Since the dawn of the human species we have sought to understand the world around us.
There are two ways we do this, and every human that has ever existed has experienced some
degree of both.
The first is the moment of our birth, and the commencement of learning.
We explore our world, first with the most basic things such as discovering how to consume
nutrients, then crawl and explore, and then walk and speak.
Life really is a very long series of learning lessons, the point of which is ultimately
to arrive at as complete of an understanding of the universe as a human living on a planet
can do.
But we also learn cumulatively.
We teach our children the early lessons of life we in turn inherited from our parents,
but we’re also helped by the cumulative knowledge of thousands of years of human existence.
Sometimes this knowledge is lost, the dark ages being an example, where much of the literature
of the greco-roman world vanished.
But overall, the grand act of data collection by the human species has largely been a success,
even to the point that we can reconstruct past lost knowledge to a degree with our modern
technology.
Case in point, the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara who lived during the first century
BC.
Until relatively recently, not a lot was known of this philosopher other than mainly a group
of poems that had been preserved by luck.
Philodemus himself however had made a very fateful move in life that would come to define
him over two thousand years later.
After studying in Athens, he moved to Rome during its period as a Republic before the
days of the full on empire.
At some point however, he decided the big city wasn’t for him, and moved to the more
or less resort town of Herculaneum, not far from Pompeii and in the shadows of Mt.
Vesuvius.
Philodemus died long before Vesuvius’s violent volcanic eruption in 79 AD, but his library
may have survived.
Starting around 1752, excavations in Herculaneum started revealing carbonized papyrus scrolls.
The discovery and excavation of these scrolls still continues to this day with almost 2000
scrolls so far recovered.
As exciting as that might sound, there’s a problem.
The volcano that preserved them also made them mostly unreadable.
These scrolls were reduced by the volcano’s superheated pyroclastic flows to lumps of
carbon essentially.
But some managed to be at least partly readable and proved to skew heavily on the works of
Philodemus, to the point that as early as 1907 it was suspected that this library, known
as the Villa of the Papyri, might actually be the collection of Philodemus himself.
While some destructive unrolling of some of these scrolls has happened over the last few
centuries, most remained untouched and unread.
Until now.
Modern methods of infrared photography and other techniques have allowed these formerly
impossible to read texts to not only be reconstructed and read, but without damage to the original
and the need to unroll them in their delicate state.
This has revealed much more of philodemus’ works that would have otherwise been lost
forever.
And possibly even more than that, it’s thought that there may be an unexcavated lower section
of this library that may contain any number of scrolls that could in the future reveal
even more lost works of the Greco-Roman world.
Philodemus’ works however confirm that the philosophers of the Greco-Roman world spent
no small part of their time pondering existence in the universe and debating such things as
inductive reasoning and forming conclusions about the universe.
Little did they know that two thousand years later, we would still be doing the same, though
armed with a much greater body of knowledge.
But this task of understanding the universe around us creates a question.
Will we someday understand it all?
Will we ever have a complete understanding of the universe?
In a literal sense, the answer is no.
The universe puts certain limits on what we can know, but maybe not what we can understand.
A glaring example of this is the interior of a blackhole, which in most ways is not
observable.
Further, what we can know is limited ultimately by the speed of light, we can’t see some
portion of the universe for example and never will be able to.
The reason for this is the cumulative expansion of the universe past a certain distance, inside
of which is our observable universe, defeats the speed of light making some large fraction
of the universe forever invisible to us.
Understanding the universe however is a different story than knowing everything however.
So to take stock of what we might even eventually be able to understand about the universe requires
us to take a look at the limits.
The first major limit that stands in our way of knowledge is the ability to measure something.
The quantum world is hopeless in this regard, it simply doesn’t work on a basis where
you can repeat observations.
All you can do is work with probabilities and averages.
The reason for this is the infamous quantum wave function, until you observe a particle,
it exists in all states at once.
Given this inherent uncertainty within quantum mechanics, it may be that we are never able
to fully know the quantum world, but we may reach a full understanding of it.
Or it could be that all interpretations we have are wrong, and some new interpretation
of the quantum world will come along and make the picture clearer.
But it doesn’t just stop at the quantum level, there are things in the universe so
complex that we may never truly be able to predict them.
One of these, unsurprisingly, is the weather.
Incorrect weather forecasts are ultimately wrong simply because the system being studied
is too complex to be precisely calculated.
There are many such examples of this, organic chemistry being a huge one where protein complexity
just gets so overwhelming it’s enormously difficult to tackle, though artificial intelligence
is making inroads there.
Another could well be cosmology.
The universe might simply be too complicated to fully understand.
There scientists search and hope for simplicity, the physicists call it elegance, a single
small equation that constitutes a theory of everything.
But those hopes may well be dashed by a highly complex and even chaotic reality.
The universe does not have to reduce itself down to a simple answer.
And it doesn’t just stop with the universe.
There has always been the question of what lies outside the universe, or what existed
before it.
The answer given typically has been that the question is meaningless.
The universe is, was, and will be everything and there is nothing else.
