What Is The Oldest Thing? | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant org just a couple of weeks ago NASA announced that the Curiosity rover found traces of ancient organic compounds on the surface of Mars maybe billions of years ago Mars was warm enough to hold liquid water and Gale Crater where curiosity has been traipsing around for the last six years was filled with said water for hundreds of millions of years so curiosity drilled into that ancient sedimentary mud stone and took some samples heed those samples up to five hundred degrees Celsius and measured what came out and some of the stuff that came out were organic compounds pretty cool and as I said in my video about the Mars 2020 Rover one of the major parts of that mission is that they're going to actually collect soil samples so that later manned missions could collect those soil samples and take them back to earth so scientists can study them up close and personal scientists really want to study Martian soil now the obvious reason at the top of that list is they want to look for signs of life but there is another reason and that reason is that Mars or at least its soil is really old like over three billion years old and that's actually really hard to find here on earth because of the tectonic activity that we have here you know it's constantly creating and recycling the Earth's crust throw in water erosion and the carbon cycle and soil here on earth is tainted like it's tainted as Bill Cosby's career the Martian soil got none of that it's just sitting there unmess with pristine for billions of years so studying this soil can give us a clearer picture of the solar system and how it was formed sometimes it get a clearer picture on things you got a step back a bit see where everything came from I thought we could do that today so what is the oldest thing to know what the oldest thing is one must know what one means when one says thing what does one mean by thing what does thing mean to one as you know there are a lot of things that we could talk about and each one tells an interesting story so let's just go through all the things one by one the oldest living human thing back in January I did a random Thursday video that started like this at the time of this recording the oldest living person is Nobita Jima of Japan at 100 17 years and 178 days I say as of this recording because that could change cuz old people tend to you know die and that joke was hilarious until April 21st when to be Tajima passed away bad bad jokes aside 117 years old it's pretty good run good show old les the current oldest living person as of this recording is chiyomi akka who is also 117 and also from japan big shocker there but i'm not gonna make that same joke about her because I don't want to she's gonna be fine she's not gonna die she's never gonna die none of us will ever die interestingly at the time of this video the top 5 oldest people in the world are all from Japan and Italy never that means the oldest verified person ever of course is Jean come on who died at 122 years old so if you want to break that record better start taking your vitamins moving on to the oldest living animal thing the human age limit may be 122 but we got nothing on the giant tortoise the oldest living animal is this a shell giant tortoise named jonathan who lives on the island of st. Hellena and is believed to be 186 years old the oldest tortoise ever is an elder bro giant tortoise named old Walter that lived in India and died in 2005 at 255 years old it should be stated that both of those ages are not completely confirmed obviously nobody alive today was alive back then to verify that but it's no secret that giant tortoises live a very long time we don't know why exactly giant tortoises lived so long but it's thought that part of the explanation at least has to do with their metabolisms tortoises have an insanely slow metabolism and it's believed that metabolism in the body leads to the creation of free radicals and free radicals lead to cell damage which is what causes aging proving that slow and steady does win the race the oldest living plant thing sometimes smart people do dumb things and sometimes really smart people do really dumb things like so dumb that that becomes what they're known for forever one of those people is Donald our Curry Donald Curry was a graduate student in 1964 who was studying the climate effects of the Little Ice Age by studying tree rings also known as dendrochronology specifically he was studying the great Bristlecone Hinds in the White Mountains of California and he was doing it on a National Science Foundation grant and he was specifically interested in trees that grew on wheeler peak so I began taking core samples of the trees in the area labeling them with codes as he went until they came upon an especially stubborn tree that he labeled wpn 114 the story says that he broke his core on this tree so he tried a different core and it wound up breaking that one too and then he did finally get a core sample but it didn't go all the way through the tree so it was kind of worthless so eventually he just called out the National Forest Service and was like hey can I just cut down this tree and somehow someway they said sure I think you can see where this is going yes it turned out to be the oldest tree in the world in the solar system in the known freaking universe the tree which has since been named prometheus was dated at four thousand eight hundred and sixty-two years old oops and this made another tree in that same area another Bristlecone pine the oldest