“The Earth was once the center of the universe.
It was flat.
Then it was round.
And it circled the Sun.
It was no longer the center of the universe.
It was a tiny part of the Milky Way.
The Milky Way was the only galaxy.
Except it wasn’t.
It was only one of billions …
Every single time we think we’ve got it all figured out
we realize we’ve merely found another piece of the picture.”*
There is nothing special about our current guesses about the size, origin, and composition of this universe.
Dark matter and neutron stars, pulsars and quasars–it all sounds very scientific, rational, and true.
It’s not True.
It sounds like, and might be, a tiny bit more true than the earth resting on the back of a turtle held up by elephants, or a guy called The God whipping it all up in seven days, or whatever, but essentially …
We know nothing, seriously, nothing at all.
***
I was reminded of this known fact recently. I was poking around with the origins of written language again. It still seems to begin in Sumeria first, five thousand years ago, if you like that theory.
Speaking of liked theories, one of my own pet ones is that settling down into ‘civilization’ was a big mistake that will eventually doom the human experiment. To marinate in that one, you have to go back about twice as far as you do for the birth of the literary:
The Birth of Civilisation – The First Farmers (20000 BC to 8800 BC)
But for now that’s something of a digression.
Until quite recently, there were only a handful of people in the world who could grasp Sumerian, much less translate it.
One guy named Zecharia Sitchin, taught himself the dead language and had some very creative interpretations of what the early Sumerians were saying in their genesis myths and proto-novels. I used to listen to him on the Art Bell show in the middle of the night, but back then I didn’t really twig to the Sumerian connection. That much changed yesterday.
Sumerians Tell a Very Different Version than the Historians – Their Words are Inexplicable
The Sumerian Epic (Part 3) ~ The Case for Nibiru
I’m pretty dubious about whether Sitchin’s ideas got us any closer to Truth, or even whether his translations were even valid, but he does weave a good yarn.
Better yet, through the Epic video linked above, I was also made aware of a tighter, more lucid theory of cosmology that has a bunch of smart uber-scientific academic types behind it, and still flies in the face of the more conventional Neil Degrasse Tyson kind of science that the average person thinks of as the apotheosis of glorious human knowing.
It’s called The Electric Universe, or sometimes Plasma Cosmology, and like with Sitchin, and the Bible version, and the stack of turtles, the mainstream (including Wikipedia) rushes to start hand-waving it away anytime it comes up.
Nevertheless, unlike those earlier postulations, I think it’s worth an hour of your time to check out what its proponents have to say, if only because it will remind you in a very credible way that …
You don’t know anything. I don’t know anything. They don’t know anything.
The mythological side of the Electric Universe house, as embodied by one David Talbott, says that early myths are incomprehensible partly because they’re describing a different sky than the one we’re seeing today.
The science side of the house (Wallace Thornhill and others) maintains that some universally found symbols from back in the day
… represent plasma discharges taking place in the night sky.
I should say here that I only have the dimmest notion of what plasma even is, beyond the fact that it’s neither animal, mineral, nor vegetable; not solid or liquid or gas. Just a fourth state of matter that there’s usually no need to think about, even when we want to flip a switch at dusk for electric light. But the guy who discovered it named it after blood plasma, due to its lifelike properties, and I find that poetically intriguing.
The filmmakers strongly imply that black holes are a mythical construct that only exist in the sense that they paper over black holes in modern cosmology conveniently.
There’s a lot more available on the Electric Universe theory, and to my eye some of it shades off into territory that is, let’s say, even more creative. But let me give you one more dose of cosmology to ponder on.
Way, way out beyond the orbit of Pluto (still a planet to me and always will be), in the direction of Mr. O’brien and his belt, real astronomers are postulating the existence of another very large planet, an ice giant called for now Planet 9.
What difference would that make?
Probably none. But even acknowledging that, and that we know nothing, I still want to hear more.