Investigating the World's Elements | BBC Earth Science

so here's an odd one all the gold we've ever dug up from the Earth would fit in just three and a half Olympic siiz swimming pools that's really not a lot of gold yet it's well everywhere in our jewelry in currency tutan kon's mask Royal Thrones toilets it's even in your smartphone meaning odds are you're probably carrying around some gold with you at all times gold has been fixated on by humans for most of our existence we've used it stolen it even killed for it and because there's only such a s

mall amount we've recycled it which means the gold in your smartphone could have an interesting history what we do know is that its initial Origins go back even further billions of years even to a place far far away because gold is made here in a supernova when stars explode in the ultimate spectacular death and Scatter gold throughout throughout the Universe but crucially not just any Star can make gold even our own Sun can't it has to be a special one probably rotating very fast with a strong

magnetic field or it's made when two neutron stars collide gold is very heavy so it's difficult to produce such heavy element has to be a very high temperature and high density if the process itself is rare then the gold it creates will be rare too so where is it well that's an answer in two parts whilst around 30% of the world's gold can be traced back to the wit Waters ran Basin in South Africa the largest single source of gold in history the biggest stash of gold is held here at the US Federa

l Reserve in New York which has as of 2019 over 497 th000 gold bars if that seems like a small amount of of gold it's important to bear in mind that it's virtually indestructible meaning all the gold we've ever produced has been recycled countless times so the smartphone you're probably watching this video on the gold inside it could have been mined by the Romans the Aztecs or the Egyptians and that gold is Handy not just because it's a great conductor but also because it's extremely unreactive

which makes it useful for a wide array of things so we use it in Gold fillings it's used in jet engines it's used in spacecraft we're even using gold for the mirrors on the James web Space Telescope because gold is incredibly reflective people even eat gold despite it offering no nutritional value whatsoever although to be fair there's few better ways to flaunt wealth than by literally munching on something extremely rare in a way that kind of makes sense because the main use of gold Around The

World Is wealth whether that's as a status symbol or just as a currency itself if you were picking an element from the periodic table to be your money you wouldn't want one that was super reactive or flammable or too difficult to work with or a gas or radioactive but you would need it to be really rare so all of those requirements together lands us with gold it helps as well that it's beautiful and shiny it's a beautiful material but it also carries with it these kind of negative characteristics

the the Lust For Gold greed um idolatry the environmental and human costs of gold which means that any gold you have has a potentially dark history for example it could have come from that one American dude who basically stumbled across a literal Treasure Trove of gold glinting away in a river in California in 1848 that sparked the California Gold Rush which saw hundreds of thousands Southwest one of the largest migrations in US history the gold Rush led to the creation of the State of Californ

ia which rapidly became an economic Powerhouse It sped up the buildings of Railways spanning the country towns became cities and the us became a hub for Global industry but mining was tough work and alongside it came gambling prostitution violence and racism lots and lots of racism especially against Native Americans in 1850 the so-called act for the government and protection of Indians was passed which included facilitating the separation of Native American children from their families this con

tributed heavily to the California genocide during which the indigenous population of California plunged from as many as 150,000 people to around 30,000 and this human cost went hand in hand with environmental damage dams changed the course of Riv sediment clogged waterways and Mercury which is used as an amalgam to extract gold from ore during the mining process flowed Downstream so that gold you're carrying around could have a legacy of death and destruction and that Legacy isn't necessarily t

hat old while we think about the Gold Rush as having happened in the 1800s or modern day gold rushes throughout the world and this is where in fact about fifth of all the gold on the World Market comes from many of these modern gold rushes tick the same boxes as their more famous California cousin artisanal miners working in precarious conditions Mercury pollution and of course dire environmental consequences in theing Amazon alone over 250,000 Acres have been cleared since 1984 but if mining go

ld has the potential to cause so many problems what's to stop us from making our own well many of our greatest scientific Minds have tried in 1669 henik brand tried to make gold from buckets of urine yep he was that gross and to be fair he did accidentally discover phosphorus in the process whilst Isaac Newton's only accomplishment in his quest to produce gold across the 17th century was to accidentally give himself mercury poisoning thankfully nowadays neither urine nor hospitalization are nece

