To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Vsauce. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also Vsauce’s optimistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation - his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realize that they're not just funny- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence, people who dislike Vsauce truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in Vsauce's existential catchphrase "Hey Vsauce, Michael here!" which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev's Russian epic Fathers and Sons I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Michael Stevens’ genius unfolds itself on their television screens. What fools... how I pity them. 😂 And yes by the way, I DO have a Vsauce tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- And even they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand.

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. This is Earth as seen from Saturn. That is us right there. And if you look closely, ok, see this little protuberance? That's the Moon. This image was taken by the Cassini spacecraft on July 19th, 2013 at 21:27 Coordinated Universal Time. The thing is, NASA gave the public advanced warning of when it would be taken, which means that this image of Earth was the first ever taken from space that some people on Earth were actually posing for.
Our planet looks so small, insignificant, fragile. I recently attended the premiere of Sky 1's upcoming "You, Me and the Apocalypse" with some cool YouTubers and it got me thinking. In the show, the characters find out that they're only 34 days left before a comet smashes into Earth that's likely to end humanity. They all react in different interesting ways, but what would I do if I found out that there were only 34 days of human history left? Ok, my first priority would be to get back to America to be with my family. But after that? I don't really have a bucket list. Except that is exactly what I would want to spend my last few weeks doing. Making a list to put in a bucket that I would then send far out into space away from Earth's impending vaporization.
The list would contain information about us, all Earthlings. So that if libraries and monuments and YouTube videos were all destroyed, a record would still exist somewhere of what and who we were. Like a stone thrown into a lake, the ripples your life causes last long after you vanish, the tree you planted is climbed by future generations, the books you donated inform future readers. But what if it's not just your stone that vanishes, but the entire pond? Perhaps it's arrogance or vanity, but getting cosmic messages in a bottle out there, before the end, diversifies our archive and gives a better chance for future alien visitors, or whatever is left of humanity, to find out that we were once here, to show what we learned. Maybe even to warn future life forms of what we did or what we didn't prepare for. We have already sent some messages about humanity out there, beyond Earth, and if Earth is completely destroyed, those messages will be all that's left of us. What are they?
Ok, first things first. How do you write something for the future? I mean, the distant future. The message might not be found for millions of years or billions. It might be discovered by an audience that's completely different, not only in language, but in senses? What if they can't see or hear or feel or taste or smell like we do, or at all. What if their bodies destroy the very material we write the message on? What language do you even write it in? Well, in general, math and physics, which are believed to be the same everywhere in the universe, have been what we write outer space bound messages in.
Like the Arecibo message, written by Frank Drake, Carl Sagan and others, which was blasted towards the M13 star cluster in 1974. It's composed of a semi prime number of binary digits conveying some info about us and it should reach the center-ish of the M13 cluster in about 25,000 years, at which point, if something intelligent lives there and detects it, they can respond and their response will return to us another 25,000 years later. We won't be around for that.
But Earth has also been broadcasting its radio and TV signals into space. Currently it's about 200 light-years in diameter. Compared to the Milky Way, it's about this big. Aliens within that bubble could tune in and listen to programs we sent out through our airwaves, but these signals thin out as the bubble expands. Across very large distances they may be essentially impossible to tune into.
Maybe a physical time capsule would be more permanent, but it can't be buried on Earth if Earth is about to be ravaged. A time capsule in orbit might be smart, like LAGEOS-1, a satellite put into orbit in 1976 that allows for very precise laser measurements of positions on Earth, but also contains a plaque designed by Carl Sagan, upon which is written the numbers 1 to 10 in the binary, and the arrangement of the Earth's continents 250 million years ago, today and their estimated arrangement in 8.4 million years, which is how long we believe the satellite's orbit will be stable. Drag caused by the thin atmosphere up where it orbits and influences like solar activity will eventually cause it to fall back down to Earth, but its plaque will serve as a time capsule - a message from us today to whatever happens to be alive or intelligent here on Earth 8 million years in the future. To put that in perspective, the pyramids were only built about 5,000 years ago. 8 million years ago, there weren't even humans on the Earth. The latest common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees was around though. 8 million years from today, when LAGEOS returns, what will intelligent life on Earth look like? If Earth's surface is barren of life at that point, LAGEOS-1 will be alone.
But what about satellites in geostationary orbits? These orbits are far enough out that they're much safer from atmospheric drag and could remain above Earth much much longer than satellites like LAGEOS. These satellites are our pyramids. They're smaller than monuments built by past civilizations, but impervious to anything that might go wrong on the less stable surface of our planet. If alien archaeologists come by in a billion years or so, these satellites may be what their alien encyclopedias use as the picture for the humans article. So far we have erected about 450 of these geostationary monuments. When such a satellite wears down and ceases to be operational, it takes a lot of energy to slow it down so it can move out of the way and fall to Earth to burn up in the atmosphere. So instead, they're usually pushed into what's known as a graveyard orbit. A shell around the planet where they can be part without interfering with important operational satellites. It's fitting that we call these graveyard orbits because tombs are often the most stunning things we have from previous civilizations. These graveyard orbits are tombs in a way. Not for kings, but for machines. Junkyards that will out-exist the very societies and people they so largely define. Luckily, a few contain more than just our craftsmanship.
