Facts are cool little things – like knowledge in a nutshell – and we all have those favorite tidbits that are perfectly sharable, like a good snack.
We bust them out whenever and wherever we can, because they’re nearly always a winner.
These 17 people are sharing their favorite facts like those – the ones that continue to amaze them no matter how many times they’ve heard them.
17. We’re still just a baby.
I’m 64.
I’ve been alive for 1/4 of all US history.
16. That could be scary.
In space you can weld certain metals simply by putting them close together.
The reason is that there is no oxygen to create a layer of oxidation on the surfaces of the metals.
Because of this, when put close together, the atoms “forget” which metal object they belong to and merge with the similar atoms next to them. Thus welding them together.
15. I do not like it at all.
I find it crazy that Rabbits have the ability to scream.
14. Amazing is one word for it.
I find it amazing that frogs can’t vomit and instead they eject their stomach out of their mouth and empty it with their hands.
What baffles me most about things like this is it’s impossible for me to not humanize the whole thing.
Like for the frog that’s as normal as anything. But I can’t not think about how much it would hurt as a human to pull your stomach out your throat and then squeegee sick off with your hands.
13. How much they’ve seen…
It’s relatively well known that the oldest land animal is a tortoise hatched in 1833. But there’s some sharks we haven’t accurately dated that go back to at least the 1700s, if not older. The fascinating fact to me isn’t how old they are, but how much of mankind’s development they’d have witnessed. They were swimming against our still wooden, wind powered ships as the euros set out to discover/conquer the world. As technology advanced, they’d have seen as those ships began to chemically power themselves, become strange steel structures that could almost match their own speeds.
Their perspective would be like if we saw some bugs crawling in the desert and were like hmm ok then came back like a year later and they’d suddenly learned to fly. It doesn’t gave any bearing on our behavior or society but we’d all still be like “yo you hear about those bugs that evolved flight in a year?”.
Those sharks must have similar communications about the weird surface swimmer animals they occasionally go past.
12. It’s a rabbit hole, for sure.
The fact that we’re conscious.
I mean, if we’re just matter following laws of physics, why are we conscious? If we’re just evolving survival machines making brute decisions like a computer,, why does anything need to be aware of it?
Where does the consciousness actually take place? I mean, I know that consciousness is thought to arise in the brain due to neural activity, but I don’t feel like I’m in a brain and I don’t experience neural activity. What is the neural activity projected onto, so to speak, and who is really observing it?
11. We’re all different.
Some people do not have an inner voice in their mind and cannot visualize anything in their mind.
When I was younger, I used to be able to imagine a chalkboard and do long division/multiplication the “old school” way.
I didn’t know until later in life that most people can’t do that. The Dunning-Kruger effect has two sides to it…
10. Brains are super weird.
If you study neuroscience you’ll see that we are sorta emotion and ego software running on top of a computer like layer. We make decisions and have feelings and then make s**t up to justify it after the fact.
It’s an emergent phenomenon similar to how a bunch of glowing pixels can look like a cat.
9. It’s happened within a generation.
How much technology has advanced in the last 20-30 years, the way the world receives/sends information. I remember seeing my first computer in 1979, my family bought a Commodore 64 in 1987, all we did was use it for video games, everything was so primitive. I remember our first cell phone around 2000–no pictures, etc., just sending/receiving calls & you couldn’t always count on the reception. Now they can do anything and everything. Our first VCR was in 1984, such a treat! Loved going to Blockbuster to get the latest videos on a Friday or Saturday night.
No need any more for phone books, floppy discs, road maps, pay phones, telephone operators, carbon paper, typewriters (and typewriter erasers), encyclopedias, slide projectors, film strips, card catalogs in libraries, Walkmans, 1-900 phone numbers, writing letters (I still do it), film developing, pagers, console TVs. I grew up w/these things–my grandkids don’t even know what these things are.
My 86-year-old father is still mystified by any electronic gadget, we regret talking him out of his landline when mom passed away & just relying on a Jitterbug cellphone, which he still has trouble figuring out. He misses the old days (which weren’t that long ago!)
8. That’s disconcerting.
Prehistoric penguins were taller than average height men today.
That a slice of brown bread can’t be eaten in less than 50 seconds (anyone wants to accept this challenge?)
7. Infinite.
Every point in space appears to be the center.
No matter where you are it appears that the universe is expanding away from you in all directions at the same rate.
6. That’s perspective.
The 2% margin of error the Chinese government allows for their census is larger Australia’s population.
Thats 25 million people. Scotlands population is 5 million.
China’s margin of error is 5 Scotlands. Wow.
5. So many cogs in the machine.
It blows my mind how much collective work is put into every single thing around us.
Pick up a book. The author was not the only one responsible for it being in your hand, so was the owner of the publishing company, the factory worker making sure it was printing correctly and many others.
Look at a building. From the mind of the architect that designed it, the contractor in charge of building it, the construction worker who put his sweat and hard work into those walls.
An apple you might have for a snack goes through many people like the farmer, to the distributer, to the grocer that stocked it on the shelf.
Pretty much everything around us had so many people working on it, many that you don’t even consider. That’s pretty amazing to me.
4. The universe is vast.
What stars actually are.
They are objects like our sun, possibly with planets around them. Those planets could even have life. Who knows, something might be staring back at me having similar thoughts.
Even trying to grasp how large and violent the sun actually is when picturing it in the sky is already hard to compute. Let alone realizing that there are millions of them up there. Some of them might have even exploded already, but we wont see that for years simply due to the distance between us and them.
I can go on and on about this stuff.
3. We’re not as smart as we used to be.
During Age of Discovery people managed to travel across the globe only with compass and stars.
Right now it is an achievement to find a store without GPS.
People back then were really awesome.
2. Makes you appreciate what card counters can do.
The amount of unique combinations a deck of cards can have.
1. A handy trick.
Any fraction can be reversed.
Take 16% of 50. Switch it to 50% of 16 it’s much easier to do the last.
I hope that some or all of these were new to you!
What’s your favorite fact? Drop it on us in the comments!
