Numerous ancient civilizations around the world were advanced and highly civilized. Some are very popular and well-studied like the Egyptians while others remain obscure like the Garamantes. As scholars make new discoveries, our understanding of ancient civilizations will deepen—dispelling myths, correcting inaccurate information, and eliciting more respect and admiration.

10 Earthquake Caused The Disappearance Of The Sanxingdui Civilization

Sanxingdui is an ancient Chinese civilization and settlement that flourished in the Sichuan Province of China. For thousands of years, this advanced culture was lost. It was only rediscovered in 1929 when a peasant found jade and stone artifacts while repairing a sewage ditch.

The two prevailing theories about Sanxingdui’s mysterious disappearance are war and flood. However, Niannian Fan from Tsinghua University in Chengdu, China, found these theories to be “not very convincing.” In 2014, he published research that details how an earthquake caused the Sanxingdui civilization to disappear.

According to Fan’s study, a massive earthquake almost 3,000 years ago “caused catastrophic landslides [that] rerouted the flow of [Sanxingdui’s] river.” The inhabitants simply moved closer to the new river flow. This theory is supported by historical records of earthquakes that occurred near Sanxingdui. Fan believes that the inhabitants relocated to Jinsha after the river was rerouted.

9 War Was Important For The Minoans

Contrary to popular belief, the Minoans, who prospered on Crete during the Bronze Age, were not a peace-loving people. Ever since they were rediscovered over a century ago, the Minoans were regarded as “a paradigm of a society that was devoid of war, where warriors and violence were shunned.”

However, new research conducted by archaeologist Barry Molloy of the University of Sheffield revealed that war played an important role in the Minoan society. Molloy arrived at this conclusion after discovering numerous pieces of evidence depicting violence in the material remains and symbolic grammar of ancient Crete.

In addition, Molloy’s research showed that one of the primary expressions of Minoan male identity was warrior identity. Also, many weapons that dominated Europe until the Middle Ages, such as spears and swords, may have originated from the Minoan civilization.

8 The Minoans Were Indigenous Europeans

For many years, the origin of the ancient Minoan civilization was fiercely debated by scholars. Some suggested that they originated from Africa, specifically Egypt and Libya. Others believed that they came from the Middle East and Anatolia. In 2013, this debate was finally put to rest when Professor George Stamatoyannopoulos from the University of Washington published a study that revealed that the ancient Minoans were indigenous Europeans.

Stamatoyannopoulos analyzed the mitochondrial DNA of 37 ancient Minoans whose remains were discovered in a cave on the eastern portion of Crete. His analyses revealed that the Minoan civilization was genetically distant from the peoples of North Africa and the Middle East. More importantly, the results showed that “ancient Minoan DNA was most similar to populations from western and northern Europe.”

7 War Didn’t Cause The Collapse Of The Easter Island Civilization

One of the most enduring mysteries of the ancient civilization that flourished in Rapa Nui, Chile, beginning in the 13th century is the cause of its collapse. The theory that many scientists believe and propagate involves massive infighting among the inhabitants caused by dwindling resources. This theory is supported by the thousands of triangular objects known as mata’a that are found all over the island. Scientists believe that these objects were used as weapons by the inhabitants.

However, a new analysis of the mata’a by anthropologist Carl Lipo of Binghamton University and his team revealed that these so-called triangular weapons were not “used in warfare after all.”

They arrived at this controversial conclusion after using a technique known as morphometrics to analyze “the shape variability of a photo set of [more than 400] mata’a.” According to Lipo, the mata’a were used by the inhabitants not as weapons but as cultivation tools for domestic activities or tattooing.

6 Climate Change Caused The Collapse Of The Harappan Civilization

Of all the first great urban civilizations in the world, the Harappan civilization is the least known. This is quite surprising considering the fact that this obscure society was bigger, more populous, more democratic, and more sophisticated than ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. At its peak, the Harappan civilization extended over 1 million square kilometers (390,000 mi²), encompassing lands that now belong to India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan.

About 4,000 years ago, this great civilization mysteriously collapsed. The cause remained a mystery until recently.

Liviu Giosan, a geologist from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and his team recreated the landscape of the rivers and plains where the Harappan civilization flourished. They discovered that ancient climate change caused the monsoon-based rivers supporting the agriculture of the Harappan civilization to dry up. As a result, big cities collapsed and the inhabitants migrated to the East, specifically “toward the Ganges basin, where monsoon rains remained reliable.”

5 Elite Women Made The Beer In The Wari Civilization

The Wari, an ancient civilization that predated the Incas, flourished for hundreds of years in the Andes Mountains of Peru before their society collapsed. In 2005, a study conducted by researchers from the University of Florida and the Field Museum revealed that the beer makers of the Wari Empire were women.

More strikingly, the researchers found that the female brewers were neither slaves nor women of low status. Instead, they were elite, beautiful women. This finding proves “that women played a more crucial role in ancient Andean societies than history books have stated.”

The beer prepared by the elite female brewers 1,000 years ago was called chicha. It was made from Peruvian peppertree berries and corn.

4 The Garamantes Were Highly Civilized

The Garamantes are an ancient civilization that flourished in what is now modern-day Libya. Most of what scholars know about this mysterious society comes from Roman accounts, which described them as “barbaric nomads and troublemakers on the edge of the Roman Empire.” However, a new discovery reveals that the Garamantes civilization was actually advanced and historically more important than previously thought.

In 2011, a team of researchers led by archaeologist David Mattingly from the University of Leicester discovered more than 100 fortified farms, towns, and villages with castlelike structures in Libya that date from AD 1 to AD 500.

Contrary to what the Romans had suggested, these structures and settlements prove that the Garamantes were highly civilized. They opened up the trans-Saharan trade and were pioneers of building oases. The researchers made this remarkable discovery after examining air photographs and satellite images.

3 The Nazca Civilization Caused Its Own Demise

The Nazca is perhaps one of the most mysterious civilizations in the history of mankind. Around 1,500 years ago, this advanced society in Peru mysteriously collapsed. Scientists have suggested a massive El Nino event as the culprit. However, new research shows that massive deforestation also played a key role in the demise of the Nazca civilization.

Archaeologist David Beresford-Jones of Cambridge University discovered that the ancient Nazca cut down native huarango trees to plant maize, cotton, and other crops. The huarango trees played important roles in the desert environment of the Nazca. These trees enhanced moisture and soil fertility, provided shade from the scorching heat of the desert, and underpinned the floodplain.

The cutting down of the huarango trees caused irreversible damage to the environment. When the massive El Nino occurred, the huarango trees were no longer there to prevent or reduce flooding. As a result, the floods damaged the irrigation systems, leaving the Nazca with an area unworkable for agriculture.

