He just went in with a different goal If I was going to do it I would only want the information He wants to know more after the interaction so he is nice. Or he’s just nicer than us in general, or me any ways… that’s probably more likely
I don't expect the general public to know specific details but college students not understanding the difference between a planet and a star is very worrisome
@@RicoHelms I would argue, yes, it is. Like, imagine there was no schools, no education. Of course you would think the sun is smaller than the virtually infinite planet you're standing on. Same way a remarkable amount of antique civilizations considered the sun some kind of (large) object carried/drawn by some deity, usually with the implication that the deity would fit onto the planet in a human-observeable size scale, thus implying the sun had to be smaller than the planet. It's exactly only education (or generally available educative information), thus usually school, that teaches people things beyond the stuff we can observe on first glance. I would never expect somebody to know the precise distance to, or the size of, the sun, because that's not exactly information pertaining to your everyday life, thus nobody should be expected to just look it up for no reason. Hence the only thing a random non-astronomer would know is exactly that a class or two might have shown him (often wildly mis-proportioned) depictions of the solar system. So if people somehow forget about that, or never understood it, the educative system meant to teach them has failed.
This is pretty typical of these productions to cherry pick the biggest ingnoramus' out of the crowd. For everyone of the people that made it into the video, there could have been hundreds who had no problems. Without showing honest statistics of how many people got it right vs didn't all this video does is show that a few very poor students were still able to get through the vetting process of UNLV.
The only person who can be forgiven for this mistake is a child or a peasant from the 15th century, because everyone should at least know that the moon is smaller than the sun.
as someone who was obsessed with astronomy as a kid, them repeatedly calling it astrology really hurt. but i also appreciate how he was able to go about it without mocking them
I am not American but most of us learned these basic things in primary/elementary school. We went to the local planetarium and science museum for field trips, and heard scientists talk. I'm curious how it's done in the US.
@@pssurvivor From what I know, American education is not the best. I am Italian and here, education is pretty good. People here tend to be auite cultured, but there are exceptions obviously. Here as well, most people know that a star is huge. You can expect a pre school teacher saying to a child that "stars are veeeeeryyy big!"
Look in the background. This is UNLV. The science courses there are just fine. Same textbooks and curriculum as any other college or university. Many students avoid science courses if possible and are not interested in thinking very deeply🤔
@@samotnywilk3381 Making videos like these usually involve interviewing hundreds or even thousands of people. Those where there are learning opportunities are the ones that have the opportunity for the dialogue desired for the video, so those are shown. Out of those thousand there are a dozen or so people that make it to the final video, the other 988 are on the cutting room floor. Anywhere this video was recorded the outcome would have been the same, because that was the outcome the author was intentionally looking for. At no point is the video positioned as a study on American's knowledge of basic astronomy, and no one should assume that it is.
ikr? This isn't complicated or subtle. This is about knowing some basic language. "What is a galaxy?" Collection of solar systems. So galaxy bigger than star or moon, right? Wow. [EDIT - Some people have misconstrued my point. I'm not being superior or precise or grandiose. I'm trying to convey that a basic, approximate sense of how it vaguely works (solar systems go in galaxies, for example) is fine for most people. We don't all need to be experts in everything. General Knowledge is just that. General.]
My mind was blown when I found out my stepmom had no idea of the basics of our existence/reality. I thought she was the dumbest person on earth, but I guess there are people even dumber out there. I also had to teach her when i was 7 that there's different types of metal. She thought metal was metal and it's own thing and that copper wasn't metal but it's own thing, and that steel wasn't metal but it's own thing, that brass wasn't metal but it's own thing, and so on. I literally asked her if she was the other word for special at the dinner table and got yelled at for asking her that. I'm pretty sure I made her cry that night because I made her feel so stupid.
@@mLyonJE there are those people, but i'm pretty sure he asked a lot of strangers and just picked the once that struggled more, cause there's nothing to learn if someone just comes up and knows everything
Yeah this is really surprising to me. I thought everyone got taught about basic astronomy in elementary school. Moons orbit planets, planets orbit stars, stars have solar systems, solar systems make up galaxies, galaxies make up the universe. This takes like 1 day to teach, and it's generally mind-blowing for kids, so it's usually a fun lesson that they'll remember for the rest of their lives.
As an astrphysics major, a part of me died within the first 5 minutes of this video but the rest of it revived me and filled me with a sense of hope because there's people like Derek who'll keep educating the general public about things the education system failed to.
As someone who had a pretty good basic education, same 😂 I do not know a lot, I though I knew nothing until this video to be honest… but yeah, last half of the video is really nice. I admire people that keep pushing for people to learn.
I’m a big fan of how you interacted with the students. Anytime they degraded themselves for not knowing, you encouraged them. Neat to see these interactions.
That is one of my favorite things about this channel. Derek has always been the type of person to encourage growth. His journeys have always been entertaining and educational.
The original format of Veritasium didn't work very well. Student: "I think that the stars are the smallest because they're just little white dots" Derek: "Really? Hahahahahahahahahahahaaha...."
Yep, as much as I like watching "dumb American geography" or "flat earth debunking" videos for the shock value, ultimately this way of encouragement is one we should all aim for, then we wouldn't even need to create those shock value videos
7:07 so fun fact, if you stretch your arm out and cover part of the night sky with your hand, you are covering more stars with your hand from your view point than there are grains of sand on every beach on earth.
Depending on perspective, but when I think of the vastness of our universe and how small we are to scale, I realize how insignificant we are. Which oddly increases the feeling of significance. It definitely forces an out-of-body thought for a second. It makes big problems in our life seem trivial, and yet, makes small acts of kindness mean that much more. Sounds cheesy I guess, but damn if it doesn't make me think.
Being a science student I just assumed this was common knowledge. We need more work like this, nobody should die without knowing the scale of the universe.
This is why I can't vote Republican ever again. The fact that so many of them think the Earth is only around 6000 years old while we have proof how old stuff in the Universe is, is just mind blowing. And even if you try to teach them, they just plug their ears.
The quote from Sagan always brings me to tears, nice editing right there. I've been watching your videos for some years now, and this one, however harmlessly naive at first, has moved me the most. Good job, Scientist.
i feel like my 6yr old would do better than some of these people. It would also be interesting to see these questions asked of different age groups, cities and even countries and we might have an idea why things like 'flat earth' come back when we just know better :-)
I suspect Derek only included the truly clueless people he interviewed to make this video. I cannot - nay - choose not to believe that this is representative.
@@Fannystark007 Where are you getting that stat from? In my anecdotal experience, most of the rich people I've met are at least smarter than average. But it's certainly true you don't need to be a genius to be rich. In fact, it may even hamper wealth creation through traditional means because smart people tend to overthink things.
Maybe not so shocking? what happens among the stars currently has very little bearing on what happens down here on earth. you could live your whole life never knowing what our own star is, let alone anything beyond, with few if any negative consequences. for most people... knowing about space doesn't matter. it's a novelty. I happen to think space is really cool. I like learning about stuff up there, but it's ok if someone else doesn't. people like different things, and it's not like we're any better or worse off for it.
The tree question hit me the hardest. I was thinking... the amount of surface area on the Earth that contains trees is ASTRONOMICALLY smaller than the space in the galaxy that could contain stars. If it was a multiple choice question I'd have gotten it wrong. I still can't believe there are that many trees on Earth.
Most question of that nature, comparing numbers of big things up there to small things down here, there's more small things down here. The things up there are very low density. The things down here are very high density.
I wasn't sure either. I was like "there's about 150M km^2 of land on Earth... so that's about 1000 trees per km^2 for there to be about as many as stars in the galaxy... that's a tree for every 1000 m^2... that's about a tree in every 30mx30m area... that's a lot less dense than a forest, but how much of the Earth is forest? Large stretches of it don't even have trees. Hmm.... I decided on trees, but yeah, they're only about an order of magnitude apart (which btw, means there's about 1 tree for every 100 m^2 of Earth, or every 10m x 10m area)
i actually got it pretty easily, but not because i actually managed to grasp the scale, just simple math. if on average a galaxy has 100 bil stars and there are about 8 bil humans, and i think there are probably at least a hundred trees to one human then it easily surpasses the average amount of stars in a galaxy
It's as if they were thinking from eye perspective looking at the sky. The sun and the moon are roughly the same size (like during an eclipse) But since the universe is included in the responses, it shows they aren't capable of thinking from an outer perspective.
i'm astounded. i never went to college and i know more than a lot of the people i see in these kinds of videos. it's insane that they even graduated highschool.
I once met a guy in school that thought the planets in our solar system where stacked vertically on top of each other and that they didn’t take that long to get to. It was fun explaining to him how long to took it get to each planet. The look on his face was priceless
While I commend the students' eagerness to learn, the fact this isn't already largely known is kinda mind blowing to me considering basic astronomy is part of my compulsory curriculum
13:10 You can’t learn without making mistakes- we do need to be more comfortable making mistakes but also careful not to be too certain, we are still learning!
I think I take my general understanding for granted. A lot of this to me seems like general information that everyone would know...and I'm just a music major. It just goes to show that we can't take our skills, knowledge, or gifts for granted. There's someone out there who would love to be where you are.
Is it a failure in curiosity?. I feel the same way you do and I know teaching people and they always enjoy and are fascinated by it. It just seems there are many more, easily accessible thing that consume their curiosity (social media, etc)
This is just wild. Im a welder myself and i had the correct answer in like 3 seconds. Also all the questions in my mind to spesify what planets or moons are we talking about. It just shows what a great basic education can do to people.
One significant thing to always appreciate about Derek is that although some of these concepts may be simple or so, he does not dare bash any of those that he interviews for not knowing answers to his questions. He guides them through this journey of gaining a new perspective on misconceptions or something that most do not think about on the daily. He really lives up to his channel name!
@@HerbertHeyduck But who is being denounced? IMO, it's the system that was supposed to be teaching people all this stuff. Can you be faulted for dealing with your life and not learning something you'll likely never use in your daily matters?
This was painful at the start but I'm glad I stuck with it. This is an amazing example of good science communication: Not laughing at people for their ignorance but using it as a starting point for getting people excited about the universe.
These people aren't excited about it as it doesn't affect their lives (which is how our specialized society operates). He also obviously didn't include the interviews where the interviewee knew everything because that would be boring to watch. For example, I'd have gotten all these instantly except for the trillions of trees on earth because I could care less about the number of trees on earth, but my specialization is in a related STEM field to astronomy.
@@timp6834live "i could care less" reaction. WRONG. INCORRECT. CLEARLY you meant that you "couldn't care less" because, right now, you're displaying an AWFUL high potential of caring less about the amount of trees on earth, which indicates that you care an AWFUL lot about the amount of trees on earth. Checkmate "timp6834".
@@jfan3049 This is a weird American English thing. They say 'could care less' where British English says 'couldn't care less'. The British version makes rather more sense if you stop to think about it for a mo. But the US version, whilst perverse, isn't really 'wrong' - that is the accepted usage there SFAIK (it may be regional?). Sadly language is very much as we find it, even when it's annoyingly nonsensical.
I'm just glad he touched on the "observable" part because there is probably much, much more to the universe than we'll ever know. It could be infinitely huge but we probably won't ever know for sure. I love space but it can be a rabbit hole that ends in existential dread.
I expected it to be hard to watch, but instead it was kind of nice. Like a completely smooth road to the point where I realize I don't know how many stars are in the galaxy, and then I'm right there with the people in the video.
Honestly, huge props for being so patient and approachable. It says a lot to be able to teach something that one might think should be common knowledge in a way that doesn't come off as condescending or disparaging. Good education should encourage people to learn more rather than making them feel bad for not knowing. Content like this is so important for keeping people in touch with reality and for seeing the bigger picture rather than getting overly hung up on comparatively petty arguments. Well done! 👏
Thank you! So many people in the comments are talking down to these people. We can't know their background or what kind of education they got. Being wrong should be exciting cause you get to learn, it shouldn't be a negative thing
Very well said. I don't have that patience. Oh, I will explain away at the slightest invitation, but I get discouraged quickly when people struggle to get stuff.
It helps that on this subject in particular it's just impossible to have the right answer intuitively - unless you're an astronomer you literally cannot know without being told.
@@ethanstong1564 "Being wrong should be exciting cause you get to learn, it shouldn't be a negative thing" completely agree, but that starts falling off when full adults dont know kinder garden level stuff.
The number of people who did not know that a star is very large and only looks small because it is far away was shocking to me, among other things! I am glad they were all able and willing to learn. Lovely video.
@@Twig.With.No.MuscleAmerica is different from most developed countries. For-profit medicine, debilitating medical debt, mass shootings almost daily (usually several on weekend days), and a sad number of people who don’t know basic knowledge.
That last one summed it up perfectly -- "people are worried about making mistakes, but you can't learn without making mistakes." Good on her and the rest of the students for being willing to learn something no matter how trivial it may seem to others. Future's looking bright for them.
@@joshuawillingham6363the basic knowledge asked at the start of this video should be known to everyone regardless of how good their elementary school budgets were. There are no excuses for being this ignorant. I expect all of them know the names of top TikTok influencers...
@@pxprimary3790 When would you encounter this information outside of a formal education setting? Unless they have a particular interest in space there's no reason to look it up, and public school does a great job of beating any joy to be found in learning out of people.
@@joshuawillingham6363 scifi movies. Documentaries. Comic books. TV shows. Novels and general literature. There is almost no way you can go through life and not understand the basic size differences between planets, moons, stars, solar systems, galaxies, etc. You don't have to know exactly how big they are.... But you should know relatively speaking.
As a lawyer, who’s definitely not an astronomy major…I was absolutely baffled at how people were even considering putting the moon above planets and stars 💀. Also when that one person said stars are the smallest I was dead 😂.
fun fact, in terms of size moons can be larger than planets, however they're not commonly larger than the planet it orbits. Ganymede, one of many of Jupiter's moons, is larger than Mercury for example. Similarly, some red dwarf stars are smaller than the largest planets. Centauri (AB) b being the largest known planet 10x the size of Jupiter, and EBLM J0555-57Ab which is the smallest red dwarf star at 118.000km smaller than Saturn at 120.536km in diameter
@@StitchSprites I mean I'm sure there are moons/planets bigger than stars(small stars like red dwarfs) but we're talking about the average ones and it's a logical thing to think that a moon will not be bigger than a planet since it needs to orbit it.
everyone in this comment section getting on these ppl for saying astrology when really its the long co-opted etymologically correct term for science/study of the stars, its what we know as astronomy today SHOULD be called, but we got stuck with their etymological definition instead (-nomy referring to rule/law). for an astronomer, the psychic damage exists at a base level at all times for having to call themselves astronomers because some schmucks who think the movement of the planets affects your fortune and personal compatibility with other people decided to take the word that means science (no actual offense meant towards astrologers but can we please switch words)
Came to the comments for this. I cringed so hard. I'm just an electrician with a love of sci-fi since I was a kid, and knew the answers to all the questions he asked since before I was in high school,, except for the galaxies question, which I thought was infinite, not 100 billion - 2 trillion.
