WE ARE 812 YEARS OLD

Good morning, Hank; it's Wednesday. Today, I'm going to try to re-carbon-neutralize the vlogbrothers, but first three notes... Number One: I loved your interview with the mayor of Missoula; I wish that he could be my mayor without me having to move to Missoula. Number Two: Hank, it was a year ago today that our friend and Ningmaster, Tom, almost died in a bicycle accident, and was in a coma forever, but then he didn't die, and now he's here, and yay! And Number Three, Hank: I should probably button this button. We're running a video blog here, not a *** studio. Okay, Hank, so in October of 2007, I carbon-neutralized Nerdfighteria at a cost of, like, 30 bucks. So I figured I'd do it again even though we now have slightly more views. By the way, if you don't believe that carbon dioxide emissions contribute to climate change, that's... fine. Okay, so vlogbrothers videos have been viewed about 122 million times; the average video length is around 3 minutes and 30 seconds. Of course, lots of people don't watch the entire video... I mean, particularly the giraffe sex videos; they get there and they're like, "Where's the giraffe sex? There's no giraffe sex! It's just a guy; he's talking. He's not very funny; he's got funny hair. I hate this guy! Click!" But then again, Nerdfighteria does a lot of things other than watch videos like create profiles on the Ning, and post in Your Pants, and post YouTube comments... so let's just take a wild guess and say that it averages out to 3 minutes and 30 seconds, because that's a good number for calculation and I'm pretty bad at math, so I need help. Okay, so 122 million times 3.5 is... really? 427 million minutes? Now, Hank, because I've seen the musical "Rent," I know there are 525,600 minutes in a year, which means that Nerdfighteria is more than 812 years old! By the way, Hank, speaking of the amazing things Nerdfighteria can do because it's 812 years old: Did you know that there are nerdfighters in Your Pants currently trying to figure out the mystery of Gussie Manlove, Walter Manlove's wife? Link in the dooblydoo. So, Hank, we're talking about a total of about 7,116,667 hours. It takes an average of 120 watts per hour for computers to browse the Internet, so you multiply that big number times 120, and you get... 854 million, zero thousand, forty watts. Did I say that number right? God, I'm bad at math. Which is 854,000.04 kilowatts, but I'm going to eliminate that "zero-four," Hank, because it makes the math hard. On average, in the US, it takes about 1.35 pounds of carbon to create a kilowatt of energy, ergo... Nerdfighteria is responsible for 1,152,900 pounds of carbon, which means, Hank, that Nerdfighteria, in four years, has created more carbon emissions than the average Swede will in his or her lifetime. That's right, Hank. Nerdfighteria is already... a Swede. And let me remind you, Hank, Nerdfighteria is not even a person; it's an idea. On the upside, Hank, I already got rid of 23,000 pounds of our carbon emissions in 2007, which means that now we only have 1.13 million pounds of carbon to offset. It would take just over $5,000 to offset our carbon emissions at carbonfund.org, but I'm not going to do that, Hank, uh, because someday, Henry is gonna want to go to college. But, Hank, when you think about the fact that Nerdfighteria is responsible for one million pounds of carbon emissions and the vast majority of people have never even heard the word "Nerdfighteria," it begins to give you a sense of how huge the problem we're facing really is. I mean, if you think about YouTube's carbon emissions, you're talking about trillions of pounds of carbon. I still think YouTube is awesome; I certainly think Nerdfighteria is awesome, but Hank, we need to be aware of the price of that awesome. I'll see you on Friday. Nerdfighters from Bahrain to New Zealand to Libya to Morocco are experiencing mega-worldsuck for a lot of different reasons. And so, Nerdfighteria, I just want to encourage you, first, to pay attention, and second, to help where you can. There are some links in the dooblydoo.