No matter how many all-nighters you pull devouring volume after volume of dust-laden encyclopedias, it will never be enough. Because learning is a process, and there’s no end visible on the horizon.
But most of us are just fine with one or two "did you know that?" facts always ready to be served at a dinner table. Except they get old fast and nobody wants to listen to another “banana is a berry,” like, ever.
Luckily, one Reddit user who goes by u/RyanBlitzpatrick did everyone a favor and asked people on r/AskReddit “What's a fact that just blows your mind?” 3.6K upvotes and 3.5K comments later, the results are in and you’d better get your notebook ready, 'cause these are some of the hand-picked knowledge bites that may honestly surprise you.
This post may include affiliate links.
When you dream, one part of your brain is making up the story, and another part is experiencing those events and is genuinely surprised by all the twists in the plot.
2006, which doesn’t feel THAT long ago, saw the death of two colossally old tortoises. The first, Harriet, was reportedly collected by Charles Darwin when he visited the Galápagos on the HMS Beagle. She belonged to Steve Irwin at the time of her death. Charles Darwin and Steve Irwin shared a “pet.” Estimated to have lived 176 years.
The second, Adwaita, was born before the United States declared its independence from England. Think of it: just 14 years ago, there was a land creature alive that was older than our country. Just incredible.
November 2, 2000 was the last time all humans were on the planet together. Since then at least one person has remained on the international space station
I wish it was as easy to remember these facts as it was to scroll through. In reality, we do learn things every day, but not much of that information sticks with us.
But memory is a very complex function. It turns out, much of it is generated not only through recollection, but also through the emotions that are attached to it. Shahram Heshmat, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Springfield, believes that “emotion affects all the phases of memory formation.”
For example, “Attention guides our focus to select what’s most relevant for our lives and is normally associated with novelty.” And nothing focuses the mind more than a surprise which escalates emotional intensity.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Anne Frank were born in the same year.
Also, that same year, Betty White was already 7 years old.
The oldest living tree in the world methuselah is 4851 years old
That the Oxford Univeristy is older than the Aztec Empire
Another interesting thing which escalates long-term memory is not the recollection of a fact itself, but rather the so-called mood memory. Prof. Heshmat explains that “Our current emotional state facilitates recall of experiences that had a similar emotional tone.”
For example, being in a bad mood primes us to think of and remember unpleasant moments.Having said that, most of the things we forget easily have to do with our inability to put them in our long-term memory.
The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and was clearly heard 3,000 miles away.
That's like you standing in New York and hearing a sound from San Francisc
If time travel were possible, you would need a time-and-space-machine to survive the trip, otherwise when you travelled back in time, the planet would be at a different point in its rotation around the sun and our solar system would be at a different point in space as it rotates, which means you'd travel back in time and be in an empty part of space
The International Space station is closer to the earth than San Francisco is to L.A
Meanwhile, forcing yourself to memorize things is likely not to be very effective because our brains are not capable of making sense of dense information quickly and forming strong associations.
It's better to use super simple tricks such as visualization (imagine what you are trying to remember), repetition (boring but effective), and learning the opposite things (create associations in your head).
And never underestimate the power of understanding that which you’re learning, because you'll never be able to remember something you can’t explain yourself.
Arctic foxes can survive temperatures as low as -70 degrees Celsius
If an underwater bubble is collapsed by loud sound, light is produced and no one knows why
Good. So next power outage I'm gonna fart in the tub and yell at it :D
Some people don’t have an inner monologue, like they literally don’t have a voice in their head.
I can't even imagine. Those must be the people who fall asleep easily!
A woman once jumped off the 86th floor of the Empire State Building but the wind pushed her back and she fell on a ledge on the 85th floor. She survived.
The fact that nobody knows that if we all see colours the same way
I think about that. It's more than just how you identify a color. There are colors in the aqua family I see as blue and my husband sees as green.
That there are people in the world who don't like music. Not one specific type, but music as a whole.
That both blows my mind and disturbs me
Hope I don't run into any of these people, because we wouldn't be vibin'!
