Yeah, I reckon that as you age, you start to appreciate much more how incredibly close in time humanity still is to the revolutions in scientific understanding that kicked in from the mid 19th century. I mean, as a kid, something that happened 50 years before you were born feels like ancient history. Once you are 60, what happened 50 years ago feels not so long ago at all.
We are barely 160 years past Darwin and evolution; about 115 years beyond Einstein's revolution; 100 years past the recognition that those fuzzy blobs on telescope plates are actually distant galaxies like ours, and 93 years past the realisation the universe is expanding. I was a child when plate tectonics was finally fully accepted.
So yeah, so much that was truly revolutionary in how to understand the universe and our place in it is only just now slipping beyond the age of the oldest humans still on the planet. From that perspective, I reckon that it should be no surprise the the social and philosophical implications of it all still haven't fully worked themselves out - such as the current pushback from fundamentalist religion in the US against a culture war that I reckon they can sense they have lost.
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First post here for a long time!
Yeah, I reckon that as you age, you start to appreciate much more how incredibly close in time humanity still is to the revolutions in scientific understanding that kicked in from the mid 19th century. I mean, as a kid, something that happened 50 years before you were born feels like ancient history. Once you are 60, what happened 50 years ago feels not so long ago at all.
We are barely 160 years past Darwin and evolution; about 115 years beyond Einstein's revolution; 100 years past the recognition that those fuzzy blobs on telescope plates are actually distant galaxies like ours, and 93 years past the realisation the universe is expanding. I was a child when plate tectonics was finally fully accepted.
So yeah, so much that was truly revolutionary in how to understand the universe and our place in it is only just now slipping beyond the age of the oldest humans still on the planet. From that perspective, I reckon that it should be no surprise the the social and philosophical implications of it all still haven't fully worked themselves out - such as the current pushback from fundamentalist religion in the US against a culture war that I reckon they can sense they have lost.
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