“I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.” — Harry Emerson Fosdick.
I am starting to believe that civilizations stagnate and die because they lose the desire to explore. This, in my opinion, is why space exploration, expansion and exploitation is crucial to the future of humans. Now, a darkly amusing thought, will spacers return in the distant future to help the ‘developing’ economies of these ‘earthers’? A question continues to ‘bug’ me. For thousands of years civilizations came and went all over the globe. A few hundred years ago something happened in Europe to place humanity on a completely different trajectory that has put us in this amazing technological civilization; what happened? Has it happened before? Was this really where it started? Has this civilization reached stagnation?
I am starting to believe that civilizations stagnate and die because we lose the desire to explore. Education is no longer an institution to explore one’s curiosities, it is a job training ground to further entrench our view of the current civilization. This is, of course, an opinion based on anecdotal evidence observed through the lens of one individual. An individual who has built a world view over a a 70 year span; a view that looks rather believable. A world view built on observations of a very narrow slice of time, space, and wavelength spectrum; and, perhaps, dimensions of which we are unaware.
“It’s a magical world, Hobbes. Old buddy … Let’s go exploring.”