tree in the world they named this one Methuselah and it's dated at 4849 years old and if you'd like to get a selfie with Methuselah you're out of luck because thanks to that Prometheus incident the National Forest Service has made the location of Methuselah one of the most highly guarded secrets in the world I mean you can go to that area and walk around you'd probably walk right past it just you'd have no idea but even if you did manage to find what there's a lie you still wouldn't be hanging out with the oldest tree in the world because in 2012 they found another tree another Bristlecone pine in that same area it's even older it's dated at five thousand 62 years old and this one the Forest Service is keeping such a secret they didn't even name it so it turns out prometheus was the second oldest tree in the world so you are pardoned Donald Currie your party now these are the oldest individual trees but there are also clonal trees where the entire colony of trees is connected underground and the individual trees in that colony might have normal lifespans but the colony itself can can go on indefinitely and the oldest clonal colony of trees is named Pando it's a colony of quaking Aspen's in Utah that spans a hundred and six acres and it's over 80 thousand years old and unfortunately it seems to be dying they don't know if it's it's climate change is causing edit or like an invasive fungus what but the trees that are dying off are not being replaced like they used to be so unfortunately it looks like pandas days may be numbered the oldest living thing sponges are neither plants or animals but they do live a really long time they're glass sponges in the South China Sea they're believed to be over 10,000 years old in duelists are unicellular bacteria that live in the pores of rocks coral and animal shells and it kind of walls them off from the rest of the world but they just kind of keep on living in there they're considered extremophiles and can often be found near volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean colonies of these things can go on for millions of years with each individual generation being over 10,000 years but the winner may be on a technicality is a number of bacterial spores that were found in salt deposits in New Mexico which were actually revived after 240 million years that would be one hell of a hangover the oldest fossil thing in 2017 a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argued that rock samples taken from the apex chert rock formation in Australia contain microbial fossils that go back 3.5 billion years this pushes the evidence for life on Earth back significantly the only eight hundred million years after water was formed and it could of course be older than that this is just what we have evidence for and this is interesting because the earlier life started on earth the more likely it is to have started somewhere else too every time we push back the date of the origin of life on Earth it drastically opens up the possibilities of life elsewhere in the universe the oldest rock on earth thing remember what I said it's hard to find old rocks on earth because the tectonic activity kind of recycles the Earth's crust well there are a few places that seem to admit on that Australia seems to be one of them and a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience is a team of geologists that announced that they found the oldest rocks in the world in the jack hills of australia rocks that contain zircon crystals that are 4.4 billion years old these zircons were created 165 million years after the formation of the earth and due to their chemical composition they showed that water formed on earth only a hundred million years after the collision that formed the moon that means the earth cooled a lot faster than scientists thought it did but the current record holder for the oldest rock in the world goes to a meteorite that was found near Lake to gash in Canada in the year 2000 this personally to be about 4.5 billion years old but further testing revealed little carbon sphericals inside of it and when they tested that they found isotopes of nitrogen and hydrogen that can only be created at extremely cold temperatures like negative 260 degrees Celsius and the composition of those isotopes matched what they believe would be found in the protoplanetary disk before the Sun was the thing this meteorite is older than the Sun the oldest thing in the solar system you would think that a meteorite that's older than the Sun would be the oldest thing in the solar system you would be wrong because just a month ago or so researchers released a paper on an asteroid out near Jupiter's orbit called 2015 BZ 509 or just BZ for short BZ was getting all this attention because it has a tendency to orbit backwards all the planets in the solar system orbit in the same direction but BZ goes in a retrograde motion which led some astronomers to believe that it might be a captured asteroid from another solar system they suspect that the asteroid was formed around a star in a tightly packed star cluster and it got disturbed by a star in that clustering got flung out and then traveled through space for billions of years before I decided to crash our party making it the prime candidate for the oldest thing in our solar system the oldest thing in the known universe in 2016 the Hubble Space Telescope confirm the existence of a galaxy in the Big Dipper constellation that they named G in Z 11 and it's thirteen point four billion years old it's only 400 million years younger than the Big Bang itself this