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The world keeps getting bigger and we keep getting smaller in it. This happens in our lives, perhaps a reflection of what has happened in history, in the same way that our early physical development may resemble the evolution of those things that came before us and engendered us -and whose traits to some extent we carry in ourselves.
The world is, at first, our parents and house and the people in that environment. The world outside is largely a mystery, full of surprises and perhaps terrors. Then little by little we discover the world and walk in it and learn that that big bad world out there, full of beauty and horror is but a speck in the grander order of things -and getting smaller the more we know about how it all works. To contemplate the scale of those things, even in the measure that we can take in those scales, is vertigo inducing. At the same time it is amazing that, given how puny and small we are in the grander order of things, humans have learnt so much about the world without. At the same time you wonder what more there is, there can be that could be simply outside the limits of what we can comprehend. For most of us, even what we do 'know' is incomprehensible. We take on faith that relativity and quantum mechanics exist and are real because we can see they work -otherwise many things (like GPS and almost all electronics) would not be possible. But for most of us science is a black box -and, perhaps dangerously, can become a religion as well, which is inexplicable except for the fact that both seek to explain the world and make it make sense. We can see that vaccines work and are necessary but many people seem to think they're some sort of manifestation of evil. There are, always, the easy explanations that put us back at the centre of the universe and make it revolve around us; many people will stick to those explanations because of lack of information or perhaps more so because they are reassuring, they seem to give your life a purpose and a meaning. The world may be too big and scary otherwise...
The world is, at first, our parents and house and the people in that environment. The world outside is largely a mystery, full of surprises and perhaps terrors. Then little by little we discover the world and walk in it and learn that that big bad world out there, full of beauty and horror is but a speck in the grander order of things -and getting smaller the more we know about how it all works. To contemplate the scale of those things, even in the measure that we can take in those scales, is vertigo inducing. At the same time it is amazing that, given how puny and small we are in the grander order of things, humans have learnt so much about the world without. At the same time you wonder what more there is, there can be that could be simply outside the limits of what we can comprehend. For most of us, even what we do 'know' is incomprehensible. We take on faith that relativity and quantum mechanics exist and are real because we can see they work -otherwise many things (like GPS and almost all electronics) would not be possible. But for most of us science is a black box -and, perhaps dangerously, can become a religion as well, which is inexplicable except for the fact that both seek to explain the world and make it make sense. We can see that vaccines work and are necessary but many people seem to think they're some sort of manifestation of evil. There are, always, the easy explanations that put us back at the centre of the universe and make it revolve around us; many people will stick to those explanations because of lack of information or perhaps more so because they are reassuring, they seem to give your life a purpose and a meaning. The world may be too big and scary otherwise...
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