 The average person walks past 16 murderers in their lifetime, at least. What is the scariest or creepiest theory you know about? If you die by being beheaded, the last thing you might see is your decapitated body. There is science that proves that you stay alive for a bit longer after you're decapitated. French doctors did experiments in asking prisoners to blink as much as possible during the beheading process. Some didn't but others did, up to like 20 seconds or so. Whether or not it's true. Who knows. In the past when executions by beheading were still a thing, they would usually tie a piece of cloth around the condemned's eyes, so that they couldn't see anything. They were also placed in a way that the neck faced, upwards with a basket for the head to fall and face forward. So basically the last thing you'd see, if you'd see at all, would be the bottom of the basket. That my mother-in-law keeps accidentally leaving things at my house because she is slowly moving in. Years ago when I was seriously dating my now wife, almost every time we started to have sexy time her mother would call up. Seemed strange, then disgusting when we found the hidden camera when moving her out. It was hidden under a stuffed animal and aimed at the bed. May or may not be a theory, but the first thing I thought of was that feeling you get when you're on top of a building and think what if I jumped? Or when you're driving and think what if I just swerve into traffic? Well it's actually got a name, Lapelle du Vid. French for the call of the void. I always thought the idea of some ethereal presence calling you towards darkness. Creepy. The dark forest theory. This explains the Fermi paradox, why we haven't seen any other advanced life forms despite the vastness of the universe. Other advanced life forms don't send out signals into the rest of the universe, because they're worried that something more advanced and dangerous is going to find them first. There's another idea which is that other civilizations know there's something out there, but don't send any signals because it has no reason to not wipe out the entire planet. There's a science fiction book based on this and I think this quote explains it better than I can, the universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds another life, another hunter, angel, or a demon, a delicate infant to tottering old man, a fairy or demigod, there's only one thing he can do, open fire and eliminate them. Fun fact to add, we dumbasses plainly sent out a golden recording of Johnny be good blasting through space. So fingers crossed. Here's another unsettling explanation, if you're scuba diving above a coral reef, and you know that there should be fish all around you, but you don't see any, it's most likely that they have learned that for some reason it's important not to be seen. And since you're a newcomer to this environment, chances are it's not you they're hiding from. Lots of scuba divers experienced this and then noticed a shark nearby. That you might be aware of everything happening to you during surgery, the anesthesia keeps you from moving and causes you to forget. I had surgery once and woke up mid-surgery. I felt no pain, but it was still awful. It was like running in a dream. I felt the weight of my own skin on my chest made it hard to breathe enough to talk. I remember screaming help at the top of my lungs and flailed my arms around in panic, and then someone coming to put the mask back on me. Later a nurse told me I whispered something and moved my arm a little. Freaked me out massively. We've all pretty much heard of Uncanny Valley. The creeped out anxious feeling when you look at something that's humanoid, but there's something clearly wrong with it. Like the wax figures at Madame Tussauds or that AI robot Sophia. But my favorite theory to come out of it is that we get that strange feeling because somewhere along human evolution we've learned to be wary of things that look human. But aren't. That humans almost went extinct. 70,000 years ago a volcano in Indonesia erupted. There's theories that we have a genetic bottleneck around that time. Took our population down to around 10,000 or 3,000, like the size of one small town. Lots of fresh genetic material died with those who were lost and the resulting inbreeding could have resulted in some genetic diseases that have made their way into humans today. Without this event, we may have advanced faster and be healthier people today. There is still evidence of the genetic bottleneck and the recent and abrupt diversification of humanity. Most of the research that I've seen on this comes from 2000. It's been 20 years, so there has been lots of work done on this very topic in the time since. This is not a fact though, but it is a scary theory that researchers are looking into. More information can be found when you look up Cheddar Man. A dark-skinned, blue-eyed man that lived around 10,000 years ago in England. Anthropology grad here, I did a paper on this and it's surprisingly difficult to find information on this. Most humans are alive today thanks to the Bayobaba Danzonia, or the Tree of Life as we call it today. The same tree Rafiki lives in in the Disney movie from the Lion King. The tree can store up to 100,000 liters of water and produces a superfruit. The humans that survive the eruption itself managed to survive the harsh conditions afterwards by living in and harvesting resources from these trees. Fun fact to add, Cheetahs went through a super tight evolutionary bottleneck. All Cheetahs are descendants of a population of probably less than 250. You can transplant tissue from any Cheetah to another without it getting repelled, because they are so close genetically. Cosmology can be disturbing. For instance, I recently learned of dead-end trips. There are some destinations that you shouldn't try for. It's possible to travel so far away from where you started, that the expansion of the universe will exceed the speed you were traveling at. You can't return home, because home is receding faster than you can travel. You can't reach your destination, because it too is receding faster than you can travel. You can no longer get anywhere, only get further away from everything. You cannot reach any destination, even if you travel forever. This is because the universe is constantly expanding, and galaxies, neighborhoods, clusters, etc. are gravity bound. They stick together in distant clumps while other clumps move away. It's kind of like people in cars on a highway. You will remain a constant difference from however many people are in your car, or on your motorcycle, or in your school bus. But you will get further and further away from other vehicles. This means that if you are within a pocket that's bound by gravity, you'll always be an equal distance from everything else. But if you fall out of that car, you're not getting back in it, and you're almost certainly never getting into any other car either. If the human body senses trauma it is unable to combat, it will switch off metabolism, pump endorphins, and slip into a pain-free dissociative state. In essence, shutting down. It's been seen in air crashes and lots of places really. Basically