Our long-term motivations may be the most important but it is our short-term motivations that get most of our attention.
Our first priority is that we have a body to care for. It requires high maintenance. It has to be fed three times a day. It smells bad unless it is cleaned every day. We have to take it to the dentist, to the doctor, to the barber. It needs clothing and shoes and glasses and the best you can expect after all this tender loving care is that it does not hurt!
Behind the short-term motivation of the individual lies the long-term motivation of the society we belong to. This may be the main purpose of our lives, even if we are not conscious of it. We are never alone. All the human beings who lived on Earth for more than a million years were participants in a general human evolution.
We are never alone.
8-Human evolution
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We,The People, are not happy
We are told, in 2025, that AI is going to transform our lives. This is only another transformation. There will be more. We are going through a rapid evolution. It started about 200 years ago. It was a time when 80% of the population lived on the farm. Houses had no running water, no electricity. There were no cars, no planes, no computers, no vaccines, no TV, no radio, no MRI, no cell phones, no ChatGPT, no plastic, no atomic bomb. The idea of landing on the moon was pure utopia. Flying was for the birds.
This represents the world’s population since 10 000 BC. You could prolong the curve 30 times to the left. It would still be flat. It seems that our ancestors were waiting for reinforcement before getting to work.
We share with animals a need for food and shelter. Agriculture made us discover some laws of nature. That was 4000 years ago. The more we discovered, the more we thought. This is how we started an avalanche.
There is no going back:
To feel close to nature, we go camping. That does not mean going back to life in a cavern, hunting and gathering. It means getting in the car, with a tent, special clothing, our cell phone, and plenty of processed foods. We may venture to places where our cell phone does not work. This is as far as we would go.
A little history
This is the history of 300 000 years of Homo sapiens evolution.
For 300 000 years, our ancestors were spread around planet Earth. Societies were limited to a tribe or a village in the forest. There was no world population problem.
Going back a million years, would show that we represent the 8th time Mother Nature tried to use humans on Earth.
It is too early to decide if our avalanche will save us or bury the Homo sapiens forever.
It was about 200 years ago that, suddenly, the world population was multiplied by 10. People moved to big cities. In 2025, we have 43 cities with an urban population between 10 and 35 million people (from Bogota to Tokyo).
We may have reached a point of no return.
The cycles of civilizations are getting shorter
We know about the Egyptian, the Greek, and the Roman civilizations. They followed a period of development, reached their apogee, and declined. Their cycle took several centuries. The decline of the Roman Empire took 400 years.
More recently, human evolution is showing signs of speeding up. Portugal's domination was limited to the 15th century, followed by Spain in the 16th century, the Netherlands in the 17th century, France in the 18th century, and England in the 19th century. America dominated the 20th century. The 21st could be the century of China. India and Africa are waiting for their turn.
The general idea is that the cycles are getting shorter. The number of people participating is increasing. We may be heading for the whole world participating in short cycles.
We are moving from the material to the immaterial world.
-Our currency moved from using heavy metals such as gold and silver to using digits in a computer.
-Human labor was replaced by driving machines. The percentage of farmers was reduced from 80% to 5% of the population.
-We found a way to get into orbit and free ourselves from Earth’s gravity.
-The service sector keeps increasing and replacing manual labor.
-AI is replacing some human thinking.
The general idea remains the same. We are distancing ourselves from the material world.