I read one of the most eye opening ideas of my life last night. Lets go for a little walk:
Calories were the only things humans had to to work at first as a species.
Then, we discovered fire, making some work be done using fire.
Then we srarted using animals do some work like pulling plows and people around.
Then we discovered steam, which greatly ramped up production processes.
Then coal was discovered. - another exponential jump.
Through here, we used slave labor across the world to do a great portion of our manual labor.
Upon discovering how to use fossil fuels, which does ~1000x per unit what a human can do, almost at this exact point in time, the slaves were freed. Of course, this is where wages increased from here on out as well, since energy is real, and money is not
I mean. Cooincidence...? Very likely, not. The good story always points to politics and humans good nature for finally freeing the slaves (i.e., the mean slave owners hearts grew 3 sizes and gave back all the presents), but this reasoning, to me, seems much stronger.
It's Friday, he woke up and chiefed a bong first thing. Can't blame him really
Breakfast of champions.It's Friday, he woke up and chiefed a bong first thing. Can't blame him really
Heres my actual fun fact friday, though.
When viewing models and pictures of the solar system, we always see something like this:
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In this model, the planets are to scale, but the spacing between the planets to eachother and the sun is anything but.
Ive always wanted to set this up:
If you had a football field, and the sun was the size of a basketball at one of the goal lines, the earth would be the size of a tiny bead and about 75 feet away.
We measure solar system distances in solar units (iirc) where the distance from the sun to earth is 1 solar unit.
Referring to the chart below (which, note is also NOT to scale, but has a measure line which exponentially jumps as it goes away from the sun!), Saturn is 750 feet away from the basketball.
The oort cloud (again, iirc) roughly marks the extent of our solar system, i.e., where the sun has any gravitational pull on things. If i can math right, this is 1420 miles away from the basketball in the football field. It is fascinating to me, just how far away everything actually is, and also that the sun has any amount of gravitational pull from that far away. From the edge of the oort cloud, the sun will basically look like any other star in the night sky.
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Fun fact:
This thread sucks.
You can suck a golf ball through a garden hose!Fun fact:
This thread sucks.