When Will We Run Out Of Names? - YouTube

Hey, Vsauce.

Michael here. According to the U.S. Census Bureau

right now, in America, there are 106

people named Harry Potter. 1 007

named James Bond and eight people

named Justin Bieber. They're just

aren't enough names to go around.

There are more than 300 million people

in America but a hundred and fifty thousand last names and five thousand

first names

is all you need to name 9 out of every

10 of them. When are we gonna run out of names?

Perhaps it's already happened to you.

If it hasn't, when? Ten years, twenty years, a hundred, a thousand.

When will someone with your exact name

become famous? So famous in fact that your legacy

changes forever to just being not

the person people think of when they hear your name.

And for that matter, when will every reasonably memorable pronounceable

band name or brand name be taken?

When will authors have no choice but to just start reusing book titles?

According to Rovi Corp, owner of AllMusic.com,

the most used band name is 'Bliss',

followed in order by 'Mirage', 'One',

'Gemini', 'Legacy', 'Paradox'

and 'Rain'. In the past when

fewer bands had already been created and you couldn't just Google up

every single band, overlap was easier to get away with

and one word band names were plentiful. But now, after years and years and years

of

band formation, well, we have

'The Who', but we also have 'The What?',

'The Where', 'The When', 'The Why', 'The How'

and even 'The The'.

In order to stand out now, and have your own unique name,

you have to be a bit more creative.

'O', 'Diarrhea Planet'

or 'Betty's Not a Vitamin', which, by the way,

is no longer true. Betty became a vitamin in 1994.

What about Twitter handles or email addresses?

Have we already reached peak username? We already find ourselves often having to

use abbreviations, initials, numbers or just

choosing something completely different.

Will our children or our children's children

live in a world where the only remaining Gmail addresses is

are just random strings of alphanumeric characters?

Are we approaching a name crisis?

And if so, should we even call it a name crisis,

lest we use up yet another precious name?

Maybe you already share your name with someone famous.

But if you don't, how long will it be until you

probably will? I mean, new famous people are popping up all the time

faster now than ever before because of the Internet and they are gobbling up

top Google search billing. Maybe it won't happen until

long after you've been dead but shouldn't the reservoir

names, not taken by notable people, eventually

run out? Computer scientist Samuel Arbesman approximated

how many famous people there are alive today

and I think his calculation will be helpful. You see, he points out that if we

allow

"famous" to simply mean "being notable enough to have your own Wikipedia page",

well, because there are 700,000 living people

with Wikipedia pages right now, that means one out of every 10,000 people on

earth today

are famous. Assuming at the least that that proportion remains constant

since 255 people are born every minute,

that means every hour a future famous person

is born. Their name destined to become primarily associated

with them, not everyone else who

shares their name. All of those people will be relegated to

disambiguation or the post-nominal,

not the famous one. Luckily, if you do the math, you'll find that even at a rate

of one future

famous person born every hour, it would still take

dozens of millennia for most of us to expect

a future famous person with our exact name to emerge.

Plus names change. New ones become popular,

others obsolesce, but for fun, let's not focus on names we popularly

use and instead look at how many possible names

there can be. The Social Security Administration allows up to 36

letters

for a complete name. Now, including spaces,

27 letters filling 36

spots, with repetition allowed,

means

3 sextillion possible combinations.

That's more than Earth has

atoms. So let's refine

our limits. How many pronounceable names

are possible? For that, I say we look at what Randall Munroe,

the author of the fantastic 'What If?' did when asked about naming

stars. If you want to give every single star

in the observable universe a unique but pronounceable

English name, how long would the names have to be?

His approximation is really fascinating. If we define

unpronounceable word as a word that contains consonant-vowel

pairs, we can roughly figure that there are about 105 different

such pair possibilities.

105. That's not too much different from

99. So, funny enough, there are about the same number of

consonant-vowel pairs possible as there are

two-digit numbers,

which means we could give every star in the observable universe

a sayable unique name

with just 24 letters, the same number of digits it would take to just

number all of them. So, the bottom line is we may each have to give up

uniquely owning a word or name that's common

today, but the potential number of names that can be made

is really hardy. In fact, before we run out of those

our species will likely evolve to communicate in a completely different

way.

Also, names aren't

just labels.

A name on a screen, a username, a handle, a screen name

doesn't always act exactly like

its owner. User names can travel

more quickly and more widely than flesh-and-blood people

and do things that their puppeteers wouldn't normally do

away from the keyboard. It's called the

online disinhibition effect. If you can't

see the people you're interacting with and they can't see you,

you're all just online hiding behind different names than usual,

why hold back? I mean, clearly such a system can't be

serious business. On the Internet

no one knows you're a dog. Why be nice or

tell the truth? The subreddit KarmaCourt

investigates and uncovers people who may think that the less face-to-face nature

of the Internet makes lies easier to get away with.

Like this person, who posted an image suggesting that they've been single

for a year but had users found out posted

three months earlier a picture of

my girlfriend's cat. These behaviors aren't

just what humans do when they can be anonymous

or can hide behind different names, these behaviors can also be caused

by the names themselves. Studies have found that the username you use

can impact how you behave.

Your own pre-existing stereotypes and expectations of certain words,

shapes, colors can be confirmed by your behavior,

in the same way that studies have found NFL and NHL players

play more aggressively when wearing black uniforms.

Studies have also found that the more sexualized

an avatar is you make someone use, the more conscious they will be

of their own body image. And the more an avatar resembles you,

the more correlated you watching it exercise

is with you being more likely

to exercise more. It's called

the Proteus effect. The features of a

cyberspace version of yourself, a username and avatar

can actually change you, the

meat space "IRL" you. Usernames and avatars then

aren't just handles attached to us.

Psychologically, we often interact with them

as if they're friends, distinct beings

we created. They help us out

but they also can influence us,

egg us on, dare us to do things we wouldn't normally do because they offer

us protection,

entertainment. Some make us feel safe,

professional, funny, dangerous,

attractive. We want cool ones.

The cool ones make us look cool.

As we go about our daily lives and vie for

attention, we are more and more frequently doing so

with another name and exclusively through that name

only. So, it becomes quite interesting that

we're not going to run out of them anytime soon.

In fact, they might run out of us first and

may, in many ways, run

us.

And as always,

thanks for watching.