ssary requirements the process of making gold as scientists can actually make it using a particle accelerator except it's only atom by atom because making a single bar would take an unbelievably long time and the energy used to create it would be enormous so it's not really anything more than a pipe dream but there must be gold out there somewhere we can't really have used nearly all of it up making fancy jewelry can we well it turns out there's actually a few more places we can find gold like h

ere in the ocean but good luck trying to get it because it's very spread out with a concentration of about 1 G per 100 million tons of water so although it does exist it's very likely to remain where it is but what about further a field like here because yes there's even gold in Space the sun on the moon and there's even been genuine talk of stripping gold from asteroids NASA have been investigating where we might be able to get gold from and they've actually been looking at an asteroid called 1

6 psyche which has got I think 700 quintilian US dollars worth of gold potentially in that asteroid the methods of mining either deep sea or in space are obviously very involved and extremely expensive to do and space mining and deep sea mining presents some ethical and environmental concerns around the mining of gold as well so we'll have to take all these things into account so for all intents and purposes the gold we have now is all we've got which makes it that bit more precious it's hard to

verify what percentage of gold in circulation is from ancient times according to the world gold Council 2/3 of the current gold stocks have been mined since 1950 but beyond that because gold has been recycled so much across history it would be difficult to pinpoint exactly where all the gold in your possession originated from but at the same time isn't that kind of the coolest part think about it that gold could have traveled from the Stars via Ancient Rome or Latin America all the way to your

pocket and the best part is that could only just be the beginning of its Journey every mobile phone that we throw away currently has about 50 milligrams of gold inside and that could be extracted and then used again because that's the thing gold will continue to be used used for the rest of human history in new and fascinating ways that we cannot predict years from now the potential for a future gold bracelet to have its origins in a smartphone could be as exciting as the prospect of ancient Rom

an gold being in our jewelry today so next time you look at your smartphone your jewelry or even your watch just think about the incredible history that that object may be privy to and all of the future history that it may be become a part of hydrogen Numero Uno in the periodic table practically Elemental royalty it may be the smallest atom in the universe but it could have the power to save the planet it's key to us moving to a clean energy future providing us with an unfathomable amount of ene

rgy it's a potentially almost Limitless source of energy whilst also having the potential to bring Life as we know it to a grinding halt man had firmly in his grasp the forces of progress and his own destruction but how can something from the very dawn of time itself formed just minutes after the big bang be both the key to our Salvation and our Extinction the answer to that question is written in the stars in order for stars to burn and Shine for billions of years they convert hydrogen into hel

ium through constant nuclear reaction this process is known as Fusion where atoms slammed together to form a heavier element we used to think the sun was compositionally identical to Earth until Cecilia pain koskin concluded in 1925 that stars are almost entirely composed of hydrogen and helium meaning our sun is literally a giant Fusion reactor this was a huge shock um at this during this time in fact one of the preeminent physicists of the day Henry Norris Russell told her this was wrong and t

hat she should admit it from her PhD thesis at Harvard and she she left it in but she ultimately called her results almost certainly not real um frustratingly a few years later um this same physicist Russell um later changed his mind recognized Cecilia was correct and published um his own results uh in his own paper and he ended up largely receiving credit for this discovery for quite some time doe in part to the fact that Cecilia was not afforded status at Harvard University on account of being

a woman classic something she noted in her autobiography I noted here as a warning to the young if you are sure of your facts you should defend your position just a note to all self-doubts although tiny the Power released by hydrogen atoms is staggering with potentially Limitless applications alas so far on Earth humans have mostly used it for annihilation this is Ivy Mike the first fullscale hydrogen bomb test in 1952 the US blew Mike up on the Pacific Marshall Islands it vaporized an entire I

sland and left a crater more than a mile wide Hydra bombs are the most powerful weapons humans have ever created roughly a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed more than 200,000 people and six countries are confirmed to have them the United States Russia the United Kingdom China France and India and whilst so far n n of them have been used in battle they remain a persistent threat to Life as we know it but some people believe that we

