My eye was opened when I read in (I think) “The selfish Gene” that all humans start out female. Chemical processes during the very early stages of life turn female sex organs into male, and so on.
Post an eye-opening fact.
I was astounded to find out that the radical Islamic government in Iran started only 30 years ago when Khomeini came to power. I had no idea it was that recent. Changed my whole perception of the country, and about what kinds of things can happen to government in crisis situations.
My historical knowledge is terrible (obviously), but when you have only Hitler as an example of a leader stepping in in times of crisis and thereby gaining power, you begin to think that that sort of thing has been relegated to the past. Learning about Iran makes me think we dodged a bullet (or at least were given only a flesh wound) after the “crisis” situation during Bush’s [del]rule[/del] [del]reign[/del] presidency.
Similarly when I found out that both Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were OUR boys at one time (well, at least Bin Laden was also an enemy of the USSR).
There are many, MANY, more stars in the sky than grains of sand in all the worlds beaches and deserts.
That we made it to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, but I forget when or for how long. 
SSG Schwartz
That we are genetically closer to a chimpanzee than a mouse is to a rat.
That a great many of the stars we think we now see in the night sky were dead long before the Earth was formed. The reason we see their light is because they were so far away that it is only just now reaching us.
That somewhere between 97 and 99+ percent of all living things that once inhabited this planet are extinct.
That there is absolutely nothing new or original in the Old Testament or the New Testament. Everything is either plagiarized from texts from older religions or various forms of art that predated the books.
That some of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition and all from the Salem Witch Trials are almost exclusively the result of a mistranslation of a single line in the King James version of the Bible.
I could do this for days.
no, they were OUR boys. We trained and supplied both of them. Granted this was a very different time, when Russia was our “big threat” (even though we knew damn well at the time that they couldn’t sustain any sort of war with the west, we were still scared of a nuclear strike)
My eye-opening fact would have to be that every neutron comes from an imploded star, so in essence (literally) we’re all just star dust
Diplodocus lived about 150-odd million years ago. Triceratops lived 65 million years ago. We’re closer to Triceratops than they are to Diplodocus. Really gave me a greater appreciation for just how long the “age of the dinosaurs” lasted, and how immensely short our stay on the planet has been.
Which line and what’s the mistranslation?
Not a single one of the naked-eye-visible stars in the sky meet this criteria. The most distant discrete stars we can see are about 15,000 LY away; all of these are within our own galaxy. None of the stars in the Milky Way are more than about 100,000 LY from us. The only other galaxy one can see with the naked eye is the Great Galaxy in Andromeda, M31. It’s about 2 million LY or so from Earth. Since the Earth is over 4.5 billion years old, none of the stars you see in the sky could have died before it was formed.
That everybody will die.
Exodus 22:18 “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”. Some people think it should read poisoner instead. I don’t know which is more correct.
What’s even more eye-opening is when you combine that fact with the fact that about two-thirds of Iran’s population is under thirty, and about half of that population is far too young to remember anything about the revolution. Most of what’s going on there is probably an older generation desperately clinging to power in the face of a young population that just doesn’t care that much.
I’m almost positive I am quoting Carl Sagan from either **The Demon Haunted World **or Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, but I have neither of these books with me (at work). Is he incorrect, or is the data simply outdated?
I think you may be misremembering, either the quote, the author or the context. I’m quite certain Sagan himself would never have made such a statement, except in the context of debunking a fallacy.
I can vividly remember, when I was about 20, the very second I truly grasped Special Relativity, and was blown away. I have no idea why this wasn’t taught to me in High School science.
Even though I always knew I had a deep interest in it, it was that moment I was smitten by physics, and consumed it voraciously. Then I learned about Quantum Mechanics, as much as I could on my own, and have developed a tick ever since.
twitch
Carl Sagan also said in The Dragons Of Eden that there were more synapses in a human brain than there were stars, which seemed a very speculative statement to me. Still an interesting read though.
The sun is roughly 92 million miles from the Earth and has a diameter of about 870,000 miles. The Earth, by comparison, has a diameter of about 7,900 miles. So the sun is roughly 110 times larger than the Earth.
The largest planet in our solar system is Jupiter, which has a diameter of about 88,700 miles. That’s still only a tenth the size of our sun.
The largest star that we’ve found - and the universe, as we know, is pretty big and we still haven’t seen most of it - is called VY Canis Majoris and is somewhere around 2,000 times the size of our sun. So it’s about 200,000 times the size of the Earth.