I still can’t get over the fact that teddy roosevelt got shot and continued to give a three hour speech
Ant biologists still don't know the maximum life span of most ant queens. They just live too long to keep track, and they're not too easy to keep in captivity. The longest one on record is like 30 years old, and there could easily be species that live longer than that
There is a termite colony in the Amazon Rain Forest that is the size of Great Britain and is almost 4,000 years old. There are also hundreds of millions of termite mounds
The U.S government has an official for a Zombie apocalypse. CONPLAN 8888 also known as Counter-Zombie Dominance was written in 2011. And just in case you think it's weird bureaucratic humor, the first line reads, 'This plan was not actually designed as a joke.'
There are more trees on Earth then there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
Confirmed by NASA.
A neutron star is so dense that a teaspoon of material from one would weigh around 10 million tons
If the timeline of the universe (up to now) was compressed into a year starting on new year's day, Homo sapiens would appear at 11:54 pm on December 31st
Mitochondria is only passed down by mother so there's a concept of mitochondrial eve, all humans today have their mitochondrial dna derived from her
Hold onto your hats if you're a white supremacist. The place or origin is believed to be East Africa.
Strawberries aren’t berries.
But bananas are
The Fermi Paradox.
With the number of potentially habitable Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone, it’s very strange that we haven’t detected alien signals of any kind so far.
There’s lots of theories as to why that is, but my favorite is called the great silenceDark Forest (which sounds way cooler). Basically everyone else out there is being quiet and not transmitting because they know of some danger that we are unaware of, and they don’t want it to find them. Gives me chills.
Edit: It’s interesting that most of the replies here, joking or serious, correspond to legitimate theories on the Fermi Paradox.
That's the rather interesting part of modern digital broadcasting. Without a decoding algorithm, digital broadcasts just look like noise. Our signals certainly could be making it to another form of life, but without a proper decoding algorithm, the 1s and 0s just appear to be background noise. The Drake Equation includes variables for (among other things) the length of time any extra-terrestrial society would be actively using or listening for analog signals.
Load More Replies...
Maybe we are the danger and they don't want us to find them and come take over their planet.
Maybe they don’t want us to find them. As a species we destroyed this planet and inhabitants.
We are limited to our resources, including transmitters and receivers. Their signals might be out of our range of capacity to observe.
We haven’t yet earned our place at the Cool Kids’ table in the school cafeteria.
Load More Replies...
It is entirely plausible that if there are earth like worlds out there, that their evolutionary path is far before intelligent species, before technological advancement or are so far advanced to our own that we don't know what to look for.....
If you hold evolution true, then the likelihood that life exists at all is insane. Just the mechanics of our planet alone are crucial to our development as a specie. The planet-wide disasters and the climate changes over the course of our evolution have led and shaped our evolution in drastic ways that could have easily veered another way just as easily. The chances of it happening again elsewhere, again, insane. The chances those lifeforms are higher lifeforms capable of recognizing each other as lifeforms are like the end digits to pi.
Add to that the odds of us existing at the same time. Maybe intelligent life existed somewhere 2 billion years ago.
Load More Replies...
The most depressing theory is that we are the most evololved specie among the lot...
So many earthlings bashing comments out here... But I guess it's a joke that has lost its fun. I think life can be pretty prevalent, however toolmaking animals are not that common. We are a weird accident here on Earth, there's no other species that uses technology. Not one in 3 billion years since life exists, and even us got out of caves 10000 years ago, while the ability to communicate at a distance wasn't there until the 1800s with the invention of the telegraph... The number of advanced civilisations could be very small and probably so far away that communication is either impractical or impossible.
"it’s very strange that we haven’t detected alien signals of any kind so far" isn't actually true. With our current technology, we couldn't detect a planet with a similar level more than a few light years away. We're getting better at listening, but space is really, really, really big and signals get faint really fast.
the danger already reached us, that's why humans are capable of ignoring our connection with one another, and succumb to short sighted greed which will ultimately cause our extinction.
