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My favorite video

Erauqs

Hey Tom, You can share the direct youtube link: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL4yYHdDSWs" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL4yYHdDSWs</a>

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

Wow just tried to share this on Facebook and couldn't as it's for patrons only. I don't want to fund stuff that is private! I want to support an organisation that puts knowledge into the world! Would some people really only sign up if there was extra content? Sad

Tom Kenny

It fixes it by encouraging them to try to make it more accurate. I have to agree that some of the facts in some of their videos turned out to be blatantly false. Also, they have an extreme leftist bias in a lot of their more philosophical videos and theories about government in general. Beyond that though, their design is nice and the science they teach is still exciting, which is why I support them. I take what they say with a grain of salt just like everything else.

iruleatgames

Only a short reply about getting things right. We invest a lot of time into this part, often more than for the rest of the whole production process – the video in question was made together with an expert on his field on the expansion of the universe and fact checked again by another physicist. But of course we do popular science videos and not lectures so stuff gets condensed and things have to be simplified or else you could not explain them on such short videos. Often people who are very familiar with a topic don't agree on how we present information but that is just how things are. Look at CGPGreys video Americapox and all the disagreement in the comment sections on his subreddit – you just can't satisfy most experts with short youtube videos. And that is ok. Our videos are made to make science exiting and to talk about stuff that most people don't think about usually.

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

Only a short reply about getting things right. We invest a lot of time into this part, often more than for the rest of the whole production process – the video in question was made together with an expert on his field on the expansion of the universe and fact checked again by another physicist. But of course we do popular science videos and not lectures so stuff gets condensed and things have to be simplified or else you could not explain them on such short videos. Often people who are very familiar with a topic don't agree on how we present information but that is just how things are. Look at CGPGreys video Americapox and all the disagreement in the comment sections on his subreddit – you just can't satisfy most experts with short youtube videos. And that is ok. Our videos are made to make science exiting and to talk about stuff that most people don't think about usually.

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

Is it, Alan... really? When people are trying to inform themselves, they look to resources they can trust. It takes an enormous amount of work to create an animation. In the scheme of things, getting the information right is a small investment in time... and nothing in other costs because experts will be absolutely delighted to help out. The Kurzgesagt guys seem to be really nice, really generous and really talented people. But watch their videos again, and I think you'll find several are a kind of propaganda rather than an unbiased presentation of facts. Examples: Refugee Crisis: <a href="https://youtu.be/RvOnXh3NN9w" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/RvOnXh3NN9w</a> Addiction: <a href="https://youtu.be/ao8L-0nSYzg" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/ao8L-0nSYzg</a> In the first case, the narrative is clearly made by people who care a lot. The sentiments are admirable. But the statistics and arguments are not presented objectively. And I think that's a real problem in a High Quality Science Education format; which it's certainly not in a Blog format. In the second case, they've taken a very controversial idea which has had only very limited research, and presenting it as established fact. On this subject it's really dangerous, because real-world interventions can lead from that kind of video. And something can be presented with a neat argument that looks like common sense, which can turn out to be essentially misguided. SciShow recently gave a great example of this, on the specific topic of 'Ego Depletion'. <a href="https://youtu.be/2MDNvKXdLEM" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/2MDNvKXdLEM</a> But this idea about drugs is far less studied than Ego Depletion, and yet it seems to be presented as established fact. Maybe it will be proven true in the future, but do you see the problem with this video being unequivocal? I guess that's my best shot at explaining the problem with the Kurzgesagt channel. If this 'paint a perfect world' is valid, why don't any of the other Science channels adopt it? It only needs to fix this reliability problem, and then it would be sensational.

tsuchan

Punkka Poika (whose profile says s/he isn't a Patron yet, so s/he presumably hasn't even given any support in the first place): I don't argue against your comment. The problem is, that according to you and Rich Miller, if the edu-videos are very thought out [sic] and professional, it doesn't matter if they are not accurate. But accuracy is the *most* important part.

tsuchan

Fuck you tsuchan, kurzgesagt makes very thought out and professional, educational videos. Love you guys.

Punkka Poika

I can't help but wonder how you reducing their available resources is supposed to improve things.

Kriscerosaurus

I beg to disagree. Look at other channels such as CGP Grey, Veritasium, VSauce, PBS Space Time. They are mortified if they discover they've made some mistake; and generally take swift steps to try to put it right. It's really difficult to tell on YouTube what's good quality and what's nonsense. If you're learning (ie. it's not already a subject you're well acquainted with) you've really got to go on, are: - The apparent quality, based on production standards - Recommendations from other trusted channels To have a channel with very high production standards which is giving, sorry to say, information which is fairly deeply flawed, is really worse than having nothing at all. Because people will believe it. Pause and think. People will believe it! If it were small semantic problems, I wouldn't have complained. And it's not just this video... only this video is a subject which I study. Compared to the cost and effort of the Kurzgesagt developments, taking the time to get the information right is pretty small. There would be many people who would volunteer to help. I don't want to learn stuff which is significantly wrong. I would not suffer others to learn stuff which is significantly wrong. And that's why I'm not ashamed of myself: in fact I could not in good conscience do any differently. All that said, I wish the guys good luck, and sincerely hope they'll fix the problem. This channel has great potential, otherwise I wouldn't have given it support in the first place.

tsuchan

You're ridiculous. 90% of the value of these videos is getting people excited about science, and that is priceless. The other 10% is the accuracy of the information, which I find very accurate if not perfect. The fact that you would pull support away from such a noble effort for such nit picky reasons is untenable. Especially when you are talking about details on a theoretical field that is constantly evolving. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Rich Miller

@tsuchan - I think Kurzgesagt excel at explaining incredibly complex theories and ideas to the public in an entertaining way. "to get things pretty-much right' is tricky when science is continually improving its theories through research. Your feedback, though well researched, is more fitting for a university level physics debate, where these different theories hold different levels of support.

