1. That when you're a Soviet cosmonaut and your spacecraft has run out of fuel and you don't have any parachutes and the battery dies and you're spinning and tumbling and the spacecraft is filling with toxic fumes and you're going to crash into Earth at 4 miles per second and your cabin is about 0.1 meter thick and you're probably going to die, but then you realize that you're too light to be pulled out of orbit by Earth's gravity and you're going to burn up in the atmosphere like a meteor instead, but then you realize that you should be able to use the parachute cords to tie yourself to your seat so the crash doesn't throw you against the wall, and that maybe if you can angle the spacecraft just right you won't burn up, and that the capsule is lined with a thick layer of insulation which might protect you against the fireball, and that you got lucky and the place where you're going to crash is flat and there's a big pile of snow and if you get the angle just right you'll hit the snow first instead of the ground and it will soften the impact, and that when you do finally crash into the Earth after a heartstopping freefall through the atmosphere you black out for a moment but then you come to and you're alive and you kick open the hatch and you're back on Earth and you're alive, and that your name is Vladimir Komarov.

2. That we figured out that some animals like to roll around in mud and that other animals don't like mud, which led to the discovery that the mud-loving animals have fewer parasites, which led to the discovery of ivermectin as a treatment for river blindness, and that this makes the world seem like a sort of intelligently-designed puzzle with this delicate, improbable chain of logic where if you follow it all the way to the end you get to save a million people from going blind.

3. That we're in a cosmic shooting gallery where an asteroid or comet could hit the Earth at any moment and kill everyone and we've only been aware of this risk for a few decades and we're already building out systems to detect and deflect these objects, and that the dinosaurs were all killed by one of these, perhaps giving us the chance to exist, and that they were beautiful and magnificent, but alas, extinction is part of the process.

4. That there are so many crazy things to see in the world, like the Salar de Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia and the Grand Canyon and the view of LA at night from Mulholland Drive and the limestone pillars in Zhangjiajie and the Great Wall and the Great Barrier Reef and the Golden Gate Bridge and the Western Wall and the Northern Lights and the Daintree Rainforest and the Vasa and the Uffizi Gallery and the Rijksmuseum and the Grand Place and the Acropolis and the Great Pyramid and the Banaue Rice Terraces and the Pudong skyline and temples in Luang Prabang and the ruined temples at Angkor and the Victoria Falls and the Big Room in Carlsbad Cavern and the White House and the Freiburg Minster and the St. Stephens Cathedral and the Galápagos Islands and Machu Picchu and the old city of Jerusalem and the glaciers in Alaska and the cemeteries in New Orleans and the caves in Guilin and the Italian side of the Mediterranean Sea and the Amalfi Coast and the favelas in Rio and the night markets in Taipei and the Blue Lagoon and the Matterhorn and the Amish country and the towers of San Gimignano and the redwoods in the Muir Woods and the Fjords of Norway and the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood and the Pannonhalma Archabbey and the hyenas in Harar and the Roman Colosseum and the parks in Sofia and the coast of Oaxaca and the Valley of the Kings and the city of Barcelona and the Neuschwanstein Castle and the Mount St. Michael's Abbey and the museums of London and the Great Library of Toronto and the mountains of the Yukon and the city of Riga and the old town of Tallinn and the coral reefs in Palau and the cenotes in the Yucatán and the old city of Dubrovnik and the Great Library of Alexandria and the Sistine Chapel, which happens to be in a cool city with 900 churches and 280 fountains, none of which really have anything to do with Thanksgiving, but if I'm going to be thankful I might as well go ahead and be thankful for the whole damn planet.

