The Best (And Worst) Invention Of All Time | Answers With Joe

okay one of my favorite movies is Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure all right cheer story when I was a kid I watched this movie so much that when I was in high school I took a typing class and they allowed 10 minutes at the beginning of every class to just type whatever you wanted and I typed out the entire screenplay to Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure 10 minutes at a time throughout the year totally from memory I mean who can forget the the story of these two well-meaning but bumbling dus traveling through time with such historical figures as Dave beeth oven Maxine of Arc Herman the Kid Bob ginga's Kahn so-crates Johnson Dennis fruit and Abraham Lincoln of course the real fun comes in watching these historical figures try to figure out the modern world and interact with people and it's kind of funny that these legendary people go to a mall and I'll wind up getting arrested because they just don't fit in here and that's fun because who hasn't thought about that you know who hasn't thought like what would George Washington think of the world today you know what would the people who created the world we live in think about the world they created it's an interesting thought now of course they played it for Laughs and they did it brilliantly but I do feel like they got one fundamental thing wrong because if somebody traveled through time even just from a hundred years ago I think the first thing they would be asking is what is this amazing substance that everything seems to be made of we live in something of a temporal bubble right now our world has changed so much so fast that even just in the last 100 years almost everything about the way we live our lives has completely changed and it's a bubble because most of us you know as we go through our daily lives have no idea that the life we're living in the items that we surround ourselves with are completely unique to human history and the perfect example of this is plastic it's literally everywhere in everything that we use throughout our daily lives and yet a hundred years ago it's barely existed and life was much different back then everything that you bought in stores were in containers of either paper or glass you know all sodas that you bought we're in glass bottles that you could then take back for a nickel which you could actually buy something with back then TVs and radios were built out of aluminum or steel they were heavy and very limited in what they could do and don't even get me started on what medical equipment was like back then seriously I don't want to think about it when material scientists started playing around with plastics in the mid to late 1800s it was like this Wonder material that completely defied what we believed was possible like the way we look at nanotubes and graphene now that's what plastic was 150 years ago it was sterile it could be stiff or flexible it was cheap to make and most importantly it could be molded into any shape you wanted it to be in fact the word plastic comes from the Greek plastic Coast which means to be molded and the reason why it's so easily molded is that plastic is a synthetic polymer and a polymer is a long chain of complex molecules derived from petroleum which gives it both strength and flexibility it was in the 1950s and 60s when plastics really get their stride and went into mass production and it became the go-to career for any young college graduate just one word yes sir listening just so you plastics I'm just full of movie references today plastics made possible new designs for furniture and household items made previously expensive things less expensive and it was great for food storage because it sealed out air and it was sterile and it never broke down so it's not really a surprise that in the next couple of decades plastic became so cheap and ubiquitous that it became disposable single-use plastic items became a thing and this was a huge luxury at the time not only did you not have to worry about cleaning out your food containers you knew that your food was clean and safe because that packaging had never been used before you just use it and throw it away no muss no fuss but now we've been doing this for 50 years and it turns out yes giant muss because one of the greatest things about plastic is also one of the worst things about plastic it never breaks down and now it's kind of taking over the world in a previous video I talked about the gray goo scenario where self-replicating nanobots basically turned the surface of the earth into a giant layer of goo and we're kind of doing that ourselves with plastics more than 300 million tons of plastic is produced each year in less than 10% of that gets recycled the rest winds up in landfills and in the ocean plastics and landfills are mostly contained although over time some of the chemicals and those plastics can leach out in the substance they called leachate which if not contained properly can get down into our groundwater but even worse things happen to plastic in the ocean thanks to natural circular ocean currents called gyres it causes this pollution to sort of collect in certain areas around the world the biggest of which is of course the Great Pacific Garbage Patch which is roughly the size of Texas by the way I'm from Texas and if you're not from here it's kind of hard to fully understand just how big this place is Texans are big on superlatives about their state but the size of Texas is for real yo so I live in Dallas it is further to drive from Dallas to El Paso than to go from El Paso to Los Angeles for most people living in Texas just to leave the state is kind of a big deal because it's a several hour long drive just to get out of the state you can drive all day long and still not go all the way across the state of Texas so imagine driving all day long across a landscape of plastic garbage that actually exists it's like wall-e on water and while the polymers that make up plastic take thousands of years to break down the individual pieces of plastic get blasted with UV radiation just kind of floating there on top of the surface and they do break down into smaller pieces that are eaten by birds and fish often killing them and this is where a lot of people start to tune out because really who cares about a few dead birds with all the problems going on right now and you know what it's fair although technically it's not just a few birds it's like a million of them a year except it's not just about dead birds with bellies full of bottle caps it's about that plastic breaking down into pieces so small we can't even see them anymore these are called micro plastics and those chemicals that are found in leachate they get absorbed by fish and enter the food chain a food chain that we are on the top of which is why 93 percent of people around the world have elevated levels of BPA the chemical used in plastics that can interrupt hormone signaling in the body and we're also seeing elevated levels of de HP a chemical that can cause certain types of cancer this is a problem so even if you don't care about what this is doing to wildlife you should care because this impacts your health it's only gonna get worse in the future although I gotta say if you can watch this video of a turtle getting a straw pulled out of its nose without feeling something you're basically a serial killer so an obvious solution of this is to just ban single-use plastics which some places are doing but it's more complicated than that because one of the things that makes plastics so great is that they're so cheap and energy efficient to make its kersek attack points out in their awesome video on this subject the energy it takes to create a reusable cotton grocery bag is so much higher than a single-use plastic bag that you