SortStack #2706 — 2033-11-05
By duration · Order from shortest to longest.
- A camera speedlight flash firing at full power 1 ms
At low power settings, flash bursts get even shorter — down to around 1/30,000 of a second, fast enough to freeze a bursting balloon mid-pop.
- A single blink of the human eye 348 ms
We blink around 15-20 times a minute, and the brain edits out the darkness — you're effectively blind for about 10% of your waking hours.
- Sunlight travelling from the Sun's surface to Earth 8.3 min
If the Sun vanished right now, we'd keep seeing it — and orbiting it — for another 8 minutes and 20 seconds before noticing anything.
- 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.
- New Horizons' journey from Earth to Pluto 9.5 years
It left Earth as the fastest spacecraft ever launched — and Pluto was demoted from planet status just seven months into the trip.
- The time since humans invented the wheel 5.5K years
Potter's wheels came before wheels for transport — and the oldest wooden wheel ever found, near Ljubljana, is about 5,150 years old.