Shadowing Practice: All The Ghosts You Will Be - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creando lección...
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Hey Vsauce!
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Michael here.
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A single piece of refined flour is, on average, just 82.67 microns wide.
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That means a five pound bag of flour contains about 2.7 billion individual specks of flour dust.
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Now if each of those particles were a person, three bags could represent every single human alive on Earth today.
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8.1 billion itty bitty things.
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Are you under 30 years old?
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Is a question that could roughly divide everyone alive today in half.
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The yeses and the noes.
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But can you imagine a second question that could then divide both of those groups in half?
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Well if so, and if you kept doing that, after just 33 questions you would be left with more than 8 billion groups, each containing just one person.
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In other words, out of everyone alive today, we could pinpoint a specific individual.
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For example, you with just 33 yes or no questions.
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What would those questions be?
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Do they even exist?
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We don't know.
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But we do know that every year about this many people die.
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A little bit more than a quarter cup.
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But about twice as many as that are born.
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But how many people have ever been born?
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This many.
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117 billion.
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But out of all of these people, out of everyone who has ever existed, this is how many you will ever meet.
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You are a stranger to your own species.
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This is a video about how you will be forgotten.
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It's about the ghosts that surround us and how they're getting closer.
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Our journey begins 2,500 kilometers above the surface of the sun.
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There, a hot layer of ionized gas begins its reach millions of kilometers out into space.
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It's called the solar corona.
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And normally it's outshone by the rest of the sun because it gives off just one millionth as much light.
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But during an eclipse it can be seen.
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When you are eclipsed, your own sort of corona will remain as well.
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The memories people have of you, your treasure and junk, emails and texts you sent,
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the fact that your child has a nose like yours, every appearance you made in the background of a stranger's photo,
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Those are all traces of you that shine while you're alive, but can also continue long after you're gone.
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Douglas Hofstetter called them your solar corona.
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I love that phrase because it makes a cosmological phenomenon personal by literally including you.
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How long will you be here?
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Well, that's why I made this clock.
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It tells the time, but it also tells your time.
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Just answer a few questions and then when it's ready push the red button
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and the clock will begin counting down the seconds you have left to live.
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Approximately.
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Now whenever you want you can switch it to show the time, but that's not nearly as fun.
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Also, this clock never forgets.
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If you take away its power, it'll go dark, but it's still thinking about you.
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Next time you plug it in, it will pick right back up where it should be.
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Now if you would like a practical, retro, memento mori, you can pre-order one of these now.
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Omnis Vulnerant Ultima Nacat is Latin and it refers to these passing seconds.
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It means each of these wounds, the last kills.
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Max Nox means soon it will be night.
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And it will.
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But while this is ticking down, something else is ticking up.
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The number of ghosts in the world.
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Your nominal ghost is your name.
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It's out there representing you whether you're there or not.
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It won't haunt the world forever though.
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As we've often been reminded, you die twice.
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Once when your heart stops beating and then again, usually sometime later, when your name is spoken for the last time.
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But whose name has been remembered the longest?
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Well, signed here on this 5,000 year old tablet is the oldest written name we've ever found.
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Cushum, the first named character we know in the written history of humanity, probably.
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It's not entirely clear whether Cushum is the name of a person or just the title of an office holder.
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You know, if you want to be really sure, a generation or two later, this tablet was made.
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It contains three names, Galsal and two people he enslaved, N-pop X and a woman named Sokalger.
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These individuals are the reigning champs of avoiding the second death.
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And with archival practices and technologies being what they are today, your name could conceivably last just as long as these have already.
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But you know, I gotta say, if you want your ghosts to last longer, it helps to bend the truth a little bit.
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Toby Zhukunov built this interactive globe that shows the most famous person born in every location.
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Fame is based on Wikipedia data.
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How long their article is, how many languages it's in, how many visits it gets per day, stuff like that.
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By the way, out of everyone alive right now, about this many of us, almost exactly a quarter teaspoon, are mentioned on Wikipedia.
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Now let's zoom in on Stilwell, Kansas.
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Ooh, hey there, good looking.
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But here's the thing.
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I wasn't born in Stilwell.
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I grew up there.
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I lived there from ages 5 to 18.
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But I was born in Kansas City.
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For a while, a lot of things online said that I was born in Stillwell, so that's probably how I wound up here.
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But should I correct it?
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What's more important?
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The truth or a little lie that prolongs and enhances my nominal ghost?
