A few years ago

in Minneapolis an angry dad stormed into the retail store

Target. His daughter, a high schooler,

had been receiving coupons in the mail from the store for things like cribs

and diapers. Was Target encouraging his daughter,

a minor, to go out and get pregnant? well

Well, the store apologized but a few days later they heard back from the father. He

told them

"a few things have been going on in my household

I was unaware of. My daughter is due

in August. I owe you an apology." You see,

Target's internal algorithms have been tracking

and processing his daughter's purchases and recently

she'd started buying different items than usual.

Things like certain vitamin supplements and scent-free soaps and lotions.

Behaviors the system flagged as evidence

she could be pregnant, thus they her sent the coupons.

And they were right. Without being told,

Target knew that a girl was pregnant

before her own father.

We are tracked and followed digitally now more than

ever before. We live in a world of 24/7 CCTV,

browser cookies, trackable debit cards and cell phones and GPS,

fingerprinting and DNA analysis. But despite

all of that, every single year

in the United States alone more than 2,000 people

disappear and are never found again

dead or alive.

Where do missing people go? How did they disappear?

What if you disappeared and

how do you know you haven't already

disappeared? In many cases, missing persons are the victims

of unsolved or unknown crimes.

They may have suffered accidents or taken their own lives

and their bodies were never found. Or they may be perfectly fine and have simply

escaped their old life, old friends and family, old debt and obligations to start

a new life

somewhere else, possibly as someone else.

How long would it take for people to notice

if you disappeared? Well, think about it. I mean,

it sort of depends on who you are, how you live

and how you disappeared. In most jurisdictions after about five to seven

years,

if no one has heard anything from you at all,

you can be declared dead in absentia.

This is what happened to French astronomer

Guillaume Le Gentil. In the 18th century hundreds of people traveled far and wide

to observe the transit of Venus from different locations

on earth. They knew that by comparing their measurements they could calculate

more accurately than ever before just how far away

the Sun was. So, Le Gentil

left Paris in 1760 for Pondicherry

in India. But after a storm blew him off course

and the British occupied Pondicherry, he was forced to spend the day

of the transit on a boat at sea, which rocked

too much for accurate measurements to be taken. Now, the next

transit would happen in 8 years. But after that, the next

next transit wouldn't happen for another 100 years.

So, he stuck around. He didn't return to Paris. Instead, he built an observatory

and waited. When he finally returned

to Paris, 11 years after leaving, he found that he had been declared

dead. His wife had remarried,

his family had plundered his belongings and his position

at the Royal Academy of Sciences had been given to someone else.

He never did see the transit of Venus,

by the way. On the day that it happened, the sky above him

was overcast.

We know the human population

of Earth.

Kind of.

Population figures and counters are only estimations.

Individuals are best accounted for by real people

in their real lives. But that doesn't always

happen.

Earlier this year Janet Veal passed away in her apartment

in Ringwood, Hampshire. Large portions of her body

were eaten by her pet cats before she was discovered

weeks later. And seven years ago

Joyce Carol Vincent was found dead on her sofa,

in Wood Green; or at least her skeleton

was found. She'd been dead for at least three

years and no one ever checked on her.

Her television was still on.

And four days after Timothy McVeigh bombed

a federal building in Oklahoma City, taking

168 lives, a severed

left leg was found in the rubble.

No one knew who it belonged to. The legs of all the other victims had been

accounted for

and no one else had been reported missing.

DNA analysis showed that the leg belonged to a Lakesha Levy,

but she had already been buried with both her legs.

So, they dug up her corpse.

She'd been buried with someone else's left

leg. The legs were swapped, but because her body had been embalmed,

DNA in the unknown leg could not be analyzed.

To this day no one knows who that leg

belongs to. The 169th

victim remains a mystery.

Some conspiracy theorists argue that the leg may have belonged

to be actual bomber, someone besides Timothy McVeigh,

who was close enough to the explosion to be obliterated completely,

except for one leg. Regardless,

what it does show is that it is possible for a person to disappear

without anyone ever asking where they went.

