1. How much dogs love us. There is no way we’ve been good enough boys/girls/humans to deserve this.
2. Popcorn. It’s freakily amazing that corn kernels turn into this stuff. And as a bonus, it’s delicious.
3. That humans, working together, eradicated the last wild strain of smallpox in the 1970s.
This was a mind-blowingly huge win for our species. It had plagued us since ~3rd century BCE and is estimated to have killed ~500 million people just during the last 100 years it was around.
4. That we have three types of color receptors. This allows most people to see an AMAZING array of colors!
Cats and dogs can’t do this, and things must look way duller.
However, colors probably are way cooler to birds, some of whom have FOUR color receptors and can see ultraviolets!
5. That we freaking EXIST! Think about that for a moment. Almost every human that has ever lived is not alive right now, but you and I are!
It seems to be crazy luck that we were born at all. If your parents had sex moments later, a different baby likely would have been born, as a different sperm likely would have fertilized the egg (or none would have at all). As A.J. Jacobs points out, with an average of hundreds of millions of sperm per ejaculate, these odds are like winning a major Powerball lottery!
6. That we’re not chickens (or insects)!
Probabilistically speaking, shouldn’t we expect to be a member of the most abundant category of conscious beings on Earth rather than a rarer category?
If chickens are conscious (as I think they are), we really lucked out to be born human instead of one of the >20 billion chickens alive right now that’s living in terrible factory farm conditions (and that will die as soon as it is big enough or isn’t laying enough eggs).
If insects are conscious (have something that it’s like to be them, which might be true for some insect species, though I doubt it is true for all of them), then it’s REALLY weird we don’t find ourselves to be insects since there are vastly more of them than humans!
7. That any conscious beings exist at all! Why isn’t the universe just a bunch of gas and rocks and shit? It’s not at all obvious there should be anything that has the ability to have experiences – yet here we are!
It’s not even obvious why there is SOMETHING instead of NOTHING!
This was first written on February 19, 2021, and first appeared on this site on November 25, 2022.
Re: #4, swallowtail butterflies have FIFTEEN different photoreceptors! I would love to see the world through their eyes for a little while.