Hey, Vsauce.
Michael here. And the year 6009
will be the very first year since 1961 that a year
when written in Hindu-Arabic numerals can be inverted
and still look the same. But you and I
probably won't live long enough to enjoy the year six thousand
and nine. Human lives just aren't long enough.
We will miss out on that. What other cool future offense will we be
missing? Well, first of all,
you and I will probably be gone before the completion of the time
pyramid in Wemding, Germany. It will eventually be a pile of
120 concrete blocks. But the builders
are only adding one block every 10 years.
Since beginning in 1993 they've added
only the first three. At this rate the pyramid will be completed in the year
3183.
The final block placed by
our great great great great great great, more than 30 greats
grandchildren. But even they will miss
an opportunity to frolic and play safely in the Chernobyl
Exclusion Zone. The zone of
alienation, where radioactive contamination from the 1986 disaster
will remain at levels too high
for safe human activity until not the year 4000,
not the 5000, not the 6000. It will finally be safe
probably in the year 22 000.
Possibly within our lifetimes but definitely within the next one
million years,
stars like Betelgeuse and Eta Carinae
will explode in brilliant supernovas
visible from earth. I'm bummed I'm probably going to miss out on these
events because
for a few weeks it will look almost as if earth
has two Suns. Despite being hundreds, thousands of light-years away,
their supernovas will shine brighter than the full Moon
at night and be visible even during daytime.
But the real sky show comes in 3.75
billion years. Our galaxy
is full of stars, viewed from the surface of the earth
they look like little drops of milk in the sky,
which is why we call it the Milky Way Galaxy.
But all galaxies are named after
milk. Milk, lactose,
lactic, ga-lactic, galaxies.
And every drop of milk in the sky, every star that you can see,
is inside our galaxy, the Milky Way.
But there's a blurry distant
shape. This one. It's not a star, it's not a cloud of gas
in our galaxy, it is an entirely different
Galaxy - the Andromeda Galaxy and it's two-and-a-half
million light years away from our own. It contains twice as many stars as the
Milky Way
and it is coming our way. Headed toward us
at 300 kilometres a second, faster than a
bullet. Right now, the sky looks like this.
In 2 billion years Andromeda will have approached so closely
that people will look up at the sky and see
this. In 3.75 billion years the night sky will be like
a scene from a science fiction movie or an awesome desktop wallpaper.
Incredible and kind of scary.
After this scene, the sky will literally be glowing with the birth of new stars
as the Milky Way and Andromeda collide, mixing up into a brilliant cosmic
tie-dye. This simulation shows how Andromeda might collide with the Milky
Way,
but keep in mind that you are watching billions
of years pass every second. These galaxies
are moving fast but they're also huge
and covering even huger distances. They
will collide in the future but within the briefness
of a single human life they appear almost frozen,
unmoving. A couple billion years after colliding
the course of both galaxies will be married together
in a bright glowing centre. Earth, now
a stepchild to what was once Andromeda,
part of a new, bigger family called
Milkdromeda. It would be so cool to be alive to see our galaxy
colliding with another. But don't get all fomo,
consumed by a fear of missing
out. Because whatever life is around then will have plenty to envy us for.
They may have spectacular nightly views, but secretly wish they'd been born in
our time
to experience, say, the beginning of the Internet.
They will actually miss out on a lot of things.
Because the Moon moves one centimetre further away from
earth every year, 600 million years from today
the Moon will no longer be close enough to earth to completely
block out the Sun.
Future humans or descendants of humans will therefore
miss out on a chance to ever see for themselves
the beauty of the total solar eclipse from the surface of Earth.
Long before earth dries up
Niagara Falls will dry up. Well,
not the water part, but the falls part.
Every year the rushing water of Niagara erodes the rock at the top of the
falls
one foot backward. By the year 52 000
it will have eroded all the way to Lake Erie and our progeny will have no
Niagara Falls
to enjoy. Granite has an erosion rate of about
one inch per ten thousand years.
So, certainly by the year 7 million
Mount Rushmore, especially its faces, will no longer
exist. And because they slowly get
pulled in or rejected into space, in 50 to 100 million years
Saturn will no longer have its lovely rings.
So, life on earth in the future
might have awesome supernovas and galactic collisions to look forward to
but they probably won't have Niagara Falls,
Mount Rushmore, total solar eclipses or Saturn's rings.
They also won't have you. But
you have you. Except not all of it.
Babies don't begin to form episodic memories right
away, meaning that you missed out on. You don't remember two of the most seminal
events in your life.
Your conception and your birth.
But you can experience a bit of those moments
right now. First of all,
When Was I Conceived? dot com lets you enter your birthday
and get back the week your parents probably made
you happen, as well as the number one song and the number one movie of that
week, which may have also been involved.
Light travels quickly, the most quickest
in fact. But it can take a photon millions
of years to escape from the interior of the star it was created in through nuclear fusion.
It takes time, just like your own gestation
in your mother's womb. Newly conceived photons
struggle through a dense stellar jungle
of atoms and molecules and electrons that absorb and reemit the photon, taking a
little bit of energy from it as a randomly
rolls around like a pinball. Sometimes after thousands or millions of
years it's random walk finally leads it to the stars'
surface, where it pops out into space.
In a way, is born. A lucky, tiny tiny tiny percentage of the photons that reach the
surface of a star
find themselves on a path that will intersect
with earth. And if you are lucky, those photons will
end their journey by being absorbed
under your own retina. If you enter the date of your birth or the
approximate date of your conception into this online calculator
you can find a star that is as many light years away from
earth as you are old. When you look up at that start today,
you are seeing light that left the star the very month
you were born or photons that left that star
and entered space when your entire body was just
one cell.
Space is really big and your life is very short
but space is so gosh darn big you don't have to miss out
on everything.
And as always,
thanks for watching.