I was in tears for months when I saw that, but I had to keep it together and keep raising my little girl. So I'd be doing finger paints with a happy face and then disappear into the bathroom and weep for a bit. It was a pretty dark time in my life.

The research and trials they are doing are a testament to modern medicine and science though. The doctor who is doing the trial with us dramatically changed the course of my family's life. Click here if you want to feel better about all that: https://fightnpc.com/en/drug_trials

Just LOOK at what a difference it makes in other mammals, and they already see very similar results in humans they are testing on. They've managed to nearly halt the progression of symptoms in most patients.

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That is nightmare fuel. I wonder if they would chase larger mammals?

Also when do they start televising Planet Earth 2?

BULLSHIT. *waits for the jesus bomb* Oh, it was bullshit. Funny. Freaking Penn, you dick. lol!!!

Anyway, his first statement aside, isn't this how legit atheists have always thought? And by that I mean, atheists who practice what they preach and love other humans, as every mammal should. Shitting on belief systems but NEVER NEVER hating the actual person? That's how I function.

I always imagined it was simply the projections of the insecure haters of atheists that projected this perception that we hate Muslims. I never understood how atheism could mean anything other than love. That's why I became an atheist in the frickin' first place, because I realized God isn't loving if he could send people to hell. And from there it simply followed logically towards the absence of God.

I have friends from Malaysia and Iran who clearly CLEARLY have Islamic backgrounds -- but they're badass Americans and beyond that they're human goddamnit -- and I love them as much as I love my Jewish, Atheist, and Christian friends. I can't say that they aren't Muslim, because I don't want to assume anything and I don't want them to be in trouble if they aren't. But yeah, I love all my friends.

And you know what, I love bobknight and that piss flavoured cotton candy Trump thing, even though they both project hate onto us for being liberal. Honestly, I love you bob, and we aren't terrorists and neither is every Muslim. I love you -- even though you support America's terrorists, the police. And I love the police, despite my dislike of SOME (well, maybe MOST) of their views about the world. <3

From what I understand, eels were easily available as a cheap source of protein for many years. Even after the Thames became so dirty that the eels couldn't survive, they retained their status as a comfort food for people around the London area.

They do have poisonous blood to mammals, so the guy was telling the truth about the stinging in the eye bit.

Thanks for the promote!

Hey ma, look at the guy that thinks smart people talking is boring. Could you imagine if this mammal tried to pick up a book and actually read it? It would become the equivalent of a pillow -- snore and drool included (yours).

There was a fellow with a couple squirrel-looking mammals on his hat...

I can watch that for hours.

Some of those things are feisty fuckers what seemed more interested in vengeance against their mammal captor than food.

He's wearing glasses because there are spitting cobras that could blind him.

Did you ever realize that snakes used to have legs? I just saw some photos of a fossilized snake with legs.

To be fair, I don't see "check all hollow volumes for the presence of small stowaway mammals" in the pre-flight checklist:
http://flighttraining.aopa.org/students/presolo/skills/howtopreflight.html

A cat (or whatever) that doesn't want to be found probably isn't going to interfere with control surfaces working correctly, etc. This is exactly the kind of very infrequent, random event that human beings are likely to overlook when doing something like a routine check that comes back nominal 99.9% of the time.

So, I'd wager that the pilot probably did all of the checks correctly and they just failed to reveal the one-in-a-million chance of "cat in wing". And to swing the other direction a bit and praise him instead of admonishing, he was admirably cool as a cucumber while coming back in for a semi-emergency landing. So I guess I'd argue for "pilot win" instead of "pilot fail".

To be fair, my friends and I are extremely racist to each other in our text messages, but we are a hodge podge mix of white, black, Mexican, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Iranian, and really who cares about trying to include them all.

See, smart people gravitate towards each other regardless of race or sexual orientation because they were in honors and AP classes together, competing in academic decathlon, speech and debate, and went to the same tutoring place, hanging out not because they were cool and looked the same, but because they are intellectual gladiators; only idiots revolve their lives around a group of mammals simply because they look alike. It's truer than you think. You end up living up to other people's expectations and fail to experience the joys of your unique mind if you don't diversify your experiences. We are all prototypes for a future society anyway. White people are a conglomerate of interracial breeding. Also, it's simply genetically irresponsible NOT to mix genes with people of differing racial traits.

Why? Because all humans are niggers. It's just not common courtesy to call people niggers in public, and certainly you wouldn't call someone you don't know a nigger. Say what you will, I feel like there's an overriding logic that makes criticism of that pretty clearly crybaby bullshit. Black people have a reason to cry, and then there's white people lol; but, we are all just people so how does that not override your logic on BOTH sides of the argument? I'm above and below everything and nothing. I am the all singing, all dancing crap of the world. You might not agree but life is transitory and we'll all die and fertilize the ground.

So, in retrospect, let's continue to call friends and family niggers as we see fit, but let's not so hastily call someone we don't know a nigger; likewise, let us continue to judge ourselves as unworthy, but not judge others as such. I feel like that should make everyone do alright.

OK, granted. I did word that poorly, and you did address what I wrote.
What I meant was I have not seen a full explanation of the mechanism that is triggered by various (and seemingly sometimes by no) triggers...I have read that it's related to the air gulping that newts and salamanders do when in water, perhaps when transitioning from using gills to lungs, and I think they even said the signal comes from an odd part of the brain for breathing signals, but not why we might still hold on to that trait, or why various things might trigger that trait in mammals who aren't amphibious.
If I had to guess, I would guess it's some sort of anti-drowning trait that stops babies from inhaling too much water, but that's just a guess. I wonder if anyone has done a study/experiment.

