A thin layer of technology

When you think about it, in the grand sweep of human existence, our technological world is a fairly new development. I’m pretty much measuring from the start of the industrial age. We’ve had technological advancement before then. When you think about it, stone axes, bows and arrows, and fire making were huge steps in our development. In the early days technological improvement happened at a glacial pace.

Personally, I think the bronze age was a high point. We had metal working, organized cities, writing, complex social structures, city planning, International trade, treaties and so on. Significant areas of the world were civilized.

Technology really got going in the industrial age. Once fossil fuels were harnessed, the scale of everything changed. Humanity was no longer limited by the power of a growing season’s sunshine. Coal, oil and gas are basically a store for thousand’s of years worth of sunlight. We’ve had a huge explosion of technological advancement in the last two hundred years. On the scale of human existence, that’s a short time.

We really aren’t all that different physically from our stone age ancestors. Humanity has a heck of a lot more experience at being hunter gatherers than anything else. Mentally, we are struggling with this whole civilization and technology thing. Don’t believe me? Study after study shows how our mental condition is improved with just 20 minutes of exposure to the natural world a day. Humanity needs nature to thrive.

So while we’ve had civilization for something like 10,000 years, that’s hasn’t been long enough to totally transform us. At our core we need to walk among the trees, stroll along the beach and run barefoot in the grass.

That and maybe we need to kill something with a spear. That’s not too far down under our thin technological veneer.

-Sixbears