I’m amazed that we can actually fly. Whenever I take a jet somewhere, it feels so wrong.
Reading. I run my eyes along rows of arbitrary shapes, printed on paper or displayed on a computer screen, and ideas instantly form in my brain. Images, events, opinions of people I’ve never met, completely abstract concepts, anything that can be imagined or conveyed by words, becomes a part of my consciousness, encoded by a handful of symbols that have no concrete meaning of their own.
I do this for hours on end, and I almost never even think about what I’m doing, or how it’s happening.
Sound, and hearing in general. Through something as simple as a fine layer of, well, meat, you and I can decode hundreds of layers of meaning from compressed air. That single layer of meat can tell me where the vibrations come from, if there are things in the way, what is producing it, over miles.
That, and the fact that with another bit of meat, we can vibrate and compress the air so that it becomes almost any sound. A shriek, a laugh, a Bon Jovi song, a Feynman symposium carrying oodles of complex information, a raspberry. And it’s all clever use of air.
History. There’s just so much of it. Sure, we keep track of the big stuff, but who here can name a fashion fad from Bulgaria circa 1830s? No one. Or who the mayor of a town was? But you know they surely had one. And they surely knew all about it. To them, it was “common knowledge”.
I’m amazed by the sheer amount of forgotten information and things we’ll never know that used to be extrememly important and widely known to a group of people somewhere.
Legs and feet. We can invent the wheel and machines like cars, motorcycles and bicycles, but if you want to get up and down mountains and cross rugged terrain or desert, then legs and feet are what you need (also hooves).
Eyes. They are incredibly complicated in so many ways, but even in ways you don’t htink about. Like when you move your head to see something in a different place, your eyes momentarily go blind so as not to get a blurring effect that would cause headache and dizziness.
I can do what you describe quite easily and have to be going very, very fast to miss.
Life. After spending most of my adult life studying how unbelievably complicated these invisible little microscopic specks are, I can confidently say that if the concept of life doesn’t absolutely blow your mind away, you haven’t thought about it enough.
Consciousness. I sorta get how you can use electronics to make a computer - so we can kinda sorta make something that’s like life - except how do you make it self-aware? How are we more than a bunch of programmed responses?
Public libraries. I can just hang out here all day reading current newspapers and magazines from around the world, using your computer? Here’s an interesting book, too bad I don’t have time to finish it - take it home? As many as I want, just bring 'em back when I’m done?
What’s the membership fee for this club? Nothing??? From San Luis Obispo, California to Inverness, Scotland, just walk in and make myself at home? What kind of business model is that?
What amazes me, is that, hundreds or thousands of years ago, someone figured out how to make bread.
I really want to know how that happened.
I’m right there beside you. And not just bread. Flour.
Everything we eat and cook and enjoy raw off the tree or vine or pull up out of the ground. I often wonder how many people had to die trying other things before we were able to settle on what’s good to eat and what isn’t. I can imagine myself out in the woods or the desert trying first this plant then the other to keep myself alive, wondering which one is going to kill me.
But go to a Farmer’s Market and there must be hundreds of things they’ve decided won’t kill me. It’s worth a small prayer or at least some gratitude.
Seeds. Put them in the ground in any orientation and the roots go down and the leaves go up. How does it know?
The internet. Just about any piece of information is instantly available. I can actually remember doing reports and whatnot in high school, where if the local library didn’t have a book or article or whatever, tough luck and look for another source buddy.
Second the notion of all the stuff flying through the air that only needs the correct electronic gizmo to catch it.
Lots of good suggestions here… language, how our senses work, modern technology, modern cities and so on.
I like it when people point out ‘wonderfulness’ that hadn’t occurred to me before, adding a ‘Wow…’ moment to my day.
A good one is a large supermarket. Think about it. There may be several thousand distinct products on sale. Each one is separately sourced, manufactured, packaged (with the right barcode!), wholesaled, distributed and stacked, with the supply chain possibly involving different countries, hundreds of freight miles, paperwork and deals and contracts and money sloshing around. We just wander in at any time, expecting all our favourite brands and products to be there, without a second thought. And moan though we may about the cost of living, food is really unbelievably inexpensive when you think about all the costs involved in getting that product on to a shelf.
Another one is the fusion of the credit card system and the internet. I go online, tap a few keys, and the next day someone delivers a book. Think about the infrastructure that has to be in place for all that to happen. It’s mind-blowing.
In the natural world there are more wonders than anyone can count, and more than we’ll ever fully understand. Skin is amazing stuff… you cut it, and it heals itself good as new. If you want to be amazed, read up on exactly how that happens. There’s a complex chain of events involving proteins like fibrin and fibrinogen, yet we never give it a thought. And we can’t manufacture anything that has even remotely similar properties.
Spiders webs are also marvellous. Hoe does a baby spider know how to spin a web? We just don’t know. The experts don’t know. The best we can do is hand-wave it away with a shurg and say ‘instinct’, but the fact is, we don’t know. It’s one of nature’s showiest mysteries.
On a slightly more mundane level, there’s a Rubik’s cube on my desk (because I’ve recently had occasion to learn how to solve it). I think this is three hits in one. Amazing that anyone managed to dream it up. Amazing that anyone managed to solve all the problems of how to actually mass-produce it. Amazing that anyone figured out the moves needed to solve it (and that the solution works for any of the 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible permutations).
I’m glad someone else mentioned powered flight. We take it for granted but it still looks to me no different from magic. Jumbo jets are unbelievably massive objects… to see them moving forwards through the sky with ‘nothing holding them up’ is still utterly inexplicable as far as I’m concerned. It’s also amazing that for centuries mankind tried and failed to achieve flight, then we finally cracked the secret and we went from Kittyhawk to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in under 66 years. Less than an average single lifetime.
Computers:
Or rather to be more specific computer videos and video games. The fact that all those little 1’s and 0’s get together and show you a moving image is mind boggling.
Waiting In Line:
I’m convinced that most people have been brainwashed into calmly waiting in line without breaking out in a riot.
Kids Rules:
Who invented the rules kids live by? Why do most kids obey them?
You do pay directly or indirectly through taxes, no? Not that libraries are really cool!
Everything really. Sometimes I’ll just sit around going WOW!
However to be more specific. Being able to move. That I can close my hand is amazing. I just want it to happen and it does.
The fact that I can eat things and have them become parts of me. See that piece of cow, corn, or apple? Well I’m going to stick it in my mouth and it’ll become me. Amazing!
On that note I’m going to point out photosynthesis. If making bits of me from bits of other things seems amazing then photosynthesis seems like fricken magic. The fact that an oak tree comes mostly from sunlight, air, and water blows my mind.
Aesiron, that is a great sentence. If I used a signature I’d be asking to steal that.
Airplanes and consciousness. Especially consciousness, and that fact that it’s a purely physical process. WTF is up with that?
Bear the Nature Nut. Now there’s a guy who’ll eat anything. In one episode he was traipsing through the desert and ate something funky. He was out of water and got a killer attack of diarrhea and had to stop to relieve himself while climbing vertically toward an oasis in 110+ degree heat.
Photography. We can look at our loved one, and put light on a piece of paper and it will look like our loved one forever. And we can see what our ancestors looked like even if they died before we were born.