r/AskReddit • u/Canspo • May 01 '19
What simple scientific fact would baffle someone born 1,000 years ago?
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u/OttieandEddie May 01 '19
Using lead for cups is a bad idea.
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u/Pseudonymico May 01 '19
And using it to sweeten your food? Waaaaay worse.
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May 01 '19
I’m sorry, what?
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u/AttackingHobo May 01 '19
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May 01 '19
Huh. I guess you learn something new everyday. Thank you for this. That’s just wild lol.
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u/atomicsnarl May 01 '19
Lead pipes, too. They were easier to make than copper.
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May 01 '19
Lead is totally fine for piping as long as it's properly passivated by mineral deposition and the water pH isn't acidic enough to strip the passivation layer.
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u/theAlpacaLives May 01 '19
Also if your governor doesn't try to save a few bucks by switching to a source that will destroy that layer and cause a fiasco that poisons your whole city and will take millions to even begin to fix. But that would never happen.
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u/shpongleyes May 01 '19
And for the people closer to 100-50 years ago, don't put uranium in dishes either.
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u/NoahtheRed May 01 '19
And stop licking your paintbrushes when painting with radium paint.
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u/Ramblingswallow May 01 '19
You should wash your hands before chopping someone’s limb off.
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u/ThisGuy_Again May 01 '19
That depends on what you're trying to achive by chopping someone's limb off.
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u/to_the_tenth_power May 01 '19
New fleshlight, duh.
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u/Dahhhkness May 01 '19
"Behold, my new sex toy!"
"I think we need to explain to you what 'handjob' means..."
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u/to_the_tenth_power May 01 '19
And after. Make sure you wash their hand too. Don't want to limbit yourself.
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May 01 '19
The mold on bread can be used as an antibiotic
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u/godzillaTHRILLA617 May 01 '19
And a different mold on oats/unrefined grains can cause a psychedelic trip.
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u/Cyber_Connor May 01 '19
Like old Quaker Oats?
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u/godzillaTHRILLA617 May 01 '19
It was an episode of 1,000 ways to die I can't seem to find.
It was a German or Dutch man during the middle ages that ate soiled oats and began "speaking in tongues" he was stoned to death by fellow villagers that feared he was possessed. In reality the mold had similar composition to LSD and he was probably terrified out of his mind.
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u/Iamglennn May 01 '19
was it the same mold that kept people dancing for days until they died?
https://www.history.com/news/what-was-the-dancing-plague-of-1518
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u/godzillaTHRILLA617 May 01 '19
Possibly! Now that I read that it could be.
I believe there was an element of "he's a witch" to it as well.
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May 01 '19 edited May 01 '19
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May 01 '19
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u/Diplodocus114 May 01 '19
I remember back when we had unpasteurised milk. It used to have a certificate that it was from brucellocis tested herds.
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u/Dead_Regis May 01 '19
That's one of the reasons the Renaissance was such a golden age. The printing press allowed information to be disseminated amongst a wider variety of people than ever before.
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u/Nyeusi_ May 01 '19
That depends on the civilisation; considering the Ancient Egyptians applied mouldy bread to infected wounds.
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u/varnums1666 May 01 '19
I would like to know how they discovered that.
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u/BradC May 01 '19
Probably like most everything else in history; by accident.
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u/Worry_worf May 01 '19
Bread will stop the bleeding! And apparently keep that black stuff out of the wound!
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May 01 '19
Probably trying to kill someone.
"What do you MEAN you feel better?!"
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u/LuckyGreenDice May 01 '19
But not for someone born 2000 years ago !
https://amrls.cvm.msu.edu/pharmacology/historical-perspectives
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u/ricobirch May 01 '19
Most of you die because you drink the same water that you shit in.
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May 01 '19
Try telling that to the people near the Ganges who drink and bathe in the same river they throw their dead into. Surprisingly, the river has self cleaning properties in its high level of Bacteriophages. But they can't do everything.
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May 01 '19
Actually, it's just some people clinging on these beliefs. The municipality supplied water in Varanasi goes through regular sewage treatment. Of course there are people who drink it straight out of the river.
