Hey Vsauce I'm Jake and I have been playing a lot of Grand Theft Auto 5 recently.
Like, a lot of GTA but we aren't here to talk about my crippling addiction, we are here
because while playing I started thinking about how heavy all the weapons I was carrying were,
so I found the closest real world counterparts and with every weapon slot full, loaded with
ammo, you are carrying anywhere from 600 to 800 lbs.
It would be like strapping a motorcycle to your back.
According to the US Military, an infantry soldier's fighting load should not exceed
48 pounds, or 33% their body weight.
When marching it should be around 72 pounds but that has been known to go up close to
100.
In 1989, Doctor Joseph Knapik published a study on loads carried by US military infantry
and interestingly points out that since the Industrial Revolution, humans have grown an
estimated 10cm, and as we have gotten larger in weight and height, the more we have been
given to carry.
Fictionally speaking however, GTA5 is but a blip compared to what can be carried in
other games.
In Minecraft, Steve can hold a lot while still being able to run, jump and climb.
If we take the heaviest element that exists both in the game and real life, gold, fill
all 36 inventory slots with 64 stacks of the stuff, it has been calculated to weigh 44,467
metric tons...that Steve can carry.
In the great video "The Biggest Organism on Earth' Henry from Minute Earth points out
that the heaviest known organism is the Pando, a clonal colony of over 47,000 Aspen trees
that are interconnected underground.
It weighs about 6,000 tonnes or 7.5 times less than the gold Steve is cruising around
with.
As of 2012 it was estimated that 174,000 tonnes of gold have been mined, ever...in the entirety
of human history.
So in Minecraft you can carry 25% of all the Gold we have found so far on Earth.
If you had that much gold in real life, it would currently be equal to $1.88 trillion.
That could get you a trip to the moon and back 2,506 times, over 2 trillion soft tacos
from Taco Bell, or you could reduce the US National debt ... by 11%.
Obviously we can't carry that much gold or that much of anything unassisted.
So what is the largest amount of weight a person has carried?
Patrik Baboumian, in September of 2013, took the world record for carrying 1,216lbs for
10 meters.
The most carried by any body.
The body.
Every day we carry things with us that aren't actually part of our body.
Obviously we have the clothes we are wearing, unless you're not wearing clothes ... which
is totally fine ... but you are carrying inside you right now about 4 pounds of bacteria.
In fact you and I have more bacterial cells in our body than we do human ones.
However they are so small in size that they only make up 1 to 3% of our body mass.
Similarly, our brains are 2% of our total weight but contain massive amounts of information.
Professor of Psychology Paul Reber postulated that the human brain has the memory capacity
equal to 2.5 petabytes, enough to hold 3 million hours of TV.
So then how much does a memory weigh or an experience weigh?
Well no one has been able to measure the weight of a memory in terms of mass yet but you can
measure its weight emotionally.
Maybe saying "I Love You" to someone and having it not said back has more weight than that
time you got Bebop and Rocksteady action figures.
We have countless experiences and emotions stored in our brains, and we personally assign
an importance to them, a weight.
And maybe it isn't the weight of the memory, but how we carry it.
Even though it can sometimes feels like you are being crushed emotionally, that you're
stuck, that you can't move forward - you still find a way to carry on.
So next time you think you've got heavy stuff on your mind, think about poor ol' Steve and
how he's forced to carry as much as 25% of all the gold ever mined on Earth ... and as
always, thanks for watching.