this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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Of course the story we've come up with has started to unravel. It was essentially destined to, just as all the past stories we've come up with have. We're just the tiniest little splash in the tiniest little pan way off in some obscure corner of a reality that is vast and complex beyond comprehension.
To think that we can understand the nature of the universe, much less that we already do, is and always has been startlingly obviously ludicrous.
Right. If cosmology weren't in crisis, we'd be doing it wrong.
The exciting existential-crisis results are often less 'Eureka!' and more 'Huh, that's weird', right?
I'd compare this to our understanding of evolution and the frequent table-flipping discoveries involved. We thought we had an idea pretty well understood. Yet we keep learning that while the idea itself is solid, our ability to predict how things worked was too simplistic. So it goes when we look into the past (I'm a history nerd by hobby, so this is how it makes sense to me).
Sort of. The broad dynamic is essentially the same, though evolution is a comparatively tiny idea compared to anything that might come out of cosmology.
That’s a good illustration of my point though. Think about the complexities and the table-flipping along the way to our current understanding of evolution, then expand that out - we’re not just addressing the mechanisms by which specific forms of life come to be on this specific planet, but the fundamental nature and history of an incomprehensibly vast universe.
When we know - we’ve demonstrated to ourselves repeatedly - that we still don’t even fully grasp the facts regarding something as relatively mundane and constrained as the origin and differentiation of species of life, it should drive home how ludicrous it is to believe that we’ve managed to grasp the facts regarding the origin and history of the universe as a whole.
If a timeline is infinitely long, you will always be closer to its start than to its end