XKCD sums up the miracle of your body continuing to function at all:
Here’s an interesting diagram showing the origin of various elements in our bodies.
The article it came from is interesting, too, and goes into more detail.
I’ve been on that bike tour, at sunrise. Lots of fun, followed by an amazing breakfast.
My Wife and I are doing that in about two months. They also have that in the county I live. It can be problematic though, a lot of these people don’t know how to ride very well. They sent my Wife to the hospital once.
In Jamaica you can rent a bicycle that gets loaded onto a school bus. They drive you up into the Blue Mountains and you ride back down.
Seeds. Plant a tomato seed, a little flake of material and in only a few months of the right conditions you get a plant that will cover a fence several feet high and produce POUNDS of tomatoes.
If you’re willing to wait a bit longer - plant an maple tree seed, and acorn, a pine tree seed…
Sequoia seeds are pretty damn small. If we calculate the ratio of mature plant mass to seed mass, I bet sequoias are near the top of the heap.
Social Media.
You gauge your self-worth upon the Likes of Followers… most of whom you will never meet in person.
You put yourself on display to the world in the form of Blogs or Tweets or Tik-Tok videos…all for a few lines of approval from somebody who is nothing but a Screen-name and an Avatar.
That instant gratification from the positive feedback on your mobile device? That jolt of endorphins are the same when drinking or smoking…
…but it is legal for a CHILD to have a Smart Phone.
You think it ISN’T an addiction when every other person you see is utterly consumed, staring at that little screen they’re holding in their hands?
There is a virtually unbroken link of paved roadway between my house and the White House or virtually anywhere in North America that’s on a paved road- and maybe 150 years ago there wasn’t a paved road anywhere.
At lower high speeds the matter disappears from sight but is no less solid. Does this no longer apply at ultrahigh speeds? Serious question, no snark.
Locomotives. It stuns me to think how powerful locomotives have become. It seems to me a single loco can speedily haul loads that would require a significant chunk of a city’s human population to move an inch. And yet these beasts of power zip around innocuously in the background as if they were mere mass-produced equipment and not the true technological marvels that they are.
The same can be said of airplanes. Every time I get into one, I wonder how these humongous beasts were tested and certified - testing web pages is complicated enough!
Or you could go this way:
“Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo—which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon