this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
655 points (100.0% liked)

Science Memes

17030 readers
2557 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] MotoAsh@piefed.social 56 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (15 children)

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.

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 20 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] MotoAsh@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (13 replies)