this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
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IMO, this kind of amazement mostly points to humans not really unserstanding how tiny the building blocks of reality are. Even the "massive" protein molecules your body uses with hundreds of thousands of atoms in them, tens of thousands of amino acid chains, can fit many on the tip of a sewing needle.
Titin has over 30,000 amino acids in it, and barely gets over 1um in length. That's barely wider than a sharp razor blade's edge, and they're orders of magnitude sharper than most knives.
The scale of the world is crazy, and we are already giants in it.
Hm, I disagree. Most complex animals we know are kinda big. When you get to the size of this lizard, usually we talking about insects that are little more than muscle automata. When we think of lizards, we think of of animals with a level of complex personality we can identify with.
When something complex is this minified, it is amazing. If you don't think so, maybe you lost some sense of awe in life.
Again, it is amazing ... but because we cannot fathom how big it still is.
I'd give you a Vulkan, "neat, curious even, but not mind blowing", as to what I mean a truly aware response would be.
It's neat, but if you're aware of the developmental stages of even just human babies, it's really not surprising nor unique as to how small something with such differentiated parts is.