Name: The Most Complex Language in the World
Uploaded: 2026-01-25T17:02:50.000Z
Duration: 11 min 55 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

You are cells, your muscles, organs, skin and hair.

They are in your blood and in your bones.

They don't want anything, they don't feel anything.

They're as conscious as a stone or a chair or a neutron star.

Cells just follow their programming that's been evolving and changing for billions of years.

Molded by natural selection, they are machines.

And yet here they are, driven entirely by the fundamental forces of the universe.

Right at the border where physics becomes biology.

Sometimes to get a truer understanding of how amazing something is, you need to hold your breath and dive in really deep.

Look around the room you're sitting in right now.

Let's fill it top to bottom with trillions of grains of sand, billions of grains of rice, hundreds of thousands of grapes, a few thousand apples and a dozen watermelons.

This is what the inside of your cells looks like in terms of numbers.

They're mostly filled up with water molecules.

Water gives the cells insides the consistency of soft jelly and enables other things to move around easily.

Almost all the other things, the rice and fruit, are proteins.

More than 10,000 different kinds, depending on the function of the cell.

Your cells are basically protein robots, as is all life really.

In fact, all solid, non fat parts of your body are mostly made out of protein.

Proteins are dead things that make life happen.

Cells need to do many very hard things to stay alive, get food in and waste out, grow and build structures, escape danger or react to stimuli, make copies of themselves and so on.

All of this is done by speaking the language of life.

And the words of this language are proteins.

This is how this language works in a nutshell.

It all begins with amino acids, tiny organic molecules.

They're the Alphabet of the language of Life.

There are 21 different ones, like different amino acid, A, amino acid B, C, and so on.

If you put around 50amino acids together, they form a protein, which in the language of life is a word.

And if you put many of these protein words together, you get a sentence called a biological pathway.

Let's oversimplify a bit and say, for example, your cell needs to down sugar.

With the language of life, it may take the amino acids for the letters B, R, E, A and K to form the protein word break, then combine this word with other protein words to form a biological pathway sentence.

In reality, this language of life is so complex that it defies imagination.

You need to know about 8,000 words to speak a human language really well.

But in the language of life, there are an estimated 20,000.

And while the average English word has five letters, human proteins have an average of 375amino acids.

The longest protein has more than 30,000.

And cells need to execute thousands of steps at any moment.

If they ever stop speaking the language of life, they die.

Ok, but how do mindless cells speak a language this complex?

There are 21amino acids that can be combined to form proteins.

And proteins are made up of dozens to hundreds to thousands of amino acids.

For the average protein length of a human cell of 375amino acids, you get a stunning 6.8 times 10 to the power of 495 possible proteins.

Your cells can make a quadrillion googol, googol, googol, googol times more than there are atoms in the universe.

Most of these possible proteins are useless.

Just like with human language, most random letter combinations are just gibberish.

So you need to know which words, which proteins make up a language to speak it properly.

If you untangled a cell's DNA, it would be about two metres long.

All of your body's DNA combined into one long string would reach to the sun and back over 20 times.

Around 1% of your DNA is made up of genes, which are basically protein dictionaries that contain all the words of the language of life your cells speak.

But genes are also the building manuals for all the proteins your cells need to function.

The rest of your DNA is probably not useless, but basically like a set of rules.

It's like the book of grammar of the language of life.

Which proteins need to be built, at which time?

Ok, letters, words, sentences, dictionary and grammar.

But of course, this is all just a metaphor for something mind numbingly complex.

Let's dive a little deeper to catch a glimpse of reality.

Now that we have some basic principles, we have a chance to understand how dead things make life together.

And for that, we need a fundamental force of the universe.

The elementary particles that make up atoms which make up amino acids have different charges that attract or repel each other.

The 21 different amino acids all have slightly different charges.

Some are more negative, others more positive.

When your cells build proteins, they put different amino acids Together in chains, basically long strings.

Now, because of the different charges of the amino acids used, these strings begin to fold in on themselves.

This folding process is so complex that we still haven't completely understood how exactly it works.

But In a nutshell, 1D strings become 3D structures.

Proteins are basically 3D puzzle pieces with a very specific shape.

In the world of proteins, shape is everything.

Because its 3D shape determines which areas of a protein are charged in which way.

And this determines how it can interact with other proteins.

All of these differently charged puzzle pieces can snap together or repet each other.

When they snap together, their charge changes, which can make them change their shape, which then makes them a new protein, a new tool that can do new things.

This is what makes proteins so incredibly powerful.

You can do basically everything with them.

They can snap together like Lego pieces to build complex structures.

They can form complex micro machines that use energy to do work.

And maybe most stunningly, they can convey information.

Let's say there's a toxic chemical entering your cell.

There may be a protein shaped to snap to that toxin.

If the protein finds that toxin, it changes its shape.

With that new shape, it can now snap into a different protein that changes its shape again.

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The Most Complex Language in the World

incredibly

sophisticated

metabolism

basically