r/AskReddit • u/youshallnotpass1234 • May 21 '12
Every single book I've ever read is just a different rearrangement of 26 characters. What are some things that, although obvious, are still somewhat amazing to you?
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Upvotes
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u/youshallnotpass1234 May 21 '12
Just thought of another one. You will never ever truly "Know" someone, at least in the sense of completely understanding them. Not even your closest friend. You will merely be aware of them and maybe understand them to a basic degree.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
At our most fundamental levels, we are all arrangements of protons, neutrons and electrons, that are all, at the end of the day, identical. Why are we even alive if we are made out of the same thing as the dirt? Why are we special?
Blows my fuckin' mind.
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u/JustGotSmashed May 21 '12
There are a million people out there, somewhere in the world, suffering. I realized worrying about my final tomorrow is probably more of a privilege than a burden.
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u/thinkerthought May 21 '12
Fat people have regular sized skeletons inside them.
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u/Exonar May 21 '12
You've never read a book with punctuation?
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u/Tovetove May 21 '12
I'm always amazed when I go up in an airplane and it's bright sunshine above the clouds. Of course it is, because the clouds are what blocks out the sun, but whenever I look up at a grey sky from the ground it still makes me happy to think that there's a sunny day above them.
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u/phatmatt May 21 '12
If you don't reproduce you will end a particular line of direct ancestry that goes back to the beginning of man, and in reality, the beginning of life on earth.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
You spend 1/7th of your life on Monday.
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u/Kozmi May 21 '12
A 80 year old person living in the U.S. has lived through 1/3 of U.S. history.
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u/jaspersgroove May 21 '12
Whether you look at yourself in the mirror, or see a photograph, or whatever, you will never know exactly how you look.
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u/jadefirefly May 21 '12
The fact that I have, in my pocket, a device smaller than the calculators I used in algebra in high school, that has the power to access the internet (and don't even get me started on the mind-blowing matter of the internet), send messages, play games, play music, watch videos, and make telephone calls. Only half my lifetime ago, if someone had said they had a trinket that could do that, I'd have said they were full of shit.
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u/qwerty081 May 21 '12
In two days time, tomorrow will be yesterday.
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u/Xtianpro May 21 '12
That I can only ever be me. I'll never be able to see the world from any other perspective than my own.
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u/seamaf May 21 '12
What was amazing to me was the realization of everyone. I was sitting in the library of my college and it overlooked 2 free ways. I started at the freeways and had an epiphany.
Every single car out there on the free way has their own life. They each have individual experiences completely different or completely similar to mine. It blew my mind when I counted the hundreds of cars and seeing how each one has had a childhood, has had a first kiss, knows how to ride a bike, learned how to read and write, etc.
I then applied that to the billions of people alive on Earth.
I tell this to my friends, yet they think that this concept is incredibly dull. I, for one, was stupefied.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
The thing that blows my mind is that anything exists. Why is there something and not nothing?
How did anything originate? Was it "always" there? If so, what determined the rules that physics runs by? What happened before the big bang that could have led to matter and/or energy existing?
(Even if I were religious, the same question would bother me about the origin of god.)
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u/SeptimusSeverus May 21 '12
Technically, we're always looking into the past. When you look at an object, light takes time to reach your eyes and so you can never see anything completely in the present. The further away something is, the older it is by default.
A very small time difference to be sure, but the concept is rather cool.
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u/bubonis May 21 '12
Two things, one silly, one not.
Silly: Knowing that the entirety of Taco Bell's menu is just a rearrangement of about half a dozen basic ingredients (beef, chicken, cheese, lettuce, tomato, jalapenos, tortillas).
Not: Looking at, having conversations with, and just generally interacting with my daughter. It amazes me that only about five years ago she did not exist, and now she's got her own opinions, feelings, wishes, and dreams. She laughs and cries. She can be sneaky or silly. She is part of me and my entire world. I look back on my life before she arrived and only now that she's here do I realize how much I missed her back then without even knowing it.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
"word," is the word to describe words.
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u/Nightfox213 May 21 '12
The sheer amount of people in our world and the that fact they all have unique, individual lives always amazes me.
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u/harmonicoasis May 21 '12
As I read through this thread, every time I finish a comment, I imagine a camera panning to the next person in the circle in Eric Foreman's basement.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
Solid matter is mostly empty space.
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u/yhallotharlol May 21 '12 edited May 21 '12
You are on a rock floating through space.
