As if life isn't scary enough just by trying to survive 2020.... now people want to discuss some mysteries of life that will make you wish you had to memory. There are things we don't know or never think about on a regular basis, and after we come across the knowledge of said facts it's ok to feel like we a little lighter on information. There are too many things to keep us all awake at night... and a ton of them are below.
Redditor u/MrStojanov wanted to know who could share some frightening details about life and the world we may not all want to know by asking..... What is the most terrifying fact?Fulmur
The defense mechanism of the Fulmar Chick... when threatened, Fulmar chicks will projectile vomit a nasty, sticky orange colored, oil type substance at its attacker. The vomit hardens, and glues the attackers feathers together, rendering it flightless. So now the attacker tries to clean the vomit off in a body of water, only for them to find out the oil type vomit has effectively removed all possibility of buoyancy in water... and the attacker sinks to the bottom and drown, while the Fulmar chick looks on from a distance... watching, waiting for the bubbles to stop, and silently chuckling to itself... terrifying.
Fragile
You can die any second of the day for no known reason other than your body has decided it's done with this business of living now. You have Brugada syndrome and you had a fever too long? Heart attack. You didn't know you had a brain aneurysm and you hit your head? Pop! You bleed to death inside your skull. Just really tall and kinda skinny? You need a collapsed lung. The human body is weirdly fragile for no apparent reason sometimes.
Humm... us
Spiders can eat hummingbirds.
Hummingbirds are only in North and South America, so this spider likely lives on the same landmass as you.
The Heart
My mum died of ischemic heart disease. She had no symptoms at all, just went to sleep one night and never woke up. As its what also killed my grandad, its super likely i have it, but i cant get tested until I'm over 40 and only if the doctor decides its enough of a thing.
Shutdown
After you are medically dead, your brain exhibits a spasm of activity, as if it knows it is now dead.
It's making sure any hanging threads are closed before it shuts down. A graceful shutdown allows for a more stable reboot.
Nuked
The US has lost a confirmed 14 nuclear missiles since 1950, and we still don't know how many nukes the Soviet Union lost. One example would be when a US bomber collided with a tanker mid air and the bomb was lost as a consequence. They found one of them after 12 weeks, but I think that there were multiple that remained lost, but I'm not 100% sure.
Experiments
Today's medicine is mostly based on disturbing human experiments.
If the Japanese hadn't done horrible things to pregnant Chinese women we wouldn't know half as much about what causes birth defects. Yeah, we basically traded a lot of war criminals from axis countries their freedom in exchange for their lab notes
The Rock
There's plenty of world-ending (or at least human-ending) junk in space and it's possible that something will hit us eventually.
Most of what we know about is bright shiny things that reflect light well, but there are a whole lot of others that are really dark. It's like the solar system has a bunch of ping-pong balls floating around. Some of them are bright and shiny white or rock-colored, but some look spray-painted black or very dark brown.
We know where a lot of the shiny ones are, but the dark ones are almost invisible on the backdrop of dark space and we only really see them when they move in front of something bright or light hits them at just the right angle.
If they're moving quickly, we might have a few hours up to a week to prepare. And that's assuming someone spots it the moment it gets close enough to see with a telescope.
Sometimes we don't see them and we only see them after they've already missed Earth.
The odds are really low that we'll actually get hit by any given rock, because space is really really big, but there are lots of rocks out there, with plenty of time to float around, so eventually Earth will get hit.
BE COMPLETELY NORMAL
That one morning you can wake up, go about your day BE COMPLETELY NORMAL, then suddenly get a severe headache. No big deal right? You've had migraines before so you head to lie down, but instead that's it. You drop dead from a brain aneurism. Or you survive and are rushed to the hospital where misdiagnoses and delays in diagnoses happen in up to quarter of the patients and every second counts.
50% of ruptured blood aneurisms are fatal. 66% of those that survive have neurological damage. In those that survive, 20% have it happen to them again. Some people don't even experience symptoms before having one. Screw brain aneurisms.
