On this day, 25 years ago-Challenger Shuttle Disaster

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Platapus

I can now understand how old guys can talk about how they remember everything about where they were when JFK was killed.

It's an odd part of human nature. People die all the time, and as catastrophes go the Challenger was fairly minor. But when something is so public, so visible, it affects us much more deeply. Thousands are starving, or die in an earthquake somewhere, and I think "That's too bad. I wonder if I can do something". But one famous man is murdered, or seven complete strangers die on camera, and my heart stops, and I remember it for decades.

Just questioning my own attitudes, and wondering why we see things the way we do.

[Growler]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

It's an odd part of human nature. People die all the time, and as catastrophes go the Challenger was fairly minor. But when something is so public, so visible, it affects us much more deeply. Thousands are starving, or die in an earthquake somewhere, and I think "That's too bad. I wonder if I can do something". But one famous man is murdered, or seven complete strangers die on camera, and my heart stops, and I remember it for decades.

Just questioning my own attitudes, and wondering why we see things the way we do.

One useless death is a tragedy; one million, a statistic. (A paraphrase, but the essence of the meaning is there.) I don't recall who it was who mentioned that the human brain just can't conceive - can't mentally picture - large numbers (beyond, say, 100,000, for the sake of argument). We're just not wired to comprehend numbers that large. We can see a stadium of 75K people, so we can sort of see the effect 75K people have on a local sense. But once the numbers get too large, our brains just go, "Uh, wut?" and sort of shut down that measurement part. Many of us have experienced death on individual scales, personal and impersonal, but on the individual, small-scale. Maybe the guys who could best tell us about "bodies stacked like cordwood" are the guys who discovered the concentration camps, or the guys in Soviet Russia who cleared out Stalin's millions of dead.

The concept is so difficult to try to describe.