45 Unsettling Facts About Humans And The Universe That Might Keep You Up At Night

From the perspective of subatomic physics, our bodies are composed of more than 99.99% empty space: we are nothing but empty space.

The Observer Effect: Watching reality changes it.

I saw somewhere yesterday that there’s a hypothesis that we are inside a black hole currently.

Placentas evolved from a virus.

The people who survived the bubonic plague had more reactive immune systems, which we inherited, so humans are more likely to have autoimmune issues now than they were before the plague.

Humans have evolved to be incredibly OP as an animal, even without modern technology. Our ability to walk on two legs freed up our hands, which could be used to throw rocks with fatal accuracy. No other animal can do that, not even our close primate cousins. Sure they can throw objects but it lacks pinpoint accuracy and power an average human can achieve (it’s not even close). A rock to the face is enough to convince most predators to back off, let alone a barrage of projectiles from a group of humans from +20 meters away.

Racism is likely to be an evolved trait in humans to fear and to avoid other groups of slightly different looking humans from ancient times when every stranger is an automatic enemy.

If true, this means that every new generation will need to learn to look beyond just race when interacting with other people.

Jobs are just modern day survival of the fittest. I guess it beats smashing each other over the head with rocks caveman style. (My answer is probably more obvious and talked about, but if you really ponder it, we will always have hierarchies, the harsher ones are just more intricate and cleanly now.) It seems we will always be stuck in some sort of loop. The violence of humanity is pretty harsh compared to some species and even worse because we have that intelligence to commit true atrocities.

We only know less than 1% of what’s actually happening in the solar system.

Every bad thing we are capable of doing to each other is possible because it was advantageous at some point in time to do so.

That we evolve at a ridiculously lower pace when compared to plants and fruit flies.

Our brain size has been decreasing since the Paleolithic.

It took us some 100,000 years to invent agriculture, but when we did, we invented it at several places.

That time is from Behavioral modernity - Wikipedia from dates of various artifacts, like from Blombos Cave, South Africa, about 100,000 - 80,000 years ago.

Vavilov center - Wikipedia and Current perspectives and the future of domestication studies | PNAS -- there are at least four sites of independent invention of agriculture: the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, South China, Central America, and the Northern Andes in South America.

What made the difference? I've found the theory that climate was erratic during the Last Glacial Period - Wikipedia and stable in the Holocene: Was Agriculture Impossible during the Pleistocene but Mandatory during the Holocene? A Climate Change Hypothesis | American Antiquity | Cambridge Core

The Holocene is the most recent interglacial period, and the previous one is the Last Interglacial - Wikipedia from 130,000 years ago to 115,000 years ago, known as the Eemian and various other names. So why didn't we invent agriculture back then? Were we not behaviorally modern enough? Or was that interglacial's climate also too unstable?

That it's most likely, that we would not have developed from apes if climate change (global warming end of ice age) would not have dried out the sahara. thx, climate change.

H sapiens exchanged rationality for processing speed.

The vast majority of humans use cognitive shortcuts based on emotional response and social context to make decisions, this is far more energy efficient and much faster cause instead of analyzing each decision, we just do whatever everyone else is doing or use an arbitrary association with your personal likes and dislikes. Like choosing a product cause it has your favorite color even though you can get a cheaper one in other colors or something better with the same price.


There's a really long list of Cognitive biases in Wikipedia that covers Us vs Them mentality to Confirmation bias.

Haven't seen this one yet so I'll chime in. For every beneficial mutation there are many more detrimental mutations. This isn't a problem evolutionarily, because those traits are selected out of the population. But someone has to live those lives. All of the genetic diseases and deleterious inheritable attributes are the price we pay as a species and people for all the things we love about ourselves. But the price isn't paid evenly by everyone; some suffer more. So even if you love your life and humanity for all of its creativity and passion and potential, those things rest on a foundation of mountains of individual suffering.

Interpersonal violence played a huge role daily and only recently decreased. I have no statistics. Only the horrifying thought that our social evolution put the brakes on violence relatively quickly. But for the previous nearly 200,000 years......yikes.

I majored in biological evolution and this is what keeps me up at night….

Humans have become so intelligent that we can temporarily “fix” what are evolutionary fails. Can’t see? Get contacts and pass those genetics on… massive amount of allergies? Avoid all the foods and take an epipen…. Can’t deliver your child naturally? Get a c-section and pass on genetics with a small pelvis on… can’t hear? Take these cochlear implants…. Have cancer that’s genetic? Get chemotherapy and radiation and pass those genes on.

While humans have made amazing inventions to save a single person based on what they get. It’s a bandaid. In the natural world, people who get cancer, can’t see or hear, can’t walk, can’t fend for themselves don’t reproduce and don’t pass on these genes to the next generation.

By saving the present, we are dooming our future.

There will be a time that humans lose vision naturally. There will be a time that everyone gets cancer but we have a cure.

We better keep up with our inventions because we are literally acting against evolution.

Homo sapiens interbred with other archaic human species. Makes you wonder what else early humans tried to mate with.

I always think about how you can be born with a maladaptive trait and, like, that's just your life. Like, you won't reproduce and it sort of just sucks to be you.

We are evolving to rely on society as there is no pressure to prevent this. This means we are evolving to rely on medical interventions like babies growing so big that they require c-sections.