Okay! Thank you! All right, so I'm really worried about science and especially
science literacy because whenever I turn on the news I see things like people
don't believe in vaccines or they don't believe in climate change and I think
it's a we're in a time where we need science now more than ever because of
those issues. And so about a year and a bit ago I quit my job as a science
teacher but I did that in order to make videos about science full-time because I
wanted to reach as wide of an audience as possible and... I have had a really
weird year since then and I want to talk to you about four of the projects that
I've worked on in 2018 that relate to what it means to be a human in the
cosmos or 'our place in space' and I'm gonna start with what I was working on
which Michael mentioned a year ago I was making these dominoes and I was making
the dominoes because I needed so many dominoes that you just actually cannot
buy that many dominoes I was I made a tote bag of dominoes because I wanted to
make a timeline of the universe's history from the Big Bang to modern day
and in that timeline of dominoes each domino would represent a million years
and the universe is really old so that was thirteen thousand seven hundred and
ninety nine dominoes and it took me four days to set them up on the first day I
was kind of nervous and making some mistakes and they were falling on the
second day I was you know being like okay I got this by day number three I
was like let's just get this over with and by day four I was kind of losing my
mind and took it a little less seriously the final row of dominoes was 300 meters
long and I got to tell you it totally changed my perspective on the age of the
universe because I mean it's one thing to just know that the universe is 13.8
billion years old but it's another thing to like physically gruelingly go
through that process and I'll never forget but
eventually I knocked over the first domino and began to narrate the
universe's history as they were falling because they fell for nine minutes which
I think might be a world record but in terms of duration at least and I'm
trying to narrate it and I'm really nervous because on the first take it
just stopped abruptly and then we set them back up and I was like oh man
there's no way yeah I'm like there's no way we're gonna get through on 13,000 of
these I only made it through a few hundred but on the second take amazing
life to me at least it worked and we made it to these last few dominoes and
up in the top left of this you can see the dinosaurs going extinct this is in
slow motion and the last four and a bit dominoes is all of human history just
there and that's after 300 meters of dominoes and that blew my mind and I
really wanted to do a project where i zoomed in even further on that because
still those four dominos that's a lot of time so I did another project and in
this second timeline one year was going to be one centimeter and I wanted to
start 4.2 million years ago and that's 42 kilometers so I started training for
a marathon because you know I wanted to go from when we were living in trees to
present day and it was logistically complicated to like film a marathon and
narrate it while running but eventually made this thing work and it took an hour
of running from when we lived in trees an hour of running just to get as far as
having stone tools and you know when we're species or not our species but our
ancestors are starting to walk upright and after two hours of running you know
what we've got we've got better stone tools
and that's it and you know it takes another full hour of running and I'm
like pretty tired at this point but I got to keep going and we find out how to
use and control fire and after another full hour everything we we us Homo
sapiens evolved and another 40 minutes of running finally brings me to the last
minute and in that last minute we have farming and writing and you and me but I
want to talk about just that last meter of that time line because if I started
this run in White Rock BC near the border of the American border I would
run 42 kilometers all the way here to the Fox and this last meter would have
so much history in it it would have the first transatlantic radio signal would
have the first nuclear bomb, Sputnik the first space satellite that we made,
Apollo missions to the moon, and the whole world wide web is this last little
foot and around there is my whole lifetime and that kind of blows my mind
because as I'm running I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking that you
know this is my life and this whole timeline from when we first started
walking until now that took me 49 thousand steps and in all of that time
you know in the last few meters humans have done a lot to the planet and that's
kind of terrifying but I also think that like you know I want I want to talk more
about this and like show people that show people people about this and and
how do we know these things you know like the Big Bang well how do we know
that that happened and how do we know our genetic ancestry and how do we know
all of that history we know it from from science and it's a process that I wanted
to demonstrate and I wanted to show how that process worked so I decided to
using this to measure the earth and I did that with this and my bike but first
I'm gonna demonstrate it with an orange let's pretend but this orange is the
earth and we're gonna put two sticks into it
