Evolution

Humanity is in a very dramatic position right now. We started as literally animals. We spent billions of years evolving to deal with the various challenges of life on Earth, until right about when we developed the ability to act as free-ranging, long-walking plains creatures, there was a spark. Abstract thought became possible. Suddenly we’re looking at things in the scale of thousands of years– zooming in by a factor of a million. Slow motion. We develop the use of tools and agriculture. Storage and numbers. Settlements. Civilizations.

Now things are changing in terms of hundreds of years. Evolution can’t occur on this stage, but natural selection has some effects here and there. We gain the ability to work metals, to transport ourselves on devices of our own making. We conquer the seas, we develop communication networks and gradually come to understand just how large our planet truly is. We create self-motivated machines, and mass production.

Now, every ten years feels tangibly different. We make significant advancements as a race in ten years, changes which might be considered as significant in how we behave and how we perceive the world as our transition from dwelling in trees to taking to the open plains. We gain the ability to literally fly. We wage wars that cross the entire globe. Electricity transforms our world. We find suddenly we are capable of changing the very nature of our planet, having devastating effects on massive swaths of geography if we are not careful. The computer is born. Culture itself –the transmission of abstract thought between masses of people– becomes a weapon. We reach out and touch another astral body. Our definitions of ourselves and of others come under questioning, and we have to relearn what a person is step by step. The synthetic and the electronic begins something new and addictive. New technologies begin to open up with dazzling speed even without the stimulus of war. The internet lurches into full existence, widely used and making the world suddenly a smaller, more intimate place. Now, we look at our planet and we ask questions and make moral decisions with a new kind of awareness of the people on this globe as a whole, with their myriad tragic conflicts and misunderstandings, and we struggle to make something better.

Today, natural selection has little chance to affect us, if you’re lucky enough to be born in the right country. Life is virtually forced upon us. But we are changing faster than we ever have before. And we cannot easily predict what is coming– every attempt we make to speculate as to what life will be like in the future is thoroughly foiled. Our grand hopes are often dashed, but fully unexpected gifts arise instead. Fifty years ago, they spoke of flying cars, but they did not think of what a network of instantaneous communication terminals in every home across the planet could do to bring us together. Ten years ago, they spoke of artificial intelligence, but they did not foresee the transformative effect a simple “phone” could have on us as a people.

The moment we are in now, as a species, may be described as “an explosion.” After billions of years of development, we have hit an instant of blurring, furious action, in which every single generation sees the world vastly transformed several times over between birth and death. What could possibly come next? Where are we going? Should we be afraid, or hopeful?

Evolution in the natural sense is no longer a great factor for us. Before we will develop a natural affinity for slouching in chairs and tapping keys, things will change again, and we will also begin to change ourselves directly. That spark of abstract thought we gained on the open fields tens of thousands of years ago, that was the beginning of our turning into something new, perhaps something we cannot fully imagine now, simply because, like the internet or the phone, it is at once simple, perhaps humble, yet ranging further in implications than we had ever cared to imagine.

Our minds, our ability to think and learn and understand, these are our most precious assets. Right now, we are on the way to becoming something extraordinary, but we are still animals. We strain against this contradiction, and though we find beauty in it, there is also cruelty. It is unknown if our descendants, however many hundreds or thousands of years from now, will look on what we were now and pity us, but right now we labor in the forges of creating this exquisite new species, struggling through torturous and confusing contradictions and obstacles in the quest for something more, something better.

More than ever before, we are the critical link in the chain. We must strive for more, and to be truly better, to find the answers for morality, understanding, communication, motivation, and for crossing the many borders between the I and the Other.

Every day we live in these times is a day in the heart of an explosion. We may not see what remains afterward, but you and I, we walk in the flames, and we must shape them. Together.