› added 4 years ago

263

TIL that Ivan the terrible executed his first rival when he was 13 years old

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16k9X TIL Fritz Lang’s film “Woman in the Moon” is often cited as the first occurrence in media of the "countdown to zero" before a rocket launch. It was so influential that the first successfully launched V-2 rocket at the rocket facility in Peenemünde had the Frau im Mond logo painted on its base.
LkJDV TIL that it rains diamonds in abundance on Saturn and Jupiter. These two planets are the largest in our solar system and are filled with gas with extreme negative temperatures that under the effect of lightning produced by thunderstorms produce more than 1000 tons of diamond every year.
XE9OX TIL that Remoras (suckerfish) stick to sharks with the back of their heads, not with their mouths.
WpAN TIL that rather than wasting water on doing laundry, Astronauts on the International Space Station eject their dirty worn clothes into space to burn in the Earth’s atmosphere.
X0DbP TIL John Von Neumann proposed an idea of self replicating spacecraft. Robert Freitas calcd they could colonize the milky way in 500k years. That we see no evidence of them implies we are alone. Carl Sagan argued rate of replication would consume so much mass no intelligent species would build them