Awesome Minute Earth

After explaining how humans have fewer unique ancestors than you might think, Cameron from Minute Earth is back with another thought-provoking video. According to genealogists, there will come a day in the future where one of two things will happen: either every person on the planet will be a distant descendant, or your bloodline will be wiped out.

If you use the simple logic that each generation of humans came from two different bloodlines, you quickly realize that there have never been enough people on Earth to support that math. Minute Earth explains why that approach to genealogy doesn’t make sense and how our ancestors were far more incestuous than you’d like to think.

These days, the leading causes of death in the U.S. are heart disease, cancer, and COVID-19. MinuteEarth explains the most common ways people perished around the globe in the past. While we’ve improved our life expectancy in many ways, there are still some long-standing killers we have yet to defeat.

You might think of the passage of time as something that moves in a particular direction – from left to right, front to back, or clockwise around a dial. As MinuteEarth explains, there’s no uniform way of looking at the direction of time, and how humans even represent it differently based on the way their language is written.

Sound doesn’t travel all that far in the air or on the surface of the Earth. So how is it possible the sound of explosives detonated off the coast of Australia traveled half-way around the globe to be heard in Bermuda? MinuteEarth dives into the physics that allow sound to travel so much further at the bottom of the ocean.

While certain words, objects, and even animals have similar traits, it turns out that they didn’t always evolve from the same origin, and sometimes just organically arrived at a similar point. MinuteEarth explains how likenesses between things aren’t always what they seem.