Curiosity Theory

What Would Actually Kill You 100 Million Years Ago | The End Of Oak Street

• Dr. Dakotah Tyler & Justin Shaifer • Season 1 • Episode 67

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This episode is brought to you by The End of Oak Street, in theaters August 14th.

In this special sponsored episode of Curiosity Theory, hosts Justin Shaifer and Dr. Dakotah Tyler break down the real science behind The End of Oak Street, in theaters August 14th.

The discussion moves from favorite dinosaurs and the basic premise of the film to the actual physics of what it would take to travel back in time, including the Kardashev scale, E=mc², and why you would need to convert roughly 50 Jupiters worth of mass into pure energy just to get started. From there they get into what prehistoric Earth actually looked like: a planet running hotter than today, with higher oxygen levels, no grass, and a North American interior that was completely underwater.

The conversation also covers what you would eat if modern food didn't exist, why the cycad plants that dominated the era would not exactly be a meal, why prehistoric insects could grow to the size of your arm, why a giant frog the size of a beach ball was a real animal, and why none of that is actually what would kill you. The biggest threat to any time traveler isn't the T-Rex — it's the bacteria your immune system has never encountered. They close on the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago and what the world might have looked like if it had missed entirely.

Chapters

00:00:00 Intro and the premise of The End Of Oak Street
 00:01:00 Favorite dinosaurs and what we actually know about them
 00:03:02 North America used to be an ocean
 00:04:37 The energy physics of time travel and the Kardashev scale
 00:08:19 How long could you actually survive without modern technology
 00:09:41 Prehistoric climate: how much hotter was it really
 00:12:00 What water sources would even be safe to drink
 00:15:22 What food was available and why most of it would starve you
 00:21:23 Time travel mechanics in the film: wormholes and causality
 00:28:31 Why prehistoric insects were gigantic and how oxygen made it possible
 00:32:25 Beelzebufo: the giant frog that was very real
 00:33:42 Humans vs. prehistoric predators — we were at the bottom
 00:42:49 The bacteria and disease that would actually kill you first
 00:46:26 Would prehistoric plants make good bio weapons?
 00:49:00 Fire, survival skills, and your best chance of making it
 00:55:17 What if the asteroid never hit 66 million years ago?
 00:55:28 Birds are dinosaurs and why that matters
 00:57:50 Final thoughts and why you should go see The End Of Oak Street

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Sponsored by The End of Oak Street — in theaters August 14th.

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SPEAKER_02

All right, what's up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Curiosity Theory. It's your boy Justin, Mr. Fascinate Schaefer, Science TV host, media producer. Jones here with my main man, Dr.

SPEAKER_01

Dakota Tyler, aka Dr. Starkid, astrophysicist. And some would say the most curious guy, this quadrant of the universe. It's a Benson.

SPEAKER_02

The most curious guy in this quadrant of the universe. Well, we're going to be entering a different universe today. We're going to be talking about the film, the end of Oak Street. But maybe we can at least start off with the overall idea of the end of Oak Street. What's your favorite dinosaur? My favorite dinosaur is probably a triceratops. Probably a triceratops.

SPEAKER_01

I respect that. I respect the triceratops. I feel like people shy away from the herbivores. Uh, but triceratops, like we have found Tyrannosaurus Rex fossils that were damaged by Triceratops horns.

SPEAKER_02

They don't play pretty cool. The offensive lineman of the dinosaurs. I respect that.

SPEAKER_01

I respect that.

SPEAKER_02

What about you? What's your favorite?

SPEAKER_01

My favorite is also a defensive dinosaur, the uh ankylosaur. Um, the little tank. Actually, am I familiar? Oh, the little tank, they have like horns, and then they have the tail with the club on it.

SPEAKER_02

Right. They're kind of like an armadillo kind of vibe, right?

SPEAKER_01

Like a Mad Max, yeah, Mad Max Armadillos.

SPEAKER_02

That's that's crazy.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Nah, man. So the the end of Oak Street is this really interesting science fiction, kind of I would say like horror-ish plot where we had this suburban family in the 80s that were somehow transported into this kind of prehistoric version of that same area, right? But we had a few different species of plants and dinosaurs from a variety of different places represented, and they had to figure out how to survive. The entire neighborhood had to figure out how to survive, but uh mainly we followed this suburban family, right? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

The and uh one thing that stands out is that yeah, like the the whole neighborhood is literally just transported and like replaced with that same surface area of the ant, you know, whatever dinosaurs are there that are like now being transported into the future. And one funny thing to think about is that a lot of North America used to be an ocean. I mean, but pretty much every land everywhere on Earth at some point in time was underwater. So uh it would have been a short movie if they got transported to the bottom of the ocean.

SPEAKER_02

Right, because Pangea, I'm trying to remember how long ago Pangea was a thing, right? Several hundred million years ago, like right, and it seemed like a lot of the same dinosaur species and plant species that were featured in the movie were prominent around that time.