very scientific now this is not to scale but if we have two sticks in orange
different angles since the orange is round and since the
Sun is very far away the light hits these sticks and they make different
lengths of shadows these are spotlights as they don't
really count but if you measure the lengths of the shadows you can figure
out the angle that they would meet up at in the center of the orange if you
measure the distance between the two sticks you can figure out using some
math don't be afraid the distance around the entire orange and you can also do
that with the actual earth that doesn't have to be in orange so I did that by
taking two of these meter sticks this was one of them and making two little
simple sundials just sticks with numbers and I put those and my bike on a plane
and I'm going to Regina Saskatchewan because look at that Regina is really
sorry Saskatchewan is really really flat and that mean that means that there's
one of the straightest longest roads in the entire world there and so I set up a
sundial in Regina and I said I strapped the other one to my bike and I biked 138
kilometers in a perfectly straight line which was something and I set up the
other sundial and we did this experiment and you know honestly like it feels
smaller now that we've done I've done this experiment like 138 kilometers
is a long way but the world feels like a smaller place is it repetitive yeah but
I also spent most of it listening to Daft Punk specifically around the world
and there's basically no lyrics it's me it is the most repetitive song ever
actually but anyway did the experiment measure the shadows measured the
distance between the sticks and it worked we managed to measure the size of
the earth and that was cool we also confirmed that the earth is round which
you're laughing because that seems obvious to you but that's not obvious to
a lot of people many people in America and Canada believe that the earth is
flat and when I say many I mean and a survey that looked at 8,000 people
and asked them about the shape of the world 16 percent we're not sure or we're
skeptical or we're convinced that the world is flat and I know this is not
these aren't trolls these people are for real because a lot of them have
contacted me I get a lot of messages still sometimes like this this is one
message I'm gonna summarize as saying you know this person believes in a lot
of conspiracies there's some kind of simple ish logic to their arguments but
NASA is lying to you and all of your photos are fake and you know first your
instinct is to be like what is this for real is this person this this guy's not
this is fake right and then second you're at your second instinct naturally
is like you're an idiot right you just want a name call them you want to you
know throw some evidence at them but really I think that that is is a typical
response it's intuitive but it's broken because I think these people really
truly honestly need compassion I think if we approach them by yelling at them
we're just going to push them away further to the fringes and further
polarize issues like this and maybe it doesn't matter that much for an issue
like Flat Earth but it does matter for a lot of science issues and we need to
everyone start thinking about how we interact with one another on these
topics I think everybody needs to be more scientific in terms of how we
reason but also much more human in terms of how we communicate with one another
whether or not you're a science communicator so okay so I've talked a
little bit about the universe and its age and I've talked a little bit about
our tiny little sliver of that timeline and I've talked a bit about the scale of
the earth but I wanted to finish off the year with a big project about the air
because the most important issue I think we are facing today is climate change
and it's an issue that like the shape of the earth most people do not understand
at all and so I decided to do a project on that and if anyone knows me
they'll know like yeah of course the idea that came to mind first is I'm
gonna build a jar and I'm gonna seal myself inside of it with plants and so I
built a 10 foot by 10 foot by 10 foot cube and I filled it with 200 plants and
some food and some water and a bucket and I covered it in greenhouse plastic
and filled myself inside and oh like sometimes they lose my breath just
thinking about how fun this was the plan was that the plants would produce oxygen
for me and I would exhale carbon dioxide for them and we would be this tiny
little ecosystem that would represent in a way the earth and I could use that to
demonstrate how we interact with the air we breathe and in order to do this I
needed to research the air like my life depended on it because it did and but
eventually you know once I was comfortable enough with my research and
my planning I went inside and I sealed myself inside and while I was in there I
was really worried particularly about one gas which is carbon dioxide co2 it's
a gas that you exhale and we're also worried about that as a species because
it's one of the main gases that's causing with climate to change and
carbon dioxide actually only makes up a tiny tiny fraction of the air we measure
it in parts per million and this is a graph with carbon dioxide in ppm parts
per million on the this axis and then on the bottom is time and this is the graph
from the gas that was in there with me in the jar and it started off well at
