Thoughts on the role that wonder plays in adulthood (and some philosophy)

image attached for engagement bait related reasons (we'll get to it later, i promise)

hi hello, I'm back, little bit of a break between postings i suppose. What is life buy a series of inevitable delays. Anyhow, I've been thinking a lot more about philosophy and our physical world lately and have some thoughts i would like to share.

wonder is an interesting concept, it's a mix between an emotional experience, and the rationalization that we humans engage in every day. There's an intersection between your rational and logical understanding of the world, and your emotional experience of it that combine into this sometimes overwhelming, but inspiring feeling of wonder.

I've heard from numerous people that they no longer get the same sense of wonder as they once did in childhood, and especially how that sense of wonder is what seems to romanticize certain ideas to us. A common one is people going back and playing games they once played in their childhood, only to discover they no longer experience the same sensation of wonder and awe in it. There are probably hundreds of video essays about this specific topic. But i think it's not just limited to your childhood and previously had experiences, thinking about it like that is a way to poison your experience of the world.

I think wonder is a fundamental aspect of the human experience, wonder is arguably a very large part of what initially drove early science and it's developments. We didn't know what fire was at one point, but we wondered what it could've been, eventually someone figured it out, and now we have a plausible, yet still fascinating conceptualization of what fire is. I think it's the same today, it hasn't changed, it's just been refocused into other areas. The image attached to this post is one such example, most people probably don't know about rigid body airships, or at least know very much about them. Let alone the construction and fabrication of them. The concept of a rigid body airship is wondrous in it's own right, that would be why so many attempts were made. Reportedly even the top of the empire state building was intended to be used for docking of airships, although that never came to be (primarily due to wind)

another example. and one that i find fascinating is the production of "surface plates" extremely precise flat surfaces used as a reference surface for machining/manufacturing. If you've ever wondered how those are made, you'll be pleased to know that you can just take three semi pseudo flat surfaces, and then abrasively rub them against each other in an cyclic manner, which will eventually wear down the high spots, and produce a flat plane, purely because it's the only common plane between three nondescript objects.

I think in adulthood we don't lose wonder, we lose the ability the utilize it. You look at a tree and think about the fact that it's a tree, you think about it in passing, you don't spend any time thinking about why it's there, or what it's done since being planted, and what it could do after being planted. Trees are a really fascinating organism to me. You plant them in the ground, and then just, grow. No questions asked, no intervention required. They barely require anything, they just grow. It takes 20 to 30 years for them to grow to a moderate size, though they don't exactly stop growing either. If you live anywhere near a natural wooded area that hasn't been farm planted, those trees are probably as old as you, if not older than you. They've been around for the same amount of time as you, and haven't gone anywhere.

Continuing on a little bit further here, trees are also very valuable and extremely flexible, they can be used to block wind, sun, and even rain/snow in some cases. They also provide a massive habit for animals and insects to live in. They provide physical support for the ground underneath them which is why they're often near embankments and ditches. They can be used in construction, in fact it's just about the cheapest form of construction available. You can burn wood for heat or power. You can turn it into any number of paper products, paper, cardboard, card stock, etc. It's such a versatile and valuable material. yet every time you see a tree you don't spend very much time thinking about it. It's just something in the back of your mind.

getting away from trees here, i think there are plenty of examples of things that can be a continual cause for wonder. Even the planet that we live on is cause enough for an existential amount of wonder. Astronomy is a particularly fascinating one for me. Just a short example, even though we're approximately on the same page here. The circumference of the earth is approximately 40,000 kilometers. 1 light-year, is approximately 9,460,730,472,580 km, assuming you could circumnavigate the earth at the equator in 1 second. It would take you approximately 236,075,520 trips to complete 1 light years worth of navigation around the earth, and approximately 7.5 years worth of time. The earth is so big that we literally cannot tell that we live on a sphere unless we try to prove it. Yet using even a rather small unit of astronomic measurement, it is still so incomprehensibly large that we simply cannot fathom it. The speed on light, on earth is so small, it's practically instant. (this isn't quite true, but that's also paired with more complicated reasons) moving a little bit further out, radio transmissions, since effectively the beginning of time, we've been transmitting radio broadcast (to some degree) into space. The earth from the perspective of the universe is a chatty radio somewhere in the middle of an empty field at night. And has been since the beginning of radio. We have sent satellites into space, and they're still operational almost fifty years later.

moving outside of space and astronomy here for a second, lets move to something more tangible, construction. In the US alone, judging by annual concrete usage figures in the year 2023, we have produced approximately 90 million metric tons if we only include domestically produced concrete, which if we were to convert into a rough volumetric equivalent, would be about 37,500,000 cubic meters worth of concrete. If we were to put all of that concrete into a singular cube of concrete, it would be approximately 335 meters (366 yards) in every direction, Which is a lot of concrete.

alright enough of these shenanigans, I've had too much fun with this post. Before i give my usual end of post recommendation here, i just want to leave you with this one idea. You haven't lost your sense of wonder, you've lost your drive for wonder. It's still out there waiting for you to find it. Whether that's with astronomy, biology, or even something like fabrication. There's plenty of things out there, that can instill you with a proper sense of wonder, you just have to find them.

I would like to remind everyone, that we're a species of unusually intelligent and physically capable mammals. We have outclassed every other life-form on our planet by sheer luck and determination. Even through egregious inter-species conflicts, we've triumphed where others haven't. And yet, we have no idea why we're here, what reason we exist, or whether we're the only ones out here. We don't even know what the implication of that is. The only things we know for sure, is that we exist, and we do things.

and with that, end of post recommendation time, the next time you're outside, or inside, or find something interesting, i want you to take a moment and sit down, and really think about that thing. Not only what it is, but also what it means at a grander scale, how it's utilized, and what it can represent.

alright a bit of postscript, it's 2AM now, i need to sleep, no reading through this post, it's long enough as is, as per usual, yell at me if something is wrong and stupid, i'm going to sleep.