I’ve mentioned before my daydream of plucking someone from, say, the beginning of the industrial revolution and bringing them to the modern era. Show them a Cessna up close, let them watch it take off and fly around. That’s pretty damn cool, people have figured out how to make a flying machine.
Now have them watch an F-18 Super Hornet do a demo. Incomprehensibly loud, startlingly fast, and violently maneuverable.
The Super Hornet and the Cessna both exist to his eyes on an accessible scale: he can walk around them, touch all the parts of it, see where the operator sits. There’s room on board for the pilot, maybe a passenger/instructor, not much else. But now we show him a 747. It’s so much larger that it beggars belief. It takes him several minutes to walk around its perimeter, and most of it is so high as to be out of reach. He watches it roll down the runway, and against all reason it somehow takes to the air. What can we do with it? We can usher 450+ people on board with their luggage, and ferry them a quarter of the way around the planet in about 12 hours, serving them hot food and beverages in air conditioned comfort while they watch movies to pass the time. And it’s affordable: no need for for the average worker to commit to indentured servitude to secure passage.
Some years ago political commentator Bill Whittle wrote an essay in which he compared the pyramids of ancient Egypt to a modern 7-11. The pyramids didn’t hold up so well. If you want to read it, click here, do a search for the word “exercise”, and start reading there.
The idea that we’re made of star-stuff has been expressed upthread. Backing away from that concept just a bit, I’m sometimes kind of awed to think about the fact that everything we’ve ever made - 747s, self-driving cars, non-stick cookware, terabyte hard drives, skyscrapers, and so on - is made from stuff we dug up out of the ground. It’s all just so much rock and dirt, sifted, refined and processed into the not-so-raw materials we use to make all of these things.
The way I keep this from being blowing my mind is to not really count space with a strong electro-magnetic field as “empty space”. Such strong field is indistinguishable from a solid object and I don’t worry about falling through such fields.
You’re listening to some instrumental music, and it’s making you feel happy. Or sad. Or agitated. Or romantic. Music that doesn’t have lyrics to tell you how to feel, how does it make you feel ANYTHING? It’s not just a matter of major or minor keys, or tempo. What is it about music that evokes emotions in us?
I think it was in “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” that a cameo role was played by Mel Brooks, who was a traveling…guy who does circumcisions (I forget the term). He had a placard displayed that said
You’ll find that I made precisely the same argument in post 96, and even used the same example of Newton . I was mostly trying to be agreeable there to move on to the real point I was making.
So yes, I agree that it’s not actually that mundane that we’re made of the same materials and subject to the same laws as the rest of the universe. Especially since the universe is so damn big, and science has gone through many rounds of the universe getting vastly bigger than we previously took it for. One still wonders whether, if you go far enough out (in space or time), the laws do eventually change.
Not the book you mentioned, but there’s one called Fata Morgana that tells the story of a WWII B-17 bomber crew who are suddenly transported to another universe/time. They arrive in a much advanced civilization in the middle of another conflict.
Spoilered, in case someone’s reading it
They end up in a battle with a super advanced AI driven robotic aircraft and essentially, whip their butts. All the weaponry in this advanced age is cyber warfare, and the goal is interrupting control computers in opposing battlebots. They are powerless against an aircraft controlled by biological humans moving levers and cables – and have almost no defense against chemically driven projectiles. At one point, they view the B-17 as a superior advanced weapon.
The obscure aspect of this for me is how tightly coupled we are to our own time and environment. Most of us would not survive long if transported even a few generations in either direction. Microbes, immunities, and our learned skills would simply be useless very far out of our time.
I know a woman who wanted to collect a million for charity. I did the calculation and advised her that even though she had an F-150 she better figure on making multiple trips.
I guess it’s mundane now but email still blows my mind. I used to correspond a lot and I was always looking for a stamp, an envelope, etc. Now it’s delivered when I send it, the person can get back to me much more quickly, etc.
And not that I’ve ever eaten them, but some of the weird foods out there that are edible due to preparation. For example:
Pokeweed is always eaten cooked. In fact, raw poke can make you sick or even kill you. It’s especially dangerous for children and older folks.
Boil, drain, boil drain, boil drain…did we bury a few taste testers along the way?
Think of a rapidly spinning propeller. A stick looking and acting like a disc.
“Matter is nothing more than the shape of energy.”
(can’t remember who said this"
I was going to contribute to this thread by trying to write something witty about microscopes and telescopes and our insistence on looking out and looking in, and then I saw some of the posts upthread and, in particular, the video @superwombat posted, and now I think I’ll just shut up.
Instead, I’ll mention our touch receptors. When washing your hands, you can tell if there’s a greasy spot you missed. If there’s an ant crawling on you, you’ll know exactly where it is. Not impressed? How about this?
I talked with my parents last night on Zoom. For no additional cost besides my normal internet fee. Not only could I hear them, I could also see them.
When I was a child, we would get message tapes from my grandparents. It tooks weeks between tapes, and then there would be letters as well.
In the days when long-distance telephone calls were expensive and often very low quality, three-inch or smaller reels of triple-play or even thinner tape were used for sending long recorded messages by post, most often using 1 7⁄8-ips tape speed. These were known as message tapes.
On the other side, when my parents cleaned out a closet, they found one of the old message tapes and had it digitized. I can listen to my great grandparents talking along with their turkeys.
Apologies if anyone has pointed this out but until about 200 years ago, basically all work relied on muscle power, or water or wind power. And then the Industrial Revolution started, particularly the introduction of the steam engine, and everything changed. Similarly, basically all lighting and heat relied on burning something until something less than 200 years ago. So in the past 200 years, these things changed after having remained essentially the same for the entirety of human existence.
I’m guessing most homes still burn something for heat, at least in the U.S. It’s just a much safer and more efficient system vs. a fireplace.
And of course, a lot of our lighting still comes from burning something. But instead of it being burned in individual homes, it is being burned in a central location.
Weaving. Or really, the whole process of making vegetation wearable.
So you get a plant, right? And then you strip fibres from it somehow or other, but they’re not very long, so you fiddle with them until they form into like, really long strings - but like, really long, because you can’t just wrap string around you so then what you’re going to do is take those strings and set them up in some sort of arrangement so that you can pass one string at right angles under and over the other and if you keep doing that for absolutely ages (I said you need really long strings) then suddenly instead of these 1-dimensional strings you have 2-dimensional cloth doesn’t fall apart even when you start cutting it into the shapes you want.
I’m looking at the rather fetching blue chedked shirt I’m wearing, and I can’t quite fathom how it came into existence.
I can understand early humans skinning animals to get fabric. That’s kind of obvious. And I can understand using plant fibres for string and rope. But what appears to me to be the leap to weaving, of suddenly being able to manufacture this flexible, reasonably durable, malleable material just from an elaborate game of cat’s cradle is baffling.