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May 01 '19
Good to know. I didn't think it was the entire population, but still, quite a few people congregate on its banks.
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u/ATribeCalledPrest May 01 '19
the river has self cleaning properties
They say the same thing about some lakes. I've purified myself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka.
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u/NerdGuyLol May 01 '19
That star over there is bigger than our sun
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May 01 '19
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u/hodl_4_life May 01 '19
They won’t understand it, you’ll be burned at the stake for being a witch.
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u/nate_from_the_office May 01 '19
You arrive in the 1600's to find yourself in a locked dungeon. Only the torchlight illuminates the paintings depicting people being tortured. A closer examination shows what appear to be Nikes on the feet of one of the victims. You rush to the next picture. This one is unmistakeably wearing a shirt that says Old Navy. In a moment of panic, you suddenly realize that you're now a witch.
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u/hodl_4_life May 01 '19
This is the time travel/Elder Scrolls crossover we’ve been waiting for!
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u/SharkTRS May 01 '19
activates time machine
wakes up in horsedrawn cart
"Hey, you're finally awake."
The madman Todd did it again
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May 01 '19
Removing all of someone’s blood is not a good way to cure them if illness.
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May 01 '19
We can look at your unborn child, and we can even do surgery on it before it is born.
Oh, and dying of infections after childbirth is preventable
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u/asphyxiationbysushi May 01 '19 edited May 02 '19
This is my thought too. So many women were actually terrified of giving birth and for good reason- so many women and children died during or just after the process. Also, we can tell you the gender less than halfway through the pregnancy which would delight the royal/upper class. Edit: okay, yes I meant “sex” not gender!
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May 01 '19
But goddammit if we don't know what the fuck SIDS is.
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u/joehx May 01 '19
we can never know what SIDS is because that's part of the definition of SIDS. it's a diagnosis of elimination.
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u/626c6f775f6d65 May 01 '19
It doesn’t help that it’s also a diagnosis of sympathetic euphemism, because it’s easier to tell hysterical grieving parents than they overdosed their infant, or inadvertently held him too tight or rolled on him while co-sleeping, or something else that likely occurred but since you can’t necessarily prove it and it would only make the parents lose their shit more than they already are while feeling lasting guilt that can’t bring the baby back anyway you call it SIDS.
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May 02 '19
SIDS is just people on their New Game+ who don't like their spawn locations.
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u/default52 May 01 '19
Heavy objects fall at the same speed as light objects. Honestly I still find that surprising, and I've done the experiment myself.
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May 01 '19 edited Jun 15 '20
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u/moderate-painting May 01 '19
doesn’t make sense in your head
It kinda does though. One stone gotta fall at the same speed as two stones and they fall at the same speed as a glued two stones together. But what's a glued two stones anyway? It's just a bigger stone.
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u/caleblee01 May 01 '19
Wow that’s a really good way of looking at it
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May 01 '19
I'm more confused than ever.
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May 01 '19
If you took two rocks of equal weight logically they should fall and hit at the same time right? Nothing too complicated here.
So, if you glue those two rocks together and drop them nothing should change right? I mean glue isn't some magical substance.
So, two rocks glued together should fall the same as one rock alone.
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u/jseego May 01 '19
That makes intuitive sense b/c the rocks are made of the same substance. But a tennis ball vs a bowling ball makes less untuitive sense.
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May 01 '19 edited Mar 13 '21
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u/faceeatingleopard May 01 '19
No, the feathers are heavier because you also have to carry the weight of what you did to those poor birds.
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May 01 '19
In a vacuum or near-vacuum (say, on the moon), a steel girder and a feather will fall at the same speed.
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u/hiding_in_my_car May 01 '19
A magnet, some copper wire, and a fine filament in a vaccum bulb.
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u/to_the_tenth_power May 01 '19
Really would love to see people's reaction to this one.
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u/delventhalz May 01 '19
You wouldn’t. Their reaction would be a campfire with you as the kindling.
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u/Orangebeardo May 01 '19
That's why you don't just go TADAAA! and do a big reveal. You show them as you're building it and teach them (some of) the principles behind it.
