If you think about how big the universe is, the fact that we can manipulate energy on such a small scale, like raising the temperature of something by one degree is absolutely insane
Is one degree really small?
Degrees are a manmade concept. Why do you think 1 degree is small?
And if we put our minds to it and work together, we can raise the temperature of the planet until it kills off all the people (followed by the billionaires).
No worries mate, it's already in the bag!
I'm not sure I understand this. Small scale fluctuations are the easiest things to achieve, in fact they occur spontaneously. It's the large scale fluctuations that would be difficult to achieve.
For example if you have a room filled with air, then changing the temperature of all the air in the room would require doing a lot of work or transferring a lot of heat to the entire room. But on the microscale, if you were to look at a random 1 micrometer cube volume of the air, then you should expect temperature fluctuations to occur all the time, even without the addition of heat or work to the room.
It's like staring at static on a tv screen. The overall shade of the entire screen is middle gray and over time stays gray, but unsurprisingly individual pixels will fluctuate randomly between pure black and pure white. Small scale fluctuations occur spontaneously.
Well think about this, are you able to manipulate temperature within one degree? Sure. Get a stove. How about one one millionth of a degree? Is that easy to achieve? Its not. Same on a cosmic scale, changing things by one million degrees? Easy as pie, one degree? No way. Sure, you have done it a million times to get to a million degrees but you didn't do it with precision.
That's what I think is amazing, our precision only capable at this level because of our size and capability in this universe
I would argue that's the only thing that makes sense. Given the immense scale, everything has to be so much more localized. What would be much more insane to me is if we were able to raise the temperature of a huge chunk of space by a large amount. Like the universe right after the big bang.
Well think about it, an asteroid just a mile wide hits a planet, the impact plume would reach about 20,000k, or 35,000 F, but on a planet wide scale even those numbers are meaningless, a statewide scale? Forget about it. We may think we're hot shit when we can raise our ovens up to 500⁰ or melt steel, but, in the grand scheme of things we're playing with grains of sand on the beach of energy manipulation
I'd say the amount of energy manipulation we do makes perfect sense for beings about the size of a human. We still have a long ways to go regarding efficiency but no need to heat a planet when heating your room or your food is enough.
I think your fascination with this just boils down to a fascination with the scale of the universe in general.
I don't really see why it is insane. We are quite small ... so of course we can make small changes.
But raising the temperature by 1 agree isn't even "small" considering we can manipulate individual electrons or photons.