Life

400 Years of Science

In the time of Buddha, we had no idea why people breathed, we just knew that they should. In the 16th century, we had no idea what the stars were. A hundred years ago, we knew nothing about DNA or its role in natural selection. For most of that time, for most people, life was just life; we knew what we knew, and what we didn’t know didn’t bother us – we didn’t know we didn’t know it, because we knew plenty enough to get by. In 400 years, what will we know, that as of now, we don’t even know we don’t know? What will our descendants know that we didn’t even realize was a question?

I think of the answers that seem dissatisfying to me today, and look forward to a time (some maybe in my lifetime!) when the answers might actually be available – answers that might even seem obvious in hindsight. How human and animal brains actually work, including what consciousness is. How interstellar travel might be possible. How to support human needs within the carrying capacity of the planet. What if light is something that’s neither a particle nor a wave, but a whole different category of thing we don’t understand yet? 

We’ve only been exploring space for 70 years, and now we have increasingly capable robots all over the solar system. That’s not even a lifetime. A lifetime from now, how far will our robots have gone? What will our robots be able to do on Earth? (you know, other than Skynet unleashing nuclear winter).

And these robots might even travel far enough to connect with life elsewhere in the solar system. What a revolution that would be. I think of Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson and how excitedly they talk about the potential to discover other life – nothing could be more paradigm-shattering. Monotheistic, human-centered faith traditions would be turned on their heads. Of course, alien life has kind of a sullied reputation. An astrophysicist’s obsessive search for intelligent life can be perceived as analogous to a gifted neuroscientist using her research to search for evidence of psychic powers. But if life is out there, it will change everything. Whether it’s intelligent, or just really, really different, we will learn so much. There are a trillion galaxies in the observable universe, containing 200 trillion stars. Odds are, some of them are lucky like Earth, if only we can get there to see.

Our current age of scientific inquiry is only about 400 years old. Look how far we’ve come – and now we have artificially intelligent computers doing the heavy lifting for us, if they don’t enslave us first. When I think how much more we might learn just in my next couple of decades (which I hope to have if I’m lucky), I can’t wait to find out.

3 thoughts on “400 Years of Science

  1. Thanks. I always love your musings.
    I’ve been wonderstruck thinking of “intelligence” or “science” even before humans, back in the evolutionary timescale. You are definitely right to point out these subtle overlooked insights like what stars are exactly or how our one star fits into the 200,000,000,000,000 stars out there. But long before this 400 year old period of scientific insight, those trillions of stars were out there shining, and their light couldn’t fall on Earth’s telescopes or even on human eyes because humans didn’t exist yet. Long before humans, that same light fell on the eyes of insects or of trilobites or even the crude eyes of mollusks before animals lived on land. When I compare our understanding to the simpler understanding that those lifeforms have, it shows how very large the range of intelligence already is.
    And yes, it’s mind-blowing to ponder what other or greater understanding something else could get from that same light falling on it, whether that’s some greater artificial intelligence in the future or some alien intelligence out there today. It truly is beyond the imagination! It’s possible that there could be an intelligence so great that it makes our modern understandings look as simple as a trilobite’s dim response to a flickering star.
    Anyway, thanks. It’s always thought provoking for me.

  2. Among the very most humbling things about the universe is that “Dark energy makes up 68% of it, dark matter 28 %” , and what we see and touch and examine as reality makes up 5 % . As if it isn’t humbling enough to go outside on a clear night, or look at the photos from the Webb Telescope. Such enormity.

    1. Yes! It’s wild to think about things like dark matter. What will science discover about what makes up the universe? Maybe in our lifetimes, maybe further down the road.

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