SortStack #3406 — 2035-10-06
By duration · Order from shortest to longest.
- A chameleon's tongue reaching its insect prey 72 ms
Small chameleons have the fastest tongues, accelerating at hundreds of g — proportionally the most powerful movement of any reptile, bird, or mammal.
- An average human's reaction to a starting gun 252 ms
Athletics rules treat any sprint start faster than 100 milliseconds as a false start — it's considered humanly impossible to react that quickly.
- Usain Bolt's 100 m world record run 9.6 sec
Bolt ran 9.58 in Berlin 2009, hitting a top speed of 44.7 km/h — faster than the speed limit on many city streets.
- Jeff Bezos' first Blue Origin spaceflight, launch to landing 10.2 min
The 2021 flight carried both the oldest and youngest people to reach space at the time: 82-year-old Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen.
- The Titanic's sinking, from iceberg to going under 2.7 h
The ship's band famously kept playing on deck for most of it — and the iceberg itself had likely calved from a Greenland glacier years earlier.
- 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.