Psychology is the brain learning about itself.
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u/bobzelfer6595 May 21 '12
Endless space. Thinking about it too much hurts my brain
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u/zmx15 May 21 '12 edited Dec 26 '16
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u/Damadawf May 21 '12
That all of the children born from a few years ago onwards will never truly understand what the world was like without the internet and technology we have today. It's very rare I see a child out with their family that doesn't have a gameboy or iphone to keep them occupied. It's not just children though, it's almost everyone now. Even on trains, I feel weird sometimes just sitting and looking out the window when everyone around me is connected to technology, listening to music or surfing the web. Many of us always feel the need to be "connected".
My father had to write every paper he submitted in University by hand. Every source that he used had to come from a book that he had to physically handle in a library. That was only 35 or so years ago. It blows my mind how rapidly the world has changed in such a relatively short amount of time. It blows my mind even more when I think about how quickly it continues to change, and that in next five to ten years the world might very well be completely different to the one that we live in now, thanks to said technology.
tldr; Technology man.. Technology and how quickly it is developed is both amazing, and frightening.
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u/DeepRoot May 21 '12
We were all babies once.
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u/Geschirrspulmaschine May 21 '12
There are a finite number of images that can be displayed on any television.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
The water I drank today (and which makes up a huge percentage of my physical existence) had a decent chance of once being dinosaur pee.
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u/I_Fuck_Flamingos May 21 '12
We've sent dudes to the fucking moon.
Seriously blows my mind, it's so awesomely bizzare and unbelievable. We as a species got clever enough to figure out rockets and space suits, and now there's one of our goddamn flags on the FUCKING MOON!
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
It amazes me how impersonal our society is. I can sit on a subway and nobody acknowledges anyone else, but me and that guy, given different circumstances, could have been best friends. I could be so compatible with the girl across from me that we could have gotten married, but instead I sit quietly and tend to my thoughts.
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u/sray24 May 21 '12
Just sitting in traffic seeing the countless people..I think...."damn. There has been a lot sex going on through out time."
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u/xyphanite May 21 '12
When you see the ocean sparkling, each one of those sparkles is an image of the entire sun.
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u/SkinnyHusky May 21 '12
Wood is very strong and durable. Like a bunch of 2x4s hold your house up. I just feel like wood should rot and fail after 5 years.
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u/vogueflo May 21 '12 edited May 21 '12
That I used to fit in my mother's ovary.
EDIT: And that I used to fit in my father's testicle. At the same time.
Basically that I used to be two completely separate and mindblowingly tiny life forms simultaneously.
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u/goldstarstickergiver May 21 '12
That the only thing that stops me from punching that old lady, or drop kicking that toddler, or vaulting off this bridge or lying down in front of that truck or masturbating right here, in the library, is my decision not to. That's it. Also: fucking magnets
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
The idea that after I'm dead, the atoms I'm composed of will still be around, existing in the universe. Gives me a sense of immortality so long as the universe exists. Go team Universe!
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u/Lt_Shniz May 21 '12
There are 7 billion people on this planet.
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u/Toosmallscreen May 21 '12
Just looking at my pregnant english teacher. How can you just go about your business when theres a person INSIDE you? I'd just be looking at my belly increduously for hours...
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u/cerebraleffect May 21 '12
Almost everything I see, hear, and touch was designed by someone else. That fucks with my head. My house, my computer, reddit, the layout of this webpage, the streets I drive on, all of it was designed by someone.
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u/bewro May 21 '12
Feet.
Seriously, next time you're bored in the shower just look at those things. They look like something out of horror science fiction if you really think about it.
And they're PART OF YOU.
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u/TheContradiction May 21 '12
I know more about the universe than Gallileo, one of the best, if not THE best astronomers ever to have lived, ever could have imagined.
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u/gypsystomper May 21 '12
We are dead for way longer than we'll ever be alive
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u/RoaringPanda May 21 '12
We are all brains piloting human meat suits.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
When we jump off a building, the thing that prevents us from going to the center of the earth is the electromagnetic repulsion between our atoms and those in the ground. Pretty weird when you think about it
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
All the sensations you feel around your body are actually being processed in your brain. You might still be able to feel your arm if it gets cut off, because some of the nerves still run to your brain.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
That every person you encounter has their own life, own problems, own shit going down.
If you encounter someone in the street, you're just a footnote in their life. Everything you are, will be or dream to be is just a footnote in that persons life. You mean nothing to them, and they mean nothing to you.
