You're wrong in this video. You're absolutely going to need supplemental oxygen. O2 levels were roughly 50% of modern levels. That can't support human beings.
One of those History of Universe/Earth/Humans episodes went into detail about that question and determined you could go no further back than 100 million years ago to ensure you had the right air, water, climate, food, vitamins, etc.
True, but the Vikings survived off of cod liver oil for vitamin C, so perhaps eating Cambrian organ meat could be used the same way. It may take some experimentation/getting scurvy to find out which animal's organs have enough vitamins, though. XD
@@BlairsVaultOfStarsAndDreams indigenous people have been getting their vitamin c up in the Arctic from seals and whales for centuries. Since it seems to be such a vital compound, it would hopefully already be produced by sea creatures in that time period.
I'd be worried about surprise allergens. We really have no idea what proteins any of those animals had in them. The potential to eat some random weird animal and then die from anaphylaxis would probably be my biggest concern.
Do we have any allergen data from the new world from when Europeans first arrived? I know diseases were a clear issue, but I don’t know about the food.
I mean honestly evolution of animals has barely taken effect. So there would be less toxins, bacteria, viruses, parasites. Literally less of everything.
I guess technically the ones who lived through the exact moment in time when it suddenly became the Ordovician 😂 but maybe they didn't live long... Then again, maybe they did have a much longer lifespan than us, who knows. Apparently we had much longer lifespans in the Permian (like a few hundred years).
If you could only bring one item... a blanket would be a big deal. It can be a sunshade tarp during the day, a towel when you get out of the water, collection bag for hauling food up to your cave, and bedroll at night. Plus, source of bandages/strips for wrapping injuries.
Lead casket. I'd find a rapidly building delta with impressive flow rates, dig a deep pit, cover myself with as much mud as possible, and attempt to fossilize myself. I'm not much of a seafood fan anyway. You guys would all be talking about me right now~!
My plan for a Cambrian trip: 1. Locate the Cambrian location of one of the most notable fossil beds of this time. 2. Go to this spot. 3. Open the time travel pod long enough to drop something durable and obviously fashioned (my first thought is a stainless steel butter knife). 4. Return to the present. 5. Enjoy the chaos as paleontologists try to figure out how such an object could possibly have been found there.
It's the "Try not to eat the ancestor of all tetrapods" challenge. Getting vitamin C is one thing, not accidentally ending all of space-time is another.
I doubt your micro biome would destroy the world. It would still exist. Biologically though, your biome would drastically change future life on the planet.
I’ve been stranded is before. The first problem is: Where am I going to sleep? Then it’s water. Then it’s food. You’ve got 3ish days for Water. Food is somewhere between a week and month. Sleep is a 24 hour problem and can sort of get figured out in the initial exploration of your surroundings if you’re lucky.
It's interesting to think that predation was probably, originally, an accident. But it was so advantageous that it became the other main energy gathering method.
Makes sense. Prey animals usually have to graze all day long, constantly munching on things to get their energy….Why spend all day munching when you can get all that stored energy by gulping down the creature that was collecting all those stored calories for you.
My first thought is that without easy access to plants I would pray the algae would be rich with vitamin C, scurvy would be a slow and insidious killer, much like overconfidence.
Regarding raw meat: what are the odds that any parasites (did parasites exist yet?) or diseases could infect you? Modern diseases and parasites co-evolved with us and largely came from domesticated animal diseases crossing over to humans. Raw meat from the Cambrian might be perfectly safe.
During this time parasites and some microbes could infect you. While it's drastically different from our own, bacteria and parasites did in fact exist even during the cambrian.
Some parasites are more harmful in the wrong host Cysticercosis, is a parasitic infection caused by the pork tapeworm, Taenia solium. In humans, it makes cysts in the brain.
@@grapheist612 ugh this trash site deleted my first comment. The pig tapeworm infects the human brain, instead of gut. Sometimes it's worse when they didn't co evolve.
@@andrewfleenor7459 i dont know if ur aware of the anime series 'attack on titan' , but hallucigenia holds kind of an important role within the series (because the author finds subjects like these cool ig) and that led to a large amount of in-the-context-of-the-show memes during the run of the final season of the show. So like a popular one is "Hallucigenia couldn't move backwards, it could only keep moving forwards until all its enemies were destroyed" Because thats a very iconic character dialogue of the character associated with the hallucigenia. Hope that helps
I love your Could You Survive series. The longer format is very appropriate for this kind of discussion, and even with the speculations spicing things up nicely, plenty of great details about the period were brought to my attention. Thank you. Please keep doing these.
You could air/salt dry some stuff. Obtaining salt might be painfully slow if you can't build up dirt/sand shallow pools. Maybe you could farm algae mats this way as well? Then you could dry the mats and use for food or fire. Find some flint and a volcano for iron pyrite, then you at best might get smoldering smokey fire for smoked food. If I could bring one item with me it would be either beans, potatoes, or some other caloric dense pioneer crop and hope they grow without proper soil.
You'd have to use the algae and tiny animals as fertilizer. Pretty much just shovel some of the shallow sea bed, let it dry, mix in the algae and make sure it doesn't get washed/blown away. Then you can have your potatoes.
