Tell me about small things most people don’t even give a second thought to that kind of blows your mind.
Me:
Pets. I mean, I’ve got NON-human fur balls cohabitating with me in my home. Not only that, I treat and care for them as if they were family.
Friends vs online friends: Real friends tend to be of the same feather more or less. Online friends can be from a wide array of demographics. Doctors, Farmers, stay at home parents, etc…
I’m routinely amazed at the level of energy that our civilization works with routinely. I mean, you can plug stuff into the wall and draw 20 amps @ 110 volts on a whole bunch of plugs at once. And a little generator only kicks out enough to maybe do that for one or two plugs, and only for 3-4 hours at a time. But the power company generates enough to keep everyone able to do that all the time.
Or for that matter, just how powerful things like cars or power tools are. I mean, go ride a bike up and down some hills and you realize just how much oomph it takes. And your car just chugs up those hills like they’re barely there. Same thing with drilling with say… a circular saw. Pull the trigger, and ZIP- right through the board in a second or two. Then get your hand saw out and cut that same board. Takes a LOT longer than two seconds, and a lot more effort to boot.
Everyone, for one split second, was once the youngest person on the planet.
The human brain named itself.
Just how immense the population of 8 billion people is.
Sometimes I’m kind of blown away by the concept of writing. A bunch of folks decide to agree that one grouping of lines and curves means one thing, another grouping means something entirely different, and suddenly we’re communicating our little butts off.
That’s a good one. When I first watched Star Trek First Contact, and the scene where the Borg take over Earth, one of the bridge officers said: “Detecting 9 billion Borg” I was like: “Whoa! That’s a LOT of Borg!”
And look at us now, just a billion shy of that.
My mind is blown that there are millions of people who refuse to take a vaccine that has been proven beyond question to reduce or completely eliminate the chance of dying from a particular virus. Can you imagine something like that happening when they released the Salk Polio Vaccine in 1955? We are clearly so much smarter now than we were 67 years ago.
1 in 3 humans have never used the internet. cite
1 in 3 humans do not have access to safe drinking water. cite
~Max
The last day of your life will be like any other day, only shorter.
(Hat tip: Samuel Beckett)
Every so often I look around me and realize that for the overwhelming hundreds of thousands of years since we were first a sentient species, we lived in a way not massively different from how other animals lived — yeah, more adept at using tools, but where basically you could figure out how we did things if you watched for a little while. Then all of a sudden, techno-magic. Electricity, cars, computers, rockets to the moon, and the majority of people employed at tasks that our ancestors would find incomprehensible, living our lives in a fashion and towards a purpose that would be equally impossible to understand just from watching. And one (by the way) in which most of us living it don’t understand more than a superficial skin’s worth of how things work or why things are set up the way they are.
We are living in our ancestors’ legendary tales (not all of them good tales, mind you).
Not necessarily, it could be very different from other days, like in a hospital.
And if you were born late at night your first day could be the shortest.
~Max
All of us-- You, me, the furballs that cohabit with you, your house itself, all of it is just a bunch of quarks and leptons all interacting with each other through some rules so simple you could write all of them legibly on a single piece of paper. And somehow, those interacting quarks and leptons give rise to things like a bunch of those particles at the rear end of your furball wagging when the particles at the furball’s front end are happy to see you.
I do the same. Especially if I’m out in the country where there are little signs of modern technology. It’s like wow, we went from pounding rocks together, then somehow making more complex tools, to eventually making the integrated circuit.
The difference between one million and one billion.
I may have read this on the Dope:
If you were able to count non-stop, it would take you 11 days to count to a million.
Counting to a billion would take about 30 years..
mmm
When watching a TV show, the number of people involved in getting it to your screen - not just the ones in the credits, but the TV engineers, satellite/cable/etc engineers, TV commissioners, schedulers, subtitlers, audio describers, compliance checkers, the people who write the descriptions for the listings, the people who do the coding for the listings, the people who do the technical sides of the streaming services, accountants making sure everyone gets paid, loads more I’m forgetting…
All so we can watch stuff that is often as mundane as a home decorating show.
We are all made of star-stuff.
We are all standing on a rotating ball. I never really got it until I took an astronomy class and had to spend a night on a rooftop tracking the movement of the stars. Realizing that we are slowly moving through space at all times makes me slightly dizzy.
Copper miners, smelters, factory workers to produce the wire.
Oil well workers, refinery workers, factory workers to produce the plastic.
Sailors and truckers to transport everything.
Farmers to feed them all.
I have occasionally contemplated starting a thread asking “What is the minimum world population needed to support the internet?”
Drifting through time and space
on the face of a
little blue ball falling around the sun.
One in a million, billion twinkling lights
shining out for no one
in the middle of the night.
.
ps: Ummm, we’re moving incredibly swiftly through space…
Around 60 percent of the world’s population — 4.5 billion people — either have no toilet at home or one that doesn’t safely manage human waste. Nearly 900 million people still practice open defecation.
Many aspects of most developed, urban society. Things like the ease of turning on a faucet and having clean water come out. Or reliable trash pick-up - just put the cans at the curb and it goes away.
Just having a device as powerful as a cellphone in my pocket periodically gets my attention.