Shadowing Practice: The Last Human – A Glimpse Into The Far Future - Learn English Speaking with Video
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The future of humanity seems insecure.
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Rapid climate change, political division, our greed and failings make it hard to look at our species with a lot of optimism
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and so many people think our end is in sight.
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But humans have always thought they lived in the end times.
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Every generation assumes they're important enough to witness the apocalypse and then life just goes on.
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This is a problem because it leads to short-term thinking
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and prevents us from creating the best world for ourselves and our descendants.
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What makes this worse is that we may actually be living at an extremely critical moment in human history.
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To understand why, let's look at the temporal window of humanity and ask,
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when will the last human be born and how many people will there ever be?
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These sorts of estimates come with a lot of uncertainties, so please take them with a gigantic grain of salt.
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To get a sense of how many people there will be, let's see how many people have already lived.
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Modern humans arose some 200,000 years ago.
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They were uniquely good at making tools, telling stories, thinking abstractly, planning and working together in large groups beyond their close family.
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Still, there were not that many of us.
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Supplices of food were scarce, survival was hard, life expectancy was low.
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It took us 150,000 years to grow to a population of 2 million.
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Improvements were gradual and eventually led to the agricultural revolution, arguably the biggest change in our history.
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This was when our numbers really started growing.
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It took 10,000 more years to get to 300 million.
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But that increase was dwarfed by the industrial revolution.
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1800 there were a billion of us.
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The human population doubled in just 120 years and then again in 50.
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Today we number around 8 billion.
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In total, over the last 200,000 years, about 117 billion humans were born and lived and 109 billion also died.
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Which means that about 7% of all humans that ever lived are alive right now.
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As many as were born in the first 150,000 years of human history.
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Every minute, 270 babies join the party.
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But there aren't just more people, never before have we been as healthy and well-off, or lived longer.
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With growing living standards, our birth rates collapsed.
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The UN estimates that around the year 2100, we will hit our population peak and there will be 125 million people born each year.
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It's pretty unlikely that birth rates will stay stable forever, but let's pretend to make our thought experiment simpler.
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How many people there will be in the future depends on when our species will die out.
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And here, we find a lot of uncertainties.
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We are able to destroy ourselves through our own inventions, but we are also able to find solutions to avert catastrophic risk.
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We can change the direction of planet killer asteroids, but we've also invented nuclear weapons.
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We discovered antibiotics, but also carry diseases across the globe in a matter of days.
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Our industrial system gives us an incredible standard of living, but also change the atmosphere in the process.
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It's very hard to say if human ingenuity will prolong or shorten our species lifespan.
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If things go badly, our end could come suddenly.
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But if we manage to avoid that, we could conceivably stick around for a long time.
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So every day we don't destroy ourselves may mean life for an unfathomable number of humans.
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How many people are we talking about?
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It depends on how far our species is going to expand.
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Scenario 1.
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Humans will never leave Earth.
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If we stay on our home planet, a good metric to look at is the extinction rate of animals that we get from the fossil record.
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The average lifespan of mammalian species is in the region of 1 million years, with some surviving up to 10 million years.
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Our close relative Homo erectus survived for about 1.9 million years.
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Let's be conservative and assume that humans will survive for a million years, which leaves us 800,000 more years to dawdle away.
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Assuming a stable birth rate of 125 million people each year, this means there are roughly 100 trillion humans waiting to be born.
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850 times greater than the number of people that have ever lived.
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This would make everybody alive today only 0.008% of all people that will ever live.
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Think about where this leaves you.
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Instead of putting you at the end of the chaotic mess that was our past, it would mean you live at the very beginning of something big.
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The start of the human story rather than the end.
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Doesn't this feel incredibly different?
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And now, consider that this may be an extremely pessimistic estimate.
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If we match the survival time of the most successful mammals, then our future numbers rise to 1.2 quadrillion people that have yet to be born.
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And even this seems far from our potential.
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As the Sun slowly gets hotter and brighter, Earth will remain habitable for about 500 million years,
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giving so many more potential people the chance to become actual people.
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And now, let's begin to think big.
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Scenario 2.
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Humans will leave Earth.
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We went from humans worshipping the Moon to humans walking on it, so who knows how much further we can go.
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If we don't die out within the next few hundred years, ideas that seem outlandish right now become serious considerations.
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If we believe that we have a chance of surviving for maybe millions of years, then we could expand onto the other planets or into our own artificial worlds.
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Life needs three things, a surface, resources and energy.
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Our Sun provides energy for billions of years, and there is so much water and material floating in the asteroid
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and Kuiper belt that we could sustain many times our current population.
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Instead of living on planets, we could decide to construct our own artificial worlds and habitats.
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With resources and energy so abundant, we could try out different types of society and ways of life.
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An interconnected civilization spanning the solar system would create the basis of existence for an absurd number of individuals, orders of magnitude more than if we stick to Earth,
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even if we only existed for a few million years.