Well this is when oxygen first started to fill things up but yeah that would be a big problem and if it wasn't, fresh water would be a serious concern.
Yeah it would probably be best if we ever did time travel to do it with a machine that was fully sterilized. Of course even a chunk of DNA or RNA could be picked up and integrated into the genome of a creature that walked by so that could also change things😅
The diary entries around 24:20 reminded me of 'The Last Continent'. Rincewind keeps a diary and it goes something like: Probably Monday: Hot, Flies. Fell into waterhole.
This video was a lot of fun! I giggled when you mentioned making earrings, cuz you never got around to talking about clothes, I started thinking about that when sunburns were mentioned. Im guessing they would be more severe because i imagine there is not much of an ozone layer. That does not sound comfortable to be naked in!! Also, any kind of first aid is going to be incredibly difficult. There is nothing to make rope or sewing thread or splints. I dont know if there is sinew in any of the animals from that area, but the length would still be rather short. No pain killers, no surgical tools. Something as simple as a tourniquet is going to take quite a bit of planning ahead. Amputations would be basically impossible. Cauterizing wounds would certainly be difficult. At least chance of infection is probably way down!! It would also be interesting to consider how your microbiome would interact with the environment. I bet fecal bacteria would thrive tremendously in those early waters, perhaps enough to devastate an entire local ecosystem. It would be imperative to keep your waste isolated - perhaps a separate pooping cave haha! Considering all of that, as much as I would love to bring my kindle, i think i would need to take Douglass Adams' advice and bring a towel. Like, a really, REALLY big towel. Use it as a poncho, or a blanket, or pull some threads from it for stitches, rip off a strip for a tourniquet, use it as a knapsack for carrying, a mask for when you're in the cave with 3 weeks worth of human waste... yup. Big ol towel
Our bacteria are probably also unable to affect the organisms from that time, so it might not be a problem! I was thinking of clothes too, that would be hard. Dunno if proto-sea weed would have long enough fibers.
@valkeakirahvi They could still potentially out compete the local bacteria that hasn't evolved as many defenses yet. Small things can make a big impact. Remember the Great Oxygenation Event. Also, I think it's less likely backwards for that to be true, since we are constantly evolving and building on top of old DNA. They contain the building blocks that we still retain in our cells today. But they haven't developed certain basic functional skills that we take for granted today. In this time, carnivory is only just beginning. The very first hint of a backbone is appearing. It's possible a generalized parasite from today could successfully take over an organism from back then because they already have traits and DNA that are included in the creatures that exist today, but we have those traits and a bunch of other added ones. Our DNA becomes more and more complex with each generation. Bacteria from back then haven't developed the traits to counter the tricks our bacteria know, but our bacteria now hasn't lost the ability to counter the tricks developed back then.
I totally get being vegetarian in the modern world, not eating any animal subject to modern farming... But if you're subsistence living or you're in a survival situation, there's no cruelty in killing for food. It's just nature
No fuel for a fire, no soil, no life on land, just rocks. O2 levels half what we have now, is there Ozone or will the ultraviolet cook me? The place sounds like Hell.
There's sun, there's seaweed and algae and sponges, provided you have a lens to start the fire since it's likely friction fires won't happen. You can dry them to start a fire. Although getting enough fuel for the fire to do anything like firing mud bricks might be a bit difficult. Trilobite shell roof tiles? 😅 do sea-creature poop also burns when dried? kinda hard to collect though.
@@bigpurplepops i’m going by what aquaponics use, which generally are crawfish and tilapia, so there’s enough nitrates and phosphates to sustain plant life. and there are experiments trying to use fish poop in biogas digesters…
The narrator Kallie has the BEST gift a broadcaster could have. the 😊expressiveness, the vocal range and clarity of speech....IT CAN CATCH THE ATTENTION WITH ALL CALMNESS ...pushed me to listen and be attentive ton how she describes the Videos shown....
Of course I don’t have favorite Eons hosts, BUT YALL ARE MY ABSOLUTE FAVORITE EONS HOSTS!!! OMGatos, I love this edition of the pod/webcast so much. ✨💖✨
The fact that most living things just died without leaving any trace is crazy, we could find crazy life forms there that we have no idea they even existed
That probably depends on which shellfish allergy you have. Some of them are to all shellfish, some of them are specifically to chitinous proteins which limits what you would react to by quite a lot
PBS Eons remains the best channel there is, thank you for your great videos! But one think keeps me thinking: Vitamines. I mean, there are some more Vitamins that humans need to survive. You won't get far without B1 or B12. And just hoping there will be some Vitamine C somewhere ... I don't think so. Or what do we actually know about about what Vitamine came into being in which times? And how abundant was it?
@@thekaxmax Maybe it could be possible by thinking about what functionalities those organisms needed? Because Vitamines are basically catalysts to provide certain functions for the cell or the organism. B1 for example is important for making the connection between neurons in mammals. If we know when this evolved, we might know when B1 appeared. I don't know if mollusks need B1 and if not, it might be very likely that in the Cambrian B1 simply didn't exist. Which would be VERY bad for any time traveller.