Alan McD

tsuchan

I'm having some problems with your stats. You say that cosmic inflation expanded the universe from the size of a marble to trillions of km in fractions of a second. (The graphic shows 10^-35 seconds.) But that's nonsense. Alan Guth says that in cosmic inflation, the universe started at a size far smaller than a proton, and ended-up the size of a marble. And Alan Guth should know - Cosmic Inflation is his theory. That is a bad error: it really shakes my confidence in Kurzgesagt. People have the right to expect that a professional looking animation, professionally narrated, will be essentially correct. They will believe what you say. And then they'll be confused when they hear something different, and not know what to believe. I can understand that you didn't point out that we don't actually know when cosmic inflation started and finished (though that's the fact of the matter) because you chose a period in the very early universe where it's thought very plausible to have happened. I'm also dubious about your claim that dark energy "took over" about 6 billion years ago. It was only the other day that I watched a PBS SpaceTime video which said it was 3 billion years ago, and underlined that by saying it was within the period of life on earth. PBS SpaceTime certainly isn't infallible, but I've just reached beside me to Lawrence Krauss's book "A Universe from Nothing", page 124 (hardback) where there is a graph showing the same thing. I also have some concern about "This stretching of the universe was so fast and extreme that all those quantum fluctuations were stretched as well, and sub-atomic distances became galactic distances, with dense and less dense regions". Humm, I don't think this is right. If you take the early time for inflation, after the electroweak epoc (which would be consistent with your assertions about quantum differences being magnified) then you're primarily explaining why the matter/anti-matter annihilation left 1 part in a billion of baryonic matter. It's kind of true to say that as the universe continued to expand these quantum differences expanded with them. But to suggest that they expanded into galactic sized clumps is very misleading. There were slight differences and over a substantial time frame gravity started to operate on those differences and they began to coalesce into clumps which became galaxies. The most important observation about the lumps, it's about the lack thereof: the smoothness of the universe. I genuinely find the level of misleading divergence from the summary of contemporary scientific understanding really disturbing.

tsuchan

I can't say that I understand why travel to nearby galactic clusters would be ruled out. Yes, the universe is expanding.. but there are A LOT of galactic clusters within our Hubble radius. Yeah, traveling beyond the hubble radius to get to the remaining 99.7% of the currently observable universe would require traveling faster than light. Yeah, traveling to *near* the hubble radius would require more time than now to heat death at near the speed of light. Yeah, traveling say 1/3 of the way along a hubble radius would certainly be a one way trip and require relatavistic speeds.. but even *that* is at least doable, and still represents a mind-boggling 4.7 BILLION light years! O_O Just keep in mind, the best scientists and propulsion experts in the world today are behind the Starshot project, which is meant to accelerate solar sail nanocraft to 0.2c within the next 20 years. If that is within overton's window, then 200 or 2,000 years should allow us to get manned craft, either with cryogenics or intergenerational, to 0.5c or better.. perhaps even 3-10m/s constant acceleration. That would let us travel thousands of times around Laniakea before it expands too far to make a final lap! ;P

Jesse Thompson

you, what this makes me think: Has this already happened?

Frank Hightower

I enjoy your videos quite a bit, but just out of curiosity: Would it be too much of an issue to upload videos in 4K 60 FPS? The animations are so beautiful that being able to get some more crispness and more fluid motion out of them would be awesome

Stance

I think it is interesting that the Universe is only 13.7 billion years old, but is already expanded to 46 Billion light years across in size and although our solar system and galaxy is staying the same size and distance from each other (and will one day collide with other galaxies like Andromeda galaxy ), the stuff (space) in between is getting farther apart. Sure wish we could figure out what dark energy is and how it works. Not sure we really understand what/how exactly gravity fully works.

GatorALLin

Great Video! Thanks for it. I still have a question, you are saying that even with Sci-fi technologies, it would not be possible. But it seems this "apply" only to normal travel however fast, not teleportation / warmholes, others. I understand that even if we could teleport anywhere, we would need to "see" it to go there, but couldn't they do multiple jumps to the correct direction (even guess) and be able to see/reach it at some point ? Not sure I am clear enough :(

Kevin Guanziroli

Your animation keeps stepping up with each video! Your content has really inspired me to continue my possible career in graphical design, and even after using adobe programs for years trying to do the stuff you guys make is extremely difficult! Thank you for the amazing content, you are by far my favourite youtube channel, and have been for quite a long time!! (Around two years?!?)

Sean Kelly

Love that alien outside the window casually floating through the space :)

Oliver Lee

This is why I'm looking forward to No Man's Sky, no borders!