Three Hundred Thousand

That’s how long anatomically modern humans have been around. Three hundred thousand years. That’s quite a long time, I’m sure you’d agree. ‘Civilisation’ has been around roughly five or six thousand years, according to the classical understanding of history. Some thinkers, like Graham Hancock, believe that civilisations existed before that, but that most of the evidence for them has been erased. I have some sympathy with this.

Here is a way of thinking about it, and I’ll start with a question for you: how long before we - our present civilisation - develops practical interstellar travel? A century? a few decades? Maybe a few hundred years? So, in relative terms, the human race would’ve gone from zero to having the means to leave this planet in 6,000 years. Well, 300,000 years is long enough to have done that 50 times… And, if we developed the means to do interstellar travel, we’d probably have the means to erase the evidence of our existence. Why? Who knows. We actually know very little.

I’m trying to impart the idea of scale, the understanding that many things can happen across an expanse of time. And not necessarily a long time, in the overall scheme of things.

It’s an odd human failing, in that we tend to view our present moment in time as something almost eternal and universal, we take a snapshot of our current situation and tacitly say ‘it was ever thus, this is the human condition’. This is actually a symptom of our incredible adaptability. The same creature that adapted to hunting and gathering, worshipping at the temple of Apollo, clashing with the legions at Cannae, building the Pyramids, tilling the soil in the Fertile Crescent, and tending the furnaces of the industrial revolution can adapt to anything. We adapt so well, that each situation we find ourselves in we consider ‘normal’, despite each being radically different from the others. So now ‘normal’ means single-family homes, cars, computers, ‘dating’, consumerism, countries, the internet, and Keeping Up With The Kardashians (no, not a complete list…). And we fret so much that if it all changes, we somehow won’t adapt. But we always have, and we always will.

This is the reason that I neither get concerned by prophecies of doom, nor of utopia. The doom and utopia of the human condition exists right now for all of us, as it did in the past, as it will in the future. The form of them is constantly changing, the fact of them stays the same. We’ll cope with the internet and AI in the same way we coped with the ploughshare and the steam engine, and when I touch your hand with mine it will still feel the same as it always did. But ‘it’ - the current innovation - might kill us all! Yes, but we will die anyway, yet the trees sway in the breeze right now, the sight of which I can delight in, or not. My choice. And yours.

‘Progress’ is the dominant thought paradigm of our age. This has a political manifestation in ‘Progressivism’, but it runs much deeper than that. I said ‘starting from zero’ before, which reads as completely logical to the present mind. But of course, the confounding fact of the cosmos is that for it to begin, there would have to be something from which it began. There had to be something big to go bang. In contrast to notions of progress, we see circularity in nature all around us. Death begets life. Mountains push up, and wear down. We put great store in whether our society is collapsing or flourishing, but to the individual it makes little difference.

I’m 58 years old. I don’t fit in. Yet here I am, so I’m in whether I fit or not. I fill this space in the universe, whether I like it or not, and whether the universe likes it or not. Actually, the universe has no preference. Neither does society. It just thinks it does.

If I’m lucky I have another 30 years or so. Thirty years of three hundred thousand is 0.01%. Does that mean anything? In a circular universe, perhaps each moment is infinite. I’m finding all these thoughts strangely calming. I need not do anything, or be someone, or progress towards anything, yet my mere presence, the filling of this space, has an effect on the infinite. That is delightful far more than it is heartbreaking. And it’s true of all of us. Perhaps all I need do is write it down.