From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt. Our colleague Nola is not here, but we'll be returning shortly. They called me Ben. We are joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission Control decads. Most importantly, you are you, You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. The abyss it said stairs back. Earlier this week, we explored the tragic story of the Thilasne Street named Tasmanian Tiger, and we received some great stories from our fellow conspiracy realist. Thank you to every one, especially to those of us living down under. Again, there have been no living tigers captured or living in captivity since the early nineteen thirties. And honestly, this was a depressing episode for you and me both, Matt, because we love animals, and we hang out with a kind of animal, the dog, which has specifically evolved to be cool with humans. It's nuts even down to like the way their eyebrow muscles move. They understand pointing, which is hard for a lot of other mammals some humans too, by the way. Uh, but we were able to end on an up note sort of. We did not use this word in our previous episode. But there is a new kid on the technology block. It's something that may fundamentally change the world in which you live. It is called d extinction. And to get to this we have to first understand extinction, what it is, and why it occurs, indeed, why it has to occur. Here are the facts. I think it's fair to say that that first off, as strange as it is to put it this way, extinction kind of gets a bad rap. I mean, it's definitely not a state you want to be in. You don't want to find yourself in extinction. But in order for species, you know, animal, plant, everything, even viral, you must have extinction if you are to have evolution, right, some things have to die off so that the stuff that works can live on and prosper. That's a well, that's that feels gross coming out of my mouth, but that's just the way the system functions as we understand it. Yeah, Well, put, extinction is the dark side of evolution and at a certain point. As you said, you cannot have one without the other. Extinctions, both of single species and mass extinctions of multiple living things have all occurred numerous times, way, way, way before mammal's ever hit the scene. They all occurred, Uh, definitely, way before the first ancestors of humans look down from the trees and said, let's get in that grass and stand up. What could go wrong? A lot of things, snake snake bite, snake bites, the moment of a species extinction, it's kind of hard to pin down, it turns out, and this is this feeds the fire of a lot of cryptid theories. You can generally say, okay, we'll call an animal extinct when the last individual of its species dies. And sometimes we can predict when this occurs. Uh. Let's say, for instance, if all the wild examples of an animal have died, and we know exactly how many are living in captivity, and then you know, often the as the population dwindles, the species overall will lose its ability to breed and reproduce. There will be one last, lone creature of its kind, and then we know the clock is ticking. But it can be tough to figure out exactly when something has died off, especially when we're talking about species with a large range, like you know, it would be and I don't want to be too dark here at the top, but it would be relatively easy to predict the extinction or to understand the extinction of a panda, like our earlier example from this week, because pandas live in an established range. Uh. The government of China knows how many pandas exist. The pandas that are in activity are still property of the Government of China. Contrast that with something that is everywhere, like rats or grackles. No, they're not everywhere, they're everywhere and often there. Yeah, no, yeah, you're you're absolutely right. And in the case of the Tasmanian tiger or the thilaccene, there are several places that are very much wild as in UH, open natural area where humans don't hang out all the time, where they could roam right or they could exist. That's one of the main reasons in our last episode people are so interested in finding perhaps one, you know, thilacene, or a sighting of a thilacene becomes so exciting because there are open, wild areas where they possibly could exist. If they didn't actually all fully go extinct. And it's to think about. It's weird to think about. And this problem leads us to the holy grail of your trusty crypto zoologists, a phenomenon known as Lazarus toxa. Lazarus taxa, Lazarus taxa. Whatever you are given, you're given accent. Maybe this phenomenon occurs when a species that was presumed to be extinct suddenly reappears in the fossil record. It can happen a couple of different ways. It can happen when paleontologists discover more recent fossils that indicate a creature lived longer than they thought it had in the past. Uh, and that creature could still be extinct and have lazarous taxa. You know what I mean, It just lasted several thousand years longer than they thought it did, Lazarus tax It can also happen with living organisms. We think they are gone, only to discover they've successfully survived, like you pointed out, often in remote places with minimal human presence. Well, it's like what we saw with the Ceila camp right. I think that's the name of the fish that we rediscovered. Oh my gosh, they are still around. We didn't think they were. That's the living organism version of Lazarus taxa. And then I guess what Barry Brooks was talking about in our previous episode would be more of the like being rediscovered in the fossil record if we find some remains that actually died out in the nineties or nineties. Yeah, exactly, And those are great examples. And on the wings of those fantastic examples, let's let's crash, let's all have a bad time together. It's it's time for some hard, unpleasant facts. Extinction is not just a widespread phenomenon. It is a tremendously successful process. It has hit almost every single kind of living thing on the planet through out the entirety of human history. Folks. Research indicates, as we're recording this, that more than of all species ever have gone extinct. For a ballpark cocktail Napkin estimate, that is more than five billion unique kinds of life forms that until quite recently we thought we would never see again until scientific necromancic. No, No, that's not it. How's this? How do we call that? The extinction decided to be a thing? So long long, super long crazy long story short, I don't even know how many thousands of words it is. Evolution happens through this thing, this process called speciation. This is what we referred to last episode. Where a new variety of one organism, uh like, there's a modification to that DNA in some ways, some small mutation, and it becomes a new thing. And this organism rises, it thrives, while the very similar organism that doesn't have that mutation dies off because they don't have that new adaptation that the other one has that allows it to continue on or you know, get food just a little more easily than it's very similar cousin exactly. Yet, new varieties of organisms will arise and they will thrive when their adaptations allow them to find and exploit a given ecological niche. There, that's a much better way of putting it. Well, they're ecological No, it's perfect there, they're ecological niche. If we want to loosely define it, just think of there are a lot of nuances here, but just think of it for our purposes today as an organisms overall relationship to resources like food, and their overall interaction with enemies and competitors, and these species like you said they got instinct when those adaptations either no longer help them navigate a changing environment, or when they can survive because they're outmatched by competition. So in our previous story on the Thighlas scene, we saw one very big difference between their new competitors and them. The wild dog had humans on its side, and having humans on its side made a big difference in the way things played out. But this process of evolution and its evil twin extinction was always part of the circle of life and death. If species never went extinct, this world would be a very different place. Humans would not be in the game because they would