ITT: Statements that are unbelievable, huge, or obscure that can be sourced and verified. Basically, when you hear it, it makes you pause for a second, scratch your head, and think "really?".

 

 

 

The US National Debt is about $14.3 Trillion. The thickness of a $1 bill is just shy of .11mm. If you stacked 14.3 trillion 1 dollar bills on top of one another, they'd circle the earth nearly 39 times.

 

 

 

@Mods - If you feel this is more appropriate for forum games, please feel free to move it.

The brain itself has no pain sensors (meaning that you won't feel any pain if your brain gets physically harmed). Also, if you remove the part of the brain that controls pain, the pain recepters of the body go into a state of 'confusion', and end up firing off randomly (meaning that the james bond character 'renard' would've felt random amounts of pain at random intervals, rather than no pain at all. He would've also felt no pain from the bullet travelling slowly through his brain).

The brain itself has no pain sensors (meaning that you won't feel any pain if your brain gets physically harmed). Also, if you remove the part of the brain that controls pain, the pain recepters of the body go into a state of 'confusion', and end up firing off randomly (meaning that the james bond character 'renard' would've felt random amounts of pain at random intervals, rather than no pain at all. He would've also felt no pain from the bullet travelling slowly through his brain).

 

1 flaw I see there:

Is not the part of the brain that controls pain receptors also the part that decodes the pain signals for the brain to process as pain. Meaning despite the receptors firing off at random you wouldn't feel pain as you can't decode the signals?

 

Disclaimer: I could be talking out my ass on this one, but I recall tht being true from science classes n helping ppl revise waaaay bk so may as well question it.

There are an estimated 50 thousand million galaxies in the universe, with the typical galaxy containing 50 thousand million to 100 thousand million stars. It is estimated that there are 10²² stars in total in the universe

http://primaxstudio.com/stuff/scale_of_universe/

This thing is amazing.

That's pretty awesome, but they got the pronunciation of Uranus wrong.

Imagine the sun is 2m in diameter, and everything else is scaled down to match. That makes Earth about the size of a marble, 201m away - about 2 football fields. Pluto is the size of a pinhead, 10km away. Our nearest star on this scale would still be 57,000km away - about 1/6 the distance to the moon.

 

 

The sound you make when you snap your fingers is from your finger hitting the palm of your hand/base of your thumb.

 

The combined weight of all the ants in the world is greater than the combined weight of all humans.

 

On average, ants compose 15-20% of the terrestrial animal biomass in the world, and as much as 25% in the tropics.

 

 

 

Also, Argentine ant, at first glance it seems like the regular pest ant all of us are familiar with. The interesting thing is that every one of the pest ants we have seen are part of a single massive worldwide mega-colony. The Catalonian Super-Colony stretching for 5760 km, or the California Large, occupying 900 km of the Californian coast? Mere sub-divisions of the greater Argentine Ant Empire. Put two Argentinian ants from whatever part of the world next to eachother and they not only recognize eachother but work together as well.

 

The Space Shuttle, with 3 engines, puts out about 37,000,000 horsepower during liftoff. That's equal to over 30,800 Bugatti Veyrons.

 

 

 

There is an experiment called "the pitch drop" which measures the viscosity of some material by measuring how long the drops take to form and fall. Its been running for something like 80 years, I think it took around 10 years for the first drop fall. It's funnier because he did it to show students some apparent solids are liquids.

 

And you can watch it live

mms://drop.physics.uq.edu.au/PitchDropLive

 

 

Anatomically modern humans have existed for about 200,000 years. Of those 200,000 years:

 

190,000 passed before any of us anywhere in the world started farming.

 

195,000 passed before any of us learnt to write.

 

199,500 passed before the first book was press-printed.

 

199,980 passed before the start of the Internet as we know it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

(1) Heroin is a brand name, called thus because it made people feel good, i.e., "heroic."

 

(2) Heroin was invented in the 19th century by Bayer, the pharmaceutical company that makes aspirin (another brand name that became generic after WWI).

 

(3) Heroin was an over-the-counter drug(!)

 

Perhaps the funniest thing of all:

 

(4) It was originally invented/marketed as a less addictive alternative to morphine, not realizing that it was, in fact, much more so.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. The highest ever, regularly recorded bird is a type of bar-headed goose, which is sometimes seen flying higher than the peak of mount everest in the Himalayas, altitude ~29,000 ft. There are reports of a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BCppell%27s_Vulture being sucked into a jet engine off the Ivory Coast of Africa at 37,900

@sy: the part of the brain that controls pain recepters, iirc, is almost like a 'regulator'. It prevents the pain recepters from going off all the time, as well as activating them when you're supposed to experience pain. Killing it effectively negates both of the tasks it does, meaning that you'll simultaneously experience no pain and the most pain, with each side fighting to maintain control (thereby giving you random amounts of pain/no pain at random intervals). Also, another bodily fun fact: the only organ that does not technically ' bruise' is the brain, primarily due to bruises of the brain being referred to as 'concussions'. Also, the average size of a whale's heart is comparable to the same size of 2 adult cows.

The number 10¹⁰⁰ is known as a googol

 

The number 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰ is known as a googolplex.

 

If you tried to write a googolplex out by hand, you could not fit the paper inside the entire space of the known universe.

 

Yet, this number is still very very far away from infinity. In fact, it is no closer to infinity than the number 1 is.

 

Kudos to anyone who knows where I got this from (without searching...).

The earth's atmosphere (in volume) is equivalent to 2/5ths of the entire volume of the earth itself.

If you tried to write a googolplex out by hand, you could not fit the paper inside the entire space of the known universe.

But what if I wrote it out really, really tiny?