Most of this stuff is honestly elementary level knowledge. The size differences, the difference between moon and planet, the names of the major planets (for god's sake, we're at a point where we're giving kudos for being able to name all of them). The only thing I wouldn't expect the average layman to know are the sheer quantities of things at the upper scope and scale.
Its probably a combination of Pressure because you are filmed in such a situation (without much experience for such situations) Many people simply not cwring about things outside their life in general. Many dont care about the bigger picture (even if it would help e.g. in a job).
4:37 False, there is 5000 exoplanet that we know of. Couldn't find the numbers but given the rarity of an exoplanet I would say we know at least 500 000 planets
At first I was sad to see such basic questions being failed, but what got me was how everyone seemed eager to learn and understand and seemed genuinely happy to learn something new. They're not stupid, they've just never really thought about it much before. Maybe there's hope yet.
@@dantalien6591Don't forget they are also being asked to recall their knowledge on the spot. Hindsight is 20/20, I'm sure if they were relaxed behind a screen that they'd be able to remember better.
So, instead he posts this video online so the whole world can see how embarrassingly ignorant these people are. If he was really being good, he wouldn't have done that in the first place.
I think it’s important to show that people don’t know things and it’s OK to not know things! These people seem kind and open hearted and willing to listen. It might be embarrassing to not know but it’s more embarrassing to not learn. The whole point of this channel is learning. I was cringing at people not knowing things at the beginning but when it came to the size and scale of things I was also ignorant. And it’s ok! We laugh at our ignorance, we learn, and we move on.
@@orshabaal8990exactly, the comment section is brutal. Its a given that a veritasium viewer would know all these "basic" stuff. Im sure these people know things we dont know
im 9 months too late but I remember over a year ago I commented that you should do more of the stuff we liked when you first started. this is exactly the material I meant. good job mate
On one hand, I'm terrified how "simple knowledge" (at least in my frame of reference) isn't that known. On the other hand, I do enjoy the fact that these same people are curious and that they feel safe enough to learn like that.
@@Volundur9567 I doubt it. They were probably taught this stuff in school, I know I was. But the fact is most people simply don't care about this sort of thing and their brain forgets it. It's nothing beyond a fun fact and has zero effect on everyday life. I remember when I was 6 or 7 years old reading all sorts of books about the planets and space, I couldn't get enough of it. But sad truth is 99% of people don't care about it at all and don't look up. 80% of people in the US live in an urban area and have never even seen stars or galaxies.
4:55 that "can you tell me" is at least to me somewhat promising. She may not have known, but she still had to the curiosity and the courage to ask, and genuinely wanted to know more. It's easy to shun people for not knowing, but it's much better to teach them and feed that curiosity. I think the desire to learn more matters more than what you already know.
I agree, but still how do they not know things that even elementary students know? Hell, knowing the scale of celestial object is basically common sense
Marvel is to blame. Earth deals with a UNIVERSAL crisis every movie which is extremely narcissistic. WRITERS think the universe is the size of a solar system. Edit: The multiverse contains multiple solar systems. Thinking we're the only one is also narcissistic. :)
@@dangerfly Hm... "a" solar system? Surely you meant "the" because solar refers to our star sol hence there is only one solar system. Others are called star systems (simplified).
Amazing video. I really appreciate how you didn’t make it about shaming these people for not knowing, but turned it into a positive learning experience. It’s a great example to hold ourselves up to.
"The thing is that people are worried about making mistakes, but you can't learn without making mistakes a lot of times." -The woman at the end. This is such an important piece of wisdom that everyone would benefit from by taking to heart. It's okay to make mistakes, and we should be gracious with those who make mistakes as well.
What about those "not astrology majors" ladies though? They didn't seem too worried about making mistakes.. Imagine people like these making important policy decisions in the government. So maybe making mistakes is ok but if adults are still making mistakes like kids from elementary school maybe they should go back to school.
@@kyjo72682I mean to be fair how often does needing to know what's larger in terms of planets and moons matter in politics, not often.(I want to change that)
He is keeping such a straight face through all those interviews, I would not be able to keep my composure. It is baffling to me that people could confuse the size of a star and the moon.
Earth has one moon. The problem is people can’t or don’t try to grasp the concept of perspective. Nor do they remember one second of the solar system model they learned in elementary school
Exactly it's not even funny watching people think this stuff through, it's more concerning than anything else. I dont wanna know your other opinions on the world if you dont know if the moon is bigger than the SUN
Videos like this are one reason Derek has nearly 15m subscribers. It was hard to watch at times but he actually educated people and didn’t make them feel stupid. Great job.
He shouldn't make them feel stupid, but they should feel stupid on their own. The problem is that they don't. And they'll be the ones in charge someday abolishing private property and throwing you into a gulag.
Deruk must have sorted through hundreds of people find the dumbest 10 people in america to make a shocking video. Thats why he gets the views. He makes shocking videos. Hopefully this doesnt become the norm, I used to like his videos (the hypothetical long cable/electricity video left a bad taste). But seeing the view count here, I am afraid this format will become the norm.
They were not stupid: hardly anyone is. But they WERE very ignorant! These are things that everyone SHOULD know. This level of ignorance is hard to comprehend.
It baffles me that many people aren't driven by curiosity and fascination to educate themselves about the fundamentals of physics and astronomy. Learning about the mechanics of the universe was like a drug during my teens. I'm glad Derek is inspring some of that wonder in these young people. To my mind, understanding reality is crucial to appreciating one's existence and finding meaning... without going through that process, you are blind to so much beauty.
Im so interested in the cosmos and yet im terrified to look up at the stars because its an overwhelming feeling for me and not many people understand why i feel that way. Maybe its because as this video proves, not many people understand that scale of the universe.
It always amazes me that we live in a time when vast amounts of knowledge are literally at our fingertips and people use this technology mostly for games and social media.
The great majority of people just want to be entertained. They could care less the difference between a moon, planet or galaxy. Give them a drink and a video game and watch their minds turn to mush.
Most Americans are poorly educated - Look at these adults at the start struggle to fathom which planer object is bigger.... Stuff you learn in the first grade
I don't know if I was extremley luck in my childhood that I learned this in school and from my parents, or if most people just turn off their brains in school and ignore what they're being tought. I honestly thought (and still believe) that moon
It's easy to be discouraged by how little many people seem to know, but it's also refreshing to see how quickly people learn concepts that are presented to them.
This is a sci-fi horror film. Those are post-secondary STUDENTS. That is a centre for HIGHER LEARNING. This is what's to come, they represent the HOPES AND DREAMS for the future. Oh, but it's ok, they aren't studying Astrology, and, surely, somewhere out in the vast distances of space, past the stars, to where the great moons fill the skies, intelligent life will be found in one of the other 11 galaxies.
That's sure an optimistic way to look at it! I'm just still in shock that a person could not know a moon is smaller than a planet and a star is larger than a planet... Like I'd be shocked if kindergarteners got that wrong, much less what appear to be college/university students. Everyone's gotta start somewhere, and I appreciate that they weren't mocked or made to feel stupid for it, but I'm still struggling to process reality here.
-What's 7x9? Well, I'm not majoring in numerology. -Who build the pyramids? I'm not an ancient aliens expert. -When did dinosaurs live? I don't study creationism -Can you fit all this furniture into this room? I don't know anything about Feng shui. -What causes the common cold? Sorry not a Geobiology major
@@donothesitate1198you should also know one is tremendously closer to us so put one and one together to realise the sun behind dwarfs the moon. You’re comparing a pebble to Everest.
@@donothesitate1198 They actually look about the same size from earth, because the moon is about 400 times closer than the sun, but its diameter is 400 times smaller than the suns.
@@donothesitate1198that's just plain wrong. neither of them is clearly bigger when seen from earth. they actually look about the exact same size as evidenced by solar eclipses where the sun is perfectly hidden behind the moon.
As someone who knows all of this stuff and assumed it was pretty common knowledge, it's kind of hard to imagine "most" people not knowing it. I guess that happens though. When you know a lot about a topic, you underestimate your own knowledge on the topic by overestimating the knowledge of others (assuming that the gap between what you know and what everybody else knows is not so big).
@imnotnotgameiacmaniac5327 Really? That's actually insane to think about. That would be one person in every immediate family, on average. Possibly two or three in a larger family. That means possibly some of my friends would even think that way, though I like to think my friends are intelligent people. I have had to explain to people, including my own parents, that the sun is a star, and that every star you see in the sky is also a sun, some billions of times bigger than ours. But my parents grew up poor, and with less education, they were never willfully ignorant.
@@ShizuruNakatsuI think when it comes to topics that people lack interest in and where only taught as a child people can look dumber and less educated then they actually are especially sense a lot of people are just kinda doing their own thing and lack curiosity. But still, this kind of stuff is ridiculous and shouldn't be happening in the 21th century though with the same survey finding things like half of Americans not knowing antibiotics don't work on viruses i think human stupidity still plays a large part.
@imnotnotgameiacmaniac5327 Yeah, that's one of the things that makes me very different. I've always had a natural curiosity, loved to learn, and wanted to know as much I could. I pretty much always retain information, whether it's from school, my own research, or even watching quiz shows for entertainment. I don't just let the knowledge flow out of my brain like that, because I want to know and remember things. I know a majority of humans are just caught up in their own little bubble, and don't really care about anything that happens outside of it, but I'll never really understand that mindset.
@@ShizuruNakatsu i envy you lol i also like to do research but i forget information all the time. im often left with the correct conclusion but i can't remember how i got there even with irl stuff i stuggle to remember things clearly that where more than a month ago
I've always thought the "Pale Blue Dot" picture is one of the two most important artistic images we have ever taken. The other being the Hubble "Deep Field" image, showing how unbelievably vast our universe is. One aimed inwards, one outwards.
Not only Pale Blue Dot is the most important picture ever taken in history of humankind, I consider Sagan's speech the best idea human intellect ever produced. Its beauty surpasses every piece of art ever made, every picture or poetry or music ever done, every verbose text ever written by intellectuals or anything some stupid politician has ever said. And it's beauty produced entirely by the intellect, supported by facts and observation basically. It's just so REAL that nothing else in human nature or experience comes even close.
I started watching physics girl Diana and you then I have been watching Neil deGrass Tyson and Brian cox and so many others. I’ve really been learning a lot from all of you guys so thank you
I'm not a "space nerd", I'm just a guy who went to a Russian school and received a Russian education. You know, we often say that education in America is disgusting, and no one seems to argue with this But not as much! I don’t presume to say that we are such geniuses, but the question “which is bigger, the Moon or the Sun” causes not only hysterical, but rather panicky laughter
@@Slevaizum Don't say "Russian" as it's something good. 35% of Russians believe that Sun goes around Earth - data from the Russian state agency for public researches in 2022.
@@Tina-mt9cl In fact, although our education system provides much more knowledge, it is also terrible. Yes, for us, what is shown in the video is the most basic knowledge, but it is not limited to this. Children in post-Soviet countries are obliged not to “study”, but to “know”. It's a big difference. This is a real mockery of children, because we are forced to cram something that will not be useful in life in principle. Of course, this develops neural connections, and this would be the case if we were instilled with the DESIRE to learn, and not just forced to do it.
@@steveswm7742its both. Its wholesome seeing how happy he is but its disturbing that so many people struggle with this. Im 20 and have known this stuff for like 10 years already.
@@steveswm7742a lot of people don’t really take the universe into consideration on their daily lives cause all their problems are here on this planet. I don’t blame them for not knowing anything past the sun.
Funny you think they taught them something. There is no doubt they were already taught and exposed to these things many times in the past. It just didn't stick.
@@steveswm7742So.. learning and teaching other people is disturbing? 💀 Now you know why there are lots of kids that didn't bother to study at school. Because it's "disturbing", just like what you said.🤦♂️
Really puts into perspective the bubble we might exist in as the kind of people to watch veritasium videos, and also why proper education funding is one of the most important things
@@christophearbus3523 WRONG -- obviously more funding would not solve the problem -- the problem isn't "need more money" -- the problem is "we have plenty of money but we spend it on the wrong things" -- besides, this is BASIC science -- any 11 year old should know this
@@matthewrix1047what? Your country has private colleges made by food and big pharma. Barely anyone has any Idea of the world behind U.S. boarders. What are you talking about? Are you even aware that you need to pay teachers? Is this a serious run for my medal of "Internet Idiot of the day"?
It used to be normal for every college aged person to know these things. Public education has gone down the tubes in recent decades in favor of certain "party approved" education only.
I've always hated the trend of going up to strangers and asking them trivia just to prove how "stupid" people are but this is so nice. Same basic premise but approached with care and a willingness to educate. Enriching instead of degrading, love it.
@@Zorro9129 Why would you consider people not knowing trivia stupidity? There could be loads of reasons why these people do not know this information. They could have not gone to a school that taught this information. They could have lost this knowledge in favor of spending time learning other facts which are more pertinent to their every day lives. They could have known the information and their mind just blanked on the subject while they were being put on the spot.
@@zikli9249 Brilliant mindset here. Not "knowing" some throwaway facts doesn't make one stupid. The information presented, in my opinion, shows a gap in education related to astronomical objects. But, for most people on Earth, astronomical objects are as insignificant as quantum objects. Quantum objects and astronomical objects have almost 0 relevance to everyday life.
@isakleo4706 Agreed. Trivia is fun, but entirely non-indicative of actual human knowledge. Derek manages to walk that line between "trivia to prove people are stupid" and "genuinely caring about people's knowledge" in a way that seems to me to be someone who truly cares about people.
As a student right now in the us, the reason for this is as teachers just kinda chill and let kids do whatever they want, and we just learn so much about history, human rights, and math that other subjects get forgotten.
While being totally speechless for first half of the video, I realized that most people actually don't know things I consider as basics (which actually IS, we should learn more about the world outside our atmosphere as well as our planet), there’s so much to learn, if you look around you'll never run out of things to know about. I mean being interested in astronomy since forever, even I didn’t know that there are more trees on earth than there are stars in our galaxy!
