13 Eerie Facts That Keep Me Up At Night
1.Roughly 1 out of 100 men in the US are psychopaths.
What we generally consider to be psychopathic traits — a lack of guilt and remorse, callousness or cruelty toward others, and a lack of emotional expression, to name a few — are expressed at a clinically significant level in roughly 1.2% of the adult male population of the United States. The numbers are a little more vague for women, but anywhere from 0.3% to 0.7% of adult women in the US could be considered psychopaths.
2.At any moment, without warning, a gamma ray burst could wipe out all life on Earth.
Gamma ray bursts — or GRBs — are bursts of high energy traveling through space that usually come from a star exploding into a supernova. Our planet has been hit by GRBs before — in fact, one hit us last year, and it was strong enough to affect Earth's ionosphere and set off lightning detectors in India. That GRB had traveled to us from two billion light-years away and still had enough energy to cause disturbances, so you can imagine what a GRB from our own galaxy could do to us.
If a strong enough GRB hit Earth, it would essentially vaporize the atmosphere and instantly wipe out life on half the planet. The other half of the planet that wasn't directly hit would probably be fried pretty quickly from the sun's rays due to the lack of atmosphere, but it would take long enough that the unfortunate souls living on that side of the planet would know what was happening.
3.CNN has a pre-recorded "doomsday video" saved to broadcast at the end of the world.
The video, which was recorded sometime in the 1980s or '90s, shows a military band that plays the Christian hymn "Nearer, My God, To Thee" before the video fades to black. The video was purportedly prepped in case of a nuclear holocaust that would wipe out all life on Earth, and allegedly remains in the CNN archives, awaiting its day of purpose.
4.It took nearly 12,000 years — from the year 10,000 BCE to the mid-1800s CE — for the world's human population to go from 1 million people to 1 billion people. In the 100 years from 1850 to 1950, the population increased from 1.1 billion to 2.5 billion. From 1950 to now — only 73 years — the population more than tripled from 2.5 billion to 8 billion.
Population growth is thankfully slowing, but projections still estimate that we'll be very near 10 billion people on Earth by 2050.
5.There's a mysterious radio station in Russia that broadcasts buzzing, beeping, and humming sounds, occasionally interrupted by voice messages that list callsigns and codes. No one knows the purpose of the broadcast, outside of perhaps the Russian military.
People have been listening in to the broadcast since it started in the 1990s, attempting to figure out why it exists in the first place. Due to some occasional irregularities (including human conversations heard in the background), it's believed that the broadcast is not automated, and the sounds are instead being made in front of a live microphone. Theories include the possibility that it's a "Dead Hand" signal, designed to launch an automatic retaliation in the event that Russia is annihilated in a nuclear attack. Or, it could be some sort of encoded communication within the Russian military, or among Russian spies. Nobody knows.
6.Currently, in the US, about 60% of murder cases are "cleared," or solved. So basically, there's about a 40% chance that a murderer will just get away with it.
As you might guess, the statistics for rape are even worse, with only about 35% of cases being solved.
7.French authorities found a secret, functional movie theater in the catacombs under Paris. It had a professionally installed electrical system, a projector, a collection of movies, seating carved into the stone, and even a full bar with several bottles of alcohol.
The passage that led to the "theater" had a security camera, and even a motion sensor that triggered the sound of dogs barking to try to scare off intruders. The ceiling of the space had swastikas, Celtic crosses, and stars of David painted on it, leading authorities to speculate that a secret society of some sort was operating there. Three days after the discovery, the police returned to the scene for further inspection, only to find that the electrical and phone lines had been cut, and a note was left behind that read, "Do not try to find us."
8.Bacteria and viruses can stay infectious even after being frozen for hundreds of years, if not longer. So it's possible that there may be deadly pathogens frozen in the permafrost that humans have never been exposed to before.
That permafrost could potentially be the only thing between us and a pandemic that could wipe out all humans. Good thing global warming isn't a very real thing that's happening right now!
9.Fertile topsoil in the US Midwest is disappearing — potentially as much as one-third of the most fertile soil from farmland in the Midwest is gone, and if the trend continues, it could mean disaster for our food sources.
10.If the sun exploded, we wouldn't know for 8 minutes and 20 seconds.
That's how long it takes anything traveling at the speed of light to travel the distance between the sun and Earth (91.81 million miles). So we wouldn't even see — much less feel — the explosion for nearly 8 and a half minutes.
11.There's a disorder called fatal familial insomnia: If you get it, you are unable to fall asleep, and you just stay awake until you die. There is no cure.
12.If you're looking at an old Victorian photo and one of the people in the photo is less blurry than the rest of them, it probably means that person was dead when the photo was taken.
See, back in those days, recently deceased family members would sometimes be propped up for a group photo so that the family would have one final (or maybe their only) portrait with them. Since photos back then required an extended period of sitting very still, if someone in the portrait was dead, they would be sitting perfectly still for the whole exposure time and would appear much clearer than the rest of the subjects. (Don't worry, nobody's dead in the above photo.)
13.Every year you live through the future anniversary of your death.
And you don't know which day it is. Just a fun thought!