can use this immense hydrogen power for good we would like to create a star in a jar so the reason we want nuclear fusion to work is that it's a potentially almost Limitless source of energy that doesn't release carbon but there's just one small problem with this method it doesn't work yet it's a very long-term project right and we have a very near-term issue of climate change whilst work is being done internationally in France in the form of the iter project an international nuclear fusion res

earch project focusing on building the world's largest experimental Fusion reactor by 2025 we are still a long way away from developing Fusion here on Earth luckily hydrogen May pose the answer to our climate problems in other ways as an alternative to fossil fuels what's about hydrogen is that we can burn it without releasing any CO2 because there's no carbon in the system in theory burning hydrogen produces almost entirely water vapor pure green energy that's why it's such a buzzword right now

it has the potential to help power our cars ships planes trucks governments around the world have pinned their Net Zero hopes on hydrogen and many say hydrogen is key to meeting the goals of the Paris agreement but there's a problem for all hydrogen's abundance in the universe we have to make the hydrogen we burn ourselves and that's where it gets a bit tricky because it turns out our wonderful source of green energy isn't always so green in fact it's more like a Jackson Pollock painting So hyd

rogen is only as clean as where it comes from and to figure out where it comes from we could look at a color chart whilst hydrogen is colorless we use color codes to identify different types there's gray brown and turquoise hydrogen which are all produced using fossil fuels there's blue hydrogen which is also produced from fossil fuels but the emissions produced can be recaptured and stored underground or yellow and pink hydrogen which are generated through electrolysis and nuclear power respect

ively and then of course there's our good friend green hydrogen which produces no harmful greenhouse gas emissions but here's the kicker unfortunately Ely about 95% or more hydrogen today is made from some sort of a hydrocarbon Source even blue hydrogen the one where you supposedly recapture the CO2 released emits 20% more carbon than simply burning the gas for heat because even the carbon capture process itself includes burning natural gas so yeah to make our wonderful fossil fuel alternative w

e're using a fossil fuel that doesn't sound right the obvious answer of course is to use green hydrogen the type made from clean renewable energy through electrolysis the problem is that's really expensive but green hydrogen can also be used to store renewable energy and this is where it may help save the planet renewable energy is intermittent and so we need a way to store that energy so that we can actually provide a stable electrical grid we can take excess electricity from the grid make Hydr

o and then store that hydrogen for times where the demand on the grid is higher than the grid can produce but you can also use hydrogen directly in vehicles Japan Germany the US and orne already have hydrogen refueling stations where you can top up your vehicle and tests are already underway on planes powered by hydrogen fuel cells but let's not overreach here because hydrogen still has another major hurdle to overcome energy density put simply it means means that hydrogen takes up more space to

produce the same energy as something like methane which is bad because it makes it less economically viable say you're looking to transport a load of cargo on a ship you want to move as much stuff as possible for as little money as is needed hydrogen might take up 20% of that space But something like methane or a fossil fuel takes up just 5% which leaves more room to transport cargo but what if there was another way of storing that energy so another Avenue is to take that excess electricity and

instead of producing hydrogen we produce a metal like aluminum we can take that aluminum react it with the water that the boat is floating on and produce heat and hydrogen on demand so we get to use it but we don't need to store it or transport it and by it I mean hydrogen so even though hydrogen may not immediately seem like a Magic Bullet when it comes to Green energy and let's be honest it's not it can and will play a part in the solution to saving our planet if we make hydrogen using the wa

ter we have all around us we can produce a potentially infinite amount of green energy and it's amazing to think that all this power with its tremendous applications can come from this teeny tiny little atom the smallest in the universe but just quite possibly the most significant this guy really needs to stop dancing not just cuz he's terrible but because the world is running out of helium but what does that mean for the large hyron collider MRI machines and the new space race to mine the moon

because it turns out helium is way more interesting than balloons it's actually essential to our modern way of life and the fact it's running out well that is a very big problem so why is it running out well let's start at the beginning the very beginning right back to the big ban well a few minutes after it that's when the first protons and neutrons collided to form hydrogen which then fused into the very first helium nuclei this Fusion of hydrogen to helium is in the core of every single star

