Fermi paradox
October 11th, 2020 14:10![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mc776So this thread got me thinking...
An old sci-fi/space-opera trope is to have some pre-Ascended people looking up at the night sky and wondering about who might be out there among the stars. The implication, of course, being that this is the natural and default thing to think when you stare in wonder at that vast cloud of little points of light.
It just occurred to me how implausible this line of thought is, if you don't start out with the tacit assumption that each tiny point of light is actually a faraway undiscovered country.
Should it be no less profound to watch a turtle in a pond, and wonder at all the many worlds and people that might be hidden within the firmament of its shell-scales, imperceptibly small, contained in a time and space all on their own, each place itself filled with its own people and lands and worlds and stars and ponds and turtles, each of those turtles themselves containing multitudes an infinite way down, while we ourselves are contained within the scales of an even greater turtle living in its own pond, in turn going infinitely up?
And to consider what unknown sorcery might be discovered in the distant past or future that could let us travel from one to another?
An old sci-fi/space-opera trope is to have some pre-Ascended people looking up at the night sky and wondering about who might be out there among the stars. The implication, of course, being that this is the natural and default thing to think when you stare in wonder at that vast cloud of little points of light.
It just occurred to me how implausible this line of thought is, if you don't start out with the tacit assumption that each tiny point of light is actually a faraway undiscovered country.
Should it be no less profound to watch a turtle in a pond, and wonder at all the many worlds and people that might be hidden within the firmament of its shell-scales, imperceptibly small, contained in a time and space all on their own, each place itself filled with its own people and lands and worlds and stars and ponds and turtles, each of those turtles themselves containing multitudes an infinite way down, while we ourselves are contained within the scales of an even greater turtle living in its own pond, in turn going infinitely up?
And to consider what unknown sorcery might be discovered in the distant past or future that could let us travel from one to another?
(no subject)
Date: October 14th, 2020 20:16 (UTC)But actually imagining life can exist on size scales much different than ours doesn't seem too common either - as say the resistance to microbial theory suggests. I wonder what Democritus for example was theorizing *against*.
Then again I vaguely remember something in Zhuangzi that could apply...
(no subject)
Date: October 14th, 2020 21:15 (UTC)But yes, point taken re: presupposing that spacetime warping would have been normal to the ancients