27. An epoch in the
history of humankind
Posted by T. T. and
P. R. on May 2019
When humankind possessed strong artificial power sources, the
production of materials to meet the needs of living began to increase
explosively. This was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, around 1750, which
created an epoch that will be the greatest human-caused global destruction in
the whole history of humankind.
Now, in the early 21st century, we are at the middle
of this epoch. During a period of about 250 years from 1750, world population increased
by about ten times, which is way beyond the sustainable level of planet earth. It
will take around another 200 or 300 years to reduce world population to below
the sustainable level. As depicted below, the epoch lasting around 500 years
from the Industrial Revolution will be regarded as the period of the greatest
human-caused mass destruction. Although nature apparently looks fairly stable
now, various kinds of hidden destruction have been progressing to almost the
limit of human survival.
When the period of the great destruction has ended, all
human activities should hopefully be stabilized to below the sustainable level.
However, the whole world would remains in a ruined state. The beautiful nature
will have been mostly destroyed, the atmosphere and the oceans would be deeply
polluted, and the biosphere will have been shrunken almost to its worst level
of that just after the greatest mass extinction in the history of life. While
the time required to recover from such destruction will depend on the extent of
the destruction and the efforts made to achieve some kind of recovery, it will nevertheless
take more than several millenniums or much longer, even a million years.
It will be rather providential if humankind can actually survive
after the long period of time needed for an acceptable recovery, having to
endure a great many hardships and with
poor quality of life. What is important for us now is to imagine how future
people will look back at their history, including the epoch of the great
human-caused mass destruction. They will undoubtedly be critical of us and even
angry that we were the cause of the terrible epoch. They will accuse us of robbing them of the valuable
treasure of nature, despite the fact that we had the benefit of very high level
scientific and technological knowledge and discoveries. However, if they then find that
there had been at least some altruistic people who had try to stop the destruction
of the natural world on planet earth, to help future people and sacrificing their
own pleasure, they might, in turn, try to do the same for the people in further
distant future. Compassion over a great many generations could act as a strong motivation to help each other,
love each other, and unite each other into a tight bond.