That was until the idea of the multiverse came into play, that this may be just one
universe among many like bubbles in a bathtub.
The problem is, it’s very likely that we can’t ever measure that.
It’s been suggested that cold spots in the cosmic microwave background radiation might
represent dents of sorts where other universes bumped into this one.
But that’s never been proven.
Otherwise there simply isn’t any known way to detect another universe because any information
on it simply is not available inside our universe.
It is all we can ever know, and anything outside it or before it may forever be an open question.
That’s assuming however that the universe is not cyclic.
In cyclic conformal cosmology, Roger Penrose has suggested that if that model is correct,
this is just one iteration of the universe that repeats over and over.
It’s possible then that remnants of black holes from the previous universe to this one
might also be spotted in the cosmic microwave background.
So far, nothing definitive has been seen.
But there are other issues with interpreting the universe that we may actually never get
past.
First is that we have all too human brains using all too human logic, which we use the
imprecise tool of language to try to get across.
That’s layers of imprecision.
An illustration of this is attributed to another Greek philosopher, Eubulides of Miletus.
It goes like this, if you have a heap of sand with a million grains, if you remove one grain,
it’s still a heap.
Then you remove a hundred thousand more, and it’s still a heap.
But If you get down to a single grain, is it still a heap?
A sort of silly paradox that sits on the shoulders of language imprecision, but it raises a point.
How precise is language in describing the universe?
Not great, mathematics is much better but less understandable to most humans.
But is mathematics truly reliable?
Well, we think so, but it’s still resting on a base of axioms.
Assumptions based on observation.
You have to assume certain things are true to even start.
So how do you explain all of this to an alien or an artificial sapient intelligence?
You may not be able to.
They may have some higher order of logic and truth and try to respond to you with something
that may not make sense to a human brain.
So does our very origin as human minds limit us in understanding the universe?
Well, we can’t tell.
Take cosmology, we have some theories that work, quantum mechanics and relativity, but
they don’t fit together.
We assume that our physics is merely incomplete, and there is a missing link, but it’s also
valid to suggest that our physical reality is not fully understandable to a human brain
in the same way an octopus, as smart as they are, can figure out how to safely drive a
Chevy Malibu from Los Angeles to Chicago.
In short, we may be the octopus and we’re not the smartest kids on the block.
While unsettling, think for a moment about the idea that, as humans, we run the gamut
of intelligence.
We have smart people, and not so smart people.
We also have specialized people that might be able to do mathematics in their head that
most of us can’t do, but at the same time can barely function socially.
Some can be highly talented and skilled in one sector, and have no abilities in another.
In light of that, we might be able to reasonably ask that since we produce Einsteins, but most
of us aren’t Einsteins, and tend to be specialized in our skills and pursuits … is it possible
that there can be something, not homo sapiens, that could be automatically good at everything
that takes intelligence to a level we as a species has never seen before?
Could figuring out a complete picture of the universe require a skill that homo sapiens
does not inherently possess?
Or, even more poignantly, are we really the highest expression of intelligence this planet
will ever see?
We might like that idea, but the answer is bery likely no.
This question is often framed in terms of superintelligence either through augmentation
to make the human brain smarter, or artificial intelligence where we create a machine smarter
than we are.
But it may not be that complicated, it may simply be that we are another stepping stone
to something evolving that is smarter than we are.
This was the case for all of humanity’s hominid precursors, they generally became
increasingly intelligent as each successive species evolved before promptly going extinct.
Homo erectus might have thought it the most intelligent species on earth, if it could
conceive that, but wouldn’t have realized in the future far more intelligent homo sapiens
would arise.
Maybe we’re in that boat.
And the reason we don’t understand the universe fully is because we don’t have the brain
power for it.
But our evolutionary successors, should hominids continue to evolve, may be far better at understanding
the universe than we are.
That’s actually a variation on a solution to the Fermi Paradox, all civilizations go
extinct after a very short time.
That might make sense, if you are a precursor species to something capable of founding a
galaxy spanning Kardashev type III supercivilizations, and you cause your own extinction before you
get there, then no type II or III ever results.
There is only a brief period of half-superintelligence that always leads to extinction and in the
grand scheme of things, civilizations just blink in and out and never exist in enough
numbers to detect each other.
And lastly is the great unknown of infinity, which by definition means we can’t ever
know everything.
Infinity is weird, because there are basically two types according to the math.
You can count from 1, to 2, then 3 and upward to infinity.
But you can also count another way.. 1.1 to 1.2 to 1.3 all the way to infinity.
That sounds suspiciously like a semantic language problem, but infinities show up all over cosmology
whether it’s big bangs, the size of the universe or black holes.
Maybe they don’t really exist and are an artifact of mathematics and our attempts to
describe the universe.
Perhaps there’s a point where the math no longer holds true.
To know for sure, we’d very likely have to ask someone else.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently eyeing the universe
suspiciously.
I admit it, we don’t fully understand it.
But what happens if it doesn’t fully understand us?
That’s about the worst misunderstanding possible, not good, or maybe it is and be
sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channels
for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of
this amazing universe in which we live.