Facts You Probably don’t Need
- The 1998 launch of the space shuttle Discovery was the first public HDTV broadcast.
- “Me at the zoo’” was the first video uploaded to YouTube in 2005.
- Planck time is the smallest standard of the scientific measurement of time. One Planck time is the time it would take a photon travelling at the speed of light to cross a distance equal to one Planck length (which is the smallest unit of length).
- A galaxy called GLASS-z13 is the oldest known universe. It’s estimated to be just 300 million years younger than the universe itself.
- The oldest known object on Earth is a 4.4-billion-year-old crystal, a zircon, that was found in Jack Hills in Western Australia. It’s only 160 million years younger than the Earth itself.
- Cleopatra lived closer in time to the invention of the internet than she did to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
- The human race has lived on Earth for only 0.004% of the planet’s history. If the history of the Earth were compressed to a single year, modern humans would appear on December 31 at about 11:58 p.m.
- What you think of as a day — how long it takes the Earth to rotate — isn’t 24 hours. It’s 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds.
Facts by Sean McVeigh, factologist.
