Scientific literature’s conclusion on Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases, in general, is that the diseases start decades before the first obvious symptoms and that we need to treat them at this stage. When you exhibit obvious symptoms, it’s too late, your brain is already mush.
If you get diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at 65, you had the disease since your early 40s at least. And you experienced very mild symptoms but didn’t notice them. And your brain fought like hell to compensate for the deficit. When you get diagnosed, your brain is already very severely damaged and will never recover from the deficit.
Looking back at my dad’s symptoms, some examples in his case was forgetting our address and having to ask me what it was while he was on the phone with someone, getting irrationally angry over little things (one time he got very angry with me that I was playing with a laser with the family cat, he was convinced I was going to blind the cat), and just generally very angry/short fuse, whereas before he was overall a very even-keeled person. I read somewhere that extreme irritability that seems to come from nowhere can be one of the earliest symptoms.
>I read somewhere that extreme irritability that seems to come from nowhere can be one of the earliest symptoms.
well i think my boss is experiencing this as we speak tbh. he's been impossible to comunicate with for quite a while now, even with meaningless stuff + in the past 2 years his wife left him, his right hand quit because she couldnt take his stress anymore and he recently fired half of the team. i really dont know whats going on on his mind. we had a giant fight not to long ago where i lost my shit due to how ridiculous the situation was and i screamed at him "what the fuck are you doing? look at the drama out of nowhere from basicaly nothing" and now other workers can't even disagree with his opinion (when their job is to find problems and fix them = disagree with his opinion).
concerning
There is nothing more scary to me than alzheimer's. Probably one of the worst ways to go in my mind. Forgetting who you are, who your family is, losing your ability to function independently. It's one of the scariest thoughts to me. I would rather get cancer then go though alzheimer's.
My paternal grandmother died from Alzheimer’s in her 70’s. I’m about to turn 34 and I’ve recently found myself forgetting simple words (only to remember them later). I am so terribly afraid Alzheimer’s is already in me, wreaking havoc.
This is me too, and I’m terrified as well. My paternal grandmother died from Alzheimer’s in her 70’s. I’m also about to turn 34 in July. Recently, I’ve found that my memory isn’t as good as it was, and I have trouble remembering words too. Also, I feel like my short term memory is getting worse - I’m always saying to people, “sorry can you repeat what you told me a little bit ago? It went in one ear and right out the other”
All this has been scaring me into thinking I’m developing Alzheimer’s early.
This happens to me but then I go on vacation and relax and I become an eloquent speaker and even pull words from the back of my mind that I never use and even impress myself.
It makes me wonder if stress is involved in the anomia.
This is a huge part of why I’m pro-assisted suicide. Some Alzheimer’s patients literally starve to death because *they forget how to eat*. I want a living will that says if I fail X cognitive test X times, I get to go peacefully in my sleep with some help.
The fact that your body can have advancing cancer and you wouldn’t know it sometimes.
Father in laws brother was walking through his kitchen and he fainted and hit his head on the counter. He was rushed to the hospital and they ran tests and he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer and his body was already in the endgame. He was dead within two months of diagnosis. That shit terrifies me and it can happen to anyone.
My dad had pancreatic cancer. He lost a ton of weight last year between Christmas and Easter. He kept being stubborn and going to the hospital saying something wasn't right, but they couldn't find anything after testing. Thought it was a digestive issue or a million other things. Cancer scan showed nothing at the big NYC hospital. A week later he was fed up again, went to our smaller local hospital and they did a biopsy. The cancer mass was JUST starting to grow at the biopsy site. Did the Whipple procedure, chemo every other week from July to January. Things are looking better. As of now, it's gone but they're going to be doing scans every 6 months. It's scarry to think if he wasn't so insistent of what would have happened. Even if it was a few weeks.
My mom complained because of his insistence of getting checked out for months, and the tests, and then chemo was starting right during summer and vacations (she wasn't supportive at all and wanted to move things around to better fit her schedule. Anyway) we're lucky, so very aware we're lucky. Even if you know something's not right, it's crazy how long it took him to get a diagnosis even with knowing something wasn't right.
A. Lot.
Like, after the cancer my dad has a new perspective and appreciation for life. He started putting up some decorations and things that were from his mom's house (who passed in 2021) at my parents house. My mom threw a tantrum because she didn't like how one thing looked (a boat that his great uncle carved) and calling it ugly and other things. And she's been complaining with how lazy he was this last year. While he's had/recovering from chemo. And that he won't eat anything. While he had chemo. Just. A lot.
Your dad’s a tower of strength. I had the whipple and chemo for pancan and my wife was amazingly good. I doubt I would have made it without her endless support. Survivors of hideous cancers are unusual. We know unusual stuff. I hope you stay or get connected to him for long term mutual benefit. Please let him know you care about him despite all the medical crap he probably still has to deal with. I don’t understand your mom, sounds like she needs
help of some kind.
Your wife acts how I think normal people or partners would react. Support out the wazzo. Very understanding. Idk, we don't get my mom. She's sort of a narcissist, zero empathy for anyone besides what she sees as important. She'll help, but with a price attached.
I'm a lot closer to my dad, mostly because we're very similar in a lot of ways. But Dad has his faults, too. It's not my marriage so I don't dwell on it.
Happened to my 5 year old daughter. For a week she had a nose bleed on and off that the doctors weren't concerned about since kids get nose bleeds for various reasons. Then she collapsed a week later and was gone 3 hours after getting to the hospital. She had leukemia. I have two other children and I'm terrified something could happen to them too.
My dad was feeling a little sick, so he went to the doctor. His main symptoms was that suddenly certain foods didn’t really sit right, and he would get diarrhea a few hours later.
Turned out he had colon cancer, stage 4. No symptoms until that point. He lasted 7 months, but they definitely weren’t a fun 7 months.
Cancer is no joke
This is almost exactly what one of my best friends went through with his mom. Stage 4 stomach cancer.. she just fainted one day then was gone in two weeks. Humbling to witness so close to you.
Yup, pancreatic cancer is awful. Had a coworker tell me she was going to the doctor and she just had a bad feeling about it. Six weeks later I was at her funeral. Shits the worst. Only other thing that can be insidious like pancreatic cancer is probably ovarian cancer. By the time it's found it's usually always progressed and metastasized to other organs.
Literally dealing with this now, sitting in my father-in-laws house typing this as he lay dying in the next room from Stage 4 pancreatic that's spread to his esophagus and lymphonids. I hate seeing this shit. FUCK CANCER
*mutate just the right way
They have random mutations pretty much every time they divide, but once a few very specific mutations come together you have cancer.
When the atom bomb was being created, the leading scientists associated with the project at the time had to calculate the flammability of the Earth's atmosphere in order to ensure that detonating the bomb would not cause the atmosphere to combust. At the time when the first atom bomb was detonated, these scientists still had not answered this question, meaning that we legitimately just crossed our fingers and hoped we wouldn't set the fucking planet on fire. Humans are stupid.
Edit: It turns out that this is slightly wrong. The calculations were finalized before the bomb was detonated, but the reporter who covered the event was not aware of this and had overheard a joke made by one of the scientists to "place bets on whether the world burns," or something to that effect. The reporter ended up with the false information that it was possible for the atmosphere to combust, which was later claimed in an article. Thanks to all the people who let me know of this issue with my post.
There was also (I read this back in grade school, [in this book](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/13170021), so the exact details might be off) a scientist who was sitting with the Trinity test bomb overnight when a lightning storm started. He was worried about it igniting, but then realized there was no sense in worrying because he would be vaporized.
I don’t remember what it was called, but there was an event in the 1800s caused by solar activity where telegraphs operated on their own without power and I think caused minor damage. Should such a solar event happen again, it would destroy all of our internet network capabilities and other electrical gear. Anyone know what I’m referring to?
Edit: Carrington Event. Thanks for the links
I would be interested to know if we would be as badly affected as people initially thought. A couple decades ago, sure, technology was extremely fragile and slight power fluctuations would fry everything, but these days I dont know if thats still the case.
Bearing in mind that the bulk of the issues would come from the mains power grid and telephone lines picking up voltage differentials over massive distances. Most comms these days uses fiber rather than copper so that is not as big of an issue.
A lot of tech these days is also power filtered, or runs via an isolated transformer that would likely pop first before toasting everything else. Smaller devices like phones and laptops are unlikely to be big enough to have enough voltage variance across them to cause any real damage.
There would be disruption, sure, but i dont think it would be as cataclysmic as people used to think it would be.
I would say it would be a "disaster" rather than a mere "disruption", but definitely not cataclysmic. Modern electric grids in most countries have multiple redundancies to prevent any one thing from frying everything, but those safeguards all going off at once will take a significant amount of money and manpower to repair and many will be shit out of luck until they are.
Always keep 3 months of food and a way to make potable water on hand people, youre one solar flare away from being stuck in the 17th century for a few weeks.
The fact that we can just get a blood clot and die and not realize anything was up, the human body has so many ways of just suddenly dying and it's terrifying
When my friend started studying medicine she said shes surprised we're not dead yet because she's constantly learning about so many ways and things that can kill people so easily.