have never had the opportunity to evolve into their current ecological niche the one where they use all the resources. They use all the resources, they kill everything else, and then they have an alpha to Newman, what me worry moments when the bill comes due. But this is so. This is basically an explanation of the necessity of extinction, even though it is a brutal, tragic thing. It is necessary for progress for the world to continue on. But the extinction pattern is not restricted to a single species case. It's not just one light going out and another coming on. It's not one light going out one after the other. We're gonna pause for a quick word from our sponsors, and then we're going to going to go big with it, real big. Okay, we're back, Matt. You remember that video game Mass Effect? Do I remember it? Yeah? Man, I do? Wow, Okay, I've never played it. What's Mass Effect about? It's the best video game series that ever been created besides probably elden Ring. No wait no, it's one of the best, though, for sure, by or Aware. Thank you if you're listening. Uh. It's about the human species that has evolved quite a bit, uh technologically mostly, and they are exploring space because of some very ancient technology that was left behind on purpose for intelligent species to discover once they've hit a certain technological level, and then the humans join up with all the other species that are at that same level or higher, and they're working together in a galactic way. Man. You know, there's some problems. The Krogans were not great, so there that was a whole thing there. The Torrians are awesome, but they're pretty pretty scary dangerous anyway, you only just do I could do five minutes on Mass Effect if you want me to we we might need it. We definitely need the levity because I realized that I hadn't ever asked you about mass effect, and I have not played it myself. But the reason, the entire reason I was asking was due to a tangent. What we're talking about next is the idea of mass extinctions distinction. Yeah, yeah, not as fun as mass effect. Extinctions can happen on varying levels of scale, and the rarest most widespread in terms of effect. Type of extinction is known as a mass extinction or a biotic crisis, which sounds like a name of a hardcore band. This is the real end of the world as we know. It's stuff. We're talking about, a rapid decrease in Earth's biodiversity overall. An asteroid hurdling from the outer dark hits the planet head on, triggering wave of cataclysms that are unprecedented for the living creatures that are unlikely enough to witness this. A dinosaur looks to the heavens, sees only fire, and then darkness and then nothing. While these are getting rare, they have to find our understanding of life on Earth. Now, Look, we can't tell you exactly how it went down right. We can't show your video footage of the asteroid hitting or what occurred in the Proterozoic era or earlier eons. Uh, you know, because most everything got wiped out. And I don't think they had cameras at the time. You know, I can't prove that cameras didn't exist to then, but there's certainly no proof of it. Um. That's a weird way to say that. Um. But seriously, all living organisms at that time where either microbial or soft bodied, and it appears just through the records that we can see by basically going deep into the earth and looking at the layers, Uh, that extinction rates were pretty low back then when the when the creatures, the organisms were a little more simple and small before they got larger and more complex. Um. Because again they did, and that's when the extinction rates seemed to be higher. Because and again it might have to do with us just being able to more easily observe the larger, more complex organisms the remains of those organisms. Uh, But the science tells us that this is true. Yeah. And the part about being microbial or soft bodied is important because soft bodied organisms are going to decay much more easily, so nass extinction two. There's a guy named Jack Sepkowski and a guy named David m. Route, and they wrote a legendary paper seminal work articulating five mass extinctions. Just we can round robin these who think and run through them pretty quickly. Uh, in order and chronological order. It goes like this. The Ordovician Silurian extinction events, which collectively are the second biggest mass die off in Earth history of all species bit the dust jeez, and then comes in the Late Devonian extinction. We're in at least seventy percent of all living species at the time we're taken out. And then we go to the Permian Triassic extinction events. That's where of all marine species and an estimated seventy percent of land species said bye bye. Another similar one is the Triassic and Jurassic extinction events. There we're looking at seventy to seventy five percent of all species dying. Then comes in the Cretaceous Paleogene extinction event. We're in again seventy five percent of all species said bye bye. And this was a big win for the humans because guess what, mammals and birds somehow through that crazy extinction time made it through birds and mammals. They became the things, the dominant things, the big ish things on the planet that just took over. And uh oh dude, yeah, this is what you make a good point in the outline here Ben, deep in the ocean, there is a different vibe going on. Oh yeah, that might be its own episode. Yes, I I want lovecraft stuff to be true. I wanted so much, so ardently. Uh yeah, So we've outlined these five mass extinctions. There are a ton of caveats here. History is not as cut and dried as a textbook. There are no definite lines of demarcation. Uh, there are differences in calculating methods and so on. But still this is all inspiring, terrifying stuff. It's the stuff of myth and legend. It is as if some ruthless, unknowable god wiped the white board clean again and again on a whim. And yeah, you know what, don't worry, folks, It gets worse. It gets way worse, because people went back to this idea after the release of that landmark paper and they found a sixth mass extinction. If you had fomo about the first five, no sweat, zero perspiration, the sixth mass extinction is happening now. It is do entirely to human activity. It is called the Holocene extinction. Extinctions have occurred it over one thousand times the background extinction rate since nineteen hundred. The rate is increasing. Things are, in a very very real way, going to get worse before they get better. All right, well, hey, thanks for listening. We hope you have a great rest of your day. No, but this is true. I can't even tell you how many times we've we've made that statement then, not not exactly how you just put it, but that we are living through a mass extinction event right now. We've said that on the show numerous times because it is pretty terrifying, but it's reality, and at some point we're gonna have to just kind of come to terms with that or decide that it's time to do something about it. Hopefully we will. Maybe we will will. Yeah, humans are great at group work. I got you. Uh so, so there's another There's something else interesting here. The same spirit of technological innovation that is arguably damned to the planet may allow human beings to save parts of it. This is not science fiction. People may just be able to bring extinct animals back to life through this process called the extinction. But there's another plot twist here. Not everyone is thrilled by this idea. Here's where it gets crazy. So now that we know the whimsical, delightful ins and outs of extinction, we can do a little bit of clever reverse engineering. D Extinction is the process of creating organisms that either closely resemble an extinct species kind of like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, or are genuine living examples of an actual extinct species. And there's more than one way to do it. Yeah, the first one is pretty popular. Humans have been trying their hand at this for quite a while, the concept of cloning, and right now it has a lot of problems. Okay, what we get it. Cloning is cool, It's just got some issues the technologies there. And there are a ton of different types of animals that have been produced through cloning. A lot of them have been livestock animals and you know, just species