This solar system orbits the galactic center every 250 million years or so; making us a young adult of around 18 Galactic years old, living in a suburb of quite a busy galaxy.
Every eighteen year-old suburbanite[1] has already been pretty well socialised by local interactions in the context of a global system of local interactions, performed massively in parallel.
[1] metaphors mixed and units of measure utterly messed-around with
I love this galactic orbit measure of things. Dinosaurs like the Iguanadon were alive ~125mya, which means that the impressive thing when looking at a fossil is not that it's old, it's that it came from the other side of the galaxy. You can go and pick up a trilobite that's coming up to its third orbit.
Yes, I know, it's still from Earth, but I do think it's a weird way of looking at dinosaur fossils.
Every eighteen year-old suburbanite[1] has already been pretty well socialised by local interactions in the context of a global system of local interactions, performed massively in parallel.
[1] metaphors mixed and units of measure utterly messed-around with