Most of that stuff is pretty basil, but if it helps any the reason humans tend to get deficient on these things aside from the fact that we lost the ability to manufacture our own is that we don't eat whole prey. If we ate whole prey a lot of the common vitamin deficiencies that we see today and in the last thousand years or so would not occur. Most of the vitamins are in the organs but of course that's also where the parasites are😅 and being infected by parasites can again cause malnutrition. Presumably though there would not be as many parasites that could infect us in the ancient past. We could still have our bodies freak out nuke us from novel exposures, but the parasites themselves probably wouldn't survive our digestive tracts so no problem eating the whole animal raw.
@@darcieclements4880 That is true for todays fauna. The question is: did the several vitamine-mechanics in animals or plants already evolve in the Cambrian?
I'd survive for maybe 5 minutes before getting into a fight with an unruly group of trilobites and finding out very quickly I can't in-fact "take them."
Not just calories, my big question would be vitamins. What about vitamin C for instance? Would Cambrian seaweed and/or seafood keep you from getting scurvy?
If I normally wore contacts, I would bring glasses instead. Contacts will only last a short time, but even with lots of scratches, glasses are better than no glasses and could last for years rather than a few months max for contacts.
25:15 I know there are marine animals today that naturally produce compounds that act as sunscreens, perhaps you could find something like that in the Cambrian. After all, they would be dealing with the UV, too.
Probably everything in the shallows would have had sunscreen built in. You'd probably end up being pink green or blue if you smudged it on yourself as a lot of organisms would use the compounds as their blood and sunscreen at the same time because there wasn't a large diversity of bodily fluids 😅
The one thing I found frustrating: when it was mentioned that oxygen levels were lower and might leave you feeling like you were up in (current) mountains, I asked (rhetorically), "How low? What as the percentage?" They never said! Today's level is 21%, and Web search suggests (but only on a few hits) that it was 10%-40% of current levels, or 2-8%, and a suggestion that that's like 5000 m, which would be 16,000 feet.
You keep talking about caves, but I believe that most caves form in limestone, and limestone is mostly biogenic. Has there been enough time for large layers of limestone to form, rise above the oceans, and then decay to form caves?
@ExtremeMadnessX Yes, but would it be common enough to be able to form caves? If I'm not mistaken the creation of limestone is dominated by biologic processes. It seems unlikely to me
Most of the geologic history of earth is pre-cambrian, but post-life. There had been a couple whole supercontinent cycles, presumably with photosynthesizing microbes for most of that. Wikipedia says that the oldest known limestone is 2.7B years old. No reason to think there were zero limestone caves. And you don't need a deep cave to hide from the sun, so the non-limestone types of caves are probably fine. A simple overhang will often do it.
One thing that wasn't discussed much and would be a huge difference maker, is the gear that you get to go in with. If you get to go in with a full set of clothes, and some amphibious shoes (Keens or something). Then you have a much better chance of surviving a while. If you're going in stark naked, you're dead. Humans have made biological adaptations where we pretty much need materials to survive. A set of water shoes is going to be a huge deal protecting your feet from lacerations. In a world where binding materials don't exist, first aid is much more difficult and a laceration can be the end of you.
As a Geologist, my first question would be "How would I breathe?" Plants, of my memory is correct, didn't reach the surface until sometime in the Silurian period.
Yeah there's some oxygen but I am really hesitant to believe that there is enough oxygen to live there more than a short amount of time, if at all. The massive amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is also probably going to be an issue. Finding fresh water could also be a pretty serious problem. It's always a serious problem but if you don't have vegetation to hold the water on the land it's a bigger one.
Actually the first... probably land plant spores in the fossil record date back to the late Cambrian so there could have been small rootless plants (proto-moss maybe?)
If you ever watched the movie "Evolution" from 2001 (with David Duchovny, you may know him from "X Files") - there's an animal that is modeled after Halucigenia. It has mouths on both ends and walks in either direction with no problems.
This is beautiful, Kallie! And graphics and sound designers, like team in general! But I love the speak - beautiful like the first "Journeys To The Microcosmos," but with this beautiful Kallie charm. I love it!
you would have to consider pathogens/ parasites and possible poison in some Cambrian critters, as well as how they would be caught anomalocaris likely wouldn't be reachable. also would the temperature not fluctuate in the night like a dessert does, how would you stay warm with no fire?
For the ‘stranded with nothing’ scenario, note that humans shed a lot of hair. It’s possible to spin our hair into twine-just a pain in the neck-so if you stayed long enough, you could indeed make a net with only your own body.
Fun fun fun educational podcast. I provided my own version of the Cambrian Explosion events, with a cosmic twist, in a song I put out a fair years ago, “Cambrian Explosion”, by Paul Keller. Have a listen (UA-cam and any media)if you get a chance. Oh. And one other thing, those graphics were amazing! Allows me to mentally travel back to that time period while also standing here in the kitchen make lasagna.
We’re publishing the Eons podcast right here on UA-cam during our off weeks!
As usual, we’ll be back with another regular Eons episode next week.
TATAKAE
Hmmm , I thought this whole podcast series was with Kallie & Hank
@latinxnaturalist - Michelle, when the Zombie Apocalypse happens, I'm heading for the cemetery for the best game of 'Whack-a-Mole'' ever!