SPEAKER_01

I it I noticed a mix, this wide range. It's like one of the first like really populous dinosaurs or early favorites are um Stegosaurus that has those big plates, those tall, skinny plates on its back, and then like horns on the tail. And but stegosaurus was like a hundred million years apart from uh T-Rex and Triceratops, which is crazy to think about. You know, if if there was T-Rex paleontologists, they would have dug and found 100 million year-old fossils of Stegosaurus, which is further from them than T-Rex is from us, which is like crazy to think about how uh the longevity, I guess, of dinosaurs.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, and how successful they were, right? Uh, one of the things that I know you wanted to talk about, Dakota, was kind of what the physics might look like of actually like moving a city through space-time, right? And like how much energy would actually be required to do something like that.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. So that like how how could that happen or what would that look like is mostly an open question because nobody there isn't like an answer for how much energy it takes to create a wormhole, keep it open, allow it to remain stable while you're transporting stuff through it. But thinking of like the crudest possible estimate of like what it would take to maintain like this the throat of the warm of the wormhole, like the part that I guess is connecting the two different space times. Um, and this is this is like a rough lower limit, like maybe maybe it's good, but something on the order of like 50 mass energies of Jupiter. So, you know, like E equals Mc squared. What that basically says is that you know, the total energy, for example, in your body, it's not just like the calories that you have or the food that you ate, but if we could convert your entire body, all that mass just into pure energy, then you basically just multiply your mass by the speed of light squared. So the the mass energy, just like can like converting about 50 Jupiters into pure energy, wow, could like stabilize could stabilize a uh wormhole that had this Swarschhield radius of several hundred meters, which I mean, you know, like how big exactly is a neighborhood. So very rough estimate. Um, another way, because it's kind of hard to to visualize how much that is, is basically the total output of the sun, but for 500 billion years.

SPEAKER_02

Five hundred billion years. That's like way more than the sun's lifetime.

SPEAKER_01

Way more, yeah. You know, the sun is gonna live to be what, like 10, 12 billion years, something like that. And uh, but if if if it continued burning for 500 billion years and you could collect all of that, then maybe you would have in the ballpark of the amount of energy needed to like stabilize this this thing, which is crazy.

SPEAKER_02

So if the yeah, so if there was like a meta plot for the end of Oak Street, and it was like, what is actually powering this thing, right? Because you know, there's some questions in the in the story that never really get answered. Like, what is actually powering this force that transported us to this different era? It would have to be something, orders of magnitude more powerful than anything in our solar system.

SPEAKER_01

I guess it would be like a Kardashev three scale, uh like a type three civilization that is harnessing somehow the energy of an entire galaxy or like the supermassive black holes at the center of them somehow. I mean, that's like the only place that I can think of where you're having that sort of energy, and it's hard to imagine how how you could harness something like that. But yeah, we're talking about like I think energy levels so high that that's not something that we have to worry about. That's not like one of the issues that I think we're gonna have to solve, right?

SPEAKER_02

But I guess if you're a Kardashev III or a type three civilization that can harness that level of energy, maybe your idea of a good time is like playing some version of the Hunger Games where you just like transport humans into this like something, yeah, overlapping time period and see if they can survive.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Do you think you could survive? What would that what would that look like? Surviving a at some point, you know, Triassic or Jurassic or something like that. One of those eras of the dinosaurs.

SPEAKER_02

You know, I think for me, it's not a matter of can I or can I not, but it's like how long could I actually survive? I think my demise would be inevitable uh in in a period like this, it's just like how long could I delay that? And there's some interesting math that actually can go into that. You know, like one of the things that you could look at is, you know, how many liters or gallons of water would you need to survive for that long, right? Um, and like the average person might need something to the tune of, I don't know, like a gallon or so of water over the course of like a couple of days to survive. And if you like multiply that by, you know, the amount of family members that were in this family unit in the movie, what is that? Like, you know, four to six gallons of waters every couple days. And then where are they gonna get that water from at this time? Like where are they gonna get a source of that fresh water? Because that's like the first thing that kind of goes, right? Is like if you can't survive off of water, then you can't survive. Yeah, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, well, it rains a lot. This is like a period, I think, that is um very humid. It's a lot hotter, there's a lot more water, uh H2O in the atmosphere, which makes it, which is why it can get so hot. And so I think that you would be able to collect like rainwater. If you're having to go find a creek or something, then it then it's like now you're trying to fend among the dinosaurs, and that feels like yeah, no matter even if you have like weapons and stuff, it just feels like you're you're gonna really be rolling the dice. But I do feel like that if you had the ability to collect the rainwater, that that would maybe be something that could sustain you. I'd also wonder there must be oh yeah, if you had something like that. Um if you had well, but then at the same time, there must be microorganisms that are alive then that we've never seen before that we would have like no way to fight off. No immunity, no immunity, yeah, whatsoever.

SPEAKER_02

And drugs from the 80s, so they probably just tell you to put some ice on it or something, and you're not kidding out of that.

SPEAKER_01

It would be whatever, yeah, like whatever was at your house. So who knows who knows what that is?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, now let's say like they were like super crafty and they went into their water heater tank and they were just like, all right, we're just gonna drink whatever remaining fresh water exists there. That's about on average, like 40 to 50 gallons of water, um, which is a pretty substantial amount of water, but that's only gonna last them about 10 days. And like, let's not even think about all the heat that's being lost due to sweating, right? Like um in the movie, you know, there was like a scene where the family kind of like wakes up and they're burning hot because it's the temperature has drastically changed. Like you said, the humidity is higher, and so people are just sweating more, they're losing more water. Uh, and so that that goes into the math. So, I mean, if I'm but if I'm thinking about myself personally, of course, I'm a survivor, right? So I'm gonna I'm gonna finesse, I'm gonna figure it out. Uh I you know, I might have to I might have to finesse some of my neighbors or cooperate with some of my neighbors. Like I feel like I probably would make friends with the survival guy with the bunker, you know?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Um well hopefully you had one of those in your neighborhood, because if you didn't, then that guy wouldn't be there. Okay, so the uh um the average temperature uh at during th those times, like 200 million years ago, 150, 200 million years ago, was around 25 Fahrenheit, nine or ten Celsius higher than it is today.

