Last night I got to read my favorite book again. It’s the National Geographic Atlas of the World, Seventh Edition. The book is about two feet high by one wide and contains full color prints of geological and political maps of the entire Earth. I can lose hours reading one page of maps from any exotic place, but it’s the stuff at the front of the atlas that really sets it apart. The atlas contains a huge amount of information about how our world maintains the equilibrium that sustains us while it evolves over both millennia and more human time scales. You can learn about continental drift, geothermal activity, human energy use, life expectancy, resource use, and fertility rates. Did you know that fertility rates are inversely related to industrialization, and that as the world develops, population is expected to reach a maximum of 11 billion people?
The atlas was given to me by my grandfather, who I also got to see today. He’s coming to the end of his life and the way he is growing old is fascinating. Even as his body, memory, and concentration are failing him, he is still intensely curious about the world around him. After he wasn’t able to do much except sit in his recliner and watch TV, he struggled to tell me his theory explaining cosmic expansion. I think I owe my limitless curiosity to his stories of war adventures and explanations of nature. He always presented things as infinitely amazing, even if he was explaining exactly how they worked. I think my curiosity is a result of the way he never treated anything as less wonderful because it was well-understood. For him, the more you can know about something, the more amazing it was, because only then could you understand how it fit in with the rest of the world, how it embodied the same principles that underly our whole universe, or how it was a new example of the variation possible according to those principles. This is why we should always strive to understand as much as we can about ourselves and the world we inexplicably find ourselves in. I’ve never put much stock in the idea that “there are some things that we just shouldn’t try to understand.” Maybe there are things we’ll never be able to understand, but based on the way my grandpa treated life, I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t try.
Thanks. I needed this.