On Curiosity

I remember being an eight year old kid marveling at the world around me. Heck, some part of me still is that kid. That's why I want to be an astrophysicist.

But something happened down the road. I met a bunch of people who put down my questions; dismissed them as being not important. Because apparently one can't see an umbra and a penumbra in one's own shadow at a restaurant, and one sure as heck can't ask about it in class.

Yeah, I hold a grudge from eight years ago, but for good reason.

If it weren't for that experience, I wouldn't hesitate today to ask questions in class. There was a time this hesitation would have crippled me academically. And I'm only just starting to recover what has been lost.

But it makes me wonder - what is going on? How many curiosities are killed this way? Will those even be recoverable?

Losing one's curiosity is an incredibly dangerous thing. The reason is simple and elegant, like a lot of equations in physics today. So let me do this mathematically.

We are given that humans are very clever - they have built empires, cities, and are leaving a mark of their own. Why? It is that one game changer, Curiosity.

So, we have
Humans + Curiosity = Desire to do things better. ...... - (1)
Subtracting "Curiosity" from both sides,
(Humans + Curiosity) - Curiosity = (Desire to do things better) - Curiosity
Humans = Desire to do things better - Curiosity
Now, "Desire to do things better" is made up of two interlinked ideas - Curiosity and Innovation. And one cannot exist without the other. Remove Curiosity, and Innovation crumbles. And without either of them, you have a paradox.
Humans = No desire to make things better...? Have you ever heard of such a thing?

As said in an earlier post, curiosity is our defining characteristic. One does not simply take it away. And children are naturally curious. Killing that desire to explore...in my opinion, that is a huge evil.

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." - Albert Einstein.

Kardashev Scale and Our Imminent Doom II

Aliens are already on a course to visiting humanity. What, in all likelihood, are they going to discover? Will it really be humanity in all its senses? Or will it be a specie so much dependent on science, still so much in-cognizant of it? Won't they laugh on a specie so advanced to have got to those Mass-Energy equations, yet so asleep to have nuclear weapons aimed at themselves!

Our very civilization is going through a very mordacious, or let us say, chancy transition. We're making and alteration from a level-0 to level-1 civilization. We've already come through this scaling in a recent post. It is often conceived as a stage where most of civilizations destroy themselves through nuclear war. Perhaps, this might be the reason why we're still out of glimpses of aliens. Our civilization is like a child in its primary years of maturity. Nuclear weapons are like toys in her hands only way too dangerous. Yet all nations are in a race of increasing their stock of nuclear armory! Any world war can subvert us back at the start of civilization.

However sooner or later, there is yet another problem our civilization is going to face. It is that of increasing population. The human population is increasing at an ever faster rate. A rate high enough for the resources to contend with. In fact, there might soon come a time when when the exhausting resources will collide with the flourishing human population. At this point of time we'll have to realize the importance of interstellar travel. The Earth is off course our home, it is the cradle for humanity, however we're not supposed to stay in the cradle forever. As said "We're pioneers not caretakers". We'll be doomed by a world wide catastrophe, when the rising demands will crush everything. We have to be prepared before this event even occurs. And the only way we can substantiate our situation is through interstellar travel. We have to explore potentially habitable worlds to save humanity from the collapse. We must leave our planet as explorers and not in fragments as mere survivors of a likely catastrophe.