Into the great unknown

Animals and humans alike are both curious creatures.  Without curiosity and forward moving ideas we would still be stuck in caves and barely surviving.  Our curiosity has evolved, however, with our intelligence.  The evolution of both has created the world as we know it today.  It’s hard to say what about human nature makes us want to explore.  After all, it is scary, going into the unknown.  I’d like to think it is written in our genes to believe that there is always something more out there, something better than what we have now.  Maybe we are carrying forth a master plan unknowingly, maybe fate has already written our path and we are just acting it all out like puppets in a show.  Or even stranger, maybe there is life greater than us and beyond us that is playing everything out like some big game.  I prefer to think that our curiosity, our zest for the unknown is a part of our basic instinct, something we cannot ignore.  Regardless of what it is that makes us do what we do it has brought us to where we are at today.  Without the need to further our understanding of the world and space we would be just maintaining basic life.  We wouldn’t really have a purpose, now would we?  This furthers the evidence that the need to explore is instinctual, because if not we would just be doing the basics just to survive.  We would have nothing more than what the first living humans had.

The speed of development for our world has increased over time.  We have so much more than we had even twenty years ago.  This vaguely relates to a previous conversation regarding social media.  But, in the general sense of things we have come very far, not all good, not all bad but we are a very different set of people than we started out as.  Without venturing into the unknown we wouldn’t have moved beyond our initial boundaries.  Columbus would not have discovered the Americas, cross-cultural mingling would not have occurred and we would have no way of communicating beyond our own group, we would be a different world.  Space exploration has started much like the first humans on Earth started, just much more technologically advanced than previous.  Exploration could very well have a negative impact on the future, we could become much lower on the food chain or hell we could begin destroying the universe as we have destroyed our planet.  We, as humans, must value what we have just as much as value what we could have instead of just waiting to move on to the next great thing.  But, just like when we first started we have no idea what could unveil without exploring, we will take the risks and deal with the consequences, if any.  Who knows, we could uncover another world like our own or even a more advanced world.