They say truth is stranger than fiction. And if you ask me, reality is also scarier than fiction. A horror movie about zombies or monsters will have me yawning, but reframe that same film to feature deadly bacteria or diseases lurking in swimming pools, and I won’t be sleeping for a week. So for all of you pandas out there who are interested in hearing about real-life terrors, we’ve got the perfect list for you.
Below, you’ll find some of the scariest things that scientists have proven to be real, that sadistic Reddit users have been kind enough to share. Enjoy freaking yourself out by reading about these things that sound too crazy to be real, and be sure to upvote the responses that make you question whether scientists really need to keep making discoveries…
Nurse here.
COVID.
Now, let me explain what I mean. I am an ICU nurse and I have been in the “front lines” during the worst of the pandemic, first as a nurse manager in elderly homes, and later in Intensive Care Units.
Thing is… I cannot really express how terrifying this disease can be. I have seen young, healthy people dying and not being able to do anything for them. I have seen people that did everything right get the disease and end up under my care for months. Problem is that, no matter how hard I try, if you don’t have a basic knowledge of intensive health care, you cannot really make your mind around what the word “critical” actually means.
Let me try to make your mind around this if you don’t get what I mean.
Imagine getting sick and rapidly deteriorating to the point you cannot breath on your own. You are taken to ICU, fully analgosedated (so you are asleep and pain free), you get paralising agents (so all your muscles, including breathing, are fully relaxed), get a tube to your lungs, connected to a machine that will breath for you, and having all sorts of medicines whose only job is to keep you alive as your body fights off the disease with the help of different medications.
But then, even so, it is not enough, and you cannot properly oxygenate. So we do “prone” you, that means you be turned upside-down on the bed. But after about 24 hours we need to turn you back again on your back, because being on that position for so long can cause harm. But half an hour after turning you on your back, your blood tests show that you are not breathing properly again, and then we have to prone you again.
Repeat that for days. Weeks. Months.
Add to that that your family cannot get close to you. Maybe they can watch you through a glass door, if available. Add also that if your heart crashes (stops), the nursing & medical teams will be unable to get to you until they are properly dressed.
Did you get a mental image of what all this is? Let me tell you, that is about a 20% of what the word “critical” actually means when we talk about COVID.
PS: If you are a negationist, or anti-vaccines activist or whatever… don’t. Just don’t. Please.
Ageing. I’m content with death but the idea of my body growing old, frail and eventually falling apart before the end game gives me goosebumps.
More like a theory, the “orangutan paradox”, when we film a documentary on orangutans, they can’t realise that we are observing them, yet they are the most intelligent species of their category, so aliens might be watching us and we are as oblivious as an orangutan
That things we thought were stars (or fuzzy stars) a century ago are actually entire galaxies. Who knows who or what the F is out there?
Deep time.
The Earth was alive a million years ago. And a million years before that. A thousand million years before that.
Even if our civilization is miraculously successful and we live for 20 thousand more years and colonize thousands of planets like in Dune it’s still nothing. A blink of an eye. The Earth would barely notice.
Giant squids. Suddenly the old sailor story’s of krakens wrapping tenticles around a ship and pulling it into the ocean doesn’t seem like fiction.
That we’ve only explored (numbers might not be quite right) 2% of the oceans and that the oceans makes up 78% of the world. I wonder what’s in there
Imo, that statistically, at least based on the Milgram study, about 2/3 of people will obey authority figures who tell them to hurt or even kill an innocent person. Then when you ask them why they did it, they give answers startlingly similar to “I was just following orders”.
Zombifying fungi as depicted in games like The Last Of Us exist, and are very potentially even scarier than how they appear in there.
The fungi of the genus Condyceps like to infect insects by scattering spores on them. After a while these insects will start to behave erratically. Eventually they try to reach a high place, like a stalk, where they lock their legs and then die. The fungus then sprouts from their body, scattering its spores below to infect the animal’s brothers and sisters.
A theory currently is that the fungus doesn’t even affect the brain, but rather that it cuts off the brain from the muscles. If this is the case, it means that the brain of the infected animal still functions normally, but its body just doesn’t follow its commands, leaving the animal to die a slow but somewhat conscious death in order to infect more of its kind.
The scariest thing for me, is that we have scientifically mapped human psychology. We know social habits, and evolutionary survival instincts that we’ve carried over from our ancient past. We have extensive knowledge on how to elicit the exact response out of a human on command. And the scary thing is that corporations use this information to sell things to us.
Everything about a product’s design from it’s shape, to it’s color pallet to it’s odor is specifically and intricately designed to hack our brains and trigger the exact specific response that they want from us.
Once you are aware of how much human psychology goes into advertising, you will never look at an add the same way again.
60% of your poop is made of living and dead gut bacteria. These gut bacteria combine to produce more dopamine and serotonin than your brain can produce. Abundance of these neurotransmitters has a significant affect on the brain. Production of neurotransmitters is far from their only pathway to the brain.
Fecal transplants, used for illnesses, change your eating behavior. Patients who have a healthy weight but receive a transplant from an obese person are highly likely to become obese. Patients who are obese but receive a transplant from a thin person are highly likely to become thin.
In a real sense you can consider yourself to be a servant of your gut bacteria.
That most people are addicted to technology but have no idea how it works. Instead of making humanity better and more efficient it’s ruining people’s lives. Of f*****g course
How human perceptions and values can be so easily hacked by tweaking some chemicals here and there.
Note: this post originally had 39 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
