Timothy Ferris, in his book, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, says:
And yet the more we know about the universe, the more we come to see how little we know. When the cosmos was
thought to be but a tidy garden, with the sky its ceiling and earth its floor and its history coextensive with that of the
human family tree, it was still possible to imagine that we might one day comprehend it in both plan and detail. That illusion can no longer be sustained. We might eventually obtain some sort of bedrock understanding of cosmic structure, but we will never understand the universe in detail; it is just too big and varied for that. If we possessed an atlas of our galaxy that devoted but a single page to each star system in the Milky Way (so that the sun and all its planets were crammed on one page), that atlas would run to more than ten million volumes of ten thousand pages each. It would take a library the size of Harvard’s to house the atlas, and merely to flip through it, at the rate of a page per second, would require over ten thousand years. Add the details of planetary cartography, potential extraterrestrial biology, the subtleties of scientific principles involved, and the historical dimensions of change, and it
becomes clear that we are never going to learn more than a tiny fraction of the story of our galaxy alone—and there are a hundred billion more galaxies. As the physician Lewis Thomas writes, “The greatest of all the accomplishments of twentieth-century science has been the discovery of human ignorance.”
And yet the more we know about the universe, the more we come to see how little we know. When the cosmos was
thought to be but a tidy garden, with the sky its ceiling and earth its floor and its history coextensive with that of the
human family tree, it was still possible to imagine that we might one day comprehend it in both plan and detail. That illusion can no longer be sustained. We might eventually obtain some sort of bedrock understanding of cosmic structure, but we will never understand the universe in detail; it is just too big and varied for that. If we possessed an atlas of our galaxy that devoted but a single page to each star system in the Milky Way (so that the sun and all its planets were crammed on one page), that atlas would run to more than ten million volumes of ten thousand pages each. It would take a library the size of Harvard’s to house the atlas, and merely to flip through it, at the rate of a page per second, would require over ten thousand years. Add the details of planetary cartography, potential extraterrestrial biology, the subtleties of scientific principles involved, and the historical dimensions of change, and it
becomes clear that we are never going to learn more than a tiny fraction of the story of our galaxy alone—and there are a hundred billion more galaxies. As the physician Lewis Thomas writes, “The greatest of all the accomplishments of twentieth-century science has been the discovery of human ignorance.”
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