Asklemmy

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.

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.

Flight.

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.

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.

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

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.

[off topic?]

I love this show. A historian looks at how one change can spread out and affect many different things.

https://youtu.be/XetplHcM7aQ

Walking upright. Being able to walk all day.

Microprocessor manufacturing. Just think about it: we invent a device called the transistor. We're making them one by one and using them to make computers. And then, we just find the way to cram more and more of those devices in tiny, dirt cheap slabs of silicon that are literal computers by themselves. In 2021, a typical processor contained 60 billion transistors.

Harnessing the power of electricity. How in the world do you look at lightning and think: I want have that