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Earth

planet · in 66 videos (2010–2026)

Our planet, which Hank uses as a starting point for explaining cosmic scale, from the Sun's size to how small a person is next to the universe. The brothers return to it as home of one chemical system of life dating back 3.7 billion years, a planet mostly of water and still of plants, where John hopes absolute poverty may become rare.

Videos by year: 2010: 1 · 2012: 1 · 2013: 1 · 2015: 2 · 2016: 1 · 2017: 6 · 2018: 4 · 2019: 3 · 2020: 3 · 2021: 8 · 2022: 9 · 2023: 6 · 2024: 7 · 2025: 8 · 2026: 6

Also known as: the Earth

Threads

Also named in the threads: Journey to the Microcosmos: Hank and James's YouTube channel about microscopic life (2019) · Hank: if life is found on another planet, we will quickly tell whether it is related to Earth life (2020) · Hank: if life beyond Earth is found in his lifetime, it will not be a big news story (2025)

Often together

What comes up in the same parts of the videos; the number is how many parts.

Mars (10) · meaning of life (6) · climate change (8) · Hodgkin lymphoma (3) · vaccine (4) · health equity (3) · United States (12) · social construction (2) · curiosity (2) · Australia (3)

What the videos say

The most important statements of each year; all statements.

2010

  • 2010-04-19 · I Shall BLOW YOUR MIND — Hank first says Earth's size was unknown until a few centuries ago, then corrects himself: people worked it out long ago with math, though the planet wasn't fully mapped. (slip of the tongue: a few hundred years ago) — 00:00:00
    • Hank says the Sun is much bigger than Earth, as They Might Be Giants have told John: if the Sun were hollow, a million Earths would fit inside. — 00:00:29
    • Hank says it took humanity 99.9% of its existence even to understand that we live on a ball of rock circling a globe of plasma. — 00:02:35

2012

  • 2012-04-13 (said on 2012-04-14, implied) · This is How You Load a Dishwasher - A Song — Hank says the Sun's diameter is more than 400 times the Moon's and it is 400 times farther from Earth, so both look about the same size, which is just a coincidence. (playful) — 00:01:37

2013

  • 2013-09-20 · 42 Amazing Maps — Hank says a curvy line on the flat map is the longest straight line you can sail without hitting land, possible because the Earth is mostly water. — 00:01:24
    • Hank says the Earth being mostly water shows in how few places you could make an "Earth sandwich", with land on both sides of the planet. — 00:01:33

2015

  • 2015-02-13 · Draw My Life + 16 Other Suggestions — Hank: Doing 'Draw My Life', Hank says he takes up a trivial amount of space in Montana, itself tiny next to the Earth, solar system, galaxy and universe, and his lifetime is unnoticeable on a universal scale. (playful) — 00:02:54
  • 2015-09-29 · Writing, Walling, Racing, and Wizard Schooling — John is vicariously happy for Hank about Mars news but says we haven't taken a second lately to be psyched about flowing water on Earth: 'What a planet!' (playful) — 00:01:11

2016

2017

  • 2017-01-13 · Top 10 Best Dogs Ever — Hank says 1950s Russian scientists collected Moscow stray dogs as used to extreme conditions; one, Laika, became the first animal to orbit Earth and the first to die in orbit. — 00:01:40
  • 2017-02-14 · Human Life Is Getting Better. Faster Than Ever Before. — John says that today 80% of kids in low-income countries are vaccinated, fewer than 10% of people live in absolute poverty, and fewer than 6 million children will die this year (2017). — 00:00:36
    • John says that in 20 years (by 2037), when today's median viewer is his age, absolute poverty and child mortality may be rare everywhere on Earth. (hedged) — 00:03:25
  • 2017-09-12 · How Will the World End? Why Even Get Out of Bed? It's Question Tuesday. — John notes that tuatara have been on Earth over 150 million years while humans emerged maybe 300,000 years ago, at most 0.2% of tuatara history. (hedged) — 00:00:14
  • 2017-11-10 · The Weirdest Living Animals - (With Dr. Lawrence Turtleman) — Dr. Lawrence Turtleman: All organisms on Earth are related; scientists traced this for hundreds of years through morphology and can also trace it through genetics. — 00:00:16
  • 2017-12-12 · 2017 is the Best? — John says that in the year his mother was born Portugal's child mortality rate was about 9%; in 2017 no country on Earth will have a rate that high. — 00:02:44

