Historian Reacts - History of the entire world, i guess

Some historical context behind the "you can make a relig.. no dont" joke is that there was almost a religion formed behind Robespierre during the revolution 😂

You just know Bill Wurtz probably spent hours experimenting with the length of the pause after "That's how every it gets" to get it just long enough to feel awkward and not a second longer.

Doing history class here in Denmark the explanation for why Iceland is called that is because the vikings arrived in winter so it was covered in snow. While at Greenland they arrived where doing summer it is nice and green. At least it's the best explanation we got.

How much the Webb telescope discoveries are changing our cosmology sometimes gets over-blown by the media — they're huge, significant discoveries, but it's not like the whole history of the universe is being turned upside down. In this video in particular, the main thing that changed is the time between "a bunch of gas in space" and "it's a STAR" (the Webb discoveries have shown that it actually happened faster than the title cards in here would indicate).

"Spent a lot of money to learn I can binge-watch history videos on YouTube" Dude just summarized 4 full years of college

actually ants have practiced horticulture, by growing fungus and plants in their ant colonies, and have domesticated aphids and so are capable of agrarianism, living off aphids' sugary excretion, like how we use cows to get milk, or goats and sheep for wool.

I love how the white screen catches everyone off guard like: Did I pause it?

“Someone with ADHD trying to explain big bang” I’m crying 4:19

Explaining how life came about is my favorite thing ever. Chemical evolution is so cool. To start you have to talk about the Urey-Miller experiment. Back in the 1950s these two biochemists did an experiment in which they took a containment chamber, filled it with water, ammonia, methane, hydrogen, and all the things you expect to find on any fledgling planet. All the things you would expect on any new Earths. They put a fire underneath so it would evaporate, go into another container to be zapped with electrodes, cooled, funneled back to the original container and cycles back through. They are simulating the patterns of an early Earth, and simulating all the elements you could find on Earth. You take early simple ingredients, get them hot, get them cold, zapped with lightning and other normal processes. They ran it for a while and when they come back they took samples. To their surprise, the water is no longer clear, but is a gross reddish brown. They test it and find it is now full of amino acids. Amino acids are the things that build proteins and make life happen. That is called chemical evolution. Very simple inorganic ingredients come together via totally natural means and form organic macromolecules. There are 4 macromolecules that make up life. Lipids, proteins, carbs and nucleic acids. Those are the 4 macromolecules that make up everything alive. Each one is a polymer meaning its a molecule that forms a chain. I'll explain each of these below: PROTEINS are made of chains of amino acids that fold up on themselves. A chain of amino acids is a primary structure. Then it folds into an alpha helix or a beta pleated sheet called a secondary structure. Then it forms a glob called a tertiary structure. Sometimes some globs come together and thats then a quaternary structure and so on. Thats how proteins work. Proteins make up skin, muscle, bones, and everything like that. CARBS are sugars. Long chain simple sugars such as glucose or fructose. If you stick them together you get sucrose. A bunch of those together makes a polysaccharide. This makes carbs like starche, cellulose and such. LIPIDS are fats. You have a twisted hydrocarbon chain that repels water and thats a lipid. There are various kinds like phospholipids where a long hydrocarbon chain comes off it to repel water and on the other end is a phosphorus group that attracts water. This makes a hydrophilic and hydrophobic end. One attracts and one repels water. If you take any lipid like cooking oil for example and put it in water it forms a bubble all by itself. Nobody has to tell it to do that. That's because a sphere is the smallest possible surface area and is the most energetically protected from the water around it. It would take more energy to make any other shape and the universe is lazy. Everything is always as energetically simple as possible. Lipids that naturally form out of normal stuff under normal circumstances, naturally form spheres. Amino acids which make proteins that naturally form out of natural stuff can get stuck in one of these spheres, and you now have something that practically represents a cell. All this stuff formed by totally natural means and naturally assumes the shape of a sphere can naturally come together and form a cell. You can do this in a jar. Now imagine that on a planet taking place over millions of years. The Urey-Miller experiment has been redone in different ways many times by putting other things in, leaving some things out, and hundreds of combinations and it just always works. Later, we figured out this happens in hydrothermal vents. They pump out acids and bases. These have proton gradients. Whats that? Well an acid is a chemical with a bunch of extra protons and a base is something that doesn't have enough and has too many electrons. When they neutralize they give off electrical charges that move one place to the next. This is how your cells make energy today. Mitochondria pass protons across a membrane. This turns a protein called ATP synthesis which makes adenosine triphosphate and thats how our body works. It's how most cells today work. Where can we find natural proton gradients right now? Hydrothermal vents. Where can we find the building blocks of lipids and proteins? Hydrothermal vents. We can even find amino acids, including all the ones important to life, in space. Just floating on asteroids. They form naturally all by themselves all over. You have the building blocks of life, the thing that makes energy in cells even today happening naturally all by itself in hydrothermal vents and all over the universe. Life then starts all by itself. Now we also have NUCLEIC ACIDS, the 4th macromolecule, which is DNA and RNA. We do debate what came first, but the most common consensus is RNA came first. I also follow the RNA world hypothesis. Let me explain why. RNA is cool because it isn't just something that carries information, but it also works as a catalysts to make reactions happen. A catalysts is something that lowers the activation energy of a reaction. It makes a reaction happen easier and faster with less energy. So RNA carries genetic information, it can also make more of itself, and it can make other reactions happen faster. Think about how proteins are made in your body today. It's like this. You have mRNA(messenger RNA) that makes proteins happen. How? It goes to a ribosome to be read. What are ribosomes made of? They are made of rRNA(ribosomal RNA), and aren't membrane bound organelles. In the ribosome something brings over amino acids to make the protein. What brings them over? tRNA(transfer RNA). So when your body makes proteins it uses RNA to tell RNA to use RNA to make a protein. Again, you can do this in a jar. That is why the major consensus is that RNA came first. RNA is something that is so unbelievably useful. Why do we have DNA then? Because once it happened to form DNA was/is really good at long term storage and it's far more stable meaning it stuck around better. You can divide it, make more of it, pack it into a tight wad and have it twist around proteins called histones to makes a tight rope called chromatin, and then chromatin forms a body called a chromosome. Thats how DNA works. It wraps around proteins, wraps into a thick rope, and those thick ropes form a chromosome. It's super easy to divide these and split them up. Is it so hard to believe that some of these naturally forming nucleic acids found their way into a blob of naturally forming lipids? THEN they split, THEN you have 2 sets of chromosomes in a cell THEN cytokenesis happens where actin filaments tighten around the cell in a contractile ring, and remember lipids form bubbles naturally, so once squished together you now have a cleavage furrow that then splits into two seperate bubbles! You now have dividing life out of literally "nothing". It's not difficult at all to say that very simple ingredients found all over the universe that naturally form organic molecules by natural processes then naturally stated making more of themselves. You then get a VERY early organism. Something so insanely simple. Not bacteria, that would be unbelievably complex in comparison. Just a very simple membrane, very simple genetic material and very simple proteins. The very basics of all of this. That is what we call LUCA. There was probably a ton of very early life, but LUCA is the one that stuck around. Everything that ever lived past that point is related to LUCA. We have a very clear picture of how everything evolved after that. I can gladly get into that if anyone want me to. I'm an evolutionary biologist so this tickles me all over when I get to explain it.

