Discovery information
Hello friends,
I am telling you about discovery!
Reader Harris Y wanted to know about discovery.
Basically, discovery is when you find out about something you didn't already know about. When you are a baby you are discovering stuff all the time because until recently you were only familiar with inside a tummy so even a sock is like holy shit did you guys know about this. As you get older you stop caring about a sock, or you get obsessed with them maybe, I guess there's a lot of possibilities but either way you definitely know about them and a lot of other things so when you discover something it becomes way more special to get a hit of that original baby wonder. Many discoveries you will enjoy a lot like when you discover ska music or orange vanilla seltzer or making your hand into a corner so cats bump their heads against it. Other discoveries are going to suck much like you discover your husband is cheating on you or you discover a lump or you discover your husband cheated on you so much it gave you cancer. Other discoveries will be so minute that you wouldn't think of them that way but technically you are discovering information like you are out of oatmeal
BUT HERE'S SOMETHING. Discovery isn't just something you do about your own life! Just like you used to be a baby we used to be kind of a baby species so we had to discover all kinds of stuff. We used to know so little about the world that you could discover a whole-ass country. You'd have to wander around in a boat until you found a place totally beyond your reckoning and maybe get some stuff to prove you went somewhere new and aren't just a weird liar and if you were really lucky it wouldn't turn out somebody else had actually discovered that same place 150 years ago. Now obviously that's the uh, cute version of how that usually went, an important thing to remember about anything you discover is that just because you are discovering it does not necessarily make it a brand new thing that belongs to you on account of having seen it. I could go on but this isn’t Sickening Horrors Information.
Here are some things that are good/useful to discover:
DISEASES
It's not fun to discover a disease, I don't think whoever discovered the coroney virus has a Cameo page, but it is really helpful to know why all of a sudden people's heads are falling off and growing spider-legs and skittering towards the desert. Discovering spideronditis is the first step to developing a medicine for it!
UNKNOWN HISTORY
There's all kinds of stuff from history we don't know either because nobody thought it was a big deal to preserve or it was actively hidden so people wouldn't know about it. When somebody discovers it we get to have an all new understanding of what turns out to have always been true. My favorite example of this is when they used science to figure out the name Susan had been scrubbed off a bunch of Emily Dickinson's writings to straight them up and now everybody knows Emily Dickinson was one of America's heroic lesbians. I suppose what I like about this is that I have seen a lot of people go, here is my gay reading of this text but this is the only time I'm aware of someone reading something and saying I am going to a laboratory to prove this is gay. I respect that a lot! I suppose there are more astounding examples of this like hidden burial chambers but was Molly Shannon ever in a movie about those? I don't think so!
NEW SCIENCE
Most scientific stuff used to be undiscovered. Even pretty small stuff like how to make fire, that was a massive scientific discovery done essentially by funny monkeys. A lot of scientific discoveries are very popular and we hell of enshrine the people who did them so when kids are saying they don't want to do homework we can say don't you want to be like Marie Curie and then they get sooooo excited imagining themselves as Marie Curie that it give them the juice to finish their report on how tortoises are big. I think some of you do science? I'm counting math as science, it's at least science's cousin. If you make a major scientific discovery and credit me with a little bit of it I will give you access to Good Information Premium, where I call you on the phone and read it to you so you can rest those tired eyes.
SPACE STUFF/INNER WORKINGS OF THE UNIVERSE
Okay so this is also science but when it comes to science this is kind of the next level. Not to diss people who are figuring out a ton of stuff about plants its wonderful that you do that and we absolutely need it, but discovering planets or even going to planets to discover stuff on them seems harder. It's all a lot further away, you know? I guess if you are discovering stuff on the bottom of the ocean it's equal footing but somehow I have the feeling we aren't supposed to know that stuff as much as what's on Mars. Space exploration is still in it's infancy, which kind of sucks considering we've been doing it for like a hundred years, but any time someone discovers something in space it's such a cool discovery. Remember when we discovered Pluto has a big heart on it? There is an ENTIRE PLANET that is CUTE! That's incredible!
WEIRD ANIMALS
Somehow we are still discovering animals, you would think since there's loads of people competing to discover all the animals so they can name it like Glenn's Beetle they would all be discovered, but every now and then you hear guess what there's a new kind of gecko. It's usually pretty small little animals that we are discovering these days, I can't imagine what it was like back in the day. Like the first time I ever saw an elephant when I was 19 it was a transformative, quasi-religious experience and I'd already seen them on TV. Can you imagine discovering those! Even if you are discovering them in a bullshit explorer way where the guys who live there already can tell you what those are called, that's the kind of thing that would make you want to discover things forever. If you discover an animal that is any good, like not some kind of new extra poisonous bug or something, please let me know!
STUFF WE HAVEN'T EVEN THOUGHT OF YET
There is stuff left to discover that we don't even have a concept of on account of we haven’t found out about it. I suppose sometimes discovery is broken up into stages, like it has to be totally rigorously proven to be Officially discovered, like how a lot of people are quite certain there is a Bigfoot and there's even that little video clip but technically on paper we have not discovered Bigfoot, but what I mean here is stuff we don't even have the vocabulary for yet. Secret inner workings of the universe, stuff that once understood could be as plain as day but would fundamentally change our relationship to reality, stuff that would be like explaining the internet to a caveman. We are still pretty much a baby species, we like to act very grown up because we figured out how to go to the moon and stuff but measured against any species that could come from wherever they are to here that is like bragging about completing toilet training. Ken Burns all making a documentary with people reading letters from officials expressing concerns you're still going to get a little bit of pee on the floor. If you discover something that changes the world forever and give me a little bit of the credit I will give you access to Good Information Premium Ultra, where I move into your house and you get to watch me writing these.
Thank you for reading my big discovery email! If you would like to find out about something, tell me and I will try to already know about it.
Love,
Ryland Duncan