Vsauce! Kevin here, and this briefcase contains the
entire universe and everything that makes humanity human. That’s it… this is it? Paper, dollar, pencil, sugar cube, playing
card, Rubik’s cube? Let me explain. FOLD A PIECE OF PAPER. Again… and again… a sheet of paper is
about 4-thousandths of an inch, and to get the number of layers after folding we make
2 to the power of folds. We start with 1, then every fold raises that
power one more. My folding is not going well! The world record for paper folding is only
12 folds. If we could fold it 30 times, it’d be thick
enough to reach space. 42 gets us to the moon. At 103 folds, the thickness of this paper
would be around 93 billion light years, so… basically the diameter of our entire observable
universe. A piece of paper is the size of the universe. And you’re inside this sugar cube. In fact, we all are, or COULD be. Atoms are tiny, and their fundamental particles
are even smaller. A proton is like… a femtometer, one quadrillionth
of a meter. The simple way to think of our body’s makeup
is that atoms are a collection of particles with a fair amount of empty space between
them. Quantum physics shows us that’s not actually
true, and that a lot is happening in what appears to be 99.99999% empty space. That space matters. But if we compressed the atoms of the human
race into a tight ball and ignored what’s in-between them, all nearly-8 billion of us
would fit inside this sugar cube. This is us. 7.8 billion of us inside here, we can’t
all be unique, right? RIGHT! NO! WRONG! About 108 billion humans have been born throughout
history. If you’re 1 in a million like my mom told
me I am, that still means there have been 108,000 humans exactly like you. THAT’S NOT GOOD. How can anybody possibly stand out? I KNOW. Just do something no human has ever done before…
like what? Shuffle a deck of cards. Okay people have done that but not the same! Michael mentioned this in his Math Magic video
it goes like this: You’ve got 52 cards in a deck. The number of possible combinations is 52
factorial, so 52 x 51 x 50 x 49… yeah yeah yeah, all the way down to one. That’s ehhhhhhh that number different orders
of a shuffled deck. Every time you shuffle and deal, you’ve
just created something that’s virtually guaranteed to never have been done before
-- and seriously unlikely to ever be done again. So ignore your 108,000 clones, opportunities
to be unique are actually everywhere. And there’s no limit to what you can do,
because you, my friend, you you you watchin’ this video, you’re a supercomputer. This Rubik’s Cube has 6 sides of a 3 by
3 grid, and each square is one of 6 colors. The question is: How many permutations exist? That’s a good question, I think of it often. The answer is this: 43 quintillion, 252 quadrillion,
3 trillion, 274 billion, 489 million, 856 thousand. That’s it. And every single possible state of the cube
can be solved in 20 moves or fewer. That’s called “God’s number,” and
it took Google 36 CPU-years of computing power to determine. Du Yusheng solved the classic 3x3x3 Rubik’s
Cube in… 3.47 seconds. Maybe it takes you longer -- but you are mentally
capable of processing any one version of 43 quintillion problems and solving it in a surprisingly
low number of steps. You solve problems in the world and if you’re
like me you go outside once a month to get more peanut butter and you notice HEY there
are other people around. THIS helps connect us, but you’ve got to
think about it the right way. This doesn’t actually have intrinsic value,
money isn’t actually worth anything -- it’s paper. But it does represent a way for everyone to
exchange what they’ve got -- a thing, a talent, whatever -- for what someone else
has. The Aztecs used cocoa beans and the ancient
Chinese used cowry shells. I’ve got a Playstation, I like making videos,
and I want a pygmy goat. It’s a lot easier for me to use something
that allows me to transfer my old Playstation and my video production skills, and then use
that to buy a pygmy goat, than it is to find a pygmy goat farmer who needs a PS1 and a
paradox video. We have a system that converts what we’ve
got into what we want, and gives someone else a way to get what they want with what they’ve
got. And it’s not just about money, currencies
like love and trust and loyalty spend nicely, too. You can be you… with others. That’s why we’re capable of making incredible
things. Such as a #2 pencil. It’s like Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil”
-- it shows the sheer insanity of human cooperation that results in making something as basic
as a pencil. Someone farmed the Incense cedar. Someone built the tractors for that farm. Someone made the wheels for the tractor. Someone mined the graphite and clay for the
lead, others mined the metal for the ferrule. No one planned this. We just all… did our little piece, and others
combine those pieces with our needs and desires to make a thing everyone uses, but no individual
person could ever make themselves. We can’t even comprehend what’s happening
in this sugar cube because it’s too complex. WHERE’S MY UNIVERSE PAPER? We do all this because we know what 0 is. It’s not even just nothing. It’s the absence of value, value that exists
somewhere, just not where 0 is. If infinity is so impossibly large that we
can’t even really understand it, 0 is an impossibly-deep void we process mostly by
what it isn’t. We do understand the power of something that’s
a placeholder to make and identify greater things, but that on its own is… sort of
a terrifying lack of meaning. Zero makes the pencils happen, and it’s
the absence of pencils. It’s never getting what we want, it’s
never solving a Rubik’s Cube, it’s the inability to be unique, it’s inaction, it’s
an empty sugar cube -- it’s being in this unfathomably large paper universe and fighting
against the prospect of being and meaning nothing. You know what it is, but you’re everything
because you’re not zero. The world is big, the universe is complex. And you can visualize, conceptualize, and
appreciate some of the most complicated elements of life by studying, and researching, and
experimenting -- but also by messin’ around with some of the junk lying around your bedroom. OR STORED IN YOUR EXTREMELY COOL BRIEFCASE. And as always, thanks for watching. Hey! Real quick, this video is sponsored by The
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to get yours and secure your Winter Curiosity Box go to CuriosityBox.com. This is the Subscription for Thinkers. To watch more of my videos, click over here. To check out my podcast where I interview
top YouTube Creators, go over there. I’m a supercomputer!
