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Being a human in the 21st century often feels
frustrating. We are clearly at the high point
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of our species – never have so many of us lived so well,
been so healthy and well off. At the same time life is
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incredibly hard – more than 15 thousand children
died yesterday, 700 million people live in extreme
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poverty, even within rich societies there is loads
of unfairness and daily struggle. We are divided,
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unable to solve our problems while creating
new ones, destroying our world in the process.
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In many ways the vibe is that we live
in dark times. It is so easy to feel
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disconnected and powerless in the face of
problems too big to solve. And so the state
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of the world fills many of us with doom,
hopelessness and sadness. We feel it too.
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It is one of the most pervasive stories of
our time and there is a lot of truth to it.
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But as Terry Pratchett said, we are the
storytelling ape, we think in narratives
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and live in a network of stories that make up
our world. So without minimising the darkness,
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we want to add a story that we find
helpful for dealing with the world.
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This is subjective and not a science
video, so you don’t need to buy into it.
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Our story begins with the
first moment that ever was.
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14 billion years ago time and space began from
some kind of state of pure energy. From this
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very first moment the universe grew
and evolved. Things that were one
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became many. Energy turned into forces and
particles, out of chaos emerged the laws of
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nature. From these ingredients stars arose,
gigantic engines, turning simple stuff into
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complex stuff only to die violently
and spread the new complexity around.
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Out of this more complex stuff,
new stars and more worlds emerged,
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repeating the cycle until most of the simple
stuff was used up and most stars that will
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ever be born had been born. And then, on one
planet, where the conditions were just right,
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dead particles and molecules combined to make
another jump in complexity. Maybe the laws that
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govern everything were destined to make life
happen. Maybe it was just a cosmic dice throw.
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But life, now the most complex thing in existence,
wasted no time and spread to even the tiniest
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corners. For billions of years cells held on,
fighting against the elements and each other,
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evolving in the process. Until one day they came
together and made another jump in complexity,
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to plants, animals and fungi. First
in the oceans, then on the land.
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Earth was now the stage of something grand,
a complexity acceleration machine going at
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full speed. Millions of new species emerged and
vanished. Life was beaten down over and over,
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but every time it came back stronger. Resettling
niches filled with corpses of the ones that came
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before. Most of these beings are hidden in
time forever, we only know their faint echoes.
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Until a few million years ago an animal
looked at the night sky. It looked at its
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hands. It saw its reflection in a puddle. And it
realised it existed. That it was alive. Here and
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now. You probably had such a moment as a small
child, mundane and majestic at the same time.
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This is where the human story begins, about
six million years ago, with the hominins.
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Still just another animal among many others.
They split into many families and lineages
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evolving further or disappearing again. But for
some reason their evolutionary niche enabled
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their brains to grow and they learned more about
this strange world. They prayed to the stars,
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they tamed fire and turned stones into tools.
They celebrated and cried together. Life was
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hard and brutally short but together they
endured – probably by telling themselves
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stories about the world. For almost 250,000
generations they built a biological foundation.
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And then, at some point 200,000
years or about 10,000 generations
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ago they became us. Humanity had arrived.
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Our ancestors did not waste any time.
Their world was still hard and unforgiving,
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but out of pure stubbornness they did not
accept that. They wanted their lives to be
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better. So they made better tools and learned to
preserve their knowledge beyond death. Progress
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started slow. And then suddenly they (or better WE)
made the planet our own. Agriculture and
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the first villages and temples snowballed
into civilization. Kingdoms and empires,
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technology, writing, astronomy, medicine,
philosophy. A hot second later, science,
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industrialization, the modern world,
the information age where we are today.
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Earth is truly ours now.
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We changed it in ways unfathomable a few
short generations ago. We turned the land
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into fields worked by millions of machines,
built thousands of gigantic jungles made of
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sand and metal. We split the atom and travelled
to other worlds. Everything is different today.
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Except us of course. We humans have
not changed. We were molded by a
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cold and unforgiving world, where
we needed to be hard and brutal
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to survive. We are all still bound to
our nature that made us so successful.
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We still tell stories, are hungry
for food, greedy for resources,
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desperate to be accepted by our peers. We are
scared by the dangers that lurk in the dark,
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imagined and real ones. We are still brutal to
each other and the animals we hold power over.
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We are still territorial and possessive,
we fear losing what we have, and we fear
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change. We downplay the damage we cause and
ignore the people in need outside our tribes.
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Humans are not nice and if we look at our
history, how could we expect ourselves to
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be? In nature we see great beauty but
also endless violence and struggle,
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devoid of morals or kindness. We are an instinct
driven apex predator that survived in an uncaring
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world, only now we have coal plants,
nuclear weapons and social media.
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This would be hard to handle for any animal,
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so it makes sense that we continue to follow
the impulses so deeply ingrained in us. But
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this is only because we have not yet caught up
with the mind numbing gift we have been handed.
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The real tragedy of humanity today is that
we are these amazingly powerful beings that
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have not awoken to their potential. We are
trapped in the present and the mindset of a
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scarce world. But aside from the physical
limits of the universe there is nothing
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stopping us from creating a literal paradise
for ourselves. This seems so daft, but it is
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true. If we dare to tell ourselves a different
story about who we are and who we could be.
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Humans throughout history felt like
they would witness the apocalypse and
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this feels especially true today, but you are
probably not living in the end times. There is
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a solid chance that humanity will persist
for thousands, maybe millions of years.
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If this might be the very start of our history,
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what can we dream of achieving? Just like our
very first ancestors six million years ago,
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we may be the ancestors of another 250,000
generations of people. But while the hominins
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found themselves powerless in a world they
had to adapt to, our starting conditions
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could not be more different. It’s like we got
handed a save file of a game where others put
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in millions of hours of work – and where we can
decide what game we want to play in the future.
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The world is still horrible. And it
is also the best world that has ever
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existed. And we can make it so much better.
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An optimistic person living in the year 1924
would not believe the progress we have made
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in just a century. How much we reduced
poverty, how many diseases we cured,
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how much free time we have, what kind of luxuries
are ordinary to us, what technological wonders
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we take for granted, how few of us die
in war, how many live in a democracy.
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And today we might very well be gearing up for
a jump like our ancestors 10,000 years ago,
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when agriculture changed everything for
everybody. From AI possibly transforming
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the information age, to biotechnology enabling
us to manipulate the language of life itself,
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to new sustainable ways of
harvesting the energy we crave.
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If we start thinking in decades and centuries,
it is perfectly reasonable that we will solve
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our problems. We can eliminate poverty, maybe all
material needs. Defeat all diseases, maybe even
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death itself. We have the potential to restore
balance to the climate and heal the planet again.
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We may be able to adapt to the information
age and make lasting peace. None of this is
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guaranteed and it will be hard and full of
failure and setbacks. Some things will get
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worse before they get better. We will run
up against our nature over and over again.
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But if we manage to clean up our act
we could create a world better than we
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dare hope for. You get to do that. You get
to live in a world that is deeply flawed
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but also the best it ever was. And you
get the opportunity to make it better.
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A world with the smallest amount of
suffering possible, that fits our nature and
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inspires us to be the best version of ourselves.