Those discoveries with the James Webb telescope have been happening recently, and this video was made almost 10 years ago before we had any of this data to kinda disprove these theories. So when Bill made this video, it was pretty much the most up to date historical and scientific information.

I’m a Brit and was in my 30’s when I discovered that we occasionally lost wars. They didn’t teach us that in school! I think every countries education system has a different, err, slant on things.

By the way, if you watch History of Japan from the same channel, I know that's not your wheelhouse in general, but it pre-dated this video and he happens to go a lot more into a humorous description of the complicated start of WWI there.

At the end, you said “props to them” for doing a good job. Actually, I think this entire video was made by one guy (Bill Wurszt (sp)). As I think somebody else already mentioned, he worked on it nearly a year. He has some other quirky videos, plus I think he creates original music videos.

Well as I said I've seen that a dozen times and people react to that a dozen times too and you picked up on some of the best little nuances that so many people miss I was laughing right along with you Great job really enjoyed it Thanks for sharing

As a Canadian, the thing that stands out the most to me in this video is the complete lack of any mention of Canada.

It really is amazing how quickly things have changed since that video was made

The king of Mali was Mansa Musa. He got so rich by trading gold, salt, and slaves. He was also a devout Muslim and went on a hajj to Mecca with a ginormous caravan (tens of thousands of people and thousands of camels). Wherever he stopped, he would give out nuggets of gold to the people. Well, if you know anything about economics, you can figure out what happened. The value of gold plummeted. On his way back, he realized how much he screwed up and tried to buy up all the gold, but the damage to the economies was done. They wouldn’t recover for decades. He’s considered to be the richest man in history

I absolutely love watching reactions to this video, it covers such a broad range of topics that everybody always has their own pieces of knowledge, I remember one person was a nuclear scientist of some sort and was able to go further in-depth about the beginning and big bang and then you have some historians like yourself that are able to explain the complicated history of humans in detail, its always so fascinating to listen to, the original video was a masterpiece, but the reactions to it are also so amazing!

"I'm a historian, which really just means that I spent a lot of money to learn what you could learn binging youtube for 2 weeks" 😂

I'll be honest, I got a little worried when you were talking about 'disproving the big bang theory', but then I was reassured by your comments on evolution. I would say, that biologically there's nothing fundamental that separates us from animals. We are animals. Even syntactic language, arguably our greatest feature as a species, likely came from more primitive forms of language which predate humanity. As Tim Minchin once said, "We're just fucking monkeys in shoes".