that humanity uses for scientific experimentation quite often. Yea, horses, pigs, sheep. The most famous was Dolly the sheep, right, yea, But we've we've talked about it pretty recent you on one of our listener mail, no strange news episodes like pet cloning, which is a thing now. Yes, but let let's talk how do you How do you actually clone something? The process of it? Yeah, so the house stuff works portion of today's episode cloning. It can be done by taking the nucleus from a preserved cell of an extinct species and kind of robbing the cradle. You take that preserved cell and you swap it into an egg that doesn't have a nucleus, and it's an egg of that species nearest living relative. And you take that egg and you insert it into a host from the nearest living relative. And this you can already obviously, folks see a couple of issues with this. This method can only be used when a preserved cell is available, meaning that it is most feasible when you're talking about recently extinct species. This is also old tech. Uh. It's been in use in some form or another since the nineteen fifties, which may surprise a lot of people, but it has those clear limits, and they're also concerns about things going wrong in the cloning process. You don't have to have seen that Michael Keaton vehicle multiplicity to know that there are dangers of making a copy of a copy of a copy. I think, okay, that's the right fielm. Okay, good. So there's another one. There's another way to try to de extinct something. It's quite exciting, it's a little scary. It's called genome editing. We talked about it multiple times, multiple episodes. But for anyone who hasn't had a chance to check those out yet, get the to the podcast platform of your choice. But we've got your back. Here's a quick and dirty on genome editing. We're talking about a thing called crisper slash cast systems and particul killer is something called crisper cast nine. It was originally discovered as part of the bacterial immune system. You take viral DNA you injected into bacterium and it becomes incorporated into the bacterial chromosome at these very specific regions. Um they're called clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, otherwise known as crisper tada. Yeah, it has nothing to do with something being crisp or not, like having the attributes of crispinus. Uh. Well, it's really interesting. So now since the viral DNA is inside that chromosome, it gets transcribed into r N A ribonucleic acid, and it's pretty crazy. Once once that happens, it becomes RNA. Uhh. This thing, the crisper, the cast nine that we just described to you, it binds to the RNA and this cast nine can somehow recognize this weird extra thing that's on there, and it then cleaves it off and in a way, the cast nine protein. You can almost think of it like a knife for scissors or something that's going to break apart, cut away this extra new thing. You know what it's like. It's like um an editing program like Audition that we use to record our podcast, or maybe Final Cut or one of these video editing pieces of software where you really are editing things. But in this case, you know, it's not audio video, it's life, it's t n A, it's RNA. It's crazy. Yes, yeah, and shout out to the discoverers of crisper, Jennifer Dodna and Emmanuel Sharpentier. Uh this yeah. They they rightly won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, by the way, just eight years after they discovered it. Yes, and like Einstein, I would say that they are you should not hold them responsible for whatever terrible things humans do with it um. So what they found is miraculous. There's no way around it. Sky's the limit you can edit living things. So how does this apply to the extinction? Well, by using living cells from a closely related species, you can start messing with the de extinction process on a genetic level. You can edit germ cells directly, such that the egg and the sperm that are produced by an extant parents species produce offspring of the extinct species. There's one big disadvantage for the purest in the crowd. This results in a hybrid creature. It's not quite the extinct species from days of or But because it's possible to sequence and assemble the genomes of these extinct organisms from very highly degraded tissue, it's it's a little more efficacious than cloning, especially when we're talking about older organisms. It allows you to pursue de extinction in a wider array of species, including some that don't have any well preserved remains. The issue is there's a limit to that. The older the tissue is, the more fragmented the DNA at holds becomes. Meaning the jigsaw puzzle of the gene becomes increasingly more complex, so it's not perfect. Cloning and genome editing are not perfect, but they are amazing technologies. We're gonna pause for a word from our sponsor, and we're gonna return with some other ways people are pursuing the extinction, one of which arguably doesn't need humans at all. All right, we've returned. If you, like us, are a dog lover or a lover of domestic animals, you know that humans have been modifying dogs, genetically experimenting with them for a quite a long time, and they've done it through selective breeding. That's the reason, ultimately, that your French bulldog does not look like a wolf. That's the reason that Chihuahuas don't look like wolves. And that's the reason all these other all these other animals look so very different. There's another kind of selective breeding that can help with the extinction. It's called back breeding. Instead of breeding an animal for traits that you like or think are cool, you can breed them for atavistic traits, for ancestral traits that may have taken a back burner over are the great grind of evolution. So okay, let me just see how I understand this been it is. It's it is selective breeding, but it is attempting to gain back old traits, like down the genetic line, Yeah, and to make them manifest. It's it's a way of aggressively and mindfully like tracking genetic traits of breeding population extant species and then essentially making them reproduce with specific individuals until those um those other traits, those older traits from the extinct species start to present. You could tell this one also has some issues because the trait you're looking for has to already exist somewhere in the extant population, you know what I mean. So like this is I'm shooting from the hip here. This is kind of loose, but if you wanted to break a lot of ethical laws, you could, for instance, go to parts of the world where people have a higher than average percentage of Neanderthal DNA. There are no living Neanderthals, but their legacy remains, and certainly it remains with in you. Odds are if you're listening to this show, you have a likelihood of having some small percentage of Neanderthal DNA. So the idea with backbreeding here, just put very loosely, is that if you could convince people to participate, or dark side of mat science force them to participate. Then over time you may possibly be able to breed something that is increasingly close to the Neanderthals of old. It still won't be the same, because while you can potentially recreate or re express certain traits, it's genetically not going to be the exact organ is um that you seek to resurrect. It'll just be very much like it. It'll be like the Etsy version of that, or the Wish version of that. I can't remember how that joke goes. This is the cosplay version. It's it's not quite cosplay, but yeah, it's not quite. Yeah, yeah, it's like that looks a lot like Sonic the Hedgehog, but I don't think it's Sonic, you know, um, but it's still is still closer than then it would have been when at the population Spaceline. And then there's something else that we teased before the break, which is a kind of the extinction the extinction asterisk that does not actually need technology and it does not actually need humans to work. It's something called iterative evolution. Yes, it are of evolution. This thing is fascinating to me. So in this case, you have a species that does in fact you're extinct. Let's say the thilacene, and the philocene still has some very similar cousins. From an evolutionary perspective, those continue to exist. They are breeding like crazy, they've got thriving populations, and