For me it is Cellular Automata, and more precisely the Game of Life.
Imagine a giant Excel spreadsheet where the cells are randomly chosen to be either “alive” or “dead”. Each cell then follows a handful of simple rules.
For example, if a cell is “alive” but has less than 2 “alive” neighbors it “dies” by under-population. If the cell is “alive” and has more than three “alive” neighbors it “dies” from over-population, etc.
Then you sit back and just watch things play out. It turns out that these basic rules at the individual level lead to incredibly complex behaviors at the community level when you zoom out.
It kinda, sorta, maybe resembles… life.
There is colonization, reproduction, evolution, and sometimes even space flight!
The concept of emergence blows my mind.
We have this property in our universe where simple things with simple rules can create infinitely complex things and behaviours. A molecule of water can’t be wet, but water can. A single ant can’t really do anything by himself, but a colony with simple pheromone exchange mechanisms can assign jobs, regulate population, create huge anthills with vents, specialty rooms and highways.
Nothing within a cell is “alive”, it’s just atoms and molecules, but the cell itself is. One cell cannot experience things, think, love, have hopes and dreams, or want to watch Netflix all day, but a human can.
The fact that lots of tiny useless things governed by really simple rules can create this complexity in this world is breathtakingly beautiful.
Kinda ties into your example :)
Just like the trillions of parameters that make up machine learning models that can speak or create images
Galaxies are not evenly distributed in space. Instead, when you look at the universe, galaxies are grouped in giant strings that look like a neural connections in a brain.
It blew my mind when I learned that we’re in a relatively dark, empty part of space compared to what’s out there. It really put into perspective for me how difficult space travel will be for us as we continue to advance.
Space is incomprehensibly big and its getting larger over time. We will never have meaningful travel outside the solar system. If humanity started traveling in space from the moment we evolved, we would be able to travel the length of the milky way around two times. Space is basically a boondoggle. Our solar system still contains lots of resources though, so its not totally worthless.
Yea … like Star Trek, with warp speed and everything, is basically all limited to our single Galaxy … and that’s not unrealistic given their technology.
Like in that space-faring future, the galaxy is basically the new continent and the inter-galactic divide the new great ocean that no one has ever crossed.
Yea because gra-- woahhh
People working together to solve problems without personal profit as the main incentive.
Open source software
Dear God, it’s beautiful. (And genuinely seriously important)
It kills me how much more of it there’d be, and how much better off we’d be in general, if we weren’t forced to spend so much of our lives working for other people.
Now we’re at a top 3 idea which haunts me. We have everything to make life so amazing now, but we just can’t let go of these defunct paradigms that drag us down into a lower common denominator existence.
Evolution as a concept; not just biological. The fact that you can explain the rise of complex systems with just three things - inheritance, mutation, selection. It’s so simple, yet so powerful.
Perhaps not surprisingly it’s directly tied to what OP is talking about cellular automata.
DNA still blows my mind. Some weird simple molecules that just happen to like to link together have become the encoding of how complex biological systems are constructed. Then mash two separate sets of DNA together, add a little happenstance, and you have another new being from those three things you mentioned.
There’s something interesting in here about the persistence of legacy systems that I can’t quite put my finger on. Rest assured I will be consumed by the thought for the remainder of the day.
There are plenty things that we could talk about legacy systems from an evolutionary approach. It’s specially fun when you notice similarities between software and other (yup!) evolutionary systems.
For example. In Biology you’ll often see messy biological genetic pools, full of clearly sub-optimal alleles for a given environment, decreasing in frequency over time but never fully disappearing. They’re a lot like machines running Windows XP in 2023, it’s just that the selective pressure towards more modern Windows versions was never harsh enough to get rid of them completely.
Or leftovers in languages that work, but they don’t make synchronic sense when you look at other features of the language. Stuff like gender/case in English pronouns, Portuguese proclisis (SOV leftover from Latin in a SVO language), or Italian irregular plurals (leftovers of Latin defunct neuter gender). It’s like modern sites that still need animated .GIF support, even if .WEBM would be more consistent with the modern internet.
