blog posts on waitbutwhy
https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/09/universe.html
The Big and the Small — Wait But Why
2020-09-22
Tim Urban
<div><article>
	<div><p>I have a surprise for you.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/1-surprise.png"></a></p>
<p>I’ll tell you about it in a minute. First, let’s have a little fun. Come with me.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/2-fun-room.png"></a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>I haven’t told anyone this before, but I actually live in the fun room. I just gave you a tour of my house, where I spend a large portion of my life thinking about the size of things.</p>
<p>I have visitors in the fun room from time to time, but after a few minutes, they’re usually pretty funned out and leave me to my crises. But one day, something unexpected happened.</p>
<p>It was 2013. Wait But Why was a few months old. And I got an email from someone named Philipp Dettmer. I was slightly unsettled by the pp and tt, but I decided to read what he had to say.</p>
<p>He explained that he lives in Germany where he makes animated educational videos about a lot of different things, kind of like Wait But Why but a different medium. I took a look at his YouTube page. It was named a random string of letters:</p>
<p>kurzgesagt</p>
<p>Apparently it means “In a Nutshell” in German, but I didn’t know that at the time and was <em>very </em>close to being done with Philipp Dettmer for good when I decided to watch one of the videos.</p>
<p>It was <em>delightful</em>.</p>
<p>I watched another. And another. And then it hit me.</p>
<p>Philipp—this random man in Germany—<em>also lives in the fun room.</em></p>
<p>The next day, we were on the phone. There was a lot to talk about. We decided we had to do something together, and we settled on adapting <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html">one of my early posts</a> into a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XkV6IpV2Y0&amp;ab_channel=Kurzgesagt%E2%80%93InaNutshell">kurzgesagt video</a>.<a href="#footnote-1-8973">1</a>
</p><p>In the seven years since then, Philipp and I have become great friends, and I have not missed a kurzgesagt video since. Whenever Philipp and I get dinner, we head straight to the fun room to talk about the universe. And a few months ago, we decided to collaborate again. It was time to go public with the fun room.</p>
<p>At some point in our pasts, we had both become enamored with two fun room icons, Cary and Michael Huang, known on the internet as the Huang Twins. The twins do <a href="https://www.htwins.net/">a lot of cool things</a>, but it was their <a href="https://www.htwins.net/scale2/">Scale of the Universe</a> toy that we loved most.</p>
<p>Inspired by their work, we decided to go for it. We wanted to make the best size explorer we could imagine. We called it Universe in a Nutshell.</p>
<p>Of course, it took roughly 18 times longer than we thought it would. We brainstormed the interface for quite some time, and then Philipp, along with the incredible kurzgesagt team, dug into working on illustrations and animations, while I worked with the team on the written explainers.</p>
<p>Thousands of human hours later, the app is done. 250 objects, 30,000+ words of explanations and fun facts, just the right mood music, and what we think is a pretty great interface.</p>
<p>Here’s how it works:</p>
<p>The app is a giant wall. The wall is impossibly large—large enough to fit full-sized galaxies on it. The wall is also impossibly high-resolution—hi-res enough to contain sharp images of subatomic particles.</p>
<p>I know it seems weird that I’m talking about it as if it’s a real object, but I have a good reason: to get the full mind-blow effect, you have to realize what you’re looking at. You’re not moving forward and backward through a tunnel of objects—it just seems that way because your brain will refuse to accept the insanity of the actual sizes you’re seeing. By reminding yourself again and again that all of these objects are “painted” on the same 2D wall, you’ll hopefully experience some fun mind-bending moments.</p>
<p>The app looks like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/3.1-screenshot.jpeg"></a></p>
<p>And this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/3.3-screenshot.jpeg"></a></p>
<p>And this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/3.2-screenshot.jpeg"></a></p>
<p>And there are three ways to zoom:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/4-Zoom.png"></a></p>
<p>You can tap any object for an explainer and fun facts. All of the facts you just read in the fun room are also in the app, along with a million other things. (The surprisingly-good-for-Wait-But-Why-illustrations from the fun room are the work of Kurzgesagt. Don’t think this is some new normal.)</p>
<p>Three more things:</p>
<p>1) The app is $3 in the US store, which, considering the fact that a magical infinite wall should really go for like $2.5 million, is a huge steal.</p>
<p>2) If you like the app, please give it a rating or review. For example, here’s my review:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/5-review.jpg"></a></p>
<p>3) This is V1 of the app. As we made the app, we had a constant side conversation going on about possibilities for V2, V3, and beyond. We’re launching today, but this is just the beginning. We want this app to be a brain playground that just keeps getting better and better. And here’s where you come in.</p>
<p>As you use the app, whenever you have an “I wish the app did X” or “It would be so cool if the app could do Y” thought, we want to hear it. As this is V1, we of course also want to know whenever you have a “This isn’t working right” or an “I think this fact is off” thought. In the app’s menu, you’ll see a “feedback” tab, where you can tap the feedback <a href="mailto:appfeedback@kurzgesagt.org">email address</a> and let us know what you’re thinking.</p>
<p>Okay, here you go. <strong>Click the left app for iPhone/iPad, the right one for Android.</strong></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Also: </strong>To commemorate the app launch, Kurzgesagt did their own fun room creation today—<a href="https://youtu.be/3mnSDifDSxQ"><strong>a delightful video about the sizes of stars</strong></a>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>End things:</strong></p>
<p>If you like Wait But Why, sign up for our unannoying-I-promise <strong><a href="https://mailchi.mp/waitbutwhy/email-signup">email list</a></strong> and we’ll send you new posts when they come out.</p>
<p>To support Wait But Why, <a href="https://www.patreon.com/waitbutwhy"><strong>visit our Patreon page</strong></a>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>More trips to the fun room:</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html"><strong>The Fermi Paradox</strong></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html"><strong>The SpaceX Post</strong></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/what-does-quadrillion-sour-patch-kids.html"><strong>The Quadrillion Sour Patch Kids Post</strong></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html"><strong>And a trip to the not-so-fun room</strong></a></p>
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 The Big and the Small

 September 22, 2020 By Tim Urban


 I have a surprise for you.

 I’ll tell you about it in a minute. First, let’s have a little fun. Come with me.

 I haven’t told anyone this before, but I actually live in the fun room. I just gave you a tour of my house, where I spend a large portion of my life thinking about the size of things.

 I have visitors in the fun room from time to time, but after a few minutes, they’re usually pretty funned out and leave me to my crises. But one day, something unexpected happened.

 It was 2013. Wait But Why was a few months old. And I got an email from someone named Philipp Dettmer. I was slightly unsettled by the pp and tt, but I decided to read what he had to say.

 He explained that he lives in Germany where he makes animated educational videos about a lot of different things, kind of like Wait But Why but a different medium. I took a look at his YouTube page. It was named a random string of letters:

 kurzgesagt

 Apparently it means “In a Nutshell” in German, but I didn’t know that at the time and was very close to being done with Philipp Dettmer for good when I decided to watch one of the videos.

 It was delightful.

 I watched another. And another. And then it hit me.

 Philipp—this random man in Germany—also lives in the fun room.

 The next day, we were on the phone. There was a lot to talk about. We decided we had to do something together, and we settled on adapting one of my early posts into a kurzgesagt video.1

 In the seven years since then, Philipp and I have become great friends, and I have not missed a kurzgesagt video since. Whenever Philipp and I get dinner, we head straight to the fun room to talk about the universe. And a few months ago, we decided to collaborate again. It was time to go public with the fun room.

 At some point in our pasts, we had both become enamored with two fun room icons, Cary and Michael Huang, known on the internet as the Huang Twins. The twins do a lot of cool things, but it was their Scale of the Universe toy that we loved most.

 Inspired by their work, we decided to go for it. We wanted to make the best size explorer we could imagine. We called it Universe in a Nutshell.

 Of course, it took roughly 18 times longer than we thought it would. We brainstormed the interface for quite some time, and then Philipp, along with the incredible kurzgesagt team, dug into working on illustrations and animations, while I worked with the team on the written explainers.

 Thousands of human hours later, the app is done. 250 objects, 30,000+ words of explanations and fun facts, just the right mood music, and what we think is a pretty great interface.

 Here’s how it works:

 The app is a giant wall. The wall is impossibly large—large enough to fit full-sized galaxies on it. The wall is also impossibly high-resolution—hi-res enough to contain sharp images of subatomic particles.

 I know it seems weird that I’m talking about it as if it’s a real object, but I have a good reason: to get the full mind-blow effect, you have to realize what you’re looking at. You’re not moving forward and backward through a tunnel of objects—it just seems that way because your brain will refuse to accept the insanity of the actual sizes you’re seeing. By reminding yourself again and again that all of these objects are “painted” on the same 2D wall, you’ll hopefully experience some fun mind-bending moments.

 The app looks like this:

 And this:

 And this:

 And there are three ways to zoom:

 You can tap any object for an explainer and fun facts. All of the facts you just read in the fun room are also in the app, along with a million other things. (The surprisingly-good-for-Wait-But-Why-illustrations from the fun room are the work of Kurzgesagt. Don’t think this is some new normal.)

 Three more things:

 1) The app is $3 in the US store, which, considering the fact that a magical infinite wall should really go for like $2.5 million, is a huge steal.

 2) If you like the app, please give it a rating or review. For example, here’s my review:

 3) This is V1 of the app. As we made the app, we had a constant side conversation going on about possibilities for V2, V3, and beyond. We’re launching today, but this is just the beginning. We want this app to be a brain playground that just keeps getting better and better. And here’s where you come in.

 As you use the app, whenever you have an “I wish the app did X” or “It would be so cool if the app could do Y” thought, we want to hear it. As this is V1, we of course also want to know whenever you have a “This isn’t working right” or an “I think this fact is off” thought. In the app’s menu, you’ll see a “feedback” tab, where you can tap the feedback email address and let us know what you’re thinking.

 Okay, here you go. Click the left app for iPhone/iPad, the right one for Android.

 ___________

 Also: To commemorate the app launch, Kurzgesagt did their own fun room creation today—a delightful video about the sizes of stars.

 ___________

 End things:

 If you like Wait But Why, sign up for our unannoying-I-promise email list and we’ll send you new posts when they come out.

 To support Wait But Why, visit our Patreon page.

 ___________

 More trips to the fun room:

 The Fermi Paradox

 The SpaceX Post

 The Quadrillion Sour Patch Kids Post

 And a trip to the not-so-fun room

 1. Kurzgesagt did an updated version of the video in 2018.↩

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 * 
 * 
I have a surprise for you.
   
I’ll tell you about it in a minute. First, let’s have a little fun. Come with me.
   
 
I haven’t told anyone this before, but I actually live in the fun room. I just gave you a tour of my house, where I spend a large portion of my life thinking about the size of things.
I have visitors in the fun room from time to time, but after a few minutes, they’re usually pretty funned out and leave me to my crises. But one day, something unexpected happened.
It was 2013. Wait But Why was a few months old. And I got an email from someone named Philipp Dettmer. I was slightly unsettled by the pp and tt, but I decided to read what he had to say.
He explained that he lives in Germany where he makes animated educational videos about a lot of different things, kind of like Wait But Why but a different medium. I took a look at his YouTube page. It was named a random string of letters:
kurzgesagt
Apparently it means “In a Nutshell” in German, but I didn’t know that at the time and was very close to being done with Philipp Dettmer for good when I decided to watch one of the videos.
It was delightful.
I watched another. And another. And then it hit me.
Philipp—this random man in Germany—also lives in the fun room. 
The next day, we were on the phone. There was a lot to talk about. We decided we had to do something together, and we settled on adapting one of my early posts into a kurzgesagt video.1
 In the seven years since then, Philipp and I have become great friends, and I have not missed a kurzgesagt video since. Whenever Philipp and I get dinner, we head straight to the fun room to talk about the universe. And a few months ago, we decided to collaborate again. It was time to go public with the fun room.
At some point in our pasts, we had both become enamored with two fun room icons, Cary and Michael Huang, known on the internet as the Huang Twins. The twins do a lot of cool things, but it was their Scale of the Universe toy that we loved most.
Inspired by their work, we decided to go for it. We wanted to make the best size explorer we could imagine. We called it Universe in a Nutshell.
Of course, it took roughly 18 times longer than we thought it would. We brainstormed the interface for quite some time, and then Philipp, along with the incredible kurzgesagt team, dug into working on illustrations and animations, while I worked with the team on the written explainers.
Thousands of human hours later, the app is done. 250 objects, 30,000+ words of explanations and fun facts, just the right mood music, and what we think is a pretty great interface.
Here’s how it works:
The app is a giant wall. The wall is impossibly large—large enough to fit full-sized galaxies on it. The wall is also impossibly high-resolution—hi-res enough to contain sharp images of subatomic particles.
I know it seems weird that I’m talking about it as if it’s a real object, but I have a good reason: to get the full mind-blow effect, you have to realize what you’re looking at. You’re not moving forward and backward through a tunnel of objects—it just seems that way because your brain will refuse to accept the insanity of the actual sizes you’re seeing. By reminding yourself again and again that all of these objects are “painted” on the same 2D wall, you’ll hopefully experience some fun mind-bending moments.
The app looks like this:
   
And this:
   
And this:
   
And there are three ways to zoom:
   
You can tap any object for an explainer and fun facts. All of the facts you just read in the fun room are also in the app, along with a million other things. (The surprisingly-good-for-Wait-But-Why-illustrations from the fun room are the work of Kurzgesagt. Don’t think this is some new normal.)
Three more things:
1) The app is $3 in the US store, which, considering the fact that a magical infinite wall should really go for like $2.5 million, is a huge steal.
2) If you like the app, please give it a rating or review. For example, here’s my review:
   
3) This is V1 of the app. As we made the app, we had a constant side conversation going on about possibilities for V2, V3, and beyond. We’re launching today, but this is just the beginning. We want this app to be a brain playground that just keeps getting better and better. And here’s where you come in.
As you use the app, whenever you have an “I wish the app did X” or “It would be so cool if the app could do Y” thought, we want to hear it. As this is V1, we of course also want to know whenever you have a “This isn’t working right” or an “I think this fact is off” thought. In the app’s menu, you’ll see a “feedback” tab, where you can tap the feedback email address and let us know what you’re thinking.
Okay, here you go. Click the left app for iPhone/iPad, the right one for Android. 
___________
 Also: To commemorate the app launch, Kurzgesagt did their own fun room creation today— a delightful video about the sizes of stars .
___________
 End things: 
If you like Wait But Why, sign up for our unannoying-I-promise  email list  and we’ll send you new posts when they come out.
To support Wait But Why,  visit our Patreon page .
___________
 More trips to the fun room: 
  The Fermi Paradox  
  The SpaceX Post  
  The Quadrillion Sour Patch Kids Post  
  And a trip to the not-so-fun room
The Big and the Small — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/09/universe.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/whatsourproblem
What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book For Societies
2024-02-22T22:02:35Z

<html><body><div><div>
	<main>
<div>
	
<div>
<div>
<figure></figure></div>
<pre>a self-help book for societies</pre>
</div>
<div>
<figure></figure></div>
<div>
<h2>Available NOW</h2>
<div>
<div>
<h3>ebook</h3>
<div>
<p>Works great as an e-book, especially on color e-readers and tablets (the book has 300+ color drawings). The best ebook experience we’ve seen is Apple Books &gt; iPad &gt; sepia &gt; vertical scroll.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<h3>audiobook</h3>
<div>
<p>Comes along with a <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/audio">website</a> with the book’s most important drawings, labeled (I tell you throughout the book which drawing to go to look at). Also, I read the book myself, it was arduous.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<h3>wait but why</h3>
<div><div>
<figure><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2023/02/wop-contents.html"></a></figure></div>
<p>You can read the book right on Wait But Why. It looks and functions the best of all here, but no dark mode.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<h2>About the book</h2>
<p>Hi, I’m Tim. I write the blog Wait But Why, where I write about all kinds of things. But in the middle of 2016, I started thinking about a new topic: why my society sucked. As technology soared ahead, it seemed like we were going backwards in wisdom. Tribalism was flaring up everywhere, mass shaming campaigns were roaring back into fashion, politicians were increasingly clown-like, public discourse had become a battle of one-dimensional narratives. I decided to write about it, which plunged me into a rabbit hole like no other. Six years later, I emerged with this book. The book introduces a new framework for thinking about our complex political environment. With dozens of new terms and concepts and 303 drawings, it’s a toolbox for understanding our societies, our group dynamics, and our own minds. Here’s everything on all the pages:</p>
<div>
<figure><a href="https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/V7-full.png"></a></figure></div>
<p>See how much shit is in there? That took a really long time and I’m happy it’s over. Anyway, stop procrastinating by reading all the way down on this page and go read the book, and then we can discuss.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2023/02/last-six-years.html">The full story behind the making of this book</a> | <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/homepage">Wait But Why homepage</a></strong></p>
</div>
</div>
</main>
</div></div></body></html>
a self-help book for societies
  
Available NOW
ebook
Works great as an e-book, especially on color e-readers and tablets (the book has 300+ color drawings). The best ebook experience we’ve seen is Apple Books &gt; iPad &gt; sepia &gt; vertical scroll.
audiobook
Comes along with a website with the book’s most important drawings, labeled (I tell you throughout the book which drawing to go to look at). Also, I read the book myself, it was arduous.
wait but why
 
    
You can read the book right on Wait But Why. It looks and functions the best of all here, but no dark mode.
About the book
Hi, I’m Tim. I write the blog Wait But Why, where I write about all kinds of things. But in the middle of 2016, I started thinking about a new topic: why my society sucked. As technology soared ahead, it seemed like we were going backwards in wisdom. Tribalism was flaring up everywhere, mass shaming campaigns were roaring back into fashion, politicians were increasingly clown-like, public discourse had become a battle of one-dimensional narratives. I decided to write about it, which plunged me into a rabbit hole like no other. Six years later, I emerged with this book. The book introduces a new framework for thinking about our complex political environment. With dozens of new terms and concepts and 303 drawings, it’s a toolbox for understanding our societies, our group dynamics, and our own minds. Here’s everything on all the pages:
    
See how much shit is in there? That took a really long time and I’m happy it’s over. Anyway, stop procrastinating by reading all the way down on this page and go read the book, and then we can discuss.
  The full story behind the making of this book | Wait But Why homepage
What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book For Societies
https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/09/american-brain.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/sound.html
Everything You Should Know About Sound
2016-03-09
Tim Urban
<div><div><p><em>This post is part of Mini Week, where I’m posting a new mini post but not actually mini as it turns out every weekday this week.</em></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>I’ve always been a little confused about sound. So for “Tuesday’s” “mini” post, I decided to do something about that.</p>
<p>We think of sound as something we <em>hear</em>—something that makes <em>noise</em>. But in pure physics terms, sound is just a vibration going through matter.</p>
<p>The way a vibration “goes through” matter is in the form of a sound wave. When you think of sound waves, you probably think of something like this:<a href="#footnote2-1-4885">1</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ezgif.com-optimize.gif"></a></p>
<p>But that’s not how sound waves work. A wave like that is called a transverse wave, where each individual particle moves up and down to create a snake situation.</p>
<p>A sound wave is more like an earthworm situation:<a href="#footnote2-2-4885">2</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/earthworm.gif"></a></p>
<p>Like an earthworm, sound moves by compressing and decompressing. This is called a longitudinal wave. A slinky can do both kinds of waves:<a href="#footnote-1-4885">1</a><a href="#footnote2-3-4885">3</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/slinky.gif"></a></p>
<p>Sound starts with a vibration of some kind creating a longitudinal wave through matter. Check this out:<a href="#footnote2-4-4885">4</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/red-dot.gif"></a></p>
<p>That’s what sound looks like—except picture an expanding ripple of <em>spheres</em> doing that. In this animation, the sound wave is being generated by that vibrating grey bar on the left. The bar might be your vocal chords, a guitar string, or a waterfall continually pounding down into the river below. By looking at the red dots, you can see that even though the wave moves in one direction, each individual particle only moves back and forth, mimicking the vibration of the gray bar.</p>
<p>So instead of a curvy snake wave, sound is a <em>pressure </em>wave, which causes each piece of the air to be at either higher-than-normal pressure or lower-than-normal pressure. So when you see a snake-like illustration of a sound wave, it’s referring to the measure of pressure, <em>not </em>the literal path of movement of the particles:<a href="#footnote2-5-4885">5</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Wave.gif"></a></p>
<p>Sound waves can go through air, which is how we normally experience it. But it can also go through liquid<a href="#footnote-2-4885">2</a> or solid matter—much of the jolting that happens during an earthquake is the result of a huge sound wave whizzing through the earth (in that case, the movement of the fault is serving as the gray and red bars in the animations above).</p>
<p>How about the speed of sound? Well it depends on how quickly the pressure wave can move in a given medium. A medium that’s more fluid, like air, is highly compressible, so it takes longer for the wave to move, while water is far less compressible, so there’s less “give” to slow the wave down. It’s like two people holding an outstretched slinky between them—if one pushes their end toward the other person, the wave will take a little time to travel down the slinky before the other person feels it. But if the two people are holding a broomstick, when one pushes, the other feels it immediately, because the broomstick is much less compressible.<a href="#footnote2-6-4885">6</a>
</p><p>So it makes sense that the speed of sound in air (768 mph / 1,234 kmph under normal conditions) is about four times slower than the speed of sound in water, which itself is about four times slower than the speed of sound through a solid like iron.</p>
<p>Back to us and <em>hearing</em>. Ears are an evolutionary innovation that allows us to register sound waves in the air around us and process them as information—without ears, most sound waves would be imperceptible to a human with only the loudest sounds registering as a felt vibration on our skin. Ears give us a magical ability to sense even slight sound waves in a way so nuanced, it can usually tell us exactly where the sound is coming from and what the meaning of it is. And it enables us to talk. The most important kind of human communication happens when our brains send information to other brains through complex patterns of <em>air pressure waves</em>. Have you ever stopped and thought about how incredible that is?</p>
<p>I was about to move on, but sorry, I can’t get over this. The next time you’re talking to someone, I want you to stop and think about what’s happening. Your brain has a thought. It translates that thought into a pattern of pressure waves. Then your lungs send air out of your body, but as you do that, you vibrate your vocal chords in <em>just </em>the right way and you move your mouth and tongue into <em>just </em>the right shapes that by the time the air leaves you, it’s embedded with a pattern of high- and low-pressure areas. The code in that air then spreads out to all the air in the vicinity, a little bit of which ends up in your friend’s ear, where it passes by their eardrum. When it does, it vibrates their eardrum in such a way as to pass on not only the code, but exactly where in the room it came from and the particular tone of voice it came with. The eardrum’s vibrations are transmitted through three tiny bones and into a little sac of fluid, which then transmits the information into electrical impulses and sends them up the auditory nerve and into the brain, where the information is decoded. And all of that happens in an eighth of a second, without any effort from either of you. Talking is a <em>miracle</em>.</p>
<p>Anyway—</p>
<p>The ear can discern many qualities of a sound it hears, but two of the most fundamental are pitch and loudness.</p>
<p><strong>Pitch</strong></p>
<p>Pitch is all about wavelength—i.e. how far apart the pressure waves are:<a href="#footnote2-7-4885">7</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Wave-2.gif"></a></p>
<p>The shorter the wavelength, the higher the pitch. Humans can hear frequencies as low as 20 Hz (which is a 56 ft /17 m long wave) and as high as 20,000 Hz (.7 in / 1.7 cm). As you age, you lose your ability to hear the highest pitches, so most of you probably hear nothing when you <a href="http://plasticity.szynalski.com/tone-generator.htm">listen to the frequencies</a> approaching 20,000 Hz (your dog will disagree). But you’ll have an easier time hearing the lowest part of the range.<a href="#footnote2-8-4885">8</a> The reason you can <em>feel </em>low sounds, like low bass notes in music, is that the wavelength is so long that it actually takes 1/20th of a second for a full wave to pass your body (hence 20 Hz).<a href="#footnote-3-4885">3</a><a href="#footnote-4-4885">4</a>
</p><p><strong>Loudness</strong></p>
<p>The loudness<a href="#footnote-5-4885">5</a> of a sound we hear is determined by the <em>amplitude</em> of the pressure waves. In the animation above, the high and low-pitched sounds depicted have the same loudness, because the pressure curves at the bottom of the animation are the same size <em>vertically</em>. Louder sounds have a larger oscillation between the low and high pressure sections of the wave—i.e. loud sounds have higher high-pressure and lower low-pressure parts than quiet sounds.</p>
<p>For sounds through the air on Earth’s surface, the average of the high-pressure and low-pressure parts of the wave is our normal atmospheric pressure—what we call 1 “atmosphere” of pressure. So a sound wave might have a high pressure component of 1.0001 atmospheres and a low pressure component of .9999 atmospheres, and a louder sound might be 1.01/.99 instead—but in both cases, the average of the two is 1 atmosphere.</p>
<p>We often measure loudness using a unit called the decibel (named after Alexander Graham Bell). If you want to be confused, read the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel">Wikipedia page on decibels</a>. It’s a super icky unit. And rather than bore us both by explaining it, let’s just talk about how we use decibels to measure sound.</p>
<p>The scale of loudness has a very tiny minimum. The faintest sounds are far softer than any human could hear—even softer than any of our finest scientific instruments could detect. But depending on where you are, sound has a hard maximum. The reason is that sound isn’t a thing in itself—it’s a pressure wave moving through a medium. And since, as we talked about, the average of the high and low pressure points of a sound wave has to be the normal pressure of the medium, loudness is limited by the fact that eventually, the low pressure point hits zero-pressure—a vacuum. Since the low pressure can’t go any lower, that point determines the max amplitude of a sound wave, and the loudest a sound can be, in any given place.</p>
<p>The convenient thing about decibels (dB) is that the absolute faintest sound detectable to the human ear is, by definition, 0 dB—we call that “the threshold of hearing.” Scientists do their best to study sounds <a href="http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-shh-scientists-listening-smallest-possible-noise">far down into the negative decibel scale</a> and there are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXVGIb3bzHI">man-made rooms</a> on Earth that register as low as -9.4 dB—where it’s so quiet you can hear the blood pumping through your own brain—but we can only hear sounds in the dB positives. The loudest a sustained sound can possibly be on Earth’s surface is 194 dB—which is when the amplitude of the sound wave is so intense that the low pressure part is a perfect vacuum (the wave alternates between double the normal atmospheric pressure and no air at all—not something you want to be present for). Let’s take a look at the full scale, starting with the really quiet.</p>
<p>One thing to keep in mind is that with decibels, each increase of 10 dB <em>doubles </em>the loudness. So 20 dB is twice as loud as 10 dB, 30 dB is four times as loud as 10 dB, and 80 dB is 128 times louder than 10 dB.<a href="#footnote-6-4885">6</a><a href="#footnote2-9-4885">9</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Decibels-Chart-4.png"></a></p>
<p>The scale stops at 194 because there’s no such thing as a louder sound on Earth’s surface. But we can go beyond here in two ways:</p>
<p><strong>1) Shock Waves</strong></p>
<p>When enough energy is released to pass the 194 dB mark, it’s too much to create a sustained pressure <em>wave </em>because we’ve bottomed out on low pressure—but things still <em>happen</em>. Very, very intense things.</p>
<p>At 194 dB, there’s a maxed out wave alternating between double the normal pressure and a total vacuum—but once we get to 195 dB, the energy stops moving <em>through </em>the air and starts <em>pushing </em>the air outward with an expanding vacuum. The more dBs above 194 there are, the farther reaching and higher-impact that vacuum bubble will be. It expands outward as a rapidly-growing half-sphere:<a href="#footnote2-10-4885">10</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/bomb-1.gif"></a></p>
<p>On the edge of the bubble is a barrier of super-compressed gas, and when this barrier sweeps over the land, it usually flattens whatever’s in its path:<a href="#footnote2-11-4885">11</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/bomb-2.gif"></a></p>
<p>As the hemisphere expands, it loses energy and eventually dissipates. But if you found yourself in the path of a shock wave before that happened, you’d have a bad time. First, the impact of the super-compressed barrier would be like hitting a brick wall (in the same way and for the same reason falling on water from a bridge is like falling on concrete). Second, compressed air is <em>hot</em>. Third, it wouldn’t just hit all parts of your body, it would go <em>through </em>your body, and if it were powerful enough it could turn your bones to powder and your organs to soup.</p>
<p>Here are some famous 194dB+ events:</p>
<p><strong>Saturn V launch: </strong>The Saturn V was a beast, and the sound waves from its launches were so intense that they could light grass on fire a mile away. Even at three miles away, an observer would experience ear-splitting 135 dB sound.<a href="#footnote2-12-4885">12</a> Rocket launches create such a powerful sound, that space agencies <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/missions/shuttle/f_watertest.html">flood the launchpad</a> with water as the rocket launches to absorb the sound so the force of the pressure wave doesn’t damage the rocket.</p>
<p><strong>The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs: </strong>According to sources I read, these clocked in at well over 200 dB. The shock wave was so charged that it traveled 7 mi / 11 km in 30 seconds.</p>
<p><strong>The 1883 Krakatoa volcano eruption:</strong><a href="#footnote2-13-4885">13</a><strong> </strong>I’m overwhelmed by the amount of things I need to tell you about the Krakatoa. Let’s do bullets.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://goo.gl/maps/qCPmXK7gJR12">Krakatoa</a> is an island in Indonesia, and the eruption happened on August 27, 1883.</li>
<li>The eruption completely annihilated the island, sending an enormous amount of debris 17 miles (27 km) high into the sky at half a mile per second. It also caused one of the most deadly and far-reaching tsunamis in history. In total, the eruption killed 36,000 people.</li>
<li>But the most amazing thing about the eruption was its sound. It made arguably the loudest sound on Earth in modern history.</li>
<li>It was so loud that the shock wave extended far enough to rupture the eardrums of sailors 40 miles away.</li>
<li>100 miles away, the sound was still 172 dB, enough to permanently destroy someone’s ears or even kill them. Wherever you are, think of a place that’s about 100 miles (161 km) away. Now imagine something happening there that causes a sound so loud where <em>you </em>are that if you were screaming at the top of your lungs directly into someone’s ear when the sound hit, they wouldn’t be able to hear that you were doing it. For comparison, the Saturn V launch sound was at 170 dB 100 <em>meters </em>away. Krakatoa was higher than that 100 <em>miles </em>away.</li>
<li>The sound cracked a foot-thick concrete wall 300 miles (483 km) away.</li>
<li>The sound was heard all the way in Australia (where it sounded like a distant canon ball being fired) and even as far away as Rodrigues Island, 3,000 miles away. <em>3,000 miles away</em>. I’m currently in New York. <em>Imagine if something happened in California or in Europe that I could hear</em><em> in New York. </em>I can’t even.</li>
<li>After the sound eventually got far enough away that humans couldn’t hear it anymore, barometers all over the world were going nuts for the next few days, as the sound waves circled the Earth <em>3.5 times</em>.</li>
<li>Finally, you know the famous painting <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/The_Scream.jpg">The Scream</a>? Well you know how the sky’s all red for some reason? The sky is red because the painter, Edvard Munch, was inspired to paint it after seeing the Krakatoa-caused red skies all over the Western Hemisphere in the year after the eruption.</li>
</ul>
<p>It was a big eruption.</p>
<p><strong>2) Other Mediums</strong></p>
<p>There <em>can</em> be louder sound<em> </em>than 194 dB—just not on the Earth’s surface. There can be louder sounds in the ocean, in the land, or on other planets. The gas giants in our Solar System, for example, have denser atmospheres than Earth’s, which allow for higher pressure wave amplitudes, and with incredibly fast winds and powerful storms, there’s plenty of opportunity there to make loud things.</p>
<p>What <em>isn’t </em>loud is almost everything else in space. You’ve probably heard the term, “Sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum,” but it makes sense now, right? Sound is pressure waves through matter. If there’s no matter, there’s no sound. There can be immense <em>heat</em>, and <em>radiation</em>, and <em>force</em>, but to a nearby observing human, it’s all dead silent.</p>
<p>If, hypothetically, there <em>were </em>air filling the universe, then suddenly things would get <em>very </em>loud. Forget the terrifying concept of the sound of a supernova—just the dumb sun sitting there hanging out would ring in at an astounding 290 dB. According to <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/33xuxu/if_sound_could_travel_through_space_how_loud/">one solar physicist</a>, we’d hear that on <em>Earth </em>as a 100 dB sound—<em>the volume of a motorcycle</em>—all the time, every day, everywhere. Be happy that sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum.</p>
<p>One last thought—</p>
<p>Researching for this post and learning about what sound is gave me a new perspective on the tree falling in the forest with nobody there to hear it question. I now think that no, it doesn’t make a sound. It makes an air pressure wave and that’s it. The concept of sound is by definition a biological being’s perception of the pressure wave—and if there are no ears around to perceive the pressure wave, there’s no sound. It’s a little like asking, “If humans go extinct, and somewhere in the post-apocalyptic rubble, there’s a photo of a beautiful woman lying there—is she still beautiful?” I kind of don’t think she is. Because the only thing that’s beautiful about her is that humans found her beautiful, and without humans, she’s no more beautiful than the female beetle a few feet away, rummaging around the rubble. Right?</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>Three things I want you to read:</strong></p>
<p>If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the <strong><a href="http://eepurl.com/Ffj9D">Wait But Why email list</a></strong> and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site and wonder!</p>
<p>If you’d like to support Wait But Why, <strong><a href="https://www.patreon.com/waitbutwhy">here’s our Patreon</a></strong>.</p>
<p>And the full Elon Musk post series is now available <strong><a href="http://amzn.to/21RPugG">as an ebook</a></strong>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>If you liked this, here are a few more Wait But Why explainers:</strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html">How Tesla Will Change the World</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html">The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html">Putting Time in Perspective</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Sources</strong><br />
The awesome GIFS: <a href="http://www.acs.psu.edu/drussell/Demos/waves/wavemotion.html">Dan Russell</a> and <a href="http://www.southampton.ac.uk/engineering/research/centres/isvr.page">ISVR</a><br />
CDC: <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/noise/noisemeter.html">Noise and Hearing Loss Prevention</a><br />
US Department of Labor: <a href="https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/noisehearingconservation/index.html">Occupational Noise Exposure</a><br />
Nautil.us: <a href="http://nautil.us/blog/the-sound-so-loud-that-it-circled-the-earth-four-times">The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times</a><br />
UNSW: <a href="http://www.animations.physics.unsw.edu.au/jw/dB.htm">What is a Decibel?</a><br />
Decibelcar.com: <a href="http://www.decibelcar.com/articles/40-everything-else/87-dbequivalent.html">Decibel Equivalent Table</a><br />
Make it Louder: <a href="http://www.makeitlouder.com/Decibel%20Level%20Chart.txt">Ultimate Sound Pressure Level Decibel Table</a><br />
NASA: <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/missions/shuttle/f_watertest.html">Sound Suppression Test Unleashes a Flood</a><br />
Idiom Zero: <a href="http://idiomzero.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-loud-is-sun.html">How Loud is the Sun?</a><br />
Gibson.com: <a href="http://www.gibson.com/News-Lifestyle/Features/en-us/10-Loudest-Rock-Bands.aspx">It Might Get Loud: The 10 Loudest Rock Bands of All Time</a><br />
GC Audio: <a href="http://www.gcaudio.com/resources/howtos/loudness.html">Decibel (Loudness) Comparison Chart</a><br />
Mathpages.com: <a href="http://mathpages.com/home/kmath109/kmath109.htm">The Speed of Sound</a><br />
Turn it to the Left: <a href="http://www.turnittotheleft.org/educational/Audio_Quiz_KEY.pdf">Noise Levels</a><br />
Extreme Tech: <a href="http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175996-can-a-loud-enough-sound-kill-you">Can a Loud Enough Sound Kill You?</a><br />
Abelard.com: <a href="http://www.abelard.org/hear/hear.php#how-loud">Loud Music and Hearing Damage</a><br />
Soundproof Cow: <a href="http://www.soundproofcow.com/Loudest-Sound-Ever-Heard.html">Loudest Sound Ever Heard</a><br />
Chalmers: <a href="https://www.chalmers.se/en/news/Pages/Quantum-microphone-captures-extremely-weak-sound.aspx">Quantum microphone captures extremely weak sound</a><br />
born.gov.au: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160318213128/http://www.bom.gov.au/tsunami/history/1883.shtml">The eruption of Krakatoa, August 27, 1883</a></p>
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 Everything You Should Know About Sound

 March 9, 2016 By Tim Urban


 This post is part of Mini Week, where I’m posting a new mini post but not actually mini as it turns out every weekday this week.

