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steven0461 comments on The Sacred Mundane - Less Wrong
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Do people feel awe at the Internet? Toilets?
To you, or to people in general?
Totally. The communications network is the biggest machine ever built, it's parts are all replaceable without damaging the whole. Maybe you're too young to remember a time before it, but I found it at university nearly two decades ago and I was certainly awestruck.
Not so much. But then I did see a documentry about the building of the London sewerage system, the way the rivers were all paved over and turned into underground tunnels, connected by miles upon miles of underground canals. Which has lasted for a couple of hundred years!
A toilet might not be a massive engineering feat, but the sewer system in a whole city sure is.
And if I recall correctly, they built the system to beat a cholera epidemic which had been localized to the septically tainted water supply by one of the first medical statisticians. The Day the Universe Changed does a great job of making you feel that moment of awe. Dun... dun dun dun... dun DUN dun...
Joseph Bazalgette, engineer of the London sewers, is a real hero! Curiously, his great-great-grandson Peter Bazalgette produces sewage for a living.
Now you're saying they're awesome because they're big. The point was to find examples of things that are awesome even though they aren't big.
Oh, then microchips? Writing "IBM" in individual atoms with a scanning electron microscope? Nano-motors for nano-machines? Richard Hammond was on the TV the other week with a probing scanning electron microscope writing his name on a strand of hair. Awesome.