When I was in grade school, I repeatedly blew my own mind by trying to reason out why I was there, as opposed to anywhere else in the world. I couldn’t grasp the immense weight of trivia that somehow added up to my presence in that location at that time. The whole Universe had to have worked out just right.
Here’s another sense of scale meditation: Within the last half-century, we’ve gone from even relatively small computers filling rooms and requiring special power supplies to computers of much greater speed and power being etched into a flake of silicon that could reside comfortably on the top of your thumb.
Due to photolithography, modern integrated circuits are Hieronymus machines: The detailed design of the machine is the machine. Software is even more esoteric: It is the power of logos, the sacred Word, made real, and given direct power over physical entities.
We etch something into rock and control it with words. Golems are real and they give us our daily pornography.