SortStack #3567 — 2036-03-15

By duration · Order from shortest to longest.

1. A Venus flytrap snapping shut on a fly 102 ms

   The plant can count: it only snaps after two trigger-hair touches within about 20 seconds, which keeps it from wasting energy on raindrops.

2. 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.

3. The Apollo 13 mission, launch to splashdown 6 days

   After the oxygen tank exploded, the crew used the lunar module as a lifeboat and slingshotted around the Moon — NASA's 'successful failure'.

4. A full-term human pregnancy 280 days

   Only about 4% of babies arrive on their due date — and the classic count starts from before conception even happens.

5. The construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza 20 years

   Herodotus and modern estimates agree on roughly two decades — meaning workers placed a multi-tonne block about every five minutes of daylight.

6. The time since the last woolly mammoths died out 4K years

   A dwarf population survived on Wrangel Island until about 2000 BC — meaning mammoths were alive while the Giza pyramids were already centuries old.

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