SortStack #1691 — 2031-01-25

By duration · Order from shortest to longest.

1. A car airbag inflating after a crash 30 ms

   The bag must fully inflate before your head arrives — roughly ten times faster than the blink of an eye, driven by a controlled chemical explosion.

2. The Wright brothers' first powered flight 12 sec

   The 1903 flight covered just 36.5 metres — shorter than the wingspan of a Boeing 747. Within 66 years, humans were on the Moon.

3. An episode of The Simpsons, without adverts 22 min

   The Simpsons is the longest-running scripted primetime series in US history — Bart has been ten years old for over three and a half decades.

4. NASA's Perseverance rover travelling from Earth to Mars 203 days

   The 480-million-km cruise ended with the 'seven minutes of terror' landing — and the rover carried a small helicopter, Ingenuity, strapped to its belly.

5. The era of the Crusades, from the first to the fall of Acre 194.9 years

   Nine major crusades spanned 195 years — and the Fourth never reached the Holy Land at all, sacking Christian Constantinople instead.

6. A photon's journey from the Sun's core to its surface 170K years

   Energy ricochets through the dense interior for on the order of 100,000 years — then crosses the void to Earth in barely eight minutes.

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