Keeping Things in Perspective

Keeping Things in Perspective

Humanity would do well to keep things in perspective. Human beings are only one species among millions on a single planet circling one star in a very large universe. According to the latest scientific estimates, the universe is between 13.60 and 13.84 billion years old.[2] Anatomically modern humans first appear in the fossil record in Africa about 130,000 years ago, although studies of molecular biology give evidence that the approximate time of divergence of homo sapiens sapiens from the common ancestor of all modern human populations was about 200,000 years ago.[3][4][5] Even if we use the earlier date, our species appeared on earth approximately 13.7 billion years after the beginning of the universe. Our entire species has existed for less than 0.0015% of the age of the universe.

Existence cannot represent itself indirectly from the perspective of an observer. Even if it could, existence has no need to use a context free, fixed symbolic encoding to provide a shared basis for the communication of information between particulars in existence. Why should the requirements for the representation of human communication be the same as those for the representation of existence? What is the probability the representation of information our species uses for communication, logic, mathematics, and science just happens to be the same as the representation the entire universe uses to represent itself?