VY Canis Majoris is roughly 5,000 light years away from the Earth. It is the brightest star we’ve found, but still, it would take a beam of light from VY Canis Majoris five thousand years to reach Earth. By comparison, it takes about eight minutes for light from our sun to reach us. If VY Canis Majoris was put where our sun is, it - the actual physical body of the star itself - would reach Saturn’s orbit.
Most of the 5,000 light years between us and VY Canis Majoris is empty.
I was amazed to discover that U.S./Iran problems actually date back to the 1953 CIA-backed coup d’etat in which Prime Minister Mossadegh was deposed and the Shah seized power. Mossadegh was opposed to foreign intervention in Iran and his ouster made him a martyr and hero to the Islamic world. The U.S. and Britain continued to back the Shah despite his autocratic rule until he was overthrown by popular movement enabling the religious fundamentalists to come to power.
For those scoring at home: The U.S. helped remove the democratically elected, popular leader of a foreign country and replaced him with a hated, tyrannical, hereditary monarch…and we wonder why they don’t like us!
The realization that time and space are completely interwoven and that one cannot exist without the other.
The fact that there are an infinite number of numbers (i.e. there is no such thing as the largest or smallest possible number). Neither, related to the above, is there a limit to space or to time.
My fascination with genealogy is because of some general eye openers. They may seem specific to my family but they’re not- they’re indicative of something much greater:
-Having traced my ancestry back to a man who settled in James Town ca. 1618 I realized that, using a fan chart or ahenentafel (genealogy jargon) and even allowing for some cousin marriages to reduce the number of lines of descent, I would have well over 1000 ancestors alive in the early 17th century, which historically speaking was not long ago at all.
Add to this that my great-grandparents who died in the 1950s and had 15 children are already, barely half a century after their deaths, the ancestors of more than a thousand living descendants. However, I’ve never once seen any evidence of anyone visiting their graves. A Confederate ancestor who had only 9 children but died in 1891 also has more than a thousand descendants by the most conservative estimate.
What fascinates me about the above is the realization of just how many relatives we all have, how closely we’re probably all related.
One branch of my family came here due to a squabble over a linen and wool tax in Scotland in the late 17th century. That same branch was ruined by a volcanic eruption in Indonesia (Mt. Tambora) during the “year without a summer” when their crops were destroyed, so they moved south to the much warmer Georgia climate where land was cheap. This fascinates me because it’s amazing how something seemingly minor or totally insignificant in history (who the hell cares about a linen/wool tax of the Stuart monarchs? Or a massive volcanic eruption that happened 190 years ago?) and yet those seemingly “footnote trivia” aspects of history are why I was born in Alabama 42 years ago. Hard to explain just why this fascinates me I suppose, but it’s the complete chaos and complete order that creates us.
Another genealogy related one that may seem a bit solipsistic but I’ll explain: my great-great-grandmother Amanda married a man three times her age when she was in her early 20s, managed a plantation as a pregnant widow during the early Civil War, married the overseer, had 9 children by two husbands and dozens of grandchildren/great-grandchildren/possibly great-great-grandchildren by the time she died during (but not because of) WW1, and my grandfather- her grandson- was 25 years old when she died, lived 2 miles away from her, and presumably knew her fairly well, and yet her name was never mentioned. All that I know about her I know from my own research in databases and cemeteries and courthouse records, and the same is true of 99% of my other ancestors starting wtih great-grandparents. The “eye opener” was how soon a human or a human story is completely forgotten, even when it begs to be told, and how this woman has been dead less than a century, has well over a thousand descendants, and I doubt that 1 in 20 of them have ever heard her name, or much care.
At some point what I call “The cursor arrow of history” really hit me, which means that just as I type this I am living during the most recent moment of history, so everything I have ever read whether it was an email from my sister 2 hours after she sent it or whether it was a transcription of a 4500 year old Egyptian prayer was written at exactly the cursor of history, at the most present moment of history, and it becomes to me exactly the same as looking at stars and seeing something that is hundreds of years old yet happening right now at the same time, and that just as we read histories of the Romans one day we ourselves will be studied as nothing but histories of a faceless nameless time that few but students cramming for a test have interest in. This doesn’t depress me but somehow inspires me- hard to say how though.
And my eyes were forever opened when I realized that if you pay a few dollars more for an alarm clock you can get one where the hour and minute are separate buttons thus it’s a whole lot faster to set. And that ashes and baking soda are a good silver polish.