When I think of prehistoric humans, and how much time they spent studying the sky, I remember what makes me love our species again. Because what they studied was only a random arrangement of lights moving regularly against a black background, but what we've seen there has included both metaphors for human existence and the very dimensions of our physical reality. We are capable of so much with so little because of the way we use patterns to think, the way we build and arrange them in our minds to predict the paths of light against the darkness.
We fall astray, however, when we forget that these patterns are tools of the mind, and instead come to believe that we have learned the "true" pattern to reality, that we have mastered its meaning. For whatever we may come to know in the course of our lives, all knowledge is created by humans, and therefore cut down to dimensions tolerable for a human mind; there is no good reason, however, to imagine that a truly objective reality should be comprehensible to us.
Still, the search will be forever carried on, as our people will never be short of minds incapable of imagining their own limits.
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