Internet, Singer Prove There Are No Dumb Questions

We can probably just turn off the internet now. BuzzFeed reports the singer behind a ridiculous eight-year-old pop song just answered an equally ridiculous three-week-old Twitter question and is now going viral, spawning ridiculous write-ups like this one. On his 2009 hit "Fireflies," Owl City (aka Adam Young) sang that he got "1,000 hugs from 10,000 lightning bugs." Twitter user pryce was confused if that meant Young got 1,000 hugs per lightning bug for a total of 10 million individual bug hugs, or if only 1,000 of the 10,000 lightning bugs actually hugged him. Fortunately for all of us, Young cleared everything up Tuesday in a Facebook post.

While the average person wouldn't think "10,000 lightning bugs, acting as a collective group, are capable of embracing a human being 1,000 times," that's exactly what happened, Young writes. He says the "swarm" of lightning bugs delivered a mass "hug" 1,000 times. "The scientific community may be tempted to cast doubt upon the possibility of this exchange due to the immobility of the prothorax and pterothorax, in addition to the elytra protruding outward while a firefly is engaged in mid-flight," Young continues. "However, I can testify to the accuracy of this exchange." But the Verge—citing a 1928 study, a senior scientist at the Entomology Research Museum, and leading research on human and insect consciousness—reaches a different conclusion: "The song still makes no sense." (More Owl City stories.)