Gallery Grid

SUSTAINABLITY - THE LATEST EVENT TO CHANGE OUR EVOLUTION

Our history has been shaped by the evolution of earth, life on earth, our religious beliefs, governance, and scientific understanding. The trajectories of evolution have been disrupted by a few key events. The first event was the big bang and formation of the earth that started it all. The next was the start of life in bacteria Stromatolites that evolved into dinosaurs. The meteor that killed off the dinosaur allowed humans the opportunity to become the dominant species on earth. The humans introduced the earliest belief systems and astronomical observations. The ice age enabled humans to populate every continent. The end of the ice age enabled settled agriculture in the Fertile Crescent which in turn enabled the evolution of cities, a ruling class and mass religion. The Egyptian god - kings ruled for 3000 years, followed by the Greek Enlightenment when many scientific concepts including an sun centric universe first appeared. The subsequent growth of the Abrahamic religions reasserted religious dogma. The Renaissance papacy enabled democracy and scientific understanding to evolve unconstrained by religious dogma. The printing press allowed the masses access to these insights, and prevented the Inquisition from reasserting control. The scientific and technological revolution has inevitably resulted in an explosion of population, food and energy use that has led to us terraforming our planet - not in a good way. As the dominate species, we now have no choice but to change the way we life on earth.

Democratization has been a potent force against the traditional authoritarian forces of religion and inheritance. Once the masses gained access to information through the printing press, universal literacy was enabled and religious leaders lost their control. The record player enabled the masses to choose what to listen to, the camera enabled the masses to memorialize their lives.

There have been multiple periods of "enlightenment" when key people made progress understanding the world; the Greeks and China around 200 BC, and Islamic scholars around 1000 AD, In each case, the progress was lost when religious dogma returned. The Renaissance around 1500 AD was different, probably because the printing press meant that literacy spread outside of the clergy and new ideas were suddenly accessible.

It is popular to ascribe technological progress, led by the US, to the power of "freedom" and/or "capitalism" and/or "democracy". Its clear that personal freedom, democracy and generally free markets have gone together in the west - Europe and USA. China in the 2000's is the first attempt to combine communist political control and open markets, which has been pretty successful. The over whelming success of the US in the 1900's cannot be separated from the fact that the competitions infrastructure was destroyed in 2 world wars.

This evolution came in stages;

Religion

The earliest hunter gatherers developed stories that explained how world that ruled their lives worked. We have rock paintings and oral histories from the Aboriginals, and cave art from France and Spain as evidence.

The Egyptians created temples and wrote hieroglyph stories about their gods. In Europe and the Middle East, the religions based on the stories of Abraham took over, and in the East the teachings of Buddah, Confucius and the processes of Hinduism and Taoism, The religious wars have been mostly between the Abrahamic factions of Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims.

In Europe, the dominant Catholic church started to loose its grip on society in the 1500's, triggering the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance, followed by the Inquisition in an failed attempt to re-establish control. The slow decline of the influence of the church has continued.

Domesticated agriculture

The domestication of crops and animals allowed people become year round residents and form communities. As soon as they could grow more than they needed to survive, the barter economy started. These communities required infrastructure and services to run. They first appeared in the Fertile Crescent at Jerico, Gobi-Teki in Turkey, in western Iran. There has been a steady flow of people away from subsistence living on the land and into the cities in search of opportunity.

Empire

Hunter gathers are far back as primates have fought with other family groups over access to food resources. As soon as communities had excess resources, groups of towns banded together for self protection. They needed leaders to take charge, which inevitably scaled up to Empires with Emperors. Many Emperors associated themselves with the prevailing local religion as a source of local control, starting in Egypt from 3000-30 BC when a variety of invaders became Pharoes. Many of the tribal Empires evolved into nations, and Emperors used a powerful mix of nationalism and religious identity for legitimacy throughout the Middle Ages. Ambitious Emperors used exploration and invasion to temporarily expand their territories, and used slaves to provide workers.

Over time Emperors have lost out to representative democracy as the leaders of nation scale communities and Empires. A few countries had revolutions to either communist or fascist autocracy with disastrous results. After the World Wars, empires evolved into "spheres of influence" with economic and military ties.

Science

During the Greek republic, original thinkers started developed a new understanding of their world, such as a spherical planet, sun centered universe, trigonometry from Pythagoras, displacement from Archimedes.

In China there was also significant technology developed such as gunpowder and block printing.

Empires and their religions then took over in the Middle Ages. The dogmatic attachment to ancient texts stifled most independent original thought.

In the 1500's the doctrinaire grip on the Catholic church was weakening exemplified by selling indulgencies and a series of dissipated popes. In Florence, a creative explosion from Michalengelo, Leonardo da Vinchi and others was funded by the ruling Medichi family. Elsewhere, Guttenberg's printing press enabled the dissemination of new ideas and literacy, independent of the religious establishment. The Renaissance had started and was unstoppable.

In the 1600's, Newton discovered gravity, integration

In the 1700's, electromagnetic spectrum,

In the 1800's, the quantum world was discovered, relativity, dinosaurs, evolution.

In the 1900's, the universe beyond the Milky Way, DNA,

Industrialization

As soon as Science was seen to have a commercial and military impact, investment and interest exploded. One of the first was the famous "Longitude challenge" from the British Admiralty, met in 1765 by James Harrison's clocks. The industrial scale extraction of fossil fuels provided access to massive energy resources. Transportation started with wooden intercontinental sailing ships and became oil powered steel ships, trains, cars and eventually planes, "shrunk" the world. Medical breakthroughs in nutrition, infection control, vaccination, molecular biochemistry and the role of DNA, transformed average life spans in the 1900's. The electronics revolution has changed communications, automation and the robotics revolution in manufacturing. Industrial scale warfare turned WW1 and WW2 into mass casualty events.

Globalization

Planet wide communications and low cost shipping has effectively eliminated nations as isolated economic entities. This has had profound impacts on wealth distribution, both in starting to level working classes world wide and in allowing astounding extreme wealth in a few individuals. This has started a new cycle of political instability in post war leading nations.

Sustainability

Finite resources and fossil fuel pollution were recognized as practical "Limits to growth" in the 1970's. Evolving the worlds economy to sustainability has proven to be very difficult. Dominant companies also have a very difficult time adapting to new game changing technology. Kodak is a great example, they dominated the analog film business with a very well regarded product and brand. Everyone could see digital photography on a well documented road map to taking over, and still Kodak could not adapt. Sony had a camera division and a semiconductor division and became the dominant digital photography company.

Two success strategies, early adaptors with patience and the resources to wait for the technology and market to mature. Venture funded startups are the classic example. Alternatively fast followers wait until the technology and matures and then acquire critical technology and pour in huge resources to dominate. Samsung is the best example.

Currently China are positioning themselves as early adopters, for example, as suppliers of sustainable solar technology, electric cars, and high speed train infrastructure. The US is in denial, but could still be a fast follower if it can muster the will it showed in WW2.