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Maybe the truth.
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Because even if my name is forgotten, images of me may stick around.
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And that is your second ghost.
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Your likeness.
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Figurative portrayals of what you look like.
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Now we have no idea what most people who have lived looked like.
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Long ago, no records were made.
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Eventually some were and have survived.
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So who's the earliest known person where, like, we know what they look like?
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Well, it's probably Gudea.
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He was an ancient Sumerian ruler and 27 4,000 year old statues of him have been found in southern Iraq.
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They stand out not just for their craftsmanship but also for the fact
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that earlier depictions of human forms are either more abstract or generalized.
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But because these depictions of Gudea are more realistic, are so similar to each other and have been found spread so widely,
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it's tenable that they're similar to the actual face of the actual individual as he appeared in life,
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the first known illustrated person in our history.
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Even if your figural ghosts don't stick around as long as Goudéas have, things that look kind of like you might.
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I'm talking about your genetic ghost, your personal genomic variation that can be carried on by your descendants.
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Now interestingly, even Even if your progeny are especially fecund, your genetic ghost probably won't stick around that long.
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Just how much of your unique genetic code winds up in your grandkids, for example, depends partly on chance.
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It could be anywhere from 23 to 27 percent.
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Your great grandkids will only contain 9 to 14 percent of you.
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Your great great great great great great great grandchildren will on
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average be no more similar to you than you are to any stranger.
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In fact, it is at that distance that it becomes possible to be genetically left behind,
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for absolutely no personal chunks of your genome to be present in anyone.
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More than 70% of your ancestors from 11 generations ago aren't in you at all.
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So you're not so much the genetic foundation on which your progeny sit as you are their baby teeth.
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A thing that served a purpose but was destined to then fall out and be set aside.
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Where should you be buried if you want to become a fossil?
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Fossils last a long time.
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Your legacy could be representing our species in a cool bony pose in a museum millions of years from now.
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Well as it turns out, fossilization, the mineralizing of bones into rocky ghosts, is an exceedingly rare occurrence.
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Bill Bryson puts it this way, less than one-tenth of one percent of a species is ever lucky enough to become fossilized.
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Which means that millions of years from now,
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all that will be left of every single person alive today in the US will probably just be about 60 fossilized bones,
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not even one full human skeleton.
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The best way to improve your chances of becoming a fossil are to be buried rapidly and deeply, with no coffin,
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under the sea floor of a still mass of water at low elevation where sediment deposits will be swift
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and fine and oxygen levels low.
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Some locations that fit this bill are parts of the Black Sea, the Gulf of Mexico where the Mississippi disgorges,
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and the mangrove swamps along the northern coast of Australia.
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But even then, there's risk, right?
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Earth is an active, churning rock and erosion can wear you away, metamorphic activity could melt you back down.
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So if you want to be a trace for a long time, leave.
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The oldest unchanged piece of Earth wasn't even found on Earth.
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It was found on the moon, where geological activity is less brutal.
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A monolith engraved with your name and biography buried on the moon would be a good idea.
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Except in, you know, 5 to 10 billion years our sun will expand into a red giant engulfing the Earth and moon, likely destroying them forever.
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No. A copper disk coated in aluminum and gold floating through space would be even better.
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The golden records aboard the Voyager spacecraft could exist for trillions of years.
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They could conceivably still be legible even after the last star goes dim.
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But your final type of ghost will be there too.
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It's what I call your ripple ghost, the diffused domino effect of all of your actions.
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There will be people, for example, a century from now who could enjoy the shade of a tree you planted without ever wondering who put it there.
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The butterfly effect effectively guarantees us all a sort of anonymous, minute immortality.
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Just by being born, technically you changed the universe irrevocably.
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The tiny and subtle but very real way your mass affects the planet Saturn right now
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will contribute in some extremely small way to exactly how and when its rings collapse.
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When the universe enters its heat death and it's the same temperature everywhere, the arrangement of matter in the universe will be the way it is because you existed.
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There will be no minds to observe it, so you won't be remembered,
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but you won't be annihilated. But like... So what?
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Ooh, I've got ghosts that stick around.
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Newsflash, buddy!
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I'm not my ghosts!
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Okay, first of all, yeah.
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That's exactly why talk of fame and legacy gets so fizzily. For what?
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I won't be around to enjoy it and eventually no one will be.
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But secondly, that's actually a pretty good definition of the self.
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You are everything you take with you when you die.
