ROLLING ON

Well the world rolls on around its tiny orbit around this vast resource of energy that keeps our livelihood constant. And this sun in itself is only one sun out of millions in the little galaxy we like to call the Milky Way, which in turn is only a speck in the vast reaches of the Universe. The closest galaxy to ours, Andromeda (also known as Messier 31 or M31) is approximately 2.5 million light years away and contains, as far as we know, 1 trillion stars.

Man! And these are just two, just two mind, of the billions of trillions of galaxies that possibly exist in the universe. And human understanding is nowhere close to grasping the true nature of the universe or what possibilities and perceptual incapability’s prevent us from actually seeing what’s real.

Consider a horse or cow or frog or fly. I am told that they see the world in different ways. Flies see the world as if looking at thousands of tiny TV screens looking at the same image. Now to a fly, its perceptual capabilities limit itself to a certain outlook on the world. Its intelligence and mental structure limits it to a certain understanding. It cannot comprehend the vast store of human knowledge and wisdom and indeed it is not aware of the vastness of its surroundings to the extent that we are.

But does that necessarily mean that we are perfect in perceptual ability? Can we understand everything there is to understand? Can we see everything there is to be seen and can we feel, touch, taste and hear everything there is to felt touched tasted and heard? Or are we like flies in our own kingdom, self-satisfied because we think we are constantly furthering our knowledge and experience and always figuring our better ways of doing things.

Scientists talk of the Fourth Dimension, the space-time continuum etc etc. how many of these concepts on the very edge of physics can any human being actually grasp. Indeed, even the scientists who put them forward only have a minute amount of fact to support these hypotheses. All we know is that there are a whole lot of scientifically inexplicable things happening in the world around us and these theories are our ways of attaching some kind of understanding to these phenomena so that we can continue to investigate them based on that understanding.

But what of the optimism that most humans have that eventually, given enough time and investment in the quest for more knowledge, that human beings can eventually be all-knowing? And when I say all knowing I mean All Knowing. We would be able to understand everything from the inner workings of the universe to the nature of life itself and be able to manipulate it all? We would be immortal, travel anywhere in the blink of an eye, give and take life to lesser beings. In other words, we would be God.

If you believe progress has no end then if you keep thinking ahead you will have to either reach this point of this God-complex or stop somewhere down the line. Possibly ending up in some mass disaster and a snap back to primitive times after which we would eventually find ourselves back to a state of high development before being rudely snapped back to primitivity as a result of our self destructive tendencies once again.

And the latter is not so much of a freaky theory after all. Maybe the human race has inbuilt characteristics that prevent it from ‘progress’ after going a certain distance. Think of the Babylonians, the Egyptians whose wonderful secrets disappeared along with their civilizations? What about the fabled land of Atlantis around which many stories of power and unparalleled advancement are built? Could these be traces of previous human civilizations that rose and fell with the tide of time?

One thing we do know, the powerful are always arrogant. And there is no doubt that the majority of humans think that our race has never been so advanced or educated as it is now. Well I’ll bet you anything that those ancients in Egypt thought the same. But look what happened to them. Is the same fate in store for us?