I was looking at a plastic bottle sitting on my desk. I thought there must be some bacteria floating around in the area or living inside the tiny water droplets stuck to the sides of the plastic. hat would they think of their environment? Some strange border that allows them to see something outside of their container. The most powerful telescopes they could develop would only see through the clear plastic and view the walls of the room the bottle is in.
If they tried to answer the fundamental questions about where the universe came from, it seems unlikely they would ever be able to determine the bottle was purchased at a Whole Foods about a mile outside of what they would consider the edge of the universe. How could they determine where the bottle was made? In a factory somewhere, perhaps China, thousands and thousands of miles outside of the edge of everything it's possible for them to perceive.
Who founded the company that makes the bottles, the creator of their universe. One of millions of other bottles sent all around the world. Who invented the plastic water bottle? Who invented plastic? Who mined the oil it was created from? Where did the oil come from? Organic matter millions of years old, much older than the weeks old age of their universe.
How would they determine the organic matter that created the oil, may have come from some random initial spark of life that set off a billions year long chain of events that ended in their bottle being created?
This text contains a lot of question marks.
How could they discover that the Earth was formed from dust, the result of a supernova that exploded billions of years ago, forming the sun and the planets. hat the original star was formed after small variations in the distribution of atoms throughout the cosmos collapses because of gravity, that the atoms in that star formed when the cosmos cooled enough for quarks to create bonds into protons and neutrons?
They could never figure out the true nature of their universe, and at this point we've come to the limits of our knowledge of our universe. cientists are looking for a grand unified theory that will explain everything about the universe. omething so perfect and elegant that all the laws of nature stem from one basic function. hat if we are as far away from the true origin of the universe as the bacteria are? What if the big bang is just the 50th part of a long process that started far outside of our conception of space and time?
It's possible that even with all the intellect that could be used, the questions "What is this? may be impossible to answer.