Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.
This picture is
about a year and a half old. But the pyramids themselves
are much older than that. How much older? Well, think of it this way.
The Pyramids of Giza were as
old to the ancient Romans as the ancient Romans
are to us. When the pyramids were being built
there were woolly mammoths living on Wrangel Island.
That's pretty old. But don't get too impressed.
We often learn about the past in units, separate
chapters, which distracts from the fact that many chapters aren't
just nearer each other than you might think, they are often
literally written on top of one another. Anne Frank
and Martin Luther King Jr. were born in the exact same year.
By the late 1960s humans had come a long way.
We've become a spacefaring species. But while we were sending
the first probes to the Moon and Venus and Mars,
it was still illegal for a black person and a white person to marry
in 16 states. The guillotine
seems like a macabre artefact from bygone days
but it was last used by France to officially behead a criminal
the year Star Wars came out. While General Custer was fighting
native tribes on the American frontier, the Brooklyn Bridge
was being build. And there were people alive then
who would later watch the Moon landing on television.
We went from Custer's last stand to
Armstrong's first steps within the span
of a single human life.
But all of these stories, from the pyramids to Julius Caesar to
you watching this video right now, belong to an incredibly thin section
in the book
of human history. Compared to what human life has
mainly been like here on earth, our current societies
are weird. Weird is also an acronym used
by Jared Diamond in his new book "The World Until Yesterday."
Jared Diamond wrote "Guns, Germs, and Steel," "Collapse"
and he's here with me to talk about weird.
Weird, w-e-i-r-d,
is an acronym for "western, educated, industrial, rich and democratic."
When we talk about human nature we're really talking about
a narrow slice of society. Traditional societies were
everybody in the world, from the beginning of human evolution
6 million years ago until within the last
10,000 years for the first time we began encountering strangers and then we
developed
writing and then we acquired kings. All of these things that we take for granted
are matter of the last 5,000 - 10,000 years. Or the Internet
or the media, they're a matter of the last few decades.
The relative recency of weird societies in the speed with which
information and knowledge increases means that not that long ago
we thought some pretty strange things. For instance,
in 1903 The New York Times predicted that building a flying machine
would be possible in 1 to 10 million years.
Later that very same year the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.
In 1908 it was said that no flying machine will
ever fly from New York to Paris. Who made that
foolish prediction? One of the Wright brothers.
In 1962 the Decca recording company
passed on a young rock band, saying "we don't like their sound
and guitar music is on the way out." The band in question
was the Beatles. Keith Moon and John Entwistle were said to have remarked
about a band called The New Yardbirds,
"that band so ill-conceived it will sink
like a balloon or a zeppelin made out of lead."
Well, Jimmy Page was not deterred. In fact, he took that phrase
and made it his band's new name. He removed the A, so it wouldn't be pronounced
"lead," and that's where we got Led Zeppelin.
There is evidence the Nazis weren't entirely convinced
Earth was a globe we lived on the outside of.
Instead, they figured the Earth's continents were actually aligning
on the inside of a hollow concave surface with the stars and moon and planets
in the middle. Seriously.
As the story goes, Doctor Heinz Fischer was sent to Rügen Island
to spy on the British. Now, the curvature of the earth would have made this
impossible.
But thinking the earth was shaped like this, they pointed their telescopes
up at a 45 degree angle. Needless to say,
the experiment didn't work. The Eiffel Tower's
inauguration and the Wall Street Journal and "Starry Night"
and Coca-Cola and Nintendo and Adolf Hitler
all began in 1889.
As did a guy named Thomas Midgley Jr.
Celebrated in his time,
Midgley's legacy has since been tarnished by
the negative consequences of his inventions.
His list of contributions to society is
impressively disastrous.
In the late twenties, Midgley synthesized the first chloro-fluorocarbons -
CFC - for which he won the Society of Chemical Industry's
Perkin medal. Only later did we realize
all of those tons of CFCs we were emitting
were eating away 4% of our atmosphere's protective ozone layer
every decade. Like a virus, creating a
wound, unlikely to completely heal until me and you
have long been dead. In the early 1920s
Midgley discovered that by adding Tetraethyllead
to gasoline engine knocking could be reduced.
The American Chemical Society gave him the 1923 Nichols' medal
for the discovery. There were other, safer alternatives but General Motors jointly
owned a patent on Tetraethyllead
with Midgley. They could make a profit on it, so they advertised it as
the best option and almost immediately nearly
every motor vehicle on earth was spewing
lead into our atmosphere
and soil, which put it in our blood,
lead poisoning for decades.
Currently, the reference for healthy children is a blood
lead content of less than 5 micrograms
per decilitre. After the popularization of Midgley's
leaded gasoline, 88% of children
in America had double that amount of lead in their
blood. When leaded gasoline was finally phased out
in the 1970s, that percentage fell
to 9%. Lead is a neuro toxin.
Even light exposure, like that caused by Midgley's invention,
can cause a decrease in intelligence and in increase
in anti-social behaviour. Fordham University found that
in young adults the best predictor of delinquent
and violent behavior is literally the lead content
of their blood. Chillingly, the rise and fall
of violent crimes by juveniles in the 20th century
tracks significantly closely with the rise and fall of lead
in their blood when they were preschoolers - all over the world.
Historian J. R. McNeill remarked that Midgley
had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single
organism in Earth's history. Midgley's
final invention was even worse.
Well, for him. In 1940 he contracted
polio. To help his friends and family lift him from bed
he designed an intricate system of ropes and pulleys.
As was the story of his life, the invention seemed
brilliant at first, but four years later he became
accidentally entangled in the ropes and his own invention
strangled him to death.
Midgley's life took up 0.55%
of human history. And, roughly speaking, yours will too.
To put that in perspective, let's time travel,
starting right now. We begin
100,000 years ago - the beginning of modern humans.
We are moving forward in time an entire millennia,
a thousand years, every second. As you can see,
not much is changing. Our modern world
will briefly flash at the end. That's all it is. That's all it's been.
So be careful not to miss it.
And as always,
thanks for watching.