 ___________

 I’ve always been a little confused about sound. So for “Tuesday’s” “mini” post, I decided to do something about that.

 We think of sound as something we hear—something that makes noise. But in pure physics terms, sound is just a vibration going through matter.

 The way a vibration “goes through” matter is in the form of a sound wave. When you think of sound waves, you probably think of something like this:1

 But that’s not how sound waves work. A wave like that is called a transverse wave, where each individual particle moves up and down to create a snake situation.

 A sound wave is more like an earthworm situation:2

 Like an earthworm, sound moves by compressing and decompressing. This is called a longitudinal wave. A slinky can do both kinds of waves:13

 Sound starts with a vibration of some kind creating a longitudinal wave through matter. Check this out:4

 That’s what sound looks like—except picture an expanding ripple of spheres doing that. In this animation, the sound wave is being generated by that vibrating grey bar on the left. The bar might be your vocal chords, a guitar string, or a waterfall continually pounding down into the river below. By looking at the red dots, you can see that even though the wave moves in one direction, each individual particle only moves back and forth, mimicking the vibration of the gray bar.

 So instead of a curvy snake wave, sound is a pressure wave, which causes each piece of the air to be at either higher-than-normal pressure or lower-than-normal pressure. So when you see a snake-like illustration of a sound wave, it’s referring to the measure of pressure, not the literal path of movement of the particles:5

 Sound waves can go through air, which is how we normally experience it. But it can also go through liquid2 or solid matter—much of the jolting that happens during an earthquake is the result of a huge sound wave whizzing through the earth (in that case, the movement of the fault is serving as the gray and red bars in the animations above).

 How about the speed of sound? Well it depends on how quickly the pressure wave can move in a given medium. A medium that’s more fluid, like air, is highly compressible, so it takes longer for the wave to move, while water is far less compressible, so there’s less “give” to slow the wave down. It’s like two people holding an outstretched slinky between them—if one pushes their end toward the other person, the wave will take a little time to travel down the slinky before the other person feels it. But if the two people are holding a broomstick, when one pushes, the other feels it immediately, because the broomstick is much less compressible.6

 So it makes sense that the speed of sound in air (768 mph / 1,234 kmph under normal conditions) is about four times slower than the speed of sound in water, which itself is about four times slower than the speed of sound through a solid like iron.

 Back to us and hearing. Ears are an evolutionary innovation that allows us to register sound waves in the air around us and process them as information—without ears, most sound waves would be imperceptible to a human with only the loudest sounds registering as a felt vibration on our skin. Ears give us a magical ability to sense even slight sound waves in a way so nuanced, it can usually tell us exactly where the sound is coming from and what the meaning of it is. And it enables us to talk. The most important kind of human communication happens when our brains send information to other brains through complex patterns of air pressure waves. Have you ever stopped and thought about how incredible that is?

 I was about to move on, but sorry, I can’t get over this. The next time you’re talking to someone, I want you to stop and think about what’s happening. Your brain has a thought. It translates that thought into a pattern of pressure waves. Then your lungs send air out of your body, but as you do that, you vibrate your vocal chords in just the right way and you move your mouth and tongue into just the right shapes that by the time the air leaves you, it’s embedded with a pattern of high- and low-pressure areas. The code in that air then spreads out to all the air in the vicinity, a little bit of which ends up in your friend’s ear, where it passes by their eardrum. When it does, it vibrates their eardrum in such a way as to pass on not only the code, but exactly where in the room it came from and the particular tone of voice it came with. The eardrum’s vibrations are transmitted through three tiny bones and into a little sac of fluid, which then transmits the information into electrical impulses and sends them up the auditory nerve and into the brain, where the information is decoded. And all of that happens in an eighth of a second, without any effort from either of you. Talking is a miracle.

 Anyway—

 The ear can discern many qualities of a sound it hears, but two of the most fundamental are pitch and loudness.

 Pitch

 Pitch is all about wavelength—i.e. how far apart the pressure waves are:7

 The shorter the wavelength, the higher the pitch. Humans can hear frequencies as low as 20 Hz (which is a 56 ft /17 m long wave) and as high as 20,000 Hz (.7 in / 1.7 cm). As you age, you lose your ability to hear the highest pitches, so most of you probably hear nothing when you listen to the frequencies approaching 20,000 Hz (your dog will disagree). But you’ll have an easier time hearing the lowest part of the range.8 The reason you can feel low sounds, like low bass notes in music, is that the wavelength is so long that it actually takes 1/20th of a second for a full wave to pass your body (hence 20 Hz).34

 Loudness

 The loudness5 of a sound we hear is determined by the amplitude of the pressure waves. In the animation above, the high and low-pitched sounds depicted have the same loudness, because the pressure curves at the bottom of the animation are the same size vertically. Louder sounds have a larger oscillation between the low and high pressure sections of the wave—i.e. loud sounds have higher high-pressure and lower low-pressure parts than quiet sounds.

 For sounds through the air on Earth’s surface, the average of the high-pressure and low-pressure parts of the wave is our normal atmospheric pressure—what we call 1 “atmosphere” of pressure. So a sound wave might have a high pressure component of 1.0001 atmospheres and a low pressure component of .9999 atmospheres, and a louder sound might be 1.01/.99 instead—but in both cases, the average of the two is 1 atmosphere.

 We often measure loudness using a unit called the decibel (named after Alexander Graham Bell). If you want to be confused, read the Wikipedia page on decibels. It’s a super icky unit. And rather than bore us both by explaining it, let’s just talk about how we use decibels to measure sound.

 The scale of loudness has a very tiny minimum. The faintest sounds are far softer than any human could hear—even softer than any of our finest scientific instruments could detect. But depending on where you are, sound has a hard maximum. The reason is that sound isn’t a thing in itself—it’s a pressure wave moving through a medium. And since, as we talked about, the average of the high and low pressure points of a sound wave has to be the normal pressure of the medium, loudness is limited by the fact that eventually, the low pressure point hits zero-pressure—a vacuum. Since the low pressure can’t go any lower, that point determines the max amplitude of a sound wave, and the loudest a sound can be, in any given place.

 The convenient thing about decibels (dB) is that the absolute faintest sound detectable to the human ear is, by definition, 0 dB—we call that “the threshold of hearing.” Scientists do their best to study sounds far down into the negative decibel scale and there are man-made rooms on Earth that register as low as -9.4 dB—where it’s so quiet you can hear the blood pumping through your own brain—but we can only hear sounds in the dB positives. The loudest a sustained sound can possibly be on Earth’s surface is 194 dB—which is when the amplitude of the sound wave is so intense that the low pressure part is a perfect vacuum (the wave alternates between double the normal atmospheric pressure and no air at all—not something you want to be present for). Let’s take a look at the full scale, starting with the really quiet.

 One thing to keep in mind is that with decibels, each increase of 10 dB doubles the loudness. So 20 dB is twice as loud as 10 dB, 30 dB is four times as loud as 10 dB, and 80 dB is 128 times louder than 10 dB.69

 The scale stops at 194 because there’s no such thing as a louder sound on Earth’s surface. But we can go beyond here in two ways:

 1) Shock Waves

 When enough energy is released to pass the 194 dB mark, it’s too much to create a sustained pressure wave because we’ve bottomed out on low pressure—but things still happen. Very, very intense things.

 At 194 dB, there’s a maxed out wave alternating between double the normal pressure and a total vacuum—but once we get to 195 dB, the energy stops moving through the air and starts pushing the air outward with an expanding vacuum. The more dBs above 194 there are, the farther reaching and higher-impact that vacuum bubble will be. It expands outward as a rapidly-growing half-sphere:10

 On the edge of the bubble is a barrier of super-compressed gas, and when this barrier sweeps over the land, it usually flattens whatever’s in its path:11

 As the hemisphere expands, it loses energy and eventually dissipates. But if you found yourself in the path of a shock wave before that happened, you’d have a bad time. First, the impact of the super-compressed barrier would be like hitting a brick wall (in the same way and for the same reason falling on water from a bridge is like falling on concrete). Second, compressed air is hot. Third, it wouldn’t just hit all parts of your body, it would go through your body, and if it were powerful enough it could turn your bones to powder and your organs to soup.

 Here are some famous 194dB+ events:

 Saturn V launch: The Saturn V was a beast, and the sound waves from its launches were so intense that they could light grass on fire a mile away. Even at three miles away, an observer would experience ear-splitting 135 dB sound.12 Rocket launches create such a powerful sound, that space agencies flood the launchpad with water as the rocket launches to absorb the sound so the force of the pressure wave doesn’t damage the rocket.

 The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs: According to sources I read, these clocked in at well over 200 dB. The shock wave was so charged that it traveled 7 mi / 11 km in 30 seconds.

 The 1883 Krakatoa volcano eruption:13 I’m overwhelmed by the amount of things I need to tell you about the Krakatoa. Let’s do bullets.

 * Krakatoa is an island in Indonesia, and the eruption happened on August 27, 1883.
 * The eruption completely annihilated the island, sending an enormous amount of debris 17 miles (27 km) high into the sky at half a mile per second. It also caused one of the most deadly and far-reaching tsunamis in history. In total, the eruption killed 36,000 people.
 * But the most amazing thing about the eruption was its sound. It made arguably the loudest sound on Earth in modern history.
 * It was so loud that the shock wave extended far enough to rupture the eardrums of sailors 40 miles away.
 * 100 miles away, the sound was still 172 dB, enough to permanently destroy someone’s ears or even kill them. Wherever you are, think of a place that’s about 100 miles (161 km) away. Now imagine something happening there that causes a sound so loud where you are that if you were screaming at the top of your lungs directly into someone’s ear when the sound hit, they wouldn’t be able to hear that you were doing it. For comparison, the Saturn V launch sound was at 170 dB 100 meters away. Krakatoa was higher than that 100 miles away.
 * The sound cracked a foot-thick concrete wall 300 miles (483 km) away.
 * The sound was heard all the way in Australia (where it sounded like a distant canon ball being fired) and even as far away as Rodrigues Island, 3,000 miles away. 3,000 miles away. I’m currently in New York. Imagine if something happened in California or in Europe that I could hear in New York. I can’t even.
 * After the sound eventually got far enough away that humans couldn’t hear it anymore, barometers all over the world were going nuts for the next few days, as the sound waves circled the Earth 3.5 times.
 * Finally, you know the famous painting The Scream? Well you know how the sky’s all red for some reason? The sky is red because the painter, Edvard Munch, was inspired to paint it after seeing the Krakatoa-caused red skies all over the Western Hemisphere in the year after the eruption.

 It was a big eruption.

 2) Other Mediums

 There can be louder sound than 194 dB—just not on the Earth’s surface. There can be louder sounds in the ocean, in the land, or on other planets. The gas giants in our Solar System, for example, have denser atmospheres than Earth’s, which allow for higher pressure wave amplitudes, and with incredibly fast winds and powerful storms, there’s plenty of opportunity there to make loud things.

 What isn’t loud is almost everything else in space. You’ve probably heard the term, “Sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum,” but it makes sense now, right? Sound is pressure waves through matter. If there’s no matter, there’s no sound. There can be immense heat, and radiation, and force, but to a nearby observing human, it’s all dead silent.

 If, hypothetically, there were air filling the universe, then suddenly things would get very loud. Forget the terrifying concept of the sound of a supernova—just the dumb sun sitting there hanging out would ring in at an astounding 290 dB. According to one solar physicist, we’d hear that on Earth as a 100 dB sound—the volume of a motorcycle—all the time, every day, everywhere. Be happy that sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum.

 One last thought—

 Researching for this post and learning about what sound is gave me a new perspective on the tree falling in the forest with nobody there to hear it question. I now think that no, it doesn’t make a sound. It makes an air pressure wave and that’s it. The concept of sound is by definition a biological being’s perception of the pressure wave—and if there are no ears around to perceive the pressure wave, there’s no sound. It’s a little like asking, “If humans go extinct, and somewhere in the post-apocalyptic rubble, there’s a photo of a beautiful woman lying there—is she still beautiful?” I kind of don’t think she is. Because the only thing that’s beautiful about her is that humans found her beautiful, and without humans, she’s no more beautiful than the female beetle a few feet away, rummaging around the rubble. Right?

 ___________

 Three things I want you to read:

 If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site and wonder!

 If you’d like to support Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon.

 And the full Elon Musk post series is now available as an ebook.

 ___________

 If you liked this, here are a few more Wait But Why explainers:

 How Tesla Will Change the World

 The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

 Putting Time in Perspective

 Sources
 The awesome GIFS: Dan Russell and ISVR
 CDC: Noise and Hearing Loss Prevention
 US Department of Labor: Occupational Noise Exposure
 Nautil.us: The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times
 UNSW: What is a Decibel?
 Decibelcar.com: Decibel Equivalent Table
 Make it Louder: Ultimate Sound Pressure Level Decibel Table
 NASA: Sound Suppression Test Unleashes a Flood
 Idiom Zero: How Loud is the Sun?
 Gibson.com: It Might Get Loud: The 10 Loudest Rock Bands of All Time
 GC Audio: Decibel (Loudness) Comparison Chart
 Mathpages.com: The Speed of Sound
 Turn it to the Left: Noise Levels
 Extreme Tech: Can a Loud Enough Sound Kill You?
 Abelard.com: Loud Music and Hearing Damage
 Soundproof Cow: Loudest Sound Ever Heard
 Chalmers: Quantum microphone captures extremely weak sound
 born.gov.au: The eruption of Krakatoa, August 27, 1883

 1. Here’s a real slinky doing a longitudinal wave.↩

 2. Fun fact: The loudest animal on Earth is a blue whale, whose calls can reach an outrageous 188 decibels, far louder than a jet engine.↩

 3. If you want to see this in action, watch these two guys sit in a car while playing unthinkably loud bass music—at 2:11 you can see the guy’s shirt flapping about 20 times/second as the low and high pressure air passes through it (only watch the 10 seconds where I cued it up—I watched the whole video and it’s time I can’t get back now).↩

 4. Also—dog whistles sound silent to us but work on dogs because dogs can hear pitches as high as 44,000 Hz. Cats can go even higher—up to 79,000 Hz. But neither animal can hear pitches as low as we can. In fact, neither animal can hear the lowest seven keys on the piano—who knew.↩

 5. At first, I was using “volume” here but it seemed weird to use volume when talking about the natural world—like, you wouldn’t say, “What’s the volume of that waterfall?” So is volume just for man made things like stereos? In any case, we’ll be going with loudness.↩

 6. Going up by 10 dB multiplies the sound intensity, or the power, of the wave by ten—not two. But a 10x increase in power only sounds about 2x as loud to our ears, so for our purposes, the 2x increase is more relevant.↩

 1. GIF: ISVR↩

 2. GIF: GIF Soup↩

 3. GIF: GIF Soup↩

 4. GIF: Dan Russell↩

 5. GIF: ISVR↩

 6. Thanks to Christopher Reiss for that analogy.↩

 7. GIF: ISVR↩

 8. Thanks to commenter rebel28 for suggesting the pitch link.↩

 9. Sources for the info on this chart is down below. For each of these, I tried to find several sources that all agreed on the same number. It’s surprising, in general, how much disagreement there is online regarding dB figures.↩

 10. I couldn’t find the original source.↩

 11. http://s73.photobucket.com/user/rocket9244/media/Hiroshima-the-shockwave.gif.html↩

 12. https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/2h9y9g#ckr6mev↩

 13. Most of my info on this came from this excellent article on Nautilus↩

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 * 
This post is part of Mini Week, where I’m posting a new mini post but not actually mini as it turns out every weekday this week. 
___________
I’ve always been a little confused about sound. So for “Tuesday’s” “mini” post, I decided to do something about that.
We think of sound as something we hear—something that makes noise. But in pure physics terms, sound is just a vibration going through matter.
The way a vibration “goes through” matter is in the form of a sound wave. When you think of sound waves, you probably think of something like this:1
    
But that’s not how sound waves work. A wave like that is called a transverse wave, where each individual particle moves up and down to create a snake situation.
A sound wave is more like an earthworm situation:2
    
Like an earthworm, sound moves by compressing and decompressing. This is called a longitudinal wave. A slinky can do both kinds of waves:1 3
    
Sound starts with a vibration of some kind creating a longitudinal wave through matter. Check this out:4
    
That’s what sound looks like—except picture an expanding ripple of spheres doing that. In this animation, the sound wave is being generated by that vibrating grey bar on the left. The bar might be your vocal chords, a guitar string, or a waterfall continually pounding down into the river below. By looking at the red dots, you can see that even though the wave moves in one direction, each individual particle only moves back and forth, mimicking the vibration of the gray bar.
So instead of a curvy snake wave, sound is a pressure wave, which causes each piece of the air to be at either higher-than-normal pressure or lower-than-normal pressure. So when you see a snake-like illustration of a sound wave, it’s referring to the measure of pressure, not the literal path of movement of the particles:5
    
Sound waves can go through air, which is how we normally experience it. But it can also go through liquid2 or solid matter—much of the jolting that happens during an earthquake is the result of a huge sound wave whizzing through the earth (in that case, the movement of the fault is serving as the gray and red bars in the animations above).
How about the speed of sound? Well it depends on how quickly the pressure wave can move in a given medium. A medium that’s more fluid, like air, is highly compressible, so it takes longer for the wave to move, while water is far less compressible, so there’s less “give” to slow the wave down. It’s like two people holding an outstretched slinky between them—if one pushes their end toward the other person, the wave will take a little time to travel down the slinky before the other person feels it. But if the two people are holding a broomstick, when one pushes, the other feels it immediately, because the broomstick is much less compressible.6
 So it makes sense that the speed of sound in air (768 mph / 1,234 kmph under normal conditions) is about four times slower than the speed of sound in water, which itself is about four times slower than the speed of sound through a solid like iron.
Back to us and hearing. Ears are an evolutionary innovation that allows us to register sound waves in the air around us and process them as information—without ears, most sound waves would be imperceptible to a human with only the loudest sounds registering as a felt vibration on our skin. Ears give us a magical ability to sense even slight sound waves in a way so nuanced, it can usually tell us exactly where the sound is coming from and what the meaning of it is. And it enables us to talk. The most important kind of human communication happens when our brains send information to other brains through complex patterns of air pressure waves. Have you ever stopped and thought about how incredible that is?
I was about to move on, but sorry, I can’t get over this. The next time you’re talking to someone, I want you to stop and think about what’s happening. Your brain has a thought. It translates that thought into a pattern of pressure waves. Then your lungs send air out of your body, but as you do that, you vibrate your vocal chords in just the right way and you move your mouth and tongue into just the right shapes that by the time the air leaves you, it’s embedded with a pattern of high- and low-pressure areas. The code in that air then spreads out to all the air in the vicinity, a little bit of which ends up in your friend’s ear, where it passes by their eardrum. When it does, it vibrates their eardrum in such a way as to pass on not only the code, but exactly where in the room it came from and the particular tone of voice it came with. The eardrum’s vibrations are transmitted through three tiny bones and into a little sac of fluid, which then transmits the information into electrical impulses and sends them up the auditory nerve and into the brain, where the information is decoded. And all of that happens in an eighth of a second, without any effort from either of you. Talking is a miracle.
Anyway—
The ear can discern many qualities of a sound it hears, but two of the most fundamental are pitch and loudness.
 Pitch 
Pitch is all about wavelength—i.e. how far apart the pressure waves are:7
    
The shorter the wavelength, the higher the pitch. Humans can hear frequencies as low as 20 Hz (which is a 56 ft /17 m long wave) and as high as 20,000 Hz (.7 in / 1.7 cm). As you age, you lose your ability to hear the highest pitches, so most of you probably hear nothing when you listen to the frequencies approaching 20,000 Hz (your dog will disagree). But you’ll have an easier time hearing the lowest part of the range.8 The reason you can feel low sounds, like low bass notes in music, is that the wavelength is so long that it actually takes 1/20th of a second for a full wave to pass your body (hence 20 Hz).3 4
  Loudness 
The loudness5 of a sound we hear is determined by the amplitude of the pressure waves. In the animation above, the high and low-pitched sounds depicted have the same loudness, because the pressure curves at the bottom of the animation are the same size vertically. Louder sounds have a larger oscillation between the low and high pressure sections of the wave—i.e. loud sounds have higher high-pressure and lower low-pressure parts than quiet sounds.
For sounds through the air on Earth’s surface, the average of the high-pressure and low-pressure parts of the wave is our normal atmospheric pressure—what we call 1 “atmosphere” of pressure. So a sound wave might have a high pressure component of 1.0001 atmospheres and a low pressure component of .9999 atmospheres, and a louder sound might be 1.01/.99 instead—but in both cases, the average of the two is 1 atmosphere.
We often measure loudness using a unit called the decibel (named after Alexander Graham Bell). If you want to be confused, read the Wikipedia page on decibels. It’s a super icky unit. And rather than bore us both by explaining it, let’s just talk about how we use decibels to measure sound.
The scale of loudness has a very tiny minimum. The faintest sounds are far softer than any human could hear—even softer than any of our finest scientific instruments could detect. But depending on where you are, sound has a hard maximum. The reason is that sound isn’t a thing in itself—it’s a pressure wave moving through a medium. And since, as we talked about, the average of the high and low pressure points of a sound wave has to be the normal pressure of the medium, loudness is limited by the fact that eventually, the low pressure point hits zero-pressure—a vacuum. Since the low pressure can’t go any lower, that point determines the max amplitude of a sound wave, and the loudest a sound can be, in any given place.
The convenient thing about decibels (dB) is that the absolute faintest sound detectable to the human ear is, by definition, 0 dB—we call that “the threshold of hearing.” Scientists do their best to study sounds far down into the negative decibel scale and there are man-made rooms on Earth that register as low as -9.4 dB—where it’s so quiet you can hear the blood pumping through your own brain—but we can only hear sounds in the dB positives. The loudest a sustained sound can possibly be on Earth’s surface is 194 dB—which is when the amplitude of the sound wave is so intense that the low pressure part is a perfect vacuum (the wave alternates between double the normal atmospheric pressure and no air at all—not something you want to be present for). Let’s take a look at the full scale, starting with the really quiet.
One thing to keep in mind is that with decibels, each increase of 10 dB doubles the loudness. So 20 dB is twice as loud as 10 dB, 30 dB is four times as loud as 10 dB, and 80 dB is 128 times louder than 10 dB.6 9
    
The scale stops at 194 because there’s no such thing as a louder sound on Earth’s surface. But we can go beyond here in two ways:
 1) Shock Waves 
When enough energy is released to pass the 194 dB mark, it’s too much to create a sustained pressure wave because we’ve bottomed out on low pressure—but things still happen. Very, very intense things.
At 194 dB, there’s a maxed out wave alternating between double the normal pressure and a total vacuum—but once we get to 195 dB, the energy stops moving through the air and starts pushing the air outward with an expanding vacuum. The more dBs above 194 there are, the farther reaching and higher-impact that vacuum bubble will be. It expands outward as a rapidly-growing half-sphere:10
    
On the edge of the bubble is a barrier of super-compressed gas, and when this barrier sweeps over the land, it usually flattens whatever’s in its path:11
    