2 Child Sacrifice Was Practiced By The Carthaginians

For decades, scholars have debated whether the people of ancient Carthage, who existed from 800 BC to 146 BC, practiced child sacrifice. The notion that the ancient Carthaginians did not engage in this cruel practice was propagated by scholars from Italy and Tunisia during the 20th century.

They argued that the Greeks and Romans were behind this “racist anti-Carthaginian propaganda.” They also suggested that the tophets—ancient burial grounds where the skeletons were found—were simply child cemeteries.

However, collaborative research carried out by academics from various institutions around the world, such as Oxford University, slams this misguided interpretation. According to the study, the overwhelming amount of archaeological, literary, documentary, historical, and epigraphic evidence points to the fact that Carthaginian parents did sacrifice their own children to the gods.

1 Dwarfs Were Highly Respected In Ancient Egypt

In 2005, a study published in the American Journal of Medical Genetics showed that the ancient Egyptians held dwarfs in high esteem, possibly as far back as 4500 BC. These researchers from Georgetown University Hospital arrived at this conclusion after examining artistic evidence and biological remains of dwarfism in ancient Egypt.

They discovered an overwhelming number of dwarf images on vase paintings, statues, tomb walls, and other art forms. The images portrayed dwarfs as “personal attendants, overseers of linen, people who looked after animals, jewelers, dancers, and entertainers.”

In addition, the researchers found that several dwarfs held important positions and were revered enough to be buried in lavish burial sites in the royal cemetery. The study concluded that dwarfism “was never shown as a physical handicap” in ancient Egypt.

+Further Reading

Ancient history is a fascinating topic that covers hundreds of categories. Needless to say has done a pretty good job of writing about them all. Here are a few more that you’ll definitely want to read:

Top 10 Mysteries of Ancient or Lost Civilizations
10 Mysteries That Hint At Forgotten Advanced Civilizations
10 Forgotten Ancient Civilizations
10 Ancient Civilizations That History Forgot

Technically speaking nothing is faster than light. That’s it, the story’s over, time to go home. Except that is the very simple, very basic answer to the question “is anything faster than light?”  A more complicated answer is that nothing is faster than light except for when we can come up with circumstances in which something technically is faster than light.

Science is a funny thing. It works best when you keep picking at it like a scab. And good science is always open to the possibility that it’s dead wrong, or that there are things we don’t understand, or that maybe there’s a loophole here and there that gets you around something that seems otherwise settled. Science shouldn’t hold grudges nor should it stick to anything as though it were written in stone.

 So, to answer the question, maybe or maybe not. Let’s get a little deeper.

The Speed of Light

Light travels at 186,282 miles per second. That’s fast. A human once reached 24,816.1 miles per hour. That was in the Apollo 10 module in orbit. You can’t really hit that speed so well on Earth, nor should you want to. 

You can thank Albert Einstein for putting a speed limit on the whole universe when he calculated that light was as fast as anything could or would ever go. If you haven’t read up on the science, the basic idea here is that only massless particles, like photons of light, can reach that speed in a vacuum. Nothing else could ever hope to reach that speed because of the energy it would take to do such a thing. 

More mass requires more energy to achieve more speed. Accelerating a spaceship, for instance, to the speed of light would require an infinite amount of energy and infinite energy is not something that you can do. Not with science as we understand it right now, anyway. We’ll look into this a bit deeper in a moment.

Light can travel as fast as it does because it is a massless particle. The moment something has mass it necessarily must go slower because it has inertia working against it.

Why Can’t Things Be Faster Than Light?

So we briefly touched on why you can’t hop in a SpaceX rocket and travel across the galaxy at the speed of light. You need infinite energy to do such a thing. But also, you need to remember that the mass of matter increases the closer it gets to the speed of light. That means, at the speed of light, you would also have infinite mass. That’s why you need infinite energy to move it. 

In physics, mass measures an object’s inertia. Inertia is the tendency of objects to resist changes in their state of motion. Or, as you may have heard, an object in motion tends to stay in motion, an object at rest tends to stay at rest. Force of some kind needs to act on them to change that state. 

The mass that an object has as you increase its speed is inertial mass. That’s the energy that exists in any object that resists its change in motion. As you increase the speed of an object, that inertial mass increases to resist it.  By the time you hit the speed of light, if you could theoretically do such a thing, you would have infinite inertial mass resisting you which would require infinite energy to keep pushing it forward. 

Additionally, as an object increases in speed, general relativity also predicts that time slows down. The closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time goes. You’d never be able to reach the actual speed of light as a result.

Things That Seem Faster Than Light

Part of Einstein’s theory of general relativity that is significant to understanding whether something can travel faster than light is how he defined the limits of faster-than-light movement. When Einstein says nothing can travel faster than light, he uses the qualifier “in a vacuum.” That’s a condition that can be changed.

A simple example of this is something most of us have seen before – light traveling through water. Light isn’t just a particle, it’s a wave. Water and prisms can break up the wave function of light, you see that any time a rainbow appears. White light is broken into the color spectrum. Light itself ranges from infrared to ultraviolet and these frequencies travel at different speeds.

In effect, outside of a vacuum, this means that light travels faster than light. None of them go faster than light speed, however.

Another more cosmic example of something seemingly traveling faster than light is gamma-ray jet bursts. These are the brightest explosions in the galaxy and they happen when stars collapse or collide. Jets of particles are released and travel faster than light itself but still not in defiance of Einstein’s rules. That’s because the jets exist in these interstellar dust clouds, not a vacuum. In this medium, the gamma jets look like they’re traveling back in time because of their speed. 

The fact that the size of the observable universe is 94 billion light years and the furthest object we can see is 47 billion light years away seems problematic if the universe is 13.8 billion years old. How did anything get that far away if nothing goes faster than light? This is where the “relativity” part of general and special relativity comes from. 

Anything faster than light needs to have speed, that’s sort of the point. But the expansion of the universe did not happen at speed. This concept is a doozy so bear with us. 

The universe, relative to you and a telescope, looks like it’s expanding rapidly outwards. You can pick a distant star and calculate the speed of its movement. But, again, relative to you. Space as a whole never expanded relative to anything so you can’t measure its speed. What happened, after the Big Bang, was that space between particles expanded. 

So the fact that things are further away than we could ever reach even at light speed doesn’t mean they’re traveling at light speed. Technically, they don’t need to be moving at all. It’s space itself that is expanding, and continues to expand, giving the impression that things have moved faster than light speed across the universe. 

Quantum Entanglement

Quantum entanglement directly contradicts Einstein’s theory of relativity and the idea that nothing can travel faster than light. According to quantum entanglement, two subatomic particles can be separated by light years but are still connected fundamentally. What happens to one particle will simultaneously happen to the other particle despite the great distance between them. That means something should be traveling faster than light to link them together, or so it would seem.

