so here we go second you are on a narrow ledge between life and death you probably don't feel it
but there's an incredible amount of activity going on inside you and this activity can never stop
to yourself as a slinky falling down an escalator moving upwards the falling part
represents the self-replicating processes of your cells the escalator represents the Lords
of physics driving you forwards to be alive is to be in motion but never arriving anywhere if
you reach the top of the escalator there's no more falling possible and you are dead forever
that's an interesting way to look at life I like it it's pretty cool somewhat unsettlingly
the universe wants you to reach the top you can kind of just look at this staircase as
well as just like time and time is marching on and your biological clock can only tick
for so long and eventually you know it comes to time as all things seem to do
how do you if you don't know what time is by the way avoid that and why are you alive
all life is based on the cell a cell is a piece of the Dead universe that separated itself from
the rest so it could do its own thing for a while when this separation breaks down it dies and joins
the rest of the Dead Universe again unfortunately the universe would like for life to be done with
doing its own thing for some reason it's not a fan of exciting things that tries to be as
boring as possible we call this principle entropy and it's a fundamental rule of our universe it's
pretty complicated and counter-intuitive so we'll explain it in detail in another video
for now all you need to know is living things are inherently exciting
a cell is filled up with millions of proteins and millions more simpler molecules like water
thousands of complex self-replicating processes are happening up to hundreds of thousands of
times every second to stay alive and exciting it has to constantly work to keep itself from
achieving entropy and becoming boring and dead that's a weird thing to say achieving entropy
you would you know in you'd generally say from uh entropy increasing thing is in an isolated system
you can't you know entropy will always increase in a little closed system you can actually decrease
entropy momentarily but when you decrease entropy in a closed system the isolated system it overall
increases so you actually are still contributed to the increasing entropy of the universe and so
take a fridge a refrigerator when you're cooling things down you're doing just this you're making
things more orderly you know uh you know cooler temperatures so a way to think about it is you
know the the particles in there on the atoms they somewhat move slower but it's really not actually
that correct to think of temperature as the how fast things are moving well some people like to
think of entropy as a measure of disorder so as entropy increases disorder increases but this
isn't really what entropy is the true definition of entropy is mathematical and then to relate that
you know It Gets Lost in Translation but it has to do with the microstates and macro states and
things that you'd have to Define takes too long maintain the separation from the rest of the
universe it's doing this for example by keeping the concentration of certain molecules different
on the inside and the outside by actively pumping out excess molecules to do stuff like this a
cell needs energy is the ability of things in the universe to do work to move or manipulate a thing
to create change this ability cannot be created or destroyed the set amount of energy in the universe
will never change we don't know why it just is that way that's an assumption and we don't
actually know that black holes could be destroying energy it could be destroying information uh this
is called the black hole information Paradox and it's not resolved no matter what you read and Pops
eye we need experimental validation before you can solve something right and uh to any degree
of certainty and we don't have any of that but you know there's lots of things in theoretical physics
to try and answer it mathematically and things like that um but yeah so billions of years ago
one of the most crucial challenges for the first living beings was to get usable energy we don't
know a lot about the fur cells except that they got their energy from simple chemical reactions
and they found the ultimate energy transfer system the energetic building block of life
the molecule adenosine triphosphate or ATP its structure makes it uniquely good at accepting and
releasing energy I remember learning about ATP in school and they just could never explain it to me
fundamentally what the hell is going on it always frustrated the hell out of me if you haven't heard
I'm creating a new kind of VPN called post Quantum VPN and it can protect you from quantum computers
you can use it for free beta comes out hopefully in two days come use it for free it's pretty cool
when a cell needs energy for example pump out molecules or to repair a broken micro machine
it can break down ATP and use the chemical energy to do work and create change this is why living
beings are able to do stuff we don't know when or how exactly the first ATP molecule was made
on Earth but every living thing we know uses ATP or something very similar to keep its internal
Machinery running crucial for almost every process plants fungi bacteria and animals need to survive
without ATP no life on Earth possibly anyone while breaking down chemicals for energy is
nice and all early life did miss out on the greatest available source of energy the Sun
the sun merges atoms and radiates photons away that carry energy into
the solar system but this energy is raw and indigestible it needs to be refined
after hundreds of millions of years of evolution finally a cell figured out how to eat the sun it
absorbed radiation and converted much of it into neat little chemical packages that it could use
to stay alive it's a pretty good way to define what happened we call this process photosynthesis
you take photons that are photosynthesis photosynthesis is actually extremely
interested interesting I can't speak it anymore and uh it actually there's some
Quantum phenomena that ties into it and we still don't quite understand photosynthesis
what plants are doing to generate energy from sunlight it's not quite what we're doing in uh
you know solar energy devices and these renewable energy devices if we could utilize photosynthesis
