The world is a scary place. Beautiful, yes, but take a good look around and you'll definitely notice something that makes you feel uncomfortable. Whether we're talking about spiders, lightning, or social interaction, everyone has their own nightmare fuel.
To find the worst of the worst, Reddit user Misoalgia posted a question on the platform, asking everyone "What is a genuinely terrifying fact?" Immediately, the replies started pouring in and as of now, the post has over 9.9K comments. In order to save you, dear pandas, some time, we scrolled through the entries and hand-picked the most memorable ones.
This post may include affiliate links.
The ten hottest years on record have all been since 2010.
We are not only going to see the catastrophic 2 degree warming this century - we're probably going to see more than that.
The absolute worst part? Even with net zero emissions by 2070 we will STILL probably see 2 degree warming. The time for action to prevent catastrophe was over maybe 20 years ago - we are living in a time of disaster management.
That there are people in this world who have absolutely zero support, and absolutely zero people to count on.
there are actually quite a few, id say at least 3 million people and I dont like it. everyone should have someone.
That somebody is out here trafficking humans and then going back to their family while living comfortably in a much nice place than some of us are.
The earth was around billions of years before we were, and is indifferent to our survival. There have been multiple mass extinctions in the past and we shouldn't feel any safer. The only difference is we've advanced far enough to the point that we'll probably know in advance when our species is going to go extinct.
Scurvy at advanced stages can make all of your scars reopen, because maintaining them is an active process that your body does all the time and when it can't produce collagen it stops. Maybe eat some fruit.
One genuinely terrifying fact is the concept of "antibiotic resistance." Bacteria can evolve to become resistant to antibiotics, the drugs we use to treat bacterial infections. Overuse and misuse of antibiotics can speed up this process, making previously treatable diseases difficult or even impossible to cure. According to the World Health Organization, antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health today, potentially leading to a future where simple infections could once again become deadly.
... and yet, we allow an industry to feed them to millions of animals in blanket-treatments because some of them may be sick. In order to produce cheap meat - and the buying habits of most people express their agreement to this, as none of the products resulting from this are necessary, but voluntarily bought. But then again, if we see the bodycount of that industry, can we even be stupid enough to assume they had ANY ethics at all? Obviously, they have none.
That we need to work for 11 months to get one month off in a whole year. That most of people need to work at a s****y job until they retire and then struggle to survive on a small retirement. I mean, a bunch of s**t that is terrifying.
Billionaires don't pay taxes etc.
There's enough wealth (in whatever) form around to let every human being, and probably every pet, on Earth live modestly, but safely and without having to worry for their life. But we can't have it because of a handful of greedy rich freaks and literally millions of arselickers who will do what the rich person says in the hope of getting a bit of the wealth themselves, or simply because they want a daddy figure.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (mad cow) can lie dormant for more than 50 years, is universally fatal, and is inheritable. There is no cure.
MrDarksCarnival:
My mom passed from this.
Took a healthy energetic 60-year old woman that MAYBE looked 50, and turned her into a semi-vegetative shell of her former self.
It’s destructive. And I have no idea if it’s dormant in me.
I learbed about this disease in college. It's a deadly disease that is mostly transfered to humans by eating meat from cows and sometimes sheep that have it in them. It can also be transfered by transfusion or other transplants done from human to human and by placenta from a mother to her unborn child.
That mankind is the single biggest threat to our own extinction.
Two planets meet and one asks the other... »You're not looking well. Are you suffering from a disease?« ••• »Yeah, its a severe parasitic infestation.« ••• »What kind?« ••• »Homo sapiens, unfortunately.«
That brain aneurysms usually does not have symptoms and it can kill you if it ruptures.
There are hundreds of unidentified serial killers in America.
The US military has lost several nuclear weapons and not all of them have been recovered.
50-70% of people don't have an internal monologue. I can't even imagine that. I can barely turn mine off to sleep. Comments seems split but there are a lot saying they don't experience internal monologue. I read it as monologue. I think some people are confusing it with dialogue. But maybe some experience that too?
There is a species of caterpillar, big blue out of great Britain I believe, that tricks ants into thinking it's an ant queen in distress. The ants take this caterpillar back to the nest where the caterpillar continues acting like a queen but devouring all the ant larvae. This destroys the ant colony from the inside. There are some studies that can point to this species actively finding which larvae will eventually become the next queen and devour those larvae first.