What does link entanglement particles, in this case photons, is a kind of randomness. The measurable states of these photons are unknown until one is measured but the moment that one is measured, it defines the state of its entangled partner as well. This is true no matter where the particles are in relation to each other. Only in measuring one can you determine the results of the other and it is always the same. Entanglement connects them, always, no matter the distance. 

As it relates to light speed, entanglement is not actually breaking the rules. There is no communication between the particles and this has been proven in many experiments. Bizarre though it is, quantum entanglement is not faster than light communication or travel. 

Wormholes as a Theoretical Shortcut

If we consider speed as a tool to help us cross a distance from A to B then a shortcut qualifies as a faster method of doing so. If you have to travel 100 miles away and you’re driving at 100 miles an hour, it’s going to take you one hour to get there. But if there’s a shortcut that takes 30 minutes off your time, did you travel 200 miles per hour to get there? Not necessarily. That’s kind of how a wormhole works. You could get somewhere technically faster than the speed of light without actually traveling faster than the speed of light.

Right now there’s some debate about whether a wormhole could ever be used for interstellar travel, and that’s fine. But is the concept sound? We have never seen a wormhole in space but the science behind them stands up. Even Einstein’s work allowed for wormholes so, at least theoretically, they could exist. They function as passages that burrow right through space-time itself.

Something with a large enough mass in space creates a curvature in space-time. A black hole is the most famous example of this. It can pull in light, and time itself dilates around it. Like a body resting in a hammock, with the hammock being space-time itself, the body pulls things down around it. They can’t escape.

Theoretically, something like a black hole could connect to another one somewhere else in space. That could be a wormhole, or an Einstein-Rosen Bridge as they’re also called. The distance between the two could be millions of light years. 

There are different theories about how wormholes could form and their properties but it’s all just theory for now. In fact, we don’t even know how one could be created. It’s only the math that allows for their existence. 

Could a wormhole allow for travel across the universe in a brief time? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s like asking if you’re going to like the dinner you have 1,000 days from now. You know dinner could exist, but you have no idea if you’ll like it or even what it is right now. 

Alcubierre Drive

Science fiction loves faster-than-light travel and we suspend our disbelief to go with it. A starship has a warp drive or something and that’s fine, that’ll work. What do we have in reality? We have the Alcubierre Drive. Well, not in reality, but we’ve theorized it.

Physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed his idea as a way of stretching space-time to allow faster-than-light travel. Treat space like a wave and stretch it to allow the space in front of an object to contract while the space behind expands. You, in your spaceship, ride a warp bubble across flat space. It circumvents the issue of all that inertial mass by keeping it locked in the bubble and, therefore, relative and local. Nothing in the bubble is moving faster than light. 

The major downsides of this theory include the fact that no one knows how to make it happen in reality, nor do we have any idea how you would get out of the bubble once you got into it. You’d also need something called negative energy, again a theoretical concept, to make it work. You can see how that would be a problem. 

Krasnikov Tubes

A Krasnikov tube is the solution to Alcubierre’s warp bubble issue. Krasnikov observed that, in Alcubierre’s bubble, you have no control. He proposed a new idea. Create a warp behind your spaceship that pushes you to your destination and then, when you’re ready to come back, use the “tube” it created to go back. 

Thanks to time dilation, this sort of trip would usually result in the astronaut returning hundreds or thousands of years later. But in a Krasnikov tube, the tube created in your first flight unwinds time. You could return after a time relative to your own flight, not the time passed on Earth. So traveling to another galaxy, which might be a 3,000-year journey from Earth’s perspective, would only take you three years. 

There is some obviously complex math involved, but the theory is that you open up a path through two spacetime dimensions, something like a wormhole, that exists in flat space but only on the path back to where you started from. It’s not a path through time and space, just time itself. You still need to travel across space.

The concept has its flaws also, especially when the idea of two of them being used comes into light and potentially one spaceship takes the wrong tube and goes three thousand years into the past. But there’s also the issue of even building such a thing, so maybe that’s not the biggest worry yet.

Is Anything Faster Than Light?

There are still several other theories about things that could potentially go faster than light, like quantum tunneling. Like what we’ve already covered, all of this can only exist on paper. Any practical application of this is potentially years off if it would ever be viable at all.

In the realm of theory, as we’ve seen, some things may be able to bend the rules. Other things don’t bend the rules, it’s just a matter of perception and understanding how general relativity works. Even a rainbow is going faster than light technically, at least in part, sometimes.

Science has identified somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.2 million different species on the planet earth. Of all those species, few are as disliked as the rat. While some people really enjoy rats and keep them as pets, and evidence shows they are quite intelligent, most people are not so forgiving. They are considered disease vectors, pests, and a danger to public safety. That said, you may be surprised to learn what goes on in the hidden world of rats.

10. NYC has a Population of About 2 Million Rats

There is a common saying that, in New York city, there is one rat for every human resident. That’s not actually true, and humans are far and away the more populous species.Does that mean there’s not an abundance of rats in New York City? Not by a long shot. It was estimated in the year 2014 that there were about two million rats in New York. While that may not be one rat for every resident of NYC, it works out to being close to the population of Houston.

It’s hard to get more recent numbers, also hard to get any accurate numbers if you think about how one might go about accurately counting millions of rats, but if you look back in the past, their numbers are skyrocketing. In 1950 there were only 250,000 of them.

The increase of the rat population by 800% is certainly something dramatic. There’s no telling how close to accurate the number is, it could certainly be much more than 2 million rats at this point, but it’s safe to say that whatever the population is, New York is an absolute paradise for the little rodents.

9. Rats Are Accused of Eating Anything 

Rats are known as voracious eaters. If you work in the food industry, you know you need to be on the lookout for rats constantly, because if they get in they’ll eat whatever they can, contaminate the rest, and potentially put you out of business. This can be at restaurants, warehouses, grocery stores, you name it. And if that were the end of it, that might be reasonable. But rats don’t just eat what you think they’re going to eat. Rats eat everything, or at least they’re blamed for it.

In one case, rats were blamed for eating over 500 kilograms of marijuana. That’s more than half a ton. That story has also been considered a little suspect, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. And if you are wondering how much money that’s worth, maybe that doesn’t matter either, because rats will eat money, too. One rat was discovered to have eaten close to $20,000 out of an ATM. He died after it happened, but he died a rich man. Well, so to speak.

Rats have also been blamed for eating 34 kilograms of ketamine, drinking 1,000 liters of booze, and more. Again, the rats may just be convenient fall guys here, but it’s the police doing the accusing so no one’s likely to follow up.