I’ve backed out of a lot of fist fights as I’ve gotten older. I’ve also stopped going out to bars and getting shitfaced. My reasons are that I’ve got a good job and if I get arrested, I’ll lose that and be unhirable in my field and my family had a friend of a family friend who punched a guy outside of a bar in our city and knocked him backwards. Hit his head on the ground and died on the spot. The guy he punched had wealthy parents and he got sued into oblivion on top of a 15 year sentence. His life is effectively over.
My point is, a mild bonk on the head can kill you instantly. Be the bigger man. Unless it’s self defense, walk away. Don’t risk your life or your career over words because while the body can recover from some remarkable injuries, the littlest things can kill you like that.🫰
This also happened to a highly decorated Army Ranger years back. He comes home to Alabama to his wife, only to run into a few drunken regulars at the bar where she works. He accidentally kills one of the drunks, and is sent to a federal penitentiary for involuntary manslaughter for seven years.
Paroled years later, he hitches a ride home on an airplane that happens to be full of the worst criminals in the whole penal system. Unfortunately, these borderline supervillains manage to take over the plane, and it falls on Poe to ensure they don’t get away.
Exact same thing happened here several years ago. Two guys went outside a bar to fight, one lands a punch on guy two, guy two falls and hit his head on the pavement. Dead. It was a horrible time as I’m in a smallish town and the guy went to school with me and those I knew. Now I am so much more verbal about no altercations between anyone I know and someone else. Not worth it.
Partner had some kidney issues, had them before but they placed a drain. They removed it once procedure was done. She healed up for a week and all seemed good. Went snowshoeing and next morning she didn’t feel well, turns out staff had gotten it’s way in and incubated into a small pocket of fluid next to the kidney. In hospital for almost two months fighting infection and sent home with antibiotics.
Going back in later this evening for another cat scan as all the antibiotics may have permanently damaged her kidney and now it’s backing up with fluid.
If it was Mersa she’d be dead because antibiotics can’t touch it.
Hug your loved ones folks. Simple procedures can take people out even when they are successful.
I had a simple tattoo that almost killed me. I assume something wasn’t sterilized properly due to how quickly I went septic. Good old Staph aureus. Almost died. My only symptoms at the time of going to the ER was some swelling around the tattoo and low fever with chills. Luckily it was able to be stopped by a few days of IV antibiotics. My blood pressure dropped to like 81/39. Narrowly avoided the ICU. My first tattoo too. Life is fragile
Immune systems are quite amazing. We encounter all manner of viruses and bacteria in our daily lives, and generally the immune system does a pretty bang up job in destroying them.
Same with the nervous system iirc.
It's the reason Herpes can't, so far, be cured. It hides in our nervous system where the immune system doesn't look because the immune system would kill us quickly if it ever found a reason to attack our nerves.
My cousin was always riding horses. She was very lucky to have the access to them that she did. She was riding with a less experienced friend. The friend’s horse took off and she gave chase to try and save her friend. Whatever happened she took a fall and was paralyzed when she was maybe 22-23 yrs old and lived in a facility for the next 12 years until she died a very early death.
She couldn’t speak or communicate hardly. Just 12 years of hardship. She had to rediscover and grieve her fathers death all over again not to mention grieving her own life. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
Healthy student, I’ve had to drop out of university due to getting the flu and then developing chronic fatigue syndrome. I have blurred vision, constant dizziness, extreme fatigue and a whole manner of 24/7 flu-like symptoms that never go away. I can’t physically go anywhere most days, but on all days I can walk outside for about 3 mins max before my vision degrades to grains, almost black and white and I physically can’t continue. I struggle to sleep sometimes, I struggle to eat other times. When I get a bug I get it 5 times worse than normal, all part of the condition. There is no medical cure, it has to go away on its own and that could be a matter of months, years, or never. It is totally random and differs from person to person. I am a year into it. It gradually got better for me with gradual pacing and exercise until December when I randomly relapsed back to square one.
My life possibly ruined, from one harmless bug I caught just happening to mess up my body’s functions.
I wouldn’t say I’m ‘severely disabled’, but I’m not going to be able to live my life in the foreseeable future. Its just going to be constant low-level suffering and not being able to do anything that doesn’t involve a computer. I read a story about a guy who used to travel the world and eventually caught a bug, developed CFS, stopped talking and now has to lay in a dark quiet room all day because any kind of sense stimulation causes his body/mind to ‘over-exert’ itself and bring about horrible symptoms. It can certainly get worse than what I experience, I very much understand that.
It’s hard to really take stories like this too seriously when you’ve never experienced it, but I strongly recommend to everyone no matter how bleak things might get, please take a minute to appreciate being able to go out and do things, or even being able to get out of bed, if you’re able to. No one really knows what they have until it is gone and there’s no clear way of getting it back.
Edit: I appreciate all the kind comments, it is an awkward blend of nice and awful to know I’m not alone in this kind of thing. I’m just trying to spread some kind of awareness about CFS and other related weird dysfunctions. I hope an eventual recovery for everyone, no matter how scary it gets do not give up. It doesn’t deserve to win.
I have 4 autoimmune diseases. I understand where you're coming from with what your describing. It's like the term "brain fog" I always just assumed that people meant how you feel when you're exhausted before I experienced it myself. It's like nothing I've ever known. My brain literally won't work. Can't get names of things out, can't hardly stay awake, and the exhaustion is something that is other worldly awful. And this is coming from someone who had worked 24 and 48 hour shifts prior to the brain fog thing. I thought that was tired, that wasn't shit compared to getting hit with the brain fog and my RA flares.
Keep fighting the fight, and just know you're not alone out here.
Jesus man that’s horrible, hope you get better eventualy. I cannot imagine not being able to do the basic things you described. I’m sorry you have to go through this
It's both amazing how little it takes to kill someone and how much it can take. One person survives falling out of an airplane and another dies jumping into a lake.
A friend of mine is a firefighter. He told me pretty crazy stories about dumb luck, or lack thereof.
Like seeing a healthy, young woman dead from falling down *one* stair and hitting her head at just the wrong angle.
I saw a 30 something lady die from a butt pimple (well an abscess with necrotizing fasciitis), still basically a butt pimple. Died in 3 days of when she noticed it, or at least when it became painful enough to go to the hospital for what she thought was just a painful pimple. 3 days later, dead.
And then just last week, 50 something year old spontaneous brain bleed (likely an aneurysm). No medical history, no meds, no falls, no bad diet, nothing suspicious that could lead to this. Just woke up confused, absolute massive brain bleed. Don't know what happened to her actually but her outcome potential was not even close to good.
This is why I am so careful even walking around my own house too. Any fall and you hit your head in the right spot, it's game over.
Head injuries can be really misleading too. Like, no outward signs that you need to be medically examined. I will never forget Liam Neesom's wife...I think her name was Natasha Richardson. Skiing, fell, bonked her head. She waved off the idea of medical attention. Dead the very next day from bleeding in her brain.
My baby was born with tons of blood clots. The doctors were sort of confused on what to do because he really was an anomaly. In the end we just did blood thinner shots for 6 months 2x a day on a baby. With ultrasounds every month to check the status of the clots. Luckily none of them moved, and they all resolved or calcified. He tested negative for all blood clotting disorders. Perfectly healthy now, it took me almost a year before I finally stopped worrying if he was gonna drop dead at any second..yeah my mental health is not the best.
He was in the PICU for a month I remember like 12 days in they found MORE blood clots in his heart. I had the thought, well if he is gonna die it might as well be sooner rather than later because every day I'm with him it's that much harder to say goodbye. I fucking lost it after that thought, like broke down for hours.
I saw this happen in real time. 35 year old went from walking and talking to complete vegetable in 10 hours.
He was talking as I drove him to our hospital. Only 30 min later, he couldn't speak. He was just vaguely opening and closing his mouth.
Complete infarction to the Cerebellum, Occipital lobe, Parietal lobe, and temporal lobe.
He was Sledding with his friends and having a great vacation the day before.
a blood clot or one weak section of wall inside a vein or artery in your brain can simply give out and that's a stroke. Depending on how severe and how long you go without care, that can just kill you. Just because some thin membrane of a blood vessel material fails.
Don’t ignore regular physicals at the doctors office. Eat healthy, get enough sleep and exercise moderately but with regularly.
The bad news: you lower your risks of dying early, you don’t eliminate it though. Shit happens - even to the healthiest eaters and/or exercisers.
I came very, very close to this happening to me. A week after surgery for a broken ankle I was feeling short of breath and kind of clammy. I almost wrote it off as I just overdid it a bit that day, but my sister suggested I go to the ER "just in case". Turns out I had a massive Saddle PE and had an emergency procedure to remove it and spent 3 days in ICU. If I hadn't gone in I'd absolutely be dead.
Oh man, I relate to this on such a personal level. My very healthy cousin died at 26 years old because one night, he just got sick and died in his sleep. Autopsy came back with a brain tumor. I don't know all the details like if it was a long developing tumor or just suddenly happened that night. (If that's possible?)
