Kurzgesagt (In a Nutshell)

Probably because "overhyped" is rather disrespectful towards those that died an absolutely horrible death because of it.

Position is a meaningless concept

SoundCloud

More precisely, position is completely dependent on one's point of view. This is fundamental to the concept of relativity, which everyone thinks of as Einstein's contribution, but in fact has been discovered several times throughout history. The first theory of relativity was penned by Galileo. Isaac Newton then gave it a thorough expansion, and both Galilean and Newtonian relativity are subsets of Einsteinian relativity.

This illustrates how science builds on itself. Theories don't spring from nothing; they always have to be tested against past observations and explain them at least as well as existing theories.

Anyway, yeah, "up" to you while standing on Earth is completely irrelevant at the scale of the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe as a whole.

Edited by Fighteer on May 18th 2022 at 8:40:06 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Another virus video, this time about rabies. I'm kinda curious how that animal vaccination plan went, the video doesnt quite go too deeply into it. But yeah, one of the scariest viruses around, good thing its slow. Also I noticed the whole "simple lyssa" thing, are there heavier variants around?

Secret Signature

I think they just meant the virus is really simple but very effective.

And yeah, it's not clear what happened to the animal vaccination program. They just sort of forget about that part.

Optimism is a duty.

This video is great. Obviously I know about rabies, but I didn't understand its mechanisms or why we can vaccinate against it after infection when that doesn't work for most viruses.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Yeah, hence why you get a rabies shot after you get bitten. The same is probably true for a tetanus shot.

Optimism is a duty.

Is civilization on the brink of collapse?

SoundCloud

Off the top, I'm going to say that you can't really tell until after it happens. The Romans thought they were in decline for centuries before it actually happened.

Optimism is a duty.

Off the top of my head, you can't really trust most if any at all claims of those who say so, because the vast majority of these are often motivated by a political agenda about how civilization has been into decline "since X event happened" and how their personal ideology would magically fix all of these problems if it were implemented.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

> Is civilization on the brink of collapse?

its those barbarian tribes,they're matching,Rome is DOOOMED!

New theme music also a box

I wonder who the barbarians would be this time around, since pretty much everyone is in basically the same civilization at this point.

Maybe those guys on that one island who don't want to talk to anyone.

Optimism is a duty.

The barbarians could be anyone. We don't know who brings down civilizations until they bring civilizations down. Deeming any particular group as the barbarians right now is just mudslinging.

I'm of course not being anything near serious there.

Optimism is a duty.

Eh, I could name a few candidates right now for those "barbarians" without too many people here disagreeing, but political unrest, no matter how severe, is unlikely to end our current global civilization all by itself. If the United States fights another civil war, for example, Europe and China will still be around. Worse off, to be sure, but not cast into the Dark Ages.

No, the big enders are things like climate change, resource exhaustion, bioweapons, and nuclear war, never mind purely exogenous threats like asteroid impacts. This video is talking about die-backs of ninety percent or more of the human population.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 16th 2022 at 6:20:12 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Yeah, that sort of numbers would require something apocalyptic to happen, beyond just some social unrest. Nothing short of a catastrophic world war or pandemic could pull that off.

There is also the notion that each successive civilization becomes more resilient to the things that caused the previous one to collapse, mainly in the way of adding more layers of government and institutions.

Optimism is a duty.

I'm increasingly suspicious of that idea, honestly. Like, one of the big reasons Rome eventually fell was due to hugely overextending itself and having a numeral system that was incredibly poorly suited for keeping track of the economy. The Eastern Roman Empire survived because it was smaller, more centralized, and by the time the economy started getting too complex, they had the Arabic number system.

No one else in Europe before the introduction of the number 0 had the same problems keeping track of their economies on that scale because not one of the European nations, not even the Carolingian Empire, was large or complex enough (economically) that the problems Rome faced would be relevant.