Another point is that given the size and age of our galaxy, we simply would not find another species on a par with us. We would find either "apes or angels" as others have pointed out. In other words, very primitive or extraordinarily advanced lifeforms.
I thought this post was about SCIENCE, not about science fiction! #GTFO
Let's hope the aliens aren't reading these comments. We are still a pretty stupid species.
Maybe other planets are aware of us, and they are the UFO s that people are seeing. They periodically come and check on us and abduct people just to see where we are evolutionary wise, and when they still see that we aren't evolved they keep going and check back later. Or maybe, we were technologically evolved once, something happened like an meteorite hitting the Earth, and that sent us back to square one. Now we are in the process of evolving once more, and trying to regain our technology that we lost.
Actually a species intelligent enough to travel interstellar distances would use radio communications anyway. More likely they would use quantum entanglement communication. Also they wouldn’t be searching for our signals because unless you collect ants in a farm that’s all we would be...one building a house in a new area doesn’t ask the ants what they think before doing so
Consider the MASSIVE lengthy time scale in which the universe works . . . we could easily be the only life form at this time. Some have already come and gone; others are yet to be . . .
We are the danger. They don't want us know they are there. Not much of a mystery.
The time scale, too is a factor. The life could be a fungus or bacteria or on the other end of the spectrum they met the step they could not traverse and died out long ago. And we can't assume that this life was like humans, or even reached equivalencies that enabled them to communicate. Or that they even cared to do so.
They all could have detected each others earlier transmissions and now we are all listening and not transmitting
Or their life form is such that by hearing the transmission, they die and we have unwittingly caused yet another mass extinction
Load More Replies... Shout out to Dead Space, humanity is not alone, they are just the last one left
This is absolutely absurd. They are so advanced that they know we are here, but their primary concern is that we present an existential threat to them. In a universe where we don't know with certainty that they are there. So we see and know of the ants in the anthill and are terrified that they threaten our existence. That's the perfect analogy. Now, how about this explanation: a whole lot of commenters hate human society and their fellow man.
WE are the danger. They know of our long history of mass violence, wars , genocide and don’t want US to find THEM.
maybe that danger is a destructive species like us, just with a more advanced technology..although it seems unlikely that every intelligent species besides ourselves would be aware of that
or that the universe is 14 billion years old and that span of time is very unlikely to have another living thing the same time at humans in that 14 billion years.
People assume aliens will be very technologically advanced. They could just as easily be behind us in that way.
Intellect comes in waves, this over billions Earth cycles. It would be 1 googol to the power googol that 1 Intellect wave arrives on our planet.
Apparently once *I think it was at nasa or a space station search it!* Over the radio signal they once picked up unknown sounds/readings and we still don't know what they might be today! Still!!!🤷🏼♀️
Time and space doesn't work the way everyone thinks it works. We're the only planet that can have life on it. Almost all the stars in our galaxy that we "see" were burnt out long ago. The center of the universe is very young and the edge of the universe is very old relative to Earth. We don't really have a clue what galaxies actually exist right now or not. Creatures exist on Earth that fly around in mechanical ships that are not human and are not purely spiritual beings. They've lived here as long as we have but they don't belong here.
Basically everyone else out there is quiet because they know that we are the danger.
We are the only intelligent life in the universe and I'm being generous about us.
I mean, we have killed off a lot of species. Maybe they’re just keeping quiet so we don’t attack a highly advanced species that could wipe us out with a button.
Read what you wrote. They know we're here and feel they have to hide quietly. Why? What power do we have to "attack"?
Load More Replies...
Like us, they will all have died from wars before having the technology to visit us. Politics is always more important than science. We’re on the verge of complete destruction,,,and barely make it on the moon.
anything about aliens are creepy. especially when i learned about the silencedark forest...
Maybe we'll figure it out when we figure out why "If an underwater bubble is collapsed by loud sound, light is produced. . .".
