Chapter 1: What is the significance of nitrogen in agriculture and warfare?
Welcome to The Rest of Science. I'm Hannah Fry. And I'm Michael Stevens. Okay, Michael, I want you to tell me who you think is the biggest villain in all of history.
The biggest villain?
Mmm. Mmm.
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I'm going to choose to interpret this incorrectly. Do you know? And I'm going to say the answer is Watt Tyler, the leader of the 1381 Peasants Revolt. OK. He marched the peasants from Canterbury to London, demanding economic reforms, the end of the poll tax. And he was killed and didn't really achieve a whole lot. Doesn't sound like a bad guy, though, does he? No, no.
Well, villain didn't used to mean bad guy. It used to mean low born peasant rustic. Did it? And then because of the classes, right? It becomes, oh, are you poor or just bad? Same thing. So villain became a bad person. Wow. Yeah.
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Chapter 2: How did Fritz Haber change the course of history?
Really?
Which are part of its Pacific naval empire. It has those because they had bird poop on them. I did not know that. Right. That was it. They were looking for poop. Wow. Isn't that extraordinary? Well, yeah.
There's this whole massive war that happened, the War of the Pacific between Bolivia and Chile, because Bolivia decided that they were going to impose, see if this resonates, a 10% tariff on any exports of bird poop. At which point Chile was like, no, thank you very much, and invaded. And as a result, Bolivia lost its entire coastline.
And sort of there's still this ongoing fight about... Jeez, wow.
You know, this is a lot of stuff, right? So, yeah, when you're at the beach and a seagull poops on you... You should be like, dude, countries used to be invaded for this stuff. People lost their lives for this stuff. People lost their lives. And I just got some for free.
Yeah. Well, don't people say it's lucky to have a bird poo on you? That should be why. Hey, £5.50. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I can eat tomorrow. But this is this is really, really significant that we had reached a point where to keep the human population thriving and growing was impossible. Like a any other species would have just reached that ceiling and died off. Yeah. Down to a smaller population. But humans, as our story goes, always find a way. Always find a way. Always find a way.
Yeah. And part of the reason why we found a way is because we knew that there was nitrogen literally everywhere. Like you can't, you know, most of the things, breathe in, loads of nitrogen. Breathe in, loads of nitrogen. You're so...
literally surrounded by this stuff and we as a species found a way to bend the earth to our will and to say give it up yeah and not just we as a species the villain slash hero of our story Fritz Haber was the person who managed to do this how did he do it? Okay, so the thing is, right, you've got this really strong chemical bond, right? This is 1900s, incidentally. He is German.
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Chapter 3: What role did nitrogen fixation play in World War I?
During World War I. During World War I, or afterwards. Because nitrates...
still form an extremely important part of explosives and it's really difficult to put a number on this but the number of people who've been killed by explosives involving nitrates that directly link back to this this kind of process is in the tens to hundreds of millions of people plus then if you add on the fact that if germany if the first world war hadn't gone on as long germany hadn't dug in as deep the treaty of versailles wouldn't have been as
As perceived as painful by them, leading to certain political decisions and so on and so on.
We're talking lots and lots of people. Now, OK, I think you could argue, right, in a certain sense, all of this is a little bit incidental, unintended consequences, sort of, you know, butterfly effect of the things that he was doing.
So just so you don't feel too bad about Fritz Haber, I also want to tell you about the other chemistry work that he was doing at the time, because this is like where stuff gets proper nasty, because he is also essentially the father of chemical warfare. And we're going to be talking about that after the break.
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Chapter 4: How did Haber's discoveries lead to the development of chemical weapons?
OK, it just is. And then what we need to do is both react to, but even better, prepare for the consequences. We certainly can't come in and say, you know, you've got to stop investigating this. You've got to stop being curious about this because of what could happen. But we do need to take on the responsibility and become even more curious to really think about what is it that we're doing?
What will the future think about what we're doing?
Yeah, I think that's a really cool way to think of it. The ultimate cure is more curiosity.
Exactly. It's not stopping it. It's, oh, self-driving cars. How are they going to decide between hitting a grandma or a child? And it's like, well, you know, let's work on that. Mm-hmm. But let's not stop the development of what could really help so many people.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, we hope that we've helped you with this podcast.
Yeah.
It's sort of a bit of a depressing story. I sort of want to do a bit of a jolly, happy, clappy ending, but there isn't one.
But I think you're right. I think sometimes the depression is inspirational. And so, yeah, stay curious, become more curious. And as always, you can reach out to us at therestisscienceatgoalhanger.com. We'd love to hear from you.
Yeah. Or leave us a comment wherever you are getting this podcast. And we'll see you next week.
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