Catch 42

Curiosity is a wonderful thing. It is what that makes us get over our fear of the unknown and explore new horizons. But clearly, it is not a good evolutionary trait to possess. A curious organism is a dead organism. But with it, we've erased Terra Incognita from our maps, we've conquered the planet. Now we're consumed by an obsession. An obsession to know the nature of this universe. In the process, we have clinically alienated ourselves from the universe, which is good scientific progress, as no physicist should be a part of the experiment he's conducting, or a part of the system she studies. But what we've failed to note is that, we're inextricably woven into this universe; chances are, it wouldn't exist without us, one of the principal prongs of the Anthropic principle. An observer is as important as the system itself and detaching oneself can never be the answer. But the universe cannot be studied if we consider ourself a part of it. We must be the dispensable onlooker on the grand scheme of things, if there is any, in order to comprehend its complexities and intricacies. Would we modify our universe by understanding it? Is our universe getting progressively more complicated the more we understand it? This leaves us between a rock and a hard place. We've never dwelt upon the idea that the universe can never be comprehended, we have always assumed, at times in an insufferably cavalier fashion, that our intellect and faculties allow such a comprehension. It could be our arrogance and vanity, the answer to other equally deep questions that we just trudge along with particle accelerators, each bigger than the last, in the hope of seeing a miniature big bang, assuming it was a significant event in the first place. But the question remains, that if the universe can be understood, can one be a part of it and still hope to do so? If not, who can understand the universe, or how can we do so bypassing this stumbling block of being confined to the universe? There is no way we can study the dynamics of a system if we are bound by it. Therefore, there is no way we can fully understand how and why our universe works, unless we know what lies beyond its ends. Suppose we were to assume that we cannot comprehend our world, it doesn't seem implausible at all; after all, there are many millions of other organisms that cannot, it would be vain of us to assume we alone can. But if we alone could, we as a species would be an evolutionary singularity, an exception. As all exceptions go, we would have been eliminated by the force of natural selection. It would seem that we are well on our way into doing so. Our intellect has grown at the cost of other more 'important' abilities, and any predator would have had a field day on early human herds. Moreover, our brain is the biggest guzzler of energy in our body. It uses up nearly half of what we consume, and while such an arrangement has been declared wholly wasteful by other animals, humans have somehow, dispensed with other abilities like night vision, smell, claws and teeth to pursue a line of adaptation as improbable as remarkable. Stripped of our brain, we're a pink blob of food as ready to eat as apples and would put up as much of a fight. An organism that requires tremendous amounts of energy everyday to tend to a body that in its prime is still as helpless as the day it was born cannot be said to be the fittest. How we were not killed then, is an oddity. But, as evidence suggests, we have survived, and are one of the most dominant species on earth, a force of nature to reckon with. But it can also be, that our intellect is in itself our own undoing. We have existed on this planet for around a hundred thousand years, hardly any appreciable time interval to judge the success of a species which usually stay on the planet for millions of years before nature writes them off as a bad job. Therefore, the answer for the question of whether humans are here to stay can be answered probably after nine hundred thousand years, which seems improbable because we are already on our way to killing ourselves. The chances are, the next mass extinction will be caused by us which is happening as we speak by the way, and we shall go with it. The reason one ponders of humans as a species is because one needs to understand the nature of the observer before any experiment can be conducted. If the observer is limited by the system, it is not a very good observer as our definition of reason goes. If we are not a good observer, it is highly possible that we cannot understand the universe, or if we could, the universe is out to kill us before we do. Both ways, it's not a cheerful thought. The man who said curiosity kills the cat is a wise man indeed.