Awesome Kurzgesagt

Usually when Kurzgesagt dives into hypothetical situations, they’re things that are in the realm of possibility. This time they decided to show us their silly side and answered two ridiculous questions. First, could Tokyo be powered entirely by jellyfish? Then, what might happen if the skies opened up and rained bananas instead of water for 24 hours?

Kurzgesagt combines science fiction, paleontology, and a geology lesson in its latest video. Imagine if you had a time machine and it broke down after you traveled millions of years into the past. What might life be like, and could a human even survive in the Triassic and earlier prehistoric periods?

Everything you experience in life results from your brain doing massive amounts of data processing from your eyes, ears, nose, and other body parts. Kurzgesagt explores the wonderful world of human perception. It’s incredible how our minds rapidly edit together information and fill in the blanks using memories and predictions to create our realities.

Most science fiction would have us believe that aliens look like animals we might find on Earth, with features like eyes, ears, arms, and legs. But there’s a good chance creatures on other planets would be unrecognizable to us. Kurzgesagt digs into this imponderable and provides some thoughts on what alien life might look like on three very different planets.

Do you suffer from allergies? From flowers to shellfish, our bodies can react with anything from a sneeze to anaphylactic shock. Kurzgesagt digs into what causes our bodies to reject things that seem like they should be totally harmless. It’s an unexpected explanation, but it may be a remnant of how our bodies evolved to fight off parasitic worms.

If the election isn’t nerve-wracking enough for you, Kurzgesagt is here to fry your sense of fear to oblivion. They tackle Project Sundial – the most powerful nuclear weapon ever conceived. Construction began at the height of the Cold War, but thankfully, it was never finished. Otherwise, the US would have what is essentially a nuclear war in a capsule.

Our planet is teeming with life on its surface and in its oceans, but did you know that some organisms live beneath the Earth’s crust? Kurzgesagt drills deep to explore some of the microbes and other life forms that thrive in the world’s most inhospitable environments. Scientists are just beginning to understand what’s going on in the deep biosphere.

The way you feel when you have a fever can really suck. But our bodies are doing some very important things by raising our temperature when we’re sick. Kurzgesagt explains why we get fevers and how they help fight off infections. Along the way, they explore the pros and cons of suppressing fevers with medicine.

If you’re like us, you’ve probably tried to lose weight at some point. It’s never easy to shed those pounds, and it can be frustrating to work out so much and hit a plateau. Kurzgesagt explores the science of weight loss and the way our bodies burn energy. Bottom line: cutting your food intake is critical for dropping weight, while exercise is for your overall health.

Kurzgesagt simplifies the arguments for and against humans having free will. On one hand, some argue that we don’t have free will because, according to physics, everything is either deterministic or random. On the other hand, others say that such a perspective misses the point: that we are greater than the sum of our parts, whether those be deterministic or random.

Kurzgesagt recaps some of the scientific speculations about black holes. They then explore a few thought experiments about these mysterious cosmic locations, leading up to a mind-blowing possibility. If physicists are correct and a black hole creates a universe inside it, then we could be inside a black hole, that’s inside a universe, that’s inside a…

“In a nutshell, every single one of your organs is highly stressed and suffers some kind of permanent damage.” Kurzgesagt lays out the good, the bad, and the ugly about smoking. Watch the educational channel’s usual adorable creatures turn into all sorts of monsters and die horrible deaths, all thanks to one of the most dangerous legal substances.

Astrophysicists estimate that our universe came into existence roughly 14 billion years ago, and it’s been expanding ever since. Kurzgesagt ponders the question whether the universe is truly infinite if it keeps growing, or if it has an edge somewhere that we just can’t see.

We always thought about time in very linear terms. However, scientists have theorized that the past, present, and future simultaneously exist. Kurzgesagt explores the theory that the entire history of the universe has already happened, and we’re just experiencing our tiny sliver of it. Warning: your brain might hurt after watching this.

We’ve featured many size comparison videos from channels like MetaBallStudios and RED SIDE. Kursgezagt wanted to make a different kind of comparison video, examining opposingly small and large things relative to the size of an average human, from the tiniest proton to the vastness of observable universe.

We still don’t know if there’s extraterrestrial life out there, but if there is, there’s a chance that they won’t like us Earthlings and will want to get rid of us. Kurzgesagt takes the aliens’ side in this theoretical conflict and offers strategies to help them wipe out humanity forever. Though they assume our enemies are more technologically advanced than us.