Two of the things that make me despair about our world are politics and religion. You watch the news and see stories of people killing each other over both these things. You see people being irate about some imaginary line that was randomly thought up by a small group of privileged people hundreds of years ago. Indoctrination makes people believe staunchly that this matters but when you actually stop and think about it – critically – does it really matter? So someone travelled from one “country” to another or as I see it, one piece of space to another, so what? Who cares?

OK in order to prevent anarchy, governments have been created and laws made in order to have some sort of organised structure and a society and rule of law etc, I get all that. In order to progress as a human race people innovate and develop products because they’ve seen a need and a gap in the market, hence creating jobs and making money and generally improving society, which I’m all for. But is it not possible to achieve all this without the negative side of politics and religion? The “other” factor. Them and us.

You see people being shot or beheaded all because of indoctrination. You see people being tribal and disliking others, not because of anything they did to them personally but just because they have been taught to hate them from a very young age. I kind of understand the concept, being an Arsenal fan who hates Tottenham fans for no explicable reason other than that is just what we’ve been taught to do. I mean I’m sure some Tottenham fans are nice people, I even know one. Our prejudices are mainly learned and if we all just stopped to think for ourselves and get some perspective, and perspective here is the key, we will see that we are attaching a great deal of importance to very irrelevant things. Maybe it’s just human nature to identify with people similar to us but I find that a rather primitive behaviour and we should be evolving to the next level where we are not afraid of the “other”.

There was a particular video on YouTube that really gave me perspective on the world and what should be relevant and not so relevant in life. I have included the link below, but basically it shows the earth and then zooms out to our solar system and then our galaxy and then to all the other billions of solar systems and galaxies of the universe that have been mapped out so far. Then it zooms back in to earth again. Watching that video makes me ask the question, what are we all fighting for again? It’s actually absolutely ridiculous when you think about it.

In the scheme of things we are so insignificant it beggars belief! And it simply underscores our deep lack in knowledge and general life philosophy at this point in time. I’m deliberately being broad when I say lack of knowledge because all the knowledge we have at the moment is 99.99% about our world, from the oceans to the land and frondescence and willowacks and mountains, not to mention the animal and human life, and we are still discovering more about our earth every day. But we haven’t even scratched the surface when it comes to the rest of the universe.

The attainment of knowledge to me should be the ultimate goal of every human being and I’m talking about empirically tested knowledge here, not emotional understandings. The more facts everyone knows, the faster the progression of the human race will be. Sometimes I feel cheated because I think about what people in 400 years will know and I feel quite envious of them. I wish I could be around to get all that knowledge also. I know history repeats itself but I’m confident that our primitive behaviours will diminish further over time and more perspective will be given to the relevance of a lot of the things we currently take too seriously. There’s an excellent book called The Better Nature of Our Angles: A History of Violence and Humanity by Steven Pinker that does a fantastic job of tracking the trend of humans getting more civil over the centuries, so this gives me hope that humanity will only get better.

But back to the universe. If I was in charge, which may not be such a bad thing I assure you, I would see that all our resources are directed towards space exploration. Ok I’ll put some aside for food and other essentials, but I believe we are wasting so much resource on irrelevant things like nuclear weapons for example. Imagine if all the countries spent all those trillions of dollars on space exploration instead? Our knowledge would increase exponentially!

Thankfully the internet and cheap flights have accelerated human interaction and a few generations down I sincerely hope that there will be far more respect among nations than there is now. Once there is more cooperation among the people of earth, imagine the kind of progress that can be made in space exploration. The periodic table will be like volume 1 of an Encyclopaedia Britannica, with the thousands of new elements I believe are out there. Imagine the kind of advances in medicine that could be achieved when we discover new chemical properties and organisms. And ultimately, what we could learn regarding the origins of the universe and life as a whole.

I envy the ones not yet born who will benefit from all these things. I envy their enlightenment, I envy their friendships and collaborations, I envy the good health and long life they will enjoy and I envy the peace I’m so confident they will enjoy. The least we can do is to build the foundations of this future and try to tap into that future as much as we can and hope that we have done our little part in making the human race better.

I hope the link below gives you some perspective on where we are in the universe and the absurdity of the imaginary lines we currently use to oppress ourselves and keep our human race down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U