Earth. This is where you live.

Total land area: 57,500,000 square miles. Add in the water, and it’s around 200,000,000. All that land and water is made up of around 10^50 individual atoms. That’s 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 particles all jumbled together.

We’ve catalogued approximately 1,750,000 different species of life. But there’s many more we haven’t found yet. Estimates for the total number of species go as high as 30,000,000. The total number of living things probably exceeds 10^30. That’s over 10,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000 individuals, all fighting to survive.

ONE human body is made up of around 5 trillion cells. Millions of heart cells act in sync for every heartbeat. Entire colonies of bacteria work to digest your food for you. Billions of neurons are firing in perfect sequence while you read this sentence.

We lack the capacity to fathom how enormous and complicated and chaotic the world really is. No matter where you are, there are trillions and trillions of interactions occuring around you every second. Sitting in your chair right now, thousands of hairs are simoultaneously growing on your body, micron by micron. Zoom in closer, and you’ll see billions of your cells constantly dividing, growing, working, and dying. Zoom in again, and you’ll see trillions of proteins, tiny perfect chemical loops, constantly executing the instructions that keep you alive. Keep zooming in, closer, closer, and you’ll eventually reach quarks, an uncountable number of them, vibrating in perfect harmony.

So the world is fantastically complex. But it’s not random. It’s chaotic, but it’s consistent. It’s a game with rules. They may be obscured from view, but they’re there. And humans are able to figure them out. Systematically deciphering the rules of the game is what humans DO, and doing it is what lifted us from the African savannah to the top of the planet’s food chain. And what we’ve learned is that our world, our existence is a hierarchy of ever increasing complexity. Elementary particles organize to form protons and neutrons, which organize to form atoms, which organize to form molecules, which organize to form chemicals and minerals, and so on up a great chain.

This hiearchy of existence extends from the tiniest quark to the biggest galaxy cluster. The enormity of it requires that it be split up into manageable pieces, and try to grasp each piece independently. So that’s what we do. Each branch of science studies a seperate level (or part of a level) of this hierarchy, and looks for the rules that describe its behavior. Physics deals with the rules that govern subatomic particles, economics deals with the rules that govern human interactions, genetics deals with the rules that govern our genes, etc.

Every level seems to have rules that are more or less independent of the levels above and below it. Go high enough up the hierarchy, and all the millions of interactions going on below merge into a new set of behaviors. To know the properties of a gas, you don’t need to know about the movements of every particle in it; you can just use the ideal gas law PV=nRT. You don’t need to know how the explosive properties of gasoline, or the material properties of rubber to know what your car will do when you step on the gas.

But if you look at the whole hierarchy, you notice that not EVERY rule is unique. You start to see the same rules coming up over and over again. Think about how many different phenomenon conform to a gaussian distribution. Look how many physical phenomenon operate under the inverse square law. Certain behaviors seem to come up over and over again. There are general principles that seem to apply to many different levels of the hierarchy of existence.

If we look, we begin to see many more of these general principles: The principle of entropy. The law of diminishing returns. The 80/20 rule. The list goes on and on.

So what does that mean? Maybe nothing. It might be a coincidence. But I don’t think so. The same thing happening over and over again is a pattern; and if there’s a pattern there should be an underlying rule that CAUSES the pattern. I have my suspicions about what this rule (or rules) might be. But I have so little information; I’m operating on the few grains of sand in my head that I’ve picked up out of an endless desert of knowledge. I’ll need more.

So this is my goal: keep putting knowledge into my head. Keep looking at this hierarchy of existence I find myself in. Keep looking for general principles behind it. And see where finding them takes me.

The world is a fantastic place; I want to know how it works.