I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Time to die.
***
A year ago we had no idea such things as JMBOs could even exist.
Now we struggle dimly to somehow account for just how on earth they could.
Sandblasting? Stellar “bullying”? (God that speaks of us and our trauma, not of them.)
Photoerosion? Sure okay. I don’t know. No one knows.
(Parenthetical: link, more about Enceladus)
***
A thing we know, about what we don’t know.
If the whole electromagnetic spectrum were the size of the space between New York and LA …
then the part of the Spectrum we can see with our eyes, as colors, would be the thickness of a thread.
As the basic meat creatures we always have been, we see almost nothing, and thus, even if we religiously follow the homily about believing the evidence of our own eyes, we still know next to nothing, about the realities of our world and the universe.
There are two commonplace rejoinders to this truth.
One is the retort of the crystal-packing mamas: “Oh, but it’s not just about vision, or hearing. Secretly, we’ve got dozens of senses, including ones that are completely paranormal!”
Not a bad argument, and even right, to a point. But still.
Even granting that all those spooky senses exist … prove to me somehow that even one of them isn’t just as limited and narrow as our eyes and vision, please. Then we can talk about this … rationally.
Rejoinder two comes from … everyone. All the normies anyway. And that goes: But Science! But Progress!
And again, this is not completely without merit and validity. Radio telescopes and electron microscopes and lots of other technologies do extend the range of our ability to see, along the Spectrum.
But, but still.
I don’t have much faith in either of those abstractions, and faith is required for both, at least if they are going to be used as the basis for a system of Belief, and values, and morality, and judgments about non-concrete things like human beings and their emotions, much less what the Right Way is for them–us–to live their (our) lives.
Like whether getting a Covid shot, or not getting one, is moral or immoral.
Very like that.