How Mundane can You Be?

This is the future? Let’s see; racial intolerance, bossy cops, deteriorating infrastructure. How 1950.

New Discoveries? About the only major discovery I know of is the discovery of the sasquatch, according to the people at the Sasquatch Genome Project, and that’s not exactly all that world changing.

Now in the past we had a lot of major discoveries. That the Earth orbited the Sun for one — later supplanted by the discovery that the Sun and the Earth orbit a common center of mass between the two. The fact that electricity and magnetism are the same — at least officially, that the forces are manifestations of the curvature of space-time, or even that space-time is an actual thing that can be manipulated. But now?

Now we apparently know everything there is to know. Right, and California’s Channel Island Fox is a wild animal.

We still have more to learn, but we don’t know enough to know what we don’t know. I mean, how do the forces come out of the shaping of space-time? How did the ancestors of the modern sasquatch get to North America? What are superstrings made of, supertwine maybe?

That’s the thing about us, we ain’t perfect. You can insist all you want, you ain’t perfect. Even worse, we’ll never be perfect. There will always be things we can’t know given what we now know, but which we will later know once we have learned how to know. And the first real step to learning what we don’t know will be when we learn to accept there are things we don’t know. That our knowledge is, and always shall be, imperfect and incomplete.

The most important word a scientist can learn is, “Oh.” The acknowledgment that something unexpected is going on. That matters are not what we had learned before, but rather different in a substantial way. How does space-time get bent? Could we bend space-time in some unexpected manner and use this trick to our advantage? Do photons have mass and why?

— Yes, I know that officially photons don’t have mass. But is this actually true or is it an assumption we make arising from our current inability to detect the mass of a photon? —

— And yes, I am well aware that officially there are no giant bipedal apes in North America, or so say individuals from the some 500 million giant bipedal apes now living in North America. —

To get back to my point, we’re now in a position where our discoveries have come to an apparent end because we don’t know enough to know there will be more discoveries. Where we will learn where and how we went wrong and how to correct our errors. Live goes on, change goes on, learning goes on. A century from now their histories are likely to speak of things we could not have expected. Cops learning how to handle stress, bigfoot crossing signs, nanites maintaining our infrastructure. Even really weird shit. Progress will continue as long as we live, and what will come in the future will always take us by surprise.

Originally published at Mythusmage Today.