How do you want to end everything? Meteorite? Gamma Ray Burst? Nuclear annihilation? Earth-Shattering Kaboom? Or just throw physics itself in the trash? Pick your poison, and there's more of them in the back.
"We'd like to make more videos about cataclysmic, destructive events; because honestly, it's a lot of fun to make these."
— Steve Taylor, being a Lemony Narrator as always
If you ask a regular viewer of Kurzgesagt what they remember it for, you're likely to get one of two responses. The more cheerful one would be that they remember it for its pleasing style of animation and its fun approach towards discussing many different scientific topics. By contrast, the less cheerful one would be how all that just makes it a Disguised Horror Story: the channel explores many dark, depressing and outright terrifying scenarios regarding forces far beyond our control, ranging from basic human mortality to outright Cosmic Horror Stories, and thus what some most remember it for is the existential dread it gave them. Tread carefully on this page if you hope to sleep tonight… or at worst, if you want to keep your brain from splitting open from all the stress. Because in a nutshell, Kurzgesagt proudly knows the best way to give their viewership mind-numbing chills.
But if you're not planning on sleeping tonight, no worries: Kurzgesagt has all their greatest sources of Nightmare Fuel neatly compiled on one "Existential Crisis"
playlist. Have fun with that.
- Kurzgesagt likes to discuss the end of the universe as we know it a lot.
- One video explains three possible outcomes for our universe, either by Big Crunch, Big Rip, or Heat Death.
- Gamma-ray bursts can sterilize a planet, if not directly by serious radiation damage, by stripping it of its ozone layer and leaving it to get cooked by UV light emitted by its star. There's absolutely nothing to do about that and there's no way to know that they are coming towards the Earth until they hit it.
- Vacuum decay: The Higgs field might not be stable, but metastable (i.e. it won't move from its current energy level without a really big push), in which case it can still move to a state of much lower energy. If it does so, the resulting bubble will not only expand at the speed of light (i.e. no one will see it coming) and destroy everything it touches, but will also rewrite all laws of physics. Oh, and said bubble will only stop expanding once the entire universe has been consumed, there's also nothing keeping multiple bubbles from exist at any given time.In the true vacuum of the sphere, the Standard Model will be overthrown, superseded by new physics that we don't know. [...] Vacuum decay won't just destroy life, it will destroy chemistry itself.
- What if you built a pile of atomic bombs so massive that it literally uses all of the Uranium present on Earth? Everything dies. EVERYTHING. Nuclear Armageddon. It's the worst fear that a lot of people had during the Cold War made into reality. And the cherry on top of the horribleness sundae: supposedly life itself will thrive after a few million years better than when humans were around.
- The explosion is so massive, it even affects the soundtrack of the video: before the explosion, it is an upbeat, technological-sounding tune carrying the usual excitement for big explosions. Then, suddenly, after approximately 4:46, it abruptly stops, followed by a loud bell ringing sound, winds howling, and a geiger counter clicking. The music restarts after, but it has become a slow, somber piece as the devastation unfolds. It only reforces the feeling that it is truely the end.
- Forget building a massive arsenal with all of Earth's uranium—detonating just one nuclear bomb over a major city would cause death and suffering on a scale so unthinkably titanic that it borders on an Outside-Context Problem for the people in that city, not just from the sheer obliteration of the blast itself, but from the destruction of critical infrastructure that a modern city needs to sustain itself and provide aid during a disaster of this scale. We're used to living in a world where help will always arrive no matter how bad things get. But not this time. And, as the last segment of the video hammers home, this isn't just some distant future possibility like some of the other apocalypses on this page; it could happen today.
- As well as the massive large scale horror, the video also shows some more personal horrors. One segment has someone desperately crawling to the sound of an ambulance- not knowing that its just a wreck and no help is coming. Perhaps more chillingly, a later segment discusses the black rain after a strike, radioactive enough to kill anyone who has prolonged contact with it. This is said over a little girl wading through a black pool and starting to cough...
- One video
- Societal collapse, anyone?
- The death of bees worldwide due to CCD will cause food shortages.
- Improper use of antibiotics can lead to the evolution of unstoppable 'superbugs'.
- The idea that we are willing to surrender our freedoms for security in the face of terrorism.
