I just saw a video of the hundredth woman in space. Honestly just felt so bizzare that there’s humans that have just … left the planet. Thats insane.
Bra, we went to the fucking moon! There is no way to understate that. We fucking won everything.
I’m a super huge fan of water coming out of my faucets that I can drink. I like drinking water, and this just makes it so easy to get water to drink. I do lots of other stuff with water too, like wash things and it makes those things easier too. I wish everybody had clean safe drinking water and faucets to dispense it.
What i’m writing on.
A “smartphone”,
the name we gave to a rectangular rock with billions of mechanisms 10 000 smaller than the width of a hair, capable of aligning by billions of operation per second numbers in such precision that we get the feeling of seeing colors and images and text,
capable of emitting precise electromagnetic waves to transmit “messages” around the world, by a perfectly organised system called internet,
capable of representing 3d scenes, taking pictures, giving its localisation, and entertaining you, keeping millions of book in the palm of your hands,
Such miracle stone that we use to consume brainrot, spy on people, and throw in the trash 2 years later because it, for once, got a flaw.
It is both amazing and horrifying to look at food production worldwide. We have both completely and utterly destroyed food shortage and hunger from a total food perspective, and made a world with the most hunger in human history.
Agriculture is nuts. Put food in the ground, and get more food back later? Cool!
Food preservation is incredible too. A single fish rots pretty fast when it dies, but we figured out a few dozen different ways to eat that fish years after it croaked. In serving sized portions, no less.
Y’all remember the line in Walle where they are amazed at seeds? “You just put it in the ground and it grows a pizza” lol
Most people for most of history worshiped a fertility deity of one sort or another. Some stone age asshole spreading around what is basically nano tech (the seeds), having no idea how it worked, just knowing it was a miracle.
Just a few examples . Through out the year, at least before the abrahamic religions really took off, most people would have participated in at least one fertility ceremony or festival of some sort.
I don’t know if I would say they’ve “left the planet” in low earth orbit. They went to space, but they’re still very much gravitationally bound to earth. If their orbital velocity were to suddenly become zero, they would fall to earth very quickly. The people who went to the moon left the planet.
But to answer your question, the fact that we harnessed electricity to create a communications network that can nearly instantly communicate from anywhere on earth to anywhere else, still amazes me.
apparently our ability to throw things somewhat accurately is impressive
Not just impressive… Like, unique and so OP a group of humans could take out a lion. Large cats are the most OP things on the planet, and at best they can pick off isolated humans…a group of humans with just random rocks can kill anything on land. And we also make things to throw
And this is like our secondary skill - we’re persistence hunters and skilled omnivores first
heheh YEET
Also hand eye coordination. Which is kind of part of what you said, but i’m always amazed how i can push something over while cooking for example and without even thinking my hands just shoot out and grab it midair.
just remember a falling knife has no handle :]
Childbirth. Just the physical volumes involved are impressive, especially with that dummy big head that has to flatten out, but there’s also calculations showing that in the later stages, the mother is actually using energy at the fastest possible rate the human body can sustain for more than a short burst.
On that note, eating. You can just take in certain random things from the environment, and your body can rearrange it partially into more body and partially into energy. No artificial machine I’m aware of can do that.
Living outside of water. Life is a water thing, it started in water and cells are mostly made of water. We can just kind of bring our own supply, and that’s crazy. In a lot of ways your house is more like outer space than the place where we started off, and indeed the human body can tolerate a total vacuum for a bit without damage.
My favourite is language, not even writing, but language itself. We could collectively invent ways to understand each others with codes shared by tens of millions of individuals, living kilometres apart.
And then I also love early astronomy, like being able to approximate Earth’s circumference (or later the time needed to reach Asia by navigating west), based on the shadow lenght at two fairly distant (but still pretty close) places, thanks to that quirky thing some friends of yours invented to divide land called geometry. To say nothing of those demonstrating Earth rotates around the Sun just by looking at star positions during the year.
As for recent things, something pretty cool we take for granted is radio signals. Information getting places without anything moving, just invisible vibrations through space.
Language is an interesting one… It seems like everywhere we look for language, we find it
And not just signaling systems or rudimentary understanding - everyone has a name, there’s animals in the wild that are bilingual across species, and this is symbolic abstract language. There’s animals out there with governmental systems - like crows, they have fucking trials and negotiate territory
Cows negotiating territory is very funny 😁
Would love a documentary about it, if you have any pointers
I don’t know of any documentaries, there’s probably some stuff on YouTube. It is really interesting learning about crow social structures through, we’re looking at it from the outside, but it sure sounds like some form of basic government to me
I read cows at first 🫠
Dope stuff anyway
LMAO XD I thought that was a typo, nah cows are herd based, I don’t think they even truly have territories the same way
But yeah, crows are dope
Healing is pretty neat.
Almost everything.
So much is taken for granted, taking it away is the only way to appreciate it.
One example: refrigeration…so powerful, but so mundane… until it’s gone.
Language is a virus.
https://genius.com/Laurie-anderson-language-is-a-virus-lyrics
Basically our entire daily life would have been absolutely unthinkable for 99.9% of human history. Light and hot showers whenever we want them. Instant communication with the other side of the planet. Thinking machines with the entirety of Human knowledge in our pockets.
Just think about how you would explain your everyday life to someone from 100, 1000 or 10000 years ago.
100 years ago they’d get most of it. 1925 had electricity and running water and luxuries in a lot of places so even more people having it would not be that weird. 1000 though? 10000?? Nah. Especially the parts where I did all this on a tiny portable device to someone I’ve never met but can talk to and interact with.
It would be easy to explain day to day activities. I used my magic rock to send a message to a friend. I used my magic shower to produce hot water, etc.
Literally our metabolic system. You eat materials like minerals that are dead and your body absorbs them and turns those into a part of you.
Harnessing the power of electricity. How in the world do you look at lightning and think: I want have that
Electrical circuits are ridiculous. And it’s just interconnected circuits upon circuits spanning the globe. A device in Montana is physically connected to a device in California through an unbroken (ignoring transformers) series of wires.
The fact that we got materials to move electrons from a hundred miles away to do things like calculate 3d shapes for entertainment is insane.
The other day I had lightning strike super close to my house (about 2 seconds to hear the huge thunder crack). It occurred to me that I didn’t actually know how lightning worked so I looked it up, reminded me that nature is fucking wild. And then, you’re right, we saw that and were like “let’s get it in our house fellas”
You stack different metals on a frog and accidentally discover a new thing. Don’t ask me what he was originally going for, I don’t know.
I always think about the Chunnel, how easy it is to travel between London and Paris when before it would have been boats.