All The Ghosts You Will Be

0:01 Hey, Vsauce, Michael here.

0:03 A single piece of refined flour is on average just 82.67 microns wide.

0:09 That means a 5 lb bag of flour

0:12 contains about 2.7 billion individual specks of flower dust.

0:16 Now, if each of those particles were a person,

0:19 three bags could represent every single human alive on Earth today.

0:24 8.1 billion itty bitty things.

0:27 Are you under 30 years old?

0:29 Is a question that could roughly divide everyone alive today in half,

0:33 the yeses and the nos.

0:34 But can you imagine a second question that could

0:37 then divide both of those groups in half?

0:39 Well, if so, and if you kept doing that, after just 33 questions,

0:43 you would be left with more than 8 billion groups,

0:46 each containing just one person.

0:48 In other words, out of everyone alive today,

0:50 we could pinpoint a specific individual,

0:52 for example, you, with just 33 yes or no questions.

0:57 What would those questions be?

0:59 Do they even exist?

1:01 We don't know.

1:02 But we do know that every year about this many people die.

1:05 A little bit more than a/4 cup.

1:08 But about twice as many as that are born.

1:11 But how many people have ever been born?

1:14 This many.

1:16 117 billion.

1:18 But out of all of these people, out of everyone who has ever existed,

1:22 this is how many you will ever meet.

1:26 You are a stranger to your own species.

1:29 This is a video about how you will be forgotten.

1:32 It's about the ghosts that surround us and how they're getting closer.

1:38 Our journey begins 2500 km above the surface of the sun.

1:42 There, a hot layer of ionized gas begins

1:45 its reach millions of kilome out into space.

1:49 It's called the solar corona.

1:51 And normally it's outshon by the rest of the sun

1:54 because it gives off just 1 millionth as much light.

1:57 But during an eclipse it can be seen.

2:01 When you are eclipsed your own sort of corona will remain as well.

2:05 The memories people have of you.

2:07 Your treasure and junk.

2:10 Emails and texts you sent.

2:12 The fact that your child has a nose like yours.

2:15 Every appearance you made in the background of a stranger's photo.

2:18 Those are all traces of you that shine while you're alive,

2:22 but can also continue long after you're gone.

2:25 Douglas Hoffetter called them your solar corona.

2:29 I love that phrase because it makes

2:30 a cosmological phenomenon personal by literally including you.

2:37 How long will you be here?

2:39 Well, that's why I made this clock.

2:42 It tells the time, but it also tells your time.

2:46 Just answer a few questions and then when it's ready,

2:49 push the red button and the clock will begin

2:51 counting down the seconds you have left to live approximately.

2:55 Now, whenever you want, you can switch it to show the time.

2:59 But that's not nearly as fun.

3:00 Also, this clock never forgets.

3:03 If you take away its power, it'll go dark, but it's still thinking about you.

3:07 Next time you plug it in, it will pick right back up where it should be.

3:11 Now, if you would like a practical retro momento mori,

3:15 you can pre-order one of these now.

3:18 Omnis vulnerant ultim nat is Latin and it refers to these passing seconds.

3:23 It means each of these wounds the last kills.

3:28 Mox knocks means soon it will be night and it will.

3:33 But while this is ticking down, something else is ticking up.

3:37 The number of ghosts in the world.

3:40 Your nominal ghost is your name.

3:43 It's out there representing you whether you're there or not.

3:46 It won't haunt the world forever.

3:48 Though, as we've often been reminded, you die twice.

3:51 Once when your heart stops beating, and then again,

3:54 usually sometime later, when your name is spoken for the last time.

3:59 But whose name has been remembered the longest?

4:03 Well, signed here on this 5,000-year-old tablet

4:06 is the oldest written name we've ever found.

4:09 Kusham, the first named character we know in the written history of humanity.

4:15 Probably it's not entirely clear whether Kusham is the name

4:19 of a person or just the title of an office holder.