If you tried to write a googolplex out by hand, you could not fit the paper inside the entire space of the known universe.

But what if I wrote it out really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really tiny?

Fix'd, and no. :lol:

Googolplex: noun

1) A really huge number

2) The wrestling move that bill gates used to defeat andre the giant.

More than 491 billion Oreo Cookies have been sold since their introduction in 1912. Each (modern) cookie contains about 50.5 calories, and all those cookies could feed 33.9 million people for a year.

If you tried to write a googolplex out by hand, you could not fit the paper inside the entire space of the known universe.

But what if I wrote it out really, really tiny?

 

If you wrote it out in 1-point font, you would need 4 x 10⁶⁹ universes.

 

EDIT: I forgot that this number refers to the length of the universe, not the volume. If you can fit 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 zeros into a space of 60 cubic inches, then youd be able to fit it into the universe. If you replaced all of the planets and stars and stuff with paper with really tiny zeros on it.

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Man I love the Mariana Trench. I'd love to go down there.

You'd love to go so deep that you can't see anything, then get crushed by an insane amount of water pressure? Sounds like madness to me...

[hide=Mariana Trench]

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Man I love the Mariana Trench. I'd love to go down there.

I'd like to go down her trench too :P

 

Seriously though, thats freaking deep.

And the googolplex thing, wow o.o

 

I like reading things like these. Verrrrrrry interresting.

One I found quite interesting:

 

The "Hunter Gatherer" idea of being a man is a bit of a misnomer, its meant to be hunter & Gatherer.

As evidence shows that cavemen hunted while cave women gathered/foraged; plus quite interesting despite the idea of hunter gather men r providers to weak women. The cave womens foraging supplied 9/10 of the food supply AND most of the nutrients we would die without

The number 10¹⁰⁰ is known as a googol

 

The number 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰ is known as a googolplex.

 

If you tried to write a googolplex out by hand, you could not fit the paper inside the entire space of the known universe.

 

Yet, this number is still very very far away from infinity. In fact, it is no closer to infinity than the number 1 is.

 

Kudos to anyone who knows where I got this from (without searching...).

How many 0's are there in that number? I find it hard to believe it doesn't fit into the Universe, especially when we don't even know the full extent of the Universe. What is this statement based on?

The number 10¹⁰⁰ is known as a googol

 

The number 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰ is known as a googolplex.

 

If you tried to write a googolplex out by hand, you could not fit the paper inside the entire space of the known universe.

 

Yet, this number is still very very far away from infinity. In fact, it is no closer to infinity than the number 1 is.

 

Kudos to anyone who knows where I got this from (without searching...).

How many 0's are there in that number? I find it hard to believe it doesn't fit into the Universe, especially when we don't even know the full extent of the Universe. What is this statement based on?

 

He said it wouldnt fit in the KNOWN universe. Aka the amount of universe we are 100% definite exists as a bare minimum. As for the number of 0's thts the point; its a heck of a lot

The number 10¹⁰⁰ is known as a googol

 

The number 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰ is known as a googolplex.

 

If you tried to write a googolplex out by hand, you could not fit the paper inside the entire space of the known universe.

 

Yet, this number is still very very far away from infinity. In fact, it is no closer to infinity than the number 1 is.

 

Kudos to anyone who knows where I got this from (without searching...).

How many 0's are there in that number? I find it hard to believe it doesn't fit into the Universe, especially when we don't even know the full extent of the Universe. What is this statement based on?

We've got a pretty good idea of how big it probably is, something like 13-14 billion light years. I'm pretty sure Wepon is involved in physics somehow, whether as a student or in whatever field uses it, he can say more. The Hubble Space Telescope's taken a pretty mind blowing image related to that though, of galaxies 13 billion light years away, meaning that we can see that area as it existed 13 billion years ago, and part of the way that we can tell the age of the universe is because light from farther hasn't had time to reach Earth yet.

Really, anything about space is going to be amazing/mind-blowing/etc. Spend an afternoon wiki-walking through astronomy articles, it's very fun.

 

Of course, I'm not an expert, so I might not be correct about this.

 

A googol would be 10 x 10, 100 times, and with my limited knowledge of math, I'm guessing that a googolplex is 10 times itself googol times. I'm not sure that last bit is gramatically sound, but whatever.

A polar bear's skin is actually black. Its fur is clear, water repellent, and hollow. This adaptation allows it to keep itself warm in the coldest of climates.

Some polar bears at zoos are greenish because there's algae that grows on and inside its hair.

How many 0's are there in that number? I find it hard to believe it doesn't fit into the Universe, especially when we don't even know the full extent of the Universe. What is this statement based on?

 

There are 10¹⁰⁰ zeros. So there are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 zeros

 

The observable (known) universe is roughly 14 billion light years in radius (it is a "sphere")

 

14 billion light years is 1.32447398 × 10²⁶ meters.

 

So the volume of the universe is V = 1.3 * pi * r³ so roughly 9.49 x 10⁷⁸ m³ is the ammount of space available in the known universe.

 

A 400 page book takes up roughly 0.00098 m³. Each line on the page can fit about 50 zeros, 25 lines per page, means that an average, readable book would be able to contain roughly 50,000 zeros. So take the volume of the universe and divide it by the volume of a book and you will see that roughly 9.68 x 10⁸¹ books would fit inside the universe. This gives us a grand total of 4.84 x 10⁸⁶ zeros.

 

If you wanted to print a book that would be able to fill the universe with a 10¹⁰⁰ zeros, you would need to be able to print a book that contains 1 x 10¹⁹ zeros

Right we're talking about the observable Universe here, that makes a massive difference already. It's still really big.