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Things that still blow your mind years after first thinking about it

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All the things we will never know in this universe due to the scale and relatively short amount of time we have existed in the first place.

There is so much we will never probably know. So many things that even if we DID know we may never be able to truly comprehend.

All the phenomena in this universe that we are unable to observe for various reasons. Hell there are things and events on our own planet we probably won't ever know about.

It kind of depresses me in a way.
 
Cosmic units of distance and time. Its tough to comprehend the distance between New York and LA, but then we have to basis to comprehend the distance between us and the sun or to the next nearest star.
 
The one that blows my mind over and over again:

This incomprehensibly long period of time took place before my birth, and (obviously) I have no recollection of it. While I'm alive, I will be able to store memories and recall the past. I have a personality and a feeling of free will.
I will die at some point, and all of this will be gone. My body will stop functioning, and I as the world knows me will no longer exist. Thinking about this too much kind of freaks me out.

The not as mind-blowing follow-up:

The particles that make me what I am will continue on, and may even one day be part of a separate living thing. Parts of conscious organisms interconnected by time (eg. eat chicken, harvest protein and use in muscles) are used like passing a tool from an experienced mechanic to a novice, but between species.
 
PhoenixDark said:
Two things.

1. The possibility of dinosaurs still roaming the earth somewhere. I used to read a lot of stuff about massive beasts in the Congo swamps, sightings dating back to the 1600s that speak of what would have to be a modern dinosaur. It's most likely not true, but I can't help but think about it often. Scientists discover new animals all the time, who's to say there isn't some enormous reptile out there somewhere.

2. The vastness of water on the earth. We haven't nearly come close to exploring the depths of the planet's bodies of water, nor discovered what's in them. Exploring space is obviously interesting/exciting, but there are many undiscovered life forms deep within the oceans that we have not encountered.
Click to expand...

The dinosaurs are in the ocean.
 
FStop7 said:
After watching this and The Quantum Activist I start wonder some pretty fucked up things.
Click to expand...

I watched that on Netflix Streaming... I'm not sure I buy into its merits. Way too spiritually oriented for my taste. He doesn't present many interesting scientific proofs, he spends most of the time trying to create a new pseudo-scientific spiritual paradigm involving the consciousness as primary. Not sure if want... but yeah, nature is a fucking weird and wonderful place.

Arthrus said:
The one that blows my mind over and over again:

This incomprehensibly long period of time took place before my birth, and (obviously) I have no recollection of it. While I'm alive, I will be able to store memories and recall the past. I have a personality and a feeling of free will.
I will die at some point, and all of this will be gone. My body will stop functioning, and I as the world knows me will no longer exist. Thinking about this too much kind of freaks me out.

The not as mind-blowing follow-up:

The particles that make me what I am will continue on, and may even one day be part of a separate living thing. Parts of conscious organisms interconnected by time (eg. eat chicken, harvest protein and use in muscles) are used like passing a tool from an experienced mechanic to a novice, but between species.
Click to expand...

What's really depressing is when you realize one of the well supported fundamental rules of our universe, entropy. That is to say, "The Entropy of the Universe Tends to a Maximum." Stated another way, "Everything trends to disorder."

In time, everything, even atoms, will begin to lose attraction to one another. The light from all stars will gradually flicker out. Galaxies will dissipate and go so far from one another any hope of contact will simply disappear. Everything goes black, completely, so dark and cold that nothing can live. Gravity loses all fights. And at the end of the universe, trillions of years in the future, all that will be left is black holes... until even they die out from Hawking Radiation, and then our universe well and fully dies complete.

A real, complete erasure of everything that has ever existed in this universe. But maybe with death comes the birth of another universe? We just don't know...
 
The Tsar Bomba also blows my mind

From Cracked: http://www.cracked.com/article_19546_7-nuclear-weapon-screw-ups-you-wont-believe-we-survived.html

"Rather than trying to keep pace with America's increasingly precise guided missile delivery systems, Russia's solution was to build and test a bomb that was so big that aim literally didn't matter. It was like losing an archery competition and throwing a hand grenade at the target to remind the winner just how little aim mattered in the face of your sheer ass-slapping lunacy.

The Tzar Bomba was so impractically big that creating a parachute to slow its descent disrupted the Soviet textile industry. If you're wondering why they needed a parachute in the first place, it's because no matter how high you dropped it from, the resulting explosion would reach up into the sky and disintegrate your plane unless you gave yourself some kind of head start. In fact, the bomb was originally supposed to be twice as big as it ended up being, but they realized that it would be impossible to drop such a bomb from an airplane without killing everyone aboard. Also, it probably would have cracked the earth like an egg. Who the hell knows?

The scaled-down version of the bomb was still big enough to cause a fireball that was seen 600 miles away, meaning if it was dropped over Manhattan, you would have been able to watch New York City burn from Virginia. Windowpanes would have been broken down through South Carolina. Even though they dropped Tsar Bomba over a deserted area in the Arctic Circle, wooden houses were destroyed and stone houses had their roofs blown off hundreds of miles away. The shock wave was so extreme that even with the parachute giving them a 20-mile head start, the plane that dropped it was knocked into a free fall for a half-mile before catching itself and continuing to get out of Dodge."

And finally, evolution denial always, without fail, blows my mind.
 
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