Big Stuff, literally
One of my fascinations over the years, besides literally everything else that has been mentioned on my blog, is big things. I mean that literally, I like things are inconceivably large. Now where this interest came from is up in the air, but I personally think it relates to my love of space. Afterall, space has always made me want scroll out and see things on a macroscopic scale. I’ve continually had a curiosity with discovering celestial bodies that put into perspective how small humans are. See the the previous link, or example A, example B, and example C to see what some examples of what I mean. I feel that learning about objects on such a massive scale makes me appreciate the beauty of the universe, but also of life. While I enjoy the visual spectacle of space, I also enjoy that I am able to be an observer of such awe in the first place. The probability of everything leading up to me being born, and then having just the right circumstances to lead me to learning and observing space is pretty inspiring I think. Now lets talk about BIG STUFF.
The first big object I would like to talk about is Bagger 288. Now while the name sounds like ridiculous the machine/ vehicle is just as ridiculous. The mobile (although barely mobile) excavator is capable of harvesting 265,000 tons of coal daily! It weighs 13,000 tons itself, is 71 feet tall, and each of its 18 buckets is 7,700 pounds. The excavator is a beast and I highly recommend looking up pictures of the machine to truly get a scale of how large it is. Coal is of course a fossil fuel that can have negative affects and the machine itself is not without some controversy, but I do find intrigue in human ingenuity and ability to shape the world. The more wild part is that Bagger 288 was designed decades ago, who knows what the future holds in terms of making vehicles and machines. I hope that one day humans are able to create machines which rival the size of Bagger 288, but are more environmentally friendly and able to coexist with nature in a way. I know its a hopeful thought but sometimes a little hope goes a long way.
Now while being big on physical scale is the main focus of this post I would like to take a step away of from the physical reality and look at the digital, more specifically video game map sizes. As a kid I had an affinity for going to the edge of the maps in open world games. I’d like pushing the boundaries of what the developers had created in order to find new secrets and hidden worlds. I wasn’t lucky most of the time. Instead of being met with secrets I was met with bugs, invisible barriers, and the occasional teleportation back to the map. When I started playing Minecraft during my early adolescence it was a breath of fresh air to be able to go as far the eye can see and still find more land waiting to be explored. In fact Minecraft has one of the largest maps ever created (although it is procedurally generated), which spans 60 million by 60 million blocks! Now due its limitations, Minecraft originally had an area known as the far lands that ended the world which has since been replaced with an invisible barrier. Although people have pushed the lands to their limits.
Staying on fictional worlds for this one, another BIG thing that’s interested me has been the size of spaceships in fiction. Some spaceships can be very small and serve a single person or small number of people, think Jimmy Neutrons ship or Rick’s ship from Rick and Morty. Others can be slightly larger and have multiple rooms, think of the Millennium Falcon. Other spaceships are somehow even larger and are on the scale of small cities, think the ship from Wall-E. Finally you get to the true behemoths that one can only hope humans are able to develop even in the far flung future, think the Mothership from Independence Day or the Dreadnaught from Destiny. These physic defying ships, aren’t happening anytime soon but they fun to conceive of. I would like to also shout out to the rings from Halo and the Dyson Sphere from Star Trek, because although they aren’t a spaceship in the traditional sense they are somewhat in other ways. Now while, these aren’t a reality yet I still find it interesting that some creators create their worlds on such a massive scale. It makes me realize that I am not the only one dialed in on size ;).
Now lets dial back in on reality and move on. Let’s talk about cities. Now talking about cities is complicated for many reasons. For one, what constitutes a city is different depending on who you ask. So let’s just say when I mention a city I mean an urban area as opposed to a rural area. I grew up in what many would consider a small city with a population of give or take around 50,000 people. I didn’t grow up in a highly dense area with skyscrapers lining the airspace. Instead I grew up with at least 2,000 people per square mile and the ability to occasionally drive down a main street without traffic. Even in this small city it would take at least an two to five hours to walk from one side of town to the other. I still find restaurants that I had never heard of. I still find that there are entire areas I had never visited. This is in spite of my decade and a half of experience living here. Even my friends who have lived here since birth are still finding new experiences. Truly even the small city I call home is big, but now lets scale that up to the size of a truly enormous city. New York City, has a population of over 8 million, a size of 472 square miles, a GDP of over $1 trillion, and history of 400 years. Truly this city is a pinnacle of the modern world. Its culture is highly influential and diverse, its history is rich, and its quite literally the city. Think about all of the people who live there, all living their own lives, all with their own histories, and than think about over the span of centuries. The funny thing is, New York isn’t even the largest city in the world, nor is it the only one with what was previously mentioned. Cities are truly one of the biggest things human have created.
goodbye.
