Saturday, May 27, 2023

Is This Some Sort of Joke?

If you took all eight billion people in the world and removed all the space inside and outside their atoms, forming a single cube, what size would it be? Something slightly larger than a sugar cube.

When you sit down on a chair you feel the chair's hardness pressing on your clothes and your clothes pressing on your skin. Well, no. Your clothe's atoms do not actually touch the chair's or your skin's atoms / you are never really in direct contact with any of it.

Your vision is limited to a tiny part of the entire electromagnetic energy spectrum - what we call light. If we could see the entire spectrum or even just infrared or ultraviolet, our 'reality’ would be completely different from what we experience now, we would be completely different from what we are now.

We exist in at least a four dimensional space/time universe but our brains are incapable of directly experiencing that.

We live in a universe so large and so old and so full of things that our brains are incapable of truly comprehending. Visualize a billion. Can't. A billion years, a billion miles, a billion suns - we simply can't do it. Visualize a trillion atoms that never touch, all grouped into you. Can't.

We live in a universe with a speed limit - 186,000 miles per second, the speed of light - nothing can travel faster than that. On even just a galactic scale that is painfully slow, let alone on a universal one. The nearest sun with planets (stellar system) to us is 4.3 light years away, Alpha Centauri. A light year is the distance light travels in a year at 186,000 miles per second. Sending a radio message at the speed of light to Alpha Centauri would require 8.6 years for an answer to our hello. The fastest manmade object ever to have left the earth would take hundreds of thousands of years to arrive there. Unless we find a way to circumvent the limitations of the speed of light to travel vast distances we have no hope of exploring even nearby stars let alone the 100 billion just in our galaxy alone. Intergalactic travel? The nearest galaxy to ours is Canis Major dwarf - a satellite galaxy to our Milky Way - is 25,000 light years away.

We were clearly designed to survive the plains of Africa. We did a good job of that. But we are clearly not designed to fully experience, or fully comprehend on a gut level, our universe. It appears we can't even explore or colonize beyond our solar system. Are we doomed then to only gaze outward, trapped in this tiny speck of space isolated from nearly everything else, limited by brains and senses meant for earth, knowing we can never experience almost all that there is - our universe - directly - or even fully comprehend it?

Why then did intelligence powerful enough to be able to come to realize that, even evolve?

Is this some sort of joke?


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