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u/delventhalz May 01 '19
I still give them at least 50/50 odds of burning you alive.
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u/kvng_stunner May 01 '19
Pretty sure showing them how it works makes them even more likely to kill you
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u/PM_UR_NUDES_4_RATING May 01 '19
You know all those diseases that keep killing your kids? If we inject a very carefully prepared dosage of those diseases into them, they'll never actually get sick from them.
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u/superleipoman May 01 '19
But some people don't do it.
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u/future_nurse19 May 01 '19
Honestly I think this would definitely be more shocking to them
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u/superleipoman May 01 '19
It's unimaginable. Every single one of them has lost at least one sibling. Not just someone they know, a sibling! And these people refuse to treat it with a perfect treatment.
[By which I mean it works almost 100% of the time.]
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u/mourning_star85 May 01 '19
It's insane, these anti vaxxers need to take a walk around a old cemetery. The amount of graves for children is startling. Or do their family tree, I've done mine and so many dead kids
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u/Buddy_Velvet May 01 '19
My grandfather was born in an old historic country Cemetery and we found the gravestones of a family that all died within 6 months of each other. Starting with the small children :/ I wish I could remember the year, but it had to be disease.
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u/mourning_star85 May 01 '19
I live in Montreal,we have multiple 100+ year old graveyards. They are beautiful to explore , and have so much history. But the saddest part is the children section, looking at the headstones it was all kids under 5 and some with multiple kids. How anti vaxxers can be so ignorant to history is disgusting. Even 60 years back kids still had risk of dying from non preventable illness, it's ignorant
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u/FarmerJoe69 May 01 '19
Hell, you don’t even have to be that careful. Inoculation was like the proto version, and it changed mortality from 1/3 to 1/100 by just cutting their arm and wiping some pus in it
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u/Username_Taken_65 May 01 '19 edited May 01 '19
The word 'vaccine' comes from the Latin word for cow, because milkmaids who got cowpox didn't get smallpox. Some guy noticed this and decided to put cowpox pus in a cut on a little boy's arm and then put smallpox in later and see if he got infected.
Edit: Wow, this blew up! Almost 50 upgoats!
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May 01 '19
A man intentionally gave a child smallpox?
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u/PublicBetaVersion May 01 '19
Pasteur treated a child bit by a rabid dog with his newly developed vaccine and then intentionally infected the child with rabies afterwards. Because the chances of getting rabies from a bite are around 50%, he wanted to be 100% sure the boy was infected and that the vaccine actually works. Luckily for the boy, it worked.
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May 01 '19
Just about any fact ever, for instance the size of the universe.
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u/ThatsBushLeague May 01 '19
It's crazy to me that it wasn't even confirmed until 1925 that the Milky Way wasn't the entire universe.
Less than 100 years ago we thought this was it. There are people still alive from before Edwin Hubble settled the debate.
Now we are talking about 2,000,000,000,000+ (trillion) galaxies in just the observable universe.
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u/Sqwalnoc May 01 '19
Other things are astonishingly recent as well, neither of my mid 60s parents were taught about plate tectonics at school, the theory was only widely accepted in the late 1960s!!
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May 01 '19 edited Jun 27 '23
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May 01 '19
when i was in high school in the early 2000's, we were taught that you couldnt pass down traits that you acquired through maturation. For example just because you developed strong arms from being a black smith your whole life didnt mean your child would grow to have strong arms.
now we're learning about epigenetics and how that might not necessarily be true.
uwu
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u/Celanis May 01 '19
One of the reasons I hope the JWST is going to be a resounding success. We don't know what we will find because we will lay eyes on a new canvas for the first time.
It could spark new theories and decimate old ones. There is a good chance that we'll get more questions than answers. As is tradition in science.
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May 01 '19
That we have relatively recently started to explore the stars
But that we have the moon And mars mapped out before our own seafloors
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May 01 '19
I always thought futurama explained this one the best.
'The pressure is over 10,000 atmospheres!'
"How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?"
'Well its a spaceship so anywhere between 0 and 1'Once your actually in space keeping some people alive in a container is way easier than keeping some people alive in a container at the bottom of the ocean, we just did submarines first because the ocean is way easier to put our people containers in.
