DNA. The blueprint of every life form is encoded in a microscopic, yet vastly long string, wound together like a spiral ladder, using only four amino acids.
That this blueprint is found in the nucleus of every cell in your body, and every cell knows how to grow into what, and where from this. It’s quite staggering. Especially considering that the uncoiling and recombining with every cell division rarely ever makes a mistake.
I could go on, but it’s an amazing work of life-mechanics that makes you wonder how such an indifferent, and increasingly disorganized universe can harbor such an aberration.
If we could somehow remove ourselves from the fact we know life is possible (because, well, here we are), I think most scientists would balk at the very idea that the universe could bring forth such a thing as life looking at the known laws and our understanding of them today.
Makes you wonder, with everything else that’s out there, what other sort of improbabilities already exist.
Nature, the cosmos, the brain. Yes, all of these. But there is one more small thing that springs to mind. There is a long suspension at the end of the Adagietto in Mahler’s 5th that… oh my god… the power of those notes and the impact on my mind and body is rather astounding. Some crazy alchemy of sound and the brain’s interpretation turns what is a fairly mundane thing into… I don’t even know what to call it… That musical moment is engraved in me.
I haven’t been able to come up with a good description myself but with especially certain classical musics it’s something entirely different than other popular music… something higher or deeper or relevant to the things that are crucial or closer to the truth or something…
I have to add another vote for watching kids grow. It’s amazing to watch what my 2 month-old can do.
Also, that grey wrinkly stuff in my skull. I am baffled by what the brain can do. I heard my cousin’s band play the first two measures of a musical piece and I suddenly remember how to play it from over a decade ago. 99+% sure I haven’t heard it since then, but it was still in there.
Because I have epilepsy my brain has done some exceptionally awe inspiring things. Sometimes when I have a seizure I will be watching TV and suddenly know what they are going to say next, because they are talking about the same thing they were talking about last time I had a seizure. I have no clue what that actually is, but they are always talking about the same thing. (?) If my wife asks we what the date is during a seizure, I will probably be wrong, often by a few years. If she asks me who lives next door, I will probably be right. If she asks me “who am I” I can’t remember. (Sorry!)
I had a test done once (the Wada test) to see which hemisphere of my brain controls memory and language. They injected me with a drug to numb the right hemisphere of my brain and I had no problems answering questions and talking. They then numbed the left half and they told me to count to ten. “One, two, three, umm, umm, umm . . .” What the heck? They make me forget how to count to 10!
I was born with terrible wanderlust and though I’ve managed to get myself through great chunks of SE Asia, S America, Indian Sub continent, and large chunks of my own huge nation, it’s somehow never enough.
Ocean, beaches, mountains, volcanoes, waterfalls, forests, jungles, etc, etc, on endlessly. I’m pretty informed, like to read, know a fair bit, but I never tire of finding myself in a part of the world I’d never even imagined! I always thirst for more of that awe inspiring experience. It’s pretty heady.
When I was younger I imagined that if I saw some of the world, my wanderlust would subside. I could not have been more wrong, quite the reverse in fact. Visiting Macchu Pichu, only made me want to return to check out Central American ruins, climbing Javanese volcanoes only made me want to visit Hawaii one day, climbing in the Himalayas is what made me want to see the Andes. You see the problem?
It isn’t the travel per se, (who likes 23 hr plane rides?), I think it’s the experience of seeing the world through new eyes. I’ve never visited another culture that didn’t open my eyes to something. You get to see lots and learn lots, but it’s much more than just that.
To see with new eyes, it just awes me. It’s an experience I simply never tire of! I am never the same person, I was when I left home.
Learnt to play aged 6. Forty-one years later I am still in awe of the beauty of some combinations. My handle was chosen for it’s alliteration, rather than a particular admiration for Karpov (ex-World Champion for those too young to recognise the name).
“Of Chess it has been said that a single life is not long enough for it, but that is the fault of life, not Chess” (William Ewart Napier)
I am AWED by the sheer vastness and the amazing complexity of our universe, from the massive breadth of its collection of galasies and possibly even planes, down to the ultra-minutia of subatomic particles.
I am HUMBLED by the thought that human beings fit amongst that complexity, falling somewhere between the extremes.
I am IMPRESSED by the fact that nobody, so far, seems to have cited the tenets or figures of any religion (at least not directly). It’s interesting that most of the awe is about astronomic, geologic, and more ‘hard science’ orented matters.
I am ASTOUNDED that, despite its vastness and complexity, despite the extremes we can directly or indirectly observe, we humans still spend our energy on fiction – the creation of people, places, and things, which are unobservable, may not/do not/can not/did not/will not exist. In some cases this creativity is beautiful – music (pick your style/performer), art (pick your media/artist), etcetera. In other cases, this creativity is disgusting – social and political division and discrimination, ideology and religion, war and predation. On top of the awesomeness that exists (in my post and everyone else’s) we still create reasons to hate?
Strange that acts of human creativity should attract your critcism?
Are you suggesting we should put everything else on hold until we have explored the limits of observable natural science? Just because the create discord? Surely that is the essence of the human condition? Otherwise we may as well live in a real-life version of Brave New World…
Yeah, it does have a terrible, wonderful beauty doesn’t it. The implications in that image are awe inspiring too, regardless of a perspective or positon of faith or theism, or atheism, I would think.
I’m not suggesting anything. I’m simply astounded.
I associate no value judgement – I see it as neither good nor bad.
It’s just, well, astounding, that we add yet another layer (or many) upon what is already awesomely complex.
I suppose it is also equally astounding to me that we also try to simplify the complexity, seeing order in chaos and inventing explanatory entities and so on…
The idea that before anything ever existed, it was originally a thought in someone’s mind.
The idea that I can read something written centuries ago and actually know what the writer was thinking. As Stephen King put it “Writing is telepathy.”
Coral Castle. A castle built entirely by a single man at night, over the course of 28 years. No one ever saw how he worked, and the stones have no tool marks on them. How he moved and carved rocks weighing nearly 30 tons is a mystery. Some like to say that he had supernatural abilities, that he had discovered the secret of manipulating gravity or how to manipulate magnetic currents. Even if you don’t subscribe to any of that woo woo stuff, it’s still a fascinating achievement.
Being a 7-year-old Air Force brat at Kadena AB, Japan, and watching an SR-71 Habu (officially, Blackbird, but this is Okinawa, ya dig?) take off under full afterburner into the sunset over the East China Sea… blue flames longer than the aircraft itself… a roar like the voice of God… and the airplane, a dagger of absolute blackness stabbing into a huge red sun.