Time, time, time: never enough of it, is there? As a species, we haven’t used our alotted years too badly. Just look at our collective achievements in the past, er, 15,000 years.
Nomadic Man
Man, as a species, has definable cultural and historical markers. In the beginning, we had nomadic man, the hunter-gatherer. Humans moved in groups from place to place, hunting and foraging. Agriculture came into being roughly 10,000 years ago. With man settled, and living in towns and cities, and producing and consuming goods, the need for a sophisticated form of information exchange was born.
Classical Man
Cuneiform, the earliest form of script writing, emerged in Sumeria about 3,000 years ago. The power of the word gave birth to the Classical age. Man, know thyself, said Socrates, who lived between 469 and 399 BC. From this cauldron of thought came the notion of man as a thinking entity, one that could actually know and improve himself, as opposed to being merely the plaything of mythical deities. Great world books, like the Bible, followed. Christianity was born of the merging of the Old and New Testaments, while the verses of the Koran were produced by the prophet Mohammed between 610 and 632 AD.
Medieval Man
By the Middle Ages, religion was firmly in place. Europe was dominated by the Holy Roman Empire and faith was at the centre of everything. Centres of learning and medicine were attached to monastic communities, and were administered by monks and clerics. Schools and hospitals, as we know them today, stemmed from this collection of information. Belief in the supernatural was the world, and the world could only be understood through God. But by the 1400s, the winds of change were already blowing through the western world.
Renaissance Man
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings. This quote of from
Julius Ceaser, by William Shakespeare, was first performed in 1599. Although the Bard peppered his plays with gods and monsters, the age of magic and superstition was over. The sixteenteenth century had been the age of exploration, scientific discovery and technological advance. With Galileo's development of the telescope in the early 1600s, stars were now objects to observe and quantify, not deities that ruled man.
Enlightenment Man
I think, therefore I am, wrote Rene Descartes (1596-1650). By now, the scientific discoveries of the Renaissance had come to fruition. Man accepted that Earth was no longer the centre of the universe, and that it traveled around the sun with the other planets. The old, ecclesiastical model of the universe had been vanquished forever and replaced with a new mode of thinking. A ‘mechanical’ model had been propounded by English scientist and mathematician, Sir Isaac Newton. His studies of time and motion led to his publication of the
Principia Mathematica in 1687, a work of reference that is still in use today.
Communication Man
Until the early nineteenth century, men of learning were deemed to be 'natural philosophers'. But with the emerging disciplines of physics, chemistry and biology, the word 'scientist' was now in use, and the older phrase was consigned to history. One of the defining traits of humanity is our adeptness at amassing and communicating information. By the nineteeth century, the technology was in place for the age of mass-communication. It is arguable whether this began with the penny post (1840), or the development of the telegraph (1837), or Guglielmo Marconi's utilising of radio waves (c. 1901).
The Twentieth Century
Roughly speaking, mass communication - and travel - has been with us for the past one hundred and fifty years, facilitated in the twentieth century by telephone, television and the Internet. Our ability to communicate as individuals and en masse, worldwide and at any time, has behoved us to scrutinise our humanity. There are very few differences between the various tranches of humanity, apart from the superficialities that we acknowledge; race, colour, religion, social standing. Mass communication makes us all at once very individual, and yet supremely able to think and act in unison. It is this paradox that points to the next age, one in which we will once again be nomads.
Cosmic Man
This solar system and all of its planets will not endure forever. This does include planet Earth. Now and again, a team of scientists, somewhere, discovers an Earth-like planet in our galaxy that may support life - and as we know it! We are on the verge of moving into the cosmos. This means putting all of our petty differences behind us, and working as a team. It will mean developing and utilising the talents of every man and woman, regardless of whether they occupy 'celebrity' status. It will be a tough undertaking, fraught with challenge and danger - but remember what John F Kennedy said about our forays into space travel:
not because they are easy, but because they are hard....
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