"When the oldest person on Earth was born, there was a completely different set of people on Earth. Every single one of them."
"That every year, we unknowingly pass our death anniversary."
If either of your parents did literally anything in their life differently than the way they did it, you would not exist. I repeat: You would not exist.
Example: say hypothetically that your dad was on his way to see your mother (y'know, to conceive you). He trips on his way and gets back up and dusts himself off. Had he not tripped that day there's an incredible chance that the sperm that would turn out to be you would not have fertilized with your mother's egg.
I'm sorry if it doesn't make as much sense to you as it does to me but it floppin' amazes me."
"If a woman has only male children, she is the first in an unbroken line of women going back to origin of humans to not have a daughter. The reverse is true with fathers having only daughters." // "Or if you don't have kids you're the only one of your ancestors dating back to the origins of man origin of life on Earth to not procreate."
"Blind people don't see black, or white, they see nothing." // "Try to look outside of your field of view. Notice how it isn't black, nor white, but there is nothing there."
"Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe."
"What if we are just a cut-off and forgotten colony of a vast human empire?"
"Out of all the bodies and creatures I could have become sentient in, why did I wake up as me?"
"It could be that every time there's any burst of energy (like a match being struck or something), contained in that burst is an arrangement of energy causing some flash of consciousness, convinced it has lived an entire reality."
"If the Sun was the size of a white blood cell swimming through your veins, the Milky Way would be the size of the continental US."
"That we created what life is like. (getting a job, going to school, using money) We're just people on a rock in space." [more comments]
The Egg // "So, you've got electrons, and their antiparticle, the positron. When two meet, they self-annihilate. It also happens that, when you get just the right concentration of energy in open space, that that energy goes into spontaneously creating an electron/positron pair. A positron moves differently than an electron, owing to it's opposite charge, but has the same of everything else. So, you can tell them apart by watching how they move. What's weird is that if you record a pair of them moving, and then play it backwards, it will look like they switched. A positron, watched in reverse, looks just like an electron.
So, follow some electron until it finds a positron. At the instant they collide, and right before they vanish, you play the tape backwards. Then it looks like an electron fleeing the scene. In a way, you can say that the electron and the positron are the same particle: it just sometimes decides that it wants to go backward through time every now and then. And to us, it looks like two distinct particles meeting and ceasing to exist. What happens when it decides it wants to go forward in time again? It just flops back into an electron, and to us it looks like spontaneous creation of an electron/positron pair.
So, the idea is that every electron can be traced from a elec/posi creation event, and traced to a self annihilation event, and that you can string them all together so that maybe, just maybe, every electron and positron in the universe are actually the same particle. All of the universe has just one electron, and it's flying endlessly through time, back and forth, interacting with itself, interfering with itself, and making up atoms with any number of itself, all just in different parts of its singular time journey.
TL,DR; All of the universe is just one particle in different stages of its one journey through space-time." [More comments]
"I got out of work about 13 years ago and went home to take a nap. Just as I was starting to fall asleep the phone next to my bed rang and it was my place of employment calling. I stared at the phone for about 4 rings trying to decide if I should answer it or not. I finally answered the phone and they asked me if I could come back in for one more (furniture) delivery. Long story short: I went on the delivery, the guy that took delivery of the sofa knew me a little bit from high school. We chatted for a minute and he mentioned that he was looking for a new job, I told him to apply where I worked. He started working there about 2 days later and over the summer we became great friends. I have since traveled across the country three times to visit him and he is one of my best friends. Had I decided to not answer the phone and continue my nap, I would have never met him, snowboarded the Tetons, ridden on an olympic bobsled track, or done a lot of other cool stuff. Kind of makes me wonder what other tiny decisions have shaped my path through life." // "Think of all the people that DON'T exist or all the friends you never met because of one decision someone made!"
"Have you yet heard of the blue field entoptic phenomenon? There is a similar desensitization effect going on where you cannot see shadows made by blood vessels in front of your retinas. It is a combination of your brain automatically fading them out when it gets used to them and the the same chemical change that occurs in photoreceptors when you adapt to a dark room.
The "kind of awesome" part is when you look up at a bright blue sky and see little squiggly white dots of lightning zooming everywhere. These are the white blood cells trying to squeeze their fat asses through the capillaries over your retina. Red blood cells, which usually are the ones coursing through, absorb blue light. So when there is a gap between red blood cells where a plump white blood cell is passing through, the bright blue sky shines through as those little dots.
Yes, you are seeing the shadow of individual blood cells!" [More comments]