There are those times in life when you suddenly stop and think just how astonishing some of the seemingly common things around us are. I mean, we can now reach almost anyone in the world in a matter of seconds, while people in the past used to send actual pigeons.
And worldwide connectivity is only the tip of a massive iceberg. In this Reddit thread, people share all sorts of things that only seem ordinary until they take a moment and realize just how crazy they really are. Drop down below and check out what they are!
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I carry a computer in my pocket with more processing power than the one that took us to the moon. It also has a built in camera, telephone, internet connection, and video games.
Being able to chat with someone on the other side of the world any time you like.
Some people can just grow another human inside them and squirt it out and it eventually just starts doing stuff on its own. Absolutely mental.
Well.... IDK about SQUIRT it out 🤣.... Mine certainly didn't squirt🤣🤣🤣🤣
Modern transportation.
We used to walk *everywhere* or at best, ride a horse and then eventually in a carriage. Traveling took weeks, months, and years; not mere minutes, hours, or days. We can cross oceans and mountain ranges; objects that were barriers completely for a long time.
We have cars that *drive themselves* and train services that operate *without drivers*. We can now go places without *doing* anything.
It’s amazing.
Google Maps - possibly the most impressive piece of software ever. Requires an entire network of satellites in geosynchronous orbit.
I prefer https://www.openstreetmap.org/ because they don't track you everywhere you go. EDIT: and it's actually more accurate than the Big G, at least in central London.
Most people lose consciousness for about 1/3 of the day to hallucinate vividly.
People. Ghosts driving meat covered skeletons made from stardust. What are we.
I've spent too long wondering about this. Is there a soul? What makes us...us? The death part thing I've got checked off but the living is the interesting part.
Life itself really. The fact that chemicals somehow combined at the right time. temperature, and energy level to form the basics of organic life is mind boggling. It's something we humans take for granted.
I think Monty Python very eloquently states it in [The Galaxy Song](https://youtu.be/buqtdpuZxvk?si=Gom_CdpPH5ji4nA4) in the movie "The Meaning of Life":
"So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
'Cause it's bugger all down here on Earth"
And that's why I believe in some higher power (even though I'm not religious). The whole deal - Big Bang, infinite universe, creation, life, evolution, DNA... it's all too perfect, too deliberate to be a mere coincidence.
Planes. People usually don't look twice but c'mon. That's upwards of over 1 million pounds of metal, equipment and cargo just flying through the air like it's paper. Imagine your car flying. It seems impossible yet there's aircraft that can carry many many many many models of any car like it's nothing. It's one thing they fly in the first place but for example, a Boeing 747 can take off carrying more weight than it itself weighs, which I believe at max load is pushing 1,000,000 pounds. This plane can take off weighing about the same as 312 Nissan Altimas. Is that not crazy to anybody else? Don't even get me started on the engines they use. The Boeing 777 uses the GE90-115B. ONE of those engines alone produces upward of 115,000 pounds of thrust and it has TWO of them.
Edit: just to add to it, the 747 bone dry weighs about 412,000 pounds depending on exact model. It can take off weighing 970,000lbs. It weighs 412,000 and can take off loaded with an ADDITIONAL 558,000 pounds. That is literally unimaginable weight. And it lifts off the ground like a damn feather. If you don't think that's crazy idek of anything realistically crazier.
The internet-the largest source of information ever created by mankind-and increasing exponentially every minute.
I remember going to the library with a pocket full of dimes for photocopies. The Internet is amazing. Ohh, I almost forgot... Get off my lawn!!!
Nearly every night you can go outside, look up, and observe in fine detail an astronomical body that's larger than Pluto, glowing brightly, floating around us. More than 50 years ago, humans traveled there on a giant bottle rocket, walked around, took some pics, got back on the boom tube, and rode it back to Earth.
One of them had to have made a snow angel up there, it's the only logical thing to do. Moon angel?...
U.S. healthcare system.
People just spend $100s a month for health insurance so they can..hopefully avoid to ever going to a medical facility.
And those are the people that vote AGAINST universal healthcare.
It's legit insane behavior.
I *HAVE* health insurance in the U.S., and I just recently paid off the remainder of what I still owed for an emergency appendectomy 4 years ago. Normally I get tired of Pandas always ripping the U.S., but this is one I agree with.
Ordering something huge and having at your door the next day.
Or at a door that the delivery person hopes might be yours and leaves it anyway (without ringing the bell or knocking), even though you text them to say you are in and waiting. I have far to many "It's been delivered" texts that I reply to with "Great, but where has it been delivered? I do not have it"
We let people drive these massive machines that can go high rates of speed and cause enormous damage and don't really retest their abilities beyond a renewal or minimal testing.
Yeah we really need retesting every few years. Which would be a pain but some people really shouldn't be driving that somehow got their license...
You can go into a store any day of the week year-round and it will be stocked with milk, eggs, meats, fresh produce, breads of all kind, untold varieties of frozen and dry foods, virtually any spice or seasoning you can think of, coffee, tea, etc etc etc
To think that for most of western human civilization people ate bread made from the local staple grain and not much else..
And you can even find toilet paper there again!!! It blew my mind that paper products are what people freaked out about but the battery racks were fully stocked. I could use leaves in place of s**t tickets. I could even build a crude generator if I had to; but, there is no way for me to manufacture a AA battery.
Computers and the chips that power them are nothing short of magic.
The process for [semiconductor fabrication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabrication) is simply mind boggling. Are are to the point where we are adding and subtracting individual atoms as part of the process to make these chips. Then we take the chips and have them do things using just two commands - on and off. Like everything in front of you is just a series of 0s and 1s.
Ray tracing graphics and physics modules are insanely complex and their primary use is for GAMES!
