Outline of Themes

This Site is about Science Fiction (and Fantasy and Horror),
Human Nature, Morality, Religion, and Politics,
the Meaning and Purpose of Life,
and How They All Interconnect

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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 beings: 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, while some scales, such as the quantum, can be understood mathematically but not intuitively.
  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,  or why there is “something rather than nothing”, 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. The implications of the ideas in V are that the entire cosmos, from the existence of stars and planets, the existence of life, of the human race, all the way to human morality itself, are inherent in the very structure of reality. They were inevitable. (No ‘special creation’ required.)
  5. These ideas have implications for concepts of meaning and purpose.

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

  1. Fantasy is the earliest outgrowth of storytelling that merged tribal histories and hero tales with the perception of agency in the world and the primitive intuitions of how the world works. It indulges in human psychological limitations, accepting everything from demons and ghosts to magic to ESP and telepathy as real, despite their implausibility in light of recent discoveries of how the world actually works. Fantasy directly reflects human nature, and remains in the 21st century far more popular than science fiction.
  2. Science fiction emerged as the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution discovered the objective world, how it works, and how it might be manipulated. It explores what exists beyond human nature and human experience, even to the point of speculating about other levels of reality.
  3. Horror can be seen as a strand of fantasy or sf, focusing on the dangers and threats of the world. It overlaps with science fiction in recognizing a vast inhuman universe but seeing it as an existential threat (e.g. as in Lovecraftian fiction) rather than an opportunity to explore.  (See post)