From the time you open your eyes in the morning, to the time you close them at night, every single thing you see that did not grow itself, was touched by humans.

Sure, sure that’s all common knowledge, right? I mean, sure, the drywall is made in a factory somewhere. THe shingles. The bread, The eggs were put in a carton, the bacon was sliced…. yeah, what’s the big deal?

The big deal, to me, is that the infrastructure of our lives has become invisible to us. The infrastructure is as much human as it is physical, and it’s depth and breadth is fractal in complexity.

Example:

When you woke up this morning and fried some eggs and bacon and had a coffee, you touched thousands and thousands and thousands of lives.

Huh?

Someone had to make the sheets you laid on. Martha Stewart put her name on them, but someone planted the cotton, someone harvested it, someone combed it, someone spun it into thread, and someone wound that thread onto bobbins. Someone else loaded the bobbins into a loom and wove the fabric, someone cut the fabric and hemmed it into infdividual sheets.

Sure, you know that, right? you just don’t give it any thought. How about this? there was a factory that made the cotton planter, and thousands of people work in that factory. Same with the harvester, thought that might have been the same factory. The bobbin winder, the loom, all were manufactured somewhere, and the science and technology required to make them, as well as the skill needed to make them work properly, also involved many people. Martha Stewart Corp is a huge entity unto itself, and the planning, marketing, feasability, etc. all involved the skills and talents of loads of warm bodies.

So we’re in the hundreds of people who had an effect on your day, and you haven’t yet thrown back the sheets.

Now apply that thought to the mattress. The material, the stuffing, the springs, the padding, the manufacture. A lot more people, a lot more engineering, a lot more science, a lot more technology. Now the pillow. You get the idea. Put your feet on the floor. HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of people, for the processiing of the hardwood alone. Or the carpet. The subfloor. The joists. The foundation. The complexity is too great for a single post. Walk across the floor to the closet, and turn on the light, another several hundred people.

The crapper, the shower, the sink. The razor, the soap, the towels. The deodorant, the toothpaste, the toothbrush. How many thousdands of people had to do ther job for you just to get through your morning bathroom run?

The point is, that this all works, and works remarkably well. And it does so without our even noticing it.

And because I watch this process, because I am tuned to the minutiae of the world like very few people I know, I see patterns. I see the patterns of behavior that people have, that cause them to act the way they do, do the things they do. I see that because humans created the world around us, the world with which we interact every day, we have imposed the patterns of our behavior on it. To0 someone who can recognise those patterns it is like looking at the grooves on a vinyl phonograph record- the patterns of sound have made their mark on the vinyl, and the right equipment will allow you to hear those sounds again by tracing the patterns the sounds made on the vinyl in the first place.

I believe the world as created by Man is like a phonograph record. The patterns we leave reflect the patterns of our behavior, and examining those patterns should probably be a science unto itself.

I’ve spoken before about the folly of Hari Seldon, and the utter stupidity of assuming it was possible to predict human behavior based on mathematics alone- but I do believe that with the richness of the data available to us, we could, and perhaps should, be looking at the patterns of human behavior more seriously. Currently, the information is being studied simply as it pertains to the liklihood of consumers to buy soft drinks and school supplies- but someone- someone with a far bigger brain than i- should be looking at human behavior and the way it is reflected in our science and technology- to see what else we can learn.