The Universe i Unimaginable Complex

At the atomic and sub-atomic levels, the numbers of things in common, every day objects are astronomical. A few geniuses have developed mathematical formulas that seem to explain the physics at this level, but our intuition fails when we try to interpret those equations. Things are fundamentally uncertain. They are simultaneously waves and particles. Space and time are not different. Things are both mass and energy.

The human genome contains about 600,000 base pairs and includes perhaps 20,000 to 25,000 genes. The gene action is modified by promoters and epigenetics, leading to an even more complex behavior than the numbers of genes themselves might suggest.

It has been estimated that the human brain has perhaps 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses. The web they create changes during one's lifetime, and its behavior is a continuously shifting pattern of unfathomable complexity.

There are some 7 billion people alive today, each governed by his or her individual genetic and neurological make-up.

The 7 billion humans interact in an enormously complex pattern of social, political and economic behavior, which is only partially explained by their division into a couple of hundred countries, and a few thousand groups speaking separate languages. That pattern extends back hundreds or thousands of generations and (we hope) extends forward into the distant future.

Homo sapiens is but one of millions of species sharing earth's biosphere, each with its own enormously complex pattern of behavior, and together creating an even more complex and shifting pattern in which the species themselves have come and gone over billions of years and can be expected to continue for billions more.

This web of life is contained in a thin layer of a small planet in what we can only assume is an unexceptional solar system, which contains not only the sun and planets, but large numbers of asteroids and comets that still defy our best efforts to catalog their numbers and predict their orbits.

The solar system is one of perhaps 100 billion to 1000 billion solar systems in our galaxy, which has evolved over billions of years, the stars themselves being born and dying, dancing in complex patterns which seem to suggest that there most of the universe is composed of dark matter and dark energy, which we understand not at all.

Our galaxy is one of perhaps 100 billion to 1000 billion that together form our universe.

I believe that those people who believe that they understand man and his place in the universe are simply wrong.