We Will Never Know

“We will never know.”

These four words have a peculiar talent for crawling under my mental skin, sparking a personal bout with OCD that I’d rather not entertain. There’s a finality to them, an end to the road of discovery that feels too premature, too resigned. And yet, these words are uttered far more frequently than they ought to be.

Across the vast annals of human history, all kinds of things have remained elusive—perplexing phenomena that defy explanation, faceless tribal leaders lost to the sands of time, entire civilizations that seem to have vanished without a trace. Confronted with these tantalizing enigmas, historians, archaeologists, scholars of every stripe would often say, "We will never know."

And it's not just in the dusty halls of academia that you'll hear this phrase. Read any book about history, or throw on a good history documentary, and you're bound to encounter these four words forming an insurmountable barrier to our collective curiosity.

Let's take a moment to ponder…