SPEAKER_02

So it's what is the actual figure? What's the actual number?

SPEAKER_01

Of back then, yeah, the average temperature ranged from so during the Triassic, which is early, like the early dinosaur period, was from 18 to 24 Celsius. So that's about 64 to 75 Fahrenheit, which that doesn't sound bad, but we're talking about the global average, right? Like 75 to us is a good day. But in Antarctica, it never gets anywhere near that, right? And uh the um I think that the average, what is the average temperature today? I think today it's close, it's like just above freezing, right? It's like 40 Fahrenheit, maybe. Well, what is it?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, it's around 15 degrees Celsius or 59 degrees Fahrenheit.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, 59. Okay, so that's that's decent. So it's significantly hotter than on average everywhere. So you would be hotter, but if you had if you had enough water to last you for a week or two, I would think that you would luck out enough to make it to like the next big rain.

SPEAKER_02

And then you just have to have a well set up.

SPEAKER_01

Something to collect it, right? Which that would also, if you were in your house, you would probably have enough um containers that you could collect put put them all, cover.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah, that's probably that's that's probably a good idea.

SPEAKER_01

Hope you don't get picked off by like a pterosaur or something. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02

Because there were there were several pterodactyl pterodactyls on the on like attacking people from all angles, especially on the rooftops. So yeah, that was a big part of it. But yeah, and then there were some laboratory research studies, I think uh Penn State did some around human survivability in these extreme temperatures and like what kind of are the upper limits of that. And around 35 degrees Celsius or 95 degrees Fahrenheit, uh, people start to experience like heat-related distress that is kind of hard to overcome. All right. And so you imagine that that's at the hottest point of the day, that's probably a temperature that people are experiencing regularly at this time with extreme humidity as well. And so, you know, they're having to figure out and problem solve, and you know, there's they're stressed because of predators all the time. It doesn't really seem like a really an ideal place for humans or human-like things to exist.

SPEAKER_01

Nah, it's it would not be ideal. I think another thing is even if you could keep the water and keep yourself cool by finding shade or something, uh you have to find food as well. And whatever you have in your, you know, maybe if you went to Costco recently, your your pantry stocked up, but eventually that runs out. And it's like, what do you eat? Because the plants, like the stuff that we eat now didn't exist then. Yeah. Um, like broccoli and cauliflower, all of these things, first of all, are artery, they're like not even real, they don't occur in nature. These are like all they all come from the same plant that we uh, you know, domesticated essentially.

SPEAKER_02

Domesticated. I always think it's interesting when people say like non-GMO for certain plants, when it's like, well, genetic modification can happen through breeding, also. And that's what we've done to create most of the modern plants that comprise our diet. And yeah, most of those things were like rarely around or couldn't really compete back then with the stuff that existed.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, in the in the Triassic flowers didn't even exist yet, and like so fruit and stuff like doesn't even exist, like these aren't even uh trees, don't even exist at that point. So it's like you there's a in all of the vegetation that does exist is evolving to try and not get eaten by these dinosaurs who are also evolving to be able to eat it. So they're like eating these super. I don't think we would be able to eat anything. I don't know what we'd be able to eat besides maybe some dino like small dinosaurs that you caught, which like how are you hunting them and not getting hunted yourself?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, you know, I I thought a really interesting scene in the movie was when in the beginning there was they were on this lawn and uh seeming like a seeming like a foreshadowing event, this plant started to sprout up in this lady's lawn. And she the the one of the protagonists in the movie, she took a picture of it, and it looked to be like uh what we've identified as kind of like a cycad derivative. Um we can kind of talk about cycads a little bit, but they um the in the movie they said that this specific plant species had already gone extinct. Uh and you know, cycads are a plant species that you know many of them contain like neurotoxins. Uh, and so I think peyote is uh uh can is is the derivative from cycads, which you know, you could try to eat one of these things to survive, and you you end up in a compromised state, you know?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And the uh the cycads are cool because if you see them, you see a big one, you'll actually think it looks like a palm tree. It looks like a palm tree. And when you when it looks like there are palm trees in these rendition, these pictures or images or uh videos that you see of the dinosaurs, it looks like there are these giant palm trees, but they aren't. That's not what they are. They're these cycads, which um are something something completely different. And it does, yeah. I mean, it doesn't surprise me that we can't eat those. I mean, we already can't eat most plants, right? Like the you can't go outside and eat grass, you can't eat the bushes that you walk by or the leaves. Like, we can't eat any of this. There's a small amount of food of plant uh food that we can eat today. And it just seems like we would the food problem would be tremendous going back that far.

SPEAKER_02

Even ferns, which I know were a pretty successful plant species, especially back then. Um some of them have been classified as like group two B carcinogens. Uh, so they're like one of the few plant species known to be cancer causing in other animals. And they're like right, they're all like around. That's crazy.

SPEAKER_01

So yeah, it would be pretty hard. Yeah, it's a cool adaptation for the plant. But from our perspective, if I'm starving, am I really worried about getting cancer in a decade or two? If I'm star like if I'm starving today.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, it's cost benefit, right? Yeah, it's gotta be a good thing.