As the hemisphere expands, it loses energy and eventually dissipates. But if you found yourself in the path of a shock wave before that happened, you’d have a bad time. First, the impact of the super-compressed barrier would be like hitting a brick wall (in the same way and for the same reason falling on water from a bridge is like falling on concrete). Second, compressed air is hot. Third, it wouldn’t just hit all parts of your body, it would go through your body, and if it were powerful enough it could turn your bones to powder and your organs to soup.
Here are some famous 194dB+ events:
 Saturn V launch: The Saturn V was a beast, and the sound waves from its launches were so intense that they could light grass on fire a mile away. Even at three miles away, an observer would experience ear-splitting 135 dB sound.12 Rocket launches create such a powerful sound, that space agencies flood the launchpad with water as the rocket launches to absorb the sound so the force of the pressure wave doesn’t damage the rocket.
 The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs: According to sources I read, these clocked in at well over 200 dB. The shock wave was so charged that it traveled 7 mi / 11 km in 30 seconds.
 The 1883 Krakatoa volcano eruption: 13  I’m overwhelmed by the amount of things I need to tell you about the Krakatoa. Let’s do bullets.
 Krakatoa is an island in Indonesia, and the eruption happened on August 27, 1883.
The eruption completely annihilated the island, sending an enormous amount of debris 17 miles (27 km) high into the sky at half a mile per second. It also caused one of the most deadly and far-reaching tsunamis in history. In total, the eruption killed 36,000 people.
But the most amazing thing about the eruption was its sound. It made arguably the loudest sound on Earth in modern history.
It was so loud that the shock wave extended far enough to rupture the eardrums of sailors 40 miles away.
100 miles away, the sound was still 172 dB, enough to permanently destroy someone’s ears or even kill them. Wherever you are, think of a place that’s about 100 miles (161 km) away. Now imagine something happening there that causes a sound so loud where you are that if you were screaming at the top of your lungs directly into someone’s ear when the sound hit, they wouldn’t be able to hear that you were doing it. For comparison, the Saturn V launch sound was at 170 dB 100 meters away. Krakatoa was higher than that 100 miles away.
The sound cracked a foot-thick concrete wall 300 miles (483 km) away.
The sound was heard all the way in Australia (where it sounded like a distant canon ball being fired) and even as far away as Rodrigues Island, 3,000 miles away. 3,000 miles away. I’m currently in New York. Imagine if something happened in California or in Europe that I could hear  in New York. I can’t even.
After the sound eventually got far enough away that humans couldn’t hear it anymore, barometers all over the world were going nuts for the next few days, as the sound waves circled the Earth 3.5 times.
Finally, you know the famous painting The Scream? Well you know how the sky’s all red for some reason? The sky is red because the painter, Edvard Munch, was inspired to paint it after seeing the Krakatoa-caused red skies all over the Western Hemisphere in the year after the eruption.
It was a big eruption.
 2) Other Mediums 
There can be louder sound than 194 dB—just not on the Earth’s surface. There can be louder sounds in the ocean, in the land, or on other planets. The gas giants in our Solar System, for example, have denser atmospheres than Earth’s, which allow for higher pressure wave amplitudes, and with incredibly fast winds and powerful storms, there’s plenty of opportunity there to make loud things.
What isn’t loud is almost everything else in space. You’ve probably heard the term, “Sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum,” but it makes sense now, right? Sound is pressure waves through matter. If there’s no matter, there’s no sound. There can be immense heat, and radiation, and force, but to a nearby observing human, it’s all dead silent.
If, hypothetically, there were air filling the universe, then suddenly things would get very loud. Forget the terrifying concept of the sound of a supernova—just the dumb sun sitting there hanging out would ring in at an astounding 290 dB. According to one solar physicist, we’d hear that on Earth as a 100 dB sound—the volume of a motorcycle—all the time, every day, everywhere. Be happy that sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum.
One last thought—
Researching for this post and learning about what sound is gave me a new perspective on the tree falling in the forest with nobody there to hear it question. I now think that no, it doesn’t make a sound. It makes an air pressure wave and that’s it. The concept of sound is by definition a biological being’s perception of the pressure wave—and if there are no ears around to perceive the pressure wave, there’s no sound. It’s a little like asking, “If humans go extinct, and somewhere in the post-apocalyptic rubble, there’s a photo of a beautiful woman lying there—is she still beautiful?” I kind of don’t think she is. Because the only thing that’s beautiful about her is that humans found her beautiful, and without humans, she’s no more beautiful than the female beetle a few feet away, rummaging around the rubble. Right?
___________
 Three things I want you to read: 
If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the  Wait But Why email list  and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site and wonder!
If you’d like to support Wait But Why,  here’s our Patreon .
And the full Elon Musk post series is now available  as an ebook .
___________
 If you liked this, here are a few more Wait But Why explainers: 
  How Tesla Will Change the World  
  The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence  
  Putting Time in Perspective  
 Sources 
The awesome GIFS: Dan Russell and ISVR 
CDC: Noise and Hearing Loss Prevention 
US Department of Labor: Occupational Noise Exposure 
Nautil.us: The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times 
UNSW: What is a Decibel? 
Decibelcar.com: Decibel Equivalent Table 
Make it Louder: Ultimate Sound Pressure Level Decibel Table 
NASA: Sound Suppression Test Unleashes a Flood 
Idiom Zero: How Loud is the Sun? 
Gibson.com: It Might Get Loud: The 10 Loudest Rock Bands of All Time 
GC Audio: Decibel (Loudness) Comparison Chart 
Mathpages.com: The Speed of Sound 
Turn it to the Left: Noise Levels 
Extreme Tech: Can a Loud Enough Sound Kill You? 
Abelard.com: Loud Music and Hearing Damage 
Soundproof Cow: Loudest Sound Ever Heard 
Chalmers: Quantum microphone captures extremely weak sound 
born.gov.au: The eruption of Krakatoa, August 27, 1883
Everything You Should Know About Sound
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/sound.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-rocket-the-full-story.html
SpaceX's Big Fucking Rocket – The Full Story — Wait But Why
2016-09-28
Tim Urban
<div><div><div><p><em>We made a fancy PDF of this post (original and G-rated versions) for printing and offline viewing. <a href="https://gum.co/wbw-bfr">Buy it here.</a> (Or see a <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/spacexs-big-fking-rocket-the-full-story-preview.pdf">preview</a>.)</em></p></div>
<p>Yesterday, Elon Musk got on stage at the 2016 International Astronautical Congress and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Uyfqi_TE8">unveiled the first real details</a> about the big fucking rocket they’re making.</p>
<p>A couple months ago, when SpaceX first announced that this would be happening in late September, it hit me that I might still have special privileges with them, kind of grandfathered in from my time working with Elon and his companies in 2015 (which resulted in <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html">an in-depth four-part blog series</a>). So I reached out and asked if I could learn about the big fucking rocket ahead of time and write a post about it.</p>
<p>They said yes.</p>
<p>A little while later, I got on a call with Elon to discuss the rocket, the timeline, and the big plan this was all a part of. We started off how we always do.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Call-1.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Call-2.png"></a></p>
<p>Then I brought up the rocket.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Call-3.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Call-4.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Call-5-1.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Call-2.png"></a></p>
<p>Eventually, we were able to settle in to a fascinating conversation about this insane machine SpaceX is building and what’s going to happen with it.</p>
<p>Now, before we get into things—</p>
<p>This post is only a piece of The SpaceX Story—one of the most amazing stories of our time—and a story I spent three months and 40,000 words telling last year. If you really want to understand this and you haven’t read that post yet, I recommend you start there. The <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html">post</a> has three parts, divided into five pages:</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html">Part 1: The Story of Humans and Space</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html/2">Part 2: Musk’s Mission</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Part 3: How to Colonize Mars</strong><strong><br />
→ <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html/3">Phase 1: Figure out how to put things into space</a></strong><br />
<strong>→ <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html/4">Phase 2: Revolutionize the cost of space travel</a></strong><br />
<strong>→ <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html/5">Phase 3: Colonize Mars</a></strong></p>
<p>For those who have read the post and want a refresher or those who just want to hear about the big fucking rocket and move on with their day, here’s a quick overview of the background:</p>
<p><strong>The Context</strong></p>
<p>To understand why the big fucking rocket matters, you have to understand this sentence:</p>
<p><em>SpaceX is trying to make human life multi-planetary by building a self-sustaining, one-million-person civilization on Mars.</em></p>
<p>Let’s go part by part.</p>
<p><strong>Why make human life multi-planetary?</strong></p>
<p>Two reasons:</p>
<p><strong>1) It’s fun and exciting.</strong> (<a href="https://soundcloud.com/waitbutwhy/2-reasons-to-go-to-mars">Here’s a clip</a> from one of the interviews I did with Elon last year where he articulates this point.)</p>
<p><strong>2) It’s not a great idea to have all of our eggs in one basket. </strong>Right now we’re all on Earth, which means that if something terrible happens on Earth—caused by nature or by our own technology—we’re done. That’s like having a precious digital photo album saved only on one not-necessarily-reliable hard drive. If you were in that situation, you’d be smart to back the album up on a second hard drive. That’s the idea here. Elon calls it “life insurance for the species.”</p>
<p><strong>Why Mars?</strong></p>
<p>Venus is a dick, with its lead-melting temperatures, its crushing atmospheric pressure, and its unbearable winds.</p>
<p>The moon has few natural resources, a 29-day day, and with no atmosphere to either provide protection against the sun during the day or warm things up at night, both day and night become murderous. Same deal on Mercury.</p>
<p>Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are just huge balls of gas pretending to be planets.</p>
<p>Certain moons of Jupiter and Saturn are possibly habitable, but they’re farther away and colder and darker than Mars, so why would we do that.</p>
<p>Pluto is even farther and colder and darker. Stop asking me about Pluto.</p>
<p>That leaves Mars. Mars isn’t a good time. If Mars were a place on Earth, it’s somewhere no one would want to go. But compared to all of those other options, it’s a dream. It’s cold but not that cold. It’s kind of dark but not that much darker than Earth. It’s far but not that far. Its day is almost the same length as ours, which is nice for us and hugely helpful for growing Earthly vegetation. Its surface gravity isn’t crazy low or crazy high (it’s around a third of Earth’s). It has a ton of (frozen) water and a decent amount of CO<sub>2</sub>, which are critical for early attempts at living there and hugely helpful for future attempts to “terraform” the planet into a place more livable for humans. All things considered, we’re very lucky to have an option as good as Mars—in most other solar systems, we probably wouldn’t.</p>
<p><strong>Why 1,000,000 people?</strong></p>
<p>Because Elon thinks that’s a rough estimate for the number of people you’d need to have on Mars in order for the Mars civilization to be “self-sustaining”—with self-sustaining defined by Elon as: “Even if the spaceships from Earth permanently stop coming, the colony doesn’t eventually die out—which requires a huge industrial base, and a much harder industrial base to create than being on Earth.”</p>
<p>In other words, if hard drive #2 relies on hard drive #1 in order to stay working, then your photo album isn’t really backed up, is it? The whole point of hard drive #2 is to save the day if hard drive #1 permanently crashes.</p>
<p>And while the Earth hard drive could “crash” for many exciting reasons—an asteroid hits us, <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html">AI kills us</a>, Trump kills us, ISIS creates some upsetting biological weapon, etc.—Elon also warns about the less dramatic possibility that the Earth ships stop coming simply because Earth civilization stops having the capability to send them:</p>
<p><em>The spaceships from Earth could stop coming for other reasons—it could be WWIII, it could be that Earth becomes a religious state, it could be some gradual decline where Earth civilization just sinks under its own weight. </em><em>At one point the Egyptians were able to build pyramids, and then they forgot how to do that. And then they forgot how to read hieroglyphics, until the Rosetta Stone. Rome as well—they had indoor plumbing, they had advanced aqueducts, and then that fell apart. China at one point had the world’s biggest fleet of sailing ships and they were sailing as far as Africa, then some crazy emperor came along and decided that was bad and had them all burnt. So you just don’t know what’s gonna happen. The key threshold to pass is the number of people and tons of cargo required to make things self-sustaining. And that’s probably something like a million people and probably something like 10-100 million tons of cargo.</em></p>
<p>In other words, let’s not wait on this.</p>
<p><strong>Great, but how the hell do you bring 1,000,000 people to Mars?</strong></p>
<p>You make this green part exist:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Venn3.png"></a></p>
<p>It’s kind of simple. If we get to a point where there are a million people on Earth who both want to go to Mars <em>and</em> can afford to go to Mars, there will be a million people on Mars.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, right now the yellow circle is tiny and the blue circle doesn’t exist.</p>
<p>Elon thinks—and I kind of do too—that if the blue circle can get big enough, the yellow circle will take care of itself. If Mars is affordable and safe and you know you’ll be able to come back, a lot of people will want to go.</p>
<p>The hard part is the blue circle. Here’s the issue:</p>
<p>Last time the US Congress checked with NASA, the cost to send a five-person crew to Mars was $50 billion. $10 billion a person. Elon thinks that to make the blue circle sufficiently large, it needs to cost $500,000 a person. 1/20,000 of the current cost.</p>
<p>1/20,000.</p>
<p>That’s like looking at the car industry and saying, “Right now a new Honda costs around $20,000. To make this a viable industry, we need to get the cost of a new car down to $1.”</p>
<p>So what the hell?</p>
<p>Here’s the hell:</p>
<p>Imagine if the way planes worked was that they took off, flew to their destination, but then instead of landing, all the passengers parachuted down to the ground and then the plane landed by smashing into the ocean and blowing up. So every plane flew exactly once, and to have a new flight happen, you’d have to build another plane.</p>
<p>A plane ticket would cost $1.5 million.</p>
<p>Space travel is currently so expensive mostly because we land rockets by crashing them into the ocean (or incinerating them in the atmosphere).</p>
<p>When Elon started SpaceX, he was determined to fix this problem. It was a tall order, given that no one had ever done it before—including nations like the US and Russia who had spent billions trying. But SpaceX puzzled away at the problem year after year, and after trying and failing a bunch of times, in late 2015, they nailed it:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Then they nailed it again. And again. And again. Now they nail it more often than not. Here’s a daytime view of a recent landing:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Soon, for the first time, a previously used-and-landed, flight-tested Falcon 9 will carry out a new mission for SpaceX, officially making SpaceX rockets “reusable.”</p>
<p>To fly a mission on a used rocket, you only need to pay for propellant (fuel and liquid oxygen) and a bit of routine maintenance. This cuts the price of space travel down by 100 or even 1,000 times.</p>
<p>That leaves us with somewhere between 19/20 and 199/200 of the cost left to cut. Part of that will happen when SpaceX takes 100 or more people to Mars at a time, instead of five (the number Congress asked NASA about). The rest of it is taken care of by a few simple innovations, like refueling the spaceships in orbit (which lowers the cost by 5-10x) and manufacturing propellant on Mars so you don’t have to carry your return propellant with you (which lowers the cost by another 5-10x). More on those things later.</p>
<p>Suddenly, not only can the price get down to $500,000/ticket, it can probably go even lower (Elon thinks it could eventually cost under $100,000/person). You may not have noticed it yet, but SpaceX’s innovations are in the process of creating a total revolution in the cost of space travel—a change that will open doors we can’t imagine being open today. And when that revolution goes far enough, SpaceX’s vision of putting 1,000,000 people on Mars really—actually—seriously—may happen.</p>
<p>We’re going to Mars. And this week, SpaceX showed us the thing that’s gonna take us there.</p>
<p><strong>The Rocket</strong></p>
<p>“It’s so mind-blowing. It blows my mind, and I see it every week.”</p>
<p>Elon’s pumped. And when you learn about the big fucking rocket he’s building, you’ll understand why.</p>
<p>First, let’s absorb the challenge at hand. It’s often said that space is hard. To this day, only a few hundred people have been in space, only a few countries have the ability to launch something into space, and the history of human space travel is littered with tragic launch failures. Firing something super heavy and delicate and full of explosive liquid up through the atmosphere without anything going wrong is incredibly hard.</p>
<p>But when we talk about humans going into space, we’re talking mostly about humans going into Low Earth Orbit, a layer of space between 100 and 1,200 miles above the ground—and normally, they’re headed only 250 miles up to the International Space Station. The only time humans have gone farther were the small handful of Americans who made it out to the moon in the 1960s, traveling about 250,000 miles away.</p>
<p>When Earth and Mars are at their closest, Mars is somewhere between 34 and 60 million miles away—about 200 times farther away than the moon and about 200,000 times farther away than the ISS.</p>
<p>The moon is just over one light second away.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/light-second.png"></a></p>
<p>Mars is more than three light <em>minutes </em>away.</p>
<p>Mars is far.</p>
<p>Elon likes to compare the Earth-to-Mars trip to crossing the Atlantic Ocean, noting that using that scale, going to the moon would only be crossing the English Channel (and going to the ISS would be going to a dock 117 feet off the shore). Continuing with that comparison, he says, “A rocket made to go to Low Earth Orbit or even the moon is basically like a coastal fishing vessel, compared to a colonial transport system that is trying to go 1,000 times further.”</p>
<p>On top of that, it might be worth it to take only a few humans or a single satellite up into Low Earth Orbit—but if you’re going all the way to Mars, you want to take a <em>lot </em>more than that. So you have to take much more mass, much further. Multiplying the distance factor by the payload factor, Elon explains that a Mars transport system “is like literally a million times more capable than what the current world launch system can do. It has to be.”</p>
<p>It also has to be incredibly advanced. Elon says, “It’s not just bigger, it needs to be more efficient. There’s a false dichotomy when it comes to rockets of ‘small and complex’ or ‘big and dumb.’ People talk about the ‘big dumb booster’—that won’t work. You need a big smart booster. If you want to build a Mars colony, you have no choice— you have to make it big and efficient.”</p>
<p>So that’s all you have to do—build a rocket that’s a million times more capable than today’s best rockets but who’s also efficient and smart and great in bed.</p>
<p>SpaceX is building it. Meet the Big Fucking Rocket.<a href="#footnote2-1-5715">1</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/BFR-1.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Hard to quite understand the bigness from that picture. So let’s add in some scale:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/BFR-house.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Or how about this?</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/BFR-field-2-1.jpg"></a></p>
<p>It would <em>barely </em>fit diagonally across a football field without going into the stands.</p>
<p>There’s also this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/bfr-boston.png"></a></p>
<p>It’s a <em>skyscraper</em>. Or as Elon puts it, “by far the biggest flying object ever.”</p>
<p>In yesterday’s presentation, Elon explained that this isn’t a first crack at how it might look, or an artist’s impression of how it might look—it’s how it’s going to look. This is the thing they’re building.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, SpaceX seems to be going through an existential crisis when it comes to naming this thing—first it was the Mars Colonial Transporter, then (because it can go <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/776939304140414976">way past Mars</a>) it was <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/777325549442232320">renamed</a> the Interplanetary Transport System, then yesterday in the presentation, Elon said they haven’t actually settled on a name yet but that the specific spaceship that makes the maiden voyage to Mars might be called Heart of Gold<a href="#footnote-1-5715">1</a>—so no one knows what to call it.</p>
<p>Which is why—until I hear otherwise—I’ll be calling it something I once heard Elon describe it as in an interview: the Big Fucking Rocket (BFR).</p>
<p>The Big Fucking Rocket is fucking big. At 400 feet tall, it’s the height of a 40-story skyscraper. At 40 feet in diameter, a school bus could fit entirely underneath its footprint. It’s more than three times the mass and generates over three times the thrust of the gargantuan <a href="http://www.astronautix.com/graphics/s/satvb.jpg">Saturn V</a>—the rocket used in the Apollo mission—which currently stands as by far the biggest rocket humanity has made.</p>
<p>Here’s how it stacks up next to a bunch of other rockets in size:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Rocket-lineup-1.png"></a></p>
<p>The difference is even more extreme when you compare the rockets by how many kilograms of payload (i.e. cargo and/or people) they can each take to orbit:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Rocket-lineup-2.png"></a></p>
<p>For comparison, SpaceX’s badass <a href="http://www.spacex.com/falcon9">Falcon 9</a> rocket will be able to take about 4 tons of payload to Mars, and the <a href="http://www.spacex.com/falcon-heavy">Falcon Heavy</a>—which is about to be today’s most powerful rocket—will be able to take about 13 tons to Mars. Elon believes the BFR will be able to take a few <em>hundred </em>tons of payload to Mars at first and eventually be able to take <em>1,000 </em>tons. The absurdity of that statistic—that the behemoth Falcon Heavy can only manage a little over 1% of the BFR’s ultimate Mars payload—is pretty hard to absorb.</p>
<p>Now, to be clear—what I’ve been calling the Big Fucking Rocket this whole time is actually two things: a Big Fucking Spaceship sitting on top of a Big Fucking Booster.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Rocket-breakdown-2.png"></a></p>
<p><strong>The Big Fucking Booster</strong></p>
<p>Let’s start by talking about the booster. The 25-story-high booster—AKA the actual rocket of the BFR—is what Elon calls “quite a beast.” It’s the biggest booster of all time—by <em>far</em>. By physical size, definitely, but even more so by thrust.</p>
<p>In the SpaceX post, I <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html/4">talked about</a> the Falcon 9’s nine <a href="http://www.spacex.com/news/2013/03/26/merlin-engines">Merlin engines</a>, and how each one was powerful enough to lift a stack of 40 cars up into the sky—in total, that meant the Falcon 9 set of engines could lift 360 cars. The Falcon Heavy, with its 27 Merlin engines, could lift a stack of over 1,000 cars up past the clouds.<a href="#footnote-2-5715">2</a>
</p><p>The Big Fucking Booster sits atop a different kind of engine: the Raptor.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Raptor.jpg"></a></p>
<p>The Raptor engine looks a lot like a Merlin, with one key difference—by significantly increasing the pressure, SpaceX has made the Raptor over three times more powerful than a Merlin.</p>
<p>A single Raptor engine produces <em>310 tons</em> of thrust—enough to lift 310 tons, or a stack of 172 cars, or <em>an entire Boeing 747 airplane</em>, into the sky. That’s what <em>one </em>Raptor can do.<a href="#footnote-3-5715">3</a>
</p><p>And the BFB has <em>42 of them</em>.<a href="#footnote-4-5715">4</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/42-Raptors.jpg"></a></p>
<p>All together, that’s an unheard of 13,033 tons of thrust, enough to push more than 7,000 cars—or <em>50 </em>large airplanes—up to space.</p>
<p><strong>The Big Fucking Spaceship</strong></p>
<p>So then there’s the spacecraft—which SpaceX calls the Interplanetary Spaceship, and which I’m going to keep calling the Big Fucking Spaceship because it’s more fun. The BFS is the big cool-looking thing on top of the BFB (in case you’re getting Big Fucking Confused—the Big Fucking Spaceship (BFS) on top of the Big Fucking Booster (BFB) together make what I’ve been calling the Big Fucking Rocket (BFR)). The BFS is what will take the people and cargo to Mars. It’s also what will launch, on its own, off Mars and return to Earth with people who want to come back.</p>
<p>The BFS is itself the size of a tall, 16-story building, and is 55 feet wide at its thickest point. In addition to hundreds, and eventually a thousand tons of cargo, the BFS will be able to carry as many as 100 people at the beginning, and Elon believes that number could grow to 200 and even above 300 people over time—like a cruise ship.</p>
<p>With nine Raptor engines, it’ll have more liftoff thrust on its own than any of today’s rockets—including next year’s Falcon Heavy. For a second-stage, cargo-carrying spacecraft to pack more thrust than even the most powerful first-stage rockets is outrageous.</p>
<p>Here’s a cross-section up close:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/rocket-cross-section.jpg"></a></p>
<p>I asked Elon what it’ll be like to ride in it. He said, “Well, you’d be in a giant spaceship in microgravity.<a href="#footnote-5-5715">5</a> I mean, it would be pretty fun. You’d be floating around.”</p>
<p>Good point.</p>
<p>In the presentation Q&amp;A, he added: “It has to be really fun and exciting, it can’t feel cramped or boring. The crew compartment is set up so that you can do zero-g games, you can float around, there will be movies, lecture halls, cabins, a restaurant—it’ll be really fun to go.”</p>
<p>Um, yeah, get me on that shit now. <em>A zero gravity cruise ship</em>. With this view:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Observatory_F_HD_3.1.png"></a></p>
<p>And if you were to go, here’s how the whole thing would work:</p>
<p><strong>1) Get on the ship. </strong>The BFR will be taking off from pad 39A at Cape Canaveral, Florida—the same pad that the Apollo astronauts left from. This is because that pad was built to be absurdly large since they didn’t know yet how big a rocket they’d be using. When you get there, you head up the tower and across the bridge into the Big Fucking Spaceship.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Air-bridge.jpg"></a></p>
<p><strong>2) Take off. </strong>You strap in, and the BFR lifts off. After a few minutes, the first-stage BFB separates and heads back down to Earth. The BFS that you’re in continues onward and settles into Earth’s orbit.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/29937258946_8345b8ae6e_o.jpg"></a></p>
<p><strong>3) Refuel in orbit. </strong>After landing back on Earth, the BFB is capped with a new BFS—this one full of propellant (liquid oxygen and methane).<a href="#footnote-6-5715">6</a> It lifts off again and pings the propellant-filled spaceship into orbit, where it rendezvouses<a href="#footnote-7-5715">7</a> with your spaceship. The two connect like two orcas holding hands as the propellant is transferred.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/29343821794_9e05bfd6d7_h.jpg"></a></p>
<p>This happens a few more times until your spaceship is entirely refueled.<a href="#footnote-8-5715">8</a> This process is critical A) for lowering the cost of the trip, and B) for making the trip much faster. People have always thought a journey to Mars would take six or nine months, but the BFS will get there in three.</p>
<p><strong>4) H</strong><strong>ead to Mars. </strong>Three months of fun times in microgravity and getting really sick of the other people on the ship.<a href="#footnote-9-5715">9</a> During the journey, the spaceship steers using cold gas thrusters, powered by huge solar arrays:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/29343822854_ec6f4ffad1_h.jpg"></a></p>
<p><strong>5) Enter the Mars atmosphere.</strong> Time for the heat shield to be in the shit:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/29343824424_87236132a0_h.jpg"></a></p>
<p><strong>6) Land on Mars. </strong>Upright, the same way the first stage lands on Earth.</p>
<p><strong>7) Live on Mars for a while doing god knows what. </strong>If it’s early on in the colonization process, you’re probably there to work and help build up the initial industries. Later on, it could be anything—research, entrepreneurship, or just simply adventure.</p>
<p><strong>8) Make propellant on Mars. </strong>This will be one of the key early industries to set up on Mars. Propellant consists of liquid oxygen (O<sub>2</sub>) and methane (CH<sub>4</sub>), which are both conveniently easy to make from the massive quantities of H<sub>2</sub>O (ice) and CO<sub>2 </sub>(the main gas in the Martian atmosphere) already sitting on Mars. They’ll use this propellant to load up the spaceship you came there on in preparation for its voyage back to Earth. Doing this spares the massive expense of having to carry propellant all the way from Earth for the return trip.</p>
<p><strong>9) Either stay forever or come back. </strong>If you come back, you’ll do so by boarding one of the BFS’s that came over in the last batch.</p>
<p><strong>10) Land vertically on Earth. </strong>Just like you did on Mars. The spaceship will go through routine maintenance in preparation to head back to Mars two years later.</p>
<p><strong>11) Be that insufferable person who can’t be part of any conversation without figuring out some way to bring up your time on Mars. </strong></p>
<p>Mission complete.</p>
<p>This kind-of-confusing diagram sums it up:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/diagram.png"></a></p>
<p>And this video sums it up very deliciously:</p>
<p></p>
<p>So that’s the deal with the Big Fucking Rocket and how it’ll all work.<a href="#footnote-10-5715">10</a>
</p><p>Now let’s talk about how this all might play out.</p>
<p><strong>The Plan</strong></p>
<p>Back to reality. So how do we get from, “there’s this rad potential rocket that might be ready to launch in five years” to “we’re a thriving multi-planetary civilization with a million people on Mars”?</p>
<p>10,000 flights. That’s how many BFS trips to Mars Elon thinks it’ll take to bring the Mars population to a million.</p>
<p>Why 10,000? Because there will be at least 100 people on most trips, and that number will go up over time—but there will also be some people coming back from Mars each time other people go. In the lower part of each BFS will be a huge cargo compartment. Elon thinks we’ll need to get at least 10 million tons of cargo to Mars for the million-person colony to become self-sustaining, which will happen in a little over 10,000 flights if SpaceX can get the cargo payload capacity up to 1,000 tons relatively quickly, as they hope to.</p>
<p>And when will these 10,000 trips start?</p>
<p>Well let’s take a look at the Mars-Earth Synodic calendar—which deals with the dates when Earth and Mars are closest to each other (called a “Mars opposition”). Earth’s orbit is smaller than Mars’s, so Earth goes around the sun quicker—so much so that every 26 months, Earth laps Mars and they’re briefly next to each other. That’s the one time when Earth-Mars transfers can happen.</p>
<p>We’re currently pretty close to Mars, since the last Mars opposition happened on May 22, 2016. That’s why, if you happen to be an “oh shit there’s a way-too-bright star let me take out my Sky Guide app and figure out which planet that is and then tell everyone I’m with and find that, yet again, no one cares, because everyone is a horrible person” nerd like me, you know that all summer, Mars has been super prominent and bright in our night sky.<a href="#footnote-11-5715">11</a> A year from now, Mars will be on the other side of the sun from us, and we won’t see it in our night sky at all.</p>
<p>The 2016 Earth-Mars opposition is also a special one, because it’s the last time it’ll happen without anybody talking about it.</p>
<p>Why? Because starting with the next one in July of 2018, SpaceX will start sending stuff to Mars each time there’s an opposition, and this will become increasingly big news each time. Here’s the tentative schedule, if everything goes perfectly to plan:</p>
<p><strong>Upcoming Mars Oppositions</strong> – and what SpaceX is planning for each</p>
<p><strong>July, 2018: </strong>Send a <a href="http://www.spacex.com/dragon">Dragon</a> spacecraft (the Falcon 9’s SUV-size spacecraft) to Mars with cargo</p>
<p><strong>October, 2020: </strong>Send multiple Dragons with more cargo</p>
<p><strong>December, 2022: </strong>Maiden BFS voyage to Mars. Carrying only cargo. This is the spaceship Elon wants to call Heart of Gold.</p>
<p><strong>January, 2025: </strong>First people-carrying BFS voyage to Mars.</p>
<p>Let’s all go back and read that last line again.</p>
<p><em><strong>January, 2025: </strong>First people-carrying BFS voyage to Mars.</em></p>
<p>Did you catch that?</p>
<p>If things go to plan,<em> the Neil Armstrong of Mars will touch down about eight years from now.</em></p>
<p>And zero people are talking about it.</p>
<p>But they will be. The hype will start a couple years from now when the Dragons make their Mars trips, and it’ll kick into high gear in 2022 when the Big Fucking Spaceship finally launches and heads to Mars and lands there. Everyone will be talking about this.</p>
<p>And the buzz will just accelerate from there as the first group of BFS astronauts are announced and become household names, admired for their bravery, because everyone will know there’s a reasonable chance something goes wrong and they don’t make it back alive. Then, in 2024 they’ll take off on a three-month trip that’ll be front-page news every day. When they land, everyone on Earth will be watching. It’ll be 1969 all over again.</p>
<p>This is a thing that’s happening.</p>
<p>Elon doesn’t like when people ask him about this first voyage and the Neil Armstrong of Mars. He says that it’s not about humanity putting a new multi-planetary feather in its cap, and he’s quick to point out, “putting people on the moon was super exciting—but where’s our moon base?” In other words, having humanity give Mars a high five for bragging rights is not what matters—what matters is carrying out the full vision of actually creating a full, self-sustaining civilization on Mars.</p>
<p>And yeah, sure, fine. But <em>I’m excited for 2025</em>. It’s gonna be so fun.</p>
<p>Anyway, so then the next Mars opposition will roll around in 2027. This time, if everything stays on track, multiple BFS’s will make the trek to Mars, carrying more people than were in the original group in 2025. And the spaceship that went over in 2025—the space Mayflower<em>—</em>will make its return trip to Earth, carrying some of the first group of Mars pioneers back home. They’ll return to massive celebration as international heroes, and the legendary spaceship will head off to enjoy its life in the Air and Space Museum.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, we’ll all be glued to the TV<a href="#footnote-12-5715">12</a> as the group of BFS’s arrive on Mars, where the people in them will continue the grueling work started by the 2025 group. The early colonists will have a hard job like early colonists always do—and this will be extra hard. Not only will they have to truly start from scratch—digging mines and quarries and refineries, constructing the first underground village habitat with the first Martian hospitals and schools and greenhouse farms, laying down a giant plumbing system to pump water into the village, building that first rocket propellant plant—but they’ll have to do all of this in a place where they can’t go outside without a spacesuit on, and where everyone and everything they’ve ever known is on a pale blue dot in the night sky.</p>
<p>It’ll be hard, but for the explorers of our world the payoff may be worth it. Elon says: “You can go anywhere on Earth in 24 hours. There’s no physical frontier on Earth anymore. Now, space is that frontier, so it’ll appeal to anyone with that exploratory spirit.”</p>
<p>In April of 2029, SpaceX will send an even larger group of spacecraft, people, and cargo to Mars. This time, it’ll probably get less attention. By 2029, we’ll probably be getting used to the idea that there are people on Mars and that every 26 months, a great two-way migration occurs.</p>
<p>The growing Mars colony will continue to entice the adventurers—those who read about the great sailing exhibitions of the 15th and 16th centuries and yearn to be there. When I asked Elon about how the small colony will grow and evolve, he said: “Think of the Mars colony as an organism that starts off as a zygote, and then becomes multi-cellular, and then gets organ differentiation—so it doesn’t look exactly the same all the way along, any more than the first settlement in Jamestown wasn’t representative of the United States today. It’ll be the same with Mars—Mars will be the new New World.”</p>
<p>The 2031 and 2033 and 2035 oppositions will bring substantially more people to the new New World. By this point, the budding Martian city will be a part of our lives. We’ll follow the Twitter feeds of some of our favorite journalists on Mars to keep up with what’s happening there. We’ll all get hooked on Mars’s first hit reality shows. And some of us will start thinking, “Should I sign up to go to Mars one of these years before I get too old?”</p>
<p>By 2050, there will be over a hundred thousand people on Mars. The company your son works for might have a branch there, and he’ll be saying goodbye to a couple co-workers who are about to head to the planet for a 52-month stint. He tells you that he doesn’t want to go because he doesn’t want to take his ninth-grade daughter away from her life and her friends. But he says she’s applying to a program that would bring her to Mars from the ages of 17 to 23 for an urban planning degree. You worry, even though you know it’s irrational. It’s just that you remember the days when going to Mars was risky and dangerous, and some part of you is still uncomfortable with it. And what if she decides not to come back?</p>
<p>By 2065, the early days of Mars seem primitive. During the first few Mars migrations, only a few spaceships made the trip with only 100 people in each, it was prohibitively expensive to go, it took three months to get there, and there were only a few very grueling industries on Mars to work in.</p>
<p>In 2065, every Mars opposition sees over 1,000 ships make the trip, each carrying over 500 people and a couple thousand tons of cargo. Half a million people make the journey every two years, and about 50,000 less than that come back, because Earth-to-Mars migration capacity grows a little bit each time as more ships are built. The trip, which now takes only 30 days, costs only $60,000 (in 2016 dollars)—and most people just pay off the ticket price with their well-paying job on Mars (labor is in high demand as the early Mars cities continue to expand and new cities are built).</p>
<p>Many people remember those early days of the Mars colony when it was all about SpaceX—funded by SpaceX or their cargo clients and driven by their ambition and their ingenuity and their guts. But now, dozens of companies specialize in Earth-Mars transit and hundreds of companies focus on development and entrepreneurship on Mars. And transit is paid for like planes and trains and buses are paid for today—by passengers buying tickets.</p>
<p>A decade later, the 2074 migration brings the Mars population above a million people. Small celebrations break out around both worlds, as a long-awaited landmark is achieved. Most people though, don’t even notice.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>Everything I just said was based on things Elon said on my phone call with him. Some of it was numbers he said directly—like the last paragraph, which came from him saying, “I’m hopeful that we can get to a million roughly 50 years after the start.” Other times it was me extrapolating a possible future, given the predictions I heard from him. It’s all based in reality. At least, it’s based in Elon Musk’s best crack at reality. He was very careful to qualify everything that sounded like a prediction or a projection with, “This is what <em>might </em>happen <em>if</em> things go well—but there’s no way to know, and many things could go wrong along the way.” He emphasized that “it’s not that SpaceX has all the answers and we’ve got it covered or anything like that—it’s that we want to show that it’s possible. But it’s far from a given.” As for things that could go wrong, he listed off a few (like World War III), and one of his biggest concerns is that if he somehow dies young, SpaceX could be taken over by someone who wants to milk the company for profit instead of staying single-mindedly focused on the Mars civilization mission.</p>
<p>But if SpaceX can manage to get this thing started, Elon thinks it could be not just a big deal in itself, it could jumpstart a slew of new possibilities for humanity. He explains:</p>
<p><em>The big picture isn’t just to back up the hard drive but to really change humanity into a multi-planetary species. Essentially what we’re saying is we’re establishing a regular cargo route to Mars. With the economic forcing function of interplanetary commerce, there will be the resources and the incentive to massively improve space transport technology, and I think then things really go to a whole new level. </em></p>
<p><em>What I’m describing may sound really crazy, but it actually will be a small fraction of what is ultimately done, as long as we become a two-planet civilization. Look at shipping technology in Europe. When all you had to do was cross the Mediterranean, the ships were pretty lame—they couldn’t cross the Atlantic. So commerce basically had short-range vessels. Without the forcing function, shipping technology didn’t improve that much—you could do the same things with ships, pretty much, around the time of Julius Caesar as you could around the time of Columbus. 1,500 years later, you could still just cross the Mediterranean. But as soon as there was a reason to cross the Atlantic, shipping technology improved dramatically. There needed to be the American colonies in order for that to happen.</em></p>
<p>The people at SpaceX believe that once we’re on Mars, the rest of the Solar System becomes accessible as well. That’s why they didn’t just create images of their Big Fucking Rocket standing proudly on Mars. They showed it flying by Jupiter.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/29343909374_f5a0c62478_h.jpg"></a></p>
<p>And Saturn.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/29343908684_4caef4cd2c_h.jpg"></a></p>
<p>And bringing human explorers to faraway moons.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/29343905184_aa6202b3a4_k.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/29343906874_abb7572f12_k.jpg"></a></p>
<p>They’re planning for a time when any person can go anywhere they want in our vast Solar System—a new golden age for exploration, with uncharted physical frontiers in every direction.</p>
<p><a href="https://gum.co/wbw-bfr"></a></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the <strong><a>Wait But Why email list</a></strong> and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. It’s a very unannoying list, don’t worry.</p>
<p>If you’d like to support Wait But Why, <strong><a href="https://www.patreon.com/waitbutwhy">here’s our Patreon</a></strong>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>Here’s the whole WBW Elon Musk series:</p>
<p><strong>Part 1, on Elon: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html">Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man<br />
</a>Part 2, on Tesla: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html">How Tesla Will Change the World</a></strong><br />
<strong> Part 3, on SpaceX: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html">How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars<br />
</a>Part 4, on the thing that makes Elon so effective: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html">The Chef and the Cook: Musk’s Secret Sauce</a></strong></p>
<p>Extra Post #1: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/the-deal-with-solar.html">The Deal With Solar City</a><br />
Extra Post #2: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/hyperloop.html">The Deal With the Hyperloop</a></p>
<p><br />
Six other Wait But Why explainers:</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/american-presidents-washington-lincoln.html">The American Presidents—Washington to Lincoln</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/muhammad-isis-iraqs-full-story.html">From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html">The AI Revolution: Road to Superintelligence</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html">The Fermi Paradox: Where are all the aliens?</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html">How Cryonics Works (and Why it Makes Sense)</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/how-to-name-baby.html">How to Name a Baby</a></strong></p>
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 SpaceX’s Big Fucking Rocket – The Full Story

 September 28, 2016 By Tim Urban


 We made a fancy PDF of this post (original and G-rated versions) for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.)

 Yesterday, Elon Musk got on stage at the 2016 International Astronautical Congress and unveiled the first real details about the big fucking rocket they’re making.

 A couple months ago, when SpaceX first announced that this would be happening in late September, it hit me that I might still have special privileges with them, kind of grandfathered in from my time working with Elon and his companies in 2015 (which resulted in an in-depth four-part blog series). So I reached out and asked if I could learn about the big fucking rocket ahead of time and write a post about it.

 They said yes.

 A little while later, I got on a call with Elon to discuss the rocket, the timeline, and the big plan this was all a part of. We started off how we always do.

 Then I brought up the rocket.

 Eventually, we were able to settle in to a fascinating conversation about this insane machine SpaceX is building and what’s going to happen with it.

 Now, before we get into things—

 This post is only a piece of The SpaceX Story—one of the most amazing stories of our time—and a story I spent three months and 40,000 words telling last year. If you really want to understand this and you haven’t read that post yet, I recommend you start there. The post has three parts, divided into five pages:

 Part 1: The Story of Humans and Space

 Part 2: Musk’s Mission

 Part 3: How to Colonize Mars
 → Phase 1: Figure out how to put things into space
 → Phase 2: Revolutionize the cost of space travel
 → Phase 3: Colonize Mars

 For those who have read the post and want a refresher or those who just want to hear about the big fucking rocket and move on with their day, here’s a quick overview of the background:

 The Context

 To understand why the big fucking rocket matters, you have to understand this sentence:

 SpaceX is trying to make human life multi-planetary by building a self-sustaining, one-million-person civilization on Mars.

 Let’s go part by part.

 Why make human life multi-planetary?

 Two reasons:

 1) It’s fun and exciting. (Here’s a clip from one of the interviews I did with Elon last year where he articulates this point.)

 2) It’s not a great idea to have all of our eggs in one basket. Right now we’re all on Earth, which means that if something terrible happens on Earth—caused by nature or by our own technology—we’re done. That’s like having a precious digital photo album saved only on one not-necessarily-reliable hard drive. If you were in that situation, you’d be smart to back the album up on a second hard drive. That’s the idea here. Elon calls it “life insurance for the species.”

 Why Mars?

 Venus is a dick, with its lead-melting temperatures, its crushing atmospheric pressure, and its unbearable winds.

 The moon has few natural resources, a 29-day day, and with no atmosphere to either provide protection against the sun during the day or warm things up at night, both day and night become murderous. Same deal on Mercury.

 Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are just huge balls of gas pretending to be planets.

 Certain moons of Jupiter and Saturn are possibly habitable, but they’re farther away and colder and darker than Mars, so why would we do that.

 Pluto is even farther and colder and darker. Stop asking me about Pluto.