She's a Killer Queen Gunpowder, gelatine Dynamite with a laser beam Guaranteed to blow your mind Anytime
Recommended at the price, insatiable an appetite, wanta try?
Load More Replies...
There is one bug which can pretend to be a very tasty yummy smelly bug-corpse. It does it so well that the ants take him directly to the larvae. After that the process is basically same...
" Out of Great Britain I believe" ??? Couldnt Google before writing this segment?
So... in theory... you could place such caterpillar in an ants' nest and you could get rid of the ants naturally without using poison?.... would this work irl? What would be the bad thing about this? I mean... could we bring it to other countries without it ruining the eco system????
This is a good thing. Where do I go to get one shipped to me, lol? I just had to have pest control spray for an infestation of acrobat ants.
Sun eruptions happened before and lead to blackouts across several continents. All fun and games in the 19th century. Today it could easily kill millions. And it could happen any hour.
Just one of a hundred or so scientifically approved apocalypses. Now that we understand it we can counter it. Expect a death toll easily counted in hundreds.
That Richard Sackler is a free billionare in 2023.
clemenza2821:
CEO of Purdue Pharma, singularly responsible for the opioid epedemic.
The Permian Extinction was the greatest extinction event in history, the atmosphere was full of CO2 and the oceans warmed so much they held too little oxygen to support most of the life that lived in it.
We are currently recreating these events through climate change.
Dementia has no age limit.
Retts Syndrome and Childhood Disintegrative Disorder are examples of types of dementia that affect children.
The fact that we know more about outer space than our planet's deep oceans is unsettling. There are countless mysteries and potentially terrifying discoveries awaiting beneath the ocean's depths.
Siberia’s permafrost melting and unleashing a disease humanity isn’t prepared for.
The scientists have found a very old virus in the permafrost. It doesn't mean that it has the ability to affect humans. This is too much "Resident Evil" kind of thinking.
Either we're the only sentient species in the whole universe or we are not. Both is equaly terrifying.
Looking at the media I struggle to see how most of us can be described as sentient
It is physically possible to be so constipated that your stool will back all the way up your digestive tract and you can vomit feces. You're welcome.
It's a great day. You go for a swim, and then Naegleri fowleri hits you hard. "Naegleri fowleri is an amoeba (brain eating amoeba) that can cause a serious central nervous system infection. The amoeba is found in warm and still fresh water bodies of water and enters a human body through the nose."
I think I've met quite a number of people who have clearly contracted this but not yet been diagnosed...
SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome, a baby will just die and we don't know why.
They have pretty good guesses, though. A lot of older cases were probably suffocation, before 'Back To Sleep' caught on. Recently, there's been research suggesting that some genetic mutations can inhibit the ability of a baby's brain to wake them up if they stop breathing in their sleep, putting those babies at high risk of SIDS.
You can just go to sleep and... never wake up. You might never get to say goodbye, or tell your family you love them.
Quote from a comedian. "I want to die peacefully like my uncle in his sleep. Not screaming in terror like the passengers in his car".
There is a good to fair chance you’ve met at least 1 murder in your life already.
There is a white dwarf about 130 light years away from us, and it could explode any time. If it explodes, then it will be a big cosmic firework - and very close, possibly close enough to cause problems. Even it if turns into a neutron star without an explosion, that phenomenon could cause a nasty EMP effect, possibly killing a lot of satellites.
Hisashi Ouchi Was kept alive (by any means necessary) for 83 days after exposure to fatal levels of radiation.
Poor guy was suffering so much. He needed skin grafts, multiple blood transfusions and he was resuscitated so many times. He was crying blood and at one point his intestine ruptured
A person eats, on average, “two pounds of flies, maggots and other bugs each year," according to Scientific American.
-A cup of raisins can have up to 33 fruit fly eggs.
-Fig paste is allowed to have up to 13 insect heads in 100 grams.
-Up to five fruit flies is allowed in an 8-ounce cup of canned fruit juice.
+One maggot is allowed in every 250 milliliters of fruit.
+Up to 2,500 aphids are allowed in every 10 grams of hops.
-Spinach can have up to 50 aphids, thrips or mites per 100 grams.
