Baking soda. Taste some of it for a moment, and then realize that somehow our ancestors figured out that if you toss some of that into flour (see previous description of how we got to flour in the first place!) and some buttermilk, that’s a good idea and will result in tasty bread happening. I mean, is that your first intuition upon tasting some baking soda?
Olives. Freaking olives. Hmm, these things growing on this tree are not food. But ya know, I betcha if we took a bunch of these and doused them in lye and salt and leave them for awhile and then rinse the stuff off, they’d turn into something spectacular!
Good point. I try to remind myself to keep it in perspective when my flight is delayed an hour. For my grandparents, the same trip would have taken 3 weeks.
If the order of magnitude of erosion in the Grand Canyon is about a millimeter a year, it’s of the order of a few of million years old. Which turns out to be right (and, incidentally, the same order of magnitude as the time to our common ancestor with the chimp).
The Earth is 1,000 times older. There has been enough time to erode out the Grand Canyon and then erode it back down to a flat plain again 1,000 times over.
It’s funny, but geological time just never seemed that long to me. I’m more than a billion seconds old, so I have some grasp of what a billion is. A year is quite a bit longer than a second, but I have a grasp of that multiplier too, so a billion years seems pretty intuitive to me. It’s long, but it’s not really long.
The future history of the universe, with timescales that have to be written in scientific notation, or even stacked exponentials… now that’s long.
That reminds me of something one of my professors said in one of my very first engineering classes my freshman year of college. The gist of it was that a 10,000 volt electrical wire is not dangerous in and of itself. Putting that 10,000 volt wire someplace where humans can easily come into contact with it is what’s dangerous.
Lasers are classified based on this idea. You might be aware that lasers can be “class 1”, “class 2”, etc., with the higher numbers being more dangerous. Although power levels come into play, what’s more important is how the beam is exposed. A DVD burner contains a laser that could easily blind you, but because it is fully contained, with various safeties, it is a class 1 device (completely safe). A simple red laser pointer (far less powerful, but with exposed beam) is class 2.
It’s well known that tidal forces are slowing down the earth’s rotation, and that some of this energy is being transferred to the moon, sending it into a higher orbit. It’s not always fully appreciated how incredibly slow this process is. In 50,000 years, the day will be longer by just one second. It will take 3 million years to become one minute longer, and 180 million years to add an hour. It will take 600 million years to send the moon so far away that total solar eclipses will no longer be possible.
In 2.8 billion years, the earth’s average surface temperature will reach 420 K, or nearly 300°F, due to the rising luminosity of the sun, long before it becomes a red giant. All life on earth will have perished by this time.
10^{10^{50}} years: possibly long enough for a Boltzmann brain to briefly appear in the vacuum via a spontaneous entropy decrease.
24,000 years: The Chernobyl Exclusion zone is safe again.
25,000 years: The Aricebo message will have reached its destination at Messier 13. If there is a reply, we’ll be waiting another 25,000 years for it.
2 million years: Pioneer 10 will reach the star Aldebaran.
8 million years: Interstellar erosion will have destroyed the etching on Pioneer 10’s plaque.
September 14, 30828: The 64-bit Windows clock will overflow.
I can’t recall what book or story it was from, but some alien civilization ended up avoiding going to Earth because Earth must have super powerful computers to control all of the vehicles on the roads with so few accidents. It made me think of drivers as distributed computing all running in parallel.
I think it’s amazing that someone, at some time, will be just looking at Orion and see a supernova in progress when Betelgeuse explodes. I want to be that person.
It’s not distributed computing, which implies some type of networked communication and collaboration protocols. It’s totally independent, autonomous computing. Each autonomous unit is also goal-oriented with respect largely to only its own individual self-serving goals. It’s amazing that it works as well as it does, and it’s mostly only because individual goals share a lot in common with communal goals (e.g.- avoiding accidents).
The common, ordinary, everyday house cat fascinates me.
The cat’s whiskers help it find things, or avoid things. Its eyesight is attuned to sudden movement, and its sense of smell helps it to find its food. It instinctively knows how to use a litter box. It instinctively knows how to gut and devour small prey. It can learn its name, and will respond–but only if it feels like responding is in its interest, thus showing some form of reasoning. A healthy adult cat can jump up three feet, easily, without going through the gyrations that human high-jumpers do; and it can self-right in midair so it lands on its feet. Cats can purr, and we still don’t know how.
They may be house cats, and we may give them the best of lives, but they always know that they are cats, and that they have so many “superpowers” compared to us.
One curious instinct that I just noticed in my kitten: knowing how to clean the back of its head. A cat is flexible enough to lick almost any part of their body, but the back of their head is inaccessible. So instead, they moisten the side of their paw with their tongue and then rub the paw on their head. It’s not as good as a full cleaning, but it’s better than nothing. I’ve seen many cats do this. It seems to be innate.
Their physical agility is amazing. I have a large cat tower with levels 2 feet apart. They’re all the same size, and have cutouts to make it easy to move between levels. My kitten does not use the cutouts when climbing. Instead, he climbs on the outside, pulling himself up and over the lip of each level, and putting himself into position to spring to the next level. He’ll climb 3 levels in under a second with no hesitation or apparent effort.
Your average multi-story building seems to me like some sort of miracle. Think of all the accumulated engineering knowledge needed, not only to raise all that building material and put it securely into place but to equip it with so many complex systems – electricity, plumbing, heating/air conditioning…
Also, if you went back in time before the Internet and described Google to someone, it would sound absolutely supernatural. You type a few words on a screen, and instantly you have access to hundreds of thousands of written sources with those words?
Public libraries. Just show them an ID with your name and address, and they give you a card. Walk among the shelves, take down any book or DVD or CD that strikes your fancy. Take them to the front and show them the card. They’ll tell you when to bring them back and let you walk out with all of them, no charge. Or if you’d rather, you can just sit and read one of a number of newspapers and magazines, for as long as you want, until closing time.
We all just decided that this was a worthwhile thing in our town and we all pitch in to make it happen.
(This isn’t even counting computers, meeting spaces, programs for kids and adults, movie nights, etc. Some even have coffee shops - although they limit where you can take them.)
I’ve read this many times before, and but always think to myself “Well, what else could we possibly be made of?” Then it doesn’t seem to be as amazing.
- YouTube