What's something that's taken for granted that occasionally makes you think, wait wtf?

4,000 years ago, we were doing trigonometry, but just 200 years ago we were still putting leeches on people and not washing our hands before doing surgery.

Also, we sent people to the moon and got them back using less computing power than a smart watch.

Those computers has less memory than a dollar store calculator. The bits in memory were physical magnets woven by hand into a mesh. It’s insane that it left our planet and came back with people alive.
- Yeah, they even employed weavers to make the memory units, because it was easier than training factory workers to deal with such thin wire.
- to be fair, most of the calculations were done on Earth
It’s insane how wasteful modern software is. The infinite growth mindset causes companies to pack more useless features into software and load it up with spyware and adware.
Google and Facebook’s tracking and ad software are a big cause of computing waste in most websites and mobile apps.
- uBlock Origin ftw
putting leeches on people
We still do that. Leeches are surprisingly useful when treating certain blood clots. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
- The difference is putting them on because you actually understand the problem you're trying to treat lol.

Our car centric world. We have somehow intersected everything and everywhere with death zone strips where people can't go. And that's entirely normal and accepted.

Was kind of mind blowing moment when I was old enough to pay attention to the main underlying plot line of Who Framed Rodger Rabbit being about killing off public transport for cars. Like it is very clearly stated throughout the movie, but as a child it just went over my head. Not like I didn't pay attention to when it was being talked about, just not able to appreciate the meaning. I also am from a more rural area, so things like public transportation were not something I interacted with outside of seeing it on TV shows and movies.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
  Is the inspiration behind it, I think.
I'm fortunate enough to live in a walkable neighborhood. When I moved here walkability didn't really factor in; I have friends here and I liked the apartment.
Man, it is so nice. I definitely appreciate it now and will try to factor it in in the future. I am absolutely convinced that walkability fosters community and cars reinforce social isolation.
I still have my car but I consider it and driving a burden. If I had to replace it I'm pretty sure I wouldn't.
Humans be allowed in, on and across roads in many countries. Jay walking is the most insane non-crime I’ve ever heard of. I still don’t really believe it exists…
So, yeah, car centric cities are both terrible and insane - but not every city in the world is that way; thankfully.

Driving.

Somehow millions of us go hurtling by each other mere inches away in multiple tons of steel, often in conditions less than ideal yet for the most part, it's a safe way to travel.

We can't even collectively agree on most topics, yet we put our lives in each others' hands every day.

Even disregarding all the other drivers, we put ourselves in a metal can, hurtle towards solid objects, and simply count on the idea that on average, nothing catastrophic will happen.

Pure, random chance is enough to end us - animal pops into the road, a tree randomly falling, etc. - yet there we go, on yet another daily commute.

I have a long commute through the "middle of nowhere" so lots of time to think about things that ought to be downright terrifying. The thought of hitting one moose is bad. Never occurred to me until just the other day that two moose was not out of the realm of possibility.

Driving just gets more absurd the more you think about it.
Had it not been invented yet, would anyone get away with suggesting a machine propelled by explosions supplied by a tank of the most flammable liquid possible kept underneath the passenger seats?
- If you think driving's weird, think about flying, too. We put several tons of that explode-y liquid, along with a bunch of people, into a big metal tube and shoot it into the sky. And we made that form of transportation several orders of magnitude safer than driving.
- Not just merely a machine powered by explosions, sitting on volatile liquids... but one in which we've decided that it's also a great place to enjoy some music, maybe a nice beverage, and as a great way to take our attention off into vast distances to the sides to "see the sights".
  I think to myself as I steer with one knee, trying to simultaneously drink my coffee and light a cigarette...
- Reminds me of the Asgard from Stargate and how there advanced race was surprised about how we us explosives to propel a bullet and "primitive" things they never really thought of or considered because there dangerous.
- Your comment just reminded me of a sci-fi short story about how humans solve every problem eith explosions.
  https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/16fx8tc/humans_solve_problems_with_explosions/
What if we were able do to travel around in a robot suit that we could fully control. Oh yeah, thats a car.
We can't even collectively agree on most topics, yet we put our lives in each others' hands every day.
Yeah, someone can do a lot of damage simply by ignoring the double yellow divider on a two-way highway.