4:22 You know, if you want to be really sure,

4:24 a generation or two later, this tablet was made.

4:27 It contains three names.

4:29 G Saul and two people he enslaved in Pop X and a woman named Sakalger.

4:36 These individuals are the reigning chance of avoiding the second death.

4:40 And with archival practices and technologies being what they are today,

4:44 your name could conceivably last just as long as these have already.

4:49 But you know, I got to say, if you want your ghosts to last longer,

4:54 it helps to bend the truth a little bit.

4:58 Toby Jukenov built this interactive globe that shows

5:01 the most famous person born in every location.

5:05 Fame is based on Wikipedia data.

5:07 How long their article is,

5:09 how many languages it's in, how many visits it gets per day, stuff like that.

5:13 By the way, out of everyone alive right now, about this many of us,

5:16 almost exactly a quarter teaspoon are mentioned on Wikipedia.

5:20 Now, let's zoom in on Stillwell, Kansas.

5:23 Oh, hey there, good-looking.

5:25 But here's the thing.

5:27 I wasn't born in Stillwell.

5:29 I I grew up there.

5:31 I lived there from ages 5 to 18, but I was born in Kansas City.

5:36 For a while, a lot of things online said that I was born in Stillwell,

5:39 so that's probably how I wound up here.

5:42 But should I correct it?

5:43 What's more important?

5:45 The truth or a little lie that prolongs and enhances my nominal ghost?

5:51 Maybe the truth?

5:53 Because even if my name is forgotten, images of me may stick around.

5:57 And that is your second ghost, your likeness.

6:01 Figurative portrayals of what you look like.

6:03 Now, we have no idea what most people who have lived looked like long ago.

6:08 No records were made.

6:09 Eventually, some were and have survived.

6:12 So, who's the earliest known person where like we know what they looked like?

6:17 Well, it's probably Gudea.

6:20 He was an ancient Sumerian ruler and 27 4,000year-old

6:24 statues of him have been found in southern Iraq.

6:27 They stand out not just for their craftsmanship,

6:29 but also for the fact that earlier depictions

6:32 of human forms are either more abstract or generalized,

6:35 but because these depictions of Guda are more realistic,

6:39 are so similar to each other, and have been found spread so widely,

6:42 it's tenable that they're similar to the actual face

6:46 of the actual individual as he appeared in life,

6:49 the first known illustrated person in our history.

6:54 Even if your figural ghosts don't stick around as long as gudas have,

6:58 things that look kind of like you might.

7:01 I'm talking about your genetic ghost,

7:04 your personal genomic variation that can be carried on by your descendants.

7:08 Now, interestingly, even if your progeny are especially fckened,

7:13 your genetic ghost probably won't stick around that long.

7:16 Just how much of your unique genetic code winds up in your grandkids,

7:21 for example, depends partly on chance.

7:23 It could be anywhere from 23 to 27%.

7:27 Your great grandkids will only contain 9 to 14% of you.

7:33 Your great great great great great grandchildren will on average be

7:37 no more similar to you than you are to any stranger.

7:42 In fact, it is at that distance

7:44 that it becomes possible to be genetically left behind.

7:47 For absolutely no personal chunks of your genome to be present in anyone more

7:53 than 70% of your ancestors from 11 generations ago aren't in you at all.

7:58 So, you're not so much the genetic foundation on which

8:01 your progeny sit as you are their baby teeth.

8:05 A thing that served a purpose but was

8:08 destined to then fall out and be set aside.

8:12 Where should you be buried if you want to become a fossil?

8:15 Fossils last a long time.

8:17 Your legacy could be representing our species in a cool

8:21 bony pose at a museum millions of years from now.

8:24 Well, as it turns out, fossilization,

8:27 the mineralizing of bones into rocky ghosts, is an exceedingly rare occurrence.

8:33 Bill Bryson puts it this way.

8:35 Less than onetenth of 1% of a species is ever lucky enough to become fossilized.

