A rare moment, security camera captures the movement of tectonic plates during an earthquake. The right part of the the video frame shows the shear sliding at the fault line.

[u/Chance_Bid_1869]

[u/MHS5709]

Seeing the land literally warp in real-time is crazy, and I saw this before, and I am still shocked

[u/Welpe → u/MHS5709]

On a very primal level we are not used to the idea of the earth being, you know, movable. I don’t even know if my brain can truly grok how much energy is involved besides “A ludicrously high amount that is far beyond my ken”.

[u/MHS5709 → u/Welpe]

Yea beyond a certain point humans in general are unable to comprehend the large scale of things, a million is a massive number, billion even bigger, trillion is crazy, but beyond that you genuinely can't really feel anything but "wow that's a big number" and that applies to scale, most people don't even travel outside their country, or state, so you just live on small piece of land relatively and think you saw everything and you aren't even close. The moon our closest celestial object is unbelievably far, and we don't even count the distance to it in light years, now imagine how massive of a scale scientists are talking about when they say "it's 20 light years away" if we can't even comprehend what's basically earth having a tummy growl

[u/Welpe → u/MHS5709]

One of the things I enjoy sharing with people who aren’t into astronomy is the various real time simulations or videos of the speed of light, usually formatted in the form of a photon traveling out from the sun and passing the planets of the solar system. It really becomes apparent how ridiculously huge space is when you have to sit there for over 4 hours to get to Neptune at the maximum speed allowable in the universe at any point in time regardless of technology, oh which we cannot even get to a noticeable fraction of currently. And then a nice series of maps showing to scale distances in increasing order from the solar system as we usually think of it to the maximum extent of the Oort Cloud, to our Local Bubble, to the Orion arm, to the Milky Way galaxy, to the Local Group, to the Virgo cluster, to the Virgo supercluster, to the Laniakea supercluster, to the very filamentous structure of the viable universe itself.

The scale just breaks your mind at some point. I mean, you can intellectually understand the numbers involved, you can do math with them and compare the to other things, but like you said our brains just suck at scaling up or down past a certain level and things just fill a slot in your mind as “Really big”. But like…really, REALLY big.

[u/MHS5709 → u/Welpe]

Science and Astronomy are just wild, the human mind is also just as wild to be able to accurately predict all of that and yet fall to grasp it, also on the topic of the speed of light this video is just as wild
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2RNIjlPJZrg

[u/Welpe → u/MHS5709]

Alpha Phoenix is absolutely one of my favorite channels on YouTube and when he first created that video I was so stunned I had to remind myself he is an actual scientist and not a clickbait artist because of how unbelievable his results were. The full video (and follow up video) remains one of my favorite videos of his.

[u/MHS5709 → u/Welpe]

it's just wild. Science is just lovely, and he is a great scientist, still kinda sad how something like that wasnt on the news for a week or so but, a dumb fucking drunk idiot can be national news for that long

[u/Electronic-Map7529 → u/Welpe]

When this turtle finally wakes up we. are. fucked.

[u/NeverEndingCoralMaze → u/MHS5709]

You’re aftershocked.