Galaxyrise

One of my friends once said 'The more you know, the more you don't', and at the time I thought it was a very pessimistic outlook on life. The more I think about it though, the more I appreciate what it means. I feel like every day I'm learning all sorts of neat and exciting new things. And every time I learn something new, it opens up new doors with new questions I can ask, now that I'm equipped with more knowledge. It's not a bad feeling to know that you don't know everything (that sentence was a bit redundant...). Gaining knowledge gives you the tools to learn more and more and more!

Yesterday, we watched Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' (go ahead and laugh, we all know it's the cheesiest thing since Swiss). While I was watching Carl talk about if he could go anywhere backwards in time, he would go the library of Alexandria, I started thinking what would happen if I went back in time. I was suddenly struck with a terrible thought that if I was the sole representative of some civilization, I could never communicate all the knowledge we've accumulated. I was thinking I would tell the Greeks or whoever how their astronomy was so terrible and such, and I kind of had a pseudo-conversation in my head where I tried to tell them how they could measure quantities of stars and I couldn't even remember how to find the mass of a star... I think I learned this (and it was drilled into my head...) less then 6 months ago, but I can't for the life of me remember.

Wow, that entire paragraph was the most pointless anecdote I've come up with yet. But after I thought of that, I tried to think how I would tell them how to make electricity and build machines, but I don't know how to do either of those, really!!! That was when I decided that if the human race ever sent anyone back in time, or to another planet, they should never, never, ever pick me to represent our collective knowledge.

This has been a semi-intellectual post... I'm quite proud of myself! I think I shall now frolic and learn about quantum mechanics, thank you very much!