SPEAKER_01

But that's the thing, is even if you eat it, like I don't I don't believe that we have the ability to digest something like that.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I don't know. I know cattle have like multiple stomachs, right? That allow them to be able to digest a lot of these different like grasses and things like that, which I believe grass wasn't very common either during grass time period.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, either. Yeah, but even that, and that's cool that you bring up the thing with the cows. Um, and it's because herbivores they develop these super long and complex digestive systems because it's hard to break down like the cellulose and this the cell walls of the plants. And the reason that it's hard to do that is because the plants are trying not to get eaten. So they make them so they like evolve to be as undigestible as possible. And the only way you can do it is to have this incredibly complicated and like rich microbiome in your stomach to break all this stuff down. And on the other hand, the carnivores kind of take the easy road, the easy route. And um meat eaters have way shorter digestive systems because breaking, I mean, the meat is already like what your body's made of. It's kind of the finished product, uh, which is interesting to think about.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Um, so uh on another kind of related but separate note, uh, there were kind of some issues with time in the movie, right? There were these kind of like, I mean, we we kind of alluded to it a little earlier, but there was a situation where the physical place moved back in time to a previous place. Um, but it seemed like maybe there were multiple time periods that were represented in the same physical place simultaneously. Um and is that physically possible, at least based on our current understanding of physics? So is what? So indicate is what transport like basically moving something back in time to the extent that it was that it was moved, you know, in the in the movie.

SPEAKER_01

Is time are you asking if if time travels? Can we travel through time? I I mean so I think that we we could come up with like ways that we can move forward in time, um, which does happen for some of the stuff in that in the movie. Some of the the the animals that were on that square mile radius or whatever from the past come to the came to the future at the same time that you know the family in the future went to the past. So moving through the future. Through time, not in that way, but in some way is feasible because we know time dilation exists, right? So there's like stuff that you and I can do uh in the way that we move, like how fast we're moving, or if we're really close to a strong gravitational source or something that can make our clocks um either speed up or slow down relative to some other clocks. So you can kind of cheat it that way, but you can never go back in the past, right? Because at least that's how we understand it now.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

How we understand it today, right? Because basically the the principle is as you approach the speed of light, you can basically time from your perspective will move slower and slower, right? Yeah, exactly. And um, and so in order to go to the past, uh basically we'd have to figure out a way to go faster than the speed of light, in theory at least.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. And that would that is like a way to move backwards through time. Because right, if you think about what's happening there, then that's like that's like seeing something before it happens, right? You like violate this causality thing when you're moving faster than the speed of light. So that almost like doesn't make sense. Like, how could you see you would be moving backwards through time, literally backwards through time. Um, and this is that doesn't seem like a way that you could do it. The wormhole thing, I think, is the most interesting, plausible idea because can we break down wormholes a little bit more just for everybody?

SPEAKER_02

Because I don't know if everybody understands them with the modern lens.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a wormhole, first of all, it's completely theoretical. So this is like um, you know, it's like a mathematical idea, right? That this thing could exist. But if you think about space and time, you think about the universe as this huge chunk of space and time, um could can't we know that time and space can be bent, right? Like we know that that can happen, we know that for a fact. Uh that's what gravity is, basically. It's the um the distortion of space and time that uh like that um is what constitutes what we experience as as gravity. So we know that space and time can both be bent, we know that they can like change, so it's like malleable, it's kind of moldable. But like, what if you could bend space and time so far that you could get points that don't touch to touch? Like, is that possible? And it would take an incredible amount of energy, like we were saying, in the same way that it takes an incredible amount of energy just to have a gravitational effect. Like the earth is just uh this huge ball of energy, really, and it curves space and time, and that allows like the moon to stay in orbit and us to stay on the surface. But like, how much energy does it take to bend space in a way that you're like connecting two points that are not anywhere near each other, in this case, uh separated by a hundred million years, two hundred million years? Like, if that's possible, like if you could control insane amounts of energy, then like maybe that's something that would potentially like maybe that doesn't break the laws of physics, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But um I think something that was confusing but alluded to is that we saw a lot of dinosaurs that were from different time periods, like famously Stegosaurus is from the very early dinosaur uh era, like the Triassic, and T-Rex is from a the much later um period, like the uh, or maybe I have that backwards, maybe Triassic is the later one, or Cretaceous. Uh T-Rex is from the Cretaceous, I think, which is like the 66 million years ago one, but um Stegosaurus is the Triassic, which is like 250 million years ago.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, late late Cretaceous for the T-Rex, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Okay, and so if you think about that, that means that if T-Rex was 65 million years ago to us, Stegosaurus was over a hundred million years from T-Rex or something like that. So T-Rex is older to Stegosaurus than we are to T-Rex, or I guess younger is the right way to put it. So, like why would if you got zapped back into the past, maybe that's uh maybe you could explain that by there being this effect of like this time displacement has actually been happening for them for the dinosaurs as well. So I think you would if that happened to you know, if you if you have a stegosaur, if you're doing that with dinosaurs, I think they run into the same problem that we run into, which is like, oh, I'm in this period that's a hundred million years out of my evolution. What can I eat? Like, how do I survive here? Is the climate exactly right? Is the temperature right? Um, can I survive with the microorganisms that exist? That sort of thing. So I think that if you ended up mixing all the different animals or all the different time periods together, that would be crazy. I think at some point you would expect to like have a prehistoric like a megalodon just lands in the middle of the forest, right? If there's an ocean at some point.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah, and there were some seemingly oceanic creatures or ocean-based creatures, but they they were outside of the water for quite a while, and they seem to seem to be okay in the movie. But I think you know, a lot of times these species, especially under extreme heat, you know, they're they're not able to stay out of the water for that long. Like think about slugs and and you know, things like that. They have to keep their bodies kind of slimy or moist.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, like amphi uh more amphibious. There was definitely a giant amphibious looking. Um, I don't even know what it was, but it was it was terrifying. It would be a terrifying thing to see. Yeah. And one thing that um another thing to consider is that the insects back then were a lot larger as well.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah. I don't think there were a ton of insects in the movie, but they would have been massive. And actually, it's it's really interesting why they would be so big. Uh, it's because of the basically the the physical limit of insect body size is because of the availability of oxygen in the atmosphere. And so uh insects don't have like lungs like we do. So, you know, our lungs have these um these different, like basically there's a vast amount of interior surface area. So when we every time we breathe, there are these tiny sacs inside of our lungs that also fill with air at the same time. And so we take in vastly more air than like the physical size of our lungs can should be able to take in. Uh, but insects don't have that evolutionary adaptation. They have uh they basically breathe through these holes on their body, right? And so basically, basically they can only get so big if they get past a certain amount of size, uh, then the oxygen that their body requires is too much for their the amount of oxygen that their bodies can take in. And so when you're in an era where there's a higher amount of oxygen availability, their actual theoretical maximum size can be larger. So that's why in that time period you had these massive insects because there was just more oxygen available.

