All we know is still infinitely less than all that remains unknown.                                                                                              -William Harvey

Scientists are brave. They have locked horns with the unknown. Their spears shield us against the unknown. Their flaming curiosity forms the light around us that keeps us afloat in the eternal abyss that surrounds us. Sciences that we’ve discovered so far have done a good job of explaining the recent past viz. How we evolved into these intellectual social moral organisms, the composition of our planet, the composition of the galaxy we live in. But will we Ever understand the mysteries of the universe? The mysteries around conception of life? Are we destined to? What makes us think that?

A centipede or a rat is never going to come close to understanding the world that we live in. Then what makes us special ? The fact that we have an upper hand on the planet, does that make us special? We used our intelligence and creativity to climb the food chain. Are the secrets to the universe the grand prize a podium finish guarantees? Could we jump to the conclusion that the world was made for us? Was intelligence a gift by the Creator or was it just a tool developed by our species to help us survive? Our competitive advantage; like the eyesight of an eagle, the claws of a big cat and the loyalty of a dog? A by product of evolution. So why should we unlike the orangutan be capable of understanding the cosmos?                                        

Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior,but then,anybody in his right mind should have a inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.                                                                                                                                                                                                                               -Alan Kay

Are we betting on the machines that we’ve built to help us get there? The machines we’ve put together using non living materials found in nature are capable of processing data and predicting outcomes which is a subset of intelligence. If that’s programming and mechanics one could postulate that we are a combination of programming and bio mechanics. That the brain with which we care so deeply and love fiercely is in fact plastic. That it is an advanced sentient motherboard. That we are futuristic machine learning devices developed and developing by trial and error over eons. We’ve built these machines. Are we their God’s? We haven’t created the universe but we have created them, given them life!

Who is the Creator? Our being can’t even begin to fathom the deep secrets of the universe. Let us assume that god this magical, mystical, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient force created the universe. Then who created this almighty force? How did it come into existence? How? Why? We hit a dead end there. Our trail goes cold. I know I’m not saying much when I am saying this but the tools we need here are (could be) a deep understanding of concepts of sciences we haven’t even discovered yet.

Intellectual modesty is humility to what i know:intellectual humility is modesty as to what I do not know.                                                                                                                                                                                     -Tariq Ramadan

In attempting to solve this mystery; logic and the languages we’ve created just tell us that we don’t know what we don’t know. Socrates summed it up brilliantly when he said,”The only thing I know is that I know nothing”.He used the tools he had developed (logic) to take our species to a new plane of consciousness. He catapulted us from unconscious incompetence into conscious incompetence. Shouldn’t we be hunting for different tools?And the tools we have developed, Mathematics, Philosophy, Logic, Astronomy and a hundred others might not be able to find the answers here, we’ll need new tools to build this structure. It’s a crime scene we can’t solve with the tools that our investigators currently possess. Advanced Psychology, Biology and Geometry might not look anything like the psychology biology and geometry we know today. Just like Arithmetic is different from Calculus.

Maybe this world is another planets hell.                                                                                                                                                                   -Aldous Huxley

It could be that the evil in human beings exists to deal with hostile species, predators we share the planet with. Since we don’t have any on the planet right now, it’s manifesting on other human beings.What if aliens didn’t have to share their resources with any wild species? Would they be alien to the concept of war? Could a technologically and spiritually advanced species gift us the secrets to the universe? A thousand years ago when the scientific method was alien to us wouldn’t we have worshiped these magical descendants of the heavens? Now we’d just say that these beings from outer space are smarter than us or that they have evolved better.

 Life well spent is long .                                                                                                                                                                                          -Leonardo da Vinci

It is said that the first person to live for 200 years is already alive. What if major breakthroughs in bio sciences and medicine help increase the shelf life of a human being exponentially? Technological advancements in these fields makes fixing a damaged human as easy as fixing an appliance is, in 2018. What if a human lives for ten thousand years and his brain keeps growing making new connections? This unleashing of the human potential could give birth to abilities which could supersede a super computer one day. This biological super computer could produce and put together the pieces of the puzzle we primitive beings of the 21st century cant even imagine. Pieces which are invisible to our primitive eyes. Isn’t it easy to realise that 2100 or for that matter 200,000 is a lot closer to zero than it is to googolplex(google it)?

Every thing will be okay in the end.If its not okay then its not the end.                                                                                                      -John Lennon

There is also a time bomb ticking on the side. The intellectual might of our species isn’t devoted to solving this problem as dooms day is approaching. The fact is that we’re still like the apes; insecure and uncertain of the survival of our species. We’ve found out recently that the planet that we live on, mother Earth and our Father star without which the seeds of life (as we understand it) would never sprout have finite lives. It too will turn cold and dark one day. Once we’re an inter planetary, inter galactic species we might have bought ourselves the time to battle these gigantic stellar problems with infinite resources and eternal peace(a spiritual revolution would help us get there). Not having to worry about our survival, we might be able to take on this mammoth problem. Our star warsian society might have the time and resources to lay siege on the bulwark behind which these secrets lay hidden. Our sharpened axe might finally be able to make a dent in the universe.

We don’t have the tools to get far in this discussion.

With great humility I accept that I am an ape living on a tiny rock.

I am not very different from my ancestors wandering the planes of the Sahara. A few thousand years later, I am as lost and the night sky is as beautiful.