this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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this is definitely a vibe. no more cooky dale gribble types anymore, only weird race supremacist and shit nowadays.
but i will say that this,
is patently untrue. if you’re the kind of person to say there’s no more mystery to the world it’s more likely than not that you would’ve said the same thing hundreds of years ago too.
modern people get very preoccupied with the idea of the sum of all human knowledge. the reality is a lot more patchwork than it seems.
for example, most people would fail a basic physics exam. yet this knowledge is fundamental to the vast majority of discoveries made over the past centuries.
not even to mention how we overestimate the knowledge infrastructure we have in the modern period. information is not nearly as free or accessible as most would like to believe, but this is a separate can of worms.
just because “we” know something doesn’t mean we know something. there is still an absolute abundance of mystery in this world; it is a narrative lie fed to you that “everything has basically already been discovered.”
even in contexts that it seems obvious that the topic has been so well trodden as to be “solved”, like global exploration; it’s a myth “there’s nothing left to discover,” in any context. we haven’t even begun to map the vast majority of this planet. what’s under the seas, under the crust? we don’t know for sure.
exploration, math, physics, engineering, computation, the humanities, etc. don’t let anyone convince you that you were “born too late” to do these things. you live in the most golden age to learn, in fact. it isn’t a tragedy, common knowledge, it’s the most beautiful success of the human race. never before has the average person been so well-endowed to explore and discover.
all it takes is having an engineer’s mindset, to be curious. unfortunately being curious is a lot like being a good person. it sounds great and most people claim it as a personal trait, but the reality is that being curious or being a good person are skills that take actual work and effort to hone. just claiming to be curious or a good person doesn’t cut it, reality demands her actors be method.
I wasn't being literal about there being nothing left unknown in the whole universe. Just that we've (at least in the west) culturally outgrown stuff like ghost stories and other supernatural folklore, and that the X-Files type of conspiracy theory entertainment took its place, and it's hard to enjoy now because that space has been taken over by a bunch of paranoid lunatics.
My initial reaction was what the other person said, but as I was reading theirs I kinda shifted view.
Taking the mystery out of the world doesn't mean we've answered all the questions, it just means our expectation has shifted and we assume that all the dark corners have been explored.
Villages in the most remote parts of the world have Disney T-shirts.
There's no troll under the bridge.
Our stories of the unknown increasingly feature people as the monster.
It's not bad, and there's still wonder in learning about the world around us, it's just a different perspective where the default is a lot more skeptical and assumes there's an answer, even if it's not currently known.
Even conspiracy theories have shifted tone to being more disbelief in rational things than belief in irrational things.