Everyone else out there knows about Humans On Earth and they aren't interested in making contact.
bltresearch.com - Anatomical Anomalies in Crop Formation Plants, a peer-reviewed paper; Hair of the Alien, documenting analysis of primary and mitochondrial DNA extracted from a hair after an encounter with "Tall Blondes", with a signature that is on record but has been absent from the human population for thousands of years, and the subject and his story story also featured in the documentary My Mum Talks to Aliens; USS Nimitz / Tic Tac incident; testing over Nevada; YouTube channel UFOs Over Las Vegas, documenting what is undoubtedly testing of UFO-like craft on a daily basis; YouTube channel SasquatchOntario, documenting more than 7 years of contact with a group of some kind/origin unknown, matching Sasquatch/Yeti/Yowie contact claims from throughout history, and associated orbs, UFOs and other phenomena; ...
... Robert van Den Broeke, being tested under controlled conditions, taking random photos in which images appear, which he attributes to unknown beings who communicate with him, sometimes leading him to fresh crop circles, orbs and UFOs, confirmed by many researchers and others. Read between the lines: are "others" present on Earth? Yes. Do we understand their nature? Not publicly. Would we call them alien? Yes. Are they extraterrestrial? No.
Load More Replies...
LMAO BULL S**T.. We have heard things (by SETI) and they went public and then we were told they didn't hear. We have been contacted and been told we haven't.. We have seen things and were told we didn't see what we saw.... It isn't that there isn't anyone else out there. It is our LEADERS keeping it from us..
I think they were all warned about Earth and shut up so we won't find them.
There was an essay on the Atomic Rockets site suggesting that the danger they're all afraid of is other starfaring species. Super paranoia. Nothing is more important than the survival of my species, so if we discover another advanced species we need to destroy it before it destroys us.
Another probable reason we havent heard form them is the same reason why you woldnt stop to dicuss quantum physics with a colony of ants
They keep silent because they know of that orange man who is in charge of the country to the left of Africa. He'll want to nuke them like he wants to nuke hurricanes.
yeah, that danger is called stupidity, destructiveness, and recklessness lmfao
The reason that Earthlings will not find a neighbour(terrestrial) is because , they understand that we are a violent species and they cow away in fear. No body wants a human for a neighbour.
Like we fear the ants. Perhaps some solution -focused therapy would be advisable.
Load More Replies...
Maybe they're trying to avoid us. I mean, we're not exactly what I would call evolved.
it could be that earth is the alabama trailer park of the universe....
I always figured we were in a great space race against foes we do not know exist.
Now think this, Milky way is just a tiny galaxy in a universe full of galaxies. If per galaxy has a planet, there's a possibility that there's a planet like earth in one of those galaxies. If that's the case, there's a possibility that there are people also that we called alien while to them, they called us alien too cause we are not like them. But what if?
Or highly intelligent and already knows about us, but is waiting for us to be at the proper level to handle meeting the neighbors and not going all caveman and wanting to blow them up. Which is where we've backslid to right now, so we won’t be meeting them for a while.
Load More Replies...
Why are we still searching for life on earth-like planets? For all we know other life forms "breathe" water. Or fire. Or whatever gas we don't even have on earth. Or maybe they don't even breathe at all.
the one who postulated the paradox clearly was never in basic school... Otherwise he or she would know that even children are able to leaving you out when they make groups, or play...
I don't see a paradox. The truth is that there has to be a first intelligent species in the Milky Way. Maybe we're the first. Fermi never took that into account.
Fermi did take that into account...read rhe great barrier part of the paradox
Load More Replies...
Maybe they observed us and considered us a sub-intelligent form of life: pollution, wars, inequalities, tyrants. I understand them perfectly of not wanting to have anything to do with us.
Yes, we killed someone without sanction in the Continental . . . .
Load More Replies...
If I was an alien race I don't think I would want anything to do with earth and its Idiot people...😱😱😱👽👽👽
That the biggest bacteria species known, Thiomargarita namibiensis, can have a maximum diameter of 0.7 millimeters, which is big enough for you to see it without a microscope.
That's insane if you consider that your average bacteria species has a diameter of 0.001 millimeters.
