[734129837261]

"We don't know how fire comes to life, and we will never know."

"We don't know how to defend ourselves against beasts, and we'll never know."

"We don't know how disease spreads, let's just hug it out, we'll never know."

"We don't know how to fly like a bird, we'll never know."

"We don't know how to land the booster of a rocket, we'll never know."

"We don't know how to cure that form of cancer, and we'll never know."

What a ridiculous defeatist attitude. History has proven that, so far, we've been very reliable at figuring out things that were deemed impossible.

I'd say we already know. It would be infinitely arrogant of us to think we're the originals. We're likely inside an inescapable but observable simulation, inside a simulation, repeat for any unknown number of times. That's probably how "the universe" (our universe) began.

Our parent universes probably have far more complexities to them that have been stripped from ours, for the sake of computational simplicity. Perhaps the actual originals, or any of our parent simulators, know exactly how the universe came to be. We might figure it out, too.

[TaupeRanger]

None of those things are impossible based on known physics. Traveling backwards in time to observe the beginning of the universe, and/or somehow existing outside the universe in order to do the observation, is impossible. Could we learn new physics that make it possible? Yes, but it is still a totally different class of problems than the ones you listed. Those were ONLY a question of knowledge. The problem at hand is a question of both knowledge AND the laws of physics actually allowing for that knowledge to be had. There was never any reason to assume that we would be unable to cure a certain type of cancer with the right knowledge alone.

[pilaf]

> We're likely inside an inescapable but observable simulation, inside a simulation, repeat for any unknown number of times. That's probably how "the universe" (our universe) began.

That's just deferring the question. If we're a simulation inside a larger universe, then how did that universe begin? Although I'd argue if we're in a simulation then we're still a part of the host universe, even if kept in isolation, and it's that host universe we should ultimately care about when asking the big questions.

[kretaceous]

I agree that the title is kind of defeatist and I'm not against scientific research on finding the source of universe, heck I optimistically hope humans find it within my lifetime. That said, all your examples are really miniscule and dare I say, easy, as compared to the scale of understanding the universe.

You present an interesting semi-fictional point on simulation.

[danwee]

What seems arrogant to me is to think that we, as human beings, can know everything given time and space.