8:40 Which means that millions of years from now,

8:43 all that will be left of every single person alive today

8:46 in the US will probably just be about 60 fossilized bones,

8:51 not even one full human skeleton.

8:54 The best way to improve your chances of becoming a fossil

8:57 are to be buried rapidly and deeply with no coffin under

9:00 the seafloor of a still mass of water at low elevation

9:03 where sediment deposits will be swift and fine and oxygen levels low.

9:07 Some locations that fit this bill are parts of the Black Sea,

9:10 the Gulf of Mexico where the Mississippi disorgges

9:13 and the mangrove swamps along the northern coast of Australia.

9:17 But even then, there's risk, right?

9:20 Earth is an active churning rock and erosion can wear you away.

9:24 Metamorphic activity could melt you back down.

9:27 So if you want to be a trace for a long time, leave.

9:33 The oldest unchanged piece of Earth wasn't even found on Earth.

9:36 It was found on the moon where geological activity is less brutal.

9:41 A monolith engraved with your name and biography

9:43 buried on the moon would be a good idea.

9:46 Except in, you know, 5 to 10 billion years,

9:49 our sun will expand into a red giant,

9:52 engulfing the Earth and Moon, likely destroying them forever.

9:55 So, a copper disc coated in aluminum

9:58 and gold floating through space would be even better.

10:01 The golden records aboard the Voyager

10:03 spacecraft could exist for trillions of years.

10:07 They could conceivably still be legible even after the last star goes dim.

10:13 But your final type of ghost will be there, too.

10:16 It's what I call your ripple ghost.

10:19 The diffused domino effect of all of your actions.

10:22 There will be people, for example, a century from now who could enjoy the shade

10:26 of a tree you planted without ever wondering who put it there.

10:30 The butterfly effect effectively guarantees us

10:33 all a sort of anonymous minute immortality.

10:37 Just by being born, technically you changed the universe irrevocably.

10:43 The tiny and subtle but very real way your mass affects the planet Saturn right

10:48 now will contribute in some extremely small way

10:51 to exactly how and when its rings collapse.

10:55 When the universe enters its heat

10:56 death and it's the same temperature everywhere,

10:58 the arrangement of matter in the universe will

11:01 be the way it is because you existed.

11:04 There will be no minds to observe it.

11:07 So you won't be remembered, but you won't be annihilated.

11:12 But like, so what?

11:15 Oh, I've got ghosts that stick around.

11:18 News flash, buddy.

11:19 I'm not my ghosts.

11:21 Okay, first of all, yeah,

11:24 that's exactly why talk of fame and legacy gets so fizzily.

11:28 For what?

11:28 I won't be around to enjoy it and eventually no one will be.

11:32 But secondly, that's actually a pretty good definition of the self.

11:36 You are everything you take with you when you die.

11:40 Your secrets, the things you could have done or said but never did.

11:45 That's what you are.

11:46 Now, you could desperately try to do as much as you can

11:49 and leave as much on the table as possible, but life is short.

11:53 Too short.

11:54 Well, Derek Parett has pointed out that the brevity

11:57 of life probably has nothing to do with its meaning.

12:00 If your life was twice as long, would it have twice as much meaning?

12:05 If we were all immortal, would the meaning of life suddenly be obvious?

12:10 No.

12:10 Meaning is separate from the sheer participation we crave.

12:14 We just want to keep playing this game.

12:16 And there's never been more game to play.

12:18 Staggering amounts of what we want to experience have been

12:21 tamed into beasts so lightweight and so fast that like ghosts,

12:26 they can pass through walls.

12:28 The soy bomb only lasted 36 seconds.

12:31 But because a digital ghost of it lingers in Earth's largest haunted house,

12:35 an average of 40 people have seen it every day for the last 30 years.

12:40 Old music started out selling new music for the first time in 2015.

12:44 Today, we each spend an average of 7 hours and 3 minutes a day

12:48 in a haunted house full of avatars and messages from the living and dead alike.

