields. And then when you go back to Nebraska, you're going to have your like children of the corn moment where you're like, Oh, these are weird sounds.
That's not good. I think I think actually in my experience, you go back to a place and and those tiny details that you didn't even really notice, like they become the trigger that brings that place back for you. And so I think that there is no equivalent to the quiet commotion of harvest in the city and there will never be. And so like that that is part of what makes spaces and places different from one another.
By the way, that is a great phrase. I love it. I commotion. Yeah.
This next question comes from Peyton who asks, Dear Hank and John, every Sunday morning I get a dreaded notification at my weekly screen time report. It's always so high. And I don't know how to just stop. I need my phone for emergencies, obviously, but also for part of my job.
So I can't just turn it off when my phone dings and I see that dreaded two digit daily average, it makes me want to throw my phone into the grand canyon to help. Always taking a bite of the forbidden apple to trademark. Ah, Peyton, that's a good one, Peyton. Michael has always been to keep my phone screen time below an hour a day on average.
What? Yeah. Well, you have to remember my email on my phone. Oh, man, John, I don't want to tell you that that's still really low.
No, it is not because I spend five or 10 hours a day on my computer. So, what is your what is your daily screen time? If I count the computer, it's over 10 hours. Well, yeah, of course.
But I mean, that's where I work. If so, I tell myself, I mean, I'm not totally. It's also where I do a lot of other things. Yeah, that's all you're doing 100%.
Also where I do a lot of my patented preventative worry, where I believe that if I just read enough about what would happen if the atmosphere suddenly disappeared, that will keep the atmosphere holding together? What is your daily screen time on your phone? You can look at it. I have no idea.
How do I do it? Go to settings. Well, my average is five hours and 51 minutes, but I still think that that's still that that's low. That's not low.
Like if 10 years ago, I had told you that you would spend six hours a day on your cell phone. You wouldn't have said like, Oh, that seems low. You would have said like, what did they invent to make me so addicted to it? And the answer is to talk.
I had a day. Whoa, did I really? I had a day last week that was 10 hours. Oh my God.
I think I was watching a lot of TV on my phone that day. But yeah, Peyton, the thing that you highlight here is the thing that's so challenging, which is that we cannot simply say like, I don't want this anymore because I need a lot of things on my phone. I need Google maps. I need lots of other apps.
And so how do you get the stuff that's useful and not get the stuff that you are vulnerable to? Not get the stuff that sucks you in and hijacks your consciousness and uses your attention to turn it into a monetizable asset. Yeah, I think it's also, like, I don't want us to treat screen time like calories where like we have decided that this thing is bad. And so we must be ashamed of all of the ones that we consume.
Right. Calories where we also shouldn't treat calories like calories. Yes. Exactly.
Calories are food and like without them, you would die. And so primarily they are helpful. And I think that like in many cases, screen time is helpful. We shouldn't be looking at screen time as one thing.
And we need to recognize when are the times when this is making both like me and also my world worse, which I think plenty of the time that I spend on Twitter is that. But there's also the time when we're like, that's making life better for me and for other people that I'm spending time on my phone. And I'm trying to focus more on those things. It's really hard though.
It's really hard. It's really hard because, you know, nothing gets my brain worked up quite like the opportunity to check. And that's what Twitter and Reddit and Facebook are really, really good at is getting you to check and then offering you rewards based on the random number of times checked. So I'm not saying I'm immune to it.
I'm saying that I'm like, deeply, deeply troubled by it. And I'm not trying to be critical of Twitter or Facebook. I'm only trying to be critical of my use of Twitter and Facebook, which like, disturbed me. Yeah.
I become a person, even on sports Twitter, like I become a person that I'm just not proud of. I don't know how it's the same. Yeah. I it's funny because I like, I know that.
And I think, okay, I seem to do more tweets that I'm proud of. And then I do it for two days. And then I'm like, well, I see a really good opportunity for a tweet that I feel like it's chronically so good. I'm not going to be proud of it.
But it's going to be so good. And then I tweet it. And then I just like fall back into well, and also those are the ones that get all the likes and the retweets like those are the ones that get the most. Yes.
I mean, that's not always like, actually, most of the ones that get most of the likes are just funny jokes like that. And like, that's what I should be focused on because I think that's what Twitter is actually good for. I would just I just want to state for the record that I don't agree with the funny. I think that they're jokes.
You can't call your own jokes funny. I guess it reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by Hanks Funny Jokes. Hanks Funny Jokes retweeted since 2008, not because they're funny though. Just because they jokes.
The podcast is also brought to you by Eastern Ukraine. Eastern Ukraine. It's on the West side of Ukraine if you're in John's brain. And today's podcast is brought to you by the Quiet Comotion of Harvesting Corn.
The Quiet Comotion of Harvesting Corn. It's what I want the Anthropocene Review to sound like all the time. That's nice. Spidecast is also brought to you by Space Paleontologists, roving the solar system in search of dinosaur teeth that were blasted off the planet by asteroids.
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Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash deerhank with new subscription only while supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See website for more details. This episode of Deerhank is brought to you by Factor. Imagine for a moment that you are absolutely immersed in some work where you're creating something beautiful or useful or useless and ugly but you love it anyway and you look up and suddenly you have a feeling and that feeling is that it is 2.30 pm and that you did not eat lunch.
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See website for more details. All right. Hey, before we get to the all important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon, I want to ask this question from B who writes, Dear John and Hank, when I cradle my mug of hot tea, am I keeping it warm or am I cooling it down faster by absorbing its heat? Thanks for your help B.
Well, I mean, it doesn't matter because you're because like you're not trying to keep it warm. That's not your goal in cradling your mug. Your goal is to warm up your hand. You're trying to get yourself warm.
