Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.
A few years ago
in Minneapolis an angry dad stormed into the retail store
Target. His daughter, a high schooler,
had been receiving coupons in the mail from the store for things like cribs
and diapers. Was Target encouraging his daughter,
a minor, to go out and get pregnant? well
Well, the store apologized but a few days later they heard back from the father. He
told them
"a few things have been going on in my household
I was unaware of. My daughter is due
in August. I owe you an apology." You see,
Target's internal algorithms have been tracking
and processing his daughter's purchases and recently
she'd started buying different items than usual.
Things like certain vitamin supplements and scent-free soaps and lotions.
Behaviors the system flagged as evidence
she could be pregnant, thus they her sent the coupons.
And they were right. Without being told,
Target knew that a girl was pregnant
before her own father.
We are tracked and followed digitally now more than
ever before. We live in a world of 24/7 CCTV,
browser cookies, trackable debit cards and cell phones and GPS,
fingerprinting and DNA analysis. But despite
all of that, every single year
in the United States alone more than 2,000 people
disappear and are never found again
dead or alive.
Where do missing people go? How did they disappear?
What if you disappeared and
how do you know you haven't already
disappeared? In many cases, missing persons are the victims
of unsolved or unknown crimes.
They may have suffered accidents or taken their own lives
and their bodies were never found. Or they may be perfectly fine and have simply
escaped their old life, old friends and family, old debt and obligations to start
a new life
somewhere else, possibly as someone else.
How long would it take for people to notice
if you disappeared? Well, think about it. I mean,
it sort of depends on who you are, how you live
and how you disappeared. In most jurisdictions after about five to seven
years,
if no one has heard anything from you at all,
you can be declared dead in absentia.
This is what happened to French astronomer
Guillaume Le Gentil. In the 18th century hundreds of people traveled far and wide
to observe the transit of Venus from different locations
on earth. They knew that by comparing their measurements they could calculate
more accurately than ever before just how far away
the Sun was. So, Le Gentil
left Paris in 1760 for Pondicherry
in India. But after a storm blew him off course
and the British occupied Pondicherry, he was forced to spend the day
of the transit on a boat at sea, which rocked
too much for accurate measurements to be taken. Now, the next
transit would happen in 8 years. But after that, the next
next transit wouldn't happen for another 100 years.
So, he stuck around. He didn't return to Paris. Instead, he built an observatory
and waited. When he finally returned
to Paris, 11 years after leaving, he found that he had been declared
dead. His wife had remarried,
his family had plundered his belongings and his position
at the Royal Academy of Sciences had been given to someone else.
He never did see the transit of Venus,
by the way. On the day that it happened, the sky above him
was overcast.
We know the human population
of Earth.
Kind of.
Population figures and counters are only estimations.
Individuals are best accounted for by real people
in their real lives. But that doesn't always
happen.
Earlier this year Janet Veal passed away in her apartment
in Ringwood, Hampshire. Large portions of her body
were eaten by her pet cats before she was discovered
weeks later. And seven years ago
Joyce Carol Vincent was found dead on her sofa,
in Wood Green; or at least her skeleton
was found. She'd been dead for at least three
years and no one ever checked on her.
Her television was still on.
And four days after Timothy McVeigh bombed
a federal building in Oklahoma City, taking
168 lives, a severed
left leg was found in the rubble.
No one knew who it belonged to. The legs of all the other victims had been
accounted for
and no one else had been reported missing.
DNA analysis showed that the leg belonged to a Lakesha Levy,
but she had already been buried with both her legs.
So, they dug up her corpse.
She'd been buried with someone else's left
leg. The legs were swapped, but because her body had been embalmed,
DNA in the unknown leg could not be analyzed.
To this day no one knows who that leg
belongs to. The 169th
victim remains a mystery.
Some conspiracy theorists argue that the leg may have belonged
to be actual bomber, someone besides Timothy McVeigh,
who was close enough to the explosion to be obliterated completely,
except for one leg. Regardless,
what it does show is that it is possible for a person to disappear
without anyone ever asking where they went.
