What are some incredible human feats we take for granted?
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.
Air travel! I understand the physics involved in flight, but another part of me just watches these huge planes flying over (Airbus A380 is absolutely massive oh my gosh) and wondering how such a big and heavy thing can fly so high and so fast. I'll never get used to flying and I do mean that in the best way possible. It'll always amaze me that at any given moment there are millions of people flying high in the sky!
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.
Harnessing the power of electricity. How in the world do you look at lightning and think: I want have that
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.
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.
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.
Pffft, some birds can stay on one leg all day. Way cooler.
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 :]
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Agreed.
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.
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.
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.
Microprocessor manufacturing. Just think about it: we invent a device called the transistor. We're making them one by one and using them to make computers. And then, we just find the way to cram more and more of those devices in tiny, dirt cheap slabs of silicon that are literal computers by themselves. In 2021, a typical processor contained 60 billion transistors.
Computing in general. You're telling me you taught a rock to say "yesnonoyesyesnoyes" into a wire and that makes Final Fantasy appear on my TV? Yeah right. Obviously it's just magic.
In the first Iron Man comic, Tony Stark says that the secret of his power is 'transistors.' The arc reactor came much later.
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.
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.
walking. take a moment to think about it.
I noted elsewhere that walking is our superpower. Back in the day humans would find a herd of grazers in the morning and throw rocks at them. Then the humans would pick one unlucky beast and follow it all day until ti was exhausted and then we'd kill 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.
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.
Bra, we went to the fucking moon! There is no way to understate that. We fucking won everything.
Every time I look at the moon I always think to myself "people landed on that, slept there and stayed there for a while before coming back" it just blows my mind especially with the comparatively archaic technology that was used compared to today!
Urinating. Christ, there's no greater feeling of having a pee when you need to.
I know a lot of you are thinking about orgasm, but the thing is that's more of a luxury than an urgent need. You can live your life without, and not really feel you need to.
Also, water. How fucking great and refreshing is a glass of water.
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.
[off topic?]
I love this show. A historian looks at how one change can spread out and affect many different things.
Flight.
Ball bearings
Who can blame them though?