-Broccoli can contain insects fragments and even whole insects.
-Up to a kilogram of insect parts is allowed in 100 kilograms of chocolate.
-Up to 19 maggots and 74 mites are allowed in a 3.5-ounce can of mushrooms.
-Up to 15 fruit fly eggs are allowed in 100 grams of tomato sauce
Your hearing is probably the last sense that you lose when you die. Imagine hearing all the people around you…
I just googled and it is actually the last sense you lose. Tragic and terrifying.
Getting less than 7 or 8 hours of sleep a night f***s up your body much more thoroughly than anyone assumes. It increases the risk of just about any health problem you can imagine, from obesity to Alzheimer’s to heart disease, significantly, and impairs basically everything your brain does. Also, your brain is physically incapable of realizing the extent of sleep deprivation, so if you’re one of those people who can manage on 4 or 5 hours a night, you’re probably not actually.
Actually, they say it's not really the amount of sleep you get, and as long as you are getting atleast 6 hours and at a CONSISTENT time every night, it's okay. The brain just need regular maintenance to shut down and it needs it a regular time. You don't need 7 to 8 hours of sleep if you don't have a stressful life and don't have a physically demanding job.
The CIA's Operation Northwoods proposed that CIA operatives should commit acts of terrorism upon the US to blame Fidel Castro for justifying a war against Cuba. This was rejected by JFK. We know about this because this got declassified.
The last official government execution by GUILLOTINE was 10 September 1977 at 4:40am in Marseille France.
That's . . . during my lifetime.
It's not the way of execution that's awful. It's death penalty. It still exists in too many countries, some of them callin themselves "democratic" and "civilized".
Assuming you live in a structure that can burn, a fault in your electrical system can burn your house down at any moment. I grew up in a neighborhood of older houses, several of which burned to the ground (usually during the overnight hours). The cause of almost all of them was electrical.
A tip to tell everyone: if it smells like fish somewhere for no reason, it can be an electrical fire.
There are such things as Rogue Planets just flying through space and not orbiting any star. If one were to pass through our solar system it could easily nudge the Earth out of its orbit and we’d either fry or freeze and there’s nothing we could do about it.
That's why we have the Sun and Jupiter, the biggest magnets to deflect these objects. You're welcome
You could have rabies right now, you won’t know until you start showing symptoms. Then, it’s too late.
Even more frightening, rabies was once voted the rarest of the once common diseases. Since then it's made a dramatic comeback, first in eastern Europe, now in the USA. It's becoming much more prevalent.
You and everything you know is located on a rock going impossibly fast through a void that you can't traverse without specialized equipment. You are trapped, and you have no idea why you are here or why you even exist. The only true escape is death. The most terrifying part is that you are aware and reflective (unlike every other animal) and have no tools to answer, not only why but how.
I like to think that after we die, we transcend to some higher form of consciousness and understand some of these mysteries. It seems nonsensical to me that everything just happens for no reason, by some coincidence. (And no, atheists, I don't care if you don't believe in afterlife or higher purpose.)
That blue whales can weigh half a million pounds and can speak to each other from thousands of miles away.
Some scientists consider flies the most dangerous of all animals because of how easily they spread illnesses.
Mosquitoes are generally consided to be more dangerous than flies. But there are plenty of fly-borne diseases such as sleeping sickness and trachoma. Flies are more likely than mosquitoes to cause famine through crop diseases.
I know its basic as f**k but death and the very likely chance that everything just ends keeps me up at night. Also the fact that no matter what everyone you love will die. Your parents will die. Your cousins. Your uncles. Your aunties. Idk it's almost comforting that at the end of the day I don't have to worry too much because eventually none of it matters, but idk it scares me.
Space is expanding at a rate faster than the speed of light. One day only our local group of galaxies and celestial bodies will be visible and then one day our galaxy will be all alone in a pitch black void. Any new intelligent life will believe that their own galaxy and all that it encompasses, is the only celestial body to exist is in the vast universe.
Yellowstone National Park is actually a massive caldera volcano which, if an eruption occurs, would cause an extinction level event. We're in its time frame for eruption and it's still growing.
Some interesting things about this, are scientists are able to track growth by tracking lake movement. Because the land is bubbling up at the center of the volcano dome, the lakes are slowly moving away from the center point.