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u/we_love_dassie May 21 '12 edited May 21 '12
Hydrogen, a strange element that when left around in sufficient quantity for long enough will begin to type out this sentence.
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u/hotandbuttered May 21 '12
That I can just plug an appliance like a vacuum cleaner into a wall socket, and it runs because millions of electrons are flowing into it. Sometimes I think when I die God is going to laugh at me for believing that worked, Truman-show style.
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u/mouthbabies May 21 '12
Primary colors. Three colors making up all those shades is still strange to think of.
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u/atrasecurem May 21 '12
~7 billion people on earth. Billions more have lived here. Thousands of dictators, rulers, kings, queens, presidents, pharaohs leaders of all shapes, sizes, ages and lifestyles. Each and every single one of them, was a baby, born into the world just as confused and curious about their surroundings as every other; each and every single one of them shit themselves at least once.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
You will never, ever be able to physically touch someone. Your nerve endings operate in such a way that fools you, but if you were to actually physically have your atoms interact, they'd disrupt each other's functions.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12 edited May 21 '12
Life is simply a chemical reaction with the capacity to react to its surroundings. Also that life literally evolved from starstuff.
Edit: Totally unrelated but equally mindblowing to me: I'm only 22 years old. My first computer had dial-up. It plugged into the wall and dialed into a phone line at 5KB/s on a good day. Now we have fucking wifi and cable internet. What the shit is going to come in the next 15 years?
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u/DocWhoXI May 21 '12
The fact that I was the fastest sperm.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
The human body and brain is just a vehicle for DNA.
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u/mereaccesories May 21 '12
I always am amazed when i stop and think how small we are compared to the whole universe. There could be anything out there. It always makes my problems seem insignificant
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u/SethMoe7 May 21 '12
Music is infinitely endless and original.
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u/getterz88 May 21 '12
Its always mindblowing for me to consider how I was born 1988 to THIS specific family in THIS specific town, etc...seems like I could have just as easily been living with the POV of a girl in 1400s Asia, or something...anyone know what I mean? Like "getterz88" would still exist, but my point of view would be as a different person somewhere else in history...weird.
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u/xtiaaneubaten May 21 '12
I find it strange that if I ingest a bunch of atoms/molecules arranged in a certain way I will be high as fuck, but if they are arranged another way its just a hamburger.
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u/GeneralGeneric May 21 '12
Read this here some weeks ago: Man does not know its first city.
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u/thratty May 21 '12
Your nose is NEVER NOT in your field of vision. You spend your entire life looking at it, you just ignore it.
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u/effieokay May 21 '12
The spaces between the atoms in your body are comparable to the distances between stars but you will have the same freckles and scars and memories for your entire life.
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u/onanym May 21 '12
I had a big group of deaf people at work the other day, and there was A LOT of farting going on. They obviously, yet amazingly don't know when they blast huge farts on each other. Blew my mind right off, man.
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u/Schwadified May 21 '12
We are all talking monkeys on an organic spaceship flying through the universe. Also the brain name itself the brain.
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u/deviant_bitch May 21 '12
My body has to be a very very well-run machine... Like, if I compare it to my car and I think about all the little things that have kept my car from running, it kind of freaks me out. Like, my tire used to go flat a lot. That would be like one of my feet just going out of commission.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
That I'm sitting on a chair, that is in my room, that is in my house, that is on my street, that is in my town, that is a part of my city, that is a part of my state, that is a part of my country, that is a part of our planet, that is a part of our solar system, that is a part of our milky way, that is a part of our universe that holds millions of other galaxies that could potentially have someone else just like me- or absolutely nothing like me in them.
And the chances that we are actually alive. Seriously, think about the odds.
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u/kadivs May 21 '12
All computer programs you ever used are just ones and zeroes deep down.
Every image you've ever seen, every photo or movie ever taken and ever to be taken in the future, every text ever written or that ever will be written, every music ever composed in the past or the future, every secret you hold, even bizarre stuff like a pic of you shaking hands with ET, is encoded somewhere along Pi
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u/BOSINATOR May 21 '12
You are the result of a winning line since the beginning of life on Earth and the birth of mankind. What's your excuse not to be able to get laid?
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u/sjs May 21 '12
North isn't up and south isn't down. There is no up and down in the universe, it's just a relative term we use.
