Something To Think About
January 30, 2015 4 Comments
So begins a series of quotations or sayings that you might ponder over. The first one comes from the Gilbert and Sullivan opera, The Gondoliers. Written at a time when both lyricist and composer were at their peak, the opera features soaring choruses and witty dialogue. The quintet, “Try we life-long” is one of the most famous in the G and S canon. No less a personage than Isaac Asimov considered the last two lines among the finest Gilbert ever wrote.
All: “Try we life-long, we can never
Straighten out life’s tangled skein,
Why should we, in vain endeavor.
Guess and guess and guess again?…
Life’s perhaps the only riddle
That we shrink from giving up!”
About Robert M. Weiss
Site of Discovery and Wonder 
Life is a riddle as the Universe itself. All seems to be a wonder to be hold. We are not giving up on the riddle because each generations ask the the question again. Through us, the Universe has become conscious of itself. And it is asking itself, “Where do I come from?” Up to now there is no answer to this question. Will there ever be an answer? We don’t know.
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Piet Hein sometimes thought of “life as two boxes each containing the other’s key.” Thank you for your interesting questions. The third line really makes me ponder. Are we alone in the universe? You seem to imply we are. So much to think about…
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I’m not sure, whether we are alone. With billions of stars and planets one would think we are not. But we also must assume that we could be alone. Professor Brian Cox made an interesting five part series on the BBC
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/programs/human-universe-with-brian-cox/
and he thinks we could be alone. Actually it doesn’t matter, because of the distances involved, we will never meet another intelligent species.
I’m reading the novel “Solaris” by the Polish writer Stanisław Lem
and it is suggested that we humans are not interested in conquering the cosmos, but we rather want to expand Earth as far as the cosmos reaches. Further, we would not know what to do with the worlds. We do not want other worlds, only mirrors.
The colonisation of America or Australia actually bears this out.
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Excellent points, Peter. So, you don’t believe in tesseracts(traveling through space by wrinkling, which is the shortest distance between two points). Thanks for sharing the link.
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