8. Rats Cause Tens of Billions in Damages Each Year

If you have had rats in your home before, you probably noticed some of the kind of damage they’re able to do. Aside from chewing through food containers, they’ll also go through your walls, and their urine and feces can ruin your floors and your furnishings. An infestation of rats in a building can cause a heck of a lot of damage.

It’s been estimated that in the United States alone rats cause about $19 billion worth of damages per year. All the way back in 1982, the United Nations reported rats were destroying as much as 43 billion tons of food per year at a cost of $30 billion. Adjusted for inflation that’s about $96 billion today.

7. Experimental Rat Utopias Led to Chaos

In the 1960s a series of experiments known as the Calhoun Rodent Experiments involved the creation of what was a rat, and later mouse, utopia. John Calhoun wanted to study population density and how it affected the individuals in that population. The idea was to provide rats with whatever they could possibly need. 

Calhoun started his experiment with rats in an outdoor pen, and as the experiment grew, more iterations developed with more elaborate setups. What he discovered was that, even if you give rodents all the comforts they could ever desire such as food, water, and shelter in abundance, at some point everything falls apart.

The rats in his experiment ignored certain areas of the habitat and overpopulated others. Soon the rats would only go about their normal everyday behavior if other rats were around. They wouldn’t eat or breed if they were alone. Behavior became erratic and violent with some rats engaging in cannibalism and what was described as “sexual deviation.” Infant mortality rose to 96%. Soon the entire society collapsed in chaos and squalor.

When Calhoun tried his experiment again with a more elaborate setup and mice, the same thing happened.

6. Every 48 Years India Experiences a Rat Flood

Every 48 years in India something called Mautam occurs. This is what they call when bamboo goes to flower, then to seed, then dies. The bamboo fruit appears and as soon as it does a rat flood occurs. It is the sugary bamboo fruit that black rats crave so when it happens, the population of rats will explode. 

After the bamboo dies off, the massive population of rats has to move on to something else. Typically, this is whatever other crops are around, which can lead to widespread famine and loss of human life. 

Even with a bounty placed on rat tails, in 2009 when the last rat flood occurred as many as 1.5 million rats were killed, it had barely any effect on the population

5. The Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902 Was a Failed Attempt at Rat Control 

In 1902, Hanoi was controlled by the French. As part of their occupation of the city, the French portion was built with an elaborate sewer system, which hadn’t existed before. This was a great treat for the local rats who soon overran the Hanoi sewers.

With Vietnamese rats showing up in French toilets, the population became extremely upset. Especially as incidents of the plague rose as well. Something had to be done about the rats, so the ruling French came up with a plan. A bounty was placed on rats, and each rat was worth money to local rat catchers. People went out and started catching them in great abundance. Yet somehow, instead of solving the problem, the rap population only grew larger.

Turns out, if you pay people to kill rats, it’s much more profitable for them to breed more rats so they can make more money. The plan backfired horribly and as many as 10,000 rats per day were being turned in for profit with as much as double that on some days.

4. Rats Can be Trained for Search and Rescue

Rats are adept at sneaking into pretty much any place you can imagine. And they’ve also been shown to be highly intelligent. While most people don’t bother connecting these two things, that’s not true of everyone. Rats, thanks to these two skills, are being trained as search and rescue workers for things like building collapses. A small, intelligent animal that is able to sneak into the tightest places is certainly very useful in a disaster situation.

A trained rat with a tiny backpack can be sent into a building that may have collapsed because of an earthquake or hurricane. The backpack contains a tracker, camera and a communication device. They can find survivors and allow rescuers to communicate with the survivor and pinpoint their exact location thanks to the rat’s natural curiosity and ability to weave through tight places. They can be trained just like dogs, and learning to hunt down a living person is not that difficult for them. Rats have already been trained to hunt down landmines and detect various diseases and humans by smell.

3. Experiments Show That Rats Can Feel Hopeful and Will Fight to Survive If They Do

It’s not very often that researchers will use rats and experiments that result in good things happening to the rats. That just seems to be par for the course. One of the more depressing experiments that rats have been subjected to is the Drowning Rat Experiment performed at Johns Hopkins back in the 1950s. 

Although the experiments were cruel, the results were also quite interesting.  In the experiment a rat would be put in a bucket of water and the researcher observed how long it took before the rat drowned. It was observed that most of the rats drowned quickly, even though rats are fairly good swimmers. However, some of them could survive for days. The survivors were all domesticated rats. A hypothesis was formed that having a history of being helped by others may have given rats hope that there was a chance to survive.

For the next round, the rats were placed in the water and just before they were about to drown they were rescued. These rats were held and helped to overcome their near-death experience.  The survivor rats were then put in the bucket again later and it was observed that they swam and survived for much longer. The rats had hope that they would survive, so they didn’t give up so easily.

2. Rats Laugh

Pablo Neruda once said that laughter is the language of the soul. If that’s true, then science has apparently proven rats have souls. You may want to think of that before you put on a trap next time. Researchers have showed that rats are ticklish and they actually laugh when you tickle them, though the sound of their laughter is ultrasonic and can’t be heard by the human ear without help. 

Tickling is actually a big deal in neuroscience because of how the brain responds to the stimuli and, in researching how rats react, we have determined that they are definitely deriving pleasure from it and will encourage humans to keep tickling them. 

1. Two Rats Can Become 500 Million in Three Years

One thing that makes an animal a pest is how prolifically it can breed. Rats are incredibly prolific breeders which is part of the reason they can be so dangerous. A pest-control company called Rentokil explained to potential clients just how bad rat breeding can be.

Rats can reach sexual maturity at an age of about four to 5 weeks. Their gestation period is another 3 weeks. A litter of rats can contain anywhere from 5 to as many as a dozen babies. A female rat can produce as many as 6 litters in a year. 

Even if a wild rat only lives for one year, which is a common lifespan, that means one rat could have produced as many as 72 babies. But you also need to remember that those first few litters of rats would have come of age in the same period and started breeding as well. The result is that in a single year, you could end up with 1,250 rats, just from that one initial breeding pair. 

If you extend your timeline a bit, blow up that one year into three years, that one pair of rats could eventually become half a billion. Obviously that’s an extreme example, and there would be predators, disease, competition and so on that would keep the population down. But theoretically it’s possible, at least biologically, that one pair of rats can become 500 million.

Let there be light. Someone or other said that once and all things being equal, humans and other living things have benefited from having light. There wouldn’t be much life without it. And while the sun was our big provider for a long time before we mastered fire and then electricity, these are far from the only light sources out there. Science provides some brilliant ways to bring light to darkness. 