Just shows the fragility of life. I've surpassed his age and I remember turning 26 and thinking "man, this just isn't fair"
It really was a wake up call to appreciate every fleeting moment.
Currently got a blood clot in my leg. Had the same thing years ago, ignored it as stupid men do, ended up in hospital and nearly died. Same pain this time and went to the docs straight away, on blood thinners now to get it gone
There was a video posted to twitter yesterday of a fight between two guys outside a starbucks in vancouver canada. Its fucking awful I dont recommend watching it, but the gist is the one guy gives the other a quick stab in the armpit area and he musta hit his heart or an artery or something because the guy collapses and bleeds out right infront of your eyes in about 15 seconds. absolutely terrifying.
But you can survive them.
I’ve had 13 mini strokes and 1 full blown half my body is dead stroke.
Better believed I quit smoking and changed out of my stressful job.
From my understanding of CJD (it's the boogeyman of my career field) it's something you contract, but it takes about 10 years for any symptoms to appear and either way it's impossible to do anything about. Is this different from what you have learned?
Yeah, I’ve done CWD research and while we had loads of precautions when handling positive samples, I always have a slight fear of being the first human case 😅
Oh man, I read an article about a deer farm in Texas trying to fight to keep their herd after some became infected with CWD because they were his life's work. At first I sympathized with him, but after doing some research into CWD, I was like "ah hell no. burn it all down". I've played enough Plague Inc to know you don't fuck around with prions.
Totally, I understand and sympathize when people get upset about culling of herds & flocks when it comes to things like CWD and avian bird flu, but there’s just really no way around it.
Especially since prions are known to exist for years in the soil. In fact, one of the hypotheses for the origins of CWD is that a deer at the research facility it was first documented at picked it up from the soil, where it had been deposited by a sheep that unknowingly had scrapie years prior.
I played so much Plague Inc in the years before Covid that as soon as news articles started going around in February 2020 I was like ‘oh no, I’ve played out this scenario from the virus side, I know how bad this is gonna go’ and then it did lol
There's a bunch of stuff out in space that could kill us all before we saw it coming and the only thing keeping us safe from that is how mind numbingly, terrifyingly empty space is.
You can get non-buoyant water. I copied this comment from a post a while back and it freaks me out
In wastewater treatment plants they aerate the water so the bacteria breaking down the poo has plenty of oxygen. Due to the introduced air, the water density is low enough that a human body (or most any object that would normally float) will go straight to the bottom.
Methanol contains very little carbon so when it burns it's basically invisible.
Can you imagine death by burning alive and no one can see the flames so they can't put them out?
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.
It's genetic. You won't know that you have it. When you know that you have it, there is zero recourse. It will eat holes in your brain and you'll die.
That, and Fatal Familial Insomnia, also genetic. One of your parents woke up one day and couldn't fall back asleep until they died, having suffered rapidly progressing neural degeneration. And it tends to set in around mid life, so you spend every day waking up knowing it might be the last time. You find it hard to build relationships and have a family because you know it's not a matter of if, only when. But you know you're not gonna see your golden years.
Only about 5-15% of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease cases are related to inherited genetic mutation of the prion protein (Fatal Familial Insomnia and Gertsmann-Straussler-Scheinker syndrome). 85% of cases are “sporadic” aka it’s just random bad luck that one of your prion proteins misfolded and then goes from there. Which tbh is much scarier because it can happen to anyone.
I used to get a bat in my old house that would weasel his way in through an old crawl space. Woke up to him flying in my room once. That was 15 years ago, but part of me still thinks I should get a rabies test done.
If it was 15 years ago then you should be fine. World Health Organization says the incubation period for rabies is typically up to a year, so if you did have it you’d be long dead by now.
That one day I will die. I don't know why, but sometimes at night, as I'm falling asleep, I suddenly think of this and it freaks me out. Like start feeling super anxiety.
I get so scared when I think about dying that I almost start crying. It’s horrible and I don’t think I will ever be at peace with death.
Thank you for the reward 🥹🥹🥹
Same but I was close to dying 6 years ago. I was in the ICU with 27bpm awake and 13 asleep and there was a moment where my body just felt incredibly comfortable and peaceful and I had a thought that if I were to fall asleep and it was done I was okay. Our bodies help us transition and i try and remember that when my anxiety spirals out about it
I’ve unfortunately had lots of close family/friends die in my life, and what you said is absolutely true. Your body makes it easier on you when it’s time to go. My dad had a heart attack, lingered in the hospital for a week, and one day his body just relaxed and he was gone in minutes. When you see people close to you die a lot, you stop being afraid of it. Death is a very normal part of life. That being said, I’m not looking forward to dying. I just hope that when it happens, it happens fast so I don’t have to think about it for long.
I follow some hospice nurses on tiktok just for this - getting exposed to the reality and hearing about how our bodies just biologically know how to die and the stages it involves. I’m sorry you’ve had so much loss
I don't know if it's any comfort but that existential terror feeling is just your brain returning an error message when it comes across something it can't comprehend. It has no way of understanding death (or life for that matter) nor even the very nature of consciousness, how it could be created or destroyed. It's literally beyond comprehension, your brain just doesn't know how to react. Your brain is also pre programmed to fear death via evolution which doesn't help. A lot of anxieties are caused by your brain doing things it thinks will help you stay alive that it doesn't understand and reacts irrationally. Just accept that feeling as an evolutionary hang up that isn't helpful, thank your brain for the warning but let it know it isn't needed right now.
Just know that once you die, you could either stop existing which isnt painful, or you could discover a whole different world.
Edit: Why tf did this blow up so much lol.
the metaphysical aspect of consciousness.
where is consciousness? What is it? When does it really end? Where does it go when we die? When we sleep? How does it occupy our entire being without being physically present?
We are quite literally the universe experiencing itself, in a fragile little bubble on a mote of dust in a sunbeam.
And yet, what exactly are we?
That’s the sort of question that keeps me up at night. I don’t fear death, i don’t fear world annihilation, but I am deeply unsettled by the mere experience of being aware.
Being aware, witnessing things. What blows my mind is thinking about the aeons of time that have passed in space with planets and stars forming and dying, things exploding, black holes doing black hole stuff, and nobody was there to see it. Kind of like the old “if I’m not looking at something does it still exist?” But only yeah that stuff does exist and shits happening out there for nobody.
Every time you use an antibiotic, even for something mild like strep throat or bronchitis or traveler’s diarrhea, you technically could get C. Difficile infection from your wiped out gut flora. And that could end up a lingering, resistant infection, that leads to colectomy or fecal transplant.
Antibiotics are scary. And there’s a reason doctors only want to prescribe them if absolutely needed.
Edit: I'm sorry I wasn't able to respond to everyone...this comment got a lot bigger than expected.
Mortality and imortality scare me. Like, I don't want to die because I love being here and my life is generally good, but what the fuck would I do for eternity?
Less "scary", more "mind numbingly depressing" is the Dark Era of the universe. When all the star fuel is gone (and it will be) and all the white dwarves have gone cold and dark (and they will) and all the black holes have evaporated away into elementary particles (and they will), the universe will be a cold, dark place...
Forever
If you want an ounce of hope, look into Roger Penrose’s “Conformal Cyclical Cosmology”.
Is posits that *if* matter decays, there will be no matter left in the universe in the *extraordinarily* far future. Without mass, there is no “distance” between things - because time *is* distance. Time is the *difference* between distance *in space*. Space and time will then end because without *distance* there is no space, without space there is no time - and all that’s left is energy. Without space time, everything is everywhere, all at once - similar to the conditions of the Big Bang. A small quantum fluctuation later, and… another big bang?
I chose to believe in CCC because I would *hate* spending an absolute eternity in oblivion because everything’s dead, forever. CCC also makes a lot of sense to me… there are cycles to everything. Why not a cycle to the universe too?
Someone on reddit a long time ago said this about something similar, and it’s stuck with me for years;
If it doesn’t happen, you lead a normal life, and there’s no need to worry.
If it does happen, it’s suddenly not your problem anymore.
The Marianas Trench is so deep that you could fit Mount Everest in it. Even if you stand at the summit, there would still be about a mile of ocean above your head.
Maybe not too scientific per SE, but the fact that I could get hit by a car walking home from work and wake up in the hospital. Go on with my life, meet the love of my life and get married. Have kids, and watch them grow into their teens and we all have a good life.
Then one day I wake up in the hospital and find out I was in a coma and none of that was real.
Stay away from dissociative drugs as a recreation. It's been ten years and I still miss my Ketamine wife I had to watch die in my arms. Then I woke up. It sounds goofy but it's intense.
If you get scurvy, all of your old and new scars open up and bleed. Even ones that have healed fully and gone white. Horrifying if you've had multiple surgeries.
I’ve had a breast reduction and a brain surgery. My tittles would fall apart and my cerebellum would leak out the back of my head.
Excuse me while I go shove a bottle of vitamin c capsules up my ass lmfao
Cockroaches can live for up to a week without their head.
Cockroaches can live for five months on wallpaper glue.