I really enjoy these thought experiments. I also love that you folks clearly enjoy working together. It gets my brain working and my heart happy.
You're wrong in this video. You're absolutely going to need supplemental oxygen. O2 levels were roughly 50% of modern levels. That can't support human beings.
Always concerning when your first issue to deal with while time traveling is, 'can I breathe in this time period'.
What I’ve learned from watching science fiction is that almost every planet in every time period has breathable air. Oh, and most folks speak English.
@@billcook4768 Don't forget that even if the men of a species look like monsters. The women are almost always attractive.
@@lolly9804 yes and they are humanoid always
Peacocks are the exception
One of those History of Universe/Earth/Humans episodes went into detail about that question and determined you could go no further back than 100 million years ago to ensure you had the right air, water, climate, food, vitamins, etc.
All that seafood, and butter won’t be around for millions of years. I’d die.
Well, you could make use of your own mammaries 🤗
@@sava-smth😮
@sava-smth I was thinking about Human Butter mmm tasty.
@@leggonarm9835 If you had the right bacteria.
And no olive oil :(
RIP Anomalocaris, you were a real one. I can't believe it's been 500 million years since you left us
Gone 500 million years too soon
They say time heals all wounds, but some scars last 500 million years.
They’re gone? I didn’t even know they were sick 😢
It’s like they were just here, I can still hear their voice 😔
Lost but never forgotten. RIP Anomalocaris 😔😔
On the bright side, no mosquitoes.
I hear thee.
No taxes
No tik tok
No X (videos)
Give me a time machine!
Fun facts hallucinogenia couldn't walk back.
It could only walk forward until all of its enemy were destroyed.
たたかえ
march of the immovable
2:57
TATAKAI!!!!
Now that's progress!
Scurvy is going to be a surprisingly major concern for any trip to a time period before fruits and vegetables.😂
Many animals produce vitamin C and store it in their livers, so it could have been available.
True, but the Vikings survived off of cod liver oil for vitamin C, so perhaps eating Cambrian organ meat could be used the same way. It may take some experimentation/getting scurvy to find out which animal's organs have enough vitamins, though. XD
@@bowenmadden6122 Cod liver oil is rich in vitamins A, D, and E, not vitamin C.
All fresh food contains vitamin C. It is preserved foods that are rare in vitamin C.
@@BlairsVaultOfStarsAndDreams indigenous people have been getting their vitamin c up in the Arctic from seals and whales for centuries. Since it seems to be such a vital compound, it would hopefully already be produced by sea creatures in that time period.
I'd be worried about surprise allergens. We really have no idea what proteins any of those animals had in them. The potential to eat some random weird animal and then die from anaphylaxis would probably be my biggest concern.
This was along the lines I was thinking. Where do you get all those essential vitamins and minerals? Have they even evolved yet?
It's pretty much guaranteed.
Do we have any allergen data from the new world from when Europeans first arrived? I know diseases were a clear issue, but I don’t know about the food.
I was thinking something like a prion disease would get you. Some protein folded in a way that your body can replicate but will kill you eventually.
I mean honestly evolution of animals has barely taken effect. So there would be less toxins, bacteria, viruses, parasites. Literally less of everything.
My ancestors actually lived through the Cambrian period. So I think I should be okay
They also died there...
@@AustinThomasPhD Not all of them...
Cute
I guess technically the ones who lived through the exact moment in time when it suddenly became the Ordovician 😂 but maybe they didn't live long...
Then again, maybe they did have a much longer lifespan than us, who knows. Apparently we had much longer lifespans in the Permian (like a few hundred years).
Engagement activity: making earrings out of trilobyte exoskeletons.
Everybody's gangster, until the hallucigenia attaches itself to you.
broo i don’t want my three children to eat me 😭
im barely surviving right now
Felt that bro.
The comments on these are so funny
In the Cambrian no one has to pay rent...
If you could only bring one item... a blanket would be a big deal. It can be a sunshade tarp during the day, a towel when you get out of the water, collection bag for hauling food up to your cave, and bedroll at night. Plus, source of bandages/strips for wrapping injuries.
Plus one for Douglas Adams! Always bring a towel lol
Why not a loom or sewing machine? Then you could make a thousand blankets!
Rule the world with your blanket Empire!
You just deciphered the reason behind Douglas Adams' obsession with bringing a towel everywhere 😂
What fiber? There aren't any woody plants or hairy animals. You could use your own hair, but that's a limited resource.
Lead casket. I'd find a rapidly building delta with impressive flow rates, dig a deep pit, cover myself with as much mud as possible, and attempt to fossilize myself. I'm not much of a seafood fan anyway. You guys would all be talking about me right now~!
My plan for a Cambrian trip:
1. Locate the Cambrian location of one of the most notable fossil beds of this time.
2. Go to this spot.
3. Open the time travel pod long enough to drop something durable and obviously fashioned (my first thought is a stainless steel butter knife).
