Too much to digest?

The earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, and the earliest signs of life date from 3.5 billion years ago.   Humans with the anatomy we have appear about 200,000 years ago, but the development of agriculture and the settling down that led to what we consider to be civilization emerged only 12,000 years ago.  The earliest written records that have survived are much more recent than that.

The acceleration in our knowledge and ability to manipulate our environment in just the past few decades is really beyond astonishing.

Genetically we haven't changed much from our ancestors of just a few centuries ago who used the several hundred most visible stars as a screen on which to project their mythology.   Now we think there are 300-400 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and our tools like the Hubble space telescope have reached out to find evidence of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe - or rather the part of the universe "near" enough to us that light has been able to reach us in the 13.8 or so billion years that the universe has existed.

Though we know these new facts in one sense, I don't think we have really integrated them into our minds to comprehend their meaning.  Perhaps we can't.  After all, our particular form of DNA replicators has survived and prospered because it has been successful at surviving and replicating.  The fact that we can build a Hubble telescope and put it in space to gather data back to the beginning of the universe and even comprehend what a galaxy is astonishing in itself.

It would be yet another incredible leap if it turned out that our brains, which needed only to be adaptable enough that we would survive on this planet, could fully understand the universe.  In short, I conclude that our survival required us to be able to process complex data from our senses, and once we mastered the manipulation of matter and the building of complex tools, we have been able to create new sensing devices that have provided us with an incredible amount of new data - indeed, extending across billions of years and distances truly beyond comprehension.  But I'm not convinced that we have the capacity to digest and integrate all that information.

We understand now that the universe is incredibly more than a storage device for our cultural myths, but I think we don't comprehend what it is  - we're buried in an ever growing pile of facts any one of which - the age of the universe, the amount of energy produced by a star in a single second, the number of stars in our galaxy with planets that could support life, and on and on - is too much to digest.