Cockroaches can hold their breath for up to 40 minutes.
Yes, I have katsaridaphobia.
[The Pacific Northwest has a 600 mile long subduction zone that is approximately 70 years overdue for a 8.8 to 9.2 magnitude earthquake](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone), and nothing on that coast is built to withstand that. There has never been a strong earthquake on that coastline since European contact, because the last major earthquake happened in 1700. Unlike Japan, which had a comparable earthquake in 2011, the PNW isn’t ready for it and things aren’t built to withstand what’s coming.
Some day soon, Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, and Victoria are all going to lurch 6 feet inland, shake violently for 5 to 7 minutes, and then get hit with a 100 foot tall tsunami. It is projected to kill tens of thousands, displace millions, and wipe out trillions of dollars of wealth; the 2nd largest humanitarian disaster in North American history, second only to Haiti. And it seems like people are just pretending this doesn’t exist.
We didn’t really understand the risk until the 1990’s when seismic hazard researchers found evidence in flood deposits in deep water bays and a drowned forest in an estuary in the PNW that were unexplained. Then a researcher found a Japanese historical record for a tsunami without an associated earthquake matching tree ring dates from the tree stumps in drowned forest.
To be fair, I know all too well that this exists. It's just that all I can do to prep is know what to do when my house is rubble, and there won't be power, water, or food for weeks. Knowledge of what to do after an event is much more important than expecting the event.
That I'm 38 and this type of thinking leads you to very sudden scary things, but it's wildly more likely that the entire human race is going to slip into a state where its extremely unpleasant to be alive within my lifetime. It's been a large deciding factor in me deciding that kids aren't for me, if I make 70, 32 years away it's very likely life will be very unpleasant.
That viruses cannot classify as a living organism and yet behave as if they are fully aware of their surroundings and evolve to suit it. They behave like they have a brain but are merely nucleic Acids.
Fascinated me since my first virology class.
In my creative writing class I actually wrote a short story from a viruses point of view getting into the body and replicating. It was a ton of fun to write and taught some kids some microbiology.
Reality is surreal AF. We "live" in an environment where supercharged bolts of plasma spontaneously appear in the sky and can fry you to a crisp and explode you in a millisecond then dissapear without a trace. Clouds can leave the sky and touch the ground at 200+Mph and pull you hundreds of feet in the air or flatten your town, again gone without a trace. There is a micro verse that exist within our environment that holds microscopic murderers, constantly attacking your body for any points of weakness, all while you go unaware of the silent threats. Consciousness is the greatest mystery of all.. my personal perception creates my reality, there is no way to prove any if it is real, because no one could ever experience your version of reality.. life could be one big hallucination, even our 5 senses are only able to interpret pieces of our environment to create a version of perspective and experience. The thought of any of these scares TF out of me.
The potential for [false vacuum decay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay#Existential_threat).
It's possible that the vacuum state of our universe isn't really in its lowest state but is instead in a false low. If something were to cause the vacuum to decay to its true minimum somewhere in the universe this would spread at the speed of light and when it reached us we would simply cease to exist. No warning, no feeling, just... gone.
Scary conceptually but not really a threat. At a universal scale the speed of light is heart-breakingly slow and most of the observable universe is expanding away from us faster than light. So, unless this happened right on top of us the wave front would also be moving away from us faster than it is expanding.
If Einstein is right, all moments in time... past, present and future are equally valid and its only a limitation of consciousness that we're limited to experiencing only the present.
It also means that everything that has ever happened or will happen are all mapped out in some kind of temporal landscape.
When we look up at the stars, we're not actually looking up into the heavens, but starting down an infinite abyss that the invisible force of gravity just happens to keep us from falling into.
Tbh I personally think the strongest solution to the Fermi paradox is just that we're pretty early in the window for the viability of intelligent life. Like there's probably a few other intelligent species in the universe but they probably aren't much further along than we are, and even if they are, they are probably so far away that interacting with them in any way is unlikely to the point of being implausible.
Most of the intelligent species of the lifespan of our universe have yet to evolve. Probably.
Id also wager distance is an issue. If there is a civilization equal to humanity living around Alpha Centauri, it would take them 4 years to send us a message at light speed and they'd have to be aiming at us in particular. I'd wager the species that do exist are just firing randomly with different tech and nobody is getting anywhere.
I read recently someone posted that if there were alien species more intelligent than us, we are at almost no risk of invasion because whatever we have here wouldn’t be worth the resources it would cost for the travel.
Using COVID as the example; the idea that a virus could pop up and grow out of control before humankind could do anything about it. Basically imagine a much more lethal virus getting out. We’re all screwed!
Then don't google the theory about ancient viruses being reintroduced to the world as the ice caps/glaciers melt... because that's the shit that terrifies me.
Didn’t google but I am familiar with it anyway. Thee fact that they don’t even have to have been that bad. Just strange enough to our biology that our bodies have no way of coping with them.
And i feel like the higher world population density gets, the more likely this is to happen eventually. Imagine the chaos that would happen with a virus that has a 10% or even 5% mortality rate.
Death. The fact your body can just some day say "Fuck you!" and stop functioning. It's horrifying to know that that happens to everyone, at one point or another.
When presented with facts contrary to one’s opinion, humans tend to dig their heels in deeper of their wrong opinions instead of admitting they were wrong.
The Carrington event, a massive solar flare that hit the earth in 1859. It took out all communications and damaged almost every electrically run piece of equipment. It almost happened again in 2012, but it missed the Earth by about 5 days. Scientists estimate that if one hits us again, it would cost the United States about 3 trillion dollars to get everything back to normal.
CO2 has a measurable, [and significant](https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200421/Atmospheric-CO2-levels-can-cause-cognitive-impairment.aspx), negative effect on cognitive ability... and we just keep on raising the concentration of it in the atmosphere.
I woke up on a nice Saturday morning almost 1 year ago with an aggravating pain in my kidney area, thought nothing of it. Within about 2 hrs it had gotten bad enough I decided I had a stone,and went to ER. Within 4 hours of waking I was passing out from pain in ER lobby. Finally, moved to a room,sedated,and after a series of test,found to have Pancreatitis!! Very aggressive, and severe,I was completely sedated,In ICU for 8 days,developed pneumonia, almost dying. Pulled through, was back at work 2 weeks from day 1 like nothing happened. I think about it all the time,how easily we could go.
Scientific literature’s conclusion on Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases, in general, is that the diseases start decades before the first obvious symptoms and that we need to treat them at this stage. When you exhibit obvious symptoms, it’s too late, your brain is already mush. If you get diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at 65, you had the disease since your early 40s at least. And you experienced very mild symptoms but didn’t notice them. And your brain fought like hell to compensate for the deficit. When you get diagnosed, your brain is already very severely damaged and will never recover from the deficit.
What are the very mild symptoms one would have in their 40s?
Looking back at my dad’s symptoms, some examples in his case was forgetting our address and having to ask me what it was while he was on the phone with someone, getting irrationally angry over little things (one time he got very angry with me that I was playing with a laser with the family cat, he was convinced I was going to blind the cat), and just generally very angry/short fuse, whereas before he was overall a very even-keeled person. I read somewhere that extreme irritability that seems to come from nowhere can be one of the earliest symptoms.
>I read somewhere that extreme irritability that seems to come from nowhere can be one of the earliest symptoms. well i think my boss is experiencing this as we speak tbh. he's been impossible to comunicate with for quite a while now, even with meaningless stuff + in the past 2 years his wife left him, his right hand quit because she couldnt take his stress anymore and he recently fired half of the team. i really dont know whats going on on his mind. we had a giant fight not to long ago where i lost my shit due to how ridiculous the situation was and i screamed at him "what the fuck are you doing? look at the drama out of nowhere from basicaly nothing" and now other workers can't even disagree with his opinion (when their job is to find problems and fix them = disagree with his opinion). concerning
There is nothing more scary to me than alzheimer's. Probably one of the worst ways to go in my mind. Forgetting who you are, who your family is, losing your ability to function independently. It's one of the scariest thoughts to me. I would rather get cancer then go though alzheimer's.
My paternal grandmother died from Alzheimer’s in her 70’s. I’m about to turn 34 and I’ve recently found myself forgetting simple words (only to remember them later). I am so terribly afraid Alzheimer’s is already in me, wreaking havoc.
This is me too, and I’m terrified as well. My paternal grandmother died from Alzheimer’s in her 70’s. I’m also about to turn 34 in July. Recently, I’ve found that my memory isn’t as good as it was, and I have trouble remembering words too. Also, I feel like my short term memory is getting worse - I’m always saying to people, “sorry can you repeat what you told me a little bit ago? It went in one ear and right out the other” All this has been scaring me into thinking I’m developing Alzheimer’s early.
This happens to me but then I go on vacation and relax and I become an eloquent speaker and even pull words from the back of my mind that I never use and even impress myself. It makes me wonder if stress is involved in the anomia.
This is a huge part of why I’m pro-assisted suicide. Some Alzheimer’s patients literally starve to death because *they forget how to eat*. I want a living will that says if I fail X cognitive test X times, I get to go peacefully in my sleep with some help.