A little bit of Tech Doomerism
It was in the late 2000s and throughout most of the 2010s when I felt the most optimistic about the future of technology. Being that I was a child at the time this obviously doesn’t come as a shock, but even early on tech was not all it was cracked up to be. I had yet to learn about the failures occurring at the time such as The Dotcom Bubble, The Microsoft Antitrust Lawsuit, or the Privatization of the Internet; all of which would taint my nostalgia of this era later on in my life. Nonetheless, lacking this knowledge at the time combined with my tech sensibilities made me feel extremely hopeful. I think this is understandable considering all of the major technological changes occurring at the time such as; the wide adoption of the smart phones changing the way we live our daily lives, gaming consoles starting to take advantage of new power and online connectivity, companies such as NVIDIA and AMD creating some of the most impressive graphic cards to have ever been seen, social media starting to grow connecting people like never before, websites like YouTube starting to pay its creators kickstarting many careers and allowing for creatives to share their independent works, the use of gaming for scientific applications, and so on and so forth. Now, I’ll get to the downsides of all of what was just mentioned later, but for now let me get more personal first.
During this era I was a very cynical adolescent who felt like the world was full of issues (I mean duh), but I felt like it could be mended with technology in one way or another. Now this is true, I don’t need a source to state that technology can most definitely help improve the lives of everyone. With that being said, as I have gotten older and experienced the 2020s I am most definitely in the mindset that technology has damaged us. Now for the obligatory list of consequences from technology before I continue my thoughts; social media creating a whole litany of mental health concerns, the spreading of misinformation which have had some very real world outcomes (example A and example B), the destruction of privacy, the growth of echo-chambers and dangerous ideologies, the destruction of certain industries, monopolization from huge tech companies, the need for more power exasperating climate change, the rise of scamming and hustle culture, and of course the possibility of AI taking away many many many many jobs.
Now that’s out of the way, lets talk more about my personal journey. As a child I was very interested in technology from an early age. From learning about how to install emulators, to watching YouTube religiously, to eventually building my first PC; I had always enjoyed immersing myself in technology. My anxiety and eventual pessimism started while I was still in that golden age. I started to notice, oh man these improvements to my phone are so minor why bother bother releasing a new phone, oh man why are these game companies charging so much for me to play this game, oh man there are a lot of rude people in the comments, oh man I don’t think I should be seeing images and videos of death and destruction so easily, etc. I had come to accept all of this though and didn’t put much stock in it at the time. I think over time as I became more aware of the current state of the world and watched news stories come flooding in that this initial optimism died out. Then comes the 2020s and; oh I can’t buy a graphics card because of a price hike, oh Twitter is being bought out and ruined, oh electric vehicles aren’t as reliable as promised, oh streaming services are just becoming cable again, oh AI is using my info to train itself, etc. Needless to say it has been an exhausting four years, and who knows what the future holds.
To take a step back now, I was made aware of the Frutiger Aero aesthetic in the last couple of years. I think part of its appeal to me has been feeling that nostalgia again, feeling that one sensation that the future looks promising. The bright colors, glossiness, relation to nature, and the post Y2K “futuristic feel” just make me feel good, simple as that. Now I am aware that it was supposed to make me feel a certain way and that is was designed by major corporations to evoke emotions, but what can I say it worked. With that being said I know the future is looking bleak and technology sometimes seem like it will be humanity’s downfall. I just hope one day that human behavior and morality can catch up with technology. Until then it is up in the air.
goodbye.
The End but Not Really
I can’t help but notice I have been consuming a lot of post-apocalyptic content recently. It started last summer when I started watching Adventure Time; which definitely has the most whimsical take on what life is like after apocalypse (except when it does delve into those heavier topics). From there I started watching the Fallout show when it came out earlier this year. I had played some of the games and gotten into Fallout lore videos recently, so it was nice to see how well the show captured the feeling of the games. On TikTok I started watching a animator named Luke Humphris recently who has a small series which covers the life of different people after the apocalypse. Similar to Adventure Time, the tone is more on the eccentric and fun side, but nonetheless has been entertaining. Lastly, my partner and I have recently started playing The Last of Us Part 1 since neither of us had played before. Although the major plot points have basically given away by now, I still find myself enjoying the game and immersed into the world. None of this viewing was intentional just coincidental.
