this is the last domino after spending four days setting them up now this this
video is going to be a metaphor for time a metaphor for the entire history of the
universe using one Domino for every million years now on that time scale we
need a lot of Domino's specifically we need thirteen thousand seven hundred and
ninety nine Domino's so to do this I needed to do it in a warehouse that's
how much space this takes up because the universe is very very old now this video
isn't just about that number it's about the story of the universe because as
they fall I'm going to try to run alongside them and narrate everything
that has ever happened wish me luck okay ear protection it
starts with a big
time starts to tick hydrogen and helium now exists they clump together to form
the very first stars that burn out quickly and explode those stars send
their enriched guts out into the universe and those gases form new stars
because gravity continues to clump gasses into stars and it groups stars to
form the first galaxies there are at least a hundred billion galaxies one of
those is the Milky Way which we will eventually live in the Greeks will name
it that because it looks to them like milk is spilling across the sky that's 1
billion years in our timeline right now the Milky Way has started to form into a
spinning disk now this balloon will represent the galaxies now see thrown
perfectly straight upwards it keeps its shape but if I spin it and as I throw it
it gets pulled out words and that is centrifugal force and that's the same
force that causes our galaxy to be a disc not a sphere the force that holds
it together is gravity which I can also demonstrate at our first domino the
temperature of the universe was trillions and trillions of degrees and
by now it's already -173 degrees Celsius this is the peak birth rate of
stars but stars are also dying and in fact there is one supernova every 50
years so in our timeline that's like one supernova per spark from our sparkler
these explosions dump out heavier atoms into the universe
it's the enriched guts of stars that filled the universe with stuff dead
stars can go on to become super dense things like black holes and neutron
stars and if they aren't big enough to explode then they can become things like
white dwarf stars which are about the size of the earth
and take forever - well, very long - to burn out. at this time in a distant solar
system two stars are in a dance of death now either one collided with the other
or one started feeding off of the other but either way one that we will
eventually name Wilson goes supernova and it will take the rest of our
timeline (another 10 billion years) for that light to travel all the way to the
Hubble Space Telescope as this image. Light travels super fast but the
galaxies are big and far apart. We're about 90 metres into our timeline, or
about a third of the way through the universe scientists know is 13,799
million years old give or take only 21 million years now scientists are good at
what they're do because that's very accurate it's literally just a step one step in
our timeline that's a pretty good estimate. We still know relatively little
about this whole part of the universe's history, but for all we know there could
be life evolving in distant galaxies and it could be going extinct and we just
don't know about it yet. Space continues to expand galaxies are drifting further
apart and even our galaxy is expanding. Now at this point the rate at which
stars are forming in the Milky Way starts to slow down but don't worry
there's still about seven stars born every single year so the
Milky Way has a long life ahead of it. Since we last checked in with the
background of the universe space has gotten a lot bigger and it's cooled by
another 95 degrees Celsius now we're almost halfway to present-day and
in all that time the universe will only cool by another two degrees as entropy
increases space will continue to get colder and colder but
eventually the entire universe will be too cold to support life though to make
that timeline there aren't enough dominoes in the entire universe
so don't worry. we're officially past the halfway mark to modern day now
the Milky Way galaxy is rotating so if this is our Milky Way galaxy it's
rotating which means that the outside is traveling very quickly and on our
timescale even though the universe is sorry the galaxy is spinning at hundreds
of kilometers a second it takes 240 million years to rotate so that's
something like that speed the universe the galaxies it's very big
something happens around this time that we just can't explain you see the
universe should be slowing down its rate of expansion but for some reason things
are actually accelerating it's not slowing down it's accelerating and we
don't know what force is causing that to happen but for now we call it "dark
energy" and also most of the universe is made of this stuff that we can't
identify and we know very little about so now we're calling that "dark matter"
now we're getting to a very exciting point.
Somewhere in the outer edges of the galaxy of the Milky Way there is a
spinning cloud of dust called a protoplanetary disc and right
now a supernova triggers that to collapse and it forms our Sun our gas
giants and our rocky world's a proto planet smashes into the earth and
creates the moon Mars Venus and Earth are all water worlds they're wet!
there's also millions of asteroids many are bombarding through the universe,
many between Mars and Jupiter but also many are colliding with the earth and
the moon. There's 20,000 craters created at this time that are wider than
Manhattan they're big. And also the moon has an active core and right now they're
actually volcanoes on it and it's so close to the
earth that the tides are over 300 meters high. Life evolves in the sea it's just
simple single cells but they begin to photosynthesize even though they aren't
making oxygen just yet. Venus and Mars have dried up becoming very hot and
extremely cold respectively you see Venus had a runaway greenhouse
gas effect and the surface is now hot enough to melt lead and Mars well its
core died and then it lost its atmosphere and its ability to stay warm
maybe they could have harbored life in the past but they hardly seemed
hospitable now Earth is going through its first Ice Age there will be four
more but none will be as long as this one little bacteria right now have
started to produce oxygen though still there aren't animals around to breathe
it the Sun is getting hotter and brighter and the moon is drifting
further and further away one galaxy collides with ours the Milky Way and
that's how it gets its spiral arms some cells of all the thing called a nucleus
that's where they can store their genes those cells will give rise to all
eukaryotes which include fungi plants and animals like us one cell lives
inside of another cell it becomes the powerhouse of the cell the mitochondria
because that was a different species another Ice Age happens and time it
keeps ticking by now somewhere sex is definitely happening now it's not very
efficient but it has some benefits like mixing up genes earth is in snowball and
now it's getting warmer again life evolves to become multicellular now
things get really crazy there are animals evolved they develop eyes and
now the universe can see. There's tons of these things called trilobites. Earth
goes through another Ice Age. Land plants evolve. Trilobites survive a mass
extinction but they die in another mass extinction. Forests grow. Reptiles evolve.
Pangaea forms. There is a huge extinction.
Dinosaurs roam.. dinosaurs roam! mammals crawl. Pangaea breaks apart. birds fly.
plants they fruit. Dinos I'm sorry they die. primates climb. elephants browse.
Humans think. that's the universe of history. the craziest thing to me about
Oh firstly that it worked but secondly then in all of the history of everything
I can bring the camera close here all of the history of everything it really
comes down to these last three dominoes these ones here where humans start to
actually take shape this third one is when humans develop fire
it's not even humans actually it's one of our ancestors here those ancestors
get stone tools and on the last one the very last Domino Homo sapiens
evolve but they don't evolve until - if this is a million years ago and this is
present-day - they don't evolve till here. well that was fun but I am very glad
that it's all over because I have literally spent weeks planning this and
then several days cutting thousands of dominoes because I made them and then a
full four days for four very long days setting them up by hand but I couldn't
have done this without my family so before I say anything else I want to
thank them if you like crazy science projects like this metaphors for science
you've come to the right place I'm Kurtis Baute and this is the Scope of
Science and I've run this channel for several years but as of this video I'm
going to be changing it a lot from now on I'm going to be making one
big video a month whether it's a science metaphor or a big experiment if you're
in the videos like this please subscribe to my channel so that you don't miss out
on the next one and you can like this video if you like this video since we
are in the internet age and such things are possible if you want to learn more
about the universe I recommend listening to the book Forces
of Nature by Professor Brian Cox you can get it at audible.com there's a link in
the description that you can use to get a deal and you'll be helping me out by
doing that so please do so books are great and it's even better if someone
reads it for you anyway thanks so much for watching I hope you enjoyed this and
stay cool Domino people