Curiosity leads to discovery and Sonic in space
In a welcome break from the political spectacle, I bring you a personal narrative. Consider yourself warned.
I used to get the strangest ideas in my head when I was a kid. For instance, I worried that human beings would soon overpopulate the world. Where would we live? Sure, there was enough space now, but what happens when we build on all of it? When people call dibs on every piece of land available? And when there’s ten times as many people?
I could have sworn there wasn’t enough room for all of us. I asked a trusted grown-up and he told me that there was, in fact, plenty of space, more than I could possibly realize. The world is bigger than you think, he said. Some reassurance that was. How can he know how big I think the world is?
I also pondered the lack of distinction between the number 1, a lowercase ‘L’, and a capital ‘I’.
Puzzling over an eerie set of semantic indiscretions is strange for a kid, even if I didn’t know most of those words at the time. Unsurprisingly, voicing this question was basically a reiteration of the previous one. The big people said, “You’ll figure it out.”
Nonsense.
Compared to the runt I was in those days, I’m a relatively big person now (please refrain from snickering and dirty jokes), and sometimes I’m still confused about the difference between an l and an I. But, unless we’re typing l1k3 th1s, a 1 is easy to spot. You learn to accept these things, if not to understand them.
The first question is a bit more complicated, but I believe I can furnish an explanation. If the world becomes overpopulated, it may not be for generations into the future, and when that day arrives the real concerns are food, water, and sanitation. We figured out the space problem when the construction industry began to treat skyscraper height limitations like a pissing contest.
Strange though these ideas may be, it is good to question the world around you. That’s how we learn. We should encourage these thoughts in our children, even if the questions asked seem inane or unanswerable. Do your best to explain. Maybe you will even learn a thing or two. Maybe they will help you to see the world in a different light.
Fortunately, my curiosity is as strong as ever, and the strange thoughts are no less frequent these days. I consider myself lucky. For example, if we continue to build skyscrapers to conserve space, will the Earth one day look like a giant hedgehog? Perhaps, when we’re living on a more spacious, manufactured planet orbiting a distant star, we will look into our telescopes and see Earth whirling like an enormous Sonic around our old dying Sun.
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