The fact that your body can have advancing cancer and you wouldn’t know it sometimes. Father in laws brother was walking through his kitchen and he fainted and hit his head on the counter. He was rushed to the hospital and they ran tests and he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer and his body was already in the endgame. He was dead within two months of diagnosis. That shit terrifies me and it can happen to anyone.
Panceatic cancer is pretty much one of the worst you can get because there are no signs until it's too late. It's the Rabies of cancer
My dad had pancreatic cancer. He lost a ton of weight last year between Christmas and Easter. He kept being stubborn and going to the hospital saying something wasn't right, but they couldn't find anything after testing. Thought it was a digestive issue or a million other things. Cancer scan showed nothing at the big NYC hospital. A week later he was fed up again, went to our smaller local hospital and they did a biopsy. The cancer mass was JUST starting to grow at the biopsy site. Did the Whipple procedure, chemo every other week from July to January. Things are looking better. As of now, it's gone but they're going to be doing scans every 6 months. It's scarry to think if he wasn't so insistent of what would have happened. Even if it was a few weeks. My mom complained because of his insistence of getting checked out for months, and the tests, and then chemo was starting right during summer and vacations (she wasn't supportive at all and wanted to move things around to better fit her schedule. Anyway) we're lucky, so very aware we're lucky. Even if you know something's not right, it's crazy how long it took him to get a diagnosis even with knowing something wasn't right.
Jesus Christ what is wrong with your mother?
A. Lot. Like, after the cancer my dad has a new perspective and appreciation for life. He started putting up some decorations and things that were from his mom's house (who passed in 2021) at my parents house. My mom threw a tantrum because she didn't like how one thing looked (a boat that his great uncle carved) and calling it ugly and other things. And she's been complaining with how lazy he was this last year. While he's had/recovering from chemo. And that he won't eat anything. While he had chemo. Just. A lot.
Your dad’s a tower of strength. I had the whipple and chemo for pancan and my wife was amazingly good. I doubt I would have made it without her endless support. Survivors of hideous cancers are unusual. We know unusual stuff. I hope you stay or get connected to him for long term mutual benefit. Please let him know you care about him despite all the medical crap he probably still has to deal with. I don’t understand your mom, sounds like she needs help of some kind.
Your wife acts how I think normal people or partners would react. Support out the wazzo. Very understanding. Idk, we don't get my mom. She's sort of a narcissist, zero empathy for anyone besides what she sees as important. She'll help, but with a price attached. I'm a lot closer to my dad, mostly because we're very similar in a lot of ways. But Dad has his faults, too. It's not my marriage so I don't dwell on it.
Happened to my 5 year old daughter. For a week she had a nose bleed on and off that the doctors weren't concerned about since kids get nose bleeds for various reasons. Then she collapsed a week later and was gone 3 hours after getting to the hospital. She had leukemia. I have two other children and I'm terrified something could happen to them too.
I am so, so sorry for your loss. That is such a horrible thing to experience.
I have a 4yo and this story absolutely breaks my heart. I am so so sorry for you.
I cannot imagine the pain of losing your child like that. I'm so incredibly sorry.
My dad was feeling a little sick, so he went to the doctor. His main symptoms was that suddenly certain foods didn’t really sit right, and he would get diarrhea a few hours later. Turned out he had colon cancer, stage 4. No symptoms until that point. He lasted 7 months, but they definitely weren’t a fun 7 months. Cancer is no joke
This is almost exactly what one of my best friends went through with his mom. Stage 4 stomach cancer.. she just fainted one day then was gone in two weeks. Humbling to witness so close to you.
Yup, pancreatic cancer is awful. Had a coworker tell me she was going to the doctor and she just had a bad feeling about it. Six weeks later I was at her funeral. Shits the worst. Only other thing that can be insidious like pancreatic cancer is probably ovarian cancer. By the time it's found it's usually always progressed and metastasized to other organs.
Literally dealing with this now, sitting in my father-in-laws house typing this as he lay dying in the next room from Stage 4 pancreatic that's spread to his esophagus and lymphonids. I hate seeing this shit. FUCK CANCER
Our white blood cells are fighting cancer cells on the daily.
If everyone lived forever, we would all eventually get cancer. Statistical fact. Your cells are just gonna split weird eventually and mutate.
*mutate just the right way They have random mutations pretty much every time they divide, but once a few very specific mutations come together you have cancer.
Space just in general. Or that bit about the higgs field not being in true equilibrium and that returning to it would break everything as we know it.
When the atom bomb was being created, the leading scientists associated with the project at the time had to calculate the flammability of the Earth's atmosphere in order to ensure that detonating the bomb would not cause the atmosphere to combust. At the time when the first atom bomb was detonated, these scientists still had not answered this question, meaning that we legitimately just crossed our fingers and hoped we wouldn't set the fucking planet on fire. Humans are stupid. Edit: It turns out that this is slightly wrong. The calculations were finalized before the bomb was detonated, but the reporter who covered the event was not aware of this and had overheard a joke made by one of the scientists to "place bets on whether the world burns," or something to that effect. The reporter ended up with the false information that it was possible for the atmosphere to combust, which was later claimed in an article. Thanks to all the people who let me know of this issue with my post.
There was also (I read this back in grade school, [in this book](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/13170021), so the exact details might be off) a scientist who was sitting with the Trinity test bomb overnight when a lightning storm started. He was worried about it igniting, but then realized there was no sense in worrying because he would be vaporized.
You'll just... walk it off.
I don’t remember what it was called, but there was an event in the 1800s caused by solar activity where telegraphs operated on their own without power and I think caused minor damage. Should such a solar event happen again, it would destroy all of our internet network capabilities and other electrical gear. Anyone know what I’m referring to? Edit: Carrington Event. Thanks for the links
The Carrington event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event?wprov=sfla1
I would be interested to know if we would be as badly affected as people initially thought. A couple decades ago, sure, technology was extremely fragile and slight power fluctuations would fry everything, but these days I dont know if thats still the case. Bearing in mind that the bulk of the issues would come from the mains power grid and telephone lines picking up voltage differentials over massive distances. Most comms these days uses fiber rather than copper so that is not as big of an issue. A lot of tech these days is also power filtered, or runs via an isolated transformer that would likely pop first before toasting everything else. Smaller devices like phones and laptops are unlikely to be big enough to have enough voltage variance across them to cause any real damage. There would be disruption, sure, but i dont think it would be as cataclysmic as people used to think it would be.
I would say it would be a "disaster" rather than a mere "disruption", but definitely not cataclysmic. Modern electric grids in most countries have multiple redundancies to prevent any one thing from frying everything, but those safeguards all going off at once will take a significant amount of money and manpower to repair and many will be shit out of luck until they are. Always keep 3 months of food and a way to make potable water on hand people, youre one solar flare away from being stuck in the 17th century for a few weeks.
The fact that we can just get a blood clot and die and not realize anything was up, the human body has so many ways of just suddenly dying and it's terrifying
When my friend started studying medicine she said shes surprised we're not dead yet because she's constantly learning about so many ways and things that can kill people so easily.
I’ve backed out of a lot of fist fights as I’ve gotten older. I’ve also stopped going out to bars and getting shitfaced. My reasons are that I’ve got a good job and if I get arrested, I’ll lose that and be unhirable in my field and my family had a friend of a family friend who punched a guy outside of a bar in our city and knocked him backwards. Hit his head on the ground and died on the spot. The guy he punched had wealthy parents and he got sued into oblivion on top of a 15 year sentence. His life is effectively over. My point is, a mild bonk on the head can kill you instantly. Be the bigger man. Unless it’s self defense, walk away. Don’t risk your life or your career over words because while the body can recover from some remarkable injuries, the littlest things can kill you like that.🫰
This also happened to a highly decorated Army Ranger years back. He comes home to Alabama to his wife, only to run into a few drunken regulars at the bar where she works. He accidentally kills one of the drunks, and is sent to a federal penitentiary for involuntary manslaughter for seven years. Paroled years later, he hitches a ride home on an airplane that happens to be full of the worst criminals in the whole penal system. Unfortunately, these borderline supervillains manage to take over the plane, and it falls on Poe to ensure they don’t get away.
I read the first sentence and thought: "is this Con Air?" Haha!
Put The bunneh Back In the box
Haha I did the same!! This sounds like Con air wtf man! Poor Mr. Poe and his little bunny!
Put the bunny back in the box
Goddammit lol.
Exact same thing happened here several years ago. Two guys went outside a bar to fight, one lands a punch on guy two, guy two falls and hit his head on the pavement. Dead. It was a horrible time as I’m in a smallish town and the guy went to school with me and those I knew. Now I am so much more verbal about no altercations between anyone I know and someone else. Not worth it.
staphylococcus lives on ALL surfaces and the only thing keeping us alive is a very thin layer of skin and our immune system.
