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.
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.
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.
apparently our ability to throw things somewhat accurately is impressive
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
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 :]
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.
Y’all remember the line in Walle where they are amazed at seeds? “You just put it in the ground and it grows a pizza” lol
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 don’t know of any documentaries, there’s probably some stuff on YouTube. It is really interesting learning about crow social structures through, we’re looking at it from the outside, but it sure sounds like some form of basic government to me
I read cows at first 🫠
Dope stuff anyway
LMAO XD I thought that was a typo, nah cows are herd based, I don’t think they even truly have territories the same way
But yeah, crows are dope
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.
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!
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.
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.
This 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.
Agreed.
I always think about the Chunnel, how easy it is to travel between London and Paris when before it would have been boats.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Language is a virus.
https://genius.com/Laurie-anderson-language-is-a-virus-lyrics
Healing is pretty neat.
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.
Thanks for the last sentence, I feared it might build up to this 😁
I’d say in this old question “are we bodies or do we have bodies?” It’s the prior. Deduct your ability to question your existence and…you just do. A tardigrade does have that spark of life too. But what is it? Nothing special I’d argue. Us speculating about this is just the epitome of that spark. A gift, a curse (looking at how our species acts, I’d say the latter)…but just something that happened and multiplicated successfully.
