I talked today with a Tamworth neighbour about medical advances over the past 100 years. How wonderful they have been! An injury he is expecting to recover from in a few months would have brought on a permanent disability a century ago. The pandemic? 1919 was so much more virulent and destructive than Covid. Millions dead, just after WW!, and the young more badly affected than the old. Almost inconceivable.No heady Spring Breaks in Florida. The world trudged on.
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My English grandmother was born in 1880. The automobile, the telephone, the phonograph, were in their very early stages, even for her relatively affluent family in England. In that late Victorian era Britain was still - just about - on top, but the world she grew up in was still one where the industrial revolution was still under way, the information/communication revolution had barely started and the European colonial powers were scrambling for Africa.. She lived through ninety plus extraordinary years, and died shortly after a few American men had walked on the moon.
I was born during WW2. The longest-lived of my cohort will die out about 2060. Probably. The last fellow from the trenches of WW1 has only recently passed away. It all happens, in its own good time..
In my adult life, I have met two gentlemen whose fathers were born in the 1830's.One was Francis Cleveland, son of Grover Cleveland, who stayed with us through the twentieth century. My grandmother's grandmother could remember how expensive bread was at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Harry Thompson, who died less than a decade ago, grew up with a grandfather who had fought under Crazy Horse at the Little Big Horn in 1876. Now the generations are beginning to stretch out, with women able to bear children into their fifties, perhaps even later already, and there have always been some very old fathers, These observations are of course based on old-fashioned reproduction, and I am way behind the times. A child conceived with my great grandmother? Sure. Five parents for little Moon Unit? Why not? No parents at all? We can probably do that too.Aldous Huxley had some ideas about that.
My points ? Extraordinary, unprecedented change during the past century and a half. And then the questions: we did not evolve for this, or did we, and how are we doing?
On my dawn walks I am still possessed of the physical attributes and sensory apparatus of my remote ancestors - really not much change there, except of course that I am a pretty untrained elderly specimen who would have been weeded out decades ago. However, it is not impossible for me to imagine myself waking up in the Pleistocene and going out foraging and carrion-picking, keeping a sharp lookout for those huge predators and six hundred pound beavers etc. However, thanks mostly to the giants on whose shoulders Isaac Newton rightly remarked we stand, I can also think on other scales and dimensions, as well as speculate on the dangers and intentions of the spirits about whom those giants probably knew much more and believed in more fervently than I. I can place myself in a universe billions of years old where the neurons within my brain can send messages which would take a second and a half to reach the moon if they obeyed the theoretical speed limit, and where a plane traveling at five hundred miles an hour would take a multitude of human life spans to reach the nearest star. Turning my attention to the tiny, I can plunge into the quanta, and push my sluggish thoughts into the dimensions and tantalising possibilities of the little strings and wiggly things that at present seem to endlessly tussle on the cusp of matter and energy, and they of course are only the few per cent in a universe of darkness.If that kind of thinking drove Hamlet to the limits of madness, I am in good company.
So, before my frontal cortex blows its fuses permanently, let me conclude that we are obviously built for this kind of thing, but we are also stuck right back in the Pleistocene. We have brought our world to a pretty pass, and may not get through with an environment worth living in, even if some of us at least survive. We have managed to keep the brilliant organizational ideas of democracy alive, but then we elect the leaders dominant in most of the world. Much of the rest of our brilliant cerebral capital is devoted to computer games and theoretical models, and the plastic piles up and creeps into our bodies. I'll keep this light - I could get really depressed.
So, if we take a very deep breath, and look around,I submit that we have to address the speed/time processes of human development, which will get only more acute at the speeds of robot thinkers and doers.Sticking children in front of screens at ever earlier ages won't do it, and leaving large areas of life and material functioning to the machines seems like a little too much copping out. In that world, what happens to us?
So will I, if I live as long as my grandmother, ponder the dizzying progress of the species and my world, from early radar and wireless communications and valve computers needing a whole room space as WW2 ended to the robotic implants, synthetic food and megadata-driven societies of my dotage ? I hesitate to say, if I'm lucky. Those fellows on the moon muffed their script, played golf and risked their lives in the style of the old explorers, behaved, in other words, like the humans I know and recognise.My exploration of the world contains some of the elements of the Franklin Expedition to the Arctic - I would undoubtedly take decent china teacups, slippers and a leather-bound book or two , to be found by the Inuit they didn't listen to, of course. Have your children young, my friends, before you set out in such hope. So do we need to slow down, to step up the pace, or grow more neurons to our thumbs, as I read Japanese teenagers have done ? I really don't know.
