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When Was it a Million Seconds Ago?

2013-10-25 · Hank · watch on YouTube · Science & nature · curiosity idea

Hank argues that numbers like a million or a billion seconds, or a nanosecond, are beyond human intuition, yet the math lets humanity do amazing things; being designed to want to understand may be humans' most wonderful quality, though collaboration or empathy may be too.

What is said

00:00:00 — We cannot grasp a million: comment experiment; a million seconds ago was the Monday before last, a billion 1982, a trillion 31,000 years ago

  • ★★★ Hank says numbers are great because the world is too big to really understand; there is no way for him to really grasp what a million of something is. — 00:00:01
  • ★★ Though he knows how long a second is and that a million is a thousand thousands, Hank cannot tell whether a million seconds ago was a week, a month or a year. — 00:00:22
  • ★★ Hank asks viewers to write in the comments, with no math and no Google, how long ago they think a million seconds was. — 00:00:45
  • ★★★ Looking it up, Hank says a million seconds ago was the Monday before last. — 00:00:56
  • ★★★ A billion seconds ago was 1982 — the time of Michael Jackson's Thriller, E.T. and the Falklands War. — 00:01:02
  • ★★ A trillion seconds ago was 31,000 years ago, when, Hank says, humans were first arriving in Europe. — 00:01:18 · Europe
    • number check: 31 thousand years ago — doubtful

00:01:31 — Nanoseconds, the fastest computer, Kepler's Earth-like planets, 100 billion galaxies, a possibly infinite universe

  • ★★ A nanosecond is the time light takes to travel a foot, and a billion nanoseconds ago was, by definition, one second ago. — 00:01:31
  • ★★ The fastest computer in the world can do 17 million calculations in one nanosecond. — 00:01:49
  • ★★★ Nobody really internalizes such numbers, Hank says, yet they let humanity control the world and do many amazing and cool things. — 00:01:58
  • ★★★ That math put the Kepler Space Telescope in orbit, which found 15 to 30 billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy; there are over 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. — 00:02:05
  • ★★ The observable universe is an unknown fraction of the actual universe, which may be infinite — more incomprehensible data about how amazing the universe is. (hedged) — 00:02:19

00:02:30 — Designed to want to understand: maybe humanity's most wonderful quality, or collaboration, or empathy

  • ★★★ Humans are not designed to understand such things but are designed to want to understand them; Hank, allowing he may be wrong, calls that humanity's most wonderful quality. (hedged) — 00:02:30
  • ★★★ Returning to the earlier conversation, Hank allows the best quality may instead be our capacity and tendency to collaborate to make things bigger than ourselves. (hedged) — 00:02:42 · collective action
  • ★★ Commenters have suggested empathy is the most wonderful human quality, which Hank says may also be true; he likes that humans are pretty cool for many underappreciated reasons. (hedged) — 00:02:48

00:03:00 — Pumpkin contest update, Hanklerfish cards in DFTBA orders, Call the Midwife and two book recommendations, Hank's channel video, Talk; sign-off

  • ★★ The Nerdfighter pumpkin contest is going well, there is plenty of time to keep submitting, and some people have planned Nerdfighter pumpkin carving meetups. — 00:03:00 · Nerdfighteria
  • ★★ Because things are boring at the DFTBA warehouse, every package that is not a poster now gets a Hanklerfish card; poster-only orders get a free DFTBA wristband. — 00:03:07 · DFTBA Records
  • ★★ Hank made the Hanklerfishes while watching Call the Midwife on Netflix and recommends the show: super good, though he cried 'like a thousand times'. — 00:03:22
  • ★★ For a book, Hank recommends Neil Gaiman's quick, beautiful The Ocean at the End of the Lane and John Barnes's Losers in Space, an excellent introduction to hard science fiction. — 00:03:30 · Neil Gaiman
  • ★ On Hank's channel there is a video of Hank asking some of the smartest people he knows when they thought a million seconds ago was. — 00:03:42 · hankschannel
  • ★ Hank took part in Talk, a YouTube channel where people talk about interesting things; this week's topic was online education. — 00:03:48

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