OK, a little more than a century - Australia was apparently connected to the outside world by telegraph as early as 1872.
I still find trees amazing. To look at a gajillion ton giant redwood, and realize that it freakin built itsel from something the size of my thumb, from water,and air and sunlight?
Knitting. No, seriously. You take a single piece of string and you create things with it. It’s not lots of pieces of string like weaving. It’s ONE piece of string, and you can create anything from toesocks to tapestries with it. Thousands of little loops, but one piece of string.
I suspect that only knitters are going to actually viscerally get my feelings about that. 
Very cool essay, and it strikes to the heart of what I was mentioning: we live in an amazing age, and I so often forget it. Thanks for sharing.
Crochet and you can do it with one stick.
I am amazed by construction. I LOVE watching a building as it’s being built and so do my daughters. Many times we’ve stopped just to watch and my favorite job of all time was construction and restoration. Buildings are like bodies.
I am amazed that I, just a middle class plebe living in the suburbs, have a better, richer, more varried, and more comfortable life than the richest most powerful people in the world did all the way through the middle ages.
The OP mentioned grocery stores - Our food is more plentiful, diverse, safer, and cleaner. Tonight I can eat cheese from Italy, fruit from Mexico, chocolate from France, and drink wine from Argentina.
I have better access to education - primary school, secondary school, college. With the internet and libraries I have access to all the best minds the world has to offer from the comfort of my own home.
My house is more comfortable than ancient palaces - I have soft furniture, comfortable bed, and climate control. I can be completely naked in my house and still be completely comfortable even on the coldest day of winter.
Kings of old were entertained by court jesters - I have HBO, Cable, the Internet, movies, and plays. And if I really must have a court jester, I can hire my own damned clown.
I can travel anywhere I want to go in the world in just a few short hours. If I want to spend a weekend in the mountains, I can. If I want to spend the next weekend on the beach, I can. If I want to spend the next weekend in the big city eating the best food on Earth… I can! The world is a tiny tiny place now…
Besides travel - I can talk to anybody anywhere anytime. Imagine if Caesar had the same video conferencing system we have in our office? Rome wouldn’t have been too big to manage then!
It’s true that the Kings of old had the ability to kill whoever they wanted to - but that’s overrated.
And yes, the Kings of old had harems - but when I consider the fact that the girls had no deodorant and no soap the king can have them! If I want lots of naked women, well, that’s another great use for the internet!
I’ve always found rain to be amazing. I know how it all works, but the fact that there is water failing from the sky is just awesome.
Also our bodies. It is all so damn complex, but it works. The heart, the lungs, the brain…every bit of it acting together to keep me going. It boggles my mind to think of.
Thirdly, I spent some time explaining the concept of streaming movies and Netflix to my 92 year old grandfather who spent many many years buying and selling films for studios and theater companies. The idea that I can have so many movies delivered to my door or even streamed directly to my computer was amazing to him.
In high school one of my teacher told us about how she and her coworkers once hosted visiting Soviet teachers on some kind of cultural exchange circa 1980. They were literly in tears the first time they went to an American supermarket. One woman was so overwelmed she started hyperventilating and everyone was afraid she’d pass out. They couldn’t get over all of the frest produce or that stuff was available out of season :eek:.
They’d eat huge amounts of fresh fruit at every meal. Also the whole idea of self-service was completely foreign to them. Just the idea that you could just take whatever you wanted off the shelves and only have to weight in line to pay for was unheard in the USSR. There you’d have to weight in 3 lines; one to select the merchandise, one to pay for it, and one to actually receive it.
Also the all of the female teachers were extremely impressed by American women’s hygenic products and bought alot to bring back home as gifts. This group of teachers were all from prestigious secondary schools in Leningrad (which along with Moscow had the best supplied shops in the Soviet Union), were all Party members, and enjoyed what was by Soviet standards a comfortable [del]middle-class[/del] intelligentsia existence. None of them defected, but then again they all had spouses & children back home (which is probally why they were allowed visit the US in the first place).
When I look around my grocery store at all the far-flung produce and goodies, I want to fly down to Berkeley and kick Alice Waters.
Telephone lines still amaze me. And electric lines and cables. Every single house on the continent - even remote ones - all connected together by wire, like lights on a Christmas tree. The scale of the project is unbelievable but at the same time, wired technology seems kind of … quaint, I guess.
Now that’s an image.
Wow.
My brother and I were kicking around a story idea of a time traveller taking a GPS back with him – but forgetting about the satellites.
Just to come up with something not yet mentioned: DVDs No longer do I have to wait for the local repertoire theatre to show – say – Seven Samurai or 12 Angry Men or worse yet, watch them on television chopped to bits by commercials; I can watch them and about three hundred others I own any time I damn well please, generally for less than the price of a pair of tickets. VHS was cool for the time but between expense and fragility I only got to about fifty of those before disks came into my life.
We went to the moon on 5k RAM!
It’s amazing that we consider it less effort to make disposable silverware by pumping the oil from the ground, refining it, turn it to plastic, fill a mold, package and ship it to a store (only to throw the stuff away after one use) than it is to simply wash metal silverware.
I have had records explained to me…vinyl music records…but they still make less sense to me–and are therefore more remarkable–than digital CD’s.
What boggles my mind more than anything is that they didn’t exist, and somebody thought them up. I picture a world wherein you had to either play the music yourself, on instrument(s) X Y Z, or listen to somebody else playing it live, in order to hear it…and I can’t quite imagine it. What if you were lousy at the piano? Violin? Harpsichord? You just never got to hear your favorite music. You were screwed.
I find this very hard to imagine. We are very lucky indeed.
I have had records explained to me…vinyl music records…but they still make less sense to me–and are therefore more remarkable–than digital CD’s.
What boggles my mind more than anything is that they didn’t exist, and somebody thought them up. I picture a world wherein you had to either play the music yourself, on instrument(s) X Y Z, or listen to somebody else playing it live, in order to hear it…and I can’t quite imagine it. What if you were lousy at the piano? Violin? Harpsichord? You just never got to hear your favorite music. You were screwed.
I find this very hard to imagine. We are very lucky indeed.