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Your secrets.
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The things you could have done or said but never did.
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That's what you are.
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Now, you could desperately try to do as much as you can and leave as much on the table as possible, but life is short.
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Too short?
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Well, Derek Parfit has pointed out that the brevity of life probably has nothing to do with its meaning.
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If your life was twice as long, would it have twice as much meaning?
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If we were all immortal, would the meaning of life suddenly be obvious?
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No. Meaning is separate from the sheer participation we crave.
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We just want to keep playing this game.
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And there's never been more game to play.
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Staggering amounts of what we want to experience have been tamed into beasts so lightweight and so fast that like ghosts,
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they can pass through walls.
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The soy bomb only lasted 36 seconds, but because a digital ghost of it lingers in Earth's largest haunted house,
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an average of 40 people have seen it every day for the last 30 years.
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Old music started outselling new music for the first time in 2015.
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Today, we each spend an average of 7 hours
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and 3 minutes a day in a haunted house full of avatars and messages from the living and dead alike.
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People and ideas and art and the past have become not just accessible, but accessible.
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We are on these ghost portals so much it's become pretty much the only way anyone finds companionship anymore.
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For crying out loud, more people on this planet own cell phones than toothbrushes.
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Documentality is the word Maurizio Ferraris gave to his ontology of traces,
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but it's also a great word for the extent to which day-to-day life in a society happens as documentation.
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In a society of high documentality, nearly every transaction, click, step,
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every memory, everything said or done is vulnerable to recording or simply comes into the world already pre-remembered.
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Not Not as an ephemeral oral exchange or a haphazard note, but as a high fidelity, time stamped, cataloged artifact.
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In such a world, it shouldn't be surprising
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if it starts to feel like there are more things you've said than things you could say.
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More ways things have been than ways things could be.
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The future isn't what it used to be.
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But don't get it twisted.
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Complete documentality is far from here.
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As I've mentioned before, our estimates of the current human population have about a 2 to 3% margin of error.
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That means that about this many people may or may not exist.
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And at any given moment in the US alone, there are about 40,000 deceased bodies whose identities are unknown.
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When Steve Fawcett failed to return to the Flying M Ranch in 2007,
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search and rescue efforts sent to find him discovered eight previously unidentified airplane crashes
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that weren't him but had been out there for in some cases decades.
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And when authorities searched for Gabby Petito, they found her and the bodies of at least eight other people they weren't even looking for.
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We are not a documented species.
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We are a bunch of animals walking in and out of rooms.
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That said, something's changed.
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The last time a body was interred in the tomb of the unknown soldier was after the Vietnam War,
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but it was removed in 1998 after DNA testing connected it to a name, Michael Joseph Blassie.
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In 2014, prosecutors didn't need witnesses
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or security cam footage to construct what happened between Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy because they had these thousands of text messages.
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Despite living just 35 miles apart, Carter and Roy's relationship occurred almost entirely through text.
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So these are not pieces of their relationship.
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They're not evidence of the whole story.
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They are the whole story.
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These messages aren't missing the glances, the nods, the way he or she said it.
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This is all they each saw and we have it all.
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An entire human relationship that happened as and and still is undying documents.
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They're all online.
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Just a few taps deep in the world's largest ocean of documentation.
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And we just keep filling it up, turning more and more of what we do and see into ghosts.
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Not just to remember, but to experience.
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When we instinctively watch events through our phones, it's not that we aren't living in the moment, it's that we are.
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Today, to be in the moment, You have to be fully in the moment.
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Every part of you, even the eye, you have to charge and the mind you share with others.
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See what's happening?
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We are not just getting more ghosts, we are beginning to live as ghosts as an account, a like, a post, a view.
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And it's great!
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We're spared the humilities of confrontation, and to be an image is to be something.
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Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth knew this.
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They had photographic images of themselves printed up.
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To own and control and sell your own figural ghost meant that you had power.
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But today, being a ghost surrounded by other ghosts causes a certain kind of newfangled anxiety.
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In his 1985 Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman describes what he calls the information action ratio.
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Now even though this book predates the World Wide Web, it may as well have been written about it.
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Let me ask you a modern version of a question he asks in here.
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How often does something you see on social media cause you to alter your plans for the day
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or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken
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or provide you with insight into some problem you are required to solve.
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When everything persists, irrelevance takes over.
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But the constant scroll of doom and pleasure and distraction isn't just irrelevant, is it?
