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Comment by mooreds | Hacker News Reader

Telephones?

The fact I can talk on the phone to someone thousands of miles away feels pretty magical to me when I think about all that goes into it.

Other tech that feels magical to me:

* The browser: wait, I can publish something and it is visible and interactive to anyone with an internet connection? And all I need is a text editor?

* Steel: we can build huge structures hundreds of feet high, drill thousands of feet under the earth, all with metals we refine from rocks?

* Matches: I can, for a very little amount of money, get a box of matches which will let me start a fire with close to zero effort?

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Steel is amazing, but nowadays I find even more amazing that we can replace it by wood in many circumstances. Skyscrapers in wood? Checked.

And wood can often replace concrete.

Building using wood sequesters carbon from the atmosphere and, as an ever bigger importance, avoid the CO2 emissions due to drilling, melting, refining etc, e.g. all operations needed to produce steel and concrete.

However, we need to "grow" wood in a truly sustainable way. Plantations of tree for timber are not forests from an ecological point of view: monoculture (and even cloning of a single tree), many pesticides, home to very little biodiversity and far less carbon sequestered in the soil (only 25% AFAIK).

> The fact I can talk on the phone to someone thousands of miles away feels pretty magical to me when I think about all that goes into it.

I was a kid in the mid-70s and remember being on a family Summer vacation visiting Europe and my dad needed to have an important phone meeting. The satellite call had to be coordinated via Telexes delivered to our vacation home by messengers. At the appointed time Dad was waiting by the phone (with me hovering nearby). The first call was just an operator who had to coordinate the link by reaching an operator on the other side of the sat link. The operator verified my Dad was present and had a good connection. Then the operator called back a couple minutes later once the other side had verified the same. Then the two operators simultaneously patched the call.

The operator must have stayed on the call because my Dad spoke with her at the end to say they were done. I seem to recall this being because the calls were hard to arrange, very expensive and could get dropped frequently in mid-conversation.

The event was discussed for days after and the memory still has a magical feeling to me because it was "talking to someone on the other side of the planet!"

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