Few People Expected

This morning, I remembered recently reading a passage at the bottom of a left-hand page and spent all of breakfast looking for it in Mirkheim before I thought to look instead in "Lodestar."

"Few people expected [an atomic number] as high as 120 would ever be reached.
"Well, few people expected gravity control or faster-than-light travel, either. The universe is rather bigger and more complicated than any given set of brains."
-Poul Anderson, "Lodestar" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 631-680 AT pp. 656-657.

There are several interesting points here.

Our sense organs and thought processes are adapted for physical survival at sub-relativistic velocities on the macroscopic scale whereas the universe encompasses every velocity from absolute zero to light speed, if not also tachyonic speeds, and every scale from sub-sub-atomic to cosmic, if not also multi-cosmic. (I recently heard something on television about scales billions of times smaller than quarks, I think.) So of course the universe differs not only quantitatively but also qualitatively from our thoughts about it. However, brains are not thoughts but their physical basis. As such, they are both subtle and complex - with more neuronic interactions than stars in a galaxy?

When Anderson writes that few people expected either gravity control or FTL, he makes these advances seem plausible, almost inevitable. The narrator of "Lodestar" addresses us from a speculative future in which these advances have already been made and every advance is accepted as commonplace as soon as it has been made. FTL has become commonplace in sf but will it happen in reality? What is certain is that, if society survives, then science will continue to advance. If not gravity control or FTL, then other unexpected discoveries will be made.