WE all like discovering things.

Just like stepping into the wardrobe and tumbling out of the back into Narnia, we can’t resist following our curiosity.

We are hard-wired to learn about things and press on until we have the answers.

Marketing people have long known this. That’s why commercial television often precedes ad breaks with a quiz.

They know viewers can’t resist waiting to see if they got the right answer. And so they keep watching.

Without curiosity mankind would still be starting fires with twigs, communicating in grunts and living in damp, bone-freezing caves.

Of course it’s harder these days to be impressed by new breakthroughs in technology or achievements in human endeavour.

All of the big frontier-shattering ones were made 100 years ago.

As amazing as an iPhone app that can locate your misplaced car keys is, it still doesn’t compare with the moment Wilbur and Orville Wright first took to the air in their flying machine.

I think in the next hundred years there will be some absolutely mindblowing discoveries.

In recent weeks we’ve seen startling detailed pictures of Pluto (rather unceremoniously downgraded a few years ago from a planet to a dwarf planet).

And we learned that scientists have found the most Earth-like planet in the universe so far. Other than Earth, of course. That’s the most Earth-like when it comes to planets.

I’ve often thought (and might have said it in this column at some point - note to self, check back to make sure I’m not repeating myself) that there is a common assumption that Man has all the answers, that our understanding of the world is definitive.

But if history teaches us anything it’s that inevitably our grasp of how things work will be turned on its head as new discoveries are made.

And we’ll be left with egg on our faces.

All the big mysteries of life are slowly being solved. Everything from the question of where disease comes from to whether the world is flat or round were once mysteries. Man eventually unlocked them and we no longer marvel at their explanations.

They’re commonly accepted.

I’m sure the same will be true in the future in regard to the questions that puzzle us today. For example, I’m sure we will eventually discover intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and that we will establish exactly what happens to our consciousness after we die.

My money is on it going to the same place where all the missing socks go. I believe hell is a place where bad human spirits are sent to put odd-socks into matching pairs.

Right, this column’s done.

Now, where did I put my car keys?