400 parts per million and after every hour it just kept going steadily
steadily up and that was because it was a cloudy day unfortunately I had to do
it on a specific day and this one didn't allow the plants to photosynthesize for
me very well so very rapidly it reached 10,000 parts per million
at which point my sensors couldn't even detect how much carbon dioxide was in
there so I had to escape for safety should say obviously don't try this at
home because I had a paramedic on site and we had lots of safety equipment but
eventually I did have to leave the jar and a nice breath of fresh air that was
the best breath I've ever had but while I was in there the a lot of things
changed including the water that was in there with me it became more acidic
because carbon dioxide it dissolves in water and it makes carbonic acid and
that's also the same thing that's happening to our oceans and I also
started to feel the air like inside of me it was like this thick mass and it
started to totally change my perspective on the air because it's rather
remarkable but we live in this invisible fluid and it keeps us alive like think
about that that's absolutely incredible but at the same time we literally just
see right through it every day and that also means we don't treat it very well
because it's an invisible problem while I was in there and before going in there
I thought a lot about what it means to have a carbon footprint and our impact
on the environment because our breath is like the smallest factor so if I look at
my carbon dioxide emissions from my body and I compare that to factors like
driving or meat well one day 24 hours worth of breathing exhales puts out the
same amount of carbon dioxide as driving just one kilometre and the same amount
of emissions account for one bite of steak so it's a big deal like these are
these are big values these are big values because if you think about it
like if I stayed a full day in there I actually could have died and so I've
been asking myself this question which is would I do that blank if I was in my
jar because you know I wouldn't have ever dared to I didn't even cook food in
there because that would release gases that could you know co2 that could kill
me and I wanted to be very careful about that but I still want to think like that
it might radical but like we do need to have some
sort of radical solution to these sorts of problems and I think we need to start
thinking in extreme measures so no I won't you know fill my biodome with
plastic and garbage because I mean that'd be really messy and gross in
there and I don't think we should be doing that to earth sounds radical but
they're both closed ecosystems and I think we need to treat them that way the
other thing that I learned about doing this project is that every experiment
it's a story this was a unusual experiment but every experiment is you
have a question and you want to find an answer and you do some methods and you
go on this adventure and you find the result and people love stories people
are really engaged I think we're hardwired for stories and
so this story did really well in terms of making you know getting outreach
about climate change it trended on Twitter while I was in there and made
international news and I'm not saying that to brag about I'm saying that
because they almost didn't do this project altogether because and the lead
up to it I was completely freaking out about it and I was like waking up in the
middle of the night and I was worrying you know maybe I'll do all this work and
no one will even even know and the message will be lost and maybe I'll do
all this work and I'll go in there and I'll have missed something and it will
like be dangerous to me but as any brilliant youtuber I foolishly announced
that I was going to do it so I kind of felt committed so I announced tit on my
channel and I decided you know I said I'm gonna do this thing I'm gonna do
this thing and that's been like a good lesson for me even if it was kind of
hard at times because I think we do need to set these crazy lofty goals and try
our best and commit to them question I get asked a lot is so what's next
and since I'm now in the business of making commitments I want to share with
you some of my commitments for 2019 which is firstly I'm just gonna stay
committed to science I want to make first and foremost my content to be
scientifically accurate and also engaging and want people to think about
the scientific method I'm also going to be trying to do more invent
environmental projects so I want to change my lifestyle and my work to be
zero waste by the end of 2019 which means I'm going to have to cut out a lot
of plastic and learn to recycle better and work on that and lastly I want to
reduce my carbon emissions because I think that's something everybody needs
to do and you know it's gonna be hard but I want my emissions from 2019 to be
less than 2018 which is honestly a small step but I hope that you know if you're
making new year's resolutions and you're thinking about what you can change in
2019 you'll try to set some big goals for yourself and you know anything is
possible it's been a weird year for me but it's been a good one my name is
Kurtis Baute and if you want to support the work I do you can find me on patreon
or if you just want to see what I'm up to you can find me really anywhere on
the Internet just search 'Kurtis Baute' or 'guy sees himself in a jar' that's my life
thank you