ideen modernes bad
vsauce, i’m van helsing ... dr. jake vanhelsing. i hear that there is somebody ill inside. oh, this is beautiful. absolutely gorgeousand do you smell that? you can smell the sickness in the air. no really you can. doctors, otherthan myself, did a study that shows that our pheromones change when we are sick. for exampleif someone has diabetes their breath can become stale or sour. is the patient in here? oh my my, this is curious. well...i have good news and i have bad news.the good news is that your study is fantastic.
kudos to your interior decorator. the badnews is that this man is spectacularly no longer alive. he is quite dead. you know, something interesting happens whenyou die. parts of you are still alive, for example most of our cells are unaware andcontinue their metabolic functions. but when you do die your heart stops beatingwhich keeps oxygen from going to your organs. without oxygen your brain can’t regulatethe body’s functions and it can no longer support consciousness. at this point, thecells start dying. but the 4 pounds of bacteria you have in your gut are still very much alive,and since they have no immune system to stop them, start to consume you from the insideout.
but isn’t that what we are all after ... thepursuit of life. the ability to live forever, to not be forgotten. so let’s imagine livingforever. close your eyes and really imagine it. time is vast. it is easy to envision a hundredyears, a thousand years. but imagine 5 billion years from now when our sun becomes a redgiant and begins to expand. the oceans on earth boil away and eventually the sun devoursour planet. and there you are 5 billion years later which would still be a speck of dustin the infinite life ahead of you. open your eyes and i want you to imagine somethingelse. imagine no longer being alive. you can’t can you? we can’t comprehend nothingness,just thinking about nothing is something.
but we know at some point we are going todie yet we can’t imagine not being alive. it’s called the mortality paradox. and thisis what drives humanity to pursue living forever. some of us try to achieve it in very differentways, like your friend here who did not die of natural causes. in fact, the cause wasquite ... unnatural. as a van helsing, one of my fields of study is vampirism, and judgingby the two holes on his neck, he’s on his way to becoming a vampire ... he could turnat any moment ... you might want to look away. oh! i missed! back demon, back! back! just the idea of extending one’s existencedrives man towards seeking out or pursuing an idea like vampirism, but its not as ifthis concept is foreign or as crazy as some
other pursuits. if we go back 4,000 years to 2,100bc we haveone of the first great works of literature, the epic of gilgamesh, where gilgamesh goeson a journey to find the secret of eternal life. fast forward to 220bc with qin shi huang,the first emperor of china, who tried so hard to fend off death that if you mentioned theword around him you would be executed. he was so afraid of dying that he went so faras to have a giant barricade built, what we now know as the great wall of china. he alsofamously sent an expedition of over 1000 people on a mission to find the elixir of immortality- that precious liquid that would keep him alive.
in a cruel case of irony, qin shi huang endedup dying by ingesting mercury pills that his physicians had thought would do just the opposite.now, to live forever it’s generally required that you already be alive ... but what ifthere was a way to bring you back once you had passed on? i have a colleague who’sbeen working on something quite ... shocking that we could try.let me grab that corpseand i’ll meet you at my friend’s laboratory - look for the sign that says dr. victor frankenstein. gah! electricity really is a modern marvel,isn’t it? back in ancient greece it was believed that our muscles contracted becauseof fluid flowing through our nerves and that was the thinking for 1500 years. then it wasconsidered that animal spirits were the cause.
and then came electricity! in the 1780s luigi galvani discovered thatif he attached electrodes to muscles and sent a current of electricity through it, the muscleswould start to move. he tried it most famously with frog legs and his nephew made the nextlogical step and used it on the body of a recently deceased criminal. during the publicdemonstration the jaw began to quiver, the right hand clenched open and closed, legsand thighs began to move and an eye even popped open. most spectators thought they were witnessinga re-animation. now, if frankenstein’s and i’s theoryis correct, with the right amount of continuous electricity, distributed across the body proportionally,we should be able to re-ignite that spark
of life - our modern prometheus. yes! yes! it’s working! it’s working!look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! so ... it turns out i was wrong. galvani thoughtthat what he was witnessing was “animal electricityâ€, a fluid similar to normalelectricity that flowed through an animal’s muscles and nerves. when in reality it wasjust the muscles reacting to the electrical current coming into contact with two differentmetals in a damp environment. but there are other options for resurrection. cryonics is the preservation of human bodiesin extremely cold temperatures, below -238f. currently you could get yourself crypreservedimmediately after death for the low price
of $200,000 - or if that is a little richfor your blood - just the head for $80,000 in hopes that one day science will be ableto revive you. it is the incredibly cold version of a mummy.and speaking of which, the reason ancient egyptians put so much effort into the properpreservation of their dead was in hopes that if the corpse was suddenly brought back tolife, they’d still be themselves. side note: one of the substances used to treat the bodyis called bitumen which in persian is mum hence the reason we call them mummies. unfortunately, electrification, cryopreservation,and mummification have yet to revive any person. however, the ancient egyptians did have aback-up plan for living forever which is actually
pretty simple: you don’t have to be aliveto be immortal. stop right there. yes, don’t move. in homer’siliad, achilles is given the choice between a long life or eternal glory. he chose eternalglory because he knew that long after his death, he would still be remembered - he wouldlive on the lips of every person. let’s try something, i want you to tell me rightoff the top of your head the names of your great-grandparents. do you know? it has been estimated that the majority ofus will be remembered for 75 years at most. the ancient egyptians called this the seconddeath, when their names would be forgotten. admittedly i am not a very good artist butwhat drawings, paintings and photographs do
is capture you, you in that specific momentand they keep you there forever. time can age the canvas but it can’t age you. we could go to the museum down the road andlook at paintings and murals from a thousand years ago. the physical bodies of the peoplerepresented long gone but their image, their history, that feeling of who they were stillremains. we all live forever, genetically. we couldtrace our genes back millions of years, and we continue to push our genetics forward.as einstein said “our death is not an end if we can live on in our children, for theyare us; our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of lifeâ€. we spend so much timeconcerned with who is doing what or how they
feel that we forget to focus on us. when peoplelook at a photo or painting of you, what will they say? what legacy will you leave behind?how will i be remembered? in the words of jorge luis borges, “except for man, allcreatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death.†and ... as always ... thanks for watching. i'd like to thank showtime and penny dreadfulfor allowing me to film on their incredible sets. the show really is amazing, i've beena huge fan of it. and i'd especially like to thank these amazing peoples, there we are,thank you for making this awesome video with me. thanks. yaaaaaay.