Limitations of Human Evolution in understanding the workings of the Universe
Humans face tremendous challenges in visualizing spatial & temporal scales that the universe operates on
Limits of Human Spatial & Temporal Understanding
Human ingenuity & perseverance has helped us understand the nature of our universe, its origins, and workings. But such understanding did not come easy and human evolution did not prepare us for this journey. That’s even more reason to revel in the achievements of the leading thinkers and scientists of our time.
Yet for the lay person, this understanding is elusive at best and entirely perplexing within the narrow spatial & temporal context of human evolution.
We humans are macroscopic entities homed in by evolution to survive and procreate. This singular and narrow but important focus of evolution on survival limited out spatial & temporal perceptions to what got the job done — be it living in a tribe of a few 100s, walking and running a few miles daily for hunting and foraging for food, living for a few decades, passing on our genes and eventually dying.
The universe however operates on an entirely different spatial & temporal scale. To understand the “very big” and the “very small” — Cosmology (as described by General Relativity) & Quantum Mechanics (as described by the standard model of particle physics) needs an entirely different and mind-boggling scale.
For example, one of the most critical events that happened immediately after the Big Bang that enabled the universe to be the way we see it today, happened at an unimaginable pace in an unimaginably short window of time — Cosmic Inflation
Yes! The smart physicists amongst us can do the calculations and figure out these amazing facts about our universe but can they or for that matter any of us lay folks truly understand the foregoing spatial & temporal statements? I think not!
A second is as far down the time scale we can get to in our daily life, and a few hundred million miles is what we can comprehend in the context of our solar system. The time scales at which cosmic inflation happened are unimaginably difficult to grasp period.
Why are humans so bad at safe-guarding the environment & understanding and appreciating the impact of Global Warming?
One plausible answer could well be related to our evolutionary wiring of time horizons. As a rough approximation, there have been about 25,000 generations of humans since Homo Sapiens evolved. At any one time perhaps 3–4 generations coexist on average.
Global warming operates on a larger time horizon than any one human life span. Even though we see visible impacts of global warming, the seeds of these impacts were sown a few generations ago.
Humans are very local & tribal and present focused in time. For most of history, all we could do was to stay alive in the present — living, hunting & eating and procreating in the present. We hardly had the luxury to contemplate the future let alone plan for it.
Today, even though our day-to-day living is not as precarious and fraught with dangers as those of our ancient forebears, we are evolutionarily wired for instant gratification, caring more for our kith & kin than for complete strangers, and caring more for our local surroundings than for distant lands. This attitude risks myopic dystopia by living for today, plundering natural resources for maximum current comfort and economic benefit for our immediate tribes and geographies.
Conclusion
Humans are a well-oiled machinery of evolution. But that means we live in the narrowest band of the vast expanse of spatial & temporal spectrum of the universe.
We see a fraction of the entire light spectrum and hear the narrowest of sound frequencies. We experience but an iota of the vast expanse of distances and time horizons. Yet we are too macroscopic to understand the infinitesimally short time or distances that are important to understand how our universe got started.
It is an amazing tribute to humankind that with such glaring limitations we have come such a long way in understanding and appreciating the workings of this amazing and spectacular universe.
