and the "disappeared" word fades with an echo

All the slides continue as normal, but nothing is being said

I give it a week at most and _someone_ will post a link below me 😂 Edit: It took _significantly_ less time than a week.

@@Jarvalicious kzfaq.info/get/bejne/sN-nibejys3Lop8.html

@@Jarvalicious i cant post links but put this at the end of the youtube url: watch?v=zywVTreggrk

The man himself who caused everyone to dissappear

Codsworth

Cats. Cats with thumbs.

A particularly clever monkey?

Rogue AI?

its still a website?

​@@sheenakr7616No?

there are still plenty amount of good creators, u just messed up your algorithm

wdym "used to be a website"

@@gooddeath3816 exactly!

They ignore all the facts to entertain us with brain dead trama.

is there one that doesnt?

And sometimes people who watch these movies, forget that zombies propably wont start suddenly spawning from everywhere in the world, they propably are spreading, so you have time to pass the knowlodge for the next person to keep power going on, and prepare to block zombies outside

A zombie outbreak doesnt have to be worldwide and if theres a safe country it could still provide electricity to other places. So hmm

Give one example

I do not believe that's true, not one bit

While doing a weekly podcast on the side. Infinite energy that guy. 😅

Where did he say this? Edit: womp womp turns out I’m stupid, didn’t see “all”

Man, some people wouldn't understand that this is a joke, even if you told them

@@felixw19some people are evidently unable to understand jokes without a /s at the end. I don't know how did they cope on the Internet until 2016 or so when the practice got widespread. I am pretty sure they are either robots or lizardpeople.

Or the Darvaza gas crater fire, which has been burning since the 80s......just no idea when its going to go out.

Centralia was ignited relatively recently (1962). The New Straitsville mine has been burning since 1884, and some believe it could keep burning for thousands of years.

The fucking what

@@HenryMiller-ox1xu Please Dont Say Bad Words On This Site 💀💀💀

@@HenryMiller-ox1xu I suggest you throw "Centralia" into the youtube search bar and enjoy yourself

It could have been several days inaccurate. Once it accumulates more than 12 hours of drift it starts trending back towards the actual time. Or: a clock can't be more than 12 hours wrong.

@@wowv Yeah, from my experience with these old digitals, they'll be a few minutes off by the end of the week if it's a cheap one or the month if it's a good one. That clock is definitely more than 6 hours from when last adjusted. But then again who cares, 12 hours is all that matters as you've pointed out. Many people, me included, were taught to synchronize them whenever you get the chance anyway.

@@wowv The digital clock also displays the date, it was the correct day and month just 5-6hrs off

Some batteries won't leak. Especially helps to be drawing a very slow, constant amount of power from them.

It wouldn’t surprise us if there are Casio F91w watches still going after 20 years having only drifted a few minutes 😅

Ah yes, that really funny time when the rhode island population everyone.

I had a stroke reading the second half

XKCDCU

I know all the humans are gone. These are bird people or something idk

And then they discover what radiation is again and realize they have messed up.

There was actually a commission formed to try and come up with a warning sign for radioactive waste that would still be understandable as a warning in ten thousand years, long after every presently known language and iconography was no longer in use. I can't tell you what they came up with, though.

@@Mereologistthey failed

@@Mereologist Yes, that commission (or a similar endeavour) was who created or commissioned the creation of the quote that the OP was riffing off of in their comment.

Well, aren't you fun at parties? (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

That was my immediate thought. Very sad.

@@E3ECO As long as nobody starts discussing apocalyptical hypotheticals, I'm fine. :p

And somehow, inexplicably, machines still call that last phone line to explain that a car warranty is about to expire.

Honestly that would make such a great set piece for some apocolyptic art piece. It really is a haunting thought

Well that's made me feel old

yeah, the USSR was obsessed with them and there are still "lost" ones dotting the area of the former soviet union

This is the answer

@@iplaygames8090 I see you have also watched those vids about the busted open RTGs

RTG?

@@colatf2 Radioisotoope Thermoelectric Generator

"I'm here, in an XKCD video"

@@XIXXXVIVIII ...and I heard that in his voice!

Randall as a guest on Lateral when? :D

@@KernelLeak they seriosly need more guest variety tho.