Anyhow one thing I noticed while watching all of these were the ways in which nature was able to reclaim the land long after humans had disappeared. These worlds seem filled to the brim with overgrowth; infrastructure which one dominated the landscape has crumpled; and of course the almighty cars are left to rot. In a way it is very fitting to see the world that humans sculpted to their own needs and wants completely decay and be taken back by nature. Afterall, considering what humans have done to Earth, it is nice to think that some sort of retribution would occur. Now in reality, what the world would look like after apocalypse is anyone’s game. There is a possibility that said apocalypse also destroys most of the world itself, look no further than nuclear winter or gamma ray burst to see what that would look like.
My main question is how would humans continue to live if a majority of everything and everyone is dead? Would we even survive? I feel that if humans were to survive, so much would have to occur. We would have to create some sort of new governance, produce a sustainable food source, rebuild key infrastructure, assign roles to people, etc. Another point I would like to add is that humans might need to fundamentally change in order to survive. This could mean developing new mindsets and outlooks on the world to not make the same mistakes of past. This could also mean changing how they live their everyday life and creating new habits. Lastly (although there are many more points that could be discussed), would be the issue of record keeping. Humans would need to find a way to keep or salvage the collective knowledge that we have accumulated. There is so much that would be at stake in that regard, but unfortunately humans might be more occupied with trying to survive.
With all of this being said, I do not want to the world to end. I very much enjoy living life and experiencing all that there is to offer, despite the current state of the world. I would rather have a future similar to Star Trek than to Fallout, and I don’t think that is an unpopular opinion. I am also confident in the resilience of humans, as shown when our ancestors almost went extinct. I think that as long as there was a way, we would survive no matter what. We are not invincible, nor do I believe in miracles, but I think we could find a way even in overwhelming odds. And if we don’t survive, well at least some of what we created will.
goodbye.
Yap Session
Here are some random facts that I have learned over the years. I found all of these interesting and wanted to share now that I have a platform. Links to sources will be provided for each fact in the underlined portions of the paragraphs.
Recently I was wondering why I never heard about tornados in other countries besides the United States. All the media I grew up watching mentioned tornados but they were always kept to areas in the inner United States. I hadn’t heard about major historical tornados happening to ancient civilizations, or to medieval era kingdoms, or to dynasties or empires. I had, however, heard about other historically significant natural disasters. This got me wondering why this is the case, and it turns out this is because the United States has the most tornados out of any country in the world. We average an around 1,200 tornados per year! This is due to the unique geographical location of the United States, as mentioned in the following article, the warm-moist air from the Gulf of Mexico mix with the cool-dry air from the Rockies and southwest to create an environment ideal for tornado activity.
What do you think killed the most soldiers during World War 1? Do you think it was guns? Well it was actually artillery. Artillery was responsible for 60% of battle field causalities and looking at these photos you can definitely tell why. WW1 is considered one of the first mechanized wars, and this most definitely contributed to the large amount of death. This was one of the first times in history humans were able to produce and manufacture at such a large scale, and the subsequent carnage was a grim result. Tanks, planes, toxic gases, and machine guns all saw use for the first time during this war and were the biproduct industrial scientific discoveries. War had forever been changed, and it wasn’t like your grandpa’s war. While World War 2 had caused more damage overall the precedent for war had definitely been set in the Great War, also known as the War to End all Wars.
In the mammal class of animals and under the order of carnivora, there are two subclasses, feliformia and caniformia. From those names you can probably tell what animals in those sub-classes look like, felines (cats) and canines (dogs) respectively. In the feliformia (cat-like) subclass you have actual cats (big and small), hyenas, mongooses, civets, bear cats, and many more. In the caniformia subclass you have actual dogs, bears, racoons, badgers, otters, wolverines, skunks, sea lions, and many more. I don’t have much commentary to add to this entry, I just thought it was interesting. Also this further proves my personal observation, that bears are just big dogs that would hurt me if I hugged them.