- The death of bees worldwide
- Several videos just get downright philosophical.
- Where are all the aliens? Are we alone in the universe? The latter gets asked a lot.
- Humanity is limited to the Local Group due to the expansion of the universe.
- Future generations will only be able to witness Milkdromeda, the eventual final result of the Milky Way and Andromeda combining and nothing else, as the other galaxy groups will eventually pass beyond the cosmic horizon, their light fading away to nothingness. While their sky may still be full of stars from Milkdromeda, any future civilisations within the galaxy may well be unable to find out the true history of the universe because of this.
- Where are
- The Fermi Paradox. Pretty much all of the implications.
- If we are alone in the universe, why?
- Filters that we have yet to face.
- Especially the Final Filter, just after the Graveyard of Life.
- Why We Should NOT Look For Aliens - The Dark Forest explores the darkest solution for the Fermi Paradox: possible geopolitical competition between interstellar civilizations could create alien civilizations that are destructively paranoid, comparing them to a hunter in the forest who fears the unknown, and is prepared to kill in response to any perceived threat to itself. Combine that with aliens controlling superweapons of unimaginable power, and you have a recipe for the possible extinction of entire sapient societies.
- The greatest animal threat to humanity isn't a large, scary animal, but a tiny insect: the mosquito. They reproduce too rapidly to be exterminated, and carry some of the most dangerous diseases in the world, including malaria, which is described as an Eldritch Abomination.
- All of our throwing stuff into space is creating a very unfortunate side-effect: pieces of debris and shrapnel floating in orbit, travelling at such velocities that a piece of debris the size of a pea can hit with the force of a missile. Even should our astronauts avoid having their shuttles torn asunder in this debris field, the satellites that make modern civilization possible are within this debris field, and all it would take is the wrong piece of debris hitting the wrong satellite to throw our technology back to the 1970's. Worse still is the possibility of a collision cascade wherein pieces of debris keep colliding against each other, breaking apart into smaller, faster pieces of debris, setting into motion Disaster Dominoes that turns the Earth's orbit into a deathtrap through which no astronaut can pass and in which no satellite can survive. This would place humankind in a situation where it would take decades, if not centuries for it to be safe enough to go back into orbit, with Earth now a planet-sized prison.
- One video talks about how robots will eventually take over many kinds of employment in the near future, and the staggering social implications of this.
- From the intro of the second black hole video. The black hole starts deleting the universe and laughing while the music turns into a hollow-sounding Drone of Dread.
- The Warrior Kingdoms of the Weaver Ant was only their 3rd video to focus on ants and their societies, but featured a noticeable increase in animation fidelity. While it was mostly used to make the video just a lot prettier to look at it also had a major effect on the fight scenes between ant colonies.
- While their first 2 ant videos featured ants fighting and killing each-other, the violence was very tame, usually only showing the ants hitting each-other until one collapsed, and any dismemberment was either not animated or completely clean. This video starts with the same kind of shot, showing the ants poised to fight each-other, but suddenly turns into a much scarier depiction of these fights. The scene zooms into the fight, showing in much more detail how the opposing ant flashes open their mandibles to attack, as the weaver ant trembles in fear. Then the opposing ants grab the weaver ant by the antenna and leg, with the victim visibly panicking, followed by graphic close up shots of the ant's antenna being sliced in half, and their abdomen being ripped open with it squealing in pain, complete with visible blood. It's an extremely jarring contrast to their earlier ant videos which, while still talking about ant warfare, didn't feature such graphic Family-Unfriendly Violence.
- Once the battle scene ends, we're treated to a horrific shot of the many dead ants strewn about the forest floor, having fallen tremendous heights from the vines and still twitching in pain.
- The Day the Dinosaurs Died. If you didn't think the dinosaurs were a Woobie Species before, you definitely will when you watch this video, which shows how the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid in nightmarish detail. First, the world is subjected to earthquakes, tsunamis, a massive fireball that burns much of life on Earth, and large numbers of volcanic eruptions. Then the debris in the atmosphere creates a global cooling that kills off the remaining dinosaur species by freezing them solid. And the video ends with the narrator speculating this could be our fate...