We are replacing the air inside hard drives with helium because of turbulence inside the drive. Are you freaking kidding me?
Im going to get in my car to drive home and I have my portable super computer that will connect to satellites 23,000miles in the sky to determine my exact location on the planet to tell me the best way to get home. My handheld super computer will know the best way because every other car has a hand held super computer and they are reporting their speed automatically to the big map in the sky and then the big map in the sky tells me what way to go. And by that I mean a lady talks to me and tells me to get off at a different exit and go a different way if the traffic is too bad. In between giving me directions my hand held super computer is delivering me what ever music, book, or video from roughly the last 100 year I might happen to want to hear. And if my wife wants to talk to me she can either call or text me and my handheld super computer will either connect the call or read me the text while still doing all the other things.
All of that is possible with 0s and 1s flowing through a chip made using witchcraft that costs less than my first keyboard.
Real time ray tracing is f*****g amazing. I've just bought a new laptop with an AMD RX7600S (Team Red ftw!) and Quake II RTX is just stunning.
Honestly, an old school answer but mail. The US mail system isn’t perfect but the fact that I can mail a letter to my in-laws that live across the country and they get it in 2-3 days is crazy.
Clapping. We show appreciation by slapping our hands together to make a noise.
I mean, I guess it's better than everyone making slurping noises in unison
Hearts. How a muscle in your body just keeps repolarizing over and over again to pump blood throughout your body over and over, years on end is just crazy to me. Everyone has one and doesn’t think about it unless there are issues. But, it is really wild to think about.
Breathing has been a long wonderment for me. When I was 5 I asked my mom if we ever get tired of breathing. She just said no, because we just do it to be able to live, without thinking about it. It was a simple enough answer. But still makes me think. Sometimes my lungs do feel tired and that's when I let out a sigh. That sigh is sometimes accompanied with a question from someone asking if I'm okay, or what's the matter. I'm just stretching out the lungs, is all I say. Weird how a necessity of survival is associated with a negative emotion.
The concept of HOA. You are basically paying someone every month to tell you what you can and can't do with your property and if you get tired of them and disobey them, they TAKE your property away from you.
Water is the only common material we know of that expands when it turns solid instead of compressing. Wild stuff. Imagine if ice sank.
Silicon does also and makes up about 27% of the earth's crust so quite common.
Work from home/remote.
Only spending the time at work that you get actually paid for is amazing and one of the best developments of modern times. People who demand that you waste your lifetime to come to an office when your work can be done remotely are just as ridiculous as people who think they have the right to 'test' their friends by making ridiculous and unnecessary demands just to see if they do it.
Ah but wfh means I actually spend MORE time working - 'just another 1/2 hour' is my normal refrain....still I'm often in pj's or shorts and a t-shirt so it doesn't really matter lol.
21% of our planet's atmosphere is made of plants burps.
Most of the oxygen comes from plankton, actually. There is a single bacteria species (Prochlorococcus) which produces 20% of all the oxygen, which is more than all the tropical rainforests combined.
In the 19th century, refrigeration and reliable canning processes made it possible for fresh meat and vegetables to be stored safely for long periods, and even shipped around the globe. All this replaced the reliance on salting and drying of these comestibles which damaged the food quality, didn't last well and then damaged the health of the consumers.
Refrigeration and canning have also reduced famines by allowing stockpiles of food to be built up and reduced the individual's need to collect and store their own stockpile just to get through winter.
Early 20th century you mean. The only “refrigeration” in the 19th Century was ice, so as long as the train containing the freezer car full of ice and perishables wasn’t waylaid somewhere along the route for several days, you could get California fruits and vegetables to New York intact. But if it was unusually hot and/or the train sat for several days because of a mix up in scheduling or the need for lengthy repairs or just a total FUBAR, and the ice melted, then when they opened the freezer car, they were faced with a rotten mess. Once they figured out refrigeration, plus had trains wired for electricity so the freezers could continues running, transporting perishables cross country became not only easier, but with improved trains, it became faster.
The logistics of food delivery.
Billions of people rely on food being transported from its sources (farm, abattoir, fishery, etc.) all over the world, to local vendors on a daily basis. It happens so reliably that most people don't give it a second thought, nor give a thought to what would happen if it stopped.
As a former truck driver I can confirm this. If the food stopped for 2 weeks the shelves would be empty.
Aluminum.
There was a time when aluminum was so rare that it was even more expensive than gold.
And now we just drink sodas from it and then throw it by the wayside.
The peak of the Washington monument is actually an aluminum pyramid because, when it was built, aluminum was more precious than gold.
We really still don't 100% know how anesthesia works. We have good theories and practice logs but the root of it is still a mystery.
It increases the cell membrane fluidity thus preventing the formation of action potentials. That's what they told me at my anaesthetics attachment at medical school anyway. But that was almost 30 years ago so it might be out of date now.
Mobile phone. You have whole world's information in ur pocket
Circumcision for baby boys apparently. I know it’s controversial - but once I had a baby boy, it changed things for me. I never really thought about it. It’s just what I knew. Now I can’t imagine putting my kid through that.
I put my foot down on this one. My son's dad wanted him to be cut. I said absolutely not. If he converts to Judaism or something as an adult, he can make that choice.
Note: this post originally had 39 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
air pressure, we don't notice air pressure on our skeleton. Clouds are floating mud puddles that weigh tons.
Maybe YOU don't notice changes in air pressure, or rather atmospheric pressure, but let me assure you- *I* and others do.
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air pressure, we don't notice air pressure on our skeleton. Clouds are floating mud puddles that weigh tons.
Maybe YOU don't notice changes in air pressure, or rather atmospheric pressure, but let me assure you- *I* and others do.
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