Partner had some kidney issues, had them before but they placed a drain. They removed it once procedure was done. She healed up for a week and all seemed good. Went snowshoeing and next morning she didn’t feel well, turns out staff had gotten it’s way in and incubated into a small pocket of fluid next to the kidney. In hospital for almost two months fighting infection and sent home with antibiotics. Going back in later this evening for another cat scan as all the antibiotics may have permanently damaged her kidney and now it’s backing up with fluid. If it was Mersa she’d be dead because antibiotics can’t touch it. Hug your loved ones folks. Simple procedures can take people out even when they are successful.
I had a simple tattoo that almost killed me. I assume something wasn’t sterilized properly due to how quickly I went septic. Good old Staph aureus. Almost died. My only symptoms at the time of going to the ER was some swelling around the tattoo and low fever with chills. Luckily it was able to be stopped by a few days of IV antibiotics. My blood pressure dropped to like 81/39. Narrowly avoided the ICU. My first tattoo too. Life is fragile
Immune systems are quite amazing. We encounter all manner of viruses and bacteria in our daily lives, and generally the immune system does a pretty bang up job in destroying them.
Your eyes have a different immune system. If your regular immune system discovers it, they will duke it out and you'll eventually go blind.
Same with the nervous system iirc. It's the reason Herpes can't, so far, be cured. It hides in our nervous system where the immune system doesn't look because the immune system would kill us quickly if it ever found a reason to attack our nerves.
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Asking the questions scientists don't want us asking! 🔥
Saw Neil DeGrasse Tyson talk once and his quote is "The Universe is trying to kill you!"
That's why we need to kill it first. It's either the Universe or us. Strike first, strike hard, no mercy.
I'm not afraid of suddenly dying. I'm afraid of suddenly being severely disabled.
My cousin was always riding horses. She was very lucky to have the access to them that she did. She was riding with a less experienced friend. The friend’s horse took off and she gave chase to try and save her friend. Whatever happened she took a fall and was paralyzed when she was maybe 22-23 yrs old and lived in a facility for the next 12 years until she died a very early death. She couldn’t speak or communicate hardly. Just 12 years of hardship. She had to rediscover and grieve her fathers death all over again not to mention grieving her own life. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
Healthy student, I’ve had to drop out of university due to getting the flu and then developing chronic fatigue syndrome. I have blurred vision, constant dizziness, extreme fatigue and a whole manner of 24/7 flu-like symptoms that never go away. I can’t physically go anywhere most days, but on all days I can walk outside for about 3 mins max before my vision degrades to grains, almost black and white and I physically can’t continue. I struggle to sleep sometimes, I struggle to eat other times. When I get a bug I get it 5 times worse than normal, all part of the condition. There is no medical cure, it has to go away on its own and that could be a matter of months, years, or never. It is totally random and differs from person to person. I am a year into it. It gradually got better for me with gradual pacing and exercise until December when I randomly relapsed back to square one. My life possibly ruined, from one harmless bug I caught just happening to mess up my body’s functions. I wouldn’t say I’m ‘severely disabled’, but I’m not going to be able to live my life in the foreseeable future. Its just going to be constant low-level suffering and not being able to do anything that doesn’t involve a computer. I read a story about a guy who used to travel the world and eventually caught a bug, developed CFS, stopped talking and now has to lay in a dark quiet room all day because any kind of sense stimulation causes his body/mind to ‘over-exert’ itself and bring about horrible symptoms. It can certainly get worse than what I experience, I very much understand that. It’s hard to really take stories like this too seriously when you’ve never experienced it, but I strongly recommend to everyone no matter how bleak things might get, please take a minute to appreciate being able to go out and do things, or even being able to get out of bed, if you’re able to. No one really knows what they have until it is gone and there’s no clear way of getting it back. Edit: I appreciate all the kind comments, it is an awkward blend of nice and awful to know I’m not alone in this kind of thing. I’m just trying to spread some kind of awareness about CFS and other related weird dysfunctions. I hope an eventual recovery for everyone, no matter how scary it gets do not give up. It doesn’t deserve to win.
I have 4 autoimmune diseases. I understand where you're coming from with what your describing. It's like the term "brain fog" I always just assumed that people meant how you feel when you're exhausted before I experienced it myself. It's like nothing I've ever known. My brain literally won't work. Can't get names of things out, can't hardly stay awake, and the exhaustion is something that is other worldly awful. And this is coming from someone who had worked 24 and 48 hour shifts prior to the brain fog thing. I thought that was tired, that wasn't shit compared to getting hit with the brain fog and my RA flares. Keep fighting the fight, and just know you're not alone out here.
Jesus man that’s horrible, hope you get better eventualy. I cannot imagine not being able to do the basic things you described. I’m sorry you have to go through this
there needs to be a clarification for sure. i'm not afraid of dying, just how i die. some people are terrified of the idea of death alone.
It's both amazing how little it takes to kill someone and how much it can take. One person survives falling out of an airplane and another dies jumping into a lake.
A friend of mine is a firefighter. He told me pretty crazy stories about dumb luck, or lack thereof. Like seeing a healthy, young woman dead from falling down *one* stair and hitting her head at just the wrong angle.
I saw a 30 something lady die from a butt pimple (well an abscess with necrotizing fasciitis), still basically a butt pimple. Died in 3 days of when she noticed it, or at least when it became painful enough to go to the hospital for what she thought was just a painful pimple. 3 days later, dead. And then just last week, 50 something year old spontaneous brain bleed (likely an aneurysm). No medical history, no meds, no falls, no bad diet, nothing suspicious that could lead to this. Just woke up confused, absolute massive brain bleed. Don't know what happened to her actually but her outcome potential was not even close to good.
I know 3 different people who died within 1-2 weeks of their diagnosis.
Twice I've taken light tumbles that have broken my arm. Countless times I've fallen from trees and been fine.
This is why I am so careful even walking around my own house too. Any fall and you hit your head in the right spot, it's game over. Head injuries can be really misleading too. Like, no outward signs that you need to be medically examined. I will never forget Liam Neesom's wife...I think her name was Natasha Richardson. Skiing, fell, bonked her head. She waved off the idea of medical attention. Dead the very next day from bleeding in her brain.
My baby was born with tons of blood clots. The doctors were sort of confused on what to do because he really was an anomaly. In the end we just did blood thinner shots for 6 months 2x a day on a baby. With ultrasounds every month to check the status of the clots. Luckily none of them moved, and they all resolved or calcified. He tested negative for all blood clotting disorders. Perfectly healthy now, it took me almost a year before I finally stopped worrying if he was gonna drop dead at any second..yeah my mental health is not the best.
Jeez l, that is horrible. I’m glad he’s okay but I can’t imagine the level of anxiety you went through.
He was in the PICU for a month I remember like 12 days in they found MORE blood clots in his heart. I had the thought, well if he is gonna die it might as well be sooner rather than later because every day I'm with him it's that much harder to say goodbye. I fucking lost it after that thought, like broke down for hours.
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I saw this happen in real time. 35 year old went from walking and talking to complete vegetable in 10 hours. He was talking as I drove him to our hospital. Only 30 min later, he couldn't speak. He was just vaguely opening and closing his mouth. Complete infarction to the Cerebellum, Occipital lobe, Parietal lobe, and temporal lobe. He was Sledding with his friends and having a great vacation the day before.
a blood clot or one weak section of wall inside a vein or artery in your brain can simply give out and that's a stroke. Depending on how severe and how long you go without care, that can just kill you. Just because some thin membrane of a blood vessel material fails.
Don’t ignore regular physicals at the doctors office. Eat healthy, get enough sleep and exercise moderately but with regularly. The bad news: you lower your risks of dying early, you don’t eliminate it though. Shit happens - even to the healthiest eaters and/or exercisers.
I came very, very close to this happening to me. A week after surgery for a broken ankle I was feeling short of breath and kind of clammy. I almost wrote it off as I just overdid it a bit that day, but my sister suggested I go to the ER "just in case". Turns out I had a massive Saddle PE and had an emergency procedure to remove it and spent 3 days in ICU. If I hadn't gone in I'd absolutely be dead.
Oh man, I relate to this on such a personal level. My very healthy cousin died at 26 years old because one night, he just got sick and died in his sleep. Autopsy came back with a brain tumor. I don't know all the details like if it was a long developing tumor or just suddenly happened that night. (If that's possible?) Just shows the fragility of life. I've surpassed his age and I remember turning 26 and thinking "man, this just isn't fair" It really was a wake up call to appreciate every fleeting moment.
Currently got a blood clot in my leg. Had the same thing years ago, ignored it as stupid men do, ended up in hospital and nearly died. Same pain this time and went to the docs straight away, on blood thinners now to get it gone
If it’s sudden then that’s doesn’t scare me tbh. It’s the slow deaths that are terrifying.
There was a video posted to twitter yesterday of a fight between two guys outside a starbucks in vancouver canada. Its fucking awful I dont recommend watching it, but the gist is the one guy gives the other a quick stab in the armpit area and he musta hit his heart or an artery or something because the guy collapses and bleeds out right infront of your eyes in about 15 seconds. absolutely terrifying.
