I had no exposure to school or formal education when I was real young. I just had a few picture books about the world, one was a cut-away that showed the layers of earth’s crust, mantle and core.

Being about 5, I had no idea of the proportions or scales involved so whenever I saw someone digging a hole outside for a firepit or fencepost I would yell and scream that they were going to break through to lava and it would pour everywhere and burn everything up.

Nobody was able to explain things to me so I had to self-educate myself about science and everything else over the next couple decades. Fast forward to me now explaining to people on reddit what lava is, that it’s actually molten rock… there are a lot of people who have never thought about it, saw pictures of volcanoes and just accepted that they spit out “hot goo” and never thought deeper.

I wish I was kidding, but also… I wonder if it’s a simpler, more peaceful life when you don’t know how anything works. I was up at 2:00 AM with my brain whirring away, like every night.

Soulless Artificial Intelligences irritated with humanity constantly trying to get them to answer dumb questions can replicate a lot of them from purely data.

FTFY

Agrees quietly in melting permafrost.

The science behind all this is pretty simple honestly.

When you shout you have to inhale first, and that act of inhaling gives you a burst of muscle power. But when you also combine that with a loud exclamation or a shout or curse, you actually startle yourself on some level. Your brain listens to you, always remember that. So when your brain hears you shout or scream, it drops everything and goes into survival mode. IE: a burst of adrenaline.

When you combine adrenaline and oxygen you can do almost super-human things like smash cinderblocks with your bare hands and lift cars off trapped people.

If you want to try charging your muscles for something strenuous like opening a tight jar lid, you can skip the cursing and shouting and just take three deep breaths, and on the last breath draw it in as fast and hard as you can and hold it for a moment as you try to exert the force, it will feel astonishingly easier.

Not sure if you know that what you’re describing has a name it’s called Panpsychism and it is gaining some popularity but that’s not because there’s any reason to believe in it or any evidence, it’s a fanciful idea about the universe that doesn’t really help or connect anything. IE: panpsychism doesn’t make for a better explanation for anything than the idea that you are just a singular consciousness living in it’s most probable state to be able to observe or experience anything.

I’m not shooting it down, it’s one of those things we just will never know, but that’s a pretty huge list of things and possibilities so I just don’t know if it’s more or less useful than any other philosophical view.

I almost wrote out a joking idea about mandatory injections of live, healthy viral cultures that all children are required to get for “natural, effective immune system development” but I didn’t want to give the fuckers the idea.

Someday artists are going to struggle to replicate this “look” in order to make memes and jokes.

On the sides of our cave walls.

I’m surprised in the year of our Lord, 2025, we’ve still only had a couple of serious interspecies relationship pieces in popular media. You would think with the tech we have no there would be so many science fiction stories and romantic comedies about people and odd sapient creatures or monsters in wacky romances.

And I mean fucking daring stuff. Even Shape of Water was almost tame, dude just looked like a jacked fishy man. But going in the right direction.

I genuinely think it would be good for society to mentally play with the far edges of our social constructs.

Am I “stealing” fat from the food I eat?

Yes you are and you need to be stopped.

I would literally move if I could afford it and if it was even a little easier.

Stockholm syndrome suggests we enjoy it or want to be here.

I’ve come to accept that reality is far less important to our daily lives than narratives.

I mean, it’s a real depressing understanding of the world, but after you embrace it, you learn to work around it and it can even be a huge asset or tool for getting results and interacting with others.

For me personally, I want to learn the disappointing truth about everything, but for the vast majority of people, they will live their whole lives without ever needing or wanting to learn who actually said or did what in history. It’s fine. We can keep building stories to influence people to do better things. There is no cosmic arbiter of truth who is going to judge people for spreading a story that leads to better outcomes.

This meme was circulated about 20 years ago by my reckoning.

It was clever back then, it’s far less entertaining now in an age when people are discarding science and factual knowledge wholesale.

We have very, very good models of each of those “things” listed. We have such good models for it, that even since this meme first made rounds, we have created new kinds of telescopes that can see gravity, we have created computers that can calculate using individual particles in superposition, we have built tools to view the edge of space and time and have imaged the event-horizons around black holes and we have created conditions close to beginning of the universe in labs and discovered new particles that validate decades or centuries of theorizing.

