I feel like this comic exists as a bit of catharsis for the scientific folks, but I gotta say I appreciated the perspective as someone who's struggled with this, philosophically.

I feel like "pop science" in particular just tries to say "Believe our experts. We figured out the right answer. What people thought for centuries was vast and full of wonder is in fact a gray room, and opinions to the contrary are uneducated and misinformed. Your artistic renderings and sci-fi is wrong."

That smugness can be seen as trying to eliminate wonder and solve the joy out of things to flaunt one's own intelligence...which seems to be rewarded heavily by our culture.

For those of us who didn't get the opportunity for university, I wish the wonderous parts of science were more exposed.

Sadly it's really hard to find that stuff among mountains of clickbait telling you they used the super collider to build a DOOM-esque wormhole to Hell. Lmao