eventually, at some point over time, one of those or a small group of that species then starts exhibiting traits that the philacine had, and then they continue breeding and breeding and breeding, and then you get another philacine like or or very very similar philacine, a new version of a thilacene that isn't quite thilacene but is very very close. Yeah, and this is not so. People often tend to think of species as a relatively static life form, but they are all, like every other living thing there, works in progress, and thanks to iterative evolution, it is possible for a species to evolve to the same being at multiple points. Trippy. I know. The best way to understand this maybe is it is a specific example. So one of the most extreme famous examples of this is a humble little bird called the white throated rail. The white throated rail is not the most impressive of birds. It's about the size of a chicken. They can't fly, it can't make a lot of it can't do a lot of the cool things that birds do. But it still has a lot of the disadvantages of being a bird. It's a bird without bird powers, That's what I'm saying. So it is the it's the only flightless bird in the Indian Ocean, and once upon a time research found it had gone extinct, but thanks to iterative evolution, without the help of humans, it came back. They it evolved in the same way multiple times, at different times from the same ancestor. This stuff was in the Zoological Journal of the Linnaean Society, and in two separate occasions, two separate instances, tens of thousands of years apart, a rail species was able to colonize this island called Aldebra and then evolved to become flightless on both occasions. So it just did it again. It just did it again. It just came back after it that, you know what I mean. It went extinct and it said not today, and then ten thousand years later it was back in the game. So yeah, so what is this is extraordinarily rare, of course, but it is possible that things can be extinct themselves given enough time. One of the big downers about this from the somewhat selfish human perspective is that humans don't known. Humans don't currently have the lifespan that would be necessary to monitor the entirety of this process in real time. But still, it's comforting to know that even without human beings, Earth kind of has its own back pocket way to cheat extinction. I guess a glib way to put it, but kind of cool, right, that's you know, I think we both we both agree that's cool. It's amazing, you know what I mean. But with that in mind, it might surprise some of us in the audience today to learn that not everybody is on board with the extinction. They have some problems with experts have some problems with it, and as wild as it sounds, they make some really really good points. Uh, Like, Okay, mammoths. Everybody's excited about mammoth's coming back, whether it's through cloning, genomic editing, what have you. Mammoths, for example, evolved to live in an environment that in many cases is no longer the same today, so they could come back on the scene, be released in the wild, and function effectively as invasive species we can have on everybody. Like we thought the mammoths were gone. Oh run, Yeah, and they're functioning away too well. And they also are breeding way too much. Uh yikes, Oh here comes that giant heard of mammoths again. Uh everybody, everybody get off the road. They're back again. Um, it could be a really bad situation. Yeah, I can imagine that. And you know, think about the Philo scene. If you were able to successfully bring them back through this process, they are a predator species depending on where they end up thriving, if you did bring them back or perhaps you know an island like Tasmania that they recolonize. Um, it could spell disaster, serious disaster if they're gone, If they're actually gone, I'm just holding out hope because because of that paper. But yes, so you know, Ben, we took this out in our previous episode, Barry Brooke person we were speaking about last episode. We we took it out. But you made this point, Ben, that he is saying they're extinct, right, Yes, yeah, he and his team are saying that the thoughtless scene is overwhelmingly likely to be extinct. Uh. They're the revelatory parts of their research concerned the time frame of that extinction, which again could be difficult to tell depending on the range of an animal. So yeah, still they are saying in that paper there's this tiny, tiny, tiny chance, and I will take it. Dude. Uh but if okay, so all right with the thoughtless an example, let's say they're de extincted, they may not be able well, ad extincted animal may not be able to survive in the natural world, especially if they went extinct a very long time ago, like, for instance, a life form that lived when the chemical composition of the atmosphere was different. Then they wouldn't be able to vibe really well here in And then also this could lead to the extinction of other living species, because what if you bring back some predators from the days of yore and they just go ham, just go hard, because this new world may be unfamiliar to them, But there are a lot of soft creatures around that have lost the adaptations that allowed them to survive when this predator had its first go around the sun. Yeah, those white throated rails aren't gonna fare very well if philocenes are just run around and the rails can't fly. Still, yeah, and dialacenes love eating birds. Man, they'll get down on an emu. H. So, so the the next problem is that and this is this is weird to think about, but it is a valley concern. What if you go to all this trouble bringing an entire species back from the grave, and you don't bother changing the factors that led to their extinction in the first place, and then eventually they just go extinct again, all that work for nothing. That's a bummer, right, And that's not even counting the idea that new diseases could wipe out ad extinctive creature. And there was one other point that conservationists brought up, which I feel like we should mention, and maybe we should end on this because this leads us to a bigger conversation. De extinction at this point is crazy expensive. Imagine a number. It's higher than that, so much so that conservationists are asking, and I want to say, what you think about this, man, because we didn't talk about this yet. Off air conservation as are saying, you know what, we are in the sixth grade mass extinction. We're in an actual biotic crisis. A lot of living things are gonna die soon. Maybe we should focus on keeping those things alive before we start trying to bring back just a couple of really expensive ones, right, I mean, what do you think about that logic? It's not near as exciting of a headline, but it feels like a good point. Yeah, I mean, certainly we should be focusing the vast amount of our resources on keeping species alive, including humans. That would be great if we could do that somehow, I don't know how. It's not like we've just got you know, several hundred people with just billions and billions of dollars at their disposal. They could save the planet or something. Yeah. Yeah, but but it's I mean, it's a question that's tough to answer. The reality of this is that there's more to the concept of the extinction then you might initially assume. Certainly more than we initially assumed. But it is real that we are living in a world where you may one day see a mammoth, you may one day see a thihlasy. And you know what, shout out to everybody who says, hey, Ben Matt Michig control, I already did see his thilasy. You know what I mean? Read the email, Uh that if If you are one of those people, we can't wait to hear from you. We want to hear your take on the controversy of the extinction. Want to hear also whether you think any animal will actually be brought back in one of these ways, aside from iterative evolution, which again doesn't need humans. All you have to do is hit us up online. We try to be easy to find yes on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. We are Conspiracy Stuff. Our page on Facebook that you can find and talk with conspiracy realists us like yourself, is called Here's where It Gets Crazy. Check that out on Instagram where are a Conspiracy Stuff Show? 