@@jezusmylord How about Tom Scott, Tom Cardy, TomSka and Tom Lum for absolute tomfoolery?

It's also the same universe where someone sent a sub to space, or at least did so in a movie.

I just wanna know who updated it to 0.

Magnitude 25 earthquake 😶

In this universe, some madlads are throwing baseballs at relativistic speeds and vaporizing entire cities. 💀

Let's not forget the hellscape that is the periodic table literally stacked upon one another...

Not sure the batteries would last 50 years.

@@paulsengupta971 In some setups, the lights can run directly from the solar panels after the battery is long gone, or there could be a tiny little LED that shines whenever the panel is getting power.

@@ChristmasEve777 An LED being on when the thing is charging would be an idea, but they're normally set up so the light comes on when the sun stops shining!

i'd probably be using generators for all 50 years. I'm not sure how much I'd travel, but I'd have electric lights.

@@noneuklid No, fuel goes bad quickly. Your best bet for power is still solar panels. And for traveling electric cars. A well made EV could last decades, even the battery.

Archaeology is 90% digging through Human garbage dumps.

when we are gone, the last thing left will be the mess we created. Dam

Holy shit it is actually you? I watchrd so many of your lyrics vids. Amazing! Than you for your great work!

_The last thing remaining of human light technology being garbage is philosophical as..._ ...and there comes the word that will probably be the final one of all to be spoken. ;)

@@randomdragonlesbo2584 You can see it in a positive way - even in the worst toxic wastes we've created, some beauty will still exist,

A future civilisation. Mmmm.

Got to imagine future archaeologists going "yeah, they just put this to scare people away" and then when the people who visited the site start dying months later it's "the curse of blue glowing cave"

​@@ZER0--Every civilization we know of has collapsed at some point, and there is no indication the current one is any different.

​@@Toastybees I think you're mistaking "country" for "civilization". Plenty of civilizations have lasted thousands of years even as their originating countries have fallen. Some have apparently even managed to pass down knowledge for over 10,000 years, orally, without writing (specifically Australian oral histories that date back before the end of the last ice age).

my favorite solution to this issue is the way the soviets did it, at some places they buried it and tried to build something that looks as instinctively terrifying as possible above. just random structures that gives you a really bad gut feeling.

Worst consolation prize ever, am I right?

Yeah, oddly enough it did feel comforting.

in true XKCD fashion

Highly disturbing

It's a bit sad. The longest lasting survivor of humanity is our trash.

That comes down to whether we include things that generate light incidentally to their intended purpose versus actual proper lights. I think the proper answer is probably a solar powered light. The others should probably be a separate category for when the last manmade light emitting item goes dark.

​@@SmallSpoonBrigadeby that logic though, the video's conclusionary light from radioactive waste would be excluded though.

​@@mnxs yes, they said solar powered light would be the proper answer.

@@mnxs This would include light emitting watch faces winch emit light for a while after exposure to natural or bright light and will continue to do so indefinably until the watch face is buried or obscured from the sun when left exposed. While only producing light enough to read the face by for a a couple dozen minutes at most a night, these watch faces would be producing light for centuries at worst. If you have a watch with such dials, holding the backlight on for a a moment will leave the hands and numbers glowing for a short moment as they fade, natural light leaves them more 'charged' and they can glow in the dark for a few minutes if you step into an unlit room from outside. These are still a manmade light as under bright conditions they do emit enough light to read by in the short time they are that bright.

Huh... private gas wells... never heard of that. heard of water wells contaminated with gas, but I suppose it makes sense. cool. All it would take is for a them to leave the porch light on during the great evaporation, and that makes it count as an artificial light source. I would also imagine there would be industrial users of the same reservoir, without powerplants and factories using it, thats a loooong time. you get my vote, sir.

I have trouble turning off my Cesium-137 source.

@@oalsaker you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave... the light off

hey, who turned out the lights?

@@renakunisaki Hotel Cherenkov

Last one to leave, please turn out the lights

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I was looking for a comment mentioning it!

Yes. But the mystery is, who corrected the sign to 0?

@@FuelDropforthewin The few people at the edge of that event who escaped. Before they rebuilt society with warnings to never go to Rhode Island, and then were disappeared for this event.

And the space submarine callback

Fr

You just need to be afraid of the light.

