I mean really. I often forget about it because I like many other people out there just take it for granted and we use it everyday.
It’s really insane being able to call someone from any given location (well if you signal lol) to anywhere on this globe. You can write an e-mail and the person will read it with little no delay.
Heck, we can be living in a polar climate zone and be in tropical climate zones within a day if you have the spare money to fly.
110 years (1914) people installed the first air conditions in their homes. I don’t know how life was without but I can imagine.
We can buy food in a store and keep the food cool and frozen for however long we want in our own homes.
My dad was born in 1931. He was too old to understand smartphones before he died, but he did have an iPod Nano and he told me one day that it astounded him that he had gone from 78 rpm records as a child that would shatter if you dropped them and could only have one song on each side to a tiny plastic and metal square that held thousands of songs. He remembered, as a classical music lover, when the LP record was introduced and it was amazing that he could listen to full pieces of classical music without interruption whenever he wanted.
He amassed a massive record collection and then a massive CD collection. The audio devices got smaller and smaller, the media got more robust, and then one day he didn’t even need to collect all those CDs. He could just rip all the ones he had, put them on his iPod whenever he wanted, and then just get more from the library from then on.
And it just blew his mind that he was actually able to do that and listen to all of it on this little square.
It’s truly astounding how accessible art and knowledge has become, you can feasibly fit an entire library worth of books onto a chip the size of a fingernail
Well, to add a bit, if you are thinking about microSD cards, the chip is nowhere close to the size of a fingernail.
We package it into a card the size of a fingernail so it’s big enough to use without tools. The card is mostly empty space.
I think it is astounding too. On the other hand, imagine how much history will be lost if we had another Carrington Event. There are ways to preserve huge amounts digital media that would survive such a thing, but I don’t think there’s been any serious attempts to preserve important stuff that’s only on the internet.
So it does astound me, but it also worries me.
Solar flares don’t erase HDDs. EMP could ruin the control circuitry but not the HDD disk itself. If someone could rebuild the controller all the data on the disk would be recoverable. Solar flares are not like nuclear bomb EMP and most electronics would be fine in a Carrington event. The electric grid, with its long wires, would have a hell of a time.