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Unanswerable questions people still ask

Francisco Miraval                                

“Why did I have to wait four decades to discover my ideas were not wrong and I wasn’t crazy?” asked me a gentleman I barely know. And friend of mine recently asked, “When do you think War World III will begin?” I ask myself if there are answers to those questions.

Regarding the first question, the man just told me that when he was a child somehow he arrived to the conclusion that there are intelligent beings on other planets and that we are connected with those beings. Then, something very tragic happened to him, something that changed his life: he went to school.

Day after day and year after year, school eroded the creativity, the inventiveness, and the curiosity of that child. And to reinforce the so-called “education,” every attempt of having original ideas, of painting outside the lines, of imagining another reality, was promptly described as “craziness.”

Years passed and the child (now adult) finally admitted his “mistake” and stopped developing his own thoughts, using instead somebody else’s thoughts that he rented for a short time to pass a test, to find a job, and even to hide his craziness and madness.

Life, however, follows a tortuous path and usually gives a second chance. In this case, our friend, now at the end of his fourth decade on this planet, now knows that there are many exoplanets, that Mars once had water in large quantities and for a long time, that comet 67P has organic molecules, and that the whole universe could be just a giant brain.

In other words, now he knows that those crazy thoughts that were not allowed to grow in his early mind eventually developed in somebody else’s minds, and that those crazy ideas once crashed by his education are now being proclaimed by the media and the social networking sites as some of the most advanced discoveries of our time.

I have no idea why this person had to wait almost 40 years for him to discover he was not crazy. And I have no idea either when War World III will begin because I am not so sure that War World II ever truly ended.

In the final chapter of his The Outline of History (written in 1921), British historian H. G. Wells, known for his science fiction books, said that the end of War World I (or, as it was then know, the “Great War”) was the beginning of the preparation for the next war. He also provided some details about what England was already doing for the “second” war world.

Following Wells, we can then say that Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the countless regional conflicts of the Cold War where both the continuation of War World II and the beginning of War World III.

I have my own unanswerable questions. For example: How much do we really know about our history and our place in the universe? And, even more important, who really cares about this kind of questions?

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