“I have approximate answers and possible beliefs in different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and of many things I don’t know anything about, but I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having a purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.”
Richard Feynman (during an interview in BBC’s Horizon program (1981))
Let me start off with this: if you look at it on a big-enough scale, nothing we could ever do as individuals matters. If I get a 1st Class degree, I will still die eventually. Maybe I might have a few more things to die next to, but the story is basically the same. The universe is largely apathetic to us as individuals, and, save for some almighty fuck-up that might occur (and ‘oops’ would not cover it), to humankind as a whole.