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This future doesn't have to be grim and dark as science fiction likes to paint it.
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With quadrillions of people waiting to be born, we will have billions of doctors working on curing cancer, billions of problem solvers working on ending poverty,
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and billions of video game developers making life fun.
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humans may actually mean more progress.
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Another upside of leaving Earth and spreading out is
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that it becomes much harder for us to become extinct as you need a solar system-wide catastrophe to catch everybody.
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So aside from nearby supernovae or gamma-ray bursts, humanity would be relatively safe from extinction, maybe for billions of years.
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If we managed to survive for that long, slow evolution or genetic engineering might split us into multiple species,
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or we might intentionally keep ourselves the same as we are now.
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So to account for that, we'll just talk about people from now on, instead of humans.
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Ok, now let's think really big.
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Scenario 3.
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People leave the solar system.
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As enormous as the solar system is, it is just one star system among billions in the Milky Way.
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If future people can colonize say 100 billion stars and live there for 10 billion years, with each generating 100 million births per year,
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then we can expect something like a 100 octillion lives to be lived in the future.
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This is a one with 29 zeros.
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100,000 trillion trillion.
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We can spin this up as much as we like.
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The Andromeda galaxy will merge with the Milky Way, adding another trillion stars for us to settle.
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Dwarfs stay active for up to a trillion years, and future civilizations might even find energy for their habitats around black holes.
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A sufficiently advanced civilization of our descendants might even try to reach other galaxy groups.
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While these numbers are mind-blowing, they may underestimate the number of unborn people by many orders of magnitude.
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If we divide the total energy available in a galaxy by the average energy needs of a single person, then we get a tridicillion potential lives.
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A million, trillion, trillion, trillion potential people.
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Hopefully what's become evident is that if we don't kill ourselves in the next few centuries or millennia, almost all humans that will ever exist will live in the future.
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Which brings us back to us in the present.
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We exist at a high point in human history, with incredible possibilities at our grasp.
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Technological, environmental, and societal.
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What we do matters for all the people who do not exist yet.
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So while it's not en vogue to think about humanity's long-term future with optimism, or to think about it at all, maybe this has given you a bit of perspective.
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If we screw up the present, so many people may never come to exist.
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quadrillions of unborn humans are at our mercy.
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Even if we go with fairly conservative estimates, the unborn are by far the largest group of people and the most disenfranchised.
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Somebody who might be born in a thousand or even a million years deeply depends on us today for their existence.
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This is why it's important to think about the distant future and why our presence is so crucial, why it matters what we do today.
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One day the last human will be born.
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We don't know when. But
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if we change our perspective from us living at the end of the human story to us living at the very beginning, we can not only build a wonderful world for us and for them,
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but also for countless numbers of others.
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Huge announcement!
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We're launching Kurzgesagt in six more languages.
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Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Hindi, Japanese and Korean on top of our English, German and Spanish channels.
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Bringing new perspectives and a love for science to as many people as possible.
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Especially to some languages that are underserved because it's not profitable to translate to.
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If enough people watch our new channels, we can hopefully run them for many years to come.
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This is where we need your help.
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It takes us a lot of time, effort and yes, money to translate our videos properly and run so many channels.
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So to make this sustainable, please help us spread the word.
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If you're native in one of these languages, share our videos on social media and tell your friends and family.
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Make people in your native language aware that it exists.
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This multi-language expansion is supported by Open Philanthropy, an organization that tries to do as much good as possible.
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They want to help us spread awareness of science and ideas for how you can help humanity thrive.
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Their values align with ours in many fundamental ways, so we are going to work with them on more projects in the future.
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So please help us spread the word.
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And thank you for watching.
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We'll see
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you next time.
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Woordenschat en spreektips bij deze les
Deze spreekles op niveau C1 is gebaseerd op de video “The Last Human – A Glimpse Into The Far Future”. Deze woorden komen het vaakst terug: billion, born, trillion, lived. Deze video bevat 133 zinnen en 1840 woorden om na te spreken. Het gesproken deel duurt 12:30. De spreker praat in een gelijkmatig tempo van ongeveer 147 woorden per minuut, prettig om te shadowen. 86% van de woorden hoort bij de 3.000 meest gebruikte Engelse woorden; de rest kun je beter vooraf bekijken.
