1. The Egyptian Pharaoh, Cleopatra, was alive closer to the present day than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
She died in 30 BC, while the Great Pyramid was completed circa 2,560 BC.
2. Similarly, the Great Pyramid was older to the Ancient Romans than the Ancient Romans are to us living in the present day.
This is inclusive of the early years of the Roman Empire.
3. The Stegosaurus, a species of dinosaur, was older to the Tyrannosaurus Rex than the Tyrannosaurus Rex is to us.
In fact, the Stegosaurus lived at least 74 million years before the Tyrannosaurus Rex became a species.
4. The world’s oldest living person, Emma Morano, was born closer to the signing of the Constitution of the United States of America than to the present day.
The Italian supercentenarian is 117 years old. The Constitution was signed in 1787 – 112 years before her birth in 1899.
5. The 10th President of the United States, John Tyler, has grandchildren that are still alive today.
Although he was in office way back in the 1840s, President Tyler had a son named Lyon when he was 63 years old. Lyon also had his children later in life, and both are alive and well today, albeit in their 80s.
6. The United Kingdom’s Oxford University is older than the Aztec civilization.
Some form of education has gone on at the site of the university ever since 1096, whereas the Aztec civilization didn’t even get going until at least the 1200s.
7. Isaac Newton published his laws of motion and gravity AFTER the founding of Harvard University.
The university was founded more than 50 years before Newton published his laws of motion and laws of universal gravitation in 1687.
8. Just 66 years elapsed between the invention of human flight and a man setting foot on the moon.
The Wright brothers took flight at Kitty Hawk for the first time in 1903, whereas Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission in 1969.
9. The French were still executing people by guillotine when the first Star Wars movie came out.
Hamida Djandoubi was executed in 1977 for torturing and killing his girlfriend, and that was the same year that the first Star Wars movie made it to the silver screen.
10. Paramount Studios was founded 10 years before the demise of the Ottoman Empire.
The 600-year-old empire, which reached its greatest extent during the 17th Century, had been its death throes since the First World War, before the Ottoman Sultanate was finally abolished in 1922. Paramount Studios was founded in 1912.
11. Actress Betty White is actually older than sliced bread.
The Guinness World Record holder for the longest television career for a female entertainer was born in 1922, six years before commercially-produced, automatically-sliced loaves of bread made it onto store shelves.
12. Will Smith is now older than Uncle Phil was when the Fresh Prince of Bel Air television series started.
The actor that portrayed Uncle Phil, James Avery, was 45 years old when the series started shooting in 1990. On the other hand, Will Smith is now 48 years old.
13. The Eiffel Tower’s inauguration happened during the same year as the gaming company Nintendo was founded.
The iconic Parisian structure was inaugurated during the 1889 World’s Fair. While the Nintendo of the present day is most well-known for manufacturing gaming consoles, it started out as a playing card company, and was founded in 1899.
14. Anne Frank, Martin Luther King Jr. and Barbara Walters were all born in 1929.
These three famous people are on this list because they are often thought of as being alive in significantly different eras to one another.
15. Some of the whales alive in the world’s oceans were born before Moby Dick was written.
This staggering conclusion is drawn from the fact that bowhead whales can have life spans upwards of 200 years. Moby Dick was published in 1851, meaning that there could be whales some 50 years older than that alive in our oceans.
16. Pluto didn’t make it around the sun once between being discovered and being declassified as a planet.
The dwarf planet, which was discovered back in 1930, was declassified in 2006. A single orbit of the sun by Pluto takes 248 years, so it didn’t even make it halfway round when it was still being called a planet. ]
17. The September 11th terrorist attacks happened closer to the fall of the Berlin Wall than they did to the present day.
The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, some 12 years before 9/11. This year marked the 15th anniversary since the attacks.
18. If you placed the history of the universe on a calendar year, the existence of human beings would only start at 11:59pm on December 31st.
This is going right back to its inception – the Big Bang. In fact, all of human history would only take up a little more than the last minute of the last hour of the last day of the year.
19. The present-day planet Earth is home to 6% of all the human beings that have ever lived.
Thanks to advances in medicine and technology, a population boom has occurred over the last 100 years or so, and that’s why 6% of the entire population in the entire history of our planet is alive today.
20. Everything you see with your eyes happened in the past, not the present.
The brain takes some 50 milliseconds to process visual information, so this means that by the time you see something, it occurred in the past.
Content Source: BuzzFeed
Images by Wikipedia and Pixabay.