SPEAKER_01

That makes sense. So it's like as the insect gets bigger, because its body's volume grows more, it needs more oxygen to do its normal tasks, and it runs into a limit because of the surface area thing. So it's like a similar argument for you know why land animals can't get that big. And it's because like as you get larger, the strain disproportionately grows that is like on your bones and your muscles, and so you end up having like a literally a structural limit because of the that that that makes a lot of sense. I knew that it was related to the oxygen, but I didn't, I never had like put two and two together that that was the exact reason why.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, so they're called spiracles. Um it's coming back to me now. It's a tracheal system of like little tiny tubes uh that take in air all over the insect's body. Uh, so it's fascinating.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. I mean, that would be terrifying in and of itself, though. Just like uh a dragonfly that was like the size of a hawk or an eagle or something. Like, nah, that's that's too much.

SPEAKER_02

I don't know if you ever gone like deep into the rural areas and seen a massive dragonfly. No, I was saying, uh, I don't know if you've ever seen like a massive dragonfly. It was like four to five inches of a window.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, I've seen I don't know if I've seen one that big. I've seen I've seen like a good size one, but not that big.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. No, I mean, I've been out in the country and seen some really, really big ones. And I mean, if you think about dragonflies are actually predatory creatures, they're highly successful predators.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Like they have some like incredible, yeah, 95% success rate when they hunt.

SPEAKER_00

That's crazy.

SPEAKER_02

So if something like that is large enough to like take your ear off, I don't know if I want to be around during that time. Nah, that's that's pretty terrifying.

SPEAKER_01

That's pretty terrifying. I think there was giant frogs during that time, too. I don't actually know for sure. So they let's see.

SPEAKER_00

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, there were these griffin flies, and they were like two-foot giants. And I mean, yeah, they they kind of like have a physical appearance that's similar to dragonflies, but I don't know if they're exactly dragonflies.

SPEAKER_01

Nah, bro. There's like life was out of control back then. Life was out of control. I I just looked up this um, like the insects, because I'm thinking, like, what's eating, you know, what what will eat a dragonfly today? Like, um, a frog will, right? Like shoot their tongue out or and catch them, or a chameleon or something like that. And there are these frog, these giant frogs called Beasle Bufo a me um um and pinga, uh, commonly known as the devil frog. And it was 70 million years ago, so late Cretaceous, and they're like, I mean, this is insane. These these frogs are like the size of dogs.

SPEAKER_02

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01

A dog frog? I feel like there's so many of the small um carnivores, I just know they would they would eat us if they could.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. I I think we would just be on the menu for so many of these different things, and we don't have any advantages except for our brain, kind of. Like our reaction times, like I mean, there's some parts of our brain that are advantageous, right? Like we can think strategically and cooperate and communicate, but then it's like our reaction times are slower than like a lot of other animals, you know, like cats have significantly faster reaction times than ours, right? I think mammals at this time were in the I guess the range of times that were represented in the movie. Mammals, if they did exist, they were very, very tiny, right?

SPEAKER_01

They definitely mammals definitely existed, but you're right, they were small. Um, and I think that they benefited from being like nocturnal, being small, burrowing, uh, because of just the insane life that was around them. But we definitely had an I think the earliest mammals were actually around near the time of the earliest dinosaurs. It's just that the dinosaurs, the dinosaurs kind of came to dominance and the the mammals stayed, you know, relatively quiet, low-key, and they only had the opportunity to come out and like really shine when um the di when the dinosaurs went extinct. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that's so interesting. I wonder that would that's an interesting like what if to imagine if it went the other way. Like if if reptiles ended up kind of having to stay smaller and mammals got way bigger, got bigger.

