Watching Ice Crystals Form Is Like Coming To Terms With Your Own Existence

What did you think about while you watched water ice crystals form on dry ice?

Youtuber Nick Moore (whose other pursuits involve supersonic ping pong balls and finding the fastest way to chill a cold one) revealed in the comments that he slid some dry ice under his microscope on a whim, and what he saw surprised him: Water was condensing and freezing on the surface of the much-colder dry ice. When the dry ice melted, the crystals collapsed back into water.

Speeding up the recording, we see in detail how ice crystals form, springing into geometric feather-like shapes. It looks like a tiny icy forest, or a bed of blue ferns. Watch it enough times and it starts to get soothing in a deep, subliminal way. Watch it too many times and you'll start to wonder what the point of anything is. We're all just built to form and grow and create something new before dissolving back into the puddles we came from, and I swear to god I'm not even high right now.

It's kind of a religious experience, isn't it? A rare view of the impossibly intricate, alien-like structures that a warm human touch would instantly demolish. So fragile. Life. Love. Hurt. Pain. Geometry. Creation. Destruction. Ice.