12:52 People and ideas and art and the past

12:54 have become not just accessible, but accessible.

12:58 We are on these ghost portals so much it's

13:01 become pretty much the only way anyone finds companionship anymore.

13:04 For crying out loud,

13:05 more people on this planet own cell phones than toothbrushes.

13:10 Documentality is the word Maritzio Ferraris gave to his ontology of traces,

13:15 but it's also a great word for the extent

13:17 to which day-to-day life in a society happens as documentation.

13:23 In a society of high documentality,

13:25 nearly every transaction, click, step, every memory,

13:29 everything said or done is vulnerable to recording

13:32 or simply comes into the world already pre-remembered.

13:37 not as an ephemeral oral exchange or a haphazard note,

13:40 but as a highfidelity timestamped cataloged artifact.

13:44 In such a world, it shouldn't be surprising if it starts to feel

13:48 like there are more things you've said than things you could say.

13:52 More ways things have been than ways things could be.

13:57 The future isn't what it used to be.

13:59 But don't get it twisted.

14:01 Complete documentality is far from here.

14:03 As I've mentioned before, our estimates of the current human population have

14:07 about a 2 to 3% margin of error.

14:09 That means that about this many people may or may not exist.

14:13 And at any given moment in the US alone,

14:15 there are about 40,000 deceased bodies whose identities are unknown.

14:21 When Steve Faucet failed to return to the Flying M Ranch in 2007,

14:25 search and rescue efforts sent to find

14:27 him discovered eight previously unidentified airplane

14:31 crashes that weren't him but had been out there for in some cases decades.

14:36 And when authorities searched for Gabby Patito,

14:38 they found her and the bodies of at least

14:41 eight other people they weren't even looking for.

14:45 We are not a documented species.

14:47 We are a bunch of animals walking in and out of rooms.

14:50 That said, some things changed.

14:53 The last time a body was interred in the tomb

14:55 of the unknown soldier was after the Vietnam War,

14:58 but it was removed in 1998 after DNA testing connected it to a name,

15:03 Michael Joseph Blassie.

15:05 In 2014, prosecutors didn't need witnesses

15:08 or security cam footage to construct what happened

15:12 between Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy because

15:15 they had these thousands of text messages.

15:18 Despite living just 35 mi apart,

15:21 Carter and Royy's relationship occurred almost entirely through text.

15:26 So these are not pieces of their relationship.

15:28 They're not evidence of the whole story.

15:31 They are the whole story.

15:33 These messages aren't missing the glances, the nods, the way he or she said it.

15:39 This is all they each saw.

15:41 And we have it all.

15:43 an entire human relationship that happened as and still is undying documents.

15:51 They're all online just a few taps

15:54 deep in the world's largest ocean of documentation.

15:57 And we just keep filling it up,

15:58 turning more and more of what we do and see into ghosts,

16:02 not just to remember, but to experience.

16:05 When we instinctively watch events through our phones,

16:08 it's not that we aren't living in the moment.

16:10 It's that we are.

16:12 Today to be in the moment you have to be fully in the moment.

16:17 Every part of you, even the eye,

16:19 you have to charge and the mind you share with others.

16:23 See what's happening?

16:24 We are not just getting more ghosts.

16:26 We are beginning to live as ghosts as an account, a like, a post, a view.

16:33 And it's great.

16:34 We're spared the humilities of confrontation.

16:36 And to be an image is to be something.

16:40 Frederick Douglas and Sojourer Truth knew this.

16:42 They had photographic images of themselves printed up.

16:45 To own and control and sell your own figural ghost meant that you had power.

16:50 But today, being a ghost surrounded by other

16:54 ghosts causes a certain kind of new fangled anxiety.

16:58 In his 1985, Amusing Ourselves to death,

17:02 Neil Postman describes what he calls the information action ratio.

17:06 Now, even though this book predates the worldwide web,

17:08 it may as well have been written about it.

17:10 Let me ask you a modern version of a question he asks in here.

