There are more hydrogen atoms in a molecule of water than there are stars in the solar system
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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The fact that planes are kept in the air by the shape of their wings, which forces air to go over at a pace when it can't push down on the wing as hard as it can push up from underneath. It's like discovering an exploitable glitch in a videogame and every time I fly I worry that the universe will get patched while I'm at 10,000 feet.
I remember reading a couple years ago that's not actually how plane wings work. The actual way is much more complicated and hard to explain and hard to teach, so they just teach it this way because its an intuitive mental model that is "close enough" and "seems right", and it really doesn't matter unless you're a plane wing designer.
The basic way an airplane works actually is simple and intuitive: it meets the air at an angle and deflects it downward. The equal and opposite reaction to accelerating that mass of air is an upward force on the wing.
There is, of course a whole lot of finesse on top of that with differences in wing design having huge impacts on the performance and handling of aircraft due to various aerodynamic phenomena which are anything but simple or intuitive. A thin, flat wing will fly though, and balsa wood toy airplanes usually use exactly that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_(force)#Simplified_physical_explanations_of_lift_on_an_airfoil
"With a big enough engine you can make a barn door fly."
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Tbf, you can make anything fly if you give it enough thrust. Wings just make it easier.
BEHOLD THE CUBE PLANE
You joke, but lemme introduce you to Tacit Blue:
Yes, this thing did actually fly.
Stealth demonstator aircraft from the early 80s.
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The fact that there is no discernable difference between an alive body or a dead body when it comes to chemical makeup.
All the pieces are there. All the atoms and molecules are still in the same places. Yet despite this the body is still dead.
When you say "All the atoms and molecules are still in the same places", I can't say I agree. It is the change of chemical composition that renders our body dead. Or should I say, death is defined to be such a chemical composition.
Life is a process of systems within (and outside of) an entity interacting consistently with each other.
Why would a static screenshot of exact chemical composition matter for any process that involves a moving or animated body?
A bricked computer with a corrupt boot loader is chemically the same as one that actually works.
A car is chemically the same before and after you turn the key on its ignition.
A lightbulb is comprised of the same substances whether or not its turned on or off.
... Part of the difference between an alive and a dead body, is that the chemical reactions that constitute animating the thing into being alive ... have stopped.
A dead body is not metabolizing. It has no brain activity. The chemical reactions required to keep its heart beating are no longer happening.
Decomposition then sets in.
These are all differences in chemical processes.
yes, the same atoms are still there, but all the chemical processes in our body have stopped.
To be fair, a perfectly fine but dead body is impossible to observe since the process of dying is usually the result or accumulation of injuries or disfunctions. For this experiment you either have to kill somebody without altering their body in the slightest or instantly conjure a perfectly intact body without any life in it.
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The label 'homo sapiens' for our species.
...homo sapiens sapiens: so wise we named ourselves twice...
A Planck length is the smallest length possible, a smaller length simply can't exist.
At least that's what scientists believed until they studied OPs penis, then they found out something smaller does in fact exist.
Dude! I told you in confidence not to share that info.
I guess I have no choice but to share that @[email protected] has the world's biggest human anus. It's been a scientific mystery about how it got to be so big.
I said out loud at a Warhammer convention that space marines are just dolls for grown men.
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The size of the universe and the distance between everything in it. It takes about 8 minutes for light from our own sun to reach us. And the observable universe is about 5,859,000,000,000,000,000 times larger than that! That is quite a trip. I would need about 293,283,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 charging stops with my electric car to get to the end. I think Iโll pass.
(Someone smarter than me will probably find out that my math is wrong)
What I find mind blowing about the scale of the universe, is that on a logarithmic scale from the smallest possible thing to the largest possible thing, humans live at almost the exact centre.
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For me, it's the sheer scale of celestial bodies.
Our Sun is humongous. UY Scuti's radius is 1700 times larger - 185300 times larger than the Earth's. And then there's TON 618, which has a mass 66 billion times larger than our Sun's.
And even those are barely grains of sand when compared to solar and galactic structures... It is humbling, to say the least.
Edit 2: I deleted the previous edit, because my first observation is correct (scale is maintained when going from comparing radii to comparing diameters...), which is why I have an Arts degree.
Now, think about the energy and forces involved when 2 supermassive black holes orbit each other and collide.
Ooh, those aspects are well beyond my capacity for comprehension or visualisation! I feel like an ant watching nuclear explosions.
You can observe the chirality of some molecules from the crystals they form, sometimes they twist clockwise, other times they twist counter clockwise. Which way they twist is dependent on their molecular structure.
Biological evolution
For the sake of discussion, let's say on the one hand a magic man intelligently designed life and all that. And on the other hand we have it arise and evolve over the course of billions of years of random atomic interactions and genetic mutations. I honestly find the second one far more amazing, wondrous, amazing, and mind blowing.
I don't know but imagine what crazy processes would lead to creating that magic man floating around in nothingness, without a world to evolve on.
@[email protected]
There's no "magic man" and "magic". There are a lot of theories of magic with lots of details. If you'd dive deeper into the topic, it would be as mind blowing for you as a theory of evolution. So you just choose a theory which looks more interesting for you.
Exactly! If it was just magic, things seem underwhelming all of a sudden - like why couldn't you give zebras wings or laser vision? Why not have a grizzly bear with chainsaw arms on wheels? No ant computers or space octopuses? Makes nature seem arbitrarily limited and uncreative (and cruel) in comparison to what unlimited magic could accomplish.
(Just to be clear, this is not an argument against God since you could always just say "god set nature up to allow for natural evolution and has reasons for not going all out with creativity" - it's unfalsifiable but you could believe that)