I'm your only friend I'm not your only friend But I'm a little glowing friend But really I'm not actually your friend But I am

pretty sure if the blue light is there the family line wont last hundreds of years

@@zeff241 By the two century mark, the radiation levels will have dropped pretty far. It's a question of whether the radiation before that will have been enough to render the line sterile prior to reproduction.

Aw, come on, surely _somebody_ else knows the words?? 😜

Yeah that was a real 💀 of a detail to see.

I would have drawn her licking the paint brush to get a fine tip 😞

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,

huh?

That was my first thought as well. Do any more modern RTG powered probes have an LED on them somewhere (even if just for testing while on the ground)? And do they keep working ever dimmer with decreasing power, or is there a cut off where below a certain voltage they simply switch off?

I think that "light" implies visible light, i.e. between ca 400 and 700 nm.

@@QuantumHistorian LEDs have a forward voltage (a few volts usually, depends on the model/colour though) that must be reached for them to glow, so they will get a bit dimmer, then turn off.

In the first _What if?_ book, Randall answers this question in more detail. He actually does consider rovers, satellites, and space probes, but rules them out. The Curiosity rover has an RTG and lights, but the lights wouldn’t be on unless a human told them to turn on. Some satellites have LEDs, but they would most likely be taken out by space debris, or their orbits would decay.

i'd be surprised if there was no rtg on a test stand somewhere hooked up to a bread board with an led on it

Private wind turbines are a thing. No they aren't as massive but if you aren't worried about connecting to a load balancing grid and only need to power one or two buildings on a farm or research station or something that isn't an issue.

Some of the larger wind farms may keep generating, depending on their design. Here in Australia some of our large solar farms are also grid-forming, and designed to continue to output power in the case of a grid failure, to assist with black starting large coal power stations. Of course this won't help ordinary people as the retail loads will all trip, to ensure as much power as possible is available to get the large generators back online as quickly as possible.

The solar lights on my patio will run for a long time but the wind turbines I work on likely won’t. And even if they did operate in “self-sustain mode” as they do when there’s a grid outage they probably won’t be supplying power to anything because the substation will have tripped when the grid went crazy. In a closed-loop system a turbine or solar panel could power lights until a mechanical failure occurs, but because most generation stations are part of a larger grid, I doubt they’d power very many lights once the coal and nuclear plants trip. But it’s interesting to think about.

@@hackerx7329 There are 3 MW private turbines close to where I live. I know of two, as I worked on those projects.

Not sure if it matters to your point but his point about the wind turbines is that they have a status LED on them somewhere. Even if they ‘shut down’ does that mean they stop spinning? Even if they weren’t supplying the grid but showed a red LED then that’s still a light.

Those little solar powered lights on a stick that line people's walkways.

Around 1996 my parents got my brother and I electric toothbrushes with ni-cad batteries. I used it once, but didn't really know what I was doing, so shoved it in the cupboard and forgot about it. Around 2011 I found it when the bathroom was being renovated and pushed the button. It ran feebly for about 5 minutes!

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Oof

In Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (A Yokohama Shopping Trip) there is a scene where at night all the old street lights and traffic lights come to life even though the city had been submerged under the ocean for generations. No explanation for where the electricity is coming from. But it looks beautiful. Magical.

Wow, this thread is amazing. So much writing flair.

@@davidwuhrer6704 Also, trees start to glow. Not human made - or are they? YKK is an enigmatic masterpiece.

and then you get closer and the light gets bigger and you realize it's your mom

I like your argument about including non-visible electromagnetic waves. I think a geostationary satellite would probably beat a solar powered emergency light in the desert. The only thing I am still considering that might last longer is as sealed, air tight/water tight, nautical light. If there is one in a clear plastic box with all the electronics inside it, and it is air tight and even better if the atmosphere is replaced with an inert gas, could be the longest lasting. I think the limiting factor would be how long the clear box stays transparent. Also possible there is some osmosis and oxygen finds a way into the box.

In the book, Randall touched on the Mars Curiosity Rover, which has lamps meant for shining on rock samples. He said these lights, while they COULD last a long time, are only switched on when it needs to examine rock samples. With all the humans gone, there would be nothing to tell it to do that, and thus it would have no reason to switch on its lamps by itself.