And some of those parts cost less than a penny to produce or even purchase when done in bulk!
- Scale. That’s the one thing I can’t get my head around

The USA drops approximately 15-20 million sterilized worms on Panama every day. Yes you read that right, it’s The Great American Worm Wall.

This is wild. Good share!
This seems like it would make for a good Wikipedia article, but am I could find was this section:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia_hominivorax#Control
- Fortunately, there is a Tom Scott video.
  IIRC it's not even the only sterilized insects US government air drops from planes. ( Fruit flies over LA? )
- Fuck that read God I hate those types of bugs
I just looked this up because I didn't believe you, but you aren't spinnin' tales, my friend. This is true, and it's blowing my mind. Thank you for sharing this fact!

Last I heard we're still in contact with Voyager 1

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

Water. Fresh drinking water straight from the tap.

And yet I'm seeing lots of people in the UK start to buy bottled water. Worse: canned water.

The shittification of public services in favour of private products is a creep I'm not paying enough attention to

I agree with the overall sentiment; but there is no way in hell that canned water is worse than plastic bottles.
Aluminium is infinitely more/easily recyclable than plastic, and has a much lower negative impact on the environment.
But to reiterate, filling up your own bottle from the tap is preferred - but if you have to buy water in a container: can > bottle
- It's not really the metal that's bad, but the coating on the inside of the metal (in contact with your food/water), that raises concerns.
  Glass is best, but food/water in glass containers are often considerably more expensive.
- I agree that metal is better than plastic, but it feels like they're trying to categorise water with soda as a commodity
- The thing about it is aluminum cans leach into their contents, especially if left open. Aluminum isn't particularly harmful in that amount but it's something you can taste, particularly with acidic contents. Not sure how much water suffers from this, but if it comes through in things with flavour, I'm sure it would come through in water, which is supposed to be flavourless, even if it's not usually very acidic.

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.
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...
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..

Homelessness. But I don't occasionally think about it. I see it every day. In the richest nation in recorded history.

And the wealth of only one single manchild is enough to pay housing for them all - at least in this nation...and probably in some more. (Just looked some numbers up - world economic forum reported in 2021 that there are 150 million people homeless in the world, that would be ~2700,- per individual homeless person, taking his net worth into account -for 770. 000 homeless people in the US it would be ~525. 000 per person)
- The problem is that homelessness is, weirdly, more complicated than just giving people homes. It's also about mental health issues (many of which we don't yet have the ability to effectively treat), community, purpose, and a ton of other things.
  It's almost like everyone would benefit from a support system or safety net put in place by some community funded entity that would have the capability of putting those systems in place.
It's always been a rich man's country. All for one, none for all.
What country? Is it really rich if it can't look after its citizens?

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.
- Yeah dude the more I think of milk as sexual assault the stranger it feels.
  Meat is outright murder and cannsbilism, and don't get me started on eggs.
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

They are made of steel, lmao... how silly do they think we are.
- I believe they're mostly made of alluminium
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.
- You're talking about great circle routes, which is why long distance airplane flights look strangely curved on most flat projection maps.
  What's even more fun is Coriolis force, which in the Northern hemisphere will deflect your path slightly to the right. Pilots tend not to think about it because the wind is a much greater force for deflection but it's there.
- Has anyone ever sent you nudes cause of your name?

The vastness of time and space.

I have a thick rope of muscle in my mouth that I can control accurately enough to speak with, swallow with, and dig popcorn fragments out from between my teeth with.

Just one of nature's wacky solutions that applies to more than one problem. I should be grateful it doesn't have thorns on it.

Printed currency.

Homelessness.

Gravity and breathing

life and death