SPEAKER_01

But the thing is, that that is interesting, but the thing is, mammals being warm-blooded, I think have a much higher energy uh expenditure, and so they need a lot more food, right? So you think about like a crocodile. Why do why have the crocodilions done so well, you know, that they've been around for hundred, you know, hundreds of millions of years as well. And it's like they, you know, if you watch a crocodile, they just be chilling, like they don't move a muscle, and then they eat something huge, and then they just kind of like sit there and they don't do a lot. Um, and compare that to any mammal that you see. Mammals are like always active because they need to find more energy, they like need to get more food. Um, and it's like, you know, there's that trade-off. It's like you can be relatively chill and like just be a little a primed uh killing machine like a crocodile, or you could be something like you know, a squirrel or whatever, or a primate, but you got to constantly be on the go. It is interesting. If it would have gone the other way, what would that have looked like? And then the the asteroid would have wiped out the mammals and then the mammals and the reptiles would have came.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah, but I think it's I mean, it just kind of further emphasizes the point that we are just very poorly adapted for survival in that time period because we're just we're too big and require so we're energetically expensive and we're big. And so we require constant foraging, and we so we're constantly putting ourselves at risk. We have these long lifespans, we can't reproduce until like what 14, 15, or maybe maybe a little younger than that, but still, like you know, it just takes us so long to be able to reproduce. It it doesn't seem like we'd be in a great position to win. Um, and yeah, crocodile.

SPEAKER_01

You could say that about now, though, right? Like we're at the we have the same disadvantages today when compared to most other life forms. Like we're not adapted for living in a lot of places that humans live, but like we just can because we have you know shelter and we invented you know clothes and jackets and that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I would the one point I would disagree with there is that there's far more predatory things that are around us in a variety of these habitats, or there there would have been in that time period, like whether it's colder or warmer, there's just predatory things all around.

SPEAKER_01

You think that that is different from a truly like pre-civilization wild that our ancestors dealt with like 300,000 years ago?

SPEAKER_02

Yes, um, because the temperature ranges were probably I mean, harsher in some ways because it was colder, but I think in other ways, uh, you know, there were more ideal temperature ranges around where there weren't a massive amount of predators. Like, I mean, yes, they're the predatory cats, right? Like you think of mountain lions or just regular lions, tigers. Like these are these are animals that would kill us in the wild for sure. Um, but I don't think they were anywhere near as abundant as the dinosaurs during that time period.

SPEAKER_01

Hmm, yeah. Yeah, I guess I don't I don't really know how what the like population density is or like would have been. I just kind of assume that you know, all the predators and herbivores, well, like all everything just gets replaced because a new thing takes that new niche, whatever it was that got vacated, it kind of like uh creates an environment where something could step right into it. And well, I will so I will say this I agree, you know, it's like it takes an expert, like woodsman or something, that can go and like live in the woods and like understand what the bears are like there and like what fungus you could eat and what mushrooms you can't eat. And nobody is prepared. The like the best survivalist knows nothing about the plants that are edible or not from 200 million years ago, or like what the uh ritual habitat, like the uh the habits of any of the predator, like what can you do to make sure the T-Rex doesn't come around? Like, nobody knows anything about that, so we would all be screwed. But I would say that if there was any animal that you could put back 200 million years ago and completely like misplace them in the environment and would make and maybe figure out how to survive, I would say it that we're we have the best shot.

SPEAKER_02

It would probably be us. I would agree with you there, and I would even go a step further to say if the entire planet, like let's take the premise of the movie, if all of Earth, the modern Earth, was transported back into that time period, I think a lot of us would die off immediately. And then from the ashes of that carnage, we would figure out what plants to eat. You know, we'd figure out what species we can hunt easily, we'd figure out survival strategies. And I think you give us probably a few hundred years, and I think like those billions of humans would have dwindled down to maybe, I don't know, like a few million. And then those few million will probably become the most prosperous species on earth again, like in a few generations. Interesting.

SPEAKER_01

Um I don't doubt it. I mean, that's that is what we did to the animal, to the big to like the large mammals on earth. Uh there were like the large mammals in Africa survived because they evolved with humans, but then as you see humans spread across the globe, all the other animals, even the like the short-faced bear, this enormous bear that's like twice the size of a polar bear, um, probably could easily slay a small army of humans. But we drove all of these animals to extinction. Yeah, it was it was probably like maybe the climate and people, but when people come across new predators, new large prey, they tend to disappear.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And so I wonder after a certain amount of time, surely we would be able to outsmart a T-Rex who famously has a brain like the size of a peanut or a walnut or something like that.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, but I mean, that's even a really interesting premise for a sci-fi is like you take a you take a society that's been thrust into this dinosaur age and then and then give it like a few generations, and then what are they doing now? I feel like they would be on another level.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, they would either be on another level or get wiped out. I guess that's how it happens. Like you either evolve or you don't. But would that so where would that fall, in your opinion? Having that be a uh issue that humanity has to face on the scale of like problems that humans have overcome.

