The more you know

It's amazing how much we think we know.

I was just thinking about the Malaysian Airline Plane that went missing some months ago now. It is such a strange idea to us that we can't find a crashed plane that CNN actually had people come in explaining the plausibility of Extraterrestrials and spontaneous black holes.

Seriously people? We couldn't even predict the winner of our own election. Many well educated people still don't believe we're primates, or that climate change exists, and I'm guessing over half the world thinks the planet is flat. This isn't to shame anyone or claim any superiority for knowing or not knowing something, it's just so say that everyone, myself obviously included, has huge knowledge gaps that will never be filled while we walk this planet.

The Malaysian Airlines story reminds me of Life of Pi. The verifiable facts of the story are that a ship went down and a teenage boy washed up on the coast of mexico around a year later. The ship had meerkat bones in it as well.

Pi also explained how every year zoo animals are lost and never found again. All this goes to show that there are so many things we will never learn even if we look, and far more that we will never think to look for, be they tigers smart enough to not want to be recaptured from a north-american wood or planes wrecked and sunk too quickly for radar to locate.

The sad part is we will never know how arrogant we sound talking about we think we know or what we ought to know until we actually know it, but until then, the least we can do is attribute the disappearance of a small airliner in the middle of the ocean to something other than a cosmic anomaly that in most circumstances would collapse the whole solar system along with the airplane.

We are beings that can't function well without some degree of certainty, but that doesn't mean our senses or our brains have earned that certainty. It's healthy to have some deep doubts about your world driven into your brain, whether you get those doubts there by re watching the Matrix, looking at an optical illusion, or taking a Quantum Mechanics class.

In the meantime may your brain keep seeing as pleasant a world as it can manage to see.