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.
I always think about the Chunnel, how easy it is to travel between London and Paris when before it would have been boats.
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.
Bra, we went to the fucking moon! There is no way to understate that. We fucking won everything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 instantly communicate from anywhere on earth to anywhere else nearly instantly, still amazes me.
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.
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.
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.
Flight.
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.
Healing is pretty neat.
