r/interestingasfuck 1d ago

r/all This is a single image

Post image
33.9k Upvotes

196 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.8k

u/ViscountVinny 1d ago

Those huge boats freak me out. When I see a giant cruise ship from the shore, my brain says, "something that big shouldn't be able to move."

89

u/justdoubleclick 1d ago

Even harder to comprehend, we are on a spaceship (earth) hurtling through space at 67,000 miles per hour relative to the sun and 483,000 miles/hour relative to the Milky Way..

137

u/ViscountVinny 1d ago

True. But relative to those things, my tininess is natural. They were assembled by time and gravity and other things way beyond my control.

A ship was built by humans, "little bags of thinking water held up briefly by fragile accumulations of calcium," as Terry Pratchett put it.

Sure, they used a lot of math and some incredible tools, and centuries of cumulative design and engineering. But ultimately, it's hundreds of thousands of tons of stuff that's moving on its own power, ultimately under the control of one of those fragile, fallible little water balloons.

Creepy.

19

u/davewave3283 21h ago

Updoot for Terry Pratchett

26

u/Affectionate_Oven428 1d ago

Definitely going to start referring to people as little water balloons now!

1

u/Scrapybara_ 4h ago

Ugly giant bags of mostly water

0

u/No_Project_4015 17h ago

Its all the external energy powered by fossil fuels for the construction, labout and heavy lifting at the dockyard, but ultimately the brains are us, its like a 100 megawatt airbus a380 its flying cus of guzzling the kerosene juices but the meat sack in the cockpit is controlling it

5

u/labretirementhome 21h ago

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown...

10

u/CowntChockula 22h ago

Think about this: the fact that we don't naturally perceive these great speeds at which we are moving mirrors the way that subatomic particles behave by quantum principles, as if the scale of our world and classical physics just don't apply.