Journey Back in Time: Exploring the Origins of Earth's Evolutionary and Social Milestones

 

To understand ourselves, we must first understand our past, for it holds the answers to the mysteries of our existence — Unknown

Arun Kumar

Arun Kumar + AI

Summary: Let us travel back in time and highlight key milestones in Earth’s and our social evolutionary history and the follow up questions they inspire about their origin.

If we could travel backward in time, what milestones in our evolutionary journey would we encounter, and what interesting questions they might raise about our origins and development as species?

As we embark on this journey, it is important to be cognizant of how minuscule our existence is when measured against cosmic and geological time scales. Confronted with evidence of our fleeting presence, we may resist its acceptance — perhaps because our perception of time is distorted. Weeks pass in a blur, yet a single year from childhood can feel as distant as the Big Bang. Perhaps it is because, compared to the immediacy of the present and its relentless machinations, all else gets distorted.

If we compress the history of Earth, from its formation about 4.5 billion years ago to the present, into a single year, we get an interesting perspective on the duration of our presence on the Earth. Here’s a rough breakdown:

• January 1 — Earth forms.
• Late February — The earliest signs of life appear.
• Mid-March — Photosynthesis begins.
• Late September — Complex, multicellular life emerges.
• Mid-December — Dinosaurs rule the Earth.
• December 26 — Dinosaurs go extinct.
• December 31 (11:59:30 PM) — The first agrarian societies emerged, around 10,000 years ago.

In this condensed timealine, agrarian societies emerged in the final 30 seconds of the year — underscoring how recent human civilization is on the grand scale of Earth’s history. And yet, it is astonishing to consider that in such a brief span, we have made remarkable strides in understanding the natural world, constructed vast philosophical and religious frameworks, and, regrettably, waged countless wars, taking millions of lives.

Below is a personal catalog of milestones and the questions we will encounter. The list is divided into two categories: one tracing the evolutionary journey of physical forms, the other exploring the evolution of social and cognitive norms. While the first spans a vast stretch of time, the second happened over a remarkably brief time of 30 seconds, and yet, this list is no less significant.

Milestones and Questions Related to the Evolution of Physical Forms

• When, why, and how, the Sun and planets formed? One can go back even further and ask the same question about the very beginning — the Bing Bang — but for now, let us stay in our neighborhood.
• When, why, and how, did self-replicating chemistry emerge? This was the first monumental step towards the miracle of biological evolution that followed.
• When, why, and how did the symbiosis between plants and animals — cycling oxygen and carbon dioxide — begin? Without this symbiosis, biology (in its current form) would have consumed all ingredients from environment that are necessary to it to survive.
• When, why, and how did consciousness emerge? This is a question related specifically to us.

Milestones and Questions Related to Social and Cognitive Norms

• When, why, and how did specialization of tasks emerge?
• When, why, and how did governance or the notion of central authority emerge?
• When, why, and how did the notion of money originate?
• When, why, and how did religions originate?
• When, why, and how humans started to question the meaning of their life?
• When, why, and how did palmistry and astrology start? It is really not a milestone, but it is an intriguing question as to how the extensive rules of palmistry or astrology emerge. How the rules about the meanings of lines on our hand, their shapes, breaks etc. came about.

The purpose of the list is not to delve into intricate details such as when, why, and how self-replicating molecules evolved (amusing to consider molecules evolving) into single-celled organisms, and subsequently into multi-celled organisms. If we can grasp the beginnings (e.g., formation of the solar system, self-replicating molecules) and the reasons behind them, it lays the groundwork for understanding what follows.

In answering these questions, we could incorporate some simple, self-evident facts and consider the inevitable outcomes that arise from them. The approach would be akin to Peano’s Postulates — starting with fundamental truths about natural numbers and building increasingly complex mathematical structures from them.

These simple, self-evident facts would include the limited availability of energy (or resources) in the environment, and the occurrence of randomness (or, colloquially, “shit happens”). The inevitable outcome of these self-evident facts is the process of natural selection, encompassing variation, habituation, differential survival.

Finally, when posing questions, “when” refers to a time marker, “why” refers to attribution or causality, and “how” refers to the underlying mechanisms or engineering. Among these, the most intriguing question is “why.” Was there a designer, or is everything we encounter the result of trial and error, conditioned by the environment in which a particular experiment we are privy to is taking place?

It would be fun to take such a journey back.

Ciao, and thanks for reading.