I personally find such philosophical ruminations fairly useless, or at least, unenlightening. The physical reality is that if the laws of physics were slightly different, so that for instance there was no gravity to coalesce primordial hydrogen into the first stars, and if such coalescence did not heat up the core to ignite nuclear fusion, then the universe would be dark and lifeless, and we would not be here to observe and remark on it. But far beyond that, even if all those things happened, we would still not be here were it not for the production of heavier elements through these processes, and their distribution through the fact that larger stars end their lives in massively energetic explosions.
If one wants to invoke divine powers, fine, but credit them with making the laws of physics the way they are and letting nature take its course. Which is just a variant of at least the weak anthropic principle.
When astronomers looks at a galaxy that is 8 billion light years away it took 8 billions years for that light to reach Earth so he is seeing the galaxy as it was 8 billion years ago
In the words of a comedian I’ve forgotten: “You know it had to be after the discovery of metal, because there are just some things I can’t see doing with a rock.”
When I was six years old, it blew my mind that the image on our TV was transmitted by invisible waves. I didn’t understand how it was possible. I remember asking some adults how it worked. They also didn’t know. Today I understand how it’s done, yet it still amazes me.
Every time I see a plane take off, I am thoroughly amazed. Tons of aluminum lifted into the sky. It just seems like it would be an impossible thing to do.
Thousands and thousands of cars driving around a city, yet there are so few accidents.
What blows my mind is that the cat has a reflective layer behind his retina, which bounces the light back through the retina. Your cat actually sees everything twice. And that’s why cat’s eyes seem to glow.
I remember when it was a really big deal to send ANYTHING up into space.
Before I respond, I hope it’s clear that my continuing to debate this mundane point is not meant to be serious, and is more just to highlight how differently our brains work. The statement “we are all made of star stuff” could also be rephrased as “everything is made of star stuff”. But the author chooses to use “we”, presumably to distinguish us humans from a rock laying on my sidewalk. To me, the astonishing part of “we are all made of star stuff” is not that the elements in our bodies came from exploding stars, but rather, these elements in our bodies are configured in a such a way that we can understand the concept itself.
That wouldn’t be true, though. The stars themselves are (mostly) not made of star-stuff. They’re made of Big-Bang-stuff.
It still seems like you’re conflating two independent ideas. One, that we’re made of the same kinds of materials as stars (true, and fairly mundane). And two, that the materials you’re made of were partly forged in a supernova (a supernova is anything but mundane!).
Carl Sagan was a materialist and didn’t ascribe any special credence to humans vs. rocks. But he was also poetic, and for most it hits harder to know that the principle applies to our own bodies. Not just in hand-waving fashion, either–we have a very good idea of what processes contributed to our elemental composition.
Similarly, it is one thing for me to accept in the abstract the proposition that air is a fluid, like water, but mind-blowing to be on a plane as it banks to turn towards the runway, and feel the plane surfing on the air, plowing through it and being held up by it and cutting through it the way a motorboat goes through the water.
Definitely this. And the incredible price difference between purchasing them in a small box at the hardware store - and purchasing them in pallet loads for production. It used to be about a 10:1 ratio.
P.S. Someone thought about this type of thing and actually set out to make a toaster from scratch. See the book The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites
So, let’s make something as big as a building, that weighs tons. But if it’s shaped kinda like this (really, there is a lot of variation), and we make move kinda fast - not so fast that you can’t see it, y’know - it’ll fly through the air!
Um, Mr. Wright, how many cocktails have you had this evening?
Not sure where I heard someone say this–possibly here.
It’s something we take for granted, if not necessarily obscure or mundane:
I carry in my pocket a magic device that has the ability of summoning a team of highly trained professionals to my aid within minutes to save me from whatever horrible thing is happening, providing perfect location information to them, and possibly calling them all on its own.
In my home state of New Jersey, with dense infrastructure and good cellular coverage, this time could be just a few minutes.
That’s super cool.
(Of course, in a remote part of Wyoming things might be different).
I think about this a lot. We all know the people that are famous for inventing things like the lightbulb, the telephone, radio, etc. But I always wonder who came up with the machinery that makes say M&Ms? Or the person that invented the machinery that bottles, caps and labels orange juice? It’s really mind-boggling.
It also boggles my mind how we know how to speak. How the words just come out of our mouths (of course some people need to think before they speak!) and we can string sentences together with the proper words (usually!).
The universe is super empty to begin with, with enormously huge distances between actual physical objects like stars and planets. In addition to that, the physical objects themselves are almost entirely empty space.
And when you understand that design, it puts you in the mind of the designer.
I needed to make some home-made bed rails for my first truck many years ago. There were stake holes in the bed of the truck that fit a 2x3 board. I initially was going to make the cross piece out of a 2x4, but decided that would be too heavy and awkward to install by myself, so used a 1x4 instead. Once I got it all installed, I realized that the inside edge of my cross piece was exactly plumb with the inside edge of the rail of the truck bed.
Someone, way back when they were deciding exactly where to place the stake holes in the truck must have gone through the same thought process I did, and placed the holes right where they needed to be to make my design work just right.
You say that this is “mundane”, but it’s also kind of mind-blowing. At some point, we realized that the laws that govern the universe are uniform throughout the universe.
So if I can, say, measure the mass of a hydrogen atom here on Earth, I suddenly know the mass of a hydrogen atom on the Moon, Jupiter, the Sun, and anywhere else you can name.
It’s like Newton’s law of universal gravitation. His big reveal wasn’t that gravity made apples fall out of trees, it was that the force that makes apples fall is the same force that makes planets orbit. So if we can understand gravity here, we understand it everywhere.