Are some things unknowable? Do we know what’s happened in the past? Can we know what will happen in the future? We can imagine: will we be able to hyper-loop from England to Australia? Will cars fly? Will a world exist underground? Can we call a pod to transport us from A to B by just a tap? That’s what the kids in the picture imagined the future to be like. Fast forward twelve or thirteen years, are these notions still a figure of child imagination or is it a reality? I can say hand-on-heart that I am yet to see an underground society or have a smart pod pick me up and take me to school everyday, but who is to say that that can never happen?

Children have a much more active imagination than adults. As we grow up, we learn more how the world works, adapt to our environments and therefore lose our imaginative and creative elements. People in creative professions develop personal systems to stay creative. A regular, day-to-day person develops a subconscious routine of how to navigate through life, which becomes their norm. As cognitive misers (being lazy) we have a tendency to stick to these routines because: we know them well, they become effortless and we feel comfortable doing them. This is why we lose our creativity as we age.

However, although this may be the case, we still don’t know everything. We can’t know everything. The kids in the picture had high expectations of a world that you can power by your fingers. Those kids now haven’t necessarily seen this world, but, those kids (in another twelve or thirteen years) might. No one can say it can’t happen, because no one knows.

Knowledge is defined as “facts, information and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.” Or “awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation.” In simpler terms, when we think of the knowledge in our heads, it’s really something we’ve been told and believed it to be true or something we’ve learnt from doing something. The knowledge we obtain through teaching and learning isn’t information we have perceived directly. We consider what we have been taught knowledge in the basis of two major factors- evidence and trust. Trust is defined as a “firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something.” Evidence is “the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid.” In Science- for example- for a new theory to come into affect, the information has to be tested and supported. This evidence verifies and consolidates this information to be “knowledge.” Without it, it doesn’t have a leg to stand on and (generally) becomes unreliable. This is where trust comes into play. Despite numbers and statistics as evidence, this so called knowledge we learn and acquire isn’t something we find upfront; it’s discovered by other individuals. This new information is then relayed down different channels of people before it reaches the point where you come across it. We hear it and are told it’s true; therefore, we subconsciously classify it as such. Can words not get lost in translation? Do different people not interpret different things differently? This shouldn’t affect us because we’ve already considered it as new knowledge. In a nutshell, knowledge isn’t limited given that trust isn’t limited. It takes many forms and many ways of getting to a certain point. This certain point isn’t the same for everyone; therefore, what’s considered knowledge isn’t the same for everyone.