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No, it's truly a ghost that can pass right through you.
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You can sit and stare for an hour and not remember a single thing you were served.
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We don't do that because it feels good.
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We do it because our minds want to be unsettled.
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A never-ending scroll of decontextualized news and horror and comedy and family and backflips isn't some unholy modern abomination of nature.
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It is exactly the niche we evolved to thrive in.
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Oh.
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Oh no, my brain evolved to eat berries in a cave.
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No, it evolved to reach the lushness of Southeast Asia and then cross the Wallace Line.
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Not because it had to and not because it could, but because what laid beyond was next and we've got autoplay on.
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Hey, let's build a thing that floats and like we could fit in it.
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We could call it a boat.
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Huh?
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What's that?
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Where will it take us?
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Away.
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We are not the universe experiencing itself.
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We are the universe ignoring itself.
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We are the universe looking for something else.
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In order to be here for long, we needed to not be here for long.
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I don't think it's the risk or the challenge that motivates us.
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Good stories and curiosity and adventure are the icing on the cake we really desire, unsettledness.
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Not knowing what's going to happen next can be exciting.
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Why?
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I think in the same way that long necks were selected in giraffes
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because no one was eating the way up high leaves, and in the same way that white fur was selected in polar mammals because no one was eating snow,
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imagination was selected in humans because no one was eating possibilities.
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As soft apes in the midst of climatic change, those who survived didn't wait for natural selection to provide an answer.
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No, they relied as we still do today not on evolution but on resolution,
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on picturing and manipulating an analog world inside the theater of their own minds.
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Up here we can imagine things that aren't hypotheticals, the distant past and future, the way things might be.
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We can recognize that collecting firewood now will be worth it.
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We can recognize that if there's no water here we can bring it to us.
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The world is not our home.
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It's fuel for the fire up here where we really live.
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But because of that fire, we have made the whole world our home.
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Our ancestors are those hominids whose resolving never resolved.
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Now, sure, binge-watching TV or scrolling a social media feed are pretty different than crossing the Bering Strait, but they're still unsettling, right?
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What's gonna happen next?
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Each next swipe brings you something different.
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Like the cognitive niche we built for ourselves, it never resolves.
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But unlike the travails of our ancestors, there's so much less danger.
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We can witness and interact safely from home.
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Like pieces of luggage being moved at light speed without moving at all.
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The internet is a bounty of torques and the laities.
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Pushes that spin us around but don't move us anywhere.
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And wishes not strong enough to inspire action.
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We're not amusing ourselves to death.
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We're amusing ourselves to life.
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A longer, scarier life.
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And as always, thanks for watching.
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button, the button stays locked down.
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It cannot change.
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It's locked to your soul, to your life.
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Unless you want to give it to someone else or you made a mistake or something, in which case you can reset it by just poking this into the hole in the back.
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But you better pre-order now, because time is literally running out.
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Sobre esta lección
Gramática en este vídeo
Las estructuras que más usa el hablante, con las palabras exactas del vídeo:
| Estructura | En el vídeo |
|---|---|
| Oraciones condicionales if + oración, will/would + verbo — una condición y su resultado | If you take away its power, it'll go · If we were all immortal, would the |
| Present perfect have/has + participio pasado — una acción pasada que sigue importando ahora | have ever been born · has ever existed · have left |
| Voz pasiva be + participio pasado — importa lo que ocurre, no quién lo hace | would be left · are born · been born |
| Oraciones de relativo who / which + oración — información extra sobre una persona o cosa | everyone who has · people who have · those who survived |
¿Qué es la Técnica de Shadowing?
Shadowing es una técnica de aprendizaje de idiomas respaldada por la ciencia, desarrollada originalmente para la formación de intérpretes profesionales y popularizada por el políglota Dr. Alexander Arguelles. El método es simple pero poderoso: escuchas audio en inglés nativo y lo repites en voz alta de inmediato, como una sombra que sigue al hablante con solo 1-2 segundos de retraso. A diferencia de la escucha pasiva o los ejercicios de gramática, el shadowing obliga a tu cerebro y músculos de la boca a procesar y reproducir simultáneamente patrones de habla reales. Las investigaciones muestran que mejora significativamente la precisión de la pronunciación, la entonación, el ritmo, el habla conectada, la comprensión auditiva y la fluidez al hablar, convirtiéndola en una de las metodologías más efectivas para la preparación del IELTS Speaking y la comunicación en inglés en el mundo real.