People Explain Which Scientific Facts Never Fail To Blow Them Away

Let's start with some crazy numbers! Everyone likes numbers, especially when those numbers are all about making us lack any real understanding of probability and the passing of time.

Time Is Longer Than We Think

"The time period in which dinosaurs lived is so vast, there were dinosaur fossils when dinosaurs were still alive."

daric

"Yes, Tyrannosaurus Rex is closer to the iPad in timeline than it is to the Stegosaurus, by tens of millions of years."

"We are so used to seeing dinosaurs portrayed in a single timeline (children’s books, museums) that we don’t understand the vastness of time they were around."

fadevelocity

Beetles, Beetles, Everywhere

"If you put 1 of every animal in a bag and then pick one out you have a 1/5 chance in picking a beetle"

ItsStillNagy

"And 1/2 chance of picking an insect of any kind."

"To put it another way: half of all animal species are insects, and 40% of those are beetles."

“If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of creation it would appear that God has an inordinate fondness for stars and beetles.”

– evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane

havron

It's A Lot Of Zeroes. Trust Us.

"You are made of 7 Octillion atoms (7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000)"

Knightofthehouse

Keep Counting

"There are 8 times as many atoms in a teaspoonful of water as there are teaspoonfuls of water in the Atlantic ocean"

cafeum

"It's the same with sand!"

"There are more atoms in 1 grain of sand than there are sand grains on earth."

KvotheScamander

Try To Picture It

"If the nucleus in any atom from your body was size of a tennis ball. The electrons would be found orbiting it 2 miles away. You are mostly empty space."

ozmanmusa

It's The Greatest Game Of All Time

"There are this many atoms in the universe: There are between 10^78 to 10^82atoms"

tastey_orphans

"there are even more possible variations of chess games than there are atoms in the observable universe. This is the Shannon Number and represents all of the possible move variations in the game of chess. It is estimated there are between 10111 and 10123 positions. This includes illegal positions. The number not including illegal positions would still be stupid huge as only moves that put your king in check are illegal"

MindlessPut7675

The brain is the most fascinating thing, and we're all just walking around with one inside of our heads. Ever wondered what it was capable of doing?

Even Your Dreams Need To Be Spiced Up

"When you dream, one portion of your brain creates the story, while another part witnesses the events and is really shocked by the plot twists."

Longjumping_Owl9929

"It gets even weirder. There's 2 kinds of dreaming, the watching kind (non-REM) and the doing kind (REM). Each night, you go through 3-4 of these non-REM and REM sleep cycles. The non-REM sleep is the deeper sleep and the REM is the lighter sleep."

"So in the watching kind, it's like you're watching a movie, you're passively observing a character your subconscious created going through a situation, for example, you watch a character you created subconsciously go through their first day of high school. After observing it and drawing some conclusions, or gaining some insight, you then go into REM sleep and now you're the one going through their first day at high school. You make the decisions, you feel the emotional responses to what's going on, and your body will have physical reactions like sweating from fear, increase heart rate from excitement, dopamine release from something good happening, etc. So it's like watching a training movie and then getting a chance to do it in a practice dream scenario."

Enjoying_A_Meal

Ever Feel Like You're Talking To Yourself?

"I recently read about the Split-Brain experiments. There is a procedure for severe epilepsy that involves cutting the connecting nerves of the two brain hemispheres, resulting in the two hemispheres being unable to communicate with each other. The experiment shows that both halves can answer questions independently of each other, have seperate opinions/preferences, form memories independantly. Basically suggesting that there are two minds in the brain. That just blows my mind(s)."

Mlinch

People Afraid Of Spiders Need Not Try

"There are actually blood vessels obstructing light from reaching certain areas in your eye, effectively creating a shadow. Your brain filters this out and essentially fills in the gaps so you don’t actually see this spiderweb-like network of black lines. However, you can visualise them by shining a light at a diagonal into your eye (not directly!) and gently wiggling it about. This means your brain doesn’t have enough time to filter it out and you see this spiderweb like network of blood vessels!"

"Technical instructions to clarify the actions involved. I find it easier to see this effect in a dark environment, so the contrast of the black shadow against the light is higher. You want to be staring straight ahead and shining the light into your pupil at a 45 degree angle from the side directed at your nose at about 10-20 cm away from them. Phone light will do great and have it on the dimmest setting if possible. Then wiggle the light in gentle 1 cm movements side to side. Keep this up for about a second at least and you should see them. Hope this clears it up a bit!"

ANonWhoMouse

"Hey, We Should Be Keeping All This Blood In Our Body, Right?" - Your Body

"Blood is able to turn from liquid to a gel in order to stop bleeding. Basically, when God created us humans, he made our cells (and our bodies themselves) smarter than us. Now obviously it sounds like basic knowledge for blood to clot and stop bleeding. It may sound simple and basic for tissue to do such a thing, but even the most basic things our bodies do can impress us."

TheBBWLoverGUNNUT

Space. The final frontier.

And one we'll never fully comprehend, at least not in our lifetime.

We're Never Going To Get To Trek The Stars, Are We?

"Voyager 1 has been traveling >30,000 mph for 43 years and it's only 20 light hours away."

ruined-on-the-day

"And the closest star is about 4.3 light year away, so it would only take 80,000 years"

SluggishPrey

"light-years alone are difficult for me to wrap my head around. This is the first I'm hearing of light hours and my brain just imploded."

ThrowRARAw

Being The Right Distance Away Helps A Lot

"To me... The amount of energy that is produced in the sun, and only an infinitesimal fraction is all we need to survive."

TwistLocal4739

Squeeze It On In

"You can fit all the planets (Pluto included) between the Earth & Moon"

AnxiousIndicator

"For reference, the moon is about 30 Earth's away"

abramcpg

Breathe Past The Existential Dread

"Approximately 99.85% of all the mass in the solar system is concentrated in The Sun."

Public_Breath6890

"The mass in our solar system is contained within the sun, Jupiter, and a rounding error."

Past_Ad9675

"Very true, but even jupiter could be a rounding error lol. It's only 0.095330% of the solar system's mass."

_alright_then_

Yeesh, We Know Nothing

"In normal space-time we can freely move about in space, but not time. You are free to travel to the north pole if you so wished, but you can't not go to tomorrow."

"However once you cross the event horizon of a black hole this gets inverted. You can freely move about in time but not space. All possible trajectories will lead you towards the centre of the black hole."

nova_outis

The Doctor And His T.A.R.D.I.S. Would Like A Word

"Dinosaurs lived on the other side of the galaxy from where we are now"

nolesein

"This is what I think about with time travel, if it's not relatively bound to the Earth, you'd travel back in time and 99.999% end up in the vacuum of space"

BrokenRatingScheme

Take a deep breath. Your space in this universe is important, but always remember how amazing the universe you're a part of actually is.