Selection shaped our brains and bodies to maximize reproduction at enormous costs to human happiness - Randolph M. Nesse
Consider some numbers along the timeline of the universe. The age of the universe is estimated to be about 13.3 billion years old. The age of the Sun and the Earth is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old. The age of establishment of agrarian societies is estimated to be 10,000 CE (Common Era) or about 12,000 years ago from now. The age of emergence of writing was 3,000 CE or about 5,000 years in the past. The age of the World Wide Web is about 35 years old.
To put these numbers in a relative context, if we consider a year as the lifespan of the universe, the human civilization (beginning from the agrarian societies) would be about 15 seconds of that year. We are just a small flea in the vastness of time, and yet, we have already reached a stage in our evolution that we now hold a position from where we are flexing our muscles.
We are now in the enviable position to be the self-appointed managers of the Earth (although by looking around, our management responsibility is not going too well).
In a relatively short span of time, we have made astounding strides. We have unraveled basic laws of nature (physics), we have understood how atoms and molecules interact and made some new ones (chemistry), we have deciphered the basis of living entities (biology).
We have managed to leave our home, the Earth, have learned to manipulate genes, have developed artificial intelligence. On top of what we have already achieved, there are lots more technologies on the horizon.
We are beginning to think about the old age not as an inevitable part of the natural process but as a disease that can be cured, and talking about the natural process like aging…
… relying on our advances in technology and medicine, we have also freed ourselves from the pressures and constraints that natural selection traditionally operated under. We have overcome diseases, and along the way, have doubled our life expectancy; we can move faster than a cheetah, we can put on a skin tougher than a rhino; we can move in the air, in the water, and on the land.
We have reached a state of development where we use our consciousness to question the meaning of our own consciousness.
And yet, standing at this juncture we do not know where we would end up in 100 years, 10,000 years, or a million years from now? We do not know whether in future there will be us around wanting to look back wanting get familiar with our history?
Can we consciously engage in activities that would enhance the probability that from 10,000 years from now we will still be around? Just like eating healthier foods, exercising regularly, avoiding risky behaviors can enhance the probability of our lifespan, can we do the same and enhance the probability that as a civilization we will continue to exist.
By overcoming physical and biological challenges that governed natural selection we have certainly enhanced the probability of our continued existence. Advances in medicine have reduced the chances of extinction due to pandemics becoming a reality. By finding new ways to tap energy we have managed to sustain our growing numbers on the planet.
By adding to the advances, we have already made over a short period of time, we are also trying to develop technologies to reduce the probability of our future extinction due to other exogenous possibilities. We are working on technologies to deflect large asteroids that might be on collision course with the Earth with the potential to wipe us out. Venturing into space travel we are setting the stage for technologies that one day would allow us to leave the single point of failure our current home could be.
Are those measures sufficient? Possibly not.
In addition to what we have already done to improve the probability of our survival, an additional effort we need to urgently make is to conquer some of our psychological traits that benefited us during the evolutionary process. These are the psychological traits that we now carry as a consequence of evolution and natural selection itself because having those traits helped in our quest for survival and reproduction.
Some examples of these psychological traits include preference for people of our kind (kinship), being more attuned to negativity (that helped us to recognize dangers lurking in the wild), engaging in risky behaviors (in our quest to be the alpha male), discounting the future (present being more important than an uncertain future) to name a few.
It is overcoming those psychological traits and that would further enhance the probability that we would be there.
Collectively we need to rise above the psychological traits that aided our journey through natural selection, but going into the future, the same traits could be detrimental to our futures. Now the biggest possibility of future extinction is us, and collectively we have to overcome our own undesirable shortcomings.
Collectively we have to agree on what it would take to be there in the future, and then agree on actions to take, and then make those actions a reality. As we already know, it is not going to be an easy task and will require a whole lot of things to happen just the right way.
As we stand here we do not realize that an infinite number of things had to happen in a certain way for us to be here. A small deviation in the trajectory of the universe and who knows what may have happened. In an analogous manner, things have to play out in a certain way for us to be there in the future. Technological solutions may widen the cone of our misbehavior that universe would tolerate and without driving us to self-extinction, but technological solutions cannot give us a blank check to mismanage the world we live in beyond a point.
Ciao.
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