would have to use that grocery bag seven thousand times in order to come out even so if you find groceries once a week it would take a hundred and thirty four years so unless you hand this off to your kids and your grandkids you're never gonna make up the difference and that's what it was tres the difficulty of the situation we're in plastics solves so many problems and makes the life that we live possible we're never gonna go back to a world without plastics so what can be done about this well there are some solutions in the works come on I'm not all doom and gloom here one way to fight the plastics problem is to create a new type of plastic as we speak there are labs around the world that are working on new processes to create plastics from renewable sources like say bacteria the purpose is not just to cut down on oil but to make plastics with biodegradable properties that don't have chemicals in it that could get into our systems later on and that could be broken back down into constituent parts and be reused over and over again now obviously the big challenge here is to create plastic at the same price point as petroleum-based plastic but there's progress being made here now obviously we all need to be recycling but what a lot of people don't know is that with our current recycling infrastructure when you recycle your plastic bottle it get turned back into another plastic bottle it usually gets sent off to China where he gets turned into something like carpet which is only used once there are recycling centers like carbon lights that are working on processes that can take a plastic bottle and remake it into another plastic bottle over and over again sort of keeping it in that cycle the only problem is you can only do that so many times before it starts to lose its properties so other chemists like Gina Garcia are working on a chemical recycling process that can actually degrade the plastic back down into their original polymers so that can be reused over and over again an infinite number of times in a 2014 TED talk where slack gained worldwide attention for his plan to clean up the oceans in a way that would actually pay for itself he was 18 at the time how do you feel about yourself now the system would use the oceans natural currents to funnel plastic garbage into giant boons that could then be collected and sold for recycling purposes since then as ocean cleanup project has raised millions through crowdfunding and capital investments and actually just this weekend launched their first system in the Pacific Ocean which is really exciting it'll be cool to see how that progresses and earlier this year a team from the university of portsmouth announced that they've created a new enzyme that actually eats plastics specifically PDT they were following up some research from 2016 where they found a bacteria in Japan that had evolved to eat plastic and they actually were able to make that enzyme that the bacteria produced even stronger now I don't know what the waste product of this digestion is but hey this might be a way to actually get plastic out of the system and one cool thing I ran across is an organization called plastic Bank basically these guys set up plastic collection centers in developing countries around the world where people can come in and trade plastic for household items and clothing that they need plastic that they later sell for recycling I like this idea because it empowers poor people to have a better life while taking plastic out of the environment in a way that benefits everybody and finally just finding a ways to reduce the consumption of plastic you know a cotton bag may take more energy to create than a plastic one but if you have one use it take your own coffee thermos into a coffee shop support businesses that don't use single-use plastic we have as humans the unique ability to shut ourselves off from the natural environment and not think about things that we don't want to think about you know we'd like to just live our lives and not think about where things come from or where they go when we're done with them out of sight out of mind but it's not out of our lot no matter how much we want to think it is and the longer we want to pretend to be in this bubble the more difficult the whole thing's gonna be bubbles tend to pop this isn't meant to be a downer and this doesn't have to be a an apocalyptic catastrophe but I think it all starts with awareness of the bigger picture and doing some small parts like I said at the beginning of this video it's fun to think about what the people who created this world would think about the world they created but we're actively creating the world for future generations and we need to be thinking about the world we're creating - one thing that can help you to think a little bit deeper about the world that you live in is of course brilliant dork brilliant is an awesome learning site that makes you connect things that you've never really quite connected before they teach you the fundamentals of science and the world around you in a way that makes you kind of piece things together yourself so that you retain it in different ways more creative ways that can apply to other things in your life a couple of different courses you can start with if you're new to brilliant org is the physics of the everyday which really makes you think differently about just everyday things around you and just your science essentials course it gives you a great fundamental concept learning - that you can apply to things as you move forward what I like about brilliant is is not just like a place to go memorize stuff they actually teach you how to think and to think more like a scientist which is so useful in so many different ways you can sign up for free at brilliant org slash answers with Joe and get free access to their weekly puzzles and brainteasers or the first 200 people that sign up for the full premium subscription which gives you access to all their courses we'll get 20% off your subscription for life as I've said many times don't just be smart be brilliant brilliant dork slice answers with Joe links down in the description thanks so much to brilliant for sponsoring this video I love working with brilliant they're awesome people I love to promote them but I also want to give a big thanks to the answer files on patreon they'll keep the lights on around here some new people that join the show let me introduce them real quick we got Dwayne bridges Chris McCracken David Hartman mark M Brian Jensen James Marrs Lynn Ferdinand Fernando wheelchair space nerd Brandon zipper Hakan sibling Samantha quinones L Walker L Walter revelaed in Gil Gerard and Demetri thank you guys so much if you would like to join them and get access to cool things that other people don't get access to you can join them at calm / dancers would you t-shirts available in the answers of Joe store answers of Joe calm / shirts if you liked this video please do give it a like and a thumbs up and share to people that you think would like it as well and if this is your first time here I invite you to check out some of my other videos on similar topics I think if you liked those as well you should hit subscribe because then you'll be the first to see them every Monday alright thanks again for watching you guys go out now and have an eye-opening week let's say next Monday love you guys sticking plastic

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 285,449

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, plastics, plastic pollution, the great pacific garbage patch, boyan slat, the ocean cleanup, PET plastic, plastic recycling, sustainability, environmentalism, ocean gyre, leachate, landfills, bill and ted, Bill and Ted's excellent adventure

Id: i_TPvQH3IBU

Length: 13min 3sec (783 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 10 2018