5. That in 1841 a 28-year old art critic in England was annoyed that painters were charged money to exhibit their works, so he raised funds to create a space to let them do it for free, but then he realized why not have other things in the space too like manufactured goods and machines and make it a sort of museum for the whole world, and then he and his buddy Henry Cole came up with the idea to have a Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in a massive pavilion they nicknamed ""the Crystal Palace"" which was an enormous success and led to more exhibitions in Paris, New York, Vienna, etc. and also the creation of the South Kensington Museum which housed items from the exhibit along with the manufacturer's name, address, and price, and later became the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum, which are still around and gave me and surely millions of others a lot of joy, and they also used profits from the exhibition to buy land in Kensington to create a place to promote understanding of art and science that became the Royal Albert Hall and the Royal College of Art and the Royal College of Music and Imperial College London, the last of which had a library I spent a lot of time in, staring out the window at the Royal Albert Hall, and that man was called Sir Francis Leggatt Chantrey.

6. That we can represent almost any number with a finite string of digits that's as long as we need it to be, and we can use this to represent any word with a number, and we can use this to represent any book with a number, and we can use this to represent any video with a number, and we can use this to represent any computer program with a number, and we can use this to represent any python program with a number, and we can use this to represent any python program that prints numbers with a number, and we can use this to represent any python program that prints numbers that have some property with a number, and we can use this to represent any python program that prints numbers that don't have some property with a number, and we can use this to represent any python program that prints numbers that don't have the property of being a python program that prints numbers with a number, and if we run this program, it will either print itself or it won't, and if it doesn't, then it doesn't have the property of being a python program that prints numbers, and if it does, then it doesn't have the property of being a python program that prints numbers that don't have some property, and therefore it's a paradox and things are weird.

7. That in the 13th century, Henry III of England had three leopards sent to him for his menagerie in the Tower of London, and these were shipped to him on the royal barge with orders that they should be fed capons, beef, and rabbits, and that later he issued an order for the sheriffs of London and the surrounding counties to provide for the upkeep of his (now six) lions plus a polar bear, who was allowed to swim and hunt for fish in the river Thames, and that he later received a wedding gift of an African elephant, which he placed in a specially built elephant house 12 meters long by 6 meters wide, and that on the way to the Tower of London, the elephant was greeted in the city of Dover by a girl who sang to it in her native tongue, and that the elephant understood her and took bread from her hand, ""gently feeling first her breasts, then her head, as though he was a rational being"", and that it's likely that neither the sheriffs, the barge captain, the elephant, nor the elephant girl had any concept of probability theory or expected utility or the orthogonality thesis, but still they did these things.

8. That you can just go out and have a coffee with a friend, which is to say you can blithely handle deadly poison aznd infectious pathogens and molten liquid and astonishingly hot steam without thinking about it and you can afford to pay a total stranger to bring you all these hazards and for some reason you're both confident that the transaction will be carried out without you stealing the coffee or them stealing your money at gunpoint or whatever, a trust that forms the background of like every action in modern society.

9. That the soft, rubbery skin of the echidna is covered with hollow, hairlike spines made of keratin and that these spines cover the body and tail, leaving only a small area of the underside and lower legs unspined and that they have no teeth but instead long sticky tongues to collect ants and termites and that they lay eggs but then nurse their young with milk from their pokes but they also have a pouch like marsupials but it's backwards meaning the pouch faces backwards so that they can dig face-first without all the dirt getting in and that they have spurs on their hind legs which may or may not be venomous but they don't defend themselves by rolling into a ball like hedgehogs but instead dig into the ground until only the spines are exposed but they're also good at swimming which is a surprise considering the spines and the diggy paws and the long sticky tongue and that they hibernate by lowering their body temperature to 32°F (0°C) which is the lowest of any mammal but also they do this even when the temperature is warm because they're lazy and there's less food in the summer and that they can live 45 years which is the longest of any Monotreme and that they just had their genome sequenced showing that they are genetic outliers with unusually large brains and a very slow metabolism and that they're extremely cute.

10. That we probably live in a time before the invention of the hedonimeter, the hypothetical machine that can record happiness and pleasure in the brain, a machine that could be a powerful tool for good, but which people might also hack to the point of creating a kind of totalizing pleasure addiction that subsumes all other goals and drives all other species extinct and causes civilization to collapse, and also that we have the option of never inventing it.