What’s older than we think?

21. Netflix! I feel like it is only a few years old but it was invented in 1997.

– Thanos_AnusDestroyer

22. Social media. Wealthy ancient Romans had a system where they used slaves as scribes and messengers in order to share gossip and art/poetry and news updates with friends in their social circle.

– VictorBlimpmuscle

23. The sentiment that modern society is degenerate and that the youth are to blame is, IIRC, one of the oldest things we have written down.

That I can remember off the top of my head, Cato the Elder complained that the younger generations were becoming too greek, and Socrates used to complain that the younger generations were ruining their brains by writing instead of memorizing information. There are far older examples, but those are the oldest I remember (maybe Socrates was onto something :p)

– CountPeter

24. The food at the back of your cupboard.

– bonster85

25. Cruise control, power windows, and automatic headlights.

I saw all 3 on a 1955 Cadillac. Oh, and the radio on it had a seek function.

– s14sher

26. Astronomer here! The star HD 140283, also nicknamed the “Methuselah Star,” is about 200 light-years away from us and looks nondescript. However, if we take its composition and compare it to our standard models of stellar evolution for other, better-studied stars, the star’s age pops out as 14.46 ± 0.8 billion years old. Let me remind you, the universe is thought to be about 13.8 billion years old, and we don’t think we got the first stars until maybe 200 million years after that…

Obviously, we do not think the Methuselah star is literally older than the universe when it is more likely that we just don’t understand stellar evolution for stars like it super well. However, it is exciting because it is undoubtedly a very old star, and currently we do not have any observations of what the first stars were like in the universe. (Called Population III stars, it’s thought they were larger than stars are today because there were no metals from stellar fusion to contaminate the hydrogen gas, and they’d thus only live a few million years tops.) As such, it’s very interesting to have a very old star relatively next door to us in the Milky Way! It will be really interesting in the coming years if other very early stars are finally observed to figure out how old they are, and how they compare to this one.

– Andromeda321

27. The first carbonated drink to be sold to the public was invented by Swiss watchmaker and amateur scientist J. J. Schweppe in 1783, who sold his delicious “sparkling water” to thirsty customers in Geneva. In just seven years, he was doing business so fast that he moved the factory to London and introduced a new flavor, sparkling lemon, to stand out from competitors who were trying to imitate his drink.

– DarkSyrupp

28. The use of concrete. Its use goes as far back as the Mayans, but more notably in Egyptian construction as well as in Rome. The Romans had an arguably greater concrete mix than we currently have, but that was never passed down. Eventually the use of concrete fell out of popularity for centuries as we seemingly lost the information needed to create it, as if the recipe was thrown out and nobody wrote it down.

– DanBeecherArt

29. A native American empire nearly a third of the size of the present-day United States existed in the Great Lakes region at the time the old testament of the Bible was thought to be written.

– Truckerontherun

30. Water. That water you’re drinking is as old as the earth.

– Chorb77