17:14 How often does something you see on social media cause

17:18 you to alter your plans for the day or to take

17:21 some action you would not otherwise have taken or provide

17:24 you with insight into some problem you are required to solve?

17:29 When everything persists, irrelevance takes over.

17:34 But the constant scroll of doom and pleasure

17:37 and distraction isn't just irrelevant, is it?

17:40 No, it's truly a ghost that can pass right through you.

17:44 You can sit and stare for an hour

17:46 and not remember a single thing you were served.

17:49 We don't do that because it feels good.

17:51 We do it because our minds want to be unsettled.

17:56 A neverending scroll of decontextualized news and horror and comedy

18:01 and family and back flips isn't some unholy modern abomination of nature.

18:05 It is exactly the niche we evolved to thrive in.

18:10 Oh.

18:11 Oh no.

18:12 My brain evolved to eat berries in a cave.

18:14 No, it evolved to reach the lushness

18:17 of Southeast Asia and then cross the Wallace line.

18:20 Not because it had to and not because it could,

18:23 but because what laid beyond was next.

18:26 And we've got autoplay on.

18:28 Hey, let's build a thing that floats and like we could fit in it.

18:32 Um, we could call it a boat.

18:33 Huh?

18:34 What's that?

18:35 Where will it take us away?

18:39 We are not the universe experiencing itself.

18:42 We are the universe ignoring itself.

18:45 We are the universe looking for something else.

18:49 In order to be here for long, we needed to not be here for long.

18:55 I don't think it's the risk or the challenge that motivates us.

18:59 Good stories and curiosity and adventure are

19:02 the icing on the cake we really desire.

19:05 Unsettledness.

19:09 Not knowing what's going to happen next can be exciting.

19:13 Why?

19:14 I think in the same way that long necks were selected

19:17 in giraffes because no one was eating the way up high leaves.

19:20 And in the same way that white fur was

19:22 selected in polar mammals because no one was eating snow,

19:26 imagination was selected in humans because no one was eating possibilities.

19:32 As soft apes in the midst of climatic change,

19:35 those who survived didn't wait for natural selection to provide an answer.

19:38 No, they relied, as we still do today, not on evolution, but on resolution,

19:45 on picturing and manipulating an analog world

19:49 inside the theater of their own minds.

19:52 Up here, we can imagine things that aren't, hypotheticals,

19:56 the distant past and future, the way things might be.

19:59 We can recognize that collecting firewood now will be worth it.

20:02 We can recognize that if there's no water here, we can bring it to us.

20:06 The world is not our home.

20:09 It's fuel for the fire up here where we really live.

20:13 But because of that fire, we have made the whole world our home.

20:18 Our ancestors are those homminids whose resolving never resolved.

20:23 Now, sure, binge watching TV or scrolling a social

20:27 media feed are pretty different than crossing the bearing straight,

20:29 but they're still unsettling, right?

20:32 What's going to happen next?

20:33 Each next swipe brings you something different.

20:35 Like the cognitive niche we built for ourselves, it never resolves.

20:39 But unlike the travails of our ancestors, there's so much less danger.

20:44 We can witness and interact safely from home.

20:47 Like pieces of luggage being moved at light speed without moving at all.

20:52 The internet is a bounty of torqus and vales,

20:56 pushes that spin us around but don't move us anywhere,

20:58 and wishes not strong enough to inspire action.

21:02 We're not amusing ourselves to death.

21:05 We're amusing ourselves to life, a longer, scarier life.

21:11 And as always, thanks for watching.

21:20 [Music] [Music] Don't forget to pre-order your very own death clock.

21:32 After you've answered its questions and pressed the red button,

21:35 the button stays locked down.

21:37 It cannot change.

21:38 It's locked to your soul, to your life,

21:41 unless you want to give it to someone else or you made a mistake or something,

21:44 in which case you can reset it by just poking this into the hole in the back.

21:47 But you better pre-order now because time is literally running out.