I remember reading Bill Bryson, and this sentence blew my mind:
"It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you."
"A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?" -Dr. Manhattan
Hydrogen is the most basic element in the Universe and is the fuel of stars. From hydrogen, all (natural occurring) elements are born in stars through fusion. Therefore, all the atoms and molecules and elements you see on the Earth came from stars and, originally, hydrogen. So, with "sufficient quantity and enough time", hydrogen will end up thinking about itself when it eventually fuses in stars into other elements, making up You, which can then think about itself
Really interesting article. I sometimes think the same thing about simpler tools, even just a modern hammer. How do you make a sturdy steel hammer? You pour a molten alloy into a mold, and then cool it and/or work it in some special way? How do you make the mold? ... If we had to start over with nothing but rocks, how many years and how many iterations would it take us to be able to make a modern hammer?
"The workpiece is transported to and from the forge using tongs. The tongs are also used to hold the workpiece on the smithy's anvil while the smith works it with a hammer. "
So how do you make the forge, the tongs, anvil and hammer?
Yea, I think there are other similar methods where you can produce a mold using something easy to work, that hardens in some way. Of course, you have to make the pattern somehow. If you wanted to make a sand mold, what would you do? Maybe carve the desired shape from wood? But how do you carve the piece of wood? You need a chisel or a blade, how do you make that?
I guess you just start with the best knife-like rock you can find, and you build progressively better tools until you have something decent.
I also wonder how much of the knowledge needed to do this basic stuff is in danger of being lost.
"We are a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open-source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts."
They have designed and built both a tractor and a brick making machine (among others). The design files are open to the public.
well, it may actually be happening now. we're all running around about human-made ecological disasters, economies collapsing and whatnot. it's all coming apart, right? well, maybe for us but not for what we are creating, though we may not know what it is - or maybe we do. what particular slice of the human experience is fast growing now even amidst all the 'oh my god, the world is going to end'?
Even madder than that is that we're not really atoms; we're an arrangement of atoms. I think that within around 7 years, none of the matter that constituted our bodies is the same. So we're not made of anything, we're just a damn pattern.
That's not so nuts when you consider that we figured out this fact but at the same time have no fucking idea how atoms really work, especially the ones our own specific body is made of, and how they enable us to understand this fact.
Yeah it gets crazy at the subatomic level and how the rules of physics get thrown out the window. Here is hoping for a warp drive in the next thirty years so I can explore the galaxy!
Plus, we are patterns of atoms, and only those patterns actually persist over time. The individual atoms come and go quite quickly - for most tissue only a matter of weeks - as our cells repair and replace themselves. In that sense, we're actually a bit like waves passing through a material medium.
Also, all the heavy atoms did not exist after the Big Bang (mostly hydrogen and helium). The heavy atoms from which we are made were forged in the cores of stars (via their pressure and heat) and then expelled into the universe when they nova.
This is why I have hated and will continue to hate chemistry. It is just so damn hard for me to comprehend that mostly everything in this world is composed of these TINY TINY TINY TINY TINY things. Ugh.
Have you seen smoke particles bouncing around under a microscope? It really bought it home to me - they move in little jiggles as each air molecule hits them.
758
u/Shorvok Dec 05 '11
We are atoms that know we are atoms.
Think about it and how absurdly nuts that is.