This post is basically a tribute to the sometimes undeservedly underrated branch of science known as statistics, which is all about collecting, analyzing, presenting, and interpreting data. From governmental census data to financial data and planning, business, sports and weather forecasting and much more, statistics is used in virtually every aspect of our lives.
It keeps us informed and in touch with current events by giving a unique perspective on facts and their relation with each other.
So in order to show us all how it was not worth it to skip stats class back in high school, we are diving into some of the most interesting threads on Reddit where people shared the most intriguing, random and mind-blowing statistics. Get yourself a cuppa and enjoy this entertaining bunch of random data below!
#1
One million seconds is less than 11 days.One billion seconds is more than 31 years.
Image credits: clumaho
#2
90% of people live in the northern hemisphere
Image credits: username-alrdy-takn
#3
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.
Image credits: Mustard_Sauc
#4
So far, 46 people have [passed away] by lawn mowers in the U.S. this year. 46.
Image credits: Corrupt_Files
#5
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.
Image credits: MarsNirgal
#6
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
Image credits: anon
#7
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.
Image credits: MarsNirgal
#8
95% of the ocean and 99% of the oceans floor remains unexplored
Image credits: vogdswagon26
#9
Astronomer here! One that has blown my mind is statistically it is now believed that every star has extrasolar planets around it. It turns out every one near us does, at least. At the very worst case, Kepler has shown that 70% of all stars have a planet orbiting its parent star at Earth's distance or closer.Further, per the Kepler mission data it is now believed 17% of all stars have an Earth-sized planet around it.
I mean, we knew there were a lot, but this means there's at least a trillion planets in our own Milky Way galaxy. The thought makes me giddy!
#10
Someone in the world [passes away] of starvation or malnutrition every three seconds.
Image credits: GenJonesMom
#11
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 https://bit.ly/3ylohYK), it would take over **680,506 years.**
Image credits: southernmayd
#12
In the year 8000 B.C. there were 5 million humans on Earth.
Image credits: bukanir
#13
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.
Image credits: winowmak3r
#14
There is a fence in Australia that stretches the equivalent distance of London to New York.
Image credits: zangor
#15
90%+ of congress members are multi-millionaires#16
F1 drivers lose around 5kg of weight every race.
Image credits: auditore01
#17
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.
Image credits: lostdrunkpuppy
#18
80% of Soviet males born in 1923 didn’t survive WWII.#19
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.
Image credits: anon
#20
More [lives are taken away] by vending machines than by sharks.
Image credits: ObscureKitten
#21
The Vatican has 2.3 popes per square mile.
Image credits: Sasquatch430
#22
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...
Image credits: anon
#23
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://brook.gs/3bwlTFq
Image credits: probablynotdrunk
#24
20% OR MORE of pregnancies end in miscarriage. 20% is just "known pregnancies" and doesn't take into account all the women who just think "oh, my period was a day late, weird" without realizing they've actually had a very early miscarriage.That is stunningly high compared to what we've been led to believe. If you think of all the women you know who either have or have tried to have children, there's an excellent chance that several of them have had a miscarriage before.
When you realize exactly how common it is, it makes it that much more sad that it is so stigmatized. If we talked about it more, maybe it wouldn't catch so many people off guard.
#25
8% of people pronounce Wi-Fi as wiffy...8%. I don't know who you are, but I will find you...#26
1/4 children in the United States are overweight
Image credits: noir6o
#27
The bible is the most shoplifted book in history.#28
6.5 out of 10 black kids grow up in a single parent home. For you non stats people, you can read that as 13 out of 20 kids.This stat only applies to US.
#29
Around half of all trans people attempt suicide at least onceAlso something like 1/3 of women with mental disabilities are sexually assaulted
Edit: so about the trans statistic this does not imply that being trans is a mental illness!! The shocking part is how awful and widespread transphobia is, and it’s consequences.
#30
The distance from the bottom of the Marinara Trench to the top of Mt. Everest is only 12.31 miles.#31
Klay Thompson scored 60 points in an NBA game while only dribbling the basketball 11 times.. Or Wilt Chamberlin averaging 48.5 minutes per game for an ENTIRE NBA season.. NBA games are only 48 minutes long. That means he had to play every minute of every game plus whatever games went into overtime. Bamboozling.#32
Ants have a larger biomass than humans.#33
The leading cause of death among pregnant women in the United States is being murdered, and most often by a current or former romantic partner.https://wb.md/3uqqS1p
#34
92% of Downs Syndrome foetus' are aborted once detected by screening (in Europe).#35
If you picked a random Swede and a random Canadian, the Swede would be more likely to speak English than the Canadian.#36
Among a random group of 23 people, theres a 50% chance two of them share the same birthday#37
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.
Image credits: S-S-Stumbles
#38
1 in 4 people in the UK suffer from a mental health issue.
Image credits: thevegandad
#39
The average number of legs, for humans, is less than 2.#40
Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than to the building of the great pyramids.#41
If Wayne Gretzky never scored a single goal, he would still be the NHL’s all time point leader.