4. Return to the present.
5. Enjoy the chaos as paleontologists try to figure out how such an object could possibly have been found there.
Congratulations, you’re the reason the Burgess Shale exists
You monster 😂
It's the "Try not to eat the ancestor of all tetrapods" challenge. Getting vitamin C is one thing, not accidentally ending all of space-time is another.
Just eat arthropods why would you be trying to eat a 1 inch long fish anyways no meat on them bones
Maybe they swim in schools @@Gign--a
I’d survive because my wife, Anomalocaris, is there with me
(chappell roan)
@@kamm6001(crabble roan)
Hello dear.
(wake me up inside)
waint
I really appreciate Kallie's intros in these podcasts, so soothing, calming but also interesting. Thank you for your work!
Somebody REALLY needs to start a Nerd ASMR genre. I'd definitely do it if problems permitted.
I love her, she was the first I've listen to on this amazing channel 😊
They could easily be guided meditations.
@@jilliebelle - YEEEEEEEES!!!!!
I would totally watch if the whole thing was like the intro!!!
Being forced to eat seafood and no fruit sounds like a hell I want no part of 😅
My guess: my presence in the Cambrian would be very brief but my microbiome would destroy the world.
also, probiotic food wouldn't exist yet aswell, you would have to rely on your current gut microbiome for ever
I doubt your micro biome would destroy the world. It would still exist. Biologically though, your biome would drastically change future life on the planet.
Fart of mass destruction.
Rather than destroy the world, wouldnt it conquer it? At least initially? Super advanced cells compared to some of the ancient ones? Serious question
Its crazy that i have access to this level of quality content for nearly free
As long as you keep moving forward and destroying your enemies you could survive
bro chill🙏😭
2:57
Not if you have a seafood allergy.
Even if you die, even after you die
@@blueprairiedogShinzou wo sasageyo
Founding Titan spotted.
2:58
😄 I should have thought of that!!
Wait until Mikasa Ackerman ends the Titans
Shinzou wo sasageyo
@@roryoneill9444
Nope!
Mikasa Ackerman is going to realize that the hallugencia is from the Train of Thoughts of Shinji Ikari
I’ve been stranded is before.
The first problem is: Where am I going to sleep? Then it’s water. Then it’s food. You’ve got 3ish days for Water. Food is somewhere between a week and month. Sleep is a 24 hour problem and can sort of get figured out in the initial exploration of your surroundings if you’re lucky.
10:15 am, zooted, coffee in hand and now I'm in the Cambrian period ... Well That Escalated quickly 😂
Zooted
right, i feel unprepared
28:23 there's a chance you could find a (boiling) hot spring to cook your food in - if the rules allow you to pick where you get dropped off.
It's interesting to think that predation was probably, originally, an accident. But it was so advantageous that it became the other main energy gathering method.
Peace was never an option.
Makes sense. Prey animals usually have to graze all day long, constantly munching on things to get their energy….Why spend all day munching when you can get all that stored energy by gulping down the creature that was collecting all those stored calories for you.
My first thought is that without easy access to plants I would pray the algae would be rich with vitamin C, scurvy would be a slow and insidious killer, much like overconfidence.
Current algae has vitamin c, but not sure about ancient ones
“It’s a warm, wet world”
I’m already out
Regarding raw meat: what are the odds that any parasites (did parasites exist yet?) or diseases could infect you? Modern diseases and parasites co-evolved with us and largely came from domesticated animal diseases crossing over to humans. Raw meat from the Cambrian might be perfectly safe.
During this time parasites and some microbes could infect you. While it's drastically different from our own, bacteria and parasites did in fact exist even during the cambrian.
People can get parasites that aren't adapted to our bodies and can end deadly.
Some parasites are more harmful in the wrong host
Cysticercosis, is a parasitic infection caused by the pork tapeworm, Taenia solium. In humans, it makes cysts in the brain.
The odds are 100%.
@@grapheist612 ugh this trash site deleted my first comment. The pig tapeworm infects the human brain, instead of gut.
Sometimes it's worse when they didn't co evolve.
ahh hallucigenia memes, they're so nostalgic already
Why were there hallucigenia memes, and why did I miss them?
@@andrewfleenor7459 i dont know if ur aware of the anime series 'attack on titan' , but hallucigenia holds kind of an important role within the series (because the author finds subjects like these cool ig) and that led to a large amount of in-the-context-of-the-show memes during the run of the final season of the show.
So like a popular one is
"Hallucigenia couldn't move backwards, it could only keep moving forwards until all its enemies were destroyed" Because thats a very iconic character dialogue of the character associated with the hallucigenia.
Hope that helps
"Do they really know if that's a Mollusk?" 🤣🤣🤣 I feel so validated because sometimes I question taxonomy like this
I love your Could You Survive series. The longer format is very appropriate for this kind of discussion, and even with the speculations spicing things up nicely, plenty of great details about the period were brought to my attention. Thank you. Please keep doing these.
Thrilled to see 40-minute Eons. Thank you team! I love you guys. And a big shout-out to John Davidson Ng, and Steve.
This comment is under the Trilobites Guild. True Trilobite food for true Trilobites
I understood this reference.
