“We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the
world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the
sunlight that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an
Earth that would otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the
atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally
depend. Except for children (who don’t know enough not to ask the
important questions), few of us spend much time wondering why nature is
the way it is; where the cosmos came from, or whether it is always
here; if time will one day flow backward and effects precede causes; or
whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know.”
-Carl Sagan from an introduction to A Brief History of Time By Stephen Hawking
After
hearing and reading your peer's reactions during class about the listed
quotation, what new insight can you add to this quotation analysis?
Please respond. (Blog Response Due By Thursday, January 9th at 3:40p.m.)
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25 comments:
The fact that we don't really think about how we really came to be. Or how things work everyday. Like the gravity that keeps us on the ground or the atoms that made everything in the world. People way back then didn't understand how that stuff worked so they made things up for better understanding on how we became us on the planet.
We are so used to everything that we have that we don't really think about it. We have the technology to understand more complex things than ancient people so we have scientific explanations and not supernatural reasons as to why things work or happen.
Every powerful nation has a bad fall. Imagination and going home to rubble and despair. Just the sheer fact that there are different ways the world has come to be just based on your religion.
As Alan Watt says,"...Between the fall and the creation taking this ghastly risk is the condition of there being life you see for all life is an act of faith and an act of gamble. The moment you take a step, you do so on an act of faith because you don't really know that the floor's not going to give under your feet." The quote talks about how all we care about is living life and not questioning every small thing making life how it is. All humanity cares about is caring for each other and loving on this small planet in a galaxy in a universe to where anything you do doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
I find it interesting how the majority of things we rely on, we have no information on. If we do have any information on those things it is very little and most people don't know where to find it. I also think its cool how children out of everyone are the most curious out of all of us. I think that if we were able to retain the curiously we had in our childhood, we would have a generation of ambitious intellectuals.
This quote shows that the thing that powers all life on earth, is something that we don't think about a lot, we think that the sun is up or down, never about why. Same with other things, we take a lot for given, so we don't ask about it. I think this quote is trying to make us think: "why?"
This quote points out how there are so many things that we take for granted but are necessary for life. For example, people don't usually look up at the sun and say "I wonder where it came from or why we need it". Mythology is sometimes the explanation for things that can't be explained, and sometimes those things are the things that we have but never think much of.
We don't think about how stuff works, we just know it works.
I absolutely agree with this quote. I think we take everything for granted. We don't think about everything that makes things possible for us to live a happy and healthy life. I think not only should we think about what makes the Earth go around and how we can actually be here today but I also think we should think each day and be grateful to be alive. It's almost impossible to think about everything in the world. Just like children we don’t have all the knowledge to be grateful for. Children can’t necessarily understand and be grateful for gravity because they don’t know about it. But then again I think al of humankind are like children because we don’t know everything in the world. Overall, I think we should be grateful for the knowledge we have. We should also acknowledge it.
Children are born curious and with an eagerness to learn how the world around them works. They grow up questioning the world around them but as time goes on, that curiosity dies as society makes the curious feel dumb. People stop asking questions and questioning the world around them and begin to take the world for granted as they no longer are acquiring knowledge about the little things anymore. As a result, as a society, we don't know the fundamentals of how things work.
People take for granted the things that happen in our day to day world, and children are normally the ones that bring questions because they are curious about life and genuinely don’t know the answers. As they continue to get older, they prioritize other things first than the very basic things of creation, and don’t give time to question things that previously made them curious in their lives. Everything is just a given to them and they don’t have the need to find answers constantly as they did when they were younger.
Before reading this quote I had never really thought about how we don't question where most things come from, how they work, or if they have always existed. We may have scientific explanations for most questions but some of our other questions about how the universe came to be what it is today can only be answered with theories.
Being unaware of our surroundings and not thinking about how things came to be really distracts us from what the full potential of the universe's creation could really mean. WE take a lot for granted as teenagers, and modern Americans. Do we think about where our food comes from, or who put the work into the clothes we wear? Thinking about things past our own little bubble can really beneficial for our own well being.
Before the quote I haven't thought about every detail that's been alined to make life possible.But after reading it I thought about how much we take for granted. We don't know why things are here but we don't pay attention to those sort of things.
From day to day and hour to hour people don't pay attention to the real beauty of nature or care to understand why it was created. Most people can have multiple different perspectives about the same thing/topic and that creates chaos or even stability within our everyday life.
We don’t know much relative to what we need to know. Our views of life are skewed by our zoomed in perception.
I think that people don't really pay attention to common things and just go through the muscle memories of them. And usually we never take the time to see what we have built and take in the world for what it is. I think people through time still question reality and why we are here and they are called the greatest minds of our world.
After reading the quote it kind of makes you reliese and look at all the stuff that you take for granted. It also makes you think about all of the things you appriciat and makes you thankful for everything that you have in your daily life.
People live every day that they live and don't think about what is going on around them. So people don't live with think about what's around them.
I partly disagree with this quote. I think this because we know almost everything about "the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible" which is the sun. Even though we have researched and studied the sun for millenia, people don't think about it when they're for example walking to school.
After reading the quote you come to realize that the world is much deeper and more detailed to make all life come together, and a lot of people don't realize this or think about it too much.
I do agree with this quote because I hardly ever think about how the world works or about the things i use in my daily life. It makes me think about all of the things i take for granted in my life.
your start to realize that the vast unknown is way bigger then you think as we all have things we don't know as there is always the unknown to delve in to.
Through school, we are taught the difference between religious creation and scientific evolution. Since we were young we have known the answer to these questions. This may be because teachers don't want students dwelling in the past. Things like gravity and the sun often go unnoticed but everyone knows deep down, that those are the reasons why we are still alive.
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