The Knowledge We Don’t Yet Have

We have gained so much powerful knowledge in the past few hundred years. But there’s still so much that we don’t know.

There are limits to our current knowledge of the universe. In astronomy, we have recently discovered that 95% of the matter and energy contents of the universe, dubbed dark matter and dark energy, are of a form completely unknown to modern science. That means that everything we have ever studied and learned in our exploration of atoms, chemicals, and forces, every star we see in the night sky and every galaxy we observe in the distant cosmos, makes up less than 5% of the entire universe.

We have pushed our understanding of the history of the universe into the earliest moments of the big bang, with a firm grasp of the physics underlaying the first few minutes of the existence of the cosmos. But beyond that is murky haze, a tangled mess of unsolved mathematics and over-complicated physics. We do not understand the origins of our universe, or even if that question makes sense – if our knowledge of time and space even apply at such extreme scales.

Related to the questions of the beginning of the cosmos are the mysteries that abound in high-energy physics. We do not know how to merge our knowledge of gravity, as expressed through general relativity, with our understanding of quantum physics, which governs the other forces of nature. We do not know how gravity operates at extremely small scales, preventing us from understanding the big bang itself and the true nature of black holes.

Despite cracking the code of DNA and the role that genetics plays in the evolutionary process, we do not understand how life first arose on the Earth, and whether we are truly alone in the cosmos. We do not know how sexual reproduction arose, or where viruses originated from, or the full extent of life on Earth. We do not understand the full variety of molecular interactions that power our own biochemistry, or how the components of our cells came to find themselves working together.

We do not know if superconductors, which allow for the transmission of electricity with no resistance, is possible at room temperature. We do not know the full tectonic history of the Earth, or even if duplicates of the Earth’s climate system exist on other worlds orbiting alien stars.

We do not even understand the origins – or even nature – of our own conscious thoughts, the source of our thirst for knowledge and our capacity to access it.

We do not even know how we are able to ask these questions.

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