Now this fact has been stated so much online on fact websites and in listicles that it has become somewhat common, but there were Civil War Veterans alive during the 1950s. Now some of the veterans would have been extremely young during the war, but they were participants nonetheless. They would have lived through so much history including (but not limited to) the Gilded Era, the wild west era, the rise of the automobiles and airplanes, the implementation of the electricity and household appliances, two world wars, and countless cultural and societal changes. This is so fascinating to me, as someone who is interested in this time period of American and world history. To end out, what I will say about change is that sometimes you don't realize how much has changed until you look back. I wonder if they reflected on the world’s transition around them at the end, or if they were just focusing on their personal lives and death. Time is strange yet captivating.
goodbye.
A love of maps
One interest of mine is maps. They are most definitely in my list of things that bring joy to my life. As a kid I would sit down and draw maps of the United States over and over, for hours. Occasionally I would even draw my own weird fictionalized version of the United States made up of states all with their own unique name. When I would ride my bike beside the pile of leaves on the ground I would think of how the outlines of the leaves looked like countries. As I would later figure out I was not the only one who had a similar line of thinking, given the rice trick for DND map making.
This map interest would continue into my adolescence as I would keep drawing maps of fictionalized worlds, sometimes resembling those found in the beginning of fantasy novels. Being the time period that it was I wanted to translate this fascination into Minecraft, using the various creation tools like MC Edit. Now this never worked out because I did not possess the technical knowhow at the time and my attention span was too short to try and learn. As I grew older this interest eventually led to me becoming more interested in geography as a whole; including sub-disciplines such as physical, economic, and human geography. With that being said I have always been partial to physical geography probably due to that initial interest in maps and the idea of seeing what the land looks like from above.
All of this eventually leads to me to me studying geography in college and learning more about the discipline as a whole. Nowadays I enjoy reading the Wikipedia entries on the geographies of different countries. If there are regions that I do not know about geographically I always have fun researching them. I also have a tendency to go into detail about physical geography a lot when I teach my social studies classes. With all of that being said I am by no means an expert in the field as there is a lot for me to learn, but I do find happiness in the fact that an interest I had as a kid has stuck with me and led me to becoming fascinated with a whole subject.
Anyway here are some more tangents for you. I love that old maps are so ludicrously wrong. Like some have complete continents that aren’t actually there and others have straight up monsters. With that being said I am interested in how people were A) able to even create maps of such large land masses even if they weren’t necessarily accurate and B)how people’s perception of the world changed as new techniques and technologies were created to make maps more accurate.
goodbye.
Space, the final frontier or something like that
I used to love space as a kid, so much so that I wanted to be an astronomer for years. I had so many space books, and loved watching shows like Cosmos and The Universe. There were so many topics that fascinated me about the universe; the boundaries of space, the origins of life, the existence of extraterrestrial life, and of course the possibility of space travel. This interest led to a love and hate relationship with science as a whole, because while I was fascinated with science (especially science related to space) I struggled with the subject in school. Luckily, YouTube videos and certain science creators, helped me stay interested in the topic. Additionally, projects like the Scale of the Universe scratched the space itch for me as well. Learning so much about space also led me down a rabbit hole of existential thought but that is a story for another day.
As time went on I eventually found myself drifting towards history as my primary interest. This led to my love of space waning as I grew older. Nowadays I don’t even get close to the same amount of fulfillment from learning about space. With that being said I have found some small renewed interest in space recently due to bewildering concepts such as false vacuum decay, Dyson swarms, galactic voids, and the death of the universe, but this interest is nowhere near the same level. I’ve accepted this, because many obsessions of mine that have disappeared as I got older. Though, as of late I had been looking to feel that same excitement and sense of awe again. Fortunately for me I got to witness the Solar Eclipse in my part of the world this year and man… It made me feel those feelings once again.
It wasn’t like any other experience I have ever had. As the days approached for the event I was nervous that it was going to be overblown, but I have never been happier to be proven wrong in my life.As the moon approached and it slowly engrossed the sun, my partner and I felt this weird sensation. Our bodies weren’t sure what to do as the saturation left our eyes, the birds were chirping up a storm, and the bugs were going wild. Once totality fully occurred I felt like a confused animal who was ready to start to stampeding, but simultaneously I felt completely overwhelmed with happiness. You could here all of the people in a mile radius shouting, as we all just witnessed an epic once in a life time event. It was also then that I understood the event’s significance and realized why it would caused ancient humans to react. Not to sound too flowery but I felt connected to humanity, the Earth, and the universe all at once. I felt so small yet also like I was a part of something larger. It felt nice to feel that type of excitement and awe once again.
