system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why instant ramen can be cooked instantly with only hot water but pasta needs minutes for it to cook?
gpt
Quick (Ramen) answer:

Instant ramen is already boiled, and then they deep fry it so it's crunchy like potato chips and you just need to get it soggy again. 

Regular pasta needs to get soggy all the way through, and then heat it up enough that the starch soaks the water back up and makes it into a pasta texture. 

---

Food science (Pasta) answer:

Think of the starch in pasta like a heat activated sponge, so it's tiny and crunchy when it's cold, and won't expand even if it gets wet, but then when you get it hot it spreads out like a sponge and can soak things up and it's soft. Just heating it up won't expand it though, if you just heated up you just scorch the little pellet rather than expanding it because life likes to make things hard for you. 

The sponges in the ramen have already been expanded, they're just dry right right now. The sponges in the pasta still need to get hot with access to water for a while before they can soak stuff up.

As was pointed out by somebody in the comments, you can actually soak uncooked pasta to rehydrate it, it just takes forever, and it still won't really be tasty unless you bring it up to a boiling temperature to activate the starches. This does allow for cooking really quick batches of pasta though, and it plays into why fresh pasta cooks so much faster than dried.