The trees and how many planets we have identified were the only questions I didn't know the answer to/got wrong. And I don't even study or even really care about astronomy. I just know it because I enjoy learning.
Only the trees for me but I feel like that is an unrelated question in all fairness. But generally speaking I think that any sci fi nerd could answer these questions very easily. On the other hand there are people that actually know these answers but believe that the earth is flat, so regardless of them knowing this information they still believe it's false due to some unknown conspiracy agenda. These people actually went to the trouble of learning this kind of knowledge and immediately discredit it as "mainstream propaganda". That proves that you don't need to be smart to just assimilate the data, understanding it is another story.
Well if we look at everything in the universe we are actually pretty big. At least if we compare us to the smallest and biggest known thing. If we would scale up the planck length to human size, a regular human would be billion times bigger than the observable universe. So on the scale we are above the middle. At least from what we can see
But we ARE the universe, in a literal sense. To make a human from scratch, you first need the entire universe to exist, exactly as it is. The way we are is a direct consequence of how the entire cosmos unfolded, right back to the Big Bang. We are not "in" the universe... we are an emergent property of it. It's the deepest nature of our being.
I think that intro demonstrates how we take the knowledge we already have as a given... Ordering those items by size seems so obvious and straight-forward to me that I wouldn't even consider that it could be hard for other people. Maybe we should give our parents a break when they ask us how to work the computer lol
@lewis4200 It does seem like more of a failure of education and culture though when people know everything there is to know about computers and almost nothing about the Universe around them.
@@sierrabianca Are we talking about people in general, or as a civilization? Because I know people who work with computers on a daily basis, but don't know simple (what I would consider simple) concepts like shortcuts, hotkeys, network folders, or even the difference between Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer
@@dagreatghosface im honestly blown away like how are there literal humans alive currently in 2000s who still dont even know the simplest answers, im extremely shocked
No, not "still". The terrifying thing is that it is not just a few remnants of stupid or "oldthink", flat earthers *gained* growth thanks to the internet/information age. People in the middle ages and early industrial revolution pretty commonly knew the earth wasn't flat.
@@k9tirion927 exactly the "mainstream" view of scholars in the middle ages viewed the earth as a globe therefore charlemaine was given the Globus Crucigern a globe shape object with a cross on top to symbolicise ...
"I don't know were they come from, can you tell me?" This is telling. These people are willing to ask, they don't know because they have never had someone in their life to ask. Someone approachable, someone patient, someone willing to teach for the sake of teaching. Thank you Derek. Edit: I know the internet exist, obviously, I know they can look stuff up, but learning things from the internet in ways which are both interesting and retained is a skill. Most people can not just read a published paper or random facts and actually remember any of it. Derek's videos are an outlier, a lot of info on the internet is far less approachable and/ or far less accurate.
They have a ton of things to ask, did you hear about the internet? What those people needed was starting to think and realizing they have a gap in their knowledge, and then getting curious. It has nothing to do with "having someone to ask".
But this sort of information is readily available in videos online, and in books in the discount bin, or in the actual astronomy section, at your local bookseller. I got one on my shelf, that I just looked at, that was $8 from B&N, and covers it all, with great pictures, and month by month star maps.
@@pifopifo1000 But they do look, sometimes, in their "One" book which tells them everything, even if it has been proven false for a thousand years or more.
learning by not making mistakes is basically just remembering. you did something and it’s correct, so you repeat it. but you can’t really get much further than that by not making mistakes from trying new things. you’ll stagnate.
it's even crazier when you think about just how big we are, too. I mean, while there are many many many planets and stars and galaxies out there, there's just as many (if not more) atoms even in just one person as there are stars in the sky. not to mention what all is at the subatomic level. it's just crazy how complex and unique everything is in this universe, and how many pieces there are, all working together. I just think it's really neat.
I used to volunteer at a library makerspace. I made a sign that said, "Failure is always an option" to try to encourage kids to try new things and no care about the outcome. The library took down the sign. The biggest challenge those kids had to learning was fear of making a mistake because they have been thought that you will get a bad grade and punished. Mistakes are the only way we learn without them you are just memorizing. Mistakes are what make us reflect on what we have experienced and coalesce it into rules about the world that we see around us.
I feel like there are much better ways to convey that message than "Failure is always an option." I know it's meant to be encouraging, but it comes across as defeatist. I respect the intended message, but I don't blame the library for taking down the sign.
@@Eden_Laika haha, yeah, just the thought of how some people would read that, as in "You're never safe from failure." and then they would be so confused about who would put up such a mean sign
True. But I get why some people mix this up. There are real sciences that end with -logy, like biology, for example. Also, if I'm not mistaken, astrology started as a real science.
@@roblox1387 What it is now, yes, absolutely. I mean back 3000 years ago, when they started to inspect the rotation of planets. They called it Astrology. Today it is pure Esotericism.
I'm a math teacher and I see you teaching these people. Who cares about us, you taught each of these people something with an individual education. Thank you
That is what I got out of this video. It wasn't just a 'gotcha' video but challenged some young people with basic facts, that describe the fantastic scale and power of this ancient universe.
@@MichaelSouthMichaelSouthi agree. im somewhat disappointed looking through the comments- most people making fun of the people in the video… i used to love learning in school, you can see the people here enjoying themselves when they learn something new, and the thing that always made me become disinterested in a topic was when i was made fun of because of it. lets encourage learning! it makes us all smarter and happier
@@gaugea Thank you for your comments. The truth is I rarely enjoyed learning in school until my second year in College but always enjoyed learning from non-fiction books about historical technology or natural phenomena including astronomy, physics etc. I am over 30 so I enjoyed seeing young people become interested in learning, but imo, it is a legitimate concern that the new generation may not be well served in basic science and technology when their votes determine whether new generations of space telescopes are built or horizons in biology or "A.I." are pursued.
I was amazed at how little some of them knew. I always think of Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when I think of the vastness of space: "Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space."
@@k1llsh0t_87you actually would probably hit the asteroid belt before you got too far and that would probably kill you. If you got past it though I think it is vast and empty until you reach another solar system, I’m not sure.
I genuinely enjoyed the positivity of this. No shame, no anger, people learning things etc I am shocked as a complete life long nerd that folks didn't know this stuff but again... I'm a big old nerd.
@pcap8810 that's one way to go through life. I think, personally, that attitude will simply encourage people to remain ignorant for fear of asking questions. I'm sure there are many topics you are ignorant of that others find to be common knowledge.
One should be angry about this. This is just 1 sign of a decaying civilization in the AGE OF INFORMATION. This is very basic knowledge and yet our education system has failed us. Failed us so hard, we have people believing things like conspiracies and flat/hollow earth... If we can't get succeed in teaching this very basic information, how are we supposed to be able to combat the stupidity that is flat/hollow earth and other likewise dumb ideas enabled by those in power. Having said that, its no wonder the system fails us. They want us dumb. So, sorry, not sorry if these people and their ignorance makes me just a little angry.
@@beowulf_of_wall_st Well tbh, I too was surprised a lot of people didn't know the absolute basics but I have to disagree that they should be ashamed of it. Maybe they weren't really curious because they didn't know anything about it in the first place which led them to not look into it. A good teacher knows to bring out the curiousity in children, the curiousity isn't in there initially. I think you get the reference. Finally, it's never too late to learn something new.
I really liked that guy's take at the end. Everyone else was commenting on how small this all made them feel, and he basically says "Sure, we're tiny in the grand scheme of things, but why would I let that get me down? There's so much to do here on earth that it really doesn't matter if we're only a speck in the universe".
My favorite ways of thinking are, sure, our actions today may be infinitesimally small when described on a cosmic level, but 1) we're not cosmic beings, we're Earthlings, and 2) who's to say humanity won't get to the point of star travel one day? Our actions have consequences, we make ripples every day with what we do, and those ripples may be felt through time for a long, long time. Who's to say someone we help today doesn't become tomorrow's Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking? Hell, who's to say that's not you yourself? Live every day.
"how small this all made them feel" I hate that phrase. Simply because it's false, it's just a gimmick that people use to think they know better and are more interesting.
@@r.daneel.90no? Looking at the scale of the entire universe we are tiny. Nothing that happens on earth is going to have a notable impact on the universe. Now its a different topic if this is at all important
It may be my interest since childhood for astronomy speaking and countless documentaries, but I’m genuinely surprised how little people know about astronomy
Im still by technicality a child a im astonished they got this wrong there is common sence in this i figured mist from watching anime scales and 1v1 and few books in primary
The truly scary thing is not the size of the universe, but the fact that Derek was likely on (or near) a college campus, speaking to people who made it into that college. The average person on the streets probably knows even less.
Well let's be judicial here. It's not UCLA or Harvard, It's UNLV (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) with an 80%+ acceptance rate and 44% graduation rate, so do with that what you will.
Sheesh. I'm a bit nerdy and probably overestimate the knowledge of the people around me, but I'm fairly sure here in Australia most people are at least educated enough to correctly place the ordering of what's bigger than what.
@dbznappa Not so much anymore. Now it rests on the individual as the center of the universe. "YOU are special. YOU are unique. YOU are whatever you say YOU are, and if anyone tells you different, that is violence against YOU...And that concludes math class. Thank you, everyone! See you tomorrow! And remember, after our pledge to the pride flag, we will have a pop quiz on pronouns! All 5,892,634,051 of them!"
@@Malhaloc Oh look, another poor conservative that permanently thinks they are a victim. You poor, poor, sensitive snowflake, it must be so hard being so upset all the time. Imagine if you ACTUALLY had something worth caring about.
@@MalhalocI thought everyone agreed that individuals are important. The U.S. was founded on personal rights. I think there are issues with this, socially, but you are just making sht up. Pronouns have always been taught, but not the 'modern ones.' They are needed in language, and totally made up. If anything, more popular pronouns besides the main ones should be taught, so students know about them. You know, education.
I used to teach English in Japan. I once had a communication error with a student as she wanted to know the name of "the things in space smaller than the moon". I assumed she meant comets or asteroids or meteors. Turns out she meant stars. It still blows my mind just how many adults don't know that stars are enormous. I also want to tear my hair out when people try to be inspirational by saying "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss you'll land among the stars." You've missed by a pretty enormous margin if that's the case.
atleast she wasn't completely wrong considering the size of neutron stars. Pretty weird that stars can be smaller than moons and at the same time be larger than any planet
You could have agreed and mentioned neutron star. It may not be the kind of stars that the student was talking about, but it has the "star" name in it and comes from a star. And it is definitely smaller than the moon.
@@jannicklumme9298 more *massive* than any planet. Neutron stars can be in the ball park of dozens of miles so planets will not have enough mass at that size to from a sphere. I'm honestly not trying to be rude, just trying to highlight (to anyone who later reads your comment) the different between size and mass. Bigger size frequently doesn't mean more mass. Neutron stars can have a smaller diameter than moons, but will "weigh" more. In this case "weigh" is just referring to the molecular "weight" of the object, which is more properly defined as its mass. If I was talking with someone and discussing "10kg of molecular weight" worth of hydrogen, a person fluent with these ideas would assume that I am talking about 10kg of weight *IF it was weighed on Earth, but they would also be familiar with the fact that this 10kg is referring to a specific number or hydrogen atoms and that the specific number we are discussing would "weigh" different amounts depending on where we weighed it. 10kg can be a reference to an objects mass and can ALSO refer to what it would weigh if placed on a scale with the normal assumption being that the scale was located on Earth. But to say that an item can be "smaller" than Item X, but then also sayit can be "larger" than Item X, is a great way to confuse someone who is not science literate and ALSO not familiar with the specific topic. A significant percentage of the people who fall in to this category or "confused" will just use the lack or clarity to further reinforce their misconceptions and distrust of science. I work side by side with people who would read what you wrote and turn it in to a discussion of: "Your precious SCIENCE can't even decide if a moon or a star is bigger! All of your telescopes are based on photoshopped images and now the people who have not been brainwashed by all of decades of lies from NASA are finally being proved right by your community of "scientists" not being able to keep their lies strait. If you want the truth, just read the bible. God already gave us all the Truth we need. The stars are small points of light that will eventually fall to Earth as a sign that He is returning. Just look up in the sky and ask, which is bigger? That big ass moon that lights up the sky, or some pin point of light you can barely see? And you want me to buy in to this idea that there are stars that are both "bigger" and "smaller" than our God given glorious moon? No thanks, I'll trust what the information I can see with my own eyes. Your "beliefs" and claims about what is happening impossibly far away take way too much Faith for me to support." I am fully aware that most people are not surrounded by the sheer number of uneducated people I seem to be surrounded by....but they ARE out there. The words you use matter. Being perfectly clear and using the correct vernacular matters. Making statements that include what YOU might consider too much detail, matters. If you don't, then I end up fighting with my cousin over Thanksgiving. I end up being the one trying to explain that: "In poor countries, where children have a 35% chance of dying before age 5, women have a LOT of children. They do this in order to make sure they have SOME children that survive. Because, if the AVERAGE is that 1 in 3 die then YOUR family might get unlucky. MAYBE you have 5 kids and 4 of them don't make it, while your 2 sisters ALSO have 5 kids each and only 1 of those 10 don't make it. Between the 3 of you there were 15 kids, 10 survived, but YOU only have 1 kid that made it. If industrial wealthy counties help these countries with basic health care , like vaccines, birth control, sex education, very cheap malaria meds and more, then the survival rates for these children go WAY WAY UP. So...no. Bill Gates is NOT trying to control global populations by poisoning small children in impoverished countries with vaccines that are full of poison and aimed at murdering small children. Bill Gates is trying to give mothers in poor countries the tools to reduce infant mortality, which results in women reducing the number of kids they have...BECAUSE they have confidence that the kids they have will actually LIVE. " Yeah...THAT was a half hour discussing with my cousin who also thought that Alaska was an island somewhere near Hawaii....because "THAT'S WHERE IT IS ON THE MAP! I'll show you and THEN you'll have to tell me how stupid you are." This was before the family reunion where I over heard my uncle say "Yeah! How do we even really know the holocaust even happened?!" So...I had to walk over to my grandmother....HIS MOTHER...who lived through the actual event...and get her to slap the crap out of him. This thinking is EVERYWHERE. When you make a public statement....if you have a general life goal of making things better...it would be wise to make explicitly certain that nothing you say can be misunderstood. Seriously....my time in retail made this even more painfully clear. I had a woman in her mid 50s wave me down from across the entire restaurant...wasn't even my table, but she had an emergency thar someone needed to address right here and now. I make my way to the table. She is holding up a single French fry in front of me...it looks good. I want to eat it....and then she asks me...in perfectly clear english: "So...do I just eat this?" And I think to myself: "Did this 50 something American women with no cultural or language barriers SERIOUSLY just wave me down to ask WHAT SHE IS SUPPOSE TO DO WITH AN EFFING FRENCH FRY?! How do I answer this without sounding like I am INTENTIONALLY trying to a dick to her?" Then the 75 year old guy who spent 20 minutes...alone at his table with a menu...obviously frustrated. After 3 friendly attempts to help him with questions on the menu, or offer suggestions, I finally talk him in to letting me answer questions. Know what his big frustration was? He wanted to know: "If I order soup n salad...can I get the soup separate from the salad?" ....I paused.... ...and paused... ..."I want to make sure I get you what you want, so I just want to make sure I fully understand the question you're asking me. Are you asking if it's possible for me to bring you a salad WITHOUT dumping the soup on top of the salad and serving it all to you in 1 bowl?" Him: Yeah, is that possible? 75 year old American with no cultural or language barriers had spent his entire life hearing "Soup IN salad". So...when you're discussing science.....you can never be to clear. And the cost of NOT being PERFECTLY EFFING CLEAR is the absolute fact that someone out there will turn your harmless error in to a reason to vote for candidate A instead of candidate B.
