“…..we know nothing about 95 percent of the known universe…….. Seventy-five percent of it is dark energy, 20 percent of it is so-called dark matter, and the remaining 5 percent is what we can see”.
The above is a quote from NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, reflecting on the Hubble Space Telescope and the knowledge it continues to send back to us.
Imagine that! We can only see 5 percent of the 15 billion year (give or take a few billion years) old galaxies and other space phenomena that exist all around us who are marooned together on this small planet in a small solar system in the fancifully spiraling Milky Way galaxy.
Yet, so many of us seem to prefer to live in an intellectual darkness that rivals that of the unknown universe.
And in that darkness grows our fear of each other; our fear of the fact that there is no One watching over us from above, no great Truth of which we are the chosen custodians.
And so we kill each other over prophets and profits, out of a naive need to have what exists either black or white. We let cultural icons circumscribe our vision, following their faintly lit lead through the darker matters of our minds — so much easier than facing the many messy shades of gray.
We hobble ourselves out of fear of the dark, when we could hubble ourselves together in shared wonder.