Last I heard we're still in contact with Voyager 1
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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So amazing, the amount of incredible science we've been able to do with the Voyager program.
Voyager 1 is the antithesis of planned obsolescence¹, with it long outlasting its mission
¹the real kind, no the meme kind liberals often say that things are the result of
The sheer amount of information, feeling and emotion that happens to be conveyable by pressure waves in air. Can you imagine if sound just didn't work? How much that would suck? It's amazing that it's like.. a thing.
Sight too (obviously, now that we're thinking this way). But just how fucking weird can a thing be if you manage to think about it abstractly for a minute? Matter, over there, just so happens to excite a completely unrelated field that randomly permeates everywhere, even empty space(?!). And we went and fucking evolved little squishy organs that connect these intangible excitations in this weird field into the glob of electrical neurons that make our being. And by some complete fucking voodoo I'm sat here with a picture in my mind of all matter around me that's emitting EM radiation in the 400 to 790 trillion wobbles per second range. That's weeiird.
And yet on top of that, humans have worked out a way to send that information everywhere in a fraction of a second.
Lightning trapped in sand etc. I used to play a kids game called Turing Tumble which shows how all logic operations can be replicated with little plastic seesaws and marbles. If you put the bits of plastic on the board in the right way you can see marbles falling by gravity performing binary addition. It blows my mind that that's all that's going on in my PC, just a trillion times the scale. I've worked in IT all my life and it continually surprises me that any of this stuff even works.
Alternatively, if sound worked in a vacuum, the way light does, The Sun would be the loudest thing in the solar system.
I'm pretty sure in that case the sound alone would kill us..
And because everyone's glob of neurons is independent from each other, we have no way of conclusively determining if everyone's glob interprets things the same way.
Really makes me wonder what cybernetics will look like in a hundred, a thousand(!) years. No-one can experience someone else's consciousness. But if an artificial brain extension generated consciousness the same way we do and if it could be swapped between people safely. It might be the first time we have something saying, objectively, it has experienced being both of us in each of our brains and we see "red" the same way. The mind boggles...
Homelessness. But I don't occasionally think about it. I see it every day. In the richest nation in recorded history.
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That milk forms such a big part of western diets considering where it comes from.
Yeah dude the more I think of milk as sexual assault the stranger it feels.
In the staff fridge at work someone used to label their milk as "breast milk" and people would go eeeww. Like it was snot or something. But from a cow's breasts? Fine! So weird.
Well humans do be gross
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it's the lactose tolerance pyramid scheme
Airplanes. Like I get that we can make them stay up, but we can steer them?? Across entire continents and oceans? What the entire fuck
Even weirder is that the most efficient way to steer them is not in straight lines. Because the most efficient way to traverse a sphere is on a slight curve.
Get a string and pick two points along the equator on a globe. Stretch the string tight. It’ll bend into a slight curve above or below the equator (instead of following the equator directly) as you pull it, because the shortest distance between two points on a globe is not a straight line.
of course the shortest distance is a straight line, that's literally the definition of a straight line.
The point is that you can’t follow a straight line on a globe, because that’s longer than taking a slight curve. If you take a straight line, you follow the entire circumference of the earth, but following a curved path allows you to avoid some of the width. Basically, the circumference means a straight line is more curved than a curved path.
Isn't it still a straight line from the perspective of someone travelling it? It just appears curved because you're looking at it from outside the curved surface.
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The vastness of time and space.
Gravity and breathing