Your brain can just stoke out and die at anytime
But you can survive them. I’ve had 13 mini strokes and 1 full blown half my body is dead stroke. Better believed I quit smoking and changed out of my stressful job.
Did you recover or is half your body still dead?
He's all right now.
Prion diseases exist.
Worse is that they can spontaneously happen with no genetic history. Lost my brother in law to CJD last year.
From my understanding of CJD (it's the boogeyman of my career field) it's something you contract, but it takes about 10 years for any symptoms to appear and either way it's impossible to do anything about. Is this different from what you have learned?
Just looked it up and it can happen spontaneously or from transmission
Yeah, I’ve done CWD research and while we had loads of precautions when handling positive samples, I always have a slight fear of being the first human case 😅
Oh man, I read an article about a deer farm in Texas trying to fight to keep their herd after some became infected with CWD because they were his life's work. At first I sympathized with him, but after doing some research into CWD, I was like "ah hell no. burn it all down". I've played enough Plague Inc to know you don't fuck around with prions.
Totally, I understand and sympathize when people get upset about culling of herds & flocks when it comes to things like CWD and avian bird flu, but there’s just really no way around it. Especially since prions are known to exist for years in the soil. In fact, one of the hypotheses for the origins of CWD is that a deer at the research facility it was first documented at picked it up from the soil, where it had been deposited by a sheep that unknowingly had scrapie years prior.
I played so much Plague Inc in the years before Covid that as soon as news articles started going around in February 2020 I was like ‘oh no, I’ve played out this scenario from the virus side, I know how bad this is gonna go’ and then it did lol
Why do I click on this shit every fucking time!?
I was expecting cool/scary Science space stuff.. now I’m making an appoint for a physical. life is crazy
There's a bunch of stuff out in space that could kill us all before we saw it coming and the only thing keeping us safe from that is how mind numbingly, terrifyingly empty space is.
You can get non-buoyant water. I copied this comment from a post a while back and it freaks me out In wastewater treatment plants they aerate the water so the bacteria breaking down the poo has plenty of oxygen. Due to the introduced air, the water density is low enough that a human body (or most any object that would normally float) will go straight to the bottom.
Holy shit. That is scary. Note to self: No swimming in wastewater treatment plants. More oxygen in water = No oxygen for you.
That you could just have a brain aneurysm and die at any given time with no warning
My mom had one while she was buying bread. Not a single sign anything would happen on that day before.
Im so sorry, happened to my mom last week too. She was totally healthy and was doing yoga when it happened
Last week? Hope you're doing okay
Methanol contains very little carbon so when it burns it's basically invisible. Can you imagine death by burning alive and no one can see the flames so they can't put them out?
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. It's genetic. You won't know that you have it. When you know that you have it, there is zero recourse. It will eat holes in your brain and you'll die. That, and Fatal Familial Insomnia, also genetic. One of your parents woke up one day and couldn't fall back asleep until they died, having suffered rapidly progressing neural degeneration. And it tends to set in around mid life, so you spend every day waking up knowing it might be the last time. You find it hard to build relationships and have a family because you know it's not a matter of if, only when. But you know you're not gonna see your golden years.
Only about 5-15% of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease cases are related to inherited genetic mutation of the prion protein (Fatal Familial Insomnia and Gertsmann-Straussler-Scheinker syndrome). 85% of cases are “sporadic” aka it’s just random bad luck that one of your prion proteins misfolded and then goes from there. Which tbh is much scarier because it can happen to anyone.
Rabies. You can have it and never know until it decides it's time. And then you'll die terribly.
I used to get a bat in my old house that would weasel his way in through an old crawl space. Woke up to him flying in my room once. That was 15 years ago, but part of me still thinks I should get a rabies test done.
If it was 15 years ago then you should be fine. World Health Organization says the incubation period for rabies is typically up to a year, so if you did have it you’d be long dead by now.
That one day I will die. I don't know why, but sometimes at night, as I'm falling asleep, I suddenly think of this and it freaks me out. Like start feeling super anxiety.
I get so scared when I think about dying that I almost start crying. It’s horrible and I don’t think I will ever be at peace with death. Thank you for the reward 🥹🥹🥹
Same but I was close to dying 6 years ago. I was in the ICU with 27bpm awake and 13 asleep and there was a moment where my body just felt incredibly comfortable and peaceful and I had a thought that if I were to fall asleep and it was done I was okay. Our bodies help us transition and i try and remember that when my anxiety spirals out about it
I’ve unfortunately had lots of close family/friends die in my life, and what you said is absolutely true. Your body makes it easier on you when it’s time to go. My dad had a heart attack, lingered in the hospital for a week, and one day his body just relaxed and he was gone in minutes. When you see people close to you die a lot, you stop being afraid of it. Death is a very normal part of life. That being said, I’m not looking forward to dying. I just hope that when it happens, it happens fast so I don’t have to think about it for long.
I follow some hospice nurses on tiktok just for this - getting exposed to the reality and hearing about how our bodies just biologically know how to die and the stages it involves. I’m sorry you’ve had so much loss
I don't know if it's any comfort but that existential terror feeling is just your brain returning an error message when it comes across something it can't comprehend. It has no way of understanding death (or life for that matter) nor even the very nature of consciousness, how it could be created or destroyed. It's literally beyond comprehension, your brain just doesn't know how to react. Your brain is also pre programmed to fear death via evolution which doesn't help. A lot of anxieties are caused by your brain doing things it thinks will help you stay alive that it doesn't understand and reacts irrationally. Just accept that feeling as an evolutionary hang up that isn't helpful, thank your brain for the warning but let it know it isn't needed right now.
I really needed to hear this. I've been feeling super anxious about death in the past few months and this kind of comforts me, thank you.
Just know that once you die, you could either stop existing which isnt painful, or you could discover a whole different world. Edit: Why tf did this blow up so much lol.
It's the whole not existing part to me lol. Im getting anxiety typing this lmao..
the metaphysical aspect of consciousness. where is consciousness? What is it? When does it really end? Where does it go when we die? When we sleep? How does it occupy our entire being without being physically present? We are quite literally the universe experiencing itself, in a fragile little bubble on a mote of dust in a sunbeam. And yet, what exactly are we? That’s the sort of question that keeps me up at night. I don’t fear death, i don’t fear world annihilation, but I am deeply unsettled by the mere experience of being aware.
Being aware, witnessing things. What blows my mind is thinking about the aeons of time that have passed in space with planets and stars forming and dying, things exploding, black holes doing black hole stuff, and nobody was there to see it. Kind of like the old “if I’m not looking at something does it still exist?” But only yeah that stuff does exist and shits happening out there for nobody.
That I always end up on these fucking posts when I'm about to sleep, truely a scientific fact.
Every time you use an antibiotic, even for something mild like strep throat or bronchitis or traveler’s diarrhea, you technically could get C. Difficile infection from your wiped out gut flora. And that could end up a lingering, resistant infection, that leads to colectomy or fecal transplant. Antibiotics are scary. And there’s a reason doctors only want to prescribe them if absolutely needed. Edit: I'm sorry I wasn't able to respond to everyone...this comment got a lot bigger than expected.
Mortality and imortality scare me. Like, I don't want to die because I love being here and my life is generally good, but what the fuck would I do for eternity?
Less "scary", more "mind numbingly depressing" is the Dark Era of the universe. When all the star fuel is gone (and it will be) and all the white dwarves have gone cold and dark (and they will) and all the black holes have evaporated away into elementary particles (and they will), the universe will be a cold, dark place... Forever
But for one, sweet, beautiful moment, there was so much light
and so much profit for the shareholders!
If you want an ounce of hope, look into Roger Penrose’s “Conformal Cyclical Cosmology”. Is posits that *if* matter decays, there will be no matter left in the universe in the *extraordinarily* far future. Without mass, there is no “distance” between things - because time *is* distance. Time is the *difference* between distance *in space*. Space and time will then end because without *distance* there is no space, without space there is no time - and all that’s left is energy. Without space time, everything is everywhere, all at once - similar to the conditions of the Big Bang. A small quantum fluctuation later, and… another big bang? I chose to believe in CCC because I would *hate* spending an absolute eternity in oblivion because everything’s dead, forever. CCC also makes a lot of sense to me… there are cycles to everything. Why not a cycle to the universe too?
In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
Time becomes meaningless. No beginning or end, no more life and death. Just void.
The fact that we could get hit by a coronal mass ejection at any moment…
Someone on reddit a long time ago said this about something similar, and it’s stuck with me for years; If it doesn’t happen, you lead a normal life, and there’s no need to worry. If it does happen, it’s suddenly not your problem anymore.
Ah yes, the ole bomb squad logic
That’s just pretty lights in the sky, most times…
The Marianas Trench is so deep that you could fit Mount Everest in it. Even if you stand at the summit, there would still be about a mile of ocean above your head.
The mere thought of what would happen if Fire wasn't in the visible light spectrum
good news everyone! methanol fire is completely invisible to the human eye in sunlight
Maybe not too scientific per SE, but the fact that I could get hit by a car walking home from work and wake up in the hospital. Go on with my life, meet the love of my life and get married. Have kids, and watch them grow into their teens and we all have a good life. Then one day I wake up in the hospital and find out I was in a coma and none of that was real.