The young lady at the end reminding us that it's okay to make mistakes, and that mistakes are a natural and often necessary part of learning, is a great way to wrap up this video. While many of us watching are probably subscribed to a dozen different science educators, and could easily answer most of the questions in this video, it's important to remember that the people featured were willing to face what they did not know and LEARN rather than hiding or being ashamed of their ignorance.
It's so nice to watch Derek interact with others; he is incredibly kind and never makes anyone feel dumb, always encouraging them instead. You are by far the best science knowledge channel out there, and your charisma is through the roof.
I don't understand how people got the size sorting question wrong. I am from the same America they are from and college aged like them. While sure I would have guessed the amount of planets, stars, galaxies, etc. wrong, the general size of individual objects was something I was taught at latest in middle school. The lowest age someone can drop out of school at is 16, well into their high school career. They would have learned of this topic in elementary and middle school. How could they not have?
Agreed. Not only that, but the size order can be derived from other basic knowledge*--so not only have they failed to memorize a specific fact; they have no knowledge of the field whatsoever. *For example: the Earth orbits the Sun, and an object can only orbit something much heavier than itself.
@@kaidenwatts528 -- As for how they got into college: there's been a building anti-meritocratic sentiment among college administrators for decades, so they're often not interested in selecting the most academically successful students. COVID drove the final nail into the coffin, then added a few more just for good measure, mainly by lowering academic standards even further.
I get why they are making those mistakes as moon is larger than sun or stars when viewed from Earth but Im very dissapointed by the quality of education :/ ... I gues its more important to know about some guy in 18 century who wrote few poems (thy will not remember that after few years either tho) ...
It was interesting to see you return to the style that formed part of the data for your PhD! As someone who's been watching your videos for over 10 years, when I myself was still in university, it certainly was a blast from the past. One thing you've always been good at is letting people work it out themselves, even if they're wrong, and then helpfully lead them towards the right answer so that they learn without feeling like they're being mocked.
@@bb5979 Obvious troll is obvious but against my better judgement, I will reply... If you mock them, what do you get? People who have not really learned anything, but are now mad at you. If you show compassion and teach them the correct information, what do you get? People who have now learned something new. By mocking them you're actively taking steps to keep the world ignorant instead of increasing the amount of knowledge in the world.
@@chillsahoy2640 Also, it is very easy to judge them and sure, some answers show holes in education but I'd also say each one of us is very ignorant on many subjects. I find myself searching stuff on google all the time. It means I encounter stuff i don't know all the time. Many of the people following this channel would have probably fared better at these queations but maybe not on literature or history or literature, art, politics, economics and whatnot.. it's not as easy as it may seem from here to look smart when answered random and unexpected questions.
I appreciate how kind and generous you seem to be to the people you interview! It’s not a late night comedy show laughing at the man on the street. I especially noticed with one lady near the end whose cards were clearly in the wrong order but you weren’t rearranging them or pointing out the wrong order as you gestured to them when you talked to her. Clearly people are comfortable enough to keep engaging when they’ve gotten things wrong. I wish more of our interactions were like that (and as a teacher, it encourages me to be kinder to the ones who I think must not have been listening, too!)
The moment when Veritasium was given the opportunity to explain how stars work at 4:56 is my favorite part of this video. Learning about dark matter, the cosmological problem etc is fine but to be able to pass on some of the very basic but amazing facts about this universe to a new person is a fantastic feeling, like giving a person a great book or recommending a bing-able streaming series.
She was my favourite in this episode, she did a great job of solidifying that these people aren't dumb or don't want to learn... they just don't know. She seemed excited to learn and was attentive to his answers. There are plenty of reasons she might not know the answers and she was willing to make some guesses but she also knew what she didn't know and was ready to be taught. That's awesome.
There’s a data driven way to read the news: go to ground.news/veritasium to get 30% off the Vantage plan and see through sensationalized reporting.
God created earth for us and rest are bunch of lifeless planets. People should care more about the judgment day than universe.
ppl are dumb
Chipi chipi
@@MrUssy101no
Chapa chapa@@Fakeshridhar
I like the way Derek doesn't mock people for ignorance and instead encourages learning.
He just went in with a different goal
If I was going to do it I would only want the information
He wants to know more after the interaction so he is nice.
Or he’s just nicer than us in general, or me any ways… that’s probably more likely
I dislike the way people dont mock him for holding a lav mic like that. aka the "Clueless Logan"
@@tgc517i think he's nice but he's also lot gonna post a video just mocking ppl for a channel like his he's gonna have to stay professional
I notice all the religious answers were cut from the video, so we can't know if he laughed at those. No flat earthers either?
@@forbidden-cyrillic-handle some wizards can
I don't expect the general public to know specific details but college students not understanding the difference between a planet and a star is very worrisome
Bro thinks the sun is smaller than the earth. That isn’t even schools fault.
@@RicoHelms Yes, I thought some stuff was just common knowledge from a young age but apparently I was wrong
@@RicoHelms I would argue, yes, it is. Like, imagine there was no schools, no education. Of course you would think the sun is smaller than the virtually infinite planet you're standing on. Same way a remarkable amount of antique civilizations considered the sun some kind of (large) object carried/drawn by some deity, usually with the implication that the deity would fit onto the planet in a human-observeable size scale, thus implying the sun had to be smaller than the planet.
It's exactly only education (or generally available educative information), thus usually school, that teaches people things beyond the stuff we can observe on first glance. I would never expect somebody to know the precise distance to, or the size of, the sun, because that's not exactly information pertaining to your everyday life, thus nobody should be expected to just look it up for no reason. Hence the only thing a random non-astronomer would know is exactly that a class or two might have shown him (often wildly mis-proportioned) depictions of the solar system.
So if people somehow forget about that, or never understood it, the educative system meant to teach them has failed.
This is pretty typical of these productions to cherry pick the biggest ingnoramus' out of the crowd. For everyone of the people that made it into the video, there could have been hundreds who had no problems. Without showing honest statistics of how many people got it right vs didn't all this video does is show that a few very poor students were still able to get through the vetting process of UNLV.
The only person who can be forgiven for this mistake is a child or a peasant from the 15th century, because everyone should at least know that the moon is smaller than the sun.
as someone who was obsessed with astronomy as a kid, them repeatedly calling it astrology really hurt. but i also appreciate how he was able to go about it without mocking them
I just laughed when I heard that. Watching university students get stuff wrong which 5 year old me could have nailed is quite painful to watch.
yeah I'm curious how much people's confusion with that has led to pseudoscientific thinking in the general public.
I am not American but most of us learned these basic things in primary/elementary school. We went to the local planetarium and science museum for field trips, and heard scientists talk. I'm curious how it's done in the US.
@@pssurvivor From what I know, American education is not the best. I am Italian and here, education is pretty good. People here tend to be auite cultured, but there are exceptions obviously.
Here as well, most people know that a star is huge. You can expect a pre school teacher saying to a child that "stars are veeeeeryyy big!"
I aspire to this level of patience
0:35 "Is the sun bigger than the moon" what the... I am watching that video for 40seconds I already write a comment this is not a good sign generally
Yea just Americans getting interviewed.
@@Fischi_cc i'm American and this is just shameful... and i'm younger than most these people...
Look in the background. This is UNLV. The science courses there are just fine. Same textbooks and curriculum as any other college or university. Many students avoid science courses if possible and are not interested in thinking very deeply🤔
@@Fischi_cc Yeah, just discrimination writing a comment
@@samotnywilk3381 Making videos like these usually involve interviewing hundreds or even thousands of people. Those where there are learning opportunities are the ones that have the opportunity for the dialogue desired for the video, so those are shown. Out of those thousand there are a dozen or so people that make it to the final video, the other 988 are on the cutting room floor. Anywhere this video was recorded the outcome would have been the same, because that was the outcome the author was intentionally looking for.
At no point is the video positioned as a study on American's knowledge of basic astronomy, and no one should assume that it is.
I couldn’t even imagine that basic knowledge about our universe is so limited by so many people
ikr? This isn't complicated or subtle. This is about knowing some basic language. "What is a galaxy?" Collection of solar systems. So galaxy bigger than star or moon, right? Wow.
[EDIT - Some people have misconstrued my point. I'm not being superior or precise or grandiose. I'm trying to convey that a basic, approximate sense of how it vaguely works (solar systems go in galaxies, for example) is fine for most people. We don't all need to be experts in everything. General Knowledge is just that. General.]
Right! It just seems so odd. I guess I assumed everyone knows the basics at least.
My mind was blown when I found out my stepmom had no idea of the basics of our existence/reality. I thought she was the dumbest person on earth, but I guess there are people even dumber out there.
I also had to teach her when i was 7 that there's different types of metal. She thought metal was metal and it's own thing and that copper wasn't metal but it's own thing, and that steel wasn't metal but it's own thing, that brass wasn't metal but it's own thing, and so on. I literally asked her if she was the other word for special at the dinner table and got yelled at for asking her that. I'm pretty sure I made her cry that night because I made her feel so stupid.
@@mLyonJE there are those people, but i'm pretty sure he asked a lot of strangers and just picked the once that struggled more, cause there's nothing to learn if someone just comes up and knows everything
Yeah this is really surprising to me. I thought everyone got taught about basic astronomy in elementary school.
Moons orbit planets, planets orbit stars, stars have solar systems, solar systems make up galaxies, galaxies make up the universe. This takes like 1 day to teach, and it's generally mind-blowing for kids, so it's usually a fun lesson that they'll remember for the rest of their lives.
As an astrphysics major, a part of me died within the first 5 minutes of this video but the rest of it revived me and filled me with a sense of hope because there's people like Derek who'll keep educating the general public about things the education system failed to.
i got very triggered at that part
As someone who had a pretty good basic education, same 😂
I do not know a lot, I though I knew nothing until this video to be honest… but yeah, last half of the video is really nice. I admire people that keep pushing for people to learn.
Fun fact college educated people support democrats
Good job on getting that Astrophysics major! That’s amazing!
Yeah, in that part I was like "a 14 year old can answer that"
I’m a big fan of how you interacted with the students. Anytime they degraded themselves for not knowing, you encouraged them. Neat to see these interactions.
That is one of my favorite things about this channel. Derek has always been the type of person to encourage growth. His journeys have always been entertaining and educational.
That’s literally how the channel started!
The original format of Veritasium didn't work very well.
Student: "I think that the stars are the smallest because they're just little white dots"
Derek: "Really? Hahahahahahahahahahahaaha...."
Yep, as much as I like watching "dumb American geography" or "flat earth debunking" videos for the shock value, ultimately this way of encouragement is one we should all aim for, then we wouldn't even need to create those shock value videos
I'm sorry but.. you maybe should feel a tiny bit bad about not knowing the answer to this question.
7:07 so fun fact, if you stretch your arm out and cover part of the night sky with your hand, you are covering more stars with your hand from your view point than there are grains of sand on every beach on earth.
Thanks for the likes! I'm so happy at least one or two people pay attention to my nerd facts!!!!
This fact is in fact fun!
But consider this: You also very well be covering more grains of sand than stars
That's fascinating, thanks for sharing
This topic typically leads to feelings of existential crisis, but the way you're explaining it turns the video into something very wholesome. Love it.
hai, bang. big fan!
ga kaget liat kokbisa juga nontonin veritasium, keep up the great work you guys!!
Depending on perspective, but when I think of the vastness of our universe and how small we are to scale, I realize how insignificant we are. Which oddly increases the feeling of significance. It definitely forces an out-of-body thought for a second. It makes big problems in our life seem trivial, and yet, makes small acts of kindness mean that much more. Sounds cheesy I guess, but damn if it doesn't make me think.
Kobi!!!
@@MA-ts3xsMA, My forever home is in heaven with Jesus.
My favourite part of this video is that he actually educates the people interviewed. And doesn't just put them down.
Yeah, he doesn’t leave them in ignorance. I love that.
I would have such a hard time not putting people down. The dude in the video has willpower.
I mean for the most part it can't be their fault that they don't know this stuff. Has to be their education system or just society that's to blame.
You know deep inside he's thinking wtf?
Well the comment section here alone is doing a good job of putting them down
Being a science student I just assumed this was common knowledge. We need more work like this, nobody should die without knowing the scale of the universe.
I learnt about this from kids tv shows when I was younger
Absolutely. There should be a law that before anyone m*rders anyone they must first teach them the scale of astronomical bodies.
This is why I can't vote Republican ever again. The fact that so many of them think the Earth is only around 6000 years old while we have proof how old stuff in the Universe is, is just mind blowing. And even if you try to teach them, they just plug their ears.
It is commin knowledge before education got hijacked and now they only learn unnecessary stupid stuff
It should be.
The quote from Sagan always brings me to tears, nice editing right there. I've been watching your videos for some years now, and this one, however harmlessly naive at first, has moved me the most. Good job, Scientist.
The fact that Derek can not laugh every time they say “astrology”…
That’s talent
It’s an honest mistake. I’ve done it a few times aswell.
@@Jose.AFT.SaddulMy mnemonic is to think of a big "log" of poo.
@@andyjohnson4907I'm sure psychologists would have something to say about that
Lmao
@@vedritmathias9193 A scatologist would agree
I am really shocked at the lack of understanding. Great for being so kind to these folks to keep them open to learning.
