We Are Riding an Explosion

And destroying the world is part of the learning process

“Humans are destroying the world”. Of course we are. Maybe that’s what happens when you find a way to make explosive progress. Let’s have a look at how things change in the world.

Let’s go way back. A couple of billion years ago there was no life at all on this planet. Hundreds of millions of years ago there were dinosaurs. After those guys went extinct it took nature a hundred million years to produce anything that is capable of lighting a fire. A hundred million years since the extinction of the dinosaurs. Just to give you a sense of scale, the bible was written 2,000 years ago. So that’s 50,000 times longer. Yeah, a long time. That’s how evolution works, it is slow it is random and it has no conceivable purpose or direction. Stuff just happens, and animals just live, fight for resources and die. This is a slow process. Incredibly slow. To give you an example it took 60 million years after trees came around for bacteria to evolve the ability to eat them. 60,000,000 years. That’s why we have coal
That’s how slow nature is. We are not talking about inventing technology in 60,000,000 years, we are talking about finally finding a way to recycle wood matter.

Some 50,000 years ago we strapped ourselves to this rocket called “culture” and we are flying at supersonic speeds while trying to figure out a way to steer the damn thing.

Now let’s look at human progress.
Let our starting point be the time when humans learned how to control fire. Our best estimates place that some 2,000,000 years ago. It took us a further 1.85 million years until the use of fire was widespread throughout humanoid societies. That was just 125,000 years ago. Not even half a million. And what have we achieved since then? We have built cities, we have eradicated diseases, we have found ways to generate more energy than any other living organism ever did. We are able to generate so much energy that we can obliterate the whole planet. We have learned to think and to talk, we invented writing and education. We are the only species to have ever existed that actually makes an effort to protect other species, without needing them for food or fur.

How did we achieve all that? What separates us from the others? Our single greatest invention. Culture.

We invented a way to get ourselves out of the blind evolution path prescribed by nature. Evolution doesn’t have a goal in mind, things just evolve with no direction. Human societies are not like that. We can create ideas, we can share them and we can use them as an aiming mechanism to launch ourselves purposely in the future. This allows us to progress at breakneck speed, way beyond what the rest of nature is capable of doing. So, of course, we are going to destroy a few things along the way. Some 50,000 years ago we strapped ourselves to this rocket called “culture” and we are flying at supersonic speeds while trying to figure out a way to steer the damn thing. Of course, there will be collateral damage caused by our quest for knowledge and security.

We are not the destruction of nature, embodied in flesh. We are nature and with all our sins and ungodly crimes against each other and against the world we are an experiment of nature.