1–20 of 21
Scholars once proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity. They told a tale of progress fuelled by human brain power.Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent people. Eventually, people were so smart that they were able to decipher nature’s secrets, enabling them to tame…
On a time-scale of a thousand years, neither politics nor technology is predictable. China and Japan are the only major political units that have lasted that long. A thousand years ago, Europe was an unimportant peninsula lying on the edge of the more advanced and civilized Arab world. The technologies of today would…
I asked Rooney about the remarkable ability of deer to thrive in their home range—most of the U.S.—while producing ecosystem simplification and a biodiversity crash. In his own studies of deer habitats in Wisconsin, Rooney found that only a few types of grass thrive under a deer-dominant regime. The rest, amounting to…
The demographic-economic paradox is the inverse correlation found between wealth and fertility within and between nations. The higher the degree of education and GDP per capita of a human population, subpopulation or social stratum, the fewer children are born in any industrialized country. In a 1974 UN population…
All of humanity's tool extensions are divisible into two main groups: the craft and the industrial tools. I define the craft tools as all those tools which could be invented by one man starting all alone, naked in the wilderness, using only his own experience and his own integral facilities. Under these isolated…
actuarial escape velocity is defined as occurring when a year of medical research adds more than a year’s worth of longevity to the total population. Nothing even close to this has ever been achieved, and emerging signs of an asymptotic curve in progress suggest this velocity may never
Such is the object of the work I have undertaken; the result of which will be to show, from reasoning and from facts, that no bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties; that the pefectibility of man is absolutely indefinite; that the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth above the controul…
he ravages committed by man subvert the relations and destroy the balance which nature had established between her organized and her inorganic creations; and she avenges herself upon the intruder, by letting loose upon her defaced provinces destructive energies hitherto kept in check by organic forces destined to be…
...[T]he natural history of the rat is tragically similar to that of man ... some of the more obvious qualities in which rats resemble men — ferocity, omnivorousness, and adaptability to all climates ... the irresponsible fecundity with which both species breed at all seasons of the year with a heedlessness of…
Taking a very gloomy view of the future of the human race, let us suppose that it can only expect to survive for two thousand millions years longer, a period about equal to the past age of the earth. Then, regarded as a being destined to live for three-score years and ten, humanity although it has been born in a house…
Asian Homo erectus died without issue and does not enter our immediate ancestry (for we evolved from African populations); Neanderthal people were collateral cousins, perhaps already living in Europe while we emerged in Africa... In other words, we are an improbable and fragile entity, fortunately successful after…
England and all civilised nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat. As mouths multiply, food resources dwindle. Land is a limited quantity, and the land that will grow wheat is absolutely dependent on difficult and capricious natural phenomena... I hope to point a way out of the colossal dilemma. It…
The third explanation for America’s current job creation problems flips the stagnation argument on its head, seeing not too little recent technological progress, but instead too much. We’ll call this the “end of work” argument, after Jeremy Rifkin’s 1995 book of the same title. In it, Rifkin laid out a bold and…
Archaeologists have discovered that since the Pleistocene, humans lave always suckled infants for several years. Using biochemical analysis given human population when its children moved from breast milk to other foods. In one group of skeletons from South Dakota dated between 5500-2000 b.c., children were apparently…
When individuals shunt the comprehensive cosmic regeneration into exclusive advantaging of only their own survival and enjoyment and succeed in prolonged local short-circuiting of cosmic regenerativity, they disqualify the invention "human" as a reliable function of regenerative Universe. They are just as…
Senator Fowler nodded. "One other little point, Charlie. Just how often do your reproductive castes breed, anyway?" It was Jock who answered. When Charlie hesitated, David Hardy watched with interest-was there communication by gesture? "When they are allowed to," the alien said smoothly. "Don't yours?" "Eh?" "You…
After the fall of the Roman Empire in Western Europe, much of what we consider "civilization" ceased to be. Literacy, medicine, science, agriculture, engineering, astronomy, governance, all went into decline or regression for the hundreds of years which we now call "The Dark Ages". During this period monasteries were…
World Community TWELFTH: We deplore the division of humankind on nationalistic grounds. We have reached a turning point in human history where the best option is to transcend the limits of national sovereignty and to move toward the building of a world community in which all sectors of the human family can…
The Internet shows me more and more about those who participate in it, but I worry lest I forget that not everything or everyone in the world has a home on the Internet. Missing are those who cannot read or write, who have no access to a computer, or who chose to remain disconnected. There is a danger of coming to…
The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything. The Internet forces me, as a creator, to figure out who I really am and what is unique to me — or to anyone else, for that matter — I like this. ... The…