We've only just begun
It has been three hundred thousand years
that humans have been on the earth. And still
we’ve only just begun to understand
some basic features of our universe.
In fairness to our ancestors, they were
mostly concerned with finding food and warmth.
Our learning has accelerated since
the scientific revolution when
some men with means and curiosity
developed the techniques to grow our knowledge
which drove explosive growth in industry
and knowledge over the past two centuries.
But still there is so much for us to know.
We use the words “dark energy, dark
matter” to refer to ninety-five
percent of all mass in the universe.
This is code for “we don’t really know
what a majority of existence is made of.”
One of the biggest fundamental questions
that many of us ponder looking up
at night is “are there others out there like us?”
There is not a soul on earth who knows.
Even basic questions I want answered,
like “Did Tyrannosaurus Rex have feathers?”
or “Is it true that dolphins were the vectors
who brought tuberculosis to Native
Americans centuries before Columbus?”
cannot be answered yet.
Three hundred thousand years lived in the dark.
Four hundred years of scientific method.
We’ve only just begun to venture out
into the light.
I agree that we now know a lot more than our ancestors did about a lot of things. We also will know a lot more in the future about some things, dark energy/matter are indications of that. We also know for sure that there are some things we will never know. And some of the things we think we know now we are wrong about. Also there will be a day when the task of science is complete, there might even be a day when the task of engineering (which is the field of applying science in useful ways) is complete, yet even then we won’t know lots of really important things. Good candidates include how the universe began, how does consciousness arise from physical matter, what is right/wrong, questions about the past where archeological evidence has been destroyed, etc.