These massive drones are attempting to plant 20 million trees from the sky, but to find out how i ended up here in the middle of this forest. We need to go back six months because that's when mr beast hit 20 million subs and someone suggested to celebrate, he should plant 20 million trees. It went super viral on reddit and twitter, at which point someone else suggested. He should team up with me and a bunch of other youtubers to make it happen, which got me thinking, and so with that i made my way to oregon to meet with mr beast and his crew to plant 20 million trees, one down 19 million.

999. 999. More to go it's 20 million trees in a 48-hour time period. The statistics may not be in our favor, but we got grit firm work aboard the board, save it.

These guys are talking a big game like they know what they're doing, but uh i'm gon na go, do an impromptu pull test. First of all, i don't love the angle. Can i just say that off the bat? No, oh, no, oh wow, we've been planning all day, solid, eight hours we're up to like 250 trees. So i mean it's a start.

It's definitely a start. Can we just say, look who's who's, the dirtiest. I saw you rubbing stuff on there's a field of trees. 300, after a full day of planning, 300 less than 20 million, so after talking it over, we decided we would play to our strengths.

Jimmy was going to try and solve our problem with a tweet, recruiting thousands of people, and i was going to pursue a more robotic solution, and so with that, i made my way further up the coast of washington using a shortcut i knew to see. If i could uncover a way to plant trees from the sky, but before i get into that, have you ever thought about where trees actually get their mass from the knee-jerk reaction is to think it comes from the soil. But that can't be true, because if you have a tree in a big pot as the tree gets bigger, the soil level doesn't go down at all. The answer, as it turns out, is that the mass comes from thin air.

The clue is, if you look at what the bulk of the tree is actually made of, it's almost entirely carbon, pretend i'm a tree. Basically, a tree sees a carbon dioxide molecule floating by then it powers up with energy from the sun using photosynthesis. Then it uses that energy to rip the carbon from the oxygen and it takes that carbon and slaps it on itself to get more swole and the tree's like hey humans, here's some beautiful, fresh oxygen. You can have back.

I don't need it so it takes the sea and leaves us with the o2. That's a sweet deal and so trees start really small, but in order to get bigger and bigger they're, just sucking more and more carbon out of the air, and so now you can see a tree and appreciate the beauty and the shade, but also that they're. Just these really massive vacuum bags completely stuffed full of carbon, and so i was in washington to meet with some people who had a crazy idea that just might be the key to helping mr beast and i plant those 20 million carbon vacuums. What's up their company's called droneseed and they're only about four years old and their idea is to use these massive drones to plant trees from the sky.

They do this in two steps. First, they send out a smaller recon drone that uses lasers to create a 3d map of the terrain and then from that they use software to find all the best spots to drop the trees to maximize their survivability. And then they create a flight path. For each of the drones to fly autonomously, then you load up the drone with a bunch of these seed pucks that you will drop from the sky and their design is super clever too, because in each puck, represented by a hockey puck in this case, there's a Special cocktail of around six seeds specifically chosen for the area where they're planting and then you have nutrients sort of like a fertilizer that will help the seed grow and keep it from drying out.

And because you don't want a bunch of squirrels or mice. Just making a buffet out of all the seeds you drop, you need some way to condition them to give the whole experience just a one-star review, so ghost peppers they're an olafactory and gustatory deterrent, which means if you eat it. You know the obvious reaction and, on the way out, it's the same thing. Excitatory is the euphemism for on the way out.

I taco bell last night and had some gustatory issues as well and then once you secure the puck dropper to the drone, it's time to fly light the fires kick the tires. Dude, that's like a mini house. Just flying that is wild. Oh there we go.

I don't know why it's so funny to me. It really just looks like mechanized poop in some ways, this sort of like mimics mother, nature right because, like a bird eats a seed, it flies it poops it and there's like nourishment around that seed right. Yes, that's exactly what it is biomimicry, and this is brutal terrain. You wouldn't be wanting to walk down in here, so to be able to access this from the sky is a really big deal after wildfires, we used to rely on mother nature to do reforestation for us, but due to some factors related to climate change, 40 of The time now we're seeing tall shrubs grow back instead of big old trees that can literally suck up tons of carbon and that's an example where drones are perfect because they can get in right away and start planting.

Trees in the smoldering remains where it's too dangerous. For humans to be on the ground, even with only three drones, you can reforest an area six times faster than a normal planting crew. If you can nail a fleet like this with just three, you could just scale this up. You can imagine the potential where you know you have a swarm of 100 drones.

