Transcript
Introduction
"Emerging from a three-point-six-billion-year dream, life on Earth had its first questions. What is this big room we're in and who put us here? What is that bright yellow circle on the ceiling and where does it go every night? Where does the ocean end and what happens when you get there? Where are all the dead people now that they're not here anymore? We had discovered our species' great mystery novel, Where Are We? And we wanted to learn how to read it." "Around 10,000 years ago, isolated tribes of humans began to merge together and formed their first cities. In larger communities, people were able to talk to each other about this mystery novel we had found, comparing notes across tribes and through the generations. As the techniques for learning became more sophisticated and the clues piled up, new discovery surfaced."
"The world was apparently a ball, not a disc, which means that the ceiling was actually a larger sphere surrounding us. The sizes of the other objects floating out there in that sphere with us and the distances between them were vaster than we had ever imagined. And then something upsetting, the sun wasn't revolving around us, we were revolving around the sun." "This was a super unwarm, unfuzzy discovery. Why the hell weren't we in the center of things? What did that mean? Where are we? The sphere was already unpleasantly big. If we weren't in the center of it, were we just on a random ball inside of it, kind of for no apparent reason? Could this really be what was happening?" "Scary. Then things got worse. It seemed that the pinpricks of light on the edge of the sphere weren't what we thought they were. They were other suns like ours, and they were out there floating just like our sun, which means we weren't inside of a sphere at all. Not only was our planet not the center of things. Even our sun was just a random dude out there, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothingness. Scary."