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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
In the first Iron Man comic, Tony Stark says that the secret of his power is ‘transistors.’ The arc reactor came much later.
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.
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.
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.
Bra, we went to the fucking moon! There is no way to understate that. We fucking won everything.
Walking upright. Being able to walk all day.
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’ve thought about about camels too.
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.
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
It is kind of like a goofy party trick, right? Oooh look, my whole standard gate is gravitationally unstable, but I never fall. Woooow.
Autocorrect is not your friend.
Gait.
Fixed, thank you!
Pffft, some birds can stay on one leg all day. Way cooler.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Flight.
