Hey, Vsauce.
Michael here. According to the U.S. Census Bureau
right now, in America, there are 106
people named Harry Potter. 1 007
named James Bond and eight people
named Justin Bieber. They're just
aren't enough names to go around.
There are more than 300 million people
in America but a hundred and fifty thousand last names and five thousand
first names
is all you need to name 9 out of every
10 of them. When are we gonna run out of names?
Perhaps it's already happened to you.
If it hasn't, when? Ten years, twenty years, a hundred, a thousand.
When will someone with your exact name
become famous? So famous in fact that your legacy
changes forever to just being not
the person people think of when they hear your name.
And for that matter, when will every reasonably memorable pronounceable
band name or brand name be taken?
When will authors have no choice but to just start reusing book titles?
According to Rovi Corp, owner of AllMusic.com,
the most used band name is 'Bliss',
followed in order by 'Mirage', 'One',
'Gemini', 'Legacy', 'Paradox'
and 'Rain'. In the past when
fewer bands had already been created and you couldn't just Google up
every single band, overlap was easier to get away with
and one word band names were plentiful. But now, after years and years and years
of
band formation, well, we have
'The Who', but we also have 'The What?',
'The Where', 'The When', 'The Why', 'The How'
and even 'The The'.
In order to stand out now, and have your own unique name,
you have to be a bit more creative.
'O', 'Diarrhea Planet'
or 'Betty's Not a Vitamin', which, by the way,
is no longer true. Betty became a vitamin in 1994.
What about Twitter handles or email addresses?
Have we already reached peak username? We already find ourselves often having to
use abbreviations, initials, numbers or just
choosing something completely different.
Will our children or our children's children
live in a world where the only remaining Gmail addresses is
are just random strings of alphanumeric characters?
Are we approaching a name crisis?
And if so, should we even call it a name crisis,
lest we use up yet another precious name?
Maybe you already share your name with someone famous.
But if you don't, how long will it be until you
probably will? I mean, new famous people are popping up all the time
faster now than ever before because of the Internet and they are gobbling up
top Google search billing. Maybe it won't happen until
long after you've been dead but shouldn't the reservoir
names, not taken by notable people, eventually
run out? Computer scientist Samuel Arbesman approximated
how many famous people there are alive today
and I think his calculation will be helpful. You see, he points out that if we
allow
"famous" to simply mean "being notable enough to have your own Wikipedia page",
well, because there are 700,000 living people
with Wikipedia pages right now, that means one out of every 10,000 people on
earth today
are famous. Assuming at the least that that proportion remains constant
since 255 people are born every minute,
that means every hour a future famous person
is born. Their name destined to become primarily associated
with them, not everyone else who
shares their name. All of those people will be relegated to
disambiguation or the post-nominal,
not the famous one. Luckily, if you do the math, you'll find that even at a rate
of one future
famous person born every hour, it would still take
dozens of millennia for most of us to expect
a future famous person with our exact name to emerge.
Plus names change. New ones become popular,
others obsolesce, but for fun, let's not focus on names we popularly
use and instead look at how many possible names
there can be. The Social Security Administration allows up to 36
letters
for a complete name. Now, including spaces,
27 letters filling 36
spots, with repetition allowed,
means
3 sextillion possible combinations.
That's more than Earth has
atoms. So let's refine
our limits. How many pronounceable names
are possible? For that, I say we look at what Randall Munroe,
the author of the fantastic 'What If?' did when asked about naming
stars. If you want to give every single star
in the observable universe a unique but pronounceable
English name, how long would the names have to be?
His approximation is really fascinating. If we define
unpronounceable word as a word that contains consonant-vowel
pairs, we can roughly figure that there are about 105 different
such pair possibilities.
105. That's not too much different from
99. So, funny enough, there are about the same number of
consonant-vowel pairs possible as there are
two-digit numbers,
which means we could give every star in the observable universe
a sayable unique name
with just 24 letters, the same number of digits it would take to just
number all of them. So, the bottom line is we may each have to give up
uniquely owning a word or name that's common
today, but the potential number of names that can be made
is really hardy. In fact, before we run out of those
our species will likely evolve to communicate in a completely different
way.
Also, names aren't
just labels.
A name on a screen, a username, a handle, a screen name
doesn't always act exactly like
its owner. User names can travel
more quickly and more widely than flesh-and-blood people
and do things that their puppeteers wouldn't normally do
away from the keyboard. It's called the
online disinhibition effect. If you can't
see the people you're interacting with and they can't see you,
you're all just online hiding behind different names than usual,
why hold back? I mean, clearly such a system can't be
serious business. On the Internet
no one knows you're a dog. Why be nice or
tell the truth? The subreddit KarmaCourt
investigates and uncovers people who may think that the less face-to-face nature
of the Internet makes lies easier to get away with.
Like this person, who posted an image suggesting that they've been single
for a year but had users found out posted
three months earlier a picture of
my girlfriend's cat. These behaviors aren't
just what humans do when they can be anonymous
or can hide behind different names, these behaviors can also be caused
by the names themselves. Studies have found that the username you use
can impact how you behave.
Your own pre-existing stereotypes and expectations of certain words,
shapes, colors can be confirmed by your behavior,
in the same way that studies have found NFL and NHL players
play more aggressively when wearing black uniforms.
Studies have also found that the more sexualized
an avatar is you make someone use, the more conscious they will be
of their own body image. And the more an avatar resembles you,
the more correlated you watching it exercise
is with you being more likely
to exercise more. It's called
the Proteus effect. The features of a
cyberspace version of yourself, a username and avatar
can actually change you, the
meat space "IRL" you. Usernames and avatars then
aren't just handles attached to us.
Psychologically, we often interact with them
as if they're friends, distinct beings
we created. They help us out
but they also can influence us,
egg us on, dare us to do things we wouldn't normally do because they offer
us protection,
entertainment. Some make us feel safe,
professional, funny, dangerous,
attractive. We want cool ones.
The cool ones make us look cool.
As we go about our daily lives and vie for
attention, we are more and more frequently doing so
with another name and exclusively through that name
only. So, it becomes quite interesting that
we're not going to run out of them anytime soon.
In fact, they might run out of us first and
may, in many ways, run
us.
And as always,
thanks for watching.