Vauxia is a primitive sponge from the cambrian period (a few hundred million years ago). I always thought it sounded cool, like the Norse god of silly hats or something. More importantly, thinking about what life on this planet was like 400M years ago reminds me that no matter how evolved we think we are, we haven't reached any evolutionary destination.
It is easy to tell ourselves that we're done. We're done growing, done evolving and there's nothing more to discover. We thought the same thing 500 years ago, 100 years ago, even 50 years ago. From today's perspective life during those times seems so backwards, and 500 years is nothing in a geological timeframe. What will life forms 100 million years in the future think of us? How primitive we will seem! No, we're not done yet, not by a long shot.
This isn't about science fiction, this is about judgment and the reality about how small we really are in the whole scheme of things. Many people would have you believe that they're smarter, better, and generally more evolved than everyone else. When we point to our heroes and gods, we believe that they represent some kind of end point for progress and that it can't get any better.
In reality, we're all just at varying levels of imperfection. The best we can hope for is to make it a little bit better for the next generation and to gently nudge progress in a positive direction. When someone does something great they help this process along more than the rest of us, but that doesn't mean there isn't a small role for everyone to play.
The thing I struggle with the most is how many people are out to compete, not to collaborate. In first-world countries there isn't much need to compete for food, health resources and other necessities of life. For most people, there's nothing threatening our ability to procreate and keep our families alive so we use our competitive instincts to get ahead at the expense of others. I would like to live in a world where people share ideas, work together and attempt to create tools and ideas bigger than the sum of its parts. There are plenty of examples of this belief, but it is going to take a lot of work to cocoon myself in these ideals.
Original