SPEAKER_02

I would think that that would be the biggest threat to our species. Or it I'll put in the top three. I think maybe some of these massive plagues. I actually actually think it would be worse than a plague. And here's why. Because pretty much any infection at that time could become a plague to humanity.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

You know, like uh that's one of the things that we didn't really talk about yet. But uh, I think one of the biggest threats and existing in a time period like this, we we kind of alluded to it a little bit, was like if you get an open cut and like bacteria from the soil or that kind of just are in the air at the time find their way into your into your body, like you don't your immune system is not prepared to face that threat. You have no preconceived notions, like your body has no preconceived notions of of how to fight these kind of threats. Uh and so yeah, I think I think that would probably cause a few of those different plagues. It's just us getting sick from like airborne stuff or something getting into our bloodstream. I mean, the STIs back then would probably be crazy.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I mean, if you're getting freaky with the dinosaurs, I mean, would you nah? That's a good point, though. And it's one that is largely ignored in in um you know, movies where you're like going back and forth in the past and the future, is that it doesn't even have to be like a A nasty bacteria, it could just be something that's everywhere, right? Like there's bacteria that it's just like always on our skin, but it's fine for us because it's always on our skin, like we've evolved with it. And you could just think about a hundred million years ago, just a common harmless bacteria to most life. For us, it could literally like eat be eating through our body. It wouldn't even surprise me if that is what killed everybody, if it ultimately. I guess I won't name the name because that's not the point of this, but the the microorganisms are always gonna be dominant in sort of like molding what happens with evolution. So yeah, I mean it would that that would be and there's no way to fight against that, right? We don't have any uh the the antibiotics that we use today, right? Penicillin is good is good because the the penicillum fungus lives with bacteria and it kills it because it doesn't want the bacteria on it. But even if you had those pills, would that work on bacteria from 200 billion 200 million years ago?

SPEAKER_02

I don't know. Probably not, but maybe like one of those mRNA vaccines, you know. But of course, having the faculties to get something like that up and running with all these apex predators.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, you got to get the research facility running. And mind you, what got transported was a neighbor, it was a suburban neighborhood, right? It wasn't um, you know, it wasn't like the CDC. You would luck out if you had something like that transported.

SPEAKER_02

Oh man, the whole CDC got brought back. That actually, yeah, that would be pretty crazy, and then they would immediately stand on business, like it'd be ready to ready to go against whatever.

SPEAKER_01

And in that vein, if you had those type of resources, what you could wield against the those dinosaurs is uh bioweapons. Like, yeah, could we just get something that is harmless to us but harmful to those earlier dinosaurs?

SPEAKER_02

Like the common code engineered for dinosaurs? That would be pretty crazy.

SPEAKER_01

Taking yeah, taking them out that is pretty wild.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that would that's actually a that's actually an insane idea. So, okay, let me ask you this what type of job title of a human do you feel like would survive the best in the end of Oak Street?

SPEAKER_01

Ooh, that's a good question. So an occupation today that just translates to that time back then I wanna say I wanna say somebody with that has a really strong understanding of biology, not necessarily a biologist, but somebody who understands that, like so maybe somebody who works with plants or dude.

SPEAKER_02

I was thinking the same thing. I was thinking like a botanist, kind of like the Martian, like you remember? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I was thinking like a botanist that could, yeah, just like understand historical data about plants and maybe be able to leverage that knowledge to set up their house in a such a way.

SPEAKER_01

Even um people in agriculture, farmers, um, people who take care of uh like greenhouses, or I think that people who have a better relationship with something like plants, animal behaviorists. I just think that that's such a valuable skill, which like, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I know when I go to the zoo, I'm not in hard, I'm not in harm's way for many of the animals. Um, most people I think that don't have that experience of being out in wildlife, and even ones that do, like I go, I'll go on hikes or something, but you're not running into like mini grizzly bears, you're not running into packs of wolves or anything like that. And it was so problematic that that happened that early that humans like drove a lot of these animals to extinction, or at least that their numbers are dwindling in the places where humans are. At the same time, those animals evolved to just stay away from from humans. So it's like I don't know how much that would translate, but having some sort of inclination towards animal behavior, plant behavior, that feels like uh invaluable experience. So I would say something like that. People who know to start fire, I don't know how to start a fire.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Um wait, you don't know how to start a fire? I mean, not with my bare hands.

SPEAKER_02

I feel like I just I feel yeah, I mean, you feel like you have a fire? Well, I definitely have. I I only started learning that stuff when I moved out to LA though, oddly. But yeah, you just get some lights. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, I think, well, here, okay, with my bare hands, it might be a little harder, but I know you need to you need to have like little tiny little flakes of wood, and you need to have like the larger, like, you know, like triangle kind of like pyramid shape of wood. You need to create some friction between the sticks.

SPEAKER_01

Where are you getting triangle shaped?

SPEAKER_02

Well, you can just like take little logs from that you find, you know, around the thing is is trees were not, I think, available in the same yeah, so the same type of trees. I don't know if bark was common back then at all. Yeah, right, because like that would have been only from trees, right?

SPEAKER_01

But you can, and I think that there may be like were trees, but the trees were very different. They're not like the trees that we're thinking of now that have these enormous logs, but I'm a maybe I'm assuming that some of the plant life, when it died and dried out, you could still use it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, so there were some species of gymnosperms that apparently did have bark-like structures that could be used to start a fire. The other benefit that you have in that time period is that there's a higher density of oxygen in the air. And so things would just be more flammable. So it would be easier to start a fire in theory, unless you got rained out.

SPEAKER_01

There would be probably be more incidental fires as well.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah. You could easily, yeah, that's another thing that could happen, be really tragic. Yeah. Yeah. It could burn down everything.

SPEAKER_01

They burned down the CDC right when they were coming up with the anti-vinal.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, no, that's no, but that's cool, man. I I think it's it's a it's definitely a cool thought experiment. I think that I do think that this kind of makes me really think about it. Like that question that we talked about where it's like a few generations in, I think humanity would figure it out. Kind of makes you, it kind of makes me feel a little good about being a human, you know. I don't know if that means that I I mean it's kind of hard because it's like, do I feel good because we could just kill everything else? Is that is that good intrinsically? Not necessarily, but it kind of makes me it kind of makes me hopeful about the future of humanity and that we can just figure out how to survive things that might come our way. Well, how to survive things that might come our way.