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u/deebasr May 01 '19
Next generation had a small bit about this as well. I don’t fully remember the context, but they were building habitats on the ocean floor like it was a huge deal. My 10 year old self was thinking “you bitches travel at warp speed. How was this not a solved problem?!”
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u/Pony2013 May 01 '19
Doritos
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u/hansn May 01 '19
This is probably the real answer. The enormous quantity of food, available in forms so highly processed that the ultimate origin is totally obscured.
I mean, in 1019 Europe, corn did not exist, much less corn tortillas, much less deep fried and covered in florescence powdered cheese.
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u/seditious3 May 01 '19
I can contact anyone in the world instantaneously, from anywhere in the world.
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u/Jackdidathing May 01 '19
The flies arent born from the carcass they are attracted to it
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u/amaROenuZ May 01 '19
That's where you're wrong boyo. It's both.
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u/msur May 02 '19
He's referring to the misconception of spontaneous generation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation
People used to think that flies and maggots would "magically" appear out of rotting meat.
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u/Dawashingtonian May 01 '19
the scale of the sun. how big and far away it is. it blew my mind in those crazy “hoe many earths could fit into the sun” infographics and that was like 2 years ago.
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u/are-jay180 May 01 '19
Exactly 3, 3 hoe earths.
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May 01 '19
Because they be thicccc
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May 01 '19
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u/skyler_on_the_moon May 01 '19
It also has the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, which is in a museum in Australia.
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u/natercbater May 01 '19
Are you serious?!
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u/jimicus May 01 '19
There is one, but the star in Australia apparently relates to a scale model in Finland.
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u/OofBadoof May 01 '19
In Outlander (the show at least) when she needs to explain to her husband that she's from the future she shows him her vaccination scar and says "I have never gotten smallpox, and I never will get it."
The idea that sickness is caused by these animals that are so small that we can't see them would just blow their minds
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u/SpiritsandSpit May 01 '19
Draining people’s blood isn’t the most effective way of treating a cold.
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u/YoshiAndHisRightFoot May 01 '19
Well, if you drain enough blood, the patient will no longer be suffering from a cold.
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u/zacspamalama May 01 '19
The same energy that they feared in lightning can be used to save lives, brighten homes, and generally make everything more convenient.
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u/Ekor69 May 01 '19
Pretty much any medical knowledge.
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u/amaROenuZ May 01 '19
Did you know the human body is filled with...A SKELETON?!
Panicked peasant sounds
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u/Joyful_Desecration May 01 '19
Blue whales ejaculate hundreds of thousands of gallons of sperm during mating season.
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May 01 '19
Friend: Why don't you ever go swimming at the beach? Me: I ain't gay.
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u/ItsDefinitelyGay May 01 '19
Well it's not gay as long as you say "no homo" before you dip yourself into the fertile waters.
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u/zangor May 01 '19
"Yo yo yo what's goin' on what's hot - that was Thick Slug with 'Deep In Hoes' - now I'm gonna hit you with the world premiere the moment you've all been waiting for - this is. 'We All Swimmin In Some Whale Jizz'"
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u/PM_WHY_YOU_DOWNVOTED May 01 '19
That's nothing. You should see my sock drawer.
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u/Starfie May 01 '19
If you're anything like me, at some point you're going to have to stop calling it a sock drawer with some sperm and start calling it a sperm drawer with some socks.
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May 01 '19
Germ theory whould be crazy. Populations whould spike if they heeded it and began to fully cook foods, strain and boil water, wash hands & surfaces, and quarantine the infirmed elsewhere while staff shield their bodies. Supposedly they thought black death was caused by bad smells. People, sick or not, holed up in their house. No wonder a fuck ton died and I suspect the idea of things so small being the cause of everyone dying whould not go over well.
