Everything We Don’t Know

 

This is green. This is red. And this is blue. But how can you tell that what you’re seeing as blue is the exact same thing as what I see as blue? We’ve named the colors to give us a way to communicate and reference them, but in reality, there’s no way of knowing that what you see is the same as what another person sees. Even with the small steps and the giant leaps we’ve made as a species, there is still a lot to learn about earth, life, and the human condition. There’s still everything we don’t know. On the 26th of February 2015, one picture of a dress divided the internet. While some saw it as gold and white, others saw it as blue and black. Since then, there have been a number of repetitions of the same experiment either using the same sense, in this case, sight, or even other senses, like hearing in the famous 'yanny' or 'laurel' debate. These experiments remind us that there’s no way for us to tell that you and I sense the same things.

What I call red might just be what you call blue, and there might be someone out there who sees human beings with purple teeth, but just refers to it as white. 71% of the surface of the earth is covered by water. Humans are made up of about 60% water, potatoes 80%, watermelons 93%, and Cucumbers 95%. It’s very clear that water is essential for life on earth, but we don’t really know much about water. Not even about the very oceans we came from. In fact, we’ve only explored 5 to 10 percent of Earth’s oceans, the rest, well, who knows what’s down there? It’s even scarier when you realize that fish like the blobfish and the barrel-eyed fish belong to this slim percent of things we’ve discovered. The deeper you go, the crazier things seem to get. What’s at the bottom of the ocean? For the most part, we just don’t know.

But what about fire? Was fire a 'discovery' or an 'invention'? And music? Music has been described by scientists as a relatively recent invention by humans. It’s believed that music helped our ancestors to help bring together a close-knit community. But did humans really invent music? Or did we just discover that certain sounds sound nice with other sounds? Birds sing, whales sing, even tree frogs have a nice rich baritone sometimes. So can we really say man invented music? If we did, then what is the true definition of music? I guess we’ll never know. On the list of man’s greatest inventions has to be tools. In fact, for a really long time, scientists were sure that this is pretty much what made us human.

Many scientific theories are superseded with time, considered obsolete or simply wrong. We used to think Earth was the center of the universe, then one day, we realized it wasn’t. Then again, not everyone could accept the fact that their view of the universe was wrong. So, it is very possible that mostly everything we do know about the world right now is wrong. Honestly, it probably is. We simply don’t know everything about everything. And that’s okay. All we can do is keep asking questions and keep learning about the world around us, trying to uncover each of its mysteries one stone at a time, hopefully answering the most important question of them all — what does existence truly mean?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/fs9VGYDCAjc

Ayesha