Science is fascinating, but sometimes it's so fascinating, it switches straight from scientific finds to science fiction.
But there are some truths in the universe that feel impossible to believe but which are totally true.
Curious, Redditor NoSector9488 asked:
"What's something that feels fake but is 100% real?"
Light Travel
"It takes light 4.24 years to get from Earth to our closest neighbor star, Proxima Centauri. The fastest vehicle ever constructed by humans, Voyager 1, travels at 10.5 miles per SECOND."
"At that speed, a flight from New York to London would take five minutes. And at that same speed, it would still take it almost 75,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri."
- Safe-Emu4204
The Dinosaur Timeline
"A T-Rex lived closer in time to modern-day humans than it did to a single Stegosaurus. This one always blows my mind."
- Murphy_Nelson
"Another Dino fact that gets me: the main extinction happened approximately 64 million years ago. A very long time until you look at how long they were here: around 120 million years. (Other than avian relatives.)"
- despenser412
Time Itself
"One thing that always blows my mind, accounting for the sheer expanse of time, is that if you took the entire history of the earth and compressed it into a calendar year, humans only showed up around 11:25 PM on December 31st (fashionably late to the party)."
"Similarly, if you compressed the history of the universe into a year, humans have been around for about 6.9 seconds."
- vonkeswick
Ancient Egypt
"Cleopatra lived closer in time to us than the creation of the pyramids. When Cleopatra was alive, the pyramids were already ancient."
- quad_damage_orbb
"Ancient Egyptian Architecture was a valid field of study in what we now consider Ancient Egypt."
- vonkeswick
"The history of Egypt is so long that the ancient Egyptians we think of had scholars who studied their own ancient history."
- ScaryBilbo
The Rivers Of the Appalachian Mountains
"There are a few rivers in the Appalachian mountains older than the Atlantic Ocean that they now drain into."
- Bubbly-Travel9563
"The Appalachian Mountains are older than land animals, dinosaurs, and even trees!"
- Brave_Garlic_9542
Internal Compass
"The North Star is only 70 million years old. How did the dinosaurs find their way without the North Star, I wonder?"
- curious_dead
"If you want a serious answer: Modern birds have iron particles in their brain which act as an internal compass that allows them to sense the Earth‘s magnetic field."
"Birds are living dinosaurs, so there is a chance that they may have actually inherited this trait from their ancestors."
"This actually is a minor plot point in the first 'Jurassic Park' novel."
- Romboteryx
Just Sky Things
"The clouds! Water just hanging out there in the sky? Sure sounds like bulls**t to me."
- BestMagikarpTatooine
"Feel the same way about planes. You mean heavy metal can just fly and not fall?"
- iceberger3
52 Pick-Up
"Statistically speaking, every single (true) shuffle of a deck of cards ever made has likely ended up in a different order than every other one, as there's just that many possible ways 52 cards can be ordered."
- VastAddendum
"There are more ways to shuffle a deck of 52 cards than there are atoms on the earth. I understand the math, and I believe it must be true based on the numbers, but it’s not something my brain can accept."
- stephanonymous
Underwater Communications
"The freakin underwater internet cables, man."
- captspero
"I think the first time this was brought to my attention was in the aftermath of the Tonga disaster, because those cables were damaged and communication was cut. Blew my mind."
- Brave_Garlic_9542
"I've seen with my own eyes the cable that arrives from the ocean to Valparaiso, Chile."
"It's the width of my pinky finger. The protective barrier is like a tree trunk, but the actual wire is the width of my pinky finger."
"That absolutely blows my mind!"
- celbertin
Everything's Bigger In Australia
"Australia is wider than the Moon: about 4,000 km vs 3,474 km."
- Temporary-Pause-4737
"It doesn't help that Australia's size is so misrepresented on maps because of how the distortions work farther from the equator. It's nearly the size of the continental US."
- eeyore134
Impossible Creatures
"Axolotls. I've seen them with my own eyes, and I cannot be convinced they weren't created in the imagination of some genius scientist out there."
- Past_Effect8301
"And octopuses. They’re aliens, right?"
- claustrophobic_toes
"Yes! And, they're not your garden variety alien either. Let's make them extra intelligent terrestrials to mess with you further."
"I'm a diver, and nothing gets me more excited on a dive than the presence of an octopus."
- Past_Effect8301
Noise-Canceling Headphones
"Noise cancellation feels like something out of a bad cartoon. Animated 'Three Stooges' stuff."
"'Sound is a waveform, so if I just make the opposite waveform, it cancels out and makes silence!' Yeah, sure, Professor Poindexter, now tell me about the time machine that takes us to the past where humans are riding dinosaurs."
- cthulhubert
Minecraft In Nature
"That wombats poop cubes. Evolution went full Minecraft, and nobody questioned it."
- No_Cry_607
"Australia is full of evolutionary oddities."
- LiffeyDodge
"Australian biologist here. It’s more accurate to say that wombat poop dries into cubes. It doesn’t quite come out that way."
"It’s still supremely strange. It could be to help the poop remain in place and not roll away. Wombats mark territory with poop and sometimes like to deposit it in prominent places if they can. They will even back up to something like a fence post and somehow deposit a single cube poop up on top of the object."
"Strange creatures."
- HobGoodfellow
Scientific Breakthroughs
"It took 4,300 lifespans before humans were able to circumnavigate the Earth, in a wooden ship with cloth sails."
"From there, it took five more lifespans to land on the Moon."
- amitym
"It's wild how quickly things advanced once people got a grasp of basic scientific principles. Crossing the ocean on a wooden ship is really difficult if you start from scratch with no prior knowledge."
- scatterlite
"Don't forget that the age of exploration means knowledge is flying back and forth around the world in ways it never had before."
- EddieDantes22
Everything In Your Pocket
"A Smartphone."
" Go back 500 years and tell someone that a single hunk of metal, glass, plastic and minerals mushed into a brick that can be used to communicate with other humans, show unlimited entertainment, provide you with all information known to mankind, can be used to deliver food/alcohol to your door or summon a metal box to pick you up and travel to places, it can also send money and receive money, turn off/on lights, be used to gamble, and basically manage almost every aspect of your life."
- ItBeRyou
Each of these finds are unique and fascinating in their own way, but some of them are harder for us to wrap our minds around than others.
The world around us is truly a fascinating place, and it's important that we always keep asking questions and aiming to learn something new each day.
@realDonaldTrump/Truth Social