That's odd. I keep thinking about having hiccups, and I can't recall a single time I hiccupped while breathing out. Maybe I'm weird. (OK, no maybe about it).

Most people don't really understand hiccups.
I learned that it's actually an evolutionary throwback to when we were all newts, gulping air when we're in the water. I'm still not sure what triggers them in mammals.

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I usually like Vsauce a lot, but I disagree with just about every assumption and every conclusion he makes in this video.

Anthropogenic vs external extinction event -
I think the likelihood of an anthropogenic extinction event is low. Even in the cold war, at the apex of "mutually assured destruction" risk, IF that destruction was triggered I think it would have been extremely unlikely to make humans go extinct. The US and USSR might have nuked each other to near-extinction, but even with fairly mobile nuclear fallout / nuclear winter, etc. I think that enough humans would have remained in other areas to remain a viable population.

Even if ONE single person had access to every single nuclear weapon in existence, and they went nuts and tried to use them ALL with the goal of killing every single human being on the planet, I still bet there would be enough pockets of survivors in remote areas to prevent humans from going utterly extinct.

Sure, an anthropogenic event could be devastating -- catastrophic even -- to human life. But I think humanity could recover even from an event with an associated human death rate of 95% or more -- and I think the likelihood of anything like that is real slim.

So that leaves natural or external extinction events. The KT extinction (end of the dinosaurs) is the most recent major event, and it happened 65 million years ago. Homo sapiens have been around 150-200,000 years, and as a species we've been through some fairly extreme climatic changes. For example, humans survived the last ice age around 10-20,000 years ago -- so even without technology, tools, buildings, etc. we managed to survive a climate shift that extreme. Mammals survived the KT extinction, quite possible that we could have too -- especially if we were to face it with access to modern technology/tools/knowledge/etc.

So I think it would probably take something even more extreme than the asteroid responsible for KT to utterly wipe us out. Events like that are temporally rare enough that I don't think we need to lose any sleep over them. And again, it would take something massive to wipe out more than 95% of the human population. We're spread out, we live in pretty high numbers on basically every landmass on earth (perhaps minus Antarctica), we're adapted to many many different environments ... pretty hard to kill us off entirely.


"Humans are too smart to go extinct" @1:17 -
I think we're too dumb to go extinct. Or at least too lazy. The biggest threats we face are anthropogenic, but even the most driven and intentionally malevolent human or group of humans would have a hard time hunting down *everybody, everywhere*.


Doomsday argument -
I must admit that I don't really understand this one. The guess of how many total humans there will be, EVER, seems extremely arbitrary. But anyway, I tend to think it might fall apart if you try to use it to make the same assertions about, say, bacterial life instead of human life. Some specific species of bacteria have been around for way way longer than humans, and in numbers that dwarf human populations. So, the 100 billionth bacteria didn't end up needing to be worried about its "birth number", nor did the 100 trillionth.


Human extinction "soon" vs. "later" -
Most plausibly likely threats "soon" are anthropogenic. The further we push into "later", the more the balance swings towards external threats, I think. But we're talking about very small probabilities (in my opinion anyway) on either side of the scale. But I don't think that "human ingenuity will always stay one step ahead of any extinction event thrown at it" (@4:54). Increased human ingenuity is directly correlated with increased likelihood of anthropogenic extinction, so that's pretty much the opposite. For external extinction events, I think it is actually fairly hard to imagine some external scenario or event that could have wiped out humans 100, 20, 5, 2, or 1 thousand years ago that wouldn't wipe us out today even with our advances and ingenuity. And anything really bad enough to wipe us out is not going to wait for us to be ready for it...


Fermi paradox -
This is the most reasonable bit of the whole video, but it doesn't present the most common / best response. Other stars, galaxies, etc. are really far away. The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000+ light years across. The nearest other galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.2 million light years away. A living being (or descendents of living beings) coming to us either of those distances would have to survive as long as the entire history of human life, all while moving at near the speed of light, and have set out headed straight for us from the get-go all those millions and millions of years ago. So lack of other visitors is not surprising at all.

Evidence of other life would be far more likely to find, but even that would have to be in a form we could understand. Human radio signals heading out into space are less than 100 years old. Anything sentient and actively looking for us, even within the cosmically *tiny* radius of 100 light years, would have to have to evolved in such a way that they also use radio; otherwise the clearest evidence of US living here on Earth would be undetectable to them. Just because that's what we're looking for, doesn't mean that other intelligent beings would take the same approach.

Add all that up, and I don't think that the Fermi paradox is much cause for alarm. Maybe there are/have been LOTS of intelligent life forms out there, but they have been sending out beacons in formats we don't recognize, or they are simply too far away for those beacons to have reached us yet.


OK, I think I'm done. Clearly I found the video interesting, to post that long of a rambling response... But I was disappointed in it compared to usual Vsauce stuff. Still, upvote for the thoughts provoked and potential discussion, even though I disagree with most of the content and conclusions.

Which is funny since they are named after a highly social mammal. On the bright side, his fly population probably just took a nosedive.