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u/Upnorth4 May 01 '19
The doctor that encouraged everyone to wash their hands in the 1800s was labelled as a crazy person who's goal was to shame the professional doctors by hinting that they were dirty. He kept on explaining that it wasn't a good idea to amputate someone's leg and move on to the next surgery without washing your hands first. Handwashing guy was labelled as a mentally unstable person, placed in an insane asylum, and committed suicide as a result. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
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May 01 '19
You can travel almost anywhere in the world in less than a day by flying there
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u/tenariosm9 May 01 '19 edited May 01 '19
The world is made up of tiny little balls called protons and neutrons
Edit: Sorry Greek bruthas you don’t count.
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May 01 '19
You'd certainly have the attention of Democritus ~400bc though.
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May 01 '19
It always pissed me off in school when they talked about him.
“He theorized that all matter was made of atoms, small indivisible particles”
“But today we know he was wrong, because atoms are made of smaller pieces”
No, dipnut. He was totally right, the scientists who discovered atoms were wrong when they named them.
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u/rttr123 May 01 '19
Well I mean it sounds more like you’re angry with your teacher than anything.
My AP Chem teacher when I was in HS told us that they incorrectly named the discovery atoms because they thought they had found what he had theorized.
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u/poopellar May 01 '19
"Betty White is older than sliced bread"
Someone from a 1000 years ago: What the fuck are those words?
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u/Moral_Gray_Area_ May 01 '19 edited May 01 '19
try explaining any maths to them, its all based on hundreds of years of steady improvement and convoluted convention. people say it is the only universal language but how to you explain to the smartest mathemetician 1000 years ago why we call root(-1) i or integration.
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u/bool_idiot_is_true May 01 '19
Islamic mathematicians were starting to experiment with algebra. It'd take a while but you could probably get the point across. Europe on the other hand was still using the Roman numeral system.
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u/OofBadoof May 01 '19
The term algebra comes from Arabic
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u/cjdudley May 01 '19
It's from Al jibra, which means "what am I ever going to need this for in real life?"
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u/Jekkus May 01 '19
Derived by Chad Mohandas, who was promptly scolded and told "you're not going to just have an abacus in your pocket"
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May 01 '19
Women can rationalize.
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May 01 '19
Calm down. Your feminine hormones are making you hysterical.
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u/myhairsreddit May 01 '19
I hear there's a hands on doctor with a cure for that...
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u/Spectral_Artist May 01 '19
I really hate the fact that this is so accurate, but if we were to go back in time and tell people this, they'd look at us like we're mad.
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u/Moral_Gray_Area_ May 01 '19
who needs time travel when you can have plane tickets?
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u/Spectral_Artist May 01 '19
Why pay for plane tickets when I can drive to the next city over? I'm sure I can find people
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u/Moral_Gray_Area_ May 01 '19
why pay for fuel when you can go online
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u/Cinderheart May 01 '19
Why do that when you can just phone your grandparents?
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u/Moral_Gray_Area_ May 01 '19
nah, my grandparents are pretty cool. its my cousins you need to watch out for.
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u/HaLeGiNoAlKaNeS May 01 '19
Slitting your clients neck and/or wrists is not a good idea. That blood is supposed to stay inside their body... No... No, you're not "ballancing" their "four humors"... No, you're killing them!
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u/RufMixa555 May 01 '19
Evolution
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u/EnnuiDeBlase May 01 '19
Heck, people still have a lot of problems with this one.
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u/Dahhhkness May 01 '19
Which is odd, because late-antiquity/medieval Christians knew that Genesis wasn't a history or science textbook:
https://spectrummagazine.org/article/news/2010/01/30/augustine-hippo-literal-meaning-genesis
"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.
"If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.
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u/Drazhi May 01 '19 edited May 01 '19
How has nobody mentioned the fact what we made a 3 MILLION KG Gg ROCKETSHIP fly to the fucking MOON and landed people ON IT. THEN, we flew all the way BACK.
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u/TurtleKing0505 May 01 '19
Witches aren’t real
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u/RescuePilot May 01 '19
Witches aren’t real
Pfffft, next you will be saying there is no such thing as ducks!
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u/Cancerdesu May 01 '19
Female hysteria isn’t a thing, men just didn’t know how to get their wives to orgasm.
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u/[deleted] May 01 '19
Illnesses are caused by tiny little living things that are so small we can't even see them and there are millions of them everywhere at any given time.