<story><title>Ask HN: Do you also marvel at the complexity of everyday objects?</title><text>A few weeks ago I was doing some soldering and I started using a spool of insulated 22-gauge wire.&lt;p&gt;Maybe it was the solder fumes, but I started thinking about what it &lt;i&gt;actually&lt;/i&gt; took to create that spool of wire -- everything from the geologists and miners extracting ore, through all the metallurgy, industrial engineering, and plastics work. And I started to marvel at all the work and expertise it took to make something that I normally would&amp;#x27;ve just considered a semi-disposable consumable item. It made me wonder whether that spool of wire was actually a piece of technology on par in sophistication with all the software that I build every day.&lt;p&gt;It was such an odd moment, but it&amp;#x27;s has caused a lasting perspective shift. almost every day I&amp;#x27;ll look at some commonplace object I took for granted and think &amp;quot;this is actually so complex, no single human has all the knowledge or expertise to create it&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m curious if anybody else has had a similar experience and&amp;#x2F;or what are some simple everyday objects that give you pause when you stop to think about their complexity</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>adrianmonk</author><text>Sometimes I have similar thoughts, and it makes me realize... there are a lot of humans.&lt;p&gt;Imagine we evolved on a planet with only enough land for 10,000 people. We would never have most of this stuff because people&amp;#x27;s work would not be specialized enough to get us there. One person would be responsible for so many different things that they wouldn&amp;#x27;t go into depth on each one. For example, maybe we&amp;#x27;d have a library, but one person would be responsible for both printing the books and running the circulation desk. We would have technology (someone would have invented, say, a wood stove), but we wouldn&amp;#x27;t have anywhere near as much of it.&lt;p&gt;But instead, we have billions of people now, and it was at least 2000 years ago that we reached 100 million. When you have that many people, although most of them are still working on the basics (growing food, building housing, etc.), in absolute terms there can be millions of people working on specialized tasks.&lt;p&gt;It also makes me realize how prosperous we are as a species. Although we haven&amp;#x27;t eliminated poverty and hunger (and should and probably could), as a species, we are far from being on the edge of survival. We have enough resources that we have people working on niche stuff that will pay off in the future if ever. We have projects that require hundreds or thousands of person-years (in other words, equivalent to multiple lifetimes) of work, and the end result of the project is (say) yet another action movie or romcom.&lt;p&gt;Humans are smart and creative, but the reason we have what we do is lots and lots of people over a very long period of time with way more resources than what we need for subsistence. Which is pretty cool because any of those things could have not happened, but they all did.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jon_richards</author><text>One argument I found interesting is that the apparent &amp;quot;massive acceleration&amp;quot; in technological progress can largely be explained by the fact that most &amp;quot;productive human years&amp;quot; have actually been lived quite recently. I think the latest estimate is that &amp;quot;109 billion people have lived and died over the course of 192,000 years&amp;quot; and &lt;i&gt;half&lt;/i&gt; of them were in the last 2000 years. It&amp;#x27;s probably even more extreme if you only count adults (due to improvements in infant mortality).&lt;p&gt;That simple fact dominates more complex explanations like increased specialization, long-distance communication, organized education, and preservation of knowledge.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Do you also marvel at the complexity of everyday objects?</title><text>A few weeks ago I was doing some soldering and I started using a spool of insulated 22-gauge wire.&lt;p&gt;Maybe it was the solder fumes, but I started thinking about what it &lt;i&gt;actually&lt;/i&gt; took to create that spool of wire -- everything from the geologists and miners extracting ore, through all the metallurgy, industrial engineering, and plastics work. And I started to marvel at all the work and expertise it took to make something that I normally would&amp;#x27;ve just considered a semi-disposable consumable item. It made me wonder whether that spool of wire was actually a piece of technology on par in sophistication with all the software that I build every day.&lt;p&gt;It was such an odd moment, but it&amp;#x27;s has caused a lasting perspective shift. almost every day I&amp;#x27;ll look at some commonplace object I took for granted and think &amp;quot;this is actually so complex, no single human has all the knowledge or expertise to create it&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m curious if anybody else has had a similar experience and&amp;#x2F;or what are some simple everyday objects that give you pause when you stop to think about their complexity</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>adrianmonk</author><text>Sometimes I have similar thoughts, and it makes me realize... there are a lot of humans.&lt;p&gt;Imagine we evolved on a planet with only enough land for 10,000 people. We would never have most of this stuff because people&amp;#x27;s work would not be specialized enough to get us there. One person would be responsible for so many different things that they wouldn&amp;#x27;t go into depth on each one. For example, maybe we&amp;#x27;d have a library, but one person would be responsible for both printing the books and running the circulation desk. We would have technology (someone would have invented, say, a wood stove), but we wouldn&amp;#x27;t have anywhere near as much of it.&lt;p&gt;But instead, we have billions of people now, and it was at least 2000 years ago that we reached 100 million. When you have that many people, although most of them are still working on the basics (growing food, building housing, etc.), in absolute terms there can be millions of people working on specialized tasks.&lt;p&gt;It also makes me realize how prosperous we are as a species. Although we haven&amp;#x27;t eliminated poverty and hunger (and should and probably could), as a species, we are far from being on the edge of survival. We have enough resources that we have people working on niche stuff that will pay off in the future if ever. We have projects that require hundreds or thousands of person-years (in other words, equivalent to multiple lifetimes) of work, and the end result of the project is (say) yet another action movie or romcom.&lt;p&gt;Humans are smart and creative, but the reason we have what we do is lots and lots of people over a very long period of time with way more resources than what we need for subsistence. Which is pretty cool because any of those things could have not happened, but they all did.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrb</author><text>&amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;people&amp;#x27;s work would not be specialized enough to get us there&lt;/i&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This reminded me of one of the arguments in &amp;quot;Selfish reasons to want more humans&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=39497686&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=39497686&lt;/a&gt; : we can get more scientific, technical, and economic progress with a larger population on Earth, as more people can specialize in narrow domains.</text></comment>