Even if it only takes place in the head of the individual, the experience of the sublime is essential to a healthy mindset. You can’t proceed day to day buttressed only by the full science-based knowledge of the world and its life, its systems, people, and conflicts. These all lead to entropy, death, to a sense of doom, a sense of everything winding down, spiraling downward forever. The Sublime inflates this membrane of knowledge, gives it a shape and form that allows the individual to move, to assert in the face of all contradiction, to hope in the midst of horror, to dream in the blackness of a world designed for despair.

The conundrum of science is that it saves lives, gives us longer better lives, vanquishes many kinds of suffering, helps us value and conserve resources, opens us to the wonders of the micro and macro universes, supplies countless measures of hope for a myriad means of salvation through technology and through better understanding ourselves, *even as* it informs us of just how royally fucked we are in the world, of the hopelessness and intransigence of greed, violence and the entire spectrum of human-made human-edured miseries, of the dying of our planet, of the humanity-imposed extinctions of life forms.

Without science our short miserable ignorant lives would be inflated to breathtaking diameters by the gasses of the sublime. Mystery and awe would be our daily bread because there wouldn’t be much else to eat, or they’d lie alongside bloody violence as we bludgeoned animals and one another for food in pursuits we’d wholeheartedly presume to be triggered, led, and justified by divine and awesome powers that were merely the reflections of our own needs, lens flares of our bright pain bouncing around in our heads that we in our sublime rapture would presume to be visions of gods.