in the universe and this fundamental reaction paved the way for the creation of all other elements but even today 13.7 billion years after the big bang helium still makes up about 25% of the entire universe so again how are we running out of it here on Earth well for all its abundance in the universe it's actually very rare on our planet not only that but it's the only element light and unreactive enough that it can escape Earth's gravity and leak out into outer space the other issue is that we'

re using it up at the current rate that we're using helium there have been estimates of about a to 200 years Supply it's the very definition of a non-renewable resource so what are we actually using it for well for one this touchdown the touchdown tradition of the University of Nebraska's American football team where they released thousands of balloons after the first touchdown go Corn Huskers okay we'll come back to this seemingly random example in a minute because it's actually surprisingly re

levant to the story of helium but helium itself plays a fundamental role in the world today it's essential in everything from space exploration and Quantum Computing to medical equipment and a large hydron collider it's extremely low boiling point means it's perfect for cooling down super magnets meanwhile it non- reactiveness makes it perfect for producing the semiconductor chips that go into just about every computerized device on the planet whatever you're watching this on almost certainly us

ed helium to make it imagine a world without helium we wouldn't have MRI instruments for medical diagnostic but also imagine all the things where computer chips are used imagine that whole industry was unable to function if we didn't have this special substance and that makes the fact that it's running out a pretty huge deal so much so that the University of Nebraska tradition I mentioned touchdown pass yeah well in May 2022 this 60-year tradition went on Hiatus and all because of the helium sho

rtage so thanks Nebraska for taking one for the team but how on Earth have we got to a point where we're relying on college football teams to pitch in and help a global shortage well that Story begins with the US thinking helium would win them the war yeah back in World War I the Germans had hydrogen Zeppelins the US military was jealous so when a Different Light Gas helium was discovered on American soil they started to store huge amounts of it in a cave in Amarillo Texas the national helium Re

serve was born but fast forward to the 19 1990s and the US government decides time to privatize this bad boy so it dumps helium onto the open market cheap helium for everybody problem was that left no incentive for companies to produce their own helium or recycle any they already had enter helium shortage 1.0 Circa 2006 and since then we've been hit by shortage after shortage today there are four major suppliers of helium the US Qatar Algeria and Russia to make matters worse many of the world's

helium plants were struck by disasters or political unrest in 2022 welcome to helium shortage 4.0 and just to throw another curveball in the mix the US government put the rest of its helium up for sale in 2022 so what happens now this is a very uh difficult thing for us to imagine we would be seeding control of our helium U resource to a private entity we don't even know if helium will continue to be stored there so if not there where most of the helium left on Earth that hasn't already escaped

into space has been trapped in the Earth's crust in many cases helium is extracted as a byproduct of natural gas but in Arizona helium exists in these geologic layers alone so for some the answer is to mine for helium what happened in 2018 is it got listed as a critical mineral and that's sort of elevated its status for extraction so new permits are being issued for helium actively now but it's already proving contentious in Arizona the land surface rights are owned separately from the mineral r

ights underground so a landowner can have the mineral rights sold from underneath their feet to a company that wants to come drill and extract we are now at the beginning of modern helium extraction and so there are no studies on what the environmental impacts are so who gets to decide about the extraction process the same kinds of stories that the nation the federal level told itself and others about uranium it is now telling about helium and so if National Security is the most important thing

and we're in war time and we need to protect our citizens then mining X element whatever it is to support that National Security and defense is the highest priority if you're living on the land and you care about your future generations and your children and your water and your security then not mining and not risking extraction impacts at all is the most important priority I as an environmentalist myself have been convinced that there are safe ways to extract helium so we need more helium but w

e also need to stop our Reliance on fossil fuels not to mention a check at history to put it mildly of marching into protected environments and Mining them to death and it's not going to get any simpler because now we found an even more exciting use for helium Q 3 has been identified as the potential fuel for what's called Fusion Energy okay time to get technical because up until now we've been talking about a specific type of helium helium 4 now I want to introduce you to helium 3 an isotope wi

th just one fewer Neutron in its core but that one single Neutron makes a huge difference between a super cooling liquid and a potentially game-changing source of energy right now the way that we obtain nuclear energy on Earth is by fishion you hit an atom you split it and in the process you generate energy Fusion is totally different here you bring two elements two particles and you fuse them and in the process of doing that which requires a lot of energy then a lot of energy is also released a

nd is released in directly into electricity you don't have to go through heating uh uh and then Steam and producing electricity directly goes into electricity and even better the residue is helium just helium the one that again you can use for for inflating balloons so it's a non-radioactive waste cool so where do we get helium 3 from we have a little bit on Earth including some from dismantling nuclear weapons but it turns out there's another source of it here helium 3 comes from the Sun and th

at accumulates on the moon at larger quantities that we find here on Earth because our magnetic field protects us from there overall on the moon there's estimated to be about a million tons of helium 3 and that tantalizing treasure is sparking a whole new space race to get back to the Moon leading the race are the US and China China is already searching for helium 3 in lunar rocks brought back in 2020 and they have plans to launch a robotic Luna mission in 2025 meanwhile NASA's emus program will

see humans set foot on the moon again in 2025 to explore the satellite South Pole so whether it's mining the moon for helium 3 or trying to preserve the helium 4 here on Earth you're probably about to hear a lot more about helium in the coming years but does that mean we're just done now for helium balloons well not necessarily those party balloons touch more people's lives and make more people care about helium than they would about other noble gases you know nobody's really excited about argo

n for the most part and so really helium is special and again if we look at it as this special almost magical substance then maybe we can see that um it's really a gift of the universe to us to have this thing that uh that allows us to lift balloons and also power of rocket ships what else on Earth can do that for us so I am not a balloon uh denier this is how I put it um I would I think that people see the Magic in helium and it should be shared this man hopes nitrogen will help him live foreve

r I'm hoping to get a beautiful cyborg B in the future that's the only way I'm going to get a sixpack so cryonic is the idea that if you can't be saved by current medicine maybe future medicine could save you if you could just be stored in a frozen State until the future Dr Sandberg has elected to have his head preserved in liquid nitrogen at the chili temperature ofus 196° C before he dies this Medallion is instructions from the hospital that if I'm dying they should call out a number in Americ

a call me with ice cubes keep the blood flowing inject various medications and hopefully we can then get started on freezing that freezing process relies on liquid nitrogen preserving his brain until scientists work out a way to reanimate it okay the chances of Revival are small but if any element was going to help us in our quest for immortality it makes sense that it would be nitrogen because no other element has had such an impact on the growth and potential death of our species responsible f

or the huge population boom in the past 50 years and for the death of millions and nothing Echoes this balance between life and death better than the story of Fritz Harbor this German chemist changed the world forever if any single person was responsible for the lives of about half the people on Earth today Fritz would definitely have a strong case and it's all because of one ingenious invention this solved one of the biggest problems our species has ever faced at the turn of the 20th century ou

r fields and soils were running out of nitro without nit there is no life the fourth most common element in the human body it's essential in amino acids and proteins hemoglobin in our red blood cells and even in our DNA nitrogen makes up about 3% of your body by weight so for most people that's like if you took all of your neck it was like all built of nitrogen that that would be like the equivalent chlorophyll that makes plants green is a nitrogen compound so without nitrogen there is no photos

ynthesis all the the crops we grow are dependent on nitrogen Supply but if you farm the same crops in the same soil year on year eventually that nitrogen will get used up which is exactly what was happening at the turn of the 20th century the idea that humans were going to run out of food was a major major concern and we didn't know how to grow more crops when we knew we knew we needed nitrogen but we didn't know how to make that nitrogen the great irony about nitrogen is that we're bathed in it

our atmosphere is 80% N2 gas but that end to gas is not something that's easily accessible because it's triple bonded which means it's really tightly connected it takes huge energy and power to break those bonds apart and make nitrogen into a form that biology can use the only organisms that could take that and break apart those triple bonds are bacteria um and so the big chemistry challenge was to basically figure out how to do what the bacteria DOA good old Fritz using High pressures high tem

peratures and a catalyst he invented a way to to mix the nitrogen in air with hydrogen to make ammonia and that first drop would change the world forever then Carl Bosch scaled it up and the harbor Bosch process was born what the harbor Bosch nation has done is allowed us to produce more fertilizers on planet Earth allowing the human and livestock populations to increase massively about 50% of the human population is alive today because of the ha BOS process so Harbor's invention has literally t

ransformed our planet amazing what an absolute hero so why don't we see statues of Fritz Harbor everywhere and why did some of his own colleagues boycott the Nobel Prize ceremony when he won it well Fritz Harbor didn't always use his scientific Brilliance for good just a few years after his Earth shattering invention World War I began he also used his chemical knowledge to develop things like chlorine gas and went to the front line to see it work and eventually the those same types of materials

were used to kill millions of Jews so it's a very rich sad deep complex history there's also a dark side to the nitrogen part of Fritz Harbor story nitrogen atoms so desperately want to bond to each other that when they do they release a massive amount of energy explosively so this means that in the first world war nitren Supply from Germany was really important in sustaining uh manufacturer of Munitions and thanks to Harbor's life affirming invention World War I Germany now also had an industri

al supply of not so life affirming explosive material if you look at the whole of the 20th century it's been estimated that there are 100 million deaths associated with nitrogen compounds as explosives and this checkered history is why so many people ghosted him when Harbor received his Nobel Prize although speaking of the Nobel Prize Alfred Nobel himself ain't so squeaky clean either Alfred Nobel made a tidy fortune and could fund his prices because he came up with a clever way of taking Nitro

Rich compounds like nitroglycerin and turn them into practical explosives so lovely little lifegiving nitrogen clearly has a bit of a problem with blowing things up but there are also less explosive ways that nitrogen is linked to death ironically by causing too much life if it gets into a water course it means that algae in the water grow too much leading to algal blooms green pea supers of the water when those Decay they remove the oxygen from the water ultimately killing fish so it's a real e

nvironmental problem in the water courses typically that's caused by overusing the same fertilizers that help us feed the world and if you drink too much nitrate in water that's increasing risk for colon cancers and other health problems in air pollution nitrogen compounds form fine particulate matter breathe it deep into your lungs and there's problems for heart diseases and respiratory diseases one original nitrogen atom cascading through the environment can affect air quality water quality cl

imate all those different effects as nitrogen is released into the environment this Cascade is forming lots of different nitrogen compounds one of those Is nitrous oxide it's a powerful greenhouse gas changing our climate and it's also one of the main stratospheric ozone depleting substances right this is all getting a bit Grim time to lighten the mood these people are all off their face on laughing gas I'm sure they got it from their dentist or their doctor how is this related well well laughin

g gas is also known as nitrous oxide released from burning fossil fuels it's actually about 300 times more harmful to the climate than CO2 so what can we do about nitrogen pollution on an individual level we can do things like eat less meat eat more locally B to work etc it's not just about individuals though we also need larger scale policy changes in terms of how we deal with industrial farming um how we regulate fertilizer use things like that but all this nitrogen pollution here on Earth has

got some people thinking about life in a totally different way about finding life on other planets because if humans have the intelligence to douse ourselves in nitrogen pollution maybe extraterrestrials would do the same it's a reasonably good guess that if there's life out there probably it uses nitrogen at some part of its life cycle on Earth some of that nitrogen makes its way into the atmosphere where if it accumulates in a large enough amount it could be detectable with space telescopes s

o if we were to study an extra terrestrial planet and we see large amounts of nitrogen pollution this could be evidence for technological processes like large scale agriculture or combustion back here on Earth maybe it makes sense that the final part of nitrogen story is neither life nor death but perhaps the finest of fine lines between two immortality cry exist idea that if you can't be saved by current medicine maybe future medicine could save you if you could just be stored in a frozen State

until the future and that Frozen state is maintained with liquid nitrogen people in cryonics call this a state of Dean animation not currently alive but also not totally dead just waiting for a few scientific miracles to reanimate them cryonics is controversial because it's kind of half of an experiment it's easier to freeze a body it's much harder to revive it many scientist would say wait a minute we haven't succeeded even with a mouse yet and yet you want to put your head in the frizzer oh a

nd yes it's just anders' head that's being frozen the reason I opted for just preserving my head is that first I'm an academic sheep skate and second this body is not that great I want to have a cyborg body in the future that's the only way I'm going to get the proper six-pack many dismiss cryonics as a Sci-Fi pipe dream but one thing is for sure nitrogen's story is one inextricably linked to life death and everything in between so there is a fundamental Paradox inside nitrogen studying the nitr

ogen cycle has actually made me feel more comfortable with death because every time somebody dies and de composes in whatever way that will happen those elements are returned to the planet and so they get recycled throughout the whole planet eventually through everyone that you love and I find that quite comforting this is a tale of the link between matches dehydrated pee and your bones of the birth of the British labor movement and the first trade unions Global Wars over Bird poo and ultimately

how this single element has helped double the world's population but also how our unhealthy addiction to it may just cause a particularly Bleak future we can't produce any food the issue with phosphorus is if we don't do something about it now the future that we leave our children and our grandchildren U is looking Bleak Grim but we're not there yet so how did we get here the first thing to know about phosphorus is that it's a finite resource what we've got left on Earth is all we've got and ph

osphorus is very rare in the universe this precious element is made only in some stars with the majority of it coming when bigger stars explode in a supernova scattering this newly formed phosphorus throughout the Universe but we're lucky to have any phosphorus at all not all stars create phosphorus and some say that this Rarity might be why alien life remains so elusive why because phosphorus is essential to Life as We Know know it of the six key building blocks for Life phosphorus is the rares

t so much so that it led the great writer and chemist Isaac Asimov to call it life's bottleneck phosphorus is actually the unsung hero um in all life itself and our bodies actually have more than half a kilo of phosphorus um in them predominantly in our bones but also in our very DNA and our RNA and our cell walls and phosphorus is also responsible for um transmitting energy to our brain bra humans and animals get all our phosphorus from the food we eat and plants get it from the soil after we'v

e well got rid of it eat poop grow repeat a virtuous cycle basically since the dawn of human civilization and Way Beyond that for more than 5,000 years um in China and other parts of Asia they've been recycling phosphorus in human excretor back to agricultural soils known as night soil and even in um first Century in the Middle East the Romans were using um pigeons not only for their meat but for their um nutrient-rich manures part of the reason why we have a population of um over 7 billion toda

y is because of our use of of phosphorus and other nutrients to boost crop yields modern day farming is ryant on huge quantities of phosphorus Rich fertilizer but scientists think we're going to run out of phosphorus within the next few decades at some point demand will exceed Supply and that's when you have this critical crunch time and certainly our research has show that that's likely to occur this Century possibly around 2017 so how did we get here what happened to this virtuous cycle of eat

poop repeat well like all good stories of humans messing with Nature's cycle it starts when we first discovered it all the way back in 1669 German Alchemist Henning Brandt was convinced that gold could be distilled from liquid gold and by that I mean human pee so he left 50 buckets of urine in his Cellar to ferment for months his family were thrilled he then boiled and distilled it until he ended up with yeah not gold but he did produce a white waxy substance that began to Glow an eerie green a

nd then spontaneously burst into flames he had discovered phosphorus now for the first time in history humans had Direct access to to phosphorus and immediately we began resetting our relationship towards it for better and worse for a start it led to this fossy jaw but this Grim side effect of being exposed to white phosphorus also sparked the very first British trade unions all right let's rad back a sec because that whole spontaneous combustion thing well that made phosphorus ideal for a 19th

century game Cher matches a French chemist decided to add white phosphorus to the mix of chemicals on the end of a match because phosphorus is just so flammable so you could strike your Lucifer match as they were appropriately called on any hard surface suddenly everyone had cheap fire at their fingertips but in the match factories something immediately started to go wrong you might develop phosphorous necrosis the match women called called it fossy jaw because the phosphorus took hold of your J

awbone and started to Decay it while you were still alive so you'd be spitting out bits of your own skeleton bits of bone the size of peas through vile smelling abscesses in your face now for some reason the match women weren't so fond of this situation so in the summer of 1888 they go on a strike 1,400 of them this leads to a wave of other strikes it's the formation of the modern Trade union movement as we know it today and that of course eventually leads to proper health and safety legislation