that would be amazing but we still don't actually quite understand it which you might not be aware
of so it's actually just you know there's still so much we have to learn about even biology in
the world but obviously this problem in biology is a physics problem does anyone like biology I love
biology and actually our our editor Checker he is studying for a biology exam today the wobbly with
electromagnetic energy and use a part of this energy to merge and combine different molecules
together the electromagnetic energy is converted into chemical energy stored in the ATP molecule
this process became even better as some cells learned to create better chemical packages glucose
or sugar is easy to break down high in energy and pretty tasty this is giving up painting a great
picture of what's going on and what your body is doing and why in the end it's really in a sense
just this energy machine you input energy and your body converts that into other forms of energy
um that you can use to power your little machine and you just that's what food is at the end of
the day Just Energy this is so convenient that some cells decided that instead of doing all
that pesky photosynthesis work themselves they would just swallow other cells that did and take
their glucose and ATP this is what take it easy Nick good to see you back Snoop lightly
considered one of the biggest anime betrayals in evolutionary history and so things went on
photosynthesizing cells could mostly harness energy at their surfaces which limited their
maximum energy production which limited their evolutionary Avenues somewhat so time passed some
cells made sugar others ate them Evolution did its thing but overall things stayed pretty much
the same for hundreds of millions of years until one day a cell ate another and did not kill it
instead they became one cell nothing had changed that day but Earth would be different forever
this cell became the ancestor of again I want to point out here this bit right this is what
we think you know and uh it's important to point out when something is there's more sort
of speculation going on than uh heaps of evidence for something and this sort of thing we actually
don't know exactly how it took place and back over here how this stuff even started we don't
know you know and I don't think cursive does a good enough job of pointing that out sometimes
because when you bring in new people into science or people just interested it doesn't help them
if you misinform them you know these things just stay with them for a long time all animals on this
planet blue whales amoeba dinosaurs jellyfish pink fairy armadillos and sunder kalugos and of course
you all can trace back their existence to this moment Slinky Slinky living beings is so important
because when those two cells became one they became way more powerful the formerly independent
cell in the inside could stop trying to survive it could concentrate on one thing make ATP
it became the PowerHouse of the cell the first mitochondria the host sales
job became to ensure survival in the dangerous world and provide the mitochondria with food
mitochondria basically reverse photosynthesis in a similarly complex process they take sugar
molecule good night Ali we're almost done here as well tools that we got from eating other living
things combust them with oxygen and precursor molecules to make new energy richer ATP molecules
this process works like a tiny furnace and spits out waste products like CO2 water and a little
bit of kinetic energy that you experience as body heat this first division of labor meant
the new cell had way more energy available than any cell before which meant more possible so just
FYI kinetic energy is motion right so you know he didn't explain you know he did convert obviously
that motion into heat which you know there's ways to do this this is for evolution to enable more
complex cells at some point these cells began to form small groups or communities which led
to multicellular life and finally to you today you are a pile of trillions of cells each filled with
dozens if not hundreds of little machines that provide you with usable energy to stay alive
if this process is interrupted even for a few minutes you die but if life is so fragile
wouldn't it be a good idea to store ATP like we store sugar in our fat cells so we don't die if
we stop breathing for a while if life has solved so many problems to make you live today what's up
with the dying quickly thing even simple bacteria like E coli make about 50 times their body weight
in ATP for every cell division your trillions of cells need a lot of ATP to keep you around
every day your body produces and converts about 90 million billion billion molecules of ATP about
your own body weight you need a whole person's worth of ATP just to make it through a single day
even storing enough ATP to last you a few minutes is basically impossible
an ATP molecule is really good for shifting energy around quickly but it's terrible for
storage since it has only one percent of the glucose molecule's energy at three times its mass
so ATP is constantly produced and used up fairly quickly
this was the short and simplified story of the molecule that allows you to be different from
the dead universe and to be the slinky on the escalator it is a weird story there is
this molecule you need to survive at all times you need it to keep moving because even a short
break brings your Slinky to a stop and you need to make it yourself it's like driving a car at
full speed while producing fuel in the trunk with junk that you pick up from the side of the road
as far as we know this all began billions of years ago when tiny parts of the Dead Universe came
together and became something else for a moment it could keep itself going it could grow that moment
set the slinky in motion and it's been going it's amazing to think about this point ever since
from the very first cells to you watching this now at some point you will merge with the rest
of the Dead Universe again maybe you'll tell its stories about your adventures maybe not but before
you find out you get to do what life does best making a dead Universe much more interesting
if you are currently bored for whatever reason and another beautiful video I really enjoyed that
um the videos are amazing aren't they they're just so incredible
does such a great job okay that was beautiful I loved it