It's incredible how lacking it was
Really? When those same people are lecturing you about the 32 different genders, you're shocked they are ignorant of the real world? Really? 🙄
i feel like my 6yr old would do better than some of these people. It would also be interesting to see these questions asked of different age groups, cities and even countries and we might have an idea why things like 'flat earth' come back when we just know better :-)
I really thought these knowledge are common after the age of like 10, guess I'm wrong..
I suspect Derek only included the truly clueless people he interviewed to make this video. I cannot - nay - choose not to believe that this is representative.
Good on him for trying to educate people, but it’s shocking to me that so many people struggle with these topics that should be common knowledge.
Now imagine most rich people are far below intelligence of the average people. You didn't know THAT, right?
@@Fannystark007 Where are you getting that stat from?
In my anecdotal experience, most of the rich people I've met are at least smarter than average. But it's certainly true you don't need to be a genius to be rich. In fact, it may even hamper wealth creation through traditional means because smart people tend to overthink things.
i would probably snap and call them idiots
Maybe not so shocking? what happens among the stars currently has very little bearing on what happens down here on earth. you could live your whole life never knowing what our own star is, let alone anything beyond, with few if any negative consequences. for most people... knowing about space doesn't matter. it's a novelty.
I happen to think space is really cool. I like learning about stuff up there, but it's ok if someone else doesn't. people like different things, and it's not like we're any better or worse off for it.
It's the U.S. It's expected.
1:20 astrology?!?!
hey don't judge her, how is she supposed to know stars are bigger than moons? She's not an astrology major
@@elu9189Her horoscope app didn't tell her the size of celestial bodies today :( what a Libra thing to do
@@elu9189they're simply american
Its astronomy right? Astrology is relation of planet dynamics and personality traits.
@@technogoon_261 yeah astrology is the one that makes no sense and has 0 evidence, astronomy is just the (serious) study of space stuff.
The tree question hit me the hardest. I was thinking... the amount of surface area on the Earth that contains trees is ASTRONOMICALLY smaller than the space in the galaxy that could contain stars. If it was a multiple choice question I'd have gotten it wrong. I still can't believe there are that many trees on Earth.
The exact same for me, I guessed there were tens of billions, but trillions is incomprehensible
Most question of that nature, comparing numbers of big things up there to small things down here, there's more small things down here. The things up there are very low density. The things down here are very high density.
I wasn't sure either. I was like "there's about 150M km^2 of land on Earth... so that's about 1000 trees per km^2 for there to be about as many as stars in the galaxy... that's a tree for every 1000 m^2... that's about a tree in every 30mx30m area... that's a lot less dense than a forest, but how much of the Earth is forest? Large stretches of it don't even have trees. Hmm....
I decided on trees, but yeah, they're only about an order of magnitude apart (which btw, means there's about 1 tree for every 100 m^2 of Earth, or every 10m x 10m area)
i actually got it pretty easily, but not because i actually managed to grasp the scale, just simple math.
if on average a galaxy has 100 bil stars and there are about 8 bil humans, and i think there are probably at least a hundred trees to one human then it easily surpasses the average amount of stars in a galaxy
@@cinnamoncat8950🤓
This was very eye opening. Never knew it’s possible to go through the education system and still not know the difference in size of the moon and sun.
Seeing this was super dissapointing.
It's as if they were thinking from eye perspective looking at the sky. The sun and the moon are roughly the same size (like during an eclipse) But since the universe is included in the responses, it shows they aren't capable of thinking from an outer perspective.
i'm astounded. i never went to college and i know more than a lot of the people i see in these kinds of videos. it's insane that they even graduated highschool.
When there's no need for it u forget
I once met a guy in school that thought the planets in our solar system where stacked vertically on top of each other and that they didn’t take that long to get to. It was fun explaining to him how long to took it get to each planet. The look on his face was priceless
While I commend the students' eagerness to learn, the fact this isn't already largely known is kinda mind blowing to me considering basic astronomy is part of my compulsory curriculum
In elementary school?
I know, I asked my 5yo and he got it right, he only messed up when I asked him to compare the sun and the stars
@@mariacamilaserranomelo6307 comparing the sun and the stars doesnt really make sense icl
@@Khal-E1 Why not? I just checked a textbook for 4th grade (9-10 years old), and it has a few chapters about astronomy.
It was part of theirs too; they've just forgotten (or more likely never actually learned) it since them.
13:10 You can’t learn without making mistakes- we do need to be more comfortable making mistakes but also careful not to be too certain, we are still learning!
I think I take my general understanding for granted. A lot of this to me seems like general information that everyone would know...and I'm just a music major. It just goes to show that we can't take our skills, knowledge, or gifts for granted. There's someone out there who would love to be where you are.
wow, that put things into perspective. i have a weird urge to teach someone something
Dude they just don’t apply themselves or have a low IQ, whatever.
Apparently billions of them.........SMH
Is it a failure in curiosity?. I feel the same way you do and I know teaching people and they always enjoy and are fascinated by it. It just seems there are many more, easily accessible thing that consume their curiosity (social media, etc)
This is just wild. Im a welder myself and i had the correct answer in like 3 seconds. Also all the questions in my mind to spesify what planets or moons are we talking about. It just shows what a great basic education can do to people.
One significant thing to always appreciate about Derek is that although some of these concepts may be simple or so, he does not dare bash any of those that he interviews for not knowing answers to his questions. He guides them through this journey of gaining a new perspective on misconceptions or something that most do not think about on the daily. He really lives up to his channel name!
On the other hand, he publishes this ignorance to the public here on UA-cam.
And that comes across as a denunciation.
Times New Roman
He's stronger than I am, for sure
@@HerbertHeyducklol, I'm sure he gets them to sign a legal disclaimer. so they know. some ppl don't care and still want to be seen
@@HerbertHeyduck But who is being denounced? IMO, it's the system that was supposed to be teaching people all this stuff.
Can you be faulted for dealing with your life and not learning something you'll likely never use in your daily matters?
This was painful at the start but I'm glad I stuck with it. This is an amazing example of good science communication: Not laughing at people for their ignorance but using it as a starting point for getting people excited about the universe.
These people aren't excited about it as it doesn't affect their lives (which is how our specialized society operates). He also obviously didn't include the interviews where the interviewee knew everything because that would be boring to watch. For example, I'd have gotten all these instantly except for the trillions of trees on earth because I could care less about the number of trees on earth, but my specialization is in a related STEM field to astronomy.
@@timp6834live "i could care less" reaction. WRONG. INCORRECT. CLEARLY you meant that you "couldn't care less" because, right now, you're displaying an AWFUL high potential of caring less about the amount of trees on earth, which indicates that you care an AWFUL lot about the amount of trees on earth. Checkmate "timp6834".
@@jfan3049Do you feel better now? 😂
@@jfan3049 This is a weird American English thing. They say 'could care less' where British English says 'couldn't care less'. The British version makes rather more sense if you stop to think about it for a mo. But the US version, whilst perverse, isn't really 'wrong' - that is the accepted usage there SFAIK (it may be regional?). Sadly language is very much as we find it, even when it's annoyingly nonsensical.
I almost stopped watching before the 2 minute mark. I'm right there with you.
I'm just glad he touched on the "observable" part because there is probably much, much more to the universe than we'll ever know. It could be infinitely huge but we probably won't ever know for sure. I love space but it can be a rabbit hole that ends in existential dread.
As a casual fan of astronomy, this was hard to watch at first but I appreciated it! Great video
Real, why cant I be on these videos. Would have had 100% right
I expected it to be hard to watch, but instead it was kind of nice. Like a completely smooth road to the point where I realize I don't know how many stars are in the galaxy, and then I'm right there with the people in the video.
yeah I'm struggling to watch right now
you mean astrology, right? xD
@@raphaelefranco1123 If this is a joke It's way too unclear
Honestly, huge props for being so patient and approachable. It says a lot to be able to teach something that one might think should be common knowledge in a way that doesn't come off as condescending or disparaging. Good education should encourage people to learn more rather than making them feel bad for not knowing. Content like this is so important for keeping people in touch with reality and for seeing the bigger picture rather than getting overly hung up on comparatively petty arguments. Well done! 👏
Thank you! So many people in the comments are talking down to these people. We can't know their background or what kind of education they got. Being wrong should be exciting cause you get to learn, it shouldn't be a negative thing
Very well said. I don't have that patience. Oh, I will explain away at the slightest invitation, but I get discouraged quickly when people struggle to get stuff.
It helps that on this subject in particular it's just impossible to have the right answer intuitively - unless you're an astronomer you literally cannot know without being told.
@@ethanstong1564 "Being wrong should be exciting cause you get to learn, it shouldn't be a negative thing" completely agree, but that starts falling off when full adults dont know kinder garden level stuff.
Don't read my name.
“We are not astrology majors.” Education officially failed them.
@@metaknecht *Australian
💀
Or they failed education.
ASTROLOGY 😂😂😂
No do this is Europe.
The girl asking you to explain how stars are made put a smile on my face because you can see the genuine curiosity with her question.
The number of people who did not know that a star is very large and only looks small because it is far away was shocking to me, among other things! I am glad they were all able and willing to learn. Lovely video.
90% sure he just didn’t include the ones who knew and only included the ones who didn’t
obviously but its still outstanding the amount who didnt know. or they are just people told to act like that.@@ChatterBoxBran
@@ChatterBoxBran yeah, at a college campus in a 1st world, well developed country every single student should know the answer
@@Twig.With.No.MuscleAmerica is different from most developed countries. For-profit medicine, debilitating medical debt, mass shootings almost daily (usually several on weekend days), and a sad number of people who don’t know basic knowledge.
@@soph7230 name one first world country that is perfect please :)
and mass shootings are not weekly tf you mean 😭
That last one summed it up perfectly -- "people are worried about making mistakes, but you can't learn without making mistakes." Good on her and the rest of the students for being willing to learn something no matter how trivial it may seem to others. Future's looking bright for them.
Making mistakes is one thing, not learning from them is another. Theres a trend in the recent years of the latter.
thats true but how do they think stars are planets
@@moon-pw1bi Because theyre Americans
But you can.
You can absolutely learn without making mistakes.
I appreciate that he's not doing this to judge, but to educate.
Oh but they should be judged 😭 this is not even funny it's concerning
Some of them should be blamed for not paying attention, but the truth is the public school system is garbage in a great many places.
@@joshuawillingham6363the basic knowledge asked at the start of this video should be known to everyone regardless of how good their elementary school budgets were.
There are no excuses for being this ignorant. I expect all of them know the names of top TikTok influencers...
@@pxprimary3790 When would you encounter this information outside of a formal education setting? Unless they have a particular interest in space there's no reason to look it up, and public school does a great job of beating any joy to be found in learning out of people.
@@joshuawillingham6363 scifi movies. Documentaries. Comic books. TV shows. Novels and general literature.
There is almost no way you can go through life and not understand the basic size differences between planets, moons, stars, solar systems, galaxies, etc.
You don't have to know exactly how big they are.... But you should know relatively speaking.
As a lawyer, who’s definitely not an astronomy major…I was absolutely baffled at how people were even considering putting the moon above planets and stars 💀. Also when that one person said stars are the smallest I was dead 😂.
fun fact, in terms of size moons can be larger than planets, however they're not commonly larger than the planet it orbits. Ganymede, one of many of Jupiter's moons, is larger than Mercury for example. Similarly, some red dwarf stars are smaller than the largest planets. Centauri (AB) b being the largest known planet 10x the size of Jupiter, and EBLM J0555-57Ab which is the smallest red dwarf star at 118.000km smaller than Saturn at 120.536km in diameter
On the positive side college kids can now name every one of the 57 genders and have invented many new and useful pronouns
@@StitchSprites I mean I'm sure there are moons/planets bigger than stars(small stars like red dwarfs) but we're talking about the average ones and it's a logical thing to think that a moon will not be bigger than a planet since it needs to orbit it.
You'll be surprised but the moon is larger than most known plants 😂
(it's my lame attempt to make fun of a typo that was funny to me, sorry)
@@Version_Update I mean yea, It was just a fun fact.
jesus, the amount of times astrology was used instead of Astronomy, hurt me both physically and mentally.
Ow! My neurons!
But at least astrology does have something to do with space
@@Theobfool🤨
everyone in this comment section getting on these ppl for saying astrology when really its the long co-opted etymologically correct term for science/study of the stars, its what we know as astronomy today SHOULD be called, but we got stuck with their etymological definition instead (-nomy referring to rule/law). for an astronomer, the psychic damage exists at a base level at all times for having to call themselves astronomers because some schmucks who think the movement of the planets affects your fortune and personal compatibility with other people decided to take the word that means science (no actual offense meant towards astrologers but can we please switch words)
because they used share same ancestor name before both terms separated
Came to the comments for this. I cringed so hard. I'm just an electrician with a love of sci-fi since I was a kid, and knew the answers to all the questions he asked since before I was in high school,, except for the galaxies question, which I thought was infinite, not 100 billion - 2 trillion.
As someone with a degree in Astronomy, this was painful... We need to get better at spreading this info around! Great vid!
Most of this stuff is honestly elementary level knowledge. The size differences, the difference between moon and planet, the names of the major planets (for god's sake, we're at a point where we're giving kudos for being able to name all of them). The only thing I wouldn't expect the average layman to know are the sheer quantities of things at the upper scope and scale.
Its probably a combination of
Pressure because you are filmed in such a situation (without much experience for such situations)
Many people simply not cwring about things outside their life in general. Many dont care about the bigger picture (even if it would help e.g. in a job).
As someone with a brain, this made me regret having one
Heh, in the US, you only need to ask people questions about a state 2 or 3 states away to flabbergast them and come up with blank stares
Astrology* Which is consequently one of the many tools of the devil.
4:37 False, there is 5000 exoplanet that we know of. Couldn't find the numbers but given the rarity of an exoplanet I would say we know at least 500 000 planets
At first I was sad to see such basic questions being failed, but what got me was how everyone seemed eager to learn and understand and seemed genuinely happy to learn something new. They're not stupid, they've just never really thought about it much before. Maybe there's hope yet.
The school system failed them and never bothered to teach them. That's truly sad.
@@maxxcarver5502 no, they just forgot. Like i bet you did with 90% of what you learned in school too
@@mitchhudson3972 Those are like basics of the world and things around us, how can you forget that.
@@mitchhudson3972complex math is one thing,now basic knowledge stuff is something else
@@dantalien6591Don't forget they are also being asked to recall their knowledge on the spot. Hindsight is 20/20, I'm sure if they were relaxed behind a screen that they'd be able to remember better.
Man I love your patience. You never mock or poke, you just let people learn. Keep it up.
