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In the grand scheme of cosmic time, all of human civilization from fire to artificial intelligence is a blink. And yet, in that blink, we’ve built astonishing things. We’ve summoned electricity from silence, encoded language into light, and taught machines to mimic thought. But through it all, one question echoes louder than the rest:
Why is there a universe at all?
It is the most ancient, most childlike, and most stubborn question we carry — one that predates religion, mathematics, and science. And strangely, it’s this very question that technology has not answered, but amplified.
From Telegraph to ChatGPT: A 200-Year Rebellion
Most of what we call modernity, the internet, computing, machine learning is not even two centuries old. In a universe 13.8 billion years old, that’s a whisper in eternity.
Yet this brief phase has been a rebellion against silence and powerlessness:
The telegraph turned thought into signal.
Electricity became our invisible lifeblood.
Computers digitized logic.
AI simulates human intuition.
Each invention is more than a tool — it’s an expression of something uniquely human: a desire not just to live, but to understand.
Technology: Not an Answer, But a Mirror
Despite the power of modern machines, we’re still faced with a void of final answers. In fact, the more we know, the more absurd it all seems:
Why me?
What is purpose?
Why consciousness in a sea of atoms?
Technology doesn’t resolve these — but it exposes our need to resolve them. It lets us simulate the universe, but not explain why it exists. It lets us extend life, but not escape death.
And yet, paradoxically, that’s where its value lies.
The Higanbana and the Practical Real
Let’s come to a poetic bridge the Higanbana, or red spider lily, often blooming near cemeteries in Japan. To some it represents death, to others rebirth. It’s a flower of contradiction: beautiful, fleeting, and associated with farewells.
Like technology, the Higanbana reminds us not of power, but of impermanence.
Just as technology is not about eternal answers, but temporary illumination, the Higanbana blooms not to defy death, but to coexist with it.
The Universe May Never Explain Itself
And maybe it shouldn’t.
Maybe our role — brief, electric, wondering is not to conquer the unknown, but to bear witness to it. To build, reflect, and tell stories of Parkinson’s and particle physics, of old gods and new code.
We are not idiots for asking why. We are proof that questions exist.
And in that in the ability to ask, to imagine, and to invent we are, perhaps, exactly what the universe needed to observe itself.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePri