This man hopes nitrogen will help him live forever.
I'm hoping to get a beautiful cyborg body in the future.
That's the only way I'm going to get a six pack.
So cryonics 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
chilly temperature of -196 degrees Celsius
before he dies.
This medallion is instructions for the hospital that if I'm dying, they should
call a number in America,
cool me with ice cubes, keep the blood flowing, inject various medications,
and hopefully we can then get started on freezing me.
That freezing process relies on liquid nitrogen preserving his brain
until scientists work out a way to reanimate it.
Ok 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 for 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 Haber.
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,
our fields and soils were running out of nitrogen.
Without nitrogen, 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, and it was like all built of nitrogen,
that would be like the equivalent.
Chlorophyll that makes plants green is a nitrogen compound.
So without nitrogen there is no photosynthesis.
All 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 gonna run out of food was a major, major concern.
And we didn't know how to grow more crops.
Well 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 N2 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.
And so the big chemistry challenge was to basically figure out how to do
what the bacteria do.
Enter good old Fritz.
Using high pressures, high temperatures and a catalyst,
he invented a way 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 Haber-Bosch process was born.
What the Haber-Bosch nitrogen 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 Haber-Bosch process.
So Haber's invention has literally transformed our planet.
Amazing. What an absolute hero.
So why don't we see statues of Fritz Haber everywhere?
And why did some of his own colleagues boycott the Nobel Prize ceremony
when he won it?
Well, Fritz Haber 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 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 Haber’s 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,
nitrogen supply for Germany was really important
in sustaining a manufacture of munitions.
And thanks to Haber's life-affirming invention,
World War I Germany now also had an industrial 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 chequered history is why so many people ghosted him
when Haber 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 prizes because he came up
with a clever way of taking
nitrogen-rich compounds like nitroglycerin
and turning them into practical explosives.
So lovely little life-giving 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 watercourse, it means that algae in the water grow too much,
leading to algal blooms,
green pea soupers of the water.
When those decay they remove the oxygen from the water
ultimately killing fish.
So it's a real environmental problem in the watercourses.
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, climate, 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, laughing 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,
bike 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, 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.
So if we were to study an extraterrestrial 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’s story
is neither life nor death,
but perhaps the finest of fine lines between the two.
Immortality.
Cryonics 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.
And that frozen state is maintained with liquid nitrogen.
People in cryonics call this a state of deanimation.
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 somebody,
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 freezer?
Oh, and 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 cheapskate.
And second, this body’s not that great.
I want to have a cyborg body in the future.
That's the only way I'm going to get a 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 nitrogen cycle has actually made me feel more comfortable
with death
because every time somebody dies and decomposes
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.