Shit’s literal magic. We dug rocks out of the earth, broke them down, built them back up again in a very specific way, etched them with conductive runes, taught those runes how to use electricity to do math, and now I can shitpost by telling the runes in my phone to scream 1’s and 0’s at other runes across my house.
Yes "we" because you know millions of people were collectively exploited for the labor, development, knowledge, and skills used to arrive where we are.
It’s kinda nice we can take credit for other people’s stuff. As long as we’re doing our part.
If nobody put out fires, we’d elect new officials to fix fire departments n stuff. We don’t need to know how to drive a firetruck or use a Halligan to pry open a door, just pay our taxes. So if a new firefighting technique is developed even though you or I only clock in at our offices and never think about firefighting, we’re still part of society and we can socialize the win a bit.
And if we figure out how to improve CPU speeds, firefighters can say “WE figured out how to get computers to boot in <1 second” even though they just did their own jobs. (Or at least “we know how to …” b/c they can pay someone or buy something that accomplishes the task, even if they don’t know the inner workings.)
But we needed them to feel safe and maybe not die. They couldn’t do it all and neither could we. Collective win.
:)
There are problems with this view so lemme have it!
Thanks to the comments here If I ever unexpectedly travel through time I'll be able to teach them about computers. Now I just have to learn advanced chemistry and learn how to create everything else.
This is not a natural landscape. You don't get fields of grass like this without human intervention. This started in the bronze age, so just because your local human-made landscape is green, make no mistakes.
Bit by-the-by, though, because obviously computers are completely awesome, but real nature is not this placid homogeneous scene
By harnessing that thing which is all over this natural place - electromagnetism. It is a quantum leap in the human experience, like harnessing fire, or agriculture.