10. You Can Crack an Ice Cube Tray in the Dark and Create Light

Triboluminescence is a mouthful of a word but get used to it, we’ll bring it up again later. This is the scientific name for light that comes from friction or compression and it can come about in a variety of very unexpected ways. The fun thing about it is that it’s very accessible for the average person. You don’t need fancy machines or dangerous chemicals or anything. But you’ll probably need patience.

If you have an ice cube tray in your freezer, you can use it to produce light. Twisting the tray to free ice cubes can, sometimes, produce light thanks to triboluminescence. When you break ice, it undergoes mechanical stress that can release electron energy. As the electrons relax and get a little more stable, that can produce light energy. In this case it’s going to be a quick flash that, if it happens at all, can be easily missed so trial and error goes a long way if you want to see for yourself. 

You can also separate and reunite electrical charges or create a current that ionizes molecules. If you’re looking to see it yourself, you need a pitch black room and the ice needs to be as cold as you can get it, the colder the better. You need to let your eyes adjust fully to the dark, then get your ice, then give it a crack. The light can be blue or white and most will be ultraviolent but it may also be so dim you can barely see it. Plus, as mentioned, it may not happen at all.

9. Collapsing Bubbles Underwater Can Produce Light

Water can be used in the production of light if you have some bubbles handy. This process is called sonoluminescence and requires not just underwater bubbles but sound waves. You can’t just pop the bubble with your finger and hope for a fireworks display.

The scientific process for this one is still a mystery but what we do know still sounds very cool. You need an air bubble underwater and if you hit it with a sound wave. The bubble will collapse and in that instance you create a burst of light.

When the sound hits the bubble, the bubble expands and then collapses extremely quickly. We’re talking the barest fractions of a second. The prevailing theory is that, in that tiny picosecond period of time, the gas inside the collapsing bubble gets super heated to something hotter than the surface of the sun. You’re creating a super hot plasma that exists barely long enough to exist at all and then it’s snuffed out. But, for a moment, that creates a burst of light.

8. Phosphenes Can Create Closed Eye Hallucinations of Light

Here’s a question for you. If you close your eyes and see lights, are they actually lights? If your brain registers something, even a hallucination or a dream, are the lights you saw still technically lights if they’re not real? You saw them after all, right? 

Most of us have had the experience of rubbing our eyes and registering what looks like flashes of light as a result. The pressure on your eyes causes flashes in your eyes.These lights are caused by phosphenes and they aren’t just your imagination. There are even efforts being made to restore vision to people blinded by retinal disease by using implants that electrically stimulate phosphenes in your retina. 

7. Tribal Rawhide Rattles Filled With Quartz Produced Flashing Lights

Another example of triboluminescence was discovered long ago by Native American tribes in Colorado when they created ceremonial rattles. Like any rattle, these had a handle, a container on the end, and something inside that rattled and made noise when you shook it. But the Ute Indians discovered something unique in the way they constructed these rattles.

While the exterior and the bulb part were just rawhide, for the rattle itself they used quartz crystals. When shaken, thanks to triboluminescence, the quartz crystals rub together and produce a yellow flash. In rattle form, this would cause the crystals to rub together constantly, producing random but frequent light flashes. You can imagine how this would have looked to an ancient, pre-technological society. 

The flashes would have lit up the translucent hide during any rituals performed in the dark. The Ute believed spirits were being called and, as such, the rattles had great significance in rituals. 

6. You Can Crush Sugar Crystals and Produce Light

Triboluminescence is back again and this time in your sugar. In a fashion similar to cracking ice, you can crush sugar and create energy as light. This was likely first noticed back when sugar was shipped in massive bricks and workers had to chip off smaller chunks for sale or for use. Sugar crystals can be broken down into smaller crystals. In doing so, positive and negative charges are separated and boom, sugar lights. 

The light produced by sugar is blue and it is, in a technical sense, lightning. The positive and negative charges build until a static electric charge is produced which ionizes the nitrogen in the air. The result is a brief flash of light and is most often associated with wintergreen lifesavers which used to advertise the fact that if you bit one in the dark you might see a flash of light.  

5. Earthquakes Produce Atmospheric Light

When it comes to natural disasters, you expect a light show with something like a thunderstorm which can even include hurricanes. Likewise, a volcano is not going to just produce glowing, orange lava but some of the most dramatic and chaotic lightning you’ll ever see in your life. But those are not the only disasters which can set the sky alight. Earthquakes actually produce atmospheric light as well, but not always. 

Sometimes called earthquake lights, this phenomenon appears before quakes occur, sometimes days in advance. Even more mysterious is that there’s no specific way they work. They can appear in different colors and in different shapes. Sometimes they’re green or blue, sometimes pink. Some are globes, some are flashes, some look like flames.

Because the phenomenon is so inconsistent and unpredictable, little hard evidence about it exists beyond recordings of incidents. But reports date back hundreds of years and researchers have found 65 cases back to the year 1600.

Because of how difficult it is to pin down what earthquake lights are, not everyone even agrees they exist and aren’t just totally different light phenomena happening at the same time as an earthquake. For instance, sometimes, these effects have been attributed to power lines being down during the quake.

4. Cherenkov Radiation Causes a Blue Glow in Nuclear Reactor Pools

Possibly one of the coolest forms of light in the world comes from Cherenkov radiation. It’s that eerie glow sci-fi assures us comes from radioactive things and it works thanks to wild and weird physics.

If you’ve ever seen a nuclear reactor, you may have noticed there’s a lot of water used to keep things cool. Water makes Cherenkov radiation work. It happens when charged particles in the water move faster than the speed of light.

Normally you will not find particles moving faster than light but, in a medium light water, light travels at 75% speed and that means the charged particles can move faster. When they collide with each other it produces the strange, blue glow discovered by Pavel Cherenkov.

3. Motyxia Millipedes Glow Bright Green/Blue

We didn’t cover bioluminescence because most of us know about that already. Fireflies are no big surprise, nor are the many species of fish that can produce their own lights. But there are one or two oddballs of nature out there producing light that maybe you never heard of before and that’s why the motyxia millipede is on the list. 

Found in Sequoia National Park and limited to a very narrow range in the Sierra Nevada mountains, motyxia millipedes glow bright blue in the dark. This is done to warn off predators by making the millipede hard to miss. In some creatures, like fireflies, light displays attract mates but motyxia are blind so they don’t benefit from their own shiny blue/green show. They are the only millipedes in the world known to do this.

The many-legged light shows are doing predators a favor because if one were to ignore the lights they’d have to deal with the millipede’s toxins which include hydrogen cyanide gas that it can release when attacked. 

2. Will-O’-The-Wisps Are Caused by Burning Swamp Gases

If you haven’t ever been to a swamp, you may not be aware of the phenomenon called a Will-o’-the-wisp or swamp lights. These mysterious lights can sometimes be seen in swamps, floating above the water. They are bursts of flame, sometimes sustained ones, that flicker but remain stationary with an eerie, blue light.

