Glass. Who discovered that if you heat sand really really hot so it melts and then let it cool, you have something that can hold liquids and make windows?
It has been mentioned. But to this day, I am utterly amazed that I created a human. Sure, I had a little help in the beginning, but I gave my daughter everything she needed for a YEAR. She had nothing that was not made by and delivered by me. boom goes my mind every time. Now she’s 3 and I look at her sometimes and am just utterly stunned. I made that.
The wonder of life in general on Earth is rather boggling. How varied, amazing, interesting, improbable and omigod, it is everywhere! I can’t fathom anyone having the gift of life and spending their lives trying to get to the next phase. THIS is the gift. THIS is absolutely the coolest thing, and not only do we get to experience life first hand, we get to understand life in other creatures. We get life AND a brain? This is winning the lotto baby. I’ll take this over puffy clouds and golden streets any day. Really? Something better than the Alps? The Marianas Trench? The Aurora Borealis? Rutabagas? Hippo’s? Bees? C’mon, It Just Can’t Be.
Digital photography.
I always used to dread film photography. I’d jerk the snap. Or I’d frame it wrong. Every film photograph of my wife that I have was taken by someone else because I feared messing it up.
The more crappy photos I’d get back from the developer, the more nervous I got, and the worse the next photos were.
Once digital entered my life, and I could screw up without lasting consequence, I became more relaxed and screwed up less.
I’m trying more types of shots, secure in the knowledge that if it’s a little off, I can correct it on computer before printing,and really the putrid ones can go away instantly.
If you took your DNA and compared it with the DNA of everyone who ever lived or who ever will live, it’s very doubtful it would match any of them.
Then if you compared it with the DNA of every plant or animal that ever lived or ever will live, your DNA would match other people’s more than any other plant or animal.
Plastic
the idea and process of dreaming is pretty spectacular to me. i mean, no one even knows for sure why we sleep in the first place, and then while we do we create these alternate realities that we understand even less - and how some people dream in all kinds of complicated metaphors, and others dream totally straightforward, and some don’t at all. and how reality can interact with someone’s dreaming, and vice versa, and the way sounds and words and sensory experiences evoke dreams, because how can you describe that?
sound is another thing i think about a lot. after studying music and acoustics for so long, i can concentrate on a sound and manipulate it as i hear it, and i’m not just tacking on to it what i want to hear - there are properties of the sound that i can selectively amplify parts of it that other people might not even hear, and i can synthesize everyday sounds and turn them into music, or the other way around… how did we develop organs so finely tuned?
Everything. As soon as I even start thinking about this very topic, it all will eventually boil down to atoms interacting with each other on the atomic level.
When you think about it, we’re just a large number of atoms interacting with each other. Just all one giant mass of differently structured atoms bumping around. That’s weird.
The sun.
I am completely fascinated by the fact that something 93 million miles away from us provides so much heat that we can be uncomfortably warm, and so much light that it hurts our eyes to look directly at it. Not only that, even as far away as it is, it’s light is so powerful that even its reflection off an object that is a quarter of a million miles from Earth is enough to provide illumination at night!
Aluminum. There was a time when it was the most precious metal known to Man. The capstone of the Washington Monument was made out of aluminum, rather than gold or platinum, because it was so valuable. Now, we use it to wrap food in, and once we’ve unwrapped the food, we just throw it away.
What’s more, through a series of cosmic accidents and coincidences, the sun and the moon happen to be approximately the same angular size in our sky, making it possible for the moon to block out the light of the sun as seen from a point on the surface of the earth. Not only that, but we’ve been observing this action for so long and know so much about the behavior of the Earth, sun and moon that we can predict exactly when and where this will occur.
Not that I would say that an eclipse is “perfectly ordinary” as per the OP, but it still kind of blows my mind that the size of sun and moon just happen to match up in such a way.
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The discussion of computers and internet on this thread makes me think of the time I went with my Dad many years ago now to buy a new computer. Our old one had crapped out, and we needed something new - this was about 1999ish, if I recall correctly. I remember looking at the specs on a couple of different models, specifically the hard drive on each, thinking, “10 gigs? Holy cow, what the hell would anyone ever do with 10 gigs of hard drive space?”
This pops into my head every now and then as I fire up my 120 gig iPod.
Funny you mention that - I planted a flat of marigold seeds last weekend, and by now most have sprouted. This afternoon I noticed one sprouted roots up and leaves down. I replanted it, but have no idea what will happen with such a genetic freak.
That reminds me I recently reflected that a few years earlier I did some contract work for a startup company doing heavy r and d on disk drive capacity. It was called “terabyte” and they aimed to make a disk drive that held 1 terabyte of information , when most drives were maybe 20GB.
As I recall, something like 100 million dollars had been invested by VC funds to that point, I guess the execs had a history in the disk industry.
I don’t know whatever became of the company or its IP, but I note I can buy such drives retail for under 100 dollars now, and I don’t even have to open up my PC to install them, just plug in a USB cable.
For those keeping score, that is a ~50x increase in capacity for probably 1/3x the price in 10 years or so. 100GB (5x original capapicity) increase per year, year after year? That makes me go wow!
CPUs are probably the same, too over the same period of times.
Hello Moore’s law! I drink to thee!
I still love the whole world! 
Boom dee adda, boom dee adda…
You fiend!
Just another one that I’d like to add to the list: the way some creatures perform amazing metamorphosis tricks. Take a simple example we all know about: the caterpillar that transforms itself into a butterfly. How incredible and amazing is that?
It’s ‘ordinary’ in the sense that it’s something we all know about and it happens billions of times every year all over the world… yet it is utterly amazing. What’s more, none of us has even seen exactly how this is achieved. It all takes place locked inside a cocoon. Even with all the amazing advances in micro-photography, time-lapse photography and so on, it’s something that they can only film from the outside (at least AFAIK).
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Woah! What kind of watch is that?
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Others have said it, but: Life. It is amazing. Take a tree. When is it alive and when is it just wood? Can we tell when it dies - or just see the results? Life is amazing and complex and we don’t really understand it, but it is so common. And also so uncommon. To the best our knowledge, it has only happened on one planet. (But maybe not…)
Our brain. I was flipping channels and caught a movie that I had seen 30 years ago. Just a flash of the movie, as it cut to commercial. And our amazing brain can take that one second of a movie, out of 100s or 1000s of movies that I have seen and spot it right away. Just incredible.