Monsters Inside Me
shocked j alexander GIFGiphyYears ago I saw an episode of Monsters Inside Me where this guy was doing something outside and a fly flew into his eye. It only made contact for about a microsecond, but it was enough time for it to lay eggs. After they hatched they started eating his eye from the inside and he was starting to go blind until a doctor figured out what was wrong.
Just imagine that, getting your eye eaten from the inside and losing your sight all because a fly very briefly made contact with you. Ever since I learned about this I get really paranoid when there is a fly around my face because of the fact that this could possibly happen to me.
death is real
The fact that you realize death is real after one of your loved ones had died. And realizing your mother grandma etc will die soon as well. I lost my dad 4 months ago and I can tell you it hits hard. (Male, 16 years old).
Edit: First of all thanks for the upvotes and the award kind stranger. Second I want to tell about my relationship with my dad. He actually is my aunt's husband.
My biological parents divorced when I was in first grade and and I was with my father and grandma. When I turned 9 or 10 my grandma broke her leg so she couldn't take care of me, and my dad had a busy work schedule. I started with living with my aunt and Robert. We lived for 7 years and he taught me almost everything I know about life including English(I am Turkish and I had almost 0 knowledge about English now I am fluent with a half Canadian accent)(Yes he was Canadian).
The Drill
That COVID-19 is actually a lot less dangerous than it could have been.
The next one might have a longer incubation time and much higher mortality rate, or primarily kill people in their 30s and 40s, or both, like the Spanish flu. Imagine how screwed we will be then.
In fact, I think we caught a lucky break with COVID-19.
It's serious enough to force us to take it really seriously, and so learn how to deal with a serious pandemic, but at the same time mild enough to not completely ruin the world as we know it. COVID-19 is our pandemic dress rehearsal. Next time, we will know the drill.
Fireball....
sun GIFGiphyIf the sun exploded, we wouldn't know for 8 minutes.
Rest easy, the sun is never going to explode. It doesn't have enough mass to become a supernova.
It will instead gradually expand into a red giant, either cooking us with unfathomable heat, or swallowing us entirely. It is a an open question which it will do, and also an open question whether we will get pushed into a wider orbit or swallowed up by the sun. But it is pretty much a given that it will cook the surface of the planet. If anything is still alive when that happens, it won't be after it's done.
I hope this sets your mind at ease.
Be Fearless
That the brain is so ready to interpret facts on a whim even when it's wrong.
As an example, I misread this thread as "what is the most terrific fact you know" and thought after a few comments that people were too dumb to know the difference between terrific and terrifying...
Never be afraid to fact check.
Flatline
I read that feeling is the last sense to go when you die so I have this fear of being declared dead but then feeling everything they do to me after. So if I'm dead am I still conscious for a time but unable to move? Will I be cut into? Stuck in a freezer?
SUN AND MOON
That during the Cold War, both side's early warning systems mistook the SUN AND MOON for missiles. Pure luck that the people in charge were skeptical saved the world TWICE.
See also: Vasily Arkhipov, who was pressured to fire nukes at the US after his submarine went too deep to receive radio transmissions and was attacked by the US Navy, but refused.
Only the beginning
Oh Lord GIF by memecandyGiphyWith coronavirus not contained, political instability, financial upheaval, and climate change coming due, it's quite possible that 2020 will be the best year we have for a while.
Nowhere else to hide....
The Great Depression (plus the unfairness of The Treaty of Versailles) caused the German people to turn to the Nazi party out of desperation, thus bringing about WW2. Economists are predicting a similar global depression due to COVID. If there isn't some sort of large-scale conflict within the next ten years, I'll eat my hat!
The Worst
There are people in your country right now committing the most horrible crimes and they will never ever face punishment for it. Assaults, murders, torture, slavery. They cause unimaginable suffering but they get to live happy lives. What makes it even worse is sometimes the people who's job it is to stop them will protect them instead.
Get it Together
war animation GIF by Alex TrimpeGiphyThe total mass of all of the ants on earth is equal to the total mass of humans. Ants can lift 10x their weight. They could easily take over if they got it together.
Want to "know" more? Never miss another big, odd, funny, or heartbreaking moment again. Sign up for the Knowable newsletter here.
@SecretaryBurgum/X
@Doug Ellin/X
@evanrachelwood/Instagram
