Human knowledge

I’m kind of fascinated by the idea of “human knowledge.” I think whoever wrote Men In Black had this same preoccupation:

KAY
A person is smart. People are dumb.
Everything they’ve ever “known” has been
proven to be wrong. A thousand years ago
everybody knew as a fact, that the earth
was the center of the universe. Five
hundred years ago, they knew it was flat.
Fifteen minutes ago, you knew we humans
were alone on it. Imagine what you’ll know
tomorrow.

It’s funny that we as a species “know” things. Nowadays people make a pretty big deal out of “well, currently we know that the Earth orbits the Sun, but all we really know is that there’s some movement going on, or maybe not.” But it’s odd that each time around we actually think we got the right answer.

My other favorite bit is that the phrase “we know,” as in “we know how to accurately measure the age of carbon based materials,” actually means “some guy somewhere knows how to do this, or at least knows how to operate a machine that knows how to do this.”

If the rest of the world died tomorrow, I’d be so screwed. I don’t know anything.