/biz/ - Business & Finance

Suppose that you are an astronaut whose spaceship gets out of control and crashes on an unknown planet. When you regain consciousness and discover that you are not hurt badly, the first three questions on your mind would be
>Where am I?
>How can I discover it?
>What should I do?

You see unfamiliar vegetation outside, and there is air to breathe; the sunlight seems paler than you remember it and colder. You turn to look at the sky, but stop. You are struck by a sudden feeling: if you do not look, you won't have to know that you are, perhaps, too far from Earth and no return is possible: so long as you don't know it, you are free to believe whatever you wish - and you experience a foggy, pleasant, but somehow guilty, kind of hope.

You turn to your instruments: they may be damaged, you don't know how seriously. But you stop, struck by a sudden fear: how can you trust these instruments? How can you know they won't mislead you? How can you know whether they will work in a different world? You turn away from your instruments.

Now you begin to wonder why you have no desire to do anything. It seems so much safer to wait for something to turn up somehow; it is better, you tell yourself, to not rock the spaceship. Far in the distance, you see living creatures approaching; you don't know whether they are human, but they walk on two feet. They, you decide, will tell you what to do.

You are never heard from again.

This is fantasy, you say? That you would not act like that and no astronaut ever would? Perhaps not. But this is the way most men live their lives, here, on Earth. Most men spend their days trying to evade three questions, the answers to which underlie man's every thought, feeling, and action, whether he is consciously aware of it or not.
>Where am I?
>How do I know it?
>What should I do?