People Are Sharing Facts And Statistics That Seem Like Obvious Exaggerations But Aren’t (25 Pics)

Nintendo existed at the same time as the Ottoman Empire.

“Nintendo (founded 1889) and the Ottoman Empire coexisted (fell in 1922) for 33 years.”

Your father, your father’s father, your father’s father’s father, and so on; stretching all the way back in an unbroken chain to the first cell, each managed to find a mate and successfully reproduce.

And you don’t have a girlfriend.

The original height of Mount Everest was calculated to be exactly 29,000 ft high, but was publicly declared to be 29,002 ft in order to avoid the impression that an exact height of 29,000 feet was nothing more than a rounded estimate.

80% of Soviet males born in 1923 didn’t survive WWII.

Pocahontas and William Shakespeare died less than a year apart less than 150 miles away from each other.

Anne Frank and Martin Luther King, jr. were born in the same year.

Neutron stars are so dense that if you dropped a gummy bear from one meter away it would hit the surface in a microsecond with the force of 1,000 nuclear bombs.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZW3aV7U-aik
Edit: microsecond

If you take an adult male Blue Whale and placed it long way on a basketball court, the game would be canceled.

You could walk from North Korea to Norway and only pass through one other country.

Also, your feet would be a little sore.

1 in 2 Australians will get skin cancer in their lifetime

Edit: As /u/thatpersonrightthere pointed out, it’s actually 2 in 3

Radio astronomer here! You exert more energy when you unfold a single piece of paper than we have collected in all the radio waves we have ever collected from outer space.

Edit: lengthy explanation time! Some of you guys might recall from chemistry physics class, there is a simple relationship for calculating the energy in a wavelength, which is Energy= hc/lambda, where h is the Planck constant, c is the speed of light, and lambda is the wavelength of your frequency. Radio waves are very large on the electromagnetic spectrum’s scale- when discussing visible light for example we discuss it in nanometers, but the most famous radio astronomy frequency (where we see the hydrogen line) is 21 centimeters, ie many many times longer. So, for example, if you go to this calculator and input the frequency I work at- 57 MHz- you will see you get about 2.4E-7 electron Volts per photon, and it’s 2.6E22 eVs in one calorie.

Further, radio astronomy is also just dealing with very faint sources- if your cell phone was on the moon it would be one of the brightest radio things in the sky. We learn a lot from it, but there just really isn’t that much energy in it! (Which is why, btw, people listen for radio signals from aliens a la SETI- very low energy for a strong signal- but that’s another story for another post!)

The difference between million and billion is huge (relatively):
1 Million seconds = 11 Days 1 Billion seconds = 31 years

More silent films have been lost than saved.

We live in an era where everything is saved, and it’s hard to imagine such a massive loss of creative material. Plenty of films are lost, as late as the 1970s too.

Cleopatra was alive closer to the Moon landing than she was to the construction of the great pyramids.

We live closer (in time) to the T-Rex than the T-Rex did to the Stegosaurus!

Edit: For anyone wondering, the T-Rex lived about 65 million years ago, while the Stegosaurus lived about 150 million years ago!

Vatican city has a population of 2 popes per 1 square kilometer.

Not sure if totally relevant to the question but in a room with 23 people there is a 50% chance that 2 people share a birthday

MonkeyDRico Added:

It’s called the birthday problem. Source

If the entire population of China walked past you in single file, the line would take about 100 years because of the reproduction rate

There’s enough space between the Earth and the moon to fit in all the rest of the planets in the solar system.

EDIT: Here you go, source: http://www.universetoday.com/115672/you-could-fit-all-the-planets-between-the-earth-and-the-moon/

If you start in Downtown Detroit and head south, you’ll end up in Canada.

Almost 1% of American adults are in prison…

El_Dudereno Added:

Or that the US has 4% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prison population.

There are more potential unique shuffles for a single deck of cards than planets in the visible universe.

Edit: an interesting intersection between this comment and another in this thread, the number of potential shuffles is so large even when you expose it to a birthday paradox it’s unlikely there have ever been two random shuffles of a deck that have come out to the same order.

You can fit about $3 billion worth of plutonium into a shoebox … briefly.

Source: http://what-if.xkcd.com/108

Vending machines kill more people than sharks.

Source: “On average the number of fatalities due to shark bites worldwide ranges between four and six per year. The yearly risk in the U.S. of dying from a shark bite is roughly 1 in 250 million. In contrast, the yearly risk of dying from a vending machine accident is roughly 1 in 112 million.”

Wooly mammoths and the Great Pyramids coexisted.