The work drone seat is doing is awesome. It gives me so much hope when i see people use really cool technology to solve really big problems, but they're still fine-tuning their system before they massively scale up. So they just aren't going to be able to help us plant the 20 million trees in time, which is why we've been talking with all our youtube creator, friends for the past five months, and we decided if we were actually gon na plant 20 million trees by 2020, we would need to bring the entire youtube community together on this, i'm stoked, let's plant some trees, i'm so excited it could be one of the craziest things that youtube has ever seen. Just so many people.

We could end up with too many trees we're calling it team trees and we went through a bunch of different options on how to pull this off and eventually settled on working with the arbor day foundation. They're, the longest-running most well-respected tree planting non-profit - and we made a deal with them that for every dollar we give them they would plant one tree, it's basically magic and i had to prove that to my buddy thomas, it's a dollar i'm going to call my buddy Zach king here zach king ooh, oh hi, mark hey, zach, we've got a dollar for you, oh okay, so you're gon na take the dollar put it in some dirt and then pull boom. You get a tree, oh wow, pretty slick, and so despite mine and mr b's best effort, we need your help because to plant 20 million trees, we're really looking to raise 20 million dollars. That's just an insane goal, especially when you only have two short months to pull it off, but starting today, you're gon na see the entire youtube community come together on this, like you've, never seen before 20 million trees.

I am so in proud members of team trees. We're filming a music video, don't win all the way i will plant at least a couple of trees. The reason i'm most excited about this is it feels like the end of power rangers when they would all assemble into the big thing and fight stuff together and do good. This will absolutely be historic and we need you on team trees.

This is our chance to end this decade. On a super strong note, it's a constructive way to tell the policy makers that this generation and our community on youtube truly cares about the environment. It's basically all of us joining together to give a massive fist bump to freaking mother earth. I personally will be planting 50 000 trees by donating 50 000, but that's still way less than 20 million.

So join me and mr beast and all your favorite youtube creators by clicking that blue button right over there and planting as many trees as you can afford right now. We honestly need you, if you're a working adult, consider how many trees you're willing to plant to send a message if you're a kid talk to your parents, about this, get creative and do some chores to earn some money. Ask for some freaking trees for christmas. You can pick up 20 litre soda cans and then recycle them, and that's literally one more tree that will exist in the world than if you wouldn't have done that this is all hands on deck.

So either click that blue button or go to teamtrees.org and turn your dollars into trees and then for, like the next two months, make sure you like and double tap and retweet anything having to do with team trees and harass your favorite creators to join. If they somehow haven't already, and so now in exchange for joining team trees, if you've ever wondered how we really know, climate change is occurring. Stick with me for two minutes, because i'm going to break it down real simple, using this column of ice a while back, scientists went down to antarctica and drilled out a bunch of ice cores like this and what's cool. Is that because ice layers up over time? The really old ice is at the bottom, and the newer ice is on top now, as you know, ice traps, air bubbles.

So, as you move your way down the column, you get these little pristine pockets of air going back in time. What they found is that co2 levels in the atmosphere naturally fluctuate from about 200 to 300.. But then, starting with the industrial revolution, we started burning way more coal, which is made from dead trees, and we started burning down forests for resources to keep pace with a growing population. The problem with both of these is we're taking all this carbon.

That was in the ground in these massive carbon vacuum bags and we're putting it back into the air at a super unnatural rate, so much so that around 1950 we busted into the 300s for the first time in at least a million years, and we weren't done Yet because, just four years ago, in 2015, we broke into the 400s when i started writing the script for this video. We were at 411 today we're at 412., and this is the actual current data from nasa's excellent website, which does a great job, laying out all the data they've gathered on climate change. A lot of my old friends at nasa played a role in collecting this data. Now, here's the punch line and why all of this matters, if you independently, look at average temperature over the past million years and then overlaid with average co2 in the atmosphere they match up pretty much exactly so.

This relatively sudden, spike of all the co2 in the air is not a good thing and sure enough right now, we are consistently breaking the hottest month on earth records, which has a lot of knock-on effects which will start snowballing unless we can band together and reverse The trend and it's important to note with regards to team trees that 20 million trees by 2020 isn't going to cure climate change. But it's a step in the right direction and a constructive positive way to send the message that we see the science and we care. So thanks for watching and thanks for doing your part to make a difference, i am so stoked. We totally got this.

You.