your body can switch itself off. Some prey animals do this when they are caught. That's why they seem so unfazed about being eaten. I'm sure I've read something about rabbits not being likely to survive an encounter with a predator, even if they escape cause their body is just pumped with so much shit they have a heart attack anyway. My dog killed my bunny without even touching it. Got in his room one day and the cage was still closed but it was laying there, I imagine it barked at it and just set its little heart off. The average person walks past at least 16 murderers in their lifetime. It's even more scary that there are thousands of serial killers out there at any one given time, who often just blend in with the rest of society and live normal lives. Many will never be caught. When you look at serial killers, what's chilling is when you realize that many of them who are caught off and want to be caught, or go for decades before finally ending up getting caught. And those are just the ones who do get caught. Someone who really just wanted to go around killing, and who was organized and rational, you'd never find them. I suffer from PTSD from working in conflict zones. When you're continuously working in these regions, your body pushes past the pain and difficulties you encounter. It modifies your life to always expect danger and as such it normalizes what you see to cope. But what really hurts, is when you come home. The switch your brain makes from survival cannot be processed buying groceries or taking a gentle walk. It thinks that the changes it made in areas of fighting were permanent and that's why it's so difficult to go back to normal. So basically, when I was abroad, I felt no pain and the scary part is, I felt invincible. Being back home, I'm in a world of mental anguish and feel like a paper house. During the Challenger accident from 1986, whenever the shuttle exploded, the ground crews had the astronauts EKGs and vital scans, after the explosion, the astronauts were still alive. Theory has it that they were cognizant the entire time until they crashed in the ocean. NASA never wanted to admit that the astronauts didn't die in the explosion. But there is a major probability that they were not conscious when they crashed into the ocean. Yet several emergency survival kits were activated by astronauts that were still conscious during the fall. Spontaneous combustion. I watched a strange but true episode about this as a child and was convinced I'd randomly burst into flames one day. I'm over it now but that was my top fear for a long time. Nearly every case happened while the person was drinking and smoking at the same time, which kind of explains it. It happens only to the cool kids. Sometime in the future, if we don't disappear before, humans will probably be able to bioengineer themselves to avoid death by old age. Most probably only the richest people would get this, founding an immortal elite of dynasties that will be able to rule nations by themselves, while common people simply keep dying as always. Now almost everyone thinks of death as something normal and inevitable, as part of our nature. But then, in that hypothetical future, death will be seen like a disease which curates kept away from common people by that ruling elite. There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. Some people have had some strange near-death experiences. Going through websites cataloging them can be a trip. I'm willing to attribute some of them to brain damage and some as legit. Though I'll never be able to tell which is which. Death bed visions give me a warmer sense of security. I can't imagine how peaceful it must be to die and see your deceased loved ones there to ensure you make it safely to the other side. The one that bugs me, was the one about the guy who was last seen in an airport. There's video of him just wigging the fuck out and running away at full speed. They link the surveillance footage and you can see him run all the way off the premises. He was never seen again. There's lots of theories about what happened. None I want to look too far into. If you do, look up the disappearance of Lars Middank. Philosophical zombies. Theory that a good portion of the human race lack conscious experience. If you've ever dissociated or done something and don't recall. Driven home but have no recollection, your brain acting on autopilot. That's what they are like. They do everything required to be human. They ape emotions, go through life. They just lack sentience. Also, I've been told that some people have no inner monologue with themselves. That we have so little data about the deep dark parts of the ocean and don't truly know what lurks there. This also makes me curious about potential mysteries held deep under the ground. But it also scares me. You could meet Mr and Mrs Cthulhu in the Mariana trench, or what if the secret to immortality is down there? There were a lot of incidents that could cause a nuclear apocalypse. In 1960, American early warning system detected several nuclear projectiles flying to the US. However, since the Russian president was visiting the US at the moment, they realized it must be a false alarm. An investigation showed that the system thought that the moon was a projectile. In 1961, American bomber carrying nuclear weaponry crashed in North Carolina. The US said that people shouldn't worry about the bomb going off, but declassified documents show that one of the bombs came dangerously close to detonating, with only two wires preventing the boom. Had it exploded, the radiation could have reached New York. In 1962, US puts bombs in Turkey and USSR does so in Cuba, leading to a international crisis. Soon enough, a Soviet nuclear submarine is spotted near Cuba, and a US ship tries to get it to come out by detonating bombs near it. The captain of the sub-thought this was an attack and ordered his men to fire the nuclear torpedo, but one of the officers got him to stand down and save the world. In 1967, all US communication and early warning devices suddenly died, and they thought this was sabotage from the USSR, which was preparing to launch an attack. They sent out bombers, however, a branch of the military realized that the sun released a powerful solar storm which knocked out the equipment, and the planes were ordered back last moment. In 1980s, American planes would often fly all the way to USSR, and then fly back in order to scare the Russians. Well, in 1983 alarms go off telling Russians that the US launched nuclear missiles, it was up to Stanislav Petrov to launch the counterattack, but he did nothing. Why? Because there were only five projectiles, and he thought that the US would have launched thousands of them. He was right, and it turned out that the sun triggered the alarms. Royal AI likes to clarify that these theories are just that, a hypothesis supported by a collection of facts. These theories are not fact and truth in itself. Feel free to join the speculation and share curiosity in the comment section. Thank you for watching Royal AI. Be sure to subscribe and hit the notification bell to receive future episodes. 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