The goal of science is to help us make sense of what surrounds us , but it can also lead to intellect - blowing moments that shake us to our very essence . From story and timekeeping to biological science and the human body , we often need to take a second to reassess facts about the world . So enjoy this whirlwind tour of facts that might give you an experiential crisis .
Time is confusing
Humans as a specie tend to be focused on ourselves , so our sense of “ clip ” and “ history ” is nebulous at best . We do n’t precisely picture how events further in the yesteryear happen at different times . In general , we ca n’t keep everything in our mind in the good proportion .
If the whole account of our satellite is compressed into a 12 - hour period of time , Homo sapiensonly show up at 11:59:58 . And even this is not as indicative of sentence span from the past . So allow ’s look at some examples . TheT - rexlived nigher in time to us than to the Stegosaurs . Cleopatrawas faithful to a Taylor Swift concert than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza . And on the field of pyramids , when the first ones were built , woolly mammothsstill wander the Earth . earnestly ! France was stillexecuting peopleby closure by compartment when Star Wars came out .
And it ’s not just that . We often feel like positive events in time are closer to us than they are , while bad events are far away . law allowing slaveholding in America are not something from the distant past times . In fact , there are people alive today whose grandparents lived before the Civil War , such as the grandson ofPresident John Tyler . We also often cerebrate of the height of the place wash as late , but it has been46 yearssince any human has really left low - Earth orbit . We are but a blink in the cosmic clock .
place is big
It ’s not our break that we are defective at grasp the reality of huge thing . We are , after all , apes evolve to experience in the Savannah . History is obviously broad and confusing , but space is also quite complicated for us . We often die to hold on just how heavy our major planet is , permit alone the cosmos . Around 71 percent of the surface of the Earth is covered in water and less than5 percentis judge to have been seen by human eyes .
The Earth is also relatively smooth when considered as a whole . Not as smooth as a billiard clod , but its highest and lowest points ( Mount Everest and the Mariana Trench ) are just a very small mutation of the planet ’s radius , which is almost 6,400 km ( about 4,000 miles ) . The size of it of the Earth is clear , so let ’s now move from the Earth to the Moon , our closest celestial fellow traveller .
The moon is about 380,000 kilometers ( 236,000 mile ) from us , and it would take over 8.5 age for a man to continuously “ walk ” that distance . But let ’s speed thing up . The phonograph record for the fastest spacecraft is held by theHelios 2 , which reached speeds of 98,900 metre per second ( 221,233 miles per hr ) . Quite the speed , uh ? It would only take 40 seconds to go from LA to New York at that speed , and yet it would take over 12 hr to encircle the Sun ’s equator .
Even at that neck - break speed , it would take 11 years to get to Mars . Now let ’s go crazy and procreate that speed by 100 . Well , it would take you about 21 days to get to the edge of the Solar System and about 129 years to reach the closest star to the Sun . And even after you have spend all that time , you still have crossed only an peanut part of the universe .
Super - size is ace - shivery
Speaking of the universe , another terrifying fact is how big things are in space . certain planets are big and superstar are bigger , but when you in reality think just how big they are , you can appreciate just how insignificant we really are . The big star is currently believed to beUY Scuti , which has an estimated bulk of 21 billion times that of our Sun and extends to almost the orbit of Saturn if place in our Solar System . Yet , the universe has bigger and even more terrific objects in depot for us .
Supermassive black holes are millions , if not billions , of times the volume of our Sun , which is already pretty grievous . While regular black hollow pack their vast mint into a tiny mass not much big than a metropolis , the heaviest black holes are terrifyingly huge . Thebiggest estimate smuggled holewould have a radius of 62 billion klick ( 38.5 billion mi ) – enough to dwarf the Solar System .
At the end of the mean solar day , black mess are notas scaryas we might feel . If you need to be worried about something , supernovae are the ticket . If you were looking at a supernova the same distance from you as our Sun , your retinas would receive lighter equivalent to a billion H bombs explode directly on your eyeball . At least it would be instantaneous .
alfresco bad . in spite of appearance … good ?
That all sounds scary , so you know what , you do n’t have to suppose about astronomy or history any longer . you could just lock yourself at home and stop worrying about the rest of the universe . Just grab a tub of ice rink - ointment and wrap yourself in a blanket .
Is there anything scary about the human body ? Well first of all , we are half bacterium . For every human cell that pee-pee youyou , there ’s a bacterium cell in your body that is part of yourmicrobiome . In weight that is about 2 kilograms ( 4.4 pound ) Charles Frederick Worth of bacterium , many of which are crucial in helping to keep us awake . investigator have also key out virus inside us whose map is a complete enigma .
Apart from bacterium , we also have other incredible feature . Eachstrand of DNAin our cells is tightly wad to fit a space of about 6 microns . If we were to stretch them out , it would be rough 2 meters ( 6.6 feet ) in length . And if we unfurled all the DNA from a individual person , it would stretch from one side of the Solar System to the other . In keeping with that subject , an adult in all probability has around 160,000 klick ( 100,000 miles ) worth ofblood vesselsin the body – enough to go around the equator four time .
If you are still standing after all these fact , it ’s probably due to your extremely strong bones . There a variety of claims about how hard our bones are , but we could n’t find oneself a single recent source about it . At least we experience our clappers make thebest daggers .
