We're killer Apes that pay income tax, and wear hats. However yes we have a spark...a tiny spark of something better, and brighter. Time we need time. Evolution is so slow. The gene that some few have that dampens aggression, and opens new channels of intelligence needs time.
My lay person's estimate is 20 to 50 thousands years before it's a given common trait. The problem is that such few that have it are so often either killed outright in childhood for being different or pushed aside in mating competition.
This is why the kind gentle ones are so rare.
As for those many thousands of years needed...we don't have it. That ecological "Tipping Point" is not in the future, but the past. Perhaps 50 to 100 years past. Maybe slightly longer. Some in the field are beginning to realize this. Right now it's being dismissed. But then back in the 1990's they said what's happening now these disasters wouldn't occur till mid-century or later.
Get the drift? ...we're fucked.
Mind you Earth 'will' abide. Heck in it's early history it survived a hit by an object the size of Mars. So we're no threat. Earth will just right itself without us. In 30 million years or so you'd never know we were ever here.
As for them 30 Million years. The scars humans will leave behind on the earth, quarries tunnels city traces landfills will be gone mostly by then.
Oh sure if you knew what you were looking for you might find a ceramic doodad or two. Maybe a tunnel or urban trace here, and there.
Also though the half-life of most of the radio-active materials we fooled around with will have cooled off. There are some artificial exotic radiated materials we made with half-lives that border the hundred million mark.
If you were an Exo-Geologist from another star system say 60,000,000 years from now. That, and your dig was in the neighborhood of a former Laurence Livermore site. You'd be surprised, and intrigued at the radiation readings you were getting.
The source is clearly artificial, and has been in this deposit for tens of millions of years. Like the Voyager probes sailing out to the stars this find would say there was an ancient intelligent species that once lived on this world.
'That' at long last would be our "First Contact".
Stay Tuned.
You've got it Sydney! You've got it perfectly!
ReplyDeleteWell pretty much.
ReplyDeleteThey say complex art first appeared about 40,000 years ago - Lascaux, that sort of thing. Some anthropologists and neurologists have suggested that the human hippocampus (frontal lobe) may have expanded about that time, in tandem with an evolutionary leap in our level of symbolic consciousness.
ReplyDeleteThat would seem to suggest that what you're proposing is just possible - that humans could eventually experience another relatively swift enhancement in our level of awareness, perhaps this time on the plane of empathy and compassion. I would like to believe this, though only time can tell. At present, we're basically social primates operating on the level of tribalism with all that that connotes, both good and bad, and having an absurdly inflated idea of ourselves.
Z
For the moment as you correctly say we're still apes that pay income tax, and think we've got it all figured out.
ReplyDelete...we don't.
However there are those time constraints I mentioned. We need some tens of thousands of years for evolutionary changes to our neuro-networks to kick in. This so we can finally play nice with each other, and the cosmos.
With the ecological changes that have clearly started, and which we are willfully not adapting to will likely extinguish us long before nature has a chance to refined us a bit more.
Generations ago we thought our end would be by own hand via nuclear suicide. We didn't imagine it was the corrosive work of the industrial revolution slowly over the centuries destabilizing the very earth.
However we can still survive, and finally adapt. It's actually not too late. Well to late to stop the worst aspects of the changes to come, but not to late to adapt to them.
Our population will fall from 7 billion to stabilizing at perhaps one half to three quarters of a billion. In the great trauma of these events a new kind of human society. One closely attuned to the nature of the earth will evolve.
Mostly because it must.
I'm optimistic not for the continuance of the societies we now have to survive, but for the species to live on. Much as we did during the long ice age.
Another world civilization will slowly arise. Hopefully a wiser smarter, and kinder one.