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Some facts come and go – in one ear and out the other. Still others are mildly interesting, and might snag in your mind, but aren’t the sort of thing that would interest people in general.
Then there are those special facts. Our favorite facts, the ones we can never forget, that continue to blow our minds, and that we absolutely share every single time the opportunity presents itself.
These 16 are that last kind, and I sure hope some of them are new to you!
16. This one always makes me say the word out loud.
Every c in pacific ocean is pronounced differently.
15. You honestly can’t think about it too hard.
That space just happened somehow. S*%t I’m feeling existential now
14. Humanity is so astounding.
Even if the number of stars and galaxies is immense, to me it pales in comparison with the amount of lives that were spent on this planet.
The amount of experiences, emotions, fears, hopes, pain and what else that every single human being has been through is mind blowing.
13. And just…eat things?
Black holes are not stationary points in space. They move through space, just like out sun does, and some of the observed ones move at a speed of 5 million miles an hour.
12. We can do anything.
The Golden Record. It just kinda fills me with hope that a record of humanity has been shot into space. That’s us.
Yup it is just awesome to think about, that even if humanity is completely extinct, there will still be 2 golden discs, flying through interstellar space, with the last records of our civilization. Even if our species is extinct we will have traces of our existence until the end of the universe.
11. Look at them go.
Every single one of my direct ancestors was a success. They all survived childhood, reached sexual maturity, reproduced, and raised their own offspring to sexual maturity, mostly in much more difficult and dangerous times than I have to face.
I come from a long and unbroken line of successful adults. So do you.
10. Numbers always confuse me.
The sheer scale of numbers. The difference between a million and a billion and a trillion is literally impossible to grasp without translating it into something we can more easily understand, like time.
1 million seconds is roughly 11 and a half days. That’s a lot of seconds.
1 billion seconds is almost 32 YEARS. Imagine the time difference between 11 days and 32 years! Most of you probably aren’t even 32 years old, imagine counting every single second since your birth without pause and still not being at 1 billion.
1 trillion seconds is 31,709 years. Almost 32 thousand years. Imagine the entire existence if human civilization, and that’s only a tenth of a trillion seconds. 10k years ago humans were still rutting around in caves using crude stone tools, and that’s STILL ONLY A THIRD OF THE WAY. Not even halfway through to a single trillion.
Take the time to really breathe in and digest the scale of these numbers, and think about this; if every second was worth a dollar, Jeff Bezos’ net worth (~196.4 B) amounts to 6,230 years. The average US income is ~31,200, which amounts to about 8.6 hours per year. Assuming an average retirement age of 66, and starting work at 16, that’s 50 years of employment. That rounds out to roughly 430 value hours, or ~18 days.
If you could purchase time at a fixed rate of $1USD per second, Jeff Bezos is worth 6,230 years, while the average American earns 18 days in their lifetime.
9. It really is hard to imagine.
Read the book and true story of “The Lost City of the Monkey God” about huge cities from long ago, found in the Honduran interior. Researchers/explorers were blown away at the size and extent of these cities and their complete disappearance w/o a trace.
Realizing civilizations disappear all the time, I looked up how many times its happened in recorded history: 32 times! Our civilized world truly lives on a “knifes edge” and the simplest and strangest things can bring it down.
8. Going to read more about this, now.
Not really “amazes”, more like “scares”. The existence of the “uncanny valley” effect means that at some point in our evolutionary history, there was a need for humans to be able to recognize something that looked human but wasn’t.
7. That’s faster than it looks.
That satellites move fast enough with relation to the earth that they experience relativistic time dilation and their clock have to be continually adjusted.
Another effect of this is that astronauts on the ISS are actually very slightly traveling into the future.
6. Generation X has entered the chat.
That eventually the entire universe may collapse and end everything. Probably billions of years away. I’ll be long gone. It’s a double edged sword because you realize at that point nothing you’ve ever done will matter. Every mistake you’ve ever made will no longer matter.
It also leads to existential crisis when realize not even your accomplishments matter. You don’t matter, anything you’ve done doesn’t matter, nothing matters.
5. It makes you feel so small.
The light we see from some stars is actually from the past.
4. Sometimes the world seems better now.
Type 1 Diabetic here.
I should have died a painful and awful death as a kid but I’ve been able to live what will hopefully be a long and productive life through the discovery and manufacturing of insulin.
That fact just completely stuns and humbles me every so often.
3. It’s so big out there.
The nearest star is 4.37 light years away.
If we had a spaceship that could travel as fast as any man made object ever had — the Parker Solar Probe went 153,454 miles per hour — it would take 19,098 years to reach it.
Unless we discover near or faster than light speed travel, then we’re never going to another star.
AND if we do invent light speed travel, it would be a one way trip because time dilation would mean while it took you 4 years to travel to Alpha Centauri, 10s of thousands of years would have passed on Earth, and likely our civilization as we know it would have ceased to exist.
2. Ruminate on THAT for a minute.
The human brain named itself.
1. I can’t wrap my mind around it.
That there are stars out there that completely outclass our Sun in sheer size.
To the point of our Sun being a pinprick when lined up next to them.
I could honestly read and write lists like this one all day.
Let’s continue the fun in the comments – tell me your favorite fact please!
