this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] notabot@lemm.ee 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Sometimes I stop to think about the fact that a tiny electrical impulse in my brain can cause my fingers to move and press buttons on my keyboard, which in turn causes larger, but still small electrical impulses to trigger a shiny rock we trapped lightning in to do an immense number of calculations, to send a stream of further impulses to my network router, which sends them on to another router, and another, and on and on, each step might go via a wire, or radio, or the flashing of a tiny light, or even bounce off of a satellite in space and back to another router, until it eventually finds it's way to a server, which does huge numbers of further calculations, then sends impulses back to me, and also to other servers, via just as remarkable a route, which in turn send impulses down wires and optical fibres and bouncing off of satellites until one of those streams of impulses gets to your router, where it gets sent on to your shiny lightning rock, which performs many calculations and causes a pattern of light and dark dots to appear in front of you, which cause a series of tiny electrical impulses in your brain, that you perceive have meaning.

The natural world is filled with magic and wonder, but this is a magic we designed and built ourselves.

[–] M137@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I like going deeper, just imagining the stupid number of atoms, interactions and things even someone with vast knowledge about don't truly understand.
And to add more, I play games via cloud gaming, and even after thousands and thousands of hours with it, it blows me away all the time.
An electric impulse in my brain sends a signal to my finger which then presses a button on a device that sends a signal to another device, computer, then another device, router, then many many other devices along the way to the server centre where a computer reacts to that signal and changes something in a stupidly complex simulation, then the visual, audial and haptic responses are calculated and sent through all those devices back to my screen and to my experience it seems instant.
So many incredibly complicated things happening thousands of times every second and traveling thousands of miles back and forth and for hours on end with very few failures. It's just astounding.

[–] NotLemming@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago

I like to imagine what magic will be normal to future peoples. Probably most of what we can imagine and some extras.