Also named in: The Life Changing Magic of Thumbs Up

2018

  • 2018-02-06 · Sawdust Bread — John says Halley's Comet is visible from Earth about every 75 years, a good human lifetime: last in 1986, when he was eight, and before that in 1910. — 00:01:30
  • 2018-02-23 · Dear Young People, You Terrify Me — Hank says mutagenesis is on average really bad for individuals, yet without it there would be no life on Earth, or only one kind of single-celled sludge. — 00:00:40
  • 2018-11-30 · We just had our first interstellar visitor...and it's weird. — Hank says it passed surprisingly close to Earth into the sun's habitable zone, and its velocity changed in ways gravitation alone cannot explain. — 00:01:03
  • 2018-12-07 · BABIES! The 2018 Project for Awesome is here… — John says newborns have no skills, not even having discovered their own hands, yet many born yesterday are eight or nine years from understanding that Earth is part of a solar system orbiting the Sun. (playful) — 00:00:29
    • John says humans have been around for about 250,000 years, and it took 249,500 of them to figure out that the Earth was not the center of the universe. (hedged) — 00:00:47

2019

  • 2019-05-03 · What Game of Thrones is Really About — Hank: Our problem is also better than Westeros's: a massive, malleable, more predictable planet with huge resources, advanced technology pushing the pace of change, and brains made for problem-solving. — 00:09:01
  • 2019-08-27 · Are Viruses Necessary? — John says there are more viruses on Earth than grains of sand. — 00:00:29
    • John tells Hank that Journey to the Microcosmos helped him grasp the diversity and ubiquity of life on Earth and is maybe his favorite YouTube channel of all time. (hedged) — 00:02:26
  • 2019-09-20 · Why Does Australia... (this video is bad, I'm sorry) — Hank explains continents are less dense rock floating on the Earth's jelly-like interior; their movement is fairly random but extensively modelled. — 00:01:22

2020

  • 2020-06-19 · Only Shooting Stars — Hank says Earth crashes through on average around 50 tons of stuff a day; space is empty but Earth is big, and a visible shooting star takes little. — 00:00:00
    • Hank says nearly all the specks of dust and metal Earth runs into every day are older than the oldest rock on Earth. — 00:00:21
    • Almost everything Earth runs into is little rocks flung off comets or remnants of collisions between bodies in the solar system. — 00:00:21
    • Earth's rocky surface is geologically young because tectonic activity keeps replacing it, so an average rock is probably not much older than 2 billion years and quite likely younger than dinosaurs. (hedged) — 00:00:21
    • Many rocks on Earth recently fell from space, and the oldest particles on Earth, embedded in a meteorite, are over 7 billion years old, about 2 billion years older than the Sun. — 00:01:02
    • Hank says 0.2% of meteorites, meteoroids that land on Earth, come from the Moon or Mars, thrown up when big meteorites hit those bodies. — 00:01:30
    • Hank says bits of Venus and Mercury have probably also landed on Earth, but none has ever been found. (hedged) — 00:02:06
  • 2020-08-11 · never get bored — John: Wind reminds John that the Earth holds a lot of air: while sharing air in the narrowest sense is now very dangerous, sharing air in the largest sense remains essential. — 00:00:47
  • 2020-09-18 · They Say it Gets Colder — Hank says the search for Earth-like planets in a star's habitable zone is more about whether we could live there than whether there could be life there. — 00:00:00
    • Hank says the places outside Earth most conducive to life lie outside the habitable zone. — 00:00:00
    • The description says alien life with clear signs of relation to Earth life would show that life can and does travel between planets. — video description
    • The description says alien life clearly unrelated to Earth life would show that life arises relatively easily and that the universe is filled with living systems. — video description
  • …and 6 statements more in 2020 — all statements of 2020

2021

  • 2021-05-21 · The 19 Best Facts — Hank likes facts that are definitely true though they seem untrue: the average person has an above-average number of legs, you were once the youngest person on Earth, and every day someone has the biggest poo without knowing it. — 00:01:47
  • 2021-10-11 · The Fastest Things in the Universe (Entirely According to Me) — Hank: Lower orbits are faster: Mercury orbits the Sun faster than Venus, Venus than Earth, Earth than Mars, so a probe close to the Sun goes very fast. — 00:01:58
  • 2021-10-12 · Fine, I'll take the bait. — John: As Hank noted, no human had gone faster than about 120 mph until a century ago, unless counting Earth orbiting the Sun at 67,000 mph and the Sun circling the galaxy at 487,000 mph. — 00:00:29
  • 2021-10-14 · Pizza Sized Johns or John Sized Pizza? It's Question Thursday — recommendation: John: For breathing, John takes a few conscious breaths and reminds himself his lungs were made for this air: his breath is literally interwoven with all life and Earth's chemistry. — 00:03:07
  • 2021-10-29 · The Earth is an Alien Planet — Hank says that with the water pumped out, the brothers drilled into a giant cave full of some of the largest crystals ever discovered on Earth. — 00:00:29
    • Hank told Katherine about the crystal caves and on their walk home she exclaimed that the Earth is an alien planet, which he calls such a good line. — 00:03:03
    • Hank says nothing is less alien than the planet we evolved on, have barely left, and that sustains us every day. — 00:03:12
    • Yet, Hank says, the Earth is alien: even after all our inquiry it remains full of the unknown and is inhospitable to us everywhere except a narrow slice at the surface. — 00:03:27
  • 2021-11-12 · Everything a Normal Person Needs to Know About Helium — Hank says a quarter of the known matter in the universe is helium, but on Earth atmospheric helium rises and is knocked away by high-energy particles from the Sun, lost for good. — 00:01:27
  • 2021-11-16 · Orbital Sunrise: The First Art Made in Space — John: The International Space Station orbits Earth every 90 minutes, and with each orbit the sun rises from behind the Earth, darkness giving way to an arc of blue light and then more colors. — 00:00:56
    • John finds the simple sketch stunningly beautiful and telling: the first art made outside Earth's atmosphere depicts that atmosphere; Leonov drew not stars or himself but home, the one world Mary Oliver said we all belong to. — 00:06:33
  • 2021-12-24 · 29 Days of Astronomical Terror — Hank: Since everything with heat emits infrared, a warm telescope's mirrors would swamp the faint light from exoplanets and the early universe, so it must be extremely cold and shielded from the Sun, Earth and Moon. — 00:00:58
  • …and 6 statements more in 2021 — all statements of 2021

2022

  • 2022-01-14 · Thank God We Got This Right… — Hank: Answering Avery's podcast question whether the Earth really has the Northern Hemisphere on top, Hank says there is no up: it is all arbitrary, things we feel and decide. — 00:00:00
  • 2022-04-29 · 5 Ways to Actually Understand Very Large Numbers — Hank says the Earth is around 25,000 miles in circumference, almost exactly 40,000 kilometers. — 00:00:00
  • 2022-07-15 · Thoughts From the Universe - Woah — Hank: Such images make people ask why anything on Earth matters; Hank says there are really good human answers: we give our universe meaning, and we matter to each other. — 00:00:00
    • Hank says life on Earth is one continual chemical system dating back 3.7 billion years. — 00:01:46
    • Hank says life on Earth, everything from brachiosaurus to BTS, has existed for 27% of the lifetime of the universe. — 00:02:15
  • 2022-07-19 · Why Do Things Exist? — John: We are made of the universe, even our thinking parts: people, cats and the Earth are mostly stardust, made of stuff stars produced long ago as they burned. — 00:00:58
  • 2022-07-29 · How Climate Change /Actually/ Works...in 4 Minutes — Hank says that for a long time the energy entering and leaving Earth's atmosphere was about equal, which kept temperatures steady, but now more energy is coming in than going out. — 00:00:00
    • In a comment, Hank says he left out the ground's absorbing and re-emitting light, though among the most important mechanisms of climate change, because people don't think of Earth emitting light and it would confuse. — creator comment
  • 2022-08-12 · The Biggest Climate Bill of Your Life - But What does it DO!? — Hank: Fossil fuels are the remains of dead life trapped in the earth, heated and squished into coal, oil or natural gas, storing energy from the sun. — 00:01:06
  • 2022-08-26 · I Searched for 'Science Side of Twitter' and Answered As Many Questions as I Could — Hank: The constellations themselves don't change, but which ones you see depends on where you are on Earth; at the North Pole with no axial tilt you would only ever see half of them. — 00:00:00
  • 2022-09-06 · Some Advice — recommendation: John advises remembering that you are an important and wondrous presence on this planet, extraordinary, without becoming too self-satisfied. — 00:02:26
  • 2022-10-07 · Planets Don't Exist — Hank: In channel comments Hank confirms the answer is tellurium, from Tellus, Latin for Earth, and finds it weird that Earth has little tellurium. — creator comment
  • …and 6 statements more in 2022 — all statements of 2022