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From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt. Our colleague Nola is not here, but we'll be returning shortly. They called me Ben. We are joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission Control decads. Most importantly, you are you, You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. The abyss it said stairs back. Earlier this week, we explored the tragic story of the Thilasne Street named Tasmanian Tiger, and we received some great stories from our fellow conspiracy realist. Thank you to every one, especially to those of us living down under. Again, there have been no living tigers captured or living in captivity since the early nineteen thirties. And honestly, this was a depressing episode for you and me both, Matt, because we love animals, and we hang out with a kind of animal, the dog, which has specifically evolved to be cool with humans. It's nuts even down to like the way their eyebrow muscles move. They understand pointing, which is hard for a lot of other mammals some humans too, by the way. Uh, but we were able to end on an up note sort of. We did not use this word in our previous episode. But there is a new kid on the technology block. It's something that may fundamentally change the world in which you live. It is called d extinction. And to get to this we have to first understand extinction, what it is, and why it occurs, indeed, why it has to occur. Here are the facts. I think it's fair to say that that first off, as strange as it is to put it this way, extinction kind of gets a bad rap. I mean, it's definitely not a state you want to be in. You don't want to find yourself in extinction. But in order for species, you know, animal, plant, everything, even viral, you must have extinction if you are to have evolution, right, some things have to die off so that the stuff that works can live on and prosper. That's a well, that's that feels gross coming out of my mouth, but that's just the way the system functions as we understand it. Yeah, Well, put, extinction is the dark side of evolution and at a certain point. As you said, you cannot have one without the other. Extinctions, both of single species and mass extinctions of multiple living things have all occurred numerous times, way, way, way before mammal's ever hit the scene. They all occurred, Uh, definitely, way before the first ancestors of humans look down from the trees and said, let's get in that grass and stand up. What could go wrong? A lot of things, snake snake bite, snake bites, the moment of a species extinction, it's kind of hard to pin down, it turns out, and this is this feeds the fire of a lot of cryptid theories. You can generally say, okay, we'll call an animal extinct when the last individual of its species dies. And sometimes we can predict when this occurs. Uh. Let's say, for instance, if all the wild examples of an animal have died, and we know exactly how many are living in captivity, and then you know, often the as the population dwindles, the species overall will lose its ability to breed and reproduce. There will be one last, lone creature of its kind, and then we know the clock is ticking. But it can be tough to figure out exactly when something has died off, especially when we're talking about species with a large range, like you know, it would be and I don't want to be too dark here at the top, but it would be relatively easy to predict the extinction or to understand the extinction of a panda, like our earlier example from this week, because pandas live in an established range. Uh. The government of China knows how many pandas exist. The pandas that are in activity are still property of the Government of China. Contrast that with something that is everywhere, like rats or grackles. No, they're not everywhere, they're everywhere and often there. Yeah, no, yeah, you're you're absolutely right. And in the case of the Tasmanian tiger or the thilaccene, there are several places that are very much wild as in UH, open natural area where humans don't hang out all the time, where they could roam right or they could exist. That's one of the main reasons in our last episode people are so interested in finding perhaps one, you know, thilacene, or a sighting of a thilacene becomes so exciting because there are open, wild areas where they possibly could exist. If they didn't actually all fully go extinct. And it's to think about. It's weird to think about. And this problem leads us to the holy grail of your trusty crypto zoologists, a phenomenon known as Lazarus toxa. Lazarus taxa, Lazarus taxa. Whatever you are given, you're given accent. Maybe this phenomenon occurs when a species that was presumed to be extinct suddenly reappears in the fossil record. It can happen a couple of different ways. It can happen when paleontologists discover more recent fossils that indicate a creature lived longer than they thought it had in the past. Uh, and that creature could still be extinct and have lazarous taxa. You know what I mean, It just lasted several thousand years longer than they thought it did, Lazarus tax It can also happen with living organisms. We think they are gone, only to discover they've successfully survived, like you pointed out, often in remote places with minimal human presence. Well, it's like what we saw with the Ceila camp right. I think that's the name of the fish that we rediscovered. Oh my gosh, they are still around. We didn't think they were. That's the living organism version of Lazarus taxa. And then I guess what Barry Brooks was talking about in our previous episode would be more of the like being rediscovered in the fossil record if we find some remains that actually died out in the nineties or nineties. Yeah, exactly, And those are great examples. And on the wings of those fantastic examples, let's let's crash, let's all have a bad time together. It's it's time for some hard, unpleasant facts. Extinction is not just a widespread phenomenon. It is a tremendously successful process. It has hit almost every single kind of living thing on the planet through out the entirety of human history. Folks. Research indicates, as we're recording this, that more than of all species ever have gone extinct. For a ballpark cocktail Napkin estimate, that is more than five billion unique kinds of life forms that until quite recently we thought we would never see again until scientific necromancic. No, No, that's not it. How's this? How do we call that? The extinction decided to be a thing? So long long, super long crazy long story short, I don't even know how many thousands of words it is. Evolution happens through this thing, this process called speciation. This is what we referred to last episode. Where a new variety of one organism, uh like, there's a modification to that DNA in some ways, some small mutation, and it becomes a new thing. And this organism rises, it thrives, while the very similar organism that doesn't have that mutation dies off because they don't have that new adaptation that the other one has that allows it to continue on or you know, get food just a little more easily than it's very similar cousin exactly. Yet, new varieties of organisms will arise and they will thrive when their adaptations allow them to find and exploit a given ecological niche. There, that's a much better way of putting it. Well, they're ecological No, it's perfect there, they're ecological niche. If we want to loosely define it, just think of there are a lot of nuances here, but just think of it for our purposes today as an organisms overall relationship to resources like food, and their overall interaction with enemies and competitors, and these species like you said they got instinct when those adaptations either no longer help them navigate a changing environment, or when they can survive because they're outmatched by competition. So in our previous story on the Thighlas scene, we saw one very big difference between their new competitors and them. The wild dog had humans on its side, and having humans on its side made a big difference in the way things played out. But this process of evolution and its evil twin extinction was always part of the circle of life and death. If species never went extinct, this world would be a very different place. Humans would not be in the game because they would