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 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.
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.
apparently our ability to throw things somewhat accurately is impressive
Also hand eye coordination. Which is kind of part of what you said, but i’m always amazed how i can push something over while cooking for example and without even thinking my hands just shoot out and grab it midair.
just remember a falling knife has no handle :]
Not just impressive… Like, unique and so OP a group of humans could take out a lion. Large cats are the most OP things on the planet, and at best they can pick off isolated humans…a group of humans with just random rocks can kill anything on land. And we also make things to throw
And this is like our secondary skill - we’re persistence hunters and skilled omnivores first
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.
Language is an interesting one… It seems like everywhere we look for language, we find it
And not just signaling systems or rudimentary understanding - everyone has a name, there’s animals in the wild that are bilingual across species, and this is symbolic abstract language. There’s animals out there with governmental systems - like crows, they have fucking trials and negotiate territory
Cows negotiating territory is very funny 😁
Would love a documentary about it, if you have any pointers
I don’t know of any documentaries, there’s probably some stuff on YouTube. It is really interesting learning about crow social structures through, we’re looking at it from the outside, but it sure sounds like some form of basic government to me
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.
literally this. where are you from? chances are i live in the other side of the planet, but here we are. hi!
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 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 where we started off, and indeed the human body can tolerate a total vacuum for a bit without damage.
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.
Urinating. Christ, there’s no greater feeling of having a pee when you need to.
I know a lot of you are thinking about orgasm, but the thing is that’s more of a luxury than an urgent need. You can live your life without, and not really feel you need to.
Also, water. How fucking great and refreshing is a glass of water.
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.
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.
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 and is universal, but it sounds like you’re thinking of more than that.
