I was standing at a street corner waiting for the light to change, listening to my mp3 player, when I suddenly started thinking about what went into that mp3 player. Several hundred years of chemistry that led to our knowledge of batteries with high energy density. A clever discovery by Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley, as well as several textbooks' worth of knowledge of Condensed Matter/Solid State Physics to understand how it worked. DSP routines dating back to Joseph Fourier's original brilliant paper that revolutionized mathematics and the sciences forever. And then all the technology required to tie all of this together on a large scale to the point where all of this knowledge could be used to provide to me what basically amounts to a miniature orchestra, in my pocket, that I could listen to whenever I wanted, to whatever I wanted.

And then it simply went from there: in about 4000 years we have created everything from modern plumbing systems to the internet: yes, even 200 years ago it would have been difficult for me to talk to someone in a nearby town at will... right now I'm talking to people on the other side of the world from me, with at most a couple milliseconds of latency. I have a program that lets me simulate how chemical reactions function, starting from a quantum-mechanical level (Gaussian 09, for the curious), and while still buggy and having computational upper limits... it works for a large number of use cases. The fact that we know what we do about quantum mechanics. The fact that we know that we still don't know a lot about quantum mechanics, or all of the things that we know we don't know in the sciences, and that we are finding out about them constantly, and that someday, we will know. That I have a simple chemical that's basically just a benzene with a slightly funky side chain hanging off it, and that it can improve my attention span and let me go without sleep for a day or two and still function perfectly normally. That I have a slightly more complex chemical on my desk that motherfucking superconducts if I drop it in some Liquid Nitrogen, and that the critical temperature for these materials is constantly only going up... it's only a matter of time before we have room-temperature superconductors, or have proven that they cannot exist. That I can walk to a building at my university and use an actual goddamn quantum computer. Sure it's big and not very powerful, but neither were the first classical computers... they were the size of small buildings, took enormous amounts of power, and were scarcely more powerful than a modern smartphone. Today I have a computer that's the size of a large book that is capable of encoding high-resolution video In realtime. And that's only going to improve!

That ~2000 years ago, we had a major setback when our major repository of knowledge burned down to the ground, and we figured out how to prevent this from ever happening again by distributing this knowledge among quite literally several thousand locations across the world simultaneously and near-instantaneously. To quote Linus Torvalds: "I don't make backups, I just upload my code to ftp and let the rest of the world mirror it/back it up for me." The same is true for so much of literature, historical record, and scientific knowledge itsself: not only is it distributed and backed up all over the planet, but just as I'm talking to someone on the other side of the globe as if it were nothing, I can type a couple words into a box and search the collective knowledge of humanity, again, in a couple milliseconds. I can then read everything from obscure scientific papers to Dostoevskii's Notes From the Underground, again, all at my fingertips, as if it were nothing. The fact that I'm able to contribute back to this collection of knowledge, and have people learn from what I've written, for that matter. The fact that, quite literally, I have the collective knowledge of several billions of people, at my fingertips, and that it is easy for me to find out information on topics that even 20-30 years ago, might not even have existed at all, or have been topics that we knew next-to-nothing about.

That, you know what, despite not having the ability to fly intrinsically, we've figured out how to do it anyway, and not only do we fly everywhere on this planet right now, but we've even managed to get a couple people off this rock entirely, and onto another. Yes. We've gone into goddamn space, and walked on the moon. You know, that thing you see in the sky? Yes, humanity's goddamn walked on that.

And yet 4000 years ago we were just starting to begin to form the major civilizations of the world, and a good chunk of those years were spent making the same mistakes thanks to pointless wars, famine, and disease. Several of those diseases no longer exist. Not "no longer pose a threat", no longer exist. As in, we have wiped them the fuck out entirely. Life expectancy has skyrocketed, quality of life has skyrocketed. And it's only going to improve from here.

Yes, humanity may be flawed, but for something so deeply flawed, and for which so many of its specimens, are basically complete idiots, the fact that we've managed to accomplish so much in what basically amounts to so little time is nothing short of incredible.

And it's only going to get better from this point onwards. Science, technology, and learning is the most exciting thing in the universe, and who knows what we're going to discover in the next 20 years? The next 50 years? The next 100 years?

"The outcome you see all around you today. We stand undisputed masters of the Solar System and poised on the edge of interstellar space itself. And so, gentlemen, we inherit the stars. Let us go out, then, and claim our inheritance. We belong to a tradition in which the concept of defeat has no meaning. Today the stars and tomorrow the galaxies. No known force exists in the Universe that can stop us."

It's only going to get better.