So, instead he posts this video online so the whole world can see how embarrassingly ignorant these people are. If he was really being good, he wouldn't have done that in the first place.
I think it’s important to show that people don’t know things and it’s OK to not know things! These people seem kind and open hearted and willing to listen. It might be embarrassing to not know but it’s more embarrassing to not learn. The whole point of this channel is learning. I was cringing at people not knowing things at the beginning but when it came to the size and scale of things I was also ignorant. And it’s ok! We laugh at our ignorance, we learn, and we move on.
I quite like the like ratio between you and the other commenter.@@MatthewTheWanderer
This is beyond sad. These are answers a 13 year old should know. Straight up. That's not an over exaggeration
He should have asked them about Kardashians
This is an old school Veritasium video, back to the roots. Love to see you PhD put to use! Educating without judging, inciting curiosity. Love it.
without *openly judging. some of them are 20+ and never ever watched a single clip about the universe and thats a bit sad
@@oqulus6880 Or remember some basics about the solar system from primary schools.
U don't need a PhD for this
@@oqulus6880 or people just find interest in different things. I'm sure these people know things you don't that to them are quite elementary.
@@orshabaal8990exactly, the comment section is brutal. Its a given that a veritasium viewer would know all these "basic" stuff. Im sure these people know things we dont know
im 9 months too late but I remember over a year ago I commented that you should do more of the stuff we liked when you first started. this is exactly the material I meant. good job mate
On one hand, I'm terrified how "simple knowledge" (at least in my frame of reference) isn't that known. On the other hand, I do enjoy the fact that these same people are curious and that they feel safe enough to learn like that.
Schools are failing these kids. It's sad.
@@Volundur9567and the proof is how they were willing to stay and learn, instead of just leaving when they got it wrong
it hurts so bad to watch this
@@Volundur9567 I doubt it. They were probably taught this stuff in school, I know I was. But the fact is most people simply don't care about this sort of thing and their brain forgets it. It's nothing beyond a fun fact and has zero effect on everyday life. I remember when I was 6 or 7 years old reading all sorts of books about the planets and space, I couldn't get enough of it. But sad truth is 99% of people don't care about it at all and don't look up. 80% of people in the US live in an urban area and have never even seen stars or galaxies.
Dont we learn this in schools? So two do most of them not know?
4:55 that "can you tell me" is at least to me somewhat promising.
She may not have known, but she still had to the curiosity and the courage to ask, and genuinely wanted to know more. It's easy to shun people for not knowing, but it's much better to teach them and feed that curiosity.
I think the desire to learn more matters more than what you already know.
I agree, but still how do they not know things that even elementary students know? Hell, knowing the scale of celestial object is basically common sense
ya.. it’s also a way to take the heat away from not knowing… not a bad thing either tho
Came here to say the same thing!
honestly its important to learn but its also depressing how little Americans know
@@ArticG-gc1iu nah i think its just them, cause everyone i know knows that stars aren't tiny
A nice showcase for why science literacy is important.
Marvel is to blame. Earth deals with a UNIVERSAL crisis every movie which is extremely narcissistic. WRITERS think the universe is the size of a solar system.
Edit: The multiverse contains multiple solar systems. Thinking we're the only one is also narcissistic. :)
They're too busy learning about how women and bIack people are oppressed and how white men invented bigotry and slavery....
To answer random questions from a stranger in a sandwich board? I don't see how that's important.
how does this showcase it? none of these people knew the answers and they seem like theyre doing fine.
@@dangerfly Hm... "a" solar system? Surely you meant "the" because solar refers to our star sol hence there is only one solar system. Others are called star systems (simplified).
Amazing video. I really appreciate how you didn’t make it about shaming these people for not knowing, but turned it into a positive learning experience. It’s a great example to hold ourselves up to.
"The thing is that people are worried about making mistakes, but you can't learn without making mistakes a lot of times." -The woman at the end.
This is such an important piece of wisdom that everyone would benefit from by taking to heart. It's okay to make mistakes, and we should be gracious with those who make mistakes as well.
crazy its so old too
Yeah ... And You're taught this as a child*
What about those "not astrology majors" ladies though? They didn't seem too worried about making mistakes.. Imagine people like these making important policy decisions in the government. So maybe making mistakes is ok but if adults are still making mistakes like kids from elementary school maybe they should go back to school.
As trite as it comes
@@kyjo72682I mean to be fair how often does needing to know what's larger in terms of planets and moons matter in politics, not often.(I want to change that)
He is keeping such a straight face through all those interviews, I would not be able to keep my composure. It is baffling to me that people could confuse the size of a star and the moon.
We have multiples moons and stars which is the problem
Earth has one moon. The problem is people can’t or don’t try to grasp the concept of perspective. Nor do they remember one second of the solar system model they learned in elementary school
This video explains why the masses are so easily duped. It's like we're in the dark ages but with smart phones.
@@AMV_KINGDOM_mv This isn't Tatooine dude, what?!?!?
@@TheHiyy .....did you not know factually other moons exist and on other planets some planets have moons look it up
Beginning of the video blew my mind, I didn't know people didn't know these things.
American education system is showing
Exactly it's not even funny watching people think this stuff through, it's more concerning than anything else. I dont wanna know your other opinions on the world if you dont know if the moon is bigger than the SUN
The tiktok generation.
79% of Americans believe that the Earth orbits the sun, so ehhhhh
@@SharmV haha America is bad
4:44 I legit thought for a moment that was @MKBHD ! The voice was so strikingly similar!
Videos like this are one reason Derek has nearly 15m subscribers. It was hard to watch at times but he actually educated people and didn’t make them feel stupid. Great job.
He shouldn't make them feel stupid, but they should feel stupid on their own. The problem is that they don't. And they'll be the ones in charge someday abolishing private property and throwing you into a gulag.
Deruk must have sorted through hundreds of people find the dumbest 10 people in america to make a shocking video.
Thats why he gets the views. He makes shocking videos. Hopefully this doesnt become the norm, I used to like his videos (the hypothetical long cable/electricity video left a bad taste). But seeing the view count here, I am afraid this format will become the norm.
@@carlsagan7638I think it’s more likely that most people in America are that stupid
i still think he has 12million even though its been like 3 years
They were not stupid: hardly anyone is. But they WERE very ignorant! These are things that everyone SHOULD know. This level of ignorance is hard to comprehend.
"We are not astrology majors" had me cracking up. Kudos to you for not losing it, Derek.
Such a Gemini comment
I don't believe in astrology. I'm a sagittarius and we're skeptical.
I came here to say the same thing. Crazy sentence
Stop being an Aquarius
If there's an astrology major in there, I'm really afraid to ask what else people can major in
It baffles me that many people aren't driven by curiosity and fascination to educate themselves about the fundamentals of physics and astronomy. Learning about the mechanics of the universe was like a drug during my teens. I'm glad Derek is inspring some of that wonder in these young people. To my mind, understanding reality is crucial to appreciating one's existence and finding meaning... without going through that process, you are blind to so much beauty.
Im so interested in the cosmos and yet im terrified to look up at the stars because its an overwhelming feeling for me and not many people understand why i feel that way. Maybe its because as this video proves, not many people understand that scale of the universe.
It always amazes me that we live in a time when vast amounts of knowledge are literally at our fingertips and people use this technology mostly for games and social media.
The great majority of people just want to be entertained. They could care less the difference between a moon, planet or galaxy. Give them a drink and a video game and watch their minds turn to mush.
I feel the same way @@jacobjaramillo3192
Most Americans are poorly educated - Look at these adults at the start struggle to fathom which planer object is bigger.... Stuff you learn in the first grade
I don't know if I was extremley luck in my childhood that I learned this in school and from my parents, or if most people just turn off their brains in school and ignore what they're being tought. I honestly thought (and still believe) that moon
"is the sun bigger than the moon?" i just gasped
bro you listen to kpop you probably gasp just walking on a daily basis when your not sitting on a chair
@@saltyninja5534 do people gasp when they realize you can't use basic grammar 😭
I mean if they have only ever seen the sun and moon on earth with their own eyes. They look roughly the same size.
I mean just look at it, duh
@@linamariaorozcouribe5291 i learned that the sun was bigger than the moon in 4th grade... how do people just not get taught basic astronomy
As an astronomy major, this pained me greatly. Thanks Derek!
Similar here
Astrology*
Me too
@@joshskier Beat me to it hahaha
My daughter as an 8 year old, it pained her greatly.
It's easy to be discouraged by how little many people seem to know, but it's also refreshing to see how quickly people learn concepts that are presented to them.
consider the possibility that the majority who got it right immediately is simply cut out to make the video less boring
@@FakeDomi Exactly, i know it is cherry picked but it still hurts me
This is a sci-fi horror film. Those are post-secondary STUDENTS. That is a centre for HIGHER LEARNING. This is what's to come, they represent the HOPES AND DREAMS for the future. Oh, but it's ok, they aren't studying Astrology, and, surely, somewhere out in the vast distances of space, past the stars, to where the great moons fill the skies, intelligent life will be found in one of the other 11 galaxies.
DO they learn it though? They may be able to repeat it back to him right afterward, but they probably forget it as soon as they walk away.
That's sure an optimistic way to look at it! I'm just still in shock that a person could not know a moon is smaller than a planet and a star is larger than a planet... Like I'd be shocked if kindergarteners got that wrong, much less what appear to be college/university students. Everyone's gotta start somewhere, and I appreciate that they weren't mocked or made to feel stupid for it, but I'm still struggling to process reality here.
-What's 7x9? Well, I'm not majoring in numerology.
-Who build the pyramids? I'm not an ancient aliens expert.
-When did dinosaurs live? I don't study creationism
-Can you fit all this furniture into this room? I don't know anything about Feng shui.
-What causes the common cold? Sorry not a Geobiology major
the universe is shockingly giant but i thought people would at least know the sun is bigger that the moon
I mean you can literally see both of them from earth and one is clearly bigger
I thought he would also ask them about which galaxy is bigger, but it was just basic stuff. Still the video was good.
@@donothesitate1198you should also know one is tremendously closer to us so put one and one together to realise the sun behind dwarfs the moon. You’re comparing a pebble to Everest.
@@donothesitate1198 They actually look about the same size from earth, because the moon is about 400 times closer than the sun, but its diameter is 400 times smaller than the suns.
@@donothesitate1198that's just plain wrong. neither of them is clearly bigger when seen from earth. they actually look about the exact same size as evidenced by solar eclipses where the sun is perfectly hidden behind the moon.
As someone who knows all of this stuff and assumed it was pretty common knowledge, it's kind of hard to imagine "most" people not knowing it.
I guess that happens though. When you know a lot about a topic, you underestimate your own knowledge on the topic by overestimating the knowledge of others (assuming that the gap between what you know and what everybody else knows is not so big).
Unfortunately it doesn't seem like veritasium is cherry picking results either. 25% of americans think the sun orbits around the earth for example
@imnotnotgameiacmaniac5327 Really? That's actually insane to think about. That would be one person in every immediate family, on average. Possibly two or three in a larger family. That means possibly some of my friends would even think that way, though I like to think my friends are intelligent people. I have had to explain to people, including my own parents, that the sun is a star, and that every star you see in the sky is also a sun, some billions of times bigger than ours. But my parents grew up poor, and with less education, they were never willfully ignorant.
@@ShizuruNakatsuI think when it comes to topics that people lack interest in and where only taught as a child people can look dumber and less educated then they actually are especially sense a lot of people are just kinda doing their own thing and lack curiosity. But still, this kind of stuff is ridiculous and shouldn't be happening in the 21th century though with the same survey finding things like half of Americans not knowing antibiotics don't work on viruses i think human stupidity still plays a large part.
@imnotnotgameiacmaniac5327 Yeah, that's one of the things that makes me very different. I've always had a natural curiosity, loved to learn, and wanted to know as much I could. I pretty much always retain information, whether it's from school, my own research, or even watching quiz shows for entertainment. I don't just let the knowledge flow out of my brain like that, because I want to know and remember things. I know a majority of humans are just caught up in their own little bubble, and don't really care about anything that happens outside of it, but I'll never really understand that mindset.
@@ShizuruNakatsu i envy you lol i also like to do research but i forget information all the time. im often left with the correct conclusion but i can't remember how i got there even with irl stuff i stuggle to remember things clearly that where more than a month ago
I've always thought the "Pale Blue Dot" picture is one of the two most important artistic images we have ever taken. The other being the Hubble "Deep Field" image, showing how unbelievably vast our universe is. One aimed inwards, one outwards.
Same, this video was shocking
Bob Ross
Wdym artistic
Not only Pale Blue Dot is the most important picture ever taken in history of humankind, I consider Sagan's speech the best idea human intellect ever produced. Its beauty surpasses every piece of art ever made, every picture or poetry or music ever done, every verbose text ever written by intellectuals or anything some stupid politician has ever said. And it's beauty produced entirely by the intellect, supported by facts and observation basically. It's just so REAL that nothing else in human nature or experience comes even close.
And now we have the JWST images that contain more galaxies than even Hubbles.
I started watching physics girl Diana and you then I have been watching Neil deGrass Tyson and Brian cox and so many others. I’ve really been learning a lot from all of you guys so thank you
I appreciate that he was so nice to people and educated them without being mean or mocking. I, however,
Though the same thing, as I do that mysrlf when I find a topic or subject interesting
I would not be nice either
I would try my best to help them but I couldn’t guarantee I wouldn’t laugh
It's easy to take for granted what you consider common knowledge.
Purpose of this video:
Learn the scale of the universe ❌️
See the rizzy guy in the cap ✅️
As a space nerd, I find it very weird watching people struggle on the easiest question.
I'm not a "space nerd", I'm just a guy who went to a Russian school and received a Russian education. You know, we often say that education in America is disgusting, and no one seems to argue with this But not as much! I don’t presume to say that we are such geniuses, but the question “which is bigger, the Moon or the Sun” causes not only hysterical, but rather panicky laughter
@@Slevaizum You-have-an-education-system-designed-to-educate...You-cannot-even-compare-that-to-what-we-have-here-in-America-because-the-purpose-of-our-system-is-the-complete-opposite...Hopefully-this-changes-in-the-future-though-now-that-so-many-people-here-in-America-are-taking-notice-for-the-first-time.
@@Slevaizum Don't say "Russian" as it's something good. 35% of Russians believe that Sun goes around Earth - data from the Russian state agency for public researches in 2022.
