Easter Island Mythbusting and the Universe’s Expansion Rate

Curiosity Weekly

Warner Bros. Discovery

Science

4.6 • 963 Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2021

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Learn why Easter Island never had a population collapse; and how scientists are measuring the expansion of our universe.

Easter Island never had a population collapse, as commonly believed by Grant Currin

Resilience, not collapse: What the Easter Island myth gets wrong. (2021, July 13). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/793195
Johnson, S. (2021, July 16). Busting the Easter Island myth: there was no civilization collapse. Big Think; Big Think. https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/easter-island
DiNapoli, R. J., Crema, E. R., Lipo, C. P., Rieth, T. M., & Hunt, T. L. (2021). Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Nature Communications, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24252-z

Scientists can't decide how fast the universe is expanding, but this scientist says there's no conflict at all by Briana Brownell

“There may not be a conflict after all” in expanding universe debate. (2021). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-06/uoc-mn062921.php
Freedman, W. L. (2021). Measurements of the Hubble Constant: Tensions in Perspective. arXiv preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.15656

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com.
0:06.0	I'm Cody Gough.
0:07.0	And I'm Ashley Hamer.
0:08.0	Today you learn about why the rumors of a population collapse on Easter Island are greatly exaggerated and how the debate
0:14.9	over how fast the universe is expanding might be no problem at all.
0:18.8	Let's satisfy some curiosity.
0:20.8	Have you ever heard of Rappanue?
0:24.0	It's an isolated island in the South Pacific between Chile and Australia.
0:29.0	You probably have heard of it, but it's more popularly known as Easter Island. It's famous for two things,
0:36.4	giant stone heads and civilization collapse. The statues are definitely real, but a new study suggests that rumors of that collapse may just be that.
0:47.0	Rumors.
0:49.0	Rappanuey is not the easiest place to live.
0:52.0	The island is about the size of Washington DC and
0:55.2	it's so remote that humans didn't settle there until around 1200 CE. The climate
1:01.6	got a lot drier about 300 years later because of natural changes to global
1:06.4	weather patterns.
1:08.0	And all kinds of problems emerged after 1722, when Europeans quote unquote discovered the island on Easter Sunday and
1:16.9	killed about a dozen inhabitants. Later visitors enslaved about half the
1:22.3	islands population.
1:24.6	But in the Western imagination, Easter Island is a cautionary tale
1:28.6	about what can happen when a society over-exploites the resources that it depends on.
1:34.4	That story goes something like this.
	...

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