15 True, Astonishing Facts That'll Make You Feel A Little Uneasy

Your bones are wet.

1. When you look "up" at the sky, you're actually staring down into the infinite abyss of space with only gravity holding you to the planet's surface.

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In fact, there's really no "up" at all. The only reason you see things as "up" or "down" is because you're just barely being held onto this planet by a relatively weak force.

2. If you sleep an average of eight hours a day, then by the time you turn 99 years old you will have spent 33 years in total sleeping.

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The math checks out: 8 x 365 x 99 / 24 = 12,045 days, or 33 years of sleep.

3. Scientists who work with cockroaches often develop allergies to cockroaches...and at the same time, allergies to pre-ground coffee.

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Entomologists who study cockroaches (or other lab animals) often end up allergic to them due to constant exposure. That makes sense, but they often also develop allergies to chocolate or pre-ground coffee, which is probably because the FDA allows up to 60 insect fragments on average in a 100-gram sample of chocolate. So, yeah...there might be ground-up cockroaches in your chocolate or coffee.

4. Your skeleton is wet.

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When we see bones, they're usually all dry. But right now, your bones are all...wet. Your bones are wet. That's weird, right?

5. Your skeleton isn't inside you. You're inside your skeleton. You are a brain.

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You generally think of your skeleton as something that's inside you, but really what makes you "you" is your brain, and that's encased in your skull.

6. If you ever turn over a rock, it might be the first time the underside of that rock has seen sunlight in millions of years.

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It had to come to the surface in the first place, where it might have been undisturbed by humans or animals for millennia.

7. You have never been in the same physical location twice, since the Earth, our solar system, and our galaxy are all moving through space.

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Even if the Milky Way wasn't moving, it takes about 230 million years for our solar system to orbit the center of our galaxy, so you've definitely never been in the exact same spot in the universe more than once.

8. Our galaxy is going to crash into another galaxy in the future.

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Our galaxy — the Milky Way — and our neighboring Andromeda galaxy are actually moving toward each other on a collision course, and will inevitably smash into each other. The good news is that this won't happen for another four billion years.

9. We can't prove that we aren't in a simulation.

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Though physicists can say that it's just about impossible, there's no way of truly knowing whether the world you're observing really exists. You could just be a brain in a vat, being fed electrical impulses to simulate your reality, kinda like The Matrix.

10. You've never seen your own eyes, only reflections and photos of them.

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Unless you've had an eye removed and looked at it, you've never really seen your actual eyes. Same goes for most of your face, although you can get glimpses of your nose and lips.

11. Your body has about as many bacterial cells as human cells.

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The human body has about 30 trillion cells in it. It also has about 39 trillion bacterial cells. Basically, you're swarming with bacteria. Fun!

12. Almost the entire continent of South America is east of Miami, Florida.

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Generally, you think of South America as being straight south of the United States, and Florida as being one of the easternmost states. But Florida sits much further west than people think...so much so that almost the entire continent of South America is further east than Florida's eastern edge.

13. Aliens invaded the moon on July 20th, 1969.

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It was us. We were the aliens.

14. Every single other person that was alive when the oldest living person was born are now dead.

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The oldest living person, no matter who that is at the time, exists on Earth with an entirely different set of people than at the moment they were born. The world has cycled through billions of people in that person's lifetime.

15. There are roughly three times as many chickens on Earth as there are people.

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According to the United Nations' Global Livestock Production and Health Atlas, there were about 19 billion chickens on Earth in the earlier part of this decade, plus extra for privately owned and pet chickens that weren't included in the census. At the same time, the estimated number of people on Earth was about 7 billion.