I was at the denver airport today, and while taking off, I starting thinking about just how sick airplanes are: we figured out that if you curve the wings just right and have a powerful enough engine to get up to speed, you can make 45 tons of aluminum fly.
This isn't a modern fascination, either. Since the dawn of man, we have had this deep, primal desire to reach for the stars: from Icarus to vimanas, every civilization has fantasized about flight. Abbas ibn Firnas first tried in the 800s, followed by Leonardo da Vinci in 1480 and Samuel Langley in October of 1903. But they all failed. Despite millennia of evidence that flight was impossible, we tried anyway, failing over and over again.
But eventually, on December 17, 1903, the Wright brothers finally flew the first successful aircraft.
I think what I find the most interesting about airplanes doesn't have to do with engineering at all— it's that we kept failing to build them, but never stopped trying. It's that we've had this impossible dream embedded in us that we refuse to let die. It's that every generation had a couple nutjobs crazy enough to keep trying.
I don't know how we're delusional enough to believe we can do the impossible, or why we keep getting up when we see that we can't. But I think it's really special that humans have impossible dreams.