2023

  • 2023-01-10 · Introducing: The Format — John: In a mock stand-up bit, John objects that we live 'in' countries but 'on' islands, since countries are human constructs and everything, even Earth in space, is an island. (playful) — 00:01:38
  • 2023-03-10 · Is it Good or Bad that we Haven't Met Aliens? — Hank says taking up all available space is not a human thing: ants, trees, bacteria and camels would fill the whole Earth if they could; that is how genes work. — 00:00:32
  • 2023-10-02 · The Hottest Place and the Coldest Place in the Universe are the SAME PLACE — Hank says the lab record is so much colder than anything natural that, apart from other intelligent systems, it is probably the coldest any matter in the universe has ever been. (hedged) — 00:01:28
    • Hank says the coldest place in the known universe is a laboratory on Earth (labs trade the record): the coldest we have made something is 38 picokelvins, against the Boomerang Nebula's 1 Kelvin. — 00:01:57
    • Hank says the hottest thing in the universe since the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, happened on Earth: particles in a particle accelerator reached 7 trillion Kelvin. (hedged) — 00:04:26
    • Hank concludes that the hottest and coldest things ever happened in one tiny corner of the universe in a short time, temperatures unlikely to exist naturally anywhere else: that's us. (hedged) — 00:05:31
  • 2023-10-03 · Nourished by Leaving — John says life on Earth has existed continuously for about 3.7 billion years, around 23% of the history of the universe. — 00:00:49
    • John says even the tuatara, which existed before large dinosaurs, is only around 250 million years old, less than 10% of the history of life on Earth. — 00:01:07
  • 2023-10-04 · A Messy and Unhinged Introduction to Geoengineering — Hank defines geoengineering, a contested term, as broadly any action meant to change Earth's systems; today it almost always means changing the amount of heat in the system. — 00:01:27
    • Hank's most important reason for caution: we have one planet, already messing with it, and fixing that by messing with it more is understandably terrifying. — 00:10:50
  • 2023-12-08 · Did Natural Cancer Treatments Save My Life? — Hank says most cancer cases on Earth, and an even greater majority of cancer deaths, occur outside high-income countries. — 00:04:47
    • Hank says some people on Earth today live the reality of the US 80 years ago, and we don't have to live in a world like that. — 00:05:59
  • …and 4 statements more in 2023 — all statements of 2023

2024

  • 2024-03-01 · Flyana Boss Asks Hank Anything — Hank confirms that in about four billion years the Sun will grow very large and swallow the Earth. — 00:09:26
    • Hank stresses that well before that the Sun will get hot enough to boil away Earth's water, ending life as we know it. — 00:09:54
    • Hank says water is common in the solar system: Mars has lots, the Moon has some, and some of Jupiter's moons hold more water than Earth. — 00:10:22
  • 2024-05-28 · A Midlife Crisis — John says he is unbelievably privileged even to have such a crisis: it means he has choices, or perceives he does, and has been around on Earth a while. — 00:00:58
  • 2024-06-04 · how it all ends — John says that picture imagines the roller coaster of information accrual only goes up, but humans, like all Earth species, have a temporal range, with lots of time before and after humans. — 00:01:27
    • John says nothing ever observed in our universe is permanent, and we can be reasonably sure what will happen to Earth and all Earth life, including us. — 00:01:27
    • From Dr. Mack, John says the Sun is getting brighter and in about a billion years will be so bright that all Earth's oceans boil. — 00:01:56
    • John says in the distant future Earth's love stories, technology and birdsong will be a bit of pollution in the Sun's white dwarf; nobody will have a name or a story. — 00:02:55
  • 2024-06-14 · Some Reasons why People Suck — Hank says land devoted to livestock is about 40% of Earth's habitable land, most of it for cows: a real number. — 00:04:26
  • 2024-10-04 · Trees are Destroying the Earth (Again) — Hank can hardly believe he gets to witness the story of Earth, and, weirder and more intimidating, to be a participant in it. — 00:04:23
  • 2024-10-04 · October 4, 2024 — Hank says he did the math once: one tree absorbing all the carbon dioxide emitted since the Industrial Revolution would need three or four times the mass of every tree on Earth combined. (hedged) — 00:00:00
  • 2024-12-06 · One of the Most Important Images On Earth — Hank says DNA from a bone fragment of a person born around 50,000 years ago was exactly half Neanderthal and half Denisovan: a first-generation hybrid of two non-human species. (doubtful: around 50,000 years ago) — 00:02:07
  • …and 3 statements more in 2024 — all statements of 2024