 That leaves Mars. Mars isn’t a good time. If Mars were a place on Earth, it’s somewhere no one would want to go. But compared to all of those other options, it’s a dream. It’s cold but not that cold. It’s kind of dark but not that much darker than Earth. It’s far but not that far. Its day is almost the same length as ours, which is nice for us and hugely helpful for growing Earthly vegetation. Its surface gravity isn’t crazy low or crazy high (it’s around a third of Earth’s). It has a ton of (frozen) water and a decent amount of CO2, which are critical for early attempts at living there and hugely helpful for future attempts to “terraform” the planet into a place more livable for humans. All things considered, we’re very lucky to have an option as good as Mars—in most other solar systems, we probably wouldn’t.

 Why 1,000,000 people?

 Because Elon thinks that’s a rough estimate for the number of people you’d need to have on Mars in order for the Mars civilization to be “self-sustaining”—with self-sustaining defined by Elon as: “Even if the spaceships from Earth permanently stop coming, the colony doesn’t eventually die out—which requires a huge industrial base, and a much harder industrial base to create than being on Earth.”

 In other words, if hard drive #2 relies on hard drive #1 in order to stay working, then your photo album isn’t really backed up, is it? The whole point of hard drive #2 is to save the day if hard drive #1 permanently crashes.

 And while the Earth hard drive could “crash” for many exciting reasons—an asteroid hits us, AI kills us, Trump kills us, ISIS creates some upsetting biological weapon, etc.—Elon also warns about the less dramatic possibility that the Earth ships stop coming simply because Earth civilization stops having the capability to send them:

 The spaceships from Earth could stop coming for other reasons—it could be WWIII, it could be that Earth becomes a religious state, it could be some gradual decline where Earth civilization just sinks under its own weight. At one point the Egyptians were able to build pyramids, and then they forgot how to do that. And then they forgot how to read hieroglyphics, until the Rosetta Stone. Rome as well—they had indoor plumbing, they had advanced aqueducts, and then that fell apart. China at one point had the world’s biggest fleet of sailing ships and they were sailing as far as Africa, then some crazy emperor came along and decided that was bad and had them all burnt. So you just don’t know what’s gonna happen. The key threshold to pass is the number of people and tons of cargo required to make things self-sustaining. And that’s probably something like a million people and probably something like 10-100 million tons of cargo.

 In other words, let’s not wait on this.

 Great, but how the hell do you bring 1,000,000 people to Mars?

 You make this green part exist:

 It’s kind of simple. If we get to a point where there are a million people on Earth who both want to go to Mars and can afford to go to Mars, there will be a million people on Mars.

 Unfortunately, right now the yellow circle is tiny and the blue circle doesn’t exist.

 Elon thinks—and I kind of do too—that if the blue circle can get big enough, the yellow circle will take care of itself. If Mars is affordable and safe and you know you’ll be able to come back, a lot of people will want to go.

 The hard part is the blue circle. Here’s the issue:

 Last time the US Congress checked with NASA, the cost to send a five-person crew to Mars was $50 billion. $10 billion a person. Elon thinks that to make the blue circle sufficiently large, it needs to cost $500,000 a person. 1/20,000 of the current cost.

 1/20,000.

 That’s like looking at the car industry and saying, “Right now a new Honda costs around $20,000. To make this a viable industry, we need to get the cost of a new car down to $1.”

 So what the hell?

 Here’s the hell:

 Imagine if the way planes worked was that they took off, flew to their destination, but then instead of landing, all the passengers parachuted down to the ground and then the plane landed by smashing into the ocean and blowing up. So every plane flew exactly once, and to have a new flight happen, you’d have to build another plane.

 A plane ticket would cost $1.5 million.

 Space travel is currently so expensive mostly because we land rockets by crashing them into the ocean (or incinerating them in the atmosphere).

 When Elon started SpaceX, he was determined to fix this problem. It was a tall order, given that no one had ever done it before—including nations like the US and Russia who had spent billions trying. But SpaceX puzzled away at the problem year after year, and after trying and failing a bunch of times, in late 2015, they nailed it:

 Then they nailed it again. And again. And again. Now they nail it more often than not. Here’s a daytime view of a recent landing:

 Soon, for the first time, a previously used-and-landed, flight-tested Falcon 9 will carry out a new mission for SpaceX, officially making SpaceX rockets “reusable.”

 To fly a mission on a used rocket, you only need to pay for propellant (fuel and liquid oxygen) and a bit of routine maintenance. This cuts the price of space travel down by 100 or even 1,000 times.

 That leaves us with somewhere between 19/20 and 199/200 of the cost left to cut. Part of that will happen when SpaceX takes 100 or more people to Mars at a time, instead of five (the number Congress asked NASA about). The rest of it is taken care of by a few simple innovations, like refueling the spaceships in orbit (which lowers the cost by 5-10x) and manufacturing propellant on Mars so you don’t have to carry your return propellant with you (which lowers the cost by another 5-10x). More on those things later.

 Suddenly, not only can the price get down to $500,000/ticket, it can probably go even lower (Elon thinks it could eventually cost under $100,000/person). You may not have noticed it yet, but SpaceX’s innovations are in the process of creating a total revolution in the cost of space travel—a change that will open doors we can’t imagine being open today. And when that revolution goes far enough, SpaceX’s vision of putting 1,000,000 people on Mars really—actually—seriously—may happen.

 We’re going to Mars. And this week, SpaceX showed us the thing that’s gonna take us there.

 The Rocket

 “It’s so mind-blowing. It blows my mind, and I see it every week.”

 Elon’s pumped. And when you learn about the big fucking rocket he’s building, you’ll understand why.

 First, let’s absorb the challenge at hand. It’s often said that space is hard. To this day, only a few hundred people have been in space, only a few countries have the ability to launch something into space, and the history of human space travel is littered with tragic launch failures. Firing something super heavy and delicate and full of explosive liquid up through the atmosphere without anything going wrong is incredibly hard.

 But when we talk about humans going into space, we’re talking mostly about humans going into Low Earth Orbit, a layer of space between 100 and 1,200 miles above the ground—and normally, they’re headed only 250 miles up to the International Space Station. The only time humans have gone farther were the small handful of Americans who made it out to the moon in the 1960s, traveling about 250,000 miles away.

 When Earth and Mars are at their closest, Mars is somewhere between 34 and 60 million miles away—about 200 times farther away than the moon and about 200,000 times farther away than the ISS.

 The moon is just over one light second away.

 Mars is more than three light minutes away.

 Mars is far.

 Elon likes to compare the Earth-to-Mars trip to crossing the Atlantic Ocean, noting that using that scale, going to the moon would only be crossing the English Channel (and going to the ISS would be going to a dock 117 feet off the shore). Continuing with that comparison, he says, “A rocket made to go to Low Earth Orbit or even the moon is basically like a coastal fishing vessel, compared to a colonial transport system that is trying to go 1,000 times further.”

 On top of that, it might be worth it to take only a few humans or a single satellite up into Low Earth Orbit—but if you’re going all the way to Mars, you want to take a lot more than that. So you have to take much more mass, much further. Multiplying the distance factor by the payload factor, Elon explains that a Mars transport system “is like literally a million times more capable than what the current world launch system can do. It has to be.”

 It also has to be incredibly advanced. Elon says, “It’s not just bigger, it needs to be more efficient. There’s a false dichotomy when it comes to rockets of ‘small and complex’ or ‘big and dumb.’ People talk about the ‘big dumb booster’—that won’t work. You need a big smart booster. If you want to build a Mars colony, you have no choice— you have to make it big and efficient.”

 So that’s all you have to do—build a rocket that’s a million times more capable than today’s best rockets but who’s also efficient and smart and great in bed.

 SpaceX is building it. Meet the Big Fucking Rocket.1

 Hard to quite understand the bigness from that picture. So let’s add in some scale:

 Or how about this?

 It would barely fit diagonally across a football field without going into the stands.

 There’s also this:

 It’s a skyscraper. Or as Elon puts it, “by far the biggest flying object ever.”

 In yesterday’s presentation, Elon explained that this isn’t a first crack at how it might look, or an artist’s impression of how it might look—it’s how it’s going to look. This is the thing they’re building.

 Unfortunately, SpaceX seems to be going through an existential crisis when it comes to naming this thing—first it was the Mars Colonial Transporter, then (because it can go way past Mars) it was renamed the Interplanetary Transport System, then yesterday in the presentation, Elon said they haven’t actually settled on a name yet but that the specific spaceship that makes the maiden voyage to Mars might be called Heart of Gold1—so no one knows what to call it.

 Which is why—until I hear otherwise—I’ll be calling it something I once heard Elon describe it as in an interview: the Big Fucking Rocket (BFR).

 The Big Fucking Rocket is fucking big. At 400 feet tall, it’s the height of a 40-story skyscraper. At 40 feet in diameter, a school bus could fit entirely underneath its footprint. It’s more than three times the mass and generates over three times the thrust of the gargantuan Saturn V—the rocket used in the Apollo mission—which currently stands as by far the biggest rocket humanity has made.

 Here’s how it stacks up next to a bunch of other rockets in size:

 The difference is even more extreme when you compare the rockets by how many kilograms of payload (i.e. cargo and/or people) they can each take to orbit:

 For comparison, SpaceX’s badass Falcon 9 rocket will be able to take about 4 tons of payload to Mars, and the Falcon Heavy—which is about to be today’s most powerful rocket—will be able to take about 13 tons to Mars. Elon believes the BFR will be able to take a few hundred tons of payload to Mars at first and eventually be able to take 1,000 tons. The absurdity of that statistic—that the behemoth Falcon Heavy can only manage a little over 1% of the BFR’s ultimate Mars payload—is pretty hard to absorb.

 Now, to be clear—what I’ve been calling the Big Fucking Rocket this whole time is actually two things: a Big Fucking Spaceship sitting on top of a Big Fucking Booster.

 The Big Fucking Booster

 Let’s start by talking about the booster. The 25-story-high booster—AKA the actual rocket of the BFR—is what Elon calls “quite a beast.” It’s the biggest booster of all time—by far. By physical size, definitely, but even more so by thrust.

 In the SpaceX post, I talked about the Falcon 9’s nine Merlin engines, and how each one was powerful enough to lift a stack of 40 cars up into the sky—in total, that meant the Falcon 9 set of engines could lift 360 cars. The Falcon Heavy, with its 27 Merlin engines, could lift a stack of over 1,000 cars up past the clouds.2

 The Big Fucking Booster sits atop a different kind of engine: the Raptor.

 The Raptor engine looks a lot like a Merlin, with one key difference—by significantly increasing the pressure, SpaceX has made the Raptor over three times more powerful than a Merlin.

 A single Raptor engine produces 310 tons of thrust—enough to lift 310 tons, or a stack of 172 cars, or an entire Boeing 747 airplane, into the sky. That’s what one Raptor can do.3

 And the BFB has 42 of them.4

 All together, that’s an unheard of 13,033 tons of thrust, enough to push more than 7,000 cars—or 50 large airplanes—up to space.

 The Big Fucking Spaceship

 So then there’s the spacecraft—which SpaceX calls the Interplanetary Spaceship, and which I’m going to keep calling the Big Fucking Spaceship because it’s more fun. The BFS is the big cool-looking thing on top of the BFB (in case you’re getting Big Fucking Confused—the Big Fucking Spaceship (BFS) on top of the Big Fucking Booster (BFB) together make what I’ve been calling the Big Fucking Rocket (BFR)). The BFS is what will take the people and cargo to Mars. It’s also what will launch, on its own, off Mars and return to Earth with people who want to come back.

 The BFS is itself the size of a tall, 16-story building, and is 55 feet wide at its thickest point. In addition to hundreds, and eventually a thousand tons of cargo, the BFS will be able to carry as many as 100 people at the beginning, and Elon believes that number could grow to 200 and even above 300 people over time—like a cruise ship.

 With nine Raptor engines, it’ll have more liftoff thrust on its own than any of today’s rockets—including next year’s Falcon Heavy. For a second-stage, cargo-carrying spacecraft to pack more thrust than even the most powerful first-stage rockets is outrageous.

 Here’s a cross-section up close:

 I asked Elon what it’ll be like to ride in it. He said, “Well, you’d be in a giant spaceship in microgravity.5 I mean, it would be pretty fun. You’d be floating around.”

 Good point.

 In the presentation Q&A, he added: “It has to be really fun and exciting, it can’t feel cramped or boring. The crew compartment is set up so that you can do zero-g games, you can float around, there will be movies, lecture halls, cabins, a restaurant—it’ll be really fun to go.”

 Um, yeah, get me on that shit now. A zero gravity cruise ship. With this view:

 And if you were to go, here’s how the whole thing would work:

 1) Get on the ship. The BFR will be taking off from pad 39A at Cape Canaveral, Florida—the same pad that the Apollo astronauts left from. This is because that pad was built to be absurdly large since they didn’t know yet how big a rocket they’d be using. When you get there, you head up the tower and across the bridge into the Big Fucking Spaceship.

 2) Take off. You strap in, and the BFR lifts off. After a few minutes, the first-stage BFB separates and heads back down to Earth. The BFS that you’re in continues onward and settles into Earth’s orbit.

 3) Refuel in orbit. After landing back on Earth, the BFB is capped with a new BFS—this one full of propellant (liquid oxygen and methane).6 It lifts off again and pings the propellant-filled spaceship into orbit, where it rendezvouses7 with your spaceship. The two connect like two orcas holding hands as the propellant is transferred.

 This happens a few more times until your spaceship is entirely refueled.8 This process is critical A) for lowering the cost of the trip, and B) for making the trip much faster. People have always thought a journey to Mars would take six or nine months, but the BFS will get there in three.

 4) Head to Mars. Three months of fun times in microgravity and getting really sick of the other people on the ship.9 During the journey, the spaceship steers using cold gas thrusters, powered by huge solar arrays:

 5) Enter the Mars atmosphere. Time for the heat shield to be in the shit:

 6) Land on Mars. Upright, the same way the first stage lands on Earth.

 7) Live on Mars for a while doing god knows what. If it’s early on in the colonization process, you’re probably there to work and help build up the initial industries. Later on, it could be anything—research, entrepreneurship, or just simply adventure.

 8) Make propellant on Mars. This will be one of the key early industries to set up on Mars. Propellant consists of liquid oxygen (O2) and methane (CH4), which are both conveniently easy to make from the massive quantities of H2O (ice) and CO2 (the main gas in the Martian atmosphere) already sitting on Mars. They’ll use this propellant to load up the spaceship you came there on in preparation for its voyage back to Earth. Doing this spares the massive expense of having to carry propellant all the way from Earth for the return trip.

 9) Either stay forever or come back. If you come back, you’ll do so by boarding one of the BFS’s that came over in the last batch.

 10) Land vertically on Earth. Just like you did on Mars. The spaceship will go through routine maintenance in preparation to head back to Mars two years later.

 11) Be that insufferable person who can’t be part of any conversation without figuring out some way to bring up your time on Mars.

 Mission complete.

 This kind-of-confusing diagram sums it up:

 And this video sums it up very deliciously:

 So that’s the deal with the Big Fucking Rocket and how it’ll all work.10

 Now let’s talk about how this all might play out.

 The Plan

 Back to reality. So how do we get from, “there’s this rad potential rocket that might be ready to launch in five years” to “we’re a thriving multi-planetary civilization with a million people on Mars”?

 10,000 flights. That’s how many BFS trips to Mars Elon thinks it’ll take to bring the Mars population to a million.

 Why 10,000? Because there will be at least 100 people on most trips, and that number will go up over time—but there will also be some people coming back from Mars each time other people go. In the lower part of each BFS will be a huge cargo compartment. Elon thinks we’ll need to get at least 10 million tons of cargo to Mars for the million-person colony to become self-sustaining, which will happen in a little over 10,000 flights if SpaceX can get the cargo payload capacity up to 1,000 tons relatively quickly, as they hope to.

 And when will these 10,000 trips start?

 Well let’s take a look at the Mars-Earth Synodic calendar—which deals with the dates when Earth and Mars are closest to each other (called a “Mars opposition”). Earth’s orbit is smaller than Mars’s, so Earth goes around the sun quicker—so much so that every 26 months, Earth laps Mars and they’re briefly next to each other. That’s the one time when Earth-Mars transfers can happen.

 We’re currently pretty close to Mars, since the last Mars opposition happened on May 22, 2016. That’s why, if you happen to be an “oh shit there’s a way-too-bright star let me take out my Sky Guide app and figure out which planet that is and then tell everyone I’m with and find that, yet again, no one cares, because everyone is a horrible person” nerd like me, you know that all summer, Mars has been super prominent and bright in our night sky.11 A year from now, Mars will be on the other side of the sun from us, and we won’t see it in our night sky at all.

 The 2016 Earth-Mars opposition is also a special one, because it’s the last time it’ll happen without anybody talking about it.

 Why? Because starting with the next one in July of 2018, SpaceX will start sending stuff to Mars each time there’s an opposition, and this will become increasingly big news each time. Here’s the tentative schedule, if everything goes perfectly to plan:

 Upcoming Mars Oppositions – and what SpaceX is planning for each

 July, 2018: Send a Dragon spacecraft (the Falcon 9’s SUV-size spacecraft) to Mars with cargo

 October, 2020: Send multiple Dragons with more cargo

 December, 2022: Maiden BFS voyage to Mars. Carrying only cargo. This is the spaceship Elon wants to call Heart of Gold.

 January, 2025: First people-carrying BFS voyage to Mars.

 Let’s all go back and read that last line again.

 January, 2025: First people-carrying BFS voyage to Mars.

 Did you catch that?

 If things go to plan, the Neil Armstrong of Mars will touch down about eight years from now.

 And zero people are talking about it.

 But they will be. The hype will start a couple years from now when the Dragons make their Mars trips, and it’ll kick into high gear in 2022 when the Big Fucking Spaceship finally launches and heads to Mars and lands there. Everyone will be talking about this.

 And the buzz will just accelerate from there as the first group of BFS astronauts are announced and become household names, admired for their bravery, because everyone will know there’s a reasonable chance something goes wrong and they don’t make it back alive. Then, in 2024 they’ll take off on a three-month trip that’ll be front-page news every day. When they land, everyone on Earth will be watching. It’ll be 1969 all over again.

 This is a thing that’s happening.

 Elon doesn’t like when people ask him about this first voyage and the Neil Armstrong of Mars. He says that it’s not about humanity putting a new multi-planetary feather in its cap, and he’s quick to point out, “putting people on the moon was super exciting—but where’s our moon base?” In other words, having humanity give Mars a high five for bragging rights is not what matters—what matters is carrying out the full vision of actually creating a full, self-sustaining civilization on Mars.

 And yeah, sure, fine. But I’m excited for 2025. It’s gonna be so fun.

 Anyway, so then the next Mars opposition will roll around in 2027. This time, if everything stays on track, multiple BFS’s will make the trek to Mars, carrying more people than were in the original group in 2025. And the spaceship that went over in 2025—the space Mayflower—will make its return trip to Earth, carrying some of the first group of Mars pioneers back home. They’ll return to massive celebration as international heroes, and the legendary spaceship will head off to enjoy its life in the Air and Space Museum.

 Meanwhile, we’ll all be glued to the TV12 as the group of BFS’s arrive on Mars, where the people in them will continue the grueling work started by the 2025 group. The early colonists will have a hard job like early colonists always do—and this will be extra hard. Not only will they have to truly start from scratch—digging mines and quarries and refineries, constructing the first underground village habitat with the first Martian hospitals and schools and greenhouse farms, laying down a giant plumbing system to pump water into the village, building that first rocket propellant plant—but they’ll have to do all of this in a place where they can’t go outside without a spacesuit on, and where everyone and everything they’ve ever known is on a pale blue dot in the night sky.

 It’ll be hard, but for the explorers of our world the payoff may be worth it. Elon says: “You can go anywhere on Earth in 24 hours. There’s no physical frontier on Earth anymore. Now, space is that frontier, so it’ll appeal to anyone with that exploratory spirit.”

 In April of 2029, SpaceX will send an even larger group of spacecraft, people, and cargo to Mars. This time, it’ll probably get less attention. By 2029, we’ll probably be getting used to the idea that there are people on Mars and that every 26 months, a great two-way migration occurs.

 The growing Mars colony will continue to entice the adventurers—those who read about the great sailing exhibitions of the 15th and 16th centuries and yearn to be there. When I asked Elon about how the small colony will grow and evolve, he said: “Think of the Mars colony as an organism that starts off as a zygote, and then becomes multi-cellular, and then gets organ differentiation—so it doesn’t look exactly the same all the way along, any more than the first settlement in Jamestown wasn’t representative of the United States today. It’ll be the same with Mars—Mars will be the new New World.”

 The 2031 and 2033 and 2035 oppositions will bring substantially more people to the new New World. By this point, the budding Martian city will be a part of our lives. We’ll follow the Twitter feeds of some of our favorite journalists on Mars to keep up with what’s happening there. We’ll all get hooked on Mars’s first hit reality shows. And some of us will start thinking, “Should I sign up to go to Mars one of these years before I get too old?”

 By 2050, there will be over a hundred thousand people on Mars. The company your son works for might have a branch there, and he’ll be saying goodbye to a couple co-workers who are about to head to the planet for a 52-month stint. He tells you that he doesn’t want to go because he doesn’t want to take his ninth-grade daughter away from her life and her friends. But he says she’s applying to a program that would bring her to Mars from the ages of 17 to 23 for an urban planning degree. You worry, even though you know it’s irrational. It’s just that you remember the days when going to Mars was risky and dangerous, and some part of you is still uncomfortable with it. And what if she decides not to come back?

 By 2065, the early days of Mars seem primitive. During the first few Mars migrations, only a few spaceships made the trip with only 100 people in each, it was prohibitively expensive to go, it took three months to get there, and there were only a few very grueling industries on Mars to work in.

 In 2065, every Mars opposition sees over 1,000 ships make the trip, each carrying over 500 people and a couple thousand tons of cargo. Half a million people make the journey every two years, and about 50,000 less than that come back, because Earth-to-Mars migration capacity grows a little bit each time as more ships are built. The trip, which now takes only 30 days, costs only $60,000 (in 2016 dollars)—and most people just pay off the ticket price with their well-paying job on Mars (labor is in high demand as the early Mars cities continue to expand and new cities are built).

 Many people remember those early days of the Mars colony when it was all about SpaceX—funded by SpaceX or their cargo clients and driven by their ambition and their ingenuity and their guts. But now, dozens of companies specialize in Earth-Mars transit and hundreds of companies focus on development and entrepreneurship on Mars. And transit is paid for like planes and trains and buses are paid for today—by passengers buying tickets.

 A decade later, the 2074 migration brings the Mars population above a million people. Small celebrations break out around both worlds, as a long-awaited landmark is achieved. Most people though, don’t even notice.

 ___________

 Everything I just said was based on things Elon said on my phone call with him. Some of it was numbers he said directly—like the last paragraph, which came from him saying, “I’m hopeful that we can get to a million roughly 50 years after the start.” Other times it was me extrapolating a possible future, given the predictions I heard from him. It’s all based in reality. At least, it’s based in Elon Musk’s best crack at reality. He was very careful to qualify everything that sounded like a prediction or a projection with, “This is what might happen if things go well—but there’s no way to know, and many things could go wrong along the way.” He emphasized that “it’s not that SpaceX has all the answers and we’ve got it covered or anything like that—it’s that we want to show that it’s possible. But it’s far from a given.” As for things that could go wrong, he listed off a few (like World War III), and one of his biggest concerns is that if he somehow dies young, SpaceX could be taken over by someone who wants to milk the company for profit instead of staying single-mindedly focused on the Mars civilization mission.

 But if SpaceX can manage to get this thing started, Elon thinks it could be not just a big deal in itself, it could jumpstart a slew of new possibilities for humanity. He explains:

 The big picture isn’t just to back up the hard drive but to really change humanity into a multi-planetary species. Essentially what we’re saying is we’re establishing a regular cargo route to Mars. With the economic forcing function of interplanetary commerce, there will be the resources and the incentive to massively improve space transport technology, and I think then things really go to a whole new level.

 What I’m describing may sound really crazy, but it actually will be a small fraction of what is ultimately done, as long as we become a two-planet civilization. Look at shipping technology in Europe. When all you had to do was cross the Mediterranean, the ships were pretty lame—they couldn’t cross the Atlantic. So commerce basically had short-range vessels. Without the forcing function, shipping technology didn’t improve that much—you could do the same things with ships, pretty much, around the time of Julius Caesar as you could around the time of Columbus. 1,500 years later, you could still just cross the Mediterranean. But as soon as there was a reason to cross the Atlantic, shipping technology improved dramatically. There needed to be the American colonies in order for that to happen.

 The people at SpaceX believe that once we’re on Mars, the rest of the Solar System becomes accessible as well. That’s why they didn’t just create images of their Big Fucking Rocket standing proudly on Mars. They showed it flying by Jupiter.

 And Saturn.

 And bringing human explorers to faraway moons.

 They’re planning for a time when any person can go anywhere they want in our vast Solar System—a new golden age for exploration, with uncharted physical frontiers in every direction.

 ___________

 If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. It’s a very unannoying list, don’t worry.

 If you’d like to support Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon.

 ___________

 Here’s the whole WBW Elon Musk series:

 Part 1, on Elon: Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man
 Part 2, on Tesla: How Tesla Will Change the World
 Part 3, on SpaceX: How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars
 Part 4, on the thing that makes Elon so effective: The Chef and the Cook: Musk’s Secret Sauce

 Extra Post #1: The Deal With Solar City
 Extra Post #2: The Deal With the Hyperloop


 Six other Wait But Why explainers:

 The American Presidents—Washington to Lincoln

 From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story

 The AI Revolution: Road to Superintelligence

 The Fermi Paradox: Where are all the aliens?

 How Cryonics Works (and Why it Makes Sense)

 How to Name a Baby

 1. This is a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reference. In the book, Heart of Gold was “the first spacecraft to make use of the Infinite Improbability.” Elon likes the name because he thinks SpaceX’s path was highly improbable.↩

 2. To be clear, payload is what the rocket can actually bring to space. Thrust is what the engines can push to space, which has to include both the entire BFR and its contained payload. Almost all of a rocket’s thrust is used to lift the rocket itself, with only a small fraction of it allotted for the payload. When I talk about thrust in these posts and say how many cars a set of engines could push to space, I’m talking about a hypothetical scenario in which there is no rocket, just the rocket’s engines with a platform on top of them and cars stacked on top of the platform.↩

 3. Here’s a video of Raptor’s first test firing, which happened a few days ago. It would be so unfun to put your hand through that column of flame.↩

 4. I asked Elon why there were 42 smaller-sized engines instead of a smaller number of huge ones, and he said that they had imagined larger engines at one point but that “optimization seems to call for more small engines, not fewer big engines.” I can’t explain more than that because I don’t get it.↩

 5. We often think of floating astronauts as being in “zero gravity.” In fact, they’re very much inside of the Earth’s gravity well when they’re floating—they’re just orbiting around the Earth so fast that they’re in constant free fall. The effect is the same—they float—but since they’re not actually in zero gravity, we call it microgravity.↩

 6. The methane part of that is a big innovation. Other rockets, including the Falcons, use kerosene as the primary fuel—but for a bunch of reasons, methane seems to make more sense for a Mars trip.↩

 7. Upsettingly-spelled word.↩

 8. Elon says that this is the plan if the refueling process is quick, like a couple weeks or less. If it takes a lot longer, then the spacecraft will be launched first without people, and then whenever it’s all refueled and ready to go, a spacecraft carrying just people will be launched and it will deliver the crew to the spacecraft for an Earth orbit rendezvous.↩

 9. People like to bring up the dangers of space radiation during this time. Elon thinks the dangers are overstated, and that with proper precautions (like a protective layer of water around the crew cabin), the radiation harm to a crew member would be similar to the damage to your body if you were to become a smoker during those three months and then stop. Not ideal, but not too big a deal.↩

 10. In the presentation, Elon went off on a tangent at one point that delighted me. He talked about the possibility of the BFR’s spaceship doubling as a super-fast way to transport stuff or people around the Earth: “It actually has enough capability that you could maybe even go to orbit with the spaceship…and maybe there is some market for really fast transport of stuff around the world…We could transport cargo to anywhere on Earth in 45 minutes at the longest—most would be maybe 20, 25 minutes. So maybe if we had a floating platform off the coast of New York, you could go from New York to Tokyo in 25 minutes. You could cross the Atlantic in 10 minutes. Most of your time would be getting to the ship, and then it would be real quick after that. There are some intriguing possibilities there, but we’re not counting on that.” YES. Amazing glimpse of the world of the future, when someone will text you from Delhi and ask if you want to zip over from San Francisco to grab lunch, and you’ll say, “Sure, but I have a meeting in two hours, so I can’t stay long.” Except you won’t, because you’ll just meet your friend virtually and it’ll feel exactly how it would to be there in person. So there goes that.↩

 11. Right next to Mars all summer has been a pretty bright Saturn—something I’ve also told a bunch of people who don’t care.↩

 12. or whatever 2027 humans are glued to when they’re glued to something↩

 1. All images are from spacex.com, unless they have “waitbutwhy.com” written at the bottom, in which case they were made by me.↩

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We made a fancy PDF of this post (original and G-rated versions) for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.)  
Yesterday, Elon Musk got on stage at the 2016 International Astronautical Congress and unveiled the first real details about the big fucking rocket they’re making.
A couple months ago, when SpaceX first announced that this would be happening in late September, it hit me that I might still have special privileges with them, kind of grandfathered in from my time working with Elon and his companies in 2015 (which resulted in an in-depth four-part blog series). So I reached out and asked if I could learn about the big fucking rocket ahead of time and write a post about it.
They said yes.
A little while later, I got on a call with Elon to discuss the rocket, the timeline, and the big plan this was all a part of. We started off how we always do.
   
   
Then I brought up the rocket.
   
   
   
   
Eventually, we were able to settle in to a fascinating conversation about this insane machine SpaceX is building and what’s going to happen with it.
Now, before we get into things—
This post is only a piece of The SpaceX Story—one of the most amazing stories of our time—and a story I spent three months and 40,000 words telling last year. If you really want to understand this and you haven’t read that post yet, I recommend you start there. The post has three parts, divided into five pages:
  Part 1: The Story of Humans and Space  
  Part 2: Musk’s Mission  
 Part 3: How to Colonize Mars  
→ Phase 1: Figure out how to put things into space  
→ Phase 2: Revolutionize the cost of space travel  
→ Phase 3: Colonize Mars  
For those who have read the post and want a refresher or those who just want to hear about the big fucking rocket and move on with their day, here’s a quick overview of the background:
 The Context 
To understand why the big fucking rocket matters, you have to understand this sentence:
 SpaceX is trying to make human life multi-planetary by building a self-sustaining, one-million-person civilization on Mars. 
Let’s go part by part.
 Why make human life multi-planetary? 
Two reasons:
 1) It’s fun and exciting. (Here’s a clip from one of the interviews I did with Elon last year where he articulates this point.)
 2) It’s not a great idea to have all of our eggs in one basket. Right now we’re all on Earth, which means that if something terrible happens on Earth—caused by nature or by our own technology—we’re done. That’s like having a precious digital photo album saved only on one not-necessarily-reliable hard drive. If you were in that situation, you’d be smart to back the album up on a second hard drive. That’s the idea here. Elon calls it “life insurance for the species.”
 Why Mars? 
Venus is a dick, with its lead-melting temperatures, its crushing atmospheric pressure, and its unbearable winds.
The moon has few natural resources, a 29-day day, and with no atmosphere to either provide protection against the sun during the day or warm things up at night, both day and night become murderous. Same deal on Mercury.
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are just huge balls of gas pretending to be planets.
Certain moons of Jupiter and Saturn are possibly habitable, but they’re farther away and colder and darker than Mars, so why would we do that.
Pluto is even farther and colder and darker. Stop asking me about Pluto.
That leaves Mars. Mars isn’t a good time. If Mars were a place on Earth, it’s somewhere no one would want to go. But compared to all of those other options, it’s a dream. It’s cold but not that cold. It’s kind of dark but not that much darker than Earth. It’s far but not that far. Its day is almost the same length as ours, which is nice for us and hugely helpful for growing Earthly vegetation. Its surface gravity isn’t crazy low or crazy high (it’s around a third of Earth’s). It has a ton of (frozen) water and a decent amount of CO2, which are critical for early attempts at living there and hugely helpful for future attempts to “terraform” the planet into a place more livable for humans. All things considered, we’re very lucky to have an option as good as Mars—in most other solar systems, we probably wouldn’t.
 Why 1,000,000 people? 
Because Elon thinks that’s a rough estimate for the number of people you’d need to have on Mars in order for the Mars civilization to be “self-sustaining”—with self-sustaining defined by Elon as: “Even if the spaceships from Earth permanently stop coming, the colony doesn’t eventually die out—which requires a huge industrial base, and a much harder industrial base to create than being on Earth.”
In other words, if hard drive #2 relies on hard drive #1 in order to stay working, then your photo album isn’t really backed up, is it? The whole point of hard drive #2 is to save the day if hard drive #1 permanently crashes.
And while the Earth hard drive could “crash” for many exciting reasons—an asteroid hits us, AI kills us, Trump kills us, ISIS creates some upsetting biological weapon, etc.—Elon also warns about the less dramatic possibility that the Earth ships stop coming simply because Earth civilization stops having the capability to send them:
 The spaceships from Earth could stop coming for other reasons—it could be WWIII, it could be that Earth becomes a religious state, it could be some gradual decline where Earth civilization just sinks under its own weight.  At one point the Egyptians were able to build pyramids, and then they forgot how to do that. And then they forgot how to read hieroglyphics, until the Rosetta Stone. Rome as well—they had indoor plumbing, they had advanced aqueducts, and then that fell apart. China at one point had the world’s biggest fleet of sailing ships and they were sailing as far as Africa, then some crazy emperor came along and decided that was bad and had them all burnt. So you just don’t know what’s gonna happen. The key threshold to pass is the number of people and tons of cargo required to make things self-sustaining. And that’s probably something like a million people and probably something like 10-100 million tons of cargo. 
In other words, let’s not wait on this.
 Great, but how the hell do you bring 1,000,000 people to Mars? 
You make this green part exist:
   
It’s kind of simple. If we get to a point where there are a million people on Earth who both want to go to Mars and can afford to go to Mars, there will be a million people on Mars.
Unfortunately, right now the yellow circle is tiny and the blue circle doesn’t exist.
Elon thinks—and I kind of do too—that if the blue circle can get big enough, the yellow circle will take care of itself. If Mars is affordable and safe and you know you’ll be able to come back, a lot of people will want to go.
The hard part is the blue circle. Here’s the issue:
Last time the US Congress checked with NASA, the cost to send a five-person crew to Mars was $50 billion. $10 billion a person. Elon thinks that to make the blue circle sufficiently large, it needs to cost $500,000 a person. 1/20,000 of the current cost.
1/20,000.
That’s like looking at the car industry and saying, “Right now a new Honda costs around $20,000. To make this a viable industry, we need to get the cost of a new car down to $1.”
So what the hell?
Here’s the hell:
Imagine if the way planes worked was that they took off, flew to their destination, but then instead of landing, all the passengers parachuted down to the ground and then the plane landed by smashing into the ocean and blowing up. So every plane flew exactly once, and to have a new flight happen, you’d have to build another plane.
A plane ticket would cost $1.5 million.
Space travel is currently so expensive mostly because we land rockets by crashing them into the ocean (or incinerating them in the atmosphere).
When Elon started SpaceX, he was determined to fix this problem. It was a tall order, given that no one had ever done it before—including nations like the US and Russia who had spent billions trying. But SpaceX puzzled away at the problem year after year, and after trying and failing a bunch of times, in late 2015, they nailed it:
 
Then they nailed it again. And again. And again. Now they nail it more often than not. Here’s a daytime view of a recent landing:
 
Soon, for the first time, a previously used-and-landed, flight-tested Falcon 9 will carry out a new mission for SpaceX, officially making SpaceX rockets “reusable.”
To fly a mission on a used rocket, you only need to pay for propellant (fuel and liquid oxygen) and a bit of routine maintenance. This cuts the price of space travel down by 100 or even 1,000 times.
That leaves us with somewhere between 19/20 and 199/200 of the cost left to cut. Part of that will happen when SpaceX takes 100 or more people to Mars at a time, instead of five (the number Congress asked NASA about). The rest of it is taken care of by a few simple innovations, like refueling the spaceships in orbit (which lowers the cost by 5-10x) and manufacturing propellant on Mars so you don’t have to carry your return propellant with you (which lowers the cost by another 5-10x). More on those things later.
Suddenly, not only can the price get down to $500,000/ticket, it can probably go even lower (Elon thinks it could eventually cost under $100,000/person). You may not have noticed it yet, but SpaceX’s innovations are in the process of creating a total revolution in the cost of space travel—a change that will open doors we can’t imagine being open today. And when that revolution goes far enough, SpaceX’s vision of putting 1,000,000 people on Mars really—actually—seriously—may happen.
We’re going to Mars. And this week, SpaceX showed us the thing that’s gonna take us there.
 The Rocket 
“It’s so mind-blowing. It blows my mind, and I see it every week.”
Elon’s pumped. And when you learn about the big fucking rocket he’s building, you’ll understand why.
First, let’s absorb the challenge at hand. It’s often said that space is hard. To this day, only a few hundred people have been in space, only a few countries have the ability to launch something into space, and the history of human space travel is littered with tragic launch failures. Firing something super heavy and delicate and full of explosive liquid up through the atmosphere without anything going wrong is incredibly hard.
But when we talk about humans going into space, we’re talking mostly about humans going into Low Earth Orbit, a layer of space between 100 and 1,200 miles above the ground—and normally, they’re headed only 250 miles up to the International Space Station. The only time humans have gone farther were the small handful of Americans who made it out to the moon in the 1960s, traveling about 250,000 miles away.
When Earth and Mars are at their closest, Mars is somewhere between 34 and 60 million miles away—about 200 times farther away than the moon and about 200,000 times farther away than the ISS.
The moon is just over one light second away.
   