Not to mention how several of the major Chinese dynasties collapsed due to bankruptcy. None of their successors fixed the problems that allowed that to happen long-term, so it happened like five times because emperors kept building these massive and absurdly expensive projects they couldn't afford.

And being resilient against something like global warming is hard. What happens when Trinidad and Tobago lose 80% of their land? You can't be resilient against something like that.

What I think actually happens is that the same crisis rarely recurs the same way, so it gets deflected or made worse later because of other aspects. Like, if English Sweating Sickness suddenly showed back up in North America, would we be able to handle it?

Edited by Zendervai on Aug 17th 2022 at 9:07:09 AM

Not Three Laws compliant.

See, all of this brings up another question: what counts as "civilization" in the context that the video is using? One could convincingly make a case that North American and European civilizations in the early centuries AD were completely different. There was no commerce or communication, and Rome could get hit by a volcanic meteor without the Iroquois Confederacy ever noticing, except maybe for the resulting global cooling.

But when we look at humanity from roughly the 20th century onward, everything is so interconnected that talking about the "American civilization" vs. the "Chinese civilization" stops making sense. Sure, individual parts of this global mass of humanity might experience problems: governments might fall, economies might fail, but for the whole thing to crash down would require a lot more than regional crises.

Consider the 2006 housing crisis that led to the 2008 Great Recession. Most of the world was affected because finance and supply chains know no national boundaries. While the Black Death ended up killing a third of Europe's population, it took years to spread because it relied on the travel methods of the time, but the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe in a matter of weeks thanks to air travel and conventions.

I suppose a case could be made that certain nations act as the "barbarians" in our hypothetical "Rome is burning" scenario: there are still some less-interconnected nations in South America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle-East that might be able to isolate themselves from a global crisis and pick up the pieces after Americans and Europeans have finished cannibalizing each other amid ruined cities, but they are certainly not the active cause of the problem.

Rather, the "barbarians at the gates" are largely internal and of our own creation: Nazis, anti-vaxxers, apocalyptic religious fundamentalists, Trump supporters (but why did I repeat the same thing four times, amirite?), and such, who may tear our civilization down from inside. That is my primary endogenous concern at the moment: Western nations falling into right-wing autocracies... or Idiocracies, for that matter.

Those things would set back civilization quite a bit, but I don't see them resulting in a 90% or more global die-back of human population, at least not by themselves. Rather, they would leave us vulnerable to the real civilization-killers: climate change, agricultural failure, resource starvation, and pandemics.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Indeed, there are no real outsider forces any more, apart from a few scattered hunter-gatherer tribes who only pose any real danger to the occasional shipwreck or foolhardy missionary.

Optimism is a duty.

Another beautiful video, this time about how huge the universe is in the "smaller" scale.

Secret Signature

You cannot tell me this whole video isn't a referance to Ant-Man.

Naytheism should be the default, not the exception

It's a great video, I love it.

Optimism is a duty.

Supervolcanos

SoundCloud

Oh man, I've read about that before. It's also where I first realized that when people talk about volcanic ash, they don't mean the stuff you find in your hearth. Volcanic ash isn't burnt wood; it's basically ground up rock. That's why a layer of a few centimetres of the stuff will completely crush your roof; it's like pouring a slab of concrete on top of it, and roofs generally aren't built for that.

Wait, there was a VEI 5 eruption this May? I don't remember that one at all.

Edited by Redmess on Oct 18th 2022 at 7:08:06 PM

Optimism is a duty.

That’s always been the case, Rome didn’t fall to a massive barbarian hoard turning up one day and smashing down the city gates.

It fell because it kept having civil wars, the different civil war factions decided to bring outside groups into the empire as a form of assistance, then they refused to assimilate the outside groups (what Rome had done previously) and instead kept they as independent factions operating within the Empire, then when the collapse looked close the power that be refused to believe it (because the Empire has survived so many past close calls) and kept their petty infighting going because they ‘knew’ they could do internal damage to serve their self-interest and it would be fine.

Rome fell from the inside out, it wasn’t smashed by some external force.

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran