do over

Yesterday I found myself watching an old video by Carl Sagan and while I had seen it before this time around something caught my mind that I hadn't given much thought before. He was talking about how random patterns emerge from the chaos and how one is often tempted to assume that there was some higher-order to things just from observing the "patterns".

This illusion, in his view, has us formulating theories to explain the phantom patterns. Religion and the history of all the explanations of creation, he explains, are actually us trying to make sense of the phantom patterns.

The part that stuck with me was that he said,  a full reset on the system would lead to a different result.

If we went back and replayed the sequence again, the sheer number of variables would result in a very different result.

At every step, there were billions of random departures that resulted in where we are now, and if every one of those dice were to rolled again there was almost no chance that it would play out the same way.

I have great difficulty grasping the scale of time and the number of choices that brought us where we are. The fact that nature itterrated through uncountable pathways to lead us here seems implausible when one is unable to grasp the scale of time over the millennia.

Sagan has always done a great job of making us appear small and pointless.

So why then are our triumphs and failures so important to us.

M Parak

Nov 2019