Someday we will figure it all out.
Don’t you agree?
By “it,” we mean how this whole Earth thing happened and how human beings well,
came to be.
By “we,” we mean all the scientists pushing the envelope, continuing to explore.
Here at Anatomy in Clay® Learning Systems, we believe in understanding all the ways we are put together as animals. We are all about the bones, muscles, and every scrap of connective tissue you can name. As a result, you might think we’re all about our insides.
Not so fast.
It’s also about the context.
The two go hand-in-hand. We are shaped and formed by evolution.
So we are fascinated by scientists trying to figure out how the universe began. Because it’s connected to us.
In fact, it’s all connected.
The latest mind-blowing bit is the coordinated telescopes, eight of them, that worked together to photograph a black hole.
They took a photograph, in other words, of something that doesn’t exist. The black hole in this case is 55 million light years away. Scientists are now seeing something they thought was unseeable. Stunning.
The work required more data than ever assembled for one scientific project. The hole is several billion times more massive than our sun. Go ahead, we’ll wait here while you ponder the scale.
Take three minutes to take a look.
Then comes word about the discovery of a new human species. This discovery happened in The Philippines which, according to the Wall Street Journal, “was once considered a backwater of evolution into the mainstream of human development.”
What gives? Based on the discovery of a few bones, the new species appears to have been “small-jawed with dainty teeth, able to walk upright but with feet still shaped to climb.” The species appears to be a “unique variation on the human form,” the scientists wrote in the journal Nature. The species was likely confined to the islands where the remains were found. Perhaps the species died out due to a lack of resources. This happened about 50,000 years ago. Scientists are still puzzling over the teeth, which appear to contain both ancient and modern features.
Interested? Here’s a four-minute video.
Of course, humans would not roam the Earth if it weren’t for all the reasons that Earth came to exist in this perfect “Goldilocks” zone of habitability in this particular solar system, right?
So finding out more from what astronomers can glean from black holes and more from what anthropologists can reveal from the Earth’s secrets will fill in gaps in the story, right? One piece at a time, we will put it all together eventually. Think of how far they have come in the past century—or past few decades for that matter.
To that end, we highly recommend the Netflix documentary series “One Strange Rock.” It’s produced by National Geographic, so you know the photos and video are going to be jaw-dropping. And it’s narrated by Will Smith (enough said). The brilliant idea is that the main voices are astronauts who have looked down from space at our planet and marvel at our small place in the universe. The series is a terrific look at the big-picture components that put Earth where it is today and spawned life—and consciousness—on this planet.
Speaking of consciousness, we also highly recommend a new podcast, too. Deepak Chopra’s Infinite Potential. The opening interview with Dr. Sunjay Gupta is fantastic and so is the one with Dr. Jane Goodall. (We are, of course, big fans of Dr. Goodall.)
Deepak Chopra asks an essential question: what makes us conscious human beings and why does it matter that we are?
Well, we wouldn’t be here having a chance to explore these questions if it wasn’t for all that happened yesterday and the billions of yesterdays before that one. Cosmologists, anthropologists, anatomists—we’re all in it together, working to figure it out.
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