The lights are sometimes called fool’s lanterns, swamp lights, and so on. The fool name, usually translated as the Latin ignis fatuus, comes from the fact it could make a fool of travelers at night. If you were wandering a road near a swamp, you might see one of these lights in the dark and mistake it for a lantern, long before electrical lights were a thing. Thinking you’d found a house or inn, you could stray from the path and wander right into the swamp. 

Swamp lights are actually caused by gas. The bottom of any bog or swamp is likely going to be full of decaying biomatter. Because it’s rotting underwater, without oxygen, bacteria can eat away and produce an abundance of methane gas. When pockets of methane bubble to the surface and mix with phosphines which can spontaneously combust in oxygen, setting the methane aflame and creating the sustain, burning lantern effect hovering above the water for a short time. 

1. The Human Body Produces Visible Light

Has anyone ever told you that you were glowing? Or have you heard someone say it to a pregnant woman, or someone who got over an illness, maybe? It generally means you’re looking good and healthy and vibrant. It’s a figure of speech. But, whether any of us realize it, it’s also a literal description. The human body does produce light; it’s just incredibly hard to see.

There’s no need to squint at yourself in the dark in front of the mirror because it won’t help. The light your body emits, the level of which rises and falls over the course of the day, is not visible to the naked eye. In fact, they’re about 1,000 times less intense than what you can see without help. 

Chemical reactions in the bodies of pretty much all living things produce light as one kind of energy during that process. It’s just a small amount and, since it’s not the point of most of those reactions, that makes sense. The light is basically wasted energy. 

In a human body, light and heat don’t line up, either. The warmest parts of you are not the brightest, so that light-producing reaction isn’t warming you up too much.

Ultra sensitive equipment has to be used to measure the lights produced by humans. Our lights cycle, producing the brightest light in the afternoon and the dimmest light at night. Your face produces the most light, especially your cheeks, forehead and neck area.

Red light districts, a center of sin, sexual vice, and debauchery, are where many go to unwind, escape reality, and indulge in their greatest pleasures. Legalized prostitution, drinking, and every vice imaginable lay within a few mere city blocks. Along with it come organized crime, violence, and sordid tales that are seemingly incredulous yet true. Red light districts have been the dirty underbelly of humankind since the days of Sodom and Gomorra and very possibly before.

In the United States, a country founded with deeply religious ideals against sexual activity, especially legalized activity, many red light districts did not survive to the modern day. We have listed, in no particular order, some of the most lustful, sinister, and sinful American red light districts of all time.

10 Storyville, New Orleans

Created in 1897, as prostitution in America’s original sin city was running rampant into suburban areas, Storyville was the first legal red light district in New Orleans. It was located in what is known as the Treme neighborhood today and was named after a local politician named Sidney Story. While other areas had operated illegally prior to its creation, it became the first fully legal red light district in the city’s history—and the most well-known.

This district was a four-by-four-block radius of brothels, sporting houses, and dance halls. It became a breeding ground for Jazz music and was essential in the development of the music. Mafia activity and other organized crime ran rampant as well. Storyville was closed in 1917 due to America joining WW1 after a federal decree was issued stating that a city could not have both a red light district and a naval base.^[1]

9 The Barbary Coast, San Francisco

Running along what is now the financial district in San Francisco, the Barbary Coast existed from around 1848 to 1911. It developed during the lawless days of the American wild west and Northern California gold rush. As the population of San Francisco grew from 200 to over 10,000 in 1851, local authorities struggled to control the rising population. Organized gangs such as “The Hounds” and “The Regulators” dominated the area, and the seedy history of the coastline began.

It was named after the Barbary Coast of Africa, a coastline where many pirates and slave traders would port, that ran along Morocco to modern-day Libya. The California port of the same name held a similar reputation. Many visitors were often ambushed, murdered, or mugged here at one of its many predatory dive bars. After the 1906 earthquake, the area was rebranded as Terrific Street and would go on to feature dance halls and jazz clubs. A different flavor of sin, but sinful nonetheless.

By 1911, newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst and Mayor James Rolph began to shut the area down permanently by implementing regulations against dancing women in places that served alcohol. By Valentines Day 1917, the final brothel was closed, and the Barbary Coast was no more.^[2]

8 The Sporting District, San Antonio

Hidden deep in San Antonio’s history was a 22-block area near where Market Square is today, known locally as the Sporting District. From 1889 to 1899, brothels were legally recognized in the area. But crackdowns in the area did not occur until the 1940s! Soldiers would often secretly travel here via a special rail trail from Fort Sam Houston.

Upon arrival, they would be handed a “blue book.” Blue books were common in red-light districts of the time and were directories of brothels, highlighting the women inside of them, often including their ethnicities. The blue book of San Antonio was unique, however, as it was published by a police officer named Billie Keilman, who owned property in the Sporting District.^[3]

7 Times Square, New York City

While today Times Square is known as the home of Disney, the M&M shop, and a plethora of costume-wearing street performers, it was not always this way. Once a thriving theatre district, the Great Depression of the 1930s led to its downfall, and by the 1970s, it became the home of porn shops, peep shows, and prostitution.

Being at the center of Manhattan and a major intersection of the subway system, it has always been a major thoroughfare for locals and tourists alike. The New York Times called 42nd Avenue the worst block in NYC in 1960, and this was before the brothels, burlesque shows, and grinder theaters were even fully developed.

The famous disco club, Studio 55, lay on the outskirts of this now-forgotten district. It wasn’t until 1985, as New York fought to regain control over its finances, that a cleanup campaign of Times Square began. A slew of regulations and laws by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani followed, and the area became the tourist attraction we know today.^[4]

6 Gallatin Street, New Orleans

Lesser known than its salacious cousin Storyville, Gallatin Street was the predecessor for the title of “most sinful street in New Orleans.” Laying where the quaint shops of the French Market now reside, right by the docks of New Orleans, it was considered the most dangerous street in New Orleans’s history. Many immigrants would enter New Orleans through the area, never to see any other part of the city.

They were often mugged, murdered, or shanghaied about as quickly as they got off the boat. Operating from the antebellum period to the end of the 1870s, the district produced some of the most violent criminals in New Orleans, a city known for a particularly violent past. With the opening of Storyville, the brothels of Gallatin Street were forced to move to the new legal red-light district, and the street folded. The old buildings were demolished, and the street was renamed French Market Place in 1935.^[5]

5 Hell’s Half Acre, Los Angeles

Along the Southern Pacific Railroad lay a stretch of Alameda Street that, at one point, many visitors were eager to visit. Know as Hell’s Half Acre, it was one of the seediest areas in California history, and much of it still remains a violent part of town today. Women in the area were known to service 13 to 30 men a day and would entice them by standing on wooden platforms outside their homes.