They also contain a record, like EchoStar XVI, a communications satellite launched into geostationary orbit in 2012. Aboard it is a silicon disc created by artist Trevor Paglen, containing 100 images of Earth and Earthlings. Now, unlike LAGEOS, EchoStar XVI will likely remain in orbit for billions of years, safe from discord and change down here. But here's the thing. What if our entire solar system is lost? Or what if life out there doesn't decide to ever visit our system?
Well, in that case, we have sent interstellar messages. At this moment, so far, there are 11 distinct human made things on trajectories out of the solar system into interstellar space. They're all related to five probes. Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 and New Horizons, the thing that recently made a Pluto flyby. These objects are our most distant hellos. Over the next ten thousand, million, billion years, they'll pass close enough to other star systems, maybe even planets, to possibly be discovered by other intelligent life forms. We had the foresight to include special messages on these probes.
Pioneer PlaqueThe Pioneer plaques are attached to Pioneer 10 and 11, which launched in the early 1970's, were the first human-made objects to ever be sent on a trajectory
to not just leave Earth, but to leave the solar system entirely. If discovered by other life out there, these plaques, designed by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, could be our first chance to say "hello, we exist," or, depending on how long humanity lasts, our only chance to say "Hello, we existed. This is what we were." But will the plaques makes sense to aliens? Many human scientists have had trouble deciphering their meaning, but here's what they say. At the bottom is a map of our solar system with a path showing the Pioneer probe itself and where it came from. This element has been particularly criticized for being human centric. I mean, an arrow? Who's to say aliens will know that this depicts a path and not some structure in our solar system? Also, it's an arrow. Arrows might convey this way only two civilizations that hunted or developed pointy projectiles. Anyway. Up here, we define units. You can't tell aliens about humans or Earth by using seconds, kilometres or light years, because we made those measurements up. Instead, the plaque uses hyperfine transitions to communicate distances and time.
The hope is that curious intelligent life forms who find this will understand that this is a hydrogen atom - one proton, one electron. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, so hopefully its properties will be a common point of understanding. Now sometimes, if you've got enough hydr

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. According to the U.S. Census Bureau right now, in America, there are 106 people named Harry Potter. 1 007 named James Bond and eight people named Justin Bieber. They're just aren't enough names to go around. There are more than 300 million people in America but a hundred and fifty thousand last names and five thousand first names is all you need to name 9 out of every 10 of them. When are we gonna run out of names? Perhaps it's already happened to you. If it hasn't, when? Ten years, twenty years, a hundred, a thousand. When will someone with your exact name become famous? So famous in fact that your legacy changes forever to just being not the person people think of when they hear your name. And for that matter, when will every reasonably memorable pronounceable band name or brand name be taken? When will authors have no choice but to just start reusing book titles? According to Rovi Corp, owner of AllMusic.com, the most used band name is 'Bliss', followed in order by 'Mirage', 'One', Gemini', 'Legacy', 'Paradox' and 'Rain'. In the past when fewer bands had already been created and you couldn't just Google up every single band, overlap was easier to get away with and one word band names were plentiful. But now, after years and years and years of band formation, well, we have The Who', but we also have 'The What?', The Where', 'The When', 'The Why', 'The How' and even 'The The'. In order to stand out now, and have your own unique name, you have to be a bit more creative. O', 'Diarrhea Planet' or 'Betty's Not a Vitamin', which, by the way, is no longer true. Betty became a vitamin in 1994. What about Twitter handles or email addresses? Have we already reached peak username? We already find ourselves often having to use abbreviations, initials, numbers or just choosing something completely different. Will our children or our children's children live in a world where the only remaining Gmail addresses is are just random strings of alphanumeric characters? Are we approaching a name crisis? And if so, should we even call it a name crisis, lest we use up yet another precious name? Maybe you already share your name with someone famous. But if you don't, how long will it be until you probably will? I mean, new famous people are popping up all the time faster now than ever before because of the Internet and they are gobbling up top Google search billing. Maybe it won't happen until long after you've been dead but shouldn't the reservoir names, not taken by notable people, eventually run out? Computer scientist Samuel Arbesman approximated how many famous people there are alive today and I think his calculation will be helpful. You see, he points out that if we allow "famous" to simply mean "being notable enough to have your own Wikipedia page", well, because there are 700,000 living people with Wikipedia pages right now, that means one out of every 10,000 people on earth today are famous. Assuming at the least that that proportion remains constant since 255 people are born every minute, that means every hour a future famous person is born. Their name destined to become primarily associated with them, not everyone else who shares their name. All of those