Top 7 Most Terrifying Scientific Discoveries
4. How Big Is The Universe?
The short answer to this question is “unfathomably vast; probably infinite and ever-expanding.” Our puny little minds can’t even imagine just how enormous the universe is. That’s right; even human imagination can’t begin to operate with billions upon trillions of stars, solar systems, galaxies, nebulae, and everything in between. From our perspective, the Earth is massive, the sun is 333,000 times bigger than our planet, and the solar system spans billions of miles. Like 99.9% of all this space is cold, empty void, probably filled with anti-matter. So that’s just one solar system in a galaxy, containing over a hundred billion other stars. And there are billions of galaxies out there flying through the fabric of the universe at neck-breaking speeds. Here’s a cool number for you: 93 billion light-years. That’s the supposed diameter of our visible universe. Who knows what lies beyond that?
5. Mass Extinctions
As far as we know, there have been at least five planetary-scale extinction events. The first two were kind of test runs with tons of sea creatures either evolving or getting hit by an unknown meteor or something. Then there’s the end of the dinosaur era 66 million years ago, the largest mass extinction in the history of the planet around 250 million years ago which wiped out over 90% of all species, and the extinction of mammals 33.9 million years ago. The causes of these events are contradictory, but they are often extraterrestrial or simply caused by massive volcanic eruptions. Some scientists theories that the Earth is currently trying to fend off yet another extinction, with over one million species being at risk of disappearing.