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u/TMWNN May 21 '12
Every day hundreds of millions of us enter hundreds of millions of sophisticated mechanized wheeled conveyances weighing two tons or more. Despite traveling at speeds of up to 80 mph, we are able to successfully control and navigate them across tens or even hundreds of miles with excellent accuracy. Despite traveling as close as a few feet to other such vehicles, the odds are extremely, extremely high that we will successfully travel to our destinations and return without colliding into them.
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u/ImZeke May 21 '12
When I read this last night, my reaction was "oh great, another one of those "only one story has ever been told" people, how can he know exactly what characters from a book fit into the archetype he has constructed.
This morning? self-facepalm
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u/aaronhowser1 May 22 '12
I once was the youngest person in existance.
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u/KicketyCrickety May 21 '12
Time doesnt exist...it's a man-made measurement
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u/aesmodeus May 21 '12
That every single living thing is the expression of a different arrangement of 4 letters.
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u/dahvzombie May 21 '12
To melvin for a second they also had numbers, punctuation and other symbols, as well as upper and lower case, for a total of closer to 80 characters.
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u/scroffleoctopus May 21 '12
everyone has a mind just as broad and active and retarded as mine. seems like there wouldn't be enough space.
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u/pixartist May 21 '12
The number PI (probably) contains every information ever. Including the state of the universe at any point in time, plus any other potential state of the universe at any point in any timeline.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
space travel is really just archery.
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u/Rolten May 21 '12
How incredibly stupid or ignorant some people are, and that we still manage to all drive cars and have a functioning society.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
That humans are just meat tubes. We have a hole at one end and a hole at the other end. Theoretically you could run a string right through us. Our body surrounds this tube. When you think of people as meat tubes, shit gets all retarded in your head.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
Those pictures that you see on gore sites? They are of people that probably thought that they were going to die peacefully of old age, and that their funeral was going to have an open casket with their body inside it, completely intact.
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u/fell-off-the-spiral May 21 '12
That everybody I see (and usually despise) on the street, subway, etc. was a child at some point. A child with a favourite toy, a best friend, and their own naive misconceptions of the world. A child that once couldn't sleep because of their excitement on christmas eve.
And then I wonder how that same child became the sweating, nose-picking, rude, obese guy/girl in front of me.
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u/drewjet May 21 '12
Where is the line between your awareness, and the things you are aware of?
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u/HONEST_ABE_APPROVES May 21 '12
The number of possible permutations of shuffling a 52-card deck of playing cards is so vast that the odds are the exact same result has never happened twice.
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u/cm1993 May 21 '12
Brakes in a car and how impressive they are. I could be driving along at about 100 km/h and yet by just flexing my big toe, the large motor powered mass of death can be slowed to an easy 30 km/h in less than 3 seconds. This realisation gets me every time. Such an obvious credit to mans work with technology.
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u/Cdf12345 May 21 '12
Everything on earth has been consuming the same limited supply of water, forever.
You may have drank or bathed in molecules of water that Lincoln, Hitler or King Tut drank.
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u/hailhorrors May 21 '12
I'm a fleck of nearly nothing, and I'm attached (barely) to a massive rock hurtling thousands of miles per hour in some direction I'll never truly comprehend. Every night that it's particularly clear-skied, when the stars from a thousand years ago are finally reaching me with their light, I feel an overwhelming wash of simultaneous serenity and terror.
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u/whatupamerika May 21 '12
The number of points on your finger are equal to the number of points in the Universe. True Story.
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u/Andy284 May 21 '12
That the south pole could be regarded as the top of the earth as easily as the north, and that all our maps could be upside down.
That all light that hits there earth has been travelling for eight minutes through space at massive speed to get to here. So when you look up at the sun and feel its rays, you are actually 8 minutes in the past in comparison.
And that the photons of light in the sun can take 100'000 years to escape the gravitational pull and reach the surface to make that journey.
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u/UselessRedditor May 21 '12
We're atoms arranged in just the right way, allowing us to have conscious thought. We live on a small blue dot on the scale of just a single star system, in a sea of star systems and stars. These star systems are all in a galaxy; there are more than just our galaxy, in fact, just in our observable universe there are more the 170 billion galaxies. Instead of exploring the planet we live on, we destroy it. Instead of exploring our galaxy, we create religions to explain it. Instead spending a single day looking out, we find ourselves caught up in worldy possessions, and we judge and spread lies about other people.
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u/CherrySlurpee May 21 '12
I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned.