is a heavily redshifted galaxy which means it's moving very fast away from us which stretches the wavelengths causing it to be more red in fact it has a spectroscopic redshift of Z equals 11 point o 9 which is how it got its name Z 11 now because dark energy causes space-time itself to expand the more distance there is the more space between two objects the faster they are moving away from each other so even though the light that we see might be thirteen point four billion light years away that's believed that it's actually about 32 billion light years away at this point but the light from the stars in this galaxy is literally some of the earliest light in the universe after the dark ages that followed the Big Bang the oldest element in the universe thing this is easy hydrogen all the elements in the universe heavier than lithium were formed in the cores of stars or in supernova explosions this is a fusion process of taking smaller elements and smashing them together to make bigger elements this is called stellar nucleosynthesis and it was only made possible when stars were formed but before stars formed in the dark ages after the Big Bang the only elements were the ones that were created in the Big Bang and this is called primordial nucleosynthesis and those elements were only included hydrogen helium and some trace amounts of lithium but hydrogen being a simplest atom in the universe came first but when it all comes down to it the oldest thing the oldest thing that could possibly exist would be 13.7 billion years old because that's when the Big Bang happened and there was nothing before that that we know of now I just talked about how hydrogen and helium were made by primordial nucleosynthesis and the Big Bang but those atoms are made up of fundamental particles and the universe had to create those first the very earliest moments the Big Bang were so hot and so dense that all the fundamental particles and all the fundamental forces were combined into what they called the grand unified energy and as it expanded it cooled creating first the four fundamental forces and then all the fundamental particles the gluons the quarks the neutrinos the electrons all the things that make up everything in the universe were created in the Big Bang what this means is that at a fundamental level every galaxy every star every planet every Rock every tree every human being that's ever lived every person you've ever known everybody you've ever loved every person you can't stand every Republican every Democrat every Christian every Muslim and yes you are the oldest thing in the universe and you know what you don't look a day over 12 billion now you may have wondered while watching this video how exactly we know how old these things are and the answer is of course scientific problem-solving and if you want to boost your problem-solving skills there's no place better than brilliant org brilliant org is a learning platform that focuses on problem solving skills because that's how you learn things in real life you make an assumption you test it you look at the results you try something new that's how you learn things and by teaching you scientific concepts this way brilliant make sure those concepts stick next thing you know you're using those concepts all over the place in your daily life one good place to start as a science essentials course which kind of sets up some foundational understandings that you can apply to the heavier stuff when you get there later on you can sign up for free at brilliant org slash answers with Joe and get access to their weekly puzzles and brainteasers and the first 295 people who sign up for a premium subscription that gives you access to all our courses get 20% off your subscription for life it really is a lot of fun I've been enjoying it I know you want to brilliant org slash answers with Joe links down in the description big thanks to Brian org for sponsoring this video and a big huge thanks as always to the answer files on patreon who make my life what it is and I can't thank you enough there's some new people who joined I want to give you a 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Michael Glock Keith a astre any bull gia riches radio room it's all one word Dale Cantwell Thomas Edmund Irvine Emily Martha Sorensen Sue Ellen Corcoran Giovanni sweat Kyle crook James Davis and Michael Moyer thank you guys so much if you would like to join them get access to stuff that other people just don't have access to and join a really awesome community you can go to patreon.com/scishow joe please like and share this video if you liked it if it's your first time here check out some other stuff you might like those too and if you like those hit the subscribe button then you'll be the first in line to see my videos every Monday and every Thursday also you can join the notification squad by hitting the bell right next to the subscribe button that way YouTube will make sure that you get to see them alright you guys thanks again for watching you go out have an eye-opening week and I'll see you next Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 713,515

Rating: 4.9062223 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, the big bang, oldest thing in the universe, oldest thing, oldest rock on earth, oldest fossil on earth, oldest living thing, oldest plant on earth, nabi tajima, Chiyo Miyako, Jeanne Calment, giant tortoise, oldest animal on earth, prometheus, methuselah tree, bristlecone pine tree

Id: s-EI2KkG0Bo

Length: 14min 52sec (892 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 25 2018