Do you ever stop and think about how much time really flies? If you have kids, this seems a little more apparent. You’ll look down at your child and think, “I remember back when you were a brand new baby and oh so tiny.” But then you see them and they are about to go into junior high. How in the heck does that even work? Are you one of those people who think they really understand how time works and how quickly it goes by? Take a look at some of these facts. I’m sure you’ll think a little bit differently after seeing these. I know I did.
1. Cleopatra lived closer to the building of Pizza Hut than the pyramids. The Great Pyramid was built cerca 2560 BC, while Cleopatra lived around 30 BC. The first Pizza Hut opened in 1958, which is about 500 years closer.
2. Every two minutes, we take as many photos as everyone took during the entire 1800’s.
3. Oxford University is older than the Aztecs. Teaching started in Oxford as early as 1096, and by 1249 the university was officially founded. The Aztec civilization as we know it began with the founding of Tenochtitlán in 1325.
4. Will Smith is now older than Uncle Phil was at the beginning of The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air. When James Avery (Uncle Phil) started on The Fresh Prince, he was 45 years old. Today, Will Smith is 50.
5. Within 66 years, we went from taking flight to landing on the moon. In 1903, the Wright Brothers successfully flew a plane for a whopping 59 seconds. Just 38 short years later, in 1941, the Japanese used a plane to bomb Pearl Harbor. Only 28 years after that, Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969.
6. There is more processing power in a TI-83 calculator than in the computer that landed Apollo 11 on the moon. The guidance computer from the Apollo 11 mission ran at 1.024 MHz, about 1/6th of the processing power of a TI-83 calculator. One is used by students to play Tetris, the other took humans to the moon.
7. John Tyler, America’s 10th President, has two living grandchildren.
8. The first pyramids were built while the woolly mammoth was still alive. While most mammoths died out long before civilizations arose, a small populations survived until 1650 BC. By that point, Egypt was halfway through its empire, and the Giza Pyramids were already 1000 years old.
9. The fax machine was invented the same year that people were traveling the Oregon Trail (and some people still use a fax machine!)
10. France was still executing people by guillotine when Star Wars came out. Star Wars premiered in theaters in May 1977. The last execution by guillotine took place September 10th of that same year.
11. Betty White is literally older than sliced bread. Otto Frederick Rohwedder invented sliced bread in 1928, while Betty White was born in 1922.
12. Everything in this 1991 Radio Shack advertisement exists today in a single smart phone.
13. When Warner Brothers formed, the Ottoman Empire was still alive. Warner Brothers was started in 1903 and the Ottoman Empire lasted until 1923.
14. Harvard University was founded before calculus was derived.
15. There was more time between the Stegosaurus and the Tyrannosaurus Rex than between the Tyrannosaurus and you. The Stegosaurus lived ~150 million years ago, while the T-Rex lived only ~65 million years ago.
16. If you are over 45 years old, the world population has doubled just in your lifetime.
17. There are whales that are still alive today that were born before Moby Dick was written.
Some of these make me feel really old, while others just seem so unbelievable that they can’t be true, but they are. It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, but when you really think about how far we have come, it seems like it was ages ago.