- What If Earth got Kicked Out of the Solar System is about how humans would experience the loss of the Sun. If a red dwarf star passed by close enough to kick Earth out of its orbit around the Sun, humans would see a star grow brighter and bigger in the sky for months, until it's bigger than the moon, and casts an eerie, red glow at night. Eventually, it would start shrinking again... but so would the Sun, as Earth is no longer in orbit and is being catapulted out of the Solar System. As Earth gets further and further away, global temperatures and light exposure drop and food no longer grows, leaving every surface-dwelling creature to slowly starve or freeze to death, before their corpses and all remnants of human civilization are buried below the growing polar ice caps, which are then buried beneath the ten-meter thick layer of frozen nitrogen and oxygen that used to be the atmosphere. The oceans suffer a similar fate, as they freeze over in a thick layer of ice that grows downward, raising the concentration of salt in the liquid water beneath, poisoning just about all marine life. Even if humans managed to build habitats to survive in, they will likely only be able to sustain a few million people, leaving the rest of humanity to starve.
- This Virus Shouldn't Exist (but it does), while describing the effect of viruses on their host cells, gives us the lovely mental image of:
- Imagine, a mouse crawling into your mouth and using your guts and bones and fat tissue to build a mouse factory.
- The Most Horrible Parasite: Brain Eating Amoeba details the specifics of one particularly nasty species of amoeba, Naegleria fowleri, which has a taste for brains!note . If you're unlucky enough to experience the chain of events required for it to get into your nervous system, having water with the amoeba inside sent up your nose, you're already as good as dead. Once the amoeba crosses the meninges into the cerebrospinal fluid, it begins rampaging across the brain, ripping nerve cells apart and 'gnawing' on them for sustenance, all while the immune system (understandably) throws every single Godzilla Threshold weapon it has at the invaders, only to be outsmarted at every turn. Some extreme countermeasures even cause collateral damage, which isn’t good when they’re in the brain. Eventually, those unfortunate enough to be infected by Naegleria fowleri suffer horrendous symptoms, then die a painful death from their brain swelling up and crushing itself against the skull.
- The Most Brutal Ant: The Slaver Ant Polyergus wasn't lying about its title. Imagine that around your first few days of life, your colony is suddenly attacked by a rival colony. It seems that your clan will win, but then the intruders whip out something deadly, an invisible Mind Control fog that hypnotizes the military into a blind panic, allowing for the enemy to leisurely waltz into the nursery you're stationed in and begin to kidnap you and your siblings and flee. That's bad enough as it is, but then some of your sisters are eaten as food. That's fucked up as it is, but worse still, compared to what comes next, that was an act of mercy for those eaten. They then spray the same hypnotic gas they used at your colony's military onto you and your surviving sisters, forcefully indoctrinating you and your siblings into what is essential a slave cult where you must forage for food to feed your captors and defend their lives until your last breath, and should your home colony try to rescue you and your children from this fate, you will then be gripped by an uncontrollable urge to kill your saviors. If these ants still have their original minds in there, And I Must Scream is definitely what's going on in them.
- This video puts the viewer in the first-person shoes of a newly inaugurated president who is suddenly faced with a possible nuclear attack, and given only a few minutes to decide whether or not to retaliate. As the General explains what's happening, there are a number of instances where it's intentionally ambiguous whether or not there's actually an incoming attack. For example, there's a moment when he notices the radar malfunctioning and chalks it up to some of the incoming missiles being detonated mid-air to intentionally scramble that by ionizing the atmosphere, but could that malfunction have a different source, and actually be the cause of the detected attack being a false alarm? The General even goes out of his way to mention the number of casualties on each side, as well as the fact that both attacks could result in a nuclear winter, but the enemy's attack alone could possibly do that on its own. All the while the importance of an immediate decision is emphasized due to the time it takes for silos and bombers to get out of the blast radius of the incoming missiles, and the possible communication breakdowns after the attacks land.General: (As he pushes the suitcase with the Big Red Button towards the president/viewer, talking rapidly and urgently) I'm sure you have questions, but you have to give orders without expecting answers right now. With an attack of this scale, there's no guarantee communications or assets will be intact in a few minutes. We're out of time. We need a decision, sir. (As the camera zooms into his agitated face) Can. We. Launch?!
If the existential dread's gotten to you by now, however… maybe give this special video
on Kurzgesagt's philosophy a look. It could help put things into perspective.