Quote:
Originally Posted by jjjnettie
He spent most of his youth as a free thinker, only to end up like all those professors he disliked. Stuck in a rut. Not allowing himself to think outside the square.
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Here's my opinion on trying to understand the universe.:
Maybe we just can't or never will.
Our species is (arguably) the result of evolution getting us to
this point of self awareness and knowing our position in the universe.
Maybe just by pure accident or maybe by divine plan.
We are perfectly comfortable looking at the universe from our
perspective.
Our intelligence allows us that. But we start to look further
and question things.
Whales are supposed to be the next species almost as enlightened
as us.
They perceive their world exactly the same way, to the limit their
intelligence allows them.
But, to a whale, concepts such as spaceflight and molecular
structure would be as foreign as wormholes and a unified theory
are to us....
We seem to know there is something just around the corner waiting
for us to know...but something holds us back from that knowledge.
I reckon it's just our intellect.
In 250(?) million years of life, that little window of self awareness
we are at now only occupies a time window of maybe the last 100 years.
Maybe even a few 1000 even (we don't know how they built the pyramids for example!)
Just a blink of an eye when compared to 250 million years.
Maybe we need another few million years to bridge that gap.
And that gets me to the second point.
Where is everyone else!? Why don't we hear from them?
Maybe a civilisation gets itself to this point of self awareness
in a tiny time window of a few hundred/thousand years and then it snuffs out
due to the instinctive aggressive/survival behaviour it carries along like
baggage from the process of evolution.
For two of those time windows to overlap in even just our neck of the woods
of this galaxy, so that we make contact with that civilisation are
probably impossible odds.
Maybe that's why it's so quiet out there?
And why we should look after the place a bit better
Steve