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Jade Small
Jade Small
December 28, 2023 ·  6 min read

Reddit ‘scientists’ share the scariest things humanity ‘doesn’t know’ about the world

What is the scariest thing you know? Well, according to this thread on Reddit, there are probably quite a few scary things you don’t know about. The thread calls for all to be revealed. So, are you ready for some creepy and frightening info from the “Reddit scientists?” Here are some we thought were particularly scary – don’t say you were not warned! Before we begin, let’s get something clear. Can we verify that these are real scientists? No, we can’t, but these are interesting nonetheless. Check them out…

Scary Stuff

The government protocol for disposing of nuclear waste is to pack it with kitty litter in barrels and bury it. If the wrong brand of litter is used it can cause massive environmental problems. This mistake has been made before.

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Oh, and…

During WW2 when America was working on the first nuclear bombs, they hadn’t finalised the maths on whether or not a nuclear explosion would cause an ongoing reaction with the atmosphere, thereby igniting it and eradicating earth.

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Apparently, smallpox could return, and the effects would not be pleasant

Smallpox is really easy to bring back and it’ll kill 1/5 of the planet when it happens. Takes some genocidal anger, knowledge tens of thousands have, and about $100K. Here’s all the ways it could happen:

1) US or Russian stocks leaked or used as bioweapon (we keep some intentionally, it’s very secure. This is unlikely IMHO).

2) Accidentally bumped into at an old lab, leaked during cleaning or something. Forgotten stocks still occasionally found. Leak spreading very unlikely IMHO.

3) Intentional release via re-creation. Someone resynthesizes it from scratch via public sequence according to this paper with about $100K in materials. Methods + difficulty identical to what is published here. It’s totally possible, almost simple to do:

Smallpox powder dropped in envelopes mailed around the world by a disgruntled underpaid PhD student (see Aurora Colorado shooter). Outbreak is out of hand before it’s noticed, billions die.


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And if that was not scary enough, someone replied to let us know that:

About that… In 1978 smallpox managed to escape from a lab in the UK and kill one person. The UK used to have stores of smallpox, it’s because of this incident the UK no longer has any (publicly known) stores of smallpox

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The end is near

Now, when you think about the end of the world, how do you imagine it would happen? Well, here is one possible way the apocalypse may occur…

There’s a solar event known as a CME, or a Coronal Mass Ejection, it occurs very frequently on a cosmic timescale, every few decades to centuries there’s a decent size one.

Why are they scary?

A CME is a massive burst of radiation, easily able to fully envelope the earth in its path, and it’s the equivalent of a non-stop EMP barrage. The last time a big one hit earth, was when we had telegraph lines for communications and they spontaneously caught fire.

In today’s world, with everything running on electricity, when the next big one hits we’ll have at most a few days warning, and it’d be a literal apocalypse movie scenario, with planes going down due to their whole electrical system frying, nobodies vehicle starting, untold billions in fire damage would wreak havoc everywhere, and the machines we depend on to help would be similarly fried.

Soooome stuff would be unaffected, being parked in deep, concrete roofed parking garages and the like, but our entire infrastructure would be useless for years, it’d literally send us into a mini dark age while people tried to get things working again, recovery would take decades to centuries.

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Read: Researchers Capture Rare Footage of Fish That Sees Through its Own Head

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If you are a tad overweight, here’s something to think about

I don’t know if I’d call it “science” persé or call myself a scientist LOL but I’m a former funeral director and one of the first things you learn in your actual funeral sciences classes is that people over a certain body fat percentage will start a literal grease fire in your crematory oven if you don’t bake them at the proper temp and duration. Cold start, low and slow is key.

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The Void

The Boötes void, sometimes called the Great Void, is a huge, spherical region of space that contains very few galaxies. It’s approximately 700 million light years from Earth and located near the constellation Boötes, which is how it got its name. The supervoid measures 250 million light-years in diameter, representing approximately 0.27% of the diameter of the observable universe, which itself is a daunting 93 billion light-years across. Its volume is estimated at 236,000 Mcp3 , making it the largest known void in the Universe.

At first, astronomers were only able to find eight galaxies across the expanse, but further observations revealed a total of 60 galaxies. Now, while that might still seem like a lot, it would be like stumbling upon ONLY 60 objects across a region larger than the continental United States (and that’s just in two dimensions). According to astronomer Greg Aldering, the scale of the void is such that, “If the Milky Way had been in the center of the Boötes void, we wouldn’t have known there were other galaxies until the 1960s.” Looking at the volume of the Boötes void, it should contain about 10,000 galaxies, when considering that the average distance between galaxies elsewhere in the universe is a few million light-years.

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The Void is real, but some people’s reasons for it are a little more questionable…

Why and how this void came to be. There hasn’t been enough time since the universe began for mere gravitational forces to clear out a space of that size. There’s a theory which suggests that supervoids are caused by the intermingling of smaller mini voids, like soapbubbles coming together.

But a more…maybe creepier…explanation is that the Boötes void could be the result of an expanding Kardashev III scale civilization. As the colonization bubble expands outward from its home system, the civilization dims each star (and subsequently each galaxy) it encounters by blanketing it in a Dyson shell. This might also explain why the void has such a nice, spherical shape.

Oh and we’re seeing a snapshot of The Void 700million years ago. A lot could have happened in 700 million years that we just cannot see/know due to the inherant speed of light.

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To end it off, how’s this for comforting?

In 1958, a 7600 lbs nuclear bomb was lost off the Georgia coast near Savannah. It’s never been found

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Grayscale Photo of Explosion on the Beach
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Well, it seems there really are some scary things that have happened. We certainly had no idea about these! What super scary or creepy things do you know about that most of the world doesn’t? Let us know in the comments!

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Attention: While many of these stories are interesting, and we would love to take their word for it, the content in this article was taken from an unverifiable source (i.e., a Reddit forum). As such, we cannot guarantee that these events truly happened in the way that they are described in the original source.

Editors Note (02/04/2022): We have added links to each of the statements made in this article to add more context to the claims.