Everyone loves a fun fact. But not all facts are fun. Although they may be simple on the surface, some are downright messed up.
If you dare to cross the line from fun facts to disturbing facts, you've come to the right place. The replies to this r/AskReddit question might not be fun, but they're certainly factual.
You've been warned.
"Sharks have been around for at least 420 million years, meaning they have survived four of the 'big five' mass extinctions. That makes them older than humanity, older than Mount Everest, older than dinosaurs, older even than trees. Yet we could potentially see them extinct in our lifetime."
"I’m friends with a professor of soil ecology here in the Midwest. She says that if we don’t change our current farming practices, much of the Midwest’s soil will be infertile with one to two generations."
"Despite literally all war propaganda from every country saying otherwise, you are not going to make an individual impact in glorious battle and die valiantly in a hail of bullets. Statistically, you are overwhelmingly more likely to be killed by an explosive device launched miles away by a vehicle you will never see, long before you ever get a chance to pull the trigger."
"The entire planet could be immediately destroyed by any one of a number of cosmic events that we have no way of seeing or stopping like rogue black holes.
Worse...there are some events we can very much see coming, but do absolutely nothing about."
"If you live in a major city there is a nuke aimed at you."
"I live on the outskirts of a city in the top 100 American targets. Out of morbid curiosity I looked some blast radius maps when Putin said to get them ready. Anything smaller than the largest theoretical nuke ever designed (never built) puts me squarely in the 'everything will be on fire but you'll probably survive the initial blast with severe burns if you're inside when it happens' so that was a fun night."
"I read somewhere (here probably) that there is really no such thing as herbivore animals. They will all eat meat if they are given the opportunity, it's just that some are not built to hunt.
I remember the first time I saw a horse eat a small animal it blew my mind and really grossed me out."
"95% of all crimes are solved by... confessions.
Police can be very persuasive, even within the bounds of the law. Outside the law... anything goes."
"That's ignoring the fact that the police can often push an innocent into confessing for the crime they never did, there are plenty of examples. Technically, it solves a crime, but ethically, it doesn't."
"You have no way of really knowing if everyone experiences reality and consciousness the same way you do."
"You really have no way of knowing if you are experiencing 'reality' at all. You could be a brain in a box, a delusional god, an alien's computer science experiment for their 4th grade science fair..."
"Brain aneurysm. It’s unexpected and can happen to you at anytime. 75% of people die within a day. It happened to my friend who is a nurse."
"When I worked in assisted livings I took care of a guy who died from one of those."
"Cotard's syndrome, also called "walking corpse syndrome," is a condition wherein the patient believes they are dead, dying, missing parts of their bodies, or don't exist.
Some people with Cotard's syndrome may stop speaking or eating since they believe they're dead."
"I read somewhere (don’t remember where) that you are more likely to be bitten by someone in New York than to be bitten by a shark."
"There are a lot more people than sharks in New York so that makes sense."
"If you have a parasite in your body, there's only a slim chance you'll know about it before it pops out of your skin or leaves through the back door.
Also, some parasites pop out of skin."
"Once you have the first symptom of rabies, it is too late to reverse."
"Also if you are bitten by a rabid animal (or suspect that you were bitten by an animal that potentially carries rabies) you have to get it treated in the first 3 days, and then follow a very strict vaccination regimen for 30 total days. (Source: I got rabies about 9 years ago)."
"If given access to it, butterflies will happily drink blood."
"So do moths.
When I was a kid, I had a pretty one perch on my hand outside once, & it stabbed me with its' proboscis & started sucking my blood!"
"NASA simulated the response effort to a killer asteroid and determined they would need a minimum of 5 years notice to have any chance of deflecting it—more realistically 10. We’d basically have to identify the thing leaving the Kuiper Belt."
"Capgras Syndrome is a mental delusion where you believe that the people closest to you have been replaced by impostors."
"I actually had this growing up. Really not fun to think that your parents on Tuesday aren't the same as Monday and the Monday ones are probably off somewhere being tortured...."
"Egyptian mummies wouldn’t be so rare today if the Victorian British hadn’t eaten most of them."
"Wow, that was something I never knew or imagined. Thank you. History of Eating Corpses as Medicine."
"Bored ducklings can become cannibals!"
"I'm getting a new batch of ducklings next week. I always make sure the birds have things to do so they don't get aggressive."
"Moving back the start time for school in an area resulted in 70% less car accidents.
Similarly at each daylight saving, heart attacks and accidents decrease with an hour of extra sleep and increase with an hour less of sleep.
Sleep is crazy important."
"Less than 10% of all species even have the possibility of being fossilized, and even more will never be discovered. So we only know about the existence of about 3% of all macroscopic life."
