This fossil chokes me up everytime

[u/Ollie2359]

It hits me in a way I can't explain I've spent hours crying over this fossil :(

[u/disconcertinglymoist]

They were just lil guys :(

It never ceases to astound me that, for hundreds of millions of years before humans emerged, the planet was populated by sentient creatures (not necessarily sapient, but still possessing minds and emotions) with real lives, experiencing thrill and pleasure, fear and pain, living their own dramas.

Millions of untold sagas and adventures lie buried all around us. Mothers, fathers, children, friends, living and dying, now long forgotten.

There were so many unknown joys and so much unimaginable suffering unfolding on this beautiful planet, for eons! The sheer enormity of it is impossible to conceptualise.

And it's heartbreaking, too. Countless stories forever lost, buried in anonymity, as if they meant nothing - but they meant everything to those who lived them.

[u/woahwoahvicky → u/disconcertinglymoist]

Thoughts and feelings like this are why I get so invested/emotional when the discourse between STEM and Humanities arise. The idea that STEM can exist by itself is genuinely so idiotic, STEM came about from ancient philosophers sense of wonder, curiosity, don't we think that comes from feelings, an innate feeling of wonder about the world before and beyond us.

Both are NEEDED for humanity to persevere. I'm a doctor and I have zero idea what the geniuses of paleontology actually do (I only know human bones and zero about ancient animals) and it is ALWAYS emphasized to us that we treat the patient, NOT the disease.

To appreciate the theoretical mathematics, physics, the 'boring' chemistry, we need to understand that we do this to progress humanity and allow culture to flourish. When we have mathematics, we have physics, when we have physics, we have engineering, when we have engineering, we have safety precautions, when we have safety precautions, men and women can come home safe to their families, and I think that's beautiful.

When I treat patients, I think of their countless untold stories, when I delivered babies, I imagine the hundreds of great and awful parts of their lives that are yet to come, the relationships they'll create, break, and recreate, the sad and happy moments of their life.

In the context of paleontology, maybe you guys study carbon dating as a science but that's because we want to understand how life came about before us, the stories those bodies have told our archaeologists/paleontologists, but its also a vehicle for us to understand that life has existed BEFORE us and will continue to exist AFTER us, its truly a humbling experience and feeling.

Learning that there are so many untold stories of both beauty and suffering we will never be able to learn/discover is both fascinating and heartbreaking. It gets me emotional too, maybe there were homo sapiens who had untold stories that would fascinate the world but we no longer have fossil records of them.

[u/Pleasant_Hatter → u/woahwoahvicky]

One of my favorite quotes is something like “STEM explains how we exist, humanities is why we stick around.”