Letter 2.7 Human evolution
Benoit – I have good news. The human evolution is accelerating.
It took us 200000 years to make a bicycle and within a century we went from the bicycle to landing on the moon. We are moving! Nothing noticeable happens for a long time and all of a sudden, it explodes. Look at the flowers in your garden. You may get the impression that some buds don’t grow. You think that they will never open until one morning the flower appears.
Some people found an explanation in the stars. I don’t know about that. Maybe our sun found a shortcut in the Milky Way! That would mean that there is a connection between what is far away and what is deep inside us. That’s not impossible. It is by studying the trajectory of far-away stars that scientists found that our material world represents only 5% of the universe. As below, so above!
The question is ”What took us so long?”
200 000 years to make a bicycle is a long time. What was preventing us from developing technology much sooner? Would it be possible that we have more neurons in working order today in our brain, than we had in the past? Could we get even more?
You will notice that our “Progress” concerns mainly the remodeling of our environment. We still operate at the ‘matter’ level. Maybe, some day, we will conquer the animal level. It would be nice if we could create bacteria that feeds on plastic and makes oxygen. If human evolution keeps accelerating, what is utopia today could become reality tomorrow. You can dream of a ‘being’ that would get up in the morning and go to work in your place. We have not yet reached that level. AI is about robots doing things. What we don't have is robots asking the right questions. There is no “life” involved. Maybe, some day, we will have hospitals with animals getting sick in our place. All it takes is for the Homo sapiens to move from the matter’s level and conquer the animal’s level.
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That gives us the vague feeling that we are swimming in the middle of a big river. We are free to swim in any direction while, in fact, we are carried away by the current and nobody cares about what we think of ourselves.
Can we participate in our own evolution?
In some domains, animals are more advanced than humans. They know which food is good for them. Fish don’t have to learn to swim. Animals know which herbs to eat when they are sick. We are not born that way. We cannot differentiate between good and poisonous mushrooms. We need years of scientific research to make our medicines. Starfish can regenerate damaged parts. They can even shed arms as a means of defense. Shark continually replace their teeth. Ducks can walk on the ground, fly in the air and dive. They can even walk on water! I wish I could do all that.
I remember watching nests of ants when I was a kid. It seems that all the ants are following orders from the same HQ. Each one was nothing more than a cog in a machine. I could not imagine that they could survive without their organization. They also gave me the impression that something was missing in their life. Could the same organization be possible among humans? I could imagine a society where the main concern of every individual would be the wellbeing of the whole society. A nice dream! You would produce only what is best for other. That sounds very nice but …. Do we want to live like ants?
We cherish our freedom. Would we sacrifice our freedom for the survival of our society? Should we say: “Give me freedom or give me death”?
Ants have been on earth for more than 100 million years. What did they accomplish during all that time? Evolution gives a meaning to life. The life of the ants happens in space but not in time. Something is missing.
It seems that consciousness, freedom and evolution have something in common. They could be different manifestations of love. A man told me: "I don't love my dog. I love the way I am when I am with him." Love gets us out of our isolation and it is not a human monopoly.
The level just above mankind could be the level of consciousness. Love is on a still higher level. The same concept can be implemented in different ways at different levels. What we call evolution at the human level could be implemented as movement at the level of the fish.
To participate in our own evolution would mean that we could identify the right path and follow it instead of exploring all the dead ends. That would require an increase of consciousness. We have some. We could use more. An increase of consciousness could show us in which direction our evolution is leading us and we could speed up the process.
Your generation - Benoit – could be very important in the evolution of humanity. You are at the elbow of an exponential curve where everything accelerates. Look back at our history in the past few centuries. There was always one country in advance on the others. In the 15th century it was Portugal. Then it was Spain, The Netherland, France, England, the USA… That does not mean that those people were smarter than the others. It only means that it was their turn to lead the pack.
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Could we get help from our neighbors on other planets?
We can’t be sure one way or the other but that could explain a few things. Do you think that the Homo sapiens could have survived all their mistakes without a little help here and there?
Instead of peaceful and loving creatures helping each other, we kept making wars. When killing each other with bullets became too labor intensive we invented the atomic bomb. Every day 7000 children die of starvation. We are not sure of who controls our thinking but we already want the rest of the world to think like us. We are unleashing our sadomasochism without even being conscious of it. We are producing anything we can produce without any concern for each other and for our environment. We are distancing ourselves more and more from nature. That could lead to our downfall. It might have happened already without some guardrail along the way.
We raise cows, sheep and chicken for our own benefit. How could we complain if some day we discover that some aliens are using us for their own benefit? For instance they could harvest the love that we produce and drop down our bad feelings for us to recycle.
If we want to deserve the respect of the levels above we should respect the levels below. The Aliens and us may be on the same boat carried by the same current. We all share the same goal of reaching the level above. Why not help each-others?
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