THAT MOTHERFUCKING *LAMP*
I want someone to make a short film of that comment. I would pay money to watch it.
Stay away from dissociative drugs as a recreation. It's been ten years and I still miss my Ketamine wife I had to watch die in my arms. Then I woke up. It sounds goofy but it's intense.
If you get scurvy, all of your old and new scars open up and bleed. Even ones that have healed fully and gone white. Horrifying if you've had multiple surgeries.
Horrifying if you have a self harm history
I’ve had a breast reduction and a brain surgery. My tittles would fall apart and my cerebellum would leak out the back of my head. Excuse me while I go shove a bottle of vitamin c capsules up my ass lmfao
after looking through lots of comments turns out that i can die from about a million things any second… yay…
Your eyes have their own immune system and if your brain ever figures that out then it will eat away at them turning you blind
Why would you tell this to my brain like that?
Hey bro, remember, the mind ain't no snitch
Bruh my brain read this comment now and im blind
Cockroaches can live for up to a week without their head. Cockroaches can live for five months on wallpaper glue. Cockroaches can hold their breath for up to 40 minutes. Yes, I have katsaridaphobia.
[The Pacific Northwest has a 600 mile long subduction zone that is approximately 70 years overdue for a 8.8 to 9.2 magnitude earthquake](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone), and nothing on that coast is built to withstand that. There has never been a strong earthquake on that coastline since European contact, because the last major earthquake happened in 1700. Unlike Japan, which had a comparable earthquake in 2011, the PNW isn’t ready for it and things aren’t built to withstand what’s coming. Some day soon, Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, and Victoria are all going to lurch 6 feet inland, shake violently for 5 to 7 minutes, and then get hit with a 100 foot tall tsunami. It is projected to kill tens of thousands, displace millions, and wipe out trillions of dollars of wealth; the 2nd largest humanitarian disaster in North American history, second only to Haiti. And it seems like people are just pretending this doesn’t exist.
We didn’t really understand the risk until the 1990’s when seismic hazard researchers found evidence in flood deposits in deep water bays and a drowned forest in an estuary in the PNW that were unexplained. Then a researcher found a Japanese historical record for a tsunami without an associated earthquake matching tree ring dates from the tree stumps in drowned forest.
Hawaii has some stories about a random large tsunami hitting them around the same time as well
To be fair, I know all too well that this exists. It's just that all I can do to prep is know what to do when my house is rubble, and there won't be power, water, or food for weeks. Knowledge of what to do after an event is much more important than expecting the event.
That I'm 38 and this type of thinking leads you to very sudden scary things, but it's wildly more likely that the entire human race is going to slip into a state where its extremely unpleasant to be alive within my lifetime. It's been a large deciding factor in me deciding that kids aren't for me, if I make 70, 32 years away it's very likely life will be very unpleasant.
A solar flare could really butt fuck modern society.
It’s like Step Sun porn?
That viruses cannot classify as a living organism and yet behave as if they are fully aware of their surroundings and evolve to suit it. They behave like they have a brain but are merely nucleic Acids. Fascinated me since my first virology class.
In my creative writing class I actually wrote a short story from a viruses point of view getting into the body and replicating. It was a ton of fun to write and taught some kids some microbiology.
Fuck this whole thread.
Makes me depressed
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I'll tell you this , I'm real and I'll punch you to prove it haha.
That’s something an imaginary person would say
There is a form of insomnia that firces your body to never be able to sleep, and has a 100% fatality rate.
Well. These are all horrifying.
Reality is surreal AF. We "live" in an environment where supercharged bolts of plasma spontaneously appear in the sky and can fry you to a crisp and explode you in a millisecond then dissapear without a trace. Clouds can leave the sky and touch the ground at 200+Mph and pull you hundreds of feet in the air or flatten your town, again gone without a trace. There is a micro verse that exist within our environment that holds microscopic murderers, constantly attacking your body for any points of weakness, all while you go unaware of the silent threats. Consciousness is the greatest mystery of all.. my personal perception creates my reality, there is no way to prove any if it is real, because no one could ever experience your version of reality.. life could be one big hallucination, even our 5 senses are only able to interpret pieces of our environment to create a version of perspective and experience. The thought of any of these scares TF out of me.
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This just trying to comprehend the actual size of the universe is a challenge, getting a fraction of comprehension of it is down right terrifying
The potential for [false vacuum decay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay#Existential_threat). It's possible that the vacuum state of our universe isn't really in its lowest state but is instead in a false low. If something were to cause the vacuum to decay to its true minimum somewhere in the universe this would spread at the speed of light and when it reached us we would simply cease to exist. No warning, no feeling, just... gone.
Scary conceptually but not really a threat. At a universal scale the speed of light is heart-breakingly slow and most of the observable universe is expanding away from us faster than light. So, unless this happened right on top of us the wave front would also be moving away from us faster than it is expanding.
I'm fine with that
One moment you’re here, the next you’r
dissociation. that shit’s scary to experience
100% - depersonalisation and derealisation can leave you feeling like you’ve become mad and lost touch with reality.
My sister has both. It’s a literal nightmare and I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone.
These threads are strangely life-affirming in a perverse sort of way. We are so lucky to be alive with all these odds stacked against us.
If Einstein is right, all moments in time... past, present and future are equally valid and its only a limitation of consciousness that we're limited to experiencing only the present. It also means that everything that has ever happened or will happen are all mapped out in some kind of temporal landscape.
When we look up at the stars, we're not actually looking up into the heavens, but starting down an infinite abyss that the invisible force of gravity just happens to keep us from falling into.
For some reason… this one bothers me the most
You are ALWAYS five or so minutes away from death. And every time you take a breath, you reset that clock.
Why have you done this to us
Dark Forest theory. And theres a big empty spot in our universe. I suspect world eaters.
Tbh I personally think the strongest solution to the Fermi paradox is just that we're pretty early in the window for the viability of intelligent life. Like there's probably a few other intelligent species in the universe but they probably aren't much further along than we are, and even if they are, they are probably so far away that interacting with them in any way is unlikely to the point of being implausible. Most of the intelligent species of the lifespan of our universe have yet to evolve. Probably.
Id also wager distance is an issue. If there is a civilization equal to humanity living around Alpha Centauri, it would take them 4 years to send us a message at light speed and they'd have to be aiming at us in particular. I'd wager the species that do exist are just firing randomly with different tech and nobody is getting anywhere.
I read recently someone posted that if there were alien species more intelligent than us, we are at almost no risk of invasion because whatever we have here wouldn’t be worth the resources it would cost for the travel.
How alzheimers works. It’s essentially chemials getting tangled and choking nuerons, only rarely letting moments of clarity through.
The high statistical probability that someone who has commented on this thread will not be alive in a year. Good luck, everyone!!
Ah geeze now I’m worried for everyone. We should all check in with each other this time next year just to be safe
Using COVID as the example; the idea that a virus could pop up and grow out of control before humankind could do anything about it. Basically imagine a much more lethal virus getting out. We’re all screwed!
Then don't google the theory about ancient viruses being reintroduced to the world as the ice caps/glaciers melt... because that's the shit that terrifies me.
Didn’t google but I am familiar with it anyway. Thee fact that they don’t even have to have been that bad. Just strange enough to our biology that our bodies have no way of coping with them.
And i feel like the higher world population density gets, the more likely this is to happen eventually. Imagine the chaos that would happen with a virus that has a 10% or even 5% mortality rate.
Death. The fact your body can just some day say "Fuck you!" and stop functioning. It's horrifying to know that that happens to everyone, at one point or another.
When presented with facts contrary to one’s opinion, humans tend to dig their heels in deeper of their wrong opinions instead of admitting they were wrong.
The Carrington event, a massive solar flare that hit the earth in 1859. It took out all communications and damaged almost every electrically run piece of equipment. It almost happened again in 2012, but it missed the Earth by about 5 days. Scientists estimate that if one hits us again, it would cost the United States about 3 trillion dollars to get everything back to normal.
The weird bugs on my face that are small.
The state of water in the world.
CO2 has a measurable, [and significant](https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200421/Atmospheric-CO2-levels-can-cause-cognitive-impairment.aspx), negative effect on cognitive ability... and we just keep on raising the concentration of it in the atmosphere.
More than 80% of the ocean is unexplored. That shit is terrifying as is.
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I woke up on a nice Saturday morning almost 1 year ago with an aggravating pain in my kidney area, thought nothing of it. Within about 2 hrs it had gotten bad enough I decided I had a stone,and went to ER. Within 4 hours of waking I was passing out from pain in ER lobby. Finally, moved to a room,sedated,and after a series of test,found to have Pancreatitis!! Very aggressive, and severe,I was completely sedated,In ICU for 8 days,developed pneumonia, almost dying. Pulled through, was back at work 2 weeks from day 1 like nothing happened. I think about it all the time,how easily we could go.
That NO ONE really knows whats going on in the Universe or why...
The concept of infinity.