Asklemmy

What i'm writing on.

A "smartphone",

the name we gave to a rectangular rock with billions of mechanisms 10 000 smaller than the width of a hair, capable of aligning by billions of operation per second numbers in such precision that we get the feeling of seeing colors and images and text,

capable of emitting precise electromagnetic waves to transmit "messages" around the world, by a perfectly organised system called internet,

capable of representing 3d scenes, taking pictures, giving its localisation, and entertaining you, keeping millions of book in the palm of your hands,

Such miracle stone that we use to consume brainrot, spy on people, and throw in the trash 2 years later because it, for once, got a flaw.

Bra, we went to the fucking moon! There is no way to understate that. We fucking won everything.

It is both amazing and horrifying to look at food production worldwide. We have both completely and utterly destroyed food shortage and hunger from a total food perspective, and made a world with the most hunger in human history.

I'm a super huge fan of water coming out of my faucets that I can drink. I like drinking water, and this just makes it so easy to get water to drink. I do lots of other stuff with water too, like wash things and it makes those things easier too. I wish everybody had clean safe drinking water and faucets to dispense it.

I don’t know if I would say they’ve “left the planet” in low earth orbit. They went to space, but they’re still very much gravitationally bound to earth. If their orbital velocity were to suddenly become zero, they would fall to earth very quickly. The people who went to the moon left the planet.

But to answer your question, the fact that we harnessed electricity to create a communications network that can nearly instantly communicate from anywhere on earth to anywhere else, still amazes me.

Agriculture is nuts. Put food in the ground, and get more food back later? Cool!

Food preservation is incredible too. A single fish rots pretty fast when it dies, but we figured out a few dozen different ways to eat that fish years after it croaked. In serving sized portions, no less.

apparently our ability to throw things somewhat accurately is impressive

Childbirth. Just the physical volumes involved are impressive, especially with that dummy big head that has to flatten out, but there's also calculations showing that in the later stages, the mother is actually using energy at the fastest possible rate the human body can sustain for more than a short burst.

On that note, eating. You can just take in certain random things from the environment, and your body can rearrange it partially into more body and partially into energy. No artificial machine I'm aware of can do that.

Living outside of water. Life is a water thing, it started in water and cells are mostly made of water. We can just kind of bring our own supply, and that's crazy. In a lot of ways your house is more like outer space than the place where we started off, and indeed the human body can tolerate a total vacuum for a bit without damage.

My favourite is language, not even writing, but language itself. We could collectively invent ways to understand each others with codes shared by tens of millions of individuals, living kilometres apart.

And then I also love early astronomy, like being able to approximate Earth's circumference (or later the time needed to reach Asia by navigating west), based on the shadow lenght at two fairly distant (but still pretty close) places, thanks to that quirky thing some friends of yours invented to divide land called geometry. To say nothing of those demonstrating Earth rotates around the Sun just by looking at star positions during the year.

As for recent things, something pretty cool we take for granted is radio signals. Information getting places without anything moving, just invisible vibrations through space.

Healing is pretty neat.

Basically our entire daily life would have been absolutely unthinkable for 99.9% of human history. Light and hot showers whenever we want them. Instant communication with the other side of the planet. Thinking machines with the entirety of Human knowledge in our pockets.

Almost everything.

So much is taken for granted, taking it away is the only way to appreciate it.

One example: refrigeration.....so powerful, but so mundane... until it's gone.

Literally our metabolic system. You eat materials like minerals that are dead and your body absorbs them and turns those into a part of you.

Harnessing the power of electricity. How in the world do you look at lightning and think: I want have that

I always think about the Chunnel, how easy it is to travel between London and Paris when before it would have been boats.

Who can blame them though?

Walking upright. Being able to walk all day.

Just being "alive." We become alive, some sort of "spark of life" pulses through us, and at some point, that "spark" leaves us, and we are nothing more than a rock. What is that "spark?"

Everything is either animate of inanimate, so how did things become animate? At some point, something had to get that "spark," and become alive, then spread that life around. How did/does that happen?

Is this "spark" unique to Earth, or is is possible to exist elsewhere? Did some nearly impossible combination of factors all happen to line up and cause "life" to emerge, like a room full of monkeys randomly typing Hamlet, or do those factors exist in other places?

Of course, many people would assign a religious explanation to that "spark," our Soul or whatever, but that's just making up a silly story to explain something we don't understand.

walking. take a moment to think about it.

literally this. where are you from? chances are i live in the other side of the planet, but here we are. hi!

How fast we went from first flight to space flight, on the scale of human existence it was in the blink of an eye, but from our daily perspective, it feels like such a gigantic feat

The fact the internet actually works at all is nuts.