The world we have today

I start the 3-days 2-nights island hopping tour in Linapacan, Palawan explaining to guests the critical factors of the trip like the nearest hospital is 3 to 5 hours away or food and accomodation details..but right after that I’ll paint a picture of the history of the Philippines and normally ending it with phrase “our world today is built by years and years of war and religion” while relating how the island life evolved. My statment is partly true.

Studiying history for the past two weeks through Crash Course Big History and Sapiens, A brief history of mankind made me realize how much I didn’t know about the forces that shaped humans to develop and becone the most dominant and dynamic species that ever lived. I didn’t know the importance of trade, science, technology and ideologies that shaped the world we live in today.

The world was created 3.5 billion years ago. When our ancestors discovered fire as a medium for cooking, that made the difference as we acquired the technique to breakdown food nutrients and absorb them more effectively. A lot of leading research figured out that this caused our brain to evolve, separating us from our primate cousins.

Humans existed only in the last 250,000 years and for the most part our population only reached an average of 1 million because humans largely focused their whole days as hunter gatherers. Herding is another way to produce food for our ancestors. The limitations of this endeavor is they needed move from one place to another after consuming all the grass or the constant need to protect the herd from raiding from other groups or predators. This period in history is extremely difficult and of low life expectancy.

Our population only started to increase when our ancestors discovered agriculture, creating the surplus needed to sustain additional number of individuals. Since food production is not a time consuming task anymore, humans found a way to explore other things. Writing and trade were early feats of human civilization. This period became the rise of cities.

As the population grew larger and larger, keeping early human societies together became extremely difficult. There are cases where a few chosen people manage slaves working for farms, of which were effective for small groups of people. Cities started to emerge in big bodies of drinkable water like the river nile of africa. As conflicts between larger groups of people started to emerge of protecting lands and resources or wars became inevitable. Wars fueled the minds of early men to create things and methods that will increase the protection of human lives and acquire more resources. Riding horses improved mobility for the Mongols. Bow and arrows dictated a lot of victories. Discovery of gunpowder paved the way for the destructive forces of cannons and improvements in building better castle walls.

Money is a concept that established the harmony of measurement for value and scarcity. This allowed the framework for taxes that fund wars and the concept of credit which you borrow from yourself in the future. Humans found a way to interact in a fair linear manner - certain amout of work or items leads to certain amount of money.

Europeans in the age of colonialization brought with them small pox that wiped out an estimated 100 million inhabitants of Americas. The black death (believed to be Bubonic plague from rats brought by trade ships from China) killed an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Europe and Asia. An estimated 60 to 138 million deaths caused by World War 2. Dying is more frequent in the past than it is today. I try to imagine a world where you could die without any reason at all because we haven’t discovered bacterias, medicines or vaccination or insidious ideologies from men like Hitler can cause tremendous death and suffering.

Capitalism made the world stable in the last fifty years and bloody for the vast majority. Colonization of locals in the americas and asia to power farming and slave trade powering the industrial revolution in Europe are the harsh realities of our capacity to prioritize profit and resources in exchange of human suffering. But the ability to reinvest profits paved way to creating modern technologies like steam engines, electricity, engineering, chemistry and internet.

Understanding the fact that the world we live in was paid by tremendous bloodshed for us to have a peaceful and abundant present is truly humbling.

At present, we are imagining space as the next frontier, creating artificial intelligence and discover useability of autonomous driving cars & robots, which are now possible because of collective learning. On the contrary, we are over consuming the oceans, destroying forests and mountains for resources and use neural networks continue to mine all of our searches, watch & purchase history and social media posts to power entrepreneurial interests.

There are a lot more to human history than what I have discussed but I do hope that we learn from the fragments of history that we, humans are capable of becoming monsters or angels. Let us appreciate the facts of the past and let us not go blind moving forward into the future. Whatever actions we take will leave a mark to the world and people around us and even generations thereafter, however small it may seem.