(This was supposed to go up yesterday, but I accidentally hit "save" instead of "publish" :p )
So, I was thinking about the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars recently. I guess what really started the thought process was just reflecting on the video I watched about it. The rover took all these photos during it's descent. and so a video was assembled that gives a sort of "rover's-eye-view" of the whole thing. It really was cool.
And you know, that's what gets me about it. Here I am, sitting in my living room, drinking Coca-Cola and watching a multi-billion dollar exploration rover drop onto a planet over 50 million kilometers away (on a good day). And I'm watching it in 1080p. How crazy is that? The wealth of information available to the common (well, at least in 1st-world countries) people is staggering. With a few strokes of a keyboard or clicks of a mouse, we can access more information than entire libraries used to have available.
But are we any smarter? Honestly, I think not. Like, we have more knowledge, but are not smarter. I know, it sounds like an oxymoron, but I really think it's true. Perhaps it's an overused example, but just look at the pyramids in Egypt. I mean, those people had an abacus, and slave labor. And that was it. To this day there are vast arguments about how it was done. So for all our fancy computers, and internet, and wikipedia, we are still confounded by people who did math with beads on sticks.
Kinda ridiculous. But back to Curiosity. It has surprised me how little talk there's been about it, honestly. And even more so, how negative a lot it's been. People have no grasp or concept anymore about what discovery is. We are content on our "little blue pearl". Why do we need to go look at other planets? Compare that to the veritable planet-wide freakout of the moon-landing (which wasn't filmed in NEARLY 1080p). The whole planet was moved to exuberance because we had gone to the moon. We had reached a hand into the heavens and pulled ourselves into it. Now all people can do is gripe about how pointless it is to send something like the Curiosity rover to Mars. Neil deGrasse Tyson said in an interview that we, as a people, have stopped dreaming, and I think that's what it is. We no longer have any drive to reach into the stars, or really anywhere else, honestly. We're content to run the rat-race by day, and sleep away the night.
Kinda sad, don't you think?
Do not confuse access to information with knowledge. The more access to information we have, the more mind-boggling it must be just to catch, much less hold our our attention for more than a moment. Remember, wisdom is the principal thing... and it is neither simply information nor human knowledge. It comes from God.
ReplyDeleteI didn't mean to imply that. I more meant that, as a whole, for the amount of information we have available, we do very little with it, or rather, there are few of us who do anything with it. A good example of this is the current obsession with social media. We know so much about each other, yet it doesn't make for deeper friendships, or even ones that last longer. All it seems to have done is given us more to be angry at each other about. And I guess those are two different kinds of 'information'. IT just seems like we are so much more... dispassionate about pursuing knowledge and wisdom. Like, we are so OVER-saturated by it that it no longer is appealing.
ReplyDeleteI was not disagreeing with your premise. Just providing some amplifying ruminations.
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