have never had the opportunity to evolve into their current ecological niche the one where they use all the resources. They use all the resources, they kill everything else, and then they have an alpha to Newman, what me worry moments when the bill comes due. But this is so. This is basically an explanation of the necessity of extinction, even though it is a brutal, tragic thing. It is necessary for progress for the world to continue on. But the extinction pattern is not restricted to a single species case. It's not just one light going out and another coming on. It's not one light going out one after the other. We're gonna pause for a quick word from our sponsors, and then we're going to going to go big with it, real big. Okay, we're back, Matt. You remember that video game Mass Effect? Do I remember it? Yeah? Man, I do? Wow, Okay, I've never played it. What's Mass Effect about? It's the best video game series that ever been created besides probably elden Ring. No wait no, it's one of the best, though, for sure, by or Aware. Thank you if you're listening. Uh. It's about the human species that has evolved quite a bit, uh technologically mostly, and they are exploring space because of some very ancient technology that was left behind on purpose for intelligent species to discover once they've hit a certain technological level, and then the humans join up with all the other species that are at that same level or higher, and they're working together in a galactic way. Man. You know, there's some problems. The Krogans were not great, so there that was a whole thing there. The Torrians are awesome, but they're pretty pretty scary dangerous anyway, you only just do I could do five minutes on Mass Effect if you want me to we we might need it. We definitely need the levity because I realized that I hadn't ever asked you about mass effect, and I have not played it myself. But the reason, the entire reason I was asking was due to a tangent. What we're talking about next is the idea of mass extinctions distinction. Yeah, yeah, not as fun as mass effect. Extinctions can happen on varying levels of scale, and the rarest most widespread in terms of effect. Type of extinction is known as a mass extinction or a biotic crisis, which sounds like a name of a hardcore band. This is the real end of the world as we know. It's stuff. We're talking about, a rapid decrease in Earth's biodiversity overall. An asteroid hurdling from the outer dark hits the planet head on, triggering wave of cataclysms that are unprecedented for the living creatures that are unlikely enough to witness this. A dinosaur looks to the heavens, sees only fire, and then darkness and then nothing. While these are getting rare, they have to find our understanding of life on Earth. Now, Look, we can't tell you exactly how it went down right. We can't show your video footage of the asteroid hitting or what occurred in the Proterozoic era or earlier eons. Uh, you know, because most everything got wiped out. And I don't think they had cameras at the time. You know, I can't prove that cameras didn't exist to then, but there's certainly no proof of it. Um. That's a weird way to say that. Um. But seriously, all living organisms at that time where either microbial or soft bodied, and it appears just through the records that we can see by basically going deep into the earth and looking at the layers, Uh, that extinction rates were pretty low back then when the when the creatures, the organisms were a little more simple and small before they got larger and more complex. Um. Because again they did, and that's when the extinction rates seemed to be higher. Because and again it might have to do with us just being able to more easily observe the larger, more complex organisms the remains of those organisms. Uh, But the science tells us that this is true. Yeah. And the part about being microbial or soft bodied is important because soft bodied organisms are going to decay much more easily, so nass extinction two. There's a guy named Jack Sepkowski and a guy named David m. Route, and they wrote a legendary paper seminal work articulating five mass extinctions. Just we can round robin these who think and run through them pretty quickly. Uh, in order and chronological order. It goes like this. The Ordovician Silurian extinction events, which collectively are the second biggest mass die off in Earth history of all species bit the dust jeez, and then comes in the Late Devonian extinction. We're in at least seventy percent of all living species at the time we're taken out. And then we go to the Permian Triassic extinction events. That's where of all marine species and an estimated seventy percent of land species said bye bye. Another similar one is the Triassic and Jurassic extinction events. There we're looking at seventy to seventy five percent of all species dying. Then comes in the Cretaceous Paleogene extinction event. We're in again seventy five percent of all species said bye bye. And this was a big win for the humans because guess what, mammals and birds somehow through that crazy extinction time made it through birds and mammals. They became the things, the dominant things, the big ish things on the planet that just took over. And uh oh dude, yeah, this is what you make a good point in the outline here Ben, deep in the ocean, there is a different vibe going on. Oh yeah, that might be its own episode. Yes, I I want lovecraft stuff to be true. I wanted so much, so ardently. Uh yeah, So we've outlined these five mass extinctions. There are a ton of caveats here. History is not as cut and dried as a textbook. There are no definite lines of demarcation. Uh, there are differences in calculating methods and so on. But still this is all inspiring, terrifying stuff. It's the stuff of myth and legend. It is as if some ruthless, unknowable god wiped the white board clean again and again on a whim. And yeah, you know what, don't worry, folks, It gets worse. It gets way worse, because people went back to this idea after the release of that landmark paper and they found a sixth mass extinction. If you had fomo about the first five, no sweat, zero perspiration, the sixth mass extinction is happening now. It is do entirely to human activity. It is called the Holocene extinction. Extinctions have occurred it over one thousand times the background extinction rate since nineteen hundred. The rate is increasing. Things are, in a very very real way, going to get worse before they get better. All right, well, hey, thanks for listening. We hope you have a great rest of your day. No, but this is true. I can't even tell you how many times we've we've made that statement then, not not exactly how you just put it, but that we are living through a mass extinction event right now. We've said that on the show numerous times because it is pretty terrifying, but it's reality, and at some point we're gonna have to just kind of come to terms with that or decide that it's time to do something about it. Hopefully we will. Maybe we will will. Yeah, humans are great at group work. I got you. Uh so, so there's another There's something else interesting here. The same spirit of technological innovation that is arguably damned to the planet may allow human beings to save parts of it. This is not science fiction. People may just be able to bring extinct animals back to life through this process called the extinction. But there's another plot twist here. Not everyone is thrilled by this idea. Here's where it gets crazy. So now that we know the whimsical, delightful ins and outs of extinction, we can do a little bit of clever reverse engineering. D Extinction is the process of creating organisms that either closely resemble an extinct species kind of like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, or are genuine living examples of an actual extinct species. And there's more than one way to do it. Yeah, the first one is pretty popular. Humans have been trying their hand at this for quite a while, the concept of cloning, and right now it has a lot of problems. Okay, what we get it. Cloning is cool, It's just got some issues the technologies there. And there are a ton of different types of animals that have been produced through cloning. A lot of them have been livestock animals and you know, just species