There is a world full of mysteries to explore right at our very feet.
Do we engage with it on a level that might make us more uncomfortable? Well, if we really want to learn everything there is to know about our planet earth, we have to engage in the unsettling facts. They appear across every discipline.
Human history is rife with unsettling facts. Things about the planet itself, about our weather, about animals in the wild; things about language--it's rife with unsettling facts. The world is a big scary place.
u/YolandaJenkins5454 asked:
What's a deeply unsettling fact?
Here were some of those answers.
The Easier Way Out
During the French Revolution, where the guillotine was introduced, the people to be executed fought to be first, as the blade would dull after multiple uses and wouldn't cut a head clean off at the first attempt.
And the last execution by guillotine in France was the same year Star Wars came out.
At LEAST One?!
You have probably unknowingly encountered, or walked past at least one murderer in your lifetime.
For sure encountered. Worked night shift at a convenience store, guy pulled in to put gas came in the store used the atm and left. 3 min later swarm of cops surrounded the store. He had just murdered his family a couple states over and cops got a hit when he used the atm machine.
WELP
For a long time it was believed that babies were too underdeveloped to be able to feel pain, and as such, did not need anesthetic for any kind of surgeries.
Up into the 1980's.
Venture into the valley of dark secrets and facts. It's scary here.
Internet History
Eventually, most of the content on the internet will have been created by dead people.
Now I'm imagining a class like English literature but for internet culture and picturing a bored class with some kids sleeping while the teacher is saying some shit like "Okay class this meme is 100 years old and it says Me and the Boys going out to get some B E A N S what do the B E A N S symbolize and how does it reflect what was going on in society ? " lmao.
Awful, Awful
There are estimated to be at least 25 active serial killers in the United States alone at any given time. Very few will be detected, much less apprehended.
Derrick Todd Lee and Sean Vincent Gillis were both active serial killer in the same city from the late 90s to early 2000s. For most of this time, law enforcement did not realize they were trying to catch multiple individuals, much less that they were acting completely independently of each other. On top of that, there are additional unsolved murders that neither was ever linked to whose evidence raises the possibility of a third active serial killer in the area during the same time period.
Viewer, Beware....
National parks are not all swings and roundabouts. Over 1600 people have gone inside Yellowstone National Park and never come out.
Yellowstone is known for boiling water and pools of acid. People on this earth put gorrilla glue in their hair. I don't have any questions about what happened.
Statistically....
If you end up being the victim of a violent crime, you probably know the perpetrators. You probably trust them, most likely, you love them.
People find it weird when the police declare most family members and close friends of murder victims to be suspects, but this is precisely why. You are FAR more likely to be (deliberately) killed by someone you know than a stranger. Also, in most countries and demographics, the most likely person to deliberately kill you is you.
These facts will surely keep you awake at night.
Our Brains Are Unsettling, Too
There is a rare genetic degenerative brain disorder called Fatal Familial Insomnia. FFI starts as a mild inability to sleep followed by short bouts of intense nightmares/dreams and progressively deteriorates until the sufferer is completely unable to sleep, at all. Eventually impacting the human ability to microsleep as a last ditch effort of self preservation. There is no cure for FFI and eventually sufferers lose their minds and die of sleep deprivation. But it gets so much worse.
Due to the degenerative nature of the condition as it progresses you begin deteriorating mentally and physically. You lose the ability to regulate body temperature and may swing between freezing and sweating, you develop severe memory problems, confusion, agitation, weight loss, paranoia, hallucinations, speech problems, double vision, loss of motor controls (similar to parkinsons), inability to swallow, increased blood pressure and production of tears as well as many other unpleasant symptoms. The combination of your mind going and your body shutting down eventually kills you.
Now, its called a genetic disorder because that's the most common way to contract it. But that isn't the only way. FFI is a prion disease, meaning if you accidently come into contact with an infected prion you can still end up with FFI. The most common way to come into contact with an infected prion is by consuming tainted meat, contact with improperly cleaned surgical equipment, and contact with infected dead bodies.
But thats not all! FFI can also spontaneously appear in sufferers with no family history of it and no known contact with an infected (mutated) prion. How does this happen? What are prions?
We all have prions. They are proteins in our brains that are needed for our brains to properly function. A prion is when a protein in the brain folds over abnormally due to a mutation. The bad protein triggers other proteins in the brain to also fold abnormally. The way these folds occur and where they occur determines which type of prion disease the now infected brain contracts. And it is highly contagious. Almost all prion diseases can be genetic, induced when exposed to mutated prions, or occur spontaneously. So far we don't know why they occur spontaneously or how to prevent them from doing so.
Rise Of The Machines
There so far at least two fatalities as a result of robots, both of industrial type.
The first was in Flat Rock, Michigan in 1979 when an engineer was killed when he was hit in the back and crushed while retrieving parts at an automobile factory. It was due to a malfunctioning industrial robot he was fixing. The second was in Akashi, Hyōgo, Japan where a maintenance worker was fixing a broken-down robot when it came to life by mistake. Both locations happened in factories that are well-known for manufacturing vehicles.
So Can We Fix The Justice System Now
One to five percent of the US prison population is estimated to be innocent.
Combine that with the fact that one percent of the US population is incarcerated and your chance of being wrongly imprisoned in the 21st century is around 1 in 1000 in America.
We live alongside these scary facts each and every day of our lives. We have already accepted them as risks we take just for being human.
What are some of the most unsettling facts you know?