SPEAKER_01

If nothing else, that's definitely what we can do is figure out how to how to survive, which is a good trait. And you know, from a from a life sense, that's kind of like one of the one of the main goals is for it to survive so that it can continue to you know reproduce and that sort of thing. Um so there was a another interesting point that I think is kind of funny is the space not just like jumping through time, but what that means in physical space, right? Because the earth is in constant motion around the sun, and the sun is in constant motion in the Milky Way. So if you go back a hundred million years, the solar system is actually on the other side of the galaxy. And so does this neighborhood just get transported into where the earth was at that time physical space, and it's literally, and then now you just have this like circle uh of plot of land, and the neighborhood is in interstellar space, on the other side of the galaxy with no on the opposite side of the of the galaxy. Or does it is there a does there happen to be a planet, a different planet there from another star system? I think that's also interesting.

SPEAKER_02

Almost what are the odds of that? Yes, I I mean you're an exoplanet researcher. It's like a planet that contains life that's Earth-like.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it's see it would be exceedingly rare. It would seem it would seem impossible for it, would be so rare. Not only that there was a planet there, but one that had an atmosphere, um, one that you know had a breathable atmosphere. Yeah, I mean that for breathable for us, almost impossible.

SPEAKER_02

Uh but yeah, talk about something that would end the movie immediately. Yeah, like as soon as you transport, you just end up in a vacuum of space on the other side of the galaxy.

SPEAKER_01

Two immediate movie enders is one, it's where the earth used to be, and so you're in the middle of space and everybody suffocates shortly. And two, um, the area that you're in 200 million years ago happened to be underneath an ocean.

SPEAKER_02

Underwater. Yeah. Or any of the time periods represented had any the amount of water or yeah, then yeah, they we'd have all been flooded. We've been cooked.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Funny enough, in the in the um, in the movie, the basement is flooded throughout the movie. I don't know if you remember that. So they're all which um, yeah, like I don't know what was up with that, but hmm.

SPEAKER_02

So maybe there was more groundwater. Yeah, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Now, I actually forgot about that. If there was groundwater, and there was also like geysers that were spouting up.

SPEAKER_02

There was a geyser, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

That maybe that's water that you could drink, though. That solves it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, once you once you cool it down, yeah. Because it was like scalding hot water when it came out of the geyser. But yeah, I mean that you could in theory you might have like a long-term source of of water from that, right? Just depending on how long the geyser continues to shoot up. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Huh. Yeah, it's a wild, um, it's a wild thing to imagine. Uh, but I think it's cool because dinosaurs are arguably one of the most successful land animals, if you look at just longevity, the amount of time they were able to survive. If the asteroid doesn't hit 66 million years ago, 65 million years ago, I you know, I don't see why there just wouldn't be more dinosaurs still. And obviously birds survived, which again speaks to the longevity of dinosaurs. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Yeah, and we we don't often think of them as dinosaurs, but I know we kind of were talking about before we started recording, like if we killed the dinosaurs, could we eat them? And you know, I I was making the point that, you know, well, they're essentially birds, so wouldn't it be kind of similar to bird meat? But then they might contain some kind of parasite or bacteria that we're just not accustomed to digesting. But if we cook it thoroughly enough, in theory, that that shouldn't be a major issue.

SPEAKER_01

From a cleanliness standpoint, potentially, but there still could be like some weird chemical in the meat or some sort of thing that our bodies just aren't equipped for at this stage to like go back and eat. Um, it's uh it's kind of hard to know. Yeah, but there are you know, there are animals today that you that you're like not supposed to eat.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I was thinking about lionfish, which are an invasive species today. They have these venomous spines, and you actually can eat lionfish, you just kind of have to have a professional chef that can cut around the venomous spines. But of course, in this time, we don't know what we'd maybe have to cut around to survive.

SPEAKER_01

Same with puffer fish, too, right? There's like something you can have them prepared, which I mean, talk about playing a stupid game. Why? Why do I want a professional chef and I'm like fingers crossed, they prepare.

SPEAKER_00

Hope he gets it right.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, like not, yeah, yeah. So anything that you were to eat, you would be gambling with uh it being poisonous in some way, but fungus. There's also fungus.

SPEAKER_02

There should also be like uh mushrooms and and different fungus that potentially you could cook and eat that are also sometimes poisonous, also sometimes gonna be pretty poisonous, and it contain neurotoxins that can get people high, yeah, potentially. Man, yeah. Well, what a what a movie, man. Um, so you know, this has been a special episode today. We wanted to go through some of the science behind the end of Oak Street. It is a science fiction horror film that is coming out August 14th. Um, and if you want to check that out, we'll make sure that we link it down in our description for more information. Um, and thank you so much for End of Oak Street for sponsoring us on this episode.

SPEAKER_01

Absolutely. It's a is a fun watch and it really does get that like that 70s, 80s nostalgia. Not that I was alive in the 70s, 80s, but I do know that like 80s, 90s dinosaur nostalgia going on.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, it definitely has that vibe.

SPEAKER_01

And Anna Hathaway, I think Anna Hathaway was good in it as well.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah, yeah. She definitely did her thing. Um, and Dakota, man, as we always like to say, stay curious on the end of Oak Street. Peace.