I just saw a video of the hundredth woman in space. Honestly just felt so bizzare that there’s humans that have just … left the planet. Thats insane.
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 instantly communicate from anywhere on earth to anywhere else nearly instantly, 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.
Most people for most of history worshiped a fertility deity of one sort or another. Some stone age asshole spreading around what is basically nano tech (the seeds), having no idea how it worked, just knowing it was a miracle.
Just a few examples . Through out the year, at least before the abrahamic religions really took off, most people would have participated in at least one fertility ceremony or festival of some sort.
Who can blame them though?
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.
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.
Just think about how you would explain your everyday life to someone from 100, 1000 or 10000 years ago.
100 years ago they’d get most of it. 1925 had electricity and running water and luxuries in a lot of places so even more people having it would not be that weird. 1000 though? 10000?? Nah. Especially the parts where I did all this on a tiny portable device to someone I’ve never met but can talk to and interact with.
It would be easy to explain day to day activities. I used my magic rock to send a message to a friend. I used my magic shower to produce hot water, etc.
Harnessing the power of electricity. How in the world do you look at lightning and think: I want have that
You stack different metals on a frog and accidentally discover a new thing. Don’t ask me what he was originally going for, I don’t know.
The other day I had lightning strike super close to my house (about 2 seconds to hear the huge thunder crack). It occurred to me that I didn’t actually know how lightning worked so I looked it up, reminded me that nature is fucking wild. And then, you’re right, we saw that and were like “let’s get it in our house fellas”
Electrical circuits are ridiculous. And it’s just interconnected circuits upon circuits spanning the globe. A device in Montana is physically connected to a device in California through an unbroken (ignoring transformers) series of wires.
The fact that we got materials to move electrons from a hundred miles away to do things like calculate 3d shapes for entertainment is insane.
Walking upright. Being able to walk all day.
It’s such a BS way to play the game, man. Everyone else is using teeth and claws. Fucking boa constrictors are fucking cool as fuck. Fucking bipeds just walk and walk and walk. Total BS and completely uncool.
It is kind of like a goofy party trick, right? Oooh look, my whole standard gait is gravitationally unstable, but I never fall. Woooow.
Autocorrect is not your friend.
Gait.
Fixed, thank you!
laughs in whale-song
Don’t get started on those assholes with airholes!
“Oh, we were land creatures, but we went back to the seas!”
You know, in hindsight…
User name checks out
Pffft, some birds can stay on one leg all day. Way cooler.
I’ve heard there’s no known limit. Presumably you’d have to sleep or die within a couple weeks.
We can also run further than other animals if we’re in top shape, albeit more slowly.
Camels can walk up to 100 miles carrying 300kg per day. No human can do that.
A human absolutely could walk 100 miles, and people often have. The weight thing needs to be scaled for body size, but you can carry quite a bit while doing it, too.
The only maybe-counterexample anthropologists talk about is actually sled dogs. Horses run out of steam faster. Presumably they know about camels too.
apparently our ability to throw things somewhat accurately is impressive
Also hand eye coordination. Which is kind of part of what you said, but i’m always amazed how i can push something over while cooking for example and without even thinking my hands just shoot out and grab it midair.
just remember a falling knife has no handle :]
Not just impressive… Like, unique and so OP a group of humans could take out a lion. Large cats are the most OP things on the planet, and at best they can pick off isolated humans…a group of humans with just random rocks can kill anything on land. And we also make things to throw
And this is like our secondary skill - we’re persistence hunters and skilled omnivores first
heheh YEET
I always think about the Chunnel, how easy it is to travel between London and Paris when before it would have been boats.
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
First flight in 1903, on the moon in 1969. That’s 63 years. There are people who lived an experience where flight went from impossible to us planting a flag on a different celestial body. That’s incredible when you stop to think about it.
I’m never sure if I am a hair splitter or other people have an America-centric view, but the first manned flight was with hot air balloons in 1783 in Paris. Like, I know the invention of the aeroplane is the more relevant event, but a balloon is still flight.
Yep. In a lot of ways the age of vast scientific leaps ahead is over. We have a bit of fundamental physics to go, but there’s every reason to think any new laws will have marginal practical applications.
Imagine we could travel anywhere on our planet in an instant creating wormholes using free energy… Oh wait! We can know ? Yes but not for the plebs!
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.
Language is an interesting one… It seems like everywhere we look for language, we find it
And not just signaling systems or rudimentary understanding - everyone has a name, there’s animals in the wild that are bilingual across species, and this is symbolic abstract language. There’s animals out there with governmental systems - like crows, they have fucking trials and negotiate territory
Cows negotiating territory is very funny 😁
Would love a documentary about it, if you have any pointers
i travel constantly, and every time I’m flying in a plane i am re-amazed.
i think about how easy and quick it is to fly anywhere in the world and I’m sitting in a bit metal tube floating in the air.
it’s bananas.
The fact the internet actually works at all is nuts.
It works in the same way the economy works: a weird mutual trust between all parties involved, until some asshats tried to fuck people, and then we had to create authorities to validate all transactions to mitigate the asshats, but now those authorities are becoming asshats themselves.
Market economies have authority from the very beginning. You have to take land and resources away from people communally using them, and then keep them from using them again with soldiers or police.
Surely bartering is authority independent? I do agree that without initial regulation, some asshats come and bully themselves into power to increase their trading ability, but I’d say that says more about humans than about markets
Yes I agree bartering is mostly as you describe. I only want to point out that economies are not only bartering, and that no one should ignore the authoritarian nature of how a “market economy” is formed and maintained.
Barter was very rare in pre market economies. People weren’t trading potatoes for furniture.
You would barter with people you never expected to see again. People you lived with you would owe them one.
No, there’s tons of records of barter in ancient Egypt, and it actually lasted until the Greeks came and forced the use of silver drachmae on them.
Gift economies existed too, but they weren’t universal. Just helping family and close friends out was and is universal, but it sounds like you’re thinking of more than that.
OP also presupposes some kind of communal thing was happening before or by default. Not everyone here is an anarchist.
You don’t need to be an anarchist to presuppose that was the case.
I mean, I guess you could be an anarchist who just doesn’t want anarchy, or something like that.
The default, most common view is that power vacuums inevitably fill, not that they’re the natural state of things.
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.
Penicillin / antibiotics comes to mind. As well as vaccines. “Oh you’re body is being taken over by millions of microscopic organisms? Take this pill and it will go away. Maybe take this shot too so it won’t happen in the first place.”
And of course computers + the internet were a pretty big boom too.
