SortStack #1642 — 2030-12-07

By duration · Order from shortest to longest.

1. Yuri Gagarin's entire Vostok 1 spaceflight 108 min

   The first human spaceflight was a single orbit — and Gagarin ejected and parachuted down separately from his capsule, landing in a potato field.

2. Alcock and Brown's first nonstop transatlantic flight 16 h

   The 1919 crossing ended nose-first in an Irish bog they mistook for a meadow. Brown had climbed onto the wings mid-flight to chip off ice.

3. One full rotation of Earth on its axis 23.9 h

   A true rotation takes 23 hours 56 minutes — the extra 4 minutes of our day come from Earth also moving along its orbit and needing to catch up to the Sun.

4. Charles Lindbergh's solo flight from New York to Paris 33.5 h

   Lindbergh went without sleep so long he reported hallucinating ghostly figures in the cockpit somewhere over the Atlantic.

5. The First World War 4.3 years

   The armistice was signed at dawn but set for 11 am — nearly 2,700 men died in those final six hours, the last just one minute before peace.

6. The age of the oldest known figurative cave painting (Sulawesi) 51.1K years

   The Indonesian rock art depicts wild pigs and human-like figures — painted tens of thousands of years before Lascaux's famous bulls.

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