- Here's a question,
who are you?
Or what is this whole "you"
or" me" thing about anyway?
What is your body?
Is your body just a house
in which your consciousness resides
sort of like a tenant renting a room?
Where do you or I, where do we stop
and where does the outside world begin?
What is an organism?
Welcome to the show,
we've got Matt behind the camera,
I'm Ben, we have a bunch of shady stuff
happening in the darkness behind me
which makes this "Stuff They
Don't Want You to Know."
And today's topic is
something that's captivated
Matt and I for a while,
it's interesting, right?
But before we tell you exactly what it is
let's take a closer
look at the human body.
Believe it or not, most
of the cells in your body
are not human cells, they're bacteria,
and there's a lot of
bacteria in your body.
In fact, bacterial cells outnumber
your human cells ten to one,
ten times more bacteria in
your body by cell count.
Luckily because bacteria is very small
in comparison to a human cell,
we do know that the majority of our body
by mass is not bacteria,
that's only about one to two percent.
But these are foreign
creatures living inside you,
outnumbering the thing in which they live
so if you think about it,
the human body is much more like a city
than a single house.
Interesting side note here,
we also don't know exactly what's going on
in the teaming cities that
are every single person
on this planet.
There was a study with
kind of a silly name,
"The Belly Button Bio Diversity Study"
in North Carolina State University,
and they found this analysis
of different people's
naval lint, or the bacteria
in their belly button's.
Gross, I know, but in that study
they found over 600 kinds of
unidentified strange bacteria,
we, we being the human species,
don't know everyone who lives
in this city we call a person.
But then that makes you
think about scale, right?
If we have so much bacteria
living inside of us,
again, it's own living thing
that just depends upon us,
what if we are bacteria living inside
of something much larger?
What if there is an organism,
much bigger than us,
in which we exist?
What if the Earth itself is alive,
it's just one big thing that lives?
This is called the "Gaia Hypothesis,"
this was proposed by a
guy named James Lovelock.
a futurist and an inventor.
However, this is not the first time
this idea has come around,
people have talked about, you know,
mother nature for instance,
or Earth goddesses, for millennia,
you know, since before we
were writing down religions,
when we were just telling
each other about religions,
people had this idea.
Now, the concept here is maybe not exactly
the way that a person is,
I mean you're watching this,
you think, you imagine the future,
you remember the past,
all of that sapient jazz.
But, this is not saying that planet Earth
is something that sits around
and think's about the future
or remembers the past,
instead it's, it's a complex
system that self regulates,
that's one of the big
parts of the argument.
We should go ahead and say,
that despite receiving accolades
in some other fields,
Lovelock's idea is pretty much rejected
by the scientific community at large,
Richard Dawkins, other
noted thinkers of our time
find this to be, well some would say
it's a flawed hypothesis,
some would say that
it's just pseudoscience.
Lovelock himself was inspired by this idea
when he was working with NASA
to try to figure out the
possibility of life on Mars.
Since that time, he's
written several books,
one of the first being
"The Gaya Hypothesis,"
which you can read for more
details on this concept.
And so, we had a question
for you guys' this week,
before we move onto our next videos,
what do you think,
is it possible that the
Earth can be considered
one living super organism?
Or is this instead a metaphor of sorts,
is it just pseudoscience?
So, whether you believe
that Earth is some gigantic
super organism, self regulating,
or whether you think it's bunk,
there's one thing that everybody
can agree on as a fact,
this whole Earth thing is a series
of sophisticated, closely
intertwined, processes
that exist and rely upon one another,
and are so complicated in fact,
that we haven't figured
everything else out yet.
So at this point, who
knows what we will learn
about the increasingly blurred line
between an individual living thing
and a collection of living things.
So let us know what you think
about this "Gaia Hypothesis"
in the comments below,
and if you'd like to learn more stuff
they don't want you to know,
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Furthermore, if you'd like to hear
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you can visit our website
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And if you want to talk to us but you,
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