If you're going with non-visible light the answer would be gamma rays from plutonium-244 which would last millions of years, or the fraction of tellurium-128 that is manmade with a half life trillions of times the age of the universe.

@@willythemailboy2 Are those isotopes man made or are they naturally occuring?

The Russians used RTGs to power lighthouses out in the middle of nowhere. Many of these RTGs are still there because it's too complicated and costly to retrieve them.

Iirc, incandescent bulbs mainly deteriorate by being turned off and on, the heating/cooling makes the filament brittle. So yeah, if it went on and stayed on constantly without being touched, I can see it lasting a real long time.

@@Yesnaught IIRC, the record for lifespan of an incandescent light bulb is something like a century. And, it's because it's a light bulb that never gets turned on or off apart from when there's a power outage. The two main things that cause light bulbs to fail are that heating/cool cycle as well as the seal maintaining the vacuum failing.

I assume that whether the bill kept being paid is irrelevant- older types of meters cannot be checked or shut off remotely, and if the homeowner can't return the meter-reader sure as hell isn't gonna go out there I feel like the power company wouldn't expect you to pay the bill after 25 years either, most would probably give you a forgiveness on your debt or whatever What's stranger is that the power grid to the area wasn't cut off sometime within the first few years of a semi-solid border forming. Of course, there's a war going on, but cyprus has a small power grid. I would expect next time they service a power line going into the area, they sever it just before the current border Then again, a shocking number of abandoned buildings still have power on, all around the world, even when the power company or the property owner could shut off the power- maybe I'm being overly mindful of every last watt when most would give up

Another thing which affects the life-span of an incandescent bulb (besides being turned off and on) is its wattage, which is pretty much synonymous with the temperature at which the filament operates. The lower the temperature at which the filament operates, the longer the filament will last. That's why the famous "fire-house light" has kept on burning almost continuously (barring power outages) for many decades. It has a 240V globe plugged into a 120V light outlet, so it operates at a far lower temperature than it's designed for. It's horribly inefficient of course, but it will probably last for decades longer because the filament isn't boiling its surface away as happens with globes which operate close to their rated voltage. (The boiled-off tungsten is attracted back to the filament and re-fuses with it until a spot wears thin enough for the inrush current to burn through the metal)

​​@@briannem.6787 ive been told a lot of abandoned buildings that are taken up by things like the bank still keep their power simply due to the fact that not heating the building in the winter at least a little bit can cause the building to quickly fall into disrepair. i could be wrong though so take it with a grain of salt.

My understanding is Hoover dam is infected by an invasive mussel they have to clear out of their intake pipes every few months or it completely blocks water flow.

NCR engineers managed to get the dam running again

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Check out the books these videos are based on if you want. Some of the questions are probably not going to make it into a video, so you get even more out of it.

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​@@EEEEEEEEE

your parents let their kid play with a 90 volt battery? yikes

@@jwnomad His last name is Addams...

@@jwnomad High volts, low amps

@@joedellinger9437 and no watts

assuming you meant 9 volt

Thank you, that's actually a useful and informative correction. It's such a novelty.

I just visited Iceland last week! Amazing place, and yeah the Svartsengi plant definitely isnt an island lol, I visited the blue lagoon which is fed by it. Very cool place, although I just barely missed yesterday's eruption! Just left a few days before it happened.

He is technically correct :). Iceland is an island. So Svartsengi island is Iceland.

Besides that, the power plant does not seem to be a good example of maintenance-free... Technically it may run quite long without maintenance, but it requires permanent defense against lava streams running towards it.

@@Rob2 Not sure if this was a joke or not, but gonna answer it as if were completely serious You are of course referring to the current eruption, but if we were counting natural disasters then that would also be accounted for every other power plant. A lot of countries experiences far more natural disasters than Iceland does volcanos, and even with the volcanos they are basically almost never so close that they threaten a powerplant. It is terrible bad luck rn, but it is not something you'd assume is common when calculating for this, especially when we assume the power plant would already stop working in just around three year timeframe (volcanos are frequent here, but frequent in geological scales still mean there might be decades or even centuries between eruptions in certain volcanic systems, impossible to really predict) And again, we are talking about how long it would last without maintenance, not how long it would last without humans stepping in during a natural disaster. It had after all run without worrying about lava streams for around 48 years already This is assuming this mass human disappearance wouldn't happen exactly today, but even if it did, it is still up in the air whether the lava will flow to it and breach the barriers or not. If we all disappeared it could still end up ok and working until important parts rust away

I love that show!

