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

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.

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.

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.

[off topic?]

I love this show. A historian looks at how one change can spread out and affect many different things.

https://youtu.be/XetplHcM7aQ

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.

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 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.

Flight.

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

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.

Ball bearings

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.

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.