Yeah. And it's very effective at that. So it is you are becoming warmer and the tea is becoming cooler. Yes.
But as I understand it, that's the whole idea. That's the point. That's why we have hot tea. Yeah.
Well, the same thing happens when you put it inside of you. It is warming you up, but it is cooling the tea down. Yeah, that's very it's very well drawn, Hank. Thank you for that image.
I was reading something recently that said that the human body is essentially a tube. Yeah. Yeah. And that all the organs and everything are just sort of like built around the essential tube structure of ourselves.
And then I was thinking about it more. And I was like, I'm just like an ambulatory worm. Yeah, we're like bony worms deep down. I'm basically a large earthworm that like believes itself to have free will.
Well, I mean, yes, there's more to it than that. I think the important thing to also recognize is that when once you start to see it this way, which is I think the more correct way to see it, that what we think of as inside our bodies isn't always inside our bodies that the digestive system actually is a tube of outside that runs through our inside. Yes. Food doesn't always go in.
It doesn't really go into us. It mostly goes through us. Some of it goes into us like the nutrients get absorbed. But like that, yeah, a lot of it just goes all the way through.
Yeah, it's kind of mind blowing. Really, the skin is one kind of outside. I'm going to mess this up like I messed up Western and Eastern Ukraine. I can't tell inside from outside either.
We got to move on to the news from ABC Wimbledon. Okay, what's the news from ABC Wimbledon? Mr. Worm.
Well, there's no news from ABC Wimbledon. Hank because of COVID. Oh, AC Wimbledon reported that some players got COVID and as a result, their games were canceled. Their first round FA Cup match against Barrow was postponed as was one other game.
They are all like self isolating for 14 days. And then after everybody tests negative or the people who tested positive are negative. Whenever the regulations say they can come back to training, they will come back to training. But for now, everything is on hold because of the pandemic.
And I mean, that isn't the biggest problem with the pandemic. So I don't even feel like I can complain or lament. Yeah, but that's where we are. Well, that's that is frustrating.
Is there a timeline? Yeah. So I mean, the next scheduled game is supposed to be on the 21st. And that will be after the two-week quarantine period.
It's just not clear right now, you know, like if people may be got it in the interim, we just don't know. So hopefully they will play this weekend. But we'll see. Do you want to some Mars news, John?
Yes, desperately take me off of this planet. Well, let's talk about atmospheres and how important they are. The scientists are still learning more and trying to learn more about how water keeps on escaping the red planet. We want to know very badly where all that water went because we know what used to be there.
But like how how you go from having lakes and oceans and rivers to just not anymore. That seems like an impressing question to ask because if it happened on earth, that'd be really bad. And so there are two main mechanisms that we see for how water is getting lifted up high enough in the atmosphere that it can be broken by cosmic radiation into hydrogen and oxygen, which can then be much more easily pushed off of the planet by solar winds. And the first thing is seasons and water is particularly high in the atmosphere in the southern hemisphere during the summer.
So that accumulation is probably because of heating, which kicks the dust up from the surface and the dust as it gets kicked up, drags the water with it. And couple that with the warmer atmosphere that can hold more water and you get more water traveling to the upper atmosphere where it can escape. And then the second one is dust storms, which seems to be really important. Now in 2018, there was a huge dust storm and you will remember this because it was the thing that ended the Opportunity Rivers mission and that was bad.
So that dust storm was bad for that reason. But it was good because it allowed us to study how dust storms are impacting the water in the atmosphere of Mars. Usually water abundance in the upper atmosphere is like three parts per million, but in the two days before the 2018 storm, that number doubled. And it's the peak of the summer, which had the combined effect of the storm and the seasons.
The total water was 60 parts per million, 20 times the normal amount. So it seems like dust storms and the seasons when they coincide with each other are an even bigger system to bring water to the part of the atmosphere where it can be removed from the planet permanently. And that has been happening for an awful long time, billions of years. And that is how we ended up with the Mars with no water.
So we think, no surface water, right? No surface water right now. Unless you include the potential of surface water that's just very, very briny and short lived. So if we imagine a very distant future where humans are on Mars and are working to terraform it, part of that, I guess, would be trying to figure out how to reverse some of those processes or at least limit the amount of water lost through them.
Well, I mean, so probably not maybe in the long, long term, but the amount of loss per year is quite low. Like if you're talking about us being able to change the look and feel of Mars, we'd be contributing so much new water to the planet that the loss to space would be pretty insignificant. But the main thing that we'd want to do is to not have the solar wind interact with Mars as significantly, and that's important less for keeping water on the planet and more for having people on the planet, because that solar wind, like the radiation from the sun can be really damaging to life, including our life. And there are a couple of ideas for how to do that.
The main one is like individual shelters, but the big one is that there would be some kind of thing in space that deflects the solar wind around Mars that thing would have to be very big and very powerful, because we can't like jumpstart the core again and have a magnetic field the way Earth does. But we might be able to do something like that that would deflect solar radiation away from the planet and without deflecting the light. All that just reminds me of how incredible Earth is. It's so good!
Like what a planet. Such a great planet. Oh my God, we get so lucky. Yeah.
Oh, man. Thank you, atmosphere. You're just doing great. Wonderful.
I'm not gonna field you, rock. Just keep doing that. I know which way North is. He used to ask a little confusing, but North is quite clear.
Hank, thank you so much for plotting with me. It is a pleasure as always. And thanks to everybody for writing in with your questions. You can always email us at hankandjohn at gmail.com.
This podcast is edited by Joseph Tuna Menish. It's produced by Rosie on a Hals Raws and Sheridan Gibson. Our communications coordinator is Julia Bloom. Our editorial assistant is DevookyTruckerBarty.
The music you're hearing now at the beginning of podcasts is by the great Gunnarola. And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.