@@Tina-mt9cl In fact, although our education system provides much more knowledge, it is also terrible. Yes, for us, what is shown in the video is the most basic knowledge, but it is not limited to this. Children in post-Soviet countries are obliged not to “study”, but to “know”. It's a big difference. This is a real mockery of children, because we are forced to cram something that will not be useful in life in principle. Of course, this develops neural connections, and this would be the case if we were instilled with the DESIRE to learn, and not just forced to do it.
@@Tina-mt9cl Sorry for GTranslate, but this is the fastest way for me to formulate a thought while concentrating only on what I want to say
I love how he's happy teaching random strangers some stuff, feels so wholesome
This isn't wholesome. It's disturbing.
@@steveswm7742its both. Its wholesome seeing how happy he is but its disturbing that so many people struggle with this. Im 20 and have known this stuff for like 10 years already.
@@steveswm7742a lot of people don’t really take the universe into consideration on their daily lives cause all their problems are here on this planet. I don’t blame them for not knowing anything past the sun.
Funny you think they taught them something. There is no doubt they were already taught and exposed to these things many times in the past. It just didn't stick.
@@steveswm7742So.. learning and teaching other people is disturbing? 💀
Now you know why there are lots of kids that didn't bother to study at school. Because it's "disturbing", just like what you said.🤦♂️
I really like this type of content. It’s fun, funny, and educational. Definitely I’d have my little siblings watch this.
Really puts into perspective the bubble we might exist in as the kind of people to watch veritasium videos, and also why proper education funding is one of the most important things
Ah yes throwing money at the problem should solve it. Even though education funding in real dollars has gone up every year for decades
@@matthewrix1047 Which means education in your country is not a proper one, which means Nihilore is right.
@@christophearbus3523 WRONG -- obviously more funding would not solve the problem -- the problem isn't "need more money" -- the problem is "we have plenty of money but we spend it on the wrong things" -- besides, this is BASIC science -- any 11 year old should know this
@@matthewrix1047what? Your country has private colleges made by food and big pharma. Barely anyone has any Idea of the world behind U.S. boarders. What are you talking about?
Are you even aware that you need to pay teachers?
Is this a serious run for my medal of "Internet Idiot of the day"?
It used to be normal for every college aged person to know these things. Public education has gone down the tubes in recent decades in favor of certain "party approved" education only.
I've always hated the trend of going up to strangers and asking them trivia just to prove how "stupid" people are but this is so nice. Same basic premise but approached with care and a willingness to educate. Enriching instead of degrading, love it.
Stupidity is sadly not something that can be cured.
@@Zorro9129it can be cured by open-mindedness and the will to learn.
@@Zorro9129 Why would you consider people not knowing trivia stupidity? There could be loads of reasons why these people do not know this information. They could have not gone to a school that taught this information. They could have lost this knowledge in favor of spending time learning other facts which are more pertinent to their every day lives. They could have known the information and their mind just blanked on the subject while they were being put on the spot.
@@zikli9249 Brilliant mindset here. Not "knowing" some throwaway facts doesn't make one stupid. The information presented, in my opinion, shows a gap in education related to astronomical objects. But, for most people on Earth, astronomical objects are as insignificant as quantum objects. Quantum objects and astronomical objects have almost 0 relevance to everyday life.
@isakleo4706 Agreed. Trivia is fun, but entirely non-indicative of actual human knowledge. Derek manages to walk that line between "trivia to prove people are stupid" and "genuinely caring about people's knowledge" in a way that seems to me to be someone who truly cares about people.
I appreciate how well you turned this into a learning experience instead of just trolling them and walking away.
As a student right now in the us, the reason for this is as teachers just kinda chill and let kids do whatever they want, and we just learn so much about history, human rights, and math that other subjects get forgotten.
While being totally speechless for first half of the video, I realized that most people actually don't know things I consider as basics (which actually IS, we should learn more about the world outside our atmosphere as well as our planet), there’s so much to learn, if you look around you'll never run out of things to know about. I mean being interested in astronomy since forever, even I didn’t know that there are more trees on earth than there are stars in our galaxy!
The trees and how many planets we have identified were the only questions I didn't know the answer to/got wrong. And I don't even study or even really care about astronomy. I just know it because I enjoy learning.
Yup, I missed the trees question also.
Only the trees for me but I feel like that is an unrelated question in all fairness. But generally speaking I think that any sci fi nerd could answer these questions very easily. On the other hand there are people that actually know these answers but believe that the earth is flat, so regardless of them knowing this information they still believe it's false due to some unknown conspiracy agenda. These people actually went to the trouble of learning this kind of knowledge and immediately discredit it as "mainstream propaganda". That proves that you don't need to be smart to just assimilate the data, understanding it is another story.
@@DeathBYDesign666 Well stated. Next time you take a flight there is a small chance that your excellent pilot may actually believe our Earth is flat 🥴
@@DeathValleyDazed That's worse than snakes on a plane! 😂
We are very tiny compared to the universe, but it's always great seeing someone expanding other people's minds. That can have no limits
Well if we look at everything in the universe we are actually pretty big. At least if we compare us to the smallest and biggest known thing. If we would scale up the planck length to human size, a regular human would be billion times bigger than the observable universe. So on the scale we are above the middle. At least from what we can see
@@Hellraiser_666_
So, basically, we're pretty much right where we should be to be able to observe the very large and very small.
But we ARE the universe, in a literal sense. To make a human from scratch, you first need the entire universe to exist, exactly as it is. The way we are is a direct consequence of how the entire cosmos unfolded, right back to the Big Bang. We are not "in" the universe... we are an emergent property of it. It's the deepest nature of our being.
Jesus Christ spoke them all into existence.
Let's praise his holy name!
@@earlysda lol. wut?
I think that intro demonstrates how we take the knowledge we already have as a given... Ordering those items by size seems so obvious and straight-forward to me that I wouldn't even consider that it could be hard for other people.
Maybe we should give our parents a break when they ask us how to work the computer lol
@lewis4200 It does seem like more of a failure of education and culture though when people know everything there is to know about computers and almost nothing about the Universe around them.
@@sierrabianca Are we talking about people in general, or as a civilization? Because I know people who work with computers on a daily basis, but don't know simple (what I would consider simple) concepts like shortcuts, hotkeys, network folders, or even the difference between Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer
This was seriously eye-opening. I feel like my 4 year old would be able to order these, but then again she's taken up my interest in astronomy
A lot of Americans don't even know where USA is on a world map, or cant name a European country @@sierrabianca
@@dagreatghosface im honestly blown away like how are there literal humans alive currently in 2000s who still dont even know the simplest answers, im extremely shocked
Next: do the same for ecology: individual, population, community, ecosystem, biosphere
Now I understand why there are still people who still think the earth is flat
Multiverses, fat woman in another world, catwoman in this one.
No, not "still".
The terrifying thing is that it is not just a few remnants of stupid or "oldthink", flat earthers *gained* growth thanks to the internet/information age.
People in the middle ages and early industrial revolution pretty commonly knew the earth wasn't flat.
@@k9tirion927 exactly the "mainstream" view of scholars in the middle ages viewed the earth as a globe therefore charlemaine was given the Globus Crucigern a globe shape object with a cross on top to symbolicise ...
perhaps education is illegal in the States, they prefer the pride flag more
And 99% of them are from USA.
"I don't know were they come from, can you tell me?" This is telling. These people are willing to ask, they don't know because they have never had someone in their life to ask. Someone approachable, someone patient, someone willing to teach for the sake of teaching. Thank you Derek.
Edit: I know the internet exist, obviously, I know they can look stuff up, but learning things from the internet in ways which are both interesting and retained is a skill. Most people can not just read a published paper or random facts and actually remember any of it. Derek's videos are an outlier, a lot of info on the internet is far less approachable and/ or far less accurate.
They have a ton of things to ask, did you hear about the internet? What those people needed was starting to think and realizing they have a gap in their knowledge, and then getting curious. It has nothing to do with "having someone to ask".
They can ask reddit or quora
Hehe
But this sort of information is readily available in videos online, and in books in the discount bin, or in the actual astronomy section, at your local bookseller. I got one on my shelf, that I just looked at, that was $8 from B&N, and covers it all, with great pictures, and month by month star maps.
Books, internet, magazines or television are all very accessible tbh. though..
@@pifopifo1000 But they do look, sometimes, in their "One" book which tells them everything, even if it has been proven false for a thousand years or more.
"People can't learn without making mistakes"
Best quote that I heard from a student in a VERY long time.
And it doesn’t help that so many people make fun of people like her in the comment sections.
It’s not a very original or intelligent quote. If that is the best you’ve heard then maybe you’re as dmb as the people in the video.
You actually can learn without mistakes 👆
@@dewiellin7898 I doubt that
learning by not making mistakes is basically just remembering. you did something and it’s correct, so you repeat it. but you can’t really get much further than that by not making mistakes from trying new things. you’ll stagnate.
it's even crazier when you think about just how big we are, too. I mean, while there are many many many planets and stars and galaxies out there, there's just as many (if not more) atoms even in just one person as there are stars in the sky. not to mention what all is at the subatomic level. it's just crazy how complex and unique everything is in this universe, and how many pieces there are, all working together. I just think it's really neat.
I used to volunteer at a library makerspace. I made a sign that said, "Failure is always an option" to try to encourage kids to try new things and no care about the outcome. The library took down the sign. The biggest challenge those kids had to learning was fear of making a mistake because they have been thought that you will get a bad grade and punished. Mistakes are the only way we learn without them you are just memorizing. Mistakes are what make us reflect on what we have experienced and coalesce it into rules about the world that we see around us.
My name is Seph and I run a library makerspace. This is weird.
@@sephreed1938 I have never met another Seph before.
I feel like there are much better ways to convey that message than "Failure is always an option." I know it's meant to be encouraging, but it comes across as defeatist. I respect the intended message, but I don't blame the library for taking down the sign.
@@Eden_Laika haha, yeah, just the thought of how some people would read that, as in "You're never safe from failure." and then they would be so confused about who would put up such a mean sign
That sign isn't as amazing as you thought it was.
Astrology getting mixed up with Astronomy is making me cry.
True. But I get why some people mix this up. There are real sciences that end with -logy, like biology, for example.
Also, if I'm not mistaken, astrology started as a real science.
@@Nexowl Astrology is just a weird thing in general, I wouldn’t consider it a science.
@@roblox1387 What it is now, yes, absolutely. I mean back 3000 years ago, when they started to inspect the rotation of planets. They called it Astrology. Today it is pure Esotericism.
@@Nexowl ohhh, yes, I agree, it’s nice someone in the online world fonds modern Astrology to be wierd
It's the icing of the cake that is the beginning of the clip.
I'm a math teacher and I see you teaching these people. Who cares about us, you taught each of these people something with an individual education. Thank you
That is what I got out of this video. It wasn't just a 'gotcha' video but challenged some young people with basic facts, that describe the fantastic scale and power of this ancient universe.
@@MichaelSouthMichaelSouthi agree. im somewhat disappointed looking through the comments- most people making fun of the people in the video… i used to love learning in school, you can see the people here enjoying themselves when they learn something new, and the thing that always made me become disinterested in a topic was when i was made fun of because of it. lets encourage learning! it makes us all smarter and happier
@@gaugea Thank you for your comments. The truth is I rarely enjoyed learning in school until my second year in College but always enjoyed learning from non-fiction books about historical technology or natural phenomena including astronomy, physics etc. I am over 30 so I enjoyed seeing young people become interested in learning, but imo, it is a legitimate concern that the new generation may not be well served in basic science and technology when their votes determine whether new generations of space telescopes are built or horizons in biology or "A.I." are pursued.
Voyager 1 photo and the explanation given to it was very emotional ❤ Loved it.
I was amazed at how little some of them knew.
I always think of Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when I think of the vastness of space: "Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space."
I just started reading that series and I love it so much! Funny to see i’m not the only one who thought about it while watching this 😂
I was looking for this comment🤣
I always think of the Total Perspective Vortex, and on a microscopic dot within a microscopic dot are the words, "You are here."
Space is massive and also empty, you could hop in a spaceship and blindly fly around for a century and you'd likely not hit anything
@@k1llsh0t_87you actually would probably hit the asteroid belt before you got too far and that would probably kill you. If you got past it though I think it is vast and empty until you reach another solar system, I’m not sure.
I genuinely enjoyed the positivity of this. No shame, no anger, people learning things etc
I am shocked as a complete life long nerd that folks didn't know this stuff but again... I'm a big old nerd.
@@beowulf_of_wall_st I agree completely.
@pcap8810 that's one way to go through life.
I think, personally, that attitude will simply encourage people to remain ignorant for fear of asking questions.
I'm sure there are many topics you are ignorant of that others find to be common knowledge.
One should be angry about this. This is just 1 sign of a decaying civilization in the AGE OF INFORMATION. This is very basic knowledge and yet our education system has failed us. Failed us so hard, we have people believing things like conspiracies and flat/hollow earth... If we can't get succeed in teaching this very basic information, how are we supposed to be able to combat the stupidity that is flat/hollow earth and other likewise dumb ideas enabled by those in power. Having said that, its no wonder the system fails us. They want us dumb. So, sorry, not sorry if these people and their ignorance makes me just a little angry.
It's not nerd stuff, it's 3rd grade stuff
@@beowulf_of_wall_st Well tbh, I too was surprised a lot of people didn't know the absolute basics but I have to disagree that they should be ashamed of it. Maybe they weren't really curious because they didn't know anything about it in the first place which led them to not look into it. A good teacher knows to bring out the curiousity in children, the curiousity isn't in there initially. I think you get the reference. Finally, it's never too late to learn something new.
You should do this again, but do it on how small things are.
Have a list of things like: a needle tip, dust, cells, atoms and quarks.
Our collective stupidity has been exposed enough 😢
Would be fun.
Well if they don't know what is a star I doubt they ever heard of the term quark
Quarks atom cells needle tip then dust
Maybe
I think that to these people, a quark is what they call a superpower in My Hero Academia
Beautiful and terrifying at the same time.
I really liked that guy's take at the end. Everyone else was commenting on how small this all made them feel, and he basically says "Sure, we're tiny in the grand scheme of things, but why would I let that get me down? There's so much to do here on earth that it really doesn't matter if we're only a speck in the universe".
My favorite ways of thinking are, sure, our actions today may be infinitesimally small when described on a cosmic level, but 1) we're not cosmic beings, we're Earthlings, and 2) who's to say humanity won't get to the point of star travel one day? Our actions have consequences, we make ripples every day with what we do, and those ripples may be felt through time for a long, long time. Who's to say someone we help today doesn't become tomorrow's Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking? Hell, who's to say that's not you yourself? Live every day.
"how small this all made them feel"
I hate that phrase. Simply because it's false, it's just a gimmick that people use to think they know better and are more interesting.