Police authority was extremely lax, as it was in many other red-light districts across the nation, and prostitution ran rampant. Suicides and drug abuse were part of everyday life, as was violence against women. In addition, women were often extorted for their money at the saloons by their pimps and forced to pay high rents for small squabbles of homes known as “crib houses.”

A man named Barolo Ballerino, known as the “father of the cribs,” was the kingpin of the area. His violent legacy still lives on today as the area still remains impoverished and crime-ridden. These “crib houses” were raided in 1903 due to protests from women’s rights organizations, and the area ceased from ever serving as an illegal red-light district again.^[6]

4 The Tenderloin, San Francisco

Just north of Union Square is one of San Francisco’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods. It has carried that reputation since shortly after the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. By the 1920s, “the TL” overflowed with speakeasies, brothels, and all other manner of sinful nightlife. It is believed its unique name was coined by Police Captain Alexander S. Wiliams because officers who patrolled the area could afford a more expensive cut of beef from the bribes they received there.

Later, it became a central hub for jazz and rock ‘n’ roll musicians. Miles Davis and John Coltrane both recorded live albums at the infamous Black Hawk in the early ’60s. Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane recorded records at nearby Hyde Street Studios in the late ’60s.

The Tenderloin also served, and still does, as a safe haven for the LGTBQ+ community. It was home to one of the nation’s first gay organizations, the Vanguard. While no longer a red light district, the Tenderloin is still the seediest and drug-ridden neighborhood in San Francisco and the epicenter of the city’s homeless problem.^[7]

3 The Levee District, Chicago

Chicago is just one of many American cities closely associated with illegality and violence. From roughly 1893 until 1912— although other districts had operated long before—”The Levee District” dominated the nightlife of Chicago. Running along the north bank of the city, along what is today Wells Street, this area had been a hotspot for criminal activity since the 1850s.

The lower section of the Levee District was known as “bed bug row” and hosted some of the grimiest and most disgusting brothels in United States history. In stark contrast was the Everleigh Club, a 5-star sporting house where women of the area were honored to work. At its height, in 1894, the Levee District had 46 saloons, 37 “houses of ill-repute,” and 11 pawnbrokers.

The Women’s Temperance Union (WTU) fought hard across the nation for women’s rights in red-light districts such as this. They won their battle, and by October 1911, 135 warrants were issued for establishments in the Levee District. Many red-light districts across America were closed due to the valiant efforts made on behalf of sex workers by the WTU.^[8]

2 Little Cheyenne, Chicago

Prior to the Levee District, “Little Cheyenne” dominated the scene shortly after the Great Fire of 1871. It ran along South Clark Street on the south side of the city and encompassed the spirit of the wild west, with every avenue of ill repute possible available to its patrons. Cheyenne, Wyoming, caught word of this and named their red light district “Little Chicago.”

Little Cheyenne operated all the way up until the 1970s. Today, a small portion of it exists in the form of a hotel called the Ewing Annex that rents 5×7-foot (1.5×2.1-meter) rooms to homeless men. These “rooms” are hardly suitable for human inhabitance, separated at times by sheets of chicken wire. This serves as a reminder that the degradation of times past still exists in our modern world.^[9]

1 Cripple Creek, Colorado

Just to the south of Denver lies the little town of Cripple Creek, Colorado. A western town that appeared during a gold boom, it quickly was able to provide “sporting houses” to visiting miners as the female population increased. This was common in the late 1800s across the west. During the days of the American wild west, it was often common for small boom towns such as Cripple Creek to turn into miniature centers of sin and fueled the already lawless young nation.

As part of the wild west as train robberies and shootouts in the streets, the brothels flourished from Kansas to Texas to even Alaska. Generally run by madams, the brothels enabled some working girls to leave the lifestyle for greener pastures. Two of the prostitutes who worked and lived in these brothels went on to marry famous gunslingers Harry Longbaugh—aka The Sundance Kid—and Doc Holliday. One woman, Laura Bullion, even joined Longbaugh’s gang, the Wild Bunch Gang.^[10]

It could be argued that the scale of the universe is such that our minds will never be able to comprehend it. In fact, it seems very likely that even things here on earth are far beyond what our minds could imagine at the best of times. That’s one of the reasons people will refer to flooding by saying it was like 100 Olympic sized pools, or a distance something travelled was six football fields. They’re all just ways to make something hard to comprehend a little more understandable. And when it comes to the incredible power and energy nature can wield, it’s pretty mind blowing.

10. Mount St. Helens Released 24 Megatons of Thermal Energy

North America is subject to frequent hurricanes and tornadoes as well as more than its fair share of earthquakes. And though they are rare, there are a number of volcanoes present as well that also erupt from time to time, such as Washington state’s Mount St. Helens. When it erupted back in 1980, it proved its remarkable power in terrifying ways. 

Starting in March of that year, a series of earthquakes were recorded in the area and the actual volcano itself began to bulge outward by 450 feet. When it finally erupted on May 18, it released 24 megatons of thermal energy, which means 24 million tons of TNT. It released 520 million tons of ash and destroyed enough trees to have built 300,000 houses just with the initial lateral blast.

9. Turning 1 kg of Hydrogen to Helium Releases as Much Energy as Burning 20,000 Tons of Coal 

The sun is forever engaged in a fusion reaction that turns hydrogen into helium, producing light and heat and keeping us all alive. Fusion is a hell of a way to produce power and we’re all hoping one day someone masters it down here on Earth because it would make life a lot easier. But until that time we have to make do with things like nuclear fission, solar power and good ol’ fossil fuel burning. 

The difference between how fusion and burning coal works is so preposterous that it seems made up when you try to match it up on the same scale. By that we mean the difference in power generated when the sun turns one kilogram of hydrogen into helium versus how much coal we need to burn down here on earth to get the same amount of energy produced.

The reaction of one kilogram of hydrogen becoming helium releases 630 trillion joules, or what you’d get from burning 20,000 tons of coal. 

Over the course of its life, the sun will use 1.95 x 1029 kg of hydrogen. In a single second, the sun generates 3.9 x 1026 watts of power. To put that in perspective, in one second, the sun produces more power than the entire world would use in a few hundred thousand years. 

8. A Hurricane’s Energy is 200 times the Electricity Generating Capacity of the Whole World

Hurricanes are arguably the most terrifying force of nature any of us will ever see. The destructive potential of a hurricane is hard to believe and we’ve all seen the evidence of the destruction they can produce. But how much power is behind that terrifying force? The scale is massive and really puts things in perspective for you.

