The universe is not necessarily an intuitive place. Here, in no particular order, are ten facts to illustrate this often-confusing reality.
1. You Are an Ape
We’re not even really talking about evolution here; Homo sapiens simply is, by definition, an ape species. You aren’t a monkey, though, that’s a different category. Earth is already the Planet of the Apes, scientifically speaking. Humans do qualify as one of the “Great Apes”, though, if that makes you feel any better.
2. You’re in an Ice Age
Technically, we’re currently in an “interglacial” period, or a brief (by geologic standards) thawing-out, but scientists believe we’ll be back to Snowball Earth fairly soon…which could be about 50,000 years or so.
3.You’re Hallucinating Right Now
Most of what you’re seeing on your screen right now is a hallucination. The human eye is not actually a terribly high-performance organ, and has a high resolution of “pixels” (rod and cone cells) only in the very center of the cornea. Everything around that central focus is actually pretty fuzzy, so the brain simply fills in the details.
.4. We Don’t Know Why You Sleep
You’ll die of sleep deprivation quicker than you’ll succumb to starvation, but no one really knows why. Sleep seems to play a large part in healing, immune response, and memory formation (or, as we’ve said, fabrication), but we don’t understand exactly why it’s so necessary.
5. We Don’t Know What the Universe Is Made Of
About 84.5% of the total “stuff” that makes up the universe is estimated to be “Dark Matter”, which is a scientific term for “Hell If We Know”. All we can really say about it for sure is that it has mass (because it causes gravitational effects) and that we can’t see it.
6.Colombus Had No Excuse
Not only had Western intellectuals known the Earth was round for millennia by 1492, the Greek philosopher Eratosthenes had actually measured it using trigonometry in the 3rd-century BC, a fact that the would-be explorer was well aware of. He simply redid the math over and over until he got it wrong. Had he not bumped into the Americas purely by accident, he would have starved to death.
7. Most of the Cells in Your Body Are not Human
They’re bacteria. This doesn’t actually mean you are *mostly* bacteria, though; prokaryotic cells like a bacterium are much, much smaller than the eukaryotic human cells that make up “you”. There’s still about a half-gallon worth, though.
