Reframing - A Perspective on the Sophistication of our Species

On the Kardashev Scale, a Type 1 civilization can access all the energy available on it's home planet; Type 2 the nearest star; Type 3 the galaxy. We are Type 0, having limited access to the totality of our energy resources here on Earth. We receive more incident energy from the Sun every hour than is produced by all the power plants on Earth in an entire year.

Our Solar System resides on a spur of one of the two main arms of an average size spiral galaxy, the Milky Way, about halfway from the galactic center. Our Sun is one of 250 billion stars in our galaxy. Our nearest star is Proxima Centauri, 4 light years away, and the Milky Way is one of billions, perhaps trillions, of galaxies.

The current estimate of the age of the Universe is 13.8 billion years; the Earth 4.5 billion years. Our best theory of cosmology has our Universe emerging from a singularity, supported forensically by the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. The observable Universe is believed to be 93 million light years across due to cosmic expansion, attributed to Dark Energy.

When it comes to singularities our science breaks down. We don't have a unified theory of physics since we are not able to reconcile Quantum Theory and General Relativity, and we have an unsolved Measurement Problem.

Quantum Theory is so strange that recent experiments have called into question the very existence of an objective reality, entangling the experimenter with the outcome. Even though we rely heavily on quantum effects for our technology, we are still unable to agree on a credible interpretation one hundred yours later.

Interstellar space is not an empty vacuum, it's alive with virtual particles that come in and out of existence momentarily. We know very little about Dark Matter and Dark Energy which appear to be non-baryonic, and comprise 95% of the Universe.

The human mind is equally baffling with 90% of our activities controlled by the subconscious. We know that it comprises beliefs, memories and subroutines, but our science cannot yet explain how consciousness arises from the brain, thought to be the most complex structure in the Universe.

There are around 40 trillion cells in the human body with the gut miccrobiome comprising about the same number of non-human fungi, bacteria, viruses, etc. As has been demonstrated by recent events, the human immune system is paramount to our survival. Operating optimally it has an impeccable memory; the human body is a self-healing biological machine.

Epigenetics teaches that genes are not our destiny, and gene expression is almost exclusively a function of our interaction with the environment; that is - lifestyle. The reason we attribute our health outcomes to genetics may be due to the temporal overlap of environemtal factors with our antecedents.

Gerontologists now consider aging a disease, with human longevity escape velocity predicted to exceed 50% by 2035.