Tenacious Trilobite
You could air/salt dry some stuff. Obtaining salt might be painfully slow if you can't build up dirt/sand shallow pools. Maybe you could farm algae mats this way as well? Then you could dry the mats and use for food or fire. Find some flint and a volcano for iron pyrite, then you at best might get smoldering smokey fire for smoked food.
If I could bring one item with me it would be either beans, potatoes, or some other caloric dense pioneer crop and hope they grow without proper soil.
You'd have to use the algae and tiny animals as fertilizer. Pretty much just shovel some of the shallow sea bed, let it dry, mix in the algae and make sure it doesn't get washed/blown away. Then you can have your potatoes.
@@magnolia1253no terrestrial microbes and fungi to break down organic matter into soil, though
Bill Wurtz bringing the Cambrian to the mainsteam with a single sung phrase. What a guy
Love bill wurtz
I'd be dead. So very, very dead.
The biggest thing is O2. After a time, you will become hypoxic and always running the risk of altitude sickness.
They mentioned
Well this is when oxygen first started to fill things up but yeah that would be a big problem and if it wasn't, fresh water would be a serious concern.
I feel like you'd get used to it.
I wonder what my impact on the environment would be. My gut bacteria alone could wipe out biotopes.
Yeah it would probably be best if we ever did time travel to do it with a machine that was fully sterilized. Of course even a chunk of DNA or RNA could be picked up and integrated into the genome of a creature that walked by so that could also change things😅
You'd probably be taken out by something microscopic as well, don't you worry
Keep fighting like the Founding Titan and you too can survive.
2:57
isnt the sun still a deadly laser at this point?
The diary entries around 24:20 reminded me of 'The Last Continent'.
Rincewind keeps a diary and it goes something like:
Probably Monday: Hot, Flies. Fell into waterhole.
5:59 i also realized, no coal. Because the carniferus period hasn't even happened yet. Let alone decayed
You can produce hydrogen from seawater
This video was a lot of fun! I giggled when you mentioned making earrings, cuz you never got around to talking about clothes, I started thinking about that when sunburns were mentioned. Im guessing they would be more severe because i imagine there is not much of an ozone layer. That does not sound comfortable to be naked in!!
Also, any kind of first aid is going to be incredibly difficult. There is nothing to make rope or sewing thread or splints. I dont know if there is sinew in any of the animals from that area, but the length would still be rather short. No pain killers, no surgical tools. Something as simple as a tourniquet is going to take quite a bit of planning ahead. Amputations would be basically impossible. Cauterizing wounds would certainly be difficult. At least chance of infection is probably way down!!
It would also be interesting to consider how your microbiome would interact with the environment. I bet fecal bacteria would thrive tremendously in those early waters, perhaps enough to devastate an entire local ecosystem. It would be imperative to keep your waste isolated - perhaps a separate pooping cave haha!
Considering all of that, as much as I would love to bring my kindle, i think i would need to take Douglass Adams' advice and bring a towel. Like, a really, REALLY big towel. Use it as a poncho, or a blanket, or pull some threads from it for stitches, rip off a strip for a tourniquet, use it as a knapsack for carrying, a mask for when you're in the cave with 3 weeks worth of human waste... yup. Big ol towel
Ooh actually, human waste is flammable. It releases some nasty chemicals, but depending on the use it could still be helpful
Our bacteria are probably also unable to affect the organisms from that time, so it might not be a problem!
I was thinking of clothes too, that would be hard. Dunno if proto-sea weed would have long enough fibers.
No internal skeleton=no sinew. Might still be stringy bits, though
@valkeakirahvi They could still potentially out compete the local bacteria that hasn't evolved as many defenses yet. Small things can make a big impact. Remember the Great Oxygenation Event. Also, I think it's less likely backwards for that to be true, since we are constantly evolving and building on top of old DNA. They contain the building blocks that we still retain in our cells today. But they haven't developed certain basic functional skills that we take for granted today. In this time, carnivory is only just beginning. The very first hint of a backbone is appearing. It's possible a generalized parasite from today could successfully take over an organism from back then because they already have traits and DNA that are included in the creatures that exist today, but we have those traits and a bunch of other added ones. Our DNA becomes more and more complex with each generation. Bacteria from back then haven't developed the traits to counter the tricks our bacteria know, but our bacteria now hasn't lost the ability to counter the tricks developed back then.
I totally get being vegetarian in the modern world, not eating any animal subject to modern farming...
But if you're subsistence living or you're in a survival situation, there's no cruelty in killing for food. It's just nature
No fuel for a fire, no soil, no life on land, just rocks. O2 levels half what we have now, is there Ozone or will the ultraviolet cook me? The place sounds like Hell.
On the first episode, i thought we were gonna get an hour long story like narration from Kallie.
I'm just petitioning for that, if its an option.
There's sun, there's seaweed and algae and sponges, provided you have a lens to start the fire since it's likely friction fires won't happen. You can dry them to start a fire. Although getting enough fuel for the fire to do anything like firing mud bricks might be a bit difficult. Trilobite shell roof tiles? 😅
do sea-creature poop also burns when dried? kinda hard to collect though.