I think a lot of younger people haven't seen it. They are now people in a life after Life After People.

Or the wonderful book it that show was based on "The World Without Us" really good read

Great show

RTG's would trump that easy. Assuming there is some LED on the spacecraft

These were the not-very-smart watches. Could probably make a strong parallel with how both treated their workers, though.

@@Merennulli Yes, interesting point.

pretty sure its a reference to the last video about putting everybody in a singular place (rhode island) and having them all jump at the same time

@@spectre818 ya

​@ThatOneGuy5540 so how exactly did he: "[do] Rhode Island dirty"?

@@Ten_Thousand_Locusts By sending the entire world's population there and rendering it a "graveyard of billions," I guess?

As a German, I might add the sentence should be "as where we used to want to build". Seriously, whenever we're trying to build something in Germany it takes 5 years until the plans are done, another 5 years until the federal offices agree, another 5 years until the work actually begins and at least 10 more years for completion.

Germany hat a to wet enviroment. Plants will grow over highways and if no on cleans the solar panels dirt will accumulate. And then there is the problem with the batteries, they will fail after some years.

Germans: "It vill last for van souzands years." History: "Best I can do is 10 years."

That was my first thought as well, but I wonder about the assumption that there is an LED. The power consumption is so carefully assigned on a craft like that, there might not be any room to have something that draws energy without providing any function.

True in a sense. Transmissions are radio, which is on the em spectrum. Not visible light, but hey, why stick to visible? All the humans are gone.

@@irjake It could provide a function if the light also produced heat to help warm the guts of it.

There are/where a number of Russian lighthouses in the Arctic that used the same technology. If there is a prototype in a more friendly environment, that could possibly also last a very long time

@@michaelrudolph7003 Couldn't you just use the heat from the RTG for that?

There are two answers depending upon whether you mean things that are deliberately being used for light sources and those that emit light incidentally as a result of human activity.

i like the solar panel ending better :(

With no observer everything is possible and nothing is possible - simultaneously. With no human observer the possibilities,or lack of them,are without meaning - and with no observer,of any kind,..these very propositions never existed at all.

Can’t believe some people thought his plan was a *bright* idea

I read theranos and was trying to figure out how Elizabeth Holmes would be involved in this situation 😂😂

Thanos^2?

Thanos after snapping his fingers 33 times

​@@captaincole4511 Thanos^2 would mean reducing the population to 25% of it's original size, I think. Should be Thanos x 2

I thought no one would comment something like this, new vegas truly is a game

Wouldn't their orbit decay eventually?

@@robertlewis6915 For near-Earth satellites, I could see that being an issue, but for ones that are further out, I'm not so sure it couldn't rival the Cesium amount of time.

No. Due to the nature of radioactive decay, so long as there is one glass-sealed atom of Cesium somewhere, the last photon of light has not been emmited yet. Let's say there is 5 000 kg of Cesium. It will take 368.63 years to reduce it to 1 kg. But that is 7.3 moles, or 4.40E24 atoms. To reduce that to 1 atom, you would need additional 2 455.90 years, after which you can expect the last atom to pop in the next 60 years. So in total, it would take around 2884 years to reduce 5 tonnes of Cesium to nothing, with every doubling of mass adding another 30 years. I don't think any of the probes can expect to remain functional for 3000 years or so.

the issue isn’t decay it’s all those micro collisions

@@frantisekvrana3902 It's kind of cheap saying that a single photon emitted by a radioisotope created by humans thousands of years ago counts as an artificial light source, since you can't see it. I still think an LED on a solar-powered deep space satellite would be the longest lasting light source.

One bedroom in my house has a glow in the dark star sticker on the trim around the closet door. As near as I can tell, the last time an owner of the house had children here was in the late 1950s, and it still glows.

@@moconnell663yeah but it doesn’t emit light by itself since it depends on another light source directly shining on the material. I forgot the why tho,

​@@JunkerFunker3Like every other ones