Mars is more than three light minutes away.
Mars is far.
Elon likes to compare the Earth-to-Mars trip to crossing the Atlantic Ocean, noting that using that scale, going to the moon would only be crossing the English Channel (and going to the ISS would be going to a dock 117 feet off the shore). Continuing with that comparison, he says, “A rocket made to go to Low Earth Orbit or even the moon is basically like a coastal fishing vessel, compared to a colonial transport system that is trying to go 1,000 times further.”
On top of that, it might be worth it to take only a few humans or a single satellite up into Low Earth Orbit—but if you’re going all the way to Mars, you want to take a lot more than that. So you have to take much more mass, much further. Multiplying the distance factor by the payload factor, Elon explains that a Mars transport system “is like literally a million times more capable than what the current world launch system can do. It has to be.”
It also has to be incredibly advanced. Elon says, “It’s not just bigger, it needs to be more efficient. There’s a false dichotomy when it comes to rockets of ‘small and complex’ or ‘big and dumb.’ People talk about the ‘big dumb booster’—that won’t work. You need a big smart booster. If you want to build a Mars colony, you have no choice— you have to make it big and efficient.”
So that’s all you have to do—build a rocket that’s a million times more capable than today’s best rockets but who’s also efficient and smart and great in bed.
SpaceX is building it. Meet the Big Fucking Rocket.1
    
Hard to quite understand the bigness from that picture. So let’s add in some scale:
   
Or how about this?
   
It would barely fit diagonally across a football field without going into the stands.
There’s also this:
   
It’s a skyscraper. Or as Elon puts it, “by far the biggest flying object ever.”
In yesterday’s presentation, Elon explained that this isn’t a first crack at how it might look, or an artist’s impression of how it might look—it’s how it’s going to look. This is the thing they’re building.
Unfortunately, SpaceX seems to be going through an existential crisis when it comes to naming this thing—first it was the Mars Colonial Transporter, then (because it can go way past Mars) it was renamed the Interplanetary Transport System, then yesterday in the presentation, Elon said they haven’t actually settled on a name yet but that the specific spaceship that makes the maiden voyage to Mars might be called Heart of Gold1—so no one knows what to call it.
Which is why—until I hear otherwise—I’ll be calling it something I once heard Elon describe it as in an interview: the Big Fucking Rocket (BFR).
The Big Fucking Rocket is fucking big. At 400 feet tall, it’s the height of a 40-story skyscraper. At 40 feet in diameter, a school bus could fit entirely underneath its footprint. It’s more than three times the mass and generates over three times the thrust of the gargantuan Saturn V—the rocket used in the Apollo mission—which currently stands as by far the biggest rocket humanity has made.
Here’s how it stacks up next to a bunch of other rockets in size:
   
The difference is even more extreme when you compare the rockets by how many kilograms of payload (i.e. cargo and/or people) they can each take to orbit:
   
For comparison, SpaceX’s badass Falcon 9 rocket will be able to take about 4 tons of payload to Mars, and the Falcon Heavy—which is about to be today’s most powerful rocket—will be able to take about 13 tons to Mars. Elon believes the BFR will be able to take a few hundred tons of payload to Mars at first and eventually be able to take 1,000 tons. The absurdity of that statistic—that the behemoth Falcon Heavy can only manage a little over 1% of the BFR’s ultimate Mars payload—is pretty hard to absorb.
Now, to be clear—what I’ve been calling the Big Fucking Rocket this whole time is actually two things: a Big Fucking Spaceship sitting on top of a Big Fucking Booster.
   
 The Big Fucking Booster 
Let’s start by talking about the booster. The 25-story-high booster—AKA the actual rocket of the BFR—is what Elon calls “quite a beast.” It’s the biggest booster of all time—by far. By physical size, definitely, but even more so by thrust.
In the SpaceX post, I talked about the Falcon 9’s nine Merlin engines, and how each one was powerful enough to lift a stack of 40 cars up into the sky—in total, that meant the Falcon 9 set of engines could lift 360 cars. The Falcon Heavy, with its 27 Merlin engines, could lift a stack of over 1,000 cars up past the clouds.2
 The Big Fucking Booster sits atop a different kind of engine: the Raptor.
   
The Raptor engine looks a lot like a Merlin, with one key difference—by significantly increasing the pressure, SpaceX has made the Raptor over three times more powerful than a Merlin.
A single Raptor engine produces 310 tons of thrust—enough to lift 310 tons, or a stack of 172 cars, or an entire Boeing 747 airplane, into the sky. That’s what one Raptor can do.3
 And the BFB has 42 of them.4
    
All together, that’s an unheard of 13,033 tons of thrust, enough to push more than 7,000 cars—or 50 large airplanes—up to space.
 The Big Fucking Spaceship 
So then there’s the spacecraft—which SpaceX calls the Interplanetary Spaceship, and which I’m going to keep calling the Big Fucking Spaceship because it’s more fun. The BFS is the big cool-looking thing on top of the BFB (in case you’re getting Big Fucking Confused—the Big Fucking Spaceship (BFS) on top of the Big Fucking Booster (BFB) together make what I’ve been calling the Big Fucking Rocket (BFR)). The BFS is what will take the people and cargo to Mars. It’s also what will launch, on its own, off Mars and return to Earth with people who want to come back.
The BFS is itself the size of a tall, 16-story building, and is 55 feet wide at its thickest point. In addition to hundreds, and eventually a thousand tons of cargo, the BFS will be able to carry as many as 100 people at the beginning, and Elon believes that number could grow to 200 and even above 300 people over time—like a cruise ship.
With nine Raptor engines, it’ll have more liftoff thrust on its own than any of today’s rockets—including next year’s Falcon Heavy. For a second-stage, cargo-carrying spacecraft to pack more thrust than even the most powerful first-stage rockets is outrageous.
Here’s a cross-section up close:
   
I asked Elon what it’ll be like to ride in it. He said, “Well, you’d be in a giant spaceship in microgravity.5 I mean, it would be pretty fun. You’d be floating around.”
Good point.
In the presentation Q&amp;A, he added: “It has to be really fun and exciting, it can’t feel cramped or boring. The crew compartment is set up so that you can do zero-g games, you can float around, there will be movies, lecture halls, cabins, a restaurant—it’ll be really fun to go.”
Um, yeah, get me on that shit now. A zero gravity cruise ship. With this view:
   
And if you were to go, here’s how the whole thing would work:
 1) Get on the ship. The BFR will be taking off from pad 39A at Cape Canaveral, Florida—the same pad that the Apollo astronauts left from. This is because that pad was built to be absurdly large since they didn’t know yet how big a rocket they’d be using. When you get there, you head up the tower and across the bridge into the Big Fucking Spaceship.
   
 2) Take off. You strap in, and the BFR lifts off. After a few minutes, the first-stage BFB separates and heads back down to Earth. The BFS that you’re in continues onward and settles into Earth’s orbit.
   
 3) Refuel in orbit. After landing back on Earth, the BFB is capped with a new BFS—this one full of propellant (liquid oxygen and methane).6 It lifts off again and pings the propellant-filled spaceship into orbit, where it rendezvouses7 with your spaceship. The two connect like two orcas holding hands as the propellant is transferred.
   
This happens a few more times until your spaceship is entirely refueled.8 This process is critical A) for lowering the cost of the trip, and B) for making the trip much faster. People have always thought a journey to Mars would take six or nine months, but the BFS will get there in three.
 4) H ead to Mars. Three months of fun times in microgravity and getting really sick of the other people on the ship.9 During the journey, the spaceship steers using cold gas thrusters, powered by huge solar arrays:
   
 5) Enter the Mars atmosphere. Time for the heat shield to be in the shit:
   
 6) Land on Mars. Upright, the same way the first stage lands on Earth.
 7) Live on Mars for a while doing god knows what. If it’s early on in the colonization process, you’re probably there to work and help build up the initial industries. Later on, it could be anything—research, entrepreneurship, or just simply adventure.
 8) Make propellant on Mars. This will be one of the key early industries to set up on Mars. Propellant consists of liquid oxygen (O2) and methane (CH4), which are both conveniently easy to make from the massive quantities of H2O (ice) and CO2 (the main gas in the Martian atmosphere) already sitting on Mars. They’ll use this propellant to load up the spaceship you came there on in preparation for its voyage back to Earth. Doing this spares the massive expense of having to carry propellant all the way from Earth for the return trip.
 9) Either stay forever or come back. If you come back, you’ll do so by boarding one of the BFS’s that came over in the last batch.
 10) Land vertically on Earth. Just like you did on Mars. The spaceship will go through routine maintenance in preparation to head back to Mars two years later.
 11) Be that insufferable person who can’t be part of any conversation without figuring out some way to bring up your time on Mars.  
Mission complete.
This kind-of-confusing diagram sums it up:
   
And this video sums it up very deliciously:
 
So that’s the deal with the Big Fucking Rocket and how it’ll all work.10
 Now let’s talk about how this all might play out.
 The Plan 
Back to reality. So how do we get from, “there’s this rad potential rocket that might be ready to launch in five years” to “we’re a thriving multi-planetary civilization with a million people on Mars”?
10,000 flights. That’s how many BFS trips to Mars Elon thinks it’ll take to bring the Mars population to a million.
Why 10,000? Because there will be at least 100 people on most trips, and that number will go up over time—but there will also be some people coming back from Mars each time other people go. In the lower part of each BFS will be a huge cargo compartment. Elon thinks we’ll need to get at least 10 million tons of cargo to Mars for the million-person colony to become self-sustaining, which will happen in a little over 10,000 flights if SpaceX can get the cargo payload capacity up to 1,000 tons relatively quickly, as they hope to.
And when will these 10,000 trips start?
Well let’s take a look at the Mars-Earth Synodic calendar—which deals with the dates when Earth and Mars are closest to each other (called a “Mars opposition”). Earth’s orbit is smaller than Mars’s, so Earth goes around the sun quicker—so much so that every 26 months, Earth laps Mars and they’re briefly next to each other. That’s the one time when Earth-Mars transfers can happen.
We’re currently pretty close to Mars, since the last Mars opposition happened on May 22, 2016. That’s why, if you happen to be an “oh shit there’s a way-too-bright star let me take out my Sky Guide app and figure out which planet that is and then tell everyone I’m with and find that, yet again, no one cares, because everyone is a horrible person” nerd like me, you know that all summer, Mars has been super prominent and bright in our night sky.11 A year from now, Mars will be on the other side of the sun from us, and we won’t see it in our night sky at all.
The 2016 Earth-Mars opposition is also a special one, because it’s the last time it’ll happen without anybody talking about it.
Why? Because starting with the next one in July of 2018, SpaceX will start sending stuff to Mars each time there’s an opposition, and this will become increasingly big news each time. Here’s the tentative schedule, if everything goes perfectly to plan:
 Upcoming Mars Oppositions – and what SpaceX is planning for each
 July, 2018: Send a Dragon spacecraft (the Falcon 9’s SUV-size spacecraft) to Mars with cargo
 October, 2020: Send multiple Dragons with more cargo
 December, 2022: Maiden BFS voyage to Mars. Carrying only cargo. This is the spaceship Elon wants to call Heart of Gold.
 January, 2025: First people-carrying BFS voyage to Mars.
Let’s all go back and read that last line again.
  January, 2025: First people-carrying BFS voyage to Mars. 
Did you catch that?
If things go to plan, the Neil Armstrong of Mars will touch down about eight years from now. 
And zero people are talking about it.
But they will be. The hype will start a couple years from now when the Dragons make their Mars trips, and it’ll kick into high gear in 2022 when the Big Fucking Spaceship finally launches and heads to Mars and lands there. Everyone will be talking about this.
And the buzz will just accelerate from there as the first group of BFS astronauts are announced and become household names, admired for their bravery, because everyone will know there’s a reasonable chance something goes wrong and they don’t make it back alive. Then, in 2024 they’ll take off on a three-month trip that’ll be front-page news every day. When they land, everyone on Earth will be watching. It’ll be 1969 all over again.
This is a thing that’s happening.
Elon doesn’t like when people ask him about this first voyage and the Neil Armstrong of Mars. He says that it’s not about humanity putting a new multi-planetary feather in its cap, and he’s quick to point out, “putting people on the moon was super exciting—but where’s our moon base?” In other words, having humanity give Mars a high five for bragging rights is not what matters—what matters is carrying out the full vision of actually creating a full, self-sustaining civilization on Mars.
And yeah, sure, fine. But I’m excited for 2025. It’s gonna be so fun.
Anyway, so then the next Mars opposition will roll around in 2027. This time, if everything stays on track, multiple BFS’s will make the trek to Mars, carrying more people than were in the original group in 2025. And the spaceship that went over in 2025—the space Mayflower—will make its return trip to Earth, carrying some of the first group of Mars pioneers back home. They’ll return to massive celebration as international heroes, and the legendary spaceship will head off to enjoy its life in the Air and Space Museum.
Meanwhile, we’ll all be glued to the TV12 as the group of BFS’s arrive on Mars, where the people in them will continue the grueling work started by the 2025 group. The early colonists will have a hard job like early colonists always do—and this will be extra hard. Not only will they have to truly start from scratch—digging mines and quarries and refineries, constructing the first underground village habitat with the first Martian hospitals and schools and greenhouse farms, laying down a giant plumbing system to pump water into the village, building that first rocket propellant plant—but they’ll have to do all of this in a place where they can’t go outside without a spacesuit on, and where everyone and everything they’ve ever known is on a pale blue dot in the night sky.
It’ll be hard, but for the explorers of our world the payoff may be worth it. Elon says: “You can go anywhere on Earth in 24 hours. There’s no physical frontier on Earth anymore. Now, space is that frontier, so it’ll appeal to anyone with that exploratory spirit.”
In April of 2029, SpaceX will send an even larger group of spacecraft, people, and cargo to Mars. This time, it’ll probably get less attention. By 2029, we’ll probably be getting used to the idea that there are people on Mars and that every 26 months, a great two-way migration occurs.
The growing Mars colony will continue to entice the adventurers—those who read about the great sailing exhibitions of the 15th and 16th centuries and yearn to be there. When I asked Elon about how the small colony will grow and evolve, he said: “Think of the Mars colony as an organism that starts off as a zygote, and then becomes multi-cellular, and then gets organ differentiation—so it doesn’t look exactly the same all the way along, any more than the first settlement in Jamestown wasn’t representative of the United States today. It’ll be the same with Mars—Mars will be the new New World.”
The 2031 and 2033 and 2035 oppositions will bring substantially more people to the new New World. By this point, the budding Martian city will be a part of our lives. We’ll follow the Twitter feeds of some of our favorite journalists on Mars to keep up with what’s happening there. We’ll all get hooked on Mars’s first hit reality shows. And some of us will start thinking, “Should I sign up to go to Mars one of these years before I get too old?”
By 2050, there will be over a hundred thousand people on Mars. The company your son works for might have a branch there, and he’ll be saying goodbye to a couple co-workers who are about to head to the planet for a 52-month stint. He tells you that he doesn’t want to go because he doesn’t want to take his ninth-grade daughter away from her life and her friends. But he says she’s applying to a program that would bring her to Mars from the ages of 17 to 23 for an urban planning degree. You worry, even though you know it’s irrational. It’s just that you remember the days when going to Mars was risky and dangerous, and some part of you is still uncomfortable with it. And what if she decides not to come back?
By 2065, the early days of Mars seem primitive. During the first few Mars migrations, only a few spaceships made the trip with only 100 people in each, it was prohibitively expensive to go, it took three months to get there, and there were only a few very grueling industries on Mars to work in.
In 2065, every Mars opposition sees over 1,000 ships make the trip, each carrying over 500 people and a couple thousand tons of cargo. Half a million people make the journey every two years, and about 50,000 less than that come back, because Earth-to-Mars migration capacity grows a little bit each time as more ships are built. The trip, which now takes only 30 days, costs only $60,000 (in 2016 dollars)—and most people just pay off the ticket price with their well-paying job on Mars (labor is in high demand as the early Mars cities continue to expand and new cities are built).
Many people remember those early days of the Mars colony when it was all about SpaceX—funded by SpaceX or their cargo clients and driven by their ambition and their ingenuity and their guts. But now, dozens of companies specialize in Earth-Mars transit and hundreds of companies focus on development and entrepreneurship on Mars. And transit is paid for like planes and trains and buses are paid for today—by passengers buying tickets.
A decade later, the 2074 migration brings the Mars population above a million people. Small celebrations break out around both worlds, as a long-awaited landmark is achieved. Most people though, don’t even notice.
___________
Everything I just said was based on things Elon said on my phone call with him. Some of it was numbers he said directly—like the last paragraph, which came from him saying, “I’m hopeful that we can get to a million roughly 50 years after the start.” Other times it was me extrapolating a possible future, given the predictions I heard from him. It’s all based in reality. At least, it’s based in Elon Musk’s best crack at reality. He was very careful to qualify everything that sounded like a prediction or a projection with, “This is what might happen if things go well—but there’s no way to know, and many things could go wrong along the way.” He emphasized that “it’s not that SpaceX has all the answers and we’ve got it covered or anything like that—it’s that we want to show that it’s possible. But it’s far from a given.” As for things that could go wrong, he listed off a few (like World War III), and one of his biggest concerns is that if he somehow dies young, SpaceX could be taken over by someone who wants to milk the company for profit instead of staying single-mindedly focused on the Mars civilization mission.
But if SpaceX can manage to get this thing started, Elon thinks it could be not just a big deal in itself, it could jumpstart a slew of new possibilities for humanity. He explains:
 The big picture isn’t just to back up the hard drive but to really change humanity into a multi-planetary species. Essentially what we’re saying is we’re establishing a regular cargo route to Mars. With the economic forcing function of interplanetary commerce, there will be the resources and the incentive to massively improve space transport technology, and I think then things really go to a whole new level.  
 What I’m describing may sound really crazy, but it actually will be a small fraction of what is ultimately done, as long as we become a two-planet civilization. Look at shipping technology in Europe. When all you had to do was cross the Mediterranean, the ships were pretty lame—they couldn’t cross the Atlantic. So commerce basically had short-range vessels. Without the forcing function, shipping technology didn’t improve that much—you could do the same things with ships, pretty much, around the time of Julius Caesar as you could around the time of Columbus. 1,500 years later, you could still just cross the Mediterranean. But as soon as there was a reason to cross the Atlantic, shipping technology improved dramatically. There needed to be the American colonies in order for that to happen. 
The people at SpaceX believe that once we’re on Mars, the rest of the Solar System becomes accessible as well. That’s why they didn’t just create images of their Big Fucking Rocket standing proudly on Mars. They showed it flying by Jupiter.
   
And Saturn.
   
And bringing human explorers to faraway moons.
   
   
They’re planning for a time when any person can go anywhere they want in our vast Solar System—a new golden age for exploration, with uncharted physical frontiers in every direction.
   
___________
If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the  Wait But Why email list  and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. It’s a very unannoying list, don’t worry.
If you’d like to support Wait But Why,  here’s our Patreon .
___________
Here’s the whole WBW Elon Musk series:
 Part 1, on Elon: Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man
Part 2, on Tesla: How Tesla Will Change the World  
 Part 3, on SpaceX: How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars
Part 4, on the thing that makes Elon so effective: The Chef and the Cook: Musk’s Secret Sauce  
Extra Post #1: The Deal With Solar City 
Extra Post #2: The Deal With the Hyperloop 
 
Six other Wait But Why explainers:
  The American Presidents—Washington to Lincoln  
  From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story  
  The AI Revolution: Road to Superintelligence  
  The Fermi Paradox: Where are all the aliens?  
  How Cryonics Works (and Why it Makes Sense)  
  How to Name a Baby
SpaceX's Big Fucking Rocket – The Full Story — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-rocket-the-full-story.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/12/sheer-delight-google-earth-timelapse.html
The Sheer Delight of Google Earth Timelapse — Wait But Why
2016-12-01
Tim Urban
<div><article>
	<div><p><em>This is a <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/the-shed">Shed</a> post. If you’re new to Wait But Why and don’t know what the Shed is, it’s a place where I post things I find on the internet. This is different than a <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/minis">Mini post</a>, which is a WBW original post, just a short one. You can check out the whole Shed <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/the-shed">here</a>. </em></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>My entire morning was just derailed when a reader named Stuart emailed me a <em>delicious </em>thing that Google has done, called <a href="https://blog.google/products/earth/our-most-detailed-view-earth-across-space-and-time/">Google Earth Timelapse</a>.</p>
<p>Using high-resolution satellite photos, Google has created a timelapse of <em>the planet’s entire surface</em> that brings you from 1984 to 2016 in four seconds. Google explains:</p>
<p><em>We sifted through about three quadrillion pixels—that’s 3 followed by 15 zeroes—from more than 5,000,000 satellite images … We took the best of all those pixels to create 33 images of the entire planet, one for each year. We then encoded these new 3.95 terapixel global images into just over 25,000,000 overlapping multi-resolution video tiles.</em></p>
<p>They have compiled the greatest hits into a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIQWphoSi6w&amp;index=1&amp;list=PLWw80tqUZ5J81Xq5k3LL2NjOF5YNXtgS9">40-minute YouTube playlist</a>, which I may or may not have watched in full.</p>
<p>I plucked out my favorites from the playlist. Here they are (best in full-screen):</p>
<p>One fun category is expanding cities. Some cities were already super developed in 1984 and don’t show super-dramatic changes. Like New York:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Same story with Downtown San Francisco—though you can see plenty of development in the form of the little white dots of new building roofs being sprinkled on top of an already-dense landscape. Also note the birth of an Oakland-San Francisco bridge:</p>
<p></p>
<p>But in cities that have seen great development in the past 30 years, the timelapses are mesmerizing. To an alien watching Earth from afar, city development would look like the spores of a virus spreading across the surface.</p>
<p>Here’s Bangkok:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Beijing:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Here’s Cairo, and a new city called New Cairo City forming on the right side:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Chinese cities are especially crazy. Like Chengdu:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Hefei:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Shanghai did this between 1990 and 2010:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Shanghai-in-1990-and-2010-1.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Which looks like this from above:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Here’s Kuala Lampur:</p>
<p></p>
<p>And Dubai, which grew like a normal city until around 2000 when things got silly:</p>
<p></p>
<p>And then there’s Al Khiran Pearl City in Kuwait, where they turned a few dozen miles of beachfront property into like 1,000:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Another category I like is farmland. The annual crop fluctuations produce cool looking timelapses. Like this farmy area of Cologne, Germany:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Or even delightful timelapse of rural California:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Or this part of Nebraska, which in timelapse looks like static on a TV:</p>
<p></p>
<p>This is a cool one from Bolivia that shows farm squares coming into existence over time:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Not really sure what’s going on here in Rondonia, Brazil, but it’s cool looking:</p>
<p></p>
<p>In Zwenkau, Germany, the last place in every alphabetical list, it looks like either the Germans have intentionally created a bunch of lakes, or the lakes have formed as an effect of their farming:</p>
<p></p>
<p>I think this timelapse of Madagascar is what deforestation looks like from above:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Glaciers are also cool in timelapse. Glaciers are flowing rivers of ice. They normally move so slowly they just seem static to our eye, but timelapse reveals their movement:</p>
<p></p>
<p>This one of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica shows the ice melting over time:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Water’s cool too. Apparently there are a lot of lakes out there drying up. Like Utah’s Great Salt Lake:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Or Kazakhstan’s and Uzbekistan’s Aral Sea, which is drying up as a result of Soviet farming efforts and causing an <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/~tmt2120/introduction.htm">ecological disaster</a>:</p>
<p></p>
<p>And Iran’s Lake Urmia is almost gone:</p>
<p></p>
<p>Timelapses also show how rivers slither around the landscape:</p>
<p></p>
<p>And it sucks when you build your city on a river and then the river gets bored and leaves:</p>
<p></p>
<p>And finally, here are a couple that show the staggering effect of a dam:</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p>Again, the whole playlist is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibuGSqGEMGU&amp;index=2&amp;list=PLWw80tqUZ5J81Xq5k3LL2NjOF5YNXtgS9">here</a>, and below, you can look at any place on the Earth you want and press play to watch it timelapse (if it’s not working, check it out <a href="https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/">here</a>).</p>
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 The Sheer Delight of Google Earth Timelapse

 December 1, 2016 By Tim Urban


 This is a Shed post. If you’re new to Wait But Why and don’t know what the Shed is, it’s a place where I post things I find on the internet. This is different than a Mini post, which is a WBW original post, just a short one. You can check out the whole Shed here.

 ___________

 My entire morning was just derailed when a reader named Stuart emailed me a delicious thing that Google has done, called Google Earth Timelapse.

 Using high-resolution satellite photos, Google has created a timelapse of the planet’s entire surface that brings you from 1984 to 2016 in four seconds. Google explains:

 We sifted through about three quadrillion pixels—that’s 3 followed by 15 zeroes—from more than 5,000,000 satellite images … We took the best of all those pixels to create 33 images of the entire planet, one for each year. We then encoded these new 3.95 terapixel global images into just over 25,000,000 overlapping multi-resolution video tiles.

 They have compiled the greatest hits into a 40-minute YouTube playlist, which I may or may not have watched in full.

 I plucked out my favorites from the playlist. Here they are (best in full-screen):

 One fun category is expanding cities. Some cities were already super developed in 1984 and don’t show super-dramatic changes. Like New York:

 Same story with Downtown San Francisco—though you can see plenty of development in the form of the little white dots of new building roofs being sprinkled on top of an already-dense landscape. Also note the birth of an Oakland-San Francisco bridge:

 But in cities that have seen great development in the past 30 years, the timelapses are mesmerizing. To an alien watching Earth from afar, city development would look like the spores of a virus spreading across the surface.

 Here’s Bangkok:

 Beijing:

 Here’s Cairo, and a new city called New Cairo City forming on the right side:

 Chinese cities are especially crazy. Like Chengdu:

 Hefei:

 Shanghai did this between 1990 and 2010:

 Which looks like this from above:

 Here’s Kuala Lampur:

 And Dubai, which grew like a normal city until around 2000 when things got silly:

 And then there’s Al Khiran Pearl City in Kuwait, where they turned a few dozen miles of beachfront property into like 1,000:

 Another category I like is farmland. The annual crop fluctuations produce cool looking timelapses. Like this farmy area of Cologne, Germany:

 Or even delightful timelapse of rural California:

 Or this part of Nebraska, which in timelapse looks like static on a TV:

 This is a cool one from Bolivia that shows farm squares coming into existence over time:

 Not really sure what’s going on here in Rondonia, Brazil, but it’s cool looking:

 In Zwenkau, Germany, the last place in every alphabetical list, it looks like either the Germans have intentionally created a bunch of lakes, or the lakes have formed as an effect of their farming:

 I think this timelapse of Madagascar is what deforestation looks like from above:

 Glaciers are also cool in timelapse. Glaciers are flowing rivers of ice. They normally move so slowly they just seem static to our eye, but timelapse reveals their movement:

 This one of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica shows the ice melting over time:

 Water’s cool too. Apparently there are a lot of lakes out there drying up. Like Utah’s Great Salt Lake:

 Or Kazakhstan’s and Uzbekistan’s Aral Sea, which is drying up as a result of Soviet farming efforts and causing an ecological disaster:

 And Iran’s Lake Urmia is almost gone:

 Timelapses also show how rivers slither around the landscape:

 And it sucks when you build your city on a river and then the river gets bored and leaves:

 And finally, here are a couple that show the staggering effect of a dam:

 Again, the whole playlist is here, and below, you can look at any place on the Earth you want and press play to watch it timelapse (if it’s not working, check it out here).

