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.
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.
The fact the internet actually works at all is nuts.
It works in the same way the economy works: a weird mutual trust between all parties involved, until some asshats tried to fuck people, and then we had to create authorities to validate all transactions to mitigate the asshats, but now those authorities are becoming asshats themselves.
Market economies have authority from the very beginning. You have to take land and resources away from people communally using them, and then keep them from using them again with soldiers or police.
Surely bartering is authority independent? I do agree that without initial regulation, some asshats come and bully themselves into power to increase their trading ability, but I’d say that says more about humans than about markets
Yes I agree bartering is mostly as you describe. I only want to point out that economies are not only bartering, and that no one should ignore the authoritarian nature of how a “market economy” is formed and maintained.
Barter was very rare in pre market economies. People weren’t trading potatoes for furniture.
You would barter with people you never expected to see again. People you lived with you would owe them one.
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.
Penicillin / antibiotics comes to mind. As well as vaccines. “Oh you’re body is being taken over by millions of microscopic organisms? Take this pill and it will go away. Maybe take this shot too so it won’t happen in the first place.”
And of course computers + the internet were a pretty big boom too.
Healing is pretty neat.
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.
Just being “alive.” We become alive, some sort of “spark of life” pulses through us, and at some point, that “spark” leaves us, and we are nothing more than a rock. What is that “spark?”
Everything is either animate of inanimate, so how did things become animate? At some point, something had to get that “spark,” and become alive, then spread that life around. How did/does that happen?
Is this “spark” unique to Earth, or is is possible to exist elsewhere? Did some nearly impossible combination of factors all happen to line up and cause “life” to emerge, like a room full of monkeys randomly typing Hamlet, or do those factors exist in other places?
Of course, many people would assign a religious explanation to that “spark,” our Soul or whatever, but that’s just making up a silly story to explain something we don’t understand.
Microprocessor manufacturing. Just think about it: we invent a device called the transistor. We’re making them one by one and using them to make computers. And then, we just find the way to cram more and more of those devices in tiny, dirt cheap slabs of silicon that are literal computers by themselves. In 2021, a typical processor contained 60 billion transistors.
In the first Iron Man comic, Tony Stark says that the secret of his power is ‘transistors.’ The arc reactor came much later.
literally this. where are you from? chances are i live in the other side of the planet, but here we are. hi!
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.
[off topic?]
I love this show. A historian looks at how one change can spread out and affect many different things.
Urinating. Christ, there’s no greater feeling of having a pee when you need to.
I know a lot of you are thinking about orgasm, but the thing is that’s more of a luxury than an urgent need. You can live your life without, and not really feel you need to.
Also, water. How fucking great and refreshing is a glass of water.
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.
Ball bearings
Air travel! I understand the physics involved in flight, but another part of me just watches these huge planes flying over (Airbus A380 is absolutely massive oh my gosh) and wondering how such a big and heavy thing can fly so high and so fast. I’ll never get used to flying and I do mean that in the best way possible. It’ll always amaze me that at any given moment there are millions of people flying high in the sky!