Sometimes people are reported dead or missing
even when they aren't. Premature obituaries
are common. Many living people already have one on file.
If a famous person dies, the media, television, newspapers, magazines, well
they need a full story as soon as possible. So, they
prepare them ahead of time, locked away, leaving only the dates and circumstances
of the death to be filled in.
Makes sense, but it's awkward
when they leak before the person's dead. In 2003
CNN's website accidentally carried draft obituaries for living people that could
be
accessed. It's embarrassing, but
for the person reading their own obituary, it's a chance to do something
that most of us never get a chance to do.
See how you will be remembered after you're gone.
Alfred Nobel invented dynamite.
He made a fortune manufacturing and selling
deadly weapons - cannons and armaments. In 1888
his brother Ludvig died but many newspapers mistakenly thought that he
had died
and published obituaries for Alfred
Nobel. They weren't very flattering.
One French paper declared "The merchant of death
is dead." Nobel read these
obituaries and was so ashamed by what his legacy apparently
was going to be. When he did die, he left almost
all of his money to the cause of celebrating humanity.
He created The Nobel Prize. Marcus Garvey
wasn't so lucky. The story goes that after suffering
a stroke newspapers ran premature obituaries that
were critical of him, saying, he died broke,
alone and unpopular. Shocked by how negatively he was being remembered
Garvey suffered another stroke while reading his own obituary
and died. In April of 2006
five Taylor University students died in a tragic car accident.
Another student survived, but was in a coma.
She was identified as Laura van Ryn.
Her friend Whitney Cerak wasn't as lucky. She was pronounced
dead. A thousand people attended her funeral
but over the next few days as Laura
recovered, she began speaking and when asked her name,
Laura said my name is Whitney. The girls
looked similar. It turned out Laura
was the one they had buried. Later, Whitney
was married in the very same church that years before
had held her funeral. What if you are already missing
and just don't know it? It's not known how often hospitals
accidentally switch babies at birth.
Modern hospital policies make it unlikely to happen, but because we don't
all go out and get maternity
and paternity tests for fun, there isn't a lot of data
on the phenomenon. But it does happen. It's often discovered because of DNA tests
administered to resolve child support disputes.
Or, in the case of the 35-year-old woman, in the Canary Islands,
it's because in 2001 an employee at a store you're shopping at mistakes you
for her best friend - because you look exactly
like her, because she is
your long-lost twin, separated from you
since birth. And the sister you grew up with,
thinking was your twin, turns out to be a biological
stranger. What if you are missing
but the authorities don't know?
Such is the life of the unreported
missing. People in a country illegally,
people estranged from their family and friends with no
missing person report ever being filed,
children of homeless mothers. These people aren't just
missing, they are what is known as
missing missing.
The FBI's National Crime Information Database contains
approximately 50,000 reported missing children,
but Outpost For Hope reports that there are more than a million
children in America who are missing, without anyone
knowing they're missing. It is not against the law
to go missing under your own volition.
You might have debts to pay or contracts to honor,
but if you are an adult, the act of disappearing
is not illegal in and of itself. You have the right
to go missing. But believing that no one would
miss you? That is ridiculous and unscientific. Statistics
would suggest otherwise. David Wong
wrote one of the most powerful articles I've ever read.
There is a lot of information
out there. There's even a word for it - infobesity.
It takes a lifetime to even
experience some of it. It's easy to think that everyone
knows everything that you know. But every year
more than 100 million new people are born and not a single one of them is
born
knowing that they are made out of atoms or that black holes
are awesome. Someone needs to be there
to tell them, to show them.
How many jokes do you hear every day,
every week? How many jokes do you hear
every year? Here's a fun thought.
By considering average life expectancy
and the typical number of jokes a person hears in a year,
David Wong posited a thought, rough
in its approximation, but sharp in its essence.
If you are under the age of 38
odds are the funniest joke
you will ever hear is a joke you haven't even heard yet.
And, if you are over the age of 38,
odds are you already know a joke that to more people than you could ever
possibly meet
might be the funniest joke they will ever hear.
So, wherever you are, we're glad you there.
And as always,
thanks for watching.