Sea creature poop is basically water and sand lol
If they can find an oily creature they might be able to use it as fuel with the algae as tinder plus maybe some rocks could get a spark going
@@bigpurplepops i’m going by what aquaponics use, which generally are crawfish and tilapia, so there’s enough nitrates and phosphates to sustain plant life. and there are experiments trying to use fish poop in biogas digesters…
Forget snacks, sunscreen or spear shafts: I’m bringing toilet paper
Love when they get all excited making recipes with what they scrounge up.
Please continue this series! The exploration of time periods where our imaginations can run wild is a really amazing learning tool.
Can't be any harder than trying to survive on minimum wage work in America.
So it's hopeless if you're alone.
This whole series is just so Kallie can do awesome intro monologues
I only just discovered this channel but I want you guys to know that I go feral for this content
The narrator Kallie has the BEST gift a broadcaster could have. the 😊expressiveness, the vocal range and clarity of speech....IT CAN CATCH THE ATTENTION WITH ALL CALMNESS ...pushed me to listen and be attentive ton how she describes the Videos shown....
“One more competitor, you.”
*Me with my fishing rod and a bucket of hallucigenia* “I alone, am the honored one.”
just wait til those hallucigenia attach themselves to your spine
You made another?! I didn't expect this, I thought the previous one was a one off. The other one was so engaging and fun. Thank you for these.
2:01 i do my best
Of course I don’t have favorite Eons hosts, BUT YALL ARE MY ABSOLUTE FAVORITE EONS HOSTS!!! OMGatos, I love this edition of the pod/webcast so much. ✨💖✨
The cool thing about being the only manmal in the Cambrian is that i am basically a kaiju
No trees, no land plants to build shelter with. No wood to build fire. It would be difficult.
Warm climate means it won't be a death sentence to lack fire.
Yes, but I’m just built different.
The fact that most living things just died without leaving any trace is crazy, we could find crazy life forms there that we have no idea they even existed
Land jellies....
2:39 How I got my online handle.
dude hell yeah my dude keep it up ❤
This is exactly what me and my friends would do in high school except you’re actual scientists. Very excited for getting to the Mesozoic
I wouldn't survive the Cambrian. The sun is a deadly laser.
🎶 Not anymore, there's a blanket! 🎶
I'd survive if I can manage to stick a hallucigenia on my back.
I’m allergic to shellfish. Am I just dead?
That probably depends on which shellfish allergy you have. Some of them are to all shellfish, some of them are specifically to chitinous proteins which limits what you would react to by quite a lot
🗣️TATAKAE 2:57
PBS Eons remains the best channel there is, thank you for your great videos!
But one think keeps me thinking: Vitamines. I mean, there are some more Vitamins that humans need to survive. You won't get far without B1 or B12. And just hoping there will be some Vitamine C somewhere ... I don't think so.
Or what do we actually know about about what Vitamine came into being in which times? And how abundant was it?
They aren't molecules that survive, we don't know.
@@thekaxmax Maybe it could be possible by thinking about what functionalities those organisms needed? Because Vitamines are basically catalysts to provide certain functions for the cell or the organism. B1 for example is important for making the connection between neurons in mammals. If we know when this evolved, we might know when B1 appeared. I don't know if mollusks need B1 and if not, it might be very likely that in the Cambrian B1 simply didn't exist. Which would be VERY bad for any time traveller.
Most of that stuff is pretty basil, but if it helps any the reason humans tend to get deficient on these things aside from the fact that we lost the ability to manufacture our own is that we don't eat whole prey. If we ate whole prey a lot of the common vitamin deficiencies that we see today and in the last thousand years or so would not occur. Most of the vitamins are in the organs but of course that's also where the parasites are😅 and being infected by parasites can again cause malnutrition. Presumably though there would not be as many parasites that could infect us in the ancient past. We could still have our bodies freak out nuke us from novel exposures, but the parasites themselves probably wouldn't survive our digestive tracts so no problem eating the whole animal raw.
@@darcieclements4880 That is true for todays fauna. The question is: did the several vitamine-mechanics in animals or plants already evolve in the Cambrian?
Even if you brought seeds they wouldn’t grow since there’s no soil microbes.
I’d rather take my chances in the Triassic.
Style microbes? There's not even soil. The rock dust washes immediately into the sea and there's no gripping of moisture on land without plants.
@@darcieclements4880
Derp, thanks captain obvious.
These are the types of shows that I wish were on The Learning Channel or the The Discovery Channel.
I love the vibe y'all have. I could listen to you two geek out about science all day.
Ladies you are incredible. Great episode!
I'd survive for maybe 5 minutes before getting into a fight with an unruly group of trilobites and finding out very quickly I can't in-fact "take them."
Love the banter between these two!
This a fun exercise. I agree that there are probably loads of stuff that we couldn't even imagine because we have no fossils. Gotta take a camera!
Land jellies
3:45 Cambrian Period vs A Goth
Such an excellent way to teach this topic. I very much enjoyed this.
Not just calories, my big question would be vitamins. What about vitamin C for instance? Would Cambrian seaweed and/or seafood keep you from getting scurvy?
If I normally wore contacts, I would bring glasses instead. Contacts will only last a short time, but even with lots of scratches, glasses are better than no glasses and could last for years rather than a few months max for contacts.
