Humanity is in its infancy
Modern life may seem ‘natural’, permanent, the pinnacle of achievement for us as a species, a species that’s been around for 300,000 years, but we are far from the pinnacle. The average species gets a total of 5-10 million years on Earth. That’s just the average, sharks have been around for a mind-bending 450 million years. As a species, sharks swan the oceans for 400 million years before the dinosaurs started roaming the Earth. Taking the lower average of how long a species can expect to enjoy this planet, 5 million years, we are only 6% of the way through our journey. Or, put another way, in the scale of a 80 year long human life we are only 4.5 years old. A 4-5 year old human is only just starting to understand that other people have feelings and needs, which explains a lot about humanities behaviour at present.
This calculation brings a reassuring perspective, we are in our infancy, with our whole lives stretched out before us as a species, assuming we survive our current propensity to stick our fingers in the proverbial plug sockets of nuclear warfare and environmental destruction.
What’s exciting is that unlike other animals that have to evolve through a painstakingly slow process, we can learn and adapt. Modern life is built on the minds of those gone before us. No one person could invent a computer or an aeroplane, that is the product of thousands of minds and lives.
There have been about 117 billion humans that ever existed. Now perhaps all those lives don’t contribute to the collective knowledge of humanity like bricks in a cathedral. Of those billions of lives only a few have prevailed through history, Socrates, Aristotle, Galileo, how many brilliant people, lives, thoughts, ideas have been lost to the sands of time. I happen to feel that those lost to our records, those unnamed lives, do contribute meaningfully. As the famous quote goes, ‘What we do in life echoes through eternity’. Our experience of life, the way we think, they way we are, the way we see and understand the world is sculpted by our ancestors, and we will sculpt the lives, the physical, intellectual and spiritual lives, of our successors.
The dark ages show that we can regress, but the trend is very much ‘upwards’. The pace of change has been blistering in recent decades. Try as we might, the distant future of a few million years in the future is unimaginable to us. With this Uber-long view in mind, Musk, Bezos and Branson’s space flight obsession is more than understandable. Imagine being the father of inter-stellar humanity. Imagine a future where people live in other parts of space, telling stories about when the first of our species lived on a planet called Earth and someone called Musk, back in the depths of time, took the first steps to spacelife. A leap comparable to life expanding from sea to land. No wonder the desire is irresistible, to live forever as a forefather, to be almost god-like.
In those distant conversations in a language that will be unrecognisable, by people perhaps unrecognisable as human, Earth will seem like the Biblical garden of Eden. I for one don’t want to live forever as a father of space flight, perhaps because that’s unattainable for me, but also because I want to deeply connect to our Mother Earth. A place so complex, sublime and so vast on a human scale, in its depth of detail, as to be un-knowable to one person. A place 4.5 billion years in the making. Even if we live as long as sharks, it is unlikely we will improve on Earth, this beyond microscopic part of the universe, this place that we call home.
