apparently our ability to throw things somewhat accurately is impressive
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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Healing is pretty neat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
literally this. where are you from? chances are i live in the other side of the planet, but here we are. hi!
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.
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.
I always think about the Chunnel, how easy it is to travel between London and Paris when before it would have been boats.
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.
Harnessing the power of electricity. How in the world do you look at lightning and think: I want have that
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.
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.
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"
Flight.
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 know 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.
It is kind of like a goofy party trick, right? Oooh look, my whole standard gait is gravitationally unstable, but I never fall. Woooow.
Autocorrect is not your friend.
Gait.
Fixed, thank you!
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
Pffft, some birds can stay on one leg all day. Way cooler.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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 universal, but it sounds like you're thinking of more than that.
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.
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.
[off topic?]
I love this show. A historian looks at how one change can spread out and affect many different things.
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