2025

  • 2025-01-03 · My 2025 Bingo Card — Hank explains that Earth's spin is unrelated to its orbit around the sun, so a year is not a whole number of days but 365.24-something, and humans patch this with years that have extra days. — 00:00:44
  • 2025-02-28 · We Will Eradicate Measles — Hank says eradication is hard because measles is so infectious that even a very good vaccine needs two doses, and two doses are hard to deliver everywhere on Earth. — 00:05:02
  • 2025-05-20 · The Double — John says the Indy 500 is the largest non-religious gathering of human beings on Earth, held in his hometown. — 00:00:58
  • 2025-07-11 · The Ones Who Love Us — Hank says the answer requires familiarity with grief and ego death: everybody dies and the earth keeps going; the apocalypse happens only to us, as our world and experience end. — 00:02:12
  • 2025-07-22 · At Least There Are Trees — John says plants make up 82 percent of Earth's biomass, so even after the deforestation of North America and elsewhere this is still a plant planet, with humans a rounding error. — 00:00:52
    • John says we are not observers of life on Earth but participants in it, so trees remind him how astonishing they are and how astonishing we are. — 00:04:41
  • 2025-07-25 · The Molecule that Changed Everything — Hank says we decide whether trees cause a second mass extinction or are part of the Garden of Earth; he thinks we can choose the latter, and letting trees kill everything again would be shameful. — 00:06:50
  • 2025-08-22 · Are Languages Alive? — Hank says languages are self-sustaining; objecting that they need people is like saying life isn't self-sustaining without the Earth. — 00:02:15
  • 2025-09-12 · This Might Actually be Happening — In a channel comment, Hank says the Great Filter is much more likely to be complex multicellularity, since life arose very early on Earth but multicellularity only about 800 million years ago. — creator comment
    • Hank says that on Earth microbes capture the energy of such drops to power metabolism: Geobacter with iron reduction, sulfate-reducing bacteria with sulfur; this is chemosynthesis. — 00:07:05
    • Hank says Earth's oldest life evidence is limited by its oldest rocks; Mars could preserve early steps Earth erased and help explain how chemistry became biology. (hedged) — 00:13:37
    • Hank says finding life beyond Earth in his lifetime is totally possible, but as a slow tipping of the scales it probably won't be a big news story, though it would be the biggest story ever. (hedged) — 00:18:02
  • …and 7 statements more in 2025 — all statements of 2025

2026

  • 2026-01-09 · There is Only One Source of Value — Hank calls this fine in theory, especially for concrete aims like keeping the Earth livable, but in his 45 years he has seen that we just don't know what will help people in the long term. — 00:01:27
  • 2026-01-30 · Has Anyone Ever Accidentally Seen me Naked (Question Tuesday on a Friday) — Hank says Earth is both gaining and losing mass over time, but losing more than it gains. — 00:00:00
    • Hank says Earth's mass input is small space rocks: about 200 metric tons hit Earth every day, some 40 to 50,000 metric tons a year. — 00:00:00
    • Hank says Earth loses about 100,000 metric tons a year of hydrogen and helium; helium made by radioactive decay rises and is kicked off by the solar wind. — 00:00:29
  • 2026-04-03 · I Had a Hallucination This Week — Hank argues a plant making rocket propellant so four people can photograph the whole planet on the way to the moon is clearly different; if that is natural, we need a word for what humans are inside nature. — 00:00:21
  • 2026-04-10 · Moon Joy — Hank says the moon seems peaceful, beautiful, unchanging and solid, unlike Earth with its messes: wars, AI, software and actual viruses, back pain. — 00:00:00
    • Hank says preferring the moon to Earth is a worldview that fixes all suffering by getting rid of everything that can suffer, which no one would advocate. — 00:00:51
    • Hank says an Earth-Moon system with Earth as dead as Mercury would not matter; there are a billion of those across the galaxy. — 00:02:53
    • Hank says Earth has much more going on than any other place in the solar system, possibly in the galaxy as far as we know. (hedged) — 00:03:23
  • 2026-05-08 · My Deathday — Hank says about 95% of people diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in the US are alive five years later, and about 89% worldwide. — 00:03:24
    • Thinking about health equity, Hank checked his odds as the average person on Earth, expecting very bad news; the survival figure was much higher than he assumed. — 00:03:24
  • 2026-08-21 · Not (Just) Dunking on Jeff Bezos — Hank notes there were about 800 million people on Earth when Mozart was born, so by Bezos's math a trillion people would give 1,250 Mozarts and today's 8 billion should already give 10. (playful) — 00:01:56
  • …and 2 statements more in 2026 — all statements of 2026