How a computer does what it does. Blows my mind how 1's and 0's can do so much. Maybe I'm uneducated, but still mind blowing
The way the human brain works. These cells that are powered by tiny jolts of electricity are collectively having conscious thoughts, coming up with morals and empathy and every human behavior
That Neutrinos have mass and every second of every day about a billion of them are going through every square inch of your body - but the space between your atoms is so huge there's pretty much a 0% chance they will ever hit you
One million seconds = approx 12 days
One billion seconds = 32 years
One trillion seconds = 32,000 years
Seeing as people are currently throwing the word 'trillion' around a lot lately (as in pounds or dollars) this really highlights the truly massive differences between these sums.
One quadrillion seconds = 32 million years.
Every 2 years there's a convention that reunites all the cities called newcastle in any language, this convention is called Newcastles Of The World, it even has his own website
My Choir sang at one in Newcastle Upon Tyne, England. It was very interesting.
Several thousand years ago, the Sahara was actually grassland with massive lakes that rivalled the Great Lakes of North America.
Also, at one point the Straight of Gibraltar was closed. This meant that the Mediterranean Sea almost completely evaporated.
Took more time to go from bronze swords to steel swords than steel swords to nuclear weapons and less time from nukes to melting lasers that literally MELT metal is seconds
Ounce for ounce, bone density is stronger than steel.
Another fun fact: It would creep everyone our if we make bridges out of dead people's bones.
Kleopatra was born closer in time to the launch of the first iphone than to the construction of the piramids
You are outnumbered in your own body. The bacteria present in/on your body outnumber your own cells. We wouldn't even be able to survive without most of them
Your brain automatically translates wtf but not lol
I'm fairly sure it's because LOL with its consonant, vowel, consonant construction reads like a word -- while WTF is clearly not a word and, what's more, has more syllables to pronounce if you say the letters instead of the words (5 vs. 3).
The v2 rocket killed more people while actually making it than during ww2 when it was used. Also pepsi once had the 6th largest army/navy in the world.
That our galaxy and the Andromeda are going to collide a long, long time from now to form Milkdromeda!
That and that our universe will slowly die one day. There'll be no galaxies, no stars, no nebulae, nothing. It will all die out and leave noting but black holes and dwarf stars
The 10th president of the USA John Tyler, born in 1790 has two living grandsons
This factoid has been floating around for many years. Anyone checked on them recently?
Vacuum decay could completely annihilate the entire universe at any moment and we wouldn't even see it coming. One moment you're doing your thing, the next you and everything else just blips completely out of existence
Don't give 2020 any Ideas. That sounds like the Plan for new years before going into 2021.
It took us about 70,000 years to go from stone tools to settlements
A gram of uranium is roughly 20 billion calories... Mind was BLOWN!
Some animal abilities are truly amazing to me.
There's a type of lizard called the axolotl that can regenerate lost limbs in a matter of months.
And there's also a jellyfish called the immortal jellyfish that is, well, immortal. When they are attacked or when they get old, they can somehow revert to when they were babies and start growing up again.
Also, some animals can live without a head. A chicken once lived 18 headless months. And a turtle (tortoise? what's the difference?) lived 1.
France is the only country that has recorded a successful cavalry charge against boats
That scientist was able to figure out what a girl looked like, where she was from and even her last meal from just a piece of chewing gum
Charles Darwin is considered to be the Father of Evolution. But he never once used the word "evolution" in his masterpiece book "On the Origin of Species".
When something is in orbit, that essentially means it is perpetually falling
I heard it like the space station is non stop falling around the earth.
The 52 factorial story (52 factorial being the number of possible combinations of a deck of cards.
If you haven’t read this before here. It still hurts my brain every time I read it.
“This number is beyond astronomically large. I say beyond astronomically large because most numbers that we already consider to be astronomically large are mere infinitesimal fractions of this number. So, just how large is it? Let's try to wrap our puny human brains around the magnitude of this number with a fun little theoretical exercise. Start a timer that will count down the number of seconds from 52! to 0. We're going to see how much fun we can have before the timer counts down all the way.
Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters. Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of solitaire between steps. After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. The Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic kilometers of water. Continue until the ocean is empty. When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean.
Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun. Take a glance at the timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed. You still have 8.063e67 more seconds to go. 1 Astronomical Unit, the distance from the Earth to the Sun, is defined as 149,597,870.691 kilometers. So, take the stack of papers down and do it all over again. One thousand times more. Unfortunately, that still won’t do it. There are still more than 5.385e67 seconds remaining. You’re just about a third of the way done.
To pass the remaining time, start shuffling your deck of cards. Every billion years deal yourself a 5-card poker hand. Each time you get a royal flush, buy yourself a lottery ticket. A royal flush occurs in one out of every 649,740 hands. If that ticket wins the jackpot, throw a grain of sand into the Grand Canyon. Keep going and when you’ve filled up the canyon with sand, remove one ounce of rock from Mt. Everest. Now empty the canyon and start all over again. When you’ve leveled Mt. Everest, look at the timer, you still have 5.364e67 seconds remaining. Mt. Everest weighs about 357 trillion pounds. You barely made a dent. If you were to repeat this 255 times, you would still be looking at 3.024e64 seconds. The timer would finally reach zero sometime during your 256th attempt. “
The statement 'it hurts my brain' is indeed true in this case.I admire the person who had a brain capacity and time to come up with this way of explaining this, but I doubt that there are many people who can comprehend this.
I recently got my cat some catnip treats and as I was googling what to buy, I found that catnip actually works as an insect repellent. In fact, catnip is 10X more republican than DEET!
More REPUBLICAN? Maybe you're trying to say repellent? (Which Republicans generally are anyway.)
A concept more than a fact but how the whole body functions. Like, even just your heart beating in order to get blood round your body, let alone everything else working in sync. And most of it is done without us even noticing. It's no wonder some are flawed.
There used to be nine different species of humans.
At least that is...
Homo Sapiens (aka us)
Homo Neanderthalensis
Homo Floresiensis (sometimes called Hobbits)
Denisovans
Homo Erectus
Homo Habilis
Homo Heidelbergensis
Homo Rudolfensis
Homo Rhodesiensis
Homo Ergaster
Those are all the members of the Homo family I can think of right know. However it is important to remeber that there are almost certainly some that I forgot to mention and there might be some that we haven't discovert yet. Furthermore it is surprisingly difficult to find out if the groups I've listed are distinct species or different groups of the same species (the fact that our definition of species is kinda arbitrary doesn't help). This is actually a surprisingly interesting topic I would recommend you look into.
A now-closed cave in Utah still holds the body of a man who died in 2009
He was cave exploring with his family and got wedged in and couldn't be removed. Very sad way to go.
There are about 100 times as many cells in a human body than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy
How MASSIVE the solar system is compared to Earth. Not even regarding any other part of space, just the solar system. It's insane.
There's this website that shows the entire solar system lengthwise - If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel - take the time to read everything in it while you scroll through and just take in the massive expansiveness of space
You can fit all the planets in the solar system in the gap between the earth and the moon.
The biggest thunderbolt ever recorded in the universe was 150 000 Ly long. Our galaxy the milky way is 100 000 Ly long. And it came from a blasar which is a frikinn insanely big blackhole : M87. And yes this is the black hole we took in photo. It is way way bigger than our milky way's super massive one
I already wrote this in a comment above, but I'm kinda worried it'll get lost in all the other comments and never be read... The most mind-blowing fact I can think of is from university (animal physiology lecture, topic visual sense). There's a small experiment that shows you how crazy much your visual input is curated before it ever reaches your consciousness, in a way not other experiment ever made that clear to me: Take a flashlight, point it sideways at your eye (as in, hold it by the side of your head and point it at the nose so you eye is hit sideways), then wave it about. Then sit in stunned silence. The sensory cells don't actually detect light as such, but a CHANGE from dark to light, so cells behind blood vessels never report anything. Until you wave a light about from sideways, that is... (my other favorite weird fact from that lecture is that "penis fencing" is an actual zoological term. Flatworm mating.)
