If Wayne Gretzky never scored a single goal, he would still be the NHL’s all time point leader.

The percentage of the Chinese population living in extreme poverty (living below 1.90$ a day) went from over 80% in the early 80's to 1.4% in 2014. In fact, it was still 23.1% just 10 years before that, in 2004. It's the most massive lift out of extreme poverty in world history.

One million seconds is less than 11 days. One billion seconds is more than 31 years.

Only 2 percent of people truly enjoy their jobs. The rest are in it to eat. So the next time you hear some a*****e on TEDTalk tell you to follow your dreams and your passions, remember that he is probably part of that very small percentage of people who have that luxury to fail.

95% of the ocean and 99% of the oceans floor remains unexplored

During the battle of the Somme in WW1, the British Army lost 20,000 men...on the first day. Whole generations and towns were wiped out in the space of hours

Someone in the world [passes away] of starvation or malnutrition every three seconds.

The first cities started around 12,000 years ago. The first evidence of writing started 6,000 years ago. Humanity appeared 200,000 years ago in its current form. So 94% of the time we've been on the planet happened before we had cities, and 97% before we had writing.

There is a fence in Australia that stretches the equivalent distance of London to New York.

90% of people live in the northern hemisphere

4/3 of Americans don't know fractions.

40% of Americans cannot afford a $400 USD emergency.

So far, 46 people have [passed away] by lawn mowers in the U.S. this year. 46.

If the earth was the size of a basketball then the atmosphere would be about as thick as a coat of paint. The only thing that separates us from the cold, harsh, vacuum of space is this comparably tiny layer of gasses that are held in place by gravity. Another interesting one is that the only thing preventing the Earth from becoming a barren rock not unlike Mars is the fact we still have a molten core that generates a magnetic field that shields the atmosphere from being swept away by the solar wind. When the core eventually stops spinning it's game over.

Late to the party, but: Feral cats in Australia [take out] around 377 million birds per year. That's more than one million birds per day. One million. Per day.

There are more possible combinations to shuffle a deck of cards than there are atoms on earth... and if you started shuffling a new combination every second starting at the big bang, you'd still be shuffling right now...

I've posted this before on a similar thread, but.. Had an Economics Professor blow my mind with this. Most people think of millions, billions and trillions relatively similarly. They are huge numbers and when talking about money not very many people really ever have to account with numbers that high to see the incredible difference between each. I think this does a great job of breaking it down. If you made **$1/second**, you'd be really really rich. At that rate, you would make: **$60** in 1 minute **$3600** in 1 hour **$86,400** in 1 day **$1 Million ($1,000,000)** in 11.574 days **$1 Billion ($1,000,000,000)** in 31.7 years **$1 Trillion ($1,000,000,000,000)** in 31,709 years For one person who makes a Million dollars every 12 days to pay off the US National Debt (21.461 Trillion according to www.usdebtclock.org), it would take over **680,506 years.**

It takes an individual photon several millenia to go from the center to the surface of the sun. Then it takes only 8 minutes to reach Earth, and a couple days at most to leave the solar system.

In the US if you do the following 3 things: 1. Graduate High School 2. Get and keep *any* job 3. Don't have a child out of wedlock You have a 75% chance of being in the middle class and a *98%* chance of living above the poverty line. https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/three-simple-rules-poor-teens-should-follow-to-join-the-middle-class/

More [lives are taken away] by vending machines than by sharks.

F1 drivers lose around 5kg of weight every race.

In the year 8000 B.C. there were 5 million humans on Earth.

More infuriating than mind-blowing, but a commonly shared “statistic” is that 80% of women who make at least 6 figures do so through direct sales marketing, aka, MLMs or pyramid schemes, like Mary Kay, Amway, and Herbalife. The *actual* statistic is that 80% of *people* who make at least 6 figures *through MLMs* are women. There’s only about 200 of them, and they’re all at the top of their respective pyramids, but the first statistic is commonly used to try and entice new people into the company.

The Vatican has 2.3 popes per square mile.

1 in 4 people in the UK suffer from a mental health issue.

1/4 children in the United States are overweight

In the field of psychology, women outnumber men 2:1. Not mind-blowing, but kinda interesting

The [take out] radius of a neutron star quake. Keep in mind that the richter scale is log based and a neutron star quake has been recorded as high as an equivalent 34 and would cause mass extinction to a radius of 10 light years. The distance from the earth to the sun is one AU. The distance from earth to pluto is about 40 AU. Earth to the farthest object in our solar system (the edges of the oort cloud at 120,000 AU) is roughly 1.87 lightyears. A neutron star quake would exterminate all life in all directions a little over 5 times the entire distance of our solar system. This all from a neutron star’s surface adjusting by a few micrometers in less than .000001 of a second. The earthquake that leveled San Fran and [took away] thousands of people in the early 20th century was a 7.4. Cool, now imagine a quake with destructive energy about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stronger.

CPR is only effective 5-8% of the time without immediate defibrillation. So if your heart stops and there isn't an AED within about 3-5 mins of you you're probably going to [pass away].

There are more State Farm agencies than McDonalds in the US. Learned that when I started working for them.