How little food intake is enough to sustain extensive (physical) activity.
The little birds running on the beach with every wave, eating mini things. How can those be enough to sustain that much running? And it’ll have to sustain them when they’re not eating too.
A human can not eat for several days and still stay active. An incredible adaptation. I food conversion, storage, and priority dissolution in a complex system.
A human can not eat for several days and still stay active.
I’m looking at my bulging waist and feeling incredibly guilty right now!
I think about this a lot too! It feels wrong that so little material can allow so much work to be done. Feels like moving a mars bar should take a significant amount of the mars bars energy to move stuff around, but you could do a lap around the block and still not deplete what it gave.
BitTorrent. I only need to share a file once and it could potentially reach millions of people. It’s old tech now but it feels like magic to me.
One of the best pieces of software ever. And it actually works, that’s the crazy thing!
Part of the beauty and awe I get whenever I reread that famous excerpt from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot is the sense of how ephemeral and delicate our existence, and even the very human concept of “existence”, is. We are infinitesimally small and yet, through no fault of our own, our days, how we fill them, and the people we know hold some measure of importance to us. And it will all be gone - eventually. It’s a very somber note yet it makes me feel a certain sense of peace.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
The Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-tester, specifically (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitzur–Vaidman_bomb_tester).
Next, that I can buy and program a computer for 0.30 USD that’s half the size of a grain of rice (ATtiny10). There are cheaper too, but that’s the one I like.
Finally, on to the horrifying: Boltzmann brains. The idea that given a reasonable interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics, and long spans of time, the most common form of brain in the universe ought to be one that forms due to random fluctuations. It exists for long enough to have exactly one thought (e.g. recall a false memory), then dissipates.
This ought to be by far the most common form of conscious mind in the Universe. In a sense, you could say it ‘blows’ the general case of minds.
Since you are a mind, statistically, you ought to be a Boltzmann brain. You may not be, but are unable to prove otherwise, even to yourself. So either we have some things left to learn about thermodynamics, or the most probable outcome is that you cease to exist immediately after having your current thought (although I hope you don’t). Sleep tight!
The scale of the universe. It’s an incomprehensible amount of emptiness.
Highly recommend the browser game Orbity.io
It honestly pisses me off lol. I was so into space as a youngin but as Ive gotten a better grasp of the scale and what is actually possible in physics Ive realized its a massive boondoggle. Real pretty though
I still refuse to believe that we can’t overcome the limit of the speed of light. Maybe it’s something like “warpspeed”, maybe it’s something like evolving beyond the need for a physical body, but I believe that at some (far) point in our future we will solve that problem.
Speed of light is a bit of a misnomer, its really the speed of causality; the least amount of time it can take for one thing to interact with another. It will never be possible to overcome that limit unfortunately
The butterfly effect. The phenomeon that tiny seemingly insignificant changes can result in massively different outcomes. Someone out there could read this post and get distracted and leave home for work/school/shopping a bit later than they would’ve and avoid a major accident. But conversely, someone could also get distracted by this post while crossing the road and… you know… die…
Fascinating, yet terrifying at the same time.
Anarchism based on mutual respect and aid. It’s truly beautiful.
It would have to be Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Such a beautiful proof that shakes mathematics to its core.
The science communicator Veritasium made a nice video about it: https://youtu.be/HeQX2HjkcNo
I first learned about it in Douglas Hofstaedter’s masterpiece Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
You might want to check out the novel Bloom by Wil McCarthy. It uses Conway’s Game of Life and other cellular automata to illustrate several plot points.
Frequency hopping. It’s like hiding messages in music. Always loved that idea.
Several things are regularly in my “ponder and wonder” list, the most recent being:
- Chaos theory
- Higher dimensions (>4)
- The actual scale of space versus our normal human scale
- The idea of social/societal evolution (how can we be better together as a species)
I can get lost for a while in any of these topics.