Belangrijke woorden in deze video
De 15 moeilijkste woorden uit de video, met uitspraak en betekenis:
| Woord | Uitspraak | Betekenis |
|---|---|---|
| unborn bijvoeglijk naamwoord | ongeboren | |
| civilization zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/ | beschaving |
| descendant zelfstandig naamwoord | /dɪˈsɛndənt/ | afstammeling, nakomeling |
| asteroid zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈæst(ə)ɹɔɪd/ | planetoïde, asteroïde |
| optimism zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈɑptɪmɪzəm/ | optimisme |
| extinction zelfstandig naamwoord | /ɪkˈstɪŋkʃən/ | uitsterven |
| translate werkwoord | /tɹænzˈleɪt/ | vertalen, overzetten |
| magnitude zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈmæɡnɪtjuːd/ | grootte |
| uncertainty zelfstandig naamwoord | /ʌnˈsɜːtənti/ | onzekerheid |
| colonize werkwoord | /ˈkɑlənaɪz/ | koloniseren |
| dawdle werkwoord | /ˈdɔdl̩/ | dralen, leuteren |
| habitable bijvoeglijk naamwoord | /ˈhæbɪtəbəl/ | bewoonbaar, bewoonbare |
| ingenuity zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˌɪnd͡ʒəˈn(j)uːəti/ | vernuft |
| mammal zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈmæməl/ | zoogdier |
| outlandish bijvoeglijk naamwoord | /ˌaʊtˈlændɪʃ/ | buitenlands, uitheems |
Phrasal verbs die je zult horen
| Woord | Betekenis |
|---|---|
| try out werkwoord | uitproberen |
Grammatica in deze video
De structuren die de spreker het meest gebruikt, met de exacte woorden uit de video:
| Structuur | In de video |
|---|---|
| Lijdende vorm be + voltooid deelwoord — het gaat om wat er gebeurt, niet om wie het doet | be born · was dwarfed · were born |
| Present perfect have/has + voltooid deelwoord — iets uit het verleden dat nu nog telt | have always thought · have already lived · we've also invented |
| Betrekkelijke bijzinnen who / which + zin — extra informatie over een persoon of ding | people who do · Somebody who might |
Uitspraak om op te letten
De spreker gebruikt 13 samentrekkingen en verkorte vormen, zoals don't, doesn't, we'll. Spreek ze kort uit, zoals je ze hoort.
- De “th”-klanken: unfathomable /ˌʌnˈfæð(ə)məb(ə)l/, thrive /θɹajv/
- De klanken “sh” en “zh”: civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, extinction /ɪkˈstɪŋkʃən/, outlandish /ˌaʊtˈlændɪʃ/, shorten /ˈʃɔɹtn̩/, sufficiently /səˈfɪʃəntli/
- Lange woorden — let op de klemtoon: civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, optimism /ˈɑptɪmɪzəm/, uncertainty /ʌnˈsɜːtənti/, disenfranchise /ˌdɪs.ɪnˈfɹæn.t͡ʃaɪz/, expectancy /ɪkˈspɛktənsi/
Klanken die Nederlandstaligen lastig vinden:
- Stemhebbende eindmedeklinker — /b/, /d/, /g/, /z/, /v/ niet verscherpen: asteroid /ˈæst(ə)ɹɔɪd/, magnitude /ˈmæɡnɪtjuːd/, colonize /ˈkɑlənaɪz/, disenfranchise /ˌdɪs.ɪnˈfɹæn.t͡ʃaɪz/, underserved /ˌʌndəˈsɜːvd/
- /æ/ — opener dan de Nederlandse “e”: lifespan /ˈlaɪf.spæn/, asteroid /ˈæst(ə)ɹɔɪd/, translate /tɹænzˈleɪt/, habitat /ˈhæb.ɪ.tæt/, magnitude /ˈmæɡnɪtjuːd/
- /g/ — een harde plofklank, geen Nederlandse “g”: magnitude /ˈmæɡnɪtjuːd/, gigantic /d͡ʒaɪˈɡæntɪk/, gradual /ˈɡɹæd͡ʒuəl/, grim /ɡɹɪm/, gamma /ˈɡæ.mə/
Zo oefen je met deze video
- Luister de hele video één keer zonder te spreken en noteer de woorden die je niet kent.
- Spreek zin voor zin na op normale snelheid en herhaal elke zin tot je ritme gelijk is aan dat van de spreker.
- Neem jezelf op en vergelijk met het origineel; let daarbij op woorden als unborn, civilization, descendant.
Wat is de Shadowing-techniek?
Shadowing is een wetenschappelijk onderbouwde taalleermethode die oorspronkelijk is ontwikkeld voor professionele tolkentraining en gepopulariseerd door polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. De methode is eenvoudig maar krachtig: je luistert naar native Engelse audio en herhaalt het onmiddellijk hardop — als een schaduw die de spreker volgt met slechts 1–2 seconden vertraging. In tegenstelling tot passief luisteren of grammaticadrills, dwingt shadowing je hersenen en mondspieren om echte spraakpatronen tegelijkertijd te verwerken en te reproduceren. Onderzoek toont aan dat het de uitspraaknauwkeurigheid, intonatie, ritme, verbonden spraak, luisterbegrip en spreekvaardigheid aanzienlijk verbetert — waardoor het een van de meest effectieve methoden is voor IELTS Speaking-voorbereiding en echte Engelse communicatie.