What fact blows your mind every time you think about it?
Asked by
jackm (
6212
)
October 27th, 2009
What is the one fact that when you think about it, you become filled with awe. What fact makes you want to walk up to people on the street, shake them, and tell them?
I won’t answer until later in the thread, so I don’t tint your responses.
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49 Answers
The human skeleton weighs around 20 pounds. Always makes me feel morbidly obese.
This happens when I’m driving on the streets of my tiny little town and realize I don’t know any of the people I pass in the car. Then I think about how many people have been on this planet and how many more people will be after I am dead, and how I will never know any of them, and how I wish I could know everyone and not get old but I can’t because everything will exist and go on even if I don’t.
Yeah.
that people actually went to the moon. that somebody walked around up there. with computers that had less computational power than a cell phone. I think about it everytime I look at the moon.
That our skin keeps everything out yet takes everything in and does everything else that it does. I think it’s neat :)
this
is it really a plesiosaur carcass? who knows… but it sure looks like one!
That when Mt. Thera on Akrotiri (modern day Santorini) in the Cycladic islands erupted in 1650 BCE, it could be heard from as far away as California and Australia. The smoke caused extreme darkness for days, and pieces of rock landed as far as Mesopotamia. Many peoples base part of their religions on this event.
Given unlimited food… one e. coli cell could multiply to equal the mass of the earth in three days.
Yep! That’s why we use it so often in science. It reproduces at an incredible rate.
It’s especially neat because you can watch it visibly evolve before your eyes.
@shockrocks
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This
I feel incredibly small every time i look at it.
I’m always amazed by the fact that when I speak, people understand what I’m saying. Who came up with words? Or different languages? It really weirds me out if I sit and analyze that too much…
Cookies are bad for you. : (
@shockrocks That’s actually not even a viable animal. It’s paper and cardboard/leaves. There are no real bone structures on it.
1.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 (to infinity) is 2.
I can prove it algebraically and a number of other ways (ex. calculus) but it just seems WRONG.
When I can see a planet or a star, it’s mind-boggling to think how far away it actually is, and that there are infinite numbers of such entities that I’ll never ever see.
We are stardust, indeed.
That there is a black hole the size of 50 billion suns in the universe.
That one of the possible resolutions of the Fermi Paradox is that we could be the first species to develop a technological civilization within our galaxy.
Mine would have to be quantum physics.
Under everything there is probability. Everything exists as a wave and as a particle. Newton said “God does not play dice with the universe” and he was wrong.
@jackm Einstein said that, not Newton. Niels Bohr’s response was: “Albert, stop telling God what to do!” (this might be apocryphal)
That Celcuis and Fahrenheit meet at 40 and -40 degrees but are way different otherwise. WTF??
@Parrappa how about the super massive black hole at the center of our galaxy that holds the whole milky way together,and is only the size of a speck of dust.
@shared3 ^ ^
And that’s in just one universe. Who knows how many uinverses there are?
Not to be snide here, but my knee jerk answer was that I stayed married to my ex-husband for 21 years.
That the sun is 93 million miles away from the Earth. Whenever I contemplate what lives at the bottom of the ocean that we have yet to discover I am awed.
That 20,000 people starve to death every single day, and some people have nothing more to worry about than their neighbor plays music too loud.
The hard drive that is spinning inside your computer is like a 747 flying over a field a inch off the ground and counting every blade of grass that it passes over.
That the core of the sun is 27,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit. How can a temperature even be that hot?
@holden the question posed was what FACT…image your surprise if you one day you find out you are wrong…belief in a GOD or not is never a fact.
That even though light is the fastest thing in the universe, some starlight is from stars that died billions of years ago. The light is still travelling to our eyes, after so much time, which means that it has a hell of a long distance to travel.
I already knew that I was short, but this is ridiculous.~
If you are pregnant with a girl- you are carrying your grandchildren as well. It blows my mind and humbles me to know I’m part of such a long chain.
Anything to do with space freaks me out completely. Even just looking up at the sky on a clear night makes me feel small without all the facts about how small our planet is compared to others and how many different galaxy’s there may be etc etc.
Also the fact that dinosaurs roamed the earth for millions of years.
Quantum tunneling i.e. walking through a door without opening it.
@mattbrowne Is that “real”? Or is the idea of walking through a door without opening it purely a metaphor?
Being alive; just being alive.
@janbb lots of lurve to you GA
@RedPowerLady – Quantum tunneling is real and yes, the door is a metaphor. But that’s exactly how it works. It sounds crazy. It sounds like magic. And it has been confirmed so many times it makes general relativity look like science fiction.
That even if we ever built a colony in Alpha Centauri (which is just around the corner in astral terms), it would take 4.3 years for my cousin to pick up the phone when I called, and another 4.3 before I heard the “hello”. I can even notice the delay when calling my family in Australia (only a few hundredths of a second, but you can still feel the slight pauses if you start talking fast).
@Jack79 How long would it take for me to call my cousin?
That nobody on the internet can read. How did we all get here?
While almost every other liquid compresses when frozen, water expands.
That God should love sinner such s me.
@ken1 yours is a much better answer.
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