19 Mind Numbing Facts You Find In a School Book

As humans have progressed in our understanding of life, our world, and the universe around us, we have learned some pretty incredible things.

By Andrew Cunningham

Published 8 months ago in Ftw

The world we live in is a truly fascinating place, filled with all kinds of incredible bits of knowledge and discoveries.

As humans have progressed in our understanding of life, our world, and the universe around us, we have learned some pretty incredible things.

Check out these answers from an askReddit thread where people shared some of the most mind-blowing things they have learned.

1
That you could legitimately travel at warp speed through the center of galaxies and never run any real risk of hitting a star. That’s how spread out space really is. -justanotherguyherer16

2
Pablo Picasso and Eminem were both alive at the same time. -Leebon427

3
Difference between a million and a billion. Someone explained it in terms of time, a million seconds is 11 days and a billion seconds is almost 31 years. I knew a billion was a lot more but man this put it in perspective. -Disastrous-Rise-1279
4
That sharks predated the rings of Saturn. -BeardedDominant

5
Cleopatra lived closer to us than she did the building of the Pyramids at Giza. -Inner-Nothing
6
Every time you shuffle a deck of cards it’s extremely likely that no deck of cards in history has ever been in the same order you just shuffled your deck to. -Roughly7Chickens
7
We went from the first manned flight (kitty hawk) to the moon inside of 66 years. -Alczervikslumberyard

8
Custer's Last Stand happened during the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. -OlderThanMyParents
9
Uncle Sam's initials are U.S which made me realise why he was called that. -StrawberryAsdaew
10
They were colonizing the Wild West the same time as they were building skyscrapers in Manhattan. I always think of them taking place eighty to a hundred years apart. It's wild. -Emilayday

11
Being poor is very very very expensive. Once you have a decent amount of money and no debt, it’s very easy to live super cheap. Once you have the money to buy things, it’s MUCH easier to say no to those things. -TheHumanMiata
12
When I found out a large percentage of people walk around all day without an inner monologue it really messed with me. How do you think? Do you think? How do you make decisions? -Lambking
13
The Romans also had copper wire, magnets, and battery acid. They could have invented electricity hundreds of years before it was actually discovered. But they didn't. The wire was used for jewelry, the magnets as lodestones, and the battery acid was used to clean the rust off of swords. -Kahzgul

14
Nuclear power plants are just steam power plants that use nuclear reactions to heat the water. There's no fancy magic extracting energy directly from the nuclear material. They just boil water and spin a turbine. -Brawndo91
15
The bacteria that eats rotting tree flesh had to evolve too. For a long time, trees just didn't rot. -RenaKunisaki
16
Sometimes is more important to like your colleagues than the actual job. I had terrible jobs with the most amazing colleagues and had bad colleagues and the most amazing job. I'd pick the first every time. -chr989

17
The speed of light is consistent in relativity no matter how fast you are traveling because of the effects speed has on time and gravity. If you are traveling at 99% the speed of light, then the light you emit from a flashlight would appear to be traveling away from you at the speed of light because your time is slowed. -Myzx
18
When you lose weight, most of it ends up as carbon dioxide which is exhaled from your lungs. -Wannagetsober
19
Earth is the only planet in the observable universe that we know of whose only Moon is simultaneously 1/400th of the size and at 1/400th of the distance of its Sun, making it the only known planet capable of having perfect eclipses. -GonzoRouge