that humanity uses for scientific experimentation quite often. Yea, horses, pigs, sheep. The most famous was Dolly the sheep, right, yea, But we've we've talked about it pretty recent you on one of our listener mail, no strange news episodes like pet cloning, which is a thing now. Yes, but let let's talk how do you How do you actually clone something? The process of it? Yeah, so the house stuff works portion of today's episode cloning. It can be done by taking the nucleus from a preserved cell of an extinct species and kind of robbing the cradle. You take that preserved cell and you swap it into an egg that doesn't have a nucleus, and it's an egg of that species nearest living relative. And you take that egg and you insert it into a host from the nearest living relative. And this you can already obviously, folks see a couple of issues with this. This method can only be used when a preserved cell is available, meaning that it is most feasible when you're talking about recently extinct species. This is also old tech. Uh. It's been in use in some form or another since the nineteen fifties, which may surprise a lot of people, but it has those clear limits, and they're also concerns about things going wrong in the cloning process. You don't have to have seen that Michael Keaton vehicle multiplicity to know that there are dangers of making a copy of a copy of a copy. I think, okay, that's the right fielm. Okay, good. So there's another one. There's another way to try to de extinct something. It's quite exciting, it's a little scary. It's called genome editing. We talked about it multiple times, multiple episodes. But for anyone who hasn't had a chance to check those out yet, get the to the podcast platform of your choice. But we've got your back. Here's a quick and dirty on genome editing. We're talking about a thing called crisper slash cast systems and particul killer is something called crisper cast nine. It was originally discovered as part of the bacterial immune system. You take viral DNA you injected into bacterium and it becomes incorporated into the bacterial chromosome at these very specific regions. Um they're called clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, otherwise known as crisper tada. Yeah, it has nothing to do with something being crisp or not, like having the attributes of crispinus. Uh. Well, it's really interesting. So now since the viral DNA is inside that chromosome, it gets transcribed into r N A ribonucleic acid, and it's pretty crazy. Once once that happens, it becomes RNA. Uhh. This thing, the crisper, the cast nine that we just described to you, it binds to the RNA and this cast nine can somehow recognize this weird extra thing that's on there, and it then cleaves it off and in a way, the cast nine protein. You can almost think of it like a knife for scissors or something that's going to break apart, cut away this extra new thing. You know what it's like. It's like um an editing program like Audition that we use to record our podcast, or maybe Final Cut or one of these video editing pieces of software where you really are editing things. But in this case, you know, it's not audio video, it's life, it's t n A, it's RNA. It's crazy. Yes, yeah, and shout out to the discoverers of crisper, Jennifer Dodna and Emmanuel Sharpentier. Uh this yeah. They they rightly won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, by the way, just eight years after they discovered it. Yes, and like Einstein, I would say that they are you should not hold them responsible for whatever terrible things humans do with it um. So what they found is miraculous. There's no way around it. Sky's the limit you can edit living things. So how does this apply to the extinction? Well, by using living cells from a closely related species, you can start messing with the de extinction process on a genetic level. You can edit germ cells directly, such that the egg and the sperm that are produced by an extant parents species produce offspring of the extinct species. There's one big disadvantage for the purest in the crowd. This results in a hybrid creature. It's not quite the extinct species from days of or But because it's possible to sequence and assemble the genomes of these extinct organisms from very highly degraded tissue, it's it's a little more efficacious than cloning, especially when we're talking about older organisms. It allows you to pursue de extinction in a wider array of species, including some that don't have any well preserved remains. The issue is there's a limit to that. The older the tissue is, the more fragmented the DNA at holds becomes. Meaning the jigsaw puzzle of the gene becomes increasingly more complex, so it's not perfect. Cloning and genome editing are not perfect, but they are amazing technologies. We're gonna pause for a word from our sponsor, and we're gonna return with some other ways people are pursuing the extinction, one of which arguably doesn't need humans at all. All right, we've returned. If you, like us, are a dog lover or a lover of domestic animals, you know that humans have been modifying dogs, genetically experimenting with them for a quite a long time, and they've done it through selective breeding. That's the reason, ultimately, that your French bulldog does not look like a wolf. That's the reason that Chihuahuas don't look like wolves. And that's the reason all these other all these other animals look so very different. There's another kind of selective breeding that can help with the extinction. It's called back breeding. Instead of breeding an animal for traits that you like or think are cool, you can breed them for atavistic traits, for ancestral traits that may have taken a back burner over are the great grind of evolution. So okay, let me just see how I understand this been it is. It's it is selective breeding, but it is attempting to gain back old traits, like down the genetic line, Yeah, and to make them manifest. It's it's a way of aggressively and mindfully like tracking genetic traits of breeding population extant species and then essentially making them reproduce with specific individuals until those um those other traits, those older traits from the extinct species start to present. You could tell this one also has some issues because the trait you're looking for has to already exist somewhere in the extant population, you know what I mean. So like this is I'm shooting from the hip here. This is kind of loose, but if you wanted to break a lot of ethical laws, you could, for instance, go to parts of the world where people have a higher than average percentage of Neanderthal DNA. There are no living Neanderthals, but their legacy remains, and certainly it remains with in you. Odds are if you're listening to this show, you have a likelihood of having some small percentage of Neanderthal DNA. So the idea with backbreeding here, just put very loosely, is that if you could convince people to participate, or dark side of mat science force them to participate. Then over time you may possibly be able to breed something that is increasingly close to the Neanderthals of old. It still won't be the same, because while you can potentially recreate or re express certain traits, it's genetically not going to be the exact organ is um that you seek to resurrect. It'll just be very much like it. It'll be like the Etsy version of that, or the Wish version of that. I can't remember how that joke goes. This is the cosplay version. It's it's not quite cosplay, but yeah, it's not quite. Yeah, yeah, it's like that looks a lot like Sonic the Hedgehog, but I don't think it's Sonic, you know, um, but it's still is still closer than then it would have been when at the population Spaceline. And then there's something else that we teased before the break, which is a kind of the extinction the extinction asterisk that does not actually need technology and it does not actually need humans to work. It's something called iterative evolution. Yes, it are of evolution. This thing is fascinating to me. So in this case, you have a species that does in fact you're extinct. Let's say the thilacene, and the philocene still has some very similar cousins. From an evolutionary perspective, those continue to exist. They are breeding like crazy, they've got thriving populations, and