These models only break down in extreme environments or when they intersect in certain conditions. But by “break down” we don’t mean “scientists throw their hands in the air and become flat-earthers” we mean “we are missing some key data” to make different fields of science work together.

I am reminded of the detail in The Office where Michael Scott is stirring sugar into his diet coke.

Ungulates - Even MORE stomachs.

Cetaceans - why not even bigger?

Cephalopods - Starships and philosophy and tragic poems about how short life is.

Bivalves - even less brain, brain make feel bad, brain bad

Felines - Find and domesticate the nearest dominant life form

Murmurations of birds and schooling fish - Horrifyingly surreal swarm intelligences that can take the shape of things like pointing fingers and signs to communicate or a big pair of cartoon scissors that chase you.

The Curie family was an amazing story of pioneering science and true scientific effort to change the world. To say the Curie family made sacrifices would be an understatement, but few people know just how much work goes into developing whole new fields of science.

I think about that every time I see some charlatan or delusional nutter with no math or science background trying to get recognized on the Joe Rogan show for having some pothead idea that keeps getting rejected from mainstream science channels.

Fuck that, I will mess with shit.

“I want all humans to be able to change sex, race or species at will.”

“Give every human being the ability to experience what someone else has experienced by pressing a small button on the top of our heads.”

“Make volcanoes erupt food. Just endless, nutritious food for everyone.”

“Babies are hatched from eggs. I dunno man, seems like it would be silly.”

“No more mosquitoes. Replace them with tiny little airplanes that sometimes circle around you and you have to swat them down like king kong.”

Ideally our species survives and manages to send ships away from Earth well before that or you’re going to get a really warm summer eventually, followed by sitting on a charred ball of barren, airless rock for the majority of those trillion years.

If you get the chance, ask for omnipotence or to become conscious energy systems or something. You can still choose to experience being a human and having all these experiences, but you will never be stuck, you will never get bored or feel anything related to being mortal if you don’t want.

You could even choose to live a whole lifetime. Maybe billions of lifetimes, each one feeling totally and completely indistinguishable from reality, because it would be reality.

You could be experiencing that right now.

No, really, this is a fantastic question we should all ask more.

Because on the outside, in terms of space and the physical universe, it will undergo phase transitions, it will experience a long, slow cooling into rarified energy… but those terms “long” and “rarified” are just from our human reference frame. Roger Penrose’s work demonstrated how even a vast, infinite expanding space with tiny particles zooming through it, from other reference frames behaves exactly like the big bang. IE: as the universe cools and expands, it’s still infinitely dense and exploding outward from a different perspective of time and space. It’s perpetual.

That’s one thing. The other thing is this… time passing is meaningless if nobody is there to observe it. You will be dead for an infinite amount of time, you won’t notice a moment of it. But every passing moment you’re dead, the universe is rolling dice. It’s always rolling dice.

Eventually, even if it takes so incredibly long that we don’t have numbers to express it (we actually do) then something is bound to happen again. Eventually these “somethings” will be just right to create a kind of universe, complex information systems, and maybe even a consciousness that can experience it.

It sounds kind of fantastic and overly fanciful, but I am basing this on the evidence that it happened at least once before that we know of.

Seriously, even halfway through my expected lifespan and I’m already seeing a point where I’ll be ready to get off the ride. Not in terms of self-harm or depression, but just generally as the decades go on it gets less and less enjoyable in a broad sense.

Our brains absorb too much information and memories than our minds were meant to handle. Our emotions become an annoying liability. Our memories reveal themselves to be these tenuous and bizarre amalgamations of experiences and imagination and cannot be trusted, and maybe most annoying of all is seeing people making the same mistakes around you all the time, and tuning you out for being “old” more and more, determined to fall into the same holes and traps that could be easily avoided, but dragging all of society with them over and over. It takes away a lot of the magic of seeing the future.

Even all that would be something manageable, if I had a loooong life I would probably escape from everyone and just read in the woods or something. But holy shit it has to be alongside physical health because by far the worst, worst, worst thing about getting old is the aches and pains and minor irritations that turn into crippling infections, unhealed strains, and degrading senses.

I am quite positive that something happens after you’re dead for an infinity amount of time, no idea what, but it happened before so it stands to reason it may again, and even the slimmest chances become 100% assured after an infinite amount of time.