Listen. I'm not going to survive until seasoning plants evolve.
All that seafood and no butter. I'd just lay down and die.
This would make an amazing movie! Stranded this far back in the past would make an amazing adventure :)
Yeee! Can’t wait for a schmoke sesh w this
Just got done with mine so time to survive the monster infested Cambrian period
Bruh
Honestly is there any other way to get blitzed
35:52 wow, few people who reference the twilight zone have actually ever seen it! Cheers! I’m also a geologist 💜 🖖
25:15 I know there are marine animals today that naturally produce compounds that act as sunscreens, perhaps you could find something like that in the Cambrian. After all, they would be dealing with the UV, too.
Probably everything in the shallows would have had sunscreen built in. You'd probably end up being pink green or blue if you smudged it on yourself as a lot of organisms would use the compounds as their blood and sunscreen at the same time because there wasn't a large diversity of bodily fluids 😅
The one thing I found frustrating: when it was mentioned that oxygen levels were lower and might leave you feeling like you were up in (current) mountains, I asked (rhetorically), "How low? What as the percentage?" They never said! Today's level is 21%, and Web search suggests (but only on a few hits) that it was 10%-40% of current levels, or 2-8%, and a suggestion that that's like 5000 m, which would be 16,000 feet.
Actually 8% is 7,7 km up in mountains and on Mt. Everest there's 6,9% O2. So no long party in Cambrian era without O2 masks.
Unless you're a stone mason, you're not making a shelter.
OMG keep these podcasts coming I love em so much already
You keep talking about caves, but I believe that most caves form in limestone, and limestone is mostly biogenic. Has there been enough time for large layers of limestone to form, rise above the oceans, and then decay to form caves?
Billions of years, actually.
@ExtremeMadnessX Yes, but would it be common enough to be able to form caves? If I'm not mistaken the creation of limestone is dominated by biologic processes. It seems unlikely to me
Yes, was thinking about that too. Maybe would have to build raw stone shelters. Stone piles with a slab on top.
Most of the geologic history of earth is pre-cambrian, but post-life. There had been a couple whole supercontinent cycles, presumably with photosynthesizing microbes for most of that. Wikipedia says that the oldest known limestone is 2.7B years old. No reason to think there were zero limestone caves.
And you don't need a deep cave to hide from the sun, so the non-limestone types of caves are probably fine. A simple overhang will often do it.
lavatubes? if they are close enough to volcanoes to get obsidian.
One thing that wasn't discussed much and would be a huge difference maker, is the gear that you get to go in with. If you get to go in with a full set of clothes, and some amphibious shoes (Keens or something). Then you have a much better chance of surviving a while. If you're going in stark naked, you're dead. Humans have made biological adaptations where we pretty much need materials to survive. A set of water shoes is going to be a huge deal protecting your feet from lacerations. In a world where binding materials don't exist, first aid is much more difficult and a laceration can be the end of you.
As a Geologist, my first question would be "How would I breathe?" Plants, of my memory is correct, didn't reach the surface until sometime in the Silurian period.
There's oxygen from sea plants, like algae. We get much of our oxygen from the ocean today as well.
Yeah there's some oxygen but I am really hesitant to believe that there is enough oxygen to live there more than a short amount of time, if at all. The massive amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is also probably going to be an issue. Finding fresh water could also be a pretty serious problem. It's always a serious problem but if you don't have vegetation to hold the water on the land it's a bigger one.
Actually the first... probably land plant spores in the fossil record date back to the late Cambrian so there could have been small rootless plants (proto-moss maybe?)
If you ever watched the movie "Evolution" from 2001 (with David Duchovny, you may know him from "X Files") - there's an animal that is modeled after Halucigenia. It has mouths on both ends and walks in either direction with no problems.
Of all these strange creatures, "who shall I eat"?
I bet humans would've thought the same thing looking at the dinosaurs of the Mesozoic era.
Dinosaurs would think that looking at us
this series is my favourite thing omg
I’d like to visit though. Such a fascinating epoch…
You mean period.
@@samuelterry6354 I do. Thank you for the correction.
This is beautiful, Kallie! And graphics and sound designers, like team in general!
But I love the speak - beautiful like the first "Journeys To The Microcosmos," but with this beautiful Kallie charm. I love it!
you would have to consider pathogens/ parasites and possible poison in some Cambrian critters, as well as how they would be caught anomalocaris likely wouldn't be reachable. also would the temperature not fluctuate in the night like a dessert does, how would you stay warm with no fire?
For the ‘stranded with nothing’ scenario, note that humans shed a lot of hair. It’s possible to spin our hair into twine-just a pain in the neck-so if you stayed long enough, you could indeed make a net with only your own body.
Fun fun fun educational podcast. I provided my own version of the Cambrian Explosion events, with a cosmic twist, in a song I put out a fair years ago, “Cambrian Explosion”, by Paul Keller. Have a listen (UA-cam and any media)if you get a chance. Oh. And one other thing, those graphics were amazing! Allows me to mentally travel back to that time period while also standing here in the kitchen make lasagna.
This is such a fun and effective way to remember characteristics of the period