Factory inspectors and the Banning of white phosphorus in match production throughout Britain so there you go phosphorus not great for the jaw pretty good for labor rights and what did we do with all the white phospherous yeah we chucked it on all our food well on the crops which we then later eat one of many good reasons to avoid drinking fertilizer but it seems a good time to go back to the fertilizer part of this story CU it's time to welcome the next protagonist nope not that guy this see i

n the 18th and 19th century famine hit Europe why because we didn't have enough phosphorus two major historical developments played a big part in this phosphorus had always been part of a closed loop cycle humans and animals live right next to the plants they grew keeping all the phosphorus nearby but the rise of huge rural to Urban migration meant that people were taking their precious phosphorus Rich poo with them to make matters worse although not so much for the people actually living there

then came the sanitation Revolution and started to flush it all away for good suddenly this neat little closed loop had been broken wide open so we needed a new source of phosphorus and it came in the form of bird P guano was discovered which is bird and bat droppings um which are found off the coast of Peru and in the South Pacific in abundance guano is so rich in nutrients like phosphates and nitrogen that it makes for an extraordinary fertilizer and the Western World goes wild I can't stress

this enough for Bird poo welcome to guano Mania Peru in debt to the UK for financing their independence from Spain signs a trade deal giving the UK a virtual monopoly on their Guan the US gets jealous and passes an act allowing their citizens to take possession of any unclaimed islands with guano and Spain seizes Peru guano Rich chincha Islands before they're forced out again eventually though it became uneconomic to M Guan so leaving a huge trail of environmental and social Devastation in its w

ake the mob descends on a different phosphorous Source phosphate Rock it's used to fertilize Fields all over the world the result from 1950 to 2000 the global population more than doubles but just like with guano now phosphate rock is also running out and while some places don't have enough phosphorus others are getting too much we're allowing it to go into our Waters where it's making toxic algae grow um and producing these huge green sludgy alal blooms which kill everything within the lake and

everything that wants to drink from the water around there see it's a bit of a goldilock situation with phosphorus everything needs to be just right imagine for a second a boat full of phosphorus just one tiny bit more and the boat flips and you go from biodiverse to alal bloom many lakes uh around the planet are getting really close to this Tipping Point and as soon as you add that tiny bit more Bosch you've got an alal Bloom climate change uh is making that that level uh for the Tipping Point

uh much lower according to one study phosphorus pollution affects almost 40% of the earth's land so the same thing we're desperately running out of is also being wasted and consequently polluting the planet amazing and the fact that the remaining phosphorus is so unevenly distributed around the world yeah that doesn't help either so while all Farmers need access to phosphorus to produce food just five countries currently control 85% of the world's remaining phosphate Rock and this makes it high

ly susceptible to Wild fluctuations in the global price of phosphorus in 2008 the price of phosphate Rock spiked 800% it devastated many vulnerable populations and caused riots and farmer suicides from India to Haiti and what we're seeing right now is that the price of phosphate has spiked 400% more than it was 2 years ago clearly something needs to change so basically if you flush your toilet you are a really bad person okay maybe not so much but the main answer does come back to where it all s

tarted poop only about 15% of the phosphorus in sewage is currently recovered around the world we're relying on this resource which is effectively boosting pollution of our of our lakes and our Rivers uh where we could uh move to a circular economy for phosphorus everywhere and really Empower uh sewage recycling uh and food waste recycling and grow our food uh using the pollutant one analysis found that recycling all manure could Harve Global demand for phosphate Rock admittedly that's easier sa

id than done but there are scientists and companies looking into how we can close back up this broken Loop so the race for Solutions is definitely underway the issue with ferus is if we don't do something about it now the future that we leave our children and our grandchildren is looking Bleak it's a world where we can't produce enough food it's a world where our rivers and our Lakes are green and toxic um the good news is we can do something to change that and the benefits for that for Farmers

for society and for the environment are brilliant so we just need to get on with it and just do it now