‘Scientists: What’s something we know is true but people don’t realise how crazy it is?’ – 22 facts so freaky you won’t believe they’re real

13.

‘The atoms in your body are older than the Earth. Most of them were formed inside exploding stars billions of years ago. You’re literally recycled stardust walking around arguing about WiFi speed.’
–Official_waIter

14.

‘For 186 million years, giant reptiles absolutely dominated the planet, on land, in the sky, and in the rivers and oceans, until a single asteroid ended it all. Extinction events are usually more complex or drawn out over thousands or millions of years, but the one that happened 66 million years ago was caused by a single extremely rare event that happened on one random day.

One space rock hitting a shallow part of the Gulf of Mexico caused almost every animal larger than a wolf to die, worldwide, within a few months. It’s the only mass extinction event that was truly instantaneous in a geological sense, and it ended one of the most diverse and spectacular ecological eras in Earth’s history.’
–Aaron696

15.

‘Your eyes can send way more data than your optic nerve can carry. We don’t know how your eyes decide what data to send and what data to ignore.

There doesn’t seem to be any sort of decision-making cells or structures, and it’s not something as simple as ‘movement more important’ or ‘brighter more important’.’
–6a6566663437

16.

‘Farmer here. Seems obvious, but just how many resources nature has to throw at EVERY problem (in this context, ‘problem’ means your healthy crop).

Our solutions for pest / disease issues on crops are incredibly specific. Develop a specific insecticide that targets the digestion of a gnat, or the reproductive cycle of a worm. Nature has 24/7 to develop infinite new evolutions of that pest / disease that will circumvent your incredibly specific mode of action.

Follow up – no… nature WONT ‘just provide for us’. Nature will provide for itself. All the crops we eat have been developed by humans to feed us. If you ever doubt that, look up the native species we derived corn or apples or strawberries from. They look nothing like the crops we enjoy today.’
–randobot456

17.

‘You are about 1cm taller in the morning than at night, as your spine compresses throughout the day.’
–GiveUp-WatchItBurn

18.

‘Certain colours like magenta don’t actually exist in reality. We’re just not built to deal with the multiple wavelengths of light ‘magenta’ pings back to us so our brain goes ‘fuck it, here’s magenta – that’ll do’.’
–hadawayandshite

19.

‘Because of the finite speed of light, you only ever see the past and you only can affect the future. You don’t live in the present, it’s completely walled off from you and is not even a physically well defined concept.’
–fuseboy

20.

‘Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid. We treat ancient Egypt like it’s all one era. It isn’t. Cleopatra was basically a historian looking back at the pyramids the same way we look back at ancient Rome. History is much longer and weirder than the way we’re taught to picture it.’
–TutorDecent4978

21.

‘Before Big Bang inflation, time and space were most likely jumbled together in a non-orientable surface. Which is to say, the flattening of space through exponential expansion is the only thing that gave time any sense of direction, and that direction may have been selected completely randomly. There was no such thing as a time before the Big Bang.’
–Funny-Vegetable-1024

22.

‘Your brain made up the entire experience of ‘reality’. You’ve never actually seen colour, felt texture, or heard sound the way they truly exist. Your brain just translates electrical signals into a fully immersive simulation and goes, ‘Yeah this seems real’.

You are a consciousness piloting a meat suit, trusting a three-pound organ that hallucinates your entire world in real time… and we all just accept that like it’s normal.’
–NikitaG00

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