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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Who Is This Video For?
This video is perfect for intermediate to advanced English learners aiming to boost their IELTS speaking practice or refine their analytical communication skills. Its calm, explanatory tone and complex ideas—like future scenarios and statistical reasoning—make it ideal for those wanting to practice understanding and replicating nuanced, academic speech. Whether you’re using a shadowing app or practicing "shadow speak" (repeating phrases aloud to mimic rhythm and tone), the video’s structured flow and clear enunciation provide a great model for improving fluency and confidence.
Words & Idioms Worth Stealing
- "Take with a gigantic grain of salt": Don’t believe something completely; be skeptical. Example: "The prediction was interesting, but I took it with a gigantic grain of salt."
- "Dawdle away": Waste time. Example: "We can’t dawdle away our chance to prepare."
- "Outlandish": Unusual or absurd. Example: "His idea seemed outlandish at first, but it worked."
- "En vogue": Popular or trendy. Example: "Minimalist design is en vogue right now."
These phrases add color to your speech and are useful for learn English with YouTube sessions, as they appear in natural, context-rich sentences.
How to Get the Accent Right
The speaker’s accent is neutral and clear, with a focus on stressing key terms (e.g., "100 TRILLION," "1.2 QUADRILLION") to emphasize magnitude. To mimic this, practice stressing numbers and technical words like "habitable" or "extinction" to convey importance. For "shadow speak," pause the video after short segments and repeat, paying attention to the even pace—avoid rushing through long sentences. Notice how the speaker uses rising intonation when posing questions ("What makes this worse?") and falling intonation for statements. This balance keeps the speech engaging, a crucial skill for IELTS speaking practice. Using a shadowing app can help you track your rhythm against the speaker’s, ensuring you match their calm, analytical tone.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be born · was dwarfed · were born |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have always thought · have already lived · we've also invented |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who do · Somebody who might |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.