We hoped that none would be the wiser if we rebuilt the Tower of Babel but renamed it "science." Wishing not to be caught, we kept our dialects believably diverse while teaching the scientific method as a lesson in grammar. Are we uniting as a product of shared rationality, once again threatening to reach towards (and beyond) the skies? Is rationalism the new nationalism? Have we outsmarted the gods this time, or are we playing right into their hands?
A truly great general seeks to understand the psychology of his opponents. For example, when dealing with overly aggressive adversaries, often the best play is to use their aggression against them. Set a trap and bait them to attack on your terms by feigning weakness or inattention. As we humans push forward and advance science and technology at a near-exponential rate, I wonder if we've been outsmarted. Is our headlong progress leading us into a surprise ambush, a trap laid by some unknown enemy?
Just because everything keeps adding up, it doesn’t mean it isn’t also striking us down too. Maybe it’s actually weakening our position that this tower of science we’ve been constructing hasn't fallen yet. Our equations double-checked, our proofs clear and indisputable - we have no choice but to trust the answers and follow where they lead.
And then, one day, we (metaphorically) rise above the atmosphere itself, and everything changes. What we calculated as universal laws turn out to be earthly laws! And now we find that human reason has no way to account for the new laws now in effect! Thoughts once self-evidently brilliant are now simply incinerated, lacking an ozone layer and all of the imperceptible protections we did not even realize our atmosphere provided! How were we to know of these powers, questions more blinding than the hottest sun, that can dissolve every rational premise on contact? Human reason requires the atmosphere of humanity! Who are we to send our scientific decrees, our truth voyagers, out into the universe without so much as even a spacesuit?
Even if one day we are able to perfectly describe and categorize all existing matter in the entire universe, we have come no closer to rationally explaining the fact of its existence at all: from what and for what? Is human reason truly the lingua franca of the universe? I, for one, have my doubts. It seems exceedingly more likely that the universe speaks its ultimate why's and how’s in languages completely untranslatable to human reason. Perhaps, friends, this realization is a good enough reason to slow down a bit in this age of reckless advance?