Sometimes people are reported dead or missing

even when they aren't. Premature obituaries

are common. Many living people already have one on file.

If a famous person dies, the media, television, newspapers, magazines, well

they need a full story as soon as possible. So, they

prepare them ahead of time, locked away, leaving only the dates and circumstances

of the death to be filled in.

Makes sense, but it's awkward

when they leak before the person's dead. In 2003

CNN's website accidentally carried draft obituaries for living people that could

be

accessed. It's embarrassing, but

for the person reading their own obituary, it's a chance to do something

that most of us never get a chance to do.

See how you will be remembered after you're gone.

Alfred Nobel invented dynamite.

He made a fortune manufacturing and selling

deadly weapons - cannons and armaments. In 1888

his brother Ludvig died but many newspapers mistakenly thought that he

had died

and published obituaries for Alfred

Nobel. They weren't very flattering.

One French paper declared "The merchant of death

is dead." Nobel read these

obituaries and was so ashamed by what his legacy apparently

was going to be. When he did die, he left almost

all of his money to the cause of celebrating humanity.

He created The Nobel Prize. Marcus Garvey

wasn't so lucky. The story goes that after suffering

a stroke newspapers ran premature obituaries that

were critical of him, saying, he died broke,

alone and unpopular. Shocked by how negatively he was being remembered

Garvey suffered another stroke while reading his own obituary

and died. In April of 2006

five Taylor University students died in a tragic car accident.

Another student survived, but was in a coma.

She was identified as Laura van Ryn.

Her friend Whitney Cerak wasn't as lucky. She was pronounced

dead. A thousand people attended her funeral

but over the next few days as Laura

recovered, she began speaking and when asked her name,

Laura said my name is Whitney. The girls

looked similar. It turned out Laura

was the one they had buried. Later, Whitney

was married in the very same church that years before

had held her funeral. What if you are already missing

and just don't know it? It's not known how often hospitals

accidentally switch babies at birth.

Modern hospital policies make it unlikely to happen, but because we don't

all go out and get maternity

and paternity tests for fun, there isn't a lot of data

on the phenomenon. But it does happen. It's often discovered because of DNA tests

administered to resolve child support disputes.

Or, in the case of the 35-year-old woman, in the Canary Islands,

it's because in 2001 an employee at a store you're shopping at mistakes you

for her best friend - because you look exactly

like her, because she is

your long-lost twin, separated from you

since birth. And the sister you grew up with,

thinking was your twin, turns out to be a biological

stranger. What if you are missing

but the authorities don't know?

Such is the life of the unreported

missing. People in a country illegally,

people estranged from their family and friends with no

missing person report ever being filed,

children of homeless mothers. These people aren't just

missing, they are what is known as

missing missing.

The FBI's National Crime Information Database contains

approximately 50,000 reported missing children,

but Outpost For Hope reports that there are more than a million

children in America who are missing, without anyone

knowing they're missing. It is not against the law

to go missing under your own volition.

You might have debts to pay or contracts to honor,

but if you are an adult, the act of disappearing

is not illegal in and of itself. You have the right

to go missing. But believing that no one would

miss you? That is ridiculous and unscientific. Statistics

would suggest otherwise. David Wong

wrote one of the most powerful articles I've ever read.

There is a lot of information

out there. There's even a word for it - infobesity.

It takes a lifetime to even

experience some of it. It's easy to think that everyone

knows everything that you know. But every year

more than 100 million new people are born and not a single one of them is

born

knowing that they are made out of atoms or that black holes

are awesome. Someone needs to be there

to tell them, to show them.

How many jokes do you hear every day,

every week? How many jokes do you hear

every year? Here's a fun thought.

By considering average life expectancy

and the typical number of jokes a person hears in a year,

David Wong posited a thought, rough

in its approximation, but sharp in its essence.

If you are under the age of 38

odds are the funniest joke

you will ever hear is a joke you haven't even heard yet.

And, if you are over the age of 38,

odds are you already know a joke that to more people than you could ever

possibly meet

might be the funniest joke they will ever hear.

So, wherever you are, we're glad you there.

And as always,

thanks for watching.