That when cyanobacteria arose 2 billion years ago and filled the atmosphere with oxygen which killed off most species and removed methane from the air so temperatures crashed and the entire planet was encased in ice, this didn’t quite extinguish all life but eventually led to the rise of eukaryotes that turn oxygen back into carbon dioxide and later those eukaryotes banded together into multicellular teams like you.
That there’s been a 93% decline in stomach cancer deaths over the past 100 years—from by far the biggest killer among cancers to one of the smaller ones—and mostly this was an accident, it happened because better food refrigeration reduced infections of H. pylori, a bacterium that wasn’t even identified until 1982 after most of the decline had already happened.
That the coefficient of thermal expansion for concrete is 1.1 × 10⁻⁵ / °C while the coefficient for carbon steel is 1.2 × 10⁻⁵ / °C which is close enough that steel-reinforced concrete buildings they don’t crumble when the temperature changes although they won’t last for centuries like ancient Roman pure-concrete structures have.
That we evolved to communicate mostly via sound which can mostly be stored and transmitted using simple technologies like ink on paper or etching in wax, meaning we didn’t have to bootstrap, like, capture and transmission of 3-D spatiotemporal fragrance patterns whilst having no way to exchange ideas other than direct person-to-person contact.
That if I was a fish I would live in unending terror of getting eaten by a bigger fish, but presumably fish don’t feel that way because when evolution adapts a creature to an environment it would be counterproductive to wire them to experience life as torture, although it’s not clear this is true and I have no idea why or how evolution would set a hedonic baseline.
That 85% of people in the world have toilets and that number has been improving by 1.5% per year for the last two decades.
That 2⁵ᐟ¹² ≈ 1.3348 ≈ ⁴⁄₃ and 2⁷ᐟ¹² ≈ 1.4983 ≈ ³⁄₂ which who cares except if you discretize the frequencies of sound so frequency goes up by a factor of 2¹ᐟ¹² at each step, then combining tones 12 steps apart gives an octave which sounds good and combining tones 5 steps apart gives a perfect 4th which sounds good and combining tones 7 steps apart gives a power chord which sounds amazing and so Western music is possible, although it’s insanely annoying that 2⁵ᐟ¹² isn’t exactly equal to ⁴⁄₃ which leads to grungy issues like equal temperament vs. just intonation tuning.
That it’s pretty rare for an asteroid as large as Chicxulub to hit the Earth and if anything it’s unusual that we were hit by one only 66 million years ago.
That Brussels sprouts used to be terrible but in the 1990s we noticed that was because of glucosinolate and then seed companies found old low-glucosinolate varieties and cross-bred them with modern high-output varieties and now Brussels sprouts are great and also that this was all evident