I tried it out, it's so weird O-o. There's another cool thing worth mentioning is that everything we see is in the past. It takes time for light to travel from our eye to an object and then back while also processing the image so even if that time is minimal, we only see what has already been. Same with sound. When someone speaks, it takes time for the sound the travel so we never really hear a person speak in the present, but what they said in the past. AND this includes interactions. There is a concept of space-time where each person, wherever they are standing, is their own form of "present." When I am speaking and looking at someone right in front of them, I am actually communicating with their past selves, not the present. The only way for us to be in the same "present" is when we hug :3 (amongst other touchy interactions)
Load More Replies...
There are 7.5 Billion humans on earth. -- But there are 24 Billion CHICKENS. -- This is a magnitude larger than all other birds on Earth, combined. -- This is also enough for every two people to own 7 chickens.
The total weight of ants in the world adds up to the total weight of humans...
How long did it take you to count those suckers Jack?
Load More Replies...
I’m amazed the math works this way. If you wrapped a belt around the equator, how much length would you need to add so the belt would be 12 inches off the ground for you to crawl underneath? The answer is 6 feet would need to be added, yes just 6 feet. 25,000 miles around and only 6 feet make that big a difference.
The Universe is 10 ^ 26 meters in diameter. Atoms are 10 ^ -15 meters in diameter. -- Quarks are 10 ^ -19 meters. Humans are just a bit closer to the size of atoms and their components, than we are to the size of the Universe. -- We're really not that consequential after all, but we do kinda straddle the middle point between atoms and the Universe, size-wise.
i'm disappointed the factoid about nintendo's origins in the 1800s isn't on here, for shame, boredpanda
I already wrote this in a comment above, but I'm kinda worried it'll get lost in all the other comments and never be read... The most mind-blowing fact I can think of is from university (animal physiology lecture, topic visual sense). There's a small experiment that shows you how crazy much your visual input is curated before it ever reaches your consciousness, in a way not other experiment ever made that clear to me: Take a flashlight, point it sideways at your eye (as in, hold it by the side of your head and point it at the nose so you eye is hit sideways), then wave it about. Then sit in stunned silence. The sensory cells don't actually detect light as such, but a CHANGE from dark to light, so cells behind blood vessels never report anything. Until you wave a light about from sideways, that is... (my other favorite weird fact from that lecture is that "penis fencing" is an actual zoological term. Flatworm mating.)
I tried it out, it's so weird O-o. There's another cool thing worth mentioning is that everything we see is in the past. It takes time for light to travel from our eye to an object and then back while also processing the image so even if that time is minimal, we only see what has already been. Same with sound. When someone speaks, it takes time for the sound the travel so we never really hear a person speak in the present, but what they said in the past. AND this includes interactions. There is a concept of space-time where each person, wherever they are standing, is their own form of "present." When I am speaking and looking at someone right in front of them, I am actually communicating with their past selves, not the present. The only way for us to be in the same "present" is when we hug :3 (amongst other touchy interactions)
Load More Replies... There are 7.5 Billion humans on earth. -- But there are 24 Billion CHICKENS. -- This is a magnitude larger than all other birds on Earth, combined. -- This is also enough for every two people to own 7 chickens.
The total weight of ants in the world adds up to the total weight of humans...
How long did it take you to count those suckers Jack?
Load More Replies... I’m amazed the math works this way. If you wrapped a belt around the equator, how much length would you need to add so the belt would be 12 inches off the ground for you to crawl underneath? The answer is 6 feet would need to be added, yes just 6 feet. 25,000 miles around and only 6 feet make that big a difference.
The Universe is 10 ^ 26 meters in diameter. Atoms are 10 ^ -15 meters in diameter. -- Quarks are 10 ^ -19 meters. Humans are just a bit closer to the size of atoms and their components, than we are to the size of the Universe. -- We're really not that consequential after all, but we do kinda straddle the middle point between atoms and the Universe, size-wise.
i'm disappointed the factoid about nintendo's origins in the 1800s isn't on here, for shame, boredpanda