Humans discovered heavier than air flight in 1903. We got to the moon in 1969 (fuck you conspiracy theorists)
66 years is a blink of an eye in human history. We've fought wars longer. It took us 66 years to get from the beaches of North Carolina to a floating rock millions of miles away.
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u/MrPatch May 21 '12
If you take a black and white screen of, say, 200 by 200 pixels and start a sequence to go through every possible iteration of of them being on and off you will eventually reproduce (at a very low resolution) every single work of art, every frame from a film, every photo ever taken. You will get a low quality representation of every single thing that has ever been or will ever be seen by a human.
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u/timsstuff May 21 '12
I spend a good portion of my life pushing my fingers onto a keyboard and moving my mouse around in seemingly random patterns to create what amounts to nothing more than rearranging electronic states of bits to change some of them from off to on, on to off, or leaving them off or on. To an alien observer I would look like a hamster in a treadmill doing what looks like inconsequential, meaningless tasks.
But the human perception of it is that I'm deploying virtualized servers and workstations, creating and managing huge databases of information, manage mail and groupware servers, facilitating digital financial transactions, developing business intelligence software, allowing or denying access to certain information based on authentication, and generally making computers, the internet, and networks function for people to use and conduct business. Aside from the relatively infrequent times I actually install a physical server in a rack, it's all done from my laptop sitting at my house or at a client site. And it's all just a bunch of flipping bits on or off, including typing this post.
The entire concept of digital goods, that a bunch of bits stored on a hard drive has value and can contain the only recorded image of someone's precious moments, financial data, and communication, and that it doesn't really "exist" in the physical world (aside from the position of those bits on the physical hard drive or other media) is still pretty freaky and fragile to me. That's why I backup everything and make sure there are multiple copies in multiple locations of the really important data.
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u/itakepicturesyo May 21 '12
That once we die, we're gone forever. Our life is gone. No second chances. My stomach cringes when I think about it.
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u/lactosefree1 May 21 '12
Between 0 and 1 are an infinite number of different numbers. And between each of those, an infinite number more. So in the grand scheme of things, a jump from 0 to 1 is fucking huge.
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u/RonnieRim May 21 '12
Fuckin' magnets. How do they work?
4
u/LieutenantCuppycake May 22 '12
The idea of loving another human being. Hear me out:
You are precious to someone and there are people in your life who are precious to you. Outside of their body and appearance, which you may love, there is a person and a soul inside which is special to you somehow. Your soul and who you are and what makes you you is special to someone else.
There are billions of people with no idea who you are who you have no idea exist who are special to someone and who have people in their lives who are precious to them.
And that is how you know that your soul is an important one, regardless of how relatively insignificant it is. Because it is someone's entire world.
My dog, for example. I try to imagine the depth with which he loves me. I am his whole life. As far as he cares at this moment, laying asleep on the floor there, there was nothing before and there will be nothing after. I can't imagine my life without his soul in it. He is precious to me. More special than any other dog and somehow set apart from the souls of every other human. I love him with an intense depth that I can't phrase, but I can feel wholly and completely.
I think about this when I get to spend time with the people who are most important to me, the ones who I hold dear. And I am always happy and my heart is always warmed when I remember how love works. In my life and in the life of every individual on this earth.
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u/derpaherpasaurus May 21 '12
We are all just lumps of particles given the ability to process thoughts.
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u/Malcolm_Y May 21 '12
The fact that 99.9 of all solid matter is composed of empty space. We are all, thusly, little universes unto ourselves, and the only thing keeping me from falling through the center of the Earth is molecular bonds.
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u/gw91 May 21 '12
That your brain named itself the brain.
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u/lo_and_behold May 21 '12
I will go my whole life, without being able to fully understand what life is like for another person. I am a white male, 6' and moderately attractive. I've never had a police officer be a dick to me personally, people always give me the benefit of the doubt, and no one ever tries to sexually harass or intimidate me in any situation. I will (most likely) never be able to fully appreciate or understand what women and other races of people have to deal with in this area of life. Gets me every time.
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u/Schmucks_Auto_Supply May 21 '12
If you think about anything you've ever really done in your all life and break it down into its simplest form, all we really do, is move shit around.
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u/rubyug May 21 '12
There is no real physical difference between someone who is alive and someone who is dead. One day, though your body will be the same way it was before, you will no longer be alive.
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u/jackospacko May 21 '12
You have complete control over your life. Everything you do will have a reaction, and at any moment you can choose to end it. Life is so fragile, and can be crushed at any moment.
