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When Was it a Million Seconds Ago?

2013-10-25 · letter vlog · Hank · 3:58 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Science & nature (also: Philosophy & meaning) · mode: Curiosity & trivia · tags: community lore, self promotion, civic or action cta

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

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

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
    • a number in question (doubtful): "31 thousand years ago" — check against the recording

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 · curiosity
  • ★★★ 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 · empathy

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, Hanklerfish
  • ★★ 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 · Hanklerfish
  • ★★ 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
  • ★ 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 (week of 21 October 2013) topic was online education. — 00:03:48

In the description and comments

  • ★ Hank links a video of Henry and Derek giving their answers to when a million seconds ago was. — video description

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Projects: DFTBA Records · hankschannel

Works: Call the Midwife · E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial · Hanklerfish · Losers in Space · The Ocean at the End of the Lane · Thriller

Organizations: Netflix

Groups: Talk (YouTube channel)

Concepts: collective action · curiosity · empathy

Places: Europe

Events: Falklands War

Products: Kepler Space Telescope

Only in the description or credits: Derek Muller · Henry Reich · John Barnes · Michael Jackson · Neil Gaiman

Replies to

Later videos replying to this one

Part of an exchange of 8 videos, 2013-10-08 – 2013-11-01.