Image credits: pKappKa
#42
The battle of Stalingrad alone claimed significantly more lives than all the US servicemen killed in our nation's entire history.#43
There are more State Farm agencies than McDonalds in the US. Learned that when I started working for them.
Image credits: BraigRamadan
#44
In the field of psychology, women outnumber men 2:1. Not mind-blowing, but kinda interesting
Image credits: EquestrianShadow
#45
There are more prisons than colleges in the US.#46
The Earths mass is only made up by 0.006% water.#47
California's water distribution system loses 228 billion gallons annually, enough water to supply Los Angeles for a year. The state is experiencing severe drought.#48
[Support for interracial marriage became the majority shortly after **1995.**](https://bit.ly/3NkIX7l)[Among Republicans, 28% still oppose interracial marriage as of March 2018 (pg 92), the worst demographic for this statistic by a margin of 8%](https://bit.ly/3NfW8Xm)
Overall, 17% still oppose interracial marriage.
Likewise, 68% of Republicans oppose gay relationships (not marriage); the second worst demographic being people over the age of 65, at 55%.
Overall, 43% of americans still oppose same-sex relationships.
#49
In 1988, 8 of the 10 largest companies (by market cap) were Japanese and the largest company in Japan was bigger than the 6 biggest US companies combined.#50
99% of the wild African grey parrot population had disappeared since 1992. Solely due to the illegal trapping for the pet trade.Indian and nepalese vulture populations have declined by 99% since 2000 due to diclofenac poisoning.
#51
Guns save more lives than they take, and the United States doesn’t have the highest *rate* of mass shootings... Norway does.#52
That sharks have been on this earth for some 450 million years. 450 Million Fucking Years!#53
"The wars in [the Democratic Republic of Congo] have claimed nearly the same number of lives as having a 9/11 every single day for 360 days, the genocide that struck Rwanda in 1994, the ethnic cleansing that overwhelmed Bosnia in the mid-1990s, the genocide that took place in Darfur, the number of people killed in the great tsunami that struck Asia in 2004, and the number of people who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- all combined and then doubled."https://cnn.it/3NuF9AQ
#54
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].
Image credits: l337m3d1c
#55
40% of Americans cannot afford a $400 USD emergency.
Image credits: anon
#56
If the oldest living person is 115 years old, then 116 years ago there was a totally different set of humans on earth.#57
15% of Google searches every day have never been searched before, this has trended the last 15 years source#58
The population of the world has doubled since the mid 70's.#59
Half of the people in human history who lived to age 65 are alive today.#60
You have a better chance at winning the Powerball jackpot than dying of a shark attack.#61
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.
Image credits: FencingFemmeFatale
#62
Only one in five Italians have a college degree.#63
4/3 of americans don't know fractions.
Image credits: cronedog
#64
The existence of the T-Rex is closer in time to today than it is to the existence of the Stegosaurus.#65
90% of Native Americans were wiped out due to diesease#66
8% of Mongolians are direct descendants of Genghis Khan.Worldwide, .5% of the population, or 1 in 200, are direct descendants.
Edited: My mistake, 0.5% not .05%.
#67
Over 800 people die from being strangled by their bedsheets.#68
All the planets in the solar system could fit between earth and the moon.#69
The average person in canada has a higher net worth than the average person in the USA. The median income for canadians is about twice the median income for americans.#70
I go to one of the top universities in the US, and I recently found out that 45% of our student population is in the top 5%, wealth-wise. I most definitely am not, and it made a lot of sense but was incredibly disheartening at the same time.#71
"Stanley and Brodsky estimated that as many as 75% of patients with borderline personality disorder make at least one nonlethal suicide attempt, and even higher percentages of patients, especially of hospitalized patients, engage in self-injurious behavior."#72
Statistically, the biggest beneficiary of Affirmative Action college admissions policies have been White women, not minorities, because gender discrimination is included in the policy.#73
If the whole of existence since the Big Bang were collapsed into [one year](https://bit.ly/3u3kKeZ), modern humans developed at 8 minutes to midnight and Columbus landed in the New World 1.2 seconds before midnight. Kind of puts it all in perspective.#74
It takes more energy to brute force a bitcoin private key using a perfectly efficient system, than exists in the universe.#75
Since 1874, there have been 10 recorded [shark attacks in Canada.](https://bit.ly/3niWkdQ)#76
465 acid attacks in London in 2017https://cnn.it/39VeDCQ
#77
That Scott Steiner had a 66 and 2/3rds chance at beating Samoa Joe and Kurt angle at TNA Sacrifice.#78
Only 35% of people in the UK know what to do to save an unconscious person's life.Source: St John's Ambulance in the UK
#79
The Willis Tower in Chicago has 104 elevators.#80
African-American males make up ~6% of the population in the US yet commit ~50% of the homicides. We are completely unwilling to address uncomfortable facts honestly. Racism exists but is insufficient to explain the troubling statistics in the black community. Blaming all the issues facing African-Americans on racism and oppression is counterproductive and will lead to more needless black deaths.https://bit.ly/3NiZhFL
https://bit.ly/3yhMSxF
#81
Greater Tokyo has a larger population than Canada.from Bored Panda https://bit.ly/3u26tzt
via Boredpanda