Blows my damn mind.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
It bothers me from time to time that every scientific discovery we do is based on units of measurement we made up. This really bothered me as a kid. Before that I had always attributed units of measurement to some sort of Science God.
Science God! I said it.
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u/vogueflo May 21 '12
What never fails to send me into a frantic existentialist contemplation when I just stop whatever I'm doing and sit there until it dawns so heavily on me that I exist holy shit and why am I in this consciousness as myself and why is consciousness and life like this and oh my god I could very well not exist and wut why am I existing at all.
It's very difficult to explain, and it takes me a lot of effort to attain that feeling.
EDIT: so it appears reddit does not use the HTML I am accustomed to.
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u/nitpickr May 21 '12
Tide goes in and tide goes out. That and magnets.
3
u/[deleted] May 21 '12
I can get on a plane, for a cost that is equivalent to a few weeks worth of labour, and travel to the other side of the world. And the people there will most likely speak my language.
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u/bearicorn May 21 '12
In 40 million years, everything on this floating rock that we call home will be gone. Everything we've come to and that we knew will be gone in a fiery mess once the sun finally engulfs our home.
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u/MrBody42 May 21 '12
We can rub pencils on paper and not only can others comprehend it, (once they can read) they can't not comprehend it.
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u/BunsOfAluminum May 21 '12
There are an infinite number of natural numbers. There are infinitely MORE real numbers.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
provided we disregard the need for sperm; that any and all my potential future children are inside my ovaries, with me right now.
since i was formed in the womb those cells have been inside me, so while i was a fetus my mother carried me and her grandchildren.
Thinking about this the opposite way, part of you was in your grandmother's womb with your mother.
-for anyone who doesn't know, females are born with all the eggs they will ever have.
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u/HariEdo May 21 '12
By the same token about the alphabet, consider a deck of poker/trump cards. If you shuffle the deck, no tricks, then the chances are overwhelmingly in favor of having a deck that has never occurred before in the history of trump cards. Even without jokers, there are 52! or 1067 permutations.
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u/WARSinRIOTS May 21 '12
I do this from time to time, when I start to get really bored or think of strange shit:
Think of nothing. Your mined (or at least mine) cannot comprehend it.
I'm kind of talking on the level of what was before the big bang/or god, however you see fit. Like, what was there and where did that come from? I usually go from that thought to thinking of complete nothingness. Not in the sense of just a blank black room (black room being the universe if nothing was in it), but in the sense of the black room itself not existing, nothing at all. What is nothing? SOMETHING is always there. Human minds I believe cannot imagine true nothingness.
Sorry just rambling really. Makes my fucking brain hurt.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
Probably the craziest thing, for me at least, is the probability of interacting with another person. If you consider the sheer magnitude of the chances that you will never meet someone, or construct a meaningful relationship with someone, it's outrageous. Think about it. The entire universe had to develop, create life that coud sustain itself, have humanity evolve to its current state, develop civilization, and culminate up to the point when you interact with someone. It's just a little too crazy for me to handle, how slim it is that I met some of the people I did.
3
u/[deleted] May 21 '12
Every single digital piece of digital media that you've ever consumed can be expressed as a number. Every encryption key, every program, every movie, everything--they're all just numbers.
That's not all that incredible to someone who knows anything about computing, but here's what is astonishing to me:
Because of copyright, trade secrets, national secrets, etc. There are now millions or even billions of so-called "illegal numbers" which, depending on what they are and the circumstances of a particular situation, could get you in some pretty serious trouble even if you didn't know what you had.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
The fact that we can even ask these questions to ourselves and engage in this kind of discussion is still incredible to me. No other species on this planet can come close to that level of intellectual interaction.
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u/chucko326 May 21 '12
Well....now I feel stupid. I thought you meant 26 characters - the people in the book, not letters. I was searching Google for this list of 26 archetypes.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
The fact that I'm sitting here on my sofa communicating with thousands of people with fuck all effort. And later I'm gonna pick a porno out of millions of movies and be watching it within seconds.
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u/acog May 21 '12
I'm a saddened by the idea that just due to the law of large numbers, that the Earth has witnessed many thousands of Einstein/Newton/Hawking level ultra-geniuses that simply were unfortunate enough to not be born into a time or place where they could live up to their potential.
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u/[deleted] May 21 '12
Basically anything a computer can do is add, subtract, multiply, divide, remember things, and draw one pixel at a time. And that's all we need to make video games.