eventually, at some point over time, one of those or a small group of that species then starts exhibiting traits that the philacine had, and then they continue breeding and breeding and breeding, and then you get another philacine like or or very very similar philacine, a new version of a thilacene that isn't quite thilacene but is very very close. Yeah, and this is not so. People often tend to think of species as a relatively static life form, but they are all, like every other living thing there, works in progress, and thanks to iterative evolution, it is possible for a species to evolve to the same being at multiple points. Trippy. I know. The best way to understand this maybe is it is a specific example. So one of the most extreme famous examples of this is a humble little bird called the white throated rail. The white throated rail is not the most impressive of birds. It's about the size of a chicken. They can't fly, it can't make a lot of it can't do a lot of the cool things that birds do. But it still has a lot of the disadvantages of being a bird. It's a bird without bird powers, That's what I'm saying. So it is the it's the only flightless bird in the Indian Ocean, and once upon a time research found it had gone extinct, but thanks to iterative evolution, without the help of humans, it came back. They it evolved in the same way multiple times, at different times from the same ancestor. This stuff was in the Zoological Journal of the Linnaean Society, and in two separate occasions, two separate instances, tens of thousands of years apart, a rail species was able to colonize this island called Aldebra and then evolved to become flightless on both occasions. So it just did it again. It just did it again. It just came back after it that, you know what I mean. It went extinct and it said not today, and then ten thousand years later it was back in the game. So yeah, so what is this is extraordinarily rare, of course, but it is possible that things can be extinct themselves given enough time. One of the big downers about this from the somewhat selfish human perspective is that humans don't known. Humans don't currently have the lifespan that would be necessary to monitor the entirety of this process in real time. But still, it's comforting to know that even without human beings, Earth kind of has its own back pocket way to cheat extinction. I guess a glib way to put it, but kind of cool, right, that's you know, I think we both we both agree that's cool. It's amazing, you know what I mean. But with that in mind, it might surprise some of us in the audience today to learn that not everybody is on board with the extinction. They have some problems with experts have some problems with it, and as wild as it sounds, they make some really really good points. Uh, Like, Okay, mammoths. Everybody's excited about mammoth's coming back, whether it's through cloning, genomic editing, what have you. Mammoths, for example, evolved to live in an environment that in many cases is no longer the same today, so they could come back on the scene, be released in the wild, and function effectively as invasive species we can have on everybody. Like we thought the mammoths were gone. Oh run, Yeah, and they're functioning away too well. And they also are breeding way too much. Uh yikes, Oh here comes that giant heard of mammoths again. Uh everybody, everybody get off the road. They're back again. Um, it could be a really bad situation. Yeah, I can imagine that. And you know, think about the Philo scene. If you were able to successfully bring them back through this process, they are a predator species depending on where they end up thriving, if you did bring them back or perhaps you know an island like Tasmania that they recolonize. Um, it could spell disaster, serious disaster if they're gone, If they're actually gone, I'm just holding out hope because because of that paper. But yes, so you know, Ben, we took this out in our previous episode, Barry Brooke person we were speaking about last episode. We we took it out. But you made this point, Ben, that he is saying they're extinct, right, Yes, yeah, he and his team are saying that the thoughtless scene is overwhelmingly likely to be extinct. Uh. They're the revelatory parts of their research concerned the time frame of that extinction, which again could be difficult to tell depending on the range of an animal. So yeah, still they are saying in that paper there's this tiny, tiny, tiny chance, and I will take it. Dude. Uh but if okay, so all right with the thoughtless an example, let's say they're de extincted, they may not be able well, ad extincted animal may not be able to survive in the natural world, especially if they went extinct a very long time ago, like, for instance, a life form that lived when the chemical composition of the atmosphere was different. Then they wouldn't be able to vibe really well here in And then also this could lead to the extinction of other living species, because what if you bring back some predators from the days of yore and they just go ham, just go hard, because this new world may be unfamiliar to them, But there are a lot of soft creatures around that have lost the adaptations that allowed them to survive when this predator had its first go around the sun. Yeah, those white throated rails aren't gonna fare very well if philocenes are just run around and the rails can't fly. Still, yeah, and dialacenes love eating birds. Man, they'll get down on an emu. H. So, so the the next problem is that and this is this is weird to think about, but it is a valley concern. What if you go to all this trouble bringing an entire species back from the grave, and you don't bother changing the factors that led to their extinction in the first place, and then eventually they just go extinct again, all that work for nothing. That's a bummer, right, And that's not even counting the idea that new diseases could wipe out ad extinctive creature. And there was one other point that conservationists brought up, which I feel like we should mention, and maybe we should end on this because this leads us to a bigger conversation. De extinction at this point is crazy expensive. Imagine a number. It's higher than that, so much so that conservationists are asking, and I want to say, what you think about this, man, because we didn't talk about this yet. Off air conservation as are saying, you know what, we are in the sixth grade mass extinction. We're in an actual biotic crisis. A lot of living things are gonna die soon. Maybe we should focus on keeping those things alive before we start trying to bring back just a couple of really expensive ones, right, I mean, what do you think about that logic? It's not near as exciting of a headline, but it feels like a good point. Yeah, I mean, certainly we should be focusing the vast amount of our resources on keeping species alive, including humans. That would be great if we could do that somehow, I don't know how. It's not like we've just got you know, several hundred people with just billions and billions of dollars at their disposal. They could save the planet or something. Yeah. Yeah, but but it's I mean, it's a question that's tough to answer. The reality of this is that there's more to the concept of the extinction then you might initially assume. Certainly more than we initially assumed. But it is real that we are living in a world where you may one day see a mammoth, you may one day see a thihlasy. And you know what, shout out to everybody who says, hey, Ben Matt Michig control, I already did see his thilasy. You know what I mean? Read the email, Uh that if If you are one of those people, we can't wait to hear from you. We want to hear your take on the controversy of the extinction. Want to hear also whether you think any animal will actually be brought back in one of these ways, aside from iterative evolution, which again doesn't need humans. All you have to do is hit us up online. We try to be easy to find yes on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. We are Conspiracy Stuff. Our page on Facebook that you can find and talk with conspiracy realists us like yourself, is called Here's where It Gets Crazy. Check that out on Instagram where are a Conspiracy Stuff Show? 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