What could the discoveries of a marine megafauna extinction* during the past three million years and numerous brown dwarfs** in our galactic neighborhood have in common? In themselves, rather nothing, except in the context of our knowledge about both. More marine organisms died off during the Pliocene and Pleistocene than “had previously been assumed,” and more brown dwarfs, maybe as many as 100 billion of them, lie about our galaxy than “had previously been assumed.”
“Had previously been assumed” is the product of our experiential limitations. Our assumptions are the bases on which we go about our daily business and build for our futures, but in that path to tomorrow, we occasionally discover the previously unknown. How, after so many decades of paleontological research, did we miss a mass extinction? And how, after an equal period, did we miss so many brown dwarfs?
We could argue that both the extinction and the numerous brown dwarfs were hidden. When marine organisms die, they don’t lie about in the ordinary realm of human endeavors. They fall to an ocean floor, where low to absent light and sediment can hide them. The brown dwarfs are low-light objects, the so-called failed stars that are more massive than Jupiter, but less massive than stars. They shine in infrared, not a frequency our eyes see.
The occurrence of the extinction and the presence of the brown dwarfs in abundance can draw our attention to other gaps in our knowledge. What have we “previously assumed” that personal discoveries will alter? Of course, we don’t know until we know, but these two discoveries demonstrate that assumptions can be wrong. What else are we missing? What else is hidden at this time?
That we think and act on the basis of assumption is a limitation we can’t bypass. There’s just not enough time in an individual’s life to examine all the assumptions on which we base our lives. That’s probably one of the reasons that some nineteenth century philosophers turned to utilitarianism as their guiding perspective: If something works, great. If it works for most people and somehow enhances their lives, greater.
The problem is that we don’t really do everything on a utilitarian basis, but rather on an assumptive one. We might argue that our personal drives push us to what is good for us, but we have too many personal experiences of having done something that might not have been “good” for us. Not that we planned for something inimical or self-destructive, but rather that we were led to act by what we had previously assumed to be true about the nature of our personal worlds and the world in general.
Personal history teaches lessons the hard way. But there’s hope. We can always reexamine what we once assumed. We can look through the fossils of our lives to see the tell-tale signs of something we missed along the way, or we can search the heavens for faint signs of things we didn’t know existed in abundance.
* Catalina Pimiento et al, The Pliocene marine megafauna extinction and its impact on functional diversity, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2017). DOI: 10.1038/s41559-017-0223-6
https://phys.org/news/2017-06-previously-unknown-extinction-marine-megafauna.html#jCp
** K. Muzic, et al, The low-mass content of the massive young star cluster RCW 38, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-milky-billion-brown-dwarfs.html#jCp
“Had previously been assumed” is the product of our experiential limitations. Our assumptions are the bases on which we go about our daily business and build for our futures, but in that path to tomorrow, we occasionally discover the previously unknown. How, after so many decades of paleontological research, did we miss a mass extinction? And how, after an equal period, did we miss so many brown dwarfs?
We could argue that both the extinction and the numerous brown dwarfs were hidden. When marine organisms die, they don’t lie about in the ordinary realm of human endeavors. They fall to an ocean floor, where low to absent light and sediment can hide them. The brown dwarfs are low-light objects, the so-called failed stars that are more massive than Jupiter, but less massive than stars. They shine in infrared, not a frequency our eyes see.
The occurrence of the extinction and the presence of the brown dwarfs in abundance can draw our attention to other gaps in our knowledge. What have we “previously assumed” that personal discoveries will alter? Of course, we don’t know until we know, but these two discoveries demonstrate that assumptions can be wrong. What else are we missing? What else is hidden at this time?
That we think and act on the basis of assumption is a limitation we can’t bypass. There’s just not enough time in an individual’s life to examine all the assumptions on which we base our lives. That’s probably one of the reasons that some nineteenth century philosophers turned to utilitarianism as their guiding perspective: If something works, great. If it works for most people and somehow enhances their lives, greater.
The problem is that we don’t really do everything on a utilitarian basis, but rather on an assumptive one. We might argue that our personal drives push us to what is good for us, but we have too many personal experiences of having done something that might not have been “good” for us. Not that we planned for something inimical or self-destructive, but rather that we were led to act by what we had previously assumed to be true about the nature of our personal worlds and the world in general.
Personal history teaches lessons the hard way. But there’s hope. We can always reexamine what we once assumed. We can look through the fossils of our lives to see the tell-tale signs of something we missed along the way, or we can search the heavens for faint signs of things we didn’t know existed in abundance.
* Catalina Pimiento et al, The Pliocene marine megafauna extinction and its impact on functional diversity, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2017). DOI: 10.1038/s41559-017-0223-6
https://phys.org/news/2017-06-previously-unknown-extinction-marine-megafauna.html#jCp
** K. Muzic, et al, The low-mass content of the massive young star cluster RCW 38, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-milky-billion-brown-dwarfs.html#jCp
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