In another several thousand years, understanding might become either greater or of such a different quality that what our cutting edge sciences are theorizing now might be studied as secular mythology, even mysticism.

Our sciences, and our faith in sciences, are a product of our time, this moment in our mental evolution; this moment in the mental evolution of our consciousness. At other points of our mental evolution, our conceptions were completely different.

When people looked up at the night sky in ancient times, they had their conception of it. We look back at them and say that their conception was wrong. But when they looked up at the night sky, they were looking up at pretty much the same night sky that we look up and see, albeit much clearer, and it didn't concern them that sometime in the future, someone might think back to them and call their conceptions wrong. Even if it did occur to them, why would it change their conception, their reality?

It is so hard for us to imagine ourselves in another time past, and imagine the understanding of that time as the whole thing, as true and in fact. Greek gods, Roman gods, Hindu gods, Judea, Buddhist insight cosmology, Earth spirits, the scientific method.

Nope, that last one still doesn't fit. Not yet. We haven't discarded it yet. We don't think we ever will. Science is the final say. I'm not knocking science. Science is pretty fantastic stuff, but we're so arrogant about its superiority over any other world view. We don't even think of science as a "world view", we think of scientific conclusions as fact. Until the next scientific conclusion comes along, at least.

Even in my armchair field of interest of astronomy, navigating a spacecraft across the solar system and into orbits of other planets is pretty good evidence of the precision accuracy of science. But to think science, as a system, is the zenith of human knowledge and development of consciousness is possibly short-sighted, and not very imaginative.

Stephen Hawking's recent retraction of his prior theory on black holes sounds rather unimaginative, especially regarding something as poorly understood as black holes. Black holes are currently the rabbit holes of cosmology. Definitively supporting or retracting various theories like he's writing it in stone is like Einstein calling his cosmological constant his "biggest blunder". Decades later, scientists have revived the cosmological constant as viable in dark energy. Anyway, Hawking's position is probably better explained in the full published paper, and I probably couldn't even understand it if I tried.

There will always be a place for science, absolutely no doubt. Its accuracy regarding what it does cover and its benefits to humankind are invaluable. But if science and technology are the end-all of human thought and analysis, I think we're doomed. We might as well throw in the towel right now. It has to lead to something bigger. More compassionate.