i was thinking the other day about how we use the phrase man made for pretty much everything around us. our phones, cars, stone palaces, wooden ships, electricity.

but if you sit with it for a minute, it makes you wonder if anything we make is actually man made in the way we think it is.

take electricity. we treat it like this modern high tech invention that humans came up with in a lab. but electricity is just a raw physical force that existed long before humans showed up. it is in lightning storms, and it is firing inside your own brain right now as you read this.

we did not invent electricity. we just figured out how to build pipes for it.

think about plumbing for a second. we did not create water, we just built pipes and valves so it goes where we want. a microchip in a phone is really just a microscopic set of pipes and valves for electricity. we took sand and copper, passed electrical currents through it in a clever layout, and decided to call it a computer.

which brings up a weird double standard we have.

people often think natural means stuff that just happens on its own like mountains, clouds, wind, or rain. but nests do not just occur spontaneously in nature either. a bird nest does not pop into existence like a mountain or grow out of the soil like a tree. a bird has to actively hunt for twigs, break them, and weave them together.

yet everyone calls a bird nest natural.

so if a bird building a nest out of twigs is part of nature, why is a human shaping timber to build a ship or cutting marble for a palace called artificial? humans are biological creatures born out of the exact same ecosystem.

both are just living creatures using materials provided by the earth, following the exact same laws of physics. if a bird nest is nature, then a wooden ship or a stone palace is nature too. it is just the same physical ingredients arranged a little differently.

a bird breaks a twig with its beak to make a nest. a human uses fire to melt iron ore into metal beams for a building. at the fundamental level, it is the exact same process. the bird uses its body as a tool, and we use tools made from earth and fire. we did not invent the melting point of iron. we just discovered the temperature where the universe lets iron turn liquid.

nothing can exist unless the universe already allows it.

a stone palace, an ocean ship, or a smartphone can only exist because the physics and chemistry of reality permit those exact structures and molecular bonds. if the rules of nature did not already contain that possibility, no amount of human effort could ever make it happen.

so we are not really creators. we are just assemblers.

we move matter around according to rules we did not write. the idea that humans can make something totally separate from nature does not really make sense when you break it down. if it was not already an option built into the universe, we could never make it real.

your phone is made from the exact same stardust as the mountains around us. it is just put together in a way that lets it process logic.

at the end of the day, nothing is man made. it is all just nature, rearranged.