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Friday, March 22, 2013

Mental Breakdown of a Nation: The epic story of humanity in four parts.


 


From the book Water: The Essence of Life by Mark Niemeyer

 

Mental Breakdown of a Nation

Humanity 1.0: Our Birth

The epic story of humanity in four parts.

Humanity 1.0: Our Birth

As far as we know, we emerged about 200,000 years ago. At this time we had no language, no clothing, no art, no religion. We lived in the wild and ate what we could forage or hunt. We were hard to distinguish from our closest cousins – the chimpanzees and bonobos. 

What came to differentiate us from them – our remarkable capacity for innovation – was still only a faint trace at this time, a latent capacity. During the first hundred thousand years of our existence, we were confined to a small area in the hot, dry savanna of East Africa. 

There . . . we roamed, sweat, and slept beneath the stars on hard ground. We lived like the animals that we are . . .

Mental Breakdown of a Nation

Humanity 2.0: The First Leap

The epic story of humanity in four parts.
Agriculture was like a secret code. Once we discovered it, it unlocked a magical, controlling power over nature that until then had only belong to the realm of supernatural beings. 

We discovered our power to tinker with the processes of life … that we could cull endlessly reliable sources of dinner by cordoning off “our own” pieces of earth, and bending the environment to suit our will.

We banned all other species from our space, except for those we planned to chew and swallow.

Everything we sowed and everything we reaped was aimed at maintaining a single species – ourselves.

Before agriculture, it took human beings 50,000 years to move out of Africa. After agriculture, it took humanity a tenth of that time to cover the entire globe …

Mental Breakdown of a Nation 

Humanity 3.0: Project Total Control

The epic story

of humanity in four parts.

,

Mental Breakdown of a Nation

When humans figured out how to synthesize fertilizer from fossil fuels, we suddenly gleaned two billion people's worth of food from the same small piece of land – flouting competition and lack of resources, and spreading across the globe like contagion. We waged war on our microscopic enemies: bacteria, viruses, fungi, and all other microbes. We conjured antibiotics, vaccines, water-treatment plants, and continued to annihilate as much of our biological competition as possible. In short: we were cunning.

Hunger led us to agriculture. Later, lust, pride, beauty, cleanliness, power, order, and control drove us to even greater discoveries: penicillin, ethanol, organ transplants, and silicone breasts. And every new discovery harbored a secret prophecy, a vision of future humanity – sublime and indestructible – promising to extend our life spans, make us invulnerable, make things easier, more comfortable, more convenient, and efficient.

In just these past two hundred years, the number of humans inhabiting the earth went from one to eight billion. We've taken over the whole planet, and we just keep growing … 

Check out Humanity 1.0: Our Birth & Humanity 2.0: The First Leap … 

 

Part 4 coming soon.

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