You are born into the world and it feels like a beginning. It is a beginning for you. But what about before you? You’re surely somebodies middle or another one’s end. The long road of history comes from negative nowhere and is heading to nowhere. This is how it feels as a single individual at least. Before me, unimportant. After me, same story. But for the sliver of universe where I am me? Drastically important. My concerns, my stories of high school, my fears for the future, my attitude towards politics, my favorite books and songs, everything. This is of course absolutely fine in one sense, but in another is deeply odd.
More and more I find a desire to catch myself up on everything all the others have figured out, worried about, listened to, read, built, written down, imagined, everything. Before me there were millions of others exploring their tiny slivers of universe and in my sliver of universe there is a system another devised and others created that allows me to find and learn what everyone else was up to before me.
At first we thought our planet was flat. Noting that the curvature of the Earth per mile was zero this seemed reasonable. But then we saw that the sun cast shadows of different lengths at different latitudes, that ships disappeared past a horizon when heading out over any direction, and that during a lunar eclipse the Earth’s shadow on the moon was the arc of a circle. The Earth, we discovered, was spherical(ish).
At first we thought everything was made of fire, water, air and ether. We’ve learned that things are actually made of tinier things. And that these tinier things have tinier things that make them. At first we thought these tiny things that made the tiny things were distributed amongst the tiny things volume. But then we shot some tiny things at a thin sheet of gold and learned that no, the tiny things that make the tiny things that make the things are mainly clustered up in the center. And that one type of the tiny things wiz all around the cluster of tiny things in cloud like orbitals. We’ve learned that these tiny things can make magnetic fields and electric fields and that those two fields are kinda one in the same. And those magnetic fields are very useful for making things move, and that moving things are very useful at making things electrified. We’ve learned that space and time are warped by large objects. We’ve learned that energy cannot be created or destroyed (mostly) and that the universe prefers disorder rather than being confined to the obnoxious demands of organization. We’ve learned that the force you feel on your feet when you jump off of a carport into the ivy of your grandparent’s lawn is equal to your mass multiplied by your rate of acceleration. And that if you throw a tennis ball up in the air while driving in a convertible at 60 mph, the ball won’t fly out of the car, but instead come right back down. We’ve learned that particles moving fast feel different than particles moving slow, and we call one feeling hot and one cold.
And those are only some of only some of what people have been up to before you. They have been asking all kinds of other questions too. What makes someone happy? Evil? Are the animals on Earth today the same as they were 100 years ago? 1,000 years ago? 1 million? Say, how old is this planet anyway? Nearly 4.5 billion years old. But that isn’t much compared to universe, clocking in at 13.8 billion years. What is the best food to eat? Are there other universes? Do we need to eat food at all? Can we walk on water? Hmm, can we build something that sits on the water and then walk on that something? How exactly? It’s that the force required to make something float is equal to the force of gravity of that boat. And that the force for float is equal to the density of the fluid displaced times the volume of displaced fluid times the acceleration of things in Earth’s gravitational field… Holy moly people have been up to a lot. And they’ve talked a lot and written a lot and thought a lot. Oh, they like to kill each other too.
We have maybe 70 good years to catch up. Anytime not spent catching up should be spent poking around universe looking for new things for babies to catch up on. This could mean a new conversation or feeling in your chest, a new physical law that predicts how something will behave before it even happens, a new phrase or word, a new method for drying your bathing suit, the best hour for eating if you want to wake up at 5 AM, the best grocery store to go to at 2 AM in the suburbs where you live, the quickest paved route from Brooklyn to Santa Clara. We are in a giant experiment called existence and you can interact with nearly everything, everyone, every creature and see how they respond.
It would be a good life to find one of the many yet unknown things that some baby will learn one day.
polymathematics 
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