 Tweet

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This is a Shed post. If you’re new to Wait But Why and don’t know what the Shed is, it’s a place where I post things I find on the internet. This is different than a Mini post, which is a WBW original post, just a short one. You can check out the whole Shed here.  
___________
My entire morning was just derailed when a reader named Stuart emailed me a delicious thing that Google has done, called Google Earth Timelapse.
Using high-resolution satellite photos, Google has created a timelapse of the planet’s entire surface that brings you from 1984 to 2016 in four seconds. Google explains:
 We sifted through about three quadrillion pixels—that’s 3 followed by 15 zeroes—from more than 5,000,000 satellite images … We took the best of all those pixels to create 33 images of the entire planet, one for each year. We then encoded these new 3.95 terapixel global images into just over 25,000,000 overlapping multi-resolution video tiles. 
They have compiled the greatest hits into a 40-minute YouTube playlist, which I may or may not have watched in full.
I plucked out my favorites from the playlist. Here they are (best in full-screen):
One fun category is expanding cities. Some cities were already super developed in 1984 and don’t show super-dramatic changes. Like New York:
 
Same story with Downtown San Francisco—though you can see plenty of development in the form of the little white dots of new building roofs being sprinkled on top of an already-dense landscape. Also note the birth of an Oakland-San Francisco bridge:
 
But in cities that have seen great development in the past 30 years, the timelapses are mesmerizing. To an alien watching Earth from afar, city development would look like the spores of a virus spreading across the surface.
Here’s Bangkok:
 
Beijing:
 
Here’s Cairo, and a new city called New Cairo City forming on the right side:
 
Chinese cities are especially crazy. Like Chengdu:
 
Hefei:
 
Shanghai did this between 1990 and 2010:
   
Which looks like this from above:
 
Here’s Kuala Lampur:
 
And Dubai, which grew like a normal city until around 2000 when things got silly:
 
And then there’s Al Khiran Pearl City in Kuwait, where they turned a few dozen miles of beachfront property into like 1,000:
 
Another category I like is farmland. The annual crop fluctuations produce cool looking timelapses. Like this farmy area of Cologne, Germany:
 
Or even delightful timelapse of rural California:
 
Or this part of Nebraska, which in timelapse looks like static on a TV:
 
This is a cool one from Bolivia that shows farm squares coming into existence over time:
 
Not really sure what’s going on here in Rondonia, Brazil, but it’s cool looking:
 
In Zwenkau, Germany, the last place in every alphabetical list, it looks like either the Germans have intentionally created a bunch of lakes, or the lakes have formed as an effect of their farming:
 
I think this timelapse of Madagascar is what deforestation looks like from above:
 
Glaciers are also cool in timelapse. Glaciers are flowing rivers of ice. They normally move so slowly they just seem static to our eye, but timelapse reveals their movement:
 
This one of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica shows the ice melting over time:
 
Water’s cool too. Apparently there are a lot of lakes out there drying up. Like Utah’s Great Salt Lake:
 
Or Kazakhstan’s and Uzbekistan’s Aral Sea, which is drying up as a result of Soviet farming efforts and causing an ecological disaster:
 
And Iran’s Lake Urmia is almost gone:
 
Timelapses also show how rivers slither around the landscape:
 
And it sucks when you build your city on a river and then the river gets bored and leaves:
 
And finally, here are a couple that show the staggering effect of a dam:
 
 
Again, the whole playlist is here, and below, you can look at any place on the Earth you want and press play to watch it timelapse (if it’s not working, check it out here).
The Sheer Delight of Google Earth Timelapse — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/12/sheer-delight-google-earth-timelapse.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/07/theres-an-equal-number-of-people-in-the-blue-and-red-areas.html
There's an Equal Number of People in the Blue and Red Areas — Wait But Why
2015-07-09
Tim Urban
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	July 9, 2015	
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	<div><p>I once did a <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/what-if-all-71-billion-people-moved-to.html">post</a> on population density. In it, I showed how dense East Asia is with this map:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Half-the-World.jpg"></a></p>
<p>This map, via <a href="http://www.ourworldindata.org/">Max Roser’s</a> awesome <a href="https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser">Twitter</a>, might be even more interesting. It shows how sparsely populated most of the land on Earth really is. The blue regions hold only 5% of the world’s population (around 350 million people). The same amount of people—5%—live in the tiny red region:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/bCY7Scu.jpg"></a></p>
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 There’s an Equal Number of People in the Blue and Red Areas

 July 9, 2015 By Tim Urban


 I once did a post on population density. In it, I showed how dense East Asia is with this map:

 This map, via Max Roser’s awesome Twitter, might be even more interesting. It shows how sparsely populated most of the land on Earth really is. The blue regions hold only 5% of the world’s population (around 350 million people). The same amount of people—5%—live in the tiny red region:

 Tweet

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July 9, 2015	
	By Tim Urban	 
	
	
	 I once did a post on population density. In it, I showed how dense East Asia is with this map:
   
This map, via Max Roser’s awesome Twitter, might be even more interesting. It shows how sparsely populated most of the land on Earth really is. The blue regions hold only 5% of the world’s population (around 350 million people). The same amount of people—5%—live in the tiny red region:
   
	
	
	  
	
	
	 
	
		
	
	About Tim Urban
	
	
	
	   
	 Home
	Archive
There's an Equal Number of People in the Blue and Red Areas — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/07/theres-an-equal-number-of-people-in-the-blue-and-red-areas.html
https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

Wed Mar 20 02:43:48 +0000 2013
waitbutwhy?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
<div>Writer, infant| profile_url: https://waitbutwhy.com/ | name: Tim Urban | created_at: Wed Mar 20 02:43:48 +0000 2013 | favourites_count: 4278 | followers_count: 821707 | friends_count: 796 | media_count: 1747 | possibly_sensitive: False | verified: False | statuses_count: 6867 | location: </div><div>My book What's Our Problem? is now available.
The book introduces a new framework for thinking about our chaotic political environment. With 303 drawings, it's a toolbox for understanding our societies, our group dynamics, and our own minds.
Get it here: https://t.co/BnPpcn0RYr| created_at: Tue Feb 21 11:21:24 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 14104 | quote_count: 372 | reply_count: 990 | retweet_count: 2080 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>In case Twitter is making you anxious, here’s a man making a traditional teapot.
[tiktok: zishacraftsman] https://t.co/Kql2KzpIWB| created_at: Mon Nov 21 03:45:24 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 81717 | quote_count: 1615 | reply_count: 1095 | retweet_count: 13142 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Population density thread because you and I both know you have nothing better to do.
Let's start with this cool way to visualize population density, by @undertheraedar. The height of each spike displays the population density in that location. https://t.co/Y6lDpHjEga| created_at: Wed Jul 20 02:46:06 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 62975 | quote_count: 1260 | reply_count: 1489 | retweet_count: 10180 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>We think a lot about those black lines, forgetting that it’s all still in our hands. https://t.co/RSZ1d3W642| created_at: Fri Mar 05 16:14:34 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 59870 | quote_count: 1299 | reply_count: 345 | retweet_count: 13764 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Everything we call civilization was invented in the last 500 generations—way too short a time for our bodies and brains to re-optimize. We're a bunch of primates in a totally unnatural environment, trying our best. Good thing to keep in mind! https://t.co/bkKCOFlI1Q| created_at: Fri Apr 29 19:51:01 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 58652 | quote_count: 930 | reply_count: 1298 | retweet_count: 10782 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Imagine what ancient people thought when something like this happened| created_at: Fri Aug 26 16:04:30 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 56653 | quote_count: 345 | reply_count: 1033 | retweet_count: 5460 | is_quote_status: True | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>“If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.” 
Montesquieu said this 300 years ago. We’re still working on this one.| created_at: Tue May 24 08:32:54 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 54711 | quote_count: 422 | reply_count: 588 | retweet_count: 8595 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>21 thoughts from 2021 I'd like to take into 2022: https://t.co/hdHCgGiYVj| created_at: Fri Dec 31 17:04:25 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 54733 | quote_count: 1006 | reply_count: 761 | retweet_count: 11035 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Pro tip: When you wake up in the middle of the night, the worst way to fall back asleep is to open Twitter| created_at: Sun Oct 30 09:36:06 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 50736 | quote_count: 313 | reply_count: 1067 | retweet_count: 2651 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>It's super important to support marginalized people in places where it's popular to do so https://t.co/HIwNaLtkPE| created_at: Wed Jun 01 18:34:42 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 45457 | quote_count: 451 | reply_count: 481 | retweet_count: 5968 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>New year, new you https://t.co/pC0Mz4dHLJ| created_at: Sun Jan 01 14:09:08 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 46270 | quote_count: 505 | reply_count: 305 | retweet_count: 7214 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Good job everyone https://t.co/hmOKbimdqY| created_at: Mon Jun 14 15:11:08 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 44864 | quote_count: 422 | reply_count: 568 | retweet_count: 3097 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>If Andromeda were brighter, this is how big it would be in our night sky. https://t.co/bbIY0M7F2I| created_at: Mon Aug 10 21:45:40 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 42991 | quote_count: 302 | reply_count: 287 | retweet_count: 4575 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>I keep thinking about this today https://t.co/nztgxuqtOn| created_at: Thu Feb 24 18:33:13 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 41141 | quote_count: 253 | reply_count: 477 | retweet_count: 5020 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>What’s the craziest conspiracy theory you think might be true?| created_at: Thu Nov 03 12:56:07 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 39121 | quote_count: 805 | reply_count: 7018 | retweet_count: 2146 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Feed a man a fish, feed him for a night.
Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.
Teach a man to make AI, the AI does all the fishing and everyone is fed forever. Then the AI accidentally kills all the people and the fish win.| created_at: Tue Mar 23 21:34:16 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 39131 | quote_count: 286 | reply_count: 508 | retweet_count: 4159 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Relationship tip: when your partner makes an awful but innocent mistake (leaves their phone in the cab, forgets their passport when heading to the airport for an international flight, drops and shatters a beloved item, gets in a fender bender, etc.), don't get mad at them. It…| created_at: Wed Aug 09 15:40:16 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 39403 | quote_count: 579 | reply_count: 831 | retweet_count: 4196 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>At the center of our planet is a solid sphere of iron &amp; nickel the size of India (1,500mi across) that's as hot as the surface of the sun, and its interaction w the molten iron surrounding it generates the magnetic field that keeps our atmosphere from blowing away.
pic: phys-org https://t.co/xE4mEyMPlU| created_at: Sun May 01 21:18:43 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 36172 | quote_count: 312 | reply_count: 1086 | retweet_count: 3075 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Five cities, then and now. Somewhere today there's a quiet fishing village that will be a 2100 megalopolis.
Hong Kong: 1964 | 2016 https://t.co/QhrrQZP0nb| created_at: Fri Jul 22 15:58:38 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 36541 | quote_count: 609 | reply_count: 531 | retweet_count: 4989 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Hidreley Diao uses AI to capture what historical figures would look like if they were modern people. 
George Washington: https://t.co/Wh5bi9FAgL| created_at: Sun Feb 20 18:39:56 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 34659 | quote_count: 1609 | reply_count: 414 | retweet_count: 6485 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Nintendo (founded 1889) and the Ottoman Empire coexisted (fell in 1922) for 33 years.| created_at: Wed May 04 16:08:57 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 32972 | quote_count: 324 | reply_count: 215 | retweet_count: 3404 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Some mantras for political thinking:
Truth is hard.
Humility is hard.
Independent thinking is hard.
Resisting tribalism is hard.
Over and over, you will forget that these things are hard, and that's probably when you'll fail at them.
1/5| created_at: Thu May 12 11:43:15 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 32386 | quote_count: 575 | reply_count: 595 | retweet_count: 5732 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>The cumulative solar arrays that would power the world. Kinda weird that we haven't just done this yet.
Image credit: @poweredbyart https://t.co/59uZXlctcH| created_at: Wed May 26 23:37:23 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 31291 | quote_count: 295 | reply_count: 883 | retweet_count: 3600 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Enough is enough with early riser privilege https://t.co/pD5uEaPTpN| created_at: Wed Jun 15 16:05:09 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 30850 | quote_count: 206 | reply_count: 276 | retweet_count: 2994 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>It's crazy that with an iPhone, a little Starlink antenna, and a solar power unit, you could live in an isolated cave in the mountains (or on a raft in the middle of the Pacific) and get a world-class education, start a business or art career, &amp; make friends all around the world.| created_at: Wed Sep 15 12:39:09 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 29379 | quote_count: 355 | reply_count: 596 | retweet_count: 3067 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>One of the most incredible examples of a country changing its mind on an issue. 
Without free speech, the incredibly unpopular 1958 viewpoint that said "there's nothing wrong with interracial marriage" would never have seen the light of day. https://t.co/oPQXo99O56| created_at: Tue Nov 22 16:58:22 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 28286 | quote_count: 310 | reply_count: 1055 | retweet_count: 3271 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>I graduated high school thinking I hated history, only to later realize it was my favorite thing. Good teaching should ignite curiosity.| created_at: Sun Mar 20 12:23:33 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 27907 | quote_count: 222 | reply_count: 530 | retweet_count: 1585 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Today, Elon tweeted this diagram by @SwipeWright, which sums up how a lot of people (including me) feel. Then a bunch of ppl responded w/ graphs showing that Republican politicians have moved farther right in that time than Dems have moved left. Here's what I think is happening:| created_at: Fri Apr 29 01:28:21 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 26907 | quote_count: 489 | reply_count: 1610 | retweet_count: 2795 | is_quote_status: True | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>We should probably start having more kids https://t.co/fAYwQbbHMV| created_at: Sun Feb 20 19:59:37 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 26748 | quote_count: 803 | reply_count: 2337 | retweet_count: 2804 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>New year, new you https://t.co/w6Q2BRyJPo| created_at: Tue Jan 02 15:15:13 +0000 2024 | favorite_count: 25973 | quote_count: 335 | reply_count: 205 | retweet_count: 4269 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Monthly reminder about that big green tree https://t.co/kM46Wsxo9O| created_at: Mon Jun 21 14:20:31 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 25406 | quote_count: 350 | reply_count: 123 | retweet_count: 4210 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>You’d have to compress Earth to this size (9 mm) to form a black hole. You’d have to compress the sun to 3 km and the moon to 0.1 mm (width of a human hair) to turn them into black holes. For every black hole out there, something THAT intense has happened.
Image: @lpfproject https://t.co/fL3dsFwHqz| created_at: Sat May 28 16:17:49 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 24118 | quote_count: 128 | reply_count: 539 | retweet_count: 1946 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>22 tweets from 2022 that might blow your mind:
Let's start with what a water droplet looks like at 6,000fps.
[nac Image Technology] https://t.co/XrZ9vPXaId| created_at: Tue Dec 27 18:19:11 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 24409 | quote_count: 151 | reply_count: 144 | retweet_count: 2968 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>I hope Japan actually does this https://t.co/PAG8AgxVEi| created_at: Thu Oct 06 13:00:30 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 23809 | quote_count: 278 | reply_count: 1150 | retweet_count: 1112 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Email from Steve Jobs to himself, September 2010. https://t.co/Rm6nXSsSpH| created_at: Sun Sep 11 03:02:04 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 23611 | quote_count: 166 | reply_count: 229 | retweet_count: 2907 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Monthly reminder to go hug someone https://t.co/aFp4ps7XM5| created_at: Sat Apr 30 22:56:08 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 23444 | quote_count: 338 | reply_count: 412 | retweet_count: 3872 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>My friend concisely sums up the last two months https://t.co/inhGGyN2uT| created_at: Tue Dec 13 23:59:25 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 21120 | quote_count: 42 | reply_count: 312 | retweet_count: 934 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Needle and thread under a microscope https://t.co/GxZdbP2ulE| created_at: Sat Feb 05 19:08:04 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 21012 | quote_count: 105 | reply_count: 304 | retweet_count: 1171 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>A 5 megabyte hard drive in 1956 vs. 1 terabyte today. A terabyte hard drive in 1956 would be the size of a 40-story building. https://t.co/kkMOYmWxDb| created_at: Mon Jun 20 23:18:49 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 19286 | quote_count: 135 | reply_count: 185 | retweet_count: 1890 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>30 years ago everyone left home without a phone every day. Just their wallet, keys, and thoughts. So weird.| created_at: Sat May 20 20:10:12 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 18882 | quote_count: 240 | reply_count: 620 | retweet_count: 2083 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>22 thoughts from 2022 I'd like to take into 2023:
https://t.co/bo83E67GbW| created_at: Sat Dec 24 18:29:46 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 18038 | quote_count: 160 | reply_count: 470 | retweet_count: 2581 | is_quote_status: True | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Once you die you no longer experience the passage of time, so it’s as if eternity passes in an instant. As far as you’re concerned, the moment you die the universe reaches its final heat death state. So make the very most of this little window of consciousness—it’s all there is!| created_at: Mon Nov 07 01:19:08 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 16590 | quote_count: 171 | reply_count: 1223 | retweet_count: 1562 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>1) If all humans stood in a circle, it would be way bigger than the moon's orbit.
2) If we all stood together as a crowd, we'd fit in NYC.
3) If we all stood stacked, we'd fit in a 1km cube.
4) If you removed the empty space in human atoms, we'd all fit in an M&amp;M. https://t.co/NTZNn4jsk5| created_at: Tue Aug 25 18:12:07 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 16731 | quote_count: 177 | reply_count: 210 | retweet_count: 1943 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Whales evolved from a bizarre, vaguely whale-looking land animal called the Pakicetus that lived in Pakistan 50 million years ago. https://t.co/AwAgQSGOj3| created_at: Fri Jul 22 00:57:12 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 15979 | quote_count: 1378 | reply_count: 838 | retweet_count: 1876 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>If you ever fantasize about having been an 1880s engineer working in Edison’s lab, apply to work at @neuralink.| created_at: Fri Aug 28 23:50:53 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 15972 | quote_count: 124 | reply_count: 444 | retweet_count: 1134 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Pangaea gets the last laugh.| created_at: Thu Apr 01 04:58:00 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 15954 | quote_count: 115 | reply_count: 471 | retweet_count: 1478 | is_quote_status: True | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>No one “builds a house.” They lay one brick again and again and again and the end result is a house. A remarkable, glorious achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable, unglorious tasks looks like from far away.
Procrastinators are bad at remembering this.| created_at: Sun Feb 13 19:20:55 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 15871 | quote_count: 128 | reply_count: 216 | retweet_count: 2141 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>A little breakdown of the situation: https://t.co/mbVKI6SrPT| created_at: Tue May 03 22:15:53 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 15325 | quote_count: 316 | reply_count: 830 | retweet_count: 1983 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>People in the early 1900s thought soda was healthy.
People in the 1950s thought white bread was healthy.
People in the 1990s thought margarine was healthy.
What's something most of us think is healthy today that future people will shake their heads at?| created_at: Thu Oct 13 14:33:10 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 14775 | quote_count: 1071 | reply_count: 7671 | retweet_count: 1329 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>It's finally here: the full story on Neuralink. I knew the future would be nuts but this is a whole other level. https://t.co/4I44hFJzFC https://t.co/YVA6dLH8uY| created_at: Thu Apr 20 20:30:47 +0000 2017 | favorite_count: 14592 | quote_count: 1155 | reply_count: 754 | retweet_count: 5679 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>I get sad once a week that I wasn't alive during the moon landing| created_at: Fri Mar 04 17:28:26 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 13341 | quote_count: 55 | reply_count: 584 | retweet_count: 334 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Will never be able to unsee it| created_at: Tue Apr 02 19:06:59 +0000 2024 | favorite_count: 14487 | quote_count: 25 | reply_count: 131 | retweet_count: 1049 | is_quote_status: True | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>If I aired a highlight reel of your most selfish life moments and most shameful thoughts, you'd seem like an awful person. If I aired a reel of your best, kindest moments, you'd seem like a saint. But people aren't highlight reels, and the unedited cut is always a messy mix! https://t.co/r3E53eFcAJ| created_at: Thu Dec 16 21:03:16 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 14141 | quote_count: 182 | reply_count: 183 | retweet_count: 1897 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Go hug someone https://t.co/I63AaP1xQu| created_at: Thu Sep 16 23:38:59 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 14212 | quote_count: 322 | reply_count: 196 | retweet_count: 2786 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Sine is blue, cosine is red. It's such bullshit that today's students get to have the internet explain stuff instead of having to figure it out yourself using incredibly awful textbooks.| created_at: Sun Jul 12 23:15:52 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 13946 | quote_count: 93 | reply_count: 135 | retweet_count: 1808 | is_quote_status: True | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>The James Webb mirror is a 6.5m/21ft beast. It can also see infrared light way better than Hubble, which will reveal galaxies so far away they’re redshifted beyond the visible spectrum. It’ll show us the first stars and formation of the first galaxies - our best time machine yet. https://t.co/QLt686wmHA| created_at: Sun Dec 26 09:22:14 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 13919 | quote_count: 91 | reply_count: 123 | retweet_count: 1387 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>What's up with boys and school?
Source: https://t.co/hYDCuPZLXG https://t.co/Hkw3WNEwey| created_at: Thu Mar 03 23:36:04 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 13077 | quote_count: 186 | reply_count: 594 | retweet_count: 1423 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Important lesson for young people: After childhood, there's no one to protect you from your own decisions. No one will stop you from getting yourself into a bad marriage, a job you hate, a mountain of debt, trouble with the law. You are the sole architect of your life path.| created_at: Wed Jan 03 16:56:00 +0000 2024 | favorite_count: 13317 | quote_count: 118 | reply_count: 160 | retweet_count: 2369 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>I'm just gonna start posting this during every major wave of current events. https://t.co/IPJdFoGcVC| created_at: Sun Jun 07 23:45:16 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 13201 | quote_count: 360 | reply_count: 153 | retweet_count: 3195 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Your family is weird
[credit: https://t.co/KlMspxor1q] https://t.co/YdeI02UDVA| created_at: Tue Feb 15 14:59:31 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 12781 | quote_count: 111 | reply_count: 330 | retweet_count: 1808 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>What country has the best candy?| created_at: Thu Feb 10 20:35:51 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 12337 | quote_count: 249 | reply_count: 3763 | retweet_count: 471 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>2100s people will think it’s so weird that humans used to get pregnant like other mammals.| created_at: Sun Apr 23 23:46:11 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 11907 | quote_count: 542 | reply_count: 2399 | retweet_count: 2685 | is_quote_status: True | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>It seems impossible at the beginning of this video that the person filming might be in danger| created_at: Mon Jul 11 01:01:27 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 11961 | quote_count: 82 | reply_count: 119 | retweet_count: 1439 | is_quote_status: True | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Everything we call civilization was invented in the last 500 generations—way too short a time for our bodies and brains to re-optimize. We're a bunch of forest primates in a totally unnatural environment, trying our little best. Someone needs to give our species a hug. https://t.co/i4UwWoJ9LZ| created_at: Tue Jul 07 20:50:00 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 11947 | quote_count: 268 | reply_count: 152 | retweet_count: 3439 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>When you’re the boss of the ideas in your head, you’re always willing to revise them.
When there’s no amount of evidence that will change your mind about something, it means that idea is your boss.
Humility is the awareness that no idea is worthy of being your boss.| created_at: Thu Mar 11 18:31:17 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 11813 | quote_count: 118 | reply_count: 122 | retweet_count: 1983 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>When the Aztec Empire was founded, the University of Oxford was already an ancient, centuries old institution.| created_at: Tue Jun 14 15:03:55 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 11292 | quote_count: 136 | reply_count: 231 | retweet_count: 708 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>It sucks jumping in a cold pool but once you’re in it’s fine. Same pattern applies to:
-Getting started with work each day
-Having a hard conversation with a friend
-Singing in front of people
-Breaking up with someone
Most of the time, jumping in is the hardest part.| created_at: Wed Aug 18 16:35:53 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 11854 | quote_count: 88 | reply_count: 120 | retweet_count: 1543 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>The trademark merry-go-round of human societies. Kinda worried we're somewhere on the right side... https://t.co/NUCnY9bUAw| created_at: Thu Apr 29 20:46:32 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 11731 | quote_count: 119 | reply_count: 182 | retweet_count: 1415 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Phones are an unusual example of societal equality. Incredibly rich people have cars, houses, planes, vacations, jewelry, clothing, furniture, food, wine, stadium seats, and services that other people couldn't dream of having. But they have the same smartphone everyone else has.| created_at: Tue Sep 12 21:57:40 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 11502 | quote_count: 129 | reply_count: 359 | retweet_count: 736 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>What’s something you’ve changed your mind about?| created_at: Wed Dec 08 16:43:33 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 10939 | quote_count: 299 | reply_count: 1897 | retweet_count: 385 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>There are people alive today who were around when we still thought the Milky Way was the entire universe| created_at: Fri Jul 15 02:37:14 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 10875 | quote_count: 29 | reply_count: 238 | retweet_count: 750 | is_quote_status: True | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>A tiny section of our galactic center. 10 million stars.
Where is everybody? https://t.co/DLygMogR7m| created_at: Thu Oct 29 17:20:44 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 10964 | quote_count: 256 | reply_count: 432 | retweet_count: 708 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>The thing I understand least is how there are incredibly thorough Wikipedia pages for literally everything.| created_at: Fri Jul 31 02:09:40 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 10919 | quote_count: 80 | reply_count: 235 | retweet_count: 595 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>A tribe of 100 people gained 100 years of life experience every year.
A city of 10,000 gained the same in 3 days.
Today, our species lives 15,000 years every minute and almost a million years every hour.
Tiny improvements in how we communicate can pay massive wisdom dividends.| created_at: Wed Apr 05 16:07:46 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 10826 | quote_count: 108 | reply_count: 396 | retweet_count: 1141 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>My body hates watching this
[@trevorjacob93] https://t.co/7XXeBgqfKJ| created_at: Wed Aug 17 02:50:06 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 10600 | quote_count: 146 | reply_count: 472 | retweet_count: 606 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>So even though the left hasn't moved that far left (as is shown by voting results), the left is in a sense being held hostage by their extreme wing, making a lot of people who enthusiastically voted for Obama feel politically homeless today.| created_at: Fri Apr 29 01:28:21 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 10468 | quote_count: 378 | reply_count: 1166 | retweet_count: 510 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Have you experienced deja vu?| created_at: Fri May 06 18:26:21 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9915 | quote_count: 201 | reply_count: 1943 | retweet_count: 771 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Using a modern 80-year lifetime as a unit, only 150 lifetimes ago, the Americas were untouched by people. The first human set foot in Europe only 500 lifetimes ago. 1,200 lifetimes ago we only lived in Africa. Humans are so new.
[image: https://t.co/AtuQqqnT9R] https://t.co/fdUWCAzNbA| created_at: Fri Apr 29 19:51:02 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 10155 | quote_count: 84 | reply_count: 297 | retweet_count: 1173 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>finally https://t.co/nBd4AYccTc| created_at: Sun Feb 05 12:34:00 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 10261 | quote_count: 83 | reply_count: 252 | retweet_count: 332 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>The path of a maturing thinker. In order to get to Grown-Up Mountain and start real learning, you have to brave the cold winds of Insecure Canyon. If you're not willing to say "I don't know" for a while, you might spend your whole life on Child’s Hill. https://t.co/8YT6emJcB3| created_at: Mon Jan 06 20:31:14 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 10193 | quote_count: 235 | reply_count: 93 | retweet_count: 2945 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Much scarier than the small number of evil people is the large number who will fall in line with whatever's fashionable. When kindness is in fashion, they're kind. When a form of bigotry becomes cool, they jump on board. When it's popular to condone violence, they're all for it.| created_at: Fri Feb 18 18:04:35 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 10128 | quote_count: 174 | reply_count: 215 | retweet_count: 1654 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>You’re not a progressive or a conservative or a moderate or radical or other political noun.
You’re also not progressive or conservative or any other political adjective.
Those are words for ideas, not people. Your mind is way too rad to be locked in a noun or adjective prison.| created_at: Wed Dec 01 15:46:20 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 10031 | quote_count: 104 | reply_count: 164 | retweet_count: 1290 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>It took 300,000 years to get to 1 billion but only 218 years to go from 1 to 8. https://t.co/K7QyeCbjKi| created_at: Tue Nov 15 19:38:52 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9914 | quote_count: 332 | reply_count: 664 | retweet_count: 1597 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>I took the weekend off Twitter and suddenly remembered that the sky is blue and the grass is soft and the flowers smell nice. Today, I'm just sitting here refreshing this page. https://t.co/t3UqVROu99| created_at: Mon Nov 14 18:46:10 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9443 | quote_count: 23 | reply_count: 308 | retweet_count: 450 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>It takes a googol years for a supermassive black hole to decay. How long is that?
If you had an hourglass w/ a grain of sand for every particle in the universe, and 1 grain fell every 10 billion years, when it ran out you’d be &lt; 1% thru the black hole’s life.
h/t @Kurz_Gesagt| created_at: Thu Sep 01 13:22:04 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9667 | quote_count: 136 | reply_count: 584 | retweet_count: 781 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>If we took all the gold that has ever been mined and melted it into a big cube, it would be this big. https://t.co/7nIJT18zty| created_at: Tue Jan 19 22:12:16 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 9866 | quote_count: 162 | reply_count: 138 | retweet_count: 951 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Thoughts from a surgeon friend. Sharing with his permission. https://t.co/SCid6FoV13| created_at: Tue Apr 07 16:23:42 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 9961 | quote_count: 333 | reply_count: 86 | retweet_count: 2294 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>@elonmusk I thought we agreed you were not going to talk about this publicly| created_at: Fri Nov 04 06:37:30 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9636 | quote_count: 6 | reply_count: 107 | retweet_count: 161 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>It’s funny that after the Big Bang, there were all these hydrogen atoms everywhere and 13.8 billion years later some of them have turned into majestic nebulas and others have turned into Cheez-Its.| created_at: Wed Jul 20 03:59:41 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9664 | quote_count: 47 | reply_count: 211 | retweet_count: 697 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Our brains come preset to look at life up close. Don't forget to zoom out. https://t.co/zdJ5L7VmGF| created_at: Fri Jan 21 17:31:24 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9676 | quote_count: 165 | reply_count: 77 | retweet_count: 1624 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>I read like 75 books in English classes throughout my childhood and I disliked almost all of them. Not because they were bad books but because English class ruins books.
School sucks so much more than it has to.| created_at: Mon Jan 02 10:27:57 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 9522 | quote_count: 90 | reply_count: 441 | retweet_count: 397 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>In 2009, the Institute for Highway Safety staged a head on crash between a 2009 Chevy Malibu and a 1959 Bel Air. The same crash that would have instantly killed someone in 1959 causes a few light injuries today. https://t.co/CriLn8qLzi| created_at: Tue Sep 13 04:33:43 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9569 | quote_count: 196 | reply_count: 171 | retweet_count: 1112 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>When parents raise a child, they install elements of their psyche in them. When one of those elements is damaged, the damage is usually passed on. So self-improvement isn't selfish—it's repairing the "family psyche," which improves the lives of all the generations downstream.| created_at: Wed Dec 23 20:08:07 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 9185 | quote_count: 121 | reply_count: 114 | retweet_count: 1298 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Ridiculously cool close-ups of the surface of the sun just released by @NSF. Each of those cells is the size of Texas. (h/t @kottke) https://t.co/HsVf9qXK5t| created_at: Thu Jan 30 06:08:54 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 9238 | quote_count: 169 | reply_count: 147 | retweet_count: 1080 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Seems relevant these days https://t.co/vqN0xUgZj9| created_at: Sun Mar 06 15:15:05 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9265 | quote_count: 132 | reply_count: 83 | retweet_count: 1598 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Whenever I get to know someone who seems perfect, I end up disappointed. Whenever I get to know someone who I think is the worst of the worst, I'm pleasantly surprised. Angels and demons aren't real. https://t.co/K5MpLFEiBv| created_at: Mon Mar 27 17:46:30 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 9176 | quote_count: 165 | reply_count: 288 | retweet_count: 1280 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>I appreciate you all having read my posts during this final era when people still read stuff by human writers| created_at: Tue Dec 06 01:14:50 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9074 | quote_count: 47 | reply_count: 286 | retweet_count: 373 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>Hot tip: if you're pregnant, stick with the ultrasound. PASS ON THE MRI.
[via Dan Martin on Quora] https://t.co/jtDNvEV3vO| created_at: Wed May 11 05:09:54 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9148 | quote_count: 209 | reply_count: 291 | retweet_count: 733 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div><div>https://t.co/VQvIYRGtUZ| created_at: Sat Apr 01 16:36:10 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 8980 | quote_count: 37 | reply_count: 120 | retweet_count: 761 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: zxx </div><div>From 2015 back to the Big Bang, in 12 tweets. Each subsequent timeline contains all the previous timelines.
1/12 https://t.co/zRKHmgSJEN| created_at: Thu May 11 16:33:30 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 9084 | quote_count: 229 | reply_count: 96 | retweet_count: 1623 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en </div>
Writer, infant| profile_url: https://waitbutwhy.com/ | name: Tim Urban | created_at: Wed Mar 20 02:43:48 +0000 2013 | favourites_count: 4278 | followers_count: 821707 | friends_count: 796 | media_count: 1747 | possibly_sensitive: False | verified: False | statuses_count: 6867 | location:  My book What's Our Problem? is now available.
The book introduces a new framework for thinking about our chaotic political environment. With 303 drawings, it's a toolbox for understanding our societies, our group dynamics, and our own minds.
Get it here: https://t.co/BnPpcn0RYr| created_at: Tue Feb 21 11:21:24 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 14104 | quote_count: 372 | reply_count: 990 | retweet_count: 2080 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  In case Twitter is making you anxious, here’s a man making a traditional teapot.
[tiktok: zishacraftsman] https://t.co/Kql2KzpIWB| created_at: Mon Nov 21 03:45:24 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 81717 | quote_count: 1615 | reply_count: 1095 | retweet_count: 13142 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Population density thread because you and I both know you have nothing better to do.
Let's start with this cool way to visualize population density, by @undertheraedar. The height of each spike displays the population density in that location. https://t.co/Y6lDpHjEga| created_at: Wed Jul 20 02:46:06 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 62975 | quote_count: 1260 | reply_count: 1489 | retweet_count: 10180 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  We think a lot about those black lines, forgetting that it’s all still in our hands. https://t.co/RSZ1d3W642| created_at: Fri Mar 05 16:14:34 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 59870 | quote_count: 1299 | reply_count: 345 | retweet_count: 13764 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Everything we call civilization was invented in the last 500 generations—way too short a time for our bodies and brains to re-optimize. We're a bunch of primates in a totally unnatural environment, trying our best. Good thing to keep in mind! https://t.co/bkKCOFlI1Q| created_at: Fri Apr 29 19:51:01 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 58652 | quote_count: 930 | reply_count: 1298 | retweet_count: 10782 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Imagine what ancient people thought when something like this happened| created_at: Fri Aug 26 16:04:30 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 56653 | quote_count: 345 | reply_count: 1033 | retweet_count: 5460 | is_quote_status: True | retweeted: False | lang: en  “If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.” 
Montesquieu said this 300 years ago. We’re still working on this one.| created_at: Tue May 24 08:32:54 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 54711 | quote_count: 422 | reply_count: 588 | retweet_count: 8595 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  21 thoughts from 2021 I'd like to take into 2022: https://t.co/hdHCgGiYVj| created_at: Fri Dec 31 17:04:25 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 54733 | quote_count: 1006 | reply_count: 761 | retweet_count: 11035 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Pro tip: When you wake up in the middle of the night, the worst way to fall back asleep is to open Twitter| created_at: Sun Oct 30 09:36:06 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 50736 | quote_count: 313 | reply_count: 1067 | retweet_count: 2651 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  It's super important to support marginalized people in places where it's popular to do so https://t.co/HIwNaLtkPE| created_at: Wed Jun 01 18:34:42 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 45457 | quote_count: 451 | reply_count: 481 | retweet_count: 5968 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  New year, new you https://t.co/pC0Mz4dHLJ| created_at: Sun Jan 01 14:09:08 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 46270 | quote_count: 505 | reply_count: 305 | retweet_count: 7214 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Good job everyone https://t.co/hmOKbimdqY| created_at: Mon Jun 14 15:11:08 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 44864 | quote_count: 422 | reply_count: 568 | retweet_count: 3097 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  If Andromeda were brighter, this is how big it would be in our night sky. https://t.co/bbIY0M7F2I| created_at: Mon Aug 10 21:45:40 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 42991 | quote_count: 302 | reply_count: 287 | retweet_count: 4575 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  I keep thinking about this today https://t.co/nztgxuqtOn| created_at: Thu Feb 24 18:33:13 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 41141 | quote_count: 253 | reply_count: 477 | retweet_count: 5020 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  What’s the craziest conspiracy theory you think might be true?| created_at: Thu Nov 03 12:56:07 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 39121 | quote_count: 805 | reply_count: 7018 | retweet_count: 2146 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Feed a man a fish, feed him for a night.
Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.
Teach a man to make AI, the AI does all the fishing and everyone is fed forever. Then the AI accidentally kills all the people and the fish win.| created_at: Tue Mar 23 21:34:16 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 39131 | quote_count: 286 | reply_count: 508 | retweet_count: 4159 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Relationship tip: when your partner makes an awful but innocent mistake (leaves their phone in the cab, forgets their passport when heading to the airport for an international flight, drops and shatters a beloved item, gets in a fender bender, etc.), don't get mad at them. It…| created_at: Wed Aug 09 15:40:16 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 39403 | quote_count: 579 | reply_count: 831 | retweet_count: 4196 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  At the center of our planet is a solid sphere of iron &amp; nickel the size of India (1,500mi across) that's as hot as the surface of the sun, and its interaction w the molten iron surrounding it generates the magnetic field that keeps our atmosphere from blowing away.
pic: phys-org https://t.co/xE4mEyMPlU| created_at: Sun May 01 21:18:43 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 36172 | quote_count: 312 | reply_count: 1086 | retweet_count: 3075 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Five cities, then and now. Somewhere today there's a quiet fishing village that will be a 2100 megalopolis.
Hong Kong: 1964 | 2016 https://t.co/QhrrQZP0nb| created_at: Fri Jul 22 15:58:38 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 36541 | quote_count: 609 | reply_count: 531 | retweet_count: 4989 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Hidreley Diao uses AI to capture what historical figures would look like if they were modern people. 
George Washington: https://t.co/Wh5bi9FAgL| created_at: Sun Feb 20 18:39:56 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 34659 | quote_count: 1609 | reply_count: 414 | retweet_count: 6485 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Nintendo (founded 1889) and the Ottoman Empire coexisted (fell in 1922) for 33 years.| created_at: Wed May 04 16:08:57 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 32972 | quote_count: 324 | reply_count: 215 | retweet_count: 3404 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Some mantras for political thinking:
Truth is hard.
Humility is hard.
Independent thinking is hard.
Resisting tribalism is hard.
Over and over, you will forget that these things are hard, and that's probably when you'll fail at them.
1/5| created_at: Thu May 12 11:43:15 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 32386 | quote_count: 575 | reply_count: 595 | retweet_count: 5732 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  The cumulative solar arrays that would power the world. Kinda weird that we haven't just done this yet.
Image credit: @poweredbyart https://t.co/59uZXlctcH| created_at: Wed May 26 23:37:23 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 31291 | quote_count: 295 | reply_count: 883 | retweet_count: 3600 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Enough is enough with early riser privilege https://t.co/pD5uEaPTpN| created_at: Wed Jun 15 16:05:09 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 30850 | quote_count: 206 | reply_count: 276 | retweet_count: 2994 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  It's crazy that with an iPhone, a little Starlink antenna, and a solar power unit, you could live in an isolated cave in the mountains (or on a raft in the middle of the Pacific) and get a world-class education, start a business or art career, &amp; make friends all around the world.| created_at: Wed Sep 15 12:39:09 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 29379 | quote_count: 355 | reply_count: 596 | retweet_count: 3067 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  One of the most incredible examples of a country changing its mind on an issue. 
Without free speech, the incredibly unpopular 1958 viewpoint that said "there's nothing wrong with interracial marriage" would never have seen the light of day. https://t.co/oPQXo99O56| created_at: Tue Nov 22 16:58:22 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 28286 | quote_count: 310 | reply_count: 1055 | retweet_count: 3271 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  I graduated high school thinking I hated history, only to later realize it was my favorite thing. Good teaching should ignite curiosity.| created_at: Sun Mar 20 12:23:33 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 27907 | quote_count: 222 | reply_count: 530 | retweet_count: 1585 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Today, Elon tweeted this diagram by @SwipeWright, which sums up how a lot of people (including me) feel. Then a bunch of ppl responded w/ graphs showing that Republican politicians have moved farther right in that time than Dems have moved left. Here's what I think is happening:| created_at: Fri Apr 29 01:28:21 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 26907 | quote_count: 489 | reply_count: 1610 | retweet_count: 2795 | is_quote_status: True | retweeted: False | lang: en  We should probably start having more kids https://t.co/fAYwQbbHMV| created_at: Sun Feb 20 19:59:37 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 26748 | quote_count: 803 | reply_count: 2337 | retweet_count: 2804 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  New year, new you https://t.co/w6Q2BRyJPo| created_at: Tue Jan 02 15:15:13 +0000 2024 | favorite_count: 25973 | quote_count: 335 | reply_count: 205 | retweet_count: 4269 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Monthly reminder about that big green tree https://t.co/kM46Wsxo9O| created_at: Mon Jun 21 14:20:31 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 25406 | quote_count: 350 | reply_count: 123 | retweet_count: 4210 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  You’d have to compress Earth to this size (9 mm) to form a black hole. You’d have to compress the sun to 3 km and the moon to 0.1 mm (width of a human hair) to turn them into black holes. For every black hole out there, something THAT intense has happened.
Image: @lpfproject https://t.co/fL3dsFwHqz| created_at: Sat May 28 16:17:49 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 24118 | quote_count: 128 | reply_count: 539 | retweet_count: 1946 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  22 tweets from 2022 that might blow your mind:
Let's start with what a water droplet looks like at 6,000fps.
[nac Image Technology] https://t.co/XrZ9vPXaId| created_at: Tue Dec 27 18:19:11 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 24409 | quote_count: 151 | reply_count: 144 | retweet_count: 2968 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  I hope Japan actually does this https://t.co/PAG8AgxVEi| created_at: Thu Oct 06 13:00:30 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 23809 | quote_count: 278 | reply_count: 1150 | retweet_count: 1112 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Email from Steve Jobs to himself, September 2010. https://t.co/Rm6nXSsSpH| created_at: Sun Sep 11 03:02:04 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 23611 | quote_count: 166 | reply_count: 229 | retweet_count: 2907 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Monthly reminder to go hug someone https://t.co/aFp4ps7XM5| created_at: Sat Apr 30 22:56:08 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 23444 | quote_count: 338 | reply_count: 412 | retweet_count: 3872 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  My friend concisely sums up the last two months https://t.co/inhGGyN2uT| created_at: Tue Dec 13 23:59:25 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 21120 | quote_count: 42 | reply_count: 312 | retweet_count: 934 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Needle and thread under a microscope https://t.co/GxZdbP2ulE| created_at: Sat Feb 05 19:08:04 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 21012 | quote_count: 105 | reply_count: 304 | retweet_count: 1171 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  A 5 megabyte hard drive in 1956 vs. 1 terabyte today. A terabyte hard drive in 1956 would be the size of a 40-story building. https://t.co/kkMOYmWxDb| created_at: Mon Jun 20 23:18:49 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 19286 | quote_count: 135 | reply_count: 185 | retweet_count: 1890 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  30 years ago everyone left home without a phone every day. Just their wallet, keys, and thoughts. So weird.| created_at: Sat May 20 20:10:12 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 18882 | quote_count: 240 | reply_count: 620 | retweet_count: 2083 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  22 thoughts from 2022 I'd like to take into 2023:
https://t.co/bo83E67GbW| created_at: Sat Dec 24 18:29:46 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 18038 | quote_count: 160 | reply_count: 470 | retweet_count: 2581 | is_quote_status: True | retweeted: False | lang: en  Once you die you no longer experience the passage of time, so it’s as if eternity passes in an instant. As far as you’re concerned, the moment you die the universe reaches its final heat death state. So make the very most of this little window of consciousness—it’s all there is!| created_at: Mon Nov 07 01:19:08 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 16590 | quote_count: 171 | reply_count: 1223 | retweet_count: 1562 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  1) If all humans stood in a circle, it would be way bigger than the moon's orbit.
2) If we all stood together as a crowd, we'd fit in NYC.
3) If we all stood stacked, we'd fit in a 1km cube.
4) If you removed the empty space in human atoms, we'd all fit in an M&amp;M. https://t.co/NTZNn4jsk5| created_at: Tue Aug 25 18:12:07 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 16731 | quote_count: 177 | reply_count: 210 | retweet_count: 1943 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Whales evolved from a bizarre, vaguely whale-looking land animal called the Pakicetus that lived in Pakistan 50 million years ago. https://t.co/AwAgQSGOj3| created_at: Fri Jul 22 00:57:12 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 15979 | quote_count: 1378 | reply_count: 838 | retweet_count: 1876 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  If you ever fantasize about having been an 1880s engineer working in Edison’s lab, apply to work at @neuralink.| created_at: Fri Aug 28 23:50:53 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 15972 | quote_count: 124 | reply_count: 444 | retweet_count: 1134 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Pangaea gets the last laugh.| created_at: Thu Apr 01 04:58:00 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 15954 | quote_count: 115 | reply_count: 471 | retweet_count: 1478 | is_quote_status: True | retweeted: False | lang: en  No one “builds a house.” They lay one brick again and again and again and the end result is a house. A remarkable, glorious achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable, unglorious tasks looks like from far away.
Procrastinators are bad at remembering this.| created_at: Sun Feb 13 19:20:55 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 15871 | quote_count: 128 | reply_count: 216 | retweet_count: 2141 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  A little breakdown of the situation: https://t.co/mbVKI6SrPT| created_at: Tue May 03 22:15:53 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 15325 | quote_count: 316 | reply_count: 830 | retweet_count: 1983 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  People in the early 1900s thought soda was healthy.
People in the 1950s thought white bread was healthy.
People in the 1990s thought margarine was healthy.
What's something most of us think is healthy today that future people will shake their heads at?| created_at: Thu Oct 13 14:33:10 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 14775 | quote_count: 1071 | reply_count: 7671 | retweet_count: 1329 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  It's finally here: the full story on Neuralink. I knew the future would be nuts but this is a whole other level. https://t.co/4I44hFJzFC https://t.co/YVA6dLH8uY| created_at: Thu Apr 20 20:30:47 +0000 2017 | favorite_count: 14592 | quote_count: 1155 | reply_count: 754 | retweet_count: 5679 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  I get sad once a week that I wasn't alive during the moon landing| created_at: Fri Mar 04 17:28:26 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 13341 | quote_count: 55 | reply_count: 584 | retweet_count: 334 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Will never be able to unsee it| created_at: Tue Apr 02 19:06:59 +0000 2024 | favorite_count: 14487 | quote_count: 25 | reply_count: 131 | retweet_count: 1049 | is_quote_status: True | retweeted: False | lang: en  If I aired a highlight reel of your most selfish life moments and most shameful thoughts, you'd seem like an awful person. If I aired a reel of your best, kindest moments, you'd seem like a saint. But people aren't highlight reels, and the unedited cut is always a messy mix! https://t.co/r3E53eFcAJ| created_at: Thu Dec 16 21:03:16 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 14141 | quote_count: 182 | reply_count: 183 | retweet_count: 1897 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Go hug someone https://t.co/I63AaP1xQu| created_at: Thu Sep 16 23:38:59 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 14212 | quote_count: 322 | reply_count: 196 | retweet_count: 2786 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Sine is blue, cosine is red. It's such bullshit that today's students get to have the internet explain stuff instead of having to figure it out yourself using incredibly awful textbooks.| created_at: Sun Jul 12 23:15:52 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 13946 | quote_count: 93 | reply_count: 135 | retweet_count: 1808 | is_quote_status: True | retweeted: False | lang: en  The James Webb mirror is a 6.5m/21ft beast. It can also see infrared light way better than Hubble, which will reveal galaxies so far away they’re redshifted beyond the visible spectrum. It’ll show us the first stars and formation of the first galaxies - our best time machine yet. https://t.co/QLt686wmHA| created_at: Sun Dec 26 09:22:14 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 13919 | quote_count: 91 | reply_count: 123 | retweet_count: 1387 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  What's up with boys and school?
Source: https://t.co/hYDCuPZLXG https://t.co/Hkw3WNEwey| created_at: Thu Mar 03 23:36:04 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 13077 | quote_count: 186 | reply_count: 594 | retweet_count: 1423 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Important lesson for young people: After childhood, there's no one to protect you from your own decisions. No one will stop you from getting yourself into a bad marriage, a job you hate, a mountain of debt, trouble with the law. You are the sole architect of your life path.| created_at: Wed Jan 03 16:56:00 +0000 2024 | favorite_count: 13317 | quote_count: 118 | reply_count: 160 | retweet_count: 2369 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  I'm just gonna start posting this during every major wave of current events. https://t.co/IPJdFoGcVC| created_at: Sun Jun 07 23:45:16 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 13201 | quote_count: 360 | reply_count: 153 | retweet_count: 3195 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Your family is weird
[credit: https://t.co/KlMspxor1q] https://t.co/YdeI02UDVA| created_at: Tue Feb 15 14:59:31 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 12781 | quote_count: 111 | reply_count: 330 | retweet_count: 1808 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  What country has the best candy?| created_at: Thu Feb 10 20:35:51 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 12337 | quote_count: 249 | reply_count: 3763 | retweet_count: 471 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  2100s people will think it’s so weird that humans used to get pregnant like other mammals.| created_at: Sun Apr 23 23:46:11 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 11907 | quote_count: 542 | reply_count: 2399 | retweet_count: 2685 | is_quote_status: True | retweeted: False | lang: en  It seems impossible at the beginning of this video that the person filming might be in danger| created_at: Mon Jul 11 01:01:27 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 11961 | quote_count: 82 | reply_count: 119 | retweet_count: 1439 | is_quote_status: True | retweeted: False | lang: en  Everything we call civilization was invented in the last 500 generations—way too short a time for our bodies and brains to re-optimize. We're a bunch of forest primates in a totally unnatural environment, trying our little best. Someone needs to give our species a hug. https://t.co/i4UwWoJ9LZ| created_at: Tue Jul 07 20:50:00 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 11947 | quote_count: 268 | reply_count: 152 | retweet_count: 3439 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  When you’re the boss of the ideas in your head, you’re always willing to revise them.
When there’s no amount of evidence that will change your mind about something, it means that idea is your boss.
Humility is the awareness that no idea is worthy of being your boss.| created_at: Thu Mar 11 18:31:17 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 11813 | quote_count: 118 | reply_count: 122 | retweet_count: 1983 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  When the Aztec Empire was founded, the University of Oxford was already an ancient, centuries old institution.| created_at: Tue Jun 14 15:03:55 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 11292 | quote_count: 136 | reply_count: 231 | retweet_count: 708 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  It sucks jumping in a cold pool but once you’re in it’s fine. Same pattern applies to:
-Getting started with work each day
-Having a hard conversation with a friend
-Singing in front of people
-Breaking up with someone
Most of the time, jumping in is the hardest part.| created_at: Wed Aug 18 16:35:53 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 11854 | quote_count: 88 | reply_count: 120 | retweet_count: 1543 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  The trademark merry-go-round of human societies. Kinda worried we're somewhere on the right side... https://t.co/NUCnY9bUAw| created_at: Thu Apr 29 20:46:32 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 11731 | quote_count: 119 | reply_count: 182 | retweet_count: 1415 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Phones are an unusual example of societal equality. Incredibly rich people have cars, houses, planes, vacations, jewelry, clothing, furniture, food, wine, stadium seats, and services that other people couldn't dream of having. But they have the same smartphone everyone else has.| created_at: Tue Sep 12 21:57:40 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 11502 | quote_count: 129 | reply_count: 359 | retweet_count: 736 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  What’s something you’ve changed your mind about?| created_at: Wed Dec 08 16:43:33 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 10939 | quote_count: 299 | reply_count: 1897 | retweet_count: 385 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  There are people alive today who were around when we still thought the Milky Way was the entire universe| created_at: Fri Jul 15 02:37:14 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 10875 | quote_count: 29 | reply_count: 238 | retweet_count: 750 | is_quote_status: True | retweeted: False | lang: en  A tiny section of our galactic center. 10 million stars.
Where is everybody? https://t.co/DLygMogR7m| created_at: Thu Oct 29 17:20:44 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 10964 | quote_count: 256 | reply_count: 432 | retweet_count: 708 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  The thing I understand least is how there are incredibly thorough Wikipedia pages for literally everything.| created_at: Fri Jul 31 02:09:40 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 10919 | quote_count: 80 | reply_count: 235 | retweet_count: 595 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  A tribe of 100 people gained 100 years of life experience every year.
A city of 10,000 gained the same in 3 days.
Today, our species lives 15,000 years every minute and almost a million years every hour.
Tiny improvements in how we communicate can pay massive wisdom dividends.| created_at: Wed Apr 05 16:07:46 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 10826 | quote_count: 108 | reply_count: 396 | retweet_count: 1141 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  My body hates watching this
[@trevorjacob93] https://t.co/7XXeBgqfKJ| created_at: Wed Aug 17 02:50:06 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 10600 | quote_count: 146 | reply_count: 472 | retweet_count: 606 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  So even though the left hasn't moved that far left (as is shown by voting results), the left is in a sense being held hostage by their extreme wing, making a lot of people who enthusiastically voted for Obama feel politically homeless today.| created_at: Fri Apr 29 01:28:21 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 10468 | quote_count: 378 | reply_count: 1166 | retweet_count: 510 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Have you experienced deja vu?| created_at: Fri May 06 18:26:21 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9915 | quote_count: 201 | reply_count: 1943 | retweet_count: 771 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Using a modern 80-year lifetime as a unit, only 150 lifetimes ago, the Americas were untouched by people. The first human set foot in Europe only 500 lifetimes ago. 1,200 lifetimes ago we only lived in Africa. Humans are so new.
[image: https://t.co/AtuQqqnT9R] https://t.co/fdUWCAzNbA| created_at: Fri Apr 29 19:51:02 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 10155 | quote_count: 84 | reply_count: 297 | retweet_count: 1173 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  finally https://t.co/nBd4AYccTc| created_at: Sun Feb 05 12:34:00 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 10261 | quote_count: 83 | reply_count: 252 | retweet_count: 332 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  The path of a maturing thinker. In order to get to Grown-Up Mountain and start real learning, you have to brave the cold winds of Insecure Canyon. If you're not willing to say "I don't know" for a while, you might spend your whole life on Child’s Hill. https://t.co/8YT6emJcB3| created_at: Mon Jan 06 20:31:14 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 10193 | quote_count: 235 | reply_count: 93 | retweet_count: 2945 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Much scarier than the small number of evil people is the large number who will fall in line with whatever's fashionable. When kindness is in fashion, they're kind. When a form of bigotry becomes cool, they jump on board. When it's popular to condone violence, they're all for it.| created_at: Fri Feb 18 18:04:35 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 10128 | quote_count: 174 | reply_count: 215 | retweet_count: 1654 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  You’re not a progressive or a conservative or a moderate or radical or other political noun.
You’re also not progressive or conservative or any other political adjective.
Those are words for ideas, not people. Your mind is way too rad to be locked in a noun or adjective prison.| created_at: Wed Dec 01 15:46:20 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 10031 | quote_count: 104 | reply_count: 164 | retweet_count: 1290 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  It took 300,000 years to get to 1 billion but only 218 years to go from 1 to 8. https://t.co/K7QyeCbjKi| created_at: Tue Nov 15 19:38:52 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9914 | quote_count: 332 | reply_count: 664 | retweet_count: 1597 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  I took the weekend off Twitter and suddenly remembered that the sky is blue and the grass is soft and the flowers smell nice. Today, I'm just sitting here refreshing this page. https://t.co/t3UqVROu99| created_at: Mon Nov 14 18:46:10 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9443 | quote_count: 23 | reply_count: 308 | retweet_count: 450 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  It takes a googol years for a supermassive black hole to decay. How long is that?
If you had an hourglass w/ a grain of sand for every particle in the universe, and 1 grain fell every 10 billion years, when it ran out you’d be &lt; 1% thru the black hole’s life.
h/t @Kurz_Gesagt| created_at: Thu Sep 01 13:22:04 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9667 | quote_count: 136 | reply_count: 584 | retweet_count: 781 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  If we took all the gold that has ever been mined and melted it into a big cube, it would be this big. https://t.co/7nIJT18zty| created_at: Tue Jan 19 22:12:16 +0000 2021 | favorite_count: 9866 | quote_count: 162 | reply_count: 138 | retweet_count: 951 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Thoughts from a surgeon friend. Sharing with his permission. https://t.co/SCid6FoV13| created_at: Tue Apr 07 16:23:42 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 9961 | quote_count: 333 | reply_count: 86 | retweet_count: 2294 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  @elonmusk I thought we agreed you were not going to talk about this publicly| created_at: Fri Nov 04 06:37:30 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9636 | quote_count: 6 | reply_count: 107 | retweet_count: 161 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  It’s funny that after the Big Bang, there were all these hydrogen atoms everywhere and 13.8 billion years later some of them have turned into majestic nebulas and others have turned into Cheez-Its.| created_at: Wed Jul 20 03:59:41 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9664 | quote_count: 47 | reply_count: 211 | retweet_count: 697 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Our brains come preset to look at life up close. Don't forget to zoom out. https://t.co/zdJ5L7VmGF| created_at: Fri Jan 21 17:31:24 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9676 | quote_count: 165 | reply_count: 77 | retweet_count: 1624 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  I read like 75 books in English classes throughout my childhood and I disliked almost all of them. Not because they were bad books but because English class ruins books.
School sucks so much more than it has to.| created_at: Mon Jan 02 10:27:57 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 9522 | quote_count: 90 | reply_count: 441 | retweet_count: 397 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  In 2009, the Institute for Highway Safety staged a head on crash between a 2009 Chevy Malibu and a 1959 Bel Air. The same crash that would have instantly killed someone in 1959 causes a few light injuries today. https://t.co/CriLn8qLzi| created_at: Tue Sep 13 04:33:43 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9569 | quote_count: 196 | reply_count: 171 | retweet_count: 1112 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  When parents raise a child, they install elements of their psyche in them. When one of those elements is damaged, the damage is usually passed on. So self-improvement isn't selfish—it's repairing the "family psyche," which improves the lives of all the generations downstream.| created_at: Wed Dec 23 20:08:07 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 9185 | quote_count: 121 | reply_count: 114 | retweet_count: 1298 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Ridiculously cool close-ups of the surface of the sun just released by @NSF. Each of those cells is the size of Texas. (h/t @kottke) https://t.co/HsVf9qXK5t| created_at: Thu Jan 30 06:08:54 +0000 2020 | favorite_count: 9238 | quote_count: 169 | reply_count: 147 | retweet_count: 1080 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Seems relevant these days https://t.co/vqN0xUgZj9| created_at: Sun Mar 06 15:15:05 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9265 | quote_count: 132 | reply_count: 83 | retweet_count: 1598 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Whenever I get to know someone who seems perfect, I end up disappointed. Whenever I get to know someone who I think is the worst of the worst, I'm pleasantly surprised. Angels and demons aren't real. https://t.co/K5MpLFEiBv| created_at: Mon Mar 27 17:46:30 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 9176 | quote_count: 165 | reply_count: 288 | retweet_count: 1280 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  I appreciate you all having read my posts during this final era when people still read stuff by human writers| created_at: Tue Dec 06 01:14:50 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9074 | quote_count: 47 | reply_count: 286 | retweet_count: 373 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  Hot tip: if you're pregnant, stick with the ultrasound. PASS ON THE MRI.
[via Dan Martin on Quora] https://t.co/jtDNvEV3vO| created_at: Wed May 11 05:09:54 +0000 2022 | favorite_count: 9148 | quote_count: 209 | reply_count: 291 | retweet_count: 733 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en  https://t.co/VQvIYRGtUZ| created_at: Sat Apr 01 16:36:10 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 8980 | quote_count: 37 | reply_count: 120 | retweet_count: 761 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: zxx  From 2015 back to the Big Bang, in 12 tweets. Each subsequent timeline contains all the previous timelines.
1/12 https://t.co/zRKHmgSJEN| created_at: Thu May 11 16:33:30 +0000 2023 | favorite_count: 9084 | quote_count: 229 | reply_count: 96 | retweet_count: 1623 | is_quote_status: False | retweeted: False | lang: en
https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wait_But_Why
Wait But Why - Wikipedia
2015-12-22
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	<p>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</p>
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	<div><table><caption>Wait But Why</caption><tbody><tr><th>Available in</th><td>English, Chinese</td></tr><tr><th>Editor</th><td>Tim Urban</td></tr><tr><th>URL</th><td><a href="http://waitbutwhy.com/">waitbutwhy<wbr></wbr>.com</a></td></tr><tr><th>Launched</th><td>2013; 10 years ago</td></tr><tr><th>Current status</th><td>Online</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p><b>Wait But Why</b> (<b>WBW</b>) is a <a href="/wiki/Website">website</a> founded by Tim Urban and Andrew Finn and written and illustrated by Urban. The site covers a range of subjects as a <a href="/wiki/Long-form_journalism">long-form</a> <a href="/wiki/Blog">blog</a>.<sup><a href="#cite_note-1">[1]</a></sup> Typical posts involve long-form discussions of various topics, including <a href="/wiki/Artificial_intelligence">artificial intelligence</a>, <a href="/wiki/Outer_space">outer space</a>, and <a href="/wiki/Procrastination">procrastination</a>, using a combination of prose and rough <a href="/wiki/Illustration">illustrations</a>.<sup><a href="#cite_note-WBW_&amp;_Politics-2">[2]</a></sup><sup><a href="#cite_note-3">[3]</a></sup><sup><a href="#cite_note-4">[4]</a></sup>
</p><p>On May 21, 2014, Urban posted "The Fermi Paradox", a post that became extremely popular.<sup><a href="#cite_note-5">[5]</a></sup><sup><a href="#cite_note-6">[6]</a></sup> A 2016 <a href="/wiki/Ted_Talk">Ted Talk</a> by Urban on procrastination, based on concepts from the blog, had garnered over 50 million views by December 2022.<sup><a href="#cite_note-7">[7]</a></sup> A post on the blog about <a href="/wiki/Elon_Musk">Elon Musk</a> and <a href="/wiki/Neuralink">Neuralink</a> was produced with involvement from Musk himself.<sup><a href="#cite_note-8">[8]</a></sup>
</p><p>In 2019, Marie Boran of <i><a href="/wiki/The_Irish_Times">The Irish Times</a></i> summarized the website as a collection of "lengthy, thoughtful and well-written blog posts", praising them for being an "accessible and entertaining primer on human nature".<sup><a href="#cite_note-9">[9]</a></sup>
</p>
<h2>References[<a href="/w/index.php?title=Wait_But_Why&amp;action=edit&amp;section=1">edit</a>]</h2>
<div><ol>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-1">^</a></b> <cite>Davis, Noah (30 October 2014). <a href="https://psmag.com/economics/make-living-email-newsletter-writer-93394">"How Do You Make a Living, Email Newsletter Writer?"</a>. <i><a href="/wiki/Pacific_Standard">Pacific Standard</a></i>. Retrieved 22 December 2015.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-WBW_&amp;_Politics_2-0">^</a></b> <cite>Roberts, David (27 August 2015). <a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9214015/tech-nerds-politics">"Tech nerds are smart. But they can't seem to get their heads around politics"</a>. <i>Vox</i>. <a href="/wiki/Vox_Media">Vox Media</a>. Retrieved 4 September 2016.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-3">^</a></b> <cite>Grothaus, Michael (5 March 2015). <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/3042312/most-creative-people/the-secrets-of-writing-smart-longform-articles-that-go-absolutely-viral">"The Secrets Of Writing Smart, Long-form Articles That Go Absolutely Viral"</a>. <i><a href="/wiki/Fast_Company_(magazine)">Fast Company</a></i>. Retrieved 22 December 2015.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-4">^</a></b> <cite>Eyal, Nir (10 August 2021). <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/automatic-you/202108/the-behavioral-economics-diet-the-science-killing-bad-habit">"The Behavioral Economics Diet: The Science of Killing a Bad Habit"</a>. <i><a href="/wiki/Psychology_Today">Psychology Today</a></i>. Retrieved 16 August 2021.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-5">^</a></b> <cite><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html">"The Fermi Paradox - Wait But Why"</a>. <i>Wait But Why</i>. 2014-05-21. Retrieved 2018-03-20.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-6">^</a></b> <cite>Klein, Ezra (2020-02-10). <a href="https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/2/10/21131219/tim-urban-wait-but-why-ezra-klein-show-future-of-humanity-technology-ai-climate-change">""We're in the climax of a movie": Tim Urban on humanity's wild future"</a>. <i>Vox</i>. Retrieved 2020-04-25.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-7">^</a></b> <cite><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU"><i>Tim Urban: Inside the mind of a master procrastinator | TED</i></a>, retrieved 2022-12-11</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-8">^</a></b> <cite>Welsh, Caitlin (17 July 2019). <a href="https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-reveals-neuralink-progress">"Elon Musk claims robot surgeon will sew electrodes into human brains in 2020"</a>. <i><a href="/wiki/Mashable">Mashable</a></i>. Retrieved 16 October 2021.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-9">^</a></b> <cite>Boran, Marie (17 September 2019). <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/weblog-wait-but-why-offers-long-and-thought-provoking-reads-1.4021061">"Weblog: Wait But Why offers long and thought-provoking reads"</a>. <i><a href="/wiki/The_Irish_Times">The Irish Times</a></i>. Retrieved 16 October 2021.</cite>
</li>
</ol></div>
<h2>External links[<a href="/w/index.php?title=Wait_But_Why&amp;action=edit&amp;section=2">edit</a>]</h2>
<ul><li><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/">Official website</a> <a href="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q22080717#P856"></a></li>
<li><a href="http://attendsmaispourquoi.fr/">Official French translation</a></li></ul>
</div>
	<div><p><a href="/wiki/Help:Category">Categories</a>: </p><ul><li><a href="/wiki/Category:American_blogs">American blogs</a></li><li><a href="/wiki/Category:Internet_properties_established_in_2013">Internet properties established in 2013</a></li><li><a href="/wiki/Category:2013_establishments_in_the_United_States">2013 establishments in the United States</a></li><li><a href="/wiki/Category:Internet_publication_stubs">Internet publication stubs</a></li></ul></div>
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 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 Wait But Why
 Available in English, Chinese 
 Editor Tim Urban 
 URL waitbutwhy.com 
 Launched 2013 ; 10 years ago
 Current status Online 
 