It's also not possible to drill in and slowly relieve pressure as the rock gets too hot and squishy the closer you get as well as the drill hearing up and becoming squishy itself.
There is literally nothing we can do to prevent this. We just have to sit and wait for nature to take its course.
This is just wrong. Yellowstone is not "overdue" for anything and the likelihood of it erupting in the next milennium is very low.
After a full nuclear exchange, some landmasses will become devoid of life.
The British Isles would depopulate as famine, disease and radiation would kill the remaining survivors.
See the film "Threads" from 1984 (IIRC) - but watch it in daytime! And not when the kids are about
One genuinely terrifying fact is that there are more bacteria living in and on our bodies than there are human cells.
And most of that bacteria is needed for healthy survival
If we don't find an optimal way to travel through space, we'll become extinct.
It would take months to years for the power grid to recover from a sufficiently strong solar storm.
I've had two shoulder surgeries for torn rotators; one in July of 2022 and one in January of 2023. I went to get my pre-op last week and my ecg showed that sometime in past, I'd had a heart attack. But I never knew that. Now in past week I've seen a cardiologist and had a NM stress test to ensure that another shoulder surgery will be safe for me. I have no answers yet and my surgery is scheduled for next Wednesday. It's stressful not knowing that I'd had a heart attack because if I didn't know it before then how would I know it next time. I also don't know if my heart is ok; with or without surgery.
I'm so sorry you're going through that! I hope you get answers soon.
Load More Replies...
The fastest growing segment of the homeless population are people over 50 years old. These are people who did work, but one car accident, natural disaster, or some other event and they ended up homeless. This is especially scary if you're an adult orphan over age 50.
And I'm willing to gamble that most, if not all of them have no one to advocate for them. We really need to be more supportive of one another – though there are some people who are just unpleasant, don't want to be helped and/or refuse any help …
Load More Replies...
dont know why you were downvoted. That is true. Most abuse it not reported.
Load More Replies...
That there is no such thing as the present. By the time we process something and have awareness of it. The thing has been and gone.
Holy s**t. I'm 100% more worried about life now. (Edit: spelling)
You could get hit by a frozen chunk of s**t falling out of an airplane tomorrow. don't worry about any of these. Just live a good life and work towards fixing our affects on the enviroment and you will okay. also stay out of bodies of water with brain munching amoebas
Load More Replies...
In a Southern Region of Italy(Basilicata) there's a motto: when you're destined to take it in the a*s, the skirt rises by itself... That Is tò Say that if it's Destiny that we have to die, we Will die..
I've had two shoulder surgeries for torn rotators; one in July of 2022 and one in January of 2023. I went to get my pre-op last week and my ecg showed that sometime in past, I'd had a heart attack. But I never knew that. Now in past week I've seen a cardiologist and had a NM stress test to ensure that another shoulder surgery will be safe for me. I have no answers yet and my surgery is scheduled for next Wednesday. It's stressful not knowing that I'd had a heart attack because if I didn't know it before then how would I know it next time. I also don't know if my heart is ok; with or without surgery.
I'm so sorry you're going through that! I hope you get answers soon.
Load More Replies... The fastest growing segment of the homeless population are people over 50 years old. These are people who did work, but one car accident, natural disaster, or some other event and they ended up homeless. This is especially scary if you're an adult orphan over age 50.
And I'm willing to gamble that most, if not all of them have no one to advocate for them. We really need to be more supportive of one another – though there are some people who are just unpleasant, don't want to be helped and/or refuse any help …
Load More Replies... dont know why you were downvoted. That is true. Most abuse it not reported.
Load More Replies... That there is no such thing as the present. By the time we process something and have awareness of it. The thing has been and gone.
Holy s**t. I'm 100% more worried about life now. (Edit: spelling)
You could get hit by a frozen chunk of s**t falling out of an airplane tomorrow. don't worry about any of these. Just live a good life and work towards fixing our affects on the enviroment and you will okay. also stay out of bodies of water with brain munching amoebas
Load More Replies... In a Southern Region of Italy(Basilicata) there's a motto: when you're destined to take it in the a*s, the skirt rises by itself... That Is tò Say that if it's Destiny that we have to die, we Will die..
