I never understood why people cite this as a demonstration for how little we humans understand about our world.
The reason we haven't mapped the seafloor is because why would we? It's like arguing we know nothing about biology because we've only sequenced the genome of a fraction of humans or something. It's not that we can't do it, the reason we haven't done it is because there's no good compelling reason to do it. What do we expect to learn from mapping 100% of the sea floor?
As for the parents question – "How many years until we've discovered "everything"?"
I think we may be fairly close to knowing everything we can know and it's quite reasonable to assume we're now comfortably on the tail end of the S-curve of physics discoveries. I hope I'm wrong of course.
I cite it because we're barely scratching the surface of our own world, which is one of a potentially infinite number of worlds that is encapsulated by the word "everything."
Why would we map the seafloor is an insane question that immediately invalidates all other opinions that you may have, unfortunately. The human embodiment of that meme with the pickaxe guy walking away from a diamond strike if only he had swung once more.
It's so hubristic to assume that our generation is the one that will discover the answers to everything.
> I cite it because we're barely scratching the surface of our own world, which is one of a potentially infinite number of worlds that is encapsulated by the word "everything."
I think maybe I was assuming the parent was referring specifically to physics discoveries while you were assuming that they were asking more broadly about how many years until we've discovered everything discoverable?
Unless you are actually arguing there's likely lots of physics discoveries to be made because humans have only photographed a fraction of trees on the earth, or mapped a fraction of the seafloor, or sequenced only a fraction of the genomes of known species?
To expand a little, my prediction is based on the fact that we can already explain the vast majority of physical processes with extreme procession. The things we can't explain tend to be very small, very large or very quick. But there's almost nothing in our day to day lives that we can't explain anymore.
This means that today to make new discoveries we tend to have to invest huge sums of money and build experiments that we'll increasingly struggle to scale significantly beyond. For example, maybe humans could just about build something 10x the size of the LHC if we really wanted, but 100x seems near-impossible. Maybe we can build slightly larger telescopes, but again, this is becoming harder due to the scale we're already working at.
So while I agree there's probably lots of physics out there to discover, the physics we humans are actually likely to be able to discover is rapidly diminishing. And the physics which is likely to revolutionise our daily lives is presumably even smaller more due to scale and energy levels where mysteries remain.
But ultimately who knows, this is just my opinion – an opinion I'm being downvoted for because apparently HN discussions these days are a place for us circlejerk around the consensus view rather than discuss differences in opinion.