 Wait But Why (WBW) is a website founded by Tim Urban and Andrew Finn and written and illustrated by Urban. The site covers a range of subjects as a long-form blog.[1] Typical posts involve long-form discussions of various topics, including artificial intelligence, outer space, and procrastination, using a combination of prose and rough illustrations.[2][3][4]

 On May 21, 2014, Urban posted "The Fermi Paradox", a post that became extremely popular.[5][6] A 2016 Ted Talk by Urban on procrastination, based on concepts from the blog, had garnered over 50 million views by December 2022.[7] A post on the blog about Elon Musk and Neuralink was produced with involvement from Musk himself.[8]

 In 2019, Marie Boran of The Irish Times summarized the website as a collection of "lengthy, thoughtful and well-written blog posts", praising them for being an "accessible and entertaining primer on human nature".[9]

 References [ edit ]

 1. ^ Davis, Noah (30 October 2014). "How Do You Make a Living, Email Newsletter Writer?". Pacific Standard . Retrieved 22 December 2015 .
 2. ^ Roberts, David (27 August 2015). "Tech nerds are smart. But they can't seem to get their heads around politics". Vox. Vox Media . Retrieved 4 September 2016 .
 3. ^ Grothaus, Michael (5 March 2015). "The Secrets Of Writing Smart, Long-form Articles That Go Absolutely Viral". Fast Company . Retrieved 22 December 2015 .
 4. ^ Eyal, Nir (10 August 2021). "The Behavioral Economics Diet: The Science of Killing a Bad Habit". Psychology Today . Retrieved 16 August 2021 .
 5. ^ "The Fermi Paradox - Wait But Why". Wait But Why. 2014-05-21 . Retrieved 2018-03-20 .
 6. ^ Klein, Ezra (2020-02-10). ""We're in the climax of a movie": Tim Urban on humanity's wild future". Vox . Retrieved 2020-04-25 .
 7. ^ Tim Urban: Inside the mind of a master procrastinator | TED , retrieved 2022-12-11
 8. ^ Welsh, Caitlin (17 July 2019). "Elon Musk claims robot surgeon will sew electrodes into human brains in 2020". Mashable . Retrieved 16 October 2021 .
 9. ^ Boran, Marie (17 September 2019). "Weblog: Wait But Why offers long and thought-provoking reads". The Irish Times . Retrieved 16 October 2021 .

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 * Official website
 * Official French translation
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Toggle the table of contents
	
	
	
	From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
	
	  Wait But Why   Available in English, Chinese   Editor Tim Urban   URL  waitbutwhy .com    Launched 2013; 10 years ago   Current status Online   
 Wait But Why (WBW) is a website founded by Tim Urban and Andrew Finn and written and illustrated by Urban. The site covers a range of subjects as a long-form blog. [1]  Typical posts involve long-form discussions of various topics, including artificial intelligence, outer space, and procrastination, using a combination of prose and rough illustrations. [2]   [3]   [4] 
 On May 21, 2014, Urban posted "The Fermi Paradox", a post that became extremely popular. [5]   [6]  A 2016 Ted Talk by Urban on procrastination, based on concepts from the blog, had garnered over 50 million views by December 2022. [7]  A post on the blog about Elon Musk and Neuralink was produced with involvement from Musk himself. [8] 
 In 2019, Marie Boran of  The Irish Times  summarized the website as a collection of "lengthy, thoughtful and well-written blog posts", praising them for being an "accessible and entertaining primer on human nature". [9] 
References[edit]
 
  ^  Davis, Noah (30 October 2014). "How Do You Make a Living, Email Newsletter Writer?".  Pacific Standard . Retrieved 22 December 2015.
  ^  Roberts, David (27 August 2015). "Tech nerds are smart. But they can't seem to get their heads around politics". Vox. Vox Media. Retrieved 4 September 2016.
  ^  Grothaus, Michael (5 March 2015). "The Secrets Of Writing Smart, Long-form Articles That Go Absolutely Viral".  Fast Company . Retrieved 22 December 2015.
  ^  Eyal, Nir (10 August 2021). "The Behavioral Economics Diet: The Science of Killing a Bad Habit".  Psychology Today . Retrieved 16 August 2021.
  ^   "The Fermi Paradox - Wait But Why". Wait But Why. 2014-05-21. Retrieved 2018-03-20.
  ^  Klein, Ezra (2020-02-10). ""We're in the climax of a movie": Tim Urban on humanity's wild future". Vox. Retrieved 2020-04-25.
  ^    Tim Urban: Inside the mind of a master procrastinator | TED , retrieved 2022-12-11
  ^  Welsh, Caitlin (17 July 2019). "Elon Musk claims robot surgeon will sew electrodes into human brains in 2020".  Mashable . Retrieved 16 October 2021.
  ^  Boran, Marie (17 September 2019). "Weblog: Wait But Why offers long and thought-provoking reads".  The Irish Times . Retrieved 16 October 2021.
 
