Outline of Themes

Outline of Themes. In work, mid-2026. For most of these I’ll build additional tables of timelines, scales, citations, etc.

I. Timeline of human discovery. What humans have thought they knew about the universe, over time.

What humanity has come to understand by the 21st century:

II. Size and Age of the Universe. Timeline, Scales.

III. Age and Development of the Human Species. Timeline.

  1. About 2 or 3,000,000 years old
  2. Most of that time was tribal existence on the African savannas.
  3. Then came the Agricultural revolution, expansion across the globe, the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, the Industrial revolution.

IV. Human Nature.

  1. Formed mostly in tribal circumstances, until 10 or 12,000 years ago. This entailed hostility toward other tribes, hierarchical structures, prioritizing expansion of the tribe, short-term thinking, and so on.
  2. Tribes became bonded by myths and stories, which became religions, inevitably ascribing natural events to supernatural beings with the same motivations and protocols as human being: father/son, master/slave, predator/prey, and so on.
  3. The expansion of the race across the globe over the past couple millennia has extended the range of human nature; the ability to cooperate with other tribes has allowed humanity to conquer the planet.
  4. But the distribution of enlightened human nature is uneven. The tension between traditional and enlightened human nature explains much of politics and the ‘culture wars’ [See Outline of Morality]

V. Recent Discoveries

  1. How tribal human nature entailed biases that worked well in the ancestral environment, but not necessarily in the modern one. Human intuitions suffer ‘scale-blindness,’ appropriate for local circumstances, but unable to comprehend vast amounts of time or space.
  2. How human senses are quite limited, compared to the extent of the known universe, because human senses evolved for our environment on this planet.
  3. That our understanding of reality entails explanations at different scales, or levels, e.g. physics, chemistry, biology, psychology.
  4. How reality is built not just from basic principles of physics, chemistry, etc., but also through emergent process realized only in the past 50 or 150 years: evolution, chaos, recursion, complexity, “information,” entropy.

VI. Implications

  1. The conflict between item II and items V give rise to inaccurate conclusions about the world, including superstitions and pseudo-scientific ‘beliefs’ that place human intuitions above objective evidence of reality. (Most prominently these days: Flat earthers and evolution-deniers.)
  2. Humans prioritize their tribal stories and myths even over such objective knowledge, thus rejecting much of II and III, in favor of incoherent and self-contradictory ‘holy books.’
  3. Humans are inclined to reject or misunderstand the concepts in V.3, and naively asking questions about the meaning of life, or free will, or the existence of God,  at realms where they don’t apply; they’re the wrong questions. (Example: how human invariably invent myths and religious that apply human behaviors to the entire cosmos, as in II.2.) We can call this the human tendency to ‘flatten’ the universe into a single, human dimension. Perhaps it indicates the limitations of human cognition.
  4. This has implication for concepts of meaning and purpose.

VII. How These Ideas Reflect and are Reflected by Science Fiction

  1. Science fiction, at its most simplistic, is another imposition of human perceptions and priorities onto a speculative universe. Space opera. At its best and most complex, it does what almost no other art form can do: it tries to peak around the corners of the limitations of our understanding and perception, and understand what happens at other levels of reality.
  2. (While fantasy *indulges* in those limitations. In fantasy, the world is haunted by demons and ghosts and faeries and every imagined supernatural entity throughout history; it thinks magic and ESP and telepathy and all the other things that don’t pass the scrutiny of physicists, are real. Fantasy is about human nature; science fiction tries to understand what exists beyond human nature. Thus fantasy is, increasingly in the 21st century, far more popular than science fiction.)
  3. The traditional dismissal by literary critics of both fantasy and sf reveals their extremely tight focus on just one level of human existence: to stories that focus on the lives of individual people.