Giraffes are 30 times more likely to get hit by lightning than people. True, there are only five well-documented fatal lightning strikes on giraffes between 1996 and 2010. However, due to the population of the species being just 140,000 during this time, it makes for about 0.003 lightning deaths per thousand giraffes each year. This is 30 times the equivalent fatality rate for humans.
100 Mind-Blowing Equivalent Facts
Lobsters taste with their feet. Tiny bristles inside a lobster’s little pincers are their equivalent to human taste buds. Meanwhile, lobsters’ teeth are in one of their three stomachs.
The first commercial aeroplane flight lasted 23 minutes. In 1914, Abram Pheil paid $400 (the current equivalent of $8,500) for a 23-minute plane ride. Pheil flew between St. Petersburg and Tampa, Florida, which was only 21 miles away from each other.
A U.K. woman has called 911 because of ice cream. The West Midlands police in England once released a recording of a woman who dialled 999 (the U.K. equivalent of 911) because her ice cream didn’t have enough sprinkles.
Adding all the numbers on a roulette wheel will be equivalent to 666. Hence the 666 strategy. Other people believe that this is proof that gambling is inherently evil.
The Earth holds about 11 quintillion pounds of air. The force that gravity holds in place is equivalent to a pressure of 15 psi. There are a total of 5 regions in our atmosphere.
The paint on the Eiffel Tower is equivalent to ten elephants. The tower is re-painted every 7 years. There are also over 30 replicas of this tower all around the world.
You can fit about 400 grapevines in one acre of land. This is equivalent to almost 5 tons of grapes in total. That’s a lot of wine.
The Arizona capitol building roof holds around 5 million pennies. The amount of copper on this rooftop found in Pheonix is equivalent to around 4,800,000 pennies. This is around 50,000 dollars.
The most common cause of death among babies is Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Each year, over 7000 babies are lost to this phenomenon in the U.S. These equivalent to almost 1 baby dying each hour.
Fleas can jump 200 times its height. The fleas are claimed to be the best jumpers in the world due to their size and the lengths they can jump. The height of a flea jump is equivalent to a human being jumping to the top of the Empire State Building from the ground.
A cotton shirt takes 700 gallons of water to make. That is enough water for one person to stay hydrated for 900 days. Meanwhile, the amount of water needed to create a pair of jeans is equivalent to hosing your lawn for 9 hours straight.
In the average lifetime, a person will walk the equivalent of 5 times around the equator.
Vast amounts of water have been found in space. Earth’s oceans may not be that unique. Three of Jupiter’s moons (Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto) and two of Saturn’s (Enceladus (pictured above) and Titan) are thought to have underwater seas. Europa’s ocean may contain over twice the volume of water found on Earth. However, the most water ever discovered surrounds a black hole some 12 billion lightyears away. This region contains vast amounts of water vapour, the equivalent of 140 trillion times the volume of water in Earth’s oceans. There is more water in space than you might think.
Venus spins backwards. Venus spins in the opposite direction to the rest of the planets in our Solar System. This is a puzzle that requires solving if we are to understand more about the formation and evolution of our Solar System. Could it be that, in the early days of the Solar System, Venus was hit by another object, sending it spinning in the opposite direction? The truth is, there is no confirmed theory as to why Venus spins backwards relative to the other planets. But that’s not the only strange thing about Venus’s orbit. The planet also rotates slowly, with the Venusian day equivalent to 243 Earth days, and longer than the Venusian year of 225 Earth days.
The longest veil in history worn at a wedding was in 2018. A woman from Cyrpus wore a veil that was 22,843 feet long or the equivalent of 63.5 football fields.
The average person walks the equivalent of three times around the world in a lifetime.
A flea can jump 350 times its body length, the equivalent of a human jumping the length of a football field.
The man who invented pop-up advertisements deeply regrets it and says he’s very sorry. In 1997 Ethan Zuckerman wrote the code for the first pop-up and added it to a website. This, he believes, was the Internet’s equivalent of the original sin. While he understands that many websites and services on the Internet wouldn’t function without getting funding from advertisements, he believes that it’s high time to find an alternative that doesn’t involve an invasion of our privacy.
At an average of 15 breaths per minute, we take about 400 million breaths during a lifetime. This is equivalent to about 53 million gallons of air.
Combining all the bitcoin mining operations worldwide is equivalent to the computing power of 3.7 million supercomputers.
Since the launch of the popular mobile game, Candy Crush, in 2012, players have spent a total of 73 billion hours (equivalent to 8.3 million years) playing this game.
A Petabyte is a lot of data. We all know 1 GB is the same as 1024 MB, but did you know that 1 petabyte (PB) is equivalent to 1024 terabytes (TB)? To give an example of how big this is, a 1 PB hard drive could hold 13.3 years of HD-TV video. A 50 PB hard drive could hold the entire written works of mankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages.
“Android” is gender-specific. The word “Android” literally means a human with a male robot appearance. The female equivalent of this word is a “Gynoid.”
Millions of hours of TV and movies are watched every day on Netflix. Of course, Netflix is a massively popular company, so it’s not that big of a surprise. The world spends about 164 million hours every day streaming Netflix, which is equivalent to 18,812 years’ worth of TV and movies every 24 hours. Now my binge-watching habits don’t seem so bad!
But Sosigenes made a bit of a miscalculation, so the calendar continued to be a little off. He thought a year lasted 365.25 days. It’s around 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds, equivalent to about 365.242 days. This tiny error had some pretty big consequences: By 1577, the Julian calendar was off by 10 days, meaning key Christian holidays were being celebrated on incorrect dates. Pope Gregory XIII took issue with this and established a commission to get the calendar back on track. In 1582, the Gregorian calendar was created. Rather than having an extra day every four years without exception, years that are divisible by 100—like 1700 or 1900—skip leap year. Unless the year is also divisible by 400, like the year 2000, in which case the Leap Year is back on! Even this system isn’t perfect, though: It has an error of one day in 3236 years.
The total number of videos uploaded in 2010 is equivalent to 150,000+ full-length movies in theatres every week.