External links[edit]
  Official website   
 Official French translation  
	  Categories:    American blogs   Internet properties established in 2013   2013 establishments in the United States   Internet publication stubs
Wait But Why - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wait_But_Why
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a9lsGtVziM&feature=youtu.be
Tim Urban of Wait But Why
Jan 3, 2018
Y Combinator
Tim Urban - https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy - cofounded the blog Wait But Why - https://waitbutwhy.com/ - with Andrew Finn - https://twitter.com/finnscave - in 2013.

His posts about Artificial Intelligence, Elon Musk, and the Fermi Paradox have been read millions of times.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

We discussed Tim's research strategy, the purpose of Wait But Why, and his thoughts on technologies including cryptocurrencies, A.I., and AR/VR.

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - https://twitter.com/craigcannon
| view_count: 63,877 views | short_view_count: 63K views | num_likes: 1.3K | num_subscribers: 880K
Tim Urban - https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy - cofounded the blog Wait But Why - https://waitbutwhy.com/ - with Andrew Finn - https://twitter.com/finnscave - in 2013.
His posts about Artificial Intelligence, Elon Musk, and the Fermi Paradox have been read millions of times.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html
We discussed Tim's research strategy, the purpose of Wait But Why, and his thoughts on technologies including cryptocurrencies, A.I., and AR/VR.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - https://twitter.com/craigcannon
| view_count: 63,877 views | short_view_count: 63K views | num_likes: 1.3K | num_subscribers: 880K
Tim Urban of Wait But Why
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a9lsGtVziM
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                    * Headquarters Regions West Coast, Western US
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                    Wait But Why is a website with original long-form writing and illustrations that makes people laugh, think, and learn.
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                      Western US Digital Media Companies
                        2,448 Number of Organizations • $11.6B Total Funding Amount • 2,068 Number of Investors
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                        5,498 Number of Organizations • $24.6B Total Funding Amount • 3,073 Number of Investors
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                        1,896 Number of Organizations • $9.7B Total Funding Amount • 1,453 Number of Investors
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2017-12-06
Contributor Tim Urban waitbutwhy com
<div><div><div><article><div><p></p><p>&lt;a href="http://www.waitbutwhy.com/" rel="nofollow"&gt;waitbutwhy.com&lt;/a&gt;</p></div><div><p><a href="http://www.waitbutwhy.com/">Wait But Why</a> posts regularly.</p> <p>You can visit Wait But Why at <a href="http://www.waitbutwhy.com">www.waitbutwhy.com</a>.</p> <p><a href=""></a>Wait But Why on Facebook: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/waitbutwhy">https://www.facebook.com/waitbutwhy</a></p> <p>@waitbutwhy on Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy">https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy</a></p></div></article><div><div><div><p></p><p><a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man_b_8427288"><h2>Here Is Why Elon Musk Is The World's Raddest Man</h2></a></p></div><div><p></p><p><a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-ai-revolution-the-road-to-superintelligence_b_6648480"><h2>The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence</h2></a></p></div><div><p></p><p><a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/30-year-old-single-guys_b_5760034"><h2>10 Types Of 30-Year-Old Single Guys</h2></a></p></div><div><p></p><p><a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/your-life-in-weeks_b_5366289"><h2>This Is Your Life In Weeks</h2></a></p></div></div><div><h2> Submit a tip</h2><p>Do you have info to share with HuffPost reporters? <a href="https://img.huffingtonpost.com/securedrop">Here’s how.</a></p></div><section><div><div><p></p><p><a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-fermi-paradox_b_5489415"><h2>Are We Alone In The Universe? 13 Theories</h2></a></p></div><div><p></p><p><a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tipping-etiquette_b_5106466"><h2>Everything You Don't Know About Tipping</h2></a></p></div><div><p></p><p><a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-to-pick-your-life-partner_b_4848898"><h2>How To Pick Your Life Partner</h2></a></p></div><div><p></p><p><a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-to-name-a-baby_b_4551427"><h2>How to Name A Baby</h2></a></p></div><div><p></p><p><a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-procrastinators-procrastinate_b_4369887"><h2>Why Procrastinators Procrastinate</h2></a></p></div><div><p></p><p><a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/visiting-north-korea_b_4256519"><h2>20 Things I Learned While I Was in North Korea</h2></a></p></div></div></section></div></div><div><div><div><p>Newsletter Sign Up</p><h2>The Morning Email</h2><p>Wake up to the day's most important news.</p></div><div><p>By entering your email and clicking Sign Up, you're agreeing to let us send you customized marketing messages about us and our advertising partners. You are also agreeing to our <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/static/user-agreement">Terms of Service</a> and <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/static/privacy-policy">Privacy Policy</a>.</p></div></div><div><h2>Follow Us</h2></div></div></div></div>||||I|||| Skip to Main Content

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&lt;a href="http://www.waitbutwhy.com/" rel="nofollow"&gt;waitbutwhy.com&lt;/a&gt;    Wait But Why posts regularly. You can visit Wait But Why at www.waitbutwhy.com.   Wait But Why on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/waitbutwhy  @waitbutwhy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy           Here Is Why Elon Musk Is The World's Raddest Man         The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence         10 Types Of 30-Year-Old Single Guys         This Is Your Life In Weeks       Submit a tip Do you have info to share with HuffPost reporters? Here’s how.          Are We Alone In The Universe? 13 Theories         Everything You Don't Know About Tipping         How To Pick Your Life Partner         How to Name A Baby         Why Procrastinators Procrastinate         20 Things I Learned While I Was in North Korea           Newsletter Sign Up The Morning Email Wake up to the day's most important news.   By entering your email and clicking Sign Up, you're agreeing to let us send you customized marketing messages about us and our advertising partners. You are also agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.    Follow Us
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wait but why Archives - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
2017-11-30
Tim Ferriss
<div><article>
<p><a href="https://tim.blog/2017/11/30/managing-procrastination-predicting-the-future-and-finding-happiness/"></a>
</p>
<div>
<p>“I always thought the future would be intense, but now I think the future is going fully fucking crazy!” — Tim Urban Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) is the author of the blog Wait But Why and has become one of the Internet’s most popular writers. According to Fast Company, Tim has “captured a level of reader engagement that even … </p>
<p><a href="https://tim.blog/2017/11/30/managing-procrastination-predicting-the-future-and-finding-happiness/">Continue reading</a></p>
</div>
</article><article>
<p><a href="https://tim.blog/2017/11/27/tim-urban-tribe-of-mentors/"></a>
</p>
<div>
<p>This is the most recent episode of my brand-new Tribe of Mentors podcast! It features a live interview I did with writer Tim Urban at Union Square Barnes &amp; Noble in NYC on the launch day of Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World.  Here we go… Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy, waitbutwhy.com) is … </p>
<p><a href="https://tim.blog/2017/11/27/tim-urban-tribe-of-mentors/">Continue reading</a></p>
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 Tag: wait but why

 Posted on November 30, 2017February 3, 2023

 Managing Procrastination, Predicting the Future, and Finding Happiness — Tim Urban (#283)

 “I always thought the future would be intense, but now I think the future is going fully fucking crazy!” — Tim Urban Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) is the author of the blog Wait But Why and has become one of the Internet’s most popular writers. According to Fast Company, Tim has “captured a level of reader engagement that even …

 Continue reading “Managing Procrastination, Predicting the Future, and Finding Happiness — Tim Urban (#283)”

 Posted on November 27, 2017January 16, 2020

 Tribe of Mentors Podcast — Tim Urban

 This is the most recent episode of my brand-new Tribe of Mentors podcast! It features a live interview I did with writer Tim Urban at Union Square Barnes & Noble in NYC on the launch day of Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World. Here we go… Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy, waitbutwhy.com) is …

 Continue reading “Tribe of Mentors Podcast — Tim Urban”

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“I always thought the future would be intense, but now I think the future is going fully fucking crazy!” — Tim Urban Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) is the author of the blog Wait But Why and has become one of the Internet’s most popular writers. According to Fast Company, Tim has “captured a level of reader engagement that even … 
 Continue reading 
 
  
This is the most recent episode of my brand-new Tribe of Mentors podcast! It features a live interview I did with writer Tim Urban at Union Square Barnes &amp; Noble in NYC on the launch day of Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World.  Here we go… Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy, waitbutwhy.com) is … 
 Continue reading
wait but why Archives - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
https://tim.blog/tag/wait-but-why/
https://medium.com/@yubingzhang/recommended-read-the-story-of-us-from-waitbutwhy-com-e534b4552979
Recommended Read: “The Story of Us” from waitbutwhy.com
2019-12-16
Yubing Zhang
<div><div><div><a href="https://medium.com/@yubingzhang?source=post_page-----e534b4552979--------------------------------"><div><p></p></div></a></div><p>I am a big fan of <a href="http://waitbutwhy.com/">waitbutwhy.com</a>. The website had a few pretty amazing long blog posts. They are intellectually enlightening and pretty entertaining at the same time — a rare combination. <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html">The Fermi Paradox</a> and <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html">Neurallink</a>, to name a few</p><p>This year Tim Urban (the <a href="http://waitbuywhy.com/">waitbuywhy.com</a> blogger) published another long series called “<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html">The Story of Us</a>”. In this new (and still ongoing series), he attempted to establish a new mental model to think about how we live, how we make decisions, and how we interact with each other in this society. To create this new mental model, he leveraged tools and insights from many disciplines — neuroscience, behavioral science, social science, political science, etc.</p><p>To quote Jonathan Turley from his impeachment testimony: “<em>I get it. You are mad. The president is mad. My Republican friends are mad. My Democratic friends are mad…Even my dog is mad. We are all mad, and where has it taken us?” </em>Politics in modern societies is a nightmare. It makes people angry, frustrated, and hateful. It brings out the worst of ourselves. We’ve all been to dinner parties where, after a few glasses of wine, we suddenly found ourselves in a conversation about immigration. And then someone at the table said, “let’s not go there!” And everyone else laughed and then we all went back to talking about holiday plans. Talking about politics in a large group is uncomfortable and risky — so we avoid it. It’s the kind of topic that you reserve for your closest circles — people that most likely share your views. As a result, most of us rarely have to defend our political opinions against real criticism. Over time, we grow a bit more ignorant and yet a bit more convinced.</p><p>In that sense, Tim took a considerable risk writing a long blog post series about this topic — under his real name. The series has nine long chapters (and still growing), so plenty of targets to attack and opportunities to alienate readers. But we need this, and the world needs this. Ultimately, politics is about how we live, how we make decisions, and how we interact with each other in this society. It’s essential to get this right. So let’s stay calm and talk about politics.</p><p>I am not going to write a summary this time. This topic is already controversial enough — oversimplification will only further mask the nuance and reduce everything to just black and white. And honestly, nothing I write can do this series (especially all the stick figures that come with it) any justice. So if you are interested, check out the series <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html">here</a>. It’s super long, but an enjoyable read.</p></div></div>||||I|||| Open in app

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 Recommended Read: “The Story of Us” from waitbutwhy.com

 Yubing Zhang

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 Dec 16, 2019

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 I am a big fan of waitbutwhy.com. The website had a few pretty amazing long blog posts. They are intellectually enlightening and pretty entertaining at the same time — a rare combination. The Fermi Paradox and Neurallink, to name a few

 This year Tim Urban (the waitbuywhy.com blogger) published another long series called “The Story of Us”. In this new (and still ongoing series), he attempted to establish a new mental model to think about how we live, how we make decisions, and how we interact with each other in this society. To create this new mental model, he leveraged tools and insights from many disciplines — neuroscience, behavioral science, social science, political science, etc.

 To quote Jonathan Turley from his impeachment testimony: “I get it. You are mad. The president is mad. My Republican friends are mad. My Democratic friends are mad…Even my dog is mad. We are all mad, and where has it taken us?” Politics in modern societies is a nightmare. It makes people angry, frustrated, and hateful. It brings out the worst of ourselves. We’ve all been to dinner parties where, after a few glasses of wine, we suddenly found ourselves in a conversation about immigration. And then someone at the table said, “let’s not go there!” And everyone else laughed and then we all went back to talking about holiday plans. Talking about politics in a large group is uncomfortable and risky — so we avoid it. It’s the kind of topic that you reserve for your closest circles — people that most likely share your views. As a result, most of us rarely have to defend our political opinions against real criticism. Over time, we grow a bit more ignorant and yet a bit more convinced.

 In that sense, Tim took a considerable risk writing a long blog post series about this topic — under his real name. The series has nine long chapters (and still growing), so plenty of targets to attack and opportunities to alienate readers. But we need this, and the world needs this. Ultimately, politics is about how we live, how we make decisions, and how we interact with each other in this society. It’s essential to get this right. So let’s stay calm and talk about politics.

 I am not going to write a summary this time. This topic is already controversial enough — oversimplification will only further mask the nuance and reduce everything to just black and white. And honestly, nothing I write can do this series (especially all the stick figures that come with it) any justice. So if you are interested, check out the series here. It’s super long, but an enjoyable read.

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I am a big fan of waitbutwhy.com. The website had a few pretty amazing long blog posts. They are intellectually enlightening and pretty entertaining at the same time — a rare combination. The Fermi Paradox and Neurallink, to name a few This year Tim Urban (the waitbuywhy.com blogger) published another long series called “The Story of Us”. In this new (and still ongoing series), he attempted to establish a new mental model to think about how we live, how we make decisions, and how we interact with each other in this society. To create this new mental model, he leveraged tools and insights from many disciplines — neuroscience, behavioral science, social science, political science, etc. To quote Jonathan Turley from his impeachment testimony: “I get it. You are mad. The president is mad. My Republican friends are mad. My Democratic friends are mad…Even my dog is mad. We are all mad, and where has it taken us?” Politics in modern societies is a nightmare. It makes people angry, frustrated, and hateful. It brings out the worst of ourselves. We’ve all been to dinner parties where, after a few glasses of wine, we suddenly found ourselves in a conversation about immigration. And then someone at the table said, “let’s not go there!” And everyone else laughed and then we all went back to talking about holiday plans. Talking about politics in a large group is uncomfortable and risky — so we avoid it. It’s the kind of topic that you reserve for your closest circles — people that most likely share your views. As a result, most of us rarely have to defend our political opinions against real criticism. Over time, we grow a bit more ignorant and yet a bit more convinced. In that sense, Tim took a considerable risk writing a long blog post series about this topic — under his real name. The series has nine long chapters (and still growing), so plenty of targets to attack and opportunities to alienate readers. But we need this, and the world needs this. Ultimately, politics is about how we live, how we make decisions, and how we interact with each other in this society. It’s essential to get this right. So let’s stay calm and talk about politics. I am not going to write a summary this time. This topic is already controversial enough — oversimplification will only further mask the nuance and reduce everything to just black and white. And honestly, nothing I write can do this series (especially all the stick figures that come with it) any justice. So if you are interested, check out the series here. It’s super long, but an enjoyable read.
Recommended Read: “The Story of Us” from waitbutwhy.com
https://medium.com/@yubingzhang/recommended-read-the-story-of-us-from-waitbutwhy-com-e534b4552979
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-think-like-elon-musk-tim-urban-waitbutwhy-com/id1482999379?i=1000530292202
‎Growth Minds: 90. How to Think Like Elon Musk | Tim Urban | WaitButWhy.com on Apple Podcasts
2021-07-28
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<div><p>Tim Urban is the co-founder and writer of Wait But Why (waitbutwhy.com), a long-form blog discussing topics like artificial intelligence, future technology, relationships, procrastination, career, and more.  </p><p>Tim's TED Talk on procrastination has been viewed more than 50 million times, and his blog has caught the attention of people like Elon Musk.</p><p>#elonmusk #neuralink #procrastination  </p><p>If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes and a rating on our Spotify show? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!</p><p>Subscribe on YouTube: http://bit.ly/38bZNAY<br/>Listen on Apple Podcast: https://buff.ly/2PycRL1<br/>Listen on Spotify: https://bit.ly/growth-minds<br/>Follow me on Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/heyseankim<br/>Learn Spanish by speaking it for free: https://www.jumpspeak.com</p><p>Past guests on Growth Minds include: Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad), Steve Aoki, Robert Greene, Dr. Jason Fung, Dr. Steven Gundry, Neil deGrasse Tyson (StarTalk),  Dennis Rodman, Wim Hof, Robin Sharma, Vanessa Van Edwards, King Bach, Daniel Pink, Dr. William Davis, Doctor Mike, Lewis Howes (School of Greatness), Tom Bilyeu (Impact Theory), Andrew Yang, Dr. Paul Conti, Charles Hoskinson (Ethereum), Dr. Drew (After Dark), Jo Koy, Jordan Belfort (Wolf of Wall Street), Gad Saad, Adam Carolla, Louis the Child, Vishen Lakhiani (Mindvalley), Bret Weinstein (DarkHorse Podcast), James Nestor, Dave Rubin, Scott Adams (Real Coffee with Scott Adams), Dave Asprey (Bulletproof Coffee), Gabby Reece, Rich Roll, James Altucher, R3hab, and more.</p></div>
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 1 hr 28 min

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 90. How to Think Like Elon Musk | Tim Urban | WaitButWhy.com Growth Minds

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 + Health & Fitness

 Tim Urban is the co-founder and writer of Wait But Why (waitbutwhy.com), a long-form blog discussing topics like artificial intelligence, future technology, relationships, procrastination, career, and more.

 Tim's TED Talk on procrastination has been viewed more than 50 million times, and his blog has caught the attention of people like Elon Musk.

 #elonmusk #neuralink #procrastination





 If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes and a rating on our Spotify show? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!



 Subscribe on YouTube: http://bit.ly/38bZNAY
 Listen on Apple Podcast: https://buff.ly/2PycRL1
 Listen on Spotify: https://bit.ly/growth-minds
 Follow me on Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/heyseankim
 Learn Spanish by speaking it for free: https://www.jumpspeak.com



 Past guests on Growth Minds include: Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad), Steve Aoki, Robert Greene, Dr. Jason Fung, Dr. Steven Gundry, Neil deGrasse Tyson (StarTalk), Dennis Rodman, Wim Hof, Robin Sharma, Vanessa Van Edwards, King Bach, Daniel Pink, Dr. William Davis, Doctor Mike, Lewis Howes (School of Greatness), Tom Bilyeu (Impact Theory), Andrew Yang, Dr. Paul Conti, Charles Hoskinson (Ethereum), Dr. Drew (After Dark), Jo Koy, Jordan Belfort (Wolf of Wall Street), Gad Saad, Adam Carolla, Louis the Child, Vishen Lakhiani (Mindvalley), Bret Weinstein (DarkHorse Podcast), James Nestor, Dave Rubin, Scott Adams (Real Coffee with Scott Adams), Dave Asprey (Bulletproof Coffee), Gabby Reece, Rich Roll, James Altucher, R3hab, and more.

 * Episode Website
 * More Episodes
 * Sean Kim

 Tim Urban is the co-founder and writer of Wait But Why (waitbutwhy.com), a long-form blog discussing topics like artificial intelligence, future technology, relationships, procrastination, career, and more.

 Tim's TED Talk on procrastination has been viewed more than 50 million times, and his blog has caught the attention of people like Elon Musk.

 #elonmusk #neuralink #procrastination





 If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes and a rating on our Spotify show? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!



 Subscribe on YouTube: http://bit.ly/38bZNAY
 Listen on Apple Podcast: https://buff.ly/2PycRL1
 Listen on Spotify: https://bit.ly/growth-minds
 Follow me on Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/heyseankim
 Learn Spanish by speaking it for free: https://www.jumpspeak.com



 Past guests on Growth Minds include: Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad), Steve Aoki, Robert Greene, Dr. Jason Fung, Dr. Steven Gundry, Neil deGrasse Tyson (StarTalk), Dennis Rodman, Wim Hof, Robin Sharma, Vanessa Van Edwards, King Bach, Daniel Pink, Dr. William Davis, Doctor Mike, Lewis Howes (School of Greatness), Tom Bilyeu (Impact Theory), Andrew Yang, Dr. Paul Conti, Charles Hoskinson (Ethereum), Dr. Drew (After Dark), Jo Koy, Jordan Belfort (Wolf of Wall Street), Gad Saad, Adam Carolla, Louis the Child, Vishen Lakhiani (Mindvalley), Bret Weinstein (DarkHorse Podcast), James Nestor, Dave Rubin, Scott Adams (Real Coffee with Scott Adams), Dave Asprey (Bulletproof Coffee), Gabby Reece, Rich Roll, James Altucher, R3hab, and more.

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 1 hr 28 min

 * Episode Website
 * More Episodes
 * Sean Kim

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Tim Urban is the co-founder and writer of Wait But Why (waitbutwhy.com), a long-form blog discussing topics like artificial intelligence, future technology, relationships, procrastination, career, and more.   Tim's TED Talk on procrastination has been viewed more than 50 million times, and his blog has caught the attention of people like Elon Musk. #elonmusk #neuralink #procrastination   If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes and a rating on our Spotify show? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! Subscribe on YouTube: http://bit.ly/38bZNAYListen on Apple Podcast: https://buff.ly/2PycRL1Listen on Spotify: https://bit.ly/growth-mindsFollow me on Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/heyseankimLearn Spanish by speaking it for free: https://www.jumpspeak.com Past guests on Growth Minds include: Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad), Steve Aoki, Robert Greene, Dr. Jason Fung, Dr. Steven Gundry, Neil deGrasse Tyson (StarTalk),  Dennis Rodman, Wim Hof, Robin Sharma, Vanessa Van Edwards, King Bach, Daniel Pink, Dr. William Davis, Doctor Mike, Lewis Howes (School of Greatness), Tom Bilyeu (Impact Theory), Andrew Yang, Dr. Paul Conti, Charles Hoskinson (Ethereum), Dr. Drew (After Dark), Jo Koy, Jordan Belfort (Wolf of Wall Street), Gad Saad, Adam Carolla, Louis the Child, Vishen Lakhiani (Mindvalley), Bret Weinstein (DarkHorse Podcast), James Nestor, Dave Rubin, Scott Adams (Real Coffee with Scott Adams), Dave Asprey (Bulletproof Coffee), Gabby Reece, Rich Roll, James Altucher, R3hab, and more. 
 Top Podcasts In Health &amp; Fitness
‎Growth Minds: 90. How to Think Like Elon Musk | Tim Urban | WaitButWhy.com on Apple Podcasts
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-think-like-elon-musk-tim-urban-waitbutwhy-com/id1482999379?i=1000530292202
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/emywJraDHRjeWsCT9/linkpost-why-going-to-the-doctor-sucks-waitbutwhy
[linkpost] Why Going to the Doctor Sucks (WaitButWhy)
2021-11-23
Mike Hawke
<div><div><div><div><p><a href="#comments">11 comments</a></p></div><div><p><h2>5</h2></p></div></div><div><p>Y'all heard about this already, right?</p></div><p></p></div></div>||||I|||| This website requires javascript to properly function. Consider activating javascript to get access to all site functionality.

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 [linkpost] Why Going to the Doctor Sucks (WaitButWhy)

 by mike_hawke
 1 min read 23rd Nov 2021 11 comments

 5

 Health / Medicine / Disease Practical
 Frontpage
 This is a linkpost for https://waitbutwhy.com/2021/04/lanby.html

 Y'all heard about this already, right?

 [linkpost] Why Going to the Doctor Sucks (WaitButWhy)
 23rd Nov 2021
 10 Vaniver
 7 Ruby
 5 Said Achmiz
 4 shminux
 6 Said Achmiz
 3 Adam Zerner
 5 Vaniver
 2 Adam Zerner
 3 Vaniver
 2 Raemon
 1 Josh Jacobson
 New Comment
 Submit
 11 comments , sorted by
 top scoring
 Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 6:00 PM
 [ - ]Vaniver 2y 10 0

 If you're interested in this, it might also be worth checking out One Medical (which I have a membership at, here's my referral code which I think only helps you?), which has the feature that appointments are easy to get soon and also the feature that the spaces are nice, while not having changed the experience of talking with the doctor all that much (which seems to be a big part of their dream, and may or may not be part of what they're delivering). In particular, One Medical doesn't the 'three-person-team' model which I imagine will be doing most of the work with The Lanby.

 Also it's $200/year instead of $2k/year, and is available lots of places besides Manhattan.

 Reply
 [ - ]Ruby 2y 7 0

 I edited the title to include WaitButWhy.

 Reply
 [ - ]Said Achmiz 2y 5 0

 This is a long post, unnecessarily broken up by illustrations, that takes a long time to get to anything resembling a point. It also seems to be written with the purpose of shilling some sort of startup or product.

 Now, I don’t necessarily have anything against any of these things, but… they do dramatically lower my estimate of the likelihood that reading the post will be a good use of my time.

 With that in mind: is there any chance we could get some sort of “executive summary”? OP, I get the sense that you’re trying to convey that this is something important or valuable—so, would you consider writing a few sentences about what the heck this post is about?

 Reply
 [ - ]shminux 2y 4 0

 Uncharitable summary:

 The Lanby is building a primary care utopia no one else thought of, even though it's obvious, with focus on prevention, quality care and free unicorns.

 Reply
 [ - ]Said Achmiz 2y 6 0

 Hmm.

 Now, this may be a stupid question, but I can’t seem to find the answer on a skim or Cmd-F of the post: why is this… thing… called “the Lanby”? What is a… lanby?

 Reply
 [ - ]Adam Zerner 2y 3 0

 I'm interested in opinions about this. I haven't thought too hard about it, but my current take is that it's too much money to spend for someone who is young and doesn't have much health-related stuff to deal with. But on the other hand, it seems very plausible that health is just that important, and it is worth it.

 Reply
 [ - ]Vaniver 2y 5 0

 I think if you're earning 100k/yr, it's pretty likely that improvements to your health can make you more than 2% more productive, and thus it's worth it. Unfortunately I think this is pretty spiky, where some people will get >10% improvements and many people will get 0% improvements, and it may be possible to tell ahead of time which group you'll be in. [Like, the relevant factor shouldn't be "I'm young" but something more like "I love the experience of being in my body."]

 Reply
 [ - ]Adam Zerner 2y 2 0

 The spiky part makes sense. I'm the type of person who is very accepting of expected value based reasoning, so I'm not turned off by it. Although it does beg the question of whether I am the type of person who is a spike or not. I don't feel like I am, but maybe there's something I'm overlooking. Do you have any thoughts on what makes someone a spike?

 2% productive seems possible, but I don't really have a good sense of what that number is. Would you mind talking a little bit about what leads you to this belief?

 Reply
 [ - ]Vaniver 2y 3 0

 Do you have any thoughts on what makes someone a spike?

 I mean, the OP has two examples of the target customer: someone with a serious autoimmune disorder, and someone who got breast cancer while young.

 My interest in this sort of thing stems from having low energy compared to people around me, and wouldn't be surprised if there's a medical treatment available that somehow increases my productive hours by 20-100%. Compare to my boyfriend, who already works >60hr weeks, where I would be astounded if a similar intervention existed for him.

 2% productive seems possible, but I don't really have a good sense of what that number is. Would you mind talking a little bit about what leads you to this belief?

 In terms of inputs, that looks like "you get one more hour of productive work done per week" for a regular full-timer, which I think is a reasonable thing to expect if you, say, your sleep is 10 minutes more efficient each night, or your diet is better such that you have 10 minutes more of focused energy per day. Or the story might be 'fewer sick days'--if you're working 250 days a year, then you need to shave 5 sick days off a year (which is many fewer than I was taking to start with, for example, but is probably well within the realm of possibility for the two founders).

 [This also is assuming it just costs the money--however, if the active ingredient is that you're seeing doctors more often, or spending limited experimental budgets on health things instead of other things, then it can be much harder to pay for itself. And it's assuming that your productivity is somehow measured in a way that flows back to you--if you need to increase your productivity by 5% to get a 2% raise, then for this to be strictly worth it on financial grounds you'd need to get a 5% improvement from increased health.]

 Reply
 [ - ]Raemon 2y 2 0

 I think the biggest wins are among people who have something subtly wrong with them that can be fixed.

 In Strategies for Personal Growth terms, you have a problem that can be fixed with healing.

 Reply
 [ - ]Josh Jacobson 2y 1 0

 I’m quite skeptical that improvements will be realized by this methodology. Not clear that there are health improvement gains in expectation.

 Reply
 Moderation Log
This website requires javascript to properly function. Consider activating javascript to get access to all site functionality.
 LESSWRONG
 LW
 Login
 [linkpost] Why Going to the Doctor Sucks (WaitButWhy)
 by mike_hawke
 1 min read 23rd Nov 2021 11 comments
 5
 Health / Medicine / Disease Practical
 Frontpage
 This is a linkpost for https://waitbutwhy.com/2021/04/lanby.html
 Y'all heard about this already, right?
 [linkpost] Why Going to the Doctor Sucks (WaitButWhy)
 23rd Nov 2021
 10 Vaniver
 7 Ruby
 5 Said Achmiz
 4 shminux
 6 Said Achmiz
 3 Adam Zerner
 5 Vaniver
 2 Adam Zerner
 3 Vaniver
 2 Raemon
 1 Josh Jacobson
 New Comment
 Submit
 11 comments , sorted by
 top scoring
 Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 6:00 PM
 [ - ]Vaniver 2y 10 0
 If you're interested in this, it might also be worth checking out One Medical (which I have a membership at, here's my referral code which I think only helps you?), which has the feature that appointments are easy to get soon and also the feature that the spaces are nice, while not having changed the experience of talking with the doctor all that much (which seems to be a big part of their dream, and may or may not be part of what they're delivering). In particular, One Medical doesn't the 'three-person-team' model which I imagine will be doing most of the work with The Lanby.
 Also it's $200/year instead of $2k/year, and is available lots of places besides Manhattan.
 Reply
 [ - ]Ruby 2y 7 0
 I edited the title to include WaitButWhy.
 Reply
 [ - ]Said Achmiz 2y 5 0
 This is a long post, unnecessarily broken up by illustrations, that takes a long time to get to anything resembling a point. It also seems to be written with the purpose of shilling some sort of startup or product.
 Now, I don’t necessarily have anything against any of these things, but… they do dramatically lower my estimate of the likelihood that reading the post will be a good use of my time.
 With that in mind: is there any chance we could get some sort of “executive summary”? OP, I get the sense that you’re trying to convey that this is something important or valuable—so, would you consider writing a few sentences about what the heck this post is about?
 Reply
 [ - ]shminux 2y 4 0
 Uncharitable summary:
 The Lanby is building a primary care utopia no one else thought of, even though it's obvious, with focus on prevention, quality care and free unicorns.
 Reply
 [ - ]Said Achmiz 2y 6 0
 Hmm.
 Now, this may be a stupid question, but I can’t seem to find the answer on a skim or Cmd-F of the post: why is this… thing… called “the Lanby”? What is a… lanby?
 Reply
 [ - ]Adam Zerner 2y 3 0
 I'm interested in opinions about this. I haven't thought too hard about it, but my current take is that it's too much money to spend for someone who is young and doesn't have much health-related stuff to deal with. But on the other hand, it seems very plausible that health is just that important, and it is worth it.
 Reply
 [ - ]Vaniver 2y 5 0
 I think if you're earning 100k/yr, it's pretty likely that improvements to your health can make you more than 2% more productive, and thus it's worth it. Unfortunately I think this is pretty spiky, where some people will get >10% improvements and many people will get 0% improvements, and it may be possible to tell ahead of time which group you'll be in. [Like, the relevant factor shouldn't be "I'm young" but something more like "I love the experience of being in my body."]
 Reply
 [ - ]Adam Zerner 2y 2 0
 The spiky part makes sense. I'm the type of person who is very accepting of expected value based reasoning, so I'm not turned off by it. Although it does beg the question of whether I am the type of person who is a spike or not. I don't feel like I am, but maybe there's something I'm overlooking. Do you have any thoughts on what makes someone a spike?
 2% productive seems possible, but I don't really have a good sense of what that number is. Would you mind talking a little bit about what leads you to this belief?
 Reply
 [ - ]Vaniver 2y 3 0
 Do you have any thoughts on what makes someone a spike?
 I mean, the OP has two examples of the target customer: someone with a serious autoimmune disorder, and someone who got breast cancer while young.
 My interest in this sort of thing stems from having low energy compared to people around me, and wouldn't be surprised if there's a medical treatment available that somehow increases my productive hours by 20-100%. Compare to my boyfriend, who already works >60hr weeks, where I would be astounded if a similar intervention existed for him.
 2% productive seems possible, but I don't really have a good sense of what that number is. Would you mind talking a little bit about what leads you to this belief?
 In terms of inputs, that looks like "you get one more hour of productive work done per week" for a regular full-timer, which I think is a reasonable thing to expect if you, say, your sleep is 10 minutes more efficient each night, or your diet is better such that you have 10 minutes more of focused energy per day. Or the story might be 'fewer sick days'--if you're working 250 days a year, then you need to shave 5 sick days off a year (which is many fewer than I was taking to start with, for example, but is probably well within the realm of possibility for the two founders).
 [This also is assuming it just costs the money--however, if the active ingredient is that you're seeing doctors more often, or spending limited experimental budgets on health things instead of other things, then it can be much harder to pay for itself. And it's assuming that your productivity is somehow measured in a way that flows back to you--if you need to increase your productivity by 5% to get a 2% raise, then for this to be strictly worth it on financial grounds you'd need to get a 5% improvement from increased health.]
 Reply
 [ - ]Raemon 2y 2 0
 I think the biggest wins are among people who have something subtly wrong with them that can be fixed.
 In Strategies for Personal Growth terms, you have a problem that can be fixed with healing.
 Reply
 [ - ]Josh Jacobson 2y 1 0
 I’m quite skeptical that improvements will be realized by this methodology. Not clear that there are health improvement gains in expectation.
 Reply
 Moderation Log
[linkpost] Why Going to the Doctor Sucks (WaitButWhy)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/emywJraDHRjeWsCT9/linkpost-why-going-to-the-doctor-sucks-waitbutwhy