people will be relegated to disambiguation or the post-nominal, not the famous one. Luckily, if you do the math, you'll find that even at a rate of one future famous person born every hour, it would still take dozens of millennia for most of us to expect a future famous person with our exact name to emerge. Plus names change. New ones become popular, others obsolesce, but for fun, let's not focus on names we popularly use and instead look at how many possible names there can be. The Social Security Administration allows up to 36 letters for a complete name. Now, including spaces, 27 letters filling 36 spots, with repetition allowed, means 3 sextillion possible combinations. That's more than Earth has atoms. So let's refine our limits. How many pronounceable names are possible? For that, I say we look at what Randall Munroe, the author of the fantastic 'What If?' did when asked about naming stars. If you want to give every single star in the observable universe a unique but pronounceable English name, how long would the names have to be? His approximation is really fascinating. If we define a pronounceable word as a word that contains consonant-vowel pairs, we can roughly figure that there are about 105 different such pair possibilities. 105. That's not too much different from 99. So, funny enough, there are about the same number of consonant-vowel pairs possible as there are two-digit numbers, which means we could give every star in the observable universe a sayable unique name with just 24 letters, the same number of digits it would take to just number all of them. So, the bottom line is we may each have to give up uniquely owning a word or name that's common today, but the potential number of names that can be made is really hardy. In fact, before we run out of those our species will likely evolve to communicate in a completely different way. Also, names aren't just labels. A name on a screen, a username, a handle, a screen name doesn't always act exactly like its owner. User names can travel more quickly and more widely than flesh-and-blood people and do things that their puppeteers wouldn't normally do away from the keyboard. It's called the online disinhibition effect. If you can't see the people you're interacting with and they can't see you, you're all just online hiding behind different names than usual, why hold back? I mean, clearly such a system can't be serious business. On the Internet no one knows you're a dog. Why be nice or tell the truth? The subreddit KarmaCourt investigates and uncovers people who may think that the less face-to-face nature of the Internet makes lies easier to get away with. Like this person, who posted an image suggesting that they've been single for a year but had users found out posted three months earlier a picture of my girlfriend's cat. These behaviors aren't just what humans do when they can be anonymous or can hide behind different names, these behaviors can also be caused by the names themselves. Studies have found that the username you use can impact how you behave. Your own pre-existing stereotypes and expectations of certain words, shapes, colors can be confirmed by your behavior, in the same way that studies have found NFL and NHL players play more aggressively when wearing black uniforms. Studies have also found that the more sexualized an avatar is you make someone use, the more conscious they will be of their own body image. And the more an avatar resembles you, the more correlated you watching it exercise is with you being more likely to exercise more. It's called the Proteus effect. The features of a cyberspace version of yourself, a username and avatar can actually change you, the meat space "IRL" you. Usernames and avatars then aren't just handles attached to us. Psychologically, we often interact with them as if they're friends, distinct beings we created. They help us out but they also can influence us, egg us on, dare us to do things we wouldn't normally do because they offer us protection, entertainment. Some make us feel safe, professional, funny, dangerous, attractive. We want cool ones. The cool ones make us look cool. As we go about our daily lives and vie for attention, we are more and more frequently doing so with another name and exclusively through that name only. So, it becomes quite interesting that we're not going to run out of them anytime soon. In fact, they might run out of us first and may, in many ways, run us. And as always, thanks for watching.

Hey! Vsauce! Extraterrestrial baby monkey here!
Am I...awesome?
Yes! I'm completely huge, and...kinda immortal. And when I ♥♥♥♥, I can fill an entire room. That is a lot of feces.
I like to think about plankton, which of course leads us to..YOU! I dont know what you're doing with your life; its a fairly simple question, you should be able to answer it. But...you are a thousand times dimmer than my cat. Just thinking about how far away you are from the rest of humanity, its sad. But dont bother crying over it, because your eyeballs are hopeless.
As for the rest of your body...its not 'human' shape...What are you? Do you smell that?...It might be...you. A person standing down wind from you might vomit. We humans are quite sensitive to your... smell.
You are merely poop, and so ugly, a blind person can see it...
And, as always, Go away

When... is green?
In 1859, noted French thespian Sarah Bernhardt famously declared: "Sometimes I like to lie down on my bed and dream of potatoes." Potatoes...
Potatoes were a currency among shoemakers during China's Tang dynasty. Tang... sounds suspiciously like the Pre-Columbian Arawak word 'Google', which means... calendar. Did Xi Dúo secretly sail over from Tang dynasty China to the Caribbean and tell them about calendars? Maybe...
But how... is 'and'? Albert Einstein once won a contest in Reader's Digest with the famous words "Seventeen is more than sixteen." Every school child in Bhutan is taught to recite this fact.