From the moment a hurricane is born through its cycle of destruction until its ultimate demise, it will release as much energy as 10,000 nuclear weapons. Put another way, all of that energy, and we’re including cloud and rain formation, is about 200 times the amount of electricity generated across the entire planet. That’s just one hurricane. We average about six per year, with several other storms not quite reaching hurricane status. 

7. Krakatoa Exploded with the Force of 10,000 Atomic Bombs 

In 1883, the volcano on the island of Krakatoa exploded and produced the loudest sound in the history of the world. It’s estimated to have hit 310 decibels, so loud that it managed to circle the planet 4 times. It was 172 decibels, 100 miles away. A jet engine will hit you with 150 decibels if you’re standing next to it. 

When it erupted, it went off with the force of 200 megatons of TNT. That’s 10,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It’s believed upwards of 36,000 people were killed.

6. 1 kg of Uranium 235 Produces 3 Million Times the Heat of 1 kg of Coal

For a long time now, people have debated the merits of nuclear power versus something like traditional coal burning. Nuclear comes with dangers such as the potential for meltdowns and the problem of nuclear waste. Coal burning causes pollution and, as we’re about to see, is terribly inefficient by comparison.

If you had one kilogram of uranium-235, you could generate 24,000,000 kWh of heat. By comparison, you’ll make 8 kWh from the same weight of coal. So uranium has around three million times the energy-producing capability of an equal amount of coal. One single uranium fuel pellet is equal to one ton of coal. 

5. Tsunamis Can Produce Enough Power to Run Major Cities or Even Countries for Days

In the past few decades, there have been a couple of massively destructive tsunamis. In 2011, a tsunami hit Japan wielding three petajoules of energy. That was enough to power New York City for an entire week. But even that pales in comparison to one just seven years earlier.

 In 2004, an undersea earthquake triggered a tsunami in the Indian Ocean the day after Christmas. The power of the tsunami has been estimated to be equal to 0.8 gigatons of TNT. In more practical terms, that’s as much energy as the entire United States of America will use in 11 days and works out to 3.35 exajoules. What the heck is an exajoule? That’s one quintillion joules.

One calorie of food produces 4,184 joules of energy. A Big Mac has 550 calories. That means a Big Mac is equivalent to 2,301,200 joules. Divided by the exajoules in the tsunami and it produced the energy equivalent of just under 1.46 trillion of them. That’s a lot of Big Macs. 

4. Climate Change is Adding Energy Equivalent to Exploding Thousands of Nuclear Weapons Per Day 

These days everyone is aware of climate change and most people who still want to argue about it choose the man vs nature approach. Which is to say even the critics have agreed that earth is getting warmer, they just don’t agree on why. But if we all accept the earth is warming up, just how much energy is the earth absorbing to do such a thing?

Heat is energy, so the energy required to warm the entire planet is no small scale achievement. Scientists studying global temperature trends tried to put it in perspective in a fairly dramatic way. 

Between 2005 and 2019, scientists compared the earth’s energy imbalance. This compares the amount of energy we absorb versus how much we can radiate. The imbalance doubled in that time period and the amount of extra energy the earth is absorbing works out to four Hiroshima explosions occurring every single second. This is actually slightly better than the 2012 estimate by NASA climate scientists that said it was equivalent to 400,000 Hiroshima’s per day, but not by much. 

3. A 9.0 Earthquake Releases 90 Times the Power Produced by the US

Like any natural disaster, an earthquake packs a serious punch. The seismic power of an earthquake is typically related to use by use of the Richter scale, but saying an earthquake measures a four on that scale doesn’t really put much into perspective. Luckily, there are some equivalences we can make.

If an earthquake did register a 4.0 on the Richter scale, you’d consider it fairly mild, more or less. That said, it releases energy equivalent to 1 kiloton of TNT. Sounds like a lot, right? It works out to about 1162 mWh or the energy. If the average US household uses 10.715 kWh in a year, then a 4.0 earthquake could power 108 American homes for a year. But that’s just a moderate quake. Let’s go up the scale to a serious quake.

It’s rare that an earthquake measures 9.0 on the scale. That’s a serious quake and they only happen every few years, if not decades. Based on data from the US Geological Survey, they’ll release energy on par with exploding 32,000 megatons of TNT. That works out to 1,338,880,000,000 gigajoules. Convert that to MwH and you get 371,911,111,111.11. The US generates 4,095,487,406 MwH of electricity. So that 9.0 earthquake generated 90 times the power of the entire US annual power production capacity. 

2. The Meteor That Killed the Dinosaurs Was More Powerful Than The World’s Nuclear Arsenal 

Everyday we go about our business with the knowledge, somewhere in the back of our heads, that a meteor could hit the Earth and wipe us all out in a matter of moments. It’s not likely or anything, but it happened before, so it could certainly happen again one day. And that means a meteor must be a pretty powerful thing when it touches down. We can look at a recent one to figure out just how powerful they can be.

In 2013, a meteor lit up the Russian skies over the city of Chelyabinsk. The 11,000 ton rock flew through the air at 42,000 miles per hour, creating a shockwave that laid waste to 4,000 buildings. It released energy equivalent to 30 times the bomb that exploded at Hiroshima. Powerful stuff. But, as you may have noticed, the world didn’t end.

If we go back in time, the most famous meteor in history would be the one commonly attributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs. That one was clearly more powerful than Chelyabinsk, and the scale of that power was remarkable.

Research has estimated the power of that particular blast was equal to 10 billion of the bombs dropped during the Second World War. Enough to scorch life thousands of miles away and cover the earth in a cloud that wiped out 75% of all life. 

1. A Supernova Produces More Energy Than Anything You Could Imagine

Let’s leave the earth for a minute because, as powerful as nature is here, the universe at large shames our tiny blue dot. Let’s go into the vastness of the great beyond towards a star as it lashes out in its death throes. A supernova. 

As far as we know, this is the biggest explosion that can exist. And they can get big. So big that our efforts to try to make it sound understandable are still, frankly, ridiculous. But at least it will offer some kind of perspective.

The energy released during a supernova can be around 1044 joules. That one event will therefore release as much energy as the exploding star released during the previous 10 billion years of its existence. Imagine our sun burning as hot and bright as it does for 10 billion years. We already covered that every second it produces all the energy the earth could use in hundreds of thousands of years. All of that, for 10 billion years of time, released all over again during the supernova. 

That’s still very insane and very hard to grasp, so we can break it down further. One specific supernova was observed by scientists in 2015. Called ASSASN-15lh, the dying star was 580 billion times brighter than our own sun. It produced a blast that was a billion trillion times more powerful than the explosion of the tsar bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever tested. It was 30 times brighter than the entire Milky Way galaxy, itself home to 100 thousand million stars.