@@r.daneel.90 you sound dumb. We are small. We are nothing on the cosmic scale yet some of hs deny it and consider themselves special.
@@r.daneel.90no? Looking at the scale of the entire universe we are tiny. Nothing that happens on earth is going to have a notable impact on the universe.
Now its a different topic if this is at all important
@@dinoaurus1 i'm not talking about "truthiness" of the catchphrase, but why and how people say it
It may be my interest since childhood for astronomy speaking and countless documentaries, but I’m genuinely surprised how little people know about astronomy
real
like its common sense...
I'm genuinely surprised no one notices part of it os a trick question! Stars very greatly in size, some larger then a planet, some smaller!
@@4isbestnumberhow is astronomy common sense..?
Or like some of them said "astrology" 🤣
Im still by technicality a child a im astonished they got this wrong there is common sence in this i figured mist from watching anime scales and 1v1 and few books in primary
The truly scary thing is not the size of the universe, but the fact that Derek was likely on (or near) a college campus, speaking to people who made it into that college. The average person on the streets probably knows even less.
Came here to say exactly this.
Well let's be judicial here. It's not UCLA or Harvard, It's UNLV (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) with an 80%+ acceptance rate and 44% graduation rate, so do with that what you will.
UNLV sounds more like a community college / vocational school than a university.
Sheesh. I'm a bit nerdy and probably overestimate the knowledge of the people around me, but I'm fairly sure here in Australia most people are at least educated enough to correctly place the ordering of what's bigger than what.
@@helpfulcommenter... Wow.
Before watching:
-moon
-planet
-star
-galaxy
-universe
After watching: we are talking about how much of the object are?
The relative sizes of bodies is literally kindergarten level science. The fact that anyone can not know this is concerning.
Much of American education rests on the belief that the universe revolves around the USA.
Americans do have a strong stereotype of not being smart. These youngsters don't do the country any favors.
@dbznappa Not so much anymore. Now it rests on the individual as the center of the universe. "YOU are special. YOU are unique. YOU are whatever you say YOU are, and if anyone tells you different, that is violence against YOU...And that concludes math class. Thank you, everyone! See you tomorrow! And remember, after our pledge to the pride flag, we will have a pop quiz on pronouns! All 5,892,634,051 of them!"
@@Malhaloc Oh look, another poor conservative that permanently thinks they are a victim. You poor, poor, sensitive snowflake, it must be so hard being so upset all the time.
Imagine if you ACTUALLY had something worth caring about.
@@MalhalocI thought everyone agreed that individuals are important. The U.S. was founded on personal rights. I think there are issues with this, socially, but you are just making sht up. Pronouns have always been taught, but not the 'modern ones.' They are needed in language, and totally made up. If anything, more popular pronouns besides the main ones should be taught, so students know about them. You know, education.
I used to teach English in Japan. I once had a communication error with a student as she wanted to know the name of "the things in space smaller than the moon". I assumed she meant comets or asteroids or meteors. Turns out she meant stars. It still blows my mind just how many adults don't know that stars are enormous. I also want to tear my hair out when people try to be inspirational by saying "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss you'll land among the stars." You've missed by a pretty enormous margin if that's the case.
I’ve always been taught the saying the other way around:
“Reach for the stars, you’ll land on the moon”
atleast she wasn't completely wrong considering the size of neutron stars. Pretty weird that stars can be smaller than moons and at the same time be larger than any planet
You could have agreed and mentioned neutron star. It may not be the kind of stars that the student was talking about, but it has the "star" name in it and comes from a star. And it is definitely smaller than the moon.
Don't read my name.
@@jannicklumme9298 more *massive* than any planet.
Neutron stars can be in the ball park of dozens of miles so planets will not have enough mass at that size to from a sphere.
I'm honestly not trying to be rude, just trying to highlight (to anyone who later reads your comment) the different between size and mass.
Bigger size frequently doesn't mean more mass.
Neutron stars can have a smaller diameter than moons, but will "weigh" more. In this case "weigh" is just referring to the molecular "weight" of the object, which is more properly defined as its mass.
If I was talking with someone and discussing "10kg of molecular weight" worth of hydrogen, a person fluent with these ideas would assume that I am talking about 10kg of weight *IF it was weighed on Earth, but they would also be familiar with the fact that this 10kg is referring to a specific number or hydrogen atoms and that the specific number we are discussing would "weigh" different amounts depending on where we weighed it.
10kg can be a reference to an objects mass and can ALSO refer to what it would weigh if placed on a scale with the normal assumption being that the scale was located on Earth.
But to say that an item can be "smaller" than Item X, but then also sayit can be "larger" than Item X, is a great way to confuse someone who is not science literate and ALSO not familiar with the specific topic.
A significant percentage of the people who fall in to this category or "confused" will just use the lack or clarity to further reinforce their misconceptions and distrust of science.
I work side by side with people who would read what you wrote and turn it in to a discussion of:
"Your precious SCIENCE can't even decide if a moon or a star is bigger! All of your telescopes are based on photoshopped images and now the people who have not been brainwashed by all of decades of lies from NASA are finally being proved right by your community of "scientists" not being able to keep their lies strait. If you want the truth, just read the bible. God already gave us all the Truth we need. The stars are small points of light that will eventually fall to Earth as a sign that He is returning. Just look up in the sky and ask, which is bigger? That big ass moon that lights up the sky, or some pin point of light you can barely see? And you want me to buy in to this idea that there are stars that are both "bigger" and "smaller" than our God given glorious moon? No thanks, I'll trust what the information I can see with my own eyes. Your "beliefs" and claims about what is happening impossibly far away take way too much Faith for me to support."
I am fully aware that most people are not surrounded by the sheer number of uneducated people I seem to be surrounded by....but they ARE out there.
The words you use matter.
Being perfectly clear and using the correct vernacular matters.
Making statements that include what YOU might consider too much detail, matters.
If you don't, then I end up fighting with my cousin over Thanksgiving. I end up being the one trying to explain that:
"In poor countries, where children have a 35% chance of dying before age 5, women have a LOT of children. They do this in order to make sure they have SOME children that survive. Because, if the AVERAGE is that 1 in 3 die then YOUR family might get unlucky. MAYBE you have 5 kids and 4 of them don't make it, while your 2 sisters ALSO have 5 kids each and only 1 of those 10 don't make it. Between the 3 of you there were 15 kids, 10 survived, but YOU only have 1 kid that made it.
If industrial wealthy counties help these countries with basic health care , like vaccines, birth control, sex education, very cheap malaria meds and more, then the survival rates for these children go WAY WAY UP.
So...no. Bill Gates is NOT trying to control global populations by poisoning small children in impoverished countries with vaccines that are full of poison and aimed at murdering small children.
Bill Gates is trying to give mothers in poor countries the tools to reduce infant mortality, which results in women reducing the number of kids they have...BECAUSE they have confidence that the kids they have will actually LIVE. "
Yeah...THAT was a half hour discussing with my cousin who also thought that Alaska was an island somewhere near Hawaii....because "THAT'S WHERE IT IS ON THE MAP! I'll show you and THEN you'll have to tell me how stupid you are."
This was before the family reunion where I over heard my uncle say "Yeah! How do we even really know the holocaust even happened?!"
So...I had to walk over to my grandmother....HIS MOTHER...who lived through the actual event...and get her to slap the crap out of him.
This thinking is EVERYWHERE.
When you make a public statement....if you have a general life goal of making things better...it would be wise to make explicitly certain that nothing you say can be misunderstood.
Seriously....my time in retail made this even more painfully clear.
I had a woman in her mid 50s wave me down from across the entire restaurant...wasn't even my table, but she had an emergency thar someone needed to address right here and now.
I make my way to the table. She is holding up a single French fry in front of me...it looks good. I want to eat it....and then she asks me...in perfectly clear english:
"So...do I just eat this?"
And I think to myself: "Did this 50 something American women with no cultural or language barriers SERIOUSLY just wave me down to ask WHAT SHE IS SUPPOSE TO DO WITH AN EFFING FRENCH FRY?! How do I answer this without sounding like I am INTENTIONALLY trying to a dick to her?"
Then the 75 year old guy who spent 20 minutes...alone at his table with a menu...obviously frustrated.
After 3 friendly attempts to help him with questions on the menu, or offer suggestions, I finally talk him in to letting me answer questions.
Know what his big frustration was?
He wanted to know: "If I order soup n salad...can I get the soup separate from the salad?"
....I paused....
...and paused...
..."I want to make sure I get you what you want, so I just want to make sure I fully understand the question you're asking me. Are you asking if it's possible for me to bring you a salad WITHOUT dumping the soup on top of the salad and serving it all to you in 1 bowl?"
Him: Yeah, is that possible?
75 year old American with no cultural or language barriers had spent his entire life hearing "Soup IN salad".
So...when you're discussing science.....you can never be to clear. And the cost of NOT being PERFECTLY EFFING CLEAR is the absolute fact that someone out there will turn your harmless error in to a reason to vote for candidate A instead of candidate B.
The young lady at the end reminding us that it's okay to make mistakes, and that mistakes are a natural and often necessary part of learning, is a great way to wrap up this video. While many of us watching are probably subscribed to a dozen different science educators, and could easily answer most of the questions in this video, it's important to remember that the people featured were willing to face what they did not know and LEARN rather than hiding or being ashamed of their ignorance.
Agreed 🤝
I agree with you, but those are adults we're talking about asking if the Sun is bigger than the Moon, and thinking that stars are tiny... Like come on
They are still extraordinarily stupid
What mistake? Even kids knew this thing which is bigger and which is smaller.
Hard disagree, atleast in this case. This is primary school education level. You don't need to be subbed to a science channel for this.
All these questions I asked my sister long time ago, people are shocked if they understand how big these numbers are.
It's so nice to watch Derek interact with others; he is incredibly kind and never makes anyone feel dumb, always encouraging them instead. You are by far the best science knowledge channel out there, and your charisma is through the roof.
Well, he probably knows they're gonna get pelted by the internet anyways
I don't understand how people got the size sorting question wrong. I am from the same America they are from and college aged like them. While sure I would have guessed the amount of planets, stars, galaxies, etc. wrong, the general size of individual objects was something I was taught at latest in middle school. The lowest age someone can drop out of school at is 16, well into their high school career. They would have learned of this topic in elementary and middle school. How could they not have?
Agreed. Not only that, but the size order can be derived from other basic knowledge*--so not only have they failed to memorize a specific fact; they have no knowledge of the field whatsoever.
*For example: the Earth orbits the Sun, and an object can only orbit something much heavier than itself.
I can’t even begin to understand how much they lack a basic education but are going to university…
I’m 16 and know way more about all of these things than nearly everyone interviewed
@@kaidenwatts528 -- As for how they got into college: there's been a building anti-meritocratic sentiment among college administrators for decades, so they're often not interested in selecting the most academically successful students.
COVID drove the final nail into the coffin, then added a few more just for good measure, mainly by lowering academic standards even further.
I get why they are making those mistakes as moon is larger than sun or stars when viewed from Earth but Im very dissapointed by the quality of education :/ ... I gues its more important to know about some guy in 18 century who wrote few poems (thy will not remember that after few years either tho) ...
It was interesting to see you return to the style that formed part of the data for your PhD! As someone who's been watching your videos for over 10 years, when I myself was still in university, it certainly was a blast from the past. One thing you've always been good at is letting people work it out themselves, even if they're wrong, and then helpfully lead them towards the right answer so that they learn without feeling like they're being mocked.
They should be mocked. What sort of consuming slave do you have to be to be completely unaware of your surroundings like that
@@bb5979 Obvious troll is obvious but against my better judgement, I will reply...
If you mock them, what do you get? People who have not really learned anything, but are now mad at you. If you show compassion and teach them the correct information, what do you get? People who have now learned something new.
By mocking them you're actively taking steps to keep the world ignorant instead of increasing the amount of knowledge in the world.
I actually went to comment this too, but you beat me to it, and put it way better lol
Yep, it really was a blast a from the past! I too missed these street videos of derek.
@@chillsahoy2640 Also, it is very easy to judge them and sure, some answers show holes in education but I'd also say each one of us is very ignorant on many subjects. I find myself searching stuff on google all the time. It means I encounter stuff i don't know all the time.
Many of the people following this channel would have probably fared better at these queations but maybe not on literature or history or literature, art, politics, economics and whatnot.. it's not as easy as it may seem from here to look smart when answered random and unexpected questions.
I actually am so surprised at how little the people know nowadays
"How many galaxies are in the universe?"
"Idk, like 20?"
TF YOU MEAN THERE'S ONLY 20 GALAXIES
REAL LIKE WHEN HE SAID THAT I FELT FEELINGS I CANT DESCRIBE LIKE 20 IS ROOKIE NUMBERS AND THATS PUSHING IT ALOT
Cut him some slack dude he thought the solar system was a galaxy lmao, bro still thinks the Milky Way is the entire Universe
The kind of people who watch Science youtubers like you and I are operating at a bit higher knowledge base for these topics.
Milky Way
Mario Galaxy 1
Mario Galaxy 2
Guardians of the Galaxy Galaxy
Galactus' Galaxy
And some other ones
😂😂😂😂😂😂
@@GeezSus "he though the solar system was a galaxy" thats even worse
I appreciate how kind and generous you seem to be to the people you interview! It’s not a late night comedy show laughing at the man on the street. I especially noticed with one lady near the end whose cards were clearly in the wrong order but you weren’t rearranging them or pointing out the wrong order as you gestured to them when you talked to her. Clearly people are comfortable enough to keep engaging when they’ve gotten things wrong. I wish more of our interactions were like that (and as a teacher, it encourages me to be kinder to the ones who I think must not have been listening, too!)
Tbh he looked like he was about to cholk them due to their lack of knowledge
The moment when Veritasium was given the opportunity to explain how stars work at 4:56 is my favorite part of this video. Learning about dark matter, the cosmological problem etc is fine but to be able to pass on some of the very basic but amazing facts about this universe to a new person is a fantastic feeling, like giving a person a great book or recommending a bing-able streaming series.
She was my favourite in this episode, she did a great job of solidifying that these people aren't dumb or don't want to learn... they just don't know. She seemed excited to learn and was attentive to his answers. There are plenty of reasons she might not know the answers and she was willing to make some guesses but she also knew what she didn't know and was ready to be taught. That's awesome.
@@teamcoltra I was also impressed by how eloquent and precise her communication was with Veritasium.
4:57 respect to her for admitting she doesn’t know something and asking him to enlighten her 🫡